Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
Have you ever considered how alcohol might be negatively affecting you? Do you know how alcohol affects your running performance or your ability to lose weight? Have you ever considered taking a …
Continue Reading about 138. Is Alcohol Really Working for You? →
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 138 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, is alcohol really working for you? Have you ever considered how alcohol might be negatively affecting you? Do you know how alcohol affects your running performance? Or your ability to maintain or lose weight? Have you ever considered taking a break from drinking? Or does the mere idea of quitting kind of send you into panic mode?
So today, I want to pose this question. Is alcohol really working for you? Or are you just acting like it is? It’s a legit question. And it’s a question that I really honestly want you to consider while you’re listening to this episode today. Because drinking alcohol has been normalized, and even glorified for centuries. But is it really doing you any good at all? Is alcohol all it’s cracked up to be?
In this episode, I’m going to tackle the big question of whether or not alcohol is actually working for you. Or maybe it’s working against you. And just so you know, this is another one of those tough love episodes. So you might want to strap in, but I know you can totally handle it. So I just got back from a run. And I feel amazing.
And I used to never think that I could be a runner. Because back in the day, I drank a lot. I smoked cigarettes, I ate garbage food, I never exercised, I was fat, and out of shape, and poisoning myself daily. And then one day I woke up, I woke up and I was hung over again. And I did something that I had never even considered doing before. And that is: I asked for help.
I knew for many, many years that I had to quit drinking, but it seemed way too hard for me to do on my own, it seemed impossible. I tried it kinda sorta here and there. But, you know, doing it on my own just seemed like just too big of an endeavor and seemed too impossible for me.
But asking for help, all of a sudden, it was like this light bulb moment that I had where I was like, You know what, I can get some help. And I bet I can do this if I get some help. So asking for help, for help seemed for the first time doable like quitting drinking seemed doable. And of course, I was ready to change at that moment. And I was finally willing to do something about it, I was willing to ask for help.
And what that looked like was, you know, I went to therapy, I did some 12 step work, I had several mentors along the way to becoming a sober person. But getting help was really the number one key ingredient in the recipe that was my getting sober my sobriety.
And it was the same when I gave up eating junk food, you know, I got someone to help me through that. And it was the first time I ever invested in myself in this way. It was also by far the best thing I’ve ever done for myself, not just because it helped me to become the healthy, happy fit person I am today.
Because it also led me down this path of helping other runners like you to quit eating garbage and just start becoming the best version of yourself. So if you’re ready to change if you’re ready to maybe quit drinking or quit eating junk food, too.
If you’re also willing to change and willing to ask for help willing to accept help, then you should really consider coaching. And coaching with me looks a little bit different than the way other people do this. There’s several different components to how I do my coaching program. So there’s one on one coaching with me, where you get to work with me personally to help you figure out a plan for you help you to stay on track.
On that plan, we keep course correcting as needed. We do group coaching, this is a very powerful component of the coaching project, where you get the support of other people that are going through the same thing you’re going through, we share wins, we celebrate progress, we support each other, we encourage and inspire one another.
I have a huge library of training materials you’ll have access to that you can kind of go through at your own pace. And then in between group coaching calls, and one on one coaching calls, you have access to me via messaging so that, you know you have this 24/7 lifeline to me, basically.
So I’m with you all the time. You can reach out, you can ask questions, you can get help, you can get support, you can get some accountability at any time. I also have a private podcast channel that is different from the podcast channel you’re listening to right now. And this is where I record all my group coaching calls.
So there’s a backlog of a year and a half of trainings and things like that, that you have access to that you can listen to while you’re out running. So there’s all these different components of my coaching program. And I call this an immersive coaching program because you’re immersed in this world of people and information and knowledge and support and encouragement and motivation and inspiration and accountability to help you stay on track to help you achieve your goals to help you become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself.
So if this is something that interests you, just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on work with me. You have to apply for coaching. We’ll have a short conversation, and we’ll see if this is a good fit for you. Cool, I would love to have you in the Running Lean coaching project. Just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on work with me. And I’ll see you soon.
Okay, so let’s talk about whether or not alcohol is really working for you. The first thing I want to kind of go over is like what is alcohol actually? You know, we think of alcohol as just being like cool craft IPAs and rose and you know, white claw and all these things. But what is alcohol? What is the active ingredient in alcohol?
So, alcohol, the active ingredient is ethanol. It’s also called ethyl alcohol, grain alcohol drinking alcohol. And it’s an organic chemical compound. Ethanol is a volatile, flammable, colorless liquid with a wine-like odor and a pungent taste. It is a psychoactive drug. It’s a recreational drug, and the active ingredient in alcoholic drinks.
I want to make this very, very clear that this is a psychoactive recreational drug that we are talking about here. Okay. Ethanol is naturally produced by the fermentation of sugars by yeast or via petrochemical processes such as ethylene hydration. I don’t even know what that means.
It has medical applications as an antiseptic, and a disinfectant, because it kills organisms by denaturing their proteins. It’s used as a chemical solvent. It’s used as a fuel source. It is a central nervous system depressant. And ethanol is one of the most commonly consumed psychoactive drugs.
Now, doesn’t that sound amazing? Doesn’t that one want to make you go out and have a few cocktails with friends? Ethanol is poisonous and toxic. It’s used as a fuel. They literally use it in cars as fuel.
And they use it to kill organisms. So anything that comes in contact with it really kills and is poisonous. So just know that what we’re talking about here is a pretty serious poison. All right. Now, of course the dosage does matter.
But I want you to consider something I want you to consider whether or not you would drink a little bit of rat poison. Now, what if rat poison had become, you know, socially acceptable, or something like heroin? You know, what about just using a little bit of heroin?
You know, of course the dosage matters, but what if you just did a little bit? You know, so it sounds crazy that I would make that comparison. But isn’t that crazy? I don’t think so. Here’s the thing, when you drink alcohol, it affects you negatively. And I’m going to go through some of the reasons why you may want to abstain from drinking alcohol, because there’s a lot of negative effects of drinking alcohol, okay?
Just so you know, though, that when you drink, even one to two drinks a week, it takes three to four days to fully remove that alcohol from your system. So if you’re drinking just once or twice a week, you’re never fully removing alcohol from your body, that alcohol is always in your system. And it’s going to affect you negatively, daily. All right.
So even drinking once or twice a week, if you think oh, you know, it’s fine. But you’re actually just never going to fully metabolize and process and remove that alcohol from your system. Okay. So, here are some things to consider, some negative effects of drinking alcohol that you may want to consider.
So the first one is that it disrupts sleep patterns and disrupts your sleep, it actually increases stress, anxiety, and increases memory loss. And also you’re going to have this lack of recovery from workouts, because you’re not getting enough sleep. Sleep is so important for your overall health.
And if you’re somebody who’s trying to lose weight, and, you know, train for a marathon or something like that, and you’re constantly not getting a good night’s sleep, you may want to consider removing alcohol, because you’re going to sleep much better, okay?
Alcohol also fuels anxiety. So there’s something called AB response when you consume a drug. So any drug whatsoever will produce two responses in the body and a response and a B response. So the effect of the drug produces an A response, right, there’s this a process that happens when you drink alcohol. And that could be like, oh, you feel more relaxed, okay.
So it does produce an effect, right, it may take the edge off a little bit, you may be a little bit distressed, you may reduce anxiety a little bit, okay. So that’s the A response. But then it triggers a B response, which tends to last much longer than the a process. So that B process is the exact opposite of a process.
And again, this is the same for any drug. So if the drug makes you feel relaxed, that’s the A process then the process will make you feel more anxious, more tense, more stressed out more anxiety. You’re going to experience actually, more anxiety, the more you go for the drink. And the more you drink, the more tense and anxious you’re actually going to be most of the time, the effect you’re looking for that a response is very short lived, it’s very fleeting.
The counteractive effect, that B response, is more persistent and long lasting. So in essence, alcohol fuels anxiety, it causes anxiety, it doesn’t manage anxiety, if you think you’re using alcohol to de stress, think again, you’re actually going to become more stressed out just because of the use of the drug. Okay.
Another negative effect of using alcohol is that it impedes detoxification. So your liver is responsible for detoxifying your body of harmful compounds that you eat, drink, rub on your skin breeze, whatever your liver cannot function, you know, cannot do other things while it’s processing.
The alcohol takes precedence over everything else. Detoxification is put on hold. Whenever alcohol is present, that means all these toxins that your liver should be removing from your system are being stored in your body and they get stored in your own adipose tissue, your own body fat, okay?
Drinking alcohol also causes weight gain. You know, alcohol is high in sugar, it’s high in calories. It’s has zero nutritional value. It’s not a food substance. You don’t need to drink alcohol. It’s not an essential nutrient that we have to have. It’s a poison, okay? It’s also a natural appetite stimulant. It numbs the body’s natural fullness sensors, so you don’t feel like you ever get full, so you end up eating more, and you don’t feel you don’t get that sense of fullness when you eat.
And so you typically eat more than you would normally eat. So you’re over eating, it increases sugar cravings, it increases carbohydrate cravings. And if you don’t believe me, have you ever been in line at a White Castle, two or three o’clock in the morning after drinking? Yeah, because all you want is french fries, and sliders, and apparently diarrhea.
But anyway, it’s also the only beverage without a nutritional label or an ingredient list. Like you don’t have to, they don’t have to put those things on there. All right. Another thing about drinking is that you tend to make poor choices when you’re drinking.
So you tend to, your inhibition, sort of like just goes out the window, and you’re just like, whatever, let’s just eat junk food, you know, whatever. So if you’re like, more likely, if you’re trying to stay on an eating plan, and you’re trying to eat healthy food, you’re much more likely to eat junk food, when you’re drinking, right, it messes up your cognitive thinking you’re just start making bad choices, you know, it also, when you’re drinking alcohol, it shuts down fat burning.
So your body is trying to metabolize the alcohol. And again, like the liver, it’s going to prioritize metabolizing or using alcohol as a fuel source before anything else. So if you’re trying to be a fat adapted athlete, and you’re trying to do all these great things for yourself, and you’re trying to, you know, become a more efficient fat burner, and you’re, you know, you’re attempting to use, you know, become a fat adapted runner, and, and then you’re drinking on a regular basis, you’re just kind of shutting all that down, you’re shutting off that whole process, right.
And, again, three or four days just from having one drink, and it could take three to four days for that to leave your body. So if you’re drinking once or twice a week, just know that you are completely shutting down your fat burning process, okay?
Alcohol also messes up your brain, it really does. They’ve shown that alcohol actually affects every region of the brain. So they call it the neurological sledgehammer. It affects memory, motor function, personality, inhibition, emotional volatility, every area of your brain gets affected negatively from alcohol.
And then a few things that are specific for running you know, alcohol will reduce your athletic performance studies have shown that your aerobic performance is going to be diminished. The day after consuming alcohol like that run, you may go out Friday night and have a bunch of beers and then Saturday morning you get up to run, that run is not going to be at your best, you’re going to be your performance will be diminished for sure.
A study in the journal nutrients also showed that drinking alcohol reduces muscle strength. Well, that’s not good. We don’t want to reduce muscle strength, we want our muscles to be strong and want them to do what they’re supposed to do.
And another study actually showed that alcohol will negatively impact protein synthesis. Protein synthesis is the ability of your body to turn protein into muscle. So if you’re trying to build muscle, if you’re doing some strength training to try to build muscle, then drinking alcohol will completely shut that process down. And it will negatively impact your ability to turn protein into muscle. Okay.
Alcohol is also an anti nutrient. Alcohol is void of nutrients, it does not have vitamins or minerals. So alcohol ends up robbing your body of the micronutrients that it needs just so the body can assimilate the alcohol and metabolize the alcohol it depletes your body of essential nutrients needed to maintain good health. Alcohol diminishes your body’s ability to absorb other nutrients as well.
And this is not good because if again, if you’re trying to eat healthy, but you’re drinking, your body’s not going to be able to absorb the good food that you’re eating, you’re not going to be able to absorb the nutrients that your body actually needs. Okay? Why spend all this time eating healthy and then drinking alcohol to just leech all that out of you? It doesn’t make any sense at all, okay.
And drinking alcohol also makes you more prone to premature fatigue during your next exercise session. So you know, not only is your aerobic performance diminished, but you will crash and burn faster. You won’t be able to run as long because of the alcohol Okay? Alcohol also impedes recovery especially if you drink you know soon after a workout.
And I can’t tell you how many runners I see, finish a run and then crack open some beers like to celebrate that run. Drinking alcohol increases dehydration, it interferes with glycogen replenishing. It inhibits repair of muscle tissue. It suppresses your production of testosterone and human growth hormone.
All of these things are going to really, you know, harm your recovery process. The toxic impact of just one drink will depress the endocrine system dramatically. So recovery from intense training is basically canceled until your body metabolizes all the alcohol. Again, we’re talking about three or four days, your body is always trying to get to homeostasis, wants to get to normal, it wants everything to be balanced and good.
And it cannot get there until the alcohol is gone from your system. Alcohol is also linked to seven different types of cancer. Alcohol is a carcinogen. It’s carcinogenic, it causes cancer and over 100 studies confirm the link between drinking and cancer, especially breast cancer.
Women who drink just three alcoholic beverages a week have a 15% higher risk of breast cancer. And that risk has increased by 10%. For each additional drink you have daily. It’s also responsible or linked to at least other cancers like mouth and throat, esophagus, voicebox, liver, colon rectum, basically, anywhere in the digestive system that alcohol comes into contact with is at risk for cancer.
Again, remember we talked about it being a poison, a toxin, it kills microorganisms, it denatures proteins. So drinking this stuff, putting it into your body is going to really negatively affect you in so many different ways. Now, you might be thinking, I’m just being overly dramatic or overly negative about alcohol. But I’m really not. These are just facts, you get to decide what you want to do.
If you want to continue using the drug, use the drug, I don’t care. But if you find that you want to stop, or maybe you can’t stop, even though you want to just know that I can help with that. Okay, you can reach out to me, we can talk about what that might look like for you.
I’ve been living alcohol free for over 15 years. And I never thought I could be a non drinker. I never thought I could get through a weekend or a holiday or a birthday or a Wednesday. without drinking. I never thought I could do it. But my life is so much richer now. So much fuller, so much more meaningful. I feel so much better about myself.
I have connections with other human beings, real connections with other human beings now, I don’t have to go dive into a bottle to escape my problems or my fears, my anxieties are up, I still have anxiety I do. I just don’t use alcohol anymore. I’ve come up with other coping mechanisms, other emotional management tools. You don’t have to use alcohol to get through life.
If you think you have to use it, if you think that’s the only choice for you. I’m telling you it’s not. And if somebody like me, can quit after drinking for 25 years. You can too. Because alcohol is addictive. And they’ve done some studies where they’ve shown that alcohol is just as addictive as drugs like cocaine.
Now, people might say well, oh gosh, Patrick, you can’t make that comparison. Cocaine is way more dangerous. And it’s way more addictive. No, it is not. It’s exactly as addictive as alcohol, alcohol and cocaine are just as addictive. The biggest difference is that cocaine is highly regulated. And it’s illegal. And it doesn’t kill as many people, it doesn’t cause as many problems.
Oh, that was the only difference is really alcohol causes more deaths per year, than cocaine, for sure. You know, and the problems related to alcohol are tenfold compared to cocaine. And if you’re, you know, if you want to know a little bit about what the cycle of addiction looks like it kind of looks like this.
And this is the same cycle for all addictions, whether it’s cocaine, or cigarettes, or pornography, or shopping, or sex, or sugar, or alcohol, they all work the same. Okay? So you, you take your drug, like drinking alcohol, and you get this release of dopamine and dopamine gets released in unnaturally high amounts because the drug produces an unnatural high for you.
