Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
Get leaner. Get Stronger. Run Faster. Run longer.
There is a health crisis going on right now in the US. Metabolic diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease are at an all-time high. Our collective health has been steadily …
Continue Reading about 130. Taking Your Health Into Your Own Hands →
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 130 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today taking your health into your own hands. There is a health crisis going on right now in the United States.
Metabolic diseases like obesity, type two diabetes and heart disease are at an all time high and our collective health has been steadily declining over the last 40 years. And it doesn’t appear to be reversing any time soon. And if you think that our healthcare system or the food industry or the government are here to help you to help reverse this, you are sadly mistaken.
So if you want to avoid being another statistic, and if you want to start becoming the healthiest and most badass version of yourself, then this episode is for you. In this episode, I’m going to share some surprising reasons why we might be experiencing this current health crisis here in this country.
And I also want to explain the simple solution not relying on the powers that be quote unquote, but instead taking your health into your own hands. What does that look like? What does it mean for you? What can you do today to start taking your health into your own hands?
First, I just want to talk a little bit about my coaching program, which is called the Running Lean coaching project. So every month I pick a different topic. And in our program, we kind of take a deep dive into that topic and June, this month of June, is all about mastering your mindset.
Your mindset is the foundation of everything that you do in your life, everything that you want to accomplish in your life, whether it’s you know, health and fitness related, even business related relationship related, all requires you to have the right mindset. And a lot of times we don’t even understand what that means. What is mindset? What does it even mean to have the right kind of mindset?
So we’re taking a deep dive into this all month long. And if you want to join us, it’s not too late. Not only can you continue to join in the conversations we’re having about this, but you can also have access to all of the past coaching calls that I’ve done.
There’s kind of a couple of different components to this coaching program. There’s group coaching, and then there’s also one on one coaching with me, I designed this program to give you all of the support that you need to accomplish your goals, whether you want to lose weight, improve your running performance, become stronger, just become the most badass version of yourself whatever that looks like for you.
I’ve created this program to provide you with the knowledge, the support, the accountability, the inspiration, the motivation to help get you there, I want to help you stay on track, help you change your mindset, if that’s what needs to happen, develop good habits, so that we can create a healthier version of you that lasts.
This is about permanent lifestyle changes. This isn’t about short term fixes or, you know, lose weight quickly kind of thing. This is about long term health and fitness. So if you’re interested in that, if you’re interested in not the short game, but the long game, and about changing your mindset and changing the way you think and feel about health and fitness and diet and nutrition permanently, then I think this might be a great program for you.
But we have to have a conversation about it, we’ll jump on a call and we’ll kind of talk about the program. I want to give you more details. I’m going to talk about your individual goals because this this program is designed for you as an individual, it’s not about just you know, doing some certain diet, you know, this is about me, and you’re working together to figure out what’s the best plan of action for you as an individual, because we’re all different.
We all have different metabolisms, different goals, different likes and dislikes, different food preferences, and we want to put together a plan that works specifically for you. So if you’re interested, go to runningleancoaching.com/apply, fill out a short application, book a call with me, and we’ll talk about it, cool. I would love to have you in the Running Lean coaching project.
And then just really quickly, I want to put out a little bit of a disclaimer about this particular episode. So I’m going to be talking about some things today that that you might want to change in your diet and I usually don’t talk about like, say I don’t usually suggest things has to do, because we don’t have a client coach relationship, me and you, you know, for the most part, right? So I can’t really offer nutritional advice here on the podcast.
But what I can do is suggest some things that you may consider changing. Of course, you know, get your doctor’s approval before you change anything in your diet before you start making any kinds of changes to your exercise regimen or anything like that, okay, I’m not a doctor, I can’t offer medical advice, I can’t really offer advice unless we have a relationship.
So nothing that I ever say here should ever be construed as medical advice. And just know that the things I’m going to be talking about today are just general sort of guidelines that I think we can all follow and maybe improve our health a little bit. But again, you got to talk to your doctor about making any kinds of changes. Cool. All right. So let’s get into this a little bit.
I have to say that I’m a little fired up about this topic. And I have been for a while. And I hope by the end of this episode, you get a little bit fired up too. Because there’s a big problem here in this country, with our health and with the health of the population of the people in the United States.
Now, this extends beyond the borders of the United States as this goes into most of the world at this point. But I’m just kind of focusing on what’s happening here, because I know more about what’s happening here in the US than I do about other countries. And I really can’t speak to that.
But we’re in the midst of a kind of a devastating health crisis here. We really are. Like I said at the beginning, you know, over the last 40 years, our health has been steadily declining, and hasn’t been getting better. You know, right now, obesity rates are at an all time high. In 2020 42% of the US population was considered obese. 42%. That’s up from 30% in the year 2000.
So just 22 years ago, that has changed dramatically. And then severe obesity, some people call it morbid obesity, but severe obesity is up from 4.7%, back in 2000, to 9.2% today in 2022. And the annual medical cost just of this one chronic condition, this the annual medical cost of obesity here in the United States is nearly $173 billion.
That’s billion with a B obesity related medical conditions include things like heart disease, stroke, type two diabetes, and certain types of cancer. These are some of the leading causes of premature death in this country. And they’re all absolutely preventable. So they call these things lifestyle diseases, because they are associated with the way you live your life, the way the choices that you make, you know, around nutrition, around exercise, around alcohol and drug intake, those kinds of things are associated with these problems.
And it’s a big, huge problem in this country. Here’s something that I saw recently, and this just this makes me very sad. Okay, and this has to do with children. Right now, one in eight children have asthma. One in five children in this country have allergic eczema. One in twelve children have food allergies, one in five children have obesity, one in five children have obesity, one in six children have a mental health disorder. And one in 54 children have autism, children with chronic conditions, has increased by over 400% since the 1970s.
And people look at these kinds of stats. And they say, well, it’s genetics, it’s genetics. Our genes haven’t changed since the 1970s. It takes 10s of 1000s of years for genes to change like that, for genetics to play a big role like that. It’s not about genetics, our environment has changed.
At the start of the 1970s we were told, you know by our government by, you know, these dietary guidelines they put out there that we should start eating what they called the food pyramid at the time. And this pushed refined carbohydrates as the basis of our diet. That should be the majority of the food we’re eating. Up to 65% of our diet should be coming in the form of refined carbohydrates.
And at the same time we started doing that chronic diseases increased in both adults and children. There’s an obesity epidemic among toddlers in this country. What the hell? That is crazy. That is just crazy. Toddlers were not obese. Prior to the 1970s, it was a very, very, very, very rare thing. But now we look at kids today, one in five children are obese. This is crazy.
Since we started following these food guidelines, we’ve gotten fatter, and we’ve gotten sicker, chronic diseases are up, and we are not getting better. And there’s no sign of this changing, it’s only getting worse.
And what I want to talk about today, is that there’s something we can do about this. But what I want to talk about today, and I’ll get to that is not just bad news, okay. But there’s a lot of bad news. Unfortunately, this is what gets me fired up, though. Okay.
But today, when we look at the policies our government has in play, we look at our health care system, as a whole. We look at Big Pharma, big pharmaceutical companies, we look at all the big food companies in this country. And we think we have this idea, this beautiful idea that all of these systems are in place to help us to keep us healthy, to improve our health.
And the reality of it is, is that they’re not there to help us. They’re not there to improve our health and to help us to live long, healthy lives, they’re there, they’re around to make money. And there’s a lot of profit in keeping people sick. I know this may seem a little bit like conspiracy theory, but it’s really not.
This is something I’ve been noodling over for a long time for years, actually. And I just feel like we need to just call it what it is, you know. And so I’m gonna break down a little bit of why I feel this way. And it’s not just me, this is not just something I just thought of the other day, and I’m like, oh, you know, I think I’m just gonna start talking about how all this stuff is working against us now.
This has been going on for decades. And there’s millions of people talking about this. Okay, so I’m just another voice out there that’s talking about this, but I think it’s really, really important that we talk about this. Okay, so, here’s an example. Look at the big food companies that are out there. Okay.
So, when you look at the biggest food companies in this country, the majority of food produced in this country is created by these companies, Kraft Foods, Coca Cola, Nestle, Procter and Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, Unilever, PepsiCo, General Mills, Kellogg’s, and Mars. Okay, so what you’re noticing in this list is that there’s a lot, a lot of sugar. Right?
There’s a lot of, a lot of processed food, it’s a lot of sugar. And it’s a lot of refined grains. You know, we look at stuff like Kellogg’s and General Mills is just nothing but sugar, refined grains, and vegetable oil. That’s like the main three ingredients of all junk food, right? Stay away from those three things, by the way, and your health is going to start to change for the better.
But Coca Cola, Nestle, PepsiCo, Mars, these are all, you know, these are sugar, sugar, water and candy companies. And these are the biggest food companies in this country. And they’re the most profitable and they have deep, deep pockets and money in this country, money equals power. And these big companies, they have the power to change laws to create policies to promote more of their own products.
You know, an example would be the sugar industry actually came up with a study to prove quote, unquote, prove that salt was bad for us. Salt is bad for us. Alright, so they wanted to divert the attention away from sugar as being a problem. And most people don’t know this, but the salt, the sugar industry actually funded studies to prove you know that that showed that salt was a problem. It was causing hypertension, high blood pressure, and all these other things.
And the truth of the matter is, salt is something we have to have in our diet. Like if we don’t eat salt, we will die. Like we have to have sodium in our diet. And in the end, the sugar industry doesn’t want you to limit the amount of sugar you’re eating. So they are kind of saying well, oh, high blood pressure, heart disease, all these other things. It’s the salt in your diet.
And so they have these deep pockets and they can fund these kinds of studies. That’s just one example. This happens every single day in this country. These big food companies are funding studies that promote their viewpoint, right?
And a lot of the science, you know, the people that are actually conducting the science, they’re being funded by these food companies. So we have to understand that there’s a lot of skewed science out there and that we have to just take things into our own hands, we have to look at what’s going on out there.
And just don’t believe everything you read, for sure, don’t even believe everything I’m telling you, like, do your own research, if you want to go and look this stuff up, I’m not sharing anything that I haven’t researched thoroughly. And I’m at this point in my life where I just have to, I have to say what’s on my mind, and I get fired up about this particular topic.
Here’s another thing to kind of consider from the big food companies, sugar and refined grains, they are not nutritious. Alright, there’s nothing really good about eating this stuff. It doesn’t, there’s no health benefits from eating this stuff, okay. And the other thing you have to realize is that sugar and refined grains will turn off sensors in your body that will actually make you feel full.
So like, when you eat something like a piece of chicken, or, you know, some some vegetables with some butter, you know, like you eat some real, you know, good sources of protein and fat, you’re going to feel full, and then you’ll stop eating, how much chicken can you sit down and eat at one at one sitting? Not a lot. I’ve tried it before.
I’m like, I’m gonna eat a pound of chicken and then I’m 12 ounces into it. I’m like, I’m done, right? You just can’t eat anymore. But how many, you know, Twinkies can you eat at one sitting like dozens, right? Like, you could just keep going, you never stop. So eating these kinds of refined foods, especially with the sugar and refined grains, they turn off sensors of fullness and satiety. And so we can overeat that very easily.
And they increase our hunger signals. So when you’re eating these kinds of foods, you’re more hungry all the time. And this is by design, the food companies understand this, if we never feel full, if we’re always hungry. And we’re eating this non nutritious, you know, empty calorie, carbohydrate laden foods, we’re gonna buy more of that stuff, because it tastes amazing, right?
We’re gonna keep buying more and more, so it increases their profits. So what they’re doing is working for them. It’s working to build more and more profits for the big food companies. But it’s making us fat, or it’s making us sick or, and they don’t care about that. They just want to, they want you to eat more, they want you to stay hungry, they don’t want you to crave their stuff, eat more of their processed garbage food, so that you just continue to buy, buy, buy buy from them, they use the cheapest ingredients available, and they make these hyper palatable foods.
You’ve probably heard about the bliss point, they have scientists that are working on the actual science of craving and how, what ingredients can they use, and it’s usually sugar, flour and vegetable oil to produce the most, the most blissful feeling in our brains. And they’ve shown that sugar is actually preferable to certain drugs like cocaine, like they’ve done these tests on rats, poor rats, they always get tested on these weird things, right?
But they did this test on rats where they gave them cocaine or sugar. And over time, the sugar was preferable. The rats just stopped doing the cocaine, stopped drinking the cocaine and stopped and started drinking their sugar water because it gave them a better high. It gave them a better high. And if you don’t think sugar is bad for you, you don’t think sugar is addictive? Just look at that study right there. Rats will prefer it over cocaine. Okay.
So they’re getting us hooked on their product. They know what they’re doing. They know exactly what they’re doing. And they’re giving us this garbage food and we’re just buying into it. We’re buying into it. We’re buying the stuff by the pallet full, just go into Costco and see what’s sitting out there on all these giant pallets of food, right?
And then, of course, there’s this idea of like, they have all this influence and power, you know, they squash any attempts to say that their food is unhealthy. You know, Coca Cola put out this whole campaign about how sugar wasn’t the problem, and you just needed to move more just like exercise more. And I forget the name of the campaign, it was something like you know, move more or something like that, but it’s basically like, oh, yeah, Coca Cola is fine. Just keep drinking Coke. That’s not the problem with you, the problem is you’re lazy. And you need to be moving more.
That’s just bananas to think about, right? What, when in human existence, have we ever needed to like, do a bunch of cardio? This has never been a thing for us. Why, since the incorporation of these guidelines in 19 in the late 1970s. Why all of a sudden do we have to do a bunch of cardio just to stay in shape and not get all fat and obese? But it’s crazy. It’s crazy. The diet is wrong.
And they’re pushing their junk on us. And we have to just stand up and say, no, thank you. No, thank you, I’m not going to buy into this anymore. Okay. And remember that, you know, he’s talking about salt being an essential nutrient salt is essential. If we don’t eat salt, we will die. Sugar, on the other hand is a non-essential nutrient, we don’t have to eat sugar in our diet, our bodies will produce the glucose that we need, our brain needs a certain amount of glucose to function, but your liver produces that just fine.
I’ve gone through stints where I’ve basically done no sugar, no carbs, basically, like just kind of a carnivore type of diet. And I gotta tell you, I’ve never felt better. I felt amazing when I eat that way. And, and I go back and forth, it’s not something I do all the time. I’m always kind of experimenting with things because I want to go to share different, you know, different diets and things with you guys and share different strategies to kind of help you.
So I’m always experimenting on myself. So I never do anything for too long. But honestly, I go back to that sort of carnivore way of eating, where it’s just basically meat and eggs for periods of time. And I’ve done it for 30, 60, 90 days, and I just feel amazing, and my body functions perfectly fine, I get all the glucose I need, my brain is functioning better than ever.
So just so you understand, I’m not telling you, you need to do that. I’m not telling you, you need to like stop eating vegetables or fruit or anything like that. Eat that stuff. It’s good. You know, fruit, veg, meat, eggs, dairy, some of that stuff. If you can handle dairy, like all good for you. But stay away from all that junk food, okay? And if the big food companies are telling you to eat something, do the opposite. Okay?
And then we’ve got this issue with the government. So our government here is there’s a lot of self interest going on here. There’s lawmakers, there’s lobbyists, and they’re tied in to the big food companies, you know, the big food companies put a lot of money into the government to help create policies, and even on the board of, and I’m gonna get this wrong, but it’s like the USDA, or the FDA can’t remember which one it is that actually funds that actually does the food guidelines. There’s a lot of people on that board that are being funded by the big food companies like Coca Cola and PepsiCo and Mars, it’s bananas like, this is not, this is not the way it should be.
The government does not really have our best interest in mind. When we look at the government, we’re talking about people who are being, you know, funded by big food companies, right. And it’s profitable, everybody’s making money off of this, you know, but it doesn’t mean it’s healthier doesn’t mean it’s the way we should be doing things. And there’s, there’s these big incentives to grow mono crops like corn, wheat, and soy. So these are the three three ingredients that dominate the food industry, right. And these three crops are subsidized heavily by the federal government, farmers received between 1995 and 2020, farmers received 424 billion with a B dollars in substitute subsidies.
And 50% of that were for just those three crops corn, wheat and soybeans. And corn was by far the largest at $116 billion in subsidy subsidies going to corn production, which accounts for about 20-27% of the total mono crop.
Mono-culture crops contribute to a large portion of soil erosion, they increase fertilizer and pesticide use. And Cornell did this study and found that pesticide use in the United States causes $520 million in crop loss, and over a billion dollars in health costs for us as humans. So buy organic by all means, okay. And we want to stay away from those mono crop foods, you know, corn, wheat and soybeans is a problem.
This is a problem these things are, are not necessarily they’re not good for us, you know, they cause all kinds of problems, right. And then just keep in mind that, you know, the government puts out these guidelines. And, you know, they basically put out these guidelines back in late 1970s or 1980 that says, you know, 65, up to 65% of your diet should be coming from refined carbohydrates. And the food guidelines are there not to make us healthy.
They’re not for health and well being, but they’re there to support a profitable food industry because the more you tell people you need to eat these, you know, these refined grains, the more money that you know, is being pumped into producing these grains, the more subsidies people are getting, and the whole system is kind of just messed up. It’s a messed up system.
And so we just have to understand what’s going on and try to take some, some control ourselves, okay. And listen, the food guidelines that are being followed. I know a lot of people say like, well, people aren’t just following, if they would just follow them, everything would be fine. But they’re not being followed. They are being followed.
I mean, and we are really good at following advice that is put out there. Like when they say, Hey, you know, smoking is bad, cigarettes are bad that causes all these problems. We follow suit, you know, all the side effects and diseases caused by smoking have gone down dramatically since we started these anti smoking campaigns right? Dramatically.
