Low-carb running

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 246, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners, and today, the Macronutrient That Matters Most for Runners. So I know I talk a lot about carbs here on the podcast, mainly why it’s maybe advised for you to keep your carbs low. If you’re a runner who wants to get fat adapted, use body fat as fuel for running and wants to lose weight, I think keeping your carbs low is a very good plan for most people, not everybody, but for most people. But I realized I haven’t spent much time talking about the other macronutrients, fat and protein. Fat and protein are essential nutrients that often get overlooked when it comes to low carb diets and fat adapted running. So I’m hoping to remedy that here today. So this episode is all about that one macronutrient that matters most for runners, and how it benefits your overall health and fitness.

But first I want to talk a little bit about what being a coach means to me. So I’m someone who struggled with eating properly, struggled with my weight, struggled with getting stronger, struggled with my business, and I decided at some point that I was going to get some help, and so I reached out, and I got a nutrition coach that helped me greatly, and I figured out a lot of important things for me, and it was really the key to me losing weight and be able to keep it off forever. I really wanted to get stronger and leaner and build more muscle, and I just was trying to do it on my own. It really wasn’t working. So I got a coach. I had a personal trainer that was working with me to help me get stronger and showing me what to do and correcting my mistakes and keeping me accountable and keeping me on track. And then I had a business coach that really helped me to get my business started, and get my business to a place where it was something that was very sustainable for me. And all along this process, I learned so much from having coaches guide me, show me the way, show me what to do. You know, they’ve already made all the mistakes so they can just teach me what to do without me having to make all those same mistakes, which is really awesome. It’s like taking everything that they know and then just downloading it into me and going like, Okay, perfect. You know, I’m good to go here. But having that accountability, having somebody to bounce ideas off of, having somebody to talk to when things aren’t going well, having somebody to help keep me on track all of those things were vital to me becoming the person that I am today, to losing the weight, to keeping it off, to improving my strength, my overall fitness, to having a thriving business. All those things were benefits of me reaching out and taking a little bit of a leap of faith here, because I had never really done too much in the way of coaching prior to doing all this stuff, and it was a game changer for me. So this is why I became a coach, because it was so impactful for me. And this is why I’m so passionate about being a coach, because I had such an amazing experience with my coaches. And I was just talking to someone the other day who is a coach herself, and she was reaching out to me to get some help. And, you know, we both agreed that all the best coaches have coaches, you know. So it’s just one of those things that if you’re looking for some help, you want somebody to just show you exactly what to do. You’re looking for some guidance and some accountability. You want somebody that’s had all the experience that can just, you know, really take everything that they’ve learned and just dump it into you then, then coaching is probably a good fit for you. And if you want to know if working with me is a good fit for you, just go to my website, running lean coaching.com, and click on the big button that says, work with me, and I’ll show you exactly how you can become the most badass version of yourself. Yeah, cool. Running, leancoaching.com. Click on work with me, and let’s do it. Let’s work together. I think it would be super fun. Cool.

Okay, so today, let’s talk about the macronutrient that matters most for runners, and I know that we talk a lot about carbs here on the podcast, because I’m a big proponent of just keeping the carbs low. What does that mean? It’s different for each person. You know, we kind of take a break from eating sugar and some of the really starchy grains and try to lower our carbohydrate intake at the beginning of this process. That’s kind of like phase one that I go through with most of my clients.

We keep the carbs pretty low at the beginning, and then at some point we start to increase the carbs. We time carbs around workouts. You go to a place where you’ve kind of maybe hit your ideal weight, and you can dial in your carbohydrate intake to determine, okay, I can eat this many carbs until I start to gain weight again. Oh, maybe I need to back it off a little bit. You know, maybe 100 grams. 150 grams is good for you. Maybe it’s 75, maybe it’s 20. I don’t know. Just everybody’s a little bit different. Everybody has the sweet spot that they feel good about.

So we know we talk a lot about carbs, and being a low carb runner is something that is pretty amazing. Getting fat adapted as a runner is pretty amazing, because now you have this unlimited fuel source of stored body fat that helps improve your endurance, helps improve your athletic performance, and it gives you a whole nother tool that most runners just don’t take advantage of. You know, burning fat as fuel, so keeping the carbs low is a really amazing tool. It helps with weight loss and helps improve your running.

