Do you ever have these thoughts when you’re trying to lose weight:

• “It’s gonna be so hard” 
• “I just lack control”
• “It’s not easy for me”
• “I’m gonna have to be uncomfortable”

And if you have these thoughts, does that mean you’re a bad person who’s doomed to never lose weight? 

NO!

It’s normal to have shitty thoughts. Stop making yourself wrong for having them. 

So what can you do about them? 

Listen to today’s episode — “Transforming Self-Doubt into Weightloss.” I share 4 ways you can listen to — and accept — your “bad” thoughts instead of:

• Beating yourself up for having them
• Waiting until they “stop” (because they won’t)
• Eating to silence them

There ain’t enough food in the world to shut up the inner critic. So stop trying. 

Tune in now to discover how to pause and hear your hard thinking. And what to start doing when you hear it, so you can lose your weight for good.

If you have been working with me for any amount of time, you know that how we think greatly impacts how we feel and do in our life. So I want to say this before we get started, which is how you think is not going to determine how successful you are. It’s how you think and recognize it and work on it. That is going to dictate how successful you are because a lot of you think you’ve got to wipe out like, oh my God, I still have excuses. Oh my God, I still think bad things about me. Oh my God, I think all this negativity, if negative thinking stopped us from being successful in life, well first of all I wouldn’t be here. I’d still weigh two 50 because I had a lot of negative thinking all the way down the scale. I would not have a successful business.

I wouldn’t be able to help all of y’all this morning. I probably had 5,000 shitty thoughts. I did not want to work out this morning at all. So this morning I’m texting Chris because he’s upstairs. That is what one does when they live in the same house. They don’t walk upstairs, they text each other. So I have an aura ring and I wasn’t feeling so hot this morning. My period has started and I was like, oh, I bet my AA ring is going to be just like shame, shame, double shame. Everybody knows your name. And so I went to look and they have this thing called circles, and in the circles you can see what other friends of yours or rings are. So I have in my circle, I just have Chris and Jane, basically y’all. That is my world right there. I hardly talk to any other humans ever, including my son who lives here.

I can go days without seeing him in our own house. So I’m like, man, your AA ring was in the stinker this morning. His was really bad and he said, oh, I just need to be updated. And so then I got to telling him, I said, the first time or last night, you kicked the shit out of me. I was still awake. He kicked the fucking shit out of my leg. And I was like, oh my God. And so I tried to wake him up. He just was incoherent. Then I fell asleep and then he punched me and I almost hit him back. And so we were texting about it this morning and my last text read, I have no desire to start this day. Fuck me. That was literally the text I sent, I don’t know, 12 minutes ago. So if being able to be in a great mood and still function, having to have perfect thinking all the time was the requirement to show up.

Guess none of us could get anything done in life. You would never change a diaper. You probably wouldn’t even feed yourself. How many times have you said, I’m just too tired to cook. I don’t feel like it, and then you got to do something because we ain’t going hungry and you do it anyway. So the reason why I want to emphasize this is because a lot of you have this mistaken idea that once you understand that our thoughts are powerful and that we’re going to work on changing our thinking over time, a lot of you get stuck in what I call no man’s land. Well, I’m hearing my shitty thoughts, so I can’t do that is not true. All you have to do is be able to hear your shitty thoughts. If you know it’s not a helpful thought and it feels bad, but you also know what you need to do, what you have thought in advanced about how you’re going to show up in those moments, you just tell yourself.

I always think shit like that. I often don’t feel like doing things that are going to be good for me. This is not a big deal. We’re just going to have to get up and get going and see what happens. That is just called life. Now, there is a lot of stuff that we can look at in our thinking and we can challenge and we can coax ourselves into so that all of our thinking isn’t just really scary, really doubtful, really catastrophizing over worrying, overthinking. There are things we can do, but if you are sitting there and you believe that until I don’t have excuses and urges or want it, and until those things happen, there’s just no way I could lose weight, you are sadly mistaken. The reason you’re not losing weight is because of that thought. It’s because you keep thinking, unless I’ve got perfect thinking, I can’t do unless these thoughts go away, I can’t do.

