Episode 309: 3 Reasons You Overeat

Corinne Crabtree:
Hello everyone. I am Corinne Crabtree, and I am the host of the Losing 100 Pounds Podcast. I am also the founder and CEO of the No BS Weight Loss Program. This is our monthly, free Facebook Live with me, where I’m going to teach you something, and then you get an opportunity to ask some questions. So I hope you’re ready to talk about why we overeat. And this is a big one, because I promise all of you, you do not have to do restrictive deprivation diets in order to lose weight, but we do have to work on emotional eating. We have to work on eating just because we want to, eating because we don’t want to waste it. There’s 1,000 reasons why we overeat and today we’re just going to talk about some of those. Now, if you’re new to me, you can listen to my podcast at Losing 100 Pounds, with Corrine.
It’s one of the top ranked podcasts. I think I’ve got almost 50 million downloads now, so a few people like it. Here’s the other thing, I really need your help sharing the word that No BS is the way to lose weight. So if you’re here, please make sure you tag someone that should be here. So if you’re one of my members already, go ahead and tag your accountability partners. I know that this is the free stuff and you get plenty in the private group, but you never know when I’m going to drop something amazing. Also, for all of my private members, this class that we are going to teach, I will be going in more detail on it tomorrow. So I’m going to cover the reasons why we overeat. And then tomorrow what we’re going to do, I came up with a brand new four step process for you to really figure out how to stop at enough versus overeating, like at dinner, at lunch with your favorite meal, all kinds of things.
So we’re going to talk about that tomorrow, inside the membership at our class, that always happens every Wednesday at 9:00 AM central time, and if you are a podcast listener and you’ve not joined the No BS Weight Loss Program and you’re like, “well, I want to learn how to stop it enough, I want to learn how to finally quit over eating and stuff.” You can join anytime you want. You can go to www.joinnobs.com. So either share this on your page or tag someone who needs to be here. We really need to get a lot of people out of the restrictive diet cycles and more into losing weight like a fucking sane person. All right, let’s talk about the reasons why we overeat. Number one is, a lot of us when we are going to lose weight, so let’s say that you are listening to everything I have to say.
Let’s say you’re a No BS member and you’re going through the weight loss course, or you’ve listened to every podcast, or you just found me on the podcast and you’re like, “Now’s the time. This bitch is about to lose some weight.” But here’s what’s crazy, as excited, as motivated, determined, or maybe you just gotten your shit level, as my granny used to say, I’ve met my shit tolerance for the day. My eyes are starting to turn brown. If any of that’s you, and you’re just like, “But when it is time for me to actually sit down with dinner and stop it enough”, which is what I teach you for losing weight, “I can’t do it. I just end up overeating.” What is happening is very often, you are triggering past diet trauma. We call it PDT inside my membership. And past diet trauma is where in some diet that you did in the past, you didn’t give yourself enough food.
I’m going to say it again, you did some diet in the past and you were not giving yourself enough food. A lot of diets that we’ve all done in the past, and seriously, I know I always use Weight Watchers as an example, but here’s the reason why I use Weight Watchers as an example, and that is because I hardly ever meet a woman that hasn’t done her rite of passage, which means I’ve signed up for Weight Watchers 5,000 fucking times. I’ve gone to the grim reaper scale, I’ve done in-person meetings, I’ve done all the things. So when I used to do Weight Watchers back in the day, I would eat foods that were a little higher in the points and stuff. And so, by the evening I wasn’t able to eat to what my body actually needed. So I’d be fucking hungry, I’d be starving, but I’d have maybe two points. And so, I would have to ignore what my body needed in that moment, to meet my point quota.
Your body does not like that. Our bodies hate this. Our bodies want to give us hunger cues, and when it says, “I’m hungry”, guess what your body wants you to do? Eat. It does not want you fucking around, go into your app and try to figure out how many damn points you have. Even if earlier in the day, let’s say earlier in the day, you were stressed out and you went face down in Cheetos and blew your points for the day. You know what your body doesn’t like? At dinner, when it needs some food, it wants you to eat. It does not want you to sit there and pay sins because you were stress eating at lunch. So when we do a lot of that, when we are taught to point calories or macros, whatever your flavor of shit is, when that matters more than what your body’s telling you and you’re overriding your body, trauma imprint, trauma imprint, trauma imprint. The way your body was designed and the way everybody’s body comes out of the box is, it wants to survive.
It would be awesome if our bodies, our minds nowadays are like, “Oh, it’s 2023. We’re not living in cave woman days anymore. I don’t need to worry that there’s a famine and all these other things.” Your body doesn’t do that. Your body still operates as if, “Hey, if you don’t feed me when I get hungry, I think something’s really wrong. I think something’s wrong in the world. You must not be able to get food, because I’m telling you what you need to do and your bitch ass ain’t listening.” So very often what ends up happening is, when we are starting any kind of diet that we’re going to do, and that includes the No BS Weight Loss Program. My program is not immune to past diet trauma. What happens is, you are sitting there, it’s time to stop it enough. You logically know it’s a good idea.
