UFYB 170: WEIGHT LOSS, THE DIET INDUSTRY, AND SELF-LOVE: A CONVERSATION WITH CORINNE CRABTREE

Welcome to Unf*ck Your Brain, the only podcast that teaches you how to use psychology, feminism, and coaching, to rewire your brain and get what you want in life. And now here’s your host, Harvard law school grad, feminist rockstar, and master coach, Kara Loewentheil.

Kara: Alright, my chickens. I am – and also Corinne’s chickens – I’m super-excited…

Corinne: Mine are the no-BS women…

Kara: Hello chickens and no-BS women. Maybe Corinne will need to do her own intro. But I am super-excited. As you know, I’ve been doing a couple of conversations with my favorite life coaches, friends, and colleagues. And I am super-excited to talk with Corinne Crabtree today.

Corinne and I like to call ourselves Harvard and Redneck. Those are our little monikers for – really for ourselves as a duo. We taught a year-long program together and that’s how we referred to ourselves. And I should say, Corinne was the one who referred to herself as a redneck. I did not label her that.

Corinne: I proudly accept that I’m very Southern and I will never be able to get it out of my system.

Kara: Yeah, but Corinne and I are just extremely different people, which is why I love our friendship so much. And she is a weight loss coach and I am an anti-weight loss coach. And we still love each other and I have learned so much from her. So, I am super-excited to talk to her today. I’m going to let her introduce herself and say who she is and what she does, since a lot of my people are probably not familiar with your work.

Corinne: So, like Kara said, I’m Corinne Crabtree and I do coach weight loss, but I coach a no-BS approach. It’s very much I want to help you lose mental weight, and then we let the physical weight come off as is needed. There’s a very big disservice being done in the world, I think, right now in the diet industry by pumping a lot of rules, a lot of restrictions, a lot of how we should look, how we should eat, and I am just not for all of that.

And so, I wanted to be some just – I lost 100 pounds and when I did it, I didn’t do it with all kinds of antics and tricks and stuff. I literally just decided each and every day, I want to make a small change to my life so that I can feel a little bit better. I was not feeling good physically. I wasn’t feeling good mentally. I’ve battled depression most of my life and I was at a low place.

And it wasn’t really about my body or anything like that. I just knew that if I kept sitting on my coach every day crying and eating, that I wasn’t going to be around much longer because I had already had one bout of suicide when I was 17. I had attempted to take my life and I just knew that I was going down a bad path and that I really needed to figure out my stuff. Can you cuss on your podcast?

Kara: It’s called Unfuck Your Brain. Yeah.

Corinne: Oh yeah, well shit. For some reason I was like, “I don’t know if I hear a cuss that much…”

Kara: “Does Kara curse? Will she be offended if I use a curse word?”

Corinne: I know you curse in real life. And I was listening to your podcast this morning, of all things. Anyway…

Kara: Yes, as much cursing as you want. Just all curse words.

Corinne: I knew that if I didn’t take care of my shit then it was going to go downhill. And so, I just made small changes to my life. I didn’t give up foods and think I had to take things away from myself. So, my approach is super-simple. It’s about if I’m hungry I’m going to eat, if I’m not hungry, I’m going to not eat. If I am eating, I’m going to stop before I’m stuffed. I just keep it real basic. All foods are fine. I just don’t eat foods that give me diarrhea, that cramp me up, or burn my mouth. I remember just eating shit and always feeling terrible in my colon…

Kara: That burns my mouth… “I don’t eat food that burns my mouth.”

Corinne: I would eat stuff for the sake of eating it, just because it tastes so good. And I would be in physical pain. I just cut out bullshit eating and that’s how I lost weight. So, anyway…

Kara: You’ve covered actually, like, two of the three things on my list for what I’ve learned from you just in that intro. But I will go first and I will say that I think the most important thing that I have learned from you is that it really is not about the weight, that that is not, I think, when I went through – and Corinne and I also did our master coach training together. So, we did our master coach training. And so, we’ve seen each other…

Corinne: A lot…

Kara: Yeah, Corinne is a juggernaut now. She has a $12 million business, and four years ago, was it five years ago, we were in master coach training together, 2016. And she was crying because our mentor was telling her that she had to raise her price from, I shit you not, $7. Which is what it used to be. It was $7 a month and she was making, what, like $500 a year or something.

Corinne: No, I was making $30,000 a year but it was costing me $30,000 a year to run the business.

