episode 126: stop getting trapped by all or nothing or thinking

May 1

On episode 126 of The Diet Diaries I’m sharing a recent experience I went through where the all or nothing thinking trap caught me by surprise.

As you all know I’ve been planning a weekend retreat in May for the last 5 months—and made a decision last week to pivot and change it to a one day retreat at my home in NJ. This change is a direct result of my ability to catch my all or nothing thinking in its tracks, notice the stories I was telling myself and take action in alignment with my values.

I’m sharing some more backstory as to what was happening in my inner world around the retreat to help you see how I was able to shift my thinking. And I talk through the skills you need to help you make sustainable changes around negative body image and binge eating recovery.

How to use your values to help you make decisions
How and why we get stuck in the all or nothing thought pattern
Why this thinking feels comfortable even though we know its ultimately not helpful
How to notice your own all or nothing thinking
A helpful visual tool to identify actions in between the extremes
How this applies to your negative body image
Why all or nothing thinking is impacting your binge eating recovery

The Spring Mini Retreat is Saturday May 20, 10am-4:30 pm at my home in Westfield NJ. One day dedicated just to you, to pay attention to yourself the way you pay attention to everyone else in your life. $150 includes 2 workshops, yoga, catered lunch, goodie bag and keepsake.

Check out episode 121 around emotional eating and episode 118 around losing fat without a diet for more support and resources around behavior and mindset.

