Corrine:
Hi, I’m Corrine, 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.
Corrine:
Welcome back everybody. So we’re going to do a podcast today on when the four basics don’t work. So, I think what would be good is, let’s start with just a brief review of the four basics. Just so that if you’re a first time listener and you’re like, “what are these four basics you speak of?”
Kathy:
We have that magic. What is that magic of the four basics?
Corrine:
Corrine’s magic weight loss formulas coming right at you.
Kathy:
Here you go.
Corrine:
We have…
Kathy:
Take notes.
Corrine:
Yes. We have plenty of podcasts on them, but just so that we can all recap what goes on with the four basics. Number one is let’s do water first. A lot of people think that water ain’t that important? That’s a bullshit one. I’m not really going to lose weight, drinking water. That’s not true. So, you have to get over that bullshit thinking first. The reason why water’s important is if you’re your dehydrated, you are very likely to increase your sugar cravings.
Corrine:
Everybody, take a minute and think about, if I’m dehydrated and my body is desperate for water… Because here’s the thing, you can go, I think, 30 days or three weeks, or something like that without even eating before you would even risk dying. Like your body can live off of no food for a long fucking time. You got three days without water and your body shuts down. I’ve always told this story, but when I did weight lifting and body building and stuff, we had to do a water deplete. That was the worst fucking experience of my life. I had 24 hours where I couldn’t have water, and I remember me and my girlfriend laying in the hotel room the night before our show, when we couldn’t have a drop of water until after we had hit the stage, listening to a toilet run, in a motel six, and both of us saying, “I could go put my face in that toilet right now.”
Corrine:
It was primal in us. I just wanted to lick it like a dog. You have to not sit there and poop all over the importance of water. It is essential. It cuts out your cravings and it will reduce your hunger signals. Doesn’t cut all of your cravings and temptations out, but at the end of the day, water will help you reduce some of them. So if you could get just 25% less times, your brain is like, “I think we’re hungry” or like “go get a doughnut” or whatever it’s doing because it’s dehydrated. That’s 25% less time that you’re going to overeat. You’ll lose weight doing that.
Corrine:
Number two is sleep seven to nine hours. Very important that you get your sleep. You need to prioritize it. It is just like water. At night when you sleep, this is exactly when your body is going to burn off the fat. It does all the repair work from anything you did that day. All that walking around you did, driving, that heavy lifting work that you did in your brain. Your body’s going to repair all those cells. It does it when you’re sleeping. If you are sleep deprived, think about it, when you’re tired, what do most of us do? Let me go get that frappuccino.
Corrine:
If you’re tired, you will induce sugar cravings. You will induce cravings. So you want to make sure that you’re also getting your sleep so that you can burn the fat, repair the body, and reduce a lot of food cravings. Also, just on the water note, I just learned this recently. I don’t know if you know this, Kathy. When you’re dehydrated, when you have not enough water, it induces salt cravings.
Kathy:
Huh? Interesting.
Corrine:
Well, see water balances out potassium in your body. So if you’re not balancing that electrolyte, then your body starts looking for salty foods like chips, and things like that, to get in thinking, if I get her to do this, then we can get some hydration.
Corrine:
Even like chips, the base level has water in it. So your body will be like, I’ll do anything to get some hydration. So…
Kathy:
Even if it craves salt so that your body will hold onto the hydration as well.
Corrine:
All kinds of stuff.
Kathy:
Holds on to what it has.
Corrine:
I’m just like…
Kathy:
Yeah.
Corrine:
What? I didn’t even know it until, this was like two weeks ago I was listening to something. I was like, holy shit. I didn’t realize water would knock out some salt cravings too. All right. So those are first two basics. Sleep and water. You got to be getting those things done. If you’re serious about losing weight, you won’t make up bullshit excuses as to why not to get them. Now we start getting more into the food and your mouth.