Kara: Right, she was breaking even because she was charging $7. Literally $7. So good. Anyway, so we’ve seen each other’s journeys. And I think, as sort of an anti-diet coach going through, obviously, life coach training at the Life Coach School, which is very weight loss coaching heavy. The only reason I was able to do that and the reason that I can count weight loss coaches among my close friends, even though we have strong disagreements about some stuff, is that it’s so clear to me from the way that you coach and teach that the weight is really not the point.

It’s like, yes, that’s what brings people in. it’s just the same way that people come to The Clutch thinking, “Okay, I’m going to be productive so I can feel good about myself.” It’s like coming in trying to fix yourself for something and it’s like the bait and switch is that we teach you that there wasn’t anything wrong with you in the first place and you don’t have to fix yourself. But that it’s really not about the weight and it’s not about – I think one of the things that you don’t do, which I really love, is you don’t sell this vision of everybody can look like me or should look like me, that there’s one way that everybody should look.

And I love that also in your marketing – I feel like a lot of weight loss marketing it’s like, people will only feature success stories, quote unquote, where the person is a fitness model now, or it all looks a certain way. But if you look at Corinne’s social media, a lot of her success stories, some of them are still technically, according to the BMI, probably overweight or obese, because it’s not actually about, like…

Corinne: Well, we try really hard to focus on – with our success stories, it’s not just about the weight loss. We pick a lot of our clients who experience success in other areas. Like, for some of our clients, it’s like, “My relationships got better. I stopped a lot of my self-loathing around my body. I haven’t lost the weight. But I’ve dropped my mental weight. And now I actually like myself and realize I didn’t have to lose weight to get there. I just needed to really learn that tool.”

But yeah, we do try to – especially I think one of the success story groups that I love featuring the most is my 55-plus women. Because I think they’ve grown up in some of the harshest diet culture times. I mean, I know we’ve got social media. But they didn’t even have options back in the day. It was just all about Weight Watchers and Shape Fit Magazines. And oh, it’s just terrible. And they come on and they’re getting off meds and they’re playing with their grandkids and, for the first time in their life, wearing shorts or going hiking.

Kara: I just love that they also still have normal person bodies. That’s part of what I’m saying. That you’re showing – it’s like some of your afters would be like a before in some other weight loss marketing because it’s just like a normal person’s body that is maybe smaller than it once was but is not like an airbrushed magazine whatever. And I think that to me is like you are so authentic and real and your marketing and your coaching, all of it, it’s never, like, “Everybody should look a certain way or everybody should be the same size and you can be this way and then your life will be perfect.” You’re always like, it doesn’t fucking matter what you do. If you don’t like yourself, we’re going to work on that and then we’ll see what happens with the rest of it.

Corinne: And I think that’s the problem in the whole diet industry, is that they focus so much on the goal weight and the goal look. I tell my people all the time, if you don’t fucking like who you are at the end of it, it won’t matter. And why go to the trouble of doing all of it if you’re not going to like who you are?

And I tell them, decide who you want to be and then let’s work towards getting there and let’s check on who you want to be and why you want to be her. That’s the majority of our work and I think that’s why our success stories typically end up not regaining their weight. They have no reason to because most people regain weight because they realize, when they get there, “I didn’t change my attitude about myself. I didn’t change my outlook on life.” If you’re an Eeyore all the way down the scale, you’re not going to weigh 150 pounds and suddenly be a ray of sunshine.

Kara: Right, I talk about this all the time in coaching, even though it’s from a slightly different direction of, like, hating yourself during the process, it’s like you think as soon as that last circumstance finally changes, the number on the scale changes or I’ve got the ring on my finger or I make the million dollars, then you think, “Then I’m going to be happy. Everything’s going to change.” Even though your brain – it’s like we think it’s magic, “I’m going to wake up on that day and I’ll have a totally different brain than I’ve ever had before.”

I feel like actually so many of the conversations I’ve been having with the coaches that I have talked to in this little series, it’s all been that. It’s been whether it’s making all the money or getting married or losing the weight or whatever it is, the destination is always going to feel like the journey. And weight loss, I think the diet industry sells us the exact opposite, which is like hate yourself, criticize yourself, punish yourself, restrict yourself. And then, magically, one day you’ll feel amazing.

Corinne: The box opens and the rainbow shoots out for you.

Kara: And that’s not how brains work. And we know that. But it’s so seductive. We’re sold that over and over.

