I lost 100 pounds 16 years ago, but what if I had to start all over?

Today, I'm giving you "The Exact Steps To Lose the First 30 Pounds (I would do these if I had to start over)" [LINK].

And I think you'll be surprised how much of it has NOTHING to do with food.

Inside the episode, I break it down into 3 phases, and each one might surprise you:

• First 10 pounds: I wouldn't change anything about what I was eating. I'd focus on 4 simple things instead
• Second 10 pounds: I'd track a few hidden eating patterns (once you see them, you'll never look at food the same way)
• Final 10 pounds: Only NOW would I pay attention to food. I wouldn't cut anything out, but maybe make some simple swaps.

Want to know exactly what I'd do to lose 30 pounds? Listen now.

Most of us fail diets because we try to make a million changes on day one. I did that for YEARS.

What finally worked was taking baby steps that felt doable - even when my brain screamed, "that's not enough!"

The scale can go down while your quality of life goes up. It's not just possible - it's the only way to lose weight and keep it off.

Welcome back everybody. So today I want to tell you how I would lose my first 30 pounds or spend my first three months losing weight if Corinne had to do it all over again. I just thought this would be a fun podcast for y'all and super helpful. So I lost a hundred pounds, but I just thought that today I would give you the outline of what I do if I were you based on not only that I lost a hundred pounds and that I've been keeping it off for over 15 years, but I have also helped thousands of women lose weight and over a million women in my free course, which is pretty amazing. And I think the podcast has been downloaded at the last time I checked, which was months and months and months ago, 55 million times. So I hope that for all of you, whether you are a member or you are a listener, you're new to me or you're old to me, I just hope that you enjoy this podcast and that it's helpful. 

So let's start with so much of losing weight is about making what we call new but doable habits that you can use for a lifetime. And I know that's why I was able to lose weight and keep it off. So by the time I lost my weight, my life was easy. Not because I had an easy life, but because I had overcome so much shit that where I could finally see that I had created an easy food lifestyle. So how I ate and moved, it felt natural. I wasn't making myself do shit every single day. I was just kind of doing it. I wasn't counting down the days until my diet was over. I had done so many times in the past when I was losing my weight. I really liked the shit I was doing. And when I got to for the first time ever, a maintenance phase, when that weight loss part was over, I was shocked as hell because I was like, there's just no end date with this. 

This is how I want to live. I finally have done this in a way where I'm like, this is who I am. I'm not finishing a diet. And I'll tell you, it felt weird as fuck because for the first time, what I was going to do to keep the weight off was just how I was living my life. I'd never done that in the past. All my previous diets, I didn't feel like I was just, it didn't feel like it was how I was going to live. It felt like a bandaid, it felt like a fix until I lost weight and it felt like something that honestly, I can remember so many diets thinking I can't wait for this part to be over so I can have some fun so I can eat things I like. 

So let me break down the three phases. Number one, for your first 10 pounds, I would up my walking first. That is exactly what I did when I first started. I was not moving much at all during the day when I weighed 250. So one of the things I did was I made sure that I walked more through my day and that was going to be really important for me. I got up during the day and I just walked around the house some. That was one of the very early things that I don't talk about a lot, but I remember when Logan was little, y'all, he hated going places. It was really hard for us to go anywhere, driving in a car overstimulated him, so he screamed bloody murder from the moment he got into the car seat. I don't know if he was just sent, y'all know Logan had or has autism, but when he was a baby before we even knew it, driving was a miserable feat. 

So we didn't go anywhere. And even if I could get past him screaming bloody murder on the way someplace, the next problem I ran into is he refused to be in a stroller. And at two 50 I just couldn't carry him around. I literally was so out of shape at two 50 it was hard for me to carry him, so we stayed home. So one of the first agreements I made with myself was like, look, if I can't take him out in the stroller and we can't go places, the very least that I could do is walk around our 1200 square foot apartment during the day. I just got up more than I normally would because I had to make that shit work. And then also I joined the Y. And once Chris got home at night because I didn't want to drive Logan there, there was no way I tried twice. 

He would cry all the way there and then once we would get there, he would not stop crying in the nursery and I just couldn't do that to him. I didn't know what all was going on, but my mommy in me felt like ass doing that. And I knew that if I was going to form a habit of going to the gym, there was no way that I could attach it to making my baby suffer and expect me to be motivated or willing to go every day. So I said, fuck that, and decided now I got to ask Chris when he gets home at night, can I go to the Y and walk? Now? I felt like I asked about that too because Chris worked all day long and then I was going to be handing him the baby the second he got home, but he was very willing. 

I had to just decide, this is not going to be easy, but I'm going to have to make some kind of agreement with myself about what am I willing to tolerate. And I was very willing to feel a little guilty about giving Chris the baby even though he didn't complain at all so that I could start that walk-in. So that's what I did, but my walks, they weren't just to lose weight for me. I knew that I was kind of in an emotional crisis and that's why I was eating so much and my weight was spiraling out of control. I just knew it was important that a few minutes each day that there was something just for me that was all about me and that was another thing I think you need for your first 10 pounds. You've got to start signaling to yourself in small ways that you matter. 

