All right, welcome back everybody. Today we're going to be talking about why I don't weigh in after vacations.

Now, this is important because, number one, I get this question a lot. People are always asking me, “What do you do with the scale? How do you not gain weight on vacation? Do you weigh in after vacation?” I'm going to tell y’all right now, most people are going to gain some weight on vacation.

Number two, I would never weigh after vacation, and that is what this whole podcast is all about. It's important because I see too many women come back from vacation, and the very first thing they do is just hop on that scale. And I'm going to tell you right now, most of the time it's going to be up.

Not all the time. I'm not saying that you have to go on vacation and eat your face off, and I'm not saying that you have to go on vacation and diet. All I'm saying is that there are a lot of reasons why the scale is going to be up, and some of it ain't going to have anything to do with how you ate.

I want all of you to pay attention to this podcast because I do not want people coming back from vacation anymore, hopping on the scale, and then letting that number decide how you remember your vacation. Because, number one, it's going to taint your vacation.

If the scale goes up, what do we start doing? We start thinking about all the shit we ate. We start thinking, I wish I hadn't done that. We start attaching all kinds of shitty memories to our vacation instead of just remembering that we had a fucking good time. And we don't need to be doing that.

Now, the second reason is what I was saying earlier. When you come home, there are a million things that can affect the scale. If you fly, you're probably going to be up at least a couple of pounds for a few days. That has everything to do with things like altitude, dehydration, your body holding on to water, and then when you rehydrate, your weight is going to be all over the place.

It does not necessarily mean that you gained any fat while you were on vacation, but your ass gets on the scale and thinks any time it goes up, it must be fat. There's just no way it could be anything else. Y’all got to get your mind right on the scale. That scale can go up for a lot of reasons, and if you understand that, you will not sit there and think you are a fat fuck who is hopeless and can't lose weight.

If you do not get your ass—or your head out of your ass—about it and start thinking about the scale more factually, you’re going to be a miserable bitch for the rest of your life.

So if you fly again, this could be like—I can tell you right now, when I fly, especially if I fly for more than three hours, which very often I'm flying from one coast to the other, when I get there, my ankles are swelled. And I've been in maintenance for almost 19 years now, and I still hold on to water. When I get home, I'm the same way. I'm retaining water. I know that it wasn't because if I went—even if I ate my face off for seven days—the likelihood of me gaining so much weight, that I gained a lot of fat, and that it was going to be so hard to work off is slim to none.

And that is all of us. Nobody's overweight because they vacation so much every year that they gained 50 pounds. If you look at all of the weight that you've gained, I guarantee you 10% of it came from vacation. Ninety percent of it happens at night, happens in your car after work, happens in the break room when you're stressed, happens on the couch when you've had a long day, happens on the weekend when you're tired as fuck and you don't want to do nothing but order pizza.

Focus on that shit, y’all. Quit making vacation seem like the end-all, be-all.

Now, same thing can happen with long car rides. Your body can hold on to water. Same thing with the sodium. Some things are just richer foods. When we're on vacation, I know me, I tend to eat things like—I’ll eat some fried stuff. I will just eat some stuff and even have alcohol that naturally is going to make me retain more water.

So a lot of women don't actually even gain weight on vacation. They just have a lot of fluid retention, and then they freak the fuck out over it when they get home, ruin their whole vacation in their memories, and then probably eat their face off for that week, thinking, “I've blown it. I always do this. The second I lose a little weight, I just gain it back. Why do I even bother?” Y’all gotta watch yourselves.

This is one of the reasons why you probably ought to be working with me and No BS so I can take that head and pull it straight out of your ass so that you are not sitting there sabotaging the shit out of yourself. I bet a lot of you who are listening right now don't even realize how often you're sabotaging yourself.

Now, this is the big one. This is number three. This is the one I care about the most, and I want you to hear the most. When you hop on that scale after vacation, you are not focused on what matters the most. It does not matter what you weigh when you get home. I promise you.

You know what matters? What matters is how fast after vacation you are going to get back to your normal routine. I'm going to say it again. What matters most is how fast you are at getting back to a normal routine when you get home. That is it. That is everything.

