Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
Here’s a fact: if you are trying to lose weight and you are hungry all the time, it is going to be a very difficult struggle. This is exactly why most people quit diets - they can’t deal with the …
Continue Reading about 37. How to Solve the Hunger Problem →
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 37 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today we are talking about how to solve the hunger problem. So here’s a fact: if you’re trying to lose weight, and you are hungry all the time, this is going to be very difficult for you, you are going to struggle. And this is exactly why most people quit diets, they just can’t deal with that constant, intense feeling of hunger.
So today I’m talking about this problem of hunger and how to solve it. So I’ll explain different types of hunger, how to tell if you’re actually hungry, which foods tend to increase your hunger and which tend to reduce it, and how all of this relates to your running. So that is all coming up momentarily.
And listen, if you’d like this podcast, I hope you do, then you got to come check us out on Facebook, check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. It’s this positive, energetic, fun group of like minded runners like you who share common goals. We all want to lose weight, we want running to be easier. We want to live a healthier life.
Okay, I do weekly live trainings in the Facebook group on a host of different topics like running nutrition, weight loss. This month, we’re talking about intermittent fasting. So I’m doing a lot of in depth talks about that. Here’s a recent comment from one of our members of the Facebook group. Erica, she says, “Okay, so I’m sure you’re still on a Saturday run.” She sent this on a Saturday morning. “But I just have to say that the scale is finally moving in the right direction. And it has nothing to do with exercise because I’ve been sick, and I’ve cut back due to trying not to physically wear myself out again. So thinking about food as my main way to control my weight has been key. I tried too long to connect diet with exercise. And I wound up focusing more on exercise to make up for my bad eating. Not anymore. And I love listening to your podcasts while walking or running. They make the time fly. Thanks again, for all you continue to share. You’re impacting so many lives in a positive way.”
Oh my gosh, Erica, I’m getting all choked up. That was really sweet. And this is my goal. I just want to help people, I want to impact people in a positive way. So thank you so much for saying that, it does make me feel good. Sometimes I feel like I’m just all alone over here. I’m just talking into this microphone. When I get messages like that it does make me feel good, that lights me up.
And you are so right. Exercise is great for a lot of things. But it’s just not a really great way to lose weight. Right. It’s more about the food you eat. And I’m glad that message is resonating with you especially. It’s one of the big reasons why I do what I do. This is why I started this whole Running Lean community in the Running Lean podcast because running you just can’t outrun a bad diet. Right? We’ve heard that a lot.
And we have to focus on nutrition. If we want to get lean, lose weight, feel better, make running easier, get stronger, all that stuff. Okay. So in the Facebook group, we’ve got a big challenge going on this month, I told you it’s intermittent fasting month, over in the Running Lean community on Facebook.
And that does not mean we’re fasting for the entire month of September. No, we’re not doing that. So what we’re talking about is what intermittent fasting is, what it isn’t, and how to do it safely. And the amazing benefits that you can get, especially for long distance running. Right?
There’s so many amazing benefits and if you haven’t checked it out last week, I did a podcast all about the myths and benefits of intermittent fasting you should definitely check that one out. So just go to Facebook, search for Running Lean community and join us. We’d love to have you in there.
Also, figuring out what to eat so you can become fat-adapted, losing weight, becoming that lean running machine. This can all be kind of challenging to do on your own. It typically takes these three things to create lasting change in your life. You need awareness, you need knowledge, and you need support.
And what I try to do with this podcast is I try to provide as much awareness and knowledge as I can. Right? But that personal, ongoing support is something you can only get from one on one, you know. So that’s why I offer one-on-one coaching. Listen, we’re all different. We all have different dietary needs, what works for one person may not work for you.
Working together, you and I, we figure out exactly how to put together a nutrition plan that works for you, that gets you the results that you want, that gets you to your goals. So if you’re ready to make some big changes in your life, if you’re ready to get off the sugar, and those crazy insatiable hunger.
If you’re ready to reap all the amazing benefits of intermittent fasting, if we’re ready to lose weight and feel good while doing it, and not be hungry all the time, then you have to apply for a one on one coaching with me, it’s very easy to do. Just go to innerfiretribe.com/weightlosscoaching, one word, do it now I promise you, it’s worth it.
Alright, let’s talk about hunger. Yay. So how to solve the hunger problem? So first of all, what is hunger? What does this even mean? What are we talking about? So early humans, we were hunter-gatherers, right? We would go and hunt. And we would eat or we would forage for food.
And we would eat, we feasted. And we fasted. I talked a lot about this in the last episode, right? So we would go for long stretches of time, without food, and this was normal. Right? So we would maybe hunt for something, and kill it and then eat it. And then, you know, that would keep us feeling pretty satiated for a few days.
Think about this in the animal kingdom today, most mammals, especially predatory mammals, like think of the lion, right? They hunt, they kill, and then they eat. And they only eat like once or twice a week. Right? This is the way that we evolved as humans. This is the way most animals operate in the animal kingdom, that are predatory animals, omnivores.
And so it was very common for our ancestral human hunter-gatherers, to go for long periods of time without a substantial meal. Right. And this did not impair them mentally or physically. In fact, it had the opposite effect. From a report that I was just reading called meal frequency and timing and health and disease. It says that the ability to function at a high level, both physically and mentally, during extended periods without food may have been a fundamental importance in our evolutionary history.
So meaning that we were not impaired mentally and physically by not eating, in fact, it had some good health benefits to us. So hunger would come on a day or two after we ate, and would signal the animal or the human in this case to go out and hunt or forage to get more food. Right?
We weren’t getting hungry, we didn’t evolve to get hungry every couple of hours. We didn’t evolve eating six meals a day. We didn’t have snacks. Okay, we feasted. And then we fasted. And when we did that, our hunger came on very slowly. So we would feel this urge to go get more food, and then we would eat it, and we would feel satiated. And then we wouldn’t be hungry for a day or two.
When that hunger came on, it would send signals that we need to eat, we need nutrition. And then we would go out and get more food. So this is what hunger is. It’s our body signaling us that we need nutrition, we require it or we will die. Now, today we eat you know, if we feel just a slightest bit hungry, we got to eat something right. This is not the way we evolved to eat though. Okay, so we’ll get into more of that in a second.
Let’s talk about some different types of hunger. First, I want you to understand what we’re talking about when we talk about different types of hunger and what real hunger actually is. So first of all, we have a type of hunger called a craving, right? Have you ever had a craving for something?
So a craving is where you have a real need like you want a specific food, so it might be what do I have a craving for? Chips and guacamole. That does sound good right about now, or I have a craving for Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. That’s a very specific kind of craving, you know, people are like, oh, I have a craving for pizza or french fries, you know, cravings feel urgent, they feel like you have to do something about it right now.
They come on very quickly, and easily pass very quickly, if you don’t do anything about it. This is not real hunger. This is just a craving. And a lot of this is mental. It’s psychological. Right? Another type of hunger is withdrawal, hunger. So this happens, when, for instance, you stop eating sugar, or refined carbohydrates. Obviously, sugar, we’ve talked about this in depth. It’s like other drugs, it’s like alcohol. And when you stop consuming drugs, or alcohol, or sugar, in this case, you may experience some withdrawal symptoms.
So in this case, the withdrawal symptoms are both physical, and mental, and it’s a sensation of ‘I need to eat something right away.’ So it might feel urgent, mentally, and physically, it comes on quickly, again, similar to a craving. But it’s not, it’s not real hunger, it’s because your body is coming off of sugar, carbohydrates.
The next type of hunger I want to talk about is called emotional hunger. And this is when you are bored, or you’re nervous, or you’re anxious, or you want something to do. And this is typically what we call emotional eating. So we’re eating to dull a sensation, to dull an unwanted emotion that we’re having. And emotions are just caused by our thoughts.
So this idea that we’re hungry, and that somehow going to make us feel better, is just a thought in our brain. That’s what emotional eating is. That’s what emotional hunger is, again, this comes on kind of quickly. And again, it just kind of passes away if you don’t do anything about it. This is not real hunger. None of these are real hunger, okay?
These are all just like our body, having addiction or coming off addiction, or not dealing with our emotions, or having a craving for something because we saw a billboard with giant french fries on him. Not real hunger.
So let’s talk about what real hunger is – physical hunger. This is when our body actually requires nutrition, we need food. Now, you’ll usually feel physical hunger only a couple times a day. And we’ll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But for the most part, you should only feel real physical hunger once or twice a day. Real physical hunger, it comes on slowly. It comes on gently, kind of like a gentle wave in the ocean. Right?
It typically doesn’t just pass very quickly, but it never feels urgent or terrible. The way you know that you’re really hungry is if a meal sounds good. In other words, if you’re like, you know, a handful of nuts, it’d be good right about now, that’s not real hunger. That’s typically an emotional eating, or a craving, or man, I could really go for some french fries right now that’s, that’s not real hunger.
Real hunger is, man, I could go for a steak and a salad and you know, some broccoli. When a big meal sounds good, then you know you’re actually hungry. Okay, so we have some signals in our body. They’re hormones, and they help to regulate our hunger. So the hormones we’ve talked about, and I’ve talked about a lot on here are insulin, ghrelin and leptin.
So insulin is the hormone that gets secreted when our blood sugars go up. So anytime we eat anything, especially when we eat sugar or carbohydrates, our blood sugars go up quite a lot and we produce insulin. We also have a hormone called ghrelin and ghrelin is produced when our body is actually hungry.
And again, ghrelin should just be produced in very limited quantities, and very slowly to tell us we are hungry so it sends hunger signals to our brain, so we eat something and we don’t die. Then we have a hormone called leptin. Leptin tells us when we are full and and when we eat food, leptin kicks in and says, you know, you’ve had enough broccoli and steak, I think you’re good and then we stop eating.
Now when insulin is super high, by eating a high carbohydrate diet, it messes up the production of ghrelin and leptin, you over produce ghrelin, so you feel hungry all the time, and you under produce leptin, so you feel you don’t feel full. So when you’re eating a diet high in carbohydrates, sugar is a carbohydrates, just a very refined carbohydrate.
So high in carbs, high in sugar, then insulin is always elevated, your body is in this mode of holding on to fat, which is not good. You’re more hungry, and you don’t feel full when you do eat. So this is a terrible combination of hormone activity in your body. Okay, so when you’re eating a diet high in carbohydrates, you are going to feel terribly hungry all the time.
So a low fat, low calorie, high carbohydrate diet makes you feel hungry, this diet, eating this kind of food will increase your hunger when you’re eating a lot of bread and pasta, and a lot of fruit and drinking a lot of you know, sports drinks with a lot of sugar in it. You’re eating all these sports goos and things like that, when you’re running.
Insulin is going to be high all the time this suppresses leptin and interferes with ghrelin, you are going to be abnormally hungry all the time. Eating a high carb diet increases your appetite and makes you hungry.
This is why restaurants really push appetizers, especially a bunch of carby appetizers, like they’ll just stick a basket of bread in front of you and say, oh yeah, here just eat as much bread as you want while you’re waiting or while you’re deciding on what you’re going to eat. Because when you start eating bread, especially carbs, or appetizers, especially high carb appetizers, it actually makes you hungrier.
Restaurants know this, they know that if they can get people to eat some carbs before they order their food, they order more food, and they eat more of their main course. But you think we probably think that if we eat some appetizers, we won’t eat as much at our meal. But the opposite is actually the case, people order more food.
So eating these high carb appetizers, and just next time you go to restaurant, check out the appetizers and you’ll notice a theme. Everything’s got a ton of carbs in it, right? Especially when they just dropped that bread basket right there. Which don’t get me wrong, I used to love the bread basket. Now, I do not eat bread. Bread is really. There’s so many bad things. I’m gonna do a whole podcast episode on bread, because bread is like the worst thing you can be eating.
I know it’s delicious. I know it is. But really, it’s not good. You guys hate me sometimes. First, I take away fruit and I’m taking away bread and you’re just like, who is this guy? Alright, so the wrong diet, the wrong food will make you hungrier. So this is lots of sugar and lots of carbs, it makes you hungrier. Now, the right type of food, the right diet should reduce your hunger.
So when we switch over to a low carbohydrate, high fat diet, this is a diet that keeps insulin levels low, normal. It normalizes these hormones, right? Then ghrelin and leptin work the way they’re supposed to. So you’re only hungry when you’re really physically hungry, which is very, not as often as you would think. When you do eat, you feel more for you to eat to satiety, so you eat until you feel for.
And then because you’re eating good types of food with nutrient dense types of food with good fats. You won’t be hungry for a long time. The high fat part of the diet really helps with hunger because you feel full for way longer.
And this is basically what our human ancestors ate for millions of years. Think about it. They ate meat with a lot of fat. They went especially for the fattest parts of the animal. They ate some vegetables. Yes, very few though. There just wasn’t a lot of vegetables available. And they ate seasonally and low, whatever they could find.
They ate very little fruit and the fruit that they ate was not sweet at all, not like it is today. They weren’t eating refined sugars or carbs. And so they would eat and they would feel so full and satiated and then they wouldn’t need to eat for a couple of days, which is I think, really cool. And we can do the same kind of thing.
Now, I’m not suggesting you don’t eat meat for a couple of days at a time. But um, you know, you can go longer periods of time without food, which is an amazing place to get to. And think about, like, you know, predatory animals today like a lion, you know, they get very full, because they basically eat a low carb, high fat diet, right.
And they don’t need to eat again for days. And I know we’re not lions, I’m just trying to say that, like mammals eat this way, most of them. So here’s another thing I want to talk about. So the types of food you eat is very important. But even if you’re eating a low carb, high fat diet, there’s times where you might experience a little bit of hunger, okay?
We think that being hungry is somehow a problem. If we ever feel the least bit of hunger, we get that little signal, maybe a little belly grumbling or something like that. We’re like, oh, my God, I’m so hungry, I can’t concentrate, my blood sugars are going to be too low, I’m running low on energy, I’m gonna pass out. And like we got to do something about it right now. Right?
This is really not something we have to like, it’s not an emergency. Okay, being hungry is not really an issue. It’s not a problem. You know, real hunger is an important signal that we should eat. But it’s almost never an emergency, especially we’re talking about here in the Western world where we have access to food all the time, you’re not going to starve to death, you’re not going to die.
Okay, unless you haven’t eaten for days, and days and days, you won’t die from being a little bit hungry. In fact, I talk about this guy who holds the world record for fasting, his name is Angus Barbieri. And he is a Scottish dude who weighed like 467 pounds or something like that. And he fasted for 382 days.
So he lived off of his own body fat, he had to, you know, drink water, obviously, and take electrolytes and some vitamins. And he had doctor’s supervision through this. And he was drinking coffee and stuff like that. But basically, no food and he lived off his own body fat for over a year. And he was fine. He didn’t die.
He ended up weighing, like 180 pounds or something like that, when all was said and done. So anyway, the point is that you can live off your own body fat, and when you do feel a little bit of hunger, if you’re trying to lose weight.
And you’re starting to feel a little bit hungry, and it’s that gentle hunger, it’s actually kind of a good signal to you, like think about it as like, Oh yeah, I’m burning fat on my body and can actually use my own fat for fuel. So it’s not a it’s not a problem.
And, and being a little hungry every now and then. Maybe it’s just something you have to accept as just being okay. You know, I’m not talking about being like ravishing, ravishingly hungry or starving, like these are unhealthy states to be in. But I guarantee you, if you’re listening to this podcast, then you don’t have to worry about starving to death, I guarantee you that.
So if you find yourself if you are eating a low carb, high fat diet, and you do find yourself getting hungry between meals, here’s what I suggest you do. Nothing. Just don’t do anything about it. Just allow it to be there. Allow that feeling to kind of be there. It’s not a problem, really, it’s just a feeling.
And you’ll probably be eating in an hour or two anyway. So it’s not an emergency, you will be fine. You won’t die. Remember, Angus, he didn’t die. One of my clients started using that as a hashtag. I think it’s fabulous. He didn’t die. If it’s true hunger, it will come on slowly, like a gentle wave that won’t feel urgent.
And you can just like let it be there and it’ll kind of pass. Right? The main reason we feel hungry all the time. And it feels urgent because we’re eating food that makes us feel that way. When you change your diet, when you switch to a low carb high fat diet, the hunger problem is basically solved.
Alright, I’m going to talk about a concept that I think is pretty interesting. And this is a concept I call hunger matching. So hunger matching is basically you have this sort of biological function in your body that says every time around the time you normally eat, you’re going to be hungry.
So let’s say you normally eat three meals a day, 8am, 12 noon, and 7pm. Over time, your body’s going to expect to be fed at those three times. So ghrelin will kind of be produced at those times. And you will start to feel more hungry at eight, noon and 7pm. I know this was recently my friend was hanging out at my friend’s house and his dog started freaking out. And I’m like, what’s the dog freaking out about and he’s like, oh, it’s dinnertime, the dog knows what time dinner is, even though he doesn’t tell time that we know of.
But he has this like biological sensor that knows, hey, it’s time to eat. Okay, so the dog doesn’t freak out two hours before it’s time to eat, or an hour afterwards. But like, right at that time, it’s pretty fascinating. But we do the same thing. So we have this internal biological function that says it’s time for you to eat.
So if you’re eating six times a day, which some people recommend you do, which I think is ridiculous, and stupid, and I don’t think this is a good is the exact opposite of what you want to do, by the way. But if you eat six times a day, then you will be hungry six times a day, you’re basically always going to be hungry from the time you wake up until the time you go to bed.
Do you want to live your life that way? I say no. Over time, let’s say you switch to eating twice a day, which is what I kind of recommend for most people, you’re only going to feel hungry around those two times a day. And it might take a few weeks for you to get used to this new like feeding schedule.
But basically, hunger should only appear around those couple of times a day where you normally eat. So your hunger, the feeling of hunger kind of matches, when you typically eat. Think about the freedom that comes with only being hungry once or twice a day. And knowing that it’s real hunger, like this is so amazing.
Alright, let’s talk about running a little bit. So running actually makes you hungry. Did you know that you probably didn’t know that exercise increases your appetite. And again, this is an evolutionary thing that is good. It’s a good system to have in place. So you exercise, and your body says, hey, you’ve just expelled a bunch of energy, you know, you burned a lot of fat or calories, we need to replace that.
So hormones will kick in and your appetite will go up, the ghrelin gets increased. And so after you exercise, then hunger becomes increased. And this is what our hunter gatherer ancestors did, you know, they would go on this hunt, which would build up their appetite. And their hunger would increase as they were out there, hunting down this animal or chasing it down or whatever they did. And then they would eat and feel satiated, right?
