Welcome back, everybody.

Today I want to talk to the woman who thinks she's given up on losing weight.

If you're the person who's sitting there, who's decided, "I'm just going to be fat the rest of my life. I might as well get used to this," I'm talking to you today.

Here's the thing. You feel like you gave up, but I don't actually think you did.

Because if you'd really given up, you wouldn't still be asking your friends, "Hey, how'd you lose all that weight?" You wouldn't still slow down when the latest diet pops up on your news feed. And guess what? You sure as hell wouldn't be sitting here listening to me on this podcast.

You see, I don't think the wanting has ever left you.

What actually happened is that you got really, really good at talking yourself out of losing weight.

Every time the topic of losing weight comes up, you've got an answer ready, like, "Why bother? You can't do it anyway. You always fail. Just accept it."

So you shut down before you get your hopes up again.

That's not a woman who gave up, okay? That's a woman who's gotten really good at talking herself off the ledge, and she thinks she's given up.

You see, you're a woman who probably still wants to lose weight, and somewhere along the way, you just stopped believing that you're allowed to lose weight—that you can lose weight.

And that's a big difference.

By the end of this podcast, I think you're going to feel a little different about whether or not you can lose weight. Then you can decide whether you should get your hopes up. You can decide if you want to try again. You can decide if you're like, "You know what? No. I've really decided it is not for me, and I'm going to be truly and genuinely happy with where I'm at."

Before we go any further, though, I want you to know this is for you no matter how old you are or how long you've been trying to lose weight.

I think this is really important to say because you might be 40 and just flat-out exhausted from 20 years of trying to lose weight. Or maybe you're in your 60s and you've decided that your best years for losing weight are behind you.

Or maybe you're somewhere in the middle. Maybe you've got kids and a job and a hundred people who need you, and losing weight always falls to the bottom of a long-ass to-do list.

So wherever you are, if you're feeling hopeless, or like, "Why bother?" when it comes to trying again, or like, "This is just how it's going to be," then I really want you to know that I wrote this podcast for you.

Let's talk about how you even got here.

Because no woman wakes up one day and says, "You know what? Today's the day. I'm done. I'm never, ever going to think about losing weight again."

It took a lot of trying, a lot of getting your hopes up, and having them stomped on before you finally started talking yourself out of the idea that you could lose weight.

The first thing we've got to talk about is just how many times you've actually tried.

You've done diet after diet after diet.

Some of them didn't work at all.

Some of them worked. You lost some weight—maybe even a lot of weight.

And then what happened?

It all came roaring back, plus some.

Every time that happened, it was like dying by a thousand cuts.

There's a study—I think it was done at Stanford—that said by the time a woman turns 40, she's tried to lose weight, on average, 140 times.

One hundred and forty.

So by the time you're in your 50s and 60s, you've got decades of diets that didn't work piled up on your back.

And each one that goes to shit is like it says, "See? When you try, you just get hurt."

So of course you feel hopeless. Of course you've lost belief.

Anybody would.

But I need you to really hear me right now because this is the thing that changes everything.

You did not fail 140 times because something is wrong with you.

You failed because every one of those 140 diets was missing the same things.

They were never going to work.

Not for you.

Not for me.

And not for most women.

You can't lose at something 140 times and not start thinking you're the problem.

But I promise everybody who's listening to this: you were never the problem.

You just kept getting handed diets that were missing the key pieces—learning how to have a bad day without needing to eat over it, figuring out why, when you do really well for a while, you suddenly sabotage yourself.

Those diets weren't helping you with the real stuff you needed.

But like all women, instead of holding them accountable, instead of holding them responsible for giving you a half-assed plan, what did you do?

You took the blame.

You figured it must somehow be your fault.

It's crazy how socialized women are to take the blame for stuff that isn't even theirs.

So repeat after me:

"Those failed diets aren't my fault."

I always like to tell people, "Please say, 'Not my fault.'"

And I'm not talking down to you from some skinny little pedestal over here where I've already lost my weight.

Don't ever forget—I was 250 fucking pounds.

I had dieted for over 30 years.

I was the woman who had absolutely gotten to the point where I'd given the fuck up.

I had decided that this was just my life now.

I was going to be the fat girl forever, and all the trying in the world wasn't going to fix shit.

So why keep setting myself up to feel like ass again?

I know that hopeless, "Why bother?" place.

Because I lived it most of my life.