I don’t even know many people that smoke anymore. I don’t know. I don’t know maybe one person that I know of smoking, everybody I knew used to smoke, right? Maybe I’m hanging around different people these days. But these guidelines are being followed. And they’re not working. The guidelines are not working. The government is putting out these food guidelines that are not designed with our health and well being in mind. And it’s just not working.
The science that produces the guidelines is bad, the sciences never really proven. They’ve come up with so many new studies that show that, you know, saturated fats are not the enemy, the fat is not the enemy, that carbs are bad, the sugar is bad, and vegetable oil is bad. And listen, these guidelines are driving a lot of policy and a lot of food that goes out to like our kids.
So public school lunch programs, they use the guidelines to follow, to put together the school lunch programs for our kids, the military follows these guidelines, hospitals, nursing homes, VA hospitals, that kind of stuff. All follow the guidelines, they use the guidelines as the basis of how to structure and nutrition programs. And these things are just not working. They’re keeping us sick, they’re keeping us overweight, obese, they’re causing all kinds of problems with our health. So we need to take things into our own hands. Okay.
And, you know, here’s something interesting, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. So and this is the organization that where if you’re a registered dietitian, this is where you get registered through or whatever, right. So they’re having a conference coming up here in a few months. And it’s touted as the world’s largest meeting of food and nutrition experts. Oh, that sounds good. Right. So this conference is coming up. And you know, it’s supposed to be all these experts coming together. Well, here’s who’s sponsoring this, this conference, PepsiCo, the sugar Foundation, Nestle, General Mills, the canola oil Council, just to name a few.
So this is indicative of the kinds of relationships that exist between food companies, healthcare systems, the government, you know, the governing agencies that are governing all these registered dieticians, our nutrition is being dictated by the sugar industry, essentially.
So there’s all these conflicts of interest, right? And conflicts of interest come about when, you know, there’s big corporations marketing, potentially harmful products, and they have these financial relationships with research institutions, or individual researchers, or public health organizations.
And as obesity is becoming just more and more rampant in this country, these kinds of relationships are jeopardizing the integrity of scientific research. So if you want to know if what you’re reading is, you know, legit or not, see who’s funding the research. You have to do your homework on this stuff. Okay? I hate that it even has to be this way.
But there’s these big companies, you know, like Pepsi Cola, sugar Foundation, General Mills, Coca Cola, whatever, they flood the literature out there with science that they funded to make it very difficult for you to actually find legit science that’s not been funded by the food industry. It’s a problem. It’s a real problem. Okay. And then I talk about the healthcare industry as you know, it’s really not about our health or care.
It’s like another for profit business in this country, our health care system in this country is messed up. And, you know, we could go into that. And maybe I will go into a whole episode about how just the healthcare industry is messed up. But I need to say this, though, health care workers are amazing. And there’s a lot of great doctors out there. And there’s a lot of great health care workers out there.
That’s not what I’m talking about here. The health care workers are amazing people. And I have a couple of doctors that I go to, and I love, they’re amazing. And they spent a long time with me, right? There’s a lot of amazing people in the healthcare industry, I have a lot of friends who work in the healthcare industry. And these people are amazing people, it’s not about the people, this is about the industry as a whole, the big health care system is broken. Right?
What doctors can and can’t do largely is dictated by the insurance companies, you know, in their hands are tied, a lot of times they want to be able to help and they can’t, right, and they have to work within these strict guidelines, often without the patient’s best interest in mind. And they’re told to push drugs. They’re not trying to solve the problem. They’re just writing prescriptions. And if you go to your doctor and say, oh, you know, I’m overweight, and I have type two diabetes, these are lifestyle diseases, right?
And you go, yes, doc, I’ve got these lifestyle diseases, you would think the doctor would say, Well, what you need to do is fix your lifestyle. Instead, they say, oh, my gosh, here’s a drug you should take. Here’s something to lower your cholesterol, or here’s something to help you with your type two diabetes, to keep insulin levels low, whatever, they’re just treating symptoms, right.
And I just watched a video from a doctor, MD Paul Saladino, who said, that not one time, not one time, during his entire med school, or his residency, was he ever challenged to actually find the root cause of any illness, he was never challenged, as a medical student to ever, like, go find what’s really causing the problems and solve the problem at its root, he was always told to just treat the symptoms. And that’s, that’s what most of our doctors are told.
Now, there’s some good doctors out there. And I want to make it very clear that there are some very good doctors out there. And you just need to find the right one, right. But a lot of these doctors, they’re just writing prescriptions, right? The big pharmaceutical companies are making huge profits off of us, and they don’t want us to get healthy. They don’t want us to solve the problem, they don’t want us to solve the root problem, they want to keep, they want us to keep taking their pills. That’s it, because money equals power, right? So they drive policies that keep doctors writing prescriptions. Because listen, a cured patient is no longer a paying customer.
Think about that, you are a customer of these big insurance companies or big pharmaceutical companies. And if you get healthy, you don’t make them money. Okay? So a few things that I’m going to suggest you do here, number one, like find a good doctor, there are amazing doctors out there. And, for example, I go to a doctor who doesn’t really take insurance.
There, I pay a monthly fee to sort of be a part of their practices called concierge health care. And so I pay a monthly fee to be a part of their practice. They’re not pressured by, you know, pharmaceutical companies to write prescriptions. And like, my doctor spends time with me, like she spends, like 30 minutes with me every time I go to see her, and we talk about what the root problem is, and we try to solve things. So this is like old school, right? It’s the way doctors should do things, right? I think you can find a doctor like this.
But you’ve got to do a little bit of work and do a little digging, but find somebody that’s on your side that has your best interests in mind. And that isn’t going to just write prescriptions, right. And on the prescription thing, you know, I try to avoid taking medications. And I suggest that you do too.
Obviously, you know, there’s some medications that are very important that you have to take, you know, and that’s awesome. And I totally am down with that, right? But instead of taking a pill like to mask symptoms, like let’s do our best to change our lifestyle so that we can get off the medications. And a lot of my clients actually end up greatly reducing or even getting off medications altogether, with their doctor’s approval, of course, right.
But here’s what I’m trying to say: a pill is not always the answer. Like sometimes it is but you know, for some of these lifestyle issues I’m talking about here. Yeah, you want to continue taking your medication but wouldn’t it be awesome if you changed things and improved your health from the inside out without having to take medications anymore? Like maybe you can reduce or eventually get off those things right.
Another thing that I want to suggest here is that those dietary guidelines from the government just don’t work, they don’t work, like they do the opposite. If they’re telling you to stay away from fat, eat more fat, if they’re saying meat and eggs is gonna kill you, like eat more of that stuff. If they say eat a ton of grains don’t do that. If they say sugar is fine, don’t eat sugar, eliminate it from your diet and see how good you feel.
You know, they say, oh, keep salt really low, like just use salt, you need salt will die if you don’t need salt, right. And they say, you know, healthy fats like vegetable oil, stay away from that stuff, they’re dead wrong about that, that stuff is toxic, avoid it altogether, okay. And then that food industry, food industry is there to make money, they make money off of us.
So like, avoid food that comes with a marketing message. Avoid foods that don’t look like food. Avoid foods, or at least most foods that come in packages. And if you do buy food that comes in a package, read the label and understand what you’re reading, understand how to read the label, because the labels can be very deceiving. You know, there’s like 96 different words they use for sugar, because they want to confuse you and hide that stuff, right. So make sure you understand what you’re reading.
And then just eat real food, eat food that looks like food, eat food that you buy around the perimeter of the grocery store, you know, meat, eggs, fruit, vegetables, right? Eat food that our ancestors would recognize, oh, beef, chicken, banana, avocado, like, stick with stuff like that, you know, if the food you’re eating is making you feel hungry all the time, this is not the right kind of food. Right? There’s, you got to change that, right? Eat the opposite,
Okay. So I get fired up about this, because I have this mission. And this mission that I have is to help you to become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself. And in order to do that, I have to call BS on a lot of stuff that’s going on in this country, the current health situation in this country is dire, it’s dire. And we have to fix it.
And I share all this stuff with you because there’s this problem out there that’s bigger than me, it’s bigger than you and we need to take things into our own hands. Right? I’m compelled to help make this world a healthier place. And it happens like one person at a time, it’s me doing what I can to become the best and most badass version of myself. So it’s me being an example of what’s possible, and then hopefully inspiring you to do the same.
And then hopefully, you inspire other people to do the same. And I see this happen all the time. And I don’t have millions of people listening to this podcast, I don’t have millions of people following me. But I do have a lot and I have a voice. And I’m passionate about helping you. I’m passionate about helping you get healthy and stay healthy and stay fit.
So I want to create this ripple effect, this ripple effect of positivity and good health in this world, I want to make an impact. And when I share topics like this, I can help to make an impact, right. And I’ve worked with hundreds of runners who have gotten leaner and gotten stronger and taken back control of their health. And I’m gonna help you too. But it’s up to you to do things differently.
Stop following the dietary advice from the government, stop buying into the marketing messages from the food industry. Stop thinking that you know, our healthcare system and the government and the big food companies have your best interest in mind because they don’t. Right, take things into your own hands. You get to do this any way that you want, and you get to do whatever you want to do. You don’t have to follow the normal things that people are doing out there.
And when I say normal, I use like finger quotes like normal, because normal isn’t good. Normal is those stats I told you at the beginning of this podcast normal is like becoming obese. Normal is becoming having type two diabetes normals having this list of chronic lifestyle diseases, don’t be normal. Take things into your own hands, take a stand, make a different start today. It’s not hard. It takes a little bit of time.
I’m here to help you if you ever want help, but just listen, you can do this. I know that you can do this. But if we’re going to change things, it’s going to be up to me and you to do this as individuals and then hopefully inspire other people to do the same cool. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
Today, I’ve got another episode in my Back to Basics series. This time it’s all about why runners get fat. I’ve talked about this topic a lot here on the podcast, but I want to go over it again …
Continue Reading about 127. Back to Basics: Why Runners Get Fat →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to Episode 127, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today, I’ve got another In My Back to Basics series, why runners get fat. So I’ve talked a lot about this topic here on the podcast in the past, but I kind of want to go over it again today in a little bit of a different way. Because understanding why you get fat, even if you’re a runner, is going to help you to make the changes that you need to make to reverse that runners are not immune to gaining weight and getting fat.
In fact, getting a lot of weight as a runner is a big part of my story. And it’s kind of why I do what I do today. And it’s also something that I hear from other runners every single day, every day I talk to people who tell me the same thing, I’m running all the time, and I’m gaining weight, and I don’t understand it. So it’s not just me, it’s not just you, it’s a problem.
It’s a problem for a lot of runners out there, okay? And I need you to understand this, I want you to know that it’s okay. It’s okay. If you’ve gained weight as a runner, it doesn’t mean that you’re doing it wrong. It doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person, you’ve just been given a lot of bad advice. And you’ve been doing things a certain way that just clearly don’t doesn’t really work for you, right?
So today this Back to Basics episode is all going to be about why runners get fat, and then what you can do about it. Cool. So first, I just wanted to mention that in June, for the whole month of June, we’re going to be talking about mastering your mindset over in the Running Lean Coaching Project. So how to take control of your mind, because changing your mindset is the way that you get everything good that you want in your life.
Everything that you want requires the right mindset. It’s the foundation for creating change of any kind in your life. Okay, it’s also required for maintaining change in your life. If you can’t lose weight, you’ve got to fix your mindset. If you can’t maintain your weight loss, which I know is a problem for a lot of us. You’ve got to fix your mindset.
But armed with the right mindset, there’s virtually nothing that you can’t accomplish. So some of the things we’re going to talk about, this whole month is going to be how to fix your mindset, so we can stop self sabotaging. So you can build the mental toughness that you need. So you can create a more disciplined life. So you can create permanent habit change, so you can become an emotional badass, all of these things require a shift in your mindset.
So if you’re ready to become more, if you’re ready to take your health and fitness to the next level, and ready to make these changes in your mindset, then you’re ready for the Running Lean Coaching Project. This is the container that I’ve created to give you all the knowledge, the support and the accountability that you need to be able to hit your health and fitness goals. If you want to lose weight, if you want to get stronger, if you want to run faster or longer, this is the place for you to do it. We support you, you get coaching, you get all the information that you need. You’re going to learn exactly what to do, how to do it, we’ll put together a plan that is personalized for you that will help you to reach your specific goals because we’re all different.
The same thing doesn’t work for everyone. If you’re interested, if you want this for yourself, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. You’ve got to fill out a short application and schedule a call with me. We’ll talk about your goals and we’ll just see if this is a good fit for you. Okay, runningleancoaching.com/apply. I would love to have you join us in the Running Lean Coaching Project.
Okay, so, back to basics. Today I’m talking about why runners get fat. And the first thing I want to mention is that there is no fat shaming here at all. This is not what this is about. Getting fat is one of those things that happens to a lot of us and it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. And I’m using the word fat because that’s what it is. I was fat, I lost a bunch of weight, I started running like crazy. I ended up getting fat again, because what I was doing was not working for me.
So I’m not using the word fat here. We’re so scared to use this word, it’s like, it’s like it’s a four letter word, right? I know, it’s only three letters. But it’s like it’s a four letter word. And it really isn’t. It’s just fat, it’s body fat. And even as runners, a lot of times we’re just storing more body fat than we’re burning.
And this is the same principle that applies to anybody who has gained weight, right? You’re just, you’re storing more energy than you’re burning, you’re storing more body fat than then you’re using his fuel. And we have to fix that, there’s a way to fix it. I’m gonna talk about that today.
But I want you to understand that this isn’t about, you know, calling people out or shaming anyone, I’ve been there, I’ve looked in the mirror and said, dude, you are fat, you’ve got to fix this problem. This is not okay. It was not okay with me to look the way that I looked, and to feel the way that I felt and to be out of shape, and overweight. And even when I was in shape, I was overweight.
So there’s this, there’s this concept, they call it tofi, you can be kind of thin on the outside, but fat on the inside, you can actually have a pretty good body shape. Like it kind of looks pretty good on the outside, a lot of runners like maybe they look pretty good on the inside. But inside, you could have a lot of visceral body fat, that you’re not even that doesn’t really show the way it does in other people that are not as fit.
So I just want to make sure that we understand that this isn’t about shaming anyone. This isn’t about saying that, you know, you’re a bad person or anything like that. Fat is just part of our vernacular, but it’s become something that is like taboo. And I want to break that taboo, we need to talk about this. We’ve got to eat fat, right? So we’ve got to eat that. And fat has been so vilified, that people don’t even want to talk about it. They don’t even want to say the word out loud.
So I’m trying to, you know, just step into this. And just say like, listen, we’re going to talk about getting fat, we’re going to talk about body fat, we’re going to talk about eating fat. None of it is bad. Okay, so let’s just lay the foundation. Let’s start there. Okay.
So the first thing I wanted to kind of talk about is the energy balance theory and why it’s really just, it’s too simple. It’s too simplified. So the energy balance theory is this idea that you have to burn more calories than you eat. And if you are burning more, you know, if you’re expending more calories than you’re taking in, you should be able to lose weight. And while there is some truth to this, it is not that simple. I really wish it was that simple.
If it was, I don’t think we’d have an obesity epidemic, the way that we do here in this country today. If it was that simple. I think a lot of us as runners would not gain weight. But it’s just not that simple. For a long time, I was a runner for a long time when I started gaining weight again. And over the course of several years, I put on something like 40 pounds. So I had gotten down to like 161-165.
And I could maintain that pretty easily through running or so I thought but then the weight started to creep back up again. And I ended up getting close to 200 pounds again. And I was training for ultra marathons and running two marathons a year like I was always running a ton of miles. So what is going on here? I was even tracking my food in an app.
And you know, I was counting the calories that I was taking in and I was counting the calories that I was supposedly expending during exercise. And the numbers should have added up the numbers should have created weight loss in me and they just didn’t. And it was confounding. It was very confounding. I did not know what the answer was.
And so I started digging into this and got really down a lot of rabbit holes honestly with this. And then I came across The Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung. And a light bulb went off in my head when I read this book, and if you haven’t read it, definitely read it. It’s amazing. But the gist of it is that there’s more going on than just calories in calories out.
You know, that works perfect if you’re a, you know, steam engine, but it does not work perfectly for the human body. Because we’re much more complicated, different foods trigger different hormonal responses within us. Those hormonal responses determine if we store some of that energy as fat or not. And so it becomes a little more complicated than just calories in calories out.
Go back and listen to the Eating Real Food episode that I did a few weeks back, that was another Back to Basics episode that I did. And I talk a lot about this and share some studies and science with that I’m not going to get into all those details today. But go back and listen to that one if you haven’t listened to it, because it’ll kind of lay the foundation for some of the stuff I’m talking about today.
But the whole idea of calories in calories out is just too simplified. I mean, it does work to a certain degree, like think about the show The Biggest Loser, they take these people who are big, you know, they’re super overweight, and they exercise them like crazy, they cut their calories down dramatically. And they get these people to lose weight, like it does work.
But here’s the problem with that approach, when you drop your calories, so low like that for an extended period of time. And when you’re exercising, they were doing like, up to like three hours of like cardio type of exercise every day. When you put that much demand on your body, that much stress on your body, and you limit your calories, that low, your body goes into what’s called starvation mode, so your body will start to slow down your metabolism to match what’s coming in.
And if you’re eating 800 calories a day, your metabolism, let’s say your metabolism is normally about 1800 calories a day which is what your resting metabolic rate is, that’ll start to slow down and slow down, slow down until it matches the energy that’s coming in. And when you add on top of that all the exercising that’s going on, that’s putting your body into this state of panic, it’s putting your body into the state of survival mode.
