Episode 310: How to Use Accountability to Lose Weight

Speaker 1:

Hello, everybody. Welcome back. So if you’re watching me on YouTube while I record this podcast, you’re going to see that I have a cat in my lap. I’ll try to get my camera to go down just a little. There you go. There’s that sweet girl. For all of you who are just listening on the podcast, let me update you a little bit on what we’re going to do today and what’s been going on in my life.

So we are going to talk about accountability today. I wanted to talk about it because it’s really one of those things that a lot of my clients ask about. They’re always like, “How do I hold myself more accountable? I’m just not accountable. Teach me how to be more accountable.” So I thought today would be a great day to talk about it since we are in the beginning of the year.

We are past quitter’s day, which is I believe it’s January. It’s January 19th, January 18th, somewhere around there, but there is a legit national quitter’s day when people make New Year’s resolutions or they decide they’re going to lose some weight or form some new habit, and within about three weeks, they’re done and finished. So we’re past that point now.

I think it’s important that when you are over the hump of let’s say New Year’s enthusiasm, the motivation starts wearing off and stuff, then we have to start talking about accountability, especially especially when you’re losing weight. It’s so easy in the beginning to ride the momentum of getting started, the fresh start mentality, the it’s exciting, it’s new, all that kind of stuff, but honestly, if you think about losing weight, especially if you were like me, I had a hundred pounds to lose. It was going to take me a hot minute to lose that. It took me over 18 months to lose my hundred pounds, and I wasn’t going to spend 18 months like, “Wow. Wow. It’s all great.” That shit is never happening.

I think what we need is we have to learn how to go from being excited, being enthusiastic, being thrilled beyond belief that we’re doing something new to, “Boring. Every day this is just what I do.” I think accountability is a huge piece of that. So this will be helpful for all of you to keep that transition from being excited and then transitioning into being accountable, showing up when you don’t want to, showing up because you said you would, and the ho-hum repetition of that.

So the reason why I highlighted Lucy in my lap, just so we can touch on something personal before we dive into how to be accountable, is we lost one of our cats just a little bit ago. I haven’t podcasted since, but it was in January of 2023, our cat Luau. If you’ve been following this podcast, you probably have heard Luau in the background. He has often cried in podcasts. If you were a member of my No BS weight loss, you got to know Luau very well. He was the camera ready boy. He was always trying to open cabinets behind me or he’d just walk across the desk. He was our personable boy.

Then I did a call on a Sunday and he got real sick right after the call. There had been nothing wrong with him, and he fell over on the floor and couldn’t use his back legs. Within 90 minutes, we were having to put him down. He had suffered a blood clot and the vet just told us that that happens in cats, and when it does, there’s really no saving them. So we lost him suddenly. It was really sad. I even want to cry now, and it’s been a couple weeks. We just miss our sweet boy.

Then we have Lucy, who is my 15-year-old. She’s like Keith Richards. Her, the cockroaches, and Keith Richards will be the only thing left over if some kind of big explosion happens in the world, but ever since Luau has passed away, she has been attached to my hip. She was always my cat to begin with, but, oh, my gosh, I think what’s happened is she’s a very skittish cat by nature. She’s a little Siamese cat. She weighs about six pounds. She’s 15 years old, and she loved Luau, but she wanted to be left alone all the time. I don’t think I realized what a big personality Luau had that she just didn’t have time to get into my lap.

Well, now, ever since he’s passed, I work at my desk and she squeezes in to sit in my lap so that she can sleep while I work. She sits on my podcast equipment. Before I even recorded this podcast, I had to get Chris come downstairs and reset everything because she had mashed every button, turned things off and on to the point to where it froze up. So she’s a sweet girl, but she’s going to be joining us for today’s podcast. So maybe she’s going to be the little co-host that Kathy will be like, “What? If you’re going to be co-hosting, you need to call me back.”

Speaking of Kathy Hartman, she is doing well for all of you. She’s doing some calls inside the No BS business membership and just cranking it out like usual. So I know a lot of you ask about her. She’s doing great. She’s such a valuable part of the No BS family, and we’re very happy that she’s getting settled into being able to do the things that she loves doing inside the program.

