Moments of inertia (MOIs) are usually derived via substantial integration and may intimidate undergraduates without prior backgrounds in calculus. This paper presents an intuitive geometric operation, termed "squashing," that transforms an object into an equivalent one with a reduced dimension, whose MOI is simpler to determine. The combination of squashing and other methods (e.g., scaling arguments, the perpendicularaxis and parallel-axis theorems) enables the computation of complex MOIs with minimal integration.