All right, welcome back.

So today, what I want to talk about is one of the things that I help a lot of my brand-new No BS women with, and that is messing up your diet, feeling like you've blown it, feeling like you've screwed everything up.

Before we get into it, I just want to say this because I think it's really important for you to hear it. I know that you try really hard when you want to lose weight. I don't want you to let anyone in the world ever tell you any different. And I know that there are people who will say, “You just need to try harder. You just need to eat less. You just need to eat healthier. You just need...” Like, it's just, “You just, you just, you just.” And it's like, no shit, Sherlock.

But I want you to think about this: this is not a “you’re not trying hard enough” problem. This is an “I’m trying really hard, but something stands in the way of me being able to do the things that I just know how to do, I just know I should do, that yes, make sense.” And if you don't understand what's in the middle of that, then you're going to spend so much time blaming yourself unnecessarily. You're going to think you're lazy. You're going to think that you don't have willpower. You're going to think you're undisciplined. You're going to think you don't want it bad enough.

And I'm just here to say, I ain't ever, number one, met a woman who wanted to lose weight and had a want-to problem. You may not want to do something in the moment, and there are really good reasons why in that moment you don't want to lose weight or you don't want to do the thing to lose weight. But overall, I guarantee you that if I stood in a booth that said, “For $100, I’ll wave my magic wand and you will have lost all of your weight,” you would be the first in line. You obviously want to.

So we do want it, and we're not lazy and stuff, but something gets in our way between “I know what to do” and “there are just times when I don't feel like I can do it. There are just times I don't want to do it. There are just times where I feel like things are in the way of me doing it.”

And I just think that's important because I do not want anybody sitting around blaming themselves, feeling like they're broken, all because they haven't learned a key piece of the puzzle.

So the reason why we're talking about all of this today is because in your first 30 days when you start a diet, even if you're restarting a brand-new one or you're restarting one that you've already done before, that first 30 days is really important. That first 30 days is the time that you probably are going to try your hardest simply because so many things are different. So the effort level does rise in that first 30 days.

So we really want to break this time down so you can use this first 30 days the right way. Because if you do it right, the next 30 days not only feel so much easier, but you find that you can keep going. And if you do it wrong in the first 30 days, you're probably going to quit, or continuing is going to feel damn near impossible.

So what I see happen all the time is women think messing up at all, especially during your first 30 days, is just wrong. So you probably think you have to follow your plan exactly right for 30 days. You leave no room for honest mistakes. Basically, you think that if you make a mistake, that's wrong, and that is why your whole diet is going to go to hell.

And that's not what actually causes a diet to go down in flames.

I'm going to give you an example. So let's say you get to the end of your day and you are just really tired. You have had a ball-busting day at work. And during this day, you happened to eat a candy bar. You grabbed a Snicker out of the vending machine at 2:00 just to push through so you could get home and get your work done.

Now, was the candy bar on your plan? No. But in the moment, you just couldn't say no. So not only were you tired as fuck, but you probably also had this little thought creeping around in your head, which is, “I just need some energy. I just need a little something so I can keep going.”

Now, I don't want to go too deep into this, but I know why you ate that candy bar. And I'm going to tell you right now, it wasn't so you could keep going and it wasn't for energy. It was likely because in that moment, your diet was the biggest threat in your life. It was standing between you and finishing your work. And we don't realize that.

Your brain's job is to constantly sit around and prioritize what is important in this moment. It doesn't give a fuck about what's important in two years, six months, three months, next week, or even tomorrow. It's like, “Right now, what is my on-fire emergency? Let me reprioritize everything quickly so that we can take care of the emergency right in front of us.”

And in the moment when you are sitting there and you're low on energy, plus you've got a deadline or you've got work that has to be done and you feel that pressure, your brain is going to prioritize eating and breaking your diet over continuing to think, “Let me manage my emotions through this. Let me remind myself that tomorrow I want to wake up proud.” Your brain doesn't give a fuck about that. It doesn't base what it's going to do in the moment on your wants, dreams, and desires.

