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Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray

Stress

81. Good Stress, Bad Stress

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We often think of stress as being something annoying, a mental or emotional issue, but stress can also have serious implications on our physical health as well. The NIH (National Institutes of …

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Podcast Transcript

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 81 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners, and today we’re talking about stress, in particular, good stress and bad stress. So we often think of stress as being just something that is annoying. It’s like a mental or emotional issue. But stress can also have serious implications on our physical health as well.

The NIH, National Institutes of Health, says that continued strain on your body from routine stress could lead to serious health problems such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, depression, anxiety disorder, and other serious illnesses. But here’s the thing, stress is not always a bad thing.

There’s another side of stress that’s actually considered not just good for us but actually required in order for us to grow and thrive as humans. In other words, some types of stress are bad and should be avoided, and some are considered good and should be embraced. So today on the podcast, I’m going to talk about good stress and bad stress, which types are detrimental, and which are considered beneficial for our health and well-being.

But first, hey, if you like this podcast, you have to come check us out on Facebook, the Running Lean podcast community is a group of positive, like-minded people, the group goes hand in hand with this podcast, it extends the conversation that we’re having here on this podcast, it gives you a chance to have a voice. So you can ask questions and get answers and feel supported and get encouragement and inspiration.

And this month, in the Facebook group, we’re doing the dry July challenge, which is we’re giving up alcohol for the month of July. And just to see how that affects our mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

And a lot of people are getting some pretty interesting, positive results from just not drinking, you know, they didn’t realize that they had, that they could have so much more energy, or that maybe their weight loss was really stalled because they were drinking or they just feel better, you know, or maybe their running is improved.

So this is an opportunity for you to kind of check us out and take a challenge with us. And the dry July challenge is something we’re just doing for the rest of this month. But I mean, you can do this anytime you want, right? It’s just a chance to like take a break from alcohol to see how it feels for you, right?

So if you’re one of those people that just wants a little bit more than what you’re getting here on the podcast, come and check us out in the Facebook group. I do some weekly coaching and teaching in the group as well. So we sort of have more than what you get here on the podcast. Okay. And it’s fun. Did I mention that we’re fun? So just search for Running Lean community on Facebook and join us over there.

And if you ever want a little help with all this stuff, like speaking of stress, I understand how stressful it can be to try to figure out what’s the right diet, you know, what’s the right exercise regimen? How much running should I be doing? What does strength training look like? You know, I want to like stop eating sugar, but I’m not sure exactly how to do that. What does it mean to be fat-adapted? How does that work? Like? How do I do that?

This can be kind of confusing, and I get it, I totally get it. And that’s why I work one on one with you as your coach. I work with runners every single day who are becoming the healthiest and most badass versions of themselves. And a coach is there to help guide you provide experience, expertise, support, encouragement, motivation.

And one of the most important parts of coaching is accountability. People tell me all the time. Yeah, I wasn’t going to stick to my plan, but then I knew I was going to be talking to you later today. So I definitely went for my run. Or I did the workout I said I was going to do or I didn’t eat cake because I knew that I would have to report it to you and tell you that I did that and I didn’t want to feel like I let you down or feel like I let myself down so that accountability is a huge part of coaching.

And just coaching is just one of those things that helps you stay on track and helps you to achieve goals you have. Goals that otherwise seem pretty daunting and pretty hard to do on your own. If you’re interested in coaching, just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply. And that’s it. Well, you and I will jump on a quick zoom call, we’ll have a conversation, and we’ll just see if this is something that you’re interested in. Cool. Awesome.

Okay, let’s get into this topic of stress today. So I was doing a little bit of research on this. And I came across some pretty interesting stuff, which I’ll be sharing with you here in a moment. But I just want you to know that there’s this sort of stigma around stress and like stress just being all bad.

And I just have to say that there is another side of stress that is good and required, and absolutely essential for certain functions here. So I’m going to get into all of that. But just let’s talk about what stress is. So, you know, there’s the one type of stress that we really kind of focus on is this chronic stress, okay, this is where, you know, maybe it’s because of your job, or because of relationship issues or financial issues or whatever.

You are in a state of chronically elevated stress hormones, you are chronically worried about things, you’re chronically angry about things, you’re chronically fearful, or in some sort of conflict. And this is the bad kind of stress. So chronic stress is the kind of stress that we really want to avoid.

Because your body in a state of chronic stress is a sick body. Alright. So chronic stress will manifest in this way where, you know, we constantly have raised cortisol levels, cortisol is the stress hormone. And when we have raised cortisol, we’re always under this like fight or flight mode, like our body is in a state of like, chronic panic mode.

And this is something we’re we’re wired for, it’s something that we’ve evolved as humans to, for a reason, like, stress is a good thing. Okay, so if you’re facing a saber-toothed tiger, you know, it’s good to feel stress in that situation. So, cortisol gets produced, and that raises your blood sugar. And that gives you some energy, your heightened awareness, you know, your awareness is super heightened.

And you’re in this state of like, you know, fight or flight. And, oh, you know, it’s kind of like panic mode, right? And it gives you energy, you know, you get this release of like, sugar into your system so that you can fight or run away. And so this is why stress is this is kind of how we’ve evolved with stress. And it’s normal, and it’s good, it’s a good thing.

Like, we want to be able to experience that moment of stress when we’re faced with some kind of immediate danger like that. You know, and today, though, here’s the thing today is different. Like, we don’t have a saber-toothed tiger, we’re not faced with these types of immediate dangers, like you may step out into the street and not see that a car is coming.

And you know, all of a sudden, you have this burst of adrenaline, cortisol, heightened sense of awareness, and you immediately step back and don’t get hit by the car, like that’s probably about the equivalent of, you know, facing off the saber-toothed tiger.

But what chronic stress looks like today is, you know, you’re just all day at work, you’re worried about things, you’re getting bombarded with emails, and, you know, you’ve got five different managers yelling at you all the time. And then you come home, and maybe you’re in conflict with your partner.

And of course, on the drive home, you’ve had to deal with all this traffic, and you’re just like, we’re in this state of chronically being in panic mode, we’re chronically in that fight or flight mode. And this is not a good place to be at all. It can cause all kinds of issues, all right, we can cause all kinds of physical ailments.

And so we’ve got to really be careful not to fall into the trap of, you know, living our lives in a way where we’re chronically stressing ourselves out. Some other causes of physical stress would be, besides like work-related things, or maybe your relationship, you know, issues would be not getting enough sleep or poor quality sleep, this is going to put your body into a chronic state of stress.

If you never get enough sleep, if you just you’re not getting enough sleep every night or your sleep quality is really terrible, then you’re not getting the rest that you need. And you are going to be in a state of elevated stress all the time. Your diet can cause physical stress on your body.

You know, a diet high in sugar will cause stress and inflammation to your cells. And diets like, like actual like, quote, unquote diets, like when people go on these extreme diets where they’re super low calorie for extended periods of time, that puts your body in a, in a state of stress, that’s not good for you.

Another thing that a lot of people don’t realize they’re doing to themselves, but they work out too much. So they’re actually like, every single day is a hard day, you know, they’re doing two workouts a day all the time. And they’re just like, cranking it out every single day, they’re always they’re stressing out their body, they’re always like going hard, they’re never giving themselves a chance to recover, and repair, and, and get the rest that they need. Right.

So it’s just like too much, too hard, and too often. So we got to be careful about some of these physical causes of stress. And then we have like, emotional stress as well, as well, we have like, you know, like I mentioned, relationship issues, or, you know, some of the leading causes of stress with people is like the death of a loved one.

This is a huge cause of stress for a lot of people or loss of a job, or divorce, or getting married. And I think these two things are funny, it’s like getting married or divorced, or to vote one of two of the most stressful things that can happen in your life, right. And we think of getting married as being such a blissful thing, right? But no, it’s like one of the biggest stressful events in your life, or moving to a new home.

These are all stressful things that cause like emotional stress, okay. And I want to say this about these types of stressors, stressors in our life, like, the real cause of the stress is not these things, you know, getting married is not what’s causing you to be stressed.

Okay, stress is an emotion, stress is a feeling. And we know that all feelings are created by your thoughts. The fact that you are getting married, does not automatically mean that you are going to be stressed out. Getting married is, you know, for a lot of people, it’s just pretty chill and pretty fun. But for a lot of people it isn’t, it’s stressful, because they think it’s got to be perfect.

And they’re worried about how you know about the table seating and about relatives sitting with each other, or you know about the food or about, you know, what kind of cake they’re going to get whatever it is, you know, there’s like a million different decisions to make. Is it going to be as magical as is all the Instagram posts I see about it?

You know, the same thing with like, getting divorced, like it’s the divorce itself does not cause the stress, but it’s your thoughts about the divorce that caused you to feel stressed. It’s not that you know, somebody dies that causes you to feel stress, it’s your thoughts about them and what that means to you, you’re thinking to yourself, I’m never gonna see this person again.

You know, it’s those types of thoughts that cause you to feel stress. Or maybe it’s somebody that you have to, you know, you have to take care of the funeral arrangements and things like that, that can be stressful. But again, it’s all about your thoughts. Okay. I just wanted to like, quickly mention that, like, we’ve talked a lot about this on the podcast, where, you know, our thoughts always cause our feelings and stress is a feeling it’s an emotion, and that we have control over how much of this we want to feel now is sometimes, you know, stress a common and a totally applicable emotion and that experience.

Yeah, it’s okay to feel stressed out when you’re getting divorced or getting married or somebody, somebody dies that you love. It’s totally normal to feel that way. And it’s okay to feel that way. We don’t want to necessarily change that. But I’m just I just want you to know that it isn’t the event itself. It’s always your thoughts about it.

Okay, so anyway, we want to try to prevent these types of emotional stress though, we want to try to prevent these things from becoming chronic. You know, if you get a divorce and it’s been like three years and you still are just eaten up about it, like, that’s something we need to work on, right?

You need to learn how to manage your thoughts and feelings around these types of situations. Yes, it’s okay. If somebody you love dies and you feel stressed, and you feel sadness, and, and all these other emotions, that’s totally normal. But if it’s chronic, that’s when it becomes problematic, okay?

So chronic stress from whatever the cause whether it’s emotional stress, or whether it’s physical stress, you know, from working out too much or not getting enough sleep. Chronic stress can put your body into that panic mode into that fight or flight mode, and it just stays there. So your cortisol, always high, your blood sugar, always high insulin, always elevated, you’re storing fat all the time, because your body’s in this survival mode, right?

It’s not in, you know, the mode of like, you know, everything is cool and chill. It’s like, oh, I got to hold on to all this extra body fat because, you know, I needed it for survival. And this causes a ripple effect on your hormones, you end up you know, feeling hungry all the time, and you end up overeating and you can’t lose weight and your athletic performance suffers, you feel tired and sluggish all the time.

Chronic stress can just lead to all kinds of physical issues. And, you know, I mentioned earlier the NIH talked about, you know, stress-causing heart disease and blood pressure and diabetes, depression, anxiety disorder, and other serious illnesses, and maybe not causing them 100%.

But absolutely, leading to these things and, and a factor in these things becoming prevalent in our lives. Even more disturbing though, according to the American Psychological Association, chronic stress is linked to six leading causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicide.

This is a problem. Chronic stress is not good, it is not good. And we need to be doing whatever we can to eliminate chronic stress from our lives so that we don’t end up one of these statistics, right. So there’s, there’s another side of stress that I want to talk about here today.

And that is the one I’m just going to call it the good stress. Okay. So we’ve talked about chronic stress and how it can have really detrimental effects on your mental, emotional and physical well-being.

But then there’s a different kind of stress, it’s the good type of stress, which is acute stress. So acute means severe and sudden, acute is short term stress is the kind of stress that’s here momentarily, and then it’s gone. As opposed to chronic stress, which is long-term, it’s ongoing.

Chronic stress is like never-ending there’s no end in sight to it. Okay. So why is acute stress good. So acute stress is actually required, in order to improve certain systematic functions in your body, right, we need to have certain stressors on our systems, in order for them to adapt, grow and improve and get stronger.

Okay, so for example, if you want to get stronger, if you want to build stronger muscles, then you need to do some weight training, you need to do resistance training, you need to overload your muscles, you need to stress out that system.

Like you need to literally lift things that are so heavy that they cause microscopic sub-cellular tears in your muscle fibers so that you will become stronger so that those muscles will then those muscle fibers will grow stronger in repairing themselves, right? This is the overload principle, we overload the muscles so that they will repair and get stronger. But we don’t do this you know, 10 times a day every day, right?

You do weight training a couple of times a week. And then you do it for a short period of time, maybe 30 minutes, maybe an hour, and then you take a day off or two days off. And when you do it this way you’re creating acute stress, acute stress in your muscles. Very short term, very severe, and sudden.

And then you let them rest. You let them prepare, you let them grow and you become stronger in the process. There’s no other way around it, if you want to get stronger, you have to stress your muscles, you got to stress your muscular system, your skeletal muscular system has to be stressed in order for it to get stronger and grow.

Same thing with if you want to become a faster runner like you have to do some sort of speed work, right? For example, sprinting, sprinting is an amazing workout super hard, though, right? But we’re talking about sprinting as fast as you can for like 20 or 30 seconds at a time very, very hard, very acute, very severe, very sudden, very short term, but very stressful, very stressful on the system, on your cardiovascular system.

And on your entire muscular system that is you know, functioning that is up responsible for your muscles functioning properly for good running form, and to get faster as a runner. And so you do like 30 second sprints, then you may rest for a minute or two, you do this like five or six times, and then boom, your workout is done.

And again, it may be 30 minute, 45 minute workout, something like that. It’s very short but very stressful on your system. But then your system responds by becoming more efficient, you become more efficient at running faster, you develop more cardiovascular endurance, from running faster, faster, so you can actually run faster for longer periods, and your muscles become stronger in your form becomes better.

