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Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray

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83. The All-or-Nothing Mentality

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As we come to the end of the #DryJulyChallenge, I’d love to know how it went for you. How was your experience giving up alcohol for a month? What’s changed? Are you sleeping better? Do you have …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode 83 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners, and today we’re talking about the all or nothing mentality. So as we come to the end of our dry July challenge, I’d love to know how it went for you. How did it go? How was your experience giving up alcohol for a month? Were you able to do it? Was it hard? What’s changed for you? Maybe you’re sleeping better? Do you have more energy, maybe your workouts have been better?

Maybe you just feel better overall, I actually would love to hear from you. You can drop your comments in our Facebook group. But a lot of people are now asking themselves like now what now? What do I do? Do I keep going do I have to, you know, swear off alcohol forever?

Whether or not you choose to continue with this, I just want to make one thing very clear, you don’t have to make a decision that you’re never going to drink again. I think a lot of people get stuck on this idea of either you can drink or you have to never drink and there’s no middle ground. There’s no moderation. And this is what I mean when I’m talking about the all or nothing mentality.

And if you’re trying to change a habit it can make the process of changing a habit feel extremely daunting, like thinking about never drinking again, or never eating sugar again for the rest of your life. Is that really going to help you stay on track? So in this episode, I’m just going to take a deep dive into this whole idea of like all or nothing, this whole mentality that people adopt, and then I’m going to propose what might be, I think a more effective way to change a habit.

And like I mentioned, if you haven’t already done so please come and check out the Running Lean community on Facebook, and share your thoughts about the dry July challenge. I’ll be posting a little bit more in there. We’re wrapping up the month.

But I would love to know what kind of experiences you guys have had like what positive experiences you’ve had from taking a break from alcohol for the month, just search for Running Lean community on Facebook, and you can join us there.

And then here’s a recent five star review of the Running Lean podcast. And this person said, “I have recently finished listening to all of your podcasts and love them. So please make more soon lol. But seriously, I thank you for sharing all of your knowledge on running and nutrition because I’ve learned a lot. Thank you so much. And I look forward to many more, please know that your podcasts are making a difference. Oh, and I will be going away for a week and really enjoyed your advice on making a plan when you are not in your typical routine because I will be sure to plan ahead.”

Thank you very much for that awesome review. And if you want to leave a review of the podcast, I would so appreciate it. I love hearing that this is helping you guys and that I am making a difference. So you can just go to whatever podcast app you use Apple podcasts, or whatever, scroll down, tap the stars and write a few words. And I will be sure to read your review on the show here. So thanks again for doing that.

And then just a quick update, you know, I’ve got this coaching group that is now open, officially open, and not going to be closing. So anytime you’re ready to start making some of these changes. This is a very cost-effective way of doing it. The monthly coaching group is where you get access to my online training materials you get access to weekly group calls with other people that are going through the same thing.

Part of it is like the support group because you get the support of people just like you that are you know going through trying to accomplish some of these big goals for themselves and you get to hear what’s working for them what’s not working, how did they overcome some of these struggles so it’s really effective at helping you to see that there’s hope and that there’s you know, things that you can do that will help you to stay on track.

And of course, I do some coaching and teaching and training every week in the group. If you’re interested just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join. And also in August, all month, all month long, we’re gonna be taking this deep dive into the thought, feeling, and action patterns that we all have, and how they might be keeping you stuck.

And if you want to start, you know, taking control of some of these things, habits, and things like that in your life, how you can use your thought, feeling, action patterns to actually start getting better results in different places in your life. Okay, so whether you’re trying to lose weight, or you want to improve your running, you want to improve your overall health and fitness, you want to get stronger.

Maybe you want to keep up with the drinking or learn how to moderate your drinking. We’ll be talking about all that stuff and how your thought feeling and action patterns play such a huge role and all that stuff. So anyway, runningleanpodcast.com/join and join us.

Okay, let’s get into this topic. Because I’m excited about talking about this, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because I’ve heard people say that, you know, when you decide you want to, you know, change a habit, that you just have to, like, abstain from doing that thing.

Like, let’s say you want to, like, quit eating sugar. And people are like, well, sugar is bad for you. And if you have a problem with sugar, you know, if you can’t moderate sugar, you just need to, like, quit forever. And the same thing goes for drinking.

A lot of people especially like in the recovery communities say that if you are, you know, if you have a problem with drinking, that you should just never drink ever, and that you have to be either 100%. You have to abstain 100% of the time, or, you know, basically, you’re not doing it, right. Okay. It’s like you’re either all in, or you’re all out and there’s no middle ground there, okay, it’s like 100% compliance, or you’re not complying at all.

So maybe you just want to, like, instead of giving up drinking, maybe you just want to change your drinking habit, you know, or maybe you don’t want to like, give up sugar 100%, but you just want to like change your relationship with sugar, you know, you don’t have to decide that you’re never going to do it again.

I think this all or nothing mentality, it’s like either this or that. It’s on or off. It’s binary, you know, it’s either yes or no, I think it’s very black and white thinking and I think it can be problematic for a lot of people and can be very challenging for a lot of people to, to give up or to change the habit, okay to like, kind of make a better habit.

And we’re really talking about when we talk about habit change of changing our relationship with, you know, alcohol, changing our relationship with food, okay. I used to have the same sort of attitude about running. So I was either like training for something big and epic, like an Ironman or 100 miler, or, I wasn’t training at all, like, why even bother running a half marathon, you know.

And this is like, very black and white thinking. And I don’t think this is you know, healthy, I’m not saying there’s nothing, there’s nothing wrong with, you know, running or training for an Ironman or, or 100 miler, whatever you want to do. I think those things are amazing. But we just have to get out of this idea that it’s like all or nothing, okay.

And I want to make something very clear before I go on here. So when I talk about all or nothing. It’s different from when I talk about going all-in on yourself. Okay, so I talk a lot about this concept of, you know, when you have a big goal, you need to go all-in on yourself for that goal, okay?

You need to approach these big things in your life with the attitude that you’re committed to making a work, right no matter what. So let’s say you want to lose weight, and you have this big weight loss goal. Going all in on yourself means that you’re going to keep going, that you’re, you know, it may take a while you may have some slip-ups, you may have some failures along the way. You may not stick to your plan or whatever, but you keep moving forward, you don’t quit on yourself.

Okay, maybe you want to change your relationship with alcohol going all-in on that means you use the power of your thoughts and feelings about alcohol to change the habit. It means you create a drinking plan, maybe you just want to moderate, so you create a drinking plan and you stick to it. No matter what.

Going on all in on yourself means you’re committed to your health. You’re committed to success. You’re committed to, you know, maybe going after this PR and your marathon. It does not mean you’re never allowed to drink again. It does not mean you’re never allowed to eat a cupcake again, it does not mean like you can never, you know, run a half marathon or five games or something like that, you know, we just want to make sure that we understand the difference between the all or nothing mentality and like going all-in on yourself, okay?

There’s a big difference between swearing off something forever, like sugar, alcohol, and changing the habit and changing your relationship with it. Okay? So going all-in on yourself does not equate to all or nothing, it just means you aren’t half-assing, you know, you’re not half-assing your efforts towards this goal. You’re full-assing it with whatever it is you’re doing. Okay?

So there’s this idea, and I was talking about this a minute ago, like, there’s this idea, especially in the recovery communities that if you want to change a habit, you have to quit it forever. If you want to change your relationship with alcohol, that there’s, you know, maybe you’ve had a problem with alcohol in the past, it’s been hard for you to give it up or hard for you to moderate that you just have to quit forever, you know.

If you have an issue with food, and maybe you, you know, you’re overweight and you’re trying to lose some weight, and you just want to be healthier and feel better. That means that like you could never eat sugar again, or never have a pizza or fries ever again. And here’s what I want to propose. And I think this is the kind of the crux of the problem here.

When you think about like never eating pizza again, or never eating a burger with fries and a milkshake ever again in your life. How does that make you feel? Probably, you probably feel deprived, it probably feels sort of terrible. And when you feel deprived and terrible, because you feel like you’re missing something, something that you enjoy, what happens to your desire for that thing, your desire for that thing actually goes up.

And when you feel terrible, and you have this now increased desire for this thing, what do you think you’re going to do? Typically, you’re going to give in to those cravings, you’re going to eat the fries, you’re going to eat the pizza, you’re going to eat the cupcakes, you’re going to drink the alcohol because you just want to feel better.

You have all this desire, and you’re feeling terrible about yourself. And like, you could never have this thing again, and feeling depressed about that. And geez, what are you going to do, you’re just going to want it even more. Okay. So thinking that you have to quit something forever, it feels, it can feel very daunting for people. You know, it can feel overwhelming, and, frankly, pretty frustrating.

And another big problem with this all or nothing mentality is that if you slip up if you do swear off drinking forever, and you do drink, man, you just feel terrible. Like you feel guilty and full of shame and disappointment in yourself like you are a failure. Like you just can’t do it. And if your mentality is like it’s all or nothing, there’s no room for moderation, there’s no room for occasionally. There’s no way that you can have a healthy relationship with alcohol or with sugar.

You have to have like, no relationship at all. Like that’s the mentality is that you can’t have a healthy relationship. So you have to have zero relationship at all, like total abstinence. And here’s what I’m just trying to propose today is like, there’s a different way of doing this.

Instead of having no relationship with alcohol, no relationship with junk food, like junk foods, okay, every now and then, you know, but here’s the thing, instead of having an unhealthy relationship with those things, what if you had a healthy relationship with those things? So there are other ways of doing it, you can actually change your habits and change the relationship with food and with alcohol and do it in a way that is, okay.

Now, I’m a big proponent of staying away from junk food. Honestly, I really am. And I’m a big proponent of staying away from sugar for the most part, and I don’t drink. Okay, that’s a choice that I’m making. I’ll talk more about that in a minute. But here’s the thing. If you want to drink alcohol, you can. If you want to eat a burger and fries every now and then you can. If you want to eat a candy bar, you can you just have to like work on your relationship with the thing.

Now I want to share with you an example of how this plays out in my life in a little bit of a different way. Like an actual relationship with a person. Okay, so about 18 months ago, my wife and I got divorced, we both had just moved to this new building near downtown Cincinnati, and we both love the building. So we both decided we were going to stay in the same building.

So we both live in the same building on different floors. And so we see each other every now and then, okay. And it’s not that big of a deal. Rarely, so I’ll occasionally see her and her new boyfriend, you know, hanging out at the pool or something like that. And it’s not really a problem, I’m kind, you know, we’re friendly with each other, we all get along.

But here’s the thing, I get advice from people, like people I know, they’ll tell me, like, you should just move somewhere else, or you just don’t ever talk to her, if you see or go talk, you know, walk away, go the other way, don’t engage in conversation. You know, like, you need to, like cut off all ties with her like 100% no relationship at all right?

And instead of doing that, because that’s not what I want, instead of trying to eliminate this person from my life, because that’s not reality, you know, I’m going to see her around, and it’s okay. Instead of trying to eliminate the relationship and make it an all-or-nothing type of deal, I’m working on changing the relationship I’ve worked on and successfully changed the relationship so that there’s not any drama around it, that’s not energetically charged anymore.

It’s not emotionally challenging anymore, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing situation, I can still see her around, I can say hi, we can stop and chat, I can, you know, have a conversation with her and her boyfriend at the pool. And it’s no big deal, I’ve effectively changed the relationship with my ex from a, you know, romantic partnership, to a platonic friendship.

And this is kind of, I mean, it’s such a good analogy, I think, to our relationship with food or to alcohol, or even with, you know, exercise in general, we can change the relationship and make it into something that is healthy. And that we can do in a different way, we can change the relationship, we don’t have to cut off the relationship. Okay.

So the way this works around food and stuff like that, is that, you know, for the same way that I can be around my ex in this building and stuff, I can be around sugar, I can be around people drinking, and I don’t have those cravings anymore. There’s no increased desire for these things in my life, the desire is not there.

Like the desire for my ex is not there the desire for you know, sugar is really just not there. I’ve changed my relationship with food and alcohol, I don’t have to abstain from you know, ever seeing alcohol or ever being around it. I don’t have to abstain from sugar or never eating it again, I can do it occasionally. I’ve changed the relationship.

You know, I love my son and I will do like taco night, sometimes we’ll go out to this place and we’ll get chips and salsa and tacos and all this stuff, a lot of carbs, you know, and I’m pretty much don’t eat carbs, you know, but I’ll go and I’ll enjoy myself and I’ll have fun doing that. And then the next day, I just go back to doing what I normally do. It’s no big deal. Right? I’ve changed my relationship with the food. Okay.

And when you change the relationship, there’s so much freedom in that, because now you’re free to do what you want to do. Because I’m here to tell you that if you want to drink alcohol, but you’re just forcing yourself not to and you’re just trying to white knuckle your way through your life without it. This is going to be so much harder for you than if you say you know what, instead of never drinking again, I just want to drink you know, on Saturday nights.

You know, that way I can just sleep in the next day. It’s not a big deal. Yeah, I know I’m not going to feel great but it’s not like the day before a long run, and like you know you can do it in a way that feels good for you. This is a powerful skill that you can master okay.

And here’s the other thing I want to make sure you understand is that for some people, the all or nothing, you know, principle the all or nothing mentality does work and they actually feel good about not making a decision to never drink alcohol again, or never eating junk food again. And if you’re the kind of person who’s like, you know, I just don’t ever want to drink again, or I don’t ever want to eat candy bars ever in your life, and you feel good about that.

And that motivates you? And that mentality kind of strengthens your resolve that keeps you on track and fuels you and it feels good for you. As long as it’s not making you feel deprived or demotivated or increasing your desire for it, it’s totally fine. If this kind of thinking works for you, then absolutely go for it. There’s nothing wrong with this line of thinking unless it makes you crave the thing more unless it makes you feel terrible.

Okay, you don’t have to decide that you’re never going to drink again, or never eat out or never eat sugar again. So I quit drinking alcohol 14 years ago, and when I made that decision to quit, I just so happen to have quit 100% and have never had a drop of alcohol since that day in 2007. That was not my intention when I quit.

When I quit. I was like, I just can’t do this anymore, I need to just like cut back. And, um, and I, you know, was in therapy and you know, involved in like some 12 Step programs and things like that. And my experience was that for me, it was better if I just didn’t pick it up if I just didn’t drink, you know, and I never made the decision, like, I’m going to quit this for the rest of my life.

I just decided that I was going to make this decision sort of a one-day at a time kind of a deal. So it’s like today, I’m just not going to drink it, we’ll see how it goes. And then the next day, I kind of made that same decision, and so on and so forth. And so I’ve sort of just kept that same mentality of like, if I want to drink I can, it’s not like I can’t, but I just don’t want to I don’t have that desire, okay.

But early on, especially in the 12 step programs, you know, I was told and I firmly believed at the time that if I had just like one drop of alcohol, I’d be back to drinking a six-pack every night in no time I’d be like, you know, end up in jail or dead, you know, to scare the crap out of me.

You know, I hear people talk about how, you know, they had many, many years of sobriety, and then they’d had one drink, and then it was all over, they’re right back to where they were before. And there was, you know, all this turmoil in their life and everything they had worked for so hard, just all fell apart, and their lives turned to crap.

And I’m just like, oh, my gosh, I don’t want that. So I better not drink at all. And here’s the thing I’ll tell you like, today, I don’t really believe this is true for everyone. It hasn’t been shown to be true. Like I know a lot of people who were sober for many years, and maybe they had a slip-up, maybe they drank once or twice, and then they didn’t go to jail. They’re not dead. They weren’t suddenly struck homeless and living in a gutter or anything like that.

They didn’t lose all the good stuff in their life. You know, they didn’t drink and then they drank, and then they don’t drink again. And it’s no big what you know, I think we get into this idea of like, it has to be one or the other. Like, it has to be binary. You know, and when we have this all or nothing mentality.

Occasionally having a drink is it’s forbidden. It’s completely off the table. You know why? Because well, you can’t control your drinking, you’re an alcoholic, or you can never drink again, you know, whatever things you tell yourself.

I was having coffee with a friend recently. And, you know, she had quit drinking many years ago as well. And we’ve both abstained from drinking, you know, but she decided not too long ago that she wanted to have a relationship with alcohol again. So now she occasionally drinks and she’s good with that.

You know, and we were both under this idea that once you start, you can’t stop and but that hasn’t been the case for her. So she can enjoy a glass of wine every now and then with friends. She can moderate her drinking. She feels good about her decision. Okay, she’s changed how she thinks and feels about alcohol. She’s changed the relationship with alcohol instead of having zero relationship with alcohol. She has a healthy relationship with alcohol now, and it’s the exact same thing with our food.

Like we can decide that we want to occasionally have a cupcake we can decide that we occasionally want to eat pizza. And this is where there’s freedom. Okay, you can do these things in a way that feels good for you, and you can change the relationship without having to swear it off forever.

So what about me, am I going to like try this experiment of like drinking again? Well, talking to this friend of mine got me really thinking about this idea. Like, if I wanted to drink again, I could probably do it in a way that is completely fine. And that feels good for me, I could change the relationship.

But I got to just tell you, like, I don’t want that for myself, I don’t have any desire to drink alcohol, or to feel buzzed or to get drunk or any of that stuff. I just don’t. I can drink if I want to, but I’m choosing not to. And this is a little bit different than my relationship with food. Because my relationship with food is a little bit different.

I will occasionally have some sweets or some, you know, sugar or some, you know, special dessert, or, you know, something that’s just like bread, you know, lots of carbs, I can occasionally do this stuff. Okay. But as far as drinking is concerned, I just don’t have the desire for it.

You know, that desire left me a long time ago, and I just don’t want it. Okay. So, and I’m not making this decision forever about alcohol. Like I might change my mind someday. And I might say, like, you know, what I might, you know, try drinking again. But for today, I don’t have that desire, and I’m not gonna drink today.

But like, as far as like, the junk food and the sugar and stuff like that, like, I’ve thought about this. And, you know, here’s something that I used to love when I would go to California and visit family out there. I love going to In and Out Burger, right? They have these great burgers and fries. And it’s like, milkshakes or whatever.

I’ll do that someday, you know, but it’s not something I’m doing like all the time, I don’t have to have it. I’m not thinking about it all the time, I don’t have this over desire for that kind of thing. But I’ll go and eat something like that. I love sourdough bread. I’d love to get, you know, a good loaf of sourdough bread when I go to San Francisco, or, you know, eat that special dessert on my birthday, or because it’s, you know, Christmas or something like that.

