When “On Track” Became All or Nothing

Once I began looking at my relationship with food differently, I started noticing something else.

I hadn’t only learned to categorise food as good or bad. I had developed a very particular idea of what being successful at weight loss was supposed to look like.

I needed to be on track.

And in my mind, being on track meant doing things properly. Following the plan, sticking to the rules, being consistent, being disciplined and staying committed.

Those were messages I had heard throughout the weight-loss world for years. I remember one of my slimming leaders regularly telling us that if we wanted it enough, we would stay committed.

And I believed her.

So when I was completely on plan, I felt as though I was demonstrating how much I wanted to lose weight. But that created another side to the equation.

If staying committed proved I wanted it enough, what did struggling to stay committed say about me?

The morality around food that we’ve already discussed could feed into this too. If some choices represented being “good” and others represented being “bad”, getting those choices right began to feel increasingly important.

And without really recognising it, consistency became something much closer to perfection.

I didn’t think, I want to make choices that support me consistently enough over time.

I thought, I need to stay on track.

There wasn’t much room in that for being human.

And I want to make an important distinction here, because being human doesn’t mean abandoning responsibility for your choices every time life becomes difficult.

If every busy day, difficult emotion or unexpected change becomes a reason to abandon the behaviours supporting your goals, that can become part of the regain cycle too.

Lasting change does require accountability.

There were choices I made throughout my own journey that I needed to take responsibility for. There were times I could have made a choice that supported me better, behaviours I needed to change and emotional eating patterns I needed to repattern rather than simply accepting that I ate emotionally whenever life became difficult.

And there were times when what I needed wasn’t permission to give up. I needed to keep showing up for myself.

But accountability and perfectionism are not the same thing.

That distinction changed a lot for me.

Accountability allowed me to ask what had happened, what had been within my control, what I needed to take responsibility for, what I could learn from it and what choice I could make next that supported where I was trying to go.

Perfectionism had a very different response.

You got it wrong. You failed. You’re off track. You’ve ruined it. Start again.

And ironically, that could leave me taking less responsibility for what happened next.

Because once I’d decided I’d already failed, I could use that failure as permission to continue behaving in ways that moved me further away from my goal.

That wasn’t accountability.

That was all-or-nothing thinking wearing the clothes of discipline.

Because real life was still going to happen. Plans change, work gets busy, children need you, you get tired, you go out or somebody invites you somewhere unexpectedly.

You might have an emotional day, eat something you hadn’t planned, eat more than you intended or find an old behaviour appearing that you haven’t yet learned how to change.

And sometimes you simply make a choice that doesn’t support the goal you’ve set for yourself.

Supporting your capacity doesn’t mean pretending those choices don’t matter. It means having a way of understanding what happened without automatically turning one choice, one difficult day or one old behaviour into a larger period of disengagement and another journey towards regain.

That’s where personal power began to look different for me.

It wasn’t, I must control myself perfectly.

And it wasn’t, It doesn’t matter what I do because life is hard.

It was, My circumstances influence my capacity, but I still have choices within that capacity.

Sometimes I could change the circumstances. Sometimes I could strengthen or support my capacity. Sometimes I needed to adjust what I was asking from myself.

And sometimes I needed to acknowledge that I had made a choice that didn’t support me and take responsibility for making a different one next.

Because long-term weight management does require consistency. It does require accountability. It does require repeatedly making choices that support the outcome you’re trying to create.

It just doesn’t require you to do any of those things perfectly.

And that was the distinction I had been missing.

Because my own definition of successful weight loss had very little flexibility built into it. So when real life interrupted the plan, I didn’t necessarily adapt the plan to real life.

I thought I’d failed at the plan.

And once I believed I’d failed, my all-or-nothing thinking could take over remarkably quickly.

That’s it. I’ve ruined today. I’ll start again tomorrow.

Or, more commonly:

I’ll start again Monday.

Sometimes it actually was the weekend. Other times it could be Tuesday.

Apparently, once Tuesday had gone wrong, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday no longer counted.

I can laugh at the logic now, but at the time it made complete sense to me.

Because once I was no longer “on track”, I wasn’t operating from the belief that the next choice still counted. I was waiting for another opportunity to start again properly.

And that could give me permission to eat in ways I might not otherwise have eaten. Sometimes that meant overeating, sometimes emotional eating and sometimes bingeing.

If I believed I’d already ruined it, continuing could almost feel inevitable.

Looking back now, I can see that this had become a habit loop of its own.

Something disrupted perfect adherence. I interpreted that disruption as failure. Failure gave me permission to abandon what I was doing, abandonment led towards another restart, and another restart meant another attempt to stay perfectly on track.

Until something disrupted it again.

