You Are Not Broken, You Are Human

In episode 2 of the Simple Nourished Living podcast (https://www.youtube.com/@MarthaMcKinnon), hosts Martha Mckinnon and Peter Morrison discuss the theme “You’re Not Broken, You’re Human.” They explore the impact of environment on eating habits, share personal experiences, and emphasize the importance of mindset in the weight loss journey. The conversation is enriched by insights from the book ‘Mindless Eating,’ which highlights how our surroundings influence our food choices and behaviors. The hosts encourage listeners to embrace their humanity and understand that mistakes are part of the learning process.

Key Takeaways

You are not broken, you are human.

Mindless Eating was a transformative book for me.

Your mindset plays a crucial role in your journey.

Re-engineering your environment can help with eating habits.

Food is more accessible now than ever before.

Understanding your environment can lead to better choices.

Mistakes are just feedback, not failures.

You have to start where you are in your journey.

It’s important to enjoy the process of cooking and eating.

Mindfulness can help you take charge of your eating.

You Are Not Broken, You Are Human – Podcast 002

Video Transcript

Martha McKinnon (00:00)
Hi, welcome to the Simple Nourish Living podcast. I’m Martha and this is my brother and partner, Peter. Hi, how you doing?

Peter Morrison (00:06)
Hello. Hi. Good, how are you doing today?

Martha McKinnon (00:12)
Good, really well. So our topic for today is, you’re not broken, you’re human. And that really, that awareness came to me years ago in the book, Mindless Eating, that you’ll hear me talking about a lot because it really was life changing for me. But before we get into the topic today, what’s new and good in your world?

Peter Morrison (00:35)
I made a really good soup last night.

Martha Mckinnon (00:38)
Tell us more. I I love to know what people are eating.

Peter Morrison (00:40)
Well, yeah, because sometimes working on simple nourished living, cooking can be challenging because we test recipes, we have to photograph, sometimes I like cooking just for the joy of cooking. Well, I love the work we do, sometimes it feels like work and sometimes the joy is not there when I’m cooking.

So yesterday I was just playing and I had a package of butternut squash. I’ve recently discovered that it’s really easy to roast in the air fryer, which I’ve done a couple of times. But I really wanted soup because it’s been cold here. So I roasted a package of butternut squash. I don’t know. It was maybe around 16 ounces or so. Roasted that.

Martha McKinnon (01:28)
So when you say a package of butternut squash, it’s already like peeled and chopped. Yeah.

Peter Morrison (01:32)
Yeah, yeah, like a plastic container already chopped and peeled from Trader Joe’s. What did I use? I used herb de Provence and just some sea salt and a little bit of oil roasted that for about 20 minutes in the air fire really quick. And while that was cooking, I was doing some, some work actually. And then when that was done.

Martha McKinnon (01:49)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Morrison (01:55)
I blended it with a little chicken broth because I wanted a sort of creamy soup, I didn’t want a chunky soup. I kind of wanted a smoother soup, even though it ended up being chunky, but I’ll get to that in a minute. And I had some light coconut milk. And so I was going for kind of a Thai Asiany kind of taste. And I had some red Thai chili paste. So after I blended it and got the…

Martha McKinnon (02:08)I love cooking. I love cooking.

Peter Morrison (02:27)
the squash all smooth, added it to a large sauce pan, added the coconut milk, and then I had some leftover rotisserie chicken. And I just was having fun with the spices, you know, adding, the Thai chili, and then I added some ginger, I added some nutmeg, it was just really fun. And then I wanted a little more veg in it. And I had a package of green beans. So I just chopped up or actually just broke them apart into inch long pieces and threw in some green beans.

Martha McKinnon (02:40)
huh.

Peter Morrison (02:52)
So it did end up kind of being chunky, but it was like that creamy, coconutty Thai with the squash. It was really good and we had a nice little bottle of red wine with it. So it is a recipe I think could be good for the website. And, and I may at some point work on amounts of ingredients and spices.

Martha McKinnon (02:52)
Yeah. Ooh, Mm-hmm. Perfecting it in amounts and all the details you need when you’re going to share the recipe. that’s cool.

Peter Morrison (03:21)
Right. But it was fun just not thinking about pictures and amounts and just just having fun.

Martha McKinnon (03:27)
Right. It sort of gets you in the flow. There’s some cool quote I read recently about that. When you’re in the flow state, there’s no anxiety. You’re just you’re in a really you’re just in a really cool spot, you know.

