Hello, everybody. Welcome back. So today, I wanna talk about questions that you can use in order to help you lose weight. And I picked this topic today because one of the things that I noticed after coaching thousands of women inside the No BS Weight Loss Program is that a lot of us are just not questioning things that we think about when it comes to eating. So, if we have a… Let’s say you wanna eat ice cream and you think it tastes good, you don’t even bother to ask yourself any questions about, you know, “Do I actually really want it? Is there anything else that I need in this moment? Um, is it as good as I think it is? Do I… I’m just defaulting to always thinking all ice cream is good.” When maybe you love the Ben & Jerry’s, or maybe you like Baskin-Robbins, or, you know, like… If you get some, like, ratchet ass Kroger ice cream, like, does it taste so good? So, a lot of times what’s happening is we just have all these automatic thoughts coming up around food, and we don’t even take a breath to even question any of it.

The other thing that we’re doing is we’re really quick to dismiss the important of boring day-to-day choices that we need to make in order to lose weight. I, I tell people this all the time, the people that I see lose weight the most successfully are the ones who, uh… Let’s say I, I tell you, you know, “Hey, make sure that you’re hungry before you eat, and y’all know, if you’ve been listening to the podcast, that’s one of the basics. So, you’re halfway through hoovering a sleeve of Oreos because you always do. Like, that’s just how you roll at 8:00 at night. And you get halfway through the sleeve and you think, “Shit, I wasn’t even hungry when I started eating these.”

Now, the people who lose weight are the ones that will sit there and say, “You know what? I wasn’t hungry. I’m just gonna go ahead and stop. Like, now’s a good time to stop.” Because any time is a good time to stop. Those are weight loss success stories. Weight loss success stories do not dismiss the importance of little changes. They do not sit around and think, “That’s not good enough.” They don’t sit around and fuck-it eat because they screwed up. The people who end up failing in weight loss are the ones that are hoovering down those Oreos, notice that they’re in the middle of ’em, and then be like, “Oh, no. I didn’t ask myself the question. I must be a loser. I’m never gonna lose weight.” We… ourselves to death, and then we finish the fucking Oreos because we have created such a shit show dumpster fire of shame for ourselves that now we just wanna finish the Oreos so we can get away from the verbal beat down. I tell y’all all the time, weight loss is pretty simple. It ain’t that complicated. The hardest part of weight loss is learning how to fucking talk to yourself. That’s the hardest part of weight loss.

So, a lot… The other thing that I see is… So, we’re not questioning, like, our, our, like, just wants and desires when it comes to food. We are sitting around dismissing the importance of boring-ass choices. We’re siting around dismissing, like, things that you… we deem that aren’t good enough, so we go and, like, you know, fucking blow all the tires out. It’s like they always say, if you get a flat tire, do you change the tire or do you go and say, like, “Oh, no. I have a flat tire, I might as well stab the rest of my tires and, you know, fuck the whole thing up”? It’s like, no, we wouldn’t do that.

The other thing that I watch is we ask asshole questions of ourselves. So if you are even gonna question things, most of the time, most people do not know how to ask a good question of themselves. We sit around and ask bullshit questions that have terrible answers at the end of them. So, it kinda goes like this, “Why can’t I get my shit together?” Like, how many of you have been sitting around on your damn [inaudible 00:05:01] couch clutching your pearls about your weight loss and the moaning and asking the question, “Why can’t I get my shit together?” Useless-ass question. Just think about it for a second. Every time that question comes up, you should be telling yourself, “Poorly-worded question. Just not even gonna think that.” Instead of thinking, “Why can’t I get my shit together?” How about, “What can I do to do a little better?” I mean, come on. Think about the question. It’s never… Like, “Why can’t I get my shit together?” Will never have a useful answer.

