Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
A lot of people feel the need to share their thoughts with me about food restrictions. They say things like, “I don’t ever want to restrict any foods”, or “All foods are OK in moderation”, or …
Continue Reading about 154. The Truth About Food Restrictions →
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 154 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today, the truth about food restrictions. A lot of people feel the need to share with me their thoughts about food restrictions, they’ll tell me things like I don’t ever want to restrict any foods or all foods should be okay in moderation or something like that.
And I know where they’re coming from with this. They just don’t want to have to give up any of their favorite foods. But here’s the thing, if you want to change your health and fitness for the better, if you want to lose weight, maybe even change your relationship with some of these foods, something has to change, you can’t lose weight by eating the same foods that got you overweight in the first place. Right?
Nothing changes if nothing changes. So in this episode, I’m going to share with you the truth about food restrictions. And why it might be necessary to restrict some foods if you want to lose weight, and live your best life. And listen, these concepts that I talked about here on the podcast, the ideas that I share with you here, the things that I teach you here on this podcast are all great on their own.
But if you really want to improve your life, if you want to lose weight, if you want to improve your health, and you want to make changes to the way you you approach food and, and nutrition and fueling, for running and all of that stuff, then you’re going to have to put these principles into practice, you’re going to have to make some changes, you’re gonna have to do things differently.
And that process can be hard, it can be challenging to do that. Because each of us is an experiment of one, you have to kind of figure out the best sort of formula, the best plan that works for you, and for your lifestyle, and for your health and fitness goals.
If I was to tell you that you could just do these five things, and it would improve your life and everybody would do the same things and they would all get the same results, I’d be totally mistaken, I’d be remiss to do that. I don’t want to do that, I’m not going to do that, I’m not going to tell you that, you know, there’s one one formula that’s going to work for everybody, because we’re all so different.
So this is why I do what I do as a coach is that I help you put together a detailed plan that will help you reach your goals. But then we analyze that plan and see how things are working for you as an individual. Are you feeling better? Are you losing weight? Are you sleeping better? Are you improving your running performance? Do your clothes fit better? Do you like the way you look in the mirror?
We’re going to look at all kinds of metrics, and then decide if we want to continue with this path or we need to change the plan a little bit. And that’s the beautiful part of coaching is that this feedback system, it’s you and I working closely together, trying some things, checking to see what’s working and what isn’t, and then we course correct as we go. That’s the way the process works.
I can’t tell you what’s going to be the answer for you as an individual because we are all so different. Okay. But if you want that help, if you want that guidance, if you want that support, the encouragement, the motivation, accountability to stay on track, and reach your health and fitness goals as we enter 2023 then reach out to me just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply fill out a short application for coaching and you and I’ll get on a call and we’ll see if this is a good fit for you. Cool, runningleancoaching.com/apply. And we’ll see you become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself in 2023.
All right, so today I’m feeling pretty compelled to talk about food restrictions. Because I’ve been seeing posts on social media about this. I’ve been getting messages from people. People that are interested in working with me will tell me hey, I really want to work with you. I want you to be my coach, but I just have to tell you, I’m not going to restrict any foods.
I just want to keep eating the same foods that I’m eating and I don’t want to have any kind of restrictions because every time I feel restricted, I binge out on foods and things like that. And I want to address all of this because I think we are doing ourselves a disservice if we think that we can make changes to our diet to our health to our fitness to our weight, and not experience some sort of restriction in some way. Okay?
I hear this from not just from people who want to work with me, but I hear this on social media too. And I see a nutritionist talk about this on social media. And where this comes from, is mostly from dieticians. And these are registered dietitians from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and the problem with, and this is not just me saying this to you; you can go online and find lots of information about about the the academy, but this particular association is funded by a number of food multinationals by pharmaceutical companies.
And food industry lobbying groups, such as the National Confectioners Association, the National Confectioners Association, just so you know, it’s an American trade organization that promotes chocolate candy gum and mints and the companies that make these things. Okay, so the AMD is funded by companies like the National Confectioners Association. The AMD is also funded by companies like PepsiCo, and Mars and Coca Cola and Kellogg’s and General Mills.
And this industry funding gives food companies like Coca Cola and General Mills and stuff, the ability to offer official educational seminars to teach dietitians how to advise their clients in a way that advances the interests of those particular food companies. For example, in a Coca Cola sponsored seminar for dieticians, the speaker promoted free sugars consumption, like for kids as a healthy choice, like kids should just be able to eat as much sugar as they want. This is healthy for kids.
So if you’re listening to advice from registered dieticians, and I’m not saying they’re all the same, or that they all offer the same advice, but in general, a lot of these dietitians will say, you know, oh, all foods are fine. In moderation, we don’t restrict any foods, sugar is fine. Flour is fine, grains are fine. Just understand that this whole organization where they got their certification is funded by the sugar industry, by the pharmaceutical industry, by the junk food industry.
Okay, so anytime I see somebody talking about food restrictions, this idea of, of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics comes to mind, and their funding and who they’re sponsored by, okay. And a lot of their material, a lot of their training material is derived from these food companies to help promote their own interests.
So to me, this is a huge conflict of interest. And I don’t think this is where we should be getting our dietary advice. That’s just my opinion. Okay. So I want you to understand where this idea of never restricting foods comes from. Okay. So what does it mean to restrict foods? I want to just kind of touch on this briefly.
So what this means is that we eliminate some foods from our diet. And some people have a real problem with this. And I’m not just talking about dieticians, but some people think that we should never restrict any kinds of foods from our diet. But what if you find that you know, losing weight is very difficult unless you cut out sugary treats. Wouldn’t it be in your best interest to maybe cut out sugary treats, at least for a while.
Is restricting foods something that you should never do something you should always do? Something that you can do? Every now and then? Like what’s the right answer? Unfortunately, there isn’t really a right answer. But you’re going to hear my stance on this and my stance is going to be this – I think that at times it is necessary to restrict some foods. If you find it very difficult to give up junk food, if you find that you, you know, are addicted to junk food to sugar to you know, soda, to cookies, ice cream, whatever it is, wouldn’t it be in your best interest to you know, get off of that substance?
You know, restriction doesn’t mean it has to be a permanent thing. Restriction means that we restrict ourselves from indulging in that food for a period of time, and for some people, that period of time might be a long time. So I’ve worked with some people who have a real bad relationship with sugar.
And anytime they start eating some sugar, they find that they can’t stop eating sugar. The same goes for people who have issues with drinking or with drugs. You know, some people can drink in moderation, they can drink every now and then. You know, I know someone that can drink once a month. And she has like one drink a month. And I’m like, how do you do that?
And I know other people who have a sip of alcohol, and then and then they’re like off to the races. And they can’t stop drinking until they’re passed out on the floor. That was kind of my experience with alcohol, where as soon as I started drinking, and I drove, I couldn’t stop until I was, you know, pretty much passed out, you know? So, for me, isn’t it better for me to just abstain from drinking alcohol and not have to continually fight that battle? Yeah, I haven’t had alcohol in like 15 years, coming up on 16 years now. And it works for me.
So restricting alcohol, for me, feels great, my life is so much better without it. And it did take some time for me to get through that discomfort of, of change and the discomfort of wanting alcohol and not having it. But once I got through that, it was so much better for me. And today, I don’t even think about it like I don’t need to drink.
You know, I go out to dinner a lot. And I sit at the bar at dinner a lot just because sometimes it’s hard to find a table at a restaurant. And so my girlfriend and I will go out to dinner and sit at the bar, and neither of us really drink. So we just sit at the bar and eat food. While everybody around us is drinking. There’s alcohol everywhere there.
I’m watching them make all these drinks, and some of them look pretty damn good too. But I have no desire to drink, that desire is long gone for me. The same goes with sugar for me. So I was really addicted to sugar. And for many years, many more, I’ll just be honest here, decades, for me decades of eating tons of sugar and tons of carbs, and justifying it with all of the running that I was doing.
And that kind of worked for a while until it didn’t. And I started gaining weight and gained within a few years something like 40 pounds, and really had to take a look at my sugar intake and really had to make a decision like is this something that I want to continue to do? Or do I need to restrict this from my diet?
And I made that decision some years ago where I was just going to remove sugar from my diet. And the more I read about the dangers of sugar, and the problems, the health problems that are caused by sugar, and the obesity epidemic in this country that’s been caused by sugar and flour and grains and refined refined carbohydrates and junk food and processed foods. I just don’t want that in my life.
And so I decided that I was going to just cut that out of my life. Now this does not mean that I don’t ever eat any sugar. I do occasionally very occasionally. I recently had a birthday. And I had a big old piece of birthday cake on my birthday. Because you know what? Nobody wants to eat a birthday salad. Right? I had a piece of birthday cake. And it was great. I loved it.
Does that mean that the next day I needed to eat another half a birthday cake or whatever? No, no, it meant that I had that cake. And then I was done. So my relationship with sugar today is much different than it used to be. In the past, it was something I had to have every single day. That’s an unhealthy relationship with sugar. So for me, restricting this, and eliminating this from my diet 99.7% of the time works for me, and I feel better.
And I know that I’m treating my body right and that I’m eating foods that are actually healthy for me and aren’t harmful. For me. I think sugar is harmful. I think refined grains are harmful for us, especially done in excess. Now if you’re somebody that can really moderate your sugar intake, and you’re like, I’m not going to restrict any foods. This doesn’t apply to me because I want to eat some sugar every now and then. It’s not a big deal, then that’s great. You do you, but if you’re the person who is sitting there listening to this right now and you’re like, Yeah, I’m 40 pounds overweight. I do eat sugar. I have a bad relationship with carbs and sugar. But I really don’t want to give that stuff up.
Then maybe it’s this is a time for you to like, start thinking about that. Maybe you’re thinking he needs to change. Restriction doesn’t have to be permanent, it can be temporary. And I’ve worked with some people who have eliminated sugar from the from their diet, have got fat adapted as a runner, have lost a bunch of weight, and then have incorporated some carbs and some sugar back into their diet very moderately, and they’ve changed their relationship with this food substance, this food like substance, so I’m going to argue that sugar really isn’t necessary for our survival.
So it’s more like a, it’s really more like a drug than it is a food but I get it that you know, it’s sugar is in everything, it’s really, it can be hard to avoid. But if you’re the kind of person who can give it up for a while, change your relationship with it. And then slowly, you know, allow a little bit back in here and there, that’s fine. And if that works for you, and you can maintain your health and maintain your weight and maintain your running performance through all of that, then that is awesome. Like you do you absolutely.
But I think it’s stupid to think that we can keep eating a crappy diet, we can keep eating all this junk food and somehow magically, your health and your weight are going to improve. If nothing changes, nothing changes. And sometimes restricting some foods, you know, for a period of time is exactly what you need. So this idea that, you know, foods, we should never restrict any foods or foods in moderation. You know, I think this is not necessarily a helpful philosophy to adopt. Okay?
Some people cannot moderate. Some people cannot moderate things like sugar. It’s kind of like telling the alcoholic Hey, just just drink every now and then we’re telling the person who’s addicted to cocaine, just you know, do cocaine every now and then like, dude, can’t you just moderate your cocaine use isn’t? Doesn’t that sound stupid when I’m saying this out loud? Doesn’t that sound ridiculous? It is ridiculous.
But this is what we’re telling people with sugar, which by the way, they’ve done studies that have shown that sugar lights up your brain more than cocaine does. That sugar actually has more of a profound impact on your brain. They’ve done these studies with rats, where rats would be given the choice of sugar or cocaine and the rats would choose the sugar over the cocaine. Poor little rats, right? They’re always being tormented.
But anyway, interesting studies, no doubt. And so if you don’t think sugar is a powerful drug, you know, studies like that kind of prove that it really is a very powerful drug, okay? But it sounds stupid to like, say to the alcoholic, or the drug addict, hey, just moderate your intake, you know, just you know, everybody else can just monitor it, why can’t you just moderate it and know if that particular substance is harmful for you? And that particular substance is something you cannot manage and you cannot control? Maybe it’s best to just cut it out of your life. All right, maybe permanently. I have no problem with that.
If you tell me like, hey, Patrick, I’m just going to cut out sugar and I’m going to do that permanently. I don’t need it anymore. And I’ve had clients who’ve told me that they’re like, I love the way I feel now that I stopped eating sugar. I don’t see any reason to ever go back to eat that junk. And I’m like, yeah, cool. I’m with you. That’s pretty much how I live my life. The most sugar I eat in a month would be some chocolate that I eat every now and then, some dark chocolate that I’ve tried, dark chocolate that’s like stevia flavored or whatever it has a erythritol or something, and I just don’t like it. It just doesn’t really do much for me. So I go to this dark chocolate that I get. And it’s pretty low in sugar. But it does have a little bit of sugar in there. But I’ll just use a little bit of that. And it’s so delicious. And it tastes so good.
And then of course, you know, my birthday, I do a piece of cake, piece of cheesecake or birthday cake or whatever. And then thinking back through this past year, as we’re coming to the end of the year here, how many times have I eaten sugar, a few bars of chocolate and some birthday cake. And that’s about it. That’s about it. It’s very, very minimal.
I’ve changed my whole relationship with sugar. And now I can do it very, very sporadically. And my life is not suffering because of that. So when it comes to never restricting foods, I don’t agree with that. I think that for some of us, it is perfectly fine to restrict foods. And for some people, maybe it’s fine to restrict foods for a period of time and then they can kind of incorporate them back.
But if you’re going to adopt this approach, you have to change your mindset around the food that you’re eating around that sugar or the soda or the desserts or whatever it is. The whole concept of restricting foods, it’s less about what foods you’re eating and not eating. And it’s more about your mindset around all of this.
So if you have this mindset of, you know, I’m going to occasionally house some sugar and it’s going to be okay. I’m going to make some cookies with my kids. And I’m going to eat a couple, great, do that. You have to have the right mindset around it, though.
But if your mindset is like, every time I eat sugar, I go into this, you know, binging behavior, if it’s if eating a little bit of sugar sets you up for for a sugar binge increases your cravings, you can’t stop thinking about it, you can’t stop eating. And once you start, then I’m going to say like, this is not something that you want to mess around with here. Like just stop eating that stuff.
