Sugar

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 138 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, is alcohol really working for you? Have you ever considered how alcohol might be negatively affecting you? Do you know how alcohol affects your running performance? Or your ability to maintain or lose weight? Have you ever considered taking a break from drinking? Or does the mere idea of quitting kind of send you into panic mode?

So today, I want to pose this question. Is alcohol really working for you? Or are you just acting like it is? It’s a legit question. And it’s a question that I really honestly want you to consider while you’re listening to this episode today. Because drinking alcohol has been normalized, and even glorified for centuries. But is it really doing you any good at all? Is alcohol all it’s cracked up to be?

In this episode, I’m going to tackle the big question of whether or not alcohol is actually working for you. Or maybe it’s working against you. And just so you know, this is another one of those tough love episodes. So you might want to strap in, but I know you can totally handle it. So I just got back from a run. And I feel amazing.

And I used to never think that I could be a runner. Because back in the day, I drank a lot. I smoked cigarettes, I ate garbage food, I never exercised, I was fat, and out of shape, and poisoning myself daily. And then one day I woke up, I woke up and I was hung over again. And I did something that I had never even considered doing before. And that is: I asked for help.

I knew for many, many years that I had to quit drinking, but it seemed way too hard for me to do on my own, it seemed impossible. I tried it kinda sorta here and there. But, you know, doing it on my own just seemed like just too big of an endeavor and seemed too impossible for me.

But asking for help, all of a sudden, it was like this light bulb moment that I had where I was like, You know what, I can get some help. And I bet I can do this if I get some help. So asking for help, for help seemed for the first time doable like quitting drinking seemed doable. And of course, I was ready to change at that moment. And I was finally willing to do something about it, I was willing to ask for help.

And what that looked like was, you know, I went to therapy, I did some 12 step work, I had several mentors along the way to becoming a sober person. But getting help was really the number one key ingredient in the recipe that was my getting sober my sobriety.

And it was the same when I gave up eating junk food, you know, I got someone to help me through that. And it was the first time I ever invested in myself in this way. It was also by far the best thing I’ve ever done for myself, not just because it helped me to become the healthy, happy fit person I am today.

Because it also led me down this path of helping other runners like you to quit eating garbage and just start becoming the best version of yourself. So if you’re ready to change if you’re ready to maybe quit drinking or quit eating junk food, too.

If you’re also willing to change and willing to ask for help willing to accept help, then you should really consider coaching. And coaching with me looks a little bit different than the way other people do this. There’s several different components to how I do my coaching program. So there’s one on one coaching with me, where you get to work with me personally to help you figure out a plan for you help you to stay on track.

On that plan, we keep course correcting as needed. We do group coaching, this is a very powerful component of the coaching project, where you get the support of other people that are going through the same thing you’re going through, we share wins, we celebrate progress, we support each other, we encourage and inspire one another.

I have a huge library of training materials you’ll have access to that you can kind of go through at your own pace. And then in between group coaching calls, and one on one coaching calls, you have access to me via messaging so that, you know you have this 24/7 lifeline to me, basically.

So I’m with you all the time. You can reach out, you can ask questions, you can get help, you can get support, you can get some accountability at any time. I also have a private podcast channel that is different from the podcast channel you’re listening to right now. And this is where I record all my group coaching calls.

So there’s a backlog of a year and a half of trainings and things like that, that you have access to that you can listen to while you’re out running. So there’s all these different components of my coaching program. And I call this an immersive coaching program because you’re immersed in this world of people and information and knowledge and support and encouragement and motivation and inspiration and accountability to help you stay on track to help you achieve your goals to help you become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself.

So if this is something that interests you, just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on work with me. You have to apply for coaching. We’ll have a short conversation, and we’ll see if this is a good fit for you. Cool, I would love to have you in the Running Lean coaching project. Just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on work with me. And I’ll see you soon.

