Corinne:
Hi, I’m Corinne. After a lifetime of obesity, being bullied for being the fattest kid in the class and losing and gaining weight like it was my job, I finally got my shit together and I lost 100 pounds. Each week, I’ll teach you no bullshit weight loss advice you can use to overcome your battle with weight. I keep it simple. You’ll learn how to quit eating and thinking like an asshole. You stop that, and weight loss becomes easy. My goal is to help you lose weight the way you want to live your life. If you are ready to figure out weight loss, then let’s go.
Corinne:
Hello, everybody. Welcome back. So today, we’re going to do a little talk here about the concept of planning. I know a lot of you ask us questions all the time. It’s like, “Tell me about your plan. What do you put on your plan? How do you plan?” There is rarely a time where I get questions from people where planning is not part of it. So what I want to do today is I want to break down the concept that I teach for a basic beginner, inside the free course. So if you go to nobsfreecourse.com, you can take my three-part video series where I’m going to introduce what we call the Doable 24-hour Plan. It’s a longer video that’s going to really help step you through, along with a workbook. So I give you a workbook with a template that you can follow. I highly recommend if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re like, “Oh, I should like get on this planning bandwagon,” make sure you take that course.
Corinne:
And then I’m also going to break it down into a separate version. So let me say this, I teach at the basic level when you first get started, that if you can just get to the point to where every day you create a doable 24-hour plan and you learn how to commit to it, that overtime momentum for you is going to build in terms of showing up for yourself and figuring out that you actually can do the things that you say you will do. That is the most valuable skill, I think that we need to learn in weight loss is you have to figure out what you’re going to do to lose weight. And then you’ve got to be able to commit and do those things.
Corinne:
And so the way that I teach with food is every day you’re going to wake up or every night before you go to bed, you are going to write down everything that you’re going to eat for the following day. You’re going to think about lunch and you’re going to think about snacks, and you’re going to think about your day and where you’re going to be and what kind of food you would want to eat, what kind of cravings might I have and what foods would I enjoy, and is today a day that like, you know, “I bet you, today’s a great day for me to give up a bag of chips and see what happens with that.” So you’re creating this daily plan.
Corinne:
And the reason why I teach you in the beginning to only do a 24-hour plan, to only think about today or the next day is because for a lot of us, when we’re losing weight, we have so much going on in our head around all of our failed diets, our lack of belief in ourselves, conflicting diet rules that we’ve collected all over the years, that planning further out invites a lot of unintended problems.
Corinne:
So… exactly. Like, when I first got started, seriously being a beginner, I just couldn’t think more than a day out. I was like, “Okay, I can get my together for today, but I don’t believe in myself enough for tomorrow or the weekend or whatever. I need to focus on today.” And when I was losing weight, being able to keep that focus right there was super helpful. Now, when you’ve been at it a while, for a lot of people, what you notice is you really figure out the foods that you’re going to like, and you really learn that skill of showing up for yourself and you start appreciating how much easier life is when you’ve made some food decisions ahead of time. That’s another reason why we plan our food for the day is so that we’re no longer rolling up on lunch and spending 5 to 10 minutes, debating and negotiating.
Corinne:
Well, should I order a salad or should I just… my favorite cheeseburger is on sale. We’re not leaving it up to our whims, like in-the-moment wants and desires, we’re learning how to, what I call, do some deliberate-ass thinking first thing in the morning. Usually when you wake up, the version of you who’s going to make your plan for the day, she’s not only trying to consider what you will like for the day and consider what’s going on for the day, she’s also thinking about you weighing in next week. She’s thinking about that goal you have for your weight loss and what you would like to weigh one day. So she’s thinking about the bigger picture. You at lunch could give a fuck about weighing in on Friday. She don’t give a shit. She is like, “That cheeseburger is on sale. Do you not see this? We can’t miss out on this glorious opportunity. Salad suck.” She’s literally just thinking about what she wants in the moment.
Corinne:
In order to lose weight, the thing you don’t want to do, like if we all just have to think about it, main reason why we’re overweight is we’re very emotional. And if we eat only by emotion, we’re probably going to be face down in Oreos and burgers all the time. I mean, that’s just the way it is. So you want to set your life up when it comes to weight loss with more purpose, more vision for who you want to be, more compassion and care about not just what you’re going to want today, but also what you’re going to want for tomorrow and your future self. So we make those decisions ahead of time. Then what happens is you get so good at that and you start proving to yourself you can do the things you say you’re going to do. And you may want to start and find it’s easier to start planning what I call a week out in advance.
