You don’t need a perfect plan.

You don’t need a new diet.

You don’t need to overhaul your whole life on Monday.

You need ONE thing — the one thing you’re actually willing to do… even on the days you don't feel like it.

In this episode, I tell you how I found mine, why it worked, and how you can find yours without burning out in three days.

If you’ve ever done “all the things” and quit anyway, this episode explains exactly why.

Get my FREE weightloss videos (The Secrets to How I Lost 100lbs):

www.nobsfreecourse.com

Welcome back, everybody. Today, I want to talk to you about something every woman screws herself with when she's trying to lose weight, especially this time of year, when you're fired up, you're ready, and you're thinking, all right, this is going to be my year, bitches, and I can't keep going like this. Now, look, that feeling, it's very real, and it's called fresh start mentality. Your brain...

is naturally wired to give you a little extra energy right now during this time of year. It's like your brain is like, all right, this is the perfect time for us to get our shit together. This is like a clean slate. And that shit feels good. It feels like hope. But here's what I want you to hear. That fresh start energy, it's not supposed to last. Nothing is wrong with you when your fresh start mentality goes away.

That part is very normal and it's called hedonic conditioning. Let me tell you what hedonic conditioning is. I've talked about it before. It is where there is a part of your brain. You've got one part that's like thrives on fresh start mentality. That's why first thing in the morning, a lot of times we start off gung-ho for the day. First of the week, Mondays, first of the month, new paycheck, all of those things. Those are fresh start mentality moments.

Then what happens is we have hedonic conditioning in our brain too. So our brain is like, okay, you have fresh start mentality to get you going. You have me to keep you at a baseline of feelings. You're not supposed to feel like your ass is on fire 24 seven for things. Otherwise you will burn out your brain. Your brain literally can't handle that. So hedonic conditioning is where

Your brain is supposed to get used to something that feels really good. So for example, let's say I always use this example. You buy a car. Almost all of us have had a new car at some point in our life. And in the beginning, it smells good. You love it. You get excited every time you walk by it. You don't feel that way a year later. It may still smell new.

It may be a lot newer than the one you had before, but it's not like every time you get in the car, you're like, hot damn new car, love it. After a while, you're now just getting in the car. And we know we do this. This is the example I love is whenever you have a new car, if you don't drive it, let's say you have it for four months. Every time you get in, you don't smell new car anymore. Not at all. Let's say somebody borrows it for two weeks and they bring it back.

The first time you sit in it, you're probably going to notice it still smells like a new car. That's hedonic conditioning. It even hedonically conditions your sense of smell. So this is happening. So you do not need to feel like something went wrong because at some point you lost all of that new energy feel. So here's what happens.

fresh mentality energy. And a lot of us, we try to do all the things. But guess what? Life happens because life always happens. Something goes wrong and you suddenly think, oh my God, I've lost all my motivation. This doesn't feel new anymore. You think, oh, here we go again. I can't do this. Something must be wrong with me. Nothing's wrong with you. There's two things happening.

One, it could just be hedonic conditioning. And you were supposed to run into that mistake. And if you ran, like, I want you to think about this when most of us start a diet. The first week, if we mess up, we're still so new into it. We're still so excited about it. We kind of just like, oh, that's all right. I'm just gonna get right back on track. If that happens in week four, you're sitting there like, this shouldn't happen. I must be a fuck up. Because you don't have fresh start mentality happening anymore.

But here's the thing that I think most of the time happens. When we have fresh start mentality, it's really easy for us to do something in diet land that we know deep down we're never going to be willing to keep doing it for the rest of our life. We're willing to do it to get some weight off, but we have this little voice inside of us that says, and when I lose all my weight, I will figure out how to eat then.

For now, I'm going to do this. And that's why today I want to talk to you about the one thing you've got to do if you want to lose weight, especially this time of year. The one thing you've got to do is you've got to figure out the thing you're willing to do for a long time. Because you are going to have fresh start mentality and we want to use that. It is a heuristic in our brain we want to take advantage of. You are also going to have hedonic conditioning.

or whatever bullshit you pick that you're excited about right now, because you're so excited to lose weight, we need to make sure that when hedonic conditioning happens, that you're still going to be able to keep going. So when you are picking the one thing that you think like, all right, this is what I really want to do to lose weight this year. I don't want you picking what you think you should do.

