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147. Bucking Conventional Wisdom

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Most of the people in this country eat a pretty terrible diet. And because of that, most people are experiencing some sort of metabolic dysfunction - their blood sugar and blood pressure are too …

Continue Reading about 147. Bucking Conventional Wisdom →

Podcast Transcript

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 147 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, bucking conventional wisdom. Most people in this country eat a pretty terrible diet.

And because of that, most people are experiencing some sort of metabolic dysfunction, their blood sugar and blood pressure are way too high, carrying around too much body fat, they’re at higher risk for heart disease, stroke, type two diabetes, just to name a few.

The troubling part about all this is that this is considered normal here in this country, okay, and in a lot of other parts of the world. So if you want to be different, meaning that you want to be the healthiest human being that you can possibly be, you’re going to have to do things differently. For most people, you’re going to have to buck conventional wisdom.

So in this episode, I’m going to break down what’s considered normal, what’s not, and how bucking conventional wisdom might be the best possible thing that you could do for yourself. And as always, if you’re looking for some help with any of this, or all the stuff that I’m talking about here, on the podcast, consider applying for coaching with me, it’s one thing to know what to do, it’s quite another thing to actually have the expert guidance and support of a coach to hold you accountable, and help you make all these big changes that you want for yourself.

Whether it’s improving your body composition, getting stronger, running faster, or just becoming the healthiest and most badass version of yourself, working with a coach is how you get there. So if you want to have me in your corner, every step of the way, apply to join the Running Lean coaching project to learn more just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. I would love to have you in my unique weight loss coaching program for runners, the Running Lean coaching project where the project is you.

Okay, so what prompted this conversation today. So, I’ve been thinking a lot about what people consider normal, and I talked to a lot of clients who feel like what they’re doing is not normal, and therefore, is difficult or is challenging, or is uncomfortable or is hard.

And they fall into this place where they just want to be doing all the normal stuff, okay, so they feel like maybe they are the weird one at the table, they feel like an outsider, they kind of feel separate, not a part of because they’re not going along with what everybody else is doing.

And they see this as a problem. So they see it as a problem, because conventional wisdom, wisdom will tell them and conventional wisdom tells us that we should be eating the food pyramid, right that we should never restrict any foods that you know, in order to run as a runner in order to function well as a runner, you have to like eat all the carbs and all the sugar, right?

And so when we get it into our heads that we should be doing all this stuff out there, there, there becomes this internal conflict. Because what we want to do in order to change our health for the better, in order to improve our health, our fitness, or speed, our body composition, whatever it is you want for yourself, what we do to get there goes against conventional wisdom.

And people feel like they should be able to do what everybody else is doing. But they can’t do what everybody else is doing because they can’t make these changes they want for themselves. So that’s where the internal conflict comes from. That’s where the inner turmoil comes from.

Everybody else is drinking alcohol and I’m not. Everybody else is eating the pizza and getting dessert and eating the ice cream and eating all the junk food and I’m not. And the internal conflict isn’t actually caused by what other people are doing. It’s caused by your thoughts because you think you should be able to do what everybody else is doing.

And you should be able to become healthier and lose the weight and get stronger and improve your health and all that stuff. Right? The cold hard truth is this though. You don’t become badass by doing what everybody else is doing. You only become badass by ditching conventional wisdom and cutting your own path, okay?

So here’s the trouble with what everybody else out there is doing. So most people are eating the food pyramid or the MyPlate, or whatever the government is telling us we should be eating, okay? The government has this agenda, to push grains on us to push sugars on us.

All these studies are funded by the big agricultural companies, big food companies like Kellogg’s and Coca Cola. And they’re making these decisions about what we should be eating in this country. Okay, so a lot of the food programs in this country, the things that are served in hospitals, what our kids eat in schools with military eats, all this is driven by the food pyramid or my plate or whatever they’re calling it these days, okay?

This is a diet that is very high in sugar and carbohydrates, it’s up to 65% of your calories should be coming from refined grains and sugar. And you should limit fats and meats. And you should just be eating all the grains, like that’s the healthy stuff. You know, eat the fruits and the grains and stay away from you know, fat and meat and things like that.

But you know, what’s interesting is, if you want to fatten up a cow, what do you do? You feed it grains, right? So grass fed beef, grass fed, and grass finished beef, this is beef that only eats grass. If you’ve ever seen this at the grocery store, you will see that it is very lean there. It’s very red. Like there’s very little marbling in there at all. There’s very little fat in there at all, almost none.

But when you look at grain fed beef or grain finished beef, in other words, they feed it grain towards the end of its cycle, whatever, then there’s a lot of fat in that. So isn’t it interesting that cows naturally don’t eat grains, cows eat grass, and they can stay pretty lean if they do that. But that’s not what people want. So we feed cows grains to fatten them up.

You want to know how to fatten up a human being? Feed them grains, will just do the exact same thing. It’ll create all this internal visceral fat and intramuscular fat. And if you don’t want all that, then stop eating the grains. Pretty simple, right?

How about wild caught salmon? Have you ever seen wild caught salmon at the store? It’s very lean, there’s very little fat in there. It’s delicious. It’s really got a nice beautiful orangish red color. And then there’s the farmed salmon. The farm salmon is fed a diet of plants and grains and fish meal and farmed salmon. You know, it’s really fatty because they’re feeding it weird stuff like grains again, right fish don’t eat grains. Right?

And so when you feed a fish, the grains are how you fatten them up, right? And what’s interesting about salmon is that farmed salmon, because the salmon are not eating their normal diet of krill, which actually colors their flesh, because of the pink little creatures, whatever they are, they have to add dye to the to the meat or to the to the feed that they feed the salmon otherwise they would just be gray.

And people don’t want to eat grey salmon, right? So anyway, this is all really dysfunctional, like the way that we fatten up animals in order to, you know, make them more desirable for us. But here’s the thing, here’s my point with all this is that we humans were not really designed to process the Greens either.

So when we eat the greens, we get that to, you know, you want to increase the intramuscular fat and yourself just eat a bunch of grains. Okay, so the point with all this is that when you look out in the wild, when you look at wild animals, there are no overweight wild animals, because each animal species is eating a specific diet that is appropriate for that animal.

The only two animals well, maybe I’ll make an exception here, but the only animals on this planet that are overweight, would be humans and their pets and of course the cows and pigs and fish that we fatten up intentionally okay. So, we human beings are not eating the appropriate diet, but we’re following the food guidelines. We’re doing what we’re supposed to do.

We’re good at following directions like this, you know, when, when the government came out with all the dangers of smoking cigarettes, we listened. We stopped smoking in the 1970s over 40% of Americans smoked. And that number is way way down to just 16% in 2018. So they came out with all these guidelines and told us Hey, smoking is bad. You should stop smoking and we did you know down from 40% to 16%. That’s me.

And the same goes for the food guidelines, right? The standard American diet that we have today was introduced in 1980. And up to that point, the obesity rates in this country were pretty stable, you know, during the 50s 60s 70s, right?

Once we introduced these guidelines, obesity rates began to surge. So they are around 13%. In 1980, obesity rates in this country were about 13%. In 2022, that number is up to 40%! 40% of people in the US are considered obese today, that’s for adults.

And then for children, this kind of makes me sad, because we’re fattening up our kids, unfortunately. But the obesity rate for children was 5%, before 1980, and it’s up to 20% today. So by all means, feel free to do what everybody else is doing, but just know that what everybody else is doing is really bad for you, it’s detrimental to your health and well being. Okay.

So you might be thinking, well, you know, Patrick, I’m a runner. And so this stuff doesn’t really apply to me, right. And here’s what I’m gonna say about that. Because every single day, I talk to runners who have been following the conventional wisdom out there, they might be eating the standard American diet as well. And they think that running is going to be the cure all.

That if they just run more, everything would be fine, if that doesn’t really work. Or they’re eating what I call the typical runner’s diet, which is all carbs all the time like they’re carbterians, right. So they carb load for days leading up to the long runs, they’re fueling up on carbs before running, they’re sucking down the gels and the goos. And the Gatorade, which is just sugar water, during their runs.

They’re making sure they get all those recovery carbs too, after their runs. And they’re basically just eating whatever they want. They’re like, I’m just gonna eat doughnuts and beer and ice cream and pizza, whatever, because hey, I’m a runner, I run, it’s not good enough. And they literally cannot understand why they keep gaining weight, especially as they get older.

All that sugar, all those grains, all that high carbohydrate diet just eventually catches up with you, and you start packing on the pounds. And I had personal experience with this too. You know, I was training for ultra marathons. And eating that kind of diet that I just described, it was like all carbs all the time.

And during this period, there were times where I was running up to 85 miles a week. And over about a two and a half year period or so I gained like 40 pounds. So all this running in the world wasn’t impacting my weight at all. I kept slowly gaining weight. And so this is not unusual. This is not just a one off type of thing.

Like I said, I talk to people every single day, who are doing what everybody else is doing. They’re following the conventional wisdom. And it just doesn’t work. They just keep getting, you know, more overweight, they’re carrying around way too much body fat and, and running is not helping with this, right, the diet is wrong, the diet does not work.

Now, the conventional wisdom out there, it might work for some people, that’s fine. If you’re one of those people that’s like, hey Patrick, I eat whatever I want. And I’m fine. I’m not overweight, I’m super healthy. And I can eat all that stuff. Like totally fine. Like if that works for you, that is amazing. But that is not the case for most people.

So you get to decide what you want to do. And if what’s working out there, you know, the conventional thinking is working for you fine, but if it’s not, you got to try a different approach, you got to do something different. Maybe try to stop eating the processed foods and the sugar and the grades and see what happens. Maybe stop doing all the fast food stuff. Because you know, it’s easy, but it’s not really good for you. It’s not really working for you.

Start eating actual real whole foods instead. Maybe stop doing the all carb diet as a runner, and see how you can improve your health and your running at the same time by ditching some of those problematic carbs and sugars and stuff. Bucking conventional wisdom is hard.

It’s hard because we are a society that loves junk food, just about every packaged, processed food is made with junk, it’s sugar, refined grains, seed oils, it’s like these are the worst three things that you can put into your body, by the way. And when you go out to eat at restaurants, you know, you’re going to places whose menus are full of foods that contain those three ingredients, right? And it can be challenging sometimes to find real food at restaurants, which seems ridiculous, right?

Restaurants are interesting too, because they’re pushing appetizers. So that’s the food you eat before you eat your food. They’re pushing out alcohol on you, that’s their big moneymaker. They’re pushing desserts on you, that’s the food you eat after you eat your food. So their job is really to drive up the price of your bill as much as possible, they don’t care about your health, they don’t care about you being healthy and feeling good.

They want to make as much money off of you as possible. That’s it, which is fine, I get it, they’re a business they’re running, you know, they want to like, make sure that you leave, you know, happy and fat and happy when you leave the restaurant, you know, and it’s working. It’s working.

You know, and then there’s like social pressures, you know, going against what normal, quote unquote, normal people are doing is hard, because there’s social pressures from friends and family. Oh, come on, Patrick, just live a little, you know, have a drink, eat the dessert, you deserve it, you’ve been good all week, you know, come on, just live a little every now and then let your hair down, so to speak.

Or, you know, oh, well, I have kids, and my kids have to eat all this junk food. So I keep all this junk food in the house, which means that, you know, I’m just going to eat it sometimes too, because it’s there. Or, you know, oh, I’m having lunch with this client at work, and my boss is going to be there and they all drink during lunch, so I got to drink too.

Or, you know, they’re all going to want to eat, you know, this pasta and bread and stuff. So I have to just go along with it. Because not doing that is going to be I don’t want to be the weird one at the table. Right.

