All right, welcome back, everybody. Today, what we're going to do is we're going to

talk about something that you probably don't even realize that you're doing, but it

is one of the little ways that we sabotage the shit out of ourself, and it screws

us up on losing our weight. And that is pre -deciding ahead of time that you can't

lose weight. So it's like you're starting every diet expecting it to go to shit.

Like it's just a matter of time before you fuck things up royally. Now, when you

do that, when we pre -decide that we are just a big old failure and all I'm doing

is waiting around for that magic moment when I quit, one of two things usually

happens. Let's talk about the first one. The first one is you scare the shit out

of yourself. So you end up stalling or you don't start at all. So when we pre

-decide failure, it will look like this. You're going to do a lot of waiting around,

waiting for your confidence, waiting to feel ready. If that's you, listen to the

previous episode because I talk about what it means when we're waiting around to be

ready and why that's never going to happen. You'll also start thinking about

starting. So you'll research tons and tons of You'll talk to all of your friends

about what are you doing to lose weight? If you ever see anyone who's lost weight,

guess what you do. You ask them a buttload of questions, but then you don't do

anything about it. You give yourself all the reasons why, well, that won't work and

that won't work and that won't work. You're probably sitting around listening to this

podcast right now. A pre -decided failure who nod you head every week,

you sit around thinking about how much this makes sense. And yet every time I open

the doors, what's your sad ass doing? Not joining, sitting on the fence,

waiting for the next time I open. You're thinking, I got to wait until I feel

confident. I got to wait until I feel ready. That ain't going to happen.

I'm telling you right now, when you're doing all that shit, you're just circling the

drain of never doing anything about your weight loss. And you do that because deep

down, you have decided, well, it ain't going to work anyway, so why am I going to

even bother trying? The only thing that's really happening is all that pre -deciding

that you're never going to be able to lose weight is some kind of protection from

this. Pay attention. pre -deciding that you're a failure protects you from being

disappointed if the next time doesn't work. But it ain't protecting you from being

disappointed. I want you to think about it. If I had to guess, you're sitting

around just like me back in the day when I was really overweight. I was 250 pounds

and I was scared shitless to start. It wasn't like I was just motoring through

life, never feeling disappointed while I was sitting around scared. Every day of my

life was full of disappointment. Every day I was disappointed myself,

especially when I wasn't trying. I was disappointed that I wasn't trying. I was

disappointed that I was eating like shit. I was disappointed that I was going to

set the wrong example for little Logan. I was disappointed that I wasn't the wife

that I thought my husband richly deserved. So I didn't save myself any fucking

disappointment sitting around stalling and thinking I couldn't lose weight. The only

thing I did was ensure that I failed before I even tried. Listen to me,

I failed before I even tried. When you're not trying, you are not saving yourself

from failure. You're doing what we call failing ahead of time.

And then I got in exchange the gift of experiencing disappointment in hundreds of

little ways each and every day, simply because I was afraid I couldn't lose weight.

Now, there is a second way that pre -deciding will sabotage weight loss.

It's hosing you over and over again, and it is a lot sneakier than what we just

talked about. So you think you can't lose weight. You have a rich,

deep belief in that. But something in you gets you going. You decide to start.

But the problem is you go into your diet, what we call half in and half out.

You're technically following some kind of a plan, but in your head, all you're doing

is bracing yourself for the moment that you fuck things up royally. You're sitting

around doing a lot of thinking about, well, let's see how long this lasts. Well, I

probably won't be able to keep this up. I'm just going to screw it up like last

time. Won't, won't. So the second something normal goes wrong,

you treat it like you were found guilty of murdering your diet in the first degree.

You make little things like forgetting to pack a lunch one day and then having to

go out, getting invited to dinner out, eating too much at a meal, or the scale not

going down for a week of two. You treat all of that as, see, now this is why I

can't lose weight. I knew I would fail. I knew I would screw it up. And basically,

you're just sitting around expecting failure. And then when normal shit happens,

you say, I knew I couldn't do it. And that's where you take the normal shit that

doesn't work perfectly, and then you fuck those things up into a major catastrophe.