I can do those things. And I feel really good about it. I’ve changed my relationship with food. And if you’re thinking about like, well, how can I do this for myself, you know, I just want you to like, take on this attitude of like, I don’t have to swear off drinking forever, I don’t have to swear off eating sugar for forever. But maybe just for today is a good place to start.

Maybe adopting that idea that they talked about in some of these 12 Step programs is like, just for today, I’m not gonna drink just for today, I’m not going to eat sugar. And don’t even worry about tomorrow, just think about what you can do today.

And when you think about it this way it doesn’t feel so big and overwhelming anymore. It doesn’t feel like you have to quit for the rest of your life or you’re a failure, you can just decide. Today, I just don’t want that. You know.

Another big problem that I think happens when we adopt this all or nothing mentality is that we feel like we’re out of control. Like, you can’t control your drinking. So you have to quit forever. You can’t control your eating, and or you know, your sugar intake. So you have to just quit forever. Maybe you’ve been told you have an addictive personality or you thought that you had something like that. Okay?

But what if you can control your drinking? What if you can control your eating? You just haven’t learned how to do it? What if there’s no such thing as an addictive personality? I did a little research into this.

And in her book, The Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, Maya, I’m gonna screw up her last name, but it’s like Szalavitz Maya says fundamentally, the idea of a general addictive personality is a myth. People with addictions or potential addicts cannot be identified by a specific collection of personality traits. So there you go. Maybe the addictive personality is not really a thing.

Here’s the thing, you always have a choice. Everything you do is a choice. The decision that you make is a choice that you are making. It’s not something that is out of control. You always have the ability to be in control or to take back control if you think you’ve lost it because you really haven’t lost control.

You just think you have you know, maybe you’ve been told that you don’t have control and you’re choosing to believe that but a lot of times it’s just a thought, feeling, action pattern that you’ve been doing for a long time. So you may not feel like you’re in control because your thoughts and feelings about eating junk food and drinking are just like automatic.

And this behavior that you’re engaging in is like something you do, mostly unconsciously. You know, it’s kind of like tying your shoes, it’s just something you do, you can do it without even thinking about it right? Eating and drinking can be the same way. It’s such an ingrained habit that you feel like you’re out of control, but you’re actually making decisions, okay, you do have control.

And if you want to see this, what you need to do is just slow down. Right? If you want to see that you do have control, pause, when you’re, you know, about to engage in this behavior. And start looking at the thoughts and feelings that precede the behavior. Like what were you thinking and feeling right before you found yourself with a glass of wine in your hand, you know, what thoughts and feelings drove the action of eating the burger and fries, the milkshake.

And I don’t want you to skip this step like this is important, I want you to get curious with yourself. Start to become aware of how those thoughts and feelings are driving your behavior. Because if you want to change the behavior, you’ve got to look at the thoughts and feelings that are driving it. When you begin to see that there’s a pattern at work here, a thought feeling reaction pattern, you can begin to take back the control, you can see that you are in control.

And this is how you begin to change the behavior. And do it in a way that actually works. Instead of just saying like, I just got to quit this forever. So it doesn’t have to be all or nothing, okay? If that all or nothing mentality works for you love it, do it, keep it going right on, get down with your bad self.

But if you want something different, if that doesn’t work for you, if that feels terrible for you, and you want to just like instead of avoiding a relationship with, with certain types of foods or alcohol, you want to change the relationship, you still want to have a relationship, but you want to be different to a healthy relationship, then that is possible for you, you can control your eating and your drinking. And you got to start by looking at your thoughts and feelings about sugar, about burgers and fries, about alcohol.

And once you start to be aware of how your thoughts and feelings are, you know driving the action, you can begin to change them so that you can take different actions, okay. And this, the same principles apply to everything in your walk of life.

Like these same principles apply to my relationship with my ex-wife, and it works beautifully. Like it works. Great. My relationship with her today is good. You know, not because of anything she’s doing. Because I’ve learned how to change the way I think and feel about this relationship. I’ve created a healthier relationship.

You know, my relationship with food today is good. Not because it’s never around, not because I avoid, you know, carbs or sugar 100% of the time. It’s not because I made a solemn oath to swear these things off forever. It’s because I’ve changed the relationship. Right? I’ve changed how I show up around these things.

And this is available for you too. I just want you to see that. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. All or nothing sometimes works for people, but sometimes it just feels too. It’s too much. It’s overwhelming. Okay.

So be sure to join us over in the Running Lean coaching group because in August, we’re taking a deep dive into this whole idea of like changing your thought, feeling, action patterns, you know, how do you how do these things show up? How do you change them so you can start getting the results that you want around things like weight loss or maybe controlling your drinking or changing your running or just improving your overall health and fitness?

If you’re interested in joining the group love to have you in there just check out runningleanpodcast.com/join and we’ll see you soon. And listen, I hope you got something out of this episode today. I had fun putting this together.

And if you did get something out of it. Please consider sharing it with a friend 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.

78. The Problem with Streaks

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When it comes to habit change, there’s this idea that if you do something every day for a period of time - 30-60-90 days - then you will automatically develop a new habit. I cannot tell you how …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there and welcome to Episode 78, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I’m talking about the problem with streaks. So when it comes to habit change, changing any kind of bad habit if you want to create new habits.

There’s this idea out there that if you just do something every day for a period of time, like 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, whatever it is, then you will automatically develop a new habit. And I just have to say that this is wrong. Okay, it just doesn’t work this way, there’s a lot more going on under the covers, there’s a lot more to habit to change than just like doing a certain behavior every single day.

How many times have you ever had a streak going like maybe you’ve given up sugar, or you’ve quit drinking for weeks or months straight, and then one day something happens, and just like that the streak is over. And then you’re right back to your old ways as if nothing has ever happened, right? This is very, very common, it happens all the time.

In order to create new habits, we have to make changes at a deeper level. Right? This very surface-level thing of just changing a behavior is not enough to make new habits and to create deeper, meaningful changes. Okay, so today here, I’m going to be talking about the problem with streaks.

And what you might want to focus on instead, if you really want to make lasting, meaningful changes in your habits. Okay, but first, if you like this podcast, you have to come check out the Running Lean podcast community on Facebook.

This is a group that goes hand in hand with the podcast, we extend the conversation over there in the group, we have a two-way conversation that gives you a voice gives you a place to ask questions and get feedback. And I’ve got a new challenge coming up. I haven’t done a challenge for a little while.

And I’ve been thinking a lot about this. And a lot of people have been coming to me talking about this subject. And so we’re going to be tackling this in July. And this is the challenge where I’m calling it dry July. Starting July 1, we’re going to give you an opportunity to take a break from alcohol, like maybe you just wanted like to see what it feels like to not drink for the month of July. And see if you feel better.

And I want to be very clear, this is not about like a streak is not about like putting in the number of days together or anything like that. This is about a group of people who all want to, you know, see if they feel healthier, and see if they feel better without drinking alcohol. Alcohol is not bad, I want to make sure you guys understand this. I’m not anti-alcohol.

But if you’re trying to lose weight, or if you’re trying to, you know, hit some sort of running goal or some sort of health goal, alcohol can be detrimental to weight loss, it can be detrimental to your running performance. And so we’re just going to talk about that. We’re going to talk about alcohol you know why you might want to limit or moderate your alcohol intake. And if you’ve ever tried to do this on your own, it’s been hard, come and join us and we’ll do it together.

Okay, we’re going to support each other, encourage each other, I’m going to do some kind of training in coaching in the Facebook group in the month of July. I’ll be talking about this subject here on the podcast too. So it’ll be a lot of fun.

This is not for people who are, you know, addicts or alcoholics like you need to seek some professional help with that kind of stuff. This is just for people who, you know, maybe want to like limit their drinking or just you know, maybe they drink a little too much and they want to like see what it would feel like to, to moderate or to quit for a little bit. Okay, so just go to Facebook, search for Running Lean community and come join us. It’s gonna be fun. I promise it’s gonna be fun.

And here’s another five-star review of the Running Lean podcast. This is from S4Waltz. And S4Waltz says, “Thanks for all you do. Hi, Patrick. I just finished listening to your interview with Leticia. I started listening and found your podcast during the pandemic and her story was amazing. I quit sugar after hearing your story and I guess, I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks. I actually started running in the late 1970s with my dad. I’m 63 now and hearing encouragement is needed no matter how long you’ve been running. The good thing about getting older is how many times I’m the only person in my age group. So I always place in my age group.”

That’s awesome. And then this person goes on to say, “Here’s a fun story, my first 10k, I wore cut-off blue jean shorts, because I didn’t know what people wore for running. Keep up the great work. And thanks for all you do.” Thank you S4Waltz, for that awesome five-star review.

And just so you know, I had this recurring nightmare where I show up at a marathon. And I’m, I have nothing on but jeans, I mean, I’m wearing like a shirt or whatever. But I don’t have running shorts, I’m wearing jeans that I have to, you know, toe the line at the start of a marathon wearing jeans. And so that’s kind of a nightmare of mine.

And listen, if you want to share the love, I would really appreciate it just go to wherever you listen to your podcast, scroll down to where it says leave a review, tap the stars and write a few words of a little love that you got for the podcast, I’d really appreciate that. I love hearing that you guys are getting something out of this.

And then hey, if you ever want a little bit of help losing weight, becoming a fat-adapted runner, or learning how to change habits, for good, for real, I got you covered. I work with runners every single day as a one-on-one coach, and a coach can do a lot of things for you, a coach can help encourage you to do things that you don’t want to do.

A coach can hold you accountable. A coach can help you navigate all the confusing information that’s out there about running nutrition, weight loss, all that stuff. And a coach can be your guide and your support and that expert to help keep you moving in the direction of your goals.

My goal as a coach is always to help you become the person that you want to become. So we talked about that, who is it that you want to become? How can I help you get there? And you know, I do a lot with helping people see how their mind works and helping people change bad habits and eliminate bad habits and create new healthy habits.

So that, you know, feeling good, being healthy can just become a part of who you are. And what you do, it just becomes the new you. So that’s the goal of coaching. And that’s kind of how it works. So if you want to learn more, or you want to apply for coaching, just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply.

And then you and I will jump on a Zoom call and we’ll have a conversation, we’ll just see if it’s a good fit. It’s not for everybody. And that’s fine. But if you want to just see what it’s all about, it can’t hurt to have a conversation that doesn’t cost you anything except maybe about 30 minutes of your time. Cool. All right. All right.

So let’s get into this topic of streaks, okay, and the problem with streaks. So first of all, I want to make sure we’re all on the same page about what we’re talking about here. We’re not talking about the kind of streaks where you run naked in public to amuse or shock others, that is actually one definition of a streak. We’re not talking about running through the quad, streaking through the quad. You know that is not what we’re talking about here.

We’re talking about a continuous period of specified success. This is what the definition of a streak is the way we’re sort of framing it in this conversation today. Okay. And listen, I gotta say this upfront, and I’ll talk more about this later. But I’m not opposed to streaks, I don’t think they’re bad. Okay. But I think we have a misconception about what a streak is going to do for us. And that’s what I want to address today. Okay.

So if you’re a runner, and you’re on some sort of running streak, and you’ve been running every day for months, or years, or whatever it is, like more power to you keep doing that. I did that for a while I’ve done that several times. I’ve done a month-long streak, I think I did up to like 80 some days of running every day until I just forgot one day.

And then I woke up the next day. I’m like, well, that’s over. And I’ll talk a little bit about that too, and about how that makes us feel because sometimes that’s the problem with streaks. That’s one of the problems is that we beat ourselves up about it. Okay.

But the biggest problem I see. And the biggest problem I want to address is this: is that we think that a streak of doing something every single day is going to somehow automatically change you. Like if you have a bad habit, all you have to do is just, you know, not do it every single day and then eventually you’re cured. Or, you know, if you’re you know, somebody that you know, maybe he drinks too much, or maybe eats a lot of sugar. And you’re like, you know what, I just got to stop doing this for 30 days, and then I’ll be fixed, you know, you think that it will automatically change you.

And I have to say that this is just not true. It’s just not true. We’ve all done this before, we’ve gone on a diet for months sometimes, and then just gone right back to doing what we did before. There are people who, you know, they check themselves into rehab, because they, maybe they drink too much, maybe they, you know, have this problem with drinking or drugs or something like that.

And this is so common, they go into rehab for like, 30 days, and they just come out, and they just go right back to drinking, or people who go to prison, people get locked up in jail for years, and then they come out and they just start drinking again or doing the drugs or whatever it is that got them locked up in the first place.

And you would think just being away from this for a period of time would be enough, but it’s not. Because you’re not, you’re not addressing the underlying issue here, okay. You know, if somebody like stops eating sugar, like, let’s say, you stop eating sugar, and we’ve done this before, in that Facebook group, we’ve done like a no sugar challenge, okay?

If you stop eating sugar for a month, and then all of a sudden, one day, you know, oh, it was so and so’s birthday at work. And so they had cake, and I just ate a cake. You know, I had this bad day at the office, and I came home and I just had ice cream for dinner, you know, this happens all the time.

This is very, very common, just not eating sugar for 30 days doesn’t automatically mean like you’re cured, or you’re never going to go back to it again. Okay, we’re not addressing the underlying issues. And the real problem isn’t that you’re not doing enough of it, or you haven’t put the right number of days in a row together. Like that’s not what the problem is.

The real problem that’s not being addressed is you haven’t changed your thinking. You have to change your thinking if you want to change a habit. So I’ve talked about this before here on the podcast, and that is this idea that our thoughts cause our feelings and our feelings drive our actions. You know this is the think, feel, act cycle.

And when we understand that it’s not about what we’re doing, that’s causing us to think a certain way, it’s the other way around, the way we are thinking is driving our actions ultimately. And so if we want to change behavior, you know, create a new habit, a new healthier habit, something that’s going to last, we have to change how we’re thinking and feeling about it, in order to change the actions.

And the actions are important too. Like you have to you know, like, if you want to quit smoking, you have to not smoke, right? That’s part of the deal, right? You have to do that as well. But you have to focus on the thinking and feeling part, if you don’t focus on that, something’s going to happen. And you’re just going to pop right back into that old habit again. Okay.

So our thinking is really the key, and just changing some habit or doing something every day doesn’t change our thinking about it. Right? Otherwise, you know, this would be so much easier for us, right? Just don’t eat sugar for 30 days and you’re cured, you’ll never want it again, it’s not true.

Because if you’re in the habit of, you know, eating sugar all the time, because it makes you feel good. You know, it’s solving a problem for you, it’s solving an emotional issue that you’re having, it’s numbing you out to your emotions, so you don’t have to feel them.

I guarantee you can put, you know, six months straight together, and it’s not going to change how you think and feel about it. Because you haven’t addressed that part of it. Okay. So that’s like, my number one issue with streaks is that they don’t really address the cause of the habit in the first place.

Listen, our brains are malleable. Our brains are amazing and powerful. And we have all these habits that we’ve created over the years and decades of our lives. Like, you know, drinking is a good example. Just because, you know, every let’s say you drink every day, you’re this kind of person after work, you just come home, you have a glass of wine. It’s how you unwind, right?

It’s how you, you know, just relax, you know, but you’ve been creating this habit of every time I come home from work and I want to unwind, I want to like kind of numb out a little bit because maybe I’ve had a stressful day I’m feeling a little bit of stress or a little anxiety. Little anger or something like that inside, and I drink the wine. And it kind of numbs me to that.

And so you’ve just gotten this habit of, you know, feeling an emotion and then numbing it out with a little bit of alcohol. Right? Very common, it’s not a big deal, okay, but if that’s something you want to change, if that’s no longer working for you, and you want to change that, you’re going to come home from work, and you’re going to not have the alcohol but you’re going to feel terrible, you’re going to be like, I don’t, this doesn’t feel right.

Because you haven’t retrained your brain with a new, you know, thought feeling action pattern, the pattern, you’re, you’re interrupting the pattern by not, you know, rewarding that emotion that you’re feeling by not numbing to that emotion that you’re feeling.

But you haven’t changed the behavior at all. You’re just changing, you’re just like not giving your brain what it wants, you’re not, you’re not squashing down those emotions, okay? So we have to change things at a deeper level, okay. thinking, feeling, and acting, are the things we have control over in our lives.

And so these are the things that drive us. These are the things that create habits. Our brains, our habits are, are ingrained in our brain, they’re like, we have these neural pathways that are well developed and well-worn pathways. They’re very, you know, they’re like, fast like you, you think, feel and act so quickly, like, I’m just all of a sudden feeling a little stressed out, boom, the wine is already in my hand, and I’m drinking it. That’s how habits work.

Okay, so we have to change at a deeper level. But we can, like I said, our brains are malleable, we can actually change the pattern. And over time, you can change that thought, feeling action pattern, and create new neural pathways.

But it requires change at all three places, you cannot just change the action that you’re doing. You have to change the thoughts and the feelings as well. Okay, so that’s like the number one issue I have with any kind of like streak, okay, you’re not if you want to change a habit, you’re not addressing the real underlying causes of the habit and the underlying mental and emotional states that are driving the behavior. Alright.

Alright, the other issue I have with streaks is this: is that if you miss a day, you beat yourself up like crazy. So let’s say you put together a bunch of days in a row, let’s say you’re doing a running streak, and you run every single day for 60 days, or 90 days, or whatever it is. And then you miss a day. Oh, now you’re back to zero. You’re a failure.

You like you make it mean something really awful and negative like you’re a bad person. And all that hard work you’ve done, everything you’ve done is just wasted. It’s all gone. Now. I think this is a dumb way of looking at things, okay. When you beat yourself up, because you miss a day, I think you’re really missing the big picture.

All right, you’re just looking at a streak of a number of days. And you’re making it mean that like, you’re a good person if you continue with the streak. And if you end the streak, you’re a bad person. But I gotta tell you something, just about every single streak is going to come to an end at some point, right?

Just about every single streak that you engage in is probably going to come to an end at some point. Now I know people who have been on running streaks for 10 years, 15 years, they run every day and more power to you. That is amazing. That is really cool.

But if they were to stop that it doesn’t mean anything bad. It doesn’t mean that they have failed. It doesn’t mean they like their all that hard work is down the drain. But we think that’s what it means when we miss a day of a streak, you know, and I just have to make sure that we all understand that it doesn’t mean anything. Doesn’t mean anything.

It’s not anything negative unless you think it’s something negative. And that’s another problem I have with it is that we just think that it’s a bad thing if we end our streak, or if we don’t you know if we’re not successful if you say oh, you know, I’m going to stop eating sugar for 30 days and then halfway through. You eat half a doughnut or something like that.