So going against what everybody else is doing is hard, it is uncomfortable, I totally get that. Going against the grain pun intended. It’s uncomfortable, because you are different. You’re not like everyone else, you’re not doing what everybody else is doing. You’re not accepting this fate of just getting fatter, and sicker and weaker.

As you get older, you know, you’re not using sugar and alcohol to feel better anymore. And that definitely doesn’t feel good, but it’s temporary. So you’re gonna be sitting at the dinner table eating something different than everybody else may be eating. They’re all eating pizza, and you’re having a salad instead. But every time you stick to your plan, you reinforce this idea that being a healthy human being is important to you.

And every time you give in and just go along with what everybody else is doing, you reinforce the notion that your health is not that important to you, that it’s more important to just be comfortable here in this moment. So here’s what I want you to do, I want you to really ask yourself, what do you want for yourself?

Do you want to become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself? I hope you do. Because if you do, you have to do things differently. Most people eat a pretty crap diet. Most people are overweight. Most people have some sort of metabolic dysfunction happening in their body. Most runners are carrying around way too much body fat.

Most people as they get older, get weaker and fatter. And you need to ask yourself, do you want this for yourself? Or do you want something more. Because if you want something more, that’s going to take a little bit of work to get there. It’s going to take being willing to be uncomfortable in those situations where you’re doing things differently. It’s going to take you getting to this place where you feel good about yourself and you feel confident about yourself.

And you feel confident in your decisions that you’re making in those moments where everybody else is doing the normal junk food and getting whatever food is there, and you’re doing something different. You’re being different. And I think that when you get to that place, it is an amazing place to get to. Because you no longer care about what is considered normal.

The conventional wisdom doesn’t work for most of us. So we got to buck the system, we got to do things differently. We get to cut our own path. And you get to decide if that’s what you want for yourself. Because if you do want that, be willing and ready to embrace the discomfort that comes along with that.

There will be discomfort that comes along with that, I promise you, but it’s short lived. It’s temporary, it doesn’t last forever. It takes some time to get past that. But once you do get past that, that’s where the good stuff really starts to happen. Cool. And as always, if you want help with this, I’m here for you. We’ll put together a personalized plan just for you. I’ll help you stay on track and together we will get you there. Cool. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.

145. All or Nothing is Not Always Best

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I’ve been hearing a lot of stories lately from people in the low-carb athlete community who tend to adhere to an all-or-nothing mentality when it comes to diet and exercise. They hear that low carb …

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Podcast Transcript

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 145, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, all or nothing is not always best. So I’ve been hearing a lot of stories lately from people in the low carb athletic community, who really tend to adhere to an all or nothing mentality when it comes to their diet and how they exercise.

So they might hear that low carb is a good way to go. And so they’re like zero carbs all the time. And that’s how they do it. And that’s kind of what they’re putting out there in the stories. They’re telling you just about no carbs, no carbs, no carbs. They might hear that training in the fasted state has certain benefits, which I’ll be talking about that in a minute, and it absolutely does; but then they do all their workouts fasted, no matter what, all of them all the time.

So today, I want to address these principles, these beliefs that I think some people have, because I think it’s important to understand when the all or nothing approach should be embraced and when it should be avoided. So in this episode, I’m going to explain why all or nothing is not always best, especially when it comes to nutrition and exercise for the endurance athlete.

So when should you use fuel for workouts? When should you add carbs around those workouts? How much fuel, how many carbs? What types of carbs? These are all great questions. And they require more information, they require more context, you can’t just answer these questions for everyone the same way because we’re all different. Everyone is different.

And we each need to figure out the right formula, right for what is going to work for you as an individual. It’s like building the perfect recipe around fuel, fuel timing, the types of exercises, you’re doing your exercise intensities, your rest, recovery, all that stuff matters. And it’s all different for each person, there’s not one recipe that’s going to work perfectly for every individual. This is why I do what I do. This is why I’m a coach.

This is why I work one on one with my clients to help you figure out the right recipe to help you figure out the right recipe that’s going to get you to your fitness goals, get you to your weight loss goals and help you improve your health overall. The only way to figure all this stuff out is really by kind of trying some things, seeing what works and then of course correcting right it’s trial and error.

And having a coach there to guide you through this process every step of the way is going to make it so much easier. So if you’re looking for that guidance, the support, the encouragement that you get from a coach, the motivation and the accountability apply to join the Running Lean coaching project. To learn more just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. I would love to have you join me in my unique weight loss coaching program for runners the Running Lean coaching project where the project is as always you.

Alright, so let’s get into this all or nothing approach here. Okay, and why I’m talking about this today is because I’ve been hearing a lot about people that embrace the low carb approach to endurance sports. And I love this approach. Obviously, I talk about this all the time. And they also talk about fasted workouts and they and they talk about doing all of their workouts fasted all the time.

And when I hear these things, when I hear people talk about zero carbs and carbs being bad and you have to avoid all carbs all the time. And when I hear about people doing all their workouts fasted all the time, it kind of makes me cringe just a little bit. And maybe I’ve kind of promoted some of this by talking about how I’ve done a marathon.

Well, actually I’ve done like two marathons and 50k all with zero calories fasted just to say like, hey, you know, you can do this right? You don’t need carbs to run, you know, it’s kind of fun. I tried to prove a point, you know, but maybe people think that this is like, the only way to go and it really isn’t. Okay. So a low carb approach to endurance sports does not mean zero carbs.

And training in the fasted state at times doesn’t mean you have to do all of your workouts fasted, and it doesn’t mean that you never fuel for anything. Okay, so I wanted to talk about this today and really kind of shed some light, especially in these two areas, when it comes to nutrition.

And the low carb approach, I want to make sure we understand that there are times when you will want to use some strategic carbohydrates to fuel your workouts and, and then adding fuel for workouts and not necessarily doing everything in the fasted state. Now, there’s benefits to doing these things to doing a low carb approach, or kind of a zero carb approach at times. There’s also benefits to training in the fasted state at times. But it doesn’t mean we do it all the time.

And it doesn’t mean that we never use carbs or never use fuel for our workouts. So I want to make sure that we get a better idea of when it’s okay to do these things. And when it’s okay to experiment with adding in some fuels, and especially adding some carbohydrates to help improve our performance to help improve our fitness. Because they’re not, as you know, carbs are not the enemy.

Carbs are not evil, carbs are not bad. Yes, the types of carbs you use does matter. And I’ll talk about that in a minute. But just remember that all or nothing is not always best, okay, and all or nothing is definitely not how we need to do, how we need to do all this stuff. Okay, so I just want to shed some light on this so that we can be successful and do it in a way that can support us.

And we can add some carbs and add some fuel and not have to do all this stuff. Totally fasted or unfasted, or zero carbs, it’s not a zero carb approach, I’ve never really talked about that being the only way to go, okay. So, all these things matter. And I kind of touched on this at the beginning here, all these things depend on you as an individual.

So being fat adapted just means it kind of means different things to different people. And being a fat adapted athlete is going to look different for somebody who maybe they’re training for their first 5k. And so they’re doing like a couch to 5k program and they’re just getting started with running. And they’re doing most of their runs at a very low intensity, a very low heart rate. And they’re losing weight in the process. And they’re feeling amazing. That might be a great place for someone to do a lot of workouts fasted and to really not dip into the carbs too much, okay.

But if you’re somebody who is, you know, training for your fastest marathon, and you’re trying to qualify for Boston, and you’ve got to shave, you know, 15 minutes off your marathon time, your intensity level is going to be high, your training is going to be high. And for higher intensity levels and longer training sessions and more intense longer training sessions especially, you will absolutely want to fuel for those things.

And you do not have to do those things fasted. So being fat adapted means different things for different people, we’re all a little bit different. We have to accept and acknowledge this. And then all these different differences in our goals in our training levels and our fitness levels in our gender like men and women need to feel a little bit differently for these things. So all these things matter.

And we have to look at this as an experiment of one and you’ll hear me say this probably 10 times today, because an experiment of one is always how we approach all of this stuff when it comes to changing your diet, losing weight, getting faster, you know, getting stronger, we all have to do this and play around with some things and figure out what works best for us. Okay, so first I want to talk about carbs.

So the first principle that I kind of hear people get into is, you know, oh, low carb, that means no carbs, zero carbs. And as athletes, we can use carbs. And we can time our carbs around our workouts and it’s not going to kick us out of fat burning mode.

It’s not going to, you know, ruin what you’re doing here and it’s not going to mean you’re starting from scratch. I’ve heard some people ask that question where Oh, you know, ate some carbs. Does that mean I’m not fat adapted anymore? It’s like no, absolutely not. It doesn’t mean that at all.

Getting fat adapted means you’re burning fat really efficiently. you’ve trained your body to burn fat efficiently as athletes and especially if you want to increase your performance and increase your fitness. It’s a good idea to use some carbs and time them around your workouts and improve your metabolic flexibility, you want to be metabolically flexible, you want to be able to use both carbs and fat as fuel efficiently. Why not?

Why would you just rely on fat as a fuel source? Fat is a great fuel source and, and you can really get really efficient at burning fat even at higher intensities, but we don’t have to use just fat as fuel, we can absolutely use carbs, okay. So if your goal, again, you’re gonna, you want to crush your fastest half marathon, different phases of that training cycle will require you to increase your carbohydrate intake, especially around those workouts, you know, and maybe even on a daily basis as your training cycle increases.

So if you’re, you know, if you’re doing the lower carb approach, and your goal is to lose weight, and you’re probably in that 30 to 50 grams of carbs a day kind of mode, or whatever, and that kind of works for you, you know,if your intensity is increasing in your workouts, and you’re really crushing some more intense harder workouts, you might be in that 80 to 100 grams of carbs, a day kind of mode, you know, and, and it’s not going to kick you out of fat burning mode, and it’s not going to impair your performance, if anything, it’s going to give you that extra gear, when your intensity increases.

So initially, we do want to keep our carbs low and get fat adapted. And then over time, we want to start to slowly kind of ramp up our carbs, as your body responds positively to the changes, you want to ramp up your carbohydrate intake, depending on the intensity levels of your training. And this does not mean that we’re going to just go crazy and eat, you know, just you know, whatever you like to eat, that’s like pure sugar and junk food, like we’re not talking about that.

We’re talking about using real whole foods, sources of carbohydrate and some slow burning carbohydrates in order to improve your running performance. So remember that, you know, when we this whole low carb approach is to help regulate blood sugar, it’s to help, you know keep your blood sugar from from spiking and crashing, to keep your insulin levels normal instead of because when your blood sugar spikes, insulin spikes, and then you’re you’re in that fat storage mode, you know, you’re burning, you’re burning the sugar, you’re burning sugar and you’re storing fat and we need to get blood sugar normal.

We need to stop the spikes and crashes in the blood sugar, stop the spikes and crashes in the insulin levels so that your body can start burning fat instead of burning all the carbohydrates that you’re eating. Okay. Think of this like a fire. I love this analogy. So sugar, it’s like kindling, right? It burns first. It’s the first fuel source your body will use. It burns very quickly. But it’s not sustainable. It depletes rapidly and then you’re left with nothing. Okay? So sugar’s like kindling, it burns quickly, it burns first, but it doesn’t burn very long. It’s just it’s boom, burns and it’s gone.

Whereas fat burning is like the logs you put on the fire right, it takes a little bit longer to get going. But once it’s burning, it’s going to last a very, very long time. And to achieve this log burning to achieve the fat burning, we need to get rid of the sugar and the refined carbs and the processed junk food and the carbage, I like to call it, and we need to get into the fat burning, we need to get into the log burning.