Corinne: I think that’s why it’s so hard for people to really grasp the concept of, “What do you mean that if I hit my goal weight, I won’t be happy?” Because they can only picture themselves running around thrilled with themselves. And so, I always tell them, it’s like if today you’re worried about your food because you won’t lose weight, then the moment you lose weight, here’s what happens. You will be happy because you’ll have some thoughts about your weight that make you happy. But about four or five days later, that number not changing gets real old real quick.

And then, if you’re a worry wart, then guess what, you start now weighing in and you’re like, “Well, I need to worry, is it going to go up? Am I going to be able to keep eating this way?” Worry is a habit. Every thought pattern is a habit. And if you don’t learn how to correct them on the way down and start thinking in a way of who you want to be, I promise, every single one of you, no number on the scale is going to remove all of that. It might for a moment. That’s only because it’s new.

Kara: 100%, it’s very temporary, right? People are like, “But that time I did have the blah, blah, blah I felt amazing.” I’m like, “Yeah, but what happened two weeks later?” Yeah, you get like a temporary high because your thoughts change because your thought – here’s your thought, “Oh my god, now I’m going to be happy forever.” And then you’re happy for that moment while you’re thinking that.

Corinne: The best example I give people is, alright, so being 150 supposed to change your life and make it alright. If right now you show up at work every day and you think your boss is a dick and doesn’t like you and gives you extra work, when you weigh 150 pounds, I promise you that when he gives you extra work you’re going to be like, “But you know what, it’s okay today because I weight 150.”

No, you’re still going to be pissed. You’re still going to think he hates you. You’re still going to think it’s unfair. You’re still going to have that whole life sitting there. and 150 doesn’t fix that shit.

Kara: Well, so many women who are trying to lose weight also have, in their younger days, been the weight that they now want to weigh, and they weren’t happy then.

Corinne: No. My mom weighed 117 and hated her thighs. She thought they were a problem all her life. Then she was telling me the other day, “I want to go back and bitch slap the 17-year-old version of me.”

Kara: Right, it doesn’t matter. It’s so true.

Corinne: Well, here’s what I have – I’ve really thought about this when we were talking about what we’ve learned from each other. And I may cry, Kara. I’m just telling you, you know I’m the emotional one, but I’ve always just admired how smart you are and that you went to Harvard. And I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned from you is, over the course of the years, any time you’ve ever asked me for advice, at first, I couldn’t even handle it because I’ve always thought of myself as uneducated and stupid and just I’m a hard worker so I had to compensate for being uneducated and stupid.

I didn’t go to college. I didn’t do all those things. And I think what I learned from you is I started noticing how hard it was for me to even think that someone who I thought was super-smart to want to talk to me, it really taught me to look within and understand the story I had about myself and to really rewrite what I’m going to think about myself in terms of my intelligence and what is my unique contribution to the world. So, I didn’t mean to get too emotional…

Kara: It’s okay. Your emotion is on my list for my third one anyway, so we’ll get there.

Corinne: I’m just banging your list out for you. But I think that’s one of the big ones for me was just being just in your aura for the last few years. And it’s really helped me think about the person I am and appreciate the person I am, especially because my second thing was you’re the first person that I’ve ever been around that I really thought loved herself.

Kara: Oh, I’m going to cry now.

Corinne: No, I’m serious. And this is why. Because I have watched you get coached over and over and over again and saw you fight for the version of you that you want to be, when I’ve watched so many other people fight for the version that they’ve been.

And I just – it’s one of those things that I have felt. I want to be like Kara. I want to be the person who’s arguing for the person I want to be and truly trying to unwind it and truly trying to understand it. And you can just tell, when you’re in your presence, that – I mean I’m sure you have your shit like the rest of us. But I can tell fundamentally at the end of the day, you love Kara. And not many of us can really say that.

Kara: And that’s all due to coaching. That was not the way I was before. I’m having my own feelings over here.

