All right, everybody, welcome back.

So today we're going to talk about something that I bet you've done a thousand times, and you've always wondered why you do it. We're talking about why you can do so good all day long. You can hold it together. You can eat right. You can be on your A game. And then somewhere around, let's say, 8:00 or 8:30, sometime around the evening, it all just goes straight to hell and you're eating your face off.

So what I want to tell you right now, before we even get into all this, is that the reason this happens to you is not because you don't have willpower. I want to say that again. This is not a willpower issue happening to you at night. It is not because you're weak when the evening comes, that you lack some discipline. I'm just telling you right now, there is nothing wrong with you. It's not like everybody's got some kind of magic formula figured out and you don't. That is not what's happening at all when this happens.

And I think by the time this podcast is over, you are going to see your evenings in a whole new way. And you're probably also going to feel a lot of relief because you're going to know what's actually going on to create this phenomenon of, I do good all day and then I'm just blowing it all at night.

So recently, I was working with one of the No BS women on my Sunday coaching calls. So I do a weekly coaching call where I spend a couple of hours with my members, calling them up one by one. And we are just talking through shit that gets in the way of them losing weight. I want to tell you about her because she's probably a lot like you.

Now, this particular client, she is in her 40s. She's got kids. She's got a job. She also happens to be a single mom. Now, what might feel familiar to you is this: she has a lot going on. She has a lot of people who need her.

So you may be in your 60s taking care of your parents who are sick or they depend on you. And you're also helping out your grown-ass kids. You've got a partner that you take care of. You've got grandkids. Basically, you are the person who feels like she's got a lot going on. You've got too much on your plate. You're at a time in your life where you feel like your days aren't really your own. And it's like you wipe everybody's ass and you barely have time to wipe your own.

So back to my precious client. We were talking, and she described her days like this. She said, “Well, Corinne, I get up in the morning. I've got to get the kids ready for school. Everybody needs to get fed and dressed. And we are rushing out the door every single day. I'm barely getting myself to work.”

When she's there, she is working so hard all day long. She happens to be the person that lots of people depend on. Like, I just want you to think about this. If your family depends on you, you're probably also the clutch person at the job too. So when she's at work, she's worn out.

And then when she comes home, the second she walks in the door, guess what? It ain't me time and bubble baths. When she walks in the door, she is right back to it. She is taking care of the kids. She's making dinner. She's making sure homework gets done. Everybody's got to get a bath. The lunches for tomorrow have got to get made. Basically, she's just working, working, working, working.

So from the moment her feet hit the ground in the morning until she sits down at night, she feels like she is on the go. So she said to her, it just feels like her day never really stops. Like, she doesn't really get a break. So from the moment her feet hit the floor in the morning to about 8:30 at night, somebody needs something from her every single minute.

And then about 8:30, she's got her kids in bed. Everything's taken care of. And so she told me that the biggest problem she has is she just wants to pass out on the couch, and she is exhausted. And she said the second she sits down on the couch, all she wants to do is eat every single night. And her particular thing that she wants to eat is candy. She keeps candy in the house because she knows every single night she's going to be hitting the candy.

So I asked her, “Well, why candy, and why at night? Like, what's really going on here?”

And so she said something that I want you to really hear because I think a lot of women actually feel this way. She is not alone in this. She looked me in the eye, because we're on a Zoom call, and she said, “Corinne, it's the only fucking me time I get all day. I don't know any other way to relax and feel good.”

And she was serious. And I will tell you, there were little tears shed too. So that is the only time of the day that she's getting.

Now, when most people hear this, they are going to think, well, she just needs a better way to relax at night. Like, very often my women will go into the Facebook group and they will say, “I'm having a really hard time not eating at night. Tell me things I can do to relax.”

And of course everybody comes flying in, and they're just like, “Oh my God, girl, try a bubble bath.” “Oh my God, don't you have a hobby? Let's start up a hobby.” “What about tea? A nice delightful cup of hot tea, snuggling up with a book.” Now, that all sounds great. It sounds like the trite-ass advice most of us get. And then some people even say, like, “Well, you should just go to bed. If you'll just go to bed, then you won't eat.”

And I will just tell you, I have watched it a million times. This is the exact kind of bullshit advice that rarely works. If hot tea, bubble baths, hobby time, and reading on the couch would work, don't you think all of us bitches would already be doing it? Of course we would. But there is a reason why this stuff isn't working. And if you don't know it, you will never be able to conquer this problem.

So in fact, just this week I was working with another client inside the Facebook group. We were just talking back and forth, and she said, “I keep trying to read at night instead of eat, but in that moment I don't ever want to do it.” And she said the key phrase that I bet you think all the time: “Reading doesn't feel as good as eating.”