For years, I had another name for what happened in that loop.

Self-sabotage.

I genuinely believed I sabotaged myself.

I could be doing brilliantly, following the plan, losing weight and feeling incredibly motivated. Then I would do something that appeared to destroy my own progress.

I couldn’t understand it.

Why do I keep doing this to myself? Why do I sabotage myself when I want this so much?

But I was looking at the behaviour at the end of the sequence and using it to explain everything that had happened before it.

Through the lens of capacity, I can see some of those experiences very differently now.

What I had interpreted as self-sabotage was often closer to self-collapse.

I wasn’t inexplicably destroying something that had been effortless and sustainable for me to maintain. I had often been using enormous amounts of capacity trying to live up to a standard that left very little room for real life.

I was constantly monitoring food, following rules, trying to resist cravings and, at times, managing genuine physical hunger.

I was trying not to emotionally eat before I’d actually learned how to repattern the reasons I was emotionally eating in the first place.

I was trying to stay motivated and disciplined, while making every day look like the version of weight loss I believed a successful woman should be able to maintain.

And eventually something would ask more from me than I had available.

Sometimes life became busier. Sometimes I was exhausted, emotional or hungry. Sometimes an old pattern resurfaced.

And sometimes I simply made an imperfect choice because no human being makes perfectly consistent choices every day of her life.

But because the standard I was trying to maintain had so little room for any of those things, when I could no longer maintain it, I interpreted that as evidence that something was wrong with me.

There I go again. Sabotaging myself.

I was judging myself for dropping the weight without ever asking how heavy the weight had become to hold.

And you may recognise your own version of that.

Maybe you’ve never binged because you went off plan. Maybe you don’t even use the words “on track”.

But perhaps you’ve had three brilliant weeks and then life became difficult and everything seemed to unravel.

Maybe you went over your calories at lunchtime and decided there wasn’t much point tracking dinner. Maybe one takeaway became a weekend of eating differently because you’d start properly again on Monday.

Maybe you went on holiday, stopped following your usual routine and struggled to return when you came home.

Maybe you can follow your eating plan when life is relatively calm but find it much harder when you’re exhausted, overwhelmed or emotionally struggling.

Or maybe nothing dramatic happens at all. You simply find that when you can’t do things as well as you believe you should, you gradually stop doing them.

And perhaps you’ve looked at that pattern and reached the same conclusion I did.

Why do I keep sabotaging myself?

Before you decide that, I want you to become curious about what happened before the behaviour you’ve been calling sabotage.

What were you asking from yourself? What else was happening in your life? What was happening emotionally and physically? How much capacity did your approach already require?

What was within your control, and what could you take responsibility for without turning that responsibility into punishment?

Did you deliberately destroy your progress?

Or did you reach a point where the standard you were trying to maintain required more capacity than you had available?

That distinction matters.

Not because understanding capacity removes accountability. It gives us somewhere more useful to apply it.

If I believed my problem was simply that I kept sabotaging myself, the obvious answer was to become more disciplined, more committed and stricter with myself. In other words, to try harder.

But that could send me straight back into the very conditions that had contributed to the collapse in the first place.

If I understood what was happening to my capacity before the collapse, I suddenly had more places to become curious about.

I could still take responsibility for my choices, while also looking at what I was asking from myself, what needed changing, what needed supporting, what needed repatterning and where I needed greater flexibility.

I could begin asking how I might keep moving towards my goal without requiring perfect conditions or perfect behaviour to do it.

That is personal power too.

But there was something even more ironic about the way I was trying to eat.

Because what I desperately wanted was food freedom.

I used to look at women who seemed naturally relaxed around food and envy them.

They could go out for dinner without spending days negotiating around it beforehand. They could eat cake at a birthday without deciding they’d ruined the week.

They could have chocolate in the house without it seeming to occupy half their brain, or eat more than usual one day and simply eat normally again the next.

There didn’t seem to be this enormous before and after attached to every deviation.

No dramatic final blowout. No Monday restart. No punishment or declaration that tomorrow everything was going to change.

They just carried on.

That was the relationship with food I wanted.

And yet I was trying to create it by doing almost the complete opposite of what I could see them doing.

They seemed flexible. I became more rigid.

They could accommodate an imperfect choice. I tried harder to eliminate imperfect choices altogether.

They appeared able to trust themselves around food. I created more rules because I believed I couldn’t trust myself without them.

They could eat something and move on. I could turn eating something into evidence about how well my entire weight-loss attempt was going.

I wanted their freedom.

But I thought freedom was something I would eventually earn once I had mastered control.

I couldn’t see that the way I was trying to reach it was taking me further away from it.

And look at the difference in what those two relationships with food require from your capacity.

