Episode 230: Eating Out and Weightloss

Corinne Crabtree:

Hi, I’m Corinne. After a lifetime of obesity, being bullied for being the fattest kid in the class and losing and gaining weight like it was my job, I finally got my shit together and I lost 100 pounds. Each week, I’ll teach you no bullshit weight loss advice you can use to overcome your battle with weight. I keep it simple. You’ll learn how to quit eating and thinking like an asshole, you stop that and weight loss becomes easy. My goal is to help you lose weight the way you want to live your life. If you’re ready to figure out weight loss, then let’s go.

Corinne Crabtree:
All right, everybody, welcome to today. We’re going to be talking about a couple of really good items, one is all about serving sizes, how do you get a grip on those? One of the things that a lot of you probably don’t know about me is I grew up in the restaurant industry. And since I was a single mom, I grew up in a drive-through first. So my restaurant experience started young. We literally rotated on a regular basis. Let me just back up, my mother was a single mother. She was 17 when she had me, and this is the height of the ’80s. When we were literally eating, we either ate McDonald’s, Hardee’s or KFC. That was the big three.

Corinne Crabtree:
We came from a really small town, and you either ate at those three places, or you went to Shoney’s buffet, or there was a seafood restaurant called The Seven Seas. And that was only if my grandparents were in town, they would take us out to eat and you could get fried shrimp and things like that. So all my life, I grew up in restaurants and eating at buffets, eating just pre-packaged meals, things like that. Then when I was in my teens, I got a job working at a Shoney’s, and was a server. So I have a lot of experience just in not only going to places and having a distorted reality with what a portion size is because of being the customer, but I also really understand the backend part of it.

Corinne Crabtree:
When I was working for Shoney’s, I was 16, I kind of knew that we were always supposed to be… how did we suggestive sell? How did we get you to order more food than you needed? There were ways this does say things versus other ways. And I was good at it. First of all, I was money-hungry so I’d get out because I had no money back in the day. So if they ran a contest on who could sell the most buffets, who could sell the most desserts, every time I was a winner. I wanted the extra 20 bucks; I was just all over it. So always be aware probably when you’re going out to eat, if they are suggesting things, there’s probably a contest tied to it. They don’t give a shit if you want to lose weight, they don’t give a shit if it’s healthy, all they want to do is make sure that you are overeating. The more you overeat, the more money a restaurant makes. All right, so we got that.

Corinne Crabtree:
Then after a while, I went to the corporate offices at Shoney’s and started working in their training department where I taught people how to sell the food. I also worked really closely with research and development, where we spent lots of time trying to figure out how can we give you a lot of food for the cheap for us so that you would feel like you had way more than you needed and get a good deal? We also spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to add ingredients to the food to make sure that it could sit in a window and look really good, and we spent a lot of time making sure that we also added a lot of ingredients that you wouldn’t want to stop eating them. So you would always be coming back, you would feel compelled.

Corinne Crabtree:
So I’m bringing all this up because there are so many ways to hack the restaurant game, it’s unreal. But the first thing you need to know is that you’re not broken if you’re going to a restaurant and you feel like you want to finish it. Their whole idea is to give you way more food than you need to get you to stay longer, and to keep eating, and to keep coming back. They’re not out for you. And I don’t give a damn if it is somebody who’s like, “We’re all organic and we’re greens.” They are still jack loading your food with stuff to keep you coming back.

Corinne Crabtree:
I don’t care what their mission statement is, at the end of the day, a business will not operate unless they make money, and the only way they make money is when you keep coming back. I’m a business too. Guess what? I do everything I can to make sure that my women are taken care of because I know that this business stays afloat if people are staying in happy. So it’s really important for you to understand that so that you don’t go into a restaurant feeling broken, you don’t go to a restaurant feeling like if, “I don’t eat the 16-ounce steak, I didn’t get my money’s worth.” You got your money’s worth probably at about seven ounces. It is incredible the amount of conditioning we have around food.

Corinne Crabtree:
So I wanted to lead off with that part today because it’s real important for you to understand that you are going to go to restaurants and you’re going to want to feel like you need to finish it to get your money’s worth. But they are drastically overselling you a lot of food for marketing purposes, for all kinds of things. There are also things, there are small hacks in restaurants that you can do to level your food up that you don’t even know about because you’re eating. I don’t teach calorie counting, but I will tell all of, if you eat steaks at a restaurant, you’re consuming about two to 300 extra calories in the glaze, the buttery oil glaze they put on top so that it can sit in the window until other things are finished and still look pretty when it comes to your plate, to your table.

Corinne Crabtree:
There are little things like that that you can say, “Hey, every…” I’ve gone to a steak house, Logan’s, Outback, even nice ones, I just tell them, “Hey, you know that butter stuff y’all put on top, I don’t want it.” And they’re like, “Are you sure?” I’m like, “100%.” If a steak can’t taste good without a dollop of butter on top of it, we have a steak problem. So I don’t want those extra things. So when you go to restaurants, be looking. I want to just give you a couple of tips before we get into questions, and at the end, we’ll kind of wrap up with a little bit more information on serving sizes and stuff. But when it comes to a restaurant, look for what are the extra things they’re putting on my plate and putting on my sandwich that I can do without?

Corinne Crabtree:
So I will give you a good example. When I first started losing weight, I loved hamburgers. Chris and I, we would go, we’d get hamburgers all the time. But we would go usually to Outback or we would go to just sit-down restaurants to get our food, especially Ruby Tuesday. One of the first big changes I made with a burger is I told them to quit putting butter on the bread. You bring me a burger, this burger should taste fine without the bread having about 100-200 calories of butter loaded on top of it, just to make sure that the bun stays crispy until it sits in the window and my server brings it to me, that just can happen.