I don't want you picking the thing that the diet industry has told you is the only way to lose weight. And I don't want you to pick the thing that sounds good only when you're all pumped up. The one thing that you know without a shadow of a doubt, you need to pick the thing you're willing to do even when you don't feel like it anymore. Even when you're not going to be excited about it anymore. Even when you start going through the normal mistakes that everyone's going to make while they're trying to lose weight.

So back when I was losing weight, it was rough. I was never motivated, never inspired. I wasn't telling myself, this is my year. I was sitting on my ass every day watching a baby and watching TV and feeling sorry for myself because I was 250 pounds. And half the time, the only reason why I got off the couch was to go get something to eat. I was sick and tired of not doing a damn thing. I was terrified I wasn't ever going to be able to lose my weight.

I had tried everything under the sun. So I didn't trust at all that if I tried again, that anything was going to happen other than a big fat fail. But I also remember telling myself something back then and it changed everything. There was the day where I finally said, I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know if I'm going to lose any weight at all, but I got to start doing something different.

I got to figure out some shit. And when I put my brain to work on figuring out some shit and stopped making myself have to be motivated, have to know how it was going to work out, that is when everything changed for me. Because then my question became, all right, Brynn, what is the easiest thing you can do right now to just get started? What is something you know you can do?

Every damn day, even on the days you don't want to.

on the days that you think it's not going to be good enough. And my answer was not fancy, dramatic, or even impressive. What popped into my head was, I think I can walk for 15 minutes a day. I think I can make myself get off this couch. If I have to make laps around the couch, I will set a timer and I will walk for 15 minutes every day because I got to start moving again. And the reason why I picked that was because my entire life I watched friends and my brother.

be athletes. And I just thought that that must be amazing because I never was. I was the girl that the PE teacher sat on the bench. I remember my PE teacher in the sixth grade telling me that she was sitting me on the bench because no one wanted the fat girl. And then she thought it would be easier for me to just sit there and not get picked than to sit there and get picked last.

and to struggle and to drag a team down. So when I sat there, I thought, I'm going to start walking. I just need to be able to get up because something in me said, you know, one day I would love to be able to be a real exerciser and all the things. And I knew that if I got off the couch 15 minutes a day, the athletes also had to get off their couch and show up.

So I needed to do the first step that an athlete did, which is work out when you don't want to. So I told myself that and I knew that I could walk 15 minutes every day and that that was going to really help me. And then on the days I didn't want to and the days that the weather was bad, the days when I was tired, the only thing that would stop me from those 15 minute walks was like life or death surgery. And you know what?

I have done the 15 minute walks every day since then, barring really being sick or surgery. And then I made a promise to myself that I wasn't going to do anything else until I felt like I could add something. So it made sense in my mind when I would sit and calmly think about it, that the main reason that I'd never been able to lose weight before,

was I was always trying to do too much. I was always trying to get a quick start. And I would change all my food and cut out sugar, cut out cards, decide to go to the gym six days a week, stop drinking, stop eating out, start counting my calories. And I tried to do everything at once. And it never worked for me. It brought up too much shit for me. It also didn't work the way our brains are even designed.

And I didn't even know that back then, but I have since read books and studies where it says our brains aren't meant to change that much. They are meant to freak out if you do that. And very few of us can manage those freak outs. I'm so grateful to myself that I started with deciding what I could do on my worst day instead of thinking I should do all of this in order to have better days.

Because when you change too many things at once, the habit center in you does freak out. Your brain can't focus on all of those things. That's why it's so easy to slip back into your old habits and patterns and your behaviors because your brain is like, you're trying to do all these things and I'm really having to think through it because I don't know how to do those habitually. And so it just starts grabbing old habits and be like, okay, your eyes off this price. So I'll just slide that one right in.

suddenly catch yourself popping food in your mouth when you haven't done it in a couple of days or even for a couple of weeks, but you're also over here trying to work out six days a week when you're not used to it and you're trying to change everything that you've been eating, that has nothing to do with you not being able to lose weight or you not caring enough. It's because your brain literally cannot juggle all these new things and all the things it has to do and think so hard to do all of them at one time. So when I started working on one thing at a time,

Those small things, it was like I suddenly had space. I could pay attention. I could figure out why something wasn't working easily instead of going into that black and white mindset of, oh my God, nothing ever works for me. And here's the thing. I didn't realize it, but I was losing weight faster that way than I was when I was trying to lose weight the old way by changing everything. I lost 100 pounds in 18 months.

