Welcome back, everybody. So today we are going to talk about consistency. And you probably hear me talk a lot about it on the podcast, but I swear to God, I cannot talk about it enough because this is one of the most asked questions, not only inside my own No BS program, which, for all my listeners who are also No BS women, I just want to tell you this summer, we are doing an entire series on how to be consistent. Not just consistent in your weight loss, but consistency in eating, consistency with exercise, all the things. You have that to look forward to.

But it’s also one of the things that I get asked about a ton when I post on social media, when I ask people on Instagram or Facebook, like, tell me what you want to hear about. And people say, talk more about consistency. So that’s what we’re getting today.

So a lot of people will tell me, “Corinne, I just gotta tell you, I am not consistent.” And it will sound like, “I start strong and then I fall off. I do good for a while and then I just mess it all up. I just need more discipline. I don’t follow through.”

And when I hear this, it’s like you’re telling me, “Hey, Corinne, I need to give you my big-ass personality flaw that I’m toting around.” So many of you act like there is a consistency gene and it was handed out when you were born, and somehow you were last in line and they ran out.

I am telling you right now, there’s no consistency gene.

And after coaching thousands and thousands of women, I’m gonna tell you what I see is the problem. No fucking body lacks consistency. I don’t give a shit what you think.

You do not lack consistency. You misunderstand what consistency is.

So let’s dig into that because before we can become consistent, you know what we gotta do? Understand what the fuck consistency is.

So you’re probably sitting there thinking that consistency means that you do all the things. You do them right. You do them every day.

There’s no room for messing up. You never get tired. You don’t ever slip up.

You have weeks where you just maybe are having a bad week, but no matter what, you’re going to be disciplined. You’re going to do all the things right. You’re going to show up perfectly.

And that is the problem.

You think consistency is the same thing as being perfect.

They are not the same.

Consistency is not perfection.

I’m going to say it again for the woman sitting in the back, not paying attention. Consistency is not the same as perfection.

And if you confuse those two, you are going to think you don’t have consistency. You are going to think that, for some reason, you just can’t be consistent.

So I’m telling you right now, there’s nobody that can be perfect. No one.

I don’t give a shit if you were raised with a hard-ass parent and that you self-identify as a perfectionist. You are never going to be perfect.

And people that say, “Corinne, I’m just a perfectionist,” you need to break that ugly habit because you have set yourself up for an entire life of losing.

No one’s going to be perfect.

Now, I know not everybody who listens to this podcast is religious, but I’m going to tell you right now, I’m a Catholic, and here’s what I know. There ain’t been but one motherfucker that ever walked the face of this earth who was perfect, and unless you’re going to be the second coming of Jesus Christ, get off your high horse, get off your stool, because you are not going to be perfect.

So we need to talk about this because if you keep confusing perfection and consistency together, you ain’t got a snowball’s chance in hell at losing some weight.

So one of the things I wanted to tell you was that when I was losing weight, old Corinne was what I identified as the version of me who had her weight problem. And I started calling her old Corinne. And I knew one thing: old Corinne was always trying to do everything right.

So when I started losing weight, it dawned on me, I’ve got to figure out how not to be old Corinne in my thinking. Not in my doing, but first and foremost in how I thought about things because old Corinne, she tended to quit. Old Corinne tended to quit because she was hard on herself. Old Corinne was hard on herself when she made mistakes, which made her quit. And it just made sense. It’s like, well, if old Corinne bitches to herself and bitches herself out every time she fucks up, and all that leads to her doing is feeling like shit and then quitting, new Corinne has to have a new way to do things.

Which meant, well, new Corinne can’t be trying to do things perfect anymore. New Corinne has to anticipate things won’t go perfect. She’s got to stop bitching herself out so that she doesn’t quit. She has to set herself up in as many ways as possible to no longer quit.

So I gave myself a new problem to solve.

It’s how I lost weight.

I’m telling you right now, stop counting calories. Stop dropping your carbs. Stop doing horseshit. If you don’t work on your thinking, none of it’s going to work long term.

I know that’s why I’ve been able to keep my weight off for so long. I know that’s why so many of you listen to me because I sit and I tell you all the time about shit I used to think and shit I don’t think anymore.

