Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
I get a lot of questions over in the Running Lean Community Facebook Group about fat-adaptation. What does it really mean to be a fat-adapted runner? How do I go about becoming …
Continue Reading about 54. The Benefits of Becoming a Fat-Adapted Runner →
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 54 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I’m going to be talking about the benefits of becoming a fat-adapted runner. So I get a lot of questions about this over in the Running Lean community Facebook group. What does it mean to become fat-adapted? How do I go about becoming fat-adapted? What are the benefits of being fat-adapted? How do I know if I’m fat-adapted?
Lots and lots of questions like that. And they’re all great questions. So today on the podcast, what I want to do is take a deep dive into this topic of becoming fat adapted. So I’m going to answer all those questions and more. My goal here is that by the end of this episode, you have a solid understanding of what it means to become fat adapted. Why is it such a powerful tool to help you improve, not just your running, but to help you improve your overall health and fitness? So that is all coming up momentarily.
But first, I wanted to mention that the Running Lean monthly coaching group is now open for enrollment. This is my monthly coaching program, where you get access to all of my online courses, including my flagship program called the weight loss training course for runners. And these programs will show you exactly what you need to do so that you can transform yourself into that fat-adapted running machine.
You also get live group coaching calls with me and your fellow runners, where you’re going to get the encouragement, support, and the accountability of the group so that you can stay on track and hit all your goals for 2021. I mean, the accountability factor alone is completely worth it. And in January, we’re doing this Powerful Goal Setting workshop called achieving the impossible, where we’re going to set impossible or seemingly impossible goals for ourselves.
And then I’m going to go about showing you exactly how to make those things happen. I want you to make 2021 your year of transformation, I want you to make this the year that you become that lean, fat-adapted running machine. Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join to learn more and enroll now. But you’re going to have to act quickly. Because enrollment closes Sunday, January 10, at 1159 pm, go to runningleanpodcast.com/join.
Also, if you’re not already part of the Running Lean community on Facebook, come and join us over there. Right now we’re doing the January journal challenge. So here’s the challenge to get you to start journaling every day. But really, it’s about thinking differently about yourself. People are discovering things about themselves that they never really thought about before.
Journaling is a great way to clear your mind of all the head trash to help you stay focused and move towards your goals. To create awareness of your thoughts and feelings. It is so important, especially during these very challenging times. So join us over the in the Facebook group and get your journaling on. Remember, we are all in this together. Cool.
All right, so let’s get into this topic, the benefits of becoming a fat-adapted runner. So first of all, what does it mean to be fat-adapted? I think there’s a lot of confusion about this. And so here’s what it means to be fat adapted. When you are fat-adapted. You have trained your body to be very efficient at using your stored body fat as a source of fuel. You’ve become adapted to using your body fat as your primary fuel source.
Okay, that’s all that this means. Right? It doesn’t have to get much more complicated than that. We have all this stored body fat for a reason, right? We have all of us have even the leanest of us have stored body fat. It’s there for a reason, but we never really access it. We never really use it so we just keep storing more and more and more.
The reason we have stored body fat is so we can use it for fuel later. And this is like from an evolutionary standpoint. You know, this helped us to get through long winters when sources of food are a little scarcer. You know, when we were going through long periods where maybe we couldn’t get, you know, sources of plant-based sources like carbohydrates and things like that were no longer really available for us.
Or even as hunters, you know, we most likely weren’t eating three square meals a day, you know, we may have gone out on these long hunts for days at a time. And that stored body fat would have been a great source of fuel to keep us going strong on these long hunts and stuff. Okay.
So we’re actually made to use our own stored body fat for fuel, we just don’t do it very well. And so really, this isn’t a crazy concept I’m I’m proposing here become fat-adapted, what I’m saying is, let’s go back to being an efficient fat burner. Like the way we’re designed like we used to be, we’ve just gotten so far away from that. And really, because of the massive changes in our diet, because of the, you know, sugar-laden foods that we eat was just keep packing more fat on us, because of the highly palatable foods, we eat all the processed foods that we eat, stuff like that. Okay.
So what does it mean to be fat-adapted? It just means you’re good at using your own stored body fat as a source of fuel. And so why would we want to do this? Like, why is fat, a good source of fuel? Or why is it a better source of fuel than some other fuel like sugar, glycogen, whatever you want to call it. So here’s the thing, our body can really only use one type of fuel at a time.
Most of the time, our body is using some form of stored carbohydrate, so carbohydrate gets converted into glucose. And some of that glucose can be freely available to us, some of that glucose gets stored in our muscles as glycogen. And we can use that as a primary fuel source our bodies and our brains are good at using this if it’s available, okay.
And, you know, if you’re a runner, and you’ve been doing the high carbohydrate thing, and you take all these gels while you’re running, that, they give you a little burst of energy, right, it’s very accessible you eat the carb-laden gel, and you have a little burst of energy because you have that glucose in your system. And you have all this stored glycogen, okay, so that’s kind of what happens when we are using sugar as our primary fuel source. Okay.
You can, you can kind of get to your fat stores after a while, but you have to burn through all of that glucose and glycogen first, so your body has to use up all the primary sources of fuel to get to the fat stores. And the problem with this is most people just never get to that point right there. Just, you know, if you’ve ever run a marathon or some long-distance event, and you’ve hit the wall, you kind of know what I’m talking about here.
So you’ve kind of burned through all your available energy. And then your body is just like boom shuts down because it doesn’t have any other source of fuel it does, it has fat that it can use for fuel, but you’ve just not trained yourself to use it. Okay? But here’s the thing, the more carbohydrate sources of fuel are available, the more your body will just burn that. And at the same time, what it does is it shuts down access to your fat stores.
Right, so we want to train our bodies to get better at accessing the fat stores and using that fat for fuel. Why? Well, one of the reasons is that fat actually gives you more energy than sugar does. Fat gives you nine calories of energy per gram. carbs and protein each only give you four calories of energy per gram. So you actually get like more than twice the amount of energy from fat than you do from you know, sugar-based sources of fuel. Okay, so that is one of the main reasons why it’s so important to become fat-adapted because it actually gives you more energy.
Another thing reason why fat is kind of a better source of fuel. or is that, you know, you have this like unlimited supply of fat on your body. At any given time, even the leanest of us have an enormous amount of stored body fat, you know, we have it all around our bodies, you know, and this is the way we’re designed as humans, we all have fat, and it’s okay. But you probably have like 40 to 100,000 calories of energy or fat stored in your body at any given time. Whereas you can only store about 1500 to 2000 calories of carbohydrate in the form of glycogen in your body.
So when it comes to sugar as your primary source of fuel, you can store maybe 2000 calories. So this would be enough fuel for, you know, a few hours, maybe, you know, four to six hours of running or something like that. But really what if you’re talking about your own body fat, even the leanest runners would have days and days worth of fuel onboard. Okay, so those are some of the reasons why we want to become better at burning fat because we get more energy from it, we have this unlimited supply, why not just use what we have? We’re carrying around our own fuel, why not use it?
So what does it mean to become fat-adapted? Like, what does this get you what are the benefits as a runner of becoming fat adapted. So as you can gather by what I just said, you have more energy, you know, so you have this better source of energy, fat will give you actually more energy than sugar will. And so you actually have more energies up feels amazing, you know.
Another benefit is that you don’t feel hungry all the time. Because your body is no longer, you know, your blood sugar isn’t spiking and dropping. Because you’re not eating all the high carbohydrate, high sugar foods, you’re going to feel less hungry, you’re going to feel more satisfied when you eat, and you’re going to feel more full for longer.
And just because your body has this constant source of fuel in the form of fat, you’re just not going to feel as hungry. This is one of the things that my clients talk about all the time is how they’re like, I just don’t feel hungry. Is that okay? Is that a problem? I’m like, No, it’s not a problem. It’s such a great feeling to not be like starving all the time.
You know, so you don’t need to eat every couple of hours. Like when you’re eating a diet high in carbohydrates, you have to eat every few hours, or else your blood sugar drops and you just feel like you’re gonna die. You’re like I gotta eat something right now. Whereas you could go 810 1216 18 hours without eating anything.
If you’re fat-adapted, because your hormones are all balanced, your satiety, hormones, your hunger hormones are all working the way they’re supposed to. And you just don’t have to eat all the time, and it feels amazing. Another benefit is that you don’t need to bring fuel on long runs with you, right, you don’t have to keep sucking down goos every 30 to 45 minutes on your long runs. Because you have the fuel you need with you.
Now you still need to drink water, you need to take electrolytes. Taking electrolytes is very important. You know you don’t want to get your electrolyte balance out of whack, for sure. But you don’t need all the gurus and stuff to run. You really just don’t. You know, I use this example a lot of Mike McKnight he’s a guy who is an ultra runner. He kind of specializes it like the 200-mile distance that’s his kind of go-to distance.
And I think it was last year he did 100 miles on zero calories and he did it just to you know, show that it’s possible. And I’ve done this I did recently 50k on zero calories. I did a marathon on zero calories. I’m using my own body fat for fuel. I didn’t have to bring any fuel with me. Feels pretty amazing honestly.
Another benefit of becoming fat adapted is that you don’t have this gi distress a lot of people get a lot of GI distress when they are ingesting all the super-concentrated carbohydrates during runs. That stuff can really mess with your gut and causes a lot of people to bonk you because they’re like puking on the side of the road or have to hit the portal a bunch of times, but like it causes a lot of people to like not to reach their goals.
So GI distress is a real problem. When you’re not ingesting all the carbs during your run, it’s really not, you don’t have to worry about that. You just don’t have that at all. And I would get a lot of Gi problems when I was doing a lot of the sugary gels and stuff like that during Ultras during marathons, and I remember doing my 100 miler, and I got to a point in there, where I just couldn’t eat anything. I mean, I was eating so much of the sugary carby things that I got to a point where I was just like, my stomach was really hurting.
And this went on for a long time. I think it started hurting around mile like 60 or something like that. And so we’re talking like, running for like 40 miles with real bad stomach pains. Like that’s no fun. That is no fun. All right, I mentioned, you know, you have this limitless supply of fuel onboard. So one of the big benefits is that you kind of become bonk proof, you know, you can kind of go forever.
And this is like one of the most amazing things that I can’t even believe this works. But it does. You know, like I talked about Mike McKnight he ran 100 miles and didn’t need any calories at all. You know, I did this with my 50k recently, you know, I don’t need any calories at all. And you basically don’t have to worry about bonking. Because you’re you’ve got all the fuel that you need onboard.
Recently, there was a couple Meredith Loring and Sammy Innokin. And they were a couple who are into like distance rowing. And they rode from California to Hawaii. And they broke the world record for how long it took them to do this. And they did it in 45 days. So they weren’t just like taking their time they were pushing it, they were going at it hard, right? They did it on zero sugar, and zero carbs, they follow a low carb, high fat kind of diet.
And they were able to do that and break this world record without having to rely on any other sources of sugary carbs. So they were using fat as fuel for this, this is just amazing. I think another benefit of becoming a fat-adapted runner is that you get this improved body composition. Now body composition is one of those things that we all want to write is like one of the main reasons why a lot of people want to lose weight, you know, they want to build muscle and get rid of the fat. I think we all want that, you know.
So when you’re fat-adapted, it helps you to preserve lean muscle mass. So you can you know, build new muscle and keep the muscle that you have, which helps you to increase your power to weight ratio. And as a runner, this makes you a more powerful runner. Okay, so that would be another benefit, right? So you get the improved body composition. But you also improve your power to weight ratio, which makes you a stronger, faster runner.
Another benefit is decreasing the accumulation of lactate in your muscle. So you can actually train harder for longer, you know, lactate builds up, and it, you know, really shuts down the whole function of your muscle and you the longer you can prolong that, you know, the longer you can stave that off, the harder you can train, the longer you can go. And when you’re fat-adapted, it actually slows down that process which is awesome.
Obviously, you got improved prolonged endurance performance. And then here’s the other thing is just running becomes more enjoyable. If you’re a long-distance runner and running is hard for you. It will become easier, it will become more fun, more enjoyable. So those are a bunch of benefits of becoming a fat-adapted runner. Oh, and there’s another one that I really haven’t talked about yet. And that is that there’s this cool side benefit this cool side thing that happens when you become an efficient fat burner. You lose weight.
You know I think we’d all agree that if you want to lose weight, you have to burn fat I think we all know that right you want to burn the fat. But most of us, what we do is we just store fat. We’re just always storing the fat. And like I said, storing fat is good, this is natural. This is what we’ve been designed to do. We’re good at storing some of our energy as fat and that’s okay. But when you’re eating a diet that’s super high in sugar, super high, unrefined carbs, that means you’re just always storing fat, your body is always in this fat storage mode.
So you never give yourself a chance for your body to burn the fat. Just keep putting more and more away. Here’s the thing. There was a study recently that looked at Americans in general. And they’ve kind of determined that around 88% of Americans are considered metabolically unhealthy. 88% of Americans are considered metabolically unhealthy, meaning overweight, obese, or they have some sort of chronic metabolic diseases like heart disease, type two diabetes, hypertension, and insulin resistance 88% is over 290 million people in the US. That is crazy.
That means that only 12% of people in the US are considered metabolically healthy. Honestly, this is a crazy epidemic. It’s crazy. And one of the most, one of the most simplest and most effective things you can do for your health, is to just stop eating sugar, get off of the refined carbohydrates, this one thing will actually turn off that fat storage mode that’s happening in your body and help you to get into the fat-burning mode. Like if you just did this one thing, you would start seeing more fat burning happening in your body. It’s a very simple thing to do.
Stop eating sugar. I know it’s not easy. This is why I have a successful coaching practice. And that’s why I’m talking to you here today. This is why I help people. This is why I do what I do. I help people get through all the tough stuff that comes up when they make these big changes in their diet.
So when they work with me, they get the knowledge support the accountability, to make these kinds of changes to their health. And if you’re the kind of person that can do all this on your own, like just take this information and run with it, do that, please. But if you want a little bit of help join us over in the monthly coaching group. It’s a great way to get all that knowledge, support the accountability, and have fun doing it. We have fun over there, for sure. Check us out.
So yeah, weight loss happens when you burn fat, right. But it only happens if you burn fat. If you’re not burning the fat. If you can’t get to the fat, you can’t lose the weight. So becoming fat-adapted means you are now a highly efficient fat-burning machine. Okay, so it’s great for running. It’s great for fat loss. It’s great for all kinds of things. So how do you do it? How do you become fat-adapted?
Well, I kind of alluded to that just now is like stop eating the sugar and the carbs. Keep running. embrace the discomfort though, because I gotta tell you something. This is the part that most people, this is why most people don’t do this because it will be kind of sucky for a little while running gets hard. While you’re going through this process when you eliminate your body’s primary source of fuel stored carbohydrate in the form of glycogen.
It will take a few weeks for your body to get used to, to adapt to using fat for fuel. Making this transition takes anywhere from two to six weeks. For some people, it may take longer. For other people it’s a week or two on average, I’d probably say like two, three weeks, something like that. You have to you know, transition to it slowly, it takes a little bit of time.
You definitely don’t want to start doing this. Like if you’ve got a big event coming up. Try to do this in the offseason. That’s why now, January is a good time to start doing this because a lot of people aren’t really into their training season just yet. So even if it’s like the very beginning of your training season, it’s not a bad time to start something like this. So you have to like really embrace the discomfort that’s going to happen and a lot of people just can’t do it.
They’re like, well, running just got hard. You know, I stopped eating sugar and I didn’t have the energy. I felt sluggish. Running was hard. So I just quit. But I gotta tell you something if you can get through that tough period that few weeks, what’s on the other side of that is amazing, all the stuff I’ve been talking about, you get all of that, but you got to get through that hard part.
And you got to slow down, you have to like, just know that you’re going to run slower, and it’s okay, just slow it down, listen to your body, make adjustments. And another thing I’ll tell you that I learned the hard way is that the greater the reduction in carbohydrate intake during your transition period, the faster it will go, the faster you will become fully fat-adapted as a runner.
So keep the carbs super low, just during this, you know, first few weeks. And that period will be hard, but you’ll get through it faster. I did it the hard way I was, you know, really eating a lot of carbs. And because it was it was uncomfortable for me that period. And so I was like, Well, maybe if I just add some more carbs in here, but it just made it go a lot longer.
For me, it took me like eight weeks to get fat adapted. And I gotta tell you, that was not a fun eight weeks, two months of, you know, tough running. But I did it the right way I did it in the offseason, I did it during a period where I knew I could just run slow, you know, I dropped my mileage down a little bit and I just ran slower and it was fine.
But eventually what happened is I got through it and then I stopped, I learned and I lowered the carb intake and I got through it and then running started to get easier. And then I started becoming faster. And I’ve actually become quite a bit faster as a fat-adapted runner, and not having to use the carbohydrates as a crutch or anything like that. Okay. So that is how you become fat adapted.
And then another question a lot of people ask, and this was like one of the most asked questions that I get is How do you know if you’re fat-adapted? This is such a good question. So there isn’t really a test you can take. I mean, some people talk about ketosis.
Now I just want to make this clear distinction here. Being in ketosis is where your body is producing ketones. So you’re like super low carb, like less than 20 grams of carbs a day. And your body is producing ketone bodies, which is a source of fuel that your body can use.
And we’re not talking about ketosis here, okay. But you know, fat adaptation and ketosis are similar, and you can be fat-adapted and be in ketosis, or you can be fat-adapted and not be in ketosis. Okay, I just want you to kind of make that distinction. I don’t want to get into the whole ketosis thing here. But how to know if you’re fat-adapted?
Well, you’ll have more sustained energy throughout the day, you won’t have these spikes, and crashes in your energy levels. I know for me, I wake up in the morning, I feel energized. And I stay that way, all day long. This is like one of the best feelings in the world, in my opinion, is just to have this sustained energy where you feel like you don’t have to, like drink coffee in the afternoon just to get through the next few hours of work or whatever. Like I just feel like I have this amazing sustained energy.