There’s so much that you can do in weight loss with imperfect thinking. You just have to see it and do the shit. Anyway, today what we’re going to be talking about is how to hear your hard thinking. So we’ve really got to figure out what is this hard thinking and where is it here? All right, so let’s talk about how to hear hard thinking and why it matters. First of all, you cannot lose weight if you are not listening to what you’re thinking about. No one loses weight permanently, happily, easily with less stress or things start clicking unless they how to listen to their thinking. This was clutch and key for me when I was losing my weight, I did not have a guru. I did not have training in this. I didn’t have anything. There was something about Corrine that went back in my day.

I would hear myself be hard on myself, and I remember saying in my brain, oh my God, we got to quit thinking like this. This is not helpful. We’re just going to keep doing things. We’re just going to keep trucking along. I’m just not going to be mean to myself right now. I didn’t have a positive thought to offer me for the first 50 pounds. I was not cheerleading myself hardly ever. The main thing that I was doing is it reminds me of all of, I watch a ton of medical shows. Right now we’re in the middle of the resident. Well, actually we’re at the end of the resident and somebody is in an accident and they’ve got to tie off the bleeding to get ’em to the emergency room. That’s the way that I think thought work kind of starts. It’s like you got to start with first, where do I need to cut the bleeding off?

So for a lot of you, it’s body bashing, making mistakes, be the end all, be all to your humanity. You overeat and you carry it like a thorny cross for three days and it’s just whip, whip, whip one right after another. We have to hear this kind of stuff. You don’t need to if you’re in the throes of it. Don’t be trying to change the thinking. Don’t be trying to do anything other than I got to just get so good at hearing these things so that when they’re happening, I can tell myself that’s some of that thinking. I’m working on changing. That’s some of that thinking that I know feels bad. The best way to catch automatic thinking is first is to just literally spend some time in silence. Now, I’m not talking, y’all need to be a monk and go 24 hours, but I have been practicing When I go out for walks, rather than talking to Jane the whole time and listening to something, I’m spending just a few minutes, whether it’s one minute or five minutes, I walk in silence and it’s uncomfortable at first when you’re used to noise all the time, drowning out your thinking at first it feels weird and it can feel painful when you first start, if you just automatically hear a bunch of who nanny.

The worst thing that can happen for any of us is that we tune out our natural thinking because when you’re not listening to it, you can’t interrupt it. You can’t shift it, you can’t examine it, you can’t get curious about it. You can’t pivot it. You can’t do a fucking thing about it because now you’re not listening. When we’re not listening to it, guess what happens? We just run on autopilot.

We’re running on autopilot now. So now what we’re doing is like, well, I don’t know why I overeat. I don’t know why I feel so stressed. It must just be work. You’re not listening to your thinking when you feel bad, you’re not acting the way you want, or you look around and you’re not getting the things you want. The only plausible explanation you have is some fact something someone. This is how your brain works. The world outside of you does things. People say words to you. You have interactions with people. You go to work and circumstances happen. A meeting gets called. You need to work late. Whatever it is, your kid says, X, Y, Z, your brain immediately tells a story about it. That’s how our brain works.

It has to formulate a story because its job is to try to describe to you what it thinks is happening. It’s just trying to tell you what this really means. And one of the ways that we do this a lot is notice if you ever read texts or emails and you get mad, and if somebody else read it, they may or may not get mad. Sometimes I’ll get a text from someone, I’ll be like rude, especially Chris. Chris is like real bottom line. If I send him, I could send him a long ass text asking questions, talking about something that said really important to me, and I’ll get back number one if he even reads it until I prod him to read it. Good luck to Corinne. But then if he ever does read it, I might get an emoji like a thumbs up, I may get fine, and so often I’m like, fuck that.