And that high is because a lot of it is because of the dopamine that your brain emits right in these unnaturally high amounts. And then glutamate gets released. Now, glutamate will respond to it’s kind of like a memory locking tool, if you want to put it that way.
Okay, it’s another neurotransmitter, but glutamate will get released. Also in unnaturally high amounts to help you kind of remember the effect to lock it into your memory banks. If you think about this, back in the caveman days, you know, we would find some honey, and we would eat the honey. And we would get that dopamine hit and we go like, ooh, that’s really good. But then we get this glutamate response to this says, we gotta remember this, this is really good.
This is a good source of calories. And this is something that we should come back to. So we got to remember, like where we are, where do we find this? How did this make us feel? All that stuff, right? So that’s what glutamate does. So you drink alcohol, you get the dopamine hit, you get the glutamate response, which locks it into your memory. And then that memory is what you recall, when we talk about, there’s this idea called euphoric recall, where you start to recall the feeling that you get from drinking alcohol, or doing whatever your drug of choice is.
And it produces this like euphoric feeling. And like, you just want that euphoric feeling again, you know, it makes you remember that euphoric feeling. All drugs produce this effect, okay. And then you go back to that drug, and that’s the cycle, right? You drink it, you drink alcohol, dopamine gets released, glutamate gets released, then you have that euphoric recall, you want it again, you know, you need the alcohol again, to give you that response again.
And then the cycle just continues. You’ve got to get out of the cycle. It’s a cycle that you can get out of, you can, you’re not hopeless, whether it’s sugar, or alcohol, or cigarettes, or whatever, you can jump off that cycle at any time. Is it easy? No, it’s hard. It’s hard to do.
One of the things that makes it hard is that we are being sold a bill of goods about alcohol, we’re being marketed to. Alcohol is not required to relax. Alcohol is not required to enjoy life, you don’t need alcohol to unwind. You don’t need alcohol to de-stress. You don’t need a drink to have a good time with your friends. I do all these things without alcohol, just fine. And I have for the last 15 years.
I relax, just fine, I do stress, I have a good time with friends. I enjoy parties and holidays, and birthdays now without alcohol, and it’s all good. But the big alcohol companies, they’re marketing an idea to you that in order to have a happy, fun life, alcohol is a requirement. But it’s not it’s not a requirement. Drinking alcohol has almost zero positive benefits, you know, maybe feels good for a minute, but it has this huge list of negative consequences. How is this possibly the key to a healthy, happy life? Why do we think this is the answer? It’s not.
And you might think that you’re deciding for yourself that you want to drink this craft IPA because it makes you feel cool, and hip and sophisticated. And this is what people do. This is you know, and this is what I’m choosing for myself, but it’s really not your decision at all. This is actually part of a marketing tactic and it’s called engineered consent.
And this idea of engineered consent was first introduced by a guy named Edward Bernays. He was a public relations guru back in 1929. And he was working for the big tobacco companies, American Tobacco companies specifically, and they wanted to tap into a new market.
They wanted to get more women to smoke. Like women were smoking at the time, but they were doing it very covertly. They’re doing it behind closed doors, not in public. So they wanted to get more women to smoke in public, because it was kind of taboo at the time. So Bernays hired a bunch of women to smoke in the Easter Parade, 1929 Easter Parade, walking down Fifth Avenue, in New York City, during the Easter Parade, all these women smoking, openly smoking cigarettes, and it was like, it was really unheard of at the time, right.
And it drew a lot of attention. And it drew a lot of publicity, and it drew a lot of, you know, newspapers and the media really picked up on this. And the term they use to, to describe what was going on the women said, we are lighting up our torches of freedom, torches of freedom, because they were trying to exploit women’s aspirations.
During this, it was like the first wave of feminism, right, we can do what we want, we can smoke in public, light up your torches of freedom, ladies. And it became a catchphrase, and it spread like wildfire. So women thought they were being bold and brave and sticking it to the man, I’m gonna light up my torch of freedom, I can smoke whenever and wherever I want to.
But in reality, the man engineered the whole thing. It was all engineered consent. So let’s go back to that craft IPA. You think you’re drinking of your own freewill? You think you’re consenting? You think this is your idea, but it’s really not that consent has been fabricated. It’s been engineered by the alcohol companies, by social media influencers, by billboards, by TV commercials to make you think that you’re making a good decision for yourself. That’s what they want you to think. It’s a big marketing ploy. Okay.
And you may or may not believe me here, you may be thinking I’ve kind of lost it. You may be in denial, maybe a little bit of both. Here’s a quote from Mark Twain that I love. He said, “It’s easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” So is alcohol the new cigarettes? So imagine, right now, if I was talking about cigarettes, would you be fighting me about this at all? Would you be in your head, you know, denying that this is the thing would you be, you know, thinking like Patrick, you’re crazy. Cigarettes are fine, you know?
Would you be like, you know, really stating your case why everybody should smoke and, you know, just smoke in moderation. Of course, would you try to convince me that, that, you know, other people might have a problem with smoking, but you’re fine. Like you can stop whenever you want to? Doesn’t that sound stupid, the way I’m saying this isn’t the sound kind of crazy. I think it’s crazy. That is like right now, I think it’s crazy to think that smoking cigarettes in any amount is okay. Right? Wouldn’t you agree with me on that? Like we should, nobody should smoke, right? It’s so they’ve proven it is so bad for you, right?
But here’s the thing, I think alcohol is just the new cigarettes. And I think we’re all gonna wake up one day and say, Oh, my God, I can’t believe we used to think drinking poison was fun. And that there were these places called bars, where they actually just served alcohol to people and they would drink it. And moms would actually drink alcohol in front of their kids.
And they would even dress their babies in onesies that said, My mommy drinks because I cry and everyone would laugh because they thought it was funny. And we would say to ourselves man weren’t times messed up back then. Wasn’t that crazy? Here’s the thing, social norms. They’re always changing. Smoking cigarettes is no longer widely accepted as being safe. It’s not cool anymore.
You can’t smoke indoors and most places you can’t smoke on airplanes. The first time I got into an airplane, the first airplane ride I ever took. I sat in the back, I sat in the smoking section. I smoked a cigarette on a plane. I cannot imagine doing that today. It’s so crazy, right? Coca Cola is no longer made with cocaine. You know they took that ingredient out. They’re like we probably shouldn’t put this in this drink okay, we’ll just put way more sugar in there and hopefully get people addicted that way. So good. Mission accomplished. Coca Cola. Good job there.
There’s no more opium dens where you can go and like smoke opium and hang out. I don’t know, I don’t think there are, maybe there are somewhere but I have a feeling this is not a normal thing anymore. You know, we don’t do frontal lobotomies on people like ice pick through the head kind of a thing. You know, this is crazy, right?
But people used to do that. And they thought it was like pretty normal. So social norms are changing. We changed, you know, our concepts of what’s acceptable, what’s normal, what’s healthy, what’s good for us over time. And I think alcohol is time is coming. There’s so many people that are like, do like, drinking alcohol is not okay. In any amount. It’s really bad, very, and has a lot of negative consequences.
There’s very few up ticks to drinking, there’s very few positives that you get out of drinking, you get a fleeting sense of relaxation, but then all those other things that I talked about, right. And one excuse I hear from people a lot is that they feel pressured from friends, or family members, but a lot of times it’s friends push you to drink, or judge you if you don’t drink.
Here’s the thing if your friends are pushing alcohol on you, or if they’re pressuring you to drink or judging you, because you drink or don’t drink, it’s time to get new friends, up level your friends. It’s plain and simple. If you’re, if your friends don’t respect your decision to not drink, these are not your friends. These are not people that have your best interest in mind.
And there’s a lot of blaming and shaming that goes on in this world of addiction around sugar addiction around alcohol and drug addiction. And it goes something like this, like alcohol is fine. That’s not the problem. You’re the problem. The problem is you, not that drug, not the poison over there. You’re the problem. So would you argue that it’s the person? That’s the problem, not the heroin, or the crystal meth or the cigarettes?
I think we’re all pretty clear that if those things are really terrible, you know, oh, no, those things are fine. You just have to moderate. If you can’t moderate then you’re broken. There’s something wrong with you. And this is the same BS that a lot of doctors and dieticians spew about sugar consumption. They’re like sugar is not addictive. It’s not the sugar. There’s nothing wrong with sugar, you just have no willpower. You have to just use it in moderation.
And this is the same message that the sugar industry pushes on us the Coca Cola move more campaign, blaming us and shaming us into thinking we’re the problem. Not the drug that they’re pushing on us to sugar isn’t the problem. You’re just not exercising enough. Stop being lazy. Get
off your ass and exercise more. Drink plenty of Coca Cola, that’s fine. That’s not the problem. You just got to exercise more.
Alcohol has the same kind of thing. They call it the drink responsibly campaign. This is the slogan of the alcohol industry: drink responsibly. So they’re kind of shaming you and blaming you if you overdo it. If you can’t handle your liquor, or if you die of alcohol poisoning. It’s not the alcohol that poisoned you. It was just you, you just overdid it. It’s the equivalent saying like just shoot heroin responsibly, snort responsibly.
You’re the problem, not our drug. Our drug is fine. There’s plenty people that drink responsibly. If you can’t, that’s your fault. You’re probably an alcoholic, you’re not normal. There’s something wrong with you. So let me finish up with this. I just want to say this, I cannot in good conscience tell you that drinking alcohol, any amount of alcohol is okay. I can’t. It’s like the equivalent of telling you that smoking cigarettes is okay. Or that occasionally snorting cocaine or shooting heroin every now and then is fine or that smoking some crystal meth is cool. It’s all good.
I can’t do that. I can’t in good conscience tell you that alcohol is okay. You know, just don’t overdo it as long as you can do it in moderation, don’t smoke, snort or shoot up, you know, irresponsibly. If you want to lose weight, if you want improve your health, if you want improve your writing, if you want to get stronger, if you want to feel amazing, if you want to sleep amazing. If you want to recover properly, if you want to lead an overall healthier life, free of stress and anxiety, free of most cancers: stop ingesting the poison.
If you think I’m being a big buzzkill here, I’ll own that. I will be the buzzkill here, okay, my job is to teach you what you need to know so that you can become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself. And drinking alcohol undermines all of that as the opposite of that. My mission is to lead by example. And I’m doing that my mission is to lead by example.
And I want to inspire you to do the same. And I feel that my message here today is absolutely in alignment with my mission and my values. I work with countless runners who love to drink, and they can’t possibly imagine life without alcohol. And I challenge them, I say, hey, let’s take a break from drinking for like 30 days and see how you feel. And they freak out a little bit at first, because they just cannot imagine not drinking, but then they do it.
And they’re amazed to how much better they feel. And they start to lose weight, and running gets easier. And then they say, Patrick, I don’t even miss it. I don’t miss alcohol at all. So I feel good about my message here today. I feel good about the work I’m doing. And I hold firm in my beliefs about alcohol. And living an alcohol free life will always be the better way to live for me, for you, for all of us. And if you want help quitting, I’m here for you. Always, always here for you. I 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.
Lots of runners come to me for help losing weight, getting stronger, and running faster. One common question that keeps coming up is, “How do I lose weight without all the discomfort?” They want …
Continue Reading about 136. How to Avoid Weight Loss Discomfort →
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 136 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today: how to avoid weight loss discomfort. Lots of runners come to me because they want help losing weight, they want help getting stronger and running faster. One common question that keeps coming up is how do I lose weight without all the discomfort?
So they want to make big sweeping changes to their health and fitness, but they want to avoid feeling uncomfortable during the process. I get that. Totally. That was definitely me. Back in the day, I was always looking for shortcuts and hacks, anything that could help me lose weight that would help me get to my goal weight without feeling any kind of discomfort, or I wanted all the gains without any of the pains.
But this is not how things work in the real world. So in this episode, I’m going to take a look at what it actually takes to reach a weight loss goal. I’ll also share the secret of how to avoid weight loss discomfort. And avoiding weight loss discomfort, avoiding the discomfort of change is something that I am very familiar with, and something that a lot of people want help with.
And what they really want though, is they want help overcoming or getting through the uncomfortable bits. Because I think we all know that it takes some discomfort in order to grow and to change and to lose weight and to get healthier and to get stronger. Like all those things that we want for ourselves. You know that it does require you to get uncomfortable.
This is one of the reasons why I created my coaching program. And why I do personalized coaching is because we all need a little help getting through those uncomfortable places. This does not mean that the rest of your life has to be riddled with discomfort. And that you’re setting yourself up for a life of discomfort. That’s not what we’re talking about at all here.
But when we’re making changes when we’re growing, when we’re changing, when we’re improving our body composition, all of those things require a certain amount of discomfort. Because what you have right now where you are right now in your comfort zone isn’t what you want for yourself like this is easy, you know how to do what you’re doing now.
But in order to get to that next level, whether it’s running faster, getting stronger, losing 30, 40, 50 pounds, it requires some level of discomfort, okay? This is why I do personalized coaching. I’ve created an immersive coaching program that delivers all the knowledge, all the support, the encouragement, the inspiration, the motivation and accountability that you need to stay on track, to improve your health to make changes that last permanently.
This isn’t about quick fixes. This isn’t about losing weight as fast as possible. And I’m going to tell you right now, this is not about doing it without any discomfort. This is about learning how to lean into the discomfort so that you can become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself. And you can do it in a way that is sustainable. That’s what we’re all looking for here.
Anybody can lose weight quickly for a short period of time. We’ve all done that. But then you put the weight back on. Anybody can get a little bit strong or a little bit faster. But what if you want to PR? What if you want to BQ? You know what, if you want to radically improve your body composition, you’re gonna have to lean into some serious discomfort.
So if you’re ready for those kinds of big changes, if you’re ready to finally drop the weight and keep it off for good, if you’re ready to get stronger, to look better, to run faster, to run longer than you ever have before; then you’re ready for the Running Lean coaching project. There is an application process to join this program. You can just fill out a short application, schedule a free Zoom call with me. We’ll talk about your goals and we’ll see if this is a good fit for you.
It may not be but if you’re interested, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply, fill out the application, you and I will get on a call, and we’ll talk about it. Cool, I would love for you to join me in the Running Lean coaching project, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. And we’ll see you there soon.
Okay, so this whole idea of leaning into discomfort is what we’re talking about today. And I titled this episode how to avoid weight loss discomfort, because I think that’s something we all want. And I will actually tell you, at the end of this episode, how you can avoid that discomfort.
But I want to, I want to like, first of all talk about how we really need to change our way of thinking around this, okay, so when people come to me, and they tell me that they, that they want things to be easy for them, they want things to be as comfortable as possible. So this is what they think they want, they think they want weight loss to be easy, they want it to be easy and effortless. They don’t want to give up anything, they want to continue to eat their favorite foods.
They don’t want to experience any level of discomfort whatsoever. And the truth is that this is just not the way things work in the real world. If you want to lose weight, you’re going to have to make some changes to your diet. If you want to run faster, you’re going to have to practice running faster. And these things do not feel good.
These things are by their very nature, they are uncomfortable things to do, because they’re pushing you out of your comfort zone. So people think they want weight loss to be easy. They think they want running faster to be easy. What they also want is they want to lose all this weight, they want to run a Boston Qualifying time, they want to look better, they want to feel better, and they want to do it without any kind of discomfort whatsoever.
And I think this is an interesting concept. But here’s the thing, you’re just you cannot have both. You cannot stay comfortable, and become more, it just doesn’t work that way. Think about everything you’ve done in your life that you’re proud of, or anything you’ve gotten through in your life. That was hard, but maybe profoundly changed you. Maybe you’ve had a child, or three, maybe you’ve raised a child through the teenage years, that’s some hard stuff right there.