Corinne Crabtree:
If a restaurant is putting your condiments on for you like mayonnaise or things like that, get them on the side and put less on there. There is not a cook in America at a traditional family style top restaurant that is going to care about your waistline. They’re going to grab a big ass dollop and they’re going to slather it on because it’s faster to throw it on there than it is to delicately smear it to make sure that they don’t saturate it too much. Take some fucking control over the little things. This is why I teach, when it comes to weight loss, there is so much low-hanging fruit, it is ridiculous. There are so many ways that we can start leveling up food without having to go into deprivation, without having to… Like I only can have a Caesar salad, no croutons or meat.

Corinne Crabtree:
There’s a lot of things you can do with your normal food that can help you. And so we’ll go into a few more things, we’ll close out today with a few more wrapping up, but let’s go ahead and get to coaching so we can get things going today.

Kathy:
All right, we’re going to take our first question here from Janet. Good morning, Janet. Do you want to unmute and say, “My question is.”

Janet:
Hey, good morning. My question is, I need some tips on dealing with the satisfied side of doable hunger, especially with dinner. I’m a nurse and I tend to be… and I know I’m exhausted at the end of the day, but I’ve implemented some things but I just don’t feel that they’re working well for me, could you help me out please?

Corinne Crabtree:
I’m going to let Kathy answer that. She’s got some really good tips on this. She coaches this a lot.

Janet:
Hey, Ms. Kathy.

Kathy:
It’s Janet. Hello, my friend.

Janet:
Hello.

Kathy:
Hello, so we’re talking about enough, right?

Janet:
Yes, ma’am.

Kathy:
All right. So there’s a lot of good hacks on enough. One of the things we talk about a lot in the membership is the sigh. Have you ever experienced the sigh where you’re eating along and all of a sudden, it’s like you slow down for a minute, you just kind of sit back in your chair, and you take a breath? And when you notice you’re doing this, your body is probably telling you that it’s an opportunity for you to slow down a minute and just take notice of how much you’re eating. That’s a really, really good thing to do. I didn’t realize I was doing it until somebody pointed it out to me one time. Sometimes you just automatically slow down and take a pause.

Kathy:
But one of the favorite things I like to teach, and I don’t know if you’ve tried this before, is serving up your regular plate, and eating half of it, and taking like a 10-minute pause, and just letting it sit there. Getting used to looking at food on your plate, but let it sit there for 10 minutes. And while you’re taking that 10 minutes, you’re thinking about how your body feels, what’s your brain saying? What kind of thoughts are going on? I should eat more or maybe I’ve had enough. What is going on in your mind?

Kathy:
But then you also think about how your stomach feels, what’s your breathing like? What’s your throat feel like? You do kind of a body scan and you wait for 10 minutes because it takes that long for the food to hit your belly, that you’ve swallowed, and a signal to go back to your brain to say, “Maybe we’ve had enough here.” Then if you decide that you probably still need to eat a little bit more, you just do the whole pattern again. You eat half again, you pause for 10 minutes, you think about what your stomach feels like. Are you having thoughts that you might have enough? And you just keep repeating that until you’ve had enough. So have you ever done that little method there, Janet?

Janet:
Yes, Kathy, I have. And I think we’ve spoken before, but I’m kind of at the point where I think half is too much, I’m almost thinking I’m going to have to start eating a fourth or a third and stop. I’m within 20 pounds of my goal weight. And I don’t know with salad-

Kathy:
So why do you think-

Janet:
… I’m thinking it, I’ve been eating half of the salad I’ve got, but then I’m thinking, “I’m not getting anywhere, so I’m thinking I’m going to have to cut that into a fourth or something and then go from there.” So is that in the correct mode?

Kathy:
Why do you think half is too much?

Janet:
I think I’m eating past satisfied and I’m not getting anywhere with my weight loss.

Kathy:
Okay. So when you eat half, are you assessing then and deciding it’s too much? Why are you still serving that much food? To kind of go back to what Corinne was saying about restaurants and stuff, why are you still serving that much food that even half is too much?

Janet:
Well, I’ll be honest, this salad that I do is typically lunch and it’s from somewhere. So it’s a restaurant, it goes along with Corinne’s restaurant thing. And it comes in the little aluminum things that a salad comes in. It’s a chef pasta salad. So I typically just put my dressing on half of it and then I know I’ve got the other half for the next lunch. Well, I did that for the past two weeks and I almost feel like the half a salad is more than what my body needs to lose weight if you told me that was [crosstalk 00:12:47]-

Corinne Crabtree:
I want to jump in. Janet, do you have any overeating going on outside of that pasta salad? Are you off-plan eating or doing anything else?

Janet:
I do sometimes do some overeating at dinner time, that’s kind of where… but yes, ma’am, I do.

Corinne Crabtree:
Okay. And then outside of dinner, is there any night-time eating, is there any weekend eating, is there any snacking, is there anything extra going on outside of those two things?

Janet:
Not after dinner. Occasionally, I have a plan snack, but I put it to where it’s got to be a piece of fruit or something and I-

Corinne Crabtree:
That’s fine. I’m talking about just any other donkey ass eating method.

Janet:
Eating wise, no ma’am. I am overeating at dinner sometimes, that’s why… Yes, I am sometimes overeating at dinner.

