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119. Why Willpower Doesn’t Work

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One of the biggest misconceptions about losing weight is that requires a ton of willpower. If you have enough willpower you’re good to go, but if you don’t - you’ll probably just fail. This …

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Podcast Transcript

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

Hey there, and welcome to Episode 119, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today, why willpower doesn’t work. So one of the biggest misconceptions about losing weight is that it requires you to have a ton of willpower.

Like if you have enough willpower, you’re good to go. But if you don’t, you’re just going to fail. And this couldn’t be further from the truth. Listen, willpower helps, but it will only get you so far. There are other forces at work that have to be addressed if you want to lose weight and be able to keep it off for good.

So in this episode of the podcast, I’m gonna explain why willpower doesn’t work and what you should be focusing on instead. And listen, if you’re the kind of person who wants a little help with all this with losing weight, with being able to keep it off, you know, maybe you do really well when you have some guidance and support, I want you to know that I’ve just opened up my brand new immersive coaching program called the Running Lean Coaching Project.

This program combines the best elements of group coaching and also includes personal one-on-one coaching with me to help you get the knowledge, the guidance, the encouragement, the accountability that you need to hit your weight loss goals and your running goals.

And our whole focus for the month of April is going to be on building healthy habits that stick. There’s an art and a science to habit change. And all month long, we’re going to be doing live trainings, q&a sessions, workshops and coaching to learn how to ditch the old habits, those old habits that aren’t serving you and replace them with healthy new habits that will actually get you to your weight loss goals.

I hope you’ll join us you can learn more and sign up now at runningleanpodcast.com/join, I would love to have you in the Running Lean Coaching Project where the project is you!

All right, this topic has been one that I’ve been thinking about for a while now, why willpower doesn’t work. And one of my clients actually asked me this question about the difference between willpower and mindset. And it really got me thinking about what I wanted to talk about today and how I wanted to frame this conversation.

So willpower is one of these things that is kind of misunderstood, I think. And willpower is actually defined as control exerted, to do something or restrain impulses. So willpower is actually your ability to control yourself and control the decisions you make in certain circumstances. The thing with willpower, though, it often reflects an internal conflict.

And willpower typically feels like there’s some sort of struggle, you know, just look at the definition: control exerted. So you have to exert some sort of effort and restrain impulses, like it doesn’t feel like there’s like this conflict and struggle going on when you think about willpower. So, here’s an example of what this might look like. So let’s say you’re trying to stick to your food plan, maybe you’d cut out eating sugar, because you know, it’s bad, sugar bad.

So you’re like, okay, I’m not eating sugar right now. And you’re going along fine. And everything’s good. And then you decide on a Sunday afternoon, you’re like, I’m gonna make some chocolate chip cookies with the kids, this will be fine. I haven’t been eating this stuff. It’ll be a fine morning for cookies, I’m just gonna help the kids make these cookies, though. They can eat them or whatever.

So you start making the cookies and everything’s going along beautifully, until you start cooking those cookies. And you can start to smell them. You know, you know where I’m going with this, right? Like the whole house is filled with that smell of fresh baked chocolate chip cookies. Hello. And then they come out of the oven and they’re all gooey and melty.

And this is where you have to have willpower, right? And you feel yourself struggling to not eat the cookies and then you’ve got this internal conflict going on. Because what you want right now in that moment, did you want to scarf down like six to eight of those amazing, gooey, gooey, warm chocolate chip cookies, right? So that’s what you want right now.

That’s what’s like driving your attention. That’s what all your attention is focused on, your energy is focused on, you want these cookies right now. But long term, what you want for yourself is to be, you know, to be the kind of person who’s no longer driven by this obsession with sugar, right?

Someone who has developed a better relationship with sugar delivers a different relationship with food. And you know that eating these cookies right now, will absolutely set you back. Right? It’s not in alignment with who you want to be. But there’s a struggle right? There, you’re fighting against this urge to not eat the cookies.

And that urge is so strong. And you’re just like, you know, white knuckling is like the willpower. That’s our definition and sort of the way we think about willpower, right? You’re just fighting this urge not to eat the cookies, right? So that struggle, that’s what willpower feels like, it’s a battle.

You’re battling against the cookies, like you against the cookies, who’s gonna win? Sometimes it’s you, sometimes it’s the cookies, right? So let’s say you’re in the same situation, but you’ve had a bad day, maybe you know, stress it, you’ve been stressed at work, or the kids have been driving you crazy, or you haven’t been sleeping well. Maybe you’re overtraining, you’re rundown and you’re tired, you’re already like drained of energy, then what?

Well, in that situation, your willpower is going to be greatly diminished, greatly diminished. And your ability to muster up the willpower to not eat the cookies in that moment is just not going to be there. And the cookies will win. I’m going to tell you right now, the cookies win, but when have you ever been there before? I’ve been there before I know exactly what this feels like. And this is not an uncommon situation.

I hear this all the time from people, they really struggle in these situations. And they think that they just don’t have the willpower to stick with it. But here’s the thing, most people are relying on willpower alone, because that’s all they know. Right?

When you even think about changing your diet, and like losing weight, just thinking about that is going to cause a little bit of an internal struggle with you, right, because what you’ve tried in the past maybe hasn’t worked. Or you’re thinking about the discomfort that’s going to be involved with changing your diet and not eating the cookies every time you make them.

And you have this preconceived notion about willpower, which is like, either you have it or you don’t. And you probably believe that your willpower, the willpower that you’re able to muster up isn’t going to be enough to get you through the tough spots, because maybe you’ve tried it in the past and it hasn’t worked.

So this is the way most people see willpower. They see it as an exertion of energy. And as a form of struggle, it’s a struggle, it’s a battle to stick with your diet. And this image comes to mind if somebody just like white knuckling it and like sweating, the sweat’s like dripping off their forehead, they’re frantically trying to keep themselves from eating the chocolate chip cookies.

