Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
This is the third episode of my three-part series called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. This subject is near and dear to my heart. I’ve spent years and years trying every type of diet …
Continue Reading about 21. How to Become a Lean Running Machine Part 3 →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Well, hey there and welcome to episode number 21 of The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host, and Master Life Coach and the weight loss coach for runners. And today, I’ve got for you part three of my three part podcast series called How to Become a Lean Running Machine.
And the reason I put this together is because I’ve tried everything to lose weight, especially running more and more and more, and nothing I ever did really worked. So I set out to find the answers. I found the answers and I’m sharing them all with you here.
In this three part series. I just want to help you to stop struggling with your weight, I want to help you to start becoming the lean runner that you want to be. Quick reminder, next week, my next weight loss masterclass, starts Monday, June 1. And I want you to do this little visualization exercise with me here. So just take a moment.
If you’re driving, don’t do this. Don’t close your eyes. But if you’re not driving, just take a moment. Close your eyes, I want you to visualize yourself at your goal weight, or whatever that ideal weight is for you. Visualize yourself, Okay, close your eyes and do this right now. And then think about it like what do you look like?
How do you feel about your body now? How much easier is running now? How much more self esteem and how much more confidence do you have now? How much better is your relationship with yourself? What else have you learned along the way? What else have you been able to accomplish?
This is a powerful exercise really, you can open your eyes now. But I want you to just hold this vivid picture of yourself in your mind for a few moments each day when you do this. Your subconscious mind, your brain will actually get you there faster, it will move you there faster.
And if you’re ready right now, to start becoming that future version of yourself. This weight loss masterclass that I have is the rocket fuel you need to get there. Listen, losing weight is hard. If this was easy, we’d all be ripped and super lean. And it would be simple and everybody would have, there wouldn’t be, I wouldn’t have a job as a weight loss coach.
But it’s not easy. Losing weight is hard. There’s a lot more going on, than just like calories in calories out or just run more, right? And that’s what you’ve been learning here. It’s really especially hard to do on your own. Imagine, just imagine how much easier losing weight would be if you had somebody there to teach you exactly what to do and to guide you through it all every single step of the way.
Well, that’s exactly what I do in this masterclass. We just finished up a six week class where my students have had some amazing progress towards becoming their future selves. Okay, I want to share a couple of those little stats with you here. Elizabeth dropped 4 pounds. She wasn’t trying to lose weight but she ended up dropping like four pounds. She wanted to kick her sugar habit, which she did. She’s off of sugar for good and she feels amazing.
Amy lost 9 pounds. She’s down two sizes. She’s dropped four inches off her waist in her hips. Jenny lost 15 pounds and feels completely in control of her over eating for the first time in her life. Eric lost 15 pounds and he doesn’t have to feel like he has to exercise like crazy anymore just to keep the weight off.
Colin’s lost 40 pounds, and he has no doubt he’s going to hit his goal of losing 100 pounds. Oh my gosh. What’s really cool, though, all that is amazing, obviously, let’s celebrate that. But what’s also really cool is that they’ve all learned how to manage their thoughts and feelings around eating and we’re gonna be talking about that today.
They’ve all developed a whole new relationship with food and they’re all still losing weight. So our next masterclass starts Monday, June 1. If you’re in, you’re in, I only take 10 or 12 people through this class at a time, I want each person to get my personal attention. I want each person to get the coaching that they need to succeed to hit their goal.
And it means that you get a better experience because it’s a small group. And everybody loves the group classes. By the way, everybody’s been telling me how awesome it is that they’re on this journey together, and that they can share their struggles and their frustrations, and their ideas and their tips with each other and learn from each other and they support each other.
It’s an amazing little community. So if you want to get in, let’s just do it, just go to innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating and sign up to it now. Okay, so, here’s a quick recap of what we learned in the last two episodes.
I feel like I need to say like, you know, previously on The Running Mind podcast, give a little recap here. So I just did. So number one, the first part of this was talking about how running more and eating less, doesn’t really work for losing weight. Okay, running more or exercising more, moving more, doesn’t work for weight loss because our bodies naturally overcompensate by increasing our appetite by lowering our metabolism, you end up eating more so you kind of overcompensate for the calories that you burn from running.
And then the progress is very slow and very minimal at best. Also, running doesn’t address the physical, mental and emotional causes of weight gain, which is hormonal imbalances, mental cravings, emotional eating, okay. Calories in, calories out doesn’t work either, it never has, it’s a myth, our body works against this process again, you reduce calories, your metabolism goes down in response to that your body stays at that reduced metabolism, and the weight inevitably comes back, you just can’t outrun this natural process.
The second secret is that your hormones are most likely all out of whack. So increased levels of insulin put your body into fat storage mode, which also causes the hunger hormone ghrelin and the safety hormone leptin to stop functioning properly. So you’re always hungry, you never feel full. Decreasing insulin puts your body into fat burning mode, which means you know, all your hormones start working the way they’re supposed to, you’re not hungry all the time you feel full when you eat.
You know, everything’s working as it should, your body’s back into homeostasis. And the way you reduce insulin is by changing what you eat and when you eat. So you eliminate the foods that cause the high insulin, which is sugar and refined carbs, and then you just eat less often. Since insulin goes up every time you eat, eating less often.
Doing something like intermittent fasting or just not eating as often throughout the day, like eliminating snacks is probably the best thing you can do and will keep your insulin levels down and get your hormones back in healthy amounts.
And then today, we’ve got the third secret to permanent weight loss, which is you need to learn how to manage your mind and take control of your emotions. When you take away the foods that are causing you to gain weight, your over desire for food, this unnatural desire that you have for food does not go away immediately.
In fact, that desire can go up initially and it can get stronger because you’re in the state of like withdrawal, and craving. So it’s critical at this point to manage your mind and learn how to process your emotions while you’re going through this process. And this is where most diets fail.
And this is also where most dieticians or nutrition coaches fall short. They do a good job of telling you what to eat. But then they’re like, okay, here’s what you eat, or here’s what you don’t eat. Good luck with that. They don’t teach you how to deal with all the mental chatter that’s going on. And all the emotional stuff that you’re feeling that comes up, you know, you get these cravings, these urges.
We have withdrawals, we have to do a lot of emotional eating. This right here is probably the most powerful work that I do with my clients. This is what separates me from the rest of the diet coaches out there. Stop the eating, stop, you know change what you’re eating. That’s the easy part that’s just changing what you do.
And we all know that changing behavior is the least effective way of accomplishing anything. What you’re left with, after you remove the food, that’s the hard part. So, first you need to learn how to manage your mind and then learn how to deal with your emotions.
So let’s talk about how to manage your mind. You need to learn how to deal with the mental aspects of this over desire. So when you stop eating certain foods, like sugar and refined carbs, you’re going to have these urges, you’re going to have cravings, you’re going to feel restless, you’re going to feel deprived, because you’re gonna feel like you’re missing out on something like you’re missing out on on the joys of life or something, okay?
And all this is perfectly normal. Your mind has been programmed to believe that you will die if you don’t eat certain foods, like right now. And it’s for a lot of different reasons. But it has to do with the way our food is made, has to do with the way that our food has been marketed to us.
And it has to do with the way you’ve conditioned yourself to crave certain foods like your whole life. But especially like the people who make our food and market it to us, they’ve learned the secret to selling more food to us, which is to make us crave it like a drug. And it works really well.
They’ve created this thing called the bliss point in food. Scientists now lab are making our food unnaturally over desirable. And so they’ve created this thing that’s called the bliss point. And what it does is like they’ve determined for whatever food it is, what is going to give your body the most dopamine hit.
So the best feel good, physical feel good feeling from the food when you eat it, because every time you eat, you get a little bit of dopamine response, well, you increase the amount of sugar, sometimes you increase the amount of salt or the right combination of sugar, fat and salt or whatever.
And then you have this unnatural dopamine response in your body. Well, this is amazing, right? Because this is what causes them to be able to sell a lot more food. But it’s not good for us because it creates an unnatural over desire for food. And so we have this unnatural over desire right now in society, like we’ve never had before in human history. Okay.
So the good news is, though, that you can change this, okay? This is something that your brain has been trained to do. It’s mostly like subconscious mental habits, okay, and you can change it, you can actually learn how to reprogram your mind. So you got to learn how to train your brain to stop giving in to the urges, and you gotta learn how to train your brain to stop the unnatural craving for food.
Your brain is working against you here. And you need to learn how to stop doing that. Okay, so you need to develop new habits around how you eat, so that you can decrease these unnatural, like primitive desires and cravings for food that is basically making us fat. So you need to learn how to decondition your mind and reprogram your brain, so you no longer have the unnatural cravings and desires.
You need to change how you think about food. And you do this by changing what food means to you. So think about this. Next time you’re about to eat something. Just ask yourself this question. Why am I choosing to eat this? Whatever it is right now. Is it because I’m actually hungry, because I want to provide fuel for my body? Or is it because I’m bored? Or it’s lunchtime, or I eat at this time every day, whether I’m hungry or not? So let’s go get some food.
How you think about food is so key the meaning you assigned to food is so key if you want to change your relationship with it. If you find yourself thinking about food all the time, you might want to take a look at that. You might want to get to the point where food is more of you think of food as more of a way of just fueling your body and not something you’re like obsessing with, obsessing over all day long in your mind.
You know, and if you find yourself using food to feel better than we need to look at the emotional aspect of eating. Okay, we’re going to talk about that in just a second. So if you’re if thinking about food all the time, or if if the reasons you’re eating food are not just because, like oh I need to fuel my body I’m actually hungry, then that’s something you need to get control over. Okay.
The next thing is learning how to take control of your emotions. This is so critical. There’s a lot of emotional eating going on in the world right now, during this COVID19 quarantine, a lot of people are feeling a lot of emotions. And so they’re doing a lot of emotional eating. And I get it, eating feels good, it makes us feel good.
You know, we get that little hit of dopamine every time we eat. This is the same chemical that gets released when you drink alcohol or when you take drugs. Highly concentrated foods and foods that are super high in sugar, especially give us a huge hit of dopamine, and they feel really freakin good. Going back to the bliss point, again, they’ve created this unnatural desire in us, okay.
So what happens is when you start to feel some kind of negative emotion, the first thing you want to do is be like, I gotta make this go away. I want to feel better right now. So what do you do? You go to the fridge, you open it up, you pull out, whatever it is, and you eat and you’re like, Ah, I feel better. What’s going on here is that we’ve trained ourselves to use food as a way of dealing with our emotions, instead of just dealing with our emotions.
So maybe you’ve had a bad day at work, or a fight with your husband. Or maybe your kids are screaming in the background, no problem, just go eat something and feel better. And we call this buffering because what you’re doing is you’re putting a buffer between you and your feelings, you’re using something external, to feel better internally.
The problem with buffering is that it’s temporary, and doesn’t work. And it has a lot of negative consequences. So I used to use alcohol as a way of buffering from my life. And it worked great. I felt better every time I drank. Here’s the thing, though, my problems were still there. My emotions were still there waiting for me.
And when I sobered up, they were still there. Except now I’m home. I was hungover, I was feeling like ass and destroying everything good around me. And then I would want to feel better. So what I would do was what? Drink again, right? Because that’s what makes you feel good.
What a terrible unhealthy cycle to be at, you know, that was just doing the one thing that was like, you know, making my life miserable, making me miserable. And it was the only thing I could do to feel better. But it was also the thing that made me feel terrible. Crazy. The same thing happens with food though.
So you might be stressed out, you might be having a bad day or you’re feeling lonely or nervous about an upcoming event or something and, and you eat over it. You know when Kristine and I separated back in December, I was feeling all the feelings. I was feeling lonely. I was feeling scared. I was feeling sad. I was feeling hurt. And I really started using food as a buffer.
I started using food to feel better. You know Dewey’s pizza, and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream became the best part of my day. I looked forward to that all day long. If I can just get to the end of the day where I can like eat a ton of food. Especially that ice cream with all the sugar in it. I knew I would feel better. But here’s the thing, it doesn’t work.
I mean, it works temporarily. It feels good. But then I started gaining weight. And I started feeling terrible about myself. And I still had all the negative emotions. But now I was eating, adding over eating on top of the negative emotions, and it made me just feel worse. Good times.
So what do you do in that situation? I just wanted to feel better. So well, I would like just go to Chipotle, get a giant burrito and chips and walk and I would feel better, right? No. It’s just part of that vicious cycle. I had to break the cycle. I had to learn how to feel my feelings. I had to learn how to stop using food as the escape pod to get away from my life.
I learned how to process my emotions all the way through. I needed to completely change how I felt about myself and how I felt about food. When you learn how to manage your emotions without having to eat over them. Not only will you have a much easier time losing weight, but you will be able to apply this same skill to every area of your life.
When you think about the worst thing that can happen in most situations, you will feel some kind of feeling. And a lot of times the feeling we’re trying to avoid is fear or, or some negative emotion, right? Fears. The biggest one that comes to mind though. But what if you are no longer afraid to feel your emotions, but if you are like, just bring it on, I’ll experience any emotion? And that’s where I’m at today.
And this is what I teach my clients is like, learn how to experience any emotion. And oh my gosh, there’s like nothing you can do. I mean, it sounds kind of scary and crazy to think about that to just like, feel your feelings. But what if you could do that? Like, what if you no longer had to eat to feel better? When you don’t have these like primitive urges, and these cravings, and you can deal with your emotions without eating, like you’re free, there’s incredible freedom in this.
And when you learn how to manage your mind, and learn how to process your emotions through, just allow them to be there, just sit with them. You know, besides being able to lose weight much easier, you get these amazing life skills that you can apply to every area of your life, everything becomes easier.
So, if you want to get back to your natural weight, if you want to stay there permanently, you need to learn how to manage your mind, you need to learn how to control your emotions. And these are skills you can learn. I can teach you all of this.
So let’s recap what we learned here today. Most diets fall short, because they only tell you what to eat or not to eat. They don’t teach you how to deal with your thoughts and your feelings. We have an unnatural mental over desire for food. It was created by scientists mostly, but it’s how we’ve programmed ourselves to think about food.
And you need to learn how to reprogram your mind and create better mental habits around eating. This is how you change your thinking about food. And then eating just like alcohol or drugs, it makes us feel good. You know, we get that little release of dopamine feels good. But you can get stuck in the cycle of using food as a buffer as a way of feeling good temporarily and trying to avoid feeling your emotions.
And it comes with a price: weight gain, insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, diabetes, the list goes on and on and on. So you have to learn how to allow your emotions to learn how to feel your feelings. Stop using food as your escape pod. If you want to lose weight and you want to keep it off, you have to change the way you think and feel about food. You have to change your whole relationship with food.
And when you learn these skills, you get to apply them in every area of your life. You become this mental and emotional badass. And when you learn how to do this, there’s nothing you won’t be able to do. I promise you, this is amazing. Okay, that’s all I got for you today.
Quick reminder, the next weight loss masterclass starts June 1 That’s only a few short days away. I don’t have room for 10 people, so you have to sign up now. Just go to innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating, and you can get signed up. You will learn all of these skills in this masterclass, you will lose weight for sure.
But you’ll also learn how to manage your mind and allow your emotions. This work is life changing, I promise you it is transformational. innefiretrib.com/stopovereating, and enroll now. That’s all I got here. I really hope you enjoyed this series. I’ve got lots more good stuff coming your way very soon. Lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends. I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are starving yourself, and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.
This is the second episode of an eye-opening podcast series I'm doing called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. This subject is near and dear to my heart. I’ve spent years and years trying every …
Continue Reading about 20. How to Become a Lean Running Machine Part 2 →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Well, hey there, and welcome to episode number 20 of The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host, Master Life Coach and weight loss coach. And today, I’ve got part two of my three part series on how to become a lean running machine.
This series is something that I’m very passionate about. This is something that is very near and dear to my heart, I’ve spent a lot of time and effort and energy trying to figure out how to lose weight as a runner, because I was really struggling with that. I put on about 25 or 30 pounds and was able to finally figure out how to lose the weight.
And it didn’t involve running a million miles, or restricting calories or anything like that. And so I’m sharing all this stuff with you here, okay. I’ve gotten back to my goal weight, you know, what I weigh now today, the same that I did when I was like in this heavy training for Ironman back in 2013. So it’s been like seven years, since I’ve been at this weight, I’ve just put on weight ever since then. But I finally got back there.
