Hey, everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Today I bring you another episode about the link between perfectionism and overeating and how and why you want to break that connection. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to some of the other episodes that I have done on perfectionism in this podcast.
Although I think you’ll probably find mention of perfectionism or all or nothing thinking or black and white thinking in just about every episode that I have recorded. Because that idea of having to perform at this impossible standard in order to be good enough is so intertwined with overeating and emotional eating and stress eating and binging and getting in yo yo cycles with weight and with overeating.
So, let’s talk about this some more because it’s really important. Just to be clear on what I’m talking about. I thought I would start with a definition of perfectionism. And so I googled and came up with, I didn’t even know it existed. The American Psychological Association actually has a dictionary of psychology, I did not know about this.
And they provided this definition of perfectionism. So, according to the American Psychological Association dictionary, perfectionism is the tendency to demand of others or of oneself. And today I’m going to be talking about of oneself. The tendency to demand of oneself an extremely high or even flawless level of performance in excess of what is required by the situation. It is associated with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and other mental health problems.
And yes, you can be a perfectionist and not even know it. You can be so perfectionistic that you think you are not perfect enough to be a perfectionist. You can be somebody who isn’t well, or who is telling themself or believing that they’re not showing up perfectly enough because the perfectionism is actually getting you stuck in cycles of procrastination or numbing or avoidance. And so it’s absolutely negatively impacting your performance.
Perfectionism is a really important issue. So, let’s talk about how perfectionism keeps you stuck or might be keeping you stuck in patterns with overeating or emotional eating. The first way that I see all the time is that when you are inside of a perfectionist mindset. The steps that you tell yourself, you need to take are going to be too big.
Perfectionism is also known as all or nothing thinking. And so there isn’t a lot of subtlety in perfectionism. You need to solve the whole problem. If you haven’t lost the weight, you haven’t accomplished anything. If you aren’t tackling all the different facets of things, you aren’t doing anything.
The steps that your brain is going to tell you, your perfectionist brain is going to tell you that you need to be taking yesterday are going to be too big. They’re going to be overwhelming. They’re likely not going to be sustainable. And the small steps that might be very effective, or the small steps that might allow you to start to build up consistency and to start to grow the muscle of a new habit, they might be the beginning steps, or sometimes the small steps are all you really need to take.
Inside a perfectionist mindset, your brain is going to tell you that they don’t count. Because remember it’s all or nothing thinking. So, if you’re taking a small step, you’re, you’re not doing everything. You could be doing more. They don’t really count. They’re not very effective. They’re not going to get you anywhere. This is all perfectionism talking in the background.
And as long as your brain is telling you that what you really need to do to make something count is something that’s too big and not sustainable. And what you are doing isn’t really effective and it isn’t really enough. What’s happening is your brain is constantly working against you.
Your brain is constantly, and by your brain I mean the thoughts that it’s having these perfectionistic beliefs, are destroying any kind of momentum and motivation. Doesn’t feel like you’re getting anywhere. It doesn’t feel like anything will help. It doesn’t matter that you had this day of eating where you didn’t binge when you normally did because this other thing happened. And so, it was all ruined. You aren’t getting anywhere. Nothing’s going to work.
Here’s another thing about perfectionism that we don’t talk about a lot. And it’s a place that I really see open up and change inside my, Your Missing Peace program because perfectionism is isolating. So, if you are in this perfectionist struggle and you are also fighting with overeating and emotional eating, you’re likely to hesitate or be unwilling to share your struggles.
Because your brain is giving you thoughts like, I shouldn’t be having these struggles. I should have figured this out by now. I should have done this more perfectly. Other people in a perfectionist world have achieved this perfect thing. Right? And so perfectionism tells you that you’re going to be judged negatively for not being perfect. And that keeps so many women locked inside themselves with, with these battles with food.
I cannot tell you. Well, I am going to tell you how many women have shown up, after joining Your Missing Peace and maybe been trepidatious about, or anxious about showing up to that first coaching meeting. Right? What’s it going to be like? And watching this relief come over their faces on zoom. As they realize that this stuff that they have struggled with in silence and worried about that has kept them up at night. That has made them feel so not enough that they’re not alone with that. Right?
