Stay ConnectedBurnt Toast is your body liberation community. We’re working to dismantle diet culture and anti-fat bias, and we have a lot of strong opinions about comfy pants.
Co-hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (NYT-bestselling author of FAT TALK) and Corinne Fay (author of the popular plus size fashion newsletter Big Undies).
Copyright: © Virginia Sole-Smith
This month we’re unpacking content from Rosey Beeme, Brianne Huntsman, and other influencers who long identified as body positive, plus size fashion folks—and now are talking proudly about their intentional weight loss journeys. But it’s not a moral failing if you can’t wipe your own ass.
CW: This episode includes some unavoidable discussion of intentional weight loss and links to posts that promote it. Take care of yourselves!
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Corinne
Are you ready? We’re tackling a big one today.
Virginia
That we have been ambivalent about tackling, I want to say. Especially you? You have been ambivalent.
Corinne
I have been ambivalent. It’s a tough topic, but a lot of you have asked us to talk about this.
So we’re going to talk about plus size influencers, Ozempic, and intentional weight loss.
Virginia
The Rosey Beeme of it all.
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
Follow us on social!
Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.
Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.
Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.
Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
You’re listening to Burnt Toast!I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, and today my guest is my good friend Lyz Lenz.lyz is a journalist living in Iowa. She is the writer behind the newsletter Men Yell at Me, and the New York Times bestselling author of This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life. In this brave, brilliant, impeccably researched book, Lyz offers us a clear solution to the systemic inequalities within the institution of marriage—and it’s far more liberating than I ever imagined it could be.Lyz’s work has been really important to me personally in the last year. This episode first ran in February and it is the most downloaded episode ever of the Burnt Toast Podcast. Which is very interesting because whenever I talk about divorce in this space, I also get a lot of pushback…from the men, of course. But also from women who are anxious and eager to defend how marriage has worked for them.What this tells me is that interrogating the institution of marriage is important work, wherever you are on the spectrum of married, partnered, divorce-curious, divorced, or single. And no matter what you choose personally, there are a lot of good reasons for a lot of us to be less afraid of divorce.You can order This American Ex-Wife from the Burnt Toast Bookshop. Don’t forget, you can always take 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talkfrom Split Rock Books! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)Episode 153 TranscriptVirginiaOkay, I have a listener question that seems like the perfect kickoff for us. This person says: “Is there such a thing as a good marriage that lasts a lifetime, or should we rethink the whole institution?” Lyz, go!LyzWow, really just getting right to the heart of it. So I think there are a couple assumptions baked into that question. Like the assumption that a good marriage lasts a lifetime. I think that there are a lot of good relationships that do not last a lifetime.And I don’t think that’s always just about divorce! Life is full of complications. There’s tragedy, there’s so much we can’t control. So I think having this idea in your head of “a good marriage lasts for your entire life” is really limiting and puts us in places where we don’t want to be, where you’re just holding on to something that no longer serves you because you have this idea of what life is supposed to be. What I think we need to do is reframe what our idea of a successful relationship looks like.But to answer the question directly: Yes, we should rethink the institution of marriage—and not just its longevity. We need to rethink the way in which we personally practice marriage and the way in which societally we enforce marriage and the rules of marriage.Because you can be two very fair, egalitarian, loving people going into a union. You get married and five years down the road, you have two little kids and you’re wondering where all that equality went. And it didn’t leave for lack of trying, it left for lack of societal support. It left because you were not getting paid as much as your husband. That’s a huge problem. America was closing that wage gap and we petered out around 2008. We haven’t made any gains on that. And child care is unaffordable, so you then take on that burden.And then, it’s really hard to rethink who does the grocery shop. Who washes the floors? Who does the laundry? And these are just the tiny little things where you compromise, and you compromise, you compromise. Then all of a sudden, you’re at a place where you’re waking up one morning and you’re like, “I thought I married a feminist.” You’re like, we thought we were going to be so equal and we couldn’t. And that’s the way that we’ve constructed marriage as a society.I think it’s important to reframe our idea of what does “success” look like? We should be asking ourselves, what does a successful life looks like for me? What is my happiness? Center your happiness, because we have no guarantees in this life. Like, you can be in love with somebody and they can leave. You can’t control that, right? So you have to say, “What does a good, happy, successful life look like to me, knowing that there are variables in this world that I cannot control?”What I’m asking women to do is to center their own happiness and center their success in a way that is radical. And probably going to be deeply destabilizing for their relationships.VirginiaTo your point about the systemic structures that are in place that make this such an impossible project: I was texting with our mutual friend Sara Petersen and she was sending me screenshots of registering her youngest for kindergarten. And there was only one spot on the form to put down a parent’s name. She was like, “So if I can’t even list their dad, that means their dad is never going to get called when the kid is sick.” It’s just built right in. There’s a default assumption of who’s doing this labor and this mental load.LyzThere was a study that I saw where researchers were having men email the school to set up a time to talk about their kid. The email would say something like, “I am available at this time and if you can’t make those times, then my wife is available.” And every time the school would be like, “Have your wife come in.” Even when the fathers were taking initiative, the bias of the people on the other end was to always prefer the mother. And you know, I’m never gonna go easy on a guy in any situation, but it’s also like the deck is stacked against these guys who do want to take paternity leave, maybe they do want to be the primary care parent.With my own kids’ school, we have to keep saying, “There are two households. You need to communicate with both of us.” Like, if you sent home a form we need two copies or just send it in an email. This isn’t that hard. They just get so flustered when you’re like, “Talk to both of us. We are both the parents and we’re split up, so we’re not in the same house.”We do communicate pretty well about school stuff, but a form had gone to my ex’s house and he hadn’t seen it. I mean, God bless, it was my 10-year-old son. There’s a little bit of chaos involved there. So none of us had seen this form until my 10-year-old was like, “Oh, in three days I have this project due.” 10 year olds need to step up, this is a time to learn, but it’s also just one of those things.VirginiaOh, it is so real. Divorce mental load is on my list first to talk about. LyzDo you want to talk about it? I’m so ready to talk about divorce mental load.VirginiaYes. I need to vent for a second about our school district’s bus department. My kids’ dad lives on the same street as me now. He just bought a house a few doors down which is, in theory, the dream joint custody scenario. But getting the bus to understand that it’s going to stop at two places—like, on some days you’re going to stop here and on some days you’re going to stop here. I have resorted to putting a color-coded tag on my six-year-old that says mom or dad—I’m labeling on her backpack, not her, to be clear. But that is the only way I can ensure she goes to the right place, because the guy who runs the bus system was like, “Your custody schedule is really complicated for us. Do you think you could simplify?” and I was like, “No, I’m not going to change my custody schedule to make the director of transportation’s life easier.”Divorce mental loadLyzSir, have you never heard of people splitting up before?Another divorce mental load thing is every year, at the beginning of the school year, I sit down—and