Today I'm putting on my psychic hat for a minute and guess how your days go.

You wake up each morning thinking, "I've got this today. I have a plan. I'm going to be 'good' all day."

Morning You feels amazing and you start the day strong.

But by nighttime? That version of you is GONE. You're tired, done with the day, and don't give a shit about your morning promises. So you eat.

Am I close?

If you feel like I'm reading your mind, today's episode, Why You Can't Stop Eating Late at Night, is for you. You'll get:

• The first step to conquering your nighttime eating
• 5 ways to deal with your feelings without turning to food
• The one thing I told myself over and over when I was losing my weight

Morning You isn't any better than Nighttime You. You just have different needs at night. And today's episode can help you figure out how to meet them.

Hello everybody. Welcome back. So I want to talk about feelings a little bit because most of us, if you are eating your face off at night, and I mean if this sounds like you wake up each day and you are just like, today's the day I'm getting serious, I'm going to be good today, and you have all these good intentions, this is probably a podcast you're really going to want to pay attention to. In fact, this past Sunday, inside my membership, I do coaching calls. And so anybody who wants to talk to me personally can come on screen and we coach back and forth where I ask a lot of questions and I will explain what's happening for them and then I will help them come up with new things that they can try and do. And particularly for my clients, it's very helpful because whether they're getting coached or they're listening to someone getting coached, they usually understand, oh, number one, I'm not alone. 

Number two, I'm not broken. There's a good reason for this. And then number three, oh, here's something I can try. So that's always the value of being in any kind of weight loss program that's going to include the mental, the coaching, really digging in other than just giving you a diet. Here's your 12 weeks of workouts, here's your 12 weeks of meal plans. That doesn't fix us, that gives us something to do, but it doesn't really get to the root of great now that I know that. But how do I do it when I feel like ass? How do I do it when I'm stressed out? How do I do it when I feel like life is taking a big shit straight into an industrial size fan? So we want to talk about this stuff. So if you relate to mourning, you just like the lady I coached this last weekend on, she wakes up every day, she makes a great plan. 

She even said, Corinne, the version of me that wakes up every morning, she believes in me. She thinks we're going to do it today. She's excited. She even likes the plan. She's like, oh my gosh, there's no reason why we can't do this. Optimism runs high for her. Nighttime version of her is fucking tired, done with the day, doesn't give a shit, says I'll start tomorrow and then just eats. She'll have a plan to talk to herself and all this other stuff and she can't turn it on. So this weekend we were talking about it. I asked her, I said, well, when you say I need to, I asked her. I'm like, okay, I understand you're not turning on your brain and you're not negotiating with yourself. Are you sure you want to eat this? Maybe we'll feel better tomorrow. All those things. Why do you think you might not be doing it? 

And she said, well, if I start having that conversation, I know what's going to happen. And I was like, what? Tell me, tell what's going to happen? And she said, I won't be able to eat. And I said, that's not true. And you literally could have heard a record scratch. She was like, what? She's like, what? And I said, that's not true. I was like, you could eat. I said, right now we just got to get good at having the fucking negotiation right now. We just got to get to where you get out of starting off like a bang during the day and then turning it off completely at night. I was like, if you still eat, even though you're negotiating in the short run, you're not doing any worse than you are right now, actually you're doing a little better because at least when you turn on the negotiation, you are taking one step forward closer to the person who one day doesn't eat. 

Because the person who doesn't eat at night at some point has to be able to negotiate with themselves, which means at some point they have to turn on the conversation. So let's just start with step one, which is turn on the conversation. Step two will be get good at listening to yourself. We'll figure out what goes on after that. I said, you might surprise yourself some nights because you turn on the negotiation. You may convince yourself not to eat. You may convince yourself to eat. Not as much. You may do nothing but say, I ain't this broke ass bitch. Ain't got nothing left in the tank today. I want to eat and I know I'm going to feel like an as tomorrow. That's progress. I would much rather my clients make some progress than no progress. So we're talking about this weekend, and as I was telling her in her mind, she thought that that negotiation that she was just going to have to sit, not eat. 

