Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
If you’re like most runners, you probably don't fully understand the importance of protein in your diet, and you might not be getting enough. Protein is one of those topics that can divide people …
Continue Reading about 74. The Ultimate Guide to Protein for Runners →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, sports nutritionist, Master life coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 74 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I’ve got a fun topic for us. It is the ultimate guide to protein for runners. Yeah, it’s fun. I said that protein is fun.
Here, here’s the deal. If you’re like most runners, you probably don’t have a good understanding of the importance of protein in your diet, and you probably aren’t getting enough, that’s gonna be my guess most people I talk to are not getting enough protein.
Protein is one of those topics that can actually divide a lot of people, especially in the health and fitness community. So everybody’s got an opinion, right? So I wanted to take a sort of a comprehensive look at protein from a couple of different angles, including some new research on the topic.
So in this episode of the podcast, I’m going to be answering questions that I get asked most often about protein, like, how much protein should I be getting? How does protein help promote weight loss? How does protein help with my running? What are the best sources of protein? How long after a workout should I take protein? What about protein supplements? Do you recommend these? Guess what if it has to do with protein?
And if it has to do with any of these questions I just went over, I got you covered. That’s why this episode is titled The Ultimate Guide to protein for runners. But before we get into that, be sure to come and check out the Running Lean podcast community on Facebook.
I created this group so that you would have a voice. So I do this podcast each week. And it’s just me talking into this microphone. The Facebook group gives us a chance to connect and have a conversation. It’s a place where you can ask questions and get answers and have fun. Have I mentioned that this is a fun group of like-minded runners? Well, it is, just go to Facebook, search for Running Lean community and come join in on the fun.
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Let’s talk about protein. Okay, are we cool? Everybody ready for this? All right. So what is protein? Protein is a long chain of amino acids. Proteins perform a vast array of functions within the human body including you know, there’s like metabolic reactions that happen with protein, there’s DNA replication.
Protein responds to different stimuli. It provides a structure to cells and organisms within the body. It helps molecules, you know, it helps transport molecules from one location to another in the body. Protein makes up everything in your body basically, right? Everything in your body is made of proteins. Proteins are the building blocks of organs, muscle, skin, hormones, and tissues, your body has to have protein.
To maintain the human body, we have to eat protein, okay, we don’t make protein internally. So protein is considered one of the essential nutrients that we have to have, that our body does not make. Fat and protein are two of the essential nutrients that we need.
Funnily enough, carbohydrate is not an essential protein or a nonessential nutrient. We don’t have to eat carbohydrates, we do need glucose. In order to survive, our brains need a certain amount of glucose, our muscles need a certain amount of glucose, but our liver provides all the glucose that we need.
So technically, we don’t really need to eat carbohydrates are not considered an essential nutrient. I’m not saying don’t eat them, I’m just saying we don’t need them. Okay. But protein is the other part of this is like we have to eat it. We don’t produce that from within our bodies. So we will die if we don’t eat protein or fat, okay?
So we don’t want to die. So we need a protein. Alright. Alright, and a podcast, we’re done. Just eat some protein. Okay, so why is protein important for runners? Well, protein plays a role in improving your running. So if the protein is key to building muscle, and repairing muscle tissue, then if you’re not getting enough protein, you won’t be recovering as well.
After those hard workouts, you won’t be able to repair the muscle damage that you do during those super long runs, or those super tough workouts, okay, you’ll just be continually breaking down muscle and not preparing it not rebuilding it properly. So for runners, protein is key. I mean, it’s key for everyone, but runners probably need more protein than the average person.
And here’s something cool when you train in the fasted state. So I’ve talked about this a lot like when you don’t eat before you go for a long run, this can actually help you to utilize protein more effectively. So training in the fasted state helps to optimize hormones, including growth hormone, and testosterone, which we all need.
But producing these hormones actually promotes protein synthesis, and therefore will help to repair muscles and help to grow muscle. So training fasted actually has this amazing benefit, where it’ll help you to utilize protein better, okay, so as a runner, we absolutely need to get enough protein.
I’ll talk about how much protein we eat and stuff like that in a minute. But just know that we break down muscle more than the average person, the sedentary person. So what about weight loss? Like what’s protein’s role in weight loss? So protein plays many roles in weight loss, not just in building lean muscle, that’s part of it.
Protein helps you to lose weight by actually turning off hunger signals. So researchers at the University of Kansas Medical Center discovered that adding more protein to the trial, the clinical trial, patients’ diets, when they added more protein, especially if they did this at the first meal of the day, literally decreased the signals in the brain that stimulate appetite and stimulate appetite, and lead to overeating.
So people were not eating as much, and they weren’t as hungry, because they were just all they did was increase the amount of protein they were eating. So that’s cool. That helps you to lose weight because you’re not going to be hungry all the time.
Another cool role that protein plays in weight loss is that you actually burn more calories just by digesting protein than you do by digesting carbs or fat. So this is called the thermic effect of food. And when you eat carbohydrates or fat, and protein, when you eat any food at all some of that food Some of the energy from that food goes to digesting that food, okay?
So when you’re eating fat, 0-3% of the calories from fat, go to digesting fat. So in other words you don’t need, you don’t use a lot of calories to digest fat because it can be easily absorbed by your body. Carbohydrates, 5-10% of the calories from the carbohydrates that you eat, go into breaking that down and digesting the carbohydrates.
So let’s even on the higher end of that, you know, let’s say 10%. So if you’re eating 100 calories of carbs, then you’re actually only going to absorb 90 calories of that, okay, so that’s cool. But protein, the thermic effect of protein, when you eat it, 20-30% of the total calories from the protein you eat goes into digesting it. This is amazing.
So at the higher end of that, you know, if you’re eating 100 calories of protein, only 70 calories actually get absorbed by your body. So you actually, you know, burn more calories when you’re just eating more protein, which is cool.
Another study they did at the Copenhagen University Hospital and was published in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that over the course of a five-year study, no macronutrient reduces the amount of belly fat for study participants more than protein. And that these results were mostly from animal-based sources of protein.
So just looking at a macronutrient, when they increased protein, then these people just lost more belly fat. So this is cool. These are big findings, they’re very important findings, okay, so protein actually, will definitely help you if you’re trying to lose weight. Now, if you’re not getting enough protein, this can lead to all kinds of problems. Okay.
So let’s think about this. Runners who are striving to lose weight, sometimes, they can be working out a lot, and then like really reducing the number of calories they’re eating. So they’re trying to do some sort of calorie-restricted diet. And they can be very protein deficient because they’re just not getting enough calories.
In general, they’re running all the time. And because they’re not eating enough food, basically, they’re not getting enough protein. And this, this can be a problem. Okay, so a couple of reasons.
Number one, when you reduce your calories, too much over a too long period of time, you put your body into this, starvation mode, which will lower your metabolism. And we don’t ever want to do that, right, we don’t want to lower our metabolism, we always want to increase our metabolism, right.
But not only that, you risk cannibalizing muscle, which means your body will start breaking down muscle to be used as energy because you’re not getting enough energy. Right. So that’s, that’s a problem with the calorie-reduced diets. Like we don’t want to go that route for sure.
But insufficient protein intake can also lead to loss of muscle. So you’re going to lose that lean muscle that you want to need for running. But if you’re not getting enough protein, you know you really risk losing muscle. And with that loss of muscle, your increase of injury goes up.
Especially things like stress fractures, stress fractures can be prevented by training properly and not overdoing it. You know, run, build up your base your long miles build that slowly is one way to make sure you prevent stress fractures and shin splints and stuff like that. But the other thing is making sure you get enough protein because you need to support muscle growth and strong muscles will help build you know help to support your skeleton and connective tissues and all that and will help to prevent injuries.
You also risk without enough protein, you risk other micronutrient deficiencies, so you’re not going to be getting enough of the vitamins and minerals that your body actually needs. So what’s the solution? What do we do? Hey, why don’t you just get enough protein?
So this leads me to like how much protein should we be eating or getting in our diet? You know? So if you look at the US Dietary Guidelines or the RDI, the recommended daily intake, suggests .4 grams of protein for every pound of body weight. This is way too low. And this is not just me saying this to you if you do a little research on these doctors, and sports nutritionists.
Anybody in the health and fitness field will tell you that this is not a recommended amount. This is like the minimum that you would want. Okay? So .4 grams of protein for every pound of body weight. So for me, I weigh 170 pounds right now, that would only be 68 grams of protein a day.
For me, this is not going to work for me at all I’m telling you right now. And they’re not taking into account my active lifestyle, or my, my running goals, or the fact that I do a lot of weight training, or that I’m trying to maybe build some muscle and become more muscular. And so this also assumes that a 170-pound sedentary person, like maybe a sedentary woman should be eating the exact same protein amount as me, that just doesn’t make any sense.
Okay, so just know that these, you know, RDI’s, the recommended daily intakes are very low and kind of the minimum. Okay. So the US military did a study on protein, and they published it in the Journal of Nutrition. And they found that higher-protein diets are actually associated with lower BMI, lower levels of visceral fat, and an improved cholesterol profile compared to protein consumed at the RDI levels.
So, you know, even the US military is like, Hey, you guys need to be eating more protein than what the, you know, the US Dietary Guidelines are recommending or whatever, are is not enough. Okay. So there are a lot of different protein recommendations out there.
And what I found, because I wanted to give you guys something that was easy for you to just kind of figure out and a good place for you to start. But like, so the sports nutrition organization that I’m licensed through the National Association of Sports Nutrition, recommends 1-1.5 grams of protein for every pound of lean body mass. So for this, you have to know your body fat percentages.
And it’s very, it’s pretty accurate, I would say this is a good place to go. Other trusted sources say to shoot for .8-1.1 grams of protein for every pound of your ideal body weight. So if you are if you currently weigh 200 pounds, but you want to weigh 150, then aim for.8-1.1 grams of protein for every 150 pounds, okay?
Now, here’s, I’m just throwing these numbers out there, but I got a much simpler formula for you. Okay, a much simpler way of figuring this out. And all of these things come to roughly the same number. But this is just an easier formula, I want you to think of protein as a percentage of your calories.
So around 30% of your calories from protein is what is recommended. For most people, this is the optimal number to optimize fat burning. So if you’re an extreme endurance athlete, or you’re a weightlifter bodybuilder, you might want more, you might want to go to like 35%, but like 30%, I think is a really great place for most people, especially runners. To begin, like, start there, you can, you know, adjust that up or down.
But let’s go with 30%. Okay, so, to figure 30% of your calories, this is an easy formula for you to do, all you have to do is multiply the total number of calories you eat each day by .075. Okay, so here’s how this works. If you’re somebody who eats about 1500 calories a day, times .075, that equals 112 grams of protein.
All right, now we’re getting somewhere as this seems much more normal, like where you should probably be. If you have a 2000 calorie diet, times .075 equals 150 grams of protein. Now, for me, I eat a lot. I work out a lot. I’m trying to build some muscle here. I’ve actually put on five pounds of muscle over the last 10-12 weeks, so I’m feeling good about that.
But for me, I eat around 2800 calories. So times .075 equals 210 grams of protein a day. Oh my gosh, that’s way different than the 68 grams of protein that the recommended daily intake suggests for somebody like me, right?
And some people say, well, what can’t you eat? You know, isn’t it a problem, like isn’t too much protein a problem? Is this something we need to be concerned about? And the short answer is no. You really don’t need to be concerned about it. You would have to be eating way, way more protein than I just mentioned, for a very long period of time.
And listen, I just did it as an experiment where I was eating basically nothing but protein, I was eating a very high protein, all carnivorous diet basically for about 40 days. And I was probably in the 200 to 220 grams of protein a day, and I didn’t have any issues at all. Honestly, I couldn’t eat more than that.
It’s just too much food, like, it’s really hard, it’s hard to overdo it with a protein, okay. But yes, there is also a concern, that too, eating too much protein will force your body to turn some of that excess protein, the protein that you’re not utilizing, it’ll turn some of that excess protein into glucose.
So there is this process that there’s your body does, it’s called gluconeogenesis. And this is a metabolic process that creates glucose from noncarbohydrate sources, namely fat and protein. This happens in your liver. So glucose gets created from fats and proteins. Now, here’s something interesting. Glucose can get created from fats. So the triglycerides that are floating around in your bloodstream can actually be used to create glucose that your muscles need that your brain needs.
And the way it works is a triglyceride is literally three fatty acids. That’s the tri part of it. And three fatty acids on a glycerol backbone. That’s what a triglyceride is. The glycerol part of it, it sounds like glucose, glycogen, that kind of thing, right? It’s very similar. So your liver can actually take a triglyceride and turn it into glucose that your body can use as fuel, which is totally cool.
Your liver will only use protein to make glucose as a last resort. So it’s going to use fat from your system first. And that can be turned into energy. This is one of the pathways that becoming fat-adapted really takes advantage of right because you’re you can create energy from fat.
So and then here’s something I think is fascinating. Glucose created from a triglyceride cannot turn back into a triglyceride. In other words, when your liver takes the triglyceride and turns it into glucose, it can’t then be stored as fat again, it has to be either burned as fuel or excreted in you know, urine or stool or whatever. So this is kind of a cool thing.
So your body will actually produce all the glucose that you need. And that extra glucose since has been created from a triglyceride can’t go back to becoming a triglyceride, so it won’t be stored as fat. Again, I think this is totally cool.
So because of this process, you know, your liver can use protein and turn some of that protein into glucose, which will raise your blood sugar, but this is the last resort, this is not going to happen until after it’s kind of used up the triglycerides that it needs. Okay, so it’s not something you really need to worry about too much, you would have to be eating way, way, way excess protein for you know, long periods of time.
Okay, so let’s talk about some high-protein foods. So foods that I would definitely recommend to get enough protein in your diet, okay. So there are basically there’s like two types of proteins out there. There are complete proteins and incomplete proteins. And you can kind of bulk these into like two different camps.
One is like, most animal proteins are considered complete proteins. And then most plant-based proteins are considered incomplete proteins. Okay. So I’m just going to say you know that animal protein are favored as a more high-quality source of protein, okay. So most plant proteins are what are considered incomplete. They don’t contain all the essential amino acids required for protein synthesis.
Okay, complete proteins have all the essential amino acids that our bodies need. So animal-based proteins like meat, poultry, fish, eggs, milk, and cheese, are all considered complete proteins. There are a couple of sources of plant proteins that are considered complete proteins, although they’re not as high quality or as easily absorbable.
Quinoa and soy would be the two key no’s – very, very high in carbohydrate though that’s something to be careful of. But soy is actually a really good quality, complete plant-based protein. So if you can tolerate soy, some people are allergic to soy, but if you can tolerate it, this would be the go-to for somebody on a plant-based or vegetarian diet.
Well, vegetarians can do like whey protein, which is awesome. But here’s the thing. As human beings, we work on the all or nothing principle when it comes to protein synthesis. So, really only complete proteins can be utilized, right? Partial proteins or incomplete proteins can’t really be utilized properly.
So if you’re somebody on a plant-based diet, you’re probably gonna have to combine different protein sources, and maybe supplements to be sure you’re getting all of the amino acids that your body actually needs to function properly. So and I’ve said this before, you know, plant proteins are designed for building and growing plants.
Animal proteins are designed for building and growing animals, we are animals and we prefer, we just prefer as human beings, animal-based proteins, okay? Nothing wrong with being a vegetarian or vegan if you want to go that route, but just make sure you’re getting the right types of proteins, right. And you may have to combine a few different things to get there.
So here are some high protein foods that I recommend eggs, obviously, an amazing source of protein, especially the whites, but eggs are just like so perfect. That’s like a 65% fat, they’re 30% protein, and then just a tiny little like a 5% carbs or something. And eggs, eggs are just the perfect little package. Right?
Now one egg is like six grams of protein. So you know, you eat four eggs, you know, you’re up to 24-25 grams of protein. This is awesome. This is gonna get you, you know, a great deal of ways towards your protein goals for the day. So eggs, an awesome source of protein.
One of the best sources of protein is chicken breast, eight ounces of chicken breast is like 70 grams of protein. So for most of us, if you can eat a couple of chicken breasts a day, boom, you’re good, like you’re pretty well covered, right?
Beefsteak, you know, eight ounces of steak is like 68 grams of protein.
Canned tuna is an amazing source of protein, four ounces of canned tuna is like 27 grams of protein.
Salmon, I love salmon and highly recommended it, you know, there are so many good health benefits from eating salmon, four ounces of salmon, 25 grams of protein.
Here’s a good plant base, there are two good plant-based sources of protein I’m gonna talk about one of them is tofu, and the other is tempeh base. So tofu, obviously made from soy, and four ounces of tofu can have anywhere from 8 to 15 grams of protein. And this depends on how firm it is. So the more firm the tofu is, the less water content and the denser it is, and the higher the protein content. So I always opt for the super firm is the most firm, whatever they call it, the firmest type of tofu that you can get.
And then tempeh is another soy-based protein. It’s made from soybeans. It’s fermented though, and so it’s a fermented soybean block. And so it’s very dense like there’s not a lot of water content in there. But the fermentation actually helps to break down the phytic acid in the soybeans, making the starches and the temporary in the temporary actually easier for you to digest.
So this is one of the best plant-based sources of protein, and four ounces of tempeh is 23 grams of protein. I know it’s amazing, right? Cottage cheese, Greek yogurt, and a cup of each of these have around 23 grams of protein. Lentils, a cup of lentils, when it comes to you know beans, legumes, I don’t know what that is. It’s a bean or legume, whatever.
Lentils are very high in protein, 18 grams of protein for a cup. But one thing with this one thing here is that 28 grams of carbs in a cup of lentils. So you’re kind of like, you know, that’s very high in carbohydrates. So I’m mostly talking about lower carbohydrate forms of protein here, but that one’s just pretty high in carbs.
Almonds, a quarter cup of almonds, seven grams protein, awesome. Here’s one, broccoli or Brussels sprouts, two cups of broccoli or Brussels sprouts gonna give you seven grams of protein. So there are all these amazing sources of protein out there.
Obviously, this is not a comprehensive list. These are just a few things that came to mind that are kind of high in protein. Definitely, you know, you can just Google this and you’ll find all kinds of other options but at starting adding some of these things into your diet and you know, one thing you can do if you’re somebody that’s leaning more towards a low carbohydrate approach, just like, lower the carbs and replace those carbs with protein.
Here’s the other thing to keep to consider. Protein is very filling, it’s very satisfying to eat, it’s filling, it fills you up, it keeps you full for longer, and you’re not going to be as hungry. You know, it also shuts down those hunger signals. So eat more protein, there are so many good benefits from this.
Okay, well, what about protein after we work out? So most people believe that you need to consume some protein right after a workout like you’ve got about 30 minutes, and you better get some protein in. Yeah, you know, get that shake, go on, or whatever. And so this is kind of a standard that’s been around for decades, you know.
But there’s some recent research that suggests that a larger window after your workout is fine. So according to the International Society of Sports Nutrition, consuming protein anytime, up to two hours after your workout is ideal for building muscle mass. So, you know, anytime up to about two hours is going to be ideal after that. It’s not terrible. But it’s just the ideal window is going to be up to two hours after a workout, right?
This works out perfectly for me, because I’m usually not that hungry right after a workout like I’m not eating, you know, right after I’m done with a heavy lifting session or a long run. I’m just not hungry right away. And I usually wait an hour or two, before I eat anything anyway. So it’s totally fine. So just know that you don’t have to slam down some protein, right? When you’re done running or lifting weights or whatever, you can wait up to two hours totally fine.