And to hear people say, “Oh my goodness, I found my people”, or “I didn’t know other people thought this way.” or “wow, what you just shared. I can relate to that perfectly”. And by the way, oftentimes that person, if they’re new in the program might have shared something that they don’t think anybody else could possibly feel that way.
Breaking that pattern of isolation is so key to breaking out of perfectionism. Which can keep you in this cycle of overeating. Right? There’s something wrong with me. I’m not perfect enough. If people only knew. I’m not allowed to ask for help, I shouldn’t need the help. There’s something wrong with me for needing help.
Here’s another thing about perfectionism, which is so worth paying attention to. And I could talk about this one all day. Perfectionism combined with diet mentality and some time on the weight loss, overeating, under eating, trying to figure out your weight and you’re eating hamster wheel. Perfectionism leads to postponing your life.
Really. Perfectionism leads to this I will do that when. I am going to do that after. I need to be perfect, although your brain won’t use those words before I can do that. Right? I will do that after I’ve lost the weight. I couldn’t possibly date until I’ve lost the weight. When I’ve lost the weight, I’m going to travel more.
When I’ve lost the weight, I’m going to spend more time being more active with my grandkids. When I’ve lost the weight, I’m going to buy some clothes that I really love, that I really feel sexy in. When I lose the weight, I’m going to start dancing again. Perfectionism leads to postponing your life until you are perfect.
Which spoiler alert, you’re never going to be. You miss out. And here’s the kicker. When you delay what you want and what you need and what you value and what you deserve. You perpetuate overeating. When you delay what you want and what you need and what you value and what you deserve, you actually can make overeating patterns worse.
Because I’m sure you’ve heard me say this. When we’re overeating, when we’re eating food that we’re not hungry for, we are using food for a reason. There’s a reason. There’s something that we need or that we want or that we desire. You use food to make up for what you aren’t getting. Or to cope with feelings that you have.
Feeling bad about yourself. Feeling anxious. Feeling sad. Feeling inferior. Feeling bored. Feeling confused. Feeling lost. Feeling alone. When you postpone your life until after. You don’t deserve to do that until after you have to earn it somehow. You have to be perfect. You are actually not taking care of the reasons, the things, the needs, the feelings, the desires that food becomes such an easy band aid to try to cope with.
So, perfectionism literally keeps you stuck in a cycle of overeating and emotional eating. I’m going to talk in a minute about how to break up with perfectionism, how to sidestep these patterns and how to get out of it. But I really want to be clear about how awful perfectionism is.
Because often we have grown up with this ideal that it’s, it’s perfectionism is quality. It’s having standards. No. Perfectionism is the belief that perfection is possible. Perfection all the time is possible. You could always have done better. Right?
And that belief leads to guilt and shame, feeling like you’re not enough. Feeling like you’ve never done enough. Feeling like you haven’t performed enough. Which can often spiral into overeating as a way to cope with it, as a way to numb it.
Because you feel bad, it’s a way to punish yourself. We use food for all sorts of different reasons. This belief that perfectionism is possible, again, feeds into that pattern that I talked about earlier about feeling like what you’ve done doesn’t matter because you could have done better.
It doesn’t matter that you got 80%. Or that half your day went exactly like you had hoped it would when you experimented with changing your eating. You didn’t get it perfect. So it doesn’t count. And there’s something wrong with you because you could have been perfect. Which is a lie.
So to say a little bit more about that, when you have this belief that perfectionism is possible and attainable, and that is the standard that you should be going for. It invalidates partial progress, or what I like to call imperfect progress or human progress.
That is, that is actually how we progress in, in, in spurts and in small ways and imperfectly. Backsliding, and I don’t even really like that word, but not getting something right all the time and then learning from our mistakes or our missteps or the things that didn’t work is actually how we cement in real change.
