The legendary Corinne Crabtree is joining the conversation on The Marriage Life Coach Podcast and I just know her wisdom, energy, and presence is going to make a difference for you. 

Corinne lost a hundred pounds 15 years ago and has kept it off. Now, as a weight and life coach and one of the leading voices in weight loss and business, Corinne helps women break generational curses to improve their personal health and wealth.

Exploring how weight loss can create a new self concept

One of the biggest barriers women face when it comes to weight loss is navigating when our partner and family are eating different things.

But the way Corinne teaches weight loss is that you don’t have to eat differently from your family. In fact, in terms of what you actually eat, food is the dead last thing Corinne worries about with her clients.

I loved her point that when you go out to eat with your family, you’re never sitting there feeling terrible that you all didn’t order the exact same thing off the menu. So why should it be the same at home? Corinne’s approach means you don’t have to eat a certain way to lose weight.

It means that you have to get over the emotional, mindless, habitual side of your eating. 

It’s focusing less on what’s going on in everybody else’s mouth and more on what’s going into yours – and WHY. Why are you choosing that food and how often are you eating it? It’s also about putting a lot of grace and compassion in how you talk to yourself, and shifting your self concept to believe you’re worthy of it. 

Of her own weight loss journey, Corinne said “I noticed a lot of the foods that I used to eat emotionally became less and less important, because I was starting to give myself my truest emotional needs.”

Following the threads between our relationship with food and our relationship

I talk a lot with my Marriage MBA clients about their hobbies or interests or passions, and how it’s okay if we don’t like the same things as our partners. It’s actually encouraged. But as we change our relationship with food and our partners don’t, how does that affect our relationship – both in terms of our self concept and as a partner?

Are there things we can learn in how we’re relating to food that we can apply to our relationship?

Definitely yes, according to Corinne.

When she first started losing weight, she realized she had a lot of mom guilt to work out. At the time, she was home with her infant son while her husband worked. She imagined that because she had such a difficult time with the baby feeding at all hours and needing to be held constantly that her husband must be stressed, too.

She hated thinking how tired he must be from work only to come home and deal with her and a fussy baby. Every night when he would (happily) bathe their son, she would throw on her “shame shawl” and emotionally eat ice cream. 

Feeling like a less-than wife also didn’t help set up any kind of atmosphere for their sex life.

But with some work, she was able to slowly wean herself out of the habit of having to have ice cream every night. When she took the guilt away and gave herself compassion and understanding, she gave herself the break that ice cream couldn’t provide.

The next thing she knew, their sex life started to come back because it’s a lot easier to be in the mood when you’re not weighed down with mom guilt and shame. The more she started going to the gym, walking, and having time to herself, her marriage got better.

Relying more on your own self concept instead of solely on your partner

One of the things we talk a lot about here on the podcast and in my coaching programs is the idea that you cannot cast your partner in every role in the movie.

When we want them to affirm us, but we also want them to challenge us, we want them to make us laugh, but we also want them to be serious. No matter who your favorite actor is, if you put him in every role in the movie, it’s not going to be a good movie.

Corinne described a time when she’d gotten dependent upon her husband, Chris, to manage her emotions. She was having such a hard time being proud of herself and treating herself with grace and compassion. It was putting undue pressure on him to keep her happy and in a healthy frame of mind.

She said, “When I figured that out for myself, I noticed our marriage got easier. It’s healthy in a relationship when each person is responsible for their own belief in themselves and their own happiness.” 

I think it’s so incredible when we’re able to look at ourselves with loving compassion, and remove the pressure from our partners.

You create so much space for so much connection and love that doesn’t require the other person to be reaffirming you from the outside. It’s not that we can’t receive it – to me, it’s the difference between desiring it and delighting in it.

Prioritizing in business so you can prioritize your relationship

I was really curious to find out from Corinne the hardest part of running a business while making time to prioritize her relationship.

What was tough for her in the beginning (and the biggest mistake she sees most entrepreneurs make) was assigning everything she needed to do an equal value in importance.

But everything cannot get equal value. You have to become someone who does a really good job of figuring out what’s the most important thing to be working on right now. As she puts it,

“When you start prioritizing, your brain can stop thinking about things that are further down the list. But when you don’t give things any priority, your brain thinks it has to hold them all.”

Corinne is a big fan of putting everything on the calendar, not just business reminders. She calendars health and nutrition tasks, workouts, plus enjoyable things in her personal life, like date nights and events with the family. If you look at your calendar and only see chores and work, what fun is that? 

She’s quick to point out that one of the reasons why many people have an aversion to calendaring things is because they calendar misery the whole time. 

People think they’ll miss the spontaneity, but Corinne said, “The problem with a lot of spontaneity is that the spontaneous moment happens in the moment when we most need ourselves. Most of the time, when we want to do something on a whim, it’s not in our best interest. We’re doing it with our worst interest in mind.”

I love the idea of prioritizing this way because it benefits everything: your business, your health and nutrition, and your marriage.

So many of my clients and listeners think they have to hold every grievance they’ve ever had in their relationship. I teach them how to prioritize that using something called the Anger Scale. On a scale of one to 10, if it’s a 10, you have to do something about it. If it’s a six or below, what do you do about it? Probably nothing.

It really helps to reframe in this way when we find ourselves thinking the socks on the floor matter as much as forgetting to pay the mortgage! 

Super simple tools like prioritizing, calendaring, and The Anger Scale can create major wins in our relationships every day.

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Follow Corinne on Instagram
• Follow Corinee on Facebook 
• Listen and Subscribe to the Losing 100 Pounds Podcast
• Corinne’s Free Weightloss Course
• Corinne’s Advanced Weightloss Coaching Certification
• Corinne’s No BS Business Women Membership
• The Anger Scale Podcast Episode 
• Satisfaction vs. Surprise – Decide what to prioritize this holiday season Podcast Episode 
• The Questions for Couples Journal
• Save your spot for the How to Have A Better Marriage Webinar