Fat-Adaptation

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 242, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners, and today my top 10 weight loss tips for runners. So there is so much contradictory advice out there when it comes to losing weight, it’s really hard to know what’s right and what’s just BS. And I’ve always taken the approach that you actually need to ignore most of the info that’s spewed out there on the internet and social media, and just figure out what works best for you. We’re all different. There’s simply not one approach that’s going to work perfectly for everybody. So with that principle in mind, for this episode of the podcast, I want to share with you my top 10 weight loss tips for runners, and these tips should work for most of you, not all of you. So as always, try some things and figure out what works for you and what doesn’t work for you. Cool.

But first, if you want to get leaner, stronger, run faster, run longer, you need to make some changes. Making change is hard, but listen, if you don’t change, nothing changes. Nothing changes, if nothing changes, I think we all understand that the real secret, though, is to make changes and make them consistently. And that’s where coaching helps you, because making change and doing things new things consistently is hard. That part is hard. So if you have a coach there, helping you, keeping you on track, showing you the path, showing you what to do, holding your hand, walking you through the whole process. It makes making change and making change consistent, much, much easier. Getting a coach was one of the best things I have ever done for myself. This is why I’m a coach today, because I got so much out of my coaching. It was such a powerful life changing experience for me that I decided to devote my life to helping other people by coaching them through their achieving their goals. You know, whether it’s losing weight or improving their health, improving their strength, getting faster, whatever it is. So if you’re ready to start making some change and you want help making those changes stick, making them consistent. Reach out to me. Just go to my website, running, leancoaching.com, click on work with me, and I’ll show you exactly how to become the most badass version of yourself yet.

Cool. Okay, so today, Top 10 Weight Loss Tips for Runners. So I wanted to put together a list of what I believe are some of the best changes that you can make as a runner, if you are interested in losing weight, and if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably a runner, and you’re probably interested in losing some weight. And there’s a lot of misinformation out there, a lot of contradicting information out there. And you might be just sitting there, like, what do I do with all of this? And you know, there’s a lot of polarizing content out there, you know, that kind of divides people.

Oh, you have to eat nothing but plants. And this other group says you have to eat nothing but meat, and you can never deviate. And they will tell you. Each of those people will tell you that their way is the right way and the only healthy way. And is that true? Because they can’t both be right. So I take a lot of the advice that’s spewed out there with a grain of salt, and I want you to do the same thing. I want you to kind of make up your own mind when it comes to what works best for you, because only you will know what works best for you, but with that principle in mind, with the principle of like, individuality and like, knowing that there is no one size fits all. When it comes to this stuff, I wanted to put together what I thought was a pretty decent list of principles that tips really, that I think will work for most people, you know. And if you’re somebody that’s been listening to this podcast for a while, you probably know a lot of the principles that I teach when it comes to, you know, how many carbs you should be eating, and how often you should be eating, and some things like that.

But I wanted to put together a kind of a bullet list of action items that you can start kind of working through. So try some of these things. You don’t have to try them all, but you can try some of these and see if they have a positive effect on you, if they work, great, if they don’t, don’t do it. You know, it’s there. I’m not telling you that all of these are going to work perfectly for everybody, but in my years and years of coaching hundreds and hundreds of runners, I’ve decided that there are some principles that seem to apply to most people. So that’s the kind of thing I’m sharing with you today. So these are my top 10 weight loss tips for runners. Again, you’ve got to figure out what works for you, but try some of these.

So number one is going to be to not cut calories. Don’t just cut your calories. This is the typical weight loss advice that’s out there. If you want to lose weight, you got to cut your calories. And the reason I’m saying don’t do this is because it doesn’t really work, not long term. The reason most people tell you to cut calories to lose weight is because it is a very effective way in the short term of losing weight, you can lose weight pretty quickly if you cut your calories. So if you’re going from eating 2000 calories a day and you drop down to like 800 calories a day, I’m gonna tell you right now, you’re going to lose weight.