And I realize that I talk a lot about carbs. And if you want to go back to many, many episodes, there’s lots of episodes where I talk about carbohydrates, you know, good carbs, bad carbs. Why carbs are not the enemy, how we feel with carbs, all that kind of stuff. Just go back through my different episodes. You can actually, if you go on to, I don’t know what Apple podcast or Spotify, you can actually scroll back and see all the different episodes. Or you can go to my podcast website, which is runningleanpodcast.com, and that will give you all the episodes that I’ve ever put out there. And you can, you know, just have a scroll through all of those as well.

So anyway, lots of information about carbs, right? But I realized I haven’t talked about the other macronutrients too much, and protein is one of those ones that does not get the air time that carbs get, even fat. Fat gets talked about a lot, you know, especially people who are trying to watch their weight and so they cut out all the fat, which is, we’ll talk a little bit about that in a second. That’s really not recommended, but protein is one of those things that we really need to focus on, especially as runners and when we’re talking about macronutrients, I just want to set the stage here.

The macronutrients that we’re talking about are fat, protein and carbohydrates. Fat and protein are both called Essential macronutrients. That means that your body does not produce fat or protein, so you have to get that in your diet. And when I talk, when I say fat, it doesn’t mean that your body doesn’t store fat. It does store fat, but your body needs fat in order to survive. If you were to go to a zero fat diet, this would be a problem. If you were to go to a zero protein diet, this would be a problem. You would die.

But carbohydrates are not essential. There is no essential requirement for the human body to consume carbohydrates. I’m not saying you shouldn’t consume carbohydrates. I’m just saying, isn’t it interesting that they are not essential, and I’ll talk more about that in a minute, too. But the macronutrients are the things that make up kind of the majority of our diet, fat, protein, carbohydrates. If you look at the back of most labels, it’ll give you the macronutrient breakdown. But there’s also something called micronutrients. And I’m not going to get into a lot of this, but just understand that micronutrients are not, they are required, and we, there are certain essential micronutrients that are required because our bodies that make them so we need to to get in our diet, things like vitamin A, vitamin B, vitamin C, vitamin D, iron, iodine, folate, zinc. There’s all kinds of essential micronutrients. And then there’s something called micro minerals, which is salt, potassium, magnesium, calcium. These are all essential as well. So we need to get those in our diet as well, because our body doesn’t produce those things. So as long as you’re eating a well balanced diet, you’re going to be getting all of the micronutrients and all the macronutrients that you need to be a healthy human being.

Okay, so now that we know there’s a difference between macronutrients and micronutrients, I wanted to talk a little bit more about carbs. So carbs are kind of considered non essential nutrients, so proteins and fats, vitamins, minerals, all those things I just mentioned are essential because your body doesn’t produce those. So your body actually produces glucose, which is carbohydrate on its own. And your body can actually use other energy sources if there’s no glucose available or very little glucose available. So fat is a good example of this, right? So just understand that you do not need to load up on the carbs all the time, because your body doesn’t really require that much in the way of carbs. Actually, there’s no essential amount of carbs that are required, you know?

And I’m not opposed to carbs, like I said, you know, I think they’re great for helping to improve your athletic performance. It’s fun to just eat some cake sometimes, or ice cream or whatever. So carbs are fine. They’re kind of addicting to a lot of people, though, I know I’m one of these people where I start eating carbs and I can’t stop, you know, so it’s one of those things where I need to really keep my carb intake in check.

Okay, so carbs are fine, but they’re just not essential in the same way that fats, proteins, vitamins and minerals are, but just understand it’s one of the macronutrients that’s talked about a lot, and the other one being fat. So fat is often touted as, like, the enemy of weight loss. Like I know, back in the 80s, they determined, you know, with some pretty shoddy science, that the reason people were getting fat is because they were eating fat. The reason people were overweight is because they were eating too much fat, so stop eating the fat. So they took all the fat out of everything. Everything became low fat, no fat, non fat. And with most of those food products, they replaced the fat with sugar. Because taking the fat out of stuff made it taste terrible. You know, you take the fat out of whatever. There are people who were like, oh, this is disgusting. And so they were like, oh, we’ll make this better, don’t worry. And so they added sugar to it, okay. Well, now everybody became even more overweight. And they’re like, See, you’re not eating all the fat, so you’re healthier. But everybody, the obesity rates have just skyrocketed in this country since we’ve done dumb stuff like that.