Corrine:
Third basic, super simple. The start of the day. Plan ahead what you’re going to eat? I don’t care what you put on your plan. You do not need to ask me, “what foods do you put on there?” What do you fucking want to eat? The key is that you put down, realistically, what you want to eat. What we don’t want to do is roll up into dinner after a long ass day, walk in the door, the dog done chewed the pillow while you’ve been at work, and then that’s when we’re like, “all right, now I’ve got to figure out what I’m eating for dinner.” According to me wanting to lose weight, that will never happen.
Corrine:
You want to be able to roll up into that situation and have on your plan what you said you would eat. It doesn’t mean you’ll always follow it, and we’re going to get into that in a minute. You’ve got a fighting chance of actually losing weight if you make decisions ahead of time versus making decisions in the moment when you’re stressed, you’re tired, you’re wore out, you’re worried, or whatever else is going on in the world.
Corrine:
Last basic to me, one of the most important ones and the most… It’s the one that you get most traction on, and it requires nothing other than asking two questions. Before you put a morsel in your mouth, you ask, “am I hungry?” If the answer is “no”, guess what you do? What do you do, Kathy? If you’re not hungry?
Kathy:
Close your mouth.
Corrine:
You don’t eat right. Put it back. We don’t need it. All right. So, we wait until we’re hungry. I mean, it just makes fucking sense that we’re supposed to eat when we’re hungry. Not because it’s time, or not because it looks good, or not because somebody bought it for us. We’re going to eat when we actually need it. Second half of it is, you’re eating. You’re hungry. You get to a point where you’ve had enough. You’re right below full. You don’t have to go to full anymore. What do you do, Kathy? When you ask yourself? Hmm, have I had enough? Feels like it. What do you do then?
Kathy:
You stop eating.
Corrine:
You shut that mouth again.
Kathy:
Shut that mouth. Put that fork down.
Corrine:
From now on that’ll be Kathy’s answer. You shut your mouth. Close that mouth. So, it’s real simple. What we’re going to do now is we’re going to eat until our body’s had enough. That’s usually right before full. Like most of us, it might take you some time to get to know it, but it makes sense that if you don’t eat everything because it tastes so good, because ,yeah, somebody bought you three donuts. So now you’re like, well, I better eat all three. You don’t keep eating because you’re like, “well, I’ve had a bad day.” I don’t want to sit here and think about that, or well, it would be so wasteful to not eat these last five bites. What we want to do is, we want to get back to eating and learning what does our body need? That’s what we’re going to do. All right. So all of that is simple. Wouldn’t you agree, Kathy Hartman?
Kathy:
It’s pretty basic Corrine.
Corrine:
It is. That’s why we call it the basics and they are easy and simple. Now…
Kathy:
Yeah, they are.
Corrine:
Today’s podcast is, “but what do you do when it’s not working?” Which means, I understand what you’re talking about. I understand to only wait until I’m hungry. What’s happening Corrine is I get tempted, like at three o’clock. That vending machine grows a mouth and it starts going like, “I’m get me. I’m Cheetos. I’ll be delicious. Did you know your job sucks?” What we want to do is, we want to understand what are we supposed to do when we’re still, basically, fucking up the basics? Here’s the one thing we definitely don’t want to do. Think that something’s going wrong, beat yourself up, or tell yourself this king ding dong thought error, which is, “I should be able to do this.”
Corrine:
The four basics when I teach them to you. If it was that simple, then all you would need to do is listen to the first, like five minutes of this podcast and be like, weight loss solved. Never have to worry about it again. The problem is this, the four basics, give you a framework that’s super simple for you to operate in, so that whenever you’re operating on the outside of those, we can identify what you’ve always really needed to work on. So this is why counting macros, all this stuff… I’m going to tell you, macros and keto and these other diets, they do work as long as you have no emotional work to do. Think about it. If all it took was a meal plan, somebody to tell me what to eat, tell me how much to eat and stuff.