He must not care. In my mind, a short response means he must think I’m just a bother. He’s being rude. He should blah, blah, blah, and I always have to check myself because my brain automatically assumes that when someone doesn’t communicate exactly the way I communicate and they don’t tell me all the things, I would love to hear that this must be a problem. And so a lot of times I have to stop myself and say, this is not a problem. If you feel bad, then you need to just say, I would like a longer text When I text you these things, could you give me a longer text? If he decides and if he says, no, I don’t like doing that, then I get to decide. Do I continue to spend my life mad and thinking he doesn’t love me and doesn’t respect me and all this other stuff, or I’m just like, okay, that’s not what he likes to say.

So I can just be like, all right, this is not a reflection of me. This is his wants and desires. Am I okay with letting this shit go for both our sake? Because sometimes what we have to realize, especially in relationships, is that you’ve got to decide what is worth having conversations over and what’s just worth letting go over. And until you’re listening to your brain, you’ll never ever know how often you are the one making you miserable. Here’s the thing, all of us, we got to be listening to our thoughts. We have to be listening to them so you can decide to journal sometimes. If you’re not ready to walk in silence, then do one to two minutes of writing each day. This is how I feel and this is why. And make yourself write three sentences that explain your feeling, that will give you insight into how you think it could be.

This is how I’m feeling about my 24 hour plan today, three reasons why I feel good about it, scared of it, worried about it, whatever it is, because then when you see those things, you’ve just now given yourself the opportunity to figure out, oh, that’s why I feel this way. And I love this exercise because it’s the fastest one to teaching you how to stop thinking people, situations and things in life inherently. Create your feelings now every day if you really want to get better at listening to what’s going on and being able to make that connection because the moment you realize that how you feel is based on how you think instead of based on what’s going on in your life, you end up with freedom.

You have so much opportunity in life to just feel better about a lot of things. So much of us, there’s two types of suffering in the world. There’s legit suffering. It’s like when my baby was diagnosed with autism, I had legit suffering. It was very scary. I was supposed to be scared. I think I was supposed to worry. There was a lot there. If my mama was to pass away, I’m supposed to miss her just like my grandparents. I’ve missed them every day since the day that they’ve died. That’s supposed to happen. That’s not unnecessary suffering. That’s what we call natural normal human suffering. When I watch the news and something bad happens, like we had recently, there is a 16-year-old autistic boy who went missing a few weeks ago in Nashville, and every time I see it on the news breaks, my heart just breaks my heart.

That’s not unnecessary suffering. I want to be heartbroken over stuff like that. I want to hope that they find him, but I also want to ache for his mother. So it’s important for you to know that there are two types of suffering in this world. There is the on purpose. This makes sense, suffering, and then there’s a whole lot of unnecessary suffering, and that’s where we want to level up our thinking. Unnecessary suffering is making shit mean crap that ain’t there deciding. I was talking to someone the other day, she was talking about no BS with her husband and she said, I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this or something like that. And the husband says, well, if you apply yourself, I guess you could. But she was just like, he’s so unsupportive, blah, blah, blah. And of course women dog piling like, yeah, unsupportive got no facts other than that. And I said, was he being unsupportive or was he just saying, yeah, if you apply yourself, you can lose weight. The only thing that was going on there is that she took it as He didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear. It’s all going to be okay. I’ll love you no matter what.

And I asked her, are you telling yourself that? Have you told yourself it’ll all be okay and no matter what happens, I’ll love you no matter what because that’s the valuable work. That’s the point of hearing our thoughts. We want to know all of this shit that we think having an overeat and thinking, see, I’ll never lose weight. That is unnecessary suffering. Instead of having an overeat and saying, what do I need most in this moment? Probably compassion, not a beat down. I probably need to give myself a hug and say, we are figuring this out. What did you really need?

