Metabolism

291 Replay Common Weight Loss Myths Debunked
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Speaker: 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 291 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners in today. Common weight loss myths debunked. So there’s no shortage of advice out there about how to lose weight. That is for sure. Just eat less, run more. Count your calories, cut your carbs, do a cleanse, go vegan, try keto.

The list goes on and on and on and on and on. But how much of this advice. Actually works. And more importantly, how much of it works long term, especially for runners. So in this episode, I’m digging into some of the most common and most misunderstood ideas around weight loss. We’re talking about what’s true, what’s total bs.

And how to take a more realistic, sustainable approach to getting leaner and stronger. So if you’ve ever felt confused or frustrated trying to figure out the right way to lose weight, you are definitely not alone. My goal here is to help you see through the hypes so you can finally start making real progress.

And listen, if you’re tired of feeling like you’re constantly struggling, struggling to hit your pace, struggling to stay consistent, struggling to lose that extra weight if running feels harder than it should if you’re putting in the miles, but not seeing the results. If you know you could be stronger, leaner, more energized, but you just don’t know how to get there.

I’ve got you. The truth is, running alone isn’t enough. Random diets don’t work and willpower will only get you so far. What you need is a comprehensive approach, a proven system that’s designed specifically for runners like you who want to feel better, run easier, and finally start making real progress.

Inside my coaching program, we take a holistic approach to transforming you from the inside out, we dial in your nutrition. Build real strength, train smart and develop the mindset you need to stay consistent for life. So if you’re ready to become the healthiest, strongest, most badass version of yourself, then let’s go.

Just go to my website, running lean coaching.com, click on work with me, book your free call. Let’s do this together. You’re so much more capable than you think. Okay. So like I said at the intro, there’s a lot of mis and misconceptions around weight loss, especially when it comes to runners. A lot of runners don’t understand, uh, the proper, uh, principles around weight loss, and there’s a lot of, and honestly, there’s just a lot of bad advice out there.

This is an older episode. I actually, uh, aired this one, oh gosh, about a hundred episodes ago or so. Um, but it is one of those ones that I feel is kind of timeless information. I think that it’s something that we can all, uh, use as a good reminder right now, especially if you’re kind of coming into the off season, which a lot of us are here in the summertime.

So I’m not gonna, uh, talk much more about this. I’m just going to go ahead and play the replay of common weight loss. Myths debunked. Enjoy. All right, let’s get into today’s topic. Common weight loss myths, debunked. Um, I was thinking about this as we start the new year here. It is now January of 2024. Happy New Year to all of you.

And I was thinking about. What people tend to do at the beginning of the year like this, they tend to jump onto some fad diet or, or do something they read about on social media to lose weight and, and maybe improve their exercise or start running or something like that. And it usually ends up being something that is very short-lived.

That’s why the gyms are full in January and they’re empty again in March. So we need to take a different approach. Okay. And, and some of the things that, that are spread out there in the world, some of the. Conceptions that people have around weight loss are confusing and they’re not always correct and, and I want to clear up some of these common myths, you know, some of these common principles that people tend to think are the truth that really aren’t.

So just sit back and enjoy this episode today because I’m gonna debunk some of these common weight loss myths. Now, the first one is gonna be. Uh, that it’s all about calories, and this is one of the most common weight loss myths out there where it’s just all about calories. You just have to eat less and you will lose weight.

That’s it. That is the one principle that most diets out there adhere to whatever the diet. They typically, um, are trying to get you to eat fewer calories. Like that is the principle of most diets. Um. Also with weight loss drugs, weight loss surgeries, these are all getting you to not eat as much. And the, the issue with this is that yes, you can lose weight by reducing your calories.

It is a very, if. Effective way to lose weight. Um, look at shows like The Biggest Loser. They restrict calories for these very obese people. They have them exercise like crazy and they do lose a lot of weight. The problem with this approach is that it is not sustainable. They have done, um, many, many studies.

In fact, there was a big meta study that was done that looked at all these other studies that showed that calorie restriction diets. Are the most effective at short-term weight loss. They are also, and this is the important part, the least effective long-term weight loss approaches. So when you, um, restrict calories for a period of time, what happens is your body goes into starvation mode.

