Low-carb running Archives - Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray

191. Fit but Unhealthy?

August 25, 2023 By Patrick McGilvray

Lots of runners look pretty healthy on the outside. They exercise a lot, maintain a decent weight, have low body fat percentage, low BMI, and generally look fit. But inside there could be a lot …

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Podcast Transcript

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

Hey there, and welcome to episode 191 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today: Fit But Unhealthy. So, lots of runners look pretty healthy on the outside, they exercise a lot, they maintain a decent weight, they have a low body fat percentage, low BMI, they generally look and feel fit. but inside there could be a lot more going on that no one really sees.

So I came across this study recently that looked at low carbohydrate diets versus high carbohydrate diets and their effects on athletic performance. And the results are pretty interesting from the athletic performance standpoint, but also kind of surprising from a health perspective.

So today, I’m going to look at what it means to be fit but unhealthy, and what you can do to make sure you are both. But first, as The Weight Loss Coach for Runners, I’ve helped hundreds of runners over the last few years lose a lot of weight; but here’s a little secret to the people who I work with, it’s not about losing weight. I know it sounds contrary, but hear me out.

Losing weight is great. And it inevitably happens, but the real goal of working together is to help you become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself. When you make the commitment to change your relationship with food and exercise when you focus on building strength and endurance.

When you do the internal work of developing the right mindset, you will absolutely transform yourself into a leaner, stronger runner and the healthiest version of yourself yet. So weight loss is not the goal. It’s just a nice side effect of you becoming your fittest and healthiest self.

So make the commitment today to improve your health and fitness. And you’ll lose that extra weight along the way. And if you want a little help with all this, as always, you can join the Running Lean Coaching Project.

That’s my unique weight loss coaching program for runners. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/join to learn more about that. And if you want a little bit of help, just getting started with all this stuff, then I have just the thing to help you get started on the right track.

I put together a free training for you. It’s about an hour long, it’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner. I will teach you how to lose weight the right way and keep it off for good without running a million miles a week.

A few of the things that you’re gonna learn in this in depth training, why running more and eating less is not an effective way to lose weight, the one thing runners typically don’t do when they are trying to lose weight, the best fuel to use to improve your endurance and help your weight loss, and the right mindset shifts required to make all these changes last for life.

You’re going to learn how to crush your weight loss goals and your running goals directly from me, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners. So if you’re ready to get leaner and stronger, to run faster and longer and to become the healthiest, most badass version of yourself, then you need to check out this free training now just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training. Cool. Awesome.

Okay, so let’s talk about Fit But Unhealthy. So I came across this study recently. The study was called low and high carbohydrate isocaloric diets on performance, fat oxidation, glucose and cardio metabolic health in middle age males. Kind of a mouthful.

This was published in the Journal Frontiers in nutrition in February of 2023. So it’s a pretty recent study. And the study was conducted by some of the pretty well known researchers in the low carb endurance and athletic world like Professor Tim Noakes, Dominic D’Agostino, Dr. Jeff Bullock.

And one of the reasons that they did this study is that since the 1970s, there has been this shift towards a high carbohydrate, low fat diet for health benefits, but also for training benefits. You know, a lot of the professional athletes since the 70s have shifted to a high carbohydrate, low fat diet because they want to reap the benefits of all the carbohydrates in their diet.

So that they can, you know, run faster, right and, and improve their athletic performance. Most athletes hit a crossover point in their fuel system. So they go from burning mostly fat to almost exclusively burning carbohydrates.

So they reach this crossover point where fat burning effectively shuts down around 85% of the of their VO2 max. So around 85% of most athletes’ VO2 max, they hit this crossover point where fat burning pretty much shuts down to zero.

And unless you have ample stores of carbohydrate to use this fuel, you bonk you crash and burn, you hit the wall. So countering all of this, this is what’s been known and been followed and adhered to, since the 1970s or so encountering all of this is the fact that there’s a lot of athletes and a huge growing number of athletes that have been following a low carb high fat diet.

And they have been able to dramatically increase their fuel crossover point to well above that 85% mark previously seen. So they wanted to do this study, to just see what was going on here and really, you know, try to predict or try to show what would happen between these two groups of athletes, the low carb diet athletes and the high carb diet athletes.

They wanted to see what the results would be on athletic performance. So they conducted this study, it was 31 days, so it was four weeks long. And they compare the two groups of competitive athletes, these were middle aged men in their 40s, they were in good shape, they had low body fat percentages, like 12-16% body fat, low BMI.

They exercised around six hours a week. And so they were competitive athletes in their 40s, mostly runners, and they divided them into two groups, they had one group that was a low carb high fat diet, the other group was a high carb low fat diet.

They assessed both diets, and they were strictly controlling macros calories and their training load. So this study was really well done. And they were very strict about making sure the only difference in these two groups of men was that their one group was eating a low carb, higher fat diet, and the other was eating a high carb lower fat diet.

And then they had them do some performance tests. So each of the subjects in the test visited the lab on 10 different occasions during that 31 day period. And they performed tests periodically, but the two main tests that they did was a one mile time trial, and then six by 800 sprints.

And so they did testing throughout, but they did some time trials at the beginning. And then at the end of the study. And all these things were very tightly controlled, all the variables were tightly controlled, to make sure the only difference between the groups was their dietary intervention.

Now, the performance side of things was pretty interesting because the results showed that both groups performed almost exactly the same in these high intensity exercises. So there was no difference really between the performance of the low carb group and the high carb group.

There was a huge difference though in fat burning. So the high carb, low fat group, their fat burning peaked around .69 grams of fat burn per minute. Whereas the low carb group, their fat burning peaked around 1.85 grams per minute, which is the highest rate of fat oxidation ever recorded.

Okay, so the big difference between these two groups was the amount of fat that the low carb group was able to burn and they were at 1.85 grams per minute where the high carb group peaked around .7 grams of fat burn per minute. That’s a huge, huge difference.

So what this is saying is that depending on your dietary protocol, either way, you’re going to be able to perform at high intensities, about the same whether you’re doing a low carb diet or a high carb diet, okay?

So we can sort of take this off the table that a high carb diet is required to perform at higher intensities. Okay. So something else that I found really interesting and this is what prompted me to want to talk about this today is that in the group that was eating the high carb diet, they were doing all these blood tests on on all these people just to see like, you know, what, they were just measuring all kinds of things.

And one of the things they were looking at was blood glucose averages, and they did like fasting blood glucose tests. And one thing that was really fascinating is that the high carb group, 30% of them had average blood glucose greater than 100 milligrams per deciliter, which is consistent with prediabetes. So 100-125 is diagnosed as pre diabetes.

And there’s where in the 111 to 115 range, on average, 30% of these super fit competitive athletes with low BMI 12 to 16%, body fat, they looked great. They were very competitive runners, they appeared on the outside to be super fit, but are they healthy?

They’re being diagnosed with pre diabetes, because of their blood sugar being greater than 100 milligrams per deciliter on average during this 31 day study. And they did these tests many, many times. So this wasn’t like a one time deal.

The other interesting thing about this is that these people were also the greatest responders to carbohydrate restriction, which means that those individuals with a higher mean glucose, so the higher the individuals with those prediabetes numbers with the higher mean glucose, were more responsive to carbohydrate restriction treatment.

And all of their glycemic parameters were greatly improved if they switch to a low carb high fat diet. So average glucose was significantly lower, starting on day eight of the low carb and then remained lower throughout. And so the 31 day average glucose levels were down by 15%.

If they had switched to that low carb high fat diet. So some of the key findings that I’m just going to read this to you, these are some key findings from the study itself. So one of them is that athletes achieved equivalent exercise performance during a one mile time trial and a six by 800 meter interval session after a 31 day habituation to low carb or high carb diets.

When controlling calories training load, body composition changes across the groups. Another key finding during the later stages of the six by 800 interval sessions athletes achieve the highest rates of fat oxidation yet reported. According to current understanding, this is paradoxical since these high rates were measured in subjects exercising edit intensity, which was a which the rate of fat oxidation should be approaching zero.

Okay, so these were, the intensity level was greater than 90% of their VO2 max and their fat oxidation should have been at zero, but it was increasing. Crazy, right? And the low carb high fat consistently reduced glucose levels and glucose variability, which along with a large inverse relationship observed between main glucose on high carb and the percentage change mean glucose when switching to low carb.

So importantly, 30% of subjects who had a 31 day mean fasting glucose of greater than 100 on high carb were also the largest responders to the carbohydrate restriction, right? No subjects on the low carb high fat diet had a 31 day average mean glucose of greater than 100. Okay, so these results challenge the existing paradigm. The diets with higher carbohydrates are superior for athletic performance even during shorter duration higher intensity exercise which has been known or thought to be the case for a long time now.

Critically, these results demonstrate that lower carbohydrate intake may be a therapeutic strategy, even for an athlete, to improve glycemic index, particularly in those with or at risk for diabetes without requiring changes in body composition. Like you don’t need to lose a bunch of weight or physical activity, you don’t need to be exercising a ton more.

Interestingly, these results also demonstrate a unique association between glycemic responsiveness to carbohydrate restriction, fat oxidation rates, suggesting that there’s an important relationship here between glycemic parameters and metabolic responsiveness.

Okay, so my sort of interpretation, I was reading a lot of that from the study itself. It’s very scientifically written, a little dry, in my opinion, but my interpretation is this: that the low carb high fat diet produces the same results from an athletic performance perspective as the high carb diet.

And once you’re on that low carb diet for several weeks, weeks, your rate of fat oxidation goes way up. And this is key for both endurance. So being able to burn more fat helps you from an endurance standpoint, and helps improve weight loss, right, you have to burn fat if you want to lose weight, and that the high carb diet can lead to adverse health effects like pre diabetes.

And this is an interesting study because they looked at, you know, seemingly fit healthy men with low body fat percentages, normal body weight, normal BMI, all that they’re all competitive athletes, they exercise more than six hours per week, they didn’t have any medical diagnosis.

They weren’t on any medications, but 30% of them of the high carb group had, you know, blood glucose levels consistent with prediabetes, this is a problem, right? This is consistent with a prior analysis they did, which found that 30% of sub-elite endurance athletes, so this is like your average weekend warrior that’s just out there running for fun, like me, and you probably exercise, less than like six hours per week, had undetected prediabetes when measured via CGM, continuous glucose monitoring devices.

So a prior study has shown that 30% of athletes who seemingly are fit on the outside have this prediabetes condition. So they were fit but not healthy. And this is an important distinction. Do you want to just look healthy on the outside? Or would you rather look healthy on the outside and actually be healthy as a human being from the inside out?

So just because we see somebody on Instagram who looks healthy, they have lean body mass, low body fat percentage they’re ripped, they got abs for days, does not mean that they are healthy. It does not mean that they aren’t having some sort of internal issues or some, you know, condition like prediabetes.

And following the standard dietary advice, which is a very high carb diet, and low in fat, seems to cause metabolic dysfunction in around 30% of the population. And this is just the most fit population, whether you’re very competitive athletes or weekend warriors.

We’re not even looking at the people who do not exercise regularly, who are kind of sedentary. So it’s no wonder that obesity rates are what they are right now here in the US, which is over 42% of the US population is considered obese, over 42%.

This is the first time that here in the US the national rate of obesity has passed the 40% mark. And it’s further evidence of the country’s obesity crisis. The national adult obesity rate has increased by 26% since 2008. I’m gonna say that again, because it’s crazy.

The national adult obesity rate has increased by 26% since 2008.

And I say this all the time, you can’t outrun a bad diet, and this is what I’m talking about. These are very fit individuals who run a lot, who are very competitive, who all appear to be in perfect shape. But there’s more to the story. Your diet matters, what you eat matters. You cannot outrun a bad diet. Sure, exercise is important.

Keep running. Do that for sure, but it’s not going to solve all your health issues. You have to pay attention to the foods that you eat. And all this exercise and all this fitness won’t help keep you healthy unless you also change your diet. It’s up to you to take things into your own hands.

Don’t do what the powers be out there, the food companies, the government or whatever, what they’re telling you to do typically doesn’t work. You have to take things in your own hands. And listen, low carb, it’s not a fad diet. It’s not keto. It doesn’t mean you never eat another grain of rice your whole life, doesn’t involve eating sticks of butter wrapped in bacon, as good as that sounds.

If you want to learn more about my thoughts on carbs, I did an episode about this last week called Carbs Are Not The Enemy. Carbs are not the enemy. There are some carbs that are great and great for endurance athletes and great for weight loss, you just have to do them the right way.

So listen to that episode, for sure it’ll help you, you know, could get a good understanding of that. So if you’re a runner, and you want to improve your health, like really improve your health from the inside out, then making the switch to a lower carb diet might just be what you need.

And as always, I can coach you through all of this. We’ll put together a nutrition plan that fits your lifestyle and gets you to your health and fitness goals. Just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Work With Me.

Okay, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.

190. Carbs Are Not the Enemy

August 18, 2023 By Patrick McGilvray

There’s a lot of confusion out there these days around carbs, especially in the endurance athlete community. Are carbs good? Are they bad? Do they have a place in our diet or should we avoid them …

Continue Reading about 190. Carbs Are Not the Enemy →

Podcast Transcript

Hey there, and welcome to episode 190 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today: carbs are not the enemy. So there’s a lot of confusion out there these days around carbs, especially in the endurance athlete community. Are carbs good? Are they bad? Should we be carb loading? Do they have a place in our diet? Should we avoid them altogether?

I think you can probably guess from the title of this episode, ‘Carbs Are Not The Enemy’, that I have a particular stance on this, I don’t think they’re the enemy. But if you’re one of many people who are confused about all the talk on whether carbs are good or bad, my goal today is to help clear all this up for you. So in this episode, I’m gonna explain why carbs are not the enemy. Also, why it might be a good idea to keep your carb intake kind of low most of the time anyway.

But first, if you’ve been thinking about coaching, maybe you’ve been thinking about getting a hold of me, maybe working with me, but you’re still not sure if this is right for you, that’s fine. It’s not a problem at all. The thing is that coaching isn’t for everyone.

Not everyone is ready to do the work that’s required to change their lifestyle. Not everyone is willing to endure a little bit of temporary discomfort in order to get to where they want to get to whether that’s improving your running, improving your health or losing weight.

Not everyone is prepared to grind it out in the gym in order to get stronger and improve their body composition. Not everyone wants more for themselves. There’s plenty of people out there who are content with where they are right now. And that’s perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But my guess is that since you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably not like everyone else, you’re not afraid of getting uncomfortable. You’re not afraid to do the hard work. If it means you can get stronger, faster, you know, achieve your weight loss goal, you’re not content with where you are, maybe you do want more for yourself.

If so, if this sounds like you, then you might be a perfect fit for coaching. Whenever you’re ready to level up, I’m here for you, you can join the Running Lean Coaching Project. This is my unique weight loss coaching program for runners. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/join to learn more about it and schedule a call with me and we can talk about it, see if coaching is a good fit for you or not.

And if you want a little help, just getting started with all this stuff, I’ve put together a cool little training program just for you. You can watch it for free, it’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner. Just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training to get started. Cool.

Alright, let’s talk about this carbs are not the enemy. So I hear a lot of people talking about cutting out carbs, you know, going super low carb, keto, carnivore, whatever. And I think that some people get it into their heads that this means they can never eat a carbohydrate again in their life.

And I want to make this very clear today because I do get a lot of questions about this from people. I wanted to make it very clear on my stance on carbohydrates, and what place they can have in your diet and maybe should have in your diet depending on where you are with your training and with your weight loss goals and things like that.

So I just wanted to kind of clear up maybe some of the confusion and firmly take a stand on where I feel about all this stuff here. Okay, so first of all, understand that there are a lot of reasons why I like a low carb diet, why I think keeping your carbs relatively low is really good for you.

So just understand that, you know, when we talk about a low carb diet, that number of carbs per day can differ for different people. Some people consider, you know, 20 to 50 grams of carbs, low carb, other people consider 100 to 150 grams of carbs per day, low carb and really anything under 200, 150-200 grams of carbs is really kind of considered low carb, believe it or not.

So there’s a lot of flexibility there. And what we’re talking about, when we talk about eating a low carb diet, this does not mean that you can have one blueberry a day and a half of a banana once a week or something like that. No, this is about like, you know, you get to eat a banana or two a day and berries and honey and fruit and you know, yogurt and root vegetables and beans and all kinds of foods that contain carbohydrates.

It just means doing it in a very strategic way, in a very mindful way, so that you’re not loading up on refined carbohydrates. And I’ll talk about the difference between these in just a second here. But just understand that we want to eat a diet if your goal is to lose weight and improve your health and improve your running, you want to eat a diet that helps to regulate your blood sugar.

And regulating your blood sugar just means keeping your blood sugar relatively, you know, low and not a hypoglycemic we want to keep we don’t want to go too low, we want to keep your blood sugar, relatively constant, right, instead of having big spikes, and then crashes of blood sugar, because that causes spikes and crashes and energy levels that causes excessive weight gain and things like that.

So we want to keep our blood sugar relatively consistent throughout the day. So that means that the typical high carbohydrate diet that a lot of runners adhere to, it’s probably not going to work for you. Because runners are all about the carbs, all carbs all the time. And if you’re doing that your blood sugar is constantly spiked, and constantly spiked blood sugar means insulin is also constantly spiked, insulin being high.

When insulin is present, your body is storing fat, you’re not able to burn fat when insulin is present. So the right diet is the one that’s going to help your body to maintain its natural ability to burn fat. So we want to keep our blood sugar relatively low and consistent. We want to keep insulin levels relatively low and consistent, so that we can burn fat consistently, right?

This is all pretty basic, this is just the science behind why the low carb diet is so effective. So whether your body is burning fat, or storing energy as fat is all based on the types of foods you eat. And there’s other factors involved, but mainly on the types of foods you eat, and how much carbohydrate you’re consuming.