Maybe you’ve run a marathon, or a half marathon or a 5k, or an ultra marathon or an Ironman or whatever. Maybe you’ve built a healthy relationship with a significant other. This is very hard work. This is years and years of work. Maybe you’ve gotten through a divorce or a health scare or a health diagnosis like cancer, maybe you’ve had a loved one passed away, like a parent, or a friend, or sibling or child.
All of these things have a profound effect on you. All these things change us profoundly. And I’ve said before, it’s the challenges that change us. It’s the challenges that teach us lessons. It’s through these challenges that growth happens. And none of this stuff is easy. It’s all hard. All of this stuff is hard to do.
But it’s those challenges that actually cause us to learn and grow and to evolve and to become more. It’s the challenges that change us. I hate that it works that way. I really do. I wish it was easier. I wish we could learn lessons from just reading a book. And we can learn some lessons from reading a book. But the profound life changes that the or life experiences that change us the most and cause us to grow, are those things that are hard to do, the ones that are uncomfortable.
You know, think about the weight loss or the strength training analogy where you have to, you know, go to the gym and lift weights, lift heavy weights, you have to overload your muscles in order for your muscles to grow and get stronger. You cannot build muscle and get stronger by lifting super lightweights. It just doesn’t work that way.
There’s a former Mr. Olympia Champion, Ronnie Coleman. And he has this saying he has this quote that I love. I say this all the time. And he says, “Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy ass weights.” And oh my god, isn’t that the truth? Everybody wants the body, but nobody wants to do the hard work. Everybody wants the gains, nobody wants the pains.
So if you want something more for yourself, if you want to lose weight, if you want to evolve, if you want to grow, if you want to get stronger, all that stuff is going to require that you endure some discomfort. And instead of trying to avoid discomfort, I want you to think about doing the opposite, I want you to actually embrace it.
Instead of trying to stay comfortable, and have everything be easy peasy. I want you to know that it will be hard, and know that you will get uncomfortable. You need to accept this, you need to embrace it, and then get on with it. Get on with doing what you need to do. And this discomfort is something that you have to choose. And you have to choose this on a regular basis. You have to choose to do the uncomfortable things.
If you want to grow, you have to decide that this is what you want for yourself. And you have to make a decision and decide that you want to embrace discomfort. And in Latin, the Latin origin of the word decide means to cut off. So you’re cutting off all other options when you make a decision.
And when you make these decisions, and you make decisions every single day, you’re going to make a decision to eat the pizza, or to eat the salad, you’re going to make a decision to have ice cream or not. You’re going to make a decision to, you know, get drunk tonight, or just drink sparkling water. And it’s in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.
That’s a Tony Robbins quote, by the way, it’s in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped. There’s no growth in the comfort zone. And there’s no comfort in the growth zone. You have to be able to, you have to be willing to get uncomfortable in order to grow in order to change in order to become more.
And there actually is one way to avoid discomfort. And I told you at the beginning I was going to share this with you. There’s a way that you can avoid discomfort with all this and a lot of people don’t talk about this. Okay. So if the idea of embracing discomfort is too much for you, that is totally fine.
Here’s the answer: if you want to avoid discomfort, do nothing. Don’t try to lose weight. Don’t try to run faster. Don’t try to improve your health. Don’t try to get stronger. Don’t try to get off your meds. You know, don’t grow, don’t evolve. Don’t worry about ever trying to be anything more than who you are right now. Right, problem solved.
Stay comfortable. Stay in your comfort zone. But just remember, there’s no growth in the comfort zone. And there’s no comfort in the growth zone. But if you don’t want to experience any kind of discomfort, that’s fine. That’s an option for you. Just don’t worry about changing, just stay where you are.
Is this what you want? Is this okay for you? Is that really what you want for yourself? I don’t think so. If you’re listening to this podcast right now, I’m gonna say probably not there’s probably something more that you want for yourself. And you’re willing to experience some discomfort to get there, right.
But what most people do is what I just mentioned, they do nothing. They don’t try to improve their health. They don’t try to lose weight. They don’t try to run faster. They don’t try to get stronger. Because it’s hard. Because that doesn’t feel good. Your brain is programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Pleasure equals in our minds, in your brain, pleasure equals eating ice cream. Pain equals not eating ice cream. Pleasure equals sitting on the couch and watching Netflix pain equals going for a run or doing speed work. That is painful, right?
So your brain just wants you to be safe and comfortable, and just, you know, everything to feel good. And what I’m asking you to do here is to kind of override your brain’s natural way of doing things, and to seek discomfort in order to become more in order to grow, in order to evolve. And I have to say this to like, more discomfort is not always better. We’re not getting uncomfortable for the sake of getting uncomfortable. That’s not what I mean here.
Like, don’t put a rock in your shoe before you run out. Patrick said, I need to get uncomfortable. So I’m just going to be really uncomfortable and just, you know, make this run really suck. No, that’s not what we’re talking about here. Okay. We’re not talking about pushing yourself so hard all the time, that you’re creating chronic stress in your body, and you’re not getting the rest and recovery that you need.
You don’t need to be go, go, go, go go all the time, you have to prioritize rest and recovery. Right? This is what I’m talking about rest and recovery, I mean, mental rest and recovery, emotional rest and recovery too, as well as physical. But we don’t want to put ourselves in a chronic state of stress, you know, I gotta stay uncomfortable all the time.
No, we can be comfortable sometimes. It’s okay. So just don’t don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here, I do want you to have some comfort in your lives, you know. And you can of course, you can eat that ice cream. Occasionally, of course, you can like watch Netflix, you know, here and there.
But we also have to remember that if there are things that you want for yourself, those things that you want for yourself that you don’t already have, why outside your comfort zone, the things you want for yourself, but they exist out of your comfort zone. So you gotta get out of your comfort zone in order to get them.
And there’s no end to this, just understand this, like as a human being, you should always be striving to grow and evolve and become more. I think this is something that we should all be working towards. And there’s no end to changing and evolving. So there’s really no end to this idea of embracing discomfort, it has to just become part of your identity, it has to become part of who you are, and what you do on a regular basis.
Today, I am someone who regularly seeks out and embraces discomfort. Because I know that if I’m doing that I am growing and evolving and I’m becoming more I’m becoming more of the person that I was put on this earth to become. This is what I want for you. I want you to embrace the idea of embracing discomfort and knowing that that is the goal. That is the path to get you to your goals. Okay, I want this for you. You should want this for you as well. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
Today I have a bit of a different podcast episode for you, it’s going to be more of a call to action. I believe that each and every one of us has the ability to make a positive impact on this …
Continue Reading about 133. Being an Example to Those Around You →
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 133, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today being an example to those around you. So today, I’ve got a bit of a different podcast episode for you. Today, I want this to be more of a call to action. So I believe that each and every one of us has the ability to make a positive impact on this world. And you don’t have to be a celebrity, or a social media influencer in order to do it.
Being an example of those around me is a big part of my mission. It’s how I make a positive impact in the world. And it drives me ever forward. So my hope today is that you listen to this episode and then take action. And I’m going to encourage you to do something today to start being an example to those around you. And then maybe just maybe some of those people will do the same.
And just imagine the ripple effect of positive changes we could make if we all lead by example. But first, I’m going to talk quickly about the Running Lean coaching project. This is my coaching program, my immersive coaching program. And something I want to mention today is that the way that I do coaching is a little bit different from other people, I don’t just hand over a plan and say, here’s what you’re going to do. And then you’re kind of on your own.
This is about creating new habits, it’s about creating a different lifestyle. Because what you’ve been doing up to this point, probably hasn’t been working for you. Or you’ve tried a bunch of things in the past, a bunch of other diets, maybe even had some other type of nutrition coaching, or dietary advice or dietary coaching, that really hasn’t worked for you.
And so I do things differently. What I teach in my programs is all about longevity, it’s all about sustainability. It’s all about maintaining good healthy eating habits and good exercise habits. For the rest of your life. It isn’t about the short term, it’s not about losing weight as fast as possible. It’s not about some quick fix. This is about the long term.
Remember, being healthy isn’t a destination we’re trying to get to, being healthy is how we live our life going forward. And I teach you exactly how to do all this in the Running Lean coaching project. Right. So this is my immersive coaching program, you get group coaching, IT support from the group, it has support and personalized guidance from me, the one on one coaching with me, they get tons of access to me.
And this, this whole program is designed to help you get results. It’s about results. It’s about you accomplishing your goals, whatever those look like for you. So it’s a personalized approach that helps you accomplish your goals, and is going to look different for you than it does for somebody else. And that’s cool, because there is no one size fits all when it comes to becoming the healthiest and most badass version of yourself. There just isn’t. That’s why I do what I do.
And if you want this for yourself, if you want to learn how to become the best version of yourself and how to maintain that forever, then just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply, fill out a short application, you and I will jump on a zoom call. I’ll talk to you all about the coaching program, I’ll explain exactly how it works. And we’ll just see if there’s a good fit for you. Sound good? runningleancoaching.com/apply, I would love to have you in the Running Lean coaching project. Okay, so on to this topic today, being an example to those around you.
And like I said at the beginning, this is a bit of a different episode, I’m going to share a little bit about how I ended up where I am today. And the power of being an example and what that means to me. And then I really want this to be something where you take the information I’m going to share with you today and then you do something with it.
So be sure to listen to the end of this because I’ve got a call to action for you towards the end of this episode. And I want you to actually do something starting today to move in that direction of being an example to those around you. Okay. So be sure to listen to the end.
So here’s how I got to kind of where I am today. So 20 years ago, I was a very, very different person. I was significantly overweight. probably pushing 235 or so, 240. At my heaviest, I was very much out of shape. I couldn’t run at all, if I tried to run, there’s just no way even if I had to save my life, I couldn’t run a lick.
I was constantly sick, I was using alcohol as an emotional management tool, because I had no emotional management tools other than food and alcohol. I mean, that’s how I dealt with everything. I just numbed out everything. I was pretty miserable all the time, never felt good, I had zero energy.
And to be honest with you, I really felt like a disappointment. I felt like I was a disappointment to people around me, to my kids, to my family, to my friends, and especially to myself. And at some point along the way, I made a decision that I was never going to be a disappointment to myself or to anybody else, again, that I wasn’t gonna live my life the way I had been up to this point.
And so I started doing things differently. I quit drinking, that was a tough thing for me to do. But I had to make that choice for myself, that that was a problem for me. And that was something that was getting in the way of who I wanted to be. And it was really causing me to feel terrible all the time.
And, and not allowing me to grow, you know, mentally, emotionally. Or to become the healthiest version of myself, there was no way I could get there if I kept drinking alcohol. Because for me, once I start drinking, I can’t stop and have that same relationship with food, especially sugar, carbohydrates, that once I start eating that stuff, I can’t stop.
And I’m the kind of person who would go and get, you know, massive amounts of food I was an overeater as well. Massive amounts of food, people would look at me like, dude, seriously, you’re eating that much food? It’s like, yeah, lay off me, I’m starving. And I ate and drank in a way that was very unhealthy. Right?
And those two things were really combined especially to create this like very unhealthy version of myself and things were not good in my life. You know, I was going through a divorce. And I made this decision to change all that and I cleaned up my diet and I quit drinking and then one thing I did that helped more than anything else was I started running.
And I ran a 10k. And then I signed up for my first marathon. And I did that. And then I was kind of hooked, I got that running bug. And that was sort of a catalyst for me to start doing things that challenged me that were hard that required me to step up my game from a bunch of different viewpoints.
You know, I had to step up my mental and emotional game, I had to step up my nutrition game, I had to step up my fitness game, if I was going to be like this marathon runner, right? So you know, I cleaned up my diet, started running, I got stronger, I started lifting weights. And I really began working on my mindset. A big part of my transformation was the mindset piece.
And listen, I made a lot of mistakes along the way, I would love to sit here and tell you that everything has been rainbows and unicorns, since I decided to kind of get healthy, but it really hasn’t been. And I don’t know if you guys can relate to this, but I’ve had some starts and stops.
You know, I’ve experienced tons of ups and downs, places in you know, times in the last 10, 12, 15 years where I’ve had lots of successes and lots of failures. I’ve had triumphs, and I’ve had tragedies I’ve experienced, being in the best shape of my life. And then, you know, getting out of shape again, during that period of time, you know, lost a bunch of weight, and then gained most of it back and then I had to lose it again.
I’ve been in the best shape of my life and then other times not so much. I dealt with all kinds of challenges of life. And I’ve dealt with these things with courage and determination and grace at times. And other times I’ve had challenges that I really struggled to deal with. But here’s the thing, honestly, today looking at my life the way it is today, I wouldn’t change a thing about my past, I wouldn’t change any stuff that I went through. Because all that hard stuff I went through all those challenges that I experienced have made me who I am today.
You know, it’s the challenges that really cause us to change and grow and evolve and become more, we don’t grow and evolve and become more by staying in our comfort zone, we have to get out of our comfort zone. And sometimes we are forced out of our comfort zone by things that happen to us, you know, death in the family, or another divorce, these things are very challenging. And they can really throw us off.
Or we can step up and face them with courage and determination and move through them. Because the only way to get through challenging stuff is to move through it can’t go around it. You can’t avoid it, a lot of times you have to go right through it. But those are the things that make us who we are. So all that stuff I’ve experienced in my past, I can look at those things and say, yeah, I’ve grown because of that, I’ve become a different person, I’ve become a better person because of that.
And looking back over my past and over all the stuff that I’ve been through, I can see that throughout all of it, throughout all of it, I was being an example to others. Now, I wasn’t always being a good example. A lot of times I can say with complete honesty, that a lot of times I was being an example of what not to do. Okay. Overdrinking, eating junk food, getting incredibly overweight, losing a bunch of weight, gaining it all back and losing it again, don’t do that. Okay, that was sort of like the message.
I think some people were saying they were like, dude, I don’t want to be like this guy. Right? But at some point along the way, I decided that I didn’t want to be the example of what not to do. That I wanted to be a good example to the people around me. You know, at some point, I decided to be an example of what is possible, a positive example of good health, and happiness.
Now, when I talk about being an example to those around you and making an impact in this world, I’m not talking about, you don’t have to be a celebrity in order to impact the world, you don’t have to have a you don’t have to be a social media influencer with millions of followers, right? I can still make an impact on my world, my sphere of influence. And so can you.
And my sphere of influence is quite small. I have my kids and my family, I have my friends. And I have my social media, friends and social media followers and my listeners you. But here’s the thing, even though my sphere of influence might be small, I can make an impact by helping one person at a time.
And when I help one person to become better to become the best version of themselves, and then people in their world see that they want to follow suit. They have then become an example to their sphere of influence to their world. And you can see how the ripple effect starts to take effect here.
And so my mission, my mission in life is to make a positive impact on this world, to transform as many people as possible, to help them to become healthier, happier humans, I want to help you to become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself. I say this all the time here on the podcast, why?
Because this is my mission. This is why I do what I do. This is my calling. This is what gets me up in the morning. This is why I show up for you here every week on his podcast. This is why I show up for myself too. And in order to fulfill this mission, I have to be an example. I can be an example. And I can help one person at a time. And I know this is a slow process. But that’s okay. I’m not in this to be you know, to be to do it fast.
So I want to help you become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself. And then I want you to be an example of what’s possible to the people in your world to your sphere of influence. And then each of those people become an example to their people in their world and so on and so forth. Right? This is the ripple effect. So we can change the world.
Me and you, we can do it. It just takes being an example, it takes living your life in such a way that the behaviors that you engage in on a daily basis, are in alignment with that best version of yourself. Because when the actions that you take and your behaviors are in alignment with your goals of becoming that badass version of yourself, that’s when the good stuff happens.
Now we all have, like, we all want to be our best selves, right? I mean, I think we do talk to people all the time, we want to become their best selves. But their actions, their behaviors don’t always line up with that. They’re doing things that are really the opposite of that. And that was me, and I get it.
