Hello everyone, welcome back. So today I want to talk about weight loss stalls, weight loss plateaus and regains. And I think this is an important topic because especially when we are coming up on the new year, everybody starts getting into the mindset of January 1st is going to be some magical moment where everything’s going to change. And what we end up doing is we stall ourself in any of the current weight loss we’re doing, thinking we’re going to wait until January 1 to get our together, or “try really hard”. And then some of us, we regain some weight during the holidays and then we’re trying to start January 1, feeling terrible that we regained weight. And then wondering why by the middle of the month, we are no longer losing weight, we’ve already quit. So I want to talk about it today because, I think it’s important that we get our mind wrapped around these concepts.
And I’m going to take a little bit different approach than probably what you always hear from the weight loss industry. So the first thing that I think we have to understand when it comes to a stall, a regain or a plateau is this, what’s happened in the past, whether that is the past week, the past day, the past month, the past year, the past, anything. You have got to figure out how to make peace with it. One of my things that I’ve been doing now for three or four years is, I’ve been getting coached by my own coach. Now she works with me just on my mindset because if you’ve listened to my past podcasts, if you go way back into the early podcast history, you know that I have suffered with depression and I have had… All of my success and weight loss came from learning how to just think a little bit better. My brain is already prewired to think, not just due to thoughts like everyone, but my brain is prewired to think overly dramatic, very terrible, sometimes even scary things.
And so for the last few years, I’ve invested in making sure that I’m getting coached so that somebody who has my best interest in mind, somebody who can hear me talking and question things and point things out to me, that I can just trust that she’s taking care of my brain. Because when my brain is taken care of, I can just show up better, not only for the world, but I get to show up better for me. And so inside the No BS weight loss program, it’s one of the reasons why I make sure that coaching is a key part of what we do.
So how does this play into stalls, plateaus, and regains? Well, today I actually was on a group coaching call. So one of the things that makes No BS very different than other diets is that, very often you start a diet because you found it on the internet, you read the book, a friend told you about it, you may have even joined a program. But very often those programs are only about what you should and should not do in order to lose weight. They do not address your mindset. So you might find out, this is how many points you should eat. I mean, so if you look at Weight Watchers, Weight Watchers is going to give you the points you should eat. Even on Noom that is supposed to be about habits and brain science, they still give you calorie ranges or foods you can’t eat, things like that. All of these programs, and I’m talking like keto, Whole30s, Mediterranean, old school, like God, what is the one? The South Beach Diet. Fruitarians. Like you name, it’s out there and it’s all about what you should and shouldn’t eat or how much you should or shouldn’t eat.
What they always fail to truly address is what is going on for you. I have just rarely met a woman that doesn’t know what to do to lose weight. Now, you may have conflicting rules because you’ve done every fucking diet in the book. If you’re like me, you’ve done them all.
I remember the military diet. I always tell y’all about this military diet. It was probably the quintessential bullshit diet that I ever did. For three days, you ate weird things like a hot dog with a scoop of ice cream. I remember there being something about peanut butter toast. You literally, you didn’t eat much, but you had to eat these specific things for three days, then you could just eat whatever you want. Well, for somebody like me who emotionally eats, for three days, I could sit and eat bullshit. I could make myself miserable. But for four days, I would eat my face off. Everything that I worried about, all the stress, all the things, I would just suffer through for three days. And then for four days I’d eat for relief. I would eat knowing that I was going to have to take away everything that I loved in four more days. And so I’d eat my face off. That diet never did anything for me other than teach me how to restrict and binge, restrict and binge.
So, I tell you all this because today I was on a group coaching call inside my program. Because even though I teach four very simple basics that are common sense that if done, of course we’re all going to lose weight. I don’t like to complicate what you have to do in order to lose weight. Person after person comes on because what makes them not so easy to implement and what makes them hard is what goes on inside of our minds. It’s this inability to pull that apart that stops us every single time from losing weight. So I was coaching someone today on our group coaching call and, I guess it was a few years ago, she had had weight loss surgery and she had lost like a hundred and I believe 50 pounds or something along those lines. And a lot of my members come to me because, they’ve been able to lose weight in the past. They’ve been unable to keep it off. And so we have a large community of weight loss surgery, I just call them the walking wounded. They had a surgery that was not backended with the emotional components.
