Hello, everybody. Welcome back.
Here’s what I want to do today: I want to talk about urges. And urges are the desire and the want to eat something when you know, it’s not on your plan; when you know it’s not going to help you lose your weight. It’s the eating that is useless.
I like to think of urges as this is the time when I’m going to do my most useless eating because urges come like this: It’s eight o’clock at night. I’ve had a long day. I’ve had dinner. My ass knows that if I’m getting ready to eat, it ain’t got a damn thing to do with this body needing some fuel. The only thing it has to do with is this mind wants to be entertained with food because it’s thinking some bullshit right now. It’s thinking, I’ve had a long day and I deserve it. It’s thinking, I don’t ever get any me time. This is the only way I get to decompress.
It’s thinking a lot of horse shit at night that just allows you to feel very justified, to feel very permissive, and it jacks you up. It gets you like, yeah, I’m on the bandwagon of me right now. We’re going to go in there, we’re going to get us some ice cream, and it’s going to be like Calgon. Rather than Calgon take me away, it’s going to be like Ben and Jerry’s, take me away. So I like to think about urges to eat… They’re usually your useless eating times.
So other ways this plays out is, I’m eating my dinner and I know, damn well, I’ve had enough and my little old brain is like, Oh my God, Corinne. Tastes so good. I don’t want to throw this away. Just a few extra bites is never going to hurt. Those are bullshit statements. That’s useless eating and being aware of all of your useless eating is helpful.
Another form of useless eating is a lot of us in the middle of the day. We’ve had a long day at work. We’re either really stressed because we’ve been going, going, going, going. And the moment we run out of steam, or there’s just a natural little lull in the day, all of a sudden we’re like we should eat. Let’s get a snack. Or we’ve run out of steam and we got so much more to do. And we’re like, we should get a snack, we can reset, and we can get back in there. That’s useless eating. We know we’re not hungry. We’re eating in reaction to just wanting to feel better; to just wanting a break. That’s our useless eating.
So it’s just really important for you guys when it comes to urges. Step one is always knowing you have your typical times when you’re going to do your useless eating. Watch your patterns. So much of ending over eating and being able to have urges and sit through them and move on is just knowing when they’re going to come.
A friend of mine, my best friend, she’s a binge eater. And she likes to describe it as knowing when the rain’s coming. I love the way she talks about it because it’s like… You know how if you get up in the morning and the weatherman says, “Oh, it’s going to rain. It’s going to rain today.” What all of us want to do in weight loss world is we know it’s going to rain and so we sit and we’re like, “I hope to God, when I go outside, I don’t get wet. I think what I’m going to do is I’m going to run really fast and hope that I avoid all the rain drops.” And then we worry all day long that we won’t be able to run fast. We worry all day long that our plan’s not going to work. And the thing is we don’t have a real plan. We’re just knowing the rain’s coming, worrying about it, coming up with some bullshit plan, and hoping that that mess is going to work.
So when it comes to urges, I like for you guys to just think, all right… With a man, with a woman, with a person, whoever. You’re saying, “The rain’s coming three o’clock today. We’re going to be bored, bored as heck at work. That’s going to be our lull period every damn day for some reason. Things calm down or we run out of steam and guess what? A snicker seems like it’s going to satisfy.”
So, you know the rain is coming. You need to make a plan for it. The plan doesn’t need to be like, “I’m not eating today.” That’s like saying, “I’m going to run through the rain and pray I don’t get wet.” We also don’t need this plan: “Well, I just hope when I get there that I’m going to remember my goals.” That’s not a plan. Hoping, wishing, and praying is not a guide to weight-loss, otherwise somebody would write the book that says, “Three ways to lose weight: Hope, wish, and pray. And I’ll give you the steps.” It’s not a plan.