So you’ll have sustained energy. Number two, your food cravings will subside greatly, you’re not going to feel hungry all the time. This is another amazing benefit. But also this is how you know that you’ve become fat-adapted because you’re not going to be creating food all the time. Okay, you won’t be hungry all the time.
Another way to tell if you’re fat-adapted is that you’ll have improved focus and concentration, and you’ll be able to think more clearly. This is awesome. Who doesn’t want to think more clearly, I’m actually more productive, I get more done each day because I can think clearer, and I can focus on what I’m doing. I can concentrate on something, get my get I get more work done, I’m more productive.
Another way to tell if you’re fat-adapted is your endurance improves. So you’ll be able to run for longer periods, longer distances, without bonking without hitting the wall. So you’ll know like your running endurance is going to improve greatly. Also, you’ll start running faster so you’ll kind of get back to that normal running pace.
So running may be tough for a while, but then as you become fat-adapted, you’ll get back to your normal running pace without having to add the sugar back into your diet. you’ll know that you’re fat adapted. And then really the other telltale sign that you’re fat-adapted is that you lose weight. If you’re burning fat, you should see some weight loss happening. Now, weight loss is very subjective.
You know, some people, you know, they start working out, and maybe they’re lifting weights. And so they’re gaining some muscle, but they’re burning fat. And their weight loss doesn’t fluctuate much. And they think, oh, it’s not working. So it’s very subjective. It’s not the whole picture. That’s why I mentioned the sustained energy, the food cravings subsiding, improved focus and concentration, endurance improvements, running faster, and weight loss, those are all signs that you are fat-adapted. Now, you may not have all of those, but if you have a bunch of those, like, you know, it’s working for you.
Another question that came up recently was, can you lose your fat adaptation? Like, can you get out of being fat-adapted? And I want you to remember that what we’re talking about here is a lifestyle. Right? It’s not a diet, it’s not a short-term thing. It’s not something you do. Here and there. It’s something you, you become like you, it’s who you are. Okay, so if you focus on this is just like, this is the way I eat now, this is who I am, this is what I do, you’ll be fine, you don’t have to really worry about it.
If you eat some sugar here and there, this may temporarily slow down your ability to burn fat, right? But it’s temporary, it’s not going to set you back to square one, you’re not going to lose your fat adaptation, and you’ll still have it. But it may slow down until you burn through that glucose that glycogen. If however, you go back to eating a high carb diet, you’re eating all these highly palatable foods for weeks on end, you’re basically training your body to use sugar as its primary source of fuel again.
And then that’s going to take some time for you to get back to being fat adapted. So if you’re, if you retrain your body to use glycogen for fuel, then it’s going to take some time for you to get back. You know, it may be kind of like, maybe not exactly like starting over from scratch, but it may take you a few weeks.
And something to keep in mind is that there’s a cool thing that a lot of pro athletes do on purpose. And that is that they train very low carb, and then they race high carb or higher carb. Okay, Zach Bitter is a great example of this. He is the current world record holder for the 100-mile distance.
And he does a totally low carb, high-fat diet. He trains very low carb. And he’s very well fat adapted. And then when he’s getting ready to do a big event, you know, a race that he’s trying to win. He’s trying to win these ultra marathons, these 100-mile races, he’ll do some carbs the days leading up to the race, and then during the race, he’ll add some carbs in as well. And this gives him a little bit of a higher gear, so to speak.
Like he can run faster for longer periods. And, and he goes right back to doing the low carb high fat thing the next day. Right. The goal here is that you can use carbohydrates, you can use glycogen, glucose, whatever, as a source of fuel, every now and then. Like the goal here is not to eliminate carbs from our lives altogether, right?
We’re not trying to become a fat burner only. What we want to do instead is to create a state in our bodies of metabolic flexibility. You want to train your body to adapt to using primarily fat as fuel, but different fuels for different times. Glucose, sometimes glycogen Yeah, ketones if you’re into that, sure, stored body fat, using these different fuels at different times, you know, gives you metabolic flexibility.
Because there are different situations we’ll call for different types of fuel. If you want to run your fastest 5k You’re probably going to want to do some carbs to help you smash that goal. But if you just want to go out there and run a 50k and you want to do it in a way that’s like, you know, pretty chill. I mean, this is me anyway. I’m not trying to win anything.
I just want to go out there and prove to myself that I can do something and I love long-distance running. I love being out there in the world. love running that 50k distance is like my favorite distance. And I love just being fat-adapted and being able to go out there and be able to run all day, and not feel like I’m gonna crash not feel like I’m gonna bonk.
And so you can, you can definitely lose your fat adaptation. But I think if you focus on this as a lifestyle, and then you incorporate some carbs every now and then you can become very flexible with all of this, okay, we don’t want to be dogmatic about anything we want to, you know, be fluid.
So, to me being fat-adapted is life-changing, I have this amazing amount of sustained energy throughout the day, I have better concentration, mental clarity, I don’t have this brain fog that I used to have, you know, our brains need fat to work properly to function optimally, our brains need fat as fuel.
And so when you’re, when you’re giving it, the fat that it requires and loves, oh, feels good. I don’t feel obsessed about food all the time, my hunger and satiety signals are working properly. I’m not addicted to sugar anymore, I don’t have to eat sugar and carbs all the time. To just maintain, you know, a level of, of existence.
I can have those things every now and then. But I don’t feel like I need them. Right, there’s a big difference between enjoying some carbs here and there and, and having to have them like, like, I’m no longer chained to the carbs, okay. And I’ve lost weight, I gave my body a chance to get back to my natural weight by getting rid of by making myself a more efficient fat burner and getting rid of the sugar from my body.
Honestly, it’s one of the reasons why I say this is so life-changing is because I have optimized my overall health, my overall fitness and I’m, and I feel so good about myself. I’m happier because of this. So I think there are amazing, amazing benefits of becoming a fat-adapted runner.
And if you want to know exactly how to do this, and you want the support to do this, then come join us in the Running Lean monthly coaching group. You’re gonna get all the support and encouragement from this group. And we’re going to help you achieve those big goals that you want for yourself. But you got to make a decision soon because enrollment closes at 11:59 pm. Sunday, January 10.
Make 2021 the year you transform yourself into a lean, fat-adapted running machine. Just go to runninglreanpodcast.com/join. Alright, you guys, go out there and become a fat-adapted runner. It is amazing. You will love it. You’ve totally got this. As always, lots and 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.
Self-sabotage is when you say you want to lose 30 lbs but you find yourself eating chocolate cake every day. What is happening here? By eating the cake, you are completely undermining what you say …
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 53 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today, this is actually the very first episode of 2021. This episode will come out on January the first. So Happy New Year, everyone. And I thought it was appropriate to talk about this topic, especially as we start the new year and that is how to overcome self-sabotage.
Self sabotage is one of those things that we all do. We’ve all done it. No one, none of us are immune to it. Self sabotage is like when you say I want to lose 30 pounds, but then you find yourself eating chocolate cake every day. What is happening? When you eat the cake, you’re undermining your goals. You’re undermining what you really want for yourself.
Okay, so if this sounds familiar to you this kind of thing. Rest assured you’re not alone, we all do it. The problem though most people think that self-sabotage is just something that happens. It’s like a part of life, and they have no control over it. That is not the case, the reality is that we absolutely can do something about it. So I’m going to talk about what self-sabotage is, and how we can overcome it in this episode. Okay.
Real quick, the Running Lean monthly coaching group opens in just a couple of days, January 3, 2021. This is my monthly group coaching program, where first of all, you get access to all of my online courses, including my flagship program called the weight loss training course for runners. This is where you learn exactly how to become an efficient fat-burning machine.
Right, you want to lose weight, you got to burn fat if you want to be able to run longer and farther and, and more efficiently. Fat is a great source of fuel. So you got to transform yourself into an efficient fat burner. So I’ll teach you exactly how to do that. You also get in the monthly coaching group, you get these live group coaching calls with me and your fellow runners.
So you get the group support, the encouragement, you get the accountability, you get help, you get to ask questions, and get answers. I want to help you reach your goals in 2021. Joining the monthly coaching group is a great way to do it. We’re also going to be doing a powerful goal-setting workshop in January called achieving the impossible I want to help you achieve some impossible goals in 2021.
So join the monthly coaching group and you can do all of that amazing stuff. Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join and let’s make 2021 a year of transformation. Become the badass runner you’ve always wanted to be; runningleanpodcast.com/join. And then I did want to mention that we have a new challenge that we just started over in the Running Lean community on Facebook.
So come check us out over there because we’re doing the January journal challenge and that is where I am challenging you to write in a journal every day for the month of January. Now you might be thinking Patrick, whatever. What is this like a dear diary kind of a thing? No, it is not.
This is like journaling, with intention. Journaling, with purpose journaling because you want to accomplish something. Journaling is an amazing way to help you reach your goals. Whether you’re journaling, for weight loss journaling, for some big running goal. Some people will call it a training log or a food log. You can call it whatever you want. There are different ways you can journal.
But the benefits of journaling are amazing in that it’s just such an incredible way of creating a new positive mindset, but also helping you create new thought habits, new thought patterns, and helping you to answer reach your goals. So we’re going to be talking all about what journaling is and how to do it the right way.
And I also have daily journal prompts that I’ll be offering up to you all through the month of January. So it’s going to be kind of a fun challenge that we’re doing in the Facebook group. So go just go to Facebook and search for Running Lean community. Okay.
Bring on the self-sabotage stuff. Today I’m talking about how to overcome self-sabotage. So let’s talk about what self-sabotage actually is. So the definition of self-sabotage, if you look it up, on the Googles, it says, self-sabotage refers to behaviors or thought patterns that hold you back and prevent you from doing what you want to do.
Self-sabotage is when you consciously or unconsciously undermine your thoughts, dreams, goals and desires. So when I look at those definitions, I’m like, Whoa, that is? That is a very, very good definition. So I kind of combine that and say self-sabotage is patterns of thoughts or behaviors that hold you back keep you stuck, or prevent you from reaching your goals. So how do you know if you’re self-sabotaging?
Like how do you know that this is something you’re actually doing. One thing you can do is take a look at your current actions, your behaviors are the things you’re doing in alignment with your long-term goals. If not, then it could be a form of self-sabotage. For example, let’s say you want to lose weight, and you decide you’re going to stop eating sugar and flour. This is a pretty, pretty common thing to do, right? If you want to try to lose weight.
So you stop eating all the refined carbs, you stop eating all the sugar, and like you’re doing okay, maybe for a couple of weeks, you’re doing okay, but then you have like a stressful day at work. And there’s like an accident on your way home, it takes you forever get home, you’re stuck in traffic, you come home, you’re tired, you’re frustrated, you open up the fridge because you’re going to your plan on eating a healthy dinner, you got a salad and a piece of chicken that you’re gonna have for dinner.
So you open up the fridge, you’re standing there, lo and behold, there’s this beautiful chocolate cake just sitting right there calling out to you eat me, it’ll make you feel better. You’re all stressed out, this is going to fix all of your problems. Chocolate Cake talking to you. So instead of eating your healthy dinner of chicken and salad like you planned on doing, you just grab the cake and you eat the whole thing while you’re standing there with the door open.
And you’re like I don’t understand what’s happening. I’m self-sabotaging. So you have this long-term goal, you want to lose weight, but your behavior standing there in front of the fridge with the door open eating a whole chocolate cake is completely undermining your progress towards your goals. Right.
So this is what self-sabotage looks like. Okay. And I know this is kind of an extremely funny example. But we do it to some degree like this all the time. Okay. Here’s a more subtle example of self-sabotage. And this may be something that you can relate to, because this is my experience.
So a few years ago, I stopped doing the longer distance running, I stopped running marathons and running ultra marathons. And I loved doing that. This is like who I was. I was like the ultra marathon guy, you know, and I just love getting out there and running all the 50K’s and the 50 milers, and stuff like that.
And I just stopped doing it because I told myself all this stuff. I gave myself all these reasons why I didn’t want to keep doing these long-distance events. So I told myself I was getting too old is too hard on my body. It’s not good for me, oh, it’s hard on your knees. Whatever those days are behind me, you know, the glory days are behind like it’s just all gonna go downhill from here, whatever. I was telling myself all this stuff. That is not what I really wanted for myself though.
What I really wanted for myself was I wanted to continue to be the ultramarathon guy. I wanted to continue to run the long-distance events but subconsciously, I was telling myself all these little stories because I was afraid because training for those events and running those events is hard, and it’s uncomfortable.
And I was telling myself all these little lies, basically, because I didn’t want to feel uncomfortable. You know, it was getting me outside my comfort zone when I started thinking about running a marathon again are these Ultras, and I just didn’t want to feel uncomfortable. So I told myself all these lies, and then I just stopped running the long-distance stuff.
Okay, so that’s pretty subtle, right? I mean, you, you kind of think that you’re just, you know, these are just the this is just the truth. And this is just, these are all the reasons why I can’t do this anymore. But, you know, kind of underlying all that was this lie. This lie that I was trying to just stay safe and secure and comfortable.
When in reality, I really wanted to continue doing those things that brought me so much joy. Yeah, they’re hard to do, but they brought me so much joy and, and fulfillment when I did that, okay. But I was self-sabotaging by telling myself all these lies. You know, another subtle way of self-sabotaging is to just say to yourself, you know, I’m okay, being overweight, I’m okay, at this weight, I’m just, I’m fine the way I am. Even though, deep down inside, you really want to lose
30 pounds. And I’m not talking about like, body image issues or anything like that, if you’re okay with where you are, like, honestly, like you, you don’t want to lose weight, that is perfectly fine.
But if deep down inside, you really do want to lose weight. But you’re telling yourself, you know, lies like, I’m okay, where I am, or, you know, this just never really works for me anyway. Or it’s just kind of too hard. I don’t want to be that uncomfortable. All those things, we tell ourselves our little subtle forms of self-sabotage. Okay, so just be mindful of that.
Okay, I’m just kind of going through what self-sabotage looks like, and how it can be kind of subtle. Why do we do this? Why do we self-sabotage? Why do we say we want to do something, but then do something different? And really, it has to do with wanting to stay comfortable, you know?
Our brains are always looking for safety, like our brains are really good at seeking comfort and avoiding pain. Okay, this is great. This is helped us to evolve as human beings over millions of years. You know, seek pleasure, avoid pain, this works really well. So when we self-sabotage, we’re actually getting a positive effect by doing this to ourselves.
Our brains are thinking that it’s a positive effect because we’re avoiding some sort of pain, right? Some sort of discomfort. Right? So it might be the feeling of safety, security, or just plain old comfort, right? So but that primitive part of our brain wants to avoid any sort of discomfort, discomfort, you know, feels like pain to our brain.
And so we might just go, oh, you know, running a marathon. That’s hard work that’s like, this is discomfort. I don’t want that. You got to stay safe. Come over here. The same thing with like, when you tell yourself, oh, losing weight is too hard, or I can’t do it. Or maybe I’m just okay being this way.
You’re telling yourself, I don’t want to go through the discomfort of losing the weight, I don’t want to go through any kind of discomfort. So instead of reaching this goal, that might be a little uncomfortable getting there.
I’m just going to keep telling myself that I’m okay where I am, even though that’s not really what you want. So that’s what self-sabotage looks like. And that’s kind of why we do it. Think about where in your life right now. You’re avoiding pain and discomfort.
You know, what goals do you have? Where you’re where you might have to get uncomfortable? And how are you avoiding achieving that goal or working towards that goal? How are you avoiding getting uncomfortable? Because your brain is telling you to stay safe? Think about that.
It’d be interesting to kind of hear what you guys think about where you’re seeing this in your own life. Okay. But self-sabotage the positive benefit we get from it is that it keeps us from having to feel uncomfortable, right, but disk Comfort is the price we have to pay if we want to achieve anything worthwhile. You know, I talk about this all the time, right?
Embrace the suck, embrace the discomfort. But for example, if I decide I’m never going to run another marathon, then I don’t have to go through any of that pain and discomfort of training for the marathon. If I never, if I say I’m never running an ultra again, you know ultras are too hard, that’s too hard on my body, I’m too old, those days are behind me, then I never have to go through the discomfort of training for one again, I can stay safe right here, my little comfort zone.
You know, if you say to yourself, I’m okay, being overweight, it’s too hard to lose weight, all that stuff, then you don’t have to endure any of that discomfort of losing the weight, right? You just keep eating the chocolate cake. And, and you’re good, you’re comfortable. You’ve succeeded in staying in your comfort zone, good job. You’ve succeeded in avoiding all the pain and seeking out the pleasure.
You’re satisfying that primitive part of your brain. But the things you really want for yourself, your hopes, your dreams, and your goals are all washed away. Right? So why do we self-sabotage as we think we’re getting some positive benefit, which is to stay comfortable. But is that what you really want for yourself? I say, no.
So here are some ways that we self sabotage some ways that are a little subtle, and you may not be thinking about all the time, but they’re not as obvious. So one way that we self-sabotage is by procrastinating. So this is the act of, you know, delaying, or postponing doing something. Okay, so we put something off because we don’t feel like doing it. Well, I’ll do it tomorrow.
When you put it off, when you say I’ll do it tomorrow, you don’t have to deal with it right now, you don’t have to do anything uncomfortable right now. Right? When you say, Oh, I’m going to change my diet, I’m going to change the way I eat, I’m going to focus on my nutrition, you know, starting next month.
So that’s a very safe thing for you to do, it causes no immediate discomfort, you just push it off. And then when next month comes, you’re like, I know, I said I was going to do that. But I’m really not ready for that yet. And I’ve got all these other things going on in my life. So I’m just going to, I’m going to do it next month. And we just keep doing this right, we just keep delaying the discomfort. It’s just a constant delay, delay, delay.
Delay is a killer of hopes and dreams. If you just keep putting stuff off, you’re never gonna get it done. Okay? This is a very common way that we self-sabotage procrastination.
