Progress Over Perfection

If you've ever felt like you're either doing it perfectly or completely blowing it, this episode offers a different way to think about your journey with food. We explore what black-and-white thinking looks like around eating, why rigid standards can actually create the very behaviors we're trying to stop, and how learning to look for progress — not perfection — changes everything.

What You'll Discover:

• Why all-or-nothing thinking keeps you stuck in binge cycles
• What progress with food can actually look like (it might surprise you)
• Why small changes are more powerful than big overhauls
• How what you focus on shapes what you create more of

If you've been measuring your days as good or bad, and the bad days keep leading to more bad days — this episode offers a way out of that cycle.

Ready to stop navigating this alone? Schedule a Breakthrough Call with Jane

Want to know why you struggle with food and what to do next? Start watching The Food Freedom Mini Series today. 

Transcript

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If you've ever had a perfect day with food, only to find yourself in full screw it mode by the evening, this episode is for you. Today we're talking about progress over perfection, what it actually means, why your brain resists it, and how shifting what you're looking for might be the thing that changes everything. Because what you focus on expands, and it's time to start focusing on something that actually works. Welcome to Binge Eating Breakthrough, the podcast to help you stop feeling out of control around food and build trust with your body. If you've tried everything but still feel stuck, you're not alone. I've been there too. I'm Jane Pilger, and I'm here to help you see binge eating in a new way so you can finally break free. Each week you'll get the tools and insights to create peace with food and your body. Your breakthrough starts next. So today we're going to talk about progress and specifically progress over perfection and what that can look like on your journey with food. I'm also going to give you an analogy that is completely not food-related because a lot of times I think that can be really helpful. So all of this focus on progress started with a conversation that I recently had with a friend. We were talking, catching up, and he mentioned something that has stayed with me. He said he loves making progress. Not arriving, not achieving, just moving forward. This is somebody who has done a lot of pretty incredible things in his life, but he is driven not by the end result. He's driven by progress daily, daily progress. And I've been thinking a lot about this since we had that conversation. I've thinking, I've been thinking about it a lot in my own life and also talking about this with my clients. What does it mean to make progress? What does progress actually look like? And what is it like when we shift from that outward outcome end result focus to daily progress? And how do we recognize it, especially in an area of our lives when we've been so focused in the past on getting it right, on trying to be good. Because here's what I see with a lot of people that I work with, and what I experience myself for a long time. When it comes to food, there's often no middle ground. Either you're doing it perfectly, you're eating the right things at the right times in the right amounts, or you've blown it. And now you're in what a lot of people think of as screw it mode. You're either on the wagon or you're off the wagon. You're having a good day with food or a bad day with food. It is all or nothing. And if you've been there, you know exactly what I mean. You wake up with a plan, you feel good, you're doing it, and then something happens. Maybe you eat something you didn't plan for. Maybe you're stressed. Maybe dinner just didn't go the way you expected. Maybe somebody invites you out to eat when you weren't planning on eating out. Maybe something happens at work and it's like suddenly a switch flips. Well, I already messed up. Might as well. I'm not going to do this again tomorrow, so I might as well just keep eating now. This is black and white thinking. And it's one of the most common patterns I see in people who struggle with binge eating, with feeling out of control around food. It doesn't leave any room for the middle. It's just black or white. It is good or it's bad. There's no such thing as a decent day, an okay day, a day where you made some choices that felt good and some that didn't feel so good. It's either perfect or failure. And here's the thing: when you are operating in all or nothing mode, you are often setting yourself up for the very outcome that you're trying to avoid. When your standards are so high, so rigid, so unforgiving, the fall is inevitable. And it's not because you lack willpower. And it's not because something is wrong with you. It's because the nervous system doesn't do well with that kind of pressure. It will find a way to release that pressure. I know this from my own experience. For a long time, I had very rigid expectations of myself around food. I counted calories. This was back before apps and everything else. I had this massive spreadsheet that I would keep. I only allowed certain foods. I kept foods out of the house so I wouldn't be tempted. And all of it backfired because