Episode 311: How to Lose Weight While Overeating

All right, let’s talk about how do you lose weight while overeating? All right, here’s the good news. When you first start losing weight, overeating will not slow you down. Let me say this again. Especially when you first start losing weight, continued overeating will not slow you down. When you get halfway to your weight loss goal, guess what? Continued overeating will not slow your weight loss down. When you get to the end of your journey and you’re closing in on your last 10 pounds, guess what? Overeating cannot slow down your weight loss. Here’s why. The only thing that actually slows down weight loss is when you make overeating a catastrophe, a problem if you will. When you make your overeating a morality issue, when you make your overeating, the end all be all to everything, what you make your overeating mean will determine how fast you lose weight.

Because I’m going to tell all of you, every human overeats, even the thin ones, especially those fucking thin people, they overeat. You know what they don’t do? Act like it’s a catastrophe. Just like yesterday, there was somebody in the Facebook group that I was coaching, I don’t know if her name was Melissa, I can’t remember what her name was, and she’s like, “Oh my God, send help.” Very dramatic message. She overate pizza at lunch. She’s like, “Talk me off the ledge. My brain’s just saying I should have Ben and Jerry’s for dinner.” Okay, bitch let’s just be real with our brains for a minute. Overeating pizza at one meal will not slow your weight loss down, if you don’t overeat at the next meal because of that one. So if at this meal you make eating pizza and be like, “We’ll take flour coming, everyone watch out, be prepared to throw water on me.”

The broken No BS woman who overate lunch and had too much pizza needeth the help. You overate pizza, ask the fucking questions that you need to ask like, why? Was it a habit? Am I just not used to stopping it enough yet? Did I let myself get caught up in how good it tastes and didn’t take a pause to tell myself, “Yeah, it tastes good,” and girl, you’re so lucky to be a No BS because it used to be the way that if something tasted good, you couldn’t eat it to lose weight. That is not what we’re doing. Did you even try to calm yourself down?

What you want to do in those moments is you want to calm yourself, reason with yourself. Do not let yourself be a jerk. Your brain will want to be the jerk because it still associates itself as someone who can’t lose weight. So it’s like, “Well, if I still believe I can’t lose weight, I need to offer up a crap load of thoughts.” Your brain is just working that way, but all of you know yourselves, if you beat yourself up. Don’t be shocked that if you overeat pizza that you make it a big fucking deal, but this is where we come in with our reasoning brain. This is what we’re teaching you. You swoop in and you’re like, “I got you.” I knew we would make this a big deal. I knew we would feel terrible. Of course, you feel scared and you feel bad because you’ve only ever overreacted to overeating.

But here’s what I know. Corinne says that as long as you just make a better decision at the next meal, as long as you modulate. When it comes dinner, are you hungry? If you are, you’re supposed to eat. If you’re not hungry, don’t. If you didn’t eat what was on plan at lunch, that doesn’t mean that you don’t eat off plan at dinner. It just means one meal I didn’t eat on plan, so can I get back on plan for dinner? Can I tell myself, “Hey, we’re going to eat this.” We don’t need to blow it. We’ve already had some pizza today. We have to talk to ourselves like grown ass women.

So here’s what happens when you lose weight, you’re going to overeat and you’re going to overeat after you lose weight, you’re going to overeat probably till the day you die for tons of reasons. We just want to get to the point to where overeating is not a big deal so that you can make better choices for yourself. If overeating is not a big… I want all of you, who by the raise of the hand, loves to just play, girl, I know what I do. It is, fuck it, eat for real central for me. Just like our girl yesterday. She’s like, “Well, fuck it. Ben and Jerry’s for dinner. You done blew it with the pizza. Or how many of you do good all day and then you come home and them kids and them partners, they all go off somewhere else and you’re like, “Oh, mama’s alone. Let’s go get Oreos.”