So the reason why I wanted to go into that just a hair is because when you don't know things like that, and we don't have somebody pointing out, “Here's what's really going on under the surface so you can then change the things that really need to be changed,” guess what? You are just going to sit there and think, “I fucked up again. I didn't try hard enough.”

So let's go back to our scenario. You've had your candy bar. You're tired as fuck. You get your energy, you push through. Now it's quitting time. And you don't know that you ate that candy bar for a really deep reason. You think you're just a lazy fuck.

So now we're getting off work, and suddenly we're driving in our car. We're sitting in traffic. And we're sitting there thinking, “Well, I already fucked up today. I shouldn't have eaten that candy bar.” On top of that, you are still tired, probably still feeling stress from the day and jacked up because, you know, Cooter over here in his truck just cut you off in the turn lane, which means you're going to take an extra two minutes to get home.

If we're still this way and we are sitting in that car, guess what we're going to do? We are going to sit there all the way home and ruminate like a boss to the point that now we're stressed out about our diet. We're sitting there thinking, “I shouldn't have eaten that. I shouldn't have done that.” And when you're getting more and more amped up, when technically you should be getting more and more amped down because you're done with the day, your mind now wants to rescue you. It thinks you're in pain again. It thinks there's a big-ass problem in the room. It needs to put out that fire.

Guess what it ain't thinking about? It ain't thinking about your damn diet again.

It starts thinking about what you can eat when you walk in the door, how you've already blown it, so why even bother? Why even bother eating healthy tonight? Why even bother going through the motions of trying? Because you've already blown it.

And you start what we call sexy talk next: “Well, I can always do better tomorrow.”

So all the way home, you're just sitting around thinking about how you've already screwed up, what you can eat, and your brain's getting excited about it. And it's thinking, “That’s going to take all the pressure off. That’s going to be the fix.”

Now, all of this matters more than you think because by the time you walk in the door, guess what you're not going to be? You ain't going to be good. Because you've pre-decided all the way home and visualized what it's going to be like when you finally get to eat and feel the sweet nectar of relief.

So you walk in the door amped and prepped, ready to eat your face off. So you probably come in, and the next thing you know, you're grabbing handfuls of stuff while you cook dinner. Maybe you order in and you just order a bunch of shit you know you're going to regret tomorrow. Or you get through dinner, you do fine, and then when it's actually time to rest and lay down and watch TV, now you want to eat. Because you've already blown it. Because it won't matter. Because you can just start over tomorrow.

Now, the problem that I see, or the problem I see, is women think that the candy bar, that’s the villain. That damn Snicker. That’s what did it. “If I had just not eaten the Snicker, I’d be all right. That started everything.”

I'm going to tell you that is not true.

Sure, there are things that, inside No BS, I help my women with when it comes to candy gate. But most women don't understand that there are at least five intervention points that could be worked on that ensure you lose your weight even if you ate a candy bar. There's things to do before the candy bar. There's things to do after the candy bar. There's things you can do on the way home. There's things you can do before dinner. There's things you could do after dinner. And there's even things you can do after all the eating is done that still would set you up to lose your weight and never gain it back.

But here's the biggest place that you need to intervene, and that’s what I want to focus on right now, and that is in that car, not before the candy bar. It’s the moment when you're thinking, “I've already screwed up, so why bother?”

Because in your mind, that candy bar has ruined the whole day. It's not just a candy bar to you anymore. That candy bar now represents: “I blew it. Today’s a shot. Whoops. I’m just back at square one.”

You probably think you're supposed to go home and eat some ultra-healthy meal. But when you're only thinking that things are blown, it feels really pointless to even eat healthy. It feels really pointless to even try in the evening. If you've already screwed up, eating something healthy just doesn't seem like it's going to help.