The problem, though, is that if you keep this up, your metabolism will slow down. So instead of burning 2000 calories a day, now you’re only burning 800 calories a day. Now you got to, like, cut your calories back even more if you want to continue to lose weight. And you can see where this is going, like, there’s a point where you’re just going to start gaining weight again, so you don’t want to slow your metabolism down. Right? So that’s one problem. Another problem is that, yes, it is one of the most effective short term ways of losing weight. It’s also the least effective method of keeping weight off long term of all the diets out there, and they’ve done massive studies on all these different diets, and they have shown that, yes, cutting calories is a great way to lose weight short term, but it’s also the most problematic, like people gain the most weight back the fastest when they do nothing but cut calories. So it’s not a very viable long term solution, because you can’t keep your body in a calorie deficit forever. If you do, you’re going to risk that slower metabolism. And it’s just, it’s, it’s a vicious cycle to get into.

The other reason why I don’t want you to cut your calories is because it’s not really recommended for runners. If you’re somebody that’s working out and running consistently, 3, 4, 5, 6 days a week, you need energy. You need the calories you need to recover from your workouts. You need the energy to perform properly in your workouts. And if you are not giving your body what it really needs, and you’re kind of starving yourself like you’re just trying to drop the calories so you can lose a bunch of weight, you’re going to suffer from a running standpoint.

So we don’t want to cut calories, so just don’t do it. It’s very, it’s not recommended, and it’s, actually, it’s very bad in the long term, like it just does not work long term, and it’s just not good. It’s not going to help you improve your running. Okay?

So instead, number two is to adopt a diet that just keeps your blood sugar levels normalized, right? So we want stable blood sugar, because when you have stable blood sugar, that means you also have stable insulin levels. Insulin is the hormone that lowers your blood sugar. And if you eat a bunch of sugar, high-carbohydrate meal, your blood sugar goes way up and so does insulin. Insulin goes way up and it stays up until it brings your blood sugar back down. Every time insulin is present, though, your body is storing fat, not burning fat. If you want to keep your body in fat burning mode, then you want to keep your insulin levels low. So we want to keep our blood sugar chill. We just want it to be low and we want it to be chill throughout the day. We don’t want to have these big spikes and crashes in our blood sugar.

Because when you have spikes in blood sugar, you feel good because you’re energized, but then you come down and your blood sugar goes below baseline. That’s when people say, Oh, my blood sugar is low because they’re, they’re going so high, they’re, they’re raising their blood sugar so high, so much insulin is being produced to push that blood sugar back down, that the blood sugar actually gets too low, and then you’ve got to eat some sugar or something like that, just to feel normal. Again. Okay, this is a bad life cycle to be in right here. Okay, so we want to keep your body in fat burning mode. That means keep the blood sugar low, keep the insulin levels low. We don’t want to keep our body in fat storing mode. That’s high blood sugar, high insulin levels.

Okay, also, when you adopt a diet that keeps your blood sugar low, it means you’re going to be less hungry throughout the day, and you’re going to have fewer cravings, because high blood sugar means you’re putting your body into an unnatural state of being more hungry. You also produce more ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone, and you suppress the production of leptin, which is your fullness receptor. It’s a fullness hormone. So more ghrelin, more hungry, less leptin, you know, less full. Okay, and so you’re going to have cravings like crazy. You’re going to be hungry all the time. So high blood sugar means that you’re just going to be more hungry. You’re going to be more hungry, you’re going to be eating more food, you’re going to be craving more sugar and more carbs, and it’s just, again, the vicious cycle to get into.

So instead, adopt a diet that just keeps the blood sugar low, and you’re going to see a lot of this just take care of itself, which leads me to number three, which is to get fat adapted. This is just training your body to burn more body fat. We all have tons of body fat stored on our bodies. Even the leanest people out there who maybe have 3% or 8% body fat or something like that, you have plenty of body fat on you to sustain you for weeks without food. Burning fat is the natural state for us as human beings. We are really good fat burners. We’ve just gotten away from that.