And you get into your Oreos and next thing you know you’re on your couch eating them going, “Fuck me. I wasn’t supposed to do this. I suck. Well, if I just eat the rest of this sleeve, I won’t have to deal with it tomorrow.” So we’ll just nom, nom, nom and Hoover like a cookie monster now knowing that tomorrow we won’t have this temptation, we’ll be so much better.

And I just won’t buy no more Oreos. That’s a temptation food. How many of you do that? Probably all of us. Here’s the thing, fuck it eating and blow it eating like, I’m just going to go off the rails eating, only happens when you define overeating as wrong, morally wrong, going to stop me from losing weight. That overeating in itself can’t stop you. It can be the lesson you need to learn in order to no longer do that behavior. For all of you who are like fuck it eating and blow it eating, what do you think the lesson is? It’s not to end those. The first lesson is, “Oh, this is trying to teach me. I’ve got to have a better relationship with my eating patterns.”

[inaudible 00:07:39]. Thought it meant I was supposed to stop this eating, I was fucking wrong this whole time. I thought it meant that I’ll never be perfect. No, it means if that’s your behavior, it’s like, oh, this is trying to tell me if I take a simple over eat and blow it out of proportion lesson than one is how to have a simple over eat and not blow it out of proportion to make it an opportunity to repair the relationship with myself, how I talk about food, how I’m losing weight this time, how this time’s different. What can I glean from this? What are my truest needs in this moment? Maybe these overeats are trying to tell me, this is how we’re going to start caring for ourselves. You keep eating every night because let’s take alone eating at night.

So many lessons there. What could hoovering the rest of the Oreos tell you? One, it could tell you, if I’m eating when I’m alone and I tell myself this is the only time I ever get it could be telling me that I need to have some conversations with people on how I can do a little bit less and cut out some time for me. Maybe we need to talk to the partner, maybe not. Maybe it’s, “Oh, if this is the only break I got all day, am I people pleasing somewhere? Am I am over committing myself in places where I just don’t have the spine right now to tell people no?” At least want to know that so that at least I know the real solve is not Oreos. The real solve is, how am I going to be brave?

What conversations do I need to have? If you’re alone eating at night, it could be and you’re tired and you’re telling yourself this is the only time I get for me, but if you didn’t eat during that time, you would be riddled with guilt as if you should be doing more. It’s like, “Oh, it’s really trying to tell me how I need to learn how to be with myself instead of feeling guilty that I’m not doing more. Maybe this is an opportunity for me to relax because I reassured myself, you did a lot today.” And every day you’re eating Oreos and you’re missing out on the opportunity to tell yourself all the amazing things you do each day and not, you’re not used to talking to yourself that way, and if you keep eating Oreos, you’ll never learn how to have that conversation.

Sometimes the solves are just staring us right in the face and it’s our overeats that are signaling to us what our truest needs are. Our overeats are saying, “Hey, ask me about this.” Set aside judgment, set aside all of it, and this is why I tell you this. It’s because the moment that you start learning from your overeats, you reduce catastrophizing and blowing up. Let’s say our girl yesterday, let’s say she ate four pieces of pizza instead of two. She could end all of it with just, “I wonder why at ate four. It’s probably because in the past when I dieted, when I ate pizza, it was wrong and my brain still thinks it’s wrong now, so it probably overreacted, it got carried away with it tasting good. I probably started thinking there’s no way that I can lose weight eating this, so I kept eating thinking, I’m going to take it away again even though I know I’m doing something different in No BS.

So maybe that was just teaching me I need more time for my brain to catch up that I don’t take away foods anymore. I don’t make foods good or bad anymore.” If that’s the case, if that’s the quality conversation you have about an overeat, that version of you is not sitting there thinking, I should eat Ben and Jerry’s later. You know what that version of you now is thinking, I know more about my eating patterns. You feel calm, you don’t feel the need to overreact. You’re like, and probably the best thing that I can do is just get right back on that plan I made.