They call it starvation mode. But it’s more like survival mode where your body’s like I gotta shut down some of this stuff, we gotta slow this metabolism down. Because we’re not getting enough food, we’re not getting enough fuel, we’re not getting enough nutrition here to sustain us. And all this exercising is just compounding the effect of the starvation mode, it actually makes it worse.
And so when you combine those two things, and your body starts to kind of slow down, you start to see the weight, the weight coming back on again. And almost everybody on that show, The Biggest Loser, ends up gaining the weight back and then some. There’s a lot of people who gain more back, even though they’re kind of sticking with the same plan. So it’s interesting, right? Because if it was all about energy in energy out, that should not happen. But it does.
So yeah, you can lose weight by exercising like crazy and cutting your calories way back. So the energy balance theory, in theory works. That’s why they call it a theory because it’s just a theory about the energy balance factor, you know.
So it does kind of work, but it’s not sustainable. And it’s not how we were designed as human beings to survive. Because the whole idea of cutting calories and increasing exercise puts your body into this state of panic, this state of survival mode. And that is not our normal state of being.
So our normal state of being we call that homeostasis, that’s when we are at our neutral best, you know, that’s when we’re like everything’s working the way it’s supposed to. And your body is always fighting to get back to homeostasis. So you know, expending that many calories is going to slow down your metabolism to match the calories that are coming in.
And you can only do that for so long until the weight just starts coming back on again. And you have to understand that the types of foods that we eat make a big difference here. And going back to Dr. Fung’s book, The Obesity Code, you know, he lays out this whole idea: this concept that eating sugar raises blood sugar, like crazy it spikes our blood sugar and carbohydrates do the same thing, especially refined carbohydrate traits like flour.
And when we eat that kind of food on a regular basis, our blood sugar is constantly elevated super high, it’s spiked in a way that it normally shouldn’t be our blood, blood sugar goes up when we eat food. You know, if you eat a piece of chicken and some broccoli, your blood sugar is gonna go up a little bit, and then it’ll come back down to baseline.
But when we eat these highly palatable foods full of sugar and refined grains and carbohydrates, it spikes our blood sugar like crazy. That’s why it feels good to eat that stuff, we get a rush when we eat that stuff, right? It’s like massive amounts of energy. And as you know, ancient humans, we would find some honey or some berries, and we would eat that stuff. And it would be like, ooh, we get this massive rush.
And we were like, it’s training our brain to go back to that, like, oh, we need to find that again, at some point, because that’s massive calories. It’s, um, it spikes our blood sugar. And, you know, this is like a good thing to our ancient humans. But it was very rare. It wasn’t like something we were eating every single day, because there weren’t Krispy Kremes back then, right?
But now with the Krispy Kremes and, you know, craft beers everywhere, like we’re just constantly, that’s our constant diet. So every time we eat that kind of food, it raises our blood sugar like crazy. And then what happens in response to that is insulin gets produced. Insulin is a hormone that’s created to manage blood sugar to bring blood sugar back down.
So again, eating the chicken in the broccoli, blood sugar is going to go up a little bit, and then insulin is going to get produced a little bit, and then your blood sugar is going to get back down to normal, and all is good. But with this spike in eating, you know, Krispy Kremes, then the blood sugar goes super high. So insulin response goes super high, it gets produced in extra high amounts, which causes a crash in your blood sugar.
So your blood sugar actually goes down below baseline. That’s where you feel that crash and burn after eating a bunch of donuts or whatever, like, you just want to take a nap. That’s because your blood sugar has gone below baseline and you have crashed. Alright, so I talked about this a lot, the spike and crash, like we want to stop doing that we want to, we want to normalize blood sugars. Okay, we don’t want to be dealing with these spikes and crashes.
But the other interesting thing about this is when insulin is high in your body, when insulin is present in your body, your body goes into storing fat, your body goes into fat storing mode. So your body is actually storing a lot of that energy as body fat to be used as fuel later. So think about that ancient humans, we find a bunch of honey, we find a bunch of berries or something like that.
And the berries weren’t as sweet as they are today. But let’s just say they were pretty sweet. You know, they find some really sugary foods out there in the wild. And they eat that stuff. And some of that energy that they’re eating gets turned into stored body fat, so that they can use that as fuel later, which they did. We were always burning fat, we were always fat adapted.
Back in the day, we had adapted ourselves to using our stored body fat as a fuel source very efficiently. This is our natural state of being to be in as human beings. We’ve always been good at this. And when I talk about being fat adapted today, people think I’m like, talking about some weird fringe diet thing. You know what I mean? And it’s like, no, no, no, no, it’s not some weird fringe diet. This is like the way we’re supposed to do things.
Why do we store body fat? Why do we store body fat? It’s a good question, right? We store body fat because our bodies need to use fuel when we don’t have food coming in. Our bodies are designed to not eat all the time. Our bodies are designed to store some of the energy that we consume as fat to be used as fuel later, later never comes though in this modern society today. All we do is store more and more and more and more. And so we have to understand that this is not normal.
This, this goes against, you know, getting our bodies into homeostasis. This goes against the natural state that we should be in as human beings, we should naturally be really freaking amazing, fat burning machines. That is our natural state. And I want to get back to that. I want you to get back to that. Because when you do, you don’t store more and more and more fat. You burn the fat. You lose the weight. You start to have all this energy. You feel much better. Running becomes easier.
This is our natural state as humans. And I want to get back to that. I feel like I’m there. Like, I feel like, you know, I would say 98.5% there, I always think I’ve got a little work to do. And I don’t do this perfectly. I like chips and salsa. I like sushi. There’s some carbohydrates that I’m just not going to say no to.
But I think that where I am today, versus where I was 10-15 years ago, is pretty damn amazing. And I’ve never felt better, never been in as good a shape today at 55 than I have the previous 54 years. If you can gain weight, as a runner, you can lose it too. And this is something that I thought was going to be impossible for me. And I tried all the things.
I tried all the diets, I tried all the apps, I tried cutting calories, I tried being a vegan, you know, and not eating fat, I tried all the stuff. And it just just didn’t work. Nothing was working for me. It wasn’t until I got off the sugar train, you know, until I just stopped eating, you know, processed foods and, and refined grains and sugar. And once I did that, everything started to shift for me, I was able to start tapping back in two that stored body fat as a fuel source.
The key to losing weight is to burn fat. And the key to getting your body into fat burning mode is to just keep the carbs low, keep the sugar low. The easiest way to do this, by the way, is just eliminate sugar and grains from your diet. These two things are problematic if you keep eating sugar, and grains. And of course a little bit is fine. But if you keep eating these things in the quantities that are recommended that we eat these things in, you are going to keep your body in that chronic state of fat storing and I don’t care how much running you do, you will not be able to move the needle. I’ve seen it myself. I’ve seen it in hundreds of people that I’ve worked with.
And they tell me the same thing, I’m running like crazy. I think I’m eating a pretty good diet. But I can’t lose weight. It’s just the weights not budging. It’s not budging. Maybe it worked when you were in your 20s or in your 30s. But as you get into your 40s and 50s, maybe it just stops working.
Maybe it wasn’t working all along and you just kept storing a little bit of fat, a little bit fat a little bit that it just kind of added up. And then all of a sudden you’re like, hey, how did this happen? That was definitely my story. I went from like 161-165 to like 200 pounds in the matter of a few years. I don’t know exactly when the weight gain started happening. But I would say it wasn’t longer than like three or four years, you know what I mean?
And I found myself at this place of like, I’ve got to fix this. So the energy balance theory is a little too simple, there’s a lot more going on, you have to understand that the kind of foods you eat will cause your body to either be in fat storing mode, or fat burning mode, we want to be in fat burning mode. But then think about the typical runners’ diet.
The typical runners’ diet is carbohydrates on top of carbohydrates on top of carbohydrates. It’s just all sugar. And sugar is just a very concentrated form of carbohydrate, carbs are sugar, carbs, or sugar. That’s it. And remember eating that stuff is going to, depending on what it is, you know, of course, a potato isn’t going to raise your blood sugar as much as you know, a spoonful of honey would but there’s a spectrum there.
And there are some carbs that are better than others. And I did a podcast about this a while back called Good Carbs, Bad Carbs, you can go back and listen to that one. But when we change the diet and we get our hormones balanced out and we normalize our blood sugars and our and we put our body in that state of homeostasis where it’s supposed to be.
This is when the good stuff starts happening. This is when you start burning fat. This is when you start using fat as a fuel source which we’ve limited because the more sugar you’re eating, the less you’re burning fat. The more sugar that’s available, the less your body’s going to go to that stored fat as fuel. And so, to be fat adapted as a runner is such an amazing thing because you’re taking advantage of the fact that you’ve trained your body to be really efficient at burning fat. Okay.
And again, this is just going back to what we’ve always done as humans. Okay, and you, you cannot get fat adapted, eating tons of sugar and refined carbs, you just can’t, your body’s going to use that stuff as fuel, and then store some of that as fat, it’s going to use some of that as fuel and store some of it as fat, the storing is just going to keep happening, the burning is not going to happen the way that we want it to.
Yeah, you’re always burning a little bit of fat and a little bit of you know, sugar, a little bit of glucose, glycogen, whatever you want to call it, when you eat carbs, you know, your body is going to produce is going to turn a lot of that stuff into glucose, and then glycogen gets stored in your muscles.
But just a cool little fact is that your body actually produces all the glucose that you need, our bodies need glucose to survive, our brains need a certain amount of glucose to survive, I think it’s something like the equivalent of about a teaspoon full of sugar a day. And your liver actually produces that, it creates it, it creates it in a process called gluconeogenesis.
That literally means creating new sugar. So your liver is actually like, dude, I got you covered. You don’t need to eat all that sugar I got you, I got it. I got it. And I’ve gone through periods where I’ve eaten zero carbs. And I’m not suggesting you do this. I’m just saying that, you know, I’ve done it just as an experiment to see like, how could I function? How can I possibly function if I’m not eating any carbs.
And guess what? I functioned just fine. My weightlifting sessions were awesome. My runs were awesome. I did this training for two different marathons and had an incredible performance. At the first one, the second one, I just was taking it easy. I was like whatever it is, tried a different approach or whatever. But that first one was amazing. And I was eating zero carbs during that training and during that race, and my body was producing all the glycogen that my muscles needed to perform and was getting produced by my body like I was just creating it. It’s kind of cool.
And listen, carbs are not the enemy. And I’m not like anti-carbohydrate. I’m not about saying like you should eat zero carbs. This is not my agenda at all. This is not what I’m about here. Right. But the recommendations that they put out there for us that the government suggests we eat, they’re, they’re just too high. They’re too high. For most of us. Maybe for some of us, they work okay.
But for the majority of majority of us, we’re carbohydrate intolerant, we just can’t tolerate 65% of our calories coming from carbohydrates. That’s crazy. That’s crazy high. And that’s not something we’re used to doing as human beings. We don’t need that much. So you can, you can survive just fine. You can thrive just fine on a lower carbohydrate diet. And if you’ve never done this before, or you think it’s some weird fringe thing, I want to suggest that you just try it.
Trust me, try it. Go 30 days without sugar and grains and see how you feel. See what happens. It’d be fun little experiment. Carbs are not the enemy. You can eat carbs. I eat carbs. I eat fruit. I mean, here’s what my diet looks like today. My diet today looks like meat, fruit, eggs, and a little bit of dairy. That’s it. It is that simple. Meat, fruit, eggs, little bit of dairy. That’s it.
That is what we’ve eaten as human beings forever. I do eat some vegetables, too. I always forget about that. I’ve told this a couple of different people lately. And they were like, you don’t need vegetables. And I’m like, oh, no, I do. But I always forget about that. Because they’re not that important for humans, honestly, like we don’t need to eat a ton of vegetables to be super fit and healthy. We just don’t. But I do eat some vegetables too.
But carbs are not the enemy. This isn’t about zero carbs. The recommendations, I think are too high. And I would encourage you to give it a shot. Just try it. And then understand this. We’re not, this isn’t a diet. Right? I want to make this point very, very clear. This is about changing your lifestyle. This is about becoming more like the human beings that we’ve evolved over millions of years to become.
It’s like it’s saying no to the status quo, because the status quo out there is to be overweight, to be obese, to be unfit to be unhealthy to be sick, to be on medication. And that is normal. That’s what’s normal. I do not want to be normal. And I don’t want that for you either. So this is about changing your lifestyle, to become a total freaking fat burning badass. I want that for myself, I hope you want that for you too.
And I have to tell you, I have a bit of an agenda here. I have like a secret agenda. Maybe it’s not so secret. Well, I’m gonna tell you what it is right now anyway, but here’s my agenda. I want to open your eyes to a different way of doing things. I want you to consider that it’s possible that there’s a better way to do things. And that you don’t have to do what everybody else is doing. That I want to be an example of what is possible for you. And I want to inspire you to do the same thing.
I want to inspire you to be an example of what’s possible to the people in your world. And I want to create this ripple effect, this huge impact of health and fitness and positivity. Because the people that I have helped tell me all the time how this has changed their life in ways they did not even know, it could have an impact on their life.
And it’s not about, this is not about losing weight. That’s a side effect. When you get amazingly healthy and fit. And you shift your diet back to eating just real food, the way that I talk about it, you, you get super, your body just becomes super healthy. And that weight loss happens as a side effect. That’s not the main goal. It’s but it’s a cool side effect. Because it means that you’re on the right path again.
And like I said earlier, if you can gain weight as a runner, you can lose it too. It is possible. It is possible. But it starts with a shift in your mindset, you’ve got to change the way you’re thinking about this stuff. You can’t be thinking that that high carb, carb loading, all carb diet, whatever is going to work for you. Because if it doesn’t work for you, you’ve got to make some changes.
And listen, I know it’s not easy, it’s hard. It’s hard to make these changes. That’s why I do what I do. That’s why I created this coaching program. Because I want to help you, I want to give you the support that you need. And if you want that kind of support, I’m here for you. If you want to try it on your own, you can do that. Try it on your own, see if it works. If you can get it to work. I think you can, there’s a lot of people to do. If you want coaching, great, I’m here for you. If you don’t, that’s totally fine, too.
But my mission in this world is to open people’s eyes to the fact that the way they’re telling us to do things is wrong. It’s just wrong. For most of us. You know, there’s not one diet that works perfectly for everyone. There’s not one way of eating or one lifestyle that works perfectly for everyone. And I totally acknowledge that.
But if you’re listening to this today, and you’re still if you’re still listening to this today, thank you for being here, by the way. Thanks for putting up with me. But if you’re still listening to this, then chances are you’re interested in making these kinds of changes because the status quo is not working for you either. So try it. See what happens. Cool. All right, love you all keep on Running Lean. It’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’ve been thinking about this podcast topic for a while now and finally just felt ready to share my thoughts with you. This is one of those “tough love” episodes, so fair warning in advance. If …
Continue Reading about 126. Are You Eating Like an Athlete? →
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 126 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, are you eating like an athlete? I’ve been thinking about this podcast topic for a while now. And I finally just felt ready to kind of organize and share my thoughts with you here.
So this might be one of those tough love episodes. So just a little fair warning in advance if you’re the kind of person who just wants to keep doing whatever you’re doing and, and just stay where you are, then this episode may not be for you. Okay, but if you’re somebody who’s interested in making changes to the way you feel your body, for not just your overall health and fitness, but you want to improve your athletic performance, then today’s message is definitely for you.
And I’ll be talking about the disconnect. There’s this disconnect that I think a lot of runners experienced when it comes to their diet and nutrition the way they eat. The truth is a lot of runners eat like crap all the time. And then they expect something amazing to happen on race day. And this is just not reality. Okay, so by the end of this episode, I want you to honestly know whether or not you’re eating like an athlete and understand why or why not. You might be or not be, okay.
Fair warning, a little bit of tough love is coming your way today. And listen, eating like an athlete seems pretty straightforward, right? But it’s not, there’s a lot of extra stuff that gets in the way of stuff. Like, you know, peer pressure marketing messages from food companies, worrying about what other people are doing, or what other people are gonna think of you.
And then there’s all the mental and emotional stuff that comes up, like just wanting to eat something amazing. So you can feel good, and all this stuff can work against you, it can make it very hard for you to actually make progress towards your health and fitness goals. This is why I decided to become a coach to help you navigate all of the BS that’s out there and in your head.
So that you can actually stay on track and hit your goal. So you can unleash that badass, it’s lurking inside you right now. So if you’re ready to become more, if you’re ready to take your health and fitness to the next level, and you gotta be ready to show up and do the work. That’s important, then you’re ready for the Running Lean Coaching Project.
In my coaching program, you’ll get all the knowledge, support and accountability that you need to make realistic lifestyle changes, mindset shifts, and start getting sustainable results. If you’re interested, cool, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. To get started, you’ll fill out a short application schedule call with me. We’ll talk about your goals and we’ll see if this is a good fit for you. Cool. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. I would love to have you join us in the Running Lean Coaching Project. Cool.
So first of all, are you eating like an athlete? The first question I want to kind of propose to you here is are you an athlete or not? Do you consider yourself an athlete and if you do, or don’t like why or why not? So the definition of an athlete is a person who competes in one or more sports that involve physical strength, speed or endurance. So that’s pretty much all of us, right? I would imagine.
I mean, if you run, you’re an athlete, if you lift weights, if you do yoga or CrossFit or you swim or bike or row or skate or ski or do Jazzercise or hike, or climb or play golf, softball, hockey, soccer on and on and on. Like there’s so many different ways that we can classify ourselves as athletes, you know, if you’re, if you’re competing or participating in anything that involves, you know, the use of endurance, strength or speed or any combination of any of those things, then you should consider yourself an athlete.
But I think we get it into our heads that oh, I’m not a real runner because I just run marathons for fun. Come on, you are an athlete, you know, or I just started running so I’m really, I’m really not an athlete. You know, maybe someday but no, no, no you’re an athlete. If you’re, you know, participating in any kind of endurance, strength or speed, exercise, then you’re an athlete.