So what I do when I come home from vacation is I don't get on the scale. I usually give myself an equal amount of time. What this means is, this is my rule that you can use: however long you were on vacation, if you took a 14-day vacation, which God love you, I wish I could, then you're gonna take 14 days before you weigh in. You take a seven-day vacation, you're gonna do seven. You go for three, you can't weigh in for three days. Equal time. That is the easiest rule that you can follow.

So you're gonna give yourself that many days at home before you actually weigh in so that we can see what really happened, if anything. So during those days, you know what your number one job is? Get back to your normal routine. Then you earn the right to see where you are at, because now you're going to know what's actually going on. Because most of the time, even if you did gain anything, you're back down to like a half a pound, maybe a pound or two pounds max, not the five pounds that your brain told you you must have gained while you were on vacation.

Now, I have been doing this for years. When I first started losing weight, we would go on vacation a couple of times a year, and Chris and I, we loved going to Las Vegas. And when I say we went to Vegas, I mean our happy asses pulled up two chairs in the poker room for 12 to 14 hours a day, and we grinded at the poker table. We ate at the table. Most days we were eating poker room food, which means it was grilled cheese and fries or fish and chips and fries, and that was all we ate around the clock. And then we'd have dessert for dinner most of the time. When we knew we were getting ready to leave, we'd order dessert, we would eat it in the room, and we'd go straight to bed. Sometimes we even drank alcohol. Sometimes we didn't. And that was our entire week.

And guess what else I didn't do? I didn't drink water hardly at all at a poker table. Why? Because I didn't want to have to get up and go to the bathroom and miss a hand. So I knew I was going to come back home loaded with salt from fish and chips and fries and not drinking my damn water.

So the first time, though, we did this trip, and I'm going to tell you, it's a lot of fun. We love to play our poker. But the first time I came home and weighed right after that, I about shit my pants. I was up seven pounds. Seven.

And I will tell you, that first time, it really fucked with my head because I'm like, there is no way I ate seven pounds’ worth of food. But then when I looked at it, I was like, well, I don't know. I sat all week. I didn't drink much water because I didn't want to get up and go to the bathroom. I was swollen as hell. And I remember thinking, okay, if I'm up seven pounds in a week, the best thing I can do is to not freak out and to not make this any worse than it is. The best thing I can do is know I'm going to get back to what I was doing before vacation as fast as humanly possible.

So I told myself, in seven days, I'm gonna weigh and I'm going to see what happens. Seven days later, guess what? Without suffering, starving, and doing donkey shit, I was back to my normal weight. And that taught me something so important. I didn't need the scale to tell me if I did good or bad on vacation. All I really needed was to go on vacation and know that I will always have a plan for when I get home, and I will not weigh in until I've executed the plan for an equal amount of time.

What's the best lesson I ever learned? And I had to learn that lesson in a freak-out moment, which all of you need to be doing. When you're freaking out, you need to be like, “And what is the lesson here?” Because it's not that—it would have been easy for me to say, “Well, you're a loser. You're just gonna gain all your weight back.”

Now, it's not that I didn't think those things. It's just I finally knew. I was like, “Corinne, that is not what's happening. That is just my head, my inner bitch voice attacking me because she's so afraid that I'm going to regain my weight. She's like, ‘Oh my God, this is like every other time.’” I'm like, “No, it's not like every other time. This is different because this time I'm not going to keep freaking out. You know what's different about this time? I'm making a plan. And you know what's different about this time? I'm going to do the plan. I'm going to give myself some time, and then I'm going to see what happens. Then if I want to freak out, then I get to. But not until then. Not freaking out until we have done some work on getting back to our routine.”

It was the best gift I ever gave myself.

So nowadays, I just don't go there anymore. I don't ever sit and have to deal with thinking I've gained all my weight, I've gained too much weight, I was bad, I shouldn't have done all that on vacation. Now I just come home and I just get back into routine. I now have proven to myself I can go on vacation, I can make choices, I can come home, I can make other choices, and everything's going to work out in the end as long as I'm patient and I do not freak out. And if I catch myself freaking out, I remind myself I don't need to do that. Freaking out doesn't help, but getting back on plan always does. It's a guaranteed winner.

So the other thing that happens is when you don't jump on the scale, it's going to lower your stress. It's going to lower your anxiety. It lowers that fear that you're going to gain all your weight back.