So every time I’d start a diet, I would work so hard to not mess up. And what I didn’t realize was that messing up was always going to happen until I had my come-to-Jesus moment where I said, like, that is old Corinne thinking. Old Corinne thinks the goal is to not mess up. New Corinne, the goal is when she messes up, to not quit over it.

So I had to figure out, how do you become a not-quitter?

So I started looking at consistency, and I realized I needed to be consistent in showing up when things went wrong, not being consistent in quitting when things went wrong.

So let me tell you, what I want to talk about is, I just really believe it’s so much easier to figure out how to lose weight when you understand why things are happening to you. Because so many of us, we just blame ourselves. We just think that we’re broken. We’re stupid. We’re hopeless. You know, we just have all this shit that we think about ourselves.

But you’re never going to be perfect when you’re trying to lose weight. And you’re never going to be consistent right out the gate. And there are several reasons why this happens. And when you understand it, I think it makes it easier to be like, “Oh, no wonder I always quit. Oh, no wonder all these diets I keep trying never work for me because they don’t teach me this stuff. And if I don’t know this stuff, how am I supposed to be able to lose weight?”

So what I want to do is I want to go over just the three most common ones. There are several reasons why we are never, ever going to be perfect when we’re losing weight. I mean, there are a multitude of reasons, but three are really important.

So number one, your mind works in automation most of the time.

So let me give you a story so you’ll understand what I’m talking about. The other day, I needed to go get my nails done. I mean, my fingernails had turned into talons. And I had to go get them done because I literally couldn’t even type anymore. I had waited four weeks. I never wait that long. And I was just like, fuck it, I gotta go get my nails done.

Well, the nail salon is past my gym. I drive down this one road, and I have to take a right to go to the gym. And I have to go farther down that road and take a right to go to the nail salon.

Well, while I’m going to get my nails done, I’m just yammering away to my best friend. Just talking, talking, talking, talking. I know where I’m going. I’m going to the nail salon. I really wanted to go. I even had an appointment.

And guess what happened?

I turned on the street to go to the gym, pulled into the parking lot, and then suddenly realized, “Oh my God, I’m supposed to be going to get my nails done. I cannot believe I just pulled into the parking lot.”

Y’all, this is why so often you will say, “Well, I know, Corinne, and your four basics. I know to make a food plan each day. I make food plans, but at night I forget. Sometimes I just eat whatever my family’s eating, forgetting that I didn’t plan that.”

That is because your brain works in automation.

It takes a while for you to reprogram automatic eating habits.

You will forget sometimes.

And it won’t be because you’re lazy, a fuck-up, a loser, because you failed so many diets in the past. It will simply be because sometimes your brain just forgets.

So it makes no sense as to why you act like you have a consistency problem. That’s not a consistency problem. That is an, “Oh, this time my brain forgot. I just need to remind myself this is what we’re doing.”

That would be like me saying, “Well, I can’t go get my nails done. I might as well just go to the gym since I pulled into the fucking parking lot.”

No. I went on to the nail salon. I just got back on track going to wherever the fuck I was going.

So part of losing weight means you’re going to have to break old habits that are just automated, and you’re going to need consistency in getting back on track. You don’t need to be perfect, but you have got to be consistent in how fast can I just get back on track when simple shit like this happens. Because the more you do that, guess what? The more your brain will want to put getting back on track into the habit.

Also, your brain will eventually quit asking you to do the old thing. It just forgot this time.

Number two. This is another reason why it’s really hard to be consistent in the beginning and throughout a lot of weight loss. I still do this.

So when I was 250 pounds, sitting on my couch, just fucking miserable, I had emotional reasons why I was eating so much food.

So I often ate at night so that when my husband got home and he took over taking care of our son, Logan, I swear to God, I felt so guilty.

I felt like a loser wife. I was just like, “Oh my God, Corinne, you don’t even have a job. You sit here all day and you’re with your kid, and he’s at work all day long.”

I just had all this shit that would go through my brain.

And so then I would feel this immense guilt. I would feel really selfish. I would feel all these things.

And so I could either, every single night while I was trying to lose weight, sit on the couch feeling guilty as hell for being lazy, or I could go get some ice cream and not have to feel that misery.

And in that moment, I didn’t give a shit that I was miserable the next day. I gave a shit that I was miserable in that moment. And I wanted to fix that moment so bad, it outweighed future misery.

