Corrine:
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 are ready to figure out weight loss, then let’s go.
Corrine:
I have something special for you to chew on today. The diet industry has bastardized eating out if you are trying to lose weight. The meal plans they give you aren’t designed for real life. They glorify spending hours in the kitchen, preparing your food, and then shame you for going out to a restaurant for date night or grabbing takeout on a busy day. Typical diets don’t understand that going to a restaurant is just part of life. Losing weight is even harder when you have to battle FOMO because you’re skipping birthday celebrations, girls nights, work lunches or vacations simply because you’re scared as shit to eat out and blow your diet. Plus after you lose your weight, what are you going to do? Say no to every person to ask you to eat out for the rest of your life? No.
Corrine:
What you really need to lose weight, is you need to learn how to stop eating when you’ve had enough at a restaurant. See, I grew up poor. Eating at buffets and my mama telling me, “Eat all you can, because I don’t know when the next meal will be.” This led to a lifelong problem of overeating. I’d go out to eat. A big ass heaping of food would arrive that’s tasty as fuck. And as I ate, I’d hit the point where I knew I’d had enough, but my brain would light up like a firecracker thinking, “I don’t want to waste it. I need to get my money’s worth.” Now I could have gotten a to-go box, but in the moment, I didn’t want a box. I wanted another fork load of steak dipped in my mashed potatoes.
Corrine:
So when I was losing my 100 pounds, I knew I had to solve this problem. I had to learn how to stop eating and actually want to do it at a restaurant. I was ready to stop wasting my life over eating food. So today I put together a podcast of my best tips, for how to eat out without eating your face off. Today’s podcast is for you if you are ready to learn my best tips for avoiding the traps restaurants use, to get you to eat more. The self-talk that you must have in the moment when food tastes so good and you do not want to stop. And what it takes to leave food behind and still have a good time, instead of sitting there feeling punished or wasteful. Now, if you like today’s episode, make sure to share it with your friends on social media and tag me. I love seeing what you’re learning and applying to lose weight.
Corrine:
If you’re thinking about going back out and you’re worried what other people are going to think about weight you may have gained, then you’re going to feel scared and then your brain is going to populate really shitty answers about what people are going to think about you. You will be dancing around, assuming that everyone thinks you’ve gained weight and all this other bullshit. If you don’t think that and you decide, “I’m going to go out, I’m figuring out my shit. This is happening.” Your brain doesn’t sit there and feel scared and hopeless and defeated. It’s going to sit there and think about, “All right, how do I go to this meal? How do I stop at enough? How do I order things that I know I want to order?” Your brain will operate on a different level. So I think the first thing is you’ve got to get really clear on, “How am I currently thinking about all this?”
Corrine:
And you know me, I’m going to tell you all to journal. So you need to write down on a piece of paper, if you’re worried about what other people are going to think, let’s say you’ve gained some weight. First and foremost, write down, what are your thoughts about the weight gain and what do I think other people will think. Just know what you’re thinking first, because that’s the most important. Then what you can do is you can sit there and you can look at it and you can decide, “All right, I need to be aware of when this kind of thinking starts so that when it does, I’m going to shut it down, because it’s not useful. It feels bad. It jacks me up. And if I’m going out jacked up, feeling bad, I’m more likely to just eat shit, so I don’t feel jacked up and feel bad.”
Corrine:
So it’s really important that you guys do that. You don’t need to come up with new thoughts yet. You don’t need to do anything other than when the volume turns up on your shitty thoughts and the only way you’ll turn the volume up is to get to know what you’re already thinking. When it happens, you can turn it down. You can just say like, “Not useful. That’s not what I’m going to think. We’re just going to sit here. We’re going to order the food we said we would order.” You know how I get you to make a 24 hour doable plan? That’s when you just fall back on, “Since my brain is acting like an asshole right now, the best thing I can do for myself is fall back on my plan. Not sit here and listen to it like it’s the God’s honest truth.”
Corrine:
So figure out those thoughts, do the same thing with, if you’re worried about going out and eating and you haven’t been there for a long time. You need to write the same story down. You need to ask yourself, “All right, what have I been thinking? What do I think about this? Is it jacking me up? Is it driving anxiety? Am I asking poor questions like, how am I ever going to not overeat?” A lot of us, wonder why we go out and we end up overeating. If you let your brain ask shitty questions, you will always get a shitty answer. So think about this. List everything that you’re thinking about going back out and then challenge each one of them and be like, “Is this what I really want to be thinking? Is this how I really want to set myself up?” Because you want to set yourself up to be able to go and you want to be able to be calmer, feel assured, confident. At least neutralized. We don’t want to go in like a scared jackrabbit.