So let's talk about what I actually do when I'm on vacation and when I get home, because I think this is important, and I know a lot of you like to know what I do. So feel free to steal, rob, and borrow anything that I tell you.

So the first thing is, when I go on vacation, I make sure that I decide: do I want to work out or not? If I don't want to work out on vacation, I don't work out on vacation. If I want to work out on vacation, I will. But I have some factors that I use.

Number one, if I'm staying at a hotel that has a really cool gym—so every now and then I go to cities where I'm at a convention or something, and we're at a big hotel and they have nice gyms—I actually want to work out in them because they're new and exciting and they have things I don't have, and I like to try new things. Plus, if I'm on some kind of trip where there's a little work involved, a lot of times for me, exercising on those days helps me pay attention more.

Now, if I'm just going for pure relaxation and I want to sleep in and stuff, I don't. I'm like, I am not going to no gym. I am not going to work out. I don't need to. I do plenty of that when I'm at home.

Now, every now and then, though, I will go to cities where I want to walk around. I want to see things. I want to explore. That's a great trip for me to take walks and stuff. I remember one trip Chris and I took to New Orleans, and I got up because Chris hates sightseeing. All he wanted to do was go to—I forget why we were in New Orleans, but we went to Harrah’s to play poker. I do remember that part. But we were there for a reason. I was at a little speaking thing, and we had made it like a little couple trip.

Well, he ain't gonna want to go and look at nothing. That is just my husband. So I woke up really early that morning, put on my walking shoes, and I walked for two hours around the city. I took selfies. I saw all kinds of stuff. I ate a beignet. I did all the things. That is worth it.

I've been to cities where they have hiking trails, or I have stayed in cities where the hotel is really close to a lake with a really lovely path. Those are fun exercise moments. But when I'm on vacation, I'm not planning workouts unless it's going to add to my life. So you just decide ahead of time what you want to do about that.

Now, the other thing that I do is I decide what kind of eating I'm gonna be doing on that vacation. I ask myself, “Corinne, is this gonna be an eating vacation?” Sometimes it's a yes. Like, I know there's gonna be amazing food. There's gonna be all kinds of opportunities to go out to eat, and I'm gonna want to enjoy it. So I just plan like this is an eating vacation. I'm gonna eat things that I really want.

Or is this a vacation where it's kind of more in the middle? There's a few occasions to eat something special, but breakfast is never going to be special. Like, if we're staying at a Holiday Inn Express or something and they got the free breakfast, I'm going to eat something healthy. I'm not going to sit there and splurge on the pancake machine just because we're at the Holiday Inn Express. That's a no.

So I make sure that it's worth it. So a lot of times I just think ahead about, is this an eating vacation or not? Is this a middle-of-the-road one or not? So I can get it clear in my head intentionally: food-wise, what do I want out of this vacation?

And then I also make some simple agreements with myself, and I literally write them down or I put them in my Notes app so I don't forget them. Anytime you write something down or you put it in your Notes app, you are triggering your brain to say, “This is really important.” I've taken it out of my mind. I've put it into something. Your brain is going to breathe a sigh of relief, like, “Oh, we've made some decisions.” And then it's probably going to remember them. Just thinking about it and never putting it down on paper or anything, your brain doesn't tend to remember it. It just bypasses all that shit.

So the simple agreements that I make with myself are: I don't eat out of bread baskets. I just don't do that on vacations. If we go out, I'm always going to decide, am I going to have drinks or am I going to have dessert? So when I go to a restaurant, I ask them to bring the dessert menu first because I want to know, is there a good dessert on this menu that's going to be worth it? I don't want to find out that there's an amazing dessert at the end of the meal that I'm going to really want after I've had drinks, appetizers, a salad, probably some steak or something, and then I'm busted-ass full, and then I'm going to want the dessert, and then I'm going to be miserable.

I don't like doing that. I like to stay very comfortable. I don't care if I'm eating rich foods. I just don't want to be vomiting or threatening somebody's eyesight because the button on my pants is going to fly off because I ate so much and put their eye out. So I decide: drinks or dessert. But I don't do both.

And then if I know I'm going to have dessert, I know that everything leading up to it—I might not have a salad. I might skip the appetizers, or I might just have a few bites. It gives me an idea of the pace. And then if there's no dessert that I like, that's easy. Now I might have an appetizer I'm going to really enjoy. Now I might have drinks that I really enjoy. I just think through it.