Corinne: It’s too bad we can’t be together and hug…

Kara: I know, I just need to like snuggle and cry post-pandemic. Okay, let me think about the first one first. So, I think it’s so interesting. We always – I’m just thinking about how this relates to our previous conversation, which is like, we always think what everything we didn’t have or experience makes the difference, whereas the person who has or experiences that thing is like, “Dude, let me tell you, I have this thing and it doesn’t really…”

It’s like the people who are single think that just getting married – even though all around there are all the people who are married being like, “Let me tell you, it does not magically make you happy…”

Corinne: Now I wake up wondering why I can’t be single…

Kara: Right, so it’s like similar thing. To me, it never even occurred to me to think about the fact that you didn’t go to college or whatever because having gone to Yale and Harvard, I was like, “There’s plenty of stupid people wherever you go. There’s plenty of smart people wherever you go.” But it’s like that vice versa. If you’re someone who’s always been bigger and you’re taught to think all the thin people are always happy, even though you look around and you know plenty of thin people who aren’t always happy.

So, it’s like that human tendency to always think – I was talking on my podcast interview with Stacey, I was talking about having grown up around people who had money, I was never under the impression that money was going to solve all the problems or make people happy. It’s like, having been in that world, I was like, “Yeah, no, some of them are still totally miserable.” It doesn’t even occur to me. But because of my own upbringing or my own whatever, like, I have different things that my brain identifies as being like, “Well, if you just had that, of you just did that…”

Corinne: I’ve been coaching a lot lately and I’ve been highlighting, when we have a lot of people who lose weight – and it’s a good thing. That’s what I try to teach them. So, I get a lot of people who lose their weight. And they come on the coaching call and they’re crying and they’re having a hard time accepting it. The next-level issues start coming up.

And I always stop them and say, “I want to ask you a question. Eight months ago, when you joined, the version of you that only wanted to be here and knew that this was going to be so awesome, can you even imagine that you would have lost your weight and then be miserable, or be…” because these are my clients that – my process works, but they don’t necessarily always want to buy into that deep thought work stuff.

Kara: Right, they’re like, “I’m just going to take the part where I learn how to stop emotionally eating, but I’m not really going to dig in under that.”

Corinne: Yes, and so they’re always like, “You’re right.” And I use them as an example to everyone in my membership and just say, “I want you to see this. If this isn’t an example of what you think’s going to happen, make sure that you are working on that relationship with yourself.” Anybody can lose weight, but not anybody can lose their weight and love themselves at the end.

Kara: I think it’s so interesting because actually, as you’re talking, I’m thinking, like, the way that I coach on the other side of it is you have to give up – there’s a grieving process when you realize that you – and it’s funny because we would disagree about how many people can necessarily lose weight and keep it off. But it’s like, we’re teaching the same thing in this way, it’s like no matter whether you’re someone who can lose the weight and keep it off or you’re someone for whom long-term permanent weight loss isn’t an option, it doesn’t matter because both ways you have to grieve the fantasy that being thin will solve all your problems.

Corinne: Yes…

Kara: That just gave me shivers…

Corinne: It’s the same thing with getting out of debt.

Kara: Right, I teach so much about giving up that fantasy and grieving it when you stop dieting. But the truth is, even if you successfully diet, you still have to grieve that fantasy because you get to the end and it still isn’t true. It’s a fantasy whether you act on it or not, which is so interesting. It’s like the same coaching work. There’s no way out of it.

Which I also think is so important because I don’t know if you get this, but I get a lot of my students – of course, this is just the human brain and they’re like, “We don’t want to be our own authorities. We want someone else to be the authority.” And so, even though I’m like, “Change your circumstance if you want, I don’t care. You’re still going to have to coach yourself,” what they hear is, “I’m never allowed to change my circumstance.”

And so, when I’m coaching on that, I’m always like, “Knock yourself out. Get divorced. Quit the job. Try to lose weight. Whatever. All I’m telling you is you’re going to have the same work to do whether you change that circumstance or not.”

Corinne: Right, it’s the same thing. Yeah, we have the same thing on our side. I think for my people, it’s always getting them to understand. Let’s identify the problems right now in your life that are going to be there, whether or not you lose weight or not. Because those problems, how you think about them right now, if we start working on all of that, you’re less likely to want to just escape hatch your life with food.

And that’s really what I’m trying to teach my people, is how do we start looking at our life in a new way? And not just in a happy way. But a lot of it is taking authority.

I think, for my clients – and I don’t know if you see this on your side – but my clients, I think their most common theme is they feel like there’s so much not in their control in life. And so, when their life feels out of control or they think so many things are out of control, they eat to not feel so victimized and to feel so weak and to feel so, “I can’t fix things.”