Okay, so let’s talk about whether or not alcohol is really working for you. The first thing I want to kind of go over is like what is alcohol actually? You know, we think of alcohol as just being like cool craft IPAs and rose and you know, white claw and all these things. But what is alcohol? What is the active ingredient in alcohol?

So, alcohol, the active ingredient is ethanol. It’s also called ethyl alcohol, grain alcohol drinking alcohol. And it’s an organic chemical compound. Ethanol is a volatile, flammable, colorless liquid with a wine-like odor and a pungent taste. It is a psychoactive drug. It’s a recreational drug, and the active ingredient in alcoholic drinks.

I want to make this very, very clear that this is a psychoactive recreational drug that we are talking about here. Okay. Ethanol is naturally produced by the fermentation of sugars by yeast or via petrochemical processes such as ethylene hydration. I don’t even know what that means.

It has medical applications as an antiseptic, and a disinfectant, because it kills organisms by denaturing their proteins. It’s used as a chemical solvent. It’s used as a fuel source. It is a central nervous system depressant. And ethanol is one of the most commonly consumed psychoactive drugs.

Now, doesn’t that sound amazing? Doesn’t that one want to make you go out and have a few cocktails with friends? Ethanol is poisonous and toxic. It’s used as a fuel. They literally use it in cars as fuel.

And they use it to kill organisms. So anything that comes in contact with it really kills and is poisonous. So just know that what we’re talking about here is a pretty serious poison. All right. Now, of course the dosage does matter.

But I want you to consider something I want you to consider whether or not you would drink a little bit of rat poison. Now, what if rat poison had become, you know, socially acceptable, or something like heroin? You know, what about just using a little bit of heroin?

You know, of course the dosage matters, but what if you just did a little bit? You know, so it sounds crazy that I would make that comparison. But isn’t that crazy? I don’t think so. Here’s the thing, when you drink alcohol, it affects you negatively. And I’m going to go through some of the reasons why you may want to abstain from drinking alcohol, because there’s a lot of negative effects of drinking alcohol, okay?

Just so you know, though, that when you drink, even one to two drinks a week, it takes three to four days to fully remove that alcohol from your system. So if you’re drinking just once or twice a week, you’re never fully removing alcohol from your body, that alcohol is always in your system. And it’s going to affect you negatively, daily. All right.

So even drinking once or twice a week, if you think oh, you know, it’s fine. But you’re actually just never going to fully metabolize and process and remove that alcohol from your system. Okay. So, here are some things to consider, some negative effects of drinking alcohol that you may want to consider.

So the first one is that it disrupts sleep patterns and disrupts your sleep, it actually increases stress, anxiety, and increases memory loss. And also you’re going to have this lack of recovery from workouts, because you’re not getting enough sleep. Sleep is so important for your overall health.

And if you’re somebody who’s trying to lose weight, and, you know, train for a marathon or something like that, and you’re constantly not getting a good night’s sleep, you may want to consider removing alcohol, because you’re going to sleep much better, okay?

Alcohol also fuels anxiety. So there’s something called AB response when you consume a drug. So any drug whatsoever will produce two responses in the body and a response and a B response. So the effect of the drug produces an A response, right, there’s this a process that happens when you drink alcohol. And that could be like, oh, you feel more relaxed, okay.

So it does produce an effect, right, it may take the edge off a little bit, you may be a little bit distressed, you may reduce anxiety a little bit, okay. So that’s the A response. But then it triggers a B response, which tends to last much longer than the a process. So that B process is the exact opposite of a process.

And again, this is the same for any drug. So if the drug makes you feel relaxed, that’s the A process then the process will make you feel more anxious, more tense, more stressed out more anxiety. You’re going to experience actually, more anxiety, the more you go for the drink. And the more you drink, the more tense and anxious you’re actually going to be most of the time, the effect you’re looking for that a response is very short lived, it’s very fleeting.

