Have you done all the things to “get ready” to lose weight? Like:

• Google all the diets
• Listen to podcasts
• Follow fitness influencers

And now you’re waiting for Tinker Bell to sprinkle you with motivation dust to get started.

Let me hit you with some truth: that bitch ain’t comin’.

That’s not how weightloss works. You don’t magically get motivated and then lose weight.

For how it really works, listen to today’s episode — The Truth About Weightloss and Motivation. I’m sharing the very first step in lasting weightloss.

For YEARS I sat around waiting for motivation…until I finally tried something different. Today, you’ll hear what my first steps looked like.

They weren’t pretty. But guess what? They worked.

You don’t have to overhaul your life to lose weight. But you do have to start. Listen in today for your first step.

Hello everyone. Welcome back. So today we’re going to talk about a question I get all the time and that is how do I get motivated to lose weight? So you can plug that into anything. How do I get motivated to get up in the mornings? How do I get motivated to make my plan? If you’re one of my members, how do I get motivated to stop it enough? We ask that question around tons of things and very often we are waiting our entire life to feel motivated before we do things. So I really want to break motivation down today because it’s really important that you understand how it works because a lot of you are waiting to feel motivated when it’s in the middle of your weight loss journey. It’s not the first thing. So if you even just think about if we were just going to make it clear, what are the steps to losing weight outside of the eating and the four basics and all the shit I teach you in the podcast, if we were taking a big view and we were scanning out, we would realize that motivation happens later in the process.

So the first thing I want you to do is I want you to think about what do you think about when it comes to motivation? A lot of us think, well, I feel good and I want to, and I’m excited about it. We have this euphoric idea about what motivation is and the problem with saying in your head, I need to feel motivated before I lose weight, is if you have to wait for you to be in a euphoric state, it’s probably never coming. It’s probably why you stay stuck thinking about losing weight but feeling like you’re frozen and can’t do anything about it. You may be this person, girl, I have thousands of healthy pens on my Pinterest board. I have got blog articles. I follow all kinds of diets. I’m constantly looking up diets on the Googles. I’m checking out programs. I’m listening to your podcast and everything sounds so simple, but I don’t do anything about it.

If that’s you, it is probably because you’re very confused about what it’s going to take to start. So let’s break it down. You cannot wait on motivation. It is not coming. Motivation is one of those things that gets generated after you’ve done scary things, after you’ve done things that you didn’t think would work after you’ve done things that you didn’t think was good enough. Once you do enough of those and you prove yourself wrong or you see things being easier than you thought, working better than you thought, then you read a result and guess what happens? Your brain starts changing. It’s like, this isn’t so bad. Maybe I can do more. That’s when motivation starts happening. So I want everybody to be really clear. We do not get motivated and then we can start doing all these wonderful things Corinne tells us to fucking do.

What we do is we listen for all these wonderful things Corinne tells us to fucking do. We do them even when we’re scared, even when we think they’re not good enough, even when we’re worried they won’t work, even if we have fantastical ideas about how awful it’s going to be or we catastrophize all these doom and gloom scenarios. My favorite is when someone’s going to stop enough at dinner and their brain is like, well, don’t do that. You going to go to bed starving tonight, my ass? You’ll go to bed starving. If you’re eating dinner at six or seven, tell me by 10 you are on starvation level and going to be needing to go to the hospital for A TPN. That is some bullshit that we have to call out in our brain, but that’s the problem. We aren’t calling this stuff out. We are too busy waiting to feel motivated.

We too busy waiting to feel good, safe, all these other things. Here’s how you’re going to lose weight. You got to figure out all the things that you scared about and you worried about and you sit there and imagine is the worst case scenario about you got to find all that and then we have to debunk that shit and we have to use what I call as the actual first step in weight loss. Take a wild guess. It’s courage motherfuckers. We have to have courage, and I’m going to tell you right now, back in the day, I mean, I’m mean back in the day sometimes I forget everybody. I think everybody forgets how long ago it was that I actually lost my weight and I didn’t have the advantages y’all have today. Wasn’t nobody sitting there yelling at me, entertaining me, giving me simple steps, motivating me.

