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
You’re listening to Burnt Toast!I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today I’m chatting with Mary Mahoney, co-host of the Dolls of Our Lives podcast, co-author of Dolls Of Our Lives: Why We Can’t Quit American Girl, and author of Landline.Mary is a historian and cultural critic who loves thinking about the stories we tell about ourselves, and the meanings behind our pop culture attachments. Through her podcasting and writing, she’s combined, travelogue and memoir to investigate the origins of the iconic AG brand. And all of Mary’s work is also just super smart, and extremely hilarious. So, as we are going to discuss today: I am a Samantha and I have a pretty tragic backstory about being a Samantha. Today’s episode was very healing for me. And I hope it will be for all the other Millennials listening, who grew up on this brand and have maybe complicated feelings and experiences with it. Mary is really great holding space for all of that.But we are also going to unpack the role that American Girl plays in diet culture, and modern narratives about bodies—especially girl bodies. All of that is probably a lot more nuanced than you’re expecting, so get ready for a few plot twists.And obviously we’re going to need to know: Which American Girl are you?You can order Dolls Of Our Livesfrom the Burnt Toast Bookshop, hosted on the website of my local independent bookstore, Split Rock Books—and take 10% off this title and a whole bunch of other great books, through the end of March with the code bookgospel.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 136 TranscriptMaryI’m a historian by training; I study how culture can be used as therapy, specifically books and reading. But I actually got into history itself through American Girls. When I was finishing grad school, a friend and I started a podcast now called Dolls of Our Lives where we reread the American Girl book series and use it as a jumping off point to talk about history and pop culture.VirginiaAnd you have the new book Dolls of Our Lives: Why We Can’t Quit American Girl, which is just terrific. Like, everyone go read it if you haven’t already, because it’s fascinating.And so, I know everybody who talks to you does this, but I am going to need to tell you my American Girl story.MaryOf course.VirginiaI’m older than you—I was born in 1981. So American Girls came out when I was like, eight, I want to say?Mary1986. So you were probably five? VirginiaYes. So I am a Samantha. I was obsessed with Samantha. My mom is a big feminist and she brought me up on Mary Poppins. The “Sister Suffragette” song was a very formative text in my youth. So Samantha was a very logical next text for us, because of her stories about being part of the early suffragettes and labor rights movements—in problematic ways, as you unpack beautifully in the book and the podcast. But I was obsessed with her. I wanted a Samantha doll more than anything in the world. And at that point in time, my family was not super financially solvent. My parents had gone through a divorce. There was no money for a Samantha doll.Cut to probably 1995 or 1996 when… my younger sister got Samantha.MarySo do you two still speak, or what’s the status of your relationship?VirginiaIt was a rough moment for us. My family’s financial status had changed so it was possible to give her an American Girl doll. I had all the books, but I never had the dolls. And yes, was a big moment of reckoning for me, because my sister is almost nine years younger than me. It was like, am I going to, as a high school sophomore, take this child’s Samantha doll for my own? Did I think about it? Yes. Did I do it? I did not. Was I mad when she got the Samantha dress? MaryThat’s tough.VirginiaIt’s a lot.I can now reflect on how Samantha is a complicated choice as an American Girl to identify with. My mother certainly would have preferred me to be a Molly. She was steering me pretty directly towards Molly and I was unavailable for Molly at that time. But now as an adult, I do understand. MaryThat’s a polite way of phrasing that. It’s really interesting that you have a sibling who’s enough younger than you that you can watch her go through a journey you had already been on, but with a different endpoint you might say. She gets a doll, you don’t and what that felt like for you. And also it sounds like you were at a point when you didn’t think you had permission to maybe steal—that’s one issue—but also just have something that was geared towards a younger person. I think now it’s so much more normalized to want toys at any age.VirginiaNo, I think I was like, I’ve already watched My So Called Life. I’ve moved into my Angela Chase phase.MaryOh my God, don’t even get into that with me. That was a time in my life, that show.VirginiaRight? How do I go from I am wearing flannel and Doc Martens to I would like to wear the Samantha dress that does not come in my size because now I’m a teenager.MaryWell, and that was also a moment, too! A year or two before “Titanic,” came out, so I feel like that was also a big moment for Samantha-core to the point that there was a meme circulating that was like “Samantha was the first victim of the Titanic” and some people just believe that she died on the Titanic. Which