Peter Morrison (03:31)
Yeah. And I just was going with my taste in the moment because I had in my mind what I was looking for, but I didn’t really know how I was going to get there. So I was tasting as it was heating and I just sort of went with it, yeah. So that was fun.

Martha McKinnon (03:53)
Yeah. Sounds yummy. Cool. Well, that’s great.

Peter Morrison (04:01)
What about you? What’s going good for you this week?

Martha McKinnon (04:03)
Well, as you know, on Sunday, we sent out an announcement that we were going to be starting this podcast, that we had this intention around starting this. And we asked for suggestions from our readers. And I’ve been kind of blown away by just the number of responses and the quality and just the interesting questions and suggestions that came forth. And so I haven’t been able to read all of them yet, but we’ve started a spreadsheet as you know to just capture all these great ideas. I don’t have any expectations around this as you know we’ve talked about it we kind of decided this is something we wanted to try, kind of like we tried the website, so I didn’t really have any expectations about what the response would be or what the kinds of you know questions or ideas or suggestions might come forth. So I’m just really pleasantly surprised by all that.

Peter Morrison (04:42)
Mm-hmm. And what I found interesting as I was scanning the comments and feedback was how varied the response was. And there wasn’t a lot of overlap. There weren’t a lot of people saying the same thing. It was a wide range of topics and ideas and suggestions.

Martha McKinnon (05:05)
There wasn’t. And I think that’s really cool because, you know, we sometimes sit here in a bubble and we have ideas about what would be helpful, but never could we have come up with, right? All of those, that variety of ideas. So, thank you everybody who took the time to submit a suggestion. We’re really appreciative of that.

Peter Morrison (05:24)
Right. And if at any time during any of these videos you do have an idea or suggestion, please feel free to drop it below in the comments and we’ll add it to our list.

Martha McKinnon (05:41)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. this is now podcast number two. Yeah. So we’re a long way from feeling comfortable doing this, but we’re just going to keep plodding along. Because this whole experience is really analogous to me to the whole weight loss journey. And we’ve talked a lot about you just can’t wait for your circumstance to be perfect. I mean, when you want to move something forward when you want to accomplish something, you have to just kind of start where you are, right? Use what you have and just do what you can. And that’s how we make mistakes and, and, right, and realize that there is no mistake, right? There’s no failure, really, there’s just feedback, we’re going to learn how to do this, just like the weight loss journey. And it’s like, when you really change your focus that way, instead of having it be feeling overwhelmed.

Peter Morrison (06:14)
Mm-hmm. Make mistakes, learn from them.

Martha McKinnon (06:35)
It’s just kind of an experiment. And when you change your focus and you change the way you look at it, it can really start to become, I think, kind of fun, right? And a lot less overwhelming depending on how you spin it. So, yeah.

Peter Morrison (06:48)
Definitely. So you’re not broken. Tell me more.

Martha McKinnon (06:51)
Right, so I think you’ve probably heard me talk a lot about, and there several posts, and we’ll talk more about mindless eating.

Peter Morrison (06:59)
Which I haven’t read yet, but I hope this is maybe one video series we might be able to do.

Martha McKinnon (07:05)
Yeah, maybe like sort of a book club because there is a series of posts that I did years ago on the website where I tried to try to do this kind of virtual kind of book club. It has been so life-changing for me. It comes up up up again and again and again. And we all have different aha moments. You know, a lot of people may read it, but a lot of the feedback I went back in preparation for this and looked at that post week one of the challenge and there are a lot of comments. It was done back in like 2017, and there are a lot of really good comments on there about how people were following along and reading it and having those same kind of ah-has.

Peter Morrison (07:35)
Wow. And do I remember correctly? That’s something you did in the summertime.

Martha McKinnon (07:46)
I did, yeah, so the story behind that was we flip back in 2017. We were living a portion of the year. We were living the winter and spring and fall in Phoenix. And then we for the summer we were going to northern Wisconsin. And again, by the time I did the challenge, I mean, many years had passed. But I was attending Weight Watchers, but I was over goal by like seven or eight pounds and just nothing was really happening. I felt like I was following the plan. I felt like I was doing what I needed to do and I felt pretty stuck. My leader at that point, I mean, because the goal was something I set back when I was 28 years old and as a lifetime Weight Watcher, you know, I was still sort of in a healthy range and she’s like, well, you have the you have the ability to just change your goal weight. You can do it once, guess, according to the program. And she’s like, you know, maybe it’s time to think about that. I was feeling good. You know, it was just, you know, when I was in the healthy range, it was just like, the part of me wanted to just get back to that goal. And so I decided to take off the summer because we were going to northern Wisconsin, where the closest Weight Watchers meeting was going to be like an hour away. And that wasn’t going to happen.