The counteractive effect, that B response, is more persistent and long lasting. So in essence, alcohol fuels anxiety, it causes anxiety, it doesn’t manage anxiety, if you think you’re using alcohol to de stress, think again, you’re actually going to become more stressed out just because of the use of the drug. Okay.

Another negative effect of using alcohol is that it impedes detoxification. So your liver is responsible for detoxifying your body of harmful compounds that you eat, drink, rub on your skin breeze, whatever your liver cannot function, you know, cannot do other things while it’s processing.

The alcohol takes precedence over everything else. Detoxification is put on hold. Whenever alcohol is present, that means all these toxins that your liver should be removing from your system are being stored in your body and they get stored in your own adipose tissue, your own body fat, okay?

Drinking alcohol also causes weight gain. You know, alcohol is high in sugar, it’s high in calories. It’s has zero nutritional value. It’s not a food substance. You don’t need to drink alcohol. It’s not an essential nutrient that we have to have. It’s a poison, okay? It’s also a natural appetite stimulant. It numbs the body’s natural fullness sensors, so you don’t feel like you ever get full, so you end up eating more, and you don’t feel you don’t get that sense of fullness when you eat.

And so you typically eat more than you would normally eat. So you’re over eating, it increases sugar cravings, it increases carbohydrate cravings. And if you don’t believe me, have you ever been in line at a White Castle, two or three o’clock in the morning after drinking? Yeah, because all you want is french fries, and sliders, and apparently diarrhea.

But anyway, it’s also the only beverage without a nutritional label or an ingredient list. Like you don’t have to, they don’t have to put those things on there. All right. Another thing about drinking is that you tend to make poor choices when you’re drinking.

So you tend to, your inhibition, sort of like just goes out the window, and you’re just like, whatever, let’s just eat junk food, you know, whatever. So if you’re like, more likely, if you’re trying to stay on an eating plan, and you’re trying to eat healthy food, you’re much more likely to eat junk food, when you’re drinking, right, it messes up your cognitive thinking you’re just start making bad choices, you know, it also, when you’re drinking alcohol, it shuts down fat burning.

So your body is trying to metabolize the alcohol. And again, like the liver, it’s going to prioritize metabolizing or using alcohol as a fuel source before anything else. So if you’re trying to be a fat adapted athlete, and you’re trying to do all these great things for yourself, and you’re trying to, you know, become a more efficient fat burner, and you’re, you know, you’re attempting to use, you know, become a fat adapted runner, and, and then you’re drinking on a regular basis, you’re just kind of shutting all that down, you’re shutting off that whole process, right.

And, again, three or four days just from having one drink, and it could take three to four days for that to leave your body. So if you’re drinking once or twice a week, just know that you are completely shutting down your fat burning process, okay?

Alcohol also messes up your brain, it really does. They’ve shown that alcohol actually affects every region of the brain. So they call it the neurological sledgehammer. It affects memory, motor function, personality, inhibition, emotional volatility, every area of your brain gets affected negatively from alcohol.

And then a few things that are specific for running you know, alcohol will reduce your athletic performance studies have shown that your aerobic performance is going to be diminished. The day after consuming alcohol like that run, you may go out Friday night and have a bunch of beers and then Saturday morning you get up to run, that run is not going to be at your best, you’re going to be your performance will be diminished for sure.

A study in the journal nutrients also showed that drinking alcohol reduces muscle strength. Well, that’s not good. We don’t want to reduce muscle strength, we want our muscles to be strong and want them to do what they’re supposed to do.

And another study actually showed that alcohol will negatively impact protein synthesis. Protein synthesis is the ability of your body to turn protein into muscle. So if you’re trying to build muscle, if you’re doing some strength training to try to build muscle, then drinking alcohol will completely shut that process down. And it will negatively impact your ability to turn protein into muscle. Okay.