There’s nothing that I’m teaching you where you’re ever going to starve and you’re not going to get enough food and all this stuff. I’m always like, “Girl, if you are hungry, take a wild guess what you should do? Eat. Girl, when you’ve had enough, guess what you should do? Just stop.” And why? Because we going to eat if we get hungry again. Even though intellectually, nothing bad’s happening, you, when it’s time to stop, your body overreacts. So I used this analogy and I used it this weekend on a coaching call with my members, and we were talking about how she was worried about being hungry, and this applies to even stopping at enough. Everybody in the world… You want a fire alarm, right? Just yesterday we had security people here. I’m in my new house. We had the security system installed and one of the things that our houses have is fire alarms, and in our particular little area, you got to have a… What do you call them?
Sprinkler system in your house. I live in a really small town and they require sprinkler systems. So what is the one thing that we want a fire alarm system to do? We want it to go off in the minute there’s an emergency. If shit’s going down, please ring the bell. Tell me so I can get out with my family. Inside of our brains, we all have a fire alarm and it’s around food, and we are just designed that way. The problem is, when you’ve done a butt load of diets where you were not given enough food, and I mean some severe restriction, having to override hunger a lot, not getting enough food in hopes of losing weight, your brain now doesn’t wait to sound the alarm when there’s a house full of smoke. Now what happens is, the alarm goes off when you make a piece of toast. Every time you’re making toast, fire alarms like, “Whoa, what’s happening? What are we doing?”
Your brain is getting activated. It doesn’t know the difference between this attempt that is based in common sense science and intuition, versus a diet based in deprivation, restriction, low calories or whatever horse shit that we’ve done in the past. So our bodies are very conditioned when we have past diet trauma, to sound the alarm and it’s a false alarm. But even if it’s a false alarm, in the moment, guess what it feels like? Serious and urgent. If your fire alarm is going off in your house, you would go see what’s causing it. The same thing happens to us emotionally when we’re eating. If you have past diet trauma, that is why sometimes it’s really hard for some of us to stop it enough. Now, there’s another reason. Number two, why you might find it hard to stop it enough and why you might be overeating, and that’s called mental restriction is happening.
If you’re one of my members or you listen to my podcast, you know I do not teach you to restrict food. I do not want you doing that to yourself ever again. You are going to learn how to eat the food you love in a way that allows you to have the life you want and lose weight. And I’m not doing some kind of bullshittery here either, you literally get to plan the food you want, but we work through all the mental stuff of really evaluating what is it that you truly want? What are the things you want to try? We have lots of things that we teach you, but at the end of the day, I teach you all this beautiful stuff. It’s just like past diet trauma. You hear all of it and you’re like, “Amen, hallelujah. Raise the roof. Let’s do it. I’m so ready.”
Then what happens is, you’re ready to eat and you don’t hear what’s really going on in your brain. You’re sitting down to your pizza, you’re sitting down to a cupcake, maybe you’re having a sandwich and some chips. You’re sitting down to whatever it is, but in the back of your brain it’s saying, “I really shouldn’t be eating this much. Well, this is too many calories. Back when I did Weight Watchers, they said that you could not have this.” But your brain has a running commentary of all the reasons why what you’re eating must be wrong, can’t be right. And when that’s happening, you’re experiencing mental restriction while you’re eating. When I teach you to plan the foods you love, why do you want to be able… Think about it. Why do we want to be able to lose weight eating foods that we like to eat? Because we want to feel peace, calm and joy.
Well, when you are sitting down to the foods you love, they don’t just give you joy automatically. The only way food can give you joy is if your thoughts open the door to some joy, and if you’re sitting there talking about how you shouldn’t be eating it and how many calories it is and wondering, is this going to screw up my weight loss? There’s no way that this is going to work when all of that is bubbling under the surface.
When you’re eating, you want to keep eating, hoping to experience that relief, that calm and that joy that you thought you would get. And if you’re not getting it due to mental restriction, we tend to overeat thinking we must need more food, because we haven’t enjoyed it yet. We haven’t gotten that feeling that we were seeking. So it’s really important that you listen for mental restriction. It’s subtle, it’s quiet, it’s whispery, and then in tomorrow’s class on Wednesday, for all of my members, I’m going to teach you step one, which is going to be how to figure out what’s going on in your brain, because if you can’t figure out what’s going on in your brain, you’ll not be able to stop it enough.