So your body will think that you are starving. Basically, you’re not getting enough calories to satisfy your, uh, energetic needs throughout the day. And so your body will actually slow down your metabolism over time to match the calories that are coming. So let’s say you’re somebody that normally eats 2000 calories a day and you restrict your caloric intake to a thousand calories a day.

That’s gonna be fine for the short term, but over time your body will slow down your metabolism to match the amount of energy that’s coming in. So now, instead of burning 2000 calories a day at rest, that’s your resting metabolic rate. Your body is like, Nope, we’re only gonna burn a thousand calories a day.

’cause that’s all we have ever coming in. So what happens is you now, the thousand calories a day is not a deficit anymore. And so the weight loss stops and actually you start gaining weight ’cause you’re still eating the, you know, the thousand calories a day and, and maybe your metabolic rate drops even more and you can’t lower your caloric intake.

You can’t keep lowering your caloric intake to match your slowdown of metabolism. So this is a very bad approach to weight loss, like just cutting calories and thinking that that is the answer. Um, again, it does work in the short term and that’s why so many people, uh, promote this type of a diet where, you know, it just don’t eat as much.

The problem with is, is not sustainable. It is not something that you can do long term because your body will go into that starvation mode and, um, as a runner especially. You do not wanna reduce your caloric intake, especially long term. This can dramatically affect your running performance. ’cause as you ramp up your mileage, you ramp up your intensity levels, your, um, caloric intake needs to match that.

So you actually need to, a lot of times you need to increase your caloric intake as a runner, especially as you’re getting, um, towards the late stages of a training cycle. Um, another thing to consider is that. Caloric restriction. A lot of the caloric restriction diets will cause you to lose weight, but that weight is in the form of fat and muscle and connective tissue and bone density.

This is not good. As a runner, you do not wanna lose muscle. You don’t wanna lose bone density. Um, a a little bit of a side note here. There’s a lot of new weight loss drugs out there, and people are talking about, um, drugs like ozempic, right? And they’re showing, oh, these are so, uh, effective at people losing weight.

What they’re not telling you though is about 40% of the weight that people are losing, you know, using drugs. Ozempic is muscle, bone and connective tissue. You know, connective tissues are ligaments and tendons. And I don’t know about you, but I’m not willing to sacrifice muscle, bone and connective tissues just so I can lose weight.

Uh, it’s not about weight loss. We’re what we wanna focus on. Fat loss, right? It’s not about just restricting calories. There’s a lot more going on that you really have to consider here. Okay? Instead of focusing on just restricting calories. Try focusing instead on eating real food. Eating nutritionally dense foods, foods that are satiating, um, foods that when you eat them, you feel satisfied.

A lot of the caloric calorically dense, or I’m sorry, the, the foods that are not calorically dense. So the, the, the empty calorie type of foods that are a lot of the processed foods, a lot of the foods that are full of sugar and um, refined grains and things like that will actually hijack your hunger signals and make you feel super hungry.

Even though you’re eating a ton of food, you can feel super hungry, um, in between meals and they actually cause you to overeat. So we wanna be eating foods that are satiating, that fill us up and that don’t mess up our hunger signals. So what I recommend is eating food, real food that still looks like food, meat, fish, eggs, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, dairy, all the stuff that is just the normal stuff you see on the outside of the grocery store.

Stay away from processed foods, stay away from sugar, stay away from refined grains. These foods make you feel super hungry. It’s hard to lose weight when you’re eating mostly processed foods and sugars. Um, those things will mess up your hunger signals. They won’t make you feel full and satisfied when you do eat.

And if you’re trying to lose weight and you’re hungry all the time, that’s a bad combination right there. That’s where you start to get hangry, right? Angry and hungry at the same time. So there’s a lot more going on here, and it’s not just about calories. In fact, just reducing calories is, is not a really good way to lose weight.

And it’s, it’s really not a long-term. Uh, definitely not a long-term, uh, approach That’s gonna work for most people. Okay. So that’s number one. It’s, it’s, it’s all about calories. I think we busted that myth right there. The next one is that we just need to exercise more. So exercise more. That’s all you need to do.