You know, overdrinking for me, was not a behavior that was moving me towards the best version of myself. So I had to cut that out of my life. Eating sugar, for me, is not something that works for me. And it’s something that moves me away from becoming the healthiest version of myself. So I’d cut that out of my life. So what I do today is in alignment with who I want to be.
And so for me, it’s about becoming the best version of myself in every area of my life. And there are four key areas that I coach on in my program. And when you work with me, you’re going to improve in all of these areas. And they are nutrition, strength, endurance, and mindset.
Nutrition. Am I eating real food? Is the food that I’m eating? Does it still look like food? Or is it processed garbage? Is it full of chemicals and sugar and seed oils? Or does it still look like food our ancestors have been eating for thousands of years? Am I fueling my body like an athlete? Or am I just eating like a couch potato?
Am I using food as an emotional management tool? Because I used to do that a lot. You know, am I dealing with my emotions? Do I feel good about my food choices? Am I in control of my food choices? Or does my eating feel out of control? These are ways that I can kind of check myself and say, okay is my nutrition on point?
And then strength. So at 55 years old, I’m in the best shape of my life, I’m the strongest I’ve ever been, you know, I have changed my body composition. Over the last few years, I’ve gained like 20 pounds of muscle. And I’m down to about 12% body fat. And I’m getting stronger all the time. I keep improving this.
I’m actually in this phase right now where I’m trying to gain weight, I’m trying to gain muscle weight. And so I’m eating a little bit more protein, I’m eating more calories in general. And I’m not gaining fat or I’m not gaining body fat, I’m gaining muscle. And at 55, the fact that I can do this, should prove to you that you can do it too. So this is me being an example for you.
Endurance, I’m still running strong. I typically do one to two marathons a year, I have for the last 12 years and I’ve done countless ultra marathons during that time. My body’s holding up. I’m not injured, I don’t get injuries and strength. The fact that I have built so much strength over the last few years helps immensely with all of that.
In my mindset, this is one of the most powerful things that I’ve changed for the better for myself. Because mindset drives everything. So your mindset, this is your thoughts, your feelings, your attitudes, it’s your mental and emotional state at any given time. And a lot of the a lot of the behaviors that are engaged in the damaging behaviors that we engage in, like overeating or overdrinking is because we’re using those things, alcohol or food as an emotional management tool.
We don’t want to deal with our emotions. So instead we eat over them or we drink over them. But learning how to manage emotions without eating junk food or drinking alcohol, or smoking cigarettes or doing you know, heroin or whatever your drug of choice might be. This is one of the most powerful things you can do for yourself. Because armed with the right mindset, there’s really nothing you can’t do.
So between my nutrition, strength, endurance and mindset, these four key areas I have become at this point in my life, I’m the best version of myself I am and I’ve got some goals. You know I’ve got goals I want to improve in all these areas still, and I will and I continue to move in the direction of my goals. I’m always working on myself, and you should be too.
And this isn’t about like ego or vanity, I’m not trying to prove anything to anyone else. I don’t need to prove my worth to anyone outside of myself, I stopped trying to do that years ago. It’s not about comparing myself to anyone else. I only care about comparing who I am today, to who I was yesterday, am I a better version of myself today? Yes or no.
And I’m not trying to impress anyone, either. My goal is to lead by example. And that’s it. Instead of trying to impress people by what I do, I want to inspire them by who I am. So here’s the call to action part. I want you to do something today, to move in the direction of you becoming the best version of yourself.
I want you to do something today to inspire somebody around you, you can make a positive impact on this world, you can help create healthier, happier humans around you. This could be your kids, your family, your friends, your followers, whatever. You can do this, you have that power. And you are takes, it just takes doing something yourself to move in the direction of you becoming the best version of yourself. When you do that, you will show people what is possible, you will be an example of what is possible to the people around you.
So what is one thing you can do today, to be a positive example. Maybe you could make a healthy meal for your family. Simple, right? Maybe you can go for a run. And then post about it, post about how good you feel. You know, I know people are like, geez, we need to see you posting on Facebook about your runs again. But listen, people tell me all the time. They’re like I’m so inspired by you.
And people were telling me this long before I was doing what I’m doing today years and years and years ago, I would post pictures of me running or post about running. And people say I’m so inspired. Just by sharing little vignettes of my day. Here’s what I did today, I got up early and I went for a run, people see that. Maybe you could skip dessert tonight. And instead, take a walk with your kids or your dog. Maybe you grab a friend and you head out to some trails and do some hiking or some trail running.
Maybe tomorrow morning, you get up early and you hit the gym, you lift some heavy weights, you could read a book on personal development, a couple of my favorites would be Atomic Habits by James Clear, or The Obstacle Is The Way by Ryan Holiday.
Maybe you get a good night’s sleep tonight, that could be something very simple to do. But you can be an example to others. When you get a good night’s sleep and you feel more well rested. When you wake up in the morning, maybe you start your day with some meditation, or some journaling. Or take a yoga class.
There are countless ways that you can improve your own personal health and happiness. Whether it’s nutrition, strength, endurance or mindset. But what I want to encourage you to do is to do something, take action now do something today. And then tomorrow, I want you to do something else. Okay. Here’s where I’m going with this. So it doesn’t stop.
This isn’t a one and done. Right? Every day, we show up for ourselves to become the best version of ourselves. And when we do that, when we do that, you we can’t help but to be an example to the people around us. Because people will notice. People will notice what you’re doing.
And listen, I talked to clients all the time who start to feel really good. So we’ve cleaned up their diet, maybe they started lifting weights or something and they feel so good. And they want to tell everybody about what they’re doing. And they and they see friends and family and they’re like, oh, and they might make comments like you should really be doing what I’m doing.
But here’s the thing, nobody likes to be told what to do. I’m just going to tell you right now, even though, you know you feel good and you’re excited about it, you know how you feel and you want to share this with everybody. But nobody wants to be told what to do. Nobody wants to be told what to do.
But people will see what you’re doing. If it works for you, they will see you becoming healthier, maybe losing weight, feeling better, getting stronger, looking amazing. Rockin that bikini in the summer, whatever it is, they’ll see that. And they’ll want that. And they might ask you about it.
You know, for years, my son Colin was overweight, you know. And for years, even though I’m a weight loss coach, I never talked to him about I never told him what to do. I never pushed any kind of agenda on him. At some point, when he was ready to change, he just came to me because he saw what I was doing. He saw how I had lost the weight and kept it off. And he saw how I was helping countless other people to do the same.
And then one day finally came to me and asked if I would be willing to coach him. Of course, I said yes. And of course, it was like a huge, proud dad moment for me. But this is how it works. You see, we lead by example, not by proselytizing. We inspire others by who we are, by how we live our life, not by impressing them by the stuff we do.
We become the healthiest and most badass versions of ourselves. And then those people around us, they will see that they will see that and they will see who we’ve become. And some of them not all, but some of them will want to follow suit. So you have your marching orders. Get busy today doing something, just one thing today, to move toward that best and healthiest and most badass version of yourself. And then tomorrow. Do it again. Cool. All right. That’s all I got for you. I love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
There is a health crisis going on right now in the US. Metabolic diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease are at an all-time high. Our collective health has been steadily …
Continue Reading about 130. Taking Your Health Into Your Own Hands →
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 130 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today taking your health into your own hands. There is a health crisis going on right now in the United States.
Metabolic diseases like obesity, type two diabetes and heart disease are at an all time high and our collective health has been steadily declining over the last 40 years. And it doesn’t appear to be reversing any time soon. And if you think that our healthcare system or the food industry or the government are here to help you to help reverse this, you are sadly mistaken.
So if you want to avoid being another statistic, and if you want to start becoming the healthiest and most badass version of yourself, then this episode is for you. In this episode, I’m going to share some surprising reasons why we might be experiencing this current health crisis here in this country.
And I also want to explain the simple solution not relying on the powers that be quote unquote, but instead taking your health into your own hands. What does that look like? What does it mean for you? What can you do today to start taking your health into your own hands?
First, I just want to talk a little bit about my coaching program, which is called the Running Lean coaching project. So every month I pick a different topic. And in our program, we kind of take a deep dive into that topic and June, this month of June, is all about mastering your mindset.
Your mindset is the foundation of everything that you do in your life, everything that you want to accomplish in your life, whether it’s you know, health and fitness related, even business related relationship related, all requires you to have the right mindset. And a lot of times we don’t even understand what that means. What is mindset? What does it even mean to have the right kind of mindset?
So we’re taking a deep dive into this all month long. And if you want to join us, it’s not too late. Not only can you continue to join in the conversations we’re having about this, but you can also have access to all of the past coaching calls that I’ve done.
There’s kind of a couple of different components to this coaching program. There’s group coaching, and then there’s also one on one coaching with me, I designed this program to give you all of the support that you need to accomplish your goals, whether you want to lose weight, improve your running performance, become stronger, just become the most badass version of yourself whatever that looks like for you.
I’ve created this program to provide you with the knowledge, the support, the accountability, the inspiration, the motivation to help get you there, I want to help you stay on track, help you change your mindset, if that’s what needs to happen, develop good habits, so that we can create a healthier version of you that lasts.
This is about permanent lifestyle changes. This isn’t about short term fixes or, you know, lose weight quickly kind of thing. This is about long term health and fitness. So if you’re interested in that, if you’re interested in not the short game, but the long game, and about changing your mindset and changing the way you think and feel about health and fitness and diet and nutrition permanently, then I think this might be a great program for you.
But we have to have a conversation about it, we’ll jump on a call and we’ll kind of talk about the program. I want to give you more details. I’m going to talk about your individual goals because this this program is designed for you as an individual, it’s not about just you know, doing some certain diet, you know, this is about me, and you’re working together to figure out what’s the best plan of action for you as an individual, because we’re all different.
We all have different metabolisms, different goals, different likes and dislikes, different food preferences, and we want to put together a plan that works specifically for you. So if you’re interested, go to runningleancoaching.com/apply, fill out a short application, book a call with me, and we’ll talk about it, cool. I would love to have you in the Running Lean coaching project.
And then just really quickly, I want to put out a little bit of a disclaimer about this particular episode. So I’m going to be talking about some things today that that you might want to change in your diet and I usually don’t talk about like, say I don’t usually suggest things has to do, because we don’t have a client coach relationship, me and you, you know, for the most part, right? So I can’t really offer nutritional advice here on the podcast.
But what I can do is suggest some things that you may consider changing. Of course, you know, get your doctor’s approval before you change anything in your diet before you start making any kinds of changes to your exercise regimen or anything like that, okay, I’m not a doctor, I can’t offer medical advice, I can’t really offer advice unless we have a relationship.
So nothing that I ever say here should ever be construed as medical advice. And just know that the things I’m going to be talking about today are just general sort of guidelines that I think we can all follow and maybe improve our health a little bit. But again, you got to talk to your doctor about making any kinds of changes. Cool. All right. So let’s get into this a little bit.
I have to say that I’m a little fired up about this topic. And I have been for a while. And I hope by the end of this episode, you get a little bit fired up too. Because there’s a big problem here in this country, with our health and with the health of the population of the people in the United States.
Now, this extends beyond the borders of the United States as this goes into most of the world at this point. But I’m just kind of focusing on what’s happening here, because I know more about what’s happening here in the US than I do about other countries. And I really can’t speak to that.
But we’re in the midst of a kind of a devastating health crisis here. We really are. Like I said at the beginning, you know, over the last 40 years, our health has been steadily declining, and hasn’t been getting better. You know, right now, obesity rates are at an all time high. In 2020 42% of the US population was considered obese. 42%. That’s up from 30% in the year 2000.
So just 22 years ago, that has changed dramatically. And then severe obesity, some people call it morbid obesity, but severe obesity is up from 4.7%, back in 2000, to 9.2% today in 2022. And the annual medical cost just of this one chronic condition, this the annual medical cost of obesity here in the United States is nearly $173 billion.
That’s billion with a B obesity related medical conditions include things like heart disease, stroke, type two diabetes, and certain types of cancer. These are some of the leading causes of premature death in this country. And they’re all absolutely preventable. So they call these things lifestyle diseases, because they are associated with the way you live your life, the way the choices that you make, you know, around nutrition, around exercise, around alcohol and drug intake, those kinds of things are associated with these problems.
And it’s a big, huge problem in this country. Here’s something that I saw recently, and this just this makes me very sad. Okay, and this has to do with children. Right now, one in eight children have asthma. One in five children in this country have allergic eczema. One in twelve children have food allergies, one in five children have obesity, one in five children have obesity, one in six children have a mental health disorder. And one in 54 children have autism, children with chronic conditions, has increased by over 400% since the 1970s.
And people look at these kinds of stats. And they say, well, it’s genetics, it’s genetics. Our genes haven’t changed since the 1970s. It takes 10s of 1000s of years for genes to change like that, for genetics to play a big role like that. It’s not about genetics, our environment has changed.
At the start of the 1970s we were told, you know by our government by, you know, these dietary guidelines they put out there that we should start eating what they called the food pyramid at the time. And this pushed refined carbohydrates as the basis of our diet. That should be the majority of the food we’re eating. Up to 65% of our diet should be coming in the form of refined carbohydrates.
And at the same time we started doing that chronic diseases increased in both adults and children. There’s an obesity epidemic among toddlers in this country. What the hell? That is crazy. That is just crazy. Toddlers were not obese. Prior to the 1970s, it was a very, very, very, very rare thing. But now we look at kids today, one in five children are obese. This is crazy.
Since we started following these food guidelines, we’ve gotten fatter, and we’ve gotten sicker, chronic diseases are up, and we are not getting better. And there’s no sign of this changing, it’s only getting worse.
And what I want to talk about today, is that there’s something we can do about this. But what I want to talk about today, and I’ll get to that is not just bad news, okay. But there’s a lot of bad news. Unfortunately, this is what gets me fired up, though. Okay.
But today, when we look at the policies our government has in play, we look at our health care system, as a whole. We look at Big Pharma, big pharmaceutical companies, we look at all the big food companies in this country. And we think we have this idea, this beautiful idea that all of these systems are in place to help us to keep us healthy, to improve our health.
And the reality of it is, is that they’re not there to help us. They’re not there to improve our health and to help us to live long, healthy lives, they’re there, they’re around to make money. And there’s a lot of profit in keeping people sick. I know this may seem a little bit like conspiracy theory, but it’s really not.
This is something I’ve been noodling over for a long time for years, actually. And I just feel like we need to just call it what it is, you know. And so I’m gonna break down a little bit of why I feel this way. And it’s not just me, this is not just something I just thought of the other day, and I’m like, oh, you know, I think I’m just gonna start talking about how all this stuff is working against us now.
This has been going on for decades. And there’s millions of people talking about this. Okay, so I’m just another voice out there that’s talking about this, but I think it’s really, really important that we talk about this. Okay, so, here’s an example. Look at the big food companies that are out there. Okay.
So, when you look at the biggest food companies in this country, the majority of food produced in this country is created by these companies, Kraft Foods, Coca Cola, Nestle, Procter and Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, Unilever, PepsiCo, General Mills, Kellogg’s, and Mars. Okay, so what you’re noticing in this list is that there’s a lot, a lot of sugar. Right?
There’s a lot of, a lot of processed food, it’s a lot of sugar. And it’s a lot of refined grains. You know, we look at stuff like Kellogg’s and General Mills is just nothing but sugar, refined grains, and vegetable oil. That’s like the main three ingredients of all junk food, right? Stay away from those three things, by the way, and your health is going to start to change for the better.