You take like a drizzling rainstorm and you turn it into a damn flood. You don't

just go out to eat with your friends when they invite you. You go out, You feel

like you can't lose weight and you order up because you have no incentive to make

a decent choice if you believe you can't lose weight. I mean, why would you if

little things to you mean you can't lose weight,

like little mishaps, zero incentive? When you pre -decide failure,

every small mistake or every little thing that isn't perfect, it's going to feel way

bigger than it is. It will be magnified by you. It will feel like the beginning of

the end is here. It will not feel like, oh, this is something I just need to work

on. So when we pre -decide that we're failing, we either never start Or we start

with your mind locked and loaded on making all the little things a full -blown

disaster. You see, your brain, it's like a golden retriever, a beautiful,

happy -ass golden retriever. You tell it, hey, go find proof that I suck.

Be a good boy. And it's going on happily fetch and bring back with its tail wagon

all proud of itself all the reasons why you're a screw up. Your brain is that

golden retriever and it thinks it's pleasing you. It thinks it's doing what it's

supposed to. And this is why, because your brain has a system called the reticular

activating system or the RAS. And the RAS is like a filter for your brain.

You see, your brain is really powerful. And it can take in tons and tons of inputs

from the whole world. And the RAS's job is like the filter in your dryer.

Its job is to remove the lint of the world. So, for example, if you're at a party

and your brain could hear all the conversations around you and you were like it was

allowed to take it all in, it would literally fry your mind. The RAS, what it

knows to do is to focus on what's important. It's filtering out all the background

noise so that it's more like white noise and then it hones in on the person you're

talking to. So it turns down the other things going on around you to murmurs so

that you can focus on what your brain thinks is important when you're at a party,

talking to one person and giving them their full attention. Now, here's how you will

know if your RAS actually works. Let's say that you're at a party and a few

conversations over someone says your name. What happens when you hear your name in a

crowded room? You probably perk up, even if you're in mid -sentence, it grabs your

attention. You likely say, did you hear someone calling my name? That is your RAS

in action. It knows your name is important. So when it hears it, even if the

person is talking to someone else who has the same name as you, guess what? Your

brain spotlights it. It says, pay attention. You should see this. So if you only

tell yourself things like, I can't lose weight, I've never been able to do it

before, I'll probably fail just like every other time. Your mind says, got it.

We are looking for every mistake, every imperfect situation. And your brain says, I

am going to go fetch you all of your fuck -ups. I'm going to fetch you every

problem. I'm going to even fetch you every reason why you might not even be able

to do it. Because that's the command you've given me. Now, while all this is going

on, guess what your brain is also doing. It's filtering out anything that you're

doing right. It treats the good like it's lint, like it's supposed to be background

noise, like you're not supposed to pay attention to it. So it ignores all the

positives. It's one of the reasons why you might could lose a half a pound one

week, but then you feel like shit about it. You start thinking it should be more.

You think it's a problem. You think you should be going faster. And you get down

on yourself because your brain is looking for symptoms of failure. And if a half a

pound isn't at least two, then that must be failure. Blows it way out of

proportion. So your brain is going to tell the story of weight loss to you through

the lens of being a failure when you have pre -decided that that's what's going to

happen. And once Simple problems that arise in your weight loss journey.

When they start happening, guess what? The problems we were always supposed to face

are now proof that we can't lose weight instead of proof that we're trying and

we're running up on things that we need to solve and fix and get better at in

order to keep losing weight. And when you sit around and use simple problems as

proof you can't lose weight, there is a big -ass domino effect of doom and gloom

that starts happening. You think, well, I screwed up. And then you eat more because

guess what? You're mad or you feel helpless because of the way you're talking to

yourself. So then you feel worse. And then you say like, see, I knew I couldn't do

this. You started agreeing with the original premises that you can't lose weight.

And you never give yourself a chance to stop and notice that the whole thing

started with one simple error. One overeat. One forgotten thing.

One week the scale doesn't move. Whatever it is for you. And when that happens,

the doom and gloom domino effect is you end up fucking up a day or you end up

fucking up a whole week when saving it was a very viable option staring you in the

face. I promise if you keep pre -deciding you can't lose weight, you will not lose

weight. You are going to have to break the habit of that if you ever want to lose

weight. We have so many habits, including the stories we tell ourselves,

become a habit of how we talk to ourselves. And if you still are sitting there

thinking, but I have failed every diet, Corinne, I've never been able to lose my

weight. You just don't understand. It's so much harder for me.