I take a day, because I am not good at scheduling. My mind is not an organized mind. I have had to learn because I am a woman, right? So I had to learn how to be organized.VirginiaI am expected to have these skills.LyzI love it when men are like, “I’m just not good at it.” And I’m like eye twitch, eye twitch “Me either, bro.”VirginiaMust be nice to have that option. LyzI would love to get to suck at something. My goal for the future is to be more incompetent. So I have to take a whole day, sometimes two days, and just sit down before the school year starts. And sometime in July, too, because I have to get it done early. But I sit down and I organize sports schedules, music schedules, the whole school schedule into the calendar. My daughter is a sports girl so I get the I get all the swim meets, tentative and non-tentative. in the calendar. I get that updated practice schedule on the calendar. The kids love their music lessons and can’t quit them, so we have piano and then drums and clarinet. It’s all of these things and I sit down and I do it. It makes me resentful because we split up because I was sick of doing all the work. And here I am, I have to take off two days to focus on this. I don’t get paid for this. And I have to do it. But I mean, I’d so much rather have this than anything else.Every year, we go to the school open house and every year I look the teachers deadass in the eyes and I go, “We are divorced. We need two copies of what you are handing out to us.” So it doesn’t end, but at least now I can sleep alone.VirginiaI think what we’re saying is, divorce mental load is just an extension of the way the system of marriage is built on the premise that the wife will do all the work. Because there is really no system of divorce, right? There is no way in which our systems are built for divorced families other than to continue to assume that the wife will do all the work.LyzYes. Even though divorce has been around since the foundation of America. If you read my book, you will see. It’s literally baked into our foundation. Thomas Jefferson, actually, wrote this brief called “in defense of divorce.” He was basically saying, we founded this country on liberty for all so we should have the liberty to leave marriages. Except it was Thomas Jefferson, so he was like, “but the man gets the liberty.” I remember reading that and I was like, whoa, Thomas! Like, thank you. And then he was actually like, a man has the liberty to leave his marriage if his wife is not putting out, basically. So I was like, oh, there it is. But at Seneca Falls, women were just like, hey, by the way, you founded a country on freedom and independence and then you get mad when we say we want freedom and independence. Like, hell yeah, sisters. So divorce has been around, and you’d think we would figure it out. But we’re not going to figure it out because that would require respecting women’s autonomy.VirginiaAnd yet, as you’re saying, as I also want to say so clearly: Divorce has been better for you. Divorce has been so much better for me. It is better for every woman we know who has gotten divorced. And when I read your book, I kept thinking about how there have been so many books about mom rage. All exploring these questions: Why are women so angry? Why are mothers so angry?And I am honestly really over that genre, not to criticize those authors who I think are doing really meaningful work. But I was talking to another divorced friend about this, and I think when we talk about “mom rage,” we usually mean “marriage rage.” Women are miserable and overburdened in marriages because of how marriage is designed to fail us, and because so many heterosexual men are comfortable with that dynamic. And so I just love that your book gives us a hopeful alternative. LyzIt reminds me of something I once read that was about this genre of “unsatisfied housewife books.” It was just like, “They can dress up their rage, they can dress up their anxiety, they can put little frills and bows on it, but it never goes anywhere. You just have to live with it.” And I know this isn’t the end goal of a lot of these projects, but there’s a part of me that worries about normalizing that. Sure you’re mad, but you don’t go anywhere. You don’t change anything.I was talking to a friend the other day who was like, “My job is just so hard to do with three kids and so I’m really angry at my job.” And I was like, “Is it hard for your husband to do his job with three kids? Why is it not hard for him?”It’s easier to take that rage and channel it towards things that we cannot change. Because I think we’re really afraid of what that other side would look like. I think deep down inside we know it’s going to break our relationships. Let’s be mad at what deserves our rage. It’s the system that’s oppressing us. It’s not your job because your partner has a job and he can do it. Get mad at the person who’s not wiping the counters. But it’s exhausting, right? You’re like, “I love him.”VirginiaWe get that people love their husbands.LyzI mean, do we?VirginiaWe hear you.LyzIt’s a concept that intellectually I grasp, yes.VirginiaWe’re just saying: Building your entire life’s happiness based on the premise of romantic love is a shaky, shaky business.LyzAt best. And then, people will say, “Well, he is a good man and I’ll never find anything better.” One of the reasons I wanted to write this book is to say: You are that something better.Even if you are in a good relationship, you have to be that something better. Because, again, you do not know what is going to happen. He could Charles Lindbergh you and have a second family in Germany. Or, God forbid, die in a car accident. We have to find ways to center our happiness. Women are not taught to center our happiness. We are taught that life is miserable and that our happiness is frivolous and that we have to throw ourselves onto the pyre of marriage and motherhood. I’m saying take yourself down off that cross because we need the wood.VirginiaAnother listener question that dovetails beautifully with that is, “How do you know when it’s time to give up, versus continue trying to work on or salvage a relationship?”LyzIf anyone has ever been divorced—and Virginia, you can give me an amen. The moment you tell people you’re getting divorced, women crawl out of the woodwork to whisper into your ear, your emails, your DMS to be like, “How do you know? How did you know? What did you do? How did you know?”I think, if you’re asking that question, it’s time. It’s time. When somebody is asking that question, I know they’re in that place where they’re looking at other marriages and other divorces and they’re saying, “My husband’s not that bad.” I can put up with this or “Well, he didn’t cheat on me. He didn’t hit me. He just doesn’t wipe the counters and thinks my writing is ridiculous.” He doesn’t have to be a villain for you to be unhappy. Why do you want to be in a situation where you’re unhappy and you’re trying so hard to be happy and he doesn’t care? I remember being in this place where I was evaluating my marriage against Shirley Jackson’s marriage, which was famously very miserable. I was like, “Well, if she can do it, I can do it.” My dear friend Anna was like, “Hey, so that’s not the bar.” Your life is not a game of chicken. You do not have to wait for someone else to blink first. Your happiness is enough. You don’t have to justify it. You can just say, “I am deeply unhappy. I am trying to be happy. I have been trying to work with you and it’s not working. And I would like to try something else now.”Because if we’ve learned one thing from 2020, it’s: We only have like one wild and precious life. Why do you want to spend it training a grown man like a golden retriever to care about you?VirginiaI’ll amen that.LyzSo that’s just my answer. It’s not a game of chicken. You’re unhappy. That’s enough. And women are so good at downplaying their own unhappiness or their happiness. But if somebody is saying “I’m unhappy,” they’re not being frivolous.VirginiaI think, for me, what it took was getting clear on what I wanted, on what a happy life looked like to me—and realizing that the marriage was not supporting that happiness. It was no longer the contributing or defining factor of the happiness, that we had run our course. The happy life I was envisioning for myself didn’t have to include him or didn’t have to include being married, per…
Full show notes at the publisherWe are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for your July Indulgence Gospel!
We’ll be getting into:
Millennial vs Gen Z feelings about socks
How to even begin a closet reorganization project
What to do when the roller coaster doesn’t fit your body.
And so much more!
This is a paywalled episode. That means to hear the whole thing you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber.
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
Follow us on social!
Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.
Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.
Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.
Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
You’re listening to Burnt Toast!I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today I’m chatting Anita Bhagwandas, author of Ugly: Giving Us Back Our Beauty Standards.Anita is an award winning journalist who explores beauty culture, unpicks aesthetic standards, and questions how pretty privilege holds the power to shape so much of our lives. Anita also writesThe Powder Room, is a beauty columnist for The Guardian, and a freelance beauty director at Conde Nast Traveler. She lives in London. I really loved talking to Anita about the origins of so many specific beauty standards, some of which you might already think you know, but a lot of which was new even to me, a person who does think about beauty standards pretty often. I also took Anita on my chin hair acceptance journey, and we talk about the absolute dumbest beauty purchase I have ever made.Uglyis available in the Burnt Toast Bookshop!Don’t forget, you can always take 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talkfrom Split Rock Books! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)(Non-US listeners, here are all the links for you to find it.)PS. If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)Episode 152 TranscriptVirginiaSo I got to read Ugly when it first came out in the UK and adored it. The book goes very deep into the origins of our beauty standards. What surprised you the most about how we’ve come to value the specific physical traits and characteristics that we have been taught to value?AnitaThere was so much that surprised me. I thought I was very well-versed in all of this, I’ve always had an interest in obviously beauty, but also the history of beauty. There were definitely so many things that just made me think, “Oh my God, if everyone knew this, I don’t think they would hate their bodies, or their faces, hate their appearance in the way that they do.” In the way that I know I had, for most of my life. I think was one of the most surprising things is how thinness is linked to race. I looked through various journals and books and old texts to look at where this came from—and lots of people have written about this as well. There are old references that specifically talk about in that era where colonization is still a very big part of the British Empire, etc. It’s almost like things are starting to shift a bit and you can tell that there’s something going on and essentially all the descriptions of people of color in the colonies were quite nice up until a point and I think there is a point where maybe Britain thinks they’re about to lose some of their control or something is happened, that it that all of those descriptions switched to being really just derogatory and positioning white beauty above everything.You see it in the art of the time, you see it in all of these texts, you see it in these very famous books written by people at the time. You see it everywhere. And I think, if people knew that [our thin ideal] was so, so closely linked to colonization, I think they would be shocked. Because I know that when I heard that—and I had always known there was a link. But I think once you read the specifics, you’re like, wow, this is wild. This just blows my mind. So yeah, I think that was a really big one for me.VirginiaWe have a parallel and equally depressing and dark story in the States about how the end of slavery led to the same kind of transitioning of language and doubling down on negative descriptions of Black folks’ bodies. It’s just fragile white people trying to hold onto power in both scenarios. That’s the root of all of this. It is a lot to sit with.AnitaIt’s one of those things that we have to know. Because, probably everyone who is listening to this and listens to your podcast hasn’t signed up for that. They don’t agree with that. So, you know, it is just going okay, wait, you know, what is my obsession with thinness? What is my obsession with dieting? It makes me complicit in something I don’t believe in and I don’t stand for.And I think that for me, it was a real turning point.VirginiaHow do you think about navigating our complicity in that? Because it’s hard. On the one hand, we can say, “None of this is my values. None of this is what I want to replicate.” And yet, these standards have such a hold on us. The stakes of not participating in thinness and beauty culture can feel so high. AnitaI don’t think we should beat ourselves up about these things. I don’t think we should be horrible to ourselves about these things. These beauty standards have come as a result of years and years of levels of oppression and forces that have tried to control us. So, I think that’s the first thing, is having a bit of compassion towards ourselves. But then also looking at how you can unpick those narratives and make some decisions for yourself that are truly, as much as we can, based in what you really believe and what you really think. I had thought my entire life that if I was thin, everything will be okay. Because that’s what we’re sold, right? We’re sold that if you’re thin, you’re successful, you’re rich, you’re pretty, you’re popular, you get everything. That’s the narrative we’ve all been sold. And there was a real point for me, I think it was probably about 10 years ago, I just went, “I actually don’t want to be thin.” And this is no shade to anyone who is really thin, because all body types are beautiful. But I was just like, “For me, I don’t actually want to look like that. If I’m honest with myself, I actually don’t want to look like that.” I think it was the first time I’d actually tuned into what I wanted. And it was really liberating. Because then when I was working out, I wasn’t working out to be thinner. It was working out to improve my strength or whatever it is. It was just a real shift for me to actually pick what I wanted and pick you know, pick to celebrate my body and pick to actually celebrate the something that wasn’t the sort of standard beauty ideal. VirginiaWe’ve been sold a certain aesthetic so much, and so often that the idea of your preferences being something different—you just assume that’s what you want, right? How do you look at what you actually want?For example, I’m not a big makeup wearer and I notice whenever I go through phases of wearing more makeup, I start to expect my face to look the way it looks in makeup. And then if I stop wearing makeup, there’s a rocky dismount period and then I go back to being like “This is my face and I’m fine with this.” AnitaI’ve had that experience with makeup, too. Even though I’m critical of beauty culture and the beauty industry, I love makeup and I love self-expression. I like playing with different things versions of myself. And I know I’ve experienced this, where I have become addicted wearing really, really thick, heavy makeup. And then it’s almost like, when the seasons change and I have to go without any makeup on, without anything done to it, it is fine. I try and have a day, usually on a Sunday, where I will try not to wear any makeup or do anything and just go out and be that in the world. To be okay to go meet your friends for brunch or whatever and challenge yourself to be the same level of confident as you would be fully made up. It’s really hard at the start. And then it starts to normalize. And it starts to be a choice, which I think is the really key thing.VirginiaDo you feel like going out is an important part of it? My first instinct would be like, well, sure, when I’m just hanging out at home watching TV, who cares? But that is then reinforcing the idea that it’s okay to look a certain way without an audience. But if there’s any kind of external gaze, you have to make changes. AnitaI think it depends on your level of comfort. For some people even being at home without makeup on or their hair done or whatever it happens to be, would be really, really challenging. So if this is something you want to try, start at your level of confidence. It might just be that you don’t wear a certain thing that you always wear outside one day a week or one day a month. And I think you can almost build it up. It almost just helps decondition you to thinking you have to look a certain way. Then it becomes more of a choice. And I think that is more of an empowering place to be in.VirginiaWe should name, too, that it’s safer for some of us to experiment with this than others, right? Folks in fat bodies know that they’ll get treated worse if they show up looking sloppy. People of color experience this as well. There is the stuff that we’re working on inside and then there are the realities of the external world, right? AnitaThat’s definitely something I’ve experienced as a person of color. My parents moved from India to the UK. I had it drilled into me from a very young age that I always had to look presentable. As I got into my teen years, my mum would always say, “Go put some makeup on.” It’s constantly trying to look like you’re part of society, like you’re worthy of being in society. And that does come with challenges because the outside world does discriminate and it does treat us badly.I guess it’s looking at how comfortable you feel within to resist that. And that’s really different for everyone. And I guess if you can resist that safely and in a way that doesn’t harm you. In a way, I think that could be a really positive thing.VirginiaEven just being clear when you do decide the armor is necessary, it can be helpful to be clear on, “this feels necessary for safety.” Because that’s still putting some distance between you and the standard. AnitaThat’s really helpful. I think that could be really good for people who feel like they definitely need that. That’s a really useful way to frame it.VirginiaI’m just thinking about your mom—she was doing that to keep you safe. It was rooted in love, even though it was also constricting.AnitaYeah, absolutely.VirginiaI love the section in the book where you run down this whole list of questions you ask yourself before buying a face massaging device.AnitaThat script is really helpful because despite knowing how the Internet works, social media, the beauty industry, ads—despite being in that and knowing how that works, I still find myself clicking on things and going to buy things very impulsively. I’ve also got ADHD and quite high on the impulsive scale. If I’m not careful, I will buy into the promise of some thing that says it’s going to change my life. Maybe you feel this too, but I feel like I’m being sold to constantly when I don’t want to. Particularly on TikTok I find this quite hard. I feel like I’m just being sold to. And I just wish there was a button to turn it off. The technique I have coined for myself is to just give myself some boundaries if I do want to impulse buy something that I think will change my life in some way. And at the point, when I was writing the book, I gave the example of a face massaging sort of tool that said it was going to help tighten and tone your skin. And I was like, oh my God, I want that. Like, it was my first thought that I want to tighten and tone my skin. VirginiaAdd to cart. AnitaAnd then I was like, wait a minute. And then I talked myself down a bit and talked myself out of this place of anxiety—because that’s where that was coming from—that I need that to fix this thing that actually isn’t really a problem. It didn’t bother me a minute before I saw this ad for it. I was cool a minute ago.VirginiaI hadn’t been plagued by my lack of tone. It was all fine.AnitaThen all of one minute later, I’m like, I’m so withered. It’s to take you out of that frame and to just go, okay, why do I want this? So there is a series of questions in the book. Starting with: Why do I want this? Maybe I do really, really want it. But I only saw it a minute ago, so I probably don’t really want it that much. Then it’s sort of just probing into why that could be. And quite often for me personally—and this might be different for different people—when I keep going, why do you want this? What’s the real reason? And you keep digging, layer by layer by layer, underneath all of that initial impulse, quite often for me, it comes down to I’m really tired. I feel like shit and I actually just need some sleep. I look in the mirror, like, oh, I look tired, I probably just need a bit more sleep. I think that’s probably true for a lot of people, particularly women. We have so many different roles in society, we probably just need a bit more sleep. So that will save you a ton on anti-aging creams and de-puffing products and all of that. Let’s just have some sleep.VirginiaAnd how depressing that buying this device feels more doable somehow than reorganizing your life to get more sleep consistently. That’s a whole other thing.AnitaMost of the best self care and wellness stuff that you can do is free.But it’s a bit of investigation to find out what’s really going on. And quite often it is something else. Maybe you’re trying to distract yourself from something, maybe you’ve had a fight with somebody and you feel shit and you need to pick me up or whatever it happens to be. And there is almost always something. And, you know, when sometimes there’s not, in which case, what I tend to do is put it on a list. And then I’ll revisit that in a certain time period. That can be different for everyone. It could be a month, it could be a week, it could be three months. VirginiaInstituting that pause is so helpful. AnitaThe pause is amazing. I have to do this with everything I buy, because I am so impulsive. I have to put it on a list and come back to it. Otherwise I would just be in tons of debt. So yeah, I think that’s a really helpful way to take the pressure and anxiety out of stuff. And if you still want it in a month, if you can afford it, you’ve done your research, you think it’s going to work, whatever, cool, go for it. And you’ve used up everything you’ve got at home, as well! I think that’s a crucial thing. Quite often we might have something that we could use at home instead of whatever this new thing is. That saves us money, saves the planet, etc. It’s good to use those things up before you go and buy something new, like a new serum that promises it’s going to take 10 years off your whatever—which is never going to happen in a serum. VirginiaOkay, I have to tell you about my purchase that I should have put through all of these filters. AnitaCall me next time. VirginiaMy most embarrassing beauty purchase. There we go. There’s the headline of this episode.So I have a lot of chin hair that I manage. My part-time job is managing my facial hair. And I’ve tried laser, but it’s expensive and you have to drive to the place and it’s such a project to keep up with it. So, mostly I shave it but then sometimes when I’m shaving, I get breakouts, and then I’m like I should just embrace this but I’m just not there on my chin hair acceptance journey. So Julia Marcum, from Chris Loves Julia, recommended this product called Nood. Have you seen this? It’s a handheld laser you plug in at home and you can zap your whole face. And it was $199. I’m not proud of this. In a moment of weakness, I purchased it. And I used it for six months and…nothing. Zero reduction in hair growth. Nothing. I just was like, “What happened there, Virginia?”And now it’s just sitting in my bathroom mocking me because I can’t donate it because it doesn’t work. Do you know what I mean? I can’t pass it on to someone else and be like, maybe it’ll work for you. Like, it probably won’t. I don’t think it works for anybody.Thank you for hearing my confession.AnitaSee, it’s so disappointing! I definitely have had experiences in my life where I thought “This one thing is going to be, amazing. It’s going to change everything.” And then it just doesn’t.VirginiaEven though the influen…
Full show notes at the publisher🧈🧈🧈It’s time for your July Extra Butter! Today we are discussing the intersection of sobriety and diet culture—and taste testing a whole bunch of mocktails! 🍹🍹🧈
To listen to the full episode and read the full transcript, you’ll need to join Extra Butter, our premium subscription tier.
