Speaker 1:
Okay. So, I’m here with Corinne Crabtree, who has, if you are an avid listener of the podcast, one, I have referred to her or talked about her on a couple of episodes, but she has an amazing podcast, Losing 100 Pounds with Corinne, and she has a coaching program. Isn’t it? Well, No B.S. Women: Phit N Phat Tribe.
Corinne Crabtree:
Yeah. It’s the No B.S. Weight Loss Program. Back in the day, when I first started, 14 years ago, it was Phit N Phat. I was a diehard pink camo wearing, blinged out bandana person, who was just like, “We’re all going to lose weight. We’re going to sweat together, ladies,” and all the things and came up with that, and then it morphed into PNP Tribe because we became more of a family.
Speaker 1:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Corinne Crabtree:
And PNP was a lot easier to say than Phit N Phat, and then as we grew and evolved and I got more into the coaching part of it, I wrote a program and a course, and basically, just really grew up in my business and figured out like, what is it about my methodology? And it became this, no bullshit. We’re going to cut out all the tricks and antiques and stuff, and that’s how it became the No B.S. Weight Loss Program, and now we’re No B.S. Women. It’s just, I think a grown ass woman feels better being considered a No B.S. woman than a Phit N Phat girl.
Speaker 1:
I don’t know. If it’s the right person, I think you can call me just about anything, but yeah. Who doesn’t love No B.S.? Now, I’m curious, and I’ve wondered this for the longest, because I know that before you went on the journey that led to becoming a coach, you had your own weight loss struggles, and what I’ve always wondered is, not so much what made you go down that journey, right? Because you’d already started or attempted losing weight a number of times, but what kept you going? And what were the things that you told yourself to keep going when the excitement of starting something new and doing something different wasn’t there anymore?
Corinne Crabtree:
Yeah… So, I had a career in trying to lose weight all my life. I was overweight from the age of nine and I joined, as everybody does, they make the rite of passage by going through the doors of Weight Watchers at some point, and I’m always shocked when somebody’s like, “I’ve never been on Weight Watchers.” I’m like, “What?” I thought we come out of the womb with a gift card of like, “Your first one’s on me.” So, I joined Weight Wars for some her mom at 12. So, it was really good at starting diets and careening off the rails, and I weighed between 175 to 250 most of my life. The last time when I decided to lose weight, it was very different than any other time.
Corinne Crabtree:
So, all the other times I basically had gotten so miserable with myself and talked so nasty to myself that I would go and find something punishing to do. I would just be like, “I will do anything to get away from this,” and so that made me pick anything. Anything sounded better than how I was talking to myself, but this last time I was at my heaviest weight I’d ever been and probably at one of the lowest points of my life, but when I decided to lose weight, I didn’t go out and find something, I told myself, “I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m going to figure this out,” and so I swear to God, the next morning I woke up and I thought, “All right, what can I do today?”
Corinne Crabtree:
And I made this agreement with myself that every day I was going to wake up and I was going to figure out something a little bit different than the day before, that I could do and I would only do things that I was ready for, and then at that point, would feel like I was ready to do it for the rest of my life. So, that meant that a lot of my changes were so minuscule, but my mindset was always like, “I think I can do this today. This sounds like a good idea,” and so as I was getting wins, because I was doing the things that I said I would do, and I was following through, I was feeling better about myself because I was telling myself things like, “You’re doing so good. You did it again today.
Corinne Crabtree:
This is working.” I just had these little bitty thoughts like that, that were happening. So, I never had that crash where I think when you start something so obscenely hard and you can make yourself and beat yourself, it’s like, “You’re so lazy. You’ve got to do this for the next six months,” and so you just get beat down. Eventually, you just can’t take that beat down anymore. Not only is the process hard, but your thinking’s hard on top of it, and so you just crumble. What I had done is, I eased up the process, talk to myself better, and so I never really, what I would consider… I never lost. It’s like I never felt highly motivated, but every single day I felt very willing. It all felt very doable. There was almost more of a sense of calm going on.
Speaker 1:
Oh.
Corinne Crabtree:
And so it was different than that rush of like, “I’ve got to be motivated. I got to be excited. I’ve got to feel this amazing high,” or, “I’ve got to be just making myself through brute force and then come crashing down.” There was no crash. Now, there were times where things would happen, say, I wouldn’t lose weight for a week, or something like that would happen, and I remember thinking like, “Just keep going.” For the first time ever, and I think it was because my self-talk was changing, it made sense to me that eating over the scale not going down probably wasn’t a good solution. When we say it out loud, raw like, “Yeah, probably not.”
