Corinne Crabtree:

Hello, everybody. Welcome back. So this is what we’re going to do today. I have heard through the grape vine that many people would love to hear me and Kathy regale our weight-loss story just one more time. I know that we told it back… Let’s go to the way-back machine. Oh, episode one. We’re going to tell it again, and I think it’ll be even better the second time. It’s always better the second time, but mainly because I think you and I have probably thought more about our journey over the last three years. We have talked about our stories so much. We probably even tell it a little different than we ever have. And if my memory serves me correctly, Kathy Hartman was terrified on episode number one. So this would probably be good for her to be like, “And now the confident version of Kathy is going to tell her story.”

Kathy Hartman:

I believe you remember that very accurately.

Corinne Crabtree:

Yes. It was like Kathy turned into Elmer’s glue. She was that white. All the blood had drained from her face on that first one, so…

Kathy Hartman:

I think that lasted-

Corinne Crabtree:

Go ahead.

Kathy Hartman:

… 10 or 20 podcasts too.

Corinne Crabtree:

What?

Kathy Hartman:

I think that lasted 10 or 20 podcasts too. Maybe 30.

Corinne Crabtree:

Yeah. It took a while before you got your stride. But then once you did, though, you’ve been great. So, yeah, we’re just going to tell our stories today. It’ll be fun. And then each of us can ask each other some questions. But it’s really for all of our new listeners. I believe there’s 50-plus-thousand downloads a day on our podcast. Something like… It’s some kind of crazy number. So I know we’re over the 30 million download mark at this point. I promise all of you, when we first started this podcast, I never knew that this many people would be listening to me and Kathy yammer about weight loss and what it takes, and me swearing, her asking me questions, her getting thrown on the coaching sword left and right. So it’s been a good journey. So this is my story. Go ahead. Did you want to say something?

Kathy Hartman:

Just listening.

Corinne Crabtree:

Okay. So when I was little, I came out of the womb thin, and then it all stopped. It was-

Kathy Hartman:

It was all over after birth.

Corinne Crabtree:

Yeah, I was like, I had a few good days in me. Nobody gives a fuck about a skinny baby. They’re always like, “Well, we like the chubby ones.” It was like the one time in my life when I could have been idolized for my dimples and rolls. I missed out on that one. But no, seriously, by the time I’d gotten to be about nine years old, we had grown up really, really poor. My mom worked like a dog. She was a 17-year-old mom, and she just barely got out of a small county high school in Alabama. So she wasn’t super educated. My mom was a hard worker, and my mother is smart as fuck. She’s like me. She doesn’t really need a big-ass education. She’s just smart. Like, me and Mamie figure shit out. Like we’re so…

Corinne Crabtree:

People always ask me about, “How is it that you can just figure stuff out?” I’m like, “I don’t know.” I just come back, “From my mama.” That’s where I got it from. And so when we moved to Nashville… We were living in Alabama. She was always working minimum-wage jobs, and we didn’t know when we were going to eat. And when we did, it was always a drive-through because it was dirt cheap or buffet because it was dirt cheap.

Corinne Crabtree:

And we come to Nashville, and we’d moved in with my grandparents. My grandfather had retired on disability, and he cooked around the clock for me and my brother. I think it was… It meant a lot for my grandparents for us to be there so that they could help my mom out. They always loved us like we were their own children. And a lot of that love came with a lot of food, and I started gaining weight and never looked back.

Corinne Crabtree:

Throughout my sixth, seventh, and eighth grade years, in particular, I was severely bullied. Kids made fun of me every single day. I remember going home most days crying my eyes out. I remember in my sixth grade year, the day that we got out for Christmas, a guy had stood up on the desk and was chanting, “Boose, Boose, Boose.” They always called me Caboose or Boose because my butt was so big. And the teacher just put her head down on the desk, and I still remember thinking, “No one cares. No one cares about me.”

