We think dieting is expensive, but no one talks about what it's really costing us to stay where we are.

I remember sitting on the couch one night, thinking about doing yet another diet.

I wasn't scared that I'd fail again.

I was SURE I'd fail again.

What scared me the most was this:

“What if I waste even more money, and nothing changes?”

I remember thinking about that long and hard.

And all of a sudden, a gut-punch of a question popped into my head:

“What does it cost me to stay at 250 pounds?”

Suddenly my mind flooded with shit I wasn’t even considering...

• I couldn't keep up with my son
• I was in pain all the time
• I knew that if my kid ran out into the street, I'd never be able to catch him
• I felt like a horrible mother because I couldn't get my tired ass off the couch to play with him

That’s what I talk about in this week’s podcast: The Cost of Doing Another Diet.

If you’ve been afraid to try again—because of the money, your past, or because you’re sure you’ll screw it up, you need to hear about…

• The money you’re spending on food to feel better, even though it just makes you feel worse
• The emotional suffering that comes with quitting
• The shame and regret that builds every time you say, “I’ll start over Monday” and don’t
• The cost of bigger clothes, bad moods, and hiding from your own life

Just like I needed to hear this stuff…so do you!

Why? Because you deserve a better life. 

But fear convinces you not to go after it.

It convinces you that trying again is worse than what you’re living right now.

But is it?

Maybe, maybe not.

The last thing you want is to fool yourself into a life you don’t want to live.

So listen to today's podcast: The Cost of Doing Another Diet today.

Welcome back everybody. So today we're going to talk about the cost of doing another damn diet. I remember thinking right before I paid another gym membership diet or some kind of program, I remember just sitting there thinking, I hope I don't waste more money. So I want to talk about it today because I think it's a very legit fear for most women. In fact, the average woman, she's going to try to lose weight about 140 times before the age of 40. I mean, let's let that sink in for a second. Most of us are going to attempt to lose weight over 140 times before we even turn 40, and that is a lot of time and a lot of money and just a lot of our self-esteem that is spent trying to lose weight. And I don't say that to validate that you have wasted your money. 

I personally don't think you or I wasted any money ever trying to lose weight, so if you're anything like me, you tried really hard on every diet. I mean, I had a few that my best was about a half a day and sometimes I could go months trying to lose weight and you're probably like I, I remember I really wanted it to work. What you didn't have though was everything you needed to lose weight. I didn't have everything I needed and I didn't know that. I just always thought I was failing. I just always thought something must be wrong with me, and when I decided that I was going to lose weight again, it wasn't that I didn't think anything wasn't wrong with me immediately, but I just remember sitting there thinking about how was I going to do it This time? For the first time in my life, I was really thinking about all the things that have never worked for me in the past, and I don't mean weight watchers or cutting out my carbs or doing back in the day, Atkins or whatever the flavor of the diet was back then. 

I remember sitting and having an honest conversation with myself about what I knew I couldn't afford emotionally. It was one of the first times I think I really didn't think about wasting money on another diet again. I really started thinking about what I couldn't afford emotionally to do. Now for me, when I first started, y'all have to remember I was really overweight from the time of being nine years old. So I had a lifetime of dieting. I had been overweight my entire life. It was something that I had been bullied and suffered through and just had all the trauma about. And when I sat on my couch thinking about how I was going to try again, and that was one of the scariest fucking decisions I was ever making, I remember sitting there thinking, Corinne, one of the reasons why diets never work for you is because you try too hard. 

In the beginning, I would always try to change everything on a dime. In the beginning, I'd sign up for some new program, I'd buy all the boxed food, I would pour a lot of money into it and stuff, and it would require me to go from being someone who ate their face off every day without any kind of regard to suddenly I had to think about everything I had to plan. I had to be someone that could be hungry, like, oh my God, it was just like a 180 on a dime. And I remember sitting there thinking, can't do that. We got to slowly turn this ship. I was like, usually the Titanic, always trying to avoid an iceberg doing a diet. And I was like, the only way this makes sense for me is I'm going to have to slowly change things because I can't afford to freak myself out if I get too strung out, too freaked out, too hungry. 