restriction, whether it's physical restriction or just the mental belief that certain things are off limits or that you can't control yourself around certain foods, drives the very urges it's trying to prevent. And then when I finally let go of all of those rules and all of that rigidity, I swung the other way for a while. And I ate everything I had been keeping myself from because I could. And while part of that felt like freedom, it also didn't feel great in my body. My body was not happy. I hadn't really found peace. I just traded one extreme for another. And the shift that actually made a difference wasn't about finding the perfect middle point on some food spectrum. It was about changing what I was looking for, changing the question I was even asking myself. So I stopped asking, did I eat well today? Did I do it right? Was today a good day or a bad day? And I started asking, what would progress look like today? So I used to call my binge days bad days. I couldn't even say the word binge out loud. I would just tell my husband I had a bad day, and he knew what that meant. It would often be, uh, I had a bad day, I'm not eating dinner. That was essentially the extent to what I would talk about. There was so much shame wrapped up in the language of using the binge. There was also so much shame wrapped up in what I had eaten, I wouldn't even tell him, but I could say, good day, bad day. Now, that framing though, it kind of kept me stuck in the cycle because it was binary. It left no room for anything in between. So as soon as I ate something that I deemed bad, well, I've already blown it. Then I would be off to the races. I've already blown it. I'm gonna be good tomorrow, so I might as well get this out of my system. There was an automatic failure as soon as I ate something that was deemed bad. Well, no longer a good day because I ate this thing I wasn't gonna eat today, and now I did, so now it's bad. But what would it mean instead to look for progress? Not perfection, not some perfect day, not even a huge leap from where you were yesterday, but one percent better. Something slightly different. A sign that you're moving in a direction that matters to you. So if yesterday I ate so much food that I couldn't sleep well last night, what would progress look like today? Not the opposite of yesterday. Not a perfectly measured, controlled day that would make up for it where I'm just so proud of every single thing I ate. No. Progress might look like this. It might look like, well, I ate past comfortable, but I stopped earlier than I did yesterday. Progress might look like I noticed the urge before I acted on it, even if I still ate the food. I noticed something about it. Maybe I created a little bit of space between the urge and the eating. Maybe I actually noticed what was happening in my body or in my brain before it happened, even if I still ate. Progress might look like I ate, but I didn't spend the entire next day in shame. That's progress. For me, progress looked like uh at some point, I decided I am no longer going to hide the evidence from my husband. So I progress for me was not throwing the trash away at the nearby convenience store and leaving trash here in the house so that he could see it. Telling him what I actually ate instead of just saying, I had a bad day. That was progress. Being able to talk to him about what happened, even if I still ate. That was progress. So many places you can find progress that if all you're doing is looking at did I have a good day or a bad day with food, you won't even see. Now, here's where I want to bring in this analogy that I mentioned. This analogy has nothing to do with food because sometimes I find that it's easier to see, see a message, see what I'm trying to bring across in an example that doesn't feel as charged or as personal as sometimes food can. So right now, I'm currently recovering from a hamstring injury. This is an injury that started back in the very first week of August, and I'm still dealing with it. And I will be honest with you, there are days I just want it to be gone. I want to no longer be in pain. Now I can see the progress. I know that things are improving. I was actually swimming this morning and I noticed I was doing a flip turn and I was like, wow, you know what? I really don't feel it at all in the pool anymore. And I used to. I can see, ah, there's progress. There's progress there. But then there are other days where I wake up and it still hurts. Or when I run, it still hurts. And there is this part of me that's just like, ugh, can't we be done with this already? I don't want it to hurt anymore. And it makes sense that I don't want it to hurt anymore. Injuries are not fun at all. So I notice this part of me that wants to skip ahead. I want to go from being in pain to not being in pain. I want to arrive at healed. But that's not how injury recovery works. And as I really started thinking about it, I was actually thinking about this while I was swimming this morning, realizing the parallel between recovering from an injury and also healing your relationship with food. So when you're recovering from an injury, you don't just go from hurting to fine and no pain overnight. Healing is a process, it has a direction, but it isn't linear. And there's no, it's going to take exactly this long to recover from this injury. There