Episode 322: Do you have Not Good Enough Syndrome?

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You. Hello everybody. Welcome back. So today we are going to talk about what is doing enough. So if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that I talk about four basics of weight loss and I talk about them all the time.

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As a recap for anybody who’s new, let me tell you what the four basics are. Number one, we’re going to drink a minimum of 64oz of water a day. Number two, you got to prioritize some sleep. It’s really hard to lose weight and not eat cheetos and snickers ice cream or fall into junk at night if you are tired. So we got to prioritize seven to 9 hours of sleep a day.

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Number three, we’re going to practice what’s called doable hunger. It means before you eat, you are going to ask, am I hungry? As you are eating, you’re going to pay attention to when your body has had enough, not when your mind’s had enough. I don’t stop eating when everybody else does. We’re going to turn in our clean plate club card.

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We’re actually going to pay attention to our body and we’ll stop when our body has had enough. And then the last one is super simple. You wake up each day, you grab you a sheet of paper, you write down here’s what I’m going to eat today. And I don’t care what that is. But you’ve got to get into the habit of planning what you’re going to eat and following through on that.

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Because the last thing you want is to be someone standing in front of the pantry trying to figure out what you’re going to eat at 06:00 at night after a bad day. Nobody has good decision making skills at that time of day. Now a lot of us wake up in the morning and we think today’s my day, I’m going to do it all. I’m going to be so much better. And we are not planning our food for tired ass 06:00 p.m.

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Corinne who’s worked all day long. We need to plan realistically. And the best way to lose weight is you have to stop thinking. You have to do everything perfectly. So that’s why I want to talk about doing enough today.

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Inside my program, I teach the concept of eating to enough. But I’ve really been thinking about this whole concept about what is doing enough. I have clients every single week. I do two calls for my members. I do one on Wednesdays where I teach something like this and we kind of go a little deeper than we can ever go in the podcast.

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At the end, they get to ask questions. All the questions that are coming up for them, all the fears, all the doubts that are coming up. And I talk to them and help them navigate that shit. Because that’s why we never lose weight. No diet out there is teaching us how to deal with the shit that comes up in our mind when it’s time to stop eating, when we don’t feel like it.

00:03:08

That’s the moment you really need a weight loss coach. So it never fails that either on my Wednesday call or my Sunday coaching call, where I bring up members and we just have a conversation in live time in a big group setting, we talk about what’s stopping us from our weight loss and what’s going on with ourselves. And this comes up frequently, this idea that, well, if this week all I do is plan the foods I would normally eat, that’s just not good enough, I should be doing better. So I want you all to think about this. If you are suffering from not good enough syndrome, not doing enough syndrome, it often sounds like this.

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You’ll hear yourself saying things like this won’t matter, this bite won’t matter. Who cares if I eat this? It’s not going to matter. I should be doing more. Like when you start planning to do things and you’re going to take baby steps, your brain is going to scream, girl, you should be doing more.

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This is just not good enough. This won’t be enough. A lot of times, especially like when I weighed 250 pounds, I would think about the things I was going to do for the day. Very often in the first few months that I was losing weight, I was taking 15 minutes walks, I was leaving mayonnaise off of hamburgers, I was still eating ice cream every night. I just wasn’t eating it out of a carton.

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I had moved over to a large size bowl and my brain would scream, this won’t be enough. And it would feel like shit. But let me tell you, all of us have this false ass idea in our head about what enough is. And the sad thing is that in the diet industry, no one’s teaching us how to question it. They’re actually fostering it.

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Like when you do a Weight Watchers or you do a noom or you do a program where you have a certain amount of calories you’ve got to eat. When you do things like a keto or a whole 30 or any kind of diet, where you’re going to go from who you are today to morphing into a completely new human overnight. They foster this idea that if you decide to start with small changes that you can do each day, that that’s not good enough. So I want all of you for a moment to just take a breath and I want you to give yourself some grace and compassion. If you’ve been hard on yourself and you have been someone who has been suffering from not good enough syndrome, it is not your fault.

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We are conditioned that way in this society, especially around weight loss. The whole weight loss industry is built on the back of giving you drastic changes. Like if you think about books that are written, they got to sell the books. And in order to sell the books, you know what they got to have? They got to have some kind of unique, weird ass bunch of shit that you should be doing.