So when you think about it, if you know you’re going to get urges at three, or you know you’re going to get urges when you… If you’re a teacher and you’re on your way home, and the moment you walk in the door, it’s like cookie monster time. Or same thing at eight o’clock. If you know at the end of the day, this is your urge time, you’ve got to have a plan. And it needs to be a realistic plan that allows you to think about the urge itself. What do you want the most in that moment? This is always something that mystifies me but I’m going to teach you how to do this. And then we’re going to get onto our three ways that we handle urges.
But I want you think about: In the moment that I’m usually eating my most normal habit, what is it that I want the most in that moment? And I will tell you guys, it is not the food. If you think it’s something sweet, then ask yourself: When I eat something sweet, that allows me to feel what? I start thinking and feeling what? Whatever that is, that’s what you really want in the moment. Nobody just wants something sweet. If it did nothing for you, if all I did was just like, well, that was sweet, and you didn’t feel better, less stressed, comforted, got your mind off shit, a boost of energy, if you didn’t get any of that, if it was just like… Well, let’s put it this way: If it didn’t do any of that, you might as well eat a charcoal brick. Why do we not eat just a carrot stick?
So for all of you who want to say, “The reason why I want to eat is because I really like candy or because I just want something sweet or whatever,” challenge yourself. Why do I want that? Otherwise, if I just wanted something sweet, I’d eat a bite of sweet potato. I would just keep little bites of sweet potato everywhere. And I’d be like, “Well, sweet’s done.” You can achieve sweet in a very bullshit, boring-ass way but you ain’t choosing that one. You’re choosing certain foods for a reason. And it is because it provides something. It’s probably providing relief in the moment from something.
So figure out what that is because when you know what you really need, this is the next step. When you know it’s going to rain and you’re going to have these urges, you cannot replace the eating of whatever you’re doing with something that doesn’t feel equally as easy to do and at least provide some of what you’ve been seeking. Now, I’m going to tell you all, if you guys are eating cookies every day at four o’clock because you got home and you’ve had a bad day and every single day, you talk your ass into a big sleeve of cookies to eat to get you through what we call second shift. I worked my ass off all day long. I get home. I got about 20 minutes of cookies to take my break because I know I’m fixing to start my homework, cleaning, doing all my other things. And then I’m going to go to bed exhausted.
Now, if you’re one of my No BS women and that’s your life, you need to be doing Module Two of No BS, the success path. You need to go to No BS, weight loss course. That is your success path, Module Two. You got to start working on your thinking about your life. We take down the blame of why you’re stressed, the way you Jack your ass up all the time. We take all that out. Guess what? Urges automatically reduce by 50%. Just by controlling some of the bullshit thinking that you do, how hard you are on yourself, the crazy things like your boss looks at you one way and you’re like, Oh my God, I’m probably going to get fired. They don’t want me! When we start managing a runaway mind that tends to tear itself down, has perfectionistic thinking, gets very overwhelmed easy. When we start unlocking all of that, then what happens is urges automatically reduce by 50%.
And then we’re just left with what I’m fixing to teach you, which is just sitting through the leftovers. The best way to quit overeating is to remove the triggers to overeat to begin with. And the triggers to overeat are not food. A lot of you think that having food lying around is the trigger for your overeating. It’s not. It’s the emotional baggage you carry around all day long.
When you have a lot of emotional baggage, when you make your life harder than it has to be because of how you think about yourself and the way you treat yourself with your thoughts, then when you do see cakes and when you do see cookies and stuff, you’re already emotionally depleted that there’s no way you’re going to see that and think about your worthiness. You’re not going to see those foods and be triggered to think about your goals. You’re not going to see those foods and be thinking about what you want for your life. They’re going to look like paradise in the moment. They’re going to look like the medicine and the antidote to all the things that are wrong in your life. [inaudible 00:11:02] to do in module two, like a boss lady all the time now.
So we want to make sure that you’re prepared when urges come to make sure that you’re doing something that’s going to provide very similar feelings and that are easy to do. Eating is a simple thing to do so whatever you’re going to do in exchange of eating has to be equally as simple or your brain will not want to do it. It will be like, F that. We’re doing this.