Corinne Crabtree:

I got in the car, and I was bawling. My grandfather had picked me up, and we went to the little store, and I got chips and candy and Coke and went home and ate and felt better. And I am sure that a lot of my eating patterns for food being comforted started on all of those days when I would get out of school. My grandfather was just being sweet and taking me to the little store to get a snack every day. And it was fun, and it was a treat, but I was eating after being emotionally tortured all day long. And it made that connection in my brain immediately for the rest of my life that to feel better, food will do that.

Corinne Crabtree:

So sixth, seventh, and eighth grade bullied. Teachers, jerks. I mean, I had PE teachers that told me I needed to run extra laps because it would be good for me because I had a weight problem. I would play sports. They would sit me out because I was too big to play. And when I say sports, I played one. I played volleyball for two years, but I never really got to play. All I remember about volleyball was that we had went to Sears. I had to get women’s shorts, because I couldn’t wear anything that the girls wore. They were butt-ugly, and they were still too tight. And they would ride up between my crotch, and I would get thigh burns just walking around. That’s really all I remember about my volleyball experience, was being in shorts that I was mortified to be in.

Corinne Crabtree:

I went to high school. I did lose a little weight in high school, but not healthfully. I’d gotten some ulcers, and I started having depression. And my weight bounced up and down between about probably 180 to 200 down to about… I would sometimes get down about 160, 175, that area.

Corinne Crabtree:

I dated a guy in high school, a sweet boy. I still talk to him on Facebook to this day. If he’s listening to this podcast, I think he’s an amazing daddy. I watch him post pictures of his daughter all the time. But our junior year… We had dated for three years. In our junior year when he broke up with me, it was very devastating to my self-concept. I remember internalizing it as it was because I was fat, and I just started going down into a really bad spiral about just… I made it all about me and my lack and all this other stuff, which this is what you do in high school.

Kathy Hartman:

Yeah.

Corinne Crabtree:

I got more and more depressed. By the end of my senior year, I had attempted to take my life and was in the hospital for a few weeks. I mean, I had swallowed like 60-something pills, just really trying hard. And then during that time, I was dating another guy who, if he’s listening to this podcast, you, sir, are a douche bag. You don’t get the same royal treatment Jonah does. But I won’t mention his name just to be nice. But he wasn’t a great guy. Just cheated on me, all the things, just not a great guy. Hopefully, in his adult years… I don’t follow him. But in his adult years, I hold out hope that he grew out of all his assholery from his 18-year-old self.

Corinne Crabtree:

But I tied up all my happiness into him. So I eloped, went off to college with him. We got a cheap little apartment, and within three or four months, I dropped out because he wasn’t working and somebody had to make money. And I was gaining weight like crazy because all I did was hope he wouldn’t leave me, ate, and work. That’s all I did.

Corinne Crabtree:

And then we moved back to Nashville. Once we got here, we weren’t together very much. I mean, we were kind of off and on a little bit, but he finally cheated on me for the last time, and my mama paid for my divorce. I still remember the day that I found out. I was working for my mother at the time. And I walked into her office, and I said, “I need to shut the door,” because she was like… My mom, she ruled me like an iron fist. She worked me harder than anybody. If somebody had to work late, it was always me. She was not going to be seen as someone who was giving her daughter one ounce of a free ride.

Corinne Crabtree:

And so she was like, “Why do you need to shut the door?” Like that. And I said, “It’s about Phillip.” She was like, “Shut the door.” She was so hoping that I was going to be leaving this guy. And when I did, she looked at me, and she said, “Baby, if you promise me this is it, I will pay for your divorce, and I will get you out of that apartment, and we will make sure that you can just close the chapter on this asshole.” So I did.

Corinne Crabtree:

And then for a few years dated, tried to lose weight. I was bouncing up and down the scale between 250 and 175. That was my magic window. Like, that right there, I was… There was no one better than me that could go from 175 to 250. Every time I’d hit 175, I would go right back up the scale. I might be able to keep it for about a day or two.

Corinne Crabtree:

I think my problem was always that I had… I never did any kind of weight-loss thing from a place of believing in myself. I was always just trying to fix myself. And when I would get to about 175 and I’d start feeling better and taking some pride in like, “Oh my gosh, I can tuck a shirt in now and stuff,” it was almost like it was too much for me to handle. I really think I had the self-sabotage behavior of fear of success. It was like tapping on that inner insecurity that you really can’t do this. You really can’t do this. You’re always going to be overweight.