Another way we self-sabotage is by doing something called buffering. Buffering is where we use some external thing, food, alcohol, drugs, shopping, whatever, to try to make us feel good. Inside, we have difficult emotions we’re dealing with. And so we use something external, like food or alcohol, to feel better, right? We’re using something external to feel better internally.
You put a buffer between you and your emotions. And you know, it’s buffering because it always comes with some kind of negative consequences, right? So you might be stressed out. And so you eat and you gain weight. Right? you overeat, you eat all the chocolate cake, and you gain weight and you never reach your goal. This is when you know it’s buffering, okay?
Some people use shopping in the same way you get that little dopamine hit every time you buy something, you know, and it kind of feels good. People use drugs, and people use, you know, cigarettes and alcohol. Some people even use exercise as a form of buffering because they don’t want to deal with the stress in their life.
And so, instead of dealing with the emotional experiences you’re having, you just use something to feel better temporarily. Right? It doesn’t really help you with the emotion you’re experiencing with the stress with the anger with the sadness, whatever it is you’re experiencing. It just covers it up temporarily. It just kind of makes you feel good in the moment, right? Very, a very common way that people self-sabotage is using some substance or something to just try to make themselves feel better.
And it’s self-sabotage because, you know, think about it like alcoholics who drink too much. They know they shouldn’t drink but they do it anyway. They know that drinking is going to cost them their marriage, their job, they won’t see their kids they may lose everything, but they drink anyway, this is a very common way that alcoholics self-sabotage, right.
They would rather drink than have to deal with all the feelings and especially the feeling of like not having that alcohol in their system. Okay, so buffering, with food, with alcohol, with drugs, or with shopping is another way that we self-sabotage.
Another pretty subtle way we self-sabotage is by just never starting anything. And this is like procrastination. But it just kind of goes on and on, you actually never do anything at all. And I see this, a lot of times, I talk to people all the time about changing their diet, right, and changing their relationship with food and changing their health and their fitness. And they tell me, without a doubt, I’m ready, I’m ready to lose weight, I’m ready to change my diet, I’m ready to, you know, go all-in on this, but then they never do anything about it.
You know, they just keep talking about it, they just keep saying they want to do it. I talk to people all the time, let’s say this. They want a different life for themselves. They want to be healthier. They want to eat better, they want to lose weight, they want to be in better shape, but they never do anything about they never get started.
I mean, it’s a little different than procrastinating, like constant procrastination. It’s like procrastination to the next level. Just never starting you, you just have to start. But again, it’s like one of those things, it’s uncomfortable. And we know it’s going to be hard. And so just talking about it is much easier than actually doing something about it. But the very, very common way that we self-sabotage.
How many things in your life have you been talking about doing? Think about it. How many things have you said, you know, it’d be nice to do that, to take that vacation, to change this about myself, to run a marathon, to whatever your goals are? Quit your job, start your own business, make more money, you know, get married, whatever it is, what is it that you just keep talking about, but never doing?
I’ll be honest with you, I keep talking about wanting to get out of here in the winter, and go live somewhere warm for at least a couple of months. And I keep talking about it. And I never do anything about it. I self-sabotage in that way. I’m gonna have to do something about it probably this year. Since I’m now that I’m bringing it up. I’m totally calling myself out on this. Oh my god.
But like, it’s one of those things that I’ve been talking about for a couple of years. And I really haven’t done anything about it. And I just need to like pull the trigger and do something about it. Go somewhere warm. Go live on a beach for 30 days in the winter. Oh my gosh, that’d be amazing. So I’m gonna do something about it. You watch.
Alright, another kind of subtle way that we self-sabotage is we just quit? I guess this isn’t that subtle. Right? Quitting is different from what I call failing. So, you know, there’s really no such thing as failure. Like, I think, you know, true failure is just quitting, honestly. But I think failure is a part of the process of accomplishing anything that you want in your life.
If you want to lose weight, let’s say, and you are trying a bunch of different things, and they’re just not working. Those are like little failures. And that’s okay. You just got to keep trying stuff until you figure out what works for you, right. I’ve been experiencing this lately, learning how to do a handstand, right? This is a goal of mine, it’s really hard to do.
It’s very, very challenging. And I keep failing, I keep falling down. And I can’t balance properly. And I’m not strong enough yet. But I keep doing it. So the only way that I could actually fail at that is if I just quit, like quitting is the ultimate self-sabotage. If I just keep trying, and I keep having these little failures, and I but I keep going and I keep learning what works and what doesn’t.
And this is what I’m doing. I’m falling down. I’m trying to get my hands down and falling down. I’m learning that I have to be I have to work on my balance. That’s a big part of this right and my core strength. So I’m working on those things, and I’m learning as I go. But if I were to just say like, oh, I tried it once and I can’t do it. And I quit. That’s like the ultimate self-sabotage. So I’m not gonna do that. I’m gonna keep going.
So you may not even be aware of why you’re quitting. It’s kind of like what I was talking about earlier when I decided I wasn’t going to run the long-distance events anymore. I was justifying it and it sounded like, you know, justifiable, it sounded like these were good reasons for not wanting to run long distances anymore.
Oh, I’m too old. It’s too hard. I don’t like doing that. But really, I was just quitting, I just quit. I just gave up. I didn’t want to do that. That’s total self-sabotage right there. So those are a few other ways that we self-sabotage, some subtle, some not so much. But here’s what happens. Here are some of the negative side effects that we experience when we self-sabotage.
So you’ve you feel like you’re choosing safety and security, you feel like you’re staying comfortable. But what you’re really doing is you’re, you’re hurting yourself. And here’s how, when you self sabotage, in whatever way that looks like for you, whether it’s procrastination, quitting, whether that’s you know, buffering, or just like never starting anything, you just stay stuck where you are.
Right, if you want something that you don’t have, like, you have to get out of your comfort zone, right, everything you want, that you don’t already have is outside your comfort zone. But getting out of your comfort zone does not feel good is scary out there. It’s uncomfortable. It’s why it’s called comfort zone. It’s the unknown. In order to grow, in order to become the best version of you.
Like, let’s say you want to lose the weight and run faster, run farther, whatever that looks like for you. Whatever vision of yourself, you have for yourself, the person that you ultimately want to be, you can’t do any of those things. If you just stay stuck and comfortable where you are, you have to get uncomfortable.
When you self sabotage, you hold yourself back from reaching all these goals from becoming who you want to become. So you’ll never become that person. You’ll never know what you’re capable of achieving. You’re gonna miss the opportunity to find out what you can do and what you’re really made of. You’re never going to realize your full potential.
This is one of the most costly side effects of self-sabotage is that you’ll never reach your full potential. I have big goals for myself in 2021 I am very aware of the ways that I self-sabotage okay. I do it in some subtle ways. Sometimes it’s it looks like procrastination. Sometimes it looks like quitting. But I’m so aware of this now I know what I’m doing it.
And I know that when I find myself seeking comfort when I when I’m seeking when I’m when I would just want to feel safe and comfortable and complacent. I know I’m probably self-sabotaging in some way. I know when I find myself feeling uncomfortable, maybe a little bit afraid. Maybe a little bit on the edge. I know I’m not self-sabotaging. And I know I’m right where I’m supposed to be because I’m getting out of my comfort zone. I do that.
Isn’t that crazy, though? Like embracing the discomfort is kind of the opposite of what we’re taught our whole lives, right? We’re always taught like just feel good. You just want to feel good all the time. Just feel comfortable, safe, and secure. But that’s not how these things work. Because it’s not how you become more. Right? Self-sabotaging does make you feel safe and secure. But it also prevents you from becoming who you want to be. It prevents you from achieving big things.
So what do we do about all this? It’s probably what you’ve been asking yourself this whole time. How do we overcome self-sabotage, Patrick? Well, I’m gonna tell you right now, the first thing you want to do to overcome self-sabotage is to focus on taking aligned action on your goals and dreams.
So figure out what it is you want to accomplish. What are your goals? If you don’t have any goals, that’s actually a form of self-sabotage too, just FYI, right. Oh, I don’t have goals. No, you’re not going to you’re not going to achieve much then. Okay. But if you do have goals, I encourage you to have goals.
Think about one of your goals. And then think about everything you did yesterday. What did you do yesterday to work toward that goal? Did you do anything? Did you do a couple of things? Why or why not? This is what it means to take aligned action, you have a goal, and there’s something important that you want to achieve.
And then every day, every day, you take little steps towards reaching that goal. So your goal could be I want to run a marathon. And so yesterday, you ran a mile, and you logged your workout in your training journal, and you wrote a few notes about how you felt about that run. This is the kind of stuff we’ll be talking about in the journal challenge in the Facebook group, FYI.
So you took a line action, right, you ran and you logged some stuff in your trading journal, and you’re keeping track of your progress. And you stuck to your plan and you ran your workout yesterday. Perfect, you’re taking aligned action towards that goal.
Let’s say your goal is to lose 30 pounds. So you look at what you did yesterday, you planned your meals ahead of time, you didn’t snack between meals, you stuck to your plan, and you logged everything in your food journal, perfect. Another form of taking aligned action towards your goal. That’s what it means to take aligned action.
So if you’re not doing something each day, to move towards this goal that you say is so important to you. That could be a form of self-sabotage. Okay, so the number one thing you can do, to overcome self-sabotage is to take aligned action every day, when you focus on taking some sort of action that moves you in the direction of your goals of your hopes of your dreams, you can avoid self-sabotage.
The second thing you can do to overcome self-sabotage is to stop focusing on the past and focus on the future instead. If all of your attention, and all of your focus is on your past, who you used to be the all the ways that you have failed, all the things that have not worked for you, you are just going to stay stuck in that past, you’re going to keep creating more and more of that past in your future.
When we focus on all of our past shortcomings, and the things that have never worked for us, we just create more and more of that, in our future. Your past is just a series of thought patterns. It’s a series of mostly subconscious mental habits. And we need to break those old habits, we need to break out of those patterns, we need to start working on new thought patterns, we need to create new mental habits for our future.
We don’t want to keep doing and thinking and feeling the same things over and over again, that we’ve been doing in the past, right? So who is it you want to be in the future? Think about this, think about the future version of yourself. So you’ve already achieved your goal.
Let’s say you, you want to lose 30 pounds, you’re already there? What does that person look like? How do you think differently? Because you’ve already achieved this goal? How do you feel about yourself? Focus on that amazing future version of you. Instead of focusing on what you’ve done or not done in the past.
I have this vision for myself. I want to be stronger. I want to be more muscular. I want to be ripped. Okay. And I think about that future version of myself all the time, I see myself standing in the mirror looking at myself, and I’m kind of jacked. You know, I’m feeling really good about how I look and how I feel about myself.
And if I were to just focus on my past and how I haven’t really been able to build much muscle in the past, I only see my future vision of myself would be just that skinny guy who I used to be who lacks muscle definition. Focusing my attention on who I want to be that jacked version of myself who I want to become keeps me motivated and moving in that direction.
Whereas if I focused all my attention on how I’ve always been the skinny guy and I’ve never really been very muscular. I just feel All terrible about myself. And I’d always be moving in that direction. And when I say the skinny guy, I don’t, because I was pretty fat at some point, but I was still never had like muscle definition, right? I just had like fat arms, I didn’t have muscular arms, you know, and I want that. That’s what I’m working on.
But where you focus, your attention is the direction you move. So if I’m focusing my intention on this amazing, healthy, muscular version of myself in the future, I’m going to be moving in that direction. If I keep focusing on this person I used to be, that just doesn’t feel good at all. But I’ll be moving in that direction. I don’t want to do that.
So my encouragement for you in a way that you can really stop the self-sabotage is to stop focusing on what’s in your past, stop focusing on what hasn’t worked on your failures, and all that other stuff, and start focusing on who you want to become. Focus on the future you, and then you’ll always be moving in that direction.
Alright, and then the third way that we can overcome self-sabotage is to manage our minds. Right, we self sabotage, because we have thoughts and feelings about why we can’t do something or about how will never amount to anything, or it’s too hard, or that’s just not who I am anymore. Whatever thoughts and feelings we have about ourselves, you have to understand something, these thoughts that you have about yourself are not the truth. They’re just thoughts. They’re thoughts in your head. They’re just like sentences, you keep saying to yourself over and over again.
And sometimes we say these things to ourselves so often, and for so long, that they just become these deep-seated beliefs that we have about ourselves, even though they’re just thoughts, they’re not the truth. I had these beliefs that running Ultras was too hard, that I’m too old. And I thought these things over and over again until I quit training for those events. And in they became true for me.
So beliefs are just recurring thoughts that we have, like habitual patterns of thoughts. And honestly, you can change them if you want, you don’t have to hold on to them. I was holding on to them. And it was keeping me feeling terrible about myself and staying stuck and staying small. So if you have a belief that, like, let’s say, you have a belief that no matter what, you’ll never be able to lose weight, I can almost guarantee that you never, ever will be able to lose weight.
If this is a strong belief that you have about yourself, you’re never gonna be able to lose weight, I guarantee you. In order to stop the self-sabotage, you have to change these thought patterns. Right? And one of the first steps is just to recognize that all these thoughts are just that they’re just thoughts, then they’re not necessarily true. Just have that awareness. Your thoughts are just how you are choosing to respond to the world around you.
So here’s my example. You know, I had all these thoughts about how you know Ultras, were too hard. I’m too old. I don’t like doing them. Maybe just like running half marathons is better. Yeah, that’s what it was. Half marathons are better. This is like a thought that I was telling people like, oh, you know, you get it done in like two hours. And you know, the training is easier, and all these other things. And so I really believe this.
All of these thoughts, though, like, these beliefs that I had created, created this, like, whole belief system around ultras being too hard, and, you know, half-marathons being easier. And, man, it just became like, part of who I was, but it wasn’t the truth. You know, when I stopped to look at this and to really think about like, what am I doing here? Like, are marathons really too hard? Am I too old? Are halves really better than full marathons are Ultras, you know, only in my past?
And when I really sat down and asked myself these questions, the answer was like, no, none of this stuff is actually true. Lots of people would say, marathons are not too hard, or they’re not too old. I know people that are like in their 70s and 80s that still run marathons or Ultras, I know a lot of people that say a half marathons are not better than full marathons.
Like, I can decide what’s true for me. So I chose, eventually, that all these thought patterns that I had these beliefs that I had, were just that in that I don’t have to, like, hang on to this stuff anymore. Because hanging on to this stuff was just keeping me feeling small and safe and comfortable. Yeah, but also, I wasn’t doing the things I really wanted to do. pretty subtle. But it felt so true for me.
I really could justify not wanting to do these harder events because of these deep-seated belief systems they created all-around how hard this stuff was. And so this is like total self-sabotage, for me. So why this is so important is because your thoughts, create your reality, everything that you have in your life right now. All of it is created by your thoughts.
Things happen in your life, you have circumstances that happen in your life, and then you have thoughts about those circumstances. Right? Always, always, always you have thoughts about stuff that’s going on around you. And it’s your thoughts that create your feelings. So if you feel motivated, it’s because you had a thought about something that created that feeling of motivation. And then those feelings drive your actions.
So when you feel motivated, you take certain actions like usually, if you’re motivated in the right direction, those actions you’re taking are aligned actions that move you towards your goal. So when you think marathons are too hard, that creates a feeling of deep motivation inside you. And when you feel demotivated, you’re probably going to take action, that’s like self-sabotaging action, or you don’t do anything at all right, you just give up, you just quit, you don’t do it. That was my experience.
So I had all these thoughts, they created these feelings of like, discouragement, uncomfortable, or D motivation. And then I just gave up, right? This is all based on my thoughts. So the trick here is that you have to learn to control how you respond to everything happening in the world around you. Your thoughts, always create your feelings, your feelings, always drive your actions. Just know this, when you know this, you can start making some changes here.
Another example of how your thoughts create your results is if you constantly think you can’t lose weight, and you’re going to feel that those thoughts are going to make you feel defeated. Those thoughts or that feeling of being defeated is going to keep you from taking aligned action, right. So you’ll just stand in front of the fridge with the door open and eat the whole chocolate cake.
This is a classic, you know, self-sabotage. And it’s all caused by your own thoughts and feelings. Think about this, your current weight is a direct result of your thoughts, your beliefs, and your belief systems. And the emotions you create by your thoughts. All of it creates your current weight, it creates everything in your life right now.
And if you think well, doesn’t matter what I’ve done in my past, I’m going to lose these 30 pounds no matter what no matter how long it takes, I’m going to do whatever it takes. And I’m going to get there. This is a whole different way of thinking. This is going to make you feel super motivated. This is going to keep you sticking to your plan.
You’re going to take aligned action, regardless of there being chocolate cake in the fridge. And I can guarantee that you will lose weight. I see this all the time in my clients that tell me oh yeah, I just got through Christmas and there were all these cookies around and pies and everything and I didn’t even want to eat it. I stuck to my plan. And I felt so good about myself. And I’ve lost a few more pounds this week. That is amazing. It’s all because they’re choosing what to believe about themselves. They’re choosing thoughts that help them to stay motivated.
Change your thoughts. You change your reality change your thoughts, you can change your weight, change your thoughts and you can run an ultra. Okay. This is what it looks like when I say you got to manage your mind right you have to change what you’re thinking mindset is the key to all of this and you won’t get it perfect right away. This is a daily practice, I still work on this.
But when you have that awareness, when you keep working on it when you keep thinking about your thoughts, pretty meta, but when you keep focused on how your thinking is creating the results that you’re getting in your life, you can absolutely do something about it and you can start creating the results that you really want in your life by just changing your thoughts. Okay, and there, there becomes nothing that you can’t accomplish. There’s nothing you can’t do with the right mindset.
So quick recap here, self-sabotage. It’s patterns of thoughts and behaviors that hold you back that keep you stuck that prevent you from becoming who you really want to be. How do you know if you’re self sabotaging? Usually, it’s because your actions, your habits, and your behaviors are not in alignment with your long-term goals.
Why do we self-sabotage? Because our brains think we’re gonna get some kind of positive benefit from it. Like we’re avoiding pain, we’re seeking pleasure trying to stay comfortable. Some of the common ways we self-sabotage are by procrastination, buffering, we never start anything or we just quit, we just give up.