If you want to become a more powerful runner, maybe you do something like hill repeats, right, so this is a terrible workout, right? Pick a hill and run up the hill hard. You know, by the time you get to the top, you should be totally cooked, like your lactic acid should be building up and you should just be like, I can’t run another step. And then you know, jog it back down and do it again, do that six times, right?

Again, we’re stressing out the system, but it’s a very quick, very short bursts of highly stressful situations on your body here. But this is what makes you become more powerful, you’re going to build much more power in your legs, because then when you’re running the flats, you’re going to be like this is easy.

And then when you do face a hill in a race or something like that, you’re like got this no problem at all right. And this all like ties into just building cardiovascular endurance, you know, if you want to improve your cardiovascular system, and improve your endurance, as a runner, you want to be able to run longer and longer, you just got to you got to get out there and run longer miles, you got to keep increasing your mileage.

Slowly, you don’t do it all at once you don’t go out there and run 50 miles every other day. That’s because that’s just going to put your body into way too much stress. So what you do is you build up your mileage slowly, you increase it by, you know, I think a good rule of thumb is 10% a week.

And you build up to that, and then you back it down you like you know, then you go through you might do up week, like three weeks where you’re increasing mileage, and then you do a couple of down weeks, and then you go up up up a couple of down weeks, you know, and this is how we increase our endurance, you know, we can run 50 miles or 100 miles, you know.

So this is the difference between acute stress and chronic stress. Another thing is, that’s kind of cool. Like, let’s say you want to increase your body’s ability to burn fat. So you could do something that’s kind of acute, you can kind of stress your system a little bit by doing like a 24 hour fast.

This is something that on the outset, you might think, oh my god, that’s crazy. How can you not eat for 24 hours, it’s not that big a deal, to be honest with you. You eat dinner, and then the next day you just eat dinner like, right, it’s not a big deal. Especially if you’re not eating a lot of sugar and carbohydrates, you’re going to find this actually pretty easy because your hunger is not out of control anymore, right?

But again, this is kind of stressful on your system, right? Because your body is like goes into this little bit of like panic mode in a way. And it starts tapping into your stored body fat for fuel because it’s like, oh, we need fuel. We’re not getting anything. So let’s tap into the stored body fat over here.

Again, this is like stressing out the system in a very short burst and in a very controlled way. And then you go back to eating normally after that. And so this is how we improve our systems. This is how we get stronger. This is how we become more powerful. This is how we get faster. Faster is how we improve things like our fat-burning system, right?

So intermittent stress is actually a good thing, it’s good for your brain too. They’ve done these studies where they’ve shown that short-term stress actually primes the brain for improved performance. Intermittent stressful events help keep your brain more alert. And you tend to perform better when you’re more alert, right?

So these researchers at UC Berkeley, this is about 10 years ago or so now. But they did this study on rats, and they found that significant but brief, stressful events. So like acute stress caused these rats, they cause the stem cells in their brains to proliferate into new nerve cells that improved the rats’ mental performance.

And the researchers’ findings reinforce the idea that stress hormones help an animal to adapt to become more aware to become more resilient. The next time they’re faced with that same type of stressor, like think about this, like, let’s say, you are you go through a tough breakup, well, in your next relationship, you’re going to be more resilient and less fragile, right? If you end up in a breakup again, right.

And the same principle applies to, you know, lifting heavier weights will build stronger and more resilient muscles. Alright. So stress has a ripple effect. And it can be a good ripple effect or a bad ripple effect. So chronic stress has this negative ripple effect, right?

Like I mentioned earlier, cortisol is higher, insulin is higher, blood sugar is higher, you’re in the state of elevated, elevated panic mode, like all the time, and this leads to chronic diseases, and a lot of times it can lead to death. Right.

So chronic stress has a ripple effect, but it’s not a good one. Acute stress, though, has a ripple effect. But it’s a positive ripple effect, right? Because it leads to adaptation to improved cognitive function to improve muscle growth, to improve speed, and improve endurance, even fighting disease is a ripple effect of a good stressor.

So if you think about how we fight disease, like a pathogen that comes into your body, like a virus or a bacteria, that’s a stressor on your system. But then our body responds in a way and fights that off. Right. So this is a natural kind of stress response, which I think is kind of cool.

So my kind of takeaway that I want you to kind of take from this episode would be to choose your stress intentionally. I want you to seek out stressors that are good for you, like seek out the good kind of stress, the ones that have positive benefits. And here’s something I need to say like, yes, these types of stressors are going to be hard, and they hurt and they’re stressful, right? If they weren’t, there wouldn’t be an adaptive response.

So you cannot get stronger without going through the stress. You cannot get faster without stressing out your system. Like people want to run faster, but they don’t want to practice running faster. Why? Because it’s hard because it sucks because, you know, it’s just like, it’s really terrible like to do sprints or speed work or hills or anything like that. Like it’s really tough, right?

But if you don’t do it, and they’re just like, oh, I’m so slow. You know, I don’t understand why I’m not getting faster. Okay. Are you doing speed work? No, no, I hate speed work. Oh, okay, then I got nothing for you. Like you got to do the work. You know, if you want to get stronger, you have to lift weights.

And so many people are like, I wish I was stronger, but they’re not doing anything to change that they’re not doing the hard stuff. And again, it’s hard, it feels terrible. It hurts you know lifting weights hurts it should you’re literally tearing your muscles a little bit, you know, and but it’s a good thing, right? It’s that good kind of acute stress that we want, we want to embrace that we want to choose that type of stress intentionally.

Even some type of like mental and emotional stresses like you know at work if you have to complete some big project on time or maybe you got to give a speech in front of a large crowd these things will create some acute stress for you. But then what happens you adapt you grow. You increase your comfort zone, you improve your cognitive function.

The next time you have a big project do like you’re going to be more confident the next time you have to stand up in front of a large crowd and talk, you’re gonna feel more poised, like, all these things help you to adapt and grow.

So choose acute stress, choose your stress wisely, you know, becoming faster or stronger or more emotionally involved, it requires a certain amount of stress, it requires some discomfort, some unease, you know, intentionally, putting your body and your mind through stressful events will help you to adapt, and grow and become more.

Listen, there’s no easy button, you can’t just sit around watching Netflix all day, and hope to become a better runner. Right? You can’t just sit around running the same, you know, speed all the time. And hope to get faster, you have to push yourself, you have to push yourself past your level of comfort, you have to get out of your comfort zone, right?

This is the does the hard hard part, I know. You got to get uncomfortable, right? And you have to do it the right way. You have to do it acutely, not chronically not every single day, this does not mean you go and do speed work every single day. You know, I suggest doing speed work once a week, do it hard. You know and do it quickly and get it over with and then give yourself a break. Give yourself a chance to adapt to that.

So your work this week is to embrace it, embrace the good stress. So whatever that means for you lift the heavy things, do that speed work, run those hill repeats. But do these things intentionally and quickly, and then give yourself a break. Take a rest day so that you can recover and so you can grow and adapt and then we continue this process right?

So here’s a good example yesterday at the gym, I did some heavy back squats. Very very heavy is very hard. And right after that, I did a sprint workout. And when I started running for my sprint workout, I just did like a mile warm-up. My legs were cooked. I mean, I was it was so hard just doing the warm-up to get to where I was going to do my sprints.

I was like, I don’t know about this. This isn’t a good idea. Because my legs were literally like pretty toast but I’m like okay, here’s my goal for today. A hard leg workout. And then sprints like I did some this is acute stress, total, totally good example of acute stress, right. But I knew that today was going to be my rest day. And then I wasn’t doing anything. No, no lifting today, no running today.

And I knew that today was going to be a day where I can repair and adapt and recover. And that I’m going to improve. You know, so that workout yesterday was really hard. I did my sprints, I did six by 30 seconds and 30 seconds is my limit like I’m running as hard as I can for 30 seconds. And those last 10 seconds are just miserable, right?

So the point here is that today, I’m just giving myself a chance to adapt and grow and totally recover from all of that. So that really acute stress on my body yesterday is a good thing. I’m not going to do that every day, there’s no way I could do that. And I actually have been combining my strength workouts and my speed workouts. And so that I can actually have a day off.

So I make my hard days hard and I make my easy days super easy. And that way I am not burning myself out. Because I was kind of getting in that way when I was running every day, I was running or working out or lifting weights or whatever, every single day. I wasn’t running every day. But I was doing some sort of a quote-unquote hard workout seven days a week.

And I was starting to feel pretty burned out. This is like my body going into this panic mode and staying in this state of chronic stress. So I was like, Okay, I got to do something about this. And ever since I’ve been, you know, making my hard days, combining my hard workouts on the same day and then taking like a total rest day.

Oh my gosh, I’m sleeping better. I feel more energized. My workouts have been improving. So this is all good stuff. And this is the way we’re designed, right? Avoid the chronic stress. Embrace the acute stress, choose your stress wisely, you know, and become stronger, become faster, and become that badass version of yourself. Cool. All right, well, I hope y’all got something out of this episode today. And if you did, consider sharing it with a friend I love you all keep Running Lean. 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.

79. Demystifying Desire

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Desire is one of those things that most people struggle with, mainly because they just don't understand what it really is. Desire can feel very strong and very powerful, and it can lead you to do …

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Podcast Transcript

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 79 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners, and today I’ve got a fun topic for you. Yes, it’s fun demystifying desire. So desire is one of those things that a lot of people struggle with. And I think a lot of people struggle with desire because they just don’t understand what it really is.

So desire can feel very strong, it can feel very powerful. And desire can lead you to do things that may not be in alignment with who you want to be, they may not desire can cause you to do things that aren’t in alignment with your goals like eating or drinking. You may think that having an intense desire for something like alcohol is normal, it’s just the way it is. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

The truth is, it doesn’t have to be this way, you can absolutely change your desire, even for things like food and alcohol. Desire does not have to be so ominous and so powerful and so mysterious. Okay, so in this episode, I want to break it all down, I’m going to go over what desire really is, hopefully, remove the mystery from desire. Talk about why desire is such a powerful force in your life and offer some things that you can do to change it.

So if you like this podcast, you got to come check out the Facebook group, we have this amazing group of like-minded runners over on Facebook. And we talk about all kinds of topics in there. You know, we do goal setting, we’re doing a challenge right now. And it’s July, and we’re doing the dry July challenge. And we’re just getting started with that. So definitely come and check us out just search for Running Lean community on Facebook, join the group.

And if you’re interested in doing the dry July challenge with us, it’s basically just we’re taking a break from alcohol for the month of July and see how that goes for us and see how it feels to do that. There are a lot of positive benefits from taking a break from alcohol.

And if it’s something you’ve thought about doing in the past, but you just feel like it might be too hard. Well, we’re going to be talking about it in the Facebook group. I’m going to be talking about it here on the podcast.

In fact, this episode today kind of has a lot to do with alcohol and our desire for alcohol. And how we can diminish that desire if that’s something we want for ourselves. So definitely come check us out. It’s fun, we have a lot of fun over in the Facebook group. It’s just you know, you get the support, the encouragement, the inspiration from a bunch of other people that are just like you.

And then here’s a message I received a while back that I was going through some folders on my computer. And I found this message from Melissa. And I just wanted to share, share part of this with you guys. Because I thought this was really cool. And she just wrote, “Patrick, your podcasts and posts have helped me so much. So much already. It’s so awesome to find a group of like-minded people who understand the passion behind what makes us run. I feel fortunate to have this strong, amazing running family that I’m always adding to with groups like yours. With COVID I’ve been mostly running solo and feeling more connected through your online resources, and social media posts. And this has meant the world to me. Thank you. I can’t wait for more emails and podcasts.”

Thank you, Melissa. That was super sweet. And I don’t think I’ve shared this before on the podcast, but I wanted to make sure that I did. Obviously, she sent this when you know we were kind of going through some lockdown stuff and COVID and social distancing and running groups weren’t meeting and things like that.

I know a lot of that has changed. But it’s really cool that she reached out and shared that. And it would mean a lot to me if you could take a moment and leave a quick review of the podcast. You can do that in Apple podcasts. Just scroll down where it says leave a review, tap the stars and write a few words. It’s just a way of saying thank you for what I’m providing here on the show.

And then if you ever want a little help with any of this stuff with, you know, sports nutrition with getting your mindset right around, you know, not drinking or changing your eating habits, maybe losing some weight, you can work with me as a one on one coach, this is what I do. And I work with runners every day who are trying to improve themselves and want to become the most badass version of themselves, whatever that looks like for you.

Listen, I want you to love yourself, exactly as you are right now. Whether you’re, you know, whether you feel like you’re you have some weight to lose, or you feel like you’re, you know, you need to get faster as a runner, or you want to become healthier. None of that stuff really matters. And wherever you are right now, is perfect.

And you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. And you should love yourself exactly as you are right here in this moment. But if you want to improve where you are, that’s okay to like you can love yourself exactly as you are and still want to lose some weight. It doesn’t There’s nothing bad about that. It’s not fat-shaming, it’s not, you know, body negativity, this is all, I want to encourage you to love yourself where you are.

And if you want to improve something in your life, then I’m here to help you. Okay? There’s no, you know, there’s no shame in where you are, in this moment, we got to love ourselves exactly as we are. And sometimes we just need a little help getting to where we want to be.

I know, that was where I was, I was, you know, finding myself feeling very unhealthy, and continuing to gain weight. And I was not happy where I was, I still loved myself. You know, I still loved myself where I was, but I wanted to improve, you know, I could look at myself in the mirror and go like, Come on, dude, you got to change something here, you know.

And so I made some decisions. And I made some choices that led me to becoming healthier and losing weight and feeling great in the process. And you can do the same thing too.

So if you ever want to talk about coaching and just see what coaching looks like, just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply, you and I’ll jump on a quick zoom call, we’ll have a short conversation, we’ll see if this is something you’re interested in. That’s it. No obligation, it can’t hurt to have a conversation. Okay, cool.