So the real problem isn't our Snicker bar. It's that you take one mistake and you blow it way out of proportion.

So I want you to hear me clearly when I say this, because I harp on this all the time: if you want to lose weight and you want to never gain it back like I have—I’ve lost my 100 pounds, I’ve kept my 100 pounds off for years and years and years—you have to know how to make a mistake and not make it worse, not make it emotionally worse. And for God's sake, don't fucking eat over it. Because that’s what ends up being the most important thing you can do in weight loss.

Because you're going to try hard, but your trying hard stops the second you make a mistake. It is like so many women just literally throw in the towel in that moment when we don't have to. We've got to stop making basic eating mistakes a catastrophic event. One candy bar cannot keep turning into “I ruined everything.” One night of eating can't turn into “This is just like every other diet I've ever done.” One weekend of eating your face off can't erase two to three weeks of doing really well. And you've got to stop making this shit a much bigger deal than it needs to be.

And when you really look at it, a lot of this comes from crap we've learned to think over time. So when we all look back at our past diets, what we typically do is we remember that last mistake. We remember the moment we quit. And in our mind, that's what's causing everything. “If I hadn't done that, if I just hadn't done that, if I hadn't just, you know, eaten my face off on my vacation.”

We always look back and we find these moments where we just gave up, and we think it's because we made a mistake. And it's not. It's because we give up on ourselves.

One of the biggest mistakes I see women make when it comes to losing weight is when you look back, or when you make a mistake, you know what you're not looking at? You don't look at the mountain of evidence. You don't look at all the things that prove you knew what you were doing. You don't look at all the things that you were doing that were working. You don't look at all the days and all the meals and all the times that you were actually consistent. You don't think about all the times that you made small choices in the moment that were so much better than the ones you would normally make. You don't think about any of that.

You take one moment and you allow it to be the magic eraser of all the good that you've done.

And when you do that, when you don't counterbalance errors with all the things that are going right, of course the error feels way too heavy.

I want you to think about a scale. If we've got all that you did right sitting on one side and we've got your one mistake you just made dropped on the top of the other, it's not going to outweigh it. But if you don't notice the good you've been doing and you're just like, “One mistake means all that's wiped out,” of course, when you drop one mistake on a scale, boom, it's now heavy.

So we've got to stop letting one mistake overshadow everything.

And I'm just going to tell you right now, after coaching thousands of women to lose weight, here's a pattern I see: most women are not good at finding what's going right. We just gloss over all of our accomplishments. I mean, we do this everywhere. It's not just in our weight loss. We do not celebrate ourselves. We're just getting by all the time. We're always thinking we're not good enough, or we accomplished something and we're like, “Okay, good. That's over.” Off to the races to the next thing.

We are really bad about dismissing little things. We'll say that this doesn't count. This isn't good enough. I talk to women every single week who will tell me that the little things they're doing well, that's not good enough. And then they end up not even doing the little things. And I'm like, you know what's not good enough? Not doing jack shit. When you go to zero, now we're in the not-good-enough lane.

And so we've got to start acknowledging the stuff that we are doing really well. Because I just watch so many women act like the good things just don't exist if they make a mistake. And I will tell you, for a lot of my women, they don't even want to acknowledge the good things when there is no mistake.

So tell me if you've had this thought before: “If I start being proud of myself, I'm going to get too cocky. And every time I get cocky, I mess everything up.”

I can't tell you how many women I have coached in my program who've made a mistake, and I'll say, “Well, why do you think you overate last night?” “Well, I don't know, Corinne. I was feeling really good about myself. I think I just got too cocky. You know, every time I get really cocky, suddenly I make a mistake.”

It's like, this has nothing to do with you being cocky. There's this belief that acknowledging what you're doing right somehow leads you to screwing it all up, that if you feel good about yourself, that's even a problem. “I shouldn't feel good about myself when I'm losing weight. That's really dangerous. That's just going to make me eat.”

