Episode 364. 8 Types of Rest That Are Key to Weightloss

Speaker 1 (00:01): 

Welcome back everybody. So today I want to talk about something that I think is really important to weight loss, which is basically rest. And I think when I think about the thousands and thousands of women now that I have coached, talked to, answered questions, listened to, taught over the past 15 years about weight loss, there is one common factor and that is a lot of our overeating is coming from this inability to be able to take a fucking break. We feel guilty for taking breaks. We feel bad for resting, we overwork. We think we’ve always got to be doing something for someone, for someone else. We have to be doing things. A lot of us, if you’re anything like me for years and years and years, I tied my ability to be able to get things done, how much shit I did, what I accomplished to my self-worth.  

Speaker 1 (01:07): 

So if you’re wondering, well what does that really sound like, Corin, for me, it has sounded like every time I accomplished something then and only then am I allowed to tell myself, okay, you’re all right. You’re doing good, but you better do this next thing and you better do this next thing. When the only time you feel good about yourself is when you are accomplishing things or doing things for other people. When you don’t really have a sense of just knowing how to appreciate yourself for who you are as a human, well, you get caught up in this endless cycle of doing, doing and rest is bad because if you’re resting, guess what? You’re not producing. If you’re not producing, you must be lazy. You must not be good enough. Somehow you’re failing and if that is the only time you feel good about yourself is when you are productive, when you are producing, when you are doing well, you’re going to want to keep doing that even if it’s wearing you out.  

Speaker 1 (02:05): 

Even if you think you have too much on your plate, you will trade feeling overwhelmed and too busy in life for feeling bad about yourself because you should be doing other things. So that’s why I want to talk about rest today because I think a lot of us who are a little bit what we call productivity junkies, people pleasers, perfectionists over doers, if you were someone who literally a lot of, if you basically sit around and do a lot and that’s kind of how you’re feeding your self-worth, I think just getting started with some rest and understanding that it’s okay and that it doesn’t mean that you’re lazy is helpful because I just see that a lot of us, this was what happened with me for years and years and years. When I would go home at night and eventually you have to quit working.  

Speaker 1 (03:06): 

When I was, especially in my twenties, I was the one who worked late all the time. I stayed until I absolutely had to go home. I would take all the overtime and everything because when I was at work I felt useful. That is where I got any kind of praise. That is the only time I ever gave myself praise. I was always telling myself I was a hard worker. I’d go home and one, I’d be physically wore out because I was always pushing myself really hard and when I would go home, that’s when I would start talking to myself like I normally would. I didn’t have work to erase a lot of it. So today I want to talk about rest because when it comes to losing weight, you’ve got to be able to rest. You have to be able to take some downtime because in downtime is when you recover, you burn more calories in downtime.  

Speaker 1 (04:05): 

I know that sounds crazy to a lot of you who think it’s all about the exercise and stuff, but your body is going to when you get more rest, it is going to burn more fat at rest. That’s why I promote that we need sleep. It also, the more rest you get, the less you need to compensate with energy eating, which just means, well, if I’m going to short circuit on rest, that means I’m going to be having extra snacks and extra food because my body is going to make me want to do something to keep going. Your body loves you enough, even if you’re burning it out, it loves you enough to say, then overfeed me. I’ll take the hit on weight because you seem to really want to keep going and I love you enough to support your nasty habit of making yourself worth be tied to your productivity levels.  

Speaker 1 (05:01): 

So I say all this and I’m just going to tell you, I all feel for you because I still work on this to this day, and let me just say this before we get into all the types of rest and stuff. For me, one of the things that I’ve had to do is really separate out all the different types of self-esteem. I’m getting ready for my members to teach a, it’s a three day in-person event. We also do it over zoom, but it’s for members only where we’re doing a body image bootcamp and we are calling it the body love revolution because one of the things I’m going to be teaching in there is there’s a difference between your self-esteem and your body esteem. So I want you to think about this. You have thoughts about your body and then we have thoughts about ourself.  