All right. The third thing is, very often it’s hard to stop at enough and we tend to overeat when you have a positive association with food. Now, I don’t want anybody to think that I want to teach you how to have a negative association with food, because that is not what I’m talking about here. What I’m talking about is, for me personally, when I was growing up, we were really poor. We were the kind of poor where, we didn’t always know if we were going to eat every day. I was joking around the other day about how I’m such a good mover, because when I was little, I’ve moved 30 something times in my life and my mama was not in the military. We were just broke ass. And so, we moved constantly so that we could keep a roof over our head. So we had to be really efficient packers and stuff.
For me, when I was little, we often would go to buffets, because they were cheap and you could eat a lot, and then that was also about the only time I got to spend time with my mom and my brother as a family, where we actually relaxed when we were eating, we were connecting. The rest of my life was pretty tumultuous. My mom was always between jobs, she’s taking us from babysitter to babysitter. We just didn’t have a lot of time. And then if we were at home, my mom was fucking tired. Literally, she would tell me all the time, “All I want to do is lay down, watch TV and go to bed”, because she was exhausted. So for me, I had a very positive relationship with overeating. Overeating when I was a kid meant connection, so it also meant safety.
When we would overeat, I would be like, “Oh, okay. If we can’t eat again for a day or two, I at least have a lot of food on me.” So as an adult, when we have plenty of food, we’re not moving all the time. I own my own business. I get to connect with my family whenever I want to. I found myself though, still eating a lot, specifically at dinner. Because once I would start eating, it was almost like the good emotions would come over me. There were these connections to, you want to keep eating, because then that means we’ll get to connect longer. And there was this sense of safety, even though it did not make sense rationally, emotionally, it was happening. And so, one of the things that I had to do was learn how to break the tie that, it’s not that I don’t want to connect at dinner, I needed to break the tie that the food was providing connection.
I had to learn how to reassure myself that food was always coming now, food was not going to be taken away like it was when it was a child. And so, for some of us, we have positive associations with overeating and it’s really important for us to find them. It’s not always negative. And I think for me, the hardest ones to break are always going to be the positive emotions, because they feel so good. Why would I want to get rid of them? What I want to tell you is what I want to teach you all, which is, we’re not getting rid of those. We’re just going to understand how they’re created to begin with, so we can quit thinking it’s the meal giving me all these feelings. I went back and looked at when I was a child and I had to really write the story over and over again how that food, eating extra, never created food safety.
My brain would think we have enough, we don’t have to worry if we don’t get food. That was never the food doing it. So if I want to feel safe now, I just had to tell myself, “You have enough. This isn’t like when you were a child.” Same thing with connection. I was never connected because we were eating. I just made an error connection, which is like, “Oh, when we eat is when we connect.” Instead of telling myself, “Connection comes whenever I want to think about someone.” And I had to retrain myself on all of it. The fourth reason why you might be overeating and it’s hard to stop. Some foods, you actually need some boundaries around them. This happened with me. There are some foods that are just super easy to overeat, like ice cream and nuts and peanut butter, things like that.
For my clients, I often tell them, find the foods that you tend to zone out on. Find the foods that, once you start, it’s hard to stop. We have to learn how to create a loving boundary. What I watch most people do is this, “Well, I can’t control myself around the ice cream, so I’m going to quit buying it. I’m going to tell everybody in the house we can’t have this no more.” And what we do is, we don’t create a loving boundary. We yell at ourselves. We act like it’s wrong. We act like we can’t be around it. We do all this very anxious energy around the food, and what I want to teach you is, it’s okay to portion some of the things that you’re going to eat. It’s even okay if you don’t want to have them in your house in the beginning, but it’s all about the thoughts behind it.
It’s about sitting there and thinking, “What is a loving boundary around nuts?” Nuts is one of those things, it’s because it’s a healthy food, but so many of us eat the shit out of them. It’s like, because it’s got the label of healthy, we notice that we’ll eat a bunch of them. We’ll graze on them, we’ll grab some, because we have this justification, “But this is healthy. It’ll be okay.” And the next thing we know, we’ve squirreled away enough nuts that our little cheeks are like this and we feel like shit. So I noticed the same pattern with me for a long time and I finally just decided, the most loving thing that I can do for myself is when I buy nuts, when they come in the house, they get portioned first. Now, I don’t teach my members to portion anything, but what I do teach everybody is look for the things that portioning would make it easier on yourself later.
Look for the things that, let’s say you’re not going to buy it, that it might make things easier for you right now. I always want you doing things for yourself when it comes to weight loss, that create senses of, this is loving, this is ease, this will help me. What I don’t want you all doing, which is what most of you do that drives the anxiety and it drives you to overeating, is telling yourself things like, “You can’t have this. You’re so weak. You must be broken. You’re the only person who eats like this. You always fuck things up.” We do so much admonishing of ourselves. You will never, ever gain authority over food or be able to eat to enough or wait for hunger, being a complete asshole to yourself. It does not work. I know a lot of you think, “Yeah, if I’m not hurting myself though, then I won’t try.”