Flexibility allows life to change without every change becoming a problem you need to solve.

Perfection requires monitoring, attention, rules, decisions and correction. And if deviation means failure, it can require emotional recovery too.

The more rigid my definition of consistency became, the more capacity I needed to maintain it. And the less capacity I had available, the more vulnerable I became to falling outside it.

That helped me understand something else about the women I had envied.

Food freedom wasn’t necessarily the ability to always make the “right” choice.

Part of the freedom I was witnessing was their ability to accommodate variation without turning it into an event.

They carried on.

I restarted.

And restarting, for me, was an event.

It usually began before the restart itself.

There was often one final blowout. One last takeaway, one last dessert, one last weekend or one last opportunity to eat the foods I believed I was about to lose access to once I became “good” again.

Sometimes I would deliberately eat through food in the house because I knew I planned to replace it with what I thought of as diet food when the new attempt began.

At the time, that felt logical.

If tomorrow meant restriction, tonight felt like my last chance at freedom.

And that belief could create an enormous sense of urgency around food.

Eat it now, because tomorrow you can’t.

Enjoy it now, because tomorrow the rules start.

Get it out of the house now, because you can’t trust yourself with it once you begin.

What started as a planned final treat could become overeating or a binge remarkably quickly.

And that matters through the capacity lens, because look at the state I could then be creating for the very beginning I believed I was preparing myself for.

Physically, I could be bloated, sluggish and deeply uncomfortable from the amount I’d eaten. My energy could feel poor, and my hunger and appetite could feel completely out of rhythm with the “fresh start” I had planned.

Mentally, I could already be preoccupied with food and what I had done.

Emotionally, I could be carrying guilt, disappointment and the immediate aftermath of another experience of feeling as though I had lost control.

So although I called Monday a fresh start, I wasn’t necessarily arriving at it fresh at all.

I was arriving in recovery.

Earlier, before we began this transformation, we looked at something different that previous weight-loss experiences can leave us carrying.

We looked at the emotional residue of our history, the meanings we may have attached to previous attempts and the expectations that history can create about what might happen next.

And you’ve already begun working with that.

What I hadn’t understood was that my restart pattern could create another capacity cost altogether.

I wasn’t only at risk of arriving at another attempt carrying a history.

Sometimes, the behaviour I used to prepare for my “fresh start” meant I was arriving physically uncomfortable, mentally preoccupied and emotionally depleted by what had happened immediately beforehand.

The final blowout had been intended to prepare me for the new attempt.

In reality, it could reduce some of the physical, mental and emotional capacity I had available before the new attempt had even begun.

And then came the practical demands of restarting.

New rules. New plans. Food shopping. Meal preparation. Tracking. Organising. Removing foods from the house. Re-establishing routines. Making decisions about what I would and wouldn’t eat.

Trying to move myself from the eating patterns of the previous few days straight back into the version of weight loss I believed I now had to perform properly.

There was an enormous amount of effort involved in repeatedly rebuilding something I had decided was broken.

And then I would ask myself to return to the same perfect standard that had eventually become impossible to maintain before.

Looking back now, I can see why the cycle became so exhausting.

I wasn’t simply losing weight, having a wobble and starting again.

I had developed an entire behavioural sequence around what happened whenever I fell outside perfection.

Something changed. I interpreted it as failure. Failure became permission to disengage. Disengagement could become overeating or bingeing.

Then came the physical, mental and emotional consequences of that.

And after all of that, I would begin another attempt that required even more from my capacity.

All because one deviation had become an ending.

And when that pattern happens repeatedly, it can contribute to regain in a way I had never previously recognised.

One meal doesn’t cause regain.

One difficult day doesn’t cause regain.

One imperfect choice doesn’t cause regain.

But if one imperfect choice repeatedly triggers a larger period of disengagement, followed by another demanding restart, the pattern around that choice can begin carrying far greater consequences than the choice itself ever needed to.

That was the part I had been missing.

I had spent years concentrating on becoming better at staying perfectly on track.

I hadn’t questioned what happened when I wasn’t.

And because perfection was never going to be something I could maintain every day for the rest of my life, the pattern I had developed around imperfection mattered enormously.

It affected my relationship with food.

It affected my capacity.

And it could help turn a deviation into a sequence of behaviours that moved me further towards the very regain I was trying so desperately to prevent.

But there was another consequence of living with food this way.

Because when eating had become so closely connected to success and failure, staying on track and falling off, control and loss of control, an eating decision didn’t always feel like a simple eating decision anymore.

Sometimes I was already anticipating what might happen afterwards.

And sometimes that anticipation began before I had even taken the first bite.

That was when I started bracing for impact.