Corinne:
So Kathy and I, that’s kind of how we roll. I will tell you, I’ve lost 100 pounds. It’s been 15 years and I vacillate between the two. There are some weeks that I want the structure. I know I’ve got a busy week, I got a lot coming at me and I’m like, all right, here’s what I want to do. I want to set my entire week up ahead of time, where every meal, everything is planned so that I am not stress eating, so I am not squeezing mils in because I’m busy. I’m not missing meals because I didn’t really plan for that day.
Corinne:
And there are some days where I’m going to wake up and have to hit the ground running. I’m not going to have time to even plan for food that day. So I’m doing it on a day when I have all that time available. I think that planning a week out in advance is very helpful, but it’s also what I would consider an advanced weight loss skill. It’s more for someone who has already gotten good at saying what they’re going to do and they notice that if they plan a week out in advance, that it is a convenience for them. So don’t think that planning a week out in advance, like, “Well, if I did that, maybe I’ll lose weight faster.” It really does not matter. All that matters is that you have a daily plan and that you execute it. So I go back and forth.
Corinne:
There are some weeks where I do the weekly and there are some weeks where I know I have time, I actually enjoy the idea of waking up each day and crafting what I’m going to have for the day. And so I just kind of let that ride based upon what’s going to work in my life, and I think that that’s an important point because so many of us have been conditioned in weight loss, how it’s going to work for your life is dead last on the priority list. Like, “What do you mean we’re going to take into consideration what we would enjoy, what would make it easy for us, what would make life doable?” I think that your weight loss life needs to fit into your life. I don’t think you need to stop your life, like come to a dead halt and rearrange everything so that you can lose weight. And that’s what a lot of diets have you doing.
Kathy:
Yes, absolutely.
Corinne:
Yeah. So Kathy and I, we both weekly plan. And what I wanted to do is, we have plenty of podcasts built around the whole idea of the doable 24-hour plan, the free course is out there for you. That’s going to be the best primer, but I just want to talk about weekly planning and how it looks like for both of us, because we do it differently. So I’ll do mine and then Kathy, you do yours and then you can ask any questions if there’s anything you think we should cover.
Corinne:
So I like to plan on, like everyone knows that Sundays are like a holy grail day for me. I feel like Sundays are the first day of the week. It is where I look back at the last week and think about what worked and what didn’t, what foods did I like, what foods did I not, and I kind of do an upper-level little review. It does not take long. It’s just a matter of, like if there’s any donkey butt eating starting up, I want to know those patterns. I don’t want to like wake up a month later and notice I’ve added in nighttime eating. I’m always looking back every Sunday and just saying, “All right, what worked this week and what didn’t?” Is there anything that I know that, like get this on your radar for this week. What do you want to cut out this week? What behavior might you want to stop doing?
Corinne:
The other thing that I do is then I look at the week ahead, and I start with my calendar. So I always know each and every day what all I’m going to be doing. If I’ve got appointments for Logan, if I’ve got whatever my business is doing, if I’m traveling, everything is always on my calendar. And so I can tell the days when, I’ll give you a good example, Tuesdays are my meeting day. And on Tuesdays I text my sister-in-law to stop and get me, one of my favorite protein shakes in the whole wide world is at this little place in Nolensville, Tennessee. It’s a banana pudding one. It’s delicious.
Kathy:
That sounds amazing.
Corinne:
It is amazing. That one and the chocolate chip cookie dough… I will say the banana pudding wins out every time, but that chocolate chip cookie dough is a close second. But on Tuesdays, I always have her stop and get a shake because I know that I can drink a shake for lunch.
Corinne:
Now, listen, everyone, is that what I ultimately would love? No, but it’s also easy to get done. And I would rather drink a shake than to sit on a meeting eating a big fat salad in front of everybody and chewing. So I make my little sacrifice. But what I do is I look at things like that. And so when I make my weekly plan, the first thing that gets planned always is, when are we going to have date night? And the way that I do it is because I like to work out, I plan my workouts for the week so that I know which days I’m doing what. Right now I’m training to do a 10-mile run. I’ve got this little race, the Moon Pie, in… where is that? Is it Bell Buckle, Tennessee?
