How Perfectionism is Sabotaging Your Weight Loss
What is Perfectionism?
Perfectionism originates from the desire to achieve and succeed at the highest level. It can manifest in many different areas of life from professional accolades to keeping a tidy home.
If you have perfectionist tendencies in some areas of your life, it is more likely that those behaviors will carry over into achieving fitness related goals, especially when it comes to losing weight.
However, even if you don’t consider yourself a perfectionist, there is a lot of emotion tied to body image and weight loss. Because of this, perfectionistic patterns can manifest where you otherwise might have a healthy relationship with goal setting.
Unfortunately, while perfectionism can be a positive motivational force, it can also lead to some reductive habits that are detrimental towards achieving your goals.
Adaptive vs. maladaptive perfectionism
Now, perfectionism is not necessarily a bad thing.
It can actually be a powerful and positive force that makes a person more driven, ambitious, and focused as they strive to reach their goals. When perfectionism is in this form, it’s called adaptive perfectionism.
Adaptive perfectionists tend to score higher than others when it comes to intrinsic feelings of confidence and focus. This feeling happens when your behavior aligns with your goals.
Maladaptive perfectionism occurs when your behaviors are unaligned with your dreams and desires. It stems from unrealistic goal setting and can lead to procrastination and feelings of frustration, depression, and anxiety.
When we are discussing how perfectionism can sabotage our goals, we are really talking about the maladaptive behaviors that can quickly knock us off course.
By setting impossible standards and unrealistic goals, we end up engaging in negative self talk that leads us down a path to depression, anxiety, and ultimately giving up on our dreams before we even get started.
When it comes to weight loss, I often see my patients making classic perfectionistic mistakes that almost always lead to them giving up and falling back into old, unhealthy patterns.
So, let’s talk about a few ways that perfectionism sabotages our goals, and how you can avoid these patterns and finally become your healthiest, most confident you!
Setting unattainable goals
Maladaptive perfectionism can sabotage our weight loss before we even take any action. Setting goals is great, but setting unattainable goals is not. Where many people fail when it comes to their health is in making huge sweeping lifestyle changes all at once.
Instead, we should be setting smaller, more attainable goals that we can build on over time, but often people want immediate results and get frustrated when that isn’t possible.
To be successful, you need to change your mindset.
all or nothing thinking
When my patients set goals for themselves, they often say things like, “I’m going to exercise for an hour everyday and eliminate all takeout and fast food.” These same patients haven’t set foot inside of a gym or used their kitchen for months or even years.
Making these huge changes overnight is really hard, and almost never works. You might have the best of intentions but this type of thinking, which I call “all or nothing” thinking can end up biting you in the butt when you inevitably burn out.
All or nothing thinking happens when the perfectionist in you says that if you’re going to do it at all, you might as well do it perfectly. The flip side though, is that if you can’t do it perfectly, you might as well not do it at all.
Picture this: you have followed your strict diet all day when your last meeting runs late and you don’t have time to get to the grocery store or the gym after work like you planned. With nothing in your fridge, you decide to just order takeout.
Since you’re getting takeout anyway, you decide to order the richest, most calorie dense item on the menu. Hey, you’re just treating yourself, right?
After you finish your dinner you think, “the day is already ruined so I might as well polish off the freezer burned tub of ice cream that’s been sitting there for months.”
Can you see how quickly things can spiral out of control?
Making goals sustainable
If your goals go out the window at the slightest inconvenience, it might be time to think about lowering your expectations. The thing about improving your health is that is has to be something that you can keep up with even during the worst circumstances.
Cutting out entire food groups is one example of all or nothing thinking that is almost never sustainable over time.
What happens if your friend invites you out for dinner at a restaurant you’ve really been wanting to try but you’ve sworn off cooking oil?
What happens on your birthday when your family get’s you a decadent birthday cake to share?
When you set these really unattainable goals, it can be incredibly disruptive in your day to day life. You miss out on the good stuff that feeds your soul and it leads you to become very self critical as well.
Not only are you depriving yourself of social and life experiences, being overly restrictive actually leads to bingeing, when you inevitably give in to your cravings. This can be detrimental or even dangerous to your health.
Negative self talk
One of the worst outcomes of maladaptive perfectionist thinking is that it inspires negative self talk. When you are the kind of person who sets unattainable goals, chances are, you are also the kind of person who beats yourself up for not achieving them.
Not only is negative self talk completely un-motivating, it can actually be really harmful to your mental health. Here are some of the ways it manifests.