Oh, all that hard work is down the drain. It’s not down the drain. You haven’t messed anything up really. Just go back to not eating sugar again. Boom, it’s easy. It doesn’t have to mean anything doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It doesn’t mean you are a failure.

It doesn’t mean you have faith. It doesn’t mean you’re not improving your health, it just means that you, you know, you had a little mini failure or a setback or whatever you want to call it, it’s not a big deal, though, we just pick ourselves back up and start over.

You know, that’s all. That’s the work. The work is we just carry on, no matter what, no matter how many times we fall off the wagon, or whatever you want to call it. There’s no wagon, right? So a streak misses the bigger picture here.

And the bigger picture is this. Why are you really doing this? Why are you running every day? Why do you want to stop eating sugar for 30 days or 90 days? Why are you, you know, lifting weights every day? Why are you not drinking? What is the goal? If the goal is to just put a certain number of days together in a row? And to check them off on your calendar like x x x?

Like if that’s your goal, how many is is the right number? How many is enough? If you get to 100 days does that? What does that mean? All right, have you changed anything really? I think when we just focus on a number of days, in a row of something, we’re missing the bigger picture, we’re missing the big lie. Why are you doing this?

You know, I talked about this before, like I made this like, promise to myself last month, I was going to do yoga for a month for 30 days straight. And I got to about day 27. And I just couldn’t do it. Like I just had, I was traveling, I just didn’t have the time and I came to about 10 o’clock at night and I was like I made a decision I could either do it and it would have been weird, I was ready to go to bed.

Or I could just like skip it and make it not mean anything. And that’s what I chose, I made the decision to just skip it. And I was fine with that I felt good about that effect. It felt liberating. I felt like you know what? This, what a relief. Because sometimes we get into streaks of doing things every single day, and it becomes stressful for us. Is that how you want to go through your life, like stressed out about, I can’t miss a day of running, or I can’t miss a day of doing yoga, or I can’t miss a day of not eating sugar, whatever it is?

No, that’s not the point of life. You can’t go through your life that way. That’s no way to become the healthiest, most badass version of yourself to be stressed out about it every single day.

Listen, when I’m working with people, and we’re working on changing diets, and you know, changing their exercise and creating new habits and things like that we focus on the fun, we focus on making it enjoyable.

Because if you don’t, if this is a stressful nightmare for you, I guarantee you, you are going to fail, you’re going to quit, who wants to do that? I don’t want to do that I want to live my life that way. So what’s the bigger picture? Why are you really doing this? Why are you engaged in this, you know, a streak of whatever it is running every day? Or you know, not drinking every day? Why? Why do you want to do that? Why is that important to you?

Some examples that I hear from people are, you know, I want to be around for my kids. You know, I feel so good. When I’m not eating sugar, I feel so good when I’m not drinking. I want more of that in my life. I want to be able to play with my grandkids. And the way I’m going you know I’m you know my doctor says I need to get my blood sugars under control or whatever.

Like I want to lose weight, I want to be a strong and lean runner, I want to you know, I want to look good naked. I want to be a good example. I want to set a good example for my kids. And when you look at it this way, when you think about the bigger picture, the number of days in a row becomes irrelevant.

Doesn’t matter how many days in a row, you did something who cares? Do you want to just say it on your gravestone, you know? Well, you know, they ran 864 days in a row, but then they were a failure. No, you just want it to be like, you know, this is a badass person.

They were awesome. They were healthy. They were around for their kids. They were a good example for others. They inspired other people to be more they became the best version of themselves. That’s what I want. I don’t think you can fit all that on a gravestone. But I’m just saying that’s the way I want to be remembered.

So I think, you know the counting numbers of days in a row of something just kind of misses the bigger picture right. Now, here’s I’m going to kind of contradict myself a little bit here because I haven’t had a drink of alcohol for over 14 years. And I’m not going to end that streak anytime soon that I know of.

Alright, I’m not like purposely going to set out to like in that streak of not drinking. But my goal with this is not to put a number of days in a row together. That’s not the goal. I’m not just checking days off a calendar. My goal with not drinking is that I feel better when I don’t drink and I don’t have a desire to numb myself to my thoughts and feelings anymore.

And I want to live life and experience my emotions without numbing out to them. And so that’s why I don’t drink alcohol. And you know what, it’s fine, you know, I don’t have a desire for it anymore. And it’s fine for me to just like, I don’t want it.

And here’s where I’m kind of contradicting myself, because I have this app on my phone, and you can plug in like the date you stopped drinking, and it gives me some information. It says you’ve been sober. You’ve been sober for 14.2 years, 170.5 months, 5190 days, 124,548 hours, okay. And I look at that every now and then I just go hmm, all right, cool, whatever.

But what if, hypothetically, what if I had a drink? What if I had a sip of alcohol? And I had to put all those numbers back to zero? Does that mean that everything I’ve done and learned and accomplished in the last 14 years has been wasted? Does that mean that it was all for nothing? Does that, you know, diminish everything that I’ve done? Have I thrown it all away? Is everything down the drain? No, doesn’t mean any of that stuff doesn’t mean I’m a failure. I failed. No.

And I hear people talk about this sometimes in, you know, some of the sobriety sober circles that I’m in some of the, you know, networks that I’m in, and they talk about oh, so and so sober for like 20 years, and then they went out and drank. They just threw it all away. Really did they throw it all away? I don’t look at it that way. I don’t look at it that way at all.

I think you learn so much when you can change your habits. And when you can, like change your thinking and change your feeling and your actions and change that whole cycle and like really become aware and curious about how your brain works. And like you, I think you just learned so much and you grow so much in that process that it doesn’t matter how many days in a row, you do something, it really, really doesn’t.

You know, the real goal is to create healthy new habits that help you to become who you want to become that help you to become more. The real goal is to change how your mind works at its core to change your, your, your state, you know, to change your internal state so you can change your external reality to change your external world. The real goal is to reprogram your mind with new thought, feeling, and action patterns.

You know, and the way you do this is through awareness and curiosity. Just notice how you think and how you’re feeling. When you’re about to take an action. You know, when you’re about to do something when you’re about to grab for the drink, when you’re about to go for the sugar when you’re about to go off your plan or like not go run because you just don’t feel like it like what is your brain telling you in that moment? What’s important to you?

Be curious, be aware of how your brain is working. Now, I’m not saying streaks are bad, streaks are not bad. There are some benefits to streaks. And there are some reasons why you might want to do things every day in a row. Like it’s kind of motivating for some people.

Okay, so let’s say you’ve been running every day, and you know, there’s a day where you just don’t feel like it. Or maybe you have been like staying off of sugar. And then there’s a day where like, you’re all of a sudden you’re like I just want to eat some ice cream right now.

But you’ve said to yourself, well, you know, I’ve put a bunch of days together in a row. So I don’t want to break that streak like that can be kind of motivating for people. But I’m just telling you don’t rely on this one thing to change your habit because that’s not going to work.

Inevitably you will break the streak. Something will always happen. You’re going to break the streak and then what? You’re going to beat yourself up you’re right back to where you were before because you haven’t actually changed your thinking and feeling about it. Okay, but it can be a little bit motivating for some people, right.

Another thing I think is cool about streaks is that they can be kind of fun, like doing a 30-day challenge. Friends, like we’re gonna do in our Facebook group is kind of fun and can help you to maybe help you to do things that you might not normally do on your own. Right.

So you’ve got the support of people around you, you’re having fun doing something together. But just know that it’s not a magic pill, that’s going to automatically mean you have like, all these new habits, and you’re a changed person. But it can be fun. And it can help you to, you know, start to learn about yourself.

When you combine a streak with understanding how your thoughts and feelings work, that’s powerful, right, but just doing a thing every day and checking it off the calendar is not enough, really. Because listen, you can lock yourself away in a cabin in the middle of the woods, and try to get away from alcohol or try to, you know, distance yourself from ice cream, or whatever it is.

And then one day, somebody’s gonna come along with a bottle, or an ice cream cone and just be like, Hey, would you like to indulge in this and you’re just gonna screw it all up for you. Like, you just can’t get away from it right? And we have to understand how our brain works.

We have to change the way our thoughts and feelings and actions, that whole cycle, that whole pattern works in order to make these lasting and meaningful changes in our lives. Okay. Again, think about your why, why are you doing this? Why do you want to give up drinking? Why do you want to, you know, stop eating sugar so you can lose weight? Like, why is that important to you?

When we think about this, it starts to really tap into some deeper things that we can address and work through. Okay. All right, you guys, I hope you join us over in the Facebook group in July for our dry July challenge. I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun. We’re gonna have some fun just talking about, you know, maybe taking a break from alcohol for a little while.

And I hope you got something out of this particular episode today. If you did, please consider sharing it with a friend. I would love that. And as always love all of you 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.

76. Sticking to Your Plan – Even on Vacation

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It’s vacation season! The kids are out of school, COVID travel restrictions are easing up, and you are going on a trip. And taking a vacation means you go completely off the rails, eat and drink …

Continue Reading about 76. Sticking to Your Plan – Even on Vacation →

Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode 76 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners, and today, I’m talking about how to stick to your plan. Even on vacation. Listen, it’s vacation season, right? The kids are out of school, the COVID travel restrictions are easing up and you, my friend, are going on a trip. Amazing, right?

But what that usually means is that you go completely off the rails eat and drink your way into oblivion and come back hating yourself. Am I right? At least that’s what I used to do, you probably don’t do that. But if you’re if you’re one of those people that’s thinking there’s just no way you’re gonna be able to get through this vacation without gaining 5 or 10 pounds and coming home feeling like crap, then I’ve got some good news for you.

Because listen, it doesn’t have to be like that. So in this episode of the podcast, I’m going to be offering up some helpful tips for sticking to your plan, whether it’s you know, a food plan or an exercise plan, even on vacation and being able to have fun and enjoy your vacation too. Because you can do it all you absolutely can.

But first, be sure to check out the Running Lean podcast community on Facebook. If you haven’t already checked us out over there. I created this group so we could have a conversation so you could ask questions and get help and support. And we can encourage each other and support each other through our big goals.

And it is a fun group. It’s a lot of fun. We have fun doing this. If it’s not fun, you’re doing it wrong. I say that all the time. Just go to Facebook search for Running Lean community. And join us join in on the fun.

And here’s another quick five star review of the Running Lean podcast. This one’s from Leanne. She says, “A must-listen for runners. I found this podcast when searching for a podcast for runners with an emphasis on diet and nutrition. Patrick’s topics each week were just what I was looking for to improve my running performance. I also worked with Patrick as a personal coach.”

Yes, she did. Leanne is amazing. And she goes on to say, “I was able to take my running to new levels and learn from Patrick that I could do much more than I thought I was possible as a runner in my early 60s. Thanks, Patrick, for your commitment to the running community and for providing these weekly podcasts that are fun, inspiring, and full of tough love.”

And Leanne is the most awesome, thank you so much. Leanne was really, really awesome to work with, by the way. And yeah, I hope this is fun. It’s supposed to be fun. And if you would like to share in the fun, and you get something out of this podcast, it would mean a lot to me. If you could take a moment and go to what is it like Apple podcasts where you can leave a review, just tap the stars and jot down a few words if this is if you’re getting something out of this, I’d love that.

And then listen, if you ever want a little help, losing some weight or, or improving your running performance or getting leaner, getting stronger, you know, running faster running longer than you ever thought you possibly could I have got you covered. As a one-on-one coach, I work with runners every single day, who want to become more who want to become the healthiest, most badass versions of themselves. This is what I do.

You know, a coach doesn’t just like tell you what to do. A coach is somebody that works with you and figures out the best plan for you, and holds you accountable for sticking to that plan. This is why the coach is so powerful because it’s very hard to stick to things on your own. Right.

I mean, this is was always my experience. It’s very hard. I know what to do. It’s very hard for me to stick to it on my own. But with a coach, I have that accountability and the encouragement to do the hard stuff. And I’m willing to like push myself harder with a coach just like when you’re at the gym and you’re you have a personal trainer, they’re saying come on, you can do one more, you can absolutely do one more.

But if you’re on your own, you’re like, I’m good. So coaching isn’t for everybody. So what we’ll do is we’ll you can go on the website, you can fill out a quick application, there’s like one question on there I want you to answer but then we’ll jump on a quick zoom call you and I will have a conversation. We’ll see if this is a good fit for you.

That’s all, we’ll just have a convo and we’ll talk about it. And if it’s a good fit great if it’s no big deal, you haven’t lost anything yet. There’s nothing to lose by doing this. So just go torunningleanpodcast.com/apply. And we’ll see if coaching is the right fit for you. All right, cool.

Let’s get on to this topic today because I’m kind of excited to talk about this. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. So I just got back from vacation, I was on vacation, and I took a vacation. I was in Florida for eight days, I went to this place that I absolutely love. And it’s just such a cool place. And it was one of these places that my ex-wife and I used to go to, in fact, she was the first one that took me there, she used to live in that area down to Florida.

And she’s like, oh, we got to go vacation this place. And we went there many, many times. And I just fell in love with this place. And honestly, it was a, it was a big decision for me, whether I wanted to go back to this place or not.

Because when I think of the beach vacation, I think of this place, and it’s just the there’s restaurants and shopping and a beach and a pool, like everything is just right there within walking distance, it’s on this little island, like you’re just, it just feels like you’re, you’re away from it all, you know.

And I just love this place so much. And I thought do I want to go back to the place that I went to, but I used to vacation with my ex-wife? And I talked to my coach about it. And she was like, Patrick, you can absolutely do this, you want to do this. If this is something you want to do, you should do it and make new memories, and create a new way of thinking about this place.

Because I always associate this place with her, you know, and or us, you know, as a couple or whatever. So, and the other thing is, I’ve never taken a vacation by myself before. You know, listen, I’m 54 years old, I’ve done a lot of traveling, I’ve gotten to visit family and stuff like that by myself, whatever.

But I’ve never really gone on an actual like week-long vacation, alone and just to like be by myself. So this was all out of my comfort zone, you guys, and I gotta tell you, I’m so glad I did it. I’m so glad I did it. Because I learned so much about myself, I learned that I can absolutely have fun, and be content and, and feel so good being alone.

And honestly, I was never really alone. I would go out walking on the beach every day, go for runs, there’s people all over the place. Every night, I would go out to dinner, sit at the bar, talk to people talk to the bartenders, whatever, and I was just having so much fun. And it was so chill, I came back so relaxed, I just feel so amazing.

So vacations are amazing. We need to take vacations, they’re so good for us, they’re good for our, for our body, they’re good for stress relief, they’re good for our mind, they’re good for our soul, you know, like all there are all these amazing benefits of taking a vacation. So I’m really glad I did this, I’m glad I went by myself, I have created all these new memories.

And, and, and I can absolutely do this again and I’m looking forward to taking another vacation by myself. I really enjoyed this I loved it. I’m very content being a lot, I’m okay with that. And, you know, to be able to be okay with being by yourself. I think that’s a sign of, you know, self-confidence of self-awareness of, you know, evolving as a human. So, I felt really good about my decision to do this. And I’m glad I did. So vacations are awesome.

I just got back and I wanted to share some stuff with you guys because a lot of people that I talk to I’m coaching people all the time and they tell me, oh yeah, I’m getting ready to go on vacation. I’m really nervous about it. Because and then they say they go on to tell me how in the past, what they would do is they use vacation as a way to just say eff it to everything right?

And they get into that mode of just like screw everything. They eat whatever they want. They go completely bananas on everything, you know, drinking, eating desserts, the all you can eat buffets, whatever it is okay. And, and then they always come back feeling terrible and hating themselves.

They come back feeling very regretful about all the stuff they did, you know, I’ve never seen anybody go on vacation, eat and drink their way into, you know, 10 or 15 pounds heavier or whatever it is, and then really feel good about themselves afterward. You know, most people do not feel good about themselves if they just go completely off the rails on vacation.

So what is the alternative, you know? So if you’re the kind of person who is sticking to some sort of diet or exercise plan right now, so maybe you’re in a mode of like, I’m trying to lose weight right now. Or maybe you’re training for an event, and you’re concerned about what might happen.

If you take a break from your normal life, so if you if you’re training for a marathon, let’s say, and you’re, you take a vacation, this is going to kind of be a little bit more challenging for you to stick to your training plan, right? So if you if you’ve got a long run to do on the weekend, where you’re going to be, you know, in, in Maui or something like that, like, are you going to be able to stick to your training plan? Right?

Or, you know, if you associate vacation with eating everything in sight, and drinking like crazy, every single night, then, and you want to lose weight, though? Like, is this in alignment with your goals? Like, is this gonna work for you? Okay, so these are the kinds of things we want to kind of think about here.

And I have a friend who was training for a marathon, and for a spring marathon this year, and we did all these training runs together. And, you know, he was doing great and really on track, and then he went on vacation. And you know, he didn’t run much, he kind of cut his runs shorter, ate and drank differently, let’s say, you know, I don’t know how much he ate and drank. But I’m assuming it was different from what he was doing before.

But this person came back from that vacation feeling not very confident, and the running was really hard. And he felt defeated. And he’s just like, you know, what, I’m just gonna do the half instead, yes, I switched from the full marathon to the half marathon. And listen, there’s nothing wrong with this, that’s totally fine.

You know, like, if that’s what you want for yourself, that’s fine. But if you’re the kind of person who’s like, I want to run this marathon, and I want to take this vacation, and how can I do both? You know, how can I stay healthy? How can I continue to eat right? Or maybe lose weight, or whatever it is? Stick with my exercise plan? How can I do all this? While I’m on vacation? Right?

So if that’s you, then this podcast is absolutely for you. If you’re the kind of person that’s like, you know what, when I go on vacation, all rules are out the window, then, but you probably don’t need to listen to this. Because you’re gonna just do your own thing. And that’s totally fine.

But we, I think a lot of times, you get it into your mind that going on vacation means that everything has to be different, you have to stop exercising, you know, like, oh, I’m working so hard all year long. You know, I just want to go on vacation and just relax, you know? And so I’m just gonna say no, to everything that I’ve been doing up to this point, well, it doesn’t have to mean that at all.

Okay, you get to decide what vacation means for you, you get to decide what your vacation looks like for you. And if you’re saying, well, I’ve always done this in the past, this is the way I’ve always done it. That doesn’t mean you have to keep doing it the same way. You know, not if you want something different for your future. If you want something different for yourself in the future, you may have to stop doing the same things over and over and over again, that has got you where you are today, right.

