The Things That Have Been Most Helpful To Me On My Journey

In this episode of Simple Shifts: Conversations to Fuel the Body, Mind and Soul, Martha McKinnon shares her personal journey with weight loss, the impact of Weight Watchers, and the importance of awareness in eating habits. She discusses the role of yoga and meditation in her wellness journey, emphasizing the need for a mind-body connection. Martha also introduces the concept of ‘mindless eating’ and how environmental factors influence our eating behaviors. Finally, she explores the ‘Inside Out Understanding’ and how our thoughts shape our experiences, particularly in relation to food and health.

The Most Helpful Things On My Journey Podcast

Video Transcript

Martha McKinnon (00:00)
Hi, welcome to Simple Shifts: Conversations to Fuel the Body, Mind and Soul. I’m Martha McKinnon from the blog Simple Nourished Living and with me is my brother and partner here at Simple Nourished Living and on Simple Shifts, Peter Morrison. Hi, how are you?

Peter Morrison (00:18)
Hi. I’m doing good today, how are you?

Martha McKinnon (00:20)
I’m doing really well. I’m excited to be back recording with you again today.

Are you excited?

Peter Morrison (00:30)
I’m overflowing with excitement.

Martha McKinnon (00:32)
I can see, I can see that you’re just exuding excitement. So today I often get questions like, you know, what’s been your secret through the years? So I’ve been on this journey for a long time. Like, you know, maybe some people don’t know, I struggled with my weight starting as a kid and then through my twenties and onward and upward and like food and weight and eating have been, had struggled, I’ve struggled.

But I feel like I’ve evolved and have figured a lot of things out and I love sharing what I’ve learned with others and that’s really what Simple Nourished Living is all about – sharing tips and recipes and things that have helped me in hopes that they can help others. And so I thought it might be fun to answer that question that has been shared, or asked of me, through the years.

And so the first thing that really helped me was Weight Watchers, to be quite honest. I joined Weight Watchers after having struggled on my own for a long time, and I just got to that point where I was tired of the struggle, and I had a friend who had successfully lost weight on Weight Watchers, and so I signed up, and it was helpful. And I think the thing that Weight Watchers really helped me with was awareness.

You know, I think we all live in our own little bubble, we live in our own little world, that can be not really grounded in reality. And so, I learned so much just from tracking. I think the biggest takeaway, the first takeaway from Weight Watchers was tracking and paying attention and learning, measuring, observing what I was eating and then learning how many calories… how oversized my portions were. That was the big takeaway that I took away the first morning. When I got up to measure out my cereal and my milk and my strawberries to start my day, I quickly learned that I had been serving myself probably three servings of cereal in a big bowl. And so that was really helpful for me just to get that awareness.

So Weight Watchers helped me tremendously develop awareness and then start paying attention to the calories in certain foods and on restaurant menus and it was just so eye opening. You know I had sort of been in denial. I had told myself I didn’t really eat that much or I couldn’t understand why I was gaining weight and once I started paying attention and learning, I quickly understood why. I was overfeeding myself without realizing it.

Peter Morrison (03:12)
When you found Weight Watchers, I know that was many, many years ago, but were there other, like, were there other, like, did Jenny Craig exist? Were there any other options at the time? I can’t remember.

Martha McKinnon (03:29)
I can’t remember either and I guess I wasn’t really shopping around. I guess I just, was just that it was sort of a perfect moment where I was very frustrated and Kathy Palmeri had lost a bunch of weight and was looking great and I saw her and she told me what she did. And I guess I knew I had history because Nana had done Weight Watchers, mom had done Weight Watchers, so it was a name that I knew. And so I didn’t at that moment feel like I needed to, or wanted to, shop around or compare. I just trusted that that was the right place to go. So there could very well have been other options, but I didn’t even really pursue them.

Peter Morrison (04:07)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Martha McKinnon (04:09)
I just went with the one that was recommended. So, yeah.

Peter Morrison (04:11)
Yeah, just curious. And probably back then you were probably tracking just writing things down and then figuring out.

