Discomfort

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 221 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, What Are You Willing to Sacrifice to Lose Weight?

So if you’ve ever trained for a marathon, then you know that sacrifices have to be made in order to achieve that goal. You have to put in lots of hours on the weekends running in the cold and the dark, you have to give up time with your friends and your family. You endure sore legs for days, you’re tired all the time, you are more than willing to sacrifice these things in order to finish that marathon.

Okay, so how about when it comes to losing weight? What are you willing to sacrifice in order to hit your weight loss goals? So in this episode, I’m going to take a deep dive into the kinds of sacrifices we all have to make in order to lose weight and keep it off.

But first, I know I talk a lot about nutrition, weight loss, improving your running, and getting stronger here on this podcast. If you’re new, welcome I’m glad you’re here. But you might be a little confused or overwhelmed by all this information.

I get it if that’s you, no worries, I’ve got you covered. I created a free hour-long training that you can check out at any time. It’s called Five Simple Steps to Becoming A Leaner, Stronger Runner.

I teach you the basics of nutrition and strength and endurance and mindset all geared towards you the long-distance runner. So if you’re ready to get leaner, ready to get stronger and become the healthiest, most badass version of yourself yet, this free training is exactly what you need. Just go to runningleancoaching.com click on Free Training and get started on your weight loss journey today.

Alright, so what are you willing to sacrifice to lose weight, there’s a lot of confusion around the weight loss world. And I’ve seen a lot of people who think or assume that you really don’t have to give up anything or make any sacrifices in order to lose weight.

Like you can just kind of keep doing what you’re doing, maybe run more, you know, maybe skip the ice cream every now and then or something like that, but you really don’t have to give anything up.

I’ve even heard, you know, dieticians and certain people touting these diets where you just can eat anything that you want. Just eat it in moderation. You don’t really have to sacrifice anything, just eat a little bit less of everything and all your problems will be solved. Does this really work?

I have to tell you that I know that didn’t work for me. I’ve tried that. I know a lot of people that have tried that it hasn’t worked for them. There’s a lot more going on than just like, you know everything in moderation.

Everything in moderation is a great idea. I wish it worked. If it worked, it would be amazing. But I don’t think it works for most people, especially when we’re talking about some types of foods like sugar, which are very difficult to moderate.

Have you ever tried to moderate your sugar intake? Have you tried to just eat a little bit of sugar? It’s hard to do. One of the reasons is is it brings you so much pleasure it lights up the pleasure centers in your brain every time you eat sugar. And it lights up those pleasure centers even more than certain drugs like cocaine do, you know, it’s crazy, how much it lights up the pleasure centers in your brain.

So just eating some sugar in moderation causes you this abnormal craving for more sugar, right? So if you’re somebody that’s trying to moderate what you’re eating, and you’re trying to moderate your sugar intake, and every time you eat it, you have this huge craving for more sugar, this is going to be very difficult for you, you’re gonna go crazy.

And what ends up happening is you eat a lot more sugar, because you’re trying to moderate. Okay, so that’s just one of the reasons why moderation doesn’t work. And I think that there’s a lot more going on in the human physiology when it comes to blood sugar when it comes to insulin when it comes to how our bodies store fat or release fat from fat cells.

You know, we’ve got to make sure that our insulin levels are low, that our blood sugar is pretty chill most of the time. And if you’re spiking your blood sugar and insulin is constantly high, it’s going to be very difficult for you to lose weight, even if you are eating in moderation, okay?

So the reality here is that we do have to make some sacrifices, and even eating whatever you want in moderation, you are still making some sacrifices there, because you’re not eating as much as you’re used to eating, if that’s the route you want to take, you know, people that do Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, calorie counting, you know, all that stuff.

I personally don’t think those methods are very effective long term, they’re effective short term, but not long term. You know, just for reasons like, you know, your, you know, restricting calories will kind of make your metabolism slowed down a little bit.

So, those types of diets, you know, why they tout just saying, like, oh, you know, we’re gonna, you know, eat everything, we’re just gonna moderate and really watch the number of calories you’re eating, you still have to make sacrifices there, you still have to watch the number of calories you’re eating. All right.

