Here are tried and true ways you can de-perfect yourself and become a happier person. From Karen R. Koenig, a cognitive-behavioral therapist and the author of Nice Girls Finish Fat: Put Yourself First and Change Your Eating Forever

Lower your expectations of yourself
Take an objective look at what you expect of yourself and decide if it’s rational, reasonable, and healthy. Check out how much other healthy people do and find out how they deal with letting go, being mediocre, and not working so hard they make themselves sick. Make a list of areas in which you want to keep expectations high (say, being a good parent), those in which you could do a mediocre job (like house cleaning or volunteering in your community), and those in which you can afford to really slack off (mothering people at work, being everyone’s best friend). Once your expectations are more realistic, you won’t feel so pressured.

Start to accept mistakes and failure
No one likes to do poorly or fail, but some people really don’t care all that much about succeeding. They figure that some endeavors aren’t worth the energy of giving it their all and that they can do a slapdash job and move on to what they enjoy. They also know the world won’t end if they fail. Instead, they expect that and that they might be better off in the long run. Shame doesn’t overwhelm them, especially when they discuss their shortcomings rather than keep them secret because they know that sharing de-powers shame.

Embrace and enjoy human imperfection
Rather than expect to be perfect, healthy people expect to be imperfect — and they always succeed! They laugh at their goofs and gaffs and don’t go out of their way to hush them up. Understanding that everyone makes mistakes, they actually enjoy the flaws of being human. Because they don’t have an attachment to perfection, they don’t take life so seriously and have a lot more fun. When life is an adventure, there’s less room for going morose when things don’t work out. Moreover, they know how to get the best mileage out of misadventures, like what terrific stories they’ll make down the line.

Ask less from yourself and more from others
Get off your high horse and ask for help. No one really likes martyrs or people who do everything so terrifically and perfectly themselves that they don’t need assistance once in a while. An I’ll-do-it-myself attitude makes other people feel superfluous and inadequate. People love to feel needed and to be considered supportive and helpful. Make yourself approachable so that folks aren’t terrified to offer help because you’ll start screaming that you’re fine or that you can handle things when you obviously can’t. No one is trying to undermine your self-esteem or your independence. Here’s a shocker: They like you a lot, enough to want to be helpful.

Avoid all-or-nothing thinking
When you think in extreme either-or terms, you set yourself up for misery, as in if you don’t do something perfectly, you’re a failure. Hello, how could this be true? If you run for president of the United States and lose but are a senator for twenty three years, you’re a failure? Come on, now. Where does this kind of craziness come from? Measure success in increments and think of achievements on a continuum. Please, scale down your grandiosity. Instead of whining that you didn’t do something completely right, think of the fact that you came pretty close. Instead of looking at what you did poorly, focus on what you did well. Remember fractions: one-half, one-quarter, three-quarters, etc.

Don’t measure yourself against others
We all start out in a different place in life with diverse genes and dissimilar upbringings. Some people have many talents, others have one amazing one. Most of us are average. Competition is fine as long as you don’t put yourself down for not measuring up. Think in terms of making progress from where you were, not comparing yourself to where someone else is. Maybe you started farther back than she did, maybe you had stumbling blocks along the way that she didn’t, maybe she’s making herself sick being so damned good at what she does.

Learn how to turn off guilt and fear
When you slip into feeling guilty or inadequate or fear disappointing or hurting someone, catch yourself and boycott the feeling. Although I spend the bulk of my professional life nudging people to explore and experience most feelings, some emotions are unproductive and have no place in a healthy life. Unwarranted guilt, fear, and inadequacy are three emotions it’s time to wave good-bye to. They won’t disappear right away; you’ll have to keep shooing them out the door. The more often you allow yourself to wallow in them, the longer they’ll stick around.

However, if you experience resentment, pay heed. Maybe it means you’re feeling undervalued, which, in turn, might indicate that you either need to do less or ask for more appreciation. Resentment might be pushing you toward reality and health, so don’t knock it until you understand what you’re feeling.

How does wanting to be perfect make me such an imperfect eater?
One obvious way that perfectionism drives you to overeat is that you use food to cope with stress. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t find perfectionism stressful? Here’s the progression: The harder you work to be perfect, the more overwhelmed you feel, and the more overwhelmed you feel, the more you want to eat. You eat to slow down, chill out, make time for yourself, recharge your battery, nourish your body, reward yourself, and feel like a human being. Of course, you could do all these things without food, but you don’t know how to do that yet.

Perfectionism works in two other ways regarding food. Not surprising, you may want to be a perfect eater, always to eat nutritiously, within a certain calorie range by balancing food groups and eschewing fat, non-organics, and anything that isn’t wholesome. So what happens? Can you stick to your ideal diet? Of course not. Sooner or later (usually sooner) you’re bound to have rebound eating, that is, cravings for forbidden foods. These desires are part mental from psychic deprivation and part physiological because you’re not choosing from a wide enough range of nutrients and your body wants to be in balance.

The other way that perfectionism impacts eating is that all of us need to have somewhere to make a mess, and your (unconsciously) chosen area is food. No one can keep herself on a tight leash all the time, and the place you break completely free is eating. We could say that overeating makes you human and is trying to drive a point home to you: Cut out all that perfectionism. If you weren’t so gung-ho on doing right all the time, you wouldn’t have to balance yourself out by “doing wrong” with food. In a way, nature will out even if it has to knock some sense into you in ways you deem unkind.

There’s more. Striving for perfection is another way of saying that you don’t know when enough is enough, right? Instead of consciously deciding to stop doing, you arrive at “enough” when you hit a wall, reach exhaustion, or there’s nothing left to accomplish because you’ve done it all! Like a blind person feeling her way through life, you rely on external cues to find your way to sufficiency rather than respond to an innate sense of adequacy and doneness.

You keep on saying yes while waiting to feel good, satisfied, full, or complete, but that never happens because there’s generally more that can be done — chores or actions, people to help, goals to reach, food to eat, etc. The fact is enough is not some predestined endpoint but comes from a self-determined sense of satisfaction and acceptance — an intuitive feeling of okayness, adequacy, and completion — that resonates within you as a yes (and should come out of your mouth as “no more”). Enough makes itself felt internally and should cause you to say “basta” no matter what anyone else thinks, says, or does.

Striving for perfection and not knowing when to cry uncle is eerily similar to not knowing when to stop eating. You keep on chewing and swallowing and stop only when you run out of money, time, or food, not because you have a feeling of fullness and satiation. Perfectionism and overeating are both manifestations of self-regulation difficulties and a kind of tone deafness to sufficiency.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karen R. Koenig, the author of Nice Girls Finish Fat: Put Yourself First and Change Your Eating Forever (Copyright © 2009 by Karen R. Koenig), is a cognitive-behavioral therapist and author of three books on eating and weight. A national speaker, she regularly teaches workshops on eating to groups around the country. She lives in Sarasota, Florida.

MORE ARTICLES BY THE AUTHOR

• 23 Do’s and Don’ts to Prevent Packing on the Pounds at Work
• Are You Overweight Because You’re Just Too Nice?
• Does Your Family Make You Fat?
• Stop Being a People Pleaser and Take Control of Your Diet

LEARN MORE

• Read the Introduction to Nice Girls Finish Fat: Put Yourself First and Change Your Eating Forever
• Read Chapter 1 of the book
• Learn more about the author