So the exercise increases your hunger. Right. And if we didn’t get hungry, when we exercise, we would have just been extinct a long time ago, because our bodies wouldn’t have any way of knowing that, hey, we need to replace some of this fuel that we just used up here. Okay. But think about this, the whole calories in calories out thing.
It doesn’t work for this very reason right here because when you burn calories, when you go and run, your body sends signals that you have to replace those calories right away. Your body is always trying to get back to homeostasis to neutral to baseline. And so your body has these systems in place to replace those calories.
It will increase your appetite and most runners what happens is you go for a long run, you come back you eat a bunch of food, lots of carbs, usually. And you sort of overcompensate so runners tend to actually eat more when they run more.
This is why it’s so hard to lose weight while you’re running a lot. And a lot of people have trouble losing weight when they’re like training for a marathon, which is bananas, right? It’s like why am I gaining weight when I’m training for this marathon? It’s because your body is saying you need more food. And of course you’re listening to your body.
So you burn all these calories and your hunger goes up like crazy. You eat a ton of food. And let’s be honest, here’s what runners eat. They eat doughnuts, cereal, pancakes, drink a lot of beer. They’re taking in these goos and gels, energy bars, pizza pasta, all the carbs. Runners tend to be carb addicts, right? They just have this idea of like I can just eat whatever I want because I run.
This is actually a recipe for metabolic disaster though. You have to switch over to a low carb diet. And then when you run you are actually being fueled by your own body fat which is amazing, so many amazing benefits to that. And it doesn’t upregulate your hunger quite as much. But when you do eat after a long run, so I might come home from a long run, and I usually wait an hour or two after I run to eat anyway, because I’m not that hungry, and I come home and then I’ll eat a low carb meal, you know, bacon and eggs and avocado or something like that.
And it doesn’t pack on the fat that that fuel is going right back into my, into my body to be used properly. And I’m not just storing all this extra carbs as fat, right? So very important thing to understand. And I know people have issues, or concerns about doing these long distance runs, and not eating enough food, like you know, what happens if I’m hungry, you know, should I be eating for running? Don’t need the calories doing the fuel.
Here’s the thing, you really don’t, if you’re fat adapted, if you’re off the sugar and the carbs, you got plenty of fuel on board. Earlier this year, in May, there was an ultra runner named Mike McKnight. And he ran 100 miles without consuming any calories during the run.
So he was out there for like, almost 19 hours running. And he didn’t have any calories before, during. And if you asked him, you know, man wasn’t this hard? He was like not really, it was actually kind of enjoyable. So he’s the fat adapted athlete, he trains very low carb. And he incorporates intermittent fasting.
So he’s running on his own body fat, and he can do these amazing long distance events without any food, like he just doesn’t get hungry. Because your body is getting what it needs is getting the nutrients it needs from your own body fat. Now there’s an important thing I need to point out, you need to be fat adapted before you go and try to run 100 miles with no calories, right? Your own fat is an amazing source of fuel for long distance running, it’s amazing.
And this is why we want to become fat-adapted. So we can use our own body fat for fuel. So how to fuel these runs, like if you’re gonna go out and do five, six miles, I suggest don’t eat anything. You know, if you get to the point where you’re running, where you are fat adapted, and you’re running for two, three hours at a time or more.
And then you start to actually feel really hungry when you’re out there, then eat some food, you know, eat something and it’s totally fine. But just know that you shouldn’t be eating like for energy, you won’t need to eat for energy you want to eat because I’m getting a little hungry, you might need a little bit of fuel.
And in that case, you can do like a little bit of fat protein, which will give you the kind of energy that you actually want, you don’t need to do the goos and stuff like that. I’m already up to about two and a half hours of running with zero calories, no calories before, during or after running. And I’m just not hungry. And I’m doing fine.
You know, 16 miles was where I’m at right now. And I’m just trying to, you know, keep going, I want to see what I can do. I want to see how good I can get at running on my own fat. It’s pretty fascinating. And trust me, I’m pretty lean, but I still got plenty of body fat to use as fuel. And I eat fat. I eat a high fat diet.
And so I’m replacing that fat in my diet. And I can use that for fuels too, as well. So it’s awesome. So I’m just getting good at listening to my body. I’m only eating when I’m genuinely hungry. And I suggest you start listening to your body to Okay, so the bottom line for eating and running is like if you’re genuinely hungry, eat something.
But for the most part, if you’re fat adapted, you shouldn’t really need to eat much unless you’re doing some very long distance type stuff. All right, so just a quick recap here. How do we solve the hunger problem? Well, first of all, become fat adapted, stop eating the carbs. Start eating more fat. And when you do this, your hormones will begin to reset. You’ll know what real hunger feels like. You know, you’ll know the difference between a craving and withdrawal, that emotional hunger that stuff will all kind of fade away.
Eat only a couple times a day. You don’t eat six times a day, you don’t need snacks, and your hunger will begin to match the times that you eat. If you do get hungry between meals, it’s not an emergency. You don’t have to get in, get into that feeling. It’s just a feeling. Allow it to be there and it’s going to be okay.
When you do run, you don’t need to overcompensate by eating doughnuts and pizza and beer. You know, don’t load up on carbs after you run. You’ll be fine. And just practice not eating before, during and after running and see how it goes for you. Right do these things and hunger will never be a problem for you again, Mischief Managed.
Alright, we’re going to be talking more about solving this hunger problem over in the Facebook group, especially how to manage hunger when you begin your intermittent fasting journey. So being hungry when you first get off the sugar and carbs, that withdrawal type stuff, it can feel a little overwhelming for people.
So I’m going to be offering some tips on how to alleviate the hunger and getting through those first few weeks of intermittent fasting. And then over the course of the next few weeks, we’re going to be talking more about intermittent fasting. You know, what do we do about electrolytes?
How do we curb the cravings between meals? We’ll be talking about training in the fasted state more, and some of the other types of fasting, and just really what it takes to become fat adapted as a runner, because this is like one of the best things you can do for yourself. So join us over in the Running Lean community on Facebook, and see what it feels like to not eat all the time. See how much better running can be. Alright, that’s all I got for you today. Lots and lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends, keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles 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.
There seems to be a lot of misleading information out there about intermittent fasting. People think it will mess up your metabolism, or it’s unsafe, or it’s just plain crazy. The truth, …
Continue Reading about 36. The Myths and Benefits of Intermittent Fasting →
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 36 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And there seems to be a lot of misleading information out there about intermittent fasting, people think it will mess up their metabolism or they think it’s unsafe, or they say it’s just plain crazy. The truth, however, is very different.
Intermittent Fasting is not only safe, but it provides some pretty amazing health benefits, especially when combined with a low carb diet. So today, I’m going to separate fact from fiction and share with you all of the incredible positive health benefits that intermittent fasting provides.
And if you liked this podcast, you should come check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. It is a fun, positive, energetic group that kind of goes hand in hand with this podcast. It’s full of fun, like minded runners who all have a common goal, we all want to lose weight, we want running to be easier. We want to live a more vibrant life.
And I do weekly trainings in there on a bunch of different topics. This month, we’re talking all about intermittent fasting. So you gotta come check out the group.
Here’s a recent review from iTunes from somebody that found me on Facebook, and this is from Tinkerboom. And Tinkerboom says, “For a long time I asked myself the same questions, why can’t I lose weight if I run every day? I’ve talked to trainers, doctors, etc. And not one of them told me or suggested that it could be my hormones. I found Patrick on Facebook and started listening to his podcast and found incredible information. And I found that I am not alone in this struggle. Patrick’s information is on point and has worked for me and I am on my way to being a fat adapted runner. Thank you, Patrick, you are amazing. I look forward to listening to all your information. #youarealifechanger.”
Well thank you Tinkerboom. I just want my message, this message I’m sharing with you today. And every day, I just want this message to resonate with runners like you, because I want you to become that badass lean running machine that you’ve always wanted to be.
Okay, so I’m talking about the Facebook group, we’ve got a big challenge going on right now, September is intermittent fasting month in the Running Lean community on Facebook. And just to be clear, it does not mean we’re fasting for the entire month of September.
But you’re gonna learn what intermittent fasting is, what it isn’t, how to do it safely, how to incorporate this into your training as part of your not only nutrition plan, but your training plan. And you’re gonna learn all about the amazing health benefits of intermittent fasting especially for running. And I’m gonna be sharing some of those with you here in this episode. So just search for the Running Lean community on facebook and join us.
Also, if you are interested in losing weight and becoming a fat adapted runner, it can be hard to do on your own, I totally get it. That’s why I offer one-on-one coaching. We’re all different. We all have different goals, different needs, different lifestyles, and what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for somebody else.
So when you work with me directly, you will learn exactly how to become a lean fat burning running machine in a way that works for you. So I’ll help you determine the right plan and the right system that works for you. I help keep you accountable. I make sure you’re reaching your goals and I help you to get results if you’re ready to make some big changes in your life.
If you’re ready to reap all the benefits of a low carbohydrate diet and intermittent fasting, then just go to innerfiretribe.com/weightlosscoaching, that’s all one word, and apply. Apply for a one-on-one coaching with me. Do it now, I promise you it is life changing, you will not regret it.
Okay, let’s get into the topic today. So today I’m talking about the myths and benefits of intermittent fasting. And like I said there are a lot of myths in information out there. Some people think this is just crazy, you can’t do it. I’m going to address a bunch of these different myths here in a minute. But I want to back up just a little bit and explain how we lose weight.
Okay, so one thing that a lot of people don’t understand is that there are systems in place in our bodies that either promote fat storage, or promote fat burning. Okay, if we want to lose weight, we want to do that whole fat burning thing, right? We want to burn the fat, we don’t want to hold on to the fat.
So our body, we have two primary sources of fuel, we have glucose and we have fat. Glucose comes from eating carbohydrates, mainly, okay, you eat carbohydrates, any carbohydrates, you turn into glucose in your system, and they get stored as fuel as glycogen, or they get stored as fat. Okay, so that’s carbohydrates.
And then we have fat. This is our own body fat that we can use for fuel. The problem is, we can only use one of these fuel sources at a time, pretty much okay. Like in order to burn fat, you basically have to burn through the available glucose first, okay, so if you are eating a diet high in carbohydrates, then you know, getting that glucose out of your system is key, so that you can actually access your own body fat for fuel, okay?
Eating a diet high in carbohydrates, makes it very difficult to lose weight. If you’ve been listening to me for a while you understand this. We’re always going to want to use the available glucose as the primary fuel. That’s just the way our bodies are designed. Okay, we’re designed to use available glucose and glycogen first.
So when you have high glucose levels in your body, when you’re eating a lot of carbs and sugar, then you cannot access your fat stores, you know, maybe a little bit but not really. When glucose is high, insulin is also high. Insulin is produced when our blood sugar goes up insulin, its job is to bring blood sugars down. But when insulin is high, it puts our body into this fat storage mode. We hold on to our body fat when insulin is high.
When glucose is high, insulin is high, we’re in fat storage mode, when glucose is low. When we don’t eat a lot of carbohydrates, when we don’t have a lot of high blood sugar. When glucose is low, insulin is low, then our bodies are in fat burning mode.
Okay, so the key to this whole deal is keep insulin levels low, keep them low. And the way we do this, there’s two ways that we lower insulin to keep it low. We don’t eat carbohydrates, and we don’t eat. Insulin will remain low. As long as our blood sugar is low, as long as our blood sugar is normal, okay, it’s not elevated. Blood sugars go high when we eat a lot of carbohydrates, especially highly refined carbohydrates, the higher refined the carbohydrate, like pure sugar will spike our blood sugar like crazy, which spikes our insulin like crazy.
And then we’re in fat storage mode like crazy. All right, when we don’t eat carbohydrates, it keeps our blood sugars normalized. Another way of keeping blood sugars normalized is to not eat anything at all. Because every time you eat some food, your blood sugar goes up a little bit. So if you eat, you know, a pile of broccoli, and a steak, your blood sugar is going to go up a little bit, which is normal.
Insulin will get produced a little bit, which is normal, and it’ll come back down pretty quickly, which is normal. Everything is like working the way it should. But if you ate a big bowl of, you know, sugary cereal, and a glass of orange juice, your blood sugar is going to go up like crazy. Insulin is gonna go up like crazy. And then we’re in that insidious fat storage mode again, okay?
But anytime we eat any food at all, blood sugar goes up a little bit. So one awesome way of keeping blood sugar down, keeping insulin down, and getting us into fat burning mode is to not eat anything at all. And I’m not talking about you know, going on a 12 day fast or something like that.
We’re talking about intermittent fasting. I’m gonna break this all down in just a minute but I just want you understand that, for example, your blood sugars are very low in the morning, because you have been fasting all night long. So anyway, when we combine these two things a low carbohydrate, high fat diet, with intermittent fasting, both of these things work to regulate our blood sugars to keep our insulin levels in check, and to put us into fat burning mode.
So when we combine these two things, it’s like rocket fuel for your overall health and for your weight loss. This approach will keep blood sugars normalized, it’ll keep insulin down, and you’ll be able to access your own body fat for fuel. So what is intermittent fasting at its simplest?
It just means this. Don’t eat anything. It’s just like not eating for periods of time. Okay? The intermittent part means we don’t do it all the time. We do it intermittently, sporadically or periodically. So it’s basically, periodically we don’t eat. That’s all that it means. Okay.
A little bit about fasting in general. So fasting is something that is in our DNA. It’s something we’ve done as humans for millions of years. It’s not some new thing that was created by the CrossFit community or anything like that. Okay. I love the CrossFit people, by the way, I think they’re awesome.
But they love the whole low carb, high fat diet, they love their intermittent fasting. But people just have some notion that this is like all new. It’s not. We’ve been doing this forever. We didn’t evolve as humans by eating three meals a day, two snacks a day and dessert. We didn’t.
We didn’t have that much food available to us. We scavenged. We hunted. We foraged and we ate. And then we fasted. This is the way we’ve evolved as humans to get to where we are today, we feasted. And then we fasted. This was beautiful, everything was working beautifully for us. You know, we didn’t have ways of preserving foods until much later in our evolution.
So when we had food available, we ate it, right? Another kind of historical part of fasting is that cultures around the world today have been practicing some form of fasting for many 1000s of years.
Fasting has been used therapeutically since at least the fifth century, when the Greek physician Hippocrates recommended to his patients abstinence from food or drink, if they had certain types of illnesses. So, you know, back in the fifth century, Hippocrates was saying like, Hey, you want to get better, don’t eat or drink anything.
Religions have been practicing fasting for millennia. Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Jainism, Hinduism have all been practicing some form of fasting for 1000s of years. Hindus, for example, are used to fasting on Ekadashi, which is the 11th day of the lunar cycle.
So they fast every 11th day. During the season of Lent, Catholics give up certain foods or practice fasting. In Judaism, they observed fasting on six different days of the year, like Yom Kippur, for example. The entire month of Ramadan and Islam as a period of penitence, sorry, and total fasting from dawn to dusk.
And then arguably three of the most influential people in the history of the world, Jesus, the prophet Muhammad, and the Buddha, they didn’t all agree on a whole lot, but they all agreed on one thing, the power of fasting.
And here’s something else that I just want you to understand about fasting. You are already doing it. You fast every day, you know, unless you eat while you’re sleeping. Like if you get up in the middle of the night and eat something and go back to bed. Most of us, I would say almost all of us fast for around seven or eight hours a day or more.
You know, you don’t you probably don’t need a couple hours before you go to bed. And maybe you don’t eat as soon as you wake up in the morning. So it might be 10 hours a day that you’re fasting anyway. Okay. And the word itself, breakfast means to break your fast, right? So this fasting is not something that is harmful. It’s not something that is weird. And it’s not something that is new. We’ve been doing this for a long, long time.
So I want to talk about some of the myths that people have around fasting and tell you what the truth is around some of these things. So here’s one of the first myths that people have: they say it’s not safe fasting is not safe. Well, like I just said you’re doing this every day, is that not safe?
And we’re not talking about going weeks without food here. This is intermittent fasting, this is sporadically not eating. You can safely go for days, weeks, probably even months without any food depending on how much body fat that you have on you.
And I’m not suggesting you do this. I’m not suggesting you try to go weeks or months without food. But you could easily go a couple of days without food without, you know, any deleterious effects. Okay? Can fasting be dangerous? Yes, if done recklessly, sure, just about anything can be done with reckless abandon and get you into trouble.
And consider the story of the marathon. According to legend. In 490 BC, the Greek soldier Pheidippides ran approximately 26 miles from the battlefield near the town of Marathon to Athens, he’s delivering a message on the news of the defeat of the Persians.
When he got there, he shouted Nike, which means victory. And then he promptly keeled over and died. And people say, well, yeah, you shouldn’t run marathons, they’re not safe, look what happened to this guy. And like, if we look at this, in today’s terms, if, if you took a sedentary middle aged out of shape person, and said go run of Marathon right now, as hard as you can, you know, at your maximum speed, without any type of preparation or knowledge, that person might very well keel over and die to okay.
But here’s the thing, just about anything can be done recklessly, can be done in a way that is not safe. But millions of people practice some form of fasting every single day on this planet and have zero problems. We have been doing fasting as a species for millions of years without any problems. Okay.
But just to address the safety issue, one step further. So there was this guy back in 1965, his name is Angus Barbieri, Scottish dude. And he was very overweight, he is obese at the time, you know, 1965 people weren’t this big, he weighed 456 pounds.
And his doctor suggested he’d go on a fast and so he fasted for like 10 days or something like that. And he loved it, he felt great, he was losing some weight. And he decided to keep going. And with his doctor supervision, he went on a total fast for 382 days. Think about that. This dude went over a year without eating any food.
He was living on his own body fat that whole time. Now, he was drinking water, obviously, coffee, tea, he had to take vitamins and electrolytes, you got to have, you know, some kind of nutrition coming in. But he lost like 276 pounds by living off of his own body fat for over a year. This is crazy, right? And I’m not suggesting again that anybody try this, but I just want you to see that, you know, this guy had doctor’s supervision, but you can go for a long time living off your own body fat. Okay.
So our fat is a great source of fuel for our bodies and for our brains. And, and this is the way we’re designed as people. So that’s kind of Myth number one that fasting isn’t safe. I think we can all agree that fasting is perfectly safe and something we do all the time. Another myth is that fasting makes you go into starvation mode.