Here’s another classic, “What’s wrong with me?” Well holy hell, what the hell do you think your brain’s gonna do? Sit there and be like, “It’s nothing buttercup, let me tell you all the thousands of ways that you’re lovely”? No. If you’re sitting around and letting your brain just be like, “What’s wrong with me?” then it’s going to say like, “Well, chapter one of how you have fucked up your life. Chapter two, all the things you should have never said. Chapter three, failed diet history.” It’s just gonna go through and look for answers, the way that your brain works. I have said this thousands of times in the podcast, and I teach processes on how to unwind this inside the No BS Weight Loss Program. So if you have not checked out my free course, now is a beautiful time for you to go to Safari or to your Google Chrome, or wherever you like to browse, and type in nobsfreecourse.com. Take the fucking free course. Learn some shit. Weight loss is a lot simpler when you ain’t asking the bullshit questions. I cover lots of that not only in my free course, but in my weekly emails to you when you sign up so that you can learn some of this shit.

But, one of the things that your brain is designed to do is answer questions. It’s like a computer. If you ask a question and you don’t on purpose answer it in a way that you want to, it is going to default answer it with all your shitty-ass stories you’ve collected about yourself for all of your life. It’s just gonna scroll through with your poor self-esteem, your fragile ego, everything you’re worried about. That’s the only place your brain knows to go get answers. So, you have to be really mindful when your brain is answering or asking douchebag questions. So, “What’s wrong with me?” is one that we need to be listening for and be like, “I am…” That, that is not a useful question. How about, “What can I do for me today? What’s right about me? What am I grateful for today?” Anything other than, “What’s wrong with me?”

And then, the last question that I hear us constantly asking that’s useless as fuck is, “What if?” Like, and it’s always, like, “What if this doesn’t work out? What if I fail? What if I humiliate myself? What if it doesn’t work?” Like, literally, “What if?” questions rarely, like… Unless you’re asking a question that’s like, “What if I succeed? What if things work out?” don’t be asking that question. So, like, before I even get into some of the useful questions that I want you to start asking yourself, I just want you to be on the lookout for when you’re sitting around and you’re not questioning things at all when it comes to weight loss. You’re just defaulting to believing that you can’t do it. I want you to be listening for all the times that you’re sitting around thinking, “Something’s not good enough, so I’m not gonna do that. If I can’t do it all, I won’t do any.” I want you to be listening for all that shit. That’s a weight loss, uh, cock-blocker right there.

And then, I want you to listen for your douchebag questions like, “Why can’t I get my shit together? What’s wrong with me?” “What if?” bullshit. I want you listening for all that stuff because even if you don’t answer on purpose any of the questions I’m fixing to give you, at the very least you do owe it to yourself to get aware of when you’re doing things that aren’t gonna be helpful for you. And even if you don’t believe you can lose weight, even if you’re, like, you know… If you’re like me when I was 250 pounds and your self-esteem and shit is in the gutter, just say, “I know that if I just act different, eventually my brain is gonna have to catch up to me.” If you just realize that some of this stuff is not useful, it at least gives you a choice and an opportunity to try to do something that is useful for yourself.

So, one of the things that, like, when I was losing weight, like, I wanted to kind of tell you how I came up with this stuff, is I had a revelation that made all the difference for me when I first started. When I had done all my other diets, like Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, military diet, like, y’all… Seriously, I don’t think there was a diet stone unturned that I did not hit during the 30 plus years of being, like, over a hundred pounds overweight. But, most of them, the only thing that I really thought about when I would start those diets was I would think about all the hard things that I should be doing. And I never really thought about what I could do, like, day-to-day to just do a little better.

So, one of the things that I realized when I started my weight loss was that I could not afford to scare the shit out of myself when it came to making changes with food, when it came to making changes with movement, things like that. So, I decided, like, “All right.” I took a look at my diet history and I just realized the common pattern was I always did something extreme that was really hard that would require me to be exhausted at the end of the day from willpowering to try to stay away from all my favorite foods. I would be exhausted from eating too little calories. And I would be exhausted from worrying that I would break at any minute. And I just knew, like, like, if I… I couldn’t do that long-term. I’d never been able to do that long-term. I might have been able to lose 50 pounds or 75 pounds, but the weight would come back because I could only be exhausted for so long. And I bet y’all are a lot like me. It’s like you kinda… like, it makes sense. It’s like, “Shit.” Like, “It… No wonder I break all the time.”