And some of the negative consequences of self-sabotage are really it just keeps us stuck. It holds us back and prevents us from becoming who we want to be from reaching our goals, from accomplishing our big impossible goals and dreams. And we just stay small. We never get to become the best version of ourselves.
And how do we overcome self-sabotage? Well, take aligned action towards your goals and dreams every single day. Remember to focus on your future, that future amazing version of you instead of your past. And then learn how to manage your thoughts and feelings. You change your thoughts, you change your results. Cool.
All right, I hope you got something out of this today. Remember, the Running Lean monthly coaching group opens up January 3, everything I just talked about here, how to take aligned action towards your goals, how to focus on your future, how to manage your mind, all of that stuff. We’re going to be talking about all of that in the monthly coaching group. I’ve got this brand new course called achieving the impossible. It’s going to be amazing.
You also get access to the weight loss training course for runners to learn exactly how to become a lean fat-burning machine, you get those live group coaching calls with me. Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join. Enrollment opens January 3, go all-in on yourself, make 2021 the year you transform yourself into a lean, fat-burning running machine. Cool.
You got this, my friends. Hey, thank you for joining me every week here in 2020. I am looking so forward to 2021. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of you keep on Running Lean. 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.
Contrary to what I see plastered all over social media, I don’t think 2020 was that bad of a year, at least it wasn’t for me. I accomplished more in my life this year than in the last 5 years …
Continue Reading about 52. Looking Back and Moving Forward →
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 52 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today, the topic is looking back and moving forward. I want to take a look back over lessons learned in 2020. And I want to talk about what it means to move forward into this new year 2021.
And contrary to what I see, plastered all over social media, I don’t think 2020 was that bad of a year. At least it wasn’t for me. I accomplished more in my life this past year. I feel like I’ve grown more in this past year than I have in like the last five years combined. Yes, I had to overcome a lot of personal struggles this year. And yes, I had to blow past my own limitations this year. But regardless of all that, I’m not choosing to look back on this year as a dumpster fire.
You know, I’m not looking at 2020 as the worst year ever. In fact, I want to say that I think 2020 has been one of the best years of my life. So in this episode, I’m going to be looking back at 2020, I’m going to share some of the valuable lessons that I learned. And I hope you’ve learned as well. And I’ll be focusing on and I’ll be talking about what I will be focusing on as I move forward into 2021. And some things that you can start thinking about focusing on as you move forward into the next year.
Before we get into all that though, please come check us out on Facebook, just search for the Running Lean community, it’s a bunch of cool people is what it is. All hanging out, talking about running, sharing stories, encouraging each other, supporting each other. It’s a very positive group of people. And you should definitely come check us out just search for Running Lean community on Facebook.
Also, I wanted to let you guys know that starting January 3, I’m opening the doors to the Running Lean monthly coaching group. Right. This is my monthly coaching program, where you get access to all of my online courses, including my flagship, my flagship program, called the weight loss training course for runners, that shows you exactly how to become an efficient fat-burning machine. You also get live coaching calls with me and fellow runners.
So if you want coaching and encouragement and support and accountability, so that you can hit your goals going into this new year, this is the group for you. Also, we’re going to be doing this cool and very powerful goal-setting workshop called achieving the impossible in 2021. That you definitely don’t want to miss so you can find out information about this just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join.
I want you to make 2021 your year, make it your best year yet become that badass runner that you’ve always wanted to be. Join the monthly coaching group and I will help you get there and so will your other runners. Okay, runningleanpodcast.com/join. Okay, let’s talk about this past year. First of all, I wanted to mention this. This is episode number 52 of the podcast which means that we have now a full year’s worth of podcasts if you listen to one each week. So the first episode came out the first week of January last year.
So we are coming up on the anniversary. But basically, we’ve got a whole year of podcasts under our belt. Oh my gosh, that is so fun. This is very exciting. You know, most podcasters when they start out. I think the average is something like they get to like episode number seven, and then they just quit.
That’s not how I roll. That is not how I roll. So I feel good about the content that I’m sharing with you guys. I hope you enjoy these podcast episodes. I know I have a lot of fun making them. I love sharing these ideas. And I hope it’s helpful in some way. And if you find it helpful, you could always hit up iTunes and leave a quick review and tell everybody else how much you love it.
But yeah, a whole year of podcasts. That’s very, very cool. So let’s talk about lessons learned. Let’s talk about the lessons that I’ve learned in 2020 and this is not everything I’ve learned. But these are some of the key lessons that I learned that I want to share with you that I think you can probably relate to.
So the first lesson I learned in 2020, was that I am stronger than I thought I was and that I am a much stronger person than I give myself credit for. You know, I struggled a lot with adversity at the beginning of this year, I was going through a divorce, I got a couple of work furloughs, I got furloughed from two jobs. There was a lot of financial insecurity happening in my world. We were in, we had just started this global pandemic, and everything was shutting down. And it was this was hard.
For me, this was a very challenging time. For me, this was a very emotional time for me. And here’s the thing, though, I can look back on all that now and say, wow, I made it through all of that. And I feel like I’m in a better place now. I feel stronger now than I did at the beginning of this year, for sure. I feel like I’m a different person now than I was the beginning of 2020.
And all that emotional stuff that I had to deal with, I had to learn how to kind of experience all those emotions, how to feel my feelings. And I learned also that, you know, your emotions can’t kill you. That it’s just a feeling you feel in your body. And they do pass, sometimes it takes a while.
But things like, you know, going through a divorce, that was very tough on me, it forced me very much forced me out of my comfort zone. Right, I was kind of forced to start over. Right here I was on my own and just got to figure everything out again, and starting from scratch in a way.
But what was cool is that I decided early on this year, that I wasn’t going to let this break me. I wasn’t going to let this thing that was happening in my life. You know, damage me or, or weaken me, I was going to get through it. And I was going to be stronger on the other side of that.
It’s like when you go to the gym, and you and you, you have to lift weights and like tear down your muscles in order to build them back up again, right? It’s kind of the same thing. Sometimes you have to go through this tough stuff, mentally and emotionally. So that you can kind of build that mental and emotional strength that you need to get stronger.
Because, you know, if everything’s just going hunky-dory in your life, you don’t have to really work those mental and emotional muscles, right? So, this kind of adversity that I was going through these tough times that I was going through, forced me to become mentally and emotionally stronger. I had to endure some pain.
But I decided I wasn’t going to wallow in it, I wasn’t going to indulge in it. I was going to allow that pain to be there, process it, and move through it. And I found out something interesting about me that I can get through a lot of stuff. I’ve been through a lot of stuff in my life. I’ve quit drinking, I went, that was my second divorce. But I had cancer, I’ve been divorced twice, I quit drinking, I was you know, drinking too much and had to stop that was very challenging. All these things that I’ve gone through. And each time I go through something like that, I come out on the other side. I feel like I get a little bit stronger.
And this year, there was a lot going on, then I think I got much stronger. I think I’m much stronger than I thought I was. I don’t give myself enough credit sometimes for how strong I am. You know, and earlier this year, I would have told you that I can’t handle this. There were times where I was literally like thinking, I don’t know what I’m going to do here. I can’t handle this.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been there in that place. It’s a terrible place to be, honestly feels terrible. But I did handle it. Somehow I managed to get through one day at a time. And then here I am, you know 12 months later, and I feel amazing today. I’m in a really good place today.
And I kind of look back at these tough times and say I’m sort of glad that happened. Now, isn’t that crazy that we can say that? Like we go through things that are terrible, and we wish for anything that they could just be different. Just make all this pain go away. But that’s how you learn. That’s how you grow. That’s how you become more of who you want to be. So that was a very, very profound lesson that I had to learn this year, that I am much stronger than I give myself credit for.
Another big lesson I learned this past year, is all about what I can and what I can control. So here’s what I’ve learned that I can control: I can control my own thoughts, my own feelings and my own actions, what I think, how I feel, and what I do, that’s what I can control. You know, what I can control.
Everything else that I didn’t just mention. That includes what other people think, what emotions other people have, when other people do it, that includes what other people think about me, or how they feel about me? Or what they do or don’t do to me, you know, all this stuff? Like? It sounds so simple, right? And I think we all kind of understand this intellectually, right?
That you can’t control other people, but do you believe it? Do you really believe it? Do you live it? Or are you always just wishing people would do things your way? I know, that’s the way I was living for a long time. I was a pro, I tried to control other people, especially my partner for the last nine years.
You know, I didn’t really see it at the time. But looking back on it, I can, I can very clearly see. I was always trying to get her to think and act my way. And if she would just do that, everything would be fine. Right? If they would just do things our way then everything would just be perfect.
But trust me, I have to tell you something, it does not work. The only person that was miserable and frustrated all that time was me. Okay, so really, I had to take control of the things that I could control my own thoughts, feelings, and actions.
And this was how I was able to finally lose weight. I mean, this is how I was able to, you know, do things like run a marathon this year and run an ultra marathon this year. Because I wasn’t blaming other people.
And that leads me to my next lesson, the next lesson I learned this past year, which is that not only do I know what I can and can’t control, but I’ve learned how to take radical responsibility for everything in my life. Radical responsibility for everything in my life. I have this t shirt. And it says in giant, a black T shirt, it says in giant white letters, it’s all my fault.
And some people see that and they don’t understand what it means. But here’s what it means. It means that everything I have in my life, everything that’s happening to me every result that I get in my life, whether it’s good or bad, it’s all my fault. You know, if I’m having a good day, that’s my fault. If I’m having a bad day, it’s my fault.
And here’s the thing, people think, oh, that’s terrible. How’s everything your fault? But I have to tell you, this is bad news. Yeah, but it’s also good news. It’s bad news. Because, well, here’s the thing, you can’t blame anybody else anymore. For how you feel. Now things are going with you. It’s good news because you get all your power back.
You are in control. Right. And this kind of goes along with taking control of your own thoughts, feelings, and actions, taking radical responsibility for everything that you have in your life. So when I’m constantly blaming other people, and I did this for so long, you just you’re in a place of blame.
You’re in a place of shunning responsibility, everything is happening to you, and you have no control. It’s a very disempowering place to be. So for example, when I found myself 40 pounds overweight at the beginning of this past year, I was trying to figure out how to lose weight. I was trying all these different things.
And you know, one of the things that I remember thinking to myself was, and she was my partner at the time, you know, she would just stop stressing me out all the time. I could build and stick to my eating plan. You know, if, if things were just different here in this relationship, maybe I wouldn’t be so stressed out all the time. And I could just stay on track here. I wasn’t taking ownership of my actions. And I wasn’t taking ownership of the results either.
Because for the past few years, I had kept putting on weight and kind of blaming other people for that very disempowering place to be in giving all my power away to somebody else. But when I decided to take responsibility, when I decided to be the cause of all of my results, in other words, I’m looking at myself in the mirror and looking at these extra 40 pounds on me, I’m like, this is your fault. This is your fault.
This is a very empowering place to be. Because now I have the power to change that. But when you’re always blaming somebody else for where you are, you give all your power away. They’re in control, you’re giving control to somebody else, this is not a good idea. And I hear this a lot of times from clients who tell me why they can’t stay on their eating plan. And they give me all these excuses.
And they talk about, you know, work is very stressful, or, you know, my husband is very unsupportive, or, you know, I just had a bad day, or whatever it is, and there is always there all external circumstances, people, usually other people, my boss yelled at me, my husband was being a jerk, whatever it is. And they’re basically saying, Okay, I can’t do what I really want to do here my life because of what somebody else said.
And then that’s just a very victim kind of place to be and you don’t want to live your life that way. You know, when I stopped blaming other people, and I started asking myself, Hey, okay, why have you gained 40 pounds? What are you going to do? How can I take 100% responsibility for where I am? And for where I want to be? How can I take 100% responsibility and make this happen for me? How can I lose this weight? What am I going to do?
It doesn’t matter what other people think, or other people say, or other people do. None of the other stuff matters. I wanted to be the cause, not the cause of where I am, the cause of where I wanted to be. How can I make this all my fault? This is a crazy mindset shift.
Honestly, think about this, if you stop blaming, and just start taking responsibility for everything in your life. How good running is going for you whether or not you’re injured. If you’re losing weight or not, if you stay on your food plan or not. How you’re doing with work with your business, with your kids, with your relationships.
When you take 100% responsibility, it is a game-changer. It’s a crazy, crazy mindset shift. Not something a lot of people think about. People just want to blame others all the time. You don’t have to do that. Big, big lesson learned for me this year. Here’s another one.
This one looking back on it, I was like, I didn’t even realize this is a thing. But here’s the lesson I learned. I can change anytime I want. I can always change my mind about anything. So can you. So I’m 54 years old now. For the past 15 years, I’ve been vegetarian and then plant-based. And this was, you know, working for me. I thought this is the best way to go for me.
Until it kind of stopped working right, I was eating a lot of processed foods, I was eating way too much sugar. I gained all this weight. I was still running a lot but it wasn’t working. Wondering, running was not helping me lose weight. I wanted to feel good about what I was eating. I wanted to just go back to eating real food, whole foods as close to nature as possible food their ancestors would have eaten.
And I decided that I was going to make a big change. And I went back to eating meat again. And I thought like I could never do that like that’s just not who I am. What are people gonna think of me? What am I going to think of myself? You know? And I have to tell you that it was like one of the most liberating things I’ve ever done to just say screw it. I don’t care what anybody else thinks. I’m going to do what I think is best for me. There’s a radical concept. Right?
But I can always change I can change my mind about anything I want at any time, I don’t have to be so dogmatic about this stuff, and that was stressing me out, I felt very dogmatic about being a plant-based athlete, you know. And like I was gonna get ostracized from some club if I started eating meat again.
And you know, there are probably people out there that have like, unfollowed, me or whatever you want to call it, I don’t really care. It doesn’t matter. I’m doing what I think is best for me. So I went back to eating meat again. And I’ve never felt better. I lost the 40 pounds, and I feel great. I’m stronger than ever. Running has been amazing for me this year.
So it really doesn’t matter how old you are, how long you’ve been doing the same things, you can change any time you want. You can change your mind. You can always learn new stuff, you can grow, you can evolve, you can become anything in anyone that you want in your life, you don’t even have to have a good reason to do it. You just have to feel good about it. Okay.
So this was a big one for me. And, and I love this because it’s kind of freeing because it means like I can change again, what am I going to do this year? I don’t know, who knows. But the thing is that we don’t have to be stuck where we are, we can always make different choices and change.
Alright, here’s another lesson I learned. And this is a big one. That failure is not optional. It’s actually required. Now, this might sound counterintuitive, because I know a lot of people, you know, have these T-shirts and memes that say like failure is not an option. And I’m like, no, I think failure is completely an option. I think it’s actually a requirement.
And for me anytime I set out to accomplish some big goal. You know, for example, when I became a fat-adapted runner, this took me a long time. But I felt terrible for a long time, every time I went out for a run. When I stopped eating sugar, I felt terrible. And I had no gas in the tank, you know, my body was not used to running on fat. And it took me a long time before I started feeling better and before running got easier.
But every time I went out there to run, and my legs felt heavy. And I was like, this feels awful. This is not working. This sucks. Like I feel like a failure. This went on for weeks. By the way, I had a lot of what you would call failures. I think it took me like over eight weeks to become fully fat-adapted to where my body was an efficient fat burner. And running started becoming super easy and actually much, much better.
But had I like given up at some point, I’d never be where I am today. You know, I’ve done some pretty amazing things this year. Because I am fat-adapted, you know, I ran a marathon and ran a 50k with zero calories. And was able to do that because I’m such an efficient fat burner.
Now, there’s this quote, I don’t know who said it. But it’s like, every success is built upon a pile of failures. I love that quote. Because what it means is that if you want to accomplish something big if you want to succeed, you have to sort of fail your way there. Now, a lot of people don’t like to even use the word failure.
They’re like, oh, well, that morning, talk about there’s no such thing as failure. And I’m like, yeah, there is; you try something, it doesn’t work, that’s a fail. And it’s fine. It doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t mean anything bad. All it means is that you did something that didn’t work. And I see this with my clients all the time, who are trying to, you know, change their diet, and they’re trying stuff and it’s not working.
And they feel like a failure, and they just want to quit and I’m like, we just learned something that didn’t work. Let’s try something else now. How many times are you willing to fail? Because if you decide ahead of time, that failure is a requirement to succeed, that it’s not optional, that it will happen, you will fail, and that is how you get to that big goal that you want.
Then you learn to embrace the failure. When I set out to do something big I know that there are going to be failures along the way. And that’s cool. I plan on it. I look forward to it now. And I know it sounds stupid. Oh, I look forward to failing, but in a way it’s like let’s get these out of the way. Let’s learn what we need to learn so that I can get to this big goal. So I have learned that failure is not an option. It’s actually required, I’m not afraid of failure. I plan it, I look forward to it. And it’s just part of the process.
You know, another big lesson I learned is that it is the challenges that actually change. So when we go through these big challenges we grow. The harder the challenge, though, the more we grow. I hate that it works that way. But it does. You know, if you just go through tiny little challenges, you grow a tiny, little bit.
But when you have to face big challenges, then you grow in a big way. And I’ve learned to embrace these challenges. And I’ve learned to embrace the discomfort. Because I know that when I do that I become more I become more of who I want to be. And I can’t tell you how many people avoid this. They avoid discomfort at all costs, they want to just stay in their comfort zone. Because it’s scary out there. It’s uncomfortable.
So they only do these little easy, tiny things. But what does that do for you, you don’t really grow, you don’t have this expansion of yourself. So for example, I was going to stay small this year. And halfway through the year, becoming fat-adapted, I’m starting to feel better. I’m running with some friends.
They’re training for a marathon. But I’m like, I’m only doing a half marathon. I don’t do marathons anymore. This is these are too hard. Marathons are too hard. I’m not doing that anymore. And it felt like it was outside my comfort zone. I didn’t run a marathon last year, I ran just one half, or maybe two half marathons last year.