I mean, get this. It’s not starving yourself. You don’t go into starvation mode when you fast. Your body has plenty of fuel onboard in the form of your own body fat. We all do. Even the leanest marathon runners have like 8% of body fat, plenty of fat on them to to last a long, long time without eating anything.
Calorie restriction diets actually will put you into starvation mode. And they did these experiments which sound horrible, the Minnesota starvation experiment where they took a group of men and they gave them a very, very limited calorie diet and they went into starvation mode. They became extremely weak, lethargic, emaciated, and were literally starving to death.
But here’s the thing, there’s a big difference between calorie restriction, severe calorie restriction and zero food. Something hormonally changes when you don’t eat anything, calorie restriction puts you in a starvation mode. Because your body can’t make the necessary hormonal adaptations that you get when you’re fasting when you have zero calories coming in, so you’re never actually getting to the point where you’re using your own body fat for fuel.
Everything changes when you go to zero calorie. So fasting the body switches from burning glucose to burning your own stored body fat. And this is exactly what your body fat is there for.
Our body fat is not for looks. It’s not there to make us look good. Right? It’s there, it’s used for food when no food is available, our stored body fat is used to nourish us when no food is available.
It’s a very well designed system and works very, very well. Again, humans have been feasting and then fasting for millions of years. If not eating for short periods of time would put us into starvation mode, we’ve become extinct a long, long time ago. Okay, so when you fast, you do not go into starvation mode. Okay.
Another myth is that when you fast you will lose muscle. So, consider the consequences of burning muscle for energy. During long winters, you know, back in the caveman days, there would have been many days where no food was available. After the first episode of like a period of no food available, your body was actually consuming muscle as fuel, you would be severely weakened after a couple times of this happening, you’d be so weak that you’d be unable to hunt, you won’t even be able to stand up.
Humans would never have survived as a species, if burning muscle happened when we didn’t eat. So your body, here’s the way your body works, you burn glucose first, then fat. And then when there’s no fat available, your body will start to use muscle as fuel.
But it’s a terrible source of fuel for your body. So it will not do that it won’t break down muscle until all the fat is gone. And I gotta tell you, it would be almost impossible for you to lose that much fat, think of Angus. He had so much fat on his body he was able to you know, use that as fuel for over a year. When you fast you burn fat that your body will only use muscle if there’s no more glucose, no fat available.
So you’d literally have to be at that point of like starving to death for your body to start using muscle. And studies indicate that intermittent fasting is actually better for maintaining muscle mass. In fact, intermittent fasting is very popular among bodybuilders because they find it helps them to maintain muscle alongside a low body fat percentage, right? So they’re lean, and super muscular. So you don’t burn muscle when you fast.
Another myth that I’m trying to bust here today is that fasting will make you tired, and lethargic. Oh, if I don’t eat all the time, I’m gonna be super tired. I need the energy. Well, have you ever been tired after eating a meal? Of course you have, everybody has. This is what happens when you eat.
There’s this moment of like drowsiness afterwards, lack of concentration. That’s your system like your stomach, your liver, your digestive system all working to process the food. When you fast, you don’t have these kinds of problems. Fat is a far superior source of fuel for your body and for your brain.
So when you fast your body can actually produce ketones, which is an amazing source of energy. And ketones along with your own body fat, actually increase your energy levels. Right? You get tired and lethargic when you’re eating a lot of sugar and carbs. And you have that crash after you eat.
Like if you’ve ever had a big lunch and then you want to go to sleep around two o’clock in the afternoon to three o’clock you’re just like dead. And you need your Starbucks, triple Mocha, caramel latte or whatever to get you through the afternoon. That’s because of you know, eating all that food, especially the sugar and the carbs.
But when you’re fasting this doesn’t happen. You don’t have those energy spikes and crashes. You have this like consistent energy throughout the day so no crashes at all. And I gotta tell you, my clients report a lot of increased energy and sustained energy when they become fat-adapted
When they stop eating the sugar and the carbs and they, their body is starting to burn fat. And then when we add in some intermittent fasting, their energy levels actually go up, not down. Okay? So fasting does not make you tired and lethargic actually gives you more energy. People think fasting will slow your metabolism.
And no, this is not true at all. It actually boosts your metabolism. When you fast it puts your body into fat burning mode, okay, which is boosting it actually boosts your metabolic rate. This is due to a drastic increase in blood levels of norepinephrine, which stimulates your metabolism and instructs your fat cells to break down body fat. And then you can use that body fat for fuel.
Studies have shown that fasting for even up to like 48 hours will boost your metabolism by something like 3% up to 14%. Fasting does not slow your metabolism. And there’s this misconception out there that you need to eat like six times a day, you know, to boost your metabolism. And it’s the opposite.
When you eat six times a day, you slow your metabolism down. Because you’re always hanging on to all that extra body fat. All that extra food is going into your fat stores. Okay, your your blood glucose is always elevated, insulin has always elevated and you’re holding on to all that extra fat. Okay, so you’re actually not burning fat when you do that. So eating less often or eating nothing at all for periods of time will actually speed up your metabolism.
Another myth is that fasting deprives your body of nutrients. So some people have concerns that fasting will lead to some sort of malnourishment, right, you’re not getting the right vitamins and minerals. And it’s been shown that fasting that lasts under 24 hours, like what we’re talking about here, intermittent fasting, there’s no real need to be concerned with missing vitamins or minerals, mainly because we replenish anything we lost.
When we eat food later in the day, like you’re not you’re you’re eating every day, okay? But for longer fasts, if you’re doing like a 24 hour or longer fast, doctors recommend supplementing with electrolytes. So sodium, potassium, magnesium, which is very easy to get in a supplement, right? I actually take these when I’m running in the heat, just because we all need electrolytes when we’re running, especially longer distances, especially when it’s super hot outside.
And so I take a supplement that’s just sodium, potassium, and magnesium, and no sugar or anything like that, and gives me everything I need. And I do all my runs fasted. And we’ll talk a little bit about that in a second here. But actually, fat is one of the best things your body can use for fuel, right, it’s one of two essential nutrients that we have to have.
And so, you know, you’re not depriving your body of nutrients when you fast for short periods of time at all. Okay, if you’re concerned, just make sure you’re getting enough salt on the electrolytes. But other than that, you’re going to be fine. You’re going to get all the food, all the nutrients you need from the food that you eat. Okay.
And then the last myth I want to just talk about here, as people say, fasting is just crazy. And at this point, I want to say isn’t eating six times a day crazy? Yeah. Keeping your insulin levels elevated all the time. So your body is constantly in fat storage mode, you become insulin resistant when you do this. You know, you get fat, you can’t lose the weight. Isn’t that crazy? Yeah, I think so.
You know, think about all these millions of people around the world who have been fasting for 1000s of years. Muslims, Christians, Jewish people, Hindus, are they all crazy? No. What about all the human ancestors who feasted and fasted millions of years of evolution and we thrived as a species? It’s not crazy. It’s perfect. It’s how we’ve evolved is how we’re designed to function optimally.
And I just wanted you to think about this. Think about animals, the animal kingdom Okay, so bears hibernate every winter, right? They gorge themselves on salmon and berries, which sounds delicious, by the way, and then they live on their own body fat all winter long when they hibernate, right? Are they crazy? Are they just you know, insane? No, is the way they’re designed.
And just a little sidebar here humans were like the only animal on the planet It eats foods that we’re not designed to eat. So all the sugar and the highly refined carbohydrates, we’re not supposed to eat that stuff. That stuff makes us fat. It makes us obese. It creates all kinds of health problems for us. But we eat tons of that stuff. No other animal on the planet does this.
Humans are the only overweight animal on the planet. Think about that. No other animals get fat and obese. You know, obviously, there’s fat animals, like Wallace’s and elephant seals, right? They have a lot of body fat, but they’re not overweight. That’s the way they’re supposed to be. They’re designed to be this way. But it’s perfectly healthy for them. That’s, that’s optimal for them. But it’s not perfectly healthy for humans to be as fat as a walrus. To me, that’s crazy.
Okay, so I hope you understand that fasting is not crazy, it’s perfectly normal. So let’s quickly I’m gonna talk about some of the benefits of fasting, sorry, I get all worked up about this stuff. And I crack myself up sometimes, okay, the benefits of fasting, especially for runners.
So here’s the benefits we can experience. And I’ve kind of talked about some of the stuff already. But I’m gonna reiterate a few things and tell you about a few things I think are kind of cool here. So what happens when you do some fasting? What’s good about it, especially for runners?
Well, number one, glucose levels go down. So when our blood sugars, you know, normalized insulin levels go down, it improves insulin sensitivity, which means our bodies can react to insulin the way they’re supposed to, we get out of fat storage mode, and we get into fat burning mode, right, so we have this boost in metabolism. And our bodies can actually get out of fat storage and into fat burning mode. So there’s a huge benefit for everybody right in it.
The second benefit is that it induces weight loss, because our metabolism is speeding up, not slowing down. It speeds up weight loss and fat loss and fat adaptation. So if you want to become a fat adapted runner, one of the best ways to get there is obviously you have to stop eating sugar and carbohydrates. And then number two, start doing some intermittent fasting.
And when you do it, you will get your body into fat burning mode faster, you’ll lose more weight, obviously, but becoming a fat adapted runner will happen quicker if you include a little intermittent fasting along with the low carb high fat diet.
Another benefit is that intermittent fasting helps you to break through weight loss plateaus. So with all my clients, invariably, at some point, weight loss kind of stalls a little bit, this is perfectly normal. And we anticipate this happening.
And there’s all kinds of tools that I help us and we implement to help my, my clients break through some of those weight loss plateaus, and one of them is intermittent fasting, it’s a great way to bust through when you get stuck at a certain weight, especially when it’s done intermittently. So not all the time, but periodically.
Because here’s what happens when we do the same thing over and over again, our bodies adapt, our body’s very good at adapting, right, so what we want to do is we want to kind of shake things up a little bit every now and then we want to cause our body a little bit of stress so that it can adapt in a different way and change things. Okay.
This is why we don’t work the same muscles at the exact same workout at the gym every single time we go if you want to actually build muscle because your body will adapt, and it’ll stop seeing that as a stressor, and it will stop building the muscle, right. So that’s why if you follow any kind of workout routine or a plan that somebody put in place for you, then you know, they always want you to be doing different things and mixing it up.
And that’s how you get stronger and build muscle. Also, this is why we don’t run the same distances and the same pace. Every time we go out and run right you got to mix things up. We want our bodies to adapt to some super hard super fast running like sprints or hill repeats. And then we want to do some really slow long running.
And then we want to do some stuff in between and then we throw some fartleks in there. I just love saying fartleks and then we want to do some interval training in there. Right? Well, we want to just keep mixing things up so our bodies can respond to these changes of stressors. Same thing happens with fasting it helps us to respond to changes in a different way and really helps to break through some of these weight loss plateaus that we get.
Another huge benefit of intermittent fasting is increased mental and cognitive abilities. So our brains love fat and ketones for fuel is an amazing source of fuel for our brains. And when we do intermittent fasting fat and ketones are produced, we get this flood of amazing fuel for our brain.
It helps improve our mental clarity or concentration, you’ll think more clearly, you’ll be more focused, you’ll be smarter, you get smarter when you do intermittent fasting. FYI. Another amazing benefit is that intermittent fasting enables cell regeneration, including immune cell regeneration, which is very important during things like global pandemics. Okay?
Intermittent fasting also helps to lower blood cholesterol levels, it helps to decrease inflammation in your body, which is amazing, especially as runners, we don’t want to be inflamed, we want to decrease inflammation, right. And intermittent fasting will help with that.
Intermittent fasting helps to lower blood pressure, so reducing hypertension. And then studies have shown that intermittent fasting can also help to prevent Alzheimer’s disease, it helps to extend your life by reversing the aging process. So fasting actually provides some anti aging benefits.
And studies have actually shown that intermittent fasting helps to lower the risk of certain types of cancer. Now, here’s some benefits that are particularly interesting for you as a runner, number one, increased energy, not a loss of energy, but an increase of energy.
So when you practice some intermittent fasting, Adrenaline increases, you actually have more energy, so you can train harder, you can run harder, you can do some more intense workouts, you know, if you’re lifting weights at the gym, you can lift a lot more, because you have all this increased adrenaline and energy. And you’re gonna get some pretty amazing results. Because you have more energy.
Also another huge benefit is there is an increase in growth hormone production during those fasting periods. When you have more growth hormone being produced in your body, this helps to increase your bone density. So this is good for people over 40. I don’t know if there’s any of you out there, well, it’ll help to increase muscle mass. So this is good for everybody.
Right, you can build more muscle because you’re producing more growth hormone. When you’re producing more growth hormone, it also allows you to recover faster from these harder runs and workouts. So intermittent fasting allows you to train harder, and recover faster.
And then one of the big benefits I want to talk about here is that and I kind of mentioned this already, but this is that intermittent fasting helps to speed up the fat adaptation process. The key to fat adaptation, becoming a fat adapted runner, is to get your body used to using your own body fat for fuel.
And the best way to do this, is just don’t eat anything. That way, your body will not have any glucose available for energy. So it will have to go into your fat stores for energy, this is good, this is what we want. And this process of switching from burning glycogen to burning fat, is what we call the fat adaptation period.
And that takes a couple of weeks, you know, two to six weeks depending on how you do it, and your body type and all kinds of other factors. But it’s kind of different for everybody. But generally speaking, it’s somewhere between two and six weeks to get to that point of where you become fully fat adapted. Fasting really helps to speed up this process, okay? It’s an uncomfortable period, because running really sucks during that period.
So when you combine low carbohydrate, high fat diet, along with intermittent fasting, it helps to shorten that uncomfortable fat adaptation period. Okay, so all of these amazing benefits that I just listed. You get all these amazing health benefits without taking any kind of medications without buying any kind of supplements, without any cost at all to you without doing anything at all, except just donate. I think that’s pretty freakin amazing if you ask me.
Okay, so we will be continuing this conversation. We’re talking all about intermittent fasting this month over in the Running Lean community on Facebook. So here’s a little preview of what’s coming up in the Running Lean community. September intermittent fasting challenge.
And so over the course of the next several weeks, talking about how to do intermittent fasting is a lot simpler than you might think. I’m going to be offering tips on how to succeed with intermittent fasting, like how to make sure we’re getting enough electrolytes, what electrolytes should you take? When should you take them?
And what to do when you feel like, when you feel like eating something because like when we’re intermittent fasting, one of the things I talk about the first thing we’re doing this week is no snacks, right? Not eating between meals. And people are like, well, I feel hungry. And I’m like, Well, what did we do about that? You know, that never happens, people never feel hungry between meals. So I’ll give you some tips on how to deal with stuff like that.
So it’s like about how to curb the cravings between meals, how to deal with those urges and stuff like that, okay. I’ll be going over all the different types of intermittent fasting. So there’s different ways of doing this. There’s something called time restricted eating. There’s something people do called alternate day fasting.
There’s some advanced fasting regimens like a 36 hour, 48 hour, 24 hour fasts, one meal a day that people like to do. So there’s different ways of doing this. And I’ll just be giving you some information on all these things, and how to do some of them safely.
And then one of the big things I’ll be talking about over in the Running Lean community on Facebook is training in a fasted state. I call it running on empty. So this is where you don’t need fuel before, during or even after your runs. What? I know it sounds crazy, right? But I gotta tell you, it’s pretty amazing. I have not used fuel.
For months, I do all my workouts, all of my runs in a fasted state. So I haven’t eaten anything for like, at least 12 hours before running, just do some coffee, you know, I gotta have my coffee in the morning. Just honestly, I take electrolytes with me on my runs. And my runs have been amazing.
I’m up to about 15 miles doing this, alright, and I don’t need to have fuel with me. It’s kind of an experiment I’m doing. You know, I could take some fuel with me if I wanted to, but I don’t need it. And that’s the point I’m trying to get out here is like, you don’t have to have it. And when you train this way, and you train in this fasted state you’re building, you’re producing all this growth hormone, and you’ve got an amazing amount of energy. So you can actually run harder, run faster, run longer, and recover faster. So amazing, right?
So honestly, becoming a fat-adapted runner, this is one of the best things you can do for yourself. We’ll talk about how we do all that. So join us for the September intermittent fasting, and see what not eating can do for your overall health, energy, weight loss, and running. Cool. That’s all I got for you guys today. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of you. Keep on Running Lean will 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 Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets 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.
If you have big goals and dreams for yourself, if you’re the kind of person who wants more out of life, then achieving those big goals and dreams will require you to do hard things. To get there …
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 35 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today we’re talking about embracing the suck. I’m gonna say the word suck a lot today, just so you know, little forewarning.
But listen, if you have big goals and dreams for yourself, if you’re the kind of person who wants more out of life, than achieving those big goals and dreams will require you to do hard things. And to get there means there will definitely be a period of time when things were going to get hard things are eventually going to suck.
So today I’m talking about embracing the suck. Most people want to do the opposite, they want to avoid the suck. But here’s the thing, the suck is going to happen, whether you like it or not. So it’s better that you learn how to embrace it, rather than always trying to resist it. So that is coming up.
If you like this podcast, you have to come check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. This is a positive, informative, highly energized group of like minded runners and it kind of goes hand in hand with the podcast. I do weekly live trainings in there on a bunch of different topics.
We talk about nutrition, weight loss, some science stuff, some mindset stuff, and we got a big challenge coming up. This is my first time talking about this, we are doing a challenge for the month of September. So beginning September 1, it is intermittent fasting month in the Running Lean community. And no, it does not mean that we will not be eating anything for the entire month of September. Okay.
I will explain exactly what intermittent fasting is and what it isn’t. We’ll talk about how you can do intermittent fasting safely. And you’re kind of already doing it already right now, whether you like whether you know it or not, I’ll be busting all the myths about intermittent fasting like it will kill you. That’s a myth, it won’t kill you.
We’ll talk about how you can incorporate intermittent fasting into your training, all the amazing health benefits of intermittent fasting especially for running and weight loss. When you combine a low carbohydrate, high fat diet, along with intermittent fasting, this is like rocket fuel for your health and for your fitness and for your weight loss.
And we’ll talk about what all that means and how to do it. So just go over to Facebook, search for Running Lean the Running Lean community and join us for our September intermittent fasting challenge. It’s going to be cool. Also losing weight, becoming fat-adapted, learning how to do all these things like intermittent fasting. It’s hard to do on your own, I get it.