Now the other things I would make sure that you do for the first 10 pounds, because if you don't get these things right, you'll have a really hard time losing anything beyond 20 pounds ounce and that's your sleep and water. I know you're thinking this is some bullshit. I need to stop eating the bad foods. Corrine, what about creamer in my coffee, Corrine and should I be eating bread or not? Corinne, y'all. That's the reasons why you ain't losing weight because you're focused on bullshit At first. We got to get the foundation set and part of that is walk around more versus sitting on your ass and then you got to get hydrated so that your body isn't trying to get you to eat to get hydrated. And then also you got to get your sleep because your sleep regulates a fuck ton of shit in your body. 

It helps reduce cravings. It also helps you burn fat at night, and you do not want these things like sleep and water out of whack while you're radically stressing your body with calorie restriction and removing your vital food groups. And the last thing I would do if I was you on the first 10 pounds is get into the habit of eating regularly. No more skipping breakfast or lunch. No more eating light to save up for nights. You've got to feed your fucking body. When you starve it, you stress it simultaneously. And most of y'all are already stressed enough in life, that first 10 pounds, it has got to be all about giving your body more of what it actually needs, not giving it those things while also cutting tons of shit out and leaving yourself in such a negative deficit. That is why so many of you tell me I start off good, but I flame out fast. 

It's because you're not giving your body what it needs. You're just subtracting. It's like we're already subtracting in life with being too busy, being worn out, not sleeping enough, not drinking enough water, not eating enough, and then we want to take more away and we wonder why our bodies freak out overreact and send us straight to McDonald's. Okay, that's all I'd focus on for the first 10 pounds. I would just make sure to get yourself fucking settled to where you feel like I take care of me. Here's how I take care of me. Now, the next 10 pounds, I think you should focus on noticing your hunger and enoughness. Now, I talk a lot about that in the podcast. There's a million episodes on it and a lot of people start here, but I would only start here if you're already taking immaculate good care of yourself when it comes to basic movement, hydration and sleep. 

So we're going to track how often you eat when you're not hungry outside of your breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Because remember, I want you on those regular meals. I want you getting regularly fed, but then I want you tracking, well, how much eating do I do outside of my regular meals when I'm just not hungry? I want you looking for nibbles bites, tastes or snacks when you're bored or you're just needing energy. And then I want you to do the same thing with eating enough. I want you to track how often you eat. Either too full, I'm full, I know this is like full or I'm eating past full, and I want you to track how often you keep eating because maybe you don't want the meal to end or because the food tastes so good. This 10 pounds is about figuring out why am I eating outside of what my body needs? 

Because if I'm eating outside of what my body needs, there's only three types of eating. It could be one is just habit. And once I'm looking for how I'm eating, I'll notice habits outside of that. The second is mindless. I'm just grabbing things and because I've not been paying attention, I'm now going to stop doing that. And the third is the emotional eating. Those are the only three reasons why we ever, ever, ever eat outside of our body's physical needs. So we've got to figure that out. And then once you know all that stuff, once you've tracked and you really start getting a good grip on your patterns, it's easy to fix what's really going on. And this means you don't have to waste time on diets that aren't fixing the real shit that's standing between you and weight loss. Now, if you're one of my nost women listening to this, you know exactly what to do. 

If you heard this part, I want you to take the things that you find out while you're tracking and you go straight to ask coaches. Tell the coaches in the member portal what you found. These are the eats I'm having outside and you have your habit tracker inside your food planner and stuff to use, but I want you to take it and you tell 'em what you find. They'll ask you some questions and then we will give you the next steps to making sure that all of those reasons and all of those things are starting to get solved. Then it's easy to wait for hunger and to stop at enough when you know your body is now getting what it needs both mentally, physically, and emotionally. Now for that last 10 pounds, this is when you look at what you're eating and how it's feeling in your body. 

You probably like the taste of a lot of what you eat, but I want you to think about this. When is the last time you evaluated food beyond just how it tastes and what you like? I want you to start paying attention to how you feel during and after you eat. If the food is just not giving you energy, if you notice your energy is crashing or maybe you're getting buttermilk ass, which just is the southern way of saying diarrhea, then the whole picture of that food, you get a chance to decide if taste alone is worth the negative side effects that come along with those foods. It might at times. There are certain things I eat every now and then that I know are going to rip my tummy apart, but every now and then I just want them and I plan for them and I have them. 