So when I tell you the problem was never you, I'm not guessing, and I'm not blowing smoke up your ass to make you feel better. I'm telling you what I figured out the hard way after three decades of beating the hell out of myself over diets that were built to fail me from the start.

I want you to think about it.

Every single one of those diets had you counting calories, cutting out foods, and weighing everything like you were making meth in a garage lab.

Not one of them ever sat down with you and dealt with why you eat when you're not even hungry.

Not one of them taught you a damn thing about how your brain works, like I talked about in the last podcast. Nothing about your habits. Nothing about why you eat your feelings.

They handed you a little meal plan and a pat on the ass for luck.

That's like somebody handing you a screen door for a fucking submarine and then standing there going, "Well, why are you all wet?"

That diet was never going to work for you.

You could be the hardest-working, most determined woman God ever made on this green earth, and you're still going to get soaked because the screen door on your submarine has a bunch of little holes in it for water to get in.

And then, on top of all that, the older you get, the more everybody starts blaming your metabolism.

"It must be your age."

"It's menopause."

"Your metabolism's shot, honey."

"It's all downhill from here."

And I've got to tell you, after coaching thousands of women, that is mostly a load of bullshit.

I know you're probably thinking, "You don't know me, Corinne."

Well, bitch, I do know you.

Short of a medical diagnosis, you need to hear me out.

I've had so many women come to No BS absolutely convinced it's their metabolism. It's their age. It's the change.

And you know what we find damn near every single time?

It ain't the metabolism.

It's the emotional eating they don't even know they're doing.

We take that one thing away. We fix the emotional eating. We get back to the simple fucking basics that I teach women to lose weight.

And guess what?

The weight starts coming off.

We don't change anything else.

We don't have magic elixirs.

We don't have magic food plans.

We aren't handing out calorie prescriptions.

Same age.

Same body.

Same hormones.

And guess what?

We just removed the thing nobody ever told them was the real problem.

So let me tell you exactly how that metabolism lie gets built, because I know you've probably been thinking this for way too long.

You go on one of these diets where you're eating, what, 1,200 or 1,400 calories a day?

You're basically starving your ass off, eating less than what a three-year-old needs to survive.

And it works for a week or two.

The scale moves.

You're feeling good about yourself.

You're thinking, "Maybe this is it. I feel motivated, Corinne."

And then you hit a week where the scale just sits there, crosses its arms, and says, "Not this week, hussy."

It doesn't move a damn ounce.

And because you've been fighting every urge to eat like you're recreating the movie Fight Club, that stall scares the shit out of you.

It frustrates you.

You think, "See? Nothing works."

You freak out.

You get pissed that you're working so hard with nothing to show for it.

So what do you do?

Well, you immediately do what you're not supposed to do.

You eat your face off.

Because that's going to work.

You go have a big blowout meal because, if we aren't losing weight, we might as well eat what we want.

That is not a metabolism problem.

That is impatience, combined with talking to yourself like an asshole until you emotionally eat just to feel better about the scale not going down.

Now look, if that sounds remotely familiar—if you're the type who eats when you feel like shit, when you're disappointed in the scale, disappointed in yourself, disappointed in life...

If you're the kind of person who pops things into your mouth saying, "A little won't hurt. I worked out today."

I could go on and on.

If any of that sounds like you, that is not your metabolism.

When you do things like that, your metabolism is far from broken.

Your truth-telling is broken.

That goes for my menopause ladies, too.

Stop blaming that if you're still emotionally eating.

Now, you don't need to blame yourself.

You just need to know this:

Until you know the actual problem, how the fuck are you ever going to apply the right solution?

Because you aren't.

I'm not saying menopause doesn't affect hormones or that things don't happen.

But so many women are emotionally eating throughout menopause.

Until you work on that, and until you fix that, don't blame everything else before you fix what's really going on.

So no, your metabolism is probably not broken.

What really happened is that you were doing two brutal things to yourself at the exact same time.

You were starving your body on that toddler diet of yours.

And guess what?

Your body demanded food.

That's exactly what a starved body is supposed to do.

At the same time, you ripped away the eating that had been the only way you knew how to get through hard days.

The only way you knew how to comfort yourself.

The only way you knew how to relax.

The only way you knew how to feel good.

And what did you do?

You didn't put anything in its place.

So now you've got a body begging for food because it's starving...

...and you've got a woman with no way to cope with life outside of food.

All happening at the same time.

You created a perfect storm.

And nobody on this earth can do that for very long.

So of course you broke.