If I rip away too much stuff in the beginning, I'm very likely to quit on myself. And so it just made sense. This time I'm going to do stuff that I might not feel like is enough, but what's really not good enough is the way I've been doing it. So I say all of that because I want you to understand that most diets that you have done have not been really built for you. They may have been built for a man, they may have been built for someone who doesn't have emotional eating issues and stuff, but they really weren't built for you because if you're anything like me, for you, it is about I do okay until I have a bad day or I do okay, but at night I feel like I just deserve something because I wear myself out all day long. I wear myself out chasing kids, doing for everybody, trying to be the best employee, trying to help people all day long. 

I give give so much and I don't feel like I get anything back and food becomes the way I get that. And so I say all this because when we talk about this, I want you to really, really think about have you been trying to lose weight in a way that is not addressing what really goes on for you? I'm not saying calorie counting doesn't work. I'm not saying if you join a gym that that can't work and stuff, but if at the end of the day, food means more to you than just sustenance, food is how you have fun. It's how you get rewarded. It's how you escape guilt. It's what you do when you're angry instead of yelling at people. It's how you pass the time. It's how you get through the evenings without feeling like a lonely fuck. If food is something more to you, then no diet is ever going to fix it unless they're having those conversations with you. 

And the reason why I need you to hear that is because it's really important because most of you are thinking, I don't want to waste money on another diet. You haven't been failing these diets if they've not been including what you uniquely need. The diets have failed you. It's not that you wasted your money, you spent the money, you were doing what they told you to do, they didn't tell you enough of what to do, they didn't give you the right answers. And so it's not that you wasted money, you got ripped off, you got hosed, and that's very different, and I don't want you making a decision about whether or not you are going to lose weight something you really want. It could be for your health. It could be just vanity. Like when I lost weight, there were so many reasons why I wanted to lose weight. 

At first, I was just fucking miserable. I couldn't keep up with my child. I was in pain. I was scared to death. My kid was going to run out into the street and I wasn't even going to be able to save him. I was feeling like a horrible mother because I couldn't get my ass off the couch because it hurt and I was too tired to play with him. Then once I got going, my why changed. I wanted to be sexy as fuck. I'd never been sexy a day in my life. I was always the fat friend. I wanted to be the girl that people looked at, and then it morphed from wanting to be a hot fucking chick to strongest fuck. When I got about three quarters of the way into my weight loss, I was about 75 pounds down. That's when weights entered my life. 

I didn't even know women could have muscles. I was just like, oh my fucking God, this is amazing. So I want you to hear me because I don't want you making a decision to go after your dreams on some busted ass premise that you've been wasting money and failing diets. If you are an emotional eater, the diet industry as a whole fails you over and over and over again. I always use this example, if I laid out a hundred piece puzzle in front of you and I said, girl, if you put this puzzle together, I'm going to wave a magic wand and every ounce of weight you want to lose comes off tomorrow, I would bet you would say, oh, I can do it. And you wouldn't give up that entire day until that fucking puzzle was put together. Now, if I held back three pieces and said, you got to do it. 

I don't care how bad you wanted to lose the weight, I don't care how long you worked, you could avoid giving up. Guess what? You wouldn't be able to do it because you didn't have everything you needed. It wouldn't matter how bad you wanted it. It wouldn't matter how hard you worked and it wouldn't matter how long you worked at it. So please hear me when I say this. If you are an emotional eater, if you overeat because you're tired, bored, lonely, overwhelmed, anxious, angry, looking to have a good time, don't want to miss out, afraid to waste things, all of those are emotional eating reasons, all of them. And there's even more than that If those are your reasons why you eat and it's hard for you to lose weight because you can only do things when life is going good, but the second life is busy, the second life throws a monkey wrench at you, you can't stick to it. 