But Coca Cola, Nestle, PepsiCo, Mars, these are all, you know, these are sugar, sugar, water and candy companies. And these are the biggest food companies in this country. And they’re the most profitable and they have deep, deep pockets and money in this country, money equals power. And these big companies, they have the power to change laws to create policies to promote more of their own products.
You know, an example would be the sugar industry actually came up with a study to prove quote, unquote, prove that salt was bad for us. Salt is bad for us. Alright, so they wanted to divert the attention away from sugar as being a problem. And most people don’t know this, but the salt, the sugar industry actually funded studies to prove you know that that showed that salt was a problem. It was causing hypertension, high blood pressure, and all these other things.
And the truth of the matter is, salt is something we have to have in our diet. Like if we don’t eat salt, we will die. Like we have to have sodium in our diet. And in the end, the sugar industry doesn’t want you to limit the amount of sugar you’re eating. So they are kind of saying well, oh, high blood pressure, heart disease, all these other things. It’s the salt in your diet.
And so they have these deep pockets and they can fund these kinds of studies. That’s just one example. This happens every single day in this country. These big food companies are funding studies that promote their viewpoint, right?
And a lot of the science, you know, the people that are actually conducting the science, they’re being funded by these food companies. So we have to understand that there’s a lot of skewed science out there and that we have to just take things into our own hands, we have to look at what’s going on out there.
And just don’t believe everything you read, for sure, don’t even believe everything I’m telling you, like, do your own research, if you want to go and look this stuff up, I’m not sharing anything that I haven’t researched thoroughly. And I’m at this point in my life where I just have to, I have to say what’s on my mind, and I get fired up about this particular topic.
Here’s another thing to kind of consider from the big food companies, sugar and refined grains, they are not nutritious. Alright, there’s nothing really good about eating this stuff. It doesn’t, there’s no health benefits from eating this stuff, okay. And the other thing you have to realize is that sugar and refined grains will turn off sensors in your body that will actually make you feel full.
So like, when you eat something like a piece of chicken, or, you know, some some vegetables with some butter, you know, like you eat some real, you know, good sources of protein and fat, you’re going to feel full, and then you’ll stop eating, how much chicken can you sit down and eat at one at one sitting? Not a lot. I’ve tried it before.
I’m like, I’m gonna eat a pound of chicken and then I’m 12 ounces into it. I’m like, I’m done, right? You just can’t eat anymore. But how many, you know, Twinkies can you eat at one sitting like dozens, right? Like, you could just keep going, you never stop. So eating these kinds of refined foods, especially with the sugar and refined grains, they turn off sensors of fullness and satiety. And so we can overeat that very easily.
And they increase our hunger signals. So when you’re eating these kinds of foods, you’re more hungry all the time. And this is by design, the food companies understand this, if we never feel full, if we’re always hungry. And we’re eating this non nutritious, you know, empty calorie, carbohydrate laden foods, we’re gonna buy more of that stuff, because it tastes amazing, right?
We’re gonna keep buying more and more, so it increases their profits. So what they’re doing is working for them. It’s working to build more and more profits for the big food companies. But it’s making us fat, or it’s making us sick or, and they don’t care about that. They just want to, they want you to eat more, they want you to stay hungry, they don’t want you to crave their stuff, eat more of their processed garbage food, so that you just continue to buy, buy, buy buy from them, they use the cheapest ingredients available, and they make these hyper palatable foods.
You’ve probably heard about the bliss point, they have scientists that are working on the actual science of craving and how, what ingredients can they use, and it’s usually sugar, flour and vegetable oil to produce the most, the most blissful feeling in our brains. And they’ve shown that sugar is actually preferable to certain drugs like cocaine, like they’ve done these tests on rats, poor rats, they always get tested on these weird things, right?
But they did this test on rats where they gave them cocaine or sugar. And over time, the sugar was preferable. The rats just stopped doing the cocaine, stopped drinking the cocaine and stopped and started drinking their sugar water because it gave them a better high. It gave them a better high. And if you don’t think sugar is bad for you, you don’t think sugar is addictive? Just look at that study right there. Rats will prefer it over cocaine. Okay.
So they’re getting us hooked on their product. They know what they’re doing. They know exactly what they’re doing. And they’re giving us this garbage food and we’re just buying into it. We’re buying into it. We’re buying the stuff by the pallet full, just go into Costco and see what’s sitting out there on all these giant pallets of food, right?
And then, of course, there’s this idea of like, they have all this influence and power, you know, they squash any attempts to say that their food is unhealthy. You know, Coca Cola put out this whole campaign about how sugar wasn’t the problem, and you just needed to move more just like exercise more. And I forget the name of the campaign, it was something like you know, move more or something like that, but it’s basically like, oh, yeah, Coca Cola is fine. Just keep drinking Coke. That’s not the problem with you, the problem is you’re lazy. And you need to be moving more.
That’s just bananas to think about, right? What, when in human existence, have we ever needed to like, do a bunch of cardio? This has never been a thing for us. Why, since the incorporation of these guidelines in 19 in the late 1970s. Why all of a sudden do we have to do a bunch of cardio just to stay in shape and not get all fat and obese? But it’s crazy. It’s crazy. The diet is wrong.
And they’re pushing their junk on us. And we have to just stand up and say, no, thank you. No, thank you, I’m not going to buy into this anymore. Okay. And remember that, you know, he’s talking about salt being an essential nutrient salt is essential. If we don’t eat salt, we will die. Sugar, on the other hand is a non-essential nutrient, we don’t have to eat sugar in our diet, our bodies will produce the glucose that we need, our brain needs a certain amount of glucose to function, but your liver produces that just fine.
I’ve gone through stints where I’ve basically done no sugar, no carbs, basically, like just kind of a carnivore type of diet. And I gotta tell you, I’ve never felt better. I felt amazing when I eat that way. And, and I go back and forth, it’s not something I do all the time. I’m always kind of experimenting with things because I want to go to share different, you know, different diets and things with you guys and share different strategies to kind of help you.
So I’m always experimenting on myself. So I never do anything for too long. But honestly, I go back to that sort of carnivore way of eating, where it’s just basically meat and eggs for periods of time. And I’ve done it for 30, 60, 90 days, and I just feel amazing, and my body functions perfectly fine, I get all the glucose I need, my brain is functioning better than ever.
So just so you understand, I’m not telling you, you need to do that. I’m not telling you, you need to like stop eating vegetables or fruit or anything like that. Eat that stuff. It’s good. You know, fruit, veg, meat, eggs, dairy, some of that stuff. If you can handle dairy, like all good for you. But stay away from all that junk food, okay? And if the big food companies are telling you to eat something, do the opposite. Okay?
And then we’ve got this issue with the government. So our government here is there’s a lot of self interest going on here. There’s lawmakers, there’s lobbyists, and they’re tied in to the big food companies, you know, the big food companies put a lot of money into the government to help create policies, and even on the board of, and I’m gonna get this wrong, but it’s like the USDA, or the FDA can’t remember which one it is that actually funds that actually does the food guidelines. There’s a lot of people on that board that are being funded by the big food companies like Coca Cola and PepsiCo and Mars, it’s bananas like, this is not, this is not the way it should be.
The government does not really have our best interest in mind. When we look at the government, we’re talking about people who are being, you know, funded by big food companies, right. And it’s profitable, everybody’s making money off of this, you know, but it doesn’t mean it’s healthier doesn’t mean it’s the way we should be doing things. And there’s, there’s these big incentives to grow mono crops like corn, wheat, and soy. So these are the three three ingredients that dominate the food industry, right. And these three crops are subsidized heavily by the federal government, farmers received between 1995 and 2020, farmers received 424 billion with a B dollars in substitute subsidies.
And 50% of that were for just those three crops corn, wheat and soybeans. And corn was by far the largest at $116 billion in subsidy subsidies going to corn production, which accounts for about 20-27% of the total mono crop.
Mono-culture crops contribute to a large portion of soil erosion, they increase fertilizer and pesticide use. And Cornell did this study and found that pesticide use in the United States causes $520 million in crop loss, and over a billion dollars in health costs for us as humans. So buy organic by all means, okay. And we want to stay away from those mono crop foods, you know, corn, wheat and soybeans is a problem.
This is a problem these things are, are not necessarily they’re not good for us, you know, they cause all kinds of problems, right. And then just keep in mind that, you know, the government puts out these guidelines. And, you know, they basically put out these guidelines back in late 1970s or 1980 that says, you know, 65, up to 65% of your diet should be coming from refined carbohydrates. And the food guidelines are there not to make us healthy.
They’re not for health and well being, but they’re there to support a profitable food industry because the more you tell people you need to eat these, you know, these refined grains, the more money that you know, is being pumped into producing these grains, the more subsidies people are getting, and the whole system is kind of just messed up. It’s a messed up system.
And so we just have to understand what’s going on and try to take some, some control ourselves, okay. And listen, the food guidelines that are being followed. I know a lot of people say like, well, people aren’t just following, if they would just follow them, everything would be fine. But they’re not being followed. They are being followed.
I mean, and we are really good at following advice that is put out there. Like when they say, Hey, you know, smoking is bad, cigarettes are bad that causes all these problems. We follow suit, you know, all the side effects and diseases caused by smoking have gone down dramatically since we started these anti smoking campaigns right? Dramatically.
I don’t even know many people that smoke anymore. I don’t know. I don’t know maybe one person that I know of smoking, everybody I knew used to smoke, right? Maybe I’m hanging around different people these days. But these guidelines are being followed. And they’re not working. The guidelines are not working. The government is putting out these food guidelines that are not designed with our health and well being in mind. And it’s just not working.
The science that produces the guidelines is bad, the sciences never really proven. They’ve come up with so many new studies that show that, you know, saturated fats are not the enemy, the fat is not the enemy, that carbs are bad, the sugar is bad, and vegetable oil is bad. And listen, these guidelines are driving a lot of policy and a lot of food that goes out to like our kids.
So public school lunch programs, they use the guidelines to follow, to put together the school lunch programs for our kids, the military follows these guidelines, hospitals, nursing homes, VA hospitals, that kind of stuff. All follow the guidelines, they use the guidelines as the basis of how to structure and nutrition programs. And these things are just not working. They’re keeping us sick, they’re keeping us overweight, obese, they’re causing all kinds of problems with our health. So we need to take things into our own hands. Okay.
And, you know, here’s something interesting, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. So and this is the organization that where if you’re a registered dietitian, this is where you get registered through or whatever, right. So they’re having a conference coming up here in a few months. And it’s touted as the world’s largest meeting of food and nutrition experts. Oh, that sounds good. Right. So this conference is coming up. And you know, it’s supposed to be all these experts coming together. Well, here’s who’s sponsoring this, this conference, PepsiCo, the sugar Foundation, Nestle, General Mills, the canola oil Council, just to name a few.
So this is indicative of the kinds of relationships that exist between food companies, healthcare systems, the government, you know, the governing agencies that are governing all these registered dieticians, our nutrition is being dictated by the sugar industry, essentially.
So there’s all these conflicts of interest, right? And conflicts of interest come about when, you know, there’s big corporations marketing, potentially harmful products, and they have these financial relationships with research institutions, or individual researchers, or public health organizations.
And as obesity is becoming just more and more rampant in this country, these kinds of relationships are jeopardizing the integrity of scientific research. So if you want to know if what you’re reading is, you know, legit or not, see who’s funding the research. You have to do your homework on this stuff. Okay? I hate that it even has to be this way.
But there’s these big companies, you know, like Pepsi Cola, sugar Foundation, General Mills, Coca Cola, whatever, they flood the literature out there with science that they funded to make it very difficult for you to actually find legit science that’s not been funded by the food industry. It’s a problem. It’s a real problem. Okay. And then I talk about the healthcare industry as you know, it’s really not about our health or care.
It’s like another for profit business in this country, our health care system in this country is messed up. And, you know, we could go into that. And maybe I will go into a whole episode about how just the healthcare industry is messed up. But I need to say this, though, health care workers are amazing. And there’s a lot of great doctors out there. And there’s a lot of great health care workers out there.
That’s not what I’m talking about here. The health care workers are amazing people. And I have a couple of doctors that I go to, and I love, they’re amazing. And they spent a long time with me, right? There’s a lot of amazing people in the healthcare industry, I have a lot of friends who work in the healthcare industry. And these people are amazing people, it’s not about the people, this is about the industry as a whole, the big health care system is broken. Right?
What doctors can and can’t do largely is dictated by the insurance companies, you know, in their hands are tied, a lot of times they want to be able to help and they can’t, right, and they have to work within these strict guidelines, often without the patient’s best interest in mind. And they’re told to push drugs. They’re not trying to solve the problem. They’re just writing prescriptions. And if you go to your doctor and say, oh, you know, I’m overweight, and I have type two diabetes, these are lifestyle diseases, right?
And you go, yes, doc, I’ve got these lifestyle diseases, you would think the doctor would say, Well, what you need to do is fix your lifestyle. Instead, they say, oh, my gosh, here’s a drug you should take. Here’s something to lower your cholesterol, or here’s something to help you with your type two diabetes, to keep insulin levels low, whatever, they’re just treating symptoms, right.
And I just watched a video from a doctor, MD Paul Saladino, who said, that not one time, not one time, during his entire med school, or his residency, was he ever challenged to actually find the root cause of any illness, he was never challenged, as a medical student to ever, like, go find what’s really causing the problems and solve the problem at its root, he was always told to just treat the symptoms. And that’s, that’s what most of our doctors are told.
Now, there’s some good doctors out there. And I want to make it very clear that there are some very good doctors out there. And you just need to find the right one, right. But a lot of these doctors, they’re just writing prescriptions, right? The big pharmaceutical companies are making huge profits off of us, and they don’t want us to get healthy. They don’t want us to solve the problem, they don’t want us to solve the root problem, they want to keep, they want us to keep taking their pills. That’s it, because money equals power, right? So they drive policies that keep doctors writing prescriptions. Because listen, a cured patient is no longer a paying customer.
Think about that, you are a customer of these big insurance companies or big pharmaceutical companies. And if you get healthy, you don’t make them money. Okay? So a few things that I’m going to suggest you do here, number one, like find a good doctor, there are amazing doctors out there. And, for example, I go to a doctor who doesn’t really take insurance.
There, I pay a monthly fee to sort of be a part of their practices called concierge health care. And so I pay a monthly fee to be a part of their practice. They’re not pressured by, you know, pharmaceutical companies to write prescriptions. And like, my doctor spends time with me, like she spends, like 30 minutes with me every time I go to see her, and we talk about what the root problem is, and we try to solve things. So this is like old school, right? It’s the way doctors should do things, right? I think you can find a doctor like this.
But you’ve got to do a little bit of work and do a little digging, but find somebody that’s on your side that has your best interests in mind. And that isn’t going to just write prescriptions, right. And on the prescription thing, you know, I try to avoid taking medications. And I suggest that you do too.
Obviously, you know, there’s some medications that are very important that you have to take, you know, and that’s awesome. And I totally am down with that, right? But instead of taking a pill like to mask symptoms, like let’s do our best to change our lifestyle so that we can get off the medications. And a lot of my clients actually end up greatly reducing or even getting off medications altogether, with their doctor’s approval, of course, right.
But here’s what I’m trying to say: a pill is not always the answer. Like sometimes it is but you know, for some of these lifestyle issues I’m talking about here. Yeah, you want to continue taking your medication but wouldn’t it be awesome if you changed things and improved your health from the inside out without having to take medications anymore? Like maybe you can reduce or eventually get off those things right.
Another thing that I want to suggest here is that those dietary guidelines from the government just don’t work, they don’t work, like they do the opposite. If they’re telling you to stay away from fat, eat more fat, if they’re saying meat and eggs is gonna kill you, like eat more of that stuff. If they say eat a ton of grains don’t do that. If they say sugar is fine, don’t eat sugar, eliminate it from your diet and see how good you feel.