And I said, well then what happens if you don't eat? Well, I'll have to be miserable all night. I'll just have to be really uncomfortable. And I said, really? That's the only option that could happen. And how do you know this? She's like, well, I've done it once or twice and it wasn't fun. I said, okay, well that's good to know because we can work on making that part easier. But when you're not trying at all because you have this fear that you won't be able to eat now, we don't have enough experiences of you sitting there and not liking it to really understand why you don't like it. So we have this big, long, beautiful conversation. It's just like all the things. I'm sure there were tears at some point. There was ahas chat going wild. Everybody's like, I needed to hear this. I'm going to try exactly what you just talked to. 

I think her name was, I can't remember if it was Anna. I can't remember exactly what her name was. I want to say it was Anna. So that brought me to why I wanted to do today's podcast because a lot of times you will hear me say, and you will hear a lot of people in the self-help realm say things like, if you're not going to eat, you need to just sit with your feelings. But no one really knows what sitting with it means. Our minds will always tell a story if we don't have a story for it. So most of us, when we think, well, if I don't eat at night, guess what? I'm just going to have to sit with it. And then when I ask them what does sitting with it means? They always say uncomfortable, anxiousness, all of these big things. 

I'm like, okay, and that means what? And it's like, well, I'm going to be miserable. It's going to be a long time. So that is the story. So what I want to do today is I want to talk to you clearly about what sitting with it could look like. These are all the different ways that we can sit with a feeling just so that that's not the only way you think about it. Because if you only think that having your feelings is a crucible, is your thorny ass crossed the bear carried up a hill on a July afternoon in the middle of Nashville, Tennessee, you are never, ever, ever going to want to do it. In fact, you are teeing your brain up to say all kinds of bullshit to get you to not do that. I mean, imagine, why would our brain air be like, you know what we should do? 

We should just sit around tonight. I mean, I know you've had a long day. I know that you're exhausted and tired and we should on top of that, sit with it. We should carry our thorny cross. Nobody wants to do that. That's why it's so important that we have these conversations because diets are roly fucking you over every single time you do one. When you do some bullshit diet that is not talking about the real emergency in the room of women's lives, you are screwed every time. And I just refuse to let women continue to get screwed over royally by the diet industry. You're going to lose weight. You need to lose weight in a way that makes your life better, not harder. Okay, so let's talk about sitting with it and all the different ways that this could look. Number one is always acknowledge what you're feeling. 

So a lot of times for me, if I'm going to not eat because I'm having a lot of stress, I will say something like, you are really stressed. You have a lot on you right now, and you are allowed to feel burdened. You are allowed to feel alone. You are allowed to feel like the only one that can fix things. This is so that you're not gaslighting yourself. This is so that you're not telling yourself a bunch of shit. You shouldn't be so stressed. You should be grateful. I'm like, bitch, I'm grateful in the mornings, but at night when I'm wore out and work's been hard and my kids had a bad day and stuff. No, not grateful. You know what? I am burdened right now tired. And when we're honest with that, there is a part of us that breathes a sigh of relief and says, fucking thank you. 

Fucking thank you for listening to me because I don't think anybody else gave two shits about listening to me today. That's number one. The next one is to whatever you're feeling, don't judge it. This is why so many women flame out when it comes to feeling their feelings or sitting with it. It's because when I was back in the day when Logan was little, I often felt like a bad mother. I didn't have the same relationship with him the other mothers did. All the other moms seemed to love every toot and fart. They love changing diapers. They loved the spit up. They wanted to just breathe their baby in. And every little cry was just like a heartfelt moment, not me. I was sitting there, who the fuck signs up for this sucks. I don't get to do what I want to do. My brain did not like it. 