Speaker 1 (05:51): 

I think the same thing happens when it comes to our productivity. There are thoughts about you that have to do with your ability to produce, to do for others, and productivity isn’t just for those who work. If you’re retired, you probably the vast majority of my retired clients, the hardest thing that they do is once they retire because all of their identity and their self-worth was around taking care of kids or working in their career that when they retire because the only time they had tied their productivity esteem to their self-esteem, now they feel almost worthless or not good enough wondering who am I? They get lost. So I want for all of you to think about it, your self-esteem is just the collection of opinions and perceptions you have about you as a human. So for me, part of my self-esteem that I’ve had to work on is figuring out who am I when I’m not a business owner and when I’m not, I’ve lost a hundred pounds.  

Speaker 1 (07:12): 

For me, there is the thoughts I have about my body, which is my body esteem, the thoughts that are positive about my body and the thoughts that are negative about it. That’s my body esteem. Then I kind of have my productivity esteem. These are the thoughts I have about me as a business owner, me as a worker each day that even your productivity esteem can even be your thoughts about how much you get done around your house and how you care for others and take care of others. Then there’s just your self-esteem and this is I think sometimes the most neglected part and why so many of us are overeating and we have an inability to rest. So for me, I’ve had to really sit down and write about who am I as just a human.  

Speaker 1 (08:09): 

If you want to know a couple of the opinions I have about myself that I feel like are a hundred percent true is number one, I feel like I’m a ride or die person when you are my family or when you are my friend or you are a no BS woman. When you come into my world, the one thing people always say is Corinne has your back. If you are in trouble, she’s the one you want to call because I am a fixer. I stand up for people that I love. I am the first one to throw down if throwing down needs to be thrown down. I remember one time being at a pool with my best friend and some  

Speaker 2 (08:55): 

Drunk woman got up in my friend’s face and tried to body shame her at the pool and I got up in her face and I was like, oh no, let me tell you this is not happening and here’s why and I dare you to try to come up on me. I was like, this is a no. So I feel like for me when it comes to my self-esteem, I am definitely right or die for people Also, when it comes to my self-esteem, here’s one thing I know I am just who the fuck I am. I really do believe that I piss a lot of people off being who I am between my cussing so many people they ride in and talk about my cussing and stuff. I wear extensions. I am like Dolly Parton 2.0. I got my fake boobs, I got my fake nails, I got my fake ass hair and I love it.  

Speaker 2 (09:56): 

I love it. And so one of the things that I really do believe about me is you are just who you are. Even though I wear a lot of fake shit, I’m proud of it. I’m just going to do me. So for all of you as you’re listening to this, I just want you to think about this. When you are spending a lot of time overeating, how often is it because you’re actually tired because you really don’t have a good way to, you don’t have a good relationship with rest. You don’t know how to rest, you don’t know how to rest physically, you don’t how to rest in your mind. A lot of your self-esteem is tied up in how much you produce. It’s tied up in what you look like. It’s tied up in all kinds of things other than just you sitting back and thinking about just who am I as a person, what are the good qualities about me?  

Speaker 2 (10:53): 

Because it’s going to be really hard for you to rest if your self-esteem is tied up in a bunch of stuff because when you’re at rest, that is when your mind is probably going to speak the loudest about what it really thinks of you. So with all that said to kind of set this up, I just want to talk about rest in general and one of the things like the first thing is rest is not just taking a nap and it’s not just getting a manicure or a pedicure or a massage or anything like that to me and rest. That’s not what that is to me. When we talk about rest and self-care, we’re really talking about doing things that allows our nervous system to calm down, to take our stress levels down, to kind of switch off so that we have time in our mind and in our body to just recover and not just recover, but to actually restore, to elevate if you will.  

Speaker 2 (12:04): 

I want you to think about this. There’s recovering and getting back to baseline and then there’s restoring, which means I want to go above the baseline. I want more than just getting back to, okay, that’s enough rest. I really want to get to a point where I feel energetic, determined like I wake up with some vigor each day. So let’s talk about the different types of rest. First and foremost there is physical rest and physical rest is exactly what you probably think it is. It’s going to be sleep and getting enough of it. It’s going to be stretching or exercising. It’s going to be things like yoga, walking, it can be running, it can be strength training. For me, when I strength train, to me that’s like physical rest. It is saying I am taking time out of my day to do something for my body.  