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And it’s usually nothing like how you live. So this is just in your ecosystem. It’s in the water you drink, the air you breathe. It’s in. All the social that you read every time you Google.

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All of it is like conditioning that there is this idea that there is a level that you should be doing and anything below that, it’s not good enough. So we have to address this because it’s very important that if you want to lose your weight that you have to stop spending your life thinking this won’t matter, this isn’t good enough, and then doing nothing. That’s all that that whole sentence does for you. It teaches you to do nothing. And that’s a big problem when it comes, like for a lot of my clients when it comes to weight loss is they are self proclaimed perfectionists.

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They will tell me all the time if I wasn’t such a perfectionist. I’m constantly beating myself up. I’m always like crying. I get what you’re teaching me. It sounds amazing.

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When I hear it. I think, is that all we have to do? And I will tell you I have thousands of women that have lost their weight. They are well into my maintenance program now. And they will all tell you in the beginning, none of it felt like it was good enough.

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Their doubts and insecurities were really loud in the beginning. But the difference between them and you is that in the moment when they didn’t think it was good enough, they told themselves that doesn’t matter. Maybe I’m wrong because this is the crazy thing. Everything that I teach is super simple. We’re going to get some sleep, we’re going to drink our water, we’re going to write down what we’re going to eat for the day.

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And you can write down anything. I don’t care if it’s 03:00 snicker, whatever you’re writing down. We’re just going to get really good at paying attention when we eat. We are going to put the foods on there that we want to be eating so that we can learn how to eat them in control. We’re not going to be eliminating foods anymore and we’re not going to bastardize foods and say these aren’t healthy.

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We’re not doing that shit anymore. It doesn’t work. Y’all, if that worked, we would not have an obesity epidemic and then we’re just going to eat when our body like all that food you put on that sticky note for the day. You’re not going to eat if you’re not hungry. If you aren’t hungry, wait till you are, plain and simple.

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And then when you do get hungry, eat the food you like. But you’ve got to learn how to stop it enough. That is a good enough diet right there. And most people, when they hear it, they’re like, oh, my God. Earth shattering.

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That makes sense. I could see how I would lose weight if I quit eating just because it’s time. If I was to quit eating just because it’s free. Someone offered they wanted to go out there. If I just quit doing a lot of eating that has nothing to do with me being Ashley hungry, I probably could lose weight.

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The problem that we run into is that the moment you start doing simple things that are laced with common sense, they feel like some of the hardest things to do. Not because doing it’s hard, but because our brain screams it’s not enough. So we need to talk about it. Why is doing enough? Why is that such a concept that’s so hard?

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Why does our brain do this? So the first thing is that it does it because so many of us are just brought up to be perfectionists. If you just think about the way the world is, it’s like there’s all these standards they’re just handed to us. This is what it should be. And we spend our entire life trying to live up to what our parents told us, what teachers told us, all these things.

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And then when we became adults, we took everything that we absorbed as a child and the way that we interpret it, and we live our adult life based on it, we never even question it. So one of the first things that we have to really think about is most of us, we don’t know what our enough is. What doing enough for us is we know what doing enough is based on past diets, what our mother told us, what our father expected of us, what society says is enough. We have other people’s definitions, but we’ve never thought for a second to ask ourselves, but what’s mine? If I wasn’t going to live by other people’s definition for weight loss, what would doing enough right now, knowing what I know about myself, what would that be?

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And if you write about that and you see it, the only thing you have to overcome is worrying what other people will think when you’re doing what feels right to you. That’s a whole nother kettle of fish we have.

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So that’s a whole nother thing that we have to learn is, all right. This is the specialty that I do inside my nobius weight loss program. It’s like once you define what you’re enough is, the next host of Doodoo thoughts come up. Now I’m worried, like, if I do what I think is enough, now I worry about what they are going to think. I’m worried that maybe my enough won’t work.

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We have all these other thoughts that come creeping up when we wonder what is hard about losing weight. That’s what’s hard about losing weight. What’s hard about losing weight is not what we do, especially if you do it the no BS way, it’s all of the fear thoughts. It’s all of the worries and anxieties that come up when it’s time to take sensible, common sense action. And so we have to work on those thoughts.

