All right, welcome back, everybody. Here’s what we’re going to talk about today.

We’re going to talk about something that probably, in your brain, sounds like a really good idea. It sounds like you’re just making a wise-ass choice, but actually what you’re doing is screwing yourself. And what you’re doing is probably the reason why you ain’t losing weight, or worse, you’re still gaining weight.

So listen to these thoughts, and you tell me if you’ve ever said them, if you’ve ever thought them, especially recently.

Number one: “Well, Corinne, I’m going to start when things settle down.”

“You know what, Corinne? I’m going to wait until the first of the month.”

“I’ll tell you what, Corinne, I just need to get my head on straight first, and then I’ll be ready.”

“Corinne, I am just so scared to try again, so I’m going to wait until I feel confident. Then I’ll work with you.”

The last one: “If I do your free stuff right, then I’ve earned the right to actually join No BS.”

So if you’ve ever said any version of those things, this episode is for you. So buckle up, because we’re going to talk about it. Because every one of these thoughts that you’re thinking, they all sound really responsible. They sound really smart and like you’re just setting yourself up for some amazing future success.

But I am here to tell you, do you know what you’re really doing? Let’s take a wild fucking guess. What you’re really doing is stalling. And you’re stalling because you’re scared to try again, most likely because when things don’t work out, guess what? You talk to yourself like a complete jackass. You’re hard on yourself. You beat yourself down.

And I’m going to tell you right now, that is one of the reasons why women stall so much. Because if you think that if you try and it doesn’t work out, and then your mind knows that all you’re going to do is put yourself into some terrible cycle of beat-downs, to where you feel hopeless, to where you feel like nothing ever works for you, guess what? You ain’t going to want to start. Of course you’re going to stall.

But I’m going to tell you right now, that is a podcast for another day. Go dig through the hundreds and hundreds of episodes I have. I am sure, at some point, I have talked about how you can’t be an asshole to yourself, especially when things don’t go right.

But what I want to focus on today is the stall tactic, because all you’re doing is telling yourself some nice story about why you ain’t starting. And every time you push off starting to lose weight until things calm down or until the first of the month, guess what? Nothing in your life is changing.

You just keep eating the same way. You keep comfort eating. You keep blowing it after a hard day. You keep screwing up the weekends because you did too much restricting during the week.

There are a thousand reasons why we keep eating the same way we do, and you’re going to have to keep that if you’re going to stall.

You also keep feeling the same way about yourself when you stall. Ain’t nothing about how you feel about yourself going to change by you doing nothing. And you’re also going to keep weighing the same, or you’re going to end up gaining if you ain’t doing something different.

Now, the only way for you to change is this: you’ve got to do things differently than you are used to.

Let me say that again. You’re going to have to do things differently than you’re used to, which includes the reasons you do and do not get started. We also have to change those.

Weight loss is not about just changing what you eat and how much. In fact, I would argue that that’s the least important part. The most important part is all of the shit you tell yourself. And if we don’t change a lot of that, guess what? We’re hosed.

It’s hard to eat differently if you don’t change how you talk to yourself. It’s hard to eat less if you don’t change the reasons why you’re eating. So we’ve got to talk about it.

So I bet that you probably think that feeling ready, in your mind, is like some big astromatic moment. It’s like one day you’re just going to bounce out of bed declaring, “Hot damn, today’s the day. I’ve woke up and I’m ready. I’m going to change my life.”

In your mind, I bet the sun is shining. It’s coming through the sheers. There are angels singing somewhere, like heaven has opened its doors and welcomed you. You’ve got a pep in your step, whereas you normally are dragging your ass to the coffee. You’re like, “I’ll have a fresh glass of water.” And you’re wafting through your living room like Snow White, with birds flying above you and little animals following you along.

And for some reason, all the fear you have has just magically left the body as if Elvis has left the building. Maybe you’re even smiling ear to ear because you’re just ready to do all the things that yesterday you were sitting around, scared shitless, that you would never be able to do.

So in your mind, a lot of us, when we think we’re ready, we have this fantasy painted. We think that there’s some mythical day coming where you are totally different, as if something has finally clicked. You’re clear-headed, you’re calm, you’re certain, and you’re just motivated as fuck.

But the unfortunate truth is this: I promise you that day ain’t coming. It is not coming. You don’t just change over. Not ever.

I mean, if that was the case, you would be looking at people all around you who are like, “Oh my God, I don’t even know who you are. Yesterday you were like this, and today you are a completely new human.” How many people have you seen like that?