So let’s talk about accountability. So the first thing is we want to know why we need accountability and why it’s an important part of your weight loss journey. So one of the things as I was taking notes about how do I want to present this to y’all is accountability, it allows you to think about how you can best support yourself. So very often when we think about accountability, and I want you to do this for yourself, I want you to think right now when you hear the word or when I say the term, “You’re going to hold yourself accountable,” What comes up in your mind?

So for some of you, what’s going to come up in your mind is, “I’m no good at it. I never do that,” and then for some of you, it’s going to be, “That’s the key to my success. Learning that’s going to help me.” So I want you to just to pay attention to whatever thoughts you have around accountability because the very first thing that has to happen, if you think accountability is one of those things that you need, then you’ve got to have really good thoughts about it.

I want you to think about this. If you think you suck at it, then anything that I teach you for the rest of this podcast, you’re going to find reasons why that won’t work for you, why that’s going to be hard for you. I don’t want your brain on alert for how this can’t help you or how this won’t work for you or how you are no good at it. I want you to just consider listening to the rest of this podcast with this idea, “Accountability is one of those things that would be helpful, and it’s one of those things I’m open to learning about,” because when you think about it that way, you are going to hear everything that I teach through like, “Huh, I wonder if that would work.”

That’s very different than thinking, “That won’t work.” I’d much rather you thinking, “Huh, I wonder how that could work for me. I wonder what would happen if I tried it,” versus, “I bet it won’t work even if I try it.” So we want to just be very conscious about how we’re thinking about accountability.

Now, when I think of accountability just in terms of just what is it, I think of accountability is the way that I know I’m on track. It’s also how I set myself up to do things when I don’t want to do them. I think the most important thing about accountability is that it is learning the skill of doing something that in the moment you’re not going to want to do. That’s why I’ve broken it down into four key pieces that I’m going to teach you in just a moment.

The other thing is when you think about accountability, I want you to think about what works for you. So for me personally when it comes to accountability, internal and external works for me. So internally, me tracking things and then me just seeing it, I’m going to look at what’s working and what’s not and say, “Okay. I’m off track here. What can I do to get back on track?” So that’s internal.

External for me looks like this. A good example is something I’ve been doing recently, which is I am on a mission to build my arms out. I want smoking arms for this summer. So I hired an arms coach. Her name is Christine Rucker. I know people are going to ask. It’s Christine Rucker, R-U-C-K-E-R. If you just look up the arms coach on Google, I’m sure you can find her. What I’m doing is hiring a coach who is giving me specific workouts to do based on how my arms are looking, and I am following those.

The external accountability is I know me. If I say to someone else, “I’m going to do this,” then I will follow through more than if I just tell myself, “I’m going to do this.” When I just tell myself, “I know Corrine. I will negotiate. I will talk about why it’s okay if I skip.” There’s an open invitation to talking myself out of it.

So I know that about myself and instead of thinking, “Well, I suck. I shouldn’t have to ask for help,” I don’t do that. I’m like, “You know what? My tendency when I’m solely relying on myself is I can talk myself out of it easily. So I want to prevent myself from being able to talk myself out of things easily. I know. I’ll go hire an arms coach because I know me. Part of my character to follow through and do the things I said I will do.”

So I hired a coach and guess what? I have made every single workout except for one, and that was the week that I was prepping for a colonoscopy. I had to do three arm workouts that week. Not only was that the week I lost my cat, it was the week that I was doing a colonoscopy prep. So there was two days that I wasn’t going to be able to lift arms, and then I started my period and I rarely ever work out on the first day of my period due to cramps and bloating. So that was the only time. Every other week since I’ve hired her, I have, whether I wanted to or not, got in there and lifted my arms because I did not want to message her saying, “I didn’t do my workout.”

Now, a lot of you sometimes you have some beef about this. You’re like, “Oh,” especially if you’re a coach. So a lot of people that listen to my podcast are just clients or y’all are just chicks looking to lose weight, and that’s amazing, but I also have a lot of life coaches, certified coaches who will sit there and beat themselves up like, “I should be able to do this on my own.” Hell, even if you’re not a life coach, so many of you are like, “I should be able to do this on my own.” No, you shouldn’t. Not everybody is cut out to rely solely on internal motivation. That’s not a bad thing at all.