Alcohol is also an anti nutrient. Alcohol is void of nutrients, it does not have vitamins or minerals. So alcohol ends up robbing your body of the micronutrients that it needs just so the body can assimilate the alcohol and metabolize the alcohol it depletes your body of essential nutrients needed to maintain good health. Alcohol diminishes your body’s ability to absorb other nutrients as well.

And this is not good because if again, if you’re trying to eat healthy, but you’re drinking, your body’s not going to be able to absorb the good food that you’re eating, you’re not going to be able to absorb the nutrients that your body actually needs. Okay? Why spend all this time eating healthy and then drinking alcohol to just leech all that out of you? It doesn’t make any sense at all, okay.

And drinking alcohol also makes you more prone to premature fatigue during your next exercise session. So you know, not only is your aerobic performance diminished, but you will crash and burn faster. You won’t be able to run as long because of the alcohol Okay? Alcohol also impedes recovery especially if you drink you know soon after a workout.

And I can’t tell you how many runners I see, finish a run and then crack open some beers like to celebrate that run. Drinking alcohol increases dehydration, it interferes with glycogen replenishing. It inhibits repair of muscle tissue. It suppresses your production of testosterone and human growth hormone.

All of these things are going to really, you know, harm your recovery process. The toxic impact of just one drink will depress the endocrine system dramatically. So recovery from intense training is basically canceled until your body metabolizes all the alcohol. Again, we’re talking about three or four days, your body is always trying to get to homeostasis, wants to get to normal, it wants everything to be balanced and good.

And it cannot get there until the alcohol is gone from your system. Alcohol is also linked to seven different types of cancer. Alcohol is a carcinogen. It’s carcinogenic, it causes cancer and over 100 studies confirm the link between drinking and cancer, especially breast cancer.

Women who drink just three alcoholic beverages a week have a 15% higher risk of breast cancer. And that risk has increased by 10%. For each additional drink you have daily. It’s also responsible or linked to at least other cancers like mouth and throat, esophagus, voicebox, liver, colon rectum, basically, anywhere in the digestive system that alcohol comes into contact with is at risk for cancer.

Again, remember we talked about it being a poison, a toxin, it kills microorganisms, it denatures proteins. So drinking this stuff, putting it into your body is going to really negatively affect you in so many different ways. Now, you might be thinking, I’m just being overly dramatic or overly negative about alcohol. But I’m really not. These are just facts, you get to decide what you want to do.

If you want to continue using the drug, use the drug, I don’t care. But if you find that you want to stop, or maybe you can’t stop, even though you want to just know that I can help with that. Okay, you can reach out to me, we can talk about what that might look like for you.

I’ve been living alcohol free for over 15 years. And I never thought I could be a non drinker. I never thought I could get through a weekend or a holiday or a birthday or a Wednesday. without drinking. I never thought I could do it. But my life is so much richer now. So much fuller, so much more meaningful. I feel so much better about myself.

I have connections with other human beings, real connections with other human beings now, I don’t have to go dive into a bottle to escape my problems or my fears, my anxieties are up, I still have anxiety I do. I just don’t use alcohol anymore. I’ve come up with other coping mechanisms, other emotional management tools. You don’t have to use alcohol to get through life.

If you think you have to use it, if you think that’s the only choice for you. I’m telling you it’s not. And if somebody like me, can quit after drinking for 25 years. You can too. Because alcohol is addictive. And they’ve done some studies where they’ve shown that alcohol is just as addictive as drugs like cocaine.

Now, people might say well, oh gosh, Patrick, you can’t make that comparison. Cocaine is way more dangerous. And it’s way more addictive. No, it is not. It’s exactly as addictive as alcohol, alcohol and cocaine are just as addictive. The biggest difference is that cocaine is highly regulated. And it’s illegal. And it doesn’t kill as many people, it doesn’t cause as many problems.

Oh, that was the only difference is really alcohol causes more deaths per year, than cocaine, for sure. You know, and the problems related to alcohol are tenfold compared to cocaine. And if you’re, you know, if you want to know a little bit about what the cycle of addiction looks like it kind of looks like this.

