Today Virginia is chatting with Cole Kazdin, author of What's Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety, which explodes a lot of the problems with our current eating disorder treatment system.

Remember, if you order Cole's book (or any books we mention on the pod!) from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. 

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Shira Rosenbluth

For anyone who needs to recover into a fat body, you’re asking them to sacrifice the safety of their eating disorder in the sense that it’s harder to exist in this world in a fat body than in a thinner one.

Gloria Lucas

just journal or do a crossword puzzle

backlash against the diagnosis of atypical anorexia

a very good piece about atypical anorexia

Virginia's story on Kurbo

Madeline Donahue

Lindsey Guile

Cole on Instagram

FAT TALK is out! Order your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. You can also order the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism. 

Today Virginia is chatting with fat rights advocate Tigress Osborn. Tigress is Chair of the Board of NAAFA, The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, and helping to lead the Campaign for Size Freedom, which just scored a huge victory in New York City and there is more to come. 

Remember, if you order books we mention in today's pod from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. 

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Campaign for Size Freedom

NAAFA 

FLARE

PHX Fat Force

 Smith College magazine profile of Tigress

Clothestime

The Overweight Lovers In The House & Heavy D

Dante Earle Tubbs from Contrast Photos

The Crown Act

Tipping the Scales of Justice: Fighting Weight Based Discrimination

Virginia's piece for Slate in 2021

International Weight Stigma Conference

Last year Burnt Toast worked with The States Project

give to NAAFA

he Association for Size Diversity And Health

NOLOSE

sign the petition

Wondermine

Black Fae Day

@IoftheTigress.

FAT TALK is out! Order your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. You can also order the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism. 

It's time for the May Indulgence Gospel! Instead of answering your questions this month, we're reading Virginia's hate mail. Buckle up! 

If you are already a paid subscriber, you’ll have this entire episode in your podcast feed and access to the entire transcript in your inbox and on the Burnt Toast Substack.

If you are not a paid subscriber, you'll only get the first chunk. To hear the whole conversation or read the whole transcript, you'll need to go paid. It's just $5 a month or $50 for the year—and you get the first week free!

Also, don't forget to order Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture! Get your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books. (Or get the UK edition or the audiobook!) 

Disclaimer: Virginia and Corinne are humans with a lot of informed opinions. They are not nutritionists, therapists, doctosr, or any kind of health care providers. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions they give are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & BOOKS

_____ Is a Breakfast Food by Marjory Sweet

The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren

The Ex Talk by Rachel Lynn Solomon

Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia

Da’Shaun Harrison Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness

chapter one of FAT TALK

Order any of these from the Burnt Toast Bookshop for 10 percent off if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)

OTHER LINKS

@SellTradePlus

The Cut did a profile

Fresh Air interview

the face shield

interview with Aubrey Gordon

yes, fat marathon runners

very popular article in The Atlantic about how eating ice cream is associated with lower rates of Type Two Diabetes

a tweet about Elizabeth Warren

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet body liberation journalism.

Today Virginia is chatting with her longtime friend and colleague Christy Harrison, MPH, RD! Christy is a journalist, registered dietitian, and certified Intuitive Eating counselor. She’s the author of Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating. And today we are talking about Christy’s new book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses, and Find Your True Well-Being.

And remember, if you order The Wellness Trap or Anti-Diet from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. 

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

christyharrison.com

Listen here for Virginia's conversation on Christy's new podcast, Rethinking Wellness. 

Virginia's first book

the SIFT check

Love Is a Revolution by Renee Watson

FAT TALK is out! Order your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. You can also order the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

FAT TALK is now out in the world! To celebrate, Corinne is here to chat with Virginia about the writing and reporting process. If you love what you hear, you can order the hardcover, ebook, or audiobook (or if you’re in the UK and the Commonwealth, the paperback) anywhere you buy books. Split Rock has signed copies (feel free to request a personal inscription!). 

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. 

Disclaimer: Virginia and Corinne are humans with a lot of informed opinions. They are not nutritionists, therapists, doctosr, or any kind of health care providers. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions they give are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

LINKS

The Eating Instinct

Diet Coke, obviously.

a great review in the Washington Post

Read an excerpt from Chapter 11 here

last week’s podcast

Amy

Lynn Steger Strong

Aubrey Gordon

Sabrina Strings

Da'Shaun Harrison

Marquisele Mercedes

Girls and Sex and Boys and Sex by Peggy Orenstein

Virginia's sensitivity reader Dom

an excerpt of the dads chapter in The Atlantic

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith, who is also on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing and also co-hosts mailbag episodes!

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

Today is a very special episode: You are all going to be the very, very first people to hear me read Chapter 1 of FAT TALK: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, which comes out in just 5 days, on April 25. We are excerpting this from the audiobook, which I got to narrate. If you love what you hear, I hope you will order the audiobook or the hardcover (or if you’re in the UK and the Commonwealth, the paperback) anywhere you buy books. Split Rock has signed copies and don’t forget that when you order from them, you can also take 10 percent off anything in the Burnt Toast Bookshop.

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. 

Disclaimer: Virginia and Corinne are humans with a lot of informed opinions. They are not nutritionists, therapists, doctosr, or any kind of health care providers. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions they give are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

LINKS

That photo by Katy Grannan

archived in the National Portrait Gallery’s Catalog of American Portraits

Anamarie Regino on Good Morning America

Lisa Belkin's NYT Magazine article

a report published in Children’s Voice

a judge ordered two teenagers into foster care

2010 analysis published in the DePaul Journal of Health Care Law

Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture

Fearing the Black Body

Hilde Bruch's research papers

National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA)

Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran wrote the first “Fat Manifesto”

Several studies from the 1960s

researchers revisited the picture ranking experiment

the 1999–2000 NHANES showed a youth obesity rate of 13.9 percent

reaching 19.3 percent in the 2017–2018 NHANES

Data collected from 1976 to 1980 showed that 15 percent of adults met criteria for obesity.

By 2007, it had risen to 34 percent.

The most recent NHANES data puts the rate of obesity among adults at 42.4 percent.

The NHANES researchers determine our annual rate of obesity by collecting the body mass index scores of about 5,000 Americans (a nationally representative sample) each year.

A major shift happened in 1998, when the National Institutes of Health’s task force lowered the BMI’s cutoff points for each weight category, a math equation that moved 29 million Americans who had previously been classified as normal weight or just overweight into the overweight and obese categories.

in 2005, epidemiologists at the CDC and the National Cancer Institute published a paper analyzing the number of deaths associated with each of these weight categories in the year 2000 and found that overweight BMIs were associated with fewer deaths than normal weight BMIs.

in 2013, Flegal and her colleagues published a systematic literature review of ninety-seven such papers, involving almost three million participants, and concluded, again, that having an overweight BMI was associated with a lower rate of death than a normal BMI in all of the studies that had adequately adjusted for factors like age, sex, and smoking status.

But in 2021, years after retiring, Flegal published an article in the journal Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases that details the backlash her work received from obesity researchers.

After her paper was published, former students of the obesity researchers most outraged by Flegal’s work took to Twitter to recall how they were instructed not to trust her analysis because Flegal was “a little bit plump herself.”

the BMI-for-age chart used in most doctors’ offices today is based on what children weighed between 1963 and 1994. 

a 1993 study by researchers at the United States Department of Health and Human Services titled “Actual Causes of Death in the United States.”

 the study’s authors published a letter to the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine saying, “You [ . . . ] cited our 1993 paper as claiming ‘that every year 300,000 deaths in the United States are caused by obesity.’ That is not what we claimed.”

“Get in Shape, Girl!”

The Fat Studies Reader

Too Fat for China

as I reported for the New York Times Magazine in 2019, it has become a common practice for infertility clinics to deny in vitro fertilization and other treatments to mothers above a certain body weight

Michelle Obama 2016 speech, another speech, a 2010 speech to the School Nutrition Association, 2013 speech

Marion Nestle, a 2011 blog post

food insecurity impacted 21 percent of all American households with children when Obama was elected 

TheHill.com story on SNAP

“I could live on French fries,” she told the New York Times in 2009, explaining that she doesn’t because “I have hips.”

Ellyn Satter's an open letter to Obama

several other critiques of “Let’s Move"

“I don’t want our children to be weight-obsessed"

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing and also co-hosts mailbag episodes!

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

It's our April Ask Us Anything episode! We're covering Ozempic, clogs, chafing, and what if you just don't want your kid to be fat. 

If you are already a paid subscriber, you’ll have this entire episode in your podcast feed and access to the entire transcript in your inbox and on the Burnt Toast Substack.

If you are not a paid subscriber, you'll only get the first chunk. To hear the whole conversation or read the whole transcript, you'll need to go paid. It's just $5 a month or $50 for the year—and you get the first week free!

Also, don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books. (Or get the UK edition or the audiobook!) 

Disclaimer: Virginia and Corinne are humans with a lot of informed opinions. They are not nutritionists, therapists, doctosr, or any kind of health care providers. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions they give are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

SellTradePlus

Universal Standard body shorts

Girlfriend Collective also has a shorts body suit thing

Casey Johnston's couch-to-barbell program

Virginia's book launch

Dacy Gillespie, Mindful Closet

Jia Tolentino’s Ozempic piece

The mainstream media's bad Ozempic coverage

March mailbag episode

Katherine Zavodni

Reclaiming "treats"

the lunchbox piece

Virginia's Charlotte Stone clogs 

Clogs for wider feet

Clogs with a strap

Corinne, resident Burnt Toast underwear expert.

Panty Drop

Kade & Vos

Chafing Shorts: Snag, Thigh Society

MegaBabe Thigh Rescue

Trouble Cookies.

Mother Grains

Bob’s Red Mill sorghum flour

True & Co bras

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet body liberation journalism.

​​Today's episode is a Comfort Food rerun featuring a conversation between Virginia, Amy Palanjian, and Darcy Lockman. Darcy is a clinical psychologist and author of All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership. All the Rage explores how egalitarian relationships become traditional ones when children are introduced to the household and why a disproportionate amount of parental work falls on women, no matter their background, class or professional status

Darcy’s book was foundational for me in starting to understand this issue more deeply. One thing I really like about Darcy’s work is that she does invite men into the conversation. It’s not just ranting, it’s about how we can change the conversation and move forward. 

And remember, if you order All the Rage from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off if you also preorder (or have already preordered) Fat Talk (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)

Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder a signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. And! You can now preorder the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player and become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. 

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

LINKS

Darcy's Website

Kids Don’t Damage Women’s Careers — Men Do

Mommastrong

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram, Twitter or TikTok. Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe. Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell. Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and supporting independent anti-diet journalism!

Today Virginia is chatting with Jessica Wilson, MS, RD. Jessica is a dietitian and community organizer who co-created the #amplifymelanatedvoices challenge which went viral in 2020. She is also the author of It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women’s Bodies which came out in February.

 If you are someone who has been in the anti-diet, intuitive eating, Health at Every Size spaces for a while, this conversation may give you some really big questions to sit with—it definitely did for me. If you’re newer to these spaces, I hope that this work helps you feel more welcome and more seen. 

And remember, if you order It’s Always Been Ours from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also preorder (or have already preordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. 

And don't forget to preorder! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. You can preorder your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. And! You can now preorder the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Jessica's Instagram: @Jessicawilson.msrd. Jessica's TikTok: byJessicaWilson.

Critiquing the Health at Every Size community

Sabrina Strings

Da'Shaun Harrison

yet another women’s magazine story about Ozempic

intuitive eating and chocolate cake

the kid who can enjoy Oreos

necklace extenders for fat necks! 

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

It's time for another community episode! This month, Virginia and Corinne are exploring how we feel about the word fat: Who gets to use it? What if you just don't want to use it? What is the power of reclaiming it? Thank you to everyone who contributed today. 

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. 

And don't forget to preorder! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. You can preorder your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. And! You can now preorder the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

CW: In this episode we do mention some specific weights and sizes. If numbers are triggering to you, you might want to skip this episode. 

BUTTER

When Whales Fly

Girlfriend Collective high waist compression leggings

Paloma bra

Superfit Hero

BOOKS

Order any of these from the Burnt Toast Bookshop for 10 percent off if you also preorder (or have already preordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)

Fat! So? by Marilyn Wann

Shrill by Lindy West

Little Witch Hazel by Phoebe Wahl

OTHER LINKS

Tuesday’s newsletter

SellTradePlus

Our March mailbag episode

Who gets to call themselves fat? 

What if you just don't want to use the word fat? 

What if you just don’t want to be fat?

I had a huge ribcage

that This American Life episode

Marielle Elizabeth

Catherine's TikTok

the good fatty

The Fat Lip

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

Today Virginia is chatting with Chrissy King. Chrissy's new book, The Body Liberation Project: How Understanding Racism and Diet Culture Helps Cultivate Joy and Build Collective Freedom is out this week. It’s an incredible mix of memoir and cultural analysis and an exploration of the intersection of racism and diet culture. 

And remember, if you order it from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off if you also preorder (or have already preordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. 

And don't forget to preorder! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. You can preorder your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. And! You can now preorder the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Follow Chrissy on Instagram, Tiktok, and Twitter

We are recording your April  Mailbag episode soon. Send us all your questions here. Wondering how we pick which Qs to answer? The mailbag episodes are for hot takes, funny anecdotes, clothing recs, or random facts you want to know about us. You can ask something more complicated, just know that anything that requires research and reporting gets put in a different “future Ask Virginia/essay ideas” pile. 

3 amazing Black dietitians to follow: Jessica Jones and Wendy Lopez and Jessica Wilson

The Body Is Not an Apology

Fearing the Black Body

the AAP guidelines

Chrissy's pottery TikToks

Souper Cubes

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

It's our March Ask Us Anything episode! We're covering anti-diet puberty books, clothing size chart confusion, our style icons, and a mom who thinks her 13-year-old needs to chew her food more. 

If you are already a paid subscriber, you’ll have this entire episode in your podcast feed and access to the entire transcript in your inbox and on the Burnt Toast Substack.

If you are not a paid subscriber, you'll only get the first chunk. To hear the whole conversation or read the whole transcript, you'll need to go paid. It's just $5 a month or $50 for the year—and you get the first week free!

Also, don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books. (Or get the UK edition or the audiobook!) 

Disclaimer: Virginia and Corinne are humans with a lot of informed opinions. They are not nutritionists, therapists, doctosr, or any kind of health care providers. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions they give are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

SellTradePlus

Unlikely Hikers

the Unlikely Hikers Merrell collab

Body Liberation Hiking Club

plus size backpacks

Celebrate Your Body (and Its Changes, Too!): The Ultimate Puberty Book for Girls

The Body Is Not an Apology

A Body Image Workbook for Every Body: A Guide for Deconstructing Diet Culture and Learning How to Respect, Nourish, and Care for Your Whole Self

The Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens: A Non-Diet, Body Positive Approach to Building a Healthy Relationship with Food

Love Your Body: Your Body Can Do Amazing Things...

No Weigh!: A Teen's Guide to Positive Body Image, Food, and Emotional Wisdom. 

It’s Perfectly Normal

Sex is a Funny Word

Universal Standard has some petite pants

Big Bud Press has petites

Jeans Science series

the complaints of the mid-size queens

Lydia Okello 

Matty Matheson 

Julie from Rudy Jude

Marquimode

Dacy’s course.

Emma Straub

Amintou Sow

 is it the ultra processed foods?

Muna and Broad pattern for underwear

mistaken for pregnant 

All That Breathes

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

Today Virginia is chatting with Debra Benfield, RDN. Debra has helped hundreds of women heal their relationship with food eating in their bodies over her 35-year career as a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist specializing in the prevention and treatment of disordered eating, and brings her passion, expertise, and lived experience to the intersection of pro-aging and body liberation work. Deb’s work is rooted in helping clients recognize internalized ageism and end it, dismantle internalized diet culture and fatphobia, nourish their bodies to support vitality and aging and develop a respectful partnership with their bodies. 

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. 

And don't forget to preorder! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. You can preorder your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. And! You can now preorder the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Follow Deb @agingbodyliberation (Facebook)

Deb's small group coaching that focuses on aging with vitality and body liberation

grappling with feelings about our aging bodies

The Truth About Grandparents

that Emma Thompson conversation

Ashton Applewhite's TED talk

Ageism Unmasked: Exploring Age Bias and How to End It

Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs about Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live 

How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

It's our February Ask Us Anything episode! We're covering body autonomy for kids, 90s makeup icons, body feelings, and the dreaded business casual. 

If you are already a paid subscriber, you’ll have this entire episode in your podcast feed and access to the entire transcript in your inbox and on the Burnt Toast Substack.

If you are not a paid subscriber, you'll only get the first chunk. To hear the whole conversation or read the whole transcript, you'll need to go paid. It's just $5 a month or $50 for the year—and you get the first week free!

Also, don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Claire Lerner

how much we love breakfast

Universal Standard Ponte Pant

11 Honore

Elizabeth Suzann

Nooworks

Draper James dresses

Stitch Fix

The Kit

Mindful Closet

You Fat-Shamed Your Beautiful Girlfriend

Comfort Food

an awesome cookbook

Glennon Doyle Indigo Girls episode

Sonya Renee Taylor episode

Bogs snow boots

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

It's time for another community episode! This month, we’re tackling the new AAP guidelines for the treatment of pediatric ob*sity. The conversation we’re having here today is intended to articulate the harm we are experiencing, as fat people, as parents, as humans concerned about the safety of other humans. Thank you to everyone who contributed today. 

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. 

And don't forget to preorder! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. You can preorder your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. And! You can now preorder the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

our first community episode on anti-diet resolutions

Virginia on the guidelines in the NYT

More coverage of the guidelines on Burnt Toast

The Body Positive

Thanks to our expert guests:

Dr. Rachel Millner, an eating disorder therapist and fat activist, who previously visited the podcast

Elizabeth Davenport, a dietitian who specializes in family feeding and eating disorder prevention, and the co-author of the SunnySide Up Nutrition blog and podcast

Anna Lutz, RD, the other half of Sunnyside Up Nutrition and a dietitian who specializes in family feeding and eating disorders in North Carolina

Amy Palanjian of YummyToddlerFood

Oona Hanson, a parent educator and eating disorder recovery advocate

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

Today Virginia is chatting with Lauren Leavell! Lauren is a trainer and fitness instructor based in Philadelphia, and the creator of Leavell Up Fitness a body positive and weight-inclusive fitness network that makes working out accessible and fun.

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. 

And don't forget to preorder! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. You can preorder your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. And! You can now preorder the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Leavell Up Fitness

Lauren on Instagram and on Tiktok

The myth of the six pack

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

What is a sensitivity read and why is it so important to the book publishing process? Today Virginia is chatting with Dominic Bradley! Dominic is a Brooklyn-based Black disabled queer visual artist, writer, and performer who provided the sensitivity read on Virginia's upcoming book, Fat Talk.

And don't forget to preorder! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. You can preorder your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. And! You can now preorder the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. 

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

why preorders are so crucial

Your ancestors gave you more than wounds. 

Dom's coloring book (reach out to get yours!) 

Dom's fav online glasses shops: Zeelool, Zenni, VoogueMe

Favianna Rodriguez

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

It's time for your January AMA! Corinne is back, and we're answering your questions about fat language, allyship, cozy clothes, Chick-fil-A, breakfast and more. 

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. To reward us all for surviving the January diet culture noise, we're taking 20 percent off subscriptions until February 1. That's just $4 per month or $40 for the year. Click here for the discount! 

And don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt — and preorders are 25 percent off right now at Barnes & Noble! Order Fat Talk here and use the code PREORDER25 at checkout. (This offer January 27!)  

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

KC Davis on the pod

Yummy Toddler Food is a very good friend

Madewell ankle socks

Google “diabetic socks”

Maggie's Organics diabetic socks

slouchy socks

Virginia's sweatshirt from Eileen Fisher

Boston Birkenstock clogs in navy

how the Boston clogs got so trendy on TikTok.

Peridot Robes

Corinne has the cuddle robe

a cute fleece from Target

we also like this one and this one.

Medium piece by Cherry Midnight on superfat

The Fatness Spectrum via Fat Lip Podcast

Aubrey Gordon always

This recent newsletter

Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder

I Love My Body Because

Beautifully Me

The Truth About Grandparents

mushroom popcorn

Kobo eReaders

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

Today is a Very Special Episode because we're hearing from all of you! If you’re a paid Burnt Toast subscriber, then you know about Friday Threads. Today's episode is like a Friday Thread for your ears. Our prompt is anti-diet New Year's resolutions and I can't wait for you to hear what everyone had to say. 

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.

And don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Body Liberation Hiking Club

Flab

Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic

a historic 1911 Aladdin kit built house

Virginia in Goodreads

The perfect roast chicken does not exist

Where does your diet culture show up?

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

Today Virginia is chatting with the brilliant Aubrey Gordon! Aubrey is the co-host of Maintenance Phase, and the author of two books: What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat and (out this week! go buy it!!) "You Just Need to Lose Weight" and 19 Other Myths About Fat People. 

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.

And don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Join Aubrey and Virginia for another conversation to celebrate Aubrey's new book next Thursday, January 19 at 7pm CT. Register here. 

Follow Aubrey on Instagram and Twitter

Aubrey's previous Burnt Toast episode

Virginia's conversation with Jeff Hunger

What if I just don't want to be fat?

Nicole Byer’s stand up, podcasting work and Nailed It

Taskmaster

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

New Year’s is a fraught time for a lot of us! Resolution culture means that diet noise and fitness noise are turned up to level 1000 right now. I was thinking about that and remembered this really lovely conversation that Amy Palanjian and I had with Christy Harrison on our old podcast Comfort Food and I decided that this episode called “New Year, No Diet” would be the perfect rerun to share with all of you this week. It originally aired on January 13, 2019. And wow, the world is different! But diet culture has remained so much the same. 

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.

If you aren’t familiar with Christy, she is an anti-diet nutritionist, a journalist, and host of the beloved Food Psych podcast. She’s also the author of the book Anti-Diet, and her new book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being comes out the same day as Fat Talk. So we will be celebrating book birthdays together in April and I’m hoping Christy will be back on the podcast in real time then to talk to us about the new book.

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti diet journalism. I’ll talk to you soon. 

Being able to feed yourself without the observation of someone around you just really changes things. 

You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fat phobia, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.

Today we are revisiting a newsletter essay, one that I actually published just last month. It’s called “Do I Wear Spanx to Family Court?”

I’m going to read the piece, and then my good friend Lyz Lenz is coming on to discuss divorce and diet culture with us. If you don’t know Lyz, she writes the excellent substack newsletter . She’s also the author of God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America, and Belabored: A Vindication of the Rights of Pregnant Women. And she has a third book coming out in 2024 called This American Ex Wife. Lyz is a really amazing political journalist, memoirist, all around phenomenally talented writer and my local divorce expert, so I’m really excited to have her on the episode.

We are also working on a very special New Year, Same You episode for January (by we I mean me and Corinne and Tommy!). And we want to know what is your anti-diet, fat positive New Year’s resolution! Obviously January is the super toxic time. It is the diet industry’s Super Bowl. So we want to know what you resolve to do in 2023 to divest from diet culture, and help dismantle anti-fat bias. So this could be like super simple, like you are not going to redownload Noom. Or it could be some bigger goal for changes you want to make in your family, advocacy you want to do in your community.

Whatever it is, we want you to send us a note or even better record a short voice memo on your phone and email that to virginiasolesmith.assistant@gmail.com.

This episode is our December paywall episode. That means to hear the whole conversation or read the whole transcript, you will need to go paid. It’s just $5 a month or $50 for the year. You will get the first week free, and you will get my full conversation with Lyz including our Butters which are both excellent entertainment ideas for your kids, if you are looking down the long specter of winter break and wondering how you’re gonna fill some time. Plus you’re just gonna get all of Lyz’s brilliance. We talk about the revenge body, we talk about family court, we talk about co parenting, there’s so much good stuff here. 

Okay, here’s the essay. It ran on November 1. 

Virginia

So Lyz, you have written so brilliantly about divorce. You are the smartest person I know about divorce. I text you whenever I want to know about divorce.

Lyz

Which isn’t that often, for her husband who’s listening.

Virginia

You are extremely knowledgeable about this topic and your next book, This American Ex Wife, is about divorce. So you are here as my divorce expert and I’m curious: Do you see diet culture playing a role in American divorces?

Lyz

Oh, absolutely. Something initially with divorce that hits on diet culture is the “revenge body.” Anybody who’s gotten divorced will tell you about the stress and the weight loss associated with it—or not! Sometimes it’s weight gain. But there is the expectation of having that “post-breakup revenge body.” I’ve seen TikToks that are kind of making jokes like, you want to sit on the couch and relax, but you remember you have to be the hot one in the breakup.

Virginia

I never thought about this. 

Lyz

You know, like the “getting back out there” body. I know for a lot of men, divorce involves some free time, which, that time used to be managed by someone and now they don’t know what to do. So there is an aspect to the culture of the Divorced Dad in the gym. I follow quite a few TikTok accounts of divorce influencers which are out there…

Virginia

Wow, divorce influencers.

Lyz

So the divorced dad going to the gym, the mom trying to get hot and get back out there. It hit me so personally when I got divorced because I was so stressed out, and my response to stress is to not eat. I lost a lot of weight, and it was not healthy. And I remember people being like, “Oh, you look so good,” and me being like, “I’m so stressed out, I’m not sleeping or eating. You should be asking me if I’m okay.” I would get so angry about it, too, because then also people—as you know—people treat you differently. All of a sudden the men would see me differently because it was a very unhealthy amount of weight [to lose].

Virginia

It sounds like a a parallel with postpartum “get your body back” pressure.

Lyz

Yes. 

Virginia

So for a lot of women you’ll have just done that in recent years and now you have to do the “revenge body.” And why are we not allowed to just let our bodies be during times of stress and trauma?

Lyz

Right, right. And I think, too, it’s so hard when you layer on that the idea that exists in the divorce world that you now have to find someone else. I hate that. I hate that whole idea. That’s what most divorce books are. It’s like, okay, well, you did it, now how do you find love again? So that comes with that added pressure of being good looking which then translates to diet culture. Thinness, muscles.

Virginia

I’m just remembering a piece of yours where you were like, “actually all women want is to live alone in the woods with our wolves.” No, we don’t want to get remarried. That’s not the goal but that is immediately the expectation. Why do you want to get right back into the thing you just got out of?

Lyz

Well, I think there’s that pressure of singleness, right? There’s that stigma of singleness. But you’re right, most women post-divorce don’t remarry. It’s the men who remarry. It’s somewhere around 70% of women initiate divorces and I think it’s less than 40%—I need to fact check myself on that. But it is a lower number who then get remarried. It’s an overwhelming number of men who then try to remarry because, like, “I don’t know how to find mustard in the grocery store without a woman.” But no, you’re right. I mean, every married woman I know wants to just live alone in the woods with a wolf, so.

Virginia

And part of that freedom would be not needing to be hot while you do it, just being able to be. 

Lyz

Yes, not being a hot witch. 

Virginia

Just want to be a witch.

Lyz

Why do we have to have weird witch beauty standards? There’s this great moment I think about a lot in the book Don Quixote where he’s traveling along and he meets all these shepherds. And they’re like, “There’s this one b***h, she’s awful. She broke all of our hearts. She’s so beautiful. We hate her. She’s evil.” And then they’re talking about her and she just walks up to them and goes, “I’m not evil. I don’t like any of you. Stop talking to me. I didn’t try to seduce you. I just existed and you thought I was in love with you.” And then she’s basically like, “I don’t want to be in your narrative.” And then she goes back into the woods and she never shows up in the book ever again. 

Virginia

She’s our queen. 

Lyz

I think about her all the time. 

Virginia

That’s icon behavior for sure. So, what else besides revenge body comes up? Anything about divorce and diet culture.

Lyz

Then there’s that whole aspect of divesting yourself of the body ideas that come from the relationship. I think there are so many ways that happens. You might have married a person looking a very specific way but, as we all know, time and life and children take a toll. And then the other person is like, “Well, you don’t look how you used to” and you’re like, “Well, I never will.”

Virginia

That’s life. That’s time passing.

Lyz

And marriage is so physical. It’s a bodily connection, right? So having divorce enables you—especially if you’re in a bad marriage. I mean, obviously people can have good marriages. My bias is that I think marriage is inherently unequal and bad. You can have good relationships within a bad system, but it’s still a bad system. So I’m gonna get that out there.

But so when you do divorce, part of that rebuilding of identity and rebuilding of sense of self comes with, like, who am I now? Like, what is my body now? And now I don’t have to manage that other person’s toxic body / diet stuff. I don’t have to manage the expectations of another person on my body and on my sense of self. I don’t have to have somebody judging what I’m eating. And then you can also make your own food. That was something that blew my mind that I didn’t expect. Like, I am not cooking for this other person who wants boneless, skinless chicken breasts every single f*****g night. 

Virginia

The saddest of proteins, truly

Lyz

He would have lived on boneless, skinless chicken breast and microwaved frozen vegetables. I’m like, “let’s roast a chicken from Ina Garten. Let’s make vegan stew!” and none of that would fly. So, yeah, being able to feed yourself without the observation of someone around you just really changes things. And since we have 50/50 custody—and it’s always different with children around—but I get to sit and be like, “what is it that I actually want to eat? And when do I want to eat? And how do I want to eat?” It just makes me so much more thoughtful and grateful about what I’m consuming in my body.

Virginia

One woman I interviewed described it as a “food rumspringa” because she was free from his expectations. For her it was embracing stuff like Annie’s Mac and Cheese—like I don’t have to cook, I can just enjoy eating a box of mac and cheese for dinner and watching Gilmore Girls and be so happy. What was your favorite thing you ate when you realized this liberation? 

Lyz

For a while I got really into cooking complicated recipes from the New York Times. That kind of stopped. I did the opposite of everybody in 2020, in the shutdown year. Everybody got into cooking and I was like, “I’m done, peace out. I will now be ordering food exclusively.” So another one was eating out because my ex does not like to go out to eat and and it was very stressful around, like, if you go out to eat and then what you order. You know, should you get a glass of wine or god forbid order dessert? That’s, like, so extra and why are you doing that? So just going out to eat by myself and an ordering whatever I wanted and dessert was a game changer. 

Virginia

I love that.

Lyz

And then I’d make complicated recipes just for myself because I’m like, “oh, he didn’t like curry so now I will make curry.”

Virginia

Now you can have all the curry! Revenge curry seems way better than revenge body, I’m just gonna put that out there. 

Today Virginia is chatting about the intersection of diet culture and care tasks with the great KC Davis! KC is a licensed professional therapist, author of How to Keep House While Drowning, and the person behind the mental health platform Struggle Care.

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.

And don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Please sign this petition in support of clemency for Nikki Addimando. 

You can read more of Nikki’s story here (CW for sexual assault and abuse), follow the #FreeNikki campaign on Instagram, and share the petition with friends here.  

Want to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.

 Fill out this form to help us plan for the Fat Talk book tour and launch. Thank you!

Virginia's essay on organization as a hobby. 

KC's post on laundry as a hobby

On seasonal exercise

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

Today Corinne is back! She got bangs, you guys! And it is time for a very special holiday themed Ask Us Anything. As always, we record these once a month. (Except last month when Thanksgiving threw us off. But here’s October if you missed it!) So if you have questions, you can email them over by hitting reply to any newsletter or drop them here. 

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.

And don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Please sign this petition in support of clemency for Nikki Addimando. 

You can read more of Nikki’s story here (CW for sexual assault and abuse), follow the #FreeNikki campaign on Instagram, and share the petition with friends here.  

Want to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.

 Fill out this form to help us plan for the Fat Talk book tour and launch. Thank you!

(always) Eileen Fisher lantern pants

Virginia got a coat

J.Crew quilted cocoon puffer

Corinne's fleece from Alder Apparel

Virginia's LL Bean fleece leggings (mixed reviews)

bamboo fleece leggings

Naadam cashmere pants

Corinne's shorts

decline to be weighed

barenecessities.com

Jeans Science

a bra that fits

How do you respond to diet talk from loved ones?

Why it's not sugar addiction

When is it restriction and when is it good parenting?

Corinne's childhood butter yogurt spread (she says ban it!)

reclaiming diet foods

Helen Hoang’s romance novels

Flight by Lynn Steger Strong

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

Today Virginia is chatting with Jeff Hunger who is an assistant professor of social psychology at Miami University in Ohio, who studies weight stigma. Our focus of this episode is Jeff’s work on anti-fat bias, understanding how we internalize it, the difference between implicit and explicit bias, and how we start to separate out concepts like body image struggles from the larger conversation of anti-fat bias. We cover a lot of important ground. Including Taylor Swift.

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.

And don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Jeff on Instagram and Twitter

Virginia's previous reporting on weight stigma in healthcare

Virginia can't be a cool foodie because she has to feed small children

A recent review on how we reduce weight bias

A good introduction to ACT, and here’s an example of research on its utility in reducing weight stigma (ironic warning for weight-normative language there!)

Weight bias is still going up. 

Study on fat-shaming celebrities and implicit bias

The very heated debate about Taylor Swift

When Lizzo used an ableist term (and fixed it!)

Stan Culture

Who gets to call themselves fat?

Denied rights to our own bodies.

When a kid comes home and reports that someone called them fat 

Mary Himmelstein's research on weight-based bullyig

Why Dan should build Virginia a hidden kitchen

No really, hidden kitchens

The appliance garage concept

It’s just gotten bigger and bigger and more absurd.

Elsie Larson's hidden library

Want to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.

 Fill out this form to help us plan for the Fat Talk book tour and launch. Thank you!

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

Today Virginia is chatting with Emiko Davies, an award winning Australian-Japanese food writer, photographer, and cookbook author based in Italy. Her most recent book is Cinnamon & Salt, and she also shares her recipes on her Instagram and in her Substack newsletter,Emiko’s Newsletter.

If you are already a paid subscriber, you’ll have this entire episode in your podcast feed and access to the entire transcript in your inbox and on the Burnt Toast Substack.

If you are not a paid subscriber, you'll only get the first chunk. To hear the whole conversation or read the whole transcript, you'll need to go paid. It's just $5 a month or $50 for the year—and you get the first week free!

Also, don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

 Julia Turshen on anti-fatness in the food industry

Luna drinking a bowl of minestrone

Emiko's tiramisu recipe

Virginia's New York Times Magazine article about her daughter's feeding differences (also her first book)

Beautifully Me by Nabela Noor

the challenges of plus sized kids clothing

 family meal planning

dumpling soup

Want to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

Today Virginia is chatting with Naureen Hunani, the founder of RDs for Neurodiversity, a neurodiversity-informed online continuing education platform for dietitians and helping professionals. Naureen also has her own private practice in Montreal, where she treats children, adults, and families struggling with various feeding and eating challenges through a trauma-informed, weight-inclusive, and anti-oppressive approach. 

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.

And don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

RDs for Neurodiversity

On the Division of Responsibility and diet culture

Melinda Wenner Moyer on core strength and sitting at the dinner table

For little ones, Yummy Toddler Food has roundups of good baby and toddler highchairs, booster seats, and toddler tables.

For older kiddos, we're hearing good things about this chair and these wobble stools

what is misophonia

Against Impulsivity

The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang 

Want to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

Today Virginia is chatting with with Pam Luk, founder of Ember & Ace, a new line of plus size athletic clothing for kids. We get in what's wrong with the kids' clothing industry, and Pam has so many tips and hacks to making finding clothes for kids in bigger bodies more doable. 

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.

And don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Ember & Ace

Jeans Science.

Virginia reporting on the weight/child custody case for Slate

Julia Turshen

what is a 10/12 plus

why I just always buy two sizes of everything

Target boots (yes, mostly sold out)

Want to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

It's our October bonus episode! And since it's spooky season, and maybe nothing is more terrifying than retro gender norms, Virginia is revisiting an old essay about Halloween in Girl World. 

If you are already a paid subscriber, you’ll have this entire episode in your podcast feed and access to the entire transcript in your inbox and on the Burnt Toast Substack.

If you are not a paid subscriber, you'll only get the first chunk. To hear the whole conversation or read the whole transcript, you'll need to go paid. It's just $5 a month or $50 for the year—and you get the first week free!

Also, don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

The original Halloween in Girl World

If you’re in the Bay Area, check out this amazing abortion film, which is screening at the Berkeley Video & Film Festival on Saturday! (Here’s Virginia's conversation with Mary about the film and body autonomy activism.) 

Election Day is looming. Remember any dollar you give to the Burnt Toast Giving Circle now goes towards The States Project’s Rapid Response Fund, to support quick-response work like last-minute electoral opportunities, ballot curing, helping with recounts, and more, in every state where we have a chance to gain (or protect) a blue majority. 

That police officer costume.

The doe costume was not homemade.

babies dressed as Ruth Bader Ginsberg or Rosie the Riveter

a ready-made RBG costume on Etsy

Mighty Girl's excellent curated round-up of girl-empowering costumes

Corinne and Virginia hate Halloween

a piece Virginia wrote about Barbie 

Everything Everywhere All At Once

an interview with Michelle Yeoh 

Halloween costume idea for white ladies: Jamie Lee Curtis in the movie plus hot dog fingers

Today’s episode is our October Ask Us Anything with Virginia and Corinne Fay of @SellTradePlus! We get into unlearning fatphobia, managing treats with kids, and our very unpopular opinions about Halloween. 

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.

And don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Virginia (Corinne) joined TikTok.

The good seltzer

How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis

lazy can also be a very racialized term

@LordTroy

our last reader survey

Body Liberation Hiking Club

STP's Philadelphia Clothes Swap

Christy Harrison’s provider directory

Corinne's cheesy song

Ellyn Satter/DOR

Kid Food Instagram

Aubrey Gordon has a great argument for why we should say anti-fat bias and not fatphobia

How to Raise Kids Who Aren't A******s by Melinda Wenner Moyer

The $58 plus size Rockford Peach Costume on Amazon. 

Noihsaf Bazaar

Corinne is making this chocolate sheet cake with brown butter frosting.

Lizzo playing James Madison’s flute

Virginia is into Lauren Leavell Fitness

Want to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

Today’s episode is a delightful conversation with Shelly Anand and Nomi Ellenson, co-authors of the wonderful new picture book I Love My Body Because. 

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.

And don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Want to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.

Shelley's first book Laxmi’s Mooch

Erika Medina, illustrator of I Love My Body Because

Roxane Gay's book Hunger

Sonya Renee Taylor's book, The Body Is Not an Apology

Tyler Feder

Nabela Noor (Beautifully Me)

More body positive picture books

 studies on representation of kids of color in children's books

Nomi's Butter: The Cycles Journal

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

Today’s episode, a conversation with blogger and fat liberation activist Linda Gerhardt, is the kind of story I can only tell on Burnt Toast. Because lipedema—despite impacting some 11 percent of women worldwide—isn’t a Sexy News Story. It doesn’t have the kind of hook mainstream media outlets want. Lipedema patients aren’t the kind of victims (i.e. thin white ladies) that America loves to rally around. But there are millions of them living quietly, in pain, unable to access healthcare or even clear answers because, as Linda puts it, “lipedema lives in this cursed intersection of medical fatphobia and medical misogyny.”

If you want more conversations like this one—about the true costs of anti-fat bias, told in ways that center fat folks—please  rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.

And don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.

CW: This episode does contain some discussion of medical fatphobia and medical trauma, as well as prescription weight loss and weight loss surgery. If any of that wouldn't be good for you to listen to, please take care of yourself and give this one a miss.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Want to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.

Linda blogs at Fluffy Kitten Party

Linda's (awesome!) Instagram is @littlewingedpotatoes

The Standard of Care for Lipedema in the United States by Dr. Karen Herbst

Ragen Chastain on why movement doesn’t have to be joyful and health is not a moral obligation

Virginia is watching Bad Sisters (on Apple TV). 

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

This week, we're taking it old school with a solo Virginia episode! She's reading her most popular essay to date, about why you should stop romanticizing your child's lunchbox. (Note: We recorded this before the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health; check the transcript for some thoughts on these new developments.) 

If you'd like to support Burnt Toast, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. Subscriptions are on sale this week only, so you can take 20 percent off and join for just $4/month or $40 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.

We've got an urgent call to action for the Burnt Toast Giving Circle! Details in the transcript. Help us fight for a blue majority in the Arizona state legislature. 

And don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Want to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.

The original essay

Here's the Biden administration’s new National Strategy on hunger and nutrition, including school lunches. 

The pandemic school lunch scramble.

Jennifer Gaddis on school lunches

School lunches are healthier than you think

So, what about processed foods?

Meal planning mental load

stress-organizing my kitchen

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Come hiking with this amazing group

CREDITS
The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

This week, Corinne joins Virginia for another Ask Us Anything episode! We have a lot of thoughts about pants. So buckle up for that. We also talk about snacks. Pants and snacks, and I know, you're already in.

If you'd like to support Burnt Toast, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And considering becoming a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.

You can also now officially preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Want to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.

For previous Corinne episodes, start here and then go here and here. 

Corinne's amazing jumpsuit

Should you get rid of your scale?

Jeans Science

Universal Standard black leggings

Universal Standard ponte pant

Universal Standard buttoned down shirt

 similar pink clogs to Virginia's

Eileen Fisher lantern pant

Draper James dress

Dacy Gillespie

cashmere bike shorts

Corinne’s Barbell Lift Off experience

the conversation I had with Serena

CREDITS
The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

This week, Virginia chats with Chelsea Conaboy, author of an amazing new book, Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood.

If you'd like to support Burnt Toast, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And considering becoming a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Want to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.

Chelsea's NYT Op-ed: Maternal Instinct Is a Myth That Men Created

Chelsea's chapter book read-aloud picks: The Wild Robot, The Wild Robot Escapes and (strong co-sign from Virginia) Dory Fantasmagory

Virginia's Instagram Gardening Content.

CREDITS
The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

It's our September bonus episode! And we're trying out a new format: Virginia's Office Hours, where a Burnt Toast subscriber comes on the pod to chat with Virginia about fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health. Our first guest is Serena, who is trying to navigate family gatherings while in eating disorder recovery—but her relatives aren't just diet-y, they are diet culture creators. 

If you are already a paid subscriber, you’ll have this entire episode in your podcast feed and access to the entire transcript in your inbox and on the Burnt Toast Substack.

If you are not a paid subscriber, you'll only get the first chunk. To hear the whole conversation or read the whole transcript, you'll need to go paid. It's just $5 a month or $50 for the year—and you get the first week free!

This episode does contain some discussion of eating disorders, eating disorder recovery, and family medical crisis. If any of that wouldn't be good for you to listen to, please take care of yourself and give this one a miss.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Want to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.

Virginia has previously discussed her daughter's medically necessary (but awful!) fat-free diet in this episode. 

Serena recommends this poem by spoken word poet Andrea Gibson. 

CREDITS
The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

This week, Virginia chats with with Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant, cofounders of the Center for Body Trust, and authors of a new book out this week, Reclaiming Body Trust: A Path to Healing and Liberation.

If you'd like to support Burnt Toast, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And considering becoming a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.

Post-Publication Note: Dana let us know after this episode aired that credit for this episode title (which she also quotes in the conversation below) belongs to Dr. Crystal Jones. We apologize for not properly attributing that during the conversation.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

We're getting ready to do another AMA episode soon. And we need your questions! Put them here, so we stay organized. 

Hilary and Dana were on the Dear Sugars podcast

Virginia previously interviewed them for a Health Magazine piece

One of the frameworks Hilary and Dana use is Barbara Love’s liberatory consciousness, which is something they learned from Desiree Adaway and Ericka Hines.