Peter Morrison (08:57)
Hmm.

Martha McKinnon (08:59)
So I just decided to take the summer off from Weight Watchers and I happened to read this book and the book was called mindless eating why you eat more than you think. Now for years I had seen that book and I just was like resentful of the title because I was like of course I know of course I’m not mindless, of course I know how much I’m eating. You know why I’m not eating more than I think but anyway it took me a few years and I finally read the book and it was just like ha ha ha ha it was just it was a light bulb, watershed moment for me and I just I found myself laughing out loud. I mean it’s a very interesting book.

The experiments and studies that have been done to demonstrate the fact that we’re mindless over how much we eat. I mean it was just undeniable. But the book basically starts off by saying you’re not broken, you’re human. And here’s all the experiments and here are all the reasons for that to be true. And so I just really really feel strongly about sharing that with people because I think so many of us beat ourselves up over, the weight management aspect of our lives and we feel like we are broken. For me, the excess weight started pretty young, know, third, fourth grade on and so it always felt like this battle and struggle and I felt bad for whatever reason.

And so when I realized that I wasn’t broken, I was human, it was like my goodness I mean it took all this stress away and and it made it made it fun because what he points out is the fact that as humans through you know through my gosh through the centuries through millennia we were designed for survival to be on the see-food diet. Essentially see food right not seafood.

Peter Morrison (10:20)
Mmm.

Martha McKinnon (10:41)
Because the world, the environment was very much unpredictable. And sometimes food was plentiful and sometimes food was scarce. So, right. Yeah. So you had to eat up when the food was available and plentiful. So all of your biology is designed, to eat up when you see food, when you’re in the presence of food, because you just don’t know how long before your next meal. Now fast forward, right to our environment now, right.

Peter Morrison (10:45)
Mm-hmm. All right.

Martha McKinnon (11:11)
And I’m talking about the environment. I’m talking about an environment, right? In the developed world, in the United States, I’m not talking about places where food scarcity is real. And there are parts of the world where that is still true. But here in the United States where we live, we’ve never known, right? Personally, I mean, food, growing up in the seventies and eighties, mean, food has just been plentiful. Then, and you think about how much more available it is.

Peter Morrison (11:12)
Food is everywhere!

Martha McKinnon (11:36)
The rules even back in the 70s, right? And the availability was way less than it is now. I mean, it’s everywhere and you can have it in an instant, right? You’ve got Uber Eats, DoorDash, you’ve got the microwave. I mean, what’s the delay? Like you think about what the delay was between I’m feeling hungry, like, you know, even a hundred years ago between I’m hungry, right?

Peter Morrison (11:47)
Mm hmm. Door to ash Uber eats. Yeah.

Martha McKinnon (12:04)
Let’s figure out what to eat versus now. I mean, I have this facsimile of the Fanny Farmer Cookbook, the early like I think it was 1898 version of that. And when you open the cookbook, the first four or five pages are all about how to light your wood stove. You know, think right before electricity, what did it take to fire up the stove?

Peter Morrison (12:24)
My goodness.

Martha Mckinnon (12:31)
But then first you had to then go get the wood for the stove and what it took to how far away might your grocery store have been if there was a grocery store? Probably not even. When you think about that, the delay and the availability versus now, how far are you away from having that I’m hungry moment to being able to fulfill it? Seconds.

Peter Morrison (12:38)
Right, probably not even. Between drive-throughs and gas stations and grocery stores.

Martha McKinnon (12:57)
Yeah, right. And so, so what he said to me just was like, and all of the examples he gave was like, my gosh. He’s a he was a professor at various universities, and ran all of these experiments. And he was just fascinated by food and health and weight and the marketing and how it all interrelated.

And he just did all of these studies and experiments demonstrating how our environment can influence us in ways that we don’t even realize. You know, the size of the bowls, the size of the packaging, the menu descriptions, you know, how we’re just influenced, the number of people we’re eating with. He just goes on and on with all of these examples.

And by doing that, he really helps show all of the ways that you can engineer because his his tenant was that, yeah, if you can become really mindful, and that’s another way to take better charge of what you’re eating and how much you’re eating. But in a distractible, busy world, that can be really difficult. So he came up with what he called this mindless eating approach, he called it the mindless margin and the fact that he said it was easier to he says it’s easier to re engineer your environment than it is to change your mind.