And this is the same cycle for all addictions, whether it’s cocaine, or cigarettes, or pornography, or shopping, or sex, or sugar, or alcohol, they all work the same. Okay? So you, you take your drug, like drinking alcohol, and you get this release of dopamine and dopamine gets released in unnaturally high amounts because the drug produces an unnatural high for you.

And that high is because a lot of it is because of the dopamine that your brain emits right in these unnaturally high amounts. And then glutamate gets released. Now, glutamate will respond to it’s kind of like a memory locking tool, if you want to put it that way.

Okay, it’s another neurotransmitter, but glutamate will get released. Also in unnaturally high amounts to help you kind of remember the effect to lock it into your memory banks. If you think about this, back in the caveman days, you know, we would find some honey, and we would eat the honey. And we would get that dopamine hit and we go like, ooh, that’s really good. But then we get this glutamate response to this says, we gotta remember this, this is really good.

This is a good source of calories. And this is something that we should come back to. So we got to remember, like where we are, where do we find this? How did this make us feel? All that stuff, right? So that’s what glutamate does. So you drink alcohol, you get the dopamine hit, you get the glutamate response, which locks it into your memory. And then that memory is what you recall, when we talk about, there’s this idea called euphoric recall, where you start to recall the feeling that you get from drinking alcohol, or doing whatever your drug of choice is.

And it produces this like euphoric feeling. And like, you just want that euphoric feeling again, you know, it makes you remember that euphoric feeling. All drugs produce this effect, okay. And then you go back to that drug, and that’s the cycle, right? You drink it, you drink alcohol, dopamine gets released, glutamate gets released, then you have that euphoric recall, you want it again, you know, you need the alcohol again, to give you that response again.

And then the cycle just continues. You’ve got to get out of the cycle. It’s a cycle that you can get out of, you can, you’re not hopeless, whether it’s sugar, or alcohol, or cigarettes, or whatever, you can jump off that cycle at any time. Is it easy? No, it’s hard. It’s hard to do.

One of the things that makes it hard is that we are being sold a bill of goods about alcohol, we’re being marketed to. Alcohol is not required to relax. Alcohol is not required to enjoy life, you don’t need alcohol to unwind. You don’t need alcohol to de-stress. You don’t need a drink to have a good time with your friends. I do all these things without alcohol, just fine. And I have for the last 15 years.

I relax, just fine, I do stress, I have a good time with friends. I enjoy parties and holidays, and birthdays now without alcohol, and it’s all good. But the big alcohol companies, they’re marketing an idea to you that in order to have a happy, fun life, alcohol is a requirement. But it’s not it’s not a requirement. Drinking alcohol has almost zero positive benefits, you know, maybe feels good for a minute, but it has this huge list of negative consequences. How is this possibly the key to a healthy, happy life? Why do we think this is the answer? It’s not.

And you might think that you’re deciding for yourself that you want to drink this craft IPA because it makes you feel cool, and hip and sophisticated. And this is what people do. This is you know, and this is what I’m choosing for myself, but it’s really not your decision at all. This is actually part of a marketing tactic and it’s called engineered consent.

And this idea of engineered consent was first introduced by a guy named Edward Bernays. He was a public relations guru back in 1929. And he was working for the big tobacco companies, American Tobacco companies specifically, and they wanted to tap into a new market.

They wanted to get more women to smoke. Like women were smoking at the time, but they were doing it very covertly. They’re doing it behind closed doors, not in public. So they wanted to get more women to smoke in public, because it was kind of taboo at the time. So Bernays hired a bunch of women to smoke in the Easter Parade, 1929 Easter Parade, walking down Fifth Avenue, in New York City, during the Easter Parade, all these women smoking, openly smoking cigarettes, and it was like, it was really unheard of at the time, right.