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Corinne Crabtree:
In the moment though, we’re so mad, and we’re so upset, and we’re so whatever, that we eat to get away from the self-loathing. It is not because eating is a good solution, it’s not because it makes sense, it’s literally to escape how hard we are on ourselves if the scale doesn’t change, and I just, like this last time, I was way more aware of my self-talk than I ever had been, and that really made all the difference.
Speaker 1:
What tuned you into your self-talk? Because I feel like I have spent my 34 years trying to ignore my self-talk.
Corinne Crabtree:
Well, I did the same. So, that was one reason why I ate and stuff, and I wish that I could tell people, because now, that I’ve… Six years ago I went and became… I mean, I lost my weight 15 years ago, but six years ago is when I actually went and got certified as a life coach and then a master coach, because for the years prior to that, I always knew that I was talking to myself different, but I never knew why I never could piece it all together, but then when I went back and really understood how you think and you feel. It all made sense as to what changed for me. It was like all of a sudden, I shined the light on my own history and I could see what was happening.
Corinne Crabtree:
I think for me, I just had one fundamental thought that lit up the next couple of steps ahead of me, that this was not going to be a diet solution that I needed, that I literally couldn’t afford to keep thinking the way I was thinking. I remember on weigh in’s or if… I had made an agreement with myself that I would walk every day, like 15 minutes. I wasn’t going out and Jazzercise walking or doing any kind of thing like that. It wasn’t like I was setting records, but I had made this decision that I was going to walk every single day for 15 minutes, and that I really felt like someone who was healthy and going to live a long life probably took a walk every day, and there would every now and then be days where I would miss one for legit reasons. I remember one time, just had bad diarrhea. I know that sounds terrible, but I had really bad diarrhea, and I knew-
Speaker 1:
That’s the truth.
Corinne Crabtree:
… that there was no leaving the house for 15 minutes. It was one of those days, and I’ve had a kid and so you don’t always have a reliable colon. You never know when the bladder or whatever’s going to go haywire, and I would want to sit there and beat myself up like, “One day leads to 20.” I would want to do that, and I remember just listening and thinking, “You cannot think like that.” There was a stark parallel to me like, the version of you that’s quit every single time only quit because you’ve talked to yourself like this. You talked yourself into quitting because you’re so hard on yourself.
Corinne Crabtree:
I already knew that learning how to have a different relationship with food, not over eating and stuff, that in and of itself was going to be hard enough that I did not need to layer my mental bullshit on top. I did not need to layer self-loathing on top of that, because that was going to be the straw that would break the camel’s back. It was never going to be a missed walk, it was going to be how I talked to myself about a missed walk that was going to cause me to quit or get me off my game, and it just made sense in the moment, and now when I look back from my master coach perspective, it’s like, no fucking wonder all that worked. You didn’t talk to yourself like an asshole. It’s not rocket science.
Corinne Crabtree:
I just got very aware of how I was speaking to myself and made my split self speak differently because I would tell myself, “100%, we know this line of thinking is not helpful and you can’t afford to spend time there.” One thing that I would always know was not going to work, but still kept trying was, I just need that one thought, that one habit, and if I had that habit that no matter what happens in my life, or if I’m out to eat and having a good time and I have one too many drinks, I’m not going to eat too much food right after whatever. I always thought there was just this one perfect thing, that if I just had this one saying in my head, I’d always be fine.
Speaker 1:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Corinne Crabtree:
And I’m not going to lie, I still wish there was a magic thought. I really do, because to know now that it’s always going to be different. It’s not really that situation that I need to worry about, it’s whatever’s going on in my head and the thoughts that are associated with that, but I guess what sometimes has overwhelmed me is the amount of work it is to work on mindset, versus, give me a diet plan and a hardcore workout plan, and I just press play, go through the motions and go about my life and I can ignore my brain.
Corinne Crabtree:
I mean, a lot of people can do that. If you can do that, I say, go for it, but most of us, what happens is, we think that’s easier, except, we are really good at it for about three to six weeks, or a lot of times people can do it for 90 days, or they can do, what is that? 75 Days Hard? That bullshit, I’m just like, “Yeah. I want to know whose lifetime’s 75 Hard.”