Corinne Crabtree:

And when I would start feeling better, it was like too much to handle, and I’d start messing it up. I would just start drinking more, going out more, making more excuses, like doing anything that I wasn’t doing to lose weight. When I look back on that, I know that there was a lot going on there. It was a lot of me. It was like I was beating myself up to lose weight and when… And I tell you guys this all the time. If you beat yourself up to lose weight, you have to continue to beat yourself up to stay there. And what happens for a lot of us is I could beat myself up for about 75 pounds, and then I’d hit this zone where I wasn’t pulling myself apart. And I was kind of like happy, but I needed something to worry about because that was now gone.

Corinne Crabtree:

You would think you wouldn’t do that, but your brain regulates. It gets used to what you’re doing. So what I would notice is, is like, “Well, I’m feeling pretty good. I’m going to have this little extra.” And then the next day, what did I do? I beat the shit out of myself for eating. It was like I was being drawn and compelled to that behavior, because on the way down, I never talked about how proud I was of myself for the changes I was making. I would go to the gym, and I would exercise, sitting there telling myself the entire time about how terrible I looked and how I had to do it, and this is the only way. Like, I would talk about all that.

Corinne Crabtree:

Eventually, what happens is, is that if you’re not taking pride in yourself, then when you start feeling better, you can’t handle it. You don’t know what to do with it. So your brain just goes back to what it always has done. So I know that was my big problem for years and years and years, was being conditioned to think that the only way that I was ever going to be able to lose weight and keep it off was I would have to always be worried, on my guard, watch out for that inner fat girl coming back.

Corinne Crabtree:

It was such a scary process and such a scary proposition that I always created. It’s no wonder that the first few times that I would overeat and feel so relaxed that I would want to do more of it, because I would spend all of my dieting and all of my moments after I would overeat so anxious, because all I ever really was looking for was peace, calm, and relaxation with myself. And I wasn’t teaching myself how to do it with food. Or I was teaching myself how to do it with food, but I wasn’t teaching myself how to do it with my brain when I would lose weight, and so I’d always go back to it.

Corinne Crabtree:

So I scale back up again. I’m about 225 this time, and I meet Mr. Chris, who’s my husband. And he just was enamored with me, like enamored with me. He was the first person that I’d ever dated and truly been with who was enamored with Corinne. Was not… Now, let’s just be honest. We did have a lot of sex. Mr. Crabtree likes the sex. But we spent so many days, like every date, just talking, talking our faces off. He was so interested in me and stuff.

Corinne Crabtree:

So we got married. We had our little boy. And about a year after we had Logan, I was back to a place that was really dangerous for me. I knew that I was… When I look back, I was in postpartum depression. I was spending my days just laying on the couch. I was miserable. We’d go for walks at the mall, and I couldn’t keep up with Chris. I could barely push the baby around. Logan also didn’t like being in a stroller. So if I took him anywhere, I had to carry him everywhere, and I was so overweight that it was killing me. I couldn’t play with him the way I wanted to. It was hard to get up and down out of the floor. And I just cried.

Corinne Crabtree:

And I remember when Chris came home that night, I said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m going to figure this out.” And I just decided that… I knew that when I first started losing weight, I was going to have to make sure that everything I did was built on the idea of whatever I do, I’ve got to be able to see myself doing it for the rest of my life. So don’t start something you’re not ready to keep doing. And it was that simple little thing that really helped me.

Corinne Crabtree:

And I just made small changes. I’ve always talked to you guys about my ice-cream story, my fast-food stories and stuff. I remember my ice-cream story is where every night I went to bed, before I would go to bed with a half a gallon of ice cream. And I didn’t quit eating until I either hit the bottom or was miserable, and that’s when I would have enough. So I just decided one day that I wasn’t going to eat out of a carton anymore. My big step was let’s just put it in a bowl, and I mean a big bowl, like a salad… like a big-ass… Not talking a cereal bowl. A salad bowl, because I wasn’t ready to give up all the ice cream, but I was ready to take a step forward to being someone who didn’t need to eat until she was miserable anymore. And that was huge for me.

