Hello everybody. Welcome back. Today I want to talk about the relationship you have with yourself. I find that when I’ve been working with people as long as I have on weight loss, the key part that has to change for most people in order to be able to not only lose their weight but be able to keep it all for good, is that relationship with you has to change. I really believe that for me, when I lost my 100 pounds, it wasn’t because of the things I did. Now, I teach a lot of steps to lose weight, the four basics of losing weight and stuff, but at the end of the day, what really got me to lose weight was this ability to be able to sit and think about, how do I talk to myself? I tell this story a lot, but I think it’s important to repeat it.
When I was losing weight, there were so many pivotal times that I would sit there and think something nasty to myself or I would think something hopeless. The most probably important one that I really can remember that not only was pivotal at me being able to lose a hundred pounds, but it was that moment where I realized, “Oh, we’re doing something different here.” This is what you keep doing that’s working.
I’ve been losing weight for a little bit. I had started off at somewhere over 250 pounds, and I got to hovering over 200. If you have ever been over 200 pounds you know this term, you just want to get into Wonderland. I mean, you might as well be going to the Disney World. For a few weeks I was doing all the things, like all the things y’all. I was working out more than I ever had. Now, I don’t teach exercise as a fundamental for weight loss, but when I was losing weight, I had a dream that there was going to be a day that I was an athlete, because I’d never played sports a day in my life. My brother was the athlete and I just wanted to try. I had been learning how to be a triathlete. I was walk running. My first 5K that I trained for during my triathlon days were, I walk ran in 53 minutes. If you’re a runner, you’re going to be like, “Yeah, that’s not super fast.”
I can walk a 5K faster now. Let me just tell you, it was in July. I was still in the about 220s. I was wearing a black top with long black pants, because I didn’t want nobody to see my body. It is a wonder my ass didn’t die in the heat, but I did it. I was going to the Y every day and learning how to swim. Seriously, I was the girl at the pool with a swimming manual in a big Ziploc bag so that it wouldn’t get wet reading how to swim so that I could teach myself how to do it.
Then I was also the girl that was showing up for cycling 101 at this dude’s house. I’d never been on a bike, and the first time they were trying to show me how to clip in, I fell straight on the ground. I remember going to ride after ride. They would have a beginner ride, and I was really slow. God bless this group from Hermitage, Tennessee. I don’t even remember their names, but if any of them ever listened to this podcast, maybe you’ll know who you are, but they were the most patient human beings that ever was.
We’d go out, we’d get on these busy roads, I don’t even know why I didn’t have an anxiety attack or a heart attack doing this. I’d go out there and I would be in the back and then I’d get lost from the pack and they would get to the stop and every single person would wait for me so that I could arrive, I could drink my water, I could take my break, and then we would all go back out again. Trust me when I tell you, there was this point where I was hovering above 200 and I was like, “What else can I fucking do to lose weight?” I am working out more than I ever have. I am eating better than I ever have. Seriously, I was so different than I’d ever been in my life and in my diet brain, it made no sense as to why.
For about six weeks, I could not break 200. My body was like, “No, we’re not doing shit.” I promise all of you, it was not a lack of effort on thy part. About the sixth time this happened, the first few times I was willing to take the swings. The third and fourth time, I was kind of getting my ass full of it. By the sixth time, out of nowhere, here’s the voice that came up. “If we aren’t going to lose weight, we might as well go fucking back to eating. Screw this, it isn’t working.” I remember standing that day on that scale and that voice might as well have been a fire alarm going off in my head. I remember thinking, no, That is what you’ve always thought. That is what old Corrine always thought. If old Corrine didn’t get what she wanted on the scale, she threw away all the good work that she was doing.
I remember telling myself in the moment, “If you start eating over this, you will gain weight. If you ever want this scale to move again, you just have to keep going and trust that it’s going to happen.” Something in me made sense of, okay, I can be pissed, I can be angry, I can be frustrated and stuff, but that’s not a good reason to quit this time. All of that anger, all that frustration, all of that being pissed only means that you want something and it’s not happening yet. That was huge for me. That, I think, was one of the major turning points into how I talked to myself. I share this story with you because I can tell you all day long what I did to lose weight, the actual things, food concoctions, what I did and didn’t do at a restaurant, my exercise routines.