Martha McKinnon (04:18)
Yeah, I joined WW in the early 90s, and so was all still paper-based. And it was before points, so it was all still based on food exchanges. So you had so many starches, so many proteins, so many fruits, so many vegetables, and optional calories a day. And I feel like that was beneficial for me too, because I think it just taught healthy, balanced eating.

Peter Morrison (04:40)
Hmm.

Martha McKinnon (04:42)
And that was the other thing I learned right away, that I was just overfeeding myself carbs, which was very common in the 90s, because we were still living in that sort of low-fat era. So I think there was so much misunderstanding about eating in a balanced way. So I feel like the program, the tracking, just helped me. So I learned that I was eating way too much starch you know, and that I needed more protein and that I needed more fruits and vegetables.

And so it taught me healthy sort of balanced eating. It taught me portion control and it just helped me understand that I was, that my portions were way, way, way too big. And so that was, you know, those are, those are awarenesses, understandings that have stood the test of time for me. They continue to help me. I know it’s easy for us to just start feeding ourselves a little more over time and for portions to get a little bigger. So it’s just been something that has stayed with me. My gosh you know, for decades.

Peter Morrison (05:50)
Well, that’s something as I’ve worked with you over the last several years on Simple Nourished Living and gotten to know the Weight Watchers program, not as a member, but from you and reading about it on my own. One of the things that I’ve struggled with the most is the whole point system, to be honest. I mean, I know that’s sort of the foundation of it, but something about thinking about food as a number and not what it is.

Martha McKinnon (06:26)
Yeah, I agree. And I think, yeah, I share your sentiment and I’ve in fact, we can link out to a post that I wrote because that was my awareness. And again, maybe it’s just because it’s what I learned. It’s what I came from. I think other people who never learned what I learned, and went into points, it worked for them, but I’ve always had this bias belief that the way I learned was a healthier way for the long run and that food should be thought of as food and it shouldn’t maybe be gamified and thought of in terms of… I know the intention is to provide just one number that tells the whole story of a food, but I’m not sure… I’m not sure… I agree with the fact that you can tell the whole story of a food in a number.

I mean, I think that just thinking of it as food, for me personally, has been beneficial and we can link out… I did write a post about why I thought and continue to think that food-based exchanges was a better, healthier way than points. And again, it could be my bias. And people are welcome to not share that opinion. And if you, as an outsider, sort of sees it that way, I guess I take comfort in that, that there’s at least one more person who sees it the way I do. So yeah, I agree that the points can work, but for me, I just see it again. It’s not as beneficial as just thinking of food as food for me personally.

Martha McKinnon (07:48)
Yeah. And for so much of the rest of the world, you know, I mean, that maybe doesn’t struggle as much as we do. You know, when you get, we’ve been to Italy together, we’ve been to other places. I mean, food seems to be food and it seems to work for people. So, yeah. So it’s a valid point.

So after Weight Watchers in my world, another thing that really helped me tremendously and has continued to help me is yoga. And I loved tennis as a kid. I never was really, really active, but yoga was the sort of exercise that has again stayed with me through the test of time. And I think we all need to find a way to move that we really love and that we can stick with. And maybe it’ll change through the years. I also love to walk. But what yoga brought to me again was a body mind approach to moving.

And so it’s sort of slowed me down and again it’s a way to really pay attention and bring more awareness. I think we’ll see a theme here around awareness. So yoga has been very, very helpful for me to just recognize and learn more about myself, to learn about myself on the mat, but also I’ve learned things on the mat that I’ve helped, I’ve taken off the mat.

And so I think that finding a mind-body form of exercise, whether it be a tai chi or a yoga, can be very helpful in addition to other forms of exercise because I really feel it could help me mentally, emotionally, as well as physically. So I strongly encourage yoga or some form of it or some type of mind-body exercise.

