How to Stop Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals with All-or-Nothing Thinking | Ep. 46

In this episode, Soraya breaks down why perfectionism is the real reason so many busy professional women keep starting over. You'll learn the Floor-to-Ceiling Method for staying consistent even on hard days, what "done is better than perfect" actually looks like with food, movement, and mindset, and the 24-hour rule that ends the start-over-on-Monday cycle for good.

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Transcript

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Do you find yourself doing everything perfectly for a couple days, but one slip-up sends you completely off track and then you're waiting till Monday or the next month to get started again? Today we're talking about how perfectionism and all-or-nothing thinking completely derails weight loss progress and the simple mindset shift you need to make to break the cycle for good. I'm your host, Saraya Russell, certified macronutrition coach, mindset coach, and lifestyle transformation coach. And each week I share practical strategies to help you build sustainable habits, boost your energy, become obsessed with what you see when you look in the mirror, and feel confident and strong in your body. All without feeling stressed, burned out, or guilty. Let's dive in. So when it comes to all or nothing thinking, perfectionism, really feeling like you're either 100% in or 100% out, I find this is a very common theme in high-achieving, successful women. And that's because in order to achieve any sort of success in your career, you have to be hardworking, you have to be highly accomplished. And so you're used to getting what you want, you're used to winning. And so when it comes to weight loss, you apply that same skill set. So when you slip up on one thing or you make a mistake, you feel like a complete failure. And what this 100% in or 100% out pattern might look like is Monday to Tuesday, you're completely on track, doing everything you need to do. Then Wednesday, there's a happy hour. You overeat the hors d'oeuvres, you have some dessert, you drink some wine, you feel bad about it, you're like, screw it, I messed up the whole week, I'm gonna get started again on Monday. And so that's then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, you completely got off track versus getting back on track the next day. So it's this mentality of if I'm not 100% in doing everything right, then nothing matters at all, and I might as well not stick to it. And a simple mindset shift that'll help you contextualize this better is perfectionism masquerades as discipline. So you feel like perfectionism basically is discipline. So when you're not being perfect, you're like, I'm not disciplined, I'm the problem. But that's actually not true. And that thought process is what's messing up your long-term results. So let's talk about how to fix this thinking. So you stop going hard for a week and then messing up the next week and then falling off completely. The first strategy that my clients find so helpful, it literally changes their lives, is the floor-to-ceiling uh framework. The way this works is you're gonna stop seeing your goals as fixed, not binary, not pass and fail. You're gonna see it as a spectrum and it's called the floor to ceiling. So the way to think about it is the floor is the bare minimum that you can do, and the ceiling is basically you hitting everything, checking off all the boxes. So anything between the floor and the ceiling, you're still making progress. The floor might be not a lot in your mind. It would be considered failing in your past mindset, but it's still the floor, it's still something. And then if you're doing anything between that and the ceiling, which is a maximum getting everything done, you are still winning and you're still in the game. And the way to lose weight and keep it off is just to stay in the game. That's it. So some examples of this is your floor could be when it comes to steps, right? Your floor could be 2,000 steps. So that's the minimum that you want to do. The ceiling could be 7,000 steps a day. So in the past, if your goal was just 7,000 steps, right, that is just a fixed outcome and you hit 5,000, 3,000, you feel like, oh, I'm a failure, and you just kind of stop prioritizing walking. But with the floor-to-ceiling concept, if your floor is 2,000 and your ceiling is seven and you did five, you're like, great, I'm still in the game. I went above my floor, I'm good. Another example is say that you um your floor for protein is 90 grams. Your ceiling is 120 grams, right? So in the past, if your goal was 120 grams and you only got 100, you feel like a failure. But because you have a floor there and you hit, say, 100 grams that day, you're like, great, I want above my floor. Even if I'm below my ceiling, I'm still in the game. The goal is just to be in the spectrum. It's not about being perfect. And that's why when our clients set their habit goals, because we have them set habit goals, not just weight goals, we have them set a floor to ceiling goal. So they might write, I want to get in 100 to 120 ounces of water per day. I want to eat 90 to 120 grams of protein per day. I want to sleep seven, two, nine hours per night, right? So they have a range that they can work within. This changes our clients' lives because instead of them feeling like I have to hit this fixed thing every time where I'm failing, they have breathing room for real life because things are not always gonna be perfect. You're gonna have a work dinner, a family gathering, a girls' brunch, you're gonna go on vacation. Not every day you're gonna hit everything perfectly, but when you give yourself room to breathe, you're able to make consistent progress and not feeling like you're failing because you didn't do everything 100%, 100% of the time. Another mindset that I want you to adopt that's complementary to this is the done is better than perfect mentality. And this basically means I did it, it doesn't matter if I did it all the way, it got done. So for example, if you plan to walk 45 minutes and you can only walk 15, done is better than perfect. You walked. Maybe you didn't walk for the full 45 minutes, but you walked. Say you meant to go to the gym, but you just had a really, really busy work day and you are running around running errands, going to the store. Instead of parking in the front of the parking lot and just walking in two steps away, park in the back of the parking lot so you can get your steps in. That is not maybe going to a gym and doing a formal workout, but you got some movement done. Done is better than perfect. You forgot your meal prep at home and you're eating out uh with co-workers for lunch. Maybe at home you prep something with protein, veggies, and some sort of carbs, which is kind of a balanced meal. You don't have your meal prep with you, but when you go to, say, chipotle with your coworkers, you order a bowl, you order maybe double chicken, fajita veggies, some black beans. Done is better than perfect. It's not the meal prep that you made, but you still have protein, you still have carbs, you still have veggies. So that's still done better than perfect. Another principle that I find really helpful for our clients is the 24-hour reset rule. So, what I see happen with a lot of women, for example, we had a client who she was really doing