Most of us spend our entire life looking around going, “Why ain’t you a whole new human? I’ve told you a thousand times how to be the human I’d like you to be.” So if everybody else ain’t going to somehow magically get their shit together overnight and then be perfect and do all the things we’ve been asking them to, why do you think you’re going to wake up somehow different?

You ain’t.

In fact, your brain is wired to keep you the same, to keep you exactly like you are. Even if, exactly like you are, you’re like, “Well, I like this habit, and I don’t know why I do this, and this isn’t helpful. I don’t know why I keep doing that.” Your brain doesn’t give a fuck about whether or not it’s good for you. It just gives a fuck about whether or not you did it yesterday.

Anything that you do all the time, your brain’s going to keep doing it.

It’s just like if you bite your nails because you have anxiety. It’s not like you wake up one day and be like, “I don’t need to bite my fingernails anymore.” You might know it’s terrible for you. You might even bleed when you do it. But you keep doing it because you’ve been doing it for so long that your brain is just used to it, and it don’t want to give it up.

So the only way that we are going to change is if we are actively changing things so that our brain can then start rewiring itself. The rewiring doesn’t happen first. It happens after you get going.

So my friend Kara Loewentheil, she calls this big stall phenomenon a “perfectionistic fantasy.” So if you listen to her podcast, Unf*ck Your Brain, it’s way back in the early episodes. I would say dig back. It’s somewhere between episode probably 10 and 100.

And the perfectionistic fantasy is an idea that there is a magical moment coming where everything is going to line up and you’re just this brand-new person.

So, like, your perfect fantasy of starting a diet is, “Well, work will be all settled down. All my stress levels will be low. My cravings won’t be coming. I’m just going to feel confident. I’m suddenly going to want to eat healthy. All that shit that I eat, I’m not going to want it. And I’m just going to feel sure as fuck that this is all going to work.”

And that’s what you have painted as, like, “When all that’s happening, then I’ve earned the right to start.”

Now, if you’re secretly believing this shit, needing or thinking that this perfectionistic fantasy has to happen, guess what? It ain’t no secret, Sherlock, that you aren’t ever feeling ready.

So let’s talk about why we do this. Because, I mean, when we say it out loud, it almost sounds stupid. But it’s not. It is not stupid at all. We are wired like this.

The reason why we do it is because the fantasy feels really good. I want you to think about it. When you’re sitting there thinking that you’re waiting for this perfect day where all the stars align, that feels really good. It feels smart. It feels like, “Man, that’s just what I should do.”

It promises that starting will not feel scary. It promises that you won’t be doubting yourself. It promises that you’re not going to be messing up.

That’s why we do it, because in fantasy land, we don’t have to feel hard things.

But guess what? We live in the real world. We are going to come face to face with doubts and fears and uncertainties and the world’s problems.

Now, there are lots of things that we can do together to lessen how much fear, doubt, and uncertainty you’re going to feel when you start and what you’re going to feel while you’re going through the process. Because so much of what you’re feeling is coming from your imagination. It is your mind’s way of explaining all the things that are probably going to happen. It’s the way it’s interpreting everything in real time.

And if you’ve got the right help, like working with someone like me, who is a weight loss coach who’s studied all this, we can ease a lot of that. We can even erase some of it so that it doesn’t have to feel like your skin’s burning off in order for you to start losing weight.

But what I promise is, no matter what, you are never going to wake up in a world where everything is aligned finally, where you’re not going to need any help, where everything is perfect. You see, we just don’t wake up with a world that magically changes.

But you know what? Sometimes the world does set itself up in alignment. But guess what also doesn’t change, even though things are easier? We don’t magically wake up changed.

I’ve been recently watching Grey’s Anatomy, and my husband and I, in the early 2000s, when lots of shows y’all were all watching, we had a little baby. He was high-needs. We missed, like, 10 to 15 years of live television for Thomas and all the other bullshit parents have to watch over and over again.

Well, we just went through the episodes where COVID hit, and we were watching all the doctors working around the clock and working hard and people dying and all this other stuff.

And I remember when COVID was happening, very often teaching people, “I know what’s going to happen when it’s over. You’re not going to be sitting around after COVID thinking suddenly your life is so easy. You’re not going to be sitting around not getting stressed out anymore.”

A lot of us, when we were going through that, we kind of had this realization like, “Oh my gosh, I take too many things seriously.” It’s like we kind of reevaluated.

Here we are in 2026, years away from it, and all of us are bitching about the exact same things we did in 2019. Most of us still have the same worries, same anxiety, same kind of stuff. We didn’t have the big collective change in ourselves that we thought we would.

