Podcast 151. Why Your Diet Brain Isn’t Broken
Go to www.pnp411.com to sign up for Corinne’s free weightloss course.
A lot of Corinne’s new members come in feeling like they’re broken. They feel like they can’t be confident or happy until they’ve lost their weight. None of this is true.
In the past, if you followed a diet plan that didn’t address your thoughts, as soon as the diet was over, you probably went back to the emotional eating habits that were still ingrained in your brain. You didn’t teach your brain how to behave in life without food having to be the only thing you solve issues with.
Your brain is acting exactly the way you’ve taught it to act. You are normal and you are not broken. The good news is that you can retrain your brain.
Corinne is not here to just help you lose weight. Weightloss is the side effect of what she’s teaching you. She wants you to believe in yourself.
You shouldn’t have to live your life feeling hopeless, scared, apathetic, resigned, defeated, or afraid. Living your life wanting or wishing is an empty feeling.
The brain is so powerful. When Corinne was losing weight, so many of the changes she made were a result of the little shift of how she was thinking each day. She spent years thinking that she couldn’t lose weight and then one day she thought that she could figure it out. It didn’t have to be perfect. She just needed to believe that today she could show up in some small ways that felt doable, reasonable, and attainable.
How you think today isn’t the biggest limit on if you lose weight. You thinking that your thoughts can’t be changed is the biggest problem.
You brain does have the capacity to change. Corinne has done a ton of research on the brain. She’s done research because she has goals she still wants to achieve.
She also did a lot of research when her son was diagnosed with autism. He was 5 when diagnosed and the research at that time showed that the brain does not change after the age of 8, so they spent the next 3 years trying to do everything they could for him.
As her son has gotten older, she’s continued to research and the research has changed exponentially. For years, people were told that how they are is how they are, but that’s not true. You brain can change. Your thought patterns, your belief patterns, the way you talk to yourself, your habits, can all change. YOU CAN CHANGE.
You are not broken. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been overweight or what your parents said to you as a child, you are not broken. You are in control of your mind. You have to be the one that actively decides to control your mind.
Your brain tends to go on autopilot and whatever thoughts you’ve been thinking your whole life, those are the ones that it will automatically go to. It will always tell you that free donuts in the break room are a good idea. It doesn’t mean that you can’t handle yourself. You have to be willing to listen to what it’s saying and decide if that is good enough for your today.
So much of your diet brain going from feeling like it’s broken to feeling like it’s working is going to be your willingness to listen to your internal dialog. You have to be willing to listen to the things you’re saying to yourself.
You have to be willing to separate out judgement from the internal dialog that you are hearing. Don’t judge the thoughts. If you throw judgement on your thoughts, you will always find a way to sabotage yourself. You have to release judgement for how you think. The key to being accountable to yourself is to not be upset with yourself because you don’t have perfect thoughts. You don’t have to think perfectly to act perfectly.
It’s okay to tell yourself “this isn’t a useful thought, let’s move on.” No judgement.
When things feel hard, your brain is going to want to turn to things that feel good, like eating. If you’re not hungry, you don’t eat, even if your brain wants to eat for entertainment or comfort.
When you’re aware of stuff, you get to decide what you want to on-purpose think. Sometimes we want to have amazing on-purpose thoughts and we come up with all the things. Sometimes, in the moment, all we need to know is that our brain is being normal and that alone can bring some relief.
Thought work is listening to the stuff your brain is thinking, sometimes you write it down, and if it doesn’t feel good or useful, it’s a delete. That’s step one of thought work. Later, you can work to come up with better thoughts, but for now just tell yourself that the thought isn’t useful and move on.
We tend to put such unreasonable expectations on ourselves about how we should be thinking. We feel like there’s either perfect thinking or thinking all the crap. There is a middle ground.
If you feel bad about the sentences that are going through your head, then it is because you are judging them. You have to take the judgement out of thought work.
Having an honest look at your internal dialog cannot hurt you. You have a lot of sentences going on in your brain. You have the capacity to change, it just may take you redirecting your brain thousands of times. You’ve thought those things thousands of times, so it may take redirecting it just as many times before it finally kicks in. Yes, it may seem like a lot, but what’s the alternative, to keep thinking the crappy thoughts?
If you want to make the scenery easier for how you think, take some control over what is coming in. You can’t control human beings, but you can control social media and newsfeeds. When you go through your newsfeed, if you don’t like someone’s attitude, then unfollow them. You need to look at all the places in your life where you have control and can minimize the thought work you’re going to need to do.
If there is someone in your life that drives you crazy either love them or choose to stop talking to them. Don’t act like people are controlling you, they’re not. You have to decide that your brain space and your emotional space is too valuable.
People are overeating because they are not managing their emotional currency. Each day we wake up with an amount of emotional currency that we have for the day. Most people blow their wad by 10am on bullshit. If you wouldn’t tell your child to accept drugs when they’re offered to them, you shouldn’t accept other people’s emotional downers.
You can control your thoughts. You have to start paying attention. You have to make an agreement with yourself that it’s okay, it’s just thoughts that you’ve been thinking and thank God you’re paying attention now.
Honesty with yourself never hurts. Honesty with yourself only grows you. What hurts is when you take a look and beat yourself up over it.
You have about 60,000 thoughts a day. They’re not all going to be useful or true. Some might be, most of them won’t. Out of 60,000, you might only get 20 useful thoughts a day, but that’s okay, you can just keep dismissing the unuseful ones.
You get to decide if your thoughts are true or relevant. Sometimes there’s junk going on that doesn’t mean anything. That’s normal. You have the power to decide whether or not to make them useful. If it’s not useful, then delete.
Corinne’s next membership opening will be from April 1st-3rd. Sign-up for her free weightloss course at www.pnp411.com to get on her email list to get notified when membership is open. She’ll offer a couple of trainings the week of the opening, so make sure you’re on her email list to get access to the trainings. It’s a shorter opening this time and you don’t want to miss it!
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