And so, and that’s what I started doing. So that summer, I just started playing with all of these suggestions in terms of getting food out of view, like out of sight, out of mind, which was incredibly powerful. Creating little obstacles and roadblocks for making the real tempting food less available. And my gosh.

Peter Morrison (14:37)
Did it work?

Martha McKinnon (14:39)
So my story is, again, I was taking the summer off, so I did not weigh, I just played, and I instituted all of these rules that I learned. I came back in the fall, and I went to my meeting, and I was back, I was under goal. In a way that felt fun and unstressful.

Peter Morrison (14:53)
Wow. So you didn’t feel deprived?

Martha McKinnon (15:02)
No, no. And again, I think that’s what we’re going to need to talk about a lot here because I really believe that your mindset is just such a big part of this. It really is a mind, body, spirit kind of journey. What I’ve come to see too is it all depends on how you’re looking at something, whether or not you feel deprived or not. You know, I don’t know if we’ve talked. I think I’ve talked with you about this before, but maybe not, where we’ve recorded it.

But you know for years like often we go out with mom, you know we’ve made it a tradition to go out with mom at least once a week sometimes more. And I often, especially living in Phoenix where the climate is really kind of hot, and I’d be out at lunch but I’d want to come home and feel good about no energy slump and I’ve just found that you know really nice salads done with like grilled protein and stuff are just something that I love and that really work for me. I often would choose that because that’s really what I wanted and they made me happy. I was never sitting there thinking I don’t want this salad. I wish I was having the burger and fries. If I wanted the burger and fries, I’d let myself have it.

But my mom, I heard mom like afterwards say I just I just don’t even understand how you can go out week after week and just get the salad. So she was seeing it through a totally different lens, you know, where I was totally happy and she’s like, you know, you’re never, you’re never not on a diet. And it’s like, I don’t feel like I’m on a diet. I feel like I’m living my life in a way that really, really works for me where there have been times in the past where I did feel like I was on a diet and I did feel like I was deprived.

And so like your mindset and like that summer of the mindless eating thing, was fun to just sort of play and experiment and say, I wonder what will happen. And I mean, one of the big things for me was the size of your dishes. I don’t even think we realize how important it is in terms of feeling satisfied.

Peter Morrison (16:55)
Mm-hmm.

Martha McKinnon (17:07)
Like if you take a cup of cereal, which is a typical serving right of a cereal and you put it in a humongous bowl.

Peter Morrison (17:13)
It doesn’t look like a lot of food.

Martha McKinnon (17:14)
It looks pitiful. It looks pitiful. You look at it you say, I’m going to starve to death, right? That can’t be enough. But if you put it in and sometimes you have to go out now and find smaller bowls, because in addition to our food being super sized, like our dishes are super sized. So the bowls that come in a set of dishes are too big. You got to go out and pay more, you know, for a smaller bowl, which I did.

Peter Morrison (17:19)
Mm-hmm.

Martha McKinnon (17:40)
But you put a cup of, cereal in a reasonable sized bowl and you put some fruit on top and you put some milk on it and it looks generous. And so all of those things he talks about in the book, the fact that if you try to free pour a serving of cereal into one of those huge bowls, guess what you’re going to do? Yeah, you’re going to pour in like two or three servings. o he gives you all these great examples. And so it became fun and playful.

Peter Morrison (17:59)
Over poor.

Martha McKinnon (18:07)
And I continue to incorporate what I learned from reading that book into my life. And it’s been really magical. And I still have to call upon it and remind myself, because I’ll get in situations where you go to somebody’s house for dinner and there’s a bunch of appetizers out.

Peter Morrison (18:24)
Mm-hmm.

Martha McKinnon (18:25)
And I find myself like overindulging because it’s there. part of me might want to say, Martha, you have no self-control. And then I remind myself, you’re human. And when you’re standing here in front of food, don’t be surprised, you know, if you want to eat it, because you’re going to have to stay really mindful and present and evoke willpower, right? In order to limit yourself. And so again, you can, there are techniques, right?

For managing that and saying, well, I’m going to get myself a little plate, right? And I’ll put the food on it and I’ll go enjoy it and I’ll walk away and then I’ll step away from where all of those apps are out and I’ll go have conversation, you know, until dinner. And so again, it just feels more easeful to know it’s not me. I’m doing what any human being is gonna do in this circumstance. I’m not broken.

Peter Morrison (19:14)
Mm.