I want you to think about if you’re going to make something a big deal, I want you to make it the right big deal. In that moment I want you to like, this was a big deal. I took time to figure out what was going on, and that’s a huge step forward in weight loss because that’s going to better prepare me for future weight loss. It’s going to prepare you way more than trying to be perfect. It’s going to make it last longer because I want you to think about this. There is a version. There’s no one inside of No BS that doesn’t have at least a whisper of a version of your future in you whose saying, “I am in here. I want it for both of us.” Otherwise, you just wouldn’t be here.

Even if you can’t hear that voice, even if your negative Nancy voice is drowning it out, there’s a small part of you that actually is like, “This is possible.” In the future version of you, you reach her who is confident around food and stuff, not because you were perfect, you reach her because all the way there you learned how to talk to yourself so that when you arrive and you’re still overeating at times, your maintenance self isn’t blowing it out of proportion. Your maintenance self knows how to auto correct. Your maintenance self doesn’t have to beat themselves up to stay in maintenance. Everything you do today not only benefits you, but it is taking care of that version of you that you want so bad. That is the difference about being in No BS. I want you to land in maintenance with a mindset that’s so resilient that it doesn’t take a ton of work to stay in maintenance.

You’re just already proud of yourself. You are proud of yourself for all the decisions you were making, all the way down. If future you is sitting there and proud that she lost her weight, that means you today is proud of the tiniest of decisions that you’ll make In order to lose that weight, you today has to teach future you how to land there and be proud, not to land there and be terrified that you’re going to lose it because if you are trying to lose weight terrified that every overeat is wrong and every overeat means something terrible, then what do you think it’s going to…

If you think it’s bad now while you’re miserable with your weight or not happy with your weight, how terrifying will it be when you have what you always wanted? Every mistake will be magnified by a thousand because you’ll be terrified of losing what you always wanted and we don’t want to do that to ourselves, and that starts with every single day figuring out, how can I face the challenges, the mistakes, the overeats, how can I show up for them each day with confidence, with thoughtfulness, consciousness, determination, compassion, some calm?

That’s how we lose weight. So let me tell you for the last time, here’s the typical pattern that most of us do and we try to lose weight. First, we pick a diet, we set expectations that if I don’t do it right, I’ll never lose weight. Then we move to step two, which is worry and fear that we can’t do it, try things that they say to do and the moment a mistake hits, we blow it out of proportion. Well, then what we do is we blow mistakes out of proportion and we repeat the cycle of going back to like, “All right, I can’t do this. Let me quit to get away from myself.” And then when you loathe about yourself for long enough, then you’re more motivated to go back on the diet. But here’s what I want you to do. I just want you to start with, “I’m here in No BS.”

I don’t even want you to think about, I don’t have to be perfect. I just want y’all to think perfect is not even a thing. Thank you. Breakfast has arrived, I ran out, ran time to eat this morning. So I want you to just think, I’m here. Perfection is just not even a real thing. I don’t know where I learned it. So if I’m trying to be perfect, I’m just going to remind myself that’s just not a real thing. It’s just not. I promise all of you, the only reason why most of you want to be perfect, it’s because either you don’t want to beat yourself up or you don’t want somebody else to think poorly of you. There’s such a better fix than trying to be perfect. The more you try to be perfect, the less opportunity you have to talk better to yourself. I’ve never met a perfectionist who cheer leads themself there all the way. I’ve only met perfectionists who talk like assholes to themselves.

So we want to learn how to speak to ourselves, and so anytime you’re trying to be perfect, just remind yourself, I’m only afraid of two things. What I’ll think of me or what somebody else will think of me. I can change how I think about me, and that just takes time and I would rather change how I think about myself than try to be perfect, which is impossible. It cannot happen. The second part is my job, if somebody else thinks poorly of me, is to figure out one of two things. Do they actually think something poorly about me? So many of you are trying to be perfect and you don’t even know what the hell they’re thinking. You just assume everybody thinks poorly of you if you make a mistake. I am so shocked all the time, my own team, let me just tell you, having 25 employees will fucking enlighten you as to how mismanaged minds are. Seriously.