So if eating a lot of carbohydrates will spike your blood sugar, then what can we do about that? So I had another podcast that I did, called Good Carbs, Bad Carbs. And I’ll link to that in the show notes here. But just understand that all carbs are not bad. But there is a spectrum. You know, carbohydrates are sugar.

So sugar, you know, white sugar is just a concentrated, super concentrated refined form of carbohydrate. So on one end of the spectrum, we have super, super refined white sugar, super concentrated form of carbohydrate. And 100 grams of sugar is 100 grams of carbohydrates, right?

So this is something that if you consume this particular I’m going to use the finger quotes food if you consume this food, sugar is like not really a food. It’s a very concentrated, refined carbohydrate. But this substance that you consume will spike your blood sugar like crazy, which is going to spike insulin like crazy, which is going to make it very hard for you to lose weight, since your body’s going to shut down fat burning while you’re metabolizing that sugar.

Okay, eat a lot of sugar, your body is constantly going to be storing fat and not able to burn fat. This is not good. If you want to use fat as an endurance fuel. This is not good if you want to burn fat so you can lose weight.

Okay, so on one end of the spectrum, we have super concentrated forms of carbohydrate, like pure white sugar. On the other end of the spectrum, we have foods that contain carbohydrates, but they’re just very low, like whole foods like an avocado for example. 100 grams of avocado has like nine grams of carbohydrates. Right?

And so yeah, we’re eating some carbs, but it’s a tiny portion. It’s like 9% of that fruit. Oh, avocados are a fruit by the way, 9% of that fruit is carbohydrate as opposed to 100% with pure sugar. 100 grams of broccoli has just like seven grams of carbs. Right, so 7%.

So these foods contain fiber, which helps to reduce the carbohydrate impact, these foods will not spike your blood sugar, your blood sugar when you eat foods like broccoli and avocados and other foods with low carb, low carb foods, they will raise your blood sugar a little bit but very little and very slowly and then it will fall back to normal again pretty quickly, like it should, your blood sugar should go up a little bit when you eat, that’s normal. Insulin should go up a little bit when you eat, that’s normal. And then it should come back down to baseline pretty quickly, which is normal.

But eating that high carbohydrate diet does not do that, it completely jacks up the system. It totally spikes blood sugar, totally spikes insulin, and then your body’s just busy metabolizing all that carbohydrate. Okay, so carbs, not the enemy. But we want to eat a diet that does not cause all these spikes and crashes, that helps to kind of regulate our blood sugar.

So we want to keep blood sugar low, we want to keep insulin levels low. And we want to keep our body in that fat burning mode. So fat burning is the key here. And that should be your goal. If you’re somebody who wants to improve your running performance and you want to lose weight, or improve your body composition, then fat burning is your goal.

Because if you can improve fat burning, you can improve your endurance. If you can improve fat burning, you can lose weight. If you want to lose weight, you have to burn fat, I think that is just common knowledge. If you want to lose weight, you have to burn fat, so why not keep your body in a key fat burning state, you know, pretty consistently, you’re going to lose weight if you do that.

So keeping the carbohydrates moderately low is a great way to keep your body burning fat. Improving your endurance, you know, if you want to be able to run whether it’s 5k or 50k or 100 miles, if you can improve your ability to burn fat, your endurance is going to go up, your endurance is going to improve, you’re going to be able to run longer, and you’ll be able to run faster as well, you’ll be able to increase your your high intensity running as well.

So this is a pretty simple concept, let’s just increase fat burning, let’s, you know, optimize your body to burn more fat. This is very simple. It’s a simple concept. But people tend to complicate this stuff, right? They over complicate it, they talk about you know you know being going keto or doing carnivore or you know going zero carb and you know, I gotta keep it under 50 grams of carbs every single day all the time.

No matter what this is, we don’t need to worry about a lot of that stuff, right, you can just simply keep your carbs low, stay away from foods that spike your blood sugar, and keep your body in fat burning mode. And if you do that you’re going to be successful with this. Okay.

So there’s lots of benefits to improving your health, including, you know, not just the things that I’ve mentioned above, but some of the other things like lowering your risk for diabetes, improving your blood pressure, lowering triglycerides, improving your cholesterol numbers.

Also, if your goal is to lose weight, a low carb diet can definitely help with that because you’re burning more fat, you’re optimizing your body for fat burning, which is how you lose weight. But also it helps to decrease your appetite. You will feel more full when you do eat. And the reason for this is due to two hormones, ghrelin and leptin.

Ghrelin is the hunger hormone, which when you eat a lot of carbohydrates, that hunger hormone gets over active. And so you tend to be more hungry all the time. Have you ever noticed that if you eat a lot of carbs throughout the day, you’re constantly hungry throughout the day and you feel like you have to keep eating, keep eating, keep eating.

And then if you’ve ever done a super low carb regimen where you’ve stopped eating a lot of the refined carbs and stuff like that, and you’ve gone you know very low carb, you’ll notice that you’re not hungry throughout the day. And it’s much easier to not overeat when you’re not hungry all the time. Right. It just makes it so much easier because if you’re just not hungry, you don’t really feel like eating then you don’t need to worry about overeating because you’re just naturally not going to overeat.

The other hormone, leptin, which controls how full you are when you eat. So when you eat a big load of carbohydrate, like let’s say a big bowl of cereal or oatmeal or something like that, then leptin actually gets deregulated. So it actually is not produced the way that it should be. And so you do not feel full when you eat that.

So you end up overeating that particular food, it’s much easier to overeat carbohydrates than it is to overeat, like protein. Have you ever tried to sit down and eat like two pounds of chicken breast? I’ve tried it, I can’t do it. Like I can eat like maybe like I can sit down and eat up a pound of meat at a time, most of the time.

Chicken is one of those things that I have a really hard time and because it’s just pure protein. And I get to about three quarters of a pound. And I’m just like darn, like, I cannot eat any more. That’s like 12 ounces of chicken and I’m just like totally stuffed. I can’t eat anything else.

But if I sat down to eat, let’s say what is like one of my favorite carbohydrates, sweet treats something like cheesecake. Oh my God, even though that’s like super dense and rich, I can eat a pound of cheesecake, two pounds of cheesecake, no problem at all. Especially if it’s got like caramel sauce on it. And whipped cream. Heck, yeah, I can tear that up.

That’s because those hormones are just jacked up, they don’t, they don’t work the way they’re supposed to. And so all of a sudden, I’m not feeling full, I’m excessively hungry, and I can overeat carbohydrates, whereas, you know, it’s really hard to overeat protein, okay.

So again, there’s a lot of benefits to eating a lower carb diet, you know, also understand there’s tons of benefits for running. So fat is an amazing fuel source for endurance athletes, we all know that. If you’ve listened to this podcast at all, you know, I talk about this a lot. And you have a virtually unlimited supply of fat on board.

And really, it doesn’t even matter your body composition. If you’ve got anywhere, you know, upwards of you know, 6 or 8% body fat you’ve got tons of fat on board to use for fuel for running. So you know, you can run on fat alone for many distances, half marathon, marathon, 50k, 50 mile, 100 miles.

Mike McKnight famously ran 100 miles on zero calories, just to show the world that you can use your own stored body fat as fuel very effectively. And he’s a super small dude and really lean. And so he was able to run 100 miles on fat alone, body fat alone.

And studies have even shown that you can train yourself to burn more fat and perform at even higher intensities. So the common belief is that you know, at some point, you’re going to cross over from fat burning to sugar burning, where you’re going to be burning mostly sugar, and you’re going to stop burning mostly fat and start burning mostly sugar.

And typically this is around 65% of your VO2 max. And this will be for most carb adapted athletes. So if you’re somebody that’s eating a traditional high carbohydrate diet, you’re not fat adapted, meaning your body isn’t burning fat super effectively, then around 65% of your VO2 max is where you’re going to make that crossover.

Well, fat adapted athletes don’t hit that crossover until much later, maybe 80, 90 or 100% of their VO2 max or even over 100% or their VO2 max. So they’re burning fat up to and even over 100% of their VO2 max.

Jeff Browning is an elite Ultra runner who has been tested to burn fat at like 90-95% of his VO2 max. It’s pretty incredible. So that means that you can run at even higher intensities and you’re still just utilizing fat you haven’t crossed over from fat to sugar burning. Right.

And so most of us weekend warriors and, you know, age group athletes or who are out there, you know, we can utilize, we’re probably not going to be running at close to 100% of our VO2 max for any race.

Maybe you would, you know, but just understand that for most age groupers out there, you’re going to be burning mostly fat no matter what you’re doing. So if you’re fat adapted, this is a profound performance enhancer for you. Okay, so all of this is to say that maintaining a low carb diet can have profound performance benefits and profound health benefits for you.

If you want to lose weight, keep your carbs low. If you want to burn more fat, keep your carbs low. If you want to prove your running, keep your carbs low. If you want improve your health markers, you know cholesterol and blood pressure and things like that, keep your carbs low, right?

So the logical conclusion a lot of people come to then is like, Oh, if low carb is good, I’m just gonna go zero carbs, isn’t zero carbs better? Doesn’t this make sense? Like, you know, if low carb as good as zero carbs better? And I’m gonna say like, probably not.

This all depends on the individual. I don’t think so. I don’t think the zero carbs is really right for everybody. I do know some people that have done really well on a carnivore type of diet, maybe zero carbs for a period of time.

Now I’ve done this before, I’ve gone 30, 60 or 90 days, doing like strict carnivore, where I had almost zero carbs, it’s really hard to keep your carbs zero, like you can’t eat vegetables at all, you can’t eat a tomato, you can’t eat anything other than like meat and eggs. Even eggs have a tiny bit of carbs in there, like one or two grams of carbs.

So anyway, it’s hard to do. But I’ve done this for a period of time, and I’ve kept the carbs super low. And there are some benefits to doing that for sure. But I don’t think it’s something that you want to do all the time. Carbs are not the enemy. Okay, carbs can definitely have a place in your diet.

And what low carb means is low carb does not mean the same thing for everybody. But it doesn’t mean zero carbs. Right. So there, there is a spectrum here of where you want to be in the low carb world. Okay. So, carbs are not the enemy, we don’t need to be afraid of carbs, they can definitely have a place in your diet.

And so, for example, if you want to lose weight, and you want to improve your running, in general, and again, this is going to vary for each person. But you might start out pretty low carb, so say like 50 grams a day or so. And you might maintain that for around 30 days, this helps to regulate your hormones, get your blood sugar normalized, helps to reduce cravings for sweet foods and gets your hunger signals working the way they’re supposed to.

Then after 30 days, you might bump that daily carb number up, you might go to 75 or 100 or 150 grams of carbs. And this all depends on you, depends on your metabolism, your calorie requirements, where you are in your training cycle, your particular goals, are you trying to lose a lot of weight? Are you just trying to improve your running? Are you running 5K’s?

Are you running ultra marathons like all these things are going to factor into this, okay? There’s tons of factors involved in this, why you have to kind of experiment with this and you got to test this, why offer coaching, instead of just handing over guidelines to people like I’m even a little leery of throwing these numbers out there because they are not going to work for everyone.

All of this is on a spectrum. And every single person is a little bit different. So I work with you on an individual basis, we look at all of these factors, we come up with some guidelines based on all of these factors. And then we kind of see if it is working or not. And then we continually make minor changes and minor tweaks to get things working properly for you.

Okay, so for me, I vary my carb intake pretty regularly. So some days, I’m pretty low carb, so that might be 30 to 50 grams of carbs. Other days, I might be 100 to 120 grams of carbs. And this all depends on my activity level.

So I look at, you know, what my running schedule is like, what my weightlifting schedule is like, and how much of that carbohydrate that I’m actually going to be utilizing. So if I’m going to be burning the carbs through my workouts, great, I can up the carb intake. But if I’m just going to be a little more sedentary or have an off day or something like that, if I were to keep the carbs, you know, at the higher end of the spectrum 120 grams or something like that, I’ll probably be storing more of that as fat instead of burning it through the workout.

So this is an important distinction because I don’t want to just add a bunch of stored body fat so I want to time the carbs around my workouts and time the carbs with my lifestyle and my activity levels so that I am oxidizing the carbs as well as maintaining them. Oxidation of fat, right?

We don’t want to be shutting down your fat metabolism, your fat oxidation. Eating too many carbs, or the wrong types of carbs, will do this though. So if you eat refined sugars that’s going to shut down fat burning or definitely dampened fat burning. So I tend to gravitate toward whole foods sources of carbs, slow burning types of carbs that will not spike my blood sugar that won’t shut down the fat burning.

So some of the go to’s for me would be sweet potatoes, legumes, fruit, some dairy, things like that. So carbs are not the enemy. And but I would argue that refined carbs like white sugar and white flour are really not good for you. Like, I don’t think they really have a place in the human diet. There’s no real positive health benefits to eating refined white sugars and refined white flowers, right? There’s only negative side effects, there’s only negative effects on your body.

It’s kind of like alcohol, alcohol is not really a health food, it’s not good for you. Right? It’s a poison, but even alcohol in moderation, very strict moderation is okay. You know, it’s not great. It’s not like it’s not good for you. Sugar is not good for you. White flour is not good for you. But every now and then it’s okay.

It’s okay to have a drink every now and then it’s okay to eat a piece of cake every now and then, or have a piece of bread every now and then. It’s like, I’m never going to tell you or even myself that I’m never going to have that stuff again, although I don’t drink so I’m probably never gonna have alcohol again.

But as far as like the white sugar, and the flour and the cake and the cheesecake and things like that, I’m gonna have some of that every now and then. But it’s very sporadic. It’s very sporadic, I do not eat that stuff all the time. So just understand that carbs are on a spectrum, that they’re not the enemy, but you got to maintain the right carb level for you and the right amount of carbs, it’s going to help to help you to reach your weight loss goals, your health goals, your fitness goals, your running goals.

And also, that’s not going to cause damage, right. So we got to be careful with this stuff and got it you know, eat the right types of carbs. So carbohydrates do have a place in our diet. We’ve been consuming carbs for millions of years as human beings. But we’re not, we weren’t consuming the refined and processed carbs, the genetically modified carbs that we have available to us today.

Like back in the day, we used to eat things like bulbs, tubers and berries. We weren’t eating refined white sugar and bread and pasta, like these foods will do a number on our blood sugar and basically shut down fat burning. We didn’t have those kinds of foods available to us.

So the carbohydrates we were consuming, you know, tens of thousands of years ago for millions of years, was a very low glycemic diet and very slow burning types of carbs. Even the fruit we used back then was much different than the modified fruit we have today, which is you know, pure sugar. A lot of it is just really, really high in sugar.

So stick to whole foods, sources of carbs. Think slow burning carbohydrates like root vegetables, temper through, say berries, dairy, like Greek yogurt, legumes like beans, lentils, these types of foods, they will not spike your blood sugar. They’re slow burning carbs, they will help you too. They will help enhance your running performance and they will help to keep you burning fat, which is what you want.

You want to continue to burn fat so you can lose weight. You want to continue to burn fat so you can run faster and run longer and keep that performance edge that you want. Okay, so carbs are not the enemy. You just gotta do it the right way. All right. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean. And I’ll talk to you soon.

186. Demystifying Metabolism

July 21, 2023 By Patrick McGilvray

I’ve been doing a lot of research lately on human metabolism and I’ve noticed a lot of inconsistencies in the data available. There seem to be a lot of misconceptions about metabolism, especially …

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Podcast Transcript

Hey there, and welcome to episode 186 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, Demystifying Metabolism. So I’ve been doing a lot of research lately on human metabolism.

And I’ve noticed a lot of inconsistencies in the data that’s available out there. There seem to be a lot of misconceptions about metabolism, especially when it comes to you know people who want to lose weight.

So today, I want to take some time to address some of the most common myths and misconceptions around human metabolism. I did an entire episode on Fixing Your Metabolism that was Episode 141. So you can definitely check that one out.

I won’t be rehashing all of that here today. Today, I’m going to focus on demystifying metabolism. So you can separate fact from fiction and make better choices to improve your overall health and fitness.

But first, if you’re anything like most runners, you’re probably really good at being an endurance badass. You’re amazing at getting out there pounding out the miles on the roads or on the trails. But when it comes to being strong, if you’re like most runners, you probably fall a little bit short.

Building and maintaining strength is essential to improving your running performance and your overall health and hitting your weight loss goals. But most runners just don’t do it or they just don’t do it well.

So building strength is probably the second biggest driver when it comes to improving your body composition after nutrition. So if you want to lose fat and gain muscle, you have to be doing some sort of resistance training regularly because lean runners are strong runners.

So some of the benefits that you will experience, if you participate in some sort of regular resistance training, you’ll lose more weight and faster, you’ll be at a much lower risk of injury from running, your endurance will improve, you can actually run longer before you get fatigued, you will run faster, your power to weight ratio goes up making you a more powerful runner.

And evidence has shown that you actually live longer. People that do regular strength training tend to live longer than those who don’t. So it’s one of the best things you can do for your overall health and fitness and to change your body composition is to get stronger. Regular strength training will help you burn more fat and gain lean muscle the more weight you lose, you’ll run more injury free you’ll be able to run longer and run faster and live longer.

All these things are amazing. If you want to learn exactly how to become a stronger, faster, leaner runner, join the Running Lean Coaching Project. That is my unique weight loss coaching program for runners. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/join to learn more about that.

And if you just want a little help getting started with all this stuff, I’ve got this great training program that I put together, you can watch it for free, it’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner. Just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training to get started.

Alright, let’s talk about demystifying metabolism. So I want to start with what is metabolism? So metabolism is a term that describes all the chemical reactions in your body that keep your body alive and functioning.

It’s also responsible for converting nutrients from the foods that you eat into fuel. So this provides your body with the energy it needs to breathe and move, digest foods, circulate blood, repair damaged tissues and cells and so much more.