And so, we work on that a lot. And I just think – I know my thing is all about the weight loss, but I really want to change women’s lives at the end of the day. I want them to see, there’s more to their life than just their weight. I want them to see their life in a new lens. I want them to go after goals that they never thought possible.

For some people, learning how to go after something you’re afraid of and using courage and using perseverance and using determination and overcoming self-doubt, for a lot of my girls, weight loss will teach them those skills. But I’m just trying to teach them those skills; to believe in themselves and to think something bigger for themselves. Whether they lose the weight or not, it’s up to them. But a lot of the things that I teach them to do, it’s just like, “Hey, tonight, let’s just try not to eat the ice cream and sit with ourselves so we can figure out…”

I will tell you something that happens that I love that I teach them. If you’re not going to eat tonight and you are just going to give yourself the actual break that you deserve…

Kara: We should just pause and say that Corinne doesn’t teach, like, never eat dinner. It’s not like you’re not going to eat. It’s like, you’re not going to do your additional emotional eating.

Corinne: No, we’ve already had dinner and we’re gearing up Lucifer on Netflix and it’s like Werther’s candies are calling my name, or, you know, my gallon of ice cream, which is what I used to do all the time. So, here’s what I’m saying. I’m not going to have that.

But the reason why I’m eating is because, at the end of the day, I’m so emotionally worn out from the world because I do think there’s things I can’t control and there’s all these things happening and my self-worth is in the toilet. I think I’m a terrible mother all day long. If, when you take that break, and what you’re really needing is rest, rejuvenation, and relaxation, but when you have it, the only thing that goes on in that moment is your to-do list, which you didn’t do for the day, what you should be doing, the dishes you left behind, the ways you failed, if that thinking’s there then that’s why we take that food away, so that we can start working on your self-concept, working on you knowing that, no matter what, if you want to take a break, you get to have it.

We have to change those relationships, otherwise you eating denies you the ability to ever think differently for yourself, to ever take pride in the way you showed up all day long. How can you ever take pride if the only thing you do is, every night, start a beatdown on yourself and then go get ice cream. You’ve lost the opportunity. Anyway, not to get off on a tangent. Thank you though, for pointing out that I’m not saying, like, “No dinner for anyone.”

Kara: You know, we have very different populations, so they may not – I mean, I have some of your people in my program, and I’m sure vice versa. But yeah, I just wanted to be clear, this is not a, “Three-day intermittent fasting, that’s what I teach.”

Corinne: No, I don’t even teach that stuff.

Kara: So, here’s the other second thing that I had on my list, which kind of relates to this, which is that I have such a tendency to overcomplicate and over intellectualize and I’m like, “Okay, here’s 37 different ways that this plays out.” And there’s positive sides to that. Like, I see how things connect and I think that really informs my body of work that I’ve created. But you are such a genius at just keeping it simple.

I’m like, “Here’s a 47-paragraph thing,” and Corinne is like, “Don’t put the food in your mouth if you’re not going to enjoy it and you’re not hungry. The end.”

Corinne: See you next week.

Kara: See you next week, you’re done. And if course, it’s not the end because you have to coach people on why that’s difficult, of course. like, why do we emotionally eat? And we’ve been talking about eating because you’re a weight loss coach, but everything we’re talking about applies to drinking, smoking, getting high, watching Netflix, shopping, you know, and all of that stuff I’ve watched and I know you have in your own life too. Like, “Okay, I don’t emotionally eat anymore. Do I need another piece of antique jewelry? Why am I scrolling Instagram?” right, like there’s always something else that you can replace it with. The work is ongoing.

But you are just like, every time I post on complicated things in our Slack, Corinne is always like, “Or you could just do this very simple version that would take 10 minutes.” I’m like, “Shall I tell them blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?” And Corinne is like, “Or you could just be like, do this.” You’re so good at keeping it simple in a very hilariously only Corinne would say it that way.

What was your famous thing? Don’t eat like an asshole. It’s such a gift and it’s so ironic that you have this whole thing about not going to college and not being whatever. But I think your natural intelligence is so simple and direct. And sometimes all that getting an Ivy League education does is teach you to write 12 paragraphs when you really only need one sentence.

Corinne: I always tell you that what I appreciate about you though is when I’m going to give you advice – because I get a lot of questions from people all the time…-

Kara: From you, you’re always asking me questions…

Corinne: But this is the thing. I’m always so happy to help you because I know you thought it through. I never doubt that. I think that’s difficult to teach, especially in business, is people do want that mentor and they do want a guide and they do want someone to tell them what to do.