You’re not an athlete. If your idea of a marathon is like binge watching Netflix all weekend, that’s a different type of athlete. That’s a non athlete. But that’s not you. I know that’s not who you are. So if you’re listening to this podcast, chances are you’re a runner of some form, maybe you’re just getting started. Maybe you’ve run 25 marathons, it doesn’t matter. If you run, you’re a runner.
And if you’re a runner, then you are an athlete. Okay, so I want to make this very, very clear upfront. So to answer the question, are you an athlete? I’m going to say probably yes. For most of us, yes. If you’re doing any kind of exercise on a regular basis, that involves speed strength, or, or endurance or any combination of those than you are an athlete. Okay? So let’s make that distinction upfront. All right, let’s all agree that we’re athletes, okay.
And the thing that I really want you to get out of this podcast today, is that you are an athlete, and you need to start acting like one. Okay, specifically, you need to start eating like an athlete. Think about that. And I want you to really ask yourself, honestly, this question, are you eating like an athlete? Are you fueling your body the way an athlete would fuel their body? Or are you just eating a bunch of crap and eating whatever you feel like whenever you feel like it? That’s not what athletes do.
So you’re an athlete, but are you eating like one? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and probably say that most of you the answer is probably no, no, I know, some of you are on board with all this stuff. And you’re good. And that’s awesome. Go you, keep doing you. But I talk to people every single day who tell me their diet is crap. They have, you know, they binge out on sugar and processed garbage.
They’re out of control, they feel out of control with their eating, right. They know their diet sucks, but they’re just they don’t know what to do about it. And they just feel out of control. And I get it. You know, you’ve been told to eat like, all this junk, all these high carbs. And whatever it jacks up your hunger, hunger signals, it messes up your body, it causes inflammation, it causes you to gain weight, but you keep doing it, because that’s what everybody says you’re supposed to do.
Especially if you’re a runner, you’ve got to eat all the carbs and all the sugar, eat the doughnuts, carb load pasta, fettuccine Alfredo the night before you run all that stuff, right? And if that stuff works for you, that is amazing. Love it, keep doing it. But I’m gonna guess for most of you, it doesn’t work. And if it doesn’t work for you, and you consider yourself an athlete, then stop doing that to stop it.
Now, stop treating your body like it’s a garbage disposal and start treating it like you are an athlete. So what would an athlete do? Like think about this, so maybe we should get little wristbands that say, well, what an athlete too. So think about any given situation where you find yourself needing to make a choice around food or nutrition. And, you know, ask yourself, what would an athlete do in this situation?
So let’s say you’re in training mode, right? You’re training for a marathon. And you’re getting leaner and stronger, and you’re, you know, you’re feeling good, you’re sticking to your schedule, your diet is pretty much on point. And then somebody’s like, hey, you know, I made these homemade cupcakes, they put a couple of them on your desk and, and they’re like, I made these cupcakes, and they’re homemade from scratch. And, you know, they’re made with love. So I just wanted to give them to you, and I really hope you enjoy it.
And what would you do? Are you going to eat those cupcakes? Maybe cupcakes are not on your plan. They’re not on your part of your training plan. And you know, that eating those cupcakes is moving you away from your goals. As an athlete, it’s moving you away from your health and fitness goals. Cupcakes, not on the plan. Okay.
So what do you do? Do you do what you always do, which is like, I just don’t want them to feel bad, they spent so much time and they put so much love into making these cupcakes for me. So I’m just going to eat them, even though I will regret it and feel guilt and shame for a few days afterwards. And you know, my weight will probably go up with all the inflammation and water retention, but I’m going to do it anyway. Because you know, I just don’t want to feel.
Is that what you want to do? No, this isn’t complicated. All right. Let’s not make this more complicated than it needs to be right. If you’re an athlete, and you are then start eating like an athlete. Let’s just stop with the eating the garbage food, okay. I’m not saying you can never eat a cupcake. I’m gonna get into that in just a minute. I’ve got some thoughts about that.
But what I am saying is that you need to treat yourself like the athlete that you are, okay? So I could just stop right here, stop this podcast and stop talking. Because this is the main message I’m trying to get across today. In every situation, I just want you to be honest and ask yourself, am I fueling my body like an athlete would in this moment? Yes or no? Yes or no? It’s a very cut and dry black and white type of situation here. It is not complicated. Am I fueling myself? Like an athlete or not? And if not, I want to, I want you to ask yourself, why? Why not? Why aren’t you taking your health and fitness seriously? Why isn’t this important to you?
Because when you just eat garbage, you are basically saying to yourself, my health and fitness is not important to me. It’s okay. If I keep gaining weight, it’s okay. If I feel like crap, it’s okay. If my health continues to decline, it’s okay. If running continues to be hard for me. But that’s not what you want. I know, that’s not what you want. And you know what, I’m coming at this from a place of like, experience and empathy because I get it. And I’ve been there. And I did the same thing. And I had to ask myself, why am I doing this? Why am I treating myself like crap?
You know, I was training for marathons and ultra marathons. I was eating a terrible diet. I kept gaining weight, right there, that’s a sign that something is amiss, right? If you’re training for ultra marathons, and you’re put on like 40 pounds and that process over a couple of years, it’s like, whoa, something is not working right here. But I just was so stuck on eating all the sugar and junk food and, you know, processed food and just highly palatable food, all the foods, it’s like, amazingly delicious.
Like I just couldn’t get away from that stuff. It had its claws in me, you know. And that was hard for me to like, break away from that, but I did. So I get it. I’m not being unsympathetic. But I do want you to have this moment with yourself where you’re just like, you gotta be honest with yourself, am I feeling myself like an athlete or not. And that’s the moment I had, where I had to say, I’m not, I’m not feeling myself, like an athlete. I’m feeling myself. Like, I don’t care about myself, like, I don’t care about my physical health, or my mental or emotional health. And I had to make a decision. And that decision was not doing that anymore.
I’m not going to keep treating myself like this anymore. I am going to do something about it. I’m going to start acting like the athlete that I am, I’m going to start fueling my body like the athlete that I am. I am training for ultra marathons here. I cannot afford to treat myself like garbage 90% of the year and think that everything is going to go perfectly right on race day. It doesn’t work that way. Okay, so that’s the main message today. Just ask yourself that question. Am I fueling myself like an athlete or not?
An athlete sees food as fuel, right? The food that you put into your body as an athlete should help you to run longer, run faster, it should help you to build strong bones and muscles. It should help improve your cardiovascular health. It should give you steady energy. It should help you sleep better at night. It should help you recover from hard workouts and rebuild muscle tissue. That’s what food is designed for. For human beings for human consumption.
Especially if you’re an athlete, you put your body under all this stress, you’ve got to have the right fuel coming in to replace that energy to repair the muscles to continue to build strong, you know, bones and strong cardiovascular system and all the energy that you need. You have to like be fueling yourself properly. So the food that you eat as an athlete should be in alignment with your health and fitness goals. So here’s the next question for you. Is it be honest, it’s a yes or no question, right? Is the food you eat in alignment with your health and fitness goals? Is the is the food that you’re putting into your body helping you become a better athlete or not? Or is it just keeping you stuck? Or is it like moving you in the opposite direction? Right? Why? Why if not why?
Why are you choosing a diet that’s working against you? Why are you continually to Using foods that keep you gaining weight and feeling like crap, why the hell would you do this to yourself over and over and over and over again, you are an athlete. So start acting like one. Because when you do, I promise you, you’re going to feel so much better, you’re going to feel stronger, you’re going to have all this energy, you’re going to recover faster, you’re gonna feel better about yourself, you’re gonna feel like a total badass.
But if you don’t feel strong, if you don’t have all day energy, if you kind of feel like crap about yourself a lot of the time, why are you doing this to yourself? You deserve better. You deserve to love yourself. Better than this, to treat yourself better than this. You deserve to be the fittest, healthiest, most badass person that you want to be. It’s just a choice you get to choose. It’s a choice that you get to make with every decision you make around food.
And then it’s just recommitting to that choice every day. It’s a recommitment to that mentality of just like, hey, I’m going to feed myself like an athlete today. And then tomorrow, you sort of make that commitment again, and so on. Athletes don’t eat like crap 90% of the time, and then just clean up their diet for, you know, a short period of time, right before they have a race or something like that. They pretty much stay on track, they pretty much stay lean, and stay strong and stay healthy all the time. Because they know how hard it is to like, quote unquote, like get back in shape.
You know what I’m talking about? Have you ever tried to get back in shape, that sucks, that’s really hard. It’s so hard to like, gain and lose the same thing, like 20 pounds over and over again. Right? It’s very difficult to do, it’s very bad for you to actually do that, it’s really not good for you, it’s better to just stay overweight, to be honest with you than it is to like gain and lose. Obviously, the best choice is to just lose it and be done with it. Right.
So most athletes, what they do is they stay lean and strong all the time. You know, there might be a couple of pounds difference between offseason and training season or something like that, but it’s minimal. So they know how important it is to just stay on point all year long. Okay. And I’ve done the whole yo yo dieting, yo yo weight gain loss thing for years. And I gotta tell you, it’s, it’s frustrating.
And you’re, I was always in this state of like, never feeling good about myself, because I was never where I wanted to be. Or if I was, I knew that it wasn’t gonna last. But I’m done with all that now, I made a decision some years ago where I’m just not doing that anymore. And so today, I eat like an athlete all the time. I maintain my weight effortlessly.
And I still indulge in it on occasion. Alright, once I got to my goal weight, and I and I got to this place where I felt super confident in my ability to maintain my weight. Then I started to allow myself some indulgences here and there, something that you have to kind of experiment with a little bit. So I’m going to say something here that I’ve really never really talked about before. And maybe you never thought you’d hear from me, but this is what I call the 90/10 rule. Some people call it the 80/20 rule, but I think that’s too, too loosey goosey. So I call it the 90/10 rule.
So 90% of the time, you need to be disciplined about your diet, you need to be fueling your body like an athlete. And then 10% of the time, you can indulge so what this looks like, typically is about one meal a week, something like that. I maybe even do it less than that. So maybe twice a month, I indulge in a meal that would be considered a little indulgent or off plan.
You know, I talk a lot about going out for Mexican food because I just grew up on Mexican food. I’m from you know, LA/Southern California and I just love Mexican food, especially like good traditional Mexican food. And with that, I know it’s chips and salsa and guacamole and tacos and I love all that stuff. Right? And instead of like saying I can never eat that stuff again. I do it minimally, I do it like once a month, you know and then I might go out for sushi and some other kind of you know, indulgent foods, another time or whatever.
So I like this 90/10 rule because I know it’s hard for people to not eat a burger or to eliminate stuff from their diet. And when we get into this place where we’re feeling deprived, like we can never eat corn chips again in our life, that just makes you crave it more, right, it makes you one and even more. I’ve seen this over and over again with people. So you know, at the beginning, we’re a little more strict about our food plan because we got to get ourselves off of the sugar, we got to get ourselves off the processed foods, we got to get ourselves off the refined carbohydrates.
Once we do that, and we sort of, you know, balance our hormones, we’ve kind of gotten to our goal weight or are closer to it, and we feel confident or ability to to maintain our weight, then we can start indulging a little bit. And this is where the 90/10 kind of principle comes into play here. Okay. So I understand it can be very hard for some people to do this. For example, eating sugar can be very addictive. And if you have a problem in this area, it’s something you have to be very careful with.
Because for some of us, for me, it’s the same thing with sugar. For me, once I start, it’s very hard for me to stop, I had the same issue with drinking alcohol too like, I can’t just drink one I drink until I’m passed out basically, is the way I’ve always done it. And so there’s this phenomenon of craving that happens as soon as I get some alcohol into my body, I just want more and more and more, and I can’t stop.
And I have a very similar kind of dysfunctional relationship with sugar, I guess, you know, so instead of dabbling in sugar and trying to moderate it, I just don’t eat sugar, I really don’t. I can’t remember the last time I ate sugar was probably like, a year and a half ago or something like that. So I just don’t eat and it’s fine. It doesn’t bother me at all. I don’t crave it. So for some of us, just total abstinence from some of this stuff is on point. It’s like what we need to do. If you can dabble in this a little bit and apply this 90/10 rule and eat some sugar and things like that. And you can do it in a way that is intentional, purposeful, and not like binging then good for you do it, okay, let’s not, let’s not deprive ourselves of things, but understand that some of these foods are not moving us in the direction of our goals that they will actually set us back, we might gain a little bit of weight, we might feel terrible, it might affect our training negatively.
So just know that that’s all part of it. Okay? Athletes, they do this too, they indulge in some of these things every now and then. And they do it at strategic times when it’s not going to affect their training when it’s not not before a race not before a long run or whatever they’re doing right.
So just know that if you’re if your goal is to lose weight, that you know indulging and things like this is going to you know, it’s going to kind of throw out your progress. It’s hard to eat sugar and lose weight. It just really is right? The whole idea of like putting your body into fat burning mode, getting it out of fat storing mode, sugar puts your body into fat storing mode, we got to limit the sugar for sure. Okay.
Okay, but all of this is to say that if we apply the 90/10 rule, and one meal a week, two meals a month, whatever you want to do, you can indulge, but then the rest of the time you stay disciplined, you’re gonna be fine. You’re gonna be fine. Okay? Athletes don’t use these, like cheat meals, and I don’t even like the word cheat meal because they’re planned. They’re intentional. They’re purposeful.
A cheat implies that you’re engaging in something that’s deceptive. Like, you’re tricking someone, you’re not tricking anybody here, you’re just making a choice for yourself. You got to feel good about that choice you’re making for yourself. So do this intentionally. Right? We’re not cheating. Anyway, so we want to play in our exceptions, we want to plan these indulgent meals, okay.
So, athletes will allow themselves this on occasion, you know, to celebrate to feel a part of but it’s a minor exception. It’s not the rule. So that’s why I say 90/10. So my, my taco night is like one of my, it’s like part of my 10% right. Come on chips and guacamole. So amazing, right. It’s also a way for me to connect with people I love with family, with friends, and I do it in a way that is very intentional and planned.
And then before that indulgent meal, and after I eat, like super clean. This is the way an athlete would do it. Right? They’re not going to just binge out on you know, burritos and stuff for a week straight. You know, they’re going to just do a meal, feel good about it, do it intentionally and then get back on plan with the next meal. Okay. So this isn’t about deprivation, this is about 100% of the time you have to fuel your fuel yourself like an athlete food can still be enjoyable food can still be you know, amazing and all that stuff, you know um, but we got to do it a minimally, we want for the most part, we want to be fueling ourselves like an athlete. Okay.
So back to that question I asked at the beginning of this episode, you know, are you eating like an athlete? Yes or no? What’s the answer? And if you’re not, why not? Why are you choosing to eat in a way that goes against your long term health and fitness goals? Why would you continue to eat like crap, and then hope that somehow everything’s gonna work out on race day or whatever? Right. And I did this too for my first few marathons. I was trying to run out a certain I wanted to run like a 9 minute mile on race day, all my training runs were way slower than that, like I never ran faster than a 10 minute mile.
And then somehow I expected something magical to happen on race day, like, all of a sudden, I was going to be able to run a minute faster per mile for 26 miles. Like, that’s ridiculous. But we do the same thing with our food, we think we can eat like crap all year long. And then somehow around race day, everything’s going to just magically fall into place. It doesn’t work that way. It really doesn’t. Okay. So just know that you’ve got to be honest with yourself and ask yourself whether or not you are eating like an athlete. Okay?
And if the answer is no, like, really ask yourself, why or why not? Like, are you afraid that you’re gonna feel like you’re missing out on something good? How much pleasure is that cupcake can actually give you? How about being a fit, strong, badass runner, how much pleasure you’re gonna get out of that. My guess is a lot, a lot more than that. Very temporary, cupcake pleasure you’re gonna get, don’t get me wrong, the cupcake will make you feel good for a minute.
But how about being a fit, strong, badass runner. That’s gonna last, that’s what you’re after. Right? Maybe you’re worried that you won’t be able to make it last, maybe you’re worried that like, this isn’t gonna, you’re not gonna be able to sustain this. And I get that that’s super common. It’s a very common worry, among people that I work with, like, I just don’t know if I’m gonna be able to make it last. But listen, what if you applied the same mindset to your nutrition that you put into your running schedule? Think about this, you are super good at sticking to stuff already.
Like, you get to work on time. Every day, you hit all your runs, like you never miss a workout, right? You never cheat on your husband or your wife or your partner, you always pick your kids up from school on time, right? You are very disciplined in many, many areas of your life. But when it comes to food, we’re all like, totally loosey goosey. And we’re like, I’m at a control. I’m like, dude, you are so disciplined in every other area of your life. Why aren’t you just applying that same mentality to your food plan?
Just copy and paste that same mindset over here to your food, and you’re gonna be a total badass and no time? I promise you. Right? That’s how you make it last. But maybe you’re afraid it’s going to be hard. It’s going to be too hard. And I can answer this one for you right now. Yes, it will be hard. At first anyway, all change is hard at first, right? Until it isn’t. You’ve got to embrace the discomfort of change. Get through the hard part.
Because the only way to become the badass version of yourself is to go through the hard stuff, you can’t go around it. You can’t avoid it. You got to go through it straight through it. It’s the challenges that change you. You want to see the view from the top of the mountain, you got to climb the mountain. There’s no other way to do it. It will be hard. But you can do it. So accept this, accept this fact that it’s going to be hard and do it anyway. Just because something is hard doesn’t mean we don’t do it. We do it anyway.
Or you might be afraid to try something new because you’ve already tried quote unquote, everything in the past and nothing ever works for you. That’s totally cool. I get that two people tell me this all the time. And I used to think this way too. But now I have a very different approach to things I do in my life. I keep freaking going. I do not stop when it gets hard. I do not stop until I’m done.