[00:00:00] Hey friends, it's episode 126 of The Diet Diaries. And I am calling my own little audible for today. Um, I had a whole episode kind of with notes written up and planned out to record for today, and then something happened yesterday. So when I say today, today is Tuesday, April 25th. This episode Will Air, is that Monday?
[00:00:29] Is that May 1st Is Monday is May 1st Mac Monday? I think so. Um, and something happened yesterday on Monday that has really. Gotten me thinking in a really good way. And so I decided to talk about it because it's entirely relevant to our work here that we do together. Um, so you guys know, I've been talking about the retreat for months, right?
[00:00:53] I think I first started talking about it in December. It's now April. So four or five months. And I have been super excited about this. I have put a ton into it. Um, there were so much interest from so many of you, um, that truthfully it was like, oh, definitely six people. No problem. I mean, I heard from like at least 25 of you over the winter saying, this sounds amazing.
[00:01:18] I can't wait to hear more. This is gonna be awesome. And then as happens, like life happens, right? Stuff comes up. We have other commitments and I have talked a lot about yes, we're gonna have to do things that are uncomfortable and reprioritize things and um, And, and move things around and be willing to do that in order to pay attention to ourselves, in order to prioritize ourselves the way that we need to, to make these changes.
[00:01:46] And also, there's the reality of life. And what I was starting to see is that an entire weekend away clearly wasn't. Not necessarily what people needed or wanted, but maybe just wasn't what was possible right now. Um, I had a couple of people sign up and then cancel a long way. I had a cancellation just over the weekend, like yesterday morning, early, and I was like, okay, maybe this doesn't like gonna happen.
[00:02:17] Maybe this just like isn't the right time. Um, people are into it. And so I know that like there's a need for this. I know there's a place for it, but. Definitely the weekend of May 19th, I know was a tough one for a lot of folks, and when I picked it in December, I wasn't thinking about graduations and recitals and all these things.
[00:02:35] So all that said, if you're on my email list or if you follow me on social media, then you have seen that I made a total pivot and I decided to change the retreat from a full weekend in upstate New York to one day at my house in Westfield. And I wanted to talk about like what was happening in my brain as I decided to do this, because my initial thoughts were, okay, I guess I'm gonna have to counsel.
[00:03:02] Like I, and I was devastated. I was crying. I was so upset, like just so disappointed that something I had been so excited about and something that I truly felt like you guys were excited about wasn't gonna happen sometimes from circumstances beyond. Our control. Um, and I was talking about it with Danny and I was talking about it with some of my really close friends, and I was like, hold on a second.
[00:03:31] I started to realize that like the retreat is a big commitment. It's a big time commitment. It's a big financial commitment. It's a big personal investment and I would say vulnerability kind of commitment. And then my, my in, in my head, the options were, we'll do the retreat as it is, right. Or cancel it all or nothing.
[00:03:53] And as I was talking to Danny about it, and he is like, well what if, like what if you went to dinner with a couple of the people and as I was talking to someone who was signed up but had to cancel because of a family conflict that popped up of a, uh, her son is potentially coming to visit from out of town that weekend, right?
[00:04:09] So I mean, stuff like this happens. Um, and she had said to me, well, what if like we did something. She said this me a couple weeks ago. She was like, you know what, if like we did yoga together had like these little seeds in the back of my head that I hadn't really thought that much about, and then I was like, what if, what if we did something in between?
[00:04:29] I talk all the time about how all or nothing thinking is like our enemy, right? It is kind of the trap that keeps us stuck and I talk about it in the context of food, but it shows up everywhere. And it was showing up here and I didn't even realize it, to be honest. It showed up from like the beginning of this retreat when I first con, like I've been wanting to do this for years in just like, you know, like dream vision.
[00:05:00] I've wanted to do this for years and when I actually decided to take action and plan something in my head, I wanted to do something. For a day or for a night. But then I quickly realized to do something overnight, pretty much every Airbnb on a weekend has a two night minimum. So right away I kind of scrapped that and was like, okay, well I'll do a two night minimum and it'll be, and then it was also caught up in like, well, what is a retreat?
[00:05:25] A retreat? A retreat is a weekend, a retreat is away from home. A retreat is at a different location. Right? It is a certain amount of time. I started to have all these like, Stories I was telling myself based on what we think things are and have to be. So right off the bat, I kind of walked away from my first, um, inclination, which was to do something a little bit, I'm gonna say smaller.
[00:05:49] And I was like, all right, well, I'm just gonna go all in because I'm gonna kind of have to, because it has to be a destination, it has to be someplace else. Other, it didn't even occur to me to do it at my house because to me, that wasn't. A retreat that's just like my house. And so I jumped in and I did this and I planned this whole thing and I booked a private chef and I booked an Airbnb and started to make all these plans and all this.
[00:06:14] And then as this was unfolding yesterday morning over the course of like a few hours, because I could kind of see, I'm like, I need to make a decision about this one cuz it's now like three and a half, four weeks away. So I need to either make the decision to cancel or make the decision to change this in some form.
[00:06:29] Like I need to take action and I am an action taker once I. See something and I make up my mind, boom. I am like off and running. There's like no hesitation. Um, so I was having this conversation with Danny and I'm like, hold on a second. There is something in between doing this up in the Catskills for a full weekend and doing nothing.
[00:06:50] And I kind of went back to, well, originally I kind of wanted to do something a little bit smaller scale for lots of different reasons. Well, maybe I can go back to that. And then I remembered about four or five years ago, I went to an afternoon workshop at one of my most beloved yoga mentors houses, Chrissy Carter.
[00:07:12] Some of you might be familiar with her. I've, she's been on the podcast, she's. Amazing and wonderful. And she has played a huge role, played a huge role in my growth as a yoga teacher, and I continue to learn so much from her. Um, because what she teaches in yoga is applicable to life as is like same things go around food, like it's all intertwined.
[00:07:32] She had out afternoon workshop at her house, at her apartment in Jersey City. And there were six or seven of us and we did journaling and we did a vision board and she cooked lunch. She's like, loves to cook. She cooked like a really simple lunch and I remember once she sent the email out for that, I couldn't sign up fast enough.
[00:07:48] I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. We're gonna go to her house and we're gonna hang out and it's gonna be a small group and we'll really get to spend time together and I'll learn so much. And it was, it was all of those things. Like I, she, um, gave us each like a journal and cuz we did, she gave us like a lot of prompts and we were doing writing and then we did a vision board.
[00:08:08] Like I still have that. Um, I still remember like the food that she made. She made this amazing soup and these she little shortbread cookies and it was just so lovely and wonderful and I'm like, that's it, that's what I'm gonna do. And so I was like, okay, I'm gonna offer a one day retreat at my house.
[00:08:26] Right. So that makes, if the whole weekend was too much, now it's just a day. If $675 was too much, now it's 150. Um, if the emotional vulnerability of doing all that for an entire weekend felt kind of scary. Okay, well now it's like one day, right? It's all of those things, but a little bit less, a little bit smaller, and it totally goes back to the, something is better than nothing.