Kathy:
I think it’s in Bell Buckle, but you might need to explain what a Moon Pie is. I don’t think everybody knows that.
Corinne:
Well, I don’t even like, well, I think they’re disgusting. That’s all I know about them is that… and I’m a candy girl. When I was a kid, I loved a Butterfinger, a Baby Ruth. My all-time favorite candy is the Milk Dud, but the Moon Pie never made the list. Yeah. It’s got all that marshmallow in it. So that’s why. See, I hate marshmallow. I just, I feel like marshmallow like I feel like mint chocolate chip ice cream. I’m like, why did anybody decide that amazing chocolate chip ice cream should be flavored with toothpaste? Was somebody just trying to multitask and be like, “I won’t have to brush my teeth. I’ll just eat mint chocolate chip ice cream and do the job.” I’m like, eh, I just think it’s terrible. So I’m the same way about that.
Corinne:
But that’s the name of the race. It’s called the Moon Pie. It’s in June, which is always balls ass hot in Nashville, so I have literally run in the rain, this entire, like every long run has been in the rain so far. I have not had one that wasn’t, and it’s been in the 50s. So I can’t wait to show up and it be 80 degrees and humid and feel like ass, I’m sure.
Kathy:
You’ll be lucky if it rains at Moon Pie.
Corinne:
I know.
Kathy:
Lucky.
Corinne:
I will, yes, I will. So-
Kathy:
Because it’s… yeah, it’s notorious for being a really hot sweaty.
Corinne:
Oh my god.
Kathy:
I don’t think there’s a lot of shade on the course either.
Corinne:
No, it’s-
Kathy:
I think it’s all in the blazing hot sun.
Corinne:
Well, this is what’s hilarious. I’ve always wanted to do this race and every year I’ve traveled that weekend. I’ve literally wanted to do it for years now, and I’m always out of town, like either we’re in Vegas or I’ve got something going on. This year, because we’re coming out of COVID, I didn’t have anything planned, so I signed up for it. Just like… There’s also like, it ends with a hill.
Kathy:
Yeah.
Corinne:
That is dumb, like dumb. I’m like, who planned this shit for… Like, “We’re going to run 10 miles in the blazing hot sun, and by the way, the last mile is a hill.”
Kathy:
I think it’s funny that people keep signing up.
Corinne:
I know. I paid money for this.
Kathy:
Right.
Corinne:
But I will tell you, when I get that T-shirt, I may wear it every damn day for a month.
Kathy:
Frame it and put it in your office.
Corinne:
I know. I know. So anyway, I’m training for this. That was a long way to get to how I plan my date nights, but so for me, I know that Saturdays I’m going to be running long. So I always plug in my workouts first. And then that means my date night cannot be on a Friday. So I’m not going to put that on a Friday. So now I’m going to make sure that my date night coincides with my training so that it’s like, for example, last night was date night. Today is Friday. Today’s a day off. I may go for a leisurely walk. That’ll be the most of it, but I make sure that I’m now thinking about my week, thinking about how I want to feel for the day, what all is coming up, and I make sure I plan some stuff.
Corinne:
But I always like to plan my fun things first, like if I’m going to go out, if I’m going to have… Like, I knew that yesterday I was having lunch with a friend. So I put on my calendar, have this salad at this restaurant with Jenny when we’re having lunch together. So I always plan all the fun things I want to get done first. And I will tell you why I do it that way. Number one, for the workouts, it’s just smart. If I’m going to take the time to exercise, I might as well maximize them and not be sabotaging them. The other thing is that when you put the fun stuff in first, guess what it signals to your brain? We’re having fun. We get to do things. We’re not just having a suffrage diets.
Corinne:
I think it’s important to lead with teaching your brain and overriding the desire of your brain to, “Hey, these are the bad foods. This is all the things I shouldn’t eat.” Most of us, what we do is we try to plan from the strict version of us, the perfect version, the one that says this is what you should be eating and what you can’t have. And then we look to see if we have anything left over for ourselves or we plan none of that, and then we just overeat and fuck it eat and emotionally eat. And we include the fun, but we don’t include it in a way that actually is fun. We include it in a way to escape a punishment.