Bullshit. I want you to recount the years of your life. If being hard on yourself worked so well, why the fuck you even listening to this broadcast? At some point, we have to just realize, being hard on ourselves is not working. If you’ve been trying to lose weight 10 years, 20 years, half your damn lifetime, most of your life and you’ve been trying to do it through brute force, making yourself do shit, shitting on yourself all the time, telling yourself you’re a loser, all that, when are you going to admit the truth? That is not working for me. I got to unlearn that and I got to learn a new way. And that’s what I teach my members, that new way. Why not lose weight being nice to yourself? That’s how I lost weight. I will give you something that is… So for all of my members, I’ve been using this term, old you, new you. You’re going to see a lot more of it.
We’re getting ready to give you brand new modules for our weight loss course in April. So if you love the ones we have now, listen to them a few times, because in April we’re going to replace them with the new shit. But I talk a lot about how, when I was losing weight, the thing when I look back at losing 100 pounds was, I got so good at noticing what I would call, old you Corinne thinking. I would sit and the example I use most often, which is to me the one that… Well, I’ll give you a different example. I’ve always used the scale as example, and you all probably heard that story a thousand times. When I first started going to the gym, I do not think anybody needs to go exercise in order to lose weight. But for me personally, one of the things that I really wanted to be able to do in my lifetime, was to be able to exercise and be athletic like my brother.
When I was growing up, I didn’t play sports, I weighed over 200 pounds. I was the big girl all the time. I would always get picked last. And then, sometimes teachers wouldn’t even let me play with the kids, because they said I was too big. Nobody wanted me on the team. So she’d be like, “Lust sit out today and watch, take notes.” Take notes on kickball? Are you fucking kidding me? I would tell you the name of that teacher, but I won’t. And so, when I first started losing weight, I had a baby. He was a year old, he was very active.
I had my brother that I’d watched all my life be fit and active and stuff. I was just like, “I just want that. I want that so bad.” And so I went and started walking, not because I thought, “This is the only way to lose weight. You have to walk.” I didn’t talk down to myself. I decided to start walking because I was like, “I want to be able to keep up with my baby. I want to be athletic like my brother.” I had a desire. So I would go to the gym, and the first few weeks I was wearing my husband’s clothes, because I had quit buying clothes. I was well over 250 pounds and I was as embarrassed as shit. And I remember walking in, full on shame.
That kind of shame that just, it feels like fucking a vice. Not only are you in a vice, but you feel flames flying up your body at the same time. It’s like being in a vice and someone setting you on fire and all you want to do is escape. And I remember going in and just thinking, “You’re the big girl and nobody wants you here.” And just being ashamed, and I can’t tell you how many times I would tell myself, “That is old Corrine thinking. Wait, new Corrine is going to go and she’s going to figure all this out. She wants to play with that baby and she’s got to start somewhere.” And I knew that if I kept talking to myself like old Corinne, I was never going to make it. I just knew it and I wish that I knew how why so special as to be the one person, well, not the one person, but the one person I know that somehow figured out that, the way she talked to herself really early on was going to be pivotal.
It wasn’t going to be the things I did. The first few weeks I was eating ice cream by the gallon. The first few weeks I was losing weight, I didn’t cut shit out when it came to the food. I just made sure I drank water, went to bed, and I went to the gym and walked for 15 minutes. A 15-minute walk was an ass kicker for me, a legit ass kicker. Not only was it hard physically, but it was mentally exhausting. And I had to go at 8:00 at night. My child was a high needs child. There was no taking Logan to the gym. Every time I had ever tried, he cried his eyes out. If you don’t know, my son was later on diagnosed with autism. It is no wonder those first few years, he was hypersensitive at everything.
I had to go at night after we got him down, after my husband came home from work and I’d had it a day of fits, crying, the normal keeping up with. God, just keeping up with a baby is hard enough and then on top of that, one with sensory issues and stuff, and then you don’t even know what’s wrong. And I went, and maybe it was all of that, but I just remember thinking, “Cannot think like old you.” That doesn’t mean that old Corrine didn’t pop up like whack-a-mole thousands of times a day every single day.
And it still happens, because a lot of you hear me say this and you’re like, “Yeah, but [inaudible 00:28:21]. Yeah, but I’ve been trying and it’s three weeks later and still having negative thoughts.” Bitch, welcome to the party. You got a choice. You want to be whining about it and just go back to living by it? Because I did that for years. I lived by that ruthless tyranny of shit that went on in my brain. And when I decided to lose weight, I drew a line in the sand and it was, that’s old Corinne thinking. I got so good at calling it out. You all know it as old shitty. Both are the same.
