Moderation is harder than the All or Nothing approach, but it’s also so much more worth it, if it’s something you want to last.

I shared this with my RESOLVE ladies last week, and wanted to elaborate on it, and share it with you today!

In my 7+ years as a personal trainer, I can tell you whether a client is an all-or-nothing type of person approximately 5 minutes into our conversations.

Telling AON (all or nothing) features include:

• the desire to start on a Monday
• the desire to do more than I initially prescribe
• the need for a “cheat day”
• having once reached a goal (or made serious progress on it) only to lose all progress made on it since
• having an ongoing relationship with me (trainer,) but sometimes with long breaks in between
• Restricting food during the day, only to overeat in the evening

In fact, if you happen to be an all or nothing type of person, I’m sure that you are 100% aware of it.

Not everything about having an all or nothing attitude is bad. When you’re on, you get ish DONE. However, that getting ish done is usually done fervently, obsessively, and almost always leads to burn out, eventually followed by quitting.

That’s where developing a moderate approach proves to be the key to success.

Surprisingly, moderation is actually a more difficult approach to accomplishing a fitness/nutrition goal than an AON approach. It’s easy to do what it takes to see results for a short amount of time, especially when excitement and motivation is revved up on high gear during this brief period. BUT – it’s even easier to quit once that motivation and excitement wavers.

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All or Nothing-ers allow “perfection” to be the enemy of “good.” And that’s where the problem occurs.

It’s much more difficult to accept that motivation and excitement toward a goal will waiver, and to develop a plan of action when the motivation factor is low in order to keep on moving the direction toward your goals.

The struggle is real, but here’s where the difference between a moderation approach and an all-or-nothing approach differs:

-An AON-er might decide to treat yoself. Then treat yoself again, and again, before declaring they’ve “fallen off the wagon.” Welp, hey, you gave it a good, hard run for about a month!

-A moderate approach would be to decide to hey, treat yoself, enjoy that treat, and then proceed back to moving in the direction of the goal.

As easy as it is to write or read that, it’s much harder to do than quitting, only to start back up much later, for likely another couple of weeks or month.

The all-or-nothing er might (probably will) see faster, bigger results in a specific, short timespan as someone who’s taking a moderate approach, but the moderate approach has lasting results. That’s because the AON will also experience fatigue, crankiness, and a quick depletion of willpower within that time span.

That said, every day I strive to become less of an all-or-nothing type of person and more of a moderation type of person because of one glaring reason: an AON approach emphasizes perfection, and makes anything other than perfection a failure. I’m never perfect in anything I do, as “perfect” is simply unattainable.

And why strive for something that doesn’t even exist? Are you with me?

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How about you? Do you consider yourself an all or nothing type of person?