Just recognize that’s not as motivating for you. So what would be? Part of accountability is figuring out motivations that will help you. The last way that you’re ever going to hold yourself accountable is trying to do it in a way that you naturally suck at it or that you don’t like or that doesn’t speak to you. There’s thousands of ways to hold yourself accountable.

So don’t just sit there and beat yourself up if you can’t just be internally highly motivated. Sometimes I am, depending on what it is in my life. When it comes to running my business, I am highly internally motivated. I don’t need to tell nobody shit. If I write it down on my calendar, I will sit there and think about, “Now, why is this important?” I will go through all of that, and that is enough internal fire for me to do the shit I say I’m going to do.

When it comes to running and lifting weights, even though I love those activities, for me, in order to get in there and push myself, in order for me to get in there and show up every day and stuff, I need external accountability. That’s why I have an arms coach. I also have my best friend. I Marco Polo her every single day, and when I talk to her, I tell her … Almost every day it starts like this. I’m walking and talking and I’m like, “I dread my workout. Girl, you don’t know how bad I just want a day off.” It’s usually I have to verbalize all of the I don’t want tos, and then I tell her, “Here’s what I’m going to do.”

For me, being able to talk to someone is super helpful and I almost always say, “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to just start with this. I’m going to get that going. Then I’m going to see where I’m at, and then after 10 or 15 minutes, if I’m done, I know I’m done. If I’m not, I’m going to keep going.”

I promise you. I am the kind of person, especially when it comes to exercise, even though I love the results, even though I pretty much like exercising, every day I don’t want to do it, and I’m the kind of person that if I just grease the wheels to get started, I’m going to finish. It is rare that I get going and I’m like, “Yup, I really can’t do it today. Yeah, my body’s shot today. Yeah, I’m actually as tired as I think I am.”

Most of the time when it comes to doing things, especially if it’s going to be challenging or hard, we convince ourselves we’re more tired than we are. We convince ourselves there’s no way we could do it. We convince ourselves it’s going to take so long and stuff, but then once you get started, you start realizing, “That was a lot of horseshit. That was just my brain telling me a lot of drama so that I could just sit on my ass or not do something challenging and go do something that might have kept me busy but sure didn’t get me closer to any of my goals.”

This happens in food a lot, and a lot of times people are just like, “There’s just no way I could cook dinner,” and if they just got started, they’d probably finish the meal. A lot of people are like, “It’s just going to take so time to do a food prep on Sunday,” but if they just got started saying like, “Well, let me just do a minimum food prep. Let me just get at least the breakfast done,” next thing you know, guess what? You’ve cooked everything you want for the week.

So grease those wheels. For me, a lot of holding myself accountable is like, “What are all the small tricks and tips I can say to myself that gets me in motion?” because once I’m in motion, what I do know about myself, and most of you are probably just like me, the hardest part is getting started, but once I get started, I just get going. I’m not bitching anymore. I’m more focused on what I’m doing. It’s not nearly as bad as all of that drama leading up to the moment of starting.

All right. So one of the other reasons why it’s really good to hold ourselves accountable, and this is to me one of probably the most important ones, is that when you decide to set a goal, let’s say your goal is weight loss or maybe your goal is how many times you want to go to the gym this month or whatever your goal is, I always tell my No BS clients, I’m like, “Y’all, your goals do not have to be centered around weight loss.” I know that I teach you how to lose weight, but a lot of times my people start learning, “I don’t need a goal weight. I need a goal life to go after. So for this month, this is the goal life I want to go after.” It’s, “This month, I want to see how many times I can, let’s say, not overeat. I’ve been overeating, been overeating, been overeating. This month, my goal life is to end the month with less overeats than the month before. I want to look at myself in the mirror and say like, ‘Girl, you cut your overeats down by 20% this month, and that’s amazing.’”

So one of the reasons why I think setting a goal and holding yourself accountable to it, why it’s so important is it will reveal the relationship you have with yourself. So as you are working towards it, whether you’re hitting it or you’re not, there’s going to be a conversation that comes up around it that goes on in your head. You’re going to talk to yourself about it.

Sometimes when we’re even on track, we will say things like, “Well, you got lucky. Let’s just hope that continues.” We don’t even acknowledge that, “You worked hard. Congratulations. You deserve a moment to be proud of yourself for reducing those overeats by 20%.” We’ll say like, “Well, we got through this month. I hope you don’t screw it up next month.” Then we also have, let’s say if you didn’t hit your goal, there’s another conversation that comes into play and it will reveal, are you a soft landing pad for yourself when you set goals or do you beat yourself up if you don’t make them?