Corinne Crabtree:
A lot of people can get to, if they can see a finish line, they can get there, but then the problem is, is they carried their own brain to the finish line, and then once they have to go back to their car, they got their old, shitty brain, still sitting there, judging them, wondering if this is going to be good enough, how the hell am I going to keep up doing this?
Corinne Crabtree:
I mean, if you’re thinking whatever your program is, how the hell am I going to do this for the rest of my life? That should be a real warning sign that when you lose the weight, that you’re going to be lost, not knowing what to do. You’re going to be left with whatever you were doing before, because you’ve only got two things that make sense. Asshole tactics that you’re not sure you can do the rest of your life, or exactly what you did before, because you’ve not practiced anything in the middle.
Corinne Crabtree:
And that is, I think, a big thing too, is that we like to think that we’ll just do something really hard, and we’ll just push play, we’ll just do these things, and then when I get to my goal, then I’ll be so thrilled that I will now practice the moderation and stuff. That never happens because your brain hasn’t ever practiced moderation. Even moderation compared to restriction will feel out of control, and that will be the problem, is that you’ve been telling yourself you have to have all these strict rules and you have to do this, and I got to follow this plan and everything.
Corinne Crabtree:
When you’re left to just moderation, you’ll put in a day to go out to eat, and like “I’m going to have what I want. But for 75 days, I couldn’t have anything I wanted, but today I get to,” then that will feel very out of control, because all you’ll tell yourself is like, “Oh my God, I wonder if I’ll gain weight tomorrow. I wonder what the scale is going to say.” We don’t practice any of that stuff.
Corinne Crabtree:
So, I think when people tell me the mental work is so hard or whatever, I always tell people, “I don’t think it’s that hard. All I’m asking you to do is find a thought that feels like shit and plug in a thought that feels better, and then just practice better thinking when you think old, shitty stuff until you feel better.” And then yeah, we’re like, “Oh my God, and then that’s the work, Corinne.”
Corinne Crabtree:
It’s like, most people, what they want to do is like, “Here’s what I want to do. I want to pick an asshole program that’s going to be super hard, and I want to bring my fear of food and my worries at this scale is not moving fast enough, my body image disorder. I want to bring all that along for the ride,” and like, “That’s the easy way to do it,” I’m like, “All right, go for it. If you think that’s easy, more power to you.”
Speaker 1:
How often do you think we actually know the solutions already?
Corinne Crabtree:
Every time.
Speaker 1:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Corinne Crabtree:
I think we’re afraid of the solutions. So, people will tell me, “I’ve just been bouncing around for the same five pounds,” and they’re like, “I just don’t know what’s going on.” Give me two minutes, and they will have told me, out of their own mouth, what’s going on. No one has ever legit stumped me. I’ve never just thrown my hands and went like, “The hell, I don’t know.” It’s all perfect. “We better call the doctor.” No one has ever been able to do that. What always ends up happening is, I’ll say things like, “Well, if you had to guess, in the last two weeks, if I took a look at all your behaviors, is there something I would see?”
Corinne Crabtree:
Like, “Well, this one day I ate this, and I’m not really overeating, but sometimes I eat a little bit too much,” but it’s like, “Oh, help me.” They’ll tell me all this stuff as if what they’re saying is, “I had some emotional eating that I would like to not count. So, what I would like to do is see the scale go down and be able to hang on to emotional eating. Tell me how that works.” So, rather than asking that question, they’re just like, “I’m so confused. It’s an anomaly.” Never is. If you are not losing weight consistently, especially if you were bouncing around the same pounds or whatever, there is always a reason.
Speaker 1:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Corinne Crabtree:
It’s usually a reason you don’t want to admit to, and some of my clients will go two weeks being super restrictive because I don’t teach that shit, but they’ll convince themselves that the reason why they’re not losing weight is because they’re not restrictive enough, and so they’ll deprive and restrict for two weeks and the scale will barely move, because they think it should just go like hell fire, and it’ll just go a pound or two, because their body is like, “Fuckery is a foot all the time with you. You’re either eating your face off or you’re restricting.” So, it’s not going to just be like a whim all at once.
Corinne Crabtree:
Then they get so mad that the scale’s not moving fast enough and they spend time and frustration, then they eat their face off for three days, and then they go right back, and then they’re blaming, “I just don’t understand why I’m losing and gaining the same five pounds,” and it’s like, “I don’t know, you’re benching your face off every two weeks for three days, and then acting like an asshole the rest of the time by not eating.” Yeah, your body is not going to want to lose weight with that plan. You’re traumatizing your body and expecting it to perform like a monkey. That shit don’t work.