This whole addictive behavior thing needs to stop. Right? This is just like you, you would deal with an alcoholic or a drug addict, like just cut them off. You got to get yourself off of the drug. All foods in moderation does not work. For some people it’s like saying all drugs in moderation. Doesn’t that sounds stupid? Yeah.
So what we want to do here is make a decision. You got to make a decision for yourself, what is it you want for yourself? If you want to lose weight, if you want to change your relationship with food, you’re going to have to probably experience some food restrictions. It’s almost impossible to do it any other way though.
And one of the big reasons why people buy into this idea of all foods in moderation or never restrict any foods. It’s because it justifies their crappy behavior. Right? If you buy into this idea that you should never restrict any foods, then this just justifies that addictive behavior. And you never have to change anything. You don’t have to give up anything. You never have to get uncomfortable. You never have to do anything differently. You can just kind of keep doing what you’re doing. And use well you know, this dietician said all foods should be fine in moderation.
But remember, the same people that are telling you this don’t restrict foods and all foods in moderation are that those people are being, you know, funded and trained and educated by the junk food companies, by the pharmaceutical companies, by the sugar industry. Just don’t listen to them. Okay? Do yourself a favor. Don’t listen to them. If you want to change, if you want to improve your health, improve your fitness. If you want to lose weight, you’re gonna have to make some changes here.
You’re gonna have to get uncomfortable. You’re gonna have to embrace the suck a little bit here, okay? Doesn’t mean forever. But what would it look like for you? If you were to lose this idea that you can eat all foods in moderation? What if? What if you just adopted this idea that Yeah, at least for a while. I’m gonna cut this junk out. I’m gonna stop eating junk food. I’m just gonna stop doing what? How do you think that would change your life? Think about that.
If you no longer ate sugar, if you no longer drink soda, if you no longer ate processed foods, how much better would you feel? How would your weight change? How would you feel about yourself? How would your energy levels be? I think that we all want more for ourselves. And that’s why you’re listening to this podcast right now, is because you want something more for yourself.
And if cutting out some of this junk food is the way that you get there. I say go for it. Absolutely go for it. It’s not a bad thing. Do it and cut some of this stuff out permanently. works better for you and your life, then I’m fine with that. It works for me. Maybe it’ll work for you. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all I really do. 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.
One of the most prevalent health issues facing us today is stress. When you think of stress you probably only imagine it being a mental health issue, but chronic stress is a major contributing …
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 144 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today: handling stress like a badass. One of the most prevalent health issues facing us today is stress. And when you think of stress, you’re probably imagining it being a mental health issue, something that happens in your brain. But chronic stress is actually a major contributing factor to a lot of physical disease here, especially in the US.
The good news is that stress can be managed quite well. The bad news is that most people, even runners, do a pretty terrible job of managing stress. Okay, so in this episode, I’m going to explain what stress actually is, how stress might be affecting you, either positively or negatively. And what you can do to start handling stress like badass, okay?
Different people handle stress in different ways. And the key to handling stress, like a badass really, is having a plan. Most people have no plan, okay. So if you find it hard to come up with a plan for yourself, if you want some help staying on track, you know, with that plan, then consider coaching might be a good fit for you.
With coaching, you and I are going to work closely together to set goals to create a plan, and then help you stay on track to help you work the plan. It’s that simple, right? Simple, but not easy. And just so you know, in my coaching program, I offer both group coaching and one on one coaching, so you get the support from the group.
So you get a supportive group of other runners with similar goals. You know, we’re all here trying to lose weight, get fat adapted, improve our running performance, get stronger, become the healthiest versions of ourselves, reduce stress, all those things. So you get the support of the group and you get the support and personalized guidance from me during our one on one coaching sessions, okay, so you get both in my program and a lot of other coaching programs offer like one or the other. But you get both in my program, okay.
So if you’re someone who is looking for some support, some accountability, some guidance, then I want to encourage you to join the Running Lean coaching project. To learn more, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply to get started. You have to apply for this program at this point.
Anyway. It’s a short application, there’s a short interview process where you and I will get on a zoom call. I’ll go over all the details of the coaching program with you and we’ll see if this is a good fit. And if it’s a good fit, I would love to have you join me in the program. I would love to have you in my unique weight loss coaching program for runners called the Running Lean coaching project where the project is you. Cool. Alright, let’s talk about stress, shall we?
And especially, handling stress and handling stress like a badass. So, the reason I’m talking about this today, the thing that kind of inspired me to bring this topic to the forefront was that I recently took a little vacation to Maine and I had never been to Maine before, beautiful state by the way. And we spent some time in Portland and we spent some time in the Lake District and and spent quite a bit of time on this little lake and it was actually a pretty good sized lake. We did some kayaking and some running.
And there were beautiful apple trees all over the place and we were picking apples right off the trees and eating them. And they all tasted a little bit different because they’re different types of apples and I couldn’t tell you which one was which, but they were all amazing. And it was such a super chill relaxed week. For me, like, there was no stress at all.
Everything was just like, you know, there’s this lake and the woods and trees. And just it was beautiful, you know. And it was funny because, you know, the friend that I was with said, I was commenting on how relaxed I was and how stress free I felt. And she was like, well, this is pretty much how you are anyway, Patrick. And I was like, yeah, I guess I am. You know, that’s kind of how I live my life anyway, I don’t really get wallowed in stress, I don’t get mired down in stress these days, like I’ve really learned how to manage stress well.
But the interesting thing is, most people don’t, most people don’t have any kind of stress management strategy in their life at all. Most people rely on things like vacation, or a trip to some really, you know, forced relaxing place like this beautiful lake that I was at. They rely on those short, short amounts of time during the year to de-stress and to kind of manage their stress and to relax.
And I think this is a problem. Because let’s say you get four weeks of vacation per year, which is I think that’s being generous for most people. But let’s just say you get about four weeks of vacation per year. And you know, we’re talking about 52 weeks in the year. So that’s roughly 8% of your year, a percent of your life that you’re dedicating to purposely and intentionally relax and de-stress.
What about the other 92% of your life? What are you doing with the rest of the time? And this is what really struck me is that most people don’t have any kind of ongoing stress management strategies. And so 92% of their life is spent in a state of chronic stress. And this is a real problem.
Stress is the cause of a lot of issues, not just mental health issues, but physical issues. So a couple of stats I found pretty interesting were that according to the American Institute of Stress, about 33% of people report feeling extreme stress. 33% of people, at least here in the United States, feel extreme stress.
77% of people experience stress that affects their physical health. And 73% of people have stress that impacts their mental health. So let’s just round that up and down to about 75% of people are experiencing some sort of stress that affects them either mentally or physically. And 33% of the people in this country report feeling extreme stress. So this is a big problem. And I’m going to talk about some of the downfalls of stress and some of the ways that this affects us, but understand that we are in general, a stressed out nation of people. Okay.
We are a nation of people who do not deal with stress very well, and are a nation of people who are mired down in stress. You know, 75% of the people in this country are reporting stress that affects their physical and mental health. This is a big problem. Okay. So, before we get into, like how stress is affecting us, let’s look at what stress is okay.
So, stress according to the Googles, according to the dictionary, stress is a physical, chemical or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension and may be a factor in disease causation. Stress can be a state that you are in, especially one of bodily or mental tension resulting from factors that tend to alter an existing equilibrium.
So I’m going to like put my own spin on this and just say that basically what we’re talking about here as stress as a physical, emotional or mental tension, that alters our equilibrium, that puts us off balance, that takes our body out of homeostasis; our body and our mind. Okay. So we are no longer in homeostasis, which is where everything is working properly and we are imbalanced, okay.
And we have to understand that there are different types of stress. So stress can be acute stress or stress can be chronic stress, acute stress is something that is very short term, and usually pretty intense, like, lifting heavy weights. So if you do a heavy benchpress session, or you do some sprints, you know, sprint intervals, high intensity interval training, that would be considered acute stress, it’s very short term, it’s very intense.
And it is actually a good form of stress, okay, because it leads to adaptive responses in our body, then we have chronic stress or long term stress, long term or chronic stress is something that is on going like you are going through a tough time at work, and your boss is constantly, you know, on you to get this project finished, and you’re under this deadline.
And, you know, weeks and weeks and weeks of stress over this project, a big project you have to get done. Or maybe you’ve had a death in the family, or going through a divorce or something like that, that can cause long term stress. Okay. And chronic or long term stress can be bad, like this is not the state that we are supposed to be in as human beings, let’s, let’s look at how stress has evolved. So when we were back in the, in their caveman days, or whatever.
As human beings, we would encounter some sort of form of stress like a saber toothed Tiger, and our body would release all these chemicals in the form of the stress hormone cortisol, cortisol gets pumped out in reaction to stress. And that cortisol leads our bodies to get into that fight or flight, state fight flight or freeze state.
And so our body will produce more glucose and our senses will be heightened, more adrenaline will be produced. Because we’re ready to fight or flight, we’re ready to like take action. And so our body’s preparing us to take action to do something about the saber toothed tiger in front of us. Do I run? Do I just stand here? Do I fight this thing?
And so your body’s preparing you to fight that your brain is to your brain is just like on high alert at this point. Okay? This is an acute form of stress, because in a second, that stress is going to be gone. So let’s say you choose to run away, you will see that saber toothed Tiger and you’re like, you know, Screw this, I’m out of here. And you bail and you run like the dickens away from that thing and you hide in a tree or cave or wherever you do. Saber toothed Tiger realizes that there’s gonna be no human snack today. So it leaves the area and you come out and you’re like, Oh, good. stress hormone goes down, glucose levels return to normal, your heart rate gets back down to normal, your brain chemicals return to normal and adrenaline is reduced.
And all those things that happened in response to stress the state of stress that your body was in. Now everything in a very short amount of time. Now everything goes back to normal, you’re back in homeostasis, you’re no longer out of equilibrium, you’re back in balance. Everything is working the way it’s supposed to. This is acute stress. And this is the way our bodies are designed. This is the way that we have evolved over millions of years to handle stress. This is good.
So where our bodies are supposed to work. Then we have the other type of stress, which is chronic, ongoing long term stress. And the interesting thing is that a lot of this is just stuff that we are dealing with in our day to day lives. like sitting in traffic, or, you know, we look at our phones and we open up our inbox, our email inbox, and there’s hundreds of unread messages, and it just makes us feel so stressed out.
So, the email, our email inboxes, the new saber toothed Tiger, or sitting in traffic or worrying about the divorce you’re going through or worrying about that big project you have to at work, or whatever it is that’s going on in your life that is causing this on going consistent long term stress. Chronic stress can cause the same physiological problem. So increased cortisol, increase in blood sugar, increase in adrenaline, that heightened awareness, but it doesn’t go away, it stays that way.
And when your body is in that constant state of fight or flight, your sympathetic nervous system is on high alert. And this is a bad place to be this is, this is not good for you, it’s very hard to to lose weight, if you’re if you’re, you’re going through chronic stress because the constant constant elevated glucose levels, will will cause your insulin levels to be raised and you’re constantly in that fat storing mode. So chronic stress is really the cause of a lot of mental, emotional and physical disease.
The National Institutes of Health says that continued stress on your body from routine, from routine stress, you know, from chronic stress can lead to serious health problems such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, depression, anxiety disorder, and other serious illnesses. And according to the American Psychological Association, chronic stress is also linked to six of the leading causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicide.
So this is a real serious issue. Chronic stress is not something to take lightly. And it’s not something that can be fixed by taking a vacation once a year. All right, this is something that we have to manage on an ongoing basis. Okay.
The other side of this, the kind of good type of stress the acute stress is, is different. And when you put stress on your body by lifting weights or doing high interval training, this actually leads to adaptation, it leads to muscle growth, it leads to improved speed and endurance as a runner. It even leads to improved ability to fight off diseases. So I think this is really fascinating that, you know, there’s two types of stress, there’s good stress, bad stress. And if you want to learn more about this, I did a podcast episode called Good stress, Bad stress. And you can go back and check that one out. It’s episode number 81. And it’s just called Good stress, bad stress. And I go into a deep dive about the different types of stress and how they affect us.
But this idea that stress is more than just a mental or emotional issue is really fascinating. Okay, so we definitely have to pay attention to stress, and we have to pay attention to the way stress is affecting us.
And are we purposely putting our bodies under acute stress like, you know, lifting weights or doing interval training to build strength or to build speed or to build endurance? Or is our body under this constant type of ongoing chronic stress where we’re just kind of always in that heightened state of awareness and that heightened fight or flight mode, like we because that’s not good for you? Okay?
So, it’s important to manage stress, and I just don’t think we do a very good job of it, okay. And when it comes down to what stress really is, it’s a physical or an emotional response. And it can be good or bad, right? We’ve talked about acute stress being good. And we’ve talked about chronic stress being bad, but even emotional stress can be good or bad.
So, you know, the stress hormones, like cortisol that get released, can help an animal to adapt to their environment to become more aware to become more resilient, with the same types of stressors that they experience in the future. So the same way that we can adapt from acute stress. from a physical standpoint, we can also adapt to acute stressors from a mental and emotional standpoint, think about going through a tough breakup, or a death in the family or something like that.
When that happens to you, you become more resilient and less fragile. For the next time that that same kind of thing happens, okay? It’s the same principle as lifting heavy weights or doing interval training that builds stronger, more resilient muscles. We’re building a stronger, more resilient, mental and emotional state, when we go through certain types of stressors in our life, and we get through them relatively quickly, okay. But just understand that this idea of chronic stress really is affecting our lives profoundly. And we have to be really diligent about managing stress. And most people don’t do it very well.
Most people handle stress by doing things like stress eating, or stress and drinking, you know, and, and, and these are coping mechanisms that they’ve developed over the years. And sometimes they’ve, they’ve been doing them since they were, you know, young children even. And it’s a way of, you know, drinking or eating over stress is a way that we’ve just trained ourselves to manage stress.