Corinne:
And so I’m just like, guys, if you’re overeating every week and blowing your plans and stuff, that’s a lesson that maybe it could be signaling that you are trying to plan from a punitive mindset. Now, this doesn’t mean that if you put down salads every day that that’s punitive. What it means is listen to the conversation you have about when you’re planning. The way I’m planning my week, I am thinking about, what are the fun meals I want to have and what do I want to have at those meals, and what day is that going to be on? And then I go back and I start looking at all right, what are my busy days? How can I set myself up for success? What are going to be the easy meals for those days? I bang all that out. So I’m really teaching myself to look at my week and make things fun and easy on me.
Corinne:
And when you’re planning from that mindset, you are opening your brain up to losing weight from love, losing weight, from compassion, losing weight, from understanding and who you want to be. And then the last thing I do is just any of the open slots, I just go in and I just put foods down, anything I’m going to want to eat that I think is going to make me feel good physically, that’s going to taste good. I’m always thinking about what foods are going to feel good physically, what foods are going to… I could see myself enjoying, which ones are going to give me energy for the day? I’m always thinking about, when I’m plugging in my food, this mindset of how can I do for me? And so that’s why I I like planning.
Corinne:
Whether or not you plan daily or whether you plan weekly, you can use these principles. It’s just for me, I like looking at the whole week because I think that I want to take care of myself over a bigger picture, but you can also do that on the daily. You can ask, what do I need today? What’s going to be good for me? When am I willing to eat today? What’s going to make me feel good physically and emotionally? You can do all of those things. It’s all about that mindset behind your planning.
Corinne:
Now my boys, so I plan Corinne first, but the way that we rock it in our house is very different than the way Kathy does it. We don’t eat the same things ever. I would bet one to two meals a month, me, Logan and Chris eat the same thing together, if that. I mean, probably last month, we didn’t at all, because I didn’t cook last month. So we do, if you don’t know, my sister-in-law cooks us food, so we send our order in every Friday or Saturday I text her all the things that, here’s everything I’m going to want to eat and Chris texts what he wants to eat and Logan texts what he wants to eat. And then we pay her to buy it, cook it and bring it to the house and shove it in the refrigerator. And it works out beautifully. She just charges us a good price to do it all. She says this is what it’s going to cost for me to do it. And I just found my sister-in-law. She loves cooking. That was super convenient. And none of us eat the same, none of us.
Corinne:
I always liken it to the idea of if we went out to eat, I just don’t think it’s weird because if me, Logan and Chris go out to eat, odds are we’re not going to order the same thing off the menu. So I’m just like, why at home do we feel like we need to order off the same menu? So when I used to food prep, I just cooked three different things. So I would do here’s Corrine’s, here’s Chris’, here’s Logan’s. Now, every now and then I cook on the rarity. We like shrimp and grits. I know how to make those.
Kathy:
I love shrimp and grits.
Corinne:
Oh yeah. It’s… love it. The shrimp and grits I make is divine too. It’s got… There’s dill in it and there’s a lot of butter and then there’s some heavy cream, but I put lemon and forget the other thing I put in. Oh, and a little cumin. I mean, it’s just… it’s not dill. Parsley. I chop up fresh parsley inside.
Kathy:
I was fixing to say, I bet dill is interesting in that. Okay. Gotcha.
Corinne:
Yeah, no. But anyway, it’s really good, so… And please don’t email in asking for a recipe. I made this shit up. I looked it up on the Internet one time ages ago, kept tweaking it to my own version, and now I just make some kind of hodgepodge bunch. So I couldn’t give anybody a recipe if they wanted one. And then sometimes we’ll do steaks. Chris likes to use the sous vide and even when we do steak, though, he cooks us all a steak. I make green beans for Logan because Logan hates baked potatoes, and then Chris makes me baked potatoes. And then Chris just eats the steak. So I mean, even when we try to eat together, we don’t always eat the same thing. And I mentioned this because I know a lot of you get hung up in this idea that your whole family’s got to be eating the same thing.