It’s, like… I’m just gonna tell all of you, none of us are broken. None of us. The reason why we always end up giving up in weight loss is ’cause we’re never really taught how to do it incrementally, we’re never really taught how to actually change our lifestyle, we’re not taught how to do things… like, how to change our opinion about whether something’s good enough or not. Like, we… No one’s teaching us that stuff.

So, when I decided to lose weight, one of the first decisions that I made… And, like, a lot of times people will ask me, “Tell me how you lost a hundred pounds,” and they always wanna fucking know like, “What did you eat? What exercises did you do?” None of that mattered. I’m telling all of you. None of it mattered. And I will tell you, when I first started I was eating the ice cream and I was walking around the block. Like, so, if you want some, like, staunch-ass weight loss plan, like, this is not the podcast for you. If you wanna learn how to really lose weight, then this is the podcast for you. The most fundamental thing that changed for me that helped me lose weight was I decided on day one the best way for me to lose weight was I was gonna have to start having different conversations with myself in my head. I was gonna have to get really good at understanding old Corinne thinking versus new Corinne thinking. Because it made sense to me that any time that I was thinking poorly about myself, I felt pretty poorly about myself. And when I felt poorly about myself, I ate extremely poorly.

So, I decided that I was no longer gonna set myself up to be required to use willpower. It was like I am only gonna do things each day that makes sense for the day. That doesn’t mean it had to be just like yesterday, but it made sense for my emotional state, what was going on in my life for that day, and I was just gonna do my best to do things that I knew I could do for that day. And then, that relieved me of having to do willpower because I didn’t challenge myself to do things that were gonna scare the shit out of me. I didn’t tackle things that I was going to risk tons of failure. It didn’t mean I didn’t challenge myself a little bit, but I learned how to challenge myself without defeating myself.

So, like, I’ve heard… Y’all have heard me talk about my ice cream story thousands of times. You know, like, when I first started, I just was not ready to give it up. That was not an area that I was like, “There’s just no way I’m going to bed at night without eating my ice cream.” So I took that option off the table for a while. But I made changes in other places I was willing. I used to get up every day and I would eat my two Eggo waffles and I’d put peanut butter on ’em, like, a liberal amount of peanut butter, then I would pour maple syrup on it, and that was my breakfast.

And when I started thinking about, like, “What can I do?” I noticed that in the mornings that my motivation for change was always higher, you know? The shit of the day hadn’t started. I had a, you know… Logan was about a year old, a little over a year old, he was, um, you know, just a very active child, all kinds of things. And I knew that by the end of the day a lot of times I was just emotionally worn out. So I decided to start with my waffles. Number one, I quit buying Eggos. And I don’t eve-… I think it went with Kashi, if I’m not mistaken. But, like, I leveled up the type of waffle that I was doing.

And then, I decided, “You know what? I don’t need near as much maple syrup as I have been pouring on these waffles.” So I started tapering back my maple syrup. Then, I got to where I was like, “You know? I don’t even think I need maple syrup.” So I took that off the table. And then, I started realizing that I didn’t need to just, like, slather it in peanut butter, that I could just thinly spread it, let’s see how that works. And what I realized is I still was enjoying my fucking waffles, but I wasn’t feeling like I was giving up everything I loved. I was evolving. And that was new Corinne thinking. Old Corinne would look at and go, “[inaudible 00:16:16] not good enough. You shouldn’t be eating this…” New Corinne thinking was focused on, “You are growing. You are evolving. Look at you. You’re making changes each day. You’re doing the things that you know you can do.”

And then, every day when I would end the day looking back and seeing, like, “Here’s all the things you did today,” it gave me momentum for the next day. And the more that I did things and the more that I got good at committing to what I said I would do, guess what? I felt stronger. I felt more willing to try other things. I got braver and bolder. And sometimes I would mess up, and instead of beating myself up I would say like, “All right, a little too soon. Let’s just go back to what we were doing.” Or, “Can I do, like, half of it? Can it be tweaked?” So, new Corinne thinking had a lot to do with, like, what I’m fixing to teach you with these questions. One of the things that I realized was I had to start asking better questions of myself. I had to start challenging myself to think in a new way. I could not afford to just keep letting myself think like old Corinne.