And it drew a lot of attention. And it drew a lot of publicity, and it drew a lot of, you know, newspapers and the media really picked up on this. And the term they use to, to describe what was going on the women said, we are lighting up our torches of freedom, torches of freedom, because they were trying to exploit women’s aspirations.

During this, it was like the first wave of feminism, right, we can do what we want, we can smoke in public, light up your torches of freedom, ladies. And it became a catchphrase, and it spread like wildfire. So women thought they were being bold and brave and sticking it to the man, I’m gonna light up my torch of freedom, I can smoke whenever and wherever I want to.

But in reality, the man engineered the whole thing. It was all engineered consent. So let’s go back to that craft IPA. You think you’re drinking of your own freewill? You think you’re consenting? You think this is your idea, but it’s really not that consent has been fabricated. It’s been engineered by the alcohol companies, by social media influencers, by billboards, by TV commercials to make you think that you’re making a good decision for yourself. That’s what they want you to think. It’s a big marketing ploy. Okay.

And you may or may not believe me here, you may be thinking I’ve kind of lost it. You may be in denial, maybe a little bit of both. Here’s a quote from Mark Twain that I love. He said, “It’s easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” So is alcohol the new cigarettes? So imagine, right now, if I was talking about cigarettes, would you be fighting me about this at all? Would you be in your head, you know, denying that this is the thing would you be, you know, thinking like Patrick, you’re crazy. Cigarettes are fine, you know?

Would you be like, you know, really stating your case why everybody should smoke and, you know, just smoke in moderation. Of course, would you try to convince me that, that, you know, other people might have a problem with smoking, but you’re fine. Like you can stop whenever you want to? Doesn’t that sound stupid, the way I’m saying this isn’t the sound kind of crazy. I think it’s crazy. That is like right now, I think it’s crazy to think that smoking cigarettes in any amount is okay. Right? Wouldn’t you agree with me on that? Like we should, nobody should smoke, right? It’s so they’ve proven it is so bad for you, right?

But here’s the thing, I think alcohol is just the new cigarettes. And I think we’re all gonna wake up one day and say, Oh, my God, I can’t believe we used to think drinking poison was fun. And that there were these places called bars, where they actually just served alcohol to people and they would drink it. And moms would actually drink alcohol in front of their kids.

And they would even dress their babies in onesies that said, My mommy drinks because I cry and everyone would laugh because they thought it was funny. And we would say to ourselves man weren’t times messed up back then. Wasn’t that crazy? Here’s the thing, social norms. They’re always changing. Smoking cigarettes is no longer widely accepted as being safe. It’s not cool anymore.

You can’t smoke indoors and most places you can’t smoke on airplanes. The first time I got into an airplane, the first airplane ride I ever took. I sat in the back, I sat in the smoking section. I smoked a cigarette on a plane. I cannot imagine doing that today. It’s so crazy, right? Coca Cola is no longer made with cocaine. You know they took that ingredient out. They’re like we probably shouldn’t put this in this drink okay, we’ll just put way more sugar in there and hopefully get people addicted that way. So good. Mission accomplished. Coca Cola. Good job there.

There’s no more opium dens where you can go and like smoke opium and hang out. I don’t know, I don’t think there are, maybe there are somewhere but I have a feeling this is not a normal thing anymore. You know, we don’t do frontal lobotomies on people like ice pick through the head kind of a thing. You know, this is crazy, right?

But people used to do that. And they thought it was like pretty normal. So social norms are changing. We changed, you know, our concepts of what’s acceptable, what’s normal, what’s healthy, what’s good for us over time. And I think alcohol is time is coming. There’s so many people that are like, do like, drinking alcohol is not okay. In any amount. It’s really bad, very, and has a lot of negative consequences.

There’s very few up ticks to drinking, there’s very few positives that you get out of drinking, you get a fleeting sense of relaxation, but then all those other things that I talked about, right. And one excuse I hear from people a lot is that they feel pressured from friends, or family members, but a lot of times it’s friends push you to drink, or judge you if you don’t drink.