So one of the reasons why I love setting goals and why I love holding myself accountable is it exposes the level of self-love I have for myself. It exposes the kind of conversation that I have with myself, and that’s important. I tell y’all all the time, the only way you’re going to lose weight is you are going to have to change what goes on on the inside because if you don’t change what’s happening on the inside, the outside can’t change, at least not permanently.

We have to learn how to tell ourselves to do something without being a bitch about it. A lot of my clients do this shit. Let’s say it’s dinner and they’re going to eat until enough. You know in the podcast that I teach is one of the basics of weight loss is we stop it enough, we no longer stop at full.

Well, a lot of times what I watch my clients do, especially at dinner, is they’ll sit down and right even before they start eating, they’re already saying things to themselves like, “You have to stop at enough. Don’t you overeat. You know if you overeat you’ll have blown it.” That’s not encouraging.

If that’s the way that you talk to yourself to hold yourself accountable to stopping at enough, it’s no wonder the meal feels anxious. It’s no wonder your nerves are on edge, and I’m just going to tell you, the vast majority of us, the only way we know how to deal with being on edge or dealing with anxiety or overwhelm or whatever is we eat because we can’t tolerate it. So when you’re holding yourself accountable, you start listening to how you’re talking to yourself and it starts illuminating those conversations, and it will show you exactly why losing weight is so hard.

I promise all of you, 80% of weight loss, the hard part all comes from how you’re thinking. All of that thinking is the bitchy part. A lot of my clients, one of the other basics is to create a 24-hour plan, which just means first thing in the morning, you write down what you’re going to eat for the day. You just decide ahead of time. Doesn’t matter what it is. That can be you’re going out to eat, it can be a piece of cake, it can be broccoli. I don’t give shit, but you decide in the morning what you’ll eat for the rest of the day, and we do this so that the logical part of us that’s thinking about our goals and thinking about our long-term good and it hasn’t faced the problems of the day yet, the brain that’s not tired yet, that’s the one making the decisions about what to eat.

The last person that should make the decisions about what we should eat is the 5:00 version of us, that’s answered 500 fucking questions all day, got stuck in traffic, their boss was a dickhead, and who was stressed out and had no time for themselves because by the time you get home, you’re the tired ass version of you. You don’t give a shit about your dreams. You know what you give a shit about? How tired you are right now. That’s what you care about and all you want to do is feel better. That will take precedent over a long-term desire to lose weight.

So when we’re sitting there at night and it’s time to eat that plan, the way that a lot of my clients try to hold themselves accountable is they’ll say, “This is what you should eat.” Then the next thing you know, the rebel of them comes out to play, “Oh, no. You’ve been doing what everybody wants you to do all day long. You know what you should do? You should eat what the fuck you want. Who’s this bitch trying to tell you what you should and shouldn’t do?” It is like, wow, this whole rebel energy takes over us.

Well, you want to be able to hear that. You want to know how you’re talking to yourself because you’re the one firing up rebel voice by using one word, should.” There’s no you should eat this. You know what’s really going on? If you learn to tell yourself, “All right, I’m going to follow my plan because the person who loves me most in the world made the plan. The person who had my back made the plan. The version of me that knew I’d be tired tonight, she made this plan. The version of me that knew I wouldn’t want to eat this, she said, ‘Come on, I put stuff on here that you can do. Can you just try it?’”

That’s the level of conversation that we want to be having, but when you’re holding yourself accountable, you’ll never find all of those little things you’re doing to yourself to make weight loss hard unless you set up an accountability system.

All right. So let’s talk about the four things that you need to do to hold yourself accountable. All right. So the very first thing you have to do is you’ve got to be specific as possible about what you’re holding yourself accountable to. So if you’re one of my No BS private members, and let’s say it’s the month of February, which we are doing a challenge around all about doable hunger. So every week, we are giving our members different activities that they can do during each week to really figure out what is their subtle cues around hunger and their subtle cues around enough so that they’re not missing them at all.