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Corinne
Today we are doing something really exciting: We’re going to try some non-alcoholic beverages! And, we’re going to talk a little bit about sobriety and sobriety culture, as two non-sober people.
Virginia
This idea came about because we did an Indulgence Gospel episode a few months ago where someone asked for our favorite non-alcoholic beverages. We were both like, “seltzer water?” But everyone in the comments started suggesting really good stuff. We were like, “We need to try a bunch more of these.” So that’s the fun part where we’re going to be taste testing—and linking everything, of course.
We’re also really interested in how sobriety culture intersects with diet culture, so we’re going to talk about that quite a bit, too. I want to be very, very clear right off the top: We are pro-sobriety, whether you need it, whether you just want it. We think sobriety is awesome. But we do think there’s a conversation to be had about the marketing and messaging in this space, which can veer into diet culture territory fast. So that’s the focus today.
Okay, are we ready to try our first one?
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
Follow us on social!
Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.
Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.
Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.
Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
You’re listening to Burnt Toast!I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today I’m chatting with Melissa Walker, head of Giving Circles at The States Project about how to save democracy.And yes, it’s July 4, so we are technically off today—but it is also America’s birthday and a very, very scary and complicated time to be an American. We recorded this conversation before last week’s debate dumpster fire and this week’s horrific SCOTUS rulings — but I promise, it’s still the reassuring action plan you need right now.The States Project works to flip state legislations blue around the country. In 2022, Burnt Toast raised over $28,000 to hold ground in the Arizona State Senate. Last year we raised over $15,000 to elect majority making candidates in Virginia, where we defended the State Senate and flipped the House of Delegates to put a wall in front of Governor Youngkin’s right wing agenda. I know November is looming, and many of us feel paralyzed with fear about Trump, and not so great about Biden. So Melissa explains why state legislatures are where we can focus our energy and do some real good—even if Trump wins again.I’m setting a goal for the Burnt Toast Giving Circle to raise $20,000 this year, and I fully expect us to hit that, and exceed it. After you listen to this episode, be sure to vote in our poll for the state you want us to support. You can also start your own Giving Circle to support the state of your choice!Join the BT Giving Circle!Happy birthday, America! You’re a mess. But we’re trying to form a more perfect union here. Or honestly, anything even a step above dumpster fire would work.PS. If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)Episode 150 TranscriptMelissaI’m Melissa Walker, I am the head of Giving Circles at The States Project. We focus on shifting the balance of power in state legislatures to elect majorities that are focused on improving people’s lives. VirginiaAnd you were on the podcast in 2022, when we first launched the Burnt Toast Giving Circle.It's Time to Stop Panic Giving.Virginia Sole-Smith·March 10, 2022Read full storyAnd I asked you to come back because, Melissa, everything feels bad right now. It truly seems like Trump will win in November. And I feel like we’re not even talking about it because we’re all just burnt out with fatigue. But you are this voice of reason in my life who’s always like, “This is what we focus on. This is what we do.” So can you talk us off some ledges, please?MelissaYes, I can. First, I want to acknowledge the fatigue, because it’s very real and we all feel it. Your fatigue is definitely a feature, not a bug, of a right wing that wants to dismantle our democracy. So if you’re feeling it, know that that is perfectly normal and we’re all feeling it to some extent. But also know that the helplessness and the isolation paralyze us, and that can cause some really bad things. I am lucky enough that I found a political path for me in December of 2016 when I heard New York State Senator Daniel Squadron speak about state legislatures. What I started to understand was that there were these 50 mini-congresses in our country where the right wing had been building power for decades, and where it turned out, I could have an impact. Being able to walk that path since 2016 has been therapy for me.I think that gathering people in community and taking action in whatever form you do, it is the antidote to despair. It is also the only thing that has ever worked to move a democracy. As Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”And I really believe in that. VirginiaAnd it’s what the other side has been doing for decades, as you said. They’ve been changing the world for the worse. So now we need to be that small group of committed citizens.MelissaThat’s correct. VirginiaTell us a little bit about how The States Project works and what you’re focusing on for 2024.MelissaState legislatures are the places where everything that we care about domestically is decided, from education funding to environmental policy to health care to civil rights to abortion to the course of our democracy, voting rights, and gerrymandering, the drawing of the district lines that decide who goes to Congress—it’s all happening in the hands of state lawmakers. These are not folks who people will have heard of. They are not going to be the spotlight races or the names on MSNBC at night. But they are the people who are deciding state by state by state what rights Americans have and get to keep. It’s an incredibly important power center. So The States Project does a 99 state chamber analysis every year—it’s 99 because Nebraska is unicameral. We figure out where we can target to try to shift power to elect majorities to improve people’s lives or break a right wing supermajority or defend against one. We figure out which races we need to go into to support with tactics and resources to make that happen. This is where the right wing has been building power for decades, no matter who’s been in the White House. And a lot of things that I think people remember, like the bathroom bill, the Stand Your Ground gun laws, the Flint, Michigan water crisis—those are all things that happened under an Obama presidency because the right wing had taken over state legislatures. This is where the rubber meets the road on policy and where we have to focus if we want to build back our democracy.VirginiaI mean, that’s weirdly reassuring because if those horrible things could happen under an Obama presidency, it means another Trump presidency wouldn’t necessarily have the impact that we’re all fearing, if we can make this progress in the State legislatures.MelissaYes. States will be a best line of defense if Trump is to win the presidency. Because states are the places where we can protect a lot of our rights and even advance them. Michigan ’22 is a great example. Michigan is a state where The States Project has been working since 2018 and making gains each year. But in 2022, we were finally able to help flip the State House and the State Senate—both of them flipped by one seat. Both of those seats were won by fewer than 400 votes. And with that trifecta—meaning Gretchen Whitmer in the governor’s mansion, and majorities in both the State House and the State Senate—Michigan has been able to codify the right to abortion, pass free breakfast and lunch for public school children, end right to work laws so unions can be strong again, and they passed the strongest climate bill in the country last fall—stronger than New York’s or California’s. All of that is because of one seat majorities in the state legislature. And again, not with politicians you will have heard of, but with that power shift comes real policy shift that changes people’s lives in Michigan and becomes a model for the rest of the country about what is possible when we elect people who are focused on improving lives.VirginiaSo tell us which states you’re focusing on for 2024. We’re going to put a poll in the show notes so that we can vote on where our Giving Circle should focus our energy.MelissaGreat. Yes. So we will be in Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania to defend new majorities that we recently were able to win.All those majorities won on very slim margins. In