In this episode of Simple Shifts: Conversations to Fuel Your Body, Mind and Soul, Martha and Peter discuss the importance of gentle weight loss strategies, drawing insights from Martha’s experiences with her golden retriever, Franny. They explore meal prep techniques, the significance of portion control, and the gradual nature of weight gain and loss. The conversation emphasizes the need for a positive mindset towards maintenance and the challenges of quick-fix diets, while also addressing the varying nutritional needs within families.
Key Takeaways
- Meal prep can simplify dinner decisions and reduce stress.
- Having components ready in the fridge allows for flexibility in meal choices.
- Gentle weight loss can be achieved by simply adjusting portion sizes.
- Mindful eating and awareness of quantity can lead to better health outcomes.
- It’s important to celebrate maintenance as a success in weight management.
- Gradual changes in eating habits can lead to sustainable weight loss.
- The environment we live in can impact our eating habits and weight.
- Stress can complicate weight loss efforts and decision-making.
- Understanding individual nutritional needs is crucial in meal planning.
- Learning from simple experiences, like caring for a pet, can provide valuable insights.
What I Learned About Weight Loss From My Dog Franny Podcast
Video Transcript
Martha McKinnon (00:00)
Hi, and welcome to Simple Shifts: Conversations to Fuel Your Body, Mind and Soul. I’m Martha McKinnon from the blog Simple Nourished Living, and with me is my partner and brother, Peter Morrison.
Peter Morrison (00:29)
Hi.
Martha McKinnon (00:31)
Hi, how you doing?
Peter Morrison (00:33)
Good, how are you?
Martha McKinnon (00:36)
I’m doing really well. So today I thought we would talk about, just, I would talk about my dear golden retriever Franny and what I learned about gentle weight loss from her. What Franny, the golden retriever taught me about weight loss. But before we jump into that, what’s going well in your world?
Peter Morrison (00:38)
Well, it’s a beautiful day for one thing. We’ve had a stretch of cooler gray days, so we’re seeing blue skies and sunshine today, so that’s really nice. We were talking something a little bit ago about, you were talking about component meal prep or ingredient meal prep, and this week was kind of a busy week.
And we came home one day and were kind of at a loss for what to have for dinner. And I just happened to have some quinoa that I had made in the refrigerator, some leftover. I had some leftover air fried broccoli and sweet potatoes from earlier in the week. We also had in the fridge some leftover chicken. So I just ended up making it was too cold for a salad. We eat a lot of salads and so wanted something a little more belly warming, if you will. So I ended up making these little bowls with quinoa and chicken, the leftover vegetables and some, I used like a bottled teriyaki marinade that I had in the refrigerator. But it was so, I mean, I still don’t know about having a whole lot of components, or ingredients in the fridge, but just having something to start from just made the meal so much easier.
Martha McKinnon (02:25)
Uh-huh. Yeah.
Peter Morrison (02:31)
The only stress was, how are you gonna combine it? But it wasn’t like starting from scratch. What are we gonna have? And I just chuckled, because I’m like, this is what Martha was talking about, the whole component thing. So it was really cool and good.
Martha McKinnon (02:46)
Well, that’s cool, because that’s like an it’s an insight, right? And it’s and like you’re saying, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You know, I think we all have to just figure out what works for us in any moment. But like you said, there’s something nice about opening the fridge, opening the pantry and having like seeing something and getting an idea like of what you might be able to do with that. Like you said, instead of just having nothing to start with and having to start totally from scratch, which can be you know, if it’s been a long day and you’re tired and you’re hungry in the moment it can just seem like an overload to try to figure it all out. So that’s cool.
Peter Morrison (03:24)
Mm. And that’s where we were. We were totally like, ugh, you’re hungry, but you just didn’t really want to start a meal from square one. But it worked out.
Martha McKinnon (03:37)
Well, good. I’m glad that worked. And maybe we can add that into the post somehow. Maybe you can add a comment about your experience so that people can start to get ideas. Because I think that’s sometimes really helpful for people to have concrete examples from which to draw. So leave a comment.
Peter Morrison (04:04)
I will try to remember to do that. I’ll add it to my list.
Martha McKinnon (04:08)
Add it to your list. Please, yeah, I mean, again, to all of you watching this, we do have a growing library of podcasts, we’ve been doing this for a few weeks now. And so if you go back and look at that topic, that podcast, where we talked about this concept of component or ingredient meal prepping, which is kind of like more of a sort of almost kind of like a restaurant approach.
