The Perfectionist Trap

How often have you resolved to have a healthier lifestyle by eating better, exercising more, getting enough sleep, taking a multivitamin or reducing your stress, and you start a routine to do one of these things? Yet for one reason or another you stop doing it. You may not even be sure why. Life got in the way.

Do you give up fairly easily because you didn’t do everything right as planned, you missed a few days or you couldn’t do what you set out to do for a whole week? Do you assume you failed because you didn’t do it all perfectly? Who says you failed. Where does that belief come from? Beliefs, if they don’t make sense for you, are things you can change. You can give yourself permission to do what you can, to learn from what gets in the way, and to do what is more realistic for you.

If there is one contributor to people’s belief they have failed it is dieting. Dieting has led many women and now a growing number of men to believe they can’t succeed and are out of control, because they haven’t been able to stay on a diet perfectly and lose weight as expected. When they eat something they shouldn’t, fail to stay within the rules, or go off course for a day or more, they assume they have failed the diet and that it’s no use to continue. They give up until they find the resolve months later to try another diet. Are you one of these? Has this been your experience?

The idea that eating well requires perfection is a faulty notion. Think of all the reasons why you may have struggled to stick with a diet. Usually it is because you wanted to participate in living, in enjoying, and in having some satisfaction, and you will want that again. To fault yourself for enjoying a delicious meal or having some dessert is a decision you are making based on rules you have taken on. And then you choose to beat yourself up for being bad or having failed. You didn’t fail the diet, the diet failed you. Diets don’t work and there are many reasons why, but the primary reason is the physical and psychological deprivation you experience. Once you are deprived, it is very difficult to stay within the rigid guidelines.

Life always gets in the way, and it is virtually impossible to always eat well and avoid wanting to indulge now and then. It is equally difficult to always fit in your exercising or always get in the full amount of activity planned. The best thing to do when things interfere with your best laid plans is to roll with the flow and make decisions that most honor your needs, knowing you don’t always have full control. When you do that, you can let go of those events or challenging days without judgment and focus on today and setting new goals for the upcoming week.

It is better to realize that in the scheme of things, eating a bit more or a bit out of balance periodically isn’t going to have much of an impact on your weight or your ability to stick with healthy eating. The same is true with being active. If you have a week or a few days when you just can’t make the time, accept it and get back on track the following week. Over time it really doesn’t matter. What matters is how attached you are to the belief that you have failed or messed up whenever you don’t do things 100%