And it only took me a couple of months really to get there. So I’m going to share a bunch of that stuff with you here. My goal here, I just want to help you. I know there’s a lot of runners out there that kind of struggle with their weight. And it’s not something that we talk about, we don’t feel comfortable talking about that a lot.
It’s almost like a taboo thing to talk about in the running community. But I know there’s a lot of people that struggle with this. So I want to be an example of what’s possible. And I want to help you. So I hope you find some value from these episodes that I’m sharing here. I’m just sharing what I know. And I hope it brings you some kind of help. And I hope it gives you something that you can do, some action that you can take that you can put into place and that you can get some results from that.
Okay. So here’s something I wanted to share with you guys. I just got this awesome text from one of my weight loss clients. And he said that he’s lost 13 pounds so far. He has more energy than ever feels better than he has in a long time. And here’s a guy who’s a runner, who also has struggled with his weight for years. And he joined my program. And he’s now well on his way to his goal weight. And oh my gosh, it’s so amazing.
I love, love, love getting texts like this from clients, it makes me feel so good. This is why I do what I do. You know, I want to help people transform their lives, I want to help people change the way they think about their bodies and the way they think about themselves. I want people to love themselves more. I’ve learned how to do that. And I want to share that with as many people as possible.
But I know what it’s like to try to just run and run and run and not be able to lose the weight. And to go to the gym six days a week and restrict what I’m eating and feel terrible all the time and still not lose weight. Like I’ve been there. I’ve done all that. So this particular client has gotten some amazing results.
He’s well on his way and he keeps texting me all the time. Like, you know, I’m down another two pounds, I’m down another three pounds. And I just love it. I just give him big hearts and smiles and everything every time he texts that to me. So I learned what to eat, I learned how to manage my mind. I learned when to eat, learned how to stop using food as an escape from my life, I learned how to deal with all the cravings and hunger.
And I will teach you all of this stuff. And I have an upcoming masterclass that starts on Monday, June 1, and I will teach you how to do every single one of these things. I only take about 10 people through these classes. Okay. It’s an intimate class. And once it’s filled, I just closed the doors and we gotta wait till the next time.
So another couple of months before I do that again. But if you want to save your spot for this class, just go to innerfiretribe.com/overeating, and enroll now. I know for a fact that this is the solution to your weight loss struggles. I know for a fact that this is the most comprehensive and most effective weight loss program you will ever experience.
I walk you through everything step by step. I’m there for you. It’s a six week program. When you’re trying to lose weight and you’re changing a bunch of stuff. Those first six weeks are the hardest. But I got you through that. Okay. I will walk you through that and help you get through the challenging stuff so that you can have this success that you’re looking for listen, you deserve this, you are worth it. Go to Inner Fire, innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating. It’s easy to say and sign up today.
Okay, so today, like I said, this is part two of the three part series on how to become a lean running machine. And if you haven’t listened to the first episode yet, go back and do that. Now listen to part one. That was episode number 19. And to find any of these podcasts, you can just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/and, then the number 19. And, and that’ll take you right to that episode. So listen to that first, because it kind of lays the foundation for what I’m going to be talking about here. Talks about why losing weight is so hard. In fact, I’m going to recap that here.
So here’s what I talked about in that episode. Running more and eating less does not work for weight loss. It just doesn’t. Calories in calories out does not work. And eat more, run less, or I’m sorry, run more, eat less just does not work, which people just have been telling us for decades.
We just need to move our bodies more, move more and eat less and you’ll be fine. It does not work. And I explain why. But some of the reasons why are your body naturally overcompensates by increasing your appetite when you exercise more, so you get hungrier, and you’re eating more, you end up eating more calories, than you can burn.
Also, progress is very, very slow when you take this approach, and it’s minimal at best. And then running doesn’t address the physical, mental and emotional causes of weight gain. Okay, you got hormonal hormonal imbalances going on, you’ve got mental cravings, you got emotional eating, and it just doesn’t address those things. Okay.
And then the calories in calories out, you know, everybody thinks this is the only way to lose weight and adjust does not work and never has is a myth, your body, the body will naturally work against this process to keep you from like dying to keep you from starving to death. So when you reduce calories, your body lowers its metabolism in response, your body stays at that reduced metabolism.
And you cannot run fast, run as many miles or reduce the amount of food you’re taking in order to burn off those calories. Right. So there’s some other things and some other reasons why that doesn’t work either. But basically, metabolism lowers when you limit the amount of calories you take in. And so it can only go so low, before your body starts to like to get into starvation mode. Okay.
So the first secret to understand the first thing you really have to understand is that running more and eating less just doesn’t work. Okay, and so I break that all down. And I talked about that in episode number 19, episode number one of this series, but the podcast episode number 19. Okay, cool.
So today, I am going to ask your permission to get a little sciency because I want to talk about hormones. And so I’m going to be talking about the three main hormones that are involved with weight gain, and why it’s really hard to lose weight and what we can do about that, okay.
But for a lot of us, we’ve thought that there must be something wrong with us because we keep gaining weight, even though we’re watching. We eat a good diet, and we don’t, we might be vegetarian or vegan, or paleo or something like that. And we exercise regularly. But we keep gaining weight, and we can’t seem to lose it.
And, and so we come to these conclusions like It must be me, I’m doing something wrong, I don’t have enough willpower. I’m not strong enough. This is just the way I am. I don’t have the self control other people have. Nothing ever works for me. Basically, there’s just something wrong with me. But here’s the truth, there is nothing wrong with you, my friend, at all.
It’s not your fault. And this is the thing I want you to understand here. And this is kind of the second secret I want to talk about to permanent weight loss is that it is not your fault. Your hormones, more than anything else are causing you to gain weight, your hormones are what are keeping you from losing weight. Okay.
If you want to lose weight, you have to be able to burn fat, you’ve got to become a fat burning machine right? And more than anything else your hormones are responsible for whether your body is in fat storage mode, or fat burning mode. And so if you want to get into fat burning mode, you’ve got to like make sure your hormones are regulated properly. Okay. So the three hormones we’re going to talk about today are going to be insulin, ghrelin, and leptin. And these all have to do with your body’s ability to become a fat burner or a fat store. We want to be fat burners, we don’t want to be fat storers. We’ve done enough of that so far in our lives. Okay?
So let’s talk about insulin first. Okay, this is the most important hormone when it comes to weight loss, insulin’s job, its main job is to lower your blood sugar. So anytime you eat any kind of food, and especially foods that are high in sugar, your body secretes, releases insulin to help keep that blood sugar low and keep things in balance, okay?
But here’s the thing. When insulin is high in your system, you are in fat storage mode. Because what insulin is doing is saying like, hey, we need to take this energy and put it somewhere, we need to store it. This sugar, let’s say, and so what we do is insulin stores it as fat for use later on, okay?
So when insulin is high, you’re in fat storage mode. The opposite is also true. When insulin is low in your system, you’re in fat burning mode, and you can start consuming your own body fat, which sounds disgusting, but you can start using your own body fat for fuel, okay? Until you get rid of the sugar that you’re burning in your system, you really can’t access that fat very well.
Okay, so we want to get rid of that, get out of that sugar burning mode, we want to get out of that fat storage mode, and we want to get into the fat burning mode, okay? And the way we do this is to lower our insulin, okay? When you have too much insulin in your system, you just cannot lose weight. Okay? Very, very important to understand. When you have too much insulin, you’re in fat storage mode, and you cannot lose weight.
So there’s two types of insulin disorders, basically, there’s type one and type two diabetes, okay? Type one diabetics, their bodies do not produce enough insulin. So it is very, very hard for them to actually put on any weight, because their insulin levels are so low. And so it’s kind of sad.
But back in the earlier 20th century, type one diabetics used to starve to death because they couldn’t get enough. Their bodies were not getting enough. They were not storing their fat, their bodies were basically just burning off everything that they took in, okay, so their insulin was way too low, until they figured out how to you know, inject insulin. And that was a life saving thing, which is awesome. But they didn’t have a way of storing fat. And so they were way too thin, and they ended up starving to death. It’s horrible, right?
Then there’s type two diabetes, and this is a disease of, of diet, basically. Okay, and type two diabetics produce way too much insulin. And type two diabetics are always in fat storage mode, so they can’t lose weight. And the treatment for type two diabetics, there’s a couple of different things, but one of the treatments, which is crazy, and I really don’t understand this, but the treatment for a lot of type two diabetics is to increase their insulin, so they give them more insulin, which produces the same fat storage mode.
And it makes it very difficult for them to lose weight, which is the big problem anyway. And it just compounds the cycle, it creates a problem called insulin resistance. Too much insulin means your body is resistant to insulin’s effects, it just stops working. It’s like when you take too many antibiotics, you know, the bacteria becomes resistant to it, right? This is same thing here.
So what we want is we want our bodies to be sensitive to insulin, okay, so we want to lower the insulin so we can access our fat for fuel. And so this is the first thing that you just really have to understand. I know I’m talking about a lot of like, sciency stuff here. Okay? But what I want you to understand with this is that insulin’s job is to lower your blood sugar.
And when your insulin is high in your system, you’re in fat storage mode. When it’s low, you’re in fat burning mode, okay? So if you’re trying to lose weight, we want to get the insulin levels down.
Okay, the second hormone I want to talk about is ghrelin, and that’s the hunger hormone. So whenever you get hungry, there’s this hormone that gets released called ghrelin, and that kind of tells you that you’re hungry. It increases your appetite so that you’ll eat some food. And this works great. You know, we should be hungry at different times.
Like there’s every now and then we should be hungry, we should feel hungry. We should have an appetite and we want to eat some food. This way we don’t die. And all these hormones. They’ve been working this way for millennia. We’ve evolved for these hormones to work beautifully, okay?
Here’s the problem. When insulin is high in your system, ghrelin gets blocked, it does not turn off. And so it’s constantly producing these signals that are saying I’m hungry, I’m hungry, my it increases your appetite. And it’s saying feed me feed me. And you constantly feel like you need to eat more food, even though you don’t.
So high insulin levels blocks ghrelin, and so you feel hungry all the time and you end up just overeating. That’s a real problem, okay? So high insulin is kind of insidious, okay? It has one more insidious effect here, and that is how it affects the hormone leptin.
And leptin is the safety hormone. So leptin’s job is to tell your brain when you’re full, and so it sends signals that says, hey, I’m no longer hungry, stop eating, and you’ve probably experienced leptin. Everybody does, you know, but think about the last time you had like, Thanksgiving dinner, and you’re like, stuffed, and you’re like, I cannot eat another thing, you got a lot of leptin going on here, okay.
But here again, when insulin is high, leptin gets blocked, same way, and it cannot do its job. So you never really feel full. You end up overeating at every meal, you eat too much food. So high insulin levels block leptin, you constantly feel like you can still eat more food. It’s like after that Thanksgiving dinner when you’re stuffed in somebody’s like, hey, would you like another piece of pumpkin pie with whipped cream? And you’re like, yes, of course I would.
That is a hormonal imbalance that’s going on there. Okay, because, you know, it’s really not good for you to do that. It’s not good for you to stuff yourself to the point of feeling miserable and terrible and sick to your stomach, okay? But because the hormones are all jacked up here, we do that to ourselves.
So high levels of insulin, cause this chain reaction with these other hormones that puts your body into the state of relentless over eating and relentless fat storage mode. So the big villain of this whole story here is insulin, okay? So too much insulin is the root cause of insidious weight gain. It’s the root cause of obesity. It’s the root cause of type two diabetes, okay? Too much insulin is bad.
So what causes insulin levels to get so high? So anytime we eat food, that food that we eat, no matter what it is, becomes, to some extent, sugar in our bloodstream, glucose. And so your body produces insulin to lower that glucose level to kind of balance things out to lower your blood sugar.
So anytime you eat any food, there’s an insulin effect. So insulin gets produced, okay, so whenever you eat, insulin goes up a little bit, okay? Which is totally normal. One of the problems though, is that when we eat all day long, our insulin is always elevated and never goes down. And so we kind of put our bodies into this consistent fat storage mode, like all day, every day, we never give our bodies the chance to regulate and for that, blood sugars actually come down, and the insulin levels go down and everything starts working the way it’s supposed to.
So eating any food causes insulin to go up, but eating all the time causes insulin to be always high. Okay? The other thing that causes insulin to be really high is certain types of foods. So sugar, and processed foods, especially highly refined carbohydrates, make insulin go way up. These are super concentrated foods, they have a huge glucose response in your body, which causes a huge insulin surge to try to bring your blood sugar down. This is a big problem.
When you’re constantly eating refined carbs and sugar, you are in way higher levels of glucose and way higher levels of insulin. Okay, and then the whole system is jacked up. So eating all the time, and eating processed foods with a lot of sugar will put your body in a state I have constantly elevated insulin, which puts your body in this state of constantly in this fat storage mode. Okay?
Which can lead to insulin resistance, which can lead to obesity, but it definitely causes weight gain, for sure. Okay. So the big question is, I know what you’re thinking, and I have an answer for you. The big question is, I didn’t get your insulin levels down. How do you get your hormones back in balance? How do you, you know, get that insulin production down, get it into the normal ranges?
So you can become that lean, mean fat burning machine. How do you get your body back into the fat burning mode and lose weight, because that’s what we’re talking about here. There’s two things you can do, you can change what you eat, and you can change when you eat.
So first, you need to change what you eat, you need to eliminate the foods that cause those huge insulin spikes. So mainly, you’re not going to like to hear this. But here’s the truth, you need to stop eating sugar and refined carbs. What? I know it sounds terrible. But everything you eat causes insulin to rise somewhat.
Sugar and highly refined carbs create this intense glucose response in your body. And they cause the highest insulin spike. If you were to just cut out eating sugar and refined carbs, you are going to decrease your insulin like crazy and you will start losing weight, I guarantee it. It’s hard to do, I can teach you how to do it. It’s hard to do on your own for sure. But if you can do that, then you are going to be well on your way to getting your hormones in balance and starting to lose weight.
One thing that I would encourage you to do is to just eat whole food, eat the kind of food that we’ve been eating for millennia. Okay? If it comes with a, if your food if you’re buying food that has a nutrition label on it, it’s probably not what you want to eat. You want to eat the stuff that’s on the outside of the store, you know, the produce, the meat, the fish, the dairy, like, stick with this stuff on the outside, okay.
Try to get away from the sugar and refined carbs, you know, and then check those labels because there are so many different types of sugar that is put into food, especially food that says like low fat or whatever, like stay away from low fat stuff all together. But when you see food and it says like, you know, healthy, whatever, low fat look at the label and see what kinds of sugar are in there.
So a lot of times there’s not added sugar, or there’s added sugar, but it’s hidden. So it’ll be called like agave nectar, or brown rice syrup or maltodextrin. Like they have all these different names for sugar. I think there’s something like 78 different names for sugar. And they try to confuse us. So they actually put sugar in the ingredients like six times.
But it’s all these crazy names. And so you think like, oh, like sugar is like only the 12th ingredient on here, you know, and oh, this must be good for me. But then they’ve hidden sugar and all these other ways. So anyway, stay away from food with labels. How about that idea? Okay.
Really, the best thing you can do is just eat whole foods. Just eat like fruits, vegetables, meat, fish protein, dairy, poultry, like all the good stuff, right? There’s so many options out there for you. But the sugar and the refined carbs are poisoning us. And it’s making us overweight, it’s keeping us from losing weight. Okay, so if you want to lose weight, drop the sugar, drop the highly refined carbs. Okay. So that’s number one, that’s changing what you eat.
Number two, is you need to change when you eat. So basically eating less often. So you know, insulin levels go up every time you eat any kind of food. So one of the simplest things you can do to get your insulin levels down, is to just not eat anything at all. And here’s the thing, like, I know what you’re thinking like, dude, I’m not going to starve myself. And I’m not talking about that. Okay?
But um, one of the things you can do to extend the time where you don’t have food in your system to give your insulin levels a chance to go down, is to stop eating snacks altogether. Okay, let’s just start there. So there was this time back in the 50’s. Like and prior to that where there was no such thing as snacks. There was no snacking going on. People would eat their three meals a day. And that was fine.