All the shit everybody tells us that we should be doing at night, guess what? It doesn't hold a candle next to eating candy. Now, I'm just being truthful. If you disagree, write in and tell me. Now, I'm not saying that some of you have conquered nighttime eating and figured it out and you've got you a new thing and stuff, but there's something else happening in between not eating and the new routine that everybody misses. And that's one of the things that we're talking about today.

So there's a good reason why this type of bullshit, I-could-scroll-Pinterest-or-Instagram-and-find-a-meme advice, doesn't work. It's because it doesn't help with what's really going on.

When a woman tells me eating is the only way she knows how to feel good, here's what I hear. Underneath that is that the way she's talking to herself on the inside all day long sounds like a bitch or an asshole talking to her. A bitch or an asshole. There's pressure behind all this bitchy-ass talk. Often, a lot of worry and angst is layered in there.

The big problem is my client, she doesn't even know that that's even happening. She doesn't realize that the internal bitch is going ham on her all day long, wearing her out on top of just life wearing her out. She doesn't realize that the way she talks to herself is setting her up to actually need candy at night, not want candy at night, but to need it. That is a big distinction I need you to hear.

If all you did was just want some candy, most of us would be able to tell ourselves no. We'd be able to reason with ourselves. We'd be able to tell ourselves, “Oh my gosh, girl, no, we don't want to ruin our weigh-in this week.” We would be motivated to say no. But when we need it, there is no amount of, “Oh my gosh, what will it do to your diet?” None of that's going to matter.

So single moms are a really good example of this. These are women who do so much every single day. Now, y'all know I have a big heart for the single moms because of my mother, and that's why I want to use it as an example because it almost makes me cry telling you about the struggles that my mother had.

These women, they do a lot every day. To be a single mother, you've got to be strong. You have to be resilient. They love their kids. And they are sacrificing all kinds of things constantly for their children. And they will never once tell themselves any of that shit. They don't walk around thinking, “I am a mom who sacrifices everything for my kids, which makes me one motherfucking amazing-ass woman. Everybody should throw roses at my feet.”

No. What they think is, no matter how hard I work, it's never going to be enough for my kids. They only see the downsides. They don't see the greatness that they are.

And this is not just single moms. This is like all of you listening. I want you to think: when is the last time I sat around for just like 30 minutes and thought about how great I am? When is the last time you grabbed a journal and just wrote down like, “Oh my gosh, I should just write down all the amazing things about me because one day someone's going to read it and be like, oh my word, I'm so glad she knew that about herself”?

Y'all ain't doing that shit. You know what's happening? Ain't no woman listening to this letting herself be the hero of her life. I taught a whole weekend camp on this inside my membership a couple of years ago about becoming the hero of your story because women don't do it. They want somebody else to come riding in and tell them how great they are. They want somebody else to be the hero, when every single day they're already great and they already are the hero and they're not recognizing themselves for it.

If you don't already think of yourself, like let's say you're the single mom, as powerful and strong and doing something remarkable, this is our problem. Our problem ain't candy. This is the problem, ladies.

So my mom was exactly like this. My mom raised me and my brother all by herself. She worked all the damn time. She gave up her 20s and her 30s. Now, my mama started at 17. That's why she had to give up her 20s and her 30s, to make sure that we were set up to have a good life.

And do you know how she told that story about herself? She told it like she was just trying to make up for the fact that my daddy left us, as if it was her fault instead of him being the one who was the shithead that abandoned us. She always felt behind, like she was always failing somebody. She never once gave herself credit for being amazing, for sacrificing so much, for doing the work of two, for financially supporting us when we didn't get child support and stuff, for working so hard in butt-sucking jobs that nobody would want. She did all of that for us and never gave herself credit for it. Only saw what was lacking, what was missing, what she should have done, where she had gone wrong.

So when a woman tells me, “I don't know any other way to feel good,” here's what she's really telling me. She's telling me, “I don't know how to see the good in myself.” That's the problem. Candy is not the problem. The candy is just the only place all day she gets a little relief from a voice that's been beating on her since the moment she woke up.

So back to my client. Here's what we worked on. We looked at her days, and we found something really interesting. Now, I want you to pay attention here because there are two things that could be going on with most women who overeat at night, and they're different. And the fix for both of them is very different. So I want you to figure out which one is you as I tell you this.

