A lot of you all are just making a goal number. I want you to think about the goal life you want. The purpose of having your goal number, number one is to give you numerical data that will tell you, “Hey, whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.” Or, “Hey, whatever you’re doing, you need to look at it.” If the scale’s not going down, it is just an indicator light on your dashboard going off like, “Hey, your gas tank might be low. Hey, check your oil.” I love the check engine light, like if you need to check your oil or something, right? I want you to think about that is kind of your scale.
It is like a check engine light going off on the dashboard when you’re not losing weight to say, something’s going on, something’s going on to prevent you from doing habits that will promote weight loss. So I need you to check under the hood, which is your brain, and find what’s going on. We’re going to look at our habit patterns. We’re going to look at our habit tracker. We’re going to say like, “All right, what does my habit tracker tell me? How many times did I eat on plan? How many times did I actually stop at enough? How many times did I eat off plan? How many days did I get sleep? Am I around my cycle?” Whatever it is. “Did I drink last night? Did I eat salty food?” It’s just a check engine light. And you go and you check your information to explain the weight result that you created.
Notice how nowhere in there did I say like, “You need to look deep inside to see where you’re broken personally. That that number, if it’s gone up, you need to check yourself. You are probably a shit show.” No, we use it as the indicator light that something might be off. Go see if you can find it. We want to look at our goal life that we want because our goals, I want you to think about them. It’s like if you are going to be driving down an interstate and there were no guardrails and there were just roads everywhere, you could just go anywhere you want. Let’s say you needed to get someplace and I’ll send you down the interstate, I give you no directions, and there’s tons of ways to get off the interstate. If you don’t know where you’re supposed to go and when you land there and what things look like, to tell you, “You’re on the right path. You’re on the right path. You’re on the right path.”
You’re likely to diverge and go a million different directions, and that always takes longer. When you don’t know what you’re working towards, where you’re going, it takes a lot longer to get there trying to feel your way down the interstate and all of its attractive, “There’s a McDonald’s over here. Look, a museum. Hey, if you go here, there’s the beach.” You have all kinds of things distracting you. But if you know you’re supposed to land at one particular point and I send you down an interstate and I have got guardrails for days, you see offshoots, but you can’t get to them because your guardrails are your habits. Your guardrails are the life you want to create for yourself. And they’re saying like, “Hey, this beach has nothing to do with us getting to where we want to go.”
Your goal number, your habit tracker, your goal life, having a real clear vision of all of that keeps you running in the right direction. And then when you try to get off, if you’re looking at your data and you’re thinking about the person that you want to be and that goal life you want, you quickly know, you at least know when you’re getting off track. You may not choose to get back on, but it is better to know if you’re off track than it is to not realize it. This happens a lot in diets. Think about a lot of your past diets that really didn’t challenge you to figure out what your goal life was. It’s like, “We’re just going to lose weight. We’re going to focus on the almighty number,” and I promise you, when you reach this number, you going to be so proud. You going to be so happy. All these things.
But we don’t really think about, “Well, what kind of eater do I want to be? Do I want to be the kind of person that eats on plan on vacation, or is it okay for me to go on vacations and I just want to eat the way I want? I come back and I easily and seamlessly get back to life? How do I want my life to be at the end? What do I want the relationship with food to be? What kinds of food do I daydream that I will at the end still eat and be able to have?” Traditional diets, what ends up happening is they don’t ask you about your goal life. When you don’t know who you want to be as an eater. Let’s say that one of your goals is, “I would love to feel confident around any food. I just desperately do not want food to control me ever again.” If you know that’s you, then choosing a diet that is reliant on very limited foods is not going to get you to your goal life.
It’s going to get you to your goal weight. But then when you get there, you haven’t built the skill of being comfortable around foods you love. You haven’t built the skill of being able to have them with control. This is why it’s important to know the goal life. What we’re going to do next is you’re going to think about, “What is my goal life? I know my number, and when I get there, this is what I think I want for me.” And just write a few things. We’re just going to figure out, what’s my goal life?