But back then starting in the 50s, the big food companies were like, hey, we got to make more money, we got to sell more food. How do we get people to eat more food? And so they came up with this whole category called snacks, okay? And they could, you know, they would tell people like you need a little pick me up in mid morning. So have a mid morning snack. And feeling love lethargic after lunch, you know, have an afternoon snack.
And then after dinner, you need a little snack, you need some dessert, you know, so we’re basically eating three snacks and three meals a day, we’re eating six times a day, here in the United States. I mean, a lot of other countries don’t do that. But at least here I know, for a fact, most people eat five or six times a day.
So your body is always in this state of elevated insulin levels, okay, you’re always in this state of storing fat, we never give our bodies a chance to lower that insulin and so that we can, you know, become fat burners. Okay, so we always have food in our system. So one of the biggest things you can do, and the easiest thing you can do is to just don’t eat something in between meals, like that’s number one.
And it’s so easy, it doesn’t cost any money to do this. You don’t have to like add anything, you don’t have to figure anything out, you don’t have to decide what you’re going to do, like just don’t do anything, just don’t eat anything. All right.
Another thing you can do is extend the amount of time between meals. And I get into this in my program. And I talk about intermittent fasting. And I’m not going to talk about that right now. But one thing you can do is extend the amount of time between your dinner and your breakfast the next day.
So if you want to give your body just a little bit more of a chance to get those insulin levels down and get into fat burning mode, eat your dinner a little bit earlier, you know, maybe an hour earlier than you normally do, and eat your breakfast like an hour later than you normally do. Okay, so extend that what we call the fasting window, you’re you’re fasting every day anyway, unless you eat while you’re sleeping, which I do know somebody that does that, which is crazy.
But if you’re eating dinner at let’s say, you know, seven o’clock, usually, and then you eat breakfast at seven o’clock. So that’s like a 12 hour window of fasting, you know, maybe just extend it, you know, eat at 6pm dinner and then eat breakfast at eight o’clock. And so now you’ve got like a 14 hour window there.
So you’ve given your body two extra hours, and you won’t even notice that really, you know, have your coffee in the morning, whatever you need to do, but just don’t eat, just push that back a little bit, you will find that you will. These two things combined, like getting rid of the sugar and flour and then extending periods where you’re not eating will actually have a huge effect on your body’s ability to get into fat burning mode and lose weight.
These two ideas are gold, they are absolutely gold. What the idea here is we’re trying to access the fuel that we have on board, we’re trying to access the fuel that we have on our bodies, which is our own fat and we have tons and tons of this on our bodies we do we have pounds of it that we can use it.
And a pound of fat has way more calories than a pound of you know, whatever. Fat has more calories than glucose, okay, so like fat is a better fuel source for us than sugar is anyway. So get rid of their sugar, you know and start accessing your fat, you’re gonna have tons of energy, you’re gonna feel amazing, and you will start losing weight. It’s awesome. And this and what you do here with these couple of simple things I’m talking about is you get your hormones back in balance. Regulating your hormones is critical. If you want to lose weight, and if you want to start becoming a lean, mean, fat burning machine. Okay, got to get those hormones regulated.
So I know I talked about a lot of stuff here, a lot of science. Let me just recap really quickly. Okay. One of the main reasons why you can’t lose weight, your hormones are out of whack. increased insulin levels puts your body into fat storage mode. Elevated insulin also causes ghrelin and leptin to stop working properly. So you’re always hungry, you never feel full and you constantly overeat, which makes it even worse.
You can put even more weight on your body okay, so increased insulin causes your body to become a fat store. When you decrease insulin, when you lower the insulin levels in your body, you become a fat burner. It means that ghrelin and leptin start functioning properly. So your hormones are all in balance, you aren’t hungry all the time, you aren’t hangry all the time.
And when you do eat, you feel full and you feel more satisfied for longer. How do we reduce insulin, we change what we eat, and we change when we eat. So we eliminate the two main causes of insulin spikes, which is sugar and refined carbs, eat whole foods, and then we eat less often, we just eliminate the snacks, and maybe extend our fasting nightly fasting period by an hour or two.
So the second part of this three part series, the second secret to permanent weight loss is basically your hormones are causing you to gain weight. And it’s not your fault, it’s totally changeable, you can fix this easily. And I teach you exactly how to do all of this in my weight loss master class.
If you really want to become a lean running machine, you have to get your body out of the fat storage mode and into the fat burning mode. Reducing insulin is perhaps the most powerful thing you can do to solve the physical aspect of permanent weight loss. So in the next episode, in part three of this series, I’m going to be covering the mental and emotional aspects of permanent weight loss.
So most diet programs, they tell you what to eat here, eat this food, do this and good luck, you should be fine. Just eat this stuff right here. They don’t tell you what to do when you have all these crazy cravings. When you have withdrawal from when you stop eating sugar, let’s say when you have these uncontrollable urges around food, when you have this unhealthy relationship with food, they don’t tell you what to do with all that.
They don’t tell you what to do when you start feeling your feelings, you just want to eat over it and you just say eff it and you eat all the food anyway, this is why most diets don’t work. This is why a lot of the approaches that most nutrition coaches take just doesn’t work either. Because they basically just tell you what to eat, they give you a nutrition plan to follow.
And my approach is very different. The way I work with my clients, it’s vastly more effective. It’s basically 100% effective, because I provide solutions for all of the factors involved, that contribute to being overweight and I provide solutions for all the things that are the root causes of weight gain, not just the physical stuff line, what to eat, but the mental and emotional factors as well.
Okay, so we’re going to talk about that in the next episode, so stay tuned for that you will not want to miss it. And then one more quick little reminder. The next weight loss masterclass starts June 1, I only take a few people through the program at a time, each person gets a lot of my personal attention and they get personal coaching time with me. It’s actually like the probably the most affordable way of working with me as your weight loss coach. But you have to get signed up now because it will fill up innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating to get signed up. Remember, if nothing changes, then nothing changes.
You know, if you want different results in your life, you have to take different actions. I know it feels uncomfortable, I know that it will be challenging for you. That’s why I created this six week program to basically walk you through all of the tough stuff step by step and help you to get to the other side where you become the person that you want to be.
Where you start to feel good about yourself again, where you start to love yourself again, where you feel good about your body and you feel you feel good about your mind. I want this for you. I’ve experienced this, I’ve learned how to do it. I’ve learned the formula.
So I’ve put together this system and this program that works wonders. I want you to be a part of this. So please join me. innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating, sign up today. That’s all I got for you here. Can’t wait to see you on the next episode. And as always, I have lots and lots of love for each and every one of you. I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are starving yourself, and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.
This is the first episode of an eye-opening new podcast series I'm doing called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. This subject is near and dear to my heart. I’ve spent years and years trying …
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My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Well, hey there and welcome to episode number 19 of The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host and a Master Life Coach and weight loss coach for runners. And today, I want to talk about how to become a lean running machine. And this is the first episode in a podcast series that I’m doing a three part series that I’m doing called How to Become a Lean Running Machine.
This subject is near and dear to my heart because I’ve spent years and years trying to lose weight, I was very overweight for a while there. I lost some weight with running and exercise and diet, and then put a bunch of that weight back on. And then I’ve spent the last few years trying everything imaginable.
And nothing was working at all, until I finally figured out the secrets to losing weight and to becoming a lean runner to getting back to my natural weight and being able to stay there. And now I’m on this mission I want to help as many runners as possible to stop struggling and stop trying to run more to lose weight. I want to help you stop struggling and hit your goal weight too.
So over these next few episodes, these next three episodes, I’m sharing everything I know about becoming a lean running machine. That’s all right here on The Running Mind podcast. As a reminder, my next weight loss masterclass starts June 1, I’m really, really excited about this. I’m really proud of this work that I’m doing and the people that have taken the class already have seen amazing results. Anywhere from 10 to 15 pounds lost in the first five or six weeks, up to 35 pounds loss in the first six weeks. It’s amazing.
You will learn how to control your cravings, manage your emotions, and stop the overeating for good because really the cause of being overweight is overeating. This is a one of a kind masterclass, it’s not a diet program. It’s not an exercise program. It’s a transformational coaching program and my job.
And what I do really well is to help you permanently change your relationship with food. Most diet plans, they just focus on the food, here’s what you do, do this. They don’t do anything to address all the mental and emotional factors, all the mental and emotional causes of overeating, overeating and weight gain.
So as a master life coach, this is my area of expertise and I got you covered here for sure. I will help you go from feeling exhausted out of control and hating how you look in the mirror to feeling full of energy in control. And loving how you look feeling confident about your new body and your new mind. You’re going to completely change how you think and feel about food and about yourself.
It’s a six week masterclass, and we teach this live so we do a zoom call with the group. And I only take like 10 to 15 people at a time. I want to keep it small so that everybody has a chance to get personal one-on-one coaching time with me.
Okay, but in the six week masterclass, you will learn how to control the hormones that cause you to gain weight, you’re going to learn how to stop the cravings of those foods that do not serve you. You’re going to learn how to only desire food that fuels your body, you’re gonna develop this whole new healthy relationship with food, you’ll stop struggling with the uncontrollable urges, we’ll recalibrate your hunger.
So you will feel satisfied for longer, you’re going to be able to use food as a way to thrive not as an escape from your life. And I will teach you how to manage your mind and your emotions, like a badass. And this work that we do. It’s not just about losing weight. It applies to every aspect of your life. The tools that you will learn here you can apply to your work, to your relationships, to your family, to your career, if you’re an entrepreneur, whatever it is.
So here’s what it looks like when you enroll in the master class. Week one we uncover the hidden causes of weight gain so you’re gonna learn all the reasons why you’re gaining weight and what you can do about it. You’re going to learn what foods you absolutely have to stop eating and the most important things you should be eating if you want to lose weight.
Week two we will go into how to recalibrate your hormones. Okay, next week we’re gonna be talking about hormones. But there’s these differences between like, what is physical hunger? What are withdrawals? What are cravings? What’s emotional hunger? You’re gonna learn how to deal with all that stuff, you’re gonna learn how to recalibrate your hormones for optimal weight loss. You’re gonna learn what a food protocol is and how to stick to it.
Week three, we talk about the mental cravings, the urges, desires, how to control your thoughts, how to manage your mind, this is such a key component to this program. And so different from what other people offer out there, honestly, you’re going to manage your mind to eliminate this over desire, this unnatural desire for food, you’re gonna learn how to believe in yourself, you’re going to learn how to believe in your ability to get back to your natural weight, and we will get you there, you’re going to learn how to process those urges and those cravings.
Okay, week four, we talk about making decisions ahead of time, the power of that I talked about that in the podcast, in a recent podcast episode, the power of making decisions ahead of time,
how to overcome obstacles that stand between you and your goal weight, using the power of visualization, and then we get into in week five, the emotional eating piece, you know, we’re we build up to this, okay.
And then in week five, we talk about how to stop using food as a way to escape your life, as a way to escape your emotions. What false pleasures are and how to create emotional well being instead of relying on these false pleasures to feel good. There’s food, it’s much like a drug, you know, we eat food, it makes us feel good, but we’re escaping our life.
When we do that we’re avoiding something, usually when we do that, okay, so I’m going to teach you how to create emotional comfort, without all these negative side effects that you get from like, from overeating, okay.
And then in week six, we’re going to talk about how to feel on purpose, like how to choose your emotions, it’s fascinating that you can choose your emotion, you can choose how you want to feel, did you know that? So we’ll talk about how to do that.
The power of making commitments, how to stop reliving your past, and start creating an amazing future for yourself. And then how to keep getting ongoing support, motivation, how to, you know, do your maintenance, your ongoing maintenance once you get to your goal weight.
So I talk about all of this stuff. It’s a comprehensive program that addresses the physical, mental and emotional aspects of gaining weight, and how to master those things. So that you can lose weight and get back to your natural weight and stay there, okay. You also get access to all the training material. So I record everything and put it on a private website. We have a private Facebook group where you guys can interact, we can ask questions, I post questions and answers in there. And you get one-on-one coaching with me.
So this is one of the biggest things that I offer. One of the most powerful things that I offer through this program is that you get one-on-one time with me throughout the course of the six weeks. And this is key because if there’s something you want to talk about, that’s, you know, maybe a little personal or you want help with a specific issue, you and I will have a chance to do that together. So you get me as your personal weight loss coach throughout this program.
Now, if you’re looking for some kind of a quick fix, this is probably not the right program for you. A lot of people want the magic pill that’s going to make them lose weight, or just tell me the one thing that I should eat. I gotta tell you, that stuff does not work. Okay. This is the most comprehensive and most effective weight loss program that you will ever experience.
I guarantee that the program itself is pretty simple. Okay, it’s a simple concept, but I will tell you this, it is not easy. Over the course of the six week masterclass, you will be challenged mentally, physically and emotionally. But I am there to help you navigate every single piece of that you will not be doing this on your own. I’m not going to just tell you what to eat, and send you on your way and say good luck with that. That’s the way most diet plans work.
Okay, that’s not what I’m going to do here. Also, if you’re the kind of person who likes to sort of half assed stuff, this is probably not for you either. This is a program of commitment, empowerment and action. I want people who are committed to reaching their weight loss goal. If that feels like you, then this is the perfect program for you.
Okay, I can’t do the work for you. Just like your personal trainer can’t do the push ups for you. I can’t do your weight loss work for you. I can’t be there standing next to you every time you know somebody shoves chocolate cake in your face, okay? But I can be there virtually for you to help you. Okay. But you have to show up and you have to have a commitment to do this work. And if that sounds like you, have you committed? If you’re ready to do this now, then this is the right program for you. Again, I only take about 10 to 15 people through this class at a time so that everybody gets the personal attention and coaching that they need to be successful.
So if you want in on this, please go to innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating, that’s one word, and enroll now you can learn more about the program their enrollment is on a first come first served basis. So once the class is filled, I’m going to close the doors and you’ll have to wait until the next program starts in probably another eight weeks. But if you want to save your spot for this life changing masterclass, then please go to innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating and enroll now. I want to see you in this class. You deserve this. You are worth it. Okay, so sign up today, innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating.
Okay, so here’s what we’re gonna talk about today. Here’s some things that I hear from my weight loss clients a lot, especially my runners. See if any of this resonates with you. So I hear things like, I’m running more, and I’m eating less, and I’m still gaining weight, or I’m running every day, and I keep gaining weight. Or I’m training for a marathon, and I’m not losing any weight, I’m actually gaining weight.
What is happening here, why can’t I lose weight by running? If you have found yourself thinking these things, or trying to run more to try to lose weight, or if you’ve tried to just limit the amount of calories you’ve been eating to try to lose weight, and it hasn’t worked for you, this is not your fault.
The truth of the matter is that this is a broken model of weight loss, it does not work. Okay, we’re going to talk all about that today. I’ve been there, I know exactly how this feels. So just a little quick backstory about me. I was about 60 pounds overweight, I was very sick, unhealthy. I was eating too much, drinking too much, I had a lot of health issues. I got really sick.
So I started eating better and running. And I did lose a lot of weight, okay. And I started getting into ultra marathons and Ironman and stuff like that. And I lost a lot of weight. But I wasn’t able to keep it off. It was temporary. It took me a long time to lose that weight. And then it didn’t take me very long to gain it all back or to gain a lot of it back.
So I started running more and trying to eat less and really controlling my calories by using apps and all kinds of stuff to like count my calories and stuff like that. I tried all these different diets. And none of that stuff was really working. I kept gaining the weight.
And so I had this mission of like trying to figure this out. I’m a runner, I’m healthy. I’m pretty fit, you know, I work out all the time, how come I’m gaining weight? And I had to realize that it wasn’t about the running. And it wasn’t about the calories. It was about this abnormal desire that I had for food and over desire, an unnatural craving and over desire for food. And that unnatural over desire was causing me to overeat.
My body and my brain. We’re addicted to food we’re addicted to eating, and no amount of running is ever going to fix that problem. Okay, so in order to lose weight, I had to figure out what was causing this over desire for food. And I had to figure out how to fix that so that I could stop the overeating so that I could get back to my natural weight. Okay, so I tried all kinds of stuff that I tried diets willpower, starving myself running more, none of this stuff was working.