You know, they say, oh, keep salt really low, like just use salt, you need salt will die if you don’t need salt, right. And they say, you know, healthy fats like vegetable oil, stay away from that stuff, they’re dead wrong about that, that stuff is toxic, avoid it altogether, okay. And then that food industry, food industry is there to make money, they make money off of us.
So like, avoid food that comes with a marketing message. Avoid foods that don’t look like food. Avoid foods, or at least most foods that come in packages. And if you do buy food that comes in a package, read the label and understand what you’re reading, understand how to read the label, because the labels can be very deceiving. You know, there’s like 96 different words they use for sugar, because they want to confuse you and hide that stuff, right. So make sure you understand what you’re reading.
And then just eat real food, eat food that looks like food, eat food that you buy around the perimeter of the grocery store, you know, meat, eggs, fruit, vegetables, right? Eat food that our ancestors would recognize, oh, beef, chicken, banana, avocado, like, stick with stuff like that, you know, if the food you’re eating is making you feel hungry all the time, this is not the right kind of food. Right? There’s, you got to change that, right? Eat the opposite,
Okay. So I get fired up about this, because I have this mission. And this mission that I have is to help you to become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself. And in order to do that, I have to call BS on a lot of stuff that’s going on in this country, the current health situation in this country is dire, it’s dire. And we have to fix it.
And I share all this stuff with you because there’s this problem out there that’s bigger than me, it’s bigger than you and we need to take things into our own hands. Right? I’m compelled to help make this world a healthier place. And it happens like one person at a time, it’s me doing what I can to become the best and most badass version of myself. So it’s me being an example of what’s possible, and then hopefully inspiring you to do the same.
And then hopefully, you inspire other people to do the same. And I see this happen all the time. And I don’t have millions of people listening to this podcast, I don’t have millions of people following me. But I do have a lot and I have a voice. And I’m passionate about helping you. I’m passionate about helping you get healthy and stay healthy and stay fit.
So I want to create this ripple effect, this ripple effect of positivity and good health in this world, I want to make an impact. And when I share topics like this, I can help to make an impact, right. And I’ve worked with hundreds of runners who have gotten leaner and gotten stronger and taken back control of their health. And I’m gonna help you too. But it’s up to you to do things differently.
Stop following the dietary advice from the government, stop buying into the marketing messages from the food industry. Stop thinking that you know, our healthcare system and the government and the big food companies have your best interest in mind because they don’t. Right, take things into your own hands. You get to do this any way that you want, and you get to do whatever you want to do. You don’t have to follow the normal things that people are doing out there.
And when I say normal, I use like finger quotes like normal, because normal isn’t good. Normal is those stats I told you at the beginning of this podcast normal is like becoming obese. Normal is becoming having type two diabetes normals having this list of chronic lifestyle diseases, don’t be normal. Take things into your own hands, take a stand, make a different start today. It’s not hard. It takes a little bit of time.
I’m here to help you if you ever want help, but just listen, you can do this. I know that you can do this. But if we’re going to change things, it’s going to be up to me and you to do this as individuals and then hopefully inspire other people to do the same cool. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
In my coaching practice, I hear this phrase a lot, “I feel like I’m spiraling out of control.” Spiraling out of control can feel terrible and typically leads to out-of-control behavior like eating …
Continue Reading about 125. Do You Feel Like You’re Spiraling Out of Control? →
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 125, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, do you feel like you’re spiraling out of control? So in my coaching practice, I hear this phrase a lot. I feel like I’m spiraling out of control, spiraling out of control can feel terrible.
And it’s one of those things that kind of leads to out of control behavior, like eating all the Oreos in the house or eating an entire large pizza by yourself. And I know this from personal experience, by the way, but what does it really mean to be spiraling out of control? Are you actually out of control? Or does it just feel like it?
Is there no way to recover from the state that you’re in? In this episode of the podcast, I’m gonna explain what it really means when you feel like you’re spiraling out of control. And I’ll show you what you need to do to get yourself out of it.
But first, I want to encourage you to consider applying to join the Running Lean Coaching Project. This is my immersive coaching program, where you get all the guidance, the support, the knowledge, the accountability, that you need to hit your goals. I know that if you’re listening to this podcast, it means that you want more for yourself, you’re not okay with the status quo. There’s somebody that you want to become.
And in order for you to become that future version of yourself, you’re going to have to get into action, there are things you’re going to have to do that you’re not doing right now. There’s some things that you might have to stop doing that you’re doing right now. There’s changes that have to happen. And my job as your coach is to help you make those changes. My job is to help you get into action. My job is to help you to stay in action, and continue to make progress towards your goals.
You know, my job is to help you accomplish whatever it is that you want for yourself. So I’m here for you. If you’re one of those people that’s like you know, what I’ve been doing isn’t working. And I just need a little guidance, I need the support of an expert, I need somebody who’s helped hundreds of other people do the same thing. Then consider joining the Running Lean Coaching Project. It’s easy, all you got to do is go to runningleancoaching.com/apply.
You’re gonna fill out a short little application, you’re going to schedule a call with me, we’re going to talk about it. We’re going to talk about your goals. We’re going to talk about what it is you really want for yourself. And then we’re going to see if this is a good fit for you. I’ll answer all your questions, I’ll explain all the details of the coaching program. But nothing’s going to change unless you get into action. So I want to encourage you, if you’re thinking about this, if you’ve been on the fence about this, if this is something that you want for yourself, just take action, it doesn’t cost anything to schedule this call with me it doesn’t. It takes a little bit of time. And that’s it.
But don’t you owe that to yourself, just invest a little bit of time to find out if this is something that you want for yourself. I think it’s worth it. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. Let’s jump on a call. We’ll see if this is a good fit for you. Sound good? Awesome. All right.
So a lot of people come to me and a lot of people share this, this phrase with me where they say like they feel like they’re spiraling out of control. And I want to break this down a little bit and talk about what this really means. So what does it really mean when you say you’re spiraling out of control?
So what that means for a lot of people is they’ve been doing pretty well for a while, maybe they’re sticking to a new kind of food plan. They’ve switched up their workout schedule. And things have been going pretty well for a while but then they have, you know, stopped they’ve they’ve stopped being consistent. They’ve stopped eating the right foods. They’ve gone back to binging on the Oreos and the pizza. And it feels like they’re out of control. And then this leads to feelings of frustration and guilt and shame.
And then you feel bad about yourself. And that feeling bad about yourself, all those feelings of guilt and shame about what you’ve been doing and how you can stay on track, you’d beat yourself up, oh my gosh, I always fail. That just leads to more, quote unquote, like out of control behavior. So you binge on even more Oreos, or Ben and Jerry’s ice cream or french fries, or whatever it is, that turns you on, you know. Because why bother?
And that’s kind of what we mean, when we say we’re spiraling out of control. You know, there’s some, there’s some out of control behavior happening, that creates these feelings within us of guilt and shame and frustration and failure. And it just leads to more out of control behavior. So that’s where the spiral comes from. Okay. I totally get this.
And this was definitely the way that I lived my life when I was drinking alcohol. When I was drinking alcohol, I would drink to excess every day. You know, every, every time five o’clock rolled around, I would start cracking open the beers. And I would drink until I fell asleep or passed out, however you want to say it. And I couldn’t stop that. I had been doing that for so many years, every day, thousands of days in a row, that to stop that felt impossible.
I felt like I had no control over my drinking. I felt like I had no control over my actions, I felt like I had no control over my behavior. So the things that I was doing just felt super out of control. And maybe it’s just my personality, but I kind of did the same thing with food. So I quit drinking, eventually, you know, it’s been over 15 years now. But a few years back, I was starting to get pretty out of control with my eating. And I was using food as an emotional management tool.
And I was that person, you know, I would order a large pizza and eat it by myself. And then you know, wash it down with some Ben and Jerry’s. So that was my deal. And that felt really out of control to like, I couldn’t not do that. And, and that led to really feeling terrible, gaining weight, feeling bad about myself, knowing I should be better knowing that I should be, you know, doing things differently. But feeling completely, like I had no control over my own decisions. Like I felt just like completely out of control. And that spiraling out of control feeling, it’s not a good feeling. Because the only solution really, when you’re in it, is to just keep going with that. At least that’s what it feels like, right?
And I just want you to think about this. Now, there are other ways that we can spiral out of control. And a lot of times we look to our circumstances, we look to things that are happening around us we can look to, oh, you know, my bosses got this. Yeah, things are crazy at work right now my bosses just laid all this extra work on me.
And it’s that time of the year where the kids are getting finished up with schooling and it’s crazy, you know, and then, oh, the husband is just driving me nuts with all this stuff right now and not supporting me, I’m trying to like change my diet, he’s just not supporting me, you know, and, you know, the in-laws are coming out.
Like, you can just keep layering on all the things that are happening around you. And it can really feel like you are spiraling out. Everywhere you look, there’s some reason, some story, some excuse, you know, something that is causing you, I’m using finger quotes, they’re causing you to just eat a bunch of crap, you know, because all you want to do is just not deal with any of this stuff here. So that spiraling feeling, forget it. It’s real, it feels real, doesn’t it?
But when you’re in that mode of feeling out of control, and it feels like there’s nothing you could do about it. This is where kind of there’s some negative consequences to this. Right? I think you can kind of see that. You know, you start veering off your plate and you start binging all the junk food, and you just stay stuck and you feel like crap in order to feel bad or you go for more food because that’s your default. That’s just the way you’ve programmed yourself.
You know, you want to stick to your running schedule, but you just can’t do it. So you just say screw it. And that’s another way where you’re just like, see I’m spiraling out of control, and you don’t make progress. And then you get even more flushed, frustrated, and you feel bad about yourself. And because like you keep letting yourself down, you make these promises to yourself that you’re not keeping, then it feels hopeless. And it feels like there’s nothing you can do about it.
But I want to tell you something. This is a victim mentality. This is blaming others. This is having excuses. This is having reasons, this is having stories. Here’s the thing, you know what you have control over? Always 100% of the time, you have control over your own thoughts, feelings and actions. That’s it.
And I would even argue that there are times when your thoughts can seem pretty automatic, but you can kind of quickly change them. I was talking to my coach today about this. And she said this phrase that I thought was amazing. She says, you need to be the guard at the door to your thoughts. You need to stand guard at the door to your thoughts? So there’s times when you know, something may sneak past you and you’re like, oops, I gotta like, keep that in check. Okay, so you have control over your own thoughts, feelings and actions. But what you don’t have control over is everything else.
All the circumstances, the boss, the kids, the husband, whatever it is, you don’t have control over that stuff. But you do have control over your own thoughts, feelings, you have control over the things over the way that you respond to the things happening around you. And I did a deep dive into this last week.
So if you listen to last week’s podcast, this kind of dovetails into it nicely. You know, your brain just wants to keep you safe, your brain just wants to keep you comfortable. And every time we indulge in change, every time we start changing something for the better your brain wants to shut that stuff down your brain is like no, we’re not doing that. Because that doesn’t feel comfortable.
Get us back to eating ice cream everyday. That’s where we felt good. That was our normal. That’s the familiar stuff, we’re used to this whole idea of not eating ice cream at night. What? Can’t do that. And so that spiraling a lot of times begins as just your brain wanting to get you back to safety. Your brain just wants to keep you safe, your brain just wants you to feel comfortable and safe. It’s always seeking pleasure. And it’s always avoiding pain.
You know, what’s pleasurable, eating ice cream, you know, it’s painful, not eating ice cream. And so then the spiraling begins, because the stuff just, you just keep going back to the easy, you keep going back to the safe, you keep going back to the comfortable. And the more you do it, the worse it gets. Because the more you do it, the easier it is right, the easier it is to eat the large pizza, the easier it is for you to do. And you’re just reinforcing those bad habits.
And it just becomes natural, it becomes part of who you are. You program yourself to act this way you program yourself to think and feel this way. That’s the spiraling that’s when it feels out of control. But I have to tell you, that this is all false. There is no out of control. You’re always in control. You’ve just taught yourself to act in a certain way. You’ve trained yourself to think and feel these thought patterns that feel so automatic, that you just feel like it’s just happening to you, but you’re doing it, you’re creating it yourself. You’re creating this spiraling feeling yourself. The out of control feeling, you’re doing that. It’s not anybody else. It’s not that you’re not actually out of control. It’s just you.
And you’re doing it because you just keep practicing these, these thought patterns. You just keep practicing these behaviors. And it just leads to more and more. More and more of the feeling of hopelessness, more and more of that feeling of like, I don’t have any control. There’s nothing I can do about this. And I get it. It’s easy. It’s easy to just say like I’m spiraling out of control. Like I have no control over this because then you don’t have to actually do anything about it. Right?
That’s the way I was with my drinking. My drinking felt so out of control. And I could just tell people like, oh, it’s just it’s out of control, I’m out of control. And then I didn’t have to do anything about it. Because I’m like, just shrug my shoulders. And there is nothing I can do about it, it’s out of control. It’s a cop out, really is, it’s a huge cop out. Listen, if you want to lose weight, then you have to take back your control.
Because I’m going to tell you right now that you were never out of control, you were just choosing thoughts, feelings and actions that just felt good. That’s it. And you’ve just been practicing it. So it just feels like it’s natural. It just feels easy. It just feels like it’s automatic, but it’s not. These are things you have control over. You have to be willing to do the work, though.
And you got to be willing to put yourself into some uncomfortable situations, you got to be willing to embrace the discomfort of change, because it’s uncomfortable. I get that talk about this all the time, right? Change is not comfortable. That’s why I do what I do as a coach. Because in order for you to lose weight and feel better, and get stronger, and become healthier, and run longer, and always say, you got to change stuff, there’s a lot of change we got to do to get you there.
You could do it, though. But it’s hard work. And it’s uncomfortable, it doesn’t feel good. You can still do it. But here’s the thing, the more you do it, the more you practice the more you practice the new stuff, the more you practice taking back your control, the easier that becomes for you.
That’s where we want to get to, that’s where we want to get, that’s when the magic starts to happen. Because then you’re like, you no longer can use that excuse of being out of control. Because you know how to take your control back. You no longer use that as a reason why you can’t make progress. You know, it’s kind of like pulling the rug out from under yourself. You’re like, look, guess what? I can’t use this excuse anymore.
It’s kind of the good and the bad news, right? It’s bad news. Because now you have no excuse, you just have to take responsibility. It’s good news, because now you get to change. Change is uncomfortable. Change is uncomfortable. It’s like a shedding of your old self. That’s an uncomfortable process to go through.
There’s all this stuff that you’ve been doing, it’s just your programming, and it’s part of who you are. And it’s so hard to let go of that stuff. For me, it was like pizza, ice cream, you know, when I was drinking, it was drinking 6-12 beers every night. That was part of who I was. To change that, to stop drinking, it just seemed like that does not compute. It does not compute.
This is not who I am, I had to become a different person. If you want to change, you want to stop the out of control BS, then you got to like shed that old version of yourself to become a different person. We use being out of control as an excuse. And we got to stop doing that. Okay. Now there are some things that happen, some traumatic events that happen in our lives that will take time to heal, you know, the death of a loved one.
If you go through a divorce, abuse, these things are, are a lot of times these things are out of your control. And the way you respond to these things can be out of control, it can feel that way. And it takes time to heal. But over time, you can heal and you can still get to choose how you think, feel and act you really do.
You know, choosing to feel sad or angry or hurt is 100% normal. It’s a normal response. If you you know, lose a loved one or go through a divorce. Like it’s it’s okay to grieve that and to feel sad or to feel angry to feel hurt. This is normal. You can get through these difficult times you can experience difficult emotions. You can also go through these things without adding the complication of the out of control behavior of binge eating or overdrinking.