incidentally, she did not. Although there is a book about Nellie, her servant /friend, being on the Titanic. An offshoot from the main series.VirginiaI never read that one, that was after my time. MaryThat’s a dark book, I’ll just say that. But you know, it’s hard to be cool and be like, “I’m listening to Sleater Kinney and wearing grunge and riot girl,” and then be like, “I’m also really invested in this Victorian girl who’s a labor queen but lives in a mansion and knows stuff about boating that those of us in my income bracket do not.” It’s tough to carry that duality. Hard to pull that off, I think. Maybe Claire Danes could have done that. I mean, she’s done a lot. VirginiaI wouldn’t put it past her and were I had to cast someone to play like a teenage Samantha, she’d be on my list. I could see that for sure. Like, Angela Chase-era Claire Danes, obviously. Not the mother and fully formed adult she is today. I do think there was something about Samantha particularly, because I think I knew that the dolls were out of reach financially for us. It’s interesting that I picked the wealthiest one to be obsessed with. That’s a little thing, although I do think the suffragette movement was part of that.I should own that while I did not get an American Girl doll, my mom did help me develop quite a collection of porcelain dolls, which I think were oddly more affordable. I remember she got one at Joanne Fabrics.I don’t know if porcelain dolls were on your radar. I know Allison is more of the doll collector. MaryYes, that’s true. I’m named after my maternal grandmother, Mary Margaret. She was very into porcelain dolls and QVC was her gateway drug for porcelain dolls—and The Christmas Tree Shops. I don’t know if you know of the Christmas Tree Shops? RIP, they just went out of business. VirginiaI do. I’m from Connecticut.MaryOkay, phew.My grandmother bought me a lot of porcelain dolls that just kind of sat on my shelf. And my other grandmother is the one who bought me American Girl dolls. I was really into the books more than the dolls in large part because the grandmother who gave it to me was very judgmental about the version of girl that I was. It didn’t sync up with what she had in mind. So I think that put me off the American Girl dolls, even though it was such a privilege to have them. It’s the only way we probably would have had them. So, I do know porcelain dolls mainly as creepy things that stared at me in the night in my bed. VirginiaI had a lot and I do remember having a high school boyfriend come over and be like, “your room is terrifying,” because there were like nine dolls staring at him. And I was like, “So you don’t want to make out?”MaryYou’re not into that? You’re not into an audience? They won’t interrupt.VirginiaBut cut to today and I have a basement full of dolls in boxes. Because I have two daughters, and they are not doll people at all. They don’t care. And what happens if you have a baby girl, the American Girl catalog shows up at your house probably before you’ve given birth. I don’t know how they know.MaryIt’s a Census Bureau thing, I imagine. VirginiaSo my older daughter did get very interested in the catalogs as reading material—I mean, that’s a American pastime for sure—and did ask for an American Girl doll when she was four and then again when she was six. And both times I got her one of course, having known the deprivation that was owning a collection of nine porcelain dolls but no American Girl doll. Again, this is my childhood trauma episode. We got her first a WellieWisher, which is like your entry level. little kid American Girl doll. And then we got her Nanea.And they never, ever get played with.MaryWow, did she like the books at all? Or just no? VirginiaShe liked the Nanea books. I don’t know if we’ve actually gotten Samantha books, now that I think about it. The books were more popular. But they are not doll oriented. They want a million stuffed animals. They’re very into animals, that’s their passion. I want to see them for who they are and support that, but it does mean I have currently a Nanea doll in a garbage bag that I’m trying to figure out where to donate, plus all the porcelain dolls from my childhood packed in storage boxes because they don’t want them.MaryUnfortunately, I’ve heard this before. Parents who grew up without the opportunity to have the dolls and either they get to adulthood and as like a gift to their childhood self they get a doll as an adult, even if they are not parents. VirginiaThat’s for sure what I was doing.MaryAnd then sometimes they gift the doll, and they want to share it with their child, and then their kids are just like, absolutely not. I had a listener who wrote to us and was like, I had this really important moment where I presented a Molly doll to my daughter and she just threw her on the floor and then walked away. Never interested again.VirginiaI mean, they don’t care, is one part of it. And I also wonder if there’s something about like, I think I was being conditioned towards a certain kind of femininity and have tried to be much more gender expansive with my kids and how we are raising them. So they have more options, which is a good thing, obviously. But also, the dolls in the stories are magical and there’s a lot to love there. Okay. We’ve now spent almost 20 minutes processing