But I haven’t run a full marathon and a couple of years. And it just seemed like something I didn’t want to do. Too hard, too uncomfortable. I didn’t want to go there. But at some point, I just made a decision. You know what? Screw that I want to be more. I want to push myself, I want to see what I could do. I want to blow my own mind.
So you know what? I’m in. I’m going to run this marathon with you guys. So I trained for it. I ran it. It was amazing. And then like seriously, like just about a month later, I find myself running a 50k. And I’m like, okay, well, this is hard. This is something that’s big. And I didn’t think I was going to be doing it again.
I mean, here I am earlier this year thinking I’m never going to run a full marathon again. And I ran a marathon and a 50k within the span of like five weeks. It’s crazy, right? Why? Because I decided that it was these big things that the hard things are what I embraced that I that make me bigger and better.
It’s the big challenges that change us in big ways. In the beginning of this year, I completely changed my diet, you know, I stopped eating all that plant-based stuff, all the processed foods, stopped eating sugar and started eating meat again, and all this stuff. This is a big huge change. This was very challenging for me at first, I didn’t know what to eat, I hadn’t eaten meat in like 15 years.
That big change though is what got me to where I am today. It’s how I became who I am today. It’s why I do what I do today. Because I went through this massive shift in my diet and the way I looked at food, my relationship with food, the way I look at exercise, all of that stuff. The bigger the challenge, the bigger, the change. It’s the challenges that change us, and why not go big?
Alright, that was another amazing lesson I learned. And then one other lesson I learned. And this is the last one I’ll talk about. There were other lessons I learned too. But these are just the key ones, the ones that really stuck out with me. The last one was this. I can do anything I set my mind to. I can do hard things, I can accomplish some big ass goals.
I figured out that if I adopt the right mindset that I can do anything I want. And so can you. You know, for so long, I struggled with my weight. I just felt gross. I looked at myself in the mirror and I was fat. And I felt doughy and I was ashamed of myself. I’m this like ultra runner, and I can’t even button my pants anymore. I didn’t have any love for myself at all. My self-esteem was down the toilet. And every time I tried to lose weight I failed. The struggle was real.
I knew that if I really wanted to lose weight, then if I really wanted to keep it off for good, which I did. I wanted to completely change how I looked at food and everything. I knew that in order to do that I would have to develop this entirely new relationship with food. And so I kind of asked myself, like, what would that mindset look like? Who would I have to become?
If I wanted to have a whole new relationship with food because I knew the only way I was going to sustain this was that I had to change the way I looked at food, the way I thought about food the way I felt about food.
And I was able to do it. But I had to get my mind right first. I had to, I had to, like adopt this new identity of like, I’m a person who eats this way. I was no longer a person who eats four bowls of cereal in the morning, I was a person who eats bacon and eggs. And now this is just who I am. This is the way I eat. This is what I do. It’s a habit, a way of life. It’s simple, easy, effortless, really, it is.
And I feel like there’s this incredible freedom. Knowing that with the right mindset, I can create anything I want in my life, any result that I want, any goal that I want. It all starts and ends with mindset. So I can do anything I set my mind to. And you know what a crappy mindset will get you crappy results every single time. But an expansive positive creative mindset will get you amazing positive results every single time.
So you can do anything you want. Just gotta have the right mindset. So those are the big lessons I learned in 2020. I’m going to take all these lessons and slide into 2021. And armed with these lessons and make this just an amazing year. I’m very excited. And so here’s a couple of things moving forward that I want to talk about. Here are a couple of things I’m going to be focusing on going into 2021.
First of all, I want to focus on the idea of accomplishing the impossible. So I want to do things next year, that seems so big and so crazy, that they just seem impossible. So I have running goals, I have fitness goals, I have business goals, I have personal goals, and I have all these different goals. And for each one of these, I have something that seems impossible for me. Because here’s the thing, why aim for tiny little goals? Because what if you get them? Why don’t you for big, huge, impossible goals? Because what if you get them?
So here’s one of my goals. I’m not going to share all these with you right now. Some of these I’m not ready to share with people. But I am going to share this one because I’ve been posting about it on Facebook. So I have this goal. This is one of the fitness goals I’m going to learn how to do a handstand. So why do I want to do this?
Well, for me, this seems impossible. I think it is super hard. When I see people that can do handstands. I’m like that person is a total badass. It’s super hard. It requires arm strength, shoulder strength, and core strength. It requires balance, and coordination. It requires a lot of patience and a lot of practice. And I’ve never been able to do something like this.
I wasn’t into gymnastics or anything like that, you know. And this is just something that’s way outside my comfort zone and has always seemed impossible for me. But I think it’s just so badass. So I am practicing doing handstands every single day. I’m learning what it takes. I’m practicing a little bit every day. I’m working on building strength, building core strength, building balance, all these things.
And I will be honest with you, I’m failing a lot. This is one of those things where I’m like, literally falling on my face quite often. So and this is just one of my goals. But this is just an example of something that I’ve set out to do. And you know what I’m going to keep you guys posted on the handstand progress and how I’m doing because it is fun.
And I feel like I can get there. It’s going to take a while though. I’m still working on the whole, being comfortable being upside down. Like that just doesn’t feel normal to me. And I’m really off balance. So I’m building my strength but the balance will that’s going to take a while. So think about what you want for an impossible goal.
Maybe you want to run a half marathon or a full marathon. Maybe you want to do your first ultra like a 50k or maybe you want to do like something you’ve never thought possible like run 100k or 50 miles or 100 miles, maybe you want to lose a lot of weight. Instead of thinking, oh me, I could probably lose 10 pounds, why not shoot for like 30 pounds, or 40 or 50 or 100 pounds.
Maybe like, you want to quit eating sugar, totally get off of that or quit drinking alcohol. Whatever it is. It should be big, it should be something that feels impossible for you. But I want you to think about that, because I don’t want you to, like settle for some small goal, some small accomplishment, I want you to think big.
Think about something that seems way outside your comfort zone. And then I want you to go all-in on that goal. Because you know what you can do anything you set your mind to, why not set it on something big. So going into 2021 accomplishing the impossible.
That is one thing I’m really focused on. I’m also going to get even better at failing, like, since failing is how we succeed, I’m gonna get really good at failing to embrace a lot of failure, I’m going to anticipate it plan on it, and build up a huge pile of failures with everything that I do.
Because I know that every time I fail, I move on. And for example, this handstand thing I’m doing is a lot of failures, I am literally falling on my face or my butt like many times a day. It doesn’t scare me as much it scared me at first, like falling and stuff like that. But now I’m kind of getting the hang of it.
And I just think it’s hilarious that I’m this like grown man like trying to do something and just falling down and just cracking myself up. But the more I do it, the better. I’m getting at it. Like the more I do it. The stronger I get, the more I do it and fail, the more I learn how not to do it, and what doesn’t work. And I’m getting better. And I’m making progress.
So failing is something I’m just going to embrace even more, and I want to get really good at failing. And then the other thing about this coming year is that I want to continue to learn and continue to grow and continue to change and continue to become more of who I want to be.
I love, love, love learning. I’m always reading books. I’m always learning something new. I always want to expand who I am. You know, I said this earlier, like I’m a different person now than I was a year ago. And I look back over that. And I can point to all the reasons why all the challenges I’ve faced the books, I’ve read the podcasts, I’ve listened to the people I’ve coached.
All the training that I’ve done, the certifications I’ve gotten, all the stuff that I’ve done and learned has helped me to grow and change and become who I am today. I am not the same person today, as I was at the beginning of this year. And I don’t want to be the same person at the end of 2021 that I am right now.
So I want to be more. Very, very excited about this next year. I really am. I can’t wait to see what I can do. I can’t wait to see what you can do. So here’s the thing you get to make 2021 Whatever you want it to be for you. Why not make it like the most amazing year of growth yet for yourself? Because you know what?
You get to decide, take radical responsibility for all of your results make the impossible happen next year. What would that look like for you? What would it look like to go all-in on yourself on some big-ass goal? How would that feel? Does that scare you a little bit? It should scare you because that means you’re kind of getting out of your comfort zone. This stuff scares me to do it anyway.
Because when you get out of your comfort zone, you push past that fear and everything. That’s where you become more, that’s where all the good stuff is. Okay, remember January 3, the Running Lean monthly coaching group opens up we’re going to be doing the achieving the impossible workshop.
We got that weight loss training course for runners that you’ll have access to you’ll learn exactly how to become a lean fat-burning machine. You get those live group coaching calls with me go all in on yourself in 2021 Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join get on the list.
And hey, this has been an amazing year. I look back at this year and I love love. Love it. I love 2020 It was amazing. Thank you guys for listening and supporting me and just being a part of my tribe here. I love each and every one of you keep on Running Lean. 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.
Last weekend I ran the Sloppy Hog 50k. This wasn’t an organized event, and since most of the ultras have been canceled this year, I decided I would just do one on my own. So I picked a date, …
Continue Reading about 51. How I Ran a 50k on Zero Calories →
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 51 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I’m going to be talking about how I ran a 50k recently on zero calories. So last weekend, I ran the sloppy hog 50k. This wasn’t an organized event. You know, since most of the ultras have been canceled this year, almost all races have been canceled, right? I just decided I’m going to do this on my own.
So I picked a date, I mapped out a course on some local trails, and bam, the sloppy hog 50k was born. So what makes this particular event unique, though, is not just the amazing name that I chose for it. It is an amazing name, right? It’s that I did the whole thing without using any fuel at all. I took in zero calories before or during my roughly eight hours-ish of running.
So in this episode of the podcast, I’m going to break it all down for you, I want to tell you exactly how I did it. But maybe even more importantly, why I did it. That is all coming up. In the meantime, if you haven’t already, come check us out on Facebook, we have this awesome group in Facebook called the Running Lean community, you can find us by just going to Facebook and searching for Running Lean community.
It’s a bunch of runners like you who are interested in nutrition, and weight loss and achieving big goals. And we all support each other and encourage each other and motivate each other. We’re in the middle of this running challenge. Right now it’s the running through the holidays challenge. The challenge is to run a mile every day, at least a mile every day between Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s Day. And we are well into this and it is so much fun.
People are finding all kinds of motivation, and really enjoying it. So come check us out on Facebook. The other thing I wanted to mention is that beginning January 3, I’m going to open my monthly coaching group. This is my signature program, which here’s what I’m doing.
I’m combining the monthly coaching group, which I had started recently, and the online weight loss training course for runners that I created. So I’m taking those two things, because here’s the thing. If you want these amazing results, you want to learn exactly how to transform yourself into an efficient fat burning machine, you need the knowledge, right, you need that training course that’ll tell you exactly how to do all of that. Okay.
The other part, though, that is so important, I think is missing from a lot of programs like this is the accountability piece, the showing up. And you know, talking to people that are going through the same thing with you getting help from me. And that’s what the coaching group is. So I’ve got the online training course and the monthly coaching group, I’ve just kind of combined it into one thing.
So when you join the monthly coaching group, you get access to the online weight loss training course for runners. And this is the combination that will get you the results that you’re looking for. I promise you, it’s gonna be awesome. So just check it out, it’s going to launch January 3 of 2021.
In the meantime, if you want to get on the waitlist, you can go to runningleanpodcast.com/join. I want you to make 2021 your year, let’s put 2020 behind us, shall we? I want you to become the badass runner that you’ve always always wanted to be. And joining the monthly coaching group is gonna get you there. Cool.
So just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join. Okay, so how did I run a 50k on zero calories? And why did I do this crazy thing? So let’s talk about the why first, because I think it’s important to let you guys know why I decided to do this. Okay, it wasn’t just a whim. This is something I’ve been planning for some time.
I did it for a bunch of different reasons. But mainly, you know, I talk about this all the time. I want to be an example of what’s possible. And so I want to show you that when you become I’m a fat adapted runner, which means you can burn fat very efficiently. That you can do, you’re capable of running much longer than you ever thought you could.
I want to just show you that you can do something like a marathon or a 50k. And you don’t have to use fuel. If you don’t want to, you can still use fuel if you want to. But I’m just saying, when you’re an efficient fat burner, you don’t need it. You got plenty of fuel on board, which is super cool. I did it because I wanted to be an example. But also because I wanted to prove to myself that this stuff really works.
You know, I wanted to test the limits of my own fat adaptation, I wanted to see how far I could go and still feel good. How far can I go? How far can I run without any fuel and still feel good? Well, the answer is at least 32 miles at this point, probably further.
But you know, I really wanted to do something that was that was going to challenge me that was going to push me outside of my comfort zone, I talk a lot about getting out of your comfort zone, I talk a lot about embracing discomfort and how when you embrace discomfort, and you get out of your comfort zone, that’s where all the good stuff is. Right?
Everything you have already is what you have, it’s in your comfort zone, it’s comfortable, it’s the known. But when you push yourself outside of the known into the unknown, that’s where the growth happens. That’s where the cool stuff happens. That’s where you, you change, and you can transform yourself physically, mentally, emotionally.
And so I wanted to push myself, I wanted to get out of my comfort zone, this was out of my comfort zone. I’ve never done a 50k I’ve done a bunch of them before, but I’ve never done one with zero calories, you know, not taking any fuel and during. So this is something that was like, I don’t know if I can do this or not, I don’t know if this is going to work.
But it did. And I’ll tell you all about that in just a second here. But the main reason why I did this is to show you what is possible, right? You don’t have to want to do this. But just knowing that that is possible, is is something I wanted to share with you.
And I want you to see that fat adaptation is is a pretty remarkable thing. And that you can do some pretty amazing things, you know, running off of your own body fat. Cool. So how did I do this? Like, what was the process I went through?
So first of all, you have to understand that I started my journey to fat adaptation this year, earlier this year, let’s just call it like, you know, January, February of 2020. And I’ve done this before, a few years back, I did the same thing. I didn’t quite do it, right. I didn’t know then what I knew now. And I had some good results in the past, but it wasn’t sustainable the way I was doing it. And let’s just leave it at that.
Like, you know, it doesn’t matter what I did wrong in the past, I just I didn’t know what I know now, especially the mental piece, right? It’s such a big part of this. So I started my fat adaptation journey again this year earlier this year. And I’ve trained for many months, you know, to become fat adapted, it was a challenge when you get off of sugar as your primary source of fuel.
So you’re a sugar burner. Most of us are sugar burners, our body’s like burning sugar for fuel, it’s very efficient, right? It’s a very easy fuel to get to and it’s very abundant. We eat a lot of sugar and carbs. And so that stuff is really available for our bodies to use as fuel. The problem with that is that, you know, you’re most of us, as runners tend to overdo it with the sugar and we tend to be storing a lot of that energy as fat instead of using it as fuel.
So we’re just constantly shoving sugar into us, and it’s being stuffed into our fat cells instead of being burned. Right. So, you know, when I got off to sugar, and started this process of becoming fat adapted, it was a challenge. It was, you know, six to eight weeks of me, you know, kind of struggling to run like running was a bit of a challenge for me.
I didn’t enjoy running very much it was it was hard because your body has to shift from having this one source of fuel that it’s used to using to switching over to fat, which is what it’s really not used to using typically as fuel because we just don’t ever allow that to happen. We don’t allow our bodies a chance to eliminate all the glycogen from our, from our cells from our muscles.
And we don’t just we just don’t get into the fat burning zone, the way we we do when you get off of sugar. So that process is a challenge and it’s uncomfortable and it doesn’t feel good. And I talk about this a lot. Like you just have to get through that part. Right.
So I got through that part. And then for the rest of this year, I made a commitment to really doing all my runs in a fasted state, meaning really not getting any fuel before I run, I drink coffee in the morning, that’s it. And then I do my workout, whether it’s a strength training, workout speed work, long runs, whatever it is, I just do it all without fuel. And I do that because when you do that, it makes you a more efficient fat burner.
Okay, so I kind of prepared for this for many months, and became a very efficient fat burner. So that’s kind of step one is you got to get good at burning your own fat and using your own fat for fuel. Once you get to that place, though, it feels so good. Because you really do feel like you can run forever.
And then I decided since I was feeling so good in the summer, I decided I was going to run a marathon in October. And so at the end of October I trained for and ran a marathon with some friends. And we had a lot of fun. It was a success, I did that unfueled as well. And that got me thinking that I was going to I wanted to do this 50k. And I wanted to do it unfueled.
And I had originally planned on doing this next spring like spring of 21. And I felt so good after that marathon, I was like, hmm, maybe I can just push this up and do it now like train for five more weeks, and then use that momentum to carry me into this 50k in December rather than waiting till, like April or whatever. And so I made that decision. And once I made that decision, I was like, I’m just going to do it, I feel good. I feel trained up to increase my mileage at that point wasn’t going to be that big of a deal.
Once I made that decision, I was like all in. I was like 100% committed, you know, I wrote out a five week training plan. And then I just worked the plan. I stuck to my plan. I did some, some long runs. On the weekends, I increased my long runs, you know after the marathon, usually I would take some time off after a marathon few weeks or something like that. But I got right back into the long runs the following weekend.
You know, I think I did something like 16 on Saturday, and then Sunday, I would do like 10. And then my peak week I ended up doing something like 45 miles or something like that. But the weekend, I did 18 on Saturday and 12 on Sunday. So over the two days, you know, we’re talking 30 miles, instead of doing a super long run one day, I decided to split it up into two.
And that was a good training plan for me like that worked really well that kept me from getting injured after a marathon, you know, you do have to kind of be careful of that kind of thing happening. But instead, I kind of broke up that that long run over two days. And you’re still running on tired legs the next day, like 18 miles on Saturday and 12 miles on Sunday is still a lot of running. Okay.
But that kept me from like doing like a 24-25 mile or something like that, and kept me from getting injured. So I felt good about my strategy. And I kind of use the same strategy for other Ultras I’ve done, like my 50 mile 100 mile, you know, you don’t really run 80 miles on one day or whatever.