So my suggestion is to think about, you know what it is you want for yourself when you go on vacation? Who is it that you want to be when you get home from this vacation, okay? Another issue is that a lot of people seem to equate overeating or eating other sugar or overdrinking with fun.

In other words, I want to have fun on this vacation. Can I just have a little fun? Which means what does that mean to eat ice cream every day? Twice a day three times a day eat dessert every night. Binge up on the all-you-can-eat buffet. This was so me. I’ve been to all these resorts where they have like an all-you-can-eat buffet and there’s always that dessert section it’s like whole tables and tables of just like desserts.

I would eat as much food as I could possibly have. So stuff from all the food you know, because it’s all you can eat everything and I go back and eat all the desserts like I would have to try them all because you know this one looks good. So does that! So I would just like I would make two trips three trips to the dessert section. Okay, so maybe that’s just me.

But then I would feel like crap the next day. So today this is not my idea of fun. Okay, but if your idea of fun means you have to like drink a lot, you know, and eat a lot or eat all the sugar eat all the crappy food, then, you know, I think we just have to get get it into our heads. What do we mean by fun? What does that mean to us?

You know what, what does it mean to have fun on vacation? And I’ll talk about this more in a minute. here, but I just want you to start thinking about this like, what? What is it that you want for yourself? For your vacation?

Okay, so one of the most important things that I suggest people do when they’re getting ready to go on a vacation is deciding ahead of time. How do you want to be when you come home, like how do you want to feel about yourself, when you come home from this vacation?

Do you want to feel good about yourself? Or do you want to feel, you know, bloated, and regretful, and ashamed and guilty? Or do you want to feel confident, and proud of yourself, because you get to decide? One thing I suggest people do is to decide ahead of time, whether they want to maintain their weight on vacation, continue to lose weight, or gain weight on vacation because you can actually choose one of those three options.

One of those three things is going to happen. Anyway, but if you go into your vacation, thinking, let’s say you’re trying to lose, you’re saying that you’re in the middle of losing, like 50 pounds or something, right? And you’re like, well, you just have this thing in your head of like, yeah, when I’m on vacation, I’ll probably still continue to lose some weight, but then you eat whatever the hell you want to while you’re on vacation, and you come back and you’re like, what happened? I, I was doing so good.

And then you know, I went on vacation, and now I’m up five pounds, you know, and then you feel like crap about yourself, you beat yourself up about it, you end up quitting on yourself. It’s all because you didn’t have an intention going into your vacation, you didn’t have a plan, I always want people to decide ahead of time what they want for themselves. So do you want to lose weight, maintain or gain because you get to choose, this is going to determine how you show up each day?

You know, if you’re if your goal is to maintain weight, during your vacation, you can kind of just do what you’re doing, you know, maybe indulge a little bit here and there. If you want to, if you’re okay with gaining weight on vacation, just know ahead of time I’m going to gain I’m gonna allow myself to gain like five pounds on vacation.

And then you know, bang it out. Have fun with that, you know, do it, do it the way that you want to do it, just know that that’s your goal. And then when you come home, if you’ve gained 10 pounds, you didn’t do it right. Okay, you went a little, a little too excessive on that, okay? Or if your goal is to lose weight, that’s gonna determine how you show up for yourself every day, it’s gonna determine what you do, you know, each day of your vacation, okay?

So do you want to here’s another thing to decide. Do you want to keep up with your training? Exactly, you know, do you want to keep with your strength training with your running? Maybe you’re doing some cross-training, cycling, or something like that swimming? Do you want to maintain your training? Do you want to back off a little bit? Or do you want to just quit altogether?

And there’s no right or wrong answer to these things. It’s just that you have to make a decision ahead of time about what you want for yourself. Don’t say you’re going to stick to your plan, I’m going to keep exercising and, and eat right. But then go completely off the rails because that’s, that’s not being in alignment with your goals. That’s not having your own back.

When you do this, you destroy your self-confidence. You kind of undermine your own progress, you lose motivation. It is very demotivating when you let yourself down like this. So my suggestion to you, I want to encourage you to make a decision ahead of time, and then stick to that decision, whatever that is for you. Okay, do you want to continue with your exercise and an eating plan? Or do you want to like, you know, be a little more lenient, because you get to decide?

No right or wrong answer, you get to decide, just decide ahead of time. Planning ahead is one of the most important things you can do to help you stick to a plan, whether it’s whether you’re on vacation or not, honestly. And when we talk about planning ahead, you may have heard this before. But when we plan something ahead of time, especially like 24 hours in advance, we’re using a part of our brain called the prefrontal cortex.

And this is our thinking more modern, like the cognitive planning part of our brain. And when we use this part of our brain to make decisions, where we’re making good decisions, and we’re, we’re thinking through with the consequences, and it’s like the planning part of our brain. And so we always want to use that type of brain, that prefrontal cortex part of our brain, the modern thinking brain, to make decisions when it comes to what we’re going to eat how much we’re gonna drink, whether we’re going to stick to exercise playing the next day and things like that.

The alternative is we use a part of our brain called the amygdala, which is our fear center, or our primitive brain fight or flight part of our brain. This is the part of our brain that is a tiny little almond size part of our brain that’s like super ancient, and it’s designed to respond to urges and things like that, you know, very primitive.

So when you’re feeling like, I really want some cake, and you haven’t really thought this out with your prefrontal cortex, you know, your amygdala is gonna be like, eat the cake. Go back to the dessert buffet, come on, and just do it, you want to do it, you know, it’s like the good, the little angel, and the devil on your shoulders. You know, this kind of analogy is a good analogy.

So we don’t want to be caught in the moment trying to use our, you know, fear center or fight or flight or urge center to make these kinds of decisions for us. Okay, whether we’re going to work out or not, whether we’re going to eat right or not, we want to plan ahead. So that’s why it works. And it does work beautifully if you plan ahead.

So the key is to plan ahead and then stick to your plan. That’s it plan ahead, stick to your plan. This works with everything in life, you guys, every single thing you want to accomplish in your life plan ahead, stick to your plan. So I’m going to give you guys some tips and some things and I’m going to share some experiences that I had with my recent trip because I was very cognizant about this planning ahead, I really wanted to make sure that I was I wanted to stick to my plan, and I wanted to do some certain things.

So I’m going to just kind of go through what I did. And hopefully, this will give you guys some tips that you can use for your vacation. I hope you’re going on vacation soon, too. So the first thing I did was to make sure I planned my food. So I was very conscious of where I was going to stay. I wanted to stay at an Airbnb that had a kitchen like it had to have a fully stocked kitchen, a fridge, and all that stuff.

I would look at some places and they had like a hot plate or one of those tiny little mini-fridges that you can hold like, you know, 12 you know, cans of soda or whatever. And I’m like that is not going to cut it for me like I need to buy some food and I need to like I want a stocked fridge, I want to be able to cook for myself, at least one meal a day I wanted to. My plan was to cook my first meal. So I eat twice a day, around noon, then around 6 or 7pm.

And I wanted that first meal to I wanted to cook that at home every day, I wanted total control over that first meal every single day. So I made sure that the place I was staying at had a kitchen. That was important to me, okay. And then the very first thing I did when I got into town was I took an Uber over to the grocery store and I stocked up I bought everything I needed for the whole week. So I bought all the food, you know, Lacroix, eggs, bacon, sausage, butter, avocado, sour cream, like all the stuff that I typically would eat. And I and I just stocked up. That’s the only time I went to the grocery store the whole time I was there. And it was awesome.

Because I just knew that I had, you know, everything I needed for that first meal was there. And then I made that first meal at home every day. So that was one thing like planning ahead was really important for me to make sure that I did that. And I went to the store and that I stocked up.

And then for me, I made a decision that I was going to eat out every night, you know, so I went to different restaurants. I sat at the bars and I talked to people, but I would check out the menus ahead of time and you know, occasionally I would ask if they could do substitutions and things like that. But for the most part, I ate you know the items off the menu as they were prepared.

And I ate haha. Oh my god, it’s so amazing. Like the seafood down there is totally amazing. So I had fresh grouper, salmon, scallops, shrimp tacos. Oh my gosh, this is amazing. So I actually made a point to go, I was eating some carbs when I was down there I made a point to like, be okay with that.

You know, I had some rice here and there I had some plantains that came with my tacos, you know and I eat the corn tortillas that came in. It’s not a big deal. You know, a few carbs here and there. But I made a point to never indulge in sugar. I did not want to do that. And so I did. And I totally stay away from sugar.

So eating out for me was amazing. And you can like, just plan ahead as much as you can with this. Know where you’re going to eat out if you can, how often you’re going to be eating out, check the menus, you can even call the restaurants and ask if they can do substitutions and stuff like that. Just tell them you have an allergy to, you know, certain foods or carbohydrates or something like that, and they’ll totally work with you. Okay.

Another thing that you can do when we’re planning food is packing snacks, making sure you bring some kind of snacks, just in case you need something, you don’t ever want to get to that place where you’re hungry, and vulnerable to temptations, right. So pack your own, like healthy snacks like nonperishable stuff, nonperishable stuff, if you can, if you need it.

Okay, so I actually brought some snacks for the plane, because, you know, I got up early, and I usually don’t eat till noon or so. But I was going to be traveling from like, basically, you know, eight o’clock in the morning until three o’clock in the afternoon. And I knew I was going to want to eat something in there.

So I brought, I got like a bag of this zero sugar, beef jerky. And I was like, Oh, this would be good. This would be like a little kind of lunchy type of thing I could do on the plane. But even if you’re taking a road trip in a car, like, you know, you can go to fast food places. It’s not ideal, but you can make it work. You know, you can get protein-style bunless burgers, you can get salads with chicken, you can make it work, or I think we get into this mindset of I don’t know what to do. I’ve never done this before. And I think this is not a good mindset to be in, like, so what if you’ve never done it before?

Guess what, a lot of people don’t know what to do. Why don’t you ask yourself this question instead, I wonder what’s available. I wonder how I can make this work. I wonder how I can get creative and make something work for me. Because chances are, you can absolutely make it work.

I’ve seen people get fried chicken at like, Chick-fil-A or something like that. And just like kind of peel the breading off of it and eat it and it’s delicious. You know, like, there are things you can do if you need to. I was talking to somebody last night about getting pizza. And like I did this recently where we were I was with a group of people and they all ordered pizza. And you know, there was nothing I could really order.

And so I just took the toppings off the pizza and kind of rolled them up. It was like cheese and pepperoni stuff like that. And I ate that. And I ate a lot of it. And it was delicious. And it was just left with some, you know pieces of crust with sauce on it that other people were like, Oh, can I eat that crust, I’m like sure. So it was a win-win for everybody.

Get creative. You know, even if you’re like on a road trip and you stop at a gas station, you can find something to eat like, for me I do, you know pretty low carbs I would stay away from, you know, chips and pretzels and stuff like that. But there’s like beef jerky, and nuts, pork rinds, hard-boiled eggs, pickles, like there are all kinds of stuff you can, you can find even at a crappy place like a gas station. Obviously, if you can bring your own stuff, that’s a better way to go.

Another suggestion that I have for you would be to plan your workouts ahead of time, okay. So if you’re going to want to stick to like a running program, if you’ve got a running schedule, let’s say you’re running three or four days a week, you want to get your miles in, plan ahead, plan ahead, what you’re going, where you’re going to run, how far you’re going to run where and the routes that you’re going to run.

The routes are important because a lot of times you may be in an area where I don’t know you don’t know the area. And maybe I don’t know if it’d be unsafe, but hopefully, you’re not staying in a place that is unsafe. I did this a while back when I was in Mexico, and the property owner was like, we don’t suggest you go run out on the streets around here. And I was like, ha, okay, and they said, but there is like a path that you can run around the property.

And so I did that I ran around it was a huge property. So I ran like the perimeter of the property. They actually like I think 75% of it was like a walking path anyway, so I just ran around the property and did a lot of miles on that vacation. And, you know, totally doable, you know.

Another thing you can do is like I go to Google Maps and I check the Street View and I’m like, is there a sidewalk here? You know, is this doable? Like, oh, this looks like a bridge. Is there a sidewalk on this bridge? I don’t want to be stuck on some bridge where there’s like, no, no shoulder and I’m in traffic and you don’t ever want to run on the street. You know, if there’s a lot of traffic and stuff like that, if you’re staying at a hotel or someplace, you can ask the concierge about local trails, about paths, you know, running routes, they know about all this kind of stuff.

Or maybe you’re at a place with a gym. And your only option is to like, you know, run on a treadmill, is there a treadmill available for you, you know, so when I was in Florida, I’d love running down there. Number one, I mean, there’s this long stretch of beach that I ran on every single day. So that’s amazing. I made a point to do that.

But then there’s this bridge that takes you from where I was staying over to Sarasota. And I would, I would run across the bridge and then run around the marina and stuff. And it’s just like, the views are amazing. And they got this nice ocean breeze was hot down there, but got this nice ocean breeze and just beautiful. And I plan all this ahead of time, I knew I was going to you know, run and I made a plan to run every day when I was down there.

And I did, I ran at least five miles every day down there, I did a 10-mile run, I think I did a few seven-mile runs. And really just really enjoyed it. You know, I made a point that this is important to me that I wanted to keep up with my running. And so I did it.

Another thing that I suggest if you’re doing any kind of strength training and you want to keep up with it on your vacation is to make a plan ahead of time for this as well. So if you’re staying somewhere with like a gym, you can use the hotel gym, hotels are so good. Now, they’re pretty well equipped with all this kind of stuff. But if you’re not staying at a place with a gym, you can find a local gym.

And a lot of times they’ll let you come in and just you know drop in on a class or use the gym, or maybe you belong to one of these big LA Fitness or 24-hour deals where you can just go to one of these places, those are all good too.

A couple of things that are kind of different is like find an outdoor fitness park or a playground because sometimes they have, you know, equipment that you can use to do pull-ups and you know, push-ups or bench presses or something like that, you know.

Sometimes they have those little parkour type of courses that you can kind of use to do fitness and you know, things like that it makes it kind of fun, you get outside what I did for my phone, because I didn’t have access to a gym where I was going, there wasn’t a gym in the area. And I didn’t really want to have to, you know, Uber, you know, 10 or 15 bucks every single day if I wanted to lift weights, so I decided to bring my resistance bands.

So I have this set of small, lightweight resistance bands, and you could just throw them in your suitcase, they’re super easy to bring with you. And I did, you know, a couple of workouts just to maintain my strength training while I was on vacation. And I felt really good about that. It wasn’t exactly the same, you know, but I could put enough resistance on those bands to make it pretty hard. And one of the days I was there, it was Memorial Day. And a lot of people were doing that Murph workout, which, if you don’t know what it is, it’s, it’s pretty tough.

It’s a one-mile run. And then it’s 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, and 300 squats. You’re supposed to do it with a weighted vest on or some sort of resistance. And I did it pretty much just with bodyweight because I didn’t have like a weighted vest or a way to do that. And I gotta tell you, that was a kick-ass strength workout.

But I felt good about doing that I felt good that I did this for myself, you know, it was a hard workout. And that one was awesome because I felt really good about sticking to that plan and sticking to my strength training because when I came home from my trip, I felt just as strong as when I left. I didn’t want to lose momentum.

I’ve been building some strength lately, I’ve been putting on some muscle, some pounds, you know, I didn’t want to lose any of that. So I wanted to keep up with it. And I absolutely did. In fact, the day that I got home the day after I got home from my trip, I went back to the gym, my gym here, and had a killer strength workout and I felt so good. I’m so glad that I kept up with it while I was on vacation, okay.

And then if you’re doing other kinds of workouts, you can find a way to do that too. Like, find a local yoga studio. If you’re doing yoga, or do yoga in your room. You can do strength training, just using bodyweight exercises if you have to as well just do it in your room. You know, other things you can do is just get out there and walk as much as possible. You know I walked on the beach every single day I walked along the beach at sunset every single night.

You can do things like rent bikes, go canoeing, go swimming, go do some rowing, stand up paddleboarding, wherever kind of, you know, hiking, whatever kind of trip you’re going on, there’s stuff you can do to stick with your plan, okay? But it all requires you to do a little bit of planning ahead of time. So that’s, that’s my really big encouragement.

And that’s my biggest, I want this to be your biggest takeaway. Plan ahead, plan ahead what you want for yourself, plan ahead, about your food, plan ahead your exercise plans, and then stick to your plan. Okay, decide who you want to be when you come home, and then stick to your plan.

And listen, you can actually choose to indulge a little bit on your vacation, you can choose to, you know, drink more than you would or, you know, eat a little bit differently if you want to just do it in a way that where you have your own back, do it in a way that is intentional. And you’re doing it with purpose, not just giving into cravings, urges, and temptations.

We don’t ever want to give in to cravings, urges, and temptations because that’s not how we build resilience. That’s not how you build new habits. That’s how you just are keeping yourself stuck to where you have been for most of your life, we got to change the way we think about this stuff, we got to change our mindset around all this stuff. Okay, planning ahead is how you do that.

Okay, so maybe you drink a little bit more, that’s fine. You know, I would suggest choosing your drinks wisely, you know, stick with the drinks that don’t contain sugar, hobbies, tropical drinks. So I went out to eat every night, I sat at the bar, and I watched them making all these drinks. And it was just like, oh, sugar, I’m going to pour some of this sugar in there. I’m going to pour some of this kind of sugar in there. And then here’s some liquor, which is mostly sugar.

Like, it was crazy how much sugar in these drinks, you know. So yeah, just make good decisions about alcohol. Make good decisions about the kinds of foods you want to eat. Like I ate more carbs than normal. I planned it. I knew I was going to do this I stayed away from the sugar. You know, I had rice at this place that made it as a side to the I had a big steak one night, which was amazing.

And as a side, they had cauliflower and potato mash. So it was like half potatoes have cauliflower. And I was like this is perfect. You know, there’ll be a few more carbs than I would normally but totally fine. Like it’s not, it’s not going off the rails here you guys, you know what I mean?

There’s a big difference between eating a couple of plantains with my tacos and eating, you know, a half a gallon of ice cream every night like I used to. Speaking of which, where I stayed, there’s this amazing gelato place and this used to be my nightly thing, I go to the gelato place every single night and order this huge big thing of gelato with one of those waffle cones. It’s just like ridiculous.