You know, fat burning is like we eat some food, some of the energy that we eat, especially when we eat the sugar and carbohydrates, some of that energy gets stored, gets used, and then some of it gets stored as body fat. So we use some of it in our muscles. We use some of it when we are in activity, or just like keeping our body running throughout the day. We use some of that energy from food. Some of that energy gets stored as fat. The problem is that we should be tapping into that stored body fat as a fuel source later, but we’re not. We’re just keep adding more wood to the wood pile, so to speak. So we just keep piling on more fat. We’re not burning the fat. So we want to get into the fat burning state. We want to get our bodies fat adapted.

Fat Burning means you’re going to lose the weight. Like if you want to lose weight, you got to burn the fat, right? So if we want to get fat adapted, we want to train our body to burn more fat. Diet has a lot to do with that. Also, when you’re burning more fat, it helps to improve your running. You improve your endurance. You have this natural fuel that’s on your body all the time, and you don’t have the need for as much fuel. From a running standpoint, you can run a half marathon, a marathon, with very little fuel, as opposed to people who are carb adapted, who need to eat tons of carbs just to keep themselves going for the run. So it helps you to lose weight. It helps to improve your running. Why wouldn’t you want to get fat adapted? Okay, that’s number three.

Number four is to time your carbs around your workouts. So this is where this isn’t about no carbs. This isn’t about never eating any sugar or any carbohydrates ever again in your life. We eat some carbs, right? We just want to time them around our workouts. So you might go a few days where you’re pretty low carb throughout the week, and then you have a long run on a Saturday. So the night before, you might increase your carb intake. The morning of a long run, you might increase your carb intake during that long run. You’re probably gonna take in some carbs, and this isn’t a ton. I’m not talking about getting 300-500 grams of carbs a day or something like that, but we want to be mindful that just because we’re doing a low carb thing doesn’t mean we don’t ever eat carbs. We do. We use carbs for fuel.

Runners will benefit greatly from having two sources of fuel, from being really good fat burners and from adding some carbohydrate into the mix. You want to earn your carbs. So you earn your carbs by using, you know, having a workout where you’re going to be using them as fuel, and then you burn the carbs, so you’re actually going to metabolize those carbohydrates during a long run or a hard workout or something like that. So that you’re, you’re not just storing a bunch of that carb energy as fat, right? So you earn your carbs by requiring them for fuel, and you metabolize them. You burn them pretty quickly during activity. So you don’t have this huge surplus of carb energy that you’re storing as fat. Cool. So earn your carbs and burn your carbs. Time your carbs around your workouts.

Number five, you’ve got to prioritize protein. Talk about this before on the podcast here. Listen. Running is a catabolic activity. Catabolic activities are ones that break down muscle tissue. So what we want to do is we have to. To offset that, we want to build lean muscle. We want to maintain and build muscle. And a lot of people will tell you again, this is why you shouldn’t run, why you’re trying to lose weight. Because if you’re just cutting calories, a lot of the weight that you lose is going to be muscle tissue, and then running is just going to make that worse. But if you’re doing this the right way, you’re not cutting your calories, you’re adding more protein into your diet. You will actually build lean muscle through this process.

More protein also means that you’re going to feel more full when you eat. You know, protein has a much higher satiety point than carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are not satisfying, like you can really overeat carbohydrates, and then they make you more hungry throughout the day. When you’re eating more protein and good quality fats too, you’re just less hungry throughout the day, and you’re going to feel more full when you eat, and you’re going to recover better from your workouts, because you’re getting, you’re providing your muscles with what they need to recover properly from your hard runs, long runs, hard workouts. So you have to make protein the priority at every meal, and make sure that you’re getting your right amount of protein every day.

And then that leads me to number six, which is you also have to add strength training into your weekly training schedule. So whatever you’re training for, if you’re ,you know, running a 5k or an ultra marathon, or anything in between, you have to make sure, even if you’re not a runner at all, you have to make sure that you are adding some sort of consistent strength training to your regimen on a weekly basis, you should be doing some strength training two or three times a week. At least twice a week would be the bare minimum that you should be doing some kind of strength training.