Corinne Crabtree:
I’d start with that. What’s going on there? Why are we overeating at dinner?

Janet:
Yeah, it’s like you said, it’s even good food. Like last night I had some squash that I made from the garden, and some lentils, and some couscous, and I just did a serving of a tablespoon of each of them-

Corinne Crabtree:
Okay.

Janet:
… And I don’t know, I just [crosstalk 00:13:53]-

Corinne Crabtree:
But why did you have those? They weren’t on the plan or they were on the plan?

Janet:
No, they were, they were on my plan, yeah.

Corinne Crabtree:
Okay, all of that was in the plan. So let me ask you this, I was actually writing about this personally this morning, so I just kind of want to like jump in because I noticed there are times when… here’s when I notice I’m eating too much, is when I’ve had say a stressor in the day and it is time to eat. I’m really good about waiting to eat, but once I start, I notice that the moment I start eating, I can feel the wave of comfort coming over me. It’s like, “Oh, now we’re thinking about food. Now the food’s hitting us. We’re totally into what we’re eating. We’re so grateful to be eating. We’re letting go of the rest of the day.” And what I’ve noticed is, first of all, the pace of my eating picks up. So I’m eating faster, which means that my wave of comfort and the time that I’m spending with my food is quickly eroding. So then I want to eat more mainly because I want to keep experiencing what’s happening with the food.

Janet:
Yes, I’m there. Yes, the joy of it.

Corinne Crabtree:
Okay. So I literally wrote about this morning because I want to either do a podcast on it or I’m going to include it this month inside of No BS. You’re one of our members, correct?

Janet:
Yes ma’am, I am.

Corinne Crabtree:
Okay. So this month I want you to do Urges 2.0. I know that we’re doing mainly over-eating windows, but the techniques that I teach in there are going to apply no matter what time of day this is, even if it’s just lunch, even if it’s just dinner. Okay?

Janet:
Okay.

Corinne Crabtree:
Because like for me, my overeating window is dinner. My overeating window is, you’re not going to see me at nine o’clock at night going back downstairs and get a bunch of food, but you will see me at dinner eating my planned dinner and then sitting there going like, “Well, I wish I’ve had just a little bit more, that was fun.” For me, it was just like, “I got to relax.” And, “I wish I had just a little bit more so I could…” Mainly, for me, it’s so I can keep relaxing.

Janet:
Yes. Like to have a reprieve from the day. And I will say yesterday, and you can relate, I’ve heard you talk about this, but I got home from work, and I waited a little bit, started to cook this food that I had prepared. And my husband was like, “What are you doing? It’s 5:30, 6:00, why are we eating so early?” I’m like, “Well, I’m fixing supper because I’m getting hungry. I’m noticing my hunger and I need to fix this up.” “Well, you should listen to Corinne, Corinne doesn’t tell you that.” And I’m like, “Corinne tells me to eat when I’m hungry, and if you’re not hungry and I am, then you eat when you want to, and I’ll eat when I want to, don’t tell me I need to eat.”

Janet:
So he went for a walk, and I fixed dinner, and I sat out on our patio, and had kind of [inaudible 00:16:33] meal, and just enjoy it. But I was like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I’m going to eat when I need to.” Because that’s what I’m… that’s the needs I’m meeting for my body. It was so funny he said that.

Corinne Crabtree:
Let’s go back to though the relief, it’s the reprieve from the day, it’s a get away from the day. So there’s a two-pronged approach I want you to take. I don’t think you really need any more tips on eating half or doing any of that stuff, yours is all the mental game now. So-

Janet:
I would agree.

Corinne Crabtree:
… When people are tackling enough, and if you’re in our challenge, right now we have to Take Control food challenge going on, if you’re in it, you need to watch the video from Monday because that’s where I give you tons of tips on like so the plate dividing just all the different hacks for how we actually slow it down so that you can get decent at questioning it.

Corinne Crabtree:
So there’s always phases to really learning how to eat at enough. Number one is, you just got to have tips, tricks, and hacks on, “How do I even get conscious about it to begin with? I’ve never done that. I’ve never even stopped. I don’t even know what that’s like.” We want to do that. Some people will find there are meals it’s so easy to stop at enough. It’s like, “Oh, had I known this all my life, I would have been doing it, it’s not a big deal.” Then what comes though is this phase where after a while, it’s all mental for us now. Now it’s, “I know what enough is. It’s do I have the self-control and the power to stop? And how do I cultivate that skill now?” And I think that’s where you-

Janet:
Yes, because I’ve been practicing that, yeah. I mean, I’ve been practicing the stopping at enough. And like you said, I’m good at some meals and not others.

Corinne Crabtree:
Well, and this happens as you lose weight. So for my beginners out there, you’re going to nail enough, and then you’re going to lose a bunch of weight, and then you’re going to need to nail enough again. Then you’re going to get real close to your goal, and then you’re going to have to nail enough again. Because as you get smaller, enough gets quicker. And every single time you hit a milestone with that, it brings back usually, all the old garbage that it used to. So it’s going to be like, “Oh, but it tastes so good.” Like, “Oh, but I was relaxing. I was getting away from my day.”

Corinne Crabtree:
And when you tell yourself, like your key sign, Janet, is, “It lets me get away from my day.” Just like me, “It lets me take a break. It lets me get away from my day.” That means I have two problems. Number one, the way that I’m constructing my day in my mind is triggering stress. So I am thinking about my day stressfully, I’m constructing, I’m talking about it, I’m busy, I have lots to do. Sometimes, if you’re like me, you won’t sit around in the about shit or about my day, but I will for sure call up Kathy and say, “Well, yeah, I got busy day to day. What do you get on tap?” Just innocently.