And, and I thought, Well, I’m gonna just one day I was like taking a walk around the little towns and the shops and stuff. And I’m like, I’m just gonna pop in here and see if they have some kind of sugar-free gelato option. And they did. They had sugar-free chocolate gelato, I’m like, I’m so getting some of this, which I did. And I really enjoyed it. And that was a way for me to indulge in something and not go off my plan. You know what I mean?

Like, we can do this, we can have fun, and stick to our plan. We can enjoy our vacation and stick to the plan. Decide who you want to be when you come home. For me, I wanted to be basically the same person I was when I left. I wanted to continue to feel good about myself, I didn’t want to feel crap about myself.

So my plan was to, you know, maintain my weight, maintain my running, maintain my eating as much as I could as much as I had control over. Indulge a little bit here and there, enjoy every bit of it. And come home feeling amazing, which I did. I feel like I’m proud of myself, proud of myself for taking a vacation by myself, proud of myself for going to this place that you know, had all these old memories.

I’ve created all these new memories, proud of myself for sticking to my exercise and eating plan and proud of myself for coming home feeling good and having my own back through this whole thing. Right, I’ve built more confidence because I did this all right. You can absolutely go on vacation and have fun and have an amazing time and stick to your plan.

Let’s make vacation more about the experiences of creating amazing memories with your family with your friends and relaxing and enjoying the outdoors and the adventures and creating all these experiences that will last, that’ll stay with you for a lifetime. Let’s make our vacation more about that and less about how much sugar we’re gonna eat. You know?

Because is that really the key to a vacation? Is that the most important thing for you? I’m going to say no, it’s eating and drinking your way into oblivion is not the purpose of the vacation. Right? It’s the reset, recharge, you know? Come back feeling rested and refreshed and good about yourself. Okay. All right.

Well, I hope you got something out of this episode today. If you did, I would love it if you would share it with a friend. And I hope you take a vacation soon. And I hope you enjoy it. I hope you decide ahead of time, who you want to be when you come home. Alright, 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.

47. How to Handle the Holidays

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Next week is Thanksgiving and that marks the beginning of the holiday season here in the U.S. The holidays are a time to gather with loved ones, give thanks for all that we have, and of course, eat …

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Podcast Transcript

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

Hey there, and welcome to episode number 47 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I want to talk about how to handle the holidays. Next week is Thanksgiving. And that marks the beginning of the official holiday season here in the US.

And the holidays are a time to gather with loved ones and give thanks for all that we have. And of course eat and drink ourselves into oblivion. Right? Okay, maybe that’s just me. So today, I want to offer some practical tips to help you handle the holidays. So you don’t roll into 2021 hating yourself and looking like Frosty the Snowman.

But first, if you are enjoying this podcast, please come check out our Facebook community. The Running Lean community on Facebook is a positive energetic, fun group of like minded runners who share goals and get through challenges together. I’ve got a big challenge that starts on Thanksgiving Day.

It’s called running through the holidays, we’re going to be running our way from Thanksgiving Day all the way through New Year’s Day, there’s going to be a lot of encouragement, a lot of support for each other. Listen, this can be a very stressful time of the year for a lot of people. And running is an amazing way to help relieve stress.

So we want to run our way through the holidays. So we can roll into 2021 Like a boss. Okay. So come check out the Facebook group, join us for the running through the holidays challenge, I’m going to be talking all about it, explaining how it works, what the quote unquote rules are, and all that stuff on Sunday. So come check us out love to have you in the group.

Okay, let’s talk about how we are going to handle the holidays. So most people, this is what happens when most people get to this time of the year. And they just don’t have any kind of plan for getting through the holidays in one piece, so to speak, okay. So this was always me, I would always roll into this time of the year and be like, it was kind of the off season.

So I might do a fall marathon. And so that would be like late October, early November, something like that. And then unrolling into this time of the year wouldn’t be running as much. And you think about how much time there is between Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s Day. It’s like 37 days. And those 37 days, it’s like hey, I’m going to go ahead and just do whatever the heck I feel like.

I’m going to eat whatever I want, drink whatever I want, whatever. And just party my face off and eat my face off for 37 straight days. So, you know there’d be holiday gatherings, a holiday family time, you know, shopping gift buying all this stuff, right? And I would just tell myself, hey, this is just, it’s the holidays. So I’m just gonna eat whatever I want. I deserve all this, I earned it. I’ve worked hard to share you know doing all this running. It’s the offseason, I’m just gonna let my hair down so to speak, and just eat whatever I feel like and we all do this.

Okay, this is a very common thing. A lot of people do this. No plan. Just feel like they can just do whatever they want. And then they roll into the new year and can’t understand why they gained five or 10 pounds.

And I did this like all the time and I couldn’t figure out why I keep doing this? Why do I always gateway this time of the year? And I just used this excuse. I used the holidays as an excuse to just stuff myself like a Thanksgiving turkey. You know, I got into this kind of mode, this end of the year where I was just like f it, I got into f it mode, okay?

It’s the holidays f it, it’s Thanksgiving Day f it, it’s the day after Thanksgiving f it, I deserve all this, f it. It’s, you know, two weeks before Christmas, like, I just keep saying f it, I was in f it mode. And you know what that’s gonna get you, when you’re, when you’re in f it mode, constantly, your whole attitude just kind of sucks.

And you’re just going to go off the rails. You know, if you’re trying to stick to some kind of food plan, you’re trying not to blow up like a Thanksgiving turkey, during the holidays, and you’re in f it mode all the time. That is a terrible combination, you won’t stick to your plan.

So that was me, I would do this every year. And then come January would be like, okay, now I’m going to start getting serious about this. But then I’m like, starting from a negative, you know, I’m starting from this place of like, well, now I gotta, I gotta lose the 10 pounds I gained here in the last couple of months.

And I also, you know, you know, maybe another 20 pounds over as I’m up 30 pounds now. So it just sets you up for disaster, it sets you up for failure, you know. And I want to tell you something, this is all normal. And it’s just your brain doing what it does. This is your, it’s your thinking, it’s the way you’re thinking and the way you’re feeling.

And you can change all of it. I’m going to offer some tips for how to get through the holidays here. But I just want you to understand this is very, very important to understand that your brain is always trying to seek pleasure and avoid pain. And when we get to this time of the year, we get very stressed out. And we don’t want to feel stressed out.

So we want to avoid that that kind of pain that we’re experiencing the pain of stress, the pain of having to you know, having family over or going to someone’s house, you know, and visiting with family or preparing all these meals or buying all these gifts, or whatever we have to do is time of the year.

It can be very stressful and cause a lot of stress and anxiety. And that’s perceived pain. And we want to avoid pain. That’s our kind of default, we want to avoid pain. We want to seek pleasure. And we go to things like food to do that. Okay, so this is just normal. This is the way your brain is kind of wired, okay, but you don’t have to just operate in default mode, though.

You don’t have to just, you know, succumb to these desires to eat all the crap and overeat and just binge out on sugar for 37 straight days. You don’t have to do that. Okay? I know. But you’re saying well, but it’s the holidays. So can’t we just live a little? You can. You can, you get to decide what you want to do.

But don’t go into this expecting that you’re going to like maintain your weight or lose five pounds with that kind of an attitude. Because if your expectations are, oh, I want to lose five pounds between now and the end of the year. But you eat like a maniac for 37 straight days, that’s not going to work. That’s not reality.

Okay, so just understand that your brain is there trying to protect you. And it’s trying to say, hey, we want to avoid this pain when avoiding stress eating makes us feel better. So let’s just do that. Let’s just eat all the things and just feel good now. But I want to drop a little bit of truth on you here.

Because when we talk about the holidays, and we talk about you know, we use the holidays as an excuse to overeat and to over consume and to binge out over drink all these things. What we’re actually talking about, how many holidays are there? There’s like, three holidays, right? There’s Thanksgiving Day, there’s Christmas, and there’s New Year’s Day.

Now you could actually argue that Christmas Eve might be a holiday or New Year’s Eve or something like that. So maybe four. Okay, and there might be a couple of parties in there. So maybe five, maybe six, we’re talking like five or six days out of 37 days. But what we’re saying is it’s the holidays, so I’m just going to eat and drink my way into oblivion and what?

No, we’re just talking about a handful of days here actually, and a handful of days that you can manage if you get your mind right. Okay. Your brain is always looking for an excuse to get what it wants. Your brain is always looking for an excuse to eat the sugar until you just give in. You missed out on sugar.

Sugar is like so addictive, you know, and your brain is gonna go, you know what, it’s the holidays, eat all the sugar, you’re gonna feel so good look at that plate of cookies over there, just eat all of them, you know? Good, that’s gonna feel good.

So just notice your brain is doing this, okay? And here’s the thing, I guarantee you that your brain is not thinking about eating a bunch of turkey, or green beans, your brain doesn’t go to this place of craving, you know, normal food. What I say is like normal food, okay?

You get fixated on pie. You get fixated on cookies, on sweet potato pie, on mashed potatoes, all the carbs, all the the alcohol, the sweet stuff, the sugar, that is what you’re thinking about. And I guarantee that that’s the kind of stuff that you will binge out on. If you don’t understand what’s happening. All those foods are super delicious. Yes, but they also make us feel good.

They release these chemicals in our body that makes us feel good. The more concentrated the carbohydrate is, the more good it feels, you know, and we love this. Even thinking about a pile of Christmas cookies right now. Just think about that. Really imagine them, smell them. Imagine what it would taste like, I guarantee you right now, you’re starting to get fixated on these cookies and your mouth is starting to water and you’re starting to crave these cookies like you started once you start thinking about them. It’s like I’ve got to have cookies now. I guarantee you that you’re doing that and I have to apologize for doing this to you.

But this is what our brains do, we start thinking about how amazing this is going to taste. And for me, it’s always like pecan pie with whipped cream. Oh my god, I’m starting to like salivate just thinking about pecan pie. It’s like, so decadent and so rich.

And when that sugar hits you, because that is just like pure sugar, right? Oh my god, it feels so good. And then so that’s just thinking about it, and we start to like, have these crazy cravings for it. But once you actually start eating it, you cannot stop. And that’s the other part of it.

So there’s this like mental fixation, there’s mental craving that we get. And then there’s this physical craving that we get once we start eating it, we cannot stop, we will binge out on pie and cake and pecan pie and apple pie and all this stuff.

Whereas you won’t do the same thing with like turkey, right? You’re not gonna like I just can’t wait to binge out on, I’m gonna eat the whole turkey myself. No, man, you can’t do that. You just can’t do it. Your body has these natural whatever you call it, the sensors, like there’s these sensors in your body that say stop eating, you’re full.

We don’t have those same sensors for carbohydrates, though. So once we start eating them, we cannot stop, that feels so good. And we don’t have these things that are telling our brain to stop eating them. Okay, so just understand that this is all what your brain is telling you but it’s not necessarily the truth.

Your brain might be telling you, you have to eat a whole pecan pie yourself. But that’s really not the truth. You don’t have to do that. And like I was saying, like you probably don’t get fixated on just eating something like turkey and green beans. You just don’t do that. Right?

But you can eat a lot of food a lot of like non carb type food and get pretty full but then you’ll still eat tons of pie. But if I were to tell you like when you’re full hey, eat a bunch more turkey. You’d be like no way I can’t. There’s no possible way I could eat any more turkey but I guarantee you, you can eat half a pie. At least I can.

I’m hoping you can relate to some of this because if this is just me, then I’m in trouble. No, I know we can all relate to this stuff. Here’s the other thing I have to make sure you understand and that I want to make sure I’m communicating this well. I am not saying you cannot enjoy Thanksgiving dinner. I am not saying you should not eat the pie. Like my friend Katie says, she says, eat the damn pie. And I love that. Because if that’s what you want to do, then you should do that.

If you’re eating your grandma’s famous pumpkin pie with whipped cream on it is going to bring you joy, and you want that to be a part of your Thanksgiving, then absolutely do that. But I just want you to do it in a way that’s intentional, I want you to do it in a way that you’ve, you’ve planned it, and that you feel good about your decision for eating that. And that you have your own back.

I don’t want you to say, you know what, I’m not eating any dessert, I’m not going to do it, I’m just, I’m off of sugar, I don’t want to do it, it’s gonna like really ruin everything for me, and then do it. And then just give in in the moment and do it because then you’re just going to feel like crap, and you’re gonna beat yourself up, you’re gonna feel guilty, and you and you’re just gonna, like hate yourself, you do not want to go through the holidays, hating yourself.

You don’t want to spend Thanksgiving dinner, thinking that you’re missing out on something good, and you can’t have anything that’s good. And you’re deprived and you can’t have certain things and woe is me, everybody else is enjoying themselves. And I can’t enjoy myself because that attitude sucks. And that’s just going to keep you feeling miserable. And that’s going to make you take terrible actions.

And you’re probably just going to give in, oh, you know what, screw it, I deserve this. So what I’m saying here is whatever you decide whether it’s, you know, I’m just not eating sugar, you could always bring your own like, sugar free dessert or something. That’s what I do. And I love it, love of it. And sometimes I just eat the sugar laden stuff too. And I love that.

But whatever you decide, do it with intention, go into it with a plan, and a purpose. And then stick to your plan. So we’re going to talk about that in just a minute. So I want you guys to enjoy the holidays. And I want you to do it in a way that is intentional, that feels good to you.

That’s honest, that’s authentic. And you’re not doing it in a way where you’re just beating yourself up for 37 straight days. Because that’s terrible. That’s just a terrible way to go through the holidays. Okay.

So here are some tips that I have for you for handling the holidays. So you don’t look like or feel like a stuffed turkey by the first of the year. So the first one is this, the first thing I want you to do is set your intention for the holidays.

How do you want to show up on January one? What is your vision for yourself? On January one, how do you want to feel about yourself? How do you want to look? Do you want to be the same as you are right now? Do you want to feel the same about yourself as you do right now? Maybe you want to get five pounds leaner? Or maybe you’re somebody that’s like you know, I’m okay gaining a few pounds.

Decide what you want to do now, set that intention for yourself now. Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to maintain weight? Or do you want to gain weight between now and the first of the year? Because the choice is yours. But decide now what you’re going to do and be honest with yourself.

Okay, so let’s say you want to lose weight, let’s say that’s your intention, I’m going to lose weight, I’m going to just continue sticking to my plan. And I’m going to try to keep losing weight. It might be, you know, a pound or two a week. So you know, I might lose, you know, five to 10 pounds.

And if that is your goal, and you’re all in on that goal, then awesome. Like, hats off to you like, awesome job. Just stick to it. Just do what you’ve been doing. Stick to your plan. So if you want to lose weight during the holidays, you can do that. It’s up to you. It just means that you’re going to have to get your mind right around some of these situations that you’re going to find yourself in.

You may not go all out on the deserts at Thanksgiving and Christmas and all this stuff. You may not be participating in the Christmas cookie bake-a-thon, if that’s something that would be challenging for you. Or you can do it and just know that you’re going to have these cravings and how to deal with them. And I talk to my clients all the time about how to deal with these kinds of cravings, and how to get through stuff like that.

Because, listen, we can’t always control our circumstances, but sometimes you can. So if you want to lose weight, you’re just gonna have to, like, stick to your plan, you’re gonna have to have the right mindset around it. And, and you can do that, but just go all in on that plan, okay?

What if you want to maintain weight during the holidays? So that might mean that you’re just gonna like, stay where you are. And that might mean you can have a few glasses of wine here and there, it might mean that you can have some exceptions to your plan, you can eat some pie here and there, you can eat the cookies here and there.

But it doesn’t mean going off the rails, it doesn’t mean like, really binging out on stuff, you know, you’re just going to continue kind of doing what you’ve been doing. But maybe you’re adding in a little bit more of the of the treats and the sugar and stuff like that. Maybe an extra helping of mashed potatoes with gravy, I love mashed potatoes, so good, isn’t it? Oh my gosh, like lots of butter in there and gravy.

And then let’s say you want to gain weight during the holidays. Now, you might think, who would want to do that? Well, if you’re the kind of person that’s like, you know what I want to really go all out and enjoy myself. I don’t mind if I gain five pounds during the holidays, if that’s what you want to do, again, go all in on that decision.

That might mean you drink more.It might mean you’re eating more and you’re participating in the cookie bake-a-thon. It means you’re like eating double desserts, you know, whatever it is you want to do. Go all in on that decision. Okay? Have your own back no matter what you decide, because there’s no right answer here.

It’s whatever you want to do for you, okay, but what happens is, most people say, I’m just going to like, I’m going to, I’m going to be really good this year, I’m not going to go off the rails, I’m going to stick to my plan, I’m going to keep losing weight, and then they they gain weight, and they can’t figure out why.

And they just didn’t go all in on their decision to lose, okay, so whatever you want to do lose, maintain gain, totally fine. Just be good with that decision. Have your own back and go all in on that. Okay, so that’s my first tip. Set your intention, decide what you want to do ahead of time, who do you want to show up as on January 1.

The second tip I have for you on how to handle the holidays is plan ahead and stick to your plan. This is like the most important thing you can do if you want to change anything in your life, but it’s so important when it comes to eating and losing weight. Or even you know, if you’re the kind of person who is doing something like maybe training for a half marathon or a marathon.

So what happens when you want to train for a marathon? You put together a training plan, you write it all down, you put it on your calendar, and then you do what when that day comes, you run those eight miles or those 16 miles or whatever it says on your calendar, right? That’s what it means to plan ahead, and then stick to your plan.

But when it comes to things like oh, I want to lose 40 pounds. And what that’s going to require is you changing what you eat, maybe when you eat. And instead of writing that down, and then working the plan and sticking to it. You’re just kind of like, oh, I’ll just kind of figure it out as I go. And it doesn’t work. And you’re like, oh, this, this diet doesn’t work or this eating plan doesn’t work?

No, it’s just that you just didn’t plan ahead and you didn’t stick to it. That’s all. It’s that simple. I know it’s simple. It’s not easy, but it’s that simple. So include in your plan, make sure you’re including in your plan, the stuff that you want to eat.

So let’s say you’re planning ahead for the holidays, right? And so you might work out a plan for a week at a time. You might write down in your journal or on a calendar, something like that. When you have holiday gatherings, parties, whatever it is. You have a written plan of what you’re going to do, when you’re going to eat, how much you’re going to eat on those occasions.

So you’re planning ahead, you’re using that prefrontal cortex of your brain that planning, cognitive part of your brain that’s responsible for thinking ahead and planning ahead. You want to use that part of your brain because you don’t want to use the primitive part of your brain into the make decisions in the moment because you typically make bad decisions in the moment.

So we plan ahead, we write down what we’re going to eat at least 24 hours in advance. So I know what I’m going to do tomorrow.

