Perfection Is Killing Your Progress: Stephen Campolo (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Stephen Campolo’s talk titled “Perfection Is Killing Your Progress” at TEDxColumbiaCollegeSC conference.

Stephen Campolo, a recovering food addict, shared his personal journey in his talk “Perfection Is Killing Your Progress.” He recounted his struggle with an eating disorder and a near-fatal health crisis due to his food addiction. Campolo highlighted the damaging effects of an all-or-nothing mentality, which he developed during his fitness journey, leading to a cycle of binge eating and self-imposed pressure.

He described the paradox of perfection, where striving for unrealistic standards hindered his progress and well-being. Despite trying various therapies and resources, Campolo realized the key was changing his relationship with food and rejecting the illusion of perfection. He advised setting realistic goals, embracing failure as part of the process, and focusing on consistency rather than perfection.

Campolo concluded by encouraging others to seek consistent progress in their lives, emphasizing that small, daily actions lead to significant, long-term change.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Early Struggles and Health Crisis

My name is Stephen Campolo, and I am a recovering food addict. This food addiction led to an eating disorder that almost killed me. About five years ago, I woke up in excruciating pain at about four in the morning. I want you to imagine the worst stomach ache you’ve ever had in your life, combined with the feeling of pins and needles just sticking you in the abdomen.

I thought I was dying, really, really scared. So, I jumped in my car and drove myself to the hospital. As soon as I got there, they took me back and ran some tests. An ultrasound had revealed that my gallbladder was about to rupture.

So, they scheduled emergency surgery, and my gallbladder was removed. I’ll never forget when the surgeon walked into my hospital room, just as I was still waking up from the anesthesia.

He looked at me and said, “Mr. Campolo, I don’t think you realize how lucky you are. If you would have waited just one or two more hours to come to the hospital, your gallbladder would have ruptured, and you would be dead.” Talk about a life-changing moment.

The Cause of the Health Crisis

Now, what had led to this gallbladder attack was, the night before, I had binged on an entire jar of peanut butter. It was just way too much for my body to handle, and it was the last straw, hence me having a gallbladder attack. Ultimately, what had led me to this point in my life was an all-or-nothing mentality I had developed when I started my fitness journey years ago.

I believed that in order to be successful on my journey, I had to be disciplined, and being disciplined meant being perfect. But the truth is, discipline has nothing to do with being perfect. Discipline has to do with being consistent. I was the type of guy where, if I felt like I messed up and had one little cookie, then I had to eat the entire package of cookies.

The All-Or-Nothing Mentality

This is like getting one flat tire and then deciding, you know what? I think I’m going to go slash my other three tires. It doesn’t really make much sense, right? But it was this all-or-nothing mentality that had gotten me to this point. Now, I have to take you way back.

So, I grew up on Long Island, New York, in an Italian home. For those of you who know Italians, we like to eat. And it’s this love affair with food that led me to gain close to 100 pounds during my childhood years. I’m the oldest of four kids, but I was the only kid that had a weight problem.

So, I knew from a very early age that my relationship with food was very, very different from other people. I remember going to kids’ birthday parties and wondering, “Is there going to be enough pizza for seconds or thirds? Am I going to be able to go sneak off and get another brownie?” I just always found a lot of pleasure in food from a very, very early age.

Decision to Change

Now, as I approached 14 years old, I decided, okay, it’s time. I don’t want to be the fat guy anymore. I was going through some hormonal changes, going through puberty, and it was time to make a change. I was tired of getting picked on, tired of getting bullied, tired of seeing all my friends go on dates with the pretty girls, so it was time to make a change.

Now, this was back in 2003, so there was no YouTube, there was no social media. If Google was around, I didn’t know it existed. So, there was really no reliable source to get information from. So, I decided to do what I had always seen in the Rocky movies. Whenever Rocky was getting ready for a fight, he would run.

ALSO READ: Get Your Body To Heal Itself: Anthony Galea (Transcript)

So, I said, “You know what? That’s a great idea. I’m going to start running.” And that’s exactly what I did. Every single day, I would go for my run. I would put on my Rocky soundtrack, play Eye of the Tiger on repeat, and just like Forrest Gump, I was running. Along with running every single day, I put myself on a very restrictive diet consisting of chicken and broccoli because I figured, well, how could anyone go wrong with chicken and broccoli?

Early Success and Challenges

But this restrictive way of eating was actually going to harm me down the road. Now, this plan did work in the short term. I lost about 50 pounds within the first three months, and over the coming year, I was down about 100 pounds. So, I was really, really happy with that. Now, what most people do when they want to lose weight and start a fitness plan is they restrict their food greatly, but then they want to exercise more.

