Hello everybody. Welcome back. All right, today's podcast kind of tags onto last week. So if you didn't hear last week's podcast, please make sure you go back and listen to it because I think this is a beautiful addition to what we talked about when it comes to making small changes. So for years, I thought one of the reasons why I couldn't lose weight as I told you in the last episode was because I was lazy. I would tell myself, if you just try harder, if he just had more discipline, all your weight would come off. I mean, that was like a bitch who lived in my brain, man. She was paying the rent, she was not leaving. So I'd listen to her and I'd jump into every new diet my friends were doing, and I would follow all the rules as best as I could. 

And what would happen. Life always seemed to get in the way, which I just want to tell all of you. If life gets in the way of your diet, there's one of two things happening. You've either picked some bullshit diet that doesn't work with life, that's always one thing. Or the second side, which is the secret that the diet industry doesn't talk about, and it's the one that I do is if life gets in the way, it is because you're using food to cope with life. So that's how we know we're either doing something. And I'll tell you, I did both for a long time. Not only would I pick some bullshittery to do, but I was also emotionally eating. So I was like in the perfect storm of nothing's going to work for me. So if I'd miss a workout, if I ate something off plan, I'd fall immediately back into my old eating habits, and every time I would just think, why can't I just stick with this? 

And the king ding dong question was always, what the hell is wrong with me? I probably could have wrote a book called What the Hell Is Wrong with Corinne 25 chapters on all the things she's terrible at? So here's what I didn't realize though. Through all those past failed diets, the problem wasn't me. It wasn't I lacked willpower. It wasn't that I didn't have discipline, it wasn't even the plan I was usually trying to follow. The problem was that I had no idea why I was overeating to begin with. Why was it that even when I would be doing a diet that seemed like it should work, it seemed like something I wanted for my life, that when life happened, I couldn't do it. So what I realized is I wasn't paying attention to the patterns and habits that were creeping back in when life got hard. 

I wasn't paying attention to little triggers that made me grab food when I wasn't hungry. I wasn't even asking myself, why am I eating right now when I was just eating to be eating and I wasn't paying attention to me? So if I wasn't paying attention to why I overate, why I mindlessly ate, why did I eat when I wasn't hungry? Why did I end my night with the ice cream if I didn't pay attention to all of that? Guess what, I also didn't know what I actually needed to fix. So that's what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about awareness because you've got to get aware of what's going on. I really believe that is the first step to losing your weight. If you're listening to my podcast, IG run tea, you are an emotional eater. A lot of women don't even realize they're emotional eaters. 

So many women who come and work with me, they get into my program and they're like, holy shit, I am an emotional eater. I eat to celebrate. I eat when I'm bored. Oh my gosh, I eat to pass the time. Oh my gosh, I eat just to because at night I'm lonely. So many of us are emotional eaters and we don't even know it. So awareness is a big deal. And when you get awareness, it is so much easier to end up losing your weight because before you can make any kind of change, whether it's to your eating, whether it's to just your lifestyle habits, whether it's to your mindset and how you're going to talk to yourself, you have to know what's really going on because you can't fix a problem that you don't even know is the problem. So let me tell you about how all of this finally clicked for me. 

I've told y'all about my ice cream story a million times and we are going to hear it one more time in a different way. So hang with me and don't be like, oh my God, Karen, if she talks about ice cream one more fucking time, I'm going to tell you right now, my ice cream story is the one thing that I really remember that changed every fucking thing. There were so many lessons that came out of it. So when I weighed two 50, my nightly ritual was to sit down with a big ass carton of ice cream every single night. Every night my husband would come home, he would take little logie upstairs, I'd grab the ice cream, get on the couch, and I would eat until I felt numb. I either would eat until I was sick, until I ran out of ice cream or to where I just was so checked out that I couldn't hear my brain anymore. 