So just know that it doesn’t matter, the method of trying to lose weight, there is going to be some sacrifices that have to be made in order for you to reach that goal. Okay. And I want to say this, you know, I’ve said this a couple times before on the podcast here, but when we talk about losing weight, of course, we’re talking about losing fat, not just weight, we’re not talking about losing muscle or bone mass or anything like that. We want to improve our body composition, we just all understand that weight loss means fat loss, right?

Can we just all agree to that? Cool, okay. So when it comes to your body weight, and the amount of fat that you’re carrying around, or muscle, even in this case, there are three different approaches.

You can choose to maintain your weight, which means you’re just gonna keep doing what you’re doing and maintain your weight easily. You can gain weight, you know, you might be somebody that wants to actively get bigger, you know, maybe from a muscular standpoint, or you can try to lose weight.

So if your goal is to maintain your weight, and your weight is kind of where you want it to be, and you’re okay with where your weight is, then probably what you’re doing is fine, and you just can keep doing whatever it is you’re doing.

You know, you might be eating a certain way, you might be exercising a certain amount each week. And if you can easily maintain your body composition, meaning you’re not gaining fat, you’re not losing muscle, you really don’t need to change anything.

So this is what we call maintenance mode. And eventually, we all want to get into maintenance mode. And the end goal of any weight loss journey should be this place where you can just easily and kind of effortlessly maintain your weight, like that should be the goal.

And that’s the goal with everybody that I work with is like the end goal should be that when you and I are done working together, you know exactly what to do to easily and pretty effortlessly maintain your weight, right? So if you just want to maintain, that’s pretty easy to do. Just keep doing what you’re doing, you don’t really have to change anything. All right.

Now, the second approach is, let’s say you’re somebody that wants to gain weight. And you might be thinking, I’m sort of crazy for talking about this, who would want to gain weight? But lots of people do. Bodybuilders want to gain weight, I’m trying to gain weight, I’ve been trying to gain weight for some time now. And when I talk about gaining weight, what we’re talking about typically is gaining muscle.

So I’ve been actively trying to gain muscle. And it is hard to do because one thing you have to understand is that you have to be very diligent about eating more food, you got to increase your calorie intake, you got to eat more protein, then you have to do a significant amount of weight training.

And that could be training for hypertrophy training for strength, but you have to be actively working towards building bigger muscles, you can’t just expect to eat a lot more calories, and then expect to gain a bunch of muscle, it doesn’t really work that way. Again, that would be awesome if it did, but it doesn’t.

So we want to combine a good healthy diet and I’m not talking about eating a bunch of junk. But a good healthy diet, you just have to increase the calorie intake and then the right amount of weight training and we have to do this stuff consistently for a pretty long period of time, especially as you get older.

You know if I was doing this in my 20s or 30s, I’d probably be gaining weight from muscle weight pretty quickly and pretty easily. But now I’m in my late 50s you know, and putting on muscle and getting bigger in that way is a little bit harder, but I’ve been pretty successful with it you know and I’ll share more about about on a future podcast, I’m not quite where I want to be yet. So when I do get there, I’m going to share my journey with you guys there.

Okay, so that would be the approach of gaining weight. All right. So if you want to maintain, just keep doing whatever it is you’re doing, if you want to, if you want to gain weight, or even if you want to lose weight, then we have to change something, right?

So that brings us to the third approach, which is the one that most people, I would assume one, which is to lose weight, you want to lose that fat weight, okay? So if you want to lose, then we have to change something, if you want to maintain your weight, just keep doing whatever you’re doing, right?

But if you want to lose, what you’re doing is not getting you there, right? So we have to change something. If you have 20, 30, 40 pounds to lose, then whatever you’re doing right now is not going to get you there.

Maybe what you’re doing right now would be a good maintenance plan for you. So think about that. Like what if you’re not gaining weight, you’re just maintaining your weight pretty easily. But you want to lose, think about this. This what you’re doing now could be a good maintenance plan for you long term after you hit your goal weight, of course, right?

So common sense says that if you want to lose the weight, then we have to change something. And when I say change something, that means we have to sacrifice something or some things in order to start getting the weight to move, in order to get you to that goal weight.