Now there are three ways to handle urges when they come. The first one is where you fight with it. I’m going to give you the three then I want to address them individually. The second is where you eat through it so I have an urge and I just eat. The third way is you work with your urge.
So let’s go to the first one, fighting with it. Now I want to say this: A lot of you call it white knuckling. And I want to say this for everyone. And I have even taught it as white knuckling. There’s two reasons why I’m not going to teach it this way anymore. Number one is I think it’s one of those muddy words where not everybody really understands what that means. And so I looked it up so that we would all know. And it means trying not to eat instead of understanding why you want to eat and then finding the urge in your body. So when we’re white knuckling, we’re just trying not to eat. We’re just doing everything we can not to eat. We’re thinking about not eating. Don’t do this. This is not on the plan. It’s a punitive, demanding conversation. It’s like, if I can just get through this kind of stuff.
The other reason why I don’t want to use the term anymore… And I like the idea of defining white knuckling now as fighting with it because that’s what we end up doing. We talk like a parent to ourselves. We say things in a way that’s punitive. We act like we shouldn’t be having an urge when we know for fuck sure, we’re going to have one. We’ve been sitting around eating over them for years and years and years. Don’t expect your diet brain to suddenly be like, Oh my God. We got goals. We’re not going to do that anymore. That’s a no. It’s never going to happen so quit having some unrealistic expectation.
It’s just like if you got a drunk uncle every year at the holidays and you go in every you’re going like, Well, I’m so shocked and surprised that he still drinks and says rude things. You can be mad but don’t be shocked. We should have the expectation that uncle so-and-so, we know he’s still drinking. And when he drinks, guess what he does? Act like an ass. Doesn’t mean you have to tolerate it but you don’t have to put extra bullshit on yourself like, Oh my God. If he just wouldn’t do that. He should stop. Doesn’t he know? It’s like, no. All of that thinking makes you upset. Just like the same thing with urges when they come up like, Oh, my God! They shouldn’t be here. I can’t believe. I got goals. Why are they here? That makes you miserable. That has you fighting with reality? You know once an urge hits, why argue with it? It’s here.
Here’s the second reason we’re not going to call it white knuckling anymore: It’s unfair to my women of color. This is the main reason why I’m going to stop calling it white knuckling. We ain’t all white. I have this thing where nothing I teach, I want it to get in the way of somebody being able to lose their weight. And I have a lot of women of color who listened to me on the podcast; who worked with me inside my membership. And I don’t want to be saying a term that makes another woman sit there and be like, “Well, I can’t really white knuckle.” She may continue to listen to me. She may set that shit aside for the greater message but I don’t want to make weight loss any harder on anyone than it has to be so I’m not going to use the term anymore.
And I asked all of my listeners, stop using it. It’s not inclusive. And I’m going to tell you guys why we’re going to stop using it. I’m going to tell you something that will make sense to every listener in this group. A lot of us have battled with our weight all of our lives. And then we got some people in the world whose never had a weight problem. Guess what they have? They have something called thin privilege which means no one will ever probably come up to them and ask, “When are you due?” If you’re a woman with a weight problem, you know you don’t ever walk up to another woman and say, “When’s the baby due?” We just know it. Thin people don’t. You know how I know? Because every day of the week, one of my clients gets asked by some thin person whether they’re a man or a woman, “When’s the baby due?” Simply because they carry their weight in their stomach.
You wouldn’t say that. It is the same thing as white knuckling. We want everybody, stop walking up to overweight people and making comments that a thin person never has to worry about it. Let me just tell you, I am pretty sure that thin people aren’t meaning to do us harm. They actually think we’re pregnant. They think it’s exciting. I’m sure in their mind, they’re like, Oh, my God. Special time in her life, blah, blah, blah. But they unintentionally do harm to an overweight person when they say that. So for all of my listeners, we’re not using white knuckling anymore because we unintentionally do harm to people that need my help just as much as anybody else so that’s what we’re doing.