well with her meal prep, eating her food, and then on Wednesday she went into the office and then someone had brought in cupcakes because it was their birthday. Obviously, uh most people really enjoy cupcakes. I know I do. And so the cupcakes were there, and she was like, oh man, I like, you know, I'm really tempted. I want these cupcakes. And she had one, right? Her old self would have had the cupcake, and then she would have had pizza for lunch, and then she would have eaten out for dinner, and then she would have felt like, okay, well, I ruined the whole week. I'll start over again on Monday. What she did was she had the cupcake. Then she had her meal prep lunch, then she had her dinner, everything else kind of went according to plan. So instead of then the next day or the rest of that day, her just kind of going off the rails, the next day she got back into her normal eating routine. There were cupcakes in the office, but she didn't have them. So this is what the 24-hour reset looks like. If you've done something someday that was not part of your plan, I wouldn't call it a slip-up, but maybe it just wasn't part of your plan. Next day, get back into your normal habits. Don't wait till a new week or a new month to start. Start right away. Another example is say that you um missed a workout on Wednesday, right? Maybe it was a long day in the office, you worked till 8 p.m., you didn't have time to get your lifting in. Some people would say, okay, well, I missed a workout. Shoot, the whole week is ruined. I'm just not gonna work out the rest of the week. No, you missed Wednesday, say you're doing a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday workout split. You could work out on Thursday to make up for that Wednesday workout and then work out again on Saturday so you still have a rest day in between. 24-hour reset. You're not saying the whole week is ruined, it's all down the toilet. You're saying, okay, I missed something, great, I'll make it up tomorrow. I'll get back to my normal habits tomorrow. The quicker you can get back into your normal routine, the easier it's gonna be to create consistent habits because you're not allowing yourself to get off the rails for multiple days at a time. Because what happens is we're very adaptable. So when you create new habits, you adapt to them relatively quickly. But also if you break those habits and you break those habits for a long period of time, you adapt to that very quickly. So for example, if you start getting into a workout routine and then you don't work out for two weeks and you start working out again, it's hard. You're more sore. Uh you can't lift as much as you used to. It's very deterring, right? And so with that, when you can kind of get back into things within 24 hours, or say you're on a trip, right? Obviously you're gone for a week, get back into it when you come back the next day, then you're able to create and maintain consistent habits versus kind of getting on track, then falling off for four days, then kind of getting on track and falling off. You kind of having that 24-hour reset rule helps you stay on some sort of consistent path over time. The next thing you want to do is find community and accountability. All or nothing thinking, perfectionism thrives in isolation because you feel like I missed something, I failed. There's no one to reassure you or reaffirm that one bad thing is not gonna mess up all your progress. You feel very alone. That also creates more room for emotional eating, sabotage, all these different things. But when you have community and you have accountability, you have someone to tell you, hey, maybe you ate the cupcake at work. What are we learning from this? It's not a failure, it's a lesson. What are we learning? Right? Perhaps you're learning is okay, having a cupcake is okay. And I'm not gonna let that one cupcake create a mindset that I ruined my progress and they're able to keep going. Or maybe you overeat three slices of pizza at the office. The learning from that might be have a lunch that you actually enjoy so you don't feel tempted to overeat the pizza, or maybe just have one slice of pizza. So when you have community and accountability, you actually get to understand your patterns and change them with someone in your corner. Like one of our clients who joined our program about four months ago, before she joined, she'd been watching my page, my podcast, all this stuff for months. And she had tried the tips I'd given on her own eating more protein, walking, drinking water. And she was like, I just couldn't stay consistent no matter what I did. And that's when I realized, and you mentioned this in one of your posts, that the gap between information and transformation is coaching, right? If you know all this information, but you have a hard time implementing it, that's probably a mix of mindset and a lack of accountability. So she joined our coaching program. She engaged in the coaching calls, she engaged in the mindset work, worked with our therapist. And because of that, she was actually able to change her emotional eating habits. She stopped seeing things as such black and white, like, okay, I'm either 100% in or 100% out, which helped her create consistency. And she stopped beating herself up when she wasn't perfect and on the money all the time. As a result, in three months, she lost 18 pounds and has kept it off since then. And that was about a month ago she graduated from the program. In fact, she's lost an additional three pounds since, so a total of 21 pounds. And that's all because, like I said, she had all the information before, but she didn't have the accountability and the mindset work needed to help her turn that information into transformation. So if you're struggling with implementing, if you're struggling with staying consistent, if you're struggling with all or nothing thinking, that might be a sign that you need that extra level of accountability and mindset work to really implement things that last long term and to stop thinking about things as such fixed outcomes, either I did it or I didn't, but more so in a spectrum so you can stay consistent over time. Just remember that all or nothing thinking is not a character flaw, it's a pattern. And patterns can be interrupted when you recognize them, you work through them, and you change how you address them. So thank you so much for tuning in to the Fit and Fulfill Show today. I hope you walked away with actionable strategies you can start using to overcome perfectionism and all or nothing thinking in your weight loss, health, and wellness journey. And if you found this helpful in absolutely any way, I ask that you please subscribe and share it with a friend that you think might find it helpful so they can benefit from this information as well. And if you're a busy professional woman who wants to lose 20 to 50 pounds in a sustainable way without cutting out your favorite foods, then I would love to invite you to apply for our coaching program, the Fit and Fulfilled Academy. In the Academy, we help women like you by providing the coaching, support, and guidance you need with nutrition, fitness, and mindset to achieve lasting weight loss. All the details are down below. Next week we're diving into a brand new topic that you're not going to want to miss. But until then, remember you deserve to feel as confident in your body as you do in your career. Take care.