When it comes to nutrition, where do you fall on the spectrum?

I was recently reading a book by Dr. Sherry Walling about psychology and entrepreneurship, and she discusses a spectrum between chaos and rigidity that we all fall on. It struck me that the same spectrum applies to how we feed ourselves.

On the rigidity side, imagine someone with firm ideas about what healthy eating looks like. She tends to eat the same things. She meal preps on Sundays. She has rules, and the rules work for her, most of the time. There are real strengths here: planning, consistency, thoughtfulness. But rigidity becomes a problem when life disrupts the plan. Taken further, this can cross into disordered eating: orthorexia, restrictive patterns, and at its most severe, anorexia.

On the chaos side, imagine someone whose eating is mostly reactive. She eats out more than she’d like, finds herself in another drive-thru because she forgot to pack lunch, or skips meals because she didn’t plan ahead. At its worst, dinner is popcorn because it was the only thing that felt feasible. There are strengths here too: flexibility, variety, a lack of food preoccupation that can be genuinely healthy. Taken further, chaotic eating can look like binge eating, chronic underfueling, or a pattern of restriction during the day followed by overeating at night, where the deprivation itself triggers the chaos.

Most of us aren’t all the way at either end. But we have a default, and it’s worth noticing which direction.

Here is where midlife makes things interesting.

This is my working theory, not something the research has formally tested: perimenopause has a way of intensifying whatever tendency you already have.

If your default is rigidity, the moment your body stops responding to what used to work, the instinct is to grip harder, usually with restriction of calories, food timing, or food groups. When women tell me that they are eating 1,200 calories a day and not losing weight, it indicates restriction may not be the right tool for the job.

If your default is chaos, perimenopause adds a biological headwind. Declining estrogen affects executive function, working memory, and the planning processes that help you shop, prep, and follow through on feeding yourself well. Layer on sleep disruption and the cognitive load of caregiving, and what was already spontaneous about meals can become genuinely chaotic.
Sometimes the transition shifts your tendency entirely. The organized meal-prepper, too exhausted to cook. The flexible eater suddenly building rigid rules because her body feels unrecognizable.

Moving towards the middle.

The first step is just noticing where you tend to land, without judgment.
If you run rigid, the work is adding flexibility. That might look like having two or three “good enough” meals you can default to when the plan falls apart, rather than treating an unplanned dinner as a moral failure. It might mean practicing the skill of eating an imperfect meal and noticing that you survived it just fine.

If you run chaotic, the work is adding just enough structure to support yourself without building a system that demands perfection. That might look like keeping a few staples stocked so there’s always something reasonable to assemble, or anchoring one meal a day, even if the rest are improvised. (I say this as someone whose DoorDash history could be entered as evidence against me.)

The trick is to borrow a little from the other side.

Need some help with your chaotic or rigid eating style?

Take action today by booking your free, 20-minute call.