Okay, so whenever people are told that they need to make a sacrifice, they figure Oh, my God, it’s like torture, you know, but it doesn’t have to be torture. I looked up the definition of sacrifice. And I like these words that are associated with it.

So the definition is to suffer loss of something to give up something to renounce something, or to destroy something, I like that one, we got to destroy the pizza cravings, you know, especially for an ideal a belief or an end. Right.

So the end, in this case, is your ideal weight. It’s your weight loss goal. And the sacrifices are the things that you need to give up that you need to renounce the things that you need to destroy, in order to achieve that.

And okay, another way of saying this is every goal requires a sacrifice. And the sacrifice could be something you love, like pizza, or ice cream. And, you know, it could be money or time or effort.

You know, if you’re training for that marathon, you know, you have to make sacrifices, months of training in the cold weather, long, long runs on sore, tired legs, you sacrifice time with your family, you sacrifice your social life, because you can’t go out on Friday night, you got to get up early to run 18 miles tomorrow. And then you can’t go out tomorrow night because you’re so tired from running the 18 miles.

You know, most people I talk to are like, oh my gosh, I am so willing to make those sacrifices in order to you know, hit my marathon goal. And so many people are so quick to make that decision. They’re like, cool, I’m definitely going to sacrifice to hit that marathon goal. In fact, I’m going to do this twice a year or three times a year, I run like two or three marathons every year.

So you’re making the sacrifices pretty much year-round. Because if you’re running two or three marathons a year, you’re kind of always in training. So you’re always giving up things. You’re always sacrificing some things for your training. So you know, that training for a marathon requires a lot of sacrifices and you do it gladly. You do it with a smile on your face. Okay.

So what about those sacrifices that you might have to make in order to reach a weight loss goal? You know, you may want to stop eating sugar and you may want to stop drinking alcohol and you may want to cut out the junk food that you’ve been scarfing down happily while you’re doing all that marathon training.

Maybe you cut out snacking or you just go down to eating a couple times a day. Maybe you stop eating all the pizza and the french fries and the ice cream. So all these things are real sacrifices that you might have to make if you want to hit that goal. But the bigger question here is this. Are you willing?

Are you willing to make those sacrifices are you willing to give up the foods that you love that tastes so amazing that light up the pleasure center in your brain like crazy, but they keep making you fatter?

Are you willing to give up those foods, because the cold hard truth is this losing weight requires sacrifices, becoming the healthiest and most badass version of yourself requires sacrifice. If it didn’t require sacrifice, you already would have achieved it. The fact that it requires a sacrifice means you have not achieved it yet.

So you have to give up something in order to get there, what you want is outside your comfort zone mean, meaning that, you know, if it was in your comfort zone, you’d already have it because it’d be something that you’re comfortable with, you know, but it’s not, it’s outside your comfort zone.

And so just by definition, one of the things you’re going to have to sacrifice is comfort in order to reach that weight loss goal. So sometimes I talk to my clients and they’ll say something like, you know, I’m a little frustrated because my weight has stalled a little bit. And by the way, this is totally normal happens all the time, weight loss can stall for 2, 3, 4 weeks sometimes.

And then it just picks up again, sometimes we don’t change anything. But it’s really not a stall if it’s you know, been four days or six days or something like that, it’s really not. If it’s three, four weeks, yeah, then we got to, you know, look at you know, something, and maybe make a change. And this is totally normal. Everybody goes through this at some point, okay?

So they’ll tell me, my weight is not changing at all, but it’s not going down, it’s staying the same. And when we really dig into what’s going on, almost always, it’s like, well, you know, I’ve had the occasional cookies here and there, I’ve had the occasional piece of cake, I only had one slice of pizza the other night, and I did have a glass of wine too, you know?

Okay, so first of all, all that stuff is fine to do if you want to maintain your weight, because you’re maintaining your way pretty easily here, you know, you can have the occasional cookie, you can have the piece of pizza here and there, you’re gonna have the occasional glass of wine.

And if you do it the right way, and you can do it in moderation. Again, it’s hard to do sometimes with some of this stuff. But if you can do it in moderation, then you’re good from a maintenance standpoint. So if your goal is to maintain your weight, you’re fine. Okay.