Most trainers, most weight loss programs, all day long, they will tell you what to do. The problem is that if you don’t know what to tell yourself to keep going, to never give up, to offset the negative thinking that’s naturally going to come along for the ride. If you don’t start learning those pieces, you will quit. It’s just like me that day. One of the things that was so different for me when I was losing weight this time was, as I was leveling up with… A leveling up is what I teach, which is where you simply just every day you try to do a little bit different or a little bit better than the day before. For example, my early level ups was I knew I was an overeater. I have always ate past full.
When I was growing up, I remember thousands of times my mother saying, “Eat all you can because I don’t know when the next meal’s coming.” We were broke. Eating way past full meant you’re saving your life. It meant avoiding starvation. It meant staying out of danger. As an adult, even when there was no food insecurity for me, to me, my body always felt very cared for, very comfortable, and had an ability to relax when I overate. Sometimes it wasn’t even really emotional. It was this is just what I do. That’s the only way that my body cannot think, “Oh, we don’t know when the next meal’s coming. We should panic. We should send the alarm.” One of the things that I was doing, one of my first level ups was I allowed myself to overeat. I just changed the quality of foods I overeat with.
If I knew that I was going to need to eat and fill that sense of fullness, in the beginning, my first level up was then add a lot of vegetables to your meals. I used to make pasta, like spaghetti and meat sauce and pasta, and I would want to eat until full. That took a lot for me because I had always been an overeater. My full was busting at the seams full. One of my very first level ups was, all right, we’re going to do half the pasta and I’m going to steam broccoli and some mushrooms and some baby carrots and I’m going to toss all that with pasta. Then I’m going to toss all that with the marinara and the ground turkey sauce. For me that was like, I just need a step in the right direction. I just got to figure out ways that I can start changing.
I would instead of saying things like, “That’s not good enough, you got to do better.” In those days I was telling myself things like, “Good for you. Every day you’re looking for something that you can do. I’m so glad we did something different today.” I rewarded myself for those changes. All of that reward led to the day that I was on the scale, because I had started talking to myself differently, it was like it slapped me in the face of like, “This is old you thinking.” I had been trying so hard at inserting new thinking and telling myself how I was going to think about things. That’s how I was going to lose weight differently this time. I wasn’t just losing weight just to lose weight. I knew I wanted to lose weight because I literally wanted to feel better. I wanted to feel better about my body, myself.
I wanted to feel in control. I wanted to be happier. I didn’t want to be so depressed all the fucking time. If I was going to do that, I knew, I don’t want to wait until I lose all the weight and hope that I like myself at the end. I got to start liking myself now. Where can I find little places to like myself now? That is what changed everything for me. You will hear me tell you thousands of times in this podcast, in 1,000 different ways. We have to learn how to like ourselves. We have to learn how to cheer lead ourselves. We have to learn how to find successes, and we most importantly have to be able to make mistakes, things not go our way and not become the enemy of ourselves. In weight loss, you’re just going to be reminded all the time of all of your inner insecurities.
The main reason why you’re going to be reminded all the time is because as you’re losing weight, you can’t just eat through your insecurities anymore. Every time you don’t like yourself, you can’t just go get a Snicker anymore. If we’re taking the Snickers away because we’re not hungry and we don’t plan it and we have insecurity about ourselves and we’re talking like a-hole to ourselves, well, I don’t want you just white knuckling through those moments being like, “I’m trying to lose weight so I can’t have the Snickers.” I want you to learn how to talk to yourself so that when insecurities come up, the answer now is new conversations with yourself, not white knuckling or going and getting the Snicker. I have three things that I want you to think about when it comes to the relationship with yourself. The first one is you are the most important relationship you’re ever going to work on.
It is not going to be the one with your kids, your mama, your partner. It’s always going to be you. That is because you are with you 24 seven. That conversation going on in your mind is the relationship you must prioritize over all other things. Everybody else benefits when you prioritize that relationship. Now, this does not mean that you have to start mani and pedi-ing and sleeping in and giving everybody boundaries and making everybody self-sufficient and all this other stuff. The biggest hoser when I talk about we’re going to improve the relationship with ourselves, is people equate that to doing things for themselves. I don’t want you like look, don’t do jack shit for yourself yet, especially if you’re going to associate it with selfishness or guilt. We are going to change the relationship with ourselves in the micro moments, in the silent moments.
We’re going to be doing it in ways that no one would ever know you’re doing it. Number two, it’s going to take you no time. You don’t have to create time, and you also do not have to tell somebody else “no” to gain time. The first thing is, you got to learn how to change how you talk to yourself. If you don’t learn how to talk to yourself, you’re going to be easily set off. You’re going to be quick to make the wrong assumptions about what someone means when they’re talking to you. You’re going to be distracted when your kids are talking to you. If you’re all up in your head about your body or your failures or whatever, you’ll overextend yourself, people pleasing just to be liked or you’re going to cut yourself out of social things because you’ll find that it’ll be too hard to be there because you’re so hard on yourself.