Okay, what about protein supplements, should we be supplementing with protein. So, you know, I talk a lot about eating real food. And I think this is probably the best way to go. For most people, getting your protein from whole foods is probably best. But I do believe there is a place for protein supplements.
So for example, some women find it difficult to get 100 or 120 grams of protein per day from eating food, because they would have to eat a lot of protein, a lot of chicken or a lot of eggs, or a lot of steaks and they just can’t do that just can’t eat that much protein, okay? Totally fine.
In this case, a protein supplement can be perfect, you know, take a protein supplement one or two scoops of protein usually there it’s like 20 to 25 grams of protein in a supplement. And you know, you could do that a couple of times a day. And that’s going to give you like half your protein requirement for the day, you know, and then you can eat real food to make up the rest, and then you’re good and you’re not stuffing yourself with food.
So a couple of the types of protein supplements that I recommend. The first one is whey protein, whey protein is dairy-based, but it contains all of the essential amino acids and it is quickly absorbed by your body. So this is like the gold standard when it comes to protein supplements is whey protein, this is like the best thing that you can take as a supplement, okay.
Second to that would be soy protein. So if you don’t do dairy, and you want like a plant-based then soy is going to give you it actually does contain all of the essential amino acids. And it’s been looked at been linked to some pretty impressive health benefits. So soy protein is actually pretty good when it comes to a plant-based protein supplement.
There are a couple of other plant-based protein supplements that do not contain all the essential amino acids, they’re pretty good but they just don’t contain all of the essential amino acids so that would be pea protein. It just doesn’t have all the amino acids that you need. And hemp protein.
Hemp protein is made from hemp seeds that have a lot of fiber, omega threes Omega six fats like these, these two like pea protein and protein, they’re fine, but they’re just not complete. They’re not going to give you everything that you need. Okay. Alright, so that is everything I have to say about protein at this time.
I hope you guys got something out of this. I hope you learned something I learned a lot just by putting this together and going back to a lot of the sources that I use and just kind of piecing it all together for this episode. I had a lot of fun doing this.
So if you got something out of this today, I would love it if you would share this with a friend that would mean a lot to me. Alright, until next time, love you all keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
This is part one of a two-part podcast series called “Becoming a Lean, Fat-Burning Machine and Making It Last For Life”. As a Sports Nutritionist and Weight Loss Coach for Runners, I help runners …
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there and welcome to episode 72 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And today, I’ve got part one of a two part podcast series that I’m doing called Becoming a Lean, Fat-Burning Machine and Making It Last For Life.
As a sports nutritionist and weight loss coach for runners, I help runners transform themselves into lean, efficient fat burning machines so they can end the yo yo dieting and finally get to their ideal weight. This subject is near and dear to my heart since I gained over 40 pounds in just a few years when I was training for marathons and ultramarathons training for and running marathons and ultra marathons and still gained like 40 pounds.
This did not make sense to me at all. What the heck is going on here? Well, I eventually figured it all out. I dropped those extra pounds, I learned how to keep them off for good this time. And now, I help as many runners as possible to do the same. So in this eye opening two part series, I’ll show you exactly what it takes to become a lean, fat burning running machine and most importantly, how to make it last for life.
But first, if you haven’t already done so, come check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. This is a group of runners who share similar health and fitness goals. You can ask questions, get help and feel supported. Listen, we all need to feel supported, especially when it comes to doing hard things like losing weight or training for a marathon or qualifying for Boston.
Having this community to lean into is so helpful. You’ll find encouragement, inspiration and even motivation from when you’re just not feeling it. Just go on Facebook and search for Running Lean community and join us.
And here’s a recent five star review of the Running Lean podcast from Erica and she says, “My weekly treat. I look forward to Patrick’s podcast each week, my treat over the weekend is to pop in my air pods and go for a run. While I take in the invaluable information of real life experiences. Tough but much needed honesty, encouragement and inspiration that Patrick provides. These podcasts cover a wide range of everyday obstacles you come to in life as you try and navigate your journey to being a stronger runner. And a healthier and happier you.”
Thank you, Erica, that was very cool. Thank you for sharing. And you can share the love too if you enjoy this podcast, it would mean a lot to me if you would just take a moment to leave a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen. I just would love that it just makes me feel good to know that this message is resonating with you guys.
And listen, I also know that all this talk about diets, sports nutrition, weight loss, becoming a fat adapted runner, all these things – it’s awesome. It’s super helpful. But it also can feel a little overwhelming. You probably want to know just like how do I get started? How do I make all of this work? Well, I got you covered as a one on one coach. I can help you make sense of all of this and help you apply these principles to your own life.
Listen, we’re all very different. We all have different metabolisms, different body types, different genetics, different goals, different likes, different dislikes. And there’s just not one approach that works perfectly for everyone. If there was, that would be amazing. It would make my job a whole lot easier, but there is not.
So the way coaching works is we work up a metabolic profile for you. We clearly define your health and fitness goals. Then we put together a plan that is specifically tailored to help you reach those goals. And it’s not just about diet and nutrition either. It’s about becoming the healthiest human being that you can possibly be physically, mentally, even emotionally.
I work with people who’ve been struggling with weight their whole life and they’re ready, finally ready to change for good. I work with runners who are tired of bonking all the time. They’re ready to stop hitting the wall at mile 18, so they can finish strong for a change.
I work with runners who just want to qualify for Boston finally they know in their heads they can do it but they just can’t seem to dial in their nutrition and drop those last 10 or 15 pounds they need to run faster. I work with people who just have an unhealthy relationship with food, they do a lot of stress eating, a lot of emotional eating, and they’re ready to take back control of their thoughts and feelings around food and maybe stop obsessing about what they’re eating all the time.
Whatever your health and fitness goals, I’m here for you, I can be your guide, and show you the way to help you to become the most badass version of yourself yet, yet. So to learn more and apply for coaching, just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply.
Alright, so I did a similar podcast series around this time last year. So this was episodes 19, 20, and 21. And I thought it was time to revisit this and provide an update because I’ve learned so much in this past year, I’ve helped so many runners become efficient fat burning machines, helped so many people lose weight and improve their running and improve their health.
And I wanted to spend a little bit of time over these next two episodes to share a lot of new information with you guys. So if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, some of this will be a review, you may have heard some of this before, but I think a lot of it’s going to be new and new and improved just for you. Okay, so lace up those running shoes, pop in those air pods and let’s get into this.
So the problem as I see it for a lot of runners is that a lot of runners are just carrying around too much body fat. A lot of runners are what would be considered overweight or even in the obese category. And we all have this idea of what runners look like – these skinny, super lean, no meat on the bones kind of person, right? This idea of like these elite marathoners, right.
But that is far from reality. A lot of runners just struggle with their weight and they have a hard time losing weight. Maybe they keep gaining weight year after year, like I you know, and running isn’t working to stay lean anymore. It’s just not keeping the weight off anymore.
And, you know, most runners that I know and a lot of the runners that I work with are coming to me because they’re they’re kind of addicted to sugar and carbs, you know, they love their doughnuts, their beer, their pizza, their goos, their gels, their sports drinks, all this sugar, right.
And this is a problem. This is a big problem for a lot of people. You know, running is great. It’s good for you. It keeps you in good cardiovascular shape, it builds endurance, it helps with stress relief, it’s good for your mental health, it’s good for your overall health, right? But running alone is just not a very good way to lose weight.
Even runners who look good on the outside, like you would look at them and go that person is pretty, pretty decent looking and they don’t look, you know, overweight, a lot of runners are what is considered trophies. You know, they’re thin on the outside, but fat on the inside. This was definitely me, you know.
I’ve worked with many runners who have steadily gained weight, they can’t lose that weight. Their doctors have told them that they’re pre diabetic or maybe even diabetic. They maybe even have moved into the obese category. A lot of times doctors will put them on diabetes medicine, like Metformin. And these are people who are runners, and they run regularly.
They’re running marathons, and they’re being put on diabetes medicine. Some of these doctors will tell them that they need to get their blood sugar under control, or they will have to go on medication. So they might be pre diabetic. Or they might suggest that they switch their diet, they stop eating all the sugar and the carbs, they switch them to like a low carb diet, right?
So a lot of these people might look okay on the outside, but they have something very different going on inside right? Inside they’re unhealthy. You know, they’re overweight. They’re at risk for a slew of metabolic diseases like Type Two Diabetes and insulin resistance, heart disease, high blood pressure, even obesity.
And here’s the thing, like a lot of people are just not talking about it. Because it’s like, oh, I’m a runner, so I’m healthy. I can just eat whatever I want. And for a lot of us, that’s just not the case. And this isn’t just an opinion. I get messages from people every single day about this. So here’s a few.
Here’s one. This guy says back in my 40’s, I was 170 pounds and running marathons in two hours and 30 minutes. That’s fast, you know, and he says now I’m in my late 50’s And I weigh in at 213 pounds. Oh my gosh, in 10 years, this person has put on 43 pounds, that is crazy.
Another one is, I’m killing myself running this month to meet a goal and I’m up four pounds, WTF. Here’s another one, I ran my first half marathon and full marathon in the past year, I gained weight training for both. And I’m so confused, and I’m exhausted from the battle of trying to get back to my original weight without ditching my love for running.
You guys, these are just messages I get from people all the time. Here’s somebody that’s like, you know, been training for a marathon, ran a half and a full marathon and cannot get back to their original weight, they gained a bunch of weight.
And then here’s what I got just a few days ago, I was training for my first marathon in 2019. And I ended up gaining around 30 pounds, which was super frustrating, because then it just made running even harder. You know, and I’ve talked about this before I work with someone who’s been on a daily run streak since 2007. This person has like more than 5000 straight days of running. And when I say run streak, this person is running like at least three miles a day.
And in the process gained over 50 pounds. That’s crazy. And if you’ve ever like ran a marathon or half marathon, or you’ve watched one, you’ve probably noticed this trend, right? Sure the people in the front, the leaders, a lot of them are pretty lean and pretty fit. But most of the people you see would be considered, you know, overweight.
And it’s not a judgment. And I’m not shaming anyone here because this was me too. For sure. I was one of those people that was like, you know, fat as a runner as a marathon runner as an ultra runner. You know, I’ve been running marathons and Ultras for like, 15 years now.
And prior to that, before I got into running, I was very overweight, 230 pounds, fat, sick, I drank too much. And I had this big wake up call in 2003 when I was diagnosed with cancer. And at that moment, I decided I had to change my life, I had to get healthy. So I started running and changed my diet. And it really did change my life.
And I went, you know, basically I started eating more vegetables, right? I just went like vegetarian. And then I went plant based, you know, for like 10 years. And this worked for a while. But I slowly started to gain the weight back again, even though I was still running marathons, and ultramarathons. And I was training all the time.
And this picked up pretty quickly. You know, in the last few years here for me, you know, I started gaining weight, like crazy. So I started running more to try to run it off, you know, and it just wasn’t working. And I was still running a lot, you know, one to two marathons a year.
Several Ultras, every year, I would work out at the gym like three times a week. I was walking all the time, doing yoga, very active lifestyle, and still gaining weight. And by the time I had put on over 40 pounds, and I was up to almost 200 pounds again, I was like, I’ve got to do something about this, you know.
So I did, I changed a bunch of stuff that I was doing, you know, but really the biggest change was with my diet. I’m going to talk more about that in just a second. But I was able to drop those 40 pounds in a very short amount of time. And I’ve been able to keep it off effortlessly. And today, I’m 54 years old, I’m 165 pounds. I’m leaner and stronger than I’ve ever been in my life. Like I feel amazing. I have a ton of energy all the time. Running is amazing. I’m still running because I love it.
I’m running because I love it, not because I have to run to try to maintain my weight. And that’s like the biggest issue right? There’s like, running alone is just not enough. It’s not enough. So the biggest problem I see really is that, you know, people use running as a way to try to lose weight and it’s just not a very effective weight loss strategy.
Okay, we’ve been told for over 40 years now that in order to lose weight, and stay healthy, you have to just eat less and exercise more. This is called the energy balance theory. And it’s called a theory because it’s just that – it’s a theory. So the energy energy balance theory says that it really doesn’t matter what you eat as long as you burn more calories than you consume. You’re good. Right?
That’s it. That’s the end of the story. Just burn more calories in your eating and you’ll be fine. This is fine if you’re like a combustion engine, right but we’re not combustion engines. The human body is much more complex. There’s a lot more going on here that has to be addressed.
Even a combustion engine will break down with the wrong kind of fuel. Have you ever put diesel gasoline or diesel fuel into a gasoline engine and see what happens? The whole thing starts smoking and just explodes, like it does not operate properly. And I think that’s kind of what’s happening here.
We’re putting the wrong kind of fuel in our body, it does matter. Calories do matter a little bit, you know, calories play a role, for sure. You know, you can’t eat 4000 calories a day, and not exercise and expect to lose weight so that’s just not going to work, right?
But it’s not just about calories. Okay? And it’s not, it’s not like running is terrible. Like you shouldn’t run or anything like that. Don’t get me wrong about that, running is amazing. It’s so good for your cardiovascular health, for your mental health. It’s a great way to like release endorphins and dopamine and feel good running actually makes you feel happier.
But as a weight loss strategy, just not very effective. So what’s going on here? What’s this whole energy balance theory, why isn’t it working? So it’s not just about the calories in versus calories out, right? In order to lose weight, what do you have to do? You’ve got to burn the fat, right?
That’s what we’re trying to do when we talk about losing weight, we’re not talking about losing muscle, we want to lose the fat. Okay, so in order to lose weight, we’ve got to burn fat. The part that most people don’t understand is that in order to get into fat burning mode, you have to remove the body’s preferred source of fuel, which is sugar, so your body will burn sugar first, and as long as there’s sugar available to burn, you will not be very efficient at burning fat.
Okay, the goal here is to transform your body to change your body from a sugar burner to a fat burner. Okay, so the main regulator of this process in your body is a hormone called insulin, when you eat sugar, or carbohydrates, so sugar is just a concentrated form of carbohydrate. It’s like a pure form of carbohydrate.
Okay, so when I talk about carbs, I’m talking about sugar. When I talk about sugar, I’m talking about carbs all the same thing. When you eat carbs, your blood sugar goes up. Insulin is then released to bring your blood sugar down. Blood sugar goes down. Everything’s cool, right?
But here’s the problem. Insulin has all these other effects on the body. So when insulin is elevated, your body is put into this state of fat storage mode. So insulin is like the security guard that keeps the fat inside the fat cells. And as long as insulin is present, the fat is going to stay right where it is. Okay.
So all of that energy from the carbohydrates that you’re eating, it can’t all be used right away. So insulin sends signals telling your body okay, store some of this energy as fat, we’re going to use this later. Okay, and then we’re going to lock it up in here, and we’re going to hold on to this fat and we’ll use some of this later for fuel. This is fine as the way our bodies are designed to work.
But when insulin is elevated all the time, your body is constantly in this state of storing fat. And now we’re getting to the gist of the problem, you’ve got to get your body out of that fat storage mode and get your body into fat burning mode. Okay?
So insulin is high, you’re storing fat, the fat cannot be used for fuel, we got to bring the insulin down so that you can start burning the fat. And don’t just take my word for it. There’s a fantastic book out there that lays all of this out, it explains the science in great detail. It’s called The Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung. Awesome, awesome book.
So it’s not just about the calories you’re eating, it’s more about what types of calories you’re eating. So when you’re eating a diet that’s high in sugar, and high in other highly refined carbohydrates like flour. This is going to keep you in that fat storage mode because insulin is always going to be high.
So when we remove those problematic carbohydrates from your diet, this helps switch off the insulin signals and helps to get your body into the fat burning mode. All right. My whole coaching program is built around helping runners become fat burning machines. Okay.
Everything we do is like we want to be burning fat. Fat is a great source of fuel for running, and it’s how you lose weight. But here’s the problem. Here’s what it looks like for a lot of runners. A lot of runners will eat a very high carbohydrate diet, right?
So they’re eating pizza and ice cream and donuts and you know drink a lot of beer and stuff like that. So you’re just like consuming carbs all the time, your body is just full of carb energy. And so carbohydrates get turned into glucose, which gets stored in your muscles as glycogen, you know, so glycogen is great. This is what fuels you know, running and things like that.
But the problem is, if you’re fueling up on carbs all the time, your glycogen is like always topped off. And so a lot of that energy has to get stored as fat. So typical runners eat tons of carbs, and they’re just, you know, a lot of the energy they’re eating is getting stored as fat. Okay.
And then, you know, in the days leading up to a long run or a race you like do carbo loading. So you’re eating even more carbs, you know, pasta, spaghetti dinner, you know, and all this. And then, you know, before your run, before you head out the door, you’re fueling up with, you know, pancakes, or bananas, or what other other carbs that you need energy drinks in order to top off, you know, your carbs stores are even more.
And then while you’re running, you’re sucking down the goos and the energy drinks and all this sugar. And you’re using carbs as fuel while you’re running. And then when you’re done running, what do you do? You replace all those carbs, you burn with more carbs, more pancakes, and, you know, more energy drinks, and recovery drinks and all this stuff.
And you’re only ever burning carbs, you’re just like in carb burning mode all the time. And a lot of that energy cannot be burned, so it gets stored as fat. So you’re burning carbs, you know, almost exclusively. And storing a lot of that energy is fat, and you never get into the, into the fat you never get into fat burning mode. Right.
This is why you can run a million miles and still be overweight. This is why you gain weight a lot of times when training for a marathon or an ultra marathon is because you’re just overloaded with carbs. Okay. And again, like my whole program here is to help you become a more efficient fat burner.
And the two reasons are number one, fat is an amazing source of fuel for running. So fat delivers more energy per gram than carbs, like you get nine calories of energy per gram of fat. Whereas from carbs and protein, you only get four calories of energy. So this is more than twice the amount of energy from fat.
Also, your body can only store a small amount of carbohydrate in the form of glycogen in your liver and in your muscles. So it works out to something like 100 grams or so of glycogen in the liver and around 400 grams of carbohydrate in the form of glycogen stored in the muscles.
On average, you know, the average runner can probably store around 2000 calories of total energy in the form of glycogen in the body. Once that’s depleted, you have to keep adding more or you’re going to bomb this is when you hit the wall because you’ve run out of fuel.
Whereas your body can store an almost unlimited amount of energy in the way of fat. So I’m pretty lean, I have around 15% body fat, which equates to around 20 pounds of fat on my body. And if you wouldn’t know that by looking at me, but there’s about 20 pounds of fat on me, which is good as healthy, right?
That’s over 9000 grams of fat, or, like 81,000 calories of stored energy available at any given time, like I could not run enough to blow through all that energy. So not only does fat provide more than twice the energy of carbs, but you’re carrying around an almost unlimited supply of fat all the time, even for the leanest of us right.
So when you become a fat adapted runner, meaning you’ve adapted your body to burning fat more efficiently, you’re burning fat as your main source of fuel. When you do this, when you make this switch, you become virtually bonk proof. Because you always have plenty of energy on board. You just can go okay, so that’s number one.
Like these are why I’m talking about fat burning, why it’s so important. Number one is fat is an amazing source of fuel for running. Okay, and the second reason why it’s so important to become a fat burning machine is because there’s this amazing side benefit to burning fat, you lose weight.