And they keep looking at the cookies. And then there’s this internal dialogue going on. Right? This is the image that comes to my mind anyway. But this exertion of energy, it implies that what you’re doing is a struggle. And it’s hard. It’s hard work. It’s a battle. And there’s this internal conflict that you’re experiencing, right.

But here’s the thing, it doesn’t have to be a struggle, it can actually feel pretty much effortless, to change your diet and to not have that urge to eat the cookies. And that’s the freedom that comes from doing the inner work of actually changing your mindset and changing your habits. When you change your habits and you change your mindset, now even the cookies become easy and effortless.

There’s no longer a struggle. When you’ve created a new mindset and developed new, healthier habits, these internal conflicts that you used to have they’re just a thing of the past. There’s no more struggling, no more white knuckling it, no more sweating over the plate of cookies. Sticking to your plan becomes easy and effortless.

I know what you’re thinking you’re like, Patrick, this seems crazy. I don’t see how I could possibly do this. Because it’s so hard for me right now where I am. And I get that I really do. And I want to share a story with you about my experience with needing something more than willpower.

So About 15 years ago, actually, on April 9, 15 years ago, so April 9, 2007, was the day that I decided I was no longer going to drink alcohol. So this is actually just a few days from now. And this episode should come out on the eighth. So it’ll be the day after this episode comes out will be me celebrating my 15th anniversary of sobriety.

And I decided to quit drinking, because at the time, my drinking had become unmanageable. And I felt very out of control. And I was using alcohol as a coping mechanism. For decades, really, I was using alcohol to dull difficult emotions. You know, I had all these feelings, and I couldn’t deal with them. And as long as I was drinking, I really didn’t have to deal with the failure.

And that way I didn’t have to feel anything really, I was just numbing out to whatever it was that was going on with me. And to the outside world. I seemed like I was doing okay, I had a job, you know, married, kids, house, dog all these things, right. But on the inside, I was miserable. I was drinking to excess every day, I felt physically sick, pretty much all the time. My marriage was falling apart. In fact, my wife left me because of my drinking.

I was a hot mess. I had two little kids at the time. And I decided one day I woke up one day, it was a Monday morning, it was the day after Easter 2007 April 9th, I woke up, I was feeling sick again. And I decided at that moment that I never wanted to feel that way. Again, I made a decision at that moment that I never wanted to drink again.

Now, of course, I’ve made this pledge to myself a million times before. But this time, it was different. Because I had this thought as I was laying in bed, feeling miserable, wondering if I was gonna be able to go to work or not. And I had this thought at that moment, that for the first time in my life, I was going to ask for help, that I couldn’t do this alone.

But I could do it if I had some help. And I didn’t know what that was gonna look like. But I knew that I was going to find somebody to help me, so I ended up getting some counseling and things like that. And it worked out pretty well in the end. But there were so many times where I had tried to quit before and I couldn’t do it.

And so, after making that decision, I started doing the work of developing a new mindset, this is where I kind of first learned of this concept of like, really, you know, you need a new mind, you know, when it comes to making big changes like this and the same, this exact same principles apply.

When you want to lose weight, when you want to stop eating sugar, when you want to, you know, start feeling better, and start getting healthier, these are big changes. And these things can be very challenging to do on your own especially. But they’re very challenging to do if you’re just going to rely on willpower alone, to get you through all the tough stuff.

And I’m going to tell you right now, if I was to rely on willpower alone, to keep me from drinking these last 15 years, I would not have been able to do it. I’m going to tell you right now, because there were many times over the last 15 years, where I did not have willpower. There were experiences that happened with me in my life where, you know, for example, I lost both my parents, you know, about two years apart early on in my sobriety. And that was very, very challenging for me and my family.

Because my parents were fairly young, you know, in their 70s. I ended up getting married in sobriety and then 10 years later getting divorced from that person. And these were all very challenging times to get through. I like quit jobs, I started new jobs, I changed careers, I did all kinds of things. And I’m going to tell you right now, that if I was relying on willpower to get me through all this stuff, if I was relying on willpower to keep me from taking a drink, it would never have been enough.

I wouldn’t be where I am today. I had to develop a whole new mind. I had to become the kind of person who no longer drinks alcohol. I had to become the kind of person who no longer used alcohol as a way of solving my problems as a way of numbing out, right, I had to start to experience life on life’s terms.

So I decided alcohol was no longer going to be a solution for me, and I had to figure something else out. And what I had to figure out was adopting a new mindset, a mindset of someone who no longer used something external, to feel better on the inside.

Same exact thing when it comes to food. If you’re relying on willpower to get you through, to help you to lose the weight, and get you through all the tough stuff, I’m going to tell you right now, it’s not going to be enough, you’re gonna get stressed out, you’re gonna have a hard day, you’re gonna fail, you’re not going to get enough sleep, you’re going to be, you know, fatigued, mentally, emotionally, physically.

And in those instances, if you’re relying on willpower, I’m going to tell you right now, it’s just not going to work. You have to develop a new mind. Gotta change your mindset. I wouldn’t be sober today, if I was relying on willpower to keep me sober. In order to make these big, profound changes in your life, like changing your diet, losing weight, no longer eating junk food, or training for a marathon, these things require more than willpower, they require a shift in your mindset.

Willpower comes and goes. It’s like an emotion, think about willpower, like an emotion that you have sometimes, right? Like, sometimes you have it, and sometimes you don’t, it’s very strong when it’s present. But when it’s gone, it’s like it’s gone. Right? Think about emotion, maybe you’ve recently had anger, frustration, stress, even a positive emotion, like motivation.

