In this episode of Simple Shifts: Conversations on Food, Life, Weight and Mindset, Martha and Peter discuss the concept of focusing on ‘one thing’ for effective weight management and healthy living. They explore how narrowing focus can simplify the journey towards better health, emphasizing the importance of living within one’s means, planning meals, and utilizing tools like the slow cooker. The conversation also delves into the benefits of intermittent fasting, understanding hunger, and creating a sustainable meal planning routine. Ultimately, they highlight the significance of momentum in achieving lasting lifestyle changes.
Key Takeaways
- Success comes from narrowing your focus to one thing.
- Living within your means simplifies weight management.
- Planning meals can prevent unhealthy eating choices.
- The slow cooker can be a game changer for meal prep.
- Intermittent fasting can make eating easier and more flexible.
- Hunger should not be feared; it’s a natural signal.
- Food should nourish, not entertain.
- Creating a routine can free up mental space.
- Momentum is key to making lasting changes.
- Engaging with others can enhance motivation and accountability.
The One Thing for Weight Management Podcast
Video Transcript
Martha McKinnon (00:00)
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.
Hi, how are you doing?
Peter Morrison (00:20)
Hi there. I’m doing fine today, how are you?
Martha Mckinnon (00:25)
I’m doing really fine. love these conversations with you. feel like everyone just gets me excited and motivated and inspired. So thanks for doing this with me.
Peter Morrison (00:30)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (00:38)
So today we’re going to talk about the one thing for weight management. Whether you’re trying to lose weight, maintain your weight. There might be folks out there trying to gain weight, but in our world there are less of those. But we’re managing, figuring out how to manage the weight, the one thing for weight loss. And the idea for this came from a book I read some time ago called The One Thing.
And the book was written by Gary Keller, who is the co-founder and chairman of Keller Williams Real Estate. And he wrote a book called The One Thing, The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results. And basically the book talks about and explores in great detail the fact that in his experience and from experience of a lot of successful people, that success comes down to narrowing your focus. Just narrowing your focus to one thing at a time. Does that make sense?
Peter Morrison (01:35)
Without a doubt.
Martha McKinnon (01:39)
Yeah, so I started to read the book and immediately I took all of the lessons that it was putting forth because it was talking about success in your business life or your personal life or you know your health and wellness whatever whatever you were focusing on but I immediately because I tend to see everything through the lens of what we do you know on Simple Nourished Living, which is a real focus on you know weight management, healthy eating, healthy living and so I immediately saw it through that lens of like the one thing for weight management.
And I immediately recognized the fact that so many of us when we’re trying to figure it out, you know, we’re frustrated, we’re overwhelmed, we take on everything and we try to just change up everything and we get overwhelmed and frustrated and we spin our wheels and we’re going right and left. You know, today we’re doing this and tomorrow we’re doing that and we’re looking for the one best solution and it keeps us kind of spinning and spinning and spinning and not really moving forward, you know, in any significant way because of that lack of focus.
So the suggestion in the book is to be asking yourself, you know, what’s the one thing that you could do such that by doing that one thing, everything else would become easier or unnecessary. So that’s the question to just keep asking yourself. What’s the one thing I could do, you know, such that by doing that everything else would become easier or unnecessary, in any aspect of your life that you’re trying to conquer. Whether it be, you know, getting your finances in order or, you know, building your business or improving your relationships or, you know, eating better, exercising more, managing your weight.
What’s the one thing that you could do that if you did it, you know, and if you figured it out and then you focus on that and you just need to make that your focus until the point where it gets easy and then you can move on to another thing and another thing, instead of just trying to do everything at once. We were designed to focus and not to just try to do everything.
Martha McKinnon (03:45)
So I’m going to hit you with the question so I could share what my one thing was on this whole journey. Maybe that’s best for me to do. When I read this book, I immediately thought, what’s the one thing? What’s the one thing? The thought that came into my head that has stayed with me since reading the book a few years ago is that everything gets easier for me if I live within my means. That means financially.