Corrine:
If that’s all it took, we’d all be thin. You wouldn’t even be listening to this damn podcast. The problem is that what we really need, is we need very common sense easy things to do, so that we can figure out, all right, when am I not doing those? Now I need to start creating that list of the things I’m not doing. These are the things that are hard for me. Now I’m going to pick one at a time, these things to start working on and overcoming until I get to where it’s easy to wait for hunger. So waiting for hunger is like a good one for us to use as an example. When you first start doing the basics, sometimes it’s really hard to wait for hunger, and it can be for a million reasons. Maybe you’ve been not waiting for hunger most of your life.
Corrine:
You’ve always just ate when it was time. If you think about when we were kids, we always had to eat breakfast before we went to school. You couldn’t eat like during school. Then we had a lunch hour. Did not matter if you were hungry or not. You had to eat during lunch hour.
Kathy:
You had to eat fast.
Corrine:
Yeah.
Kathy:
Yeah.
Corrine:
You were put on a timer.
Kathy:
Yeah.
Corrine:
When lunch is over, your ass is going outside for recess. We’re cleaning up. Now, I’m not saying the school systems all need to recognize that you’re creating terrible behavior patterns as adults. It does explain why so many of us get very habitual about our eating and we don’t necessarily listen to why we’re eating. Then as you come home from school, most of us were given a snack.
Corrine:
I always was. I associated with the end of a bad day, because my schooling was not very fun. The relief eating, after work and stuff. That’s where it started for me. I remember so many times going to school, being bullied, having a miserable day. Then my grandfather had taken us to the little store and I would so look forward to going to the little store, getting my snacks and then sitting at his house and just eat and relax. It’s the first time of every day that I actually would relax. It took me a long time in my life to disassociate food and relaxation because of just what I was comprehending as a child. Then we have to wait for dinner. As kids, we don’t eat when we’re hungry, we eat when mama puts it on the table.
Corrine:
So one of the things that we have to learn is that if we have spent a lifetime of eating by the clock, it may be hard to wait for hunger at first. Because of that, we are used to eating by the clock. You may be very disassociated from your body’s cues because you’ve never really listened. You’ve never really waited. Maybe the only times you’ve ever waited for hunger has been when you’ve been on a very restrictive diet. You are either eating when you’re not hungry and by the clock and just kind of going through your day, or eating emotionally, or you’re on some kind of super restrictive diet to where the only relationship you have with hunger is full of fear, terror, restriction, hard, lightheadedness.
Corrine:
So in the beginning, if you’re not waiting for hunger, we want to figure out why? Is there something you’re afraid of? Is it just because you haven’t ever waited, it’s going to take you a while to really understand what you’re tolerable hunger is? You’ll only learn that if you stop using the basics against yourself. Using the basics against yourself is like, “Corrine has taught me the four golden rules and I’m on week two, and I’m a fuck up because I can’t do them.”
Corrine:
My basics are not there and introduced to you so that you can do them perfectly out of the gate. It is to give you very simple things to help us identify. “What do you need to work on next? What is it that’s getting in your way?” That’s what the four basics are there for. So do you want to add to this before I move on Kathy?
Kathy:
No. I’m…
Corrine:
Your face just looked like you had something to say. I’m like watching her on a video.
Kathy:
No. I’m just… Yeah, I’m just listening. I’m just listening. I was thinking, you were talking about how two weeks in, people think they’re supposed to be perfect? Good grief. I’m almost eight years, or maybe I am eight years in. I’m definitely not perfect. Not at all.
Corrine:
So that’s a good point, Kathy. One of the things that we want to think about is, you’re going to do the four basics for the rest of your life, if you want to do it like me. They change and they evolve and they shift. The four basics are always there as guardrails. Imagine you’re just driving over a ravine. You want guardrails. If you are getting off course, something protects you. The four basics are there as the guardrails there to say, this is the way that we want to lose our way. This is the way we want to maintain our way. When they’re not happening, let’s look at what’s going on and how do we solve it? That’s all that’s supposed to happen.