Now, I just wanna warn y’all I’m gonna give you the questions, but your shitty narrative is not going away any time soon. I mean, I’m over 15 years in now of maintenance, and I’ll tell you, my shitty narrative still pops up. It’s like, “Here I am. Did you miss me?” (laughs) I’m like, “No, but come on.” I want you to not worry about it not coming up. I want you to get so good at hearing it that you give yourself the opportunity to say, “I don’t want to think like that. Here’s what I do want to think instead. Here’s the questions I wanna ask of myself.”

So, let me give you some of the questions. Now, if you are one of my No BS members, we talk a lot about this inside the membership. If you want to, uh, ask questions, you can go to our private Facebook group or you can go to Ask Coaches. And if you wanna talk about this podcast more, please just post to us and we will get in there and we will help you more with the questions, we will help you apply them, and anything that you need to use them.

All right, so here’s the list of questions that you can start using each and every day. Let me tell you how I would use them. For some of them, like, I would first of all make a list of them and I’d write them down. And then, for some of you who journal, so if you’re a No BS woman, you know you get your No BS 30-day planner, I would write about these. Put ’em inside your planner and use them as needed. So, the first question that I got really good at using very early on in my weight loss journey was, what can I do better today than I did yesterday? What can I do better today than I did yesterday? So, I got really good at assessing. So if you’re a No BS woman, inside your planner, you know you have your daily assessment where I ask you a few key questions, I give you that opportunity to, you know, listen for some of the shitty thinking, I teach you how to change it, I do all of those things. This question is gold. It is gold in assessment land. The… One of the reasons why I put it inside of our planner is because I love this question.

So, I want you thinking about, “What can I do better today than I did yesterday?” For me, it allowed me to look at what I did for the day, to see what I could do better the next day without beating myself up. I was always… Instead of being on the hunt for how I screwed up, how I wasn’t doing enough, how my day wasn’t great, whatever, I started challenging myself to just examine my day and then think about how I could tweak it. This is important for perfectionists. This question, for perfectionists, can help you break the cycle of always thinking things aren’t good enough. Your day literally is just a bunch of facts after the… after you’re done with the day. And then, you get to decide, do you make it mean that you’re not good enough? Or do you make it mean you have an opportunity to rise up a little tomorrow if you want?

The second the question that I think is really important, we teach this inside the membership also, is, can I just? This is one of the questions that we use in those moments that we don’t want to do something. So, let’s say, um… Now, I don’t… I am not somebody who teaches exercise for weight loss, but a lot of my clients do love to walk. They do love to do some type of movement. And if y’all are anything like me, there is a few days [inaudible 00:21:23] in a week where you’re just like, “Uh, fuck this. I don’t wanna do it.” I mean, that… I mean, dread, not wanting to do something, that’s just a way of life.

Like today, uh, I had to sweep the stairs. I hate sweeping the stairs. Oh my God, I’d rather do anything other than sweep the stairs, but I got sick and tired looking at all the damn dirt on the stairs. And I asked my… I literally asked myself, “Can I just get the broom out and do a, a, like, like, just a quick… a quick brush?” I was like, “You don’t have to get up in there and get in the corners and stuff, but just get it to where you can walk up and down the middle of the tread without your feet feeling like it’s got, like, cat hair and everything else stuck on it.” Well, next thing I know, once I got started, I was actually just sweeping the stairs. “Can I just?” is one of those things. It’s like, “Can I just leave a few bites behind? Can I just not eat all the chips in the basket when I got to the Mexican restaurant? Can I just eat 10 of them? 15 of them? Can I just put them on a napkin and eat them one at a time?” “Can I just?” is just one of those things that gets you in motion.

And then, once you’re in motion, it’s a lot easier. Just, like, your brain is like, “Okay, I’m over the worse part,” which is starting. The hardest part is going from zero to one. One to two ain’t so hard. So, when you use, “Can I just?” it just gets you out of the blocks. And then, once you’re going, momentum takes over. I use this a lot when it comes to working out. I like to work out. I enjoy it, but there’s plenty of days I just don’t feel like it. I’ve got a thousand other things I’d rather be doing. And I use, “Can I just?” And if I get, like, 15 minutes in and I’m still feeling like ass, then I stop because I know it’s like, look, if you got started and you got going, and it just isn’t clicking, there’s probably a good reason why. So, use, “Can I just?” You can use it all throughout your life.