That’s why I’m here. I want to help you. And I do offer one-on-one coaching because we’re all different. We all have different goals, different needs, different lifestyles. Working with me, you’ll learn exactly how to do all this stuff in a way that works for you as an individual. In fact, here’s one of my very favorite clients Deborah had to say recently, she wrote this comment, so sweet.
She wrote, “I’m on day 14 of coaching with Patrick. I’ve seen many nutritionists and dietitians in my life, and also work with a dedicated running coach. Patrick is by far the most legit health coach I’ve had the pleasure of working with. He takes the whole body and the whole mind approach and helps you to battle through the tough stuff, cutting out sugar and carbs, and helps you to identify the reasons that are far bigger than calories or pounds. So you can stay with it. I was dying for a piece of supermarket birthday cake yesterday. And just knowing that Patrick is in my corner to make a smarter decision helped me to get through that craving.”
Thank you so much for those kind words. Deborah, you are so sweet and you are an awesome client. Also, that craving for that supermarket birthday cake is very, very specific. We need to talk about that. But it’s funny. That’s what sugar does to us. It has a powerful hold on as it causes all kinds of very specific cravings apparently.
But if you’re ready to make some big changes in your life if you’re ready to ditch the sugar and the carbs In the addiction to sugar and carbs and those crazy, specific cravings, if you’re ready to embrace the suck, at least temporarily, then you have to go to innerfiretribe.com/weightlosscoaching, one word, and apply for one on one coaching with me do it now I promise you, you will not regret it.
Alright, embracing the suck, embrace the suck is a fun phrase that is very popular in endurance sports, it means that it means this, it means things are gonna get hard. At some point during this event during this race, whatever it is you’re doing, things are going to suck, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You just have to accept it, embrace it, and keep going.
And I first started hearing about this a lot when I was training for Ironman. There’s a great deal of suck during that race, there’s a great deal of suck in the training for that event too, just so you know, it’s a lifetime of suck when you’re into Ironman Triathlon, as a lifestyle.
But anyway, so during that event, there’s a lot of suck, that’s going to happen, right. And I knew that at some point, during that day, I was going to have to face the suck, okay. And I didn’t really know when that was going to happen or whatever, until the day of the race.
So the day of the race, you know, do this swim, two and a half, 2.4 mile swim, get out of the water and, you know, cycling for 112 miles. And then I laced up my running shoes and started to run while this was Louisville, Kentucky, August 95 degrees and humid.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon, the hottest part of the day, arguably. And this is when I was heading out to start to run my marathon after the 2.4 mile swim and cycling 112 miles of rolling hills. So I had been out exerting myself since 7am. And this was now three o’clock in the afternoon. So this is like eight straight hours of continuous physical exertion. And I started running and my legs just would not move. I felt horrible. It sucked big time. And it’s in that very moment right there. I was like, oh, yeah, this is what they’re talking about. Embrace the suck. This is the sucky part.
And I knew what it meant intellectually, like, I knew like, oh, yeah, this is gonna happen at some point. But until you experience it in the moment, it is just a concept. It’s just a theory. But when it hits you hard like that, and I will tell you, it hit me hard, it was very, very difficult, I would start running for maybe 10 seconds, and I just had to start walking and try to start running again for maybe 15 seconds. And I just couldn’t do it, I had to walk.
And it took a while for me to get a little momentum going where I could actually run for any extended period of time. I mean, there were people, you know, at the beginning of the marathon that were just like, sitting on the ground, just like on the curb, like laying down, you know, just already they were just done.
And it kind of freaks you out a little bit because you’re like, oh my god, you know, what have I got myself into here? But as you know, I kept moving. And when I was fueling and hydrating and things like that I was able to get up a little running, but I just let it be sucky. And I just kept moving forward. That little mantra was in my mind, embrace the suck, just know it’s gonna suck. And keep moving.
Another crystal clear moment of embracing the suck for me, was during the Hallucination 100. So this was the 100 mile trail race that I did up in Hell, Michigan, which is an aptly named play by the way. And the trail is 16, roughly 16 miles, a little over 16 miles. And so you got to do the loop six times to get to 100 miles.
So I finished my fifth loop. And so there’s right around mile 84. So I just had one more loop to go and you’d think I’d be like, Yay, just one more loop to go. Well, my feet were swollen like crazy. I had these giant blisters. My feet hurt every step. I was in excruciating pain. Every muscle in my body was like, just sore and tense and tight.
I had been running nonstop for over 24 hours at this point. So I’d rip around all through the night. No sleep and here I was, I still had 60 more miles of trails and hills to go, I wanted to quit. So I had to make a choice, in that moment, you know, because it sucked big time, it was really, my whole body just wanted to shut down and just lay down and be done with it.
I had a choice though, I could call it a day, and just be done with it. You know, say, Hey, I got to mile 84 good job, or embrace the suck, and finish. I mustered up all the courage, I had all the determination. I knew it was going to be painful. And I just put one foot in front of the other.
And I set out on that single track trail, and started that last 16 grueling miles. And it was very hard. It hurt a lot. It sucked a lot. But I just allowed it. I allowed the pain to ache, I embraced the suck. The exhaustion, the fear, the frustration, all of it, I just was like, it’s all going to be there. And I’m going to keep moving forward no matter what.
I have this mantra, there’s a mantra and trail running, which is, or ultra running, I guess it’s relentless forward progress. And this is kind of my mantra for life in general. But relentless forward, progress is like the thing that keeps me moving in those moments, like no matter what, just keep moving forward. And I did. And I finished that.
I finished both those races to the hardest things I’ve ever done. Arguably, like, those two moments are like, the most sucky experiences of my life, but I embraced them. And I kept going, I didn’t quit.
And then what happened to me, which surprised me, when I finished those races, the experience of of having gone through that sucky period, and like embracing it, and then keep moving forward. This was life changing for me, I became more of a person more than what I was before starting those events. You know, I got way outside my comfort zone. And I grew in more ways than I could ever have imagined.
And it didn’t happen because there weren’t any sucky periods or because it was easy. It happened because it was hard. You know, I’ve talked about this before, and, you know, we gotta like, accept the challenges that come our way. And that’s how we get to the, to the good stuff is we got to go through the challenges, kind of what we’re talking about here. embracing the suck, okay.
And this applies to many different areas of your life, you know, so I talk about my, my weight loss clients, I tell them that things are gonna get uncomfortable, you know, that they need to embrace the suck when they stop eating sugar. And they’re like, yes, Patrick, I’m down with all of that, bring it on, I’m ready.
And so they stop eating sugar. And a week or so goes by, you know, things are okay. But then they start having these withdrawal symptoms, you know, they get headaches they get, they feel lethargic, they start having these super strong cravings for sugar, they start dreaming of sheet cakes from the grocery stores and edible cookie dough.
And they start to feel like they’re missing out on all of life’s pleasures that their life really sucks now, and there’s never ever gonna be joy in their life again, their life is basically over. And I’m like, remember, when I said things were going to suck and get very uncomfortable? Well, that’s what we’re talking about. You’re in it now.
But they’re like, but I don’t want it now. I want it to go away. And I’m like, I know, I know. But here we are. Same thing with runners who want to, you know, kick the carbohydrate addiction and want to become fat-adapted runners. And I tell them very specifically, running will suck for a few weeks as your body adjusts to switching from, you know, glucose to fat as fuel, just it takes a while for your body to get to that process.
And they’re always like, I’m down with that. I’m ready, bring it on. So they stop eating the carbohydrates. And after a week or so the running gets really hard and they’re like, what’s happening? Running is really hard. I mean, it’s really hard and I’m like remember when I said you have to embrace the suck and you were all down with all that. Well, this is what we’re telling you. This is the suck. Okay.
You know, it just takes a few weeks to become fat-adapted. Once you do, it’s amazing. But there’s a period where it’s very uncomfortable and running is hard. And you just have to accept it. That is part of the process.
Okay, but here’s the thing. Anytime things start to get hard they start to suck, we have two choices. We can resist them, resist it, or we can embrace it, we can either resist it all, fight it, reject it, push it away. wish it wasn’t so hard wish it was different.
Or we can embrace it, we can allow it to be there, accept it, accept the fact that it’s going to be hard and keep going anyway. So when we, when we resist it, when we resist the sock, you know, we wish things were different. We’re basically not accepting reality. It’s like saying I wish the sky was red instead of blue.
Or, I wish running 100 miles didn’t hurt at all. Or I wish my sugar addiction wasn’t so real. These things are just the way things are. They are exactly how they’re supposed to be. And here’s a little pro tip, do you know how you know that this is how they’re supposed to be? Because that’s how they are.
You know, running 100 miles is going to hurt because it hurts. You know that sugar addiction is real, because it’s real. You know, this guy’s supposed to be blue, because it is. It’s when we don’t accept this reality, this is what causes us inner turmoil.
When we don’t accept things as they are, it actually makes the sucky part a lot worse. You know, and I get it, it’s like, I just want to feel better, like right now. But you know, it’s not how it works. It’s like trying to hold a big beach ball underwater.
So you push it down and you push it down, the more you push it down, the harder it is to hold it down, and you just can’t keep it up. And eventually, that beach ball is going to come up, it’s going to come splashing up into your face. And don’t ask me how I know how this works. But that’s what happens. Okay.
So we’re just like rejecting what is, we’re pushing away. This sucky part, when that is just part of the process of getting to those big goals and dreams. Anything worthwhile that we want to accomplish means we got to go through something sucky to get there, okay.
You can accept it, you can embrace it, or you can just resist it and fight it. Fighting it and resisting, it just makes it worse. Right. But when you embrace it, when you stop the resisting, when you stop pushing away, the reality of what it is, you let go of the beach ball, you just let it be there. All sucky and everything. When you can accept things as they are, even if they suck, and that’s okay. Just embrace it and keep moving forward.
You feel the pain, yeah. But you keep on running. You feel like quitting, but you don’t, you just keep going instead, you feel like eating a whole sheet cake to yourself. But you don’t, you just allow that craving to be there. And you don’t do anything about it. Maybe eat some bacon instead. Or you feel like going back to all the carbs.
So that running will be quote unquote, easy again. But you don’t, you just let it be hard. Because you know, you have to go through that sucky part to get to the amazing part. And here’s a little spoiler alert for you guys. Life is not supposed to be happy, and comfortable all the time. Life is like 50/50. it’s just not supposed to be happy, carefree, joyous, and amazing and super comfortable all the time. It’s just not.
It’s more like 50% of the time, life is amazing, and exciting and fun and uncomfortable. And then 50% of the time, it’s uncomfortable and kind of crappy and a little sucky. And that’s okay, this is normal. This is the way of life. This is what it means to be a human being alive on the planet today.
But if you think life is going to be good all the time, if you expect that you are going to be very disappointed and very miserable a lot of the time because you’re going to be rejecting and resisting the reality of what is. You have to accept it all. You have to embrace the suck.
Because without the pain, we don’t get to experience the pleasure. Without agony we don’t know what joy is without feeling sadness. We don’t know what happiness feels like without frustration, we don’t learn patience. Without feeling anxiety, we don’t experience peace. Without failing, we don’t want to know what accomplishment feels like.
You know, without uncertainty, we don’t know what confidence is. When you can embrace all of it, when you become willing to experience all of these emotions that we’re talking about a lot of emotions here fear, anxiety, frustration, anger, pain, when you’re willing to experience these emotions, when you’re willing to embrace the suck. There’s nothing you can’t do.
Most people, they’re afraid to feel uncomfortable. They are so afraid of the suck that they never do anything hard, they’re not even going to try. They don’t even get up off the couch. Because they know that to put on their running shoes and go start running when they haven’t been running forever.
And they want to run a 5k. They want to do that. But they know it’s going to be hard. And so they just stay on the couch. They don’t embrace the suck. So they never do anything hard. And guess what? They never accomplish anything. They stay comfortable. Yeah. They don’t have to experience the sucky things. Yeah. They stay in their comfort zone.
But what does that do for you? What does that get you? Is that what you want for your life? I don’t think so. If you’re listening to this podcast, if you’re listening to me, then I’m pretty sure that’s not you. That does not sound like you. Everything you want, but don’t already have, lies outside your comfort zone. So if you never embrace the suck, you never embrace the discomfort you never grow.
You never become more than what you are today, right here, now. You never accomplish anything bigger than what you’ve already done in your life. Like, this is it, this is where you are. And that’s it. If you don’t embrace the suck, you don’t get uncomfortable.
You never experience the amazing 50% of your life full of joy and satisfaction and accomplishment. You got to go through the 50% that’s hard and painful and sucky. Remember the sucky parts, you have to go through the sucky part, in order to get to the amazing part.
It just that’s just the way it works. So I want to encourage you to embrace it all. The good, the bad, and the suck, embrace the suck. Become an emotional badass, like allow all those things to come up. The pain, the frustration, the fear of missing out the exhaustion, whatever it is you’re doing, embrace it all.
Because when you do when you embrace the suck, you become a total badass you’d be there’s like nothing you can’t accomplish. Most people are so afraid to experience these emotions. Don’t be afraid to experience the emotions. And you’ll see what you can do. I guarantee you, it’s a much better way to live your life.
Well, we will be continuing this conversation over in the Running Lean community on Facebook. Just come and check us out. It’s really fun. And remember, September is going to be intermittent fasting month, we’re gonna be talking all about it, how to do it, why we do it, why it’s important, how it’ll help you.
And, you know, it’d be super awesome. If you enjoy this podcast. If you get something out of it. Just leave a quick little review on iTunes, just, you know, scroll down and your little iTunes podcast app, tap the stars. And then just write a couple words that that you’re getting something out of this, it would really mean a lot to me if you did that. Thank you. I appreciate that. All right. That’s all I got for you today. Lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends, keep on Running Lean. Embrace the suck. 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 Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets 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.
Today, I’m talking about what happens when you commit to achieving something, and I mean really committing to it. It’s like the difference between saying you’re going to run a marathon one day and …
Continue Reading about 33. The Power of Making a Real Commitment →
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 33 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host and weight loss coach for runners. And today I am talking about what happens when you commit to achieving something.
And I mean really committing to something, it’s like the difference between saying you’re going to run a marathon some day, and then actually signing up for a marathon. And then putting together a training plan and then actually training for it. There’s a big difference there.
There’s this subtle but very powerful shift that happens in your brain when you decide to go all in on a goal. Making a real commitment, especially early on in the process is often the one thing that differentiates those who succeed at reaching their goal and those who do not.
But first, I want to tell you a little bit about the Running Lean community on Facebook. If you like this podcast, then you have to come check out the Running Lean community. It’s a positive, energetic, informative group that goes hand in hand with the podcast. It’s a fun group of like minded runners who share common goals like losing weight, running easier, running farther and living a more vibrant life.
I do some weekly trainings in there on a host of topics like the running mindset, running nutrition, similar to the things that I talked about here on the podcast, weight loss, and so much more. So we can take a little bit of deeper dive into some of these issues, and topics.
Here’s a recent comment from a podcast listener and member of the Running Lean community Tammy, she said, “I’ve learned more from Patrick listening to and being part of the Running Lean community and podcasts for the past few months than I have in the past 30 years as an avid runner and workout junkie. His insight on running nutrition and life principles for optimal health are inspiring and encouraging. I’m enjoying running again, for the first time in years have lost weight and have incorporated the knowledge I’m learning into practice. It’s one thing to hear it, but another thing to have someone motivating you and encouraging you to make it happen. It’s made a huge difference. Highly recommend fellow runners to join in.”
Thank you, Tammy, you’re so sweet. Listen, I strive to be an example, to be an example of what is possible. I’ve accomplished a lot in my life for just an average guy. I’m not some elite athlete, I never went to the Olympics or anything like, you know, I’m an average guy. But I’ve done some pretty amazing things.
And I want to encourage you and maybe even push you a little bit to get you outside your comfort zone to help you to accomplish those things that you want in your life. So join us over in the Facebook group, it’s just go to Facebook and search for Running Lean community, you’ll find us it’s fun.
Also, if you’re interested in coaching with me, I’m always available for personal weight loss coaching for runners, you know, losing weight, becoming fat adapted learning how to run on your own body fat, it’s, it’s challenging, not gonna lie, and it’s kind of hard to do on your own. And everybody’s different.
We all have different goals, different needs,and different lifestyles. Working with me, you know, you and I working together, I’ll help you learn exactly how to become that lean, fat burning running machine and do it in a way that works for you and your specific needs and goals.
So you’ll get help and guidance you need to work through obstacles, I help point out your blind spots, things that you cannot see. You get a step by step action plan that will help get you to your goals you get accountability. That’s such a huge part of coaching is the accountability piece.
Motivation, encouragement, keeping moving forward, and tools and skills to help you improve every aspect of your life. Just imagine how much easier losing weight would be if you have someone right there showing you exactly what to do and holding you accountable. So if you want to ditch the sugar, if you want to get off the carbs, if you want to become fat-adapted, lose the weight, feel better, have more energy, you want running to be fun again, sign up with coaching with me. Just go to innerfiretribe.com/weightlosscoaching, one word. And let’s talk. Alright, cool.
So today I am talking about making a real commitment. And I want you to do something here, as I start talking about this, I want to encourage you to start thinking about a goal that you have. So what is that thing that you want to do that maybe you’re a little afraid to do? Or maybe it seems like it’s outside the realm of possibility, it might seem kind of impossible for you to accomplish it, whatever that goal is that you want.
And I want you to start thinking about that, while you’re listening to this episode. Keep that goal in mind, okay. So it might be like you want to lose 30 pounds, it might be you just want to become a fat adapted runner, you might, you may want to like sign up and run your first marathon, or maybe start trail running, or just be healthier overall, like learn how to eat healthier overall, whatever your goal is, doesn’t matter.
Just keep it in mind as we’re going through this material. And then at the end of this episode, I have a little challenge for you. And you’re probably already thinking you know what it is? So we’ll get there. Okay, so keep that goal in mind. You got it, you got it in your head. Awesome.
Okay, so here’s the thing, the difference between people who succeed at stuff and those who don’t, a lot of times just comes down to a commitment. Successful people decide that they are going to succeed, they make a commitment to reach their goal. No matter how long it takes, no matter how hard it gets, no matter how many challenges they face, they are committed to making that happen.
So they don’t necessarily have some superpower, they don’t have more drive than you, more determination, more willpower, or anything like that. They just early on in the process, they made a decision that they were going all in on this no matter what.