fact, the ones that I just mentioned in Michigan were the largest margins of those three states. In Minnesota, we were able to flip the State House by 191 votes. And in Pennsylvania, the State Senate, we flipped 12 seats, and the last one was won by 63 votes. VirginiaOh my gosh. MelissaSo what I really want to tell the Burnt Toast crowd is that each Giving Circle really matters in this work. If every piece of the basketweave isn’t there, these are the margins that we’re winning or losing on. So we’ll be back to defend in those states.And in addition, in Pennsylvania, we’ll be working on the Pennsylvania Senate as well to try to get to a tie there. Only half the seats are up so we’re looking for a tie in 2024. That will help us set up for 2026 flip. We’ll also be in Arizona to try to flip both chambers. We are two seats away from a flip in each chamber, one seat away from a tie. And that margin has held for the past few years. We are really, really close to flipping Arizona. There’s a Democratic governor. It’s an incredibly important state, obviously. All the states are important, but it’s a presidential swing state, so we’ll be in Arizona. We will also be in New Hampshire to try to flip the State House and tie the State Senate. That’s another, of course, swing state. And then we’re in a few states to try to break right wing super majorities. So we’re in North Carolina today to break a right wing supermajority. We just need one seat in the State House to do that. And we’re in Kansas to try to break a right wing supermajority for a Democratic governor Laura Kelly. Breaking those super majorities means that a Democratic governor has veto power which is incredibly important. One illustration of that is in Kansas where we saw voters come to the polls in Kansas and reject abortion restrictions, but the state legislature passed them anyway. When the governor vetoed them, they overturned her veto because of the supermajority. So if we’re able to break that supermajority those vetoes can stand and that’s a really important power shift that needs to happen in Kansas. Especially because the will of the voters is being completely ignored. We will also be in Nevada to try to build a supermajority against a right wing governor who vetoes everything. We’d love to be able to overturn those vetoes. And then in Wisconsin, we are going to be working to flip the assembly, which is what they call their state house. And Wisconsin has new maps and this is the first time that we actually see a path to shifting power there because of those new maps that are fairer than they’ve been in years in Wisconsin. So that’s a big lift, but an exciting new state for us to be in.VirginiaEvery state listed above is linked to its page on the State Project’s website so you can read up on them if you like. It turns out that Substack’s poll feature only lets me list 4 options, so here’s a Google Poll everyone can use to vote!Which state should BT support?If your state doesn’t get picked for the Burnt Toast giving circle, however, you can start your own giving circle to raise money for the state that you are most focused on. Melissa, tell folks how they do that.MelissaSo I should say a couple of things about Giving Circles. One is that it is often cheaper to change the balance of power in an entire State Chamber than it is to win a single competitive congressional seat. Congressional races cost millions and millions of dollars and state legislative races do not. So, if you think, “Well my Giving Circle won’t be big enough to make a difference,” I beg to differ. Because dollars at this level go so incredibly far. Whatever you are thinking about investing politically this year—because I know everyone is looking for a place where they can really have impact—think about having that impact and then inviting 10 other people to come in and match what you gave. You’ve just given 10 times what you individually are able to do. And that’s the beauty of Giving Circles. It’s the community coming together for collective power. I think it’s a real antidote for that isolation and helplessness that a lot of us tend to feel when we watch what’s happening on the national scene. I should also say this, because I think it’s really important: Last year, Congress passed about 30 bills. Michigan, with that new trifecta, passed 321. This is absolutely where things are moving. If you care about Congress, you should care about state legislatures, because state legislatures draw the district lines that decide who goes to Congress in 70 percent of the country.If you care about the Supreme Court, you should care about state legislatures because the Supreme Court doesn’t write laws, they rule on laws that are coming out of state legislatures. It was a Mississippi law that took down Roe and if that one hadn’t done it, there were 16 other states that had queued up abortion bans right after Kavanaugh was confirmed with the explicit purpose of rising up to the Supreme Court to challenge Roe. Those laws are coming from state legislatures. If you care about the presidency, you should care about state legislatures because not only do state legislators decide who can vote and when and how and when to purge the rolls or close polling places, but also because the path that the Trump team tried to steal the presidency and 2020 ran directly through state legislatures. It wasn’t senators or congresspeople that Trump called to the Oval Office in December of 2020, it was state legislators from Michigan and Arizona and Pennsylvania. He was asking them to change their electoral college votes because state legislatures are in charge of their state’s elections. And what I say to everyone who starts a Giving Circle at any level is that they’ve turned on the porch light for strategic political giving and that is a gift to everyone in their networks—their friends, their families and their neighbors—because everyone is looking for that right now. So I really appreciate the Burnt Toast community having a Giving Circle. I hope folks will join. I should also mention that in 2023, the Burnt Toast Giving Circle helped us focus on Virginia where we were able to defend the State Senate and flip the House of Delegates, so that there is a wall in front of Governor Youngkin’s rightwing agenda. There were a lot of articles about Governor Youngkin and his national ambitions and his plan for an abortion ban in Virginia last fall. But you haven’t read much about him lately and that is because the legislature has blocked everything that he’s trying to do, and that was partly because of the Burnt Toast Giving Circle. VirginiaGood work us! Yes, yes.MelissaStart a States Project Giving circle at statesproject.org if you’ve got your own crew, and just don’t give into the helplessness and despair. We do not have to be witnesses to what is happening in our country. We can absolutely be active participants to make it better. VirginiaI mean, I feel so much better when I talk to you about this. There is a clear path, this is a thing we can all do. It’s doable. We can do this and we just need to come together and make it happen. Thank you so much for hopping on to talk about this. I’m excited to see which state Burnt Toast picks to focus on (vote here!) and to hear from everybody starting their own Giving Circles. Keep in touch. We want to know what you’re doing and what you’re focusing on.MelissaAmazing. Thank you so much. VirginiaThanks, Melissa.---The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay who runs @SellTradePlus and Big Undies—subscribe for 20% off.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!56EPISODE CREDITSCo-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay. Producer: Kim Baldwin. Logo design: Deanna Lowe.Theme Song: Farideh.Video Editor: Elizabeth AyikuAudio Engineer: Tommy HarronFollow us on social! Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith. Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
Full show notes at the publisherWe are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for your June Indulgence Gospel! We’ve got an old-fashioned listener Q roundup today, including:
How should we think about breast reductions—are they medically necessary or diet culture or both?
How are we solving chub rub this summer?
Do they make fat-friendly toilet seats? (Corinne says yes!)
And so much more!
This is a paywalled episode. That means to hear the whole thing you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber.
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
Follow us on social!
Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.
Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.
Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.
Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
You’re listening to Burnt Toast!I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today I’m chatting with Angel Austin and Ani Janzen from the Association for Size Diversity and Health.ASDAH’s purpose is to create the conditions for people of all sizes, particularly those most impacted by systemic anti-fat bias, to have equitable and barrier free access to the care and healthcare resources we need to support our well-being. ASDAH educates health care providers about medical anti-fat bias and advocates for health care that aligns with the Health at Every Size approach. You’re probably familiar with the term Health at Every Size or HAES. Angel and Ani join me today to talk about how HAES has evolved over the years and what it has gotten wrong—and what their new framework of care for Health at Every Size looks like. If you have struggled with questions about Health at Every Size—and about weight and health in general—I think you will learn a lot from this episode.With the help of paid subscribers, Burnt Toast supports ASDAH with monthly donations, and both Ani and Angel asked me to donate their honorariums as podcast guests today to ASDAH as well. But if you find this conversation valuable, we would love for you to support ASDAH directly. Donations help them to continue to develop Health at Every Size curriculums for higher education institutions, and medical schools, and to build out their HAES provider database, so we can all find weight inclusive health care providers near us.Support weight-inclusive healthcare!PS. If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)Episode 148 TranscriptAngelI’m Angel Austin and I am the advocacy and community leader for ASDAH. I started out on the board, and eventually ended up where I am today as advocacy and community leader.I just really love working with the organization because it’s in such alignment with my life, and my purpose. I also run Sacred Space for Fat Bodies, an organization I created just because I needed self-care experiences that weren’t accessible to me in the world, because I’m an infinifat person. It was in the heart of the pandemic, though, so I had to take a hard pivot and start providing that space online. It was through doing that that I learned more about ASDAH and came to be involved with that work.AniAnd I’m Ani Janzen. I’m the ASDAH operations and projects leader. I have been doing fat activism and Health at Every Size advocacy work for about ten years. And I actually started it with my own organization locally in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, the Radical Health Alliance. My very first foray into activism was community organizing and creating what we call the Twin Cities Fat Community, which is now over 1,000 people strong and has been going for like seven or eight years. I started with ASDAH back in 2018, on the board of directors, and have participated in much of the transformation that you’ve seen.For those of you who have followed along with ASDAH’s journey, we used to be a completely volunteer led organization. That factor in addition to other factors created an atmosphere where those with lots of privilege ended up being the decision makers and leaders of the org, because who has time and energy to volunteer their labor? It tends to be focused on the more privileged end of the spectrum. There was a moment in ASDAH’s history where there were almost no fat people on the board. That just really struck me as an issue, as a fat person. I had never really imagined myself in that kind of role before, but I had to put myself out there. I wanted to see what could happen. I feel very privileged to have gotten to work alongside the folks that have really put Black, superfat and other BIPOC and multiply marginalized folks at the forefront of our organization. VirginiaWe are here to talk about the new Health at Every Size framework of care which ASDAH released a few months ago. But before we get into where we are now, I do want to back up a little bit and talk about how Health at Every Size originated.I mean, for myself, learning about the initial HAES framework was one of my first steps out of diet culture. HAES is an entry point for lots of folks. But that doesn’t mean it has always been the right entry point, or the best version of itself. AniHealth at Every Size has very long and complicated history. We really trace our lineage back to the 1960s and 70s for what specifically became the the ideas of Health at Every Size. It’s really important to remember that there have always been counter narratives to what it means to be healthy, what it means to be fat, and beauty ideals. And a huge portion of these ideas existed before they became codified into Health at Every Size, particularly in Black, disabled, superfat and infinifat communities. Those conversations were happening probably eons before The Fat Underground kicked off what eventually became what now exists as Health at Every Size. But back to The Fat Underground, they started in the late 60s and 70s. This was a form of activism that came out of all of the civil rights unrest of that era. These activists saw the need to be talking specifically about body size in addition to other oppressions that activism was becoming more organized around during that era. So The Fat Underground talked about a lot of things related to fat and fat activism, but one of the things that they were very critical of was the medical industrial complex, which is what we call it today. At that time, and still today, fat folks were not getting proper treatment, not getting medications, not getting care beyond being told to lose weight. So The Fat Undergroundd pushed back against that and raised awareness about why this was a problem. Then over time, as we get into the late 70s, the 80s, and the 90s, we see a lot of health care professionals start to learn from these folks, start to pick up pieces of this and more organization starts to happen. And eventually, folks start to say, “We need a term for this. We want to name this in some way.” And Health at Every Size is the name that came out of that conversation.Initially, there was no specific organization. ASDAH didn’t exist at that time. We were established in 2003. So there were several versions of what they called the Health at Every Size approach, or Health at Every Size tenets. I think I have a historical account of at least three or four different versions of these through that that time period. But what’s really notable about the 80s and 90s and the early aughts is that the life enhancing movement principle and the eating for wellbeing principle started to become synonymous with Health at Every Size. The other three principles, which were more focused on access and breaking down systemic barriers—those kind of got lost in the mix. I think that was due to a lot of factors, but one of the big ones was that what was publishable, what was easily consumable by the mainstream, was the principles of “eating for wellbeing instead of weight loss control,” and “life enhancing movement instead of weight control.”VirginiaI have to say, I think I’ve been complicit in that, as a journalist covering this. Intuitive eating, joyful movement —those were the stories I could get editors interested in and the other pieces of the conversation for so many reasons felt like a harder sell. Angel, is anything you want to add to this?AngelAs a person coming in new to this, it’s been really interesting to see the shift and even to learn the history. It just kind of blew my mind. I know it’s going to be an ongoing education. I’m excited to see the world learn, but it’s an ongoing education even for myself. VirginiaTalk a little bit about what inspired this. What were the big things you wanted to change when you sat down to re envision the framework?AniWe knew from the get go, that it was problematic to have “eating for wellbeing” and “life-enhancing movment” raised to the level of being called a principle. My personal fat activism journey, I was very lucky that even though Health at Every Size was also one of my early entry points to this work, I very quickly got plugged in to the world of folks like Cat Pausé and Deb Burgard, who were integrating the more radical liberation ideologies into their work. My introduction to Health at Every Size was Lindo Bacon’s book Health at Every Size. That really pushed me to go further and deeper. So I had been thinking about and trying to reconcile the healthism that comes out in the advocacy of Health at Every Size and how I still felt that there was a core to what Health at Every Size—where it came from, and what it stood for—that was still valuable and important. As someone who was going through a health care education to become a dietitian, and then eventually a public health professional, I knew that change needed to happen in these spaces. I felt that Health at Every Size could and should still have a role in that. But I was also hearing and trying to integrate these arguments about isn’t Health at Every Size healthist and a lot of the other critiques about Health at Every Size, which honestly kind of ended up landing on those two principles of eating for wellbeing and life enhancing movement. So one of the things that really guided our work was going all the way back to the basics. What does it mean for this to be a principle? So we literally looked at the definition of what is a principle, and we could no longer stand on the ground that those two were principles. They were not applicable to every single fat person’s pursuit of adequate care and well being. VirginiaCan you say a little more about that? Or Angel, feel free to jump in! What about those concepts are not applicable to every fat person? AngelWe’re talking about eating for wellbeing and joyful movement. It’s problematic because of the discussion around food and how that’s generally applied when it comes to fat people. And then, joyful movement. I think around movement, very honestly, sometimes it’s not joyful. Especially for very fat people, superfat and infinifat people. It’s something that has been problematic and has been used in harmful ways in the past for us. Feel free to add, Ani.AniI think there’s a lot of nuance that has to go into both of those in a very individualistic way. If health is not a moral pursuit, if health is not what makes you a good person, then no one has to pursue eating for wellbeing or life-enhancing movement in any way, shape, or form, whether that’s for weight control or not. If health is not a moral obligation, then does anyone need to pursue any healthy behaviors in order to be worthy of and deserve access to care through the healthcare system or through any, hopefully, future care system that we envision and create in the future? And the answer to that for us—after listening and learning from so many liberationists, specifically not Health at Every Size advocates, but liberationists—was no. People can pursue anything in their life. And no matter what happens, they’re still deserving of care and treatment and wellbeing through through what is currently our