Right, this is a great, great tip, especially for things like Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, whatever it is, the day before Thanksgiving, make sure you know what you’re going to do for that day. And if your plan is to eat some pie, and eat the mashed potatoes, and you know, whatever, write it down, it’s totally fine.

Whatever you want to put on your plan is up to you. If you want to include a glass of wine, put that in there. Okay, just like with your running, plan it out ahead of time, and then stick to your plan. This is how you like, create good habits, this is how you build trust with yourself. This is how you build self confidence. If you plan ahead and you stick to your plan, you’re gonna feel so much better about yourself when you do it this way, as opposed to planning ahead and then just saying f it.

Because that’s the, you’re just gonna feel terrible about yourself, you let yourself down, you’re gonna feel guilty, you’re gonna beat yourself up, we don’t want to do that we want to feel good about ourselves, about ourselves and about our decisions. So have your own back, write, write down what you’re going to do, and then stick to that plan.

When it comes to food, remember, you know, it’s very compelling these foods, you know, especially he’s looking at that pile of Christmas cookies, or the table with the five different pies that you can eat after dinner, like it can be very compelling, and feel very urgent and feel like, you know, you get these intense cravings for that stuff in the moment.

But if you’ve planned ahead and said, I’m going to eat a small piece of pecan pie, and a small piece of pumpkin pie, and I’m going to be good with that, then do that. Stick to that and you’re gonna feel so much better about yourself. Okay. So that’s my second tip is to plan ahead, stick to your plan. And include the good stuff, include the stuff that you want to eat, the stuff that you love, if that’s what you want to do.

Tip number three is don’t show up at these holiday dinners, or meals, like starving and dehydrated. Because I’m going to tell you, if you show up feeling super hungry, hangry and super dehydrated, what you’re going to do is you’re going to as soon as you get there, you’re just going to be shoving food in your face and drinking whatever’s available to you.

Okay, so the suggestion is, for any kind of holiday event, to make sure you eat beforehand, like eat your regular breakfast or lunch, whatever you would normally do, do that. Make sure you’re getting good fats and protein, because that stuff kind of keeps you feeling full for a while.

And then when you show up at this event, you’re not going to feel like you got to eat your face off, you’re not going to feel like super dehydrated, drink plenty of water too, this is so important. Most people don’t drink enough water during holidays and stuff like that and family gatherings.

And what you end up doing is drinking a lot more alcohol and then when you’re drinking a lot of alcohol, you sort of lower your willpower and you start making bad decisions and that’s when f it mode gets activated and right.

So if you’re super thirsty, you tend to drink more alcohol. So if that’s something you want to avoid, my suggestion is to drink more water to make sure you’re just staying hydrated, okay? And whether or not you want to drink alcohol is totally fine. It’s up to you know, I don’t have any strong opinions either way.

Just know that as you drink more and you feel more drunk, you know you feel more relaxed, a little more loosey goosey. You get a little more loosey goosey with your eating plan and you tend to kind of get into that mode where you’re just like screw it, I deserve this, this is awesome. I’m enjoying myself. I’m just gonna eat whatever it’s fine.

So you’ve tended to make terrible decisions when you drink too much. So just make sure that you’re not coming to these events feeling super super hungry. Eat your normal breakfast or lunch and then when you do show up, you won’t be just, you know voraciously, digging into the piles of nuts and chips and all this other stuff, okay, so don’t show up super hungry or dehydrated.

Number four, and this one is so important. These are all important, but this one is one that we really have a hard time doing on a daily basis. But even more so during the holidays, especially Thanksgiving, and that is to don’t eat to discomfort. This was a big aha moment for me when I started losing weight.

Finally, for the last time, I learned that I am an overeater. I tend to eat a lot of food. And I always justify it because I’m a runner, hey, I run a lot, so I need to eat a lot more. But I would eat until I was uncomfortable, basically at every meal.

And at the holidays, it was way worse. I can remember Thanksgivings where I literally would stuf myself so much that I felt so miserable. I couldn’t even function after dinner. I just had to like go sit on the couch and just veg. And I felt terrible. I felt sick to my stomach. Is that how you want to go through the holidays? I say no.

There’s this comedian. And I don’t know who said this. But basically, he’s an overweight guy. And he’s like, “Yeah, I tend to overeat a lot. He’s like, the meal isn’t over when I’m full, the meal’s over when I hate myself.” And I think about this all the time, because that was true for me.

I would eat until I hated myself, I felt so bad about eating so much food. And I just don’t do that anymore. I’ve learned how to eat to a place where I’m comfortably full. And I use this tool with my clients called the hunger scale.

And it’s basically a scale of 0 to 10. How hungry are you? How full are you? And when you get to like a plus two plus three, on that fullness meter, then you just stop eating. So you’re kind of pleasantly full but not uncomfortable. Because as soon as you get uncomfortable, you’ve eaten too much.

Our bodies are not designed to eat that much food when you get uncomfortable. That’s because we have these sensors in our stomachs that sense. They’re like stretchers. Stretch sensors, they determine how much food we’re putting in our stomach. And when they get to a certain point, they say stop eating.

And I would not stop at that point, I would start to feel that uncomfortable. And I would just keep going and keep going and keep going. And that’s what made me hate myself, as it made me miserable. Okay, so I’m not talking about like, counting calories, or you know, tracking everything in an app or you don’t have to get that detailed with this kind of stuff.

You don’t have to get super diligent about counting everything that you eat or weighing your food or anything like that, because that can be very, very stressful for a lot of people. But I do suggest really getting in tune with how your body feels, how much food does your body actually need?

When do you start to feel full, and then don’t eat beyond that feeling. Because when you do, you’re eating too much. And if your goal is to maintain or lose weight during the holidays, but you keep overeating at every meal. You’re not going to recycle I’m just going to tell you right now.

And like I said, when I first started talking about this subject of not eating to discomfort, that was the game changer for me when I was able to start losing weight that I stopped eating to the point of making myself feel terrible. I stopped eating too are uncomfortable. I stopped eating to where I hated myself.

Okay, now I’m eating enough to where I feel satisfied. But I don’t feel uncomfortable. This is a game changer. I guarantee you. Okay, so do not eat till you feel miserable. That’s not healthy. It’s just not good for you.

And then my fifth tip is just to remember what the holidays are all about, and that they’re not all about the food. For me, the holidays are about giving thanks for everything good in my life, obviously especially Thanksgiving, right? But it’s a chance for me reflect on this past year, and all the things that I’m grateful for.

You know, the people in my life, the abundance that I have in my life, I’m so grateful for everything, for being able to sit here and do these podcasts and share this with you guys, for the Facebook group for my coaching clients, for my membership group, all these people that are changing their lives for the better because they’re changing their mindset.

They’re changing their diet, they’re changing their relationship with food, they’re changing their relationship with their bodies, and with running and all this stuff. And I get to do this with people, I get to help people. I’m so grateful for all this stuff. And these holidays are a time to celebrate our accomplishments over there.

It’s time to celebrate with family and with friends, it’s time to make connections, it’s time to be together and enjoy that feeling of kinship and togetherness. It’s time to share love, and laughter and have fun together and play games and make lasting memories together. 20 years from now, you’re not going to remember how many helpings of mashed potatoes you ate.

Unless you eat like 12 helpings and you’ll probably remember, but you’re always going to remember that time you spent with your family. Like I remember, honestly, like I remember so many Thanksgivings with my family sitting around the table when all of us were together.

And seeing my dad’s face and seeing him smile. And just looking around the table. And he was so grateful to have this amazing family. With these amazing kids. Especially me, I was really probably the most amazing of all. I’m just kidding.

But he just was like, would look around us in like, raise his glass and be like, I love all you, I’m so thankful for all of you. This is so amazing. You know, let’s all give thanks. And I just remember that connection in that family togetherness that we shared. And it was so amazing.

That’s what I remember, I don’t remember, you know how many pieces of pie I ate, or you know, my mom always made these amazing, this amazing Thanksgiving dinner and all the traditional stuff. And it was always great. But I remember laughing with my family.

I remember sitting around the table, and me and my brothers, we get going and my sister we just start laughing like crazy. That’s the kind of stuff that I remember. And my mom shaking her head and just going like you guys are terrible. Oh my gosh. We’d always kind of take things a little too far.

But that’s the stuff I remember. And it was so fun. Remember what the holidays are all about. Don’t focus so much on what you’re eating, or what you’re not eating, or what you get to eat or what you don’t get to eat because you get to decide all of that. Okay? So set your intentions.

Here’s, here’s our list of tips to get you through the holidays here. Set your intention, do you want to lose, maintain or gain weight it just go all in on that decision. Okay. Number two, plan ahead and stick to your plan. Just know what you’re going to do at least 24 hours in advance and stick to it. That’s the important part: sticking to it. Number three, don’t show up starving, don’t show up dehydrated. Eat a regular meal beforehand, make sure you’re drinking plenty of water. Number four, don’t eat so much that you’re miserable, you’re uncomfortable. And then number five, remember what the holidays are all about. Connection, togetherness. Make memories.

It doesn’t have to be all about the food. It can be a little bit about the food, but it doesn’t have to be the main focus. Okay. Those are my tips to help you get through the holidays. Come on over to the Running Lean community on Facebook because we’re going to do this amazing running challenge. We’re going to be running every day from Thanksgiving Day through New Year’s Day.

And then I’m going to do some weekly coaching in the group to help you stay on track. We’re going to be talking about some goal setting for the new year. weight loss goals, setting running goals, all kinds of stuff. Cool. I cannot wait to see you guys there in the group.

And if I don’t talk to you beforehand, have an amazing Thanksgiving with your family and friends. And as always, lots of love to each and every one of you keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles or starving yourself and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a lien running machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets to losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become lean running machine.

29. The Ultimate Guide to Fruit

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Fruit is one of those things we all just assume is good for us, right? Everyone agrees we should be eating more fruits and vegetables. But should we? We check the label on something and we’re like, …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is the Running Mind podcast.

Well, hey there, and welcome to episode number 29 of the Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray and I am the weight loss coach for runners. And I just noticed that the Running Mind podcast is currently ranked number 31 in the iTunes podcast directory in the sports category.

And that is really, really cool. It’s right up there with like a couple of CBS Sports and fantasy football, podcast and ESPN podcast. So I am very humbled by this, I’m very grateful. That’s really cool. It’s not something I’m trying to do. It’s just, I think this message is resonating with a lot of you guys out there. So thank you for checking it out.

And if you have a chance, if you want to leave a review in iTunes, do that. I would be really eternally grateful for that just to say hey, you know, love it, give me you know, some stars, whatever you think is good. I’d appreciate it. But that’s really cool. We’re getting up there.

Okay, so today I want to talk about fruit, we’re talking about all things. Fruit. Fruit is one of those things that we just assume is good for us. And we should be eating a lot of fruit. Eat your fruit and vegetables. That’s the message we get told all the time. But should we be eating all those fruits?

You know, we check the labels on something. And we’re like, Hey, check this out. It’s got fruit juice in it, this must be healthy. But is it really healthy? How much fruit should we be eating? And what role does fruit play in this whole long distance running thing? You know, what about all those vitamins and essential nutrients that we need in fruit? Don’t we need those? Does fruit help us or hurt us if we’re trying to lose weight?

So all these questions I’m going to be answering today in the ultimate guide to fruit. And if you haven’t already, be sure to come and check us out on Facebook, we got this really engaging community on Facebook, the Running Lean community. It’s a group that goes hand in hand with this podcast.

And right now we’re in the middle of July. And we are doing a no sugar challenge for the month of July. And people have been getting a lot of great results from that. And it’s been a lot of fun. The questions that people are asking are great. The results people are getting have been great.

People are actually saying they’re losing weight just by cutting out the sugar, which is amazing. I mean, that’s kind of the way it works. I know it’s crazy, right? But you know, people are asking questions like what kinds of fat should I be eating? You know, how do I fuel my long runs without all the sugar or how much fruit should I be eating? Hey, we’re going to be talking about that today.

And the best part is the community aspect of it. So we all support each other, encourage each other and it’s fun. And here’s a recent comment from someone in the Facebook group from Libby. She says, “Your Facebook Lives and your podcasts are a bit blessed. Your Facebook Lives and podcasts are packed full of information I never knew. And I’ve done a crapload of challenges. Thank you for giving me skill power.”

Love that. Thank you Libby. Thanks for being a part of the group. You are amazing. You’re doing all the work I’m just over here yep on my gums and barely able to even form a sentence apparently. But there are many amazing people just like Libby in the Facebook group. So come check us out. It’ll be fun. Just go to Facebook and search for Running Lean community. Okay.

Also something is very important want to talk to you guys about which is that our next masterclass begins in just a few weeks here. So starting Monday, August 3, the next Running Lean weight loss masterclass for runners begins.

It’s a six week intensive training to teach you exactly how to become a fat-adapted runner, which just means getting off the sugar and running on fat which you can run on forever. It’s an amazing, transformational program. You will become leaner, you will get stronger, you will learn how to be able to run faster, and run longer.

You’re going to learn how to change your whole relationship with food, what you eat, how you eat, and running is going to be fun again for you. And if you want more information about that just go to innerfiretribe.com/masterclass.

I only accept a small number of people for each class but I want to keep it small and intimate. So if you want in on this go to innerfiretribe.com/masterclass and apply you have to apply for this program. It’s not something I just, you know, sell. It’s something that I want to talk to you about and see if it’s a good fit for you. Okay, so before it sells out though, definitely go over to innerfiretribe.com/masterclass.

Okay, let’s get into fruit, The Ultimate Guide to Fruit, that’s we’re talking about today. So first of all, what is fruit? Fruits are seed bearing the seed bearing part of a flowering plant. So it’s the structure of a flowering plant that actually holds the seeds for that plant. So fruit is how flowering plants spread their seeds.

Fruits are typically semi sweet, they’re delicious. They encourage animals to eat them. And since they don’t really digest the seeds, the seeds are then dispersed by the animals. And then the plant has successfully reproduced out in the wild. So that’s the purpose of fruit. The purpose of fruit is to propagate the plant species, okay.

They’re delicious because we want to encourage animals like us to eat them. And so what are some of the different types of fruits so, some of the fruits that you can get would be pom fruits and these are like apples and pears. These are different like fruit categories.

Okay, another category would be citrus so we know all about that lemons, limes, oranges, grapefruits, tangerines, clementines and so on. Then we have melons which are like watermelons, cassava melons, honeydew, cantaloupe, those are all the melons.

There are stone fruits, otherwise known as drupes, which are peaches, nectarines, cherries, qualms, apricot, mango is a stone fruit. Coconut is actually considered a stone fruit. And then we have berries, berries or blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, loganberries, strawberries, gooseberries, cranberries.

And then here are some that I did not know were berries, tomato is actually a berry, avocados are considered a berry, bananas are considered a berry, grapes, cucumbers, eggplants, papaya, and those are all berries and then pineapple, which is considered a whole group of berries that have been fused together. Which is fascinating. So berries can, you know consists of a huge swath of different types of fruits.

Okay, so those are like all kinds of different types of fruits and there’s many many more I’m just like going over some of the high level ones here. But let’s get into kind of the history of fruit so the fruit that we know today is very, very different from what it used to be.

Fruit has been modified extensively, really just in the past few 100 years and it’s been modified to make it sweeter you know. Fruit has been selectively bred to contain more sugar and to make it denser, and include more of the sugary part of the fruit itself. Okay, so fruit didn’t used to be so sweet. It didn’t used to be so dense and it didn’t used to be so big either.

So fruit used to be pretty sour, some of it kind of bitter, and a lot smaller. So some of the very interesting research I did looking into this was some of the way the fruit has evolved over time. So for instance, the peach you know, just a few hundred years ago, peaches were like the size of a cherry, very small.

And the stone inside was you know, rather large compared to the size of it, even larger than a cherry seed would be. And so there was very little flesh and they were somewhat bitter. And then you know, over years we’ve bred them into what we know today, which is juicy and a very sweet thing, right?

Bananas are another one. Bananas used to be these short, stubby little things, and full of these very large seeds with very little edible flesh on the inside and they weren’t super sweet. The bananas of ancient times were way different than what we know today. Like we selectively bred these things to be elongated. And for, you know, the seeds that have become teeny tiny, and they are incredibly sweet.

Now, watermelon is another good one. So watermelon in the old days used to have a lot of this white inedible structure on the inside. So if you cut up on a watermelon, you know, today, it’s like all red, right? And then you got some black seeds in there. But in the old days, you could open a watermelon and there was like mostly this white structure with these small little pockets of edible red flesh, and lots of large seeds. So very, very different than what we know today. O

ne of the most fascinating ones, though, is corn. So the corn kernels are actually considered fruits. And corn was first domesticated, like 7000 BC. So corn has been one of those things we’ve been dorking around with for like thousands of years, literally. Okay.

But back in those days, corn kinda looked like a green bean, it was like an elongated little thing, it was about the size of your finger, maybe your little finger like really kind of narrow and long. And it had like five to ten of these hard kernels that were dry, then they tasted like a raw potato.

So they were like very, very different, kind of the starchy fruit or vegetable back in the day. But very different than what we know today. The average year of corn today has around 800 kernels. And we’ve, you know, genetically modified this corn over the thousands of years to contain tons of water and tons of sugar.

So corn is incredibly sweet. And obviously, they use it for all kinds of things now. But those are just some examples of how fruit is not fruit today, it’s not what it used to be. And I mentioned all this because the way we evolved to eat fruit was very different than what we’re eating today.

The fruit they were eating just a couple of hundred years ago had way less sugar in it. Okay, the high sugar content in fruit is a relatively new thing. It’s like a modern invention. It’s not unlike Coca Cola.

And here’s the thing, the food industry is going to do whatever it takes to sell more food. And they’re very good at this. So they do whatever they can to make food as pleasurable as possible. To the point of, you know, creating something like that peach we’re talking about, which is so sweet and so juicy and so large, where just a few hundred years ago, it was just a tiny little thing that wasn’t that sweet, but they make this food, they modify it until it becomes so desirable that we crave it like a drug.

You know, we do and, and fruit is basically you know, it’s got a lot of sugar in it. And so when you tell somebody like hey, you may want to like cut back on how much fruit you’re eating. It’s like saying Christmas has been canceled this year. You know, people don’t want to hear that, you know, they love their morning smoothie with their strawberries and banana in there.

Or, you know, they like their glass of orange juice or whatever. And here’s the thing, I’m always advocating for eating real food over anything processed, or anything modified. I want to eat real food the way we did, you know, even as early as a few hundred years ago.