Corinne Crabtree:
We’re just throwing these terms around as if it’s not a big deal, but the second you declare you have a busy day, the rest of the day, your body pumps out cortisol and adrenaline to get you through it. Well, guess what? At the end of the day, yeah, you want to fucking relax. And the second you start eating, you quit thinking about how busy you are, you start thinking about how you’re relaxing. Your body has the waves of relaxation come over it, and then it makes sense to your brain. When this part’s over, are we going back to stewing, and worrying, and our to-do list and all the things that we have to do if on the other end of finishing our meal is another construct of worry, or busy, or overwhelm, or things I need to get done before I go to bed, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Corinne Crabtree:
Guess what we want to do, we want to eat a little bit more, just a little bit more and then I’ll have enough strength to get through that. So I think your fix, Janet, is let’s look at your thoughts that you’re carrying through the day that leads you up to your meal, and then when you’re eating, I want you to think about, “When I stop eating, what am I going back to?” Whatever your story about what you’re going back to is the one that has to change in order for you not to feel compelled to want to eat in that moment more. It’s basically like I’m delaying having my arms saws off.

Janet:
So yeah, right, Corinne. So when you say I need to look at the story that I’m telling, drilling on that, you mean what am I looking for when I go back, are you thinking what feelings I’m trying-

Corinne Crabtree:
Feelings And thoughts. Literally, all you need to do is get you a piece of paper out, do it tonight, have dinner. Before you ate dinner, ask yourself, “When dinner’s over and I’ve enjoyed myself, in my mind, if I have to stop it enough and I don’t get to keep eating what I want, what do I think about that? What do I think about actually stopping at enough?” Those thoughts will oppose you. They’re probably not going to be sexy, so you’re going to want to rework those. Then also, “And when I finish eating, what do I think about the rest of the evening?” First of all, see if you can figure it out.

Corinne Crabtree:
You may be far enough along in your thought work from being a No BS woman to where you can kind of know… Here’s what I do, I know that when I finish eating that my brain is going to start thinking, “You should check in the Facebook group just to make sure no one is sitting there needing you. You really should check Slack, make sure that the team, like the website’s not down, you should just do those things.” My brain knows it’s going to go there the moment I stop eating and I will feel this urge to want to start working again.

Corinne Crabtree:
But the problem is, is that most of us, what we really want to do, is if we’re eating to relax is what we’re wanting at the moment is relaxation, so we have to figure out like, “All right, my brain is going to want to work, so if I think Rome is burning in the Facebook group and they have set all the donuts on fire, and then in Slack, the website’s down and never coming back ever again, I have to remind myself, I have a nighttime team, they’re taking care of it, they would text me if they needed me. And I’ll also tell myself the same thing about the Facebook group. There’s 10,000 women in there who know what they’re doing. I’m pretty sure that if somebody is eating a donut right now, somebody is helping them and they don’t need me.”

Janet:
Right, I’ll have to-

Corinne Crabtree:
Calm my brain down on that stuff. And that’s how you rebuild the relationship. Your brain, when you’re eating, if it’s anticipating stress when you finish eating, it will want to keep eating to kick the stress can down the road. Eventually what happens is you’ll eat just enough to where you can handle your stress. We don’t want to handle stress that way, we want to handle it mentally.

Janet:
Right, and I have the [inaudible 00:23:24] because the other night I got home from work, went, and walked. It’s my birthday month, so I’m walking every day, this month. And we got kind of late and I knew in my mind when I got back it was about 7:30. On my side, I have you sitting there saying, “You’re not really hungry, you don’t need to eat. But then on the other side, I got the little food man saying, “Yeah, but you hadn’t had dinner yet.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but I’m not hungry.” And so, I drank my water and I said, “If eight o’clock I’m hungry, I’ll eat, if not, I won’t.” Well, I wasn’t, so I didn’t eat because I truly wasn’t hungry, and I went to bed at 9:30. So I know I have the data and some of the mental capacity to think through. I think you’re right, I need to really work on that relaxation piece and the stress after I’m eating and what I think.

Corinne Crabtree:
Yeah, just to start for all of you, the easiest way to do this, in the beginning, is when you’re eating and you stop it enough, take a five-minute pause. You don’t have to be sitting there thinking about food. Just listen to what your brain has to say at first. The very first thing when you’ve been in No BS for a while, a lot of times you don’t have to sit and listen, you know the garbage. It’s like, “This is probably what my brain is thinking.”

Corinne Crabtree:
But if you don’t know the quickest way to figure out why you keep eating, is to not eat, give yourself some space and just be like, “I wonder what my brain bitches about. I’m pretty sure it bitches about something, otherwise, I would just be not interested in finishing when I know I have enough.” And you want to know what your brain bitches about. Guys, you don’t need to be afraid of it, you don’t need to be scared of it, you don’t need to do any of that. You really want to know because once, then you have the power to hear it loudly the next time.

Corinne Crabtree:
And then you also have the authority to tell it something different. Right now, what we’re doing when we’re not really listening, we don’t have the opportunity to think anything different. We just keep wondering why we can’t make ourselves do shit. You’ll never be able to make yourself do something that on the inside, your brain is commanding you the complete opposite. So that’s why you have to be really good at hearing it. All right, I think Kathy wanted to jump in, and then we’ll move on to the next person.