I wasn't hearing the worries of the day. So for years I thought, you just are addicted to ice cream. You just love ice cream. I really just thought that ice cream was the problem. And I told myself stuff like, this is my thing I deserve. It was another one, a lot of us emotionally because we think we deserve it. Ice cream makes me happy was another story. And I would also tell myself I'm addicted to ice cream. But when I finally started paying attention, I realized my nighttime eating ritual had nothing to do with ice cream that just happened to be what I ate. So I was eating because I was stressed the fuck out all the time. All the time I was stressed out about my weight. I sat around imagining that if I didn't lose weight for some reason, my husband was going to leave me even though my husband married me and I was already over 200 pounds. 

Even though my husband told me all the time how much he loved me, my husband gave me no reason to think he was going to leave me in my crazy batshit mind that made weight the central focus of everything in my head. I was one pound away from a divorce and being a spinster the rest of my life, I was also completely overwhelmed. I had worked all my life and at that stage, this was the first year I'd not worked. I was at home with a high needs baby all day. I couldn't go places and I felt like I was failing him. I felt like I was a terrible role model. I couldn't understand why I couldn't make my baby happy. I thought that I had ruined my life. And so at night I was guilt ridden. I was dreading the next day and I will just be honest. 

At that stage of my life, before I started losing 250 pounds, I hated my life. I loved my son, I loved my husband, but I just hated my life. And for a few minutes every single night that ice cream made things bearable. It got to where it was tolerable. So once I realized that that is when everything for weight loss started changing for me, that is when it kind of clicked. I have got to do this differently than I've ever done before. Diet's not going to do it. I got to figure my shit out this time, and I'm going to make small changes to food because right now food means a lot to me. So here's the thing, I realized Corinne did not need any more willpower to stop eating ice cream. She wasn't lazy. That is not why she was eating ice cream. I did not need a strict diet to tell me that ice cream was bad. 

I did not need a calorie range to tell me to only eat half a cup. What I actually needed was to figure out what I was really hungry for in my life. I was hungry for rest. I was hungry for relief. I was hungry for my own self love. I was hungry for assuredness. I was hungry for happiness, and I was hungry for something to make my day feel a little less miserable. And no amount of ice cream was going to fix that. I was never going to eat enough ice cream to fix my life. That is what awareness will do for you when you start asking the right questions. Awareness helps you see what's really going on in your diet life. It lets you see it with curiosity, not with judgment. It would've been real easy for me to take a look at my life and called myself a name. 

Like, how dare you not love your life? You're so lucky. I refused to judge myself. I wanted had the thoughts, but I told myself my judgment, thoughts aren't the truth. I really just need to be curious. I've got to shine a light on my habits with eating my patterns, my emotions that are driving me to eat so I can work on what we call the root cause of the weight. And I know this might sound simple, but it is not always easy to do. Awareness feels really tough. In the beginning, the first time I asked myself, why am I eating this ice cream? It was not fun. I wasn't sitting there on a pillow with incense burning in a journal, having a yoga moment. I had to admit to myself that I was not happy. I had to admit to myself that I felt like a failure as a mother and that I didn't like the way my life looked at that moment. 

But what I realized also was that avoiding all of those feelings wasn't helping me. It was keeping me stuck and digging a deeper hole into a life I really didn't want for myself. And so once I started paying attention, then I was finally free just a little bit to start making a few small changes that actually worked. So what does awareness look like when you try to put it into your life? Well, first, awareness isn't about the fixing of everything right away. Awareness is about first and foremost, we've got to know what's going on because there's, most of us are using a diet. This is what usually happens. We have no awareness around why we're really miserable. We think it's our weight, but it's all the reason why we're really not happy. Our weight is like the byproduct of it. We're eating for reasons and all of that. 

Eating adds up weight. And then we think our weight is the problem. And I'm not saying that you do have some shitty thoughts about it. I'm not taking that away, but at the root of all of it is what's driving the eating that drives the weight to begin with? And that's the shit we got to notice first, because you're trying to solve. For me, I was always trying to do a diet when I felt like I was a failure. As a mother, a diet doesn't solve feeling like you're never good enough. Doing a diet doesn't fix loneliness. Doing a diet doesn't fix feeling like you've made a tragic mistake in your life. All it does is fix your weight and that will have its own amount of happiness that comes with it. But everything that drove the weight to begin with, if you're not working on that, all you're doing is becoming happier in your body while being miserable and with no way of dealing with everything that caused the weight gain to begin with. 