Corrine:
I think a lot of people, what they do is, they think, I’m going to learn this and now I should be doing it this way. The real thing is, you’re going to learn this, and it’s not that you should be doing it this way. This is what we want to get to, to where, these things become a part of how you live. Where these things become seamless, where these things become your default. So like with me, I don’t even have to think about asking myself if I’m hungry anymore. I just naturally wait for hunger. I’ve overcome the version of me that was very scared of getting hungry because I started waiting.
Corrine:
When I first started using hunger as an indicator of when to eat, in the very beginning, if I just thought I was hungry, that’s when I ate. For me, that was the first step to becoming someone where hunger is no longer scary. Hunger is just something I wait on. Hunger is something that’s no longer an emergency., Like, “hell, I’m hungry right now.” I’m going to be honest with all of you.
Kathy:
Me too.
Corrine:
My ass ate breakfast at eight o’clock this morning. Kathy and are podcasting, and it’s 1:35.
Kathy:
Yeah.
Corrine:
I talk my face off. This is the last podcast of the day I’m doing. I’m sitting here talking about…I’m like, my stomach’s growling.
Kathy:
Yeah. Right before this, right before we started talking, I looked at Ken and I said, “well, I’m not hungry yet. So I’ll have my sandwich when we’re done.” I wasn’t. I’m hungry now.
Corrine:
Well, and that’s one of the things…
Kathy:
It’s okay.
Corrine:
Exactly. In order to become the version of us, we had to have the first versions of us.
Kathy:
Yes, exactly.
Corrine:
I was like, “okay.” I know me well enough that when I get really hungry, I tend to really overeat. So my first level of experimenting with, “am I hungry?” Is, if I think I’m hungry, I have full permission to go ahead and eat. I’m never going to be overweight because I’m thinking about hunger. So one of the things to think about is there are these evolutions to the four basics. Let’s say you never drink water. Just because I drop on your ass how important it is and you hate it, and you don’t like it, that doesn’t mean that tomorrow you’re going to start drinking 64 ounces. I tell you what, you could be.
Corrine:
You could be on day… I didn’t drink water at all. Have I ever told you the story about what I used to drink?
Kathy:
No.
Corrine:
Like practically a gallon of orange juice a day.
Kathy:
Oh.
Corrine:
I don’t know how I was not diabetic.
Kathy:
I don’t know how you didn’t stay out of the bathroom.
Corrine:
Sweet tea! Like I like…
Kathy:
Wow.
Corrine:
Yeah. Well I was in the bathroom all the time, but I was drinking a gallon of juice a day. Then, if I didn’t have juice, I was ordering sweet tea. So one of the things that I had to learn how to do is like water. So the first version of me agreed that she would at least start the day with some real water to get used to it. I remember when I first started, I would hut juice, half water, half juice. Sweet tea was now going to be half unsweetened, half sweet.
Corrine:
Like I weaned up and then weaned into water. A lot of you are like, but Corrine said 64 ounces of water a day. Today I didn’t do that. So I must be doing it wrong. I should be able to do this. Isn’t water fucking easy? Yeah. Water in itself is easy. All it takes is you going and filling a glass and turning that bitch up to your mouth. It is actually easy. What’s hard though is overcoming the version of you who doesn’t like it, who doesn’t want to drink it, who has a big story about having to go to the bathroom all the time? You will have to start with that version of you. It’s the same thing with stopping at enough. For a lot of you, you’re going to miss it for a while.
Corrine:
You haven’t been stopping at enough for a long time. You’ve been stopping when you’ve emotionally had enough. Not when you physically had enough. Which means that we need to get to know what physical is, which means you are probably going to overeat. Then you’re going to have to get used to understanding why you overeat, and identifying all of that, while also working on figuring out ways to overcome those.