are guidelines. There are, well, based on what other people have gone through, here's how long sometimes it takes. But each individual is going to be very different. There are also things that you can do when you're injured to help the healing happen. And there are also things that you can do or not do that set it back or keep the healing from happening at all. And here's the thing that's really interesting, particularly when you're thinking about injury recovery. There is often a fine line between the kind of pain that tells you to stop, the pain that means you're actually doing more damage, and the kind of pain that's actually necessary for the healing. The discomfort that means your body is adapting, it's adjusting, it's getting stronger. Physical therapists spend years learning to read that distinction because pushing through the wrong kind of pain makes things worse. But if you stop at every sensation of discomfort, it means you're never going to rebuild. And here's the thing that's actually really fascinating about injury recovery is so many people, when they get injured, they want to just stop moving entirely. It's like, no, it hurts when I move. I just need to wait it out. I just need to rest. But for so many injuries, that's actually one of the worst things you can do. The body needs gentle, appropriate movement to heal. And complete avoidance keeps you stuck. This hamstring injury that I have right now, the actually the only way to heal it is to put it under the right types of load so that it will rebuild. But there's like this progression of exercises that you have to do. And if you do them in the wrong order, you will prolong the injury. If you do them in the right order with the right amount of load and you keep adding the load, then your body will adapt and adjust with time. It's so fascinating. But when we think about just this instinct, this idea that so many people have when they get injured, well, it hurts when I do that. So I'm just going to stop. I see this so often with food too. So when somebody has a difficult relationship with food, the instinct is often to eliminate, remove the foods, remove the choice, remove the exposure, control everything so nothing can go wrong. But that is not healing the relationship. It's avoidance. And avoidance, just like complete rest from an injured muscle, can actually prevent the healing that needs to happen. Real recovery from an injury and from a challenging relationship with food requires working with something rather than around it. It requires guidance on what kind of effort creates the environment for healing versus what kind of effort just creates more pain. It's not about pushing through everything. And it's not about doing nothing. It's about learning to read the signals, to trust the process, to stay in it, even when you can't yet see the finish line. And also to surround yourself with people who can guide you to tell you what type of pain do I push through and what type of pain tells me to rest. I would not know that answer without a physical therapist telling me what pains are good and what pains are actually exacerbating the very thing that I'm trying to heal from. So progress, progress with an injury might look like I walked to the mailbox today when last week I couldn't. Or for me, wow, I don't feel my hamstring in the pool today when last week I did. Progress with food might look like, ah, I ate a little bit more than maybe I wanted to, but I stopped before I used to. Neither of these is a destination. They're both aspects of healing. We are making progress towards the thing that we want. Now, let's go back to this whole idea of 1% better, just a little bit better every day. Now, you might be thinking, wait a second, isn't that settling? Isn't that kind of giving up? If I only improve 1% per day, am I actually really going to make any progress? Shouldn't I want more for myself? I want more than 1% better. Now, I totally hear it, makes so much sense, but I want to offer you a different way to look at this. Aiming for small, sustainable progress is not giving up. It's actually the most effective strategy available to you. And there's a reason your nervous system doesn't like change. Even change that you want, even change that you have been seeking for years. The part of you that has used food to cope, to soothe, to survive, that part has been doing its job really well. It is very well practiced. And when you come in with the big plan to overhaul everything overnight, it's a little overwhelming for that part. It doesn't feel safe. And when something doesn't feel safe to the nervous system, it resists. And sometimes it resists by going right back to the old behavior, those old neural pathways that are already wiring and firing together. But small progress feels doable. It feels safe enough. And safe is what allows the nervous system to actually let something new in. You're not tricking your brain into change, you're inviting it. You're showing it this is manageable. We can do this. And when that feels true, you start to actually do it. Same thing with injury. There's a very tiny progression that you do when you return to activities that you couldn't do before because of the pain. If you try to do too much, the nervous system is going to tighten up. It's going to fear the pain again. We have to very slowly over