All of these emotional states come and go. They’re not constant. Sometimes they’re around for a while, but they’re always in motion. They’re like, they wax and wane, right. And that’s what happens with our emotions, which is good, we want to, we don’t want to be feeling the same emotion all the time. This is a good thing, right?

Because it means you’re not going to feel sad forever, you’re not going to feel lonely or stressed out forever. It also means that the positive emotions come and go too, and we just have to accept that as part of the deal here, right. So, for example, if you’re relying on the feeling of motivation to always be there, it’s not going to always be there. It comes and goes, you have to create your own motivation. If you want to, you know, go and do something, if you’re not feeling motivated to run, I’m gonna tell you right now, you need to create that motivation, it’s not going to just be bestowed upon you, in some magical way.

I talked about this in great length, in an episode called the secret sauce of self motivation, it’s episode number 62. Definitely check it out. Because it really talks about how to get yourself motivated and get out the door and things like that. But willpower is like an emotion and the way that it comes and goes. So it’s not something you can rely on to be there all the time.

You can’t rely on willpower alone to be there, to get you through the tough stuff to keep you from eating those chocolate chip cookies, or whatever. Whatever your chocolate chip cookies are. Mindset, on the other hand, when you change your mind, this is something that is much deeper, it’s stronger, it’s much more powerful and much more consistent.

Think about your mindset as like a standard that you set for yourself. Right? If you have a standard, like for me, I have a standard. It’s like I don’t drink alcohol. That’s a standard that I set for myself 15 years ago, and I never fall below that standard. So for me, not drinking alcohol is easy and effortless. It does not require any willpower at all.

Today, I can tell you with 100% certainty that I have no desire to drink alcohol, even when it’s like in my face. I can sit at a bar. And I do this sometimes, you know, I go to bars and I’ll eat dinner sitting at the bar talking to the bartender or people around me and things like that. And there’ll be alcohol all over the place.

I don’t even want it. That’s freedom right there. That is like True, true freedom. This can be the same with your relationship with sugar two. So if your standard is I don’t eat sugar, then, you know, eating those chocolate chip cookies I talked about earlier. That’s not going to be thing you have to worry about. Because that’s not who you are. You just don’t do that.

I haven’t had sugar in like two years. None. And that’s a lie. I had sugar about 18 months ago. On my birthday, I had some dessert. But I’ve had one, you know, serving whatever of sugar in last two years, which is why I put it that way. But not eating sugar is just something that I don’t do. It’s just not.

It’s a standard that I have set for myself, I don’t eat sugar. And so it’s easy. It’s effortless. I have this new mindset. And your mindset is based on on a lot. I mean, it’s a big topic, right? It’s based on your beliefs, your values, it’s based on the standards that you set for yourself.

Your mindset is your thoughts, your feelings, all these things, but your mindset beats willpower every single time. Your mindset is what’s driving your behavior. Your mindset is what’s actually creating, you know, whether or not you have this willpower.

Because willpower, think of it like an emotion, okay. So, you have to understand that you, you create your mindset, this is something that, you know, may may be something that you’ve had for a long time, but it’s something you’ve created, you’ve create your own mindset, and you can change it. It’s not set in stone.

Think about this, think about something you do easily and effortlessly right now. like brushing your teeth before going to bed. I’m hoping you do this regularly. Okay, if you don’t, get on that. Okay, so brushing your teeth before you go to bed, right? My guess is that this is like something that you do is so automatic, it doesn’t take willpower to do it, right.

It’s just something you do, you don’t have to be like, okay, I really, really got to brush my teeth here, right? It’s just part of your daily routine. It’s what you do, it’s who you are, you would never think of going to bed, I hope without brushing your teeth.

But it wasn’t always like this for you. Like when you were a kid, brushing your teeth was a struggle, try getting your kids to brush your teeth today, like before going to bed, it’s a struggle, it’s a battle, right? They don’t know what’s good for them, you’re telling them it’s good for them, but they just don’t want to do it.

There’s no internal motivation, they haven’t developed the mindset yet. They haven’t developed the mindset of somebody who just brushes their teeth every night before they go to bed. They will eventually, right, but it takes a while. Just like us, it’s the same way with when we’re trying to change our diet or stick to our workout schedule or stick to our food plan.

Think of yourself as that little kid who doesn’t want to brush their teeth, you’re not going to always feel like doing it. But the more you do it, the easier it becomes, the more you do it, the more it just becomes a part of who you are, the more you do it, the more effortlessly it becomes for you.

You develop your mindset over time, it doesn’t happen overnight. And I know a lot of people get impatient, they want to go fast, they want to stop, they want to stop eating sugar and then stop craving it right away. Because it’d be way easier to give up sugar if you didn’t crave it, right. But that’s the part that takes time.

Just like anything else worthwhile in our lives, it takes time to change your mind. Okay? So you’ve got to be patient with yourself. And one big part of your mindset is how you talk to yourself. So trash talking yourself will not get you there, you have to love yourself through this process of change.

Change can be hard, it can be hard, I get that totally. But beating yourself up every day, because it’s not going fast enough just makes it harder. You can’t hate yourself thin. So I just want you to understand that willpower is fine. And it’s something that you know, you can use at times, and you’ll have it at times, but there’s going to be times where it’s just not going to be there.

And what you need instead is to have developed the mindset of somebody who stays on track of somebody who doesn’t give in to those urges of somebody who doesn’t rely on sugar, or junk food or alcohol to feel better. You have to develop the mindset of somebody who does these things, and it becomes easy and effortless for you.

Because willpower is not going to be there all the time. You can’t rely on it. But you can definitely rely on your mindset. Okay. And remember that we’re going to be spending the whole month of April over in the Running Lean coaching project on the art and science of habit change. So you’re gonna learn exactly how to create the mindset you need to ditch those old habits and make healthy eating healthy habits.