You know, a couple years ago, I went through a divorce. This is hard. I used food to soothe myself. I was engaging in out of control behavior. At least it felt like that to me. And I used food as an emotional management tool. I don’t recommend doing this. I learned a lesson that I can just experience the emotions.
I can experience the hurt and the endless badness, and I could grieve that relationship. And I could be angry and all those things without eating large pizza, to feel better. And I could just be with the pain and be with the hurt and all that stuff and process the emotions without eating them. And I did. That’s when you kind of become an emotional badass.
Okay, so I’m just letting you know that there are traumatic things that happen that do take some time to heal from, you know, but we don’t have to also add the complication of you know, the out of control behavior or using that as an excuse to engage in the out of control behavior. Eating a large pizza by myself, not helping me to improve my emotional state that was not helping me to process my emotions that was not helping me to, to, to move on. It just kept me feeling terrible.
So that out of control, spiraling feeling, I just want you to really understand that you have control. And I want you to stop acting like you’re out of control. I want you to stop using this out of control, as an excuse, right? You know, stop pretending that you don’t have control over your own behavior. Always, always, always do take your power back, take your control back today, start doing this today, stop using this spiraling out of control as an excuse to stay stuck, and to stay small, and to stay comfortable.
There’s all kinds of areas of your life where you exhibit control, no matter what. Like think about, I talk to so many people about this and it cracks me up. I’ll be like, listen, okay, you feel out of control with your eating? Like you just have no control? What about your running? How are you doing with that? Are you sticking to your running schedule? You’re training for a marathon? Are you sticking to that schedule?
Oh, yeah, perfectly. I hit all my runs, no matter what I do all those workouts. I’m perfect with that. Perfect 100%. I’m like, well, that is the same date, like you, you have total control over that. Or you could choose to not be in control there. But you’re doing that you’re doing it over here in this area of your life. Why can’t you do it with your food? And something sort of I see like a light bulb go off in people’s heads, I can almost see it like being as if they’re like, oh, yeah, you’re right. I do have control over that. I do have control over my food, too. I’m just, I just don’t feel like it.
You know, I just like, yeah, and they and they kind of see that they can exhibit this control in other places of their life. It’s kind of like showing up for work on time. There’s so many people that like they just show up for work on time, no matter what they’re gonna show up for work every day, five days a week to get there on time. They make sure they’re sitting at their desk five minutes before their shift starts or whatever, like they are diligent about that.
But then I’m like, how’s it going sticking to that food plan? Oh, I can’t do it, can’t even put two days together. Like really? What about work? Like, are you going to show up late for work every day? Oh, no, I’ll do that perfectly. It’s that same concept. It’s the same concept. It’s the same thing happening in your brain. You’re just making choices. And you’re making excuses. And you’re using it as a way of keeping yourself safe and comfortable. But also stuck where you are. And you don’t want that I know I said that earlier. You want more for yourself. You want to become that badass person that you know you can be.
In order to get there. We’ve got to stop acting like we’re out of control. Stop thinking and feeling out of control thoughts and feelings stop in engaging in out of control behavior. Take back your power. Take back the control over every area of your life. I know you can do this. And if you want my help, I’m here for you. Okay. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean. Talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
Today I have a bit of a different episode for you. I’m going to be asking you a lot of questions about your diet, your weight, your current health, your running performance, and a few other …
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My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 121 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, is it time to change your diet? So today I have a bit of a different episode for you. I’m going to be asking you some questions about your diet, your weight, your current health, your running performance, and a few other things.
The reason for this is that I want you to consider how your current diet, whatever you’re doing today, might be affecting you in a bunch of different areas of your life. Most people don’t pay attention to their diet unless they find themselves suddenly overweight, or their doctor wants to put them on some kind of medication.
And of course, I’m joking because it’s never suddenly, “I’m overweight!” It’s a slow, gradual process, right? We just don’t notice it until it’s like I can’t put my pants on anymore. The point is, this episode is all about you and your diet. So I want you to be thinking about your diet and your current state of health and fitness as I talk about diet here today.
And by the end of this episode, I want you to have a clear understanding of the effects of food, the effects of your diet on your health, and your sports performance. And I want to help you decide whether or not it’s time to finally change your diet. And listen, I know what it’s like to try to change your diet.
I know how hard it can be. I’ve done this many, many times in the past, it was never easy. For me, it was always some sort of a struggle. And the only time it really wasn’t the only time it finally worked permanently, was when I reached out and I got some help.
I got a coach to help me figure out what I should do. What was going to work for me, not based on some fad diet. But putting together a custom plan that I felt good about that I sort of created myself and man it finally worked.
I lost 40 pounds after making this change, running became easier. I’ve never felt so good. I’ve never had so much energy. And now this is what I do. I help runners like you lose the weight that you’ve been struggling with. For years, maybe I help runners to get leaner and stronger and to become running bad asses.
So if you’re a runner, and you’d like to get that weight problem solved for good, I want to invite you to apply for coaching with me. You’ll fill out a short application, schedule a Zoom call with me, we’ll jump on a call, we’ll talk about your goals. And we’ll see how coaching can help you get there.
I would love to help you lose weight, and do it without all the stupid struggling and frustration. I know what that’s like, there’s a better way. If you’re ready for some realistic lifestyle changes, mindset shifts and sustainable results, then you’re ready for coaching, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply to get started.
Alright, so today, I want to talk about diet and whether or not it’s time for you to make a change to your diet. So specifically, we’re going to be talking about whether or not your current diet is working for you. And listen, people get pretty emotional when talking about diet, especially when anyone suggests that maybe you should change your diet, I’m not going to make that decision for you.
I want you to just think about this for yourself and make that decision for yourself. Because your diet is either, it’s either working for you or it’s not. And sometimes we don’t understand the effects that our diet is actually having on our health, on our athletic performance on our general mood, you know, and we naturally put up a lot of resistance when anyone suggest that we change our diet, or that maybe somebody suggests that diet could be the cause of a lot of the health issues that you’re experiencing.
And I totally get this. And there’s a lot of information out there. A lot of people that are pushing an agenda on you and I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to push an agenda on you. I want to help you to make a good decision and this is what I do with my coaching.
This is why the way that I do coaching is a little bit different from other coaches, I don’t just tell you what to do, we come up with a solution together, something that you feel good about. Because only you know what kinds of foods you like and don’t like. Only you know what’s going to be sustainable for you.
And when we can put together a plan that you feel good about, that you are in alignment with, this is the game changer here. Okay, and, and this was what was the game changer for me too, when I finally decided to change my diet for good and it started to work and I started to lose the weight and I became fat-adapted, and I understood how certain foods were affecting me.
And I put that together myself, I kind of put that plan together myself, obviously with a lot of guidance with a lot of help from experts and things like that. But I just want you to understand that I just want you to think about whether or not your current diet is working for you. Okay.
Now, before I dive into this, I want to also explain how I’m using the word diet today because I tend to not use this word a lot. Just because people freak out a little bit when they hear diet. I’m not saying diet in the sense of like, you need to go on a diet, or you need to really limit how much food you’re eating.
You know, I mean diet in the sense of a nutrition regimen, a food plan died in the sense of the food that you habitually eat, not like vegetarian or carnivore or vegan or keto or South Beach diet or anything like that. I just mean like, the foods that you eat, because we’re all different. You know, we all eat differently, I can’t really put what I eat, I really can’t put it into a category, like the ones I just mentioned, it’s just different. It’s just what feels good for me and what works for me, which is different from what’s going to work for you.
But people hear the word diet, and they immediately start thinking about cutting calories, deprivation, struggle, suffering, falling off the wagon, it brings up all these negative connotations, right? So today, I just want to use the word diet freely to mean the foods that you eat on a regular basis, right? It’s not good, it’s not bad. I don’t want to be polarizing here. And I’m not talking about the latest fad diet or anything like that, just the foods you typically eat. That’s the way I’m using diet here today. Cool.
And then lastly, I want to help you to understand how profoundly your diet is affecting you, and your running, and your overall health and your weight and whether or not you can lose the weight. And I want to help you decide if changing your diet is right for you or not.
So you might be doing fine. You might be listening to this and like you’re super healthy, you’re at your natural weight, you feel amazing, you have tons of energy, all this stuff, there’s probably not a real big need to change anything.
But I’m guessing that there are a lot of people listening to this right now. And there’s some areas in your life or some areas of your health and fitness that you’d like to improve. And your diet is one of the most powerful drivers of your health, good health or bad health, and it depends on the diet.
So by the end of this episode, I want you to have a clear understanding of how your diet is affecting things like your energy levels, your mood, your sleep quality, running performance, body composition, and really your overall health and happiness.
And then I want you to have what it takes to be able to make an informed decision as to whether or not it’s time for you to change your diet. Cool. Okay, so let’s look at a few of these indicators here.
So again, think about your current state of health and your current diet. When I go through some of these questions like first and foremost, how is your weight? Think about your weight. This is always the number one thing people look at when they consider changing their diet. Am I overweight? Do I need to lose weight?
So one of the ways that people determine whether or not they need to lose weight is they look at something like BMI, body mass index. And they look at this as the one indicator of whether or not they’re overweight. And you see these charts in doctors offices and things like that.
The problem with BMI, I don’t like the BMI to be honest with you because it’s only taking two data points. It’s taking your height and your weight and then making an assessment based on that. BMI is not a very accurate indicator of your state of health and fitness.
And it’s definitely not accurate if you’re pretty fit. So BMI can be very off; it can be very inaccurate, especially if you’re muscular. So for example, my son and I are the same height. We’re both 5’11. But he probably weighs 25-30 pounds more than me. And so if you look at the BMI chart, he’s borderline obese, he’s over, he’s considered overweight on the BMI chart, he’d be borderline obese.
But I have to tell you, he’s nothing but huge. He’s a bodybuilder, you know, he’s muscular. He’s put on a lot of weight in the form of muscle. But the BMI which is telling that he’s overweight, okay. So that’s a good example of where BMI can be wrong.
Right now, I’m in a place where I’m trying to gain weight. So I’m starting to dip into that overweight range of BMI. And I’m not overweight, okay, I’m gaining muscle, I’m doing some pretty intense gym workouts, I’m really focusing on building muscle this year.
So anyway, BMI, not a super good indicator of whether you are overweight or not. Okay, there is a better way to determine your body composition. When we talk about weight, I’m really talking about fat weight, okay, there’s a certain amount of fat we all need to have on our bodies. And fat is not wrong or bad.
Like, people talk about zero body fat, you would die. If you had zero body fat. The minimum body fat requirements to sustain human life for men, I think is 3%. For women is 12%. Women need more body fat to support their, you know, female reproductive systems and things like that.
So we don’t aim, we’re not aiming for a 0% body fat ever, right? Just as to sustain life, women need 12%. So maybe 20-25% body fat is where you want to be. If you’re a female, or maybe you know, 18-16% as a male. It’s different for everybody, really.
But you can use something like the US Navy body fat calculator, you can find this online. So you take some body girth measurements along with height, weight, and age, to determine your body composition. So this is a better indicator of whether or not you want to lose some of the fat weight. Okay.
And the goal when I tell people that, you know, we talked about weight loss, and I asked people like, how much weight do you want to lose? Where do you want your body composition to be? And sometimes there’s just like, I’ve never thought about that before, I just want the scale to go down.
I’m like, well, let’s say we start gaining muscle, you’re losing some of the fat weight, but you’re gaining muscle, the scale is not going to go down, it’s going to kind of stay the same. Are you okay with that?
And so then I’ve got to like, get them to take some other measurements, and we’ve got to do some other type of measuring so that we can see that we are improving our body composition, okay. And they have scales that can do something like this, you know, those smart scales that use an electrical impedance, so they send a little bit of electric current up through your body and it you know, has to do with it tries to determine your muscle weight versus fat weight.
And so it’s trying to make a determination based on how fast the electrical current goes through your body of whether or not your competition is mostly fat, or muscle or whatever. They did a study about five years ago, and consumer reports on these different scales.
And they compare them to a bod pod, so bod pod is an air displacement measuring device, which is very accurate. So you have to go somewhere and you have to sit in this thing that looks like an egg. And they shut you in there. And it’s very, very precise.
Okay, it measures volume, and it can definitely measure, you know, the difference between your fat and muscle weight. But they, they took that as the base baseline measurement, and then they compared these scales, and the scales were off by like, a lot, you know, 20 to 30% difference, this is huge, right?
There’s a huge difference between what is considered to be, you know, accurate. So, I don’t really suggest these scales are very accurate, you know, can they help you to kind of determine if you’re losing some fat weight and gaining some muscle weight, probably, but just know that they’re not very accurate, okay.
Here’s what I want you to do instead, instead of worrying about all these measurements and things like that, some are good, some not so good. Go by how you feel. Use your best judgment. You know your body better than anyone else. Ask yourself some questions.
Do you feel like you’re overweight? Would you feel better if you lost weight? Do you feel pudgy? Or doughy or fluffy or bloated? This was me. I always felt doughy like when I started to feel doughy, like the Pillsbury Doughboy, I was like, I don’t want to feel like that. And if this is how you feel every day, then you can decide for yourself if you want to lose weight or not.
But it’s not up to a number. It’s not up to the government, it’s not up to some standard that you see on a chart somewhere. Just determine this for yourself. How do you feel about yourself? How are your clothes fitting? Are they tight? You know, have you had to go up a size or two?
And a few years back, when I started gaining weight again, my clothes were getting a little snugger. And I refused to buy new clothes. I was like, eventually, I’m just going to lose this weight. But you know, for now, I’m not buying new clothes, there’s no way I was going to go up a size in pants or shirts or anything like that.
So the clothes kept getting tighter. And I kept feeling less confident. I was feeling more self conscious, I would put on the shirts like a button up shirt, and the buttons would be sort of like pulling apart at the around the belly section. This is not a good look. All right. And it was very embarrassing for me.
And so I would like just choose whatever the loosest fitting clothes I had, and not a lot. All the tight fitting clothes, I had just ended up in the back of the drawer or the back of the closet, whatever. And then I remember I had some shorts in the summertime and I had some shorts that used to fit perfectly and I loved the shorts, but I couldn’t even button them anymore.
Could not even get them buttoned. And that was part of my wake up call was like, I’ve got to do something about this because I’m not going to buy new clothes. I’m not going to go up sizes. Alright, just so you know those shorts now I wear them today. And they’re like loose on me. Like I almost could go a size down. I’m not going to do that though.
But listen, I want you to decide for yourself, do you want to feel better about yourself? Do you want to feel better in your body with losing some weight? Maybe some fat weight and gaining some muscle help you to feel better about yourself. Now I always encourage people to work on the way they feel about themselves before they decide to go on a weight loss journey.
Like you have to like, kind of love yourself through this whole process. You can’t just hate yourself and expect to love yourself when you lose the weight. No, it doesn’t work that way. But no one else can decide whether or not you need to lose weight. It’s not up to the scale or to chart or anything else like that.
And it’s not up to other people in your life, either. Because sometimes I work with people who come to me and they’re like, yeah, I really want to lose like 10 pounds. But you know, my husband tells me I look fine, and I don’t need to lose weight, or my mom tells me I shouldn’t lose any more weight.
And I just want to like encourage you to just decide what you want to do. If you want to lose five or 10 pounds, you know, maybe you want to improve your running time. You want to run a faster marathon and losing 10 or 15 pounds is gonna really help you to get there, then absolutely, that should be something that you decide for yourself.
It’s not up to other people, other people just want us to feel good about ourselves, they want us to be happy. And if they see you, you know saying like, oh, I need to lose some weight, they might think you’re unhappy. And it’s not about that. It’s about becoming our best selves. It’s about becoming badass, right?