And this is because our brain goes back to what it knows.

So in Grey’s Anatomy, the doctors, you know, they were working, like in that show, 48 straight hours. They were spending weeks away from their children and stuff. Cut to three seasons later, where they’re far away from COVID, they’re working a regular schedule, and all they’re doing is talking about how overworked they are, how tired they are.

Now, I’m not saying that doctors are not overworked and not tired. What I’m saying is they talked about it just like it was still COVID. It wasn’t like they were saying, “You know what? I am tired, but it sure ain’t like it was in COVID, so I’m going to be grateful that I only work 60, 70 hours a week, not working around the clock.” No. Their brain just went back to the way it always thought.

And that is going to be you.

We don’t wake up magically changed. Even if the world changes, guess what? We doubt it. We think that won’t last. It’ll be just a matter of time before we go back to our old shit.

We don’t change that much.

You wake up every day the same old you. You will have the same doubts, the same worries, same stack of failed diets in your wake. You will have the same brain that has rehearsed, “This isn’t going to work for me,” a thousand times.

You’re not going to wake up one day ready. You are going to wake up thinking the same shit you always think unless you are actively intervening in how you think.

And what you keep thinking with no intervention, that right there is creating all of the fear and doubt that keeps you stalling. All of that lack of intervention is what keeps you hoping for a better day, hoping to wake up one day with everything being perfect. It’s what keeps you trapped in a perfectionistic fantasy because it feels good to think that way. But it’s not helpful.

So let’s get all the way back to confidence, as we were talking about the confidence to start, the “I’m waiting for my confidence. I’m waiting for everything to be perfect.” Confidence is a big factor in that. We think, “If I’m not confident, I can’t start yet.”

So if you think you need confidence to start, I’m telling you that’s not true. Because that is not at all what you need.

You know what you do need? You’ve got to have courage.

We don’t get confidence first. We don’t get to feel confident in something that we haven’t succeeded at yet. We need courage to start, to see if we can do it. We need courage to start because so much of us is going to believe we can’t.

We need the courage to say, “But I’m going to try anyway, and I’m going to bet this time that I’m wrong.”

That takes courage.

Courage is doing something that your mind has said “No, you can’t” for years and years and years. Courage is saying, “I’m going to try,” even though everything in me is screaming, “Don’t do it.”

And the way you get courage is to know why things are screaming so loud inside of you, understanding how that beautiful mind of yours is actually working. Because the more you know why things think the way they do in your head, why things are set up the way they are, the more you kind of understand just some simple brain science, the more you get to see, “Huh, this isn’t a defect in me. This is how the brain is actually wired to think naturally.”

So if I want it to think naturally in a different way, I’ve got to retrain it.

Because I promise you this: if you can build a brain pattern, and it’s the pattern of doubt, that means you can also build a pattern of courage if you have the right help.

And we need the courage first because confidence comes after you try things. That’s where confidence comes from. And we’ve got it backwards.

Can you see how we keep stalling? If we think we’ve got to have confidence first, we’re never going to start. Because confidence comes from, “Oh, my brain has watched me do this so many times and it’s worked through so many problems and it’s seen me get going so many times that it now has the confidence to go. It has the confidence to try again.”

It’s like it’s now seen me succeed some. So now it feels like, “Oh, this isn’t that bad. Oh, I’m starting to figure things out.” That’s where confidence comes from.

But right now, your brain, all it has is a long list of reasons that say, “You always quit. Look. Look at my reasons. You can’t stick with anything. Hey, look at all this shit. This is why the diets never work.”

And all of that is going to feel true because you’ve let yourself tell what I call a one-sided story for years and years and years.

Our brain has this weird thing. It always wants to explain what’s happening. So if you hear a knock on my door, your brain is not going to hear knock, knock, knock and then do nothing. Your brain, if you were to hear a knock on my door, would try to create a story. It might think, like, “Oh, maybe she’s got an Amazon package. Huh. I wonder if she’s going to answer it. Huh. I wonder why she doesn’t record in a place where nobody can knock on the door.”

Your brain is going to start trying to explain: Why is somebody knocking on that door? Why am I hearing it in a podcast? Why is all this happening?

And the weird thing about your brain is that when it hears something and it wants to explain it, the first reasonable thing that it thinks of, it just decides that’s the truth. Your brain is kind of lazy. It’s not going to want to come up with, like, 40 scenarios. It’s just going to be like, “Yeah, it’s probably this. Moving on.”

It just doesn’t think hard.

But the problem with the brain is that very often, when it tells its story, it’s not telling a good one.