Corrine:
That does not happen overnight and it doesn’t need to happen overnight. It does not even need to be perfect at the end. You just want to be like… If I could grant anyone, anything when it comes to the four basics, it’s about knowing when you’re doing them and being aware when you’re tempted to get away from them and to be able to ask yourself, is that what I really want? That if I do get off path with them, to not beat yourself up and just be like, “I’m the person who does the four basics. So what do I need to do to figure out why I’m not on them right now and what I could do to get back on the path towards them.” What’s the first step, not what’s the hundred and 30th step? What is the first step? I think that’s what the biggest misconception of the four basics is.
Kathy:
I think we’re so used to, as women trying to lose weight, we’re so used to be given a set of rules and we’re either on or we’re off, we’re either counting points or we’re not counting our points. We’re either eating on the keto plan or we’re not eating on the keto plan. It means we’re losing weight or we’re not losing weight. What the four basics do, is they create that gray area in between that says, “you know what, maybe you didn’t get your 64 ounces in today. Wonder why?” Just adds a little bit of opportunity to examine, rather than beat yourself up and say, “off plan”.
Corrine:
Somebody, the other day I was talking to had something interesting. Just talking about water. When you use that example, because that is the one where people just argue with me, like it’s not important. She was noticing that she hadn’t been drinking her water lately. We were talking about it and I asked a similar question. “What’s getting in your way? You were drinking water, what’s happening?” She said, “to be real honest, I’ve just been so busy lately and not taking any time for myself and it wasn’t until I realized I wasn’t even drinking water, that I realized I wasn’t taking even a moment during the day anymore for myself to just breathe. I’ve just been going to work and hammering through.” She was telling me that now she’s going to use like… If I notice and I’m not even drinking water, if I’m holding my pee, I need to ask myself, why would I not just in this moment, take a moment?
Corrine:
Is everything so serious that I can’t even take a moment, because she was looking at it from the bigger picture like that. That’s what I’m trying to highlight for all of you. The four basics, they trigger you to look inside, so that when they’re not working or when you’re not working them, it’s a trigger for you to look inside and say, “what needs to change in my life right now? What’s really going on here. What’s happening?” The way that I like to describe the four basics is that everything that you find that you’re not able to do, that’s not clicking yet, that doesn’t come easy for you, that’s the diet plan that you need. It’s not the four basics. It’s all those things that are getting in the way that you’re thinking, and the way that you’re treating yourself, and the way that you’re setting up your life and stuff. All of those become, “oh, I’ve got to get rid of all that.”
Corrine:
That’s the real diet. When I overcome this stuff and I work on all of this, four basics are going to work like everything. They’re going to snap into place and that’s going to be the easier part. It’s so easy to stop it enough when you’ve allowed yourself to start eating foods that you love. It literally becomes easy, but what I watch people do with the four basics is they only plan food they think they should be eating.
Kathy:
Yeah.
Corrine:
Then what they notice is, “I don’t know why whenever I do plan something that I love,” like on the rare occasion that they do, “I have a hard time stopping.” It’s because if you look at your 24 hour plans, have they been permissive with food or have they been restrictive with food? I just love them because they allow us to think about these.
Corrine:
My missteps now become the actual diet I always needed to create for myself. It’s the weight loss program I always needed to learn from, to overcome in order to get to where I truly want to get to. The other reason why I give you guys the four basics is real simple. I wanted to give you something easy enough that you could get started with on day one, where you can get quick wins. When I was losing weight, one of the things that I’ve told myself a thousand times is, “you’ve got to do easy stuff first.” I knew my mindset. I had a shitty one and it was going to go to Shitsville real quick. I could not afford to set myself up to do things that were too hard in the beginning. Everything needed to be very achievable, very doable and very honest, which meant sometimes I was going to think that’s not good enough.
Corrine:
I would just remind myself, “no, what’s not good enough is you doing things that you know you cannot commit to and then feeling terrible about it and then eating over it and quitting.” That I knew had to stop the version of me that was going to lose the weight, had to overcome that version. When I first started, I did make things very doable. I made things super simple that no one in their right mind would even say, “you must be losing weight.” If they looked at me and it was…I was. I was losing the weight of my mental beat downs. I was giving myself quick wins. I was allowing myself to be successful so I could build upon it.