But you can’t do any of that unless you’re hearing things. First step is we have to hear and then when we hear things, we have to listen to what it is that we’re saying, and then we get to where I’m going to tell y’all the shittiest thoughts are the littlest thoughts. You will not believe how much better you could feel in life. It will feel like getting a happy pill if you listen for little shitty thoughts instead of what most of y’all want to do. Well, if I start listening, I’m going to discover some kind of trauma that I’ve probably blocked my entire life. I’m terrified of what I’m going to find in there. How about we just start with some of the garden variety, bullshit, unnecessary suffering. Let’s get to feeling better by cutting out some horse shit first. Here are your examples of bullshit.

Tiny ass thinking that most of you have, and it’s time to level it up. Number one, this is going to be hard for me. I mean, shit, Corrine, will you mean do stuff when I’m thinking it’s not good enough? That’s going to be hard for me. Y’all think that’s just true? That is not true. That’s a thought. Thoughts can feel true, but I’m going to tell y’all, I always say it just because you think it doesn’t mean it’s true. Just because it feels true still doesn’t believe it’s true. Our motherfuckers walking around this planet right now who still think the earth’s flat just determine the earth’s flat.

So don’t sit there and tell me that human brains can’t be wrong about shit. If you can be wrong about something, we can take a picture out of space and prove wrong, then my God, I bet you can be wrong about how hard it’s going to be to do something that feels like it’s not good enough. What the hell we doing? Taking nails and driving ’em up our arms. When I hear that, when I’m like, oh, it’s going to be so hard. This is what I usually tell myself. I don’t know. Maybe it won’t be as hard as I think. Maybe it’ll feel hard at first and then it’ll get better.

And then this is the other thing you can always ask yourself. I wonder why is it going to be hard for me? Most of the time it’s going to be because the only thing, it’s not going to be good enough. I think it won’t work. Those are the little thoughts. I think it won’t work really where the fuck’s your crystal ball. Invite me over for the lottery. I want to pick out my numbers tomorrow because if you so good about telling the future, I got a few questions and I need you to come to Nashville, set my ass down and give me wisdom to the stock market.

You are not good at knowing if something’s going to work or not. You know what you’re real good at? Not trying and convincing yourself. See, I knew it wouldn’t work if you already do inject shit and trying shit. How the fuck do you know? Those are the little thoughts that we have to keep catching. We have to keep challenging over and over and over again because if you don’t, you just feel bad. Y’all act like feeling bad. It’s going to be, what if I try it and I failed? Then I’m going to beat myself up. I invite you to try something just to see if you fail. Number one, we got to see if you’re even going to fail. You might be trying to preserve a beat down that may never come because you don’t fucking know if it’s going to work or not. There’s one thing that you ain’t even considered.

Here’s the second thing you ain’t considered. Try some shit. Mess up and learn how to quit beating yourself up. Listen for those thoughts and remind yourself the people that lose weight learn how to quit beating themselves up over mistakes. Notice I didn’t say people who lose weight never make mistakes. They put themselves in what’s called harm’s way. They’re purposely trying things when they’re nervous, doubting, worried it won’t work to see they’re purposely doing things to trigger their brain to be a complete asshole because they’re tired of being an asshole to themselves. And the only way to stop being an asshole to yourself is to put yourself in situations where your brain starts doing it so that you can tell yourself, look, we’re cutting it off. I’m not going to talk to myself this way. I’m just going to keep trying and every time this asshole stuff comes up, I’m going to tell myself, Nope, we’re not going to think that.

Not in this moment. And you do that over and over and over again. And then guess what happens? The asshole starts going away. But you know how the asshole never goes away getting tucked in the back. So I want y’all to imagine this. You were at the sporting event of your life for you, okay? You’re on the field and you’re playing the game of life and you got a spectator who’s chowing down popcorn telling you all the ways you fucked up. And for some reason y’all think like, okay, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll move that spectator from the front row to the 20th row that’ll do it except it. You can still hear it. You don’t hear it as much. You’re trying to ignore it. But in clutch moments, asshole is speaking up. Asshole had got a megaphone, assholes talking loud.