But you know, over the course of a week, you might do 80 or 85 miles. On the weekends. I remember training for my 100 I would do like 30 miles on Saturday and 20 miles on Sunday. So you’re running 50 miles in a 24 hour period, you’re totally running on tired legs, it does really build your aerobic base without the risk of injury. So at least that reduces the risk of injury. So that’s a good good plan that I kind of have adopted in the past. It’s worked well for me in the past and I thought I’m just going to do this again.
So that worked really well and I just stuck to this plan for the last five weeks or so. And really here’s the thing, there’s three parts to a successful event like this. Really there’s three parts to successful running, right? There’s the training, there’s the nutrition, and then there’s the mindset.
The training, we understand, you know, do your long runs, do a few shorter runs during the week, do some strength training, all that stuff, we all kind of get that the nutrition part, you know, I trained very low carb, and, you know, I might do 50 grams of carbs a day or less, most days, I don’t really count carbs and stuff, I don’t count macros, I don’t enter food into an app or anything.
Like, I just, I’m at the point right now where I stay away from sugar and flour and other refined carbs. And I just eat real food. And I have put my food, entered it into apps just to see kind of where I was. And I’m usually somewhere around 30 or 40 grams of carbs. And that’s mostly in the form of vegetables, maybe some full fat, Greek yogurt, some strawberries and stuff like that. So I do train very low carb.
And then the mindset piece is so important. Like you, you have to be all in on something like this, you know, you have to have that mindset of like, I’m going to make this work, I’m going to figure it out and make it work. And you have to be committed, you have to be motivated, you have to be self motivated, you have to have a certain amount of confidence to do this.
Okay, so we got the training, the nutrition and the mindset, and they’re like three legs of the stool, they all have to work together. So after that marathon, I decided I was going to, you know, kick these things into high gear, I did a few weeks of some longer runs, and then tapered, you know, so I did a couple of weeks of tapering, and ended up doing one run on trails in that period. So I haven’t been running on trails a whole lot.
I kind of went out one weekend, I scouted the course, you know, I typically would do a lot more running on trails before an event like this. Because the 50k that I did was all trail. And normally I I really adhere to this principle, that specificity of training is very important. So if you’re going to do a trail 50k, you should be running a lot of trails, I did not do that.
So this is like a lesson learned for me is like do more trail running leading up to a big event like this. So I’ll tell you why in a minute. But just understand that you always want to do you keep your training specific to the event that you’re going to be doing.
And another thing to keep in mind here is that we’re doing this running challenge right now is running through the holidays. And I decided I was going to run not just a mile every day, but I was going to do at least a 5k every single day between Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s Day. And so I’ve been keeping up with that. The problem I was worried about was that this was adding to my weekly mileage and that I was worried I was going to burn myself out before this event, I was worried I was going to be like overdoing it overtraining, you know, especially in the day or two before an event like this.
Normally, I would take the day off, I wouldn’t do anything. But I was running a 5k every single day. I was also worried about the day after my 50k like, can I go out there and run a 5k? Is this even a good idea or not? How am I gonna feel. So we’ll talk about that in a minute. But I ended up you know, running and keeping up my 5k every single day.
But that was something that was like definitely different than I would normally do in training for something like this. So this is all like leading up to the week of the event, right? I was like, you know, I had become fat adapted. I had, you know, run a marathon at the end of October, which is perfect for something like this. You know, you want to have an event like that as part of your training plan. And then I increased my mileage and then dipped it back down again. And I felt ready.
So the week of the event I took it easy. I still did my 5k every day, but I was getting a little bit more rest. I was getting some good nights’ sleep. And especially in the couple of days before the event I was eating more food like I was just getting more calories. Right and a few more carbs. Right.
So I wasn’t as concerned about like keeping carbs super low in the day before especially. I probably got I probably doubled my carbs. Like for the day before like maybe around 100 grams. Again, I don’t really count this stuff. But I was just giving myself a little bit of extra in the tank, you know.
And so that’s something that you can definitely do leading up to something like this is increase your carbs, and that those carbohydrates when you eat them, if you’re not eating a lot of them, they become readily available to your muscles. So instead of like being processed by the liver and being stored as fat, you know, some of that energy being stored as fat, most of the energy from eating those carbohydrates, almost all of it, in fact, will go directly to your muscles to be used as energy.
So when you’re an efficient fat burner, and you do add some carbs, it actually will not throw you off, you know, it will give you the glycogen that you need to, you know, just have a little bit of extra energy for a big event like this. So I adopted that strategy. And again, I don’t eat a lot of carbs. So like doing this the day before, it gave me a little bit of extra gas in the tank, so you know, why not do it.
And then, the day of the event, I started it, just like I do, every other day, I got up early, I made some coffee. And that’s all I did. I drink coffee in the morning. And that’s it, I headed out to the trails, got out there, met a couple friends out there. They were setting up a camp, they were setting up a – we had a trailer and a fire pit and all this stuff. So they were like we’re gonna set up this camp, you can go to your first loop on your own, I was like, cool headed out into the woods, it was still dark.
And I got my first loop done, you know, in 40 minutes or so. So the course I had set up was a looped course, there was actually two parts to the loop, there was a three mile section and a five mile section. So add those two together, and that’s eight miles. And that would be one full loop. And so I did that full loop four times to give me 32 miles. So it was actually farther than a 50k little bit about a mile further.
And that first loop was fine. You know, I felt good. It was cool. It was supposed to rain all day. Supposed to rain, like super hard all day, it really didn’t rain off and on. But the the weather was really cooperating. It was awesome. wasn’t super cold, it wasn’t warm, it was like mid 60s, cloudy, everything was just perfect, right.
And so, as the day went on, I just settled into this all day pace like, my typical kind of trail pace, slow and easy. Listen, I am not trying to break any records, I really don’t care how fast I run, I don’t even look at my watch, other than just to see like, how far I’ve gone. It doesn’t matter to me, I took a lot of breaks, you know, we had this camp set up.
And so I would come back, maybe change my shirt, you know, have something to drink, get some coffee, you know, one of my friends was making coffee. For me, I was like this is amazing. So I was not in any hurry to get this thing done. All in all, it took me around eight hours to finish this thing.
And I could have done it faster, I could have taken fewer breaks or shorter breaks. But I was feeling so good. I was just having fun. The whole thing was just about having fun out there. So I don’t know about halfway through my watch died. So I use an Apple Watch for all my training. And I love it for a lot of reasons. It just doesn’t last very long.
And so here’s a good lesson that I learned. Next time, bring the Garmin just use my Garmin watch next time, it lasts forever. So that was a good lesson to learn right there. But I had these friends that came out to support me and run with me.
And I have to tell you, this made the day so much more fun. Leslie, Brandon, Jake, all amazing, good friends. We were cracking up out there running on the trails, laughing, smiling. I was just beaming all day. It was really just so much but it made the whole event so much more meaningful for me.
So I have to tell you, if you have friends that will run with you and help you and support you in something like this. They didn’t run the whole thing with me. But they they ran a loop. You know, each of them ran a loop with me. And I only ended up doing, I didn’t have to do that much on my own. And it just made it so much more fun. And Brandon kept telling me he’s like we got a surprise for you at the finish and he wouldn’t tell me what it was.
And I was like, huh, I’m very excited about this. So he just kept teasing me with this surprise. I was like I wonder what it is. I hope it has something to do with like bacon but we’ll see. And then. But anyway and just, it was so much fun. So much fun. It was actually the most fun I’ve ever had doing any any kind of race, I don’t really want to call it a race, it was an event, you know, because it was just me. I mean, I won, right?
But I just had so much fun. The way I look at it is like this, the training is the hard part. You know, you train for something like this, and you put in weeks and weeks, sometimes months of work, that’s the hard part. The actual event is like your victory lap, just go out there and have fun, smile, laugh, enjoy it.
And that’s what I tried to do. That’s my attitude around all kinds of all the events that I do like this. So I just felt really good. So here’s the thing, I was feeling so good, I had so much energy. And this is one of the benefits of being a very efficient fat burner, you have a lot of energy, your body uses the your own body fat and your produce ketones and stuff like that, too.
But your body can use your own body fat for fuel, and it is a very efficient source of fuel. This fuel will last you all day long. And I remember coming in after one of the loops, and it was like mile 27. I came in and these guys were sitting around and I was like bouncing off the walls. I was like, I had so much energy.
And they’re like what is wrong with you? What is the matter with you? Why are you so full of energy, you should be tired, and I was like, I am not tired? I feel so good. And that last loop that I did last five miles loop that I did, it was I felt just as good as the first loop, honestly, which was really weird for me, normally I’d be dying. At that time, I still had gas in the tank. When I was finished, I came in finished, I felt so good still I could have kept going.
I could easily see doing a longer than than 50k I could easily see doing like a 50 miler unfueled. And maybe I’ll try that I’m not going to commit to that at this point. But 50k, man, easy, easy to do if you’re an efficient fat burner. So I finished very strong, I felt really good. At the end, I had tons of energy still. And I would call this whole thing a huge success.
Now, again, I don’t really care about the time, this thing took me roughly eight hours, right? And it doesn’t matter. If I wanted to run it faster, I could, if I did that, or if this is like something that you’re interested in, if you’re interested in becoming a fat adapted runner, and you want to, you know, smash a PR and like you know, try to win something or whatever, then just add more carbs in during your event, you don’t have to do it unfueled.
But when you’re an efficient fat burner, and you add more carbs, you’re gonna get that extra gear, you know, you’re gonna get the, you’re going to be in your anaerobic zone for longer periods of time. And so you will want the carbohydrates to help you get there. So you can definitely do that. That can definitely be part of your plan. It’s a tool that you can use, if you want to, you know, even run faster or have even more energy.
For me, though, I feel like I really don’t even need to do that. Because I’m not running fast, first of all, but I also I feel so amazing running in this fasted state. I feel so amazing running on fueled, why would I change that? You know, I’ve done all my long runs this year, including a marathon and a 50k unfueled, you know, I drink water and I take electrolytes, that’s it, you gotta have the electrolytes, especially for long events like this.
So I wouldn’t change that for myself. But if I wanted to crush a PR, I would just add some carbs. You know, but some of the things that I experienced was, which were surprising to me was, number one, no GI issues. I did not have any stomach issues at all.
And normally, on a long endurance event like this, I would not feel like my stomach would be bugging me. No problems at all. I felt great the whole time. No bonking I never lost energy not even close. I was feeling amazing and energized. The whole time. I had tons of gas in the tank at the end, right? This is like the most fun I’ve ever had running an ultra tons of energy.
And I just felt so good. So after the after I finished I get back to the camp area. These guys have got a fire going and then they break out the surprise for me which was ribeyes so they were grilling some ribeyes. And so we sat around for a few hours and ate some food. And I felt so good.
And the funny thing is, is normally, if I were to just finish a race like this and sit around for a few hours, getting up would be miserable I could be so my legs be all tight and sore, and they really weren’t. One of the benefits of training in a fasted state is that your body produces more growth hormone, which helps your muscles to repair faster, you know, cells will regenerate faster. So your recovery time is a lot faster.
So, you know, I wasn’t as sore afterwards. And, you know, went to bed that night, feeling pretty good, still woke up the next day, when I woke up the next day, the only thing that was really a concern was my feet hurt.
And this is what I was kind of alluding to earlier, when I said I should do more specificity of training on the trails, because my feet hurt from all the undulation of the trails, you know, jumping over rocks, and roots and logs and stuff like that juking back and forth for eight hours out there on the trails, like my feet were sore, the bottoms of my feet, especially, were getting pretty sore.
And that was about the only thing that I really noticed the next day, I could still, you know, when I got up the next morning, normally, I would just be the wreck, but I wasn’t, you know, my feet hurt. But I could still like do an air squat, you know, I could still squat standing up.
In fact, I was like, well, I gotta run a 5k today. And so I laced up my running shoes, and I headed outside, and I started running, and I was slow. But I felt fine. I mean, I was tired. But I felt fine.
And, you know, by the end of that day, by the end of the next day, I really felt a lot, lot better, my feet had stopped hurting and stuff like that.
And then so that was Sunday, and then Monday morning, I got up to do another 5k. And then I felt amazing. And I almost felt like I was back to 100%. Like my recovery time is just so much faster. And I have you know, I know that that’s has a lot to do with the fasting and the in the low carb way that I eat.
Also, my fitness level has increased, you know, I’m definitely more fit now than I was at the beginning of 2020. You know, because I’ve, you know, consistently trained for events. I’ve trained smart, and I’ve kept up with my strength training. I think that’s a big part of this, too. So the bottom line is that I wanted to do something hard. I wanted to be an example of what’s possible, I wanted to prove to myself that I’m capable of doing something like this, I wanted to push myself beyond the limits of my comfort zone.
You know, I wanted to show you that this is possible that if I can do it, so can you, you know, I wanted to show you and show myself and prove to us all, without any shadow of a doubt that being fat adapted is a real thing. And it is pretty dang incredible. It feels so good. It makes running so amazing. Honestly, you feel like you could run literally all day. Prove that, without a shadow of a doubt.
This is a very powerful way to live your life. Also, there’s this very cool side benefit of being an efficient fat burner, you lose weight. Becoming an efficient fat burner is what got me to where I am today. I’m basically at my goal weight, and I have no problem staying here. You know, I’m very lean, but I still have enough body fat on me to power me through a full day of running, you know, at least a 50k a lot more I’m sure.
So just know that when you change your, your nutrition plan when you change what you’re eating, you can become such an efficient fat burner is so amazing. It really makes running a dream. And it can help you to get to your natural weight, whatever that is for you. So what’s next for me? People have been asking me like, what’s your next goal? What are you going to do? And seriously, I have no idea.
But I know that for me, I like to have something on the calendar. I like to feel like I’m training for something I have something out in the future that I’m working towards. It gets me motivated. You know, I don’t know if you guys feel that way or not. But for me, the having something out there helps me to get get motivated.
So I don’t know what that’s going to be yet. I’m not ready to commit to anything just yet. But I’d like to do another ultra sometime in the spring. So probably a spring marathon and probably some kind of an ultra sometime after that. So I’ll let you know. I’ll keep you posted on that.
Okay, so that’s my recap, I hope this has inspired you to consider becoming a fat adapted runner, I think it’s an amazing way to live your life. Remember that the Running Lean monthly coaching group is going to open on January 3, make 2021 your year become the badass fat adapted runner you’ve always wanted to be. Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join, get on that list. And I’ll see you in the coaching group. Starting January. You guys are awesome. Lots and 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.
One of the most common issues I hear from clients is they’ve lost their motivation to keep going. They’re doing fine for a while, sticking to their food plan, losing weight, feeling great, and then …
Continue Reading about 50. How to Create Unstoppable Motivation →
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 50 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And I can’t believe we’re at episode number 50 already. This is amazing. So today, I’m going to be talking about how to create unstoppable motivation for yourself.
One of the most common issues that I get from my clients is that they tell me they lost their motivation, whether they’re trying to stick to their food plan, or you know, trying to lose weight. Or maybe it’s a running schedule, they don’t do it because they just don’t feel like it.
They feel like they’ve lost their mojo. So they might be doing fine for a while they might, you know, things might be working for a while, but then all of a sudden, their motivation just disappears. Okay, so they no longer feel motivated to stick to the plan. So they find themselves eating whatever, not running, not getting up to run whatever it is, they just end up quitting on themselves.
And if this sounds like you, if you’ve ever done this before, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Whether it’s trying to stick to a food plan or trying to stick to a running schedule, you need motivation to make it happen. And so in this episode, I’m gonna explain where you find that motivation where motivation really comes from. And I’m going to offer some tips on how you can create unstoppable, unstoppable motivation for yourself. So you can continue to stick to your plan so you can hit your goals. Cool.
First, I wanted to just invite you guys to join our Running Lean community on Facebook, if you haven’t already done so, come and hang out with us. It’s fun, we’re doing a fun challenge the month of December, up until January 1, we’re challenging each other and motivating each other or like trying to, to run a mile each day between Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s Day.
And so we’re having a lot of fun over there. I do weekly talks, kind of like the podcast trainings and things like that, in the Facebook group, the Facebook group and this podcast kind of go hand in hand, so come check us out.
Also, I want to let you guys know something that because I’ve been getting a lot of questions about this by popular demand, I’m going to be opening the doors to the Running Lean monthly coaching group. So I’m going to be opening the door starting January 3.
This is my monthly coaching program, where you get first you get access to all of my online courses, including the weight loss training course for runners is going to show you exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat burning machine, okay, but you also get live group coaching calls with me and your fellow runners.
So you’ll get the encouragement and support not only from me, but from the group. And this will help you to stay on track. This will make sure you are able to hit your goals for 2021 the accountability factor alone totally worth it.
Also, in January we’re gonna be doing in the group, we’re going to be doing a powerful goal setting workshop so we can all get started on this year on the right track. You do not want to miss this. Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join and make 2021 your year. Let’s put 2020 behind us.
I want to help you become the badass runner that you’ve always wanted to be. And by joining the monthly coaching group, this is how you do it. Okay, just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join and join the monthly coaching group. It’s going to be awesome.
Okay, so let’s talk about how to create unstoppable motivation. First, let’s talk about what motivation actually is. So if you look up the Google definition of motivation, it says the general desire or willingness of someone to do something. So motivation is a desire hire to do something. That’s it. And motivation or desire is a feeling.
All right. Now, if you have been paying attention here on the podcast at all, I talk a lot about feelings. Let’s talk about our feelings. I talk about how our feelings our emotions are always created by our thoughts. Okay?
So if you’re talking about motivation, as a feeling, because it is created by your thoughts. You don’t find motivation outside of yourself. You don’t get it by looking outside of yourself, you create motivation, with your mind with your thinking. So motivation is not something that’s outside of you. It’s not like somebody grants you motivation.
Motivation is not bestowed upon you by some, you know, Royal Majesty or whatever. Motivation is created by you. It’s 100%. An inside job. Okay, so I just want to make sure we understand this. First and foremost here, motivation is created by you. So you might see something that gets you motivated, hear something that gets you motivated, you might read motivational quotes, or listen to podcasts, listening to this podcast might get you motivated.