I don’t quit when things get challenging. I don’t stop when it seems like it’s not working. I don’t give up until I reach my goal of relentless forward progress. I keep going no matter what Because if it’s going to work, I have to make it work, period. And I’m committed to reaching my goals, no matter what. No matter how many times I stumble and fall, no matter how long it takes, no matter how many times I fail, I’m not in a hurry. I’m not about avoiding failure. I am absolutely freaking relentless in my pursuit of my goals, and you should be too. So ask yourself, honestly. Are you eating like an athlete? Don’t fool yourself. Just be 100% honest with yourself. Yes or no? Are you eating like an athlete? Why or why not?
And if you want some help with this, I got you. We’ll do it together. I’ll help you get through the hard stuff. I’ll get you up that mountain. But you got to commit to showing up and doing the work, right? You’ve got to make this daily commitment to yourself when you do that. There’s nothing you can’t do. I love you all. Keep on Running Lean. And I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
I’ve taught a lot of nutrition and mindset concepts over the last two and a half years of doing this podcast, and some of these topics are worth a revisit. Either because I’ve discovered new …
Continue Reading about 123. Back to Basics: Eating Real Food →
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 123 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, Back to Basics Eating Real Food. I’ve talked a lot about nutrition and mindset over the last two and a half years of doing this podcast. And some of these topics are worth a revisit, either because I’ve discovered new information about the topic and I want to share that with you.
Or because it’s just so important, it’s worth another look. So over the next several weeks, I’m going to be sprinkling in some of these back to basics episodes to share new and improved info, and then revisit some of the key concepts for weight loss and sports nutrition for runners. And today’s topic, eating real food falls into both categories.
So I’ve learned a lot since first talking about eating real food. And it’s also one of the most important things you can do to improve your overall health and fitness. So it absolutely deserves another look. And eating real food is a simple concept. But it looks a little different for everyone.
If you’re a runner, and you’re interested in making a change in your eating habits so that you can lose weight while also supporting your running goals, then I want to invite you to join the Running Lean coaching project. This is my immersive coaching program that includes group coaching one-on-one coaching with me, you get all the knowledge, support and accountability that you need to learn what to do to learn how to do it, and to help you stay on track.
Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply, you will fill out a short application, schedule a Zoom call with me. And we’ll talk about your goals and see if coaching is a good fit for you. I would love to help you learn how to eat real food, lose the weight without all the frustration and learn how to build good habits that last for life.
If you’re ready for some realistic lifestyle changes, mindset shifts and sustainable results, then you’re ready for the Running Lean coaching project. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply to get started down. All right back to basics, eating real food.
So I’m just gonna jump in and talk about why I teach this concept. And the really the first reason why I talk about eating real food is that there’s something really wrong with the standard American diet. Alright. So for millions of years as humans, we did really well, you know, eating real food was just something we did naturally.
But then pretty recently, we screwed it all up, all right? The standard American diet is based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, it was created back in the late 70s. It was like 1977, I believe, I think they published it in like 1980. But they basically told us that we should all be eating a very high carbohydrate diet, like upwards of 65% of your calories should be coming from carbohydrates. And low fat, like fat is bad. They just decided this right?
And immediately upon implementing these guidelines, the health of this country began to decline. So why did they make this change? Well, there was this guy named Ancel Keys. And he was a researcher and a doctor. And back in the 50s, he proposed this idea. It was called The Diet Heart Hypothesis. And it was an idea that eating fat would cause people to die of heart attacks. So he did all these studies. And he did. He published a study called The Seven Countries Study.
And the interesting thing about this study is actually there were 22 countries involved, but he just cherry picked the seven that kind of fit with his idea of what he wanted the results to be and he only published the seven countries that that kind of supported his claims. Anyway, none of the stuff that he proposed in this study have actually been proven.
In fact, a lot of it has been disproven over the years. A lot of the stuff that he proposed in this Diet Heart Hypothesis has been disproven yet. We changed our dietary guidelines back in 1977/1980 and we’ve changed everything, this has affected everything. It still does today, the guidelines that they produce and they haven’t changed much over the last 50 years or whatever.
But these guidelines have a profound effect on all areas of our lives. So all school lunch programs are being generated based on those guidelines. Right now, 19% of school aged kids are obese. This is a problem. All military rations, all mess hall food and military is dictated by the guidelines. 7% of our troops are obese.
All the special nutrition programs for women, infants and children like WIC are being determined by the guidelines. 15% of toddlers and WIC are obese toddlers, all hospital food is dictated by the guidelines. Food Programs for the elderly are being dictated by the guidelines. Life expectancy in the elderly is going down.
There’s more Alzheimer’s disease, more diabetes, more cancer. These things are rampant among the elderly. And they’re all diet and lifestyle caused diseases. Agricultural production is dictated by those guidelines. It’s simplified, it’s incentivizing farmers to produce more and more cheap carbohydrates like soybeans, wheat and corn.
Those are like the main things that we produce here in this country. And then of course, the food industry uses the guidelines too, so they produce more garbage food that’s loaded with things like vegetable oil, right? And high fructose corn syrup and all this junk. So all these things I just mentioned, they all are using those guidelines to produce, you know, the foods that we eat, and the guidelines are just wrong. They don’t work.
Since implementing the guidelines in ‘80, 88% of Americans are today considered metabolically unhealthy meaning they’re overweight, they’re obese, their insulin resistant they have diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and on and on, only 12% of us are considered healthy. This is wrong. This does not work.
“For the first time in history, we had a government telling us what to eat.” This is a quote from Ben Bikman. He’s a PhD, a Utah professor and a leading metabolic scientist and he says, “For the first time, we have a government telling us what to eat, encouraging us to eat far more refined carbohydrates, and much less healthy fats and proteins and our weight, and our health has only suffered for it.”
The results on the nation’s health and weight have been dire since the government first set dietary guidelines in 1977. The food industry has completely shifted the types of foods they produce to our overall detriment. According to the CDC, the weight of the average adult American today is nearly 30 pounds more than that of the average adult American in 1977.
This is a problem. What are we doing? There’s all sorts of issues and diseases related to eating this particular diet too, by the way. Obesity rates have more than tripled in the US because we’re following the guidelines. We have a diabetes epidemic. 14 different types of cancer have been related to diet, including breast cancer, colorectal cancer.
Alzheimer’s disease is diet related. They call it type three diabetes, PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome, is diet related. All of these issues are mostly caused by you know too much insulin in the bud. And that’s called hyperinsulinemia. And how do you get too much insulin in the blood? Eat a lot of carbohydrates and eat a lot of sugar. Right?
So the diet is wrong. It’s making us sicker, it’s making us fatter, and we need to get off of that. Do anything else do anything else, then what the dietary guidelines are telling you to do? Okay. And I don’t think I’ve talked about this, but they did a study a while back, and this was called The Pure Study.
And they did this over a 10 year period. And they did it from 2003 to 2013. And they followed over 135,000 people in 18 different countries. And they basically, you know, divided these people up based on their macronutrient intake and basically there were people who are eating high carbohydrate and lower fat, and then low carbohydrate, high fat.
And the conclusion basically is this: I’ll just read the conclusion to you. High carbohydrate intake was associated with a higher risk of total mortality body death. Whereas total fat and individual types of fat were related to lower total mortality. Total fat and types of fat were not associated with cardiovascular disease, myocardial infarction, or cardiovascular disease mortality, whereas saturated fat had an inverse association with stroke.
Global dietary guidelines should be reconsidered in light of these findings. So that’s the conclusion from this study. The interesting part about that, I mean, the whole thing is fascinating to me, because basically they just disprove that Diet Heart Hypothesis right there, they’re saying fat has nothing to do with it.
In fact, the people with the high fat diet had lower risk of dying from all these diseases. And the saturated fat had an inverse association with stroke, meaning that the people who ate more saturated fat had less stroke than the other people. So that was really fascinating, right? That kind of blows all that out of the water, right?
Okay, so how does this affect you, as a runner? Aren’t runners just immune to all this stuff? Can’t runners just eat whatever we want? No, we cannot. Runners are humans too, in case you haven’t noticed, and lots of runners experience a lot of these health issues, weight gain, obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, type two diabetes, right?
There’s this phenomenon called TOFI. And this is someone who is thin on the outside, fat on the inside. And this is especially true with runners who look pretty lean on the outside. But on the inside, they might have a lot of visceral fat. And they might have developed something like type two diabetes, and no amount of running more is going to fix this right.
This is a diet related problem, a diet related disease. And one of the famous examples of this is Professor Tim Noakes, who wrote the book, The Lore of Running, and this guy is a total badass, right? He’s a researcher, he’s run over 70 marathons, but he ended up getting Type Two Diabetes. As a runner, he looked fine on the outside, but his doctor was like, you need to switch your diet.
It opened his eyes, he switched to a low carbohydrate diet. And now he coaches world class athletes on this low carb approach and this fat-adapted approach to running. And in his book, The Law of Running, he has a chapter on nutrition in there, which he advocates for the traditional high carbohydrate approach that, you know, you’ve probably heard of that most runners have heard of, right.
But he famously like, tore that chapter out of the book, because he just could no longer support that he’s like, I was wrong. I wrote this stuff about eating all the carbs. And it’s completely wrong. It’s bad for you, it’s killing us, we’ve got to stop doing it. Okay. So this whole low carb approach to running to sports nutrition, it’s no longer some weird fringe thing.
This is becoming more and more common. So the NASM, the National Association of Sports Nutrition, this is where I got my sports nutrition license. They used to teach the traditional high carb approach to nutrition for endurance activities running and such.
Several years ago, they made a big decision in that they couldn’t do that anymore, they’re going to move away from that high carb approach, and move to a more of a low carb fat adapted approach to sports nutrition. This is a bold move for this organization. But they could not in good conscience keep telling people, especially athletes to eat this crap diet, this diet that is literally killing us.
So they said we can’t do it, no more. And the funny thing is, is that this decision was not well received by everybody. Like there’s people who, you know, we’re following that traditional all carb approach to sports nutrition, and they wanted to get trained in this and wanted to get licensed in this approach. And they were not happy about this, but they just decided that this was what they had to do.
They couldn’t, you know, in good conscience, they couldn’t keep telling people to eat this garbage food anymore. Okay. And this is probably the biggest reason why I signed up with NASN is because they promote the low carb approach to sports nutrition, they understand the importance of being fat-adapted and how it’s not just good for for us as humans and to become the healthiest people that we can be.
But also, it’s great for endurance sports. And then there’s doctors like Stephen Finney and Jeff Bullock, who wrote the book on low carb sports nutrition called The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance. And then there’s all these companies out there right now that are making nutrition products for low carb running like Mirror Energy, s fuels, you have Elemental Labs, and there are more companies coming on board all the time, they’re springing up all over the place.
Why? Because there’s a need. There are a lot of athletes like me and you who want to perform at our best without eating all the garbage. All those like nutrition food like substances like Clif Bars, I used to eat a lot of Clif bars back in the day when I was like doing the high carbohydrate thing. And I would eat a couple Clif Bars every day and I was like, well, this is healthy, you know?
And look at the ingredients, Clif Bars, these things are not good for you. In fact, I was on their website and I was like what is in a Clif Bar. And so I’m going to read you some of these ingredients: organic rolled oats, so that’s all carbs, organic brown rice syrup, sugar, soy rice crisps, which are made from soy protein isolate rice flour and barley, barley malt extract, which is a form of sugar. Organic roasted soybeans, organic tapioca syrup, that’s sugar, organic cane syrup, that’s sugar. Unsweetened chocolate, chicory fiber, soy flour, high oleic, sunflower oil, natural flavor, sea salt, cinnamon, there’s not a whole lot of nutrition in here.
Okay, this is a bunch of carbs. This one bar is 43 grams of carbohydrates, including 17 grams of sugar with 16 grams of added sugars. And only 10 grams of protein. So this is just a candy bar essentially, is what it is okay. And on their website, it says there’s like a FAQ section like frequently asked questions that says are Clif Bars good for you? And here’s their answer, “Clif Bar is the ultimate energy bar trusted for nearly 30 years by athletes and sports nutrition experts to get you started and help you keep going during long outings on the bike trail or slopes.” Notice how they don’t actually answer that question.
Because their lawyers probably were like, you can’t say that they’re not good for you. Right? So they kind of skirt that answer. But anyway, I’m just trying to tell you that instead of eating this, like processed garbage food, we need to be eating real food. And I’m gonna get into that in just a second. Okay, I’m gonna tell you what that means.
But we’ve evolved as humans to like, eat real food. We’ve thrived on eating real food for millions of years. And I just want to say that we’ve changed things recently, pretty recently, right? I mean, we’ve evolved as hunter gatherers, our diet was mostly animal based for hundreds of thousands of years. You know, we’re also omnivores, we can eat a lot of different foods. It doesn’t mean we should.
But for the most part, we were eating a diet of meat, tubers, fruit, not like the fruit we have today, honey, but there wasn’t broccoli. Broccoli didn’t come around until the 1700s. There wasn’t tomatoes, tomatoes didn’t come around until 700 ad. Even bread is a relatively recent thing, like refining grains that happened about 1000 years BC, so maybe about 10,000 years ago, right?
But in the grand scheme of things, two and a half million years of human evolution 10,000 years is not that much time. And prior to that, you know, we just didn’t need that stuff. You know, and if you look at the mummies of ancient Egyptians, they, you know, we can study the actual bodies, you know, because they’re, they’ve been preserved for the last few thousand years.
They have rotten teeth and distended bellies, and they’ve determined that this is from eating refined grains, a lot of refined grains, rotten teeth, distended bellies. Prior to that though, Paleolithic man, they found all these, you know, they didn’t find the bodies, but they found the skeletons and the skulls and they all have like perfect teeth.
So no refined grains, no tooth decay, you start eating this stuff, and it starts to be bad for you, right? The bottom line is that the refined grains are a problem, right? Alright, so what I mean when I say like, let’s eat real food. Let’s go back to eating real food. Real food is food that still looks like and it’s food that our ancestors would recognize.
So a Clif Bar does not fit into this description. Okay. So eating real food means you’re sticking with unrefined unprocessed food. Food that still looks like it’s supposed to look, if it’s a piece of salmon, it’s a piece of salmon. If it’s a sweet potato, it’s a sweet potato. If it’s broccoli, it’s broccoli. Not food that’s been ground up into powders or liquids, not food that’s been extracted from whole foods, but the actual food, okay.
I think it’s a good idea to stay away from most foods that come in packages. Most packaged food is basically processed food, okay, and I’m not anti packaged food, but most of it is highly processed. You just have to be careful, read the labels, right? Most processed food, most packaged food contains like the three worst things you can eat. I call this the Vile Triumvirate. Right?
It’s sugar, refined grains, and vegetable oil. If you stay away from packaged food, you’re not going to get any of that stuff. I promise you. Stick with whole foods, meat, fish, eggs, nuts, vegetables, fruit, natural fats, like olive oil, butter, some dairy like whole milk, Greek yogurt. Stay away from highly refined, highly processed food made with a million unpronounceable and unnatural ingredients. All right.
And then when I start talking about this, people get this idea in their head, and they’re like, isn’t this just like keto or low carb, high fat or paleo? And the short answer is like, no, it’s really none of those things. It’s similar. Paleo is pretty close. But even that isn’t quite right. Because here’s the thing. This is going to look different for each individual. And last week’s episode, I talked about this in depth, that’s episode 122.
Like we’re all different, we all have different goals. We all have different lifestyles, different food preferences, genetics, our metabolism, our culture, all that has to play a part in what you choose, as the diet that works best for you. Right? There’s not a one size fits all plan that’s going to work for everybody.
There just isn’t, there’s no such thing. And to be clear on this, this isn’t about eliminating a food group. This isn’t about eliminating carbohydrates, right? Or never eating a carb again, or anything like that. This is about shifting your body back to the way it’s supposed to function. The way that your body has been functioning beautifully, as humans for thousands or millions of years, right?
I think it’s ignorant to think that introducing all this processed food in the last like 60 to 100 years or so is not going to negatively impact our health it is it has, it’s a problem. So the best thing and simplest thing you can do for yourself right now is just eat real food, food that still looks like food, food our ancestors would recognize.
So what if you do this what happens when you start eating real food? Well, your body starts to function the way it’s supposed to. You know, the way that humans have been functioning for millions of years, hormones become balanced and regulated. You’re no longer hungry all the time. You’re getting all the nutrients your body actually needs. Things like insulin drop, like you stopped storing so much energy as fat, right?
You keep eating sugar, a lot of that sugar energy can’t be used right away. So your body stores it as fat. If you’re not eating that stuff, you’re not storing all this fat, you’re actually burning fat, your fat begins to be released from your fat cells and you begin to burn fat and you begin to lose weight.
You start sleeping better, you wake up feeling more rested. You have this steady supply of energy from burning fat, so you don’t have these afternoon crashes where you need that Starbucks Triple Shot, Caramel Macchiato with extra whip, just to get you through your workday. Right. So when you start eating real food, your body starts to function the way it’s supposed to.
So what about running? How does this affect your running? Or why would runners choose to eat this way? Well, one of the biggest benefits of eating this way is that you become really efficient at burning fat. And fat is an amazing fuel source for long distance running. And when you become fat adapted, this is a pretty amazing experience. Like if you’re into running and I know you are, then I suggest you try this. I can’t explain it.
Like you have to go and you know, try this for yourself and see how you feel. Now there are some misconceptions about what it means to be fat-adapted. So I want to explain this a little bit more. Being fat-adapted means you are training your body to burn fat very efficiently. And we all have a virtually unlimited supply of energy on our bodies at all times in the form of stored body fat.
