The recent Atlantic article by Olga Khazan, “Avoiding Ultraprocessed Foods is Completely Unrealistic. Especially if you have kids,” brought a concern that I’ve carried for a long time into full clarity: Our worries about family weight and eating habits aren’t actually about the physical body. They’re about perfection. And they are a call to approach health completely differently.

I am a pediatrician working at the intersection of family stress, emotional health, weight, and eating habits. My private practice helps parents who are worried about their family’s weight and eating habits create lifelong relationships with food, body, self, and family. At its core, it’s eating disorder prevention with an anxiety-whisperer’s touch. I don’t take either of those designations lightly.

Khazan’s article captures the stress that each and every parent that I speak with knows: juggling schedules, children’s emotional needs, and the utter exhaustion that hits when it’s time for dinner. The idyllic “family meal” turns into a chaotic scramble to just get everyone fed before marching toward the eventual, blissful peace known as bedtime.

A large part of the stress that is experienced is knowing that the quick and easy meal choices (the ones we grab in moments of exhaustion and frustration because we just want (need!) to get it over with) are the same foods that are being lamented for being ultraprocessed and unhealthy. But busy parents (that’s all of us), especially those who are solo parenting or caregiving while pouring emotional energy into others professionally and personally, don’t have the time or bandwidth for the “healthy stuff.” “Who’s got time for that?” is a frequent refrain. “I’m not a trad wife. I don’t have a stay-at-home partner to focus on all of this. I’m a physician. I’m failing. Might as well just give up.”

Perfectionism.

It’s sneaky. And in medicine, we’ve been really selected for it. After all, we didn’t get accepted to medical school and residency and leadership roles by being mediocre, messy, and the realest versions of ourselves. We want the best. We only provide the best. And when it comes to our health, I’ve found that our best energy and effort are given away. Yes, given away to others. We have nothing left for ourselves and our families. And yet, we keep comparing ourselves to perfection, and see failure at every turn.

Our ideals are what we call “healthy.” They are depicted in the perfect meals and smiling families we scroll past while seeking stress relief while our own children are melting down in the background. The same social scrolling that spikes anxiety because it never shows the truth:

We are real.

We aren’t perfect.

We are stressed and that’s where the dichotomies of black-and-white thinking, healthy vs unhealthy, whole vs ultraprocessed thrive.

We need to call it out. Repeatedly: Enough.

Enough of the perfectionism.

Enough of believing if we just work harder or longer we can break through to the other side and finally be healthy or perfect.

Enough of the rat races built on the backs of adults who normalize that stress and those unrealistic ideals to their children.

Enough.

When we name the damage that perfectionistic, idyllic definitions of health have created, we can finally see how well-intended ideals morph into monsters under stress. It’s by dismantling those ideals and the stress itself that we find not a middle ground, but a new path. One filled with realness, nuance, and lifelong relationships with food, body, and family.

Wendy Schofer is a pediatrician and a retired captain in the U.S. Navy.