Now, if you’re listening to this and you’re like, “That sounds amazing,” then you can still get in. All you got to do is go to joinnobs.com and you can become a member and anything that we’re doing at any time, you can jump right in to help you lose weight.

So if you’re one of my members and you’re doing the big doable hunger challenge this month, what you don’t want to do is you don’t want to say, “For this month, I want to get better at my hunger cues.” That ain’t a specific goal, and if that’s all that you said, then you don’t give your brain a specific way to pay attention. Your brain is just going to be like, “Well, you did get better a couple of times. You listened.” I mean, that’s awesome, but that’s not really what we want. We want a very specific goal.

So for my members, I would suggest having a goal of something like, “In my habit tracker, I will track how many meals. I ask the question, ‘Am I hungry?’ and then I will create a one-page quick and easy document that I can just type or write in that says, ‘Today’s cues were …’ and I’ll do that every day for 30 days.”

Then your brain really knows what the hell’s going on. It will know really quick if you forget to do something. You won’t get to the end of the month and have just been like, “Well, I guess I got a little better. A few times I listened, but I petered off.” What ends up happening is when you don’t have a very specific goal, then your brain is open to negotiation. It can say like, “Well, I mean, you’re doing it some. I guess it’s okay if you miss it now.” That will make sense because there’s no goal. If your goal was 30 days and your brain is like, “We can miss today, but well, we really can’t because we said what we would do is track for 30 days.”

Notice how the level of conversation and holding yourself accountable changes when you have a more specific goal. So the first thing is you have to be as specific as possible around whatever it is that you’re going to hold yourself accountable to. I like to have numbers as often as possible.

Now, the second thing that you’re going to want to do is you’re going to need a plan for the I don’t want tos. This always comes up when you hold yourself accountable. I have never met anyone who is going to do something, change something and never not want to do it, ever. Every single person that I’ve ever known who achieves any kind of success, meets any kind of goal, if you ask them, they will tell you, “Yeah, I did it. I mean, there were times I didn’t want to, but I just did it anyway.” We have to become the kind of person who is like, “I know there are going to be times I’m not going to want to, and I totally expect that now.”

What I watch most people do is say, “Hey, can you tell me what do I do when I don’t want to?” I just want y’all to think about that. It’s such a dumb question, right? I don’t want anybody to be offended, but just think about the question. It’s just dumb ass. There’s only one answer. What do I do when I don’t want to? Tell yourself, “No. We’re doing it anyway.”

The real question that you’re asking because I just want all of you to think there’s nothing … If you just don’t want to, there’s no magic answer to that other than there’s just going to be times you don’t want to and you do it anyway. What you’re really asking is, “In the moments I don’t want to, is there a way to make it easy to want to?” I tell people this all the time. I just wouldn’t waste my time with that.

I don’t think you need to want to do things all the time. I think what happens is that when you get really good at doing things anyway, you may not want to, but it doesn’t feel like a game changer anymore. It doesn’t feel like a cop blocker. That’s where the real magic comes in. That’s like with me every day when I dread working out and stuff. I have about five minutes of just like, “Ugh,” and I notice when I start trying to talk myself out of it, that is the exact moment I should just take some action.

Don’t sit there and try to negotiate and like, “Well, let me see if I can feel really good about this and let me sit back and try to … Let me wait for my motivation to kick in.” You’re just dragging out the misery because there’s only two things that are going to happen. If you’re waiting for motivation and you’re trying to make yourself feel good about it, then you’re just extending the amount of time that sucks until you start.

So I’d rather just shrink my window of suckage to almost nothing and just start if I know that’s what’s going to happen or the other thing that’s going to happen is you’re going to drag out the suckage and then not do it. It’s like, “All right.”

Here’s the other option. Just decide to not do it immediately. Just tell yourself, “I don’t negotiate. If I don’t want to, then I either am going to start right now with can I just and get into motion or I’m just going to tell myself, ‘Today’s the day.” I use my excuses to stop. At least be honest and just say, “I refuse to drag this shit out. I refuse to keep practicing lots and lots of wishing this was easy.” The only way it’s ever going to get easy to do something is to get better and better at doing things you don’t want to do in the moment.

So this is how I make it easy for myself to get started. Number one, I usually just use that, “All right. I notice I don’t want to. What can I just start with?” and then I just go and do it knowing I don’t want to sit in negotiation land. Negotiation land sucks the energy right out of me.