Here’s the thing if your friends are pushing alcohol on you, or if they’re pressuring you to drink or judging you, because you drink or don’t drink, it’s time to get new friends, up level your friends. It’s plain and simple. If you’re, if your friends don’t respect your decision to not drink, these are not your friends. These are not people that have your best interest in mind.

And there’s a lot of blaming and shaming that goes on in this world of addiction around sugar addiction around alcohol and drug addiction. And it goes something like this, like alcohol is fine. That’s not the problem. You’re the problem. The problem is you, not that drug, not the poison over there. You’re the problem. So would you argue that it’s the person? That’s the problem, not the heroin, or the crystal meth or the cigarettes?

I think we’re all pretty clear that if those things are really terrible, you know, oh, no, those things are fine. You just have to moderate. If you can’t moderate then you’re broken. There’s something wrong with you. And this is the same BS that a lot of doctors and dieticians spew about sugar consumption. They’re like sugar is not addictive. It’s not the sugar. There’s nothing wrong with sugar, you just have no willpower. You have to just use it in moderation.

And this is the same message that the sugar industry pushes on us the Coca Cola move more campaign, blaming us and shaming us into thinking we’re the problem. Not the drug that they’re pushing on us to sugar isn’t the problem. You’re just not exercising enough. Stop being lazy. Get
off your ass and exercise more. Drink plenty of Coca Cola, that’s fine. That’s not the problem. You just got to exercise more.

Alcohol has the same kind of thing. They call it the drink responsibly campaign. This is the slogan of the alcohol industry: drink responsibly. So they’re kind of shaming you and blaming you if you overdo it. If you can’t handle your liquor, or if you die of alcohol poisoning. It’s not the alcohol that poisoned you. It was just you, you just overdid it. It’s the equivalent saying like just shoot heroin responsibly, snort responsibly.

You’re the problem, not our drug. Our drug is fine. There’s plenty people that drink responsibly. If you can’t, that’s your fault. You’re probably an alcoholic, you’re not normal. There’s something wrong with you. So let me finish up with this. I just want to say this, I cannot in good conscience tell you that drinking alcohol, any amount of alcohol is okay. I can’t. It’s like the equivalent of telling you that smoking cigarettes is okay. Or that occasionally snorting cocaine or shooting heroin every now and then is fine or that smoking some crystal meth is cool. It’s all good.

I can’t do that. I can’t in good conscience tell you that alcohol is okay. You know, just don’t overdo it as long as you can do it in moderation, don’t smoke, snort or shoot up, you know, irresponsibly. If you want to lose weight, if you want improve your health, if you want improve your writing, if you want to get stronger, if you want to feel amazing, if you want to sleep amazing. If you want to recover properly, if you want to lead an overall healthier life, free of stress and anxiety, free of most cancers: stop ingesting the poison.

If you think I’m being a big buzzkill here, I’ll own that. I will be the buzzkill here, okay, my job is to teach you what you need to know so that you can become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself. And drinking alcohol undermines all of that as the opposite of that. My mission is to lead by example. And I’m doing that my mission is to lead by example.

And I want to inspire you to do the same. And I feel that my message here today is absolutely in alignment with my mission and my values. I work with countless runners who love to drink, and they can’t possibly imagine life without alcohol. And I challenge them, I say, hey, let’s take a break from drinking for like 30 days and see how you feel. And they freak out a little bit at first, because they just cannot imagine not drinking, but then they do it.

And they’re amazed to how much better they feel. And they start to lose weight, and running gets easier. And then they say, Patrick, I don’t even miss it. I don’t miss alcohol at all. So I feel good about my message here today. I feel good about the work I’m doing. And I hold firm in my beliefs about alcohol. And living an alcohol free life will always be the better way to live for me, for you, for all of us. And if you want help quitting, I’m here for you. Always, always here for you. I love you all keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.

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