It’s not about you know, not feeling good about ourselves. Okay, so going back to the question, how’s your weight? How do you feel about yourself? How do you feel about your weight? If you want to lose weight, if you feel like you’re overweight, diet is going to be the number one driver of this for you. We want to change your body composition, then we’re going to change your diet.
Okay. The next indicator of whether or not it might be time to change your diet is your relationship with food. Like if you struggle with food choices, if you struggle with making good choices and staying on track with a pretty healthy diet, then it might be time to give that diet an overhaul. You know if you find it very difficult to avoid junk food, sugar in particular, then it might be time to change your diet.
Listen, sugar jacks you up. It’s more like a drug than a food. There’s no real positive nutritional benefits from eating sugar. There aren’t. There’s a lot of negative consequences though. You know, sugar causes all kinds of metabolic issues like higher blood pressure, inflammation, gain, weight gain, diabetes, fatty liver disease, increased risk for heart attack and stroke.
Too much sugar in the diet is the number one cause of metabolic diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, some cancers, Alzheimer’s and all these things that I just mentioned. And what it really does is it puts your body into this state of hyperinsulinemia with too much insulin in your blood, or insulin resistance, that means your body just can’t regulate insulin properly, and so it just keeps pumping out more and more and more insulin.
Insulin drives fat into fat cells. Insulin drives your body into fat storage mode. So when insulin is high all the time, you’re just storing fat all the time. You can’t burn the fat. And then in researching this podcast today, I found some other negative side effects of too much sugar in the diet.
And some of these things I did not realize first is dental health. Now of course, we all know that eating too much sugar can cause cavities, right? You know, bacteria in your mouth feed on sugar. And they release these acid byproducts which cause tooth decay, right and cavities. Think we all know that one.
But sugar also cause like an increase of kidney disease risk. Having consistently high blood sugar can damage the delicate blood vessels in your kidneys. And that can lead to an increased risk of kidney disease. Too much sugar can cause gout. Gout is an inflammatory condition characterized by pain in the joints, especially in the toes, like big toes.
I had gout some time ago, years and years ago, because I was eating a real crap diet. And I will tell you it is one of the most painful things you can experience. There was almost nothing I’ve ever experienced that was as painful as gout. I couldn’t even couldn’t even walk, couldn’t put shoes on, couldn’t have the sheets touching my feet. I had to sleep with my feet like not touching the sheets. Not good.
But sugar raises the uric acid levels in the blood, which helps make gout worse, it makes it really bad. And then another thing that I did not know is that high sugar in the diet can lead to cognitive decline, impaired memory and increased risk of dementia. Right. So why are we eating sugar?
Listen in moderation. Yes, very, very limited amounts, you know, whatever. Okay, but listen, sugar is not healthy, this is not good for you. There’s only negative consequences to eating sugar, it’s more like a drug than it is a food. It causes harm at certain levels like a drug does, it’s very difficult to quit eating sugar.
And if you struggle with giving up sugar, this is an indicator that something may have to change in your diet. Okay, if you find yourself craving sugar all the time, or just thinking about giving it up kind of sends you into like a panic mode, then it might be time to get off the sugar and change your relationship with food or change your food choices and change your diet. Okay.
Another indicator that it might be time to change your diet is your eating habits in general, like are you using food as an emotional management tool, because if you are, we got to change something here. Okay. This is about changing your thoughts and feelings, but it’s also about changing what you’re eating.
Because if you’re binging on junk food, if you’re using this hyper palatable food, you know, most processed foods most junk food is considered what they call hyper palatable, it’s been engineered to be incredibly delicious, and give you like a dopamine hit and, and make you feel good and releases all these chemicals that make you feel amazing. Again, like a drug, right?
And so if you’re using food as an emotional management tool, maybe it’s time to change your diet. Right? If you’re eating because you’re stressed, you’re bored, you’re anxious, you’re frustrated, you’re overwhelmed, angry, lonely, whatever. These are reasons to consider making a change to your diet.
Okay, you have to be able to handle your emotions and your emotional experiences in this life. Like a mature, evolved adult human being not like a toddler. The toddler reaction to our emotions is when we just want them to go away right away. I don’t want to feel this way. Give me some food to make me feel better. Right?
That’s what we do. And I’m kind of like saying it funnily. But listen, funnily is a word. I don’t even know if that’s a word. I’m saying it in a funny way. But we got to deal with our emotions like mature evolved adults, we have to actually be able to just sit with our emotions and experience these emotions without having to eat over them when we’re eating just to feel better.
This is a problem. These are not good eating habits, okay? And listen, ending emotional eating, this is not an easy thing to do. And I get it. This is a complicated topic. And we actually spent a whole month last month on this topic in the coaching project.
And people got a lot out of it, to be honest with you, we really dug deep into emotional eating and how to stop doing it and how to deal with our emotions instead, it was pretty powerful stuff. But if you regularly find yourself eating, not because you’re hungry, but because like you just want to feel better, maybe it’s time to change your diet, okay?
Another indicator that it might be time to change your diet, are you hungry all the time, because you shouldn’t be. If you’re hungry all the time, there’s something wrong. Humans evolved over, you know, millennia, I would say, lots of millennia, hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years, we’ve evolved to eat a couple of times a day, at most, and then sometimes we would go for days without food altogether.
So think about our human ancestors, we were amazing, persistent hunters. That’s why we’re such good runners, because we would, you know, call an animal from the herd, and then run it down. And we could just keep up with this animal, they would, they would die of exhaustion, but we can sweat really well.
We maintain our body temperature. And we’re really good at running we have big butts, which help us to balance when we’re running. And, you know, we are really good at long distance running. Right? That’s why I love endurance events, especially ultra running, where you’re running through the woods for extended periods of time, because this most typically, most directly mimics how we’ve evolved as humans, it’s like built into our DNA, this persistent hunting and this running.
But we would run down animals, this would take days sometimes. And we wouldn’t have food during that time. And during that time, if not having food was a problem, we would you know, crash and burn and die along with the animals. Right. But no, that’s not what we did, we could maintain.
Our brains actually got more focused, we became more cognitively aware of what was going on in our surroundings. And we had plenty of energy to just keep going. And if we had to eat every couple of hours, if this is the way we’ve evolved as humans, this wouldn’t have worked at all right?
This is just not normal, our digestive systems, our pancreas and things like that are designed to work sporadically to work intermittently, not all the time. So if you can’t go for a couple of hours without food, this means that your body is not working the way it’s supposed to. Okay, it means your hunger signals are messed up, your hormones are messed up.
And what causes that is the wrong kind of diet. If you’re eating the kind of diet where you know, you’re hungry all the time, this is a problem. This is not right, you need to change your diet. Speaking of energy, how are your energy levels, because if you’re crashing and burning every afternoon, then this is a problem. This means your diet needs to be changed, right?
You want to have sustainable energy, that’s pretty consistent all day long. We don’t want to be having these spikes of energy, oh my gosh, I feel amazing. And then crashes where you just feel like falling asleep at your desk at three o’clock in the afternoon, right? The wrong kind of diet will cause these spikes in your blood sugar.
And when we have these massive spikes in our blood sugar, when we come down from that, we actually kind of dropped below baseline. So we want to stay near that baseline as closely as possible. But when you spike really high, you crash really low. And that’s where people say, oh, my blood sugar is low, I need to eat some sugar, whatever, you know, I need an energy drink in the afternoon.
So this is a problem. Again, this is not normal. We should have pretty pretty steady energy all day long, right? But a diet high in sugar, high in refined carbohydrates, high in highly processed foods is typically the cause of these energy spikes and crashes. All right. And as a runner, you don’t want this. You want steady energy being delivered to your brain into your muscles like all day, especially for running especially for your athletic performance.
Speaking of which, how is your running? How is your endurance? Do you find yourself hitting the wall during long runs? Are you just getting gassed? Are you running out of energy at some point? Do you have to like wash down a bunch of gels and goos and stuff just to like, get out there and do a 10 mile run or something?
So when we talk about, you know, running out of energy, this is like hitting the wall or bonking when you’re running, right? And if this is you, if you find yourself consistently just running out of energy, then we need to look at your diet, it could be, it could be a big problem, okay?
So, running out of energy hitting the wall is a pretty common thing, especially with the marathon runners, right. And for me, I used to hit the wall between mile like 18 and 20, pretty consistently. And this is where most runners that I talked to tell me that they typically would hit the wall.
This is when you run out of glycogen in your muscles, and you have no alternative energy source. So you’re not fat-adapted, you’re not burning fat efficiently. And you’re you have no more fuel, and you just crash and burn, boom, you’re done. You just have to stop and walk. And then it’s kind of a slog fest, those last five, six miles on a marathon, right?
So you know, for me, one of the big reasons I got into sports nutrition, and especially sports nutrition with this, you know, kind of leaning towards the fat-adaptation side of things is that I wanted to figure out how to become a fat adapted runner, I wanted to figure out how to stop the bonking, how to stop hitting the wall at mile 18 or 20, I wanted to have unlimited, you know, fuel for running.
And when you become a fat-adapted runner, you virtually become bulletproof. You have this endless supply of fuel onboard in the way of your own stored body fat. And just to prove this, I’ve heard other people that have done endurance events without any calories at all. And I wanted to see, you know, can I even do this? Is this even feasible? You know, is this possible?
And then last year, once I got fat-adapted, I ran two marathons. And then the year before I did a 50k, and I did all these events on zero calories, I didn’t eat breakfast beforehand, I didn’t take in any calories during the event. And I had plenty of energy to complete these distances.
So you can absolutely do it once you’re fat adapted, you can absolutely do these long distance events without having a bunch of fuel or any fuel really, except for the fuel that you’re producing, using your own body fat. Now, is this optimal for everybody? Maybe not, I just wanted you to understand that when you become fat-adapted, you no longer need massive amounts of fuel, you can get away with not very much, right?
I actually teach my clients how to use fuel strategically during races to enhance running performance, you can use some types of fuel to keep the fat burning going, but also take advantage of you know, the carbohydrate sources or, you know, other sources of fuel to give your muscles more glycogen, so that you can like, get a little bit faster, maybe have that top gear, okay.
Speaking of speed, how is your running speed? This could be an indication that you need to switch up your diet, you know, if you find yourself just stuck at the same speed, and you just can’t make any improvements, your diet is going to help with this. Okay, your diet could be hindering your speed and your performance.
And of course, you know, when it comes to running faster, you’ve got to work on strength training, you’ve got to build stronger muscles. You want to become a more powerful runner. And you also have to do speed work, right? These are things you need to do. But diet plays a huge part in this too. Right? The wrong diet can kill your speed.
If you’re eating a bunch of junk food, processed food, a bunch of weird ingredients, you’re not giving your body, you’re not giving your muscles the nutrition that it actually needs to perform at its best. And you’re just doing yourself a disservice you’re not going to get faster, it’s going to be very difficult to get faster. Put it that way.
So look at your running speed and if you’re trying to, you know PR a marathon PR a 5k or 10k Let’s look at the diet it could be having a negative impact on your running speed. Okay. And then how are you recovering from running? Most runners who eat the Standard American Diet who eat a lot of sugar, a lot of processed foods, a lot of refined carbohydrates and refined grains experience chronic inflammation.
This means that recovering from hard workouts takes a lot longer, which will actually decrease your running performance overall. And when we get fat adapted when we change the diet, the runners that I work with telling me that they have, they are recovering faster than ever, they’ve never experienced this kind of like, they’ll go and run a 20 miler, and the next day, they feel amazing.
They no longer feel all the inflammation and the bloating. And even their doctors report the lower levels of the inflammatory marker, I can’t remember what it’s called off the top of my head here. But when you get your blood work done, there’s that inflammatory marker.
And they can see that that’s greatly lowered because of diet. So diet can have a huge impact on your recovery. And when you recover faster, and your body’s not in a state of chronic inflammation, you can become a stronger runner, you can improve your running performance, you can actually get faster too.
A couple more things. What about sleeping, how is your sleep? Sleep is often overlooked. But this is an important part of your training, it should be. It is crucial to get a good night’s sleep, your body has to use that time to, to rebuild to recover, and so that you can go out there and get after it the next day. And if you’re not getting the right amount of sleep, if your sleep is horrible, and you wake up not feeling good, feeling tired of feeling exhausted when you wake up in the morning, this is a problem, this is going to put your body in this state of chronic stress.
Chronic stress will increase your cortisol levels, which is the stress hormone, your body will produce more glucose in response to that stress hormone, which increases insulin levels, which keeps your body in that fat storage mode. Chronic stress leads to chronically storing body fat, and it makes it very difficult to improve your body composition.
If you’re super stressed out, we want to practice like acute stress in our body. So we want to run hard. Sometimes we want to lift weights hard, sometimes that’s acute stress, it’s short, short term, your body can adapt to that kind of stress.
There’s an adaptive response that happens when we experience that kind of stress, chronic stress being stressed all the time, which what is what happens when you don’t get a good night’s sleep every night, you can be just chronically stressed out, this is going to just keep it keep you from losing weight, it’s going to keep you from running at your best, it’s going to just make it very hard for you to recover.
So you gotta get a good night’s sleep. diet plays a huge role in this diet plays a huge role in your sleep. If you’re not, if you’re not eating the right diet, if you’re eating a bunch of junk food and eating a bunch of sugar, I’m going to tell you right now your sleep is going to be messed up.
People that I work with report that they’re sleeping has never been better, once they get off of that sugar kind of roller coaster. And then the last thing I want you to consider is your ability to focus and concentrate. One of the best things about being fat adapted for me, is the clear headedness that I experience, I can think more clearly, I concentrate more easily. And I can stay focused all day long.
The wrong diet doesn’t give your brain the kinds of fuel that it needs to function properly, your brain actually thrives on fat as a fuel source. So if your diet isn’t promoting fat burning, then you’re probably experiencing, you know, brain fog. And it’s hard to know that you’re experiencing brain fog when you’re in it. It just seems like this is the way things are.
But I’m telling you right now, when you get off of that sugar roller coaster, when you change your diet, you start eating real food, you start burning fat more efficiently. All of a sudden, it seems like the world comes into clearer focus, and you can concentrate and you can think more clearly.
And it’s like the fog has been lifted. It’s amazing. This is like one of my favorite parts about eating this way is that I just feel like my brain works the way it’s supposed to. Right. So all these things we just talked about are all indicators that your diet is either working for you or it’s not, you know, and if you’re finding yourself deciding that, yeah, you know, it’s time for me to change my diet. I want to encourage you to do something about it. Don’t just think about it. Don’t just listen to this and go okay, good stuff.
Let’s move on to the next one or whatever. I want you to do something, try something, take a break from sugar. Start eating real food, you know, food that still looks like food, right? Get fat-adapted as a runner. It takes a little bit of time to do that. It’s not for everyone. It’s a little bit of an uncomfortable process to go through. But once you get there It’s amazing.
And I’m going to tell you right now, you’ll never want to go back to doing what you’ve been doing in the past, right? Maybe eliminate processed food, that’s a good place for a lot of people to start. Anything that comes in a package, just stay away from it. Stop it with all the ingredients, right?
Most of these processed foods are not designed for your health, but they’re just they’re designed to taste amazing and to sell you more food really. They keep you hungry. They keep you craving foods so that you’ll buy more of their crappy processed packaged foods, right? The food companies are making a lot of money, but we pay the price with our health right?
And then consider getting some help. If you’re looking for some help with all of this. If you want some help and guidance, consider joining us in the Running Lean coaching project because you’ll learn exactly what to do and how to do it. You learn how to get fat-adapted the right way.
You’ll get support from the group and from me as your coach, you’ll get encouragement to keep going accountability to help you stay on track. And you’ll just get to your goals faster when you have the expert guidance helping you get there. Okay, so if you’re interested, love to have you just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply, and we can get you started on your journey to becoming a badass today. Cool. Okay, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