The first kind of woman, she's got a lot on her plate, but it's fixable because she actually could get some help to get some me time. Her problem is that she can't say no to any damn body. Her problem is she feels guilty for asking for help. Her problem is she's got really sky-high expectations of herself. She has this idea of, “Well, I should be able to do it myself. I shouldn't be a burden to other people.” And so she's run herself completely into the ground by the time the night comes. And a lot of it, not all of it, but a lot of it, she put herself in that position without even realizing it. No one's helping her see that piece. She just thinks this is the way it is.

Now, the second kind of woman is in a genuinely hard season of life. She's a single mom, or maybe she's taking care of people who are sick, like a partner with dementia, parents with Alzheimer's, or who are suffering with cancer. She doesn't have a support system because maybe she has no one that lives around her, or she just actually doesn't have friends or family that can help. She just really does have a full plate, and help is not there at all. It's not that she's making it harder than it has to be. It's that her life is actually that full and that hard right now.

And that was my mom. She didn't get me time because there was no me time to get. She was working two jobs most of the time I was growing up, and there was nobody else to help. She was chauffeuring us around, trying to make sure that we got to and from school, getting us from babysitter to babysitter so she could go to the next job. She really only had me, as a little kid, to lean on. I still remember watching my brother at the age of five when she didn't have anybody else that could possibly help her.

So here's how you can tell which one you are. So I'm going to ask you the two questions I always ask my clients because before we can fix nighttime eating, we've got to figure out which boat you're in.

The first question is: if you weren't worried about how it looks or what people would think, or you weren't worried about letting anybody down, right now what would you let go of in your life?

So you're just going to go through your typical week in your head and all of your responsibilities and all your to-do lists and all that kind of stuff. And if you can rattle off some stuff that you could drop, but you don't drop it for reasons like people pleasing, fear of what people might think of you, then we already know you're not having a me-time issue. You need to work on the guilt for asking people to help, the worry that you're going to be seen as not being able to keep up or not good enough. There are things that we need to work on in that realm in order for you to get me time. Because if we don't, the only thing that happens is you keep everything and you give yourself me time while feeling incredibly guilty while taking it. So you never get what you really want.

Now the second question is really important too. What are you saying yes to right now that you could be saying no to, but you just don't? Let's say you've got a pile of things you don't have to be saying yes to when you go through all your stuff. Then we know you've got too much on your plate because you don't feel safe for some reason to tell people no.

Okay, so here's the thing. If you go through those two questions and you ain't got shit you can let go of, if you're sitting there going, “Corinne, I really don't have anything I could drop. I don't have anybody that I can ask. This is all genuinely my stuff. I'm not afraid to ask for help. I don't have anybody to ask for help. I'm not afraid of how it would look. There's no one to even be afraid of their opinion. Like, I just, I'm the only one that really can do these things,” then you're the second woman. And I'm going to talk to you directly here in a minute, so just hang with me.

But let me tell you what we found with my client because she was very interesting. She was mostly the second kind. She really didn't have a lot of help. But when we kept talking things through, we found something she had no idea she was doing.

You see, her kids were 10 and 12. And there were things those kids could absolutely be doing to help, like learning to do their own laundry, helping out in little ways around the house, that she just wasn't having them do. She just wasn't letting them. And when I asked her why, it came out that she felt so guilty that their dad wasn't around that she was trying to make it all up to them by doing every single thing herself. She didn't want them to have to lift a finger because she felt like they'd already been through enough with the divorce and not having their dad. So she was doing everything. The guilt she felt for the life they were living was the thing stealing her me time.

I said, “What if for the next two months you taught your kids how to do some of these things? Think about that. What if for the next couple of months you just taught your kids how to do some of those things? Would you have more me time after two months?”

And then she got really quiet because the answer was yes. It was just obviously yes.

But here's what I had to prepare her for because this is the part that a lot of people don't realize is going to happen. I told her, “When you start teaching your kids to do these things, you are going to be impatient. Impatient like a motherfucker. You're going to want it done right, and you're going to want it done right now because you're so used to having no time that every minute feels precious. And watching a 12-year-old fumble through doing the whites is going to drive you insane.”

And in those moments, you're going to have to remind yourself, “This right here is how I'm building my me time. This is how I get to have time for myself in a couple of months so that eating candy isn't the only way I can get it.”

And then the other thing she had to remind herself, and this is so important for you to hear, was that teaching her kids to help is not something she is doing to them. That divorce guilt was going to come screaming and hollering like a banshee, and it was going to tell her that she's being unfair. She's making them pick up slack because their dad's gone.

And she had to keep telling herself, “No, letting a 10- and a 12-year-old learn how to do things for themselves is not unfair. It's not me being a bad mother. It's actually going to be good for them. And it's going to be really good for me. And I'm not failing them by letting them help.”

