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you

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Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mini Mikkipedia on a Monday. And today's a bit of a mindset episode, which really most of us could all do with listening to at one point or another, right? And this is just based on a few things that I see there out in my Mondays Matter Accelerated group and the DMs that I get sent from people on social media. It's around the all or nothing mindset, being a perfectionist,

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accusing yourself of not having discipline, et cetera, and just really unpacking that and how to frame it in the context of diet and exercise, which for a lot of us, we're just trying to sort of get a handle on and find some really great routines and structures that overcome a lot of the barriers that a perfectionist type A mindset might put up. And I like to start with a little bit of a personal anecdote.

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uh You've probably heard me talk about swimming before. In fact, if you ever listened to me back in the day on Fitter Radio, you'd definitely heard about me swimming. And I didn't love it, actually. I pretty much hated it, but thought that it would be quite good to do as a runner. And also a lot of my friends at the time I started swimming, they were triathletes and I sort of just wanted to be like them. And in fact, at one point in time I'd entered Ironman New Zealand thinking I was going to do that. But anyway, the thing is, is that

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I could swim, you know, and people would look at my stroke and go, oh, you're not a bad swimmer. And I could tumble turn and all the rest of it, but I was so slow. And I thought, well, given the fact that I'm a pretty decent runner, surely I should be pretty good at getting across a pole, you know, 25 meters, particularly with my tumble turn. You know, could really push off and use that power to generate some speed. Well, no, actually, I could not. And it did not matter how many

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swim squads I went to or private swim lessons I took to be fair, I didn't take that many, but I took enough for me to figure out that in order for me to be much, much better at swimming, I was going to have to swim about five or six times a week. In fact, that's what someone even told me, like a professional. And I was like, I just don't know that I've got that in me. And if that's what it takes and screw that, I'm not going to do it at all. And I just had this real...

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underlying kind of, ah, just didn't love it. Didn't want to do it. And I realized actually that part of me not wanting to do it was the fact that I wasn't that good. And I would never actually be that good unless I had had 10 or 15 hours a week to put into swimming. And I just didn't want to go there. So it really put me off doing it. And actually the reality when you listen to that is it's not the swimming that was the problem. It was how I felt about the swimming and

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I expected that with a little bit of grit and determination, I could be a pretty decent swimmer. But my idea of grit and determination was about a quarter of what was actually expected. Because it's a skill, right? And I didn't have it and I had to learn the things that would take me from pretty slow to pretty average. Once I let go of the idea that I had to be a good swimmer, I was started to enjoy it. And I think this is...

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the thing. And now I swim and I absolutely love it for a kilometer with my fins, super slow, don't even care. And I just love the way that it makes me feel. I love the fact that I do it as a runner and I absolutely let go of that expectation I had of myself that eventually I would be good. And I actually, I do see this pattern a bit in fat loss because being a perfectionist while it's often just sort of thrown around as, I'm a bit of perfectionist.

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whatever, like some sort of like personality quirk, it actually is one of the most well-documented predictors of why people struggle with fat loss. And there is a decent body of research telling us why that is and in fact what to do instead. Most of the people I work with are capable individuals. They run households, they manage careers, they keep everything moving. So when they start trying to change how they eat and it doesn't click immediately,

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The conclusion that comes from it is something is wrong with me, not this takes practice. And this is the distinction, right? Knowing how to eat and knowing how to manage hunger, stress, social occasions, food preferences, energy and consistency over months, are different skills entirely. Nobody arrives already fluent in that second one. Of course you know how to eat. You've been eating forever, right? It's something that you do several times a day. So we expect

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to be experts at this other stuff and we are not. And the only way to build in those other skills is the same way you build in any skill for most people. You start pretty badly at first, then less badly, then reasonably well, and there is no version of this story that starts with you being expert out the gate. So just remember that and just give yourself a little grace as you're adopting new patterns of behavior.

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such as the people that are in my Monday's Matter Accelerated group. And I also want to address this idea that when people make decisions that don't align with what they were intending to do, for whatever reason, they're like, I just need to have more discipline. Discipline is really a single global trait that you either have or don't. It's usually context specific. Bandura, who is a psychologist, his work on self-efficacy underpins a lot of this field, and he essentially made this point decades ago.