I didn’t have nobody. I didn’t have a podcast. I didn’t have shit. This is 2005. I was lucky if I could go on YouTube and find a workout much less figure out all this. I don’t even think YouTube was around in 2005. Now that I think about it, I wasn’t even texting in 2005 if that says any fucking thing about how long ago it was. So back in the day when it was time for me to start, I realized, man, I can’t wait to be motivated. I was miserable. I was all the things. I had to sit there and use courage. The first day that I went for a walk, I remember rolling up to the Y and sitting in my car full of shame. I mean, my face was hot. I was wearing my husband’s clothes because given, well, I had my own yoga pants on from the tarjay, but I always wore his shirts and his polos because I was like at my size, I shouldn’t be wasting money on clothes.

They’re not going to look good on me anyway, so I might as well wear his. And so I dumped. I just dressed dumpy and frumpy all the time. I did not treat myself well, and so I remember sitting there worried about what everybody was going to think, worried if I was going to be able to even walk because I was so out of shape at that point. Everything kicked my ass and made me hurt, but I went in anyway. I remember sitting there thinking, you’re already here. Go in and just see what happens. It took courage. There was not one part of me that believed I could lose weight. There was not one part of me that was excited to walk into that gym. I was not proud of myself. I was not happy to be there. There was none of that. It was terrifying.

It was scary, and I was sitting there telling myself, this isn’t going to be good enough. I was all of those things, but here’s the difference. At some level, instead of trying to be motivated and waiting for this golden happy moment, I just decided we have to try. There was this little bit of space in me that loved me just enough to say, let’s just go anyway, and I think that’s what a lot of you need to do. So the very first thing we have to do if we are going to ever be motivated is we do have to elicit some courage. We have to have the courage to challenge how we think about things. We have to have the courage to do things we think won’t work. We have to have the courage to do something When our brain is screaming, this will never be good enough.

This is for sure not going to be good enough. It will not work for you. Because one of the things that I really believe is that our brain is just wrong about things so many times, and I want you to, I actually did this exercise the other day inside my membership. Every Wednesday they get a really good solid hour of q and a and motivation from me, and we were talking about all kinds of stuff, and one of the things that I said is, I want all of you to sit and I want you to just ask yourself when you are at your scaredest, when you are at your most worried, when you think something’s not good enough,

I want you to ask yourself, is that even true? How many times in my life have I felt this way and been wrong? Because a lot of us don’t realize how wrong we are most of the time. So let me just tell you a little bit about how your brain works. Your brain, 95% of the time is operating what’s called it’s habit Center. The Habit Center is supposed to just do the shit. It’s always done over and over and over again. The Habit Center is responsible for making sure you stay alive, that nothing bad happens to you. It is very, very wired to take something new and to punch holes in it as much as it possibly can. It will worry about it, it will challenge it, it will think it’s not good enough. Your brain is literally thinking anything new is life-threatening and it’s trying to figure out how it can tap into some kind of fear in you to get you to not do it.

That is just how the brain is wired. Now, it’s very handy in a lot of situations. Let’s say that you are at the grocery store and someone pisses you off. Let’s say grandpa is in front of you. You’re in a hurry, and he has decided to go to the 10 items or less lane with 20 and paying pennies. In your mind, you’re sitting there like, oh my God, I’m going to be so late. I’m going to be all these other things. I should push grandpa down and make my way through the line. So your brain is wrong in that situation. It thinks all these crazy things like let’s throw punch grandpa. Let’s yell at grandpa. Let’s push grandpa down. Let’s cause a scene. Your brain might think all kinds of crazy stuff like that, but you don’t act on it because in that situation, it’s like your brain is actually offering up shitty ass solutions like that and you’re just like, oh, that’s a no. Oh, that’s a no for this reason. The same thing happens when something bad happens. I’m going to tell you, when my son was diagnosed with autism back in 2 0 7, if you read my journals from 2007 to about 2010, I worried about everything with my child. In my mind, he was never going to be able to speak. He was never going to be able to drive. He would live with us for the rest of his life. My brain went wild on that with worry and worst case scenarios.