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Now here’s the second thing that will help happen, is you have to not only define what your enough is, you have to remember that whatever your enough right now is, is probably vague as hell. That’s why I want you writing it and I want you to do a real deep exploration of it. Get you a pad, write, this is what enough for losing weight looks like for me at this stage of my life. And these are the things I feel like on a scale from one to four, one being hell no, four being absolutely, yes, I am at least or three or four, I could do this right now. And that’s going to be enough.

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Because if you don’t have that listed, your brain is only going to go to really high standards that may not even be real, may not even be obtainable, may not even make sense for your life. And yet you keep trying to force yourself to fit into a box you don’t even want to be in. So here’s the second thing we have to do. Or the third dieters enough, it’s all defined terribly. So when you make your list of what your enough is, I want you to think about and what does the diet industry tell me what enough is?

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And then I want you to look at those lists and I want you to see that there’s probably a big difference between what you really want to do and what other people selling books and shakes and whatever junk science they’re doing right now. Then you’ve got their list of what enough is. And I just want you to do this. I just want you to decide, is there anything on that list I even want for myself? Most of the time it’s not.

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And yet we keep telling ourselves that’s what we have to do and it’s just not true. Literally. Not only did I lose 100 pounds not doing the bullshit the diet industry asked me to do, but I have coached thousands of women to do the same. A million people have taken my free course where I give the initial steps for getting started on your weight loss journey. We all can’t be wrong.

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So I want you to just question, is a lot of my enough coming from the diet industry? Do I want to let go of some of those rules and replace them with ones that make sense for me that I feel like I could do? Now, the last thing is that feeling like you’re doing enough at the end of the day is not about what you do. And I want you to think about this. Most of us will lose weight if every day we end the day thinking, I did enough today.

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I did enough. That comes from your thoughts. There’s no amount of stuff you can do, because I have clients that will do thousands of things every day. And I want you all to. If you’re a busy woman, please pay attention.

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Come back to me right now. I can’t tell you how many days I have gotten up at 05:00 A.m., worked for two or 3 hours, got in a workout, made sure that I spent 2030 minutes with my son, worked the rest of the day, was at the felt like what everybody’s beck and call, then did household duties, like literally slay the day. And at the end of the day, say, I didn’t do enough. I didn’t get enough done today. This is how we know.

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And especially if you’re an overachiever or perfectionist or someone who is bending over backward, people pleasing all day long. If you routinely are getting a lot of shit done and never given yourself credit for it and still feel like you’re doing enough, doing enough is not an amount. It is a relationship with what you do. It is how you think about it. It is so important that we start realizing that we need to have a new conversation with ourselves.

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So when you’re trying to lose weight and you make a couple of small changes in the day, I want you to give yourself credit. No more saying that wasn’t enough. Because here’s the crazy part. Sometimes, let’s say you decide that for today that you’re going to McDonald’s. This was me back in the day.

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When I first the first couple of months, I did not give up my drive throughs. I loved the drive through, and I was not giving up the drive through. But I made an agreement with myself. My favorite meal at McDonald’s was the number two super size. That’s those little cheeseburgers.

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You got two cheeseburgers. And I would get mayonnaise instead of mustard. I’d get a diet dr. Pepper. Of course it was super sized.

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And I would add on a Butterfinger McFlurry, sometimes an Oreo McFurry if I got wild. So when I first started, I started leaving the mayo off and going with the mustard because I was like, well, if I’m going to have McDonald’s, that’s a sacrifice I can make. I stopped supersizing things. I eventually got the small McFlurry. Then I switched over to an ice cream cone.

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And let me just tell you, those were some of the hardest fucking changes of all. You know why? Because I didn’t believe they’d work. I had to do them thinking it wasn’t going to be good enough. So in those moments, what had to happen for me is I had to let myself think, this isn’t going to be good enough.

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And I want to give you a super secret tip hack that works wonderfully for everyone. In the moment when my brain would want to tell me that leaving off mayonnaise and not supersizing wasn’t good enough, I would say. And I’m also learning that I’ve got to start with something. There is a power in the word and what it does is not good enough. Thinking leaves us in the land of we’re either doing all of it or we’re doing none of it.