Nonbinary psychologist and Body Trust provider Sand Chang contributed to their book.

Hilary is obsessed with the show on Apple TV called Home and her dog Arrow. 

Dana is obsessed with her hot tub, heated or not, and English muffins from Sparrow Bakery.

Virginia and her lower back are obsessed with this $29 heating pad from Target

CREDITS
The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

This week, we revisit an old episode of Comfort Food where Virginia Sole-Smith and Amy Palanjian chat with Lisa Du Breuil, an incredible fat activist and clinical social worker who specializes in eating disorders and addiction. They discuss sugar addiction and how to navigate endless treats with your kids.

If you'd like to support Burnt Toast, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And considering becoming a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.

CREDITS
The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

This week, Virginia chats with Dana Miranda, a certified educator in personal finance and the founder of Healthy Rich, a platform for inclusive budget-free financial education. Check out her podcast and her Substack newsletter, Founder Notes.

If you'd like to support Burnt Toast, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And considering becoming a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Virginia found Dana through this great Culture Study interview. 

Dana recommends literal burnt toast with butter, and also playing the flute.

Virginia recommends the Maui Mat. 

CREDITS
The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

Today, Virginia is chatting with Julia Turshen. Julia is a New York Times best-selling cookbook author. Her latest book is Simply Julia, she writes a fantastic newsletter, and she’s the host and producer of the podcast, Keep Calm and Cook On. Julia lives in the Hudson Valley, with her spouse Grace and their pets. And she teaches live cooking classes every Sunday afternoon. Follow her on Instagram: @Turshen.

If you'd like to support the show, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And considering becoming a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable me to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS
Virginia and Julia talk about a presentation that Julia recently gave at the Culinary Institute of America about fatphobia and diet culture in the food industry.

Julia's Butter is the Body Liberation Hiking Club. Find them on Instagram and Facebook.

Virginia's Butter is cutting up the cheese before you serve it, the way Julia taught her.

CREDITS
The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

They're dealing with a consumer that they've never marketed to before and they don't really have the tools to do that. They don't know what's going to speak to that consumer. And it's also fatphobia, right? Because the brand doesn't want to center fat people as their customer. So they have to put everybody together in order for it to be okay. 

You're listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I'm Virginia Sole-Smith and I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.

Today I am chatting once again with the fantastic Mia O'Malley. Mia is content creator on Instagram and Tiktok (@MiaOMalley and @plussizebabywearing). Mia has been on the show before, so you’re probably already a big fan. I asked her back today because we needed to have a deep dive conversation about everything happening at Old Navy with plus size clothing.

Also! Substack has asked us to try out a new format for this episode. Paid subscribers, you’re getting the full audio and full transcript, below. (So nothing has changed, just consider this your July bonus episode!)

Free list folks: You’re getting the first chunk of my conversation with Mia (both audio and transcript), but if you would like the full version, you’ll need to become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber.

Reader subscriptions enable me to pay guests like Mia for their time and labor, so please, consider investing in these conversations if this is work you care about. 

When you get full access to my conversation with Mia, you’ll get way more juicy details on the whole Old Navy situation. And you’ll find out the two brands we think are doing a surprisingly GOOD job on plus size clothes right now. I bet it’s not who you think! 

PS. You voted and the results are in: We’ll be reading ESSENTIAL LABOR by Angela Garbes for the August Burnt Toast Book Club! Mark your calendars for Wednesday, August 31 at 12pm Eastern.

Episode 55 Transcript

Virginia

Hi Mia. So we'll start by reminding listeners who you are and what you do.

Mia

I'm Mia O'Malley. I'm a content creator on Instagram. I have my account @MiaOMalley where I share a lot of resources for fat and plus sized people and some of my own style and life. And then I have an account called @plussizebabywearing on Instagram and I'm @plussizebabywearing on TikTok.

Virginia

Last time, we had a pretty wide-ranging conversation where we talked about the intersection of fat activism and momfluencing, about finding a fat-friendly health care provider—all sorts of stuff. But this time, we have a very specific mission. When this news story broke, I was in the middle of writing my book, and I had no time to think about it, but you were on it. Your Instagram is this amazing resource. And I was like, Thank God, Mia will come on and explain to us what is happening with Old Navy and plus size clothing. I mean, it's a mess. How did this all start? 

Mia

So in August of 2021, old Navy launched what they called BODEQUALITY, and it was like, “the democracy of style.” They were going to offer sizes 0 to 30 and XS to 4x at the same price and then they would have it in 1200 stores. And they would be rolling out sizes 0 to 28 with no special plus size section. They also wanted us to know that there were going to be mannequins size 12 and 18. The CEO of Old Navy said, “It's not a one time campaign. It's a full transformation of our business and service to our customers, based on years of working closely with them to research their needs.” The marketing campaign included a TV commercial with Aidy Bryant from SNL and Shrill.

Virginia

So, none of this was subtle. This was a very full-throated, “We are here for plus sizes.”

Mia

Well, yes and no. The campaign was not subtle, but the campaign was also confusing. So many people did not even realize what BODEQUALITY meant.

Virginia

Well, they made up that word. 

Mia

And they made sure to include all diverse body types which, in general, is great. But it's part of a watered down body positivity, where we're not really getting to the heart of the matter and helping the people that are marginalized, that need to be helped and need to be lifted up. A lot of people did not recognize that this campaign meant that plus sizes were being carried in stores. It included people of “diverse body types,” it said “democracy of fashion.” But what does this really mean to someone? Does this mean that I can get my size in your store? It's not really clear.

This is me editorializing, but I just think: We couldn't have a campaign that was just for fat people. We have to do it adjacent to thin people.

Virginia

It gives them this cover, because they're using this aspirational rhetoric, instead of saying explicitly, “We have screwed over fat customers.”

Mia

Exactly. It just was not clear enough to the fat consumer that they were going to be able to access their clothes in store. It was muddled in the same way that body positivity gets muddled when we don't talk about the people that really should be centered in the movement.

But as someone who has been critical of Old Navy in the past, even I wanted BODEQUALITY to work. We wanted it to be an example for other retailers and brands, that that this could be something they could do. Even though I had messages in my DMs talking about issues folks were seeing, I didn't really want to talk about it at first, because I wanted to see how far it would go.

Well, less than a year later the Wall Street Journal reported that Old Navy would be pulling extended sizes from their stores. That article is a whole other thing that we can get into, too, because it's its own beast. 

Virginia

Yeah, so that's what just happened, which blew this all up. It looked like they were blaming their sales dropping on the fact that they had added more plus sizes to the stores. That was the story out there, right?

Mia

Yes, that's right. Suzanne Kapner—she wrote the article called “Old Navy Made Clothing Sizes for Everyone. It Backfired.” 

Virginia

I will say quickly, as a journalist, the headline is not Suzanne's fault. We never get to pick our headlines. However, the article itself is also problematic as you can now explain.

Mia

There are a few issues with the article. Most specifically, it doesn't include comments from anyone in Old Navy corporate. They took quotes from other interviews that they had done, but Old Navy didn't comment on this article itself. So a lot of what they had was attributions to someone who worked in the store, a PR person, a city analyst—different things. They also have this quote from Diane Von Furstenberg, who spoke at the the Future of Everything Festival and they put that front and center.

Virginia

So all we really know is that Old Navy sales dropped, right? We don't really know why, or whether it is reasonable to blame that on plus sizes.

Mia

Correct. First of all, they did not give this even a year to work. The CEO, Sonya Syngal, said on an earnings call that they “overestimated demand in stores” and they launched too broadly. They "over-planned larger sizes, with customer demand under-pacing supply. Someone else in Old Navy corporate said it was “a realigning of store inventory.” Which is not at all what the article says but sort of points to, they had an inventory problem.

Virginia

Which, it's been a pandemic! Everyone shifted to online shopping. They haven't yet gotten the customers back in the stores, period. Getting inventory right, regardless of sizing, is sort of a moving target right now.

Mia

What we're hearing from customers at Old Navy though, is they weren't even aware that plus sizes were in stores. That’s possibly because of the way that these stores are laid out. They took away or they didn't have a plus size section for a long time. But the plus size shopper is used to going to a specific section for their clothing. In this “democratizing of fashion,” Old Navy put everything together. And in some cases that made it harder for people to actually find their size. You had a lot of packed racks. You've had people struggling to find their sizes across the board.

I'm also hearing that although Old Navy says that they went to great lengths to look at their fit when they did this inclusive sizing, that the fits are completely off for many, many items. So, Old Navy denim that people were used to buying for years, totally changed. People's sizes completely changed. Rockstar jeans, which they had been buying for over a decade, are now a completely different size. And in many cases, people were having to size up two or three sizes thinking that their body has changed in some drastic way, when really Old Navy sizing, completely changed in many items. 

Virginia

That makes me wonder how inclusive they really intended to be.

I think it's important for people to recognize that no matter how fascinated you might be by a Black person’s hair, we are not an exhibit or curiosity.

You're listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, and I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.

Today I am speaking with anti-racism activist, writer, and educator Sharon Hurley Hall. Sharon is firmly committed to doing her part to eliminate racism as the founder and curator in chief of Sharon's Anti-Racism Newsletter, one of my favorite Substacks. Sharon writes about existing while Black in majority white spaces and amplifies the voices of other anti-racism activists. Sharon is also the head of anti-racism and a special advisor for the Diverse Leaders Group.

I asked Sharon to come on the podcast to talk about a piece she wrote on the newsletter a few weeks ago about the CROWN act, Black hair, and the ways in which white people perpetrate racism against Black people for their hair. We also get into how to talk about hair and skin color differences with your kids, which I found super, super helpful and I think you will, too.

If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! It’s free and a great way to help more folks find the show.

And! It’s time to decide what we should read for the next Burnt Toast Book Club!

I’ve culled through all of your suggestions and narrowed it down to these five (mostly because the Substack poll-maker limits me to five choices). I was going to stick with fiction because it’s summer and I’m in beach read mode, but I made an exception for Angela Garbes because, it’s Angela Garbes. (Which is to say, if we don’t pick her for August, we’ll do it for September or October!) You have until the end of this week to vote. I’ll announce the pick on Tuesday. (The discussion thread will go live Wednesday, August 31 at 12pm Eastern!)

Episode 54 Transcript

Virginia

Hi Sharon! Why don't we start by having you tell my listeners a little more about yourself and your work?

Sharon

Okay, so I am an anti-racism writer and educator, a former journalist, and I have been writing about anti-racism-related stuff for longer than it appears. I actually wrote my first article in 2016, but I wasn't doing it consistently. I launched an anti-racism newsletter in 2020. So it's just been going for just about two years now. In it, I share my perspectives as a global citizen. I was born in England, I grew up in the Caribbean, I lived in England as an adult. I visited the US. I lived in France. I've been in a lot of places, and I've experienced racism everywhere. And so I bring that lens to what I write about. You know, quite often we think what we're experiencing is the only way it's being experienced or is unique to the location that we're in. And my experience is that there's a lot of commonality in how these things operate in different places. 

Virginia

Oh, that's so interesting. I have British and American citizenship, but I've lived my whole life in America. And I definitely tend to think of racism as this very American issue. But as you're saying that, I'm realizing how incredibly reductive that is. Although Americans certainly are a big part of the problem. 

Sharon

Yes, but—or yes and, I suppose. Let's not forget that all of this started with the British people—well, British and Europeans—who colonized everywhere.

Virginia

Sure did. Yup. Absolutely. 

Sharon

There are many places besides the USA that share this history of enslavement. Barbados and the Caribbean being among those places. So there are similarities, there are commonalities, I think. It operates in a particularly American way, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist in other places. Because it does. It's sometimes less visible. And of course, because so many other places don't have a gun culture, you're less likely to end up dead as a Black person, even if people are being racist towards you. 

Virginia

Yes. We add that extra layer of things.

Well, I am having you here today to talk about a piece of American legislation because you wrote a really excellent piece for your newsletter. I want everyone to subscribe to your newsletter and to be supporting your work. Often you're putting things on my radar that I have missed and I just really appreciate the education that you do. This was a piece you wrote recently on the CROWN Act, which I have to admit I wasn't even aware of as something that was happening. So for starters, for folks who aren't who aren't familiar with this, can you tell us a little bit about what the CROWN act is and what inspired it? 

Sharon

The CROWN Act stands for Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural hair. I believe it was (first) sponsored by State Senator Holly Mitchell from California. And then other states have since passed similar laws. There is also a federal act, which was passed by the House earlier this year.

The idea is that Black people should be able to wear their natural hair, and not have it be a problem. In all post-enslavement societies, in all post-colonial societies, in many white majority places, the way that our hair grows out of our head is a problem for people. It can be seen as not professional. There are all sorts of ancient ideas about what Black people's hair is and isn't, that play into the way that it is treated. It's not just about being able to wear your hair, the respect piece is important as well. Because you'd be surprised how often—I mean, I worked in England for 15 years and there were people that would come and say, “Ooh, your hair! Let me…” (For those listening, I am running my hands through my hair.) “Your hair,” you know, “It feels so different. Let me…”

Virginia

Like it’s okay to touch you. 

Sharon

It's okay to just touch my hair. So there has historically been this thing where Black people's natural hair, and all the various styles that we put our hair in, were not seen as worthy of respect, were not seen as professional, were not seen as acceptable. All of that comes out of that whole white supremacist ideology.

Virginia

What I really appreciated in your piece is you explain why the ability to have legal redress for microaggressions is obviously really important, given this really problematic history that you've just sketched out for us. But you also wrote, “Why the hell do we need to legislate for Black people to enjoy autonomy over our hair?” So, talk a little more about that piece.

Sharon

White supremacy has weaponized Black hair in many ways. It's been a matter of control that extended to using hair as evidence of the reasons why Black people deserve to be enslaved, because our hair was seen as like wool, animal-like, somehow bestial, somehow not right. You could think of the Tignon Laws, which I think were in Louisiana, where Black women's hair was supposed to be covered. Because otherwise the white guys would not be able to control themselves. There was this idea of overt sexuality, as well.

Virginia

That being your problem to control as opposed to…

Sharon

Yes, our problem that they needed to control. Black women and Black people being what they are, we've made lemonade out of lemons. That's why you get these fabulous headdresses and head ties and so on. They look absolutely wonderful. But you know, the the original idea was to control it, to cover it up, to hide anything that would make us look more human and more beautiful. Often in the past, women have been encouraged to cover themselves up so that they don't get assaulted. This is another facet of that.

As I've said, I don't know any Black person who's worked in a white majority space, especially a woman, who has not had some white person in their office space, make free with their hair. And you know, I would not do the same if the situation were reversed. I want to add something here, which is that a lot of white people say, “Oh, I went to a country in Asia, and people were fascinated by my straight blonde hair.” And I say, that is not the same thing, because the history is different. The agency that you have historically had over your own body is different. Coming out of a culture where we have not had that agency, somebody putting their hands in our hair lands very differently. 

Virginia

Yeah, absolutely. It's always going to be a different experience. But you're right, people do make that comparison. I would imagine also there's some comparisons to when you're pregnant and people feel like they can touch your stomach. And that is also very violating. But that's a finite experience. You're only going to be in that mode for nine months. I'm not saying it's okay that it happens, it shouldn't happen. But this is something Black people are being asked to navigate daily, without other people adjusting. 

Sharon

I just actually want to address that particular because: Imagine if you're a Black pregnant woman.

Virginia

Oh god, yes.

Sharon

Because I was a Black pregnant woman. So people would be putting their hands in my hair, but they'd also be touching my belly. That felt extremely violating. 

Virginia

Yes, it is. I mean, it just is.

Sharon

And in a way that I couldn't even fully articulate at the time as to why it bothered me so much. But I know now why it bothered me so much. 

Virginia

Do you mind sharing a little bit about how you do navigate those moments?

Sharon

At the time when it used to happen most often, I was not often in a position to navigate that safely. Because people would then regard me as being the problem, regard me as being the angry Black woman, regard me as making something out of nothing. Now I would be in a position to say something like, “Because of the history of enslavement, this does not feel good to me. This feels like a violation.” And I could say it as plainly as that.

And I think if you said it like that people would would pause and think about it. I've not often had the chance to do that, but it's definitely something that I would do the next time it happens. And of course, you know, the other weapon is a glare. A glare, the right kind of glare. Sometimes you can see someone coming towards you and you just give them that look and they think better of it. It's the bomb look, the look that you give your kid when they're about to do something that's really problematic and you don't even want to have to talk about it and it stops them in their tracks. Sometimes you need to pull that look out.

Virginia

You need that look. I mean, and again, not to equate the experiences, but I did notice that getting touched while pregnant happened much less the second time. I think because I had learned that look a little. I think I was much clearer with the nope, you're not allowed in this space.

I was wondering if we could also talk a bit about texturism, that’s a concept you hit on in that piece as well. How do white people perpetrate this, and also how does it play out within the Black community?

Sharon

Okay, so I'm going to start with the second question first. This is another offshoot of enslavement, of that white supremacist ideal and ideology. The societies that we grew up in that say that “white is right” and that's what you aspire to. And it is true that in those times and even subsequently, if you had lighter skin, if you were closer to looking European, you had more opportunities open to you. One of the ways this revealed itself was in your hair. So you will hear people—I mean, I certainly did when I was growing up. I would hear older people talk about good hair, right? And good hair meant it had a little wave in it, it was closer to what they would think of as European hair. This happens in Black majority Caribbean countries, in Black communities all around the world, and in so many post-colonial spaces. 

What is also interesting is that many white people feel more comfortable with those people that they see as having more proximity to them, than the people that are darker skinned, that they see as having less proximity to them. I'm not sure they're always consciously aware of it, but I know that it does happen. For example, you can look at things like casting in films and TV series, and who gets what kind of roles. Where are the darker skinned people? What kind of roles do they get? What do the lighter skinned people with the wavy hair get? Who are the people that are representing Black people in the ads? Who are the models?

I mean, it's not 100 percent that way, but if you were to look at it, you would see that there's definitely this idea that having that wavy hair texture, and that lighter skin can buy you some additional visibility and acceptability. So, it plays out in what hair is deemed acceptable and professional within the Black community and beyond the Black community. 

Virginia

I'm thinking, as you mentioned casting, how even when a very dark-skinned Black person is cast in a role, it's then the subject of, “look at how we're breaking ground, look at what a big deal this is.” It has to be this huge conversation because it's so rare. So the assumptions prove the rule here, because you're still in a place where that's news, when that shouldn't be news.

I'm hoping we can also talk a little bit about how to navigate this conversation with our kids, because I do think hair—and of course skin color, as well—is often one of those physical differences that little kids—I'm thinking like three, five, seven year olds—will notice and point out about people when they meet them. And often white parents have this instinct to rush in with, “That's not nice, don't say anything.” And, maybe they're speaking in terms of “don't comment on that person's body, because that's rude.” But it also reinforces to white kids, that there's something wrong with Black hair, that this is something we can't talk about, that this is off limits in some way. 

Sharon

I remember when I was living in France and I was driving somewhere with a white friend and her kid who was maybe three or four at the time. He was fascinated by the fact that my skin was a different color. So he asked if I'd stayed out in the sun too long. And his mother was absolutely mortified. And I laughed, because, you know, he was three or four, he wasn't coming at it from a hurtful point of view. And I explained that people had different skin color. That's just how we are.

I often think when you're dealing with these things, going with the factual is the way to go. A recognition that the differences exist, but no suggestion that they mean something positive or negative in terms of how we interact with those people, you know? You have to, at the same time, avoid suggesting that there's something negative about having darker skin or Black skin, but also avoid suggesting that there's something particularly positive about having white skin. You have to do both things. Because kids are going to notice, kids are going to see it. I think for young, very young kids, that kind of thing doesn't matter to them. We have to not shy away from the fact that there are aspects of society that are going to see these things as major differences and treat people differently. But we can also teach them that this is not something that they themselves have to do or perpetuate. 

Virginia

So in that moment, what would you have wished your friend had said to her kid? It sounds like you handled it beautifully, but it shouldn't be your job to handle it. What do you want white parents to be doing?

Sharon

Definitely not to come down on the kid like a ton of bricks, suggesting that they've done something wrong in even asking the question. Possibly reframing the question. Parents have to educate themselves so that when they get these questions, they have the answers. Because I don't know that that particular parent would have even known what to say or how to explain it. 

Virginia

I think often, the reason we panic is because we are having our own stuff called out, we're suddenly realizing, Oh, I don't have the right language for this. And that's on me. I should have done that work.

Sharon

If you're going to raise anti-racist kids, you have to be an anti-racist parent. And that doesn't mean that you're not going to make mistakes. It means that you recognize that this is the route that we have to travel for all our humanity. And for equality and equity for all.

Virginia

Another way I get asked this question often is how to respond if your three year old says, “Why is that lady so fat?” You know, comments on body size, and I always go with something like, “Bodies come in all different shapes and sizes—”

Sharon

—And colors!

Virginia

And colors! Hair comes in all different colors and styles and, you know, hair comes in different textures. You can just normalize that without getting into some intense thing about it. 

Sharon

Especially for young kids. You have different conversations with your kids about things like this at different ages. If your kid is three, you don't necessarily have to give them the whole history of colonialism, you know? If your kid is 12, that might be different. 

Virginia

You should be doing that, absolutely. 

Sharon

Exactly. Because we we teach our kids at a very young age about stranger danger and unwanted touching. And it's a good time to say that that also extends to touching people's skin and hair when they have not asked for it. I think that is something that would fit very nicely with that lesson, right? 

Virginia

Yeah, to just say, “No one can touch your body without permission. You don't touch other people's bodies without permission.”

Sharon

Exactly.

Virginia

And fortunately, young children will give you plenty of opportunities to reinforce that.

Sharon 

Because they're curious. They're always, you know, sticking their hands in things.

Virginia

Black hair is obviously such a huge topic. What haven't I asked you that you think is really important for us to be thinking about? 

Sharon

I think it's important for people to recognize that no matter how fascinated you might be by a Black person’s hair, we are not an exhibit or curiosity. Just don't touch the hair. You know, just don't touch the hair. Some people are so traumatized by it, even if you asked to touch the hair, they'd still be upset. We're coming out of a history where Black people for centuries had no agency. Where in some countries, we were put on display. And those very features that you now want to treat as a curiosity were the things that were displayed.

So, it's not just about it being wrong in this moment, it's all the generational trauma that is awakened by that. So it's really best avoided. Google is available, if you want to find out more. If you have a real Black friend—and I'm not talking about somebody you work with that you don't even sit with at lunchtime. I'm talking about somebody that's actually in your life—then maybe you can have those more in depth conversations with that person. But if we're talking about your colleagues and casual acquaintances, for best results, just keep your hands out of their hair.

I was just going to add that from the point of view of your workplace, what you can do is you can look at what your policies say and make sure that they are equitable in terms of what's seen as professional. Do your bit to change things where you are. 

Virginia

That's a great idea. And I just wanted to share your rage for a moment that it is 2022 and we are having to say don't touch people's hair. And we are having to pass laws to protect people from this. I mean, it is astounding to me that body autonomy is not more of a—well, I live in the United States where they're taking bodily autonomy away in so many different ways right now. 

Sharon

You know, if you think about how the country started, it started by taking stuff away from the people that were here. It started by taking autonomy away from the Black people they brought in. It started in a time when women didn't have very many rights at all. Yeah, and all of this was still the case at the point when the country became the country.

Virginia

Right. 

Sharon

So maybe it's time to rethink what the country is and should be and could be, instead of going back to what was the norm in 1776.

Virginia

 Which protected only one type of person. 

Sharon

I mean, exactly, exactly. It's the 21st century, we should be beyond that. 

Virginia

Definitely. Well, I so appreciate you giving us this education, taking the time to talk through this issue more. I think it's one that all of us can be doing better on. And encouraging us to think about how it's playing out in our workplaces, and our kids’ schools, all of that.

Butter for Your Burnt Toast

Virginia

We wrap up every podcast with my butter for your burnt toast segment. This is where we give a fun recommendation of something we are loving or learning from right now. So Sharon, what's your butter?

Sharon

Well, the funny thing about it, it's a little bit of a self promotion, in a way, because I've just started a new gig at Diverse Leaders Group, a brand new startup as the head of anti-racism. Our aim is to identify development support leaders at all levels. That's anyone wanting to lead the way to equality in their own lives and for their communities. We're starting with anti-racist leaders. So I'm pumped about developing community support and educational resources to help people really live anti-racism and create a more equal world for everybody. 

Virginia

That's fantastic. My recommendation, related to our conversation about Black hair, is a kid's book that my both my daughters have really loved over the years called Don't Touch My Hair by Sharee Miller. It is a great story of a Black girl who has amazing hair and everybody when she walks down the street wants to touch it, and she doesn't like it. She uses her voice to tell people to stop and they have to listen.

We talked about how with your three year old, you're not gonna explain all of colonialism, but you can start to talk to your three and four year old about how Black kids have to deal with this and your straight hair doesn't attract the same attention. So that was a conversation I wanted to be having with them. But they also relate so deeply to this experience of a kid getting unwanted attention, and how do you sort of say your body is yours, and so there's certainly a universal theme, as well as it being a great way to have this conversation and help kids understand this issue. So I wanted to recommend that. 

Sharon, tell everyone the name of your newsletter and anything else you want us to be following?. How can we support you? 

Sharon

My newsletter is Sharon's Anti Racism Newsletter. You can support me by taking a paid subscription because one day I would like to run the newsletter full time. And you could also join the Anti-Racist Leaders Association, which I mentioned earlier and take the lead in fighting racism wherever you are. 

Virginia

Amazing. Thank you so much for being here. I really loved this conversation. 

Sharon

Thank you, Virginia. I enjoyed it, too. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode.

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

People don’t have a choice about whether or not to fight these things. You have to keep learning all you can, you have to keep finding the allies you can. And to despair is to abandon all the people who need us most.

You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, and I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.

Today is a very special episode because I am interviewing one of my very favorite people in the world: My stepmother, Mary Summers. Mary is a Senior Fellow in the Fox Leadership Program and a lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s also a former physician assistant, political speechwriter, and a lifelong activist.

And 52 years ago, she and three other activists made a 28 minute black and white film about what it was like to live in a country where abortions were illegal. (Watch it and get involved!)

This was in 1970. The Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion throughout the country was three years in the future. And of the approximately 800,000 abortions performed in 1970, only 1% were obtained legally. 300,000 resulted in complications and 8000 resulted in death.

We are now living in post-Roe America. There is much about this fight that has changed in the past 52 years, but also much that stays the same. So, I asked Mary to come chat with me about her work on the film as well as what we can learn from the people who fought for legal abortion before as we begin to do it again.

PS. Mary was delighted to donate her $100 podcast honorarium to the National Network of Abortion Funds. Thank you to the Burnt Toast paid subscribers who made that possible!

And big news: The Burnt Toast Giving Circle has exceeded our goal! We’ve raised $20,111 and counting for Arizona state legislature races. You can join us here, and read more about why that helps in the fight to legalize abortion here.

Episode 53 Transcript

Virginia

Let’s start by telling listeners a little bit about you and about your work.

Mary

I am a senior fellow with the Robert Fox Leadership Program at the University of Pennsylvania. I’ve been, for the last 20 years, a lecturer in political science, teaching service learning courses on the politics of food and agriculture and on schools as sites where inequalities and economic status and and health, health especially, can either be addressed or reproduced. My students, as well as being in class with me, are working in schools and after-school programs and food stamp snap enrollment campaigns and programs like that, so that they’re learning about institutions on the ground as well as in the classroom.

Virginia

And that just one of many things you have done in your life. Do you want to also just go back a little further and tell us what you did, especially around the time you made the film?

Mary

I got involved in making the film right as I was graduating from college in 1970 I was at Radcliffe. And I had gotten interested in film, and interested in the women’s movement. That period at Harvard was the height of the anti-war movement. We basically were on strike most spring semesters that I was there. Especially the Harvard strike of 1969 was really important to me, seeing the entire university mobilized around stopping ROTC on campus. People who had been meeting in tiny rooms trying to organize, by the end of that strike, were meeting in the football stadium. Faculty and students were working together, voting on the demands of the strike and passing them overwhelmingly and the administration basically conceding everything we were fighting for. That gave me a real sense that we could change the world.

In the years both prior to and after graduation, I was also getting more interested in the women’s movement as one more important way of thinking about relationships within the anti-war movement, within the student movement, and in society as a whole. Men were clearly very dominant. And women were starting to be very interested in talking to each other, about everything from clitoral orgasms to shared housekeeping in ways that were exciting and interesting. And then, a person I was taking some classes from told me about a group of women who were making a film about abortion. So I contacted them. 

They originally started out of the same group of women who eventually would become the founders of Our Bodies Ourselves. It was a big Bread and Roses office that was generating all this activity around women’s health and consciousness raising groups and just lots of excitement about thinking about the inequalities of gender roles, and how could we address that. So I wrote a little grant to a program called Education for Action that that gave me funding to join this group of four women who were making this film on abortion.

It had originally been inspired, I think, by Jane Pincus, the person who made it possible to make a film because her husband was a documentary filmmaker then at MIT and we were able to use the MIT film lab equipment, and both cameras and editing. She had been listening to what was then the equivalent of NPR, about efforts to get the Massachusetts legislature to legalize abortion, and just couldn’t believe that the only voices you could hear debating it were men’s voices. So she thought, well, if we could make a film that would raise up women’s stories and voices that would make a big difference in these debates. And that made a lot of sense to me.

Virginia

Can you talk a little more about why the conversation on abortion in particular was being only had by men?

Mary

Literally, the Massachusetts legislature was all men. I mean, if there were any women in it, they, their voices were not on the radio. And really, that was a time when electoral politics was overwhelmingly dominated by white men.

Virginia

Let’s also be clear, this was three years before Roe, so abortion was illegal, which was why you were doing the film. How did you think about the potential risks you were facing by doing this work? 

Mary

This was a period in which it looked as if the way we would win abortion rights was state by state, with the legislatures passing it. Hawaii had legalized abortion before we started, but that, it’s so far away.

Virginia

Right, not very helpful.

Mary

People were not going to Hawaii for abortions. Then the big question was that a lot of states were starting to legalize abortion, but you had to get permission from a doctor, meet with a psychiatrist. Abortion on demand sounded like a very, very radical idea to a lot of people. So, we were very interested in making a film that would say that should be the norm, that women should get to decide if they needed an abortion. Obviously, you can understand why people who are fighting just within state legislatures were feeling like, we aren’t going to be able to get any legalization at all, unless we allow for all these permissions and doctor involvement, “it has to be between a woman and her doctor” kind of talk.

Virginia

They were taking a kind of incremental approach.

Mary

Right. So it seemed really important to have more pressure and organizing outside the legislatures and the courts that would help push the idea that this should be women’s decisions.

Now on the question of risk—there was certainly a lot of stigma. But there was also tremendous pent up trauma that women did want a chance to talk about. I mean, that was what was so exciting about the women’s movement at that time, was all these women who had experienced a whole range of different types of very real oppression, either in their own homes or in—I mean, I went to my college infirmary and asked for birth control and they wouldn’t give it to me. The range of humiliating experiences women had been through, much less the women who had been through illegal abortions, which for many were so terrifying and so scary. There was this lovely doctor in the hills of Pennsylvania that apparently gave many women very good abortion experiences, but there were a lot of people who did not have that. So, for some of them, just being able to tell their stories was huge, even if they didn’t want their name associated with it. We started receiving tapes of women wanting to tell their stories and several of the filmmakers had stories that they taped.

So I think more we were really excited and energized about doing this work. I mean, there was a lot of debate about whether we wanted our names on the movie. So in that sense, there was worry about stigma, I would say.

Virginia

It’s so moving to think about all those women sending in those tapes. Like pre-internet, that’s a lot of work, right? You’ve have to get a tape made, put it in the mail. It’s just, it’s amazing.

Mary

That’s one of the things I remember, is trying to splice those tapes together and you know my technical skills! To create the story in the first part of the film.

I do want to emphasize that all around the country there were women who were who were becoming amazingly strong and militant around the fact that they weren’t going to put up with this anymore. We knew about the Janes in Chicago—which I think a lot of your listeners are going to know about—where women had trained themselves to do abortions on kitchen tables. To me, at least, that seemed extraordinary and, and really scary. I was like, well, thank goodness, I’m just making a film. Because that was also risking very long term prison sentences. Both, you know, could you harm somebody and could you go to prison for this. Both of those things seemed much more scary than anything we were doing.

Virginia

As you mentioned, the original goal as activists was to work towards passing abortion laws, state by state, that’s where you were when Roe happened. I would love for you to talk a little bit about how that conversation shifted. Was there a feeling that like, we really still need to do the state work? Or did it feel like okay, now that conversation is over?

Mary

Well, a couple of things were going on. I think in terms of the bigger political picture, there was this sense of, Oh, okay. We’ve won this in the courts. That’s where we’re going to be protected. No matter what happens in the state legislature, the Supreme Court has given us this right. So, I think especially for the the people who are devoting their lives to winning abortion rights, that that just made sense.

I did think grassroots organizing and changing people’s hearts and minds, and reaching out to people with women’s stories was very, very, very important. That, to me, was the way you could make more fundamental and more lasting political change. I mean, it was incredibly important to protect women’s individual rights. But to me, we needed these bigger social and political changes that weren’t going to happen through the courts. So that was the bigger political picture.

The personal picture was: It took us almost a year longer to finish this film than we thought it would. We weren’t getting any funding. We had been this very small, intense group of women, trying to figure out how to make this film, how to tell these stories, how to guarantee that it would put abortion in a broader context in a way that we all felt proud of. Some of the major forces funding the push to win abortion rights were associated with organizations like Zero Population Growth, that had this big push on, we can solve poverty by making sure poor women don’t have children. We didn’t want our film to be used by people who had a class perspective that we thought was wrong. But it was really hard to figure out how to how to do that. So there were a lot of tensions among ourselves as we were figuring all that out. And we had to get out of the MIT Film Studio! So, we finished it quite abruptly. There were a couple of showings and we each tried to arrange other showings. My parents were in Rochester then and I went off to show it at the University of Rochester and RIT and a former professor had me come show it at Mount Holyoke.

Meanwhile, we needed to get jobs, we needed to move on with our lives. And, and it was very clear that now that abortion was legal— our film was mainly about how incredibly frightening illegal abortions were, which was not the main message that young women should be hearing. What they needed was assurance that legal abortions are safe. And so like the Guttmacher Institute, folks, for example, were kind of horrified by our film.

Virginia

Plus, the abortion pill was not an option back then. 

Mary

The only thing was a D&C.

Virginia

And that does change even what a legal abortion looks like now.

Mary

In fact, legal D&Cs were not the intense, scary, painful experience that the film portrays. The broader issues that we wanted to address in the film were about the huge percentage of the people that were actually dying from illegal abortions being Black and poor women. They were also the people with the higher maternal mortality rates. Our eagerness was to address issues of inequality with regard to race and class and women’s health. Clearly all that was still very relevant. Winning abortion rights didn’t mean winning abortion access.

Virginia 

Right. You see abortion as just one piece of this much larger puzzle. And at times, this has put you at odds with other feminists who’ve taken a single issue approach to this topic. So let’s talk a little bit about why it is so important to connect abortion to other issues, especially poverty, and how that helps work towards building these broader movements.

Mary

I’m somewhat reluctant to be critical, because I’m old enough now and also have studied history enough to be able to see, again and again, that what happens when you have these big broad movements trying to fight for social justice is: We never win everything we’re fighting for. And there’s a tendency afterwards to blame the people fighting for not having won it all, as opposed to blaming their opponents. One reason I want people to see the film is because I think there is this impression of “Oh, those second wave feminists, all they cared about was middle class white women,” and you can see from the film how concerned we were that that the people who were dying were Black. And how concerned we were about forced sterilization. We did not succeed in raising up those issues in ways where we won but we were raising them up.

I do think the important thing to remember is that Roe v. Wade is won in 73. And throughout the 70s, going into the 80s, we have an increasing reaction against these efforts to fight for greater equality and to use government to protect people’s rights. There’s a growing reaction against the civil rights movement, against the women’s movement, against the environmental movement. I mean, they’re achieving their greatest victories. But the reaction against them is growing and is fully articulated when Ronald Reagan gets elected and is saying, the problem is government.

The world in which you grew up is a world in which everybody was being told governments, our bureaucracy, they don’t do anybody any good. We need to work with markets to make the world a better place. That that became the mantra, which worked very well for people who had enough money. I mean, it didn’t work, it wasn’t even great for them, but it was way better for them than for people who didn’t have enough money to participate in markets. But that was the world in which people were still trying to fight for women’s equality. So the definition of equality became narrower and narrower. It was like, we need for women to get to be part of that narrow group of elites that are dominating this economy.

Virginia

It was just about accessing the white man’s power, it wasn’t redefining it.

Mary

Well, and only a very few white men’s power. Wealthy white men’s power. Very well educated and professional white men’s power. So that is happening at the same time that millions and millions and millions of white men and women and people of color, who throughout the 60s and 70s, had lived in an economy of greater equality, higher wages, jobs with benefits, pensions, funded pensions, are losing all of that.

So you can completely understand why if we’re going to live in a world dominated by wealthy elites, it should seem right that women and black people should be part of those elites. You can understand why those struggles became narrowly focused. But it also then lost you the broad base that you need to sustain a greater social movement for a vision of social justice that that speaks to more people.

Virginia

I think it’s important for folks doing this work now to understand that second wave feminists weren’t all working under the Betty Friedan model. That there was the Johnnie Tillman model (as I discussed with Angela Garbes), and this focus on what if we were dismantling this whole system of elitism as opposed to just getting a couple people promoted?

Mary

Which we thought we were doing! We won significant victories. I don’t want to lose track of that. It means a tremendous amount that we are not in the same place in this struggle that we were when I was young, much less when my mother was young. She couldn’t get a diaphragm until Massachusetts passed laws saying married couples could get birth control. So the victories we won were really significant. But the Reagan Revolution was really significant in ways that I see as resulting in the election of Donald Trump, which is why we lost abortion.

Virginia

And right now, as we’re all reeling from everything, there’s this new, divisive conversation emerging. I think there’s value to this push on using inclusive language around abortion to acknowledge that people of all genders have abortions. And then we’re hearing from folks like Pamela Paul—you and I talked about her op-ed—saying we have to keep this as a women’s issue. I think you are such a great example of someone who has been through all the different iterations of this, who has embraced inclusive language. I’d love you to talk a little bit about how you see that piece of it. What can we learn from that conversation? What do we need to be doing?

Mary

I think of social and political movements as as playing several different functions, all of which are really important. And one is, they get their strength, from the fact of people recognizing their own experience, you know, “oh my gosh, I’ve been living with this, you’ve been living with this.” We can say out loud what was terrible about this, and we can name it, we could say how horrible it was that our husbands thought they don’t even have to do the dishes, much less share the cooking. Obviously, this was going to make our husbands defensive. But it was still so important for us that we do this.

And I just think that’s always true. We need to recognize the needs of people to speak to their own experience, to name it, and to name it in ways that may make others uncomfortable.

At the same time, I just so deeply believe that most of us want the same things. We all want clean air, we all want a planet that’s not going to burn to a crisp, we want our kids to go to schools—

Virginia

And not get shot at.

Mary

Where they’re not killed and where they’re nurtured, where they learn stuff.

Virginia

Oh so, raising the bar a little higher even than not getting killed. Sure. I like how you dream big, Mary.

Mary

We want to live in safe neighborhoods. All of these are things that all of us want and right now, the politics of this country do not reflect that. Issues have been defined in ways where we just need to do a lot, a lot. Those of us who can stand to, those of us who aren’t too hurt by what we’ve been through—I don’t think any of us should be trying to force anybody who’s been through something horrendous that makes them not want to talk to anybody who sounds homophobic or sounds anti-trans. People need to be safe and to be in community. There’s so much work to be done, that no matter what your trauma, you can be doing something really useful to help others who suffered trauma like yours, right? But those of us who have led pretty protected, privileged lives—and many extraordinarily strong and amazing people who haven’t— I do think we need to be doing everything we can to be reaching out and to be listening and to not limiting our language.

We need to be able to talk to all kinds of different people who use all kinds of different language. I do think it’s important to be able to say to our trans brothers and sisters, “There are times I want to talk about women because this is so overwhelmingly a women’s experience and this is an audience I need to reach.” But to me, it’s also very liberating to go back to being able to speak very generally about people.  The issues that are affecting Black lives are the same issues of health care, and housing, and jobs, and global warming, pollution. These all have more impact on Black lives than on white lives. But to address those issues, we need movements that speak to white people, too. For a long time, in the women’s movement, we sort of weren’t speaking to men at all. And that wasn’t a way to win.

Virginia

Right, that just made everything very easy to dismiss as a women’s issue. That’s why we’ve made no progress on paid leave, because it’s only women who need to take paid leave, because it’s only women who have the babies. We’re not going to get anywhere on a lot of this until it matters to men.

Mary

That’s why I think it’s actually quite exciting to challenge gender roles. Let’s speak to “people.” 

Virginia

Right, let’s talk about how people have abortions, and people are impacted by abortion.

Mary

Yeah. And obviously, you know, there can be grammatical issues. I’m sort of against people getting too self righteous about the grammar either way. I remember a time when amazing civil rights leaders didn’t want to start saying “African American” or “Black,” who were sticking with Negro. And they had led extraordinary struggles and then started to get dissed by militant young Black leaders. Those stories happen again and again, in our movements. I do think it’s very understandable how and why it happens. The more we say, the more voices we have speaking in as many languages as possible about how most of us want the same thing, the better. Let’s make good faith efforts to get there. Let’s not attack each other. Let’s try to listen. Let’s try to understand why people are hurt and acknowledge that. And let’s follow leadership’s that’s getting us where we want to go.

Virginia

And as you said, those of us with privileged lives, who can do more work, we can do this work of learning new language. This is not the hardest thing anyone’s been asked to do! If this makes things safer and more comfortable for more people to participate, then we should be doing it.

Mary

What bothers me about the Pamela Paul piece is: No one is saying to her, don’t go out there and speak to women. She’s the one who’s choosing—

Virginia

—to feel attacked by other people’s choices. Other people’s language doesn’t actually have to impact her at all.

So, here we are post-Roe. You and I spent the week together after the decision was announced and I think I cried every day. People who know you and know your work were saying to me, “Isn’t your stepmom just devastated by what’s happening right now?” But you were one of the people giving me a lot of hope. So I would love for you to share some of that. We had a whole thread discussion here, and I was hearing from lawyers who were feeling like they had to question their careers, like, how do I keep doing this work? I was hearing from health care providers, from parents, everybody is very scared right now. And I think, pretty depressed, in my generation.

Mary

I do understand how and why people decided to rely on the courts to protect abortion and I want us to pass laws that will allow us to do that again. I see abortion rights and access as critical to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I think we have to get the majority of Americans to see that that’s the case and pass laws that will protect all of us. I understand that when it looked like you could just get those rights protected without getting people to vote for them, why people went in that direction, even though it meant giving up on building on the hearts and minds. It seemed like a safer way to go, right?

Virginia

Even though there were big trade offs to it.

Mary

The truth is that 50 years ago, we probably could have won. Before there was 50 years of anti-abortion organizing. We could have won hearts and minds more easily than we’re going to do now. 50 years of anti abortion organizing, 50 years of people’s becoming increasingly embattled and increasingly embittered by losing so much. Which has given the people that call themselves right to life their power. They seem to be the ones that are standing for principle and reaching out to others and saying, “We have principles, we value life, you know, and we may lose everything else, but we’re going to stand up for life.”