So the faster your metabolism is, the more calories your body tends to need. Metabolism is the reason why some people can eat a lot without gaining weight while others seem to need less to accumulate fat. The speed of your metabolism is commonly known as your metabolic rate or resting metabolic rate.

It’s the number of calories you burn in a given amount of time, okay, and some people talk about it as calorie expenditure. So, the first myth I kind of want to address here is that metabolism is not just about calories. So many people consider metabolism only under the scope of calories and weight.

And you know, for the most part we are talking about that, but you have to understand that metabolism encompasses all chemical reactions in the body, from absorption of light to the creation of usable ATP energy to body temperature regulation to hormone production to balance of fluids and hydration in the body to your circadian rhythm and so much more.

So if it’s a function of the body, it’s likely to be related to metabolism in some way or another. Okay, so just understand that metabolism is about a lot more than just burning calories.

Okay, the next myth I wanted to address is that eating more often will increase your metabolism. So eating small, frequent meals throughout the day will help boost your metabolism. And the idea is pretty simple. Because whenever we eat food, our body does burn some calories to break the food down to absorb the nutrients. This is called the thermic effect of food.

So if we are constantly eating, wouldn’t our bodies constantly be burning calories? It just doesn’t quite work that way. Okay, so eating small meals throughout the day may help you with portion control, but it doesn’t really speed up your metabolism.

Researchers have studied people eating six meals a day compared to people eating three meals a day, and they found that there really wasn’t any difference in a 24 hour fat oxidation rate. So this is one measure of metabolism, okay.

They actually found that people that eat more often throughout the day, have increased feelings of hunger and tend to eat more in general, okay. So understand that there is a temporary boost in your metabolic rate when you’re eating food, all right.

But eating six small meals over the course of a day isn’t really going to cause any kind of overall increase in your metabolism. In fact, it’s going to probably cause you more hunger, and cause you to eat more food overall. Okay, so eating more often does not increase your metabolism.

Another big myth that a lot of people adhere to is that your metabolism slows down as you get older. And this is sort of true, but I want to break this down, so you fully understand what this means. Okay, so a lot of people will just say, well, I’m older, and so my metabolism has slowed down.

And you can pick any age, and people will tell me this, because I talk to people all the time in their 40s 50s 60s 70s, whatever. And they just tell me, oh, yeah, my metabolism, my metabolism has slowed down. So I tend to put on more weight.

Okay, so they’ve done some studies recently in like 2021. And they’ve shown that this is not really the case, okay. So the rate at which your body burns energy, your metabolism is thought to decline during middle age as people gradually lose muscle mass, okay.

So they did a study where they looked at total energy expenditure, including energy burned at rest, to perform basic functions like digesting food as well as energy burned during physical activity. And they looked at like 6400 people ranging in age from eight days old to 95 years old, okay, they looked at their height, their weight, their body fat percentage. So they calculated average metabolic rates for men, women and different people in different age groups.

And the data indicated that there were some differences in metabolism based on four distinct periods in people’s lives. So the first is from infancy to one year old, this is where your metabolic rate surge is, okay? It was about 50% higher than it will be during adulthood.

So this is a huge surge in your metabolism, which makes sense. You’ve just been born, you got to, you know, grow bones and get a big brain and all these things, your metabolism is super high during that first year of life, okay. Then, from age one to age 20, this is like the second period that we’re talking about here. Your metabolism decreases by about 3% a year. Okay, so your metabolism is actually decreasing from one until you hit age 20.

But then, from age 20 to age 60, they’ve shown that your metabolism really doesn’t change. It stays pretty consistent. Okay. After age 60, and this is the fourth period, metabolism decreases by 0.7% annually, which is not insignificant, but it’s not as much as people think. Okay.

So infancy to one year old, your metabolism is surging, it’s about 50% higher than it will be during adulthood from one to 20 when it decreases by about 3% a year. From 20 to 60 doesn’t change. And then after 60, it decreases by around 0.7% annually.

And something interesting about this is that there are ways to actually prevent that deep annual decrease after age 60. And it’s more likely changes in lifestyle, like eating the proper diet, staying active and maintaining lean muscle mass all have positive effects on your metabolism after age 60.

So even though the data is saying like, oh, you know, the average tends to be a 0.7% annual decrease after age 60, you can still offset that by resistance training by staying active. And by eating healthy, getting enough sleep and exercise and good relationships. And all that stuff helps do good mental health helps with all that stuff, too.

Okay, the other myth that’s sort of correlated with this is that menopause causes your metabolism to slow down. And so many women talk about this, that, oh, you know, I’ve hit menopause. And so I’m just gonna, I’ve just gained a bunch of weight. So we’re talking about perimenopausal and postmenopausal women, just understand that the same principles apply, as you get older.

You know, so they did the studies on men and women, and from ages, you know, all the way up to 95 years old. So lots of menopausal women and postmenopausal women. So just going through menopause does not mean you’ll automatically gain weight, whether you are a male or female, whether you’re going through menopause or not.

As you get older, you know, you need to stay active, get good sleep, maintain muscle mass, practice healthy eating habits, get in plenty of protein, that kind of stuff, and you should keep your metabolism going pretty well. Okay, regardless of menopause or age. Cool.

I know that was a big one. A lot of people don’t understand that. And these are pretty new studies. So this is good data that’s coming out here. Love this. Right. Alright, the next myth I want to address is that active people have higher metabolisms.

Okay, so this one is sort of true and false. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna start with why it’s sort of true. So, exercise will temporarily increase your metabolism, but it only lasts about a day or so. Okay, so you might think, oh, yeah, well just exercise every day. And that’ll keep your metabolism going. And that’ll raise your metabolism.

And yes, that’s kind of true, it will. But you have to understand that, you know, your body also needs enough rest and recovery. And if you don’t give your body enough rest and recovery, you are going to chronically elevate stress hormones in your body, you’re going to put your body into this state of chronic stress. And that will actually slow your metabolism down.

So I do know people who love to do these running streaks, and they run three or five, five miles every day, no matter what, and they never give themselves a rest. I’m a little concerned that they’re constantly in a state of stress and slowing their metabolism down.

I’ve told the story about a client of mine who was running at least five kg every day for something like seven straight years and gained about 50 pounds in the process. That shows me that running every day does not really increase your metabolism all that much. Or maybe putting yourself in a state of chronic stress is doing the opposite, having the opposite effect that you know that slight gain in your metabolism has okay.

And this is one of the reasons why I say you can’t outrun a bad diet because exercise alone isn’t going to move the needle that much from a metabolism standpoint. Okay. So, interesting studies they have done on Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania.

So these are groups of people who are very lean, very active, very active people. And it was always thought that their resting metabolic rate was much higher than the typical, you know, American, or whatever. And it turns out that they’re burning about the same number of calories that we do per day.

So Hadza men and women, they walk like four to seven miles a day. They hunt wild game, they harvest honey, they’re digging for tubers, they’re picking berries, they’re fetching water and firewood. They get more activity in a day than the standard American gets in a week.

And surprisingly, the researchers have found that the Hadza don’t burn more calories than the average adults in the US and other industrialized countries. Hadza men burn about 2500 calories a day, Hadza women it’s about 1900. This tracks perfectly with what we know here in the US like what the average Americans, men and women burn per day, the resting metabolic rate.

So, it appears that human energy expenditure is pretty tightly controlled, right? The human body seems to adjust to physical activity by saving energy saving calories on other physiological processes to keep total energy expenditure in check. So your body’s really good at maintaining homeostasis.

And if you’re used to burning 2500 calories, you know, it doesn’t matter how much more activity you’re doing, it’s going to slow some things down. So you’re constantly just burning that 2500 calories. It’s just something interesting to think about. Because being more active isn’t really going to increase your overall metabolism.

Like I said, it does increase your metabolism for a short period of time. Another thing to keep in mind about this is that most of the energy that you burn in a day is really from your resting metabolism, your resting metabolic rate.

So there are three main ways that your body burns energy or uses energy each day. So there’s your resting metabolic rate, your basal metabolism. So this is energy used for your body’s basic functioning, while you’re at rest, you’re sitting on the couch, your body is actually just burning calories. Cool, right?

You can sit there and watch Netflix and know that your body is burning, you know, let’s say it’s around 2500 calories a day. So you know, let’s say it’s just around 100 calories an hour. Cool. Okay, you can go for a run, or you can sit on the couch watching Netflix, and you’re burning about the same amount of calories. So just understand that.

And then number two, the energy, there’s energy used when you break down foods. So this is called the thermic effect of food. I talked about this earlier, when you ingest food, your body actually has to use energy to digest that food. And the thermic effect of food is highest when you’re eating protein.

So you’re going to burn more calories when you eat protein than when you eat carbohydrates and fat. And then thirdly, there’s energy that you use in physical activity. So you have your basal metabolic rate or your resting metabolism, you have the energy used to break down food thermic effect of food, T.F. And then there’s energy used during physical activity.

Your resting metabolism, though, accounts for a huge amount of the total calories you burn each day. Physical activity accounts for about, let’s say about 20% and your resting metabolism. It counts for like 60 to 80% of your total energy. And that digesting of food is just about 10%.

Okay, so think about this. 60 to 80% of your total energy each day is just your resting metabolism, okay. So just understand that when it comes to, you know, trying to outrun your diet or trying to out exercise to get your metabolism, you’re still going to be not really doing much, you’re not moving the needle much compared to what your resting metabolic rate looks like. Okay, all right.

Next myth is that thin people just have naturally faster metabolisms. And this is just not true. So it actually takes more energy for a larger body to function compared to a smaller body. So an overweight person tends to have a faster metabolism than a thin person.

Very overweight people tend to burn way more calories at rest. And they tend to lose weight much faster compared to leaner individuals. So it takes more energy to carry more mass even if, let’s say you kept to people with different body weights and you kept them in bed for an extended period of time.

The heavier person will just have a higher resting metabolic rate just based on their size alone, okay? Also understand that body composition does matter here. Okay, so at a given body weight, someone with a higher amount of lean mass, so lean mass is your connective tissues, muscle and bone.

You really can’t change bone size, you really can’t change your connective tissue size that I’m aware of. But you can control muscle size, okay? So your lean mass, really the one thing that we can concentrate on and actually physically change is our muscle mass. So somebody with a higher amount of muscle mass will burn more calories than someone with less muscle mass.

So think of an athlete and a non athlete with identical body weights, the athlete with a more muscular physique will actually have a higher metabolism. So carrying more lean muscle actually increases your metabolism, this is a good thing.

Similarly, a lean muscular person who weighs 120 pounds, and has a healthy amount of lean mass will have a relatively fast metabolism. But another person who weighs the exact same amount 120 pounds, who has more fat will actually have a slower metabolism.

Okay, so increasing muscle mass is a great way to naturally increase your metabolism. And that’s one of the reasons why I talk about strength training so much. If you’re somebody that wants to, you know, lose weight, improve your body composition, get stronger, improve running, all those things, definitely want to focus on strength training, resistance training to build muscle and build lean muscle.

Okay, next myth, your metabolism cannot change because it’s just genetic. So, understand that your resting metabolism is likely genetic, but you can change your metabolism, you can increase your lean muscle mass, like we just talked about.

Muscle burns more calories at rest, the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t want to take responsibility, they don’t want to do the work to improve their metabolism by doing something like resistance training, because it takes some work, it takes some time to get stronger to grow muscles. Okay?

So genetics is at play here, it does provide a predisposition for metabolism. But environmental and lifestyle habits will actually have a positive effect on your metabolism, right. So it doesn’t matter the genes that you’re provided with, it’s always within your ability to improve your metabolic function, and to not necessarily let those genes express themselves to their fullest extent.

Okay, and then this leads me to the last myth I want to talk about today, which is that we can’t control our metabolism. So it’s easy to just blame your metabolism when you’re having trouble losing weight or something like that.

But studies have shown that we do have more control over our metabolism than we previously thought. Some stuff like strength training, getting good quality sleep each night helps to improve your metabolism, reducing stress, drinking more water, consistent resistance training, especially as you get older, building more lean muscle will help with that. Eating less often, these are things we’ve talked about here today.

Maybe just eat two or three times a day, eating enough food each day making sure that you’re getting enough quality protein each day, all these things can help to keep your metabolism going and could lead to improvements in your metabolism even as you get older. Okay.

And then the last thing I’m going to talk about here is, you know, we’re talking about metabolism and burning calories, but we have to think about what we are burning, what calories are we burning, you know, what is the substrate that we are burning?

And eating a diet high in sugar and carbs means that you’re mostly burning glucose, glycogen, sugar and carbs. Okay? If your goal is to lose weight, this is going to make it kind of difficult for you. Losing weight means you want to be burning mostly fat.

So when you ditch the sugar, you ditch the carbs and you get fat adapted, you train your body to be really good at burning fat. This means that you will burn more fat during exercise, but also at rest. So the factors that affect how your metabolism functions, that I’ve talked about here today, can increase either carbohydrate metabolism or fat metabolism.

Obviously, we want to increase our fat metabolism. So as an endurance athlete who also wants to lose fat, you want to increase your fat oxidation. The typical runners’ diet of all the sugar and carbs is probably not going to get you there. Okay. Your body always wants to prioritize that carbohydrate and glucose metabolism.

So ditch that stuff, get your body burning fat. That is the first step. That way when you do increase your metabolism, you will naturally be burning more fat, which is good. Burning fat is how you lose weight. Burning fat is how you improve your endurance as a runner.

Cool. I hope this has been helpful. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I’ll talk to you soon.

182. A Better Approach to the Off-Season

June 23, 2023 By Patrick McGilvray

If you’re anything like most runners, especially if you live in the US, this is most likely the off-season for you. You’ve completed your Spring races and you’re not quite into the next training …

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Podcast Transcript

Hey there and welcome to episode 182 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today a better approach to the offseason. If you’re anything like most runners, especially if you live here in the US, this is most likely the offseason for you.

So you’ve completed your spring races, and you’re not quite into the next training cycle yet. Most runners that I know of anyway, approach this offseason as a time to live it up, eat and drink whatever, slack off on your training and just have fun.

This is always my approach to the offseason, I figured I would you know get back on track as soon as training started up yet. The problem is that I ended up gaining weight feeling like crap. And then when training started again, I had to like make up all this ground, right?

So in this episode, I’m gonna offer a better approach to the offseason, one that will have you feeling your best when you start training for that next big race. Cool. All right, but first, when runners come to me, for help losing weight, they often experience some pretty amazing transformations.

They stop burning sugar, they start burning stored body fat, they start losing weight like they’ve never been able to do before. Their endurance improves, they become long distance running machines, they get faster, they’re able to run at higher intensities for much longer.

But one of the most unexpected transformations they experienced is that running becomes fun again. Since they’re not carrying around so much weight, running becomes easier. Gone are the days when running is a constant struggle, running actually becomes fun again. Can you even remember the last time you thought running was fun? I bet it’s been a while.

And if so, that’s okay, you can get back to that feeling anytime that you want, you just have to start doing things differently. If you’re ready to make running fun, again, join The Coaching Project.

This is my lifetime access weight loss coaching program for runners, you’ll get all the knowledge, support, guidance, and accountability you need to crush your weight loss and your running goals. To learn more, just go to runningleancoaching.com/join.

Okay, let’s talk about this, a better approach to the offseason. So the way most runners approach the offseason looks like this, eat whatever you want, all the junk food all the time, no training structure. So you know, there may not be running consistently, they may not be sticking to any kind of a running schedule.

There’s no resistance training structure or schedule there, they probably just don’t do that at all. So no hitting the gym regularly. They’re on vacation, they’re drinking more. They’re eating just kind of whatever, lots of junk food, lots of sugar.

And I don’t know about you, but this is the way that I used to approach the offseason. This was my life for years and years, okay. When our Fall or Spring races were done, I would just go into, basically, hey, I’m off, I’m not training.

And so I would just kind of slack off on everything, skip the resistance training, don’t go to the gym, no structured runs, and then eat whatever, especially during the summertime, you know. This is the time where we’ve got the pool and the cookouts and the beer and the wine and the desserts and vacation and margaritas everywhere, right?

It’s a time where most people just kind of do whatever. So the effects of this though there’s a problem with this, right? Because this approach is not going to be sustainable. This isn’t something you can’t do all the time.

In fact, I’m going to argue that it’s not something you should ever really do. You don’t really want to ever get into this place where you just toss everything out the window, and then hopefully, you know, start it back up again. Right? What happens when you take this “toss it out the window” approach is that you end up losing fitness.

You know, you’re not going to be as strong if you’re not maintaining some sort of a resistance training routine. You’re going to lose endurance if you’re not running consistently. Most likely you’re going to gain weight if you’re just eating a bunch of junk food and drinking a lot more than you’re used to.

Your mindset also just kind of goes out the window, because you get into this mindset of like, I can just do whatever I want. And so you lack discipline. And all of this kind of just leads to a general feeling of like getting out of shape, you know, and feeling like you’re starting, if and when you do start up your next training cycle you got, you’re coming from this big deficit, like, you’re just got to, you kind of got to start over again, maybe you gain 10 or 12 pounds, and you got to lose the weight.

And then, you know, you’re probably not going to lose all that weight in the beginning of this training cycle. And this is always my experience, I would gain 10 or 12 pounds, I might lose a few of those, but then I would, you know, have netted a gain of three or four, eight pounds or whatever, every year, I did the same thing just over and over again.

And not only is it not healthy, but it’s like a terrible way to start your training cycle. When you’re getting ready to train for your next marathon or triathlon or ultra marathon, whatever it is, if you just keep doing this big cycle of like eating a bunch of junk food and gaining a bunch of weight and then trying to lose it again, it’s just not it’s not healthy for you, it’s much healthier to just maintain your weight and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

So I just want to kind of address this whole situation here where I think there’s a mindset that a lot of runners get into, which is “it’s the offseason I can do whatever I want.” And I want to argue that that is not a very good approach. Okay. It becomes this crazy roller coaster of like, Oh, I’m working out, oh no, I’m not working out, oh, I’m running, no, I’m not running, or I’m eating right now I’m not eating right.