Another one is, what’s in my control? If you go back through the podcast episodes, I have, um, the worry bucket and worry 2.0. We use, “What’s in my control?” in those episodes. This is a great one for when you’re worrying or you feel like things aren’t out of control, or are out of control. Uh, I talk to my clients a lot, like, we do Sunday coaching where I go live and I coach a few people, and all the members get to watch live. And then, we give everybody replays of it. And one of the things that I ask them all the time is when they come in and they feel like their life is in chaos, they feel like it’s turned upside down, the shit has hit the fan, it’s a dumpster fire, we often… we make a list of, “But what is in your control right now?” It’s very helpful to think about it because what it does, calms your brain down. Our brains love to be a runaway freight train of just, like, all-or-nothing thinking. It’s like, “Everything is a shit show,” when maybe only 50% is a shit show. “Everybody’s talking about me,” when it’s actually, like, three people, not, you know, your entire 30-friend network. So, you wanna make sure that you’re thinking about, like, “What’s in my control?” so it can, like, get you centered and calmed down when you are facing out of control worry.

the next question is, what if it works out just fine? So often, when we’re faced with something, our brains are very wired naturally to think about what could go wrong, and it wants to fixate on it. I like for you to at least give your brain equal airtime to think about, “But what if it was to work out just fine?” This also helps calm your anxiety and your nerves down.

Another good question, when you ha-… something happening and you have an elaborate story, and it’s just, like, you’re angry, or you’re so upset, or you’ve got so much shame, or there’s just, like, really intense negative emotion, a great question to write about is, what’s really happening here? So often what we do is we have so many thoughts, and stories, and adverbs, and adjectives about something, and what we really need to do is take a breath and just get factual about what’s happening. So, if you’re a No BS woman and you wanna know more about what’s really happening here, this question is what we do in the four ins process. And it’s the third in which is neutralizing, where we are just trying to help our brain calm down and find the facts.

So, for all of No BS women, if you’ll watch module two of the No BS Weight Loss Course, we dive a lot deeper into, how do you look at your life through a lens where you calm yourself down, you settle in, and then you can make some decisions about things instead of eating over the things? Because I just believe that weight loss can only happen if we start solving our root cause problems. Weight loss is not about, uh, food lists, and calories, and macros, and things like that. Food lists, calories, and macros do not fix stress, worry, and anxiety, overwhelm, procrastination. Like, we gotta get to the root cause of why we eat. And ’cause when we start solving for the root cause, uh, you can eat the things you love and you’ll be eating them with control, you’ll be making good choices for yourself. Like, trust me. Root cause is where it’s at.

The next question is, will I care about this in three weeks or three months? This is a great question for when you are getting so worked up about something as if it’s just like, “This is horrible,” and you just kinda think like, you know, um, like… It’s, it’s, like, it’s good for when there’s a problem of the day and you think it’s so monumental and it’s so bad, and you literally can’t even see the future. It’s good to just take a breath and ask yourself, “Am I actually even gonna care about this in three weeks or three months?”

This recently happened, um, with my team. We had made a big change inside the membership and we had, um, tons of people who loved the change. Like, literally loved the change. And we had a few that just didn’t. And I always know that no matter what you do, even when you have the best of intentions, when you can say, like, “This is gonna be amazing and people are gonna love it,” and all this other stuff, I always know there’s also the other side, there are some people who just won’t. And I wanna be there and I wanna be compassionate for that.