Healthy workout habits, healthy running habits, something that you do easily and effortlessly. And we’re gonna have fun doing it. Just so you know. I hope you’ll join us just go torunningleanpodcast.com/join. Love you all keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.

68. Our Complicated Relationship With Food

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When it comes to health and fitness, there’s no topic more controversial or more complicated than which foods we should eat, and which we should avoid. Some experts tell you this diet or that diet …

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Podcast Transcript

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

Hey there, and welcome to episode 68 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And today, I’ve got a really cool topic for you. This is our complicated relationship with food. So when it comes to our health and fitness, honestly, there’s no topic that’s probably more controversial or more complicated, than what foods we should eat and what foods we should avoid.

And experts will tell you like this diet is the best one for everyone or that one is the best for everyone and, or maybe that it’s not about the food at all. It’s more a problem of willpower and self-control. Just eat whatever you want, just eat less of it and exercise more, and you’ll be fine.

And I’ve come to realize that it’s just not that simple. We humans, we’ve evolved to have a very interesting and very complicated relationship with food. So why is what we eat so complicated? And what does this mean for us? And most importantly, what can we do about it? So in this episode, I share many of the reasons why our relationship with food is complicated. And my hope is that by the end of this episode, you’ll have a deeper understanding of this complicated relationship we have with food, and maybe be able to make some more informed decisions about your own dietary choices.

But first, if you haven’t already done so come check us out on Facebook, we have this amazing group of runners, the Running Lean podcast community, on Facebook, and it’s a place where you can ask questions get help feel supported, hey, we all need to feel supported. Sometimes, especially when it comes to trying to accomplish something big, like training for a marathon or an ultra-marathon or maybe, you know, getting lean and strong, maybe losing some weight.

All of these things. We support each other in the Facebook community. So come and join us. You can lean into this community you’ll find encouragement, inspiration, and motivation. Just go to Facebook and search for Running Lean community. I hope you join us. It’s fun, we have fun.

I want to dive right into this topic today. Because I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks now. And I really wanted to share this information with you guys and acknowledge the fact that our relationship with food is complicated. And I think it’s, we do ourselves a disservice when we try to simplify it, you know, just eat this or don’t eat that. And it’s more complicated than that.

And I want to just really acknowledge how complicated this really is. And that there’s a lot more going on than just, you know, these foods are good, these foods are bad, you know, that kind of mentality. I don’t think that serves anybody. Okay. So before I get into, like, why things are complicated, I want to just give a quick history.

And this is nonscientific. But I just want to give you a rundown, kind of the way we’ve evolved. Okay, so we had these hunter-gatherer ancestors, okay, who I’m assuming did not have a very complicated relationship with food. Alright, food was a means of survival. So they would hunt, they would gather, and they had this survival instinct. They told them that they needed to go forage for food or hunt for food, they got some food, they ate it, they shared it, it was probably from what I understand is probably a community effort.

You know, the whole community got involved with the hunting and gathering, the preparing of the food, and then the eating of the food. And so we evolved with this beautiful, healthy sort of relationship, I guess you could call it a relationship with food. And over millions of years, we grew these amazing brains.

You know, we became the most advanced living creature in the known universe. Think about this. There is no creature that is as evolved as we are that we know about in the universe. There might be, it’d be very cool if we could figure that out and meet some of these other creatures. But for now, it’s just us, okay.

And we evolved this way, because of our dietary choices, really think about it. And then we live this way for eons, you know, from literally millions of years. And then something changed in the last few 1000 years, you know, we started to see things like, people becoming obese and diseased. And, you know, there was a lot of overeating, gluttony, and things like that.

And you can see this in history, if you look at, like the Roman Empire. So this would have been, you know, just a few 1000 years ago, during the Roman Empire, being fat was a sign of being ugly, like they really admired the ideal human form. If you look at the sculptures and paintings from that era, they had this ideal that they were reaching for.

And people that were fat people that were overweight, this is a sign of ugliness, and a sign of being mentally unbalanced, like an unfit mind. And so they created things like gymnasiums, where they would work out to get stronger and improve their fitness and their health. And they held beauty contests for women, just like interesting, you know.

And then, like, early Christians, they thought that being obese was a sign of not being spiritual. And early on in you know, the early few 100 years A.D., you know, gluttony was deemed, you know, one of the deadly sins. And so we started out with really no, sort of, like, emotional, spiritual or mental, like, hang-ups around food, and our bodies.

And then as we’ve evolved, you know, all of this has become more complicated. And being overweight, or obese, you know, has been vilified. Okay. So, just know that you know, only in the last few 1000 years have we started to really have this super complicated relationship with food. And I would say, probably, within the last 100-120 years or so, have things really amped up, you know, especially in the era of the Internet, and social media. And we’ll get into that a little bit more in just a minute here.

But here’s the thing. We do need food to survive. Food gives us life. Food can also cause us harm, it can create a diseased state in our body, we know this. Science tells us this it can create a state of obesity, lead to debilitating diseases, and can even kill us. So when I talk about our complicated relationship with food, we need food to survive without it will die. But eating the wrong types of food too much food can literally kill us. This is where things start to get complicated. Okay.

So, one of the first real big complications I want to talk about here is that you know, the foods we tend to love the most the foods that we’re most drawn to, the foods that we fantasize about, seem to be the ones that are the worst for us. For example, sugar is amazing, right? When we eat sugar, we feel amazing. Feels so good. We get this rush of dopamine, our endorphins, you know get released.

Eating sugar lights up the same centers in our brain as when you do cocaine. So this is great, right? Like we’ve evolved as humans to seek out these kinds of calorie-dense, very sweet foods, you know, like honey, and berries. And we would eat these foods every now and then. But nowadays, these foods that we’re eating are being you know, developed in a laboratory, by food scientists, they’re deemed hyper-palatable.