One of the things that you can do is in order to start that changing of the relationship with yourself first in your head is start doing an inventory of how you might be showing up half ass at times simply due to your negative self-talk. Everyone does it. A lot of times people say like, “I don’t want to work on my negative self-talk because I don’t say things like that in front of my kids. I don’t act like that in front of other people.” It’s usually subtle. I want you to turn up the volume on watching your life or turn up the light on watching your life to see where you might be half ass showing up for the people you love the most simply to do because you’re in your head. All right, so that’s actually not one of the three things, but I’m going to give you three things.
Let’s just call that a bonus. All right. The first thing to do is to learn how to keep promises to yourself. Now, that sounds amazing, but it also sounds hard. The first thing is if you don’t break promises to other people, I want you to dissect why. Very often it’s because you don’t overpromise. When we promise to do something for somebody else, usually we promise something we know we can do. When you are making promises to yourself, when it comes to changing your food or changing how you’re going to eat or whatever, don’t promise you’re going to do something that you don’t feel like you can follow through on.
If you don’t feel like you can follow through on it, you got to make it simpler. You got to make it easier, or you got to save it for a time when you are really willing to do that. You probably also don’t tolerate excuses from yourself. Like, “I don’t want to, or I dread doing this.” If you wouldn’t shit on someone else, guess what? Dread doesn’t mean you don’t go. Not wanting to has nothing to do with doing it. If you see yourself doing things you don’t want to do and dreading for other people, that’s normal to dread and not want to do things.
You have the skill to show up, which means you don’t have to wait on weight loss for you to want to or for you to have no more excuses or for you to love doing it. Don’t have to. The second thing, is you’ve got to notice your negative self-talk, and then I want you to think, every single time you notice yourself telling yourself bullshit, I want you to think this. “I’m learning to love myself enough to no longer speak to myself this way.” If you are tearing your body apart, I just want you to get factual about your body. Instead of saying things like, “My fat ass, I just want you to say, I have a human ass.”
It’s the truth. You have a human ass. Your negative thought is that it’s fat or too big or whatever it is. The only way your brain can ever talk about your ass in a different way is for you to, in the moment you catch it talking about it one way, you have to break it down and say it in a new way, over and over and over again to teach your brain, “We’re now going to start thinking about our ass as just an ass.” With no qualifiers. “I always screw up.” Change it to, “Sometimes I screw up and I’m willing to admit when that’s the truth versus me just being hard on myself.” Even if you think you screw up all the time, at least get really good at figuring out, “Is it really true?” Or is there, “Sometimes I don’t screw up because I’m a human?”
There’s also times I’m just being an asshole to myself. I’m blowing it out of proportion. I’m exaggerating, and that just harms me. I don’t learn from that. I get more scared to try things. I’m more likely to screw up next time if I don’t learn something from this. Then the last thing is, I want you to write one thing down every single day that you like about yourself. This can be hard, but I promise you it’s possible. Then for 30 days, you cannot repeat things. I want 30 unique things. Make you a list and keep it somewhere where you can see it. Some of the things can be big, some of them can be small, but they have to feel half-assed genuine. Now, some of you won’t have a problem with this until about day 15. Some of you, from the get-go, it’s going to feel near impossible if you’ve always talked to yourself like a-hole.
Think big and small, and here’s some examples. Like today, I’m just having one of those days where I don’t particularly like myself. I woke up, and just hard on myself. It’s like my brain is just begging to not like me. I wrote down today, “The one thing I like about me is I have wicked lipstick choices.” I know I how to do lipstick. That was my thing. Sometimes I write down things like, “I like how I responded to my husband when he smiled at me. Rather than brushing it off, I smiled back. I like how even in my darkest moments, I’m still trying to be there for myself.” Very often, I write that.
Even when I’m really depressed, I like that I’m the kind of person who acknowledges that. I like that I’m the kind of person who knows that they deserve better even when they don’t feel like it. Please, for the love of you and me, start talking better to yourself. Start liking yourself. If you really want to lose weight for the last time, you must work on you more than what you’re working on when it comes to researching, Googling and Pinteresting latest fad diets, what you should and shouldn’t eat, and all that other shenanigan. None of it works until the relationship with you works. Y’all have a good week and I’ll talk to you next time.