Kathy:
Yeah, I just want to thank Janet for bringing this topic up and Corinne, when you took it all the way back to what’s going on at dinner time, and then what are you telling yourself in the morning? When you talked about calling me and saying, “I have such a busy day today.” Oh my gosh, I do that every single day.

Kathy:
Ken and I will sit down over coffee and say, “So what are you doing today?” And it always turns into this laundry list of all the things. And I had no idea I was setting myself up for this wave of relaxation that you’re talking about that happens at dinner time. I just wanted to tell you, you coached me today and I had this big aha and thank you to you and Janet.

Corinne Crabtree:
Well, I will tell you, I know that I am seriously not above any of you. Because y’all know, I Marco Polo, my best friend every morning, and most of the time, the first 10 minutes of my Marco Polo is me like, “Oh my God, you’re not going to believe what all I got to do today.” And I’ll rattle off, the laundry list of shit, I’m a martyr, I’m a victim of my calendar. I mean, if you heard my whining every single… One day, I should just get Jane, just put publicly out there one day of my shit show just so all you know I do the same thing. But what I end up doing is when I verbalize it, and this is what I want for all of you, as you listen to the podcast, as you move along inside your No BS membership and your world is, I have all the same stinking thinking that you guys do, the only difference is, after I’ve verbalized it and I’ve heard myself say it, then I’m like, “Okay, I know that today, I need to think about this a little bit differently. I need to remember that…” I even told her this morning, I was already getting anxious because we have our big opening tomorrow.

Corinne Crabtree:
Well, there’s not a lot for Corinne to do other than, be in the Facebook group, be on camera. The team takes care of everything. Well, because I’m basically sitting and waiting for things to do, my brain has nothing to think about other than, “Let’s create fires and problems. Let’s think about how you’re never going to be able to help anyone. Let’s think about imposter syndrome for a hot minute. Let’s think about how you could’ve said this better yesterday.” It’s like idle time is the fucking devil’s playground. But it’s being on top of knowing that, “I’m going to listen, I’m going to get really good at hearing it. I’m going to notice when I’m self…” If you’re sharing your day with someone and by the end of it, you’re more anxious than you were before you started, the way you’re sharing your day and the way you’re sharing your story is a problem. It is not what you, what has happened or what’s going to happen. It’s your perception.

Corinne Crabtree:
So when you call your girlfriend and you want to talk about how your partner acted the night before, if you’re in a full-on sweat horse and dying and marked up at the end, your interpretation of the story is so jacked up, you’ll be jacked up at the end of the day. So we have to be more onto ourselves. And that’s the way that we want to think about the way I’m telling my story, about my day. At the end of the day, do I feel in control of my life, or do I feel like I’m at the effect of it? Same thing with, before I go into a meal, the story about what the rest of the night’s going to be like in my mind, am I in control of my life or am I at the effect of my life? And that will tell you everything.

Corinne Crabtree:
All right, we should probably move on, because I know we have to be out of here on time today because I will be doing what the fuck I need to lose weight on the challenge for day three. And I don’t want to be late for… I don’t know, there’s like 20-something thousand people in this challenge, which is amazing. And I can’t wait to teach all of you.

Kathy:
There’s a lot of people.

Corinne Crabtree:
That’s right.

Janet:
Well, thank you so much ladies. And Corinne, your call yesterday for the challenge was rocking out. So thank you, I’ve been listening to that too. But thank you, ladies. Have a great day.

Kathy:
Thank you so much, Janet. We’re so glad that you were able to come and ask us your question. And if you’re here with us on Clubhouse today, and you’d like to join us and learn what to eat for weight loss, go to takecontrolchallenge.com. You can sign up and write on that page, there’s a link to join our webinar for today. We would love to have you. I’m going to go ahead and move on to Debbie. Good morning, do you want to unmute and ask us your question?

Debby:
Good morning, thank you. I am wondering about drinking specifically. I just am not a water drinker and I guess, am I going to just have to tell myself you need to become a water drinker? I do Crystal Light, I do diet pop. Do I have [crosstalk 00:30:17] straight water?

Corinne Crabtree:
Okay, I can help you. Number one, you have to quit saying, “I’m not a water drinker.” You have to quit saying that. Just tell me, when you think, I’m not a water drinker, how do you feel, Debbie?

Debby:
Yeah, bad.

Corinne Crabtree:
Right, so that’s never going to get you to be a water drinker, focusing on what you don’t like about it. So we want to make sure that, if you’re going to talk about water, I want you to say, “I could learn.” I want you to say, “It’s good for me.” I want you to say, “This is the key to weight loss.” I want you to say anything other than, “Well, I’m not one of them.” Or “I don’t like it.”

Corinne Crabtree:
I think a lot of times you guys want to say those things, the problem with… You might not like it, that could be a truth to you, but if you ultimately want to be healthy and lose your weight, you have to transcend that version of you. And all of us, I mean, I remember saying for years, “I’ll never have kids, I’m not having kids. I’m not the motherly type.” Well, when I had a kid, it’s a damn good thing that I dropped that persona because I could have easily kept saying, “Well, I have a kid, but I’m not the motherly type. Well, I have a kid, I should have never been one.” I know that sounds like two disjointed things, but it’s the same shit, all the time in our life, we identify as one thing, something makes it compelling to identify another way, and so we do it. So it’s not that you can’t become a water drinker, it’s that it’s one of the things you haven’t worked on just yet, okay?

Debby:
Okay.