But perfectionism invalidates that kind of human imperfect progress. And it also invalidates times when we’re struggling. Which are normal and which are human. Or when the unexpected happens that we couldn’t possibly have planned for. And so with all that pressure on us, because remember, there’s this belief that somehow perfectionism is possible.
Perfectionism and that mindset leads to this tendency to numb out or to want to numb out or to want to not feel. Because the feelings and the beliefs highlight this idea of imperfection. Which is so unacceptable because we should be able to be different. Again, I’m, I’m telling you these beliefs that are not true. Right?
And all of that feels really bad. So when you have that mindset happening, it is so tempting to just want to just silence it, numb it out, distract yourself from it, not feel those things. And guess what? Guess what a great way is to numb out. You don’t have to guess because you know. Needing to numb or wanting to numb, the urge to numb is a major cause of overeating.
And then after you numb, then it’s so easy to spiral into the guilt and the shame and what have I done? And now remember all or nothing thinking it’s all ruined. And so again, there’s this cycle of feeling bad, wanting to numb and turning to food because you can’t get it perfect. And it feels rather hopeless.
Here’s something else. And remember, we’re going to talk in a minute about how to sidestep this stuff. Perfectionistic beliefs, being mired in perfectionism, is the opposite of self-compassion or self-kindness. And without self-compassion, without self-kindness, you cannot be curious about your own behavior.
You can’t be curious about why you ate that thing or why your cravings were so strong that night, or why you binged after lunch. Because in that rigid perfectionistic mindset, you’ve already decided. Well, I should have been able to do this. I failed. I’m the problem. There’s something wrong with me. I just need to be tougher or more rigid or more convicted or more motivated. You’ve already decided.
So, we need self-compassion and self-kindness to be able to say. Wait a minute, I was working really hard, something didn’t go well here. Or this went well Wednesday and today it all fell apart. What was that about? What can I learn from that? Without compassion and kindness and a belief that there is something valuable in imperfect progress, in imperfect situations, you can’t learn what you need to learn to be able to untangle and eventually end your overeating habits.
You’re just always, it’s all or nothing. Right? Did you do the thing? Did you not do the thing? I didn’t do the thing. It’s ruined. Now I have to start over. Now I have to try harder. It is a trap. That creates a vicious cycle that gets you nowhere. It’s like that poster with the big X on it that says bang head here.
That is what perfectionistic believes when you combine them with trying to change your eating. Or that, that is what it is. It’s you banging your head against the wall, feeling bad, blaming yourself and getting nowhere.
So, I hope I have made the case that perfectionism is a lie. That perfectionism isn’t possible. It isn’t necessary, even if it was possible. And it is the root of so many vicious cycles and patterns and habits with food that feel horrible. It is not the key to success.
And so now you are probably wondering what you are supposed to do with your own inner perfectionist. Who, by the way, has been made stronger and more resilient by a diet culture. Which pumps you up with lots of all or nothing beliefs and these ideas that you and your strength and your rigidity and your discipline are a hundred percent responsible for your success and all sorts of crap. Right?
So how do you sidestep the perfectionism? How do you get out of this mindset that is making you miserable and step into a mindset that Actually works if what you want to do is break out of these patterns with food that are not serving you.
The first thing I want you to do is to start recognizing the perfectionism that is all around you. In your beliefs, in the way you set yourself up to succeed or to fail in the way that you talk to yourself.
I’m going to give you these pointers and you are going to nod and think that they make sense. And then you are going to catch yourself doing the opposite anyway. I’m telling you perfectionism, especially when it comes to approaching eating habits is so ingrained in us. We just do it automatically. So be prepared to catch yourself and celebrate when you catch yourself.
First thing I want you to practice is stop setting 100 percent goals. Stop telling yourself you’re going to do something 100 percent of the time or every single day or all 24 hours of the day. If you’re currently doing something 0%, let’s say you want to start working out, right? And you are not working out, then set a 20 percent goal.