Corrine:
So I just wanted to do a little podcast on that today because I think that I watched people even in our membership, no matter how many times I tell them the four basics do work, but they take time, and they’re not there for you to use it as a tool against you. They’re there to be simple so that you can see all the things that you’ve always needed to overcome and no diet has ever addressed it before, but we are going to address it with you every single day. Anything else you want to add about the basics?
Kathy:
The only other thing I would say is that if you have the thought that the four basics aren’t working, you need to get really honest with yourself about how well you are actually doing the four basics.
Corrine:
Yeah.
Kathy:
You need to do that without going to the wood shed.
Corrine:
Yeah. Don’t say, “I suck at this.”
Kathy:
Right.
Corrine:
I struggle with this. Just say, “I notice that…
Kathy:
Yeah.
Corrine:
I’m not making the 24 hour plan. I wonder why that is.”
Kathy:
Yeah.
Corrine:
“Why do I keep thinking it’s too hard”, or “I don’t have time.” Those are the kinds of things you want to identify.
Kathy:
Yeah. So for me, the real easy story I can tell about this just happened recently with sleep. I’m not a great sleeper. I tend to rehash my day when I’m in bed at night and plan the next day and think about all the things that went wrong. Shocking, right? That Kathy thinks about all the things that went wrong. I recognized that I wasn’t getting good sleep. So I asked myself, “how can I fix that?” So I’ve started every day on my 24 hour plan, actually, one of my goals for the day is to read for 15 minutes before I go to bed. It clears my head. I’m not talking about reading power, self development. I’m talking about reading cheesy romance that doesn’t take any brain power.
Corrine:
Smut?
Kathy:
Okay. Just smut.
Corrine:
Smut.
Kathy:
Something to just help me. It’s not on a kindle, and it’s not on my iPhone. It’s a book. Okay. So I’m not…
Corrine:
Are you doing the 75 hard and I don’t even know it?
Kathy:
No, I’m not sure he would say Bridgerton series was self development. Okay. What I saw was, because I was taking all of my worries and fears and stress to bed with me, I wasn’t sleeping well. If I took just the 15 minutes for myself, I was able to rest into bed easier. When you do that, you not only help your weight loss, you improve your entire wellbeing. How you show up the next day, because you’re sleeping better. How you process things in a different way. The basics help you identify those areas in your life where you can just really improve your life. I think that’s just what’s so important about them. So don’t ever tell yourself they don’t work. Ask yourself “Why? What, where am I, where can I find a little improvement here in my four basics?”
Corrine:
Yeah.
Kathy:
They do work.
Corrine:
It’s the idea of… The four basics do work. I have coached so many people that will come on. How many times have you heard me coach a call where somebody swears to God, “I’m on a plateau, like keep losing and gaining, same five pounds, blah, blah, blah.”
Kathy:
Hundreds.
Corrine:
Then every time we dig into things, they’re swearing the basics don’t work for them. No, the basics do work, but we cut out this 20% bullshit eating you’re doing over here. We cut this out. We get more consistent here. Let’s see what happens. Then every time that they work on those things we identify what was really getting in their way. Those plateaus suddenly disappear. Just remember, the four basics do work.
Corrine:
The way they work though, is their job is to always be the foundation and guardrails of what you’re going to do, and then look at when you’re not doing them, and then that tells you, this is the next thing I need to learn. This is the next thing I need to overcome. It’s more about that process. I want you to think of the basics as they work. They also spotlight what I’m going to work on alongside them. So, I hope you guys enjoyed this podcast. I hope you take it to heart. Kathy and I will see you next week. Bye y’all. Thank you so much for listening today. Make sure you head on over to nobsrecourse.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 podcasts, help you lose your weight without all the bullshit bad advice. I’ll see you next week.