And those of us who want better lives for all people can’t allow them to be the ones in that position. I do think we need to reach out to all the presumably good hearted people who are embracing that. If they want to support women and having children, we need to say, “Okay, work with us to support healthcare for all, the Child Tax allowance…”

Virginia

Paid leave, day care…

Mary

I do think that’s one front we need to move on. We need to embrace a broader truly pro-life agenda. There’s so much work to be done to promote access, that actually people have had to be working on all these years ever since Medicaid stopped paying, much less people who don’t have access to Medicaid. People have been doing amazing work at that. They now need even more support, there’s all the work to support individual women directly. And then there’s the broader, how do we change the politics of this? And then, obviously, we’ve got to continue the court battles. We need people passionately defending freedom of speech in the states where doctors and health care providers are being told, you have to tell patients lies. Either they’re being forbidden from talking to people about abortions at all, or they’re being told they have to read scripts where abortions are associated with breast cancer and suicide.

Virginia

None of which is true.

Mary

It’s completely false science! It’s just a correlation of the fact that it’s the poor people and people of color who are an overwhelming number of the people who need abortions, and they’re also the people who face the worst health consequences on every issue. That correlation is being read as if it’s a scientific thing that has to be read to patients. Every law school in the country should be helping people think, how do we challenge this? And every medical and nursing student school should be thinking, how do we help?

I am very interested in how this is all going to play out in terms of thinking, how can we support people legally? Because we do need all these organizations that are trying to provide abortion rights and access. We can’t have them all go under. I think a lot of them do have to follow whatever the law is, and provide whatever help they can. I think a whole lot of the rest of us do need to be like the Janes in the 70s, thinking, Well, if you have to break the law in order to help women, how are we going to do it? How are we going to do it in ways that makes the law unenforceable in the ways that civil rights people did?

I mean, I think there are enormous challenges. But we have to meet them.

I have to say the one other thing that really keeps me going is thinking about history. When you think about all that Black people went through after Reconstruction. People don’t have a choice about whether or not to fight these things. You have to keep learning all you can you have to keep finding the allies you can. To despair is to abandon all the people who need us most.

Virginia

Well, now I’m going to cry again. Yes, you’re right. You’re right! It’s just, it’s hard. It’s scary. We have a lot of lives at stake and I think just sometimes I have to sit with that for a minute. But I appreciate you sketching out what these different fights are going to look like. I think it helps us all think about how we’re going to contribute. 

Mary

And the sense of solidarity you can feel once you’re working with other people does support you. It’s very important not to do this work in ways that make you feel burned out or under attack in ways that you can’t handle. You have to find what works for you. And the community that can support you and the ways in which you can support yourself.

Virginia

We should say, too, there is a very robust reproductive justice movement. There are people who have been planning for this, who knew this was coming. Our work is to figure out how to support them. There was an initial response on social media, of people posting things about like, “you can come stay in my guest room if you need an abortion in my state!” And we may come to that, but there are also systems in place that we can be supporting. Individual acts of heroism going rogue is not going to be how we get this done. 

Mary

And there are organizations organizing the guest rooms! People have been doing that all along because because for all these decades many women have been lacking access and then having to come to other states.

Butter For Your Burnt Toast

Virginia

Well, on the note of figuring out how to do this work without burning out, we can turn to our Butter for Burnt Toast segment where we give a recommendation. I would love to know what you were doing to take care of yourself right now?

Mary

What do I do every day, or try to do every day, it is to have breakfast on my porch, where I get the look at my garden, and read the paper. And talk to my husband, to the extent that he’s willing to have breakfast on the porch! He’s more willing on weekends, sometimes weekdays, as well. It’s a way of sharing the news, even when it’s really bad news, getting to talk about it together makes you feel more in control. And then, the way the sunlight hits the trees around my garden, that early in the morning is just so beautiful. And then I take the time to make myself a breakfast with yogurt and fruit and granola. It’s sort of the food preparation I most enjoy and enjoy eating.

Virginia

People should know that Mary is not someone who enjoys cooking dinner, certainly not on a nightly basis. All of the other conversations we’ve had about mental loads of planning meals, and all of that come directly from lived experience! But yes, breakfast preparation. I also enjoy that for myself, not for other people.

I have the same breakfast ritual, except I do it before anyone else is awake in our house so that I can just sit out on the porch and look at the flowers and the trees and rage about the news. And sometimes text Dad my Spelling Bee score, even though he’s probably already done it. It is really important to have that quiet time at the beginning of the day. It is really lovely.

Well, Mary, thank you so much. This was a really helpful conversation. I hope it helps people feel clearer on what we’re doing. And you know what this work needs to look like now, and I want to make sure people watch the film and get involved. So let’s wrap up by telling people where to find the film.

Mary

You can see the film for free at our website Abortion and Women’s Rights 1970. We really hope people will find it helpful for thinking talking and organizing around abortion rights and access. It’s 28 minutes long. It’s a good length for either a public screening or inviting some friends over to watch it and discuss it over coffee or a glass of wine. And the website’s “get involved” page provides links to organizations that they can work with or donate to, which support individuals in need of abortion care, helping people access medication abortions, as well as organizing and lobbying at local, state, national, and international levels. We would really love for that the link to that website in the film to be widely shared and posted!

Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode.

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

Yoga Journal, which is the long standing print magazine for yoga professionals, and the yoga community, is owned by the same parent company that publishes Clean Eating magazine. So there’s a lot of intersection in the writing and the journalists between them. And I find it very problematic. Extremely problematic. But that’s capitalism, right? 

You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health.

Today I’m chatting with Jessica Grosman! Jessica is an experienced anti-diet registered dietitian and certified Intuitive Eating counselor, weight inclusive health practitioner, and yoga teacher. She is on the faculty of Yoga for Eating Disorders, where she teaches the popular compassionate and mindful yin yoga series. And she’s a co-founder of Anti-Diet Culture Yoga, a platform with a mission to keep diet culture out of yoga spaces by providing training and educational opportunities for teachers.

So, as you can probably guess from her bio, Jessica and I are discussing the intersection of diet culture and yoga today. This was such a fascinating conversation for me, because I truly did not know the extent to which yoga has been colonized and appropriated by white people and diet culture. If you have a fraught relationship with yoga, or have had that over the years like I have, I think you will get a lot out of this one.

I do want to acknowledge that Jessica and I are two white, privileged ladies having this conversation. I’m very aware that in order to divest from yoga from diet culture and white supremacy more completely, we need to be learning this from people of color. We do shout out some of those voices towards the end of the episode. But I would love to know who else you are learning from—post suggestions in the comments so we can continue this conversation!

If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! It’s free and a great way to help more folks find the show.

Keep sending in your questions for Virginia’s Office Hours! If you have a question about navigating diet culture and anti-fat bias that you’d like to talk through with me, or if you just want to rant about a shitty diet with me, you can submit your question/topic here. I’ll pick one person to join me on the bonus episode so we can hash it out together.

PS. Also hi new subscribers/listeners! I think a bunch of you found me through Julia Turshen’s podcast Keep Calm and Cook On. I have loved her entire series on Unapologetic Appetites and was delighted to join her for this conversation.

Post-Publication Note from Virginia: After this episode aired, a listener let us know that Jessica’s Instagram contains some old content that may be triggering to folks in eating disorder recovery. I don’t expect Burnt Toast Podcast guests to align with me on every single issue; I also don’t expect podcast guests to have lived their lives free from diet culture influences (if I did, I’d have no one to interview!). And I find tremendous value in the conversation we had on this episode. But I wanted to offer this word of caution for folks in the Burnt Toast community who are in recovery. Please take care of yourselves.

Episode 52 Transcript

Virginia

Hi, Jessica! Why don’t we start by having you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your work?

Jessica

My work is primarily patient-focused nutrition therapy, and I work to help individuals reestablish a comfortable connection with food and body most often after years of living and diet culture. I am a member of ASDAH, the Association of Size Diversity and Health and use HAES principles in my individualized care. I’m also a yoga teacher, as I mentioned, and really love bringing together all sorts of ways to help people feel comfortable in their body.

Virginia

I think you’re our first yoga teacher on the podcast and today that’s going to be our focus — this intersection of diet culture and yoga. I think for a lot of listeners, this probably isn’t breaking news. We’ve all kind of seen the Lululemon version of yoga, and the Gwyneth Paltrow / Goop version. I think a lot of us may assume that diet culture has been baked into yoga from the start. But is that true or do you see this as a more recent co-option of yoga?

Jessica

I want to start by asking you if you know what the word yoga means. So I want to spin this question back to you. 

Virginia

I feel like I knew this when I did a lot more yoga, and now I’m going to fail this quiz. 

Jessica

It’s okay! Yoga is a Sanskrit word that means “to yoke” or “to join.” So right there, the word yoga does not mean acrobatics, leggings, green juice, restrictive diets, or any other stereotype that has been portrayed in the media through diet culture. I want to acknowledge that right from the start that yoga has nothing to do with diet culture in its origin.

I’m going to give you a little history lesson here. There are eight limbs of yoga, with only one being the physical practice of yoga, the poses and postures that we see so often. In the classic, traditional sense, yoga really is about the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. The physical practice of yoga was developed to help rid the body of distractions, of impulses, to be able to sit and meditate. So if you think about kids in a classroom, we know that if we want kids to sit and concentrate, first we let them get all their energy out, and they run around on a playground have play time before they’re able to sit calmly and concentrate. Yoga, the physical practice of yoga, is in the same vein, to give the body time to rid itself of the distractions to be able to turn inward and sit and focus in meditation.

Virginia

I love that framing and I’d never thought of it that way. And nothing you mentioned has to do with weight loss or changing your body size or shape. So when did the shift happened?

Jessica

So, yoga was brought to the west from southern Asia about 100 years ago—and notice I said Southern Asia and not India, because yoga’s inception was not just in the land that is currently India, but all throughout southern Asia. So we want to give respect and honor to those lineages. But it was brought to the West about 100 years ago by a Russian woman named Eugenia Peterson who later changed her name to Indra Devy. She was an actress and a spiritual seeker who traveled to India and became the first female student of Krishna Macharia, who was considered the father of modern yoga. He created the posture-based yoga practice, the physical yoga that was influenced by martial arts and wrestling and British calisthenics. Remember, this was in colonized, British-occupied India. And so Indra was able to bring her yoga studies to the west with her when South Asians were not able to come West due to the Immigration Act of 1924, which set quotas for immigration from “less desirable” countries. Indra came back to the west, came to Hollywood dressed in saris and was emulated by movie stars and Hollywood types seeking exotic practices from the East to keep themselves young and beautiful. This was the start of the modern wellness movement and with yoga at the core. 

Virginia

She’s like a proto-Gwyneth Paltrow.

Jessica

Exactly. And you know, how ironic that she was on Gwyneth Paltrow land?

Virginia

So, the Western conception of yoga has always been more linked to diet culture. We wouldn’t have called it diet culture back then, but certainly this idea of the body and controlling the body. 

Jessica

I would say so, especially in the yoga space that is full of white practitioners. I think South Asians in the West practicing yoga that are coming from that lineage, from their motherland, it’s a different type of practice. But the yoga of diet culture is very whitewashed.

Virginia

Let’s talk specifics about how that manifests. What are some of the most surprising ways you’ve seen diet culture infiltrate yoga?

Jessica 

Yoga is part of wellness culture and wellness culture is that friendly guise of diet culture which is rooted in capitalism. Yoga in the West is rooted in capitalism. I can tell you that working as a yoga teacher, to earn a living as a yoga teacher is not sustainable in our capitalistic society. There’s just no way to go about doing that for most people, other than those elevated—and I’m going to use air quotes—“gurus” of yoga, the ones that we see in the ads for Lululemon and all of the other brands.

So yoga studios—we have yoga studios in the West, not so much in South Asia. But yoga studios in the West are for profit, and you can just look at what they sell beyond classes: The food, the drinks, the clothing, the apothecary items. This is all so steeped in diet culture. So before setting foot in a yoga studio, there’s this assumption that certain clothing is required to practice yoga, and that clothing is most often indicated for particular bodies. That keeps diversity out of yoga spaces. We don’t have to look too far to see that the ad campaigns for leggings, for activewear that is indicated for yoga practices, is usually on very small bodies. 

Virginia

As you’re saying that, I’m just thinking I would feel weird going to a yoga class not wearing yoga pants. Like, we have this sense that you have to. But you also don’t have to. When I practice yoga at home, I often do it in just my pajama pants or any loose clothing. Why we have this idea that you have to wear this one type of pants to go to a yoga studio is fascinating.

Jessica

It’s all about that culture of fitting in and needing to feel like you’re worthy of being in that space. 

Virginia

Yep, that makes sense. And yet the pants so rarely have pockets and are not efficient for many of my needs.

Jessica

Well, that’s why you need more of the swag to go along with them.

Virginia

Oh, of course. 

Jessica

You need the correct bag to hold your yoga mat. And it has to be the correct yoga mat. And then the correct yoga bag, which has the pockets for this, that, and the other. 

Virginia

There’s many more products we can buy.

Jessica

So yoga studios, right? They’re selling more than classes. They’re selling a lifestyle. And I can tell you that walking into many studios—and I have not been in many studios since the pandemic, that’s been the beauty of the pandemic for me is the ability to both practice and teach yoga from the comfort of my home which I think is very, very important. But yoga studios have to make a profit and they do this by selling more than classes, by selling more than experience. So there is the clothing, there is oftentimes food—and I can tell you that it’s not chips and candy that are sold in yoga studios. It’s whatever bar or superfood of the moment is capturing the attention of wellness culture. It’s specific filtered water and kombucha and all sorts of other foods and foodstuffs that really have nothing to do with yoga or wellbeing, but just offer that glimmer of hope that by being in the space, by drinking this liquid, eating this snack, you’ll become more than who you were when you walked in the door. 

Virginia

And they’re also selling restriction too, right? There’s often an emphasis on cutting out food groups. I’m hoping you can tease this out a little bit. I know being vegetarian is linked to some of the history of yoga, but cutting out sugar seems more of just a straight up diet culture intervention. 

Jessica

So there are many different lineages of yoga. As I mentioned, yoga is not just based in the land that is currently referred to as India, but all over South Asia. And different lineages do have different traditions when it comes to food. There’s this assumption, though, that to practice yoga, to be a quote unquote “good yogi,” means that you are vegetarian, if not vegan, and that cannot be further from the truth. Really what we are looking for in a yoga experience is to feel well in your body. One of the ethical precepts of yoga is a Ahimsa and I’m sure a lot of people have heard this term Ahimsa, which means “no harm” and oftentimes gets co opted into meaning veganism as no harm, you’re not harming another living organism. But I like to turn back Ahimsa to no harm upon yourself. And really, when you’re not harming yourself, you’re loving yourself and taking care of yourself. The notion that to practice yoga means that you have to eat a certain way or not eat a certain way is completely false for the general population.

As I said, there are pockets of yoga lineages and people practicing yoga that do take a different stance, but for the general public that wants to bring yoga into their life, keep on eating whatever you want and feel well in your body.

Virginia

That’s a really powerful reframing because yes, I’ve gotten stuck on that ahimsa, do no harm piece. And I think that’s really useful to consider that we have to include ourselves in that doing of no harm. 

I also want to circle back quickly to the guru concept that you touched on. I’m curious to hear more about to what extent the idea of a guru is important to what yoga was originally and how you see the guru concept working out today, because it seems like that’s often where a lot of the diet culture comes in, right? Because people in a studio or in a yoga community are so revering this one teacher to the point that there’s a lot of opportunities for harm. 

Jessica

Correct. Yoga in its origin was taught from teacher to student, and there wasn’t a set number of hours that you study with your teacher and then are declared a yoga teacher. It was a lifelong relationship of learning and reciprocity between student and teacher, and continuous learning. We don’t see that sort of student teacher relationship in modern yoga in the West. There is more of that Guru culture where teachers are revered. They’re oftentimes put on a pedestal and whatever a teacher says is often taken as the right thing to do, the right way to be. That’s really dangerous because the scope of practice which is a set of rules and policies set forth by Yoga Alliance, the governing body of yoga teachers, does not include any talk of food, diet or nutrition. Yet we know that to be far from the truth, that is definitely an area that is abused by many teachers who share their thoughts, their opinions, their personal experiences as the way things should be done, on and off of the mat. And that’s where the danger comes in. 

Virginia

I’m looking back on my own relationship with yoga over the years and so many workshops I went to with male gurus who were very hands on in their adjustments of the women who came in with the right Lululemon leggings. There’s just a whole whole lot going on there.

Jessica

Absolutely. I mean, I didn’t even touch on the hands-on adjustments. Partly from teaching outside of studios, in the online space, I think we’ve gotten away from adjustments a lot, because my students are on the other side of the screen. But that sort of abuse in teacher/student relationships definitely has been well documented. I think the more subtle abuse or harm is the teacher or the guru that inflicts on their students their own beliefs, opinions, and knowledge that isn’t their place to share.

Virginia

It can be hard when you’re seeking something from yoga, which a lot of people are. You’re in a vulnerable position, right? This person seems to have a lot of answers. They’re personifying this lifestyle that’s extremely seductive. And often you’re getting some real tangible benefits from the yoga practice. So it can get very murky and hard to sort out. Like, which aspect of what I’m doing in yoga, what’s coming from the breathing or the meditation or the physical work and what’s coming from now I’m doing this cleanse with 30 people in my studio?

Jessica

Exactly, exactly. It gets blurry, as you said, and I think it’s important for anyone that is currently practicing yoga or looking to begin a yoga practice to really examine their intention for being in a space or for being in the presence of a particular teacher. 

Virginia

Yeah, let’s talk more about that. There’s obviously so much that’s great about yoga and making yoga more accessible for all bodies is so important. So how can we think about separating yoga from diet culture? How do you start to suss out where a studio falls in all of this? And how do you figure out what to wear if you don’t want to wear skinny yoga pants?

Jessica

You never need to wear skinny yoga pants. The most important thing from the start is to be comfortable. So skinny yoga pants aren’t comfortable for you, then that’s not what you should be wearing. But I think the most important thing from the start is to read class descriptions. If you’re looking for a yoga class, read class descriptions. There should not be any promise of changing a body or any regimented requirements for diet involved, right?

Along the lines of diet, culture and wellness culture and its roots in white supremacy and patriarchy, we have to look at classes and specifically about levels of classes and saying that a class is advanced and has advanced poses is not a place that welcomes everyone, right? If you go to a class and feel like you’re being told to just rest while everyone else is doing some fancy shape pose, then that class is not for you, and that class shouldn’t be taught that way, either. We have autonomy as yoga students to practice the way we want to in our body, our bodies are unique and individual and have unique capabilities that change from day to day. So there is no one pose or practice is more advanced than another. It’s learning how to honor your body and its unique abilities from day to day, from moment to moment.

Virginia

I certainly have had and I’m sure many people listening have had that feeling of failure, when you’re told, “okay, you can just go into child’s pose now,” and that feels very stigmatizing. I think a lot of teachers mean it kindly. I think they mean, like, listen to your body and take your time and whatever. But if you’re the one person in the room, and especially if you’re in a bigger body than everybody else, it doesn’t feel kind. 

Jessica

I also pay attention to the languaging used by the teacher and the languaging used within a yoga studio. You want language to be qualitative, and not descriptive. Descriptive language can be inappropriate and stigmatizing. So for example, if a teacher says, “place your hands on your fleshy thighs” versus “place your hands on your upper legs,” there’s a big difference right there. “Rest your hands on your abdomen” versus “rest your hands on your soft belly.” Well, it just isn’t comfortable, right?

This is something that’s very nuanced. My experience in teaching yoga for eating disorders and those suffering from eating disorders—that’s very trauma informed work—really informs the language that I use. But I think it’s something that all yoga teachers need to have exposure to and be taught the nuance of qualitative and descriptive languaging. Because there is something very uncomfortable about being told to put your hands on your fleshy thighs, on your soft belly.

(Note from Virginia: Obviously fleshy thighs and soft bellies are not inherently bad! Jessica is referencing how these descriptions can feel not great when used by thin teachers, in a diet culture context.)

Virginia

I had a yoga teacher once who taught triangle pose by telling us to imagine our body between two panes of glass. It took me years to even recognize how stigmatizing that was because I don’t want my round body flattened between two panes of glass. That’s not a helpful note. I don’t really want anyone’s body being flattened between two panes of glass. That sounds painful. It’s an incredibly anti-fat image.

Jessica 

I couldn’t agree more. I want to point out that yoga is an embodied practice. So that means listening to your body’s cues and messages and trusting yourself and your instincts. So, if you don’t feel comfortable in a space, if you don’t feel comfortable in the presence of a teacher, if it’s online or in person, trust your body. Trust your nervous system, if you have that awareness because it’s very hard to have an embodied practice and embodied experience in a body that is heightened and on alert and not relaxed and not comfortable.

Jessica

So in terms of where diet culture comes in to yoga, and especially in social media, at this point, Yoga Journal, which is the long standing print magazine for yoga professionals, and the yoga community, has a large online presence. And it is owned by the same parent company that publishes Clean Eating magazine. There’s a lot of intersection in the writing and the journalists between Yoga Journal and Clean Eating. I find it very problematic. Extremely problematic. But that’s capitalism, right? 

Virginia

It sure is.

Jessica

The other very alarming situation that I’ve seen time and time again is this notion that some students, especially in a more active yoga class, will leave before savasana, before the end of class.

Savasana is this time to reconnect with the body, to integrate all of the practice into the body. Its definition is “corpse pose.” Not to be gruesome, but just laying on the back in stillness that is savasana. There are a number of people, as I said, especially in more active classes that will leave class before savasana because it’s not a calorie burning pose. They feel like they need to keep the body moving and active and that rest is for the weary. It’s very sad to me.

Virginia

I admit, savasana is the pose I often struggle with most, not because I want to burn calories but just because I’m, feeling like I need to get on with my day. But that’s also why it’s important, right? That’s what I need to be challenging. But yes, thinking of yoga as a workout, period, is so problematic. But certainly then thinking every minute of it has to be this really intense workout is that’s just straight up diet culture, for sure.

Jessica

Yoga as a workout is straight up diet culture, because as I said, at the beginning, yoga is for the purpose of being able to sit and meditate. One thing I didn’t say at the start is the way that I define yoga is the integration of body, mind, and breath in the present moment. So, Virginia, we’re practicing yoga right now. We are having this conversation. We’re here, we’re breathing. We’re present. We’re in the present moment. We are practicing yoga. We are not doing handstands and contorting our bodies. 

Virginia

We are not, for people who can’t see us. Nobody’s in a  headstand right now. 

Jessica

Maybe when we’re done recording, I will go and get in that headstand. But for now…

Virginia

That’s such a more inclusive way to think about it because so many of the Yoga Journal cover poses are so inaccessible for bigger bodies. We should talk about that, too. I have a longtime hatred of shoulder stand because if you are a person with a stomach and large breasts, being in shoulder stand can feel like your body is suffocating you. It puts me immediately at war with my body when that’s not at all how I want to feel during a yoga practice. It always strikes me as a very male body designed pose. I don’t know if there are other examples like that you want to mention, in terms of getting away from this specific idea of doing yoga for certain bodies.

Jessica

I want to acknowledge that any body—any shape and size body—can be challenged by different yoga shapes, yoga poses. Someone in a thin privileged body may not have the ability to get into every shape and that is due to bone structure. Bone structure and the uniqueness of anybody’s bones and joints and tissues, regardless of their body size. So this assumption that you need to be in a smaller frame body, in a thin, privileged body to practice yoga is completely false. Just because you have a smaller body doesn’t mean that you’re able to do every shape either. So there are ways for every body, every single body shape and size, to get into nearly all of the shapes and postures and poses that are out there. I’ve done training on how to teach yoga for those that are bedbound, yoga for people in wheelchairs. There actually is bed yoga, which is so lovely and really beneficial for people that don’t have the ability to get out of bed, don’t have the ability to get out of a wheelchair or some other mobility device. 

Virginia

As you’re saying this too, I’m realizing another way that the diet culture shows up is we so often think of modifications for poses as either failure or as a starting point and you have to progress beyond. Like, you have to eventually be able to do inversions in the middle of the room is always a big one that comes up in class. I have no interest in doing a headstand in the middle of the room. I want the wall there. I want to know that I’ve got that support. The idea that I’ve somehow never achieved a true headstand because I don’t feel safe doing it in the middle of a room is so frustrating. And there are so many examples of that.

Jessica

Using props, including the wall, the wall is the greatest of all props is not a sign of inadequacy, or of being a beginner being a failure. Oftentimes, and more often than not, the use of a prop can help you get further into a shape into an area of the body that you didn’t know you had access to. 

Virginia

Who else do you love who’s fighting this diet culture definition of yoga? Who are you learning from? I would love to shout out some names.

Jessica 

There are a lot of people bringing awareness to the origins and to the roots of yoga, the South Asian roots. Names like Susanna Barkataki. There’s two podcasters from the Yoga is Dead podcast, Jesal Parikh and Tejal Patel. Those three women in particular are bringing a lot of awareness of the roots of yoga and what has happened through colonization and cultural appropriation of yoga practices.

I don’t see as much of the resistance to diet culture, because I see this is a little different from the fat positive or body positive movement within yoga. There is a small but mighty group of us registered dietitian and yoga teachers and a very small group that I know of that are in the anti-diet, weight inclusive space and practicing as Registered Dietitians as well as yoga teachers that are really trying to make sure that diet culture does not continue to bring harm or the harm of diet culture into the yoga space. One of my colleagues and I have started Anti-Diet Culture Yoga as a training platform for yoga teachers to help them decipher what is the true teachings of yoga versus what is the influence of diet culture.

Virginia

There are so many ways we need to rethink what modern yoga has become. It makes sense that not everybody is doing all of the work, because there’s so much work.

I’ll shout out a couple of people I love on Instagram who are doing yoga and fat bodies. Jessamyn Stanley has been a longtime go-to for me. I love her underbelly app videos. They were really a turning point for my yoga relationship, both in terms of being able to do yoga outside of a studio and do yoga with someone who wasn’t in a thin body. All of that was really liberating for me.

I also love @fringeish on Instagram. Shannon does a lot challenging people’s perceptions of what fat bodies can do with yoga, and creating safe spaces.

Dianne Bondy is another one I’ve learned a lot from. So they’re there. You’re right, there’s not nearly enough. Different people are working on different aspects of this, but it is encouraging to see this kind of small community of voices emerging.

Jessica

I also I want to give a shout out to accessible yoga, specifically to Jivana Heyman, who has done a tremendous amount for bringing yoga to all people and that recognition that any body and everybody, regardless of shape, size, color, ability, disability, so on and so forth, can practice yoga in a meaningful way. I also want to mention Yoga for Eating Disorders which is an online school that I’m on the faculty of. 

One thing that we didn’t touch upon, which is a whole other conversation is that not all yoga is good yoga. Yoga and its intertwining with diet culture has been harmful and in the perpetuation of disordered eating and development of eating disorders. Not all yoga is good yoga for all bodies and for all people, especially those suffering with issues of disordered eating and eating disorders. At yoga for eating disorders we teach in a way that is safe is trauma-informed and is available to help heal the relationship with the body in a way that is neutral and supportive. 

Virginia

It’s so important to have that safe space.

Butter For Your Burnt Toast

Virginia

Well, Jessica, we always wrap up, as you know, with our butter for burnt toast segment, so I would love to know what is your butter for us today?

Jessica

I’m so glad you asked! Because it’s summertime, and there’s nothing better in the summer than ice cream. And I’m talking about real ice cream. I’m not talking about Tasti D-lite. I’m a former New Yorker that thought that Tasti D-lite was a good thing. Now is the time on a beautiful sunny afternoon or a rainy afternoon like I have today here to go and enjoy a bowl of ice cream, cone of ice cream, whatever it may be. I just can’t think of anything better. 

Virginia

It really is one of the most perfect things about summer. 

I’m gonna do a plant recommendation for my plant obsessed listeners. My butter is the Great Umbrella Plant, Darmera Peltata. Okay, so Darmera looks like a giant rhubarb. It has a very round umbrella shaped leaf. It’s a garden plant, not a house plant. I should have started with that. It’s native to the Pacific Northwest but it grows really well in shade gardens if you have enough moisture. I’ve just put some in and they get huge and they put up these really pretty pink flowers in the spring. And then you get these giant leaves for the rest of the season. So if you’re looking for a good plant for a shade garden, check out Darmera. It’s like an alternative to a hosta but even more giant big leaves. Very cool.

All right. Well, thank you so much, Jessica, for being here! Where can we follow you and learn more about your work?

Jessica

You can find me at with health and gratitude which has all the information for how to work with me for nutrition therapy. I teach weekly online yin yoga classes which are accessible for everyone—there is no previous experience required. Links to my classes are at yoga for eating disorders. I have hundreds of recipes on my website, original recipes—I used to do work and recipe development and culinary education. So my website has lots of information regardless of what you’re looking for. There’s something for everyone.

Virginia

We will link to that. Thank you so much for being here!

Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode.

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The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

You’re listening to Burnt Toast!

We have another Comfort Food rerun for you this week. Hopefully, by the time you’re listening to this, I have turned in my book manuscript, and I am taking this week to chill out. It’s the first week of July and we’ve got family visiting. My whole goal for this first week is to just spend a ton of time in my pool and my garden, and let my post book brain melt. There’s a stage in book writing where you just feel like you have used all the words. There is nothing left and you have nothing to say. But don’t worry, it’s temporary! It always comes back.

And I will be back in your feeds next week with a brand new podcast episode, so make sure you’re subscribed to get that in your podcast player.

In the meantime, we are revisiting the Comfort Food archives again. This is episode 53 which aired on December 5, 2019. Our guest on this episode was Jennifer Berry, who is a feeding therapist and founder of Thrive by Spectrum Pediatrics. I’m a huge fan of Jeni’s. I first met her when I was reporting a story for the New York Times Magazine in 2015. I mean, we go way back. I spent a lot of time reporting on the approach that Jeni and her colleagues take towards child-led weaning off feeding tubes and child-led feeding therapy in general—or responsive feeding therapy, as it’s now known. Jeni is just a really trusted source on all questions related to family feeding, all the dynamics, how to think about the different skills, the emotional development piece of it, and the nutrition piece of it.

This conversation is about why nutrition is much less important to successful family meals than we think. I know that may feel uncomfortable for a lot of us. We hear all the time that our big responsibility as parents is to feed our kids a healthy diet and more fruits and vegetables and all of that. But that so often gets in the way of feeling good about how you’re feeding your family. So we talk about how to set aside your nutrition anxieties at the family dinner table and how that might improve some of the struggles you’re having there.

But Jeni is a trained therapist with a strong research background. I’m a health journalist. So we also talk a lot about the way that nutrition science gets done, and how flawed and misleading both the studies themselves can be and the media coverage of nutrition science. We talk about how to interpret what you’re seeing in the media and by media, I mean mainstream media outlets and I also mean social media. When you see people throwing out statistics throwing out these really broad claims about different foods, or making claims about “healthy” eating in general. So I think this is another super useful episode!

Keep sending in your questions for Virginia’s Office Hours! If you have a question about navigating diet culture and anti-fat bias that you’d like to talk through with me, or if you just want to rant about a shitty diet with me, you can submit your question/topic here. I’ll pick one person to join me on the bonus episode so we can hash it out together.

And don’t forget: Next Wednesday, July 13 is our first Burnt Toast Book Club! We’re reading The School of Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan and wow is that book even more of a gut punch now than when I picked it. CW for child endangerment, prison abuse, foster system abuse, mother shaming (to put it mildly) and psychological torture… but also know that this book is compulsively readable, heart-breaking, and thought-provoking in all the best ways. I’ll post the book club thread at 12pm Eastern on Wednesday, and be on there live for the hour. (But if you can’t join us at that time, feel free to join the discussion later—that’s the beauty of a thread chat!)

Episode 50 Transcript

Virginia

Hello and welcome to episode 53 of Comfort Food! This is the podcast about the joys and meltdowns of feeding our families and feeding ourselves.

Amy

This week we’re talking about what to do and everything you know about nutrition is starting to make you a little crazy. Because sometimes what you know about nutrition seems to not be true depending on the day. So we’re gonna brainstorm some ways you can find a better balance for yourself and your family with a very special guest.

Virginia

I’m the author of The Eating Instinct: Food, Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America. I write about how women relate to food and nutrition and our bodies in a culture that gives us so many unrealistic expectations about all those things.

Amy

And I’m Amy Palanjian, a writer, recipe developer, and creator of Yummy Toddler Food. And I love helping parents to stop freaking out about what their kids will and won’t eat and also about nutrition news because lately it’s been like every week, there has been something in the news that is just…

Virginia

It’s been kind of crazy. So this week, we are so happy to have Jennifer Berry of Thrive by Spectrum Pediatrics back on the podcast. Jeni, welcome.

Jeni

Thank you. Hi! How are you guys doing today?

Virginia

We are good. We are so excited to be talking to you. You are a fan favorite on the podcast and our listeners mostly will be familiar. But for folks who are new to the podcast, let’s remind them or tell them who you are and what you do.

Jeni

So I am an occupational therapist by trade and a feeding therapist by specialty. And I’m the owner, as you said, of Thrive by Spectrum Pediatrics. We work with families near our headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, but also all over the United States and beyond, helping families help their children overcome feeding challenges. We work with kids that are feeding tube dependent, helping them wean from their feeding tubes, we help kids that have severe feeding aversions, motor problems with eating, all the way through the kind of everyday common hurdles that families face at the table.

Amy

And for listeners who want to know more about Jeni and her approach to food, check out episode 28, when she was on last. We talked about what to do when your kids just don’t eat dinner.

Virginia

A perennial problem. So, today’s episode came out of an email conversation that the three of us had after Jenny listened to episode 46, where we talked about the new nutrition guidelines from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation saying that kids should not drink chocolate milk or juice before age five. So, we were then talking afterwards with Jenny about how hard it is to balance the “knowledge”—and I put that in quotes because, as Amy said, the information can change so wildly. We have all this information these days about nutrition and what we think our kids and we ourselves need to be eating. But how do you incorporate that into just being present with your families at meals. And Jeni had this really beautiful analogy, comparing it to yoga. So Jeni, tell us about that?

Jeni

Because I’m so immersed in this world, both as a mom who feeds kids, and also as a feeding therapist who looks at these studies that you’re talking about, that have so much different information, some of it good, some of it competing. It occurs to me that we get so caught up in that information. The yoga analogy was, if you’re learning a yoga pose, for example, you have to first learn all the technical aspects, like the posture and the breath, positioning—all of that is really important. You can’t do without the technical knowledge. But in order for it to be like truly yogic or in order for you to experience the pose as it was meant to be, or this probably applies to sports and other performance, and other areas of life. But in order to really experience the yoga pose the way that it was designed, you kind of have to take all of that technical knowledge, and set it aside and be in the pose. I tend to look at feeding kids in the same way. We have all of this information on the macro level. We are really fortunate to have access to all of this information that floods us every day about what foods we should feed our kids and why. And then not let it seep into everyday decisions because it takes us away from our kids. I feel like it also leads to a really unhealthy kind of dynamic for us as parents and between our kids that we can get really stuck and overly focused on doing things the right way. The trick is to have the knowledge and then to let it go and then be with your kids and try to make decisions. I don’t know that it’s easy. I know it’s not easy for me. But I think it is possible to work towards that and have a little bit more freedom for you and your child.

Amy

Is this something that you see your clients struggling with often?

Jeni

It’s universal. Yeah, not only my clients but my friends that are parents. I don’t really know many parents that don’t struggle with it, honestly.

Amy

I was thinking, as you were explaining that, the other night we went out to dinner and it happened to be a restaurant that had calories listed on the menu. I was like, oh!

Virginia

It’s everywhere in New York, but I think it varies by state.

Amy

It really threw me because I’m not used to having that information when making food choices. I feel like I’m a pretty informed person and I feel like I usually can push that stuff aside, but I was really stuck.

Virginia

Because it’s right there in front of you! And then it feels like, oh wait, is every decision I make around the meal supposed to focus on this one aspect? But, you know, of course not! Especially when you’re trying to like help your three year old decide what to have for dinner.

Jeni

And keep your sanity.

Amy

And keep the three year old from climbing underneath the table.

Virginia

That ship has sailed at my house.

Jeni

I think that’s a great example of the burden that can come with information. I do think it’s really hard to negotiate and that’s a really concrete example. But there’s lots of really subtle ways, too. We want our kids to be healthy across the board, not just around food, and so it carries a lot of weight with us. I do think it’s a real challenge. I think it can be done, to kind of hit that just right balance between having the knowledge and using it at the right time to make decisions.

Amy

Virginia, could we just pause for a minute, so that you can tell us like some examples of where we might be getting this information just so that we can be a little bit more clear with our listeners about what we’re talking about here?

Virginia

As someone who’s been a health journalist for 15+ years now, I both experience this as a consumer of media, like we all are, but also this is what I do day-to-day, putting these messages out there. For a long time, this is what I did. So what we’re talking about is the nutritional information you get when the morning news is talking about how everything you know about red meat is wrong. Or, the New York Times reports on it. Then it gets distilled further, because it comes not just from these news sources, but also from a meme on Instagram or Facebook or a thread on Twitter where everyone’s weighing in. A lot of them maybe are experts, and maybe they aren’t. We’re getting our knowledge about nutrition from a lot of different sources these days. And the problem is these sources are definitely not all created equal. Just because somebody puts it on a pretty graphic on Instagram does not mean they bothered to look up the study that was done or actually evaluate the quality of the research to see whether it’s a useful tidbit to share. This is not just to put Instagram on blast, although I do think it’s a huge issue there and Pinterest, and other places where this gets disseminated. But I think it can be useful to know a little more about how to actually evaluate the information when you get it.

Some strategies that I use as a journalist that I think are not hard to learn—I think anyone can do this—always, when you’re given a new piece of nutrition news, figure out the primary source for it. Don’t just trust the Instagram meme. But also don’t just trust the New York Times or any media reiteration of it. Because that means a journalist—it’s like a game of telephone. You’re that much further away from the source. What is really useful to do is to go look up the actual study they’re reporting on. In newspaper articles, especially if you’re reading online, they’ll usually hyperlink to it. Or, if you Google the researcher’s name and the study topic, you’ll find it pretty quickly. You may only be able to read the abstract, which is the research summary, because often you have to pay to read full research papers. But even the abstract, you can get a pretty good sense of how robust it was, this research. It’s important to know, especially with nutrition research, it’s very difficult to do high quality nutrition research. It’s very expensive and time consuming. So, a lot of small studies come out that are done much more quickly and the data is just not as robust.

So, a couple of things to look for when you’re dissecting and abstract. Start by looking at how many people were involved in the study. If it was a study done on 16 people, it’s not very relevant to anybody’s lives. It’s a case report. It’s interesting, but it’s not. If it’s data collected on 1,000 people and they were a nationally representative sample where they tried to make sure that 1,000 people in the study have characteristics—age, socioeconomic status, gender, race—that are representative of the United States, or wherever you are, that’s more of a useful population. Or if it’s a study done on 50 year old men and you’re a 30 year old woman, it’s not going to be relevant to you, particularly. You want to look at research that was done on a population that’s comparable to you and your family.

You also want to look at how long they were followed. So often, this is happens all the time with weight loss studies. They’ll see a big result after about six weeks of following some program. But they won’t bother to follow up with people at six months, 12 months, two years, five years. And you really want to know what happened at that point. How long did they see this benefit? Whatever big takeaway they’re claiming about the study, did it really last?

And then the other thing with nutrition research, because it’s expensive for researchers to make food and feed people directly for two years, usually they’re just having themselves report what they ate. And people are not very reliable with that. So that’s another one to really pay attention to. Because if it’s all self reported data, it’s probably not as ironclad as if they sat in the lab for two years. On the other hand, if they sat in the lab for two years, it’s not real life. So that’s a drawback with that kind of research.

Amy

Jeni, do you have other strategies that you would want to add here?

Jeni

Just to just to reinforce what Virginia’s saying, those same tips I would use. The two that stand out to me are the length of time. We often get a study about a certain nutritional ingredient or a certain way of feeding a child—an example would be in my feeding therapy world, there’s ways of feeding kids and they have a protocol, they apply it to a small group of people, and then they examine them, they see how the kids are doing with eating, expanding their food choices for kids that have a limited amount. They’re using a behavioral approach. This is the example I’m thinking of right now, where they’re kind of rewarding the kids for eating it. And what the study shows, in the study that I’m thinking of, is that the kids eat more. What the study doesn’t do—it’s just good to know what’s not there, and I think you’ve pointed that out, Virginia. What it doesn’t do is show what impact it has to reward kids for eating in two years, four years, five years. There is research out there about how we feed kids that has been out there for a long time that does follow kids more longitudinally, over long periods of time. But so to me, the biggest one that affects most parents in the work that we do, is that they’re looking at short term studies or studies that don’t follow them. And then this other thing that came up in our email exchange that we were referring to, which is the correlation versus cause.

Virginia

Yes, this is really, really big. Jeni, explain this, because this is critical to understand about nutrition, all kinds of research, really.

Jeni

We often, as consumers who are not sitting around in a research lab and analyzing data, it’s really easy to to see a study and think that one thing is linked to another. In the example that we were talking about after the the last episode, about the chocolate milk and drinks, there was a study that said that kids who are exposed to different flavors, had an increased incidence of being more willing to eat flavors, or having a broader diet later. And they were exposed when they were babies. So lots of different flavors, it was a predictor of more choices or variety later on. And while that may be true, it wasn’t saying that that’s why. It wasn’t saying that the reason that the children were eating more foods later in life was only the food choices that they tasted or were exposed to. So I just think it’s helpful to point that out, because there are lots of factors that go into it. And in that that example, in particular, what’s more important to look at is the big picture. If the children were forced to eat those foods in wide variety, forced or coerced to eat them, my guess would be that the results of the study would be very different. Based on what we know about responsive feeding and lifelong healthy relationships with food. I just think it’s super important that we not mistake, something being correlated or a predictor of another thing as being the black and white answer of what’s causing it. Those are different things.

Virginia

It’s easy for parents to misinterpret that and think, I have to get my baby to eat tons of different foods.

Amy

This is why there are like, if you Google “baby food chart,” there’s all of these charts of 100 foods to give your baby before they turn one because if you do that you won’t have a picky eater and it’s just not true.

Jeni

Then the moment your child throws number three on the list on the floor, you’re left questioning yourself and it’s stressful. And then you’re less likely to offer those foods in the future. To take it back to the longitudinal aspect of things and looking at things in the long term, there actually is a lot of research, but also just information about the long view, and what we know works best for kids. What we know is what you guys talk about in most episodes. Which is that if kids are taught healthy messages about their own bodies; if they’re not being subjected to messages that are negative about their parents or other’s bodies; if they are not having foods that are viewed as unhealthy restricted completely from their diet or shamed for eating them; if they’re not being pressured or forced to eat foods that are viewed as healthy by the people that are feeding them; and then if they’re allowed to read their cues for fullness and hunger, which is not always easy—but if that happens, there is a lot of weight behind those things in the research. But also in my clinical practice, you can just see those kids become more confident, healthy eaters in the long run.

Then, if I may just go back to that study about exposure, because that’s what prompted our whole conversation. Exposure is super important. It’s really important that we expose our kids to different foods, but that exposure doesn’t necessarily mean it goes in their mouth. We can expose kids to a wide variety of foods while honoring their bodies, while not forcing them or having them silence any fear or discomfort or disinterest they have around a food. We can expose them to it by eating it ourselves, by having them be involved in the preparation of it, by taking them to the grocery store. There are lots of ways to expose kids, in a healthful way, to a variety of different foods without putting that insane pressure on ourselves, that they have to eat that huge list that you saw on Instagram or Pinterest. And so I just like to keep reminding parents of that, that our job isn’t to dictate what goes in.