And then telling myself, “But new Corrine’s thinking like this, the new version of us is going to think this. This is what the new version of us is going to do.” And I just did it over and over and over again. My theory has always been, if I’m going to go to bed at night fucking emotionally exhausted, it’s going to be because I was trying so hard to be the person I wanted to be and it’s going to be because I was fucking trying so hard to change how I thought about myself, versus going to bed every night fucking emotionality exhausted, whining, bitching, moaning, complaining and relenting to whatever my brain said.
I’m just like, “Look, if we’re going to go to bed tired, we might as well go the bed tired for a good fucking reason.” And that’s what I did. And so, in tomorrow’s class, what I’m going to teach all of you members, if you’re here 9:00 AM central time on Wednesday, is we are going to do a deep dive. I’m going to review these really quick, and then I’m going to teach you the four step process.
We’re going to take those four ends, but it’s not going to be the way you’ve heard me describe it before. I’m going to help you stretch them out and give you the actual steps. Do this at this moment, then do this at this moment. I’m going to show you how to stretch it out over a few weeks, because for the month of March, it’s all about stopping at enough. And I’m going to relentlessly teach you how to stop it enough, so that by the end of March you feel really good and safe and capable at stopping at enough. And tomorrow the class is going to be teaching you those four steps that you can be working on all month long.
If you want in on that class in the morning, go to joinnobs.com right now, and you can go ahead and sign up for our membership. And if you can’t attend that class live, no problem. I have 14,000 people in my membership and there’s usually about 800 people on that call, which goes to show you that less than 10% of our people attend our live calls. Guess what they do? They listen on a replay when it fits their life. I designed my program to fit your life. I did not design a program where you got to contort your life on my terms, like most diets do. And you can either watch the video at your leisure on two times speed or you can listen to it in our private member podcast. It’ll be downloaded and ready for you on Friday, and you can have at it and learn all about it all. We can long if you want. All right, let’s see if we have any questions today.
Let me get my screen up. Can you lose on this No BS program, if you are in your 60s and have a low thyroid? Yes. So in the comments, if you are over 60 and have lost weight, will you please let our person know that you can lose weight and low thyroid is also, whether you’ve had thyroid or you are over 60 or you are a combination of both, please just tell her what has happened for you. I believe, let’s see, we have 500 something people on here, so we must… You all, for real. I’m just a member, not paid for my endorsement. No BS will change your shitty thinking. That’s hilarious. How do I make myself feel comfort and security without food? It’s all about your thinking. I get so anxious about the future that the only thing that makes me feel safe is the physical sensation of food in my belly.
Here’s one thing I’ll tell you. Food right now is the only way you know how to do it, but food is not actually doing that. Let me tell you what actually happens when you eat. So you’re sitting there, you’re thinking about your future and you’re probably thinking shit like, “I probably can’t do this”, or whatever it is your thoughts about your future are. S lot of times when we think about our future, it’s like, I’ll be alone for the rest of my life. I’ll never find somebody. I’m going to be stuck in this job forever. No one’s going to hire me to do the work that I want to do. Whatever your future is, I just coached someone this weekend who is having infertility problems and she was very terrified of her future and was like, “What if I can’t get my body under control and I’ll never have children?”
When you’re thinking all of that, that drives the anxiety and if you think food is the answer, food’s the only thing that seems to calm it down, then your brain says, “Hey, we’re feeling anxiety. That sucks. You should go eat.” When you go eat, you’re not exactly feeling better. What’s actually happening is, when you’re eating, you’re thinking about eating now. You’ve stopped the thoughts about your future. So once you get to eating, you start thinking in, this tastes so good. Sometimes when we start eating, we get a little bit of the dopamine from the food and we start thinking about other things, but the thing I want you to see is, the food is not actually doing it for you and it’s very important. And I know that you all can go out on the internet and find a thousand articles about how, that food does light up your brain. Food does these things.
Here’s what I know. It’s not helpful for you to keep arguing for food being the thing that comforts you. When you keep going down that road, that means you are not open to other ways. You are just very focused on food being the solution. We have to stop that part. So what we want to do is tell ourselves, food has never comforted me. Here’s how I know. When I eat, I don’t feel better about my future. It’s not like I start eating and be like, “Oh my God, my future’s going to be amazing. I bet I can solve all this. One day somebody will want to hire me.” It’s not like your outlook on the future ever changes.
All food does is distract you from your shitty ass opinions. So you want to tell yourself, food’s never actually comforted me. It’s distracted me from my shitty opinions about my future. And then the next thing you want to tell yourself is, the best way for me to actually lower my anxiety is to start learning how to listen for the things I tell myself, and argue a better truth. Learn how to change my thinking. That’s what we work on inside of No BS.