Speaker 2 (13:03): 

It also can be nourishing food. So I want you to think about, for me in particular when I’m eating plenty of fruits and vegetables, getting good carbs in protein fats when I’m really concentrating on just some really good nourishing food that allows my body to have physical rest, it’s giving it the nutrients it needs, it’s giving it what it’s going to need to rebuild to sleep well, poop well, all the things that I’m just going to tell y’all. I’m a big believer in pooping. Well, I carene does not like being constipated. I don’t like being not regular. I always feel like something weird is going on in the force. If I’m not having a solid each day. Then here comes the next type of rest. This is mental rest and this is any kind of what we call the non-thinking activities. So that can be for some of you.  

Speaker 2 (14:08): 

Y’all like to bake. I’ve got a member inside my membership named Andrea. She loves to draw. She draws the best daily little posts for us when she journals for her. Drawing out her feelings and her thoughts is very calming to her and we love seeing them. Also, I know a lot of you like to garden. Corinne is not a gardener. I’ll just say my grandfather was a voracious gardener. I did not get his green thumb. It did not come through this side of my family. My brother got that. Some of the mental rest I like is journaling. I also, honestly, I love watching. I love nothing more than watching. I like crime shows. I know that sounds crazy. Is that mental rest? Yes. Anything that’s like a crime show, action adventure. I love swat. I watch a lot of swat. I watch all of the Chicago shows, Chicago pd, Chicago Med and Chicago Fire. I love Blue Bloods.  

Speaker 2 (15:22): 

I like the law An authorities as I used to call them, I love all the law. I love binge watching stuff like that because I get to check out of my world and check into another world and for me that gives me mental rest. For a long time I thought that watching TV was lazy or a waste of time until I started thinking about God. It’s wasting time sitting around thinking you should be doing something else. If I’ve slayed for the day, I want to give myself permission to do the things I love most and I happen to love watching television, so for me that’s mental rest. There’s also something called emotional rest. This is crying. Corinne does a lot of crying. Honestly, if you are inside my membership, there’s hardly a week that goes by when we do a coaching call or something where I don’t give myself permission to just cry because I’m telling a story or I’m talking about something that means a lot to me.  

Speaker 2 (16:31): 

I also cry at home every now and then I think about I’ll just have days where I will think about my grandparents and they’ve been gone for over 20 years and I still miss them to this day and sometimes I’ll sit in the shower and I’ll just have a good two minute cry just missing them. For me, that is emotionally healing. It gives me emotional rest. Journaling is also a big piece of my emotional resting. I write a little bit every day. Sometimes I write about what’s bugging me. Sometimes I just write about things I want to do, just making a list of things that I want to do. It’s like emotional rest. It allows me to stay it out of being overwhelmed. It allows me to not be, I don’t have to worry all day that I’m forgetting something because I have my list of things.  

Speaker 2 (17:26): 

For some of you emotional rest is therapy. Going and seeing a therapist and for some people it’s even having just a trusted friend that you talk to. There’s another form of rest that most of us don’t even realize that we’re doing and that is social rest for me, social rest is hugging my husband, having some time at a coffee shop with my earbuds in working on something fun, just being around other people. Sex is like social rest. Also you can if you have a friend group, just having time to go and have time with your friends. A lot of my no BS members, they become really good friends with a lot of the people who live in their local area and they have regular meetups where they can go and they can just talk about weight loss and the things that they’re learning inside. No BS with women who get it.  

Speaker 2 (18:26): 

There’s another type of rest. There’s sensory rest. This is where we do lighting candles. For me, that’s a big one. I love scented candles. I like having candles burning when I’m needing, if I just want to rest, I burn a lot of lavender candles when I’m wanting to focus at work, one of the things that helps me get into the zone, it gets my sensories kicked in is I burn a lot of lemon or grapefruit candles when I’m wanting to work for me, that’s resting my sensories. So for example, if I try to work sometimes where I just dive in and I don’t give myself the right music or the right smells, I feel like I’m forcing myself to work. My senses are easily distracted. I’m kind of jumping around. I swear sometimes I think I’ve got adult A DHD. I’d never have been diagnosed, but I am definitely a squirrel cage at best most of the time.  

Speaker 2 (19:35): 

But when I light a grapefruit or an orange candle and I play the Game of Thrones soundtrack, I can get into work and be a lot more focused than I can be at any other time. For some of us also sensory rest is going to be like loose clothing. Y’all know how it is. Sometimes we just have days where we just are not comfortable in our body and if we are wearing clothes that are too tight, too small, ill-fitting. We are sensory, aggravated all day long. You are emotionally triggered all day long. Your brain is now triggered to think negative things about you. So some days just wearing some loose clothing allows your senses to be at ease. For a lot of you, there’s also spiritual rest, going to church, yoga, meditation, praying. All of that is involved in spiritual rest. There’s also creative rest.  