And, you know, that can really mess with your mind and mess with good habits maybe that you’ve worked to establish. You know, you go from being like super committed and dedicated and disciplined to just throwing everything out the window. Like that is not how you want to approach any of this stuff.

Because one thing I have learned working with hundreds of runners on this stuff is that if you just stay consistent, this is so much easier than doing this whole roller coaster up and down thing, you know, where it’s like an all or nothing sort of mentality, way, way easier to just stay consistent with all of this stuff. Okay.

But like I said, this is how I did it for years. You know, I gained weight every offseason, I tried to run it off and you know, marathon training kicked in again, or triathlon training or whatever it was. And that never really worked. I always, you know, consistently just gained weight every single year and felt like crap.

And so when you start your training cycle, feeling like crap, like this is just not a good way to approach your training. Okay, remember, you’re an athlete, right? If you run, if you do any kind of consistent, working out training races, whatever, consider yourself and an athlete because you are one.

So just start acting like that, you know, elite athletes, they don’t approach their offseason in this way. They don’t totally go off the rails, you know, they stick to the plan for the most part. And I’m gonna talk about that too. Like, you can vary your plan a little bit, you’re gonna go on vacation, you’re probably going to have a margarita or two here and there. And that stuff is okay.

But we’ve got to do this in a more mindful, more, intentional way, as opposed to just like, just throwing the rulebook out the window and just going crazy, because it’s the offseason. Okay. So I’m gonna give you a few pointers here to make the offseason more fruitful for you.

And it’s just a better approach to the offseason and the offseason can be a month or two, sometimes it’s three months, depends on what you’re training for whatever but just know that there’s a period of time here where you know, you’re not going to be in that heat of the your training cycle. And so you will have to do things a little bit differently.

So let’s kind of go through this. The first thing I want you to do, before you even get into the offseason. We’re probably already there into the thick of it right now, but just set an intention, like how do you want to handle this offseason? What do you want this to look like for you?

Do you want to go crazy and go off the rails? Then be my guest. Totally fine. You’re probably going to regret it, but it’s totally up to you. Okay. What I want you to think about is who do you want to be at the end of this offseason when the training starts up again? Who do you want to be?

How do you want to show up for yourself? Do you want to feel good and energized and feel like you’ve made some progress? In maybe some of your habits, or in your diet or your weight? Or do you want to just maybe gain a bunch of weight and get a little bit ,you know, weak and dopey because that’s up to you, you get to decide that.

Do you want to maintain your weight, lose weight, gain weight, just make that decision ahead of time, and then just act accordingly. Right, so you get to do this any way that you want. My suggestion is that you at least try to just maintain where you are, which is fine. If you want to continue to lose weight, that’s great.

But during the offseason, if you want to just maintain where you are, I think that’s great. But decide ahead of time, don’t fool yourself, don’t think, oh, I’m just going to lose a bunch of weight when the off-season comes and then you’re acting like, you know, you’re just eating whatever and drinking all the time.

Because that’s going totally against what you really want for yourself, right? That behavior doesn’t coincide, it doesn’t really line up with your intention, right. So if you have an intention of wanting to maintain weight, then act accordingly.

If you have an intention of wanting to lose weight and act accordingly, if you have an intention of wanting to gain weight, you get to act accordingly. Okay, but set that intention. That’s step number one.

The second thing I want to encourage you to do is to maintain some sort of structure, that means that you’ve got to have a structured workout program, structured runs, structured diet, this does not mean that you can’t have fun and indulge a little bit you should do that.

You know, you go on vacation, you should have a drink, you should have a beer, you should have that Margarita while you’re sitting on the beach. I think that is amazing. I think that is, you know, how we enjoy our life sometimes.

And it’s okay to do that. And every now and then you gotta do it in a way that fits your long term goals, though. So you have to have a plan, you have to have a plan for when you’re going to work out for when you’re going to run for what you’re going to be eating or not eating.

You can’t just wing it, you can’t just expect that somehow you’re going to, you know, come out of this thing on the other side of the offseason, you’re going to feel amazing and lose a bunch of weight if you have no intention and no structure around any of this stuff. Right. So structure means here’s the days I’m running, here are the days I’m lifting weights, here are the days I’m doing my cross training or whatever. Here’s what my diet is going to look like. Create that structure for yourself.

It does not mean you have to be, you know, 100% perfect with it. But have some structure. Go into this with a plan. Don’t just wing it. Winging it never works, it doesn’t work. So make sure that you have some sort of structure, make sure that you have a plan for yourself, whatever that looks like.

Like for me right now I’m kind of focusing on strength and working out. I’m at the gym five days a week. I’m running three days a week. I’ve got speed work that I’m doing. I’ve got this all planned out. It’s all written down. I know what I’m eating right now. My diet looks a little bit different right now than it did a month ago when I was training for my ultra marathon.

So I’ve got all this kind of figured out and I don’t just wing it, right that winging it doesn’t work doesn’t work for me. Anyway, I like having that structure. Okay.

Next tip is to stick to the food plan. That’s it, like you got to stick to your food plan. First of all, you have to have a food plan. And then you got to stick to it. Right? Yes, you can deviate here and there, but no more than usual.

You know, I’ve talked about the 90/10 rule. 90/10 rule that is like, nobody’s going to stick to their food plan 100% of the time you’re going to, you know, have a piece of chocolate or eat a doughnut or whatever you’re going to do have a beer, do that stuff. 90% of the time, though, stick to your food plan that 10% which works out to be maybe like one meal a week that can be a little bit off the plan. But you got to plan those things.

You can’t just do it in the moment. Like you have to do these things intentionally and purposefully. Okay, enjoy your vacation, but do it mindfully. This is not an excuse to just go crazy with food. So have a food plan and then stick to the food plan.

This is a great time to work on your diet, the offseason, especially if you’re interested in getting fat adapted because it takes a few weeks to transition, you know from being mostly a carb burner to being mostly a fat burner. And that process of that fat adaptation process can be a little bit uncomfortable.

So your running performance might dip a little bit. It’ll come back but you know, there’s a few weeks there where running might dip a little bit. This is a perfect time to change your diet and focus on that area of improvement. Okay?

You don’t want to be doing this in the thick of a training cycle. So let’s say you got three weeks to go before your marathon or whatever, that is not the time to change your diet, do not do that. Okay?

But think about how amazing you’ll feel when your training kicks in again, in a month or two, and you’re fat adapted and running feels easier, and you’ve lost some weight and you’re lighter, like, and maybe you’ve stuck with some strength training too, and you’ve got a little bit stronger.

So normally lighter, but you’re stronger, like running is going to feel amazing, okay? So just make sure that you have a plan and then stick to that food plan during the offseason, right, this is not the time to go crazy and go off the rails, you’re going to pay for that, you know, you’re gonna see the weight gain, you’re gonna feel terrible.

And if you’re somebody that already is fat adapted, maintain that fat adapted status. Don’t go so crazy that you get out of that fat adapted state, you know, that would require and I’ve seen some people that have done this before, but it’s going to require you to kind of start the process over a little bit, it takes a very short amount of time to get back into it once you’ve been fat adapted for a while.

But to get out of it is means that you’ve just been really indulging in a lot of sugar essentially. So we got to like, keep that out of the picture, right? Just keep the sugar low. Don’t be tempted to go crazy with the sugar during this offseason. Okay, stay fat adapted, it’s much easier to just stay fat adapted than it is to keep going like back and forth with this whole thing. Okay.

Next suggestion here is to focus on an area of weakness or an area that needs improvement. So that’s why like food is a big one for most people. It’s a time where they can clean up their diet and get fat adapted and get off to sugar and all that. So if that’s the area of weakness for you, this is the time to focus on that area.

It could be where you just haven’t been working on your strength training very consistently. And so this is the time for you to get into a resistance training routine. Right? Maybe your speed work has been put on hold.

I know that was kind of the case for me over the last six or eight weeks prior to my ultra marathon I did recently, I kind of put the speed work on hold, I really focused on the long slow running for the majority of that, like a third part of my training cycle for my ultra. And so right now I’m back into regular speed work again. Okay?

This is a great time to pick an area of weakness or an area that you’ve wanted to work on in wanting to improve and focus on that. Okay, so it could be one of those things where maybe you want to focus on more flexibility, or mobility work, then do that, now’s the time to focus on that. So it also helps you to kind of stay in the game. You know, and this is all good for your mindset as well.

All these things I’m talking about here will keep your mind focused and keep you in that mode of like I’m an athlete, I’m acting like an athlete, I’m still kind of in training even though I’m in between training cycles right now. Like you’re still at this place where this stuff still does matter to you, your health, your fitness still matters to you, right.

And then my last suggestion is to use this time to start creating better habits, you know, because changing habits takes time, it takes commitment, it takes focus, it takes some discipline. And you’re gonna have a lot more time and commitment and discipline during the offseason season than you would like during the middle of your training for a big race that you have coming up. Okay.

So if you want to develop some better habits, especially around food or resistance training, maybe it’s something like you want to sleep better, like you want to establish a better sleep pattern, better sleep routine, this is the time to start working on it.

It could be where you want to focus more on cross training. So you want to do more regular cycling or swimming or yoga or maybe some of that flexibility work that I talked about. It could be just other personal growth stuff like reading every day, some meditation like establishing a good morning routine.

This is key if you want to, you know start your day on a positive mindset every single day get into a good morning routine. What does that look like for you? I don’t know. It’s different for everybody. Maybe you want to spend more time having fun playing with your kids.

I just had such a blast last Friday, took the second half of the day off and my girlfriend and I went up to run to the little Miami River and we did a little kayaking down the river. And when I say kayaking, I mean we sat in our kayaks and just floated down the river for like two hours, it was so nice as beautiful day.

There was nobody else out there. And because it was like a Friday, you know, and it was so just lovely to be out in nature and to just like kick back and have nothing to do and just have fun for a couple of hours off, so nice.

But just doing things like that, this is a great time to get out into nature, walk more, I’m actually spending a lot of time rucking right now. So I’ve got a good rucking backpack with the 25 pound ruck weight that I haul around.

And I’m up to a couple miles at a time, some hilly miles where I’m just rocking right now. And I’m having a lot of fun doing that. It’s a totally different kind of workout than running. But then when I take that thing off, and I go for a run, I’m like, oh man, I feel so light, this feels so amazing right now.

So any kind of habits that you want to work on, now is the time to start building those habits, right? This is why I talk a lot about using this time to change your habits around food. Because this is like the time where you gotta like, do something consistently for a period of time in order to make these, you know, different eating habits stick.

You know, this isn’t about short term, like quick fixes. It’s about like long term lifestyle changes, you know, and that just takes time to get there. And if you think you’re going to do it in the middle of, you know, training for your race, a marathon or ultra, it’s not going to happen, it’s not the time to change your diet. Okay, right now is a great time to change your diet.

Okay, so approach the offseason with intention with mindfulness with some structure with a plan and a little bit of discipline too, you know, you can still have fun, right? And you’re going to come out the other side of this feeling amazing and feeling good about yourself, you know, set that intention.

Where do you want to be in three weeks or six weeks or a month or whatever it is, this is such a better way to do it, then the way that at least I used to do it, which is feeling like crap about myself.

And having gained like 10 or 12 pounds, right. And then remember, we still want to have fun. This is, you know, summer for us here in the US and we want to enjoy time at the pool. We want to enjoy that margarita on the beach, you can do that. Just do it with intention and with purpose.

You don’t want to undo all the good work that you’ve done up to this point, you know, just because it’s the offseason. So maintain some structure, maintain some good habits, focus on some areas of improvement and come out the end of this offseason feeling amazing with yourself.

You know, having had your own back, having like set good intentions and then, like kept those promises that you made to yourself, you’re gonna feel so much better than doing it the other way. I promise you, cool.

All right, are you ready to learn what it takes to get leaner and stronger and run faster and longer than you ever imagined? If so, then I have just the thing for you. Check out my all new free training called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner.

It is a comprehensive hour-long training that will teach you how to lose weight and keep it off for good without running an extra million miles per week. It takes everything that I’ve been teaching on this podcast for the last three years and distills it all down into a training program that will teach you what you need to know to get started on your weight loss journey the right way.

And of course, it’s all designed with you the runner in mind, just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training to get started. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.

181. Ultramarathon Redemption with Pete Caigan

June 16, 2023 By Patrick McGilvray

Today I have a special treat for you, I’m sharing a candid conversation I recently had with Pete Caigan. Pete is one of my clients who has had a pretty remarkable transformation over the last 6 …

Continue Reading about 181. Ultramarathon Redemption with Pete Caigan →

Podcast Transcript

Hey there and welcome to episode 181 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today: Ultramarathon Redemption with Pete Caigan. So today I have a special treat for you.

I’m sharing a candid conversation I recently had with Pete Caigan, Pete is one of my clients who’s had a pretty remarkable transformation over the last six months or so. Before finding me Pete was training for an ultra marathon and found himself gaining quite a bit of weight, and ended up getting a DNF.

So he did not finish his first 50k attempt and was determined to try again and succeed. So he’s going to share his story of changing his diet, getting fat adapted, and the things he struggled with along the way, losing weight and then attempting that same 50k again.

I hope you enjoy this episode of Ultramarathon Redemption with Pete Caigan. His story is truly inspiring. But first, if you’re ready to learn what it takes to get leaner and stronger, run faster and longer than you ever imagined, then I have just the thing for you.

Check out my all new free training called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner, Stronger Runner. This comprehensive training will teach you how to lose weight and keep it off for good without running an extra million miles per week.

It takes everything I’ve been teaching on this podcast for the last three years or so and distills it down into an hour long training program to teach you everything you need to know to get started on your weight loss journey the right way, and it’s all designed with you the runner in mind, just go to runningleancoaching.com click on free training to get started.

Okay, let’s just get into it. Without further ado, please enjoy my recent conversation with Pete Caigan.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, so today we’re having a conversation. Me and Pete. Pete Caigan has been working with me for a period of time now, and has experienced some pretty amazing stuff, some pretty amazing transformations. And I want to talk about that. So welcome, Pete.

Pete Caigan
Thank you. Good to be here, Patrick. Thank you for having me.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. So give me an idea of, you know, what things were like for you before we started working together. So think back to that time. It’s been a while now. I guess it was back in probably October, September, October of last year. And you needed some help with some things and you had some goals. So just give me an idea, kind of a little bit of a snapshot of where you were at that time and what you were looking for some help with what your goals were at that time.

Pete Caigan
Sure. It was September of 2022. And I was feeling frustrated. I was 30 pounds more than I am now by running and slowing down to crawl. I had done a half marathon trail run in the fall of ‘21 and it went great. Started training the spring of ‘22 for 50k.

I took the advice of my cousin to eat a lot of carbs and load and just eat whatever you want and run a lot. And I did that and I gained about 20 pounds and attempted my 50k in the spring of 2022 got taken off the course at mile 10 by the sweepers. Mumbled and grumbled for a few months and then heard your podcast a bunch of times and decided to get in touch.

Patrick McGilvray
So that that experience of training for that first ultra marathon and eating all the what I’ll just call like “carbage”, right, all the junk food or whatever, will lead to 20 pounds of weight gain.

Pete Caigan
Yeah, I gained 20 pounds and slowed down. My endurance was really good. I was so slow and it was brutal. Everything was difficult.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and it’s crazy because we’re told, at least by traditional coaches and you know, this is you know, long standing principles, I guess, of running that you need all these carbs, but some of us are a little more sensitive than others to them and they have an adverse effect and even training for an ultra marathon isn’t going to undo kind of what your experience was of loading up on all those carbs and and you can’t outrun that bad diet.

Pete Caigan
As I said before, I was doing long runs over 20 miles. And so gaining weight, and you’re probably running 40 miles a week or that entire time gave me wings. It was very strange. I was going on and I was legitimately hungry. It wasn’t like, I felt hungry. It was signals, and I was listening.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. And then you tempted this 50k. And you said around mile 10, you got taken off the course because you didn’t make a cut off?

Pete Caigan
Yeah, there was a cut off. And the sweepers came and the race director said, come on, get the bus. And I was like, no way. He’s like, well, you can keep going, but you’re not part of the race anymore if you want to keep going. And this is very bad country, Vermont. So I was, I think, wise and got on the bus. And I was really mad at the guy for like months. Like I was like telling all my friends and took me when whining finally hit me like maybe he was right. Like maybe I already got hurt, not made it. So that’s what I recommitted and called you.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, so you were 30 pounds overweight at the time, or 30 pounds heavier than you are now. You were frustrated. Sounds like from not being able to finish this event that you train for, you’re probably frustrated that you gain all that weight in the process.

So give me an idea of what some of the goals were when you wanted to, you know, start working with me and like why you came to me and like what is it that you wanted out of that coaching experience? What did you need help with?

Pete Caigan
Well, I needed to get help, because I couldn’t figure it out. I was eating, I thought well, and I was working out a lot. So I wanted to initially lose 20 pounds and try to do the same race again. And finish. Be successful was my initial goal when I joined up with you.

Patrick McGilvray
So those are the big goals. To lose 20 pounds and then do this race and redeem yourself, you know, not be taken off the course or suggested to be taken off the course.

Pete Caigan
Yeah. Exactly.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, good. So you committed to those goals, we started kind of changing something. So what was that process like for you at the beginning? Like, what were some of the changes that that seemed to help you the most at the beginning, especially.

Pete Caigan
I think getting off grains, sugar, and seed oils was really the beginning. And start to be more conscious of what I was eating. So I started to journal food. And I started to eat in a window. You know, like I was doing 16 hours a day not eating, eight hours a day eating.