So I had to get to the to the actual cause. And I discovered something interesting. My overeating was just a symptom of deeper problems. And if I wanted to lose weight, I had to identify and solve those deeper problems. I had to solve the cause of the over desire, cause of the kind of food addiction, not just treat the symptom which was overeating.
So here’s what I learned. The reason we are overweight is not because we don’t run enough. The reason we are overweight is because we overeat, period. And the reason we overeat is because we have a physical, mental and emotional over desire for food. And when we solve these underlying issues, mental, physical and emotional issues, the overeating stops the way It comes off, we get to our natural weight, and we can stay there permanently.
Now, there are three things you need to understand if you want to stop the struggling, if you want to stop the overeating and if you want to lose the weight and keep it off permanently. And these three things go against a lot of what you may already know about weight loss are about diet and exercise. And these are three things that a lot of people are not talking about.
I’m going to talk about them here. These are the secrets to getting your body back to its natural weight. Okay. So the first thing I’m going to talk about, and the subject of today’s podcast is all about how running more and eating less does not work for weight loss. Okay, so this is secret number one. So we’re going to focus on this today.
So we’ve been told for decades that the formula for weight loss is this, right: eat less, exercise more. That’s all anybody has ever said. And so this has like been the normal advice we’ve all been given. But unfortunately, it’s not good advice. And it’s basically wrong. It just doesn’t work.
Okay, running more and eating less, does not work. If you want to lose weight, and keep it off permanently. So, just a little backstory back in the 1970s, early 70s. There was this guy named Jim Fixx, and he and he wrote this book called The Complete Book of Running. And so this guy is considered sort of the catalyst for the American Fitness revolution, okay, he really popularized the sport of running.
Since then, running has become like such a popular and such an accessible sport to people. I just did some research on this, there are more than 30,000 running events in the US every year. So that includes 5k’s marathons, half marathons, ultra marathons, all that stuff. Yet, as a nation, we are fatter than ever. We are exercising more than we ever have in a recorded human history. Yet since the 1970s, the obesity rates, especially here in the US have tripled. This is crazy.
Okay, what is happening here? Here’s why running or exercise doesn’t really work for weight loss. So there’s three parts to this: running doesn’t work for weight loss. And the first part is this, that we tend to overcompensate by eating more food. So when we exercise, we burn calories, right, we burn a bunch of calories. Well, when that happens, our body requires more calories.
So do you ever notice how hungry you are after a long run? I know that I used to eat like crazy after a long run. That’s because after your long run, your brain is sending signals to your body to increase your appetite. So this causes you to actually eat more food. So your body’s always like trying to regulate itself, right? It’s trying to get back to a neutral state.
That neutral state is called homeostasis. And what happens is when you burn a lot of calories, your body’s like we got to get all those calories back. Okay, so it sends signals using hormones to your brain, to increase your appetite to cause you to eat more food. And a lot of times we overcompensate.
So instead of just, you know, eating the exact same amount of calories that we burn or fewer, we eat more, which leads to weight gain instead of weight loss. That’s why a lot of people who train for marathons gain weight, because their appetite is increased and they overcompensate. And there’s kind of a mental thing there too, where people think, hey, I ran today, so I can eat whatever I want.
And they’re just shoving doughnuts and stuff in their mouth all the time. Right? And it’s fun, I get it. Like it’s like, hey, I’m a runner, I can eat whatever I want. And I see all these memes and all these posts in Facebook groups, from runners who are like, I run so I can eat anything I want. And it’s funny, but it doesn’t really work.
Okay, you can’t just consume donuts and expect to lose weight. I don’t care how much running you’re doing. That is not going to work for you. In fact, it is going to have some very detrimental effects for you. It’s just not about it’s not about that you just can’t eat anything you want just because you’re running. Okay.
So when you exercise, you’re burning a lot of fuel and your body’s like I need to get back to homeostasis as quickly as possible. So it does this by making you hungry so you eat more food. Running actually makes you hungrier, you overcompensate, you gain weight. And this cycle just continues.
And then when you’re not exercising those hunger signals because you’re eating certain types of food, and we’ll get into that later, but because you’re eating certain types of food, and because you’re constantly burning a lot of calories, you’re constantly in this like increased appetite mode. It’s a vicious cycle, okay? You just can’t outrun this process, you can’t outrun your appetite here. Okay. So that’s number one. The number one reason why running doesn’t really work for weight loss is because you tend to overcompensate and your body’s this is just a natural process that your body is doing here. Okay.
Number two, when you try to use exercise running as a way to lose weight, progress is slow and minimal at best. It takes a long time to lose weight just by exercising just by running a bunch of miles. And when you do, the effects are usually pretty minimal. So there’s a couple of studies that were done. One of them studied this large group of men and women for over a year. And they had them do an hour of strenuous exercise six days a week for more than a year. Okay.
After the study, after more than a year, the women had lost an average of only three pounds, and the men had lost an average of around four pounds. This is after a year of exercising six days a week. They’ve done a lot of studies like this that prove that exercise is not a great way to lose weight. Okay.
Another study that I think is really fascinating is that they took this group of sedentary people, people who normally do not exercise, and they had them trained for a marathon. Okay, so what is that, 17 weeks, 20 weeks? And then at the end of the training season, they checked in and the men had lost an average of around five pounds, which is not bad. The women had lost zero pounds. This is crazy.
This is a ton of running that you’re doing when you’re training for a marathon, right. But it just doesn’t work. All of these people were overcompensating by eating more food, okay. But one of the most compelling studies was the Women’s Health Study. So this is where they followed around 40,000 women for 10 years. 10 years!
And they were divided up into three different groups, high exercise, medium exercise, and low levels of exercise. And the high intensity group exercised for like an hour every day, okay. And after 10 years, they checked out the groups, and this high exercise group has lost no additional weight. In fact, there was no noticeable change in body composition. This is insane, right?
But you just got to look at the facts. You know, science has proven time and time again, that exercise is not a great way to lose weight, yet we are so Ultra focused on this one thing: just run more, and the weight will magically come off, but it doesn’t work. Okay. So that is reason number two why running does not really work for losing weight. Which it progresses slow and minimal.
And then reason number three, why running is not a great way to lose weight is because running doesn’t address the underlying causes of weight gain, the mental, physical and emotional causes. Okay, running is just treating a symptom. So you gain weight, and then you want to try to burn it off by running right?
All you’re doing is just putting a tiny bandaid on this huge wound, okay, it’s just not enough, it’s not going to work, okay, you just cannot run enough to get out of that cycle. And you’re not addressing the underlying issues. And that’s what the third thing here is, it doesn’t address the cause of overeating, the cause of your over desire for food.
Like I said before, overeating. That’s just a symptom. You’ve got to treat the cause of the overeating, which is an over desire, okay. And I feel like I need to say this here. So I don’t want you to stop running. Running is awesome. It’s very, very good for you. It helps to build strong bones and muscles. It improves your overall fitness, especially your cardiovascular fitness. It helps you sleep better. It helps reduce stress, it’s really good for your heart. It’s an amazing thing to do. So keep running for sure.
Just don’t rely on running as a way of losing weight. Okay, so I just want to make sure that I threw that in there, okay. But there are mental issues and emotional issues that are hidden kind of beneath the surface that cause us to overeat that cause us to crave food and have an unnatural craving for food and running just doesn’t address those things. Okay?
So the three things that why running is not a great way to lose weight is you overcompensate, progress is slow and minimal, and then it doesn’t address the underlying causes: the physical, mental, emotional causes of overeating.
Okay, so that’s why running is not a really great way to lose weight, and then why eating less doesn’t work for weight loss. This is fascinating stuff right here. So we all think that if we just burn more calories than we take in, we can lose weight, right? We’ve been taught this forever. And it’s not that simple. It really does not work the way you think it does.
Okay, so here’s what we think. We think that if we normally burn something like 2000 calories a day, if we restrict our daily calorie intake to 1500 calories a day, we’re going to lose weight, right? I know you’ve tried this, I’ve tried this for years, I actually had this app where I was logging every bit of food that I ate, every time I went to a restaurant, everything I bought in the store, everything I made at home, like I was logging every single item.
And you know, getting my macros right, and counting all the calories, and then making sure that I’m running to burn off more of these calories. And it was completely ineffective. And so frustrating. I can’t tell you how much time I wasted entering food data into this app. It was crazy, okay.
But here’s what happens, you restrict your caloric intake to you know, 1500 calories, okay. And what happens is your body then lowers its metabolism to conserve calories. Okay, your body, again, is trying to get back to homeostasis, it wants to get back to normal, okay. So if you’re used to eating 2000 calories per day, and you limit your intake to 1500, your body has this process where it will down regulate its metabolism, to only burn those 1500 calories and no more, your body has a very good system at regulating this.
What’s happening here is your body is trying to keep you from starving to death. If you were to continue to lower your caloric intake, you know, there’s this idea that if you continue to lower your caloric intake, you can just keep losing weight, and you can lose some weight, but your body will continue to downregulate.
Okay, so let’s say you lowered your caloric intake and you’re losing like two pounds a week, you know, if you went on this thing for, like, two years, would you lose 200 pounds? No, you would not. Your body will downregulate what it burns. And it’ll keep you at a certain level. Okay.
Because your body’s like, I do not want you to starve to death. Okay, your body is really good at this process, okay. They actually did this experiment back in the 40s, like 1944 or 45, right after World War Two or during, during the end of it. So it was called the Minnesota starvation experiment.
And it sounds terrible I’ll tell you, but they took a bunch of healthy young men, who averaged eating around 3000 calories a day. And they lowered their caloric intake to around 1500. And then they lowered it even more to like less than 1000. And there were all kinds of issues that they had.
They ended up being like super cold all the time. Their fingernails got really brittle, their hair was falling out. Like there were all these side effects, you know, because their body was trying to conserve calories it was trying to and so it was putting all its it lowered the metabolism so much that it wasn’t effective at keeping the body in, in a good state in a natural healthy state.
And so these people were slowly losing their minds. They were starting to, you know, hallucinate and think about food all the time, and anyways, horrible. But anyway, the expected weight loss for each of these guys was around 78 pounds. That’s what they expected would happen. They discovered though, that on average, they only lost about 37 pounds each.
And what they figured out is that their bodies were reducing their energy expenditure in direct response to the reduced caloric intake. So the body was lowering its metabolism to make up for the fact that they were getting fewer calories. So for those people who were doing like 1500 calories a day, at that time, their energy expenditure dropped to only around 1400 calories per day.
So the body actually creates this little buffer, this margin of safety. Again, it’s like trying to stay healthy, so you don’t starve to death. Okay? Once the experiment was over, though, and they went back to their normal caloric intake, the 3000 calories, or whatever it was, they started gaining weight until it was actually they were even heavier than they were before the experiment.
And I know that we have all experienced this kind of thing, you kind of starve yourself, you eat less for a while, and you kind of lose a few pounds, but then you start eating normally again, and, and you gain all this weight back. In fact, you’re heavier, right? It’s crazy. I’ve done this before. It’s a crazy cycle. It’s no fun at all. But the fewer calories you eat, the lower your metabolism goes, and the fewer calories you burn.
There was another study done most recently in like 2008. And they had these participants, you know, they lowered their caloric intake, and they initially lost like 10% of their body weight. And their total energy expenditure decreased as expected. But it didn’t last very long, their metabolism actually remained reduced. So their ability to burn calories remained reduced for the entire year of the study. So even after a year at this new lower body weight, their total energy expenditure was still reduced by an average of almost 500 calories per day.
When you lower your caloric intake, your metabolism decreases almost immediately. And then that decrease persists basically indefinitely. Otherwise, you’d keep losing weight until you die. And the application of this is like it’s, it’s obvious like, let’s say, prior to dieting, a woman eats and burns 2000 calories per day. And then following doctor’s orders, she adopts a calorie restricted portion controlled low fat diet and reduces her intake by 500 calories a day, quickly.
Her total expenditure also drops by 500 calories a day. So her metabolism lowers. She feels lousy, tired, cold, hungry, irritable, depressed, but she sticks with it thinking that things must eventually improve, she might lose some weight. But as the caloric expenditure decreases to match the lower calorie intake, the weight plateaus.
And a year later, things have not improved, the weight slowly comes back. Even though she’s eating the same number of calories, right? So she finally figures this is not working. She abandons this failed diet and resumes eating 2000 calories a day, but her metabolism has slowed. She’s only burning off like 1500 calories a day now. And all the weight comes rushing back.
And people will say, well, you just are lacking willpower, right? You need to just, you know, eat less, control yourself. Right? Does this sound familiar to anybody? This is my experience for sure. Okay. Everything I’m describing here has been well documented, okay. Remember, your body is always trying to balance things out, your body always wants to get back to homeostasis.
And when you limit the amount of fuel that you give your body, your body also limits how much fuel that will burn. So you don’t become calorie deficient and starve yourself to death. calories in, calories out is broken. It does not work. Your body naturally works against this process. Okay.
So let’s recap. Running more does not work for weight loss. Your body naturally overcompensates by increasing your appetite and you end up actually eating more than you would normally. Progress is slow and minimal at best. And running doesn’t address the physical, mental and emotional causes of weight gain. It doesn’t address the hormonal imbalances that cause us to overeat the mental cravings, the emotional eating.And then eating less doesn’t work either, calories in calories out is a myth.
It doesn’t work. Your body naturally works against this. You reduce calories and your body lowers its metabolism and response, your body stays at that reduced metabolism basically forever. And you cannot lose weight this way. If you want to lose weight, you have to address the causes of weight gain. And just eating less and running more does not address the cause.
It’s just treating a symptom and doesn’t do very well. That’s why this approach to weight loss is so frustrating. It was so frustrating to me for so long and so frustrating to my clients for so long, because it doesn’t work. Okay, so next week on the podcast, I’m going to be talking about the role your hormones play in overeating and gaining weight. And this is a fascinating, fascinating topic. You will learn a lot I guarantee it.
But one of the biggest reasons why we gain weight is that our hormones are just completely out of whack. Okay, and I’m going to talk about how to get your hormones back in balance by simply changing what you eat. This is fascinating. It’s eye opening information, it will completely change what you know about food and how it affects your body.
Okay, quick reminder, my next weight class weight loss masterclass starts June 1, and I only take about 10 people through the class. So if you want in, you have to enroll now, go to innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating and get signed up. Drop the Quarantine 15, get your body ready for the summer, become a lean running machine. Go to innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating to enroll now. That’s all I got for you today. Lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are starving yourself, and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.
Today, I have a cool little brain hack to teach you. It’s all about the power of making decisions ahead of time. It’s a simple technique, but it’s not always easy to do. It requires a little bit of …
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Hey there, and welcome to The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host and the life coach for runners. And today, I’m going to be talking about a cool little brain hack that you can do. I’m going to teach you this today. It’s all about making decisions ahead of time. It’s a simple technique. It’s not always easy to do. It’s not easy to do at first, but it gets easier. We’ll talk all about that in just a minute.
But when you commit to doing this, you kind of trick your brain, okay? You can, it’s a cool way to build confidence, confidence in yourself, build trust in yourself, create momentum towards your goals, keep you motivated, get more done. All of that in just a minute.
First, let me ask you a question. Have you tried using running as a way to lose weight? And has this ever worked for you? My guess is probably not. Because I’ve tried this. I’ve tried this for years, and it has never worked. And I know why now. But running was not working.
I was running many, many miles to try to lose weight and I wasn’t getting any results. I tried all these different diet plans. I tried using sheer willpower. I tried restricting calories, none of this stuff worked. So I did tons of research. And I finally found the answer. It turns out that I had an unnatural over desire for food, and no amount of running was ever going to fix that.
I also learned that this wasn’t entirely my fault. My over desire, this unnatural over desire was caused by things like the way our food is made the way it’s marketed to us. And mostly by the way that I had trained myself to think and feel about food. So I was an over eater, okay, I was over eating. But the overeating was just a symptom.
The real problem was an underlying physical, mental and emotional relationship with food. And when I figured out those three things, when I figured out how to fix those three things, I was able to lose the weight easily. And I’ve been able to keep it off. So I’ve dropped 23 pounds in the last couple of months here. I’m actually back to the weight I was at when I was training for Ironman back in 2013.