And I often think of weight management as analogous with managing your budget. Like if I learn to live within my means, if I learn to live within the amount of food that you know, I can eat without gaining or losing weight, then everything’s going to get easier. So that became sort of my overarching like so one thing if I focus on. Because so many of us I think for a long time, for me, I think I fought against reality.
It’s like somehow I think weight management can get really, really simple if you let it be really, really simple. If you weigh more than you want to weigh, at the end of the day, the bottom line is that you’re taking in more energy, you’re taking in more food than your body needs.
And you can fight that, you can argue with that, you can get mad because your metabolism is too slow you can You know you can fight reality, but at the end of the day if you just embrace that, accept that and start moving like forward from there, then it gets easier, and it’s like okay, so that’s now I need to just figure out what I can eat and how much I can eat you know to stay where I am. Or if I’m trying to lose you know, how do I eat a little bit less so that I can lose the excess weight. Because if we’re carrying excess weight, what does that mean?
Martha McKinnon (05:44)
It means we’ve taken in more energy than we needed, right? And we’ve got reserves, we’ve got extra, we’ve got extra stores and that we’re going to need to call upon, we’re going to eat, need to eat less than we need energetically so that our body can call upon those stores so that we can get back to the equilibrium that we ultimately want to achieve.
And when I started to think about it that way, it got easier for me. And when I started to think about it in terms of my budget, you know, like if you’re constantly living month to month, depending upon your credit card and extending yourself that way, it’s going to create an imbalance in your life. And for me, I’ve lived like that and it created tremendous amounts of stress, just like eating more than I needed, you know, created stress in the fact that I hated the way I looked. I hated the way I felt. I hated that I couldn’t fit into my clothes. I hated that I was always in this sort of fight with food and my body and my relationship with myself. Does that make sense?
Peter Morrison (06:59)
Absolutely.
Martha McKinnon (07:02)
Yeah. And so, and after that, then my thought was, you know, in terms of living within my means, what are the things that kind of tripped me up in my life? And I found what tends to trip me up is getting to the end of the day without a plan, you know, getting to the end of the day, you’ve had a long day, you’ve worked hard, you’ve had a commute, you know, you’re tired and you need to, you want to eat, but you don’t really have a plan.
Martha McKinnon (07:30)
And when you don’t have a plan, then you do what’s easy. You go out, you stop for fast food, you grab take out, you do what’s convenient, you dial for pizza, you dial for Chinese food. And then you end up overeating those foods. They tend to be caloric and you just end up in this vicious cycle. So when I thought about the next one thing that would really be helpful for me, it was like to have food readily available in a really easy way.
And so for me, the tool in my kitchen that became a real life changer was the crock pot, the slow cooker. Because I started to depend upon that, in a way where, you know, you have a plan early in the day. And for example, I just did it, you know recently, you know, you find an easy recipe, you load the food in the crock pot and then you can step away, you get on with your day. And then when you’re hungry, you’ve got something there ready, willing and able to be served up.
And it just takes out all that thinking because for me as the day progresses, again, I lose focus, lose energy. And sometimes even if you have a plan for what you want to cook, but that requires a lot of cooking at the end of the day, you kind of lost your motivation and so I found the slow cooker to be magical because in the morning I have more energy you know I’m less distracted. I can get the stuff in there and then it’s done you know and I feel the same way about having some prepared foods in the fridge like we’ve talked about the components. You know if I’ve got some rotisserie chicken and I’ve got some you know cooked vegetables and I’ve got some salad vegetables that I’ve prepped that don’t need to be washed and chopped. It makes figuring something out for dinner just so much easier.
So for me, the slow cooker became that one thing that really helped make sure that I would have food available when I needed it so I wouldn’t opt for those less healthy choices.
Peter Morrison (09:43)
Do you think, so you said something earlier about, you seemed to be fine during the day, it was like the end of the day that would trip you up. So you felt like in the morning, like the first part of your day you didn’t struggle.