So a lot of times y’all tell me, “I know why I want to lose weight. I really want it. I hate being overweight. I just don’t understand why I do it.”

A lot of times it’s because in the moment when you are eating, it is emotional. And in that moment, that is an unfair fire emergency. And your long-term goal of fitting in a pair of size-eight jeans that you’re going to go buy at Target is not on the menu. Nobody cares.

Your brain is like, “Fuck that shit. You can do better tomorrow. Right now, we gotta put this fire out.”

So until I fixed feeling guilty, until I worked on the reasons why I felt guilty, reasons why I didn’t need to feel guilty, all the things, guess what? I was going to have a really hard time not eating because if I did a diet that took away my ice cream and I wasn’t working on my emotional eating, then it was also taking away the only way I knew how to feel better. The only way that I could get through a night without misery.

So if I was sitting there thinking consistency was the same as perfection, then of course every time that I would eat that ice cream, I would think something’s wrong with me. I must not want it bad enough. I’m such a failure. All those past diets, I fail them every time. That’s why this time I failed.

I would be attacking the wrong problem.

If the problem was past failed diets, the problem was me being a loser and all this other shit, then I gotta morph into a new human. But if the problem is, “Oh, when you don’t have ice cream at night, you also don’t have a coping mechanism,” now I know what I need to fix. I need to fix why do I need a coping mechanism? I might need new ones. Or I just need to figure out how not to feel so fucking guilty.

Now here’s the third reason, and this is the last one. When you start something new, especially weight loss, guess what?

It’s going to feel exciting at first.

You got your plan. It’s new. Susan gave it to you. She’s your bestie, and y’all are doing it together. And you got energy, and you’re just motivated, and you’re thinking, this time’s going to be different.

That is very normal. It’s called a brain heuristic, but basically the short of it is fresh-start mentality. Our brains have a mechanism called fresh-start mentality. And sometimes we want to use it, but we can’t rely on it because fresh-start mentality is exactly for a start. It is not fresh-start-and-continuation mentality.

The brain also has another thing that it does. It is called hedonic conditioning.

So it uses fresh starts to get you motivated and get going, and then your brain is immediately going to try to start doing what’s called hedonic conditioning. It is going to, around weeks six and eight, normalize everything.

Because you’re not supposed to stay high on weight loss all the time.

The newness is supposed to wear off. And that is the hedonic conditioning.

So think about this. This is how you’ll know it works in you. If you’ve ever bought a new car, most of us, when we first get it, we swear to God we’re going to take care of it. We’re going to wash it every week, and we’re going to dry it with a baby’s fucking diaper. Nobody’s ever going to eat in this car. And when you get in it, you can smell the new-car smell.

What happens after about two to three months?

We have hedonic conditioning.

The brain’s number-one job is to take something new and exciting and normalize it for us so that it can almost become boring, so that we don’t really have to think about it, because your brain is just trying to conserve energy.

So after a couple of months, you ain’t washing that car every week anymore. In fact, your kid is always screaming in the back seat. You broke the golden rule. You’re throwing Goldfish back there. You’re not sitting there going like, “Oh no, we’re not going to have Goldfish all over the car anymore.”

And that baby diaper that you were going to dry that motherfucker off with is like, no, you’re lucky if you’re doing jack shit.

And think about the smell. After a couple of months, you can’t smell new-car smell anymore, but it’s there. If you want to test me on this theory, go get a new car. Drive around a little bit. You’ll notice how much it smells like a new car. After a couple of months, go on vacation for a week. Come back, get in your car. Guess what? All of a sudden, you’re like, “Oh wow, I forgot how good it smelled.”

Because even your sense of smell, your brain does hedonic conditioning.

Like, we have a newer house. It’s three years old now. It was a brand-new built house. Even now, we will go on vacation and come back, and I can still smell wood. And I don’t notice it unless I come back from vacation.

So that is hedonic conditioning.

So when you are blaming yourself, this is, “I’m just not consistent. I’m not blah, blah, blah. I’m not perfect.” Then you are doing yourself a disservice because we don’t need to be perfect to lose weight.

Life is going to be hard, and it’s going to throw you whammies. The scale is going to stall sometimes. You’re going to notice habits that are harder to fix than others. All of these things are going to happen.

