If you eat like an influencer, exercise like a pro athlete and have a 20-step skin care routine, you’re making a big mistake. Here’s why.

Any decent fitness professional will tell you that holding back their over-eager clientele is essential for the client’s own success. If you rock up to the gym (full of enthusiasm and Instagram-fueled dreams) and go super hard in your first session, what happens?

You wake up sore as anything the next day. You hobble to the bathroom, wince as you lift your arms to put your jacket on, and hold back tears when you have to take the stairs at work.

Are you excited to go to the gym again? Absolutely not! If you feel super sore every time you work out and it takes days and days to recover, you’ll probably be mighty tempted to quit, thinking the gym just isn’t your thing.

The same principle applies to nutrition. Whenever I see a client who wants to re-haul their diet, I hold them back. Throwing out all of your junk food in an effort to eat perfectly isn’t a long-term strategy (no matter how many times they did it on TV shows in the early 2000’s). In fact, it just puts you in a vulnerable position where you’re more likely to crave those very foods you threw in the trash, and fall into a restrict-binge cycle.

Then suddenly you’re really “good” during the day, but you binge eat your fave snacks at night (whilst guilt eats at you.)

Or you meal prep the most nutritious food for lunches for the week, but by Day 3 you’d wrestle an alligator for a pie from the bakery across from your office.

And slowly but surely, you actually gain weight instead of lose it.

All or nothing thinking is pervasive in my nutrition clients. And they’re often surprised when I suggest intentionally including their binge foods in their meals and snacks earlier in the day. They expect me to tell them to be stricter, or to give them a recipe for a healthy homemade alternative, not to tell them to have biscuits with their morning snack.

And if cooking every night is too exhausting, maybe they should buy a few pre-packaged foods to make things easier.

Etc., etc.

But it doesn’t end with nutrition. I don’t personally worry about what I eat anymore, but I certainly have to watch my mindset in other areas of my life.

If I’m running late and now only have 20 mins to hit the gym instead of the full hour I had planned, I’m tempted to think, “It’s pointless to even go.” When really I should be happy that I got some activity in my day.

Or if I have a goal to post a short-form video every day but I miss a day, it’s oh-so-easy to think, “I’ve blown it, I might as well just skip the rest of the week, too.”

From the big things to the little things, all or nothing thinking an easy trap to fall in to.

I don’t have all the answers to combating it, but here is what I think: half the battle is just catching the thought as it comes up. I’ve been reading The Gap and the Gain and I like the simplicity of the language they use.

You are “in the gap” if you are measuring yourself (or someone else) against some idealized version. The ideal you might eat only healthy foods for every meal and snack of the day, for example. When you’re “in the gap” it feels crappy and you never feel good enough.

But when you’re “in the gain”, you’re measuring yourself against where you were. I didn’t post on social media every day, but I did post twice, and that’s more than zero! The secret is that being “in the gain” is so motivating, you’re more likely to follow through with your goals in the long-term.

So here’s a little challenge for both me and you this week: let’s catch ourselves when we’re falling into the all or nothing “gap”, and remind ourselves of all the gains we’ve made instead.