But that's not what's actually happening.

What's actually happening is you're going to have days when you're tired. You're going to have long days of work. You're going to have stress. And that's why you might eat a candy bar, just like in our story. I don't care if you had three good weeks before that and you felt proud as a fucking rooster in a henhouse full of chickens. Eating a candy bar wasn't because somehow you were just too cocky. It's not. It was because I had a long day. It was very stressful. Deep down, I was afraid that if I didn't get my work done, something bad was going to happen. So you ate not only to feel better, but you ate to prevent something bad from happening. And if you felt better, guess what? You would sit down and keep working.

But instead of looking at it like that, you probably take eating a candy bar and turn it into, “See, I knew I couldn't lose weight. See, every time I get cocky, every time I start believing in myself, something bad happens. I mess up every time.”

That's not what's happening.

I am telling you right now, cockiness, being proud of yourself, and acknowledging your wins doesn't cause the mistakes. There are really good reasons why they're happening, and we've got to get good at finding those. Because it just so happens that mistake was coming whether you ate like a jackass before or not.

When you believe in yourself, when you are proud of what's going on, what really happens is when you make a mistake, it's like you go from feeling like a level 10 to feeling like a 2. It feels dramatic, but that doesn't mean it is. It means that between the mistake and feeling like the level 2, you talked like shit to yourself. You didn't diagnose why you ate in a way that will help you lose weight. You diagnosed it as being lazy, lacking willpower, not trying hard enough, can't lose your weight, “I always fail,” “Nothing ever works for me.” That is why it felt terrible.

Now, if we are a level 10 on our belief and we are a level 10 on feeling really good, like, “Oh my God, I'm on such a roll,” and then we make a mistake and we say, “I wonder what was happening. Let me look at that day. Oh my gosh, I see it now. I was really tired and stressed out. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to get my work done. And I thought a candy bar would help. So I need to figure out: how do I get tired, stressed, and have a lot of pressure on myself and not need to eat over it? That's what I should probably solve.”

Now we feel very aware. We're not feeling hopeless. We're not feeling dejected. We don't go from a 10 to a 2. Now we probably go from a 10 to about a 7. And it allows us to be able to keep believing in ourselves, to keep feeling good. Because I promise you, weight loss happens a lot easier and a lot smoother when you're not beating the shit out of yourself over mistakes.

So we have to watch out because very often we're doing a lot of right things, and then one thing goes wrong and suddenly we say nothing that we're doing right counts anymore. “I was too cocky. This one moment, in an instant, erases everything that I've been doing.”

And this is where your typical diets are failing you. Because these diets out there and all their bullshittery, they are not teaching you anything about this stuff. They don't slow things down. They don't slow down the moments when we're tired and stressed and turn to food. And they don't help you see, “This is what's really happening.”

You need to know these things so you can feel some relief that there are good reasons why food mistakes happen. Because if you don't, you just feel at fault. You feel weak, lazy, broken, and defeated.

Diets typically, what do they do? They’re handing us a damn plan. They're telling us what to eat and what not to eat and when to eat. And that's about it. They don't talk about what happens when you're tired. They don't talk about what happens when your day is long. They don't talk about what happens after you eat a candy bar. And they don't talk about what happens when you don't follow all the rules perfectly.

They just want you to get right back on track without diagnosing, without looking at things. We need to figure out why this happened. We need to figure out new ways to handle it. And that way, in the future, we're not having as many of these things happen. We're not getting triggered as often. In the moments, we can slow down and be like, “Oh, the last time this happened, I learned that this means blah.”

That is how you're going to lose weight.

We do not want you messing up anymore, no matter how big or how small. And the only thing that a diet has taught you is to just suffer and wonder what the hell happened.

And this is one of the things that's really important: a lot of times when we make mistakes, it starts triggering questions that feel awful in our brain. We will think things like, “Why can't I do this? Why do I always do this? What is wrong with me? Why do I always fail?”