When you go to a restaurant, they’ve done a lot of prep, they’ve got a lot of stuff ready, and that’s how they can make these wonderful dishes for you and deliver them up in just 10 minutes. They’re not starting from scratch. And so it’s kind of a fun and different way of thinking about getting a meal, a lunch, or a dinner on the table in relatively short order. And I’ve been playing more and more with it.
Peter Morrison (05:02)
What I like about it too is depending on what you have available obviously, you can sort of, well, if I wanted a soup, I just needed to, you know, get some, heat some broth and toss it into a broth or if you want a bowl, you can do a bowl and so it’s easy to adjust to based on do you want a lot? Do you want, you’re not that hungry? Do you just want a little? So.
Martha McKinnon (05:28)
And I think like you’re saying, it’s sometimes more practical because, well, while some type of meal prep and meal planning is very important, oftentimes what I found with the more traditional approach is, you plan it a week ahead, you go do your shop, you you pick your recipes, but then the weather shifts, or your plans shift or, or you’re feeling, you know, what seemed like something you would want last week isn’t as appealing now.
Peter Morrison (05:50)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (05:53)
And so, like you said, if you’d opened up the fridge and seen those components, the roasted veg, the quinoa, the chicken, you could have thought, ooh, soup. I mean, that might have appealed to you. Or salad might have appealed to you on a bed of greens. Or it just gives you a lot more flexibility, I think, in just being able to respond to how you’re really feeling in the exact moment instead of feeling locked into something you decided a week ago. So.
Peter Morrison (06:20)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I’m notorious for not really knowing what I want until it’s meal time.
Martha McKinnon (06:27)
Right? Which is, which makes it’s more tricky then, right? There’s more pressure in the moment. And I’m all about…
Peter Morrison (06:38)
Mm-hmm. But if you have things ready to go, you can adjust on the fly as opposed to, we’re having, if you predetermined it, like you said, the week before, it’s like, I don’t really feel like chicken pot pie tonight. I want something else, so.
Martha McKinnon (06:55)
Right. Right. So it’s just another way to think about it. It’s just another, you know, another way of thinking about it. Another tool, right in the toolbox. So yeah, so that’s, that’s great. I’m glad that that worked. So yeah, it’s always good to, it’s always good to feed yourself without having to resort to, you know, Door Dash or something like that that would be expensive and and usually caloric, right? Restaurants, I mean, I’m often shocked. I loved those Eat This Not That (affiliate link). Remember those books back in the day? And they would often share, you know, the calorie realities of a lot of the rest, the menu items. And it was always shocking to me, like how it’s like, how do they how does a restaurant put that many calories in a dish?
You know, it seems like it would be a lot of effort. yes, you have a lot more control. It’s going to be a lot healthier, a lot less expensive. So it has a lot of advantages for sure.
Martha McKinnon (08:00)
So what I learned about losing weight, gentle weight loss from my golden retriever Franny. So Franny’s been gone a few years now, but my beloved golden retriever, she was a devourer of food. I think maybe she had been the runt of the litter or something. I mean, she seemed always, always hungry and she was one who devoured her food. And there was a point where I took her to the vet and the vet said, you know, she needs to lose some weight for her own health and wellness. And so, what did I do? How did I help her? How did I help her achieve her weight loss? And I thought about that in comparison to what we often do to ourselves when we decide that we need to take off a few pounds.
As I look back on it, was just so easy and so natural and so sort of common sense. I mean, basically at that point we were feeding her twice a day and because of her weight she was getting this like sort of heaping cup of kibble. And what we had purchased for her sometime earlier than that was one of those puzzle dishes. You know, the dishes that allow the food to kind of get spread out so that the dog doesn’t eat it so quickly.
Because oftentimes she was eating so fast that she would then blurp up some of her some of her food. So the puzzle dish and I’m sure we can share a picture, you know, in this podcast, so people don’t know what we’re talking about. It’s basically just designed like a spiral just to kind of slow her down. And so we just at that point, we didn’t get drastic. All we did was we took what was what had been her overfilled cup of dog food and I just kind of made sure I leveled it off or went with this kind of a scant cup.
And kept the food the same, but took what was an over filling cup to a scant cup, just kind of leveled it off and did that. Then cut back, didn’t totally cut out her treats, but, you know, cut back, bought small Milk Bones instead of giving her large Milk Bones, bought smaller ones so that she didn’t feel that she was losing out on her treats. And we were, we were walkers anyway. We walked.