And once we do that, you will have steady energy and you will have plenty of energy to fuel your you know lower intensity workouts especially at the beginning, okay, but that does not mean you never use any kind of carbs to improve, okay. And again, what we’re after is metabolic flexibility, the ability to burn both types of fuel sugar and fat very effectively.

Humans are really good fat burners, we’re, we’re naturally good fat burners, it’s our natural state of being. And we’ve just gotten away from that state. This junk food is processed carbohydrates, the carbage that we’ve been eating, it now makes up over 50% of the calories that we consume here in the United States. And that number is rising every single year. We’ve become a nation of sugar eaters, and therefore sugar burners.

So we’re not burning fat naturally anymore. And we’re gaining weight and you know, experiencing all kinds of metabolic issues and diseases and you know, obesity and all these other things, right? So we all were talking about doing things like lower the carbohydrate intake, get rid of the junk food, get rid of the garbage and start eating real whole foods. Doesn’t mean zero carbs. It does mean we will ditch a lot of the problematic carbs But we want to use some types of carbohydrates and time them around our workout so that we get the benefits of the added sugar intake from the added carbohydrate intake.

Because when you’re burning fat efficiently and when you’re exercising at a higher intensity, you’re going to burn through that sugar that you’re taking in, you’re going to burn through the carbohydrates that you’re fueling with pretty quickly. And then you’re back into fat burning again. Okay, so it’s not like you just like, oh, you’re just always burning sugar or always fat, you’re always burning both, right, but at different levels, different intensities, okay.

So when you increase your exercise intensity, you might also need to increase your carb intake. And this is where most people kind of freak out a little bit, right, they’re like, oh, my gosh, no way, I don’t want to eat any carbs, I’m gonna kick myself out of fat burning mode, I’m gonna be fat adapted, you know, low carb, low carb, zero carb.

But listen, don’t freak out, there’s a way to do this in a way that it’s not gonna really affect your body’s ability to burn fat, you can still burn fat and burn sugar at the same time, okay, if most of your training is done at a low heart rate and a lower intensity, then there’s not much of a need to add carbs as fuel, you can continue to burn fat efficiently.

And if you’re just doing some, some lower intensity stuff, lower heart rate stuff, you’re gonna be fine, you can improve your fitness, you know, you can get a little bit you know, stronger as a runner, and you can get a little bit faster, and that’s going to be fine. But if you really want to make some gains, you want to improve fitness, you get stronger, get faster, workout at higher intensities, higher heart rates, then some strategic carbs around those workouts will give you the energy that you need to improve and to and to go a little harder.

And to have that extra gear that you need to hit those faster times and hit that PR, okay. And it doesn’t mean that you have to go and start downing all the gu’s and gels and sports drinks that are laden with high fructose corn syrup and all this junk, right? There are fuels that are specifically made for the fat adapted athlete, and there’s brands like Muir energy, and that’s M-U-I-R, there’s S-fuels, there’s you can and these all make products that have slow burning carbohydrate fuels designed for the low carb athlete, so check out those brands, but really, we’re talking like 12 to 20 grams of slow burning carbs per hour might be enough to give you that little bit of an extra edge that you need.

You know, 20 grams of carbs is like a medium size banana, this is not a lot of fuel we’re talking about here, okay, so don’t freak out about this too much. But consider trying some carbohydrates around your workouts and see what works for you. Again, we’re all different. This is an experiment of one, try it and see how it feels and how it works for you.

If your goal is just to lose weight, if you’re just interested in losing weight, you’re not interested in improving your running or running longer, then stick to the low carb approach. You know, again, it doesn’t mean zero carbs, but just stick to the low carb, you know, nutrition regimen. Keeping in mind that, you know, some people will require slightly more carbs than others. And everybody’s a little different, you know.

In talking about like pre menopausal women versus postmenopausal women, pre menopausal women will probably need a little bit more carbs, especially around certain days of their cycle. I’m actually going to put together a podcast on this topic and just kind of talk about how women are different from men and how they require a little bit of a different approach when it comes to nutrition and around fitness.

Because you guys men and women are different, did you know that we are very different and we all have some slightly different needs. And I’ve been really doing some research on this lately. And it’s a fascinating topic to me. And I’m learning a lot about how women respond differently to dietary changes in intensity levels, changes in their workouts and things like that.

So we can all do this, we can all kind of maintain that kind of a lower carb approach. But we don’t have to do it with zero carbs. Okay, so when it comes to carbs, especially for the endurance athlete, all or nothing is definitely not always best. Adding in some carbs as fuel around your workouts is recommended for most people for most low carb athletes.

Especially if you want to improve your performance, okay, you can still maintain efficient fat burning, you can still lose weight, you can still prioritize fat as that main fuel source you still get to those, those logs that you’re burning, okay, but you’re just adding in a little bit of kindling to help get things going. Okay. And you’ll burn through the carbs during your workout.

So you’re not going to be like storing a lot of extra energy as fat or anything like that. Okay? So for the first sort of all or nothing, zero carbs versus some carbs, definitely, you know, give it a shot, try fueling some workouts and see how it goes.

The other all or nothing mentality is around fasting and whether or not we should be doing all of our workouts in that fasted state. And I’ve just seen a lot of people talking about this lately. And I wanted to really clear this one up too, because I think there’s some misconceptions here as well.

So, fasting, the way I’m talking about here is basically when you train in the fasted state, meaning you haven’t had any kind of fuel, any food at all, really no calories, for, you know, typically like 4 to 12 hours prior to working out. So let’s say you typically what most people do is they eat dinner, the night before they wake up in the morning, it’s been, you know, 12 hours, since they last ate, they might have a cup of coffee, and then they go and do a workout that would be considered training in the fasted state, they do a workout, they don’t use any kind of fuel.

And this is pretty, pretty effective. You know, this is a good way of ramping up, the fat burning is a good way of getting your body fat adapted. So fasting has lots of benefits and training in this state has many, many benefits, right? And please understand that fasting this way is like super normal and supernatural, it’s just kind of our natural state as humans.

One of the things I’ve heard recently, which I think is really fascinating is that the human body is designed to process digest, metabolize about two meals a day, you know, one to two meals a day is about all that we’re really supposed to be metabolizing because our pancreas can’t work more than that. And our liver has issues if we are processing more than that.

So the systems of the human body are naturally designed for eating a couple of times a day, and that’s about it. So fasting is really a natural state, again, burning fat and fasting very natural states for humans to be in, okay. But we’ve gotten away from that. We have to, you know, adhere to this three meals a day, plus eight snacks and dessert, you know, it’s like we’re eating 13 times a day or whatever. It’s ridiculous, right? We don’t need to eat that often. Right?

But so fasting, working out in the fasted state just means that you’re working out without added calories without fuel for that workout. Okay, so it helps you to get fat adapted, it helps you to stay fat adapted helps you to burn more body fat, no fuel coming in, means your body is prioritizing that stored body fat as fuel.

And the low carb approach and fasting like this and doing workouts in that fasted state all help to maintain the blood sugar like I mentioned earlier, they help to keep the insulin levels down, help to prioritize fat as fuel will help you to tap into that stored body fat as fuel. These are all amazing benefits of working out in that fasted state.

You know, the fasted workouts also help improve your fat burning efficiency. And even at higher intensities. So for most normal carb adapted athletes, you know, they’ll burn fat up to about 60-65% of their VO2 max and then they kind of start prioritizing just carbohydrates as fuel, they need carbohydrates fuel.

But as fat adapted athletes, we can actually push our fat burning up into the 75, 80 90% range. And there are some elite athletes who even go above 90% and fat burning, so 90% of their VO2 max. So this is like, massively cool, right? This is massively cool because we can not only burn fat at the lower intensities, but we are also really good at burning fat at the higher intensities, okay, so this is going to help you improve your higher intensity running is going to indefinitely improve your endurance more fat burning means you’re just going to be able to go longer without bonking, which is super amazing.

And then also training in the fastest state helps to improve your hormonal responses. So more adrenaline gets produced when you’re working out in the fasted state, which means you can go a little bit harder. It’s almost like a performance enhancing tool, you know, and then more growth hormone gets produced to help you recover faster from those workouts.

So this combination of you can go harder and recover faster is pretty awesome. And then people are like, well, yeah, so I want to do that all the time. But here’s the thing. Is it necessary or is it a good idea to always do all of your workouts in that fasted state? Yeah, there’s some great benefits to doing it. But it isn’t necessary to do it all the time.

So, I recommend people definitely train in that fasted state to build the fat adaptation and to really get efficient at burning fat. Okay, and this could take a couple of weeks or a couple of months. Again, we’re all an experiment of one. Everybody’s preferences are a little bit different. Some people love training in that fasted state, some people just don’t, they just don’t like doing it doesn’t feel good. I’ve heard people that kind of get sick when they train in the fasted state, they need some fuel, okay, great, then you’re the kind of person that would benefit from some fuel, okay.

But if you find that you, your workouts, maybe you’re taking a hit like you’ve hit a plateau in your fitness and you’re not improving, maybe you’re not getting faster, maybe you’re not recovering as quickly. Maybe your heart rate isn’t where you want it to be, it’s staying super high, you might want to consider adding in some fuel for your workouts, you know.

But I do love the idea of doing kind of the bulk of your training, especially at the beginning, in this fasted state, when you’re trying to get fat adapted, it just helps you to get through that initial phase, that first phase of getting your body trained to burn fat more efficiently. It really helps with that whole process. Okay?

So it’s a good way to begin, but it doesn’t mean you have to do it all the time. So how do you know like, when it’s time to add some fuel to your workouts, keep track of your workouts, log your workouts in a log or journal. Maybe you use an app. But you know, look at things like heart rate, pace, how you felt during that workout recovery time, you know, how long does it take you to recover? And then don’t be afraid to just try some fuel and see how it affects you.

Everybody’s a little bit different. So you got to try something and see if it works. If it does, great. If not, then try something else. And what kinds of fuel are we talking about here? Well, I just mentioned using carbs as fuel, so that’s always an option. But it doesn’t even have to be carbs. Because when you’re fat adapted, you can take advantage of using exogenous fat as fuel so fat that you eat, you know, fat and protein actually can work pretty beautifully as a fuel source.

Okay, so remember, we burn sugar first, and we can burn like fat that we get in our diet and then we kind of burn that stored body fat. So if we you know, don’t have carbs coming in, we’ll be able to take advantage of the some of the fat that we’re getting in our diet so we can actually use some fat as fuel before a workout.

And this might be as simple as putting MCT oil and heavy cream and some collagen in your coffee pre workout. That’s it. Like that could be how you fuel a workout. And remember all the brands that I mentioned above Muir energy, S-fuels you can they all have products for like pre workout, for during a workout, for post workout, they have bars that have fat and protein, you could do an hour before workout, they have drink mixes with fat and amino acids and electrolytes that you can do during a workout they have kind of a gel product that you can use during longer training runs.

And you could do those, you know, maybe they have 12 to 20 grams of carbs, you can do one every hour or so you know, and all these products. Again, they’re designed with the low carb athlete in mind, they’re designed to keep you in the fat burning mode to still prioritize fat burning, but give your body that little bit of extra energy that you need for those longer runs are those more intense workouts. So fat is fuel is a good approach and it’s something that you definitely want to try. And you might find that a little bit is all you need.

Okay, so again, like when should you start adding fuel and stop doing all your workouts fasted, again, just kind of play around with when you if your training is starting to tank a little bit or if you’re plateauing. But if you’re training for something like a marathon, and you’re up to 12 to 15 miles and you’re doing those fasted and you’re feeling pretty good, you might want to try you know, going forward from that point on, you might want to try fueling and see how it goes for you and try a couple of different products.