Amy

I think a lot of times that the exposure issue gets misconstrued as your child needs to taste this thing 20 times before they will like it. That’s just not that’s not the way that that works.

Jeni

No, it’s not the way kids work. So there’s an actual thing out there called “neophobia,” which you guys have talked about on here before, which is that it’s a developmentally appropriate around preschool age for kids to be afraid of trying new things. So it’s not that that’s going to make them like it, it’s for them to feel comfortable enough to try it, the newness has to go away. And the newness doesn’t go away in two offerings or five offerings and often not in ten. Your kids need to see things consistently, in different settings by different people. That doesn’t mean you should be like having a notebook next to your table with and checking off how many times you’ve offered sweet peppers or whatever. But it does mean that it takes a minute. It’s normal that your child doesn’t try things in the beginning and that when they try them, they reject them. That’s a typical part of development.

Virginia

That is super reassuring to hear. And I think again, framing it around not getting too literal about how we interpret this research is really helpful.

Jeni

We try to coach parents that when you’re just making decisions about how to feed your kids, you’re not making big decisions about whether you’re doing it right or big shifts in how you’re doing it in the moment when your kid is throwing the food on the floor. You’re going to do it away from the mealtime. You’re going to do it in a time where things are relatively unstressful. We call it checking in with yourself or checking in with your partner about how the mealtimes are going. You make the decisions about what your kids eat at the grocery store and when you decide who you surround them with, what school you send them to, and then whether or not you decide to team with those people and collaborate with them in a trusting way. And then when you’re assessing if it’s going well, a meal, it hasn’t to do much with what goes in their mouth. It has more to do with the internal drives to eat. And the internal drives to eat are not just hunger. Hunger is a big one, but togetherness is an internal drive to eat. Curiosity is an internal drive to eat. Novelty is a natural internal reason that kids want to eat. And comfort! Here we are talking about comfort food, but those are the those are the natural drives in childhood for learning to eat.

So if you step back, and try to keep those at the forefront of your mind when your child is eating. At the meal or at the party or wherever it is where you’re feeling conflicted about what choice to make, try to just think about those. And if you’ve got one of them, things are going okay. If your child is enjoying time together around food with a peer, then one of the internal drives to eat is being met and that’s important and valuable. Even if it’s just comfort, there’s a time and a place for that those are really important things and we’ve talked about that before. And it’s also okay, occasionally, if those things aren’t present. because we all know that that does happen occasionally and we have to give ourselves a break. It doesn’t mean that if you mess up, or if a situation comes up, there’s a surprise or whatever, somebody said something unfortunate at a birthday party to your child about their food choice, that doesn’t unravel everything else you’ve done. It doesn’t erase it. The message is about what you’re sending on the whole. It’s a more of an umbrella message that you’re sending that matters, that stays with the kids versus those tiny, little individual episodes.

Virginia

That is a really helpful perspective. I love that it.

Amy

And it can for sure be hard to do that in the moment. But I think the more that you practice this sort of the easier that it gets.

Jeni

Everybody’s different in terms of the way that they need to be reminded about things or the way that they learn or help themselves through tasks that are difficult. I’ve had parents write down the internal drives to eat and keep them on the refrigerator or have a list of them on their phones.

Virginia

Oh that’s a great tip!

Amy

I guess we’re gonna be making a little printable for everybody. Unless you have one that you want us to share.

Jeni

I don’t! Make it, it sounds great. I want one.

So that is one strategy that people use. I think another one that people have used is really looking at your child and how they’re doing in other areas. Health is about more than food. Health is about the whole child. If they’re happy, and participating in school, and if they’re affectionate and emotionally doing okay, if they’re able to be themselves and they are meeting milestones and they’re progressing, then we’re in a good spot. We don’t have to have it be all about the food all the time.

I’m a developmentalist, by training. And so I look at development, but in childhood, we don’t expect kids—or adults for that matter—to perform at their best 100% of the time. Mastery we consider when we look at developmental milestones is 80% of the time. 20% of time, it is not going to be happening. So a decent meal, not their best meal, is going to happen 80% of the time. It doesn’t mean that everything’s going to be easy. It doesn’t mean what your kid is eating, it means these other components.

Virginia

How well the overall meal experience goes.

Jeni

Based on these internal drives to eat, which includes togetherness. 80% of the time, if you’re there, you’re doing it, because that’s human nature. That’s the nature of learning to develop and figuring things out. Nobody’s at 100%. And there’s a lot of pressure at 100%. If we’re expecting ourselves and our kids to do their best and to be in the moment and we’re as parents incorporating all of this information that we’re being bombarded with, not just about food, but about how to plan a birthday party, and how to be the best parents and juggling our work and our home lives, there’s no way that we can do it at our best 100% of time. And we also are then setting our kids up with unrealistic expectations.

They need to be able to go out into a world where there is non-responsive messages being sent all the time around food. If we if we create a world for them around food where they only are experiencing the messages that we really want them to experience, those responsive messages as I call them, then what’s going to happen when they need to learn how to contend with the non-responsive things, too? And that’s what we’re here to help them do that as parents.

Virginia

That’s so interesting. Do you find that the percentages change when kids are struggling with something else? And the reason I’m asking is, on last week’s podcast episode I talked about both my girls, their list of safe foods had gotten a little shorter recently. Beatrix just turn two, so neophobia arriving. And then with my older daughter, when she’s going through different periods of stress in her life this is the area where we often see she’ll get a lot more particular about food. She’ll get much less adventurous again. I’m wondering if that’s something that people might commonly see and you might zero in on feeling like food is the problem, but is it helpful to sort of look more broadly at like, oh, well, they’re just learning to read or they’re mastering potty training or something else is going on that’s maybe causing meals to sort of plateau a little bit. Does that make sense?

Jeni

Yes, it does make sense. Absolutely. Yeah. These are more like umbrella averages for the big picture of how our years and our months are going. The literature that shows—although we have to, again, be careful about these studies—but what we know is that when a child learns to walk, sometimes they talk a little bit less or vice versa. We have a finite amount of energy and bandwidth on certain things. And so, of course, it makes sense that if you’re going through a challenge in one area, you’re going to hunker down at a different level than you might have the week before in another area of development. So yes, that’s absolutely true with food, too. It’s true across areas of development.

Virginia

Another reason not to get so hung up on the nutrition piece. If you take a more holistic look at your kid and think about why broccoli is less interesting this week, it might not have anything to do with the broccoli.

Jeni

Exactly, it probably doesn’t. I hesitate often with families to ever talk about numbers, honestly, because so much of the most important predictors of how well kids are going to do with food feeding challenges, but then how well they’re going to relate to food later, has to do with qualitative stuff. And if we focus on anything with a number, it takes us away.

Virginia

People are suddenly calculating.

Jeni

As long as you’re changing your the framework that you’re assessing things by. Is your child thriving? Are they growing? Are they meeting milestones? Are they relatively happy? And then, are you looking at those internal drives to eat: togetherness, curiosity, hunger, novelty and comfort. You know, if those things are there 80% of the time, you’re good. And I think we’re hard on ourselves. I think they are there most of the time. I think some of those components are present in most of the meals. I think you’re there, most people that are listening are probably already there. It’s just because we have all of this other information, we get lost. We get distracted from what’s the most important and what is truly the best predictor of a child feeling safe and comfortable around food. And now and then later, which is, which is these more qualitative things.

Amy

On that note, I did want to just remind everyone that when you’re seeing headlines, from news organizations or websites, like I put myself in this list, all of these sites are making money from people being on their site. So they have a very real reason to make you want to click on that link. The headline may be completely misleading. And it may be completely taking whatever the study was out of context. So just take a minute to realize that someone is trying to make a dollar.

Virginia

and don’t email the author of the article and yell at her because we don’t get to write our own headlines. The editors do that to us. Anyways, Jenny, thank you so much! This was such a great conversation. This was super, super helpful. Will you tell our listeners where we can find more of you?

Jeni

Oh, sure. We can be found at Thrive With Spectrum and we can be found on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. We’d love to hear from people.

Amy

And we’ll have all of those links in the show notes. And if anyone has follow up questions for this or wants more information on anything we talked about, you can either send us a message or comment on our show notes.

Virginia

All right now coming up. I have some breaking news on the Beatrix bottle, so stay tuned

Unrelated

Amy

So, Virginia, the other day you had posted something on somewhere—I can’t remember where—how about you put Beatrix to bed without a bottle!

Virginia

It finally happened, you guys!

Amy

So we’ve been talking about this since the spring, I think?

Virginia

Yes, Episode 37. It was the end of season two, was when we went like deep dive into milk weaning and that is like our most popular episode ever. So I have a feeling I’m speaking to a lot of you right now. Because people really like to talk about milk weaning. We talked about both breastfeeding weaning and bottle weaning. And this was a journey for me, because I’ve talked about the traumatic feeding experiences with my older daughter and how cathartic It was to be able to first breastfeed Beatrix successfully, and then make the decision around four or five months that I was ready to just go over to formula and really embrace that. And I just derive so much joy out of feeding her. I mean, that’s not breaking news to anyone who listens to this podcast, feeding babies is great. When it works well, it’s really wonderful.

I am not someone who is super sentimental about losing the baby stage. Like my husband and I basically throw a party on every birthday like, oh my God, our lives are finally getting easier. I don’t ever want another newborn in my life. I like other people’s, but I don’t want to have one. But the bottle was the one thing that I was sentimental about. This was a big stage. So I think a lot of this was me needing to be ready as much as her needing to be ready. But she’s also a kid who loves her bottles.

So what we did last spring, I think it was like her 18 month checkup, our pediatrician was like, “Yeah, you have got to get started on this. There’s no medical or physiological need for her to have a bottle.” We had switched, when she turned one, over to regular milk from formula. And she was still, around 18 months, she was still on like five bottles a day. And it was like, how are we going to do this? So I talked in those episodes—you can go back to Episode 37 and hear how we dropped down to just having a 4-6 ounce bottle before nap and before bedtime, and we were able to pretty seamlessly drop the daytime bottles. Then we just, we just stayed there for a while. We were like, it’s fine. We’re going to just hang out with these bottles because they were part of her bedtime routine and they were really comforting. And we were all, both me, Dan, and our babysitter were all like, “Oh, this is not gonna go well.” So then when we had her two year checkup, the pediatrician was like, Aren’t you done? Which, you know, pediatricians, I feel like they just think it’s this really easy thing. And they forget how emotional this is. It’s not just like I want to just put it away and be done with it.

Amy

My pediatrician asked me at our nine month checkup if meals had been replacing nursing sessions, and I was like, What? No, he’s a baby. How long has it been since you’ve had a baby? Because I feel like that’s really out of touch.

Virginia

It’s really out of touch. That’s really weird.

So anyway, we kind of hemmed and hawed about it. And so we have taken this very gradual approach. And I don’t know, maybe if we had just put all the bottles away at 18 months, it would have been fine. That is entirely possible. I think that works great for a lot of kids. So when I’m talking about what we did, guys, I’m not saying anyone needs to do it the way we did. But, if you are feeling ambivalent about this, or have a lot of emotions to process, I think a gradual approach can be helpful because it gives everybody time to get there. So after her two year checkup, we decided, Okay, we’re gonna take the pre-nap, pre-bedtime bottle, which at that point was four ounces, and we’re gonna take it down to two ounces, which sounds really silly. But I’m really glad we did it, because it gave her a few days. She was mad about it, like she would finish it, and she would be like, let’s go back downstairs, I need more bottles. There’s not much milk here, Mommy. She was very straightforward, like, you didn’t put enough in. Then I would say, “Nope, that’s all we’re having today.” And she would throw the bottle and be mad about it. And it just let her let out some of the feelings about it.

We did that for a full week. On Sunday and Monday of that week, she was furious. It was like a thing. And by Wednesday, she was sort of like, ugh fine. And by Friday, she was barely finishing the two ounces. It just gave her that time to work through it and accept the change in routine. The other thing we did, not deliberately, but looking back I think was helpful, was we kept everything else very consistent and down to the books that she wanted to read. I think we all read Curious George and the Dump Truck 900 times that week. We just kept reading the one book that she was most reassured and comforted by over and over and over. So I think that helped reinforce not that much is changing. You’re still getting your snuggles you’re still getting all the cozy bedtime reading and everything, just a little less milk in the bottle. That’s it.

And then Sunday night. So, we never want to mess with weekend naps because you know, obviously. So we kept it over the weekend, the two ounces, so she would still nap and we would have our break. But then Sunday night bedtime, I was like Okay, let’s do it. We went upstairs and I had this last minute thought, I was like, Oh, maybe a toothbrush. Let’s brush your teeth, which we had a miss on at bedtime. And we went and got her toothbrush, which was super excited about and then she brushed her teeth the whole time I read the story, and she didn’t even ask about the bottle at all. It did not come up. She was totally happy.

Amy

Wow. Had you been giving her a bottle before nap time?

Virginia

Yeah, we had had both. That’s why I’m saying, over last weekend we didn’t drop the nap time bottle, so that bedtime was the first time because I didn’t want to lose that two hours of unconscious toddler. I didn’t want her to not nap. So I waited until the bedtime to do it. And she still didn’t even really reference that.

Now, the next day, Monday, she did remember. When our babysitter took her up to nap, she remembered about the bottle and she asked for it. And same when Dan put her to bed that night. And there was maybe, both times, five minutes of feelings. And then she was happy to sit with the toothbrush brush her teeth while being read a story. And last night when I put her to bed, it was like on the way up the stairs, she was like, “no more bottle.” And I was like, “that’s right.” She does this thing where she puts her head down and she goes, “it’s gone forever.” She’ll say this about anything, though. She said this about her baby gate. The baby gate is gone forever. She’ll finish her Cheerios, it’s gone forever. So, it’s like just her way of acknowledging. And then I was like “yeah, you’re a big girl now, you know, isn’t that exciting? Let’s go get your toothbrush.” And she was fine.

Amy

That’s so sweet. You had also mentioned something about saying goodnight to all the..?

Virginia

Oh, yeah, that was the other thing. She has actually been building that herself—I think it’s bedtime stalling. It’s definitely a bedtime stalling tactic. We’ll get halfway up the stairs and she’ll go, “I need to say goodnight to the playroom.” We’ll go back downstairs and she’ll go, “Goodnight playroom, good night trampoline, goodnight sofa, goodnight pillow.” She’ll just like pick random things she needs to say goodnight spoon. And so we did that as well. That and the toothbrush combination seemed to just give her the touchpoint she needed. She has other ways to self soothe, that was just one option. I don’t feel like this has in any way undermined her sense of security with anything. So that was my goal.

I think the takeaway is there’s no right way to do this. It’s going to be different for everyone. There’s this kind of myth out there that like you have to rip it away and it’s going to be brutal for two weeks, and then it’ll be fine. And I don’t know that it has to go that way. I think you can find a gentler approach and that can be good too.

Amy

Yeah, and there’s no timeline that works exactly the same for everybody.

Virginia

And honestly, if I felt like she was still really clinging to it, I would have waited a little longer even. I was not like just because the pediatrician said she turned two we need to do this. But we could generally tell her fixation was lessening. She was more interested in the stories than she was the bottle. Her whole bedtime energy had changed, like she’s running over to pick out a book. She’s been like getting distracted with a toy. She’s wanting less to be held like a little baby. She’s transitioning into more of being a toddler, so it felt like the right time.

Amy

Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. It’s very sweet.

Virginia

It’s a big milestone. I’m excited. Yeah, I’m excited. It’s good stuff.

Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode.

Consider a paid subscription to the Burnt Toast newsletter! It’s just $5 a month or $50 for the year you get a ton of cool perks and you keep that’s an ad- and sponsor-free space.

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

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Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

Kids turn one and our expectations change. Suddenly, we want them to eat for nutrition and “food is fuel.”

You're listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast (and newsletter) about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health.

As you are listening to this podcast today, I am also writing the last pages of my next book. It is called Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. It will be out next April. I'm recording this with still about 6,000 words ahead of me. I'm hoping by the time you're hearing this, it's like a thousand or five hundred words left. Or even none left! That would be great!

It's such a weird experience. I love writing books. I love being immersed in the research and the storytelling and the issues that I'm thinking about constantly. But I'm definitely also in the can-no-longer-see-the-forest-for-the-trees stage of this first draft. So, that is how I am feeling. Hopefully, by the time you're listening to this, it will be feeling much closer to relieved and celebratory!

Because I am swamped with getting this manuscript finished, I am giving you a couple of weeks of rerun episodes so I can stay firmly locked into book world and do a little less bouncing between book, newsletter, podcast, the way I have been for the last many months. So this week's rerun is a conversation that Amy Palanjian and I had on our old podcast Comfort Food, about emotional eating. This episode first aired on February 27, 2020. And I think it's one where we were actually a little ahead of our time because once Covid happened, the conversation around comfort eating changed. There was so much demonization of comfort eating and stress eating that we did see this really powerful backlash of folks saying, “No wait, actually we're going through a global trauma, making sourdough and enjoying it is a great way to cope with your anxiety.” A lot of that is what Amy and I are talking about in this episode.

We are longtime fans of comfort eating—that's why we named the podcast Comfort Food!—and of emotional eating as a benign coping strategy. It's something I continue to talk about: The importance of reclaiming these coping strategies for yourself, of removing the guilt and shame because that's what causes them to feel so harmful. A lot of what we talked about may not feel entirely new to you, if you've been following Burnt Toast for a while, but I do think we hit a lot of the key points really well. If you are struggling with feeling okay about feeding yourself in any way, it should be a really useful lesson.

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Virginia

Hello and welcome to episode 64 of Comfort Food! This is the podcast about the joys and meltdowns of feeding our families and feeding ourselves.

Amy

So this week we are going to explore the concept of emotional eating and some of the myths and misconceptions that can come up and also to talk about is it okay to eat when you're not physically hungry?

Virginia

I'm Virginia Sole-Smith, I'm a writer, a contributor to Parents Magazine and New York Times Parenting, and I'm the author of The Eating Instinct: Food, Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America, which is out in paperback now and it has such a pretty new cover. Maybe I'll get Amy to put a picture in the show notes, you should definitely check it out. Anyway, I write about how women relate to food and our bodies in a culture that gives us so many unrealistic expectations about those things.

Amy

And I'm Amy Palanjian, a writer, recipe developer, and creator of Yummy Toddler Food. And I love helping parents to stop freaking out about what their kids will and won't eat and sharing doable recipes that fit into even the busiest family schedules.

Okay, so obviously, the name of our podcast is Comfort Food. So, we think that food should be comforting, but we realized we never explicitly talked about it in depth— about the concept of comfort as it relates to food and why we think it's important.

Virginia

Yeah. And it's a really fundamental to what we do. I mean, again, we named the podcast after it. I thought it would be fun to talk about some of the other names we went through. I really wanted to call the podcast Burnt Toast, which I still think is a great name. But we couldn't because there was one, even though it’s not around.

Amy

It's not a functioning podcast, but yeah.

Virginia

So anyway, if you're listening, and you were affiliated with the prior Burnt Toast podcast, you should give us your name. I mean, we're kind of already here. But Comfort Food felt like the perfect name. I think what we liked about Burnt Toast was that it was like the sort of imperfect, meal on the fly situation that a lot of us are in.

Amy

We went through a lot of iterations of something with pasta.

Virginia

I know, I really wanted to name it something with pasta. Basically, you can tell from all the foods we considered, we were about comfort food. So then it was like, okay, let's just group it all together into that umbrella.

Amy

Yeah. And you actually wanted to use that phrase in your book title, right?

Virginia

Yeah, my original title for The Eating Instinct was actually Comfort, Food. Now that feels dumb and a little twee—maybe that's why my agent vetoed it. But I thought that summed up what I was initially hoping to do with the book. My agent and the publisher liked The Eating Instinct better because it was a little more science-y sounding. Naming books is really hard.

The reason that I wanted it to be the book title is the book starts with Violet’s story. A really big turning point for us in helping Violet learn to become an oral eater was in the summer of 2016, when she was in and out of the hospital a ton. She had actually gotten off her feeding tube and become a really successful oral eater, and then she got very, very sick again and she stopped eating. I remember being in the ICU with her and these hospital dietitians and doctors swarming and obsessing over why she wasn't eating, what was going on. It was just so clear to me that eating had ceased to offer her any comfort so she had no incentive to do it. It felt like just another horrible thing happening to her body in this really intense medical situation. She didn't turn the corner again, until she found a way to make eating feel safe and comforting. That really opened my eyes to how, in this hospital setting, it doesn't work with a sick kid. They need food to be comforting—we all need that. We are so consistently making nutrition the enemy of comfort and the way we relate to food. So that was really what inspired the book and also a lot of the conversations that Amy and I have.

Amy

So much of what we hear about nutrition or the way that we're “supposed” to eat is looking at macros and doing it by grams. It's so devoid of any emotion, but that's not what it's like when you sit down at the table. You can't separate the two.

Virginia

I mean, it literally doesn't work without it. I think any of us who have successfully fed a baby, you intrinsically get why comfort matters. It is absolutely essential to a baby eating that they feel safe and comfortable. It's this really cozy, bonding, joyous experience to feed a baby, for both the parent and the child. But then suddenly, kids turn one and our expectations change and we want them to eat all these different foods, but now it's for “nutrition” and “food is fuel.” We want them to think of food as just this way to grow their bodies, but we're just much more anxious about comfort.

A lot of the research I did for the book really showed that we are biologically programmed to seek comfort in food. This is a feature, not a bug. We evolved to do it because human survival depends on us eating so often. We have to eat very regularly—and babies in particular have to eat, over and over and over again, all day long. If we didn't find it inherently pleasurable and comforting, we wouldn't do it. Especially generations ago, when food was scarce and it was hard to do. We need this, this is fundamental to the whole thing.

Amy Palanjian

So, last week Selway had his 12 month checkup and on the little paper that they gave us, it was like, “Your baby should be weaned off a bottle at this point.”

Virginia

Whoa. Whoa there.

Amy

Let's back up and look at like the emotional attachment that that baby might have.

For adults, it's been drilled into us that we are supposed to eat when we're hungry and stop when we're full. And if we eat for any other reason, then we're doing something wrong. We feel guilty and we've failed ourselves.

Virginia

Yeah, I think both Christy Harrison and Evelyn Tribole have talked about that in their episodes on the podcast. There's a misconception that when you talk about intuitive eating, you're talking about the hunger/fullness diet. I actually had a friend, a few months ago, we were out getting ice cream, and she was like, “Oh, I'd love to have that but I'm not hungry and I'm doing intuitive eating, so I'm not gonna eat the ice cream.” And I was like, “Oh, no. That's not what it means. It doesn't mean you only eat when you experience physical hunger.” You can also eat because we're out with our kids eating ice cream and we want to share that. That is this other piece of it. We are both of these things.

Amy

So we're going to run through a few common myths about comfort food and emotional eating.

Myth number one: Eating to comfort yourself is always bad.

Virginia

I mean, that's what people think, right? They think the cliche of having a pint of ice cream after a breakup or wanting cheesy crackers when you're stressed out is somehow this big failure. But eating something tasty to cheer yourself up after a hard day is totally normal. It's totally human. And it's also a totally fine coping strategy.

Amy

I have come to terms with the fact that I always need some sort of chocolate at the end of the day. It has nothing to do with like my overall nutritional intake. It just makes me feel better.

Virginia

Yeah. I mean, you have three children running around your house!

Amy

I made it to the end of the day, guys!

Virginia

You made it to bedtime, you need chocolate. Yeah, I struggled with this when we were in the hospital for so many months with Violet. Some people when they're undergoing extreme trauma totally lose their appetite and stop eating. I've had friends say to me, “This is really hard. People will praise this weight loss, but actually my life's falling apart. It’s not really for a good reason.” So, you know, that definitely happens. I do not respond to trauma that way. I respond to trauma by seeking comfort in food. I did a lot of comfort eating during those years of Violet being so sick. I had to really kind of come to terms with that. I struggled with it. Like, oh, I shouldn't be comfort eating. Then finally, I was like, “You know what? I am eating this chocolate croissant in a corner of an ICU hospital. This is what's getting me through the day. I am glad it is here for me.” There is nothing wrong with it. It's a form of taking care of yourself, for sure. It just gets such a bad rap.

Christy Harrison and I did an event for our books recently, and when we were doing the audience Q&A, a new mom raised her hand. She said, “You know, I really think I'm an emotional eater. Especially now that my baby's three months old, it just feels like I can't even have chocolate in the house because I can't stop eating it.” And we were both just like, of course you need chocolate, you are three months postpartum. You're not sleeping. Your life has been thrown up in the air. Give yourself this grace.

Amy

You're grasping at straws for something to sort of make you feel a little bit better in the moment. I have this lactation cookie, which I'm renaming to be just mama cookies, and it has chocolate in it purely because I know that having that thirty seconds of something that tastes good in your mouth is incredibly helpful when you're taking care of a small child. You're super, super tired and you just need that small window of pleasure.

Virginia

You literally can't get more sleep probably, that’s not available to you. Like, probably you wouldn't crave the chocolate quite as much if you were getting nine hours of sleep a night, but that's not going to happen for a long time. The solution is not to deprive yourself of this other thing, it's to meet what need you can. That’s a way to reframe it.

Amy

Myth number two: Feeling compulsive around food is the same as emotionally eating.

Virginia

This is interesting because people often label something as emotional eating when what they really mean is, it's hard for me to stop eating X. Like, If I have a bag of potato chips, I'm going to eat the whole bag. Or, if I see a plate of brownies, I'm going to need to eat the whole plate of brownies. They think that this means they're eating emotionally, when it may just mean that they feel restricted about that food. They've restricted it for so long, and now they can't anymore. That's why they're eating in that uncontrollable, scary-feeling way. This is a really big misconception about binge eating disorder, that it's somehow really different from anorexia or bulimia, these other eating disorders that are more obviously restriction-based. People think, binge eating disorder, those people just eat all the time, they can never stop. But all the new research on it is showing in around 40% of cases, it's a response to restriction. Somebody has been on a more restrictive plan, or diet, or full anorexia, and then it hits a brick wall and it goes the other way. Binge eating disorder is a whole complicated thing, we don't have to get into all of it, but a lot of cases are also people responding to growing up with intense food insecurity. Not having enough food in your house is also a form of restriction. It's kind of threaded throughout. I think it's important to understand that because we punish the symptom—eating in this uncontrollable way—without dealing what's really causing that. I think for a lot of us, even if you're not in an extreme place with it, that feeling of “I can't control myself around this food",” what you really need to ask is, why are you restricting this food? Why are you not able to give yourself permission to enjoy it when it's here?

Amy

Yeah, and I think if you've ever had a child who's been obsessed about one type of food, like goldfish, and then you buy goldfish and allow them to have them for snacks, you don't hide them or restrict them in any way, they lose a lot of their appeal. It becomes very clear that they weren't necessarily wanting to have them so badly because they love them so much, it was the feeling that they loved them and also they were not allowed to have them.

Virginia

Right. The love is not the problem, it was the restriction that was the problem. It's also worth noting, there's a difference between using food to comfort yourself in a tough situation or after a tough day, and using food as a way to escape or numb your emotions. That can become a more self destructive way to go, just like drinking to numb your emotions can be destructive. Anytime we're escaping our feelings, it can be worrisome, but it’s not the food that’s the problem. The solution isn't to stop eating those foods, it's to figure out how to deal with the hard feelings and find other coping strategies. And I'd also argue even in the short term, sometimes emotions are too frickin’ big.

Amy

I was going to say, maybe it's okay to numb your emotions sometimes, if you need to.

Virginia

Maybe you can't deal with it all in one day and you'll deal with some more of it tomorrow. Let's not demonize these strategies. It's interesting how much these really normal ways of coping with life become demonized because they don't line up with diet culture expectations. But we of course, blame ourselves.

Amy

One thing that has been helpful for me, like if there's something that I feel like I just want to eat the whole thing of, I just ask myself, what if I'm just allowed to eat as much as I want? Does that change the emotional reaction to it?

Virginia

Does it?

Amy

Usually. I mean, I have asked my significant other that question, too, if there's something that he says he can't have in the house. I'm like, what if you were just allowed to have it? It’s an interesting exercise.

Virginia

That's really interesting.

The third Myth is this idea that we should not let our kids eat for comfort either, and that we somehow have to rein in their emotions around food.

Amy

Back to the baby example, we talked a little bit about weaning. We're not weaning, but like, it's a little bit on my mind. No matter when Selway’s last bottle was, when I pick him up at daycare he always wants me to breastfeed him. That's obviously not about hunger, like, he could have had a bottle within an hour. He wants to do that because it's how he connects with me.

Virginia

He wants to see his mama.

Amy

It's a totally normal. That would not be something that would be upsetting to anyone. That's very easy to understand. And I think taking that a few years forward, when the child is isn’t breastfeeding, but also has that relationship with food, it would be kind of weird if they weren't comforted by food, in some ways.

Virginia

This is something that's part of the human experience. Speaking as someone who had a kid who found no comfort and food, it is terrifying, actually, when you take it all the way to that extreme place. One of the most powerful memories of my life is the first time I saw Violet take comfort from food. She was a little older than Selway and snuggled on my lap eating an apple. What the food was doesn't matter, I suddenly had this experience of like, oh, she associates me and food and comfort all together again. The way she should. It's so powerful.

We were also talking a little before we started recording about seeing our kids use food in this way is actually a sign that they are self-regulating. Beatrix often will, if something falls apart for her, she immediately says, “Where's my ubby?” which is her lovey, and then like, “I need my snack cup.” I'm not worried that she's addicted to the goldfish or whatever's in the snack cup. She's like, oh, I need some comfort right now. That's pretty cool to see.

Amy

I don't know that I would want a child to always turn to food for comfort, just as I would want for myself to have different options of things that would make me feel better. But I think having it in the arsenal with other things can be super helpful. I mean, we had a situation where one of the girls was able to calm themselves down, after a pretty horrific screaming battle, with some crackers and cucumber and a book. There's nothing wrong in that situation.

Virginia

Yeah, so many great strategies that she's using there.

Amy

I think when that happens, as a parent, your initial reaction might be, “Uh oh. I know she's not hungry. I'm supposed to be teaching her to honor her hunger cues.” But at the same time, I think we need to be aware that sometimes we have to look at the bigger context and realize that in that moment, that was a helpful choice.

Virginia

Yeah, absolutely. I mean I really talk about comfort as the third eating instinct. We've got hunger and fullness, but comfort is this other really important one. Jennifer Berry has talked about that, too, that it is an internal drive kids have to seek comfort. So, don't dismiss that even if it feels at odds with their hunger. But yes, of course, eventually Selway will not need to nourish the second he sees you at the end of the day. When we were weaning Beatrice’s bottle, we talked about how she wanted to read the exact same bedtime book every night for two weeks while we were dropping the bottles, because that was the new comfort thing. She wanted Curious George over and over and over. We can definitely encourage kids to find these other tools, but don't be afraid of the food.

Amy

This was on my mind after the Super Bowl. I was thinking about how holiday foods can offer this type of—or food traditions— can offer comfort in this way, too. My husband grew up, he didn't have a TV, but his grandparents did. So on Super Bowl Sunday, he went to his grandparents and his grandfather and made him a root beer float. So he's always wanted to share that tradition with us. And at this point in time, my girls don't like the carbonation in drinks, so they don't like soda. The idea of having soda poured on ice cream is like ruining ice cream for them. So they were like, we just want the ice cream. And I don't know, a root beer float? It's not my favorite thing. But I realized after, I didn't handle that well. Because this is something that means a lot to him. There could have been a way that we could have all shared that experience, taking comfort in the food experience. There was a bigger meaning to that where it was more than just the food.

Virginia

He wanted to tell the story of drinking root beer floats with his granddad and that kind of thing. And you could have shared that while possibly serving the root beer in glasses separate from the ice cream.

Amy

Or we could have showed the girls what happens when we pour the root beer. It could have been the coolest science experiment. Like there could have been ways that we could have all shared the experience. The way that it turned out just was really disappointing. But I mean, this happens. Now with a lot of people having very specific dietary restrictions, this happens at the holidays, where the foods that you once were able to share with everyone, you can’t. Where do all of those feelings go, about those foods that you love when you can't share them in the same way?

Virginia

That's really tough. You see this on both sides. You see both the person with the restrictions struggling to enjoy their holiday in the same way, and I also feel for the people preparing the food. You know, grandma or whoever makes these amazing cookies every year, and suddenly people aren't eating them. That's a little bit heartbreaking because she's done that to show her love. You have to think about the feelings on both sides of that. It's not to say you can't find new and different traditions, but also that these traditions do really matter and shouldn't just be sort of tossed aside, right?

Amy

I think we can get laser-focused on the specific food aspect of it when we are in the culture that we're in, that does often boil it down to whether or not it has gluten, or whatever the thing might be.

Virginia

There's so much talk around the holidays about how there's too much focus on food. And to my mind, it's so sad that we can't just let this be about food, because it is. Because, again, that's very fundamental to human experience. To celebrate through food is something that every culture around the world does. This is part of what we do, being able to enjoy that and appreciate it for what it is. Then it doesn't have to dominate in this intense way because, again, you've removed the restriction around it. You can take the comfort from it without feeling this compulsive, out of control thing.

Amy

Okay, do you guys have questions? Questions about emotional eating or comfort food? We're here to take them on.

Virginia

Want me to find the old list of other podcasts names? We can see if any of them are any good. I think we landed on the right one. I think it speaks to our souls.

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The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

The reason people are angry at thin women is because they hate fat. Yes, of course, we should not be yelling at skinny people. But it’s important to hold that together with, when those jokes get made, they’re actually anti-fat jokes. They’re not anti-thin jokes.

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And keep sending in your questions for Virginia’s Office Hours! If you have a question about navigating diet culture and anti-fat bias that you’d like to talk through with me, or if you just want to rant about a shitty diet with me, you can submit your question/topic here. I’ll pick one person to join me on the bonus episode so we can hash it out together.

Episode 49 Transcript

Virginia

All right, we’ve got a whole big list of questions we’re gonna work through. Where do you want to start?

Corinne

The first question is: How did you get started as a writer?

Virginia

I have written about this before, so here is one of the early episodes of the podcast where I give the whole story. I was an English and creative writing major in college. I went to school in New York, so I did a bunch of free internships at magazines. My first job out of college was as an editorial assistant at Seventeen magazine. That is where I got my start writing, so a lot of “get your best bikini body” stories and prom bodies. Lots of event-based bodies in the teen magazine world. 

We did also do some really good health reporting. I remember doing a big story about vaginas. A misconception about women’s media is that everyone who works there hates women, when it’s actually mostly run by feminists who are up against advertising and always caught in that vortex. So, I learned a ton. There was a lot of very good journalism happening there, but always under this umbrella of how do we sell beauty products and clothes to teenage girls. From there I went to another women’s magazine and then in 2005, I went freelance and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. 

Okay the next question is for you! How and why did Corinne start @SellTradePlus? It is such a unique community and vision.

Corinne

I started @selltradeplus in 2018. I started it because I was addicted to looking at other buy/sell/trade accounts on Instagram and was never seeing my size. I just thought, if I were going to a used clothing store, I would just go to the section that was my size. So why not just make a size-based Buy Sell Trade account? And that’s kind of how it got started. And then I really liked the people that I was meeting. And I think it’s turned into a bit more of a community.

Virginia

It is a lovely community. You’re very good at community building. 

Corinne 

Thank you. 

Virginia

I hear a lot of Corinne love from people who find my work through you.

Corinne

That’s so nice. 

Virginia

As well they should be. And we will also link back to the first time you were on the podcast, because you kind of told your whole origin story in more detail there, too. So folks can catch up there. And you do those weekly discussion posts where people chat about all sorts of different things. It is much more than just the clothes, although the clothes are excellent.

Corinne

It’s a fun place to be. 

Okay, the next question is: Can you share a little bit about your own progression from dieting to anti-diet mentality? 

Virginia

I think we should both answer this one, if you’re up for it.

So, as I mentioned, I started in women’s magazines and wrote a lot of shitty diet stories. Very much in the diet world, while also feeling conflicted about it and rationalizing many of those stories to myself. Like, “this one’s not really a diet, it’s just about portion control.” Or, you know, “this one’s not really a diet, it’s eating the way Michael Pollan told you to eat, so that’s fine,” etc, etc, and increasingly getting frustrated about that. But not really understanding a different way to think about food.

The turning point in my story is around the time my first daughter was born, and she was born with a rare congenital heart condition that required her to be on a feeding tube. We spent two years helping her learn to eat again, so it was like the reverse of dieting. I was grasping for all these external rules, wanting someone to tell me how to do this, how to get eating right for her, and then increasingly realizing there were no rules. There was nobody who could fix it. We had to get her back to a safe place with food by helping her learn to trust her body again. And that started to connect a lot of dots for me about the way I had been eating over the years and not trusting my body. Diet culture separates all of us from being able to trust ourselves. That was my big, “okay, I’m done with this,” moment, even though it wasn’t like one moment. I mean, it was a long process. I can remember when she was around 18 months old, saying something shitty about my body and having her repeat it back to me, and then thinking like, Well, okay, I’m done with that now. This kid has fought too hard to feel safe in her body. I’m not going to be the one to screw it up for her.

Corinne

That’s a lot of pressure. 

Virginia

It is, but it also made it so clear. Do you know what I mean? This is one of those things that in a way I sort of hate, being like, “becoming a mother liberated me from diet culture,” because it feels like, honestly, sort of a b******t narrative. I hate when we credit motherhood with being this mystical thing. It’s honestly mostly just diapers. It’s not that glamorous. But it is true that it is often easier to do things for other people than it is to do them for ourselves. And since I had this very clear goal of not wanting to pass this on to her, it was like failure is no longer an option, in that sense.

Corinne

That makes sense.

I feel like I don’t have a good answer. I’m not a mom and I think it hasn’t always been just like a linear progression for me. I’ve wavered back and forth, and I think I also, even from a younger age, had kind of an oppositional personality where I was always just kind of like, “Screw anyone who’s telling me what to do.” There was a long time where I went back and forth between being on one hand, f**k diets or whatever anyone else is telling me to do, and on the other hand, thinking the only way I can be happy is by losing weight. I wish I had a moment when I was just like, I’m done. But I mean, I think eventually it just is exhausting and you’re tired of it.

Virginia

You realize how much mental energy it takes, and physical energy. And it’s like, other things are more interesting? I think everyone can relate to it not being linear. I mean, mine wasn’t linear. I thought I was fully out of diet culture and in 2015, I wrote a story about detox diets where I went on a detox diet for a month to write the story. And at the time, I would have been like, No, I’m not dieting anymore. I’m very much out of diet culture now. And I reread the article recently, it was like…

Corinne

It’s very easy to get sucked back in. 

Virginia

Yeah, it really is. 

Corinne

They’re always finding new ways to get you.

Virginia

They really are. They’re very good at that.

I understand why this person asked that question because getting to the anti-diet mentality feels like a goal and it is because there’s obviously a lot of benefits that come with it. Like, you are not obsessing about food and beating yourself up when you eat and that’s really lovely. But I am almost wary of framing it as a goal to work towards because that can be a sort of parallel dieting experience. Do you know what I mean?

Corinne

Yeah, that’s a good point. I don’t think it feels like you ever get to a point where you’re just like, “now I’m at peace forever.” I still am sometimes like, “oh, I don’t want to deal with airplane seats.”

Virginia

It’s maybe more like getting to a place where you can more quickly recognize the pattern of, “Oh, I am responding to this larger cultural situation. It’s not my fault.” Being able to place the blame where it belongs is in some ways more the goal, if we’re going to talk about it as a goal.

Corinne

So that the next question is: Is there a balance between slamming the thin ideal, but inadvertently slamming, less fat, slender-ish, petite bodied people as crappy?

Virginia

This is a very interesting question. It does remind me of the column we did where the question was, “what if I just don’t want to be fat?” I think there’s often something that comes up for less fat, slender-ish, petite-bodied people, when they start to hear us pushing back against the thin ideal, and they take it really personally. I’ve interviewed lots of women in thin bodies who talk about the constant shaming they get for being thin. And this is a real thing, right? People will say to a thin woman, like, “I hate you. You’re so skinny,” or “How can you eat whatever you want and never gain weight? Oh, my God, I’m so angry.” They get a lot of hostility for their thinness. But, the hostility is rooted in anti-fat bias. The reason people are angry at the thin woman is because they hate fat.

Like, yes, of course, we should not be yelling at skinny people, but I think it’s really important to hold that when those jokes get made, they’re actually anti-fat jokes. They’re not anti-thin jokes. So in terms of finding this balance, personal attacks help nobody, but it is fine to be critical of the thin ideal that is oppressive to all of us, and particularly oppressive to people in larger bodies. In doing that, you are not causing harm to thin people. 

Corinne

The next question is part two of the previous question: Is there a balance of accepting nutrition or GI research as beneficial and informative and slamming probiotic supplements, foods, and quick convenience powders?

Virginia

Okay, so I would flip this. As it currently stands, nutritional research is not terribly beneficial or informative for individuals. In part because it tends to be very poorly done. Most nutrition studies rely on people self reporting. People are really bad at self-reporting what they ate. A lot of nutritional research will do stuff like study what broccoli does if we feed it in huge quantities to a rat, and you’re not a rat who eats huge quantities of broccoli, so the fact that it prevented cancer in that rat is not applicable to your life.

There is a lot about nutritional science that is useful to nutrition scientists. But it gets reported on and marketed and communicated to the public as if we should be living by these lessons. It gets turned into best selling diet books. And then when you look at the source material, it’s like, this was a study on 30 people and we didn’t follow them very long. We didn’t ask them the right questions and it was only men, or something like that. There are all these limitations to the research. So I think that it’s really good to be critical and curious about nutritional science and to realize that it often doesn’t have a big place in your life.

At the same time, I’m much more forgiving of people finding a quick convenience protein powder as an efficient way to have breakfast in the morning. In my house, we have protein powder in smoothies every morning because my kids are both cautious eaters and they like it. It’s a useful way of making sure they get like a good amount of energy for the day, if they want to otherwise live on, you know, carpet lint, and Tic Tacs or whatever. I will certainly be critical of the marketing hype that these products come with. I don’t love when they’re claiming to be super foods, and everyone’s heard my rant on Athletic Greens. But if your take is, “These Clif Bars are so helpful to keep in my bag because I work an eight hour shift and I don’t get a lunch break and I can eat one and not starve,” that’s great. When I say let’s not shame foods, I mean all of the foods. We don’t have to shame any of the foods. But you don’t have to buy into the hype around these foods. You don’t have to buy into the claim that they should replace other foods in your diet or anything like that.

Corinne

That seems like a good distinction. 

Okay. The next one is a parenting question: How do you deal with judgment from health care providers who disagree with choices you make, i.e. breastfeeding past one year, not doing cry it out. So, not harmful choices, but choices that may fall outside the mainstream.

Virginia

I almost didn’t answer this question because I did not breastfeed past five months and I definitely did cry it out. So, I’m not judging your choices, but I am someone who can only offer the other side of this. But, if you only breastfeed your baby for four to five months, you’re gonna get judgment for not doing it long enough. So, I do know what you mean in terms of making a choice that’s different from “gold standard” advice about parenting. I think it’s so hard with your first because you don’t know what the hell you’re doing and it’s very easy to feel super unnerved by it all. I think that confidence is something that just comes with time. The more you parent your own kids and see what works for them, you feel more comfortable saying, “that best practice doesn’t actually apply to our life in any way.”