my childhood trauma. MaryListen, I’m here with you. I get it. I mean, insofar as a childless person can understand.In a sense, you’re showing that Pleasant Rowland dream hasn’t necessarily played out the way she intended, which of course is true. We can talk about all the ways that her brand became something that she never could have dreamed of. You can invent a toy brand, you can’t control how people play with it.But there’s this YouTube video that we write about in the book, and Pleasant is giving a talk at the launch of Felicity—picture Felicity dolls in glass museum cases at Colonial Williamsburg. And she’s basically like, “My dream is that girls will get this doll and then they will play with it with their moms and then that will be passed down to their daughters,” and so on and so on and so on. It’s this very gendered female experience, but she’s seeing this generational cycle. Like these stories and dolls are going to live forever in your family tree and perhaps in years it will come to an abrupt stop but maybe a future generation will pick it up. Who can say?VirginiaIt’s true.MaryI’m trying to paint a story of hope for you. Whatever you need, if you want to be sad you can also be sad.VirginiaWell, thank you for that therapy session, but we are actually here to talk about American Girls and the role that they’ve played in diet culture! I thought one interesting place to start is how American Girls were actually developed in very deliberate opposition to Barbie.MaryYes, this is quite a tale because when people hear about American Girl they think there’s real hypocrisy in Pleasant Rowland. Because she ends up selling her brand to Mattel—which obviously owns Barbie—and yet she began the brand in large part in angry response to Barbie. So she, as she tells it, goes to malls to find gifts for her nieces and is really appalled by what she sees at toy store. She herself is childless so she doesn’t know this experience as a parent, but she’s trying to buy educational gifts. She’s a former teacher. She’s really appalled by Barbies, particularly, because she views them as sexualizing children or asking them to grow up too soon, specifically girls, by presenting an unrealistic body type. Barbie is an adult and it seems at odds with what girls should be given as educational tools. I should also say she was very upset by Cabbage Patch dolls, which were really having a moment in the 80s when she was getting into this. She called them ugly—that’s her word, not mine.And Teddy Ruxpin which was a kind of creepy teddy bear that would read you books from a cassette tape you would play in his back. Like, I put my Janet Jackson cassette there once and it came on when I was asleep at night, again with my porcelain dolls there. I am not the same since. The version of me that existed before that moment is gone.She’s also coming up in a moment in the 80s when Reagan is president. We have this harkening back to this imagined past where people were like, you know what? The 70’s were wild, like, disco, Watergate, huge discontent over Vietnam. Everyone’s upset, jobs are moving to the south and then overseas. The economy is flagging. Reagan comes in and is like, “Hey, guys, I’m proud to be an American.” He’s trumpeting all of these pro-American policies that are largely, hugely conservative and built on a vision of American history that never existed. So that’s kind of happening in the background. So Pleasant is like, Barbie has really unrealistic body expectations, sexualizing girls, and also no one understands like the power of American history. I’m going to be part of this. VirginiaThat’s such an interesting mix of goals and values. I think part of the reason I was on the porcelain doll train was because my mother definitely banned Barbie. I mean, I still owned a lot of Barbies. It’s complicated. But there was a lot of anti-Barbie sentiment in my house for sure. I can understand the the body criticism and the unrealistic ideals. I’m here for all that, but then to also be like, and we need to teach children the correct whitewashed version of American history?MaryWell, because it wasn’t just whitewashed history. She is inspired to create American Girl by two things. One, she goes to the mall and looks for a gift and is like Cabbage Patch dolls are ugly and Barbies are a definite no.And I should add, when Barbies were invented, they were inspired by a German doll that was actually almost like a sex toy. It was sold to truckers at gas station. So, it was not something that was like this is going to teach you the beauty of being a woman or American history or like anything necessarily positive. Not trying to teach you anything and definitely an adult.When pleasant goes to the mall, that appalls her. That whole trajectory. So that’s in the back of her mind. She then goes on vacation. Now, how many of us come up with a business plan after we go on vacation? But she goes to Colonial Williamsburg, which is a living history museum where people pretend it’s 1774, I think. She’s noticing that this museum is really amazing and their dedication to recreating this time, but there’s nothing that puts kids and their stories at the center. And she t…
Full show notes at the publisherWe are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for your March Indulgence Gospel.