Try a couple of different fueling approaches, because here’s the thing, you don’t want to wait till race day right to try to fuel for your race. If you’re deciding you’re going to use fuel on race day. Don’t wait till race day to experiment with it; you have to play around with it ahead of time. You have to practice fueling strategies during your training, right? Nothing new on race day ever. Okay?

So that could be where you decide that feeling might be a good strategy for you. workouts that are over 90 minutes is a benchmark a lot of people use when they start to choose like maybe the fat protein combo for for the most part. And then as your intensity increases, your carb intake should increase as well. So the fuel sources, the carbohydrate, fuel sources can increase as your intensity levels increase, or even if you’re going super long, maybe you’re training for an ultra 50k 100k 100 miles, something like that, you’re definitely going to want to have, you definitely asked us fuel for something like that. And that that approach is going to be very different from what it looks like for, you know, fueling for a half marathon or something like that, right.

So, when it comes to fasted training, just remember, all or nothing, not always best. And really, what we’re going for with all of this is metabolic flexibility, we want to be able to burn both fat and sugar very effectively, right, we want to train our bodies to burn both fuel sources really well, so that we have the ability to use both types of fuel and improve our running, improve our fitness, improve our strength, improve our intensity, and become the badass runners that we know we can be okay.

So to do this does not mean that we have to do everything, all or nothing, it doesn’t mean we have to do all our training fast, it doesn’t mean we have to do zero carbs, it means we can use proper types of fuel and, and train fueled and, and use carbs in a very strategic way to help us and not hurt us. It doesn’t have to kick us out of fat burning mode, it doesn’t have to, you know, ruin what we’re doing here, right?

So, and as always, if you want some help with any of this or all of this, apply for coaching you and I will work closely together, we’ll put together a personalized plan for you. I’ll help you stay on track so you can achieve those goals so you can achieve your weight loss goals, your fitness goals, we can do it all cool. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply and I’ll see you over in the Running Lean coaching project. Alright, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.

If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.

139. Eating Healthy Is So Boring!

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I’ll bet you’ve thought about eating healthy at one point or another in your life and then thought, nah…that’s going to be way too boring. If this sounds like something you’ve thought (or even said …

Continue Reading about 139. Eating Healthy Is So Boring! →

Podcast Transcript

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 139 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, eating healthy is so boring. I bet that you’ve thought about eating healthy at some point in your life. And then you’ve thought, man, that’s going to be way too boring.

If this sounds like something you’ve thought or even maybe said out loud, then you are definitely not alone. People tell me all the time that they can’t stick to their food plan, or they don’t even want to start in the first place. Because it’s all going to be so boring. And I used to think this way too, but definitely not anymore. I’ve embraced the idea that food can be a little bit boring. If it means I get to live a long, healthy, happy life.

So today, I’m going to be talking about this big lie, this lie that eating healthy is boring. And how you might be able to radically improve your health by rethinking this by rethinking how exciting your meals really need to be. And as a licensed sports nutritionist, my focus is on food, it’s on nutrition, that’s like my number one focus, I want to help you make good choices I want you to I want to help you change your eating habits, I want to help you to change your body composition, to lose weight to gain muscle.

But really, what I want to help you with is to become the healthiest version of yourself to become healthy, fit and strong. So my main focus is on nutrition. This is the main driver of good health in my opinion. And I understand that you also want to crush your running goals. So this is where I’m a little bit different from other coaches.

So you might be training for a half marathon or a full marathon, or your first 5k. You know, maybe you’re just getting started with running. And lots of coaches out there will tell you that you cannot lose weight while you’re training for some race or while you’re running. You should stop running to lose weight. And I think this is ridiculous.

Okay, so for us, we, the people in my coaching program, we change our eating habits while we’re training for a marathon, lose weight feel better, running gets improved, our health is improved. And we do it all in a way that feels good for you. It’s not about severe caloric restriction, because we can’t do that when we’re training for a marathon. Right?

We’re not focused on counting calories and doing all this math about how many calories you should be eating because you ran this many miles, which means you burn this many calories and all that stuff, right? That’s just that’s too much. It’s ridiculous. That’s not how we do this, right? I do things differently.

I focus on helping you simplify nutrition, we don’t want to make it more complicated. And I want to help you change habits around food, simplify change habits, and make healthy eating just a way of life. It’s like it has to be part of who you are and what you do. Right. It has to be something you can do without a coach without me.

So the goal is to help you develop new habits, develop a new mindset. So that how you eat just becomes effortless. And it’s just what you do from here on out. So if you want help simplifying your nutrition, you know, maybe you’re ready to embrace the boring. I’ll talk about that more in a minute here.

And if you want a plan that also supports your love of running, then I want to encourage you to apply for my coaching program, you can just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply fill out a short application and we’ll talk about coaching. We’ll see if this is a good fit for you. Sounds good. I would love to have you in the Running Lean coaching project. That’s where the project is you.

Alright, let’s talk about how eating healthy is so boring. The reason I’m talking about this today is because I’ve had a lot of people say this to me recently. I’ve had clients, potential clients, I’ve had friends and family all tell me that they don’t want their food to be boring, and that some people haven’t even engaged in any type of, you know, change of their nutrition regimen, and they’re just thinking about it. And they’re just thinking about like, oh, I could never do that because it would be so boring.

Here’s the thing that is really just a thought. It’s a thought that you have in your head. And it’s a thought that stops you from making any kind of changes. And if you want something different for yourself, then you have to, like drop that thought that eating healthy is going to be boring, okay?

Eating healthy, can be fun, and can be sort of exciting. But if you think that it’s going to be boring, then you’re, that’s what’s going to be reality for you. If you think eating healthy, nutritious food on a regular basis is going to be boring, then that is your reality.

So I just want you to like embrace this idea that this idea of food being boring, is just a thought, okay, but it definitely is something that comes from somewhere. Right? So there’s this idea that food has to be exciting. Food has to be amazing. Every time we sit down to eat a meal, it has to be an experience to remember forever.

And really, this is all just marketing, right? This is all just marketing. It’s the big food companies that are coming together to market an idea to us. And the idea is this. The idea is that if you want to have an amazing, fulfilling, happy life, then every time you sit down to eat a meal, it has to be amazing. It has to be an entertainment experience.

Everything you eat has to be so delicious that you are compelled to post about it on social media. And there’s a term for these photos of food that make you drool and make you crave whatever food is in the picture. And they call it food porn, like porn. But for food, that’s kind of weird, if you think about it, okay. But this is what this is the term I didn’t make it up to this is the term that a lot of people use for this idea of posting all these pictures that make you drool and make you say, oh my gosh, I have to have that.

Another term for this feeling that you get is called euphoric recall. So you see a picture. And you remember how amazing the food was, and you remember an experience similar to that. So you may have eaten that exact thing, but it reminds you of something else that you’ve had. Or you can just be sitting around talking to friends and you can, you know, recall, this amazing meal that you had, or this amazing dessert that you had.

And it brings back all these thoughts and feelings of euphoria, like you start to feel amazing, your mouth will start to water and all you’re doing is just thinking about food. Right. And so this idea of euphoric recall, really, it’s a, it’s a mechanism that’s happening in our brains, where we are driven to remember very deeply and very vividly an experience.

And it’s a good evolutionary thing, because in the past, we may have, you know, encountered some berries or some honey as hunter gatherers, and we would, you know, eat that particular food. And we would want to remember that because it will be like, hey, this is a really good source of calories, or this is something that we can, you know, that is that tastes good. It’s delicious, it feels good. We want to remember that.

So your brain sort of locks that into your memory. But now we’re doing it about everything that we eat, and it’s becoming a problem. It’s becoming a problem, because people can’t even imagine switching their diet and eating a more healthy diet because they’re like, Well, what’s going to happen to all this amazing food that I remember, this is all just stuff that’s happening in your brain, by the way.

And food never used to be like this. Like this is a relatively new phenomenon. This idea of like food being so amazing, and there’s a meta or a scientific term for this. It’s called hyper palatable food. Hyper palatable means it’s uber uber palatable, like, like I mentioned, some berries, like you know, we’d find some wild blackberries, you know, as, you know, ancient hunter gatherers, and we’d be like, oh my god, this is so amazing, or fruits that we would find back in the day.

Now, those things have been engineered to become hyper palatable. And then there’s all these scientists that are actually creating hyper palatable foods in the lab, you know, and they really light up our pleasure centers in our brain, these foods light up our pleasure centers, just like alcohol, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines. And they know what they’re doing. They know that it’s going to give us a rush of dopamine, they know, it’s going to give us a high.

And we’re just buying into this whole idea. I’m gonna sound a little crazy here. But that, to me, this is very much like what drug dealers do, they want to get you hooked on their product. Because once they get you hooked on your product, you can’t stop thinking about it, you want to get that feeling again. You know, and they know what they’re doing, they put it right on the label, like once you pop, you can’t stop.

They know that we’re addicted to these hyper palatable, processed foods, and we can’t get enough of them. So the scientists that are creating these things are creating something that really, really lights up our pleasure centers. A lot of times even more so than those drugs I mentioned.

They did this experiment with rats, I think poor little rats, right? They’re always like experimenting on them. But they gave them a choice between sugar and cocaine. And over time, the rats preferred the high that they got from the sugar, so they would go for the sugar or the cocaine.

So when you talk about something that’s addictive, I mean, is sugar addictive? I mean, we crave it like a drug. We get hooked on it, like it’s a drug, we can’t stop thinking about it, and how amazing it is, like a drug. But they say it’s not a drug. And that’s okay. I mean, they can say that, but we sure act like it is. We sure buy more and more and more of this stuff, because we can’t stop eating it and are hooked on the product. We’re hooked on the quote unquote, drug. Okay?

If we stop, we’re gonna have withdrawal symptoms. I see this all the time, I help people get off sugar all the time, by the way. And when we stop eating sugar, our brains start to freak out. And we have withdrawal symptoms, we have headaches, and we feel nauseous, and we’re grumpy. And it’s just like coming off of other drugs like cocaine or alcohol. Right.

And if we stop just the idea, just thinking about stopping makes us feel like we’re gonna be missing out on all that good stuff. All that amazing stuff. Everyone else is having all these amazing experiences, how come I can’t. So just the idea of like, not eating sugar, kind of freaks us out. You know, food can’t be boring. I can’t live a boring life. Everybody else is having an amazing life. They’re living their best life. Thank you, Cheesecake Factory.

So they’ve created this product that really gets us hooked on their product. And when we think about not using the product, we feel bad. So we don’t want to give it up. And we were being sold this idea that food has to be amazing. And it has to be an experience. And if you’re the kind of person that’s like, hey, I just want to eat healthy food. I just want to live a long, healthy life, healthy life, right?

But we can’t even do that. Because we have sort of convinced ourselves or we’ve been programmed to think that it’s just going to be too boring. Eating healthy food and living a long happy life can’t do it. It’s going to be too boring. It’s going to be too boring. So we have this. We have a physical addiction to food. We have a mental and emotional addiction to food, or obsessing over food just like an addict obsesses over their particular drug of choice.

And we’re certainly acting much more like this as a drug than a food. So I just want you to know that if you’re feeling like you cannot make a change like this in your life, like you can’t stop eating, you know the junk food and you can’t stop going to Cheesecake Factory or whatever it is that you’d like to do. Because this idea of like, oh my life is going to be boring. I’m never going to be happy again.

I just want you to rethink that. Because you know food did not used to be like this. This is a recent thing in the last 50 years especially really the last probably 20 years since the Internet, this has really become this has exploded, right? This idea that food has to be amazing or whatever. But really in the last few 100 years, let’s just say, that’s really no time at all in this, you know, in the life span of humans.

So we hunted and gathered, we came together to celebrate with food. And we came together with our tribe and with our families, we socialized, we connected we bonded over food. It was nourishment, it was fuel as a source of life. It was something to be set to celebrate, you know, it was important. And nobody would ever say like, oh, God, this is so boring.

You guys, woolly mammoth again, geez, this is so boring. I know, it sounds kind of ridiculous. But that’s kind of where we are today with all of this, right. But again, this is all just a big lie. And you don’t have to believe it. You don’t have to buy into this idea that food has to be super exciting and that it has to be a source of entertainment. And every meal has to be amazing.

Food was pretty boring for like 2 million years of human evolution. Why all of a sudden does it have to be some amazing experience? Now, every meal doesn’t have to be an entertainment experience, it could just be a meal. And listen, would you rather experience a little tiny bit of short term pleasure now, or a lifetime of health and happiness in the future?

Because here’s what we’re doing, we’re choosing one over the other. When we choose short term pleasure, we’re choosing to feel good momentarily, we’re choosing the effect that the drug has on us. We’re choosing the dopamine hit that we’re going to get. And we’re choosing that. We’re forgoing our health or forgoing what makes us healthy human beings and what really is going to drive our fitness, our health, improve our running, all those things that we want for ourselves.

So we’re programming ourselves to choose short term pleasure over long term health and happiness. What if you just delayed that pleasure? Like, what if you just said, you know what, I’m not going to give in to the idea that I have to have something amazing right now, in this moment? What if we just forego the immediate pleasure, for feeling amazing for the rest of your life? Like, what if you did that?

And runners are kind of bad at this in general, I’m just going to say that because the typical runner’s diet is just bad, like lots of refined carbs, lots of sugar, lots of alcohol, really kind of the worst things you can do for your health. But they think that, hey, I’m a runner, so I get to eat and drink whatever I want. You know, I’m gonna drink like crazy. Like, if there’s anybody else, it’d be like, Hey, I think you might have a little problem with drinking. But no, it’s like, I’m a runner.

So it’s okay. And if this is working for you, you get to eat and drink whatever you want, as often as you want, as much as you want. Donuts, you know, all the refined carbs, tons of sugar, alcohol, whatever. Like, that’s all good. If this is working for you, more power to you. But I’m gonna tell you right now, it’s probably not gonna work for long. It’s probably not sustainable. If it is, and you’re that rare person that can just do that for your whole life, and you can stay super healthy. That’s amazing.

I don’t see that happening, especially as you get a little bit older. You know, once you get into your 40s, things start to change, things get a little bit different. And I’ve found myself running with friends on Saturday mornings, and we talk about food. And we’re talking about what we’re going to be eating when we’re done running and people will be like, oh, yeah, I can’t wait.

I’m gonna have this huge stack of pancakes and waffles and doughnuts and croissants and drink some beer. And I’m like, really, beer on a Saturday morning? And they’re like, yeah, what are you going to be eating Patrick? I’m like, bacon, eggs, yogurt, fruit, and they’re like, boring. And I’m like, Hey, listen, I’ve been there. I’ve done all that. I’m done with that now, though. I’m 55. And then the best shape of my life. I’m fine with my food being boring. You call it whatever you want. I enjoy it.

Can we just embrace boring, though? Can we just drop the idea that food has to be amazing? Can we just accept that our food can be a little boring? I teach my clients how to simplify their meals. Meaning that every meal doesn’t have to be different. Every meal doesn’t have to involve recipes, and shopping, and tons of ingredients and lots of time and effort to prepare.

And I really think we do ourselves no good by holding on to the notion that every meal has to be an experience for the ages. One of my favorite meals that I love to eat and I eat this a lot, is a grilled ribeye steak with sea salt. Here are the two ingredients. It’s a ribeye steak and sea salt. And I put some salt on the steak and I cook it on the grill, and then I eat it. And that’s my meal.

Sometimes I’ll do like some steamed broccoli on the side with some sea salt and lots of grass fed butter melted on there. Simple, delicious, effortless, two ingredients, almost no time to prepare. It’s simple. You can call that boring if you want to. I love it. And it’s so delicious. Boring does not mean it has to taste bad or it can’t be delicious. I love the simplicity of food these days.

Because when I eat food now I can really taste the flavors. Because I’m not making everything into this big ordeal, right? You can change your palate, your tastes will change over time. When you start to simplify, and you get off the hyper palatable foods and you start eating real foods, foods will start to taste much better than they ever have before.

So you could eat something like a plain chicken breast with salt and pepper on it. You’re like, oh my god, this is like the best thing I’ve ever had. And I never realized this until I stopped eating all the junk food. And when I stopped eating all the junk food, all that stuff that’s been designed to be like super, hyper delicious or whatever. All of a sudden, the simpler things just taste so, so good.

I think you know, we should still enjoy food. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying food should not taste good. And I’ve heard people say that food is fuel and it should just be fuel and you shouldn’t even enjoy it. And I’m like, no, we should enjoy food. We’ve been programmed to enjoy food, it’s what’s kept us alive for millions of years, if we didn’t enjoy food, we wouldn’t go back to it, we wouldn’t seek out nourishment when we need it. You know.

So I think food can be both simple, and delicious. I think food can be kind of boring, and still tastes amazing. So this isn’t about not enjoying ourselves or not enjoying food. I just think we have to get away from this idea that every food experience has to be amazing. Now I went out to dinner last night, and I had a steak and it had this kind of like South American sauce on it. And it was really delicious. It was really good. I really enjoyed it.

And every now and then I will go out to dinner. And I will do something that is a little bit more of an experience around food. And, you know, I might go out with friends or my girlfriend or something like that, and we come together and we can enjoy food. And we like I mentioned, you know, our ancestors would come and celebrate around food and it’s how we bonded and connected and how we grew closer together. And I still think we should do that.

But I think we can also simplify things. And that every food experience doesn’t have to be, you know, something amazing, right? Because when we have this idea when we have this thought in our head that every food experience has to be amazing, then, just the idea of changing our our nutrition plan, changing our diet is gonna seem just undoable, it’s just gonna seem too hard. It’s gonna seem too hard.

So, the idea that food has to be an experience, we just have to squash that idea. Start by simplifying food, make it simple. What can you do to simplify a meal? Stick with real food food that still looks like food. Try to stay away from anything that has a marketing message behind it right? So don’t be eating that stuff that’s been concocted in a lab to get you hooked on the food like an addict is hooked on the drug. Gotta get away from that.

Start to make better choices and start to simplify your food. And yes, it can be boring. Eating healthy can be boring, and it can be delicious. And it can improve your health and it can improve your fitness and it can help you improve your running all those things.

And remember, if you want help with this, if you want help simplifying your nutrition, you know maybe you’re ready now to embrace the boring and you want to be able to support your running performance reach out. I’m always always here for you. 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.

138. Is Alcohol Really Working for You?

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Podcast Transcript

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.

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.

135. The Benefits of Becoming Metabolically Flexible

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As a runner, you’ve probably been told that if you want to avoid hitting the wall, you need to consume a whole lot of one main fuel source - sugar. This approach does work for some, but for others …

Continue Reading about 135. The Benefits of Becoming Metabolically Flexible →

Podcast Transcript

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 135 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, the benefits of becoming metabolically flexible. As a runner, you’ve probably been told that if you want to avoid hitting the wall, you need to consume a whole lot of one type of fuel: sugar basically, right?

And this approach does work for some, but for others, it spells metabolic disaster leading to incessant weight gain, insulin resistance and a host of other health issues. If you fall into this latter category, you may want to consider becoming metabolically flexible. Metabolic flexibility means you’re able to use multiple fuel sources effectively, this approach will help you lose weight, run longer and run faster.

So in this episode of the podcast, you’ll learn exactly what metabolic flexibility is, you’ll learn all about the benefits of metabolic flexibility. And I’ll show you how to get started with it. And you have to understand something: metabolic flexibility is not a one size fits all type of solution.

Okay, this does not work the same for everyone. Everyone’s a little bit different. We all have our own goals, we all have our own metabolisms, we all have our own likes and dislikes. You know, we all have our certain food preferences, body types, genetics, all these things factor into how we approach nutrition from an athletic performance standpoint, and metabolic flexibility, you know, choosing different sources of fuel for different types of activities is going to be the same it’s going to, it’s going to be different for every individual.

Okay, this is one of the reasons why I created the Running Lean coaching project. This is my immersive coaching program. And in my program we work together. So I work with you as an individual to help you come up with a personalized plan that works for you. You want to become metabolically flexible, you want to become more efficient at burning fat, you want to, you know, lose weight, you want to get faster, you want to be able to run longer than you ever have before.

All these things require some level of metabolic flexibility is what we’re talking about on the podcast here today. But also, if you want to take things a step further, and you want a little help with this, then consider joining the Running Lean coaching project. And what we do together is that we will put together a plan that works for you. And that will help you to get to your individualized goals, whatever those are for yourself.

So it’s really about you becoming the best possible version of yourself, the healthiest version of yourself, the most badass version of yourself and making it last. This is about long term, sustainable results, not about quick fixes, okay.

So if you’re ready to lose weight, get stronger, run faster, run longer, then you’re ready for the Running Lean coaching project. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. You’ll fill out a short application, you and I will jump on a quick zoom call. We’ll talk about your goals. We’ll see if this is a good fit for you. I would love to have you join me in the Running Lean coaching project. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply. Put in your application and we’ll see you soon. All right on to the topic.

So what is metabolic flexibility? At its simplest, metabolic flexibility is your body’s ability to use whatever fuel is available to it at the time. It means that your body’s metabolism is flexible, the ability of your body to metabolize different substrates, meaning different types of fuel. So different types of fuel could be food that you just ate could be used as fuel. It could be fuel that is stored in your muscles like glycogen.

It could be fuel that is stored in your fat stores could be stored body fat that you use as fuel. And so for most people, and I’ll get into this in just a minute for most people, though, they are only using like one source of fuel, mostly that stored glycogen, okay? And we want to change that we want to be able to tap into multiple sources of fuel, the two main sources of fuel we’re going to be talking about.

And the two main sort of preferred fuel sources that your body prefers to use, especially for exercise, like running, are going to be carbohydrates stored in your body. So sugar is stored in your body as glycogen in your muscles, and fat that’s stored in your body’s fat cells. Okay, so these are the two preferred fuel sources that we love to use it we’re very well adapted at using.

So the science calls this glucose oxidation and fat oxidation, okay. And something you have to understand about, you know, fat burning or a sugar burning is that we are always burning both at the same time. So it’s never just one or the other. Or very, you’re always burning a little bit of one or the other, okay? But what we’re talking about here is, is maximizing the amount of fat or, or glycogen that you’re burning, okay, so it’s never an all or nothing when it comes to fat and glucose oxidation, you’re always burning both.

But for example, the longer you’re out there running, the more fat that you’re actually burning, your body will, you know, if you’re running at a lower intensity, you will start out burning more carbohydrate, but that fat oxidation will continue to go up. And so what’s nice about you know, being really well fat adapted, is that you can burn much more fat much more efficiently.

And you can run for longer and longer distances without having to, you know, refuel, because you’ve got plenty of fuel on board at all times. And if you are a fat adapted athlete, so if you’re a low carb athlete, and you’ve become fat adapted, then you can even run at higher intensities, and still be very efficient at using fat as your main source of fuel. This is one of the reasons why we get into fat adaptation.