Okay, now, I want to go back to our prehistoric man for a second because in doing a little bit of research for this episode, I came across this fascinating study in this article. And I just want to talk about what it means to be fat-adapted and how we have evolved to kind of, this is like our normal state of being okay.
So we are born runners, we are really good at running long distances. We’ve adapted to become these amazing long distance runners, right? Modern humans, and their immediate ancestors, like Homo erectus, have several adaptations that make humans instead of being some ferocious, furry fleet creature, the animals, the animal world’s best, we are the world’s best distance runners. Right?
Early humans, scavengers, ended up becoming persistence hunters. So we develop these long springy tendons in our legs and our feet that function like large elastics like rubber bands, right? They store energy, and then with each running stride, release it and this actually reduces the amount of energy it takes to take another step. There’s also other adaptations to keep our bodies stable as we run.
So we counterbalance each step with an arm swing, we have these large butts and these large buttock muscles that hold our bodies upright. And we have this elastic ligament in our neck to help keep our head steady. All of this stuff is designed to help us run very efficiently, right? Even the human waste, which is thinner and more flexible than that of our primate relatives, allows us to twist our upper bodies as we run to counterbalance the slightly off center. It forces exerted as we stride with each leg.
Okay, so once humans start running, it only takes a little bit more energy for us to run faster. Other animals, on the other hand, expend a ton of energy as they speed up, particularly when they switch from a trot to a gallop, which most animals cannot maintain over long distances, right?
Those adaptations make humans and our ancestors better runners, it’s our ability to run in the heat that may have made the real difference in our ability to procure game. So humans have several adaptations that help us dump the amount of heat that we generate when we’re running. These adaptations include being hairless, virtually, some of us more than others, our ability to sweat, the fact that we breathe through our mouths when we run, it allows us to take bigger breaths, and helps us to dump heat.
And we can run in conditions that no other animal can run in. So other animals, they get to get rid of excess heat, they pant, they have to pant and they can’t pant when they’re running, so they have to stop and rest and pant to dump the heat. That means to run a prey animal into the ground, ancient humans, they just kept that animal running. So altogether, these adaptations allowed us to relentlessly pursue game in the hottest part of the day, when most animals are resting right.
So we practice persistence hunting. We would chase a game animal during the heat of the day, make it run faster than it can maintain, we would track it, flush it if it tried to rest and repeat the process, just keeping the thing going until the animal would literally overheat and collapse. And so the animal would develop hyperthermia, which is like heatstroke in humans after about 6 or 10 miles of this.
And so, by the end of all this, even humans with their crude, early weapons could have overcome stronger and more dangerous prey. And adding credence to this theory is the fact that some Aboriginal humans still practice persistent hunting today. And it remains an effective hunting technique. It requires very minimal technology, has a high success rate, and yields a lot of nutrient dense fuel in the form of meat.
Okay, so all that is just to say that running long distances is part of our DNA. And running long distances means that we needed a steady fuel source available at all times, especially when we were not eating we would be fasting we would be, you know, running an animal for days until we, you know, caught up with it and whatever. That’s where our stored body fat comes into play.
We’re naturally born fat burners. And when you get off the sugar, and you get off the refined grains and the packaged garbage food, you can turn your body back into a long distance running badass fat burning machine. And right now, most people, like the average runner probably has around 100,000 calories of stored energy in the form of stored body fat, enough to run for days and days without stopping.
On the contrary though, your body can only hold about 2000 calories of carbohydrate in the form of glucose. So if this was our preferred fuel source, we would need a lot, lot more of that to be able to track animals for days, right. So the idea of getting fat-adapted should be really stated like getting back to being fat-adapted like we were meant to be.
The other misconception about being fat-adapted is that you make this switch from burning all carbs, you know in sugar, and then burning all fat. And this is never the case, you’re always burning both your body produces glucose, all the glucose that your body needs your body actually creates at your liver creates glucose for your brain and for your muscles to function properly.
And as long as your activity level is kept low enough, like during most long distance running, you will continue to produce enough glucose glucose for your working muscles while also utilizing fat as your main source of fuel. But as your exercise intensity gets higher and higher as you start burning more glucose and less fat, and you will probably need to add some sort of fuel in the form of carbohydrate to maintain the more intense effort, okay, and you got to practice this in your training.
And then you can dial in exactly how much carbohydrate you need, at what level of intensity. So you can keep that inner fire burning hot, right? So you can keep delivering a steady supply of fat and glucose to working muscles and kick some serious butt out there. Okay, so when you get good at this when you practice both, using both fuel sources efficiently, this is known as being metabolically flexible or metabolic flexibility.
So you train your body to use both types of fuel very effectively. Again, this isn’t about eliminating carbohydrates. This is about switching your body to going back to being an efficient fat burner, okay? The only thing with this is that if you go too high in the carbs, you kind of shut down the fat burning process. So you have to be careful with how you do this. And you have to experiment with it.
Okay, and everybody’s a little bit different. And so you have to practice with this in your training. This is not something you’re going to just do on race day, for sure. Okay. So eating real food, I want to recap real quick, what I just talked about, the standard American diet is wrong, needs to be changed.
Runners are not immune to the effects of this terrible diet. So just stop doing it. Running does not mean you can eat whatever you want, okay. Humans have evolved by eating real food. We’ve become amazing creatures, the most advanced creatures in the universe as far as we know. And we did it by eating real food. So we need to get back to that.
Humans have also evolved to be badass runners and badass fat-burning machines. We need to get back to that too. And the easiest way to get back to that to get back to our badass purpose is to eat real food. Eat food that still looks like food, food our ancestors would recognize. Cool, this is fun. I love talking about this. I could talk about this all day. Hope you guys have an awesome day. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
There are a lot of misconceptions out there about what coaching is and what it isn’t. Some people think coaching is just someone screaming at you like a drill sergeant in boot camp. Others think …
Continue Reading about 122. What Coaching Should Look Like →
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 122 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, what coaching should look like? I think there are a lot of misconceptions out there about what coaching is and what it isn’t.
Some people think coaching is just like having someone screaming at you like a drill sergeant and boot camp. Other people think coaching is having a cheerleader by your side always telling you great job. Both of these can be positive aspects of coaching. But there’s a lot more to consider if you’re seriously looking for someone to help you reach your weight loss and running goals.
So in this episode of the podcast, I break down what coaching is, what it isn’t, and explain what coaching should look like. And I’m hoping that by the end of this episode, you have a very clear understanding of how the right kind of coaching can actually help you achieve all of your health and fitness goals.
And I just want to get right into this topic today because this is something that I’ve been very passionate about, and something that I talk about just about every day. So I talk with runners every single day about their goals and whether or not they want to coach with me, whether they want to work with me or not.
And I always explain a little bit about what coaching looks like, when I get on a call with someone. And I thought you know, this would be a great idea to just jump on here and do a whole podcast about this topic about what good coaching should actually look like, you know, what coaching should look like versus what maybe we think it is?
Okay, so let me ask you this, like when you think of a coach, what image comes to mind for you, when I think of a coach, I get this image of somebody standing on the side of the track, like with a clipboard and a stopwatch, right?
Or maybe that coach in the locker room at halftime screaming at the players to get them all pumped up for the second half of the game. Or the personal trainer screaming at you there’s a lot of screaming in my envision of coaches for some reason. The personal trainer at the gym screaming like, you know, do one more rep. One more, one more.
So we all have some notion of what a coach looks like. And most of us have probably had some experience working with or having some sort of a coach in our lives, whether it was a coaching, you know, when you played high school sports, you maybe had a coach. But this idea of what a coach actually is, I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding about that.
Okay, and so, today I want to talk about this, I want to talk about what coaching is and what it isn’t. And I want to bust some of the myths around coaching and what it means to work with a coach. I want to help you to understand what to look for if you want to work with a coach.
Okay, by the end of this episode, I want you to have a clear understanding of what this should look like. Okay, now I need to say this, I’m a coach, right? And of course, I would love it if you wanted coaching and you decided you want to work with me. That would be amazing. But that’s not what this is about. Okay, this isn’t about me.
This is about you understanding the power of coaching, and how it can help you and how, what I want for you is I want to give you the information to go out there and find a coach that works for you, whether it’s me or somebody else, it’s fine with me either way. I fiercely believe in the power of coaching. It is one of the most amazing things I have ever done for myself is getting a coach and I think everyone can benefit from having a coach.
I actually have several coaches, I have a strength coach, I have a nutrition coach and a business coach. And each of these coaches plays a huge role in helping me to become my most badass self. I would not have lost the weight and learned how to keep it off for good without my coach.
I wouldn’t have learned how to get stronger. I wouldn’t understand the importance of continually, you know, building strength as a runner, if it wasn’t for my functional strength coach, and I definitely wouldn’t make it as an entrepreneur without my business coach. You know, being an entrepreneur building a business from the ground up and doing it all by yourself. This is one of the hardest things I have ever done. It’s challenging.
And they say I love this little like analogy here, they say, “Being an entrepreneur is like jumping out of an airplane and building the parachute on the way down.” And I feel this deeply, every single day. Okay? Anyway, so I just wanted to make this very clear that this isn’t about me, this is not about me, like selling you on coaching with me or anything like that.
It’s about helping you understand what good coaching should look like, whether it’s with me or somebody else. But I want you to understand how powerful coaching can be for you, and how amazing it can be for you, and how it can absolutely transform your life, and help you achieve whatever goals you want for yourself in different areas of your life. Okay.
So one of the biggest misconceptions I want to talk about is that a coach is just there to tell you what to do. Right? I have talked to so many runners who have worked with a running coach, or maybe a nutrition coach in the past. And one of the common issues I see with most coaches with most of like what I’ll call like traditional coaching, okay?
That it’s just somebody, they’re telling you what to do. Like, here’s what you should eat, or here’s your running workout, just do what I say. All right, and this is fine. You know, there has to be a part of that with coaching, right. But when that’s all the coaches doing for you, they’re giving you some sort of standard formula, some standard meal plan or some standard workout. You know, everybody they’re coaching is kind of getting the same standard deal, right? That doesn’t really work. Okay.
This is a problem. And I see this with a lot of nutrition coaches, specifically who just prescribe meal plans for their clients. So they give them a menu of actually, like, here’s what you’re going to eat this week. And then next week, I’ll give you a new meal plan of what you should eat. Okay? And again, this is fine.
This might work sometimes, but what are you teaching the client? What are you teaching that person you’re working with? Are they learning how to make good decisions about food? Are they developing the habits they need to make their new food choices on their own and to make them last for the long haul?
Like, how sustainable is it to just tell somebody what to do? I’ve had several people come to me after working with other nutrition coaches, who gave them meal plans, who gave them a menu of what to do. And by the end of that coaching relationship, they had no clue what to do on their own.
So once the coaching relationship was over, they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t understand why they were being told to eat these certain foods. And to avoid these foods over here. They didn’t understand the philosophy behind making these menus, you know, they hadn’t developed any skills of their own.
They just didn’t know how to create their own food plan. Okay. That’s not sustainable. Right? They also hadn’t developed good eating habits, right. So they just ended up falling back into old behaviors, once that coaching relationship was over, and they ended up putting all the weight back on.
And I see this with most diet plans, right? They just tell you what to eat, and what not to eat. And then, you know, send you on your way. Good luck. Good luck with all that, right. And I see this with books. You know, I read a lot of books on diet and nutrition, sports, nutrition, athletic performance.
And a lot of these books have meal plans in them and recipes and things like that. I guess people say they want those kinds of things, right? This might be what people say they want, but it’s not what they need. Right? What people want is for somebody to just tell them what to do.
But what they need is they need to learn how to break old habits. People need to learn how to develop new habits from the ground up, and you can’t learn new habits just by somebody telling you what to do. And just a little side note here, I’m planning on writing a book, I’ve actually kind of started this is a long process to write a book, by the way, and I’m at the baby stages right now.
But my goal with this book that I’m creating is to not just offer meal plans and tell people what to do, but to teach you how to build your own meal plan to teach you how to make good choices and why you should make those choices. That right there is going to be a game changer, I promise you, but that’s down the road.
So I’m just giving you a little preview of what’s to come later. All this is just to say that instead of just telling you what to do, a good coach should empower you to make good decisions for yourself. And to help you to be there as your guide to help you build the habits that are required to make whatever changes you’re making last for good.
Like this isn’t about, you know, just a quick fix, like these short term plans might be fine. But what do you do when you stop working with the coach, if you haven’t learned how to do this for yourself, you’re just on your own. And most people just don’t know what to do when they stop working with their coach, okay. So you should be becoming empowered, your coach should be empowering you. Right?
When the coach just tells you what to do, they have all the power, they have all the power, you need to have the power, right, you should be able to make most of these decisions for yourself. Now, of course, having a coach, a good coach, is there to guide you, and to show you the way, but also to empower you to learn what works for you and what doesn’t work for you.
Now, there’s no possible way any coach could know what’s going to work for you ahead of time, I’m just going to tell you right now, when it comes to things like nutrition, there is just no way. Every human being is different. Every human being has different metabolism, different goals, different food preferences, different likes and dislikes.
There’s different lifestyle concerns to take into consideration. There’s different cultures, different genetics, different medical histories, oh my gosh, there’s no way that one meal plan from a book is going to work for every single person, right? There’s no way that just giving everybody the same standard meal plan every week is going to work for everybody.
This is not a one size fits all situation here. There’s way too many factors involved. So the power of coaching is helping you figure out what works for you, as an individual and what doesn’t work for you. And this is one of the reasons why most people, they try some kind of diet, it doesn’t work for them.
And so they just say you know what diet doesn’t work. But in reality, one diet is not going to work for everyone. I’m just telling you, it’s not anyone who tells you that one diet is going to work for everyone is wrong, I’m just gonna tell you right now they are wrong. People get super worked up about this.
People are like they get dug in with their particular diet. Think about like, plant-based people, for whatever reason, they seem to be very worked up about their diet and telling you if they want to tell everybody that you’re stupid if you eat meat and plant-based is the only way to go. And honestly, I just have to tell you, there’s a lot of ignorance in that kind of generalization, right? The reality is, there isn’t one diet that works for everyone, there just isn’t.
So when I work with someone, it’s you and me like we are engaged in a coaching relationship. Yes, of course, I have a lot of experience and a lot of expertise in the area of diet nutrition for runners, for runners who want to lose weight and be able to keep it off like, yeah, we kind of start with a framework.
But you know, we have some basics that we sort of, kind of start with, but then throughout our coaching relationship, we pretty quickly figure out what works and what doesn’t. And here’s the important part, we constantly analyze the results. We look at a bunch of different metrics. And we see, are we making progress here or not? Yes or no? Where can we improve things?
And then we course correct, we change something. If something isn’t working, we want to change it. So it’s not just about telling you what to do and then hoping you do it. It’s a feedback system, right? We’re always looking at your results. It’s a results oriented type of coaching. And that’s something you should definitely be looking for.
If you’re looking for a coach, somebody that’s going to help you to analyze the results that you’re getting, and then make the necessary changes so that you keep moving closer to your goals. And I’ll tell you right now, I’m going to be totally honest with you. I don’t know what’s going to work for you.
Yes, I have some good ideas based on working with hundreds of runners. But not every single person is the same. Every single person I work with is different. I’ve never done the exact same thing for two people, really I never have.
So when it comes to diet and nutrition, especially when we add in the complexity of doing all of this in a way that will also support your running goals. It’s always an experiment of one. This is a n equals one situation and the one that’s you so look for a coach who will win work with you, one who will help you to make good decisions for yourself, one who will empower you to make those kinds of choices and decisions and to create the good habits and teach you how to make all of this last.
Well, after the coaching relationship is over, I tell people who want to work with me all the time, I’m like, This is not a, I don’t want to like be stringing you along as a coach forever, I want to teach you what you need to learn so that you can go and go live your life. You know, you’ve got to find somebody who understands that you are an individual, and who will treat you like an individual. Okay.
So another sign you’re working with a good coach is someone who will ask you a lot of questions, a lot of powerful questions. Here’s why this is important. Most likely, you already have the answers within you. You just need help accessing them. So believe it or not, you are right now a powerhouse of information. And you know more than you think you do. And you definitely know more about you than anyone else on the planet. Okay.
This is one of those things that I couldn’t grasp at first. I thought I had no clue what to do. And that’s why I hired a coach in the first place, right? Just tell me what to do. But the more I got into this process, the more I worked with my coach, the more I learned that I pretty much had everything I needed to know already inside me.
And then I just needed somebody to help figure it out. That really changed everything for me. And I love this now, like, I see this every week, especially in working with my business coach, because she’s always asking me these powerful questions, right? Questions that force me to go inside, to go inside myself to go inside my own brain to find the answers.
The answers aren’t out there. The answers are in here. And I’m pointing to my head. And this used to be really frustrating for me at first, right? Because I just wanted her to tell me what to do, just tell me what to do. But she wouldn’t do that, she would ask me a lot of questions and help me come up with the right answers. And now I love this process.
Because I know that by asking me the right questions, she’s helping me to access those parts of my brain that I just that I need to access to be able to solve problems. And then I’m just I haven’t developed that, like skill of being able to access those things until I started doing this on a regular basis. And now, it’s extremely powerful. I know it sounds counterintuitive, right? To work with a coach and have them help you figure it out for yourself. But it’s an amazing way to coach someone.
Because when you do it this way, you’re actually teaching someone how to become a powerful problem solver on their own. Again, this isn’t about, like just, you know, telling somebody what to do in that situation, you would always have to have that coach there with you, right? Instead, what have you learned how to become that powerful problem solver on your own? That’s amazing, right there.
The point of coaching is not to just rely on your coach forever, right? But to teach you how to think for yourself to develop the cognitive skills to know what to do in every situation. Right, and to be able to solve every problem that comes your way. So for me, I ask a lot of powerful questions. Okay.
