This summer, I made the wise decision to sign up for a weekly veggie box from a local farm. I was encouraged by one of my lovely clients who raved about the quality and the ease of having your veggie shopping done for you.
I like simple food prep so prior to this, I’d been leaning heavily on frozen veggies. They don’t require prep time and they’re equally as nutrient packed as fresh veggies (if not sometimes more) that travel across the world to end up in our fridges. And that was the one drawback of switching exclusively to a fresh box of vegetables—more time would go into big batch meal assembly.
It was no biggie for the first couple of months because the box had a lot of things I could transform into glorious salads, which didn’t add much to my prep time.
But the week that I got a bag of potatoes, a couple of pounds of beets, and squash changed it all.
At 8am on a Saturday morning, I frantically sent my husband to the local Canadian Tire with very specific instructions to bring back a high-powered, high-volume food processor.
I’ve always been a bit skeptical about food processors for anything beyond sauce prep or mixing baking ingredients.
Yeah, they’re fast, but are they as meticulous as my own chopping? Of course not and uniformity is important when you want things to roast evenly in the oven. And what about shape? You have little control over the specific size and shape that gets spit out!
But here I was, putting my trust in automation. What’ll be next? Trusting AI?
It’s a slippery slope. [Laugh with me here]
That Saturday morning, my life was changed. It wasn’t just because I whipped through food prep in record time, it was also that the food processor reinforced some life lessons that I’ve been working on for the last bit.
Lesson 1: Done is so much better than perfect
As a recovering perfectionist, this one is extremely hard to internalize. It still takes a conscious shift in mindset to accept that A+ effort is not always required. Using a B+ strategy can get me to the same place as my high achieving tendencies prefer—but more quickly and with less internal angst and residual exhaustion.
That food processor had those hard veggies sliced and diced in about 25% of the time it would’ve taken me to hand chop them all. Were they the exact shape and size I would have made them? Absolutely not—but they still tasted the same.
Lesson 2: No one cares as much as you do
The funny thing about being a perfectionist is that we truly believe that people care about our efforts and the meticulousness of our end product. While there are exceptions, most of the time, it’s just not true. Most people are totally oblivious and don’t take in the details or make the judgements we think they will. Letting go of the idea that our own perfectionism will be noticed, rewarded, and validated by anyone else is incredibly freeing.
I can tell you that my family did not care one bit about the lack of uniformity of those veggies. They did not notice that they weren’t the bite-sized blocks that they normally are, nor did they inspect them to make sure they were cooking-show crispy on all sides. They were just happy that I was done the food prep quickly and had more time to spend with them.
Lesson 3: What you think matters probably doesn’t
A lot of what drives my own perfectionism is the very logical reasoning that I put behind why I do things the way I do. I’m often focused on doing things right to avoid negative consequences. I have an anxious brain that fixates on worst case scenarios if I’m not vigilant about sweeping those worries away.
When it came to my veggies, I believed that if they weren’t the right size and shape that they wouldn’t roast the way I wanted them to—crisp on the outside, soft and flavourful on the inside. The truth was it didn’t matter. When I piled all the roasted veggies into one storage bin for future meals, it was 100% irrelevant.
Lesson 4: Do the work and move on
Many of my clients talk to me about wanting to stop overthinking and ruminating, and I completely relate. Constantly replaying past conversations or circumstances and questioning how you showed up or said or did the right thing is exhausting. This over-analysis stems from the mistaken belief that you can change the past.
I guarantee that when my food processor slices something a little too thinly, in no way does it consider it a failure. It just moves on to the next thing that comes its way and does the best it has to offer in the moment.
It’s not often that we can learn life lessons from an appliance, but my new food processor had some brilliant insights. It’s been weeks since it showed up in my kitchen and I’ve been amused every time I pull it out as I reminisce about what it’s taught me.
If you’re a perfectionist on the road to recovery, what would it mean for you to adopt some of these lessons?
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