That's why so many of us regained weight for some reason. We can hang on for a while, we can lose the weight. And then when we do and we're happy with our weight, we realize we're not happy in our life. And if we're still trying to white knuckle our way through life every day with no way to cope because we took away the food, we'll eventually feeling good about your weight loss wears off. You're only going to love that for so long. After a while, you're going to normalize to it. And it's the moment that you start not being excited about your weight loss and your life becomes the spotlight again. We start eating because now that's the misery. That's the pain. We got to make that go away. And if we didn't make it go away while we lost weight, it only makes sense. 

We'll go back to the way we used to make it go away. And that's how weight gain comes. So if you want to start getting aware, don't try to fix everything first. First we got to acknowledge what the problem is. We've got to start noticing stuff. So an easy way to do this is the next time you're about to eat, I want you to pause for a second and ask yourself, am I actually hungry right now? Or do I just want to feel better? What is going on around me right now? See, another good question. Sometimes I ask myself, how do I feel before, during, and after I eat my meals just to know if these meals are being eaten because I need them or if they're being eaten because I'm just used to eating them? Because it's just what I do. It's just how I end my day, whatever it is, because you don't have to do anything differently just yet. 

It's really important for you to notice what's going on. For example, maybe you realize that you're always snacking while you're scrolling on your phone in bed, or that you're grabbing bites of food while you cook dinner, or that every night after your kids go to bed, you're like me. You're standing in the pantry, not because you're hungry, but because it's the first quiet moment you've had all day long. Those are your patterns. And once you see them, you can start working on them. You can start figuring out why they're your patterns. Lemme give you another example. One of the things I used to do all the time was clean my plate. Even if I was full, I'd keep eating until the plate was bone dry. Why? Because when I grew up, I always was told, don't waste food. We're broke, and we don't always know when our next meal is coming. 

So I had the habits so ingrained in me that I didn't even realize that I was still cleaning my plate as an adult as if I wasn't going to be able to eat for a couple of days, even though everything had changed for me. But once I noticed that, I started asking myself, have I had enough? Or am I just eating because the food is there and I feel guilty for not finishing my plate? That was big for me. That one little question made a huge difference. So I did the brave thing, which is instead of automatically just cleaning my plate all the time, I started leaving a little food behind just a bite or two just to get comfortable with the idea that we're not going to go broke. If I don't eat everything, it's not going to be two days before I eat another meal. 

Because at first it felt awful. It felt like I was doing something morally wrong. But over time I got used to it and I started realizing, you know what? Nothing bad is actually happening when I throw away just a little bit of food because my body has had enough. And that's the power of awareness. It helps you break out of all that autopilot eating that we do, and it lets you start making some thoughtful choices instead of just going through the emotions of things. So here's what I want you to take away from today's podcast. That awareness really is at the heart of our weight loss. Most diets skip this entirely. They will tell you what to eat. They will tell you how much they will put limits on you. They will tell you what's bad for you. They will do all the things, but they never teach you how to pay attention to why you're eating in the first place. 

And if you don't have that awareness, then you're just guessing your way through weight loss. You're just hoping that whatever diet you do fixes whatever goes on inside of you. And this is why only 4% of women keep the weight they lose off. And I swear it's because of this. I am a four percenter because I took the time to figure out why I was eating to begin with. And when I fixed those things, it was so much easier to not only lose the weight, but also keep it off. So here's what I want you to do this week. Pay attention the next time you eat. I want you asking yourself, am I hungry or do I just want to feel better? What's triggering this eating that I'm doing right now? How do I feel before, during, and after my common eating patterns? And don't judge yourself it. 

Don't try to fix all of this at one time. I just want you noticing this stuff. Noticing will give you some power because once you know what's really going on, you'll finally see what really needs to be changed, and that will keep you from picking stupid bullshit diets that aren't helping you solve the real problems. All right, I will see all of you next week. And again, please share this podcast. There are so many women out in the world that need to hear this message. I'm so tired of watching women beep their head against the wall with broken diets. So many of us need to hear this stuff, and my podcast is a really simple way to introduce someone to a whole new way to think about themselves and weight loss. See you soon.