That diet is failing you. It is not giving you a real plan. Real life has problems. It has good moments too, but real life has problems. Real life has seasons where you're real busy and has seasons where you're not as busy. You got to pick your next program with eyes wide fucking open. You deserve programs that help you with your emotional eating that work during the hardest times in your life, not just the highlight reels. Okay, so I want all of you to think about this. I want you to think about stopping, being afraid of wasting money because most of us, what we don't realize is that we are wasting our time, our energy and our money now with overeating. So let me explain it to you this way. I used to be worried that I was going to waste money on another diet and then I had to sit and I had to calculate how much money was I spending on food right now. 

That was food that was legit trying to create some peace relief, a break to escape, to feel better for entertainment for all of those reasons. And when I started adding up how many times I would go through the drive-through because I was feeling sorry for myself because I didn't want to have to go home and eat something healthy, I was like, oh, that's costing me money. I think it would be great for you to do an audit of for just this week or next week. I just want to add up the money I'm spending on my feelings. Food feelings, foods are things like that. Ben and Jerry's carton, you put away every single night after the kids go to bed because you don't get me time during the day, and the only way you know how to unwind is to do it with food. That $7 carton of ice cream that costs money, that $7 of ice cream also costs emotions. 

It makes you probably wake up the next day wondering why you can't get your shit together, worrying that your pants ain't going to fit, and for God's sakes, if you got a dairy allergy but you can't give up your ice cream, you probably got buttermilk ass on top. So I want you to think, just take a moment and for the next few weeks, I just want you give it a week and just notice how many times do you stop by a gas station to grab a candy bar because you're overwhelmed and you just need a little pick me up so that you can just keep pushing yourself. How often are you hitting the break room and eating some donuts and shit that's been left by God knows who because you hate your job, but you're too terrified to go look for another one or you hate your job, but you're too terrified to talk to your boss about making things better or you feel so underappreciated in your job and yet you never tell yourself you're doing a good job. All you do is tell yourself how unfair it is that nobody else recognizes your hard work, which leaves you frustrated. And on top of that, because you're not recognizing your hard work, you fear because you're not hearing it. Now, are you pissed that you ain't hearing it, but now you're fearing that it might not be true that you do a good job? 

All of this stuff adds up. So when we think about the cost of overeating, because I want you to think about the cost of overeating, not how much does my next diet cost. I'm so afraid I'm going to waste money on it. I want you to think about what the fuck is the cost I'm paying daily and weekly and monthly and yearly to not work on this emotional eating I got going on on this overeating I got on. For a lot of us, we don't understand how much money we're spending on average. When I ask people to add up and I do this regularly inside my membership, I want 'em to just add up how much money they're spending on the extra food to feel better, to shut down at night, to avoid having difficult conversations to rage eat because they're actually pissed at people, but don't feel comfortable saying anything. Add that shit up. The average woman says that it's costing her over $150 in food in one month, $150 in just a month. Now, there are other costs. We're not just talking about cash money. We are also talking about emotional costs. If you are turning to food every time somebody crosses a boundary with you and you're eating because on the inside you're seething, you feel taken advantage of, you're angry because people should know better, and yet you just keep doing shit. Guess what? You're paying with emotions and when you eat, guess what? 

You don't talk to anybody. You don't figure out how to start voicing your needs in a way that maybe they can get met. You don't learn how to draw lines in the sand of this is what I tolerate and this is what I no longer tolerate in my life. We don't end up becoming courageous and brave, and if you want to be assertive, we don't get better relationships. I have so many women that I end up working with inside our membership who always write into me and they say, I joined an OBS to lose weight. What I didn't realize what also happened is that my relationships would get better. So many of my women don't even realize they're not even asking people in their life anymore to help them. They feel guilty for asking for help or they just think everybody should know this and they forget. Most people don't, and I have found that most women that I work with, we have a lot of people around us who actually love us and give two fucks, and if we ask for help, we get it. 