So I’ll ask clients, they’ll tell me they, you know, did something and I’ll say like, well, why did you make that choice? You know, why do you think you chose cake for dinner last night instead of chicken? Or, you know, okay, so you had a situation? How could you have handled that situation better when your coworker put that cupcake on your desk? You know, or what was the thought that immediately preceded the action that you took, you know, that behavior where, you know, you decided I’m not going to work out today? What was the thought right before that?
Or maybe you fail? Did you binge out on some pizza last night or ice cream? Like, what did you learn about yourself from this experience? These are examples of real questions that I ask clients all the time. And when I ask them these questions, they go inside themselves to find the answers. And they come up with solutions on their own with my help, right? But instead of me just telling them what to do in each of these situations, well, here’s what you do next time.
They are figuring it out for themselves. And I’m going to tell you something right now. When you figure it out for yourself, you are way more likely to remember that and to make better choices next time. There is a big difference between somebody telling you what to do, and you making a decision for yourself on what you should do.
When you come up with the solution for yourself, you learn from it, it just sticks, right? It’s the difference between, well, Patrick told me I shouldn’t eat cake for dinner and, and I don’t eat cake for dinner because that choice is not in alignment with who I want to be. See the difference there. It’s very powerful, very powerful.
Another thing you should look for in a good coach is someone who will point out your blind spots. So a good coach should help you see things that you cannot see about yourself. These are often called your blind spots, because like a blind spot in your car, you know, where you can’t see the car next to you, or whatever. There are things about yourself that you can’t see, because you’re inside yourself.
There’s a saying, and it goes something like “You can’t see the label from inside the bottle.” So you can’t see the outside, from inside. So sometimes it takes an outsider’s perspective to show you things about yourself that you wouldn’t be able to see on your own.
For example, I see a lot of self-sabotaging behavior happen when people set out to lose weight. So they might be going along fine for a while. And maybe their weight stalls a little bit, which is totally normal. It happens all the time, right? But then they’re just like, ethic, you know, and they binge out on french fries and donuts.
And they don’t understand why they do this. And they come to me and they’re like, Patrick, I don’t understand why, why do I do this all the time? So I started asking a lot of questions. And when we get to the root of the problem, it’s usually something like, well, you know, I was getting frustrated, the weight was stalled.
And I was having a tough day at work. And I thought, well, I might as well just eat whatever I want, since this isn’t working anyway, you know, some variation of a thought like that, okay. But they don’t see what’s happening in their brain, you know, because they’re, it’s their brain.
And they’re just like, they’re just operating on sort of autopilot. It’s just doing what they’ve always done, right. But having a coach, they’re having that person that’s outside of them, to show them what their brain is doing. To show you things about yourself that you cannot see, that’s some powerful stuff right there.
There are things about yourself that you can’t see, because they’ve just been like, things you’ve been doing your whole life, automatic behaviors and habits and they just seem like normal to you. But to an outsider, they might see like, oh, well, there’s your problem right there. You don’t see it, because it’s just part of who you are. And just something you’ve been doing forever, right.
But having this outsider’s perspective, like somebody’s pointing out these blind spots that you have, it’s crucial, it’s crucial. This is why it’s hard to have somebody that’s like really close to you, as your coach, you know, they need to be a bit more removed. So people who you’re too close with, like a spouse, or a good friend or family member, they don’t have that third party perspective, right, they’re also going to have trouble telling you things that you actually need to hear, they won’t be able to dole out the tough love the way they need to maybe.
And so somebody that’s like too close to you won’t be able to do that. Somebody that’s too close to you really just can’t be a good coach for you. Right, then it’s kind of damaging to the relationship if you’ve ever worked with somebody in that capacity, that’s a spouse or something like that, not usually a good situation. Okay.
The other thing about working with a coach versus a friend or family member is the coach has the training, the background, the professionalism, the experience necessary to help you get the results that you want. Friends and family members really don’t have that. They don’t have what it takes, unless they’re trained as a coach, but even then, again, they’re too close to you, right? So anyway, just make sure that you have somebody that can point out those blind spots. Okay.
And then there’s a few other qualities to look for in a coach that I think are very important. One is accountability. So this is one of the most important aspects of coaching in general, like you are way more likely to do what you said you’re going to do when you have somebody holding you accountable. You have to have somebody holding you accountable.
People tell me all the time, you know, I was going to eat this junk food, but I knew I was going to have to talk to you later. So I decided not to do it. They just know that they’d rather stay on their plan, then have to tell me, they went off their plan. Even though I don’t yell at anybody, like I don’t judge anybody. But having somebody that’s there to hold you accountable is key crucial insight, one of the most important aspects of coaching for sure, okay?
Another good quality to look for is encouragement. So, being a cheerleader, it’s not really the main job of a coach. A coach’s job is to help you get results. But having somebody there to encourage you, and support you, and believe in you, it’s so helpful, it really is so helpful. You want somebody who can encourage you to do hard things, to do those hard things that you know you need to do, in order to get the results that you want.
You need someone in your corner who believes in you fiercely, who can help you to start believing in yourself, right? In case that’s a problem. In case you don’t believe in yourself, you need somebody that’s there that believes in you. And that can help you build that belief that you need for yourself, right.
And then of course, another quality is look for his knowledge, like it goes without saying, but you need someone with the knowledge with the experience with the expertise to be able to help you achieve your specific goals. And a lot of coaches that I know are very general, they’re like generalists, right?
They have a little bit of knowledge over a wide variety of topics. You want a coach who specializes in helping someone like you to reach your specific goals, right? So for example, when I talk about me being the weight loss coach for runners, I say it like that for a reason. It’s because I specialize in being the weight loss coach for runners.
I don’t know of anybody else who really specializes in this particular area of coaching. As far as I know, I’m the only weight loss coach for runners. Now, there might be others. But no one does it quite like I do, I know that for sure. Okay.
But that’s just an example, like, find a coach who specializes in helping somebody like you reach your specific goals, right, because you want to find the expert in your area, you know, whatever it is that you’re looking for, okay.
And again, it doesn’t have to be me, I want you to understand how powerful coaching can be, I want you to understand that, you know, you just need to have this criteria for deciding if coaching is a good fit for you or not, it’s not for everyone. Some people don’t want that accountability. They want to just do it on their own. And that’s fine. And that used to be me, my mantra was always ‘I will figure it out myself’.
And when that strategy stopped working for me, and I decided to reach out and get help and get a coach, it really changed everything. For me, it’s absolutely been one of the most powerful things I’ve ever done for myself, okay. So listen, if you’re a runner, and you’d like to get the weight problem solved for good, and you want a coach to help get you there, I want to encourage you to find someone to help you, right?
And if you want to work with me, I would absolutely love that. And I will invite you to apply for coaching, right? Fill out an application, you and I will get on a short Zoom call. We’ll talk about your goals and we’ll see if coaching is a good fit for you. Okay, I would love to be your guide.
I would love to help you lose the weight and show you how to do it without all the struggle and frustration. So if you’re ready for some realistic lifestyle changes, mindset shifts, and sustainable results. Then just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. And let’s get started. Love you all keep on Running Lean. Talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
Today I have a bit of a different episode for you. I’m going to be asking you a lot of questions about your diet, your weight, your current health, your running performance, and a few other …
Continue Reading about 121. Is It Time to Change Your Diet? →
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 121 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, is it time to change your diet? So today I have a bit of a different episode for you. I’m going to be asking you some questions about your diet, your weight, your current health, your running performance, and a few other things.
The reason for this is that I want you to consider how your current diet, whatever you’re doing today, might be affecting you in a bunch of different areas of your life. Most people don’t pay attention to their diet unless they find themselves suddenly overweight, or their doctor wants to put them on some kind of medication.
And of course, I’m joking because it’s never suddenly, “I’m overweight!” It’s a slow, gradual process, right? We just don’t notice it until it’s like I can’t put my pants on anymore. The point is, this episode is all about you and your diet. So I want you to be thinking about your diet and your current state of health and fitness as I talk about diet here today.
And by the end of this episode, I want you to have a clear understanding of the effects of food, the effects of your diet on your health, and your sports performance. And I want to help you decide whether or not it’s time to finally change your diet. And listen, I know what it’s like to try to change your diet.
I know how hard it can be. I’ve done this many, many times in the past, it was never easy. For me, it was always some sort of a struggle. And the only time it really wasn’t the only time it finally worked permanently, was when I reached out and I got some help.
I got a coach to help me figure out what I should do. What was going to work for me, not based on some fad diet. But putting together a custom plan that I felt good about that I sort of created myself and man it finally worked.
I lost 40 pounds after making this change, running became easier. I’ve never felt so good. I’ve never had so much energy. And now this is what I do. I help runners like you lose the weight that you’ve been struggling with. For years, maybe I help runners to get leaner and stronger and to become running bad asses.
So if you’re a runner, and you’d like to get that weight problem solved for good, I want to invite you to apply for coaching with me. You’ll fill out a short application, schedule a Zoom call with me, we’ll jump on a call, we’ll talk about your goals. And we’ll see how coaching can help you get there.
I would love to help you lose weight, and do it without all the stupid struggling and frustration. I know what that’s like, there’s a better way. If you’re ready for some realistic lifestyle changes, mindset shifts and sustainable results, then you’re ready for coaching, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply to get started.
Alright, so today, I want to talk about diet and whether or not it’s time for you to make a change to your diet. So specifically, we’re going to be talking about whether or not your current diet is working for you. And listen, people get pretty emotional when talking about diet, especially when anyone suggests that maybe you should change your diet, I’m not going to make that decision for you.
I want you to just think about this for yourself and make that decision for yourself. Because your diet is either, it’s either working for you or it’s not. And sometimes we don’t understand the effects that our diet is actually having on our health, on our athletic performance on our general mood, you know, and we naturally put up a lot of resistance when anyone suggest that we change our diet, or that maybe somebody suggests that diet could be the cause of a lot of the health issues that you’re experiencing.
And I totally get this. And there’s a lot of information out there. A lot of people that are pushing an agenda on you and I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to push an agenda on you. I want to help you to make a good decision and this is what I do with my coaching.
This is why the way that I do coaching is a little bit different from other coaches, I don’t just tell you what to do, we come up with a solution together, something that you feel good about. Because only you know what kinds of foods you like and don’t like. Only you know what’s going to be sustainable for you.
And when we can put together a plan that you feel good about, that you are in alignment with, this is the game changer here. Okay, and, and this was what was the game changer for me too, when I finally decided to change my diet for good and it started to work and I started to lose the weight and I became fat-adapted, and I understood how certain foods were affecting me.
And I put that together myself, I kind of put that plan together myself, obviously with a lot of guidance with a lot of help from experts and things like that. But I just want you to understand that I just want you to think about whether or not your current diet is working for you. Okay.
Now, before I dive into this, I want to also explain how I’m using the word diet today because I tend to not use this word a lot. Just because people freak out a little bit when they hear diet. I’m not saying diet in the sense of like, you need to go on a diet, or you need to really limit how much food you’re eating.
You know, I mean diet in the sense of a nutrition regimen, a food plan died in the sense of the food that you habitually eat, not like vegetarian or carnivore or vegan or keto or South Beach diet or anything like that. I just mean like, the foods that you eat, because we’re all different. You know, we all eat differently, I can’t really put what I eat, I really can’t put it into a category, like the ones I just mentioned, it’s just different. It’s just what feels good for me and what works for me, which is different from what’s going to work for you.
But people hear the word diet, and they immediately start thinking about cutting calories, deprivation, struggle, suffering, falling off the wagon, it brings up all these negative connotations, right? So today, I just want to use the word diet freely to mean the foods that you eat on a regular basis, right? It’s not good, it’s not bad. I don’t want to be polarizing here. And I’m not talking about the latest fad diet or anything like that, just the foods you typically eat. That’s the way I’m using diet here today. Cool.
And then lastly, I want to help you to understand how profoundly your diet is affecting you, and your running, and your overall health and your weight and whether or not you can lose the weight. And I want to help you decide if changing your diet is right for you or not.
So you might be doing fine. You might be listening to this and like you’re super healthy, you’re at your natural weight, you feel amazing, you have tons of energy, all this stuff, there’s probably not a real big need to change anything.
But I’m guessing that there are a lot of people listening to this right now. And there’s some areas in your life or some areas of your health and fitness that you’d like to improve. And your diet is one of the most powerful drivers of your health, good health or bad health, and it depends on the diet.
So by the end of this episode, I want you to have a clear understanding of how your diet is affecting things like your energy levels, your mood, your sleep quality, running performance, body composition, and really your overall health and happiness.
And then I want you to have what it takes to be able to make an informed decision as to whether or not it’s time for you to change your diet. Cool. Okay, so let’s look at a few of these indicators here.
So again, think about your current state of health and your current diet. When I go through some of these questions like first and foremost, how is your weight? Think about your weight. This is always the number one thing people look at when they consider changing their diet. Am I overweight? Do I need to lose weight?
So one of the ways that people determine whether or not they need to lose weight is they look at something like BMI, body mass index. And they look at this as the one indicator of whether or not they’re overweight. And you see these charts in doctors offices and things like that.
The problem with BMI, I don’t like the BMI to be honest with you because it’s only taking two data points. It’s taking your height and your weight and then making an assessment based on that. BMI is not a very accurate indicator of your state of health and fitness.
And it’s definitely not accurate if you’re pretty fit. So BMI can be very off; it can be very inaccurate, especially if you’re muscular. So for example, my son and I are the same height. We’re both 5’11. But he probably weighs 25-30 pounds more than me. And so if you look at the BMI chart, he’s borderline obese, he’s over, he’s considered overweight on the BMI chart, he’d be borderline obese.
But I have to tell you, he’s nothing but huge. He’s a bodybuilder, you know, he’s muscular. He’s put on a lot of weight in the form of muscle. But the BMI which is telling that he’s overweight, okay. So that’s a good example of where BMI can be wrong.
Right now, I’m in a place where I’m trying to gain weight. So I’m starting to dip into that overweight range of BMI. And I’m not overweight, okay, I’m gaining muscle, I’m doing some pretty intense gym workouts, I’m really focusing on building muscle this year.
So anyway, BMI, not a super good indicator of whether you are overweight or not. Okay, there is a better way to determine your body composition. When we talk about weight, I’m really talking about fat weight, okay, there’s a certain amount of fat we all need to have on our bodies. And fat is not wrong or bad.
Like, people talk about zero body fat, you would die. If you had zero body fat. The minimum body fat requirements to sustain human life for men, I think is 3%. For women is 12%. Women need more body fat to support their, you know, female reproductive systems and things like that.
So we don’t aim, we’re not aiming for a 0% body fat ever, right? Just as to sustain life, women need 12%. So maybe 20-25% body fat is where you want to be. If you’re a female, or maybe you know, 18-16% as a male. It’s different for everybody, really.
But you can use something like the US Navy body fat calculator, you can find this online. So you take some body girth measurements along with height, weight, and age, to determine your body composition. So this is a better indicator of whether or not you want to lose some of the fat weight. Okay.
And the goal when I tell people that, you know, we talked about weight loss, and I asked people like, how much weight do you want to lose? Where do you want your body composition to be? And sometimes there’s just like, I’ve never thought about that before, I just want the scale to go down.
I’m like, well, let’s say we start gaining muscle, you’re losing some of the fat weight, but you’re gaining muscle, the scale is not going to go down, it’s going to kind of stay the same. Are you okay with that?
And so then I’ve got to like, get them to take some other measurements, and we’ve got to do some other type of measuring so that we can see that we are improving our body composition, okay. And they have scales that can do something like this, you know, those smart scales that use an electrical impedance, so they send a little bit of electric current up through your body and it you know, has to do with it tries to determine your muscle weight versus fat weight.
And so it’s trying to make a determination based on how fast the electrical current goes through your body of whether or not your competition is mostly fat, or muscle or whatever. They did a study about five years ago, and consumer reports on these different scales.
And they compare them to a bod pod, so bod pod is an air displacement measuring device, which is very accurate. So you have to go somewhere and you have to sit in this thing that looks like an egg. And they shut you in there. And it’s very, very precise.
Okay, it measures volume, and it can definitely measure, you know, the difference between your fat and muscle weight. But they, they took that as the base baseline measurement, and then they compared these scales, and the scales were off by like, a lot, you know, 20 to 30% difference, this is huge, right?
There’s a huge difference between what is considered to be, you know, accurate. So, I don’t really suggest these scales are very accurate, you know, can they help you to kind of determine if you’re losing some fat weight and gaining some muscle weight, probably, but just know that they’re not very accurate, okay.
Here’s what I want you to do instead, instead of worrying about all these measurements and things like that, some are good, some not so good. Go by how you feel. Use your best judgment. You know your body better than anyone else. Ask yourself some questions.
Do you feel like you’re overweight? Would you feel better if you lost weight? Do you feel pudgy? Or doughy or fluffy or bloated? This was me. I always felt doughy like when I started to feel doughy, like the Pillsbury Doughboy, I was like, I don’t want to feel like that. And if this is how you feel every day, then you can decide for yourself if you want to lose weight or not.
But it’s not up to a number. It’s not up to the government, it’s not up to some standard that you see on a chart somewhere. Just determine this for yourself. How do you feel about yourself? How are your clothes fitting? Are they tight? You know, have you had to go up a size or two?
And a few years back, when I started gaining weight again, my clothes were getting a little snugger. And I refused to buy new clothes. I was like, eventually, I’m just going to lose this weight. But you know, for now, I’m not buying new clothes, there’s no way I was going to go up a size in pants or shirts or anything like that.
So the clothes kept getting tighter. And I kept feeling less confident. I was feeling more self conscious, I would put on the shirts like a button up shirt, and the buttons would be sort of like pulling apart at the around the belly section. This is not a good look. All right. And it was very embarrassing for me.