So demystifying desire, I’ve been excited about talking about this, because desire is one of those things that I think we get in our heads that it’s some big, complicated, ominous, mysterious thing. And it can really keep us stuck, whether it’s a desire for sugar, you know, or junk food, or scrolling through social media or alcohol, or, you know, whatever your desire is, whatever this strong desire that you have, it can seem overwhelming, and it can feel so big and overpowering.

And just feel like there’s nothing you can do about it, right. And if you want to make a change, like let’s say you want to stop drinking, you just have to like grit your teeth and white knuckle your way through it, right. And that’s not really the case. And we’re gonna talk about all this today. And one of the reasons I’m bringing this up, and especially talking about alcohol is because we’re doing that challenge in the Facebook group, the dry July challenge.

Alcohol is a big crutch for a lot of people. Lots of people use alcohol as a way of feeling better as a way of soothing themselves. Just like we use food. You know, we have talked about sugar in the past and how sugar can feel very addictive, it can be very hard to stop eating sugar, right.

So just I wanted to preface this was just saying like this conversation today is about we’re going to talk a lot about alcohol. I’m just using this as our vehicle because we’re talking about this in the Facebook group. Okay, so today’s focus is going to kind of be on you know, not drinking and alcohol and our desire for alcohol.

And, and maybe you don’t drink. Maybe you’re somebody who’s like, well, I don’t drink already. So this isn’t really an issue for me. And that’s totally fine. Just substitute, you know, your desire for something else sugar, junk food, shopping, whatever your thing is, you can just substitute because it’s all the same. The work is the same for whatever the desire is that you have, okay?

It’s just like, we just need to preface I just wanted to preface this by just talking about how I’m going to be talking about alcohol in this episode. Okay, so what is desire? Exactly? So if you look up the definition of desire, it says desire is a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen, a strong feeling, in other words, desire is a feeling desire is not something that’s out there external to you.

Desire is inside you. It’s a feeling it’s an emotion. Desire is just a feeling. And this is kind of cool because when you look at it this way it right away, we’ve, you know, kind of eliminated a lot of the mystery around this right? So desires are just a feeling. And if you’ve been listening to this podcast, you know that all of your feelings, all of your emotions are always created by your thoughts.

So there’s this thought feeling action cycle, you have a thought about something that thought creates an emotional experience inside of you, that creates a feeling inside of you. And those emotions, those feelings that you have drive your actions, thought feeling action.

And it always happens in that order, you have a thought, that creates an emotion or a feeling. And that feeling will drive your action. This is the way it works all the time you think you’re doing something automatically, like you just doing it because, you know, you see a glass of wine and you just drink it.

But there’s a thought and a feeling in there before you take that action. Always, always always. Alright. So knowing this really helps a lot. This helped me a lot, for sure. And the other thing that’s kind of cool, is that desire is just something that is learned. It’s something that you learn over time, you’re not born with a desire to drink alcohol, right, I didn’t have a desire to drink alcohol until I started drinking alcohol.

So when I was in high school, I was a very shy kid, I was introverted, nerdy, awkward, full of fear, couldn’t talk to girls, very uncomfortable in my own skin. And, you know, I just I, no matter what I did, I could not change this, okay. And I just felt very uncomfortable and very awkward all the time.

Until I drank alcohol for the first time. And all of that kind of changed for me, right? All of a sudden, I felt more outgoing, more confident, the fear went away. I was funny, I was the life of the party. I’m talking to girls like I felt comfortable. All that stuff shifted for me because I drank alcohol.

So right away, I started to want more of what I wanted, I wanted that feeling. Right, I wanted to. I wanted to feel outgoing and confident. I didn’t want to feel fearful and uncomfortable anymore. I wanted that. That feeling that alcohol gaming. So all of a sudden, I had created a desire, I learned that alcohol could help me.

And it was actually a lot of what was happening, it was dampening those feelings I had. So I felt uncomfortable, awkward fearful. And the alcohol actually just squashed those feelings down. It diminished those feelings. And so that’s where the desire started to grow for me. And I learned that you know, alcohol kind of helped with this issue here.

So I learned the desire for alcohol. Right? It wasn’t actually the alcohol that was desiring. It was the feeling that I got from drinking. That’s what I was craving. That’s what I wanted. That was a strong feeling that I wanted, okay, my desire was very strong. But it wasn’t for the alcohol. It was what alcohol did for me. It made me feel better.

I was the life of the party, it was a lot of fun, felt more, more comfortable. So my desire was really to just feel less fearful, more comfortable, I want to feel safer. And alcohol made me feel more comfortable. So the real desire boils down for a lot of us the real desire boils down to comfort, it boils down to safety, I just want to feel more comfortable, I want to feel safer.

I don’t want to feel this fear. I don’t want to feel this anxiety. I don’t want to feel this stress, whatever I can do to feel more comfortable. And alcohol did that. For me, it made me feel more comfortable, at least I thought it did. So another way of saying this is like the desire was not the desire was to not feel the fear. The desire was to not feel the anxiety and the awkwardness.

And alcohol kind of numbed those feelings for me. So I didn’t have to feel those things, right. And I developed this. I learned this process, I learned that if I drink alcohol, I’m not going to feel that way. Right? So it was something that I learned which is this is good news, in my opinion, because if the desire is something that you learn, it’s something that you can unlearn.

If desire is something you learn, it’s something that you can change. And you’ve already done this in other places in your life, right? You’ve already had a strong desire for something, and then it’s gone away. Because desire is just a feeling and feelings come and go, right.

So, you know, think back to maybe, you know, when you were in high school, and maybe you were dating someone, and you had this obsession with this other person, you know, you had this intense desire to be with this person for the rest of your life, like you couldn’t imagine not being with this person. And now think of where you are today, you probably haven’t thought about that person until just now. And I started saying this, right?

I know, as I was writing some notes for this episode, I started thinking about those old girlfriends that I had back in high school, and I’m like, well, I have not thought about her in many years, like, you know, 40 years almost. And so it’s crazy. So we have these people that we think are, you know, we can’t live without, and we have this super strong desire for this other person, we can, you know, we want to be with them forever.

And then, you know, some years go by, and then you just stop thinking about them, and that desire is gone. So that’s something that you’ve already experienced in your life, you know, desire, comes and goes, it’s a feeling, Feelings come and go.

And so why would you want to change your desire? Why would you no longer want to have a strong desire? And the reason you would want to change it, or, you know, kind of get rid of that desire is because when you no longer desire, things like sugar, or junk food, or alcohol, there’s like so much freedom in that.

Because when you’re chained to this desire when you have this over desire for alcohol or food, you’re going to have a very hard time losing weight, you’re going to have a hard time, you know, improving your running performance, you’re going to have a hard time getting healthier.

And you know, you’re just going to be constantly in this cycle of kind of beating yourself up and engaging in bad behaviors and then beating yourself up again. And so it’s just like this vicious cycle, right? But when you no longer have the desire. You just don’t crave that anymore. And that’s where the freedom comes in.

And I hear people say, Well, I’m going to miss drinking. And I just, I can’t imagine not drinking, and I’m just going to miss it way too much. And here’s the thing, you’re thinking that now because you have this strong desire right now. And you can’t imagine not feeling that desire for alcohol. You can’t imagine not wanting it you can imagine not wanting to drink.

But it’s just like that old boyfriend and girlfriend that you had, you couldn’t imagine living without them. And now you’re like, yeah, whatever. That was interesting. That whole situation. But this is what freedom looks like, it looks like you’re not emotionally charged with this desire to have, you know, the sugar or the alcohol. This is what freedom looks like. Okay.

So one of the things we can do to change our desire is we have to understand, like what change looks like, okay, so you will learn over time that alcohol can dampen those difficult emotions that can dull the difficult emotions that you’re experiencing, right. And so you keep using alcohol in that way, and you keep getting better at it, right, you get better at what you practice.

So every time you feel stressed out, or you feel like you just need to take the edge off. You know, you just want to unwind, you go for a drink. And you keep practicing this and for years and years, and maybe decades, and you get really good at it, it becomes a very unconscious automatic habit, you do it automatically.

But really, it’s always a thought, that’s creating a feeling that’s driving an action. It always works that way. It’s just you’ve gotten so good at it, you’ve created this pattern, this thought pattern. That’s really an unconscious habit. It’s just super easy and effortless. It seems like it’s automatic. But really, it’s always a thought feeling action that’s happening, right.

And so one of the things I’m going to have you do here we’ll talk about this in just a minute is identifying those pieces and identifying, you know what’s really going on in that moment and interrupting that pattern.

Because that’s the work that we have to do is we have to change the pattern. If you want to change the habit. We’ve got to interrupt the pattern and then change the pattern, okay? But it’s just something you’ve learned to desire, something you’ve just been practicing. It’s something that you’ve learned. And it’s something that’s very habitual, automatic, and unconscious for you

We just want to bring up the awareness, we want to bring it into our consciousness. Right. So, in order to change the desire, dampen it or make it go away, you have to interrupt the pattern, you have to notice when the desire comes up for you. So you’re gonna think you know what? A drink sounds really good, right by now, I, you know, I said, I’m not going to drink, but I’m, there’s a bottle of wine in the fridge. And I just, you know, it just sounds really good. Right now, I just want to take the edge off, I just want to relax, I want to unwind destress, I just want to feel good.

So when you notice this is coming up for you when you notice that you have that desire, that’s when you need to stop, you need to interrupt the pattern in that moment, while it is happening, do not take a drink. This is not easy, I get it, it’s hard. It’s an uncomfortable thing to do. But this is how you’re going to break the habit. And this is how you’re going to diminish the desire.

So you can’t skip this part, you have to stop you, you got to just like nod, take the drink, okay. And then you have to identify the emotion or the feeling that you’re having at that moment. Right, you have to stop and be present with yourself. Now, when you stop and you don’t take the drink, you’re going to start to feel something.

And your first reaction is going to be I want to make this feeling go away. And if you’re choosing not to drink, you might choose to do something else like to distract yourself in some other way. I’m just going to go for a run, I’m going to do some laundry, I’m going to wash the dog, I’m going to do something just to like, take my mind off of this.

And I don’t want you to do that. In fact, it’s not going to help you’re not going to be you’re not going to become better at changing the desire if you do that. All you’re going to do is just you know you’re replacing the drink with some other way of distracting yourself. And we don’t want to do that.

You have to create awareness about what is really going on inside you inside your brain inside your body. So what I want you to do is when you notice that urge comes and that desire is there to drink. You just have to stop, stop right there, interrupt the pattern, do not take the drink, sit down, close your eyes, and feel whatever’s coming up for you just feel the emotion is the part where you’re like you had me up until this point.

But you just have to do this part. It’s so important. What is this thing you’re feeling? Is it stress? Is it anger? Like, name it. Is it boredom? Is it frustration? Is it anxiety? Describe the feeling, name it, and describe it. What is this feeling like inside your body? We feel our emotions in our body, our thoughts we experience in our brains in our heads, our emotions, our feelings we experience in our body.

And they manifest in ways like a tightness in your shoulders, stiffness in your neck, turning in your stomach, a heaviness in your chest, things like that. Describe the way it feels. And you only have to take a few minutes to do this, like five minutes.

Sit down, close your eyes, name that thing you’re feeling. Name the emotion. Feel it in your body describe the way you’re feeling it in your body. Because what emotion really is, is a sensation in your body. That’s it. It’s a sensation in your body. But we’re so afraid to feel these things, we’re so afraid to feel an emotion that we’re drinking instead. And we’re eating instead.

Because when we drink or we eat, it just stuffs that emotion down and it makes it kind of go away. It doesn’t really go away, by the way. It’s still there. But you’re dampening it. And you’re like pushing it down. And I heard you describe it this way. It’s kind of like holding a beach ball underwater. Like if you’re in a pool or in the ocean, you’re trying to hold that ball underwater.

And the more you push it down, the more it wants to just shoot up. And it’s just like you can’t hold it down forever. At some point, it’s going to come exploding out through the water. And that’s exactly what we’re doing with our emotions. When we drink over them when we eat over them.

So this process is so important. You have to understand what it is you’re feeling and you just have to feel it. So, identify what it is you’re feeling. Name the emotion and then feel it in your body. That’s it. Take five minutes to be present with yourself, with exactly what you’re feeling.

And I would encourage you to write it down, this is really helpful through this process is just to write down what you’re feeling and how it feels in your body, you’re going to be creating so much awareness around while you’re drinking, that that desire will start to immediately just diminish, I promise you.

And the key part of this is like, we don’t want to try to make the feelings go away. And this is going to be your natural inclination, you’re going to be like, I just want to make this go away. I don’t like to feel the stress, I don’t like to feel the anxiety or the boredom, I just want to make this go away.

But the key thing here, and the key habit we’re trying to change is not dampening our emotions, not avoiding our emotions, not trying to numb out to our emotions, the key thing we’re trying to change is we want to feel them, we want to be present with them, we want to acknowledge them, and it may not feel good. And that’s okay, you can do this, you can do this for five minutes, you can feel a little bit of stress for five minutes, you will not die, I promise you. Don’t do anything to try to change how you feel. This is kind of a radical concept, right?

Just feeling your feelings, it seems so simple. And it is simple. It’s not easy. It’s uncomfortable. But the more you do it, the better you get at it, and the more comfortable it becomes. In order to change that thought feeling action habit that you’re in, and change the desire that you’re feeling, you’ve got to get good at feeling stuff, you just got to get good at feeling what you’re feeling, and not giving in to it.

And here’s something that’s kind of interesting. This is not just true for negative emotions. So we talk about stress and fear and anxiety and anger and all this stuff, right. But sometimes you might be feeling a lot of joy or happiness or excitement. And those emotions can be very strong and feel very uncomfortable for a lot of people because we’re not, we’re not used to feeling those things. So they feel weird to us, right?