Speaker 1:
Can I tell you one thing? So, a really good friend of mine, [Bow 00:17:48], who’s also in the No B.S. program, and she was on an episode of the podcast. I told her, I said, “I always knew, because the reason I never did diet pills is because they would always say stuff like, “It’s going to reduce your appetite,”” and I would roll my eyes and be like, “Well, appetite ain’t my problem. I eat when I’m not hungry. You can reduce my appetite all you want.”
Corinne Crabtree:
Exactly.
Speaker 1:
I would say that, and I would know it, but I would still be like, “But I need a new workout plan.”
Corinne Crabtree:
Yeah. There was never a diet pill that when I would go out with my friends to Outback on a Friday night, but like, “I’m just not hungry for the blooming onion and margaritas.”
Speaker 1:
Texas cheese fries, or Outback fries.
Corinne Crabtree:
Yeah. It’s like when everybody’s… This is the funny thing. Most of us aren’t having a problem with our hunger. We trick ourselves into thinking that the reason why we can’t lose weight is because of this whole hunger thing. I have coached thousands of women. Very rarely, is this a real hunger issue. They don’t need an appetite suppressant.
Speaker 1:
Mm-mm (negative).
Corinne Crabtree:
Now, if I could give them a pill that just leveled out their emotion… A drama free pill, rather than appetite suppression, if I could just give them a pill that suppressed all their inner drama about their partners, their bosses, their life, their past-
Speaker 1:
Their mother.
Corinne Crabtree:
… what they think other people are thinking about them. If we could just suppress all that, no fool would have a hard time losing weight, because we’re eating because we don’t like wasting food, that has nothing to do with a diet pill, we’re eating because it’s free. Somebody brought it in and we don’t want to miss out, that has nothing to do with a diet pill.
Corinne Crabtree:
We’ve had a bad day and at eight o’clock at night, all we want to do is check out and we don’t want to listen to babies talk, and we don’t want to listen to partners spout off about their bad day or watch them sit on the couch when we do dishes. So, we’re eating for those reasons. Diet pills won’t solve all that.
Speaker 1:
Mm-mm (negative).
Corinne Crabtree:
So, that is the thing that we have to realize. All a diet pill will do is make you not hungry during the part of the day that you normally aren’t overeating, and now you’ll skip meals [inaudible 00:19:59] because you’ve never even… So many people don’t have a problem with breakfast and lunch. It’s because yeah, because the bullshit of your mind hasn’t built up yet.
Speaker 1:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Corinne Crabtree:
And a diet pill will convince you to skip breakfast and lunch because it is suppressing your appetite, but by the time dinner comes, you could do it for a little while, then dinner comes and then it’s time to relax, and it’s the weekend and things like that where our normal excuses come in, diet pills don’t help with any of that.
Speaker 1:
Mm-mm (negative).
Corinne Crabtree:
I remember I used to take them back in my, oh God, my early 20s. Me and my girlfriend, we were constantly going to GNC to see what the new one was. We’d try them for two weeks, feel cracked out, like shit. It is a wonder I did not die in my 20s trying to solve my issues.
Speaker 1:
So, I’m curious. As the professional, right? You have done this, what? For 15 years now.
Corinne Crabtree:
15 years.
Speaker 1:
And you have coached so many women. What are the things that cause those thoughts to still come up from you? Because it’s not that the thoughts don’t still come, right?
Corinne Crabtree:
Right.
Speaker 1:
So, what are the triggers or the things that you’ve noticed do still bring those thoughts to the forefront?
Corinne Crabtree:
For me, so it’s, and this is what I want to say, is that the brain is not designed to have purity of thought at all times. I think a lot of us are on some kind of pursuit to be happy all the time. I mean, that’s why they created drugs. So, if you really want to be happy all the time, you need to become a coke head or something along those lines. You’re supposed to have the full range of emotions anyway. So, I think one is, it’s very natural to have thoughts that aren’t going to work for you, and most of us just have patterns. So, for me, I grew up very worried about other people’s opinions.
Speaker 1:
Really?
Corinne Crabtree:
Oh God, yeah. I was bullied so bad growing up.
Speaker 1:
Corinne, this surprises me. I would not have ever expected that.