And that was really it. That’s what we did. And over the course of a few months, she lost the weight. Lo and behold, that’s all it took was to just basically decrease her portions. And I think there’s a lot to that we can learn from that experience because I think sometimes we make it so hard.
Martha Mckinnon (10:40)
I didn’t change up her food, I didn’t look for a lighter food. It’s like, what do we do to ourselves when we decide we want to lose a few pounds? Where does our mind go? What are some of the things we start doing?
Peter Morrison (10:56)
Is that a question?
Martha McKinnon (10:58)
Yeah. Have you ever noticed like where your mind goes or like me, it was like I start reading books. I think I have to, you know, change out my whole way of eating. I had a friend recently, we were out with friends and he’s struggling with his weight and he needs to have surgery and they’ve told him that before he has the surgery that he he needs to lose 30 pounds. He’s a food lover and he looked at me and he knows what I do and he said, Martha, I have a question for you. Can you help me with this? He says, I need you to give me a meal plan. And I just know from experience that that’s not the solution. We can’t just take somebody, their total way of life, and have them suddenly drop their whole way of being into a different food plan.
Peter Morrison (11:51)
Mm.
Martha McKinnon (11:52)
And that’s actually what spurred my remembering this conversation because what Rod said to me he said, I wish you had basically explained to Ray that it just doesn’t work like that. You know I can give you lots of ideas on how to change up what you’re doing, but it really has to come from you and what works for you because what I like to eat might be totally foreign to what to the way that you’re eating.
Martha McKinnon (12:16)
And Rod said to me after he says, I wish you had mentioned to him our experience with Franny, you know, and the fact that it really was that simple. It was really about, it can often be about as simple as just taking a look at your quantity. Often we look at what we’re eating instead of really looking at how much we’re eating. And that that can be a very powerful place to start is to just take what you’re eating and eat less of it.
And this comes back to the Mindless Eating concept of 20% less and then maybe bulking up to make up so that you’re not feeling like you’re missing out, bulking up on your fruits and vegetables and salads and things to offset where you’re eating less of the starches and the proteins and all that.
Peter Morrison (13:02)
So I’m curious with Franny, I had a thought. Knowing that you guys always walked.
How do you think it happened that she even got to the point where she was overweight? Because do you think it was more treats or did you start giving her slightly more food at her meal time?
Martha McKinnon (13:29)
I think it could be, I mean, it could be the fact that, you just, you’re not, and again, it can be that subtle in us too, where suddenly, you know, you’re suggesting a cup of food, but the cup becomes a heaping cup. I mean, and that’s enough probably to turn it into like one in an eighth or one and a quarter, right? If you’re really heaping up, because I just used them like a plastic measuring cup.
Peter Morrison (13:50)
Hmm
Martha McKinnon (13:52)
It can be that little bit over time that can really start to affect things. Yeah, I mean, there may have been extra treats, there may have been extra pizza crust and things like that, you know, quite conceivably. I mean, but I think that that’s what can happen to us. It can be that gradual, a little bit of overeating over time, you know, and suddenly you take her to the vet and she probably went to the vet once a year in good health. Right. And so it’s been a year and a year of that over eating.
But even that little bit caused her, I mean, again, cause you’re talking about somebody who’s, know, 35, you know, what she was probably 40, maybe 45 pounds. So it was enough for the vet to say, you know, she needs to lose a few pounds. So that’s, that’s another reality that happens to people over time. I know it happens to other friends down here where suddenly women are going along fine, fine, fine, you know, decade, decade, you know, you lose, you know, you’re gaining a pound, two pounds, three pounds a year, and it doesn’t seem like very much.
But then suddenly, you know, a lot of my friends are in menopause, or moving beyond that. And suddenly, you know, your metabolism is slowing down, you’re losing muscle mass, you’re maybe more sedentary than you were younger, you’re still eating the same or maybe eating more, you know, just because gradually portions can get bigger.