She was going to have to go right into the face of everything that she was believing. And every time those thoughts came up, she was going to need to be there for herself. Otherwise, she would keep going right back to eating candy.

So that's the part of what has to get looked at and fixed in order to make nights a time where you don't feel like eating is the only way that you can relax or have time to yourself.

Now there's another piece we need to look at too in all of this. And I bet you've heard, “Just stop eating at night. Just break the habit.”

But here's what I want you to know. If your nighttime eating is truly just a habit, if there's really nothing emotional going on underneath there, then yes, you can just work on breaking the habit. And I'll tell you how in a second. But for most of you, and definitely for my client, that eating at night is not just a habit. It is so emotional, and it's doing a job for you. And it's the only relief that my client was getting.

And if you just try to rip that away without dealing with what's underneath it, you know what you're doing? You're taking away the one way that you've learned to cope with a really hard day, and you're handing yourself nothing, jack shit, to put in its place. This is exactly what every diet you've ever done has done to you. They take away your food, and they give you nothing to deal with the reason you were eating in the first place.

So please hear me when I say this. We do not start by just white-knuckling no food at night. Everybody write that down. We do not start by just white-knuckling no food at night. Not when there is emotional shit running underneath it.

So let me tell you what we actually do instead, because there is a way to sit there at night without the candy that's not going to feel like the world's ultimate punishment.

The mistake most women make is they finally sit down at night, they don't eat, but they sit there the exact same way they always have on the inside. They're beating themselves up, feeling sorry for themselves, running through everything they didn't get done that day. And then of course, sitting there without food feels like absolute crap because nothing changed except now you don't even have the candy to take the edge off.

The food was never really what you wanted, y'all. What you wanted was what the food does for you. And that's that the food turns off the way you talk to yourself. What the food is doing, very often, is it's just turning off the way you talk to yourself.

So if you take away the food but you keep that harsh asshole voice running in the background, you've just made it nearly impossible for you to ever be able to stop eating the candy at night.

So here's what actually helps. When you sit down at night, you have to start telling yourself something different. You have to catch what you're thinking. And when you hear that old stuff come up, you feed yourself a new line instead of feeding yourself candy. Something like, “This is my time. I deserve to just sit here. I'm learning that this time is mine whether or not I eat.”

And I want to be really clear about how you talk to yourself here because there's a right way and a wrong way to do this, and almost everybody does it the wrong way.

The wrong way is what I call command language. It's when you talk to yourself like a drill sergeant. “You can't have that. You're not allowed. You shouldn't be eating. Stop it. Don't you dare. You're going to screw everything up if you eat that candy.”

Now look, that is the wrong way to talk to yourself, and it does not work. It just makes you feel like a kid getting yelled at. And you know what we do when we feel like that. We go eat to feel better about being yelled at.

The right way is very different. The right way sounds like you're talking to somebody you actually like and love. It sounds like, “Hey, I know you want the candy, and I get it. We always have it right about now, so of course you want it. But here's what we're doing tonight. We're just going to sit here, and I've got you. This is going to feel weird because it's different, not because it's wrong. We're just getting used to doing something new. That's it.”

That's the kind of conversation you want to have. That's the way I want you to talk to yourself. I want you to be nice. I want you to be on your own side, like you're trying to soothe somebody, not like you're trying to command them, order them, or scold them.

Now, I'm not going to lie to you about what happens next because I want you to be ready for it. When you sit there and you don't eat, your brain is going to ask for that food a lot. And it's going to ask like a thousand times. It's going to get insistent. It's going to make excuses. It's going to tell you that you deserve it, that today was hard, that you'll start tomorrow, that one little piece of candy never hurt nobody, that you should have it.

That is completely normal, and it does not mean anything has gone wrong. It does not mean that everything I'm telling you is not working. Your mind is just used to eating candy, and when you don't do what you always do, your brain's going to freak out about it.

So you just keep talking to yourself. “I know. I know you want it. We're okay. We're just getting used to this.” And then you ride it out.

Now, a little trick is tell yourself you're only doing it for one night. Just tonight. Because then tomorrow you get to wake up and see, huh, was it as bad as I thought last night was going to be? In the moment, it's probably going to feel like ass. But when you get a little perspective, it usually doesn't feel as bad as it was. Because now you know what it feels like to eat the candy, and you also know what it feels like to not eat it from a genuine perspective. So you've got both sides of the story, and you get to decide from hearing both sides of the story in actuality.

That takes all the pressure off very often, just saying, “I'm just going to try it for tonight.” It means that your brain thinks, “Oh, we're not quitting candy forever. It's just tonight. You're just running an experiment so you can wake up tomorrow with a new perspective.” And then from that new perspective, you can decide if you want to do it again.