When you start burning fat instead of all the sugar, you’re actually able to lose weight. You’ll burn through the extra fat that you have on your body. It is very, very difficult to lose weight while eating a high carbohydrate diet. Okay? If you ditch the sugar, ditch the refined carbs, like flour, and lose weight, it’s going to become so much easier for you.
And here’s a question I get a lot from people. It’s like, don’t I need carbs for running? And like, yeah, a lot of people have been, you know, coming to me with this, and I just need the carbs to run. I need the carbs to run. And this is kind of old school thinking it goes back to like the 70s.
There was a guy, Professor Tim Noakes, who wrote a book. This was like the runner’s Bible it’s called the Lore of Running and he talked about it. He wrote a whole section in there about carbo loading, for running and how you need the carbs to run, and how carbs are so great as fuel for running, and not too long ago.
But it was many years ago that he did this, but he completely had an about face around all of this. He’s like, you know, carbohydrates are a problem for a lot of people. And he totally changed his tune. He’s like, you know, runners really don’t need carbs to run, they can really fuel themselves very, very efficiently, with fat instead.
And they will reduce all these metabolic issues. He was a tofi. He was one of these guys that was thin on the outside, but fat on the inside. He had run like 70 marathons and was diagnosed with type two diabetes.
And so he did this thing, he was at a book signing, and he very dramatically, like, tore out that chapter from his book on carbo loading and said, This is irrelevant. Now I’ve learned that there’s a better way to go.
So just, you know, he tore it out of the book, I think that’s really cool. So, you know, it’s kind of old school thinking, you know, it goes back for, you know, 40-50 years or whatever. And yeah, carbs will give you fuel for running, but they have this big side effect, they make you hold on the fat, like they’re storing fat. And some people can handle this, some people can handle a high carbohydrate diet, you know, there’s something like maybe 15% of the population who can tolerate a very high carb diet.
Most of us though, cannot. Most of us are what is considered carbohydrate intolerant. That means that when we eat carbs, we put our body into this fat storing mode that we just cannot lose weight and we gain weight incessantly.
So if you’re a part of that 15% or whatever that number is great. Eat all those sugary gels. You want carbo load with pasta before your races, eat all the bread, drink the beer and enjoy. Like you’re you’re one of the few, okay. But for the rest of us who have tried that, and it doesn’t work, or maybe it used to work when we were younger, it’s not working anymore, we need to take a different approach.
So I’ve been following a pretty low carbohydrate diet for a while now. And I have to tell you, I’ve never bonked, I’ve run several marathons, I even ran a 50k without the need for any goos or gels. I don’t use calories for my runs, and it feels amazing. Honestly, I feel like I can run all day. I’ve run two marathons and 50k all on zero calories just using my own stored body fat as a source of fuel. That’s it.
And it’s not just me that thinks this is a better way to go like there are a bunch of new elite runners, even elite ultra runners who are turning to a low carbohydrate approach to fueling for running. Tim Olson, years ago, he won the western states 100 miler following this low carb diet and he was one of the first people to do something like this and people are like, what is this guy doing?
Zach Bitter held the world record for running the fastest 100 miler up until recently. His record was broken recently, but he ran 100 miles in 11 hours and 19 minutes. Holy smokes, this guy is fast. And he does basically a very low carb diet. And, you know, he’s setting records and he still holds the record for the 12 hours, you know, running the most miles in 12 hours.
Mike McKnight this guy is known for winning like 200 mile races like this is his, you know, preferred distance is that – 200 miles. And just for kicks, he ran 100 miles on zero calories just to show that you can do it as a fat adapted runner, you know.
Dave Scott six times, six time Ironman champion. He now trains athletes on a low carb approach. Even Michelle Hearn, Michelle Hearn is so awesome. She’s a registered dietician, and she’s the author of a book called The Dietitians’ Dilemma. So she had this dilemma where she was working as a diet registered dietitian in hospitals.
And she was forced to, to give diabetic patients, you know, orange juice and bagels and sugary breakfast and pancakes with syrup and all this stuff. Like this was what she was told to give these people. And it was just making their diabetes worse, and they would just have to up their insulin that they were giving them and all kinds of problems. She was just like, this is crazy. Something has to change. If you guys want to read a really interesting book, it’s very eye opening, Dieticians’ Dilemma.
But Michelle Hearn is also an ultra runner. And she recently ran a 50k in like 3 hours and 56 minutes, like she’s super, she’s badass. And she does like a carnivore diet, like she is just like a zero carb person. So she’s really cool.
I think something like 4 of the top 11 ultra runners in the world back in 2020, we’re following some sort of a low carb approach. And they were doing it not because it was like, weird, or you know, fringe, but they were doing it because it enhances their running performance. They were performing like, these are some of the top runners in the world. And they’re following this approach. Because it’s good for running. It really is amazing, right?
So a big question a lot of people ask me is like, how do you make the switch? Like, how do you switch from being a sugar burner to a fat burner? Like I get it, Patrick, I want to be a more efficient fat burning machine, right? How do I do this?
So really, the, the, the way you get started is pretty easy. It’s not. It’s simple, but it’s not easy. I’ll say it that way, you’ve got to stop eating the most problematic types of carbohydrates. This is mainly sugar, and flour. These are probably two of the most unhealthy things you can eat.
Sugar and flour are in everything. And it’s really hard to get away from this stuff. But if you can, then you will absolutely begin to change the way your body works, you’re just going to feel amazing, I promise you. Sugar, flour, and vegetable oil, these things are really bad for you. Try to stay away from those three things, okay? If you could just make this one change, it will help you so much, you’re gonna you’re it’s gonna go a long way to becoming healthier.
And, you know, like I said, it’s a simple thing to do, just stop eating sugar and flour. But it’s not easy, because in order to become fat adapted, you reduce your carbohydrate intake, and then you’ve got to train your body to adapt to using fat for fuel, this is the part that people don’t like.
Because fat is not as easily accessible as fuel. At first, it takes a little while for your body to adapt to this. And it can take anywhere from like two to six weeks. And a lot of people who start with they’re like, this sounds like a great idea, I’m going to do this. And then they start, they cut out the sugar, and they start running and they keep running and then all of a sudden running becomes hard. And it’s uncomfortable.
And a lot of people just quit, they can’t hang, you know, running is gonna be hard for a few weeks. And what I need to say to you guys right now is that if you want to do this and you want to give it a shot, you got to stick with it, you have to stick with it, because the results of the things that you get on the other side of this adaptation process are amazing, okay.
But it is uncomfortable. And it feels like you have no energy because you don’t, your body is not used to using fat for fuel. So you have to train it to do that. And the way you do it is you just go out there and run.
And I work with my clients on this and believe me they have issues like it’s, it’s challenging, you know, but it’s a little different for everyone. Okay, everyone’s a little bit different. Everybody has different metabolisms, different fitness levels, different goals and stuff. So, you know, I work with my clients and put together a very personalized plan that works for them.
And some people can get through this tough part pretty much unscathed, like they can handle the first few weeks and get through that tough period. Other people it takes a little bit longer, but we tweak things and we’re always trying to make it a little bit easier. There’s a few things you can do to kind of alleviate some of this discomfort you know, during those first few weeks.
But I will say this, and I tried this a few years ago on my own it was very hard. I had a very hard time doing this. And most people trying to do this on their own just can’t do it. They just give up because it kind of sucks. Learning is hard for a while. But I promise you, if you stick with it, the resort the rewards are like so worth it, it’s truly life changing.
So some of the things you can experience when you become a lean fat burning running machine, when you try, you know, transform yourself from a sugar burner to a fat burner, obviously, you lose weight, because you’re going to give your body a chance to actually start burning the fat instead of storing it right, you won’t feel hungry all the time, you’ll feel more full and more satisfied for longer you won’t be, you know, obsessing about food all the time.
Because when insulin is high, it kind of jacks up your hunger signals and your satiety signals. So when we can bring insulin levels down, those things start working properly, okay, you’re not going to need to eat every, you know, one to two hours, like when you’re eating a high carb diet, because you’re like, I’m hungry all the time. Right?
That’s, that’s not normal, right? You can go 8 or 10 or 16 hours without food, and you’ll be fine, you know. And you can kind of get off of that, you know, addictive response that we have to sugar and carbohydrates. You can still have them here and there. But you won’t feel like you need them, you won’t be obsessed about them.
Some of the things you can experience when you become more efficient at burning fat is you don’t really need to bring fuel on the long runs, right? I always take water and electrolytes with me, but I don’t have to bring goos. I haven’t had a goo and a year and a half.
You know, you don’t have to have sugary carbs with you every 30 or 45 minutes during a run I do all these long runs up to 50k. So up to 32 miles so far, unfueled, you know, with just running on my own body fat, zero calories, right? You don’t have GI distress from all the sugar that you’re eating right. A lot of people have GI problems when they’re eating a lot of sugar.
You basically have limitless fuel on board, right? So you become virtually bonk proof. There was this couple Meredith Loring and Sammy Innokin. And they were rowers. And they set a record by rowing from California to Hawaii in a rowboat, in 45 days. And they did this on zero sugar, zero carbs, they follow a low carb diet. And they did this without all the sugary fuel, you know what I mean?
So like, there’s just unlimited things you can do. You know, when you make this switch, you will improve your body composition, for sure. Because you’ll be preserving lean muscle mass, you’ll you’ll be able to build and keep more muscle tissue, you’ll be able to increase your power to weight ratio, which means you can be a more powerful runner, a faster runner, you’ll have more sustained energy throughout the day, you won’t be crashing from these, like when you have to eat a bunch of carbs in the afternoon.
Or you know frappe or a Jamba Juice from Starbucks in the afternoon. Because you’re just like, I need some energy, you know, and then you come crashing down and you take a nap after that like that just goes away. Also when you’re burning fat, you have more mental clarity, more mental focus, better concentration, because your brain actually needs fat to work properly.
And a lot of people experience this, they’re like Patrick, I don’t have this brain fog anymore. Like I didn’t even realize I was so foggy in my brain. But now I feel you know, like, everything is more clear to me now. And listen, you’re just gonna feel better about yourself, because you’re becoming healthier overall, you know, so you’re optimizing your health and your happiness.
And you know what? Running becomes more fun when you lose weight and you and running is lighter. Like if you’re 30 pounds overweight, carry around a 30 pound weight with you and run with it. This is really hard to do. You know, I imagined myself carrying around one of those 45 pound weights from the gym, you know, trying to run with that home. I got up but I was running with that not that long ago, throw that weight down and start running and how much easier is it going to feel? Oh my gosh.
So here’s a little secret for you guys. This is not really all about weight loss or even being able to run all day without bonking. Those things are awesome, though. But this is about becoming the healthiest human being that you can possibly become right? It’s about becoming fit and healthy and not just for a little while.
Not just you know, for a month or two, but this is like, what this is what we want for the rest of our life. Being healthy is not some destination you’re trying to get to, it becomes a way of life. It’s about Running Lean for life. So here’s the thing, the most challenging part of all of this is how do I make it last for life? How do I sustain this? Making it last.
This is like the biggest challenge that I help my clients with. This is the biggest challenge with any kind of diet, any kind of lifestyle change, the number one issue people have with sticking to any kind of healthy eating program losing weight, whatever it is, anyone can follow a diet for like, a minute, anybody, you know, follow weight loss program for a few weeks, or maybe a month or two, but several years? Most people just can’t do it. Most people give up, they quit, it’s too hard.
So this is a huge, huge part of what I do. This is why I’m a coach. I give people the tools and I teach them exactly how to make it last for life. This is the work that we really do together. I’ll help you break all those old habits and establish new healthy habits that just become part of how you live your life going forward and becoming healthy becomes who you are. It’s who you are. And it’s what you do. Making it last is so important.
It’s such a big topic that I’m doing a whole other podcast episode on just this part of it. Okay. So, you know, be on the lookout for part two of this discussion, which is going to be all about how do we make this last for life. Listen, I’m always striving to become more, I’m always striving to become healthier. I’m always striving to become, you know, to learn and grow. And I want that for you too.
I want you to become the most healthy, most badass version of yourself yet. Because I’ve done it. I know what it feels like. It’s amazing. I’ve done it for myself, I help other runners just like you do this every single day, and I want you to want this for yourself.
I want you to do this because you are worth it. Your health for the rest of your life is so worth it. I want you to make being healthy, just part of who you are what you do. Okay, so making it last. That’s all coming up in part two. So if you haven’t already done so be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you get part two of the discussion as soon as it comes out.
All right, I talked a lot today. I hope you got something out of this episode today. And if you did, please consider sharing it with a friend. I love you all, keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
I recently decided to do a little nutrition experiment on myself. I trained for a marathon while following a zero-carb diet, and then I ran that marathon without carb-loading and without the use of …
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.
Well, hey there, and welcome to episode 71 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today I’m talking about zero carb marathon training. What the heck is this all about? Well, recently, I decided to try a little experiment, a little nutrition experiment on myself.
I trained for a marathon or at least, you know, did the good portion of my training while following basically a zero carb diet. And then I ran that marathon without carb loading without the use of any fuel at all. And why would I do this? Why would anybody do this? How did the training go? How was the race? Did I crash and burn? Is this something you should consider trying for yourself?
Well, in this episode of the Running Lean podcast, I answer all of those questions. I’m going to share my results of this experiment. And I’ll talk about what it was like to train for a marathon and then run that marathon without the use of carbohydrates as fuel. So that is all coming up shortly.
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Here’s a another five star review of the Running Lean podcast. This is from TimeToChange71. And they said, “Life Changing podcast. I’ve been listening to all the episodes many several times, and they’re so motivating and so informational.” Thank you very much, TimeToChange71.
If you enjoy the podcast, it would mean a lot to me. If you could just take a moment and leave a five star review. It’s a way of just saying hey, thanks, Patrick. I appreciate what you’re doing here. And it helps other people to kind of find the show.
So whether you listen on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google Play or whatever, definitely leave a review if you can, thank you so much. Appreciate that.
And then here listen, I know I talk a lot about diet, nutrition, weight loss, and all of these things, you know, running without carbs becoming fat adapted and all this stuff. And it can probably seem a little overwhelming. And I get it I totally understand. And I got you covered too. You know, as a coach, this is what I do every day is I help people make sense of all this to help you apply these principles to your own weight loss or running journey.
Whatever your goals are. Listen, we’re all different. We all have different body types, metabolisms, different goals, different likes and dislikes. There’s not one approach that works for everyone. And what I’m talking about today, this whole zero carb training thing, this is not for everyone, okay. It’s just something I was playing around with.
I’m going to share that whole experience with you. I think you might find it kind of interesting. But if there was one thing that works perfectly for everyone, we wouldn’t be having these conversations, you know, there would just be one thing that we all did, but it doesn’t work that way.
So with coaching, what I do is I work with you to come up with a plan that works for you based on your metabolic profile based on your health and fitness goals based on your likes and dislikes. And then we put together something that is tailored to help you reach your goals. Okay.
And this isn’t just about losing weight. It’s not just about diet. This is about becoming the healthiest human being that you can possibly be physically, mentally, and emotionally. You know, I work with runners who are tired of gaining and losing the same 20 pounds over and over again.
I work with runners who are maybe already pretty fit but need help dropping those last 10 or 15 pounds, so they can run lighter and faster, maybe they want to qualify for Boston. I have worked with people who aren’t really runners, they want to lose, you know, 50 or 100 pounds, and they can’t run, but they want to be a runner.
They desire to turn their life around and become a healthy person who could be a runner, they want to become a runner, they wanted to their whole life to be a runner. But they need to lose this weight in order to get there.
So whatever your health and fitness goals, I’m here for you, I’m here to be your guide to show you the way to help you to become the most badass version of yourself. To learn more and apply for coaching, just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply. And I’ll see you over there.
Alright, let’s talk about this zero carb marathon training. What did I do? And why did I do this? So first of all, what I did was, I adopted basically a zero carb diet. And some people would call this like the carnivore diet.
Okay, so I was not eating plants, I was eating, basically just animal based foods. So meat, eggs, cheese, you know, some dairy, but really no plants at all. Okay, so it wasn’t really like zero carbs, like, you really can’t do that. I mean, eggs have a couple of grams of carbs in there, I guess you could eat just like steaks or something like that. But I didn’t really want to do that.
So this is basically a very, very, very low, almost zero carb diet. And my goal was to do this for 30 days or so. And I decided to do this during the last part of my marathon training. So before I you know, I had all these long runs scheduled, and I wanted to see how it would affect my training. Okay.
So why would somebody do this? Why did I choose to do this? Well, I study nutrition all the time, and I’ve heard lots and lots of studies that show how eating plants can be somewhat toxic for human beings, like, plants have these built in defense mechanisms. Okay, so plants can’t really run away. So in order for them to defend themselves against predators, meaning animals that would eat them, they make it hard for animals to digest them.
So a lot of plants are not edible, right? And a lot of plants are very hard to digest for a lot of animals. The fiber content in a lot of plants gets passed through the human digestive system, right.
So we talked about, Oh, you want, you want to get your fiber, eat a bunch of plants, right, and you’ll get all this fiber. So there are some animals that have adapted to eating a lot of plants. You know, there’s, there’s animals like, you know, elephants and gorillas who are very well adapted to eating nothing, but plants eat a lot of grasses and things like that.
We cannot eat that kind of stuff. So it’s very, very difficult for humans to digest that stuff, our stomachs just don’t work that way. Some of these animals have developed ways of making plant materials more easily digestible.
For example, birds have this thing called a crop where they eat like seeds, and they sort of store them seeds and grains and things like that. And they store them in this little pouch in their like throat sort of. And in this little pouch, these grains or seeds will sort of ferment and sort of sprout a little bit and they become more easily digestible for some of these birds that have this crop.
Okay, so the nutrients from the plants are less toxic, and then more bioavailable. Some of the toxic traits of plants would be things like lectin, gluten from wheat, though, these are the kinds of things oxalates are the kinds of things that make it kind of difficult for humans to digest some plants, okay.
Also, nutrient absorption from plants is much lower than nutrient absorption from animal based foods. Alright, so you know, when you’re eating something that’s high in fiber, you’re not going to extract all the nutrients from that high fiber food because a lot of that is actually just going to get passed through you and digested.
Okay, with animal sources of food, like meat and eggs and some dairy, our bodies are really able to pull all the nutrients out of that very easily because there’s nothing blocking that process from happening, right? There are in plants, but not in animal based foods, okay?
Also, plant proteins are basically inferior to animal based proteins. Plant proteins are great for growing plants. You know, if you want to build plants, plant proteins are perfect for that. Animal proteins are designed for growing animals. And I’m not trying to say like, plant proteins are bad, I’m just saying that they are not complete proteins, they don’t have all the amino acids that you need.
And you have to combine them with other types of proteins in order to make it actually work. And there’s people that do this, and they have great results with that, whatever. But then animal based proteins are complete proteins. And they’re kind of the proteins that humans have been eating for millions of years.
And we’ve, you know, evolved from eating these things. And we’re very, very good at using animal proteins to, to build strong muscles and connective tissues and things like that. So they’re great for building humans. So I’ve been reading all these books, listening to all these experts sharing all these amazing results from, you know, going in more of like a carnivorous direction, like eating more of a carnivorous diet.
Okay, sticking with mainly just animal foods. And I thought, Okay, I just want to see what this is all about. I just want to see if this will make any significant changes in how I feel in my running performance. Like, is this all it’s cracked up to be? Is this a better way to go? Can you even run, you know, 20 miles or run a marathon without eating any carbs at all?
