Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
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When it comes to proper hydration, most runners are all over the place. I get it, it’s a little confusing…how much should you drink, how often, should you only drink water, what about electrolytes, …
Continue Reading about 165. The Ultimate Guide to Hydration for Runners →
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 165 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today the ultimate guide to hydration for runners. So when it comes to proper hydration, most runners are kind of all over the place. And I get it. It’s a little confusing.
How much are you supposed to drink? How often? Should you only drink water? What about electrolytes is Gatorade the best option, etc, etc. Spoiler alert Gatorade to stay away from that stuff. It’s just sugar water. Okay. So today I want to end the confusion for you. I want to give you a very clear understanding of what hydration actually means for runners and how to do it properly. That’s why I’m calling this one The Ultimate Guide to hydration for runners.
So today you’re going to learn exactly what hydration means. The role electrolytes play in hydration, they are very important, by the way, how to hydrate before, during and after exercise, how coffee affects hydration, and loads more. So sit back, maybe grab a pen and paper for this one, because you might want to take notes. I have a lot of numbers for you today. And enjoy the ultimate guide to hydration for runners.
First, let me ask you this, does any of this sound familiar? You don’t need carbs to run, oh, you can’t run without carbs. You can’t lose weight while you’re running. You have to run in order to lose weight. You need to eat six times a day to keep your metabolism going. Eating less often will speed up your metabolism. Have you heard these contrasting ideas?
If some of these sound familiar, if all this sounds familiar, and you’re confused by all this like conflicting, conflicting information out there, you’re definitely not everyone has their own viewpoint and opinion of what works best. But the truth is there is no best way to do this stuff. Okay, the only thing that matters, the only thing that really should matter to you is what works best for you. Figuring that out, though, it’s kind of the tough part, right.
So a key component of my coaching program is putting together a personalized plan that actually works for you, a plan that will get you to your weight loss goals into your running goals much faster than you could probably do on your own. So if you want some expert guidance to figure out what works for you, then I think you’d definitely be a good fit for coaching. Stop the confusion and start taking expertly Guided Action to learn more and apply for coaching. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply.
Okay, let’s talk hydration. I really wanted to get into this topic today. And I’ve been thinking about this for a while and doing some research on this topic because I think it’s very important and something that a lot of runners overlook, or they think they have an idea of what they should do, but they’re maybe kind of misguided a little bit. And so I want to make sure that we have a deep dive in a detailed discussion on hydration. And so that’s why I’m calling this the ultimate guide to hydration for runners.
So let’s get into this. First of all, what is hydration? So hydration is basically the process of causing something to absorb water. Think about a sponge, you know, you take a dry sponge, it’s all like shriveled up and flat and then you add some water to it and it absorbs that water. It’s able to hold that water. Okay, so that’s hydration, very simple right?
Every cell in our bodies is made up of mostly water. So 70% or more depending on the cell but 70% or more of your total cell mass is water your brain all the all the cells in your blood your skin organs, muscles, bones, teeth all contain water. So hydration means that we are providing enough water to ourselves for them to function properly.
Okay, so just understand that at the base level, like hydration, is you know required for every cell in our body is required to be hydrated properly okay? That’s why we need water. We don’t drink water. We will die. You can live by the rule of threes – so three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food, so you could go a couple days without water. But then eventually you’re going to die. So just keep that in mind. Drink your water.
So how much should you drink, though? I mean, this is one of the big questions, right? And people say, oh, you should drink eight glasses of water a day. Well, what’s a glass? How many ounces is that? How big is your glass? Is it sixteen ounces? Is it eight ounces? What is that?
So one of the rules of thumb that we can use, is to just take half your body weight and drink that in ounces per day. So if you weigh 180 pounds, then you know, 90 ounces of water is what you want to get per day. If you weigh 150 pounds, then 75 ounces of water is where you want to be. Yeah, this is for the average adult, right? This is not necessarily for an endurance athlete.
So if you’re somebody who’s training a lot, you’re going to require more fluid intake, you’re going to require more hydration, and we’re going to talk all about that in just a second. But I just want you to understand, at a base level, whatever your body weight is, just have that and that should be around where you want to be at a minimum, from from a water standpoint, just drinking water each day, okay.
So something to keep in mind, when you wake up in the morning, you are going to be dehydrated. And there’s a good way to offset this, which is by first thing in the morning, is by drinking 16-30 ounces of water just to start things off. And it’s recommended that you put some salt or some electrolytes in that water. And I’ll talk more about electrolytes in a minute. So just understand that you will wake up somewhat dehydrated. And how you can determine how dehydrated you are as an individual is by doing a simple test.
So that would be to weigh yourself naked before you go to bed. And then after you get up in the morning and you’ve urinated, weigh yourself again, and just kind of see how much water weight you lost overnight. And that’s a good indicator of maybe how dehydrated you are in the morning.
So being dehydrated is not a good thing. That means our cells are not functioning properly, our brains are not functioning properly, our nervous system is not functioning properly. And if you’re just one to 2% dehydrated, meaning that if you’re just if you’ve lost 1-2% of your body weight, due to dehydration, it can have a significant impact on your athletic performance.
Now I know a lot of people love working out first thing in the morning in that fasted state, I know I do, I don’t eat before I work out, I drink some coffee and then I hydrate before I work out. But if you’re starting your workout, and you’re already, let’s say 1% dehydrated, you’ve lost a few pounds of body weight overnight due to dehydration, and you’re going to start your workout in that 1% dehydrated state.
Getting yourself back to normal is going to be very challenging, like it’s really hard to do that with that hydration deficit that you’re going to be starting your workout in. So let’s say you have a long run, and you got a three hour run, and you’re starting this run at a 1% dehydration. So you’ve you’ve lost 1% of your body weight, it’s only going to get worse, it’s not going to be, it’s not going to get better, it’s going to be very hard to make up for that deficit, right?
Drinking while you’re running, it’s going to be really hard to drink enough to really make up for that. So training dehydrated can have a really negative impact on your athletic performance. So just keep that in mind. It’s great if you like to work out in that fasted state, just make sure you hydrate prior to work out.
So how much are we supposed to drink? Well for running, you know, for exercising. So for short bouts of exercise less than 30 minutes, let’s say you really don’t need to do much, you know, because you’re not going to lose much in the way of fluid. Okay? Typically, though, anything over an hour, you’re probably going to want to consume some fluids.
And this does depend on the weather and you know, the humidity levels and how much you sweat and things like that. But the one thing that I really want to get into here is making sure that we understand that when we talk about hydration, we’re not just talking about water alone, that we’re talking about electrolytes, electrolyte is like an umbrella term.
Basically it means particles that carry either positive or negative electric charge. So in nutrition we’re talking about essential minerals that are found in your blood, sweat and urine. So, when these minerals dissolve in fluid, they form electrolytes positive or negative ions used in metabolic processes.
So the electrolytes that are found in your body are sodium, potassium, chloride, calcium, magnesium, phosphate, bicarbonate. All of these electrolytes are required for various bodily processes including proper nerve and muscle function, maintaining balance, you know, like a pH balance and keeping you hydrated, okay? And so, the main electrolytes that we’re going to be kind of talking about are going to be sodium chloride, potassium and magnesium, sodium and chloride, basically salt, okay, so sodium, potassium, magnesium is kind of how we lumped those three together, okay?
Electrolytes are extremely important, they are crucial to keeping your nervous system and your muscles functioning properly. They help keep your internal environment balanced, like your pH levels balanced, okay? Without electrolytes, you’re really not hydrating properly. Remember, hydration is your body, drawing water into cells. And a critical part of this function is especially sodium.
So salt helps to make sure the cells don’t burst from being too full or shrivel up due to dehydration. So too much water is a problem. And a lot of athletes think that I just need to drink more water, drink more water, drink more water, but they’re not getting enough electrolytes and they’re not getting enough salt to mix with that water. And this can lead to a serious condition called hyponatremia. Hypo means low, na meaning salt, and then tremia is like in the blood. So basically it just means you don’t have enough sodium in your blood.
And hyponatremia can cause dizziness, lightheadedness, nausea, cognitive issues like confusion, or irritability, vomiting, and then there’s some very severe symptoms too with loss of consciousness, seizures, coma, even death. So drinking too much water can literally kill you. So you got to be careful with that, like, we don’t want to be just drinking plain water, you know, you’re out running an ultra marathon, and it’s hot out and you’re sweating a lot.
The more water that you consume, the more you’re diluting your system of sodium. And you will eventually get into some level of hyponatremia. And you have to be really careful with that. So we want to make sure that we are using electrolytes to hydrate properly. And again, electrolytes are required for proper muscle function and hydration and nervous system function and all these things, right. So just understand that we don’t when I talk about hydration, we really need to make sure we’re thinking about hydrating with water and electrolytes.
So how much do you need? How much electrolytes are you supposed to be, you know, consuming? So this is a little bit different for everyone, I’m going to give you some kind of averages here. And you can play around with this a little bit. Okay, and this goes to this whole discussion today. Which is like you have to kind of figure out what works best for you.
I’m gonna give you some ballpark numbers here, but just remember that it’s good for you to to play around with this a little bit. None of this stuff is like set in stone. Okay, so the first thing you need to determine is like, you know how much you’re losing in your sweat because when you sweat, then you want to replace the electrolytes that you lose in your sweat. So that you kind of replace that same concentration of electrolytes that’s in your sweat with the fluid that you’re drinking. Okay.
So for example, in one liter, which is 33 ounces, like one liter of sweat, I know it sounds disgusting, right? But one liter of sweat contains somewhere between 502,000 milligrams of sodium, 1-500 milligrams of potassium, and 0-100 milligrams of magnesium. So the averages in sweat would be somewhere around 1000 milligrams or a gram of sodium, 300 milligrams of potassium and 50 milligrams of magnesium.
Now there’s a product that you can get out there that I love. There’s lots of products for hydration. This one I just happen to love it’s called element LMNT. You can find it on Amazon or whatever. I don’t make any money off of this stuff. I just love it. I think it works great, it contains 1000 milligrams of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium and 60 milligrams of magnesium. So it’s kind of hits, those numbers are pretty close to those numbers, right.
So basically, for every liter of sweat that you produce, you want to have one packet of LMNT added to water. And so, you know, let’s say, if you sweat out a pound per hour, then every two hours of running, you’re gonna want to have an element. Okay, that’s pretty easy, right? Again, these are sort of ballpark numbers, you need to kind of figure out what works best for you. But this is a good place to start here. Okay.
And then, you know, post exercise, just, you know, we want to make sure that we are, you know, replacing our fluids, you know, post exercise the same way that we do during exercise. Okay, and I’m gonna talk about that in just a minute, like, how to hydrate specifically during exercise?
Well, let me just talk about that right now. So how about this? How do we hydrate during exercise, or specifically, how do we replace lost fluids during exercise, the first thing you need to do is determine how much fluid you lose during exercise. So a great field test, again, is to weigh yourself naked before you run, and maybe go for an hour long run, after the run, dry off where you are again, and then you’ll see how much you lost. So this will give you a rough idea of how much water you know, you lose how much sweat you lose per hour.
So for every pound of water lost, we want to replace that with one and a quarter pounds of fluid. So we want that to be 125% of what we lost through sweat, we want to replace it with fluid that means electrolytes, right? water and electrolytes. So for example, if you weigh 150 pounds before you run, and then you come home from that run, and you weigh 149 pounds, you lost one pound during that one hour run. Okay? Pretty easy to do, right?