It really doesn’t matter what you eat. As long as you’re burning it off, you’re fine. It’s okay to overeat. It’s okay to eat whatever junk food you want. Just run more, just exercise more. Get your cardio in every day, and you’ll be fine. Here’s the thing. Right now we are exercising more in this time in human history than we ever have as human beings, and we are more overweight, more obese, and have more metabolic dysfunction than any other time in human history.

Clearly exercising more is not the answer. I talk to people literally every single day who, who tell me, Patrick, I gain weight. I’m running more and I keep gaining weight. I’m training for a marathon and I’m gaining weight. Every time I, uh, increase my exercise, I end up gaining weight, and I’m like, yeah, I know.

This was me too. For years there I was running at least two marathons a year. I was running several ultra marathons every year. And in that process I was gaining weight consistently, and over a few years I gained something like 40 pounds. And this was, you know, when I was doing that pretty typical training for me at the time, which was running a few marathons and a few ultra marathons every single year.

So I was training a lot, I was running a lot, I was doing other types of cardio and cross training and, and, um. Strength training and things like that. So this concept of exercising more, it just doesn’t hold up. Okay. Never in human history have we needed to quote unquote like exercise to maintain a healthy weight, to ha, to maintain a healthy metabolism, to maintain a good health and fitness.

Our hunter gatherer ancestors, they did not like intentionally exercise. They weren’t out there, you know, doing calisthenics every day. They actually were focused on energy conservation. They did not exert themselves excessively, they rested whenever they didn’t have to go out there and, and walk distances, you know, and, and hunt, pray or, or gather, you know, fruits and vegetables and things like that.

So they, they were actually focused on conserving energy. You know, they probably walked a few miles every day. Um, and at times they may have done more than that, but they weren’t like running, uh, consistently all the time. They did some running, but it wasn’t something they, they were doing like running ultra marathons for fun.

Like, you know, they just didn’t do that. It was stupid. To like, you know, use that much energy. You don’t see any animal ever, you know, just exercising for the heck of it. You know what I mean? We actually see this today in, uh, modern day hunter gatherer tribes like the ZA in Tanzania. They have been a well-studied group of people.

They are super fit. They’re healthy, they’re lean, they’re strong. They don’t have. All the metabolic diseases that we have in the western world here, they don’t have diabetes. They’re not obese. Obese, they don’t have heart disease. Um, so all of that stuff is, is really not present with these people. And they are a hunter gatherer tribe, very similar to our ancient ancestors.

So, you know, humans have evolved over two and a half million years, and for the vast majority of that time, we were hunter gatherers and living in tribes, and we were super fit, healthy, lean, and strong people. Um, the only time we’ve started to experience all this metabolic dysfunction and disease is, is within the last few hundred years, really, um, you know, maybe 500 years, a thousand years, even like 2000 years.

You can go back to the time of the, uh, ancient Egyptians when we started to see. Um, them using more grains and eating a lot more refined grains in the form of flowers and things like that. So they started to, you know, perfect agriculture and they were eating a lot more grains. And you can see that the distended bellies of the.

Um, mummies ’cause they actually have the actual whole person preserved as a mummy and their teeth are all messed up. You know, they have a lot of, um, tooth decay from the sugar and the grains they were eating, and they have a lot of distended bellies, which means they were, you know, starting to gain weight even at that, uh, even 2000 years ago.

So in the long span of human history, there’s only a short amount of time where we actually are starting to experience all these, uh, metabolic, uh, diseases, and they’re all really based off of our diet. You know, so we see tribes like the, the hazah, and we can kind of look at them and say like, yeah, they’re pretty close to what our ancestors used to be like.

And what’s interesting about the Hazah is that their metabolic rate, so how many calories they burn at rest is about the same as the rest of us in the western world here. Um, for men it’s like 2,500 calories a day. For women, it’s 1900 calories a day. That’s pretty similar to where we are here in the western world.

So you can’t say like, oh, well they just exercise more. They don’t, they’re doing about the same amount of exercise we’re doing. They get in. Some steps every day they walk, you know, they might be getting in 10 to 15,000 steps a day, which is, you know, what we’re supposed to be getting anyway, you know, it’s kind of recommended.