But since your goal is not to maintain, it’s to lose your weight, then you’re going to have to be a little bit more disciplined, right, you have to make these sacrifices, at least until you reach your goal weight, then you can go back to the occasional cookie, the slice of pizza, or the glass of wine here and there.

And maybe we practice doing that here and there, as you’re getting closer to that goal weight, so that you understand the mental and emotional aspects of drinking alcohol and eating sugar, because those things can really mess you up. And they’ll they’ll cause more cravings. And it’ll be really hard to stop once you start for some people anyway.

And so we got to be careful with that. So maybe we practice that and we can walk through it slowly. You know, I’m not just going to cut you loose and go Good luck, you know, we’re going to practice doing some of that stuff together. Okay.

So what I’m saying here is like we do have to make sacrifices, but we don’t necessarily have to make these sacrifices for life. Okay. I always talk about how we want to commit to a lifestyle, and commit to a lifestyle of eating healthy, that does not mean we commit to a lifestyle of never having another piece of pizza again, in our lives. That’s not what we’re talking about here.

So losing weight requires these lifestyle changes, you have to change the core of how you approach food, like your mental and emotional approach to food has to be different, right? You can’t keep doing the things you were doing before that doesn’t work, you already know that we and if you want to lose, you got to tighten things up a little bit.

You have to make some sacrifices. And then you have to learn how to do maintenance the right way. And maintenance doesn’t mean you just go back to doing things the way you did before. It’s about sticking to your healthy eating plan most of the time, like let’s say 90% of the time, it means learning that you can eat the occasional slice of pizza, and not the entire large pizza.

That was always my problem. I would be like I’m gonna get some pizza and I would eat like a whole medium or large pizza to myself. Depending on how like thick the crust was, you can only eat so much crust, you know, it means learning how to have a glass of wine once a week, not a bottle of wine every night. Like there’s a big difference there. Okay.

And this learning is how to do things differently. This learning how to moderate amazingly delicious foods that make us feel so good that that’s where the real work comes into play. Right? So if you’re somebody that’s like, you know, the thing that’s going to really be sustainable for me is if I can occasionally have that glass of wine, if I can occasionally have a piece of cake or cookie, but I can occasionally have pizza. I have learned how to do this.

And I have learned that I can eat pizza like couple times a year, I pretty much don’t eat sugar, I’ll have the occasional piece of dark chocolate. So it might be at 5% dark. So it’s there’s not much sugar in there. But I, when I eat that stuff, when I’m eating chocolate, when I’m eating some pizza, I want more of that stuff.

You know, I’ll start thinking about it ahead of time, because I usually plan it out. I’ll be like, oh, yeah, next month on the 14th I’m gonna have a pizza, you know, or eat some pizza. And then I’ll be thinking about, I can’t wait to have that pizza that I haven’t. I’m like, yeah, it was fine.

But then afterwards, I’m like, that was really good. I want more of that, you know, and I’ll and I’ll have to be really cognizant of my mental and emotional state around those types of foods that light up my pleasure centers, okay, and you’re gonna have to do the same thing for you. Okay.

So learning how to moderate some of these foods is really where the work kicks in. Okay, but you can do it. And the cool thing is, is that when you make these sacrifices, so you gotta be willing to make some sacrifices.

And when you make these sacrifices, and sometimes it’s for months on end, you might have to sacrifice some of these things for three months, six months, something like that, when you give them up, when you destroy them, they no longer have the power over you that they once had.

And after some time, you realize that not eating these things is really, you’re really not sacrificing anything at all. You know, it’s just not a big deal anymore. Okay.

So here’s your work for this week. Think about this. What do you need to sacrifice in order to reach your weight loss goals? Right? And then what are you willing to sacrifice? Are you willing to sacrifice all those things? And it has to be like a yes or no, you have to be committed.

You have to be absolutely committed to cutting these things out of your life, at least for a while. Okay? Every goal requires sacrifice. Losing weight requires sacrifice. What are you willing to cut out of your life to reach your weight loss goal? Okay, think about that. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.