Okay, this is very important that you don’t have to have some gene that like, you know, is required for you to reach big goals, you just have to decide that you’re going to do it. Think about some of the things you’ve already done in your past.
So you’ve made some commitments in the past that were pretty epic. I know you have. And if you’re an avid runner, chances are you’ve signed up for marathons or a half marathon or a triathlon or a 5k or something like that. And at some point, you thought this was something you could never do, right?
And then at some point, you made a decision that you were going to do that no matter what. Early on in the process, you made a decision that you are going to do your first 5k. And I remember when I made the decision that I was going to run my first 10k. This was a big goal for me because I couldn’t run a mile without stopping. And so I made a decision to run a 10k.
And it was the Thanksgiving Day race here in Cincinnati, which is one of the oldest foot races in the country. And it’s been going on for over 100 years. And anyway, it’s a fun race. You know, 15-20,000 people show up on Thanksgiving morning, dress up like turkeys and run 10k. But 10k, you know, 6.2 miles seemed daunting to me, like, Whoa, that’s a big deal.
And so I started training for it. Well, I signed up for the thing, you know, and then I started, I put together a training plan. And when did we have the Internet back then? I don’t even know maybe I went online and picked a training plan. And then maybe I got a book. I don’t remember exactly. It would have been like 2003-2004 or something like that. So yeah, I guess we had the internet back then.
So anyway, I found a training plan. And then I like wrote it all into my calendar and I like stuck to it. Like I made the commitment that I was going to do this no matter what. And I trained hard and I ended up doing that. I made a decision early on in the process, no matter what I was going to cross that finish line.
And I’ve done this a bunch of other times too. When I trained for my first marathon, I made a decision at some point, I think I got kind of hooked after that 10k I was like, dang, if I could do that, I could do anything. I think the next race I signed up for was a marathon.
Actually, I just skipped the whole half marathon thing, and went straight for the marathon. And made a decision when I signed up for that marathon, I paid for it. I like signed up. And that was that was enough that was going to propel me forward. That’s what I needed to do. That was a decision that I had to make. That was the commitment that I had to make.
And then during my training for that first marathon, I ended up getting injured. I had stress fractures in my both of my tibias. And I had to take a bunch of time off of running like six to eight weeks or something like that, I probably didn’t take that much time off, but I had to take a bunch of time off. So it really messed up my training schedule.
My longest run, my longest training run for my first marathon was only 16 miles. So I’ve never run more than 16 miles. And so when I towed the line, at the start of my first marathon, the longest I’d ever run was 16 miles. So this was going to be 10 miles longer. But you know what? I did. I crossed that finish line.
And I’m convinced that making that real commitment early on, was like the rocket fuel that I needed to push me through all those trainings and to push me through injury. And to get me to that start line and get me to the finish line. A very powerful example of this is when I signed up for Ironman in 2013. At the beginning of the year, I decided I was going to do Ironman.
And I got online, and I signed up for Ironman Louisville. And I was like hovering over the submit button on that website form after putting all my information and my credit card information in and I was like, Oh my gosh, as soon as I click this button, I’m committed. That’s the power of making real commitment. And then, of course, I pushed the button.
And I was like, oh, my God, what did I just do? So it kind of like, freaked me out a little bit. And I was full of fear. And I just put together a training plan again. And I had to get through a lot of challenges. During that training, I was struggling with the bike, I couldn’t find the right kind of saddle, I was having all kinds of pain when I was riding, I crashed my bike, kind of like freaked me out when I did that.
You know, I put in like 20 hours a week of training for this thing. And there were so many challenges I had to face. And I’m convinced still, that it was that making that decision early on, that got me through all that training got me through all those obstacles. And that got me across the finish line in a successful completion of that Ironman. Still one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
But really, like when I made the decision, when I committed to finishing an Ironman, I knew in my heart and my brain, I knew I was going to do it. And that’s the way I approach things. Not always, but I try. And the same goes for every time I’ve trained for a marathon.
You know, I’ve run like two marathons a year for a bunch of years there. I haven’t done that in a couple of years. But for a while there, it was two marathons a year. And so I was pretty much training all the time. And so I would choose a race, sign up for it. And then I would show up for every single training run for those races. And that’s a commitment. That’s a commitment that goes deep, you know, and it’s something you have to do early on.
So you’ve got to make that commitment early on in the process. But here’s what happens when you make that real commitment. It’ll dictate how you show up every day. It’s got to be something that’s bigger than you first of all, because it has to keep you motivated. It has to keep you energized. It has to get you out there. Even when the weather really sucks when it’s super cold, or it’s dark, snowing, it’s like miserable. Or boiling hot. You know, depending on what time of the year you’re training.
It’s that commitment you make has to be epic. It has to be bigger than you. It has to keep you going even when you don’t feel like it. But when you make a real commitment to reaching a goal, that goal is as good as done. Now let’s transfer this like, think about other types of goals you might have, like, maybe you want to lose weight, or like I mentioned becoming fat-adapted, changing your diet. These same principles apply.
You have to make that commitment early on, it has to be an epic commitment, you have to make the decision that you are going to go all in, that you are going to succeed, no matter what, no matter what challenges come up, no matter how uncomfortable you might get, no matter how hard it might seem, in the moment.
Most people don’t do this though. Most people, you know, dabble in these concepts and principles, when we talk about losing weight, and changing your diet and what you’re eating, and how much you’re eating, and when you’re eating the kinds of foods you’re eating, people do it kinda sorta they don’t make that commitment, they don’t go out there.
And because they’re afraid, they’re afraid of how they might feel, because they might feel sluggish, they might have cravings, they might get an urge to eat some pizza or ice cream. And guess what, those people that kind of dabble that kind of go, not all in it goes sort of a little bit in, they get some little results.
And when things get challenging for them, which they will, they always do, they don’t have anything to fall back on, they don’t have any internal support system, you know, from within themselves. So they might like, maybe they’ve stopped eating sugar, and carbohydrates, okay. And they’re like, you know, I’m kind of committed to stop eating carbs.
And then they’re like, at a friend’s house, and they’re, you know, hanging around and they see a cookie right there. And there’s nothing in them that’s stronger than this urge they’re having in this moment, eat this cookie. And so they just eat cookie right there. You know, think about that, though.
They’re taking this moment, this tiny moment in time. And you know, even though they want to lose weight, they want their health to be better. They want to change the way they eat, they want to change the way they think about food and the way they feel about food. It’s causing them all kinds of problems. But in this moment, that one cookie sitting there is more important than all of that to them.
And they cave and eat the cookie. So that cookie is more important than who they ultimately want to be. Now, I’m oversimplifying this, and I get it sugar is very addictive. That’s why making this commitment to yourself is critical. It really is.
If you want to succeed at losing weight, if you want to succeed at changing your diet, if you want to succeed at becoming fat adapted. You know, you have to go all in with your commitment. You have to have this attitude of like, I am going to make this work no matter what.
When you do, it’s going to work. I can guarantee it. It’s all in your head. It’s all in your thoughts. It really is. But when we make these half ass commitments, you know what you get half assed results every single time. Half assed commitments will get you half assed results if that every single time.
And I know what you’re thinking, Patrick, it’s hard. It’s hard to stop eating sugar. It’s hard to change the way we think about food. And then I want to challenge that thought. Really, is it really harder than say training for a marathon? Is, you know, eating or not eating carbohydrates harder than sticking to a training schedule where you run four to five days a week for months and months on end through the dead of winter to train for a goal. Is that harder than that?
Is it harder than getting up early every Saturday morning? You know, running in the cold and the snow and the rain? I mean, believe me, I have done this so many times. I’ve had some very miserable Saturday morning runs that me and my running friends we still talk about oh yeah, remember that one 22 miler that we did in the freezing rain? Yeah. Where people’s like hands were numb? Yeah, I remember that.
Here’s the thing. You already do hard things. You’ve accomplished some amazing things already. I know you have and you’ve accomplished those things because you committed to accomplishing those things, you have to do that same thing here, I’m not asking you to do anything you haven’t already done.
You know, you just have to go all in, you have to decide early on that this is what you’re going to do, this is who you’re going to be. And that is going to help drive all of your actions. But what happens is we have these thoughts in our brain that this is hard, or I can’t do it. Or, you know, who am I? I’m not good enough. I’m not like you, or whatever the thoughts are, that we have.
So whether you think something is easy, or you think something is hard, these are all just thoughts in your brain, it doesn’t actually mean it’s easy or hard. You know, if you have a thought, like, I can try this fat adaptation thing for a while. And then if it gets kind of hard, I can just go back to eating the way I was before.
What do you think is going to happen if that’s your thought? I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. It will get hard, because it always does. And then you’re gonna go back to doing things the way you’ve always done them, which don’t work, and you’re just going to be stuck where you are. And that’s fine if that’s what you want. Totally fine. And I’ve had clients who’ve done this, so they quit, because they get uncomfortable. They think it’s too hard, and they can’t do it.
But here’s the thing, I have other clients who are doing the exact same thing. And for them, it’s like, super easy. They have just a different thought about it. It’s kind of interesting. Those people are like all in. They’re like, man, yeah, I’m totally committed to making this work. And I’ve had clients who have been like, hey, Patrick, this is challenging, but I’m, I’m committed to making this work.
How do we get through this obstacle? Like I hit a plateau? How do we break through this weight loss plateau here? And I’m like, let’s figure it out. That’s a much better place to come from. It’s very powerful. It’s empowering. Okay, saying it’s too hard. I can’t do it all that you’re giving all your power away, you’re just, you know, basically saying you’re not powerful enough, you can’t, you have no control over all this.
These are just thoughts in your brain, though. But when you make that commitment early on, and that’s just a thought too, by the way, but it’s a super powerful thought. I will do this no matter what. I love this quote from Tony Robbins, he says, “It’s in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped. It’s in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.”
So think about those moments of decision that you have. What are you thinking in those moments? What are you deciding to think in those moments? What kind of a commitment are you making, in those moments of decision, because whatever it is, it will shape your destiny. Whether you think it will or not, it will. It is shaping your destiny.
It’s either moving you closer to your goal and ultimately will get you there, or it’s moving you further away. And you’ll just be stuck where you are. So honestly, the only thing that can stop you from reaching that goal is a thought in your brain. So think about like what thoughts are going through your brain right now around your goal? What thoughts are you having about it?
Some thoughts might be like let’s say your your goal is to you know, get off the sugar, become fat-adapted, lose some weight. Here’s some thoughts that people have. “I’m super addicted to sugar. I crave it all the time. There’s no way I can give it up. There’s just no way I can do it.” That’s just a thought.
Or, “I’ve tried to lose weight before. It’s never worked before. Why should it work now? I’m just gonna fail again. I know I will.” That’s just a thought. Or, “I’m gonna feel deprived. I’m gonna feel hungry all the time. I’m gonna have FOMO (fear of missing out) because other people get to eat pizza and I can’t.” That’s just a thought.
Or like, “This is just gonna be it’s just gonna be too hard. Or people will judge me. They’ll think I’m weird.” People think you’re weird anyway. So okay. People think I’m weird. People don’t like me. There’s a lot of people that don’t like me. I know. It’s crazy, right?
But anyway, there are people out there. And it’s okay. It’s just a thought. It’s just a thought that we all have. But these are like thoughts, all those thoughts that I just kind of ran through, these are actual thoughts from clients. They feel like they’re the truth, but they’re not. They’re just thoughts. They’re just like sentences in our brain. I’ve had clients who think that losing weight on like a low carb high fat diet is the easiest thing they’ve ever done. They say it’s simple, it’s fun.
There’s a lot of freedom in it, and they love doing it. These are just thoughts that people have. And those people that have those kinds of thoughts will tell you what? They reach their goals, and it’s fun, and they enjoy it. Just a thought.
So I want to encourage you to like, go all in whatever that goal is that we were talking about earlier that you are thinking about, let all this stuff come up all these thoughts that you might have, it’s okay, just allow those thoughts should be there, because they’ll come up. But keep going anyway.
You know, we don’t succeed, because we never have never negative thoughts, we succeed because we have negative thoughts. We allow them and we keep going anyway. You know, think about the marathon training, have you ever been out on a long training run in your thought, this sucks, I’m never gonna finish. It’s too hard. I’m never gonna be able to finish this thing. Maybe I should just quit.
Of course, we’ve all had that thought, right. Especially on that cold 20 miler where we had the freezing rain. I was like, this really blows, I hate running. But I kept going anyway, and I finished it. You know, so we could have those thoughts and still do the deal and still, you know, move towards our goal, we can still take the action we need to take to get us there.
Those thoughts can be with us, they can come along for the ride with us, but they’re not driving the bus. They’re like in the passenger seat over there. Okay, we want the thoughts, that’s those, those epic commitments that we have that like, I’m going to do this no matter what we want that driving the bus, okay.
So, something I want you to do here is to think about this, this is a cool kind of exercise you can do. And it’s important that you kind of do this and think about that commitment level that you want to reach that goal that you have, okay. Your six year success, like reaching that goal, achieving that goal, it’s as good as done, when your reason for sticking to it is more compelling than some, you know, physical craving, or some emotional desire or some thought like, I just don’t feel like doing this.
So here’s the kind of little exercise you can do in your mind, it’s a very easy thing to do. But I want you to like, go out into the future, like put yourself out into your future. And you have accomplished that goal. So it is done. So you’re at your goal weight, or you’ve crossed the finish line of that marathon, or you’re healthy and happy, you have a different relationship with food, whatever your goal was, you’ve achieved it, it is done and think about this.
How did you make that happen? How did you get here? What’s the main reason you were able to achieve this goal? What was the commitment that you made early on that kept you going? Obviously, it was something that was very compelling, because it got you through all the challenges, all the obstacles, or the all the hard stuff. It wasn’t some half assed commitment. Right? You went all in.
So what did that look like for you? How did that feel to have that commitment driving you all that time? That got you there? How did that feel? Now hold on to that feeling. And here’s the challenge that I have for you. So at the beginning of the episode, I talked about thinking about a goal, right? Here’s the challenge for you, I want you right now, holding on to that feeling, I want you to make the commitment that you are going to reach that goal no matter what.
No matter how long it takes, no matter how hard it might seem to you right now, it might seem impossible for you right now. Still make the commitment. Doesn’t matter how challenging things you’re gonna get or you don’t, you don’t even have to know how you’re going to make it happen. You just have to commit to making it happen. Do that right now.
This is the challenge, make a real commitment right now. And then come over into the Running Lean community on Facebook and share that goal with us. What I bet that just made you feel uncomfortable, right? You’re like oh, I don’t know about sharing my goal. Because it makes it real when you do that. I know it’s scary. And some people don’t like to share their goals and that is totally fine.
Personally, I do share my goals with a few key people in my life like with my coach, with some very close friends, you know, I have some, some goals with my business and things like that, and some, you know, goals for my health and things. I don’t share it like, in a super overt way.
But sometimes I do, sometimes I post in groups, or share with, you know, groups of people, goals that I have. And it’s actually pretty powerful to do that. So if you’re the kind of person that wants to share something with a group of people that would encourage you, I want to encourage you to do that in the Facebook group, just post your goal in there and say, my goal is, or I’m committed to, let’s write it that way.
I’m committed to and then share your goal with us write a post, and then we’re all going to tell you that you can do it, and we’re going to help you achieve that goal. It’ll be fun, and scary, and awesome and amazing and powerful.
Okay. I know some of you are like cringing right now you’re like, dude, really, I don’t want to do that. You don’t have to do that. But I want you to make that commitment in your mind, regardless of whether you post it or not, whether you share it with the world, I want you to make that real commitment in your mind to reach that goal.
And then see what happens, see what amazing, powerful things you can do. Okay, so we’re gonna continue this conversation in the Running Lean community on Facebook. So just go to Facebook, search for Running Lean community, and join us it’s going to be super epic.
And if you enjoy this podcast and you get something out of it, if it helps you in some way, you can show your support by just leaving a quick review on iTunes, I would really appreciate that. Alright, that’s all I got for you today. As always, lots of love to each and every one of you. Keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles or starving yourself and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets 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 a lean running machine.
In this episode of the Running Lean podcast, I break my silence about making the switch to eating meat again. Many of you know that I’ve been a big proponent of the plant-based diet for the last 10 …
Continue Reading about 32. Why I Changed My Mind About Eating Meat →
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 32 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host, and weight loss coach for runners. And if you’re just checking out the podcast for the first time, or recently, and you are hoping to find The Running Mind podcast, well guess what? I changed the name. That’s all, same content, just a different name. It’s called Running Lean. And eventually I’ll change the website. That’s a whole nother thing I got to do.
But welcome to Running Lean. That’s the name of the podcast now. Cool, cool. Awesome. How are you today? I’m good. I just got done with a five mile run. I ate some food, some eggs, some bacon, some avocado, a little Greek yogurt with a couple of strawberries. And I feel good. And that’s kind of what we’re talking about today.
The fact that I have recently changed my mind about eating meat. I’m breaking my silence, I’ve made the switch to eating meat again. So if you know me, if you’ve known me for some time for awhile, you may know that I’ve been a big proponent of eating a plant based diet for like the last 9 or 10 years.
So now hearing that I’m eating meat again, may come as a surprise to you, it may be shocking to you. So I wanted to just be completely forthright with all of this and record this episode to explain what led me to this decision why I made this switch and answer questions about you know why now and talk about the impact that it’s had on my overall health and my athletic performance.
And then I also want to talk about what this means for you, you know, whether as a listener of the podcast, or as a potential or current coaching client of mine. So I think this is going to be very interesting episode. It was very interesting for me to like, write some notes about this, and really just speak from the heart. But that’s what’s going on today. So that’s what you get to look forward to hear in a moment.
If you haven’t already, come and check us out on Facebook, we got this awesome community of people. It’s the Running Lean community. And it kind of goes hand in hand with this podcast. It’s an energetic positive group of like minded runners who share common goals like losing weight, wanting to run easier and living a more vibrant life. You know, I do these weekly live trainings on a host of topics like running mindset, nutrition for runners, weight loss, and just a bunch of other stuff.
Here’s a recent comment from one of the members of the Running Lean community on Facebook, Josh and Josh says, “Thank you for doing such great work. You’re gifted with simplifying the complex and confusing jargon. We are bombarded with your experience and understanding of the runners mindset hits a home run by me.”