Martha McKinnon (10:01)
I really struggled, like if I think back to, and I think, you know, and I’m taking it back to, cause now I do work from home and I have a lot more control over my schedule, but I think back to when I really sort of was struggling and caught in the vicious cycle. And it seemed to be dinner. I mean, I will say that as I look back on it, I mean, there were struggles, there were struggles earlier in the day, but that was at a time when I was just totally on a, like if I look back at the weight loss struggle, there was a time when I was just oblivious to what I was eating and what I was doing, you know? That got me to the point where I stepped into Weight Watchers and then I started to learn and become aware of just how much I was overeating.
And so there was a time when I was overeating at breakfast, I was overeating at lunch, I was overeating at every meal, but I was oblivious to it. And then there came a point when I learned, you know, the fact that I was overeating, that I was taking in a lot more food than a person of my frame needed. And I started to appreciate just how many calories in some of the foods that I just ate without even thinking about it.
So there was a huge shift in understanding that happened. And then from there, if I think about where the struggle over time, where the struggle really came in, I think breakfast got really easy because I think it just went on automatic pilot.
I found that in lunch, the same thing, I think those kind of went, they got sort of easier where I just had these rotation of sort of healthy options. I never typically woke up in the morning and wanted to like undermine my day with a donut. That just doesn’t really happen for me.
Peter Morrison (11:45)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (11:48)
I was really happy to eat something more healthy and nourishing and I learned about the importance of eating a healthy balanced breakfast. And then of course with the intermittent fasting experiments, then breakfast sometimes became a non-issue because sometimes I would skip breakfast and my first meal would become lunch. So yeah, I mean, so as I think about it, the real wild card for me became dinner because especially as we moved into working on the website and you know, the day gets away from you.
Peter Morrison (12:27)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (12:30)
If you don’t have a plan, and you work really hard, you get to the end of the day and you’re tired. And that’s when for me it could like spin out and say, well, let’s just go get food or let’s just, you know, let’s just order Chinese or where if I could have something in the slow cooker, then that wouldn’t even be an issue anymore. Cause now I had something healthy, you know, ready and waiting for me when I was, when we were ready to eat it.
Peter Morrison (12:58)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (13:00)
So that was really helpful for me. How about you, if you really thought about an area that challenges you right now. I mean if you thought about one thing you wanted to shift or change?
Peter Morrison (13:05)
Well, I was thinking back a few years and as you were sharing your story, I think for me, my issue or whatever issues I had if I felt like they weren’t necessarily weight but maybe overeating. I think when I really embraced time restricted eating or intermittent fasting, everything became easier for me.
Martha McKinnon (13:30)
Yeah. Why do you think that was? Like what’s the magic about, mean, cause I’m also a fan of the time restricted eating. I mean, and I was hesitant when you’ve, when you talked about your success with it. I, there are a lot of hesitancies that came up for me that we can talk about, you know, later, but like, what, what do you think was so helpful for you with the intermittent fasting?
Peter Morrison (13:58)
Well, I’ve never been a big breakfast eater. So it made sense if you’re doing intermittent fasting or time restricted eating, it made sense to eliminate or to use the time in the morning because you’re already naturally fasting while you’re sleeping anyway. So it made sense to extend for me to extend that window.
So what was your question again?
Martha McKinnon (14:29)
Why do think it was so like, you said everything kind of sort of shifted for you with the intermittent fasting. And I’m just like, well, what was the shift or why do you think that there was a shift with that approach?
Peter Morrison (14:44)
I just feel that when I found a time that worked for me, I felt like I could be less careful with what I was eating for lunch and dinner because the window in a 24 hour period that I’m eating is, I’m not eating 16 or 18 hours a day. It’s a much smaller window. So I’m gonna naturally not eat as much because when I’m full or it’s harder for me to overeat in a shorter window. And I felt like if I wanted to have french fries with lunch on occasion, not all the time, but on occasion or have dessert, because it sounded good, I’m still getting a fair amount of calories without overdoing it. So I felt like I was not I was not depriving myself of anything food-wise. I was depriving myself of the length, you know, the times when I was eating, but that seemed easy because my mornings were busy or not being a breakfast eater, it just seemed easy to me. Does that make sense?