Then you just take 1.25 times that and that means that you know, during your next run, you’re going to want to run, you’re going to want to consume 1.25 pounds of fluid for that run. You also have to factor in water consumed during the run. So let’s say you take the same 150 pound person, you weigh yourself before you run, you drink eight ounces during that, so about half, and then you come back and you notice that you’re down to 149, you actually lost really 1.5 pounds total because you replaced eight ounces of that.
So then you would say okay, so what is 1.25 times 1.5? And that brings us to about 20 ounces, right? So 20 ounces every hour is how much that particular individual loses. Okay, so let’s break this down just a little bit more. Take that 20 ounces per hour and divide by four, because we want to know about how much we should be drinking every 15 minutes. This makes it so much easier, right? Because you’re not going to chug 20 ounces every hour, so top of the hour better chug 20 ounces of water. That is not going to be a good strategy for running. Okay.
So that means that we want to break that 20 ounces down over every 15 minutes. So that’s like five ounces every 15 minutes, right? So pretty easy math once you once you do this. Okay, so let me let me repeat, you know, kind of replay this right here. So for every pound every 16 ounces of water last, replace it with 1.25 pounds of fluid or one 125% of the ounces of fluid lost. Okay, that’s it, that’s all you have to remember right there. And then just divide that by four so that you’re, you know, consuming, you know, a little bit every 15 minutes or so. Okay.
Now, there’s another formula that you can use, if you don’t want to do the sweat test where you weigh yourself before and after, you can just take your body weight and divide it by 30. And that’s how many ounces to drink every 15 minutes. This is kind of an easy way of doing this. So let’s say you weigh 150 pounds, divide that by 30. That’s five, five ounces every 15 minutes. That’s it. Simple, right?
I like this one because it kind of jives with you know what most people kind of find there. And it gives you just enough, it gives you probably a good place to start. All right, and then you need to kind of figure out what works best for you and then remember, these numbers will go up or down based on how hot it is outside, how humid it is, and how hard you’re training. So you have to experiment with this, like what works for you may not work for other people, what works for them may not work for you. Okay?
So now that we understand that, when you are done with exercise, you want to have that same formula that 125% of fluids are lost during exercise. So even though you’ve hydrated during, maybe you still come back and you’ve lost some weight because of a little bit of dehydration, even though you’ve been drinking, it’s fine. Not a big deal. Just replace those same fluids lost using the same concentration of water, electrolytes and that 125% rule, okay?
So another way to tell if you’re getting enough fluid and electrolytes, and I know this is a great one for ultra runners, because they’re always asking about their weight, they’re looking at their urine, you want to make sure your urine is not a dark color. You want to make sure you’re not losing too much weight. And then how thirsty are you feeling? So we call this what w u t? WUT?
So is your weight down? How much have you lost in the way of fluids? And then we look at urine; what color is it? Is it clear? That’s a good sign. Is it dark colored? Like stout beer? That’s a bad sign. And like how thirsty are you or do you feel very thirsty or not really? Okay. So if any one of these weight, urine or thirst if you can answer yes to any of these; urine is kind of dark and you’re feeling thirsty? Yes to any one of these, you might be a little dehydrated, okay?
If two or three or yes or three or yes, that you’re definitely dehydrated, okay, so then you need to probably up your hydration game a little bit. So maybe the kidney you didn’t plan for the conditions or something like that. Okay. Now, another way of determining what your salt needs are, is, you know, if you’re craving salt, you may need to eat more salt. If the food you’re eating just doesn’t taste salty at all, and you keep adding more salt to your food and it starts to taste fine, then you probably don’t have enough salt in the system. All right.
So if you’re craving salt, eat more salt, if what you’re eating tastes super salty, and you go for one of these electrolyte drinks. And you’re like, Oh, this is so salty then maybe you’re salted enough. Like you don’t really need to add more sodium into your system. So go by sort of that moat, we call it the salt appetite. Like how is your salt appetite? Do you crave salt, you want more salt, and maybe you need a little bit more. But if you’re not, then you might be okay.
And keep in mind the RDA, the recommended daily allowance for sodium intake is like 2300 milligrams a day. So that’s for people who are eating a typical American diet, who are eating maybe a lot of carbohydrates, a lot of processed foods. When you eat a clean diet, when you’re maybe doing sort of a lower carbohydrate intake, you’re doing lots of endurance activities, where you’re losing a lot of sodium through sweat, you can probably up your salt game, you can probably up your salt intake, from that 2300 milligrams a day to 3000 milligrams a day, maybe even up to 5000 milligrams a day. Depends on you as an individual.
Now, if you have pre hypotension or hypertension, you have to be careful with salt. Talk to your doctor about what numbers are right for you. Chances are that you’re gonna have to keep sodium probably a lot lower than some of these numbers that I mentioned here. Okay, so definitely talk to your doctor and see what you know they recommend for you. Okay, yeah, and another thing about processed foods is that a lot of people who kind of switch and start eating a lower carb diet, they’re not getting enough salt all of a sudden.
So they may have been close to that 20 303,000 milligrams of salt per day. And then they start eating really clean foods, they start eating a lot less processed foods, and their sodium intake goes way down and they don’t feel good. You know, they still maybe have a little lightheadedness, headaches, a little bit of brain fog or something like that. So if you eat pretty clean, you might want to just try adding a little bit more salt to your diet to see if you feel better, you’ll probably feel better perform better. You’ll have better brain function, you’ll probably sleep better too. Okay.
And then electrolytes, you know, this question has come up before like, should I use electrolytes only when I’m running or should I use them other times? And the answer is yes. Yes, you should use electrolytes every day. It’s vital for sports performance Yes, but also vital for proper brain function. It’s vital for maintaining pH levels, it’s vital for nerve and muscle functions and all the stuff that I mentioned earlier, okay.
So, you know, just keep in mind that we want to take electrolytes on a daily basis, and make sure that we are hydrating before, during and after exercise. And then really quickly, yeah, how to hydrate before exercise. So a good place to start with this is maybe around 500 milligrams of sodium, right, so what you want to do is 30 to 60 minutes before exercise, go ahead and preload with some salt or electrolytes, and water, maybe 16 ounces of water, so and then over the course of about 15 to 20 minutes, sip that water, don’t just chug it all down at once.
Because what this will do is it’ll help to increase blood volume, it’ll actually give your body more blood to deliver oxygen to working muscles. So this is a very easy and very simple performance enhancing hack, right, just by pre-hydrating before you exercise. So that way, you’re not starting off your exercise in that dehydrated state. So one of the first things I do every morning is while I’m making my coffee in the morning, I add salt to 16 ounces of water. And I drink it. And that’s how I start every day that way. I know that no matter what my exercise looks like that day, whether I’m lifting weights, or running that I know I’m like starting out with some level of hydration. Okay.
Oh, what about coffee? People ask about coffee and they think that it’s, you know, maybe dehydrating. You know, people talk about, you know, caffeine being a diuretic, and it’ll actually dehydrate you. And that is true coffee, or caffeine on its own is a diuretic and will dehydrate you it will cause dehydration.
So if you’re taking caffeine pills, it will probably cause some dehydration. But if you’re drinking brewed coffee, which is mostly water, then the effect of that dehydration is beaches basically neutralized so you don’t really need to worry about coffee being D dehydrating or a diuretic because it really won’t do that to you as long as it’s got all that water. So if you are somebody that takes caffeine pills, just make sure you drink plenty of water with them to kind of offset that and you’ll be fine there.
Okay, and just coffee is a proven performance enhancing compound so use it but not too much. One to two cups of coffee, pre workout seems to really enhance exercise performance. Three plus cups of coffee can start to cause some performance degradation. So, you have to be careful not to overdo it with the coffee or the caffeine. So this is good news. Right? If you like drinking coffee, then you’re good to go there. It’s not dehydrated at all.
Okay, I hope you got something out of this episode. I hope you understand hydration, how to hydrate before, during and after exercise. What electrolytes are, how much to use, when to use them. If you have any questions, reach out, I’m always here for you. But 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.
There’s a lot of conflicting information out there in the world today about proper nutrition, the best ways to lose weight, what types of exercise are best for weight loss, and on and on. But I …
Continue Reading about 163. 3 Proven Ways to Get Your Body Burning Fat →
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 163 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today three proven ways to get your body burning fat. I know that there’s a lot of conflicting information out there in the world today about proper nutrition, the best ways to lose weight, what types of exercise are best for weight loss, and so on and so on.
But I think we can all agree on one thing that if you want to lose weight, you have to burn fat, right? Losing weight means reducing the amount of fat you have stored in your body period. When you look at yourself in the mirror naked, you see exactly where this fat is to write. That’s the stuff you want to get rid of. But how do you do it?
Maybe you’ve tried running it off. And maybe you’ve made some progress with that, but maybe not. For many of us running just doesn’t move the needle at all. There are lots of ways to reduce body fat. Today, I’m gonna go over the three proven ways to get your body burning fat so that you can lose weight and so that you can improve your running performance.
But first I want to talk about something. Here’s something that most coaches get wrong. Most coaches focus on one thing, they focus on what you should do, which is fine. That’s part of coaching, you need to know what to do, you need to know how to do it. But there’s more to it than that, especially if you really want to make changes to your health and fitness that lasts, especially if you want to make sustainable, long lasting lifetime changes.
So in my program, we don’t focus on just what you’re doing. That’s part of it. But rather, we focus on something bigger, like who are you becoming? This is a much more powerful approach to creating lasting change. Because when you focus on who you are becoming, you are way more likely to get there, you’re more focused, you’re more committed, you stay on track, more healthy habits become a way of life, they just become part of who you are, and what you do. So decide on who it is that you want to become.
And then hey, let’s make a plan to get you there. To learn more and apply for coaching, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. Okay, so three proven ways to get your body burning fat. The first thing I want to talk about here is what is weight? Because we talk about weight loss a lot. And people say I just want to lose weight, I want to lose weight.
So what is this weight that we’re talking about? Well, we’re talking about body fat, right? A lot of times when people go on calorie restrictive diets to lose weight, a lot of the weight that they’re losing is muscle mass, we don’t want to do that, especially if you are somebody who wants to continue improving your running performance or get stronger and just be a healthy fit human being you want to maintain or even gain muscle weight.
And while you are getting rid of the fat weight, and this is something that you can absolutely do, is what we call improving your body composition. Your body is composed of fat, muscle and bone and all kinds of things. We want to improve your body composition, we want to increase your muscle mass while reducing your fat mass. So this, this is really what we’re talking about when we talk about losing weight, we just don’t want to drop weight, we want to drop the fat weight, right.
And this all makes total common sense, right, we want to get stronger, we want to have more energy, we want to feel better, we want to be as healthy and as fit as possible. That is really what the goal is here. The goal isn’t even to lose weight, the goal is to be as healthy and as strong and fit as possible.
When we do that, when we make that our goal, the fat loss happens as a nice side result of all that right. So let’s just make sure that we understand we’re talking about fat weight here. Okay. And how do you lose the fat weight? Well, you gotta burn the fat. We can all agree on that. All right. I know there’s a lot of information out there and different ways of doing things and calorie restriction and don’t count calories and track all your food and never track your food. Only eat these kinds of foods, never eat those kinds of foods. And on and on and on.
And it gets pretty frustrating, right? But I think we can all agree that if you want to lose weight, you want to lose fat weight, you’ve got to burn the fat. Right? So let’s just focus on that this is what our focus is on this discussion today is how do we burn fat? How do we get our body burning fat more efficiently, we’re always burning a little bit of that.