It’s because we want to be able to burn fat very, very effectively for long distance running. But also we can get into some pretty intense running as well. So they did a study a while back, it’s called the faster study and you can look it up. And one of the things they did was that they found that for the most part, most athletes that are, you know, the carb adapted athletes, so just your standard athletes, not fat adapted athletes, that once they get over 65% of VO2 Max, that they they tend to stop burning fat and start burning, mostly carbohydrate. Okay. So this is the majority of people out there.

Once you get over 65% VO2 max, you’re burning mostly carbohydrates up to 65%. And you’re burning mostly fat. And this goes across the board for most people. With the faster study, they found that the fat adapted athletes could burn much more fat than the carb adapted athletes. So their peak fat oxidation was 2.3 times higher in the fat adapted group.

So over twice as much fat they were able to burn. And they found that they could increase their intensity and still be burning mostly fat so they could get up to 76% of their VO2 max and still be burning more fat than carbohydrate and really didn’t need the carbohydrates in order to the carbohydrates in the form of fuel in order to achieve those kinds of numbers.

So just understand that one thing I think people get into this idea of becoming fat adapted, and they think that they’re just burning fat, you know, and that’s it. That’s the end of the story. Or if you’re not fat adapted, you’re only burning sugar, you’re only burning carbohydrates.

And really, it’s not the case, you’re always burning both, okay? Just understand that. But as a fat adapted athlete, you can take advantage of your levels of fat oxidation, which are going to be much higher than the standard of carb adapted athlete. And it’ll give you a bit of an edge.

So why am I even talking about this? Well, I’ve been really on this kick this whole month about talking about ancestral living, you know, and what we’ve done as human beings for millions of years. And really, for since like 2.5 million years ago, to about 10,000 years ago, humans have been very metabolically flexible, we’ve been able to, to burn fat very, very efficiently, we’re able to take advantage of other types of foods when they were available to us, you know, think about, you know, times when certain types of foods would have been scarce, we had to have different types of fuel, and we had to be able to metabolize those different types of fuel.

So for example, when we would hunt and you know, eat meat, or we are eating things like fish and eggs, very dense, nutrient dense types of foods, we could eat, we could hunt and eat a lot of meat, you know, and share that with the group. And then we might go for days without food. So in that case, we are consuming fuel in the form of, you know, meat and animal protein. But then we would go days, without food, where we would be basically using our own stored body fat as fuel, right?

This is the way we are designed to operate as human beings. We are very efficient fat burning machines, we always have been. What has happened in the last 50-60 years is that we’ve gotten away from that? And we’ve gotten more into just relying on very quick sources of energy, like carbohydrate, like sugar, like grains, like really concentrated refined carbohydrates, refined grains, that kind of stuff.

And the problem with that approach is that we really well, there’s all kinds of problems with that approach. But from an athletic standpoint, we’re only using one source of fuel when we do that, we’re not able to take advantage of the fact that we are really efficient fat burning machines. Okay, so back in the day humans would eat sporadically, we would take advantage of the fact that we could find things like tubers and nuts and seeds and fruit and things like that. And we would be able to use those things as fuel as well.

So we became really good, really efficient at being metabolically flexible. It’s one of the reasons we’ve survived. Whereas a lot of other hominid type species did not, you know, because we were able to have that flexibility. Okay. And all I’m proposing here is that we get that back. That’s it. That’s all I’m saying.

And especially if you’re a runner, then you are absolutely leaving a lot on the table. If you’re not taking advantage of metabolic flexibility, you absolutely are leaving a lot on the table. Our bodies are well adapted to feast and famine. Our bodies are well adapted to a variety of fuel sources, especially using stored body fat as a fuel source. Most people do not do that. Most people, most people are good at storing fat, but not actually using it as a source of fuel.

But we humans, we are really good at burning fat. We’ve been doing it for millions of years, I just want us to get back to being really efficient at burning fat, okay. And as a runner, you absolutely want to be taking advantage of this virtually unlimited source of fuel that you have on your body. stored body fat is an amazing source of fuel. And I talk to runners every single day and I coach runners on how to become fat adapted every single day.

And I get a lot of skeptical runners out there. They’re like I just don’t see how this is possible. I don’t see how, you know, not taking in all these gels and stuff and sports drinks that I’ve been doing forever. I don’t see how I can possibly run without all that stuff. And then they do it. And then they’re pretty surprised at how amazing they feel, okay?

But it’s not about just doing just using that one source of fuel. This is the thing I want to kind of drill home here today is that metabolic flexibility means you can use multiple fuel sources. So yes, that does mean that you can use carbohydrates as a fuel source as well as fat. But most runners don’t take advantage of the fat side of things. They’re only interested in the carbohydrate side of things.

But why would you leave a tool on the table, so to speak, you know, why not become fat adapted and get really, really good at burning fat? And also, you can use carbohydrates strategically, in order to have that flexibility for different types of activities, different intensities of running different distances, all right.

The problem is that most people are just metabolically inflexible. So most people, especially here in the United States are eating the standard American diet. It’s interesting that the acronym for that is SAD because it’s a sad diet. It’s so sad, it’s making us sad, it’s making us unhealthy, or it’s creating a nation of sick, weak, unhealthy, overweight people.

And one of the issues with this is that it’s a very, very high carbohydrate diet. And it means that you have to rely on just one fuel source for energy. So if you’re a runner, and you’re eating the standard American diet, you are relying on one source of fuel carbohydrates for energy for running, and you’re not taking advantage of being fat adapted.

So that standard American diet with all the carbs, you might be eating six, seven times a day, you know, you are relying on one source of fuel and you need it, you need it every couple of hours, or else you’re going to crash and burn.

Not to mention you’ve got to carb load before running the night before you got to carb load before you get out there and run you got to carb up during runs. You’ve got to carb up after runs or else you’re going to crash and burn. And this might work okay for you for running like it might help to fuel your runs. And you might be okay with that.

But eating that much carbohydrate, especially eating every few hours, it does a few things. Not good things by the way. For example, It ramps up your cravings for more carbs. So you just want more and more and more of that same stuff, same sugary goodness, you know, it causes your body to keep storing a lot of that excess energy as fat in your fat cells.

And because you’re not fat adapted, you can’t really tap into that fat for energy. So you just keep storing more and more fat in those fat cells. It causes massive spikes and dips in your blood sugar, and therefore your energy levels throughout the day.

And you end up being hungry all the time you feel fatigued, you have these massive cravings for more sugary foods, more carbohydrates, you get what people call hangry because you’re hungry and angry at the same time. And really, it just causes a host of issues not just weight gain, but it can lead to things like insulin resistance, which means your body is producing so much insulin that your body has become accustomed to that much insulin and so it’s no longer bringing your blood sugar down the way it’s supposed to.

Which means your body just keeps storing more and more fat in your fat cells. And insulin resistance is something that causes type two diabetes, and it leads to gaining a lot of weight and obesity and things like that.

And not to mention that eating that standard American diet with all the carbs and you know, eating just a ton of carbs, especially for running means you’re going to be hitting the wall at some point during a long run because you’re going to crash and burn unless you keep the sugar intake coming in.

But even that can have all kinds of digestive issues, it can cause digestive stress, and a lot of people cannot handle that much sugar while they’re out there running. And so they end up just sort of like either having to find a portapotty or they end up just crashing and burning. And you’re hitting the wall.

So that’s kind of the problem with the way that most people do this thing, right? They’re not metabolically flexible. So they have to rely on one source of fuel only for running. And you end up running out of fuel, you end up with insulin resistance with weight gain, and with a host of other metabolic issues, right. So that is the way that most people do it.

And I’m just saying here, listen, there’s another approach that you can take and you can become more metabolically flexible, you can actually train your body to use fat and carbohydrate as your two main fuel sources. very effectively, you can do this very effectively. So here are some of the benefits of metabolic flexibility.

So first of all, you can tap into different fuels and use different fuels for different types of activities, more intense activities, you can increase your carbohydrate intake, you can use different types of carbohydrates, you can use, you know, very concentrated forms of carbohydrates. So you can use slow burning types of carbohydrates. And you can use carbs for long distance activities, or for higher intensity activities. But one of the benefits is that you have this flexibility, and you have the ability to use different fuels.

So as you get into that higher, you know, intensity exercise closer to 65-70-80% of your VO2 max, when your fat oxidation starts to go down, you can actually increase your carbohydrate intake. And in preparation for that, you’ve got to do it ahead of time. But you can increase your carbohydrate intake, and maintain high intensity levels, without as much carb intake as you would need if you were not fat adapted.

Okay, so that’s one amazing benefit, obviously, you’re gonna burn more fat. One of the biggest benefits here is that you burn fat very efficiently. And when you burn fat, you know you’re losing weight, it’s much easier to lose weight. If you become fat adapted, if you actually train your body to be a really efficient fat burning machine, right. And you use fat as a source of fuel for running, then you’re going to lose weight much easier, and you’re no longer going to be storing so much body fat, you’ll be burning that body fat. Okay, so losing weight becomes much much easier when you’re fat adapted.

You know, one of the other benefits is that you can improve your athletic performance not only running longer, but running faster again, because you can tap into different types of fuel, you’re not relying on just fat, or just carbohydrate as a fuel source.

One of the other things is that you become more insulin sensitive. So instead of becoming insulin resistant, your body becomes more sensitive to the effects of insulin, meaning your blood sugar’s will normalize, you won’t have those spikes, and crashes and blood sugars, you’re going to have more all day energy. So you’re going to have more steady energy throughout the day, which is amazing.

You’re going to be able to think more clearly because your brain uses fat as a source of fuel. So your cognitive function will be improved. You will sleep better at night, you will feel more rested when you wake up in the morning. And going forward with your weight management or weight maintenance. That becomes much much easier if you are metabolically flexible. It’s much harder if you’re relying on just carbohydrate as a fuel source, because it just it makes managing your weight much more of a challenge because then you have all these other things the insulin resistance and the weight, you know the storing body, storing of more body fat, and incessant weight gain and hunger levels and things like that.

So being metabolically flexible means that you have the ability to tap into multiple sources of fuel, and you have the ability to improve your athletic performance and just become this amazing fat burning machine as well as having the ability to use carbohydrates as fuel.

One thing a lot of people one mistake a lot of people make when they become fat adapted is they don’t regularly use carbohydrates as a fuel source for certain athletic endeavors. And you got to kind of train yourself to use carbs as well as you know, your stored body fat as fuel, you don’t want to just become fat adapted and wait six months, and then, you know, try carbs for a race, because your body at that point is so used to using fat as fuel. It’s not really used to having that carbohydrate glycogen stored as fuel the way that it used to when you were carb adapted.

So you have to actually train yourself to become more carb adapted as you get into some of the more intense running and things like that. So that’s just something to keep in mind. So how do you do this? How do you become more metabolically flexible?

There’s a couple things you can do to get started, number one, is getting fat adapted, this is really important. So you gotta get your body burning fat more efficiently. And most runners just don’t do this. Right. So you got to get off the sugar, you got to get off the refined grains and things like that, and start training your body. To use fat as a fuel source, one of the easiest ways you can do this is just train in the fasted state.

Don’t eat anything before you run, like let’s say you run in the morning, don’t eat anything after dinner the night before, you know, just get out there and start running in that fasted state. And that will force your body to start using stored body fat as fuel. And of course, you have to lay off the carbs too, that’s going to kind of hinder this process.