Um, and for the vast majority of us, you know, we’re getting around three or 5,000 steps a day without any intentional exercise. So we’re just in our daily lives, you know, we’re, we’re getting about a third, you know, half to a third of that. Um. In, in the amount of steps we take on a daily basis anyway. And if you’re a runner, you’re definitely getting that 10,000 steps a day, you know?

So these people who are really about the same as us in most aspects, they, they don’t exercise exceedingly. Um, they are extremely healthy, fit, lean, strong, and their metabolic rate is about the same as ours. So the more ex, it doesn’t mean like you need to exercise more. You know, so please understand this.

Like the, the answer is not doing a ton of cardio and trying to burn off the food. You can’t eat a bunch of junk food and then think you’re gonna burn it off. It just doesn’t work that way. Okay, so let’s just, um, put that one to rest too. Um, the next weight loss myth that I want to debunk here is that. Um, X, y, Z diet is all you need, so whatever that one diet is, right, there’s so many crazy diets out there.

There’s literally thousands of diets. And in doing a little bit of research for this episode, I started looking at some of the weirder diets that are out there and, and I cannot make this stuff up, but there is a diet called the Cotton Ball Diet, which is where you soak cotton balls in different liquids.

You know, like, uh, cabbage juice or fruit juice, and then you eat that. Right. And you, you actually, it’s supposed to make you feel more full because you’re eating these cotton balls and I guess you pass the cotton balls or whatever and you’re getting a little bit of, um, nutrition from the juice or whatever that’s soaked in there.

But don’t do that. That’s crazy. Another one is one called the Werewolf Diet, and I was like, oh, what is that? Where they eat people? Like, what, what is the werewolf diet? And no, it has to do with like fasting around the lunar cycles. Okay. Uh, great. I love that one actually. And then there’s one that I cannot make this up.

This is called the Breatharian Diet, and these are people that believe that you can sub subsist on spirituality and sunlight that you only need. Um, air to get all the, um, uh, nutrients that you need that you don’t really need to eat or drink anything, including water. And, um, obviously if you try this, you will die.

Okay. So the people that are, say they’re practicing Breatharian, they’ve actually shown them sneaking liquids and food and stuff because you can’t. This is not sustainable. I know it sounds crazy. It sounds like I’m like making this up or reading these out of some sort of like, you know, comedy show or something like that.

But no, they are things that people have actually done in the past. Okay. Every diet out there claims to be the answer for everyone. And listen, I’ve tried them all. Not the Cotton Ball or the Breatharian Diet, although the Werewolf Diet sounds interesting. I might have to give that one a try, but I’ve tried like most of the diets that are out there, the big popular ones, right?

And to some extent they all worked. The problem is that nothing I ever did was ever sustainable for me. For example, I. Started reading about, uh, vegetarianism and veganism, and for about five years or so, I went and I started cutting out my meat and I started cutting out more and more meat and then fish, and then eventually, so I went vegetarian.

Then eventually I went plant-based, and I did that for like 10 years. So about 15 years. I was like vegetarian and vegan essentially. You know, stay away from meat, stay away from eggs, stay away from dairy. That stuff is bad for you. And at the beginning it was okay, like I did lose some weight. But I have to tell you, for me, I gained a lot of weight eating that kind of a diet.

Um, because if you think about it, that diet is mostly, almost all a hundred percent carbs. It’s fruits and vegetables, and that’s a hundred percent. So for me, it did not work. For me over 10 years, I steadily gained weight. I gained like 40 pounds in that process of, of eating a plant-based diet for me, this was not healthy and it was not sustainable, gaining weight on any kind of diet.

That shouldn’t be the case, that that’s not good for you, whatever you’re doing. And I know a lot of people who do really well on a plant-based diet or a vegetarian diet, and they love it and they do it for ethical reasons, or they do it for reasons that that work for them as individuals. And I’m not saying it’s a bad choice for you.

I’m just saying that it didn’t work for me. If I kept doing that, I’d probably be like 300 pounds by now. All right. And I have clients and I work with people who are vegetarians and vegans, and they do well, we can make it work okay, but we have to stay away from some of the refined foods and the processed foods and things like that.

