4 Ways the All-Or-Nothing Thinking Impacts Staying on Track

March 17, 2021

All-Or-Nothing Thinking: You’ve decided to take a trip. Not just any trip, but a long getaway to an oasis of your choosing. Destination in mind, you resolve to prepare for the long journey ahead. After all, this destination is so spectacular that any amount of effort you’ll need to exert to get there will be worth it.

Bag packed, train ticket in hand, you set out on your new adventure. Stuck to the side of your luggage is an “Oasis or Bust” sticker, a personal reminder of your fervent resolve.

All-Or-Nothing Thinking

Many of us begin new adventures with that same sticker stuck in our minds: we must stay on track this time, no matter what.

• We will follow the diet plan to perfection or we will not follow it at all.
• We will never miss a gym day because we are serious this time. Until we are not.

All-or-nothing thinking colors the world in black and white, with no room for hues of gray, blue, yellow, or red. While the intention may be noble (who wouldn’t like to think of themselves as capable of perfection?), it can lead to disastrous results.

This dualistic thinking pattern can completely miss the whole point of the journey and often leads to either the wrong destination or back to where you started.

Getting Off Track

Even with the best of intentions, all-or-nothing thinking can derail you from staying on track in a number of ways.

Often we confuse staying on track with following our weight loss plan. Staying on track means moving toward our goals and ultimately our values. Remember, it is possible to move toward your goals while not following the weight loss plan with absolute precision.

Consider an example. Ok, so you may have gained 5 pounds over the past month. However, overall you are down 50 pounds from where you originally started. Have you failed the program because of the recent weight gain? No, but when you are so focused on completing your weight loss plans to a T, it is easy to “lose the forest for the trees” and begin to think this setback means you have failed.

When you can’t see the forest anymore, you risk losing what was motivating you to begin with; it becomes far more likely that you will give up.

Remedy: Many of us have an idea of the goals and values we want to achieve (our personal oasis destination).

Yet those goals and values are often too vague and are easily forgotten when the going gets tough. So be very specific and clear about what you actually want to achieve at the start of your journey and understand how your goals are in line with your values. For example, if you value good health, then a goal of cooking a homemade meal five nights of the week is both reasonable and specific.

Sure, it is all too easy to feel down about eating that brownie your co-worker brought to the office. But it is even easier to then get home and continue eating the sweets late into the night, and beyond. We think, “I messed up at work, I’ll start again tomorrow.”

The gateway brownie represents what you did wrong, but in this case, it is better to recognize what you got right: you also met your water goal that day, ate a healthy breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and even went for a walk afterward.

So many things went right that day, yet with all-or-nothing thinking, you limit your vision to only see your day as bad. So often, it only takes one cloud to cast a shadow over all the sunny moments of the day.

Remedy: Write down at least 3 things you are grateful for before going to bed. Our goals are met by the sum of our actions, so if 80% of those actions are positive, then that is worth celebrating.

Mistakes are often our greatest teachers. Yet with all-or-nothing thinking, we see our mistakes as the end of the road and don’t bother to learn from them. How did you feel after eating that brownie after lunch? Did you enjoy it at the moment only to succumb to the 2 pm crash? Knowing that information is invaluable when it comes to learning about yourself and your body.

True knowledge is experiential. If you experience the negative consequences of eating certain foods (or of not eating others) then you are more likely to stay on the track toward your goal.

Remedy: Make a commitment that the next time someone else makes a mistake, such as taking your order wrong or cutting you off in traffic, you will immediately forgive them for it. Then do it again. The more you practice patience and compassion surrounding others’ mistakes in life, the more compassion you will have for your own inevitable mistakes.

So often we start a diet plan and as soon as the going gets rough, we throw our hands in the air and go right back to our usual routines. This “diet-on, diet-off” mentality leads to yo-yo weight changes, and, over time, we are further from our original goal than when we started. This type of thinking can lead to weight regain that you'll also want to lose again. Instead of a steady crawl forward, we jump forward then fall back, over and over again. This makes the overall journey much longer and leads to frustration and feelings of low self-worth.

Remedy: Any behavioral modification technique works if it fits in with your daily life. Instead of making sweeping changes to your diet and exercise, try incremental habits.

For example, if you already have to cook dinner for the family, build on that existing habit by steaming a bag of vegetables on the side. All-or-nothing thinking is especially detrimental to weight loss programs that require multiple behavior changes, because changing our behavior requires patience and practice.

Yes, we all want to be superhero human beings who wake up one day and effortlessly make all the right choices, assuming we even know what the right choices are. But life is more difficult and nuanced than that; life is messy and all the more beautiful for it. Seeing our day as black or white robs us of any color, vibrancy, or meaning. So imagine your oasis, pack your bag, and enjoy the bumps along the way.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Julie Wintersteiner, MS, RDN, CDN is a Touchpoint bariatric dietitian for Lourdes Hospital in Binghamton, NY. Julie earned her BS in biology from the University of Michigan, her MS in human nutrition from Cornell University, and her dietetics degree from Russell Sage College. Read more articles by Julie!

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