So these are some of the reasons why I did this. And these are some of the questions that I wanted to answer and just kind of find out for myself. So what did I eat? Mostly just, you know, meat, eggs, cheese and dairy. So I just skipped veggies, basically. Okay, so no big salad. I know, I love my big salad. And I just stopped eating that.
And stuck to a very high protein and diet of just, you know, a few basic food groups. Now the types of meats I would eat while I was eating were ground beef and steak, and pork. And, you know, fish, salmon, chicken. So I was eating a really wide variety of meats, eggs, a bunch of different ways, some cheese here and there, but not a ton.
And then some dairy, little full fat, Greek yogurt, maybe some sour cream, but not a ton of dairy either. Okay, so mostly the focus was on meat and eggs, you know, and like fish for the most part. So one disclaimer, I need to say this here, it’s almost impossible to eat zero carbs.
Like there are carbs in eggs, there are carbs in cheese and dairy and things like that. So it really wasn’t zero carbs, it was basically zero carbs. Okay, so for all intents and purposes, it was around, you know, my daily net carbs on eating a low carb diet, the way I have been eating for the past, you know, year, year and a half or whatever. Typically, my net carbs are somewhere around 30-40 grams a day, maybe less some days.
And my daily net carbs on carnivore were like seven or nine grams total, you know, and this is just from a couple of eggs, and a couple of grams of carbs that you get from eating eggs and some dairy. So but this is about as low as I could get them. Um, like I said before, like you could eat nothing but meat. But that just didn’t really appeal to me. So you know, these fine, tiny few little carbs were okay, no big deal. Okay. So that’s what I was eating.
And so how did my training go? Well, I gotta tell you, I felt pretty darn good. I just kind of stick stuck to my same running schedule. My same workouts, you know, I was running three times a week. You know, I started you know, I got into the longer 16,18, 20, 22 mile runs, and really was running fine.
Like I never ran out of gas. I had plenty of energy. I was doing my weightlifting twice a week. And I didn’t really notice any changes really. Okay, so I went from, you know, maybe 20 to 50 grams of carbs a day to like, you know, seven to nine, and really didn’t make much of a difference at all.
I’m already a very efficient fat burner, so I’m using fat as energy pretty much all the time. So as an efficient fat burner as a well established fat adapted runner, this was not a big transition for me, like it wasn’t that big of a deal. Now, I have to say this because I did not train to run a fast marathon. Alright. And you’ll know why I say that.
When I talk about the actual race, I was not training to run a hard, fast marathon. For the last several years, I’ve sort of backed off of like running hard and fast, I’ve just been like, headed, I’ve had this mindset, that I’m just gonna run slow. Like, I’m a slow runner.
The last time I ran a hard marathon was I think it was like 2016, or 2017, we’re talking like four or five years ago. And I had a terrible couple of outings. I remember having a terrible spring marathon and then a terrible 50k that I did about a month later. And I was just like, screw all this. I hate marathons, this is too hard. I don’t want to, I don’t need to run fast anymore.
In fact, I’m not going to do marathons or races, I’m just going to stick to like half marathons. And I sort of quit on myself. Right. And so for the last five years, I’ve been sort of like, you know, I backed off of running hard and running fast, and trying to hit some kind of time goal is just like, I’m just going to run and just, you know, get it done and enjoy myself and a strong that kind of that kind of goal for my races.
And that’s been my MO, right, even through last year, you know, I ran a marathon and 50k last year, but I didn’t like push the pace, it was just kind of like a, you know, casual, I guess, you know, kind of effort, right? Easy effort. So this is the way I was training. I was training to do an easy effort marathon.
Alright, so little foreshadowing, you’ll know why I’m talking about this in a minute. Okay, now I want to talk about fiber a little bit, okay. And I’m actually going to talk about poop for just a second. So if you’re eating right now, you may want to like take a break or something like that.
But here’s the thing. I’ve heard a lot of people talking about how if you stop eating fiber, this is going to be a big problem for you, you’re just going to become constipated, you’re never going to poop again. You have to eat fiber, or this is going to be a problem. So I was like, fully expecting to like not poop for a week or something, right? And this is gonna be a big problem for me.
Okay, so I stopped eating plants, I stopped eating fiber. So I’m eating a zero fiber diet at this point, right. And up to this point, I’ve been super regular. I’m once a day pooper, I’m very consistent. It’s all good. No, no issues there. And then I have to say that I really enjoyed pooping on the carnivore diet, like it was fine.
I did not have any issues at all, no constipation, I was still completely regular, you know, once a day at the same like always, but the poops were maybe a little smaller, and a little more dense. Okay. And this is actually a good thing.
Because here’s what’s happening, the animal based foods that I was eating are much more nutrient dense. And since there’s no fiber to like, bulk up the stool, you are actually absorbing more of the nutrients from the foods you’re eating. So it means that your poops are generally a little smaller and a little denser.
So for me, my experience and a lot of people have this very same experience. No fiber is no problem. Okay. There’s a lot of misconceptions about fiber out there. Now, obviously, everybody has to like, experiment with this. But fiber I believe is kind of overrated. So people say like, Oh, if you’re constipated, you need more fiber, eat more fiber, eat more fiber.
Well, think about it like this. If you’re sitting in a traffic jam, the last thing you want to do is add more cars to that traffic jam. And that’s what it’s like if you’re constipated. To add more fiber, you’re adding more of the thing that’s kind of blocking you up in the first place. Okay.
So without having all this fiber to kind of block things up, things tend to just move very, very easily through the system. This is my experience, a lot of people have the same experience. Okay. So this part of the experiment, I will say, was a huge success and I enjoyed that. I enjoyed my poops on the carnivore diet. Okay, so I’m done talking about poop, I just want you guys to all know that it was not an issue.
Okay, so what about vitamins and minerals? What about all those vitamins that you get from eating, you know, vegetables, and don’t you need all the micronutrients? And, again, the animal, the animal based sources of, of macronutrients, so fat and protein contain all of the nutrients that we need to be healthy and to grow a healthy human being okay.
So all the fat protein we need is contained in animal based foods. Also, so are the vitamins and minerals, and they are much more bioavailable to the human body, there’s nothing blocking their absorption like there is in plants, okay, so you get more nutrients out of the foods you eat, when you’re eating animal based foods you just do.
Your body is able to absorb more of the nutrients out of the food. So let’s say you know you’re eating some liver. Now, I don’t really eat organ meats, I just don’t like them. You know, but the liver is just such a great source of all kinds of vitamins like vitamin C, and iron, right.
And if you eat a bunch of spinach, you know, the iron content or the vitamin C content of that spinach, you know, you’re going to get some of those nutrients from that some of those vitamins and minerals, but not as much as you would from eating liver because, again, the plants are going to pass through you a lot of that and digested, right.
So just know that you can get everything you need from eating animal based foods only. Okay, so that wasn’t really a concern at all. I wasn’t really worried about that at all. And I felt great. This whole time, I didn’t have any lack of energy, I didn’t have any nutrient deficiencies that I can really tell. So that was all good. All right.
So race week, here’s why I decided to do the week of the race. So about a week out. A week before the marathon, I made a decision that I was going to shoot for a time goal. Now this is what I was talking about earlier, when I was like I really wasn’t training to run a hard or fast marathon. But then I decided about a week out, I’m gonna like push the pace. I’m gonna run this thing hard. I’m gonna give it everything I got.
And so this was a little bit of a concern of mine, because I hadn’t trained to run a hard and fast marathon. Yet at the last minute, I’m like, Hey, I think I’m gonna run a hard and fast marathon. This is not recommended, by the way. I don’t think this is the way we should do things. Okay? So diet, nutrition, definitely a big part of the equation.
If you want to run a successful marathon, you have got to dial in your diet, nutrition, it’s so important. You’ve got to, you know, train, eat the right kinds of foods and train, you know, fueling yourself properly. Okay, whether that’s eating fat, you know, a lot of fat and protein and being fat adapted or eating a lot of carbs, whatever you want to do.
And listen, there’s no right or wrong answer here. That’s all good. You can do whatever you want. I’m just giving you a different way of doing things here. So diet, nutrition, are definitely a big part of the equation, but also specificity of training. This is a critical component of any type of physical endurance activity, like you have to train for the type of ratio you’re gonna run.
So if you want to run a fast 5k, you have to train, you have to run fast for that distance. You know, you got to train doing that. If you want to run a fast marathon. You got to do some fast long runs. Like those there’s just no way around it right? I didn’t do that. Alright.
I’d been doing my long runs like around a 9:30-ish pace or something like that, you know, which is okay. And that was so easy anyway, so that was kind of the goal that I was shooting for was alright, maybe I can just maintain like a 9:30-ish pace for this marathon, not something I had really been planning on.
So I just wanted to see what I could do. So here was the goal, the goal was to run a 4:10 to 4:15 marathon somewhere in that range. So, you know, that was the goal that I decided on at the last minute. And that was what I was going to shoot for, and just see what could I do? What could I do zero carbs, what could I do?
So now normally, when I even running, like in training, low carb, like I, like I have been for the past, you know, year and a half or so, I will add in some strategic carbs, you know, the day or two leading up to a race, you know, sweet potatoes, rice, you know, quinoa, oats, things like that, just to like, build up a little bit of glycogen stores.
And so you got a little extra fuel in the tank for a marathon or whatever. But this time, I decided not to do that at all. So no carb loading, not even one piece of rice, not even a sweet potato, nothing. So I just was eating the same animal based foods, you know, think the night before I had, you know, a steak or some chicken or something like that. And that was that no veggies, so no carb loading.
And and this was a big part of my experiment, which is, can I run a hard and fast marathon using just my own body fat as fuel basically having no glycogen stored up extra glycogen stored up in the muscles, just whatever my body naturally produces in our bodies produce, our liver actually produces glycogen, you know, glucose and it gets stored in our muscles. So we have all the sort of sugar fuel that we need and it just naturally gets produced.
So I wasn’t too worried about that part. But I’m so well fat adapted that I wasn’t really too concerned about that. But can I, you know, train for this marathon and then run a hard and fast marathon using just my own body fat as fuel? Would this be a success or would I totally crash and burn?
So the goal of 4:10 to 4:15, that was my time goal. And I really wanted to finish feeling strong. I didn’t want to be like dying at the end of this thing. So to me, that was also a big part of this. I wanted to finish feeling strong, feeling good. Okay, race day comes right Saturday, last Saturday, the morning of I do coffee as usual.
And then I considered taking, I have these newer energy gels which are very clean, slow burning fuel. They’re made for people that do low carb, they’re not super sugary. They use blackstrap molasses and sweet potatoes in the energy packets. And there’s just like four ingredients and they’re awesome.
So I consider taking one with me and like sticking in my pocket just in case I needed it. And then as I was getting ready and drinking my coffee in the morning, I’m like, you know what, I’m not even going to bring this with me. I’m going to leave it at home. So I’m just going to do this thing like naked I’m not even going to bring, you know, something you know as a backup just in case things go south.
No, I was confident. I was super confident right? So I do all my long runs fasted. I don’t eat beforehand. I don’t eat during, so I don’t take in any calories. I just drink water and electrolytes and I use that element recharged by elemental labs. It’s just a powdered drink that you can add to water and you can find it at drinkLMNt.com because people ask me all the time what do you use for electrolytes so that’s the stuff I recommend to people.
So I just brought that with me and I used that only, right, water and electrolytes. Okay, so the first half of the race, the first 13 miles I ran comfortably hard like I had that 9:39-40 ish pace, something like that. And maybe a little slower than that. And I was running comfortably hard now.
The reason I say maybe a little slower than that is because my watch died. around mile five. I have an Apple Watch. I use this for all my long runs. It’s works great. For the most part. I’ve had the battery die like during my 50k but I thought this is only going to be about four hours. It should be fine.
No, it wasn’t fine. My watch just stopped working. No more GPS, I had no idea how far I was going. I didn’t know what my pace was, I had a vague idea of what my time was. But that was just vague. So I was just kind of running blind. So I don’t even know, like, what my pace was, I can’t tell you what my splits were or anything like that.
So I’m a little bummed out about that, because I really wanted the data for this race. So I had to do this all by feel I was running on feel I was running on how did this feel to me, you know, we’ve got that rate of perceived exertion scale that RPE of like, zero to 10, like, you know, running like a three, four, it’s pretty easy pace, and then running like a five, six is harder, you know, that kind of thing.
So that’s what I was kind of using in my brain just to like, am I running fast? Felt like it. Yeah. Okay, so first half, comfortably hard. So I was, you know, trying to aim for that, you know, 9:30 ish pace or whatever, I have no idea where I was, it’s probably slower than that. And then I felt great at the halfway point. So I was like, Okay, I’m gonna pick this up a little bit, I’m gonna make the second half, uncomfortably hard.
So I’m going to run the next two hours, uncomfortably hard. And that’s what I did. I set out to with a faster pace, I picked it up. And that rate of perceived exertion, I kicked it up a notch or two. And I was just like, let’s see how long I can keep this up. And I gotta tell you, I felt pretty good. I never felt out of gas, I always have plenty of energy in the tank, like, but those last few miles were tough.
Those last few miles, my legs, were feeling pretty beat up, I was getting pretty sore and tired. And this is where the specificity of training would have helped me a lot. Because I didn’t really plan and train to run a fast, hard marathon. I planned and trained to run a nice, easy, casual marathon. But I pushed through the pain, I pushed through that feeling of like, I’m getting a little tired here.
And I just kept going and I finished feeling super strong and finished feeling amazing. And really the last half mile, I just was like not sprinting, but I was running pretty hard. And it felt so good. I literally had no idea what my time was, so I crossed the finish line. And this was a timed race, you know, we had a timing system and everything like that. So trip times.
So I didn’t know what my time was. And, you know, we could log into a website and you know, after about a minute or two, and then we could see where time was at. 4:16 was my time. This is almost exactly what I wanted to do. I felt so damn proud of myself because I was so close to my projected finish time without even having a clue what my time was while I was running.
So the fact that my watch wasn’t working, and that I hadn’t trained really, for this kind of thing is a testament to me being pretty fit, pretty efficient runner these days, and running only on fat as fuel like not having any carbs for my training, not having any carbs the day before. I did not crash and burn, I finished feeling strong. And I was so close to my time. I was so ecstatic with that performance really.
This is like the first time in five years or so that I set out to run a hard marathon and it was a big success. I felt super, super good about this. And, you know, I gotta tell you that there’s a lot of there’s a lot of talk about, you know, running and having to, you know, fuel up on all the carbs and carbo load to run things like that. And it’s just I think it’s a little overrated, honestly.
So here are some of the lessons that I learned from this experience. Okay, so number one is just that, like carbs, I think are a little bit overrated. I don’t think we need them. I don’t think they’re essential. Actually, they are not essential. And this is not just me, you know, my opinion that essential macronutrients are fat and protein.
If we don’t eat fat and protein, we will die as human beings. We have to eat those two things. But there’s no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. There’s nothing from carbohydrates that we have to eat, or we will die like we can go fine. We’ll be fine without eating carbohydrates. Okay.
Do I think you should eat zero carbohydrates? No, I don’t. And honestly, I don’t know that I have any big, amazing changes by trying this experiment. I just wanted to see, is this even possible, okay?
So my biggest lesson learned is just like, the carbs are a little overrated if you’re a fat adapted runner, which I am, and you can get there too, and you don’t have to do zero carbs to get there, by the way, but if you’re a fat adapted runner, you could run just fine, you can do all kinds of amazing things, and even run a hard and fast marathon without them. Okay?
Another lesson learned specificity of training is very important. Okay. I’m going to do this again. Well, I’m going to train for another marathon in the fall, I’ve got another marathon coming up in the fall.
And I’m going to take a different approach to that one, I’m not going to do this carnivore thing like I did for this marathon. I’ll talk more about that later another day. But I’ll definitely be changing my training plan, I’m definitely going to train differently for that one, because I do want to hit a time goal for that one.
So my big lesson learned around this is like, set your goal early, and then base all your training around that goal. So if you want to run a four hour marathon, train from day one, to run a four hour marathon, that means you’re gonna have to do the speed work, that means you’re gonna have to do the long runs those tempo runs, you’re gonna have to do the, the those goal paced runs, you know, which I didn’t do.
Okay, another lesson learned is that there’s a lot of truth to the carnivore diet, being healthy and being effective. And being just fine. Like, you can do just fine eating a carnivore diet. Like, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it necessarily. Okay. I think it’s a diet that humans have been eating for literally millions of years, and I think we’ve evolved eating a lot of animals and animal based product foods.
So I don’t think it’s bad, okay. And you can even train for a marathon and run a successful marathon without eating clients and carbs and things like that. Okay. Now, here’s one big lesson, I’ll just tell you, like, I didn’t see amazing results, I didn’t really see big changes to my energy levels, or how I felt or, you know, sleeping better or overall feeling better, I would say that I felt about the same as eating a relatively low carbohydrate diet.
So for me, there wasn’t that big of a change, honestly. And my original plan was to just do this for about 30 days, and then get through that marathon. But I felt good so I kept it going for I did something like 40 days of this, and it felt great, you know, but nothing, not a big difference from where I was before that, okay.
So since then, since the marathon, I’ve gone back to eating some carbs and eating my big salad every night. You know why? Because I love it. I love it. So I’m back to doing probably, I don’t know, 30 to 40 grams of carbs a day in the form of some veggies, avocados and things like that, I miss my avocados.
And I’ll report back to you in a few weeks and see if there’s anything big that I noticed that changes, but so far, after almost a week, like nothing is really different, no significant changes, everything is still functioning beautifully. Okay. So is this something I would recommend? Like should you do this? Honestly, I don’t recommend one way of eating or one diet over another.
Other than I suggest that most of us who are overweight, can probably benefit from eating a lower carbohydrate diet. So most people are somewhat carbohydrate intolerant, meaning that they, most people can’t handle carbs very well. And when they eat a lot of carbs, they tend to gain a lot of weight.
And I think most people can dramatically improve their health by ditching the problematic carbohydrates, okay, but other than that, like I don’t recommend anybody do plant based or vegetarian or carnivore, or whatever it is, you know, pescatarian I’m not going to tell you what to do. You’ve got to try stuff and see what works for you. I’m doing this because I’m just curious. I’m a curious person. I’m always learning and always curious and open to different things.
You know, if I was working with someone who was a one on one client, and they were having trouble losing weight, and you know, maybe they the weight was just not moving at all, or they were dealing with chronic constipation or something like that. I might suggest trying a carnivore approach for a few weeks to see if things change.
You know, like, I’m suggesting that for somebody that I was working with, and we would have to talk about exactly how you would do that, and what that would look like, and, you know, but here’s the thing, we are all an experiment of one, what works for this person over here may not work for you what works for me, may not work for for someone over there.
I didn’t see dramatic improvements in my health and well being on a carnivore diet. Right? It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t much different from what I was doing before. If you prefer to get fuel from plants, if you prefer a high carbohydrate diet, and this works really well, for you for running and for your health and for how you feel, that is amazing. That is awesome. Do you, absolutely. Right?
If you want to, if you’re a vegan, because of like, you know, religious reasons, or, you know, moral issues with animals and whatever, you don’t, don’t do this, like, it’s, I support that. I absolutely support that everybody’s different. Do what works for you.