But getting fat adapted is one of the best things you can do to become more metabolically flexible, because now you’ve taken advantage of this fuel source that most runners are not using. Okay. The other thing you can do to become more metabolically flexible, is to exercise regularly. And you gotta do it the right way, you have to be doing both aerobic type exercises. So long distance running would fall into that category beautifully, right.

But also you have to include some form of high intensity exercising, so something like weightlifting or HIIT training, or sprinting, all those things are going to help increase that intensity that you’re putting on your, your systems, you know, your muscles, your aerobic system, you’re, you’re gonna help to increase your lactate threshold and things like that. All those things will help you to become more efficient at burning fat and help you to become more metabolically flexible. Okay.

So getting fat adapted, and then doing both aerobic type of exercise and higher intensity, shorter duration, but higher intensity exercises, is going to kind of kick things into gear for you there. Okay? So think about this this week, I want you to think about becoming more metabolically flexible. There’s so many reasons why you want to do this. You don’t want to be doing things the way that most people are doing things. Because the way most people are doing things does not work. It does not work for the majority of us, okay?

And if you’re one of those people, and you find yourself wanting to lose some weight, and you find yourself wanting to improve your running performance, and you find yourself not wanting to rely on all the carbs and having all the negative things that go along with that thing, consider becoming fat adapted, and taking advantage of that metabolic flexibility that we as humans have developed over millions of years. Let’s just get back to that. Cool. All right, that’s all I got for you this week. Love you all, keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.

If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.

132. Ancestral Eating to Improve Health & Fitness

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If there’s one sure-fire way to make sure you stay unhealthy and die early it’s eating the modern, westernized diet. We’ve gotten very far away from eating the way our ancient ancestors ate and …

Continue Reading about 132. Ancestral Eating to Improve Health & Fitness →

Podcast Transcript

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 132 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, ancestral eating to improve health and fitness. If there’s one surefire way to make sure you stay unhealthy, and most likely die early, is to continue eating the modern westernized diet.

We’ve gotten very far away from eating the way our ancient ancestors ate, and it’s causing us irreparable harm. Chronic lifestyle diseases like obesity, type two diabetes, heart disease, and stroke are all linked to an unhealthy diet. And these afflictions were virtually non-existent in ancient populations for two and a half million years, humans evolved beautifully on a very simple diet.

So if you want to take control of your health and become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself, and I know you do, then you might want to consider following in the footsteps of your ancestors.

So in this episode, I’m going to break it all down for you to explain how ancestral eating can dramatically improve your health and fitness. And listen, I understand that getting healthy, losing weight, maintaining your weight, training for marathons, and changing your diet and trying to fit all this stuff in becoming the strongest version of yourself and the healthiest version of yourself.

All this stuff is complicated. There’s a lot of confusing information out there. And this stuff is not easy to do on your own, becoming the healthiest and most badass version of yourself. It takes time. It takes discipline, it takes consistency, it takes knowing what to do and how to do it. And this is everything that I do in the Running Lean coaching project.

This is my coaching program that gives you all the knowledge, the support, the accountability that you need, in order to reach your goals to improve your health, to get leaner, to get stronger, to run faster, to run longer. And to do it in a way that is sustainable. We are not about quick fixes.

In the Running Lean coaching project, we are about long term health and fitness, creating new habits that last for life. And this is about longevity more than anything else. It’s about improving your health, improving your fitness, improving your athletic performance, so that you can stay strong and healthy and live longer. Don’t you want to live longer? Yeah, absolutely.

I know, we all want that for ourselves, we all want to become healthy, we all want to live longer, we all want to, you know, become the most badass version of ourselves. Not many people are willing to do the work to get there, though. So that’s why I’m here to help you. If you’re feeling compelled to change your health for the better, and to do it in a way that is sustainable, then I want to encourage you to apply to join the Running Lean coaching project, you can go to my website, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply, fill out a short application, you and I will jump on a call and we’ll see if this is a good fit for you.

You know, it’s not for everybody. And I talk to people every single day. And a lot of people are like, you know, I’m just not sure if this is right for me. And that’s totally fine. You have to be willing to commit, you have to be willing to kind of get uncomfortable and do some hard things. Because what you’re doing right now feels good, it feels comfortable, but it’s not working for you.

So in order to change we need to do some things we need to get out of our comfort zone. Getting out of your comfort zone is by definition uncomfortable. So I’m here to help you with that process. If you want that kind of help, if you’re looking for that kind of help, if you want to improve your health and make it last, join the Running Lean coaching project that’s runningleancoaching.com/apply. I would love to have you join me in the Running Lean coaching project.

Alright, let’s get into this topic today: ancestral eating to improve health and fitness. So why am I talking about this today? Well, there’s been a lot of talk out there and a lot of concern about some of these like crazy fad diets that people are doing right. There’s the South Beach diet and then there’s Weight Watchers and there’s Jenny Craig and there’s like keto and carnivore and paleo.

And all these other things that are for the most part, newer kind of diets based on you know, more modern research and, and some modern studies and things like that, but they’re pretty new. They’re pretty new there. And a lot of these are based on calorie restriction and trying to, you know, they’re focused on losing weight and things like that. And, and a lot of this stuff is, is really eating in a very modern, very new kind of way.

Okay, so the thing I want to bring to you today and the big, you know, the big sort of message that I want you to take away from this episode today is that when we engage in ancestral eating, we’re talking about doing things, the way we used to do them a long time ago.

And for millions of years, and you know, humans have evolved over the last two and a half million years, we evolved eating a certain type of diet. And we have gotten very far away from that diet. So what we’re eating today as human beings, is crazy compared to what we used to eat, for the vast majority of those two and a half million years.

And if you think about the way that we did things, we were more like wild animals of today than we are, you know, these modern thinking humans that we are in this modern society that we live in, in all the comfort and all that, you know, we’re more like wild animals, think about animals in the wild today, there’s no obesity.

In the animal kingdom out there outside of domesticated animals, there are obese dogs, I’ve seen people with dogs who are wildly overweight. And that’s because they’re, they’re eating a diet that wasn’t made for dogs, right? They’re eating a lot of grains. A lot of these dog foods have additives and they’re full of grains and things like that, that make dogs gain weight. Don’t feed your dog that stuff. Give it dog like real dog food, what do dogs eat? Meat mostly, right?

But think about animals in the wild. Today, there’s no heart disease, there’s no cancer, there’s no obesity, you know, there are some issues here and there. But for the most part, that stuff is non existent, that stuff is non existent. And why? Because those animals in the wild are eating a diet that is specific for them, they’re eating an animal specific diet, we want to go back to doing that.

So all these new diets that you see out there today, most of them are based on, you know, modern, you know, modern studies and, and modern ways of thinking about food, and nutrition. And my suggestion is we just kind of ditch all that BS, and just go back to doing things, the way we’ve always done them as human beings.

You know, think about us more like wild animals. You know, when you eat an animal specific diet, you thrive, all the animals out there in the animal kingdom that are eating, they don’t eat food that is not designed for them. They just don’t. You know, elephants are vegetarians, they eat grass, and whatever leaves and things like that.

And, you know, we don’t you don’t see elephants, you know, going off and eating a bunch of meat and you don’t see and vice versa. You don’t see cows, or I’m sorry, you don’t see lions snacking on grass and stuff. Like, they don’t eat that stuff, right? They eat an animal specific diet. Have you ever seen an obese lion? No, the lion doesn’t need to snack during the day because it eats the right kinds of food, and then it fasts. It doesn’t need to eat after it eats.

So I was looking this up. And I think this is really fascinating. Lions eat like every three or four days. And they need an average of about 11 to 15 pounds of meat every day. And lions can go without food for more than a week. And then they can eat up to 110 pounds of meat at a time. That’s crazy. I mean, that’s the way I feel. Sometimes I could do that. Right?

But that’s almost a quarter of their body weight. And they can eat that all at once. And then they don’t need to eat for another 3-5-7 days. So you know, lions don’t need to be snacking on food during the day because they’re getting all the nutrition that they need from eating those few times a week. It’s very interesting, right?

So, you know, when we snack as human beings, we’re doing it because we are eating the wrong diet and the diet that we’re eating is jacking up our hunger signals. It’s making us feel hungry all the time. When we eat food, it’s not filling us up. It’s not giving us the nutrition that we need. It’s not triggering the sensors to say, hey, you’re full, you know.

A lot of carbohydrates will do that, they will make you feel like you are constantly hungry, and you need to eat more. But then you eat more of that same type of food and you’re still hungry. It’s all messed up, just doesn’t doesn’t work, right. It’s not designed for humans that carbohydrates are really not designed for human consumption. We’ve, you know, we can eat that stuff. And it’s okay, you know, it gives us some nutrition, you know, a little bit of nutritional value, but not a lot, but it causes more harm than good.

So, when we live more like wild animals, we are going to see improved hormonal responses, we’re going to see food, we’re going to eat food that makes us feel full when we eat it, it’s going to satisfy us for longer and then there won’t be a need to snack between meals. So let’s just get off these foods that really aren’t designed for human consumption. I’m mainly talking about sugar, grains, seed oils, processed foods, that kind of stuff, right? And live more like our ancient ancestors did.

Now I’m not talking about, you know, sleeping in a cave, you don’t have to sleep on the ground in the dirt, you can still sleep in your big comfy bed with all the extra pillows, all the unnecessary pillows.

Why do we do that? By the way, here’s a little sidebar, but I have pillows on my bed that every night before I go to bed, I take them off, and I set them aside. Do you guys do that? Isn’t that weird? Why do we do that? Why do we have extra pillows? Anyway, just think about that every day when I’m taking those off my bed? Why do I have these extra pillows that I don’t use?

Anyway, but you don’t have to sleep in the dirt, you can still shop at Whole Foods. You can buy, you know your groceries at the grocery store, you don’t have to go hunt your own food or anything like that. That’s not what I’m suggesting here. What I am suggesting is that we go back to eating a proper human diet.

What happens when you feed a cow, which normally would just eat grass? What happens when you feed a cow grains? You know, they get fat, right? Have you ever seen grass fed, grass finished meat at the grocery store? If you see it, take a look at it, you’ll notice something in it, there’s very little fat in there, that muscle meat is like just red, there’s not those big streaks of fat in there.

And then look at the grain finished or grain fed grain finished meat and you’ll see that it’s very fatty. So when you feed cows grains, they get fat. This same thing happens to humans, when you feed us fat. Or I’m sorry, when you feed us grains we get fat. We store lots of that energy as fat that we’re eating from grains and sugars.

So if you want a surefire way of fattening yourself up like we do with cows then just eat a high carbohydrate diet. Right? I mean, this is just science, just the way it works. Okay. So my proposition here, my suggestion here is just to go back to doing things the way we used to, for two and a half million years of evolution. It’s not some new, weird fad thing.

Let’s just go back to eating the way we always have been eating. So how does this improve our health? Well, when we eat the proper human diet, we keep our blood sugar low. So we’re not eating foods that spike our blood sugar like crazy. We’re not eating foods that cause an insulin spike, which causes us to stay in that fat storing mode.

If you’re eating a lot of sugar and carbohydrates, you’re constantly storing energy as fat, you’re never giving your body a chance to tap into that stored body fat as a fuel source. You know, going back to our lion example, that lion is really good at, you know, consuming large amounts of food, and then going for days and you know, up to a week at a time with nothing. And they do that because they’re able to burn fat very efficiently.

We do the same thing as human beings, we’ve evolved to be really efficient fat burners, and we’ve gotten away from them. Because we’re constantly eating a diet that keeps us storing fat and doesn’t allow us to sort of lock that fat in our fat cells.