Corinne Crabtree:
The second part is you can count Crystal Light and stuff like that, I don’t have a problem with it. For all of you, this is a common question, if you drink… Well, a good example, I had a glass of cashew milk this morning. I love cashew milk, I had a Kodiak pancake, which is a protein pancake. I think one of the best breakfast in the world is a chocolate chip Kodiak pancake with a big ass glass of cashew milk. I mean, for me, there’s hardly nothing better these days than to start it off that way. I count the glass of cashew milk, even though it technically has calories and stuff. But if I decided to drink a gallon of cashew milk every single day, I would not be counting that as my water.

Corinne Crabtree:
So you can count one diet soda, if you want, you can count one coffee with creamer if you want, you can count one iced tea with a little bit of sweetener in there if you want, but you cannot expect to drink all that stuff all day long and ultimately expect it to count towards water. Now, if you want to add some Crystal Light, here’s what I suggest because that’s how I got to be a water drinker, to begin with. Started off with full dose, then I cut it down by 25%.

Corinne Crabtree:
[crosstalk 00:33:02] Yeah, I weaned my tongue off of needing it to be so sweet. So the misconception about the tongue, and this is for all of you when it comes to vegetables, water, there are just certain… Let’s go back to the restaurant industry. Let’s just throw the whole restaurant industry under the bus for a moment. The food industry in and of itself has basically dumbed our tongue pallets down. Chips and different things are all actually chemically designed to be able to be easily palliated and swallowed and exaggerate the tongue’s senses to light your brain up. That’s how they know that if we give you this, you will want to eat way more of it.

Corinne Crabtree:
So what ends up happening though, is that things like water and vegetables, the tongue is like… All of a sudden, it’s not sweet enough, all of a sudden it’s not crunchy, like a broccoli will be too crunchy and bitter, everything will taste overly bitter and stuff. So you want to wean yourself off of those things. So with water, in particular, you can just dial back a little at a time until you get to the point where you’re barely flavoring something, barely enhancing something.

Corinne Crabtree:
And this works with vegetables too. I remember I hated sweet potatoes my entire life. I felt that they were so bitter. And then when I got to where I was eating more fruits and I’d started eating a little bit more salads and I was eating a lot less chips and kind of mixing up, I try to sweep potato one day and I was like, “Holy shit, were they always this sweet.” It’s like, “Yeah.” When I quit eating half a gallon a carton of ice cream every night, suddenly a sweet potato, I could taste the natural sugars in it. I could not taste the natural sugars when I was offsetting it by only eating things that were highly sugared all the time.

Corinne Crabtree:
So your tongue, it’s one of the most important muscles and organs in your entire body. If you think about it, what we ingest with, so mother nature made sure to make sure that the tongue would be the last man standing when it came to being able to regenerate, it had to be strong, it had to protect us because we were always going to be a species that ingested through our mouth. And so, it went to great lengths to make sure it works well for the rest of our life. So it doesn’t matter if you’ve spent 70 years on this planet eating Twinkies and drinking Coke, you can wean off those things and your tongue will always adapt, it adapts until the day we die. It is one of the few muscles that stays strong and continually adapts until you die, all right?

Debby:
Thank you. In fact, I’m sitting here thinking, I’m going to do it with my coffee too. I’m the type that has the creamer and the sweet and low, and I’m going to start that same principle, thank you.

Corinne Crabtree:
You’re welcome.

Kathy:
Thank you, Debbie, for your question. And I want to say that this really, really works. I used to be a person who put mostly creamer in my coffee, the coffee was mostly creamer. And over the past couple of years, I just dialed it back a little bit, a little bit, a little bit and then I switched to half and half where there was no sugar and now I just put a splash of milk in it. And over time, my tongue just naturally adapted. I don’t miss the sugar at all, I can’t even drink sugary coffee. So this does work, making those small little tweaks and changes. All right, let’s move on to Rebecca. Good morning, what is your question?

Rebecca:
Good morning, y’all. So my question is, I am in the challenge that Corinne’s doing this week. And yesterday I drank a protein shake, that I blended with a tablespoon of peanut butter, ice protein powder and unsweetened almond vanilla milk. Well, last night, I was not hungry at all. I started drinking my HydroJug water religiously and so, I didn’t get hungry yesterday. Is it normal in the process to not be hungry and how do you turn your brain off from going, “You’re supposed to be eating, you’re not eating enough?”

Corinne Crabtree:
You don’t turn your brain off on that. So this is one of the biggest misconceptions is when your brain is screaming, “Oh my God. One day of your life, you didn’t get hungry for dinner. I bet you anything, the rest of your life you’re going to under eat. You should probably stop doing this.” This is when we’re just like, “Got it. You are blowing things way out of proportion and you’re wrong.” I would invite you to go back and listen to the day one video because I actually talk about this. I talk about how very often what we’ve done in life… Nobody was sitting around on the day that they went to Shoney’s in the morning and had the breakfast bar, Golden Corral for lunch, swung by McDonald’s to grab an ice cream, and then for dinner ordered the KFC bucket and then thought, “I bet you there’ll be a day, where I won’t be as hungry and this will all offset it.” That’s what we end up doing.

Corinne Crabtree:
When you get hydrated and you put some nutrition in your body and you pay attention to actual hunger, if you’ve got extra weight, you might find there are going to be days that your body’s like, “I guess all this shit we’re storing on your body, on the day you went to Golden Corral, Shoney’s, the Chinese Buffet, and everything else, today’s the day we’re going to use that because on that day you had way too much.” What we do is we freak out like, so this one day in my weight loss journey, I wasn’t hungry, I bet that’s the way it’s going to be forever. I bet I’m developing disordered eating.