Corinne Crabtree:
Well, I’ve worked on it. That’s why it’s probably surprising to people today, who know me now, as the version of me that has worked on, for 15 years, really learning how to create the opinion I want for myself, and when I say don’t give a fuck about what other people’s opinions are, it’s not that I don’t give a fuck, it never bothers me, it’s more about being, I am so aware of when I am allowing comments and opinions and stuff to interfere with my emotional, internal environment.
Corinne Crabtree:
And that’s because I’m paying attention to it, and I am trying to solve it, or I am thinking it shouldn’t be happening. I’m so aware of those patterns now, that when they start, I’m really good at reminding myself who I am, I’m really good at saying like, “Yeah, no. They’re wrong. They don’t know me.” Rather than saying they don’t know me and needing to go to war and argue, I’m just like, “I don’t even need to go to work.
Corinne Crabtree:
They don’t know me. I know me now,” and when that happened, when that really became what I believe, I was able to just… When I hear other people’s opinions and stuff, it stinks to this day, but it only stinks for a little bit. I don’t spend three days eating over it anymore, and I don’t spend a week trying to tell everybody the story over and over and over again until I’ve heard enough from other people, it’s okay to be like, “Okay, and now I can believe it.”
Corinne Crabtree:
Now, I do that for myself, but I grew up really bullied. I mean, from the age of nine on, I was made fun of for my weight. I mean, my dad and I are in a good place now, but my dad pretty much checked out of our lives when I was nine. He was very not interested in us. That left me with a lot of, throughout my 20s and 30s, seeking external approval. Testing love. Like with Chris, one of the things I watch now that’s still one of my patterns is testing Chris’s love.
Speaker 1:
Oh.
Corinne Crabtree:
If he doesn’t do something like what I think he should, I start arguments and get really upset to make sure he really loves me, versus just deciding, “I don’t think him not taking out the trash on a Tuesday is a sign of our declaration of our love or not.” Just understanding I do things like that. But yeah, I mean, we’re all going to always have triggers and we’re all going to have stuff for all of our lives, you just get better and better at recognizing your patterns. For me, I’m really good at noticing now, when I feel something, and when I start feeling angry, when I start feeling ashamed…
Corinne Crabtree:
Like sometimes if somebody says I suck on the internet or whatever, I immediately feel a lot of shame as if it’s true, and I’ve noticed that I’m real good now at allowing myself to feel it, but not react to it. Not need to yell, not need to prove myself, not need to change things, not need to hide, isolate, eat or whatever. I just feel it, and I’m like, “Okay, but what’s really going on here?” And I’m really good about thinking it through and understanding what I’m thinking that’s helpful, and what I’m thinking that so not helpful in the moment.
Speaker 1:
I’m so curious. Okay. And it’s funny you said that, because I literally had that moment, and I think I might’ve been on your podcast where you were talking about where I had a moment the other day where I felt very inadequate. I got an assignment from work and I was just like, “I don’t know how I’m supposed to complete this based on what I have,” and I went into all the, “I’m not smart enough for this. I’ve never been smart,” all that stuff, and I just was like, “Maybe if I just…”
Speaker 1:
Normally, I would just go get a snack or I would go on Instagram and distract myself, and I was like, “All right, we’re going to sit with this for just a bit,” and I don’t remember where I heard, and they said that it would pass in 30 seconds. It was the longest 32nd hour of my life, but I was like, “Okay, okay. I could probably figure out.” And it was just like, “I’m not going to solve it. I’m just going to give myself little steps, little steps.”
Corinne Crabtree:
Yep.
Speaker 1:
And I got to the end of it, and I was like, “Is that all I had to do?”
Corinne Crabtree:
Yeah. Well, and that is the… So, the way feelings work is, every feeling is caused by a sentence in your brain, and every thought has a… I always call it, it’s like going up to the bar and ordering a shot.
Corinne Crabtree:
So, the thought is telling the bartender, “I want a shot of Jaeger,” or whatever, and then when they give you the shot, the feeling courses through your brain. So, the thought happens, there’s a feeling that always comes along and that feeling is the chemicals released through the body. And they have about a 90 second life cycle. Some have less [crosstalk 00:27:17]. Yes. 90 is for the extreme emotions.
Speaker 1:
Okay.
Corinne Crabtree:
So, like shame, or anxiety, panic, things like that, but every sentence will have its own unique little cocktail of things. So, if you are thinking, like you got an assignment and you’re like, “Oh my God, I don’t know what to do.” So, the first thing you have is confusion or overwhelm, which has its own little… Like, “Here’s a little shot of whiskey,” and then you’ve got on there like, “Oh my God, I’m not good enough to do this.” Now, you’ve got the next one. So, that’s why it’s really important to, when you start feeling, some of those feelings come through to just be like, “All right, we’re just going to sit here for a minute.
