Episode 301: Diet Plans vs. Weightloss Coaching

Hello everybody. Welcome back. So today we are going to talk about diet plans versus weight loss coaching, why they’re different, and kind of the things to watch out for even in the weight loss coaching industry. So, if you’re watching this on YouTube, which we are just now starting to fire up a YouTube channel, you’re going to see some videos where Corrine looks fabulous, and you’re going to see some videos where Corrine is about to go to the gym. So today you’re watching on video. I literally, when I lost a hundred pounds, I made a promise to myself that I was going to do at least a 15 minute walk every single day for the rest of my life. That was my first step towards changing my life, and I’m very proud to say that 15 years later I still prioritize going to the gym, or working out.

I don’t tell people that they have to work out in order to lose weight. But if you want to feel strong, if you want to play with babies, one day get on the floor, roll around with them grandchildren and stuff, I do highly recommend putting some movement in your life. So you get to see me in all my glory today. This is my never apologize for who you are shirt, and I don’t apologize for who I am, which is somebody who will come on YouTube, put it out to the world, go on a podcast, and let everybody just see the real her. All right, so let’s talk about the difference between diet, and weight loss coaching. First thing that we got to understand is for some people you may get a medical diagnosis, you may have some kind of life altering event, and even that doesn’t convince you that it’s time to lose some weight.

Now, I want to introduce with that first, and foremost, because I coach thousands of women. I have my own membership, the No BS weight loss membership. And so often people come in with diagnoses, like now I’m diabetic, or they have other things that are going on and they really need to lose weight, but that still isn’t doing the trick. And when things like that, don’t convince them, they call it the mortality motivation. When even mortality motivation doesn’t click for them, they have a lot of shame about it. They feel so bad that when they’re told now you’re diabetic, or whatever, that they still don’t want to lose weight. And it’s not that they don’t want to lose weight, they don’t want to do the work to lose weight, or they don’t want to do the things they think are required to lose weight. This is a really good example of why a weight loss coach is different than a diet program.

I always tell my clients, just because you have something really important that you want to lose weight for, it doesn’t make in the moment when you are emotionally eating. A lot of my clients tend to eat at eight o’clock at night after a long day because they’re stressed, they’ve been worrying their ass off all day. I coach the lady just the other day, she’s in my women of color group, and she was like, “There’s so much pressure of being a black woman executive.” She said, “I go in every day feeling like I need to prove myself.” And when you take the totality of the stress, and the pressure, often what women are under, maybe you’re retired, and you thought that you, and your partner were going to just play the golf love each other all day. And it comes to find out that when y’all are by yourselves, he kind of boring, she kind of boring.

Y’all got different interests. And if all day long you think, “We’re not connected, this isn’t what I thought it would be. I don’t have a purpose anymore.” Eight o’clock at night, you’re going to want to soothe that pain, that emotional pain more than you’re going to want to soothe the pain of a medical diagnosis. It won’t feel urgent when your emotions are taking over. So, I say all this, number one is because if you do have a mortality motivation, or something along those lines, or maybe you have a strong why as to why you want to lose weight, please don’t feel bad that in the moments when you emotionally are coping with food that your other why for weight loss just goes out the window. That’s normal. And that’s why you need a weight loss coach. Someone who like their specialty is coaching, life coaching, and helping you see your life in a new way to help you really examine what’s going on for you.

Because most people when they need to lose weight, they just don’t need another fucking diet. We don’t need another meal plan. We don’t need Jimbo at the gym kicking our ass three or four days a week, and telling us what to eat in between. What we really need is we need to learn how to make behavioral changes, habit changes, and emotional shifts so that at night we’re not ending so exhausted. At night we have the energy to say no to food when we’ve been eating our face off every night repeatedly for years because we did not have any other way to deal with stress, anxiety, just being tired. And I say all this because when I started losing weight, I didn’t have a weight loss coach, I was my first client. I weighed over 250 pounds, depressed as fuck, had a one year old and had an literal emotional meltdown.

I was sitting on the couch one day, I was crying my eyes out because I couldn’t play with my own kid, and I was exhausted at 10:00 AM in the morning, and I knew I needed to change. I was like, when I look back on that person, I am so proud of her because she didn’t start a big diet. I didn’t run out, and buy another book. I didn’t go join Weight Watchers, Jeanie Craig, Noom, I didn’t do any of the latest greatest shake programs, and stuff. I didn’t go and get some exercise program. I literally sat there, and just told myself, I don’t know what I’m going to do but I’m going to figure this out. And when I said that to myself, it prompted me to start thinking I am going to only do things that I know I can do for the rest of my life.