And back then I was working out like over 20 hours a week. And today I’m barely working out at all, seriously, I’m running a couple of times a week, I go for a walk every now and then. But I’m not doing that kind of training. And I’m back to that weight. And then one of my weight loss clients just checked in with me this morning.
And he said he’s lost 29 pounds since he started working with me just six weeks ago. He says he feels great. He has tons of energy. He no longer suffers from those crazy food cravings and doesn’t have those uncontrollable urges anymore. And he says that for the first time in his life, he feels completely in control of his weight. He even said that he doesn’t have any pants that fit him and so he’s got to go buy all new clothes, which is not a bad problem to have.
But if you want to learn how to do this, if you want to learn how to change your physical, mental and emotional relationship with food, I’ve created a brand new training program. It’s free, and it’s called How to Become a Lean Running Machine and you can get it right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean to get the free training.
You’re going to learn why running more and eating less does not work to lose weight, and you’ll learn what to do instead, you’ll discover why we store fat on our bodies and how to train ourselves to burn more of it. You’re going to learn how to reprogram your mind so you stop craving food that does not serve you and you’re going to understand how to break those emotional eating habits.
Now I explain the science behind all this. I provide solutions to help you recalibrate your body to manage your mind to control your emotions. Just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean. And you’ll discover the secrets to becoming a lean running machine. And spoiler alert, it’s not about counting calories, and you don’t have to run 20 miles a day. Okay, just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you too can become a lean running machine. Cool.
So today we’re talking about making decisions ahead of time. This is a cool, cool brain hack. I’m really excited about talking about this today. So before we get into the content here, the actual solution, what we’re going to do, I need to explain a couple of things to you, I need to talk to you about how your brain works.
Now, we have kind of two brains, we have a primitive brain, and we have a modern brain, we have this primitive area of our brain called our amygdala. And this is often called the fear center of our brain. Now, the amygdala is like, responsible for our fight or flight response. Okay, this is like an old part of our brain that was used, you know, created eons ago, okay, so, a lot of times people call this our reptilian brain, or I like to call it our lizard brain, okay?
But this part of our brain is responsible for the fight or flight for those primal urges that we have for just survival. It’s always wanting to avoid pain and seek pleasure. Okay, so this is all of our like primitive urges, this part of our brain, the amygdala is responsible for all that, okay. We also have an evolved brain, and this is called our prefrontal cortex.
And the prefrontal cortex is, is more modern, it’s one of the newest parts of our brain. This is the part of our brain that controls cognitive behavior. It controls planning, it’s responsible for decision making. Okay? So just so you understand the difference between the two, we have our, our lizard brain, that’s the fight or flight, the fear center, the primitive urges, and then we have the prefrontal cortex. This is our modern evolved brain responsible for cognitive behavior, and decision making, okay.
So when it comes to making decisions, clearly, we don’t want to be using our amygdala. We don’t want to be using our lizard brain to make our decisions for us, okay, but too many of us do that. We do this all the time, we’ve trained ourselves to just give in to those primal urges, at all costs, okay? This is not good for us, okay.
So when it comes to reaching a goal, succeeding in anything that you want, like, if you want to succeed in running, let’s say you want to run a marathon, or let’s say you want to lose 50 pounds, either of those things, is just a series of decisions that you make along the way. Okay, Tony Robbins actually has this quote, and I love this quote, he says, “It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.”
So do you want to leave your destiny up to your primitive brain? Probably not. We want our destiny to be shaped by our prefrontal cortex by our thinking, cognitive decision making brain, okay. So what happens though, is we don’t do that, we have learned over our whole lives really to just give in to these primal urges to just be the lizard brain, okay?
But what happens when we do this is we make a decision, and then when the time comes to actually act on that decision, we give in to the feelings we’re having in that moment, okay. We don’t do what we say we’re going to do. So we may, we may plan on running tomorrow. But then tomorrow comes and we wake up in the morning, and we had it on our schedule to run five miles at 6am.
And then at six o’clock, your alarm, you know, or 5:30, your alarm goes off, and you’re like, I don’t feel like it. And so you just hit snooze, and snooze, and snooze, and you get up at like 7:30 or whatever. You just don’t feel like running. So you’re giving in to that primitive urge of like, oh, this is uncomfortable. I don’t really feel like doing this right now. So you don’t do it.
Or maybe you plan on eating healthy food tomorrow, okay, and then tomorrow comes and then you know, you’re at the company in the break room, and somebody has some cupcakes sitting there and you’re like, ah, screw it, I’m just going to eat five cupcakes, whatever, who cares? You know, like you’re just giving in to those primitive urges.
You know, you have this desire, this craving and you just give into it. That’s letting the primitive brain that’s letting your lizard brain run the show. Okay, you’re when you do this though, and we do this with everything in our lives. That’s crazy. When you do this, you’re putting your lizard brain in charge of your goals and your dreams. That’s crazy.
But I see this all the time. Runners, they don’t run. People who say they want to lose weight, and they just eat whatever the hell they feel like. And what do you get when you do that, when you continue to give in to these urges? You get nothing, you don’t get the results you actually want. You don’t get anything done, you don’t create the momentum you need. You don’t feel motivated, you feel stuck.
So you end up just giving up on your goals and your dreams, and leaving your lizard brain in charge of your life. And this, when you do this, it’s like a dream killer. Okay? Well, that sounds terrible, but it’s true. Okay, so instead, you want to put your prefrontal cortex in charge of your decision making, you want your modern evolved brain running the show, okay? You want that planning, thinking, and cognitive brain to be making decisions and following through on those for you.
This part of your brain is far superior at setting goals and accomplishing things, okay? You’ve got to train yourself, though, to use this part of your brain, it’s really easy to just use your primitive, primal fight or flight, you know, fear center, like just just get into that that’s easy to do. It’s not easy to use your prefrontal cortex to plan ahead, to write out your training plan to plan what you’re going to eat, and then actually do those things.
Follow through with those things. But you want to use your prefrontal cortex, you want to use it to make decisions and keep those promises that you make to yourself. Okay. So how do you do this? Well, step one is to plan ahead. So get the steps that you need, figure out what your training plan is, figure out what you’re going to eat, okay, and then put that stuff on your calendar.
Alright, so plan ahead, plan your runs for the whole week, plan on what you’re going to eat for the week. And I tell my clients always plan at least 24 hours in advance, this is key. You know, if you make plans for an hour from now, you’re already into that lizard brain thinking because you’re already like responding to how you feel in the moment, okay, and you, you cannot do that, you have to plan ahead of time, okay? It’s so easy to just give into the urges in the moment. Okay. So number one is to plan ahead, always, always, always plan ahead.
And then number two, there’s only two steps to this, by the way. Number two is to follow through, do what you say you’re going to do. If you put a training run on your calendar for tomorrow morning at six o’clock, do your training run tomorrow morning at six o’clock, when the time comes tomorrow to eat a healthy meal, eat what you said you’re going to eat, don’t deviate from that, okay?
Don’t deviate from your pre-planned schedule, or your pre-planned eating plan or whatever it is. So when you do this, you start to train yourself, you start to train your brain to use more of the evolved brain and you start to quiet the lizard brain. You stop giving in to the primal urges, like I don’t feel like it. And you start building momentum towards your goals.
So you plan ahead, and you follow through, you plan ahead and you follow through it, you plan ahead and you follow through this is how you get stuff done. This is how you build momentum and trust in yourself. This is how you build motivation. Your motivation is a feeling. That feeling is created by thoughts. You know, so what do you want to think? What do you want to do so that you feel motivated? Motivation doesn’t come from outside of you. It’s a state of mind.
So here’s an example from my weight loss clients. Okay, this is what I tell them to do. And this is how we apply this when it comes to losing weight. So I make them well, I encourage them and make anybody do anything. But I encourage them to plan all of their food for at least 24 hours in advance. Okay plan, I recommend writing out a two week eating food plan which we call a protocol. So write out a two week protocol. This is what I’m going to eat every day. Okay?
But at least 24 hours in advance you plan what you’re going to eat and then you only eat what you said you’re going to eat okay, you don’t deviate from that ever. So you choose foods that are going to fuel your body in advance and then you only eat what you said you’re going to eat. You do not deviate ever, okay?
You don’t give in to those primitive urges, or the cravings, and I teach my clients, I’ve got some awesome tools and strategies that they can use for how to deal with the cravings and urges when they come up because they do come up. But I teach them to honor their protocol no matter what.
And this is hard to do at first, because it’s uncomfortable. Our primitive brain is saying, like, I don’t want to be uncomfortable here. You know, I’m all about avoiding pain, and seeking pleasure. And this feels kind of painful to me, it’s not pleasurable. But I gotta tell you something, that uncomfortable feeling, it goes away, and it goes away pretty quickly, when you stick to this, you know, might be a few days, it might be a couple of weeks, but it goes away.
And then what happens is, my clients, they begin to lose weight, they begin to feel good about themselves, they start to build trust in themselves, they know that they can then go to a party, and they don’t eat the cupcakes that are there, not because they’re like white knuckling it and starving themselves and forcing themselves not to and using sheer where willpower is because they’ve built up some mental toughness, they’ve built the confidence that they need, and they just no longer have those cravings and those urges, okay, they begin creating these new mental habits.
They’ve hacked their brain, they’re creating new neural pathways, they’ve been creating new behavior patterns. So they’re no longer a slave to the lizard brain, their prefrontal cortex is now running the show. And it’s a lot easier for them to just stick to their plan. And they keep making steady progress, they get to their goal weight, and they end up having to buy all new clothes, which is a good problem to have, right.
But they’ve built so much trust and confidence in themselves that, you know, when it comes to just maintaining that weight, it’s a piece of cake. Pardon the expression, it’s easy for them. It’s a cupcake. And it takes practice, I gotta tell you, it’s not easy.
At first, it will be uncomfortable, but that’s okay, because you can handle a little discomfort. You know, your lizard brain is always trying to avoid pain and seek pleasure, it does not want you to be uncomfortable at all, you know, your lizard brain is gonna say just eat the Ben and Jerry’s, you know, or you don’t really need to run today, it’s fine, you’ll be fine.
But you cannot listen to that lizard brain, okay? Except the fact that there will be a little discomfort when you are, you know, going for some big goal that you want, except that you will be uncomfortable. That is part of the process. But do what you said you’re going to do no matter what. And do this over and over again. Plan ahead and follow through, plan ahead and follow through. Keep the promises you make to yourself. And it gets easier. And the more you do it, the easier it gets. And the more you do it, the easier it gets.
And you build mental toughness, you build confidence in yourself, you build trust in yourself. You said you were going to run and you did. You said you are only going to eat what you put on your food plan and you did, you stuck to it. You didn’t give into the urges eating give into the primal cravings. This builds a huge amount of trust in yourself. It builds a huge amount of trust in your ability to accomplish things that are important to us.
One of the problems is we get stuck in this moment of, you know, giving into an urge to eat the ice cream, even though we know we shouldn’t. And we know we’re not going to lose weight if we eat the ice cream, but we do it anyway. And what we’re doing here is we’re making the ice cream more important than our long term health and our weight loss goal.
We’re trading a tiny bit of immediate gratification for getting to our goal weight for feeling good about ourselves. You know, we trade away our long term health and happiness for some tiny bit of short term pleasure. So when you plan ahead and follow through you build trust and confidence in yourself and there’s really there’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing you won’t try.
You know you train your brain so you don’t make decisions on the fly that you make all of your important decisions ahead of time when you stick to them. This is a cool little brain hack. I’m telling you it works. You create new neural pathways and you create new brain patterns, right these are like new mental habits. And then you create these new patterns of behavior that become easier and easier over time.
So you’ll know you’ll have this confidence and confidence in yourself that no matter what you will stick to your training plan. And when you know that, when you know that no matter what you’re going to stick to your trading plan, how do you think you’re going to do in that marathon? Probably pretty damn awesome.
When you know, no matter what you’re only eating what’s on your food plan, how much easier do you think it’s going to be for you to lose weight, probably a lot easier. This is a simple little brain hack. But it’s so incredibly powerful. Most people have no idea how to do this. Most people just listen to their primitive brain, they just let the lizard brain run the show.
They let the lizard brain make all of their decisions, they just give in to all the primal urges no matter what. And most people never make any progress toward their goals because of this. And they always feel like they’re stuck. And they are stuck in this loop of like, avoid pain, seek pleasure, avoid pain, seek pleasure, and they’re not willing to get even a little bit uncomfortable. And so they don’t get anywhere. And their life sucks and they can’t figure out why.
Instead, learn how to use your evolved thinking brain practice using your prefrontal cortex. Put your modern thinking brain in charge of all of your important decisions, plan ahead, follow through, plan ahead, follow through, just keep doing that. And I promise you, you’re going to be a mental badass, there’s nothing you won’t be able to accomplish seriously. Alright, that’s all I got for you today.
Next week, I got something cool that I’m doing for you. Starting next week, I’ve got the first in a three part series that I’m doing all about why runners gain weight, and what you can do to lose the weight and how to become a lean running machine. I’m gonna be talking about that over the next couple of weeks. I’m excited about sharing that stuff with you guys. I’m really passionate about this.
I’ve had amazing results in my weight loss journey over the years, and most recently, some some sharing this with other people. They’re starting to get amazing results. And I want to share this with you guys. So that’s all I got. Listen, I got lots and lots of love for each and every one of you, my friends, always. 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.
Today, I am sharing a conversation I recently had with my friend Sarah Buckley. Sarah is a badass personal trainer, owner of Persist Fitness Training and creator of Run Strong Cincy - a strength …
Continue Reading about 14. Sarah Buckley on the Myths of Strength Training for Runners →
Patrick McGilvray
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Hey there, and welcome to The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m your host, and I’m the life coach for runners. And I teach you how to stop struggling, how to stop struggling and start getting results in your running in your weight loss journey in your life. And it all starts with managing your mind. And that’s what I created this podcast for. That’s what I teach you here.
I want to teach you how to manage your mind so you can create the life that you love, the life that you really want whatever that looks like for you. Today, I’m sharing a conversation I recently had with my friend Sarah Buckley. Sarah is a badass personal trainer. She’s the owner of Persist Fitness training here in Cincinnati, and she’s the creator of a program called Run Strong Cincy.
And that’s a strength training program that’s designed specifically for runners. It’s awesome. Now, there are a lot of myths around strength training and running. And today here Sarah breaks it all down for us. And she explains why strength training might be kind of misunderstood in the running community. Especially in the long distance running community. It’s kind of an eye opening interview.
Sarah and I discuss how managing your mind is the key to every good thing you want in your life from building muscle to overcoming food addictions to running a marathon. It all begins with mindset. I’m actually very excited to share this interview with you. So I’m gonna stop talking now. Here’s my interview with Sarah Buckley.
Today I am talking to my friend Sarah Buckley, about strength training specifically for runners. And she’s going to share a bunch of awesome knowledge with us today. Sarah, how are you doing?
Sarah Buckley
I’m good. Thank you, Patrick. I appreciate you having me on today.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, so tell us just a little bit about you know, who you are and what you do?
Sarah Buckley
Sure. So I am a strength and conditioning coach or personal trainer. I have been in the business going on nine years. And I own Persist Fitness. That’s my business. And I work with a lot of runners. I’ve been working with runners my entire career as a personal trainer, and I have a significant running history myself, which is why I feel very passionate about working with that population. You know, I have been running since I was little. I competed in college, did the marathon half marathon kind of stuff post grad. And when I moved to Cincinnati, I didn’t know anybody. And so of course, my running community was the first place that I plugged in. And as they say the rest is history.
Patrick McGilvray
So what is it about? Well, like why do runners come to see you? What do you see? Is there kind of some of the main issues that they come to see you?
Sarah Buckley
Yeah, so I actually kind of accidentally developed this program, when I was training for, you know, half marathon marathon and triathlons and I started playing around with my own strength programming. Because I was having a resource issue. And that resource was time, I had to get my mileage in. And I love lifting weights. So I didn’t want to quit.
And I also understood how beneficial it would be for my health and my performance to continue lifting. So I started to really take a critical look at my programming and my exercise choice. So that every single movement and every single exercise that I was doing was giving me the absolute highest return for my health and performance as a runner.