Corrine:
So if your brain’s asking, “How am I going to go out to eat and not eat my face off?” Then you need to say like, “What’s a better question here?” Any question that’s going to have anxiety behind it is a what I would call a shitty question. You could be asking, “How can I go out to eat, enjoy myself and include things that I could lose weight with?” Your brain is going to populate very different answers. It’s going to when you sit down and you look at the menu, if you’re asking that question, your mind automatically goes to the foods that you will enjoy and you could lose weight on.
Corrine:
I want you all to think about this, just imagine yourself thinking, “How am I not going to eat my face off?” You open the menu and you probably flip straight to desserts or you go straight to your favorite stuff and look at it and go like, “I wish I could eat those things.” And you sit there and you talk to yourself like a jackass again. So we have to be mindful. For me, a lot of the pandemic work, is all done before you go. You get your mindset straight, you do it on paper. You give your brain new direction, clarity, what to listen for, what to change and stuff. And then when you go out, you’re just more prepared. It doesn’t mean that you won’t be freaking out a little bit. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to be perfect, but I guarantee all of you, you stand a fucking better chance at going out and it being a better experience for yourself, than sitting around scared of it and hoping for the best. Hope is not a weight loss strategy.
Corrine:
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 from 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.
Corrine:
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 prepackaged 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.
Corrine:
When I was working for Shoney’s, I was 16. I kind of knew that we were always supposed to be, “How did we suggest a sell? How did we get you to order more food than you needed?” There were ways to say things versus other ways. And I was good at it. First of all, I was money hungry as all 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 that there’s 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.
Corrine:
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 the 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 that you would always be coming back. You would feel compelled.
Corrine:
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. 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 and happy.
Corrine:
So it’s real 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. 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.
Corrine:
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 you, 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 table. There are little things like that you can say, “Hey.” I’ve never gone to a steakhouse. Logan’s I don’t know where, 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’ll be 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.
Corrine:
So when you go to restaurants, 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? So I would give you a good example. When I first started losing weight, I loved hamburgers. Chris and I, we would go, we get hamburgers all the time, but we would go usually like to Outback or we would go to just sit down restaurants to get our food. Especially Ruby Tuesday.
Corrine:
One of the first big changes I made with a burger is I told them to quit putting butter on the bread. You can bring me a burger, but this burger should taste fine without the bread having about 100 or 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. Like that just can happen. Look for, 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.
Corrine:
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, “Well, I only can have a Caesar salad, no croutons or meat.” There’s a lot of things you can do with your normal food that can help you.
Corrine:
Let me just go over a couple of little tips for restaurants, just so that everybody like, 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 just shame around, not finishing what was on my plate because I had been raised that I was 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’ve rarely nowadays go to a restaurant where they’re giving me just enough food. It’s almost always too much.
Corrine:
So when I thought I’d hit 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 of myself. How far I’m coming along in my weight loss journey. And I would use it as an opportunity to just 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 by way, when I would come back, it was just so much more pleasant and so much more easy.
Corrine:
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 and 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.
Corrine:
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 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. So think about when you go out to eat and ask your friends like, “What do you think about splitting an 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.
Corrine:
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. I go all the time and I will look at something like… I used to do this all the time at this. I don’t go to, we don’t have a 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 him 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 got plenty.
Corrine:
So look at different things on the menu. If an ingredient’s 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. So they’re like, “Here’s my name. Next time you come in, ask for me.” And they will make all your dreams come true.
Corrine:
Do you love my no nonsense approach to eating out? I want you to start practicing some of these tools the next time you eat out. I know so many of you listen to the podcast while you’re walking or driving. And it’s hard to jot down everything that I’m teaching you, let alone remember it the next time you get an impromptu dinner invite. This is why I created a free How to Eat Out Without Eating Your Face Off guide that you can download at losing100podcast.com/eatoutguide. That’s losing, the number 100 podcast.com/eatoutguide. All one word. This printable PDF is going to walk you through how to plan ahead and prepare for your next meal out. Making decisions about what and how much you will eat. Practical tips for ordering less food. Strategies to help you stop eating once you’ve had enough and not stuff yourself. And how to enjoy your food without freaking the fuck out that the scale is going to be up the next day.
Corrine:
So what are you waiting for? Get the How to Eat Out Without Eating Your Face Off guide at losing100podcast.com/eatoutguide. And if you know someone else working on losing weight, please be sure to share the website with them so they can grab their own copy of the guide and plan a meal out together so that the two of you can practice what you’re learning in the podcast.