The problem is that, you know, when we deal with stress, with alcohol or with food, it really doesn’t have the effect we want it to have. Like, we think that you know, drinking alcohol is gonna make us feel relaxed, right? It does for a moment, but then it has that opposite effect, when the alcohol wears off, we get more stressed out, just because it has that counter effect, right?
Same thing with stress eating when we eat. Because we’re stressed out, we feel a little bit better temporarily. It’s like, oh, I’m feeling really stressed out, I’m just gonna eat this whole gallon of ice cream right here, half gallon of ice cream, whatever it is, I can eat a gallon of ice cream at once. Love to do that. But you know, you eat the half gallon of ice cream, and you’re like, Oh, this feels so amazing. And it just feels so good.
But then you feel terrible afterwards. And you gain weight and you can’t, you just not functioning properly and you have that big sugar crash and, and then all of a sudden you feel terrible about going off, you’re bland and like you just you know, I shouldn’t have done that. And you just become even more stressed out about the whole thing.
Okay, so stress eating and drinking are not good coping mechanisms, they are not good stress management strategies. Okay. Another way that people don’t really realize that stress affects them is that they may not sleep well at night. And that can put their body into a state of chronic stress, just not getting a good night’s sleep every night can cause chronic stress that in itself can cause stress.
Also, not sleeping well can be a byproduct of stress. So if you’re not sleeping, well, you’ve got to look at that and look at the stress in your life as a cause, or the cause of stress in your life. Okay, so getting enough sleep at night is extremely important. Right? And real real, the real problem we’re dealing with here is that there is no ongoing stress management, do you have an ongoing stress management system in place? Or do you just like deal with stress when it shows up, because if you’re the kind of person who just wants to deal with stress, when it shows up, it might be too late, you might be just like, too far gone. You know what I mean? It’s maybe too much for you, okay.
And people use time off, they use vacations, they use the weekends, to blow off steam or to let your hair down, or to unwind or relax or whatever. And the problem with this approach is that you can’t just de-stress on the weekend or on vacation. And using food or alcohol, as stress management tools does not work either.
And I know so many people that have used food or alcohol to manage stress, and it’s an ongoing stress management strategy that does not work. It has the opposite effect that they’re looking for. So we want to handle stress differently. We want to handle stress like a badass, right? The way you handle stress like a badass The first step is to be proactive, not reactive.
You can’t react to stress in your life and then decide, well, I better come up with some kind of strategy to deal with this, you have to be proactive, you have to have a regular, ongoing stress management practice of some sort. This is not something you just do when you’re on vacation, it’s not something you just do on the weekends. It’s something that you have to do every single day. So first of all, you have to be proactive, and you have to have something that you’re doing every day to help manage stress, what is that? What would that look like for you?
But it depends, but some things that people like to do to manage stress would be taking a walk, going for a run, exercising in some way, you know, cycling, rowing, lifting weights, these are all things you can do every single day to help reduce stress. If that isn’t enough, you know, you can add in other types of exercise, yoga, you can do some hit training, you can do interval other types of interval training.
There’s just so many different ways from an exercise perspective that you can use, that you can do to help manage stress on an ongoing basis that there’s just really the possibilities are endless, right? Exercise is one of the best ways of getting your body taking your body from that state of heightened awareness, that state of fight or flight, that state of stress, and using the adrenaline using the cortisol using the glucose in your system and releasing it, you know, using it for, you know, intense exercise or, you know, whatever that might look like for you even a power walk, whatever. And then, you know, burning it off, basically, you know, burning off that stress.
And then, you know, doing this on an ongoing basis, we’ll just help to alleviate that stress, okay. But there’s other things that we can do, we can use, things like meditation, and journaling. These are great ways of helping to reduce stress on an ongoing basis. So this is something that you can do every single day, and just get in the habit of doing okay.
The other thing you have to do is if you want to handle stress, like a badass is you have to stop using food and alcohol, and drugs and other external substances as stress relievers, because they do not work, they have the opposite effect, they come with a bunch of baggage, they come with all the negative side effects. You know, if you’re using alcohol, for example, as a stress management tool, you are risking a lot more than just you know, maybe not reducing stress very well.
But you can find yourself more reliant on alcohol on a regular basis and using alcohol more regularly. And we know that, you know, using alcohol regularly will kick your body out of that fat burning mode and keep your body in fat storage mode. And your running performance is affected negatively with alcohol use, you know, for several days afterwards. So alcohol, drugs, food, we got to stop using these things to reduce stress, okay?
And the other step we need to really get our arms around here is that we need to learn how to manage our minds and our emotions, we need to learn how to manage our brains and our emotional response to things. When it comes to things in our environment that stress us out, like you know, that project at work or that divorce or whatever it is, a lot of times it’s not the event itself that’s causing the stress, but it’s our thoughts about it.
And we have to learn how to manage those thoughts and feelings. This is called managing your mind or, or managing your mindset around this stuff, right. So if you’re constantly thinking that this situation at work is going to stress you out and the situation with your ex is stressing you out, then you’re going to be in this heightened stress state from a mental and emotional standpoint, and then that’s going to cause the physical reactions too.
And sometimes, if we can do some journaling, if we can do some self awareness practices that will help to build the awareness of what it is we’re actually thinking and feeling in those moments where we feel stressed out. We can learn to manage those things, we can learn to manage our mind, we can learn to manage our emotional state and our mental state. Stress does not have to be detrimental to your health and well being.
Stress can be one of those things that you manage, like a badass, right and I want to encourage you to start doing something every single day to start managing your stress, what could that look like for you? Okay, I want you to start handling stress like a badass Cool. Alright, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I will 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.
Have you ever considered how alcohol might be negatively affecting you? Do you know how alcohol affects your running performance or your ability to lose weight? Have you ever considered taking a …
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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 138 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, is alcohol really working for you? Have you ever considered how alcohol might be negatively affecting you? Do you know how alcohol affects your running performance? Or your ability to maintain or lose weight? Have you ever considered taking a break from drinking? Or does the mere idea of quitting kind of send you into panic mode?
So today, I want to pose this question. Is alcohol really working for you? Or are you just acting like it is? It’s a legit question. And it’s a question that I really honestly want you to consider while you’re listening to this episode today. Because drinking alcohol has been normalized, and even glorified for centuries. But is it really doing you any good at all? Is alcohol all it’s cracked up to be?
In this episode, I’m going to tackle the big question of whether or not alcohol is actually working for you. Or maybe it’s working against you. And just so you know, this is another one of those tough love episodes. So you might want to strap in, but I know you can totally handle it. So I just got back from a run. And I feel amazing.
And I used to never think that I could be a runner. Because back in the day, I drank a lot. I smoked cigarettes, I ate garbage food, I never exercised, I was fat, and out of shape, and poisoning myself daily. And then one day I woke up, I woke up and I was hung over again. And I did something that I had never even considered doing before. And that is: I asked for help.
I knew for many, many years that I had to quit drinking, but it seemed way too hard for me to do on my own, it seemed impossible. I tried it kinda sorta here and there. But, you know, doing it on my own just seemed like just too big of an endeavor and seemed too impossible for me.
But asking for help, all of a sudden, it was like this light bulb moment that I had where I was like, You know what, I can get some help. And I bet I can do this if I get some help. So asking for help, for help seemed for the first time doable like quitting drinking seemed doable. And of course, I was ready to change at that moment. And I was finally willing to do something about it, I was willing to ask for help.
And what that looked like was, you know, I went to therapy, I did some 12 step work, I had several mentors along the way to becoming a sober person. But getting help was really the number one key ingredient in the recipe that was my getting sober my sobriety.
And it was the same when I gave up eating junk food, you know, I got someone to help me through that. And it was the first time I ever invested in myself in this way. It was also by far the best thing I’ve ever done for myself, not just because it helped me to become the healthy, happy fit person I am today.
Because it also led me down this path of helping other runners like you to quit eating garbage and just start becoming the best version of yourself. So if you’re ready to change if you’re ready to maybe quit drinking or quit eating junk food, too.
If you’re also willing to change and willing to ask for help willing to accept help, then you should really consider coaching. And coaching with me looks a little bit different than the way other people do this. There’s several different components to how I do my coaching program. So there’s one on one coaching with me, where you get to work with me personally to help you figure out a plan for you help you to stay on track.
On that plan, we keep course correcting as needed. We do group coaching, this is a very powerful component of the coaching project, where you get the support of other people that are going through the same thing you’re going through, we share wins, we celebrate progress, we support each other, we encourage and inspire one another.
I have a huge library of training materials you’ll have access to that you can kind of go through at your own pace. And then in between group coaching calls, and one on one coaching calls, you have access to me via messaging so that, you know you have this 24/7 lifeline to me, basically.
So I’m with you all the time. You can reach out, you can ask questions, you can get help, you can get support, you can get some accountability at any time. I also have a private podcast channel that is different from the podcast channel you’re listening to right now. And this is where I record all my group coaching calls.
So there’s a backlog of a year and a half of trainings and things like that, that you have access to that you can listen to while you’re out running. So there’s all these different components of my coaching program. And I call this an immersive coaching program because you’re immersed in this world of people and information and knowledge and support and encouragement and motivation and inspiration and accountability to help you stay on track to help you achieve your goals to help you become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself.
So if this is something that interests you, just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on work with me. You have to apply for coaching. We’ll have a short conversation, and we’ll see if this is a good fit for you. Cool, I would love to have you in the Running Lean coaching project. Just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on work with me. And I’ll see you soon.
Okay, so let’s talk about whether or not alcohol is really working for you. The first thing I want to kind of go over is like what is alcohol actually? You know, we think of alcohol as just being like cool craft IPAs and rose and you know, white claw and all these things. But what is alcohol? What is the active ingredient in alcohol?
So, alcohol, the active ingredient is ethanol. It’s also called ethyl alcohol, grain alcohol drinking alcohol. And it’s an organic chemical compound. Ethanol is a volatile, flammable, colorless liquid with a wine-like odor and a pungent taste. It is a psychoactive drug. It’s a recreational drug, and the active ingredient in alcoholic drinks.
I want to make this very, very clear that this is a psychoactive recreational drug that we are talking about here. Okay. Ethanol is naturally produced by the fermentation of sugars by yeast or via petrochemical processes such as ethylene hydration. I don’t even know what that means.
It has medical applications as an antiseptic, and a disinfectant, because it kills organisms by denaturing their proteins. It’s used as a chemical solvent. It’s used as a fuel source. It is a central nervous system depressant. And ethanol is one of the most commonly consumed psychoactive drugs.
Now, doesn’t that sound amazing? Doesn’t that one want to make you go out and have a few cocktails with friends? Ethanol is poisonous and toxic. It’s used as a fuel. They literally use it in cars as fuel.
And they use it to kill organisms. So anything that comes in contact with it really kills and is poisonous. So just know that what we’re talking about here is a pretty serious poison. All right. Now, of course the dosage does matter.
But I want you to consider something I want you to consider whether or not you would drink a little bit of rat poison. Now, what if rat poison had become, you know, socially acceptable, or something like heroin? You know, what about just using a little bit of heroin?
You know, of course the dosage matters, but what if you just did a little bit? You know, so it sounds crazy that I would make that comparison. But isn’t that crazy? I don’t think so. Here’s the thing, when you drink alcohol, it affects you negatively. And I’m going to go through some of the reasons why you may want to abstain from drinking alcohol, because there’s a lot of negative effects of drinking alcohol, okay?
Just so you know, though, that when you drink, even one to two drinks a week, it takes three to four days to fully remove that alcohol from your system. So if you’re drinking just once or twice a week, you’re never fully removing alcohol from your body, that alcohol is always in your system. And it’s going to affect you negatively, daily. All right.
So even drinking once or twice a week, if you think oh, you know, it’s fine. But you’re actually just never going to fully metabolize and process and remove that alcohol from your system. Okay. So, here are some things to consider, some negative effects of drinking alcohol that you may want to consider.
So the first one is that it disrupts sleep patterns and disrupts your sleep, it actually increases stress, anxiety, and increases memory loss. And also you’re going to have this lack of recovery from workouts, because you’re not getting enough sleep. Sleep is so important for your overall health.
And if you’re somebody who’s trying to lose weight, and, you know, train for a marathon or something like that, and you’re constantly not getting a good night’s sleep, you may want to consider removing alcohol, because you’re going to sleep much better, okay?
Alcohol also fuels anxiety. So there’s something called AB response when you consume a drug. So any drug whatsoever will produce two responses in the body and a response and a B response. So the effect of the drug produces an A response, right, there’s this a process that happens when you drink alcohol. And that could be like, oh, you feel more relaxed, okay.
So it does produce an effect, right, it may take the edge off a little bit, you may be a little bit distressed, you may reduce anxiety a little bit, okay. So that’s the A response. But then it triggers a B response, which tends to last much longer than the a process. So that B process is the exact opposite of a process.
And again, this is the same for any drug. So if the drug makes you feel relaxed, that’s the A process then the process will make you feel more anxious, more tense, more stressed out more anxiety. You’re going to experience actually, more anxiety, the more you go for the drink. And the more you drink, the more tense and anxious you’re actually going to be most of the time, the effect you’re looking for that a response is very short lived, it’s very fleeting.
The counteractive effect, that B response, is more persistent and long lasting. So in essence, alcohol fuels anxiety, it causes anxiety, it doesn’t manage anxiety, if you think you’re using alcohol to de stress, think again, you’re actually going to become more stressed out just because of the use of the drug. Okay.
Another negative effect of using alcohol is that it impedes detoxification. So your liver is responsible for detoxifying your body of harmful compounds that you eat, drink, rub on your skin breeze, whatever your liver cannot function, you know, cannot do other things while it’s processing.
The alcohol takes precedence over everything else. Detoxification is put on hold. Whenever alcohol is present, that means all these toxins that your liver should be removing from your system are being stored in your body and they get stored in your own adipose tissue, your own body fat, okay?
Drinking alcohol also causes weight gain. You know, alcohol is high in sugar, it’s high in calories. It’s has zero nutritional value. It’s not a food substance. You don’t need to drink alcohol. It’s not an essential nutrient that we have to have. It’s a poison, okay? It’s also a natural appetite stimulant. It numbs the body’s natural fullness sensors, so you don’t feel like you ever get full, so you end up eating more, and you don’t feel you don’t get that sense of fullness when you eat.