You're supposed to break every single time.

What you're not supposed to do is take all of that and call it a broken metabolism or menopause, when really it was just starvation with no support.

Nobody teaching you how to talk to yourself when the scale doesn't cooperate.

Nobody teaching you how to be kind to yourself in the moments when you feel worried, anxious, overwhelmed, busy, or tired.

That is not your body failing you.

That's a setup that was always going to blow up right in your face.

And I want you to think about that stall week for a second because it just pisses me off what we do to ourselves.

You did everything right.

You probably ate your sad little bit of food.

You were probably white-knuckling your way through all the urges.

And the scale just sat there for one week.

The scale stalling is the most normal thing in the world.

It happens to every single person who's ever lost weight, multiple times while they're losing it.

It means your body is working on the weight loss you'll probably see in a few days.

But nobody ever tells you how the scale really works or what your body's actually doing.

So when the scale doesn't move, you read it like a verdict.

You think your body isn't working.

You think something's wrong with you.

You think you're broken.

You think you're wasting your time.

And that's the week you crack.

Not because you're weak, but because you've been running on fumes, and now your own scale just told you the suffering isn't even going to pay off.

So who the hell wouldn't give in under all that pressure?

That's not a willpower problem.

That's a human being acting exactly like a human being is going to act.

And it was for damn sure never your metabolism or your menopause.

So I need you to look at your whole track record of dieting a little differently.

All those things you keep calling failures—that big old pile of evidence you've been using to prove to yourself that you can't do this—that is not proof that you can't lose weight.

It's proof that you never once got a fair shot at losing weight.

Those are two completely different things.

One says you're broken.

The other says the shit they handed you was broken.

And I'm telling you, only one of those is true.

And it ain't the one about you.

Now I know what you're thinking.

"Well, Corinne, that sounds nice, but I've been at this since I was 15 years old. I'm 58 now. It's already June. Half the damn year's gone. It's too late for me."

I want to talk to you about that because you've got to get your head out of your ass right now.

There's this thing our brains do called the Fresh Start Effect.

It's one of many brain heuristics that we all have from the second we come out of the womb.

Our brains are designed to love a clean slate.

We love a reset button.

Think about how good it feels just to imagine cleaning out your entire closet.

Wouldn't it be amazing if somebody handed you $5,000 and said, "Go throw everything out and start over. Fill it with whatever you want."

Or maybe you have a kitchen you can't stand, and it would be amazing if somebody could wave a magic wand and remodel it overnight.

Clean slate.

I'm telling you right now, it feels good to have a fresh start.

So here's the good news when it comes to losing weight.

We're at the halfway mark of the year.

And the halfway mark of the year is one of the best fresh starts there is for the brain.

It's like a giant reset button is sitting there just waiting for you to slap it.

But here's the problem.

And I bet this has been your whole life.

You mess up on a Wednesday while you're dieting, and you don't start over at the next meal.

You don't start over the next morning.

You wait for Monday.

Or the first of the month.

Or after the holidays.

After the summer.

After the wedding.

After the vacation.

After things settle down at work.

After the kids go back to school.

The first of the year.

There's always a better time coming.

So you plop your ass down and wait for it.

And you've done that so many times that you've waited away years of your life, sitting in the waiting room for some perfect starting line that never shows up.

Because the second you get to that Monday, something comes up.

Now there's a newer, shinier Monday somewhere farther ahead.

So here's what I want to tell you about fresh starts.

We want to use them wisely.

I want you to use the fresh start when it's easy to do.

July is right around the corner.

It's the halfway mark of the year.

It's a natural time to tap into that fresh-start mentality your brain already loves.

But I don't want you to rely on it.

I want you to become someone who can find a fresh start at the very next meal.

I want you to use right now as the natural restart because we're at that halfway mark.

But once you start, I want you to get really good at starting fresh.

The second you notice you're taking your foot off the gas...

The second you make a mistake...

I want you to tell yourself:

"I'm one decision away from being right back on track."

That next meal is a fresh start.

You see, because we already have that fresh-start mentality, we just have to get good at tapping into it—and tapping into it fast.

Sometimes it's great to have a clean slate because it's halfway through the year or it's the first of the month.

But the majority of your life, you have to teach your brain that any moment you choose to start is the best moment to start.

We're not going to flush another six months of your life down the toilet simply because you didn't do what you said you would do the first half of the year.

Or because you didn't do well last week.

Or last month.

Whatever it is.