Oh my gosh, Josh. Thank you. That was really sweet. And it is something that I really work hard on. So I’m really glad that you made this, this observation. Because I work hard to learn everything I can. I soak it all up, I read the scientific papers, I read the books, I follow all the leading experts. I’m constantly learning, constantly consuming information about nutrition and diet and weight loss and mindset and what this all means for us as runners. And not just like the elite athletes, the Olympic gold medalists, like we’re weekend warriors, you know, we’re middle of the pack here.
So what does this mean for us? And it doesn’t mean we’re not capable of amazing things because we are. We are capable of some amazing, incredible things. And my job, my goal here is just to break all this information down. Let’s apply it for us. Let’s see what works. I want to help you accomplish those amazing things. So check us out. Just go to Facebook search for Running Lean community. Join us it’d be fun to have you there.
Also, I want to let you know that losing weight and becoming a fat-adapted runner, it’s kind of hard to do on your own. Part of that is why I have the Facebook group so you can get some some motivation and some support. I also want you to know that I offer one-on-one coaching.
Listen, we are all different, we all have different goals. We all have different needs. We all have different lifestyles, working one on one with me, you’ll learn exactly how to become a lean fat burning running machine in a way that works for you. You get the help and guidance, you need to work through obstacles, you get a personalized step by step action plan that will get you to your goals.
You get the accountability for your results, you get the motivation you need from me to keep you moving forward. And you get these tools and these skills that you’re going to learn that will help you improve every aspect of your life. Just imagine how much easier losing weight will be when you have someone right there with you. Someone like me showing you exactly what to do and holding you accountable.
Ditch the sugar and carbs, get fat-adapted, lose weight, feel better, have more energy, run easier, get leaner, get stronger, run faster, run longer than you ever thought possible. Just go to innerfiretribe.com/weight-loss-coaching. That’s a terrible URL. I’m sorry for that. I gotta fix that.
Weight Loss coaching with dashes in between, there’s basically what it is.
And then you can apply for one on one coaching with me, we’ll get on a call, we’ll talk about if this is a good fit for you. You can also, anytime I mention a link, you can just go to the show notes for that episode. And if you’re looking at it on your let’s say on your iPhone, in your podcast app, just click that Details button. And you’ll get all the notes and the links are right there. You can just click the link. You don’t have to remember all these slash dash and all this other stuff. Okay, just click the link in the show notes. And, and let’s get you to your goals. Cool. Awesome.
Okay, so just so you guys know, I’ve been thinking about recording this episode for some time. Now, I have not really been talking about this publicly that I’ve switched from being plant based to a more omnivorous type of diet, that I started eating meat again, I’ve been sort of hiding this. And it didn’t feel right to me, I felt like I was not being truthful.
I didn’t feel like I was being honest and open about what I was doing. And here’s why I was afraid, I was afraid of what people would think of me. If they found out that this plant based guy has now switched to you know, eating meat.
You know, I might lose some friends. I’ve got a lot of friends who are big proponents of like a vegetarian or a vegan or plant based diet. And these are great friends. And I love these people and I don’t want to lose their respect, or I don’t want to lose them as friends. And that’s what I’m afraid of.
But I can’t keep my silence any longer. I just feel like I have to talk about this so that I can be completely in alignment with who I am publicly and privately. I want to be transparent. And I want my message that I communicate to you guys to be in full alignment with my personal values and beliefs. Okay, and I was afraid to do that.
Now, I know that no matter what I do or say that some people will not like me. And that goes for all of us. Some people will, some people won’t. No matter what stand I take. Some people will not like what I’m about to say here today. And basically talking about, you know, how eating meat is not that bad, okay.
When I went to a plant based diet, and I started talking about that, and I’m gonna give you a little backstory here in a minute, but when when I went to that kind of a diet, I got people calling me stupid, people telling me I was going to be sick and diseased and ruin my life. Because I wasn’t eating animal based proteins.
Basically the same thing I’m finding is happening. Now that I’ve switched back to eating meat I get people they’re not really calling me stupid not yet. Probably after this episode comes out and I share it. But I’ve had some interesting comments from some people that have, you know, kind of found out that the cat kind of got laid out of the bag a little bit recently in a comment on Facebook that I made about what I eat.
And I mentioned bacon and eggs or something like that. And then I got a few comments from people about you know, I’m going to kill myself basically. So no matter what you do, you guys just so you know, there are going to be people that don’t like it or don’t agree with you, and that’s okay.
So I might, I might get some unfollows, I might have some unfriends. And that’s okay, it means that I’m just taking a stand and I’m standing up for what I believe in, it means that I actually have a stand to take, it means that I actually have strong values and beliefs, and I’m not afraid to share them.
It really doesn’t matter what people think of me, it really doesn’t. It has nothing to do with me at all. And honestly, what I eat has nothing to do with you either. Now, I say that and I get it that I’m out here, talking about nutrition and talking about athletic performance and sharing this information that I know that there’s a certain amount of bias there, I get that. I try to be as unbiased as possible in my message, just so you know, we’re gonna get into that too, today.
But here’s the thing, I don’t base my friendships, or the respect I have for other people based on what they eat. I really don’t. I have friends who post pictures of food that they eat on Facebook. And it’s a bunch of crap. Okay, fast food 180 ounce sodas, or whatever they are. And you know what? I click ‘love it’. I say, ‘I love you’. I think that you do you, you know what I mean?
I don’t judge people based on the fact that they’re eating, you know, McDonald’s and funnel cakes and drinking large sodas, I don’t really care. Now, I don’t really think that’s a really healthy way to live your life. But that’s not for me to decide, okay. And here’s the thing, I’m not sharing this information today to try to convince you that you should do what I do.
Or that one way is right. And another way is wrong. I’m not trying to change hearts or minds here. I’m sharing this information because I want to be in integrity with myself. And I want to be in integrity with you. And I want to be transparent and honest. And I want you to know the truth. Cool. Cool. That’s why I’m doing this here today.
So here’s a little bit of a backstory. I started running later in life back in like, ‘04, ‘03, ‘04. And from the very start, I was very focused on nutrition. I was reading everything I could and trying all kinds of things. To try to make running better. Like I wanted running to be easier. I started running marathons.
And I was like, I’ve got to figure out a way to make this as easy as possible, what can I do. And all the evidence at the time was really pointing towards this high carbohydrate, low fat diet, the same thing the USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans suggested back in the 80s. And in the carbo loading, that, you know, early marathoners, we’re proponents of and things like that.
And then the low fat part of that, you know, so lean meat, you know, stick with like just chicken or turkey and maybe some fish, but stay away from red meat and bacon and eggs and all this other stuff. And so my diet progressively got more higher carbohydrate, I guess, and less fatty. So I just went like, if meat was bad, basically, then vegetarian was better.
And so after a few years, I went pretty much full vegetarian, I don’t know ‘06, or ‘07, something like that. And then went fully like plant-based at the end of 2011, somewhere around there sometime in 2011. And because I kept thinking, okay, if I just get rid of these fats, then that’s going to be the answer, right?
And so I just kept limiting the amount of fats and the animal products and all that stuff. So totally plant based, starting in 2011. I even got so into it. I like started this recipe blog called The Vegan Road, and it’s still out there and I got a bunch of recipes out there. Honestly, though, even as a plant based, they’re like, a lot of sugar high in carbs like I did. They’re probably not awesome recipes. I wouldn’t go, you don’t need to go check it out. There’s a lot of sites out there that have better recipes these days.
Okay, but anyway, at the time, it was a passion of mine. I was really passionate about plant based nutrition for runners. Okay. I saw this movie called Forks Over Knives and it just talked about the plant based diet and how it was so good for you. And then they kind of put out this call for people to share their stories, you know, and that they would publish them on their website or whatever.
And so I submitted a story, I got kind of a before and after picture, and they published it. And so I got a lot of attention from that, you know, a lot of attention, it was actually like, overwhelming in a way, you know, because here I am, I’m really into this topic and really into nutrition and stuff like that, but I wasn’t like a big expert.
So and then I figured, you know what, I should probably become an expert. And so I actually attended this program through Cornell University, which was a plant based nutrition certification program. And so I did this program, got certified and was kind of like sharing a lot of the information.
And that’s kind of when when I started sharing more of this information, that’s when people started telling me that I was stupid and telling me that this was dumb, and, you know, whatever. But it was something that I believed in, you know, at the time, and it was, it was working for me, you know, I was able to do a lot of long distance running and a lot of endurance events.
I mean, pretty much all the stuff I’ve done, for the most part has been on a plant based diet. You know, I ran like 14 plus marathons, dozens of ultra marathons, I did a 50 miler, a 100 miler, an Ironman, and it pretty much had good results, for the most part. Now, could they have been better based on what I know now, you know, if I had adopted more of a low carb, higher fat type of diet?
Even plant-based, but becoming fat-adapted, is kind of the key that a lot of endurance athletes are latching on to now. And the data that’s coming out, and the scientists coming up about the benefits of that are pretty incredible. So could those results have been better? Yeah, probably.
But at the same time, I was having some, you know, pretty decent results. And I was able to do a lot for somebody on a plant based diet back then. And the other thing is like, at the same time, there were plenty of people out there that have always gotten great results, eating an omnivorous diet, plenty of people.
So what’s the answer here? You know, is there an answer? Is there a right way to do this or a wrong way to do it? And then really quickly, I want to talk about the difference between a plant-based diet and vegan. So I always talk about following a plant-based diet. That’s the kind of diet that I focused on. Basically, you’re just eating nothing but plants, so no animal products whatsoever. So no dairy, no eggs, not even honey, because it comes from bees, they consider that an animal product.
But a plant-based diet is nutrition centric. You hear a lot of athletes talk about a plant-based diet. And so the focus is on the food that you’re eating, and your personal health and athletic performance, basically, okay. And then there’s vegan. Vegan is a little different, same type of diet, you eat nothing but plants, no animal products, no dairy eggs, no honey. Also no leather. So you wouldn’t like, buy a leather belt or leather shoes or anything like that, or any other thing that comes from animals.
Vegan is more animal rights centric. So when you say I’m vegan, that kind of means, you know, for most people that it’s a, it’s a lifestyle, it almost has more of like a religious feel about it. Vegans tend to be more vocal about animal rights and things like that, they tend to be a little more evangelical.
Typically, they want to try to convert people. And think that’s where the kind of religious aspect comes from, you know, they want to change hearts and minds. And I was just never like that. I was never super vocal, I wasn’t really telling people what to do, or telling them that what they’re doing is wrong or bad.
And a lot of people in the vegan community. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the term militant vegans. I mean, I’m not trying to paint a bad picture of anybody or anything like that. But that’s a term out there that people use that are pretty hardcore. And that will kind of shame people for eating meat and things like that. So I was never into that. Okay, I just that’s not my jam at all.
Okay, I kind of stayed in my own lane. I did my own thing. And really just tried to be a good example, I guess more than anything else. So I lived in this world, this world of eating a plant based diet, specially for endurance athletes, like I developed a profound understanding of the plant-based diet, especially for runners.
And so here I was the plant-based runner guy. I was quietly advocating for what I thought was really the best diet for everyone. You know, if everyone would just go plant-based we’d all be much healthier, the world would be a better place. And this is kind of what I was taught in my certification program and what a lot of stuff I was reading and listening to kind of pointed to.
So things were humming along pretty well for me, until things began to go kind of terribly wrong for me. So in 2017, I did my 100 miler, the Hallucination 100 at the end of 2017. And after that, I had run like 2000 miles that year, over 2000 miles out here, I was just running all the time. And I decided I was going to kind of back off on my running. So I slowed down.
I kept running, I kept up with it, but just not as much. So maybe running twice a week, three times a week, doing more walking, some strength training, still that kind of thing. And then, over the course of the next three years, basically two to three years, I gained like 40 pounds, you know, I was down to like 160 or so. And I was pushing 200 again. And I was like what is going on here? I really had to figure something out. I mean, I know what’s happening. I knew what was happening with my body.
Now, I didn’t know at the time though, because I’m like, Hey, I’m eating, you know, plant-based diet. I should be fine. Everything should be fine. So I had to really take an honest look at what was happening to me. So at the beginning of this year, at the beginning of 2020 I really started looking at what I was eating.
So here’s what my diet kind of look like, you know, over the last three years, very hard, high carbohydrate, so lots of refined grains, lots of bread, cereals, granola, pancakes, maybe not a ton of gluten because my wife was a big proponent of gluten free so I didn’t do a lot of gluten, but I did enough.
And also, man, I was a cereal addict. I would eat this huge bowl of cereal and granola all mixed together, maybe three or four different kinds of cereal with blueberries or bananas with like maple syrup on it. Oh my gosh, I was a big proponent of maple syrup, too, loved it. So very high refined carbohydrates, lots of Clif Bars, lots of goos and gels while I was running, it was also a very low fat diet, because a lot of the stuff I was reading about was like any kind of fat as bad all fat is bad.
And so when I was eating fat, it was like vegetable oils, you know, the ones that say heart healthy, like canola oil, which I know are just like industrial seed oils, industrial oil in there. It’s just toxic. It’s poison, don’t eat that stuff. By the way, I was eating lots of processed foods.
So one of the things I was a big proponent of was the Beyond Meat brand of products. So they make these beyond burgers. They make these likes, quote unquote, like sausages. But it is like the definition of highly processed foods with a ton of canola oil and things like that. And then so, but they were very satiating to a point.
I liked that idea of eating, getting my protein in and things like that. But they were all plant based. It was all like a plant-based meat substitute kind of a thing. Very processed, though. And then of course, lots of sugar. I was eating tons of fruit because fruit is good for you. Right? I was eating tons of maple syrup.
You guys ever seen the movie Elf and he like carries around a little flask of maple syrup with him? That was like me, okay. Not really, but pretty close. I was eating lots of vegan ice cream. Because it’s vegan, right? It’s fine. I would pour maple syrup on my ice cream. Oh my God, that’s the greatest thing ever.
But here’s what was going on, I was like hungry all the time. I was eating all the time. I never felt full. And so I was like way over eating, way over eating the wrong kinds of foods, was never full, and I felt tired all the time. I was lethargic. Running was terrible. I was only running a couple days a week but it was terrible. My clothes were not fitting any longer. Everything was like super tight. I would put these shorts on that were like I couldn’t even button them up. I just had to throw them back in the drawer. I couldn’t even put them on anymore.
I’d put a shirt on like a button down shirt and it would be so tight. The buttons would be like the shirt would be stretching across the front. It was embarrassing. I didn’t even want to wear those kinds of clothes. You know, I was bloated, my body was inflamed. I had a lot of inflammation. I looked very puffy, very doughy.
Okay, if you can imagine the Pillsbury Doughboy, that’s kind of where I was getting to, okay. And I like was like, Oh, my God, something has to change. So I did this analysis of looking, really taking a good, hard look at what I was really eating. And I had to figure something out. I didn’t really know what to do. But I knew what I didn’t want.
And what I was, all the things that I was doing, all the stuff I just laid out for you there, was definitely not working. And then, you know, I went to the doctor, and I had some blood work done at one point, I don’t know, a year ago or so. And it wasn’t good. You know, she told me I had to, you know, get some of these numbers lowered, or else I was going to be having some issues.
And anyway, so how did I get to the point where I was like, I made the decision that meat was the answer. Well, I thought back to a few years back. So back in 2016, I tried keto for a while because I had been running Ultras and started kind of following some people who were doing like more of a ketogenic type of diet.
So very low carb, high fat, and they were having these great results. And talking about becoming a fat-adapted runner. And I was like, that sounds really appealing to me. How do you do that? And so I started like, just took a deep dive into the low carb high fat diet. Now, I was doing it then as a plant-based person. And so there are differences when you do it that way.
For example, like you wouldn’t be eating meat, obviously, or butter and things like that. So you got to substitute with other good healthy types of fat, like coconut oil, it’s a great saturated fat avocados and avocado oil, olives, olive oil, that kind of stuff.
So there’s plenty of good options. You can do a Keto type of diet, as plant-based, or vegetarian. It’s not that hard. There’s so many good resources out there for stuff like that. So I tried this, I was like, I’m going to do the Keto thing. And so I started counting my carbs.
And I’ll tell you, I got fat-adapted, running got easier. I could run all day, I actually did a couple of 50K’s that summer, without any sugar, without any carbs. And I felt amazing. I felt like I could run all day. I go out for a 20 mile training run. And I just felt like amazing at mile two and amazing at mile 19. Like it was just great.
When I was like, wow, this is awesome. I need to just keep doing this. But here’s the thing. I didn’t keep doing that. I was like why didn’t I keep doing that? And I didn’t have it all figured out. So first of all, number one, I was still eating all the time, I was constantly eating, like, you know, from the morning time I got up in the morning till the time I went to bed just eating all day long.
I was also eating a ton of these artificially sweetened, like desserts. Like I made this like keto ice cream, kind of a thing with some kind of sweetener, like erythritol or something like that. And I was eating this stuff all the time. Well, I know now that the artificial sweeteners will kind of increase your cravings and increase your appetite. So you got to be careful with that. I didn’t know that at the time.
I was eating a ton of highly processed foods like the Beyond Meat and like vegan cheeses and things like that. Lots of vegetable oils. And while I was, you know, running had gotten easier. I wasn’t really losing weight. I wasn’t getting the results I had hoped for. And one of the biggest things is it got really stressful for me, I was counting all these carbs, I had to put everything into an app.
You know, you gotta keep everything below, like 50 grams of carb net carbs a day. And I was just like, this is like crazy. And I look to some people in the ultra running community, the elites like Scott Jurek, who just eats whatever he wants. I mean, he’s a plant-based guy, but he just needs tons of grains and cereals and things like that. Or at least that was my impression.
Maybe he doesn’t, I don’t know, you really don’t know what people eat unless you watch him. But he has like this cookbook and I was kind of following that. And I just gave up what I was doing. And I went back to the high carbohydrate, low fat diet and I wish I had just stuck with it and figured it out.
Because a year later I did my 100 miler, and it was really tough. There’s a lot of very challenging moments there. I was just loaded up with sugar and carbs and my stomach was a mess. I was a wreck for most of that, and I think it would have been a better experience had I stuck with the low carb, high fat type of diet, but I didn’t, I just went back to doing things the other way. And I started gaining weight.
And then, you know, eventually 40 pounds of weight came back over the last couple of years.
So in order to me for me to like go back to that like because this is what I was thinking about earlier this year when I decided I need to change something and I was thinking like, Oh, I got really, I got some good results, and I was doing the Keto thing, I need to revisit that.