And the other thing is it’s just a bullshit way to describe it. It’s confusing. So now we’re going to call it, arguing with it; fighting with it because that’s way more descriptive. Because I was sitting there thinking about it when it comes to urges, what do we do? The reason why they’re so hard is because internally we are literally walking into the room and acting like our parents. Where it’s like, you need to do this! You shouldn’t be thinking this! Stop doing that! You can’t have! It’s like our parents on their worst day. And then we wonder why urges are hard to sit through because we’re talking to ourself like an asshole.
So that that’s one way to handle it. It almost always ends up in you thinking you might get through a bunch of them doing that but it builds a relationship with yourself that weight loss is hard. I struggle with food. And that’s not the result we want. We want to ease the relationship.
So the next way we do is we just eat. That’s the most simplest one is I feel an urge, fuck that, time to eat. And I just do it.
The best way to handle urges is to work with them. And I want to make sure that we understand that when we are working with our urges, this is where all the growth happens for us. A lot of times you guys think that when you’re not going to eat something that you are denying yourself, you are restricting, you are whatever. It’s like, no. Every single time you decide, you know what? I am not eating ice cream every night anymore. I eventually did that. I did eat it in the beginning and then slowly over time, I weaned myself off of it because I wanted to gain confidence around the food. I asked myself every single day when I would have the urge to want to eat more than I needed, I would just ask myself, but what can I do? What am I ready for? That allowed me to gain confidence around the foods that, for a long time, I just thought there was no way that I
could live without them. I had to learn how to live without them by slowly working with myself on small steps that wean them out.
I eat ice cream every now and then now, but I have found so much more joy in my life by taking some of those foods out and challenging myself to find other things in life that I enjoy, that now I don’t feel like I need them. When I have them, I plan them and I enjoy the shit out of them. I look forward to them. I don’t feel like I need to overeat them because I know I can plan them anytime I want. But I’ve reduced the amount that I want. And that’s the magic.
Also, when you work with your urges, you get the by-product of redefining how you speak to yourself. When you write out, when I have an urge, here’s the conversation I want to have with myself. Here are the things I want to say. Then read it to yourself when you have urges. Record it in your own voice. You get the opportunity to redefine how you speak to you.
And then when you also work with your urges, the last things, is your feelings around food, your feelings around wanting something in the moment, they start to normalize. They’re not as dramatic or traumatic as they used to be. You start describing like, I can handle this. It’s just an urge. I can wait 15 minutes and then see where I’m at. You start normalizing that instead of, Oh my God, I’m having an urge. This is so bad. Oh, my God. I feel so stressed right now. It’s so bad.
When you really work with urges, you start getting some growth in your life. And I wanted to say this because I think a lot of you think about when you’re working with urges, that it’s just going to be hard, it’s just going to be impossible, that it’s just going to be so much work. You’re so focused on how bad it’s going to be, that you haven’t even stopped to take time to realize how much good’s going to come out of it. And it’s not just weight loss.
Being able to finally learn how to be confident around food by making slight changes, being able to redefine the relationship with yourself by learning how to talk to yourself in the moments when you really want something, exploring why you want it to begin with and how you can actually give yourself that peace, that comfort, that love, that entertainment, whatever it is without having to eat, and then being able to normalize your feelings so that you’re not freaking out over them and acting as if you’re a helpless victim, that’s everything. And that’s what the work around urges gives to you.
So I hope that you enjoyed today’s podcast. Please leave me comments and you can review this podcast. You can find me on Instagram and Facebook. Just search for Corinne, C-O-R-I-N-N-E, Crabtree, C-R-A-B-T-R-E-E. Find me. Leave comments about what you think on this podcast. I love hearing from you guys. Y’all have a good week and I’ll talk to you later.