Nothing is off limits, but I just love optionality. I love optionality. I love that I give myself freedom and options, and I'm never sitting around thinking, “I'll never get to have this. I rarely get to eat these things. It’s a once in a lifetime.” But there is nothing in the world that is a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

Now, I might go somewhere super special and just decide, hey, this is one of those times that I'm so glad that I use hunger and enough and that I live my life saying there are no bad foods. Because this may be a time that I might want to eat foods I don't normally eat at home, and it may be a time where I might want to eat a little bit more than I normally do. But I'm thinking the whole time. I'm doing it for my own good. I'm not sitting there restricting, depriving, feeling unfair, and then flipping right to the other side because I don't want to feel like shit on vacations. I'm like, “Fuck it. I'll just deal with it when I get home.” And then the next thing I know, I'm blackout eating for seven days. No.

I love that I have become someone who is always telling myself, “You always take care of yourself. You have become someone who takes care of yourself.” If you're not there yet listening to this, you need to start practicing that now. You need to start thinking about, hey, when I'm on vacation, I need to practice the idea of, I'm the kind of person that watches out for me, that takes care of me, that plans for me so that this person gets to have fun, gets to have options, and also gets to go home feeling so good about herself. That's how we lose weight, ladies.

So I also think through the day. I’ll ask Chris first thing in the morning—or if I'm traveling with a girlfriend, be like, “Hey, what do you think we're going to do? You think we're going to go out for lunch and dinner? What are you thinking?” And a lot of times they want to make reservations and do fancy things for dinner. That means for me, I'm like, okay, well, for breakfast and lunch, I'm probably going to order more like salads and fruits and proteins and stuff like that, and that way at dinner, I will eat richer things.

Not because I can't eat rich things at three meals a day, but it's very rare that I'm on a vacation where I want to eat heavy meals three times a day. I just know me. I don't feel good physically when I do that. A lot of times when I'm on vacation, we're going and we're doing things, and I don't want to feel food-hungover all the time. That doesn't mean I eat tasteless shit, but it might mean if I have breakfast, I'm not going to order the French toast, but I might order eggs and one pancake. I might order things I enjoy, but I'm not just like a bucket. I'm just going to order all the things because I'm on vacation and I don't want to deal with it.

When y’all say, “I'm on vacation and I don't want to deal with it,” let me tell you what that is. That is literally code for “dealing with it” means I talk to myself like an asshole. I say things like, “I shouldn't have that. I can't have this. I hope I don't gain weight,” blah, blah, blah. If you degrade yourself, if you command yourself, if you talk to yourself like an asshole, that is what you don't want to deal with. You have a choice. You don't have to talk to yourself that way. You can catch it and change it.

That is what I teach inside my program all the time. Y’all think losing weight is all these tips. These tips are only as good as your mindset that backs it up. Most people listening to this podcast, you are never, ever going to get your mind on board with my amazing simple tips. Your mind is kind of mean. It's an inner critic. It's loaded with diet mentality. It's got so many rules and so many things that it's throwing at you all the time, and you don't know how to reprogram it. You need someone like me who can help you with that so that you can take all these fucking tips I give you that sound so like, “This sounds so easy. This sounds so reasonable. This sounds amazing. I'm going to do it the next time I go on vacation. This is what I'm going to do when I get home.”

And guess what? The moment you get there, you don't remember shit about what I said. And if you do remember, you've got the flying monkey of inner critic coming in, making everything feel harder than it is. And that is why you can't do those things.

So the other thing that I do when I'm on vacation, I often bring snacks so I'm not stuck in the room eating the minibar. I have my own snacks. Number one, they're cheaper, just saying. But number two, a lot of times we're caught in situations where we're in the room and you're hungry and you're not going to be eating for a while, and I don't want the only option to be the M&Ms in the snack bar. I'm going to have protein bars or fruit or whatever.

A lot of times when I go on trips also, I order a Shipt. I have fresh fruit brought. I have nuts and protein bars and beef jerky and just bananas and different things that are really healthy, that are easy to eat.