Because a lot of people want to teach you, like somebody’s asking, do you have a food app? I ain’t got no food app. Why would I want you to have a food app? Your problem isn’t that you have a lack of apps that’ll track food. You know what? You all have no one teaching you how to listen to the shit that’s going on in your brain, so that you can start rewiring it and changing it. Because when you really piece apart your thoughts about your future and you start learning how to debunk some of them, calm your nervous system down, rethink things through, have small things that you can think about your future that feel a little more hopeful, less interrogating, whatever it is, then you have the lifelong solution to not overeat anymore.
Think about it. We focus on the causal problems of your weight loss. When we solve the causes of why we’re overweight, why we’re overeating, we now can lose the weight we want in a much easier way. If you don’t solve the cause and all you’re doing is just trying to change the food, what happens is, I’m changing the food. I’ve got my food app. I’m doing all my calculations and stuff, while also terrified of my future. This is such a good example. Here is a person who’s so worried about their future. Just like the girl that came to me with infertility. She was so worked up about, she just had a miscarriage. They found out some stuff that she needs to do in order to set her body up to be able to have a baby and stuff, and she’s so scared she’s never going to be able to have children.
I did not coach her on how to stop it enough. I did not tell her to go out and download a food protocol. We worked on her fear around her not being able to take care of her body and have babies. And when we worked through all of that, now she’s more apt to go out and figure out how to truly take care of herself, because what I don’t want to do is say like, “Hey, eat these things. Maybe that’ll work, but I also want you to take away all the foods that, right now that you used to deal with your emotions, but I’m going to leave you with your shitty ones. We’re just not going to work on that stuff.” We have to stop doing diets that force us to follow certain things, but they don’t resolve our emotional eating. Because when you take the food away, if you don’t look at your life and solve for that, then you’re left with all of the emotions that you have, with no way to cope. And I teach how to cope and change your life.
How do you do something like follow No BS when you have past diets so stuck in your head? Well, that’s why I have lessons on how to unwind diet trauma. That’s it. Inside No BS, you’re probably listening to the podcast or something. Inside No BS. We unwind all that. I teach processes. I teach you how to find your diet rules. I teach you how to change them and shift them. We talk a lot about restriction and deprivation. When is it happening? How do you let it go, and all that kind of stuff. How do you get past the thought that anything less than 30 pounds of weight loss isn’t enough? I have about 100 pounds to lose and cannot seem to lose more than 20 before my weight plateaus, and then starts back up again. I’m struggling to become more consistent, but did just start pre-portioned food in a container, so I’m hoping that will help.
There’s three questions in this one. I have about 100 pounds to lose and cannot seem to get past 20 pounds for plateaus. If it starts going back up because you’re overeating, then the problem isn’t the portioning. The problem is, when you get to a weight loss stall or a plateau, what are you making it mean? Because you’re probably making it mean shitty, like this always happens. I can’t lose weight. It’s like your brain suddenly turns into an Eeyore, and when you go into Eeyore mode and feel terrible, you probably start like, “Well, fuck it. I’m just going to take a break this weekend.” That’s not a weight loss stall or plateau. That’s called my weight stops for a couple of weeks and rather than me practicing patience and perseverance, I go into an Eeyore mode and then I eat, and then I regain weight.
We just have to be really clear what the problem is, so that you’re not sitting there thinking that there’s something outside of your control or mystical. Most people when they lose about 20 pounds, are going to hit a stall for a little bit, probably about two to four weeks. Their weight’s not going to move. During that time, this is where most people get it wrong. They think this isn’t working. Instead of, “Oh, this is that part of weight loss I’m supposed to be learning next”, which is how do you keep doing the habits that you’re doing even when you’re not getting rewarded on the scale? How do you make sense that I’m going to keep doing this, because I actually am changing my life? Most people when the scale isn’t giving them a reward and they just start eating like a jackass, they are not sitting there trying to create a lifestyle.
They’re like, “Oh God, I’m not losing weight.” We have to tie it into, you got to have purpose. You got to really understand why you’re doing this, and you’re either in it for the long haul or you’re not. This is why I’m like, we only should lose weight the way that we plan to live the rest of our life. Quick fixes don’t work, because even with quick fix diets, everybody hits a stall or plateau. You might be able to rip off 10 or 15 pounds real quick, and then guess what? You have your one to two weeks or two to three weeks where you don’t lose weight. And yeah, if you’re doing something asinine and the scale’s not going down, you’ll be like, “Fuck it, I’m just going to eat whatever I want.” Instead of, why do I want to eat whatever I want? Am I doing something that is not actually creating the life I want? Those are some of the powerful questions we have to start asking ourselves.