So they really hijack the pleasure centers of our brains. So when we eat some of these hyper-palatable foods, we can’t get them out of our mind, you know. So we’re really, really drawn to these foods. So that’s sugar.

Flour is the same way. So flour is like, white flour especially, is a very concentrated form of carbohydrate, just like sugar is, but I didn’t know this until recently, but flour actually spikes your blood sugar even more than actual table sugar does. Because it’s ground so finely. So it is a very refined carbohydrate.

But because there’s so much more surface area in flour, because it’s so fine, it will create an even higher spike in your blood sugar. So when you’re eating things that are made of flour, and sugar, this is just like, off the charts, right? So the foods we love the most, the foods that we’re like, most drawn to seem to be the ones that cause the most problems, you know. So this, this makes things complicated, right.

And these foods, you know, we know that too much sugar is bad, and it causes us to hold on to fat, and we store fat when we eat a lot of sugar, and flour. And it’s making us fat, obese, and sick, and it’s slowly killing us. We’ve never been more fat as a nation. In the US, you know, obesity rates have more than tripled since the 1970s.

And the major culprit, I would argue in the science would argue is the highly refined carbohydrates, especially sugar and liquid sugar and soda and things like that. So this is complicated, right, in, in conjunction with that is, you know, is this addictive nature of food. So, you know, I really, I gotta say, in the big food industry, they use this idea of hyper palatability, and they create this food that is super, super desirable so that they can sell more food.

And, honestly, we are being manipulated in a way. I’m not like a conspiracy theorist type of guy here, but we are being manipulated by the big food industries, especially the big packaged food industries because they just want to sell us more food. They’re not concerned about how healthy or unhealthy these products are. They are only concerned about making more money.

And so they put a lot of money into making these foods as highly palatable as possible. And so, you know, this is where the complication comes in, right? Because these foods that we know are not good for us are incredibly addicting, and we just like we can’t get enough of them. Right?

They’re like the most the things we desire the most. Our desire is like off the charts for these kinds of foods. Okay. So, you know, most of us, most of us cannot handle these, these highly refined carbohydrates and most people, the majority of people are what is called carbohydrate intolerant – just means like you can’t handle a diet that’s really high in carbohydrates.

These highly palatable high carbohydrate foods, they’re just as addictive as a substance as something like alcohol. In fact, they turn on those similar pathways in the brain, they turn on this thing called the phenomenon of craving. It’s like once you start thinking about donuts, you can’t get it out of your head and you just gotta go have a doughnut.

It’s very similar to somebody who has an addiction to something like alcohol. When they start thinking about it. They can’t get out of their head. It’s this craving that they just can’t shake. You know, and the food industry they know this and they make these foods that do this to us. So that will buy more.

They even put it on their packaging, you know, once you, once you pop, you can’t stop. Like we acknowledge the fact that you cannot just have one potato chip. You know, like, you’ve got to eat this whole bag once you open it up, that was my experience. Anyway, I used to love those kettle chips. Let’s see, I think it’s called kettle brand chips, I don’t even know anymore.

But they’re these potato chips with like salt and vinegar on them and just the saltiness and, and the bitter like vinegar taste to these things. I could not stop eating these things, I would go through a whole bag, and I could not just eat just one. You’re right, food companies, I cannot stop once I pop.

And so there’s this like addictive nature to and there’s this hyper palatability to food. And on one hand, there are people you know trying to make the food as pleasurable as possible. Remember, our brains are really good at seeking pleasure and avoiding pain that’s our, our amygdala, you know, that ancient part of our brain that primitive part of our brain that is always seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. And this does it for us.

You know, seeking out these highly palatable foods creates this incredibly intense desire and pleasure for us. Okay, but it’s also super terrible for our health. So this is complicated, right? And then you’ll hear people say things like, well, you can eat anything you want, just in moderation. All foods in moderation. This is the slogan that a lot of registered dieticians use: all foods in moderation.

And I just don’t think this is necessarily good advice because, for some of us, certain foods can trigger addictive-like responses. So wouldn’t it be better to just avoid some of these foods? Just a thought. I mean, it’s kind of like telling somebody who has a drinking problem. And maybe they’re an alcoholic to just have a few beers every now and then. You know you can drink. It’s fine. Just you know, one or two.

But the answer for some of us is that the answer, really, for some of us is that we just have to avoid these problematic foods altogether. Because if we start we can’t stop. You know, when I used to drink alcohol, I could not stop at just one. I had to keep going. Because it lit up that pleasure center in my brain. And my brain, you know, maybe it’s wired differently than most people. I don’t know.

But I couldn’t stop it. Just I couldn’t have just one beer, I would see people that would like drink a half a beer and like, leave it on the table. I’d be like, what is happening here? Does not compute. How do you do that?

And it’s the same way with food for a lot of us like we cannot stop we you know, once you if you ordered dessert at the table and everybody’s like, oh, let’s just share, just have one bite, we can each have one bite? No, man, I’m gonna get my own dessert. Okay, I’m gonna eat the whole thing myself. You can’t, I’m not sharing it with you. All right, because I’m not I can’t just have one bite it just triggers this response inside me.

So wouldn’t it be better to maybe just avoid that? Okay. I don’t know that all foods in moderation is like the best advice, you know. And I’m gonna go on a little bit of a rant here just about registered dieticians and I love them and I have friends who are RDS but the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics so this is the organization that kind of the Governing Board of Registered Dieticians. This is an organization that over the years has been funded by big companies like McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola Company, Sara Lee, Abbott nutrition, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars, you know people that make candy. Unilever and the sugar association.