Peter Morrison (09:38)
What was it? I mean, I know, but like I was thinking it could be good for you to share. Like why did you even go to yoga? Because I know you and our other sister, Brenda, talked up yoga a lot and I was very resistant, very hesitant to try it out, because I had preconceived ideas of what it was and how it worked, which were wrong.

So I’m just curious if you can give a brief little intro, or share how or why you even started going to yoga.

Martha McKinnon (10:14)
I would love to do that and then I would like to circle back to you to find out what those preconceived notions were that caused you to be resistant because I think that those are probably concerns that others share and that could benefit from. So for me, I went to yoga because I was in severe sciatica, severe back pain and I just felt, I don’t know, it was just, I don’t know why I felt it but I felt as though the sciatica would be helped from the yoga. And it turned out to be true, yoga, there is a lot of focus in yoga on the spine and spine health.

And by creating a healthier spine, I mean, I had been for an MRI. I was in my 30s, and the MRI showed lots of damage. They basically said my back looked like somebody, the back of a much older person. I hadn’t been really respectful to my back. I had done a lot of, you know heavy lifting that I probably shouldn’t have done. I traveled for work and I was lifting know his suitcases up and over into the overhead bins and I just wasn’t really taking care of my back and so it brought a lot of spinal health to me for first of all. So that helped alleviate and get me out of that tremendous sciatic pain.

But it also helped me because I tend to be a very anxious person. And I held a lot more anxiety and tension than I even realized. And so, while the yoga helped me with my back and brought me there as I practiced yoga, I found that it helped me with my anxiousness. It helped me with headaches that I had, suddenly like headaches were going away. And so it helped the breathing techniques that I learned helped calm my system down.

So it really helps with those of us who live in fight or flight, you know, and don’t even really realize it, to learn how to sort of self-regulate and take care of ourselves. It’s a much healthier way to manage stress. And so that was just an unintended benefit for me personally. Yeah. So back to you, what were your preconceived notions or what, why do you think you were hesitant about trying yoga?

Peter Morrison (12:29)
It sounds silly, but I didn’t think many men did it and I didn’t necessarily want to be the only man in a room full of women. I think it has or before I knew better, I thought it was kind of a woo-woo kind of thing. I don’t know, I just had this, you know, you have to sit around with your legs crossed and chanting kind of thing. And I do like individual not individual activities, but I’m more of a pickleball, tennis, you know, like a one person, two person thing. I’m not big on big group activities. So that was kind of a resistance that I had and just not knowing, like I’m not very flexible. I didn’t want to get in this room full of people I don’t know and not be able to bend over and touch my toes.

Martha McKinnon (13:53)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Morrison (13:55)
And feel like I was being watched and not outwardly ridiculed, but people saying, oh, what’s that person doing here? They don’t belong. I think the yoga studio that I joined had like, I forget, maybe one or two free classes. And I just, I don’t know that people were amazingly kind and helpful. Not only the instructors, but the people in the class. I was correct in that the classes I went to were probably 90% women. But there were occasionally, there’d be, you know, a handful of guys there as well.

But I think I was just able to relax into the fact that I was there for me and not for someone else’s entertainment and people are gonna think what they’re gonna think whether you’re at the shopping mall, at the supermarket. It’s like, you know, so I didn’t, I wear what I wear. If someone doesn’t like it then too bad. I’m sort of beyond that now, but it was a it was a process for me to get comfortable with it for sure. Yeah.

Martha McKinnon (15:30)
Yeah, and that’s a valid point. And I think that may be an opportunity on Simple Nourished Living that we haven’t explored yet for videos. Because maybe a lot of people share your concern. I loved yoga enough to actually go through yoga teacher training. I’ve spent years. I’ve taught classes. I’ve taught a lot of one-on-one. I’ve worked a lot with people who had the same concerns and chose to have me come in one-on-one privately.

I would love to help others move beyond that stigma and there may be an audience here of Simple Nourished Living readers of Simple Shifts podcast watchers. So if that’s something you think you could be interested in, very much interested in knowing how I can serve. And so if I could take some of that stigma or misunderstanding away from yoga and help people understand that I mean, for me, yoga just means that if you’re moving and you’re breathing and you’re paying attention, then that’s really a form of yoga.