healthcare system. We hope to see that obviously change in the future. AngelThey fall too perfectly into some sort of morality, like Ani was saying. Eating for wellbeing—it’s just a slippery slope. So we just wanted to get that removed and the possibility of that situation happening. I can speak for myself, when I talk about eating for wellbeing or joyful movement, it does put me back in the mind-frame of the days that I did use both eating and joyful movement to do severe damage to myself and my body. That’s something that we don’t ever want to support or provide for the community. VirginiaI think that’s such a powerful reframing for folks. And I hope for folks listening, it feels liberating to think “Oh, I don’t have a moral obligation to love moving my body.” You can’t force people to love things or force people to eat in certain ways. You can see so quickly how, even though it felt like it was reframing, that was a response to diet culture. It still has that control element to it.So okay, so those two are off the list of principles. Now talk to us about the new principles? What are we looking at now?AniOur new Health at Every Size principles—we have four now instead of five. And of those four, I think they’re still really reflective of the original spirit of the earlier versions of the principles. But we did want to make sure that like certain things do not get lost in the conversation. So our principles are: Health care is a human right for people of all sizes, including those at the highest end of the spectrum. Care is fully provided only when free from anti-fat bias and offered with people of all sizes in mind. Wellbeing care and healing are resources that are both collective and deeply personal. Health is a sociopolitical construct that reflects the values of society.VirginiaOkay, so healthcare is a human right for people of all sizes. I think we’ve touched on that a little bit in terms of, eating and exercise cannot be things we have to do to earn access to health, right? This feels like the core of a lot of anti-fatness. When I go out into mainstream media outlets and talk about these things one of the most common troll responses is the “this is a drain on our healthcare system” myth. So how are you finding that principle is being received specifically from healthcare providers, who we know have such high levels of anti-fat bias kind of built into the profession? AniI think most healthcare professionals got into their fields because they wanted to help people and it gets lost in the interpretation and the execution of care. Healthcare actually creates the barriers for people to get to get appropriate treatment.VirginiaI’m just thinking of different doctors I’ve interviewed over the years, or who send me long emails after they read my work. There’s this perception of “the non-compliant patient,” which is really hard to get people past. This feels like the core mindset shift that needs to happen. Why is there even an idea of compliance? Why is the healthcare system something we comply with, we have to be obedient to? It is such a such a wildly negative framing.AniAnd what counts as compliant or not compliant is so incredibly biased based on mainstream ideas of what is acceptable behavior. So you’ll notice no doctor is mad at the patient who comes in after a car accident, right? No doctor is saying you all should stop driving cars, even though accidents and injuries are one of our biggest causes of death. We’re not shaming them because they got into a car. We’re not denying them care or surgeries because they were in a car accident. So when we start to unpack that a little bit, we start to very quickly see the double standard. We consider athletes to be so healthy, but a lot of what they engage in is really dangerous activities that put their ACLs at risk, their elbows at risk, their shoulders at risk. For football, head injuries. Some people have spoken out about some of these things, especially the head injury risks to kids. But by and large as a society, we have just accepted sports as a totally good and appropriate behavior. And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t accept these things as just normal parts of our society, because they are. But when you start to realize that living life is a risk and no one is asking people to stop doing those other things, it becomes kind of absurd that we would ever consider denying care to someone. Even if we could prove that they control their body size—which is a whole other conversation—but even if that were the case, why would we deny someone care because they have undertaken things that might not be 100 percent healthy?AngelI was just thinking about some of the things that are happenin…
Full show notes at the publisher🧈🧈🧈It’s time for your June Extra Butter! Today we are giving you a behind-the-scenes look at how we make Burnt Toast. And yes, finally addressing some of the butter-related Internet rumors about Virginia’s personal life. 🧈🧈🧈
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Corinne
Today is a really special episode of Extra Butter because we are celebrating three years of Burnt Toast. Virginia, can you believe it has been three years?
Virginia
It feels like it’s been forever and also no, not at all. It’s wild.
Corinne
How are you celebrating?
Virginia
Probably buy a plant.
Corinne
Oh, yeah. I was going to say brownies. Or cake.
Virginia
Oh, I should see if my mom wants to make me a butter cake!
Corinne
Oh my God. Yes!
Virginia
For people that don’t know, my mother is an amazing cake baker, and we have a family tradition where she takes requests to make elaborate cakes for many occasions, including the dumpling cake she just made for my sister’s baby shower.
Corinne
It was extremely cute.
Virginia
Yeah, so three years is very cool and weird. We have definitely grown in ways I could not have predicted when I decided I was going to turn on paid subscribers. We had 700 people on the list. Now there are over 54,000. I have to not think about the numbers too much sometimes. It’s a big stage.
But it’s it’s exciting! And I’m excited to dish a little today about how we make it happen. So we’re going to talk about how the podcast is made, we’re going to reflect a little bit on where we started, where we’ve come from, the journey of Burnt Toast. And we’re going to talk a little bit about the recent New York Times profile.
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
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You’re listening to Burnt Toast!I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today I’m chatting with jenn romolini.Jenn is a longtime journalist and magazine editor. She co-hosts the podcast Everything Is Fine with Kim France and writes the Substack extended scenes. And Jenn’s new memoirAmbition Monsteris just out this week! Ambition Monster is a deeply personal memoir about workaholism, the addictive nature of ambition, and the humbling process of picking yourself up when the world lets you down. It’s an anti-girlboss tale for our times. And Jenn writes quite a lot in the book about her years in women’s magazines. So I asked her to come on so we could process some of our trauma together. We get into the very specific intersection of diet culture, perfectionism, and workaholism that we survived working in women’s media in the early 2000s and 2010s—which may feel like ancient history but a lot of that stuff is still with us.Ambition Monsteris available in the Burnt Toast Bookshop!Don’t forget, you can always take 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talkfrom Split Rock Books! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)PS. If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)JennI’m Jenn Romolini. I’m a longtime writer and editor. I was at one point a Chief Content Officer. I’m former tech executive. And I had a professional crash in 2018, reassessed my entire life, got myself off the ladder I’d been on, and wrote a book about it called Ambition Monster. And now I am a podcaster and a writer. And that’s me. VirginiaYou co-host the Everything Is Fine podcast which is my every Monday morning “walk the dog and listen to Jenn and Kim” hour and I love it so much.JennI love it too. It’s a very fulfilling project. I think it’s fulfilling because that’s all we want. We just want it to be fulfilling, you know? That’s part of reassessing your feelings about work, what actually lights you up. That’s one of the things that lights me up.VirginiaThat’s something I’ve thought about a lot as I’ve listened to it over the years, both you and Kim both had these huge careers, you had visibility in lots of different ways. And every week it is the just two of you having so much fun together—like the way you crack each other up. You’re being so generous by inviting all of us into your friendship in this really beautiful way. This is what we want to be creating now. Fuck the ladder.JennExactly. And fuck looking for external validation, too. We don’t even really imagine that people are listening to the podcast, we’re doing it for us and then we’re happy that other people have come along. That’s a huge shift. And I think that’s a shift that only could have happened with age and experience.VirginiaSo tell us a little bit about Ambition Monster. I inhaled this book. I ignored my children. I was cooking dinner and letting things burn to keep reading—it’s that kind of reading experience. JennI’m happy to hear that you devoured it. I didn’t mean for you to burn dinner, but I’m happy to hear that it hit you like that. I want this to go off like a bullet. I want it to be fast because I wanted it to feel like an addiction memoir, and I wanted it to have the stakes of an addiction memoir and be building in that way, because that’s the way work felt for me. It was very toxic. I had a relationship with work that was really problematic, that sort of blotted out everything else in my life. And it was starting to ruin my life. It was ruining my relationships, it was ruining my health. It felt like an addiction like any other. So, I intentionally wrote it in that kind of pace that to feel like you feel when you’re in the throes of an addiction.VirginiaIt feels that way. You also take us into your whole family history. We’re right there in Philly, in your childhood.JennI didn’t want to have to expose so much of my personal life, but as I started writing about workaholism and ambition, it became very clear to me that I had to tell an origin story. I had to name the source of never feeling like enough and never feeling good enough, and the connection between childhood trauma and perfectionism. And just all of the lies we were sold about having it all. The big, fake, fairy tales about men and that you could build this life and then it would somehow be in balance. It was it was an impossible lie. And it was very much sold to us by our mothers who were part of the Women’s Liberation Movement. They were like, “Okay, this is it. Now we just step into it.” And we were really ill prepared for how many ways it could go wrong.VirginiaWell and for how much “having it all” means still doing work on the terms of the