But if we’re not losing that fat weight, we’re not burning enough. So we have to increase that fat burning capacity in our bodies. So the first thing I want to talk about here is the insulin model, because this is something that is very well adopted now and very well researched, and something that I think most people could agree is probably what’s going on with the majority of people who have a hard time losing weight.
And the insulin model looks something like this. When your insulin is high, in your blood, when your body has a high amounts of insulin, then your hormones are put into a state where your body cannot burn fat. High insulin means your body is storing fat, not burning fat. So the idea is to keep insulin levels low, so that your body can burn fat. So this is, this is what the insulin model is, it’s pretty simple.
It gets a little complicated when you talk about the best ways to keep insulin levels low. And a lot of this has to do with the study of obesity and the study of type two diabetes. But it applies to all of us really, and this is something that I think is really fascinating is that even though we might be healthy, and we don’t have pre diabetes, or diabetes, you know, we’re not obese, but we were runners, we’re pretty fit people, but we can’t seem to lose weight.
Maybe you know, there’s some truth to this insulin model of weight gain and weight loss. And maybe there’s something that we can apply to even us as runners, right. So, I think that we have to just take this as a baseline, understanding that when we have high levels of insulin, that our body is storing fat, when we can keep our insulin levels low, then we can create an environment where our body can burn our stored body fat.
Okay, so how do we keep our insulin levels low? So the first suggestion or tip or the first way, the first proven way to get your body burning fat is to lower your carbohydrate intake, get off the sugars, get off the refined grains, stop eating tons of carbs, this is not about you know, zero carbs. But you gotta get away from those refined carbs and the foods that really spike your blood sugar.
And here’s why. Because when you eat sugar, for example, your blood sugar spikes like crazy. So you get this huge spike in your blood sugar. When you have a huge spike in your blood sugar, insulin gets produced, again in a huge amount in order to bring that blood sugar back down to baseline.
So a high spike of blood sugar, glucose in the blood, high spike of insulin; now your body is storing fat, your body cannot burn fat when you’re in this high insulin mode. Okay, so we keep our carbs low. We don’t eat a ton of sugar, we don’t eat any sugar if we can avoid it. We don’t eat a lot of things like you know refined grains.
And, what happens is the food that you do eat, let’s say you eat some chicken and some broccoli, or some scrambled eggs with cheese, bacon and some avocado. These are all foods that are low glycemic. These are foods that won’t raise your blood sugar, a ton of good sources of protein, good sources of fat, and will not raise your blood sugar.
So what happens when you eat these foods is that your blood sugar stays pretty, pretty steady. It’ll go up a little bit. When you eat protein, your blood sugar will go up slightly. When you eat fat, your blood sugar doesn’t go up at all. So if you ate for example, I have coffee in the morning. I’ve put a little MCT oil in my coffee, maybe a little bit of grass fed butter in there, blend it up. Tastes amazing. Gives me a little bit of energy in the morning but does nothing to raise my blood sugar because it’s just pure fat.
Pure fat does not raise your blood sugar, carbs and protein will raise your blood sugar, carbs much more so than protein. Okay, so we eat a diet that is higher in protein and lower in carbohydrates. And what happens? Well, you’re getting all the nutrients that you need. You’re getting a very nutrient dense diet when you do this and you are keeping your blood sugar pretty low.
And when you do this, insulin is low, which means your body is constantly in fat, fat burning mode, not fat storing mode. Alright, so do we understand this much of this process so far? Because it’s very important that we understand this concept.
So here’s something we need to understand. As runners, we need to understand this as well, because we basically have, you know, two types of fuel that our body can use, there’s more, but I’m just gonna go over these two. So we have glucose, carbs, and we have fat; stored body fat as fuel. And think of it as a gas tank, and at the bottom of the gas tank is this huge supply of stored body fat as fuel.
So this is going to burn for days and days and days. But then at the very top of that gas tank, we have a little bit of glucose, so we have a little bit of fast burning glucose, there’s only a little bit but as long as that’s there, that’s going to be the preferred fuel source. So our body wants to burn that first. So if we burn that top layer of glucose off, then our body can start tapping into that huge supply of clean burning long lasting, stored body fat.
And this is how you start to burn fat really efficiently. And you can start to lose weight and things like that. As long as you keep that top level of fuel topped off, as long as you keep carbs, and glucose. As readily available fuel for your body to use as energy, you will not get into that fat burning, you will not be able to get into that other source of fuel.
Think about this: as runners, we’ve been told we need to keep our carbs up, we need to keep our glycogen levels topped off, which means that we need to continually eat carbs, continually eat sugar, so that we always have that to use as fuel. Fine, okay, that works as a fuel source just purely for running performance. But it also keeps your body in this fat storing mode. So you’re constantly going to be gaining weight in this process.
This is why so many people come to me and they’re like Patrick, I am training for this marathon. And I’m gaining weight, like what is going on here? And we look at the diet, we see that you know, maybe this person is eating the typical runner’s diet of nothing but carbs and sugar and then fueling with carbs and sugar, recovering with carbs and sugar and then repeating that process day in and day out. And they can’t figure out why they’re gaining weight.
And this is the process here, you just keep topping off the carbs and keep topping off the glucose and so you don’t have the ability to access that huge supply of stored body fat, okay, so get rid of that top layer of fuel, get rid of the glucose, get rid of the glycogen. And now you’ve got the ability to start burning stored body fat.
Okay, so the first proven method of getting your body to start burning fat more efficiently, is to lower your carb intake and just cut out most of the carbs. And we’re not talking about anything crazy here, if you’re eating 50-75 grams of carbs a day, that’s pretty low compared to what most people do. I know people that do very low, I probably do around 30-40 grams of carbs a day, maybe 50.
Some days when I’m running, I’m going to increase that to be a little bit higher, because I’m using that as a little bit of fuel before running. But that’s because I’m very efficient at burning fat. I’m already fat adapted, and I can use some carbs as fuel. I’m not trying to lose weight. But if you are trying to lose weight, just keep that stuff out of the equation, you don’t really need carbs, you don’t need carbs for running you can, you can run really well without carbs.
You really can. You don’t have to do it all the time. But you can do it most of the time, especially for the longer distance, lower intensity stuff. Okay. So lower the carb intake, and you can start getting your body burning fat instead of storing fat. The other thing I want to say here before I go on to the next one is that burning fat is our natural state.
We as human beings have always been really proficient fat burners. We’ve always eaten a pretty low glycemic diet. And it can be argued what we ate as human beings. Lots of meat, lots of fat, lots of, you know, tubers and some berries and things like that, honey. So you know, it’s not like we ate zero carbs or zero vegetables or zero fruits, but we didn’t need the kinds of processed foods that we have today. We didn’t have access to that stuff.
They weren’t obese, you know, ancient ancestors were not obese people. If they didn’t have type two diabetes, they didn’t have heart disease then they would have all the problems that we have today. So they were really good at storing some of the energy that they consumed as body fat. And then they were really good at using that stored energy as body fat.
It’s kind of like you’re putting wood on the woodpile to burn later. But in modern society today, over the last 40 years or so, 40-50 years, we have been a society that just keeps putting more and more wood on the woodpile, we’re not burning the wood for fuel, we’re not burning that fat for fuel, we’re just adding to the fat stores that we have. So this is a really big problem.
But just understand that we are, we can take control of the way our bodies work, and we can get back to being really efficient fat burning machines, like we used to be, as human beings forever got. So this isn’t some weird thing that I’m explaining isn’t like some fringe thing that just happened, you know, a year ago or something like that. Now, we’ve always been efficient fat burning machines, we just want to get back to that natural state.
Okay, so lower the carbon take, that’s number one. Number two, don’t eat all the time. Another way to get fat burning going, is to not eat constantly. So remember what I said about blood sugar? Well, every time you eat, even if you’re eating just, you know fat and protein, your blood sugar will go up a little bit.
So that means that when your blood sugar goes up, your body is going to produce some insulin to bring that back down to normal. So instead of eating six times a day where our blood sugar is constantly up, and insulin is constantly present, why don’t we just eat a couple of times a day?
You know, the human body is really designed to eat like once or twice a day. When we do that, you’re keeping it. This is another great way of keeping insulin levels steady and low, and giving your body the ability to burn that stored body fat.
Well, you know, well, what about timing for running? I need to fuel my runs. I need protein right after a workout. And I have to tell you something like there’s been so many studies that have really proven that it really doesn’t matter when you consume protein after a workout. As long as you get the right amount of protein each day, the timing is not that important.
You might have some minuscule gains from eating protein within an hour after a hard workout. But the results have really shown to be negligible, there’s really not that big of a difference between people who time their protein, you know, right around a hard workout, or they just eat later, you know, give themselves a couple of hours after a workout and eat when they feel hungry again, so people don’t get hungry right after working out. It’s more important to get enough protein each day.
So as long as you’re getting the right amount of protein each day, then that’s going to be more important, that’s going to have a bigger impact on your recovery and on muscle maintaining and muscle building, then, you know, this one, our timing right after a workout or something like that. So maybe eat a couple times a day, eat when you’re hungry, don’t eat when you’re not hungry.
When you do this, when you extend the amount of time between meals, and you know, we call this intermittent fasting, and people freak out when they hear the word fasting, but it’s just the thing. It’s not a big deal. We just don’t eat all the time. So we do some intermittent fasting, which means we’re just you know, going to maybe skip breakfast.
So maybe we do our workouts in the morning in that fasted state. And we do that there’s a reason why we want to work out in that fasted state, the number one reason is that we can really take advantage of the fact that we have not raised our blood sugar, we don’t have fuel onboard, we didn’t eat a bunch of you know, pancakes or whatever that we’re going to be using as fuel for our runs.
We can go out there and workout in that fasted state, which really improves your body’s ability to burn fat. So now you can start burning fat even more efficiently because you’re working out without any other fuel to draw from that glucose, that top level of fuel that I talked about earlier. It’s not there, you’re fasted.
So it helps to increase your fat burning. It increases your adrenaline when you work out in a fasted state. So it actually can work out a little bit harder. A you increase your recovery hormones like human growth hormone, which means you can recover faster from some of these harder workouts. And you’re kind of forcing your body to use stored body fat as a fuel source.
And the more you do this, the more efficient you get at it. So if you want to lose weight and you want to get your body really burning fat and you want a great source of fuel for running, just don’t eat all the time. Do some workouts in that fasted state, as well. And this will help to keep insulin low and it’ll help keep your body into that fat burning mode as opposed to the fat storing mode.
Okay, so we want to lower the carb intake and then we do want to space out our meals a little bit and not eat constantly. And then the third way of getting your body burning fat and this one you probably have figured I was gonna be talking about is exercise, right? I mean, this is the most, most common way that people think of when you think of oh, how do you burn fat?
And people think cardio, step aerobics, Zumba, Jazzercise, whatever, they think, you know, you just need to like go out there and run more, and that’s going to be the answer. And moving your body more will help. Only as long as you’re doing the first two things right? As long as you’re eating the right diet, you’re not eating tons of sugar, refined grains and tons of carbs. And you’re not eating constantly.
If you do cardio, you know, without all the sugar and stuff and without, you know, eating constantly, you will actually be able to burn more fat than you would if you’re eating the wrong diet and things like that. This is why people have a really hard time losing weight when they are running a lot is because they’re just the diet is wrong, right, you can’t outrun that high carb diet, okay, all the exercise in the world isn’t going to help if the only fuel that you’re burning is carbs.
So if you want to burn fat, you have to get rid of the carbs first. So number one, change the diet, get your body burning fat naturally without exercise, then when you do add an exercise, you’re just going to improve your body’s ability to burn fat that much more.