And you’re right, it has a lot of sort of mysticism around it or misunderstanding. And there are lots of different types of yoga. But this age and stage of my life, what I’m really most interested in is helping people. I think it helped me get comfortable in my own body and in my own skin, in my own mind. So it’s been so beneficial and I’d love to be able to figure out ways to share that with others and take away the misunderstanding.

So that’s something we could, you know, stay open to. Maybe when we’re together, Peter, we could figure out a way to do a few really short yoga videos to help people get introduced to it in a way, you know, in their own home, in a really, really, gentle way. Cause that’s the other thing. I think yoga, what I’m finding right now as a 62 year old is that yoga tends to be moving too fast, you know, for me at this stage of my life.

And I’m drawn to adjust a much more gentle, much more slow moving yoga then tends to be offered in the mainstream because a lot of it has gone pretty fast. It has gone vinyasa flow. And so that may be a little niche that we can explore further. So yoga for sure.

The next thing was the book that we’ve discussed here, the book Mindless Eating. So the book Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink was another huge shift for me. I read that book at a point where I was a few pounds over my goal weight, sort of struggling with getting back to it for reasons that I didn’t completely understand. I walked away from Weight Watchers and went for a summer up to Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin, where we spend summers where Weight Watchers meetings weren’t readily available, and it was before, you know, all these wonderful virtual meetings.

But I read the book. And it was just, again, it was just filled with so many insights, so many aha moments. I found myself almost even laughing at parts of it. And it helped me see all the ways that our environment can be influencing us without us understanding. It was just so many, it helped me understand an easier, gentler way to be with food. It showed me all kinds of things I could do to my environment to help support me in a kind way to make the whole process easier. And there’s tons of videos that we can link to or videos we can link to, posts on the Simple Nourished Living that we can link to around mindless eating. So when you really understand all the ways you’re being influenced, without you knowing it and you can embrace those and start to make gentle changes, the whole journey gets easier, in ways that you can’t even believe.

I can’t really encourage Mindless Eating enough, so I hope you’ll check out some of that around Mindless Eating. Read the book, check out some of the podcasts, check out some of the posts we’ve written. There’s just tons of helpful information to make the whole process easier.

Peter Morrison (19:35)
Right, and I would add if you’re interested, among our many posts, you did a 28-Day Challenge. It’s not Mindless Eating specific, but it incorporates a lot of the concepts.

Martha McKinnon (19:54)
The concepts, yes. And I’m really proud of that, the 28-Day Smart Start Challenge, because while you may not accomplish it in 28 days, you can take as long as you want. I think there’s just a lot of helpful information to put you on that path to a slow and steady, sustainable approach to weight loss and to healthier eating and to getting yourself where you want to go in a way that doesn’t have to hurt, which has become my motto these days.

Martha McKinnon (20:19)
The next thing is meditation, and meditation is kind of tied to yoga. You don’t always get lots of meditation in yoga per se, but yoga is sort of a meditative form of exercise where you are asked to kind of tune into what’s going on. But I became a practicing meditator a couple of years ago.

And again, it’s just been another way for me to slow down, to begin to appreciate all of the ways that my thinking, my erroneous thinking was working against me instead of for me. It’s helped me probably most in creating the pause. I think so many of us are just living really quickly. We’re multitasking. We’re moving too fast. And so meditation has been a way to sort of slow things down on the mat to help me appreciate the the busyness of my mind, but also to help me then take that off the cushion and apply it more into my life so that again I can create pauses for myself instead of reaching into the pantry.

Instead of grabbing something that I don’t really want to just help me to create that pause to say is this really what you need, is this really what you want. It’s just been really helpful in that way. And again meditation could be something, Brenda was talking about that with me, the fact that there could be an opportunity to do just a little basic you know meditation type course either in person or somehow online virtually because again there’s a lot of misnomer I think around meditation and what meditation means and to just take away a lot of the misunderstanding around that and help people understand. A lot of people say I can’t meditate because my you know my mind’s too busy and it’s like well no that’s the point I mean just to become aware of that can be life-changing to just be able to notice what’s going on in there without getting lost in it is just an amazing, amazing help.