You know, I’m not opposed to a plant based diet, I did it for like 10 years, and it just wasn’t, it wasn’t the right diet. For me, it wasn’t the best diet. For me, I feel so much better, eating more of an omnivorous diet. But if you trying something like this appeals to you, and you want to give it a shot, try it and see how it goes can’t hurt, can’t hurt.
So I’m always open to trying things for myself, I’m always kind of pushing the envelope a little bit to see like, what can I do? What can I improve my health? You know, will this help to improve my health? Will that make me healthier? Will make me stronger? Will it give me more energy? Will it improve my sports performance? I’m always trying stuff like this. Okay.
So one of the points I want to make here is that I wanted to show you and show myself but I really wanted to show you that we really don’t need carbs to function optimally, right? We don’t need carbs to run a marathon, we can do just fine without them. Okay, I’m not saying you should, but I’m just saying we can do fine without them. Okay. Listen, I love being a fat adapted runner.
I love the feeling of running a marathon and running it hard and relatively fast for me. Without having to worry about bonking without having to worry about hitting the wall at mile 18 or 19, which I’ve done so many times. I love all day energy. I love the clarity of mind that I get from eating a low carb diet. I love being fat adapted runner. The foods that I eat is very satisfying, very delicious and very satiating, right? I’m not hungry all day long. I don’t have afternoon crashes. I’m not thinking about food all the time. So I love this whole lifestyle.
All these things are amazing and really eating this way that I am now just being a kind of ditching the problematic carbs and being more of a low carb runner, and being fat adapted. This works really well for me and I feel really good eating this way. Right. And I can still be very fat adapted.
I don’t have to go strict carnivore, I don’t have to go zero carbs, I can still eat my big salad, and enjoy it. Alright, so that’s all I got for you guys today. I hope you got something out of this episode. I hope you pulled some little nuggets out of this today. And if you got something out of it, please consider sharing it with a friend. I would so appreciate that. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
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I hear a lot of runners talk about strength training, and honestly, not all of what they say makes sense. For example, runners tend to think they need to do a lot of reps with super light weights …
Continue Reading about 67. The Myths and Benefits of Strength Training for Runners →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 67 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, a health and fitness expert and certified personal trainer. And as a certified personal trainer, I talk a lot with my clients about the benefits of strength training. So today, I’m going to go through some of those benefits.
And also kind of I want to dispel some of the myths around strength training, especially for runners because I hear a lot of people, a lot of runners, especially talking about strength training. And honestly, not everything I hear makes a lot of sense.
For example, runners tend to think they need to do a lot of reps with super lightweights or they’re going to get too jacked, you know, they’re going to get too muscley. Right, and it’s going to hinder their running performance. Really? Is that something you’re concerned about?
I get it though because I’ve bought into a lot of these ideas over the years. And I’ve come to realize that there’s just a lot of information out there that we believe to be true. We believe it’s based on facts, but it’s just not true. Okay, so in this episode of the Running Lean podcast, I want to help clarify some of these things bust a few of these myths and misconceptions that runners have around strength training and what it can and can’t do for you.
I also will outline the many, many benefits that strength training actually does provide, especially for endurance athletes. If you haven’t already done so please come check us out on Facebook, we have this amazing podcast community on Facebook called the Running Lean podcast community. It’s a group of runners who all share similar health and fitness goals.
Join the group, you can ask questions, get help, and feel supported. Listen, we all want to feel supported, especially when it comes to doing hard things like training for a marathon or losing a bunch of weight. And having a community like this to lean into is so helpful. You’ll find encouragement, inspiration, and even motivation for when you’re just not feeling it. So just go to Facebook search for Running Lean community and join us.
Okay, let’s get right into this topic here. Because I’m excited about this. The myths and benefits of strength training for runners. So first off, I’m going to go through a few of these myths that are very common among the running community and things that I’ve heard for many years. And I’ve just come to realize that some of these things are not true.
And we need to understand what’s really going on, I really want to focus on the importance of strength training, especially for endurance athletes. Okay, so the first myth I’ve heard for years and years and years, and I kind of bought into this too early on in my running days is that I’m a runner, so I don’t really need to do strength training, running is enough.
And this one, I’ve just got to tell you, you know, no, running is not enough. Okay. So, as a healthy human being, as an athlete, especially though, we have three main kinds of systems that we need to improve, okay, we’ve got our endurance system, our strength system, and our explosive power system.
All three of these are required for optimal human health and fitness, okay, but especially for us runners, right? You’ve got to build your endurance, you’ve got to build strength, and you need to build up your explosive power. Most long-distance runners only focus on one thing though, endurance, and that’s it.
They might focus on maybe getting a little bit faster, but they kind of leave a lot on the table, right? Just because you can go long distances and run far doesn’t mean you’re as strong or as fitter, as healthy as you can be. And when you only focus on one system, like endurance, you never improve other areas and you’re actually not going to be as fit or as powerful as a runner as you could be.
Okay, so we all know that to build endurance, we need to run more, right, we just keep increasing our distance, we keep increasing the time that we’re out there running. And that’s how we build endurance, you know, you, you go longer and then you back it off a little bit. So your body can adapt and recover.
And then you go longer, again, you build up that cardiovascular system, you build up that aerobic system. Great, we all understand how to do that, right? To build explosive power, you can do things like plyometric exercises, box jumps, single-leg jumps, lateral jumps, HIIT training, these are all ways of building explosive power.
Also, things like sprinting, and I’m not talking about, you know, speed work, where you just go a little bit faster, I’m talking about all-out sprinting, or explosive step running, like running up steps, right, just until you just can’t go any further. It’s like, you hit that lactic threshold really fast. Okay, that’s, that’ll build explosive power.
And then to build strength, we need to do some sort of resistance training, we need to do some sort of resistance exercise where we lift heavy things, we progressively overload our muscles, so that our muscles can adapt and grow and get stronger. And it’s not just enough to go out there and run a lot to get stronger legs, let’s say, like, you can do that.
And you will improve the strength in your legs by running. But even more effective would be to do some sort of resistance training. But when you have all three of these systems, you know, when you’re building into all three of these systems – endurance, explosive power and strength – you’re going to be a much stronger, much more powerful runner, you will be able to go farther and faster. And also, you’re just gonna be a much more healthy human being over. All right.
Everything I talk about here is like, I want to be the healthiest, most badass version of myself possible. I’m always working on improving my health, and my fitness, always. And I’ve realized that in order to do that, I can’t just go run a million miles. Like, that’s part of it. But if I only focus on one thing, I’m just leaving so much behind. And so I’ve really made it a point to start focusing on building strength. And it’s so powerful.
And I’ll get into a lot of the benefits about this as we go through this, but just know that you do need to do strength training, you know, running is not enough, just running a million miles is not enough. Okay. Another thing I hear from people because I work with a lot of people who are, you know, maybe in their 40s, or 50s, or 60s, you know, and a lot of people have said this, to me, it’s like, I’m getting too old to do strength training, I’m too old to do this.
And I just have to say like this one is not true at all, you’re never too old to do strength training, even if you’ve never done it before in your life. Especially for endurance athletes who are over the age of 40. We especially benefit from strength training, because as we get older, our strength tends to decline faster than our endurance, like our endurance seems to be pretty good. And we can kind of maintain that as we get older, but our strength declines pretty fast.
And when you engage in high-intensity strength training, it actually kind of produces an anti-aging effect, because what you’re doing is you’re preserving lean muscle mass, which is very important. We want to stave off sarcopenia, which is you know, losing muscle. It optimizes certain adaptive hormones so that you, you know, get stronger, you build more lean muscle mass.
And the reason this is important is because as you get older, you know, sarcopenia is a real problem. Osteoporosis is a real problem. And one of the most common causes of death in the elderly population is not having strong bones and muscles, not having a strong muscular, skeletal muscular system, and people fall down.
Falling down is one of the leading causes of death in the elderly population because they fall down, they break a hip or something like that, and all of a sudden they become said theory. And then when you’re sedentary, everything declines very rapidly, right? You totally lose muscle mass, you lose bone density and bone strength.
And, you know, your quality of life just goes downhill pretty fast, you know. So if you can maintain your muscle strength, if you can maintain your bone density, you’re much more likely to live longer and thrive even as you get super old, right.
So strength training will actually help increase muscles, right, we know that, but it also will help increase bone density and can help prevent osteoporosis. A study published in the journal, endocrinology, and metabolism this study was called the effects of resistance exercise on bone health.
And basically, they say, based on the available information resistance exercise, either alone or in combination with other interventions may be the most optimal strategy to improve the muscle and bone mass in postmenopausal women, middle-aged men, or even the older population. So studies have confirmed this, this is not just speculation, and as you get older, you definitely want to maintain some sort of wrist resistance exercise.
One of the best ways to stave off aging, and to build and maintain a good strong skeletal muscular system is to lift heavy things, keep doing some strength training or start doing it. Listen, I’m 54 years old. I’ve been doing this for a long time, I’ve been doing strength training for a long time. And right now, I’m the strongest I’ve ever been.
I am in really, really good shape. I feel amazing. My running is amazing. My strength regimen just keeps improving. I’m starting to see a lot of muscle growth and muscle definition like I’ve never seen before. So even at my ripe old age of 54 years old, I’m still making massive improvements. Okay, so you absolutely can do this. It doesn’t matter how old you are.
I recently saw some video, I think it was on Instagram of some 95-year-old woman doing deadlifts. And that was pretty badass, you know, she was like in super great shape. And that was impressive, you know, so it doesn’t matter how old you are, at any age, you’re never too old to do strength training. Alright.
Another common misconception people have is that strength training just takes too long. It takes too long. Listen, I get it looks like you’re already running four days a week or six days a week. And now you want to add strength training to that too. I mean, come on, I don’t have time for that. Nobody has time for this, right.
So there is a little bit of truth to this, because if you’re doing it wrong, it may take too long. So I used to do strength training, like three or four times a week, and I would go for an hour or an hour and a half each time. And for years I did this and my results were never all that great, right? I really wasn’t getting a lot of results.
And the thing is, I was doing it wrong. Okay, I was going there and I wasn’t doing a good effective strength training program. So what I was doing was just kind of going through the motions putting my time in, you know, it was more of a cardio workout than anything else, right.
So to spend that much time at the gym doing strength training, unless you’re a professional bodybuilder, and this is like what you’re doing for a living, I would say you don’t need to spend that much time at the gym. A well-written strength program, the programs that I write for my clients only require twice a week.
And about 20 minutes each time 15 to 20 minutes each session, you get a whole-body workout twice a week, and it is a kick-ass program and very effective. Very, very effective. I am seeing amazing results in myself and in my clients. I’m getting bigger arms, bigger legs, more muscle definition, and I feel more powerful.
I’m definitely stronger because I’ve been tracking all this from just doing this, like 20 minutes a week, twice a week. That’s it. I have time for that you have time for that. So strength training does not take too long. If it’s taking too long. You’re not doing it right. Okay, we need to back off the amount of time we’re doing it and make the most of the time we’re lifting.
So that requires you to get get a little bit heavier with the weights. It’s got to hurt it’s got to be hard. But you can do it and do it without spending a lot of time at the gym. Okay, this one is interesting. So a lot of people think that you have to do strength training on your rest days.
So the days that you’re not running are the days that you should do your strength training. And I used to believe this, and I used to think this was a really smart way to go, like, you don’t want to, like, you know, go run a lot and do some sort of heavy, heavy lifting on the same day, right. And until recently, I used to believe this and used to practice this, but I found more and more evidence that this is actually not a very good idea.
Here’s why. Because when you do your strength training on your rest days, you’re effectively destroying all the benefits of a rest day. Okay, so let’s say, for example, you run four days a week, like Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. And then on Mondays and Wednesdays, these are supposed to be your rest days. Very critical rest days, you know, for a hard-running schedule, you need those rest days, right.
But now you’re putting in a couple of heavy lifting days, well, you’re gonna have a much harder time recovering from your runs, because you’re not giving your body the time it needs to recover on those rest days. Also, because you’re doing your strength training, and then the next day you’re running again, you’re gonna have a hard time recovering from your strength sessions, because you’re not giving yourself time to recover on those rest days.
Okay, so the suggestion here, then this may go against everything you thought you knew. But the suggestion is to do your hard strength training days on the same days as your hard running workouts. The idea here is that you want to make your hard days hard and make your easy days easy.
So this will actually help you to work harder on those hard days because you’re going to recover faster, you’re going to reduce your risk of getting injured, and you’ll be more you’ll have more energy and you’ll be more rested and recovered for those hard workout days. And then on your rest days, treat it as a true easy day, a true rest day, and you’ll recover much better. And you’re going to get stronger, and you’re going to improve both your strength training and your running if you do it this way.
Okay, so and then there’s a preference, some people decide to do their strength training before their running. And some people like to do it in the opposite order, they like to run first and then do their strength training. Really, this is kind of a personal preference, really up to you.
Personally, I like to do the strength training first and then run. But do you know, do whatever works for you. But try to keep your hard days hard, and your easy days easy. And you’re gonna start to see some definite improvements in both places, for sure.
All right, now this one is fun. And I love this because I hear this all the time. And it cracks me up. I need to do super light weights with a lot of reps so that, you know, I build endurance. And here’s the thing, your endurance system, you’re already working in the endurance system, right?
You do not need to do a bunch of reps with super lightweight, this is not doing you much good at all, honestly. And I see people do this all the time. They’re like, you know, they go to the gym, they pick up those five-pound weights, and they’re just doing these arm curls or something. And they can do like 100 reps. And yeah, it is true.
It does help to build some cardiovascular endurance, but you don’t really need to be working on that at the gym with weights in your hands, okay, you work that work on your cardiovascular endurance out on the roads running, right? You don’t lift weights to build endurance, you lift weights to build muscle.
You don’t need more endurance training. What you need to do is increase your lean muscle mass so you can become a stronger runner and doing a lot of reps with very light weights is just like going out and running a bunch more. Right? There is a cardiovascular component to it, but there’s no strength component to it.
So you want to develop muscles you want to get stronger and the only way you can do that is to overload your muscles. You got to put more load than your muscles can handle so that they adapt to those stressors. You want to overload your muscles so that they get super stressed, send signals to repair and grow so that it can accommodate more stress the next time.
And if you could do this properly, and you do this consistently, you will build muscle and you will get stronger. You just never tax your system enough by lifting super light weights and doing a million reps. Your muscles never need to adapt. And I totally get this because I kind of did this for years, I was doing some sort of strength training for years, and I wasn’t getting results.
And I’m like, what am I doing wrong? Maybe I need to go and, and do even more. Because I was in this mindset of like, I’m a runner. So I need to do lightweights with a million reps. And it just never worked. And never, I never got any results from that, you know. So the same thing applies here.
You know, when we keep doing the same amount of weight each time we work out at the gym, right? You’re never going to progress, your muscles will never grow because they aren’t being overloaded. And here’s the thing, the reason we don’t want to do this is because it sucks and it hurts, it’s hard. Overloading your muscles means you’re going to have to get to failure. And that’s painful. It’s really, it’s painful. If you do it the right way.
If you’re doing strength training the right way. You should be just cooked at the end of the workout. Okay. So the whole lightweights with a million reps is not a thing, just stop doing that it’s not really doing you much good at all. Okay.
Another myth I hear is that, if I do strength training, it will actually hurt my running performance. And this one, I mean, I would hope you guys understand by now that this is definitely not true like strength training can only help your running performance, right? Being stronger overall, having a stronger, you know, muscular system definitely makes you a better endurance athlete.
Building strength helps you to maintain good running form helps you to maintain consistent power, especially as we get into these longer endurance activities and you start to fatigue towards the end, right like towards the end of a marathon, or an ultra marathon when you need that extra strength and power.
You know, if you’ve not built up your muscular system, you’re not going to have that extra power that you need. And you’re going to fatigue and you’re going to kind of crash and burn, okay. Strength training is actually essential. If you want to be a successful endurance athlete, okay, putting your muscles under intense stress stimulates muscle growth, right, you build more muscle, you build more lean mass, you get stronger, and you will be able to achieve peak performance in running.
Only if you improve your muscular strength, right, you absolutely must include strength training if you want to become a stronger runner. Strength training will make you a more powerful runner. Because here’s the thing, when you build more muscle, and you reduce your body fat, that means you’re going to increase your power to weight ratio making you a more powerful runner. How awesome would it be to be lighter with carrying around less body fat and stronger, carrying around more muscle mass, this will only help your running performance? Okay.
Another myth that people have – this is my favorite one. This is the last myth I’m going to talk about here. But this is a good one. If I lift heavy weights, I’m going to bulk up too much. So heavy weights will make me bulk up too much. Light weights will get me toned. And this is awesome. I love this.
Like I hear people say this all the time. I don’t want to get all big and muscle-bound. So I’m just going to lift light weights. I’m afraid I’m gonna get too jacked. I’m going to be too big and muscley and jacked and it’s going to hurt my running performance or whatever. I think this is so amazing.
Because if you want a real honest answer to this, go to a gym and tell one of these big huge bodybuilders that you don’t want to lift weights because you’re afraid you’re gonna get too big. They’re just gonna laugh you out of the gym. Do you know why? Because as it takes a long, long time, for them to get huge like that.
It takes years of very hard work and dedication, they’ve got to show up at the gym constantly. They’re eating like 4 or 5000 calories a day. Honestly, if you’re an endurance athlete, you don’t need to worry about getting too big, heavy weights will not bulk you up. The only way you can build muscle is if you lift heavy weights regularly.
You’ve got to do it the right way, right, you’ve got to lift heavy weights, overload the system, adapt muscles grow. Right, if you’re doing it the right way, you’re going to be fine, right, you’ll build more lean muscle, your muscles will get bigger, very slowly, takes a very long time, months, months and months.
And listen, if you start to get too big, if you really start to get too muscley, all you have to do is back off on the weight training, just you know, maybe go down to once a week, that’s all you really need to maintain your muscle mass anyway, once you’ve built a solid base. So if you’re doing this properly, you should begin to lose body fat because carrying around muscle will help you to lose, lose weight. I’ll tell you more about that in a minute.
But your muscles will start to show because you’re losing body fat, and then you’re building some muscle and so your muscles will start to show through your skin a little bit better. And this is what we mean when we say we want to look toned, we want to see some muscle definition, we want to see those muscles, right?
Being toned is a function of both increasing muscle size and decreasing excess body fat. So this is what gets you that toned look. But you have to do it the right way, you have to actually build muscle. And you can’t build muscle by doing this super lightweight and a million reps, right? It’s just not gonna work.
So I think this is so funny, people are worried they’re gonna get too big. And it’s kind of like a brand new runner coming to you and saying, yeah, I don’t really want to train for a marathon because I’m afraid I’m going to do like a two and a half hour marathon. And you know, I just don’t want to run that fast. You’re just gonna be like, yeah, good luck with that.
So here are some other benefits of strength training, I’ve talked about a lot of benefits, you know that you increase your power to weight ratio, right, we can get stronger bones as well, from increasing our strength, we can prevent injury. Some of the other benefits of strength training are that you actually increase your lactic threshold.
So strength training isn’t, is an anaerobic exercise. In other words, if you’re doing it properly, you’re not in that, you know, aerobic zone, like when you’re out there running a 10-minute mile or whatever your anaerobic like, you can only lift a certain amount of reps if you’re doing this properly until your body is just like cooked, yours is done, right.
So this is like training at or above your anaerobic threshold, right? When you do this regularly, your body can actually increase its ability to handle like lactic acid and remove it from your system, which will increase your lactic threshold or the point at which you experience fatigue.