Okay, now we’re going to talk about a couple different types of exercise. So there’s two types of exercise that we want to do in order to burn fat. Actually, there’s more, I’m just going to talk about these two today, though. So we’re going to talk about low intensity exercise and high intensity exercise.
So low intensity exercise, this is long distance running. This is like a lot of running in zones wanting to or if you use the RPE scale, the rate of perceived exertion, this is like one to four this is that very easy, comfortable conversational pace, this easy effort, the stuff that you can do all day, like just go out there and run doesn’t feel hard. You know, it just feels very natural and very comfortable for you. Whatever that is, that low intensity running. This is great for fat burning. Even a brisk walk can get you there, you know, whatever. Whatever gets you into that state where you’re in those zones one and two, then you’re in the fat burning zone. This is awesome.
And we call these steady state exercises. This is running, this is swimming, this is cycling, elliptical rowing, anything that is going to keep you in that steady state for an extended period of time and extended can be 30 minutes, it could be six hours, you know, just depends on what floats your boat, right. So we like the low intensity stuff for fat burning.
But also, we also want to include some high intensity workouts. The high intensity exercise is interesting, because when you add in moderate to high intensity, like running, for example, you’re going to make gains and your endurance and your speed and your power, which all help to increase your body’s ability to burn fat even more efficiently. And so these are exercises like sprinting, you know, HIIT workouts, weightlifting, hill repeats, even things like dancing and boxing and martial arts like these are all high intensity, shorter duration, typically maybe up to an hour or so, but higher intensity.
And something that I think is really fascinating is that most carb adapted athletes, so most traditional athletes who are following a traditional, you know approach to nutrition and stuff, they’ll hit the crossover point from where they’re burning mostly fat to burning mostly sugar. Most people, carb adapted athletes will hit this crossover point around 65% of their VO2 max.
Whereas fat adapted athletes who are very efficient at burning fat can push this crossover point much higher. So instead of 65% of their vo to max they can they’re burning mostly fat at 70% of their vo to max or 80% or 90%. Jeff Browning, he’s famous, he’s an ultra runner, he’s famous for still burning mostly fat at like 90-95% of his VO2 max so even at the higher intensities.
You can increase your fat burning ability. So just understand that the high intensity workouts can help to push your lactate threshold help push your your ability to burn fat at these higher levels as well. And you know, when we exercise, we’re always burning both types of fuel. So never just one, but the ratio goes way up and fat burning when you keep the carbs low when you don’t eat all the time. And when we do these fasted workouts, you’re just going to increase your body’s ability to burn fat. So, you know, the carb adapted athletes just burn less fat, they need to refuel constantly, they’re using sugar for fuel, they’re never tapping into that stored body fat as a fuel source, they have a hard time losing weight, and a lot of times they even gain weight, especially during higher training periods because they tend to up the carb intake. Okay, so that’s carb adapted athletes.
Fat adapted athletes, however, burn much higher amounts of fat, they don’t need much in the way of fuel if any, for most workouts, they train themselves to use stored body fat for fuel, they do high intensity workouts as well, which helped to push their fat burning ability even higher, they tend to lose weight pretty easily. So these are the three best ways to get your body burning fat, reduce your carb intake, and eat less frequently. And be sure to include both high intensity and low intensity exercises. So you can burn tons of stored body fat and turn your body into a lean mean fat burning running machine. Cool. Alright, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.
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I get a lot of questions about how to improve running performance and one concept I keep coming back to is building your aerobic engine. Before you can run longer or faster you have to improve your …
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 158, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, building your aerobic engine. So I get a lot of questions from people in general and clients about how to improve running performance.
And one concept I keep coming back to is building your aerobic engine. Before you can run longer, or run faster, you have to improve your aerobic fitness. So building and maintaining a solid aerobic base should be the goal of every runner, regardless of your running experience. But many runners skip this step, because they just want to get to the faster running the higher intensity running.
So in this episode, I’m going to explain how building your aerobic engine is essential to helping you improve both your running speed and your endurance. And Happy New Year everyone. This is the first episode of 2023. And is this going to be a new year and a new you or a new year and the same old, same old you?
So I want you to think about this, where do you want to be this time next year? When you look back? Over 2023? What do you want to have accomplished? Where do you want to be with your health and your fitness? Do you want to make this year the year that you finally lose the weight and learn how to keep it off for good?
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Okay, so lots of people who are new to running, especially the newer runners, want to kind of skip the part where they have to focus on building their aerobic base, or what I like to call the aerobic engine. And this is a good time of the year to be talking about this, because I think a lot of us are just about to start marathon training, or maybe half marathon training, a lot of spring races happen in the United States.
And so the beginning of January is when a lot of training begins. The problem is that most runners don’t do a really good job of building their aerobic engine properly. At the beginning of a training cycle, lots of runners, even very experienced runners who are maybe following some sort of training plan.
So they may have some sort of marathon training plan that they’re doing. They just begin by, you know, doing all their miles at a kind of medium hard intensity, and they end up kind of maybe getting burned out or getting injured. A lot of overuse injuries happen, especially with new runners, but even with experienced runners.
And a lot of these overuse injuries happen kind of at the first half of the training cycle, which leads me to believe that when we start our marathon training or start our half marathon training program, you need to be you need to have developed a good solid aerobic base, you need a good solid base on which you can build, right?
So you want to start with a good base, start with a good aerobic engine, and then you can get faster and build your intensity levels on top of that. So what does it mean when I’m talking about your aerobic engine? So really what I’m talking about here, as I’m talking about increasing the efficiency of your cardiovascular system, right?
The cardiovascular system is the different functions of your body that can combine to enable you to run for longer distances, right? Your cardiovascular system is, you know, your heart, your blood, carrying oxygen to working muscles and organs to every working part of your body. So it’s mostly, you know, how, how efficient is your heart? How much blood can your heart pump out at a time, like how much blood volume can you pump out?
Because the more blood volume in your heart can pump out, the more oxygen you will be delivering to working muscles, the better you are at delivering oxygen rich blood to working muscles, especially those muscles used for running, that easier running becomes. So we want to improve this system. And it’s something that you can absolutely improve.
Now, if you’re a new runner, and you’re just starting out, and you get out there, and maybe you’re training for your first 5k, and you get out there and to run a mile is takes everything you’ve got and you feel completely winded at the end of that mile, that is fine, that is normal. If you’re just getting started with this, then that is something where if you continue running, and you continue doing the right kind of running, you will find that running a mile becomes very easy.
And then running two and three miles becomes a no big deal. And then all of a sudden, you’re like, I’m just gonna go ahead and, and run a half marathon or trust our training for a marathon, right? But don’t get ahead of yourself. Work your way up to that slowly. And I’m going to be talking about that in a minute here.
So really, what we’re talking about when we’re talking about your aerobic engine, is your cardiovascular system, you know, your body’s ability to deliver oxygen rich blood to all the working muscles and organs and all the functions in your body that help you to improve your running efficiency and your running performance.
Okay, so why do we want to build an aerobic engine? Like why is it important to build this? Well, you know, you just can’t expect to go out there and run a fast half marathon or a fast marathon. Without doing the work to build your cardiovascular system, you can’t improve your running performance, if you don’t start with a good base, right?
So you need to first build a solid aerobic base, then you can work on getting faster, and increasing the intensity of your running over those longer distances. But I want to make sure this is very clear, do not skip this step, do not skip the part where you build that aerobic base. And something that is actually kind of counterintuitive. But I’ll explain why this works in just a minute here, you will actually get faster, just by improving your aerobic engine.
So by doing more slow, easy running and improving your cardiovascular system, you will become more efficient at running and you can actually run faster at the same intensity levels. This is one of the huge benefits of building a strong aerobic base is that you can improve your running efficiency, you can improve your running speed.
In fact, there are many benefits to improving your aerobic engine here. So when your cardiovascular system gets more efficient, when you improve your aerobic fitness, running becomes easier. This is like one of the number one reasons why we want to do this, it just gets easier, right? You can run longer distances and you can run faster at the same perceived effort level.
So let’s say you go out there and you run out a perceived effort level of a three or a four and you’re like this feels great, it feels pretty easy for me. And you might notice your pace is a 10 minute pace. For example, over time, if you build your cardiovascular system the right way, if you build your aerobic engine properly, over time, you can run at that same three four effort level.
Oh, this feels pretty easy. But now your pace is a 9:30 or a 9:00 minute pace because you’ve improved how your body is fueling itself and how your body is using oxygen and and how much blood volume you’re pumping out there. Okay, so you actually get faster at the same effort level, which is amazing.
Another reason why we want to improve our cardiovascular system, or our aerobic engine is that it actually increases the number of mitochondria in your body. So this is the powerhouse of your cells. And you can actually increase the size and strength of your mitochondria as well. So this right here is going to give you an edge and this is one of the reasons why you run easier and you can run faster at the same effort level.
You also get denser capillaries and you can deliver more oxygenated blood with more capillaries working in your bloodstream. So your working muscles will actually get more oxygen, which makes running easier. Another kind of benefit of improving your aerobic engine is that it helps to build mental toughness. So as you improve your cardiovascular system, you start to feel more confident. So you can go out there and run three miles and it feels tough.
But as you, you know, increase your running volume as you increase your distance as you increase your aerobic capacity and your aerobic performance, then running becomes easier and becomes more confident you can run 8, 10, 12 miles and and feel like well, yeah, I can do this. And it makes you more mentally tough because it pushes you, enables you to push yourself a little bit harder, enables you to shoot for higher and higher goals. And next thing you know you’re running a half marathon or you’re running a marathon, you’re starting to train for an ultra marathon.
Another benefit of improving your aerobic engine is that it helps to improve muscular strength, you know, you’re delivering more oxygen to muscles, you’re able to run longer, you build more muscular strength, you improve your running economy, you improve your running efficiency, you become more energy efficient, you know, you’re using the same kind of you have the same inputs, but your output is much more efficient. And then you get faster, you know, you’ll be able to perform better at races.
So all these reasons are why we work hard to improve our aerobic engine, okay. So do not skip this, we absolutely want to make sure that before you begin your training, or the first phases of your training for any kind of endurance events should be to really build a strong aerobic base. Now some people like to do this in the offseason, they like to spend, you know, four to six weeks building that aerobic engine, even up to 12 weeks, you know, really building a strong aerobic engine before they get into their training cycle.
But you can absolutely do this at the beginning of a half or full marathon training cycle. So how do we do this? How do you start building your aerobic engine? What are the keys to improving your aerobic fitness and improving your cardiovascular efficiency?
So the first tip I’m going to give you here to improve your aerobic engine would be to increase your running volume. Right? The simple fact of running more will help you to increase your aerobic capacity, increase your running efficiency, just running more and increasing your volume helps to improve your running form and helps to increase your cardiovascular system.
You build stronger muscles. Running becomes easier, just by running more. But the caveat with this is you don’t do too much too soon. This is one of the biggest rookie mistakes that new runners make is increasing their volume too much too soon. So the standard sort of rule of thumb has always been to increase by no more than around 10% a week in your weekly volume.
So that means if you’re starting out and you’re running about 10 miles a week, you know, for the first few weeks, I would only increase that by like a mile each week. So maybe week one you’re at 10 miles and then you build up to 11, 12, 13. Maybe you can jump up to 14.5 or 15, 16, 18, 20. But you don’t really want to increase volume too quickly.
So people get excited when they start running and they’re like oh running is amazing. I feel so great doing this and your muscles might be ready to take on the miles but your connective tissues, your tendons and ligaments are not quite ready for that yet. And a lot of the running injuries that people experience are tendinitis issues or strained, you know ligaments or tendons. They tend to be more connective tissue issues than they do with muscular issues.