But I’m here to tell you something. It’s not because of the words you’re reading or the words you’re hearing. Because those words are just barked, right? They don’t mean anything until you decide they mean something for you. And all of us kind of get motivated a little differently.
Different things will motivate us, depending on where we’re coming from, what our goals are, and all this other stuff. So just know that when you maybe I get motivated by watching documentaries on running, like these people that do these amazing feats, or even stuff like, what’s it called? Free Solo, if you guys haven’t seen this movie, this is crazy.
This guy climbed El Capitan, without any ropes or anything like that, like I would never ever do anything like that. But that is so motivating to me to see somebody do something that amazing, then I think, oh, I’m just gonna go out and run 26.2 miles, no big deal.
But that’s because I’m looking at what this person is doing. And I’m interpreting that with my own thoughts and feelings, I’m looking at it through my lens, my model of the world, and I’m deciding what I want that to mean to me. And I’m deciding that seeing somebody do something crazy, like scaling El Capitan, without any kind of ropes at all, is so huge and so crazy, that what I’m doing maybe running a 50k or something like that is no big deal.
Okay, so that’s what motivation is, it’s not something that’s out there. But what you see out there might, you know, get you it might spur something inside you it might get you start thinking about how this relates to you, or what it means to you, okay? You create your own motivation, so it is important to understand this.
Okay, but and I, but I get it, you know, a lot of us are gonna say, well, I don’t have any motivation, how do I create my own motivation? And that’s what we’re going to be talking about here. So the first thing I want you to do is this, I want you to start taking responsibility for creating your own motivation. Okay.
Instead of using phrases like I lost my mojo, or, you know, I’m not thinking, you know, I don’t, I don’t feel motivated. I just didn’t feel motivated to get a bit. I want you to change that thinking and change what you’re saying to yourself about this, change your language around it.
Maybe start saying things like, I’m not creating my own motivation, or I’m not thinking very much motivational thoughts right now. I want you to take responsibility for creating your own motivation.
Instead of asking something like, why have I lost my motivation? Because that’s a terrible question. It’s a terrible question because your brain will come up with all kinds of reasons why you’ve lost your motivation. But is this really doing you any good?
Now, here’s a better question to ask yourself. How can I create motivation for myself right now? What thoughts can I start thinking that are going to get me to feel motivated right now? Remember, motivation, it’s always an inside job. You taking responsibility for creating your own motivation is so, so powerful.
Because you can create motivation, when you don’t feel like you have any you can create it, you just have to look at your thoughts, you have to look at what you’re thinking. So my first tip for you, is to just take responsibility, take the responsibility and own it.
Know that this is your job to create your own motivation. It’s not anybody else’s job out there. Okay. So that’s my, my first tip is to take responsibility for your own motivation.
And then number two, practice thinking, motivating thoughts. What thoughts get you fired up when you think them? Think about that. I’m a big fan of journaling. So I write a lot. I do this for this reason, because when I can get all the stuff that’s swirling around in my head, and there’s a lot of it, by the way, there’s a lot of thoughts swirling around this head of mine.
But when I can get those out of my head and onto the page, I can look at them, when I can look at them. I have like a snapshot of what my brain looks like in this moment. Okay, this is a very powerful practice.
And if you’re not doing any kind of journaling, even if it’s just thought downloads, which is just dumping out all the garbage, all the whatever thinking your your is going on in your brain, just get it all on the page, even if it doesn’t make any sense, even if it’s like, you know, jumbled up and distorted or whatever.
Just get it all out there and look and see what thoughts keep reoccurring for you. It’s very, very powerful to do this. I actually encourage all my clients to journal, they journal, their food plan, they journal what they eat, they journal, their thoughts, and we talk about that stuff. Okay?
Now, you need to start looking at what you’re thinking regularly, and start thinking about what thoughts you’re thinking about your thoughts, right? So meta, you need to think about what thoughts get you motivated. So for me, I think about thoughts like this, like, I am an example of what’s possible for others. This is my mission in life, right? This is like my calling.
And I talked about this. In the last podcast, I talked about being an example of what’s possible. I’m an example of what’s possible. That gets me motivated, that makes me feel like it likes that fire inside me. Right. Another thing that I like to think is that I can do hard things.
And I’ve done a lot of really hard things in the past, you know, I’ve overcome cancer, I’ve changed my health, I was very overweight, and very sick. And I completely changed my life. For the better. I quit drinking. You know, I drank too much. It wasn’t working for me. And I quit that. I quit smoking some years ago, that was hard to do.
So, of course, I’ve done other hard things like, gone through divorce, I’ve, you know, run 50 miles, I’ve run 100 miles, I’ve done an Ironman, I do hard things, I actually choose to do hard things now. Because I know that it’s in that process of doing the hard things that I become more and that I grow.
Thinking that thought right there, ‘I do hard things’, this gets me fired up, it really does. Another thought that I have is just that I got this. You know, this is one of my favorite things to tell my clients is like you got this because I want them to know that they do have it.
Like we all got this we can do this we can get through whatever it is going on. So thinking I got this gives me that feeling of like power and confidence. I got this, I can do this. That gets me motivated. Another one is that this is how I become more. Whatever it is I’m going through right now whatever this tough thing is that I’m looking at, this is how I become more.
This is the way that gets me really fired up so these are some thoughts that I have that I practice on a regular basis. Whenever I need some motivation. These are very meaningful to me. They’re very personal to me and very meaningful for me.
Now I have other thoughts that get me motivated, I can fill a whole page with these thoughts. And I want to encourage you to do that, to do this exercise, I know you probably listen to these podcasts, maybe while you’re running, and you’re like, yeah, whatever, I’m just gonna listen. But I don’t want you to skip this one, I want you to do this writing exercise, it’s so powerful.
Because you’re gonna, you’re gonna use this later. And so this is how you do it, grab a notebook, you know, just grab a piece of notebook paper, whatever it is, give yourself 15 or 20 minutes. And then start thinking about all the thoughts that get you fired up, that like that fire inside you that get you feeling motivated, whatever that looks like for you.
And I want you to fill a whole page, right? I don’t know how many lines are on a typical notebook page, 50, whatever it is, fill up the page. And if you can’t, if you get stuck, at some point, put it down, come back to it. Anytime you have a motivating thought, throughout the day, add it to your list. Okay, this is a cool, cool thing to do.
Then what I want you to do, so you’re gonna have this page that’s just full of things that gets you fired up full of thoughts that you think that are personal to you meaningful to you that get you fired up, then what I want you to do is open up that notebook and read it every single day.
Start your day this way, make some coffee, have a seat. Light some candles, listen to some music, whatever you do, but just like pull it out and read it. Read those thoughts every single day. Because when you do this, you start practicing thinking these thoughts, they become habit for you.
They become powerful for you, they become very motivational for you. Because they’re your thoughts. They’re in your words, there’s nothing more powerful than your own, your own ideas, your own thoughts, written in your own words, right? This really drills this stuff into your subconscious, right, and you start to create new thought patterns, new neural pathways, these become your automatic thoughts.
And you don’t have to, like, go out there searching for motivation anymore. Like you can create it simply by remembering these thoughts. I can just sit here and think about a thought like, I can do hard things. And this whole story, all these stories of what I’ve done in the past comes rushing back to me, and I’m immediately motivated. Right, super cool.
So you want to make these thoughts automatic, and the way you do it is by writing them down, and then reading them. Do it every day. We have a lot of automatic thoughts, wouldn’t you rather that they were these positive, encouraging motivating thoughts rather than the frustrating and defeating thoughts that we think most of the time, isn’t that crazy, we use our brains to create anxiety and stress and make ourselves frustrated and feel defeated.
We do this all the time with our brains, we have all these automatic thought patterns, these old patterns that we run through our brains just that are constantly keeping us stuck or making us feel terrible. You can change that. Okay, start creating new thought patterns. Just practice thinking new thoughts, okay?
These thought patterns will get ingrained into your subconscious and you’ll find yourself like never seeking motivation, okay, you’ll have it, you’ll be able to create it, you’ll be able to conjure it up whenever you want it. train your brain to do this. And you’ll have it whenever you need it. Okay, so that was my second suggestion, which is to practice thinking motivational thoughts.
Number three is to choose what you get better at. When you do the same things over and over and over again, you get better at them right when you practice that makes perfect, right? When you practice thinking motivating thoughts, you’ll get better at motivating yourself. Okay, this is just simple logic.
The problem though, like I was just kind of talking about, is that a lot of us don’t practice positive motivating thoughts. We practice negative, discouraging thoughts. So we’re constantly focused on maybe past failures, you know, oh, I’ve tried all these other diets. I just can’t do it. anything to lose weight, nothing ever works for me. And people beat themselves up for narrowing, and never having been able to do something like that, in the past never being able to lose weight in the past.
And what you want to do is choose things that you can get better at so that you can change your future. Okay, so let’s say, for example, you’ve given up eating sugar and flour, because you’re determined to, you know, get off the sugar wagon and, and really do something serious about your weight. And maybe you’re also doing some sort of intermittent fasting, right? These are things that are pretty common ways of losing weight.
So let’s say you’ve just quit snacking between meals, that’s a pretty easy way to do some kind of intermittent fasting, right, just give up snacks between meals. All right, so you’re not eating sugar, and flour, and you’re not eating snacks, and it’s like three o’clock in the afternoon. And you’re not gonna be eating dinner till like six o’clock.
And so you’re feeling a little urge to eat something, maybe you’re at work, and you know, there’s doughnuts in the break room, or you just find yourself, maybe you’re working from home, and you’re standing there with the pantry doors open and drooling over all the cookies that are in the pantry, okay.
So you have a choice in that moment, right, you can give in to that urge and eat the doughnut, or eat cookies, right. And when you give in to that urge, you get better at giving in to the urge, right? Every time you give in to an urge like that, against your better judgment, you get better at giving in, that you’re training yourself, that the way you’re going to deal with this urge to eat some sugar is to eat sugar.
And the crazy thing is, is that it feels terrible. Because you know, you’re not supposed to be doing that you’re like, I don’t want to eat this, I can’t believe I’m eating this doughnut right now. And this is very demotivating, you will feel incredibly demotivated when you continue to take action that you know is not moving you closer to your goals. Right?
You’re getting better at demotivating yourself if and when you do this, okay? So instead of training your brain to constantly give in to the urge, because that’s what you’re gonna get better at, you want to do the alternative, you want to do the opposite, you want to do something that will motivate you.
And that is to feel that urge, that feeling, allow it to be there and don’t do anything about it. Because here’s the thing, you won’t die, you’re going to be eating a meal in a couple of hours. So the answer is just don’t do anything about it. When you do this, you get better at allowing urges without giving into them.
When you get better at this, this is incredibly motivating for you. Because you get better at sticking to your plan. This becomes your new habit sticking to your plan is like the key to this whole deal. Right? If you’re trying to lose weight, you know what to do. Most of all, most of us know what to do. If you don’t ask me, I’ll tell you.
But sticking to your plan is like the main part of this, right? Like you just got to plan on what you’re going to eat and when and then stick to the plan. Right? It seems so simple. But it was very hard. It’s very challenging for a lot of people.
But when you do that, when you get better at sticking to your plan, you build all this confidence in yourself. You have your own back, you’re honoring your commitments to yourself, and it creates this like motivational flywheel that starts turning because you start making progress towards your goals.
You can see the scale going down, you’re like losing weight, because you’re sticking to your plan. And then you feel better about yourself. And then you’re losing some more weight. And then you’re honoring your commitments again and you’re sticking to your plan and like you just keep this motivation flywheel turning, it feels really good.
So you make a commitment to yourself. You honor it no matter what. And you build this self confidence and trust and you create this motivation that just even when things get hard and challenging, you’ve got it like you’ve got your own back. Okay, incredibly motivating. Choose what you get better at, get better at the things that are moving you towards your goal. This is Very, very motivating.
The other thing that I want to talk about so that was number three, to choose what you get better at and the number four tip for creating unstoppable motivation is remember your Why. Why are you doing this? Why do you want to lose weight? Why do you want to run that marathon? Why is this important to you? This is such a great question. It’s such a powerful question.
But most people don’t really take the time to think about this. Or maybe they just don’t really have a good reason why. Your reason why you’re doing something, especially when you’re trying to accomplish a big goal is incredibly important. Your reason why has to be big and bold and epic and powerful. It has to make you feel something inside a powerful why is extremely motivating. Right?
A powerful why is what gets you out of bed on a very cold Saturday morning to go outside and run in the cold and the rain. Right? A powerful why is what keeps you sticking to your food plan, even when there’s doughnuts in the break room, even when there’s cookies in the pantry. So why is this important to you?
Think about this, this is a really good question. I have two why’s. And I’m going to share these with you here. The first why is this: I used to be very overweight, very sick, very unhealthy, I had cancer, I was drinking too much. I just kind of talked about this, right, but my life was a hot mess, I was going through a divorce.
And I have this picture of myself actually I saw a picture of myself with my shirt off. And very overweight. And I was like oh my god, who is that person? And so I have this image of what I used to look like.
And I can remember what I used to feel like, and how sick I was and how unhealthy I was, and how I just was like, I was miserable all the time. I never want to go back to being that guy again. This is very motivating for me.
And this is what we call an away motivation. I am very, very motivated to move away from that old version of myself. I’m very motivated to never want to be that person. Again. I’m propelled away from who I used to be. Okay, so that is one of my why’s. I am motivated away from that gross, terrible version of myself that I never want to be again.
Okay, so when I started to gain a couple of pounds or something like that, and this was this, this was powerful for me earlier this year, when I began, you know, really seriously about losing the weight for the last time, I had gained 40 pounds. And I was like very, very close to the 200 pound mark again, like I was at 199 or something like that. 198, 199.
And I was like, Oh my God, I was getting close to that other version of myself at my heaviest. I think it was like 230. But getting into the two hundreds again was like, nope, I am not going there again. So that was very, very motivating for me. I do not want to be that version of myself again.
And I have another why. My other why is who I want to be in the future. So I’m determined to become the strongest and most healthy version of myself yet. This is one of the reasons why I’m here talking to you right now. This is why I created Running Lean, and the podcast and my programs.
That’s why I’m sharing all this stuff with you. Because I want to become more. I’m becoming this amazing, healthy, strong, new person, the most badass version of myself yet. This is who I want to become, I have this very clear picture of who I want to be.
So I have a clear picture of who I don’t want to be from my past. And I want to move away from that. And I have this very clear picture of who I do want to be in my future. And I’m moving toward that. That’s called toward motivation. Right? I’m moving toward the vision that I have for my future self.
Now here’s something that is very cool when you have both of these types of motivation. When you have an away motivation and a toward motivation, this is like rocket fuel. This is how you create unstoppable, powerful motivation for yourself. Because you’re propelled away from one thing and you’re propelled towards something else. Very, very powerful. Okay?
So I want you to think about this. Why are you doing this? Why do you want to lose weight? Why do you want to run that marathon? Why is this important to you? Is there something you’re moving away from or maybe who you used to be? Or are you afraid, you know, of who you’ll never become?
Or is there some goal that you’re moving toward? What is it for you? It’s different for all of us, right? But what is it that’s going to get you out of bed on a cold Saturday morning, when you really, really don’t feel like because it has to be something powerful that makes you feel something inside? Right?
When you remember your why when you have a very powerful why you create this unstoppable motivation for yourself. Okay, so think about that. Think about what it is that is moving you What are you moving away from? What are you moving toward? And remember that every single day?
All right, so that was number four, remembering your why. Number five is this, what would your future self tell you right now? So think about that future version of yourself, that person that you want to become? You know, let’s say you want to lose 40 pounds. And you have this vision of your future self. Right, you’ve reached your goal, you’re at your ideal weight.
Now, think about how you got there. How did you do it? Did you get there by giving up on yourself when things got hard? Did you get there by sleeping in on Saturday mornings? Did you get there by standing in front of the pantry and eating all the cookies? Probably not.
I mean, if you did, that’s awesome, but probably not. Think about that future version of you. And think about that future version of you. giving you advice today. What would you say to yourself right now? You should probably just quit, you’ll never lose the weight. Yeah, what makes you think you can run a marathon? You know, you’ve never been able to do that before? No, this is not what your future self would say to you. This is what we say to ourselves in the present, though, right? We say these things to ourselves all the time. It’s terrible, very motivating.
What would your future self who’s already achieved the goal say to you probably say something like, Hey, I know what you’re doing right now feels hard. And I know it feels like it may not be working. But I promise you, if you stick to it, if you get through this, you aren’t going to be so amazed at what you can accomplish, you’re going to feel so confident, you’re going to feel so much love for yourself, I know you can do this, you have to trust me, I’ve already done it. I’m already there.
That’s what your future self needs to be saying to you right now. Think about it like this. There’s like, two versions of you. Okay, there’s the one in the future, who’s already done it right, already reached the goal, already lost the weight, lost the 40 pounds. Then there’s the current version of you standing in front of the pantry whose not really sure if they can do it or not.
You’re not sure if you have what it takes in this moment. Right. So there’s the future you already there. And there’s current you wondering if you should eat the cookies or not? Here’s the question you should ask yourself. What’s the difference?
What’s the difference between who you are now? And who you want to be? What’s the difference in your thinking between where you are right now? And what got you there? What’s the difference in the actions that you’re taking? Or not taking between now? And then? Because there’s that version of you that’s already hit the goal way, right?
Then there’s this version of you that’s like wondering if eating the cookies is going to get you there. What you do in this moment, can be decided by asking yourself honestly, what’s the difference? What would future me do in this moment? I know that sounds a little weird, but it is very powerful little brain trick because what you’re doing is you’re going out into the future.
You’ve already accomplished this goal. And you’re looking back at where you are right now. Like through the lens of your own experiences and stuff. And you can actually motivate yourself to do what it takes, even though it’s hard by just thinking about the future, and how you accomplish this. Okay, so what would the future you tell you right now? So, that was number five.