Kathy Hartman:

This is so interesting because I’ve heard you tell this story a thousand times.

Corinne Crabtree:

Probably at least. You’ve heard it probably more than anyone.

Kathy Hartman:

But you said something. When you talked about this last time about you knew you had to do something different, right, what was the difference? Because you’d lost weight, what, 50, 60 times before. What was different about this time? What turned your brain in a different way this time?

Corinne Crabtree:

I don’t know what made me decide, but when I really thought about it, I knew that I couldn’t do it the… What made sense to me is that every way that I had tried before had failed, and I thought about why it failed, and it was always a failure on… And this is what I think is important. I think I made the diets like they failed me, and here’s how they failed me, whereas before I think I was thinking about it as I failed all these diets. Like, it was all my fault, and I took a lot of blame and shame over it. And I really was sitting there thinking, “I tell you, I just don’t… I’m not the kind of person that can do restriction. I’m not the kind of person who’s going to give up ice cream and stuff. And all these diets that call for me to do that, that’s a no.”

Corinne Crabtree:

Like, it was more of… I think that was a big change for me. And then when I was losing weight, I had just, for some reason, gotten insightful on listening to how I was talking to myself and noticing the stuff. I was like, “I can’t talk to myself like that.” I knew that I ate when I felt gross. If I felt bad about myself and stuff, I knew. And maybe this is because I had depression and was… I know a lot of us use depression as like, “Oh, it’s my anchor.” I think of my depression as what has made me strong. It has taught me so much about myself. It has taught me the ways I don’t want to regard myself. It teaches me how to be more resilient with my self-talk, how to be more purposeful and dedicated to it because, for me, it’s life or death, literally.

Kathy Hartman:

Yeah.

Corinne Crabtree:

I’ve damn near died because of a lack of good self-talk. So I think for me it was… I knew that I couldn’t keep allowing myself to talk to myself the same way about the process and the things that I was doing. I was going to have to change my inner conversation. I was going to have to on purpose say, “I’m so proud of you today,” versus, “Oh, got through another one.” I really had to be aware of the moments when I was nitpicking myself, being like judging, telling myself what progress wasn’t good enough. I had to be real aware of those moments and draw a line in the sand and say, “No, this is what has to be true now. We have to think this way.” And I made that a big piece of what I did.

Corinne Crabtree:

And I didn’t even… I’ve always been a journaler. I’ve always written. But when I was losing weight, I wasn’t just sitting there every day and notebooks pouring through and stuff. It was literally a lot of just listening. I was talking, and I was like, “Boom, that’s a thought that I really don’t want to be having. So here’s how we’re going to think about things so that we can keep moving forward.” It was always like the best way to keep moving forward is to stop thinking these things and start thinking these. And it doesn’t mean that I stopped thinking a lot of stuff. I was turning the volume down on all the crap and turning the volume up… Well, let’s be honest. I was creating a channel that actually existed in my brain that I could turn the volume up on where I talked differently.

Corinne Crabtree:

And it took me about 18 months to lose my weight, but I did it in such a sustainable way for me. I really developed habits. I didn’t just change everything to lose weight. I really thought about the habits I really wanted, the life I really wanted, how I wanted to live. And I never looked back after that. I mean, I just have 15 years now, still going strong. I love a good salad. I’ve always loved salads, but I was a fast-food junkie growing up. And if somebody like me can learn how to appreciate fruits and vegetables and… I actually yesterday had a Shipt delivered with salmon. I’m craving salmon. I’m like, “My old version of me would have been craving a fish filet sandwich from the McDonald’s.” And now I’m just like, “Let me get some fresh salmon and bake it for the weekend. It will make my skin glow.” And I’m like, “Who the fuck am I really seriously?” I still astound myself 15 years later. All right. Let’s tell your story.