And that’s why you have to know what stories you’re telling yourself about your life, about why you’re waiting to start, why you’re not starting. We have to be able to look at those things. Otherwise, we stay stuck.

Because if your brain is telling a one-sided story for years, then what it’s also doing simultaneously is dismissing anything that goes against its story.

So let’s say you’ve told the story that you’ve failed every single diet. We could make an argument: if you haven’t lost your weight, yep, you have failed every diet.

But another story could easily be there are parts of losing weight you’re really good at, and there are some parts you still need to work on. And that’s why you haven’t lost your weight yet. You haven’t fixed the parts that are harder for you.

That is equally as true.

Because if you’re a woman who’s breathing and you listen to this podcast, I will bet you have done diets in the past. And I will bet you there’s been some limited success. And you’re not telling yourself about that. Or if you do talk about it, you say, “Well, I can lose some weight, but I always gain it back.”

Your brain is the most powerful part of losing weight. And your brain’s going to tell you a lot of shit. It’s going to tell a story over and over again in one way, and that’s going to be your pattern of thinking about things. And when you have a pattern that is well-worn, guess what? It feels very true.

But I’m going to tell you, just because something feels true, it doesn’t mean it’s 100% true. It doesn’t mean it’s the only truth. It doesn’t mean that it’s the truth you want to keep.

So back when I first started losing weight, I weighed 250 pounds, and I had never lost my weight and kept it off. Not one time. In fact, I’d probably done hundreds of diets because I started trying to lose weight at the age of nine years old.

And so for years, I talked to myself like you do.

The things that I blamed for being overweight were still happening. And I still had chips in the house. I still had ice cream waiting on me in the freezer. I still had to take care of my kid who overwhelmed me. Nothing in my world changed.

But the one thing that did change was this: I knew that if I didn’t do something different, I was just going to stay like I was. So that meant I was going to have to do something, just something.

So instead of focusing on “I’m probably going to fail,” I just decided that every day I was going to wake up and I was going to tell myself, “I might fail, but today I’m going to do something a little bit better than I did yesterday, and I’m going to see where that takes me.”

And I remember sitting there and thinking about all the things that came up in my head. When I was trying to lose weight, I got really good at calling out what I called my old Corinne thinking. Old Corinne thinking just meant these are things I’ve always thought that I know have helped me stay overweight.

And I knew that I could not afford to only think like that because it had only gotten me to where I was: 250 pounds on my couch, crying my ass off.

Now notice, I didn’t say I couldn’t think like that anymore. My goal was not to never have those thoughts ever again or to get rid of them. I didn’t want to blame them anymore for the reason why I was staying like I was.

It was just this simple acknowledgment that, “Corinne, you are going to think some shit. But here’s what we also know to be true too. I know that thinking only this way will not help you. So what makes sense to me right now is I’m going to have to tell myself something that can help me.”

I said this a thousand times probably, probably a week: “This is how we’re going to think about this, and this is what we’re going to do.”

Every single time old Corinne thinking popped up, it was probably one of the very first boundaries that I actually set with myself.

Because a lot of times we think that boundaries are these rules that are hard to follow. We also think about boundaries as things we say to other people like, “You can’t do this anymore. I won’t tolerate this. You need to stop doing this. You should be doing this.”

The way that I think about boundaries for other people is, if you do this thing, here’s what I am going to do. So, like, “If you yell at me, I’m going to leave the room.” That’s an example of a boundary that I have.

I don’t expect somebody to quit yelling at me. I just tell them that, “Hey, if you’re going to show up the way you always do, here’s what I will be doing in response.”

So the way that I think about boundaries for other people is when you do this thing, here’s what I will do. It’s all about how you respond to the way people are going to act so you stop trying to change their behavior.

So the same thing went for me and my brain. I knew I wasn’t going to stop thinking bullshit, so I needed to create a boundary for myself for when I did think those things. And the boundary was really simple: when I think these things, I am now going to say and do this thing.

Of all the things I did to lose weight, I am telling you right now, this was absolutely the most important: getting good at how I spoke to myself.

You see, when you only think that you can’t lose weight, you’re probably just going to fail. You are now highly motivated to stall starting again.

But if you tell yourself the truth, which is, “I can’t predict the future. I’m just scared right now,” you open up to starting even if you don’t feel ready yet.

Because I promise, if you could predict the future, stop listening to me right now. Get your ass on an airplane, go to Las Vegas, and bet your life savings on some blackjack because you’re going to know when you’re going to hit 21.

I promise, when it comes to losing weight, you don’t actually know that this time won’t work. You’re betting that it won’t.