Speaker 2 (20:42): 

I was telling you about my client Andra who draws drawing, reading fantasy books and stuff. All of that is creative and then there’s also playful rest. A lot of you want to do fun and unproductive shit and that’s amazing. That’s like me and my TV time. You can play games. I play waffle every day. I play wordle every day and I play connections every day and I text it to my best friend and I text it to my husband. Some people want to do puzzles. A lot of you just want to go play with your kids. All of this is different types of rest and I think what we don’t realize is we are missing out on number one, just even identifying that these are all types of rest, but here’s the bottom line, we all need it. You need it and there are lots of ways to get it.  

Speaker 2 (21:41): 

I think one of the things that when I first started talking to y’all about is for those of us who are A types and high productivity junkies and stuff, we really do need it, but we’ve got to start small because it’s going to be hard in the very beginning to feel like you deserve it, to feel like you should take it to feel like you’re not wasting time. You are going to probably think these things a lot and that’s okay. That’s why I want you to do the same thing with rest. As I teach you how to lose weight, which is let’s start with real little things and make some improvements so that you get used to feeling like this is okay, this is actually safe. And then the more that you do it, what you end up doing is seeing benefits start arising. You start feeling better, you start noticing, you might even be more productive or your relationships are improving, you’ll start losing weight.  

Speaker 2 (22:48): 

Positive things will start happening and for me, the easiest way for me to ever change a deeply rooted belief system like I should be doing something or feeling bad that I’m not work working self-developing all the time is to first change what I’m doing in small ways, get some wins, see that it’s not as bad as I’ve made it out to be, and then my mind starts changing naturally. Sometimes we can just change how we think about stuff. A new perspective drop is everything, but sometimes we have to do some stuff to show ourselves that it’s okay in order to believe and then catch fire with motivation and momentum. So these are all types of rests and what I want you to do is I want you to start thinking about some of these things. Am I actually resting number one in ways that I don’t even know I am where now instead of always telling myself I never get any rest because you’re conditioned to believe it’s only manicures, pedicures, vacations and whatnot, maybe it will give you some relief in thinking like, okay, I am a busy person, I do a lot, but I also do these things.  

Speaker 2 (24:18): 

Sometimes that’s enough to just give you some relief where you don’t always feel so overwhelmed. Then the next thing is when you start noticing these little things, you start saying like, this is a version of me resting and this is a version of me resting that will help you see that nothing bad’s happening. When you’re doing these things, you’re actually getting some positive benefits and when that switch starts flipping, you can take bigger, more rest. You can actually probably start saying no to a few things in order to get more rest. You can start honoring some more of your self-care needs, but at the end of the day, I just want you to be thinking about there’s my physical rest and where am I getting that? There’s my mental rest and how am I doing that? There’s emotional rest. Am I doing it and giving myself permission to social, rest, some sensory rest, spiritual rest, creative, rest, playful rest, all of those count.  

Speaker 2 (25:27): 

You don’t have to be doing all of them, but I do suggest you start doing some of them because I’m going to tell all of you, most of us just have a very conditioned twisted sense that we should be doing all the time. You can’t be doing all the time, you just can’t. We try, but something always breaks and usually for all of us, it breaks in the form of eating to compensate because we’re pushing ourselves too much all the time. So I want you to be thinking about this question. If I started allowing myself to get more rest, how would that positively impact my weight loss journey? I really want you to think about it. If you want to journal on it, journal on it, and then if you want to be able to make peace with getting more rest, if you want to be able to figure out how to not feel so guilty and end up eating at night because you feel so guilty for being tired, for not wanting to be with your kids, for wanting to lay down and watch tv, work, a  

Speaker 3 (26:42): 

Puzzle, whatever that is, consider joining no bs. That is the stuff we work on. We work on that stuff because that’s what’s standing in the way of weight loss, the inability to cut ourselves some slack and so we eat over it. Alright, I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Leave me a review, give us a rating you will not believe how much it helps the podcast to stay ranked and to get more people listening when you’re rating and reviewing. Talk to y’all next week.