Then I want you to do a simple exercise this week, and this came from Mel Robbins.

So Mel Robbins also

did this as a challenge last year. It was wrapped up in a whole challenge about

how to believe in yourself and do more than you think you're capable of. And this

was one of the important concepts that they needed to learn is that you are the

person you repeatedly tell yourself you are. And if you want to be a new person,

you have to tell yourself new things in the face of all the old shit you're

telling yourself. So I challenged them to find the hearts just to see, do you have

a functioning RAS? Because if you do, that means you need to give yourself new

commands. That is the most important thing that you can do in your weight loss. And

guess what? They saw hearts and rocks. I can't tell you how many women posted

pictures of little rocks, shaped like hearts. They posted pictures of clouds that

were shaped like hearts. They saw them in logos. They would see them in commercials.

They just started seeing them everywhere. I suggest you do that for a week just to

prove yourself how powerful. If you give your mind some simple directions,

it will want to comply. So the good news is if you can tell your brain to hunt

for failure, you can also tell it to look for the good. You can train it to find

what you need. I once heard Kirsten Ferguson from Peloton tell a story about her

daughter, and she was wanting to quit basketball because the team had lost their

first few games. And Kirsten said, I didn't all let her quit. I told her,

you get to quit when you win. When you have won,

and you've seen both sides of the story, you can decide Because that's what we do

with weight loss. We don't allow ourselves to win some in order to be able to tell

ourselves the story. You've experienced a lot of losing in weight loss. You've

experienced a lot of quitting when it gets hard. You've experienced a lot of

regaining weight because you quit because you were looking for moments to fail.

You've experienced a lot of disappointment because no one's ever taught you how to

talk to yourself when you do make mistakes. And you're deciding your fate based only

on that stuff. You're sitting around thinking, well, I already know how it goes. So

I'm not going to try. I'm going to stall. Or if I do try, I'm going to half

-heartedly try because I want to be able to quit the second I think it's not going

well.

So I need you to know this. You have got to experience winning on the other side

of a loss. If you mess up, don't quit. Mess up,

recover,

keep working on that thing until it's working, and then you get to decide if you

want to quit. Because I guarantee your attitude will be completely different.

You do not know how it's going to go in weight loss. You know how it goes when

you quit. You know how it goes when you melt down over the scale, not going down

a week or two. You know how it goes when you talk like an asshole to yourself

about messing up. You know how it goes when you keep focusing only on failure. You

don't know how it goes when you keep going even if the scale doesn't move. You

don't know how it goes when you treat the mess -ups as learning opportunities for

the next time. You don't know how it goes when you focus on figuring shit out

instead of failing. I say if you're going to pre -decide something, decide the best

fucking outcome. Assume it will work and let your brain work on it. Back when I

was losing weight, there was a time I wanted to give up too, y 'all. I was already

50 pounds down and I hit a six weeks stall six weeks of not losing a fucking

pound and I remember standing on the scales thinking to myself see you can't do

this and out of nowhere the next thought was well if we're not going to lose

weight we might as well just eat whatever the fuck we won't it was my pissed off

moment But something crazy happened. It was in that moment. It was like someone else

took over my mind. Because I had been expecting to figure out my weight loss from

the very beginning, every time I doubted, every time I was scared, every single time

I would remind myself, Corinne, that's old Corinne thinking, here's what we're going

to do. We are figuring this out, no matter how long it takes. My RAS heard that

part loud and clear that I was about to do something that was in direct

contradiction to everything I had been telling myself. You see, I didn't believe I

could lose weight, but I was telling myself over and over again, I don't know what

I'm going to do. I don't know what problems are going to arise, but I am going to

figure this out, no matter how long it takes me. Because I knew deep in my heart

that figuring this out And so.