Lamenting your losses vs. celebrating your wins
Negative self talk puts all the focus on what you failed to do rather than what you achieved. Take our example from earlier: when you ordered takeout to “treat yourself” after a bad day, what you were actually doing was self soothing.
The difference is subtle, but super important. Where self soothing involves trying to fill an emotional void with something that makes you feel good, treating yourself happens with no ulterior motive, purely for enjoyment.
In this example, instead of eating your favorite takeout and moving on, you most likely barely enjoyed the meal because you were too busy thinking about what a failure you were for not sticking to your diet.
Afterwards, you forgot all about how healthy you ate during the day, and could only focus on the part where you deviated from the standard you set for yourself.
Then, after dinner, instead of going for a walk to get your body moving since you missed the gym, you doubled down and polished off that tub of ice cream.
None of these actions on their own are bad. You should be able to enjoy takeout once in awhile and skip the gym if you need to or even just because you don’t really feel like it that day.
What is bad is the way you treat yourself when you make choices that might not align with your overall goal. The truth is, one bad day is not going to undo weeks or months of hard work. In fact, loosening up is actually helpful because it gives you a break and helps get you motivated to buckle down again.
The power of positive self talk
When you do fall off the wagon or decide to indulge, try doing so out of love and kindness to yourself as opposed to coming from such a negative mindset. Practice loving kindness toward yourself because the truth is, we all deserve a little treat here and there.
In fact, positive self talk has been found to have health benefits from lower anxiety and depression, better cardiovascular health, and even an increased lifespan.
You can achieve this by practicing mindfulness. When you do treat yourself, go all in and be present for the full experience. By taking the time to enjoy a treat, you reinforce the positivity and are less likely to go through periods of restriction and bingeing.
For more detail, check out my blog post about the power of positive self talk!
Finally, make sure that you are taking the time to celebrate every time you win. Every time you make it to the gym, make a healthy meal, or make a good choice for yourself deserves celebration!
Risk for disordered eating habits
One of the biggest concerns that I have as a nurse practitioner working with weight loss patients is the tendency for perfectionism to manifest in disordered eating habits.
When we engage in perfectionist behaviors, we can become overly restrictive with food or start to overtrain in the gym. This behavior can have dangerous consequences to our health including malnourishment, injury from exercise, and lasting impacts to your metabolism and relationship with your body.
If you are concerned that your behaviors might be indicative of an eating disorder, reach out and seek the advice of a medical professional.
How to flip the script
So, if you are a recovering maladaptive perfectionist, how do you approach weight loss in a healthy way? We covered setting achievable goals, celebrating your wins, and using mindfulness and positive self talk to get you on the right track.
Now let’s talk about how to set sustainable goals you can feel good about.
Focus on what you can add rather than take away
Starting a journey towards better health often means making major changes to your current lifestyle. For many people, a good place to start is not what you can cut out of your diet but rather what you can add.
For example, try to add a serving of fruits and vegetables and a protein source to every meal.
Bonus points if you eat the veggies and protein first to get in the good vitamins and minerals, fiber, and protein that will help you feel satisfied and satiated and follow it with the indulgent carbs and fats.
Focusing on what you can add is a subtle way to shift your mindset with more positive reinforcement for good behavior that makes you feel less like you are depriving yourself of the things you love- because you aren’t!
Make small changes
When it comes to diet or exercise, make your lifestyle changes small, attainable, and gradual. If you are someone who never cooks at home, you probably won’t immediately take to meal prepping.
However, you can make better choices with your Doordash orders by opting for healthier options and you can introduce one or two nights per week that you do cook at home.
The same goes for exercise. If you haven’t seen the inside of a gym in years, try home workouts first just to get into the habit of exercising. Instead of committing to an hour workout five days a week, try 20 minutes three times per week.
When you are getting started, your goal should be to improve on what you have and to start creating routines that you can build on. It’s a lot easier to go from three workouts a week to five than it is to go from zero to five.
That’s a wrap
Hopefully this advice has been helpful to you and you are now thinking about how to reframe your mindset to get you closer to achieving your goals in a way that feels good and not like a punishment.
The bottom line is that any changes you make should be sustainable for the rest of your life, and I hope that being negative and super hard on yourself is not a behavior you will continue forever.
At the end of the day, perfectionism can be powerful. It can motivate you to achieve big goals and feel proud of yourself afterwards. However, if you aren’t feeling good or motivated, start to think of some ways you can shift your patterns to become your healthiest, most confident, happiest self.
References:
