Why Perfectionism Shows Up When Healing Your Relationship to Food and What to Do About It
By Katherine Metzelaar, MSN, RDN, CD
If you are reading this, you are a person who holds themselves to high standards.
Maybe you resist the idea of calling yourself a perfectionist, or maybe you consider yourself a recovering perfectionist. Either way, you have spent years of your life feeling like no matter what you do it’s never good enough. Unsurprisingly, if this is part of your experience, you may also be noticing that it’s showing up in your healing work around food.
What is perfectionism?
Perfectionism is a trait that drives people to continuously shoot for the highest standard possible, in looks, body image, achievements, food, relationships and more. It’s done often in a desperate attempt to avoid failure and protect oneself from perceived outcomes/threats that might happen if they don’t achieve perfection or aren’t the best at something. Perfectionism is often rooted in feelings of unworthiness, low self-esteem, fear of failure and difficult/traumatic childhood experiences.
Why does perfectionism show up in your relationship to food?
First we have to take a look at how diet culture and diets perpetuate and cater to perfectionism as a way to understand why it’s showing up in other areas related to healing your relationship to food. Diets offer the facade of “perfect health,” “perfect looks” and community in exchange for compliance and diligence. Simultaneously, inherent in the ideals of dieting is that nothing will ever be good enough and that you are not good enough as you are. So it’s both the promise of perfection and the continuous reminder that you will never achieve “perfect.”
Diet culture and diets perpetuate the idea that there is a place where you will end up, where you will be happy and content, and everything will feel better. This often appeals to perfectionists. Because of this, when you move from a dieting mindset to a non-diet mindset, you might expect that those same tendencies will show up if gone unaddressed.
How do you move away from a perfectionist mindset and into one that is flexible, forgiving and compassionate when working toward healing your relationship to food?
Offering yourself self-compassion is often a really helpful and gentle place to start. Remember that It’s ok if perfectionism is showing up in your relationship with food even when you are wanting to move away from dieting and wanting perfectionism to hit the road. It often takes time and practice to begin challenging the reasons why perfectionism is showing up in healing your relationship with food.
Second, in order to address the ways that perfectionism is showing up in healing your relationship with food you must also start to become aware of the ways that it is showing up. This often sounds much more simple said than done. Mindfulness as a practice is helpful to start challenging perfectionism because it increases your awareness which then allows you to take specific action to start challenging and fact checking the perfectionist beliefs around healing your relationship to food.
Lastly, it can be helpful to take a closer look at and get curious about what’s behind the perfectionism when it comes to healing your relationship to food. You can do this by asking yourself questions like: what would happen if my healing journey with food was imperfect? How or what taught me that I needed to be perfect in what I do? Do I feel like I would be any less deserving or worthy if I didn’t heal perfectly? Who decides what healing perfectly looks like? Are things like social media getting in the way of me doing this work “good enough”?
Perfectionism has no place in healing your relationship to food and it will often get in the way of you truly healing.
Remember that all coping is rooted in wisdom no matter how much it may be getting in the way of you having a more peaceful relationship with food. Your perfectionism didn’t show up out of nowhere. Perfectionism may have helped you to get through really tough things and may have gotten you to this point in your life. And likely there have been moments, sometimes fleeting, where you have started to see the ways that it’s no longer serving you. Perfectionism has no place in healing your relationship to food because healing is imperfect. Healing your relationship with food “imperfectly” is how you learn as you keep showing up, keep trying, keep experimenting and keep expanding.
Feeling stuck in a perfectionistic mindset towards food or body?
At Bravespace Nutrition we work with clients virtually helping people who are struggling with food and body image. It’s possible to change your relationship with food and your body, free up headspace, and live your life with more presence, abundance and peace. Learn more about Bravespace Nutrition, our philosophy, and the services we offer.