So you gotta eat fat like, fat is important. It is an essential nutrient. Fat and protein are both essential nutrients. If you don’t eat fat, you’ll die. There’s actually something called dietary fat deficiency. It’s kind of rare, but it can happen if you just, like, cut all the fat out of your diet. I know some people who have tried this, they’re like, Oh, I’m just gonna go super, I’m just gonna eat no fat, like zero fat. But it leads to things like vitamin deficiencies, dermatitis, slow wound healing, hair loss, sickness problems with your eyes not functioning properly because of like, vitamin deficiencies. There’s like, all kinds of problems that happen when you completely cut out fat. So don’t do that. Fat is a essential macronutrient. We have to get fat in our diet. Don’t be afraid of the fat. The fat is not causing you to get fat.

There’s other factors involved here, and carbs have a bigger role to play when it comes to gaining weight. So we don’t want to just cut out all the fat. We don’t want to go to some kind of a low fat diet, because a lot of times when you do that, you know, you’re replacing a lot of that fat with sugar, and your carbohydrate intake tends to go up pretty high. So just keep the fat in check. You know, I’m not saying you need to be wrapping bacon around sticks of butter and eating that every day. That’s not what we’re talking about here. But don’t be afraid of the fat. I eat lots of fat in my diet.

I actually found that I was trying to cut back on the fat a little bit as an experiment. So I did this for, I don’t know, for four to five months, something like that, and I noticed I just was more lethargic. My running wasn’t going as well. I just didn’t feel as good. Generally, I wasn’t making gains at the gym, and so I added more fat back into the diet, and I noticed that I started feeling better. I was sleeping better. I had more energy. My running improved. My energy levels throughout the day improved. My workouts got better. I started putting on some muscle again, like, so for me, eating a little bit more fat is good. It works for me. And everybody kind of needs to figure out their own fat intake or whatever. But just understand that.

You know, we don’t want to be just cutting all the fat out of the diet, but fat gets so much, you know, whatever you want to call it, press, people talk about fat a lot. Talk about carbs a lot. The one macro that I think you should really be focusing on here is protein for a lot of reasons. And I mean. Give you a few of them here.

Like, one of them is that when you eat more protein, you typically don’t eat as much food. So I’m a person who is, I’m a chronic overeater. I just eat a lot of food when I sit down to eat food, like, if you give me a large pizza, I can put a big, huge dent in that large pizza. People are like, oh, we’re going to be taking some of this home. I’m like, Yeah, I don’t think so. Like, I can put away some food, and I’m not a big person, but I just, especially when it comes to eating carbs. Carbs mess up your hunger signals. When you’re eating a lot of sugar, a lot of carbs, they make your body, they make you feel more hungry. You know, they increase the production of ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone, so you feel more hungry. So if you’re eating a lot of carbs, you’re going to be hungry all the time. They suppress the production of leptin, which is the fullness hormone, so then you’re hungry all the time, but you’re not feeling full when you do eat.

So that’s a bad combination, because now you’re just you tend to overeat, and you’re eating and you’re more hungry and eating more all the time. So when we increase the number of the, or the amount of protein that we’re eating, I think what happens for most people is they reduce the amount of fat, and they reduce the amount of carbs that they’re eating. And I would say, if you’re going to replace something on your plate, you know, I would say, just cut out some of the carbs and replace it with protein. We want protein to be the main event at every meal. We want protein to be the main event, and I’m not gonna, you know, necessarily tell you, you got to get so many grams of protein every single day.

I think there’s some new data out there that suggests that a good place for most people who are athletic, like for runners, I think a 0.7 grams of protein per pound of body weight is a pretty good place for most people to be. If you’re non athletic, you could probably go a little bit less than that, maybe 0.5, 0.6, some people, if you’re highly athletic, you know, maybe bodybuilder type of person, you might need closer to 1.0 gram of protein per pound of body weight, but I think runners can do really well at about 0.7 grams of protein per pound of body weight.