And other times you might choose different. When you start paying attention, you start getting choice and most women feel like losing weight means that their choices are limited. They start feeling deprived, they start feeling like they have to do things and they should and shouldn't do things, and it feels so restrictive. I want you to feel like you have a lot of choices. I want you to feel like you have freedom. I want you to feel like you are in control. And the other thing that I would do in this stage, in that last 30 pounds is I'd start making a couple of small changes to what you eat that feels reasonable based on what you've been finding out. So start noticing the stuff that you eat regularly that you might want to think. I might want to healthify this just a little bit. You don't have to do anything drastic. 

You don't have to overhaul your food, but you could do a few things like I did when when I was losing weight, one of the first things that I did with pizza to healthify is we used to always get thick crust, all the meat and cheese, and I looked at my husband one day and I said, what do you think about adding some vegetables to the pizza and switching to thin crust versus thick? He was like, that'd be fine with me. And so we started with that. That's Healthify, and then eventually we got to where we didn't order anymore, but once every few weeks. We weren't ordering it four or five times a night, but we got there slowly. I healthified things. Then I finally, as I worked on my emotions and stuff, I started figuring out maybe I just don't need pizza as often. 

Maybe some nights what I want to have is just a really good salad and maybe a small bag of chips. Healthify is not saying some foods are good and some foods are bad. Healthify is just where we're combining everything because I think a part of a healthy diet, it's to not be obsessive over every little thing. I think a healthy diet also includes pleasure and joy, not just vitamins, minerals and nutrients. So think bigger on this stuff. Another thing that I also used to do just as a quick way to healthify is I used to eat ice cream all the time. Every single night. Part of Healthify is also reducing your portions. So I started with eating ice cream literally out of a carton, and I mean the half gallon carton, not the little tiny Ben and Jerry's. I wish I had been a pint girl, but I was never a pint girl. 

I was a half gallon girl, and I started with putting it in a huge bowl. Then eventually I got it down to a really small bowl, and then eventually I went to vanilla ice cream and I would add some strawberries in there to bulk it up. Then I tried Greek yogurt for the first time. I was like, Hey, this ain't half bad. And it felt like it wasn't ice cream, but it still felt like a treat and it was just a little bit healthier, and I liked the kind of person I was becoming, becoming the kind of person who only ate ice cream when it was really good quality. I wasn't just eating ice cream every night because I was wore out. I was tired or I didn't know how to feel good any other way. I just didn't want to be that person anymore. 

So you can try healthify just a little bit. You just want to try in this phase some simple basic healthify as you become more aware of what you're eating and what it does and doesn't do for you. Now, I know what a lot of you are thinking. That's it. The first 30 pounds, that's all I would do. Yes, that is all I would do. That is all I did. It was a lot of Herculean tiny efforts. I'm going to tell y'all right now, the small efforts are way harder to make than the big ones. For some reason, diets have punished us so much and done so much wackadoo shit that it's usually really easy for us to just turn on punishment, restriction, deprivation, hardcore bullshit stuff we know realistically in our bones we won't do for the rest of our lives. What's hard to do? 

Little stuff you doubt will work to do the little things while you're scared it's not going to be enough. To me, that takes balls. So if you want to sit there and you want it to be hard, then tell yourself the hardest part of weight loss is doing a lot of tiny ballsy ass shit because my brain will bitch and moan harder about that. Most of us are really good about starting and stopping asinine diets, so I promise you the reason I lost weight was because I kept things simple while fixing all the reasons I was using food to get through the days. It's not that hard to fix when you understand shit that's getting in your way, and that's why I want to tell you I work harder with my women inside an OBS on fixing what's driving their eating more than I'll ever work on whether or not they should have creamer in their coffee. 

Does a crystal light count? Shit like that. So many of y'all are so jacked up on whether or not you can have a Diet Coke or not and stuff, and I'm like, you are missing the plot. I promise you, those are not the reasons why you're struggling to lose weight. You're struggling to lose weight because you're eating your face off at night. You can't say no to things. You lose control of food because you're so afraid of X, Y, Z, or you're losing control of your eating at night because all day long you're wore the fuck out. You don't have boundaries and you don't know how to do that stuff. Let's actually fix the real shit so that you can lose weight. The scale can go down while your quality of life is rising with it. Alright? That's what I would work on. I hope this was helpful. 

The last thing I ever want is for another woman to try to lose weight with some bullshit. If you can't make your life better while you're losing weight, don't start that diet because I want you to wake up one day and I want you to think, wow, I did lose my weight and I'm damn happy to keep doing the shit I'm doing because it actually feels right and it actually feels good. I want you to be in love with the lifestyle you built. I don't want you to just be obsessed with the size of your ass, the size of your jeans and what's on the scale. You can't just be in love with those things and hate everything you have to do to stay there or you won't be able to stay there. We've got to be able to love the life that we create along with it, and I think that's not only how you lose weight, but it's also how you're going to keep it off is when you lose weight the way you will love to live it. All right, share this podcast with someone who's maybe been diet surfing and wanting to lose some weight. I would be thrilled for you to share it. Otherwise, y'all have an amazing week and I'll talk to you soon.