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I remember learning about it actually in sports psych, in my phys ed degree. People's belief in their own capability doesn't sit as one number across their entire life. It's built domain by domain through their own experience in that specific area. Someone can be highly disciplined at work because the environment supports it. Deadlines, structure, external accountability, clear consequences, immediate feedback. You either hit the deadline or you don't. And everyone knows which one happened by 5pm. m

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Whereas diet and exercise offer almost the opposite environment. The reward is delayed while the discomfort is immediate. Food is always available and highly rewarding, not the way that you're in boxes. Eating is tangled up with stress relief, celebration, boredom, habit, and social connection. And it isn't just fuel. The rules are pretty unclear, particularly as experts always disagree. You've got one expert telling you to fast and another one says to eat six times a day.

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Both of these people have podcasts and big platforms and you just don't know who to listen to. Progress is noisy. You can do everything right for a week and the scale will go up anyway, which is the opposite of where you expect to be. And there's often no immediate consequence of skipping a session or overeating. Nobody emails you about it. You're not like pulled up for it. And the decisions happen repeatedly, all day, often when you're tired, hungry or emotionally depleted.

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This is exactly when decision making is at its worst. Work discipline is also usually propped up by some sort of stable identity. I am competent. I am reliable. I follow through. With food, that identity is often far shakier going in. I always fall off. I have no willpower. I'm either perfect or I failed. And this is exactly the framing that I was talking about earlier. And it means that one deviation doesn't get filed away as a normal, unremarkable event.

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It gets filed as proof that you can't do it. And there's also a distinction that I want to address and that is the difference between performing a task and regulating an appetite. You can force yourself to answer emails through share will because emails don't fight back. Hunger, cravings, fatigue and food reward are biological signals. These are not sort of character traits. Exercise carries a version of the same barrier, discomfort, low energy.

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pressure and none of the immediate payoff that makes work effort feel worthwhile in the moment. So if this is you, this isn't a discipline problem. It's that you have discipline exactly where the system around you supports it and you haven't yet built an equivalent system around food and movement. So that is a completely different problem and it's a far more solvable one and I've had these conversations with people in Mondays Matter and they're like I just don't have discipline.

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I always call them up on it. I'm like, well, well, you know, did you have to get out of bed to go to work? Yes, inevitably. And I don't do that to make them feel bad, but I just try to get them to see this isn't a discipline issue. And probably this is why trying harder isn't actually going to work. It's making diet and exercise look more like the areas of your life where you already succeed. This is what you need. You need clearer rules, fewer decisions to make in the moment. You need realistic expectations.

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You need scheduled actions rather than in the moment willpower. You do need some form of accountability. That's where a program like Mondays Matter or consultation with someone like me, something like that. And you need an actual plan for the days when things don't go to plan because things will not always go to plan. So that is what structure is. And it doesn't rely on quote unquote discipline or willpower or motivation or anything like that. You've just got the systems in place.

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And that is a lot of the thread that runs through everything else I want to chat about this morning. Well, it's morning for you if you're listening to this on Monday when this is released. So let's think about rigid versus flexible thinking. These are the two ways with which people restrain their eating. So first of all, dietary restraint. Restraint just means the degree to which someone is deliberately managing their food intake, which almost everyone trying to lose weight is doing to some extent.

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What the research has consistently found is that restraint splits into two quite different styles, rigid and flexible, and they produce very different outcomes. Rigid restraint looks like a strict, almost moral approach to food. Days are either perfect or they're failures. Foods are either allowed or completely off limits. If the day's target is a certain number of calories and someone goes even slightly over it or eats a small amount of a quote unquote banned food, the whole day is written off.

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Flexible restraint looks different. Small deviations are seen as just that, they're small, and it's either compensated for gently over the next day or two, or it's simply ignored because they don't matter in the context of months of a consistent effort. And maybe unsurprisingly at this point, rigid restraint doesn't produce better results. It's consistently associated with more mental preoccupation with food, more frequent binge eating, and counter-intuitively,

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higher body weight over time, largely because rigid restraint is so often followed by disinhibition, a total loss of control once the rule has been broken. Flexible restraint, by contrast, is associated with less binge eating and better long-term weight management. This is one of the more robust and replicated findings in the dieting behavior literature. And it's a backdrop for everything else in this episode. So let's talk about that all or nothing trap. There's a specific term for this in the literature.

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that dichotomous thinking, sometimes called all or nothing thinking, it means sorting foods, days, or your own performance into strict binary categories, good or bad, clean or ruined, on track or blown it. Levinson and colleagues writing in the Journal of Eating Disorder looked at this specifically as a subclinical eating cognition, meaning it shows up well below the threshold of a diagnosable eating disorder in ordinary people trying to manage their weight.