And in those moments, you have to decide that you are going to become someone who can roll with these punches and become consistent instead of saying, “See, I just can’t be consistent. I don’t stay consistent.”

Because that’s not what’s happening.

Consistency starts right after a fuck-up, right after something doesn’t work.

So I recently had a group of clients who signed up to work with No BS for three months. And like clockwork, around week six to eight, things started getting hard for them.

And it wasn’t because the program stopped working. It was because the shine had worn off.

The rough patches, they just started showing up because they were supposed to. They were supposed to run into emotional eating. They were supposed to forget things. They were in the part where they did have to think about their eating and figure things out. Old habits were popping up. Doubt gets louder because now hedonic conditioning has taken effect.

So I’m not thinking about how new it is. My brain is back to thinking about, “I don’t know if I can do this.”

So the interesting part about this is many of them said, “Since I’ve committed to three months with you, Corinne, I’m just going to reach out for help. Otherwise, I would have just quit.”

I want you to think about that.

They said, “Otherwise, I would have just quit.”

And they would have quit in the past because they thought something’s wrong. I’m doing it wrong. I can’t lose weight. I’m a failure. I’m weak. I’m lazy.

Because in those moments, when you’re talking to yourself like an asshole, quitting is always easier than going on.

But when they had already committed their time and their money to me, they didn’t have an easy way out anymore. They had to stay.

So you know what?

It was easy for them to do what consistency really, truly calls for.

In the moments when things aren’t going well, you start becoming someone who’s going to be consistent.

Because no one is consistent. We become someone who’s consistent.

Again, consistency has nothing to do with being perfect.

Consistency really is getting back on track as fast as you can when the normal things that should get in your way start happening.

And as you get back on track, all you got to do is figure out why did this happen? You have to make sense of it. And then you got to figure out what you’ll do next time. And then the most important step, move the fuck on.

Now, this is really hard to do by yourself.

This is when you are going to need help because you’ve got to have someone like me explaining what’s happening so that you’re not sitting around in a shitty fucking diaper thinking, I fucked up and I just can’t lose weight.

And I will tell you, I guarantee you, you don’t understand what’s going on underneath the times you get off track.

You will think shit like you’re just a failure. You’ll think crap like, “See, you’ve always failed diets. That’s why this is happening.”

You need someone telling you that shit is just self-loathing dressed up as reasons.

You need someone who can poke around and find out what you really need, like when I was sitting on the couch eating ice cream from guilt.

I didn’t eat ice cream because I’d failed too many diets. I ate ice cream because when I sat there, I felt guilty for asking my husband to do something that I thought I should be doing.

And I needed somebody to help me with that.

And that is what my clients did.

Because they had committed to No BS, they decided, “I’m reaching out. I might as well get that help.” It makes sense. I just need to ask these questions. Otherwise, what am I doing?

So we showed them what they needed to start adjusting, what they needed to start trying. We talked about what was really going on for each of them so that they didn’t feel like a loser. And then we could help them get through the parts where they would normally quit.

So the bottom line is really simple.

Anybody, anybody listening to the sound of my voice, if you can fog a mirror, you can become consistent when you lose weight.

But you won’t be consistent with the new ways to eat and all the other things until you do work through some shit.

You become consistent.

You aren’t just consistent right out the gate.

So what you can do is you can be consistent with getting back on track as fast as possible when you mess up. You can get consistent with reaching out for help so that you don’t quit. You can be consistent with looking at the reasons why. Why are things hard for me? Do I do a lot of self-loathing, or do I look for the real reasons?

And that is the real shit that you want to be doing in order to be consistent.

Because when you do those types of things, it is so much easier to get better and better at staying on track.

Weight loss now just becomes a simple byproduct of you doing the work of figuring out, like, these are the real reasons why it’s hard for me to stay on plan.

If you took out every self-loathing reason and you said, it can’t be a self-loathing reason. It has to be something reasonable, based in science, based in how my brain works, based in my environment, based in all the things, you’d be able to lose weight. I promise you.

So do not forget, you’re supposed to have rough patches when you’re losing weight. You are supposed to be on and off track before you get really good at being on track.

Consistency is not perfection.

Consistency is something you become. It is not something you just own.

All right, everybody. Y’all have a good one, and I’ll see you next week.