Now, for my ladies who are sitting there and you are genuinely in your hard season, you're the second woman, the one who came up empty on the two questions I asked earlier, I want to talk to you for a minute specifically because I don't want you to walk away from this episode thinking, “Well, I guess I'm just stuck eating my face off.”

Your life is that full. It really is. The help isn't there. I'm not going to sit here and tell you to just go delegate or blow smoke up your ass or say no when you don't have anybody to help you. But here's what I need you to hear, and this is a really important thing that I'm going to tell you: when you don't have a lot of support in life, you cannot afford to also not support yourself on the inside. You just can't.

So many women who don't have help out in their life are also not giving themselves one ounce, one shred, of help on the inside. They're making their whole world so much harder than it already is. And it's hard enough.

When you're the one who's carrying the load, everything's on your shoulders. When there's nobody coming to help you, you do not have the wiggle room to spend all day being an asshole to yourself on top of it.

Think about it. If you had a friend who was doing everything that you're doing all by herself with no help, would you talk to her the way you talk to yourself? Would you tell her she's behind? She's not doing enough? She's failing everyone? You would never do that. You'd tell her she's incredible. You'd tell her you don't know how she gets it all done.

So you have got to be the one person who's on your side because right now you might be the only one who is on your side. We have to get really aware of how we're talking to ourselves so that we are not making a hard life even harder from the inside out. You can't fix the season. The season is just the season. But you can stop being hard on yourself about it. And I promise you, that one tiny change will help your nights feel more manageable.

So if you've been sitting here and listening and going, “Oh my God, Corinne, this sounds like me. This is my night, and I talk like a jackass to myself,” then here's what I want you to know. This is deeper than you've been giving it credit for.

All of this eating, losing weight for you was never really about the calories or the foods that you did or didn't eat or what you're eating. It's all about this stuff underneath. It's the way you talk to yourself, the unnecessary guilt, the never letting yourself off the hook, the fact that the only peace that you get all day comes out of a bag of candy at 8:30 at night.

And I know the second I say it's deeper, you might be getting scared. You think deeper means there's something horrible buried in you, like some big awful thing you're going to have to dig up. My clients are always worrying there's some kind of weirdness deep down in there. I want you to just drop that bullshit right now. That is not what I'm talking about. There is nothing deep, dark, and scary going on on the inside. It's just guilt. It's just saying yes when you really want to say no and you don't know how. It's the “I should be able to do this all by myself” when, in fact, you deserve to get help if you can. It's that harsh inner critic, bitch-ass voice you've got working on the inside that you don't even know is being hard on you anymore because it's just how you talk to yourself. That's all we've got going on. This is all very normal for most women, and it's also fixable.

You see, when you actually work on this type of stuff, you don't just lose weight. You get to feel fucking better. The weight comes off, yes, but the bigger thing is your days stop feeling like a grind. They stop feeling like ass. The inner bitch starts to soften. She starts to sound like somebody you'd like to hear from every now and then. You stop dreading the evening because you know you're going to blow your diet.

That's why fixing all this shit is so worth it.

I'm going to tell you right now, when you work on emotional eating, it isn't some soul-crushing deep dive where you lay your soul out on a hot rock in the Arizona sun in the middle of July and let it bake and scorch. We're just fixing some simple things so that you get to feel a fuck ton better. And then the weight, well, the weight comes off because of it.

And the last thing I want you to know is this: you have not been failing all of those diets. Please hear me. You weren't ever failing. You were just working on the wrong thing the whole time.

Every one of those diets had you counting and weighing and cutting out foods you overeat. And not one of them, not a damn one, ever sat you down at 8:30 at night and helped you with the real reason why you were eating. Of course they didn't because they were never helping you with the real problem.

Now, this is exactly what we help you with inside No BS. I know one podcast is not going to have you suddenly figuring out all your damn nighttime eating and why you're blowing it at night and shit like that. But I do hope it's actually showing you what you need to fix. I hope it's helping you see the real reason losing weight has been hard for you. And I hope it helps you stop blaming yourself. And that's the biggest one. Because I don't want you blaming yourself for failing. I want you to start seeing that there's real hope, that this is something that you can figure out with the right help, just like I did.

You see, you were never supposed to do this alone, let alone figure all this shit out by yourself. I promise there ain't nothing wrong with you for needing some help with all of this. We all need this kind of help. And I know that this is what helped me lose my weight. And it's why I teach weight loss this way.

Okay. That is it for today. You've still got half the year in front of you, y'all. And a lot can happen in half a year when you're finally working on the right things when it comes to losing weight.

I will talk to you next week.