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In a sample of over 600 women, dichotomous thinking about food was significantly associated with body dissatisfaction, binge eating, restriction, and excessive exercise. What's more useful than just knowing dichotomous thinking exists is knowing what it actually predicts. A researcher Park and other colleagues used something called behavior sequence analysis, essentially mapping out step by step what people did and thought in the lead up to

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in the aftermath of a dietary lapse. They found that the abandonment of a weight loss effort after a lapse was consistently preceded by dichotomous thinking, while people who kept going after a lapse on their diet showed a more neutral, flexible interpretation of what had just happened. The lapse itself wasn't the deciding factor. The story they told themselves about the lapse was. And this shows up in clinical populations too, not just in people doing a general

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diet. Marshall and colleagues publishing in Obesity Surgery studied people more than a year out from bariatric surgery and found that eating specific dichotomous thinking fully explained the relationship between rigid dieting restraint and poorer weight loss outcomes. Rigid restraint on its own wasn't the problem. It was the rigid restraint filtered through all or nothing interpretation that predicted the worst results. Interestingly, this only held for dichotomous thinking

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specifically about food and eating and not a general tendency towards black and white thinking in all other areas of life. So this isn't about your personality overall, it's about specific thinking habit that attached itself to food. And the thing is, and I mean this, like I'm not a Taipei person, but I know a lot of other Taipei people. And if you're organized and high achieving everywhere else in your life, you'd assume that that would translate to fat loss being easier for you too.

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But in my experience, it's often the opposite. And that's because type A clients are often perfectionists. They try to follow a plan meticulously until they don't. One meal goes off script, one workout gets missed, one weekend gets pretty all over the place, and the whole thing suddenly feels ruined. Not slightly off track, just absolutely ruined. And that reaction isn't about missing information about macros or calories. It is that perfectionism turning

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a small deviation into a full collapse. Delacroix and colleagues, publishing a scoping review in Obesity Reviews in 2026, synthesized 80 studies on perfectionism in people with overweight and obesity. And the headline finding was that perfectionism itself wasn't consistently linked to a higher BMI directly, but what it was consistently linked to was disordered eating behavior, particularly the concern over mistakes dimension of perfectionism.

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across every weight category studied. So in other words, perfectionism doesn't necessarily make you heavier. It makes the process of managing your eating far more fraught and far more likely to swing between rigid control and losing control completely. And there is a well-established connection between perfectionism, self-criticism, and how people respond to their own setbacks. There was a 2024 meta-analysis by Parin Jothi and colleagues

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which drew on 135 studies and nearly 43,000 participants. They found a moderate consistent link between self-criticism and disordered eating, and that self-compassion sits as something of a buffer against it. Robinson and colleagues' 2021 systematic review and meta-analysis is worth mentioning too. They found that perfectionist interventions, largely drawn from cognitive behavioral approaches, produced large effect sizes for reducing both perfectionism itself

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and disordered eating symptoms. So that means that this pattern of thinking can respond to treatment when it's directly addressed. So the thing is with perfectionism, for a lot of high achieving women, eating becomes tangled up with identity in a way that other habits don't. Sticking to a plan isn't just, ate well today, becomes evidence that you're disciplined, in control, person who follows through. Which means breaking from the plan isn't just, I ate more than planned,

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becomes evidence of the opposite. And this is the same mechanism behind what gets called clean eating taken to an extreme. Man, I hate that saying clean eating. Where food is sort of sorted into morally good and morally bad and eating the smallest amount of bad food isn't a nutritional non-event, it's a character flaw. Once eating becomes a referendum on who you are rather than what you did, a five minute decision at dinner starts carrying weight far more than what it really should.

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And so here are some signs that perfectionism might be an issue for you. You've got harsh self-talk in the moment when something doesn't go to plan. All or nothing framing when one biscuit means that the day is blown. Avoiding a new approach in case you're bad at it early on. I see that a lot. Rigid expectations of yourself and often of the people around you, but not always. Generally we're very harsh on ourselves compared to other people. And difficulty sitting with

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anything uncertain or not fully in your control. given all of that, the fix isn't just to try harder to not think that way, because I mean, if you could do that, how amazing, but you sort of can't. um There has been research in this as well, and Hageman and colleagues found that people who responded to a lapse with more self-kindness, specifically treating themselves the way they'd treat a friend, reported greater perceived control over their eating,

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in the hours that followed. And this isn't an isolated finding either. another study, other studies showed that in adults actively trying to lose weight, self-compassion and responsive dietary lapse was linked to higher self-efficacy and stronger intentions to keep going. And it worked partly by lowering that guilt response that would otherwise follow the lapse. Neither of the studies

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that I've mentioned found that self-compassion made people more likely to lapse again the same day. If anything, the opposite pattern showed up. Brenton Peters and colleagues systematic review pulled together 20 studies on self-compassion interventions and weight management and found that those measuring eating behavior, 15 of the 18 showed improvement and most gains held at follow-up. So this isn't about just being nice to yourself, which I know it sounds like on the surface.