I’m not going to start any other bullshit ever again that I don’t see me doing as a part of my lifestyle. And that meant I had to like it, it meant I had to want it. It meant that it could feel a little challenging, but it also felt like a tad invigorating. A tad like, hmm, I think I could. I needed that. What I didn’t need is a stack of failures anymore. I had already failed every diet known to man, some of which multiple times, and I knew me. And so when I looked back, and I think I was coaching myself, and that’s one of the reasons why I went to the life coach school, which is the Harvard of life coaching. And at the time there was a weight coaching certification, so I did both. So I tell you all of this because when you hire a weight loss coach, their job is to help you really break down what’s actually getting in the way of your weight loss. And I believe that most people what’s getting in the way of weight loss isn’t they don’t have the right calorie range.

You can Google that in a heartbeat. If your calorie range lack of info was really a problem, you’d all be thin. Every single person. What we do as weight coaches is we break down why you’re eating when you’re not hungry to begin with. Why do you have such? One of the things that my clients work on all the time is they feel so guilty if they don’t clean their plate. And it’s like one of those little things I tell my clients all the time, when we first start losing weight, we are going to work on low hanging fruit, we’re going to start cutting out bullshit eating that you’re doing that you’ve never questioned. And so I highlight a lot of it, and then we work on how we need to think about it because in the moment you’re going to want to finish that plate. I grew up really poor, super poor, and we often went to buffets, and we were told you need to eat all you can because we don’t know where the next meal’s coming from.

And so that locked into my psyche growing up that you didn’t throw away food. That was dangerous. I grew up where not eating past full was dangerous. And so as an adult what happened in my weight coaching was realizing, “Oh, I need to get used to not always finishing my plate. My body doesn’t need it and I am now not in that position anymore.” And it was hard as fuck. I’m going to tell you even to this day I have had my weight off for 15 years, and there are times when we’ll go out to eat, and I will have paid $20 for something, and in my brain if I don’t eat all of it is like danger, danger, danger. You are wasting food, you should eat that. We need to clean that plate. It’s too good to throw away. Now, I know I could take home leftovers and often when I am at home, I do, but when I’m on vacation, I can’t take home leftovers if there ain’t no fridge.

And so I can either eat my face off on vacation, and gain weight, or I can eat to what my body needs and then I can calmly remind myself, you get your money’s worth when your body feels like it’s had enough, that’s your money’s worth. But that’s what a weight loss coach does. A weight loss coach talks to you about your common pitfalls and your obstacles. Whereas a diet, you just have a plan. You just supposed to follow it, you just are supposed to just like this is it. And there’s no behavioral modification, there’s no making sure it fits with your lifestyle. There’s no looking at what are going to be your unique obstacles that are going to get in your way, and then addressing them. And for most people they need a weight loss coach. They just don’t need another diet. And lots of weight loss coaches have their own frameworks for how to lose weight.

I have my own framework. I think mine is one of the best ones out there. It’s four simple steps, and I teach people how to rely on their body to guide them versus external things like apps, and plans, and macros and all this other stuff. I always think that the best coaches for weight loss are the ones that teach you how to be able to get to the weight you want without there having to be antics, without there having to be all kinds of stuff. We’re going to use your mind, we’re going to relearn how your body works. So we’re not going to eat when we’re hungry. You’re going to start learning, when you’ve had enough, what does that look like for you, and how do you stop even when you feel emotionally you need to keep going. Water and sleep. Then the other thing that I do that I think is important in coaching is we teach you how to plan your food ahead of time.

Which means in the morning I’m just going to think about my day, I’m going to think about is this date night? I’m going to think about is this going to be a long day? Do I need to plan for the drive through because I’m going to have me, and my kids running all over town trying to hit all the sports. This ain’t a Martha Stewart moment night, this is a drive through night, and if I’m going to go the drive through, I’m going to do it like a boss, not like a bitch. So, when you plan, you need… I want all of my clients to understand how do you plan for your life? Not, I don’t want to teach you just how to follow any old plan because it doesn’t mean that it’s your plan. It doesn’t mean it works for you. The only way that you’re going to know something works for you is if you are the crafter, and the designer, and you need to learn how to craft, and design those things every single person can. It’s just a matter of being shown how.

So, one of the important things about a weight loss coach that I think is also everybody should know is there are true weight loss coaches out here. So, there’s people, when I say true, I am not trying to throw anybody else under the bus, but to me the way I define a weight loss coach is someone who also has a life coaching background. So, if you think about me, I went to the life coach school, and got a weight, and life coaching certification, then I went back, and I studied for a year to get a master level certification, and now I’m in another advanced certification for how to create safety with emotions to do a little bit of trauma coaching. And I don’t mean trauma from child abuse, and stuff, I’m talking about the types of trauma that all of us go through as we grow up.