Happiness can feel very uncomfortable for us because it’s not our norm. So we often feel like I just want to drink because you know, I’m feeling a little too good. I want to like, dampen that emotion, you don’t even know you’re doing this, I promise you, you think you’re just drinking to celebrate or have fun. And a lot of times we’re drinking to just feel comfortable. We’re not wired as humans to seek happiness, we’re wired to seek comfort. We’re not wired to experience our emotions, we’re wired to, you know, numb out and try to avoid our emotions.

This is not something we’re used to doing at all, just sending with our feelings and feeling them good, bad, whatever we want to whatever, however you want to label them. And these are just labels, right? There’s no good or bad emotion. They’re all just emotions. And as humans, it’s cool, we get to experience all the emotions, right?

So we got to feel what we’re feeling, we just have to be present with that, we have to create the awareness that internal that self-awareness, it’s so key, right. And in order to make any kind of change, it’s not enough, just know this or think about it, you have to take action. And I know a lot of you that are listening to this right now will never do this, you will never take the time to just sit with your feelings and write them down. And that’s okay, that’s fine.

But the solution to lessening your desire for alcohol or food or whatever your strong desire is, the solution is to get good at experiencing your feelings. Now, I’ve been practicing this for a long time. And I’ve changed a lot of habits, I’ve changed a lot of bad habits. I’ve replaced those habits with new ones, habits that helped me to grow and helped me to evolve, and helped me to become more of who I want to be.

And these new habits, are now in alignment with that future version of myself that I’m always working towards. I’m not superhuman, there’s nothing really special about me. I’m just willing to feel my emotions, all of them. And you can get good at this too. When you do you can become an emotional badass. I love this little phrase, the becoming an emotional badass. I think this is something we can all strive for.

And I was talking to a client recently who she and I were talking about this exact topic about you know, just sitting with your feelings and feeling them instead of trying to eat over them or instead of trying to drink over them. And she said that she was going over this with her 12-year-old daughter, she was explaining how to do this with her daughter and explaining her that it was okay for her to not feel good and to just feel her feelings.

And that was okay. And I was like, Well, what a radical concept that must be. For kids especially like to be taught this at an early age, I’m really hoping that this kind of stuff catches on with kids. And that we can learn how to do this early on in our life, and we can get good at it and we can become emotional badass is at an early age, and the rest of our lives can be, it’s not going to be without struggles or challenges.

But I think we can just be so much better and engage in less of the kind of behavior that we don’t want to be engaged in, you know, like drinking too much or, or eating over our feelings, you know. So I think this is cool stuff that we can teach our kids, you know.

So I want to encourage you, even though you might think it’s weird, even though you may probably not want to do it, I want to encourage you to do this work to take action because it’s only by taking action that you’re going to make any kind of change, okay?

I want to encourage you to stop giving in to every desire that you have. You know, I want you to stop giving in to seeking comfort and safety all the time and seeking more of the known I want you to seek discomfort I want you to seek, you know, the unknown. I want you to do the harder thing, which is to just feel whatever it is that’s coming up for you without doing anything to make it go away.

And then over time, as you get good at this, a lot of times that the desire, once you understand and you’ve demystified desire and you understand what’s really going on inside you, you can begin to change this so easily and so quickly, and it’ll become a habit for you, it’ll become an unconscious automatic habit for you where you have, you know, you experience a desire for something, and it just sort of like you can instantly just kind of make it change, you can make it go away and lessen it, and then you don’t need it anymore.

And you can actually over time, you can learn how to change your thoughts and feelings. But the first step is you have to create the awareness that your thoughts are causing your feelings, your thoughts are causing your desire. It’s not the alcohol that’s causing your desire, the alcohol sitting over there is not causing you to feel this way. It’s your thoughts about it that are causing you to feel this way.

And over time, you can learn how to change those thoughts. And when you get good at this, you can go anywhere you can be around people who are drinking and go hang out at bars with people, you can have alcohol in your house and not desire it at all. And that’s what I want for you.

I want you to be able to just live your life and hang out with people who are drinking and not be you know, having to white knuckle it. Through all of that, I want you to experience the freedom that comes with understanding desire and eliminating that desire for things that aren’t serving you.

Alright, so I hope you got something out of this episode today. If you did, please consider sharing it with a friend. Come join us over in the Facebook group for our dry July challenge. We’re gonna be talking more about this kind of stuff all month long. Love you all keep on Running Lean. 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.

77. Happiness is Overrated

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There’s a lot of talk out there in the personal development world about happiness. There are so many books on how to be happy all the time and how to be happy about everything, and honestly, I see …

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Podcast Transcript

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 77, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I am so happy to be here talking about happiness today. And my take on happiness, which might be a little different from what most people say about happiness. I have this idea that happiness might be a little overrated. So I’m going to talk about that today.

Listen, there’s a lot of talk in the personal development space, about happiness about how to become happy all the time, and how the goal is to just like, we need to be happy all the time. There are books on this, there are podcasts on this, there are all kinds of teachings out there about how to be happy all the time. And honestly, I think this is kind of a problem because my take on happiness is a little bit different.

I think happiness is not the goal, I don’t think our goal or our purpose in life is to be happy all the time. So I believe we are put here on this earth for something bigger, and much more powerful than just like being happy.

Okay, so in this episode of the podcast, I’m going to explain all of that, I’ll break it down. I’ll explain what I mean when I say that happiness is overrated, and I’ll offer my take on what I believe my life’s purpose and your life’s purpose really is.

And then as a little extra something, be sure to listen to the end of this episode because I’m going to walk you through a very powerful happiness, exercise. Okay, so be sure to listen to the end of this one, because it’ll be kind of fun, fun thing for you at the end here.

But first, if you haven’t already joined us on Facebook, come check us out the Running Lean podcast community, I created this group as an extension of this podcast so that we could have more of a two-way conversation because it’s just me here talking into this microphone. I know you’re listening on the other end there. But I like to have that interaction.

And so in the Facebook group, you can ask questions, I can chime in and help answer those questions. And then each week, I do a little coaching a little teaching in the group. And I love doing that. It’s super fun to connect with you guys. live and in person, so to speak, right virtually, virtually live and in person. So come and check us out on Facebook, just go to Facebook and search for Running Lean community and you’ll find us we have fun, we have a lot of fun.

Here’s another five-star review of the Running Lean podcast. This one’s from Maddie. And she says “Five-star plus, I’ve only been listening a few weeks and listened to most podcasts more than once very informative, very encouraging. I’m also a member of the Facebook group, everyone is there to support, encourage and help each other.”

Thank you, Maddie, for that awesome review. And yes, the Facebook group is amazing. And if you feel the urge to drop a review of the podcast, I would really appreciate it. You can just go to Apple podcasts or Spotify or audible wherever you listen to your podcasts and tap the stars. Leave a few words and you’re good to go. I’d really appreciate that. Thank you so much.

And then listen, if you’re ever looking for a little bit of help with all this stuff, losing weight, becoming a fat-adapted runner, changing your mindset, you know, working through all the issues we have around sticking to our plan. This is what I do as a one-on-one coach, this is the kind of work we do together. Listen, everybody I work with experiences some sort of a transformation.

Sometimes it’s the transformation of the mind. Sometimes it’s the transformation of the body sometimes it’s both. But I promise you that working one on one with a coach for a period of time can be very transformative. And just imagine what you can accomplish in like three months working one on one with a coach. It’s It’s amazing. Right?

So a coach just doesn’t you know, tell you what to do. A coach is there to support you. guide you offer you encouragement, support, knowledge experience, but also a coach there to help you do the things that you know you should do that you don’t want to do. There might be a little bit of tough love involved with coaching as well. That’s all part of it.

But the goal of coaching is not to just teach you a bunch of stuff, but to help you become the person that you ultimately want to become. So if you’re ever interested, you can just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply and apply for coaching, we’ll get on a Zoom call, we’ll have a conversation about and see if it’s a good fit for you.

No obligations, it doesn’t cost anything to jump on this call with me. It’s just me and you, having a little chat about your goals and seeing if coaching is something you’re interested in. And if you’re a good fit, cool, awesome.

Okay, let’s get into this topic because I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. And I’m finally like, okay, I’m ready to have this conversation with you guys. This is one of those maybe a little bit of tough love conversations. And I just want to start out by saying, like, happiness is not the goal, happiness is not the end result that we’re looking for. At least it shouldn’t be, okay?

But a lot of times I talk to people, and I’ll say like, tell me about your goals, what do you want for yourself? And inevitably, something will come up, like, oh, I just want to be happy. You know, I know that if I just lose weight, then I’ll be happy. Or if I can just run a faster marathon, then I’m going to be happy.

And I want to caution you guys against this. Because if you’re looking at happiness, as the end result of, of what you really want for yourself is like, that’s the goal I’m trying to reach, I’m trying to get to this place where I can just be happy all the time, you are going to be disappointed. It is almost impossible for you to be happy all the time. And I’ll talk about this more, I’ll break this down for you here.

But I just want you to know that happiness is one of those emotions that we want. And we desire. It’s one of our positive emotions, right, it’s a wanted emotion, it’s something we want more of in our life. And we can absolutely have more happiness in our life. But to think that, like, we’re going to be happy all the time.

And I think this is the mental image we project and this is the idea we get in our heads about, you know, if I could just lose this weight, if I could just lose the 30 pounds, get back to this weight I was when I first got married or when I was, you know, at my peak, then then I’ll be happy.

You know, and we do this in other areas of our lives, too. Like, oh, if I just had a better job, I’d be happy. Or if maybe I had a better relationship, you know, I’d be happy. And I want to caution you against thinking this way. Because accomplishing some big goal in your life or, you know, changing, you know, moving or changing a job or changing a relationship. Those things are all great. And you should always be wanting to accomplish things in your life.

But if the end goal is to be happy, you’re going to be disappointed. Happiness should not be the end goal, okay? Because happiness is just an emotion and emotions we can experience they come and they go, you know, you feel happiness, you feel joy, you feel sadness, you feel sorrow, you feel shame, or guilt, or stress or boredom. These are all emotions that we experience at different times in our lives, different times in our day, you can go through a whole day where you’re feeling a whole breadth of emotions, right?

Which I think is super cool, because as human beings, we get to experience all of these cool emotions. And as far as we know, we’re the only creatures in the universe that experience emotion in this way, especially this wide breadth of emotions.

I think somebody told me once they’re like dogs, dogs feel emotions, too. And I’m like, Yeah, probably. Cats, not so much. Dogs. Yes. But we get to experience all these different emotions, okay? And if we’re just, you know, set on, like, I just want this one emotion to be around forever. And that’s it. Like, I think this is, this is dumb to think this way, honestly. Okay.

So I don’t want you to be in this place of like, chasing happiness and making happiness the goal. Okay. Happiness is not a permanent state of being, it’s not something that you can just experience all the time. And if you see people that are like, Oh, that person is just happy all the time. I promise you they are not.

And they why would you want to be? Why would you want to be happy all the time? The purpose of your life is not to be happy all the time. Because when you’re happy. Where are you like everything is great, right? You’re comfortable. Everything is going perfectly well right? and you’re, you get to this place of contentment. Right?

And that’s okay to feel contentment, that’s okay to feel comfortable. But I think we get into this place of, oh, I just want to be happy. And then you want to be content and you get comfortable and just feel sort of, you know, like your life is sort of soft, soft and happy and comfortable all the time. Is that really what you want for yourself?

So you no longer need to work to improve yourself, you no longer need to push yourself, you no longer need to change anything in your life, because you’re just happy. I think this is the problem, right? I have this vision of being happy all the time, like this, if you guys saw the movie, Wally, the cruise ship in space, you know, with all the fat happy people, like everybody’s become so happy. And they don’t have to do anything. And they’re so comfortable that they’re so fat, they can’t even walk anymore.

So they get carted around in these little hover chairs. And there are all these robots that do everything for them. And all they do is like sit around and eat and drink all day, and they’re just fat slobs, right? It’s just like, so hilarious.

But it’s not unlike this vision of like, Oh, I just want to be happy all the time. You know, and just happy, soft, comfortable, you know, and content. And I don’t think this is what we want for ourselves. So this is kind of what I mean when I say happiness is overrated. I think if you want to evolve and you want to grow and you want to become something more than what you are right now, that there is a level of unhappiness required that there is some discontentment that is required if you want to become more.

And this takes me to what I believe the purpose of life really is for us, the purpose of your life is not to be happy all the time, the purpose of your life is to become more. Becoming more requires you to be somewhat unhappy and somewhat discontented with how things are and somewhat uncomfortable, right?

For yourself or others for your community for the world. Like there needs to be some level of discontentment with the way things are, in order for you to want to grow and become more to change to evolve. Becoming more means experiencing some amount of discomfort, some amount of pain or hardness or suffering.

We don’t grow and evolve by sitting around on our butts in our comfort zone all the time. If I could grow and become more by just sitting on the couch watching Netflix all day long, I would absolutely do that. But it doesn’t work that way. It does not work that way.

Becoming more means and I want to break this down for you. Because I talk about this idea of becoming more what does that mean? Becoming more means becoming more of who you are not becoming someone else. But just becoming more of you. More of who you want to be.

There’s this version of you that’s inside you that’s lurking inside you that maybe you’ve always been afraid to, to let her out. That’s what I’m talking about. I want that for you. I want you to be more authentically you. And I don’t know if I’ve shared this with you guys before this quote from Dr. Seuss. And it’s from one of the Dr. Seuss books. I can’t remember which book it’s from. But the quote is this: “Today you are you that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you.”

Anytime I talk about like becoming more you I always this quote always comes to mind like there’s no one alive who’s youer than you. Becoming more means living up to your true potential becoming the best you can be right? Most of us are living up to about 40% of our potential. This is below average, I want more for myself, I want to become more.

I want more than that for myself. I want you to want more than that for yourself. I don’t want to be below average. I want to be well above average 40% is not cool with me. Shouldn’t be cool with you either. We need to tap into more of who we are more of what we are capable of.