You know that insulin will, you know, when insulin is high when insulin is present, locking up that fat in our fat cells and not allowing us to tap into it as a fuel source. When we change the diet, we become more fat adapted, we’re able to tap into that stored body fat and not only lose the weight, but we have this amazing all day energy.

So one of the best ways that eating ancestrally will help you improve your health is that it improves fat burning. So you keep your blood sugar low, keep insulin low. Have all your hormones get balanced, you know, and we’re talking about hormones like leptin, and ghrelin.

Ghrelin is the hunger hormone, and it gets jacked up and it gets really elevated when you are eating a high carbohydrate diet. Leptin is the is the satiety hormone. When you have leptin, leptin is present, that means, you know, leptin gets released when you are full. So if you eat a big ol ‘steak, by the time you’re done with that steak, you’ve got leptin present and you’re full, it says, hey, don’t eat any more, you’re full. Carbohydrates do not trigger that leptin response, so you stay hungry.

So ghrelin, the hunger hormone is increased, which means you’re gonna be hungry, and then leptin is suppressed, which means you’re not going to feel full. This is a bad combination, if you’re trying to lose weight, right? If you’re trying to improve your health, you’re just going to be storing and storing more fat, right? So we don’t want that, we want our hormones balanced. We don’t want our hormones all jacked up.

Okay, so eating the proper human diet will reduce inflammation, it will reduce bloating, it will reduce the water retention, it’ll improve fat burning and helps you balance your hormones and then helps improve athletic performance. When you’re an efficient fat burner, you can run for longer periods of time.

So endurance improves, you know, your adaptive hormones are working the way they’re supposed to. So when you work out when you do a hard workout, you will improve, you know more quickly, your strength will improve the intensity of your workouts can improve, your recovery improves because you’re you’ve reduced inflammation so you can work out harder, and you can recover faster, you can work out harder because more adrenaline is being produced.

Some other ways that eating the proper human diet, eating ancestrally can improve your health is you’ll sleep better, you’ll have more energy throughout the day. You’ll have more vitality, more longevity, live longer and improve body composition. So there’s all these amazing health benefits of eating ancestral eating the proper human diet. Okay.

So how do we do it? Like what do we do? So the first thing I would say is like, let’s just get off of all these modern processed foods, you know, Franken foods, foods that are like, you know, super processed, they don’t look like food anymore. Right? Shop the areas of the grocery store where you buy meat, and eggs and produce, dairy. Stay away from all the packaged foods right?

Stay away from sugar and seed oils and liquid calories. Stay away from refined grains and anything that would be considered like hyper palatable foods. And those things contain all those things I just mentioned, which will be sugar, refined grains, and seed oils, like hyper palatable foods or foods that have been manufactured in a laboratory to be extremely delicious and make you basically addicted to them. Okay.

So we want to eat what our ancient ancestors ate: meat, eggs, fish, fruit, dairy, some honey, some vegetables, like tubers, and other vegetables that are not super high in carbohydrates. So it’s a very simple way of eating, it’s not complicated. And our ancient ancestors ate the whole animal that ate nose to tail.

One of the best things you can eat, one of the best things you can eat as a human being, one of the most nutritious things and most nutrient dense things you can eat on this planet would be liver, and organ meats, but I have to tell you that I cannot eat that stuff. I don’t like it. I don’t like the way it tastes. So instead, I use a supplement. So I use a beef organ supplement that I take and you know, this is kind of my equivalent of, of eating nose to tail, okay?

And if you’re vegetarian or vegan or something like that, you know, you don’t have to eat animal products, and you can still eat very much like our ancient ancestors. Right? But here’s the thing, like what is the way we evolved as human beings. All I’m suggesting is that we go back to doing what we’ve always done. The way we’re eating today in this modern westernized world is very, very different today than it was 100 years ago, or 500 years ago, or 5000 years ago.

And for the vast, vast majority of human existence, we ate very simply we ate animals. We ate some fruit and eggs and fish and some dairy. And we just did not go to town. on sugar and refined grains, this is a new thing. And what if we just, you know, eliminated that stuff from our diet? How would you feel, I wonder? I think you’d feel pretty amazing.

And then people always ask me, but what about this, Patrick? What about that and just fill in your favorite cheat meal or treat, you know, fill in pizza ice cream, you know, whatever it is that you love gummy worms, you know?

What about this? And what about that, you get to decide what you do for yourself, right? And this all depends on your goals, you know? So I always tell people, like, let’s try to follow the 90/10 rule, right. The 90/10 rule states that 90% of the time, I’m just gonna stick to my plan. And that means that about once a week, I might have a meal one meal a week that is a little bit different, you know, it’s a little bit off that very simple ancestral eating plan.

You know, I had dinner with my girlfriend last night, and we went to an Indian restaurant, and I ate some rice. That was my way of sort of saying, like, okay, I’m gonna eat some rice tonight. Like, it’s not crazy. It’s a grain. And I have to be honest with you, I don’t feel good today. I don’t feel good today. And I’m thinking to myself, like, why do I do this? I feel much better when I stay on track. And so do most of my clients. We feel so much better when we just stay on the plan.

But every now and then, it just seems like a good idea. Or it seems like it would be no big deal. And yet, it kind of moves us away from our goals a little bit, right? And it tends to be all about comfort versus discomfort, like what are we willing to do in these situations, to stay comfortable? What are we willing to do to keep moving in the direction of our goals? Is this choice I’m about to make here at this moment, going to move me closer to my goals or further away from my goals?

What am I feeling in this moment that makes me think I want to make this choice? Is it FOMO, fear of missing out? Is it wanting to fit in and be normal and do what everybody else is doing. And I say, let’s be abnormal, let’s get uncomfortable. Because the norm is being overweight. The norm is feeling sick, most of the time, the norm is being sluggish and feeling out of shape and not having energy and dying early.

Dying early has become a thing. And like in 2020, the average life expectancy in the United States went down 1.5 years, this is the largest one year decline since World War Two. We are not getting healthier, living longer, that’s starting to go the opposite way. This is not a good thing. Think about this.

I follow a lot of doctors and I hear them. I listen to podcasts and stuff where they’re talking about, you know, longevity and health and fitness and diet and exercise and all these things. And I hear all these doctors talk about how they never see obese 90 year olds, you know, people that live to be 90 plus years old, are not obese, because they don’t live that well. And the people with all these chronic diseases are living or not living as long as our ancestors did, you know, even 100 years ago.

So we’ve got to be concerned about this. Right? Now, I understand that ancient humans didn’t live as long as we do now. They, you know, would you know, die of certain types of viruses and things like that, which, you know, we live longer now because of modern medicine, for sure.

But the fact that we have access to all this modern medicine, and yet we’re choosing to live a lifestyle that is killing us earlier, this is not a good thing. It’s not a good thing, right? The food that we’re eating a lot of times is more like a drug than it is fuel for our bodies. Especially carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are addictive.

There are people who cannot moderate carbohydrate intake. I’m not one of those people. If I start eating sugar, it’s hard for me to stop. And when you look at the definition of what a drug is, a drug is something that is a substance that is not necessary for human existence for human health and carbohydrates fit that category.

Fat is necessary for human health. We have to eat fat or we will die. Protein is necessary for human health, we have to eat that or we will die. Those two things are called essential nutrients. We have to get those in our diet. Our body does not produce those things. We have to eat them.

Carbohydrates are not an essential nutrient. We don’t have to eat carbohydrates. Your body produces the glucose it needs. It takes some of the protein you eat, it turns it into glucose, the process in your liver called gluconeogenesis. And this is just something that we have to understand. I’m not saying don’t ever eat carbohydrates, I’m just saying they’re, they’re not necessary for human health.

Okay, so the definite definition of a drug is something that is not necessary for existence. It’s something that when you eat it, or ingest it, or smoke, or drink it or whatever, it gives you an instant reward. It lights up your dopamine centers, your pleasure centers, and releases dopamine and oxytocin and serotonin and endorphins and all that stuff, right.

So you get this buzz from eating or drinking or whatever. So it’s not necessary for human health, it gives you a reward, and then it causes harm in excess. So in excess, eating carbohydrates will cause negative consequences. If there’s no harm from the substance, there’s no addiction. Right? So people that drink alcohol, if you drink, moderately, if you drink, have, you have one glass of wine twice a week or something like that, and you can just put it down. There’s no addiction there. Right, because it’s not causing negative consequences.

But if it does, when you are in excess, when it does cause negative consequences in excess, that’s a drug. And that’s something that’s an addiction, that’s an addictive behavior. And then another criteria is if you try to control your intake, and you cannot, so the absence of control is, you know, means that there’s some addiction happening there, too. Right? Once you start, you can’t stop.

And for a lot of us eating sugar is our once we start eating it, we can’t stop. It’s the definition of addiction, right. And also, another criteria is that there’s a dysfunctional way of managing emotions. So this becomes an emotional management strategy. People use drugs like nicotine, alcohol, and things like food, especially carbohydrates, sugar, to manage their emotions, they just want to feel better.

So instead of dealing with the actual emotions they are experiencing, they eat this food that makes them feel good. And it’s impossible to get obese from eating food. You cannot get obese from eating real food. You can only get obese by eating carbohydrates by eating drugs. Like if you just ate an ancestral human diet. I mean, you might get overweight, you might gain some weight. But you know, a lot of that might be muscle weight. You might get a little bit overweight, but you’re not going to become obese.

You can’t get morbidly obese from eating real food. You only get that when you’re eating, you know, drugs, essentially. Okay? Food is not addictive. You don’t get addicted to eating steak and broccoli. You don’t. Carbohydrates are very addictive, though. Right? So we want to get off of the food as a drug and start eating the way our ancestors have eaten for millions of years. Just eat real food, food that still looks like food.

And listen, I get it, you probably have a million questions about stuff and everybody wants to complicate things, I’m trying to simplify things I want to simplify my life. I want my dietary choices to be so simple, I don’t have to think about it, I don’t have to make some extravagant meal with all these recipes and ingredients and things like that. Every meal does not have to be an amazing entertainment event.

Every now and then I will go out and have a nice meal in a restaurant. And I enjoy that I had a nice meal last night and I enjoyed that, you know, maybe overdid it on the rice a little bit. But besides that, you know, I can do that every now and then it’s fine. But for the most part for like 90% of the time, the way I eat is extremely simple. And it makes me happy. Eating a steak, or a big piece of salmon at night for dinner makes me happy. I look forward to it. And I might have a little bit of Greek yogurt with a little berries afterwards. You know, it’s like a little treat or something.

But this is all real food. This is all food our ancestors would say oh yeah, I guess I know what that is. We’ve been eating that for millions of years. Patrick, that’s cool. This cannot be simpler. We want to make things very, very simple. Go back to the simple ways of living our lives. Go back to those simple ways of eating and see how it might improve your health. Like what would it look like if you started living more like our ancient ancestors?

If you started eating more like your ancient ancestors, you know what if we all got off the addictive substances, alcohol, nicotine and carbohydrates you know, what if we just simplified? What if you improved your health? What if you got leaner and stronger? How would that feel for you? What if we all live to be 100 years old? Because we are so healthy and strong, going into old age? And you know, these diseases of lifestyle were no longer a thing?

And what if we modeled that for our kids? And what if they modeled that for their kids?
Think about the impact we can make in this world. Not to mention how badass you’re going to feel when you PR your next marathon. Because you’re so lean and you’re so strong, and you’ve improved your health, you’ve improved your athletic performance.

Or imagine how amazing you’re going to look in that bikini next summer because you’ve improved your body composition, you’ve lost the fat weight, you’ve gained the muscle weight and you feel amazing and you look amazing. Just imagine what that might look like for you. Alright, 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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