The One You Feed | Personal Growth, Emotional Resilience & Purpose
Why All-or-Nothing Thinking Keeps You From Exercising | Michelle Segar
23 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of all-or-nothing thinking in exercise?
I really think we're misguiding people when we ask them to form automatic habits. Instead, I think we should be teaching them on what you and I have been talking about this whole time. Because you know what this is? Another word for everything we've been talking about is resilience.
Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.
We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf.
Michelle Seeger just ran one of the first studies on all or nothing thinking and exercise, and the results surprised her. A lot of people, it turned out, didn't actually want to do the exercise they planned in the first place. So when life got in the way, choosing nothing wasn't a defeat. It was a quiet escape from something they dreaded. The fix isn't more willpower.
It's to find movement that feels better to you and to follow a phrase I've used for years. A little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing. Michelle also wrote the joy choice about sustainable change. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Michelle. Welcome back.
Thanks for having me.
I believe this is time number three, if I am correct. And I've loved your research and your books over the years. I was saying to you before we started, you're actually in my book very directly. I quote you on something called the self-care hierarchy from a previous conversation. And your ideas are also sprinkled throughout. So I'm really excited to have this conversation with you.
We'll get into all that in a moment, but before we do, we'll start like we always do, which is with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, In life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love.
And then there's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
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Chapter 2: How does all-or-nothing thinking affect motivation and exercise habits?
Yes. You know, I went into this new research that actually was inspired by writing The Joy Choice and seeing how little research on exercise there was about this. Quite a bit on eating, but nothing on exercise for the most part. Who are the most important people to help learn how to sustain physically active lives?
It's those who have not succeeded at doing it who start and stop and start and stop but don't sustain. So we targeted people in the community and also two different groups, student groups and, you know, people who work, living their lives, having families. And we advertised everything. to get people who identified with the idea that they had tried to exercise but just couldn't stick with it.
Because those were the people, those are the people, the majority of the population that we want to help. So we wanted to talk to them and find out, gosh, do these people talk about physical activity and exercise using language and concepts that might reflect all or nothing thinking? And if they do, in what ways do they manifest all or nothing thinking at exercise choice points, right?
When a challenge bumps up against a plan or an intention, what do they say to themselves? What do they choose to do? And those are the people that we wanted to do this research with.
Excellent. Let's talk about choice point for a second, because I think it's a really important idea. How do you describe choice point?
Yes. So when I first started using this concept, I called it decision point with my clients. It just kind of came to me one day when I was coaching and it was like, well, at this decision point, when your plan bumps up against something, but then choice point is is a nicer term.
And then I found out that actually choice point is used largely in other places, which shows what a great concept it has. So to me, a choice point represents when someone has, and it doesn't matter what behavior, someone has a plan,
or intention to do something, but whether it's a competing goal, whether it's low motivation, whether it's an unexpected call from the school to pick up your kids, any kind of conflict that occurs to an intention or plan becomes a choice point that you have to navigate.
Yeah, I often think of it as the moment when it's you and the choice that you kind of have to make. There's so much stuff we can do structurally, I call it, upstream, right? Knowing what I'm doing, when I'm doing it, how I'm doing it, planning for what happens if I don't do it well, having support for doing it. But there comes a moment where it's like me and the choice. Yeah.
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Chapter 3: What are choice points and how do they influence exercise decisions?
So that's a value calculation about the worthiness of doing less. And I interviewed a lot of other scientists for the all or nothing discussion because... I wanted to understand all these different perspectives. And I spoke to some people in cognitive psychology who really helped me see just plain and clear. This is a value calculation that people, it's not valuable to do less.
And so that's, that's the, that part of the all or nothing, but the other piece is the should, I mean, and the should ties directly to the criteria, but it's, as you've already said, it's bigger than that. It's, My doctor is telling me this, I have to do this. The influencers are saying that. And they're very much related, but they're two very different things.
And there's a couple of other issues too, but I don't want to take us too far off track.
Yeah, I do think the messaging that we get is really, really important around this because the messaging that we do tend to get is 150 minutes of semi-hard cardio a week. That is a lot. And then you can go to any number of different influencers who will take it up even beyond that. It's this really, it's a high level of intensity. It's a high level of consistency. We're told aim for streaks.
You do it 90 days in a row. And if you mess up, you go back and you start over. And I'm not saying that those things are not valuable for some people, because in some ways, I think those things can be valuable for some people. We are all different. But most people, my experience is they do need permission to do less. I think it was BJ Fogg that I got this from.
And I think it's a very good analogy because he's talking about this idea and he's like, well, you know, let's say your thing is to do strength training, you know, three days a week. And you go on vacation and you're not really going to be able to do it. But what you decide to do instead is that you'll just do two sets of push-ups and crunches on those days instead.
And the analogy he makes is he's like, it's kind of like a houseplant. He's like, when you're home, you can really give the plant all the attention it wants. But in these other moments, what you're doing is you're keeping the plant alive. And I think that's really valuable because oftentimes people will be like, well, who cares?
Two sets of push-ups and crunches, that's not going to shape my future outcome very much. And you're right. It won't. But what it will potentially do is enable you to continue with the behavior over time. And that's the value sometimes for me of a little bit of something being better than a lot of nothing. It's not that the thing I do, the smaller thing that I do, is beneficial in and of itself.
Although it is. It is, right. It's also part of a bigger picture. Right. And that bigger picture is that I'm flexible enough that I keep doing something to the best of my ability versus what feels like start, stop, start, stop, start, stop. Yes. It's much more gradual, but it keeps the momentum going.
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Chapter 4: What role do rigid standards play in exercise routines?
And that needs to be done. I can kind of manage it. But when things start to get really wobbly for me, I sometimes need to go back to more rigidity and structure. I need to go back to like, okay, I actually do need to sit down and go, okay, what meetings do you have today? And what are the spaces in between? And what are you going to do in those spaces in between?
Because I'm not in as good a place. And so I think about that sometimes too, also with exercise. I was thinking about this recently, like with my strength training, it's gotten a little bit wobbly. And so I'm like, you know what? I think what I'm going to do is rejoin this gym that I go to and they have strength training classes three days a week.
And I'm going to go to those for a little while because I'm off right now and I need the rigidity. And over time, I will probably migrate away from that again and kind of be more on my own. And this just goes back and forth, this waxing and waning of structure.
Absolutely. And, you know, what you just kind of demonstrated is it's a journey, right? And it ebbs and flows. And people with exercise, especially, they just, they have the wrong impression. I don't want to say wrong because that's judgmental. And some people do. My husband's exercise is the same day in, day out when we travel. Yeah.
You know, I mean, he is just one of these people who's going to do it the same way. But I don't think most of us... have either the discipline or the wherewithal or the desire or the value to do that. And so, I mean, everything in life changes. Yet, because of the way people have been socialized to think about exercising, they haven't been taught to change it.
Like you said earlier, 30 minutes, five days a week at moderate intensity, forever. But That is not a recipe for resilience for most people. And so that's what I think we need to do is I think we need to give people permission to be flexible and to be resilient with physical activity, just like they are as parents, as professionals, as daughters and sons and siblings, right?
I mean, we don't expect these other life areas not to change.
Exactly. Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up resilience and flexibility. Michelle, thank you so much. I always enjoy talking to you. And like I said, so much of the way I see things you have been a big influence on. So I love talking with you.
Thank you. I love talking with you too, Eric. Thank you so much.
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