They come to me all the time with these crazy ideas about what they think I think of them and I’m like, “What?” And I’m always thinking, “Did I say that?” They’re like, “Well, no, you didn’t say that.” I’m like, “Okay. Well, why would you think that then?” Well, I just assumed. Ask yourself, why would I assume someone thinks the worst of me versus most of you are assuming that people who actually love you are sitting around thinking the worst about you, and it makes no sense. So you have a couple of choices when it comes to somebody else’s opinion. You can say like, okay, literally this mistake I made literally, if I screw up, is it really true? Can I prove it in a court of law that my mother, my partner, my boss, my friend, my kid, whoever these people are, will they actually come to me and say, “I just got to let you know you’re a fucking shit show?”

You’re a shit show that happens to be going down in the midst of a dumpster fire, just letting you know. Or is it made up shit in your head? If it’s made up shit in your head, then guess what? You just need to delete it. If somebody doesn’t say it to you, you need to delete it in your head because that’s a reflection of what you believe about you. So you’re like, they’re not saying that that’s not a real concern, but if I imagine other people are going to think that, that’s my job to change my opinion about me.

I would never make up crap about me unless something in me believed it. So stop worrying about what they think go to the real work. Don’t let that be a distraction. But you may have very honest people in your life who judge the fuck out of you and they happen to be named Uncle Beau Seefus and they’re like, “Corinne just got to let you know I’m very disappointed in you just need to let you know, I knew you couldn’t do it. I just want to let you know you’re doing it all wrong. I would do it this way.”

Whatever it is, they’ve said it out loud, guess what? Here’s your work. Your work is not to be like, oh, fret, fret, clutch pearls. Try to be perfect, need to make sure that I live up to their expectations. Bull fucking shit. We do not clutch our pearls. In fact, I wish all of you would just throw pearls away or donate them to the goodwill. Here’s what we do. When somebody says opinions, we first ask ourself, “Do we give a shit about their opinion?” If it is Uncle Beau Seefus, why are you clutching your pearls over something that somebody who you don’t even respect has to say about you? We throw that one away. Just get rid of it. If you don’t like them or you don’t honor their opinion, why are you giving it any oxygen? Sometimes we just got to check ourselves, but let’s pretend it’s someone you love. Immense respect for. Let’s say Chris comes to me and is just like, “Corinne. you don’t know enough. I don’t think you can do this. You’re terrible at blah, blah, blah.” And it’s someone I love and someone I respect.

Here’s your, it’s your choice. Do I agree with their opinion? If you don’t, then don’t get butt hurt. Just be like, “Well, I just don’t agree with their opinion. And that’s what they think.” My job is to be like, stay in my lane. Tell them I disagree, but I don’t take it personally. A lot of times when people throw shade at me, I’m just like, “Okay, I’ll just prove you wrong.” Or I think about all the things they’re just wrong about. People throw shade at me all the time. I get told constantly, my body’s too big. I’m too small. My hair should be short. No, it should be long. You shouldn’t bleach your hair. Oh wait, no, you shouldn’t have gray. I get all kinds of opinions about how I should talk. I should or shouldn’t cuss but y’all, all the time, and it used to really hurt because I would take it personally.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe I am not classy. Maybe I do look like a hooker. Maybe I shouldn’t have spray tans. For god’s sakes, people love to pick on me about stuff, but then I just remind myself, but I like this stuff. I like having versatile hair, so I reassure myself, but let’s say it’s someone that I love and respect and they say the things and I’m like, “Huh, they might be right.” If I think they might be right, then that’s really good news. I don’t have to beat myself up for it. I can just say, “This is someone I actually love and value their opinion.” Maybe you don’t like the way they said it, but you’re like, “You know what? I’m going to go off and I’m going to really think on it and I’m just going to decide is that a place that I can improve or am I just going to decide, you know what, I don’t think so.” At the end of the day I have my back, and that’s the whole point. So get really curious about your overeating.