It's like five and a half pounds every single month. And that's normal. That is like rock steady weight loss. That is me not quitting. Like my biggest problem was most of my diets, they had about a three to eight week shelf life. And so it was really slow for me to lose weight if I was going to lose like 15 pounds in six weeks because I was doing all the things and then quit.

when I couldn't keep up, gain 20 and have to start over again. I was one of those people that could diet so good for like six weeks to three months. I could lose a big chunk of weight. Then I'd quit because everything was too hard. It was wearing me out. I couldn't keep up. Then I'd go off a diet for about four to six months. Get all that weight back and then have to start again. That took forever.

It took me a lifetime to get to the point to where I could lose 100 pounds in 18 months. So the only reason this last time worked for me was because I finally quit trying to shock my system into a new life and instead asked myself, what am I actually willing to do today? And that's what I want you to do. If you want to lose weight this month, don't you dare build yourself a big old list. Don't you go cleaning out your pantry like your life depends on it.

Don't start making bunches of promises that you know deep down you can't keep in three months, hell in three weeks. So ask yourself, what is one thing I'm willing to do every day, no matter what? And for a lot of women, that one thing is just eating a little bit less of what you already eat. Now look, a lot of the foods you're eating right now, you're eating them because you're tired, you're stressed, needing a break or needing comfort. You know I preach the emotional eating all the time.

If you don't know what emotional eating is, go back to my episode on the nine types of overeating and you will find if you do any of it. And what happens is, is when you take away the foods you use to emotionally eat, you're also taking away simultaneously every one of your emotional coping mechanisms. And when you do that, of course, it's really hard for you to stick to this diet. Of course, you end up overeating at some point.

You are trying to use sheer willpower and to white knuckle your way down the scale. And that is hard. That is what makes those diets you do so hard. So instead of changing everything that you eat, I always suggest...

you start by cutting out what we call bullshit eating. This is the mindless stuff. It's the stuff where you're like cooking and tasting things. This is where you're popping food in your mouth as you cook. And then you feel full before you even sit down with the damn meal you made. It is eating the nuggets off your kid's plate because they didn't eat them. And so now you're the garbage disposal. Your ass has become a trash can. And this is what I want you to hear.

you need to just try eating a little bit less. So let's start with being really mindful of where's the mindless bullshit eating I'm doing? Let me cut some of that mess out because that is not emotional eating. It's a lot easier to cut out and you're probably gonna lose some weight when you start paying attention to it. Now, the next thing, the way we eat just a little bit less is just eat what you currently eat.

but eat a little bit less than you currently do. That is why I started with not giving up pizza. Instead of eating a half a pizza, I ate half a pizza minus one slice until I could get to where I could make it to where I was usually... Nowadays, when I order pizza, it's two slices and a side salad. That's what I eat. Sometimes it's just one piece of pizza.

a bigger salad, and I want some fruit on the side because I'm a volume kind of girl. 99% of women will do better if they don't cut out the foods that they emotionally eat first and they just start eating a little bit less over all the quantity of them. It allows you to feel safe. It doesn't require you to overhaul your life.

It doesn't take away your emotional coping mechanisms. Now, one of the good things is when you start doing small things, you start feeling different. You start calming down. You stop feeling like you're behind. You stop thinking you have to do all the things in order to lose weight. And you start feeling supported by yourself because you're sitting there constantly thinking about the things you know you can do, even on your worst day.

Because that's what I really wanted back then. I wanted to feel like I was going to be able to lose weight, but I wanted to feel like it had some ease. I did not want to feel restricted. I wanted to feel calm. And in order to do that, I just couldn't change everything overnight. I didn't want to feel like I had to be perfect in order to do this. I wanted some things to make sense.

I wanted to take it slow enough so that I wouldn't get overwhelmed and quit. I wanted to feel supported by myself. I wanted something that I could actually keep doing for the long haul. I didn't want something that I knew I couldn't do for long and that I was probably just going to risk regaining all my weight. I had no interest in losing weight again. Y'all, losing weight is not that much fun.

There's no reason, I don't think there's any woman that has such a big party while she's losing weight that she's like, oh my God, that was so fun the first time. Let me regain my weight because I want to do it all over again. So stop trying to do 10 things at once and just do the things you are willing to do. I promise you, you will do better this month doing it that way. That's how you will lose weight this year. That's how you will lose weight for the rest of your life. Figure out the one thing you're willing to do,

Start there and layer on when you're ready. All right, y'all. I'll talk to you next week.