Corinne Crabtree:
No, you just weren’t hungry. That’s not disordered eating. That’s just your body regulating, that’s it. Now, this is what happens though, in the beginning, some of you are going to get real hydrated, and you’re going to throw it out a meal and your body’s going to immediately kick over and start trying to tap into its stored calories, all that extra that you’re carrying around. Because your body is good at storing the calories, it’s good at storing extra fat.

Corinne Crabtree:
We’re just not that far off from our primitive brothers and sisters. Our bodies are designed that when we take in extra, throw it into fat because our… If you think about historically as humans, we have gone through famines, we go through periods where you don’t get to eat much. Even as early, as the early 1900s, when there were big working farms, my grandmother grew up on a 100 person working farm. She was one of nine kids. In farming season, they pretty much ate once a day because you had to be working, working. So they didn’t eat in the mornings. They didn’t eat until it got smoking hot in the middle of the day and then they would get lunch and then they would farm until they couldn’t see and they’d go to bed. And they’d just start over the next day. And during high season, that’s what you did. And nobody was sitting around going like, “Oh my God, I got an eating disorder.” Farming season brings out my ED, no, that was called life, nowadays though.

Corinne Crabtree:
And so, back then, what would happen is during the winter, they would eat more and their body would store up fat because they knew the seasons were coming, times were coming, when we needed too, that is the way our body’s designed. The problem is, we all sitting around with an abundance of food everywhere. Even during the coronavirus, if you wanted food, there were food banks, shipped, Uber Eats, an explosion of places where… Like, “Let’s make sure nobody fucking goes hungry.” Most of us gained weight during Corona.

Corinne Crabtree:
So you have to think about your body as a fat-storing machine. It wants to store it because it thinks there’s going to be a day you need it. When you start paying attention to hunger, if you’re not hungry, it’s also meant to automatically tap into what you’ve stored. It’s expertly designed that way. And if you’re carrying around extra, especially in the early days, you’re going to have times where your body’s like, “Oh, I guess we’re supposed to use what you’ve been overeating with.” So that part’s normal.

Corinne Crabtree:
Now, here’s what also happens, after a while, your body stabilizes and realizes what’s going on. It’s like, “Oh, we’re trying to get rid of some of this.” So it’s going to want to ask for food, it’s going to not want to tap the calories inside your body as quickly, and that’s a good thing. It’s going to want to make sure there’s food security happening. So a lot of times, what I see people do is, they will go through a few days where they’re just not as hungry as they normally are and they’re not eating as much as they’re used to. Then all of sudden, they’ll have a hungry day where their body will ask for food and then they’ll think something’s going wrong then. It’s like, “Oh my God, these last few days, I’ve barely been hungry. Suddenly I’m just hungry all the time, now, something’s wrong.” It’s like, “Y’all it can’t be wrong on both sides or you’re never going to be able to win.” You have to watch what your brain is doing.

Corinne Crabtree:
Basically, you got to quit fucking your shit out every single time you think you’re hungry or not hungry. If you’re not hungry, that’s a good thing. If you’re hungry, that’s called a good thing. But what y’all make it mean is like, “I’m not hungry, that’s a bad thing. When I’m hungry, that’s a bad thing.” So don’t set yourself up for the no-win situation. So what ends up happening is, you’ll have some auto-correction, your body will have a day where it’s actually hungry. Your job is to make sure that it’s true hunger and if it is, you just eat, and then you don’t worry and shame and everything else.

Corinne Crabtree:
The body works in ebbs and flows. It’s not going to be the same every single day. That is why I teach you guys, the 24-hour plan ahead of time. That’s why I teach you to check in with hunger, check-in with enough because calorie counting apps and stuff don’t address that your body has different needs on different days, based upon hormones, what you’ve got going on, your stress levels, how much you’re sleeping, if you’re getting really good rest and stuff. You might have a day where you might actually want to eat a little bit more because you’ve been getting some good rest and your body’s firing everything back up, fired up that metabolism again. So the key is just really to listen. Does that help Rebecca?

Rebecca:
Yeah, absolutely. And yesterday you were on your call and you were talking about getting rid of, I’m going to call it the whiny asses in your life and so, I deleted all of those-

Corinne Crabtree:
Titty-baby, we like to call it the titty-baby.

Rebecca:
Yeah, so I deleted all of the groups that I was in and I deleted my carb manager app because I was kind of keto. And I was like, “Why?” It just doesn’t make sense to me anymore. But no, that makes perfect sense.

Corinne Crabtree:
Well, I’m proud of you, it’s not easy to delete those apps and to get rid of that stuff, but I will promise you when you start getting rid of a lot of that bullshit in your life, you give yourself the ability to start creating a lot of mental clarity for yourself. I’m actually kicking off today’s call with something that one of my team members was talking about this morning, that I thought was really insightful, that I wanted to share with everyone, and it has to do with keto in particular. And I want everybody to know I’m not anti-keto, but there’s no sort of keto. You’re either keto because it fits your life, and makes your health amazing and stuff. But when we’re just sort of keto, we’re in it for the wrong reasons. You’re not trying to change your health and stuff. You’re there secretly in the inside like, “No, I like I think this is the only way to lose weight. I’ve just bought all the snake oil from the salesman, that this is the only way.” So I’m proud of you, good job.