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So often when we are thinking this isn’t good enough, we dead. Stop. Might as well not bother. If I can’t do these 400 things, why bother doing the first step? When you add and it brings you to the middle, it gets you out of I’m either doing it all or I’m doing nothing.

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It brings you to the middle of I know. I think it’s not good enough and I’m going to take this step anyway. Maybe one day I’ll be wrong. I bet I said that to myself a thousand times. Maybe one day I’ll be wrong.

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I also told myself this. I’ve often thought things weren’t good enough, but I don’t really know because I never really tried. I never really tried the small steps. I always tried going ham every single time. So it’s important that you listen for that because I promise you, the biggest diet killers of all are the things that are happening in our brain.

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It’s not what you’re eating. It’s not what’s going on outside of you. It’s not your past failures. It’s in the moment when you’re going to take the next small step that you feel is doable and your brain screams, it’s not good enough. That’s a moment of impact.

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It is a huge moment because the more you can convince yourself that every change matters, no matter how big or small, you teach yourself. You’re always looking for a win. You teach yourself. You’re always trying to figure out a way to have some progress. It is so important.

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So the last thing I want to leave is for all of my members, my nobs women who still listen to my public podcast. I want to give you a little homework. I want you to journal on this and then I invite you to bring your homework to Ask Coaches where our team of expert level weight loss coaches, they’re going to look at your answers and any questions that you have, like do the journaling prompts and then see what comes up. What are your fears? What are your doubts?

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What are your questions? And then once you take it to Ask coaches and I want you to let us help you work at a deeper level on this. You can also take it to our private Facebook group and you can share it with the other members and all of you can do some peer support because don’t forget, you’re not alone. When you’re an OBS woman, you’re with other women who are working on things just like this. So here are the journaling questions.

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I love good journaling questions. So get out your pen be prepared to write it down. And if you don’t have a pen or you’re doing something else, save this episode, download it, and then come back to it later when you can write it down. All right, the first question is I want you to just define, what does enough mean to me right now? Not the glorious version.

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I want the old shitty version. What is it that the shitty, hard ass version of you says, this is what enough means? Because we all have a working definition. That’s somewhere high on a pedestal somewhere that we’re holding ourselves to, and we need to know what that is. You got to know what it is.

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You subconsciously think, enough is the second thing. I want you to look at it, and I want you to ask every single thing that you wrote down, do I want to even live by that? Is that what I want as my definition? I will bet you half the shit on that list is a no. It is something that you picked up somewhere.

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So that’s what brings you to the third part. So we’re going to list all of our shitty thoughts about what enough is. Then we’re going to just ask, do I even want to live by this? And the ones that you don’t, I want you to ask yourself, where did they even learn this shit from? Did somebody tell you this?

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Is this the person that you even want to believe their opinion? Did you just happen to learn it from some coworker back in 92? And here you are in 2023, still doing what they told you back then? Did you get it from some book you read, some Google article, some pinterest hole you found, fell yourself into? We want to make sure we understand where we’re living from.

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Most of us are living from sources in our life that we don’t want to live by. And you don’t even notice it until you do this stuff. The next thing is then we’re going to just ask if I wasn’t worried about how long weight loss would take, if I wasn’t worried about what other people would think about what I’m fixing to do, or if I was going to just prove myself wrong about this being enough, what would I do each day? And what does that look like for me, for my weight loss? This is where we’re going to just free ourselves.

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And I really want you to free yourself. You don’t have to do that. If it feels too scary, you’re not doing it now, so you don’t even have to go for it. But I want you to at least see that. If you were free of other people’s opinions, if you were free of your own bullshit, junkie ass self talk, if you were just freeing yourself around, like, your worries and anxieties, what would you do?

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What would be good enough for you then? The only thing left after that is, are you going to start doing that? Are you going to give yourself the relief that I can do this? This is the new good enough, and whenever my brain tries to tell me it’s not, I’m going to change the relationship with myself. For the first time in my adult life, I’m going to teach adult Corinne what good enough really is for her.

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All right, I hope you enjoyed this podcast. I will see you next week. Th.