And so you typically eat more than you would normally eat. So you’re over eating, it increases sugar cravings, it increases carbohydrate cravings. And if you don’t believe me, have you ever been in line at a White Castle, two or three o’clock in the morning after drinking? Yeah, because all you want is french fries, and sliders, and apparently diarrhea.
But anyway, it’s also the only beverage without a nutritional label or an ingredient list. Like you don’t have to, they don’t have to put those things on there. All right. Another thing about drinking is that you tend to make poor choices when you’re drinking.
So you tend to, your inhibition, sort of like just goes out the window, and you’re just like, whatever, let’s just eat junk food, you know, whatever. So if you’re like, more likely, if you’re trying to stay on an eating plan, and you’re trying to eat healthy food, you’re much more likely to eat junk food, when you’re drinking, right, it messes up your cognitive thinking you’re just start making bad choices, you know, it also, when you’re drinking alcohol, it shuts down fat burning.
So your body is trying to metabolize the alcohol. And again, like the liver, it’s going to prioritize metabolizing or using alcohol as a fuel source before anything else. So if you’re trying to be a fat adapted athlete, and you’re trying to do all these great things for yourself, and you’re trying to, you know, become a more efficient fat burner, and you’re, you know, you’re attempting to use, you know, become a fat adapted runner, and, and then you’re drinking on a regular basis, you’re just kind of shutting all that down, you’re shutting off that whole process, right.
And, again, three or four days just from having one drink, and it could take three to four days for that to leave your body. So if you’re drinking once or twice a week, just know that you are completely shutting down your fat burning process, okay?
Alcohol also messes up your brain, it really does. They’ve shown that alcohol actually affects every region of the brain. So they call it the neurological sledgehammer. It affects memory, motor function, personality, inhibition, emotional volatility, every area of your brain gets affected negatively from alcohol.
And then a few things that are specific for running you know, alcohol will reduce your athletic performance studies have shown that your aerobic performance is going to be diminished. The day after consuming alcohol like that run, you may go out Friday night and have a bunch of beers and then Saturday morning you get up to run, that run is not going to be at your best, you’re going to be your performance will be diminished for sure.
A study in the journal nutrients also showed that drinking alcohol reduces muscle strength. Well, that’s not good. We don’t want to reduce muscle strength, we want our muscles to be strong and want them to do what they’re supposed to do.
And another study actually showed that alcohol will negatively impact protein synthesis. Protein synthesis is the ability of your body to turn protein into muscle. So if you’re trying to build muscle, if you’re doing some strength training to try to build muscle, then drinking alcohol will completely shut that process down. And it will negatively impact your ability to turn protein into muscle. Okay.
Alcohol is also an anti nutrient. Alcohol is void of nutrients, it does not have vitamins or minerals. So alcohol ends up robbing your body of the micronutrients that it needs just so the body can assimilate the alcohol and metabolize the alcohol it depletes your body of essential nutrients needed to maintain good health. Alcohol diminishes your body’s ability to absorb other nutrients as well.
And this is not good because if again, if you’re trying to eat healthy, but you’re drinking, your body’s not going to be able to absorb the good food that you’re eating, you’re not going to be able to absorb the nutrients that your body actually needs. Okay? Why spend all this time eating healthy and then drinking alcohol to just leech all that out of you? It doesn’t make any sense at all, okay.
And drinking alcohol also makes you more prone to premature fatigue during your next exercise session. So you know, not only is your aerobic performance diminished, but you will crash and burn faster. You won’t be able to run as long because of the alcohol Okay? Alcohol also impedes recovery especially if you drink you know soon after a workout.
And I can’t tell you how many runners I see, finish a run and then crack open some beers like to celebrate that run. Drinking alcohol increases dehydration, it interferes with glycogen replenishing. It inhibits repair of muscle tissue. It suppresses your production of testosterone and human growth hormone.
All of these things are going to really, you know, harm your recovery process. The toxic impact of just one drink will depress the endocrine system dramatically. So recovery from intense training is basically canceled until your body metabolizes all the alcohol. Again, we’re talking about three or four days, your body is always trying to get to homeostasis, wants to get to normal, it wants everything to be balanced and good.
And it cannot get there until the alcohol is gone from your system. Alcohol is also linked to seven different types of cancer. Alcohol is a carcinogen. It’s carcinogenic, it causes cancer and over 100 studies confirm the link between drinking and cancer, especially breast cancer.
Women who drink just three alcoholic beverages a week have a 15% higher risk of breast cancer. And that risk has increased by 10%. For each additional drink you have daily. It’s also responsible or linked to at least other cancers like mouth and throat, esophagus, voicebox, liver, colon rectum, basically, anywhere in the digestive system that alcohol comes into contact with is at risk for cancer.
Again, remember we talked about it being a poison, a toxin, it kills microorganisms, it denatures proteins. So drinking this stuff, putting it into your body is going to really negatively affect you in so many different ways. Now, you might be thinking, I’m just being overly dramatic or overly negative about alcohol. But I’m really not. These are just facts, you get to decide what you want to do.
If you want to continue using the drug, use the drug, I don’t care. But if you find that you want to stop, or maybe you can’t stop, even though you want to just know that I can help with that. Okay, you can reach out to me, we can talk about what that might look like for you.
I’ve been living alcohol free for over 15 years. And I never thought I could be a non drinker. I never thought I could get through a weekend or a holiday or a birthday or a Wednesday. without drinking. I never thought I could do it. But my life is so much richer now. So much fuller, so much more meaningful. I feel so much better about myself.
I have connections with other human beings, real connections with other human beings now, I don’t have to go dive into a bottle to escape my problems or my fears, my anxieties are up, I still have anxiety I do. I just don’t use alcohol anymore. I’ve come up with other coping mechanisms, other emotional management tools. You don’t have to use alcohol to get through life.
If you think you have to use it, if you think that’s the only choice for you. I’m telling you it’s not. And if somebody like me, can quit after drinking for 25 years. You can too. Because alcohol is addictive. And they’ve done some studies where they’ve shown that alcohol is just as addictive as drugs like cocaine.
Now, people might say well, oh gosh, Patrick, you can’t make that comparison. Cocaine is way more dangerous. And it’s way more addictive. No, it is not. It’s exactly as addictive as alcohol, alcohol and cocaine are just as addictive. The biggest difference is that cocaine is highly regulated. And it’s illegal. And it doesn’t kill as many people, it doesn’t cause as many problems.
Oh, that was the only difference is really alcohol causes more deaths per year, than cocaine, for sure. You know, and the problems related to alcohol are tenfold compared to cocaine. And if you’re, you know, if you want to know a little bit about what the cycle of addiction looks like it kind of looks like this.
And this is the same cycle for all addictions, whether it’s cocaine, or cigarettes, or pornography, or shopping, or sex, or sugar, or alcohol, they all work the same. Okay? So you, you take your drug, like drinking alcohol, and you get this release of dopamine and dopamine gets released in unnaturally high amounts because the drug produces an unnatural high for you.
And that high is because a lot of it is because of the dopamine that your brain emits right in these unnaturally high amounts. And then glutamate gets released. Now, glutamate will respond to it’s kind of like a memory locking tool, if you want to put it that way.
Okay, it’s another neurotransmitter, but glutamate will get released. Also in unnaturally high amounts to help you kind of remember the effect to lock it into your memory banks. If you think about this, back in the caveman days, you know, we would find some honey, and we would eat the honey. And we would get that dopamine hit and we go like, ooh, that’s really good. But then we get this glutamate response to this says, we gotta remember this, this is really good.
This is a good source of calories. And this is something that we should come back to. So we got to remember, like where we are, where do we find this? How did this make us feel? All that stuff, right? So that’s what glutamate does. So you drink alcohol, you get the dopamine hit, you get the glutamate response, which locks it into your memory. And then that memory is what you recall, when we talk about, there’s this idea called euphoric recall, where you start to recall the feeling that you get from drinking alcohol, or doing whatever your drug of choice is.
And it produces this like euphoric feeling. And like, you just want that euphoric feeling again, you know, it makes you remember that euphoric feeling. All drugs produce this effect, okay. And then you go back to that drug, and that’s the cycle, right? You drink it, you drink alcohol, dopamine gets released, glutamate gets released, then you have that euphoric recall, you want it again, you know, you need the alcohol again, to give you that response again.
And then the cycle just continues. You’ve got to get out of the cycle. It’s a cycle that you can get out of, you can, you’re not hopeless, whether it’s sugar, or alcohol, or cigarettes, or whatever, you can jump off that cycle at any time. Is it easy? No, it’s hard. It’s hard to do.
One of the things that makes it hard is that we are being sold a bill of goods about alcohol, we’re being marketed to. Alcohol is not required to relax. Alcohol is not required to enjoy life, you don’t need alcohol to unwind. You don’t need alcohol to de-stress. You don’t need a drink to have a good time with your friends. I do all these things without alcohol, just fine. And I have for the last 15 years.
I relax, just fine, I do stress, I have a good time with friends. I enjoy parties and holidays, and birthdays now without alcohol, and it’s all good. But the big alcohol companies, they’re marketing an idea to you that in order to have a happy, fun life, alcohol is a requirement. But it’s not it’s not a requirement. Drinking alcohol has almost zero positive benefits, you know, maybe feels good for a minute, but it has this huge list of negative consequences. How is this possibly the key to a healthy, happy life? Why do we think this is the answer? It’s not.
And you might think that you’re deciding for yourself that you want to drink this craft IPA because it makes you feel cool, and hip and sophisticated. And this is what people do. This is you know, and this is what I’m choosing for myself, but it’s really not your decision at all. This is actually part of a marketing tactic and it’s called engineered consent.
And this idea of engineered consent was first introduced by a guy named Edward Bernays. He was a public relations guru back in 1929. And he was working for the big tobacco companies, American Tobacco companies specifically, and they wanted to tap into a new market.
They wanted to get more women to smoke. Like women were smoking at the time, but they were doing it very covertly. They’re doing it behind closed doors, not in public. So they wanted to get more women to smoke in public, because it was kind of taboo at the time. So Bernays hired a bunch of women to smoke in the Easter Parade, 1929 Easter Parade, walking down Fifth Avenue, in New York City, during the Easter Parade, all these women smoking, openly smoking cigarettes, and it was like, it was really unheard of at the time, right.
And it drew a lot of attention. And it drew a lot of publicity, and it drew a lot of, you know, newspapers and the media really picked up on this. And the term they use to, to describe what was going on the women said, we are lighting up our torches of freedom, torches of freedom, because they were trying to exploit women’s aspirations.
During this, it was like the first wave of feminism, right, we can do what we want, we can smoke in public, light up your torches of freedom, ladies. And it became a catchphrase, and it spread like wildfire. So women thought they were being bold and brave and sticking it to the man, I’m gonna light up my torch of freedom, I can smoke whenever and wherever I want to.
But in reality, the man engineered the whole thing. It was all engineered consent. So let’s go back to that craft IPA. You think you’re drinking of your own freewill? You think you’re consenting? You think this is your idea, but it’s really not that consent has been fabricated. It’s been engineered by the alcohol companies, by social media influencers, by billboards, by TV commercials to make you think that you’re making a good decision for yourself. That’s what they want you to think. It’s a big marketing ploy. Okay.
And you may or may not believe me here, you may be thinking I’ve kind of lost it. You may be in denial, maybe a little bit of both. Here’s a quote from Mark Twain that I love. He said, “It’s easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” So is alcohol the new cigarettes? So imagine, right now, if I was talking about cigarettes, would you be fighting me about this at all? Would you be in your head, you know, denying that this is the thing would you be, you know, thinking like Patrick, you’re crazy. Cigarettes are fine, you know?
Would you be like, you know, really stating your case why everybody should smoke and, you know, just smoke in moderation. Of course, would you try to convince me that, that, you know, other people might have a problem with smoking, but you’re fine. Like you can stop whenever you want to? Doesn’t that sound stupid, the way I’m saying this isn’t the sound kind of crazy. I think it’s crazy. That is like right now, I think it’s crazy to think that smoking cigarettes in any amount is okay. Right? Wouldn’t you agree with me on that? Like we should, nobody should smoke, right? It’s so they’ve proven it is so bad for you, right?
But here’s the thing, I think alcohol is just the new cigarettes. And I think we’re all gonna wake up one day and say, Oh, my God, I can’t believe we used to think drinking poison was fun. And that there were these places called bars, where they actually just served alcohol to people and they would drink it. And moms would actually drink alcohol in front of their kids.
And they would even dress their babies in onesies that said, My mommy drinks because I cry and everyone would laugh because they thought it was funny. And we would say to ourselves man weren’t times messed up back then. Wasn’t that crazy? Here’s the thing, social norms. They’re always changing. Smoking cigarettes is no longer widely accepted as being safe. It’s not cool anymore.
You can’t smoke indoors and most places you can’t smoke on airplanes. The first time I got into an airplane, the first airplane ride I ever took. I sat in the back, I sat in the smoking section. I smoked a cigarette on a plane. I cannot imagine doing that today. It’s so crazy, right? Coca Cola is no longer made with cocaine. You know they took that ingredient out. They’re like we probably shouldn’t put this in this drink okay, we’ll just put way more sugar in there and hopefully get people addicted that way. So good. Mission accomplished. Coca Cola. Good job there.
There’s no more opium dens where you can go and like smoke opium and hang out. I don’t know, I don’t think there are, maybe there are somewhere but I have a feeling this is not a normal thing anymore. You know, we don’t do frontal lobotomies on people like ice pick through the head kind of a thing. You know, this is crazy, right?
But people used to do that. And they thought it was like pretty normal. So social norms are changing. We changed, you know, our concepts of what’s acceptable, what’s normal, what’s healthy, what’s good for us over time. And I think alcohol is time is coming. There’s so many people that are like, do like, drinking alcohol is not okay. In any amount. It’s really bad, very, and has a lot of negative consequences.