What does it look like? Do you exercise or not? How do you eat? Do you envision yourself one day as being a healthy eater? That was really important for me. I will tell all of you in the very beginning, I’ve never been a healthy eater my entire life. We lived in drive-throughs. We lived in buffets. We ate at home, it was literally pizza. I remember one time having a friend come over in high school and she had a very typical family. She had a mom, a dad, a sister. She lived in the good part of town, all the things. And her mother made a June Cleaver breakfast every morning for her. She had never hung out that she’d literally never had a friend whose parents were divorced. You got to remember how old I am. I remember being in high school and in a group, and we had about 175 kids in our class, and we had a special group for all of us whose parents were divorced, and there was like 20 of us.
My girlfriend comes over, she’s spending the weekend with me with some of my other friends. It’s Saturday morning, first time we’ve all stayed at my house. And she’s like, “Where’s your mother?” And I said, “Asleep.” And she’s like, “Well, is she not making us breakfast?” She was stunned. And I was like, “No.” I thought, “What are you speaking in tongues?” And she’s like, “Well, how are we going to eat?” And I was like, “That’s what leftover pizza’s for.” And I said, “Go help yourself. Why do you think she ordered three last night? So we’d have breakfast.” She was shocked. I’m telling you this story because when I first started losing weight, I would think about thin Corrine. I’m going to tell all of you. I really didn’t think I’d get there.
I didn’t set a goal number. I did not have a Corinne like this. I was not this enlightened. I had to figure it all out over the years. But I remember sitting around daydreaming about what life would be like if I really lost my weight. In my mind, I always pictured me eating healthy. I had a thin friend who she would bring fruit for snacks at work. I was going to the convenience store to buy a fully loaded sugar latte and a snicker bar every afternoon, sometimes fried chicken tenders, depended on what my mood was. And she would sit with me, she’d eat her fruit. No complaining, no acting like it was unfair. No lording it over me. But I always thought, “I wish I could be like her. I so wish that I could just eat healthy. I wish I liked healthy food.”
So when I would think about it, I was like, “All right, I want to be a healthy eater.” I knew I wanted to be that person. I knew I wanted to be somebody who could exercise. I had watched my brother play sports all his life, and I always thought, “That’s not for me. I’m just the fat sister.” Even as an adult, I was like, “Yep. All my friends, they go do 5Ks and they go to the gym, not me. I’m the big girl.” And so when I was daydreaming about who I wanted to be, I really started identifying, “Wow, I want to be a different person. I have a goal life I actually want. I don’t have a goal number.” And it made sense to me at some point that when I really understood what my goal life was, landing on my number was really easy.
It just kind of followed. And so I started taking tiny steps in that direction. That was my guardrails. I didn’t, on day one, start eating… I eat a salad every day of my life. It’s rare that I don’t have a salad, because as I lost weight, I fell in love with salads. And as I lost weight, I knew that salads were an easy vehicle to get more protein, more vegetables in a very tasty way, more healthy fats. And it felt like a gift. But on day one, I had to cut out mayonnaise and use mustard on a double cheeseburger.
Knowing what I wanted for me, knowing this goal life helped me start making tiny decisions from like, “All right, the version of me one day, who’s moving, and if she’s healthy,” and all this other stuff, what would she decide to do a little different today? And that put me in that mindset. Now I tell you all of this because you got to know your goal life. Otherwise, you might let old diet thinking, old diet rules, outdated things you’ve done in the past, they’re going to want to take over the show when you are doing your 24-hour plans. They are going to rear their head. The more you try to do doable hunger and 24-hour plans, the more they rear their head. Most of you all want to put a stop when that happens. Like, “Well, let me quit doing my 24-hour plan. This obviously isn’t working.”
Instead of, “I need to uncover all those rules and compare it to my goal life. If it doesn’t match with my goal life, it’s not a rule anymore. It’s something I don’t want. It’s not something I should do or have to do. It’s very clear this isn’t who I want to be. My brain just hasn’t caught up to that yet.” So then you use the same technique. It’s like when you know your goal, when you start having outdated diet rules and outdated things trying to rear their head, you say, “I knew I’d think this. I always think I should restrict after I overeat. I always think I can’t have carbs. I’m the one.” And you tell yourself, “I knew I would think that, but that’s not what we’re doing here.” And you dead stop it with that. You don’t try to believe new things. You don’t have to go and do a bunch of other shit. You just dead stop it with that.