Okay, so this means that when you increase your lactic threshold, you’ll be able to work out harder for longer. This will enable you to run faster and run faster for longer periods. So it helps to increase your speed and endurance. Okay, so that increase of lactic threshold is an amazing benefit of strength training.
Another one that I mentioned earlier is that strength training will boost your metabolism. So muscles just carrying around muscles will increase your resting metabolic rate because muscle takes more energy to carry around than fat does. So just by carrying around more muscles, you are burning more fat, you’re burning more calories, right? It increases your overall metabolism.
And if you’re you know, following a more of a low carbohydrate diet and you’re already kind of an efficient fat burner, this will actually make you an even more efficient fat burner. And if you’re wanting to be a fat-adapted runner, this will help to speed up your fat adaptation process. So strength training will help to speed up that process of you know, turning yourself from a carb adapted athlete to a fat-adapted athlete, which is amazing.
So, because of this boost in your metabolism, it helps you to lose weight. So increasing your lean muscle mass strength training makes it easier to lose weight. Isn’t that awesome? I love that.
Strength training also helps to fight depression. And I think this is a really cool area of study. And I want to do a little more research into this, because studies have shown that doing an aerobic exercise like, you know, high-intensity strength training can actually boost your mood, and make you feel better, gives you a bit of a pick me up, and even helps to fight off depression, which I think is really, really cool. So if you want to feel good, you want to be just happier, do some strength training.
Also, strength training helps to reduce the risk of certain diseases, gains strength and gains in bone density, attained by doing high-intensity anaerobic training, like strength training, can actually reduce your risk for diabetes, heart disease, and other cardiovascular diseases.
So this is a really cool thing to just know that as we engage in regular, intense anaerobic strength training, that it has all these other amazing health benefits for us, not just stronger muscles, you know, obviously, we get bigger muscles, and we look good, right? And this is important to you will look good naked. So that’s, that’s an important benefit as well.
But also, you know, you’re going to help to stave off other diseases like heart disease. Also, strength training will help to protect joints because it builds stronger muscles and helps to build stronger connective tissues. Right, so we’re talking tendons and ligaments here.
So when you build up your muscle strength and your muscle mass, your joints will be better protected, meaning that you’ll have greater protection against injury, which is really important, especially for us endurance athletes, and especially as we get older.
And then lastly, just doing strength training get boosts your energy, consistent. anaerobic exercise increases your body’s ability to store glycogen, which is what your body uses as energy. And even if you’re not eating a lot of carbs, your body still produces glycogen and can store it. So when you’re consistently doing strength training, you actually become more efficient at storing glycogen, which will give you more energy for your next bout of intense activity or training. Right. So this will improve your athletic endurance and your performance overall.
So, bottom line, get out there and do some strength training, lift some heavy things. And listen, it has to be hard, it should be very hard, it should be very taxing to your system, you should get to that anaerobic threshold, you should just be, you know, cooked at the end of your strength session. Okay, it doesn’t have to take a long time. But there are so many amazing health benefits, especially for runners.
Okay, so if it’s hard, and it feels terrible, and it hurts, that’s good. That means it’s working. All right, you guys, that’s all I got for you today. As always, lots and lots of love. Keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles or starving yourself and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets to losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.
I get a lot of questions over in the Running Lean Community Facebook Group about fat-adaptation. What does it really mean to be a fat-adapted runner? How do I go about becoming …
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My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 54 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I’m going to be talking about the benefits of becoming a fat-adapted runner. So I get a lot of questions about this over in the Running Lean community Facebook group. What does it mean to become fat-adapted? How do I go about becoming fat-adapted? What are the benefits of being fat-adapted? How do I know if I’m fat-adapted?
Lots and lots of questions like that. And they’re all great questions. So today on the podcast, what I want to do is take a deep dive into this topic of becoming fat adapted. So I’m going to answer all those questions and more. My goal here is that by the end of this episode, you have a solid understanding of what it means to become fat adapted. Why is it such a powerful tool to help you improve, not just your running, but to help you improve your overall health and fitness? So that is all coming up momentarily.
But first, I wanted to mention that the Running Lean monthly coaching group is now open for enrollment. This is my monthly coaching program, where you get access to all of my online courses, including my flagship program called the weight loss training course for runners. And these programs will show you exactly what you need to do so that you can transform yourself into that fat-adapted running machine.
You also get live group coaching calls with me and your fellow runners, where you’re going to get the encouragement, support, and the accountability of the group so that you can stay on track and hit all your goals for 2021. I mean, the accountability factor alone is completely worth it. And in January, we’re doing this Powerful Goal Setting workshop called achieving the impossible, where we’re going to set impossible or seemingly impossible goals for ourselves.
And then I’m going to go about showing you exactly how to make those things happen. I want you to make 2021 your year of transformation, I want you to make this the year that you become that lean, fat-adapted running machine. Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join to learn more and enroll now. But you’re going to have to act quickly. Because enrollment closes Sunday, January 10, at 1159 pm, go to runningleanpodcast.com/join.
Also, if you’re not already part of the Running Lean community on Facebook, come and join us over there. Right now we’re doing the January journal challenge. So here’s the challenge to get you to start journaling every day. But really, it’s about thinking differently about yourself. People are discovering things about themselves that they never really thought about before.
Journaling is a great way to clear your mind of all the head trash to help you stay focused and move towards your goals. To create awareness of your thoughts and feelings. It is so important, especially during these very challenging times. So join us over the in the Facebook group and get your journaling on. Remember, we are all in this together. Cool.
All right, so let’s get into this topic, the benefits of becoming a fat-adapted runner. So first of all, what does it mean to be fat-adapted? I think there’s a lot of confusion about this. And so here’s what it means to be fat adapted. When you are fat-adapted. You have trained your body to be very efficient at using your stored body fat as a source of fuel. You’ve become adapted to using your body fat as your primary fuel source.
Okay, that’s all that this means. Right? It doesn’t have to get much more complicated than that. We have all this stored body fat for a reason, right? We have all of us have even the leanest of us have stored body fat. It’s there for a reason, but we never really access it. We never really use it so we just keep storing more and more and more.
The reason we have stored body fat is so we can use it for fuel later. And this is like from an evolutionary standpoint. You know, this helped us to get through long winters when sources of food are a little scarcer. You know, when we were going through long periods where maybe we couldn’t get, you know, sources of plant-based sources like carbohydrates and things like that were no longer really available for us.
Or even as hunters, you know, we most likely weren’t eating three square meals a day, you know, we may have gone out on these long hunts for days at a time. And that stored body fat would have been a great source of fuel to keep us going strong on these long hunts and stuff. Okay.
So we’re actually made to use our own stored body fat for fuel, we just don’t do it very well. And so really, this isn’t a crazy concept I’m I’m proposing here become fat-adapted, what I’m saying is, let’s go back to being an efficient fat burner. Like the way we’re designed like we used to be, we’ve just gotten so far away from that. And really, because of the massive changes in our diet, because of the, you know, sugar-laden foods that we eat was just keep packing more fat on us, because of the highly palatable foods, we eat all the processed foods that we eat, stuff like that. Okay.
So what does it mean to be fat-adapted? It just means you’re good at using your own stored body fat as a source of fuel. And so why would we want to do this? Like, why is fat, a good source of fuel? Or why is it a better source of fuel than some other fuel like sugar, glycogen, whatever you want to call it. So here’s the thing, our body can really only use one type of fuel at a time.
Most of the time, our body is using some form of stored carbohydrate, so carbohydrate gets converted into glucose. And some of that glucose can be freely available to us, some of that glucose gets stored in our muscles as glycogen. And we can use that as a primary fuel source our bodies and our brains are good at using this if it’s available, okay.
And, you know, if you’re a runner, and you’ve been doing the high carbohydrate thing, and you take all these gels while you’re running, that, they give you a little burst of energy, right, it’s very accessible you eat the carb-laden gel, and you have a little burst of energy because you have that glucose in your system. And you have all this stored glycogen, okay, so that’s kind of what happens when we are using sugar as our primary fuel source. Okay.
You can, you can kind of get to your fat stores after a while, but you have to burn through all of that glucose and glycogen first, so your body has to use up all the primary sources of fuel to get to the fat stores. And the problem with this is most people just never get to that point right there. Just, you know, if you’ve ever run a marathon or some long-distance event, and you’ve hit the wall, you kind of know what I’m talking about here.
So you’ve kind of burned through all your available energy. And then your body is just like boom shuts down because it doesn’t have any other source of fuel it does, it has fat that it can use for fuel, but you’ve just not trained yourself to use it. Okay? But here’s the thing, the more carbohydrate sources of fuel are available, the more your body will just burn that. And at the same time, what it does is it shuts down access to your fat stores.
Right, so we want to train our bodies to get better at accessing the fat stores and using that fat for fuel. Why? Well, one of the reasons is that fat actually gives you more energy than sugar does. Fat gives you nine calories of energy per gram. carbs and protein each only give you four calories of energy per gram. So you actually get like more than twice the amount of energy from fat than you do from you know, sugar-based sources of fuel. Okay, so that is one of the main reasons why it’s so important to become fat-adapted because it actually gives you more energy.
Another thing reason why fat is kind of a better source of fuel. or is that, you know, you have this like unlimited supply of fat on your body. At any given time, even the leanest of us have an enormous amount of stored body fat, you know, we have it all around our bodies, you know, and this is the way we’re designed as humans, we all have fat, and it’s okay. But you probably have like 40 to 100,000 calories of energy or fat stored in your body at any given time. Whereas you can only store about 1500 to 2000 calories of carbohydrate in the form of glycogen in your body.
So when it comes to sugar as your primary source of fuel, you can store maybe 2000 calories. So this would be enough fuel for, you know, a few hours, maybe, you know, four to six hours of running or something like that. But really what if you’re talking about your own body fat, even the leanest runners would have days and days worth of fuel onboard. Okay, so those are some of the reasons why we want to become better at burning fat because we get more energy from it, we have this unlimited supply, why not just use what we have? We’re carrying around our own fuel, why not use it?
So what does it mean to become fat-adapted? Like, what does this get you what are the benefits as a runner of becoming fat adapted. So as you can gather by what I just said, you have more energy, you know, so you have this better source of energy, fat will give you actually more energy than sugar will. And so you actually have more energies up feels amazing, you know.
Another benefit is that you don’t feel hungry all the time. Because your body is no longer, you know, your blood sugar isn’t spiking and dropping. Because you’re not eating all the high carbohydrate, high sugar foods, you’re going to feel less hungry, you’re going to feel more satisfied when you eat, and you’re going to feel more full for longer.
And just because your body has this constant source of fuel in the form of fat, you’re just not going to feel as hungry. This is one of the things that my clients talk about all the time is how they’re like, I just don’t feel hungry. Is that okay? Is that a problem? I’m like, No, it’s not a problem. It’s such a great feeling to not be like starving all the time.
You know, so you don’t need to eat every couple of hours. Like when you’re eating a diet high in carbohydrates, you have to eat every few hours, or else your blood sugar drops and you just feel like you’re gonna die. You’re like I gotta eat something right now. Whereas you could go 810 1216 18 hours without eating anything.
If you’re fat-adapted, because your hormones are all balanced, your satiety, hormones, your hunger hormones are all working the way they’re supposed to. And you just don’t have to eat all the time, and it feels amazing. Another benefit is that you don’t need to bring fuel on long runs with you, right, you don’t have to keep sucking down goos every 30 to 45 minutes on your long runs. Because you have the fuel you need with you.
Now you still need to drink water, you need to take electrolytes. Taking electrolytes is very important. You know you don’t want to get your electrolyte balance out of whack, for sure. But you don’t need all the gurus and stuff to run. You really just don’t. You know, I use this example a lot of Mike McKnight he’s a guy who is an ultra runner. He kind of specializes it like the 200-mile distance that’s his kind of go-to distance.
And I think it was last year he did 100 miles on zero calories and he did it just to you know, show that it’s possible. And I’ve done this I did recently 50k on zero calories. I did a marathon on zero calories. I’m using my own body fat for fuel. I didn’t have to bring any fuel with me. Feels pretty amazing honestly.
Another benefit of becoming fat adapted is that you don’t have this gi distress a lot of people get a lot of GI distress when they are ingesting all the super-concentrated carbohydrates during runs. That stuff can really mess with your gut and causes a lot of people to bonk you because they’re like puking on the side of the road or have to hit the portal a bunch of times, but like it causes a lot of people to like not to reach their goals.
So GI distress is a real problem. When you’re not ingesting all the carbs during your run, it’s really not, you don’t have to worry about that. You just don’t have that at all. And I would get a lot of Gi problems when I was doing a lot of the sugary gels and stuff like that during Ultras during marathons, and I remember doing my 100 miler, and I got to a point in there, where I just couldn’t eat anything. I mean, I was eating so much of the sugary carby things that I got to a point where I was just like, my stomach was really hurting.
And this went on for a long time. I think it started hurting around mile like 60 or something like that. And so we’re talking like, running for like 40 miles with real bad stomach pains. Like that’s no fun. That is no fun. All right, I mentioned, you know, you have this limitless supply of fuel onboard. So one of the big benefits is that you kind of become bonk proof, you know, you can kind of go forever.
And this is like one of the most amazing things that I can’t even believe this works. But it does. You know, like I talked about Mike McKnight he ran 100 miles and didn’t need any calories at all. You know, I did this with my 50k recently, you know, I don’t need any calories at all. And you basically don’t have to worry about bonking. Because you’re you’ve got all the fuel that you need onboard.
Recently, there was a couple Meredith Loring and Sammy Innokin. And they were a couple who are into like distance rowing. And they rode from California to Hawaii. And they broke the world record for how long it took them to do this. And they did it in 45 days. So they weren’t just like taking their time they were pushing it, they were going at it hard, right? They did it on zero sugar, and zero carbs, they follow a low carb, high fat kind of diet.
And they were able to do that and break this world record without having to rely on any other sources of sugary carbs. So they were using fat as fuel for this, this is just amazing. I think another benefit of becoming a fat-adapted runner is that you get this improved body composition. Now body composition is one of those things that we all want to write is like one of the main reasons why a lot of people want to lose weight, you know, they want to build muscle and get rid of the fat. I think we all want that, you know.
So when you’re fat-adapted, it helps you to preserve lean muscle mass. So you can you know, build new muscle and keep the muscle that you have, which helps you to increase your power to weight ratio. And as a runner, this makes you a more powerful runner. Okay, so that would be another benefit, right? So you get the improved body composition. But you also improve your power to weight ratio, which makes you a stronger, faster runner.
Another benefit is decreasing the accumulation of lactate in your muscle. So you can actually train harder for longer, you know, lactate builds up, and it, you know, really shuts down the whole function of your muscle and you the longer you can prolong that, you know, the longer you can stave that off, the harder you can train, the longer you can go. And when you’re fat-adapted, it actually slows down that process which is awesome.
Obviously, you got improved prolonged endurance performance. And then here’s the other thing is just running becomes more enjoyable. If you’re a long-distance runner and running is hard for you. It will become easier, it will become more fun, more enjoyable. So those are a bunch of benefits of becoming a fat-adapted runner. Oh, and there’s another one that I really haven’t talked about yet. And that is that there’s this cool side benefit this cool side thing that happens when you become an efficient fat burner. You lose weight.
You know I think we’d all agree that if you want to lose weight, you have to burn fat I think we all know that right you want to burn the fat. But most of us, what we do is we just store fat. We’re just always storing the fat. And like I said, storing fat is good, this is natural. This is what we’ve been designed to do. We’re good at storing some of our energy as fat and that’s okay. But when you’re eating a diet that’s super high in sugar, super high, unrefined carbs, that means you’re just always storing fat, your body is always in this fat storage mode.
So you never give yourself a chance for your body to burn the fat. Just keep putting more and more away. Here’s the thing. There was a study recently that looked at Americans in general. And they’ve kind of determined that around 88% of Americans are considered metabolically unhealthy. 88% of Americans are considered metabolically unhealthy, meaning overweight, obese, or they have some sort of chronic metabolic diseases like heart disease, type two diabetes, hypertension, and insulin resistance 88% is over 290 million people in the US. That is crazy.
That means that only 12% of people in the US are considered metabolically healthy. Honestly, this is a crazy epidemic. It’s crazy. And one of the most, one of the most simplest and most effective things you can do for your health, is to just stop eating sugar, get off of the refined carbohydrates, this one thing will actually turn off that fat storage mode that’s happening in your body and help you to get into the fat-burning mode. Like if you just did this one thing, you would start seeing more fat burning happening in your body. It’s a very simple thing to do.
Stop eating sugar. I know it’s not easy. This is why I have a successful coaching practice. And that’s why I’m talking to you here today. This is why I help people. This is why I do what I do. I help people get through all the tough stuff that comes up when they make these big changes in their diet.
So when they work with me, they get the knowledge support the accountability, to make these kinds of changes to their health. And if you’re the kind of person that can do all this on your own, like just take this information and run with it, do that, please. But if you want a little bit of help join us over in the monthly coaching group. It’s a great way to get all that knowledge, support the accountability, and have fun doing it. We have fun over there, for sure. Check us out.
So yeah, weight loss happens when you burn fat, right. But it only happens if you burn fat. If you’re not burning the fat. If you can’t get to the fat, you can’t lose the weight. So becoming fat-adapted means you are now a highly efficient fat-burning machine. Okay, so it’s great for running. It’s great for fat loss. It’s great for all kinds of things. So how do you do it? How do you become fat-adapted?
Well, I kind of alluded to that just now is like stop eating the sugar and the carbs. Keep running. embrace the discomfort though, because I gotta tell you something. This is the part that most people, this is why most people don’t do this because it will be kind of sucky for a little while running gets hard. While you’re going through this process when you eliminate your body’s primary source of fuel stored carbohydrate in the form of glycogen.
It will take a few weeks for your body to get used to, to adapt to using fat for fuel. Making this transition takes anywhere from two to six weeks. For some people, it may take longer. For other people it’s a week or two on average, I’d probably say like two, three weeks, something like that. You have to you know, transition to it slowly, it takes a little bit of time.
You definitely don’t want to start doing this. Like if you’ve got a big event coming up. Try to do this in the offseason. That’s why now, January is a good time to start doing this because a lot of people aren’t really into their training season just yet. So even if it’s like the very beginning of your training season, it’s not a bad time to start something like this. So you have to like really embrace the discomfort that’s going to happen and a lot of people just can’t do it.
They’re like, well, running just got hard. You know, I stopped eating sugar and I didn’t have the energy. I felt sluggish. Running was hard. So I just quit. But I gotta tell you something if you can get through that tough period that few weeks, what’s on the other side of that is amazing, all the stuff I’ve been talking about, you get all of that, but you got to get through that hard part.
And you got to slow down, you have to like, just know that you’re going to run slower, and it’s okay, just slow it down, listen to your body, make adjustments. And another thing I’ll tell you that I learned the hard way is that the greater the reduction in carbohydrate intake during your transition period, the faster it will go, the faster you will become fully fat-adapted as a runner.
So keep the carbs super low, just during this, you know, first few weeks. And that period will be hard, but you’ll get through it faster. I did it the hard way I was, you know, really eating a lot of carbs. And because it was it was uncomfortable for me that period. And so I was like, Well, maybe if I just add some more carbs in here, but it just made it go a lot longer.