I have chronic fatigue and ADD. How can I get motivated mentally to get off the sofa and go walk? Well, you don’t wait for motivation. I don’t know why, everybody’s always like, how do I get motivated? No one needs motivation. You know what you need? You need to tell yourself, “I don’t want to do it. I’m going, and I’m going to dread it and I’m going to hate it and I’m going to”, all of that, “But I’m going.” You need willingness. That’s very different. And chronic fatigue and ADD, if you are sitting there thinking, “I need to get off this couch and go walk”, then already you have said ADD and chronic fatigue cannot get in the way of that. Now, if you were paralyzed in a wheelchair and saying, “How do I get out of this wheelchair and go walk?” Notice how someone who’s paralyzed would never set that goal. So you already need to tell yourself, “My chronic fatigue and my ADD doesn’t have anything to do with this. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have that as a goal for myself.”
The only thing that’s happening right now is, I’m using those as an excuse not to do something. And of course that creates dread and of course that creates not wanting to. So I just need to start telling myself, “Look, we’re going when we don’t want to. Look, I know you’re dreading it. We’re going to go even if we don’t want to.” You get to enjoy it after, right now you don’t get to enjoy it at all. It would be like your children saying to you, “Oh my God, I’m just tired and I’m 12. How do I do my homework when I don’t want? How do I get motivated to do my homework?” Every parent would just about die. You would probably tell your kid, if you’re not motivated too bad. You know what you need to do, do your homework.
You’re going to do your homework because you’re supposed to. And sometimes we just have to have those conversations with ourselves. You don’t have to be an asshole to yourself and if you really want to go for a walk and you need to tell yourself, “Look, this will help those things. I know you don’t want to, but you just supposed to, because you decided you wanted to do it.” People are always looking to feel motivated first. That is the hardest way to reach a goal. I always believe in this. If I want to do something, I always tell myself this. Motivation’s going to come a lot lot later down the road. After you started getting wins and you start seeing the positive benefits of what you’re doing, you’ll probably be motivated to keep doing it, but for now, I’m not going to waste time waiting for motivation to just drop out of the sky.
It doesn’t work that way. I’m just going to tell myself, “This is what I’m going to do.” So break it down to, I take a two-minute walk, three times a week. I actually get off the couch, I go outside and I do two minutes, and I’m going to do that for a few weeks just to prove to myself I can get off the couch. Now some people will be like, “That’s not good enough.” I don’t give a fuck if your brain says it’s not good enough, you know what’s not good enough? Sitting around whining that you ain’t got no motivation to get off the couch. That’s what I would tell myself, but that version of me is not good enough. The version of me that waits for motivation, the version of me that sits around and does nothing, because they can’t do everything, that’s the definition of not good enough for Corrine now.
Old Corinne used to think she had to do more. New Corinne gets off her ass when she doesn’t want to and knows that doing anything in the right direction, is now the definition of good enough. That’s the level of conversation and this is what I keep telling you all. Your diets are very much so… All of them are emphasizing what you put in your mouth, how many calories and blah, blah, blah. I don’t care if they give you, all of you probably have a stack of bibles this high, of diets. Go through your books, how many magazines, how many diet books, how many downloads, how much shit do you have that’s telling you what to eat, how many apps you got on your glorious phone? It’s like, “Well, I got the Weight Watchers app and I got the MyFitnessPal app and I got old Spark people and I got this one.” How many of you all got 10 different apps for calculating your food, and guess what?
Ain’t none of them teaching you how to get motivated, how to be willing, any of that stuff. Obviously another app, another cookbook or whatever, is not going to do it if you are not working on your brain, you can’t follow anything. That’s why my program is all about, brain science, common sense, meets things that are easy to do to lose weight. I tell you very simple things, because it should not be complicated, but then we got to go through all the brain stuff. We got to learn how to talk to ourselves. That’s the secret.
I keep thinking that I just really want a certain food. Are you saying that it isn’t really over desire for a food, it’s over desire for the thoughts and feelings I have around the food, comfort, joy and distraction? Yeah, pretty much. That’s usually what it is. We have an association with certain foods that, this is what we really enjoy. Let’s say your favorite food was nachos and you just really want nachos and stuff, and tomorrow you were told by a doctor that if you were to eat a plate of nachos you’d drop dead, and so would one of your children. I’m a guessing that over desire for nachos would drop dramatically.
Some of you all, if you were to say, whatever your favorite food is, type in the chat, my favorite food is… Or just whatever your favorite food is, cookies, cupcakes, chips, whatever it is and if you have pets, and I said, “All right, if you ever eat it again, that pet dies instantly.” A lot of you would be like, “I’ll never eat that again.” Your motivation now, for that food has drastically changed. You may still want it, but you would want Grover to live more than you would want to eat that food. If you don’t have a pet, just think of something or somebody you really love in this world and every time you ate it, they would drop to the ground in pain for 10 minutes, excruciating pain. Your attitude about that food would change. You may still think, “I remember when I used to eat that, that tasted so good. But boy, I don’t eat that no more. I really don’t want mama Jean over here dropping to the ground in immense pain for 10 minutes.”