Rebecca:
Thank you.

Corinne Crabtree:
All right. Are you going to come to the next call starts in nine minutes?

Rebecca:
Yes, absolutely.

Corinne Crabtree:
I will be in rare form because we’re talking about what to eat and I love good, better, best day.

Rebecca:
Thank you so, Corinne.

Corinne Crabtree:
You’re welcome.

Rebecca:
You’re a lifesaver.

Corinne Crabtree:
Bye-bye.

Kathy:
Thank you so much for your question, Rebecca. And we’re going to go ahead and wrap up our call a few minutes early today. If you would like to join us to learn what to eat, Corinne is going to teach her good, better, best method inside the Take Control of Food challenge and you can head to takecontrolchallenge.com to sign up. If the challenge is not really your jam, and you’d like to take a little bit of an easy smaller course, you can go to nobsfreecourse.com and get Corinne three-day video course, and that’ll teach you some of the same things as well. We would love to help you figure out how to lose weight for the rest of your life and keep it off in a simple way. And you can do that by joining us there. Any last words Corinne, before we sign off.

Corinne Crabtree:
Let me just go over a couple of little tips for restaurants just so that everybody, I don’t want to leave y’all hanging. Number one is, one of the things that I used to do, and Kathy, I know this is one of her ideas too, is when I would go out to eat, I used to have a lot of shame around not finishing what was on my plate, because I had been raised that I’m supposed to eat everything that I saw. And one of the things that really helped me in the beginning, when I wasn’t going to eat everything that was given to me, because I’m just going, to be honest, I rarely nowadays go to a restaurant where they’re giving me just enough food, it’s almost always too much.

Corinne Crabtree:
When I thought I’d had enough, I’d excuse myself and go to the restroom. And then I would go into the restroom and I would just think about what I wanted to think about myself, rather than sitting there and staring at the food and thinking, “Oh my God, I’m not going to get to finish this.” Or, “Oh my God, everything looks so good and everybody else is still eating but me.” I would go to the bathroom and I would talk to myself about how proud I was with myself, how far I’m coming along in my weight loss journey. And I would use it as an opportunity to just kind of reground myself, get away from the food. And most of the time I would tell Chris, “Hey, if the server comes by, tell them to wrap my food.” By the way, all that was happening, and I had delegated it to somebody else while I was gone. And that way, when I would come back, it was just so much more pleasant. It’s so much more easy.

Corinne Crabtree:
One of the things that Kathy had suggested is that, especially if you’re going to be going out to eat, I know a lot of times when you’re sitting there and everybody’s eating, it’s hard to remember who you want to be because your brain is screaming, “Everybody’s eating but you, you’re being left out.” Or you’re sitting there because you’re not eating feeling like you need to be talking and maybe you’re not really comfortable talking. So one of the things to do is to put all of your whys on your home screen, on your phone, or put them in your notes app so that when you’re sitting there, if you want to just tap your screen, your why can flash so that you can see it and reground yourself. Or if let’s say everybody’s ordering and you’re not going to get appetizers today, they’re all going around trying to figure out what appetizer they want and stuff, you can pull up on your notes app, your whys and what it means to you to be in this journey and you can read that. That’s another good way to ground you.

Corinne Crabtree:
The other thing is when you are at a restaurant, I watch my friends do this all the time. And this is not because all of my friends are trying to lose weight and stuff. But I had a girlfriend way back in the day when I was not even… I was at 250 pounds, she always said, “Hey, do you want to split something?” I can’t tell you how common it is, this day and age to split things. I think it used to not be, but nowadays lots and lots of people do it.

Corinne Crabtree:
So think about when you go out to eat and ask your friends, “What do you think about splitting the entree and then we both get a side salad?” Number one, it saves money. I mean, let’s just say that, but number two, it saves you from having to negotiate, getting such a large portion and all that other kind of stuff. So that’s just some of the general tips on top of. I promise you, if you go to a restaurant and you want to get what you want to get, they can mix and match things if you’re clever and you’re looking at the menu.

Corinne Crabtree:
I go all the time and I will look at something… I used to do this all the time at this… We don’t have Ruby Tuesday by us anymore, but I used to do this often. I loved the chicken pasta dish, chicken and broccoli pasta. So I would go and I would tell them that I wanted the marinara sauce from the shrimp dinner instead of the cream sauce, I wanted that on my spaghetti and I wanted them to give me double broccoli and half the pasta. And it was delicious. And I was going out to eat, and I felt like a normal person, and I got extra vegetables and I felt like I’ve got plenty.

Corinne Crabtree:
So look at different things on the menu, if an ingredient is in something else, and you want to mix and match on your stuff, almost every restaurant is very accommodating. All they care about is you paying the bill and the server getting a tip. They are not sitting there thinking, “What a pain in the ass.” Even if they think you’re a pain in the ass, if you leave a good tip, they don’t think you’re a pain in the ass anymore. They’re like, “Here’s my name, next time you come in, ask for me.” And they will make all your dreams come true. All right, guys, y’all have a good week. I’m going to get out of here, my presentations in the other room, so I got a quick run over to the other room and grab it. See all of my challengers in a few minutes. Otherwise, we’ll see you next week. Bye y’all.

Corinne Crabtree:
Thank you so much for listening today. Make sure you head on over to nobsfreecourse.com and sign up for my free weight loss training, on what you need to know to start losing your weight right now. You’ll also find lots of notes and resources from our past podcast to help you lose your weight without all the bullshit data diets. I’ll see you next week.