There’s very few up ticks to drinking, there’s very few positives that you get out of drinking, you get a fleeting sense of relaxation, but then all those other things that I talked about, right. And one excuse I hear from people a lot is that they feel pressured from friends, or family members, but a lot of times it’s friends push you to drink, or judge you if you don’t drink.
Here’s the thing if your friends are pushing alcohol on you, or if they’re pressuring you to drink or judging you, because you drink or don’t drink, it’s time to get new friends, up level your friends. It’s plain and simple. If you’re, if your friends don’t respect your decision to not drink, these are not your friends. These are not people that have your best interest in mind.
And there’s a lot of blaming and shaming that goes on in this world of addiction around sugar addiction around alcohol and drug addiction. And it goes something like this, like alcohol is fine. That’s not the problem. You’re the problem. The problem is you, not that drug, not the poison over there. You’re the problem. So would you argue that it’s the person? That’s the problem, not the heroin, or the crystal meth or the cigarettes?
I think we’re all pretty clear that if those things are really terrible, you know, oh, no, those things are fine. You just have to moderate. If you can’t moderate then you’re broken. There’s something wrong with you. And this is the same BS that a lot of doctors and dieticians spew about sugar consumption. They’re like sugar is not addictive. It’s not the sugar. There’s nothing wrong with sugar, you just have no willpower. You have to just use it in moderation.
And this is the same message that the sugar industry pushes on us the Coca Cola move more campaign, blaming us and shaming us into thinking we’re the problem. Not the drug that they’re pushing on us to sugar isn’t the problem. You’re just not exercising enough. Stop being lazy. Get
off your ass and exercise more. Drink plenty of Coca Cola, that’s fine. That’s not the problem. You just got to exercise more.
Alcohol has the same kind of thing. They call it the drink responsibly campaign. This is the slogan of the alcohol industry: drink responsibly. So they’re kind of shaming you and blaming you if you overdo it. If you can’t handle your liquor, or if you die of alcohol poisoning. It’s not the alcohol that poisoned you. It was just you, you just overdid it. It’s the equivalent saying like just shoot heroin responsibly, snort responsibly.
You’re the problem, not our drug. Our drug is fine. There’s plenty people that drink responsibly. If you can’t, that’s your fault. You’re probably an alcoholic, you’re not normal. There’s something wrong with you. So let me finish up with this. I just want to say this, I cannot in good conscience tell you that drinking alcohol, any amount of alcohol is okay. I can’t. It’s like the equivalent of telling you that smoking cigarettes is okay. Or that occasionally snorting cocaine or shooting heroin every now and then is fine or that smoking some crystal meth is cool. It’s all good.
I can’t do that. I can’t in good conscience tell you that alcohol is okay. You know, just don’t overdo it as long as you can do it in moderation, don’t smoke, snort or shoot up, you know, irresponsibly. If you want to lose weight, if you want improve your health, if you want improve your writing, if you want to get stronger, if you want to feel amazing, if you want to sleep amazing. If you want to recover properly, if you want to lead an overall healthier life, free of stress and anxiety, free of most cancers: stop ingesting the poison.
If you think I’m being a big buzzkill here, I’ll own that. I will be the buzzkill here, okay, my job is to teach you what you need to know so that you can become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself. And drinking alcohol undermines all of that as the opposite of that. My mission is to lead by example. And I’m doing that my mission is to lead by example.
And I want to inspire you to do the same. And I feel that my message here today is absolutely in alignment with my mission and my values. I work with countless runners who love to drink, and they can’t possibly imagine life without alcohol. And I challenge them, I say, hey, let’s take a break from drinking for like 30 days and see how you feel. And they freak out a little bit at first, because they just cannot imagine not drinking, but then they do it.
And they’re amazed to how much better they feel. And they start to lose weight, and running gets easier. And then they say, Patrick, I don’t even miss it. I don’t miss alcohol at all. So I feel good about my message here today. I feel good about the work I’m doing. And I hold firm in my beliefs about alcohol. And living an alcohol free life will always be the better way to live for me, for you, for all of us. And if you want help quitting, I’m here for you. Always, always here for you. I love you all keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
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 …
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.
Today I have a very special guest for you. I recently sat down with Melanie Millaway and we had a candid conversation about her experience of changing her diet and getting fat-adapted. But the …
Continue Reading about 112. Taking Back Control of Your Life with Melanie Millaway →
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 112, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners, and today, taking back control of your life with Melanie Millaway.
Today I have a very special guest for you. I recently sat down with Melanie Millaway. And we had a candid conversation about her experience of changing her diet and getting fat adapted. But the real change didn’t happen on the outside. Yes, she lost weight. Yes, she improved her running performance. Yes, she got stronger. Yes, she has more energy now. And yes, she generally feels a lot better.
But the real change happened on the inside. Melanie made this massive shift in her mindset. And I just have to say that this is the real work we do here in my coaching program, you will learn how to become a leaner, stronger runner. But you do it by making the internal shift by doing the inner work just like Melanie did. And I’ll let her tell you more about that.
Here’s the thing, the way you look on the outside, for example, your current weight, it’s just a reflection of whether or not you’re doing the internal work. If you’re unhappy with the way that you look and feel and you want more for yourself, then you have to do that internal work. Okay. This is the work that Melanie did. And in this episode of the podcast, she shares how she’s absolutely transformed herself her entire life from the inside out.
But first, if you love this podcast, come check out the Running Lean podcast community on Facebook, just search for Running Lean community on Facebook, come join us join in the fun, we have a lot of fun over there. We post selfies, we do challenges, we support each other, we encourage each other, and we have a good time doing it. It’s all about running. It’s all about diet and exercise and becoming your best self. Just search for Running Lean Community on Facebook and join the fun.
And then if you’re somebody who is ready to do that inner work to make that shift in your mindset so that you can start becoming the healthiest and most badass version of yourself, then you have to just take action. One of the biggest mistakes people make around changing their health is procrastination. They put off taking action.
They always think later. Like when I have more time or when I feel more motivated or after the kids go to college later, is a dream killer. It’s a killer of hopes and dreams. It’s a killer of goals. If you want something more for yourself, if you want to make a change for yourself for the better, then you have to start today.
Apply for coaching with me. There’s no commitment. It’s just a conversation, you and me just going to have a conversation about what coaching would look like for you, and how it might be one of the best things you ever do for yourself.
Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply and take that first step take action, stop putting it off. Take that step towards becoming that badass future version of yourself. Cool.
All right. As I said, I’m excited to share this interview with you. Melanie experienced this profound transformation and affected a bunch of different areas of her life. And I’m gonna let her tell you all about it. So I’m gonna stop talking. Here’s my interview with Melanie Millaway.
Patrick McGilvray
All right, cool. So today I’m talking with Melanie and Melanie has a cool story that I felt was worth sharing with you guys. So Melanie and I started working together a few months ago. And
Melanie just is one of these people that at the beginning, things were very challenging for her. And at the beginning, she may have had some doubts, and she may have struggled a little bit and we’re going to talk about that. But I want you to know that at the end of our coaching together and the end of our sort of time working together. Melanie just had this amazing, like,
attitude, and this amazing transformation, and I wanted to make sure that we sort of captured that and shared it with you guys, because I think it’s very inspirational. And I hope I’m not, you know, setting this up too, too big for you here, Melanie. But I thought it was very inspirational. And I wanted to make sure that we sort of had this conversation and talked about all this stuff.
So, Melanie, why don’t you just introduce yourself and kind of tell us like, where you were, before you and I started working together?
Melanie Millaway
Awesome. Well, Patrick, first off, thanks for having me. Man, all the way back to the beginning with this process, I think when we started…
Patrick McGilvray
So where did you find yourself and by the way, this is like such a common story. This is one of the reasons I do what I do is because so many runners have this mentality of “Oh, I just run to eat, I can eat whatever I want. I just need to run more. And that’ll solve the problem.” You know, and so what you’re describing here is completely normal. We can all relate, we’ve all been there. Okay. But where did you find yourself that you thought “I need help with this?” Like what was the biggest issue that you really wanted to be solved, or the biggest issue you wanted help with?
Melanie Millaway
Well, you know, what I was doing wasn’t working, I was spending more time running and kind of prioritizing that over other things. And it was really was creating a strain for me to balance everything. Like I have a lot more responsibilities in my life, like family and career now than when I trained for my last full marathon. And, you know, I wasn’t blessed with like Olympic DNA. So I’m just your average runner based on age and kind of finish time. And, you know, it takes me a couple of hours to knock out a 10-15 mile run. And yet, I felt like I was stuck. And I wasn’t really making any material progress. I wasn’t getting faster, I didn’t look any different. In general, I kind of felt like garbage. And I wasn’t in a great mood most of the time. Yet, I was investing all this time running and I was feeling frustrated.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and this is so interesting because you’re one of these people Melanie who has come to me and said like, “Listen, I don’t have like a bunch of weight to lose. I’m not super overweight or anything like that.”
You did lose some weight in this process. We’ll talk about that in a minute. But you didn’t come to me saying like, “Oh, I just can lose the weight you just you know you had a lot more going on and there was just so many things like you described it just feeling like garbage.
I think that pretty much sums it up there. But it’s like we want more for ourselves. We want to feel better. We want running to be something we enjoy. We want it to be easier.
And so those are some of the things that I remember from when we started working together where you were just like, I’ve got to figure this out, you know?
And so we started kind of working together describe like, what, what are some of the things you, you experienced when we started making some of these changes? Because I know it didn’t know, it wasn’t all like super easy or work super well, for the beginning.
Melanie Millaway
Yeah, you know, I think when we first started, got started, really what I wanted some guidance, I wanted to be held accountable. Like I knew that was something I needed for myself. Because I have a tendency to kind of put others before me, just a kind of a pleaser, by nature that way, and if you overuse that formula, a lot of times you end up kind of sacrificing your own goals and desires. And that’s not very empowering, and it leaves you feeling like you don’t have a lot of control in certain circles, you know, situations or circumstances.
And then kind of looking outward, you know, I’ve had a lot of success, other aspects of my life working with a mentor, kind of specifically, in my career with, you know, whether it’s like an individual development plan or your career growth, I’ve had mentors in the past that were supporting me with a variety of goals, and kind of seeking their advice or guidance on something, but I never really thought to make that kind of investment in my own personal life, until I cross paths with you.
But, you know, how did they get started? Or how did it go? You know, it was challenging in the beginning, you know, I made the conscious choice to begin this journey heading into what I perceive to be the most challenging time of the year, the holiday season, that quad factor of Halloween, and Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and New Years, like, they are all packed in there. And it’s kind of crazy to, you know, experience growth and discomfort to the holidays, like the ultimate gauntlet of obstacles. But I thought if I could come out of that specific time of the year successful, it would be a huge boost to my self-confidence. And I could kind of wear it like a badge of honor.
And as I worked to get kind of fat-adapted, you know, I experienced the headaches and the sugar withdrawal symptoms. And looking back on it, I was probably a little more than grouchy. But I was really committed. You know, I started my food journal, and I was logging meals consistently. And I started planning and buying different things at the store and set my protocol and knew what I wanted to eat ahead of time.
And, you know, when it comes to running, like, I’m not gonna lie, the running sucks for a while going through this process. Yeah, there were weeks when I felt sluggish, and my body was heavy. And I was basically sucking wind.
And I had run a half marathon just a few weeks prior to kind of starting to want the Running Lean program. And I had a PR in that race. And then fast forward, like, as I’m in the midst of getting fat-adapted, I had forgot I had committed to a friend that was gonna, I was going to help pace her during a local, like half marathon. And that race felt hard. But I wasn’t quite over the hump yet at that point.
And then I just remember kind of coming out on the other side, eventually, my runs, they started getting easier. You know, my times were improving. I felt like less effort. And it was just kind of gradual onset. And I remember sending you a text message, like, you know, ran five miles this morning, and it felt really good. And I was back but I was like better.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, you bring it up. Um, a couple of things I want to touch on number one is like you did take this on during candy season, which is Halloween through New Years, you know, and we’ve talked about that. And you were like, I don’t know if I really want to do this right now. But I think I need to do this right now.
And that takes a lot of courage like to stand up and do that because most people they don’t you know, most people are like, “You know what, I’m gonna wait till the New Year’s I’m just gonna like, binge my way through this holiday season. I need a bunch of garbage and feel terrible, and gained a bunch of weight. And then hopefully on New Year’s, I’ll make a resolution and be able to stick with it this time, which will be different, you know?”
And nobody does that. Do you know what I mean? It’s just, it doesn’t really work, you know? And you were like, “You know what, no, that’s not what I want for myself. I want to do something different. I want to just get started now. And I want to make these changes now. And I’m going to get through the holidays and feel good about myself. I want to come out on the other side of the holidays feeling like I had my own back through that whole process.”
So how did that go for you? Like how was the how’d you come out of the holidays?
Melanie Millaway
I came out and felt like I was well ahead of the game, you know, and I had been training along the way for my event in January and I mean, I was so far ahead. So that felt that part of felt amazing.
Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. Yeah. So you came out of the holidays, you came into January, with all this momentum. And you had actually lost weight over the holidays, which is something most people don’t do.
So that was really cool. And then yeah, then you had your race in January. What was that? What was the race?
Melanie Millaway
Yeah, so that was I ran a half marathon in Houston, which Houston’s a really special city to me, and I just, I love that event. And this time, you know, I was fully fat-adapted, like, it seemed so simple.
I didn’t have to do anything different than any other typical day when I was down there. Like, I didn’t have to carb load the night before. And I never, I never liked that feeling of carb-loading before a race anyway, it always kind of made me feel lethargic or gross.
But, you know, now I didn’t have to do that. And I didn’t eat anything pre-race, like I completely fasted aside from a cup of coffee. And, you know, I didn’t run with any carbs on me, like I was naked. With carbs, like, you know, I still carry my own hydration. But my running back was a little lighter. And I wasn’t ravenous post race, you know, like, I ate a standard meal a few hours later. So it was kind of surreal at first, but just strangely liberating, like to go through that transformation and to, for it to just be so easy.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and how’d you do in the race?