And so that program started out as me working with myself and then bringing in the rest of my running community. I have probably trained over 100 runners easily in the past six years, and I have a really strong group that has stuck with me. And so yeah, we are focused on health and performance and optimizing those two, while also accounting for your running programs. So You know, you have your miles on X, Y and Z days, you are tapering for this specific race and the strength. Part of your training runs directly alongside that as a complementary, rather than a competitor story, kind of part of your training.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I think that’s good that you have that perspective as a seasoned runner yourself, to be able to coach people and train them to get get to their race goals, because a lot of trainers are not, you know, half marathoners or whatever, and they don’t understand what it is to go through that training period, how you peak at a certain point, how you taper and things like that. And so having that knowledge under your belt, I think gives you definitely a great advantage to help people.
Sarah Buckley
Yeah, thanks. I agree. And then just also, I think the running mind is a little bit different than some other athletes. And so I think having, you know, been an avid runner, having been both a competitor and a recreational part of that community for a long time, I really feel you know, connected.
And I feel like I’m in a unique position to communicate kind of the benefits. And I really deeply understand their why. And I can find that, you know, what I have to offer is really strongly connected to their why, it’s just a matter of having that conversation.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, when you’re talking about the mind of a runner, you know, I always say that running is 20% physical and 100% mental. And then I follow that up with saying like, and we runners were very mental, you know, we definitely have a different sort of mindset when it comes to goals, fitness, endurance, all that kind of stuff. We’re a little little out there sometimes. And we like it. We like being out there. Not everybody gets us. So and that’s okay. Yeah, we’re okay with that.
Yeah, so I know that there are some kind of myths or misconceptions about strength training, because I’ve heard a lot of people say things like, you know, you can’t build muscle while you’re, you know, training or as a runner as a long distance runner, you know, you don’t really even need to go work out at the gym and things like that. Have you heard some of these myths?
Sarah Buckley
Yeah, definitely. And these are conversations that I have with my runners frequently. There’s a lot of information out there. And I think sometimes the strength conversation and the running conversation are happening in silos. So neither is really considering the like applications of the other, even though when we’re working with a real live human athlete, as an individual, we can’t operate in silos, because all of these things holistically are forming this athlete.
So for instance, the example of you know, putting on muscle because I’m like, way more, and then I’m going to slow down. That is something that I try to dispel immediately when I’m having conversations with runners, if you’re a beginner, in the gym, if you’re a beginner for strength, it’s very likely that you are going to build some muscle, you are your body and might actually recomp, meaning you might shed some body fat, and kind of put that weight that scale weight back on with muscle.
However, as far as the weight that you’re carrying, muscle is so much more valuable for your health and performance than that other weight is. So if you had to choose between the two, I would want you to have the muscle. And also of course, there is a point of diminishing return.
However, from a scientific standpoint, your nutrition number one and that’s a very important kind of separate conversation would have to be very, very dialed in for you to put on, you know, the maximum amount of muscle especially as a training endurance athlete, because those are kind of competing energy systems. I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m just saying you have to really be dialed in on quite a few different things to move that needle forward.
And secondly, muscle even if you’re, you know, just for general health, it is healthy, it’s safe. It’s protecting your body so it’s protecting your joints, it’s making you more resilient. You know, your organs are underneath. If you have some muscles in the front, you know, even like a fender bender, having some muscle in your structure can actually protect you from the world.
So it’s not something that we need to worry about. I’ve never worked with a runner who I thought needed to shed some of this muscle, you’re carrying too much around, in seven years.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, that’s definitely one of the things I hear a lot people talking about. Or that, you know, you can’t build muscle as a runner like it just you’re, you know, it can’t happen, it’s impossible to do. Like, what do you say to that?
Sarah Buckley
So it’s not impossible, I think we said there’s some things that would need to be dialed in. And that would be a kind of a nutrition conversation. Just, you know, protein is something that builds muscle. And so if an athlete is interested in putting muscle on, there’s gonna have to be some, you know, kind of broad nutritional guidelines that would need to be followed in order to put muscle on.
That being said, there’s scientific protocols that basically do what’s called hypertrophy and hypertrophy is the scientific name for putting on muscle. So as long as an individual is consistent and over a long enough timeframe, so say, three to six months, depending on that individual, individual variables like age, gender, those types of things. As long as they’re hitting that rep scheme, and that volume scheme, they’ll put muscle on, especially someone who’s training age, meaning how long they’ve been strength training is low.
Patrick McGilvray
Okay, that’s awesome.
Sarah Buckley
Yeah, we call those beginner gains, because you get super strong super fast, because everything is new. So your body is on the fly there. It’s adapting very quickly.
Patrick McGilvray
Hmm. And so how would this help a long distance runner?
Sarah Buckley
Great question. So when we look at the physical demands, kind of zooming way, way in on what’s required of the body to actually run? First of all, it’s very high impact. So most of us who are in the running role, understand that conservatively, every single step when you’re running is three times your body weight, plus overcoming momentum, plus overcoming gravity, and each leg is landing about 1000 times per mile.
So this is a quite a high impact sport, which is, which is okay, that’s fine. But from the strength side of things, we need to look at how we can stay safe when we’re constantly pounding, constantly pounding, and all sports are reliant on one major foundation, and that’s being able to maintain correct position for specific amounts of time.
So for endurance athletes, it’s being able to maintain proper and efficient running biomechanics for a very long time. So you have this high demand for muscular endurance. So strength training is absolutely necessary for an endurance athlete, because simply running does not put the appropriate external load on your body is necessary for a scientific adaptation to take place for you to actually get stronger within those positions.
And secondly, running also requires almost all of the different ways you could move your body, it requires single leg strength, it requires Single Leg level change, where you know, you have knee bending and hip flexion, those kinds of things, it requires both stiffness and mobility in your joints.
And it requires rotation, that’s basically all of the components of movement that the human body allows for. And it’s all happening in an extremely short window of time, over and over and over and over and over again. So if that’s not an opportunity for over usage to happen, I don’t know what is. So we have to train that body to be prepared to do all of these necessary biomechanical things to run efficiently.
And like I said, you might be, it might be an hour and a half, it might be five hours that you’re required to maintain these pretty high level positions of your body. And strength is the only way that you can get to that place.
Patrick McGilvray
Oh my gosh, yeah. I mean, the way you’re describing this and the way you’re describing the mechanics of running, just makes it sound like it’s so hard on your body like how could you not want to be stronger? You know what I mean? Because it would just make you be able to absorb all that impact to be able to push through the the repetitive motion and get to, you know, you know, have a successful workout or a successful race because without the strength involved have, oh my gosh, I could see how this could be, I’m could see why a lot of people get injured.
Sarah Buckley
Yeah, absolutely. And I don’t want to discourage people from entering into the running world, I think the running community is one of the best and strongest and most accepting and accessible fitness communities that is available. And I absolutely love it for that. But just like a runner, who goes from one mile to three miles and three miles to five miles, and so on, and so forth, until they’re running their marathon, you have to earn that mileage.
And I think something that people don’t consider is that they think, oh, running is just walking like, but faster. And it really isn’t that simple. It’s highly complicated. When you kind of look at it, you know, the way that I’m looking at it, I’m looking at it from a human body perspective. So I would love people to think about their strength in the same way that they think about their progression of mileage. Which is like, I’m not ready to run five miles, because I haven’t put the base work in.
Similarly, like, I might not be ready to run at all, because I have, I don’t have these kind of specific strength prerequisites, in order to maintain position, keep my joints healthy. You know, and especially for a starter performance aside, the main goal is going to be health and sustainability in the sport. And then we can talk about performance, once we have this pretty significant bass, similar to how a runner, you know, would approach their first say, half marathon or marathon, I don’t think as much work as necessary for maybe a 5k. But you know, the longer distances certainly.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, what are some of those like beginner type of injuries that you see people coming in with? Like, what is kind of the main thing where people are, are, maybe they don’t have the right mechanics, or they don’t have the right strength in the right areas, like what are you seeing?
Sarah Buckley
So I see a lot of kind of random knee and that it’s really nothing, there’s no diagnosis, but it hurts all the time. And it’s probably like arthritis, or bursitis, or tendinitis, these things that are caused from, you know, doing the same thing over and over again. And, you know, consistent loading on a joint the same way over and over again.
So I see a lot of joint stuff. So hip, knee, even like ankle or foot things, is probably the most common. And I have to say almost every kind of pain, I want to say injury, because a lot of it is more just kind of chronic aches and stuff like that is coming from upstream, it’s coming from the hip. And the hip joint is very special and specific to what runners need, it needs to be able to, you know, rotate in it’s ball and socket, but it also has to be strong through its entire range of motion.
Or else you have a very significant energy week, which is going to likely come out in the knee because the knee doesn’t really it doesn’t. Of course, it does something. But as far as when we’re talking about performance and health and running efficiency, the knee is kind of just like following up with what the hip is telling it to do. So the hip isn’t healthy and strong, the knee isn’t going to be able to kind of execute on that follow up, and so on don’t down the line.
Conversely, if you have a lack of foot strength and toe dexterity, it can move up the chain. And that’s when you kind of start to see ankle issues. And again, knee issues, shin splints, I get a lot of plantar fascia stuff. And I truly believe that just just even just gaining some general strength, not even specific to your sport, but just lower body strength, stiffness, and bracing and breathing capabilities in your core will take the load off of those areas.
Because truly, you know, our body is designed to absorb and distribute forces through our core. And when I say core, I kind of mean like, from your armpit to your armpit and down to your hip towards your other hip and then on your back as well. So your torso is your core. That’s where forces come from in your body and that’s where we can absorb them. So the more stiff and strong we are in our center area, the less our joints have to absorb. So just some general training in the beginning can certainly start to reduce, you know, pain and discomfort in our limbs.
Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. And I know that there’s a lot of different exercises that people can do and different strength training circuits and things like that they can do to build up all of those areas and strengthen the hips and strengthen the glutes. and strengthen the hamstrings and calves and all this stuff.
And you know, you get the whole thing abs, whatever. What is like one exercise that somebody could do just like at home since especially we’re all locked down at home right now anyway, like what would be like the one thing you would say that people could do that would give them kind of an overall good strength exercise or whatever?
Sarah Buckley
Yeah, great question. So for all of my runners, regardless of whether we’re in the gym, or if we’re quarantined at home, I prioritize strengthening our posterior chain, which is your back and your vectors, which are the muscles that surround your spine, and they’re responsible for protecting and keeping your spine stable, your low back, your booty, your glutes and your hamstrings, because those are a runners engine, and those are a runner’s brakes.
So those are likely areas where I see energy leaks. So any movement that is a hinge. So one example would be a deadlift, where you have a soft bending of your knees, and you’re pushing your hips back and your belly button down and kind of reaching towards mid Shin, you’ll feel your hips load up, because you’ll start to feel a stretch in your hamstring.
When we’re at home, something that works great if you have a little bit of equipment, you can just stand on a band. And you can hold the band on the outside of your legs and do your hands movement from there. But also, I actually just made gallon weights by using old gallon cartons that I just taped and one of them is filled with sand and basically dirt and it’s a little heavier and more dense. And then the other one I filled like three quarters of the way with water. And it’s a little bit unstable because the water sloshes around, and I secured it with duct tape. It’s kind of whatever. But it’s working for me right now. Awful items. But I think nailing a hinge pattern, being able to lengthen your hamstrings under load is the absolute first priority for any runner, I don’t care if you have been running for two days or 20 years, you have to be able to load your hamstring in a lengthened state.
Patrick McGilvray
And doing that you said to do these bent over hinges or the deadlifts?
Sarah Buckley
Especially, you know, if you were to Google ‘deadlift’, you’re gonna see somebody probably doing it with a barbell, but the movement is the same. And it’s you’re acting as your hips, if your body is a door, your hips are your hinge, and your upper body is the door and your legs are staying in the same place. So they’re the doorframe so your upper body is opening and closing your hips will be pushing backwards as your belly button going down, and you have a soft bend in your knee, that’s the biggest thing I see is that people bend their knees all the way and they do more of a squat, rather than being a very so think about your the knee bend that you’re looking for is the same knee bend that you would have on your landing. When you’re running. It’s not very deep. It’s a tiny degree.
Patrick McGilvray
Gotcha. Like would this be like a Romanian deadlift?
Sarah Buckley
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Romanian, or RDL or deadlift, do like the same thing, but different ranges of motion. So yeah, exactly. Patrick.
Patrick McGilvray
Cool. That’s good. I’ve done a few of those.
Sarah Buckley
Good. Yeah. Good for everybody.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, they suck. No, that’s actually a really, it’s a really good strength training any I’ve found, and from what I understand any type of squatting, like that is going to help a lot for runners just because you’re, you’re strengthening that whole posterior chain also, you know, you’re hitting the glutes, and you’re hitting the hamstrings and the calves and the hip flexors and all that stuff. So that’s all good.
Sarah Buckley
Yeah, and I really like compound movement, meaning it’s one movement that checks a lot of boxes. Yes. Efficiently from like a weight loss standpoint, I really like it because it’s not ice. Like it’s not a bicep curl. Your bicep is like three inches of your whole body versus your RDL, your deadlift, which is literally recruiting all of your muscle fibers for your entire body. It’s quite a bit more of a workout. So from a resources standpoint, I really liked the compound lifts. Not that we don’t hit isolated stuff we absolutely do. But again, if we had to choose one, and we’re prioritizing, it’s gonna be the compound lifts.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and I think maybe a good rule of thumb for people when they do start going back to the gym, is to avoid the machines because those are very isolating and to do more stuff, just on the floor, you know, on the using the rig or whatever they got there, right.
Sarah Buckley
Yeah. And, you know, I don’t use a lot on machines, I don’t train within one specific kind of like program, I’m more of a hybrid. So I would consider myself working within a system where multiple tools can be brought in depending on the needs of an individual. So I will never say no to machines.
However, like you had said, they’re very isolating. So it’s unlikely that you’re going to get the benefits from a compound movement. And also, it puts you in a prescribed range of motion that may not be what you’re ready for, or be structurally what you have the capacity for. So I know a lot of people, particularly with shoulders that have big time trouble with machines.
So I would recommend having a coach look at your movement. Dumbbells are king for stability. I love using dumbbells. And I would recommend that over any machine any day, for any individual, except for maybe somebody who’s either doing like powerlifting or weightlifting, specifically, but even those folks are going to use the dumbbells for their accessories.
Patrick McGilvray
And I think what you just touched on something that’s so important, which is having somebody like watch you, that knows what they’re doing. And that can help you. I’ve seen some people the gym, the way they’re lifting weights is just terrible. And you’re just like, oh my god, you’re so doing it wrong, you’re going to hurt yourself. And we don’t want that. So having somebody to watch over you to help you to create the movement that works best for your body type for your shape for what your goals are. I think that’s so important.
Sarah Buckley
Yeah, absolutely. And I actually think that kind of hits on another, like myth as well, which is where I hear a lot of my runners saying two things, one of the things that they say is that they want to get in shape before they come to work out. And then secondly, you know, because I think of, and I again, love the running community.
A lot of the reason that people are plugged into running groups, or become runners is because it is so social, and it is so supportive, and it is so inclusive, and I think you can find some of those same markers in group fitness type classes.
And when we’re talking about getting assessed and using your resources wisely, and getting kind of in shape, that would not be the route that I recommend for runners based on what kind of energy system they’re trying to train based on progressions that I would be recommending for them, because you haven’t been assessed on your individual needs. So we don’t know where you stand.
We don’t know what your strengths are, we don’t know where there’s opportunity to grow. And we certainly, you know, the emphasis is on the individual to say when they’re ready for the next thing. And all of those decisions can be made by a coach who’s working with somebody because the variables are, you know, they vary.
So it could be someone who’s coming off of an injury or could simply be someone who’s having a hard week at work and their stress is really high. And there’s really no value in continuing to stress that system. All the way to okay, you have a race in two weeks, so I’m tapering you in the gym. So that’s something that those kinds of circuit, specifically kind of timed circuit based classes, I don’t necessarily recommend those for my runners because it is very depleting to their recovery tank. And it is not adding value to their long term goals, because of the lack of assessment because of the lack of correct progressions and variations for themselves.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, it’s really not a one size fits all, you know what I mean? It’s just like, it’s so individual. So individual.