That’s how we know it’s not the food providing our feelings. So I want you to really think about that. You may think it does, it may release hormones in your head, it may do some of that stuff, but is it helpful for you to hang onto the story that food is ever creating emotions for you. Or is it more helpful to say, “There are emotions I really want for myself and I’m ready to get them without food. I’d like to learn that.” Which one do you think is more helpful long-term in your life?
Can you do No BS while pregnant? Yep. I got girls that are pregnant right now. I got girls in the program that have had one, two, and three babies already. I have some clients, they’ve got married and have had three kids and over the term and every single time they’re like, “I stay in No BS because No BS helps me with my pregnancy and it helps me get that weight right back off. I just stay No BS for life.” So yep, you can do it. When you feel overwhelmingly lonely and depressed, can you suggest a few things to maybe do, so that food isn’t the thing you do out of boredom and all the sad feelings. Need something to replace in a strike? I have a few podcasts on my own depression. You could go and look that up on the Losing 100 Pounds Podcast, I believe my depression episode is in the first 100.
One of the things that I teach in my members inside our membership is, I have a depression protocol. I take a shower on days that I’m depressed. I do not lay stinky on the couch and I do not lay in the bed. If I wake up feeling really shit ass terrible, I get up, I take a shower and I at least relocate myself to the couch. If I want to cry, I can cry all day. If I want to veg out and watch TV, I get to do that, but I have a very compassionate plan. And then I make a plan for on days where I’m having depression, here’s what I eat. And I just plan all of it ahead of time, so that I’m prepared for that version of me. A lot of people know I suffered from depression most of my life.
I attempted suicide at the age of 17. So I really understand how desperate people can get when they’re depressed, but that’s why I created a protocol for myself and a protocol is just simply sitting down with a sheet of paper and deciding right now, when this happens, here’s how I’m going to show up for myself. And I write it from love. And I really think about, especially when it comes to depression and those of who have anxiety, same kind of thing. I really take myself in my brain, to where I’m at in those moments. A lot of times when people write a depression protocol, they’re not really writing one for the depressed version of them. They’re writing what they think you should be doing on most days. And I don’t put high expectations on myself. I really think about, what does Corrine most need on those days? And then I don’t judge that, and then it’s so much easier to follow, because it was written with my best interest in mind.
My menopause weight gain is real, as opposed to fake. I have 10 pounds to lose. How do you lose weight if it’s not a huge amount? Same way that you do all this other stuff. A lot of times when people have menopause weight, they also still have grab ass eating, which is bites, licks and tastes. They still have emotional eating. It’s like, I do really good for five days, but then on Friday night I’m just like, “Fuck, I didn’t lose weight like I thought I should.” Or if they’re only able to lose a half a pound or 0.4 pounds, they end up eating a little extra at a meal and they offset.
It’s cleaning up all those little things, but I’ve had plenty of people with menopause lose weight. You just have to pay attention to, are there any places where I’m actually overeating still? And really look for those, because if you’re overeating at all, it’s not menopause’s fault. And that has been the biggest thing that most of my people who are in the menopause years, like myself, that we have found is that, a lot of times we blame menopause or we blame certain things, when it’s easy to blame and be frustrated and be like, “Ugh”, and now if it’s menopause or something, it’s like, oh, now you get to be released of responsibility, but then when you really look at it and there’s still some overeats happening, you’re like, “Oh, fuck. The control and the responsibility is still on me.”
We get all that cleaned up and if you still have issues, then we’ll talk, but most people that I’ve ever worked with, they are like, “Oh yeah, I was sitting there eating because of menopause.” And it doesn’t mean you’re eating your face off. When you only have 10 pounds to lose, you’re probably not eating your face off. My overeats now, compared to when I was at 250 are very different, but they’re still overeats, but they’re not justified just because they’re smaller.
It’s like, no, these are the places I want to continue to work on, the things I want to continue to think about. All right, tomorrow is our class at 9:00 AM on Wednesday. It will be live for all of my members. You can come if you want or you can get the replay on Friday. If you want to join us, go to joinnobs.com. You can join today. You will get an email in the morning saying, come to the call and if you can’t come to the call, guess what? You can watch the replay this weekend or listen to it on your private member podcast. Then you can spend the entire month of March with us, where we are going to be really focused on how to stop overeating. We’re going to focus on stopping at enough and all the different components and things that go into the ability to be able to stop it enough with ease, and not feeling restricted and not feeling deprived. All right, you all have a good one. Talk to you soon. Bye you all.