The other thing that I do is really simple. I don’t make not wanting to a big deal. I watch a lot of people the second their brain says, “I don’t want to,” they argue. They’re like, “Ugh, I just wish I was the kind of person that wanted to do this stuff. Why can’t I be like everybody else?” I wish people do that all the time. Fuck. That sucks. Don’t do it to yourself. You know what you got to do? Don’t be surprised anymore.

I just tell myself, “Yup, I don’t want to. Expected that. That’s normal. That happens about every day, twice on Sunday. That’s all right.” I like to save my surprise and delight for when I actually want to. That’s the fun part. There are times I actually want to. There are days where it’s easy, and on those days I tell myself, “This is amazing. Today is a day that we want to conquer the world.” I’m like, “I’m excited about today. This is great.” What am I telling myself?” I always like to ask myself, “What’s different today than yesterday?” in my mind.

This is really important. What’s different is not circumstances. You don’t just wake up a new human. I always know if I’m excited or if I’m not dreading or if I’m very willing, I try to listen, “What conversation am I having?” so that I can take note of that and use that in future instances and when I don’t want to because that’s all that’s going to take.

All right. So we’re going to be specific, and in the moment we don’t want to, we’re going to say, “Can I adjust?” We’re not going to belabor the not wanting to, and we’re also going to not be surprised by it anymore. We’re just going to tell ourselves, “Of course, I don’t want to. Who’d want to go out into the garage when it’s 40 degrees outside? But I’m going to, I’ll put on a jacket that’ll get me started,” whatever we got to do to sexy talk our way into getting into action.

The third thing is you need a process. Accountability, you really need some process for yourself. What are you going to do to hold yourself accountable? So for me, a lot of mine is it’s easier for me to hold myself accountable when I have on my calendar the things that I’m going to do. It’s easier for me to hold myself accountable to my weight when I plan my food each day. At 15 plus years of maintenance, I still plan my food each day. Even though I have my food prepped on Sundays for the entire week, I don’t mind eating the same thing over and over again. My whole family, my son eats up the same thing over and over again. My husband does. We are just very boring ass eaters around here. It works for us.

So we just pick out the food we’re going to eat for the week and we just eat it and it’s all done for us because we like fast, we don’t mind to repeat, and we only pick foods we like. So I don’t know why we would mind repeating them. We just don’t need that much variety. So I still write it down though every day because I could order Uber Eats just like y’all. I could do other things just like y’all, but every day I plan ahead for the day just so that if the next day, if I didn’t plan, and let’s say I did eat Uber Eats, then I wouldn’t be sitting there, “Well, it’s okay. I didn’t have anything planned anyway.”

I want to be able to say the next day like, “Hey, why did you want Uber Eats last night versus what you had planned? Did you have a legit reason or were you just bored, wanting to have fun?” whatever it is. I want to make sure that I have a plan.

So you want to kind of come up with your process. For some people, you may need to plan regular check-ins. So I have my coach. I have a regular check-in on Mondays. I send my workouts to her. She sends me a message back and tells me, “Keep going. Change this,” whatever it is. I have my regular check-in with my best friend every single day. I give her the rundown of what I’m going to accomplish for the day. We hold each other business accountable. We tell each other, “Here are all the things I’m going to get done today in my work,” and then the next day I usually say, “Here’s what I got done yesterday and here’s what I’m going to do today,” and then I talk about my life.

So come up with whatever your unique process is going to be to hold you accountable. Do you need some external support? A lot of my No BS members, because in our program when you join, we give you the opportunity to get into a small accountability group. So then we teach you how to be a group where you’re doing regular check-ins with people who are working the same program as you, talking about losing weight in the same ways that you are. You’re getting cheerleading and all this other stuff. They do regular check-ins.

Some of our accountability groups check in daily. They send each other their food logs. Some accountability groups, they only check in every few days, and every few days they send a wrap up of what they’ve done and what they plan to do until the next check-in. So pick out your process and then do that.