It’s pretty rare to strain the muscle from running in the beginning especially. It’s more common to have these connective tissue issues so definitely be careful and don’t do too. Too much too soon try to keep it around that 10% increase in weekly volume, then, you know, if you’re a more experienced runner, you can increase that from 10 to maybe 15 or 20% per week. The idea is that you have to do what feels right for you. And don’t overdo it. That is the key here. Less is more in this case, right. So just slowly build your volume, but definitely increasing your volume is going to be one of the best ways to improve your aerobic engine.
Another way of doing this is to run slower. So when I talk about running slower, there’s different ways we can look at this. So running slower means you’re running in, maybe you’re running in a zone one or two. From a heart rate standpoint, maybe you’re someone who likes to just use RPE, rate of perceived exertion, the scale of 1 to 10. And you might like to stay in the one to four range.
That would be nice, easy running, maybe you’d like to just run at a conversational pace, you’d like to just, you know, go by if you can carry on a conversation or not. The idea here is that you need to slow down, and you need to do a lot of running slower. When you do a lot of running slower, you increase your distance, but if you keep the intensity levels very low, you are at lower risk of injury. And you put less stress on your systems, you put less stress on your bones and muscles and those connective tissues like I talked about.
So slow running is one of the best ways to build your aerobic engine, it’s one of the most effective ways to build your aerobic engine, you’re not going to be able to get more aerobically fit by just cranking out every workout, you can’t go out there and do every workout hard or medium hard, you know that you have to spend a lot of time running easy and rolling slow.
So something I noticed here, so I took about three months off of running. And since August, so August, September, October, getting into November, I’ve been running very consistently since the middle of November in my room or maybe like Thanksgiving, let’s just say. And I’m noticing that I’m paying very close attention to my effort level and my heart rate.
And I’m noticing that I’m staying very consistent from an energy standpoint, very easy running most of my runs, I would say 90% of my runs right now or at a very easy conversational pace, probably that one to two zones, and the heart rate zones, and maybe three to four on the RPE scale, or two to four somewhere in there and that our RPE scale.
But one thing that’s interesting here is I noticed that my effort level is staying the same, my heart rate is staying the same, but my pace is increasing. So I’m getting faster, at the same effort level. So this is a sign that I’m building a strong aerobic engine. And this is what I want for you too. You should notice that over time, doing a lot of running 90% 80% of your runs at this slower pace, just slowing things down, will help you to increase your aerobic engine and help you to get faster.
So now as I get to the place where I’m you know, going to get into marathon training here, and I’m training for an ultra marathon event here in May, I will continue doing a lot of this slow, easy running and see my pace continually increase, you know, to a certain degree here, okay? The other way that you can really increase your aerobic engine is by running faster.
And I know that sounds a little bit counterintuitive here. But doing higher intensity, like short, higher intensity workouts is another amazing way of building that aerobic engine, right? So why these work is that these workouts put a very high amount of stress on the cardiovascular system, very high amount of stress for very short intervals. This elicits an adaptive response where your system improves.
Think about it, like you know building muscle, like if you lift heavy weights, and you do you know six to eight reps of a very heavy weight. And you get to the point where you just cannot lift one more rep of that weight.
And then you stop and so that’s a short interval but very intense. Your muscle is going to have been put under a high amount of stress for a very short amount of time. That muscle is going to have an adaptive response. It’s going to get stronger. It’s going to grow. You’re gonna see some growth rather than that muscle, and the next time, you’ll be able to lift a heavier weight.
The exact same response happens in our cardiovascular system. So we put high stress for a very short amount of time on that cardiovascular system that improves, this isn’t there’s an adaptive response, your body’s like, hey, we need to, you know, change the way we’re doing things here, we need to increase the amount of blood we’re pumping out per heartbeat. So increase our blood volume, you know, we need to deliver more oxygen working muscles.
And this is another very effective way of improving that aerobic engine. And especially when you combine it with your longer slower runs, right, your very easy lower stress run. So very low stress, long runs, and then very high stress, short runs. So running fast and hard for short intervals, like this could be like, one to three minutes, a very hard running 4-10 minutes of moderate intensity running maybe 12-30 minutes.
For tempo type workouts, these are just examples of different intensity levels that you can add in there. But you know, anything short is one to 30 minutes, maybe. And it just kind of depends on the event that you’re training for. But high stress for short intervals, and low stress for the long runs equals a badass aerobic engine, right there. Okay?
So those two combined are a really, really good way of improving your cardiovascular fitness. So the slower runs focus on 80-90% of your runs at that slow pace, and then higher intensity, shorter workouts, you know, 10-20%, depending on where you are in your training cycle, when we’re talking about building your aerobic base here, I would I would focus on more of a 90/10 breakdown there, okay.
And then probably the most common method people think of when they want to improve their aerobic fitness would be the long run, like improve the length of your long run. And when I say long run, it depends on what you’re training for, again, so this could be 30 minutes, if you’re training for your first 5k, that could be a long run for you, or six hours, if you’re trading for for a 50 miler, you know, so, long run is very subjective. So it just kind of depends on what you’re training for.
Most of us, if we’re training for a marathon, let’s say, most people are going to be doing a long run anywhere from an hour to three and a half hours, something like that, okay. So when we’re talking about in increasing the distance of your long run, the effort level has to be low. So we’re talking about, you know, heart rate zones wanting to wonder for on the RPE scale, this is a conversational pace, this is a easy, I could run all day at this pace.
Okay, this is gonna be one of the most powerful ways of improving your cardiovascular system. So we’re, we’re not just doing one of these things. By the way, we’re not just picking one of these things and saying, like, Oh, I’m just going to improve my long run, I’m just gonna increase the distance on my lawn, or I’m just going to do some HIIT workouts or I’m just going to run slower.
No, you got to do a mile, you got to increase your running volume, you got to run slower, you got to run faster for shorter distances, and you got to increase the distance of that long run, you got to do all these things. But when you do and you combine them all, you’re going to find that your aerobic engine is pretty badass. Okay.
And then the last thing I’ll add to this list is really just getting better at burning fat. You need fuel for running. And when you’re especially running slower and running at these lower intensities, the preferred source of fuel your body’s going to want to use as fat, the better you can get at burning fat, the easier running is going to feel for you.
Listen, we as human beings, we’re naturally good fat burning machines, we’ve just gotten very far away from that state. You know, we’ve been eating a diet that forces us to use glucose as our main fuel source. And granted, it is a very easily available and very quick burning source of fuel especially for running but you run out of that fast and your body isn’t using a whole lot of glucose. When you’re running at these lower intensities fat is going to be the main fuel source, so you got to get good at burning fat.
I suggest you get fat adapted stop using sugar and carbs as fuel. stop relying on glucose as a fuel source. Start training your body to tap into your own stored body fat as a source of fuel for running run in the fasted state. That means you don’t need to fuel up before you run. Maybe for a long long run or a high intensity run, yes. But for the most part, you know, you don’t really need to feel up before the runs, train your body to get good at burning fat.
And this isn’t about like zero carbs or anything like that, this is just about using the right kinds of carbs and using carbs properly. Keeping the carbs pretty low, though, okay, so get better at burning fat. Listen, we’re great at storing fat, right? We’re really good at storing fat, we’re just not good at tapping into our own body fat for fuel. And if you’re somebody who has, you know, 10-20 pounds to lose, you’ve got way more than enough body fat to get you out there and run for many, many, many miles for days, days.
I’m pretty low in the body fat percentage, and I’ve got hundreds of 1000s of calories of body fat on my body right now that I could use, I could literally run for, you know, weeks at a time or something like that. So get better at burning that fat. And you’ll find that your aerobic capacity, it gets better too. And just running just becomes so much easier. Okay.
So remember, we want to build our aerobic engine, we want to, you know, we only want to be delivering more oxygen to working muscles. The way we do this, as we increase our running volume, we run more just more often, we want to run slower, keep it in those zones wanting to keep it in the fat burning zone, right? You know, RPE should be, you know, one to four, run faster, do some HIIT workouts, do some high intensity, but short workouts run longer, like increase the distance of your long run, and then get better at burning fat.
And when you do these things, and you combine all these things, you’re going to be well on your way to being a fit faster, more efficient runner, running is going to become easier for you, you’re going to be able to get faster, and your spring marathon or spring race, whatever it is that you’re training for, will be a huge success for you. Cool. Awesome. 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.
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.
There seems to be a bit of confusion out there in the endurance world when it comes to the terms “keto” and “fat-adapted.” Keto gets a bad rap because people tout it as being an all-fat diet - all …
Continue Reading about 149. Keto vs. Fat-Adapted – Which is Better? →
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 149 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today keto versus fat adapted, which is better? So there seems to be a bit of confusion out there in the endurance world when it comes to the terms keto and fat adapted.
Keto kind of gets a bad rap because people tout keto as being the all fat diet, right? Like you’re just eating sticks of butter wrapped with bacon, but this is definitely not the case at all. And then being fat adapted on the other hand, it causes confusion because there’s the word fat in there. And so people are running in the other direction because they’re afraid of fat. We’ve become kind of a fat phobic nation here. All right.
So any kind of dietary intervention that allows you to consume higher amounts of fat seems counterintuitive and scary and all that. So today on the podcast, I’m going to clear up all this confusion and help answer the question: keto versus fat adapted, which is better?
And whether you want to lose weight, run longer, or just become that healthiest version of yourself, burning fat is how you get there, and figuring out how to best get your body into fat burning mode; this is what I do every single day as the weight loss coach for runners.
So working together, you and I will put together a plan to get your body burning fat effectively. The way it’s supposed to. This is not some weird fat diet. This is like getting your body back to its natural state of being a fat burning machine.
We humans are excellent fat burners, we’ve just gotten away from that with the crappy diet most people eat. Okay, so if you’re ready to get back to being a fat burning machine, apply for coaching with me and we’ll get you there to learn more just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply to get started. I would love to have you in my unique weight loss coaching program for runners, the Running Lean coaching project where the project is you.
Okay, the reason I wanted to talk about this today is because there seems to be this confusion over the terms there’s confusion about what it means to be keto. There’s words like the ketogenic diet, and being in ketosis and ketones and ketone bodies and all these different words around keto, and people don’t fully understand what it means.
They also hear people talk about keto is just being like this diet, we’re eating nothing but fat. And fat adapted, you know, people are confused about what does that mean? What does it mean, fat adapted? And do you have to eat high amounts of fat in that diet, too? Is it all just about eating a bunch of fat?
So I want to break this all down for you today, I want to like kind of help you to understand the difference between the two. There’s some similarities to keto and fat adapted, they share many similarities, right? I’m gonna go over what those similarities are, how there’s some overlap between the two. And then what the differences are between the two. And I’m hoping that by the end of this episode, you can make that determination for yourself, which is better for you as a person.
Okay, I’m gonna just gonna say from the outset, that they’re both very beneficial states to be in being fat adapted and being keto, they’re both really healthy for you and they have lots of positive health benefits, okay. And I want you to understand how this relates to you as a runner as well. Okay, so I want you to understand the difference between keto and fat adapted, I want you to understand the implications that it will have for you as a runner.
I want you to understand the health benefits of both of these things and then hopefully, dispel some of these myths and misconceptions about keto and fat adapted and, and really just help you to make an informed decision about your own health and fitness journey. Okay, and what you want for yourself, so be thinking about that.
What is it that you want for yourself? What are the goals that you have for yourself, and then as I’m talking through this stuff today, think oh, that might be a way that can help me get there or maybe that’s not for me. Either way, it’s fine. There’s no right or wrong answer here. Okay. So first, let’s get into this.