That is really the biggest change and really not easy. It was extremely difficult. For me it was about two weeks of discomfort, but it wasn’t miserable. I was just a little cranky, little hungry. I was very slow as a runner. I felt like I was carrying a bag of rocks. And

Patrick McGilvray
How many times a day were you eating before? Like how often during the day were you eating prior to this?

Pete Caigan
Oh, seven.

Pete Caigan
Yeah, just like constantly eating all the time.

Pete Caigan
Well, I usually would like wake up, have some coffee, hang out and have a bowl of oatmeal. Maybe wait an hour, go for a run, get back. You know, have a protein bar. Work a couple hours more.

Have lunch, pretty good lunch, maybe a salad, chicken, maybe some rice. Mid afternoon I’d be back at it with some more food, whatever nuts, bag of nuts, maybe more bars or something. And then before dinner I was snacking a bit on whatever, chips. It’s pretty healthy.

Like I was shopping at the health food store. I was eating good foods, but then dinner, it could be like anything. I mean, could be anything. It could be a bowl of pasta with, you know, fish or whatever. It was a lot of carbs. No window, you know, I was eating like 14 hours a day.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, so you’re describing what I’ve talked about in the past, which is that typical runner’s diet. Which is just eating all the time, because you’re hungry all the time, and you’re eating all the carbs all the time.

And when you’re eating all the carbs all the time, that makes you more hungry. So you just got to keep eating the carbs so you can keep satisfying that hunger but the satisfaction never comes. And you end up doing a couple things.

Number one, a lot of that energy that you’re taking in, a lot of the food that you’re taking in, gets converted to fat stores and you, you recognize that from gaining 20 pounds during this process.

The other thing is that you’re never feeling really satisfied, you’re always hungry, you know, and the only thing that you’re your body, you’ve you’ve trained your body essentially to crave more carbs.

You know, the body will crave what you continue to give it, what you repeatedly do. And so when you repeatedly eat carbs, you’re just going to be craving more and more and more carbs. And that is a really kind of a downward spiral. It’s a cycle that you can’t get out of.

Pete Caigan
There for a little bit like when I was working out and I was working a lot. I was doing CrossFit three or four times a week, I was running four days a week, and I was stretching every day and my work is active.

So I was working out and feeling like when I did eat the carbs, I was like, okay, good. I’m good to go. And I’d have like an hour. I don’t know what it is, a sugar rush? But then the hunger would come quickly, you know, and I realized now, it wasn’t real hunger when it felt like hunger.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, well, it feels great eating that stuff. It feels amazing because it lights you up. You know it hits those dopamine receptors in your brain and produces serotonin and you know, all the good feeling hormones and things like that.

It’s very similar to the way drugs and alcohol light up our brains. You know, they’ve done all these studies on the poor little rats who you know, they make them take all this cocaine and sugar and things like that. And the rats kind of prefer the sugar to the cocaine because it just feels so amazing.

So even the rats will choose carbs over cocaine. It’s kind of funny. But yeah, so that that whole process is maybe, okay, for some people like what you just described there is the way a lot of people approach running, especially when doing ultras.

Pete Caigan
Yeah, my cousin who recommended it, he eats like that, and he came in third on the 50 miler on the same event. That he was like, wasn’t that great? I don’t know.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. And I followed a bunch of ultra runners early in my running career. And, and they were doing the same thing. And I was like, well, I guess this is what I need to do. And I had the same experience you did Pete, where I just kept gaining weight until I was like 40 pounds overweight, and like what is happening here, you know, so that doesn’t work for everybody.

And if you’re somebody listening to this, and you’re like, yeah, that’s my experience too. Just know that you can change like, you don’t have to keep doing that. And being in that cycle, that frustrating cycle of like, eating all the carbs, being hungry all the time, getting fatter and fatter as you go, like, that’s not a good place to be. It’s not healthy.

It’s just not, you know. And so, you know, the solution is not to just, you know, never eat another grain or carb again in your life. That’s not what we’re talking about here. So, what did that sort of diet look like for you, you know, at the beginning at least, Pete?

Pete Caigan
Well, I would drink coffee. I started to use heavy cream in my coffee, which I always avoided because that was taboo. And I love the taste. So I could put a couple of tablespoons of heavy cream in my coffee in the morning and feel like good.

So that would usually be the morning combined with a fasted workout. And I was at first struggling with that, the fasted workouts, but within a couple of weeks, it was better, actually. Surprisingly even the lifting and Crossfit was better.

And then I would wait till noon generally to eat and what it would look like was a nice serving a protein could be like 12 ounces of fish, or chicken, usually fish or chicken with the big salad, no starchy vegetables, but a big salad with olive oil, salt and pepper. Very satisfying.

So I would do that and then at first I was really struggling getting from lunch to dinner, like to get from noon to six for me because I’m pretty active was hard. And I did that for a while but I was constantly like kind of freaking out.

So I added a protein shake mid afternoon, like a whey protein. And if I’m really hungry, I might eat some nuts but not a lot. And then dinner would generally be another big serving of protein and not salad more like cauliflower or broccoli.

I could use cheese. I was using a lot of coconut oil. I mean it’s still scary but not crazy amounts, a lot of coconut oil, a lot of olive oil, a lot of avocado oil. And, you know, it could even be a big serving of protein like I can eat a 16 ounce steak, which I love.

And I got into blue cheese which I have to be careful about but it’s, I love it so much. And it’s so satisfying. I kind of can’t eat anything after a blue cheese, it’s overwhelming. I’ll eat that. And then if I was really craving dessert type food, you know, I’d have some berries like blueberries on Greek yogurt, maybe with some stevia and cocoa powder, had the feeling of like ice cream, a very satisfying and good amount of protein. But often nothing like I don’t, the no sugar thing is much better. If I hit any fruit, it’ll be like berries, maybe an apple? Well, you really just got a big part of my diet.

Patrick McGilvray
Yes, so for you a couple of the changes. Just to kind of recap here, you went from eating seven times a day to eating, you know, two or three times a day, which is normal. That’s kind of what normal human eating patterns should look like. You know what I mean, we shouldn’t be eating seven times a day.

Because when you do that, you just train yourself that you are going to be hungry all the time, you know, especially if you’re eating a lot of carbs in those meals. So when you switch to eating a couple times a day, two, three times a day, your body will naturally switch to being hungry those two or three times a day, which becomes normal, and then it becomes very easy to only eat a couple times a day. So you made that change, which is great. It was a little bit of a struggle at the beginning, but you got used to it. You know? Do you enjoy eating that way today still?

Pete Caigan
The thing I love is the high fat high protein because I avoided fats like the plague for so many years. And it’s really some of my favorite foods. So I love that aspect of it. You know, now that I’m fat adapted, I do eat carbs sometimes and it’s not a big deal. I mean, I do notice like the day after. I have to clean up a little bit but I don’t if I eat carbs once a week if I have sweet potatoes or something. I’m generally I don’t want it the next day, like maybe I’m loaded up or something. So it’s not even that big a deal.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, we’re not talking about like, birthday cake every week or something like that. It’s just some sweet potatoes like it’s fine.

Pete Caigan
Honestly, the sweet sweet stuff, I have a bite sometimes it’s so overwhelming. I don’t really enjoy it at all. Like I used to get it really barely once in a blue moon, I ate a marshmallow recently, and I was like woah. I’m so sensitive now to the sugar. I didn’t realize how strong it is.

Patrick McGilvray
So you’ve shifted. That’s good. That’s a good time.

Pete Caigan
Yeah, I really enjoyed it. It’s like, it’s almost a relief.

Patrick McGilvray
Another big change was focusing on more protein.

Pete Caigan
Right? Well, yeah, I’ve been keeping track, I use an app on my phone, right? I don’t do it all the time. But entering my food during a journal shows me the protein I’m getting. And I’m trying to get almost a gram per pound of body weight. Because I’m so active. I’m training for another 50k.

Patrick McGilvray
I think that’s a good place to be.

Pete Caigan
The macros are significantly different. It’s like 60/30/10 usually fat to protein to carbs.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay. Yeah, like 60% fat, 30% protein, 10% carbs. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And that’s different for everybody. But you know if that works for you, awesome. Yeah, so you focused on more protein, not eating all the time. And, you know, what were some of the results of that? Or like, how did you feel through the day? Did your hunger start to like, go down?

Pete Caigan
Yeah, after two weeks, it was way better. And then the hunger went down. But it wasn’t gone. I also learned a lot working with you and the group about hunger and like, whatever. It’s not the end of the world, you’re hungry. And usually it goes away in like 10 minutes. It’s not that big a deal.

So one of the things for me is my life really shifted in a lot of ways away from other than food and running, which is I got way more motivated on what I do. And I started working harder and sleeping less, which was a very unexpected side effect of all this, like I was sleeping a solid hour to two hours more than a night than I do now.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, so you’re sleeping less but how’s the quality of sleep?

Pete Caigan
Yeah, I’m sleeping a lot less and my quality of sleep is better. So that was an interesting thing that I didn’t, uh, I wasn’t planning on which is great. I feel way more energy.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, good. Yeah, typically, people would say that they need more sleep or they sleep longer when they get off of the crazy foods, but you’re saying you’re sleeping less, but it’s a positive change. Right?

Pete Caigan
Well, I would say maybe at the beginning I was sleeping more but after I feel like I cleaned up and lost the weight and got off that food, I just I was sleeping eight to nine hours a night and now it’s been seven.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, gotcha. So probably more in line with the way you should be then. Okay. Yeah, that’s cool. That’s good. So what else was your experience during this process of like shifting your diet and what you’re eating, how often you’re eating, upping in the protein, all those things. What was, or was there anything that you really struggled with, you know, during that transition?

Pete Caigan
Yeah, there were some things I struggled with me, I was very moody. I had to not be a jerk to my mate, my wife. I definitely was cranky for a while. So that was hard. And then, like, I just had to deal with myself more, my emotions, and reality.

And the accountability with you and with the group just made me be like, no, I really want to lose a pound this week, like, I don’t want to gain this week. And I would have moments, usually at night in front of the fridge, where I’d have to be like, don’t do it! But there were moments, so the struggle was really like dealing with my emotions, like if I had a really stressful day, and like figuring out other ways to deal with it.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and for how long did that like cranky pants last?

Pete Caigan
Probably a month. I mean, it still happens occasionally. Like in the morning, if I’m waiting till noon to eat. But I’ve learned how to do it. Usually if I’m not, if I haven’t worked out, really, I find I could do a fasted workout and then feel great, it doesn’t happen. But if I end up like waking up, having some coffee and ending up at a desk for two or three hours, I’ll get like, like, edgy.

Patrick McGilvray
So yeah, that sounds like it’s probably from lack of exercise, because you didn’t get your endorphin rush that you’re used to in the morning.

Pete Caigan
Exactly.

Patrick McGilvray
But that crankiness at the beginning, whenever we get off of a really high carbohydrate diet. It is basically like withdrawal symptoms. It’s one of the symptoms of withdrawal from like a sugar addiction, you know. And it’s the same, you know, kind of shows up the same way that when you stop drinking alcohol or doing drugs or something like that. It can have the same sort of withdrawal effects, which is crazy to think about. That sugar has that kind of an effect on us.

Pete Caigan
Right? It’s so accepted that we eat tons of carbs all the time. Maybe that’s not how our bodies function best, but that’s how we were brought up. So you think you’re supposed to eat breakfast or you’re bad. Maybe you’re fine.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, well, that whole idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. That’s just a marketing tactic. You know, that was made up by the cereal companies like Kellogg’s or someone made that up.

Pete Caigan
You can still have breakfast, but have breakfast at 11. Like it’s okay. Your first meal can be your bacon and eggs.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, eat some protein at that first meal for sure. Okay, so you went through this process, you got fat adapted, which just means that you, you know, we’re running without the need for all the carbs without the need for a bunch of fuel. And you trained yourself to use your stored body fat as fuel. And I’m guessing through this process, you started losing weight as well. Right?

Pete Caigan
Yeah, started to come off by two pounds a week at the beginning.

Patrick McGilvray
Nice.

Pete Caigain
A lot at the beginning. Yeah, I started to lose significant weight. And that’s always really great to see what the first person notices and your clothes fit. That’s a big moment.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. That’s motivating and it keeps you going because you’re seeing progress. I mean, you can literally see the progress happening. And it keeps you in the game.

Pete Caigan
In like 5 weeks I lost like 10 pounds or something. And the first person was like wow Pete, and I was like thank you. And then yeah, I’d like to think I don’t have a big ego, but at first it really feels good. Clothes fit better, it’s starts to be like actually fun. Because once I got fat adapted it was not difficult.

For me, it was many ways a pleasure because I was eating the fat switch I stayed with the running and I started to get better quickly too. So you think now put on a 10 pound pack and go for a run. That’s enough to make a big difference.

That first 10 pounds and as I say now I feel like free back to running like bouncing. I run in the woods and just fly around. I’d forgotten that a little bit. Like I kind of had it in my memory. But it wasn’t. It’s been a few years since I felt that so now it’s back and it’s just it’s incredible.

Patrick McGilvray
Well you get used to it. You know you get used to being overweight, you get used to carrying around an extra 30 pounds or whatever. And until you lose the weight again, it’s like oh, now I see what I was carrying around and you know, I had that experience too some years ago, lost 40 pounds and it was literally like running just became so easy.

It was so much more enjoyable. Yeah.

Patrick McGilvray
And then you started training. So let’s talk about that a little bit. So you decided you’re going to conquer this 50k, the same one, same race. And but this time, there’s no way you’re gonna DNF. So talk about the training a little bit with that, like, what, what was that like for you?

Pete Caigan
Sure. All Fall, I was doing three runs a week, kind of short, medium long, but not as a structured plan, which is keeping my fitness up and losing weight. And then I started, I think an 18 week training cycle in maybe the beginning of February, that you helped me design. That was four to five days a week of running, and I was doing strength training two days a week, which often ended up once a week. But I was hitting it hard, like I was getting a lot of miles on the trail.

And where I live is in the mountains in upstate New York. So I was dealing with running snow and the ice and very cold temperatures. And I was getting up in the mountains, which means carrying a 15 pound pack and wearing spikes. So it was very challenging in February March, but I got the miles in and I didn’t miss many runs.

And I was losing weight. I wasn’t as late as I am now. But I was probably down 20 pounds at that point, and feeling good, you know, struggles. I had definitely had a lot of struggles through the 18 week training cycle, I had two injuries that weren’t really injuries, they were just pain, which was a good thing for me to understand, and notice that just because you’re hurt, doesn’t mean you’re injured. That’s a big difference that I didn’t quite understand fully until this training cycle.

One day I finished a 20 mile run, which included a lot of concrete running and running shoes, which I don’t do I mostly do trails. I woke up the next day and there was like a peak on the top of my first metatarsal. Like it looked like I broken my metatarsal. It hurt, couldn’t walk. So I was just like, oh, I’m so screwed. So I just did and I hobbled around for a few days. And then like after like five days, I got back to like jogging lightly, like it didn’t really hurt. And then by the next week I was back out.

Patrick McGilvray just the joys of running, you know.

Pete Caigan
So that was a good lesson. And then I played golf, like four weeks out from my event, and I hurt my neck. And I couldn’t move. And I was like, I’m so dumb. So that put me down for like, over a week of no running, when I was in my peak phase. And I was really scared at that point.

Like I blew it like I can’t believe I hurt myself at the end. But again, you helped me to see like, you know, you’ve banked a lot of fitness here. Like don’t sweat it like it’ll be okay. And then I got back they did one more long run after that I did. My race was 32 miles, I went out and did like a 25 mile run with maybe 4700 feet a gain, in the mountains, it was big deal. And I did and I was like alright, I got this.

So yeah, then the last few weeks just took it easy as I was supposed to which was a challenge into unto itself to taper. But yeah, that was the training cycle. It was challenging in many ways. It was hard to make the time on my long runs because I’m in the mountains. It could be like an eight hour day. So it was challenging to just be like alright, family I’m leaving. I’ll see you tonight.

Patrick McGilvray
How was this training different from your approach last year when you were going for the same event?

Pete Caigan
I didn’t do nearly as many miles or as many runs last year, I was doing three days a week, I would do like a short run or medium run and a long run. But my longest run last year was 21 before the race, before the 32 mile race. And my you know I had done a few like 15-18 days as well. But like really slow, like way more walking than I did this time.

Patrick McGilvray
So more volume and a few longer runs. Yes, more work overall for sure.

Pete Caigan
More miles for sure. And more frequency. Yeah.

Patrick McGilvray
That’s one of the biggest things for an event like that because you are going to be on your feet for so long. You gotta you got to make sure you are putting in the time like time on your feet, you know, and increasing the amount of running that you’re doing per week has to go up pretty high to get you there. So good. Good job with all that.

So the race comes and where were you at? Give us a snapshot of where you were like for the race itself, like from what was your kind of weight loss at that point? How much had you lost? You know, come race day.

Pete Caigan
I got to 30 pounds down.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay. Beautiful.

Pete Caigan
And, you know, for whatever it’s worth, if you care about body composition was like I was at 18% fat.

Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. Yeah, no, that’s great.

Pete Caigan
Do you want me to tell you about the event?

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, just like, how was it for you?

Pete Caigan
It was brutal and it was the most amazing thing I’ve ever done. I totally had many, many times the week leading up to it where I thought maybe I was gonna chicken out.

Patrick McGilvray
Really? Okay.

Pete Caigan
I just had like weird thoughts. Like, maybe this isn’t for you, you’re gonna hurt yourself. Every ghost came up into my mind trying to get me to not do it. It was like the one side’s the angel the other side’s evil and like telling me not to do it.

But I was like, just go, keep going. I made the hotel reservation, the race is about three hours for me. So I got a hotel the night before, and the night of the race. So Friday, Saturday. I went and I did some research on the race director Luis Escobar? You could look him up. He’s one of the guys in Born to Run. The guy had been personally before.