I was in a mastermind just right before this with a group of people who were about my level, all the way down to, “I’m trying to get my shit together and I’ve paid my way in.” And the people trying to get their shit together were asking questions where it’s basically like, “Hey, you tell me what to do.” And you were always asking for advice, at the end of the day though, you’re always willing to make your own decision and blend advice. But you always think it through, and that’s a skill that’s not easy to teach people.

People always think it’s easier to be told what to do. It’s easier but it’s not scalable, it’s not sustainable. What’s better? Somebody telling me what to do and being successful, or me learning what to do and then I can be successful as many times as I want on my own?

Kara: Yeah, that’s true in coaching too, right? Everybody, of course, just wants, “Just tell me what to eat. Or just tell me what to do. Just tell me how to negotiate for the raise. Just tell me how I should respond to the text message,” or whatever it is. And I’m sure it’s frustrating for our clients sometimes, but the reason we don’t tell you that is that that’s not growth and you can’t replicate it. It’s just telling you what you’re A-line should be, but then you don’t know how to create that yourself.

Corinne: That’s why I don’t give my clients meal plans. It drives me – they finally are used to not getting them, but it drove them crazy for a long time and I’m just like, if I’m telling you what to eat then you’re not listening to your life. You’re not listening to your emotions, your wants, your desires and such. You’re listening to my best advice. But my best advice probably is not going to work in your life.

One of the things I want my people to do is, I tell them all the time, I don’t want you to pay me forever. I want you to be a success, not because you lost weight, but because you can go out into the world for the rest of your life and never have to fucking worry about food again. That it’s just easy for you.

Kara: Yeah, I think you are – having watched your business scale in such a crazy way, I have so much admiration for your work ethic. Every time I talk to Corinne she’s like, “Okay, well I’ve just read these three new marketing books and blah, blah, blah and these three programs and also running my business.” And I’m like, “I wrote almost a whole podcast today and was very proud of myself.”

You are just really good at simple constraint and, like, such a hard worker. And that, I think, it’s so interesting, so many people who have this – like you were saying that you had this belief about yourself that’s like, “I’m not smart, I’m just a hard worker.” But the truth is, one of my best friends when to Yale with me and she has the same belief. That’s also such a gender-based thing, I think. Men are socialized to think that, “Here’s my brilliance that I’ve barely even researched at all,” and women are taught to think, like, “Well now I have to work super-hard and get ahead that way because I’m not smart enough.” So, it’s such a common belief and I do think there’s so much gender socialization behind it.

Corinne: Oh yeah, let me tell you the third thing. It is your hugging and touching.

Kara: You mean the fact that I don’t hug and touch so much?

Corinne: No, that you do.

Kara: I feel like you’re the selfie hugging queen with your clients and I’m always like…

Corinne: I am. But if you ask my no-BS women, they will tell you, I don’t like it. I do it for them, but I always tell them, I skeeve out on the inside with it. But I do it because I know they like it. So, I’m just like, “Yeah, let’s do all the things.” But with you, I remember, you didn’t hug and touch me as much during mastermind training, but during the 100K…

Kara: I didn’t know you as much yet, but…

Corinne: Yeah, well when we had to spend intimate time together for a year, like, you would come in and you would just start petting me and stuff and I was like…

Kara: Did I? I don’t even remember this. Oh my gosh, so funny.

Corinne: At that silly Marriott. We actually had a conversation toward the end of the week, I think you had come up and pet me so much and then you told me you were going to miss petting me.

Kara: I am dying. I don’t remember this at all. It’s totally unconscious. I’m like, I love you, let me pet you.

Corinne: Well, what it did though is what it did teach me was I literally quit bitching to my members about not liking all of that because it really made me appreciate…

Kara: You were like, they don’t touch me as much as Kara.

Corinne: There’s always that part. But it was more of just what it really showed me is that for some people, being able to be close to someone and stuff is comforting or important, or it’s a real signal that they do like you and stuff. And rather than me being so caught up in just how I felt about it, it made it easier for me to hug the people and do the things because I started thinking about what their experience was probably more like.

Kara: I love that I like, cuddle-harassed you into accepting physical affection from your clients.

Corinne: It was. But it was hilarious. I can’t believe you can’t even remember it.