Let’s talk about keto. What doees keto mean? Okay. So when we talk about keto, a lot of times we’re talking about the ketogenic Diet a ketogenic diet is a diet that is low in carbohydrates. It’s higher in fat, you know, when you drop the carbohydrate ratio, you’re going to increase your fat content as well. Okay? But it does not mean we’re eating sticks of butter wrapped with bacon all day long. That’s not what we do.
It’s basically keeping your carbohydrate levels pretty low so that you can lower your blood sugar, lower your insulin levels and shift your body’s metabolism away from burning carbs towards burning fat. And ketones are using mostly fat and ketones for energy.
Okay, so the ketogenic diet offers many health benefits right? Many studies have shown that this type of diet can help you to lose weight and improve your health and a bunch of different ways. The ketogenic diet has proven benefits that help reverse diabetes that help prevent cancers, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease.
But really the main focus here in the way that I want to talk about this today is on fat metabolism, your body’s ability to burn fat for fuel, okay, so you lower your carbohydrate intake, blood sugar, lowers insulin levels, lowers and now your body can access your stored body fat for fuel, okay? So the ketogenic diet is a diet that is low carbohydrate and higher in fat, yes, but it helps your body to start burning fat really effectively and producing ketones and and this state of producing a certain amount of ketones is called ketosis. Okay?
Ketosis is a metabolic state where your body is using fat and ketones for fuel instead of sugar and carbs and glucose, okay? It’s called dietary ketosis because in this state, your body is producing a certain amount of ketones. There are three main ketones that get produced: beta hydroxy butyrate, acetylacetate, and then acetone. The first two beta hydroxy butyrate, or BHB, and acetylacetate seemed, are the the main ketone bodies that get produced, okay, acetone is actually a byproduct of acetoacetate.
And in order to know whether or not you’re in this state of ketosis, you have to test your blood, your urine, your breath for the presence of one or more of those ketone bodies, okay? So being in ketosis means that you are producing between point five and three millimoles of ketones per liter of blood. So for me, when I have like, tried to get into ketosis in the past, I never really produced these numbers, I might get between like point five and one.
So I might be where they consider trace amounts of ketones, I might produce small amounts of ketones, but I never got into this place where I was burning, you know, two, three millimoles of ketones, right? Or producing those kinds of numbers. And to be honest with you, I never worried about it. I felt great when I when I do more of a Keto type of diet, when I keep my carbs super low.
And for me, it’s not about the number on some test device. It’s about how I feel and how my workouts are. And if I’m maintaining weight, if I’m losing weight, if my cognitive function is high, all those things are important to me, not a number of ketones. It’s produced on a certain test meter or something like that.
I’ve done the urine tests, I’ve done the blood tests, haven’t done the breath test, but there’s different ways of testing ketones. So if you follow a strict ketogenic diet, meaning you’re keeping your carbs very low, and you shoot for probably between 20 to 50 grams of carbs total per day.
So this is a dramatic lowering of your carbohydrate intake, especially if you’re used to eating like a standard kind of American type of diet with very, very high in carbs. If you follow this very strict ketogenic type of diet, you will most likely get into that state of ketosis, okay, which is great. Your blood sugar’s level out, insulin levels out, your body starts being able to use the stored body fat for fuel.
Ketones get produced as a byproduct of this fat burning, and you’re in ketosis, okay. And there’s a lot of great benefits to be in this state of ketosis. Okay. So some of the benefits of being in in ketosis and in doing the following a strict ketogenic diet, fat burning is put into high gear you are burning fat really effectively, you’re no longer burning glucose for energy because you’re not giving your body glucose for energy, you’re not really eating much in the way of sugar or carbohydrates at all.
So the only fuel your body has now is your own stored body fat and some of the fat that you’re consuming that you’re eating, okay? So fat burning is put into high gear, weight loss will absolutely begin to happen for you. If you want to lose weight, you got to burn fat, this is a great way to get fat burning going.
Okay, lots and lots of studies have shown the effectiveness of a ketogenic diet for weight loss, right? This is very well known. It’s the you know, they’ve proven like they’ve compared it to the low fat diet or low calorie diets, and they get better results. So you lose weight without counting calories without tracking your food, and with less hunger and deprivation because you’re eating a higher fat, higher protein type of diet.
And what’s interesting is they did a study, one particular study I’ll mention here was in the journal, Nutrition and Metabolism found that people who followed a ketogenic diet for eight weeks lost nearly five times as much body fat as those who followed a low fat diet, okay, so a low fat diet is not as effective at losing weight, like you can burn much more fat and get your body into this natural state of fat burning by just lowering your carbohydrate intake getting into ketosis, and boom, you’re gonna start to feel great, you’re gonna start losing weight, some other other health benefits of being in ketosis, your endurance improves.
So runners who follow a pretty strict ketogenic diet will most likely also experience an improvement in their running endurance, because you’re burning fat really effectively here, this is the key thing we have to understand here. You’re burning fat really effectively, even at higher running intensity. So people think that oh, you know, keto is great. You know, you really can’t, like run fast when you’re doing this when you’re doing the super low carb, you know, ketogenic approach, which is not really true.
They’ve done some studies, they’ve shown that typical carb adapted athletes, you know, they can hit, they can burn their burning fat up to about 65%, or their VO2 max, right. But the keto adapted athletes, somebody who’s doing more of a strict ketogenic type of diet can burn fat, you know, 70, 80 up to 90 or more percent of their VO2 max.
So as the intensity increases, as a keto adapted athlete, you can increase your fat burning as well. So just keep that in mind that athletic performance does not have to suffer because your carbohydrate intake goes down because you’re doing kind of a Keto type of diet, okay? Also, sleep is improved.
Studies have shown that ketogenic diet promotes adenosine activity in the body. So adenosine promotes the sleep drive. So it is a chemical that helps you sleep more effectively, right. And so they’ve shown that adenosine gets produced. It helps to relax the nervous system, it helps to reduce pain and inflammation, all of which help you improve sleep.
Your focus and concentration improve on the ketogenic diet. So your brain loves fat and ketones as a fuel source. And most people when they switched from, you know, a regular high sugar diet, high carb diet to a low carb ketogenic type of diet, they experienced the lifting of the brain fog that happens when they make this switch.
And most people don’t even know they’re in a brain fog until they start experiencing this. And they’re like, oh my gosh, I didn’t realize how much more clearly I could think and concentrate. People experience more sustained energy throughout the day. So blood sugar and insulin levels are normalized. So you no longer have these spikes and crashes and energy levels throughout the day.
You don’t have to get an afternoon coffee just to get you through the last part of the day. Food cravings subside greatly. So when you switch to a lower carb diet and a strict ketogenic type of diet, you no longer have your hunger signals being jacked up by all the carbs and insulin. And so your food cravings go way down. You’re not as hungry during the day, this is a really good place to be by the way. If you’re feeling hungry all the time, there’s something wrong with your diet right there. There’s some dysfunction happening there.
Also, people experience less bloating and inflammation. Keto is a non inflammatory diet, you’re removing the inflammatory carbohydrates from your diet. So inflammation and bloating become a thing of the past which helps you to recover faster from the harder workouts as well. So you have this lack of inflammation And this is gonna play a role in helping you to recover faster especially from the longer harder workouts. Okay?
So these are all benefits of the ketogenic diet. These are all benefits of fat burning, when you really kick your fat burning into high gear. These are all the amazing things that can happen. Studies have actually shown that this kind of a diet, the ketogenic diet can have other benefits for a variety of different health conditions like heart disease.
They’ve shown that the ketogenic diet can help improve risk factors like body fat HDL, which is the good cholesterol blood pressure, normalized blood sugars normalized, and this can have a positive effect on your risk of heart disease. Cancer, they’ve shown that the diet has been explored as an additional treatment for cancer because it helps to slow tumor growth, which is really interesting. The keto diet may help reduce symptoms of Alzheimer’s and actually help to slow its progress. Research has shown that the ketogenic diet can cause significant reductions in seizures for children that have epilepsy.
They’ve shown that this diet can help improve symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. The ketogenic diet also helps to reduce insulin levels, which plays a key role in PCOS polycystic ovary syndrome. And then the last thing that I thought was pretty interesting was that some research has shown that this diet, the ketogenic diet improves the outcomes of traumatic brain injuries as well.
Okay, so lots and lots of benefits of getting off the carbs and switching to a very low carb ketogenic type of diet. Okay, so that’s keto. That’s what it means to be in ketosis. You know, we’re keeping our ketone bodies up into that point five to three millimoles per liter of blood. We’re producing ketones, we have all these positive health benefits that begin to happen.
Now, let’s talk about the difference between keto and being fat adapted, okay. So first and foremost, understand this: being fat adapted shares a lot of the same benefits. In fact, all of the same benefits as keto they both mean that you are burning fat for fuel, you are training your body to become really effective at burning fat, right? They’re both great as weight loss interventions.
They’re both great at helping to improve cognitive function, sleep endurance, energy levels, blood sugar and insulin levels, faster recovery, everything else I mentioned above. So being fat adapted and being in the state of ketosis or following a ketogenic diet, share all of those same benefits. Okay. So in one aspect, they are virtually the same thing you would think right?
Being fat adapted means you’re burning mostly fat for energy, you’re producing ketones as well. Probably not as many though, and this is where there’s some overlap between the two. And this is where the differences start to happen. Okay. The biggest difference between being fat adapted and being keto is that when you’re fat adapted, you increase your ability to switch between burning fat and burning carbs for fuel.
So someone doing strict keto, you know, keeping the carbs super low, producing that point five to three millimoles of ketones is mainly using fat for fuel and ketones. But they will not be as metabolically flexible, meaning that you can’t switch between burning fat and carbs as easily. Okay, so eating a bunch of carbs may not shut down fat burning totally, but it will definitely kick you out of ketosis.
Okay, so as soon as you start increasing your carbs, you’re going to be kicking yourself out of that ketogenic state out of ketosis, okay. The fat adapted athlete can handle a carb load. So let’s say you eat a couple of sweet potatoes that night before a long run. In the short term, you’re going to be kicked out of ketosis, right? But it’s not a problem. Because as soon as your blood sugar and your insulin levels normalize, you’re going to be back to burning fat really effectively.
So you’ll quickly go from burning sugar burning carbs to burning fat, and you can kind of switch between the two. So, the key differentiator here is that the fat adapted athlete has the ability to use both fat and carbs as fuel. Metabolic Flexibility is the key here and this is a really good place to be. So you can switch between being keto and being fat adapted and one of the processes that I work through with all my clients.
First of all, we want to get their bodies used to burning fat, we got to get really good at burning fat. And this is the state we are naturally in as human beings, we’re naturally good fat burners. And we’ve gotten away from this state because we’re just eating tons of sugar, tons of grains, tons of processed foods, and we’re just burning all that for fuel.
So you’re constantly have to keep, you know, putting this big, fast burning fuel on the fire, it’s like putting paper on a fire and you just got it, you’re you keep burning through that paper really quickly, what we want to do is we want to be putting logs on that fire that burned really slowly.
And for long periods of time, that’s fat, okay, the paper is sugar, right? So we want to get our body back into the natural state of burning fat really effectively. And this is where keto is a great tool to us for a period of time, okay, so you can, you can go really strict ketogenic diet, you can keep your carbs super low at the beginning.
And you really don’t even need to test for ketones just keep your carbs super low, and you’re gonna start burning fat, right, and this may take some time, it may take two to four weeks, it may take longer, everybody’s a little bit different here. Okay. But then we can start incorporating more carbs back in the diet. And what we do is we time the carbs around key workouts.