Where I do certainly relate is the advice on kids below two should have zero added sugar. I mean, what? That’s not useful, it’s not realistic. If your kids are eating food at daycare, if they have an older sibling who gets given a cupcake, you’re of course going to let your toddler or your baby have some sugar. And they’re going to be great and suffer no consequences from it. So, certainly around nutrition is a piece where I find myself often making the “unpopular” decision with a healthcare provider. We can link to that episode Sara Louise Peterson and I did on gentle parenting. We went a lot deeper into this. Because it’s not just healthcare providers, it’s also social media and mom friends and mom groups on Facebook that can get like really weird and dogmatic fast. All those places where they tend to present parenting in a binary state, that you’re either doing it right or you’re doing it wrong. And anyone who’s actually spent any time with a kid knows that you’re always doing it a little bit wrong, but it’s fine. That’s the best we can do on any given day.

Corinne

Man, I do not envy parents.

Virginia

It’s real fun to be doing something that requires you to be regularly sleep deprived and hungry at odd hours.

Corinne

And always slightly failing.

Virginia

I do have one quick story. So, my four year old has been home sick like every week for the past month with some nonsense because ever since we took masks out of schools, the kids are getting all of the diseases they didn’t get for the last two years. Last week she was home for three days straight. It was the third week in a row with this really bad cough. We’ve tested and tested and it’s not COVID. So by the end of the third day, I was like, we’ve got to get out of the house. We’ve got to go do something. It’s a beautiful day. She’s been watching TV for three days straight because Dan and I have to work and she’s here.

So, we pick up her older sister. We go to get ice cream and we’re down by the river. It’s a beautiful afternoon. I’m feeling so successful. Like, I got both kids out. We’re getting ice cream. How lovely. She inhales her ice cream, spills it all the way down herself, and then gets a coughing fit and throws up her ice cream all over herself and the park bench and multiple other surfaces. And I was just like, why do I try? 

There was an older woman on the park bench next to us, dramatically turning her head to the side. Literally like, “I can’t look at you, this is so revolting.” And then another mom from school and her kids were a little further down. Here’s my kid starting to gag and she’s like, “Do you need help?” And I’m just like, what help can you even offer?

Corinne

Oh my God.

Virginia

So there’s quite an audience for this whole experience.

The parenting win there is that I had remembered to bring baby wipes. I was so f*****g proud of myself because we’re past the stage where we need baby wipes all the time so I don’t always think to have them. But I went through a pile of baby wipes. I got a bottle of water, I was cleaning puke off the sidewalk and off this park bench. And then, I want to get her back in the car, but I don’t want her to puke again. So I’m like, “Okay, guys, why don’t you just play while we make sure she’s done puking?” And other people are clearly like, WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE? There was a lot of judgment. 

Corinne

I am so sorry. 

Virginia

It was fine. I was rage texting Dan while I’m cleaning puke off the park bench. But once you’ve survived your first—I mean, it’s not even my first, it’s probably like my dozenth—public vomiting, it’s like whatever! They can think what they want. Unless you’re the one here cleaning the puke off the park bench, you don’t get to judge. 

I’m sorry for that disgusting story. We can move on.

Corinne

No, I love it. Well, this is also kind of a tangent, but where does that advice about not giving kids sugar before two years come from? 

Virginia

Oh, I think it’s the American Heart Association.

Corinne

Is that based on facts? 

Virginia

We should do a deep dive on this. 

Corinne

Or is this where we’re like take nutritional studies with a grain of salt. 

Virginia

Yes, I think it’s definitely that. I would have to look into the source material on this, but based on where some of these other guidelines have come from, my guess is they’re taking a large-scale study and they’re finding a small correlation of kids who ate less sugar had lower rates of X, Y, and Z health conditions later on. So, it is correlation, not causation, right? Because you cannot prove a negative. You can’t prove that not eating sugar prevented it. All you can say is some households feed their kids more sugar than others and those households correlate to these other conditions. But what else might be contributing to that? Like, if you’re a low-income family, and McDonald’s is a really reasonable way for you to get calories in your kid, your kid is consuming more sugar than the Whole Foods mom’s kid has consumed.

The other thing that research doesn’t tell us is the harm caused by restricting sugar. It may be that you could even prove a causal link between kids who eat less sugar and future heart disease risk, but you may also be able to prove a causal link between kids who eat less sugar and kids who have eating disorders. And if I’m worrying about my kid’s mortality, kids are more likely to die of eating disorders than they are of heart disease. So, if we’re really gonna get serious about health risks, we have to consider all aspects. Being restrictive around sugar leads to kids who fixate on sugar. We see this over and over. We’ve seen this in experimental studies that are really well done. So we know that that is just not practical advice for parents.

Corinne

Well, too bad it’s not practical, because it’s everywhere.

Virginia

Yep, they’re still gonna make you feel bad about not doing it.

Corinne

All right. Let’s move on to our favorite topic! What’s your favorite house plant? And how do you keep it alive?

Virginia

I mean, I cannot pick a favorite house plant, people. It’s is really hard.

Corinne

Okay, do you have a least favorite? 

Virginia

Oh, that’s a good question. 

Corinne

I have a least favorite. 

Virginia

Let me think. Okay, what’s your least favorite? Because I’m thinking…

Corinne

Mother of Thousands? It’s the one that makes a million babies and I hate it. I literally just threw it away because I was like, I can’t. Too prolific.

Virginia

It is very prolific. I have one of those that my stepdad brought back from a trip. My mother was like, “please take this thing out of my house.” Because they can get really tall, too. They’re quite enormous. 

Corinne

It’s messy. I don’t want to be just throwing away all these little things all the time. 

Virginia

Yeah, you actually don’t need thousands of that one plant. 

Corinne

I don’t even want one.

Virginia 

I have it in a very small pot, so I think I’m containing it a little bit.

One plant that I am frustrated by, because I love it, but I’m having trouble with is my string of bananas. I’m doing really well with a string of pearls. String of bananas is similar to string of pearls, but instead of little pearls, they are shaped like little bananas. They’re just so finicky! If you overwater them, they don’t like it, but they do want some water and so we’re kind of in a little love/hate relationship where I’m like, I really like you but you don’t seem happy here. Is it me? We’re trying to work it out. 

One of my favorite houseplants is my polka dot leaf begonia. She’s just really lovely. And also a little high maintenance but I get it, you’re very pretty, you’re loud. I’ve got her in a good spot and she’s doing well. They’re really, really cool. Any of the fancy leaf begonias are pretty cool if you have the right conditions for them.

Corinne

Do you have a fiddle leaf fig?

Virginia

Oh God no. I’ve killed two, if not three, fiddle leaf figs.

Corinne

I killed one and I was like, that’s enough.

Virginia

Yeah, because they’re expensive if you buy a big one. I don’t think I have the right conditions in my house for a fiddle leaf fig because we have only have one south facing room and I don’t have space in there to get another giant plant in. I don’t know, figs are so hard. They’re the hardest.

Corinne

They seem like they’re always just slowly dying.

Virginia

Yeah, and they look so gorgeous when they’re working and then they’ll just drop all their leaves. And then they are just a stick. I had one that was just a stick for a year. I kept hoping it would come back.

I feel like if you like a big leaf plant like that, which of course I love big leaf plants, like you can do a Monstera. That’ll get just as giant for you. I have a Dieffenbachia that’s got pretty big leaves. And Elephant’s Ear. Elephant Ears can be a little finicky in the winter but they’re worth it. There are other options. You don’t have to fall for the fiddle leaf fig, is what I’m saying.

Corinne

The next question is: What does work life balance look like for you right now? And what do you wish was different?

Virginia

I was thinking about this because last month there was a question about how I get time for myself and I realized I forgot to share in that question that one of the main things I do is wake up really early. The rest of my family sleeps till like 7:30 and I get up at five and I have time to myself then. When my work life balance is not great, I get up at five and I work before my kids are awake for two hours. And since I’m finishing my book right now, a lot of my early morning time is working. So, when I’m done writing this book, I will get that chunk of morning time back, and then I really like to go out in the summer and be in the garden during that time, or read, or just not be talked to by my family.

In terms of general work/life balance: I love my family very much, but I am the only member of my family (of origin) who doesn’t work weekends. And it’s a really big accomplishment for me to be breaking the generations of workaholism, in that sense. My sister is an urban education high school teacher. It’s really hard not to work nights and weekends with that job. My dad and my stepmom are college professors. Working on weekends is what I grew up with. And I totally get it and I didn’t want it. So I’m very proud that I don’t work weekends, for the most part.

What about you, you’re kind of going through a big transition right now. Do you want to talk about that?

Corinne

Sure. I don’t know what my work life balance is gonna look like. I just left my full-time job and I’m focusing some time and energy on @selltradeplus and Burnt Toast and some other freelance-y things. I’m very much figuring it out and I’m trying to have a little break where I’m just spending less time on my phone, hopefully.

Virginia

Yeah, because you have been working weekends, as I know, because you often do Burnt Toast work on the weekends. You have been doing a lot.

Corinne 

Yes, for a long time my schedule was do @selltradeplus before work, go to work for eight hours, do @selltradeplus after work, do Burnt Toast on the weekends. So, just trying to shift that a little bit!

Virginia

I think we all want you to have more downtime. I’m really a big fan of changing that. 

Corinne

This past week has been my first week without going into my job and I have felt really weird. Just, it’s really weird not having like coworkers. But yeah, I’m sure I’ll adjust.

Alright. This is kind of a follow up question: Could you talk about finding time to write with young children? Especially making mental space for it. Young children being under four.

Virginia

Well, so, as I said, getting up at five in the morning. I realize it’s the least sexy advice ever. Something about having kids broke me and made me a morning person. I also go to bed at like 8:30 at night now. I just became my mother immediately when I had kids and got on that schedule. Obviously, if you are wired differently, you could make it a nighttime writing time. I know lots of folks who do that. Once the kids go to bed, that’s when they get time.

I’m assuming with this question, this is not your full-time job. Because I do want to acknowledge the privilege of, I was already a full-time professional writer before my children came on the scene. I was making a full-time income from it, therefore it had to continue because it was bringing in 50 percent of my household income. We’ve had daycare or a nanny, or now they’re in school, but we’ve had childcare built into our lives from the time they were really little, because it was necessary for both of us to work. Of course, COVID made that very different because then they were home all the time.

The hardest point for me is the days I pick them up from school and have them in the late afternoons. Because young children are terrible in the late afternoons, they’re really grumpy and need snacks. That’s why the ice cream seemed like such a good idea at the time, before it ended in puke. And my brain is still really in my work at that point, like I don’t have a transition. This is where I can understand having a commute must be nice, because you have thirty minutes in the car to transition out. So, often I’m parenting and still looking at my phone to check work emails or I’ll think of something and want to make notes. It’s really hard, having half attention for both. My advice is, whenever you can, even if it’s not a lot of time, carve out whatever time you can separate and protect that ruthlessly as your writing time. Even if it’s a couple hours a week when you can get a babysitter. Don’t try to do the half in both worlds thing because I think that’s where the burnout really comes.

Corinne

The next question is: Recommendations for a new homeowner to learn about gardening? 

Virginia

This is a fun one. This came from Instagram because I’ve been sharing incessant garden pictures because this is the best time of year for my garden. So you’re just going see it constantly, at the moment. If you are on the East Coast, and you want to be a gardener, my number one tip is the blog A Way to Garden by Margaret Roach. She gardens here in the Hudson Valley. She was a garden editor for Martha Stewart a long time ago and has the most exquisite garden in the world.  She’s a genius. She has a wonderful podcast. She knows just everything about everything. And the website is like a treasure trove of what kind of mulch to get, how to use mulch, how to start seeds, how to think about design, all of these different things. So that would be my first step. I think it’s probably useful even for people in other gardening zones, like the specific plants change if you’re in the Southwest, like Corinne, or on the west coast. But a lot of the principles are the same.

Otherwise, what I did with our second house that was more useful, was I did spend some time making a master plan of all the different little areas. Like, this is where eventually a fire pit might go. This is where a shade garden could go or whatever. And then like, just tackle one of those projects per year instead of trying to do it all at once. So we’re now five years into what is probably a ten year list of projects, but I’m more realistic about what we can get done.

The other tip I will give if you are a new homeowner and this is your first season in your house: Don’t do much this year, because you haven’t lived there through a whole growing season. You don’t even know what you have, where the light is, what your soil is like. So even though you want to get going and there’s stuff you want to change, like, just take a break. Get some containers and pot some stuff up and put it on your porch instead. Because doing too much before you really understand your property, I think can lead to wasting money and effort.

What about you, you’re starting to work on a garden now, right, Corinne? 

Corinne 

I have lived in my house for a couple years and that advice is definitely good. There’s still stuff I’m discovering, like, “Oh, there’s irises planted here, which makes no sense because they’re getting no water.” But yeah, someone definitely put a lot of like time and thought and care into my backyard. So, we’ll see. I’m hopefully going to start doing some more work. I’m very envious of your raised beds. I’m also curious if you’ve ever watched any Monty Don?

Virginia

Oh my god. We could do a whole Monty Don fan episode. 

Corinne

Okay, great, because I was going to recommend Big Dreams, Small Spaces or Gardener’s World.

Virginia

Yes, Gardener’s World, for sure. I can’t believe I didn’t start there. He was my COVID survival strategy. My older daughter and I would watch it together in the evenings and make lots of plans. I love it so much.

Corinne

It’s so soothing. 

Virginia

So soothing. 

Corinne

Also less relevant for the Southwest, but still just great to watch.

Virginia

I know. I’m interested that you like it because you’re gardening in such a different climate.

Corinne

I mean, I’m always like, “Maybe they’ll do an episode in the desert.” But yeah, I mean, I just think Monty Don is so lovely.

Virginia

Yes, and his dogs are so lovely.

Corinne

He has great style. 

Virginia

Oh, yes. My mom is British, so the reason I’m a gardener is because of my British DNA. Like, everyone in England gardens, pretty much. 

Corinne

I mean, there’s a gardening celebrity.

Virginia

Literally one of their number one celebrities. My grandfather was a really intensive gardener, my aunt, both my cousins garden… It’s a big part of our family. And, yes, he’s the epitome of British gardening style. It makes me so happy. He’s always in a little cardigan and Wellington boots and it’s just delightful. Everything about it so good and there’s tons of really practical advice.

Corinne

Yes. And tons of episodes if you need something to watch for hours.

Virginia

Yeah. They’ve been making that show for like a hundred years. Definitely recommend a Monty Don deep dive.

Corinne

Okay, here’s another fun one. What is your dream vacation?

Virginia

This is hard because since we’ve been travel-starved for so long and we’re just getting back to travel, I have such a long list. A dream vacation that I am waiting until my children are older to take is, I really want to do a very foodie trip in Italy. I did a trip like that when I was in my 20s and it was amazing. It’s the kind of trip I want to recreate with my kids, but I want them to be more fun to eat with first. Because right now, going out to restaurants is still hard with my four year old. And the fact that Italians eat dinner at 10 o’clock at night, all of that would be tricky right now. So we’ll get there. That’s a big one. I also have never been to Greece and that’s been on my list forever.

What about you?

Corinne

I would love to go to Italy and Greece. The one that comes to mind for me, which is kind of a never-gonna-happen one, I think. But have you heard of Amangiri?

Virginia

No. What is it?

Corinne

It’s a crazy resort, I think it’s in Utah. It just it’s like it looks very beautiful. Like it’s just like this kind of stark…

Virginia

I’m googling.

Corinne

It just looks beautiful and incredibly serene. I feel like celebrities always go there. I know one time I tried to guess how much it was, and I was like, maybe like $500 a night? Like thinking that was like wild. It’s so much more than that.

Virginia

No, it’s so much more than that. I’m on their website now, I can confirm it’s definitely going to be more than $500. 

Corinne

But it looks awesome, right? It just seems fun to go there and like turn off your phone for a week. It’s also on an incredibly large, like hundreds of acres, property where you can hike around and stuff. 

Virginia

Oh my gosh, this looks beautiful. This is a good fantasy one. 

Speaking of completely over the top hotel fantasies, I’m so mad at Highlights Magazine for this. Highlights Magazine had an article that was like cool hotels, which, like, why?

Corinne

What? For kids? That makes no sense. 

Virginia

It was supposed to be hotels that would be like very kid friendly. So there was like a Disney one, which whatever. But then there was one in, I want to say, I think it was in Bali? And it’s literally under the ocean. So it’s like the bedroom was like a giant aquarium basically. I will find it and link it.

Corinne

That sounds incredible. 

Virginia

And it’s $10,000 a night.

Corinne

And now your daughter’s like, “Please? For my birthday?”

Virginia

And I couldn’t stop laughing and she was like, is that a lot of money? She’s a kid, she doesn’t get money. She’s like, “What do you think? Are you saying we don’t have $10,000?” I’m like, “We’re not gonna spend it on that!!”

[Virginia’s Note: After we recorded Corinne did find this underwater hotel room for the comparatively bargain price of $1840 per night. I’m still not taking my 8-year-old!]

Corinne

Yeah, that’s very reasonable.

Okay, what about favorite podcasts?

Virginia

We have to give Maintenance Phase a shout out. Obviously, if you’re looking for anti-diet content and you’re listening to us and not Maintenance Phase, you did that backwards because you should have started there. They do excellent work, Aubrey gordon and Michael Hobbes. That’s a big one that I never miss.

I’m also really into Everything Is Fine with Kim France and Jennifer Romolini. It is a podcast for women over 40, which I admit just hearing that tagline I was like, fine, put us in a box. But it’s so good. They’re both former women’s magazine people. Kim France was the editor in chief of Lucky magazine during like Conde Nast’s big towncar heyday years. They’re very funny and smart. They did a great episode on Roe. They have really interesting authors on and the chitchat between the two of them is really good. It’s a great listen. And not just for women over 40, I feel like anyone could enjoy it. What about you?

Corinne

I’m really into this astrology podcast, Ghost of a Podcast. So if you’re into the woo side of things, I recommend that. I also love Reply All, which I know is very popular. I’m sure everyone’s listening to that. 

Virginia

That’s a good one. 

Corinne

The last question is, what’s the most destructive health or diet culture message you’ve received?

Virginia

I think one message that has taken me personally the longest time to work through was the message that exercise is only for weight management. When I was a kid, I was a skinny kid, and I hated sports and hated moving my body. I was an indoor cat, for sure. I just wanted to read and play pretend and not be physical. And it was fine because I was skinny, right? But that meant that then when I was no longer skinny, I felt like this obligation to exercise to get back to my thinness, which did not work.

I had a pretty disordered relationship with exercise in my 20’s. No one ever said, maybe you would love moving your body for other reasons, right? There was no option on the table to enjoy exercise or just joyful movement, whatever you want to call it, on its own terms or for its own pleasures. So it has taken me most of my 30’s to really get to a place where I do notice implicit benefits to exercise that are not related to body size. I want to do it when I wake up in the morning. I feel joy when I do it. And I don’t even have that all the time still, you know? There was a long time where I really couldn’t do any cardio because it was too triggering.

What about you?

Corinne

Well, that’s a really good answer. I think for me it would be that the path to happiness is thinness. Like, don’t you just want to be happy? Stuff like that, I guess.

Virginia

Like feeling like your life needs to be on hold until you lose weight?

Corinne

And also just that being thinner will make you happier. That has not been the correlation in my life.

Virginia

No, it very often is not. I think that’s a really common and super insidious one. And it’s holding a lot of people back from just living their lives. 

Butter For Your Burnt Toast

Virginia

All right. Well, let’s bring us up. I realized when I ordered these questions, I picked a sad one to end on. “Let’s talk about terrible diet messages. Okay, goodbye!” No. We will bring it up now with Butter for your Burnt Toast. Corinne, last time you were on, you set a very high bar for yourself.

Corinne

I know I was actually struggling a little bit because I don’t think I can really live up to that.

Virginia

I don’t think anyone ever can, so you can release yourself from that pressure.

Corinne

Okay. My endorsement is slightly related to what you were just saying, which is that sometimes, I’m just living my life and I get a feeling in my body of , I want to do something other than walk the dog and garden, which are like my usual exercise activities. I subscribe to a lot of Substacks, but one of my favorite is She’s a Beast, which is Casey Johnston’s newsletter about being strong and lifting weights. She recently started a couch-to-barbell program called Liftoff, so I decided that I would just look into it. I don’t have a good track record with finishing programs or following programs. But it’s divided into three phases and the first phase requires only your house and a broomstick. And there’s a YouTube video that you can follow along with and it takes less than 15 minutes, which is incredible!

Virginia

Oh my gosh!

Corinne

You just do like six exercises maybe? And they’re all probably stuff you’ve done before. I love that it starts off like so simply and I don’t know if I’ll make it to phase two, but I’ve done phase one.

Virginia

You’re enjoying phase one. That’s awesome.

Corinne

I’ve done it six times or something. I just think it’s great. So I want to just recommend that program and also Casey’s newsletter which is about fitness-y stuff, but she definitely has an anti-diet lens.

Virginia

Yeah, very fat-positive, strong critiques of fitness culture which are really well done. I want to do this, too, now. You’re influencing me. This looks great. 

Corinne

Well, let me know if you do.

Virginia

I will. I am endlessly in physical therapy, as people know, because of my back and ankle. I’m trying to get out now, but I can’t. The other week I was like, “I feel like I’m done.” And she was like, “No, I feel like you’re in that place where you’re no longer in active pain but if you leave, you will re-injure yourself immediately.” And I was like “Touché.” But I am getting bored. For a while I was an A student with physical therapy and would do my exercises every morning and now I’m just losing interest. I need a new program, so I’m gonna check this out.

Corinne

Yeah, it’s really so fun and easy to just follow a YouTube video. I just put it on and like put it on silent and listen to a podcast while I’m waving my little broomstick around.

Virginia

So, I am recommending an absurdly large water jug. A while back I posted on Instagram that I get migraines and I loosely tie getting migraines to the days when I drink only Diet Coke. This is not a criticism of Diet Coke, it’s necessary to my wellbeing, but I should drink water, too, to be a person. Sometime I want to do a reported piece on hydration culture. It’s a whole thing, for sure. However, I do need to drink water and I asked for recommendations and a couple of people recommended this. It is the Stanley GO IceFlow 64oz Stainless Steel Flip Straw Jug. It’s a beast. It’s enormous

Corinne

Is 64 ounces a gallon?

Virginia

It is a gallon. Yes.

Corinne

Okay, I also have a gallon water jug.

Virginia

This is maybe why we were destined to be friends. 

Corinne

Yours looks really good though.

Virginia

I appreciate the size, but I have never once drunk 64 ounces in a day. I’ve had it for a couple weeks now, I have never once drunk 64 ounces in one day. Like, that’s just, I cannot drink that much water in a day. That’s a ridiculous amount of water. But what I love about it is, it is so well insulated that it stays cold all day long. I do not like drinking tepid water. That is not interesting to me. It was 90 degrees here all weekend. We were out at the pool. I was out gardening the whole day. And I would fill this thing up in the morning with a bunch of ice cubes and cart it outside with me. And last night at eight o’clock, I was like Dan, you have to drink this water. It’s so cold. And he was like, thank you for sharing with me that your water is cold. 

Corinne

Do you have to like lift it over your head to drink it?

Virginia

No! You don’t have to lift it. It is not a barbell workout. You can just hold it up and tilt it a little bit to drink. I have been self conscious to drink out of it like on a Zoom. Because I don’t know, it’s so preposterous. I want to get their 20-ounce one, I feel like that might be more for daily use. But this is very useful for being outside when I’m out with my kids and like we all need water and they don’t have to carry multiple water bottles.

Corinne

It looks sleek, too, at least.

Virginia

I have the petal, the light pink.

Well, Corinne, thank you so much for doing this again. This was really fun! Do you want to remind people where to find you once again?

Corinne

Oh, sure. You can find me on Instagram at @selltradeplus that’s where I spend most of my time. And then my personal Instagram is @SelfieFay.

Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! Once again, if you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player. Leave us a rating or review and tell a friend, maybe a mom friend, about this episode.

And consider a paid subscription to the Burnt Toast newsletter. Until June 30, you can take 20 percent off and pay just $4 per month or $40 for the year! You get a ton of cool perks and you keep this an ad- and sponsor-free space.

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

Like yesterday, I included goldfish crackers in a lunch picture. And I’m like, how long is it going to take before someone yells at me about the goldfish?

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health.

Today I am chatting with fan favorite, and my best friend, Amy Palanjian. Amy is the creator of the blog Yummy Toddler Food, and she’s on Instagram and Tiktok, as we’ll talk about. She’s also my former podcast co-host of the Comfort Food podcast, and a frequent flyer here on Burnt Toast.

Today we’re talking about the business of kid food blogging, and the line Amy walks in trying to present realistic relatable content, but also have people be aware that this is a business and have that labor be somewhat visible. No one has ever asked Mark Bittman (or any other male food writer) if they are making a living writing recipes. We know and understand they run a business—but when women do this, and especially when moms do it, we act like it’s not work. We also get into broader themes about how we make domestic work visible and what happens when we do that.

If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! It’s free and a great way to help more folks find the show.

For an upcoming bonus ep, I’m trying out a new format: Virginia’s Office Hours. If you have a question about navigating diet culture and anti-fat bias that you’d like to talk through with me, or if you just want to rant about a shitty diet with me, you can submit your question/topic here. I’ll pick one person to join me on the bonus episode so we can hash it out together.

Bonus episodes are for paid subscribers only, so join us here so you don’t miss out!

Virginia

This conversation is inspired by a piece you wrote for your newsletter a little while ago where you kind of… came out to your audience. You were like, “Guys, this is a business. I’m a blogger, recipe developer, influencer, cookbook author. This is a business.”

So I just want to start by saying it feels weird that you had to explain this to people. My first thought in reading it was: Does Mark Bittman have to explain to people that he runs a business? I don’t think so.

Amy

There’s this assumption maybe that the recipes that I share are like, a food diary. That I’m taking pictures of the food I’m making for my kids, and then just happening to share them. And I think that’s the way that blogging started many, many years ago. Blogs were sort of diaries. And there are a lot of people on social media now that are stille doing that. They don’t have fleshed out websites. They’re just sharing stuff on Instagram or Tiktok. I think the assumption is, Oh, she just happened to make this for her family and she’s sharing it with us. But most of the time when I’m cooking for work, my children are not even home.

I have a content calendar that is scheduled out many, many months ahead of time. I am doing almost nothing in real time. Because I can’t! There’s production time on shooting everything and writing all the content and doing all the videos. I have to be ahead of schedule, because that’s the way you run most businesses.

Virginia

You do run them with a plan. You don’t tend to just show up one day and be like, Hey, let’s make some stuff.

Amy

I think there are people that do that. But I run my website like we ran magazines. I have gotten a lot of requests like, “Can you show the ‘after’ plate?” Like, I’m not gonna sit there and videotape everything that my kids are eating, right? Because a that’s a giant pain. And it’s such a strange thing to do to a kid.

Virginia

It’s a real invasion of privacy to be like, “Okay, eat dinner, I’m just going to be here cataloging whether you like it and what you eat!”

Amy

And how much my kids eat has no bearing on how much your kids eat. It’s a strange request for information because it’s basically meaningless.

Virginia

They just either want some reassurance that your kid doesn’t eat it either. Or they want to feel bad because your kid eats something that their kid won’t eat. No good comes from these comparisons.

Amy

And my kids don’t eat everything that I make for the website. They are a sample size of three! I have enough food experience that I can taste a recipe and judge whether or not it’s good, from a much different lens than my children can.

Virginia

That’s another way I feel like the labor of all of this is made invisible. Because you are writing recipes for kids, there is an assumption that your children are the experts on your work. As opposed to understanding that you develop recipes because you have years of experience developing recipes, and you know what tastes good because this is your work. Again when any male food writer is like, here’s this amazing stew, we’re not like, But did your wife like it? Did your friends eat it? We trust them when they say this was amazing. I’m insulted on your behalf that people are like, Did Selway eat it? No offense, Selway, but it’s not really your job.

Amy

That would be the most maddening way to have my website.

Virginia

When your kid is going through the inevitable only eats mac and cheese for six months phase, what are you supposed to do for content? Just keep putting out mac and cheese recipes? It’s very strange.

When we’re consuming social media content, I think all of us need to understand the amount of work that goes into producing those images. And because they are images of domestic life, we assume that no work went into creating them. That feels really devaluing of your professional work and of domestic life. 

Amy

Well, it’s also questions like, Why do you need daycare? You’re just cooking. Why can’t your kids just be home? There was a lot of that during COVID. Like, what’s the big deal? I mean. Have you ever tried to write anything with a toddler on your leg?

Virginia

The way your photos are so beautifully shot and you’re so carefully styling the plate—you can’t do that with kids underfoot.

Amy

I know some people who have Instagram accounts who do it with their kids at home. There’s one person in particular who, once a month, will send me emails about how she’s drowning, and she can’t do all the things. I’m like, But you have no childcare! You’re comparing your output to mine and I have full-time childcare, because I’ve chosen that and you haven’t.

[Virginia’s Note: Or maybe it’s not in the budget/unavailable for other reasons. But that’s all the more reason not to expect to do all the things. The system is failing you!]

You have to give yourself a break. It’s completely not fair for people who are trying to do it while they’re taking care of their kids to think that they should be able to do all of the things. It’s all very muddy.

Virginia

That’s an example of the way these myths get perpetuated on Instagram by both the creators of the content and the viewers of the content. I’m not surprised someone thinks they can get into this work without needing childcare, because that’s an image that gets sold. You are very transparent about having childcare, but that’s not everybody. There are plenty of influencers who aren’t thanking the nanny or the daycare center workers, and are letting you believe that it’s all happening with their kids in tow. That sets women up to fail.

Amy

Or you see someone on TikTok who’s making an income by posting videos dancing with their babies. And you’re like, well I should be able to do that—TikTok in particular has really changed what is possible because it pays people once you have a certain number of followers. But I still feel like the assumption that you should be able to do all the things is just really murky.

Virginia

Also, let’s not discount the amount of labor that goes into making those videos. Like what if the baby’s cranky and you need to make them dance? We’re supposed to watch the video and think that she just happened to catch this totally charming moment with her child, but she learned a dance routine, figured out how to do it with the music, and then edited it afterwards. It’s a lot of production. 

Amy

So, for the most part, I try to let my kids eat without being videotaped, unless we’re gonna do something for a video and I tell them. But the other night, I was making dinner and my husband had the girls out of the house, so it was just the little guy and I. I had made some roasted carrots while the rest of dinner was cooking. And I honestly and truly do not know what made me start filming. There was nothing about me that was camera ready. I just was in whatever clothes I was wearing. My hair is kind of a mess. And I started filming it. So it actually was real. I put the carrots down and I asked Selway if he wanted them. And we went through this whole thing where he said I made the wrong carrots because I cut them into sticks versus circles. Then I just talked him through the carrot situation as I would in normal life. I compared the carrots to his crayons because they were sitting on the table. We got out some ketchup he wound up eating the whole thing of carrots. So I shared it on Instagram. It went like kind of nuts.

[Virginia Note: By “kind of nuts” Amy means that Selway eating carrots now has over 5.4 million views between Instagram and TikTok.]

As I was about to post it, I thought, okay, but now everyone’s going to think that my kids eat everything. Because this just happened to be a moment that went with this particular way. And I have not happened to catch a moment that went the other way. I do think the things I did along the way in that video do show the way I talk about food because I was not claiming that the carrots were gonna make him fly, I was not selling health messaging. It was like, “These are really yummy. These are mommy’s favorite. I’m gonna eat them all.” But there is this false promise when you see a kid eating something and you think, well my kids should eat that. And if they don’t, it’s either I’m failing or my kid is failing. I posted it and it immediately started doing really well and I’ve just been feeling so uncomfortable about it.

Virginia

Because you’re worried you were putting out that false expectation?

Amy

Right and I tried really hard to clarify that this doesn’t always happen in the caption. But anytime you videotape something, you are taking it out of context. It’s not what would be like if you didn’t have the phone on. And I think that’s the thing that we all forget. If you’re videotaping food, it is going to look different than if you didn’t videotape food, because you want the food to look a certain way. You’re going to choose something in the beginning that grabs people’s attention. You might put it in a different bowl or a cup that’s going to make people ask a question. You’re going do stuff to get people to engage in a way that you would not if you were just making yourself a bowl of oatmeal.

Virginia

Right. You wouldn’t be like, “I need to sprinkle something on top of the oatmeal because beige oatmeal doesn’t actually look good.” All of that is manufactured.

Amy

I think it’s really, really hard to remember, when you’re looking at videos of food, that there were lots of decisions made because people are going to be looking at it that are just a few steps away from “real.”

Virginia

I am curious to hear more about what motivated you to start filming. Does it feel hard to just be making dinner for your family and not thinking with one part of your brain, is there content here?

Amy

I go through periods that are better than others. I think it’s harder now because of the way that Instagram has changed in the past six months, where if you want to be growing, you have to be posting a lot of video. And so I can’t really turn that part of my brain off. To some extent, I am always like, “Is this something?”

We pretty much don’t tape anything at dinner. I try to do most of it during the day, but that is always on in my head.  My phone’s usually nearby, so I can turn on the camera pretty quick. [Another time] Selway had gone to the freezer and was getting himself a popsicle completely on his own, so I videotaped that because I was like, well, I might use this.

I mean, it’s hard. I sort of hate it because it’s putting my kids in a position that they didn’t ask to be in. And, you know, they’re getting older. This is a temporary phase of their life. But the potential for the number of eyeballs to see my content has drastically changed and it makes me feel really differently now to think about sharing them. But I’m not quite to the place where I feel like I can stop because it does seem so integral to my brand. Like, I posted that carrot video on TikTok an hour ago. I do not have a lot of TikTok followers and 30,000 people have already seen it. [Virginia Note: By publication time, that number was over 700,000 on TikTok alone]

I also find it to be incredibly difficult to take days off because of the nature of how connected this all is to my business.

Virginia

Let’s talk about how these misunderstanding about the business of making food content plays into diet culture standards. I think those “What I Eat in a Day” videos are such a good example. I was thinking about a reel I saw Cassey Ho do—she’s Blogilates. So she’s a fitness influencer and a diet influencer, straight up. She had a reel where she started by showing a beautiful shot of her protein pancakes covered and blueberries with the syrup dripping down them. And the caption says “sometimes I eat like this.” And then the shot changes, and it’s her eating canned chicken, plain out of the can, and lettuce out of a bag of salad. And she’s like, “and some days, I eat like this.”

And her message with the video was that you don’t have to always be pulling off this beautifully produced meal. Like, she was trying to show that the pancakes are fake and manufactured. But in her case, well, when you strip away what makes that meal pretty, it turns out, she’s just eating canned chicken and lettuce because she’s living on a really restrictive diet. So it was very revealing in a way that I don’t think she intended because it shows that in a lot of this “What I Eat in a Day” content, we’re making food look pretty to make up for the fact that it’s not very filling or satisfying. Which is obviously very different from your recipes, which are delicious and not diet culture content.

Amy

Well, like take the assumption that all the food I’m making is the food that my kids are eating. The reality is that 99 percent of what my kids eat, nobody ever sees. I’m not like taking videos of them eating their goldfish for snack because, there’s nothing to see. It looks the same in my house as yours! But then people say, “I wish my kids ate like your kids eat.” And I’m like, “Well, I think they probably do.” Or, “I wish I was as good of a mom as you.” I’m like, “This is my job.”

Virginia

And why are we measuring people’s quality as a mom by the food they serve? It’s a little more than that. Not to reduce what you do! But, that isn’t your mom work. That’s your business. That’s not what you do as a mom.

Amy

I think in kid food, particularly, the thing where it intersects with diet culture is in the types of food that we’re deciding to show or the types of food that we now expect kids to eat. Like which type of crackers you use. Yesterday I included goldfish in a lunch picture and I’m like, How long is it gonna take before someone yells at me about the goldfish? It’s making those choices. There’s a lot of behind the scenes thinking that goes along with that, so I think you have try really hard to not be sending those messages. 

Virginia

It’s hard too because you have to decide if you’re up for the goldfish fight, right? But if you don’t include the goldfish, then you’re upholding this standard you don’t agree with, even if it’s just inadvertently.

Amy

Here’s another example. I do a lot of content on storing produce or making your produce last longer or freezing things. I have six reusable stasher bags, like the fancy silicone ones that come in colors. I typically use those in videos, because they look nice. They are expensive, I’m not gonna lie. The big ones are like $30 apiece. I got them for free. And again, I have six of them. I do not have a whole stash of them. You literally see the same one in most posts. But a lot of people call me out for using something that’s expensive. And yet, if I showed a regular Ziploc bag, there would be a cascade of people complaining about the plastic. So, like, which is better?

Virginia

You can’t win.

Amy

Right, but I do think that showing the reusable fancy eco one is also perpetuating that feeling that you have to use this.

Virginia

 And that your freezer should be pretty this way.

Amy

Or that this is the only safe option. I did have a whole DM conversation with someone where she was like, “I’m trying to switch to all glass and silicone for my freezer it because I need it to be safe for my baby.” And then I have to explain like which plastic is actually problematic, what not to put in plastic, and then all the ways you can use plastic. But, so many assumptions are being drawn from those visuals and that’s tricky.

Virginia

For the record, I cheer whenever you put goldfish in the lunch and share it whenever you put more than three M&M’s in something. Oh and I also loved your banana sushi reel. Let’s talk about that one.

Amy

Okay, so banana sushi is where you put peanut butter or another nut or seed butter on a tortilla, you put a banana in the middle, you roll it up and slice it, so they look sort of like spirals. They’re cute. So I made the thing and then I took one apart with my hands and smashed it all together, acting like I was a toddler. I was like, this is either gonna do really well or it’s gonna look really dumb. And it did really well. I think it’s helpful for people to see that I’m going to make this thing for my kid and they’re going to rip it to shreds and maybe eat it. Because kids are really tactile. I did not want to make that video and be like, this is an amazing toddler lunch and leave it at that. Because I know there is no way I could give that to any of my children and they would actually just put it in their mouth.

Virginia

Right, right. I’ve done peanut butter and jelly that way and then watched my children unravel it all and I’m like, “Why are you monsters?”

Amy

I know. Why didn’t I just make a regular sandwich?

Virginia

Why are you not appreciating the adorable aesthetic of the sandwich I’ve made you? Occasionally, it has delighted my children when I’ve made stuff in shapes. I do have some of those little Japanese sandwich cutters and my younger one went through a phase where she was enchanted. And then they started coming back not eaten in the lunchbox and I was like well, back to regular regular peanut butter and jelly for you, kid. I’m not going to any extra trouble here. 

But it does seem really challenging to talk about that honestly with your audience, especially because I feel like influencers are under a lot of pressure to seem “authentic,” right? And often that version of authenticity is not authentic, right? 

Amy

It’s manufactured.

Virginia

It’s often like, “Mama, I see you.” And showing the chaos without being like, “If we had a better society, this would not be so hard.” So then we’re continuing to perpetuate the expectation that motherhood is so hard and you’re crumbling all the time, without directing the anger that we should have about that towards the institutions responsible.

Amy

Yeah, I’m trying when I can, especially with voiceovers, to be more realistic. But you have to do it on purpose.

There’s someone that I follow, Sarah Crawford, her account is @bromabakery. So, she does all this baking. She makes a giant mess. And I’m like, at what point did she realize that that was her thing? Because I doubt if she didn’t have her camera on that she would be playing it up that much.

Virginia

Oh, interesting. Do you think she’s making it messier than it has to be? 

Amy

I think she might be.

Virginia

Sarah, we want to know! DM us. 

Amy

She is very good at social media. She has a whole program that she sells, she’s very good at it. And that’s the thing that she’s decided that she’s doing, which, like, kudos to her for figuring it out. But also, it’s maybe not real?

Virginia

God. It’s like, none of its real. It’s so fascinating. I think the takeaway for those of us who just consume this content is just keep the lack of reality in mind all the time. I don’t know what shifted. I was reading Real Simple magazine last night. And I know none of that is real, right? And maybe that’s because I worked in magazines and I saw what went into photoshoots. Maybe you didn’t know all the tricks that they use to make the food look perfect, but you certainly knew—well, maybe you don’t know. I do remember when we used to shoot lifestyle stories together, being shocked at the first photo shoot when it’s like, oh, wait, we’re not going to eat the food that you had all these people over to be at a party. We’re shooting a party at our house, but…

Amy

You’re not actually having a party and taking pictures.

Virginia

Right. It’s also totally manufactured thing. So maybe we didn’t even know about magazines and that’s why we don’t know about social. But I do think we even more don’t know it about social. We expect that we are seeing what people are really cooking to feed themselves and it creates these unrealistic standards for the viewers And it devalues the work of content creators, too.

Amy

I think it’s giving us completely unrealistic expectations for what we should be making and feeding our families. 

Virginia

Like family dinner should look like a photoshoot every day?

Amy

Or you should have the baby who is like stuffing all the food into their mouths happily. There’s so much comparison that comes out of it that I think really is problematic. It’s hard to remember to run it through the filter of your own life.

Virginia

Agreed. Well, we also had a request from folks on Instagram to talk about maintaining mom friendships, which I think is a lovely topic. Amy and I have been best friends since.. How old were we? 22? 23?

Amy 

I think we were 23. 

Virginia

We were babies. Babies!

Amy

Maybe I was 23 and you were 22.

Virginia

So it’s almost 20 years of being friends. And the other thing about us is we lived in New York City together for five years and then the whole rest of our friendship has been long distance. You moved to Iowa. I moved to the Hudson Valley. Now you’re in Pennsylvania. So we’re still hours apart, and yet here we are. So how did we do it, Amy? How are we so great?

Amy

I think our texting is really the magic glue.

Virginia

It’s just texting.

Amy

I’ve got nothing besides that.

Virginia

Constant texting.

Amy

I mean, I think obviously it helped that we were working in the same industry. So we’re constantly talking about both work and life and we have a lot in common because of that. We’ve often been, I was gonna say freelance, but that seems like the wrong word, but like making your own businesses.

Virginia

I use freelance, for sure. You were an editor at magazines that kept folding. So it was a little different.

Amy

And then I learned how to be a freelancer for you.

Virginia

We were both figuring it out.

Amy

I think that had a lot to do with it. We did email a lot, before we started texting. We had these really amazing rainbow email threads.

Virginia

Yeah, that was a pre-kids thing. We couldn’t sustain that. We used to write long emails and we would respond in-line and we would change our font colors so you could keep track of the conversation. I hope our grandchildren discover those emails someday. 

Amy

Those were amazing. That’s like how we planned our weddings.

Virginia

I was going to say baby showers. And then we switched to texting because it was just much more efficient. It also helps that we’re on similar sleep schedules. We’re both awake early in the morning. There’s you and maybe two other people that I can text at five in the morning and fully expect a response, and who won’t text me at 10pm because I will lose track of the text because I’m asleep. So, I think texting is the only answer. I don’t know how previous generations did it. But I do think, keep your mom friends close. They’re very important. Very key to our survival.

Butter for your Burnt Toast

Amy

So I recently finished Book Lovers by Emily Henry.

Virginia

Oh, that’s a good one!

Amy

It was delightful read I was very sad when it was over.