Martha McKinnon (16:11)
Yeah, I mean, I think what I’m hearing you say is that by limiting yourself to essentially two meals a day or limiting yourself to an eight hour eating window, it seemed to take the pressure off all of the individual decisions. You had to make it every single meal and it gave you more flexibility about what you would choose to eat. So it felt a little more freeing. You didn’t feel like you had to be so restrictive.
You were restricting the time, you weren’t having to restrict everything you ate. Is that right?
Peter Morrison (16:44)
Mm-hmm. Right, right, because in eight hours, or six hours, or whatever the time is that you’re eating, you can only eat so much and you’re just full, you’re still living your life, you’re doing other things, so it’s not like you’re feasting during those times.
Martha McKinnon (17:04)
So I mean, think again, you have to have a healthy attitude, right? Because I think there are some people who struggle and tend to overeat, right? It’s not for everybody. So there are some people who it doesn’t work for because they they end up eating, they they end up taking in an excess of calories even during this shorter window. So you have to kind of know again, know yourself. It’s an experiment. My experience was very much like yours. And in the beginning, I was hesitant.
Peter Morrison (17:14)
And it’s not for everybody. Mm.
Martha Mckinnon (17:35)
I think I had a lot of, we can discuss this, be an episode about my issues around my fear of hunger and things like that. I think I was afraid of hunger. I was afraid that I would get over hungry using time restricted eating.
I had like fear around it. don’t know. I can’t even explain why at this point, but I did try it and I was absolutely blown away and I read about it and it started to make sense for me because what I discovered about myself and what I’ll still say is that every time I eat, it’s an opportunity and there’s a potential to overeat. You know, if you’re not tuning into yourself every, every time you open that your kitchen and you start taking in food, if you’re not really paying attention to your signals,
Peter Morrison (18:20)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (18:25)
The more times of day that I eat, the more opportunities there are to eat more than I need. So by restricting the time and limiting myself now to certain number of hours, coupled with really trying to tune in, which I’m continuing to tune into, is really tuning into my hunger and my satisfaction. Learning to stop and pause and pay attention to when I’ve had enough and not just eating food because it’s there. And I’m playing with like lightening up my servings a little bit just you know to play with this. But yeah the combination of tuning it trying to tune in and limit the times a day I ate was very very beneficial for me. And I learned I mean this was another great lesson that hunger is nothing to be scared of. Your hunger is a signal but it’s been fun to be curious and to notice and to learn about hunger.
Peter Morrison (19:20)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (19:23)
And for me to realize that it ebbs and it flows, know, and it can come and it can go. And I know that if I’m really engaged in something that I love to do, I can be oblivious, right? That there’s things in the universe that feed me beyond food, you know, which is pretty exciting for somebody who’s really struggled with their relationship with food. So, yeah.
Peter Morrison (19:49)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I actually love the feeling of hunger, not in a masochistic, painful kind of way, but I don’t like eating when I don’t feel like I’m hungry. I mean we all eat when we’re sometimes not hungry, you know everybody’s going out and I mean we all do that. But when I when I actually let myself feel hungry I don’t know, the food tastes better somehow.
Martha McKinnon (20:17)
Right. It does. I think there are quotes that say hunger is the best sauce, and so I think you’re in a really, really healthy place with recognizing the fact that you you want to go into a meal a little bit hungry, looking forward to it, because the food is going to taste better. And if you start off eating when you’re not hungry, how can you possibly know when to stop?
Peter Morrison (20:32)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (20:46)
You know, you have to start to gauge and get tune with your body and its signals and its feelings right. And the more you practice it you know and sometimes in the beginning if you’re really tuning in maybe you’re gonna under eat because you’re like I’ve had enough and then you discover, well an hour later you know so you learn the signals and what feels good and what feels doesn’t feel good and then you learn what it feels like to overeat. What I found too is that I don’t beat myself up about that anymore either because sometimes you just need to say that was too much.