Corinne Crabtree:
We’re going to let some of this process through,” because then what happens is, when you concentrate on your body, your brain is no longer populating the sentences that are sending more and more and more chemical reactions through your body. That’s what makes feelings last longer, longer, longer, longer, longer, longer. So, if you only have two or three, not 90 seconds, you have an hour’s worth of spiraling and thinking toilet thoughts, you feel like all day long, you’re stressed, all day long, you have anxiety, all day long, you can’t breathe, and it’s only because you’re allowing these thoughts to just populate without any intervention from you.
Corinne Crabtree:
Most of us are just believing the shit we’re thinking, and I’m like, “Every thought, there’s no thought you have that’s true.” Every one of them is the way you are perceiving something in the moment. So, if it feels bad, you need to check like, “What is my perception right now? And is this, this perception that I want to tell? I could tell something else that would feel more neutral.” In your case, most people want to go to, if I don’t know what to do, they’re like, “Okay. Well, what I would like to think is I am magnificently blessed and gifted to solve any problem handed to me and will get a raise because of it.”
Corinne Crabtree:
We always want to go to fantastical land. And it’s like, rather than thinking, “I’m not good enough to solve this,” we could just say, “I have a work thing. I need to think on it.” You can just literally go to something completely benign that’s also very true. It may be feeling true that you don’t know what to do, and that’s okay, but if it feels terrible, do we want to sit and think, “I don’t know what to do,” or do we want to sit and think, “Right now, I want to think on it.” They have very different emotions behind them, and they’re both true.
Speaker 1:
Sure.
Corinne Crabtree:
And it’s just getting really good at watching for when you think one thing, and if I don’t know how to do this, it’s going to trigger, “I’m not good enough. Oh my gosh, I’ll probably fail at this. Oh my gosh, if I fail, what if they write me up?” Or, “What if they give me something else I can’t do. I’ll probably get fired then, and then will I even be able to find another job?” You notice how it’s real easy for your brain to just go down a road, but if you can stop it early on or just anywhere and just say, “All right, what’s needed right now?”
Speaker 1:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Corinne Crabtree:
And just think that, and just get real present, it allows those feelings to process, it lets you concentrate on your body, it gives you some clarity and space in the moment.
Speaker 1:
I’m curious, when did you decide to transition from, this is my story, this is what I figured out to making a business of this?
Corinne Crabtree:
So, when I first started, so I’ve been in business for 14 years now, or 13? 13 or 14 years. 2007, however long that is. So, I lost my weight in 2005, and then in 2007 is when I actually incorporated. Got my LLC going, but when I started losing weight and I lost my weight, it was the first time in my life that I actually felt good about myself, and I remember telling my husband, it was the first time ever in my life. I mean, I had lost weight before. I’d never gotten that thin, but I had never felt good about myself when I lost weight. I had always lost enough weight to kind of feel okay, but I just remember I had lost weight so many times, hating what I did, and worrying I’d never be able to keep my weight off, but it never felt truly happy, and amazing, and at peace.
Corinne Crabtree:
When I lost my weight this time, there was a conviction in my bones that I would never regain my weight. I had changed fundamentally who I was on the inside, and I just looked at him and just said, “Every woman should be able to feel this amazing. Every woman should be able to believe in themselves like this. I know they don’t.” I remember telling him like, “And they don’t, Chris.” I was trying to convince him like, women don’t feel this way. So, that’s when I decided to start, and I started off really simply and at the time, people would write in and I would give them workouts because I was big into working out at that point, and I would help them with their food, but 80% of what we did was email back and forth each day, not about their exercise plan, and not about their food. We emailed about their life, and about their dreams, and how they were feeling, and who they wanted to be.
Corinne Crabtree:
And I was just talking to them, and so after a few years, I was trying to do it this old way, and I really started understanding, trying to give people exercise, not only was creating new exercise plans, exhausting, but I had thousands of them, and I was like, “I don’t know why I’m creating new ones every fucking month now,” and I was constantly trying to answer food questions and then I would be like, “But why are you even overeating to begin with? I can tell you all day long, stop eating this snack at three o’clock, you’re obviously not hungry. We don’t need a different snack, we need to know what the fuck’s wrong with your life at three o’clock every day that you need to eat,” and so it really dawned on me that I knew that the people that I was helping that was focused on their thinking and their emotional life, they were the ones losing the weight.
