My name is Caroline, and I am a recovering perfectionist.

Growing up, I always felt pressure to excel at everything I did. I was the kid who always needed to set the curve on exams, win first chair in every audition, and get all A+’s in every class. If I couldn’t be the best at something, I usually gave up and quit.

Sports were a perfect example. Although I was a swimmer for most of my life, I was never the fastest. I grew to hate practice and resented the faster swimmers. Eventually I quit swim team and exercise altogether, which contributed in no small part to me gaining weight through the end of high school and my freshman year of college.

My perfectionist tendencies became even more problematic in my early twenties. When I started losing weight my sophomore year of college, I subscribed to several problematic nutritional dogmas. These diet plans restricted entire food groups and forbade me from eating outside narrow windows.

I was never able to stick with these plans for long. Each time I broke a rule, even if my infraction was small, I decided I might as well eat whatever I wanted the rest of the day. After a while, these binges started getting more and more destructive. Something had to change for the sake of my physical and mental health.

If you’re struggling with your weight, your eating or training, or your sense of self-worth, there’s a good chance you’re holding yourself up to the same impossibly high standards I once was. I encourage you to stop chasing perfection. Only by relinquishing some control and accepting that there’s no perfect plan can you finally make real progress toward your health and fitness goals.

Perfection is unattainable.

The first step to moving forward is to realize nobody’s perfect. We all know this on some level, but to truly accept and embrace it is extremely powerful.

There are many ways we chase perfection with our health and fitness goals, such as:

• Attempting to follow a hardcore, 5-7 day per week training program that doesn’t work with your busy schedule.
• Forcing yourself to perform the same heavy barbell lifts with the same loads you used to do as a teenager, but which leave you feeling beat up and exhausted now.
• Following an ultra-strict diet with no wiggle room to navigate social situations or other contingencies.
• Believing there is one best diet or training program and every other plan will give you such lackluster results they aren’t worth considering.

I hope you can see how all these approaches are problematic. It’s easy for elite athletes to build their lives around the most scientifically-optimized plan. For the rest of us, plans that demand perfection don’t work. We have unusually busy days at work, family emergencies, unexpected obligations, and active social lives. We need plans which give us space to navigate these situations and still be successful.

The most optimal diet or training plan for you is the one you can follow consistently while maintaining your energy, performance, and sanity. This means the way you eat and train has to be flexible and not overly restrictive. It’s better to do less but stick with it than to try and do too much and burn out.

Read more: You Don’t Need an Extreme Diet or Program

Chasing perfection leads to all-or-nothing behavior.

When you’re chasing perfection, it’s easy to use “screw ups” as an excuse to go off the rails. Perfectionists get triggered by failure and overreact with harmful behaviors.

My struggles with binging and restricting are a great example. I ate a bit of forbidden food and then said “screw it” and jumped face-first into a pile of junk food I often didn’t even want. These binges did way more harm than the initial mistake ever did.

Instead of living and dying by a long list of strict rules, reduce your focus to just one or two behaviors at a time. I recommend picking things you’re confident you can manage. Once you’ve identified your current focus, let everything else go. You can always tackle more things once you’ve nailed your initial commitment.

If this freaks you out, take a deep breath and realize you have plenty of time to get to where you want to go. Breaking your goals into smaller pieces and getting rid of strict rules keeps you moving forward and prevents overwhelm and all-or-nothing behaviors.

Read more: Do Less to Do More

Active acceptance and self-compassion

If you’re anything like me, you may have a tendency to be overly hard on yourself. This is a hallmark of being a perfectionist – you beat yourself up when you don’t live up to your impossibly high standards. You may feel bad about yourself all the time, wondering why you’re unable to stick with your strict diet and workout routine. You think something is wrong with you, when the real problem is your perception and expectations.

A crucial part of moving away from perfectionism is to practice self-compassion. Just as you accepted that nobody’s perfect, accept that you can’t get everything right all the time. You’re going to screw up. The important thing is to learn from your struggles and keep taking positive action. Don’t use your slip-ups as an excuse to binge or skip the gym for weeks at a time.

Just because you’re practicing self-compassion doesn’t mean you have to love everything about your life just the way it is. My mentor Jill Coleman talks about “active acceptance.” This means you accept where you’re at right now – flaws and all – without judgement, but you’re still trying to move forward and improve. This is a great place to be if you’re trying to change your body or improve your health.

If you’ve been chasing perfection in the gym and kitchen with little to show for it, consider another way. Chasing perfection sets you up for failure and keeps you from achieving your goals. Instead, choose a few manageable changes to tackle right now. Accept that everything else will stay the way it is for now, and that’s ok. You’ll experience much more long term success making small changes that stick rather than aiming to be perfect and always falling short.

Looking for a way to become a more consistent exerciser? Sign up for my 4C System course below. Once you sign up, you’ll receive five days of free lessons sharing the strategies I’ve used to help hundreds of clients exercise more without losing their sanity.