For me, it took me like eight weeks to get fat adapted. And I gotta tell you, that was not a fun eight weeks, two months of, you know, tough running. But I did it the right way I did it in the offseason, I did it during a period where I knew I could just run slow, you know, I dropped my mileage down a little bit and I just ran slower and it was fine.
But eventually what happened is I got through it and then I stopped, I learned and I lowered the carb intake and I got through it and then running started to get easier. And then I started becoming faster. And I’ve actually become quite a bit faster as a fat-adapted runner, and not having to use the carbohydrates as a crutch or anything like that. Okay. So that is how you become fat adapted.
And then another question a lot of people ask, and this was like one of the most asked questions that I get is How do you know if you’re fat-adapted? This is such a good question. So there isn’t really a test you can take. I mean, some people talk about ketosis.
Now I just want to make this clear distinction here. Being in ketosis is where your body is producing ketones. So you’re like super low carb, like less than 20 grams of carbs a day. And your body is producing ketone bodies, which is a source of fuel that your body can use.
And we’re not talking about ketosis here, okay. But you know, fat adaptation and ketosis are similar, and you can be fat-adapted and be in ketosis, or you can be fat-adapted and not be in ketosis. Okay, I just want you to kind of make that distinction. I don’t want to get into the whole ketosis thing here. But how to know if you’re fat-adapted?
Well, you’ll have more sustained energy throughout the day, you won’t have these spikes, and crashes in your energy levels. I know for me, I wake up in the morning, I feel energized. And I stay that way, all day long. This is like one of the best feelings in the world, in my opinion, is just to have this sustained energy where you feel like you don’t have to, like drink coffee in the afternoon just to get through the next few hours of work or whatever. Like I just feel like I have this amazing sustained energy.
So you’ll have sustained energy. Number two, your food cravings will subside greatly, you’re not going to feel hungry all the time. This is another amazing benefit. But also this is how you know that you’ve become fat-adapted because you’re not going to be creating food all the time. Okay, you won’t be hungry all the time.
Another way to tell if you’re fat-adapted is that you’ll have improved focus and concentration, and you’ll be able to think more clearly. This is awesome. Who doesn’t want to think more clearly, I’m actually more productive, I get more done each day because I can think clearer, and I can focus on what I’m doing. I can concentrate on something, get my get I get more work done, I’m more productive.
Another way to tell if you’re fat-adapted is your endurance improves. So you’ll be able to run for longer periods, longer distances, without bonking without hitting the wall. So you’ll know like your running endurance is going to improve greatly. Also, you’ll start running faster so you’ll kind of get back to that normal running pace.
So running may be tough for a while, but then as you become fat-adapted, you’ll get back to your normal running pace without having to add the sugar back into your diet. you’ll know that you’re fat adapted. And then really the other telltale sign that you’re fat-adapted is that you lose weight. If you’re burning fat, you should see some weight loss happening. Now, weight loss is very subjective.
You know, some people, you know, they start working out, and maybe they’re lifting weights. And so they’re gaining some muscle, but they’re burning fat. And their weight loss doesn’t fluctuate much. And they think, oh, it’s not working. So it’s very subjective. It’s not the whole picture. That’s why I mentioned the sustained energy, the food cravings subsiding, improved focus and concentration, endurance improvements, running faster, and weight loss, those are all signs that you are fat-adapted. Now, you may not have all of those, but if you have a bunch of those, like, you know, it’s working for you.
Another question that came up recently was, can you lose your fat adaptation? Like, can you get out of being fat-adapted? And I want you to remember that what we’re talking about here is a lifestyle. Right? It’s not a diet, it’s not a short-term thing. It’s not something you do. Here and there. It’s something you, you become like you, it’s who you are. Okay, so if you focus on this is just like, this is the way I eat now, this is who I am, this is what I do, you’ll be fine, you don’t have to really worry about it.
If you eat some sugar here and there, this may temporarily slow down your ability to burn fat, right? But it’s temporary, it’s not going to set you back to square one, you’re not going to lose your fat adaptation, and you’ll still have it. But it may slow down until you burn through that glucose that glycogen. If however, you go back to eating a high carb diet, you’re eating all these highly palatable foods for weeks on end, you’re basically training your body to use sugar as its primary source of fuel again.
And then that’s going to take some time for you to get back to being fat adapted. So if you’re, if you retrain your body to use glycogen for fuel, then it’s going to take some time for you to get back. You know, it may be kind of like, maybe not exactly like starting over from scratch, but it may take you a few weeks.
And something to keep in mind is that there’s a cool thing that a lot of pro athletes do on purpose. And that is that they train very low carb, and then they race high carb or higher carb. Okay, Zach Bitter is a great example of this. He is the current world record holder for the 100-mile distance.
And he does a totally low carb, high-fat diet. He trains very low carb. And he’s very well fat adapted. And then when he’s getting ready to do a big event, you know, a race that he’s trying to win. He’s trying to win these ultra marathons, these 100-mile races, he’ll do some carbs the days leading up to the race, and then during the race, he’ll add some carbs in as well. And this gives him a little bit of a higher gear, so to speak.
Like he can run faster for longer periods. And, and he goes right back to doing the low carb high fat thing the next day. Right. The goal here is that you can use carbohydrates, you can use glycogen, glucose, whatever, as a source of fuel, every now and then. Like the goal here is not to eliminate carbs from our lives altogether, right?
We’re not trying to become a fat burner only. What we want to do instead is to create a state in our bodies of metabolic flexibility. You want to train your body to adapt to using primarily fat as fuel, but different fuels for different times. Glucose, sometimes glycogen Yeah, ketones if you’re into that, sure, stored body fat, using these different fuels at different times, you know, gives you metabolic flexibility.
Because there are different situations we’ll call for different types of fuel. If you want to run your fastest 5k You’re probably going to want to do some carbs to help you smash that goal. But if you just want to go out there and run a 50k and you want to do it in a way that’s like, you know, pretty chill. I mean, this is me anyway. I’m not trying to win anything.
I just want to go out there and prove to myself that I can do something and I love long-distance running. I love being out there in the world. love running that 50k distance is like my favorite distance. And I love just being fat-adapted and being able to go out there and be able to run all day, and not feel like I’m gonna crash not feel like I’m gonna bonk.
And so you can, you can definitely lose your fat adaptation. But I think if you focus on this as a lifestyle, and then you incorporate some carbs every now and then you can become very flexible with all of this, okay, we don’t want to be dogmatic about anything we want to, you know, be fluid.
So, to me being fat-adapted is life-changing, I have this amazing amount of sustained energy throughout the day, I have better concentration, mental clarity, I don’t have this brain fog that I used to have, you know, our brains need fat to work properly to function optimally, our brains need fat as fuel.
And so when you’re, when you’re giving it, the fat that it requires and loves, oh, feels good. I don’t feel obsessed about food all the time, my hunger and satiety signals are working properly. I’m not addicted to sugar anymore, I don’t have to eat sugar and carbs all the time. To just maintain, you know, a level of, of existence.
I can have those things every now and then. But I don’t feel like I need them. Right, there’s a big difference between enjoying some carbs here and there and, and having to have them like, like, I’m no longer chained to the carbs, okay. And I’ve lost weight, I gave my body a chance to get back to my natural weight by getting rid of by making myself a more efficient fat burner and getting rid of the sugar from my body.
Honestly, it’s one of the reasons why I say this is so life-changing is because I have optimized my overall health, my overall fitness and I’m, and I feel so good about myself. I’m happier because of this. So I think there are amazing, amazing benefits of becoming a fat-adapted runner.
And if you want to know exactly how to do this, and you want the support to do this, then come join us in the Running Lean monthly coaching group. You’re gonna get all the support and encouragement from this group. And we’re going to help you achieve those big goals that you want for yourself. But you got to make a decision soon because enrollment closes at 11:59 pm. Sunday, January 10.
Make 2021 the year you transform yourself into a lean, fat-adapted running machine. Just go to runninglreanpodcast.com/join. Alright, you guys, go out there and become a fat-adapted runner. It is amazing. You will love it. You’ve totally got this. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of you keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles or starving yourself and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a lien running machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets to losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become lean running machine.
Self-sabotage is when you say you want to lose 30 lbs but you find yourself eating chocolate cake every day. What is happening here? By eating the cake, you are completely undermining what you say …
My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 53 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today, this is actually the very first episode of 2021. This episode will come out on January the first. So Happy New Year, everyone. And I thought it was appropriate to talk about this topic, especially as we start the new year and that is how to overcome self-sabotage.
Self sabotage is one of those things that we all do. We’ve all done it. No one, none of us are immune to it. Self sabotage is like when you say I want to lose 30 pounds, but then you find yourself eating chocolate cake every day. What is happening? When you eat the cake, you’re undermining your goals. You’re undermining what you really want for yourself.
Okay, so if this sounds familiar to you this kind of thing. Rest assured you’re not alone, we all do it. The problem though most people think that self-sabotage is just something that happens. It’s like a part of life, and they have no control over it. That is not the case, the reality is that we absolutely can do something about it. So I’m going to talk about what self-sabotage is, and how we can overcome it in this episode. Okay.
Real quick, the Running Lean monthly coaching group opens in just a couple of days, January 3, 2021. This is my monthly group coaching program, where first of all, you get access to all of my online courses, including my flagship program called the weight loss training course for runners. This is where you learn exactly how to become an efficient fat-burning machine.
Right, you want to lose weight, you got to burn fat if you want to be able to run longer and farther and, and more efficiently. Fat is a great source of fuel. So you got to transform yourself into an efficient fat burner. So I’ll teach you exactly how to do that. You also get in the monthly coaching group, you get these live group coaching calls with me and your fellow runners.
So you get the group support, the encouragement, you get the accountability, you get help, you get to ask questions, and get answers. I want to help you reach your goals in 2021. Joining the monthly coaching group is a great way to do it. We’re also going to be doing a powerful goal-setting workshop in January called achieving the impossible I want to help you achieve some impossible goals in 2021.
So join the monthly coaching group and you can do all of that amazing stuff. Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join and let’s make 2021 a year of transformation. Become the badass runner you’ve always wanted to be; runningleanpodcast.com/join. And then I did want to mention that we have a new challenge that we just started over in the Running Lean community on Facebook.
So come check us out over there because we’re doing the January journal challenge and that is where I am challenging you to write in a journal every day for the month of January. Now you might be thinking Patrick, whatever. What is this like a dear diary kind of a thing? No, it is not.
This is like journaling, with intention. Journaling, with purpose journaling because you want to accomplish something. Journaling is an amazing way to help you reach your goals. Whether you’re journaling, for weight loss journaling, for some big running goal. Some people will call it a training log or a food log. You can call it whatever you want. There are different ways you can journal.
But the benefits of journaling are amazing in that it’s just such an incredible way of creating a new positive mindset, but also helping you create new thought habits, new thought patterns, and helping you to answer reach your goals. So we’re going to be talking all about what journaling is and how to do it the right way.
And I also have daily journal prompts that I’ll be offering up to you all through the month of January. So it’s going to be kind of a fun challenge that we’re doing in the Facebook group. So go just go to Facebook and search for Running Lean community. Okay.
Bring on the self-sabotage stuff. Today I’m talking about how to overcome self-sabotage. So let’s talk about what self-sabotage actually is. So the definition of self-sabotage, if you look it up, on the Googles, it says, self-sabotage refers to behaviors or thought patterns that hold you back and prevent you from doing what you want to do.
Self-sabotage is when you consciously or unconsciously undermine your thoughts, dreams, goals and desires. So when I look at those definitions, I’m like, Whoa, that is? That is a very, very good definition. So I kind of combine that and say self-sabotage is patterns of thoughts or behaviors that hold you back keep you stuck, or prevent you from reaching your goals. So how do you know if you’re self-sabotaging?
Like how do you know that this is something you’re actually doing. One thing you can do is take a look at your current actions, your behaviors are the things you’re doing in alignment with your long-term goals. If not, then it could be a form of self-sabotage. For example, let’s say you want to lose weight, and you decide you’re going to stop eating sugar and flour. This is a pretty, pretty common thing to do, right? If you want to try to lose weight.
So you stop eating all the refined carbs, you stop eating all the sugar, and like you’re doing okay, maybe for a couple of weeks, you’re doing okay, but then you have like a stressful day at work. And there’s like an accident on your way home, it takes you forever get home, you’re stuck in traffic, you come home, you’re tired, you’re frustrated, you open up the fridge because you’re going to your plan on eating a healthy dinner, you got a salad and a piece of chicken that you’re gonna have for dinner.
So you open up the fridge, you’re standing there, lo and behold, there’s this beautiful chocolate cake just sitting right there calling out to you eat me, it’ll make you feel better. You’re all stressed out, this is going to fix all of your problems. Chocolate Cake talking to you. So instead of eating your healthy dinner of chicken and salad like you planned on doing, you just grab the cake and you eat the whole thing while you’re standing there with the door open.
And you’re like I don’t understand what’s happening. I’m self-sabotaging. So you have this long-term goal, you want to lose weight, but your behavior standing there in front of the fridge with the door open eating a whole chocolate cake is completely undermining your progress towards your goals. Right.
So this is what self-sabotage looks like. Okay. And I know this is kind of an extremely funny example. But we do it to some degree like this all the time. Okay. Here’s a more subtle example of self-sabotage. And this may be something that you can relate to, because this is my experience.
So a few years ago, I stopped doing the longer distance running, I stopped running marathons and running ultra marathons. And I loved doing that. This is like who I was. I was like the ultra marathon guy, you know, and I just love getting out there and running all the 50K’s and the 50 milers, and stuff like that.
And I just stopped doing it because I told myself all this stuff. I gave myself all these reasons why I didn’t want to keep doing these long-distance events. So I told myself I was getting too old is too hard on my body. It’s not good for me, oh, it’s hard on your knees. Whatever those days are behind me, you know, the glory days are behind like it’s just all gonna go downhill from here, whatever. I was telling myself all this stuff. That is not what I really wanted for myself though.
What I really wanted for myself was I wanted to continue to be the ultramarathon guy. I wanted to continue to run the long-distance events but subconsciously, I was telling myself all these little stories because I was afraid because training for those events and running those events is hard, and it’s uncomfortable.
And I was telling myself all these little lies, basically, because I didn’t want to feel uncomfortable. You know, it was getting me outside my comfort zone when I started thinking about running a marathon again are these Ultras, and I just didn’t want to feel uncomfortable. So I told myself all these lies, and then I just stopped running the long-distance stuff.
Okay, so that’s pretty subtle, right? I mean, you, you kind of think that you’re just, you know, these are just the this is just the truth. And this is just, these are all the reasons why I can’t do this anymore. But, you know, kind of underlying all that was this lie. This lie that I was trying to just stay safe and secure and comfortable.
When in reality, I really wanted to continue doing those things that brought me so much joy. Yeah, they’re hard to do, but they brought me so much joy and, and fulfillment when I did that, okay. But I was self-sabotaging by telling myself all these lies. You know, another subtle way of self-sabotaging is to just say to yourself, you know, I’m okay, being overweight, I’m okay, at this weight, I’m just, I’m fine the way I am. Even though, deep down inside, you really want to lose
30 pounds. And I’m not talking about like, body image issues or anything like that, if you’re okay with where you are, like, honestly, like you, you don’t want to lose weight, that is perfectly fine.
But if deep down inside, you really do want to lose weight. But you’re telling yourself, you know, lies like, I’m okay, where I am, or, you know, this just never really works for me anyway. Or it’s just kind of too hard. I don’t want to be that uncomfortable. All those things, we tell ourselves our little subtle forms of self-sabotage. Okay, so just be mindful of that.
Okay, I’m just kind of going through what self-sabotage looks like, and how it can be kind of subtle. Why do we do this? Why do we self-sabotage? Why do we say we want to do something, but then do something different? And really, it has to do with wanting to stay comfortable, you know?
Our brains are always looking for safety, like our brains are really good at seeking comfort and avoiding pain. Okay, this is great. This is helped us to evolve as human beings over millions of years. You know, seek pleasure, avoid pain, this works really well. So when we self-sabotage, we’re actually getting a positive effect by doing this to ourselves.
Our brains are thinking that it’s a positive effect because we’re avoiding some sort of pain, right? Some sort of discomfort. Right? So it might be the feeling of safety, security, or just plain old comfort, right? So but that primitive part of our brain wants to avoid any sort of discomfort, discomfort, you know, feels like pain to our brain.
And so we might just go, oh, you know, running a marathon. That’s hard work that’s like, this is discomfort. I don’t want that. You got to stay safe. Come over here. The same thing with like, when you tell yourself, oh, losing weight is too hard, or I can’t do it. Or maybe I’m just okay being this way.
You’re telling yourself, I don’t want to go through the discomfort of losing the weight, I don’t want to go through any kind of discomfort. So instead of reaching this goal, that might be a little uncomfortable getting there.
I’m just going to keep telling myself that I’m okay where I am, even though that’s not really what you want. So that’s what self-sabotage looks like. And that’s kind of why we do it. Think about where in your life right now. You’re avoiding pain and discomfort.
You know, what goals do you have? Where you’re where you might have to get uncomfortable? And how are you avoiding achieving that goal or working towards that goal? How are you avoiding getting uncomfortable? Because your brain is telling you to stay safe? Think about that.
It’d be interesting to kind of hear what you guys think about where you’re seeing this in your own life. Okay. But self-sabotage the positive benefit we get from it is that it keeps us from having to feel uncomfortable, right, but disk Comfort is the price we have to pay if we want to achieve anything worthwhile. You know, I talk about this all the time, right?
Embrace the suck, embrace the discomfort. But for example, if I decide I’m never going to run another marathon, then I don’t have to go through any of that pain and discomfort of training for the marathon. If I never, if I say I’m never running an ultra again, you know ultras are too hard, that’s too hard on my body, I’m too old, those days are behind me, then I never have to go through the discomfort of training for one again, I can stay safe right here, my little comfort zone.
You know, if you say to yourself, I’m okay, being overweight, it’s too hard to lose weight, all that stuff, then you don’t have to endure any of that discomfort of losing the weight, right? You just keep eating the chocolate cake. And, and you’re good, you’re comfortable. You’ve succeeded in staying in your comfort zone, good job. You’ve succeeded in avoiding all the pain and seeking out the pleasure.
You’re satisfying that primitive part of your brain. But the things you really want for yourself, your hopes, your dreams, and your goals are all washed away. Right? So why do we self-sabotage as we think we’re getting some positive benefit, which is to stay comfortable. But is that what you really want for yourself? I say, no.
So here are some ways that we self sabotage some ways that are a little subtle, and you may not be thinking about all the time, but they’re not as obvious. So one way that we self-sabotage is by procrastinating. So this is the act of, you know, delaying, or postponing doing something. Okay, so we put something off because we don’t feel like doing it. Well, I’ll do it tomorrow.
When you put it off, when you say I’ll do it tomorrow, you don’t have to deal with it right now, you don’t have to do anything uncomfortable right now. Right? When you say, Oh, I’m going to change my diet, I’m going to change the way I eat, I’m going to focus on my nutrition, you know, starting next month.
So that’s a very safe thing for you to do, it causes no immediate discomfort, you just push it off. And then when next month comes, you’re like, I know, I said I was going to do that. But I’m really not ready for that yet. And I’ve got all these other things going on in my life. So I’m just going to, I’m going to do it next month. And we just keep doing this right, we just keep delaying the discomfort. It’s just a constant delay, delay, delay.