If you’re doing something 20 percent of the time, break your brain by instead of deciding, okay, from now on every day, aim for 40%. Break your brain. Break the pattern that it has to be all or nothing. If you do something, well, if you’re currently doing something 0 percent and you are able to do it 35 percent of the time, do you know what a huge win that is?
So stop setting a hundred percent goals. Aim for lower than a hundred percent. And then I would coach you to maybe cut that number in half too. Until you get success with that number. Set yourself up for success and then celebrate the win. Be prepared for your brain to say, well, yeah, you only did it 35 percent of the time and talk back to it. 35 percent is a lot more than zero.
So stop setting 100 percent goals. Aim for 35 percent or 40 percent. Instead of saying you’re going to do something every single day. If you’re not doing it now, why not try for three out of seven days. Or why not try for practicing something in the afternoons instead of all day long. If you want to practice mindful eating, try one meal this week, instead of deciding you’re going to do all of them. And setting yourself up and you know you’re doing it to with a goal that you’re not going to accomplish.
If you have a hidden hunger for rest. Instead of outlining the perfect bedtime routine and completely overhauling your schedule. Aim for going to bed 20 minutes earlier and see what happens. Let yourself win. If what you want is more movement, if you want to walk every day as a way to de stress. Then make the goal getting out the door instead of I’m going to walk every day for 30 minutes.
Here’s another thing that I want you to do. Focus on the habit, a habit, instead of whether or not you’ve reached the goal. Track the times that you show up for yourself or that you followed through on this new habit. Instead of asking whether or not you reached a goal, whether or not you lost weight, whether or not you ate perfectly.
Track the habits. Track the times that you show up for yourself. Another way to do this is to start tracking wins. We do this all the time inside Your Missing Peace. It is so much harder than it sounds. Be prepared for your brain to say, well, that wasn’t really a win. Or that’s not really big enough to be a win or I’m embarrassed to share this win. Here’s that isolating perfectionism again. Nobody else will think this is a win.
Start tracking your wins. There is no win that is too small. If win is a hard word to wrap your brain around, then start tracking what went right. I guarantee you, if you had to right now, you could stop and write down 10 things that went wrong today. Your brain is doing a great job of tracking everything that didn’t go well, which really means everything that didn’t go perfectly.
It takes major rewiring to start seeing progress. To start tracking wins outside of a perfectionism mindset. But remember what I said, if your brain won’t let you see the wins, if your brain won’t let you see the progress, if your brain downplays every doable step that you take, because it’s not all, it’s just nothing. Then you are destroying your momentum and your motivation.
If you start tracking your wins. If you start tracking what went well and you do it consistently, you work to build that habit. And if you start doing that around these tools that I’m teaching you about, creating freedom from overeating, you will be amazed.
Here’s the last thing I want to challenge you to do. I want you to ask yourself, if you want your future self, that you in the future, that you tomorrow, or six months from now, or a year from now, do you want your future self, or do you want the children that you are raising, or your grandchildren, or your friends, kids, or somebody impressionable that you care about…
do you want your future self or any of these wonderful people to be trapped by the tyranny of having to get everything perfect just to be good enough?
Do you want that? And do you actually believe that that is a reasonable standard for anybody else on the planet, but you. To have to get everything perfect simply to be good enough.
Start noticing the faulty belief that perfectionism is. I guess an easier way to say that is start noticing that perfectionism is a lie. It’s not a true belief. Even though it repeats in your head hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times a day. And then this is advanced, but it’s really powerful.
Start tracking, voicing, noticing appreciations of yourself that aren’t tied to your behavior. that aren’t dependent on how you ate today. Or what you ate or what you didn’t eat. Start noticing and voicing appreciations of yourself that are not tied to the number on the scale. Whether it was a quote unquote good day or a bad day, which is perfectionistic thinking, by the way.
Start appreciating yourself, start noticing the wins, start noticing what went well. And stop aiming for a hundred percent. You will never get there and you’re going to get so much farther, especially when it comes to overeating and overwhelm and all the stuff that goes with it, if you just allow yourself to be human.
I’ll talk to you soon.