Peter Morrison (21:15.)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Martha Mckinnon (21:20)
I know I need to remember that. And so it’s all it’s just all a learning and an experimentation. And this goes back to trusting yourself and trusting that you do have this inner wisdom, but you have to be brave enough to really experiment with it and trust it and believe it and not believe that you know you’re not to be trusted.
Peter Morrison (21:37)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (21:42)
Because I think we all are very, very wise at our core. And if we start to tap into that, it can be really powerful.
Peter Morrison (21:50)
And for me, I think secondarily to that, to time restricted eating. Secondarily, it’s not intentional, but we’ve sort of slipped into certain days of the week, we eat certain meals. And again, it sort of makes everything else easier around that.
You know, we grill salmon and the salmon we buy provides enough for two meals. So we have the fresh salmon Sunday with dinner and then the leftovers Friday night. So boom, there’s two days you don’t have to think about dinner. You know, Thursday is Trader Joe’s chicken parmesan, you know, with salad. That’s another day we don’t have to think about dinner.
Martha McKinnon (22:40)
Right. Right. And again, think we are, I’m sorry.
Peter Morrison (22:43)
I just gonna say if you can tolerate, it’s not the right word, but if you find meals you really like and can repeat them or find simple ways to change them up, but they’re easy preparations or satisfying, then I think it’s okay to make certain days, certain meals. Every day doesn’t have to be a brand new something you’ve never had before.
Martha McKinnon (23:15)
Right, so and again, yeah, right, because this takes us right back to atomic habits, right? And if you’re trying to create a new habit, if you’re trying to eat healthier, then those questions, how do I make it attractive? How do I make it obvious? How do I make it easy? How do I make it satisfying? Sort of just fits right in with this. And how do I, you what’s that one thing such that if I were doing it, everything else would become easier and unnecessary.
And if we’re having to overthink it, if we’re making it harder than it needs to be, you’ve done some great work about making it easy for yourself. you know Sundays are for salmon, then that frees your thinking to focus on other things.
Peter Morrison (23:57)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (24:00)
And that’s something that comes up in the whole willpower discussion, the fact that the more decisions we have to make on a variety of topics, the more we’re having to do, the more decisions we have to have to make ,there is this sort of decision fatigue that makes again, staying maintaining our self control harder over time. And so I think you’re you’re what you’re doing is brilliant in terms of finding a way to nourish yourself in a way that feels easy and effortless, because I think that’s what we want to get to, to make it as, you know, enjoyable and effortless as we can. For sure.
Peter Morrison (24:34)
And I also think sometimes my digestion, everything even works. Life just works better when, again, it’s not a 100% repeat. There’s always variety, but there’s something about the regularity and the consistency that for me personally, that just works really well. Sometimes if you’re introducing a whole new spices or new things and things don’t always feel good.
Martha McKinnon (25:12)
Yeah, your digestion can be affected, right? I remember reading that in a book. Yeah. Right? For sure. And I think there are a lot of other cultures, you know, more simple cultures where the food isn’t as complicated as it is here for us and that there are just sort of set, you know, number of options that people return to again and again, you know, and again. And you’re not just eating such a wide range.
Peter Morrison (25:18)
And then it affects your sleep and it affects your mood.
Martha McKinnon (25:43)
It’s almost like in some ways we’ve turned food into entertainment as opposed to just figuring out what nourishes us, what feels good. Of course you want it to taste good and be enjoyable, but it doesn’t have to be a sport, right? It doesn’t have to be entertainment. If you find the foods that work for you, why wouldn’t you want to, if you love something, why wouldn’t you want to eat it several times, you know, a month? So.
Peter Morrison (26:00)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right. Right.
Martha McKinnon (26:08)
And if you find something that you like and it tastes good and it’s easy and it works for you and it leaves you feeling good and energized, mean, that’s like a win-win.