So to become more though it means you have to experience some level of discontentment or discomfort with where you are right now. And that’s okay. It’s not a bad thing. Like to not be happy where you are right now this is okay. That just means you want more for yourself. It’s amazing actually, right, if there’s you know, discontentment a little unhappiness that will actually serve you and actually help to drive you forward.

And being unhappy sometimes or being discontented sometimes. Don’t look at this as a negative thing. We think of this as being negative, I’m discontented, oh, I’m unhappy. It’s okay. You know, Life is 50/50. You know, we experience 50% of the time, roughly, we have positive emotions, and 50% of the time, you know, we experience quote, unquote, like negative emotions, right?

And it’s meant to be that way, life is supposed to be about half and half. Because as humans, we get to experience all the emotions, this wide breadth of emotions, the good and the bad, we need the contrast. Because without sadness, we wouldn’t have happiness. without sorrow, you wouldn’t know what joy feels like without conflict, you wouldn’t feel peaceful.

Without some sort of discontentment, you wouldn’t have any reason to grow. And to become more. We need the contrast. The contrast provides clarity for us. Otherwise, all these emotions would all just like, blend together, and just be like, blah, right?

So we have, you know, emotions that feel good and positive, and there are emotions that we feel that we experience and we feel maybe not so good. And then we might label these as negative, okay.

And listen, negative emotions are not to be avoided or pushed away or numbed out, we do this all the time, we experienced some sort of negative emotion, and we want to just push away wanting to go with his fastball, get back to being happy, I don’t want to feel this way.

Do not make the mistake of pushing these emotions away, do not make the mistake of trying to just feel happy all the time. Because when you do this, you get caught in this practice of running away from half of the emotions you’re trying to that you want to feel, you know, end up, pushing away, and numbing out to half of your life. These negative emotions are things that we should absolutely allow them to be there.

I don’t even like to use the word negative to describe emotions, because I don’t really think they’re negative, I think it’s just part of who you are. And when we say negative then we think, Oh, I, they’re, they’re bad, they’re not bad.

Now, some of these are difficult emotions, their unwanted emotions, they’re highly charged emotions, they’re strong emotions, you know, shame, guilt, hurt, sadness. These are emotionally or energetically charged motions, they really make you feel something in your body like you feel these emotions deeply. Right. And it’s okay to feel deeply. Happiness and sadness.

It’s okay to feel deep guilt and hurt and shame, and joy, and excitement and motivation. But when we push away half of our emotions, we’re not experiencing like half of our life or numbing out to half of our experience in this world. So what does this look like?

So if, for example, somebody that you care about dies, you want to feel sadness for that person, you want to feel sadness for that loss. You don’t want to push that away. You don’t want to be happy about that. Right? So that’s kind of what I’m talking about like when we want to feel happy all the time.

That means you want to feel happy when somebody you love dies, do you want to feel happy when your husband cheats on you? You know you want to feel angry. You want to feel hurt, right? Because that is how we are wired as human beings and it’s good. It’s good to feel these things. You should be angry. If your husband cheats on you like that is something you can absolutely be angry about.

Allow that to be there don’t push it away. You don’t need to feel happy about those things. Okay, that would be weird. Okay. So whenever we experience certain emotions we want to push them away as fast as possible. A lot of times what we do is we numb out to those so we go, we eat something or drink something, we go shopping, whatever we do. We’re trying to feel better, just like right right now I just want to say feel better. I just want to feel better.

I don’t want to feel sadness, I don’t want to feel shame. I don’t want to feel guilt. I don’t want to feel stress. So I’m just gonna eat something, you know, and we condition ourselves to eat and drink our way to feeling better. To try to make ourselves feel happy. If I just eat this cake, I’m gonna be happy.

You guys, it doesn’t work. I talked to people every single day who tell me, you know, I wasn’t feeling good. I was stressed out or I was unhappy, and I just wanted to be happy. So I, you know, I ate the cake, because I thought that was gonna make me feel happy. Oh, okay. How’d that work for you? Do you feel happy? Hmm. No, I mean, you know, it tasted good. Gave me a sugar rush. But I wasn’t happy.

We eat and drink ourselves into oblivion sometimes, because we think that it’s gonna make us happy. And we think it’s gonna make us feel better. But it doesn’t. It tricks your brain into making you think you’re feeling better because it’s a, it’s like a drug, sugar as a drug. I would argue alcohol is a drug.

And we use these things to trick our brains into feeling good, right? Because we release dopamine, they light up these pleasure centers in our brain. And so we feel good. Our brain thinks we feel good. Our brain thinks we’re happy. But are we really happy? No, we just think we are.

And listen, the difficult emotions like the stress, the boredom, the sadness, whatever you’re experiencing, it’s still there. It hasn’t gone anywhere. Okay. So I don’t want to chase this idea of happiness as something that we need to get to as a destination as an end result. Happiness is something we can experience and we should experience.

I think we can increase the amount of happiness in our lives and I’ll talk about that more in a minute. But I don’t want to get stuck in this idea of chasing happiness as the goal. So not the goal. The goal is to become more and I don’t want to conflate being unhappy with like grumpiness. Okay, because I think we can do this.

I think there’s a misconception that like if you’re a grumpy person you’re unhappy. Just because you’re discontented with the way things are. You don’t have to be a grim kin or a snark. Okay, you can be happy, or you can be unhappy and discontented and still be positive. You can be unhappy and discontented and still be kind, generous, selfless, and friendly. And motivated.

You know, when we talk about weight loss, a lot of times people are discontented with the way they are today. I don’t like my body today. I feel fat. I feel I’m ashamed of who I am. I don’t want you to be ashamed of who you are. We have to love ourselves exactly as we are right now.

You can absolutely love yourself how you are right now. And have a positive body image and be discontented and want to become more and want to lose the weight. You can do both. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Love yourself exactly as you are and want to become more you can do that. I love that. I love that idea.

So I don’t want you to think that if you’re unhappy, that means you’re, you know, you’re just a jerk to everybody. Because that’s different. That’s just you’re a jerk, okay? If everybody you meet is a jerk, you’re the jerk. Just so you know. Okay.

I saw that meme recently, I thought was pretty funny. And listen, I’m not about anti-happiness. Okay, I absolutely think we can increase the amount of happiness in our lives. And I think we should, I think we should be working on ways to increase the amount of happiness in our lives. As long as we understand that this is not the end goal.

We should increase the time the amount of time that we spend experiencing positive or, you know, wanted emotions like joy and excitement, and delight and happiness. You know, all of these things in love. Oh my gosh, love what a great emotion to experience. Don’t you want to experience more love in your life? Absolutely.

So we just don’t want to make that like the absolute goal, right? Remember, your purpose in life is to become more of who you are. So I’m not anti-happiness. I just don’t want you to seek it as the purpose of your life. The purpose of your life is not to be happy. Because if you make that the purpose of your life, you’re going to be miserable a lot of the time because you’re going to be, you’re not going to be where you want to be. Right.

So happiness is one of those things that it’s just an emotion that you can experience. And it’s an emotion that you can experience anytime you want. And so if, if you’re into it, I’m going to walk you through a little exercise here, where you can actually experience a great deal of happiness right now, right here in this moment, okay?

So, if your goal with this, I’m going to just kind of walk you through this little exercise, okay, this is really powerful. And something you can do. Anytime you want to experience more happiness, or, or any other emotion that you want to experience and you want to create more love, we’re just going to use happiness because that’s kind of what we’re talking about today.

So here’s what we’re going to do if you’re listening to this, and you can, you know, sit down or, or just close your eyes, and just relax a little bit, that’s a good way to do this. But if you’re out running or driving or something like that, and you’re listening to this, that’s totally fine, too, you don’t have to close your eyes, don’t close your eyes, if you’re driving, unless you’re driving your Tesla with autopilot on, and that’s totally fine. But even then keep your hands on the steering wheel.

But now, so just like if you’re out running or something like that, you can still do this, you just do it with your eyes open. Okay. And so here’s what I want you to do, close your eyes, and I just want you to like, relax, take a couple of deep breaths.

And just try to relax a little bit, okay, because we just want to like, we want to tap into a different state right, now we want to tap into a state where we feel a little more calm, a little bit more relaxed, a little more at ease, we just want to slow down a little bit here, okay.

And what I want you to do is I want you to think about a time when you are really happy. I want you to think about a specific moment in time in your past when you were really, really happy. And then I want you to go back to that moment right now. Go back to that moment in your mind.

Float down into that moment and see what you saw through your own eyes. Hear what you heard. And I want you to really feel the feeling of happiness. From that moment. Start to tap into what that feels like. And you can start to feel it in your body. And start to feel that energy flowing in and through you.

And as you’re experiencing this moment of happiness, I want you to turn it up a little bit. Want you to crank up the happiness, just like you would adjust the dials on an OLED television to like, make it more vibrant. make it clearer, turn up the level of happiness that you’re feeling right now in this moment.

Make it even stronger until you feel like you’re just overflowing with happiness. And you feel that happiness just wanting to burst out through you. And you can feel this energy welling up and just growing inside you. It feels so good. Doesn’t it feel good? Feels good to be happy. And this happy feeling that you’re experiencing right now in this moment. You can tap into this any time you want. It’s cool. I love this.

I love feeling good and I love tapping into an emotion an emotional state like that. And that’s as simple as it is right there you guys. You can feel happy like that any time you want. You can feel love like that anytime you want. You can feel confidence just like that anytime you want. Just go back to a time when you felt super confident and walk through that same exercise.

I would encourage you to really re-listen to this like last section of this podcast. And you can plug in different emotions you can plug in, you know confidence or motivation. Love is such a good one too. Who doesn’t love to feel love? I love to feel love.

Whew, I’m feeling so good right now. I love doing that. I haven’t done that exercise for a while. And I was just doing it with you guys just now and I’m just feeling so good right now. I’m like beaming. Okay, so that’s all I got for you today. I hope this was helpful for you.

In a way, I hope you got something out of this episode. If you did consider sharing it with a friend that would mean the world to me. And as always, I love you all. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening, keep on Running Lean. 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.

64. Warning Signs and Dangers of Overtraining

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Overtraining is something that a lot of runners experience but very few actually know that it’s happening. You might be feeling overly sore or fatigued but you keep pushing through those tough …

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Podcast Transcript

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 64 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, sports nutritionist personal trainer, health and fitness expert, and the weight loss coach for runners. And today, I’m talking about the warning signs and dangers of overtraining.

Now, overtraining is something that a lot of runners experience. But few runners actually know that it is happening. So you might be feeling overly sore, or overly fatigued, but you just keep pushing through those tough workouts because, hey, that’s what you do as a runner, right?

The problem is that if you keep this up, it can result in overtraining. And overtraining can lead to all sorts of health issues like poor performance, burnout, and even injury. So in this episode, I’m going to go over some of the warning signs of overtraining. And some of the dangers of overtraining and the things that you want to try to avoid. Okay.

And I’m gonna also offer some solid strategies for what you can do to avoid overtraining, we don’t want to do this, we don’t want to be overtraining. Okay, but first, please come check us out on Facebook, if you haven’t already, you can join the Running Lean podcast community. And all this month, the month of March is motivation month.

So all month long, I’m talking about motivation, how to get more motivation, how to maintain motivation, and how to get your motivation back when you’ve lost it. It is a fun group. It’s a bunch of positive runners who are all sharing their experiences, who ask great questions, support one another, and encourage one another.

And we’re all trying to hit certain health and fitness goals. And we all support each other in this group. So just come check us out search for Running Lean community on Facebook and join us. Also, just a quick announcement that the Running Lean monthly coaching group will be open again for enrollment very soon, just a couple of weeks here.

So the monthly coaching group is my membership program. And it is a community of runners who support each other working towards the same goals, who are trying to, you know, become fat-adapted, who want to lose weight, and who want to become the healthiest versions of themselves.

And there’s an entire library of online training materials that you get access to when you’re a member of this program as well. And then we do twice-monthly group coaching calls where we get on a Zoom together and you can ask questions and get help from me and other people in the group as well.

So if you’re looking to dial in your nutrition plan so that you can, you know, become fat-adapted, sleep better at night, have all-day energy, start losing weight, feel better, all that stuff, then you need to join this membership program. I’m in the group, I’m here to answer your questions. And it’s pretty effective.

So I only open the group once every few months, like once a quarter basically. And that opportunity is coming up very soon. So you don’t want to miss out on it if you want to get on the list. So you can be the first to know when I do open the doors. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/join.

Okay, and then here’s a quick five-star review of the Running Lean podcast. This is from BLS2003 and BLS2003 says, “Love the inspiration. I love this podcast. Listening to this podcast gives me the inspiration to keep moving forward toward my health goals.”

I love it. Share the love. If you enjoy this podcast, it would mean a lot to me if you could just take a moment and leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts. Okay, let’s get into this topic because I’m kind of excited about talking about this. I know I’m weird, right? The warning signs and dangers of overtraining fun. That’s just me.

So I just got back from a run. And I will tell you, I usually run in the mornings and I got up this morning and I was just feeling a little tired. We recently changed the clocks. You know we spring forward and that always messes me up for about a week and so I’m not sleeping really well. I’m a little bit like my circadian rhythm’s a little out of kilter.

And so I was a little too tired this morning, and it was pouring down rain as well. And so already, I’m just like not looking forward to going out and running five miles. But this is what I wanted to do. And I thought, okay, how am I feeling?

I really checked in with myself and was like, Am I in danger of overtraining if I go out there and try to smash this five-mile workout, and I had to really, you know, think about this and check in with my body and with my brain and just say, like, no, I think I’m okay. I’m definitely not overtraining, but I was feeling a little tired.

So I made a decision, I was gonna go out and go slow, and just take it really, really slow, like super low heart rate. And just, you know, I didn’t care about the time or how long it took, I just wanted to get out there and enjoy the outdoors in the pouring rain. And so as I set out to run, and with this intention of going really slow, which I did, but about five minutes into the run, it stopped raining.