A lot of times you’ll hear it called little T trauma, but it feels very real. So, for me, I’ve worked a lot on that being afraid of food, being afraid we’re going to run out of food, needing to over consume food, all being triggered from being poor, and often not having meals, and things like that as a child. So you want to work with someone who has studied different types of things that all surround, and relate you being able to lose weight. So like one of my coaches, I have a team of 10 in my program, one of which has gotten some certifications in anxiety because a lot of our members come to us, and they have a lot of anxiety, and so she’s an anxiety coach who also can coach weight loss, and stuff. But her specialty is, she hosts calls, and stuff on how to regulate your nervous system when that’s happening.

Because if you can’t regulate your nervous system with anxiety, and the only thing you know how to do is eat, then you’re always going to eat because anxiety’s probably not going away. But what we can do is teach you a whole nother way to cope when anxiety hits. We have someone with a grief certification because a lot of our people, they can lose weight when everything’s going right, but then they have something that rocks their world. They have a traumatic event in their life, and now they’re grieving, and the only way that they know how to deal with really intense emotions is with food. So, it’s really important when you’re thinking about your weight loss journey. What do you really need? Do you really need just another diet, or do you need someone who’s taking a look at all the things for you. And teaching you how to navigate it.

I know that I eat when I’m stressed, or I know I eat every weekend because it’s the only time I ever have a good time and I seem to go off the rails. So, if you are the kind of person who’s like, “I think a lot of my eating, it’s not my ability to follow a plan. Sometimes I’m really good at it, but there are these other times where I just break it.” I feel like I just have to, or I feel so exhausted, or I run out of steam. That’s the emotional eating component, and until that gets addressed, you’ll always be starting, and stopping diets, yo-yo dieting, losing weight, and regaining because that emotional component, that lifestyle component doesn’t truly get addressed. So you want to make sure that you’re finding a coach who really specializes in that. There are people out there who identify as weight coaches that often are a multi-level marketer, or an MLM.

So you might see they might be called beach body coaches or maybe they sell a shape program, or something. I think people like that are well-intended. I have nothing against them. I probably have people in my immediate life. In fact, I do know someone who is a multi-level marketer, very love her to death and stuff, but she’s never going to be able to address the emotional eating component. She’s never going to be able to get to root cause of weight loss like a true weight loss coach with life coaching behind them can. So, it’s just important for you to think about when you are looking for someone to help you solve weight loss, what is it that you really need solving? Do you truly just need another trainer at the gym kicking you in the ass? If you do that route, you notice that your pattern is, well, I go and I do this six week bootcamp and stuff, but I’m treat eating afterward, or every weekend I’m like partying with my workout crew.

You’re not addressing the real problem, you’re just working out. I mean bravo to you. I’m all about people working out, but if your goal is weight loss, and you’re working out but you’re emotionally eating to match your hard workouts, it’s never going to work for you. You need someone who’s going to address the other things. So we want to make sure that you find someone that fits. Here’s a few other differences when it comes to diets versus weight loss coaches. A weight loss coach isn’t your friend. A weight loss coach is friendly with you, but we’re not your friend, we’re not your buddy, we’re not any of that. Our job is to give you expert help so you can lose weight, and then develop skills like knowing the difference between when you’re using excuses in your life to eat, or to do things, and then when you actually have a legit reason for doing certain things. Maybe you are going to eat your face off one day, it’s your momma’s home cooking meal, you rarely get it, and you’re like all in.

You just, we want to show you the difference between legit, it’s fine, this is your moment, versus excuses like fuck it eating. I had a bad day eating. I never get to do this eating. And because the real reason for this is because a weight loss coach, when they help you see your reasons, you can move forward, and decide better each, and every time. But also what I watch a lot of people do, which is important in weight loss coaching is let’s say it is your mama’s big meal, and you decide, “I rarely get to do this. On that meal on that day. I want to eat all my favorite foods. Even if I go over what my body needs, this is a special time, and I’m making a decision that that’s what I want to do.” So like our reason, we feel convicted, and yet we feel guilty as fuck when it’s over. All of a sudden the beat down comes in. You shouldn’t have done that. You’re never going to lose weight, you just went backward.