So of course their slogan is going to be all foods in moderation, eat some McDonald’s eat some you know, drink some Coke and Pepsi, eat your cereal, eat your candy bars. Sugar is fine, just in moderation, right. So this organization, the AMD is kind of in bed with big food. And in my opinion and the opinion of a lot of people in the nutrition world, it’s coloring their stance you know, by telling people that cereal and soda and candy bars are fine.

I don’t think this is good advice necessarily. Okay. That does not mean that every registered dietitian is telling people to go eat McDonald’s and Coke and things like that. But I’m just saying that again, this is complicated, right? That there are these relationships that those big companies have with nutrition governing bodies.

And, for example, like registered dietitians, they are the only people that can prescribe meals for patients in hospitals. And for type two diabetic patients. This is no joke. They will prescribe a breakfast of coffee, orange juice, a bagel, Rice Krispies, a V8, and a package of white sugar. This is for somebody suffering from high blood sugar hyperinsulinemia, type two diabetes, this diet is going to spike their blood sugar like crazy. This is not what you want to give somebody that’s a type two diabetic.

And then their solution is well then we just inject them with more insulin and the problem is solved. This is crazy right here. Okay. And if you want to learn more about this, there’s a great book by Michelle Hearn. She’s a registered dietician. And it’s called the Dietitian’s Dilemma.

And she talks about this place where she got to in her dietitian practice where she was like, I just, I don’t feel good prescribing people with type two diabetes, these super high sugary meals, I just can’t do it. But this is what they have to give them. It’s a little complicated.

And here’s the thing, I absolutely believe that we should be able to treat ourselves every now and then. You know, so yeah, some foods are problematic. Maybe for me, you know, sugar is a problem. And maybe I want to not eat sugar most of the time. But can I treat myself every now and then? You know, if it’s Christmas, can I have some Christmas pudding? Or if it’s Thanksgiving? Do I want to eat a piece of pumpkin pie with some whipped cream on it? Yeah, sure. If it’s my birthday, am I gonna eat some birthday cake? Probably yes.

And then I just go back to my regular diet, you know, the next day. But if treating yourself is having negative consequences, or if it becomes something that you can’t stop doing, is this good for you? Is this really a treat?

So, you know, I don’t want to go through my life, never eating a good piece of fresh sourdough bread again, or, you know, pizza, I love pizza for the crust, I’ll be honest with you, I the toppings, whatever, I love pizza, because it’s the crust, I just love the stretchiness of it. And so good. So good.

And I want to be able to eat that, again, I want to be able to eat some ice cream again. But I don’t want to be obsessed with these foods. And this is where things get complicated, right? Because we want to be able to do this every now and then. But for some, we just can’t do that.

You know, so maybe it’s better to just avoid altogether, for the most part, you know, avoid it altogether. Except for maybe some special occasions. I haven’t eaten sugar in a very long time. I think the last time I ate some sugar was on. Well, was it Thanksgiving, probably. And we’re in April now. So this was a while back. And I enjoyed it. But it wasn’t amazing. And I didn’t get obsessed with it, you know.

So for me, I don’t really want to. I just don’t want to eat sugar because I can’t stop once I start. So I’m just you know, the reason I’m doing this today and talking about this stuff is because we do have a complicated relationship with food. And I don’t want to ever say that it’s easy. And that it’s super straightforward.

Because we all have a very unique relationship with food. We all have strong opinions, we all have certain desires and things that trigger us, and it’s complicated. And I just want to acknowledge that.

So another thing that we’re told is that and I kind of mentioned this earlier is that you know, if you just eat less food and exercise more, you’ll be fine. So eat whatever you want, just eat less and exercise more and got nothing to worry about. And honestly, this just doesn’t work. And we’ve talked about this before.

It has been proven that this doesn’t work for the majority of us, you know if you’re overweight. So this is their stance is like if you’re overweight, it means you overeat, you’ve just got to eat less. If you had more self-control, you wouldn’t be overweight, because you wouldn’t eat as much.

And I just think this is so crazy because it’s just not true. There are so many people that watch their calories, and they exercise a lot. And they still gain weight. It’s not necessarily about how much you’re eating. It’s like, what kinds of foods you’re eating? And how is your relationship with it?

I have this client who had a running streak going and still does. But he’s had this running streak going since 2007. So this guy is an absolute beast, he runs at least three miles a day, since 2007. This is like well over 5000 miles, I believe by now. And in this process, he’s gained over 50 pounds. So this is an average weight gain of 3.8 pounds a year.

If it really took that long, you know, it really only came on in the last half of this. So really, it was more like six pounds a year or so. And just so you know, the average adult in the US gains around two pounds a year after the age of 20. And so this is a problem like you’re gonna be pretty overweight, as you get older, right?

But this person, this client of mine, doing this running streak was exercising like crazy, like crazy, and still gained all this weight, like, the answer is not to exercise more. And this person was not a compulsive overeater or anything like that, you know, for the most part, try to eat up a pretty healthy diet but still gained 50 pounds, the answer is not, you know, eat less and run more, it just doesn’t work.

And, you know, there’s a lot of experts out there that are doling out advice. And trying to tell us what we should do. And a lot of this advice, I think, is well-intentioned, and it may work for them. But a lot of these experts are, are thin people, and they’ve always been thin. And they’ve never been overweight, and they’ve never struggled with eating, and they don’t know what it’s like to be a fat person to be overweight.

And some of these experts that are that have always been thin, trying to tell us, you know, well, you just don’t have enough self-control, I think is really doing us a disservice. I used to follow these ultra runners who were following a high carbohydrate plant-based diet, and they’re like, this is what you do, you got to eat all these carbs eat a plant-based diet. And I’m like, oh if this is the way to go, that’s what I’m going to do. Because this is what the experts are telling me.