We’re doing an old-fashioned listener question episode because those are really everyone’s favorite (at least they are our favorite!). So if you’ve ever wondered:
How to talk to a kid who only cares about being beautiful?
Whether it’s okay to feed your children Paleo Waffles?
Is wanting to lose weight always because of the patriarchy?
How Virginia really feels about single mom travel?
ARE THERE ANY COMFORTABLE JEANS?
We got you! (Yes, really on the jeans!!!)
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 Christyna Johnson (@encougagingdietitian on Instagram and TikTok).Christyna is a registered dietitian specializing in eating disorders, disordered eating, and body image work. She also talks a lot about the intersection of consumerism, diet culture and white supremacy — and that giant topic is what we’re getting into today. I’ll be honest: Unlearning consumerism is work I’m truly just beginning to contemplate. It’s a topic I have a lot of questions about, and Christyna has a lot of answers, but they are (and should be!) the kinds of answers that raise even more questions.So I’ll be really excited to hear your responses to this one. I’d love to know how you’re wrestling with your own shopping habits and how you see diet culture showing up there?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 134 TranscriptChristynaMy work centers around people’s relationship with food, their bodies, and the systemic cultural things that they bump up against that really impact their relationship with food and their body. I help them figure out how to navigate those spaces. Because sometimes we can’t change the things we bump up against, but we can change the way we respond.VirginiaYou do amazing work connecting our personal experiences of diet culture to racism, to classism, to all of these systems of oppression. There was one post you posted recently, and I saw Aubrey Gordon shared it, and I shared it. And we were like, “Oh my God, Christyna just nailed that.”You wrote, “It seems that many of us have conflated rejecting the diet mentality with dismantling diet culture.” What is rejecting diet mentality? What is dismantling the system? Why are these not the same thing? ChristynaI’m so glad that y’all liked that post. That one was sitting internally and I was like, I’ve got to just put this out there in the world and just let it do what it needs to do.Rejecting the diet mentality is a very individual process. It’s saying within myself, where have I internalized this idea that I need to be on a diet. It’s examining all these beliefs you have about food, and rejecting anything that you do not need, want, or serves you no purpose, especially as it relates to diet culture. Again, that’s a more individual process.Dismantling diet culture is very much systemic. That is now a communal practice. One individual cannot dismantle that system. Part of dismantling that system is acknowledging it for what it is, but acknowledging it as the fact that it’s not the system itself. It is a tentacle of the system, right? It’s a root of the system. In order for me to dismantle diet culture, I have to acknowledge that it is a part of racism, it is a part of white supremacy. If I can’t acknowledge that, I can’t dismantle it. We end up sort of in this stuck space where we’re performing the dismantling of diet culture because we won’t acknowledge its roots, its origins. VirginiaAnd when we’re performing that dismantling, we’re maybe making our own lives easier or more comfortable without really ever getting at the root of it. ChristynaWe’re not getting at the root of it. And we’re not making it any easier for people who are having a harder time than us. Part of diet culture is that it doesn’t just harm certain groups of people, it harms all of us. The fact that we’re not dismantling it means that we’re not dismantling it for people in larger bodies, for people with disabilities, for people in poverty, right? We are leaving them to suffer and endure this diet culture that we’re refusing to dismantle because we will not acknowledge and eradicate the systems from which it originated.VirginiaDo you feel like, for most folks, the personal work has to come first in order to understand the larger system?ChristynaI think for most people, the