Corinne:
If your whole family likes eating the same thing, I think that’s amazing. Just eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’ve had enough. Sometimes you’re going to be eating the same thing as your family, and you’re going to eat just a little bit less than you normally do and that’s it. My mom has lost over 100, I think she’s up to 110 pounds now or something like that. She’s been eating fried chicken every damn week since she’s been losing weight. I think a lot of us think that we have to give up our favorite foods. Last week, I was having a salad with fried chicken livers on it every damn day, because I love fried chicken livers. I don’t think you have to give all that stuff up. I think what we have to do is give up emotional eating. Part of emotional eating is it tastes so good, I don’t want to stop.
Corinne:
We have to give up that kind of emotional eating. It’s like, yeah, it tastes really good. And guess what? Plan it more often. That’s amazing. But most of us, what we think is, “I shouldn’t be eating this, so then I fall into it tastes so good. I need to eat this because you know what I’ll do? I’ll just for the next week or two, I won’t have anything I like.” That shit doesn’t work. That is how we do it. Right now, I just have my sister-in-law doing all of our food prep. I highly recommend a lot of you who don’t like cooking, there are loads of services out there nowadays. I mean, not everybody has access to them, but even in Nashville, there’s a bunch of meal prep services where you can… that’s what we’re doing next week because my sister-in-law’s abandoning me, Kathy.
Kathy:
She’s not going to you see that family again, is she?
Corinne:
No. That whore is taking a vacation.
Kathy:
Oh my goodness.
Corinne:
So, she-
Kathy:
Shame on her.
Corinne:
I know. Shame. She should wear the shame shawl. But she’s going to be gone next week. She did bring in a big wad of food. This is a Friday that we’re recording and she’s bringing in a big bunch that’ll, maybe, make us ’til Tuesday. So Corinne had to figure out what was going to be the rest of the week. So I found a place in Nashville that you don’t have to do a subscription, but you can just order food. So this morning I was passing the phone around to the boys. I was like, “Go to this app. Add all the meals you’re going to want. You’re going to need it three a day for five days. They were just… I was telling them the app-
Kathy:
The lesson.
Corinne:
That was our big weekly plan. And I was like, use this phone app. So-
Kathy:
That’s funny.
Corinne:
But that’s how we do it. We just, we things simple, but we enjoy the food. And over time, I still eat a few things that, like I still love my fried chicken livers. I still love my nachos. I still have those things, French fries. But I will say that as I’ve… The longer that I have lost weight and kept weight off, I also have expanded my appreciation for fresher foods. I love a good salad and those kinds of things. So Kathy, why don’t you tell us all about how you guys do your version of weekend planning?
Kathy:
So for those who don’t know, I’m an empty-nester, so it’s just me and the husband at home, Ken. And so what we do is we will get together on, usually on Saturday, and we also look at the calendar, but what we do is we look at the evenings, because Ken teaches a yoga class on Wednesday nights, so that needs to be a super quick meal. Sometimes I have calls on the evenings. So we look at the calendar and then we decide what the dinners are going to be first. And we make this choice together. Ken might say, “I’d really like spaghetti next week.” Okay. So we write in spaghetti one of the days. I might say, “Why don’t you grill some steaks one night?” And so we’ll write that in. So we plan the dinners and we write them on this piece of paper.
Kathy:
Then breakfast and lunch are super easy. He, almost every single morning, will have eggs and bacon and he pre cooks his own bacon, so all he has to do is throw it in the microwave. Almost every day, I have oatmeal with a banana and a little bit of granola thrown in. I mean, that’s probably six out of seven days a week. So I always know I better have oatmeal in the house. I better have eggs in the house. Then lunch, we decide together as well. And I do one prep on Sunday for lunch and we decide, Ken will say, he might say, “I’d like chili this week.” And I’m thinking, “Ah, chili? That might be okay, but I think I’ll put mine over rice or something like that.” So I’ll modify it a little bit for me if I don’t want exactly what he has, what he’s asked for, or I’ll make myself something. Sometimes I do that as well.
Kathy:
So lunch is all in the fridge, kind of like your 21 meals each week are all in the fridge, my lunches are always in the fridge. My oatmeal’s always in the pantry, and I have the list that I’ve created of dinners on the refrigerator. I take that list and I make my grocery list for the week. So I have those things in the house. There’s no negotiating, and I don’t have a lot of extra stuff in my house. So that’s what makes me a little bit different with just being the two of us. If we run out of food for some reason, we got to go to the store, because there’s nothing left because we just buy what we need each week.