Now, if I had have been just acknowledging and saying, girl, I get it, your life has been turned upside down. This is nothing like what you have lived. This is the hard part. I would've felt better, but no, this is Corinne. Oh my God, you're a terrible mother for thinking those things. What is wrong with you? Why can't you just love your kid and your experience like everybody else? That's what I was doing. So you want to let any of your emotions exist without judgment. Like a lot of my women right now, they have parents who are going through dementia and they're taking care of them. I worked with someone on a coaching call this past weekend on this. So we talk about a lot on our coaching calls because this is the shit that makes us eat. And she said, Corrine, I hate it. 

I hate taking care of her. I get mad that she yells at me that she's angry at me half the time and she's like, I know my mother doesn't mean it, but my God, I get so infuriated, it sets me off. I feel like I'm 14 again and railing against her. And then she felt like a bad daughter. She felt like she should not be feeling that way. And I said, well, how should you be feeling when your mother is not herself yelling at you when she's treating you like you're 14 and you're 64? I just kind of went through it and I said, don't you kind of think that you are entitled to feel all of these emotions? Wouldn't it be normal to feel this way? I think it would be weird if you did all that with a big fucking smile on your face and just hearing someone not judge her was like, oh my God, if I just stop that part, I wouldn't have to binge on ice cream every single night. 

And she just felt better for that. So that's another one. Another thing that we do when we're sitting with it that makes it hard is we will label our emotions as the good or the bad emotions. All emotions are good. You cannot know what happiness is unless you've experienced sadness. You do not need courage unless you are experiencing fear. So it's really helpful if this kind of goes back to the judgment. Judgment is more like, who am I because I'm feeling this. But then we scare the shit out of ourselves when we call an emotion a bad one because then we're like, Ooh, I must be being bad. I must be doing it wrong. You're going to have all the emotions. They're all normal. We are equipped with them all for a reason. Shame is a powerful one. Shame is one of those things that provides an inner compass for us. 

If we didn't have shame, we would've like an asshole all the time. So you just want to remember that your feelings are all normal and all feelings are good. I always like to remind myself, Corin, your feelings are serving a purpose. They are an indicator light that something is going on in your life right now. They are telling you something that you either need to provide for yourself, that you need to be aware of, or you just need to know it's okay to feel this. Go cry. Go lay down for a little bit. Whatever it is you need to do, go ask for some help, but there's nothing wrong with them. And then another thing is we want to pay attention when we are letting ourselves be with our emotions, you want to step back and you want to what I call narrate what's happening. 

This is really helpful a lot of people because a lot of times when we experience an emotion, we're not really experiencing that. We are experiencing all the judgment, the shame, the thoughts we have about the emotion, and we're not really breaking it down into its simplest form. A feeling is something that's just going through your body. It is a physical manifestation of something that's going through your mind. So for a lot of my clients, we teach this inside of our courses in membership. I tell 'em, when you have an emotion, take a few moments to breathe and close your eyes and just picture it traveling through your body. What's happening in my head? What's happening on my lips? How does my throat feel? Just pay from head to toe. What's going on inside your body? This serves two purposes. Number one is it distracts you from dog piling other shitty emotions on top. 

So if you're feeling bad about something and then you feel bad about you feeling bad about something, now you've got two negative emotions coursing through your veins. But when we're narrating, we don't have that conversation. We've given our brain something else to think about. And that's the second part is like you're slowing down all the douche ery that we do to ourselves, and then we're combining on top of that a little bit of a distraction. That distraction allows your body to start calming down some. So that is another thing you can do is just body scans. Another thing that you can do to help with sitting with emotions, it kind of goes back to what we talked about in the very beginning about acknowledging and allowing yourself to feel it is validating what and why you're feeling. I'm feeling sadness because so and so doesn't want to hang out with me. 

This weekend I'm feeling sadness because my child is off at college and I don't hear from the little shit ever. Sometimes just saying it's okay to not like that is very calming and it allows you to be with it without feeling like it's like you've done something about it without having to eat over it or rage text about it. It allows you to do something with it that's a little bit more productive. And then I think the last and most important thing when it comes to sitting with your emotions that most people don't do, and that is just having compassion for yourself. Some understanding if you have. So often when we are tired, when we are lonely, when we feel exhausted, when we're fed up, annoyed, whatever it is, women are our worst critics in that moment. We tend to tell ourselves a lot of shit. 