Virginia

My recommendation is also a book, but it’s nonfiction. It is our dear friend Kate Tellers' book How to Tell a Story. I figured this was a good episode to shout it out because Amy and I are both Kate superfans. So I’ll even link to our very old Comfort Food podcast episode where Kate came on and we talked about family dinner. Kate Tellers is one of our longtime friends, also from our New York City days. She works for The Moth, the storytelling organization, and they have an incredible new book out about how to tell a story. It is great if you are someone who wants to do oral storytelling. I also got a lot out of it in terms of thinking about writing. It’s just a great craft book. It helps you really understand why some people are great storytellers and some people, when they start to tell a story, you just die inside, because you know the anecdotes going to take so long. They guide you through the process. So, it’s wonderful.

I do think we have to agree that on an anecdotal level, Kate is the best storyteller I think we both know, hands down.

Amy

Yes. Sometimes in our text messages it’s very funny because she’ll just start halfway through the story and then we’re like, but wait…

Virginia

Kate, bring us in. We need a little backstory! Yes, she’s also on the group mom text chain and we are regularly brought into car trouble or various shenanigans. It’s great. But the book is excellent and she’s not the only author, there are five co-authors and they all do a really great job. So, I recommend that if you are interested in working on your writing game or your storytelling game or just want to learn more about how stories get made.

Thank you, Amy, for coming back. Always a delight to have you on Burnt Toast. I really appreciate it. Tell people where they can find you!

Amy

I’m at yummytoddlerfood.com or @Yummytoddlerfood on all the socials now.

Virginia

Including her TikTok, guys.

Amy

Yeah, that was a decision that I did not take lightly. But it is what it is now.

Virginia

I’m watching and dreading maybe having to join you. I’m still on the fence. I appreciate you blazing the trail for those of us who may or may not follow.

Amy

Yeah, I often just have to cover my eyes if I’m on there.

Virginia

Well, thank you for doing this. We really appreciate it.

Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! Once again, if you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player. Leave us a rating or review and tell a friend, maybe a mom friend, about this episode.

And consider a paid subscription to the Burnt Toast newsletter. It’s just $5 per month or $50 for the year. You get a ton of cool perks and you keep this an ad- and sponsor-free space.

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

Because this is what we do to ourselves every day. We put in so much effort to just exist as basic people in the world. Like, we’re not like knockout celebrities. We’re not like stunning anybody. Like, we put in all of this work for a reward that doesn’t actually ever come.

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health.

Today I’m chatting with Jessica Defino. Jessica is a pro-skin, anti-product beauty reporter who is dismantling beauty standards, debunking marketing myths, and exploring how beauty culture impacts people. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, Allure, and more. She also writes the beauty-critical newsletter, The Unpublishable.

If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! It’s free and a great way to help more folks find the show.

For next month’s bonus ep, I’m trying out a new format: Virginia’s Office Hours. If you have a question about navigating diet culture and anti-fat bias that you’d like to talk through with me, or if you just want to rant about a shitty diet with me, you can submit your question/topic here. I’ll pick one person to join me on the bonus episode so we can hash it out together.

Bonus episodes are for paid subscribers only, so join us here so you don’t miss out!

Episode 47 Transcript

Virginia

I feel a weird compulsion to tell you that as I contemplated this conversation, my skin broke out very dramatically. And I was like, do I need to disclose this to her? And then I was like, No, it’s fine. It’s fine.

Jessica

It’s totally fine. You’re just a normal human being with skin.

Virginia

Yes, exactly. But it was very funny timing. Why don’t we start by having you tell listeners a little bit about yourself and your work?

Jessica

I describe myself as a pro-skin, anti-product beauty reporter. I report on beauty and skincare, mostly through the lens of skin first, and then what we put on the skin and the consumerism of it all second, which is pretty rare in the beauty space. It’s also really hard in the beauty space. I was finding all this information about skin and skincare culture and beauty culture and really wanting to report on it, and found that I had a hard time placing these more controversial pitches. My bread and butter is still freelancing. I write for places like the New York Times and Vogue and Allure, but mostly these days, I’m working on my own newsletter The Unpublishable where I can dive a little deeper and explore some of these not industry-friendly topics.

Virginia

You’re speaking to my soul. As my readers know, I started Burnt Toast so that I could write diet culture stories that I can’t write in the outlets that run diet ads next to my work. I spent a long time at women’s magazines and the ethical conundrum of the beauty department is fascinating. And I don’t think people understand the extent to which advertising and beauty content are interwoven. Sketch that out a little bit for us.

Jessica

It’s intense. I had no idea until I started reporting on the beauty industry, too. Beauty media is pretty much funded by beauty advertisers, which means it’s not within a publication’s best interest to publish anything that goes against advertisers’ interest—which means a lot of beauty content is very product focused. It’s very sort of light and airy, and not diving deep to question, like, how are these products affecting our skin, our health, our endocrine systems.

Beauty media makes money in one of two ways: Through advertising or through affiliate sales. So there’s a big internal incentive to push a lot of products on people, because the publication will get a cut of all those products that are sold online. It’s very interwoven. I have had so many stories killed or completely edited to remove brand names, softened, just really toned down in order to appease advertisers.

Virginia

I want to tell you my story of this, which is taking us all the way back to 2007, pre- social media. I did my first big investigative feature piece, which was a deep dive into working conditions in nail salons. I wrote it for Jane magazine, when Jane was the coolest women’s magazine, and also the sort of counterculture women’s magazine. I spent all this time with these nail salon workers, exploring every aspect of this, and they killed it right before we went to press because of nail polish advertisers. And because a big portion of subscribers were nail salons, and they thought they would lose subscribers.

That was such a transformative moment for me as a journalist. I was like, Oh, I have to figure out different ways to do this. Because that was a media outlet that I don’t think you would have expected to be as beholden to their advertisers as they were. I can talk about this all now because they folded a million years ago and the piece did end up finally running in The Nation, which obviously has no beauty advertisers. But it also was read by a much smaller audience, not all of whom understood what nail salons were. I mean, the overlap between nail salon customers and The Nation readers is probably not that big.

Jessica

That’s the thing! It is a little bit easier to get some harder hitting pieces published in more news-driven outlets, but that’s not where the majority of people who are interested in beauty are getting their beauty information. And so I try really hard to infiltrate those spaces. But it is hard and your story doesn’t surprise me at all. Still, every time I hear something like that, it hurts.

Virginia

And when you’re trying to publish in the other outlets, you have to convince them that these issues matter. Because now it’s a women’s issue. It’s fluffy. It’s beauty. There’s that whole piece of it.

Well, we could rant about that forever, but I feel like we also need to talk about Kim Kardashian. And I probably need to apologize for making you do this, because it’s maybe bringing up some trauma. But we are recording this, it’s a week after the Met Gala when Kim wore Marilyn Monroe’s dress and went on this crazy diet losing a stupid amount of weight in three weeks. You wrote an incredible piece for Vice about your experience working for the Kardashians’ app company. You draw so many smart parallels in that piece between underpaid media work and beauty work. So what is your take on the whole Met Gala thing?

Jessica

So Kim was boasting about spending three weeks basically starving herself working out twice a day in a sauna suit. She did an article for Vogue where she said she spent 14 hours the day before getting her hair bleached. Like, that’s so much effort. And my thought was: She looked fine. It was a pretty boring look. It wasn’t a standout moment at the Met Gala. And that makes it such a perfect parallel for mass beauty culture because this is what we do to ourselves every day. We put in so much effort to just exist as basic people in the world. We’re not knockout celebrities. We’re not stunning anybody. We put in all of this work for a reward that doesn’t actually ever come and I thought it was a pretty interesting parallel there.

Virginia

Yes, it’s an amazing metaphor of what we’re all doing. She just compressed it all into three weeks.

My other thought was, this is a woman for whom beauty work is so non-negotiable. If she wants to leave the house without makeup, this is something that’s going to be covered and talked about. So for me, it just kind of felt like why are we even surprised? She’s saying out loud what a lot of other people were also doing to get into their dresses, they just weren’t making a media stunt out of it. It’s not uncommon for a celebrity to spend three weeks before a big event doing insane things to fit into a dress.

Jessica

It’s not uncommon for anyone. I had tweeted something to that effect and someone was like, “Please, this is what women do before their wedding day all the time. It’s not that big of a deal.” And I was like, “Just because it happens all the time doesn’t mean it’s not that big of a deal.” That’s a huge deal. That’s a huge deal that so many people are doing it constantly. It’s not just celebrities.

Virginia

A line I loved from the Vice piece is: “Beauty standards have always been physical manifestations of systems of oppression.” This, of course, applies to the diet industry just as much as it does to beauty and skincare. So I really want to explore the intersections of these two cultures. How are skincare culture and diet culture really one and the same? 

“Beauty standards have always been physical manifestations of systems of oppression.”

Jessica

I always say that skincare culture is dewy diet culture. There are so many parallels. In both instances people have been made to believe that a certain aesthetic signifies health, when that’s not the case. We’re sold products to help us achieve that aesthetic at the expense of our health. We’re sent to doctors who reinforce beauty standards and call it medical care. There are all sorts of doctors who subscribe to BMI as a marker of health, and will tell a patient “just lose weight” when they actually have cancer—and dermatologists are really not that different.

I don’t mean this as a slight against dermatologists. This as an indictment of the entire western medical system where beauty standards have been subsumed into medical care. When you’re going to a dermatologist, very often, aside from skin cancer screenings, you are getting treatments to help you look a certain way without ever exploring the root cause of why your skin is reacting the way it’s reacting. The entire thing is “how do we get rid of this as quickly as possible?” And very often achieving that goal goes against your actual skin health.

Virginia

And they’re often treating things that aren’t even health problems, right? Wrinkles are not a health problem. Even breaking out is normal.

Jessica

Yes. I hate skin types. I hate this idea of “normal” skin because normal skin reacts to the world around it. That is actually the the job your skin is supposed to play. It’s supposed to alert you to any potential imbalances, any internal health issues, any issues in your external environment. So when your skin is reacting in that way, that’s health. That is exactly what it’s supposed to be doing.

It’s our job to figure out if is this actually a cue about my health, and if so, what’s going on? Or to say, this isn’t actually about my health. This is just a normal thing that happens to people as they age or as they go through pregnancy or as they go through menopause, whatever. So much of it has nothing to do with health.

I think the other parallel is that we’re told that subscribing to this certain standard of beauty, whether it’s your body size or your skin, will increase your confidence and make you feel good. But the data bears out a very different story. Feeling held to this impossible standard of beauty to have like skin like a doll or a model who has been through Photoshop and filters and FaceTune and plastic surgery, increases appearance anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, facial dysmorphia, eating disorder, self harm and even suicide. We’re told that it’s going to be good for us and make us feel better and really makes us feel like s**t.

Virginia

The thing about dermatologists gets me so fired up. We have a history of melanoma in my family so I do go in for my skin checks and one year, I couldn’t get my annual skin check appointment for 18 months. She was booked out that far for the annual cancer screenings, but they could get me in the next week to talk about acne. I just remember thinking, Isn’t making sure I don’t have cancerous moles like more pressing? It said a lot to me. There’s no product she can sell me related to cancerous moles, but there are many products to sell me related to breakouts.

Jessica

That’s horrible. And it’s also not surprising. I’ve had so many women tell me specifically that they have gone in for their annual skin cancer screenings and their dermatologist will start talking about Botox or filler and selling them during this health appointment. That messes with your mind because it’s coming from a medical doctor. They’re suggesting alongside a cancer screening, “Hey, maybe you should get your crow’s feet done. Maybe you should get your frown lines done. Maybe you should get your lips filled.” It starts to feel like these things are part of being a healthy human being when they’re not.

Virginia

I’m thinking about the intersections, too, with anti-fat bias. I think for a lot of us in bigger bodies, there’s often some added pressure around skincare. Like, if I’m not meeting the size beauty standard, I have to have good skin. There’s a tension between these two things. And we can also talk about the vulnerability of going into these appointments, to any medical appointment when you’re braced for medical weight stigma. Similarly, I think going to the dermatologist is often really anxiety provoking about appearance because you’re expecting to be dissected and told everything about your skin is wrong.

Jessica

I have a long history of being obsessed with dermatology and taking any pill or prescription that they would give me, starting from probably age 14. I started antibiotics for acne. I was put on birth control pills at 15 for acne. I was on retinoids, tretinoin, Accutane for too long. Then a topical steroid prescription that actually ended up causing something called skin atrophy. This is what kick-started my whole interest in beauty and skincare to begin with, because my skin just stopped working. It was peeling off of my face in chunks. It was a terrible experience at the hands of my dermatologist. I remember after I had pretty much healed my skin myself by learning about how the skin actually works and how unnecessary most products actually are and really paring back, I went to a dermatologist again for my skin cancer screening, and he was like, “Your skin is really dry,” in this very judgmental tone. I was like, “Yeah, it’s dry, because you and your colleagues put me on Accutane for years, which killed my sebaceous gland function and now my skin can’t moisturize itself. That’s not my fault. It’s actually your fault.”

It is really frustrating. Especially as somebody who has been through the wringer with dermatology to still get that judgment. Because I’ve actually tried everything you’ve suggested, and it doesn’t work.

Virginia

Oh, my gosh, that’s so infuriating. I loved the piece you wrote in the newsletter where you talked about Katie Sturino, who is a really great body positive fashion influencer. But she did this whole thing about Botox. It felt like a very weird left turn.

Jessica

Yeah, for sure. I actually see this a lot in the body positive community, especially on Instagram. When it gets to your face, when it gets above the neck, all of that rhetoric goes out the window. In Katie Sturino’s post, she celebrated Botox’s anniversary with a huge cake. So it was like, “eat the cake!” but “freeze your frown lines.” These things really are the same and I see them put together so often, as if they don’t stem from the same exact tenants of oppression. It’s harmful to position yourself as taking a stand against beauty standards, and then use that same platform to feed people another set of beauty standards. People trust you, so it’s really easy for them to internalize that as something that is good and healthy.

So what I like to tell people is: Take the beauty content that you consume and swap out certain phrases. For instance, if instead of “frown lines” this Instagram caption had said “fat rolls,” would it feel good to you? If they were like, “get rid of your fat rolls in five minutes?” No, that would obviously be problematic. But for some reason, when we put frown lines in there, it’s like, oh, yeah, no, I have to get rid of this. Or wrinkles and stretch marks, or acne and cellulite, or dull skin and that extra five pounds. It’s a good exercise to insert one for the other and see how empowering it feels to you. I think in the large majority of instances, you’ll see, oh, this is really harmful messaging coming from these these beauty influencers.

Virginia

I am so glad you are connecting these dots. I think that ageism hasn’t been touched by the body positive movement, at least not online. I don’t think it’s a conversation we’re having yet. Shout out to my mom, who will be listening to this and saying, “Yes, that’s why I text you every week and say write about ageism.” I’m on it! But she’s right. Even among friends of mine, or folks in this community who would no longer say “I feel fat” in a pejorative way, it’s still very normal and acceptable to say, “I’m so old” or to express remorse about your birthday and about any physical signs of aging.

Why do you think we’re still so locked into anti-aging as the goal? Especially since, as you put it in the newsletter piece, it is literally the most unattainable of all beauty standards.

Jessica

It’s physically impossible. Never gonna happen. Which is great for the beauty industry. The reason they can push this so hard is because it’s a never-ending goal. There is no point at which you will have bought the right product or gotten the right Botox shot, and think, “I’m done. I’ve anti-aged.” They get you forever once they sell you on anti aging.

I also think that this attraction to anti-aging has very spiritual roots. I think that it’s an extension of our fear of death, and our fear of facing our mortality. That’s a very human thing to fear, but we don’t live in a culture where we actually explore those feelings. And then, because we live in a society that also rvalues external appearance, it’s like, okay, well, if I can just look young forever, I won’t actually have to face any of these issues.

A big thing I hear from women who are telling me that they need to get Botox, they need to get filler, they need to get the facelift, is: “I look in the mirror, and I don’t look like myself anymore.” And that’s a really scary thing for a lot of people to face. And I get that. But also the point of life is not to look like yourself forever. The point of life is to grow and evolve and change and find a way to be comfortable with that change. If we keep reverting back to former versions of ourselves and calling that progress, that causes a lot of problems.

Virginia

People say the same thing about weight gain, and particularly postpartum weight gain: “I just don’t feel like myself anymore.” But why is your 16-year-old self or your 26-year-old self the only you that you’re allowed to be? Why did you have to freeze in time with that body? Why can you not change and grow in terms of your physical appearance?

Jessica

That’s such a beautiful way to put it. I think with anti-aging, too, there’s a lot of it tied up in productivity culture and also in the way that we treat our elderly community. If we really wanted to address our fear of aging, we would need to start investing in community care and advocating for human rights and health equity and economic security for the elderly and age diversity in the workplace. This idea that once you stop being able to produce output for the economy, that your value as a person diminishes—I think all of that is tied up in what we’re doing to our faces as well. 

Virginia

I’m thinking this also intersects so heavily with misogyny, right? Because women are held to very different aging standards than men. In the workplace, that plays out in terms of whether you can get a job and whether you can literally financially support yourself. I’ve talked to women who’ve said, “I don’t care about gray hair, but I can’t show up to work with gray hair.” How do you navigate that piece of it?

Jessica

It’s really tough. When I get the same question, I do tend to draw a line here between beauty culture and diet culture. Because we’ve gotten to the point in diet culture where we can all agree that life is easier for you in terms of how people treat you, when you’re thin. Is that a good justification to starve yourself and put yourself through these unhealthy practices in order to be thin? I think most people would agree that’s not a good justification. But when it comes to beauty, when it comes to wrinkles, when it comes to gray hair, we allow that. We say okay, yes, this is a good justification. I would like to see us get to the point as a culture where we can agree that giving into these beauty demands is similarly not a sustainable way to exist in the world. Sometimes we feel like we do have to alter our appearance in order to deal with these external judgments. And coping mechanisms aren’t always bad. But you have to understand what is a coping mechanism in your beauty routine and what is truly something you’re doing for your health. What is for “feeling good,” what is a self-expression lipstick and what is actually giving into a really harmful, ageist, sexist standard in order to exist in the world. And then: Where can we divest? Where can we invest in changing those standards instead?

Virginia

Maybe a first step is just being honest with yourself. If job security is on the line, you’re not going to stop dying your hair, and I don’t think either one of us is saying you should. You can only challenge what makes sense to challenge. But there’s probably some clarity that comes with being clear and honest with yourself about why you’re choosing these different standards. It can be so interrelated and hard to sort out for yourself why these different things matter.

Jessica

Right? There’s a great quote that I love to reference from Tressie McMillan Cottom’s book Thick: “‘I like what I like’ is always a capitalist lie.” Oh my gosh, when I first read that it hit me so hard. I repeat it constantly to people because just saying, “Oh, I like doing this,” or “I do this for me,” isn’t really a good enough answer, because there’s always something deeper that informs why you like it and why it makes you feel good. And it normally stems from something in the external culture making you feel really bad first, and that is the thing that we have to address.

Virginia

A reader question I answered recently that I think made people the most uncomfortable was someone saying but, what if I just don’t want to be fat? Like, what if that’s just my preference? It’s so hard for us to recognize we didn’t get there in a vacuum. 

Butter For Your Burnt Toast

Jessica

I’m working on a post for my newsletter now and I’m trying to create a list of songs, movies, poems, art that reference ugly women—not necessarily ugly, but things you wouldn’t necessarily find attractive. Just to romanticize these features that are often neglected by mainstream beauty media. I was listening to “Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen the other day, and I love that line where he’s like, “You ain’t a beauty, but hey, you’re alright.” And then it’s just this like bleeding heart love song to this woman who’s like, fine, I guess. I just love that and I want more. I want more art about plain, ugly people.

Virginia

Yes! That’s a great recommendation. Mine is also music, we’re in sync there. This is actually a double recommendation. So novelist Emma Straub, who I recommend just as a human, as a fashion icon, as a writer, everything. I recommend her, and I recommend her new book This Time Tomorrow, which is the best novel I’ve read all year. So that’s your first recommendation.

But, a very cool thing Emma does, that she talked about in her newsletter, is she makes playlists for each of her novels, which you can find on Spotify. And they are so good. Particularly for my peers who were teenagers in the 90’s. The one for This Time Tomorrow was really great. It starts with the Kinks song, which is not a 90s song, but it’s a beautiful song. And the one for her novel Modern Lovers, I’m really obsessed with. It starts with Melissa Etheridge. This is the soundtrack that I’ve been putting on—I talked in a recent podcast about how I’m into puzzles now. So that’s my puzzle soundtrack when I’m working on a puzzle. And my eight-year-old really loves it, too. I was like, “do we need a different soundtrack because we’re starting a new puzzle?” And she was like, “No, we need Modern Lovers again.” So we’re really into it.

Jessica

I’m gonna go listen to it now.

Virginia

It’s so good. Jessica, thank you for being here! Tell us where we can find more of you and support your work.

Jessica

Thank you so much for having me! Pretty much all my work now is through my newsletter The Unpublishable.

Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast. If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode.

And consider a paid subscription to the Burnt Toast newsletter! You’ll help keep this an ad- and sponsor-free space, and as you know from me and Jessica, that is hard to find.

If you subscribe, renew, or gift a subscription to someone this month, you can also enter to win one of 15 books that have been featured on previous Burnt Toast podcasts.

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

We have to disconnect the idea of good parenting from health and fitness. Because people don’t have a moral imperative to health.

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting and health.

Today I am chatting with Amanda Martinez Beck. Amanda is a fat activist, author and host of the Fat and Faithful podcast. She focuses on the ways that fatphobia and ableism have intertwined with American Christian culture. We are discussing Amanda’s second book, More of You: the Fat Girls Field Guide to the Modern World which came out this week.

Some news: Beginning with today’s episode, I’m now able to pay every podcast guest a $100 honorarium, to compensate them for their time and labor. This will make it easier for the podcast to center the voices of marginalized folks (a goal I previously discussed here). And our incredible community of Burnt Toast subscribers is making this possible! So thank you so much, if you’re already subscribed, for helping me do this. And if you’re not, but want to hear more conversations like this one, consider joining us. (I also offer comp subscriptions—just email if that would be helpful to you.)

PS. If you enjoy this episode, please also subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! That’s free and a great way to help more folks find the show.

And: I wanted to note that Amanda and I recorded this conversation before news of the Uvalde school shooting broke, so you won’t hear us discuss it, though of course it is now all I can think about. As I said, all too recently, after the Buffalo shooting: Remember that gun reform is now a states issue. Everytown has a website that lets you see — state by state — what the laws are in each state. We know that electing new majorities in our target states will make it possible to pass gun safety legislation. The States Project helped flip Maine in 2018, and were able to deepen that new majority in 2020 — this was an outcome in their 2021 session. So this is, yet again, where the Burnt Toast Giving Circle can do some good. Join us, if you need a place to put your rage.

Episode 45 Transcript

Virginia

Hi Amanda, I’m so glad to have you on! And big congratulations on the new book. Why don’t we start by having you tell us a little bit about yourself, your work, and your family?

Amanda

Okay. I am a fat activist. My middle name is Martinez, which alludes to my Cuban background. My dad was a Cuban refugee, so I grew up in a home that was half Latinx, half white. My husband Zachary is a university professor and we have four kids, and they’re in bodies that don’t conform to societal standards, most of them. So I’m doing this work for myself and for my kids. I have a podcast called Fat and Faithful, which talks about fat liberation through a Christian lens. I wrote a new book, which we’re going to talk about. And I have an Instagram, which is called @your_body_is_good. In addition to my body image coaching that I do, that’s the work that I’m doing right now.

Virginia

That’s not a short list of work, so thank you for all of that. We met when I interviewed you for a story on how anti-fat bias was impacting the treatment of fat folks with COVID. You were in early recovery, at that point, from COVID. I would love, if you don’t mind, to talk a little bit about how that’s gone. How are you doing?

Amanda

I’m doing really well, but it has been a long road. I was hospitalized for 40 days and was on a ventilator for two weeks and lost the ability to walk, in addition to just all the respiratory things that come along with COVID. While I was in the hospital, I encountered fatphobia in some very glaring ways and some very systemic ways—you wrote a whole piece on that. But I am on a good path right now. I have been off of oxygen since October of 2021. I was on oxygen for about a year. My lungs are doing really well. And I have more mobility than I did even before going into the hospital. I credit that to a fabulous doctor who’s taken my post-acute COVID syndrome really seriously, or what we call long COVID, to help me with getting on the right medicines, and specifically, to help with the brain fog, to get on medicine for that, and I feel like a new person. Really.

Virginia

I worried about you for a long time. I know there are a lot of us who have been rooting for you. I’m glad to hear you’re in a better place and also so grateful that you did share your story, because it was so important, I think, for us to continue to follow this path, past the initial COVID and through long COVID. I know when you’re in the middle of something like that, I know how much additional labor it is to share that and put that out there, so thank you for doing that. 

I’m curious to hear a little more about what misconceptions came up the most? What do you still find yourself having to challenge or correct with folks around COVID and weight?

Amanda

In the beginning, I felt really guilty for getting COVID because there was definitely a narrative that fat people were at higher risk for developing complications from COVID. Even though those risks were correlated, not necessarily caused by, body size, I always felt like people were blaming me. I got blamed explicitly by people on social media for catching COVID in a fat body. I think that people still believe that fatness is an underlying condition or a precondition to getting COVID—which, it’s not. People of all sizes get COVID complications. And long COVID is affecting all types of people. COVID is an equal opportunity virus.

Virginia

We have so much work to do to reframe that conversation. People want to be able to say like, “Well, I’ll be safe, because I can blame this person for getting it. I don’t have the same risk factors,” or whatever, but it’s such a callous way to approach this global pandemic. 

Amanda

For sure. Not necessarily connected to weight bias, but I think one other misunderstanding about long COVID is the effect that it has on mental health. You remember watching update videos from me in the hospital, and I go back and watch those now and realize just how impaired COVID had me. I’m also encountering heightened mental illness in long COVID. I think that’s something that’s a part of COVID that people are still not taking seriously, which affects so many aspects of health.

Virginia

And again, there’s the stigma. Anytime there’s a mental component to it, it’s very easy to stigmatize that as well.

Well, somehow, while you’ve been doing both your own recovery work from COVID, and putting the story out in the world, you’ve also been writing a book.

Amanda

I have. 

Virginia

So, let’s talk about that. The new book is called More of You. Tell us what inspired you to write this. I also do want to hear how you got it written during all of this.

Amanda

The memory of writing is a bit of a blur, but I have a fantastic editor, who walked me through the process very graciously. So the book is called More of You: the Fat Girl’s Field Guide to the Modern World. Before I had COVID, I realized I’d stumbled through fatness, learning how to exist in my today body and how to take up space. I wished that I’d had some sort of guidebook that could walk through these different things before I had to experience them. And I didn’t have anything like that. And so I wrote More of You to be the guidebook that I wish that I had had, when I was first coming to accept my body and not wanting to take up less space. Specifically, I targeted it towards what I wish I had known in grade school: That I have the right to exist in my body today, that I have the right to take up space, that I have the right to wear what I want, and eat what I want, and that I have the right to compassionate medical care. And just stating those things, what I call The Fat Girl’s Bill of Rights, is transformative for me today. I can’t imagine how transformative it will be for my own children and the children who get to know these truths that their parents are trying to put into practice in their lives. I know that you’re doing that work, too.

Virginia

One of the things I find most valuable about the book is the way you hold fatphobia and ableism accountable for each other. I think this is a common tension in the disability rights and fat rights communities. We often see fat folks leaning into “But I’m healthy” as this defense against anti fat bias. I’ve certainly done it. And I would imagine there may be a parallel experience of wanting to perform being a “good” disabled person through your thinness. And we know that relying on health as this sort of marker of virtue is really problematic. How does this hold us back from making progress on both of these issues?

Amanda

So I first encountered the idea of performative fatness, “I’m healthy, so I’m a good performing fat person,” in a web comic by the fat activist Stacey Bias called The Good Fatty Archetypes. And she has a list of 12 different ways that fat people can adapt to their environment to prove that they’re worthy of dignity. And one of them is the Fat Unicorn, where it’s like, “I am just fat even though I exercise all the time. I’m just, you know, a unicorn.”

She talks about the different ways that you can perform fitness virtue signaling. And it’s setting up this idea that we have to earn our our position of dignity, to earn respect. That’s really a very capitalistic idea, which Stacy talks about in her comic. We don’t have to earn dignity, we possess inherent dignity. To be able to look at a fat body as morally neutral or even morally good takes digging below those good fatty archetypes of, “but I’m healthy, but I’m an athlete.” In a disabled fat body, there is inherent goodness. So we have to look at how assuming that someone’s health and ability is based on their moral virtue, how that is not a fair assumption. That’s actually ableism.

I’m coming from a Christian lens, so we see this in the Christian scripture when there’s a man who was born blind, and the people asked Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” And Jesus is like, “Neither.” And so I really feel that for a parallel to fatness. It’s not a moral failing of anyone that someone is fat. It just is. And fat people themselves perpetuate this idea that “as long as I’m healthy, it’s okay to be fat.” I say, “If it’s not okay for everyone to be fat, it’s not okay for anyone to be fat.”

Virginia

I’m just looking at how Stacy explains the Fat Unicorn here and she says, “What does it mean to seek legitimacy for the fat body on the basis of its capacity for health? Who gets excluded or silenced when we do so?”

Amanda

Someone much wiser than me has said that ability is a temporary condition. We are all headed towards disability of some sort or another. We have to separate that from morality. In the same way we have to separate body size from morality. Because body size and ability are a lot of genetics, systemic issues, and societal issues. We can’t just say A plus B equals C when we’re looking at a body like that.

Virginia

Another line that really resonated with me from the book, is when you wrote that “Nobody has a moral obligation to be healthy, and we don’t owe health to our community or our families or our kids.” And that believing that you do is this cornerstone of ableism. I think this is often a line people come up against where they may say, Okay, i’s fine to be unhealthy. But of course, we we should all be trying to be healthy for our kids. And I think particularly for mothers, right? There’s this huge pressure that being a good mother is synonymous with being a mother who can chase your kids around the playground.

Amanda

The question that I probably get asked most frequently, when I talk about being okay with my fatness is, but don’t you owe it to your kids to be healthy? To live a longer life to be with them? There’s two layers happening there.

One, I’m accused often of being on the verge of death, like I’m just about to keel over—which, post-COVID, okay, there were some rough moments. But just because I inhabit a fat body does not mean that I am more susceptible to early death. The numbers actually show that people in the BMI category of overweight live longer than people in the normal category. People assume that I’m going to die young, which is really hard to encounter day in and day out. When I was young, someone I loved, told me, in tears, “I just don’t want you to die of a heart attack at age 20.” Which is a very emotionally manipulative thing to say to a teenager—and to anyone, because none of us is guaranteed another day. We’re all in the same boat. My life is lived, as as much as I can choose, in a morally upright way. And I define morality as treating my neighbors as I would treat myself.

So, number one, it’s not good for mental health to live with that assumption. Number two: The claim that I can’t be a good mom, if I’m in a disabled or, quote, “unhealthy” body is really an ableist thing to say. Because there are parents of all stripes, with all different levels of ability, who are amazing parents. And just because someone’s in a wheelchair, we don’t automatically assume they’re a bad mother. But if I’m fat and walking with a cane, there is that assumption. And it is inherently ableist to say because you don’t have full capacity of your body, you cannot be a good parent. And this has real consequences, because children are being taken from their fat parents. It’s not something that we’re just fearmongering about. We have to disconnect the idea of good parenting from health and fitness because people don’t have a moral imperative to health.

Virginia

It’s such a narrow definition of good motherhood. And it’s implying that there’s only one way to love your kids. That there’s a right way to love your kids, as opposed to allowing for this diversity of experiences. I’m glad you brought up the issue of how it gets used around parental rights. I did some reporting on that for Slate and what I heard from lots of folks in the foster system is that it’s not always the top reason that parents lose parental rights, but it’s something that caseworkers know to look for. It’s something that they can add to the list when they’re building the case. That struck me as, in a way, almost more chilling. Because if you’re a parent going through a really hard time with mental health, addiction, whatever, the knowledge that your body will also be weaponized against you in that conversation is really scary.

I admit I myself, in the past, have started and stopped at well, of course, I want to be healthy for my kids. But it’s just like, “of course, you want a healthy baby” without unpacking the ableism of that. Children are born with disabilities every day, and they are very worthy of our love.

Amanda

I think that we all have this innate desire for goodness. We’re looking to be good, to experience goodness. And I think a lot of people assume that to have a good body means to have a healthy and fit body. But I like to go old school and look at Aristotle. Aristotle says that a thing is good when it fulfills its purpose. So this is where the conversation about what is the purpose of my body comes to the fore. And when you say that the purpose of my body is health, then you have to also acknowledge that health is much bigger than just physical health—it’s also emotional health, mental health, and spiritual health. If you have an ATV four wheeler and you just pump up the air on that one physical health tire, it’s gonna be a rocky road. So, even if we agree at some point that health is the purpose of my body, we have to recognize that physical health or the way that we look cannot be the end all be all.

But I say that the purpose of my body isn’t health or thinness or perfection. It’s relationship. My body can be good, no matter my ability or my size, because I can have relationship with anyone and it can be a fruitful and deep relationship. And that’s what really keeps me going with my kids. When I do feel that shame of sitting in my car when they’re playing on the playground. I know that the other 95 percent of the day, they’re with me, and we’re investing in our relationship. And it’s part of my relationship to let them go and experience things that I don’t have experience with.

Virginia

I love reframing it around relationships. That’s so beautifully put.

Amanda

When we treat health as a moral imperative, we wind up applying individualistic “answers” to a complex, system-wide situation. Because if we see morality on an individual basis, which we do, then person A, person B, Person C all have the same responsibility to health, but they might have vastly different access to resources. We don’t have universal health care. That’s a big deal. And then the racism, transphobia, and fatphobia that exists in our current system makes it look like certain types of people are not being morally upright if they don’t achieve some sort of health level that we think they should. 

Virginia

You also talk a bit in the book about the anti-fat bias you’ve experienced in the church, and as someone who’s not Christian, I would just love to understand this a little more. How do diet culture and Christian culture intersect? And how do we start to untangle them?

Amanda

I grew up believing that thinness was next to godliness. That the smaller I was, the more my body would reflect the submissive woman that I thought God was calling me to be. And there’s nothing small or submissive about me. I’m very big and my personality is big, my voice is loud. I take up more space than a lot of people. My journey of clawing my way out of a fundamentalist, elitist version of Christianity to find that that’s not what God is requiring of me showed me that diet culture and Christian culture in the United States have a lot in common. Number one, that idea that being smaller is morally better. Number two is purity rules. Christian culture is full of ways that you can be sexually pure, but also there’s this idea of being dietetically pure. In diet culture, we see that where we talk about “clean” and “unclean” food. We’re moralizing food. Bad and good food, that all that kind of language is religious language.

Virginia

Now that you spelled that out, that makes total sense that that didn’t just begin and end with Gwyneth Paltrow, but has deeper roots. It’s fascinating.

Amanda

I’m reading the Christian New Testament, and there’s a scene where the The apostle Peter, who’s the first pope, right? This really important guy gets his vision of all these different kinds of foods, foods that he thought were unclean. And God says, “Don’t call what I’ve made clean, unclean.” And there’s this way that Peter applies it. “Oh, I can’t call people who eat unclean foods unclean either because God has made them clean.” And so what for whatever reason, there’s this thing that we do when we talk about clean and unclean foods, we apply it to the people that eat those things. 

Virginia

Yeah, we go right to their bodies.

Amanda

We go straight to their bodies, and that is classist AF. Because access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and what we our culture considers, quote, “good food,” it’s just inaccessible to a large swath of the population. It enables people to discriminate against the poor, those who live in food deserts, people who eat free lunches at school, like my kids. There’s there’s just a huge amount of classist behavior there—and of course, racist and fatphobic behavior. So really finding that all food is good food is has been something instrumental in my journey towards fat liberation.

Butter For Your Burnt Toast

Amanda

I am lately obsessed with Jon Batiste, the musician. He is the leader of the band on the Stephen Colbert show, but he is much more celebrated than that. His album called We Are won Album of the Year at the Grammys this year, and he helped write, or did most of the writing for the soundtrack to “Soul.” the Pixar movie.

Virginia

Ooooh, excellent.

Amanda

And I’m just obsessed. I highly recommend his new album and also the Soul soundtrack.

Virginia

Amazing. We have not watched “Soul” yet. My kids adore “Inside Out,” but I’ve been holding off on “Soul” because my four-year-old is in that phase of being very anxious about death.

Amanda

Been there. Yeah, I have one sentimental kid who laments over the death of leaves. 

Virginia

The other week, she picked a flower and said, “Can we put it in a vase?” And I said, Yes. And she said, “But will it die?” And I said, “Well, yes.” And she was like, “I don’t want it in the house then, it’ll make me too sad.”

Amanda

I feel you strongly.

Virginia

But I am dying to see “Soul.” And in the meantime, I can listen to his music. So that’s a great recommendation. 

My recommendation is a podcast. I just listened to the first episode of Ghost Church by Jamie Loftus. Sara Louise Petersen, who was on the podcast a few weeks ago, recommended it in her newsletter, and I checked it out. It is fascinating. She is investigating American Spiritualism, which is the tradition of communing with the dead. It’s a fringe religion, I guess, is the technical term. I just knew nothing about this whole world. And I think it’s always challenging with this kind of journalism, trying to understand a culture in a world that you don’t belong to, whether you’re going to come in and completely interrogate it and take it down, or whether you’re going to fall on that spectrum. And she walks the line really nicely. She’s very respectful of the people. She is herself, somewhat of a believer in some of the concepts, but also has a lot of questions. It’s a really well done exploration where you’re sort of allowed to draw your own conclusion. She’s not saying it’s all garbage. She’s not saying it’s all true.

Well, Amanda, thank you so much for being here. I really loved this conversation. And again, cannot encourage readers enough to get your book. We covered some of the heavier aspects of the book, the book itself is a really delightful read. Amanda is a very light and fun writer. So I hope people will check it out. Tell us where we can find more of your work and support you!

Amanda

I am on Instagram as @your_body_is_good. I’m on Twitter at @AmandaMBeck. And I am on the interwebs on Facebook, too. I’m a millennial, so good Facebooker. I have a group on there called All Bodies Are Good Bodies. It’s a fat positive, body neutral space where people can have community apart from diet culture. 

Virginia

Thank you for being here!

Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode.

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting and health.

Today we’re doing a very fun Ask Me Anything episode. A lot of great questions came in, so I’ve asked Corinne to help out with this one. For folks who don’t know, Corinne works on Burnt Toast with me and she is also the founder of @selltradeplus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. She very graciously agreed to come ask me your questions and even answer one of her own.

Also! We’re planning another AMA ep for next month, to celebrate ONE YEAR of Burnt Toast (in its current fully-formed newsletter/podcast iteration). So if you’ve got even more questions for us, and especially if you have questions about the newsletter, or my book (which is also getting done next month!) put them here.

If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! And subscribe to the Burnt Toast newsletter for episode transcripts, reported essays, and more.

Episode 44 Transcript

Virginia

Hi Corinne! I have drafted you to come on and help with this AMA episode. These things are always so weird and I have feelings about them. So, I’m glad you’re here to do it with me.

Corinne

I love an AMA.

Virginia

They are the kind of thing that I kind of hate doing myself but also love other people’s. So I recognize that people enjoy it.

Corinne

Here’s our first question:

I’d love to know if there’s any body related topic you ever have a hard time discussing with your kids. And if when that happens, what do you do to get better at having the conversation / beginning the conversation?

Virginia

So for context, my kids are four and eight. I’m sure there are many body conversations we have yet to have that may be hard for me in the future. But, I have covered genitalia in a lot of detail. I’ve explained what the clitoris is for. And certainly, there’s a lot of fat positive talk in our house. All of those conversations I sort of weirdly enjoy. I guess because often in parenting, you’re not really having meaningful conversations with your kids, you’re just trying to move them through the day. When they ask a question like that, it’s like, oh, this is an opportunity to actually tell you something I know something about, it’s weirdly rewarding. So those questions don’t throw me too much. 

The stress point for me on this is more related to food, when I’m navigating my children’s strong feelings about not wanting to eat what I’m serving, what they wish I was serving, that kind of thing. I’m just more exhausted by it and annoyed by it, whereas with the curiosity about bodies I’m like, “Yeah, man! Let’s be curious about bodies! That’s great!” But when it’s more feelings about me wanting to keep all foods neutral but maybe once a week we eat a vegetable, I can sometimes feel more unsure in the moment. My kids also can use my work against me, which is very smart of them, but also frustrating. There will be a lot of, “It’s my body, my choice” when it’s like, “But can you brush your teeth?” And then it’s like, well, crap. Good work, guys. 

I would also say there are definitely conversations where I was overwhelmed the first time we had them. The great thing is you never have the conversation just once. I remember trying to explain periods to both my kids. The first time I kind of traumatized them a little bit. I explained what a period was and my younger daughter was like, “Then it’s over and you’re better, right?” And I was like, “Oh, no. You do it every month for the rest of your life.” And then she sobbed “I don’t want to bleed forever,” and went upstairs to her room. And I was like, Do I explain about IUDs? Or have I already taken this too far?

I have plenty of examples of we had a conversation, and I kind of fucked it up. But then you get another chance! And you can normalize it and come back to it. Even if you feel like you really freeze in the moment, or tell them more than they’re asking for and they cry, you can fix it later.

Or, you know, it’s good for them to have stuff to work on in therapy. 

Corinne

That seems like good advice. Next question!

I am pregnant with my second, due in mid July. My first kid will have just turned four. Seems like your kids have a similar age gap. Got any tips for handling this major life transition for our four year old? I feel like he will inevitably hate us and the baby occasionally, but hoping to find ways to maintain some sanity and happiness at the same time. Hopefully?

Virginia

I love this age spread! My kids are four years and two months apart. It was awesome in the baby stage because the older kid can really get into being a big kid. When my kids were three, they didn’t really want to be big kids, they still wanted me to do everything for them. Then sometime around four, they both have switched into “No, wait. I can do it!” and feeling good about that. So, you could lean into like, “Can you go get me the diaper? Can you go get the bottle?” and they would like having the jobs and like being in charge. 

And the other thing about four, I don’t know what your situation is, but mine was in a full day of preschool at that age. So she had her own world. And she would get a lot of attention for being a big sister, but she also could just be with her friends and get attention and wasn’t competing. I think that is easier than when you have two under two. That would be a lot more exhausting. 

I did buy some new cheap coloring books and stickers and that kind of thing and I stuck them in a box and it was called her “big sister box.” Then when I was breastfeeding or bottle feeding or going to be stuck in one place with the baby for a bit, I could say, “Do you want to get out your big sister box?” and she would have an activity she could do so that she was less enraged that I wasn’t actively paying attention to her. We didn’t end up having to use it a ton, but it definitely helped in the first couple of weeks. 

But it will be a huge shift. My relationship with my older child did change a lot, just because now there are two of them. So just looking for ways to carve out time with your older kid can be helpful to reinforce your bond with with him. Especially in the early stages, there would be a lot of like, “The baby’s just gonna like sleep on the floor here while I’m doing something with the bigger kid.” It is funny because with your first kid you would think I should be paying attention to you all the time. You do ignore the littler one a little more the second time, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

The other thing I will say for four years apart, there are ages where they can really play together and be really close. Ours were really close at six and two and three and seven. Four and eight, there’s a little bit more of a developmental change. But it’s actually starting to come back again. I give two thumbs up to this age spread. 

