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Summary
On episode 366 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Audrey Johns, who lost 150 pounds in 11 months and went on to found the blog Lose Weight by Eating, to talk about her cookbook Lose Weight With Your Instant Pot.
Audrey’s core message is that an Instant Pot is just an electronic pressure cooker, and the intimidating wall of buttons is mostly noise. Learn three of them, sauté, pressure cook, and cancel, and you can cook nearly anything in the book. She built the recipes around whole, real ingredients rather than canned shortcuts, so cooking from scratch stops being the time-consuming chore people assume it is.
The conversation also covers batch cooking a week of meals in one afternoon, how to build a healthy plate at a party or holiday gathering, and why she believes weight loss happens in the kitchen, not the gym.
Links
- https://loseweightbyeating.com
- https://www.harpercollins.com
- Episode 309 – Lose weight by eating with Audrey Johns
Key Takeaways
- An Instant Pot only requires three buttons to get started. Sauté, pressure cook, and cancel are enough to run nearly every recipe in the book. Doing the manual’s water test first removes the fear factor and confirms the machine is working.
- Start with something your family already loves, not an ambitious recipe. Trying mac and cheese instead of a cassoulet on day one removes the pressure of a brand-new appliance and builds confidence to try more later.
- Weight loss happens in the kitchen, not the gym. Exercise builds strength, posture, and fitness, but Audrey is blunt that burning 300 calories on the elliptical does not cancel out a slice of cake. The food you eat drives the scale.
- Batch cooking turns one afternoon into a week of meals. A single protein, shredded chicken, pulled pork, or shredded beef, cooked once can anchor several different dinners, cutting a week’s worth of cooking down to about two hours on a Sunday.
- Build a party plate with the 50-25-25 rule. Fill half the plate with vegetables first, a quarter with protein, and a quarter with carbohydrates, and start with water rather than a cocktail so you are less likely to overdo it once you sit down to eat.
- Not all carbs at a gathering are equal. A baked potato carries more nutritional value than a dinner roll, so if you are going to spend your carb allowance, spend it on something that actually feeds you.
- Adding is easier than subtracting. People resist giving up favorite foods, but adding one plant-based meal, or steadily increasing vegetables, feels less like deprivation and builds momentum the same way adding exercise would.
- Audrey’s three strategies to get and stay well: eat all-natural, whole foods so you stay satiated and feel your best; drink as much water as you can each day, aiming for close to a gallon, to support your metabolism; and drop the negative self-talk, since comparing yourself to a heavily Photoshopped magazine cover does more damage than any meal ever could.
“I am a firm believer that weight loss is found in the kitchen and not in the gym.”
Audrey Johns