Has this ever happened to you? You’ve jumped into a new nutrition plan—or dare I say the dreaded word “diet”—and everything is on track, you’re perfectly restricting your calories, the scale is going down, you’re convinced you CAN DO THIS!
And then temptation arises. Perhaps your family wants take-out. It’s just one meal, you tell yourself and you dig in alongside them.
The next morning, you hop on the scale and BAM!, “You messed it ALL up”, the scale notifies you in big judgy, electronic script as it registers a four pound increase over yesterday.
The devastation kicks in.
“Screw this”, you say to yourself. “I CAN’T do this. I might as well just eat whatever I want because even when I diet, it doesn’t seem to matter. I’ve failed again.”
And off to the kitchen you go. The day is spent seeking emotional salvation in the form of sweet treats, salty snacks, and whatever else catches your eye. By the end of the day, you feel worse than you did that morning. But yet, the next day is a repeat. And on and on it goes. It takes weeks to break out of the funk.
And when you’re able to zoom out you ask yourself, “What the heck happened? How did I go from feeling SO optimistic and in control, to the exact opposite?”
The simple answer? You’re a black and white, all or nothing, pass or fail thinker. Your belief in yourself is tied to an unrealistic expectation that when you go on a diet, it must be executed perfectly. All restriction, no flexibility. Because gosh, if you have one slip up, just look at what happens!
The problem with black and white thinking is that it’s all about absolutes. There’s no room for the ebbs and flows of life, self-compassion, or grace. It’s hard, it’s rigid, and it’s a devastating way to live.
That’s because the black and white mindset sets you up to feel like a failure more often than not. For example, if the scale isn’t consistently going down, you’ve failed. And that judgement cuts to the core of who you believe you are. Your record of perceived failure begins to define you—it becomes your identity. “I’m such a failure”, runs on repeat through your head, permeating other areas of your life.
And this heaviness causes your brain to freak out. It’s overwhelmed by the negativity and releases ALL the stress hormones. But then it wants you to feel better, like RIGHT NOW!, so it directs you to self-soothe in the quickest way it knows how…with food. And all the hard work you put into those first few weeks of your diet are eroded.
This is a perfect example of how your thoughts create feelings, your feelings stimulate action, and the action you take gets you results. In this case, it’s a cascade of things you don’t want—eating more food and seeing the scale go up, when the objective was to stay aligned with your new eating plan and lose those pounds you’ve been dreaming about.
So, clearly, this black and white thinking is not serving you well. But, just what are you to do?
The answer is to become a grey thinker.
A grey thinker lets go of absolutes and focuses on the in-between. Things are not perfect nor are they a total failure. They are not good or bad. They just are. Grey thinkers focus on objectively evaluating their behaviour.
Are you a failure because you ate take-out? No.
Are you a failure because the scale went up? No.
A grey thinker recognizes the facts, without attaching emotional judgement to them. All that happened is that you ate a meal higher in calories, carbs, and sodium and the scale went up in response to the water retention that occurred because of those factors. Those are the facts. There is no catastrophe. You are not a failure—your diet has not been ruined.
Grey thinkers also don’t evaluate their self-worth based on their ability to achieve perfection. They focus on the big picture of whether they are moving towards their goals. One meal, one day, or even one week doesn’t define their journey. That’s because grey thinkers understand that life is unpredictable and because of that, some days will go really well and they’ll feel aligned with their goals and other days will feel a bit more scattered, where things don’t go according to plan.
They also use such times as an opportunity for growth. They learn from these experiences. They treat life like a big experiment, where expectations are tested and challenged. Grey thinkers lean into mistakes as a way to figure out what works better for them.
Many clients come into my program firmly entrenched in black and white thinking. They’ve spent decades starting and stopping a multitude of diets because one slip-up would send them spiralling. We work together to change this mindset to a softer shade of grey, where self-acceptance is paramount and fear of failure slides into the past. Spirals go from being months long, to lasting maybe a week, to just a couple of days, to one meal, to an absence in judgement altogether. It’s a beautiful trajectory to observe. It’s one that leads to a greater sense of internal peace.
If you want to become a grey thinker, begin by embracing a progress over perfection mindset where there’s a deep understanding that it’s the small things that you do just well enough, on repeat, that stack up to create the big wins. The exciting thing is that in between the extremes of black and white are miles upon miles of good enough.
Now this is not to say that you shouldn’t have high expectations of yourself. Becoming a grey thinker shouldn’t discourage you from living up to your standards of personal excellence or setting big goals—it encourages both, but in a way where your personal standards and goals are in line with the reality of being a messy, imperfect human that is always learning and growing.
The key to becoming a grey thinker is letting go, once and for all, of the idea that you would ever fail at anything.
Comments