Corinne

What’s your childcare situation? Do you feel like you get enough time for yourself and your marriage? I have a one year old and I’m definitely struggling on the enough time front, even though I outsource most tasks.

Virginia

You have a one year old, so it’s just terrible right now. And it will get better. I’m sorry, you’re in a very hard time. I think one is, in some ways, harder than the newborn stage when they’re like a little cute house plant and you can put them places. But one, you really can’t multitask because they’re always one head injury away from a hospital trip.  

Right now, we don’t have childcare outside of the school day. Our kids are in school from about 8:30am to whoever’s picking them up has to leave at 2:30pm. Except two days a week when they have after school activities, so they stay later and get picked up between four and five. Dan and I trade off on who does the afternoon pickups. I do Mondays and Fridays. And he does Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday (which includes their later activity days). So I get three days a week where I have a pretty full workday. I’m back from school drop off by nine-ish, and I’m at my desk till between four and five. So it’s pretty manageable, although I do have to plan carefully to remember to leave my desk at 2:30 on the days I have to pick them up from school. But it is not a 50 hour workweek, it’s not compatible with a corporate job. That’s for sure. We’re lucky that we both have pretty flexible careers. 

In terms of feeling like I get enough time for myself and my marriage, it’s like one or the other, I would say? There’s the hours they’re in child care, but there’s also the morning of getting kids out the door, then the afternoon and early part of the evening is very family focused. We’ve got one kid in bed by seven and one kid still around until about 8 or 8:30. And I like to go to bed at 8:30, so that’s kind of my day. So, yeah, it is tricky to fit in either time together or time alone.

[Virginia Note: I completely forgot to give my best tip for getting alone time, which is: I get up between 5-6am and the rest of my family isn’t up till 7:30am. So I start my day with a chunk of time to myself. This is essential to my ability to love them when they wake up.]

We’re still working on it, I would say. We do try to watch a show together a few nights a week, and on Friday nights, we feed the kids early and order takeout for ourselves after they go to bed, so we can have dinner without them. Other nights, he does his own thing and I do a puzzle and maybe the 8-year-old hangs out and reads. Now that we’re not in COVID craziness, we are able to get babysitters for date nights or nights out with friends. Also at these ages—and you are not here at the one year old—but with a four and eight year old, it is much less of a big deal for one of us to go away with friends for the weekend. So we’ve been doing that more, or even just saying, “I’m going to be out for a chunk of hours on the weekend.” Like I would feel rage at being left with small children when they were under three because it’s just so much work. Now it’s much more like my kids can entertain themselves and play together and I can be out in the garden while they’re doing stuff and it’s not as draining. So, it definitely gets better. But yeah, the one year old year is a time where having enough time for yourself is very hard.

I feel like I just convinced a lot of people not to have kids. Well, maybe I’m not wrong.

Corinne

You have mentioned that your husband is thin and athletic. So is mine. How do you manage your feelings around gaining weight while he has stayed thin. This is an area that I’m struggling with for myself.

Virginia

Yes, skinny husbands are the worst! One thing that has been helpful is, as I have been able to untangle weight and health, I understand that both of our health pictures are quite nuanced in different ways. Just because he’s thin and can run a lot does not necessarily mean he’s “healthier” than me by every marker, if that makes sense. I don’t feel like I need to compare our cardiovascular abilities. Which, obviously his are superior because he’s a marathon runner and I’m not.

The other thing about me and Dan is we went to high school together. We actually went to middle school together, too. 

Corinne

Whoa. Big reveal.

Virginia

It’s a whole thing. So we know a lot of people who knew us a long time ago and when we run into people who knew us a long time ago, I do have to do some self talk. I look very different than we looked 20 years ago and he looks like the same, but a little more gray hair. It just is what it is, you know? His whole family is built that way. They have of one type of person they make with their genes. My family has a different type of person that we make with our genes. And our person changes more through the years, and this is normal. It’s not a value judgment on either of our body types. But I’ve had a few moments over the years of feeling weird about that and needing to process it. 

What it also really comes down to is that he’s never made me feel weird about my body. He has been a fan of my body throughout its journey. So I think as long as you’ve got that in place, then it shouldn’t matter. My sense of my body does not hinge on my husband’s feelings about it. But if there is a way in which your thin partner is making you feel bad about your larger body, that’s a whole other thing you need to unpack and work through. And that’s not a part of our story. It’s very tricky because it’s not just about what your weight is. It’s also about how you both think about weight. 

Corinne 

There was a TikTok going around for a while where some thin lady was like, “I have to tell you, try on your boyfriend’s jeans! They’re amazing!” and then all these bigger women responding like, “LOL, Yeah. They go up to my knees.”

Virginia

The other day, I grabbed the wrong coat to take the dog out to pee. And I was like, “Why doesn’t it zip?” Oh, right. It’s not mine. We have similar looking Northface coats. And that is irritating, but also should not be irritating. It is such a stupid stereotype. It is rooted in no reality that women can’t be bigger than their male partners or that you can’t be bigger than your partner of any gender. This is such an odd thing that we are so locked into. 

Another thing I would say is anytime you start to feel weird about it, remember that the person to blame is not your thin husband and not your fat body. It’s the culture that’s making you think there’s something wrong with a totally normal dynamic. There are millions of thin men married to fat women who think that their fat wives are amazing. And they are not heroes, by the way. That’s the other thing.

Corinne

The next question is, What do you guys think about the “you gotta find the perfectly fitting bra” craze?

Virginia

Okay, I’m going to want to know your thoughts about this because you are more of a fashion expert than me. My first feeling is, it is a ton of marketing hype. And, I do hate a badly fitting bra. This one’s tricky! What do you think?

Corinne

God, I don’t know. I have such a complicated relationship with bras.

Virginia

They’re a very hard garment. It feels like such an industry-created problem, though. Maybe we should do bra science at some point. 

Corinne

I go through waves of like, “F**k bras!!!” where I don’t want to wear a bra or I just want to wear a sports bra. And then like, “No, I really need this architectural garment that fits me perfectly.” But it does sometimes seem like they just don’t make enough sizes. There are too many variables.

Virginia

It is a complicated garment. I shouldn’t say it would be so easy to make bras that fit everybody. The human body has infinite variations. And this is a particularly variable section of anatomy. 

At least not since I had kids—I don’t know if it’s a pregnancy/postpartum thing that never quite went away—I cannot say f**k bras. I wear a bra every day, even in COVID when everyone was not wearing bras. I was like, I’m wearing one. What’s wrong with me? Am I bad feminist? I just am more comfortable in one.

Corinne

I mean, that sounds like an argument for finding the perfectly fitting bra! Weirdly, I just want to ask you, what is it?

Virginia

What is the perfect bra?

Corinne

Is that TMI for the podcast?

Virginia

No! I buy them from barenecessities.com and I think they carry the best variety of brands. I have found their customer service quite helpful. There are two brands I like on there. One is Birdsong, for like more of a structured like, you take it off and it’s still shaped like boobs kind of bra. The other one is Curvy Couture. Terrible name. 

Corinne

I’ve never heard either of those. 

Virginia

This is not sponsored! We don’t do sponsored content. But I’ve been wearing both those brands for years. Because I wear a bra every day, they do wear out after a year or two and I replace them. I find them both pretty comfortable. I’m not saying I put them on and it’s like I’m in a warm bath. They’re still an underwire bra. But I have issues with chafing and movement. I don’t feel comfortable. I am a larger breasted person, but it’s not like, “Oh, I wish they were smaller.” It’s just like, I feel uncomfortable with the way they move around without support. I don’t enjoy that experience, from a physical pain perspective. I’m more comfortable in one.

But this feels like a problem the industry created by not making good bras and then they could say 60 percent of women are wearing the wrong size bra. You need to buy all new bras. If you had just made them better from the beginning, Oprah wouldn’t have had to reveal that to us. 

Corinne

Also like, could there be a little standardization? It just feels so confusing.

Virginia

One thing I like about Bare Necessities is they convert the sizes between brands. So like, I’m like a 38DDD in most brands, but in some brands that’s a 38H and in some brands, that’s a 36F. They seem to have grasped how the different brands change. That’s a very helpful feature that saves me a lot of returns.

I will say Thirdlove bras are s**t. With all their claims of so many sizes. Nope. Nope. Didn’t work for me.

Corinne

At some point, during the pandemic, I did the—there’s a bra Reddit that goes really deep into measuring yourself. And I did that. They have a calculator. Then you can post photos for fit feedback. So, I did that and I was like, oh, none of these fit. And it was like a lot of math.

Virginia

I don’t want to do math when I’m shopping. 

Corinne

If I were going to try again, I would try to go somewhere in person, which is another recommendation I’ve heard. Go get measured by a person who knows what they’re doing. 

Virginia

I haven’t done that in years. I haven’t done that since pre-COVID, if not longer. I live an hour from any good stores. I’d have to be like, “Instead of taking an afternoon to have lunch with a friend, I’m devoting four hours to a bra shopping mission.” Like, I don’t have that much time to myself.

Corinne

“I’m taking a weekend just to find a bra.” Yeah.

Virginia

That is not what I’m going to do with my precious child-free hours.

Corinne

That’s a good point. It’s definitely just not a priority for me. 

Virginia

On the sports bras, have you found a sports bra that you feel like is actually supportive? 

Corinne

I’m more in the soft bra zone right now. There’s a few I like. I like the Free Label Dani Bra. It’s bamboo. The Dani is the biggest bust Free Label style and that is the one that works the best for me. I also wore those True & Co bras for a long time. They’re very thin and very stretchy and I’m definitely outside of their size zone, but it kind of fits.

Virginia

Yeah, I do feel like there is a place for the soft t-shirt-y kind of bra. Mostly just like giving you a piece of elastic and that’s it. Yeah, I do I have ARQ. That’s the one that crazy high waisted underwear, right? I have the one of their bras and I like it for that.

Corinne

Wow, I hate their bras, so… 

Virginia

So guys, don’t feel like we’re giving you hardcore recommendations!

Corinne

There is no perfectly fitting bra.

Virginia

Don’t be influenced. We’re not here to influence. But I do enjoy that ARQ bra because I feel like underwire is wearing permanent grooves in my body at this point.

Corinne

Sometimes I feel like underwire bras like push my boobs out too far. You’re creating an impediment for me going around corners or whatever. You know what I mean?They just need to be strapped down and we’re good to go.

Virginia

Just be efficient and not too much in my way. That’s what I’m looking for.

Corinne

Exactly. So that’s the perfectly fitting bra.

Virginia

In conclusion, yes, we think it’s marketing hype. Also, we wish the the bras fit better.

Corinne

Alright. Next question.

Would you rather 1. talk about food or 2. talk about bodies?

Virginia

I was thinking when we were talking about conversations that are hard to have with your kids, I for sure am more comfortable having the body conversations. But my whole entry point into this world and my authority as someone in this world definitely began with food, because I wrote about my experiences with my older daughter and the feeding tube. And then, breaking out of diet culture. I’ve done so much reporting on diets. So it’s kind of funny that in my own life, I don’t want to talk about food. And I can’t decide if that’s actually because it’s hard or I’m sick of it because this is also my work. But I do find food really annoying to talk about. I feel like when you talk to friends or family members about food, or just in the world about food, food brings up so much. People get really performative and people want to tell you about their diets and they want to be really definitive about it. It’s such an annoying thing to navigate. They want to apologize for how they’re eating like, then you have to deal with that. So I guess I still would rather talk about bodies. There’s pros and cons to it.

Where would you land on that one?

Corinne

I agree with you. Food is really annoying to talk about. Similarly, I used to work with cookbooks and I worked in restaurants. I’ve done a lot of work with food. I feel like maybe people are less aware of cultural stuff around food, like people are more willing to just be like, “I’m Paleo and sugar is bad for you.” And I think people are a little more like connected to their bodies and understand how criticizing how people look can be bad. Or something like that?

Virginia

 I mean, they can both be landmines, for sure. But yeah, I think people tend to say more definitive things about food. And then you’re in this position of like, do I question that? Do I agree with that? What do I do? It can be trickier to navigate.

Corinne

Maybe everyone has a little more sensitivity about their own bodies? 

Virginia

A smidge more sensitivity, depending on the room. 

I mean, from a journalistic perspective, I would say I enjoy both equally, like researching a diet and debunking it, that’s very satisfying. And I like writing about questions about our bodies. I guess I’ve just done more of the food stuff and so now it’s sometimes the body questions are more interesting or feel fresher to me just because of like my trajectory.

Corinne

How did you decide that sharing your personal life, home, children, husband, vacation, etc, will be part of your public professional persona? I follow you on social media because I’m interested in your writing, but because of that, I see what feels like a lot of your personal life. Was this a conscious choice? Can you be a writer in the era of social media without the sharing?

Virginia

I don’t think you can and I hate it. It feels necessary to share in order to be a person people want to follow on Instagram and then hopefully read their work. 

There’s also the fact that I did make the conscious decision to write about a personal experience, which was having a child on a feeding tube. In doing that, I sort of tipped myself into a category of writer who shares some personal things. I could have made the decision to stay a much more straightforward journalistic reporter. Prior to having that experience, I don’t think a lot of my life was on the internet in the same way. I had my first kid in 2013. Instagram was just a baby. All of it was new. I don’t think we were having to do as much sharing in the same way. 

If I had stayed in the more traditional New York Times health reporter type of beat, you don’t know a lot about those people’s lives. But that type of writer doesn’t get to take stands on issues and has to stay in a very traditional model of journalism that I was ready to break out of and do a little more activism journalism, like I do now. So some of it was conscious. 

I do also want to say that, yes, there are categories of my life that I share on Instagram, but there is so much of my life you are not seeing. I think it’s really important that people understand that even when it feels like you’re seeing quite a lot, you’re seeing so little. I share houseplants and gardening because they are actually quite impersonal topics that are fun to talk about with people. I do have other interest that would feel more sensitive to share, you know what I’m saying?

Well maybe I don’t. That’s kind of all I do. But I could!

Also: I no longer show my children’s faces on social media. That was a decision I made a few years ago, as they’ve gotten older and more distinctive looking. Every now and then one slips into a story, but I pretty much don’t. And I don’t share a lot of specifics about their personalities or struggles they’re having. I’ve never talked about toilet training either one of them, and I never will. There is a lot that is off limits. If I have a fight with my husband, you’re not going to hear about it.

I think everybody in this space is constantly drawing and redrawing those lines for ourselves. And it’s really hard because there is the pressure to share more and more. I can draw a direct line towards when I’m being more open and personal on Instagram, I get more engagement and then that brings more people over to the newsletter to engage with my work. That is a shitty thing you have to decide. Getting a dog was helpful because dog content feels innocuous. I can talk about the dog and then share less about the kids, I guess. Penelope has no boundaries with social media.

What are your thoughts on all of that?

Corinne

I am glad to not have to do more of it. It seems really hard. I definitely appreciate that there are lots of things people aren’t sharing on social media.

Virginia

But people do often feel like they know you really well. And I get that because I do it too with people I follow! And it’s sort of funny to then exchange DMs with someone or get an email from someone. Like, of course it feels like you know me because you see my face talking to you or I’m showing you the garden. It’s an odd way of knowing people, I guess.

Corinne

Have you ever gotten recognized on the street?

Virginia

No, that would be so weird. I am not big enough for that. I have friends who have, though, and it is a weird experience.

Interestingly, some of the weirdness has come less from social media and more from traditional media. When I first wrote about my daughter’s condition in some bigger media outlets, we did get some really weird emails and mail. Nothing that was endangering my family—although that absolutely happens, and is revolting. Just things where people were assuming a familiarity with my family that I was not comfortable with.

One other small decision I made is that I never show the exterior of my house on Instagram. Even though I show you the garden, I don’t show you the house. And I don’t plan to change that because that doesn’t need to be a thing people who live in other states can find.

So it is an ongoing question. And it is something everyone I know who is any kind of public persona on Instagram has revisited and struggled with.

Corinne

How does newsletter writing compare to book writing, compare to magazine writing? And which do you prefer?

Virginia

I love this question. I have to say writing the newsletter is probably my favorite job I’ve ever had. It is for sure better than magazine writing. Watch me block myself out of any future magazine work!

When I say magazines, there’s only like three magazines left in the world, so I’m really talking about magazines and websites. Any sort of prestige media outlets, I guess we could say. The big difference is when you write for other people like that, the pro is you have an editor and a fact checker and a copy editor and an art person and a whole team, in most places, going over the piece making it really perfect. There’s a lot of added support that I have had to, with the newsletter, figure out which parts I need to replicate and how to replicate. And Corinne, you are doing it—so, thank you. There were also times when I wrote pieces that were really controversial and it was nice that the publishing house had a lawyer who would vet it and make sure we wouldn’t get sued. 

But when you’re writing for another outlet, you have to fit your work into their vision. If you want to write about fatphobia, that’s hard because a lot of these media outlets either haven’t heard of it or are perpetuating it daily in their health coverage. It’s such a relief to not have to make those have those negotiations and make those compromises. I don’t miss that at all. 

I will also say from a work/life balance perspective, it’s so much better, because when you are freelancing for many different outlets, the odds of somebody emailing you the night you go on vacation to say they need a complete revise of a 3,000 word story—Oh my God, it probably happened to us at least 50% of vacations, if not more? I have friends who are just always working on vacation. They bring the laptop, they know that an editor is going to need something. So the fact that I can now carve out that time for myself and do a rerun episode that week—that control has been amazing. Newsletter subscribers don’t seem to get mad if we skip a week. So that’s been really lovely!

Book writing I do also really love, although I am at the point with this book where I’m ready to be done writing it because I have written over 80,000 words. It’s a lot of words, and I’m tired. But I do really love it. The thing about book writing is you’re kind of alone, right? You’re in this little world writing the book. You don’t get a lot of feedback. So you do sort of worry at times, I’m thousands of words into this thing. And if it’s bad, no one’s checking on it right now. And with newsletters, we’re getting feedback from readers every week. So that part of it also I do love. That’s been a nice balance because I have days where I’m in book mode, really feeling really detached from the world and then I get to come back to the newsletter and this conversation is happening and I’m participating in it.

They are three very different mediums for sure. I’m sure I will write for magazines again. So, magazine editors, don’t take it too personally that I don’t like it. 

Now, can we have one question that came in for Corinne! So I’m throwing it over to you now.

What is @selfiefay’s favorite thing to cook for company? And how does she rule so hard?

@selfiefay is Corinne’s personal Instagram handle. Corinne, tell us, what do you cook? And why do you rule so hard?

Corinne

The best, most recent thing I’ve made for company—which, such a funny question, because who’s having company right now? I’ve had company not very often recently, which is sad. But the thing I’ve made that was great most recently was this “a nice lasagna” from Julia Turshen’s cookbook, Small Victories.

It is special because you make your own pasta, which is both easier and more delicious than I was expecting. You also use a food processor, so it’s a little bit less messy. And you mix creme fraiche into the tomato sauce instead of using ricotta or making béchamel. It was very delicious and sort of impressive.

Virginia

You made your own pasta. That’s very impressive!

Corinne

Yeah, I would definitely recommend that recipe and that cookbook and Julia Turshen in general.

Virginia

Yes! General recommendation of Julia Turshen. She is amazing. The lasagna sounds awesome.

Corinne

Do you have a favorite thing to cook for a company?

Virginia

I was actually just thinking about this because we have not had friends over for dinner. We have not had a dinner party since COVID and I really do want to have one soon. But I was paralyzed trying to remember what to make. I often do a pasta because I make really good pasta, but I have a couple friends who are gluten-free by necessity, so then it’s figuring that piece out. I need some dinner party inspiration, for sure, so I will check out Julia’s cookbook. That’s a great suggestion.

Corinne

If you could do any job in the world, including the one you invent, what would it be?

Virginia

I mean, I think I’ve invented it, to be honest. I do not and have never, for the last 20 years, had a job that is easy to explain to people at parties. My grandmother was always like, what does she do? Now when I’m like, “Well, I used to write a column for the times and now I have this Substack,” people are like, “What?” So yeah, I did invent it. 

That said, if I couldn’t be a writer, for some reason, you know, like writing didn’t exist, I think my other dream job would be garden designer. Not a landscaper, but I would come out and putter around and prune things and plant things for people. The design piece of it I really love.

What would yours be?

Corinne

This is a tough question. When I think of my dream job, I think I want to be somewhere really beautiful and not have to work a lot. Making jam in the countryside or something. I’d make tiny batches of jam and sell them for a lot of money. 

Virginia

That sounds delightful. I would buy your overpriced jam.

Corinne

I also really need a garden designer.

Virginia

Well, we can trade services. I’ll design the garden where you grow the fruit for your jam.

Corinne

Oh, perfect. I’m loving this future. 

Okay, what are your goals for the podcast for your writing? And for your advocacy? What is next for you?

Virginia

So, I will say, I am finishing a book. So it is hard. Every writer hates when people ask what your next book is going to be about. I’m like, “There are no other books. I’m just trying to finish this one book. All the words go to this book.” So, I don’t know is one answer. 

But certainly finishing this book, getting it out into the world. It’ll be out next spring, 2023 some time. So that will be the big focus of my work in the next year and a half because launching a book and promoting a book is a full time job for at least three months and often longer.

In terms of the goals for the podcast, I just want to keep bringing on more people we need to hear from in this space, more diversity of voices. I think it’s really important that my platform be available to folks who need this platform. And similarly, I do have a goal for the newsletter of bringing on other writers. I’m not quite ready to launch that because I want to make sure we’re in a place where I can pay really well. Because I have been underpaid as a writer in the past and I know how shitty it is and I will not do it. So, that is something we are working towards being able to do. 

In terms of advocacy issues, I really want to tackle the issue of kids plus size clothing. That is one that’s burning a hole in my brain right now. Always open to feedback and thoughts from folks! You all are in this community with us and have a sense of what work we need to be doing. So tell us!

Butter For Your Burnt Toast

Corinne

As true fans may remember, I live in New Mexico. And it is sadly already getting very hot. So my butter recommendation this week is for sun protection. I’m really hoping this recommendation inspires a lot of people because I really want to feel less weird walking around my neighborhood wearing a solar face shield, which I just purchased.

Virginia

I don’t even know… I’m googling it. What is a solar face shield?

Corinne

I don’t even know if that’s really what it’s called. But it’s basically sunglass material that covers your whole face.

Virginia

Oh my gosh. Yeah, it looks like when people were wearing the shields during COVID?

Corinne

Yeah, it looks like a COVID shield, but it’s sunglasses. Like, tinted. 

Virginia

You are committed to your sun protection.

Corinne

Yeah. I just bought that and I do feel self conscious wearing it around the neighborhood. I’ve worn it driving. It’s great for driving. And then I also got one of those fold up-able Baggu hats that everyone had last summer. And I got some prescription sunglasses. 

Virginia

Wait, so do you need the sunglasses and the face shield?

Corinne

Well, I’ve had these just like really ugly over-glasses sunglasses. They look terrible. Like, not even in a cool way. They’re always really dirty and they get scratched super easily and they feel too expensive for what they are. So I was like, Well, if I get the sunshield, I can just wear that over my glasses and it covers your whole face. I mean, it seems like a great product. Aside from making you look like a space alien.

Virginia

Also, let’s deal with the fact that in the first Google image search result, it’s a woman in a bikini top and the face shield. I feel like these things are at odds with one another. If you  were so concerned about sun exposure that you’re wearing the face shield, why are you not also in a rash guard?

Corinne

My request to listeners is, can we make this cool?

Virginia

Can we embrace the face shield?

Corinne

Are you gonna get one, Virginia?

Virginia

Well, I’m wondering about how it would be for gardening? Where I live, bugs are a big problem, like we have a few weeks of gnats. And then we have a few weeks of mosquitoes. Would it help keep bugs from flying in my face while I’m gardening?

I think of myself as someone who take sun protection seriously. There is skin cancer in my family. We are a very white, pasty people. But I have settled apparently for decent prescription sunglasses and a strong sunscreen and you’re making me realize I could take that further. Do I have to buy the $68 face shield from Nordstrom? Or can I buy the $15 one?

Corinne

I will say I bought these $68 one from Nordstrom. I don’t know. It also very tight on my head. So I would be interested in maybe checking out some other models. It’s adjustable, but maybe I just need to break it in. It’s tight. 

Virginia

Like shoes. 

Corinne

When I take it off I have like a little imprint on my forehead, just making it even cooler.

Virginia

I mean, I have I do own a bug net that I wear during these peaks. So yes, I could see it also being helpful for like holding the bug net because a breeze comes in and it’s like smushed up against your face in an annoying way.

This is an amazing recommendation. This might be the best recommendation we’ve ever had. I’m very excited.

I’m recommending an app for your house plants called Planta. I have been using it for a few months. I didn’t want to recommend it right away in case I didn’t like it. But I learned about it when Anne Helen Peterson did her houseplant series, which I also recommend. It’s a great read on the history of houseplants and someone in the comments said they were using this app. 

If you are a person who regularly kills your houseplants or you are a person like me with an excessive number of houseplants that are hard to keep track of this, it is worth it. You do have to spend some time upfront. You have to take pictures of all your plants and put them in the app and get them all organized. I spent a whole Saturday on that and it was a very satisfying project to catalog my plants. Then it gives you reminders of when you need to water them and fertilize them. Some plants like a lot of fertilizer and some plants, you really can kill them if you over fertilize. So the Planta app is helping me keep track. It does make me feel a little guilty because sometimes they want me to be doing more. It thinks I should be misting and I don’t really believe in misting house plants. So, sometimes I have to ignore the notifications. But yeah, if you’re trying to keep houseplants alive, it’s a good one. I recommend it. 

Well, this was very fun! Thanks for being here to help me, Corinne. Remind everyone where they can find you and follow your work?

Corinne

Mainly you can find me on Instagram at @selltradeplus, which is an Instagram where people buy and resell plus size clothes. My personal Instagram is @selfiefay.

Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode.

Or consider a paid subscription! It’s just $5 a month or $50 for the year.

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

We hear so much about Betty Friedan, and the Feminine Mystique. And the whole thing was women find power and fulfillment and identity outside of the home by working professionally. Right? The thing that that leaves out is when you go outside of the home, who’s in the home? Like that work never went away.

Hello and welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting and health.

Today I am chatting with Angela Garbes, author of Like a Mother and the brilliant new book Essential Labor. I am a huge fan of Angela’s. We’ve been sort of admiring one another from afar over the internet for several years now, and this is our first IRL conversation (Well, IRL+Zoom, if you will.) We talk a ton about her new book, which is about the social construction of modern motherhood and what we need to do to truly support mothers, but also all caregivers and care work. It’s a really fun and sort of surprisingly funny conversation for what’s a pretty heavy topic. I think you will get so much out of it and even more out of her book Essential Labor, which I really recommend you run right out and get.

If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! And subscribe to the Burnt Toast newsletter for episode transcripts, reported essays, and more.

PS. The Burnt Toast Giving Circle is over $11,000! You are all amazing. We will be picking which state election to fund in the next few weeks, so stay tuned for details there. And if you’ve been thinking about joining, we still need you! Here’s the Burnt Toast episode where I announced it, ICYMI, and the link to donate.

Episode 43 Transcript

Virginia

So the new book is just incredible. How are you doing? How are you feeling?

Angela

Thank you for asking! I’m feeling so many things. I’m feeling tired. I hate to be the person that leads with “I’m tired,” but I feel like writing a book is is a frankly terrible process. I feel like my brain is still sort of recovering from that. And I was on kind of an accelerated timeline. I finished edits on the book in like December/January. And now it’s coming out. But I mean, I’m excited. I feel like I have been cooped up with these ideas and these thoughts for like, two years, and I am ready to like, be on the loose. COVID variants willing, I’m ready to go on tour and connect with people. I’m really desperate for that contact and conversation. So I feel really good. And I feel proud. I feel really proud of the book I’ve written. I’m trying to just hold on to that because amidst all the chaos that is going to happen, and hearing what other people think, I want to always remember how good I feel about this book and how that’s really the only thing that matters.

[Virginia Note: So far, people think it’s amazing. Here’s Jia Tolentino and Sara Louise Petersen saying so, among others.]

Virginia

Your book is very of the moment. Did the idea come out of the pandemic? Or was it something you’ve been thinking about, because it also ties so closely to your first book?

Angela

The secret history of this book is that I sold a second book right after my first book came out in 2018. It was a book of essays about the human body, like the body as a lens for how we move through the world and how we process the world. I was trying to write that book for two years, and it was due the summer of the pandemic. A couple of weeks into lockdown I contacted my editor and I was like, “There’s no way. There’s no way I can meet this deadline.” I’m a professional, like, I always get it done. And luckily, she was totally understanding because she was like, “I just told my husband, I think I have to quit my job.” So like everyone was going through this thing. So we pushed the deadline back several times. 

I used to co-host a podcast called The Double Shift with my friend, Katherine Goldstein. She invited me, during the pandemic, to cohost this with her because she wanted to continue to make the podcast during a time in which it felt almost impossible to do it and during a time in which we both felt mother’s voices, and the voices of caregivers, were both vitally important, but on the edge of being erased. And just consumed by domestic work. In September 2020, 865,000 women dropped out of the workforce in one month, because no one could be a caretaker, a virtual school proctor, and a professional worker at the same time. So I said, “women’s participation in the workforce is directly tied to their participation in public life. And what happens if women disappear for a year? Or more?”

So, from that lighthearted thought, I had a wonderful editor who reached out to me and she was like, “Do you want to write about this? I want someone to write about it and I think you need to do it.” I had not been writing and I was scared to do it. But I basically put every bad thought I’d been having about disappearing, about feeling unsatisfied by domestic labor, about questioning ambition, about just everything, and I wrote this piece for The Cut that ended up going a little bit viral. Elizabeth Warren retweeted it—career highlight for me. And I realized I’ve been isolated and alone with my depression and my concerns, but I’m not alone. So many people are feeling this way now, as everyone’s trying to force us out of the pandemic. Which, facts to the contrary. These problems aren’t going away. Childcare, figuring it out on your own. Our society’s treatment of mothers and care work. We have not solved that problem. It is a longstanding problem that we have never properly reckoned with.

So that’s a very long answer to how I wrote this book. The one nice thing about it is that there’s a lot about embodiment in this book. And while I was not unfortunately able to cannibalize everything from the first book, it did feel good because all of that research that I had done that I couldn’t figure out how to make it work. A lot of that research and some snippets of writing made it into this book. And it also made me feel like everything I’ve been doing has not been a waste of time.

Virginia

You give us this whole history of care work, tracing your family’s history. It helped me, and I think it will help a lot of people, put what happened in the pandemic into context. People with privilege were caught by surprise by how hard it is to live. Obviously, it was not news to the majority of people, but it helped me put in context, like, what is happening right now? And why is it so bad? Why is it happening in this way? So it absolutely transcends the pandemic because you’re explaining this much larger systemic issue and also looking ahead into where do we go from here with that.

There is a snippet from the book I wanted to talk about in detail. Okay, so actually two little quotes I’m gonna read. You wrote:

The pandemic revealed that this can happen to anyone. That work won’t save affluent white women, despite Betty Friedan’s theorizing. Ultimately, they cannot ever fully outsource domestic labor, it still comes down to them.

And then later you wrote:

It makes white women uncomfortable to think that they are no different from their hired help. What they chase and  have been given is validation, acceptance, and success—but only on terms set by white men.

I mean, Angela! So good! I read those, I underlined them, I came back and read them again. I was just flashing back to so many phone calls with editors. So many reporting trips. I remember being on a reporting trip when I was visibly pregnant with my second daughter, and feeling like I had to hide it and downplay it. This weird guy who worked for the Philadelphia Mayor was making comments about it. It was like a whole thing where I was like, I can’t be pregnant in this public space because it’s getting so weird for everybody.

Angela 

I can’t be who I am. 

Virginia

This is what my body’s doing right now and I have to do this work. There are these ways in which we are conditioned to downplay our kids, to downplay our responsibility to our kids, in order to seem professional and successful. For a lot of us, the pandemic is what made it impossible to maintain that lie. Like your editor, I was in the same boat of like, “Okay, I’m just not working for several months here.”

I would love for you to unpack for us a little further why this is so specifically a problem of white feminism.

Angela 

I mean, I want to start by saying that I’m really glad that you want to talk about this. As I was writing it, I was like, “This feels risky.” Do I want to call out white women? As a woman of color that felt and still feels a little bit risky. But this really gives me hope, because you know my joke is “some of my best friends are white women.” And I feel like there’s a reckoning that’s happening. I know that word has been overused in the last couple of years. But I think that people really want to understand what’s happening and why they feel so betrayed, and why so many white women felt and were righteously angry, you know? I want to harness that power which is why I want to keep talking about it. 

Mainstream feminism, which is white feminism, has always had a race problem, just like the United States. We have never fully acknowledged the history, right? Susan B. Anthony, a great suffragette, did not think that black women deserved to vote. Betty Friedan—and I shouldn’t have to say this, but these women contributed to society. I am not trying to take away, I’m not trying to come for them.

Virginia

You’re not canceling Susan B. Anthony. 

Angela

Exactly. I just feel like these people were human. We hear so much about Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique. The whole thing was women finding power and fulfillment and identity outside of the home by working professionally. The thing that that leaves out is when you go outside of the home, who’s in the home? That work never went away. There’s a history of slavery in this country. We have a history of Black women working for free in the home and taking care of children and cooking and cleaning, black women as property. And so it was easy to slot women of color and Black women into these roles as domestic workers because they’d always been doing this labor. So, I just want to point out that women—and specifically affluent white women—were sold a bill of goods. I think Boomer women especially. I think a lot of white women now are reckoning with this. A lot of Boomer women were like, “I can have it all.” And that’s the huge lie that we’re still grappling with. Like, you cannot have it all. Even if you come close to it, someone will be like, “can you hide your pregnant body?” It’s very inconvenient that you are overflowing with life, right? Because white women are also oppressed, right? But there’s a better chance for white women to attain success or to fit in.

You know, oppression sucks. The thing that marginalized communities and marginalized women and people of color understand is that this world wasn’t built for us. So success is sort of unattainable. At least, I’m speaking for myself now, this classic, shiny version of white feminist success is out of reach. 

I started self-identifying as a feminist when I was 12 years old. But nothing I read ever talked about my mother, who was an immigrant from the Philippines who worked and raised three kids. Marginalized people have a better understanding of who is left out of conversations. White women haven’t been challenged to imagine themselves in other people’s shoes. They’ve been encouraged to lean in. 

But to go back to history, when we think of feminism, we don’t think about Johnnie Tillmon or the National Welfare Rights Organization, who were contemporaries of Betty Friedan. Their work was organizing to make sure that women and families who received welfare, which was called aid for families with dependent children at the time, were able to access aid from the government. There was a time when women receiving that aid were subjected to impromptu searches of their home because the government thought that if they were giving them money, then they had the right to come in and make sure they weren’t sleeping with men. Because if men were in the picture, then they shouldn’t have any support.

So the NWRO and Johnnie Tillmon were working in a multiracial coalition for poor people. And their analysis, when faced with the same scenario that Betty Friedan had, was that we should have a universal basic income. We should eliminate poverty and we should make life better for as many people as possible. And that’s also history that we don’t hear about.

What white women are taught is white feminism, and actually, there is and has always been a much more inclusive feminism. The feminism of women of color, of marginalized people. It’s time for people to understand that and reckon with it and realize that it’s solidarity.

I quote Sylvia Federici in the book:

“All women are in a condition of servitude when it comes to the male world.”

Virginia

This distinction between Johnnie Tillmon and Betty Friedan is so important because it shows us that the answer was never to try to live on men’s terms. What you’re arguing for is that we need to reject that whole system. We need to do something really different.

Angela

Care work is essential to life. It is the work that makes all other work possible. It’s mind boggling when you realize the extent to which we have tried to make care work invisible. The way we have devalued care work. You either do it as a labor of love as a woman or you outsource it to women of color and you pay them poverty wages. Domestic workers are three times as likely to live in poverty than workers in any other field. The median wage in America is close to $20. The median wage for domestic workers is $12. What I’m arguing is that, actually, the only work that matters as a human being is taking care of people.

I was struggling with this in the pandemic with the “mask debate.” I’m at a loss. I don’t know how to convince people that they should care about other people if they don’t already have a sense of that. I think it’s a very human and innate and beautiful urge that we have to take care of each other. And I think our culture has beat it out of us. This culture of individual, of hustle and grinding, every man for themselves, I’m looking out for number one. It’s not working. The pandemic showed us that we can’t do it alone. What I’m arguing for is the visibility of care work, the absolute insistence on the importance of care and viewing care as labor that should be respected and valued, culturally and financially.

Virginia

It makes a ton of sense and is tricky to implement because you just keep coming up against the ways in which the systems don’t allow for it. Do you know what I mean? But I think holding that as the starting point and the goal feels critical to making any change.

Angela

I do feel hopeful that we’re having a moment. I think it’s going to take longer than I thought. When we got the Biden administration, we were talking about paid leave. We had been experimenting with direct stimulus payments to people. There was, in the American Rescue Plan, the advanced Child Tax Credit which did lift a lot of families and children out of poverty—like four million of them for the brief time. Even though we have a Democratic leadership in Congress that died and the funding lapsed and so we’re backsliding. I definitely have felt really disappointed and disheartened by that. But the fact that we are talking about these things, the fact that we had those things, there are these glimmers of hope. 

I also just see, too, that maybe the government isn’t coming to save us, right? Like we’ve known that since the start of the pandemic. Certainly the Trump administration wasn’t going to come and save us. The Biden administration feels like a grave disappointment to me in this sense, too. But what I do see and what I always saw through the pandemic is that we take care of each other. We have pods. We have mutual aid societies. We have playdates, we have community fridges, we have little free libraries. I’ve seen a flourishing of that and that, again, is to me the most beautiful human thing of caring for each other. Maybe we don’t name that as such, but I want to spend some time naming that and acknowledging that and saying that that is how people survived. 

Virginia

I’m glad you brought that up because that was a big takeaway I had from the book. I would read a chapter, and I I would think, I am craving community so deeply.

Angela

Didn’t you have COVID at the time?

Virginia

Oh right! I read it while I had COVID. I was like, why did I feel so alone? It was because I couldn’t leave my house.

Angela

I think I was like, “Virginia! You don’t have to do that!” 

Virginia

No, it was actually amazing to read it while I had COVID! I highly recommend it to anyone getting COVID now.

Angela

Well I’m honored that I got to keep your company during this dark moment in your life.

Virginia

It was fantastic. Well, and because it was this moment where I was having to parent really intensively because the four of us were locked in our house together. So, it was a great book to be reading. I was like, I am really in this care work right now in a very intense way. 

I want to go back to the community thing in a minute, but this does remind me. One other thing I thought about as I was reading was that I often don’t like care work. I don’t enjoy it. I love my children—you know, standard disclaimer—but I don’t enjoy a lot of the minutia of negotiating with someone about socks or making a potty try happen. I’m not someone who was ever like, “I would love to be an early education teacher.” Maybe this is my white feminism coming up again, or maybe it’s just my being a heartless person who doesn’t like children enough. Or both. But I have fallen into this trap of no, no, my career still needs to matter so much. My motherhood is going to be a smaller part of my identity because I am not taking the pure pleasure in it that I thought it was supposed to.

What I like about what you’re arguing for is: If we really value care work and elevate it, I think we can make it more pleasurable, right? Because it can be less isolating and draining. And it creates an opportunity where, if you don’t love it, it’s less awful that you’re outsourcing. You’re valuing who you’re outsourcing it to, right? It creates a more collaborative community approach towards it. 

Angela

The thing that I feel when you say that is like, you shouldn’t have to choose. That’s the thing, you should not have to choose. I hate that. So many of us are left feeling bad or like, “Is it me? Am I heartless? And am I a bad feminist?” We internalize that and I just really want to press pause. Let’s back the drone camera up and be like, this is a systemic issue. We hate women. Our country hates women. It really hates women of color, and it doesn’t value care work. That’s not for you or me to solve individually. We can’t. I just want to point that out, too, because I think that’s a very familiar feeling that people have.

I am someone who actually did take great pleasure in care work. Not all of it. Straight up, a lot of it is drudgery. So many fluids. Little silver corners torn off of fruit snack things are everywhere. That’s my thing these days. And also just the feeling that no matter what happens in life, it somehow always comes down to me, on my hands and knees, with a sponge. So, you know, care work is not great when that’s all you have to do, right? Which is what the pandemic showed us. Like, as someone who actually enjoys like a certain amount of care work, like loves to cook, is satisfied by sweeping, I felt like I saw the pleasure bleed out from it in the pandemic. It was really hard to enjoy the things that I used to enjoy.

So I don’t expect everyone to be suddenly like, “Oh, I love doing care work and domestic labor.” But I’m talking about some of those physical pleasures of care and how satisfying it can be to care for yourself, too. Meaningful self care, taking care of your body, it feels so nice to give yourself a rest. And I just wanted to give people space and I wanted to give myself space to reimagine these things. If I’m going to be doing this care work, I can’t hate it. Life is so hard. If you do nothing else today but keep yourself alive and love on somebody else, you did a lot. That’s a really good day. 

Virginia

This allowed me to take more pleasure in the parts I do enjoy. I do find it really rewarding and have sometimes felt embarrassed to admit I enjoy it, too. That’s the other piece.

Angela

Oh right. Because then you’d be like, “I’m a housewife.”

I mean, I don’t like imaginative play with my children. I don’t want to play hide and seek. I don’t like to do the kitty cat game or meow. It’s just not really my thing. And I’m always like, “Oh, my husband’s more fun,” because he’s willing to do that stuff. But I have more patience to sit and read on the couch with them.

The other thing is, young children are so different. My children are seven and four now and I feel like I’m emerging from a dark tunnel. 

Virginia

My youngest is four, too, and it is a turning point.

Angela

Yeah. Thank f*****g god. Because it was really hard for a while there.

Virginia

So as I said, while reading your book is trapped in my house, I really missed community. But you know, I’ll be honest, even when I don’t have COVID, I’m an introverted person. We live in a fairly rural area in the Hudson Valley. We are part of a small town but we don’t even live down in the town. We live out in the woods. What advice do you have for us? Being a better part of our communities feels so fundamental to mothering as social change to valuing care work, but how do you start if you’re not naturally good at that?

Angela

That’s a great question because I think a lot of people feel challenged or like, I want to do something but I don’t know what. The first thing I would say is that small is great. I remember  when you were in COVID, you had posted that a friend brought you groceries. So I think part of it is just that these little gestures actually do go a long way. If it’s safe to have a playdate, having a kid over to explore the woods by your house is very cool. Maybe it’s reaching out to someone you don’t know very well, maybe even a parent that you suspect you might not like that much, but just inviting them. Community doesn’t have to look any particular way. I think it is stepping outside yourself, feeling part of something bigger than yourself, and contributing to it in a hopefully positive way.

If you’re in a position of privilege, one great thing to do is to be a community member who does not reap the benefit of community. Who is in fact the person who is giving, whether that is money, or time.  It actually feels really good to care for somebody else and expect nothing in return. We always think community works in a reciprocal way. But maybe the effects are not immediate. This is my existential, philosophical answer. I think you can start small and simple.

Virginia

I like focusing on small, it feels doable. 

Angela 

It’s the littlest things that are so meaningful and that make you feel like a human being and make you feel like part of something. We are not all made for the grand gesture. You know, like, I am not. I’m so grateful to activists who are in DC, not giving up, talking to people. That’s not my role. Those are not where my energies are best served. I used to think maybe that I was rationalizing and then I was really just lazy and not that good a person. 

Virginia

I do struggle with that. 

