Corinne:
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:
It’s hard. A lot of us have this thought about the weekends just being hard, and then we’ll list, our brain is like, “Oh yeah, okay, let me go to work on finding all the reasons why it’s hard.” If you keep allowing yourself in every place when it comes to food to keep thinking it’s hard, your brain has, it’s the reticular activation system. Its job is to keep your ass alive, but think of the reticular activation system, it’s also called the selective, I think it’s called selective reasoning or something like that. But basically, your job, the job of your brain is whatever you keep thinking it wants to filter out anything that doesn’t match that narrative. Every one of us has it. If you did not have it, you would have severe problems. One of the things, I’ve talked about this, Logan’s reticular activation system, because he has autism, doesn’t work as well as just all of us who are just walking around neurotypical.
Corinne:
That’s why he takes everything in, and why sometimes it’s very much sensory overload. He has a lot harder time making sense out of a lot of stuff, because his brain has a hard time searching out and filtering out noise so that he can see the thing he needs to see. So how you know yours is working is real simple. Make sure my mic is on, yeah. Is if anybody has ever, like we’ve all had this experience, where somebody comes up to us and they’ll say like, “Oh my God, have you heard this song?” And you’re like, “No,” and you listen to it and the next thing you know, it’s in every single commercial, it’s in the background of grocery stores and restaurants and all this other stuff. That song was not important to you, so your brain was filtering out background noise. It was filtering out things.
Corinne:
The moment it got on your radar, guess what it did? It started highlighting it and filtering out other things. Like if you ever are starting, say you want to buy a new car, how many of you have ever wanted to buy a new car, and then suddenly the car you want, you start seeing it on the road? Now it’s in the commercials. Before, it just fell into the background, because your brain cannot take in everything. You would fry yourself. So when you have thoughts, like if you just keep allowing yourself to talk about the weekends are hard, then your brain goes into the weekend and it’s like, “Okay, it’s going to be hard. Here’s why, so just prepare yourself. It’s going to suck.”
Corinne:
And then when you’re in the weekend, everything that you love to eat, you will see every commercial. I cannot tell you how many restrictive diets I started. It never failed, the moment that I would start a very restrictive diet where I was going to cut out fast food, I would never noticed a fast food commercial until I was on a diet. And then it would be like Taco Bell, sandwiched between Burger King and McDonald’s. I’m like, “What the fuck?” And it would always be the second I’d start a diet, the sales for pizza would come on. Suddenly, pizza’s like cheaper than it ever was. Because I always thought dieting was hard, and I can’t have these things, and next thing you know, it’s like, “Here’s why it’s so hard, and here’s why what you’re doing is so expensive. Let me show you all the ways.”
Corinne:
That’s how your reticular activation system works. So if you allow yourself to keep thinking it’s hard, you’re going to have problems. So one of the things that we’re going to be learning at camp in January is how to thought-ladder things. For this one, I have on here, “It’s hard, and there are things that can be easy.” Add something like that to the end, to decondition you to just dead-stopping at thinking it’s hard. Doing, “It’s hard, and I also could find some moments where it’s easy.” Then your brain will let you start seeing some of the easier things. A lot of us just need to think about the weekends as not being so hard on ourselves. “Why are weekends amazing? How can they be supportive of my weight loss? Where on the weekends, can I include some foods that I love and a little bit more free…”
Corinne:
If that’s what you want to do. That’s what I do. During the week, I just eat pretty boring. I love it, it’s simple. J.J. just makes our food, I love the food J.J. makes, but I’m just going to be eating the same thing. My boys are the same way. The three of us eat the same shit every single day, Monday through Friday. And then we run out of food, and then on the weekends, I cook or we’ll go out or whatever, and on those days, I don’t sit there and think, “Oh, finally I get to eat all the things I want.” No, I just think, “I’m going to plan some foods I like, I can’t wait until Monday too.” I just don’t think dramatically about all of it, and that’s key.
Corinne:
Thank you so much for listening today. Make sure you head on over to nobsfreecourse.com and sign up from 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 podcasts, to help you lose your weight without all the bullshit diet advice. I’ll see you next week.