You've got a fresh start sitting right here at the end of June, staring you in the face.

So let's think about this.

One of the things people tell me all the time is, "It'll take forever to lose the weight," or, "It's going to take a long time."

But I want to do some math because I love data, and it puts things into perspective.

Let's say, just to be on the safe side, that you lose only half a pound a week.

Half a pound.

That's very doable for most people because it just takes really small changes, just like I talked about in the last podcast. So if you haven't listened to it, make sure you go back and do that.

By the end of the year, you're down 12 to 15 pounds.

For some people, that's one or two clothing sizes, depending on how much weight you have to lose and where you're starting.

But let's say you lose a pound a week.

By the end of the year, you're down 24 or 25 pounds.

And if you've got a good bit of weight to lose, guess what?

You could be down 50 pounds by Christmas.

Now let me ask you this.

If I walked up to you right now and said, "Here, I'm going to wave a magic wand and take 12 pounds off your body," what would you say?

Hell yeah.

You'd take that.

You wouldn't say, "No, I don't want to lose 12 pounds if I can't lose it all."

You'd take it.

So let's take the opportunity.

The same goes if I waved my wand and said, "How about 24 pounds? Or 50 pounds?"

You'd take it so fast you'd probably knock me over.

But you won't take the six months that gets you the exact same thing because you keep telling yourself six months is a long time.

No, it ain't, bitch.

Here's what I know about six months.

It's going to pass.

And it's going to pass pretty fast.

Christmas will be here before we know it.

Just like every year.

You blink, and suddenly you're standing there saying, "Oh my God, I can't believe it's December already. That year went by fast."

We say it every single year.

So the time is going to pass no matter what you do with it.

The only real question is whether you're down one, two, or three sizes when Christmas rolls around...

...or whether you're sitting in the exact same spot, telling yourself the exact same sad-ass story.

Having pissed away another six months waiting to feel ready.

Waiting to be confident.

Waiting to be sure.

Or whatever bullshit you keep telling yourself is a good enough reason not to get started.

So quit telling yourself that half the year's gone and you might as well give up.

Start telling yourself, "I've got a whole lot of year left, and I'd better get off my ass and do something with it."

Now I want to tell you something that I think really matters because this right here makes a big difference.

The way I teach weight loss is really fucking simple.

We're going to work on your life so the weight can come off easily and stay off.

You see, diets do the exact opposite.

They focus on the weight first, and then they hope and pray that's enough to make you happy.

Well, it doesn't work that way.

Every diet you've ever done had one goal: the number on the scale.

That was the whole premise.

But think about why you actually eat.

Let's say every day at three o'clock you eat because you're bored out of your damn mind at a job you can't stand.

Most diets would tell you to just follow the plan at three o'clock and then tell you you're not trying hard enough when you don't.

But what if, instead, we looked at the boredom?

Maybe we work on why you've never gone after a different job.

What's the fear inside you that's keeping you stuck somewhere you don't want to be?

What would it actually take to go after work you'd really enjoy?

Or maybe the job pays too well to walk away from.

That's okay.

Then guess what?

We don't work on changing the job.

We work on how you think about the job.

Instead of sitting there bitching, moaning, and complaining for eight hours, driving yourself crazy and cussing the place out in your head...

...what if you started saying, "You know what? I show up here because I love what this paycheck does for my life."

"Yeah, I don't necessarily love the job, but I'm not going to sit here and grouse because I get a little bored."

"If I get all this money and everything it provides for me, fine."

"I'm going to get really good at being bored while getting paid really well."

Either way, the way I teach you to lose weight, we fill the hole that three o'clock candy was filling.

That Snickers bar was trying to fill a hole somewhere else in your life.

When you do it my way—when you learn how to lose weight the way I teach it—you don't need the candy anymore.

Because the eating was never about the candy.

That's how I want you losing weight.

Most of us are overweight because we don't feel good in our lives, and food is the only thing we've got to take the edge off.

Nobody ever helped us figure out how to actually become happier.

Nobody ever pointed out all the places where we talk to ourselves like complete assholes and don't even hear it anymore.

Nobody helped us see where we're people-pleasing ourselves straight into a carton of ice cream every night.

Or helped us feel safe enough that we don't have to do everything for everyone just to believe we're a good girl.

Just to believe nobody thinks we're a burden.

Just to believe we're good enough.

Maybe for you, it isn't the job.

Maybe you eat every night after the house finally goes quiet because that's the only time of day that's yours.