Then the fourth thing is you’re going to need a way to measure what’s going on so you can see how far you’ve come. One of the things that I’ve been studying and learning is about our brain, and our brains are very hardwired to think that we don’t change much. Our brains miss progress, especially as women. We are not taught to celebrate ourselves and we’re not taught to acknowledge ourselves. We are always taught to go do and to go do more and to take on more responsibility. So we get into this never ending cycle of always, “There’s more to do, there’s more to do, there’s more to do,” and we miss all the good things that we’re doing.

So you want to make sure that you come up with a way to measure yourself because if you think about you let’s say 10 years ago, you have changed a lot. You probably talk a little different. You hang with different people. Your likes and dislikes are probably changing. I know for me personally, I used to used to love working out first thing in the morning. I was a 5:00 AM girl. I slam a cup of coffee and I was in the gym by 5:15.

Now, I’m more like a 7:00 AM girl. I get up around 4:30, I drink some coffee, I plan my day, I drink one more cup of coffee, and then I do a little work. I like to do a fresh 60 minutes of creativity work first thing in the morning. It’s just so productive for me, and then I work out. We all actually change all the time. We just don’t notice we’re doing it. I think when you’re holding yourself accountable, one of the things that’s really important is you have to see where progress is being made. Otherwise, you’ll think nothing’s happening even when you are making progress because we’re not used to finding it.

So set up some tracker. Now, if you’re one of my No BS women, the easiest way for you to measure your progress is to go to your planner. We give every member a digital download of our No BS 30-day food planner. In the front is your habit tracker that you’re going to track eight key things. I think it’s eight. Hang on, let me look at mine since I have my handy dandy one digitally on my computer. Here we go. See? For all the YouTube people, it’s just sitting right here, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.

We have eight spots that we prefilled, and then we have one spot where you can pick your own. Use that habit tracker to track the key things in your weight loss so that you can see where you’re making progress. You’ll be able to see there’s certain areas it’s like, “Hey, I’m doing pretty good in those areas. That’s amazing.” Certain areas you’ll be like, “Hey, I notice these are the things I’m going to tackle this next month.” You want to be able to see that because your brain is designed to make up stories, and then you really want to give your brain as much factual data to create its story from.

It’s like setting that goal. If you don’t tell yourself specifics, your brain is designed to make up the difference. So here’s a good example of how the brain makes up stories. If someone knocks on your door, you don’t just think door knocking. Your brain automatically is like, “I bet that’s the UPS man. I wonder if that’s a salesman. I really hope that’s Uber Eats. I wish somebody else would go answer the door. I just hate it when somebody knocks on the door in the middle of me shooting a YouTube video.” So your brain is a story creator. It is going to do it without your permission all the time.

Come on, Lucy. Sorry, y’all. My sweet little cat, she was over there dancing on the soundboard in the middle of the podcast so I had to grab her because this is some good shit and I know all of you are going to want to make sure you don’t miss a second of it.

So your brain is just a story maker, and what you don’t want to do is give it vague details and then let it just fill the great divide with whatever it wants. You want to give it solid data, all the detail you can, and then you let it go and make up stories, but it’s not even enough to just let it make up the stories. When you look at that data, I want you to hear the story your brain automatically makes up, and then you being accountable to yourself to be the boss of your brain, “Is that story the one I want?” You don’t have to just take any story that your brain offers up. You get to choose whatever the fuck story you want. So choose wisely.

All right. So let’s go back over our little steps. Let me find them. Sorry. Number one is you’ve got to be specific as possible. You cannot be ambiguous about your goal. Number two, expect to not want to do things when you’re holding yourself accountable. Now, we’re going to tell ourselves, :I knew I wouldn’t want to, but here’s why I’m going to do it. I knew I wouldn’t want to, and that’s okay. I’m going to do it anyway. I knew I wouldn’t want to, so can I just do this?”

Number three, you got to have a process. Do you need people? Do you need to make a plan? Do you need to get it on your calendar? What do you need to do that makes it easy for you to remember to do the things you said you would do? Then number four, you’ve got to have a way to measure what you actually do. So it’s not enough to have a goal. Now we got to see how often do we do it, what is the difference, and then we’re going to be very deliberate about the story that we allow ourselves to carry forward with.

All right, everybody. I hope you enjoyed it. Don’t forget, if you want to get in this month so you can participate in figuring out how to learn all of those hunger cues, how to learn all those enough cues, this is a great month to join No BS. You can go to join nobs.com and I hope to see you soon inside the membership.