And so, my team, though, God, they get so upset when our members are upset. Like, if anybody is just not having a balls-out amazing time 24/7 inside of No BS, my team takes it to heart and they do everything they can to try to just make everyone happy. And, and I tell ’em all the time, like, “I love that about y’all.” But they get very worked up about it. They worry. They feel like, you know, “Are we letting people down?” Like, their brains run away with them. And so, um… And this was a change that was, like… I’ll tell you the change. We decided… I had decided that I wanted to update our planner. It had… We had done it about… I think the… we had released it in early 2020, maybe it was the end of 2019, and a lot of how I teach, the four basics, and different things, and, like, how to, like… the questions to ask yourself each day and everything for our planner had changed. And I just didn’t think the current… the old planner matched where we were at. And I was like, “We are updating the planner. I want a simple version. I want one that somebody can do fast. I want it to ask the best questions. But I want somebody to be able to lose weight easily with it.”

So, I had worked really hard on coming up with a 30-day planner that anybody could sit down and use and not even have to watch a video to implement it. Well, almost everyone in the membership loved it. Except for a few people who really liked the old planner. And so, our team was just, like, doing all this stuff, and I finally said, “Y’all, in about three weeks, no one’s gonna be talking about the old planner anymore. Like, let’s just be compassionate, let’s just c-… like, convince them, give the new one a try. Let’s just see what will happen. And if nothing else, if they still don’t like the new planner, we will just give them the PDF of the old one and then they can print it themselves.”

And, guess what? After about three weeks, no one’s fucking talking about the old planner because everybody is now like, “Oh, this planner is better.” So, like, a lot of times you have to ask yourself, “Am I gonna care about this in three weeks or three months?” Most of the time, the answer’s no. So many things blow over. And we forget that we won’t be in the same emotional state we are right now when a few days have passed. So giving yourself that question and letting yourself think about all the times in the past when something seemed so awful and so important, do you even care about it today? I think about people I broke up with, like, people that I dated when, you know… back in the day before I met Chris. Hell, I think about arguments he and I have had over the course of our marriage. In the moment, it’s devastating, and terrible, and horrible. Now, I can’t even tell you any of the arguments Chris and I have ever had but one. A- a- and we’re gonna be together 21 years this year. One argument I can tell you what we argued about. All the other ones that I felt so upset and, you know, all like, “This is so terrible,” I don’t even remember now. So, just giving yourself that perspective is helpful.

And the last question, if I didn’t think this was hard or impossible, what would I do? And this actually came from a podcast episode I was listening to with my mentor, Brooke Castillo. She had someone on there called the Arm Coach. And they were just kinda talking about how very often we give up hope on things. And y’all have heard me talk about my legs and how, like, I will say, you know, I… I’m, you know… I try to love them, blah, blah, blah, blah. When they were talking about this, I was sitting there thinking, “This is such a good question,” because when I asked myself, “If I didn’t think it was hard or impossible to shape up my legs, what would I be doing?” And I made a list of things. And I looked at the list and I was like, “Huh, they may never look the way I would want them to, but I guaran-damn-tee if I was doing some of this shit they probably would look better.”

And I… It was just a quick hack for me to be thinking like, “Oh, yeah.” I forget, even me, how often I take my foot off the gas of effort, simply because I’m thinking, “It’s hard or impossible.” So, I don’t even give minimal effort. I don’t even give some effort that could change things for the better. And I think that that’s a really important question for all of us to ask.

So let me repeat them one more time for you in case you didn’t have a pen and you wanna write ’em down. What can I do better today than I did yesterday? Can I just? So that you can get some momentum. What’s in my control? To help with worries. What if it works out just fine? So that you get some equal airtime for both sides of the story. What’s really happening here? So you can separate out your emotional story from the facts of what’s really happening. Will I care about this in three weeks or three months? So you can at least calm yourself down to know that one day this too shall pass. And then, if I didn’t think this was hard or impossible, what would I do? So that you can see in every situation there are things that you could be doing. You either will get what you want and surprise yourself and prove yourself wrong, or you may significantly improve things because you’re not taking your foot off the gas.

All right, everybody, I hope this podcast was helpful. These are money questions. I’m telling you, you can use them all over your life. And this is why I give you this information, because, y’all, your weight loss, you gotta quit looking for diets. You gotta quit looking for food lists. You gotta quit looking for calorie ranges and the latest apps. We need to look inside of us. Solve the root cause, and you solve your weight loss. I’ll talk to y’all next week.