Okay? The truth is, here’s, here’s what I’m trying to get to here. There isn’t one diet that works here. Everyone you need to figure out. The right formula that works for you because you are an individual. You have your own metabolism, your own genetics, your own lifestyle, your own family, your culture of origin, your own food preferences, your own likes and dislikes.

You got your own health and fitness goals. Maybe you’re training for ultra marathons. Maybe you wanna run your first 5K, maybe you don’t exercise at all. All these factors. Put together mean that you are an individual and you need to approach nutrition and exercise with this important principle in mind.

That is, you have to figure out what works for you as an individual, and it’s going to look different from what everybody else is doing. And it probably isn’t going to be some preconceived diet that you know is published in the New York Times or whatever. All right. This is why I do coaching, and I don’t just prescribe a diet for everyone that I work with.

Coaching is a process of figuring out the best approach for you of figuring out what works for you and what doesn’t work for you, and then modifying it as needed until you get the results that you want. It’s simple. It’s a feedback system. Let’s see what’s working. Let’s see what’s not, and we will adjust accordingly.

But honestly, most people are not willing to put in the time and effort to do it this way. Sorry, but there’s no quick fix here. It takes time to figure these things out, and you have to be willing to invest the time in yourself because that’s what’s required to get the results that you’re going after here.

Okay? So the right diet is not one that’s out there. It’s the one that works for you, the one that is sustainable for you. Because if it’s not sustainable for you, you’re not gonna stick with it, and it’s not gonna work long term for you. You’re gonna go back to doing what feels comfortable, and that’s probably eating the junk food because hey, that’s what feels comfortable, right?

So don’t think that there’s some diet out there that’s gonna work for you. That’s, you know, everybody is talking about these days. ’cause there just isn’t such a thing. Okay. All right. I think that weight loss myth is debunked. Here’s another one. Your metabolism slows down as you get older, so why even bother?

And I hear people say this all the time, they’re like, Hey, I’m just getting older, so I’m not even gonna try to lose weight. You know, I’m not even gonna worry about it because it’s just, it’s not gonna work for me because my metabolism, uh, just is getting slower. My metabolism’s slowed down now and losing weight is too hard.

And people use this as an excuse to not start or, or to not change their diet or not to eat healthy foods or whatever. There was a study published a couple of years ago, uh, that suggests that this is just really not true at all. So your metabolism, the rate at which your body burns energy has long been thought to decline during middle age, and then to keep declining as you get older.

So for this particular study, researchers um, looked at metabolism by measuring the total energy expenditure, which includes energy burned at rest, you know, and, you know, in order to perform basic functions like digesting food and energy burned during physical activity as well. So they looked at exercise and you know, your resting metabolic rate.

And they did this study on like 6,400 people, uh, ranging from eight days old to 95 years old, along with their height weight, their body fat percentage. Um, they looked at their, um, uh, average metabolic rates for men, women, people in different age groups. And they found some very interesting, um, results here based on four distinct periods in people’s lives.

So from infancy to 1-year-old, the metabolic rate surged until it was about 50% higher than it will be during their adulthood. So that’s pretty common. You know, like your metabolic rate is going to increase a lot at the beginning of your life. Right? And then from the ages of one to 20, the, um, metabolism decreased by.

3% per year. Okay. Again, very normal. The one big surprising thing is that from 20 to 60 years old, people’s metabolism doesn’t really change at all, and then after age 60, your metabolism does decrease slightly, but only by about a 0.7% a year. So not as much as people think it does. Um, and definitely not in that middle age.

So people think that, you know, once you turn 40, like that’s it, you know, it’s all over. Like, no, it’s not true at all. Like, your metabolism really doesn’t start to decrease until you get to about age 60. So studies like this are showing us that our metabolism doesn’t have to slow down as we get older, and that it’s much more likely, um, that changes in our behavior are causing us to gain weight as we get older.

Um, changes in our diet are, are what can help us to prevent, uh, the slowing down of our metabolism. Um, so people want to use this as an excuse as why they. Can’t gain weight, but they don’t wanna look at their actual diet, you know, their lifestyle choices. So your lifestyle choices are gonna go a lot further in helping you to, uh, maintain a healthy weight and, and even lose weight as you get older and you can’t use the metabolism.