Patrick McGilvray
Oh, yeah. Cool.

Pete Caigan
So I was like, oh, this guy’s like legitimate. Like come on. Pete like get over yourself. So I went the day before Friday to get my race bed and I hung out at the starting line was 100 mile distance was starting that night.

So I like spent like an hour there with him and all the other race directors and CO race directors are also well known. ultra runners so I like really spend time with them chatted Luis was like, man, it’s so great. You came back you have good, you’re gonna do great. So that was cool, because it gave me like a vibe of the race and it’s a Spartan Race, and it’s really friendly environment.

There were 300 participants. So I spent some time with the people picking up their badges and just trying to get into like the vibe of what was going on in its a gorgeous place. It’s the guy who started Spartan, I don’t know his name. It was his home, of course, and beautiful Vermont. So I really enjoyed that.

And I went home, I had packed all my food which was smart. Last year I’d gone out to a restaurant and gotten like, I don’t even know like a bowl of cheesy fries for dinner. It was horrible.

So I had like my two purple sweet potatoes and like a little chicken salad. At my dinner I had my race vest pack like before, which I highly recommend for anybody. So you’re not nervous in the morning packing. I woke up super early, race time was seven. I got up before, just like took my time, got my stuff together, got to the starting line by 6:00.

Everybody like it’s a really good camaraderie of these things. Spend time people are nervous talking, you know, people doing the 50 mile the 100 miler have been going down for 14 hours. So they’re still going and then went out. It was like in the front of the pack. Like I went too hot like but too hot. Really? Maybe in retrospect. So I kind of crushed the first 10 miles I did. I was really fast for me, which was also the reason is 6500 feet a gain 32 miles. So you know it’s a lot.

And a lot of it was bushwhacking, like difficult terrain where there’s puddles and mud and very little trail. But the first 10 miles was generally really nice, trails up and down, a couple more, got to the first checkpoint where I had been pulled off the year before. And the guys were like Pete, you’re doing great. You’re like, you know, you’re not at the back of the pack, so that was cool.

Miles 10 to mile 15 was up and over a huge mountain. Very difficult. Extremely difficult. But I did all this generally fasted. I only had about 200 calories an hour. You know, it was I had electrolytes. But I felt great. I felt fine. Up and down this big mountain who was cool. I was okay, but I was definitely not as fast.

And then there was a checkpoint it was like a party, like they had like barbecue and beer like music cranking, and I maybe made a mistake, and I had like two sips of beer. And I was like, This is bad. Don’t do it. And then they had it cut off. You had to get to mile 22 by 3pm, which was eight hours.

And at the beginning of the race. He stood up on a table he said does anyone disagree that if you’re not at mile 22 I’m taking you off the course? Nobody said anything, he shouted it so everyone understood. So now miles like 15 to 22 up and down many mountains.

At this point, it was little mountains, but up and down a few if something happened, I started to slow down significantly. But I did not stop. Like I didn’t stop and I sit down, I sat down once the whole race just to change my socks, like I was relentless for me.

Relentless forward progress zone for the majority of the time, which sounds crazy, but somehow my body held up. So anyway 15 to 22 miles I was slow, like things were falling apart a little bit, kept going, I got to 22 to seven and a half hours. And I’m like, pumping my chest. And now there’s a bus already filled with people who are calling it a day, even though they made the cut off the next.

The 22 or 32 is extremely difficult. 22 to 28 is extremely difficult. So a bunch of people quit and then like RIP, you’re done. Right? And you want to get on the bus. We’ll take you back. And I was like, no way, there’s zero chance of getting on your bus goodbye, and they were like alright.

So I took off. And now I’m going up and down three mountains, mile 22 to mile 29. Alone in the woods. The sweepers are behind me, but they’re not in sight. They’re back. And I just started to lose my mind. Like I was having a very, very hard time functioning.

My body was like leaning left, I kept on drifting left. I didn’t know what was going on. I was like, I’m gonna have a stroke, am I dying? Like, I didn’t really think that but I was hurting. And I didn’t know what was going on. But I just kept trudging forward going as fast as I could. And I got out into back to civilization, which is at mile 29 is the top of this mountain but there’s houses.

The last three miles is downhill. Three miles back to the starting line through country roads. And the checkpoint there. It was 6pm. And they say alright, well, Whoever didn’t get here by six, we’d have to take you down the hill. You got to get in the bus.

And I was like, I’m not getting in your bus. I don’t care what you do. I’m leaving goodbye. And they were like, really? I was like, really, goodbye. And I took off and I was holding myself up on my ribs because I couldn’t stand up straight. But I was okay. I was okay. And then I passed the guy’s house. He comes out of his house. He’s like, are you okay? Like you’re leaning all the way over?

I was like, I don’t know if I’m okay. I think I’m okay. And I sat down hung out with him. He was really cool. And older Vermont guy. And then the sweepers came by in a car and they’re like, go Pete. Okay, we’ll see you at the finish line. Right? I was like, yeah, I’m good. Like, yeah, go man go.

So I got down to the finish line. I was like, within 200 meters, I could see the finish line and straighten up and pull my head I’m talking my shirt like, act like I got my act together, went as fast as I could to the finish line got through and all those sweepers who were trying to get me off the course were cheering me on.

Good job, you made it. You made it, we love you! Giving me hugs, you’re the reason we do this. You’re so great. And I finished in 12 hours, and I got a DFL, I did not finish last. So there was a girl behind me, which was great. And so I accomplished my goal. I was so happy. It was like one of the great moments in my life. It was really, really cool.

Patrick McGilvray
That’s so awesome. And I love your determination of like, you know, nope, nothing you can do or say is gonna get me into that van at this point. Like I’ve trained for this. I’m ready for this. I’m doing it. What was the deal with you, like leaning to the left? What was that all about?

Pete Caigan
So Luis at the finish line personally came up to me, he’s like, I’m so happy you did this. I’m so happy you came back. You just show that like perseverance is I can work and use it was cool. And he said you got the leans, man. You got the leans, you gotta go take care of that. And I was like, what?

And I realized what had happened is that and I looked it up. And it’s a thing that can happen where your core fails. And you can’t keep your spine up, right. And it’s not entirely uncommon. So I realized it was going on and I just kind of took it easy. And I went to bed and I woke up I was fine, the next day, it was Mother’s Day. It was gone. I was totally fine. I was able to walk. it I wasn’t even that sore. But it’s called the leans I guess, in that community.

Patrick McGilvray
Shows you the power of like or the importance of strength training and core strengthening probably would help with that.

Pete Caigan
Yeah, I think so. It was definitely a weakness, maybe doing more that type of work would be helpful.

Patrick McGilvray
So what an amazing experience. I mean, super. I mean, it’s kind of life changing, right?

Pete Caigan
You know, it is and it completely translates to everything else. Because everything else that feels hard. I’m like, this isn’t that hard? It isn’t just running things, but things I’m talking about, like emotional things or work? You know, struggling to do the stuff I don’t want to do is not as big a struggle, because it’s like, oh, I freaking ran 32 miles.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, you’ve proven to yourself that not only can you do hard things, but you can accomplish things that maybe you’re not even. Maybe you don’t even believe in yourself or you’re not even sure you can do it. But you can do it anyway.

Like, you can push yourself out of that comfort zone. And because you’re, you know, remember you were talking about how you were having some doubts in those weeks leading up to it and thinking about, you know, pulling out and things like that, but you didn’t do any of that you just kept moving forward, and you just stayed with the plan, and you trusted your training, and look what you did. It’s amazing.

Pete Caigan
Yeah, thank you. I mean, I do have such a long term goal to be so persistent and consistent with something and then see the results was a big lesson for me. Or, you know, sometimes it’s persistence over a long period of time that gets you somewhere, it’s not the two week effort could be the year of doing something, a lot of things, you know.

I will say thank you, Patrick, for your guidance. And you know, what you do is so valuable and like, I feel like I went to school, honestly, nutrition and fitness and in many ways, life. I had no idea you can eat like this or train like this, it’s gonna be like, it wasn’t something that I thought could be for me, people used to talk about being keto or low carb. Never seemed possible or appealing, just seemed like not normal. Now that I’ve been doing it. I see how, for me at least, it’s it’s a really good way to be.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, yeah. And just for clarification, like everybody does this a little bit differently, you know, the way that Pete approached his nutrition and training was probably different from everybody else I work with.

So there’s no two people really doing this exactly the same, which is the way it should be, you know, there isn’t one plan, one diet, that’s going to work perfectly for everybody. I know, that’s what everybody wants you to believe out there. But it’s just not true.

So we got to figure out what works for us as individuals. And that’s a big part of what Pete and I did is kind of that figuring out process, you know, figuring out the right combination of foods and training and strength training and in the running to make these positive changes for you as an individual.

Pete Caigan
With me in terms of like, I’d be like, oh, I’m eating too many nuts, I’m going to again, and I’m going again, not losing weight. I mean, he’s not saying I can’t eat nuts, and you would often just be like, oh, you just eat less nuts. And that was so helpful for me. That was like one of those little tidbits to help me to realize that, you know, to do in my, what works for me, but maybe I don’t need to be so extreme.

Patrick McGilvray
So tell me where you are today with things. How’s everything going for you? How are you from like a nutrition standpoint? And from like a training standpoint?

Pete Caigan
Yeah, took the past month, I’ve been very light training. But I took a week off pretty much but not even off just not running a lot, or lifting a lot. And then the past three weeks, I’ve been running three times a week and lifting two to three times a week.

And actually, today was day one of the 13 week training cycle of doing another 50k.

Patrick McGilvray
Oh, heck yeah!

Pete Caigan
So I’m back in the game. I’m way ahead of where I was 13 weeks out from the last run. Now, that being said, I’m humble about this experience, I don’t expect this to be easy. And I have to do 20 mile uphill run on Sunday. So that’s no joke. So that’s good.

And the nutrition, I was a little lax after the race on the food for a couple of weeks. But I didn’t really gain weight. But now I’ve been eating really clean and on program for about 10 days, and I’m getting down to my lowest ever. Lowest weight ever for many, many years. And I’d like to get lower for this race I see, you know, even just five or 10 pounds less, thatwill make a big difference to be no faster. And I want to know I don’t expect to compete, but I’d like to be able to faster at this point. So that’s one of my goals for this.

Patrick McGilvray
Cool and how are you feeling about this next 50k having just completed this last one? Feeling a little bit different about this one?

Pete Caigan
You know, in my mind, I’m like, oh, this will be easier but it’s not easy. There’s nothing easy about this. So I do feel a little differently, but I’m also slightly reserved. Uh, in terms of letting myself feel like this is like a big deal, because it is a really big deal to do something like this again. Yeah, out there, in the woods all day.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, you probably have more confidence. But you also know it’s still gonna be at some point you’re going to enter the pain cave out there, right? Because we all do.

Pete Caigan
This one has no time cut off, which is interesting. Oh yeah,

Pete Caigan
Oh yeah, interesting.

Pete Caigan
I’m excited. And it’s a lot different to train where I live in summer than in the winter. So I enjoy the heat. So I’m really actually, it’s good to be out there this summer where we live, which is blueberry, wild blueberries and you know, streams, you can drink water on them. It’s gorgeous.

Patrick McGilvray
Heck, yeah. That’s amazing. And then maintenance, like, how’s that for you feeling like, that’s pretty easy for you to do going forward? Like, this has become something that is more natural for you now?

Because I know, we talked about at the beginning of the process, especially with the change in diet, it was a little bit of a struggle, you know, there was a little bit of a transition period there where you’re like, you know, this is kind of hard. I’m a little hungry. I’m a little cranky, you know, um, uh, but now, like, how does all that feel for you?

Pete Caigan
I mean, it feels easy. Maintenance is a non-issue to get leaders challenging, because I’m kind of like anyone wants to be so, you know, when I get into like, eating, try to get leaner. It’s a little challenging. It’s okay, maintenance, though. Not hard, because I’m eating foods that I like. Intermittent fasting has gotten so easy.

Patrick McGilvray
That just feels normal to you now?

Pete Caigan
Yeah, I don’t want to eat after dinner or in the morning. I don’t want to be. So. Yeah. Okay. Make the window 14 hours just set to 16.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, one of the goals is that by this point of the process, this should all feel easy and effortless. It just should feel normal for you. Yeah.

Pete Caigan
I don’t have to talk about it with people anymore. I don’t have to make a big deal. And what to do. If I go to a restaurant, I can like whisper to waiters like keto. They know exactly what to do. You know, no low carb, no carbs. No problem. I don’t even talk about it with people anymore. I used to talk about whatever. You really care what I eat. Anyways, that was a big hard thing at first, which it isn’t now.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, yeah. And then you mentioned something which is like, the maintenance is easy, once you get used to this, but then if you’re like, Okay, I want to, I want to lose a few pounds here, you know, I want to get down to a little bit lower weight, that’s easy to do, too. It just takes a little bit more discipline a little bit more, you got to be a little stricter about what you’re doing.

So sometimes I recommend to journal food again, you know, or track your macros again for a couple of weeks, you know, just to get you to the place where you’re like, okay, now I’m, you know, kind of recommitted. I know what I’m doing. And I can start to make some incremental changes here. Because it doesn’t take much to dial the weight down. You know, sometimes it’s just cutting back on the amount of food you’re eating, you know, and, you know, something as simple as that.

Pete Caigan
Yeah, it is a small margin between gaining and maintaining, small margin’s maintaining.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and it’s possible while you’re training, for an event like this, especially at the beginning of the training cycle, it’s a little bit easier to do. To lose weight, like you can, you can lose weight while you’re training for sure. I don’t recommend it as you’re getting into that last half of the training cycle, like the you know, as your race is approaching, you don’t want to be focused on losing weight, you just want to be like maintaining and focused on running and improving your performance and doing all the things you know and not be stressed out about trying to lose. But it’s possible, it’s possible to do that.

Pete Caigan
One other thing I want to say before we wrap up is it was a big step for me to take to decide to get in touch with Patrick to do the one on one initial consultation. You know, I somehow found the podcast I don’t know how. But I started listening to it a lot. I was like, I like this guy’s like my buddy like I felt simpatico with you.

But to like call somebody you don’t know to like do something over the internet was a big stretch for me and to think about spending money on it was a stretch and then I realized like investing in myself.

First of all, you eat less food so you’re gonna save money. But it was a big stretch to do it on this like kind of anonymous internet thing, but I can’t say like, how great it was of a decision for me to do it in the community is incredible.

I mean twice a week to have these group calls, which I still get on, at least one of them a week is very big, because these people who I’ve never met, are like my buddies, and we’re like working together on the same goals. And it seems a little weird that you’ve never met these people in person, but it really works. It works for me. So I highly recommend if you’re thinking about it, to have the faith that it can be real.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, it is a great group of people. And you’re right, I feel like you guys are kind of my family in a way, you know, because we do spend a lot of time together. And not only do I do all these one on one calls, where you and I spent a lot of time together over the last six months or so. But then we do the group calls where we all come together and, and can kind of share what’s going on share wins, you know, ask questions, and kind of…

Pete Caigan
They go through almost the same thing you go through. It’s like, we’re not all that different. Most of us and we each have our own issues, but there’s a lot of similarities. So to hear that someone else is struggling with something similar helps a lot, because then a lot of people have strategies that work out.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and I remember cracking up last week because somebody else shared a story of injuring themselves golfing right before their race, right. And I was like, and Pete, you were just like cracking up because you’re like, I did the same thing. And lesson here is like to stay away from golfing, you guys, okay? It’s a dangerous sport. It’s apparently very dangerous.

Pete Caigan
That’s serious.

Patrick McGilvray
Good stuff. Anything else you want to share? Pete, this has been awesome. Thank you for being here and sharing all this stuff with us.

Pete Caigan
Thank you for your work, Patrick, I know you’ve been working on this a long time. And you’re very thoughtful. And you put a lot of time into this. And, you know, just grateful for what you do. And it’s really what. So that’s all just gratitude towards you, and acknowledgement of all your hard work goes into this, as well.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, well, I’m just over here yammering on about stuff, you’re the one actually doing the work, you know, you showed up, you made a decision that you were going to conquer this 50k, you are going to lose the 30 pounds, you made that decision, which is really important.

And you said it was a little bit scary, because who is this guy, this random guy from the internet or whatever. But you made that decision. You committed to the process, you know, which was I’m going to change the way I’m doing things. Because what you were doing wasn’t working for you. It was, you were having the opposite effect. You were getting slower, you were gaining weight, you were feeling terrible. Like you needed to shift that you know, and that takes a commitment.

And that is scary. Because you’re getting into uncharted territory. When you do that, you know, you’re like, I don’t know if it was gonna work or not, you know, I don’t know what’s gonna happen here. But you committed to the process.

And anybody listening to this, if you just do that part right there, if you commit to the process, like I know, this is what I want for myself, here’s the goals that I have for myself. They’re very clear, very measurable goals. And then you commit to that process of change, I guarantee you can get there. As long as you don’t quit. The only way you can really fail kind of like with the 50k is if you just quit, you get on the van. But if you keep going, you’ll finish. Right.

Pete Caigan
So let’s keep going back every time you fall off, it’s like okay, well, I fell off. Well, we’re back on.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. So you did the work. And I’m proud of you for showing up for yourself for making that commitment to yourself for making that decision that this is what you wanted for yourself. And then just doing it and like continually sticking with it.

Even though it was hard sometimes, even though it was a struggle sometimes. You didn’t give up. You kept going. And I can’t wait to hear about your next 50k. I want to I want to hear about how you crush your last time on that.

Pete Caigan
You know, yeah, I’ll keep you posted for sure.

Patrick McGilvray
All right. Well, thanks again, Pete for everything. Thanks for being here. I really appreciate it.