Kathy Hartman:

Okay. So I’ll go back to childhood just for a minute. Growing up, on my dad’s side of the family, all heavy people. I don’t know why. They just always were. So I grew up with the messaging from my dad and from my mom even that I better watch out, or I was going to be heavy like the rest of the McManuses. It’s in the genes. You’re going to have to be real careful. I even remember my dad sitting me down. I was probably eight or nine years old, because it was still before I moved to Tennessee. It was still in Rhode Island. I remember exactly where I was sitting when he said, “Kathleen, you’re going to have to slow your roll on what you eat.”

Corinne Crabtree:

Slow your roll, Kathleen.

Kathy Hartman:

Kathleen-

Corinne Crabtree:

Your dad, I love him.

Kathy Hartman:

Yeah. My dad was a hoot. At the time, I was sneaking food. I look back, and I was… I’d get in the refrigerator with a spoon and eat out of the Cool Whip. I would cruise through and grab a cookie here and a cracker over there so my mother wouldn’t see what was missing. I was sneaking food. It wasn’t because I was hungry. We weren’t rich, but we had plenty to eat. Okay. I didn’t… A two-family household, a little bit different than your upbringing. Wait till your father gets home. Mom stayed home and all that. So my persona going through high school, I wasn’t bullied. I was just ignored. I was very shy. Shocking, right? I had no self-confidence. I was worried about my butt being too big all the time, because that was the messaging I was getting. So I pretty much withdrew. I was just ignored.

Kathy Hartman:

Got to college. Pretty good weight. Pretty decent. 125, 130 pounds for an 18-year-old is a pretty good weight, right? Met Ken, got married. Then Ken… Like you, we were fast-food junkies. Where should we go today? Oh, Mrs. Winner’s. Let’s get a fried chicken biscuit. Oh, McDonald’s, they’ve got the filet of fish for 99 cents. All the fast food. Weight went up. So basically, for the first two or three years, ate like that.

Kathy Hartman:

Then Jason came. Jason, he was born… I was about 25 years old. Put on a bunch of weight with him. My dad came to visit us in the hospital, and my dad at the time weighed 400 pounds. And he said, “I don’t know a lot of 400-pound grandfathers. I need to lose some weight.” He lost 200 pounds.

Corinne Crabtree:

Wow!

Kathy Hartman:

Okay. Still not the thinnest guy in the world. Probably when he died, he was probably about 220, but that’s okay, right? He wasn’t 400 anymore. Lived a lot longer than he was supposed to. But still the messaging, right? Everybody in the family’s overweight. It’s all in my genes. I’d go up, and I’d go down. Weight Watchers, keto, all the things. My thoughts were, “It’s too good to be true.” When I would hit that goal weight, it’s too good to be true. I don’t know how to do maintenance. Boom, right back up.

Corinne Crabtree:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Kathy Hartman:

But mine was, I’ll never be able to sustain this, so I didn’t even try. I didn’t figure it out. I knew how to diet. I could lose weight all day long. Couldn’t keep it down. Couldn’t keep it off. So we’ll fast forward to about 2013 when I met you. My best friend talked me into going to a church retreat where Corinne and a priest were the keynote speakers.

Corinne Crabtree:

I swear to God, that still cracks me up, that I was… Last night, we went to dinner. I ran into Helen Aiken.

Kathy Hartman:

Yeah.

Corinne Crabtree:

I ran into her sister, and she was like, “Yeah, I came to one of your boot camps.” I was like, “Oh my God.” I forget that when you and I met that I was still doing church boot camps. I’m like, “How did they allow this mouth to come and do things?”

Kathy Hartman:

Do you remember the name of the priest? Father Strange, okay?

Corinne Crabtree:

Father Strange.

Kathy Hartman:

It just adds to the ambience of the-

Corinne Crabtree:

Yes, exactly.

Kathy Hartman:

… of this story. But Corinne talked in such a common-sense way about taking care of yourself and advocating for yourself. And Father Strange talked about, in such a common-sense way, loving yourself, that I went home that night, and I sat on the very sturdy coffee table, my 230 pounds of myself across from my husband. And I said, “I’m going to try this one more time. I met this girl today, and she makes a lot of sense.” And for the very first time in my life, I told him, “You don’t have to do this with me. You can still go to Taco Bell if what you fix is not… If what I fix is something you don’t want, you won’t hurt my feelings.”