You’re back at square one. You derailed all your progress. Even if you decided to do it, your brain acts like a jackass, and it beats the out of you. A good weight loss coach knows how to take that situation with you, and either anticipate it so that when all the horse shit comes up, you know exactly what to say, or they work with you after the fact to show you your brain’s just wrong. Remember we thought about this, sometimes our brain associates guilt, and shame at the wrong times. Could this be a time when it might be wrong? So, that is the power of weight loss coaching. That’s very different than hiring gym trainers, or hiring coaches who really don’t understand how to get into the psychology of eating, how to really understand more of a 360 of their clients. And then here’s one of the things I think that, so weight loss coaches, really, they’re exposing a lot of the subtle fears, and the doubts and stuff that cause self-sabotage, but diets they can’t diagnose things, they can’t tell you why you broke the plan.

If you think about a trainer or you think about a shake coach or somebody like that, if you break the plan, you’re usually just told, “Well, get back in there.” But they don’t trace back to figure out, well what happened so that the next time we can be more prepared. What trainers unintentionally do when they say just get back in there is when they don’t address that, then the next time you make a mistake, you beat yourself up because you’re like, “I just can’t do it.” Or you think something’s wrong with you because you keep fucking up. Or when they say just get back in there, you internalize that as I need to work harder. One of the things that we do not need to do in weight loss is work harder anymore. Weight loss should, when I think about how I lost weight, it should feel doable most days. You should be a little bit excited to try things at times. A little nervous but a little excited too.

You should be doing things in such a way that you’re seeing a little bit of progress every single day with new decisions. Everything should start feeling like there’s momentum. It’s not about working harder to lose weight, doubling down, using a lot of willpower, forcing yourself being more strict, and rigid. That’s diet culture, and it’s everywhere. And I think for people who actually make a lifestyle change, it needs to feel like it fits. If the goal is to lose weight, and keep it off for the rest of your life, that means you develop a new lifestyle. And a lifestyle shouldn’t feel like you’re having to force yourself to be good all the time. And it shouldn’t be stacked with so many rules that there’s no wiggle room for you to have a life. And that’s what a lot of diet do, and that’s what unintentionally happens when trainers, and coaches will say, “Just try again. Just get back on plan. Try harder next time.” It doesn’t work. The same problems are going to keep coming. The same fears and anxieties are going to keep coming.

Life is still going to throw shit at you left, and right. And until you learn how to quit dealing with it with food, the moment it gets hard, then it’s almost impossible to lose weight. So, that’s just like everything that I think is kind of the difference between a weight loss coach, and a diet. A weight loss coach is really helping you navigate all those things that a diet plan, or a trainer at a gym that they can’t anticipate they’ve not been trained to handle. They’re all well intentioned. I have nothing against any of them. I have hired my own trainers in the past. If I’m going to hire a, let’s say, a muscle coach, someone who’s going to, “We’re lift the weights, we’re going to get after it, Corrine”, because I love lifting weights now. I mean for someone that never played sports who was so overweight as a child that they wouldn’t even let her play PE, I love doing that stuff now. But if I hired a coach, it would be more like, I want to know good form. I want their expertise in that area.

And I hired them and I liked my reason. My reason was I really want to learn how to do this for the long haul. And I think that’s important. When you are thinking about weight loss, are you hiring someone for the long haul? A lot of these diets y’all do, you know in your gut, this is not for the long haul. I’m just so desperate to feel better, and get some weight off I’m willing to make myself do this. Up until the point you can’t make yourself anymore, because you’re running into all those emotional problems you’re not addressing. So, I just suggest that you start from the get go with a program that addresses the long haul. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be slow, it doesn’t mean it’s going to take forever. In fact, I think having a weight loss coach speeds up weight loss because the slowest way to lose your weight is to spend 15, or 20 years of your life like I did, or the first 20 years of my life starting and stopping diets, going up and down the scale.

That’s the slowest fucking weight loss program I ever did. The fastest one I ever did was the last one where I didn’t do a thing that I knew I wasn’t going to do for the rest of my life. And every day that I made a small change, I was ready for another one after a few days of wins. And then they all stacked up and a hundred pounds came off, and I’ve never ever had to worry about my weight again. That’s the fastest way to lose weight. So, if you want to give us a try, just come on over to joinnobs.com, take a look at what we offer.

We have all the weight loss coaching that you need, and at the most affordable price on the internet, most of the time when you hire a weight loss coach, if you’re hiring one on one, you’re looking at about $5,000 for a six month program. We are $59 a month. And you get access to coaches, you get access to all kinds of courses that help you with that mindset. And you get me coming live to you in the private membership once, or twice every single week working with the entire group on how to truly change their mind, truly change their weight for the last time. All right, y’all have a good week, and I’ll talk to you soon.