And now you’re suddenly 20, 30, 40 pounds overweight and you’re very, very frustrated when the reality is, you want it off now, but the truth is it happened gradually, you know, over years and decades. And so it can be that subtle. And I mean, and so that’s what I’m really excited about is exploring with people the power of these gentle shifts. Because the more I study habit change, the more I look back at my experience and the experience of others and look at the challenges of those I’m hanging out with, I’m just seeing this…
I just had this other insight that just came to me. I mean, it’s really that subtle. I’m just having this awareness that what we’re really struggling with is this disconnect between our environment and our biology. The fact that we were designed for a very different environment. Our biology is all designed for living in a feast or famine world where food was sometimes scarce, was sometimes plentiful, where there was a lot more physical activity. Now there’s just, look at the environment now. Food is everywhere.
Martha McKinnon (16:32)
And if it’s not food itself, it’s the advertising for food, right, on television. Where do you go even these days where there’s not temptations? There used to be bookstores. But now there’s coffee shops often attached with muffins and brownies attached to the bookstore. You go for gasoline in the convenience store, and there’s food.
I can’t think of anywhere you can go where there isn’t food. I mean, that’s really, that’s the bottom line is that we’re not broken. We are doing exactly what our biology is designed to do. The problem is the environment is so much shifted and the reality that these gradual eating a little bit too much, a little bit too little can really affect you over time.
Peter Morrison (17:26)
Right, so if you have the gradual change that causes the weight increase, then another disconnect is you want it, people want it gone not gradually, they want it gone quickly. So there’s that.
Martha McKinnon (17:48)
And that just adds a bunch of stress and then we can talk about. I mean, so it’s like, you can just see how all this, and then stress adds this whole next layer of problems, right? And complexity, because everything’s more difficult when you’re stressed. Um, where if you’re, where if you’re calm, you know, things are, think about your own life. Like when you’re trying to get something done and you’re feeling stressed versus trying to get something done when you’re calm, like what’s, you know, it’s a heck of a lot harder to accomplish anything when you’re feeling overwhelmed, overloaded, stressed and having all that negative thinking and emotion around it. So, we’ve taken what’s a really pretty basic and simple concept, and I think just overcomplicated it. And I think maybe it’s our human nature to make things complicated.
Peter Morrison (18:41)
Well that makes me think, so I saw a comment on Facebook this morning. I wanna see if I can find it real quick. I can’t find it real quickly, but it was something along the lines of, I’m like an old Weight Watcher from back in the day and I used to have success with the program, her mindset was sort of, from my perspective, a little harsh on herself because she said something along the lines of under the new plan, I’m not losing weight. I’m just maintaining. And I was thinking, well, that’s success, isn’t it?
Martha McKinnon (19:31)
I think so. And in fact, that’s another topic that I think we’ll talk about soon. This whole concept of maintenance, I think what we could all benefit from is a maintenance first mentality, you know, and maybe taking a maintenance first approach. I try to get to stability before you try to, you know, to try to really change things up. But I think there’s a lot of harshness.
Peter Morrison (19:55)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (22:00.779)
I think we do that to ourselves where we think we need to be a drill sergeant or we can’t, we have sort of a negative outlook as opposed to a positive outlook. So you could look at that and spin it and say, I’ve learned to maintain. And that’s a really great step, right?
Because now I’m, if I never did anything more than that, at least the problem’s not getting worse, right? And now I’ve got this point of stability from which I can start to continue to explore. So again, it’s all depending on how you see it. Internally herself, she was beating herself up and that can be the power of the support that can happen in these meetings, right? Somebody can say that out loud and then others around can point out and remind that that’s a very, that can be a very positive step. That’s a step in the right direction because now you’re not, you know, you’re not gaining anymore, which is great, you know.
Peter Morrison (20:46)
Right, and I was thinking, well, if you get that under control to something you’re comfortable with and you’re really confident, a few small tweaks, right? A little bit more exercise, a few less calories here and there, and then I would think you’re gonna start moving in the right direction from there.
Martha McKinnon (21:07)
Right. Right. Yeah, because ultimately we want to get to maintenance, right? And it’s like, you’re there. I mean, you’ve already got that part of it, you know, celebrate that, like you said, but again, it’s spinning the way you’re seeing it, which is sometimes what people need help with, because we do tend to be really hard on ourselves. So.
Peter Morrison (21:24)
Do you think Franny suffered isn’t the right word, but do you think, obviously she doesn’t have any control, I mean, she eats what you, you know, all of our pets eat what we give them, and she adjusted obviously, but do you know what am I trying to ask?