You know, you can get into the whole debate about, you know, the Paleo thing and how we evolved over thousands of years. And there’s a lot of truth to that. And I do adhere to a lot of that as well. Like I believe that we evolved as humans to eat all kinds of different foods. And I think in the last couple of hundred years, we’ve changed so much.

The food has changed so much that we are no longer eating the food that we evolved to eat or eating something that is completely new and different and not always good. Okay, so I’m always advocating for eating real food over anything that’s been highly modified or heavily processed.

And I would say that fruit falls into this, you know, heavily modified category If I just do, so yeah, I’m canceling Christmas this year. Okay, so what about all that nutrition and food, Patrick? Don’t we need to eat fruit to get the nutrition that we need? An apple a day and all that, right?

Here’s the thing, most of the calories and fruit come from sugar. 5 grams to 20 grams of net carbs, or sugar is pretty typical and most fruit per hundred grams. Okay, so fruit is basically between 5% and 20% sugar. And this is not necessarily a good thing. It’s not terrible, but you know, it’s not like eating, you know, table sugar.

But you know, let’s say you eat five servings of fruit in a day, that’s roughly like a 16 ounce can of soda. If you follow this podcast, and you’re into this low carbohydrate, high fat kind of living, you probably don’t drink soda, I would imagine, I’m guessing. And so eating that much fruit is the equivalent of, you know, drinking a can of soda.

So I would say that the nutrition you’re getting from that is not going to be all that awesome. So what about the fiber? Well, fiber is often touted as one of the reasons why we need the fruit we need the fiber, right? But there’s lots of other sources of fiber, like we can get fiber from nuts and seeds and things like flaxseed meal and psyllium husk.

And then all sorts of vegetables like dark green veggies, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, dark leafy greens, like spinach, and kale, all kinds of ways of getting fiber. And here’s the one that people always throw out. They’re like, well, while we do have to eat fruit for the vitamin C, though, right?

It’s like no, you really don’t. You know, you’re not gonna get vitamin C deficient. Like, do you know anybody that has scurvy? No, I think we’re gonna be okay there. But there are tons of sources of vitamin C out there. Like from the animal kingdom like organ meats, like liver and kidney, huge source of vitamin C, tons of vegetable sources, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, spinach, tomatoes, peppers, like green peppers, red peppers, yellow peppers, cabbage, kale, all this stuff has tons of vitamin C.

And then the other essential vitamins that we need, as humans, you can get from things like meat, fish, eggs, dairy, and these are actually, these sources actually provide more essential vitamins than most fruits and vegetables. So you’re not going to miss out on, you know, vitamin C, you’re not gonna get scurvy, and don’t have to worry about that.

And you’re gonna get, you can get all the nutrition you need, with really not eating any fruit, if that’s the way you want to go. Some of the problems with fruit is like, number one is the sugar content, you know, especially when you take fruit and you turn it into juice. So that glass of orange juice that people drink in the morning, I’ve never fully understood that. It is like pure sugar. So let’s say you take an orange, you know, so you’ve got an orange, let’s say it’s a big, you know, juicy orange, and you peel that orange, let’s say you take four of those oranges.

And you say, here you go, eat these four oranges, I think people would have a hard time knocking back four oranges. Like it’d be hard to eat that and kind of fill you up, right, and you get the fiber and all this other stuff, you get the same sugar content or whatever. But you know, you get all that fiber, you’d be pretty full.

But if you take a glass of orange juice, which is like four to six oranges and the juice of four to six oranges, the sugar of four to six oranges without the fiber. People can knock that back in 10 seconds. No problem. And your body just doesn’t really see those calories, it doesn’t recognize those calories. And you know, it spikes your blood sugar like crazy.

Insulin goes up and you start storing fat, like it’s a bad thing. Like the the fruit juice is, is really bad. And so stay away from anything that says fruit juice, especially if you’re looking on ingredients and it says contains real fruit juice. You know, like they’re trying to tell you that this is healthy, but it’s the way they hide sugar.

They’re basically saying this contains sugar. And so they use the word fruit juice to make it sound healthy when all it is is just pure sugar. And since fruit contains so much sugar, it will increase your hunger just like eating any other carbohydrates. You know fruit is a carbohydrate. It’s a type of sugar. So, sugar turns on the hunger hormone ghrelin, like it doesn’t turn that off, like, so you’re going to be, your hunger is going to increase when you eat more fruit.

Eating a lot of fruit increases cravings for more sugar like it increases your sugar cravings, because it does this thing where it like kind of releases dopamine, it turns on that part of your brain that makes you feel good that’s kind of wired for addiction. And if you haven’t listened to my last podcast on whether or not sugar is addicting, definitely listen to that, because it’s pretty eye opening.

But you can get into this vicious cycle of eating fruit and then craving more sugar, whatever that looks like for you. More carbohydrates, and then you’re in that cycle of high insulin and all that eating a lot of fruit slows fat burning, because you can’t burn fat when sugar’s in your system.

So when your sugar is high, when you have a lot of glucose in your system, your body cannot access your fat for fuel. If you want to lose weight, you have to burn fat. And you can either burn one or the other, they don’t work simultaneously. So you got to blow through all that sugar. And then you can start losing, you know losing weight by burning the fat.

So eating a lot of fruit will slow down the fat burning, which will mean it will take longer for you to lose weight, if at all, you may even gain weight if you’re eating too much fruit. And then, of course, it takes longer to become fat-adapted. And if you want to become a fat-adapted runner, which is an amazing thing, let me tell you, this is like life changing, you’ve got to get the sugar out of your system, you cannot keep eating the sugar and the carbs, you just can’t.

And then the sugar makeup of fruit is very similar to drinking a can of Coca Cola. So Coke is like 50% glucose 50% fructose, that’s the ratio of glucose to fructose in that, and fruit is very similar. It’s like exactly the same, you know, it’s a one to one ratio of glucose fructose.

And just for comparison, like high fructose corn syrup is basically just a little bit higher. It’s like 55% fructose to 45% glucose, so it’s just a little bit higher. So for the most part, when you eat any type of sugar, any type of carbohydrate, your body kind of reacts the same way, whether it’s table sugar, high fructose corn syrup, french fries, or an apple, that sugar, the carbohydrate gets turned into glucose, your blood sugar goes up, insulin goes up, your body goes into this fat storage mode where it’s, you can only use so much of this glucose for energy. So stores most of us fat for use later. And then you start gaining weight.

And this is just the way our bodies work. You know, our bodies were not designed to eat that much sugar, they’re just not. We didn’t evolve over the last 10 or 50,000 years to eat this much sugar. You know, this is a new thing. So, again, it’s like if your goal is to lose weight, if your goal is to become a fat-adapted runner, then you’ve got to stop eating all the sugar.

And that includes fruit. And I know it just you know people love their fruit, they love their blueberries, they love their bananas. And I’m just telling you like, you got to choose one or the other. You can either eat their sugar or you can lose the weight, but it’s really, really hard to do both.

Okay, so what fruits are good and what foods are bad like this is probably the part you’ve been waiting for. Okay, so, in a simple, in the most simplest way here, like the best bets for you would be berries: strawberries, blackberries, raspberries. These are going to be fruits if you have to eat fruit, you want to you know go down that path.

Go ahead, eat some fruit. Stick with strawberries, blackberries, raspberries. Those are gonna be your best bet. The highest sugar content fruits or like the worst ones, the ones you should probably just stay away from would be things like apples, bananas, grapes, mango, kiwi, pear. All those are very high in sugar, and blueberries. I didn’t know this. But blueberries have about the same amount of sugar as pineapple pineapples, very high in sugar content too.

And if you guys are interested, I have a graphic that I will put on the show notes for this episode, which you’ll find at therunningmindpodcast.com/29. And I’m also going to share this graphic. I actually did share it already in the Facebook group of which fruits have you know how many carbs per 100 or grams, or whatever.

So it kind of breaks down which fruits are better to stick with and which ones you want to stay away from. But blueberries really surprised me because I’ve always heard the blueberries are like one of these low glycemic fruits, you know, and they’re fine. And so I was eating a lot of blueberries. And, and then I realized that it’s like basically eating pineapple, which is like one of the highest in sugar. So blueberries are actually not awesome.

Okay, strawberries are a good go to and this is what I do. So every now and then, I eat a little bit of strawberries. So I did cut up some strawberries, and I put a little dollop of this full fat, plain Greek yogurt on top and maybe throw a handful of macadamia nuts on there. And this feels like an indulgent, satisfying dessert.

You know, it’s got a little bit of sweetness, but not a lot. It’s not a lot of sugar content, it might have something like 10, or 12, net carbs of net carbs of sugar or whatever. It’s a, it’s mildly sweet and the fat in there, when I throw a little bit fat on there, it helps me to not overeat. And it actually can kind of reduce the glucose response a little bit.

And anytime I eat fruit, I do it with a meal. Or like right after a meal, I don’t do it as a snack. I don’t ever snack on anything, maybe once or twice a day. And that’s it. And then all eat this kind of thing, this little strawberry yogurt, macadamia nut, little treat, I’ll do this as like part of my quote unquote carb loading the night before a long run, where I might eat like 200 grams of carbs, which is not a lot.

But this helps me to, you know, it provides a little bit of glycogen. But it’s nutrient dense glycogen and, and nutrient dense carbs, which gives me the kind of glycogen that I want for a long run the next day. So I might eat a few sweet potatoes, wild rice, quinoa or something like that, that lasts longer. It’s slowly released. It’s not a ton of glucose.

So you’ll kind of burn through it quickly, and it’ll help you to maintain the fat-adaption. So if you’re one of those kinds of people that’s like, you know, I just have to have something for my long runs, I just have to have some sort of fuel for my long runs, then fruit is really not a terrible option.

You know, I would say it’s better than drinking Gatorade or sucking on all those gels, which are just pure sugar. So some options for you, if you have to take something on the long run would be like bananas, dates, oranges, grapes, like I’ve done all those things before, and it’s fine. But just keep in mind that when you do this, when you’re taking in the sugar while you’re out there running, you won’t be accessing your fat for fuel.

So you’re always going to have to, like keep taking more sugar basically, or more fruit or whatever it is that you’re doing. So, you know, let’s say you’re running a 50 miler,you’re gonna have to grab a banana at every aid station, you know, every couple of miles so that you can keep that sugar, keep your glucose levels tapped up, or else you’re going to kind of end up bonking.

And, and then eating this stuff, like while you’re running can cause GI issues with people too. So it’s better not to eat anything when you’re running. You know, if you can do it, you know, use your own fat for fuel. This is the whole thing about becoming fat-adapted and why it’s so amazing.

But when you have all this when you have to keep eating stuff while you’re running, your blood will move to the stomach to help in digestion and it moves away from your extremities where you want it. You want it in your legs and your arms. And you don’t need to waste all that energy digesting all these sugary fruits.

Actually fat and protein are better sources of fuel when you’re running, especially once you become fat-adapted. You know I’ve done 50K’s on nothing but almond butter. And it’s amazing. So the bottom line – fruit is not what it used to be. It’s changed a lot in like the just the last couple hundred years a lot more sugar. And it’s basically fruit is basically just like eating sugar now. Okay, so it is sugar.

Is fruit a real food? I would say no, I think it’s something that’s been highly modified recently. And I don’t think it’s something we’ve evolved to eat the way it is today. For the most part, you don’t really need it. You can get your vitamins and your fiber from better sources. If you do eat some fruit, just do it sparingly a little bit here and there. It’s fine. It’s kind of a nice treat every now and then if you do want something a little bit sweeter, that’s not too bad.

You can do something like I suggested with some strawberries and some Greek yogurt. And you can use fruit as part of your kind of carb loading that you do the night before a long run, which could help a little bit, I would stick with low sugar fruits like, you know the strawberries, blackberries, raspberries.

But here’s the most important thing, experiment, do it, try something and see if it works for you or not. If it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t change it up, but there’s only one way to find out. You know, the stuff I talk about on here is all suggestions. And it’s all up to you to kind of try and see what works for you.

So you might be one of those kinds of people that does really well by eating, you know, a lot of fruit on your long runs, and all through the week. And this is the way you do it, and it’s fine and you’re losing weight, you feel great, you’re super lean, you’re super fast. Awesome.

But if you’re one of those kinds of people that’s trying to lose weight, or you have a lot of GI issues or you know, you’re you’re just not feeling it, you can’t go as far as you used to be able to go or you want to try to, you know, complete this ultra run and you just can’t do it like, you know, cut it out and see what happens. You know, let’s, let’s stick with the path.

Okay, so experiment. See what works for you. There’s only one way to find out and that’s to try it, see what happens and then let me know. So join us over in the Facebook group, the Running Lean community on Facebook, and then remember, our next masterclass begins in just a couple of weeks, you’re going to learn exactly how to become a fat adapted runner in just six weeks time, you’ll lose weight, you’ll run faster, you’ll become a stronger runner, you’ll become bonk proof, you’d be able to run those long distances without ever having to worry about taking all this sugar or about bonking.

So to find out more about that just go to innerfiretribe.com/masterclass. Well, that’s all I got for you today. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends, keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are starving yourself, and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.

28. Is Sugar Addictive or Do We Just Act Like It Is?

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Sugar has been the subject of controversy since as far back as over 2,000 years ago when Hindu physicians wrote about sugar that it “promotes nutrition and corpulency” (meaning fatness or …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is the Running Mind podcast.

Hey there, and welcome to episode number 28 of the running mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m a weight loss coach for runners. And today I want to talk about whether or not sugar is addictive, or do we just act like it is? Sugar has been the subject of controversy since as far back as over 2000 years ago, there was a Hindu physician who wrote in I think it was like 78 AD.

And he wrote this, “Sugar promotes nutrition and corpulent c.” which is just an Old World word that means fatness or obesity. So he wrote that, “Sugar promotes nutrition and fatness, basically.” So we’ve known about this issue for quite some time now. Today, I think we all can agree that eating sugar, especially too much sugar, is bad idea.

Yet, the average American is consuming around 150 pounds of sugar a year, it’s crazy, we find it almost impossible to just say no to our favorite sugary treat. Willpower just doesn’t work here, it seems. So the question on the table is, is sugar addictive? Should sugar be treated more like a drug than a nutrient? Do we even need to eat sugar? I’m going to get into all of this, in this episode of the podcast is chock full of goodness here.

Which is a good transition into talking about our July no sugar challenge in the Facebook group. So if you haven’t already, be sure to check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. It’s a group of like minded runners and people who want to get lean and become lean running machines. And it kind of goes hand in hand with this podcast.

And for the whole month of July. I’m doing some extensive training around the topic of sugar. Not eating sugar, the benefits of not eating sugar. And in the group, we are doing this together. So we’re on like day eight or nine right now. The day this comes out, I think we’ll be on like day 10 of no sugar.

But in the group, I’m doing some weekly trainings and answering questions like how many carbs should I be eating? I’m feeling lightheaded, I’m feeling a little lethargic. What do I do about that? How do I fix that? How many beers can I have a day? Very important questions we’re talking about in the group.

But anyway, the best part of this group is that it’s fun. It’s the community aspect of it. It’s supportive. It’s encouraging. In fact, here’s a recent comment from one of the members in the group, Leslie, and she says, “I need to thank you for this group and your podcasts. When I first heard about the challenge, I thought to myself that I could never do it. But I followed all of your posts and podcasts and I’ve done really well this week. I’ve had some crabby moments, but I’m down four pounds, which is extremely motivating. Now, I know I can do this for the entire month and more. Thank you for all your guidance and support.”

Leslie, thank you. Thanks for doing the work. I’m just here as your guide. You’re doing the work. Leslie you are kicking butt and a bunch of other people like Leslie are kicking butt to several people are posting that they’ve lost four or five pounds in the first week alone. So many amazing, amazing fun stories. So many strong courageous people in this group. Definitely come check it out. Just go on Facebook and search for the Running Lean community.

And it’s not too late. We’ve just started we’re only you know, eight or 10 days into this okay. Honestly, you can quit eating sugar anytime you want. Why not just do it now and do it with some friends to wisdom support. It’s awesome.

Okay, so the question on the table is sugar addictive? Or do we just act like it is? So I want to go back and give you a little bit of history about sugar and how this kind of all started okay, I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about this but there’s a couple of things that are kind of important.

So you know sugar came mainly from the tropic regions. And it started to make its impact in the world and back in the 16th century. And these tropic regions were producing what are kind of known as the drug foods. So these are foods like coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco, rum, which is just fermented sugar cane juice. And then, of course, sugar itself.

And many European empires were built upon these drug foods, you know, they used the trade of chocolate and tea and rum and tobacco, and sugar, to build empires. All of these foods have something in common, they are all considered powerful psychoactive substances. And most of them are considered somewhat addictive. Carbs, coffee, tea, chocolate, and tobacco were unique.

And that they became even more desirable and more powerful with the introduction of sugar or with the addition of sugar, so people would sweeten their tea with sugar. And this became the way that Europeans love drinking their tea. Same with coffee. Chocolate was one of those things that wasn’t really sweetened at first, but then when you, you know, throw some sugar in there, and you know, tamp down the bitterness with some milk, oh my gosh, it became wildly popular.

And so sugar consumption then increased throughout the colonized world as well. So anywhere where you found these items, your sugar was right there with them. Okay, so sugar just was like, boom, it just exploded in the world. And I want to talk a little bit about tobacco in particular, because there’s something that most people don’t know about tobacco.

So when you cure tobacco leaves, the way that they normally do it is they use a process that’s called flue curing. And what they do is they hang up the tobacco leaves in these hot barns. And they control the heat inside the barn by a fire that’s, it’s not inside the barn.

It’s actually outside, but they have like a flue that runs through the barn so they can control the temperature inside the barn. And what happens is the leaves dry out, they go from green to yellow to kind of brownish. And during this process, the leaves actually release some of their natural sugars. So they kind of turn some of their starches into sugars, like all most plants do.

Interestingly, when you cure tobacco in this way, the sugar in the tobacco actually makes it easier to inhale the smoke. Because if you wouldn’t, if you didn’t have the sugar in this in the tobacco, that sugar content, it makes it a lot harder to inhale so you can’t inhale as deeply. Cigars and pipes typically, were not cured. The tobacco wasn’t cured in the same way and so they weren’t as easy to inhale the tobacco in pipes and cigars.

But then they started doing something really ingenious. They started soaking the leaves in a sugar solution, or they called it a sauce. They called it saucing the tobacco. And so they would soak the leaves in this sugar. And then after they were cured, they would absorb all this extra sugar. And this is like back in in the early 1900s.