The whole point of this is how do you lose weight and still overeat? You really get curious about the overeats. You don’t blow them out of proportion and you don’t catastrophize them. You ask yourself, “What is this overeating trying to tell me? In that moment when I was overeating, what did it help me with?” A lot of times our overeating is helping us with something. Sometimes it helps us with stress. We’d rather overeat than face while we’re stressed. Sometimes we’re bored. We’d rather overeat than to sit there and be like, “Every single day I’m bored at work.”

What is my overeating trying to tell me? Maybe I want a new job, but I’m just scared to go after one. Maybe I need to ask for more responsibility, but I need to work on. I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to do that work, so I need to work on my courage. I need to work on my believability around being able to do more, to take on more. Maybe it’s helping me socialize. When I go out, maybe I get in my head so much about worrying about what other people are going to think about my eating that I just eat to play nice, to fit in.

So think about that stuff. When you know why you overeat, it helps you start solving the real problems of your life. So one of the things that you can do is like Vanessa says, “I have no confidence in myself.” So the answer isn’t to keep eating, and it’s not to say I have no confidence. It’s to say like, “Oh, my overeating is allowing me to not work on becoming more confident. What are the things I need to start telling myself more of? Where are the places that I’m so busy telling myself I’m not good enough and I’m forgetting there might be things about me that are right?”

The second thing you want to do is you want to prepare for your obstacles. So triggers and all kinds of stuff to eat are going to be normal. I do not want you doubling down on trying to be good or restricting yourself from food after you overeat. What I really want you to do is if you’ve had an overeat, I want you to get back to eating normally as fast as you possibly can. What we want to do is teach our body that there are no punishments coming if you overeat, that is going to create a lot of food safety for you. And if there’s no punishments coming, like restricting, withholding, under eating or self-loathing, talking bad to yourself, when those things stop, you will be surprised at how much less you overeat and how much insight you start opening yourself up to. And the more insight open up to into what your truest needs are, then you have more information on how to change your life so you don’t have to eat every time you don’t feel confident.

You don’t have to eat anymore just because you want to fit in socially. So we want to have a plan in the moments that I am most likely to eat, to overeat. What do I want to tell myself? How do I want to treat myself, and what can I do in those moments? And then the last thing is decide now how you’re going to respond to yourself if you do overeat, most of you try to…. You’re just like, you hear all this. You’re like, “Okay, I get it. Don’t beat yourself up after an overeat.” And then you just go on your merry way and you don’t think any more about it. I want you to write in your journal, what does new you do and say to herself after an overeat? Do you do a discovery worksheet? And how do you encourage yourself to do it?

When you hear yourself beating yourself up, what conversation do you have in that moment and what do you do to end that kind of talk? In the moment is the worst time to try to figure out how you’re going to show up for yourself, especially if you’ve always beat yourself up. The best time to figure it out is on paper with your reasoning brain, because when you make a mistake, your habit brain’s going to kick on. It may even try to shut down your reasoning brain. They call it feeling hijacked. You just couldn’t reason with yourself. You were so emotional about it.

The reason why we do this in journaling, the reason why we do this on paper and we write about this stuff is because your brain will store some of the stuff that you do with your reasoning brain, it will store it in the habit brain. And you won’t know when this happens, but there will be a day that you overeat and your brain will start to make it a catastrophe and be like, “You know what? I’m not going to make this a big deal. I’m just going to do a discovery worksheet. I’m going to try.” And next thing you know, you’re doing it and you think, “Huh, this overeats not as bad as the ones I used to have.” Things will just start clicking without it having to be a lot of work. Stuff will just start happening because you’re doing this foundational work on paper. And then the last thing is just keep adjusting.

Work through the conversation you’re going to have ahead of time with yourself if you mess up, prepare for the obstacles that you know that are coming. Figure out what’s really going on underneath your overeats, and then make small adjustments. And then the next time you have an overeat, even it’s the same one. You just go back to step one. We don’t go, “Well, that didn’t work. Corinne gave me some steps. What a failure. I did all that writing. Nothing works.” No, you go back to step one, you do it again and again, and then one day it’s just who you are. And that’s a great place to be.