Because I will just tell all of you, having weight loss surgery is no joke. It’s still hard for every single person that has weight loss surgery. They are suddenly, their body has changed and their coping mechanism that they’ve used in this world has been ripped away and no one is teaching them how to cope with life. So I want you to think about this. One of the things that I was telling her is, we don’t have a choice right now. You have got to look back on this weight gain and we’ve got to make this a compassionate story. She was beating herself up. She was thinking about how much she had failed. She had put so much judgment on herself for regaining weight that it was now terrifying her to do any of the things that I teach.
One of the components that I teach is to make a daily plan. What are we going to eat today? And the way that I teach inside my program is, we’re not going to villainize food anymore. And we’re not going to think that there’s a moral high ground that we all get to live on simply because we chose to eat chicken and broccoli. That chicken and broccoli is no better than chicken fettuccine. They’re just food. And as long as we plan it, as long as we wait until we’re like legit, physically hungry, and I don’t mean hangry or upset, starving, blacking out, low blood sugar hungry. I mean normal fucking, this is what the body’s supposed to do, it says, Hey, I could use a little food. How about you? And then we’re going to stop when we’ve had enough. Not when we got our money’s worth, not when we feel safe that we won’t get hungry later on in the day.
We’re actually just going to listen to our present body right now and we’re going to dial in and we’re going to say, have I had enough in this moment for now? And we’re going to learn how to do that over and over again. So I’m talking to her, she’s terrified of planning. She’s like, Sometimes I do it, I half ass. I just don’t understand what’s going on. And when I asked her about, well, if you had to guess what’s going on. She’s like, Well, the plan scares me because if I make a plan then I think I have to follow it and I know how hard it is for me to follow it on some days and that just makes me think, See, you’re going to fail again. And I said, Well, what have you failed at? And so she told me her story and I said, Honey, what went on those two years where the weight gain happened?
And she started telling me about how her life had been upended. Lots of things had happened. And I said, I don’t think you failed at all. I said, I think you took care of yourself the only way you knew how. And sometimes that’s eating. And you’ve come out on the other side and all that happened is you regained weight. I said, Now we’ve got to look at that story and quit beating yourself up for it. And you’ve got to say, I just don’t want to keep doing it that way. This time when I learn how to lose weight, I want to be able to lose weight in a way where if life happens, I have more ways to take care of myself than just food.
Because I’m going to be the first one to tell all of you, I’ve lost a hundred pounds. Sometimes there are days, the best that I can do is to take care of myself with a little bit of food. And it’s gotten to where on the days that I overeat or on the days that I eat off plan, it’s minimal compared to what I used to do simply because I don’t beat myself up for it anymore. I notice when I’m doing it, I allow myself to be like, Corinne, that was the best you could do, but what was going on so next time you have another option? And over time my overeats and my off plan eats, they become farther and fewer between. When they do happen, guess what I don’t do anymore that so many of you do. If I eat off plan or if I overeat at a meal, I don’t fuck it eat the rest of the day or the next day or for the weekend and stuff because I know there had to be a reason. And it’s just time to get curious about my reasons instead of getting down on myself.
So simply by not expecting to be perfect. Simply by always being compassionate about there had to be something going on, let’s just work on that. I’ve been able to mitigate a lot of the extra damage that I used to do because I was beating myself up all the time. And so I say all this because a lot of you are stuck in that cycle and you keep trying to…
Like when I was asking her, I said, All right, so you’ve regained the weight. What do you think needs to happen in order for you to get restarted again? And she immediately went to, I’m going to have to make a plan. I’m going to have to eat till enough. And it’s like, All right, those are the things that we’re going to do. But if you really had to look inside and figure out what needs to change in order for you to get started, it’s the compassion piece. She was like, I’m going to have to stop being ashamed of regaining weight. When that shame wants to come up, I need to tell myself I was doing the best I could and I got through a tough time in my life and not only did I get through it, the worst that happened was I gained some weight that I know that when I calm down, and I know that when I’m asking for help inside of No BS, I can work on that and I want that for all of you.