And then the last thing I want to say is this, this is number six, this is my last tip for creating unstoppable motivation. And this may be trademarked by Nike, but just do it. That’s not really what I want to say. What I want to say is just start. So sometimes you just don’t feel motivated to do something. I experienced this quite a bit.
When it’s cold and raining outside, and I’ve got like an eight mile run on my schedule. And I’m looking outside, I’m looking at my weather app, I’m looking at the radar. And the rain just keeps coming and just keeps coming. And it’s still only, you know, 34 degrees. And I’m like, I don’t feel like doing this, I don’t feel like going out and running in the cold and the rain.
So here’s what I do, I just start, I put on my running shoes, I put on my rain jacket. And I head out the door. And as I’m walking down the stairs of my building here, and I’m starting my watch, and I’m heading outside and it’s raining on me, I still don’t feel motivated. But you know what happens, it’s kind of crazy.
I’ll start running. And after a mile or two, the motivation sort of starts creeping in. And pretty soon I’m feeling super motivated. I’ve created my own motivation by just starting. So that’s something I just want to encourage you to do. And we can apply the same thing for you know, if you’re if you’re conflicted about eating or, or not sticking to your plan.
Sometimes you don’t feel like sticking to your plan. But I promise you, if you just do what it takes, in the moment, just start. And sometimes this means like, I’m just going to start, you know, a new way of eating, I’m going to change my diet. And you may not feel motivated to do it. But when you start and you stick to it for a couple of days, even the motivation will come.
Just getting started often is the thing that propels you into that place of feeling motivated of creating your own motivation. Okay. So remember, motivation is always an inside job, you’re creating it every day, if you want it. Okay, don’t look outside for motivation. Look inside, create the motivation that you need. And you’ll always have it because you can’t rely on outside motivation.
When you do that, when you rely on other people or other things to get you motivated, they’re going to be let down a lot of times, because you can’t rely on them or those things that are outside of you. To keep you motivated when you don’t feel like it, create your own motivation and carry it with you all the time.
You got this, my friends, I want to remind you to think about making 2021 tour year. Join the monthly coaching group and I want to help you become the badass runner that you’ve always wanted to be that lean fat burning machine.
Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join and I hope you’ll join the monthly coaching group. 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 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.
This is the final episode in the Running Lean Manifesto series. The Running Lean Manifesto is a set of guiding principles that, when you practice them each day, you can create the life you’ve …
Continue Reading about 49. Be an Example of What’s Possible →
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 49 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. How are you today? I am doing amazing. I went for a run this morning. And it’s cold here in Cincinnati this time of the year. And I just feel alive.
It made me feel very grateful for my health and the fact that I get to go out and run whenever I feel like it. And it was cold. And I just felt very much alive. It was an awesome experience this morning. So today I want to talk about how to be an example of what’s possible and what that means for you and for the world.
This is the final episode in the series I’ve been doing on the Running Lean manifesto. So the Running Lean manifesto is a set of guiding principles that when you practice them each day, you get to create the life that you’ve always wanted for yourself, you can accomplish anything you want, you can be who you want to be.
And when you do that, when you become that person you ultimately want to be, you inspire others, you inspire others to want that for themselves. So in this episode, I’m going to be sharing my thoughts about what it means to live your life in such a way that you become an example of what’s possible for others.
And if you like this podcast, then please come check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. This is a fun group of runners that all share the same kinds of goals like we’re all there to help each other, whether it’s to lose weight, or run faster or run farther or to get stronger.
Whatever your goals are, we’re there to help encourage you support you and help you get it done. Okay, the stuff I teach over there in the Facebook group is is similar to what I teach here in the podcast, they kind of go hand in hand with each other. And we do some fun things like right now we have this cool running through the holidays challenge going on over there in the Facebook community.
And we’re encouraging each other to run a mile every day between Thanksgiving Day, and New Year’s Day. It’s a great way to relieve stress during this kind of a stressful time of the year for a lot of people. And it’s a lot of fun. So we’re having fun over there. Come check us out on Facebook, just search for the Running Lean community.
Okay, I want to get into this because this is like I’ve been really wanting to share this stuff with you guys. I really love this topic I’m gonna be talking about today. And that is to be an example of what’s possible.
So like I said, we’ve been working our way through the Running Lean manifesto. So I created this manifesto, or this set of guiding principles to kind of frame everything that I teach here on the podcast, everything I teach with my clients. Because when you practice these principles in your life, you can create an amazing life for yourself. It’s really that simple.
Okay, so we’ve been going through the list of all of the principles of the manifesto, and I’m going to kind of recap them here. But just think of it this way, think of this as a guideline for living an amazing life. Okay, so you want to have an amazing life. Here’s how you do it. Okay, so here’s the manifesto. And here’s a quick rundown of what we’ve covered so far.
The first principle is to eat real food. This means that we are eating whole food, food that is as close to nature as possible. So unrefined, unprocessed food, foods our ancestors would have eaten, not some stuff full of you know, garbage and sugar that is brand new, you know, snack food industry type of stuff.
This is like tried and true food we’ve been eating for millennia. We want to optimize our health from the inside out. So it starts with eating real food.
Number two is to live vibrantly. That’s living every moment of every moment of your life, with meaning with purpose, doing everything with positive energy with enthusiasm for living, as if every moment of your life matters, because guess what they all do, they all do.
Number three is to thrive in your body. And this is, like where, where you’re always wanting to improve our physical body, we don’t want to be jamming our body full of garbage so that we become diseased and sick. You know, we want to improve our physical body, always working to become healthier, to become stronger and to be more fit.
Number four is to embrace discomfort, I talk a lot about this, we don’t want to run away from hard things, we want to move toward them, we want to push ourselves outside of our comfort zone. Because when we do that, that is when we grow. That’s the only way to grow. You know, everything that you want, that you don’t already have is outside your comfort zone. So I encourage you to seek out discomfort and face it, head on.
Number five is to run because you love it, stop running just to lose weight, you know, I got to burn these calories, I better run more. First of all, it’s not very effective. Second of all, you end up doing it because you feel like you have to. And then running becomes a chore. And it’s something you have to do and you get resentful.
And you grow to like just hate running. This happens to so many people. I want to encourage you instead to fall in love with running, and fall in love with all of the amazing benefits that running does provide for you. The adrenaline, the dopamine that you get, you know, people that run regularly are just happier than other people than normal people.
I always say that runners are a little abnormal, and it’s fine. I love it. I like being abnormal, because the norm is to be overweight, and miserable. And unhappy. Like I don’t want that. I want to be abnormal. How about you?
Number six, love yourself unconditionally. This is like stop beating yourself up. If you make a mistake, or if you fail or when things don’t go your way. Practice positive self talk, have your own back. Love yourself unconditionally means without condition, meaning loving yourself, no matter what, no matter what you’ve done in your past, or what you haven’t done. You know, no matter which way the number on the scale is moving. We love ourselves through all of it always.
Number seven is to think, feel and act with purpose. This is oh my gosh, this is a life changing principle right here. This is like taking responsibility for your own thoughts. Taking responsibility for your own feelings and taking responsibility for your actions. And that’s it.
Because you can’t control anything other than your own thoughts, feelings and actions can’t control others. We try to, doesn’t work. And we blame other people for how things are going in our life. We blame other people for how we feel, doesn’t work that way. Take back your power, start creating the life that you want, on purpose. And it all starts with your thoughts and your feelings and the things that you do.
And then the eighth principle, and more we’re gonna talk about today, is be an example of what’s possible. Because here’s the thing, when you live your life, by all of those other principles that I just went through, you will become an example of what’s possible. Being an example of what’s possible means that you’re living your life in such a way that you inspire others to want that for themselves.
So people will look at you and say, hey, if she can do it, so can I. Be an example of what’s possible means being an example to others, obviously, but it also means being an example to yourself, like blowing your own mind at what you are capable of accomplishing. It’s about building confidence in yourself and building trust in yourself.
Strengthening your relationship with yourself. It’s about having this inner knowing and this confidence that you can do anything that you want that truly anything is possible. Being an example of what’s possible is about finding the edges of your comfort zone and then going beyond them. Right it’s about always becoming more whatever that looks like for you.
So maybe for you, it’s, you know, you have a lot of weight to lose. Or maybe you want to run an ultra marathon. Or maybe you want to climb a mountain, or write a book, or start a business, whatever your big, audacious goal is that you have for yourself. This is what we’re talking about, it’s about being an example of what’s possible by accomplishing what you feel might be impossible.
I want to give you a couple examples of what this looks like. The first one is my son, Colin. So Colin, to me, is an inspiration. And he is a perfect example of what’s possible. So Colin has always been a bigger kid. And, you know, earlier this year, he finally came to me and asked for help losing weight. He always struggled with his weight, it was really hard for him during high school and things like that.
And after high school, even, he’s just 21. So he’s still young. And to be, you know, overweight, at that age is tough, okay. And I always wanted to help him, but I never pushed it with him. You know, I knew that. When he was ready, he would come to me. And he did. So I started coaching him and the first thing he did, is that he made this commitment to himself that he was going to go all in, he had this commitment level, like I’ve never seen anybody else. It was awesome.
He had his vision for who he wanted to be. And he would always tell me, like future Colin wants to look like this. And future Colin is going to have these clothes. So he had this vision of himself, and he was all in on who he was going to be no matter what. Like, this kid was like, determined to make this thing work.
And he had a lot of weight to lose, he had 100 pounds he wanted to lose. But he went into it into this whole thing. And, you know, obviously, you know, I was helping him. I was coaching him through all of this, you know, I taught him all these principles that I just went over with you.
And he started adopting them. And he started practicing them. And he did, he lost over 100 pounds this year. And he did it in a way that, frankly, just is so inspirational to me. He adopted this mindset of I’m going to lose 100 pounds, no matter what, no matter how long it takes, I’m going to make this work, it is going to happen. This is like, damn, this is a solid commitment level. Okay.
And because his commitment was so solid, when I asked him about this recently, he was like, yeah, losing the weight was just it was effortless. It’s because he just was like all in. And when you have that sort of a mental attitude, and you’re so committed to becoming this other person, you know, what you do becomes easy.
Today, he’s down like 110 pounds total, he feels so good about himself. And he did it. That’s not a magical formula. He just did it by practicing these principles. That’s it. So Colin, to me, is an amazing example of what’s possible. He decided. He made a decision that he was going to be this future. Colin, he is that person today. He did it by practicing these principles. That’s it. Okay.
Now, today, he inspires a lot of people, people are always coming up to him and asking him because it’s dramatic when you lose 100 pounds. Like that’s dramatic, right? And people see him. It’s kind of funny, he works or used to work in the customer service department of this organization.
And somebody came in from the warehouse and was like, who’s the new guy in customer service? And they’re like, that’s Colin. He’s been working here for like three years. And it’s like, oh, my god that’s Colin?! How? Like, they couldn’t believe it. They thought it was a new breed that looked like a different person.
But he is an amazing example of what’s possible and he inspires people. People look at him and they’re just like, wow, they’re blown away. But he’s an example of what is possible. If he can do it, other people can do it.
I had a similar experience this year. I didn’t lose 100, I lost 40 pounds, which has been, you know, amazing for me, okay? It wasn’t easy. Losing 40 pounds requires a daily commitment. And I knew that I had to have that same all in attitude every day if I was gonna make this work for me.
And, you know, I’ve talked about my weight loss a lot in here on the podcast here, and today I’m at my ideal weight, okay, I’ve lost the 40 pounds, I’m in my ideal weight and staying there is easy, it doesn’t require any effort at all.
I didn’t do this by going on some whack diet. I didn’t do it by staying in my comfort zone. I didn’t do it by beating myself up every time the scale like went up, because it does go up sometimes. You know, I didn’t do it by hating on myself all the time, I did it by just following the principles that I’ve laid out here, at least to the best of my ability.
And there’s other parts of my life where I’ve practiced these exact same principles to accomplish big things. You know, I use these to train for and have a successful marathon. Recently, I’ve been following these same principles to train for and run my 50k, which is coming up next weekend.
So I’m eating real food, I’ve been embracing the discomfort I’ve been loving myself unconditionally. I’ve practiced running because I love it. And every day I work on thinking feeling and acting with purpose like, so I just take all these principles and apply them to everything that I do.
My plan for next weekend is to run this ultra marathon which is 50k, 31 miles, fasted. So nothing to eat before, no fuel during, no calories, just using my own body fat, which gives me all the fuel that I need for an event like this.
So this is not something you just wake up and do it. You don’t just like go, hey, I think I’m gonna run 50k tomorrow, without eating any calories or anything like that. No, that’s not going to work. I promise you. It takes time to train and it takes time to turn yourself into an efficient fat burner.
But that’s exactly what I’ve set out to do this year. I have this goal to run a 50k fasted, I’m going to do it next weekend. And if somebody asked me like, well, how do you do that? How do you prepare for something like that? Like, what do you eat? What do you not eat? It’s not about what I’m eating or what I’m not eating. I mean, it’s a little bit about that. It’s, but there’s all these other things that I have to do. Like, there’s eight principles I’m following here.
Right, but I’m doing this because it’s hard. I’m doing this because it’s a big challenge. And I’m doing it so that I can be an example for you. So that I can be an example of what’s possible for you. Because if I can do this, there’s things that you’re probably thinking, oh, well, I can do this half marathon or a marathon or whatever it is.
And listen, I’m not special. I don’t do this perfectly. I have setbacks, I face challenges every day, I experience failure, I struggle just like everyone else. But you know what I do? I just keep going, I just keep doing the deal, no matter what. I am 54 years old now.
And earlier this year, I made a decision that I was going to get myself into the best shape of my life at 54 years old. And guess what? I am today. I can look myself in the mirror and say, damn, I’m in really good shape. I feel amazing about myself.
And you know, I’m like buying new clothes, they look great on me. I don’t have to wear baggy clothes. And I have all this confidence about how I look. And this is something I’ve always struggled with. I’ve always been sort of like, uncomfortable about how I looked. But I wanted to be an example to myself of what I could do that anything is possible.
That if I wanted to get in the best shape of my life at 54 years old that I could do that, then I could be whoever I want it to be, it doesn’t matter how old I am. It doesn’t matter what I’ve done in the past or what I’ve been able to do or not been able to do. Doesn’t matter how I’ve thought about myself in the past, that this is what I wanted for myself.
Now, I want it to be an example for you. And for myself. Like I said, I’m nothing special. I’m just like you. If I can do it, you can too and that’s the way I try to live my life every day. This is my mission, my mission in life is to be an example of what’s possible. And I try to do big things. To do big, challenging things, so that I can fulfill that mission so that I can be an example of what’s possible to you.
I want you to say, man, if Patrick can do it, so can I, because he’s just a normal person like me. And you know, I’m very public about this stuff, I talk about this, I have this podcast, right, I’m in my Facebook group. And I teach this and I have clients, and this is my profession. This is my, this is my calling, right?
Being an example of what’s possible is my mission and my calling, I just feel called to do this. And I share all this very publicly. But you don’t have to be public. You don’t have to be like a leader, to be an example to others.
People see you, they see how you live your life. They see your integrity, they see your dedication, they see the commitment that you make, to getting these results that you’ve that you want to accomplishing big things, they see your commitment to yourself, they see you becoming more being an example of what’s possible doesn’t mean you have to be some leader or public figure.
When you live your life by these principles, when you become more, people notice. I promise you that you will notice. I love my life today. More than any other time in my life. Honestly, I love where I am right now in this moment. And I used to dream about the past a lot. The good old days, oh, if I could just go back to the 80s when I was in high school, and everything was so cool.
I didn’t have as many responsibilities and my life was so much easier. And we had all this fun, whatever. And of course, the music and the hair and everything, right. And I used to just really pine for the old days, and I just don’t do that anymore. I don’t have to dream about the past. Because my present is so freakin good.
Listen, I do work that I love. This work that I do is sharing these ideas with you. This fulfills me, helping people get results, changing people’s lives every single day, this, I love this work, it fills me up. It brings me so much joy. You know, I get to make my own schedule, I get to run every day, if I feel like it. I have all these amazing, deep and meaningful relationships with people who I truly love and who I truly care about.
You know, I’m creating the exact life that I’ve always wanted for myself, and I’m creating it on purpose. It’s not just happening to me, I’m creating this life, I’m making it happen. And every day, I kind of blow my own mind with how amazing my life is, like some days, it’s just, I feel so good.
It almost feels like my heart is gonna burst out of my chest. I feel so good about just my life. And this is not bragging, this is not about ego. This isn’t about me boasting about how awesome I am. No, it’s about me being in integrity with myself.
You know, I have this vision for who I want to be. And then every day I just try to act in alignment with that vision. That’s all. I do it by practicing these eight principles. That’s it. I practice these principles in all my affairs. In everything that I do, I’m thinking about these things.
Now, these eight principles, they’re not just something you learn. You might be listening to the podcast, you’re like, cool, I learned those eight things, awesome. And then you just go on with your day. It’s not like that. There’s not something like you hear once or you read once or you learn.
You have to live them. You have to live them every single day. And, and you practice them. Right when I say practice, it’s like any other kind of practice, like practicing yoga. Practicing yoga is a challenge.
I’ve done a lot of yoga, and I’m not very good at it. I mean, I’ve gotten better, but I don’t do it perfectly. And I don’t practice these principles perfectly either. Like far from it. I have my own, you know, anxiety, fears, challenges, and I work through these things every day. The difference is that I keep showing up.
I don’t let those challenges, fears, anxieties stop me from becoming who I want to be. I want to leave you with this thought, imagine, if we were all examples of what’s possible. Imagine if you follow these principles, and you created an amazing life for yourself. And you inspired one other person to do the same.
And then imagine if that person inspired someone else. Imagine if you’re an example for someone, they became an example for someone else, and on and on and on what an amazing world this would be right?
This is my hope that you become the person you’ve always wanted to be. And then you inspire someone else to do the same. Imagine the transformation you could have in your family and your community and in the world. You totally got this, my friends, lots and lots of love to each and every one of you keep on Running Lean. 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.