Delay is a killer of hopes and dreams. If you just keep putting stuff off, you’re never gonna get it done. Okay? This is a very common way that we self-sabotage procrastination.
Another way we self-sabotage is by doing something called buffering. Buffering is where we use some external thing, food, alcohol, drugs, shopping, whatever, to try to make us feel good. Inside, we have difficult emotions we’re dealing with. And so we use something external, like food or alcohol, to feel better, right? We’re using something external to feel better internally.
You put a buffer between you and your emotions. And you know, it’s buffering because it always comes with some kind of negative consequences, right? So you might be stressed out. And so you eat and you gain weight. Right? you overeat, you eat all the chocolate cake, and you gain weight and you never reach your goal. This is when you know it’s buffering, okay?
Some people use shopping in the same way you get that little dopamine hit every time you buy something, you know, and it kind of feels good. People use drugs, and people use, you know, cigarettes and alcohol. Some people even use exercise as a form of buffering because they don’t want to deal with the stress in their life.
And so, instead of dealing with the emotional experiences you’re having, you just use something to feel better temporarily. Right? It doesn’t really help you with the emotion you’re experiencing with the stress with the anger with the sadness, whatever it is you’re experiencing. It just covers it up temporarily. It just kind of makes you feel good in the moment, right? Very, a very common way that people self-sabotage is using some substance or something to just try to make themselves feel better.
And it’s self-sabotage because, you know, think about it like alcoholics who drink too much. They know they shouldn’t drink but they do it anyway. They know that drinking is going to cost them their marriage, their job, they won’t see their kids they may lose everything, but they drink anyway, this is a very common way that alcoholics self-sabotage, right.
They would rather drink than have to deal with all the feelings and especially the feeling of like not having that alcohol in their system. Okay, so buffering, with food, with alcohol, with drugs, or with shopping is another way that we self-sabotage.
Another pretty subtle way we self-sabotage is by just never starting anything. And this is like procrastination. But it just kind of goes on and on, you actually never do anything at all. And I see this, a lot of times, I talk to people all the time about changing their diet, right, and changing their relationship with food and changing their health and their fitness. And they tell me, without a doubt, I’m ready, I’m ready to lose weight, I’m ready to change my diet, I’m ready to, you know, go all-in on this, but then they never do anything about it.
You know, they just keep talking about it, they just keep saying they want to do it. I talk to people all the time, let’s say this. They want a different life for themselves. They want to be healthier. They want to eat better, they want to lose weight, they want to be in better shape, but they never do anything about they never get started.
I mean, it’s a little different than procrastinating, like constant procrastination. It’s like procrastination to the next level. Just never starting you, you just have to start. But again, it’s like one of those things, it’s uncomfortable. And we know it’s going to be hard. And so just talking about it is much easier than actually doing something about it. But the very, very common way that we self-sabotage.
How many things in your life have you been talking about doing? Think about it. How many things have you said, you know, it’d be nice to do that, to take that vacation, to change this about myself, to run a marathon, to whatever your goals are? Quit your job, start your own business, make more money, you know, get married, whatever it is, what is it that you just keep talking about, but never doing?
I’ll be honest with you, I keep talking about wanting to get out of here in the winter, and go live somewhere warm for at least a couple of months. And I keep talking about it. And I never do anything about it. I self-sabotage in that way. I’m gonna have to do something about it probably this year. Since I’m now that I’m bringing it up. I’m totally calling myself out on this. Oh my god.
But like, it’s one of those things that I’ve been talking about for a couple of years. And I really haven’t done anything about it. And I just need to like pull the trigger and do something about it. Go somewhere warm. Go live on a beach for 30 days in the winter. Oh my gosh, that’d be amazing. So I’m gonna do something about it. You watch.
Alright, another kind of subtle way that we self-sabotage is we just quit? I guess this isn’t that subtle. Right? Quitting is different from what I call failing. So, you know, there’s really no such thing as failure. Like, I think, you know, true failure is just quitting, honestly. But I think failure is a part of the process of accomplishing anything that you want in your life.
If you want to lose weight, let’s say, and you are trying a bunch of different things, and they’re just not working. Those are like little failures. And that’s okay. You just got to keep trying stuff until you figure out what works for you, right. I’ve been experiencing this lately, learning how to do a handstand, right? This is a goal of mine, it’s really hard to do.
It’s very, very challenging. And I keep failing, I keep falling down. And I can’t balance properly. And I’m not strong enough yet. But I keep doing it. So the only way that I could actually fail at that is if I just quit, like quitting is the ultimate self-sabotage. If I just keep trying, and I keep having these little failures, and I but I keep going and I keep learning what works and what doesn’t.
And this is what I’m doing. I’m falling down. I’m trying to get my hands down and falling down. I’m learning that I have to be I have to work on my balance. That’s a big part of this right and my core strength. So I’m working on those things, and I’m learning as I go. But if I were to just say like, oh, I tried it once and I can’t do it. And I quit. That’s like the ultimate self-sabotage. So I’m not gonna do that. I’m gonna keep going.
So you may not even be aware of why you’re quitting. It’s kind of like what I was talking about earlier when I decided I wasn’t going to run the long-distance events anymore. I was justifying it and it sounded like, you know, justifiable, it sounded like these were good reasons for not wanting to run long distances anymore.
Oh, I’m too old. It’s too hard. I don’t like doing that. But really, I was just quitting, I just quit. I just gave up. I didn’t want to do that. That’s total self-sabotage right there. So those are a few other ways that we self-sabotage, some subtle, some not so much. But here’s what happens. Here are some of the negative side effects that we experience when we self-sabotage.
So you’ve you feel like you’re choosing safety and security, you feel like you’re staying comfortable. But what you’re really doing is you’re, you’re hurting yourself. And here’s how, when you self sabotage, in whatever way that looks like for you, whether it’s procrastination, quitting, whether that’s you know, buffering, or just like never starting anything, you just stay stuck where you are.
Right, if you want something that you don’t have, like, you have to get out of your comfort zone, right, everything you want, that you don’t already have is outside your comfort zone. But getting out of your comfort zone does not feel good is scary out there. It’s uncomfortable. It’s why it’s called comfort zone. It’s the unknown. In order to grow, in order to become the best version of you.
Like, let’s say you want to lose the weight and run faster, run farther, whatever that looks like for you. Whatever vision of yourself, you have for yourself, the person that you ultimately want to be, you can’t do any of those things. If you just stay stuck and comfortable where you are, you have to get uncomfortable.
When you self sabotage, you hold yourself back from reaching all these goals from becoming who you want to become. So you’ll never become that person. You’ll never know what you’re capable of achieving. You’re gonna miss the opportunity to find out what you can do and what you’re really made of. You’re never going to realize your full potential.
This is one of the most costly side effects of self-sabotage is that you’ll never reach your full potential. I have big goals for myself in 2021 I am very aware of the ways that I self-sabotage okay. I do it in some subtle ways. Sometimes it’s it looks like procrastination. Sometimes it looks like quitting. But I’m so aware of this now I know what I’m doing it.
And I know that when I find myself seeking comfort when I when I’m seeking when I’m when I would just want to feel safe and comfortable and complacent. I know I’m probably self-sabotaging in some way. I know when I find myself feeling uncomfortable, maybe a little bit afraid. Maybe a little bit on the edge. I know I’m not self-sabotaging. And I know I’m right where I’m supposed to be because I’m getting out of my comfort zone. I do that.
Isn’t that crazy, though? Like embracing the discomfort is kind of the opposite of what we’re taught our whole lives, right? We’re always taught like just feel good. You just want to feel good all the time. Just feel comfortable, safe, and secure. But that’s not how these things work. Because it’s not how you become more. Right? Self-sabotaging does make you feel safe and secure. But it also prevents you from becoming who you want to be. It prevents you from achieving big things.
So what do we do about all this? It’s probably what you’ve been asking yourself this whole time. How do we overcome self-sabotage, Patrick? Well, I’m gonna tell you right now, the first thing you want to do to overcome self-sabotage is to focus on taking aligned action on your goals and dreams.
So figure out what it is you want to accomplish. What are your goals? If you don’t have any goals, that’s actually a form of self-sabotage too, just FYI, right. Oh, I don’t have goals. No, you’re not going to you’re not going to achieve much then. Okay. But if you do have goals, I encourage you to have goals.
Think about one of your goals. And then think about everything you did yesterday. What did you do yesterday to work toward that goal? Did you do anything? Did you do a couple of things? Why or why not? This is what it means to take aligned action, you have a goal, and there’s something important that you want to achieve.
And then every day, every day, you take little steps towards reaching that goal. So your goal could be I want to run a marathon. And so yesterday, you ran a mile, and you logged your workout in your training journal, and you wrote a few notes about how you felt about that run. This is the kind of stuff we’ll be talking about in the journal challenge in the Facebook group, FYI.
So you took a line action, right, you ran and you logged some stuff in your trading journal, and you’re keeping track of your progress. And you stuck to your plan and you ran your workout yesterday. Perfect, you’re taking aligned action towards that goal.
Let’s say your goal is to lose 30 pounds. So you look at what you did yesterday, you planned your meals ahead of time, you didn’t snack between meals, you stuck to your plan, and you logged everything in your food journal, perfect. Another form of taking aligned action towards your goal. That’s what it means to take aligned action.
So if you’re not doing something each day, to move towards this goal that you say is so important to you. That could be a form of self-sabotage. Okay, so the number one thing you can do, to overcome self-sabotage is to take aligned action every day, when you focus on taking some sort of action that moves you in the direction of your goals of your hopes of your dreams, you can avoid self-sabotage.
The second thing you can do to overcome self-sabotage is to stop focusing on the past and focus on the future instead. If all of your attention, and all of your focus is on your past, who you used to be the all the ways that you have failed, all the things that have not worked for you, you are just going to stay stuck in that past, you’re going to keep creating more and more of that past in your future.
When we focus on all of our past shortcomings, and the things that have never worked for us, we just create more and more of that, in our future. Your past is just a series of thought patterns. It’s a series of mostly subconscious mental habits. And we need to break those old habits, we need to break out of those patterns, we need to start working on new thought patterns, we need to create new mental habits for our future.
We don’t want to keep doing and thinking and feeling the same things over and over again, that we’ve been doing in the past, right? So who is it you want to be in the future? Think about this, think about the future version of yourself. So you’ve already achieved your goal.
Let’s say you, you want to lose 30 pounds, you’re already there? What does that person look like? How do you think differently? Because you’ve already achieved this goal? How do you feel about yourself? Focus on that amazing future version of you. Instead of focusing on what you’ve done or not done in the past.
I have this vision for myself. I want to be stronger. I want to be more muscular. I want to be ripped. Okay. And I think about that future version of myself all the time, I see myself standing in the mirror looking at myself, and I’m kind of jacked. You know, I’m feeling really good about how I look and how I feel about myself.
And if I were to just focus on my past and how I haven’t really been able to build much muscle in the past, I only see my future vision of myself would be just that skinny guy who I used to be who lacks muscle definition. Focusing my attention on who I want to be that jacked version of myself who I want to become keeps me motivated and moving in that direction.
Whereas if I focused all my attention on how I’ve always been the skinny guy and I’ve never really been very muscular. I just feel All terrible about myself. And I’d always be moving in that direction. And when I say the skinny guy, I don’t, because I was pretty fat at some point, but I was still never had like muscle definition, right? I just had like fat arms, I didn’t have muscular arms, you know, and I want that. That’s what I’m working on.
But where you focus, your attention is the direction you move. So if I’m focusing my intention on this amazing, healthy, muscular version of myself in the future, I’m going to be moving in that direction. If I keep focusing on this person I used to be, that just doesn’t feel good at all. But I’ll be moving in that direction. I don’t want to do that.
So my encouragement for you in a way that you can really stop the self-sabotage is to stop focusing on what’s in your past, stop focusing on what hasn’t worked on your failures, and all that other stuff, and start focusing on who you want to become. Focus on the future you, and then you’ll always be moving in that direction.
Alright, and then the third way that we can overcome self-sabotage is to manage our minds. Right, we self sabotage, because we have thoughts and feelings about why we can’t do something or about how will never amount to anything, or it’s too hard, or that’s just not who I am anymore. Whatever thoughts and feelings we have about ourselves, you have to understand something, these thoughts that you have about yourself are not the truth. They’re just thoughts. They’re thoughts in your head. They’re just like sentences, you keep saying to yourself over and over again.
And sometimes we say these things to ourselves so often, and for so long, that they just become these deep-seated beliefs that we have about ourselves, even though they’re just thoughts, they’re not the truth. I had these beliefs that running Ultras was too hard, that I’m too old. And I thought these things over and over again until I quit training for those events. And in they became true for me.
So beliefs are just recurring thoughts that we have, like habitual patterns of thoughts. And honestly, you can change them if you want, you don’t have to hold on to them. I was holding on to them. And it was keeping me feeling terrible about myself and staying stuck and staying small. So if you have a belief that, like, let’s say, you have a belief that no matter what, you’ll never be able to lose weight, I can almost guarantee that you never, ever will be able to lose weight.
If this is a strong belief that you have about yourself, you’re never gonna be able to lose weight, I guarantee you. In order to stop the self-sabotage, you have to change these thought patterns. Right? And one of the first steps is just to recognize that all these thoughts are just that they’re just thoughts, then they’re not necessarily true. Just have that awareness. Your thoughts are just how you are choosing to respond to the world around you.
So here’s my example. You know, I had all these thoughts about how you know Ultras, were too hard. I’m too old. I don’t like doing them. Maybe just like running half marathons is better. Yeah, that’s what it was. Half marathons are better. This is like a thought that I was telling people like, oh, you know, you get it done in like two hours. And you know, the training is easier, and all these other things. And so I really believe this.
All of these thoughts, though, like, these beliefs that I had created, created this, like, whole belief system around ultras being too hard, and, you know, half-marathons being easier. And, man, it just became like, part of who I was, but it wasn’t the truth. You know, when I stopped to look at this and to really think about like, what am I doing here? Like, are marathons really too hard? Am I too old? Are halves really better than full marathons are Ultras, you know, only in my past?
And when I really sat down and asked myself these questions, the answer was like, no, none of this stuff is actually true. Lots of people would say, marathons are not too hard, or they’re not too old. I know people that are like in their 70s and 80s that still run marathons or Ultras, I know a lot of people that say a half marathons are not better than full marathons.
Like, I can decide what’s true for me. So I chose, eventually, that all these thought patterns that I had these beliefs that I had, were just that in that I don’t have to, like, hang on to this stuff anymore. Because hanging on to this stuff was just keeping me feeling small and safe and comfortable. Yeah, but also, I wasn’t doing the things I really wanted to do. pretty subtle. But it felt so true for me.
I really could justify not wanting to do these harder events because of these deep-seated belief systems they created all-around how hard this stuff was. And so this is like total self-sabotage, for me. So why this is so important is because your thoughts, create your reality, everything that you have in your life right now. All of it is created by your thoughts.
Things happen in your life, you have circumstances that happen in your life, and then you have thoughts about those circumstances. Right? Always, always, always you have thoughts about stuff that’s going on around you. And it’s your thoughts that create your feelings. So if you feel motivated, it’s because you had a thought about something that created that feeling of motivation. And then those feelings drive your actions.
So when you feel motivated, you take certain actions like usually, if you’re motivated in the right direction, those actions you’re taking are aligned actions that move you towards your goal. So when you think marathons are too hard, that creates a feeling of deep motivation inside you. And when you feel demotivated, you’re probably going to take action, that’s like self-sabotaging action, or you don’t do anything at all right, you just give up, you just quit, you don’t do it. That was my experience.
So I had all these thoughts, they created these feelings of like, discouragement, uncomfortable, or D motivation. And then I just gave up, right? This is all based on my thoughts. So the trick here is that you have to learn to control how you respond to everything happening in the world around you. Your thoughts, always create your feelings, your feelings, always drive your actions. Just know this, when you know this, you can start making some changes here.
Another example of how your thoughts create your results is if you constantly think you can’t lose weight, and you’re going to feel that those thoughts are going to make you feel defeated. Those thoughts or that feeling of being defeated is going to keep you from taking aligned action, right. So you’ll just stand in front of the fridge with the door open and eat the whole chocolate cake.
This is a classic, you know, self-sabotage. And it’s all caused by your own thoughts and feelings. Think about this, your current weight is a direct result of your thoughts, your beliefs, and your belief systems. And the emotions you create by your thoughts. All of it creates your current weight, it creates everything in your life right now.
And if you think well, doesn’t matter what I’ve done in my past, I’m going to lose these 30 pounds no matter what no matter how long it takes, I’m going to do whatever it takes. And I’m going to get there. This is a whole different way of thinking. This is going to make you feel super motivated. This is going to keep you sticking to your plan.
You’re going to take aligned action, regardless of there being chocolate cake in the fridge. And I can guarantee that you will lose weight. I see this all the time in my clients that tell me oh yeah, I just got through Christmas and there were all these cookies around and pies and everything and I didn’t even want to eat it. I stuck to my plan. And I felt so good about myself. And I’ve lost a few more pounds this week. That is amazing. It’s all because they’re choosing what to believe about themselves. They’re choosing thoughts that help them to stay motivated.
Change your thoughts. You change your reality change your thoughts, you can change your weight, change your thoughts and you can run an ultra. Okay. This is what it looks like when I say you got to manage your mind right you have to change what you’re thinking mindset is the key to all of this and you won’t get it perfect right away. This is a daily practice, I still work on this.
But when you have that awareness, when you keep working on it when you keep thinking about your thoughts, pretty meta, but when you keep focused on how your thinking is creating the results that you’re getting in your life, you can absolutely do something about it and you can start creating the results that you really want in your life by just changing your thoughts. Okay, and there, there becomes nothing that you can’t accomplish. There’s nothing you can’t do with the right mindset.
So quick recap here, self-sabotage. It’s patterns of thoughts and behaviors that hold you back that keep you stuck that prevent you from becoming who you really want to be. How do you know if you’re self sabotaging? Usually, it’s because your actions, your habits, and your behaviors are not in alignment with your long-term goals.
Why do we self-sabotage? Because our brains think we’re gonna get some kind of positive benefit from it. Like we’re avoiding pain, we’re seeking pleasure trying to stay comfortable. Some of the common ways we self-sabotage are by procrastination, buffering, we never start anything or we just quit, we just give up.
And some of the negative consequences of self-sabotage are really it just keeps us stuck. It holds us back and prevents us from becoming who we want to be from reaching our goals, from accomplishing our big impossible goals and dreams. And we just stay small. We never get to become the best version of ourselves.
And how do we overcome self-sabotage? Well, take aligned action towards your goals and dreams every single day. Remember to focus on your future, that future amazing version of you instead of your past. And then learn how to manage your thoughts and feelings. You change your thoughts, you change your results. Cool.
All right, I hope you got something out of this today. Remember, the Running Lean monthly coaching group opens up January 3, everything I just talked about here, how to take aligned action towards your goals, how to focus on your future, how to manage your mind, all of that stuff. We’re going to be talking about all of that in the monthly coaching group. I’ve got this brand new course called achieving the impossible. It’s going to be amazing.
You also get access to the weight loss training course for runners to learn exactly how to become a lean fat-burning machine, you get those live group coaching calls with me. Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join. Enrollment opens January 3, go all-in on yourself, make 2021 the year you transform yourself into a lean, fat-burning running machine. Cool.
You got this, my friends. Hey, thank you for joining me every week here in 2020. I am looking so forward to 2021. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of you keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.
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