You have to include strength training into your training schedule, because you want to be gaining muscle, you want to be building lean muscle, not getting big. We’re not talking about becoming a huge bodybuilder. That’s very difficult to do if you’re an endurance athlete, but we want you to be stronger, because when you’re stronger, this means you’re going to offset that catabolic nature of running, so you’re going to not lose muscle through this process. And a lot of times, you can become anabolic, which means you’re building muscle. You get stronger. This means you’re going to have a faster metabolism. You’re going to burn more fat, you’re going to lose more weight.

When you’re stronger, you are at less risk of injury. You improve your endurance when you’re stronger, because stronger muscles take longer to fatigue than weak muscles, you become a faster runner. Then some other side effects that just happen to come along with regular strength training is less stress. You’re in a better mood, you’re just happier. You’re nicer to be around, you sleep better and you live longer. So strength training absolutely has to be something that you add into your weekly training schedule. If you’re not doing it, make sure you start doing it today.

Number seven is going to be to eat less often, not eat less, but eat less often. And this is one of those things where you may have been told, Oh, you need to eat six times a day to keep your metabolism burning hot. You know, this is just gym bro science. You know, there’s really no science behind this, the human body. If you look at our digestive systems, they’re really designed to work two or three times a day at the max, so eating six or eight times a day is just not recommended. Again, every time you eat some food, you’re going to raise your blood sugar, you’re going to raise insulin, and you’re going to be kind of storing some fat. So the fewer times a day you’re eating actually is better for you. And this doesn’t mean you eat, you know, one tiny little meal per day or something like that. We want to make sure you’re getting enough calories and enough protein throughout the day. So eat two, three times a day, twice, seems to be what a lot of people love doing, and it just feels really good, and you’re getting what you need at those two meals.

But this is a great way to keep your body burning fat. You want to space out your meals so that in between meals, your body is getting into that fat burning state. And if you want to lose weight, you know this is a great way of helping to enhance that. And you’ll get fat adapted faster. You’ll be burning more fat. You’ll get all the energy you need. You’ll get all the calories you need. You don’t need to worry about that.

But another great side effect of eating less often is that it helps you start to maintain, get back control of your eating, and maintain control of your eating instead of being an automatic eater where you just, every time you think about food, or you get stressed, or you get bored, you go and you grab something from the pantry. You know you’re just munching on stuff all day long. You become a more mindful eater. So you learn how to not snack throughout the day. You learn how to skip breakfast. You learn how to control your eating to where you’re eating a couple of times a day. It makes you a much more evolved eater, and not just a reactive eater. Okay, so this is really important, so eat less often. That’s number seven.

Number eight. This one might surprise you. Number eight is to not be too restrictive. Don’t be too restrictive with your diet. Allow yourself the indulgence every now and then. Listen, whatever your diet is, the formula that works for you, it has to be sustainable for you. And what I have found over many years of coaching people is that if it’s too restrictive, it’s not going to be sustainable long term for most people.

Now we do some things where we might cut the carbs pretty low for the first 30 days or something, and then we can, like, start adding in some of these little treat meals, or whatever you want to call them, treats, cheat meals, exceptions to the plan, whatever you want to call them. But if you want to stay in the game long term, you have to have this little release valve every now and then, from my experience, and I need this too. It works for me every now and then I’m like, you know, I’m really craving pizza. I need to eat some pizza, and I’ll just go eat some pizza. It’s something I do a couple times a year. Big whoop. It doesn’t throw me off. It might set me back a day or two, but then I’m right back on my plan.

I like the 90/10 approach instead of 80/20. 80/20 is a little too loosey goosey, in my opinion. But if you try the 90/10 approach, this equals maybe one meal a week that you can have an exception to your plan, right? So there’s too many people out there, too many diets that are promoting that you never, ever deviate from the plan. And this just is not something that is sustainable for most people. And I’ve worked with hundreds of people who’ve had much more success long term when they have the cheat meal every now and then, you have to learn how to do it properly. You can’t just go crazy every weekend and just binge out on everything. I’ve tried that approach, that does not work, but you definitely need to, like work on this, and it’s something you have to sort of practice and ease your way into. But being too restrictive too long is is definitely not something that’s going to work long term. Okay, that was number eight.