Well, you know, these, these ultra runner experts are, have been thin their whole life. And they run like 200 miles a week. Okay, they’ve never struggled with their weight a day in their life, maybe they’re not carbohydrate intolerant, they may be part of that population that can handle a high carbohydrate diet. Plus, you know, if you’re running 200 miles a week, you know, it’s gonna be really hard for you to put on weight.

You know, also these people are like, elite athletes are like the top 1% of athletes in the world. You know, and here I am just some average dude with, you know, who’s overweight, you know, trying to follow their advice, and it’s not working for me. Right? This is complicated. It’s not as simple as just doing what they do, because I’m not them.

We’re all different. We all have different needs. We all have different metabolic profiles, we all have different desires, we all have different likes, and we all have different goals. And we have to meet you know, we need to meet ourselves where we are. And we need to do what is best for us and what works for us and having thin people trying to tell us what to do, I don’t think is doing us a much of a service. Okay.

And then we get into things like our relationship with food being so complicated, we get into things like eating disorders, you know, there’s this body dysmorphia, which is a mental illness, you know, and it’s, it’s when people think, you know, they see a flaw in themselves, you know that this flaw they see in themselves, could be very minor or it could even be just something they’re imagining, but they spend hours just, you know, trying to fix this flaw.

You know, they may try to excel at exercise, or they do cosmetic procedures. And they look at themselves in the mirror, and they say, oh, I’m so fat. Or look at that, look at my nose, you know. And this is an issue that causes you to know, other eating disorders. So this body dysmorphia, like we were comparing ourselves to maybe this perfect ideal image we see on Instagram or something.

And it can lead to, you know, depression, anxiety, and other types of eating disorders. You know, like anorexia, Anorexia is a very distorted body image, it’s a super, like, intense fear of gaining weight or being fat. And so a lot of people that have anorexia are very below normal weight, they’re very unhealthy, they starve themselves, they exercise, they over-exercise.

And a lot of these people, need medical treatment, to get themselves back to normal weight. A lot of times they need therapy to help with their self-esteem. And with these behavioral changes, they need to make.

Bulimia is a similar disorder. You know this is binging and purging, you know, and people with bulimia. You know, they’re, they feel compelled to binge eat. And then they want to avoid any kind of weight gain. So they’ll purge, and this can be life-threatening, right, because, you know, with anorexia and bulimia, these people are not getting the nutrition that they need to be healthy.

So, you know, we’ve taken this idea of like, a healthy ideal, and it can go to the extreme. And it can be very hard for people to see themselves as healthy as well, especially when we compare ourselves to others. And if you or somebody you know, is struggling with you know, dysmorphia, anorexia, or bulimia, you need to get some sort of medical help, honestly, because these are serious eating disorders and could be life-threatening. So definitely seek out help with these kinds of things.

But see, there’s this complicated relationship we have with food, you know, and it’s just been, it gets more intense, you know, it can be very intense for people. You know, we have this physical, we have a physical relationship with food, like where we have to eat food, or we die, okay. But like I was saying, you know, we have these hyper-palatable foods, and that creates a physical craving in our body.

So our body gets addicted to these feelings of bliss that we get from eating highly refined carbohydrates, for example. So the way it works is you eat some sugar, let’s say, like, you eat some donuts, right? Blood sugar spikes like crazy, but then it comes crashing down. And in order to get back to baseline, your body needs more donuts, to get back there. So you eat more donuts, and then the cycle repeats, you know, blood sugar spikes then crashes hard.

And you know, we get a lot of energy from eating donuts, we get this like a burst of, of energy, but then after a couple of hours, we have much less energy, we’re more fatigued than before we ate the donuts. Okay, so we have this physical, this complicated physical relationship with food with certain foods especially.

And then we have this emotional relationship with food. We use food to comfort ourselves, we use food to soothe ourselves so that we feel better. When we experience a difficult emotion like we’re stressed out, or we have anxiety, or we’re bored or angry, or we’re sad, or we feel hurt, a lot of times we turn to food to make us feel better.

Some foods we call comfort foods because they come for us. They make us feel good. And this is fine. It’s fine to do this, okay. But if your comfort food has negative consequences, this may not be such a good idea. Obviously, it depends on the food you’re using to comfort yourself. You could cover yourself with a whole pizza like I used to do.

A large pizza and a pint of beer and Ben and Jerry’s and oh, that’s very comforting. But lots of negative consequences. I just kept getting fatter and sicker. You could also come for yourself with other types of food and people don’t think of it this way. But you could come for yourself with a big colorful salad. Or a thick ribeye steak. Or a piece of grilled salmon or yeah, with like butter sauce on it.

Oh my gosh, amazing. And it’s very comforting to eat healthy foods as well, it can be. So we don’t have to go to the highly palatable foods to comfort ourselves, sometimes we can use I know. It’s like, oh, really, Patrick? Like, I’m just gonna go eat a big pile of broccoli? And that’s going to comfort me? And, you know, sometimes, yes, sometimes, yes. Okay.

But we can actually choose comfort foods that do serve us, and that will support our good health. So we have a physical relationship with food that’s complicated, we have an emotional relationship with food that can be complicated. And then we have this mental relationship with food.

You know, just thinking about food can produce a physical craving, just the anticipation of eating food. It’s actually more enticing than the actual experience itself. Like, I remember. Yeah, for Thanksgiving, last year, I was all obsessed about this pumpkin pie. And I’m like, this is gonna be so amazing. And I’m gonna get the, you know, the whipped cream on there. And it’s just, I can’t wait to do it.

And the anticipation, I had this idea in my brain that it was going to be so amazing. And then, when the event actually happened, and I ate it, I was like, all right. It’s like no big deal. It wasn’t as good as it was in my brain, you know, beforehand leading up to it. So we have this mental sort of obsession with food. This is complicated, right?