So if I was gonna go back to that I had to figure out some of this stuff. I had to find some good sources of saturated fats and complete proteins, I had to get off the highly processed foods and get off the loaded, the toxic oils that are just loaded with toxins and stuff like that. So I had to get rid of that. So what do I do?
And I was doing a bunch of research and reading and watching documentaries and stuff like that. And I read The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Ty Schultz. Oh my gosh, amazing, amazing book. I recommend you read that for sure. I watched ‘Fat’, a documentary, I read the case against sugar by Gary Taubes. I watched that sugar film, which is fun and disturbing. And I read, one of the biggest things that changed my whole beliefs here was reading the obesity code by Dr. Jason Fung.
He’s a nephrologist, a kidney doctor who treats people with type two diabetes and obesity and basically cures them with a low carbohydrate, high fat diet and intermittent fasting. And he has this clinic up in Toronto, and he treats thousands of people. And they have these amazing results.
And you know, I’ve listened to his podcast, and I’ve consumed a lot of what he’s done, a lot of the weight loss teaching and coaching that I do is based on Dr. Jason Fung’s methodologies, which he teaches in his book. So you know, I just started to paint this picture that things are not what I thought they were.
And I came to realize that really, the saturated fats, especially coming from animals are not the problem. You know, this is not why we have heart disease, obesity, type two diabetes, stroke, and a slew of other diseases. The reality of this is that it’s not the fat, it’s the sugar. And sugar is a carbohydrate. It is like the purest form of carbohydrate. So it’s the refined carbohydrates that are the problem.
You know, it’s not the bacon, it’s the bagels, it’s not the eggs, it’s the eclaires. And this was creating a very clear picture for me that, you know, carbohydrates, like sugar and flour, are the reason we gain weight. They are the reason we have tripled the obesity rates here in the US, since implementing the high carbohydrate, low fat diet in 1980. This is the sugars, the refined grains are why so many of us have type two diabetes and heart disease and a host of other what they call Western diseases.
Saturated fat and meat have never been proven to be harmful to our health. The science is very clear on this. And I’m not just making this up, I would encourage you to do your own research and really look into this stuff, you know. And then something interesting here, like when I was in my plant-based in the throes of my plant-based certification program, and really researching all that.
There was a lot of talk about how we’ve evolved to be vegetarians, basically, that, you know, we look at the way our jaws are in our stomachs and things like that. And they can just say like, oh, yeah, so we, you know, we didn’t evolve to eat meat. And I never really felt on board with that. The archaeological evidence just doesn’t point to that at all.
And so, you know, I started doing a deep dive into this and really looking at what the unbiased archaeological evidence shows. And here’s what it shows. The unbiased archaeological evidence shows that humans started eating meat around 2.6 million years ago. This is like just the beginning of the Paleolithic period, or the old stone age, right, which was a period that lasted two and a half million years ago to 10,000 years ago. So it’s a huge swath of time, right, and actually fits nicely with the Pleistocene era, which is the timeframe 2.6 million years ago to 10,000 years ago, when we had our last major ice age.
Okay, this was a major evolutionary change for us eating meat. So we began to hunt down and eat animals. We began eating the meat and the bone marrow and the fat and the organ meats and things like that. And this provided us with essential amino acids that we needed. It provided us with the macronutrients that we needed, that helped our brains to grow and our bodies to become larger in size and stronger.
So our brains got bigger, and we became bigger and stronger because we started eating meat, our relatives that were still in the trees, eating fruit and nuts and things like that did not evolve the way we did. So humans did not evolve solely as plant eaters, or solely as meat eaters, either. Also, the archaeological evidence points to us eating plants to like, there are some tubers and bulbs.
But you’ve got to understand this is like most of this period of evolution was during an ice age. So there wasn’t an abundance of fruit and vegetables and seeds available. They would hunt animals, they would hunt woolly mammoth and Mastodon, and smaller animals like antelope size creatures, whatever those were at the time.
And we learn this thing, which is really cool, called persistence hunting. So we as humans, we sweat very efficiently, right? I know I do, like I sweat like crazy out there. You know, and this is a cooling mechanism and keeps our body temperature low, which enables us to go out and run long distances, we can run literally for 12 hours or 24 hours straight. I mean, I did 100 miles, it took me 29 hours, I was pretty much running the whole time.
And we sweat and we can call our bodies that way. Most animals don’t do this, though. Especially like think about those herd animals, you know, antelope and things like that. They can’t keep running, or they’ll die of heat exhaustion, basically, you know, their bodies will overheat, they’ll die of exhaustion, they have to stop.
And so what we learned how to do is we learned how to chase down these animals over these long ranges, which is awesome, like, so we evolved to be long distance runners, which I just love that, I think that’s so cool. So our ability to control our body temperature made us better hunters, we could just chase these animals down and wear them out, basically.
And then we would just, you know, smash them on the head with a rock or whatever we did. I don’t know. I crack myself up sometimes just so you know. So that was one part of it. The other part of it is we have these big butts, right? We have these big glutes, the glutes are the biggest muscle in our body.
Why is that? Why are our butts so big? Isn’t that weird that we have these big butts? No, it’s that it’s perfect to balance this out when we’re running. So think about as you’re running, how your your butt actually kind of counterbalances the front of your body, you lean forward just a little bit. And then those big muscles propel your legs forward, allowing you to push off and then keep you balanced.
So like we are the perfect long distance hunting animal, you know, we’re perfect for that we evolved to, you know, chase animals down and eat that we didn’t develop these abilities to run long distances and out sweat other animals so we could hunt down, you know, sweet potatoes, we just didn’t, okay.
We wouldn’t be here where we are today without eating meat, like our brains never would have evolved. We never would have become bigger and stronger and then we survived like two and a half million years of an ice age by eating a diet rich in fish and meat. Because there just weren’t all the options available all over the planet now.
Evidence also shows archaeological evidence also shows there were times and areas on the planet where meat may have been scarce. And so, you know, people around the planet would eat tubers and nuts and yams and some fruit and even honey. And, and this is very important because there isn’t just one paleo diet, there isn’t one caveman diet.
You know, we evolved as humans to eat a lot of different foods. Because there wasn’t, there isn’t, just one ideal human diet. You know, we’ve evolved this unique ability to combine many different types of foods throughout the year seasonally, to create many different healthy diets. You know, there’s the Inuit up in the Canadian Arctic that eat nothing but fish and seals.
You know, there’s some people that live in the mountains of Afghanistan that eat nothing but animals because nothing grows up in these higher elevations, no crops or anything like that grow. And then there’s other peoples in India that have been vegetarian for thousands of years, and they do fine.
So, really, there isn’t like one ideal human diet. And I think that’s really important to know. And this is one of the messages I really want to make clear here. Is this archaeological evidence that I’m talking about in this evolutionary evidence? Am I oversimplifying things? Absolutely. Am I telling you the complete picture of our evolutionary history? Oh, my gosh, no, because I couldn’t do that in, you know, 45 minutes on a podcast. Maybe I’ll just do that one day, I’ll talk about it. Nothing but that.
But here’s the thing, what I’m trying to say is like, we have evolved to be meat eaters, we have evolved to be plant eaters, we’ve evolved to be omnivores, basically, okay. The only thing I will tell you, that we have not evolved to be is to follow that modern Western diet, which is high in refined carbohydrates and sugar, that is not something we have been evolved to eat.
In fact, that is what is making us sick. And that is what is making us fat. And that is what is making us dying earlier and earlier. So I’m a science nerd. I’m all about the evidence based science, you know, I study all these theories. I look up what the new scientific papers and I read them.
And honestly, when I was taking this plant based nutrition certification, I was kind of questioning a lot of the stuff they were putting out there. And they were just suggesting that, oh, humans didn’t really eat meat. You know, we’re natural vegetarians. Eating any meat at all will cause all kinds of health issues. And it’s just, it’s just not true. It’s not supported by actual science, okay.
But at the time, I wanted to believe at all, because it matched my worldview. And I wanted it to be the truth, I really did. But now I can just say that I can’t really stand behind that, because it was kind of flimsy science. So I finally had to let go of that. And I did.
So where am I today? So I made that decision that I was going to give it a try. I was going to try eating meat again. And then people asked me this question all the time, like, what was it like eating meat for that first time? What did you have?
First of all, I had bacon. And it was delicious. And there were no problems at all. I felt fine. I didn’t get violently ill. My body didn’t reject it. There’s no negative consequences. It makes me just really realize that we are omnivores, you know, our bodies digest meat perfectly fine. We can absorb tons of nutrients from meat, and other animal products. My body had no problem at all.
Yeah, and your body’s not going to forget what it’s like to eat meat after 10 years of not eating, it handles it just fine. And so I really have taken a deep dive into this topic of being an omnivore. Basically, eating meat, eating saturated fat, what does saturated fat do to us? How is it detrimental? Is this the problem?
And I’ve even looked into really finding some interesting information about the carnivore diet, which is basically no plant products at all. So you got the plant based people on one end, and then you got the carnivores who basically, they believe that all plants are toxic to our bodies at some degree. And so they don’t eat any plants at all.
And they believe that the bioavailability of the nutrients in meat is more beneficial for us and the nutrients we can actually absorb the nutrients better than we can from plants, because plants have all this fiber. And they have these natural defense mechanisms that stop us from absorbing the nutrients.
But meat does not have that and it’s easier to digest. And the animals eat the plants. And then the animals that we’re getting the nutrition from all that anyway, that’s kind of a very brief, high level, look at the carnivore diet. But anyway, my point is that it’s all very interesting. There’s lots of new science coming out all the time.
There’s experts in these fields that I listened to and read and I’m taking a more open viewpoint of all these things. I’m taking it all in. I want to know about it all, tell me everything. There’s world class athletes out there who are switching from a traditional high carbohydrate diet to more of like a carnivorous approach and they’re having these amazing results.
So today, I eat meat pretty much every day. I eat bacon, beef, chicken, pork, coldwater fish, and eggs. I eat eggs, full fat dairy cheese. And I’m very particular about what I eat. I really am very particular about the kinds of meat that I get and where I get it and what I buy. So for example, I only eat wild caught salmon, never farmed. The salmon in the wild eat other fish and stuff like that. Farmed salmon eat grains, salmon aren’t supposed to eat grains. Okay, salmon need a lot of krill, these little shrimp, like dudes that turn their skin orange. That’s why salmon are orange because they eat a lot of this particular little shrimp or whatever, that guy has an orange color.
The farm salmon, they color them, they add some kind of color to their food or something like that to turn their gray flesh orange. So anyway, don’t buy farm salmon. I only buy local organic, free range eggs from chickens who eat bugs and things like that, right? No grain fed animals. No factory farmed animals ever, no big agriculture.
So I try to buy everything local, like grass fed local beef, and pork and things like that. And chicken, no fish farms, no grain fed anything, no growth hormones, no antibiotics. So anyway, I pay a little bit extra for these things. But it’s very, very important to me, that I’m eating really clean meat. And that, you know, it’s humanely raised and things like that.
So basically, I’m just trying to eat real food the way that our ancestors ate, you know, maybe a few 100 years ago, maybe a few 1000 years ago, you know, they were eating just regular food. They weren’t, there was nothing processed, they didn’t have to count calories. You know, they weren’t adding up, you know, how many macros they ate, you know, they were just, it was intuitive, and they ate when they’re hungry.
They didn’t when they weren’t and that kind of stuff. So that’s what I’m trying to go back to. But I in particular about the kinds of foods I eat, especially meat. So what are my results so far? So I’ve been doing this for about six months now, the low carb high fat omnivorous diet. And here’s something pretty dramatic, I think pretty dramatic, benefits and changes that I’ve experienced.
So no more bloating or inflammation, like my body is no longer puffy. I am no longer the Pillsbury Doughboy. I’ve lost 40 pounds, and I am super lean. I am cut up like never before. Running is amazing. I’ve become fat-adapted. I can run five miles, 10 miles, and I feel great. I just have tons of energy. In fact, I just have tons of energy all the time, all day long.
I am not hungry all the time. I reaped the benefits of fasting, I do some fasting and some intermittent fasting. Sometimes I eat once a day or twice a day. And I’m not hungry in between. Sometimes I do a longer fast, maybe a 48 hour or something like that. The important part here though, is that I am not starving all the time, like I used to be when I was eating a high carbohydrate diet.
I don’t take any supplements, I don’t have to like suck down protein powders and take a multivitamin every day. So when I was plant based, I had to take a multivitamin. Like you have to take certain supplements, you know, and depending on who you ask, but here’s the list of supplements that you should take if you’re following a plant-based diet: calcium, iron, B12, vitamin D, omega threes, zinc, among others. And it’s interesting to me that our ancestors who ate an omnivorous diet, they didn’t take multivitamins, they didn’t have to take protein supplements. And this is just a little bit of a red flag.
For me a diet that requires you to supplement certain vitamins and minerals means that it’s maybe not a complete diet. Maybe it’s not the best diet, I don’t know. But I don’t think we evolved to eat a diet where we would have to supplement certain vitamins or else we’d be really deficient and maybe get sick or die.
So I just had my annual physical a month or two ago and the bloodwork was perfect. The doctor said she wished all of her patients were doing what I was doing, which was a huge compliment to me. I love that. I’m seeing gains at the gym, like from strength training after just a couple of months that I never saw in years of lifting weights on a plant based diet.
And now granted, these are all anecdotal my evidence like, you know, will your results differ, of course, everybody’s different. But I can tell you right now, I’m in the best shape of my life. I’m 53 years old, and I’m in the best shape of my life. I’m leaner now than I was back in 2013, when I was training over two hours a day for Ironman, I’m leaner and more fit, I’m stronger and more cut up than I was then.
I’ve never had like, this little body fat on me feels amazing. I do work out pretty regularly. But kind of the same that I always have the last few years, I run maybe three times a week. My long runs are like 10 or 12 miles. And then I run like maybe three miles one day, maybe five miles another day. So I don’t know, 18 miles a week, something like that.
I do a lot of walking, I walk, you know, a couple miles three times a week, let’s say I do a little bit of yoga, stretching, and I lift weights. So I’m not exercising two hours a day, by any stretch. I’m eating about the same number of calories that I was eating, when I was doing the plant based diet with lots of carbs and sugar and all that stuff, maybe, maybe more calories, actually.
So I’m somewhere between and I don’t track this stuff. But I have tracked it recently, a few days just to like, so I could share this stuff with you guys. And give you a ballpark of where I am. Because people ask me all the time, like how many carbs you eat, and I’m like, I don’t know. But anyway, so I’m probably at around 2000-2500 calories, probably getting net, maybe 50-60 grams of carbs a day, something like that, again, I don’t really track it. So I can’t tell you exact numbers, but it’s somewhere in that range 50 to 100 grams of carbs net a day, right?
So it’s pretty low. I eat when I’m hungry. And I don’t eat when I’m not hungry. That’s amazing right there. And that’s a very freeing thing. This whole thing I’m doing now this eating real food, it’s stress free. It’s very satisfying too. And I feel like I’m absolutely thriving in my body right now.
I feel like this is how my body is supposed to look and feel. You know, I feel like I’ve hit my natural weight. And now staying there is effortless. And I weigh myself every day. Just so I know. And I’ve been at like 157-158, somewhere in that range. And remember, I was close to 200. So I’m below 160. And I eat a lot of food. I’m never hungry, I’m not starving myself. And I can just maintain that way. It’s no problem. So that’s where I am. What does this mean for you?
That’s a good question. Here’s what I think it means for you. Number one, I am no longer stuck with this one sort of narrow minded point of view. This whole experience of going back to an omnivorous diet is making me a better coach, I’m a more well rounded coach. And it gives me authority to speak on a wider variety of topics, especially, you know, eating meat and animal products and the nutrition that you get from that, and how it, how its effects on weight loss and running and things like that.
Also, I don’t believe in this idea that there’s one right way to fuel your body, there’s not one right way to do this. And I was kind of into this myopic view of things before, whereas like plant based or everything else is stupid, you know, I don’t believe that anymore. I’m willing to take a deep dive into these different options and learn multiple ways of helping you get the results that you want.
So all in all, I think that just me making this shift in my own diet makes me a better all around authority, and a better all around coach. And, you know, in my coaching, I try to take on a very informed but unbiased approach. So my goal is to help you figure out what works best for you. And it’s not the same thing that works for me.
So whether you do plant-based diet, whether you do carnivore, whether you do something in between most people or somewhere in between, right, you can get great results. I do however take a solid stand against the whole high carbohydrate approach. I don’t think that’s necessary. We shouldn’t be eating all the sugar and the carbs, carbs cause all kinds of health issues they need to be avoided. So I am firmly attached to this principle. I will take a stand there for sure. That’s where I draw the line.
But you can run half marathons, you can run full marathons, you can do Ultra triathlons, you can be a long distance swimmer cyclist, rowing, bodybuilding, speed golfing, whatever you want to do whatever floats your endurance boat, you can do all of it on a low carbohydrate, high fat diet, whether you’re a vegan, plant based carnivore, omnivore, vegetarian, whatever.
So the bottom line is, I’m not going to tell you that you should or shouldn’t eat meat, I don’t want that to be the message you take away here. You know, my job as a good coach is to help you get the results that you want. That’s it, and do it in a way that works for you. So you can do this in a way that works for you.
And I’ll help you make those decisions and tweak things until you get the results that you’re looking for. I just want you to have all the information. So I’m going to continue to talk about these kinds of topics, you know, I want to like, get some people on here to share their expert opinions and experiences on running on a plant based diet or a carnivore diet or vegetarian diet or whatever it is.
So I’m actually actively looking for some people to talk to about those things. So if you have some people in mind you’d like me to check out, send me a message and give me some ideas, and we’ll try to get them on the show. That’d be really fun. I want you to make good decisions for yourselves. That’s all.
So I’m giving you all the information so you can decide what works for you. I’m open to new ideas, I’m willing to admit that. I don’t know everything I really don’t. I’m always learning and when, when the science and the evidence. Sort of like goes against what I believe in my heart. Let’s say I’m willing to take a really serious look at that, and change what I believe, based on what’s real, you know, what’s the truth? What’s the real evidence out there?
So I’m not, I don’t need to die on my sword while holding on to some ideology that may or may not be right for everyone. Okay. So that’s my story. That’s why I made the switch from a plant based diet to eating meat. I hope this was informative for you. I hope you got something out of this.
We will be continuing this conversation over in the Running Lean community on Facebook. So just go to Facebook, search for Running Lean community join in the conversation, it’s going to be fun. That’s all I got for you today, my friends. 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 Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets 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 a lean running machine.