Corinne Crabtree:
They were the ones that were making the change, and then the ones who were just there for the plan and just for the workouts, they were always the same way. They could kick theirselve’s ass in the gym, but they’d eat every night, but they weren’t interested in all that. So, in 2015, I had to make a really tough choice. Only had 150 members, and that’s 150 people that I worked with, and I knew I wanted to help lots of people, but I didn’t want to keep doing it the way I was doing it, and I wanted to shift into, I really wanted to be a coach, I wanted to teach people how to truly feel better, and I wanted to teach them how to make weight loss as simple as possible. I never wanted another woman to have to have a meal plan, I wanted to teach them how to decide what the fuck they wanted to put in their mouth and enjoy it.
Corinne Crabtree:
I wanted women to get liberated with food, and announced it, lost half my members, half of them were like, “It’s a no. I’m going to beach body now,” or, “I’m going to somewhere else,” and the other half stuck around, and from that point on, I just got such clarity that the path to us losing weight was really learning how to believe in ourselves, and quitting and learning how to talk to ourselves on days when we feel bad, and learning how to… I was just coaching a group before this call, six women had won a free hour with me from our membership, who had participated in a challenge, and none of them wanted help with food. We coached about a mother-in-law, we coached about a child with a diagnosis, we coached on urges, not believing in yourself anymore. We just coached on everything, but that stuff. That’s where people get help because that’s the things that we really have to overcome in order to be able to lose our physical weight. When the mental weight comes off, the physical weight falls off.
Speaker 1:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I’m so curious, if all the women that have come to you to lose weight, how many have you coached and then they decide to go do something else that they’ve always wanted to do like start a business or leave an abusive spouse, or whatever it might be? What are those? Because I have a feeling that that’s happened a lot.
Corinne Crabtree:
It happens daily. We have right now 10,000, I think, 600 members or something like that.
Speaker 1:
Jesus!
Corinne Crabtree:
Every day. What I’m most proud of in our group is people, I mean, people are losing weight all the time, but what really lights me up is when I go into the group and people are posting about things that they’re doing for the first time in their life, that they’ve never given themselves permission to do, that they’ve always thought they couldn’t do. I mean, it’s daily. I wish I knew, but so many people have started businesses. One of our success stories start a cookie… She lost 80 pounds and started a cookie business.
Corinne Crabtree:
She bakes cookies for a living and she’s like, “I never would have thought that I would be baking cookies for my living.” This is how she supplements their income. She makes almost as much money as her husband now, and she’s like, “And I lost 80 pounds.” So, we have people to do that, we have people that… A lot of our women are doing activities that they were too ashamed to do, and they’re not doing them now because they’ve lost some weight. I mean, a lot of them have lost some weight, but what I love is, they’re not waiting until they lose all of their weight to go kayaking, hiking, to wear a bikini, to do all kinds of things, and they’re doing it every single day.
Corinne Crabtree:
So, many of them go to family vacations for the first time, because they’ve been so worried and ashamed they would be in a picture, that they wouldn’t even go on a family vacation. They would send their kids with the dad or with their wife and they would stay home and use work or something as and excuse, and they’ll say, “I have missed so many vacations because I’ve used work as an excuse, or someone needs to take care of the dog when it was really, I didn’t want anybody to see me in a bathing suit, I didn’t want anybody to judge me, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to ride the rides, so I stayed home,” and I think that for our people, just those kinds of things.
Corinne Crabtree:
And we have had several people leave relationships that they never had the courage to, or I will tell you some of the best things that we end up having is, a lot of people come in thinking they have a marriage that’s on the skids and they realize the marriage was never on the skids, they weren’t connecting themselves. They were spending so much time isolating, they weren’t even letting people in, and their marriages have improved and stuff, and it’s like, “And nobody changed, but me. My attitude changed. I started looking around and noticing people do love me, I just was so not in love with myself, I assumed everything that anyone did meant that I wasn’t loved, and I think that’s been super powerful too.
Speaker 1:
I have something I have been dying to ask you ever since I heard you do a podcast, and Kara or Kara?
Corinne Crabtree:
It depends on which one. So, we have a coach inside of No B.S. named Kara, and then my friend, Kara, has the Unfuck Your Brain podcast.
Speaker 1:
Yes. Because I love that. That was just a beautiful love fest, but one thing that y’all talked about, and it’s related to this that just blew my mind, is when she was talking about how, when you first started and you had a tough time upping your prices.