Kara: No, this doesn’t even stand out to me. I don’t think of us as being cuddly friends specifically. I think because I always think of myself, my experience with the LCS community at large is I go to those big events we have and that I want to wear a sweater that says don’t touch me because all these strangers are coming up to me.

They listen to the podcast, so they’re coming up to me and touching me. Like Amy Latta, I’m going to make her listen to this episode, who famously hugs with her whole body, including her legs, hugged me that way once and I had to be like, you are like an octopus. Only top part of the body hugging. That’s so funny because my thought about myself in LCS context is that I’m like, oh my god, stranger, stop touching me. Because apparently, I just only want to touch you and Rachel.

Corinne: I know. And I was thinking about Rachel and how much she got coached once on her – we get coached on the weirdest things, you know?

Kara: We do get coached on the weirdest things. Alright, so here’s my third for you, which kind of relates to this hilariously. But I think I definitely still have to coach myself, I mean of course, about various thing in my business. But one of the things that stands out to me about you is just you already cried on this call, how much you love your clients and your women and how much I feel like you – that is always my model in trying to – of course I love mine too, but you’re running a business, it’s easy to get caught up in the bullshit or the people who are complaining, or the people who don’t read any of the emails and then say they can’t figure out what’s going on or whatever.

It’s easy to get caught up in that customer service nonsense. But I think you operate from such deep and genuine love for your people. Basically, any time Corinne starts talking about her business, if you let her go for more than 10 minutes, she’ll be crying by the end.

But like, out of love. Because you’re so emotional about how much you love your women and how proud you are of them. I feel like you operate from such a deep well of love. And as somebody who’s more kind of analytical and operates more from humor and analysis, I think it’s such a powerful reminder to me to come back to being heart-centered in my business and for my clients.

Corinne: Well, I appreciate that. I mean, I do really genuinely love them. And I will say that if I could boil down my success to one thing, it’s literally that purpose behind everything I do. I keep them – I’m going to cry. And I swear to god, I know this sounds so cheesy, but I think about them all the time in good ways.

When I’m making business decisions, I hammer it into my team all the time. I’m like, guys, what is she going to think? Is this going to help her? Is this something she can do? What does she need? It’s always about that. And I think it’s because I just, for my clients in particular, they are where I started and I remember how I felt then.

And for all of those women, it is not about getting their weight off. I remember – your audience hasn’t heard this story, my audience will be like, one more time, really? But when I had lost my weight, and I hadn’t lost all of it, but as I was losing it, I was changing my opinion about myself all the way down the scale.

I remember one time weighing in for a few weeks and I had been really working hard. I was trying to crack 200, I was doing so many things that scared the shit out of me. I learned how to ride a bike. I had never rode a bike since I was nine years old. And I just knew that I was going to be a cyclist.

So I would go to the beginner classes by myself, I was just constantly relying on courage when I was always going to be the slowest, the newest, the heaviest, all the things. And I was so proud of myself for being the version of me that was willing to chase my dream of being an athlete.

My brother was athletic, I had played shit. Always wanted to, was always told I was too fat and too out of shape to do it. And PE teachers would put me on the stands and wouldn’t let me participate. And so it meant a lot to me to learn how to be an adult athlete. More so than the weight loss.

And so anyway, I can’t lose weight for a while because I’m so pursuing my dream that I stalled. My body is like, I don’t know what’s going on but we need to hang on to everything we can because she’s doing exponentially more shit than she’s ever done, we’re going to die. But I remember a couple weeks, I was fine. Three or four weeks, I remember one day weighing in and I was so upset and I remember thinking, “Fuck this, I might as well be eating if the scale’s not going to move.”

And I literally had a moment where I was like, no, that is how we used to think. You are doing too many good things for yourself now. You are taking better care of yourself than you ever have before. That is what we’re excited about. And I remember redirecting myself, and this was even before The Life Coach School.

And it was those moments that I want my clients to have. I want them to have moments where they know how to believe in themselves, they know how to talk to themselves, and they know how to redirect the moment an old shitty thought comes in that they don’t deserve, that some asshole who did not understand jackshit about a woman’s body or how to treat somebody planted in their brain when they were 12 years old. So that is why I cry because it’s – every woman deserves to feel good about herself and not enough people in this world are teaching us how to do it.

Kara: Yeah. And I think that’s where you and I are 100% on the same page. It’s like, with whatever the goal is, I don’t care if you – it’s great for you, but do I really care if you run the marathon or get the promotion or whatever external thing it is, or lose the weight? No, of course not. What we both want is for women to learn that they get to be in charge of what they think about themselves.