And I was like, oh, this is cool. And then I got done with my run, took it nice and easy throughout the whole thing. Got done with my run, got upstairs into my apartment, and I heard this noise outside, I looked outside, it was pouring down rain again. So somehow, magically, I went out there and ran at the perfect time to avoid the rain, which was totally awesome.

But the other thing I want to say about that is that I was really cognizant about this idea of like pushing too hard when you’re tired or just not feeling it. And this is one of the reasons why I want to talk about this today, okay, because sometimes we just need to take it easy and slow down. Okay. So we’ll talk more about that in a minute.

But let’s get into like what it means to train right. So if we want to talk about overtraining, first, we want to know what normal training looks like. So in order to develop our muscles to get stronger, all skeletal muscle tissue has to be developed if you want to get stronger.

And there are three basic principles that underline all training progress. And these three principles are the principles of specificity, overload, and progression. The principle of specificity states that you must exercise the specific muscles you want to develop, right? I think we all know that if you want bigger biceps, you got to like, do some bicep curls.

You know, if you want to develop stronger legs, you got to do squats, right, if you want to become a faster runner, you got to run faster. Right? So specificity, you must follow specific exercise guidelines to produce the specific type of change that you desire, whether that’s muscle strength, muscle size, or muscle endurance. Okay?

The second principle is overload. So this is the principle that states that a muscle has to be overloaded in order to develop this is the principle of all training programs, right? Anything that you want to improve has to be overloaded or first forced to work harder than normal. The overload and this is the important part, the overload must be enough to stimulate improvement, but not enough to cause injury. That’s the important part.

And then the third principle is progression. So once a muscle has adapted to a given workload, so once you’ve overloaded a muscle, and you’ve done it enough times where you’re you’ve adapted to that workload, okay, your muscles are no longer overloaded, the workout must be increased progressively, as the muscles adapt to each new demand. Right? So the progression in the workload needs to be enough to continue to stimulate improvement. But again, not so much that it causes, you know, some sort of injury.

So, these three principles are the basis of all training. All right, so we want to do specific workouts specific exercises, and we want to overload our systems, and we want to progress. Alright, so this is all good. This is the way the system is supposed to work.

And when I say the system, I’m talking about your muscular system, your connective tissues, ligaments, tendons, your cardiovascular system, your nervous system, all of these things make up your, your whole body, basically your physiology, but all these things I’m just calling lumping them all together to talk about stressing the system.

But all these things work together to keep you running fast, running strong, and running further. Okay. But when we take these principles, and we don’t adhere to them properly, or we push ourselves beyond the limits, this can result in overtraining. And then there’s a host of issues that go along with that, a bunch of bad things that happen in our bodies when we overtrain.

So overtraining is basically putting your body under chronic stress, never letting your body recover and adapt. So you’re basically overstressing the system. stress on your body is good, right? We’re talking about overload, we’re stressing a muscle or stressing your cardiovascular system. But it has to be done in a way that is specific, and slowly progressive, or else you risk injury and burnout and all kinds of other things.

Okay, so stress is good. But it has to be done the right way. So there’s this thing I’ve talked about before called chronic cardio. And for a lot of runners, overtraining looks like this, it looks like chronic cardio. So here’s, here’s what I mean by chronic cardio. All of your runs are done pretty hard, like medium-fast, right, they’re not slow enough to be considered a true recovery run.

So recovery runs should be done well below your aerobic threshold, they should be done at a very low heart rate, something you could literally run all day at that pace. And that’s kind of what I did today, I chose today to be a recovery run, I did five miles at like a 10:45 pace. Normally, I would run about a 9:30, something like that.

And so I just purposely was like, I’m just gonna go super slow. And it felt great. I could have run all day at that pace, I was not burned out by the end of it. Slow. So chronic cardio is where all of your runs are done faster than that recovery run, but they’re not fast enough to be like true speed work.

So speed work is where you’re, you’re hitting close to that anaerobic zone. So you’re getting into those higher zones, those higher aerobic zones. And when we do fast speed work, we’re eliciting an overload response from the body, right, so you do sprints, I did a sprint workout on Tuesday.

And I did a quick little one-mile warmup, and then I did 6/32 all out sprints as fast as I could, with about a minute rest in between each. And that is really hard. And that is like an overload. I’m overloading my cardiovascular system, when I do that I’m getting super close or into that anaerobic zone, when you’re gonna hold anaerobic efforts for you know, 15-20 seconds, maybe because your anaerobic means without oxygen.

And when you’re in that anaerobic zone, you cannot do that for very long, I could feel the lactic acid building up very fast, and I had to stop, you know, so 30 seconds is about the limit for that kind of speed work. So really slow runs are great, really fast runs are great, and they both have a place.

But instead, what a lot of runners do is they just do all their runs at the same sort of medium-hard pace. And it’s always just kind of stressful on your system. So you’re chronically stressing your system, you never give your body a chance to fully recover. And then you go back and just do that same running effort again, and again. And again. And again, I see so many people just I did this for many years, I’m totally guilty of this. And this is why I want to talk about this today because you don’t need to do this. Learn from my mistakes.

But this kind of chronic cardio thing, can really start to degrade your performance. And you’ll start to not be able to run as fast or as far and it will degrade your body too. Right, you’re going to start to feel fatigued, and your training will suffer. Next thing you know you’re injured, you’re out for the season, that kind of stuff.

So we do not want to partake in chronic cardio, we want to mix it up, okay. But here’s a little bit more of what’s going on in your body because I want you to really understand what this kind of looks like from a physiological perspective.

So here’s an example of what is going on. And this is a very common scenario for a lot of runners. And you might be able to relate to this. So let’s say you start training for a marathon. So you go out there, and you’re doing all your runs at this medium-hard effort, like I mentioned, right?

So you’re not really doing much speed work. You’re not really doing recovery runs when you’re supposed to do recovery runs you’re still doing them at that same right medium-hard effort, right? I know what you’re doing. And things are probably okay for a while. So you might be getting a little bit faster, you might be able to increase your distance and you’re feeling pretty good.

You don’t know it, but your body is not recovering properly. Okay, your sympathetic nervous system, this is your fight or flight system is put on high alert, right? So you’re constantly engaging the sympathetic nervous system, which releases cortisol. So cortisol is the stress hormone. So cortisol is constantly elevated in your body.

So you’re under stress, mentally and physically. And elevated cortisol causes your body to increase blood glucose production. So you’re going to be producing more glucose because your body’s in this constant fight or flight mode. And it’s like, we need the energy to run away or fight. And so the increase in blood glucose causes an increase in insulin, right.

And now we’ve gotten to where insulin is a problem, right? We know this. Now, your body’s in this chronic fat storage mode. So you’re stressed out, you’re starting to like, store all this x as glucose, then maybe your diet isn’t helping with this either. So maybe you’re storing all this excess glucose as fat.

So you start gaining weight, even though you’re like, hey, I’ve been training for a marathon for like, eight weeks now. And I’m gaining weight, right? I know, I know exactly what that feels like, I know what this looks like, I hear this all the time from runners who are struggling with this, okay.

Part of it could be this chronic cardio, this chronic state of stress that you’re putting your body in, okay? The state of chronic stress also disrupts your sleep cycles, your circadian rhythm gets kind of messed up, right. So you have trouble falling asleep at night, or you’re no longer sleeping through the night, you’re restless all night long tossing and turning, that lack of sleep adds to the stress that your body is under. Okay?

So all these things are a very common scenario. And I’m not saying that, you know, if you go out there and train for a marathon, this is going to happen to you no matter what, like, this isn’t the case with everybody, but it’s pretty common. This is a pretty common scenario.

So your body is under stress. You’re not getting enough sleep, you know, everything’s just kind of thrown out of whack, but you keep on running. And it’s like this badge of honor for runners to get out there and do all their training runs, no matter what, no matter how terrible you feel like oh, I just gotta go crush this time. Even though I feel like crap, you know, and we never give ourselves a break.

Your body is not recovering properly or not, your body’s not rebuilding properly, and your body will begin to break down, and your cells will become damaged. Muscle tissues cannot repair themselves, you will become fatigued, your energy levels will keep dropping, your immune system becomes compromised, you might get sick, you might get injured.

And then you got to put your training on hold for weeks while you’re getting your body back to healthy back to homeostasis back to normal. This is not some fairy tale Adventure Land story. Okay, this is very, very common. This is my experience and the experience of many, many other runners.

I’ve overtrained so much you guys I’m like a professional over trainer. I’ve developed stress fractures from overtraining. Muscle tears from overtraining. Groin pulls. I even did this recently. Back in the fall of last year, I was lifting weights too much too soon, too fast, too heavy.

And I developed a shoulder injury I pulled or tore some sort of muscle in my shoulder. And it’s still bugging me. It’s taking a long time to heal. So I didn’t follow those principles of, you know, progression and overload and I didn’t do it the right way. So this is not something that is like super rare. This is very common. Overtraining is very very common, but you may not even know you’re doing it.

You may not even know that it’s an issue for you. Okay. So here are some warning signs. Here are some warning signs that you might be overtraining. So if you have lingering muscle soreness that just doesn’t ever go away. That might be a sign that you’re overtraining.

Now, sore muscles are normal. If you go out there and do some speed work. Your legs are going to be a little sore. I did a pretty heavy lifting session yesterday and my quads are sore today. And I’m like that’s normal and they’ll be fine by tomorrow, you know, or the next day for sure. Probably back to 100%. That’s normal to have a little bit of soreness.

But if you are chronically sore, this can be a sign that you’re overtraining, if you don’t seem to be recovering as fast as you used to this can be a sign, you’re overtraining. So you should be able to get out there and run the next day after a long workout, or a hard workout, you should be able to run or walk the next day, you shouldn’t have much soreness or stiffness like you should just you should, you know, your recovery.

You know, when you’re recovered, like when you’re feeling ready to go again, I have to tell you that since I changed my diet since I started eating more low carb and high fat, my recovery is much, much faster, much, much faster. And a lot of that just has to do with the reduced inflammation from not eating all the sugar and refined grains.

So those things can cause a lot of inflammation in your body. Now I’ll talk more about that I’m going to talk about some nutrition that we can do to help with all this stuff here. But if you’re not recovering, like used to this could be a sign that you’re overtraining. So if you’re feeling chronically fatigued, physically and mentally, so if you have zero energy for anything, you’re always tired, you’re always run down, this could be overtraining.

Or mentally, if you’re like, the brain is just burned out, you can’t focus, you can’t concentrate, you have that brain fog, this can be a sign of overtraining as well. If you have increased irritability or mood swings, this could be a sign of overtraining, like different from normal, if you’re already an irritable person, we’re talking like, different, you know, maybe it’s more than normal, okay.

Or if your running performance has plateaued, or is declining. So if you don’t see any improvement in your running, and you’re trying to improve, it’s like you’re not getting faster, even though you’re working on getting faster, or you just hit some plateau with your workouts and you just can’t seem to improve at all, this might be a sign of overtraining.

Again, if you can’t sleep well at night, if you can’t fall asleep, or you’re tossing and turning all night long or if you wake up off and you can’t get back to sleep, when you do wake up, this could be a sign of overtraining. Also, if your resting heart rate is higher than normal, this could be a sign that you’re overtraining, this is actually a pretty good indicator that you’re overtraining.

Now you would have to track your heart rate and your resting heart rate over a period of time, so you know what your baseline is, so you know what your normal is. But elevated resting heart rate, is a sign of chronic stress and could be a sign of overtraining. So those are some of the warning signs.

So what do we do about this? Like, what can we do to kind of prevent overtraining? Well, the first thing to do is to train smarter. So you want to stop it with the chronic cardio, stop doing all the medium, hard efforts, and slow it down every now and then. And then sometimes you need to speed up.

Variation is key, though, okay, so you want to do your recovery runs at a true recovery, pace, like really, really slow down. And then when you are, when you are doing speed work, really, really smash it, like, crank it up, okay? Variation is key.

Now it’s okay to do some of your runs that medium-hard pace, you know, some runs should be comfortably hard, especially if you’re doing like tempo runs and things like that. But every run shouldn’t be like that. Another thing you can do is to remember the training principles, specificity, overload, and progression.

And make sure that everything you’re doing all of your training, whether you’re doing, whether you’re lifting weights, doing a HIIT or some sort of cross-training, yoga, even any kind of like CrossFit or running all of your training all of your exercise, make sure you’re hitting the principles of specificity overload and progression properly and not overdoing it.

And the other thing you can do is to think in terms of training cycles. So here’s what I mean by that. Training cycles would be periodization. That’s one way of doing a training cycle. So breaking down your training into periods of stress and recovery. So some weeks you go hard, some weeks you go long, some weeks you go easy. Some weeks, you go short, right, some days you’re doing speed work, other days, you’re going really slow. This is periodization, right?

You can also think of training seasons, like think of your whole year, and then you can break it down into seasons. So like right now this is March and this is like marathon training season for most people who are doing a spring marathon. So we want to think in terms of seasons so that we’re not always in training mode the whole year-round.

It’s okay to have an offseason, let your body recover for a few weeks or a month or two, especially after a really hard event like a fast marathon or a long ultra-marathon. One of the most important things you can do to prevent and avoid overtraining is to get enough rest. And this seems like a no-brainer, right?

But I will tell you, people. I talk to runners who are notoriously not good at resting, like you need to take a rest day seriously. And then just like, rest, get horizontal. Especially like after a long run, it’s okay to kick your feet up.

Like I love Saturday afternoons, Netflix on the couch. This is my jam. Like I run I do my long runs on Saturday mornings. And then Saturday afternoons, I get horizontal, I’m on the couch, I’m you know, hydrating, I’m eating good food, and I’m watching some Netflix like I do let myself recover.