So we want to get your body used to burning fat and used to burning carbs as fuel during certain times when your body demands more fuel from your body. So this is being fat adapted, right? But it’s not like a free for all with the carbs and sugar. This is not an excuse to binge out on ice cream and candy and stuff like that.
We’re still eating real food, nutrient dense sources of naturally occurring carbohydrates, for example, root vegetables or fruit, right? And then we time these around your workouts, you earn your carbs, and then you burn your carbs. Okay, and if you do this properly, you should still be experiencing all the benefits of keto.
So weight loss, improved endurance, improved cognitive function all day energy, etc, etc, etc. all the benefits I mentioned above, and also being able to use carbohydrates strategically around workouts as fuel to give you that extra gear, okay. So you can be fat adapted and not be in ketosis, you can be fat adapted, and not have to follow a strict ketogenic diet, fat adapted and keto are using the same pathways for energy.
So they’re both utilizing fat and ketones for fuel. But being fat adapted will allow you to also use carbohydrates for fuel, which is especially ideal for the endurance athlete. So I hope this clears up the confusion about keto and fat adapted, they’re similar. They’re similar states to be in their long, they’re like different sides of the same spectrum of fat burning, right, and they’re both great.
They’re both great places to be right, tons of health benefits for both and you get to decide what works best for you. Some people love being in ketosis all the time, they feel great, their workouts are great. They don’t need the extra push, they don’t need the carbs, and it can help them to lose weight or maintain their weight pretty effortlessly.
So keto is a great option for a lot of people. Other people prefer the option to use carbs for workouts. And being fat adapted gives them all the benefits of keto without having to be quite as strict right. So they also get the added benefit of having that extra gear for the higher intensity workouts and adding in some carbs, is how you do that. And that will definitely give you that edge. Okay.
And as always, if you want help with any of this, I’m totally here for you. We’ll figure out what works best for you. We’ll put together a plan for you and I’ll help you stay on track with that plan. Cool. All right. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all keep on Running Lean. 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.
A lot of people make the assumption that if you’re a low-carb runner, it means you don't ever eat any carbs at all. But this simply isn’t true. There’s a time and place for carbs in your diet, …
Continue Reading about 148. Determining Your Carbohydrate Tolerance →
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 148 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners today, determining your carbohydrate tolerance. So a lot of people make this assumption that if you’re a low carb athlete, that means that you don’t ever eat any carbs at all. And this simply isn’t true.
I’ve talked about this before, here on the podcast, there’s definitely a time and place for carbs in your diet, but you need to understand how carbs affect you as an individual, before you start piling all those sweet potatoes onto your plate. Okay, we all have differing levels of tolerance. When it comes to carbohydrates.
Some people can handle more than others without any negative side effects at all. Others need to keep their carb intake fairly low, or they experience all kinds of issues. And I’ll talk about that in a minute. Carbohydrates are not bad. But understanding how you tolerate them can definitely prevent a lot of the common issues and a lot of the negative side effects that a lot of people experience.
So here today, I’m going to explain the importance of determining your carbohydrate tolerance, so that you can lose weight and prove your endurance and basically achieve all of your health and fitness goals. And for a lot of people figuring out how many carbs is going to be right for you as an individual is challenging. It’s kind of confusing.
And this is why this is a big part of what I do as the weight loss coach for runners. So we’re not only going to focus on how many carbs you’re eating, but we want to focus on the timing of those carbs as well. We want to make sure that you’re getting the best bang for your buck, so to speak, without any of the issues that come along with increasing carbs in your diet.
So it’s not an all or nothing kind of thing we need to figure out, we need to do a little bit of experimenting, we do a little trial and error. And we got to figure out what is the right plan, what is the right sort of recipe for you around workouts, how many carbs the timing of your carbs. But listen, having a coach there to help you make sense of all this and help you figure it out. It’s just like hitting the easy button on all this for you.
Okay, and this is my jam. This is what I do every single day. So if you’re ready to just stop struggling and hit that easy button, I’m here for you. Okay, to learn more, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply fill out a short application, you and I will get on a call and we’ll see if the Running Lean coaching project is a good fit for you. I would love to have you in my unique weight loss coaching program for runners, the Running Lean coaching project where the project is you just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply to get started.
And if I sound like I’m a little nasally today, it’s because I have had this head cold for like 10 days now. And I rarely get sick. The last time I was sick was at the beginning of 2020 before COVID I probably had COVID at the time, but I haven’t had any kind of head cold or anything since then. And this one has been lingering. And it’s kind of I’m ready for this to be done because it’s driving me crazy. Not only do I sound nasally, I feel like my head is still going to explode.
I’m trying not to take any medication. I did that for a few days at the beginning. But that stuff just messes me up. And I feel like I just want my body to fight this off and do what it needs to do naturally. But one thing about this is that for about a week there I completely lost my sense of smell and taste. And I did a COVID test because I was like man, I think I probably have COVID because I had a fever and, you know, coughing and lost my sense of smell and taste. Tested negative for COVID. So that’s not what it is. It’s just a head cold that is really messing with my whole system here.
So, this past week again, though, the reason I’m bringing this up is because this past weekend, we’re here in Cincinnati, we had this festival called the Coffee Fest. And it was, it’s one of those things where we have lots of festivals here in the summer, you know, we have, and they’re all revolved around drinking, right? They’re all about wine tasting and beer fests. And or, you know, we have Oktoberfest Cincinnati, which is really popular here. And it’s just a bunch of junk food and beer.
And finally, there’s something where I can go and actually enjoy. This is my jam. I love coffee, I love good coffee, I drink very high quality coffee, I grind my own beans. And I’m very particular about coffee. And I’m like, this is going to be perfect. So I got these tickets. And I’m like, man, I hope I can actually taste some of this coffee, and showed up at Coffee Fest, and I’m walking around the different vendors and, and trying their coffee and trying to smell it.
I like I could not smell or taste anything. I mean, nothing at all. And, you know, I felt bad because I was like, man, I would really be enjoying this. If I could smell or taste any of this. So much of taste is is through your nose, right how you smell things. So I’m at this beautiful place with music playing. It’s a beautiful place. All these amazing coffees around, I’m tasting the coffee. And they’re explaining to me the different notes of citrus and floral and cocoa.
And I’m just like, yeah, I was just going to take your word for it because I can’t taste anything at all. It’s such a bummer. But my sense of smell and taste are coming back, I can definitely smell things now. And my taste is coming back. And I love food too. I love to eat. And eating food has not been extremely enjoyable. To me, it’s just been like, I better eat some food because I need the energy to, you know, get through my workouts and such. But it was nothing that I could taste at all.
So what a weird experience to go through, I’ve never had this before, I’ve never lost my sense of taste and smell like that before. So I don’t recommend it. I’m just gonna be honest with you. It’s no fun. But I’m getting through this, but I’m hoping that, you know, by the next time I record my next podcast, I will sound so nasally but um, I’m about apologizing, you’re just gonna have to deal with it for right now. Okay.
So here’s what I want to talk about today. I have been talking to a lot of runners, and you know, a lot of people are into this higher training cycle, you know, higher training parts of their training cycle, because we’ve got all of our fall races happening these days, you know, New York Marathon is, you know, about 10 days away. So a lot of people are talking about training and you know, how there may be increasing carbs, or we’re having these conversations in our client calls and our coaching calls about how to match your carb intake along with your training. Okay.
And for everybody that I talked to, it’s a little bit different. We all have a different tolerance for carbohydrates. Okay. And I want to explain, first of all, what this means, like what does it mean that you can tolerate, quote, unquote, like tolerate carbs or not tolerate carbs? You know, I’ve talked before that a lot of people have some level of intolerance.
For carbohydrates. I think the human body in general, has some level of intolerance for carbohydrates, and some people are more susceptible to that than others more sensitive to that intolerance than others. Okay? So when I talk about tolerance, what I’m really talking about is how many carbs you can eat that you can ingest without any negative side effects.
So we have to make this assumption that to some level carbs are somewhat toxic to the human body, okay, they have an element of toxicity, and it’s very much like alcohol, when you think about it this way. Alcohol in small amounts is slightly toxic to the human body, but is it really very harmful? I mean, you can argue why this might be harmful, even in small amounts.
But from a metabolic standpoint, even in small amounts, carbohydrates do have an effect on the human body and there’s some negative effects of carbohydrates on the human body that I really want to address here today. Because when we talk about whether you can tolerate more carbs or not? We need to be looking at these negative side effects that a lot of people experience when they are eating a high carb diet, or moderate carbohydrate diet.
Okay, now, a lot of people means that the majority of people have some sort of intolerance to carbohydrates. And they experience one or more of these negative side effects that I’m going to talk about here in just a second. But at higher amounts, all of these things get exacerbated.
Okay, and so in higher amounts, people experience more of these issues, and people experience them and in greater degrees, okay, so some of the dysfunction that I’m talking about here are things like bloating, inflammation, blood sugar spikes, and then crashes, weight gain, the inability to lose weight. These are all side effects of carbohydrates, carbohydrate intake, sleep issues, chronic stress, incessant hunger, cravings for more carbohydrates, sugar cravings, brain fog, the inability to think and concentrate, gas, constipation, diarrhea, high heart rate while exercising, the inability to recover quickly from harder workouts.
Endurance issues where your endurance just tanks, you know, you’re out there running and you hit the wall. Things like irritability, grumpiness, anxiety, depression, these are all symptoms of high carbohydrate intake. And of course, there’s a bigger list of things that will happen as a result of, of years and years of high carb intake, we start to get into metabolic diseases.
But these are just very common, these are not weird one off things I’m talking about here. These are all very common side effects, very common symptoms of carbohydrate intolerance. And a lot of people experienced these side effects, especially when they’re ingesting carbs and higher amounts, okay. And as we get older, we become even more carbohydrate intolerant, meaning that as we get older, we probably most of us can’t handle carbs like we did when we were younger.
So lowering your carb intake is going to be especially helpful and beneficial for the aging athlete if you’re in your 40s 50s 60s and beyond, okay, so really, determining your individual carbohydrate tolerance is going to be key to you, not just becoming a fat adapted runner, but also to help you to become the healthiest and fittest human being that you can possibly be.
Alright, we need to figure out what works for you from a carbohydrate standpoint, if you want to be the healthiest person that you can be. Okay, so let’s look at one common scenario. A common scenario would be somebody that is interested in losing weight, and I talked to so many people who are runners who are trying to lose weight and having a hard time with it, they’re struggling with it.
Most people that listen to this podcast are probably people that fit into that category. Right? Right. So if you’re a runner and you struggled with your weight, then this is, you know, a pretty common scenario. Okay, so let’s look at what changes you might make and how to get a feel for what your carb carb tolerance might be.
Okay, so let’s say you have been eating that standard runner’s diet that I’ve talked about in the past the standard runners diet is the all carbs all the time diet hits, where your your carb loading basically every single day, you’re pre fueling with carbs, you’re fueling during running with carbs, your post fueling with carbs. And you have it in your head, you can just eat anything you want at any time because you’re a runner.
So I call this the carbterian diet. And you might be sick of doing that and that’s not working for you any more. So you stop doing that, okay? And you decide, okay, I’m gonna, I’m going to try this Patrick, I’m gonna I’m gonna adopt a low carb approach here, I’m gonna, I’m gonna adopt a low carb diet, I’m gonna stop eating all the carbs and like you say, and I’m going to try and lose weight.