The same thing happens when you are on stalls and plateaus. So many of you, your weight will stall for a few weeks. And you’re not asking the right questions like what really has to change in order for this stall or this plateau to end? Very often we’re stalling out because we’re hanging on to shame about overeats instead of getting curious about, what are our truest needs.
Inside No BS, I have a whole course called Stalls and Plateaus because first of all, when you lose weight, it is natural for your body to just have regular stalls and plateaus. There are going to be weeks where sometimes your body, it needs to maintain your weight while it’s regrouping itself, while it’s feeling safe, that it’s okay to continue the journey of weight loss. Your body does not like to think that any… As you’re getting smaller, your body, even if you’re doing good things for yourself, even if you’re doing it my way, your body still worries that something must be wrong because you’re dropping weight. I don’t care, if like when I weighed 250, my body didn’t sit around and say like, bitch you got plenty to lose. No, it thought 250 must have been necessary because I ate to get to 250. And so then the body wanted to protect me from losing it.
You have to be the guide for your body. And then sometimes the guide has to be patient. And so you’re always going to have natural stalls and plateaus that you do not need to heap shame or judgment on top that triggers you to then overeat, which is never the solve for a stall or plateau. Sitting around eating out of shame or frustration, not exactly a step in the right direction of weight loss. So we have to always be looking inside about what needs to change on the inside before I start changing things on the outside. And then inside that course I also talk about, is it a true stall or plateau? Or are you just at a point in your weight loss where this level of eating got you here, now we got to start thinking about, all right, my body’s smaller. Does it need as much as I give it?
And for some people, the reason why I created this course is because, that next level, it’s like it’s all fun and games until the scale stops. I find almost always that when someone, and this is a lot of the podcast listeners, so for all of you who are just podcast listeners who have experienced success and you notice you lose about half the weight you want to or you lose the first 25%. You lose a certain amount and then all of a sudden you’re not losing anymore. That’s because you don’t have the brain part going on like we do on the inside of No BS. So many people join, almost every single week I get several personal emails, several posts inside of our private Facebook community that says, I was losing weight with just the podcast. I decided to gift myself No BS. Holy cow. I didn’t realize how much better I could feel so quickly. I didn’t realize how much stuff was going on for me. This is therapy for me.
And a lot of people do this. They join because they can only get so far in the podcast and they realize, I probably need to work on being afraid of being hungry. I need to work on little things like feeling as if I change a little bit of my food, it just kick starts so much diet mentality, it just kick starts so much deprivation that I’m not making the changes that I know I need to make. I’m just so paralyzed and scared to make them and I don’t know what to do about it. That’s why I wrote this whole course for my members. Because when they join, they take the No BS weight loss program and then they move straight into stalls and plateaus so that they’re like, Now I’m prepared for these things. Now I know I don’t have to be panicked. Now I know how to diagnose my issues. Now I know how to look for the problems and solve the real problems. No more just trying harder. No more just, I got to be tougher, I got to work harder. None of you need to work harder. None of you need to be tougher and none of you need more willpower.
Need to have someone expertly guiding you through the process of dialing in what’s really going on inside, talking it through, calming it down, and then the changes feel easier. They feel doable and they feel worth it. That is the magic of getting coached through.
So I hope this helps a lot of you today, especially for those of you who are regaining. If you don’t learn anything from this podcast today, here’s the one thing I want you to walk away with. Whatever’s happened in my past, my only and my best option is to take a look at it and tell myself compassionately, that’s the best I had. And if you can’t even get to, that’s the best I had. Just at least tell yourself that’s what I did. That’s how I got through it. And now I just want something different for myself. I don’t have to be ashamed, I don’t have to be wrong. I don’t have to tear myself apart. What I really need to do is remember the version of me that I want to become, doesn’t do that anymore. None of you are sitting around fantasizing about a version of you in the future who’s lost her weight, who still acts like an asshole to herself. Who regrets things. Who beats herself up. The version of you that’s lost weight is not doing that anymore. And it’s not because you are perfect losing weight, it’s because you realize it’s nonsense. It’s because you realize it’s not needed. You realize that’s really what makes your weight loss hard. That’s really what slows you down.
All right everybody. I hope you have an amazing week and I’ll talk to you soon.