Melanie Millaway
Yeah. So I broke a course record for myself. So improved my time for the last time that I’d run in person. So you know, it was, it was a really smooth race, I got to see my dad along the way, like at mile two. So it’s always encouraging to have, you know, family there to support you.
But it just the overall experience of felt good. And I was really energized and happy to be there. And just overall, an incredible weekend.
Patrick McGilvray
Awesome, super awesome. Just goes to show you that just because you’re running on fat instead of carbs, like you can still run fast. You know, a lot of people, there’s a lot of misconceptions out there about that, you know, you want to get faster, you can work on getting faster, and you can do it as a fat-adapted runner, for sure. That’s awesome.
So something I wanted to kind of go back to you mentioned, like drinking and sort of like, you know, taking some time off from drinking, what was that like for you? Was that something you were just kind of struggling with a little bit and you want to do like, you knew that was maybe something that was contributing to you feeling like garbage? Is that kind of why you decided you wanted to take a break from drinking?
Melanie Millaway
Yeah, I just wasn’t very happy with who I was. And I’ll kind of go back a little bit on my relationship with alcohol, you know,
I wanted to just kind of take a pause and kind of figure out the role it was playing in my life. And, you know, alcohol was a challenge. Like, I think I’ve had established some enduring habits over the past 20 years, like, when I was younger, and you know, you’re seeking social acceptance, like, I was one of those, I had to put effort into acquiring a taste for alcohol. But then like, fast forward, you know, now I’m in a position where I find myself thinking about having a beer after I’m done working for the day, or after a stressful week, or maybe it’s the start of the weekend, and like, let’s kick it off with a drink. Or I’m at a business meeting, and I want to be the first to meet my colleagues at the bar. So like, I had some legacy habits there. But I didn’t like the way I was feeling.
And I think with coaching, I ended up making some really positive and just lasting changes with that relationship to kind of pause on it kind of reflect on, you know, what are the positives and the negatives from drinking, like, I’m not getting a whole lot of benefits here. Like I don’t feel good. I’m not really motivated. That’s an area where I think I’ve just been wanting to make a change for a while. And this is an aspect of kind of shame with the struggle.
And that’s where you kind of provided just a safe place for me and kind of understood that the challenge that comes with it, and being like how empowering to re-evaluate that relationship over the holidays like I think it’s December and it’s holiday parties and gatherings and get-togethers and I just did like a complete dry December and like it was really challenging at first but as each day kind of passed by and I had those successes, you build more confidence and like it’s so much easier at the end and then again, looking back on it like for something I had looked so forward to like the race that year, okay, well, now I’m going to have a sip of it. And it’s just kind of neck like it kind of lost its luster by the end, like, my feeling towards it is so different now.
Patrick McGilvray
If you could identify like kind of what that mindset shift was for you because what you’re describing is awesome. And a lot of people that I work with kind of experienced the same thing. So you know, just to lose weight and kind of get fat-adapted and change our, you know, body composition and things like that. I do recommend maybe taking a break from alcohol, some people freak out a little bit about that. Some people are like, okay, no big deal I can take or leave it. And, but something interesting happens along the way.
There’s always a mindset shift. There’s like a way we think about alcohol and what it does for us. Like before we give it up for a period of time. And then there’s the way we think about it afterward. Like, can you tell me kind of what that looked like for you? Like, what was the biggest shift for you and your mindset around that?
Melanie Millaway
I think it was feeling like, I needed some sense of control, like, at some point, it kind of had control over me. And I needed to have that, that shift of power kind of back into my favor, like it’s really not all that it’s cracked up to be.
And I think just more awareness to my thoughts and the feelings that they’re generating and slowing down a little bit kind of pause for a moment.
And I kind of liken it to thinking before you speak but on a more like a deeper, subconscious level. But is this really what I want at the moment and I still, you know, I still have a beer every now and then. So it’s not like I’ve completely ended my relationship with alcohol, but it’s just, I have better control. And my thought process is different towards it. And yeah, it’s been a shift, it’s, it’s not as sexy as it used to be. Because I can take it or leave it at this point.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, that’s so cool. Because that’s the place where you want to get to, and when it comes to drinking alcohol, or eating sugar, for example, these are like two things that are like drugs, if not our drugs, you know, the way that they affect our body and the way they affect our brain, the way they light up our pleasure centers.
And we have a hard time, you know, not doing these things when we’re used to doing them on the regular basis, right. And so when we’re like, okay, you know what, maybe, you know, stop eating sugar, stop drinking alcohol, and then all this resistance comes up and all this, we start freaking out about that, because we’re just so used to having it whenever we want it. So we use it to feel good, we use it as a reward system for ourselves, we use it to deal with our emotions, all that stuff.
When we take it away, it becomes challenging, and we got to deal with all that stuff that comes up. So you got to deal with the emotions, you got to like, reward yourself in different ways. You got to make yourself feel good in different ways, you know. But the other thing that people don’t realize is that that desire that you have for alcohol or sugar, will actually go away once you’ve abstained from it for a while.
And that desire, you can actually, when that sort of desire goes away, you actually start to not crave it anymore. You don’t. You’re no longer like thinking about it, you’re no longer dreaming about it. It’s no longer the solution for you anymore. And so you don’t even really want it anymore. That’s a place you want to get to. That’s a beautiful place to be because if you’re craving alcohol, but you’re not drinking, that’s terrible. I just want to murder somebody, right? But when you’re like, all of a sudden you’re like, and I remember you told me this, you’re like, it’s lost its luster. I just don’t even want it anymore. I was like, yes, that’s where we want to get to because now it’s easy to say no. Right? Yeah.
Melanie Millaway
Yeah, I just feel so much better. So like how I feel is more powerful than the thing than the food than the sugar than the drink. Like, that doesn’t make me feel as good as like how I feel now with the clarity and how much better I sleep at night or how much better my mood is or like I’m more engaged with my family or connected with the world like, that feels better than the beer ever made me feel.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I love that. I love that and we get into this place sometimes where we start to feel good. And you know, we start to feel good without using you know, food or alcohol to make us feel good and we think this can’t last. This isn’t sustainable. And all these like stories will start to come up and excuses and things like that, because we get some comfortable.
It’s like feeling good. Actually, it doesn’t make sense. But feeling good. Like that actually makes us feel uncomfortable because we’re not used to it. And you even said this to me, and I took a note of this of some time into our working together, you were like, I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop in our heads if like, this is all gonna just come crashing down. But it didn’t, did it?
Melanie Millaway
No, I felt guilty, like for feeling so good. Like when I first felt the impact and kind of just the transformation. And I honestly had no idea that I could feel this good. It was like euphoria, like, and I just wasn’t sure what to do with myself. Like, I didn’t trust it.
And, you know, I also had to kind of remind myself not to go back to the things or the habits that got me where, where I was before, and I certainly where I don’t want to go back to you. But it was, it was a strange feeling to feel so good.
Patrick McGilvray
I just think that’s so funny in a way that we, we do that to ourselves, we actually start to feel good. And then we’re like, there’s got to be something wrong here. When is this gonna change? This is not normal, this is weird, is uncomfortable. But it’s like, no, we want to feel good. We want to feel good. So tell me about something else that shifted for you. Because, you know, you’ve you’ve experienced some profound shifts in your, in your mindset and in the way you think and feel about yourself. Tell me something else that you’ve experienced through this process.
Melanie Millaway
You know, just seeking some clarity in my life, there were things I wanted to change about myself. But I was lacking direction or certainty on kind of how to make that meaningful and lasting change.
And, you know, I had celebrated a milestone birthday earlier last year. And I think that natural progression, kind of when you enter a new decade of your life is to get introspective and start kind of conducting your own personal inventory. So you know, my satisfied with where I am right now, is there something more out there? Is this what life is really all about? Like, is this it? Or is it time for change?
And I think I coupled those kind of internal thoughts with the fact that I’ve always been interested in health and fitness and nutrition and learning new things. And, you know, identify as a runner, you know, I was an athlete in high school. And after college, I ran my first marathon, and I was hooked. I love the sport. But that also started me down the path of adopting the mindset of like, now that I’m a marathon runner, like, I can eat whatever I want like I run to eat. And if I’m training, logging miles, and burning tons of calories, and naturally, I get to eat and drink, whatever I want, as much as I want, whenever I want, like, I love food.
And my childhood and upbringing certainly revolved around food. So it seemed like a natural fit. You know, all this to say that you know, the strategy that I had adopted, you know, I run to I can eat that wasn’t really working for me anymore. I wasn’t feeling great, I was not really motivated. So what did I do? I leaned in further with what I knew, I thought, well, clearly, I just need to run farther. So let’s increase the distance.
So I signed up, and I started training to run another full marathon. And that was my goal. It had been a few years since my last full marathon, I have been running half marathons kind of for maintenance. And it was at this point that I kind of discovered the Running Lean podcast on Audible, and I was listening during my training runs. And that led me to you. And kind of just the start of this new beginning and understanding that you can’t outrun a bad diet. And what I needed was to change my relationship with food and alcohol. And if I wanted to feel better, and to achieve, like greater things for myself, like those changes needed to happen. You know, I was just kind of searching for more.
Patrick McGilvray
I mean, absolutely. It’s normal to start the year that way and to not feel like you’re in the hole, so to speak of you, you know, overindulge to the holidays, and maybe ate more drank more than you normally would have any other time of the year and have to start just to start building.
Melanie Millaway
You know, just, you know, I remember early on, I had some anxiety or apprehension with an upcoming business trip, you know, meeting with vendors, typically, that’s meals out, like a reason to overindulge with food or alcohol or otherwise and used to use support me to ensure that I had a solid plan kind of going into that situation, it’s as simple as thinking like about, how do you want to come out of that week? You know, how do you want to feel about yourself that really resonated with me. And again, just I felt supported, that was a big boost to my confidence.
You know, another simple situation where a friend had brought me lunch, like, I think it was a roast beef sandwich. And I didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that I was doing this high fat, low carb thing. And basically, I didn’t want to eat the bread in front of my friends. So I’d not eat the bread. So I ended up, you know, kind of caving and eating the entire sandwich.
And I just remember, kind of, I felt disappointed with myself afterward. I took a good thing like someone bringing me lunch, and I turned it into something else. And I remember you kind of breaking it down. And obviously, the situation was deeper than just the bread, like leaving that conversation, feeling more confident in my choices, and being empowered to kind of stick to stick with those was really important to me.
And then really just, I mean, again, mindset, just being more aware of my thoughts and the feelings that those are generating and slowing down. Kind of just taking a pause for a moment. I didn’t realize I’ve always felt frustrated for a long time. And I couldn’t really figure out why or kind of put my finger on it. And it all makes a lot more sense.
Now it’s like, the thought is the thing. But I have control over the thoughts, how it makes me feel, and ultimately kind of what my actions are. So I feel like my life is I feel less frustrated. And I feel like I have more control in despite not being able to control the circumstance, but just how I react to the situation and just being more at ease. Like I feel less frustrated.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. Do you feel like you have more control over your thoughts and feelings?
Melanie Millaway
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I love just being able to, I’m more intentional, I think with my thoughts. And even if the thoughts maybe don’t feel good kind of marinating enough for a minute or kind of reflecting on it and trying to connect it back to the why.
And just having a better mindset in general. And feeling like I have control. Like, and I do. And that’s incredibly empowering. Like, I can think about having a drink. And again, pause for a second and think with that thought and contemplate it. That’s what I really want. And occasionally I may want to eat the thing like maybe it’s cake. But I got the power back like I get to decide for myself I get to choose.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, that’s really cool. And I love the way you phrase that too because you do have the power. And it’s incredibly empowering when we can learn how to manage or control our thoughts and feelings. We go through life thinking that what other people do or say, makes us feel a certain way. And when we start to take control over that and start to take responsibility for our own stuff, and for our own emotional state, it becomes, it becomes so empowering, because now you’re not blaming other people for how you feel. You’re not blaming other people for how you’re reacting to situations.
Do you see this work that we’ve done together? Do you see it sort of spilling over into other areas of your life?
Melanie Millaway
Absolutely, I mean, that part of it, it is positively impacted so many other areas of my life. Like I said, with just being more engaged at home, I have more energy to spend time with my kids in the evening, after, you know, working all day or kind of fulfilling my responsibilities. At work, I think I’m more inspiring to my team of leaders that I work with, my colleagues, and just kind of energizing them and it’s infectious. Like, it’s pretty, it’s pretty incredible how I can like just spill over and impact so many other areas of my life in such meaningful and positive ways. Like that feels really good.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and, and I just want to point out, Melanie, that this is all you, you know, I’m, I’m over here, like yammering on about stuff, and, you know, kind of, you know, offering some suggestions and things like that, but you’re doing the work.
And that’s something I want everybody that’s listening to this to really hear that, you know, having a coach is great. And it’s great to have somebody that can guide you, that has the experience and that expertise with this kind of stuff. But really, you got to show up, and you got to actually do the work, you got to like, do things that you don’t want to do, you know, you’ve got to, you know, practice being disciplined about your diet and about exercising and about getting your runs and getting your strength training in and working through the mindset stuff.
And so I just wanted to point out that you have done an exceptional job with all that stuff, you know, you are the one that has shown up and actually done the work. So good job.
Well, what’s been like the most, like, if you could just identify like one big, the best part of this for you are the biggest transformation you’ve experienced with all of this, what would you say that was for you?
Melanie Millaway
I would say it’s having your own back. I mean, life isn’t easy. You know life is full of struggles. But you have choices. And I think I learned you have more control than you know, like, you get to choose your own adventure. Choose your struggles, right.
So personally, I’d rather be focused on controlling aspects of my diet, or sitting with an uncomfortable thought or emotion than struggling with diabetes, or heart disease or alcoholism, all of which, you know, run in my family, I think you’ve got to give yourself some grace and kind of self-love along the way.
Like, I’m going to make mistakes, the reality is I’m going to fail at things. But just keep going and keep working towards making those small, incremental changes. Because they all add up in time and, you know, you’re moving forward and getting closer towards the things that you want, and just never quitting.