time prove to ourselves that we can do it. So there's this principle that I come back to often, repeat very, I repeat this so often to my clients. What you focus on expands. What you put your attention on, you create more of. So when you focus on everything you're doing wrong, every binge, every slip, every day that didn't go the way you wanted with food, you keep feeding that story. You keep reinforcing the identity of someone who can't do this, who keeps failing, who can't be trusted around food. But when you start looking for progress, even tiny, imperfect, hard to see progress, something starts to shift. You start to find it. The more evidence you have that change is actually happening. You create and build and start sustaining momentum. The belief that you are someone who is capable of change. This is something I work with on my clients. All the time learning to see the things that don't look like progress but actually are. Pausing before eating, still eating anyway, progress. That pause is a new behavior. That pause is your brain building a new pathway. Noticing you usually binge on Mondays, but you didn't binge Monday, you binged on Tuesday. That's progress. The window shifted. Something is changing. Getting curious about what happened instead of going straight into shame and judgment. That is progress. Awareness is always the first step. Eating one food that you used to restrict without spiraling, progress. Asking for help when you used to try to figure it out alone, huge progress. These things might not feel like progress because they don't match the image of what fixed is supposed to look like. We have this picture in our mind of the end result, someone who never struggles with food, who eats intuitively and joyfully and never thinks about it twice. And we measure ourselves every day against that image. And of course, measured against that image, most days feel like failure. But what if instead of measuring against this perfect image of the future, you measure against yesterday? What if the only standard was is something, anything shifting? All right, let's come back to this injury analogy. I would not be where I am in my recovery from my hamstring injury without my physical therapist. Not a chance. Left to my own devices, I either would have pushed too hard and made things worse, or I would have been too cautious and made no progress at all because I would have been afraid that any amount of pain was causing more injury instead of actually creating the tension and the healing that I need. Having who could actually see what was happening, who could identify what needed strengthening, when I needed to rest and when I needed to push, what exercises to do in what order, give me a clear path forward, that made all the difference. And sometimes I couldn't see the progress myself. I would show up to a session feeling like, oh, there's still pain. And he would point something out specific, like, uh, you actually have a better range of motion, or you're able to do more now with less pain overall. That is progress. These are things I couldn't see on my own. I needed someone else to reflect them back to me. And that's what good support does. It helps you see the progress you can't see on your own. And it gives you a path to keep moving toward your ultimate goal, which in this case might be feeling free and peaceful around food, even on the days when you feel like you're still right where you started. So if you are someone who has been trying to figure this out alone and it's not working, not because you're doing something wrong, but because this is genuinely hard to navigate without guidance, I want you to know that support is available. So you can schedule with me a breakthrough call. It's just an honest conversation about where you are, what you've tried, what a path forward could actually look like for you, what questions you have, what might be possible in terms of here is a path. Here are the things that maybe are keeping you stuck, here are the things that we can work on that might help you towards that healing, that freedom, that recovery that you're really looking for. So I'm gonna put a link to schedule that in the show notes. I would love to talk with you if you are interested in getting that sort of support. But in the meantime, I really want you to try something simple. At the end of each day, instead of asking yourself, did I do well today? Was I good today? Ask yourself, what was one moment of progress today? It might be something small. It might be something in the past you would have dismissed as not enough. I want you to look for the progress. It counts. Every single bit of progress counts. Progress over perfection isn't a consolation prize, it is the actual path. So put your brain to work on where am I making progress on my journey with food? And let your brain find the answer. All right, that's what I have for you today. I'll see you next week. If you know you want to rebuild self-trust, if you know you want to stop looking outside yourself for answers and start listening to the part of you that already knows what you need, but you can't seem to do it on your own, I want to invite you to join me in the gathering. It's a monthly space where you can reconnect with yourself and rebuild trust from the inside out. Learn more at janepilger.com forward slash gather.