And throughout his growing up, even though I had no clue how things would turn out, I did not know Dick about what kind of adult he would be. I had every worst case scenario run through my head. I also said, we could be wrong about this, so we should probably get him all the help that we can just in case we are, and I’m going to promise you all of my fears, doubts and worries felt a hundred percent true. There were people in powerful positions like therapists, doctors and stuff telling me that all of it was true that I needed to be on guard. I’m just so glad that in the face of all that, I didn’t just go with my brain thinking, oh God, we have no hope. And it went with, I’m not giving up on my baby. I was not motivated one ounce.

I had every fear, doubt and worry, but I decided that my brain had to be wrong about this. Now, I didn’t know what Logan’s outcomes would be. Just like you’re not going to know what your weight loss outcomes are going to be, but I can guarantee you that when you are trying and when you are doing and you’re taking action, you set yourself up for better outcomes. But when all you do is let your brain run wild with this won’t be good enough, this won’t work for me. I’m scared of this because, and you don’t do anything about it, your outcomes are set in stone. You are going to get exactly what you’re thinking about. You just owe it to yourself to take action in the face of fears, doubts, and uncertainties. That’s why you’re going to need courage, and then you’re going to need to challenge.

You have to listen to all of those things. Now, this is what we do inside the No BS membership. Like when you join my weight loss program, you are not just fucking getting like, well, here’s how you lose weight. Good luck with you. Let us cheer lead you. We’re cheerleaders. But at the end of the day, we help you learn how to look into why am I not doing, what am I so afraid of? What is going on in my head that keeps stopping me? Because then me and my coaches can one by one take those things and we teach you how to overcome them. We teach you how to summon the courage. We teach you how to give yourself at least enough space between thinking this won’t work, to thinking, I know what won’t work sitting here doing nothing. We are masters at helping you get some space in your head to go from feeling like you’re stuck and paralyzed, that you can’t do anything to feeling like you can start things in a safe, easy, doable way.

So motivation is going to take first some courage. You’re going to have to all of the assumptions, and then you have to get into action. You have to decide that you want to do things that you are afraid of. Now, I will tell you, it’s a lot easier to do those things when you know exactly what you’re afraid of and someone’s helped you challenge them. But if for some reason you want to try it on your own, here’s a quick and easy tip. Every time you’re afraid of something, just tell yourself, I’m going to do it and see if whatever it is I’m afraid of actually comes true. At least give yourself the gift of knowing. Are you in fantasy land in your head or not? So we are going to take action even if you’re not motivated, even if you’re scared, even if you’re unsure and doubting, try to take action.

One of my coaches, coach Betsy, she’s been with me forever. She was actually the first full-time coach I ever hired for my program, and she had been a client of mine for years, lost her weight. She specializes in binge eating and stuff. She has a motto when I doubt I do it when I doubt I do it. And so I want you to use Coach Betsy’s motivation. She’s never excited when she’s doubting and doing it, but she’s focused. She has said it enough to know like, okay, when my doubts and stuff come up, that is now the signal to go. It’s not the signal to fall back. So when you do that and you take action and you start seeing yourself like get little wins, things aren’t as bad as you thought and stuff, it’s a lot easier for motivation to kick in. Now, a lot of people will ask me about, well, what about those first steps?

This is one of the things that we just finished working on inside my Nobis membership. So if you’re one of our members, one of the things that happens is you join our program and for the first 30 days, you are in an intimate small group. We want you over there really focused on our nobis weight loss course. It’s just a few modules that teach you the basics of not just how to eat, but also the basics of understanding what are those things that get in the way, and then we help you knock them out one by one and then once you graduate from that program, because it only takes about 30 days to take the whole course, and that’s if you’re only watching a five minute or less video every two to three days. Because what I really want for everyone who comes in is I don’t want people going through everything fast.

I want them going through it, listening to one thing, taking one little small thing that I tell you to do, and then I want you to try it for a couple days. And then I want you talking to us because we put you in a Facebook group and we have a feature called Ask Coaches, where you go and you try something and then you tell us here’s what worked. And here’s where I struggled because one of the biggest differences in our program than any other program out there is I already know you’re going to struggle. Most diets will never tell you that you’re going to struggle, but I want you to think about every diet you’ve ever done. If you’re listening to this podcast, it is because you have done diets and when you were struggling, they just told you to stick to the plan.

They didn’t help you figure out why you were struggling because if you’re ever going to lose weight and keep it off throughout the process of weight loss, you’ve got to figure out all these places you’ve struggled in the past and come up with a way to be like, oh, okay, that diet never addressed this. Now I have to address this. So once you get out of that 30 day group, you’re really ready to start taking our specialty courses and each one of our specialty courses, what they do is they really dial in on these smaller problems. One we just wrapped up that you would have access to when you join after your first 30 days is what we call the 1% level Up. It’s an entire month where we spent talking about all the different ways that we level up and what gets in the way.

So a 1% level up, I’ve got podcasts on, it’s real simple. You start small and most people don’t want to start small because they think it won’t be good enough. So we spent an entire month talking about what is good enough, how to redefine good enough, how good enough, not good enough steps actually get you into action, which build into more than good enough later. And so one of the things that we talked about is when you are struggling with motivation and you are using courage, the easiest way to start is to not sit there and scare yourself so bad that you have to do all the things it is to find some small things that you can start with. So inside that program, I think we gave everyone either 50 or a hundred small starter steps and versions of level ups so that people could pick something that actually felt doable for them.

And you just pick one at a time. And then what happens is a snowball effect ends up overcoming you After a while, you’ve made so many small things that they really do compound and add up into you looking around going, oh my God, I’m just losing weight. I like what I’m doing. This isn’t that hard. I’ve just stacked so many little things that now I’m succeeding at a fast pace and I’m liking it. So for some of y’all, if you’re listening to this podcast, you might just need to get your ass outside for five minutes a day and walk. That is one of the things Quinn’s working on right now. I am a sedentary bitch. Unfortunately, I work hard. I’m sitting on my ass right now making this podcast. So much of my work has to do with being in meetings, teaching classes, sitting and designing things, and I just can’t be walking around a lot.

So I’ve made a point of getting five to 10 minute walks in several times during the day, even if I just walk around my house, put away a few things, but just breaking things up because I know for me, I want to be a lifelong maintainer, and the only way I’m going to be able to keep my weight after all these years is I have to always be looking for ways that I can level up. I have to notice things that aren’t going to help me live a long life and make those changes. So if for you, it could be, can you just start walking five minutes a day so you can start identifying as someone who gets off their ass instead of someone who sits there wishing they could get off their ass, it might be drinking more water. If you’re not drinking water, hardly at all, just adding one eight ounce glass a day for the next week is amazing.

You will get some benefit from that. And it’s a start. We have to quit telling ourselves things aren’t good enough, and we have to start saying, no. This is called a start to the person I want to be. So for a lot of you pick up those small actions, and from there, I think what you’ll notice is you’ll feel just a little bit better. You’ll start inching your way to feeling more motivated, to feeling better. You’re actually doing something for yourself because the more you can give yourself little spikes of motivation and feel good, you’re going to notice you’re going to want to do maybe try this thing. Maybe I’ll try that because you’ve already overcome the hump of telling yourself, oh, that won’t work. If you start feeling a little better, your brain starts being like, oh, that’s a pretty good thing. That’s a good hit.

What else could we do? We want to give our brain the opportunity to what it sees right now. So many of you, it’s almost like you’re fucking determined to only give your brain a bunch of shit to look around and be like, I don’t like what I’m seeing. So let me tell you all about your failings. We have to stop that. That’s in you to stop that. So stop wasting your time thinking, I just need to get motivated. Why am I not motivated? I need to wait until I’m motivated know. You the fuck don’t. Because you’re never going to just get motivated. That does not happen. Motivation doesn’t come raining out of the sky. There’s no lucky charms or fairytale dust coming. You have to earn motivation, which means the first thing you have to do is use your courage, challenge what you’re currently thinking, and then take action in small doable ways so that you get to feel or at least give yourself the gift of some motivation. So I hope this was helpful and I would love for you to join us inside the No BS Weight Loss program. If you like this kind of talk, if you’re like, oh my God, this is probably the shit that’s been missing in all my diets, you need to join us right now. No more waiting. No more waiting to feel good, perfect times, and to be motivated. Just make now the best time for you to get started, no matter what’s happening. Talk to y’all next week.