Let’s face it, it’s been a challenging year for all of us. Just consider the impact the COVID-19 global pandemic has had on each of us - this year has been a huge challenge! We’ve all been forced …
Continue Reading about 30. It’s the Challenges That Change Us →
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 30 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m your host and the weight loss coach for runners. And if you’re just tuning in for the first time, you’re not losing your mind, I just recently changed the name of the podcast. So this is the podcast formerly known as The Running Mind podcast. And now we’re just Running Lean, boom.
So welcome to Running Lean, where you’re gonna learn all about how to get leaner and get stronger. So you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. You are capable of amazing things. And that’s kind of what we’re talking about. Today, we’re talking about facing challenges in order to unleash that amazingness that is lurking inside you.
Let’s face it, it’s been a challenging year for all of us. Just considering the impact that the COVID-19 global pandemic has had on every single one of us. It’s been a challenging year, it’s been a huge challenge for all of us. We’ve all been forced outside our comfort zones, and into a place that feels very uncomfortable, very challenging.
But what I want to talk about today is how it’s these, these very challenges that we face, that show us who we really are. It’s the challenges that force us to grow. It’s the challenges that change us sometimes in profound ways that we never would have experienced if it weren’t for going through all the discomfort of these challenges. The challenges that we face are essential for our growth as human beings. So I’m gonna get into all of that in just a minute.
But if you haven’t already, be sure to check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. It’s a group that kind of goes hand in hand with this podcast. And it’s a fun, thriving, engaging community of like minded runners who all want the same thing. They want to get leaner and stronger, run faster, and be able to run longer.
And speaking of challenges this month, we’ve been doing the no sugar challenge, and it’s been super fun. It’s hard. It’s a challenge. It’s why it’s called a town challenge. It’s not easy to quit eating sugar, trust me. But lots of people have been in the group ditching sugar and carbs and experiencing, you know, discomfort, but also amazing changes.
And here’s a recent comment from Sondra, she’s in the group and she’s talking about how she feels and she says, “I’m doing great. I’m finally over the headaches and the fatigue. I now have the energy to run consistently and longer. Oh, and I’ve lost inches and I’ve lost eight pounds. It’s day 16 for me, super excited about the results thus far.”
That is amazing, Sondra, that is amazing work. Giving up sugar is not easy. It’s a challenge. It’s hard. But it’s not quite as hard when you’ve got the support of all these people around you to kind of share the experience with you and help keep you motivated. So join the group just search for Running Lean community on Facebook and join us, I’d love to have you in there.
Also very important. Our next masterclass the next Running Lean weight loss masterclass for runners starts Monday, August 3, that is just 10 days from today. If you’re listening to this on Friday, it’s a six week intensive training program, you’re going to learn how to become a fat adapted runner. That means getting off the sugar and running on fat.
Running on your own body fat, which is an amazing source of fuel. Yes, you will lose pounds, you will lose inches but also you’ll become leaner and stronger you’ll be able to run. Running will be easier. I promise you. It’s hard at first but then it gets easier. I do have a couple of spots left. And I’m only accepting a small number of students per class. I keep it intimate. And it’s a select group of people so you’ll need to apply so if you want to get your application in do it now before the program sells out because it will sell out. Just go to innerfiretribe.com/masterclass to apply.
Okay, so let’s get into this topic today, which it’s the challenges that change us. So like I had mentioned, it’s been a challenging year for all of us, you know, we’ve got this global pandemic. I mean, who would have known that something like this would happen. It has radically changed our lives, it has affected the economy, it’s affected us as human beings like nothing we’ve ever experienced before.
There’s been layoffs and work furloughs, people have had to adjust to working from home, people have had to adjust to being at home with their spouses and with their kids. Not always easy. People have had to learn how to use Zoom, talk about stress. You know, parents are expected to homeschool their kids along with, you know, doing their job from home.
You know, our running groups have all been canceled, all of our races have been canceled. All of these big goals and dreams that we had for this year have been canceled, or at least, you know, put on some extended hold. And, you know, these are all big challenges. You know, if you can put all this stuff together, you know, it can seem like pretty overwhelming, right? Pretty big challenges.
So I’m going to share some stuff with you here. And I hope you don’t mind. But I’m going to ask your permission to get real with you. And I’m going to be vulnerable and talk about some things that I really haven’t talked about before. Here’s that cool, cool, cool. Okay, good.
So here we go. So here’s been some of the personal challenges that I’ve faced, in addition to, you know, the global pandemic, and all the fun that’s kind of gone along with that. So at the beginning of this year, I got divorced, you know, my wife said she was ready to move on.
And, and so I had to go through that, which is a challenge. And that meant, you know, finding my own place to live. So I moved into my own place, I had to get used to living alone again, which is kind of weird. After being married for like nine and a half years, you know, I had to figure out how to pay my bills, because honestly, at the time, she was the main income earner for our relationship in our marriage. And so I had to hustle, right, I had to, like, get some jobs and stuff.
So I did, I like, I had my coaching business and I was you know, doing some coaching which was good, kind of building my business at the time. But I went out there and I got some jobs so that I could have some more income coming in. So I got a job working at a running store, local running store, selling running shoes, basically, which was, you know, was fine.
I got a job working as the head coach of one of the local running groups here in Cincinnati, and that was fine. And you know, paid a little bit of money, just good. In addition to those three things, so my coaching, the running store, the running group, head coach, I was doing some rideshare you know, driving just picking up some, some extra cash, driving people around for Lyft, and all that was fine. Like I was fine, I was making ends meet, I was hustling. I was very busy. I was working literally like all the time. And then COVID hit and things really changed in a big way for me, personally.
The two jobs that I had the two paying jobs that I had I got furloughed from both of those so we had to stop the running group and obviously the running store had to shut down. So those two things went away immediately. And then I had to like stop doing that ride share thing because I did not want people in my car.
You know, I did not I just don’t trust you know, people I wanted to stay safe and I didn’t want to get sick. So I stopped doing that. And that all brought a lot of fear to me and a lot of financial fear like how am I going to pay my rent? How am I going to buy groceries? That kind of stuff.
And so I started delivering food for Uber Eats so I just did some of that food delivery and I gotta tell you, during the stay at home order that was a pretty lucrative gig. You know what I mean? I could work on my coaching business in the day and then deliver food dinner time basically and I and I did that for quite a while and really made a lot of good money doing that.
You’d be surprised people were ordering a lot of food during the lockdown. Okay so working on my coaching business during the day, recording podcasts, sharing content, you know, creating programs and things like that. And then at night out there hustling, delivering food and I gotta tell you all of this stuff dealing with all of this and and the divorce and all of that all at once was very challenging for me, there was a lot, a lot of stress going on in my life.
And, and I didn’t choose any of it. You know, it wasn’t like I went out there and was like, I think I’m going to get divorced and start my life kind of all over again, at 53 years old. You know, I didn’t want that. Choose that. I mean, I’ve chosen plenty of challenges like I’ve chosen to do hard things, plenty of times, I’ve run dozens of marathons and ultra marathons, you know, I did an Ironman, I ran 100 miles, I did a 100 mile trail race, all these things are very hard, but I chose them.
They all made me feel very uncomfortable. They got me out of my comfort zone. I knew they would, though. But I made a decision, a conscious decision ahead of time to do these things. Okay, I didn’t choose to get divorced, I didn’t choose to get furloughed from those jobs. I didn’t choose to kind of start my life all over again, on my own. I certainly didn’t choose a global pandemic, to just add to the fun of all this stuff going on.
All of this stuff forced me to get out of my comfort zone. It forced me to get uncomfortable. And inevitably, it like forced me to grow and to change. And this is the powerful lesson that I’m going to share with you here today is that whether or not you choose the challenge, if you face it head on, you change for the better.
You’ve got to embrace the discomfort that these challenges bring. The key is to step up and face the challenge head on, embrace the discomfort. Discomfort is the cost of growth, it’s the price you pay, if you want to change. Because when you avoid discomfort, you avoid all the change and all the growth, you stay right where you are.
Yeah, it feels comfortable, feels good. It’s what you know. But you’ll also never have the experience of becoming anything more than you are right here now in this moment. And one big way that we avoid discomfort is we try not to feel our feelings, you know, we don’t want to feel bad, we don’t want to feel any negative emotions, because that feels bad.
So a lot of times what we do is we buffer away our emotions. And buffering means we put something external between us in our emotions. So we use something like food or alcohol, to make us feel better on the inside. So we might, we might feel scared or lonely or angry. And so we eat something or drink something and it does feel better temporarily.
But we’re basically, we’re resisting those feelings, we’re resisting those emotions that are coming up during that challenging time. You know, we reject anything that’s so called like a negative emotion, because they don’t feel good. And we want to feel good.
Like right now. I can’t tell you how often I used food to feel better at the beginning of this year. You know, the first couple of months after our separation. I was eating a lot of pizza and a lot of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. And it did feel good. It was kind of like the best part of my day.
I would you know, like I was saying I was working all day and then working all night. And then I would be like I’m getting a large pizza and a couple of pints of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. And this is going to be like the best part of my day. I look forward to it.
I mean, honestly, that’s probably not awesome, if that’s the best part of your day. But that’s a topic for another day. But anyway, it works for a minute like it does, does feel good. Eat all that sugar and stuff. It works for a minute, but then it doesn’t work right like you come down after sugar.
And then you’re still left with all those emotions, you still feel all those feelings. But only now you feel worse because you’re getting fat on top of feeling hurt or lonely or scared. So avoiding the discomfort does not work. It only makes things worse, you have to embrace the discomfort of your challenges. So I had to learn how to allow these emotions in.
I had to learn how to allow them in and process them just to let them be there. The negative emotions the quote unquote negative emotions, the positive emotions, all of them. I had to stop using food as an escape from my emotions. And this is not something most people are willing to do.
Most people will not do this because it’s hard, it does not feel good, it is uncomfortable. But if you want to step up, if you want to face your challenges head on, you have to allow these emotions in. You know, like, a good example is right before the start of Ironman. So if you’re not familiar with what Ironman is, it is a brutal, it’s like one of the toughest sporting events you can do as a human being.
So it starts with a 2.4 mile swim, and then 112 mile bike ride, followed by a full 26.2 marathon. And so I trained for a long time for this thing, but then, right, you know, the morning of the event, we’re standing there ready to jump in the water. And I was like, feeling so scared, so scared, full of fear. And I just allowed that fear to be there with me, and I, and I, the gun went off, and I jumped in the water.
And I just did it anyway, as a good example, I tuned in to that feeling I had at the time of just allowing that emotion to be there with me, while I was doing this really hard thing. And I was kind of feeling that same way, about the separation and the divorce.
At the beginning of this year, I was feeling so hurt and angry about the divorce, you know, I didn’t want to feel that way. But I allowed the feelings to be there. I allowed those emotions to be there. And I carried on anyway, I just kept doing the next right thing. Anyway, it’s kind of like you’re driving in a car, and you look over in the passenger seat and you’re like, hello, fear, hello, hurt, hello, anger.
Yeah, you guys can come along with me, but I’m driving, you’re not in charge here. So don’t allow those feelings to overwhelm you or overtake you, or dictate how you’re going to show up. You know, keep moving forward, allow the feelings to be there with you. That’s what it means to embrace the discomfort.
You know, think about this sugar challenge or no sugar challenge we’re doing in July, it’s uncomfortable, it’s uncomfortable to not eat sugar, if you’re used to eating it, it doesn’t feel good. You can there’s some like withdrawal symptoms that you get, your head aches, maybe a little lethargy.
And it just doesn’t feel good. And you don’t have that thing anymore, that buffer to use to feel better. So there’s this period of like discomfort and most people are just not willing to feel that discomfort. But I’m telling you, discomfort is the price you have to pay to become more when you embrace discomfort and you face your challenges, you grow.
Because growth doesn’t happen in your comfort zone. Oh, you get in your comfort zone is more of what you already know and have you know, you don’t get to be more. When you embrace discomfort, you learn what you’re capable of. And let me tell you, you’re capable of way more than you realize. When you embrace discomfort, you build trust in yourself, you build confidence in yourself. And you begin to change in profound ways that you’d never even imagine.
If you weren’t faced with this particular challenge, you become more of that amazing human being that you already are, but you just become more. You know, you get to become an example of what’s possible. And honestly, when you embrace discomfort and you like, face your challenges and move through them. It just, it feels amazing. The sense of accomplishment and pride that you have in that, oh my gosh.
Now, here’s the best and worst part about all this, the bigger the challenge, the bigger the change. So, if you want to make some big changes in your life, you’ve got to like face some big challenges head on. You know, and a lot of times, what we do is we say, well, I’m gonna do this little challenge, I’ll stop eating a little bit of sugar. I’ll cut it down a little bit, you know, and then you might get a little bit of a change, you know, but if you really want to elicit big changes in your life, you’ve got to like face these big challenges whether you choose them or not.
You know, I faced some very big challenges this year so far. And because of those big challenges, I’ve changed in big ways. You know, right now sitting here talking to you today. I feel so good about myself. I’m very comfortable living here on my own, I’m very comfortable financially, I’m very comfortable with myself.
I actually love being alone, in love living by myself. I actually have a good relationship with my ex wife. Like we still talk. And just a little sidebar, like who wouldn’t want to be married to me? I just want to know that, right? I mean, because I’m awesome. But anyway, that’s another, another topic.
But I’ve gotten myself off the sugar, I’ve gotten myself off the carbs I’ve lost 40 pounds this year. And it’s not because of stress. Actually, I was gaining weight, because of the stress eating that I was doing. I was one of the reasons why I was like, dude, I gotta do something about this now.
So I got off the sugar and the carbs, I started eating high fat, low carb diet, lost 40 pounds, running is so much more enjoyable again, I’m actually like, at the best weight, and I’m in the best shape of my life that I’ve been at since I can remember, I don’t remember ever being in this good shape. And I’m 53 I’m not like you know, super young.
Other big ways I’ve changed, I’m doing work that I love every single day. Talking to you right here on this podcast is a great example of the kind of work I’m doing. Not because, not in spite of the challenges I’ve had, but because of them. Because I’ve been forced to like step up my game.
You know, I’m building this amazing community of runners. And it fills me with gratitude and with love. I mean, this is an amazing positive group of people that I get to surround myself with, I feel so grateful for that. I have this great coaching business that I just love. Coaching people, by the way, like, when I’m coaching someone, I’m in my zone, and I just feel amazing. You know, right now, this podcast, it’s like one of the top ranked podcasts on iTunes. What? That’s crazy.
I’ve rekindled all these amazing friendships with people, from people from high school and people that I just haven’t been, you know, friends with for a while or haven’t really communicated.
But I have all these people reaching out to me and saying, Hey, Patrick, how are you doing? I just, I feel overwhelmed with love and support from my friends and from family. And today, I show up in everything I do as like the best and most authentic version of myself yet. And I know there’s even more to come.
But today, I can honestly tell you sitting here today, I love myself unconditionally. This is not something I would have said four or five months ago. I love myself unconditionally. And this is one of the most amazing changes I’ve ever experienced in my life. And here’s the crazy part about all this, I would not be here today in this place with all this. All these amazing changes that I’ve experienced. I would not be here today, if I was still married, I just know that I would not be who I am today.
If I was still in that comfortable life that I had. I was forced out of that comfortable life and into all this discomfort. It was very uncomfortable. If I haven’t stressed that enough, it was very uncomfortable, the divorce, the loss of jobs, the pandemic, all of this. But it was the catalyst for my change in my growth. And I know it sounds crazy. But I’m grateful for all of it.
I’m not where I am today despite these challenges. I’m here and who I am today because of those challenges. And I look at challenges differently today. I see challenges as opportunities, opportunities to grow, to change, to become more to get stronger to thrive. I don’t want to just survive. I’m not here to be a survivor, I want to thrive. I want to be amazing.
I just want to be like, fine. You ever ask people like how are you doing? And they’re like, fine. Like of all the emotions you could choose to feel? You just want to feel fine? No, I want to be amazing.
Now are our challenges hard? Are they hard to do? Is it hard to like face your challenges? Yes. Is giving up sugar hard? Yes it is. You know you feel terrible at first,running sucks for a little while. But then is it worth it when you get through all that and you get to the other side of that again? Hell yes. It is so worth it.
Is running a marathon hard? You know it is, but are you profoundly changed when you cross that finish line, especially with your first marathon, oh my gosh, you know you are. So here’s my challenge to you. What are you avoiding doing because it’s hard? What are you not doing because it’s uncomfortable? I want to challenge you today to do that. Do the hard stuff, face those challenges, whether you’re choosing them or not, get out of your comfort zone. Do it off.
And if you can’t do it every day, if you can, you know whether the challenge is something you’re choosing or not choosing, embrace the discomfort because there will be discomfort. Learn how to feel your feelings, learn how to allow them in and keep moving forward. You know, don’t use those buffers against your emotions, don’t eat to feel better, don’t drink to feel better, don’t do drugs to feel better.
Because that stuff that does not work, you have to learn how to feel your feelings. But when you do, when you get out of your comfort zone, when you show up as your most authentic self, when you face your challenges head on, you get to show yourself what you’re made of. You get to become more you will blow your own mind with this work, I promise you.
And you can see what amazing big changes you can make in your life. Who you can be? Who do you want to be? Not despite the challenges but because of them. Ah, that was good. I’m glad I shared that stuff with you guys here today. And honestly join the Facebook group because we talk about challenges a lot in there.
And every Sunday I do kind of like a little free training in there. Sunday afternoons. So last Sunday, we talked about what it means to become a fat-adapted runner and all the benefits of that. And it’s good, we have lots of fun discussions in the group. So please join us over on Facebook, Facebook land, just go to find the Running Lean community on Facebook.
And then remember the next Running Lean weight loss masterclass for runners starts in just 10 days, you will learn exactly how to become a fat adapted runner. It’s an intensive six week training program taught by me live, you get to ask questions, get all your questions answered, you will lose weight, you will run faster, you will become stronger. You will become a bonk proof runner and build around those long distances without ever worrying about like crashing and burning.
You’ll learn how to end the emotional eating and learn how to allow and process those emotions will help you work through embracing the discomfort of all of this. Yes, it’s a challenging program, but it will change you. You will be transformed as a runner and as a human being in just six weeks. And I do have a couple spots left.
So please get your application in now. innerfiretribe.com/masterclass. Okay, that’s all I got for you today. Lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends 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 Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets 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 a lean running machine.