patriarchy, and on the terms of these systems of oppression. It wasn’t about reinventing work. It was about women playing the same game. Don’t worry, we can do it all.JennWe can do it, too. And then also do all the other stuff, we can do it, too. We can do it just like them and do everything else, too. It was an impossible dream. And it didn’t hit me until I reached the height, the peak, because you keep raising the bar. You’re like when I just get there, if I just make a little more money, if I just get this title, if I just, if just, if I get married. If I have a kid, this certainly is going to be it. And when I had reached the point that it looked to the outside world like I had it all—like literally Cosmo was writing an article about how to get my life. I was like, this feels awful inside.VirginiaDon’t get this life. JennYou don’t want this at all! Get away from it!VirginiaWell, and I think you tell the personal story with so much love. I really felt the love for your parents and for your extended family. I can imagine how complicated it is to write that stuff, but it felt honest and vulnerable and full of love in a way that I really admired.JennI’m glad I worked really hard on writing about my parents because I love them so much. And I understand what happened. I understand what my mother did. You know, they were teenagers when they had me. They were having to survive. I understand what happened. And in some ways, they’re heroes. I wanted them to come across as heroes. I wanted to talk about generational trauma and I wanted to talk about parenting and how parenting is just so hard for anyone but especially for people who had no models and no tools. VirginiaAnd who are so young. Your mom was so young. Just thrown into it. JennExactly, just thrown into it. I mess up all the time and I didn’t have a kid until I was 37 and had lived a whole life. I really wanted to be compassionate and empathetic while also not hiding the story because I had hidden it for so long trying to protect them. I’d really taken it on and kept it a secret. It felt very, very liberating to air it out. VirginiaSince you mentioned the Cosmo story, the other piece that you spent a long time on in the book is your experiences in women’s magazines and New York City media more broadly in the early 2000s. And you and I are both survivors of that world.JennWhat a mess. VirginiaIt’s like that meme: The kids today would not last an hour in the asylum where they raised us. Jenn, they just wouldn’t.JennNo way. I still don’t know if I’m over what happened in that situation. The other thing that the book is about is class, right? It’s a lot about class and Conde Nast was a shock and I spent a lot of time in Conde Nast both as a fact checker and as an editor at Lucky and I was at Allure for a minute and I was at Glamour for a year.VirginiaOh, I’m sure. JennIt was just okay for somebody come up and call you portly. It was just okay. I was called portly. I was a size 8 or 10, it doesn’t matter. But it was just like—I was called portly. VirginiaYeah, that word specifically, too.JennPortly. And not to mention the stories I wrote and how the subjects had to be conventionally attractive or they would kill the story. I remember fact-checking two stories, one about breast cancer survivors, and one about 9/11 widows. I remember the editors saying, “can we get more attractive people?” About the 9/11 widows. And then on the breast cancer survival story: “She’s chubs, we’re going to have to cut this one.”VirginiaI have a feeling the listeners are imploding right now. So, just to give some historical context to that, women’s magazines in this time period were very big on these Real Women Stories. They would always be about the serious issues: Breast cancer, date rape, all these pressing issues that were that are actually incredibly important to women’s lives. And they would want to tell them through real women, often as “as told to,” first person essays. And so the editor or the writer assigned the story would literally have to cast these pieces with the right mix of real women for the top editors to be okay with. None of the women were ever real because they were so carefully slotted in. I can remember age was another big one. If you wrote for a magazine whose demographic topped out at 26, God forbid you show them a 28 year old. JennOh my God.VirginiaThey wouldn’t know what to do with it. JennI mean 40 was just like, can you imagine?VirginiaAnyone over 40, forget it. JennIt was a nightmare. Unless it was a model and you were making this big deal about it. I just think about how complicit we were in our own subjugation. Because this was a time where the tabloids were circling cellulite. Remember? Like, it was just like such a “gotcha!” moment. VirginiaYes, Jessica Simpson was “fat.”JennOh, remember that? Oh my God, yeah. It felt sickening to be in it. I was married to a writer, he worked at men’s magazines. It was totally different game. Didn’t matter what he wore to work.VirginiaNo mandatory pedicures.JennNo. Exactly. The money we spent just to work there, just to keep yourself groomed. I could have retired on that!There were so few jobs for women in publishing at the time that were outside of women’s magazines. And, the women’s magazines paid the best. Because I actually had a job I loved at Time Out New York, but I made $35,000 a year as an editor of a full section. So it was like, at a certain point, the lure of survival brought you there.VirginiaIt brought you there and then you were trapped there. You couldn’t get your pitches read by editors at a men’s magazine, or even a general interest magazine, because you came from lady mags.JennExactly. They wouldn’t even look at your pitches.VirginiaIt was a fancy prison.JennIt was a fancy prison. That’s exactly right. It was a fancy prison run by skinny, wealthy, white women. Like, Mayflower white. Because it was also a very particular kind of white lady who was acceptable in those worlds. That was the class culture shock for me, too. I come from working class, like I’m fully self-made. I had no money. I really had no money. I was in such terrifying debt. I remember talking to somebody on the fashion team—I’d written something about a $150 dress—and she was like, “that’s a budget dress.” She was like, “you can’t get a decent dress for less than $500.”VirginiaAnd this was in early 2000s money, people! JennYes, exactly. It’s so shocking. Lucky for me I found a workaround. I was one of the first people on eBay when eBay came out. In the early days of eBay, you could really find steals. So I would look through what was coming up, like spring fashion or whatever the next season was, and I would find dupes on eBay. I had an incredible vintage wardrobe. I was very proud of it. But everything was like $30 that I bought. So I just was able to pass. Because I was just hoping to pass in that world. I remember going to a meeting and I had a weird hairstyle that day—I put my hair and braids on top of my head, you know? And somebody said, “It’s hard to make a pretty girl ugly, Jenn, but somehow today you’ve managed.”Virginia Wow.JennIn a meeting! Out loud! In front of other people!VirginiaAt work. Where we’ve all come to do our jobs. JennYes, I mean, The Devil Wears Prada is a true accounting of what this shit was like. VirginiaIt’s pretty much a memoir. I remember, either as an unpaid intern or a very poorly paid editorial assistant at Seventeen, getting roped into being one of those real women on a photo shoot. And none of the things zipping up the back and everyone just kind of standing around being like, “well, I guess we can make it work…” And just picking your body apart. That’s super scarring. Another time, we did this photoshoot at Seventeen where we had all these real girls doing workout gear. And they’d brought in one size 12 girl to check that box of “we have one real body!” I still think about the girl because they were legit teenagers. And she was gorgeous. So I hope she went on to feel really great about herself, but it was a not positive experience that day. JennWell, this was also part of the thin privilege because the sample sizes were 0, 2 and maybe 4. The people who were those sizes got free clothes all the time because they could fit into those clothes. So they got anything that came in sample that we weren’t sending back. I would never fit into those clothes.VirginiaNo, definitely not.JennSo they would get very expensive clothes for free. And you were just like, oh no, I have to buy everything myself. VirginiaBecause the expectation was still there that you’re going to dress at that level despite having no access.JennExactly, exactly. We haven’t even gotten into the photoshopping and airbrushing. I remember there was a picture of Christina Applegate at one of the magazines I was at. I saw the proof on the art director’s desk and everything had been circled, like lift breast, do this, thin arm, and then on the bottom, the art director had written “make beautiful.”VirginiaI mean and what’s outrageous about that is—I mean, it’s outrageous for her experience, of course. But if that is the standard? How outrageous to everybody who is bigger than Christina Applegate. Everybody is made to feel less than, because if that isn’t good enough, what is? That’s how these standards become so insidious. JennRight. And like, this is the only way clothes are supposed to look. This is the only way that’s acceptable to be, because this is the only thing we’re showing you. I mean, let’s not even get into the fact that everything was so white. There was one month a year, January, when you could put a woman of color on the on the cover of a magazine, which is also fucking crazy if you really think about that. VirginiaAnd they would always talk about how it didn’t sell well. Hmm. JennYeah, exactly. Put them on the cover the month of the year you know sells the least and then talk about how it didn’t sell well. VirginiaMaybe give them September? Just a thought.JennI interviewed cover models, like the celebrities, the actresses, at the cover shoots. That’s where I would do the cover shoot interviews. It was so weird to watch them being put in clothes and how uncomfortable they felt. It wasn’t like playing dress up. It didn’t feel good to them either. We were all part of this machine that was just perpetuating all this toxic information, you know? I’ve worked for famous people and people who say to me, well, you can wear two pair of Spanx. And it’s like, who the fuck wants to wear two pair of Spanx? VirginiaYeah, no thank you. JennI don’t ever want to wear Spanx. But, like, the Spanx were a godsend, right? VirginiaThey were our salvation. JennThank God for shape wear. I mean, I hate bras. I hated it all. It’s weird to think about it. It’s weird to think about why we didn’t just walk away.VirginiaI mean, I don’t think we could see it at the time! Going back to the breast cancer story example—I think I felt really proud to be working on some of those pieces. I was like, “Well, this is the game I have to play to get the story told.” I finally convinced them to car…
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