And then like around 1913 RJ Reynolds they came out with a Camel cigarette. So it was like the first commercially successful sugar sauced tobacco blend and it was a big hit. Right? It’s like the most popular cigarette out there. People couldn’t get enough of the Camel cigarette. And mostly it was because of the sugar.

Also when you burn sugar caramelizes and it actually produces a nice sweet flavor. I know for me as when I was a sugar addict. One of my favorite things was carmelized, like that burnt sugar like when you burn sugar just enough Oh my god. It’s like the most amazing thing in the world for me.

So this sweeter flavor made the tobacco even more pleasing. And they actually noted, the cigarette industry, noted that this more pleasing, sweeter flavor appeals more to women and adolescents. I know it’s crazy, right? But they were actually marketing their products to the you know, they wanted more adolescents and more women smoking so they added more sugar to make it more appealing.

And they actually used this soft tobacco in chewing tobacco as well and all that. So here’s what happens. You add all this sugar to cigarettes, cigarettes become even easier to inhale. Have you ever smoked cigarettes? I smoked cigarettes. And it’s so very easy to inhale smoke from cigarettes.

I also have smoked cigars. And I’ll tell you what, you cannot inhale cigar smoke. It will, it hurts, it makes you start coughing, it’s just it’s terrible experience but cigarettes are nice and smooth, right? It’s because of the sugar. So it makes it super easy to inhale super deeply, which means that more nicotine is getting delivered to your system.

So you get this more potent dose of the drug, the nicotine drug, you get this bigger rush. The problem with that is that the rush, you know is very temporary. So it makes you go back for more so you get this huge rush. And then you come down off of that and you need more. So you go back and smoke another cigarette and it’s insidious the way this works. It’s not the same with like cigars and pipes, like people don’t have the same sort of, they’re not as addictive because you’re not inhaling as deeply. Okay, it’s all thanks to sugar. Good job, guys.

Okay, so that’s kind of like one of the areas of study that’s, to me, it’s just really fascinating, and how we’ve kind of, you know, treated sugar as a drug or how it is, affects us as a drug. Also, as children, we have conditioned our children to see sugar as something really special. We use sugar as a reward for our kids, okay, if you get good grades, or if you have good behavior, you’ll get to eat some sugar, we’ll give you this candy bar.

Or if you eat all your dinner, you can now have some dessert, something sweet. Which never really made sense to me at all. It still doesn’t make sense. But we all know that sugar is, you know, we shouldn’t be eating a lot of it. So we ration sugar to our children, right? So we teach our kids at an early age that there’s something very special about sugar. It’s very special, you can’t eat too much of it. And this is weird, right? It’s like it’s unlike any other food. We don’t ration you know, carrots or Brussels sprouts, or anything else, or cheese or eggs to our kids.

But we ration sugar, why do we need to ration sugar to our children? Because we know it’s not good for them. And we know that there’s something about it that causes this craving, which I’m gonna get into in a minute with cravings and stuff.

But as adults, you know, as we grow up, we start to condition ourselves that sugar is somewhat synonymous with love. You know, we celebrate special occasions with sugar. We celebrate holidays with sugar everywhere, birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, even funerals, there’s all kinds of sugar there.

And anytime we go on vacation, you know, if we’re eating sugar, it means we’re having fun. You know, it means we were happy. You know, if there’s sugar around we know we’re having a good time. Feels good. We’re happy, right? We even use sugar as affectionate nicknames for our loved ones we call them sweetie. And sweetie pie and honey and sweetheart. Even just hey, sugar.

You know, so our whole lives we’ve been conditioned to believe that sugar equals love and who doesn’t want to be loved, you know, who doesn’t want to love and be loved? So we have this fondness and this affection for sugar. That’s unlike any other nutrient, any other food out there. Why is this? Why Why? Why this fixation on sugar?

Well, one reason is because sugar makes us feel good. It feels good to eat sugar. So when we eat sugar it affects these reward centers of our brain. You know we eat some sugar, and it stimulates the release of this neurotransmitter called dopamine and dopamine makes us feel good. It lights up the same place in the brain that alcohol and nicotine cocaine, even heroin light up. Here’s an interesting thing though.

Powerful psychoactive drugs like cocaine and heroin, they only stimulate and light up like this one spot in the brain and sugar lights up that same spot to one reward center. But sugar, unlike those other ones, lights up areas all over the brain, one doctor said, it lights up the brain like a pinball machine. That’s sugar, that’s the difference.

So it makes us feel good, lights up all these receptors in our brain, it turns on our brain, we feel good. And we want more of it. And the more refined the drug, the bigger the hit of dopamine it so when you refine something, you increase the surface area for the drug to have an effect.

For example, chewing on coca leaves will give you a mild, it’s a mild stimulant, versus grinding those up into powder, like for powdered cocaine is a very powerful stimulant, versus then taking that and smoking it in like crack cocaine, which is an even more intense experience.

It’s very similar with sugar, so you could like chew on sugar cane, which people used to do back in the day. And sugar cane is just like it’s a big grass, you know, it’s part of the grass family. So you could chew on sugar cane, you’d get, you know, a little bit of a hit of dopamine or whatever.

But then you refine that sugar into crystals or even a fine powder. And you increase the surface area, and you increase the amount of dopamine that gets released and you increase the pleasure of the substance. And then what happens is just like other drugs, like alcohol or heroin, the more you do, the less dopamine gets released.

So dopamine actually down regulates when you continually drink alcohol or do cocaine or eat sugar. So the more you have, the more of the substance you eat, or ingest, or smoke or shoot or whatever. The more at first, the more dopamine gets released, but then dopamine starts down regulate and you become what they call like dopamine resistant.

And drug addicts and alcoholics know this very well, it takes more and more of the drug to get the same rush. And so we end up eating a lot more sugar to get the same sort of feeling the same experience that we used to get, so it takes more sugar to feel good.

And we all know, and I’ve talked about this extensively how, you know, eating sugar, you know, creates glucose, excess glucose in our system, which, you know, makes us produce more insulin, which is the fat storage hormone. And that’s why we get fat because we’re eating sugar, and our insulin is always high.

And the same thing kind of the same thing happens with insulin. So as our body’s producing insulin all the time, our bodies become insulin resistant, meaning that we can’t produce enough insulin to bring our blood sugar down. So our blood sugar continues to go high. And so more and more insulin keeps getting produced, but it’s not doing anything.

And so we’re just in this massive cycle of storing fat, and we just become fatter and fatter and more obese. And we get diabetes and all kinds of things. Very similar to the dopamine resistance in our bodies that happens with consuming sugar or other drugs over long periods of time.

And they’ve even found, they’ve done these studies on rats that show that rats actually prefer sugar over other drugs. They prefer sugar over cocaine. So they did these experiments and these poor rats, I gotta tell you, you know, what did we ever do? What did they ever do to us? We’re so we do all these terrible experiments on rats.

But anyway, that’s another episode altogether. Anyway, so they do these studies on rats, where they got them addicted to cocaine for like, several months, okay, that’s why I’m saying poor rats. They get them addicted to cocaine for several months.

And then they’re like, hey, try this sugar and they give them like sugar water. And within two days, the rats switch over from preferring the cocaine to their sugar water. They like prefer sugar within two days of being completely addicted to this very powerful psychoactive drug cocaine.

Rats also preferred Oreos. Apparently, rats preferred Oreos over cocaine and morphine by what they call “a significant margin”. Okay, so they gave him like they got these addicted cocaine addicted rats. And they’re like, hey, what about Oreos? What do you think about these? And they’re like, heck yeah. Bring on the Oreos.

I want more of that cocaine. No, no morphine, not interested. But Oreos? Heck, yes. Give me more of those. So for rats anyway, I know we’re not rats. But just for rats anyway, sugar is more pleasurable than these powerful psychoactive, highly addictive drugs. And some studies suggest that sugar is actually around eight times more addictive than some of these drugs like cocaine, eight times more addictive. Which is crazy.

Now that that number may be high, let’s just say it’s, it’s five times more addictive, or four, or three or twice, or even the same. Oh, my God, that’s still too much. It’s crazy. So when it comes to addiction, I have some extensive knowledge in this area. I’ve been sober for 13 years, I was addicted to alcohol, I had a problem with drinking.

I have extensive knowledge of this disease, the disease of alcoholism, and this world of addiction and recovery. And there are some glaring similarities between sugar and alcohol, and the effects that they have on our brains and our bodies.

So some of the traits of alcohol addiction are that it is something that you crave all the time. It’s something that you can never get enough of. And for me, like when I was drinking, I was obsessed about it. I was thinking about it all the time. If I wasn’t drinking, I was thinking about drinking.

And I knew it was bad for me, but I kept drinking anyway, I knew it was having negative consequences on me physically and in my life. I knew that drinking alcohol was slowly killing me. But I didn’t care. The feeling that I got from the alcohol from being drunk was more important than my health.

And it got to this point where this is not a good place to be where I couldn’t, I couldn’t drink anymore. I couldn’t not drink. I couldn’t live with it. I couldn’t live without it. And sugar is incredibly similar. You know, not too long ago, just a few months ago, I would tell myself, I gotta stop eating sugar. But I was thinking about it all the time.

You know, I was going through a divorce. And you know, we started with this whole COVID thing. And, you know, there’s a lot going on, and I was you know, having a hard time getting through the day. But I was always thinking like, okay, at the end of the day, I’m going to eat my Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, because this that was my go to Ben Jerry’s Cherry Garcia, or anything with caramel in it is just amazing.

And when I think about it all day, like I just got to make it through the day so I can get to the ice cream. And, but I would tell myself, like I got to stop doing this, I’m gaining all this weight, I’m having all these negative consequences. I know it’s bad for me, but I am doing it anyway. It’s having negative consequences on me mentally and emotionally and physically.

I’m gaining a lot of weight, I’ve gained a lot of weight, put on like 40 pounds. And I would find myself at the grocery store, you know, doing my shopping and like I’m not buying any ice cream and then I’d go down that aisle and I just throw three or four pints of Ben and Jerry’s into the cart without even like thinking about it was like uh, it was like a subconscious habit almost.

But like, there was almost like a screw it attitude. Like, you know what, I know, this is bad for me, but I don’t care. The feeling I’m gonna get from this is more important than, you know, the fact that I’m gaining all this weight. I don’t care about that. You know, the promise of the sugar high was more powerful than any willpower that I had.

And I got to this place, just like with alcohol where I was like, I gotta stop doing this. I can’t. I couldn’t live with it. I couldn’t live without it. So similar. It’s eerie. And both alcohol and sugar. They’re hard to quit, man. I’ll tell you what is hard. Do come to the place where you’re like, I gotta stop doing this. You know, they both have withdrawal symptoms. You know, with alcohol, it’s it can be pretty intense. You know, your body goes through some, some crazy, crazy stuff.

It depends on how much you’re drinking a day. But that can be you, some people need hospitalization to get through alcohol withdrawal. And the sugar withdrawal can be bad too. You know, with sugar withdrawal, you’re going to experience headaches, lightheadedness, nausea, lethargy, just massive lack of energy, which is really troublesome.

As runners, it can be really hard those first few weeks, you can just be just feeling like you just have no energy and running is so hard your legs just feel like you’re you’ve got cinder blocks attached to them. And that’s all part of the, you know, withdrawal from sugar.

And the Alcoholics Anonymous has this book, it’s their Bible, it’s called The Big Book. And they even suggested there to use sugar and sugary foods like candy and chocolate, to help soothe the cravings for alcohol to help people wean themselves off of alcohol. And it kind of helps ease the severity of the withdrawal symptoms for alcoholics. Which, you know, it does help with that. But then there’s people that like start getting addicted to sugar when they get sober, because they eat all this chocolate, I’m not drinking alcohol, but then they eat all this candy and chocolate and stuff like that.

And again, a bunch of weight, but they use sugar as a way of like, increasing the dopamine that they’re getting. So they continue to kind of feel good, without the super negative consequences of you know, of alcohol. And then, you know, both sugar and alcohol, they’re both socially acceptable to do in public, and they’re perfectly legal, right?

Unlike cocaine, or heroin, which you know, those drugs are bad. We all know that those drugs are bad. But sugar or alcohol, no big deal. I mean, you’re kind of considered weird. If you go to a party and you don’t drink or you don’t eat cake. Right? I mean, you’re almost like an outcast.

When I stopped drinking, I had people telling me like, why not just have a drink? It’s no big deal. I’m like, no, you don’t understand I got, I can’t do this. Can’t do this at all. And it’s kind of like with sugar, too. There’s a lot of peer pressure. People are like, well, I made this cake. You really have to, you have to eat some.

It’s like no, I don’t, back off. So do we even need sugar? Do we even need to eat sugar? The answer to that is no, we don’t, we don’t need to eat sugar. As humans, we don’t need it, we only need to consume two nutrients. We only need to consume two things that our bodies don’t naturally produce.

Our bodies are really amazing. They produce all these natural nutrients that we need to live very healthy lives. But there’s two things that we have to eat, we have to get our essential amino acids from externally, we don’t produce those ourselves. So we need to eat those. And we get all those from eating protein. And we also need to eat fat.

Because our body does not create essential fatty acids, we have to eat fat in order to get those. So those are the only two things amino acids and fatty acids, so fat and protein. If you don’t eat any fat, or you don’t eat any protein, you will die. But if you don’t ever eat sugar or carbohydrates, again, you’re going to be fine.

And actually your liver produces all the glucose you need because you do need glucose sugar in your system, your brain needs a certain amount of glucose, and your liver produces all the glucose that you need. So you don’t have to worry about it. Your body is fine. producing its own glucose even as an endurance athlete, even as a runner. So this is fascinating. You’re gonna like this part.

How does this all apply to running and runners? So they did this study called the faster study and the title of the study is this metabolic characteristics of keto adapted ultra endurance athletes. And so what they did was they took 20 elite, ultra endurance athletes, so marathoners, ultra marathoners, Ironman Distance triathletes, and they divided them up into two groups. One was a traditional group eating a high carbohydrate diet, right? Pretty traditional ultra athletes. The other group, so there’s 10 athletes in each group, the other group were on a low carbohydrate high fat diet, and they had become fat-adapted.

And one ofthe runners that was in this fat-adapted group was Zach Bitter, and Zach Bitter is a badass. Zach Bitter holds a world record for the 100 mile run, which he did on track. And he ran 100 miles in 11 hours and 19 minutes. And he also holds the world record for the 12 hour run where he ran 104.8 miles. And just to give you an idea of what that looks like, 100 miles at 11 hours and 19 minutes is his pace was 6:47 for 100 miles.

Now Zach Bitter follows a low carbohydrate, high fat diet. And he is a fat adapted runner, meaning that he uses mostly his own body fat as fuel. Okay, so they had these two groups of athletes, I just wanted to give you that heads up, like he’s an amazing dude. And he was in this study, I think that’s really cool.

So they had these two groups, one eating the traditional low carbohydrate, high fat diet, so they had already become fat adapted, and then the traditional high carb group, okay. And they had them both perform the same intensity, I think it was like a 180 minute run on a treadmill. And they’re measuring all this stuff.

And, and all these people, like have similar pedigrees, you know, they have similar experiences, and they’re ranked and they do similar, you know, types of events like they’re very, very similar. Anyway, at the end of the day, they found basically no differences in glycogen utilization, storage, or repletion, between the two groups.

So the high carb group, and the low carb group looked basically the same. When it came to the amount of glycogen their muscles were using, it was available to their muscles before, during and after exercise. One group’s eating a ton of sugar and carbs, the other is virtually eating, no sugar, and no carbs. So to me, that’s really fascinating.

And it’s just, you know, further proof that you can be an incredible, incredible endurance athlete, and not have to eat sugar at all. I’m going to link to this study in the show notes notes for this episode, which you can find at therunningmindpocast.com/28.

Because it is fascinating, it is really, really interesting. And if you want to geek out on a ton of science, it’s all there for you. And I read through it, and it’s oh my gosh, it’s really, really cool. But basically, your body will produce all the glycogen you need.

So you don’t need to eat sugar, we just don’t need to eat it. And when you use your own fat for fuel, you’re gonna get more energy. So you get four calories of energy from glucose, nine calories of energy from fat, so you get basically more than twice the energy from fat than you do from glycogen.

And you can only store so much sugar in your body when you’re running. But you’ll basically never run out of fat for fuel because, hey, runners, on the whole, we carry around too much body fat. And I think it’s because we consume way too much sugar, way too many carbohydrates.

And runners rely on sugar and carbs for fuel. So we can never get enough. So we need more and more and more. But there’s so many benefits of becoming a fat-adapted athlete, and that’s, you know, the big picture, but I’m trying to teach here. But are runners addicted to sugar? I think it’s highly, highly possible. I think it’s worth somebody looking into, I would love to see some studies on this, but I hear about it all the time from my runners. I mean I hear it every day, people talk about how they need to get off the sugar addiction. It’s crazy. So is sugar an addictive substance? Or do we just act like it is?

There’s a journalist and historian Charles Seaman. And he posited this question he wondered whether sugar is actually an addictive substance or if people just act like it is. And my thing is like if everyone’s acting like it is and the evidence is pretty clear. The answer to that question becomes pretty clear as well.

And you know, scientists have concluded that sugar is both a nutrient and a carbohydrate and a psychoactive substance with addictive characteristics. At the end of the day, you got to make the choice. Do you want to continue to eat sugar or not? It’s up to you. And don’t look to the food industry to like help you make this decision because they’re going to fight against this idea that sugar is addictive with everything that they’ve got.

And of course, the reason is that there is sugar in everything. And if you haven’t listened to the last podcast, you got to listen to that one for sure. It’s called there’s sugar in everything. So don’t think you’re gonna start seeing health warnings on foods that contain sugar anytime soon.

Now, like you see on packs of cigarettes, because calling sugar evil or saying sugar is bad for you is the equivalent of like stealing Christmas, you know, and taking all the love out of your life. So don’t wait for the government to issue warnings on labels, just quit, just stop eating sugar, you can do it.

And if you’re ready to stop now, if you’re ready to become a fat-adapted runner, come join us in the Running Lean community on Facebook, the sugar, the no sugar challenge is on member we’re just about 10 days into it. So come join us. Grab a few friends to do it with you. It’s really fun. We’re having a good time.

Lots of interesting questions and answers in the group. Just go to Facebook and search for the Running Lean community and join us. So that’s all I got for you today. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.

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