Sarah Buckley
Communities are wonderful, like I said, for the workout, but when we’re talking about training, just like your training for your race. There’s a difference between going to a workout class and going to train for you, for yourself, for your goals, for your why.
Patrick McGilvray
That’s a very good point. Yeah, you touched on something else earlier that I want to kind of mention, which is you you said like doing these compound exercises are better for your kind of for your, like weight loss goals. And one of the things that I firmly believe, and I think it’s kind of one of those myths about running in general is like if I just run I’ll lose weight, you know, and when it comes down to it, running is not a very effective way to lose weight.
I think exercising in general is not a very effective way by itself to lose weight. The problem, a couple problems with it are number one, people tend to work out or run and then they overcompensate with what they eat. And so they’re just they’re negating any kind of gains they may have made at the gym or out on the road.
So another problem is that the main reason we are overweight, especially here in the United States is that we overeat. And the over eating has to do with, you know, social cultural things. It has to do with psychological reasons, hormonal reasons, but it’s mostly like there’s physical, mental and emotional causes that are sort of hidden, and that have kind of programmed us to be overeaters, you know, and no amount of running is going to fix that.
And so, you know, I tell people, like you have to address the underlying issues, if you want to lose weight and get to your, you know, natural weight, not everybody needs to like fit some perfect airbrushed model version of whatever people think reality is, but like, what is your natural weight, where should you be, if you’re not there, then we need to address those issues.
So you know, but I do, but here’s the thing, here’s where I’m getting to it, this long, roundabout way of saying it, is like running is a part of that, it is a part of staying healthy and staying fit. Running makes you feel good, you get that release of dopamine and endorphins and adrenaline and like it just it’s, it’s a good, it makes you feel good. It’s good for your mental health, it’s good for your physical health, it’s good to get outside and get some vitamin D, get some sunshine, how does strength training play into someone’s overall, you know, kind of weight loss goals for the people that are interested in losing weight?
Sarah Buckley
Sure, so just to kind of touch on what you just kind of left off with, with the running. The reason that, you know, I became a strength coach, and I push lifting the weights so hard and believe in it so deeply, you know, my, my tagline for my business is empowerment through movement is because I truly believe that pursue personal emotional mental growth far surpasses the physical gains that you will have in the gym.
And it’s a way to do something and to have success on something that you’ve never done before. And you feel amazing, you feel like a badass, you are able, you’re you feel very capable. And so there’s all these other, like high value, things, high value words that you’re getting from your lifting experience, that I think are going to again, we can’t work in a silo.
So from a holistic standpoint, that checks many boxes when I start to think about mental and emotional health. And I think, at least for me, I provide a safe, accessible place for people to come do those things. Because I understand like, it can seem intimidating. When you just go out on the road, you’re by yourself. Maybe people in cars see you but you know, you’re very separated from them.
Versus in the gym, you might be face to face with someone who you feel like it’s watching you. And so I think that, that that’s why I’m here to be on that journey with you. And that’s kind of the soft science things, and anecdotally why I believe in doing it that way. But the hard science absolutely supports that as well. So yeah, running in and of itself, weightlifting in and of itself, these are tools towards weight loss, whether you have just strictly an aesthetic goal or a weight loss goal that’s tied to help. Both are great.
So doing the high, you know, compound movements that’s recruiting a lot of muscle. You know, it’s just, it just makes more sense, wouldn’t you rather burn this amount of calories doing a compound lift and this amount of calories, doing 50 bicep curls, and only targeting one part of your body and the rest of your body now is not getting what it needs.
So and also it’s a great way to put on muscle and build muscle is to do those compound movements because you are using every muscle in your body. And so we know that having more muscle is helpful to weight loss. Even though you know muscle weighs more, I say it’s helpful to fat loss, because that scale number could potentially go up but your percent body fat is going to go down.
So that’s something that I was mentioning earlier. And so it’s the quality of the number that we see on the scale. And you’ll look different and you know your body is going to change. But the weight that you are carrying is working for you; it is adding value to your life every single day.
Versus on the other side. Maybe there’s risks that are involved with the weight that you are carrying. And so I think that you again, all those conversations need to be happening. That’s why I said this kind of nutrition is very important. But it’s kind of separate because we need to, you know, be talking about emotionally, why is this happening? It’s not just about eat this, don’t eat that, like, why are we eating what we’re eating? What, what history do we have with food? How do we address behaviors at a behavioral level? And those are probably just manifesting themselves in overeating, binging restricting those kinds of those kinds of behaviors.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and you know, I call that buffering. And that’s where you’re putting a buffer between your, your emotions and your and your mind, you know what I mean, you’re trying to stuffed those things down, so you don’t have to experience them, maybe it’s a negative emotion, some kind of feeling you don’t want to feel and so you just eat the whole bag of potato chips, or the whole pint of Ben and Jerry’s, or you sit in front of the TV and watch Netflix all day long.
And it’s a way of numbing yourself and feeling good, because you kind of it replaces that kind of dopamine hit that you would get from doing something like working out or running, you know, so it makes you feel good for a moment. But then when you’re done with that, but with that buffering experience, whatever it is, we finish the pint of ice cream, you’re gonna come down crashing from that, and you’re still left with feeling the emotions, and now you’re beating yourself up because you were you ate something you knew that was bad for you.
And it’s actually making you gain weight instead of losing weight. So, yeah, it’s, it’s just such a, there’s a, there’s a lot of factors involved here, there’s no like, you know, there’s no magic bullet. And here’s the thing, people want a magic bullet, they just want to be like, you know, I’m just going to eat these five things and work out three times a week and run three times, and I’ll be fine. Like, and a lot of times, that doesn’t work.
And they need to understand there’s so much more going on under the surface that they have to like, be willing to uncover and look at, it’s like these dark corners of our minds, and our emotions that we don’t want to look at. But once you start bringing those things up, you know, it, it’s not, it doesn’t feel good at first. But once you start to realize you can like feel your emotions and not have to eat over them or, you know, just, you know, sit around because of them. Like you can be such a more well rounded and healthy person mentally and physically.
Sarah Buckley
Yeah, I absolutely agree. I mean, I’ve shared this with you before, but I have a long history of every eating disorder, disordered eating, those kinds of things, different behaviors. And I, myself, I worked on it, you know, big time in a kind of concentrated area, and then every single day, similar to other kinds of behaviors, you know. Whatever your age, I’m in recovery is how I would describe myself, like, you know, so there’s things to work on every single day. But you’re right, it’s so nuanced.
And, you know, for me, it has just been, you know, running, you know, I have a history as a runner, and now I’m more of a lifter, but those two things complemented, my, you know, emotional, well being journey. Because they’re unlike everything else, they’re very constant. You know, one mile is one mile, always. And it’s always, like, accessible to you, you know, even if it’s slower, or even if it feels crappy, you know, it’s still one mile.
That’s similar to how things are in the gym, you know, five pounds is always five pounds. And so, you know, and it’s always just a, you know, something else with running. I mean, I think some people are at the level where yeah, they are trying to beat somebody. And that happens in the lifting world as well. But you know, it’s a way for you to just kind of be with yourself. And also both things are really hard.
And I think it’s important for us to put ourselves in positions that feel really uncomfortable, even if it’s extreme physical discomfort, because that is going to train us to be unable to adapt to emotional discomfort and just be in our feelings, you know, mental discomfort feels like out of control. So, I really think that there’s so much carryover to physical training when we are dealing with like you said, those dark corners.
Patrick McGilvray
Oh my gosh, that’s such a good analogy to the you know, getting uncomfortable getting outside your comfort zone because that’s the only time you can actually learn that’s the only time you grow that’s the only time you expand your consciousness that you expand, you know that you grow who you are, and become you know, a different person when we stay in our comfort zone.
We just stay stuck in the here and now and that’s it and we can never grow and be you know, we have these dreams of like, here’s who I want to be I haven’t you know this person I want to be but I’m not willing to be uncomfortable at all to get there. Guess what? You’re never going to get there. And so it takes getting uncomfortable out on the road when you’re running, it takes pushing yourself farther and, and faster and running up that hill 27 times.
It takes going to the gym, and embracing how bad it’s going to suck for those first few weeks at start doing that, but the results on the other side of that are just so good and so amazing and, and it works with our feelings to let but like when we’re pushing down our emotions and not wanting to feel them because it’s uncomfortable.
We just stay stuck there, you know, in that emotional childhood, so to speak, you know, in order to grow and become an emotional adult, we have to be able to sit with our feelings, experienced them, process them, manage them, and that will allow us to grow when we get really good at managing our, our emotions, man, we can do anything, there’s really nothing we can do if we’re not if we’re willing to feel our emotions.
And I think we get so stuck in trying to stuff all that down. And we have all these excuses why we can’t do things like, you know, go work out at the gym or, or you know, run a half marathon or whatever, we have all kinds of excuses. You know, a lot of it just has to do with us not wanting to get uncomfortable with our emotions. It’s crazy, but this is really awesome. This has been a really cool conversation, Sarah just so cool.
So where can people like find out more about you? Or like, what can they do? I know we’re kind of in a situation now where it’s can’t go to the gym, but what can people do right now to connect with you?
Sarah Buckley
Great. Yeah, so even though gyms are closed, I’m still running. My run has been strong since the strength program over zoom. And I’ve had people who are good with it. And you know, the doors are open here. I’m welcome to have additional participants. We have a couple different times a day a couple different times a week to kind of accommodate everybody’s schedules right now. So you can find information about that at persistfitnesstraining.com You can also email me sarah@persistfitnesstraining.com. And, yeah, I’ll reach out to you ASAP.
Patrick McGilvray
And this is for anybody whether they live around the Cincinnati area or not, because you’re doing it on Zoom right now. Right?
Sarah Buckley
Yeah, and actually, even when we go back to the gym, the way that my running program works is that it’s extremely flexible. So people can come in and be in the gym with me or they can train remotely. So there’s an opportunity for them to have programming delivered to them. And but we are still coaching, um, you know, we’re still communicating about their needs. And so, you know, kind of depending on where you are physically, geographically where you are in your fitness journey, those things will all be accounted for.
Patrick McGilvray
So you can do some kind of personal coaching and assessments over zoom with people, right?
Sarah Buckley
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think it’s everything, of course, now it’s a little bit different with the assessments. So typically, I would have someone come in and run for me and do all of these things. But I’ve been able to do like, what’s something that’s very important for me is to look at as joint health, we talked about the hips stuff.
So that is something that I could get a pretty good handle on over zoom, just by directing people to move a certain way. I mean, I’ve been looking at, you know, human bodies move for seven years, and my hobby is exercising. So I, you know, I’m training with a bunch of people. So I’m looking at people move for like, many, many hours a week. So over Zoom, it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty darn close to what we would be able to do if we were in person together. This is the situation we’re in.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, that’s cool. I’m glad you’re still offering this service to people because I think it’s really important. I think it’s important for runners to get stronger and to realize that it’ll only serve them in a positive way to, you know, get stronger and build that strength and muscle fitness. Yeah.
Sarah Buckley
Yeah, absolutely. And similar to your running group, we have our community too. So you know, you get to see your people. Oh, and I forgot to mention that anyone who’s interested in joining, especially now when we’re doing during quarantine, I will be gifting you equipment that you will need because I understand people don’t necessarily have access to everything and I want to accommodate for that.
Patrick McGilvray
No way. What, you’re gonna like send them stuff like in the mail?
Sarah Buckley
I’ll send them something if they’re not in Cincinnati. If they’re in Cincinnati, I’ll come and drop it off on your porch.
Patrick McGilvray
Oh my gosh, that’s awesome. Yeah. You’re so awesome, Sarah. Hey, this has been really awesome. We’re gonna get you on another time and we’ll continue the conversation because there’s a lot of things I want to talk to you about here that come up here. Yeah. So we’ll do that another time. But in the meantime, you guys go check out. Persistfitnesstraining.com, sign up for one of Sarah’s remote classes. You can do it no matter where you are in quarantine right now. So awesome. Thank you so much, Sarah.
Sarah Buckley
Yeah, thank you for having me on Patrick. I loved our talk.
Patrick McGilvray
Did you know that most runners fail to reach their goals? It’s not because of lack of training, lack of desire, whether it’s running faster or running farther, I believe most runners just haven’t developed the mental toughness they need to get them across the finish line. That’s why I created a step by step training called How to Build Mental Toughness and Become A Badass Runner. I want to show you how to train your mind so you can tough it out when the going gets tough. And the best part, this comprehensive training is yours absolutely free. To get it right now just go to innerfiretribe.com/badass and get started today.
Being overweight is not something that’s not talked about very much (or at all) in the running community. There seems to be some stigma around being a runner and being overweight. Like you’re not …
Continue Reading about 12. Why Running Doesn’t Work for Weight Loss →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Hey there, and welcome to The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m your host, and I’m the life coach for runners. And I help you overcome your obstacles in running and in life. So you can unleash your inner badass. And today I want to talk about a subject that is really important to me and something that I’m really passionate about.
And that is why running doesn’t work for weight loss. So being overweight is not something that’s talked about very much, or at all in the running community, there seems to be some sort of stigma around being a runner, and being overweight. It’s like, hey, you’re not doing it, right. You must not be running enough. If you can’t lose weight, or if you’re overweight. Oh, I see you’re training for a marathon. Still can’t seem to lose weight. What’s wrong with you?
These are some of the things that I’ve heard around the running community. And some things that people have shared with me and I felt as well. Okay, so I know, I know how this feels. I really do. I know this is something that not a lot of people are talking about. And so I wanted to sort of just like shine a light on this subject and talk about this today, because it’s really something that I’m really passionate about. And I haven’t shared this really before. And I think now’s the right time. So here we go.
So back in the day, back in, like 2003, I was seriously, I was overweight, I was I was probably 50 or 60 pounds overweight. And I was very unhealthy. I was very sick, I had cancer, I was drinking too much. And I was in a very, very bad place. I was basically just really sick and really unhealthy. And I needed to change some stuff in my life.
So I did, I quit drinking, which was a big part of the problem for me. I started eating better. And I started running. And obviously I got treated for the cancer and I’ve been cancer free for many, many years now. So that’s all good. But the running was like a big catalyst for me to like, do something that would help me to lose weight.
You know, like that was the thing was like, oh, if I just run I’m gonna lose weight. And, and for me, it was like a change of lifestyle completely. You know, I gave up the crazy eating that I was doing. And I started running and stopped drinking. So all those things combined. I lost a lot of weight and I lost probably 60 pounds and kept it off for a long time and continued to run and train and do all these awesome things.
I’ve run like 14 marathons, I’ve done an Ironman, I’ve done countless other triathlons and ultra marathons, including a 50 miler and a 100 miler. And I’ve done all these things, and was able to kind of maintain this, this weight that I was at for a long time. And I felt pretty good about myself.
Well, in the last few years, I’ve sort of backed off my running a little bit. After I did my 100 miler at the end of 2017. I wanted to scale back my running, and I just didn’t want to put anything on the calendar and I just wanted to be like, I just want to go out there and run and have fun and enjoy it and not to have all these goals out there.
So I stopped kind of signing up for races and having goals like that, and I started gaining weight. And I couldn’t figure out why because I was still training and I was still running and I was still like I would do a marathon a year or whatever. But I was running all the time.
Well, I ended up, you know, gaining like 15 or 20 pounds back, you know, look, looking back over time, it was like, it happened slowly, but it happened. And I found myself in this place of like, okay, I need to lose this weight, what am I going to do? And so I tried all these different things to help me to lose the weight.
And I tried like calorie restriction where I was just like counting calories. And that is very challenging to do, by the way, I had to have this app. And I had to log every bite of anything that I ate, and I had to know all the ingredients in it, and all the breakdown of all the nutrition breakdown of it according to the label.
And it was challenging to try to keep track of that. When the idea there was like, oh, yeah, if you eat, you know, 1500 calories, but you burn off 2000 calories a day, you’ll lose weight. I gotta tell you, I did not lose weight. And I was constantly stressed out about entering all this data into this app. Okay.
Maybe that’s how you lose the weight, you’ve spent so much time and energy, and you’re so stressed about trying to figure out how to enter all that data into this thing. You just lose weight. Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to work. But you know, I’ve done a plant-based thing for many years. Vegetarian, I tried sort of a vegan-paleo thing, a vegan-keto thing, I’ve tried to eat nothing but fat, nothing, but no carbs. Like, I’ve tried all these things. And I couldn’t get anything to work, I can’t get anything to work.