Martha McKinnon (21:43)
Yeah, think, and that’s why we consciously didn’t take away the treats. And I don’t know, mean, guess we’re projecting on ourselves what we think our dogs are experiencing. And we can’t really know for sure. But I think we didn’t really change the routine at all. It’s not like we only fed her once a day. We didn’t make a drastic shift. Like I said, we made the milk bones smaller.
Peter Morrison (22:04)
Yeah. Yeah.
Martha McKinnon (22:07)
We cut down the food just a little bit, but the food was the same so she didn’t have to adjust to a different food. So I think we did it in a gentle way. I guess I can never know for certain, but I feel pretty confident that she didn’t exhibit any real unhappiness. She’s a golden retriever. They’re so happy most of the time. They’re just happy dogs.
Peter Morrison (22:35)
Mm-hmm. Right, right.
Martha McKinnon (22:38)
So did that make sense? I think that you can just get these insights and just be learning from so many different experiences in your life. Sometimes you don’t need a diet expert or a nutritionist. Sometimes you just have to look at something as simple and basic as your pet. And what would you do for your pet who is struggling? And just think about how you could apply that to your own life.
And sometimes you can almost just start to laugh when you see the ease with which you can start moving towards your goal.
Peter Morrison (23:15)
Right, no drastic overhauls, no cleaning out the fridge, no special foods, no special vitamins.
Martha McKinnon (23:26)
Right. And just start with that and just get used to that and see how that feels for a while. Right. And then you can again continue to assess, your situation and again, make gradual shifts. Suddenly if that wasn’t enough, I could take her on a longer, you know start to increase the time we were walking or add a walk?
I mean, there’s so many, when you really start to think about incremental shifts, you start to see all kinds of little things you can do that just don’t overwhelm you. And I think that that’s where we start to really begin to feel empowered and excited maybe is an overreach if you’re really struggling, but at least you start to feel like you have more control and that you have more control than you realize.
Peter Morrison (24:18)
Mm-hmm. Well, that also made me think of it as a few episodes back now. When I mentioned when I was, when I’m preparing the meals, it’s based on my appetite level and I’m the more active one burning a lot more on a daily basis. But now I’ve cut back to instead of making each of us a sandwich for lunch or a wrap, I actually make one and just cut it in half. Neal’s happy, I’m happy. And if it’s not quite enough for me, well, I’ll have a little bit of yogurt or I’ll have, you know, couple bites of a banana or something a little more.
Martha McKinnon (25:08)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Peter Morrison (25:10)
But even at my level, like sometimes a whole sandwich was just too much. It’s sort of where I wouldn’t have, if I was like on my own, I probably wouldn’t have necessarily made that connection. But since Neal asked me just to maybe cut back a little bit, I’m like, well, on the portions.
Martha McKinnon (25:35)
On the portions? And that’s really cool. That brings up, I noticed in our spreadsheet, that there was an inquiry from a reader about the issue and maybe in a little bit more extreme term where she, she’s the caretaker. She’s the one who needs to be more cognizant in watching her weight. She needs fewer calories, but she’s the caretaker for her husband who has some health problems and needs more, significantly more calories. And she was talking about how to deal and wanted some strategies for dealing with that reality.
And so this is one really good suggestion for her. And maybe that’s something we could in a future episode just take a deeper dive into to talk about all these ways and all the adjustments we can make when, you know, one partner in the family needs significantly more or less than the other. And this can happen a lot. I mean, if one person has a more active job. If one person is larger than the other person, if one person is older.
So there’s a lot of times where this can come up where the nutrient needs, the amount of food required is just very different between the two people. What are some strategies where you’re not having to totally have two separate meal strategies? What can you do to make it easy? So that’s good.
Peter Morrison (26:55)
Mm-hmm. Well, thank you, Franny.
Martha McKinnon (26:57)
Thank you Franny for inspiring this week’s talk. And if you enjoyed this, we would love to have you like, subscribe, let other people know, let friends and family know about what we’re doing here because I’m really coming to understand that this is a big issue for so many people.
And often, especially as we reach a certain age, there are people who never really struggled with their weight where suddenly you reach middle age and beyond and you’ve got some challenges now that you’ve never experienced before. As well as people who have been having issues, like me, since they were a child. So I’d love to have you let others know what we’re doing here. It would be much appreciated.
Peter Morrison (27:48)
Mm-hmm. Thanks everyone, have a great day.
Martha McKinnon (27:52)
Thanks. Yeah, thanks and we’ll see you soon. Be well until then.