So, have you meditated? Do you do a much around that? You were into yoga for a while, but have you played with meditation?

Peter Morrison (22:20)
No, more so when I was going to yoga, I haven’t been really practicing yoga recently. So, no.

Martha McKinnon (22:31)
Yeah. So another tool for the toolbox and another something to consider because it’s been beneficial. And then the latest thing for me was this new understanding that came to my world within the past, gosh, guess it was December and again, it’s going to be many months before we probably get this posted. But I would say within the past year, I tapped into a new understanding called the Inside Out Understanding and it’s kind of just a new way of thinking about how the mind works, how psychology works.

And it’s been really life changing and helpful for me and I think it can help us so much on this journey, on this Weight Watchers journey. It’s really basically helping us understand that the basic concept would be that we’re not really living in the… we’re living in the feeling of our thinking, not necessarily the feeling of our circumstance. And so that when we come to appreciate just how powerful our thinking is around our journey around life, it can just make everything easier. And so, I have one classic example that I took from one of the first books I read that then morphed into, think I’ve probably read… I probably have read and or listened to over 30 books since December on this topic and watched multitudes of podcasts.

And one of the biggest takeaways for me was that very concept, the fact that we can all be having very different experiences. We could be doing the same thing, but having very different experiences. And so the classic example I like to think about is, you can have two people sitting in a restaurant having a salad, you know? And one person can be sitting there, left work, sitting there calmly, enjoying their salad, enjoying the chicken and the vegetables and loving the fact that they’re away from work for a little bit and they get to eat this salad and knowing it’s going to make them feel really great when they go back for the afternoon. And that’s one experience. You look outside and you say, well, this person’s eating a salad.

The other person’s eating the salad. You know, they’re angry, they wanted a cheeseburger and fries, but they have to eat this salad because they’re disappointed with their weight, they’re not feeling good in their clothes. And the salad is punishment because of the way they’re thinking about that salad. And that’s just two people, you watch, you look at those two, they’re in the same restaurant eating the same salad, but the experience just couldn’t be more different.

And that’s when we start to really appreciate just how powerful our thinking is around everything in life, and most especially this journey around getting healthier and losing weight. So I want to continue to explore it because I think there are a lot of ways that we can explore this concept to help our readers embrace just how much sort of power they have on this journey and that when you change the way you look at things, everything changes just by virtue of having a different perspective of it.

Peter Morrison (25:52)
What did you call it?

Martha McKinnon (25:54)
It’s mostly called, you’ll hear it called a lot of different things. The concept was brought forth by a man named Sidney Banks in the 70s. He’s considered this kind of Scottish mystic. Mostly it goes by terms that you’ll hear it called the three principles or the inside out understanding. So those are some names for it. So inside out understanding is the term that resonates most with me and with some of the authors and teachers that I’m following right now.

So there it is in a nutshell. I hope other people find this helpful. My journey has been decades long now. And Weight Watchers was part of it way back, and I continue to learn and grow from Weight Watchers as Weight Watchers learns and grows. And yoga, Mindless Eating, meditation, and the inside out understanding, any one of those I think could help our readers as they look at ways to manage their weight, their relationship with food, manage their eating, their cooking, any of these things would be helpful.

Peter Morrison (27:02)
Great, very insightful. Thank you for sharing.

Martha McKinnon (27:06)
You’re so welcome.

Peter Morrison (27:10)
Well, we should wrap this up.

Martha McKinnon (27:12)
Well, I think we should wrap it up. It was so cool to be able to share some of these things that I found really helpful with you today. And I hope others are helped as well.

Peter Morrison (27:23)
Thanks everyone, have a great day.

Martha McKinnon (27:26)
Bye bye.