Martha McKinnon (19:19)
And so I just want to share that with people and help them understand because I really think that can help you on this journey and when you start to just really look at the environment outside of you and understand all of the ways it’s influencing you. I was forever a huge fan of the Food Network and I don’t really watch the Food Network anymore I mean, you’ll sit there and you’ll watch and you’ll be exposed to these things.

And suddenly you’ll be like, I want that. I need that. I’m hungry. Where that came from the outside. If I really step back and check, well, are you really, are you really hungry? Or are you just salivating because you’re seeing it? Right. And oftentimes you just start salivating because that’s what you’re designed to do when you see it. When you’re out, you know, at the mall and you smell it, you know, suddenly you’re like,

Peter Morrison (19:43)
I’m hungry. Mm-hmm.

Martha McKinnon (20:10)
I need that where you’re you’re being influenced from the outside and the and the more you realize that the more you can just kind of step back and just say you know I can take charge here. And one of the huge things I suggest to everybody is just really take a look at and we can talk more about this we can have other sessions where we just talk more about how can you really look at your environment or your spaces right if we can really sort of look at our spaces, our environment and say, how can I set this up to be helpful for me? How, if I look around, is it harmful for me? You can just change, mean, you can get to where you want to get to in a much easier, much gentler, less stressful way. And the same with your habits.

Peter Morrison (20:50)
Well, I’m definitely, even though I don’t have any direct need or immediate need, would say that the book sounds really interesting. And I think we should definitely put it on the schedule because it sounds like it could stir some interesting ideas

Martha McKinnon (21:03)
Yeah. I think so.

And I remember, you may not remember this, but we had a phone conversation. I don’t know. I think you were, you were up and you had to, I think you had taken Neil for an appointment and you were looking for a place away from that appointment site for us to talk. And the place that was suggested to you was like a donut shop, I think, or a bakery. Remember that? See, all these things stay with me because I always think of them in terms of mindless eating, but you were like, no, that’s not the place I want to go sit. Right. Because I’m, if I sit in a donut shop, it’s okay to have, I’m not saying you can’t have a donut, but I think you want to be having the donut because you really want the donut, not just because it’s there. Right. And I’ll just share one more story that’s coming into my mind at this moment. Mom had a friend, back in Phoenix who had a daughter who.

Peter Morrison (21:49)
Right,

Martha McKinnon (21:58)
was struggling with her weight and Patty was trying to help, you know, her daughter set, you know, some boundaries. And I was having a conversation with her one day and she had a job where she worked in, she worked in a bookstore, I think that was adjacent to like an ice cream candy shop. And it was the expectation that, I mean, every day, this young person who was trying to rein herself in, but essentially she was taking her lunch in the candy shop ice cream shop. And I’m like, that’s like, that’s like a degree of difficulty. I mean, I think about that’s just a, that’s a degree of difficulty that you just don’t want to subject yourself to. You know, if you’re really wanting to be kind to yourself, you know, if you’re trying to give up drinking, you’re not going to be hanging out with your friends at the bar.

Peter Morrison (22:28)
Hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Martha McKinnon (22:49)
You’re going to find somewhere else to hang out where the temptation is not there. And if you’re trying to eat less sugar, in an ideal world, you’re not going to be sitting in the candy shop eating your sandwich because, my gosh, the temptation is all around you.

So there you have it. You’re not broken. You’re human. And this is what humans do. And when you see it that way, but our environment is broken. You know, our environment really now is designed to result in what we’re seeing. You know, we’ve got a big problem with, overweight and, our bodies, our biology hasn’t changed that much.

But our environment sure has. And if you just start looking at the environment and you look at some of the offerings at the restaurants, know, the fact that, my gosh, you know, some of these meals can have a full days worth of calories in like one meal.

Peter Morrison (23:43)
Yeah, some portion sizes at some restaurants is incredible for a single meal, not family style,

Martha McKinnon (23:47)
Right. So all of those things, right. Right. So we can talk more and more about all kinds of suggestions that are made in mindless eating to help manage those situations so that you can feel more in charge and more in control and you can realize, you know, what’s happening and prevent it. So I think it’s just a real powerful shift in your thinking.

Peter Morrison (24:11)
Well, great. I think that’s a wonderful idea. Very helpful.

Martha McKinnon (24:17)
Alright, well thank you for tuning in and again if you have any ideas for other topics you would like explored, please leave them in the comments below. And please, please, if you’re interested in learning more, subscribe to our channel.

Peter Morrison (24:32)
Thank you.

Martha Mckinnon (24:33)
Thanks.

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