And I think lastly, kind of coming out of this process, you know, I learned that nothing is impossible like we all have or should have like what I call a big, hairy, audacious goal, and you need to go after it, like see it as part of your identity, and who you are and believe in it. I think most importantly, just believe in yourself, because anything is possible.
Patrick McGilvray
Oh my gosh, I love that. Yeah, and I totally agree with you, I think we should have big, huge, impossible goals, we should all have those kinds of goals for ourselves. Because if we don’t, if our goals are small, that means they’re because we a lot of people, we set small goals for ourselves because we know we can attain them.
But those small goals feel kind of comfortable for us. But we want those big or bigger things that are uncomfortable, the ones that require us to change and to become more in the process of going for them. Right. So love that.
Let me ask you this. How do you feel about going forward of all this? So you and I worked together for a few months. But now do you feel like you have like what it takes to like continue this as a way of life? Is this something that you just did temporarily? Like where do you stand with all that today?
Melanie Millaway
I think it’s I’m more confident than ever. It’s completely sustainable. It is a life track, like a lifestyle choice. It’s not like a diet or something that’s a fad that’s, you know, quickly slips away. Like I feel like I’ve acquired a set of skills that are transferable across all facets of my life.
And again, I think when I started this journey I was, I thought my goal was one thing. But really what I was seeking was something else and just the skill set that I’ve acquired make it easier for me to have a positive mindset. Being able to take back control, like, it’s a huge and just the self-confidence that comes from it. It’s life-changing. And it’s been a transformational process for me.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, that’s so awesome. I love that. And that’s really the goal is to make this something that is pretty easy and effortless that you can carry forward. You know, we’re not about it’s not about the short term, it’s not about like, losing weight, or, you know, improving your running for a month or two. This is about lifestyle changes.
You know, it’s about becoming the healthiest version of yourself and being able to continue that going forward. You know, I always say that health is not a destination that we’re trying to get to. It’s how we live our lives. And so you’re sort of an example of that, you know, and that’s why one of the reasons why I want to talk to you is because now you’re just like, Yeah, this is how I live my life now. I love that. So awesome.
Last question, really, like, what would you say to someone who isn’t sure about this stuff? Or isn’t sure if they’re ready to change? You know, or, or they’re on the fence? Or they’re undecided? Or they’re not sure if it’s the right time? Like, what would you say to that person?
Melanie Millaway
Put yourself out there, you’ve got nothing to lose. I mean, just kind of the growth through discomfort, make an investment in yourself. It works if you go all in and you’re truly committed to the program, and you’re willing to get uncomfortable, but it can change your life and how you experience the world.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, heck yeah. I think just like starting is just so important for people. You know, just like start, just get started. I know. But what happens is we start to think about, oh, I want to change my diet. I want to get healthy, I want to lose some weight, I want to get leaner, I want to improve my running, I want to get faster.
And then we start like, we just think about it and all this stuff starts coming up for us like oh, I’ve never worked for me in the past. Or maybe this is not the right time. I need to wait till after the holidays, or you know, whatever. But yeah, I think that’s good advice. Just start, just get started today, get started, do something for yourself today.
Anything else you wanted to talk about or anything else you wanted to mention before we finish up here?
Melanie Millaway
No, I mean, just yeah, be fully committed. Trust the contents of this program it is life-changing. It really appeals, it’s very logical. Makes a lot of sense. It’s very simplistic, kind of easy to understand and follow.
It’s built on a bunch of principles that build upon themselves. So it’s, it’s just so different than I know, I totally ditched the idea of because I’m a runner, I can eat whatever I want. Now that thought process is gone.
And I guess one other final thought too, is just again, it’s just a huge sense of relief that I can do things more efficiently with this process. Like I don’t have to spend hours running. Like I can work smarter, not harder.
And being a fat-adapted runner is so much easier. Like I’m not constantly eating I don’t feel hungry all the time. You know, I have two meals a day, I don’t snack. I can distinguish hunger from cravings and I’m just amazed at how little food I need to eat. And I’m always leaving a meal feeling satisfied. And you know, fat is your friend like it gets a bad rap. I think fat needs a new PR agent, because not only does it taste delicious, but again, it leaves you feeling satisfied. So yeah, it’s good.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. Focus on fat, focus on protein. Those are the macros we want to be focused on. Awesome stuff, Melanie. Well, thanks again for coming on here and sharing your story and sharing about your transformation. And we’re gonna keep an eye on you and just kind of see where things go with you. Do you have any races coming up anytime soon?
Melanie Millaway
I’ve got one in April, I’ve got a half I’m looking forward to. And then I’ll be focused on you know, building some lean muscle mass. So that’s what’s next for me.
Patrick McGilvray
Love it. Well, we’ll stay in touch and we’ll do an update here. Once you start getting strong and ripped. Okay. All right. Well, thanks again. I really appreciate it and thanks for just sharing so much about your story. It’s been really cool.
Melanie Millaway
Awesome. Thank you for having me.
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As we come to the end of the #DryJulyChallenge, I’d love to know how it went for you. How was your experience giving up alcohol for a month? What’s changed? Are you sleeping better? Do you have …
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 83 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners, and today we’re talking about the all or nothing mentality. So as we come to the end of our dry July challenge, I’d love to know how it went for you. How did it go? How was your experience giving up alcohol for a month? Were you able to do it? Was it hard? What’s changed for you? Maybe you’re sleeping better? Do you have more energy, maybe your workouts have been better?
Maybe you just feel better overall, I actually would love to hear from you. You can drop your comments in our Facebook group. But a lot of people are now asking themselves like now what now? What do I do? Do I keep going do I have to, you know, swear off alcohol forever?
Whether or not you choose to continue with this, I just want to make one thing very clear, you don’t have to make a decision that you’re never going to drink again. I think a lot of people get stuck on this idea of either you can drink or you have to never drink and there’s no middle ground. There’s no moderation. And this is what I mean when I’m talking about the all or nothing mentality.
And if you’re trying to change a habit it can make the process of changing a habit feel extremely daunting, like thinking about never drinking again, or never eating sugar again for the rest of your life. Is that really going to help you stay on track? So in this episode, I’m just going to take a deep dive into this whole idea of like all or nothing, this whole mentality that people adopt, and then I’m going to propose what might be, I think a more effective way to change a habit.
And like I mentioned, if you haven’t already done so please come and check out the Running Lean community on Facebook, and share your thoughts about the dry July challenge. I’ll be posting a little bit more in there. We’re wrapping up the month.
But I would love to know what kind of experiences you guys have had like what positive experiences you’ve had from taking a break from alcohol for the month, just search for Running Lean community on Facebook, and you can join us there.
And then here’s a recent five star review of the Running Lean podcast. And this person said, “I have recently finished listening to all of your podcasts and love them. So please make more soon lol. But seriously, I thank you for sharing all of your knowledge on running and nutrition because I’ve learned a lot. Thank you so much. And I look forward to many more, please know that your podcasts are making a difference. Oh, and I will be going away for a week and really enjoyed your advice on making a plan when you are not in your typical routine because I will be sure to plan ahead.”
Thank you very much for that awesome review. And if you want to leave a review of the podcast, I would so appreciate it. I love hearing that this is helping you guys and that I am making a difference. So you can just go to whatever podcast app you use Apple podcasts, or whatever, scroll down, tap the stars and write a few words. And I will be sure to read your review on the show here. So thanks again for doing that.
And then just a quick update, you know, I’ve got this coaching group that is now open, officially open, and not going to be closing. So anytime you’re ready to start making some of these changes. This is a very cost-effective way of doing it. The monthly coaching group is where you get access to my online training materials you get access to weekly group calls with other people that are going through the same thing.
Part of it is like the support group because you get the support of people just like you that are you know going through trying to accomplish some of these big goals for themselves and you get to hear what’s working for them what’s not working, how did they overcome some of these struggles so it’s really effective at helping you to see that there’s hope and that there’s you know, things that you can do that will help you to stay on track.
And of course, I do some coaching and teaching and training every week in the group. If you’re interested just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join. And also in August, all month, all month long, we’re gonna be taking this deep dive into the thought, feeling, and action patterns that we all have, and how they might be keeping you stuck.
And if you want to start, you know, taking control of some of these things, habits, and things like that in your life, how you can use your thought, feeling, action patterns to actually start getting better results in different places in your life. Okay, so whether you’re trying to lose weight, or you want to improve your running, you want to improve your overall health and fitness, you want to get stronger.
Maybe you want to keep up with the drinking or learn how to moderate your drinking. We’ll be talking about all that stuff and how your thought feeling and action patterns play such a huge role and all that stuff. So anyway, runningleanpodcast.com/join and join us.
Okay, let’s get into this topic. Because I’m excited about talking about this, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because I’ve heard people say that, you know, when you decide you want to, you know, change a habit, that you just have to, like, abstain from doing that thing.
Like, let’s say you want to, like, quit eating sugar. And people are like, well, sugar is bad for you. And if you have a problem with sugar, you know, if you can’t moderate sugar, you just need to, like, quit forever. And the same thing goes for drinking.
A lot of people especially like in the recovery communities say that if you are, you know, if you have a problem with drinking, that you should just never drink ever, and that you have to be either 100%. You have to abstain 100% of the time, or, you know, basically, you’re not doing it, right. Okay. It’s like you’re either all in, or you’re all out and there’s no middle ground there, okay, it’s like 100% compliance, or you’re not complying at all.
So maybe you just want to, like, instead of giving up drinking, maybe you just want to change your drinking habit, you know, or maybe you don’t want to like, give up sugar 100%, but you just want to like change your relationship with sugar, you know, you don’t have to decide that you’re never going to do it again.
I think this all or nothing mentality, it’s like either this or that. It’s on or off. It’s binary, you know, it’s either yes or no, I think it’s very black and white thinking and I think it can be problematic for a lot of people and can be very challenging for a lot of people to, to give up or to change the habit, okay to like, kind of make a better habit.
And we’re really talking about when we talk about habit change of changing our relationship with, you know, alcohol, changing our relationship with food, okay. I used to have the same sort of attitude about running. So I was either like training for something big and epic, like an Ironman or 100 miler, or, I wasn’t training at all, like, why even bother running a half marathon, you know.
And this is like, very black and white thinking. And I don’t think this is you know, healthy, I’m not saying there’s nothing, there’s nothing wrong with, you know, running or training for an Ironman or, or 100 miler, whatever you want to do. I think those things are amazing. But we just have to get out of this idea that it’s like all or nothing, okay.
And I want to make something very clear before I go on here. So when I talk about all or nothing. It’s different from when I talk about going all-in on yourself. Okay, so I talk a lot about this concept of, you know, when you have a big goal, you need to go all-in on yourself for that goal, okay?
You need to approach these big things in your life with the attitude that you’re committed to making a work, right no matter what. So let’s say you want to lose weight, and you have this big weight loss goal. Going all in on yourself means that you’re going to keep going, that you’re, you know, it may take a while you may have some slip-ups, you may have some failures along the way. You may not stick to your plan or whatever, but you keep moving forward, you don’t quit on yourself.
Okay, maybe you want to change your relationship with alcohol going all-in on that means you use the power of your thoughts and feelings about alcohol to change the habit. It means you create a drinking plan, maybe you just want to moderate, so you create a drinking plan and you stick to it. No matter what.
Going on all in on yourself means you’re committed to your health. You’re committed to success. You’re committed to, you know, maybe going after this PR and your marathon. It does not mean you’re never allowed to drink again. It does not mean you’re never allowed to eat a cupcake again, it does not mean like you can never, you know, run a half marathon or five games or something like that, you know, we just want to make sure that we understand the difference between the all or nothing mentality and like going all-in on yourself, okay?
There’s a big difference between swearing off something forever, like sugar, alcohol, and changing the habit and changing your relationship with it. Okay? So going all-in on yourself does not equate to all or nothing, it just means you aren’t half-assing, you know, you’re not half-assing your efforts towards this goal. You’re full-assing it with whatever it is you’re doing. Okay?
So there’s this idea, and I was talking about this a minute ago, like, there’s this idea, especially in the recovery communities that if you want to change a habit, you have to quit it forever. If you want to change your relationship with alcohol, that there’s, you know, maybe you’ve had a problem with alcohol in the past, it’s been hard for you to give it up or hard for you to moderate that you just have to quit forever, you know.
If you have an issue with food, and maybe you, you know, you’re overweight and you’re trying to lose some weight, and you just want to be healthier and feel better. That means that like you could never eat sugar again, or never have a pizza or fries ever again. And here’s what I want to propose. And I think this is the kind of the crux of the problem here.
When you think about like never eating pizza again, or never eating a burger with fries and a milkshake ever again in your life. How does that make you feel? Probably, you probably feel deprived, it probably feels sort of terrible. And when you feel deprived and terrible, because you feel like you’re missing something, something that you enjoy, what happens to your desire for that thing, your desire for that thing actually goes up.
And when you feel terrible, and you have this now increased desire for this thing, what do you think you’re going to do? Typically, you’re going to give in to those cravings, you’re going to eat the fries, you’re going to eat the pizza, you’re going to eat the cupcakes, you’re going to drink the alcohol because you just want to feel better.
You have all this desire, and you’re feeling terrible about yourself. And like, you could never have this thing again, and feeling depressed about that. And geez, what are you going to do, you’re just going to want it even more. Okay. So thinking that you have to quit something forever, it feels, it can feel very daunting for people. You know, it can feel overwhelming, and, frankly, pretty frustrating.
And another big problem with this all or nothing mentality is that if you slip up if you do swear off drinking forever, and you do drink, man, you just feel terrible. Like you feel guilty and full of shame and disappointment in yourself like you are a failure. Like you just can’t do it. And if your mentality is like it’s all or nothing, there’s no room for moderation, there’s no room for occasionally. There’s no way that you can have a healthy relationship with alcohol or with sugar.
You have to have like, no relationship at all. Like that’s the mentality is that you can’t have a healthy relationship. So you have to have zero relationship at all, like total abstinence. And here’s what I’m just trying to propose today is like, there’s a different way of doing this.