That’s equivalent to putting less fuel in your car, but then wanting to drive it more. Well, it’s only going to be a matter of time before your car breaks down, right? And that’s exactly what I was doing to my own body. I was exercising a lot, but I wasn’t giving my body enough food, and my cravings were going through the roof, my hunger hormones were going wild, and it just wasn’t very sustainable.

The Onset of Binge Eating Disorder

The ironic thing is that my binge eating disorder didn’t start until I began my weight loss journey. You see, when I was younger, I just loved to eat, so I ate, but I didn’t classify foods as good or bad. The National Eating Disorder Association says that the strongest risk factors for binge eating is defined by something called perfectionism, and they say that perfectionism means setting the bar so high for yourself that the second you don’t meet that standard, you feel like a failure, and you want to self-sabotage. And this is exactly what I was doing.

Monday through Friday, I was on my game. I was working out every day. I was following my restrictive diet, but when the weekend would come, all bets were off. I would eat anything and everything, and typically by Sunday, what would happen is I would feel disgusted with myself, and I just wanted Monday to get here so I can get back on my diet again. This is called the Monday diet.

The Monday Diet and Long Journey

Are any of you familiar with that? Little did I know, I was going to be on this journey for the next 15 years. When I turned 15 years old, my family decided to move from New York down to Florida, and my dad got me a job at Gold’s Gym. Now for me, I was in heaven, because at this point in my life, I had just lost about 100 pounds, so I had a lot of loose skin, and I looked like a melted candle.

So, I said, “Alright, I’ve got to do something about this. Now I want to build some muscle like Arnold. I want to get strong. I want to become a macho man.” So, being at Gold’s Gym was a great opportunity for me, because there were all these personal trainers and coaches, so now I could absorb all this information from them and learn how to build my body.

The First Bodybuilding Show

Around this time, I met my first bodybuilding coach. After working out with him a few times, we decided to get me ready for my first teenage bodybuilding show, which just happened to be six months away. So for six months, I was all in. I was following this very, very strict diet. I was doing my cardio. I was working out every single day. I had to be ready, because within six months, I was going to be standing on a stage just like this in nothing but my Speedo, practically half naked, in front of my friends, family, and hundreds of other strangers.

So, there was no margin for error. I was fully, fully committed. Leading up to the show, about a few weeks away, I found myself going on the McDonald’s website and just staring at the burgers and staring at the fries and imagining holding this burger in my hands and taking a bite out of it. I didn’t even care about the show anymore.

ALSO READ: Transcript of Dr Nathan Bryan on The Diary Of A CEO Podcast

Post-Show Binge and Family Crisis

Oddly enough, as the show got closer, I just wanted it to be over so I could go back to enjoying all of my favorite foods. As you can imagine,

that’s exactly what happened. As soon as the bodybuilding show was over, I binged, and I binged really, really hard. I gained about 30 pounds within the first month of the show being over.

Now, I still didn’t think I had a problem, because I just told myself, “Well, you know what, Steven? You just dieted really hard for this show. You depleted yourself, so your body needs these extra calories. It’s okay to binge. It’s okay to eat a lot more food.” So, I still didn’t really think I had a problem.

Coping with Loss and Turning to Food

Years later, my mother was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer and given just one year to live. This was something that was really hard on me and my family, and I really didn’t know how to process it. Although, I did what I always did; I turned to food for comfort and as a distraction. While my mom was sick for the next year, I binged, and I binged a lot more frequently.

I remember listening to a podcast one day, and on this podcast, they were interviewing a former addict. When they asked him, “Why did you continue to do the drugs and drink the alcohol when you knew that it was destroying your life? You lost your family. You were losing your career. You were losing relationships. Why did you continue to do it?”

Honest Realizations

And he gave one of the most honest answers I ever heard. He said, “You know, even though I knew what I was doing was wrong, I was just looking for that little bit of happiness and that little bit of joy that the high would give me. I was looking for that little bit of happiness at the bottom of a bottle. Even though I knew I was going to regret it, even though I knew that as soon as this was over, I was going to hate myself, I was willing to sacrifice that because I wanted that little bit of joy.”

I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, that’s exactly how I feel about food.” I know that when I binge, I’m doing the wrong thing. I’m fully aware of that. I know I’m going to hate myself just minutes after I eat all these cookies and raid the pantry.

But I had fallen short so many times, and I had binged so many times, that I was familiar with the feeling of embarrassment, discomfort, shame, and guilt. It really had become the devil that I knew. Unfortunately, my mother did end up passing away, and the binging continued. At this point in my life, I knew that I had a problem and I had to get a hold of it, especially having just lost my mom.