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It's a specific measurable shift in how quickly someone recovers from a normal expected deviation to their diet. And whether that deviation stays small becomes the reason that the whole week gets abandoned. So in summary then, treating yourself when you have a lapse in your diet, the way that you would treat a friend who'd had a rough day, not abandoning the goal and pretending the deviation didn't happen. So if you respond to, like in the studies,

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elapse in your diet and exercise patterns, if you respond to that with grace and some self-kindness, it may prevent you from spiraling into abandoning the whole effort because of it. So that's really important because remember it's the consistency of patterns and behaviors, which is important and it's not that little deviation in itself. So how do you do it? I think that's important, right? First one is to lower the bar on purpose. Success isn't the scale reading.

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certain number by Friday, it's showing up to the plan more days than not. So redefine the win as consistency rather than perfection and you will hit it far more often. This in itself builds that self-efficacy that the research points to as being protective. Catch the all-or-nothing thought before it completely takes over. So when you notice, well I've already ruined it forming, that's exact moment that matters the most.

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One meal is one meal. In the context of a goal measured in months, it almost has no bearing on the outcome. But the interpretation you attach to it does. So therefore, the next decision is always the one that counts. Not next Monday, not the next grocery store run. It's the next meal, the next glass of water, the next walk. You do not need a clean slate to get back on track. You need that next decision without the abstinence violation effect deciding it for you.

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And remember, if it's helpful, just break your day up into quarters. Win the quarter every day. And that will largely track with you winning that next meal. Build systems instead of asking for more willpower. Willpower, as you know, is like a muscle. It's finite, gets used up by stress, poor sleep and a long day, none of which you fully control. Structure does the job that willpower can't. Prepping protein in advance,

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keeping a reliable meal for chaotic days, deciding ahead of time what you order when eating out, getting your exercise done and dusted in the morning where possible so you do not have it hanging over you for the remainder of the day. And this is the logic behind my program and many programs like mine. This isn't some sort of sustained deficit protocol. We have these periodic planned lower calorie days built into an otherwise well formulated week and

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The reason the structure works is not magic, it's a flexible restraint model where the lower day is planned in advance rather than imposed as punishment after a bad day. So it doesn't carry that same psychological weight and it doesn't set off this all or nothing collapse that unplanned restriction attempts tend to do. You also want to track patterns and not perfection. So if you're keeping a food diary or noticing your habits, don't do it to make yourself right or wrong.

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You're doing it to spot what's actually driving your choices. Is it stress? Is it boredom? Is it the time of day? So you can work with that instead of against it. And then practice being a beginner somewhere low stakes, right? So if sitting with not being good at something yet feels a bit unbearable to you, that discomfort is actually worth knowing really. So give yourself permission to be mediocre at something new. It builds that tolerance for imperfection

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that the fat loss process requires. So remember, whenever you're starting something new, any sort of new approach, or you find yourself sort of falling off the wagon, so to speak, part of it is, is that you think you need to be perfect at it and you don't. The research is remarkably consistent on this point. From the dichotomous thinking studies to the self-compassion trials, what predicts where the people keep going isn't whether they slipped up, it's how they've interpreted the slip and how quickly they themselves move past it.

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You need to keep showing up to it and perfectly belong enough that it stops being something you're trying to get right and just starts being something that you just do. So there's my thinking on discipline, flexible restraint and of course perfectionism. If this resonates with you, I hope it does. Come along to my webinar. It's happening this Wednesday, 29th of July, 12 p.m. and 7 p.m. New Zealand time. It is free if you can't make it live.

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I talk about my program Mondays Matter all of the time. We talk about the structure of that and why it's helpful to help people overcome these types of self-limiting beliefs that then allow them to be successful. It will be well worth your time, which is all that it costs you on the day. So, it's recorded if you can't make it live. Links are in the show notes. Or go to my website, mckewilledon.com, click on the banner and sign up there. I would love to see you. Or ask me a question about it, that or anything.

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Share this episode with your mates if you like. It'll be great. Share it on social, tag me in it. I'll share it as well. Catch me over on social, threads X and Instagram @mikkiwilliden, Facebook @mikkiwillidennutrition or head to my website @mikkiwilliden.com. Book a one-on-one call with me there or sign up to that webinar. Amazing team. You guys have a great week.