If only we could all get to that point where we had a very set menu that worked for us. It probably shifts a little with the seasons depending on where we live, shifts with special occasions, but overall just to find a pattern. And I think that that’s what I’ve done over time. You find what your breakfast is, you find what your lunch is, you find your dinners that work, and then you freeze up all this time and space for other things.
I think a lot of us who struggle around weight and healthy eating realize that we talk about food noise and this whole topic ends up just taking up way too much time and energy and space in our lives and in our brains. And once we can figure it out, figure out the routine that works, it’s like, hallelujah, I’ve got time and space for other things beyond like, what am I eating next?
Peter Morrison (27:15)
Mm-hmm. And it’s amazing to me how I mean, this is our 26th episode. But how many, and we’ve had a variety of topics, but there’s so much similarity. You know, it pulls you back from this book or that, you know, there’s so many things that repeat from Mindless Eating to The One Thing to Atomic Habits.
There’s so much similarity. It’s kind of mind boggling when you step back and think about.
Martha McKinnon (27:51)
So am I hearing you say that a relatively simple concept has become over complicated in our world? Or that there’s these simple threads that keep showing up from a variety of sources, these common threads. And when we start to see these common threads, it can get easier, right, I think. And you can just trust it more that you’re on the right track.
Peter Morrison (28:08)
That or. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Right, right. Because you could apply like the one thing, like the whole mindless eating book. Well, one thing, well, you use smaller plates. Well, that might make everything else easier or leave the fruit bowl on the counter, but put the potato chips and candy in a hard to reach place, you know.
Martha McKinnon (28:44)
Right. Right. So, yeah. So when you take this one thing concept and you overwrite it on all of the other things that we’ve talked about, you can suddenly say like, well, yeah, so what is my one thing that would make this easier for me? Right? And I think, yeah, is it cleaning up my pantry so that I’m less tempted by the snacks and things that I really don’t want to indulge in?
Peter Morrison (29:02)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (29:11)
Or is it, you know, is ittaking time to deep breathe? Is it focusing on my sleep? Because does everything just go wonky when I’m sleep deprived? So whatever that one thing is where you start to focus, you’re going to start to get some traction now and make some progress where there’s a good chance that you’ve spent weeks, years spinning and spinning and spinning.
Peter Morrison (29:31)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (29:35)
So I think this whole concept of the one thing really can give us the focus that we need to get some traction. And once you get some traction and you start having some progress, that’s when the magic starts to happen. Because now you start to spin in an upward spiral and you start to think of other one things and other like shifts and it just starts to snowball. And it gets easier and easier and easier over time. You create momentum.
Peter Morrison (29:55)
Yeah, and you create momentum.
Martha McKinnon (29:59)
Right? And momentum is huge. I don’t think momentum is something that can be forced. I think it’s something that has to be like sort of, think it’s a natural force that needs to build. But you can never get momentum if you can’t get started and you can’t really get started if you don’t have a focus. And so that’s why I’m really, I was really excited about this whole concept of the one thing, because just start with one thing, get some success there and then just trust in the snowball effect and the momentum that will come from that.
Peter Morrison (30:32)
Mm-hmm. So what’s your one thing? Let’s ask for readers to maybe leave their one thing for us in the comments below.
Martha McKinnon (30:43)
Yeah, that would be great. if people would love to, people who tune into this would love to share what their one thing is, I’d love to know, I love to learn. I feel like I have pen pals all over the world because I get a lot of comments and interchange through the email newsletters, emails that we send out several times a week. And so this is just another way to build that kind of relationship and learn more about the people who are tuning in and how we might learn from them and also support them in their goals.
Peter Morrison (31:09)
If you’ve liked this, I’d say please give us a thumbs up and subscribe. We’d love to keep growing our audience. Share it with anybody you feel might find it helpful or useful. And thanks for the nice dialogue.
Martha McKinnon (31:23)
Yeah. And thanks for tuning in and we’ll be back soon. Have a great week, everyone. Bye bye.
Peter Morrison (31:28)
Have a good day. Bye bye.