That’s an excuse anymore. Okay, so that myth totally busted. Another one that I’ve been hearing a lot about lately is, um, cleanses and detox diets. Like that’s all you need to do. You just need to do a cleanse every now and then, and you’ll be fine. And listen, almost none of the cleanses and detox diets that are out there today have been proven to be effective on short or long-term metabolic health.

This is another case where people are trying to justify a crappy diet with some sort of a detox or a cleanse. Yes, it is true that today we are exposed to more toxins than probably ever before. But what you need to understand is that most of these toxins you are choosing because of your poor diet.

You’re eating processed foods, loaded with chemicals, industrial seed oils, um, deep fried foods, foods loaded with sugar and refined grains. All these things are contributing to health problems. All these things are making it harder to lose weight. So the idea of a cleanse, it’s a good idea and we should absolutely cleanse our systems of these toxic ingredients, okay?

But you can’t just do it like once a year. The best way to cleanse your body of toxins is to stop eating the toxins. The best cleanse is actually a diet that just eliminates all these terrible ingredients from your life permanently. So people think that they can eat whatever they want for months and then just drink a bunch of detox tea, or take a bunch of supplements and pull the toxins outta your system.

And these things might work for the short term. They might have some short term benefits, they might make you feel a little better, um, in the interim, but it’s not a long-term solution. I was talking to some friends recently, um, this couple, and they’re taking all these expensive supplements to, um, pull all these toxins outta their system, and they were telling me about this whole system of things that, you know, use, uh, all these different ingredients.

I can’t remember the names of all this stuff, but they, they. You know, grab the toxins and they pull ’em out and, and it takes like six months of this protocol in order to do this. Meanwhile, they’re taking all these expensive supplements every single day. Okay. That’s great. And I, I applaud you for trying to get healthier, but what happens after the six months?

What do you do? Like, do the toxins just come back? Like, wouldn’t it be wiser to just eat clean and healthy foods, void of all the toxic ingredients in the first place and just keep doing that? Anyway. Never in human history have we needed to go on a cleanse. Right. For two and a half million years as humans, we’ve thrived simply by eating real food.

We haven’t had to drink a bunch of detox tea or like, you know, eat, eat all these crazy supplements and things like that just to rid our bodies of the garbage. Just stop eating the garbage. Your body’s really good at cleansing itself. Your body’s really good at detoxing itself. We have a, an incredibly complex system to remove toxins from our bodies.

Let your body do what it’s supposed to do naturally. Just stop eating the junk food. Okay. So, uh, that’s another myth busted, by the way. So the biggest takeaways here, uh, that I want you to, to have a look at here is like looking at our ancestors, ancient human civilizations. Were incredibly healthy, lean strong, and disease free.

Much like that ZA Tribe today. Okay. They did not count calories. They did not restrict their caloric intake. They didn’t need to exercise like mad every day to stay lean and healthy. They actually were trying to conserve energy. They didn’t have to go on some crazy fad diet. They weren’t eating cotton balls, soaked in cabbage juice to lose weight.

Their metabolism didn’t suddenly stop working when they hit a certain age, and they definitely did. Didn’t do some weird juice cleanses or take a bunch of detox supplements, right. What did they do? They ate real food. They ate food that today still looks like food. That food that our ancestors would recognize, that their ancestors recognize.

That’s just food. Just eat food. Stay away from the processed foods. Stay away from the Franken foods. Try to eliminate sugar and refined grains. Those things have only been around for a short period of time. In the course of human history, stay away from seed oil. Stay away from toxic ingredients. Stay away from fried foods.

Yes, exercise. Keep on running, but don’t do it to try to lose weight. Do it because it’s good for you. It’s good for your mental health. Your emotional health. It’s good for your heart. It’s great at helping you to manage stress. Just don’t run a bunch to try to lose weight because that doesn’t work. Okay, so those are the common weight loss myths debunked.

I hope you got something good out of this episode today. If you did, shoot me a message. Tell me what you liked about it. Okay, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all. Keep on running lean and I will talk to you soon.