Kathy:
That’s a constraint that we use that works for us. There’s not a lot of food waste, but there’s also not a lot of negotiating because that’s all there is, so that really works for us. I don’t do much of the short order cook stuff, like green beans for him and baked potato for that or whatever. But I will modify a little bit. And I think that’s an important point for those women out there who work full time and have the kids at home. You might want to involve your family in the planning process, like I do with Ken, so that you can avoid a short order cook situation, if you’re coming home and you have all the kids pulling at you and dinner to fix, and just figure out what little modifications you want to adopt.
Kathy:
The other thing is, I put the plan on the refrigerator so that if I come downstairs, now, my husband’s very anal. I come downstairs and say, “Well, we planned spaghetti for tonight, what do you think about pork chops? What do you want to switch?” Ken will point at that list, and he’ll say, “The plan says spaghetti.” So together we stay on track because we planned it together, we’ve stuck it on the refrigerator, we have the food in the house and that’s basically what we do. Our date nights are almost always Friday night. We hit church on Saturday evenings and then eat after that, so… and then we go to the grocery store on Saturday nights. We’re the only ones there.
Kathy:
Sunday, get up. Yeah, seriously. That’s our big-
Corinne:
Rocking hard on the Saturday.
Kathy:
That’s right. So on Sunday, when I get up, I work for a little bit, I do my food prep, I set up the week and everything is solid. So that’s what works for me. Now, every night I will go ahead and I’ll write my plan for the next day, and I’ll have oatmeal for breakfast and I’ll have whatever I had in the fridge for lunch. And we’ll have whatever is on the list for dinner, but that’s the way I reinforce what I’m doing and how I’m taking care of myself and what my plan is. And that just really works for us. It’s worked for that way for us for the seven or eight years I’ve known you, that’s how we’ve done it.
Corinne:
Yeah, and I think that’s important for all of you that follow my stuff, is that if you’re going to do the weekly planning, people have asked me in the past, we actually had a version of our private membership planner for a while. I had a weekly plan and it led to a lot of confusion, and a lot of people just couldn’t make the commitment. So we decided to, we’re going to adjust focus on getting everybody super consistent and good at making a doable 24-hour plan.
Corinne:
If I do a weekly plan, I still, almost every day, if I have time, write down, like you, I still just have a habit of doing it for the day. And it’s not so much to just write the food down, but it’s the thought process behind it. It’s the reminder that this is what I’m having. It’s the reminder that this was a good decision, even if… because sometimes, even with the best laid plans, you’ve thought about your week, you may wake up grumpy as a crab on Thursday and everything that you planned for the week looks terrible. But it’s a good reminder to sit there in that moment and say, now on Sunday you thought this was an amazing idea. So today, if it’s still not amazing, you’re probably not thinking with your future in mind. You’re probably thinking with your emotions you rolled up out of bed with, and it just helps you realize those kinds of things. So I think that’s important.
Kathy:
Yeah. Here’s the other thing that I do, and this is super important, for me anyway, and for, as I think about the person that I want to be when I go downstairs at night, is if I know, for instance, we’re grilling steaks, I might want to have a glass of wine with that steak. So I will decide in the morning whether or not a glass of wine goes on the plan to go with that steak. And I will either write one glass of wine or I will write no wine on my plan so that when I go back, when I go downstairs and I see that steak and I think, “Oh man, did I play the glass of wine?” I ask myself that question first, rather than, “Well, I don’t know if I planned wine. I’m just going to have wine.”
Kathy:
Yeah. That’s a super important part of the process for me too. It works the same thing with dessert. If you know, I know dessert is always planned. It’s never an assumption. So if I know we’re going somewhere with friends and we’re likely to have dessert, I’ll go ahead and plan dessert. But otherwise it’s a no dessert.
Corinne:
Yeah. Well, that’s how we do our weekly plan. And that’s the difference between the doable 24-hour plan and a weekly plan. So I hope this was helpful for all of you, just to get a little tickle on some of the things that we teach you and what we want you doing in order to lose weight. Y’all have a good week and we will talk to you soon.
Corinne:
Thank you so much for listening today. Make sure you head on over to nobsfreecourse.com and sign up for my free weight loss training on what you need to know to start losing your weight right now. You’ll also find lots of notes and resources from our past podcast, help you lose your weight without all the bullshit diet advice. I’ll see you next week.