You know, you might want to work out every single day like you might want to like just, you know, make sure you’re getting some sort of exercise in every single day. And it’s okay if you do that. But you’ve got to take at least a day where you go a day or two where you go easy has to be a recovery day.

So usually for me, Fridays, and Sundays are my kind of rest days. So I don’t do any hard workouts on those two days, I usually take a walk, and I’ll go for a two or three-mile walk through the park. And listen to some podcasts, get outside, get a little walk in, it feels great.

But it’s definitely a recovery, those two days are recovery days. For me. Another thing you can do is to make sleep a priority. And this takes a while to get good at it takes you got to train your body, you got to train your body and your mind to get good at sleeping. But it’s so well worth it.

And most people should be getting seven to nine hours of sleep a night. This is what we need as human beings just to be healthy, right. And sleep is when the majority of our muscle and tissue repair happens this is when we recover when we sleep. So if we’re not getting good night’s sleep, we’re never recovering properly.

And then another thing you can do to help avoid overtraining is to just reduce stress and other ways in your life. So whether that’s doing something like meditation, taking long walks, yoga, reading, dancing, whatever works for you to kind of reduce stress. Do that in addition to your exercise, because it’s so important to keep your stress levels down.

Because again, overtraining is just overstressing your body. Now, I do want to talk about nutrition. And nutrition is a role in overtraining because I think it plays a role and can help you if you pay attention to what it is that you’re eating. So you know, you want to make sure that whatever nutrition regimen you’re on that it is support supporting your training and your recovery as well.

So, you may have heard this before, but you probably want to limit or eliminate sugar and refined grains, and other high glycemic foods. Also, processed foods, vegetable oils, and alcohol, these types of foods tend to create a lot of free radicals in your body that damage your cells. That makes it even more challenging for you to recover from these tough workouts. Okay.

Sugar and refined grains especially tend to spike your blood sugar, and then they cause blood sugar surges and then crashes. And these energy ups and downs can be very stressful on your body.

Also, you’re putting your body into a state of high inflammation when you’re consuming sugar, refined grains, processed foods, vegetable oils, alcohol, that inflammation can lead to your body not being able to recover properly, and not being able to build the tissues that it needs to recover and repair.

And so this can be very stressful on your body as well. So limit those things or just eliminate them just get rid of that stuff. You know, eating that stuff. Watch the calorie intake. So I don’t talk a lot about calories because I just don’t think it’s the one thing we need to be paying much attention to or you know, we should pay a little bit of attention to it.

But when it comes to overtraining or chronically stressing out your body things can have a problem or increase the problem with that which is you’re not eating enough so you’re in a calorie deficit all the time.

This can actually lead to actually being undernourished, you know, and again, putting your body in into a highly stressful state, and contribute to overtraining and all the stuff that goes along with it.

Eating too much can also be a problem. So you’re overloading your body with too many extra calories. This can also create a stress response, right? High blood sugar and insulin response. And you ended up storing a lot of that energy as fat. And especially if you’re not eating the right kinds of food, if you’re eating too much, then you’re, again, creating a stressful situation in your body.

So you just want to make sure you’re getting, you know the right amount of it. Also, you want to be getting the right amount of protein. Protein is key to repairing muscle and connective tissues. And most runners just don’t get enough protein. You know, most runners are a little, little low in the protein department, you know, most runners are, are good at getting enough carbs, and we love our carbs.

But when it comes to protein, we tend to not be getting enough. So you want to make sure you’re getting enough protein to initiate that muscle protein synthesis where your muscles can synthesize protein to help build and repair. So getting the right amount of protein will help you to recover faster, and you’ll be less sore. And it’ll help stave off overtraining, too.

So how much protein is the right amount of protein? People ask me this. And it’s hard to say, like for an individual, because it is kind of an individual thing. But I will just give you a couple of ballparks here and you can kind of see what you think about this. Adjust accordingly.

Obviously, this is not the same for every single person in the world. But it’s just some general information, right. So how much protein is the right amount? Somewhere between 25 and 30% of your daily caloric intake should be from protein. And we’re talking high-quality, nutrient-dense sources of protein.

For me, I’m 165 pounds, I eat around 2500 calories a day, roughly. And so that works out to about 150 grams of protein per day. And I’m actually eating probably more protein than that because I’m trying to build muscle right now. So I might be in the 161-165 range. And that’s normal. And that is a safe amount of protein for me.

So you need to kind of figure out what works best for you. Those are some guidelines you can use though. And then the last thing I’ll say about the nutrition piece here, and again, this should go without saying you guys but water, you got to hydrate, you got to be drinking enough water. Water is just so key to maintaining human health and fitness.

And most people just don’t drink enough water. Every single cell in our body uses water and is made up of water. Our bodies are made up of so much water, we have to be drinking enough water. So what is the right amount of water again, here’s a ballpark for you. Like take your body weight and cut it in half. And that’s how many ounces of water you should be drinking a day.

Again, for me, um 165 pounds, divide that by two, around 83 ounces of water a day. And that works out to about five pints of water a day. So I have this pint glass and I just fill it up like five times a day and I’m good to go. I know I’m good to go with that. Okay.

So, the bottom line here is, overtraining is a real issue for a lot of runners, right? It’s not just some fringe thing. This is a problem for a lot of people. So if you think you might be overtraining, if you’re experiencing any of the symptoms I mentioned earlier, then you might be overtraining. So think about it, get off of that chronic cardio merry-go-round, start training, smarter training cycles, prioritize sleep, get your nutrition dialed in to make sure you’re supporting recovery and rebuilding of your system.

Okay, and then get enough rest. I mean it, you have to recover properly. You have my permission to kick your feet up every now and then and binge-watch some Netflix. That’s cool. I gotcha. All right, you guys, I hope you got something out of this episode. I hope you all have an amazing day as well. And as always, lots of love. Keep on Running Lean. Now talk to you soon.

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58. How Stress Is Making Us Fat

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Stress is not something that can be avoided, it’s just a fact of modern life. In fact, we all need a certain amount of stress to function normally. We’ve evolved as humans to handle stress; we …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Well, hey there, and welcome to episode 58 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I’m going to be talking about how stress is making us fat. That’s right, stress is making us fat.

Now, stress is not really something that can be avoided. You know, it’s just a fact of modern life, that we all need a certain amount of stress to function. Normally, a little bit of stress is okay, it’s normal, it’s healthy. We’ve evolved as humans to handle stress pretty well. We have these built-in mechanisms that kick into gear to help us deal with stressful situations very effectively, this works great, but too much stress or the wrong kind of stress can have some pretty serious health consequences.

Stress can make us sick, stress can lead to a host of other chronic diseases. And stress can make us fat. So in this episode, I’ll be taking a look at stress from several different angles. I’ll explain how stress is making us fat. And I’ll provide some options for how you can reduce stress in your life.

If you haven’t already done so please come check out the Running Lean community on Facebook, all this month, this is February 2021. We’re doing a 28 day low carb challenge. So the focus this month is to try to reduce the problematic carbohydrates for a couple of weeks. That’s all. It’s not like, you know, zero carbs or anything like that. It’s just like, let’s see what it feels like to ditch some of the problematic carbs, and see how our body responds.

Each week, I’m doing a little bit of training in there. To show you how to do this simply and safely. We’re also encouraging each other people are asking great questions. They’re posting great results they’re having already. And it’s a lot of fun. We’re all supporting each other this month, through the 28 day, low carb challenge. So come join us over there. Just jump on Facebook search for Running Lean community.

Here’s a recent five-star review of the Running Lean podcast. This is from RTM71. And RT says, “This is not just about running. I’m an almost 50 year old malel, I quit smoking five years ago, never really thought about becoming a regular runner until I found this podcast. And it’s not only about running, it’s about a lifestyle. I love it. And Patrick interacts with his listeners on different platforms as well.”

Thank you RTM71. And if you feel so compelled, if you get something out of this podcast, I would love it if you jumped on Apple podcasts and you can just scroll down and leave a quick review. And who knows I might even read it here on the show. Awesome.

Okay, so let’s talk about this how stress is making us fat. So first of all, let’s define stress. What is stress? What do we mean when we talk about stress? Stress is the mental, emotional, and physiological response of the body to any situation that is new, threatening, frightening, or even exciting. Okay.

So it’s like a mental, emotional, and physical, physiological response to situations that are new or different, that seem threatening, frightening, or exciting. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s normal, you know, we all need a certain amount of stress in our lives, you know, there’s a certain amount of optimal stress that happens in our lives that helps us to you know, maintain our homeostasis and maintain adequate health and our athletic performance okay.

But when stress levels reach mental, emotional, and physiological limits, stress becomes a problem. We no longer function optimally, right we become sick we become diseased, we gain weight or it becomes very hard to lose weight or we get injured. You know this is when stress becomes a problem, okay.

So stress is one of the most common problems people face today. And chronic stress really undermines your ability to just stay healthy. An August 2020 Gallup Poll reported that 60% of Americans say they experience daily stress and worry. 60% of Americans say they experience daily stress and worry. And this is up 14% from the previous year.

So in 2019, only 46% of Americans said they felt daily stress and worry, by the way, that 46% is pretty much what it’s been for a long time, many, many years, it doesn’t really change much. 46% is about what it normally is. But because of this global pandemic, you know, 2020 is like the most stressful year we’ve had, in a long, long time, we’re more stressed out than ever right now.

And current estimates indicate that the annual cost of stress and stress-related diseases in the United States exceeds a $300 billion 300 billion with a B dollars annually. And this is mostly due to health care costs. It also is due to lost productivity, and absenteeism as well. So stress is a big, big problem. It’s very common.

It’s a chronic issue here in the United States and other parts of the world, but especially here, we do everything being here, tell me. So we just have to understand that stress can be problematic. Okay.

Let’s talk a little bit about the different types of stress. So how do we react to stress? What is stress? What are the two main types of stress we want to talk about here? So you know, there’s two types of stress, I’ll talk about those in a minute.

But it’s really how we respond to these that makes all the difference, okay, because we’re all going to experience stress, it’s not like you can, you know, wave your magic wand and you’re going to have a stress free life, that’s just doesn’t work. That way, there’s always going to be something that happens to create that mental emotional, and physiological response in your, in your body in your mind.

So you have to just be able to learn how to handle what comes your way. Okay, so it’s how you respond to stressful situations, that makes all the difference, all right. So, the main two types of stress first of all, we have eustress and that is spelled eustress, eustress. This is the beneficial kind of stress.

This is the kind of stress where health and performance continue to improve even though the stressor is there. Okay, so here’s a good example of a type of use stress, lifting weights, this produces a good type of stress. This is the principle behind lifting weights, one of the principles is the principle called overload.

And if you want to develop muscles, you need to apply the principle of overload so when weight training, the muscle must be forced to work harder than normal, and the muscle must be overloaded, in order to stimulate improvement. So you overload the muscle by lifting a weight that’s heavier than you would normally lift, your muscle adapts, by getting stronger.

And then you continue this process. And that’s how you build muscle. You build muscle during the rest phase, actually, right? So you stress your muscle for a short period of time at the gym. And then the next day you rest. And that’s how you build muscle. So that’s an example of a beneficial type of stress, you stress.

Another example of a type of use stress would be doing interval training or speed work as a runner, right? So you would run very hard and very fast for a short period of time. So maybe you do a sprint workout. You do hard, you know all-out sprinting for 30 seconds at a time. Rest for a couple of minutes and repeat that maybe four or five times that’d be a good stressful workout.

But it’s very short. It’s very intense. You’re stressing your body, but then you back off When your body responds by adapting the same principle as the weightlifting here, you’re overloading your muscles by sprinting, you’re overloading your cardiovascular system by sprinting. But your body responds by adapting and getting stronger, getting more efficient and delivering oxygen to your muscles, and building muscle.

So this is the beneficial kind of stress, you become a faster, stronger runner. So this is like the good kind of stress. And this is fine, we want this, we need this in our life in order to grow in order to continue to be a healthy human being, you want some of this good kind of stress in your life. Okay.

Now let’s talk about the other kind of stress. This is the kind most people think of this is, it’s not us stress, this is distress. And this is the negative kind of stress this is the unpleasant or harmful response to stress. When your body has a distress response to stress, this is where your health and your performance deteriorate.

So it would be like, if you lifted heavy weights every single day, without ever giving yourself a rest day, you totally like tax your muscles, they wouldn’t be able to grow because you’d never give them a chance to rest and go through that repair phase. And you’d probably cause injury. And running is the same. Running is the same thing.

Like if you just ran the same like super-fast tempo, every time you go out and run and you ran every single day, you never gave yourself a rest day you never let off the gas. You’re not slow enough to be in the aerobic zone. You’re not fast enough to be creating adaptive responses like doing speed work, you’re in that chronic cardio stressful running mode.

And by the way, a lot of new runners do this. And this causes a lot of injuries in new runners or burnout. You know, it’s really hard to keep your body under that chronic distress for long periods of time. Okay, so those are some examples of distress, okay? Chronic distress can be very problematic, okay, when your body is chronically distressed.

You can increase your risk of all kinds of health disorders. Chronic distress has been related to coronary heart disease, which is the number one cause of death in the United States. Chronic distress has been linked to hypertension, high blood pressure. It’s been linked to eating disorders, ulcers, diabetes, asthma, depression, migraines, sleep disorders, chronic fatigue.

Chronic stress has also been linked to the development of certain types of cancer. Chronic stress is not good. It is not good for us, it causes all kinds of problems, okay. So there are basically two types of stress. Eustress this is the short term beneficial, good kind of stress, our body responds positively by adapting and improving.

And then we have distress. This is long term chronic, harmful type of stress, our body responds in a negative way, our health and our performance decline, and it could kill us. It has a lot of very bad effects on our body and on our health.

So let’s talk a little bit about what happens when we experience stress in the world. Okay. So again, stress is stress in itself is not inherently bad. You know, we’ve evolved as humans to have an amazing response to stress, you know, something in our environment, you know, would stress us out?