And this is some new data that’s been coming out. And you know, I’ve been trying this and working with a lot of clients who have been doing this, and it seems to work pretty well for most people. Again, you’re an individual, you got to do what works for you. But when you’re eating more protein, you tend to not eat as much and so and when you do eat, you tend to be more full, because protein is very satiating. And when it comes to, you know, satiety per calorie, protein is going to give you, you know, one of the best bangs for your buck there, okay?

Plus, you’re giving your body what it really needs. Protein is required to build lean muscle. And when most people try to lose weight, they just cut their calories. They lose weight, but they lose muscle through this process. We don’t want that. You definitely do not want to do that. So when you increase protein, and, you know, do some consistent strength training, this is going to stop this from happening. This is going to prevent the loss of muscle. So we want to make sure that you are eating enough protein to build lean muscle, not lose that if you’re trying to lose weight, especially if you’re training for any kind of you know, half marathon or a marathon, then you do not want to be losing muscle in the process.

Getting enough protein also means that you’re going to recover better from those hard workouts, whether at the gym or on the track or whatever, long runs, anytime you get out there and you push yourself hard, that you break down muscle tissue. Running is a catabolic activity. It breaks down muscle tissue, and you need to recover from those workouts, and so getting enough protein helps support the repair of muscle tissue and the building of new muscle tissue.

So if you want to make sure that you’re recovering properly from your workouts, you want a low inflammatory diet. So that means a diet that’s not going to keep you in a state of inflammation and bloating, which is, you know, the low carb diet tends to work pretty well for that, and you want to make sure you’re getting enough protein. So we want a higher protein diet.

Also, when you eat more protein, you will perform better as a runner, because you’re going to get stronger, you’re going to build stronger muscles. You can run harder, you can run faster, you can recover faster. Stronger muscles means you are less likely to get injured. It helps improve your immune function as well. So if you’re somebody that gets sick a lot, especially as you’re running more. I used to get sick all the time, late stages of marathon training when I’d be, you know, getting out there and doing these super long runs. You know, it’s just a lot of stress on your body, and it can really break down your immune system and compromise your immune system and help, you know, getting enough protein helps you to stay strong and build muscle tissue and helps to improve your immune function, which is amazing.

And then understand that when you’re eating more protein, this can really help with improving your weight loss for a few reasons. So you’re not as hungry all the time, like you stay more satiated throughout the day. You don’t need to eat as often. So you can eat a couple times a day. You don’t need to eat six or eight times a day, and you start to get in tune with your body’s natural hunger signals, which is a really powerful thing, if you think about it.

When did we start having MyFitnessPal to count all of our calories and track all of our macros? We started that. What, 6, 7 years ago, 10 years ago, I don’t know, but it hasn’t been that long, and before that, what did we do? How did people stay in shape? How did people not just blow up and get super fat? They just listened to their body. They just did what their body was telling them to do. Are you hungry? Eat something. Are you not hungry? Don’t eat anything. Don’t eat because you’re bored. Don’t eat because you’re stressed. You eat because you’re hungry, and when you’re eating more protein and fewer carbs, your body tends to be much better in tune with your natural hunger signals, and you tend to just eat less in general, you tend to eat fewer carbs in general too, because you’re satiated, you don’t need more.

So more protein has, gosh, so many benefits. You know, it also means you don’t need to count your macros, you don’t need to count your calories. You’re just going to feel better. You’re going to notice that you’re getting results. You’re going to lose more weight. You’re going to improve your strength, you know, more protein plus strength training. This is like magic for weight loss, it just helps improve your metabolism. Helps improve fat burning. There’s so many benefits. So for runners, especially runners who want to lose weight, or if you’re a runner who maybe you don’t need to lose weight, but you want to maintain a lean, strong body, you don’t want to keep breaking yourself down. You want to recover faster. You want to make sure that you’re building lean muscle tissue, then it’s more protein for the win every time. Cool.

All right, that’s all I got for you today. Hope that was helpful, and love you all. Keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.