Pete Caigan
Thank you, Patrick.

Patrick McGilvray
So a lot of runners who struggle to lose weight, wonder if coaching is a good fit for them. I’m going to be very honest about this. Coaching is a good fit for you. If you are willing to go all in on yourself.

You have to be willing to commit to the process of change. You have to be willing to get uncomfortable. You have to be willing to give it everything you’ve got.

The people in my program who do amazingly well are the ones who go all in on themselves. There are a few people who don’t do so well. And those are the people who kind of half ass it, right?

You cannot expect to accomplish anything of value in your life by half assing it, you just can’t. You have to full ass everything you do. So if you’re ready to commit to becoming the most badass version of yourself, then you’re ready for The Coaching Project.

That’s my lifetime access weight loss coaching program for runners. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/join to learn more. That’s all I got for you today, love you all, keep on Running Lean and I’ll talk to you soon.

177. Weight Loss Principles Every Runner Needs to Know Part 1: Nutrition

May 19, 2023 By Patrick McGilvray

Nutrition is going to be the number one driver of your body composition. If you’re a runner and you want to lose weight, you have to get your nutrition game on point. The thinking that just …

Continue Reading about 177. Weight Loss Principles Every Runner Needs to Know Part 1: Nutrition →

Podcast Transcript

Hey there, and welcome to episode 177 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today: Weight Loss Principles Every Runner Needs To Know, Part 1: Nutrition.

So nutrition is going to be the number one driver of your body composition. If you’re a runner and you want to lose weight, you have to get your nutrition game on point. The thinking that just running more is going to solve the weight problem for you is outdated. And frankly, it just doesn’t work.

There’s a lot more going on when it comes to weight loss; the types of foods we eat, the timing of our meals, what happens in our bodies, when we eat certain foods and so much more. There’s a lot to consider here. So don’t worry, I’m gonna break this all down here for you today.

My hope is that by the end of this episode, you’ll have a much clearer understanding of just how important nutrition is for weight loss, even if you’re a runner, especially if you’re a runner. And this is part one of a three part series called Weight Loss Principles Every Runner Needs To Know.

Part two will be focused on exercise principles. And part three will be all about the mindset principles runners need to focus on in order to lose weight and keep it off for good.

But first, if you’re a runner, and you struggle to lose weight, then I have just the thing to help you get started on the right track. I put together a brand new fun and free training just for you called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner, Stronger Runner. I will teach you how to lose weight the right way and keep it off for good without running a million miles a week.

Here’s some of the things that you’ll learn in this in depth training. You’ll learn why running more and eating less is not an effective way to lose weight. You’ll learn the one thing runners don’t do properly when they’re trying to lose weight.

You’ll learn the best fuel to use to improve your endurance and improve your weight loss. You’ll learn the mindset shifts required to make these changes last, and you’ll learn the surprising key to losing weight and keep it off for good and a lot more.

You’re going to learn how to crush your weight loss goals and your running goals directly from me, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners. And this is about more than just losing weight. It’s about not doing the same things over and over expecting different results. It’s about changing your whole relationship with food and diets and nutrition and exercise.

It’s about becoming the healthiest version of yourself from the inside out. It’s about changing your mindset and creating new habits that last for life. Are you ready to get leaner and stronger, run faster and longer and become the healthiest, most badass version of yourself? If yes, then you’ve got to check out this free training now.

Just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training. Do not put this off, there’s never going to be a better time to do this to get started on your weight loss journey than today, just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on free training.

So when I started thinking about putting together this episode on weight loss principles every runner needs to know I started listing out all the principles I thought were important. And my list got massively huge. So I decided to split it up into three parts.

So today we’re going to be focusing on nutrition principles. Next week, we’ll talk about exercise principles. And then the following week, all talk all about mindset principles. So today is going to be focused on nutrition and the nutrition principles that you need to understand if you want to lose weight.

If you’re a runner, and you want to lose weight these are the principles that you really have to understand. And it’s not a list of every nutrition principle possible. But it is a pretty comprehensive list. There’s a lot that I’m gonna be talking about here today.

And these are the ones that I talk about with my clients the most and the ones that we focus on the most, and the ones that seem to have the biggest impact on your weight loss. So that’s why I’m kind of focusing on these here today.

I don’t have these in any particular order. They’re not numbered or anything like that. I don’t know if there’s 12 or 18 principles here. I don’t even know, I didn’t even count them but the thing is that these are all important and they will all contribute to your overall health and fitness and especially to your weight loss journey. Cool.

Okay, so let’s just get into this, I’ll just start rattling off these principles. The first one is this. And you’ve heard me say this before, but I thought it was like one of the most important. So I’m just gonna lay it on you right now. And that principle is this: you cannot outrun a bad diet.

I know that we’ve heard for decades that you know, cardio is king. And especially the sugar companies will tell you this, right, just move more, eat less and move more, and you’re fine. The real thing that we have to understand, though, is that the biggest driver of your weight, the biggest driver of your overall body composition is not cardio, it is nutrition.

I work with runners who are in massive amounts of training, who are training for ultra marathons, and who gain weight during a training cycle. This happened to me several times, I was training for ultra marathons and was gaining weight. And I was like, this does not make sense. I’m not eating a ton more, what’s going on here?
And it had a lot to do with the types of foods I was eating, which I’ll talk about here in a minute. I had a client a while back, who was running at least three miles a day. So he was doing at least a 5k every single day. And he had done this for seven straight years.

And he’s probably still going seven straight years of running at least three miles a day. That is a lot of running. And he gained like 15 pounds in the process. That’s crazy, right? So you cannot outrun a bad diet, what you eat is way more important than how much you run. And I’m going to get into this, you know, and several of these principles, you’ll understand this more as we go but just understand that running more is not the answer. Okay.

So the second principle you have to understand is that if you want to lose weight, you have to burn fat. And, I mean, we all know this, like intellectually, but we don’t put our bodies into a state of fat burning. We eat the kind of diet that really keeps our body storing fat. So I want to explain this process really quickly here.

When you eat certain foods, like sugar, for example, this will spike your blood sugar, this will also cause a spike in the hormone insulin. When insulin gets produced in a high amount, it will drive that blood sugar down and you’ll kind of feel terrible, and you’ll want to eat more sugar so you can feel normal again, right? So that’s one part of it.

The other thing is though, every time insulin is present, your body is holding on to fat in its fat cells. So insulin is like the jailer that has locked up your fat, and it’s fat cells. And you cannot, you know, burn fat, you cannot lose weight while your insulin levels are high all the time.

So really, what you want to do is you want to eat the kind of diet that keeps your blood sugar regulated, pretty normalized, and you got to get your body into fat burning mode and get out of fat storing mode.

Okay, so we are naturally good fat burners, human beings. But we’ve gotten very far away from that, especially in the last 50 years or so. We started eating more processed food, more junk food, a lot more snacking, a lot more sugar, and we are just storing and storing and storing that fat.

Well as humans, you know, we evolved to store some body fat, and that’s good for us. It’s good to store some body fat, it helps us insulate us in the wintertime. But it’s also a good fuel source. For times of famine, you can survive for a long time off of your own stored body fat.

But we never put our bodies in the state where we can actually burn that fat. All we’re doing is just adding more wood to the woodpile, so to speak. So we just keep making that woodpile larger, but we’re not using that wood as fuel that fat as fuel.

So really, you have to understand that there is a fat burning state that your body needs to be in, versus a fat storage state that your body might be in, right? And in order to get the fat burning optimized, you have to eat a diet that regulates your blood sugar a little better. Okay.

The next principle is the order in which your body burns fuel, you have to understand that we metabolize certain macronutrients in a certain order. And this is important because I’m going to shed some light on what foods you want to kind of focus on here.

So, the order that we metabolize different nutrients is like this. First is alcohol. So that’s the first thing that gets metabolized. So, if you drank a couple drinks of alcohol, let’s say you have a couple of drinks on a Wednesday night, and then that is going to slow down or stop your fat burning from happening while your body is processing that alcohol.

And it takes about 48 hours, 48 to 72 hours for your body to metabolize that alcohol fully, and get you back into fat burning mode. Okay, so if you’re trying to lose weight, maybe take a break from alcohol, that’s something to consider. So alcohol is number one.

Number two is sugar. As long as sugar is available as a fuel source, your body will use it, it loves using sugar as fuel, it’s very easy for your body to use sugar as fuel. The problem is it doesn’t utilize it 100% gram for gram of sugar.

You eat a chocolate bar, some of that is going to be used for fuel. And some of that is going to be stored in your fat cells to be used as fuel later. You know, you drink a Big Gulp, which I don’t know if you guys know what that is. But it’s a giant soda, a giant sugary drink and you drink that drink, your body cannot process that much sugar all at once.

I don’t even know how many teaspoons of sugar is in something like that, but it’s probably a lot. My guess is that it’s way more than your body can metabolize at once. So you’re going to store some of that as body fat, and which is normal, that’s the way your body’s supposed to work.

The problem is that you’re not going to be able to burn that until you kind of get rid of that sugar. So we’ve burned alcohol first as fuel, then we burned sugar.

The next thing we can use as fuel is what we call exogenous fat. So that is fat that you eat. So if you eat, you know, some bacon, and then you go for a run, you might be using some of that exogenous fat as fuel, which is fine. You know, fat is not a bad fuel source.

Most people won’t be really good at burning fat until you get fat adapted until you’ve trained your body to become fat adapted. But you can use exogenous fat as fuel to some extent. Okay, the next order of metabolites that your body will use as fuel would be stored body fat.

So this is important to understand, because we want to limit the amount of alcohol and sugar. And the exogenous fat is not as big a deal because once your body gets good at burning fat, you’re going to be burning more stored body fat anyway. But we want to, you know, limit the amount of sugar and alcohol especially that we are consuming in order for our body to kind of force our body to use its own stored body fat as fuel, okay?

So you want to get really good at burning your own stored body fat. So the typical way we think about this is just think of a fuel tank, and at the top of the tank is sugar and at the bottom of the tank is like your own stored body fat. And you got to get rid of that sugar first you got to like get rid of that as a fuel source, you got to burn through that. And then you can start tapping into that stored body fat, okay.

So this is why it matters, the kinds of foods that you eat matter, more than just like calories, you know, calories do matter. We’ll talk about that in a minute. But just understand that it is important to eat the right kinds of foods and not go too crazy on the sugar side of things especially, or alcohol. Okay.

Next principle, what you eat is more important than how much you eat. So the types of foods you eat, like I just was explaining here, matter more than the number of calories. Yes, calories do matter. But typically, the right diet will help to regulate caloric intake, and do that in a way that is nice and easy and sort of effortless.

You know, if you’re eating the kind of diet where you feel pretty full throughout the day, and you’re not having these crazy cravings and over desire for sugary carbohydrate laden foods, then, you know, you’re going to feel more satiated and you’re going to be less hungry throughout the day and you’ll probably naturally just drive those cravings down and drive the number of calories that you’re eating down, which is fine, right?

The wrong diet, on the other hand, though, tons of carbs and tons of sugar will make you crave more of that stuff. It will drive hunger up, it will cause you to overeat. It’s very easy to overeat carbohydrates, refined carbohydrates, especially.

And sugar especially because your body will respond to those things, and will release some hormones that make it very difficult for your body to regulate your hunger signals. Like ghrelin is the hunger signal, and it actually ramps up that signaling of that hormone when you eat more sugar.

Leptin is the fullness hormone. And that gets down regulated when you’re eating a lot of sugar and carbohydrates, right. But if you’re eating more protein, and you know less on the on the refined carbohydrate side of things, your hormones start to work the way they’re supposed to, insulin won’t be produced in a great amount, and your leptin and ghrelin will be in check, your blood sugars will be regulated, and you’ll feel more satiated and full throughout the day.

So just understand that what you eat, the types of foods you eat is going to make a bigger impact than just trying to focus on the number of calories that you’re eating.

Okay, next principle is this, the typical runner’s diet just doesn’t work. So the typical runner’s diet, I talk about this, half jokingly, but really not is that it’s all carbs, it’s all sugar. So we do carb loading in the days leading up to runs. And then you know, the morning of or we’re loading up with carbs before we run, and then we’re fueling with carbs during the run. And then after the run, we need to recover. So we eat a bunch more carbs.

And then basically, every day is just like, I’m gonna eat as many carbs as I want, because I run and it just doesn’t work. Or if it did work for you in the past, it probably doesn’t anymore. Or for some people, it really does not work at all, ever. So we just have to understand that that typical diet of like beer and donuts, and burgers, it just doesn’t work, you know.

So we have to understand that if you’re the kind of person that is a little more carbohydrate sensitive, that you’re a little bit intolerant to carbohydrates, then just get rid of that stuff. That’s all, get rid of that stuff. There’s a way we can do this that will absolutely help you to fuel your running and lose weight and do it all. And there’s an answer.

You know, there’s a way of doing this that will allow you to hit all your goals, your weight loss goal and your running goals simultaneously, right? But we just have to understand that that typical runner’s diet is probably not going to work for you. Okay.

Next principle. The goal here is to eat a diet that helps to regulate your blood sugar. Now, I kind of talked about this a little bit, that insulin spikes, that constant insulin spiking and crashing will cause massive hunger, you’ll never feel satiated.

It causes overeating, it causes poor running performance too. So you get those blood sugar spikes and crashes, insulin is high all the time you’re hungry all the time, running becomes more difficult. You need a lot of fuel for running, you’re constantly hitting the wall because you don’t have enough fuel.

It takes longer to recover from those harder workouts, sleep becomes compromised. You don’t have all day energy, you kind of crash in the afternoons, right? Focus and concentration are impaired and you’re gaining weight. So this is all what happens when you eat that typical runner’s diet, that diet that is spiking your blood sugar constantly, right?

So we want to make sure that we are doing the opposite of that, right? Get to a diet that helps to regulate your blood sugar, and helps you to keep your blood sugar normalized. This is going to be key, okay. And it’s a little bit different for each person. But I’m going to give you some examples and some ideas of what to do here in a second, okay.

Next principle is this: all foods in moderation does not work for everyone. So I hear a lot of people, especially dieticians, talk about all foods in moderation, like there should be no foods that are off the table, like you can eat everything, but just moderate, just moderate it. Okay?

This is like telling somebody that has a drinking problem, just moderate your drinking. Why can’t you just moderate it? Why can’t you just control it, just drink like normal people. So I think we have to be very careful when we lump everyone together and say everyone should be able to eat everything that they want. Just do it in moderation.

I don’t hold this belief, this ideology. I believe there are some foods that we should kind of stay away from and that or should be consumed very sparingly. And that some people just have a very hard time doing that in moderation. Some of these foods, so why not just stay away from it? It’s not a big deal.

Like for example, I used to drink alcohol and I don’t anymore I quit like 16 years ago. And for me, I don’t know, I don’t have any desire to drink alcohol anymore. I used to smoke cigarettes, I have no desire to smoke cigarettes again, I stopped smoking cigarettes, I don’t know, 20-25 years ago, something like that. I couldn’t imagine not having a cigarette or having a drink every day. Now, it’s something I don’t ever need to think about.

So what if you took that same approach to something like sugar, where you just, you know, took a break from it for a while, and you got to this place where you just don’t even want it anymore. You just don’t even want it. That’s a great place to be. Okay.

Some people can moderate their sugar intake, and maybe just have, you know, a piece of chocolate every now and then. And it’s no big deal. Some people, they have one piece of chocolate and it’s like they’re off to the races, they start binging on that stuff. That’s kind of an unhealthy relationship with that particular food.

But it’s also something where maybe just stay away from it, at least for a while. And in my coaching program, we do this thing where we help to turn down the volume on our desires for these kinds of foods so that we don’t feel like we have to moderate or we don’t feel like we have to avoid them altogether.

Like we can just take it or leave it because there’s not a big deal anymore. That’s a good place to get to. Okay. So just keep in mind that all foods in moderation, it doesn’t work for everyone. Some people maybe should stay away from some foods, you know, but I’m not saying that everybody has to, okay?

So the next principle is this. You need to avoid what I call the Vile Triumvirate. What is the Vile Triumvirate? The Vile Triumvirate does this. It’s three things, it’s sugar, refined grains and vegetable oils. If you stay away from these three things, I’m telling you right now your health will improve. And you’ll probably start losing weight.

And for some people, it can be pretty dramatic, the health improvements and weight loss that you experience when you just stop doing these three things. So sugar, no one’s going to tell you that sugar is good for you. I don’t care. If you’re a dietitian, if you’re a doctor, if you’re some other type of like health or fitness expert, nobody’s going to tell you that sugar is good for you. It’s not, I think we all know that.

Moderating is hard, and we probably all need to eat a lot less of it. Okay. And listen, you don’t need sugar to run, you don’t need to eat sugar in order to run, you can get fat adapted, you can use your own body fat as fuel. When you get fat adapted, and you are burning fat really effectively, then you can run for long distances with basically almost no fuel doesn’t mean you don’t, you can’t use fuel for running but you don’t need all the sugar to run. Okay, so sugar, all the forms of sugar, just get rid of that.

Refined grains, those are wheat, corn, rice, oats. This stuff, especially when it’s refined, is very concentrated. It’s a very concentrated form of carbohydrate. This spikes your glucose, in some cases, even higher than just eating pure sugar does. That’s crazy, right? So it’s also hard to digest.

Some people have a real problem with this stuff, right? So if you just get rid of that, if you get rid of sugar and refined grains, I’m going to tell you right now that your blood sugar is gonna start to get more normalized, right? So those are the big two.

And then vegetable oils. These are just gross industrial seed oils. Go look up how they make vegetable oil at some point and you’ll never want to eat that stuff again. Okay, it’s disgusting.

Stick with good healthy fats, you know, like olive oil, butter, ghee, coconut oil, that kind of stuff. Those are all good for you. Avocado oil. There’s much better sources of fats and oils out there than using industrial seed oils. Okay, just get away from that stuff.