And guess what success stories do? The people who end up losing weight, like me and all the thousands of women that I’ve helped, they stop betting that it won’t work. They start trying to see, “Is this the time that it will work?”

So let’s talk about what’s really happening.

Your brain is constantly changing based on what you’re repeating. It’s not sitting there changing because of what you want and what you hope. It changes because you do new things and then you do them over and over again.

This is called rewiring your brain. Neuroplasticity is the fancy word for how your brain is just wired to operate. It is wired to repeat whatever it keeps doing and thinking.

Now, I love the word plasticity because what does that imply? Flexibility. It’s not called neuroconcrete for a reason. It’s neuroplasticity.

So your brain, what it does, is it builds these strong connections around whatever you think and do over and over again.

So I want you to think of it like a trail in the woods. If you walk it one time, what happens? Nothing. If you walk it 100 times, what happens? You start wearing down the grass. You can kind of see where you’re going. You walk it for 20 years, there’s a damn dirt road, and it’s easy to follow. You’ve probably even left markers for future people to know where they’re going.

If you’ve been walking the “I can’t do this” path for decades, that is a well-worn, smooth, easy path for you to follow. It’s automatic to think. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right path. It doesn’t mean it’s accurate and true. It just feels that way because you have thought it over and over and over again. It’s well-practiced.

So your brain, it doesn’t fire thoughts because they’re true. It fires off a lot of your thinking simply because, “I’m very used to thinking that way.”

So when you say, “This is just who I am. I’ve been this way for 50 years. I’m just too old to change,” that’s going to feel true because it’s a practiced thought.

But what’s also true? Who you are can change through the years. I bet you don’t think like your 20-year-old self anymore. Your brain is wired to change from birth to death.

So the truth is, you didn’t know that. And now you do. Now you do know your brain can change.

So here’s the good news: because your brain can build new trails at any age, as long as you’re willing to walk the path toward the new one, that is just your biology. Brains do not stop changing. They update based on what you repeatedly do.

Which means waiting to feel ready makes no sense, because your readiness is based on what you’ve been telling yourself over and over and over again. It now needs to be based on what you are going to tell yourself with your new Corinne boundaries.

And the best way for you to feel ready is to remind yourself: I don’t need to be confident. I need courage in the face of my fears. And that my fears are practiced, well-worn thoughts, but they’re not the only thing that’s true and available to me.

And then when you get going, you’re going to see yourself do new things like make mistakes and keep going. That’s a biggie in weight loss. Nobody can change their whole way of eating and being in just one day. It’s not like you can get on a diet and then suddenly follow it with no problems.

Sometimes you’re going to forget to do shit. Sometimes you’re going to eat the old way because that’s what you always do. Sometimes you’re just going to get it plain wrong. Sometimes life is just going to get in the way and interfere.

But in order to lose weight, you have to learn how to show up differently for all that stuff than you have in the past. Because if you show up the way you have in the past, guess what? You just get the same well-worn result.

So the problem isn’t that these things happen. The problem is you don’t adjust, learn, and keep going. And when you learn how to adjust, learn, and keep going, guess what? Then you earn the confidence that you’ve been waiting on.

Now your mind has watched you show up in a whole new way, so it begins to think in a whole new way.

So no more thinking that fear means stop. Doubt means not ready. A busy life now means this is the right time.

Let me just say this again because I want to make sure you get this. I don’t want you to use fear to stop. I don’t want you to think doubt means “not ready right now.” I want you to think doubt means “I’m doing something new.”

A busy life, a lot of times you think it means the wrong time. I want you to think a busy life means this is the perfect time to lose weight.

Here’s why.

Busy life means the best time to start because if you can’t do weight loss with a busy life, how the fuck are you ever going to keep your weight off? Because you’re not going to have a non-busy life in maintenance. It’s the best time to learn.

So remember, your job isn’t to feel ready. It’s to start so you can start changing. You’re never going to feel totally ready. But you can feel willing because things you’re learning from me start making sense. And if it makes sense, then you just need courage.

Now, I have a special download for you. If you follow the link in the show notes, you can go to the link and get a resource that’s going to help you figure out if you’re ready or what is stopping you from being ready.

I think it’ll be highly helpful for you because if you’ve been on the fence at all, if you’ve been wavering, if you’ve been scared to start, I would get this resource because you deserve a better life than you have right now. You deserve your weight loss, and you do not deserve all of this fear and anxiety and worry stopping you.

We’ve got to overcome the perfectionistic fantasy, and I really do think this resource will help you.

All right, everybody. See you next week.