So the last, the biggest thing is my mindset about vacation. I just don't want to feel like shit while I'm on vacation. So I make wise choices for myself, and then in between all of it, guess what I'm doing? Wagging water around with me, definitely trying to get my sleep, and I'm also using hunger and enough—everything I teach you in this podcast.

So this is the important part: going home. I plan. On the last day of vacation, I make a plan for the first three days that I'm home. I put my workouts on the calendar. I write them down. I put down what time I'm going to go and what I'm actually going to do so that I'm not having to decide, “Do I want to go work out? Do I have time?” None of that shit. I make all the decisions so my brain doesn't even have to think about it. It's easier to execute if I've made a plan. If I don't have a plan, all of my excuses are a lot easier. They just come up so much easier.

Then the other thing is I handle the food. So most of the time we come back, guess what? We ain't got no food in the house. So if we ain't got no food in the house, I'm probably going to start ordering pizza. I'm going to start ordering Uber Eats, crap like that. Well, I just spent a whole week probably eating rich food and stuff. I want to get back to eating some healthier stuff. So I make it as easy as possible.

So what I do is things like I will run to the store and buy bagged salads, rotisserie chicken, fruit, yogurt, all kinds of stuff that takes zero effort to do. Because when you get home, remember, you're going to have laundry and work and life all standing there staring you in the face, and you are not going to want to be Martha Stewart preparing some fine-ass five-course meal. So I make things easy.

Sometimes I order a Shipt. I will literally be at the airport waiting on luggage, and I'm ordering a Shipt to bring everything to the house so that when I get home, it's all just sitting on the porch. Sometimes I dump my husband's ass off at the front door and I say, “Get the luggage unloaded. I'm going to the grocery store. I'm going to get all the simple stuff.” And I make the simple-stuff list on the airplane or in the car. I have a plan. And I just make sure that I get three days knocked out, because I always find that about after day three, I'm ready to increase the load of my cooking if I'm going to be cooking.

So the other two things that I do are I make sure that I hydrate, hydrate, hydrate, because most of the time when I've been on vacation, I'm probably underhydrated due to the travel or we're in a hot climate, whatever it is. And I get caught up on sleep because sometimes on vacation, especially if we go to Vegas, I come home and I'm a little sleep-deprived. So I make sure that my ass is in bed early. I also make sure that I get a good night's sleep because I'm usually behind on both.

And that's it.

And this is the part where I'm going to say something that some of you are probably not going to love, but it's true. If you come home from vacation, step on the scale, freak out, and then eat like shit for three days, the problem isn't that losing weight is so hard. The problem is you're making losing weight harder than it needs to be because you don't come home with a plan other than hop on the scale and freak out.

Just listening to this podcast is typically not enough for a lot of you, like I was saying earlier, because hearing me say all this is one thing, but actually being able to do it in the moment is a whole other thing. And being able to do it in the moment is all going to depend on: do you have somebody helping you work through all the bullshit that comes up for you? If you don't, you're going to be one of those people who says, “I know what to do. I mean, I'm listening to your podcast. I heard you say it. But when it came time to do it, Corinne, I just didn't do it. It felt so hard. I was so upset with myself. I was so overwhelmed when I got home.”

You need help with this, y’all. If you're sitting there camped out on my podcast and you love everything I say, but you ain't seeing the scale go down alongside it, you definitely need to be on the inside so I can connect the hidden dots. You ain't ever going to be able to connect on your own listening to one fucking measly podcast every week.

So what we want to do is we want to become the kind of woman who knows how to come back from vacation and be there for herself. She's not freaking out because the scale is up.

So here's what I want you to do: stay the fuck off the scale when you come home. Don't weigh in until you've been home as many days as you were gone. And during that time, your job is very simple. Get your sleep, drink your water, make things as easy as possible, and just eat like a normal human again. That is it.

And then just remind yourself: this is what it's like to lose weight the way you're going to live your life. I don't ever teach you anything in this podcast that we just can't do for the rest of our life. I like to keep it all so simple and common sense for a reason. It won't be hard to implement, but things are easy to implement when what's going on in your head doesn't get in the way. And that is my specialty.

All right. Go on your vacations. Enjoy the shit out of them. Come home and just get back to your routine. That's how we're going to lose weight and keep it off.

I will see y’all next week.