Angela

I think Everyone has a role to play and sometimes it takes some work to figure out exactly what that is.

Meanwhile, you just started a fund through your newsletter to support democratic elections happening in states! I’m not blowing smoke up your ass. Like, that’s huge. And it’s really important and engaging your community.

Virginia

I appreciate that. I do think, especially for us introverted types, online community can be much more doable.

I also, of course, want to discuss your beautiful chapter “Mothering as Encouraging Appetites. I am quoted in this chapter, so full disclosure, I’m obviously biased to loving it.

Angela

Your writing and your work is definitely a guiding force and spirit in the chapter. So thank you for your work.

Virginia

Thank you. Well, it’s a really powerful piece of writing. You’re talking about owning our appetites, coming to terms with our bodies, and how one of the most powerful things we can do as mothers is help cultivate that in our kids. You wrote about realizing you don’t take after your own mother physically. You wrote:

I decided that being a little bit fat was the price I paid for always wanting seconds. I don’t know why I didn’t shrink myself, only allowed myself to expand both in size and in personality.

I love this so much. This is my mission for my children, just not wanting them to shrink themselves. And realizing that if this is the body that you have that allows you to be a happy and fully present person, this is the right body.

Angela

Yeah, that’s a perfect body.

Virginia

So can you tell us a little more about how you arrived at that place? And how it informs how you’re parenting your daughters now around food and body?

Angela

I’m not a stereotypical petite Filipino woman. I really struggled with that. I mean, now I look at pictures of myself in high school, and I’m like, I can’t believe I thought I was fat. But the message is so clear. Being thin and being white, that’s how people will recognize you as beautiful. I have struggled with my own self esteem issues with my own body acceptance and body issues. But I feel so grateful that diet culture didn’t interest me. I just really love eating. And I was like, I’m not gonna stop. I mean, part of it is that I really think like, to go back to something we were talking about earlier, I am just all about physical pleasure. And leisure. I love fudgy cheeses. I love really sour vinegar. I love spicy soup. I love chewy bread. I love all of these things and they make me so happy. And I’ve never been good at denying myself pleasure, which isn’t great in terms of impulse control as an adult sometimes. Definitely not in my 20s.

But there was something in me, this spirit, that I’m so grateful to little baby Angela for. There was just this spirit that was like, “No. I’m not I’m not going to be crushed.” And so, and I don’t know how I did it. Honestly, like, I’m not sure what I did. So there’s part of me that’s like, I want this to be the same for my girls but I’m not sure how to replicate it.

Part of it goes back to white feminism. I was just like, I’m never gonna fit in, so I might as I might as well just be me. And there’s something very freeing in that.

Virginia

I wondered if that was a piece of it. I often find women in very small bodies who live very close to the ideal have large struggles, in terms of internal struggle, because it’s like they’re so close and they can’t get there. I mean, fat people are experiencing oppression for their fatness. That’s different. But I’m talking about the internal stuff. And it’s not to say that fat folks don’t also have those struggles, because we do. But I think that when you are like a 98% on a scale that is completely unrealistic, the extreme tactics to get there feel reasonable because you could get there. Whereas I think if you have a body type that is never going to be it, you have to reckon with that earlier in some way. 

Angela

There is still a very dominant image of beauty in the United States. But I have this language now where I can say to my kids, like, “Being beautiful, it’s not like the most important thing. Because you decide what’s beautiful. And because it’s not the most important thing to be. The most important thing to be as a nice person, an empathetic person or a kind person.”

We have a long way to go, but representationally they see more. They go to school with mixed race kids now. My girls are mixed race. You know, my daughter’s already talking about how I am Brown Filipina, Daddy is American White.

My daughters looked at a picture of me from like 10, 12, 14 years ago, and they were like, “Mommy, you got fat.” And I was like, stay in it. Stay in it. You’ve been training for this, Angela. You’ve been training for this. And it was so hard, but I was like, “Yep, I got fat.” They weren’t weird in the moment. Fat to them is an adjective. And that’s all it is. The person who was making it hard was me! And I have tenderness for myself in that moment. But I felt like, oh, no, I’m doing a good job here. One of the things that I hear mothers committing to is like, I am going to continue to struggle with my body, but I want to do my best to not say disparaging things about my body in front of my children. Or to be honest with them about what’s hard about it.

What do you do?

Virginia

I’ve had that same conversation of “Yep, I’m fat. That’s right. Fat bodies are great bodies.” And I definitely have had that same experience of like, “Oh, God, this is the moment that I have been preparing for. And also people ask me for advice on this and so I really better get it right now.”

Angela

No, totally, that’s a lot of pressure.

Virginia

I better get a newsletter essay out of this. 

Angela

Writers are such traitors. When that was happening to me, I was laying on my bed and having that discussion with my girls like about how I’m fat. I’m trying not to cry, and I’m having all of these feelings. And this thing popped Into my mind. I was like, “Well, I’m gonna have to write about this.”

Virginia

Thanks, kids. Sorry that I do this with our conversations.

The other piece of it that you were emphasizing: That being beautiful doesn’t matter that much, and that it needs to matter less—that we both need to broaden our definition of beauty and we need to care less about beauty. It’s hard to hold both of those together, but it’s really the crux of it.

You had this line in the book which I really think you need to put on t-shirts:

“Eating is a necessity. Being beautiful is not.”

Thank you. That’s it.

Angela

That’s what it comes down to.

Virginia

You are allowed to reject this whole system that’s telling you your body isn’t good enough. You’re allowed to just say f**k it, and center your own pleasure and your own hunger. 

Angela

And you’re allowed to talk about how that is really hard sometimes. I’m contributing to the conversation and cultural change. But we can’t solve problems that we don’t talk about. And there’s so much shame and stigma around talking about bodies and how we feel about our own bodies. But yeah, like, 100% I just want to enjoy my life and my body. I could spend my whole life trying to make my body do a thing or I could just live my life in the body that I have. I take option two.

Virginia

Option two sounds much easier and less stressful. And more fun, for sure.

Butter For Your Burnt Toast

Angela

I recommend falling in love with your friends. I just went away on a weekend. It was supposed to be a writing retreat with my friend, the novelist Lydia Kiesling. We became friends because we published our books around the same time, our first books, and our books were both about mothering, so naturally, we were lumped together. But we’ve never lived in the same city and I’ve met her just a couple of times, but I’ve always had this feeling like I think we would be friends. And then I was like, how would we ever figure out how to do that? And then, one of the things in the pandemic is, I’ve just been like, I don’t want to waste time. I want to see my friends, I want to spend time with them. I want to make the most of it. And I want to invest in this friendship. And so I invited her to go away on a weekend with me and we were gonna write.

We had these adjacent little studio cabins, I would bring her coffee and a bagel with a fried egg. And then I would get into her bed and we watched “Love Is Blind” together. Like, speaking of physical pleasure, these are the things that we have been denied. And you know, I’m not saying, everyone go jump in bed with all of your friends. But thank God for vaccines, right? Like, that’s an option that is open to us again. I want to remind everyone that we can reawaken to things that are pleasurable and spending time being in the company of friends. What is better than friendship? There’s nothing better. Sex is great, but have you had a friend?

Virginia

I did a weekend with my three best friends from when we were in our 20s. And now we live in all different places. We haven’t seen each other, obviously, in a whole pandemic. We did a weekend together last month. I came home feeling high. Like I was just like, I had long conversations with these women that I love so much. Oh, it was amazing.

Angela 

It was like three days of one running conversation. 

Virginia

It is such a good feeling. Well, that is a wonderful recommendation. Mine is also very pleasure related, because I felt like that was gonna be a theme in our conversation. I am recommending romance novels, specifically Talia Hibbert and Jasmine Guillory. I have just discovered both of them. Two Black novelists who write about Black characters. The women are usually in larger bodies, and they are really hot and there’s a lot of good sex in these books. They’re romances, so happy endings are guaranteed, but they’re fun and sexy and I haven’t read romance in years and years. My image of Harlequin romance was very like, skinny white lady and you know, big ripped brooding guy and there’s been a total evolution in the genre. There’s all these great feminist writers writing very sex positive, women-centered—like the woman always get taken care of first. Like, chapters ahead, often. She gets hers and then they get around to him much later on. It’s pretty great.

Angela 

I love it! I feel like that’s all the stuff that were taught we don’t deserve. And to see it really front and center? It’s beautiful.

Virginia 

They’re just delightful. And very heteronormative so disclaimer on that. If listeners know of good, queer romance novelists, drop them in comments, because I’m here for that too! I just want people to be having sex and loving their bodies.

Well, Angela, thank you again, this was an amazing conversation. Tell people where they can find you and follow your work.

Angela

Thank you so much, Virginia. It was a little bit like falling in love.

You can find me on my website and on Instagram.

Virginia

And you all need to go and get Essential Labor. It is everywhere you get your books and required reading for Burnt Toast listeners. 

If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player or tell a friend about this episode.

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

If you asked any of these gentle parenting experts, they would say parenting is the most important work in the world. But they are also perpetually downplaying the hardest parts of it—which means not ever making visible the parts of parenting that we most need to change.

Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health.

Today I am chatting again with Sara Louise Petersen. She’s the Burnt Toast resident momfluencer expert, and you can catch her previous episodes here and here. Sara is also the author of an upcoming book about momfluencers and the awesome new Substack newsletter In Pursuit of Clean Countertops, which is a must-subscribe!

Today, Sara and I are chatting about the gentle parenting trend—and how it intersect with our conversations around gender roles, diet culture, and more.

If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! And subscribe to the Burnt Toast newsletter for episode transcripts, reported essays, and more.

PS. The Burnt Toast Giving Circle is almost to $9,000! We are so close to our goal and will soon be picking which state election to fund. So if you’ve been thinking about joining, we still need you! Here’s the Burnt Toast episode where I announced it, ICYMI, and the link to donate.

Episode 41 Transcript

Virginia

Hi Sara! You are the resident Burnt Toast momfluencer expert, which I admit is not a category of expert I knew that I needed when I launched the podcast, but it turns out it very much is. And you just started your own Substack newsletter! So let’s talk about that first.

Sara

It’s called In Pursuit of Clean Countertops. It’s not about countertops. It’s not about cleaning. The title is a nod to all of the things that momfluencer culture invites you to pursue and desire and want. I started it a little over a month ago based on an inflammatory post by @BallerinaFarm, Hannah Neeleman. She’s a big one. Her husband Daniel Neeleman started his own Instagram account relatively recently. He posted about the way that Hannah loves to clean and natural light and children like to congregate around her. It just made me feel a lot of a lot of feelings, Virginia. So that was the the post that started it at all.

Virginia

I had a lot of feelings about that post, as well. I also love your new Weekly WTF which is so cathartic to read.

Sara

My goal is to take the text threads that we all have with our friends, which can be more like, “Holy s**t. Did you see this? This is enraging this is infuriating,” and explore why is it infuriating. Why am I feeling these feelings? To expose the systemic issues at play.

Virginia

Today you are coming back on this podcast because we want to dissect a sub-trend of momfluencing culture. We’re talking about “gentle parenting.” I also see it called “positive parenting.” It’s important to say right off the bat, there is no official definition of this concept. Jessica Grose wrote a piece for The New York Times where she described it as “a sort of open-source mélange, interpreted and remixed by moms across the country.” And yes, that is really what it is.

Sara, do you want to read this definition that we found in this piece in The New Yorker by Jessica Winter, just so everyone’s on the same page about what we’re talking about here.

Sara

So, okay:

In its broadest outlines, gentle parenting centers on acknowledging a child’s feelings and the motivations behind challenging behavior, as opposed to correcting the behavior itself. The gentle parent holds firm boundaries, gives a child choices instead of orders, and eschews rewards, punishments, and threats—no sticker charts, no time-outs, no “I will turn this car around right now.” Instead of issuing commands (“Put on your shoes!”), the parent strives to understand why a child is acting out in the first place (“What’s up, honey? You don’t want to put your shoes on?”) or, perhaps, narrates the problem (“You’re playing with your trains because putting on shoes doesn’t feel good”).

The gently parented child, the theory goes, learns to recognize and control her emotions because a caregiver is consistently affirming those emotions as real and important. The parent provides a model for keeping one’s cool, but no overt incentives for doing so—the kid becomes a person who is self-regulating, kind, and conscientious because she wants to be, not because it will result in ice cream.

Virginia

That is what I want my children to be, is the thing. This is the goal I think a lot of us have for kids. And yet the path for getting there is so convoluted. Let’s talk about when we each first became aware of this trend and how it’s showing up in our parenting.

Sara

I became aware of it by way of attachment parenting, which was just everywhere when I had my first kid, who is now almost 10. Attachment parenting is the whole 'if the kid is crying, the kid is not being annoying. It’s expressing needs or desires and it’s your job as the parent to interpret the cries.’ In attachment parenting, you’re not thinking of the kid’s behavior as an impediment to your life, but as the kid expressing his or her or their individuality. I was all about this when I was pregnant. I read all the Dr. Sears books. And then, almost immediately after having my first child, I just felt like I was being gaslit. I remember reading something... Kelly Something?

Virginia

Oh, yes, KellyMom. Oh, I’m having a trauma response. It’s been a minute.

Sara

I know. So my kid was not sleeping and I remember reading on KellyMom something like “when cluster feeding happens and baby only wants mom, consider it a compliment.” And I was just like fuuuuuck this. F**k this!!

Virginia

It’s not a compliment. I’m so tired.

Sara

Attachment parenting kind of feeds into gentle parenting really well in that it’s all about prioritizing the child’s needs. And very rarely are the parent’s needs anywhere in the conversation.

Virginia

I had a pretty knee jerk reaction against attachment parenting, although, you know, my oldest is eight, so same time period. It was everywhere. But I was like, this is just code for the woman does everything. And I didn’t sign up for that. It’s not what we’ve agreed upon in my house. We’re not doing it.

But then the gentle parenting thing for me, it was discovering Janet Lansbury’s work when my older daughter was a toddler and the toddler tantrums started.

(Note from Virginia: I forgot to mention in our conversation that I’ve interviewed Lansbury for parenting articles a few times and think she’s incredibly smart and thoughtful, even if her tantrum advice didn’t always land for me. If you are also a Lansbury fan, this Ariel Levy profile is a must-read.)

I was constantly having to negotiate with this person who is totally irrational, according to the way I understand the world. And who is demanding a lot from me in ways that just don’t make sense anymore. At least with a baby, you’re like, well, you’re hungry, or you’re cold or—their needs are just more concrete and not emotional. But suddenly, in the toddler years, you’re sorting through this emotional stuff, as well as—I’m now going to get mail from people saying babies have emotions. I know they do. I know they have emotions. But there’s something about engaging with a tiny verbal child or quasi-verbal child that is just much harder for me.

So this whole gentle parenting approach, I sort of clung to it like a life raft. Will someone explain why these children scream so much? And gentle parenting has these '“answers” for you. But what was interesting, even when my older daughter was two or three, was how much it didn’t work with her. All this advice about, like, “What’s up? You don’t want to put your shoes on? Or you’re playing with trains because shoes don’t feel good?” She would just be enraged when I did that. I think it felt like very patronizing to her. She was like, “I am telling you how I feel through my yelling. You putting words to it is not making me better.”

Sara

Well, one of my challenges that you’re speaking to is: You’ll get this script and the lines that you’re reciting are at odds with your feelings, which are often rage, impatience, annoyance, frustration, despair. So if you’re reciting this script that is like, “I can see you’re having really big feelings right now. And that’s okay. Your big feelings are valid,” kids, I think can tell that you are feeding them a line from a script. Or at least my kids definitely can. It oftentimes in my household has made things worse.

Virginia

Yes. Because then you’re getting more frustrated while trying to recite the script.

Sara

And then you’re doubly frustrated because the script isn’t working.

Virginia

So, let’s talk more about the scripts because they are one of the most common tropes of the way gentle parenting is performed online. I want to talk about this Dr. Becky post. (Above.)

If I have a child screaming, “I hate you! I hope you die!,” which has happened in my life, me responding with calmness is almost denying the feeling. The goal, ostensibly, is to label their feeling, but you’re denying the feeling because you’re responding so stoically to their feelings. Something about it feels so inauthentic.

Sara

The other thing that just really stands out to me in this mantra is “the real story is my child’s pain.” There’s no room for the parents’ feelings in this mantra.

Virginia

I don’t disagree with the argument here that a small child using that word doesn’t really mean the word the way an adult does. Like, this isn’t them being verbally abusive. I understand that. But that doesn’t stop it from feeling bad when it happens. And we are supposed to so totally center the child’s emotions to the point of having no emotional response to it. It’s just never going to happen, that way.

Sara

What if the kid is saying “I HATE YOU” to the sibling? You have to attend to the kid who’s having feelings and saying I hate you. And you have to attend to the kid who is the target of the “I hate you.” It’s just so much more complicated than any of these scripts would have you believe.

Virginia

I think what’s interesting about this movement is there’s a lot of emphasis on not being punitive towards kids when they do bad things. When they hit, when they bite, when they say I hate you. An older model of parenting would have been to punish those behaviors. And their argument is: We’re never going to help kids move past these behaviors if we demonize the kid who’s doing the bad thing. Which I understand. But if you have a dynamic where an older brother has just slapped his little sister in the face, what is that girl learning? That someone who loves you can hurt you like that?

Sara

We don’t want our children to internalize our feelings. But I also don’t think it’s terrible if our kids see us have an emotional reaction, such as anger or frustration. It’s natural to have a reaction when somebody says, “I hate you,” or when you get slapped in the face. We need to allow for the parents’ humanity in all of this. If your facial expression becomes angry, that’s okay. You can still value the child’s humanity and individuality and hold space for both things.

Virginia

There’s a lot of talk about how if you tell your child how you feel, you’re making them codependent. I just feel like this is a real big leap because the alternative is you’re teaching your child their emotions should always be centered. That feels like a terrible model for future relationships.

Sara

In the Jessica Winter piece, she gives the example of if your kid is having a meltdown and you’re in the middle of vacuuming, you should by all means stop vacuuming and say to the kid, “your feelings are more important than housework.” Winter writes:

The housework that [Robin] Einzig says to put off is a synecdoche for everything that the gentle parent—and, perhaps, the gently parented child’s invisible siblings—must push aside in order to complete a transformation into a self-renouncing, perpetually present humanoid who has nothing but time and who is programmed for nothing but calm.”

Virginia 

And when is the vacuuming getting done? Maybe you don’t want to spend your whole day being interrupted during a chore that should take 15 minutes. This feels very much of a piece with what we see in momfleuncer culture. That’s @BallerinaFarm cleaning her house with a smile while the kids are frolicking around. This image of joy and calmness through domestic life doesn’t line up with anything I’ve ever experienced in domestic life. I don’t think it lines up with most people’s experience.

Sara

No. I constantly talk to my kids when I’m feeling overwhelmed or how a lot of work goes into keeping a house and raising kids. I’m sure some gentle parenting advocates would tell me I’m burdening my kids with my own suffering or whatever. But it’s true and nobody ever talked to me about this openly, about how being a parent and being a grown up is hard.

Virginia

Making that work visible is so important for so many reasons. We are never going to make progress on our larger cultural gender roles if we are continually downplaying this work. I’m sure if you asked any of these gentle parenting experts, they would say parenting is the most important work in the world. That’s why they’ve devoted their careers to giving us all the scripts! But when you’re perpetually downplaying the hard parts of it, and when you’re needing to perform it in this really controlled way, you’re not actually ever making visible the parts of it that we need to change. 

Sara

I can see a future where kids who are parented perfectly according to the gentle script, turn into parents themselves and say, like, “What the f**k? This is hard as s**t! Why did my parents always present as so calm and pulled together?”

Virginia

I mean, that assumes anyone’s able to actually execute gentle parenting. I f\have my doubts that anybody is this parent, even three days a week. The other night, my child who, like I said, screams in fury if I try a gentle parenting script, we were having a thing. I finally said to her, “I am a human being with emotions, and you are hurting my feelings right now.” And one part of my brain was like, You are breaking all the rules. You aren’t supposed to tell her that she’s hurting your feelings. But that was what turned the corner in that particular moment. I’m not saying she was like, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I hurt your feelings.” There was no apology. But it did make her pause for a moment and have this recognition of, Oh, right. I am powerful here. My words have impact. She took a slight step back and we were able to then get on a much better track.

A thought I had a lot, especially when I was parenting toddlers was: If an adult treated you like this, it would be an abusive relationship—and yet we are supposed to accept this wholeheartedly from children. It’s one of the things that is so hard about parenting. Because they are children and emotional capabilities are not fully developed, so you literally sign up for accepting abuse for several years. It’s not abuse, but it does not feel great.

Sara

I’m sure you’ve had this experience, where you are heated, you are furious, you’re having big emotions and the person you’re arguing with is stoic and calm and seemingly unaffected by your big emotions.

Virginia

It’s the worst!

Sara

It’s the worst. So I can totally understand why being the kid at the receiving end of these scripts would be infuriating. Like, I’m kicking and screaming and like spitting at you. Why isn’t this having any impact?

Virginia

It feels kind of manipulative in that way, like you’re trying to make them feel powerless. Because kids want a reaction. They’re looking for connection. Often the yelling is an attempt to get your attention and get your connection. So if you’re giving them Robot Mom, you’re not connecting with them authentically.

Virginia

Okay, so another big theme, and also m big division point with gentle parenting, is the fact that they frame timeouts as an act of trauma. This is a @biglittlefeelings post. They are big in this space and I have a lot of feelings about that. Because, with both my kids, there are times when timeouts save my family. We all need to step away from each other. I don’t think it is punitive or traumatizing to teach a kid that when your feelings are so big that you can only deliver them in hurtful ways that you need to take some time alone We call them “cool downs” which is totally trying to soften the language. But giving myself permission to use those with my kids has helped so much.

Sara

I have a kid who, when she’s having her biggest feelings, will remove herself. Like, her instinct is to go and sob sob, sob for 15 minutes. But if I try to go in before 15 minutes, it’s bad. It’s only after that she has that cathartic release that she’s even capable of connecting. 

Virginia

I am sure there are kids who want to collapse on you and need that sort of experience. But recognizing that, if you yourself are someone who needs to go be alone to think through your big feelings, maybe your kid needs that, too. And maybe it’s okay.

Sara

Another thing that I want to highlight that’s giving me some big feelings is the caption. It says:

When the parental response is to isolate the child, an instinctual psychological need of the child goes unmet. In fact, brain imaging shows that the experience of relational pain–like that caused by rejection–looks very similar to the experience of physical pain in terms of brain activity.

This is not great. 

Virginia

There’s no citation, there’s no science. We would need to fact check the heck out of that.

Sara

It just feels so manipulative and like playing into parental shame and guilt.

Virginia

I bet it’s stemming from the same research used to argue for attachment parenting, about how if you let a baby cry it out, you’re inflicting physical pain on them. And then when we looked at which data they were using, it was children who’d been neglected for months in orphanages. It was not children in loving homes who are being asked to cry for 15 minutes to fall asleep. I’m guessing this is orphanage research again and that research is very important for understanding the impact of true trauma. But it is not helpful to give to parents who are trying really hard to be decent parents. 

The other trope I wanted to hit on is: Speaking in the child’s voice. This is a post from Robin Einzig’s Facebook page:

Sara

I just want to describe the image because it’s doing a lot of work. It’s a painting of a very cherubic looking three or four year old, whose eyes are just full of innocent wonder and who has like rosy little pursed lips. She just looks like a blank canvas that you as the parent might be in danger of destroying. So it says, “When you cut it for me, write it for me, open it for me, set it up for me, draw it for me, and make it for me or find it for me. All I learned is that you do it better than I do. So I’ll let you do it. In the textbooks, this is called learned helplessness, but actually I call it clever on the part of the child and less than clever on the part of the adult.”

Virginia

Sick burn from a gentle parenting expert. 

Sara

Also the quote says “quote unknown.”

Virginia

I mean, obviously the quote is unknown. They just made it up. They’re not quoting a human child because no child has ever said, “You know Mom, when you do this for me, all I learned is that you’re better at things than me.” 

Sara

So this one’s really thrown me for a loop.

Virginia

It’s another one of those super paralyzing pieces of advice. I remember reading some advice like this. The argument was, if you’re drawing with your child and if they see how you draw a cat, then they’ll never learn how to draw a cat themselves, like in their own vision of a cat. And I remember trying to do that and being like, well, this just sucked all the fun out of drawing. I’m actually kind of good at drawing cats and now I feel like I can’t draw a cat. You’re simultaneously supposed to do nothing for them so they can have all of these learning experiences, yet also be emotionally available to the point you can’t get your vacuuming done.

Sara

How the hell are you supposed to get anything done if you’re letting a two-year-old do all these things? You will spend your entire day having the two-year-old cut something. 

Virginia

This is just one of those constant tensions of parenting where of course they have to eventually learn to do these things for themselves. But when you’re trying to get out of the door or set them up with an activity, so you can get things done, of course, you’re going to do the hard parts for them. Because life demands it.

Sara

Because of life! Like really. Because of life.

Virginia

One more good quote from the Jessica Winter piece:

Gentle-parenting advocates are near-unanimous in the view that a child should never be told that she “made Mommy sad”—she should focus on her internal weather rather than peering out the window. “Good job!” is usually not O.K., even if you corroborate why the job is good. “Because I said so” is never O.K., no matter how many times a child asks why she has to go to bed.

So Sara, when we were talking about this trend, you really found the mom influencer to end all momfluencers. She’s definitely at the most extreme end of the spectrum. So tell us about @milkgiver, please.

Sara

So I’ve been following her for a long time. This type of momfluencer is catnip for me because they present with this very cool hipster, maybe used to live in Brooklyn type of vibe. So I’m initially attracted by their Shaker style fisherman’s sweaters. And then I get lured into the messaging, which often gets into very intense prescriptive nutrition stuff. There’s a lot of beef liver gummy making. 

Virginia

She’s in a striped caftan type garment. I mean, I think I have the same mug as her right here because you know, #influenced. I’m pretty sure she has an East Fork pottery mug. So I’m not here to hate on her mug choice.

Sara

I have yet to pull the trigger, but I’m sure I will, Virginia. I’m sure I will.

Virginia

You will not be sorry.

Anyway, she’s basically buried in children while having her morning coffee, is the image.

Sara

You know Mary Cassatt paintings? It’s giving me those vibes. Like, you know, adoring children, beatific mother. It’s a long post, the thesis of which is that we, as mothers have so much power over giving our children happy, trauma-free childhoods. She says,

…for the most part, I, as a mother, hold the incredible power of creating happy childhoods for my little ones or not so happy childhoods…

And this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

there have been so many recurring themes in my life and something I keep hearing in the health and wellness circles is how disease or illness can be caused by past trauma. how interesting is that to think about?

So, I’m not loving the direct connection between “I slammed the door or put my kid in timeout or lose my temper” and “down the road my kids might get cancer.”

Virginia

It defies the major thesis of all parenting research, which is that good enough parenting is all you really need. It’s reminding me quite a lot of the shaming that fat moms get. That your unruly body will be the cause of all of this downfall to your children. And again, that’s not borne out by research.

Sara

I have a therapist friend who is always like, “I actually take a lot of comfort in the fact that like, my kids can talk about whatever parts of their childhood in therapy later down the road. That’s okay.”

Virginia

That’s a great point.

Sara

It’s okay if 20 years from now, my kid is like, “Mom always bitched about cleaning and how hard childcare was.” That’s not the end of the world.

Virginia

There are a lot of tools we can give our kids—including future therapy—to make up for our imperfections. I’m just looking at @milkgiver’s grid now and it is many whimsical hats. It is a lot of homemade. A homemade dollhouse, a homemade garland. Oh, and we should talk about the nutrition piece a little more because I definitely want us to hit on the way gentle parenting intersects with diet culture. Did you say she’s into calf liver gummies?

Sara

There are so many gummies. So many.

Virginia

How do you even make liver into a gummy? I know she’ll have a tutorial for me.

[Note from Virginia: Our post-recording fact-check revealed that @milkgiver actually makes beef gelatin gummies. We regret this error but not too much because calf liver gummies will surely be next.]

Wait, can we also talk about the fact this woman doesn’t have a name? She’s just @milkgiver. 

Sara

I do know her first name just because I’ve been following her forever, but yeah the fact that her identity is the giving of milk to children by way of her Instagram handle says a lot. 

Virginia

Even in the bio line, it’s just wife and mother of three, homeschooling, gentle parenting, Orthodox Christianity, knitting, nutrition, simple living. No name, no identity for you outside of how you serve your family. 

Sara

Do you see the photo on the grid with the dried oranges?

Virginia

Okay, so she writes:

How did I get here? From being a fast food junkie, to vegan teen, to full out cigarette and alcohol addicted young adult to mama of three religiously wearing her blue blocker glasses in the evenings, taking raw liver shots and avoiding fluoride at all costs. This crunchy mama road isn’t always an easy one, and high five to anyone else desperately trying to keep their kids away from the junk being thrown at them right and left, I see you! It’s not always an easy path, but it is one I enjoy and ultimately follow because I like feeling good, I like keeping my kids healthy, and I like having energy, because that helps me to be a better mom. That’s my top goal in life currently, and being mostly healthy helps A LOT with it. It’d also be cool to live a long time. But who knows 😉🤎 #crunchymama #embracethecrunch

Oh, Sara. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.

Sara

I knew you wouldn’t.

Virginia

I mean, she’s just combining so many different things. “Fast food junkie” is not the same thing as an alcoholic. Let’s be real clear about that. Addiction is a terrible disease that destroys lives. Eating a lot of fast food is not the same thing.

Sara

Even even the term junkie in that context.

Virginia

You are not a junkie because you like fast food.

And then this, this whole message of, okay, you have to take the hardest road to do everything. Even if you don’t want to eat fast food every day, there’s a big gulf between that and taking raw liver shots and avoiding fluoride. We’re just combining every possible wellness trend. It’s like she needs to check every single box here in a way that’s exhausting and overwhelming, and not at all doable for anybody. And also not necessary. Nobody needs to take raw liver shots in their lives. People have lived to be 100 years old without ever taking raw liver shots.

Sara

I also don’t like the the use of the word “desperate.” She says, “high five to anyone else desperately trying to keep their kids away from the junk.” How about we desperately try to like give all kids access to food, period?

Virginia

That would be cool.

Sara

It just feels like such a classic trope of the self-optimizing white motherhood stuff. “Because I like feeling good. I like keeping my kids healthy.” The implication is that if she were not to follow all these super strict guidelines, she would knowingly be not giving her kids a healthy life. 

Virginia

Also this vibe of, “oh well, that’s just me! I like feeling good. I like having healthy kids.” Oh, really? Do you think mothers living in poverty don’t like to feel good? They’re not feeding their kids enough food every day because they don’t like having healthy kids? This isn’t a whimsical choice for you. This is something you can do because you have a ton of privilege.

Let’s also talk about if you are a parent desperately trying to keep your kid away from junk food, how fast that’s going backfire and harm your child’s relationship with junk food. I mean, how many letters do I get? (For starters: This one, this one, this one, and this one.) This is probably the number one question I am asked. Sneaking food is just how it plays out every time because your kids know that your raw liver gummies are not as delicious as their friends gummy bears.

Sara

The other thing that’s kind of hysterical to me is this is also not in agreement with gentle parenting. We’re supposed to enable our kids to have the tools within themselves to navigate life. So this feels like a direct contradiction. 

Virginia

The interesting thing about the way gentle parenting and diet culture intersect is most gentle parenting folks are really big proponents of Division of Responsibility, which is about empowering kids to listen to their bodies and trust their own hunger and fullness. So you’re not counting bites, you’re not requiring them to finish stuff or eat their broccoli before they have the cookie. The problem is, it gets layered in with this idea of, “I have to choose things like calf flavored gummies and green smoothies and all of these perfectly healthy things.” And then I’m frustrated because my kids still is asking for Little Bites muffins and not my homemade spelt muffins or whatever. It’s using Division of Responsibility as a script for diet culture. You’re still trying to control them, but you’ve coopted this other rhetoric to do it. 

Sara

I’m sure you’ve written and talked about this before, but what happens if you are so hyper-controlling the environment that your kid is choosing from? What happens when your kid enters the real world of actual food choice?

Virginia

Those are the kids who go on playdates and eat the whole sleeve of Oreos at their friend’s house or eat sugar by the spoonful. I am not shaming those kids, I am not shaming those parents. It’s a totally natural response. You’ve been restricted, these foods have been banned. Forbidden fruit is really powerful and really tempting. Your mom’s not gonna let this stuff in the house. So it’s super understandable.

This is another thing where they give us a lot of scripts! Let’s talk about this @biglittlefeelings post (above).

Sara

My response as my kid is, “I don’t want either bowl. F**k the bowl, lady!”

Virginia

Giving them a choice of the bowls is not going to distract them from the fact that they want cereal. Especially if you’re not offering cereal very often. I’m not saying you should cave in the moment and be a short order cook and just like immediately whisk off the bowl of yogurt and granola and give them the cereal. But you might do better to say, “let me pack cereal for your snack for school,” or “I totally hear you. Let’s make sure we have cereal for breakfast tomorrow.” If we’re gonna give kids permission to have all their big feelings, let’s spend some time on the big feeling about cereal instead of just like moving right past it and trying to distract them with the bowl choices.

Again, it runs so counter to the larger message of what they tell us to do. But she doesn’t want to give in on the cereal, so she’s trying to control the food from a diet culture perspective— and then the gentle parenting quickly falls apart in the face of that goal.

I also want to say it’s fine if sometimes you do say, “yeah, you know what, I’m gonna grab you the bowl of cereal.” Making a bowl of cereal is not the most time consuming thing. If this allows you to move on with your morning because it’s just been one of those mornings, it’s fine. It happens. We don’t need to feel like we failed because we did that. That’s another piece of this: When you don’t follow the scripts, you have to feel like you got it wrong.

Sara

Totally.

Virginia

Let’s wrap up by talking about some parenting folks we do like.

The person that I really liked that I wanted to talk about is Claire Lerner. She is the author of the book, Why Is My Child in Charge. I am going to put in a caveat that her chapter on food is not totally there. There’s definitely some diet culture stuff in it. But this was a really useful book for me to read because she does help parents understand why we end up in those power struggles. And a big thing I like is that she’s pro-timeouts when the kid needs it. She recognizes a place for them.

She also really encourages parents to hold boundaries and not feel guilty about it. One line that she uses that I like is “you don’t have to like this.” I’ve started using this when I do say no to my kids about something and they throw a fit. I’m like, “You don’t have to like it, but this is what we’re doing.” And that has been so liberating. Because of course they’re having a tantrum. They don’t like being told TV is done for the day. But they don’t have to like it, we’re just doing it.

Sara

@Destini.Ann is someone I love. She’s just so approachable and the mother’s emotions are always valued. Her Instagram bio says “sign up for parent coaching below. Peaceful parent, but real AF.” That kind of tells you what you need to know. 

Virginia

Yeah, I like it. I like it a lot. “Gentle is not my default.”

Sara

Yes. Let’s acknowledge that gentleness is not everybody’s default and is labor.

Another great one is @EricaMBurrell. I’ll limk to one of her reels where she’s talking about how gentle parenting is not something that white people own.

Virginia

That’s really interesting because that certainly is the impression you get on Instagram.

Sara

Black parents have talked a lot about how Black culture plays into parenting mores and how there is a lot of judgment lobbed by white people towards Black parenting, without bothering to engage with Black culture.

Virginia

Yeah, that’s excellent. And then @supernova_momma?

Sara

In her Instagram bio it says “Certified Positive Discipline Parent Educator, Mother of Two, Autism /Neurodiversity Acceptance, Sometimes I twerk.” A lot of her content speaks specifically to neurodiversity, which I can imagine being so so tricky to maneuver in the gentle parenting space.

Virginia

I think anytime your kid is dealing with something extra—whether it’s a disability, neurodiversity, or certain life experiences—there is this disconnect. You try to follow the rules they’re laying out and your kid has a completely opposite reaction to it and then you feel like you did something wrong, when in fact, the advice wasn’t inclusive and wasn’t thinking about your kid at all.

Sara

Almost all the problems with gentle parenting arise from not respecting both the parent’s individuality and the kid’s individuality. Both you and I have talked about specific parenting experiences where we recognize, we intuit what our kid needs in that moment. We can intuit that this script is not going to work for either of us. So we make a choice based on our knowledge of our kids’ specific needs and specific personalities and our own specific needs and specific personalities.

Virginia

I think it speaks to the fact that, as a culture, we don’t really empower parents—we especially don’t empower moms—to have that confidence in ourselves. You’re simultaneously expected to know exactly what to do and to have all this motherly intuition that guides you perfectly. But you’re also not really empowered to feel like you can make the right choices without outside experts, because we have such rigid standards and expectations. I just think it is helpful to start to realize you can make choices for yourself on this stuff. There is not a parenting police. Dr Becky’s not going to come to your house and edit your scripts.

Butter For Your Burnt Toast

Sara

My new obsession is Jessica Defino’s newsletter. It’s called The Unpublishable and it’s a takedown of the beauty industry. I just find it so, so delicious. She’s so funny. She’s so smart. I interviewed her recently for my newsletter

Virginia

It is so rare to find beauty content that is not tied to advertising—like so, so, so rare. So she’s a great voice. Hopefully she will be on a Burnt Toast episode soon. Stay tuned! It’s in the works. 

Okay, my recommendation is a recommendation that I feel I’ve been journeying to for a long time, that I was always meant to be this person and now I finally am.

I am now someone who does puzzles.

I think no one is surprised, if you know me at all, that I am now in the puzzling phase of my life, that I am I am a puzzler. I started it while we were on vacation. We had two days of a sick kid because that’s how family vacations roll. And so we were in our Airbnb and they had a bunch of puzzles. And I was like, I’m gonna do some puzzles while we’re hanging out here. It was so soothing!

I think my husband always knew this about me, before I knew it about myself because several years ago for Christmas, he had given me an 1000 piece puzzle and he’d given me this cool felt mat thing (similar to this one). So you can do the puzzle but you can also roll it up if you’re not done. Because I have a dog and kids and you know, I can’t leave the puzzle out all the time. So I came home and dug it out of the closet and now I’m working on this puzzle in the evenings. I’m so happy. I’m just so happy. It was definitely at the point on vacation where my kids were like, “can we have lunch?” And I was like, “No, I’m doing this puzzle.”

Sara

It sucks you in. 

Virginia

Yeah, I was like, “I’m not a parent right now. I’m a puzzler. You have to raise yourself.”

Sara

When I will start a puzzle, the kids will be nowhere in sight to do the hard edges or whatever, and then they’ll come in like little vultures as soon as I’m down to like 50 pieces. Like, back off. Don’t steal my thunder.

Virginia

Yeah, mine did not want to do it at all. My older daughter did sort of like sit and haze me while I was doing it for a while, which was fun for both of us. But I think she’s got a puzzler in her, too. She’s just not there yet. I think it’ll come out, especially now that this is my life.

Sara

And your identity.

Virginia

It’s my identity now. And what it’s really great for is, this week I had a piece getting some pushback on Twitter and I was having a day where looking at Twitter was not going to be helpful to me. That evening, I put the phone down and puzzled away instead of looking at Twitter. I was really proud of myself!

All right, Sara. Thank you so much for being here. Tell everyone where we can find you and find your newsletter!

Sara

Definitely check out my newsletter, it’s called In Pursuit of Clean Countertops. I’m on Instagram at @SLouisePeterson and I am on Twitter as the same thing.

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

“Sometimes I’ve just shoved some granola in my face, because I knew that I needed to have some fuel in my body. I didn’t really enjoy it. And that’s okay. That’s absolutely appropriate for that moment.”

Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health.

Today I am chatting with Leanne Brown who is the author of the cookbooks Good and Cheap and Good Enough. Leanne focuses on making cooking more accessible and affordable. She also does a lot of important work challenging our perceptions around what cooking should be and how we can make it into whatever we want it to be, including stuff on toast or bowls of cereal.

If you’re feeling stressed about family meals or about feeding yourself, or if cooking is feeling hard for you, whether it’s because of who you’re feeding or your relationship with food: Leanne’s work may be a helpful starting point in terms of growing your confidence around food and cooking and recognizing what’s useful and what’s not useful.

If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! And subscribe to the Burnt Toast newsletter for episode transcripts, reported essays, and more.

PS. The Burnt Toast Giving Circle is almost to $9,000! We are so close to our goal. And if you’ve been thinking about joining, we still need you! Here’s the Burnt Toast episode where I announced it, ICYMI, and the link to donate.

Episode 40 Transcript

Virginia

Hi Leanne! Why don’t we start by having you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work?

Leanne

I’m a cookbook author, but at the same time, I don’t think that that really describes what I do. It’s certainly a huge part of what I do—I love the creating cookbooks aspect. What I really want to do is welcome anyone and everyone into the kitchen. And I think I have a particular soft spot in my heart for people who don’t really think of themselves as cooks or aren’t necessarily as naturally attracted to cooking. I believe that they have a place in the kitchen. Becoming comfortable with cooking—not even cooking but simply making food for oneself and for those in your life that you want to make food for—brings so much empowerment. My passion is in connecting with people, and finding a way to make peace with food in your life. 

Virginia

I am someone who loves cooking, but I’m also very big on not putting cooking on such a pedestal, because it’s so often held to these impossible standards. So I went on this little journey reading your work where at first I was like, Oh sure, cooking solves everything, fine. And then I was like, Oh, wait, but she’s also saying it’s okay if you don’t like cooking!

Leanne

When I introduce myself as a cookbook author, it puts me into the world of food media. Which is all these videos, TV shows, and beautiful magazines, and it’s all this glorification of food. There’s obviously a place for that. I think it adds so much to our lives and our culture. There’s this artistic aspect to it, and there’s so much beauty in it. 

But at the same time: I hear from so many people who say, “Oh, I’m a terrible cook.” Why are any of us judging ourselves like that? So long as you’re able to feed your body every day, that’s really all that matters.

I’ve been going through a lot of family emergency stuff and that means that I don’t have a very big appetite a lot of the time because I have a nervous tummy. So sometimes I’m just like, well, I just shoved some granola in my face, because I knew that I needed to have some fuel in my body. I didn’t really enjoy it. And that’s totally okay. That’s appropriate for this moment. There are so many times in life like that and I shouldn’t internalize them as ‘I’m a failure,’ or ‘what kind of a cook am I?’ But I’ve gone through periods of life where I’ve felt that way. So I really want to share this message with others, because I think it’s such an important balance to all that beautiful, curated stuff that we see all the time.

Virginia

As you’re talking, I’m just thinking: Why do we expect ourselves as home cooks to live up to this standard? It would be like expecting to do your taxes as well as a professional accountant or solve your own medical crisis. We need professionals! Cooking is a professional skill. And it’s this thing we have to do day-to-day. But why do you expect yourself to execute it like someone who’s had years of training and has a whole team and a huge budget? I feel like this has to be somewhat rooted in the way we devalue cooking as women’s work. We’re socially conditioned to have cooking be a default part of our gender identity, so it’s not valued or made visible—and yet we’re also expected to be effortlessly great at it.

Leanne

We could absolutely do a whole episode trying to unpack that.

Virginia

Well, let’s talk about the new cookbook. So it’s called Good Enough and it is so much more than a cookbook. It’s a different genre of book because you have recipes—and the recipes are wonderful—but then you have just essay after beautiful essay. Many of them are about why it is okay, and even necessary, to lower the bar and to lower our standards around food and ourselves. You’re giving us permission to do less. Tell us a little more about what made you want to write a cookbook that essentially gives people permission not to cook.