[00:08:52] So often we don't do anything because we can't do everything. I'm gonna say that again. We don't do anything because we can't do everything. And that was my brain about this retreat, and I didn't even realize it. Well, a retreat has to be this, it has to be away. It has to be two nights. It has to be all these things.
[00:09:11] It has to have a private chef has to have all these things, or it's nothing. It's not a retreat. That's entirely untrue. That is a story that I concocted based on things I've seen and all these shoulds that we put on ourself. And as this idea like came, it was like, it was really kind of wild how quickly this happened.
[00:09:30] I went from being so sad and so disappointed and, and crying and so upset to being. Super excited and like running off, working on the website, writing the email, sending the email. This is over a period of like hours. It was a crazy rollercoaster of emotions and I'm being totally honest with you when I tell you that, like I'm more excited about this, which, you know, doesn't mean that I wasn't, I was.
[00:09:56] You know, so excited about the other retreat, but I feel like this is more doable for people and that's what matters to me. And I think about all the most important work that I have done around my relationship to food and feeling an ease around food has been to move away from this all or nothing place.
[00:10:14] Um, you know, we. Like slingshot ourselves, like back and forth between doing all the things. And then when we try to do all the things we just can't sustain, it's not sustainable. So we tell ourselves, oh yeah, see this isn't workable. And then we boomerang back to doing nothing, and then we feel like shit because we're doing nothing.
[00:10:35] And then instead of saying, okay, I'm gonna work on one or two things, that's like I have to go back and do all of the things because we had these ideas in our head, just like I had this idea about what a retreat had to be. We have those same ideas around changing our bodies, around changing our eating, around, changing how we exercise.
[00:10:50] We only see these changes existing as doing everything as one in one way. And the reality is that there are so many, there's an infinite number of ways in between the all or the nothing. Right. If we look at these things as like a spectrum from nothing on one end and every single possible thing on the other, there's so much space in between that of ways to approach this of actions you can take.
[00:11:19] And so I just, I wanted to kind of just share a little bit more about my thinking with you about my own, like the way my brain works, the traps that I still get stuck in. Our limiting beliefs about ourselves and how they show up in places we don't even realize. I didn't even realize that I was thinking this way until the situation kind of pushed me to do that.
[00:11:38] And honestly, like, I'm so grateful for that. Um, so I ask you, so I want to, I want to give you like a takeaway from this for yourself and not just make it about like me. Where? Where, is there a circumstance or a situation in your life right now? It may be related to food, it may not, or exercise or not.
[00:11:58] Where you are thinking in terms of everything or nothing, but may not fully realize it and that you're limiting yourself or you're feeling stuck or trapped because of it. And then what is something smaller in between that you can do? To feel good to know that you are taking action in the direction you wanna go, but that it's not everything all at once.
[00:12:19] Um, because really this is how change happens. In very rare circumstances, does permanent lasting change happen because we jump in and do everything all at once. Our brains are just not made that way. Right. Our brains, we are humans. We are very. Adaptable. This is why we're not machines, and I hate that analogy because we can adapt and we respond to our environment and to our inputs and to things that happen to us, and actions we choose to do, but we also respond in little bits at a time.
[00:12:52] This is how, uh, treatment, um, oral immunotherapy works for food allergies. This is how treatment for O C D works. This is how treatment for severe forms of anxiety work. You expose yourself to something a little bit at a time so you can adapt, you get comfortable, and then you expose yourself to a little bit more.
[00:13:07] You adapt, get comfortable, expose a little bit more, et cetera, et cetera, right? If you throw yourself into like, I'm gonna use the analogy, throw yourself into the fire of whatever it is you're trying to do with everything you wants. It's too much. Too much for your brain, too much for your nervous system, too much emotionally, too much logistically, too much in every single facet.
[00:13:27] So how can we do less? Doing less is actually doing more because you will be able to do less over a longer period of time. And that that's like, it's like the long way is the shortcut, right? It's so true. Do less over a longer period of time, get the changes you wanna make permanently instead of doing everything for a short period of time and never getting to those changes and repeating that over and over and over again.
[00:13:53] So you could spend a year going back and forth between crash diet and. Binging. Or you could say, okay, I'm going to focus on having more protein at breakfast every day, and that's the one thing I'm gonna work on. I'm not gonna worry about lunch, I'm not gonna worry about dinner. I'm just gonna worry about focus on breakfast.
[00:14:12] And then, oh, find that you can actually, that's something you can stick with and it has all these other positive impacts. In terms of like binging and hunger and cravings, and then suddenly you're not going back and forth between these two extremes and you're able to, to keep up with this small change for months at a time, and now you haven't gone back and forth between these extremes having made no progress at all.
[00:14:34] So in a year from one or two small changes, you could accomplish so much. Whereas going and doing all in for a month and then going back to doing nothing, never gets you anywhere. So I hope that this is helpful. Again, think about where in your life are you using, is all or nothing thinking limiting you, keeping you stuck, where you're telling yourself a story that something smaller isn't enough?
[00:15:00] It doesn't count. I've said this before, probably on the podcast. I've definitely talked about it in emails. You can use math as an example. Zero plus zero is always zero. Doing nothing and doing nothing and doing nothing is always nothing. However, Point oh one plus 0.01 is 0.02 plus another 0.01 plus another 0.01.
[00:15:21] It adds up. Is it small? Yes. Doing nothing will always get you nothing. Doing something, no matter how small will always add up to something bigger. And when you catch yourself feeling really stuck and saying it's not enough, it doesn't count. And those judgmental thoughts are coming up. Pause. And say, hang on a second.
[00:15:44] Is this actually true or is this just a story I'm telling myself? Use that math analogy, right? Go back to the data, go back to the facts, pull the emotion out of it. Look at things objectively, which is hard to do, but this is like a really helpful tool to do that and see and experiment. Just get curious what happens if I tried doing this differently?
[00:16:03] What happens if I offer a one day retreat at my house? What will happen? Will people be interested? Seems like people are, we've already got three people signed up, which is awesome. Um, experiment. Get curious, see what happens. Um, thank you guys for listening. Thanks for being here As always. I think I kept this one pretty on the shorter side.
[00:16:24] Yeah. 16 minutes. Um, all the details for the spring mini retreat are gonna be in the show notes. Again, this is one day at my house in Westfield, New Jersey, 10 to four 30. We're gonna do two workshops, catered lunch and snacks, a yoga class. I'm super excited about this. It's gonna be wonderful and laid back and collaborative and just gonna spend time together for the day and you are gonna walk away.
[00:16:49] With very, a very clear action plan around what you need to focus on. We're gonna do a work, a values inventory workshop, and we're gonna do a body image intensive workshop. The values is going to encompass a lot of things around food, so we will be addressing food. Um, reach out if you've got questions.
[00:17:08] It's $150. Um, and that's it More next week.