Do you know how do you get rid of the asshole? You keep playing the game, making mistakes, scoring whatever it is that you do that turns up your asshole and you call security every time they start. Now, this asshole’s going to sneak back into the stadium over and over again, but guess what he’s got to do? He’s got to change his seats. He’s got to be more clever. He’s going to have to hide. He’s only going to be able to speak up in certain situ. Now he’s like, well, maybe I’m not going to scream at every mistake. I’m going to scream at only the ones where I’ve got an excellent comeback where I can get on the jumbo screen of her life. And every time you’re like, call security assholes, back, assholes back, and eventually they get tired of coming in or eventually you’ve escorted ’em out so much and locked so many doors they can’t get back in. That’s what hearing or thinking does. But for some reason, y’all just want to say like, well, look asshole. I realize you don’t like anything about me and you want to ruin my day all the time. I’m going to keep playing the game of life and I’m just going to move you 20 seats back. And then you know what? Maybe I should just pull. Maybe I should bench myself. That’ll keep the asshole quiet. But then you get to just watch your life pass by. You miss out on all of it.

And even when you’re watching, let me just tell you, when you bench yourself and you think you’re preventing all of this, guess what? That asshole’s not watching the rest of your life. They’re still yelling at you while you’re on the bench. I knew you couldn’t do this one of these days. You should try getting your shit together. You’re just wasting your life. The tone changes. You’re not saving yourself anything. You got to listen to this stuff. The only way is to stop trying to protect your feelings because I guarantee all of you, if you have an inner critic, you cannot eat enough food to shut ’em down. They’re either beating you up over failing, or they’re beating you up over not trying at all. So if we are going to get a beat down in the time being, let’s get a beat down. We’re trying so hard, and then let’s work on changing that conversation while we keep trying so hard. You can’t get anywhere just sitting around doing nothing hoping for the best. All right, here’s some of the other thoughts. I’m just going to have to be uncomfortable. Really? Why do you have to be? I always love it when that thought comes up. It’s like that is not true. This could be a little uncomfortable. It could not be as uncomfortable as I think it could only be uncomfortable for the first few times I try it and then I like to ask myself, what’s going to make it so uncomfortable?

Take that to ask coaches. Here’s why I think this is going to be so uncomfortable for me. And don’t forget, uncomfortable is a feeling that is not caused by something that you do. It’s caused by, I’m going to do this thing. These thoughts are going to make me uncomfortable while I do it. So we want to make sure that we’re examining all of those things because sometimes you’ll find, oh, maybe I could start this a little easier. Maybe I don’t have to do all of it. Maybe the reason why it’s going to be uncomfortable is my judgment around it. We want to find that stuff so we can find little ways to just change the thought. I just lack control. Why? Look for those thoughts. My 1% level up on this one on I just lack control is like in everything, where do I have control in life?

Why in those areas, what is it that I’m telling myself about those areas that I refuse to tell myself the same when it comes to food? Because if you can control yelling at people, throat punching people, if you can control a lot of those things, that means you already have the skill to control yourself. But when you think you lack control with food, it will always be harder. We don’t want to jump to, I have total control. You might want to ask yourself, what could I do with these foods to set me up to have more control than I currently do?

That would be a good question. And then the last one is, it’s not easy for me. Why is that a problem? Everything new is always going to not be easy for anyone. So why is that a problem? It’s not easy for me is code for. It’s not easy for me because I think I am, and you have to figure that part out. So we want to be figuring out these little things that we think so we can put little twists on them, make little improvements on them, challenge them. And here’s a pro tip. You know how y’all just love to doubt things are going to work, doubt that you can do things.