And your inner voice, who can either help you or sabotage you, guess what? The inner voice is what's answering these questions. And this is another thing that no diet is ever telling you. So it's no wonder you feel like you can't lose weight.

You see, when your brain hears a question, it is just like AI. It is just like Google. If you have a question swirling around in your head, your mind is going to give you an answer. Its job is to take a question and go out and get something. Just like Google: you type it in the bar, its job is to go out there and get you information. AI: you ask it a question, its job is to go out and bring you information back.

And your brain will do the same based on the quality of question you're asking.

And your brain doesn't care about your feelings. It's not trying to protect you. It's not going to try to be nice. It is literally just responding to the exact question you ask. That's its only job.

So if you ask, “Why can't I do this?” it will give you all the reasons why you can't. If you ask, “What's wrong with me?” it will give you answers based on your level of self-esteem. And you probably now are going to feel worse. You're going to feel more hopeless. It's going to feel more true that you're the problem.

And none of this is being talked about in diets. It breaks my heart.

I promise you, every woman listening to the sound of my voice, you have got plenty of plans. You know what the healthy foods are. You probably have tips, tricks, and tactics coming out your ass, saved in your Instagram. You probably got shit everywhere. And that's not our problem.

The problem is we don't understand what's going on for us when we're making those eating mistakes. We don't understand what's triggering it. We don't understand why we're doing this. And again, I cannot stress this enough: there are always really good, solvable reasons why it's happening.

So if something doesn't go the way you wanted, guess what? You don't know what to do with that if diets aren't teaching it to you. And then we're just left to make it mean such awful bullshit about ourselves.

So if you really look at this and you've really listened to what I'm saying, you can see that it makes total sense why you would think it is your fault every time you screw up your diet. Because if someone wants to hand you a plan right now and the only rule is basically “follow this,” then yeah, if you don't follow it and you don't know why you're not following it and they're not telling you, much less telling you how to fix that stuff, you're only left with a default choice, which is, “Well, it must be me.”

And I don't want you thinking that you're the problem anymore. I really don't want that for you because it's not what's happening. What's actually happening is you were never given the full picture in the first place.

So I want you to think about it like this. If I gave you a 10-piece puzzle and told you I'd give you a million dollars if you finished it, and I will even give you a whole day to do it, I bet you'd be like, “Sign me fucking up. This is going to be simple. I'm fixing to collect my million dollars from Corinne. Hallelujah.”

So if I quietly, though, held back two or three of the pieces and kept them in my pocket and didn't give them to you, it would not matter how hard you tried. It wouldn't matter how bad you wanted it. It wouldn't matter if you had a thousand reasons why it's important to you. None of that would matter. It wouldn't even matter how long you sat there. You could work all day on it and all night. You would not be able to finish that puzzle.

And right there, that is what dieting is for most women. We get a puzzle from our diets, and they hold back important pieces. They're only telling you what to eat, what not to eat, and when to eat. But they're not giving you the pieces for when you're tired, when you're stressed, when you just want to eat a candy bar to push through, when your day doesn't go as planned. When they're not giving you the help you need in those areas, it's just like getting a puzzle that you can't solve because you're not getting all the pieces.

So what I would love for you to do this week is I want you to think about the diets that you have followed in the past. I want you to think about why that diet didn't work. I want you to write about what is their fault, not what's your fault. This whole exercise is about you looking at the diets now instead of only assaulting yourself.

So don't sit there and say, “I'm a loser who doesn't try hard enough.” I want you to think about what's missing from normal diets that you have followed and why that could be the real reason you just aren't losing weight.

It's really hard, I promise you, to pick the right plan for you if you don't know what you really need. And I think this exercise will help you not only see that you've never been to blame, but it's also going to help you see, “Holy shit, this is the stuff I actually need help with.” And if nothing else, it'll save you time and money from picking diets that are never going to meet your needs.

All right, have a good week.