Corinne Crabtree:
Oh God, yeah.
Speaker 1:
Where did that come from? Why? You know that you are creating immense value for all of these people. Why was it hard to increase the prices?
Corinne Crabtree:
I was valuing… I knew. I have never had a doubt. I have worked hard all my life and I grew up with a single mother, and we always had to work hard and we had to be the best, and because my mom didn’t have a college education, I didn’t have a college education, I couldn’t afford to fuck around, so I always felt like I had to work three times as hard as anybody around me and be three times as better because if I lost a good paying job, I’d have to start at the bottom. That was the way it was going to be. So, I’ve always been able to over-deliver like a freaking boss, and so I never have doubted that I over-deliver, but I based my prices on my self-worth.
Corinne Crabtree:
I based my prices on not wanting people to leave me, and that if I just make it cheaper, they won’t want to leave me, rather than, I need to just invest in them as much as I want, charge what it’s worth, and they’re never going to leave me. They may quit, but I can quit believing it’s because of me. I can now start believing that I’m going to be there 110% for every single woman who wants me, and I had to make that shift, and I don’t price on myself… I will just tell everybody who runs a business, pricing based on your worth is never a good thing. Number one, most of us don’t have great self worth, so it’s a terrible baseline to begin with, but second, it’s just not even helpful for the person.
Corinne Crabtree:
I just always think, how can I over deliver like a boss and make it so worth it that they’ll never think about what I know is a fair price. What I know, that’s how I structure my prices for our membership, is like, I take a look at all of our expense… I mean, I just run it like a business now. I don’t run it based on my personal feelings. I take a look at all of our expenses, I take a look at everything that we do. Everything does that way, and then I price, I’m like, “All right, to do the things that we want to do, to be able to hire the people we want to be able to hire, this is what we charge,” and then from there I say, “All right. Say, I’m charging $59 a month right now, then I want to make sure that every single person in there feels like they’re getting at least $159 worth of value every single month.
Corinne Crabtree:
So, I always look at what I need to charge, and then I build out programs and I build out the resources and just go over the top, and that’s how I do it. And I think that it helps me not make it personal anymore. For just a long time, it was excruciating for me because I would think, “If I raise my prices, they’re going to leave me,” rather than, “I’m going to raise my prices and I’m going to blow them all out of the water, and if anybody decides to leave, it’s not for them,” and that whole mindset took time to cultivate, but it has… I mean, when I was operating from 15 bucks a month, I was going literally from $5 and $0.95 a month to $15 a month, and that was what was excruciating for me. I lost people, but had I kept doing it the way I was doing it, 150 women in this world would be helped.
Speaker 1:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Corinne Crabtree:
And we have currently over 10,000. I’ve had over a half a million people come through my free course. I didn’t even have a free course back then, my podcast, as of a few weeks ago, has had 31 million downloads.
Speaker 1:
Holy moly.
Corinne Crabtree:
Yeah. By me, no longer taking everything so personally, and just deciding, how was I going to change women’s lives? And that meant changing lives and the people that work for me. One of the reasons why I’m so passionate about growing my business is not just so that I get to help more women lose weight, but I now have 19 women that work for me that left careers they hated, or one woman that works for me was a mom all her life. She was like, Corinne, I could have never gotten a job like this, but you created a job for me that I can excel in.
Corinne Crabtree:
She’s one of our Facebook community people. She gets in there every day, and she goes hard all day long, helping women know where the resources are, talking to them, showing them their successes, highlighting the things that they can’t see for themselves. That, for me, is what’s powerful. It’s like, I always thought that I would change lives. I just thought I would help a lot of people lose weight, but I never really thought that I would be able to change family legacy, change the trajectory.
Corinne Crabtree:
I’ve got women on my team right now who, the money they make goes into their family’s future savings that they never thought they would contribute to. So, being willing to divorce myself from making everything so personal, and really putting more of the focus on, it’s not about you Corinne, it’s about the people you serve. Serve in a big way, and so I always look at, whenever I’m making these decisions, how it’s going to help me impact more lives, and that’s what keeps me more on a path of what I would call smart business decisions.
Speaker 1:
Love that. I love that, and I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me, and I hope that people hear that there was so much more that you talked about than weight loss or even business coaching. That was life coaching.
Corinne Crabtree:
Well, thank you. I appreciate you having me too. Now, stop recording.