It's so sad to me that we will say, I don't want to waste money on losing weight when you could be wasting your emotional life, sitting back, eating and not learning how to have valuable conversations that could make your life better. So there's a big emotional cost that comes with sitting back and hanging on to emotional eating. There's the health costs. I have so many women that come into my program that get off all kinds of medications. My mother's a good example. I talk about my mom and how she was able to get off blood pressure medicine. She was able to get off so many meds. My mom was like a walk-in pill box and simply by doing my mama still eats fried chicken a couple times a week. She still eats a lot of her favorite foods. She literally just stopped the overeating. She really started listening to her body, the foods that don't play well with her. 

She just cut them back. She realized she didn't even need to cut them out. She had done so many diets in her lifetime where she had to every time was like cut out her favorite foods and she'd be ass miserable because there were a lot of foods like fried chicken in particular remind her of when she was a child. They remind her of her parents that have now passed for her. She likes to have fried chicken a couple times a week. That is the emotional eating we do want to do. She feels connected, but when she was doing all these diets that said she couldn't have it, guess what my mama would do? Eat fried chicken every damn night. The second she'd break the diet, then she would feel like physical ass and it was killing her health. Now she has such a healthy relationship. 

She's like, you know what? I realize there's other ways to connect to the memory of my parents, but sometimes I do want to have the chicken and now I just know how to work that in a way that my health doesn't suffer. So for a lot of you, you need a program that helps you emotionally so that you also can see your health get better, and then there are other costs. There's just the cost of feeling bad when you are waking up each day beating yourself up because you can't get your shit together because you quit one more time because nothing in your closet fits. You're having to go buy new clothes, all that kind of shit that costs too. And then I think the last piece of the puzzle that I think we forget when we're thinking about what is keeping this overeating and emotional eating in our life, and to me this is the worst of all. So we've got money. We have got all the emotional energy that you're losing out on. We've got the health, you got the price of your clothes and stuff, but the one that breaks my heart, that legit breaks my heart for women, it's missing out on life. 

I remember when Logan was little. I'm so glad that I listened to myself because by the time he was the age of one, and I still have regrets about this to this day, that first year killed me and a big piece of it, I mean there's not all of it was my weight's fault, but a big piece of it was I was so disconnected from my child because I was so overweight that getting up and messing with him hurt. And so I was pulling out of life that first year. I didn't have sex with. My husband was so ashamed of my body. So many of us are not in pictures. We are avoiding going to our kids' events. We are shutting out of life all because of our weight. So I don't want you to ever say, I can't afford to lose weight if you're still emotionally eating, I want you to tell yourself, I can't afford to keep emotionally eating. It's costing me money. It's costing me my health physically. It's costing me my mental health. It's costing me experiences in life. This is a hard podcast for a lot of people. This is the kind of stuff where if you've been sitting on the fence about doing it again, if you've been sitting on the fence about joining me, this is the stuff you've got to ask yourself. I don't want another woman spending a lot of her life like I did, fooling herself into thinking that not trying to lose weight was somehow saving her money. 

It never saved me money. I never wasted money on diets. I found a lot that didn't work for me. I needed every single one of them to figure out the weight loss program I was ultimately going to need, which is the one I built for myself. I realized what I was missing, and that's why when I lost my weight, I pledged to my husband. I was going to help as many women as possible lose their weight too. Now, I do want to say this because I think this is super important. I grew up very poor, really, really poor. I know what it's like to truly not have money. When I was little, we didn't have the luxury of overeating. We didn't have the luxury of emotionally eating. In fact, most of the time we were not eating a lot when I was little, and the only times we got to eat was when we could go to a buffet, and so we did a lot of the sumo wrestler diet. We just ate a ton, and my mom could only afford cheap ass food.