And so I would like just choose whatever the loosest fitting clothes I had, and not a lot. All the tight fitting clothes, I had just ended up in the back of the drawer or the back of the closet, whatever. And then I remember I had some shorts in the summertime and I had some shorts that used to fit perfectly and I loved the shorts, but I couldn’t even button them anymore.
Could not even get them buttoned. And that was part of my wake up call was like, I’ve got to do something about this because I’m not going to buy new clothes. I’m not going to go up sizes. Alright, just so you know those shorts now I wear them today. And they’re like loose on me. Like I almost could go a size down. I’m not going to do that though.
But listen, I want you to decide for yourself, do you want to feel better about yourself? Do you want to feel better in your body with losing some weight? Maybe some fat weight and gaining some muscle help you to feel better about yourself. Now I always encourage people to work on the way they feel about themselves before they decide to go on a weight loss journey.
Like you have to like, kind of love yourself through this whole process. You can’t just hate yourself and expect to love yourself when you lose the weight. No, it doesn’t work that way. But no one else can decide whether or not you need to lose weight. It’s not up to the scale or to chart or anything else like that.
And it’s not up to other people in your life, either. Because sometimes I work with people who come to me and they’re like, yeah, I really want to lose like 10 pounds. But you know, my husband tells me I look fine, and I don’t need to lose weight, or my mom tells me I shouldn’t lose any more weight.
And I just want to like encourage you to just decide what you want to do. If you want to lose five or 10 pounds, you know, maybe you want to improve your running time. You want to run a faster marathon and losing 10 or 15 pounds is gonna really help you to get there, then absolutely, that should be something that you decide for yourself.
It’s not up to other people, other people just want us to feel good about ourselves, they want us to be happy. And if they see you, you know saying like, oh, I need to lose some weight, they might think you’re unhappy. And it’s not about that. It’s about becoming our best selves. It’s about becoming badass, right?
It’s not about you know, not feeling good about ourselves. Okay, so going back to the question, how’s your weight? How do you feel about yourself? How do you feel about your weight? If you want to lose weight, if you feel like you’re overweight, diet is going to be the number one driver of this for you. We want to change your body composition, then we’re going to change your diet.
Okay. The next indicator of whether or not it might be time to change your diet is your relationship with food. Like if you struggle with food choices, if you struggle with making good choices and staying on track with a pretty healthy diet, then it might be time to give that diet an overhaul. You know if you find it very difficult to avoid junk food, sugar in particular, then it might be time to change your diet.
Listen, sugar jacks you up. It’s more like a drug than a food. There’s no real positive nutritional benefits from eating sugar. There aren’t. There’s a lot of negative consequences though. You know, sugar causes all kinds of metabolic issues like higher blood pressure, inflammation, gain, weight gain, diabetes, fatty liver disease, increased risk for heart attack and stroke.
Too much sugar in the diet is the number one cause of metabolic diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, some cancers, Alzheimer’s and all these things that I just mentioned. And what it really does is it puts your body into this state of hyperinsulinemia with too much insulin in your blood, or insulin resistance, that means your body just can’t regulate insulin properly, and so it just keeps pumping out more and more and more insulin.
Insulin drives fat into fat cells. Insulin drives your body into fat storage mode. So when insulin is high all the time, you’re just storing fat all the time. You can’t burn the fat. And then in researching this podcast today, I found some other negative side effects of too much sugar in the diet.
And some of these things I did not realize first is dental health. Now of course, we all know that eating too much sugar can cause cavities, right? You know, bacteria in your mouth feed on sugar. And they release these acid byproducts which cause tooth decay, right and cavities. Think we all know that one.
But sugar also cause like an increase of kidney disease risk. Having consistently high blood sugar can damage the delicate blood vessels in your kidneys. And that can lead to an increased risk of kidney disease. Too much sugar can cause gout. Gout is an inflammatory condition characterized by pain in the joints, especially in the toes, like big toes.
I had gout some time ago, years and years ago, because I was eating a real crap diet. And I will tell you it is one of the most painful things you can experience. There was almost nothing I’ve ever experienced that was as painful as gout. I couldn’t even couldn’t even walk, couldn’t put shoes on, couldn’t have the sheets touching my feet. I had to sleep with my feet like not touching the sheets. Not good.
But sugar raises the uric acid levels in the blood, which helps make gout worse, it makes it really bad. And then another thing that I did not know is that high sugar in the diet can lead to cognitive decline, impaired memory and increased risk of dementia. Right. So why are we eating sugar?
Listen in moderation. Yes, very, very limited amounts, you know, whatever. Okay, but listen, sugar is not healthy, this is not good for you. There’s only negative consequences to eating sugar, it’s more like a drug than it is a food. It causes harm at certain levels like a drug does, it’s very difficult to quit eating sugar.
And if you struggle with giving up sugar, this is an indicator that something may have to change in your diet. Okay, if you find yourself craving sugar all the time, or just thinking about giving it up kind of sends you into like a panic mode, then it might be time to get off the sugar and change your relationship with food or change your food choices and change your diet. Okay.
Another indicator that it might be time to change your diet is your eating habits in general, like are you using food as an emotional management tool, because if you are, we got to change something here. Okay. This is about changing your thoughts and feelings, but it’s also about changing what you’re eating.
Because if you’re binging on junk food, if you’re using this hyper palatable food, you know, most processed foods most junk food is considered what they call hyper palatable, it’s been engineered to be incredibly delicious, and give you like a dopamine hit and, and make you feel good and releases all these chemicals that make you feel amazing. Again, like a drug, right?
And so if you’re using food as an emotional management tool, maybe it’s time to change your diet. Right? If you’re eating because you’re stressed, you’re bored, you’re anxious, you’re frustrated, you’re overwhelmed, angry, lonely, whatever. These are reasons to consider making a change to your diet.
Okay, you have to be able to handle your emotions and your emotional experiences in this life. Like a mature, evolved adult human being not like a toddler. The toddler reaction to our emotions is when we just want them to go away right away. I don’t want to feel this way. Give me some food to make me feel better. Right?
That’s what we do. And I’m kind of like saying it funnily. But listen, funnily is a word. I don’t even know if that’s a word. I’m saying it in a funny way. But we got to deal with our emotions like mature evolved adults, we have to actually be able to just sit with our emotions and experience these emotions without having to eat over them when we’re eating just to feel better.
This is a problem. These are not good eating habits, okay? And listen, ending emotional eating, this is not an easy thing to do. And I get it. This is a complicated topic. And we actually spent a whole month last month on this topic in the coaching project.
And people got a lot out of it, to be honest with you, we really dug deep into emotional eating and how to stop doing it and how to deal with our emotions instead, it was pretty powerful stuff. But if you regularly find yourself eating, not because you’re hungry, but because like you just want to feel better, maybe it’s time to change your diet, okay?
Another indicator that it might be time to change your diet, are you hungry all the time, because you shouldn’t be. If you’re hungry all the time, there’s something wrong. Humans evolved over, you know, millennia, I would say, lots of millennia, hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years, we’ve evolved to eat a couple of times a day, at most, and then sometimes we would go for days without food altogether.
So think about our human ancestors, we were amazing, persistent hunters. That’s why we’re such good runners, because we would, you know, call an animal from the herd, and then run it down. And we could just keep up with this animal, they would, they would die of exhaustion, but we can sweat really well.
We maintain our body temperature. And we’re really good at running we have big butts, which help us to balance when we’re running. And, you know, we are really good at long distance running. Right? That’s why I love endurance events, especially ultra running, where you’re running through the woods for extended periods of time, because this most typically, most directly mimics how we’ve evolved as humans, it’s like built into our DNA, this persistent hunting and this running.
But we would run down animals, this would take days sometimes. And we wouldn’t have food during that time. And during that time, if not having food was a problem, we would you know, crash and burn and die along with the animals. Right. But no, that’s not what we did, we could maintain.
Our brains actually got more focused, we became more cognitively aware of what was going on in our surroundings. And we had plenty of energy to just keep going. And if we had to eat every couple of hours, if this is the way we’ve evolved as humans, this wouldn’t have worked at all right?
This is just not normal, our digestive systems, our pancreas and things like that are designed to work sporadically to work intermittently, not all the time. So if you can’t go for a couple of hours without food, this means that your body is not working the way it’s supposed to. Okay, it means your hunger signals are messed up, your hormones are messed up.
And what causes that is the wrong kind of diet. If you’re eating the kind of diet where you know, you’re hungry all the time, this is a problem. This is not right, you need to change your diet. Speaking of energy, how are your energy levels, because if you’re crashing and burning every afternoon, then this is a problem. This means your diet needs to be changed, right?
You want to have sustainable energy, that’s pretty consistent all day long. We don’t want to be having these spikes of energy, oh my gosh, I feel amazing. And then crashes where you just feel like falling asleep at your desk at three o’clock in the afternoon, right? The wrong kind of diet will cause these spikes in your blood sugar.
And when we have these massive spikes in our blood sugar, when we come down from that, we actually kind of dropped below baseline. So we want to stay near that baseline as closely as possible. But when you spike really high, you crash really low. And that’s where people say, oh, my blood sugar is low, I need to eat some sugar, whatever, you know, I need an energy drink in the afternoon.
So this is a problem. Again, this is not normal. We should have pretty pretty steady energy all day long, right? But a diet high in sugar, high in refined carbohydrates, high in highly processed foods is typically the cause of these energy spikes and crashes. All right. And as a runner, you don’t want this. You want steady energy being delivered to your brain into your muscles like all day, especially for running especially for your athletic performance.
Speaking of which, how is your running? How is your endurance? Do you find yourself hitting the wall during long runs? Are you just getting gassed? Are you running out of energy at some point? Do you have to like wash down a bunch of gels and goos and stuff just to like, get out there and do a 10 mile run or something?
So when we talk about, you know, running out of energy, this is like hitting the wall or bonking when you’re running, right? And if this is you, if you find yourself consistently just running out of energy, then we need to look at your diet, it could be, it could be a big problem, okay?
So, running out of energy hitting the wall is a pretty common thing, especially with the marathon runners, right. And for me, I used to hit the wall between mile like 18 and 20, pretty consistently. And this is where most runners that I talked to tell me that they typically would hit the wall.
This is when you run out of glycogen in your muscles, and you have no alternative energy source. So you’re not fat-adapted, you’re not burning fat efficiently. And you’re you have no more fuel, and you just crash and burn, boom, you’re done. You just have to stop and walk. And then it’s kind of a slog fest, those last five, six miles on a marathon, right?
So you know, for me, one of the big reasons I got into sports nutrition, and especially sports nutrition with this, you know, kind of leaning towards the fat-adaptation side of things is that I wanted to figure out how to become a fat adapted runner, I wanted to figure out how to stop the bonking, how to stop hitting the wall at mile 18 or 20, I wanted to have unlimited, you know, fuel for running.
And when you become a fat-adapted runner, you virtually become bulletproof. You have this endless supply of fuel onboard in the way of your own stored body fat. And just to prove this, I’ve heard other people that have done endurance events without any calories at all. And I wanted to see, you know, can I even do this? Is this even feasible? You know, is this possible?
And then last year, once I got fat-adapted, I ran two marathons. And then the year before I did a 50k, and I did all these events on zero calories, I didn’t eat breakfast beforehand, I didn’t take in any calories during the event. And I had plenty of energy to complete these distances.
So you can absolutely do it once you’re fat adapted, you can absolutely do these long distance events without having a bunch of fuel or any fuel really, except for the fuel that you’re producing, using your own body fat. Now, is this optimal for everybody? Maybe not, I just wanted you to understand that when you become fat-adapted, you no longer need massive amounts of fuel, you can get away with not very much, right?
I actually teach my clients how to use fuel strategically during races to enhance running performance, you can use some types of fuel to keep the fat burning going, but also take advantage of you know, the carbohydrate sources or, you know, other sources of fuel to give your muscles more glycogen, so that you can like, get a little bit faster, maybe have that top gear, okay.
Speaking of speed, how is your running speed? This could be an indication that you need to switch up your diet, you know, if you find yourself just stuck at the same speed, and you just can’t make any improvements, your diet is going to help with this. Okay, your diet could be hindering your speed and your performance.
And of course, you know, when it comes to running faster, you’ve got to work on strength training, you’ve got to build stronger muscles. You want to become a more powerful runner. And you also have to do speed work, right? These are things you need to do. But diet plays a huge part in this too. Right? The wrong diet can kill your speed.
If you’re eating a bunch of junk food, processed food, a bunch of weird ingredients, you’re not giving your body, you’re not giving your muscles the nutrition that it actually needs to perform at its best. And you’re just doing yourself a disservice you’re not going to get faster, it’s going to be very difficult to get faster. Put it that way.
So look at your running speed and if you’re trying to, you know PR a marathon PR a 5k or 10k Let’s look at the diet it could be having a negative impact on your running speed. Okay. And then how are you recovering from running? Most runners who eat the Standard American Diet who eat a lot of sugar, a lot of processed foods, a lot of refined carbohydrates and refined grains experience chronic inflammation.
This means that recovering from hard workouts takes a lot longer, which will actually decrease your running performance overall. And when we get fat adapted when we change the diet, the runners that I work with telling me that they have, they are recovering faster than ever, they’ve never experienced this kind of like, they’ll go and run a 20 miler, and the next day, they feel amazing.
They no longer feel all the inflammation and the bloating. And even their doctors report the lower levels of the inflammatory marker, I can’t remember what it’s called off the top of my head here. But when you get your blood work done, there’s that inflammatory marker.
And they can see that that’s greatly lowered because of diet. So diet can have a huge impact on your recovery. And when you recover faster, and your body’s not in a state of chronic inflammation, you can become a stronger runner, you can improve your running performance, you can actually get faster too.
A couple more things. What about sleeping, how is your sleep? Sleep is often overlooked. But this is an important part of your training, it should be. It is crucial to get a good night’s sleep, your body has to use that time to, to rebuild to recover, and so that you can go out there and get after it the next day. And if you’re not getting the right amount of sleep, if your sleep is horrible, and you wake up not feeling good, feeling tired of feeling exhausted when you wake up in the morning, this is a problem, this is going to put your body in this state of chronic stress.
Chronic stress will increase your cortisol levels, which is the stress hormone, your body will produce more glucose in response to that stress hormone, which increases insulin levels, which keeps your body in that fat storage mode. Chronic stress leads to chronically storing body fat, and it makes it very difficult to improve your body composition.
If you’re super stressed out, we want to practice like acute stress in our body. So we want to run hard. Sometimes we want to lift weights hard, sometimes that’s acute stress, it’s short, short term, your body can adapt to that kind of stress.
There’s an adaptive response that happens when we experience that kind of stress, chronic stress being stressed all the time, which what is what happens when you don’t get a good night’s sleep every night, you can be just chronically stressed out, this is going to just keep it keep you from losing weight, it’s going to keep you from running at your best, it’s going to just make it very hard for you to recover.
So you gotta get a good night’s sleep. diet plays a huge role in this diet plays a huge role in your sleep. If you’re not, if you’re not eating the right diet, if you’re eating a bunch of junk food and eating a bunch of sugar, I’m going to tell you right now your sleep is going to be messed up.
People that I work with report that they’re sleeping has never been better, once they get off of that sugar kind of roller coaster. And then the last thing I want you to consider is your ability to focus and concentrate. One of the best things about being fat adapted for me, is the clear headedness that I experience, I can think more clearly, I concentrate more easily. And I can stay focused all day long.
The wrong diet doesn’t give your brain the kinds of fuel that it needs to function properly, your brain actually thrives on fat as a fuel source. So if your diet isn’t promoting fat burning, then you’re probably experiencing, you know, brain fog. And it’s hard to know that you’re experiencing brain fog when you’re in it. It just seems like this is the way things are.
But I’m telling you right now, when you get off of that sugar roller coaster, when you change your diet, you start eating real food, you start burning fat more efficiently. All of a sudden, it seems like the world comes into clearer focus, and you can concentrate and you can think more clearly.
And it’s like the fog has been lifted. It’s amazing. This is like one of my favorite parts about eating this way is that I just feel like my brain works the way it’s supposed to. Right. So all these things we just talked about are all indicators that your diet is either working for you or it’s not, you know, and if you’re finding yourself deciding that, yeah, you know, it’s time for me to change my diet. I want to encourage you to do something about it. Don’t just think about it. Don’t just listen to this and go okay, good stuff.
Let’s move on to the next one or whatever. I want you to do something, try something, take a break from sugar. Start eating real food, you know, food that still looks like food, right? Get fat-adapted as a runner. It takes a little bit of time to do that. It’s not for everyone. It’s a little bit of an uncomfortable process to go through. But once you get there It’s amazing.
And I’m going to tell you right now, you’ll never want to go back to doing what you’ve been doing in the past, right? Maybe eliminate processed food, that’s a good place for a lot of people to start. Anything that comes in a package, just stay away from it. Stop it with all the ingredients, right?
Most of these processed foods are not designed for your health, but they’re just they’re designed to taste amazing and to sell you more food really. They keep you hungry. They keep you craving foods so that you’ll buy more of their crappy processed packaged foods, right? The food companies are making a lot of money, but we pay the price with our health right?
And then consider getting some help. If you’re looking for some help with all of this. If you want some help and guidance, consider joining us in the Running Lean coaching project because you’ll learn exactly what to do and how to do it. You learn how to get fat-adapted the right way.
You’ll get support from the group and from me as your coach, you’ll get encouragement to keep going accountability to help you stay on track. And you’ll just get to your goals faster when you have the expert guidance helping you get there. Okay, so if you’re interested, love to have you just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply, and we can get you started on your journey to becoming a badass today. Cool. Okay, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
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