Kathy Hartman:

So we went different paths for the first time in our entire marriage. We’d been married, I don’t know, 25, 26 years by that point. And I was a supreme people-pleaser, always followed him, always did everything he wants. First time I ever stood up for myself. And I’ll tell you, 18 months later, I was 80 pounds down. I was a mentor in your group because I had latched onto everything that you said and thought, “This is possible. I can do this. Maybe it’s not too good to be true. Maybe I can live this life.” It was that mind shift that sometimes was easy and sometimes wasn’t. Sometimes it was you yelling at me. Sometimes it was you figuratively beating me over the head with what I was saying. But it was that mind shift, that it took that 18 months to get to where I thought, “Maybe I can do maintenance. What do I need to do that’s different? Oh, what? Nothing?”

Corinne Crabtree:

Right.

Kathy Hartman:

“But wait, this is easy?” Just inviting all that new perspective in is really what did it for me. And from there, I mean, we know the rest of the story from there: coach, life coach, school certified, podcast co-host, even though I was terrified. I started doing things I was terrified to do, left my job, all the things, all because I decided maybe it was okay to do something for me on that January day in 2013.

Corinne Crabtree:

You know what my favorite part of your story is?

Kathy Hartman:

What?

Corinne Crabtree:

And you didn’t even tell it, but I have to tell it because you mentioned Ken, was when you were working out. So you were following me, and then you decided you were actually going to learn to work out because I still remember-

Kathy Hartman:

The Beginner Bootcamp.

Corinne Crabtree:

Yeah. I pulled up a chair and said, “All I want you to do is to sit down in it and get back up. We’re going to learn how to squat so it doesn’t hurt your knees.” And you were doing something at home. You were working out at home, probably some little routine I gave you. And Ken realized he wanted to work out with you.

Kathy Hartman:

Right. I asked him, I said, “Do you want to do this workout with me?” And he’s like, “Oh, sure.” [crosstalk 00:28:59].

Corinne Crabtree:

And then you were stronger than him.

Kathy Hartman:

Right. He said, “I’m going to have to do more of this if I’m going to continue to wear the pants in this house.”

Corinne Crabtree:

To me, of all the things you’ve ever said about your story, that moment when Ken was like, “Uh, shit’s got to change.” That’s awesome.

Kathy Hartman:

That’s where the story… The two of us come back together in the weight-loss story, is that he watched me for 18 months or so. And I never chastised him, never bullied him, never said, “You should do this too.” Not one time. I would invite him every now and then. And when he finally said yes, he realized where he was in his journey and decided to turn it around too, and he lost 60 pounds.

Corinne Crabtree:

Well, and I think that’s where it’s amazing, is that when we change… Well, it’s just like… My mom was on the podcast not too long ago. I’ve been in maintenance for a long time. It literally took my mom 15 years of seeing me do this before she really figured out, “I can do it too. I want to do it.” I think it’s one of the things that you and I have in common, is that we’ve just impacted a lot of people by losing our weight and not making a big stink about it.

Corinne Crabtree:

Now I know we do a podcast for people. But our personal-life people, we don’t beat it down their throat or nag them or talk about our weight loss all the time and all that stuff. We just basically quietly go about on our way, and people pick up on it, and they get inspired by it because we actually do look like we’re genuinely happy, and we’re not suffering around our food and stuff.

Corinne Crabtree:

All right, everybody, I hope that that was helpful. We wanted to just tell you one more time our story for everybody who’s not heard it. I think we probably did drop a couple of extra little probably thought nuggets about how we got to where we were and stuff that we might not have included on the first one. But I think it’s just good to kind of every now and then just reset the podcast a little bit of like, we really do get you. We really do understand when we say, “I remember,” or, “When I was.” We were in your shoes. We both probably wore the 3XL sweatshirt at some point with you. So we’ve been there. Y’all have a good week, and we will talk to you soon.