What if you started applying the same exact amount of energy that you go into doubting that things won’t work for you into doubting the sentences that you think about you? What if half the shit you think about you is wrong? And I’m talking the negative shit. For some of you, you want to be thinking about that. Have I even ever doubted some of the opinions I have about myself? Have I ever even doubted some of the opinions that I keep carrying around about food, my worth, my past? So many of you think that your past is such an indicator of failure in the future. Have you ever tried to cast doubt on that?

Challenge yourself to go a few days thinking, I doubt my past has anything to do with what I eat today rather than this is just going to be like every other day, and y’all will say that it’s the only truth there is, and yet it is also just as true that what happened in the past doesn’t make you eat things today. You might have similar thinking. You might feel similarly, but that doesn’t mean it has to have the same outcome. That’s just a decision to not do it like you did last time. That’s just a decision not to believe some of the shit you’re thinking. That’s it.

Then we already talked about some of the ways to catch your automatic thinking. Number one is spend some time in silence. Number two is to journal. Number three is talk out loud to your accountability groups. What’s going on for you? That’s called oral journaling. Most of you think like I’m a shitty journaler, and then yet y’all can have 30 minute text threads working with your accountability group or partner bitching about your life. That bitch session about your life is also called journaling. All your thoughts are right there. If you think you don’t know how to journal, you’re probably wrong. Get out a piece of paper, pretend it’s your favorite partner in crime when it comes to complaining, complain in your journal, blame in your journal bitch and moan bellyache.

Get riled up in your journal. That is a journaling session that will show you what you are thinking. So many of you think you can’t do it, and it’s like I just go blank. It’s like, all right, then talk out loud. Find an accountability partner and y’all use the Marco Polo app and say, here’s my daily journal for the day. That’s why every day I walk with Jane, I don’t hand write everyday journaling anymore. The only time I ever do that is when I’m working through, A lot of times it’s ideas and solutions. I’ll write about a problem I’m having where I need to come up with new ways to try and new things, and so I’ll write

A little bit about the problem as it is, and then I’ll write about problems or solutions for it. But when I talk to Jane every day, I’m just orally journaling. I’m just going through my day. I’m complaining. I’m doing all things, and as I’m doing it, I’m listening and I’m like, yeah, I see where I’m thinking this. I know it’s not helpful. A lot of times I don’t work through anything. I just say, I’m just going to pay attention today for when I’m thinking this and remind myself it’s okay. Just keep going. Usually that is enough. And then whatever it is that I was all worked up about, because I end up having a productive day anyway, I get shit done anyway, guess what? That problem kind of just goes away.

Some stuff never even has to be truly resolved. You just need to feel it for a little bit and move on. And then to feel better, you have to be willing to look at any thought that’s unhelpful or makes you doubt yourself. So that’s what I want to finish with. Understanding what you’re thinking about isn’t bad, isn’t shameful, isn’t weird. There is nothing any of you think, I promise you, there’s nothing any of you think that the rest of us or some of us haven’t thought to. I’ve never literally had anybody after all these years of coaching come on a call and say something that I’m like, I’m shocked. I’ve never heard anybody say this. I have coached women that want to cheat on their partners. I have coached women who are at their wits end and wish they hadn’t had their children.

I have coached women who are wanting to just leave their life. I have coached all of it. So if you are thinking, well, I eat in secret, well, welcome to the other 5,000 of us, 50% of us that eat in secret in this group. If you think you’re the only binge eater, welcome to the over 2000 of us in this group who do the same. That special not in the way you think you are. Y’all think y’all are special in a bad way. You know what? You are. You’re special in a good way. You’re special because you’re here. You’re special because you’re working on you while also working on your relationship with food and your weight. Not everybody chooses this path. Plenty of people quit all the time. They get tired of trying to do the work of feeling better. That is literally what people do. It’s too hard to try to feel better. So I’m just going to go back to feeling nothing, feeling bad, being in that truth. I don’t want that for any of you. Not a damn one of you. All right, y’all have a good week. Bye y’all.