A Turning Point

She was only 52, and 52 years old is way, way too young. And I knew what I was doing to my own health wasn’t good. On the outside, I looked fit because I was still following a very restrictive diet and I was still working out almost every day, but I was still binging. And when I would binge, it would hurt.

I knew I was hurting my health. My kidneys would hurt. My gallbladder would hurt, which ultimately had to be removed. It had come down to this all-or-nothing mentality that I had developed.

I believed that in order to be perfect, I had to do everything right. And that’s actually what stops people from making progress. We call this the paradox of perfection. We think that we have to be perfect with everything we do.

Seeking Solutions

But the truth is, perfection is just an illusion. It’s something that doesn’t even exist. But so many of us strive to achieve this standard of perfection. And I was the one putting all of this pressure on myself.

At this point in my life, I had tried a lot of things. I met with therapists and eating disorder counselors. And I knew people who had success with those things, but it just didn’t work for me. I bought all the books you can imagine on binge eating and eating disorders, but nothing really seemed to click.

And then one day, I just thought to myself, “Why don’t I just change my relationship with food? I’m the one putting all this pressure on myself to be perfect.” But again, perfection is something that doesn’t even exist. It’s just an illusion.

Embracing a New Philosophy

You’ve been taught our entire life that you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Well, I am here to tell you that you can, and you should. And that’s actually how you get the best results. So today, I want to share a few ways with you that you can move from the idea of trying to be perfect and get on a path to start making more consistent progress.

ALSO READ: Tinnitus: Ringing in the Brain by Josef Rauschecker at TEDxCharlottesville (Transcript)

First, you want to set a realistic timeframe for yourself. As a full-time fat loss coach, I have hundreds of conversations with people every single year. And my favorite question to ask them is, “How long did it take you to gain all this weight? How long did it take you to gain 100 pounds or 50 pounds?”

Did it happen overnight, or was it a period of years? And of course, their answer is, “Well, it happened over years, right?” I always like to say, “No one ever got in shape from having one good meal, and no one ever got fat from having one bad meal, right?” It’s usually a culmination of the things that we’re doing consistently.

Realistic Goals and Embracing Failure

But yet, people want to do these extreme things, and they want to lose the weight overnight, which isn’t very realistic. So, I always say, “Give yourself a realistic timeframe. You didn’t gain the weight overnight; you’re not going to lose it overnight.” So, start setting long-term goals and take all that pressure off of yourself.

Secondly, you want to embrace failure. When I first started my fitness journey years ago, I looked at failure as a death sentence. I thought that if I slipped up just a little bit and had a Hershey’s kiss or had a little piece of candy, that it was all over. I was a failure.

I was ruined. But the truth is, failure is part of the process. And even when I begin working with a client today, I always tell them from the very beginning, “Listen, you’re going to fall off track. You’re going to fail.”

Simplifying the Fitness Journey

We’re all human. Failure happens to all of us. And don’t be surprised when it does, because it’s going to happen. However, your success will be dictated by recognizing that you messed up and then course-correcting quickly.

My most successful clients are the ones who acknowledge that they messed up a little bit, get back on track, forget it happened, and now they’re moving on. Don’t allow one little slip-up to become two or three, and now a week or a month has gone by, and you’re still sabotaging and you’re back at square one. Failure is part of the process.

And third, you want to do less and not more. Having been involved in fitness for close to 20 years, I see it all the time. When people want to start a fitness journey, what do they do? They want to do a million things at once.

Conclusion: Consistency Over Perfection

They want to go from zero to 100 miles an hour. They want to cut sugar, cut the bread, cut carbs. They want to do yoga, run 10 miles a day, lift weights. They set the bar so high for themselves, and then by the second or third day when they can no longer sustain this new lifestyle, they feel like a failure and are usually pulling into a McDonald’s drive-thru because they set the bar so high for themselves.

You don’t have to do that. To be successful on your fitness journey, you just have to do a few things but do them consistently over time. Get your steps in every day, go for a walk, work out three to four days a week, follow a well-balanced diet. If you could do these things but do them consistently, you’re going to be way ahead of the game.

Before I leave you today, I want you to identify an area of your life where maybe you’ve been trying to be perfect and setting the bar so high for yourself, and instead of trying to achieve this level of perfection, start aiming for consistent progress. Because it’s the little things that we do every single day that create ripples in our life, and these ripples ultimately compound into tidal waves of progress months and years down the road. So, stop trying to be perfect and start trying to be consistent, because consistency always compounds. Thank you.