Maybe you eat because you're lonely and think it's because something's wrong with you.

Maybe you eat when your grown kids don't call because you feel disrespected.

Maybe you eat sitting next to a parent who doesn't even know your name anymore, and you feel resentful that you have to take care of someone who rarely took care of you growing up.

Or maybe you eat because you look around at your life and it just doesn't look the way you thought it would by now.

Whatever your overeating is about, there's something real happening for you.

And when you start fixing the real stuff, your whole life gets better.

The reason you were eating just isn't there anymore.

And that right there is when losing weight gets easy—and kind of fun.

It's when it starts feeling like the weight is just coming off and you're barely having to try because you pulled out all the stuff that was driving you to eat in the first place.

And the best part is, when you lose weight this way, you don't gain it back.

Want to know why you've gained the weight back every other time?

Because you never fixed why you were eating.

You just lost the weight and left all that stuff sitting there waiting on you.

And for a lot of women, dieting itself becomes the way they cope with life.

The scale going down becomes that one thing that feels good.

It becomes the thing they look forward to.

Losing weight gives them purpose when they don't feel like they have much purpose anywhere else.

But then you hit your goal.

The scale isn't a project anymore.

All that purpose is gone.

And all the stuff you never dealt with is still standing there in the kitchen, staring at you, inviting you into the pantry.

Then your mind does what it knows how to do to make you feel better.

It goes right back to eating.

Because here's the deal with your brain.

It never throws old habits away.

Ever.

It simply stops using them when you give it something better to do.

But it keeps every last one of them filed away in a dusty old filing cabinet.

The second it thinks it needs one again, it pulls it right back out.

So if you never gave your brain something better to hold on to, all your old habits will be waiting for you.

Food will become the answer again.

And the weight will come back.

So when you try to lose weight with me, you're never signing up to lose weight by fighting your urges, starving yourself, denying yourself, or depriving yourself.

That's bullshit.

And it's the kind of bullshit that almost guarantees you'll regain the weight.

I don't teach that.

At No BS, you'll be fixing the things that always needed work.

You'll be fixing the things that, once they're fixed, mean the weight doesn't come back.

You'll learn what to do when you have bad days.

You'll learn how to spot the places in your life that, if you worked on them, could become so much better.

The places that food simply can't fix anymore.

So I want you to picture six months from now, at Christmas.

And I don't want you picturing a number on the scale.

I want you to picture your actual life.

Picture what it's like at the end of the year when you're not eating over that job anymore because you've fixed how you feel when you walk into work.

Picture what it's like when you're not standing in the kitchen every night after everyone has gone to bed because you finally know how to relax without eating.

Picture what it's like to get through an entire day without that mean bitch in your head constantly running you down because you've learned to talk to yourself differently.

That stuff right there...

That life...

That's what I want to help you build.

The weight coming off is simply what happens while you're fixing all of that.

So what I hope is that you're sitting there right now feeling just a little different than when we started this podcast.

I don't need you to be all fired up and excited.

Because let's be real.

You've felt excited at the beginning of a bajillion diets.

And excitement always wears off.

That's what it's supposed to do.

I'm talking about something better than excitement.

More like a little something stirring inside of you that's saying,

"Shit... I think I really should do something about this."

The fears are probably still there.

The doubts are probably still there.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend I erased 30 years of that in one podcast.

I'll never blow smoke up your ass.

But I think we talked about enough today that maybe a little bit of hope is breaking through all the bullshit.

Maybe you're realizing this really is something you can fix—if you just have the right help.

Maybe it's been the diets this whole time.

Maybe it was never you.

Maybe that's where you're at right now.

Maybe you're sitting there thinking there's a better way to do this than the way you've been trying.

Because the truth is, you were never supposed to figure this out by yourself.

You just weren't.

I didn't.

I spent 30 years trying to white-knuckle myself skinny, and it never, ever worked.

Not until I started figuring out everything I told you today.

Not until I started reading the books.

Listening to myself.

Really working on what was underneath those 140 diets I thought I'd failed.

Those diets failed us because they taught us the wrong things.

And they expected us to do it all alone, with nobody who actually knew the way.

A woman who still wants this as badly as you do—after everything...

After all the tries...

After all the years of getting knocked down...

That's not a woman who's resigned to being fat.

That's a woman who still has way too much fight left in her to spend the rest of her life settling for less than what she wants.

Okay.

I hope you have an amazing week, and I'll talk to you next week.