Instead of having no relationship with alcohol, no relationship with junk food, like junk foods, okay, every now and then, you know, but here’s the thing, instead of having an unhealthy relationship with those things, what if you had a healthy relationship with those things? So there are other ways of doing it, you can actually change your habits and change the relationship with food and with alcohol and do it in a way that is, okay.
Now, I’m a big proponent of staying away from junk food. Honestly, I really am. And I’m a big proponent of staying away from sugar for the most part, and I don’t drink. Okay, that’s a choice that I’m making. I’ll talk more about that in a minute. But here’s the thing. If you want to drink alcohol, you can. If you want to eat a burger and fries every now and then you can. If you want to eat a candy bar, you can you just have to like work on your relationship with the thing.
Now I want to share with you an example of how this plays out in my life in a little bit of a different way. Like an actual relationship with a person. Okay, so about 18 months ago, my wife and I got divorced, we both had just moved to this new building near downtown Cincinnati, and we both love the building. So we both decided we were going to stay in the same building.
So we both live in the same building on different floors. And so we see each other every now and then, okay. And it’s not that big of a deal. Rarely, so I’ll occasionally see her and her new boyfriend, you know, hanging out at the pool or something like that. And it’s not really a problem, I’m kind, you know, we’re friendly with each other, we all get along.
But here’s the thing, I get advice from people, like people I know, they’ll tell me, like, you should just move somewhere else, or you just don’t ever talk to her, if you see or go talk, you know, walk away, go the other way, don’t engage in conversation. You know, like, you need to, like cut off all ties with her like 100% no relationship at all right?
And instead of doing that, because that’s not what I want, instead of trying to eliminate this person from my life, because that’s not reality, you know, I’m going to see her around, and it’s okay. Instead of trying to eliminate the relationship and make it an all-or-nothing type of deal, I’m working on changing the relationship I’ve worked on and successfully changed the relationship so that there’s not any drama around it, that’s not energetically charged anymore.
It’s not emotionally challenging anymore, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing situation, I can still see her around, I can say hi, we can stop and chat, I can, you know, have a conversation with her and her boyfriend at the pool. And it’s no big deal, I’ve effectively changed the relationship with my ex from a, you know, romantic partnership, to a platonic friendship.
And this is kind of, I mean, it’s such a good analogy, I think, to our relationship with food or to alcohol, or even with, you know, exercise in general, we can change the relationship and make it into something that is healthy. And that we can do in a different way, we can change the relationship, we don’t have to cut off the relationship. Okay.
So the way this works around food and stuff like that, is that, you know, for the same way that I can be around my ex in this building and stuff, I can be around sugar, I can be around people drinking, and I don’t have those cravings anymore. There’s no increased desire for these things in my life, the desire is not there.
Like the desire for my ex is not there the desire for you know, sugar is really just not there. I’ve changed my relationship with food and alcohol, I don’t have to abstain from you know, ever seeing alcohol or ever being around it. I don’t have to abstain from sugar or never eating it again, I can do it occasionally. I’ve changed the relationship.
You know, I love my son and I will do like taco night, sometimes we’ll go out to this place and we’ll get chips and salsa and tacos and all this stuff, a lot of carbs, you know, and I’m pretty much don’t eat carbs, you know, but I’ll go and I’ll enjoy myself and I’ll have fun doing that. And then the next day, I just go back to doing what I normally do. It’s no big deal. Right? I’ve changed my relationship with the food. Okay.
And when you change the relationship, there’s so much freedom in that, because now you’re free to do what you want to do. Because I’m here to tell you that if you want to drink alcohol, but you’re just forcing yourself not to and you’re just trying to white knuckle your way through your life without it. This is going to be so much harder for you than if you say you know what, instead of never drinking again, I just want to drink you know, on Saturday nights.
You know, that way I can just sleep in the next day. It’s not a big deal. Yeah, I know I’m not going to feel great but it’s not like the day before a long run, and like you know you can do it in a way that feels good for you. This is a powerful skill that you can master okay.
And here’s the other thing I want to make sure you understand is that for some people, the all or nothing, you know, principle the all or nothing mentality does work and they actually feel good about not making a decision to never drink alcohol again, or never eating junk food again. And if you’re the kind of person who’s like, you know, I just don’t ever want to drink again, or I don’t ever want to eat candy bars ever in your life, and you feel good about that.
And that motivates you? And that mentality kind of strengthens your resolve that keeps you on track and fuels you and it feels good for you. As long as it’s not making you feel deprived or demotivated or increasing your desire for it, it’s totally fine. If this kind of thinking works for you, then absolutely go for it. There’s nothing wrong with this line of thinking unless it makes you crave the thing more unless it makes you feel terrible.
Okay, you don’t have to decide that you’re never going to drink again, or never eat out or never eat sugar again. So I quit drinking alcohol 14 years ago, and when I made that decision to quit, I just so happen to have quit 100% and have never had a drop of alcohol since that day in 2007. That was not my intention when I quit.
When I quit. I was like, I just can’t do this anymore, I need to just like cut back. And, um, and I, you know, was in therapy and you know, involved in like some 12 Step programs and things like that. And my experience was that for me, it was better if I just didn’t pick it up if I just didn’t drink, you know, and I never made the decision, like, I’m going to quit this for the rest of my life.
I just decided that I was going to make this decision sort of a one-day at a time kind of a deal. So it’s like today, I’m just not going to drink it, we’ll see how it goes. And then the next day, I kind of made that same decision, and so on and so forth. And so I’ve sort of just kept that same mentality of like, if I want to drink I can, it’s not like I can’t, but I just don’t want to I don’t have that desire, okay.
But early on, especially in the 12 step programs, you know, I was told and I firmly believed at the time that if I had just like one drop of alcohol, I’d be back to drinking a six-pack every night in no time I’d be like, you know, end up in jail or dead, you know, to scare the crap out of me.
You know, I hear people talk about how, you know, they had many, many years of sobriety, and then they’d had one drink, and then it was all over, they’re right back to where they were before. And there was, you know, all this turmoil in their life and everything they had worked for so hard, just all fell apart, and their lives turned to crap.
And I’m just like, oh, my gosh, I don’t want that. So I better not drink at all. And here’s the thing I’ll tell you like, today, I don’t really believe this is true for everyone. It hasn’t been shown to be true. Like I know a lot of people who were sober for many years, and maybe they had a slip-up, maybe they drank once or twice, and then they didn’t go to jail. They’re not dead. They weren’t suddenly struck homeless and living in a gutter or anything like that.
They didn’t lose all the good stuff in their life. You know, they didn’t drink and then they drank, and then they don’t drink again. And it’s no big what you know, I think we get into this idea of like, it has to be one or the other. Like, it has to be binary. You know, and when we have this all or nothing mentality.
Occasionally having a drink is it’s forbidden. It’s completely off the table. You know why? Because well, you can’t control your drinking, you’re an alcoholic, or you can never drink again, you know, whatever things you tell yourself.
I was having coffee with a friend recently. And, you know, she had quit drinking many years ago as well. And we’ve both abstained from drinking, you know, but she decided not too long ago that she wanted to have a relationship with alcohol again. So now she occasionally drinks and she’s good with that.
You know, and we were both under this idea that once you start, you can’t stop and but that hasn’t been the case for her. So she can enjoy a glass of wine every now and then with friends. She can moderate her drinking. She feels good about her decision. Okay, she’s changed how she thinks and feels about alcohol. She’s changed the relationship with alcohol instead of having zero relationship with alcohol. She has a healthy relationship with alcohol now, and it’s the exact same thing with our food.
Like we can decide that we want to occasionally have a cupcake we can decide that we occasionally want to eat pizza. And this is where there’s freedom. Okay, you can do these things in a way that feels good for you, and you can change the relationship without having to swear it off forever.
So what about me, am I going to like try this experiment of like drinking again? Well, talking to this friend of mine got me really thinking about this idea. Like, if I wanted to drink again, I could probably do it in a way that is completely fine. And that feels good for me, I could change the relationship.
But I got to just tell you, like, I don’t want that for myself, I don’t have any desire to drink alcohol, or to feel buzzed or to get drunk or any of that stuff. I just don’t. I can drink if I want to, but I’m choosing not to. And this is a little bit different than my relationship with food. Because my relationship with food is a little bit different.
I will occasionally have some sweets or some, you know, sugar or some, you know, special dessert, or, you know, something that’s just like bread, you know, lots of carbs, I can occasionally do this stuff. Okay. But as far as drinking is concerned, I just don’t have the desire for it.
You know, that desire left me a long time ago, and I just don’t want it. Okay. So, and I’m not making this decision forever about alcohol. Like I might change my mind someday. And I might say, like, you know, what I might, you know, try drinking again. But for today, I don’t have that desire, and I’m not gonna drink today.
But like, as far as like, the junk food and the sugar and stuff like that, like, I’ve thought about this. And, you know, here’s something that I used to love when I would go to California and visit family out there. I love going to In and Out Burger, right? They have these great burgers and fries. And it’s like, milkshakes or whatever.
I’ll do that someday, you know, but it’s not something I’m doing like all the time, I don’t have to have it. I’m not thinking about it all the time, I don’t have this over desire for that kind of thing. But I’ll go and eat something like that. I love sourdough bread. I’d love to get, you know, a good loaf of sourdough bread when I go to San Francisco, or, you know, eat that special dessert on my birthday, or because it’s, you know, Christmas or something like that.
I can do those things. And I feel really good about it. I’ve changed my relationship with food. And if you’re thinking about like, well, how can I do this for myself, you know, I just want you to like, take on this attitude of like, I don’t have to swear off drinking forever, I don’t have to swear off eating sugar for forever. But maybe just for today is a good place to start.
Maybe adopting that idea that they talked about in some of these 12 Step programs is like, just for today, I’m not gonna drink just for today, I’m not going to eat sugar. And don’t even worry about tomorrow, just think about what you can do today.
And when you think about it this way it doesn’t feel so big and overwhelming anymore. It doesn’t feel like you have to quit for the rest of your life or you’re a failure, you can just decide. Today, I just don’t want that. You know.
Another big problem that I think happens when we adopt this all or nothing mentality is that we feel like we’re out of control. Like, you can’t control your drinking. So you have to quit forever. You can’t control your eating, and or you know, your sugar intake. So you have to just quit forever. Maybe you’ve been told you have an addictive personality or you thought that you had something like that. Okay?
But what if you can control your drinking? What if you can control your eating? You just haven’t learned how to do it? What if there’s no such thing as an addictive personality? I did a little research into this.
And in her book, The Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, Maya, I’m gonna screw up her last name, but it’s like Szalavitz Maya says fundamentally, the idea of a general addictive personality is a myth. People with addictions or potential addicts cannot be identified by a specific collection of personality traits. So there you go. Maybe the addictive personality is not really a thing.
Here’s the thing, you always have a choice. Everything you do is a choice. The decision that you make is a choice that you are making. It’s not something that is out of control. You always have the ability to be in control or to take back control if you think you’ve lost it because you really haven’t lost control.
You just think you have you know, maybe you’ve been told that you don’t have control and you’re choosing to believe that but a lot of times it’s just a thought, feeling, action pattern that you’ve been doing for a long time. So you may not feel like you’re in control because your thoughts and feelings about eating junk food and drinking are just like automatic.
And this behavior that you’re engaging in is like something you do, mostly unconsciously. You know, it’s kind of like tying your shoes, it’s just something you do, you can do it without even thinking about it right? Eating and drinking can be the same way. It’s such an ingrained habit that you feel like you’re out of control, but you’re actually making decisions, okay, you do have control.
And if you want to see this, what you need to do is just slow down. Right? If you want to see that you do have control, pause, when you’re, you know, about to engage in this behavior. And start looking at the thoughts and feelings that precede the behavior. Like what were you thinking and feeling right before you found yourself with a glass of wine in your hand, you know, what thoughts and feelings drove the action of eating the burger and fries, the milkshake.
And I don’t want you to skip this step like this is important, I want you to get curious with yourself. Start to become aware of how those thoughts and feelings are driving your behavior. Because if you want to change the behavior, you’ve got to look at the thoughts and feelings that are driving it. When you begin to see that there’s a pattern at work here, a thought feeling reaction pattern, you can begin to take back the control, you can see that you are in control.
And this is how you begin to change the behavior. And do it in a way that actually works. Instead of just saying like, I just got to quit this forever. So it doesn’t have to be all or nothing, okay? If that all or nothing mentality works for you love it, do it, keep it going right on, get down with your bad self.
But if you want something different, if that doesn’t work for you, if that feels terrible for you, and you want to just like instead of avoiding a relationship with, with certain types of foods or alcohol, you want to change the relationship, you still want to have a relationship, but you want to be different to a healthy relationship, then that is possible for you, you can control your eating and your drinking. And you got to start by looking at your thoughts and feelings about sugar, about burgers and fries, about alcohol.
And once you start to be aware of how your thoughts and feelings are, you know driving the action, you can begin to change them so that you can take different actions, okay. And this, the same principles apply to everything in your walk of life.
Like these same principles apply to my relationship with my ex-wife, and it works beautifully. Like it works. Great. My relationship with her today is good. You know, not because of anything she’s doing. Because I’ve learned how to change the way I think and feel about this relationship. I’ve created a healthier relationship.
You know, my relationship with food today is good. Not because it’s never around, not because I avoid, you know, carbs or sugar 100% of the time. It’s not because I made a solemn oath to swear these things off forever. It’s because I’ve changed the relationship. Right? I’ve changed how I show up around these things.
And this is available for you too. I just want you to see that. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. All or nothing sometimes works for people, but sometimes it just feels too. It’s too much. It’s overwhelming. Okay.
So be sure to join us over in the Running Lean coaching group because in August, we’re taking a deep dive into this whole idea of like changing your thought, feeling, action patterns, you know, how do you how do these things show up? How do you change them so you can start getting the results that you want around things like weight loss or maybe controlling your drinking or changing your running or just improving your overall health and fitness?
If you’re interested in joining the group love to have you in there just check out runningleanpodcast.com/join and we’ll see you soon. And listen, I hope you got something out of this episode today. I had fun putting this together.
And if you did get something out of it. Please consider sharing it with a friend I love you all keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.
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