They get to decide how to think about themselves and how to be in the world. And whatever body you’re doing that in, whatever arena you’re trying to conquer, not living by all of that programming that teaches women that they’re not good enough, that they don’t deserve pleasure and rest and nourishment of any kind, that they are flawed and unworthy and need to sublimate themselves to everything else in their lives just to be good enough to exist.

Corinne: That’s exactly it. And I think that’s why you and I have always – I think we get along so well because we are so opposite. It’s like, we have the same idea of what we want for women and we come at it from such a different perspective. It’s almost like I’m just obsessed with listening to you talk about it because it’s so new.

Even though you’re talking about what I think, you’re talking about it in such a new way, I’m just like – and I tell people all the time like, you need to listen to Kara’s podcast.

Kara: I’m going to add more one thing I – it’s just something I learned from you. It’s something I’d really say I admire about you, which is that I think we are both the tough love coaches. That we have in common.

Corinne: We’re not going to sugarcoat shit.

Kara: Yeah. When we did that program together, the 100K, like, oh my god, what is happening. Yeah, we’re both very low tolerance for bullshit, but a lot of compassion and self-love. I will say we didn’t even get into this, but I feel like the whole coaching industry and a lot of LCS coaches have gone through a sort of awakening in the last year I would say about social justice and racial justice and a lot of those issues.

And I think one of the things that I really – this kind of relates to something I said about you earlier, but I really admired and respected how you moved through that because I felt like you were really willing to hear and listen and learn and really came to it from a place of humility and love, with really almost no defensiveness about your own privilege or your own blind spots, or the things you hadn’t been aware of before.

I think you really have not just a servant’s heart, but a student’s heart, which I think is such a powerful way to go through life. And I think it is the secret to your success because you’re always willing to learn and grow and with sort of very little – I think so many coaches, even myself, even me, of course me, I have a human brain, but even coaches can get kind of defensive when somebody’s like, “No, you’re not seeing this, or you’re missing this, or you don’t understand this.”

We can get kind of like – I feel like you are just always like, tell me more, I want to know. And I felt like your attitude towards that whole thing was okay, maybe I’ve had blind spots, maybe there’s things that I didn’t know. I want to do the best I can for my students, so what do I need to know? How can I learn? I just felt like you showed up through that process, which can be uncomfortable, an awakening of privilege in that way, in such a beautiful way.

Corinne: And you were so good to help me too because I didn’t know a lot, and you were the first person I would text or message and just say like, hey, I don’t know this, what is this? And you really led the way, especially in LCS. You were one of the big leaders and first people to come and jump out there and start talking about we got to learn this stuff. We can’t just sit back, and I appreciated that.

And I watched you on your social – I’m always somebody that watches how people who are doing it, the way that I might – that’s the way. That right there, I watched you like a student and you really showed, especially for all of us in LCS, I think – and the handful of people really shot out fast and led the way. And I think just being the people who did that, for people like me who didn’t know what to do but were willing to go there, it just made it easier for us.

It made it a lot more – the human brain is always scared of what it doesn’t know. And it was like this whole arena of shit that I didn’t know jackshit about. But I loved having somebody that I felt like was supportive and willing to give. I mean, the amount of help and the amount of just teaching and everything that you have given all of us over the last year, in a thousand different ways, not even just that, I mean, I think that’s the other thing that a lot of people – I don’t know if they know this about you but as in your face as Kara is and stuff, she’s actually got a soft spot for helping people.

I mean, you have always been such a giver in the coaching community and a real expert, opinion and expert voice. It’s definitely not unseen. I mean, you should be very – let me tell you, you should be very proud of yourself Miss Kara.

Kara: Can I change my thoughts to do that? Just one big love fest, and now Corinne is safe, I can’t stroke her across the screen. But let me tell you, when we’re all vaccinated, there’s going to be a lot of cuddling. I will get consent first but it’s going to be aggressive.

Corinne: It’s alright. I’ve promised everybody in the world now that we haven’t been able to hug that I would never bitch about it one more time.

Kara: Right? I mean the things that you – what I wouldn’t give to be in a room full of 1000 coaches being like, stop touching me.

Corinne: Exactly.

Kara: Thank you for coming on and sharing your wisdom with us as always.

Corinne: Well, thank you for having me. It was so fun so I loved it.

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