You shouldn't feel that way. You blow things out of proportion. We tend to say things to ourselves that we might've heard as children. I remember when I was little, my mom when she grew up, my grandfather was an alcoholic. My grandmother was not a very big feelings person. And I'm sure my grandmother was just always trying to keep the peace. And if you don't have an alcoholic in your family, you know how that can be. Now, I love my grandparents. They did the best they could, but it couldn't have been easy for my mom growing up and feelings were not okay. You just didn't do that. You never knew what was going to happen with my grandfather. Then when I was growing up, my mom passed that little legacy on down to me. I remember so often having big feelings. I am just a very big feelings person. 

I live big. I am loud. I came out of the womb talking. I just feel big. I remember her always telling me, you'll always blow things out of proportion. Get over it. We ain't got time for this. My feelings were often talked about in a way that there was no compassion for it. And it's not because my mom was battering things. She was literally just doing what she learned about feelings. And as I've gotten older, I've realized, man, I never learned how to do that. So I need to teach myself that now it's time for me to parent me. It's time for me to, this was in my forties. In my forties. I spent a lot of my time being mad at my mom for not teaching me those things, feeling all victimy because I didn't learn those things. Sitting, never learning how to do it, just sitting around, bitching, moaning, complaining, and feeling bad about it. 

And I just remember one day I was at some conference and it was Brendan Burchard, and I remember him saying to the crowd, who in here is over 18 years old? Of course everybody raises their hand. There was nobody in this audience. There was like 2000 of us who were under 18. And he said, okay. So you are all grown ass adults who now, if there's anything you didn't like about your childhood, take care of it. Now. Reparent yourself. If you didn't learn how to have compassion for yourself, teach yourself now. Read books about it. Stop complaining that it didn't happen and start doing something about it. And I just tell you what, in that moment, it was like someone freed me. I literally felt freed. I was like, what you mean I can just do this for myself? I think so many of us, when it comes to being with our feelings, we weren't taught this stuff. 

We sure as hell, if you're my age at 50, you were not taught this in school and most of our parents, if they were never taught it, how are we ever supposed to learn this stuff? And I think we sit around for a lot of our life feeling sorry for ourselves when we could stop feeling sorry for ourselves and start feeling compassionate and be like, girl, I get it. You did not learn how to do all this. It makes sense that it's hard for you to do this, but I promise we're going to figure it out. And when I was losing weight, I must have told myself 10,000 times if I said it once, every time something didn't go my way, if the scale didn't go down, if my feelings got hurt, whatever it is, I would just take a deep breath and say, Corrine, you can't quit. 

You have to figure this out. That's the only option. And I didn't know if I'd ever figure it out, but I remember one day telling myself, if you don't keep trying to figure it out and you just quit, you a hundred percent know it's never going to happen for you. It's you are always trying to figure it out. You always have a chance at solving it. And for me, that was everything. Knowing that I was now a grown ass woman, that I was not 18, that I had the opportunity to reparent myself, that I had the opportunity to figure out my feelings, that I had the opportunity to learn about this stuff. I didn't know Dick about this stuff, y'all at all, and I know so many of you don't. And then now I teach y'all how to do this shit. If I can go from 40 something years of blame, complain, feeling sorry for myself, not knowing how to do it, to now at 50, teach others because I know how. 

Now any of you have hope. I don't care how old you are. The most beautiful thing about getting older is that our capacity to figure things out, to learn new things is always there are people learning new things all over the world at all ages. You can be one of them if you choose to be. Okay, that's it for today. So that is sitting with your feelings. That is what it's like to at night, not eat and experience what's happening. And I hope that when you hear this, it's like, okay, maybe I can try this if I'm not judging myself, if I'm having compassion, if I'm narrating, if I'm doing that, rather than sitting there and just telling myself the narration of this is going to suck. This is too hard. I shouldn't be feeling like this. Anyway, then I just hope you feel better knowing that there's another option. Y'all have a good week.