We have food we see in our Instagram feed, you know, food porn, they call it, you know, and just do a search for the hashtag food porn on Instagram. It’s amazing, like, pictures of burgers and pie and cake, and doughnuts and all kinds of stuff. It’s pretty amazing, your mouth will just start to water just by looking at these pictures. And then there’s the role that, you know, the media plays, and we see these billboards with giant pictures of pizzas on them.

We were out running this past weekend and I don’t like, you know, pizza, really, from this one place here in town. But there was a big giant billboard with his huge pizza on it. And like I said, I don’t even like their pizza. But I saw that billboard. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I go for a big piece of pizza right now, because I’m looking at this thing. And it’s creating this trigger in my brain. Right. And they know that it does that to us.

You know, we see these ads on TV ads, social media ads, and magazines and stuff like that. And the food that they just, you know, they’re just pumping us full of, you know, these images of how amazing this food is, okay. And then we have the social aspects of food. So a lot of times, you know, we want to stay on our plan, but then we, we go out with friends or something, and we feel like we’re being judged by other people.

You know, we want to celebrate with food. But then we feel like we’re, we’re doing something bad. You know, there’s a lot of stereotypes to like, oh, you’re a runner. Oh, all runners are skinny people, all runners can eat whatever they want. They don’t have to worry about getting fat.

I don’t know about you, but that’s not my experience. I was fat. And I felt judged by people, like, oh, you’re a runner, and you’re overweight? Like you must be doing it wrong. And then we have all this fat-shaming that goes on, you know, there’s like so much judgment around this stuff, right? When we’re being judged by others, we tend to want to, you know, crawl back to safety. And so we don’t stick to our program because we feel judged.

You know, we don’t want to be the weirdo at the dinner party, or in the restaurant with our friends. You know, everybody’s eating bread, and you’re like, oh, no bread for me. And they’re like, what’s wrong with you weirdo? Now, of course, people probably don’t say that. But that’s what we think. And we feel judged by people.

There’s this social pressure and food pushers, you know, people that are telling us just eat, just eat it. It’s fine. It’s not fine. It’s not fine. And then, you know, we have this. Speaking of restaurants, we have this problem, I think with portion sizes and how much we eat and how often we eat. And we’re told that we need to eat three meals a day plus a couple of snacks plus dessert and so we end up eating six times a day.

So we’re snacking all day long, and we go out to eat and our portion sizes are humongous, and I think that overeating has become the norm, you know. And then there’s this, like self-torture that we, that we do to ourselves, like, we torture ourselves around food, like, I shouldn’t eat this, or I can eat that. And in order to lose weight, I have to suffer, I have to suffer my way to better health.

You know, if I’m not suffering, I must not be doing it right. So I’ve never had a diet where I didn’t suffer and feel terrible. And then there’s this guilt and shame, we feel and we don’t stick to our plan. And there’s an internal shame of feeling, you know, ugly or overweight. And we have this emotional distress around how much we weigh on the scale.

And if we gain a pound, it means we’re a bad person. And we’re a failure. And we have a bad day. And so we just go back to eating the garbage food, you know. And if you want to know more about the scale drama, check out episode number 66, all about eliminating skilled drama, because I take a deep dive into that topic.

So all of these things I’ve talked about here today, I know I’ve kind of been all over the place. But I did this on purpose because I just want to I want you to know that this is complicated. It’s not a subject that, you know, we can just talk about in black and white. It’s not black and white, there’s so much gray area here. And what works for one person doesn’t work for somebody else.

So what do we do with all this? What do we do with all this information? Yeah, it’s super complicated. So what do we do? Well, I want you to know that the reason I created this is because I wanted to create a massive amount of awareness, I want you to see how complicated our relationship with food has become. And that this is not easy.

This topic is controversial, it’s complicated, it’s complex. There are a lot of nuances here, a lot of gray areas, I want you to be able to make informed decisions about your own health. And I want you to feel good about what you choose to eat and choose not to eat, you got to do what feels good for you. I also want you to be open to different ideas. So maybe not the ideas that are pushed down from the big food companies. But maybe some more grassroots kinds of ideas.

You know, we are all an experiment of one. You need to figure out what works best for you take control of your own health and your own fitness and your own diet and do what feels best for you. If you want to be a vegetarian or a vegan, or do the Mediterranean diet or Weight Watchers, whatever you want to do is completely fine. I have no judgments about any of that stuff.

But if what you’re doing isn’t working, I want you to be open-minded to try something else. You know, I talk about this a lot here I have a bias towards a lower carbohydrate approach. It seems to be the high carbohydrate diets seem to be a problem for most of us. Okay. And so, a lot, just lowering some of these problematic carbohydrates seems to help most people achieve peak physical health.

And, you know, if you can adopt a lower carbohydrate approach, and become a fat-adapted runner, oh, that’s amazing. And if you want help with this, like, reach out to me, I’ll walk you through that whole process step by step. One of the main reasons why I chose this field to specialize in sports, nutrition, health, and fitness coaching for runners is because it is so complicated.

And because I want to take all of these complicated issues here, and I want to do my best to distill them down for you so that they make sense and that you can make informed decisions and you can take control of your own health and fitness. So I do my best here on this podcast and in my coaching programs, to help you to make good decisions and do what works best for you because there’s not one diet that works for everyone.

My job is to help you and help my clients figure out what’s best for you. What’s the best for your body type what works best for your metabolism, what’s going to help support your health and fit goals? What supports your likes and dislikes? Complicated, right? We have a complicated relationship with food. I’m hoping that you got something out of this episode today.

And if you did, if you could please consider sharing it with a friend that would mean a lot to me. All right, that’s all I got for you today. Thanks for letting me rant a little bit here. As always, lots and lots of love to every single one of you keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.

47. How to Handle the Holidays

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

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Podcast Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

29. The Ultimate Guide to Fruit

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

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Podcast Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Podcast Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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