Number nine. Keep on running like you just have to keep up with the running. Lots of dietitians, lots of weight loss coaches out there tell you don’t run if you’re trying to lose weight. They tell you not to run because they don’t want to restrict calories, because that’s going to have a negative impact on running, which we’re not doing that. We’re not restricting calories, so we don’t need to worry about that.

And a lot of these people will tell you, well, you should only be focusing on one thing at a time. And, you know, I kind of get where they’re coming from, instead of, like, focusing on running and lifting weights, and, you know, your diet, they want you to just focus on one thing. Just focus on your diet, and don’t do anything else. But listen. I know from experience that you listening to this podcast can absolutely focus on more than one thing at a time. You’re a runner, so you like, you love running. You love strength training. You love working on your nutrition. You love cross training. This is how you live your life every single day.

Why now should I tell you that you should only be doing one thing at a time, right? Consistent running, also, it’s going to help you to burn more fat, which is going to equal more weight loss. But also, don’t forget, with all the running that you’re doing, don’t forget your speed work, long, slow, easy running is great, but be sure to add in some moderate to high intensity intervals, like sprint repeats and tempo runs, to help improve your cardiovascular system, to help improve your heart rate, we want lower heart rate to have a higher VO2 Max, improved lactate clearing, not to mention you get faster when you’re doing the speed work.

Also, little side note here, faster running makes your slow, easy runs feel very, very easy. So if you want running to just feel easier in general, make sure you’re doing the speed work every week. All right, okay.

And number 10, and maybe the most important tip I have for you today is don’t be in a hurry. Weight loss takes time. How much time? Who knows? It’s different for everyone. So just commit to the process. Don’t compare yourself to where you are today to where somebody else is. Just compare yourself to where you were yesterday and just always be trying to improve. Don’t set arbitrary weight loss goals, especially with dates like, oh, I need to lose 40 pounds in four months. There’s just too many factors involved with something like this, and who knows how fast your body’s going to respond to these changes.

Instead, commit to the process of change. Do what you need to do today to stay on track. Don’t worry about tomorrow until tomorrow. This has to be a lifestyle change if you want it to last. People that lose weight fast with like liposuction or weight loss surgery, they don’t learn how to maintain it, because they’re not learning what works for them. They’re not learning new habits and new behaviors. You have to learn how to make this work for you long term, and you know what, that takes time.

You need to learn how to shop differently, how to handle vacations and holidays, how to handle family functions, dinners out with friends, how to handle stressful situations in your life. There’s always going to be some kind of stressful situations in your life. You need to learn how to get through those without totally going off plan. So every day, just make a commitment to being the best you that you can be from now until forever.

So that’s the good news, and the bad news is that this doesn’t change. You just keep working on this. You just keep going. There’s no finish line. There’s no destination you’re trying to get to. This is who you are. This is how you live your life from here on out, right? It’s good news and bad news because, you know, it’s bad news because there is no finish line. You’re just going to continue doing this. But it’s good news because this is how you get to live your life now. This is how you approach everything. You’re just a, you’re a different person now, and you’re a healthy eater, and you commit to your workouts, and this is just who you are now.

Actually, it makes going through your life much easier. You don’t have to think about it anymore. You don’t have to question these decisions you’re making. You’re just gonna do it. You’re just gonna show up for yourself every day. So commit to the process. Don’t ever, ever, ever quit. Don’t give up on yourself. Okay, if you don’t give up on yourself, eventually you will reach your weight loss goal, but you just can’t take your head out of the game. You have to keep your head in the game.

Okay, cool. Those are my top 10 tips, my top 10 weight loss tips for runners. That’s all I got for you today. I know you got this. I love you all. Keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.