I’ve always felt like I just haven’t had control of what I eat. I know what the problem is now. And I’m gonna get to that in just a minute. But getting here, you know, I just felt like I did not have control over what I was eating. I didn’t have control over myself. You know, I felt tired all the time. I found myself doing a lot of emotional eating. I’ve been doing that lately, too.
By the way, with the lock down here, The Stay At Home order. And some other things going on in my life, I’ve been doing a lot of emotional eating. And I’m not sorry about it, but I even eat when I’m not hungry. And you know what, I’ve just felt stuck.
I felt like, I am never going to lose this weight. And I’ve keep running. You know, I ran back in August, I did 31 days of running. And I thought for sure that would help me to lose weight. No, I gained weight. Starting in November, I did a running challenge running through the holidays. And I ran for something like 80 days straight. And I thought that would help me to lose weight.
And it didn’t, I didn’t lose weight at all, I actually gained weight. And so I’ve realized that the problem really isn’t about running. It’s not about like, oh, I’m not running enough. The problem is that I’m overeating. The problem is that I overeat, I eat too much. I have an addiction to food. I’ve programmed my body to become so addicted to food, not just my body, but my brain as well, to become so addicted to food, especially sugar.
That not even you know, training for a marathon is going to help me to lose weight. Okay? So, believe me, I’m frustrated by this or have been frustrated by this. And I feel like the advice out there is just like here, Here, eat this. Just eat this over here or eat this or just do this diet over here. And it just this just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for most people.
You know, just changing your behavior, changing what you eat, does not address the underlying issues. You know, I feel like everyone’s out there just saying, eat this as if it’s that simple. It’s not that simple. In order to lose weight in order to be at your ideal weight to be at your natural weight. You need to identify and fix the causes of your over eating. Not just treat the symptoms. We’re so focused on treating the symptoms or not getting to the root of the problem. Okay.
So all these different like diets I’ve tried or whatever, I’ve tried these things and then said, that doesn’t work because I gained weight, or I kept overeating. And the problem isn’t in what I’m eating, necessarily, although that is part of it. The problem is, I wasn’t addressing the mental and emotional part of overeating, okay?
There’s three parts to overeating that have to be addressed. There’s the physical causes of overeating, there’s the mental causes, and then there’s the emotional causes. I’m going to talk about all three of these. But I want you to know something, if you’re out there and you’re a runner, and you’re having a, you know, a struggle with you’re struggling to lose weight or struggling to feel good about your body.
I know what you’re going through, I feel I feel your pain, I really do. And, and I want to help you, and I, and I coach people through this. I’m coaching myself through this and I want to coach you through this. So here’s what we’re gonna talk about today, we’re going to talk about the three causes of overeating. And, and the things that aren’t really addressed. And if you’re a runner, I want you to pay attention. And I want you to really take in what I’m going to say here and be open to trying something that’s a little different, okay?
Because whatever, whatever you’ve been trying is not working. Okay? So let’s try something different. Okay? Okay, so the three causes of overeating. The first is the physical causes. So this is, most overeating is caused by a hormonal imbalance, okay? Overeating, especially sugar, causes too much insulin to be produced in your body. Insulin is a fat storage hormone, okay, the more insulin you produce, the more fat will be stored on your body, the more you way, okay?
If you continually produce insulin, you are going to continue to gain weight. Okay, this is just straight up science, okay? The problem is that when you’re trying to lose weight, the most important thing for you to consume is what it’s your own body fat you want to consume, if you will, you want to burn for energy, your own body fat, in order to lose weight, you cannot do that when your body is full of glucose sugar, your insulin is too high. And you’re in fat storage mode, and you got to, you got to shift that, okay.
So the first thing you need to do is you need to get your insulin levels down. And you can do this by eating less often. And by reducing the amount of sugar you consume. We all know that sugar is bad for us. Okay? It’s actually the worst thing you can put in your body. And I’m saying this, as, as the words are coming out of my mouth here. I’m thinking of the Ben and Jerry’s that I have in the freezer, and I’m like, Oh, my God, I love Ben and Jerry’s. I absolutely love it.
But I’m giving it up, because I know how bad it is for me, and I’m just tired of feeling the way that I felt lately, okay. So I’m giving it up. And here’s the other thing, when you eat too much sugar, you get this huge over desire for food, you get this like physical craving for food.
Because what happens is, sugar is super concentrated, it causes a super concentrated dopamine response in your brain. It causes an excess of dopamine to be produced, which feels really good, right? So much so that the neurotransmitters that are producing the dopamine, they actually down regulate over time.
So it takes more and more sugar for you to get the same amount of pleasure. So you got to eat more sugar to feel good. And your brain and your body or just being there like it’s like a Drug Act, okay? A drug addict needs more and more of the drug to produce the same result. And so what happens there then your insulin goes up again, you get more cravings, you can’t handle the cravings, you eat more, and there’s this crazy cycle that happens, right.
And you know what? This isn’t your fault. We’ve all been programmed this way. For decades, the food industry has made it their mission to make food as delicious as possible, you know, as desirable as possible, they put sugar in everything, for the love. And the food that we eat, it’s so concentrated and processed that it gives us this incredible hit of dopamine when we eat certain foods. And then we have to eat more and more just to get that same feeling.
Okay, so it’s like being addicted to drugs or alcohol, you need more to produce the same effect. So in order to fix the physical cause of overeating, you have to get that insulin level down, you have to eat less, eat less often and eat less processed foods like sugar and flour. Okay? When you do this, you actually can start to get your hormones back in balance and start burning fat instead of burning to sugar. Okay. So that’s how we fix the physical part of overeating.
Okay, next is the mental part of overeating, the mental causes. So mental cravings, this is a real thing. Again, the food industry has concentrated this sugar in our foods so much that we are constantly craving more and more food, more and more of this delicious sugar, right? Our brains are actually responding the way they’re supposed to, though. They’re not,your brain is working normally. Okay, this isn’t your fault.
You eat the sugar, you eat the flour, you release the dopamine. And then your brain wants more of that. It’s just like your primitive brain, the amygdala, part of your brain responding to this like, it’s like a life or death situation, you know, are primitive brains, they’ve learned over time that when food is good, we’re going to produce a hormone that makes us feel good. So that will remember that, hey, this is good, okay.
So when you know when we would be eating blueberries back in the caveman days, you know, back in the day, we’d be eating some blueberries and be like, ooh, these are really good. And you get this little tiny dopamine response, right? That’s good. Oh, I want to remember this, I want to eat more of those because they made me feel good. And so you’ll go back and eat more of the blueberries.
Okay, but over time, it’s kind of developed into this thing of like, life and death kind of situation with our brains. Because now we have like blueberry syrup, blueberry pie, blueberry toaster strudels. We juice everything. So it’s super concentrated, and we get this super intense hit of dopamine. And then when we don’t get it, our brains are like, we need this now or we’re going to die.
Your brain actually literally thinks it’s like a life and death situation happening here. Okay. So that’s kind of like what’s happening with your brain. And then you get these thoughts. So the thoughts will start to come into play here, you get these thoughts of, I’m restless, I’m bored. I feel deprived.
You know, when you stop overeating, even for a little bit. You start to feel like, you know, oh, I just deserve this. I’m deprived. What’s one box of Oreos? You know that you can justify that all you want. And all that mental chatter. All it’s doing is just continuing to build into that idea and support that idea that your brain is thinking like you need this or you’re going to die. And so you give in to it, you give into the mental craving, okay.
And we’ve just been programmed our whole lives, we’ve essentially programmed our minds to over eat and buy now. It’s our subconscious mind that’s running the show. Our subconscious minds have been programmed to make us think we have to overeat or will die. Okay, we get these intense cravings for something sweet.
And I know I talk about Ben and Jerry’s all the time, but it’s just a good example. It’s so good. But it’s like Ben and Jerry’s. You know? I think about that. And I’m like, I’ve just got to have it. And these thoughts go through my mind. Like if I don’t have it, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I might die. And I’ll go to the store and I’ll get some.
I’ll go drive miles to the store to get Ben and Jerry’s just so I can like satisfy that mental craving. And there’s a physical craving there too. But here’s the thing. The good news is that you can reprogram your mind to not overeat, you can reprogram your mind to just just eat normally. This is actually one of the most powerful things I do with my coaching clients is I help them change their brains literally by creating new habits, new neural pathways.
And if you really want to stop overeating, you have to break those old habits and create new habits that serve to reprogram your mind, especially the subconscious. But even if you can get the physical piece to work, and you can get through some of this mental stuff, there’s still that emotional side of overeating that has to be addressed.
One of the biggest underlying factors in weight gain is emotional eating. And you know what? Runners just don’t want to talk about this. Runners think I’ve got this. I’m a runner, I know what to do. I know all this stuff about nutrition, I’ve read the books, like I’m good, thanks. They just don’t want to talk about it. Okay.
Runners do love talking about food, though, but not overeating. You know, we talk about donuts and ice cream and pizza and chips and cake and all that. What are we going to eat after the run? And I would do that too. And I would just eat all that food. But then I noticed something happening to me, I started to feel bad about myself.
You know, I started gaining weight. And I started feeling guilty about overeating. And I started to feel like shame around it. I felt shame about how I looked and how I felt I’ve been fit for a long time and had been really in great shape. And then I got to this point where I didn’t even want to like, take my shirt off at the pool or whatever. Because I was like, oh, I you know, feel fat again, okay.
And I felt judged by other people, like people were talking about me. They probably weren’t, it’s probably all in my head. But I just felt that way. And I felt like a failure. Like, I used to be really fit. I used to be in good shape. And now I’m not anymore. And like, I’m never going to be that person again. And honestly, I just felt depressed about it and sad.
And you know how I know how I dealt with all these emotions I was feeling? Yes, I ate over them. Because eating gives me that little dopamine hit and it feels good. Does that make any sense whatsoever? As I’m saying this, you’re probably like, dude, that makes no sense whatsoever. Or maybe you’re like, yep, I get it.
Here’s the problem, though. When that little feel good, dopamine wears off, you’re still left with feeling all those emotions. But now it’s worse because you feel bad about overeating. So you eat more to feel better. And then like, oh my gosh, it’s this crazy vicious cycle that just goes on and on. But you know what? Emotional eating is a very common thing. It’s a very, very common theme. A lot of people do it, they eat, so they don’t have to feel their feelings. Especially right now during this like stay at home order people are dealing with this crisis by going to the refrigerator. I’ve seen a lot of people joking about it on social media, but I think there’s an underlying like, oh, yeah, that’s me. You know?
I mean, I’ve been doing it. I know that it’s been me, okay. I mean, it does work for a little bit like you do feel a little bit better while you’re eating the Ben and Jerry’s. But when you stop, what happens? Like what results are you getting? Who are you? Who are you becoming in the process of stuffing down your feelings and feeling good momentarily, like you’re using this? It’s like a false pleasure.
You know, to just try to feel good in the moment we were so afraid to feel our feelings that we will become overweight, instead of feeling our feelings. You know, if you want to stop overeating, if you want to lose weight, you have to be able to manage your emotions, you have to be able to feel your emotions. Well, how do you do that?
Well, one of the things you do is you need to stop using food to feel better. Okay, that’s one thing. And you need to learn how to just sit with your feelings, how to sit with your emotions, how to allow them to be there, without reacting to them, or without eating to now feel them. And you know what, here’s some truth I’m gonna drop on you right now.
This is not a comfortable place to be. Sometimes it’s not comfortable, to feel sad, or to feel frustrated or to feel angry, or to feel shame or guilt or whatever it is, it might suck pretty bad sometimes. And honestly, in those times, it’s really good to have somebody there and help you. And that’s where I come in.
And I, one of the most powerful things I do as a coach is I help my clients work through their emotions, I help them to learn to allow those emotions to be with them, to allow them to be present in their body, to embrace that temporary uncomfort uncomfortable feelings so they can get to the other side of that because on the other side of that is all the stuff that you want, okay, on the other side of those uncomfortable feelings are the results that you want in your life, okay? That’s where the good shit is, okay.
And I teach my clients how to be emotional bad asses. Okay, I want to show you how to be an emotional badass. So those are the three big things that people aren’t really talking about. And this is why running doesn’t really work for weight loss. Now, here’s the thing about running.
Running is freaking awesome. You should keep running. Do not misunderstand what I’m saying here. I completely love running and do it all the time. It is just not a great tool for weight loss. Exercise in general is not a great way to lose weight. Because as soon as you stop exercising, the weight is just going to come back if you’re just trying to like do this calorie burn thing. It’s not sustainable.
You have to stop the overeating. The reason you are overweight is because you overeat. And I’m like looking in the mirror when I’m saying this because I do it too. I want to help you overcome your addiction to food. I want to help you overcome your addiction to overeating. I want to help you overcome your addiction to stuffing your feelings down with food.
And I can show you how to do this. I can show you how to stop overeating. More importantly, I can show you how to deal with the physical, mental and emotional aspects of losing weight as a runner. So I’ve got something really amazing to share with you guys. I’m launching a brand new masterclass called You Can’t Outrun Your Fork. And the stop overeating masterclass, it’s a six week live masterclass with me. I’m only allowing 10 people to join this, I just want to keep this really small and intimate.
But you are going to learn why you overeat, you are going to develop a new way of eating that will serve you for the rest of your life, you are going to learn the skills to deal with all those mental and emotional urges and desires. You’re going to learn how to stop the emotional eating, and you’re going to learn how to manage those three things, the physical, mental and emotional aspects of overeating.
We’re going to work on those underlying issues that cause you to overeat. You’re going to learn how to reduce your hunger and your desire for food to their natural states so that you can weigh your natural weight. I want you to imagine for a minute how much easier running will be when you aren’t carrying around all those extra pounds. And you know what no one else is really teaching this in this way.
So here’s the thing, I am going to be offering this course to the general public here in a couple of months. And it’s a lot of material. And I’m walking you through every step of the way. And I’m coaching you we’re doing group coaching, and I’m doing one on one coaching with each person in this group for six weeks, okay?
When I launch this, it’s going to be around $3,000 which I think is a really good deal for that. Okay. But right now, since this is the first time I’m doing this, I want you to help make this launch a success. So I’m only charging $97 for this beta launch. Okay. That being said, there’s only 10 spots available. Some are already taken. If you want to get in on this, you have to sign up now.
I’ve only got a few spots left and I have to cap it at 10. I don’t want more people than that in there. Okay. And there’s just one catch at the end of the program. I’m going to ask you for some feedback. Give me your thoughts about the program and I might ask you to share your story. Cool.
So the program starts Monday April 6, it’s a six week live masterclass with weekly meetings on Zoom. So it’s social distancing friendly. I will be coaching you through the entire process and other people will be going through this with you, I will be going through this with you. You will not be doing this on your own.
You’ll get one on one coaching with me to work through any personal issues that come up to so we’ll have to save some time just me and you talking Okay. You will learn how to stop overeating you will learn how to stop using food to prevent you from becoming the most badass version of yourself. Okay, I want you to join me. Go to innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating. That’s one word, innerfiretribe.com/stopovereating. I would love to hear what you think about this topic.
It might be a little controversial. I don’t know if people when you start talking about food and weight loss, sometimes it can be a little controversial. You know what, if so, bring it on. I want to hear what you think about this. Always, always, always you can reach out to me at hello@innerfiretribe.com. You know and I sincerely hope you all make the most of this time at home. So you can think of this time here locked in your house or whatever as a huge problem. Or you can think of it as a chance to learn and to grow and an opportunity to become the best version of yourself. You get to choose. Much love to each and every one of you will talk to you next week.
Did you know that most runners fail to reach their goals? It’s not because of lack of training, lack of desire, whether it’s running faster or running farther, I believe most runners just haven’t developed the mental toughness they need to get them across the finish line. That’s why I created a step by step training called How to Build Mental Toughness and Become A Badass Runner. I want to show you how to train your mind so you can tough it out when the going gets tough. And the best part, this comprehensive training is yours absolutely free. To get it right now just go to innerfiretribe.com/badass and get started today.