Speaker 2:
Good morning, Joan, what’s your question?
Joan:
Good morning. Sorry about that. I’m a newbie. I’m loving the program and I know I should have this answer, but I want to hear it from Corrine. How do I change this feeling that I’m at a restaurant, I eat half of it to enough. I can’t take the food home, I’m away. How do I deal with that, I feel bad wasting food.
Corrine:
Well, first of all, Joan, I’m glad you wanted me to speak on this. I feel like a rock star.
Joan:
And you are.
Corrine:
And welcome to being a newbie. First of all, I just want to say, that’s normal. It’s very normal. And this is why. We attribute the amount of money that we’re paying for the food as if that’s getting the value from it or getting our worth it from it. When you go to a restaurant, you are not paying for volume of food. You’re going to a restaurant for taste, experience. You’re going to enjoy it and to eat enough to where your body is no longer hungry. That’s what we’re doing when we’re going out to eat. We’re not going out to see if we can get a 16 ounce, T-bone for $10 and make sure that we eat all 16 ounces of them. I don’t think most people go and say like, “You know what? I’m going to go out to eat. And I hope I get $21 worth of food in my belly.”
Corrine:
Is that why you go?
Joan:
No.
Corrine:
No, but when we’re sitting there, what do we tell ourselves? “Oh my God, I can’t take this home. What a waste. Here’s what I should do. I should waste all my time and energy in the next three days, with regret and sorrow that I overate and once again, fucked up my plan.” That’s pretty wasteful. This is the thing, guys. I’m not advocating you guys wasting money, but when you go out to eat and when you’re traveling, this is a very small occurrence in your life. You leaving some food behind, you may leave a few dollars on the table, if you want to think of it that way. But I want you guys to quit wasting your time with self-loathing and struggling and denying yourself your dreams.
Corrine:
Because the one thing, you can make more money, but you are not going to make more time in this life. So every minute that you spend when regret and guilt and shame over overeating, is a minute of your life that costs way more than that five bucks you’re leaving on the table at a restaurant. You’re not getting that time back. And I guarantee you, when you die, you’re not going to be on your deathbed going, “Well, sure do regret all those meals when we ate out that I left some food on the table.” No one is. Do you know what we always do on our deathbed? We regret every moment of our life that we wasted, because we know we’re done.
Corrine:
And none of us should to the grave full. No one’s going to say like, “I’m so glad I dieted my entire life. I’m so glad I struggled with my weight.” That’s the waste. So in those moments, Joan, you need to like… Here’s what I would do. I would journal now about how, “Here’s all the things I’m no longer willing to waste in my life. And here are the things, when it comes to food that I keep thinking, this is wasteful.” And then I want you to tell yourself, “But here’s the real truth Joan, it’s not wasteful for these reasons because I’m tired of feeling these things and I’m ready to start feeling these things.” And you do that work in your journal guys. And I’m going to keep talking about this.
Corrine:
When we say, journal and do the work, that’s what we mean. You have to write out these new truths. You have to write about these new truths and the things that you’re telling yourself. You have to convince your brain that this is a lie. This is a lie. And here’s why. And you do all that work away from going out to eat. Then Joan, we are all going on a road trip and you’re going to go to the world’s best nacho joint and they’re going to bring a platter the size of my ass. And you’re going to think that you need to eat all that, because like, “Oh my God, we can’t take this to go. We don’t even have a microwave or a refrigerator or nothing.”
Corrine:
And in that moment is where you practice what you’ve been writing. And you’re like, “Take a deep breath, Joan, this is nachos. Here’s the things I’ve been writing about. It’s going to feel uncomfortable because I’m going to be having my old shitty thought of this is wasteful and I’m going to practice my new thoughts too. And it’s my job to be uncomfortable, doing the new thing a few times, until I prove to myself how much better life’s going to be when I quit doing these old behaviors that I know, when I’m in my right mind and I’m away from the moment, never feel good.” And that’s the practice part of doing it. How does that sound?
Joan:
Okay. I am ready to go and I love the journaling. Like I said, I’ve been doing it a month. Never thought I would, but thank you so much.
Corrine:
You’re welcome. And you keep enjoying the membership.
Joan:
Oh I will. Thank you.
Corrine:
All right. Bye bye.
Corrine:
Thank you so much for listening today. Make sure you head on over to nobsrecourse.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 help you lose your weight without all the bullshit diet advice. I’ll see you next week.