Okay, so what should you eat? Here’s another principle. I love this one. One of my favorites is eat real food. Just eat real food. That’s it. What’s real food? It’s food that still looks like food. It’s not processed food. It’s maybe minimally processed. It’s not packaged food. Or maybe it’s you know, maybe it’s in a package, but it’s like, doesn’t contain a ton of ingredients, you know.

But what’s interesting is a lot of the processed packaged food tends to have those three ingredients I just talked about: sugar, refined grains and vegetable oils. Like sugar, flour and vegetable oil seem to be the three main ingredients in most junk food.

So if you just stop eating processed packaged foods, you’re going to get a lot of that out of your diet. So that’s awesome, right? So food that still looks like food, you should be able to recognize that our ancestors should be able to recognize it. Oh, this is an apple. Oh, those are berries. That’s fish. That’s meat. That’s beans. That’s cheese. That’s potato. That’s some nuts, right? Just eat stuff like that, and you’ll be fine.

Honestly, there’s so much you can do with that kind of food that this doesn’t have to be complicated, you guys. Like you don’t have to make some crazy, complicated recipe every time you eat something. My diet is so simple and so easy. I’m almost embarrassed to talk about it. Because it’s so ridiculously simple.

You probably think like, I’m some, like, I’m a prisoner or something like for lunch today, I had a bunch of egg whites and salt. That was my lunch. Okay, that’s it. And it was amazingly delicious. Tonight, I’m having a big piece of meat and some sweet potatoes and some salad. Like that’s dinner. That’s it. It’s very simple, very simple. It doesn’t have to be complicated.

Okay, so real food, eat real food, food that looks like food, food, our ancestors would recognize food that doesn’t come in a package. You know, for the most part, sometimes I get the packaged, like frozen broccoli or something like that, right food that doesn’t have a million ingredients. Or at least you know, it has a few ingredients, and you can pronounce them all.

And you know what? Each of them is food that doesn’t come with all the marketing messages, right? If you’re eating packaged food, chances are it’s got some kind of marketing message, a bunch of ingredients, processed stuff, like just just stay away from that for the most part, okay?

If you just stick to these things, here we go: meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, eggs, dairy, tubers, potatoes, that kind of stuff. Nuts, seeds, healthy fats, salt, spices, just eat that stuff. Boom, you’re good to go. Okay.

All right, next principle, say no to snacking. You don’t need to eat all the time. What happens when you eat all the time is that every time you eat some food, even though it might be not sugar, but it’s some food, you know, it will, you know, raise your blood sugar a little bit. And again, we want to keep your blood sugar pretty regulated, right.

So if you keep your blood sugar lower, most of the time and you’re not snacking constantly, you’re eating like six or eight times a day, then your blood sugar is going to be pretty chill most of the day, which means your body is going to be burning fat most of the day. Right.

So just one of the easiest ways you can keep your meals spaced out and give your body a chance to tap into that stored body fat as fuel is to just stop snacking. You don’t need to snack. Snacking is not hunger. It’s not real hunger.

Real hunger means you can sit down and eat a meal. And if you’re thinking like, oh, I’m hungry, I should eat something. Can you eat a meal? If the answer is no, then don’t eat something. If the answer is I want like six nuts. That’s not hunger. Come on.

Snacking is almost always an emotional event anyway, like you’re bored, you’re lonely, you’re anxious, you’re stressed out, you’re tired, you’re angry, whatever. It’s some kind of emotion is driving that trip to the pantry. So just understand that you don’t need to snack. Okay, you’ll be okay. Give your body a chance to burn fat. Do that instead, right?

Listen, snacking wasn’t a thing until like the 1950s between 1950 and like today, you know, here especially in the US, we’ve just become a nation of snackers. And the food industry, they introduced all these packaged snacks that cater to our basic cravings for sugar, salt and fat.

And by the 80s, by the 1980s, people were eating snacks everywhere at home, at work, at school, while in the car, walking down the sidewalk. We did not evolve to snack all day long, right? This was never a thing until like the 50s. Right? It is a relatively new thing. You don’t need to snack just stop doing that. Okay, say no to snacking. The people who tell you you need a snack all day long is the food industry that’s telling you that and they want you to buy more food.

Okay, this leads me to my next principle, which is this. The food companies do not care about your health. They just don’t. They don’t care that you’re healthy. They don’t care that you’re lean and strong. They just want you to eat more of their garbage. That’s it. They do not care about you know, your health, you are not their priority.

Their priority is selling more food. So they make their foods hyper palatable. That means they are so amazingly delicious that you crave them day and night. Their goal is to sell as much food as possible. How do they do that? They just make it irresistible.

You cannot say no, you can’t stop. They even say it on the package. You know? “Once you pop you can’t stop. You can’t eat just one.” Right? They just tell you right there, like here’s what we’re doing to you, we’re gonna make it so that you cannot eat just one of these chips or whatever it is. They just care about making money and their bottom line.

And the end result of this is we are a nation that is metabolically unhealthy. We’re terribly unhealthy here in the US, right? We’re buying into all these marketing messages from the food companies, you know. And what you need to do is you need to go against that.

You need to go against the grain, and pun very much intended here. You need to take control of your own health and well being and on your own terms, that means do what people are not doing, do what the majority of people are not doing. Okay?

88% of the US population has some form of metabolic disease. They’re overweight, especially in the midsection. They have high blood pressure, high blood sugar, pre diabetes, diabetes, and on and on and on, you do not want to be a part of that 88%. You want to be in the 12%, who are considered metabolically healthy. That’s a very small percentage of the population, right?

But be that weirdo at the table who’s not doing what everybody else is doing. Be okay with that. We’ll talk about this more and when we get into the mindset stuff, but just understand that what everybody else is doing is not working. And the food companies, they don’t care about your health or you know, your weight or anything like that. They just want you to buy more of their junk, okay. Okay, rant over.

So, next principle is this: you are an athlete, so eat like one. This means that you should be eating like an athlete all the time. Whether it’s the offseason, or you’re in peak training mode, II, like an athlete, be intentional about what you’re doing.

Don’t just say like, well, you know, I got this marathon coming up, so I’m just going to kind of do whatever I want. But then afterwards, after this marathon, I’m gonna like really dial in my nutrition, like, don’t do that. Stay on track, always, it’s so much easier to just maintain a healthy lifestyle than it is to like, start and stop. Again, that’s kind of more of a mindset principle. But listen, you do not want to eat like crap for three months, and then try to get back on track just so you can like train for the next race or whatever.

Actual athletes do not do this. And you shouldn’t either. Now I’m not saying you got to train like an athlete, or, you know, you know, these elite athletes who are Olympic quality qualifiers and stuff like that. Like, that’s not what I’m talking about here.

But just like adopt this mindset of like, I am going to take care of myself, my health, my fitness, my running is a priority. And I’m going to eat like it all the time. Yeah, that means that you can have a beer here and there, that means you can eat that doughnut every now and then. But it doesn’t mean that this is like, you know, three months of the year you eat right, the rest of the time you just eat a bunch of junk, right?

If you started acting like an athlete and eating like an athlete, how would things change for you? Think about that.

Okay, next principle is this: there is no one size fits all. There’s not one diet that works for everyone. There just isn’t. Every single person I’ve worked with, I’ve worked with hundreds of runners. And we’ve put together custom nutrition plans for each one. And nobody does this the same. No two people do the same, which is cool.

I mean, it would be awesome if everybody could do it the same because I could like write a book or something and just hand it to you. And you know, you give me 20 bucks, and then we’re good to go. It just doesn’t work that way. It just doesn’t.

And any book that tells you what to do. Just take it with a grain of salt, you know, because it may not work for you. I’ve read all these diet books and listen to so many experts tell me what to do. And I have to tell you that it just doesn’t always work. You know, the South Beach diet, vegan, vegetarian, plant based paleo whatever, I’ve done all these different things. And none of them really worked perfectly for me until I kind of figured things out on my own. Right?

There’s so many factors that make us all individuals like my specific goals, my current diet, the way I exercise day to day, my food preferences, my dietary restrictions, my family and cultural considerations, my work and travel considerations, like there’s so many things to look at, that what somebody else is doing may work for them beautifully, but it may not work for me. Right?

So the goal here is that you have to figure this out. So a big part of what we do in the coaching project is we figure out what works for you. Right, and it does take a little bit of work to get there.

All right, next principle is this: the 90/10 rule. So you’ve probably heard of the 80/20 rule, right? I think that is fine for most things, but when it comes to sticking with your diet I love like more of like a 90/10 better.

I think that we can, most of us, can adhere to that. The 80/20 rule seems to be a little too loosey goosey for people. Okay? So 90/10. That means that 90% of the time you’re going to eat on plan, and then 10% of the time, you can eat a little bit off plan, right? That’s like one meal per week, essentially, is what we’re talking about here the rest of the time, just stick with the plan.

Listen, life is meant to be lived, we should be able to indulge every now and then to celebrate with family and friends. We just got to do it the right way. Food is a big part of our culture and how we come together as human beings, there always has been. It’s important. We celebrate special events in our lives with food, it brings family and friends together. And it’s how we connect. And you should enjoy that.

But you have to do it the right way. And that means you just don’t do it all the time. Okay. So, and I love this, somebody said this, I love this little quote. And it says, “It matters more what you eat between New Year’s and Christmas than what you eat between Christmas and New Year’s.”

So just think about that 90% of the time, stick to your plan that 10% of the time, you can be a little loosey goosey with it. You can indulge you can enjoy, you can celebrate, just do it the right way. Okay. All right.

Next principle, carbs are not the enemy. Okay, so I talk a lot about sort of the low carb approach to running. And if you if we kind of take a low carb approach, we can tend to lose weight a little easier, okay. But this does not mean zero carbs, right? So you do not need carbs to run, but we don’t avoid them altogether.

You can use carbs to help with running, you can use carbs to help build muscle, to improve your exercise performance, you just gotta do it the right way. The types of carbs that you choose, it matters, the timing of the carbs matters, how much you’re eating, that stuff matters. This is not an excuse to eat junk food 24/7. And there’s whole food types of carbs, like, you know, rice and potatoes and sweet potatoes.

And then there’s like carbage, which is just junk food, you know, is that carbohydrate, super refined carbohydrate, junk food, candy bars and cake and you know, bread and pizza and stuff like that. I mean, that stuff is fine, in moderation, very, very limited. Remember that 10%.

But if you’re using carbs strategically, you want to stick with whole foods, types of carbohydrates, right? And then the timing of how you do it matters, okay, but just understand that carbs are not the enemy and that like, it’s okay to indulge in some carbs here and there and to use them strategically around workouts and things like that. But we just got to be careful with how we do that. Okay.

Next principle, eating fat doesn’t make you fat. Listen, we need fat to live, we need it to survive as human beings, you have to eat that. That is what’s called an essential nutrient. Protein is also an essential nutrient. That means that we have to get it in our diet or we die. So fat and protein are what we call essential nutrients. If we don’t get those in our diet, we will die. There’s just no way around that right.

By the way, there’s a nonessential nutrient called carbohydrates. We don’t need to eat carbohydrates, our brains do need some glucose to function properly, but our liver will actually produce all the glucose that we need on a daily basis. So you could like just never eat carbs again, and you’d probably be fine. I don’t recommend that. I’m not saying you should do that.

I’m just saying like fat and protein, essential nutrients. Carbohydrates, nonessential. Just interesting, right? But there was this huge low fat craze in the 80’s and extended into the 90’s to some degree. Basically, that was like don’t eat fat, fat is bad. People were having all kinds of adverse reactions like being cold all the time. It was affecting their eyesight because they just completely eliminated fat from their diet. You can die if you do that, actually.

And what they ended up doing in the 80’s especially is they replaced a lot of the fat with sugar, you know, so they had these processed foods like, oh, here’s a low here’s no fat yogurt, but it’s like full of sugar, but it says no fat and people were like, oh yeah, let’s gravitate towards that.

How come I’m gaining weight? Well it’s because of all the sugar, right? Just choose healthy fats and I talked about that a little bit earlier. Animal types of fats. If you eat that stuff it is fine. And then you know things like butter and dairy and avocados, nuts, olives, olive oil, coconut oil, all those things are good sources of fat.

Okay. Another principle is this: train low, race high. What does this mean? That means that it In training, we want to, you know, train pretty low carb, okay. But for races, we want to have more carbs. So we want to train low carb and race high carb, high-ish. Okay, once you’re fat-adapted, you don’t need a whole lot of fuel for running and other workouts right? You need a lot less fuel than you think.

So for example, I did a couple of 25 mile runs recently, I’m training for a 12 hour event coming up here in a couple of weeks. And in these 25 mile training runs I did, I only took a few little Muir energy gels with me, which are about 12 grams of carbs, they also have some nut butter in there like almond butter, and some fat and protein, so fat and protein, a little bit of carbs.

And I had like three of them over 25 miles, it was very low in carbs, like I didn’t have to have, you know, a Gu every 30 minutes or whatever. And I was fine because I’m fat adapted because I use my own stored body fat as fuel very effectively. Okay. So just understand that there are benefits to exercising without fuel.

So exercising in that fasted state, you get a lot of benefits, you get improved performance due to more adrenaline being produced, you get a clearer head, better focus and concentration, faster recovery times due to more growth hormone being produced. So there’s lots of reasons why we like to exercise in that fasted state.

And it also helps emphasize fat burning, you know, so when you get really good at burning fat, then you go to, to race and you’ve been training low carb, you go to race and you add more carbohydrates for that race. That’s like adding rocket fuel, right, and you’ll get the you can optimize your running performance when you do that. Okay, so train low, race high.

Next principle, at some point, calories do matter. So there’s this concept called CICO. C-I-C-O.
And that stands for calories in, calories out. And this is the energy balance theory, which says, you know, the more energy you consume, the more you need to burn, basically, the cardio in order to maintain that energy balance, okay.

So this is what most people adhere to when they try to lose weight, the energy balance theory, and I tried this for years with an app. And I was tracking all the calories I was eating, like literally every gram of whatever I was eating, and then I was tracking all my exercise. It just wasn’t working. I was gaining weight in the process. Because there’s more to it than that, right.

And stuff we’ve talked about already, hormones like insulin have to be considered, the type of foods you eat have to be considered, all calories are not the same. The human body is not a steam engine. If we are a steam engine, this CICO theory might work, okay, but we’re not.

The human body is a complex, complicated, interconnected multi system living organism and trying to simplify it to work the same as a steam engine is just ridiculous, because it’s not. Right. Okay, all that being said, at some point over consuming calories is going to be a problem.

You have to be mindful not to overeat, you have to stop the automatic eating, the out of control eating, the emotional eating, you have to learn to know when you’re actually hungry and when you’re not. I know this sounds simple. And it is a simple concept. But it’s not easy. Because you’ve probably trained yourself to use food as an emotional management tool, right?

We all have. We all use food to feel better. We use it as a reward. We use it to feel better. We use it to manage our emotions, especially when we’re having negative emotions. We’re feeling really stressed out. Oh, I was doing great until I got really stressed out at work. And then everything went to you know hell in a handbasket?

Well, it’s because you haven’t learned how to deal with those emotional stuff. This is one of the most talked about topics in our coaching program, the coaching project, because everybody has to deal with this. Every single person I’ve worked with has had to deal with this to some degree. Okay.

So yes, at some point, overeating has to be addressed. Calories do matter. But keep in mind, when you change your diet, when you start eating real food, you start getting enough protein, you stop eating all the refined grains and sugar, your hormones start working properly, your blood sugar’s regulated, you’re not going to be hungry all the time. And not eating will be easy.

It’ll be effortless, and overeating will be much less of an issue. Okay? You got to learn how to deal with your emotions without food. And I’m going to talk more about this in our mindset principles episode that’s going to be part three.

So stick around for that one, because that’s going to be good. It’s important. This is one of the most important things that we have to address if you want to lose weight, okay? All right. So that’s what I got for you today.

Those are the principles that I think are the most important when it comes to losing weight as a runner. And remember, this is episode one of a three part series called Weight Loss Principles Every Runner Needs To Know.

And next we’re going to be talking about exercise principles for weight loss like running, walking, resistance, training, rest, recovery, cross training, flexibility, mobility exercises, tons more, all with a focus on, you know, helping you to lose weight guide. So definitely be on the lookout for that one.

And then listen, if you ever want help with all this, consider joining us in the coaching project. That’s my lifetime access, a weight loss coaching program. It’s designed specifically for runners to help you crush your weight loss and your running goals simultaneously.

The three things that you need to succeed at anything are number one, you need knowledge, so you need to know what to do and how to do it. You need the strategies you need, you need the knowledge, okay?

Number two is you need support. You need someone there to have your back, somebody to guide you through the process every step of the way, someone to encourage you and keep you motivated and help you stay on track.

And then number three, you need accountability. You need someone there to hold you accountable, so that you do what you said you’re going to do. Right and my unique weight loss coaching program delivers all three.

The coaching project will help you dial in a custom nutrition plan that works for you, your goals, your lifestyle, you’ll learn how to stay on track, even when you don’t feel like it. You’ll develop the mindset skills necessary to do the hard things. You’ll learn how to do cheat meals the right way, and I use cheat meals in quotes. I don’t really believe in cheat meals.

You’ll learn how to stop the emotional eating, the stress eating, the automatic eating that makes it so hard to lose weight. You’ll learn how to improve your running performance. Whether that means running faster or farther, you’ll be able to basically crush your running goals. And then you’ll just learn how to become a lean, strong fat burning machine right.

So to learn more and sign up today, just go to runningleancoaching.com/join. And I would love to see you in the coaching project. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.

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Low-carb running

Podcast Transcript

Podcast Transcript

Podcast Transcript

Podcast Transcript

Podcast Transcript

Podcast Transcript