We would hear a rustling in the bushes that we’re not familiar with, well, what’s that that’s something new. So we would, you know, our senses would get heightened, you know, and then out pops a saber toothed Tiger. And when that happens, all these things like kick into gear, our brain sends messages to our hypothalamus, you know, into our adrenal glands. We activate the sympathetic nervous system.

This is the fight or flight nervous system, right? The adrenal glands produce adrenaline and cortisol, the stress hormone, you know in our body responds by increasing blood pressure, increasing our heart rate, increasing blood glucose, our liver will actually create more glucose and send it out into our bloodstream because we need that energy to be able to fight or flight right. In turn, our insulin levels go up.

We do some more blood flow to the brain, more oxygen uptake we are breathing increases, our muscles tense up, our muscles strengthen. And we have this sense of heightened awareness. These are all the things that happened in our body in response to stress, okay, so this is all good. This is normal, if there’s a saber toothed Tiger there, okay? This is all good if the stress can be released in some way.

So when you set your body up into this fight or flight mode, you’re getting ready to like do some battle or run away very, very fast. Okay. So in my case, if I see that saber toothed Tiger, I am running away as fast as I can, I am not going to take my chances with saber toothed Tiger, right. So, you know, if the stress can be released in some way, you know if we can run away, or if you want to stand and fight the tiger, awesome. And if you win, then good for you even better.

But you know that stress will be released by either one – we fight the tiger or we run away, something has to happen to get our body back to homeostasis, we got to get back to normal. So we are we need our heart rate to drop our blood pressure to normalize, we need to burn off that excess glucose we would do that by running or fighting or whatever, our insulin levels will get back to normal or muscle tensions would release our muscles would relax, our bodies would relax.

So this is all good. This is the way the stress response system is all set up. This is all good, right? But what happens if there’s no release of the stress? Your heart rate is gonna stay high, your blood pressure is going to remain elevated glucose and insulin levels are going to remain high, your body is going to remain tense, and your muscles are going to be all tensed up.

And this condition I’m describing right here, this chronic stress is how 60% of Americans live their entire lives. Right, there’s no saber toothed Tiger today. There’s other things that stress us out instead, but our bodies have this exact same response to whatever we determine is stress in our lives. Okay.

So that stress could be, oh, my boss is a jerk. You know, I got these three projects, he wants me to get them done by the end of the week, or, you know, I gotta homeschool my kids, or you know, just driving to and from work in rush hour traffic. That can be very stressful, right? Or feeling like there’s never enough time to do everything that has to get done. Maybe you’re not sleeping well.

This can keep your body in a state of chronic stress. Feeling overwhelmed by you know, emails and text messages and social media, being distracted by social media. So we never get anything worthwhile done, right? Information overload. constantly comparing ourselves to others worrying about money and finances. Worrying about COVID.

All these things are what stress us out on a daily basis. All of these things create that same mental, emotional and physiological response in our bodies. They all produce that same stressful response as though there were danger in front of us something frightening, right?

And so it’s very easy for us as, as humans today, in the modern world, especially in the United States, to get stuck in this state of chronic stress is not good. It’s not good for us at all. It’s creating a very healthy, very unhealthy environment and our bodies and our minds. And it’s leading to all sorts of, of illness, disease, ill health, and it’s making us fat. So how does stress make us fat?

Well, your body’s response to stress. One of the things that happens is that your body produces cortisol, that is the stress hormone. Your body produces cortisol, adrenaline, blood glucose, so glucose levels go up; adrenaline, cortisol, and insulin.

And again, this is all great if you’re going to fight off the saber toothed tiger or runaway, you’re going to burn that glucose off the cortisol will lower the adrenaline will lower insulin lower and everything will get back to normal. You would use the glucose for energy right and insulin would kind of level out but that just doesn’t happen today, right, because you’re like stuck in traffic or you never get a good night’s sleep or whatever it is.

So your blood glucose your cortisol levels remain high, your blood glucose levels remain high, your insulin levels remain high. And remember, if insulin is high, your body is holding on to fat. If insulin is high, you are in fat storage mode, your body is holding is not releasing fat from your fat cells, it is holding on to it, you’ve got to get the insulin low in order to release the fat in order to become a fat burner to get your body into fat-burning mode, right?

Cortisol increases our blood sugar. And insulin goes up in response to that. And here’s a little side note, cortisol also suppresses your immune system. So it makes you more susceptible to all sorts of illnesses, including some things that you don’t want these days. COVID-19. So cortisol, you know, it’s a stress hormone, it’s fine to have some cortisol in our system, but we, we don’t want an inordinate amount of this.

And we don’t want stress, and cortisol in our bodies all the time. This is how stress is literally making us fat. Cortisol increases our blood sugar increases our insulin. That’s the main reason we hold on to weight when we’re stressed out. And if you want more proof of that, they make a synthetic form of cortisol. It’s called prednisone.

This is a corticosteroid that they use for some people. Some people use this and they get some good results from using it. But the number one side effect of using prednisone is weight gain. People that take it weight gain over 70% report, I’m sorry, people that take prednisone over 70% of them report weight gain, and the higher the dose, and the longer the duration of, of use of prednisone, the more weight they gain.

So if they keep taking this steroid, they keep gaining weight. And as soon as they stop taking it, they stop gaining weight. And sometimes it takes a while to lose that weight. It’s very hard. But that’s just a little sidebar. Like you know, prednisone is the synthetic form of cortisol. So cortisol is not good. No bueno.

We don’t want a lot of cortisol in our system all the time, a little bit every now and then it’s fine. And that’s what the short term, they use stress. That’s why it’s good to go to the gym workout, you know, stress your whole body out, stress all your muscles out quickly, and then let it repair. That’s good. That’s what it’s designed for, right?

But when we’re stressed out all the time, our hormones are just whacked. Hormone regulation, it’s like one of the most important factors in maintaining a healthy body weight, when your hormones are out of whack, your weight is out of whack.

When your hormones are normal, you tend to be at your normal healthy body weight. So just we got to like get this stuff in check, right? Like stress is literally making us fat. If you’re having a hard time losing weight, then you got to check your stress levels. Okay. So how do you know if you’re stressed? I mean, I think most of us know.

But if you’re not sure, I’ve got a list of some symptoms that you can kind of check out. But you have to be aware, the first step is like you just have to be aware that stress is an issue in your life. And I asked my clients this a lot when we hit a weight loss stall, or a plateau and I say, Hey, how’s your stress level? Oh, you know, everything’s great. I’m eating great, you know, blah, blah, blah, but oh, yeah, work is really stressful.

And, you know, gosh, the kids are just driving me crazy. And, oh, yeah. And I find out that their stress levels are super high, and they’re not taking care of themselves. And we dig into it a little bit deeper. And we find that once we start working on the stress, the weight starts to kind of come off again. So we kind of can break through some of these weight loss stalls or plateaus by reducing stress. It’s amazing. Totally cool.

So you may be chronically stressed and not even know it. Here are some common system symptoms of stress. These are this is not a comprehensive list, but these are things that if you experience these things on a regular basis, any of these things on a regular basis, this could just be that you’re overstressed headaches, sore muscles, like neck, shoulder, back muscles, and I’m not talking about from working out.

I’m talking about just like my neck and back and shoulders are always sore. What is that all about? Well, if your shoulders are up in your ears all the time because you’re so stressed out, that’s what we’re talking about. If you grind your teeth all the time, maybe you have a nervous tic like a finger tapping or toe-tapping, a sudden increase or loss of appetite, insomnia, nightmares, could be a cause of stress, fatigue, just chronic fatigue all the time, high blood pressure, impotence, loss of sex drive could be stress related to pry depression, irritation, irritability, anger are all kind of related to stress.

If you’re like hostile, or you experience a lot of fear, panic, or anxiety, this could be stress-related. Stomach pain or nausea. You know, stress can cause ulcers, you know, so if you’re experiencing some stomach pain or nausea that lasts kind of on a regular basis, and you can’t really identify the cause of it could be stress. Lack of concentration, rapid heart rate, low-grade infection, and just a general feeling of restlessness. These are all signs that we’re chronically stressed out, and we need to do something about it.

Okay, if you’re experiencing some of these are a lot of these, you know, kind of symptoms. Definitely work on kind of reducing stress, see a doctor obviously, if some of these things are going on, and see if, you know, make sure there isn’t something else happening. But definitely work on things to reduce stress.

So if you think you might be chronically stressed, don’t, don’t freak out on me here, there’s some things you can do to kind of reduce the stress. And one of the most powerful tools to help reduce stress is exercise. You know, go back to this saber toothed Tiger example, you know, our body is being primed. When we get stressed out, our body’s being primed to take action to fight or flight. So exercise is like kind of mimicking that in our lives. Okay. So this is like one of the best things you can do to help reduce stress.

So let’s say for example, you’re super stressed out at work. You had a tough day at work, your boss was a jerk all day, you spent the last eight hours being chastised. And then to make matters worse, you’re driving home. And the car in front of you is driving like way slower than the speed limit. And you’re just like, freaking out, right?

The fight or flight response has already been activated from your stressful day at work, right. So now driving home, this guy is going super slow and it’s in high gear, your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure shoots up, you’re breathing, quickens your muscles tense up, cortisol and adrenaline are released. And it’s all systems go, right.

But you can’t do anything about it. Because you’re just sitting there in traffic, you can’t dissipate the stress, there’s no fight or flight response that can happen. So you’re just going to sit there and feel terrible, right. And we do this all the time. Like I used to have to commute to work and oh my gosh, I remember just like it was so stressful.

So really just doing some sort of exercise will help to relieve that stress, okay, you got to do something, you got to like dissipate this stuff from your body, you got to give your body your work your muscles so that they can relax. You got to, you know, do something aerobic to or anaerobic, you know, do some moderate or intense, vigorous exercise to get that blood sugar out of your system. So your insulin levels can go down, right.

So even just like you get home after that commute, and you do like some aerobic exercise for 30 minutes, this can start to relieve tension in your muscles, it can use up that extra energy that you’ve got in your body. And even moderate to vigorous-intensity exercise even produces better results.

And it produces things like endorphins, endorphins or morphine-like chemicals that actually act like painkillers in our body. So they kind of help to kill the pain. But they also have this soothing, calming effect. Research has shown that exercise has an immediate effect on your mood, and that that effect lasts up to 12 hours following the activity. So you want to relieve stress. Get some exercise. It’ll put you in a better mood.

You ever hear people say like oh running I love running, running is my therapy. Well, now you know why. Running reduces stress. It improves your mood for up to 12 hours. After running, people who run regularly are just less stressed out. And generally, they’re just happier, they’re in a better mood. And I would totally agree with this right?

I am in a great mood pretty much all the time. And all the people that I know that are runners are so positive, and, and generally happy and in a good mood and fun. And, and I love that about runners. And this is one of the reasons why I love working with runners is because we’re all in a good mood, we all have a lot of fun, and we laugh a lot.

And by the way, if running makes you stressed out, you’re doing it wrong. Okay? If you run and you’re just constantly stressed, every time you run, you’re not doing it right. So two things you can do.

Number one, you can slow down a lot, like do some really slow runs every now and then just stay in that zone one or two, you know, stay in that aerobic zone. And really just work your aerobic engine, just build some aerobic and don’t overly stress your body. And you can do this for long periods of time, you can run like that. And this is really good for you.

The other thing you can do on the other end of the spectrum is to speed up a lot like do some intense speed drills like sprints, like I described earlier. Those will produce high amounts of stress. But the release afterward is what you’re looking for, you’re looking for that adaptation. You know, and you do this for a very short amount of time, like you’re this isn’t a chronic thing you’re going to do, okay?

So the slowing down or the speeding up the slowing down, you can do for longer periods of time to slow, the speeding up, you want to do very short. But these both produce positive adaptations in your body and in your brain. They both make you feel good. Obviously, there’s many other ways to reduce stress. I just love running. I think this is like the best way to reduce stress.

But other things could be walking, journaling, meditation, getting a massage, yoga, stretching, sleeping, well getting a good night’s sleep. All these are amazing. Like there’s so many things you can do to reduce stress, like you can’t do too many of these things, right? Just find a few things that work for you. For me, every day I get outside and I walk or I run no matter the weather. So it could be pouring down rain, snowing, four degrees doesn’t matter. I’m outside, I’m walking, or I’m running.

I do strength training a few days a week, I do some meditation every single day. I do journaling every single day. I connect with friends on a regular basis. This is one of the best stress relief. Things that I do for myself are connecting with friends. You know, sometimes it’s over zoom, sometimes it’s in person, maybe on a phone call, whatever it is, we have fun, we laugh. And that human connection is so important. And it really does help me to reduce stress.

And then I get it, I try to get a good night’s sleep. So that’s the like little combo that works for me walking, running, strength training, meditation, journaling, connecting with friends, and getting a good night’s sleep. Figure out what works for you. Pick a few things and try them, apply them on a regular basis and see if you can help reduce the stress in your life, it cannot hurt, it can only help you.

And if you’re somebody who’s really struggling to lose weight, or maybe you’ve hit some sort of a stall, then this is a great way to kind of breakthrough that. So I want to encourage you to check in with yourself, how are your stress levels? If you might think you’re a little chronically stressed out, you can do something about it, right?

Pick some pick a few things that work for you, but do something. And if it is the weight, that’s a problem and your diet is good, you know, you’re sticking to a low carb type of diet, maybe you’re practicing some intermittent fasting, you’re not overeating, and you just can’t seem to move the needle. It could be stress-related.

Okay, so this is one time where I think I think running really does help with weight loss in this case, you know, it’s not from a burning calories perspective, but more from a stress relief perspective. So just consider that and pick a few of these things and start applying them and start getting rid of the stress in your life. Well, I hope you all have an amazing day. And if you liked this episode and you got something out of it, please share it with a friend. You guys totally got this. Lots of love. As always keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.

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