me. And I'm so glad that my mind caught that moment because I was quitting when I

had lost 50 pounds. Quitting. I hadn't physically quit yet,

but mentally, I was about to go back to my old ways. And I remember thinking, hey,

you actually like a lot of the shit you're doing now. You like how you feel. You

just don't like it when the is not moving. You like how you're thinking. You just

don't like that you're putting in effort, and right now you're still not seeing

results. And I just told myself, even if the scale never fucking moves again, this

way of living is a hell of a lot better than what I was doing, which was eating

my face off every single day because I was scared and

I just decided if I'm going to eat my, if I'm going to be scared and disappointed,

because I'm going to tell you on my scale, I was scared and disappointed. I was

scared I wasn't going to be able to get off this stall, was disappointed, that I

was working hard and nothing was happening yet. But it just made sense to me. It's

like, well, if I'm going to be scared and disappointed, I might as well be making

an effort to change my situation, not just scared and disappointed because I'm doing

jack shit, nothing. I was so glad I'd been countering my fear of failing with

something my brain could literally sink its teeth into it the moment I needed it

most. You see, I had pre -decided that I was going to make a lot of mistakes and

one by one I was going to figure out what to do about them, how to live

different. I was going to solve this. That is a baller pre -decision that I made

for myself and I encourage you to make for you. It doesn't mean that right now you

are going to believe you can lose weight and feel all the amazement and the

readiness and the excitement and the motivation and stuff. The only thing I need you

to do is I just need you to stop believing that you're destined to fail.

I need you to be open to the idea that you could be very wrong about that because

there's a lot about brain science and psychology and things that I teach you that

you just don't know. I was wrong about me. I'm so glad I didn't believe all the

shit I was telling myself. So I want you to put your mind to work on something

you can control, which is anytime you mess up, I want you to say, okay, I messed

up now what? Instead of I messed up, that's proof I can't lose weight.

I want you to decide that keeping on going is better to going back to what you've

been doing.

See, I knew back then that eating my face off would feel good for a minute.

And it would, maybe even a whole hour, but then it would bring on a lifetime of

regret and shame along for the ride. So I want you to think about this. Another

pre -decision you've made is that mistakes and problems mean you've screwed up. And

maybe you need to pre -decide that you need to get better at recovering from them

because they're coming. If you can recover from them, If you can keep going,

you will learn what you really need, and you will sharpen your eating skills from

experience. Because the truth is this, you're going to mess up. You're going to

munch on something without thinking at times because you're breaking habits. You're

going to overeat sometimes. Sometimes from just the habit and the pace at which you

eat, sometimes it's going to be does it taste really good? You don't know how to

interrupt that yet. Sometimes it's momentum. But more often than not, it's going to

be emotional. And you are going to have very hard weeks that will lead to some

emotional overeats. You are going to feel discouraged at times because that is just

normal. There will just be times that weight loss won't go as fast as you won't.

There will be times that you won't be doing it as well as you wish you could.

There will be times when life is life in and it feels harder to do the things and

you can't go as fast as you'd like. So the question isn't, am I going to mess up?

The question really becomes, what am I going to do when all that happens?

If you've decided that all that shit means you can't lose weight, then all that

shit becomes your quitting moment. But if you pre -decide that all that stuff is

just part of figuring out how to lose your weight, then all that stuff becomes

steps along the journey of losing weight. And your brain starts looking for solutions

to those things instead of turning it into proof that you suck so that you quit.

So here's what I want you to try. Instead of pre -deciding that you're going to

fail, pre -decide that even though you're afraid, it doesn't mean you can't try to

figure it out. Pre -decide, you won't do it perfectly, so instead, you're going to

keep going and learning. Pre -decide that you'll struggle and figure out how to make

it easier next time. Pre -decide, you'll doubt yourself and use it as a chance to

reassure yourself. And pre -decide, you'll figure it out instead of failing,

even if it takes longer than you want, even if it's messier than you'd like it to

be, even if you're scared to death, because it feels a hell of a lot better than

just settling for failing ahead of time. Right now, I know that believing that you

can do this and that you can figure it out probably feel scary, but that's only

because you're not used to doing it. You're not used to believing. It's not because

you can't lose weight. It's because you're not used to believing when it comes to

weight loss. I promise, if you can get used to settling for failure from fear,

you can get used to believing even if you're afraid. So tell yourself something like

this every day, every meal, and every time you doubt you can lose weight. I can't

know how this ends, but I'm not pre -deciding failure anymore. And then I want you

to get started. Sign up for my free weight loss plan if you're new here. The link

is in the bio. And if you've been around a while, look out for my next openings

or anything that I offer because I promise you're more ready to do weight loss than

you feel you are. I'll see y 'all next week.