You know, your goals might be to lose weight to improve your body composition, you know, to lose fat weight, gain muscle weight, improve your endurance, you, you want to reduce inflammation and all those things, right? So you have these very specific goals, and you decide to go on a quote unquote low carb diet.
And so you might decrease your carb intake to like 100 to 150 grams of carbs a day. And this may not seem very low to most people. But most runners are probably eating between 5 and 800 grams of carbs a day, you heard me correctly, 5-800 grams of carbs per day, then remember, the dosage determines the poison, right.
So eating a few grams of carbs a day, not a big deal, but 5 to 800 grams of carbs a day is gonna have a significant impact on your metabolism and on your health in general. And I did a little bit of research into this and looked at what traditional running coaches recommend, and traditional running coaches will recommend from a carbohydrate standpoint, two and a half to four and a half grams of carbs, for every pound of bodyweight, you know, to kind of depending on where you are in your training cycle, but the higher end of this is so crazy.
So for somebody like me, so I weigh about 180 pounds these days, okay? For me, if I’m at that, you know, four and a half grams of carbs, for every pound of body weight, that is 110 grams of carbs per day, that the traditional, you know, conventional wisdom will tell you is appropriate, right. And I used to eat this way, I did.
And it was amazing. Like, I loved eating all those carbs, like I was like, bring it on, you know, I was training for ultra marathons and running several marathons a year and several ultra marathons a year. And I was gaining a lot of weight. Until you know, after a few years, I realized that I was 40 pounds overweight, and I was like this is stupid, like I can’t keep doing this, I can’t go on this way.
Like there has to be a different way of doing this, right. So just keep in mind that 100 to 150 grams of carbs a day, is pretty low compared to where a lot of people start out with this thing, okay, so you reduce your carbs, you’re down to 100, let’s say you’re about 150 grams a day, and you’re like, you know, I’m feeling better, my inflammation is going down, I don’t feel so bloated all the time, I’m feeling pretty good. I like I’ve got pretty good energy all day long, like, I’m actually losing a few pounds too, you know, so you stick with that approach for a while.
And then after some time, your weight loss might kind of stall out. So you hit a sort of a plateau. And maybe your endurance, so your running isn’t really improving much, right. So at that 150 grams level, your body is probably still relying mostly on carbs as the main fuel source, right, so you’re really not tapping into your own stored body fat as your main fuel source, you’re still relying on carbs, you might feel better, you might lose some weight.
And this may be a place where you want to stay and totally fine if that’s what you want for yourself, okay? Fat adaptation, probably not going to happen at this level of carbs. Okay, in order to get fat adapted, you have to reduce your carbs. And we’ll talk about that in a second here. But if you’re okay, like just with a lower carb approach, and you’re at that level, 150 grams, something like that, you still get to eat a lot of food that maybe you have always eaten, and it’s pretty easy to do, and pretty easy to maintain this.
Great, that’s a good place for you to be, then stick with that, if that works for you. Okay, but if you really want to get fat burning kicked into gear, if you want to become fat adapted as a runner, meaning you’re burning mostly fat instead of sugar, then you you’re going to have to drop the carb intake, okay, if you really want to get weight loss moving, you’re going to have to drop your carb intake, you know, you might be better suited in that 50 to 100 grams per day range, something like that, okay.
For me, I tend to stick with a pretty low carb approach most of the time. And then what I do is I add carbs around certain workouts or when my training load increases. And this works really well for me. And one thing I need to say right here is like we don’t need to be tracking these grams of carbs every single day, for the rest of our lives. That’s not what we’re about here.
We do want to get a feel for where we are, and then we can start to use our intuition and eat the kinds of foods that we know will work for us and avoid the kinds of foods we know don’t work for us. Okay. And that’s a big part of what I do in my coaching with people as individuals as we get to this place where All of this just becomes intuitive for you. And it just becomes how you live your life.
Like I understand what I can and can’t eat, I understand how many carbs I’m eating without even having to enter anything into an app or track any of my food. I know what I’m doing. And I know how to add extra carbs around certain workouts, or when my training load increases, to give me a little bit of an edge, and to help me with that higher gear with that higher intensity training. So that’s a beautiful place to be and, you know, if you want help with that, I can help you get there.
Okay, but just understand that, for the most part, I tend to stick with a pretty low carb approach most of the time, okay. So I do something that’s probably more like a low carb, keto carnivore type of diet, okay, I’m probably in the 20 to 30 grams of carbs total for most days, right, this is really low. And a lot of people don’t like doing this. They don’t think it’s sustainable, or they think it’s too hard or too restrictive. Like, that’s fine. But I love it.
I feel amazing when I’m super low carb like this. But then around certain workouts, I’m going to add 20 to 40 grams of carbs. So on days, when I up my training, and I have a really intense workout, I might be in the 50 to 75 grams of carbs for that day. But here’s something that’s interesting is we have to earn our carbs. Okay?
So you earn your carbs around high intensity workouts or longer workouts, okay. And, like I said, there isn’t exactly some right number that I’m shooting for. Because I don’t really track this anymore. I go about how I feel, and what I need for this particular workout that I’m about to embark on here.
Okay, so I tie my carbs around my workouts. And this is key, you have to understand this, because during a high intensity interval session, for example, I’m going to burn through that sugar that’s in my system pretty quickly. So I may raise my blood sugar by eating some carbs, but I’m essentially going to burn through that sugar very, very quickly during that workout. So I’m earning my carbs for that workout.
And then my blood sugar comes back down the rest of the day, and I’m back into that total fat burning zone again, right, and I’m back down into that, you know, keto, carnivore, whatever you want to call it, right, I don’t really have a name for that, because I don’t really track ketones and things like that, right.
So just understand that you gotta earn your carbs, and we want to time them around our workouts, okay. And lower intensity workouts basically require fewer carbs, because you’re staying in that fat burning zone, right? Usually, that’s gonna be zones one, two, and three, even, you can even get into zone four, and still be burning a lot of fat if you’re an experienced fat adapted athlete.
And I know that there are some elite athletes out there, you know, top of their game in the world who are burning mostly fat still in zones for even in the zone five, like this is like up to 80 90% of their vo to max, they are still burning mostly fat, which is amazing, which is so so amazing.
But for most of us, you know, we’re going to be into that zone one, two, and three, possibly a little bit into zone four, okay. But for those higher intensity workouts or workouts that are going to be, for me, maybe longer than two, three hours, I’m going to add more carbs to help me defend against that glycogen depletion. And just to keep my glycogen levels high, so that I can continue to perform at the level that I want to perform at.
So it doesn’t take much for me during a long workout. It doesn’t take much in the way of carbs during long workout for me to get the fuel that I need. And for me to experience that little burst of energy and a little bit of rocket fuel.
So for me, I might be adding 15 to 20 grams of carbohydrate fuel per hour, which is totally sufficient for me. There are some athletes who, like you know, talked about Zach Bitter in the past, elite ultra marathoner, right? He does something more in the 40 to 50 grams of carbs per hour. And he’s running these world record paces like he’s trying to set a world record for the 100 mile or something like that, right? This is not something that I’m going to ever have to worry about.
Okay, so, my guess is you probably won’t either, which is fine, but it’s interesting that he only needs 40 or 50 grams per hour and he can still perform as one of the top ultra runners in the world. Okay? So, for me, and I’ve experimented with this for years, I know what works for me, I know what works for me and my goals.
For me, I can keep my carbs super low, increase them around workouts, add some carbs during some higher intensity or longer workouts. And, and I know what to do when I’m in these situations, and I and I just intuitively know how to keep things working for me, okay, and I know what to do when things aren’t working the way I’d like them to work.
Okay. So for example, a couple of months ago, I, I hate even admitting this, but a couple months ago, I fell running through on the sidewalk and tripped over a big crack in the sidewalk. I was not even paying attention. I went down hard, blamed up my knee, so my knee was all swollen. And for a couple of days, I could run still, and I was like, oh, I think I’m gonna be okay. But it just got worse and, and I really had to cut back on my running because any running at all hurt my knee like crazy.
And I’ve done this before, in the past, both my knees are kind of messed up from falling down. Especially trail running. You got to avoid those roots and rocks and stuff when your trail running makes it a much more adventurous type of running for sure. But so both my knees are a little bit jacked up. But you know, it’s not enough to keep me from running, you know, I get some pain every now and then. But not a big deal.
So these last 60 days, though, I have not been able to run without a significant amount of pain. Now, the pain is getting better. And I can actually start to increase my mileage. But in the last two months, I’ve run around 30 miles total. And I was getting closer to around 30 miles per week before I fell. Okay, so anyway, because of this, I’ve had to really lower my cardio, you know, I’ve had a lower my, my running, not exercising as much. And I just know intuitively that when I get to this place where I am having some periods of inactivity, or I’m not able to exercise, then I’m gonna just drop my carbs to like zero basically, right?
So during this period, these last 60 days, I’ve been very low carb, keto carnivore-ish, right. And, and I feel really good, I feel lean, I’m not gaining weight, right. And as soon as my weekly mileage went from that 25-30 miles a week down to like three to five miles a week, because that’s about all I can handle these days. I just decreased the carbs, I just dropped the carbs altogether, basically. Right. So I’ve been focusing more on weight training more elliptical rower to get that kind of endorphin rush that I love from running.
And I’m getting better, my knees feeling better, my runs feel much better. There’s much less pain, not quite where I want to be. I was scheduled to do a half marathon this fall, I had to cancel because I can’t do it. There’s no way I can run that far right now. Without my knee just like going ballistic on me here. So for me, I know that when I get into these places where my training intensity goes down, so does my carb intake, I feel really good.
And then when I increase my intensity again, those carbs will go back up again, in order to make sure that I am like I said, defending against that muscle glycogen. And then I’m giving my body the energy that I need to crush those harder workouts. All right. So this is what I want you to do. This is all an experiment, okay? There’s no right or wrong way to do this. There’s no magic number that is perfect for you or for everybody. It’s all an experiment, okay?
And it’s a fun thing to do. Like we get to play around with this. You get to decide what you want to do for yourself. As long as what you’re doing is working for you. You’re feeling good, your inflammation is down, you’re losing weight, running is improving, your endurance is improving. You’re not experiencing the inflammation and bloating and all those side effects that I mentioned. Your body composition is improving.
Sleeping is good, your energy levels are good. Brain fog is lifted. All those things are happening then you’re doing it right. And I don’t care what that number is for you. Okay, listen, we’ve been doing this low carb approach to our diet as human beings for like two and a half million years of evolution is always the way we’ve done it. We were never a high carbohydrate society. So this is just getting back to our roots. This is just getting back to the natural order of things as human beings, okay?
So first of all determine your goals, what is it you want for yourself? If you want to lose weight, you want to improve your running, you want better sleep? Do you want more energy throughout the day? Do you want all those things? So determine what goals you want for yourself, make some changes, try it for a while, track your progress and see what works for you. And then look at your results. Okay, is this working or not? What is working, what’s not working.
And look at all these different metrics you know about weight loss and your body composition, sleeping and energy and all these things, right. And if you’re noticing things aren’t working the way you want to change something, you know, maybe add more carbs or drop your carbs lower. You know, experiment with this, have fun with this. It’s all a fun experiment, right?
And basically, you’re just going to rinse and repeat this process until you feel like you have a good handle on what works for you. And that’s what this is all about. Determining your carbohydrate tolerance means that you get to decide what works for you and what doesn’t work for you. Okay, and as always, if you want help with this, I’m here for you. We’ll figure it out together. We’ll put together a plan. I’ll help you stay on track, we’ll hit that easy button, and together we’ll crush those goals. Okay. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.
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