personal work does need to come first. There’s a lot of brain space occupied with dieting and diet culture and our relationship with food. That amount of brain space does not leave a lot of extra room to sit with the discomfort of acknowledging these systems and the harm that they do.I think giving someone the space to work through their own stuff oftentimes frees up brain space, and gives them good skills to cope with discomfort. Because the discomfort you’re going to have with your own internal work is not going to be nearly as uncomfortable as acknowledging these big systems and acknowledging all the areas of our lives that they touch.encouragingdietitianA post shared by @encouragingdietitianVirginiaI feel like people are going to be listening to this and nodding, and then thinking like, wait, but I need an example. Like, okay, the personal work might be “I’m letting myself eat brownies.” What would the bigger work look like?ChristynaThe bigger work is why do we care that much about brownies? Why are we so fixated on who can and cannot eat brownies? Why is this person allowed to have a brownie on the internet, but that person isn’t? Why do we need to make brownies do something for us? Can’t dessert just be a dessert? Why do my brownies now need to offer me protein? Why do they now need this extra pack of fiber? What’s going on here?Now we’ve moved past me the individual, and we’re asking: Why is this not equally and equitably accessible to everyone else?VirginiaThat’s a really helpful way to think about it. So if you’re starting with your personal stuff, then add on, “who else doesn’t have access to this? Or who else is being impacted by this?”Are there any other kind of common examples that come up for folks?ChristynaI’ve been sitting with this idea of, what does it mean to perform our relationship with food to ourselves? This is one of those things where it’s like, oh, I should be cooking for myself. I should want to eat these fruits and vegetables so I’m going to purchase them with the hope and the fascination that I will eventually have the internal desire to do that.Then we sit here and we’ve got this wasted food because it’s like, but I don’t want to cook that. I don’t want to eat that. I don’t even know what to do with it. But if I buy it, I’ll figure it out. That’ll give me the incentive to figure it out.VirginiaYou just explained why I stopped joining CSAs, which I do really believe in as a concept. But it was me with a fridge full of kohlrabi every week, not wanting to eat kohlrabi more than maybe once, and not knowing what else to do with it, and it just going bad. And then the guilt. ChristynaFirst of all, most of us don’t know what to do with kohlrabi, so I can’t blame you there.In the sense of like, oh, I should be cooking. We’re really thinking, this convenience food is “bad” for me, right? This prepackaged thing is bad for me. I’m allowed to do it only if I compensate in this other way. As opposed to really taking a step back and being like, why do we care who is and is not eating something convenient? Why is there even a moral concept around this? Why am I good for avoiding this or bad for using this? What even is the history of convenience food?Because history of a convenience item was that historically—after we somewhat get rid of slavery, because it’s still legal in a lot of states—most Black women worked as housekeepers, right? They maintained the houses of these people that they no longer were owned by, but now just worked for. So if that family is no longer doing their own cooking, but eventually Black women move away from this domestic labor, who’s doing the cooking? Enter convenience foods. Convenience foods started as a luxury. VirginiaThat makes sense. ChristynaBut now we associate convenience foods with poverty. And we don’t want to be associated with that. So we say, I can’t do that, if I do that I’m now a bad person. I should be cooking for myself because that’s the morally superior thing to do. VirginiaNow cooking for yourself is the luxury act. But it’s luxury embedded with morality. It’s all twisted together.ChristynaYes. There’s the individual aspect of, “I need to change my relationship with convenience foods,” but then there’s the social-cultural aspect of, “We need to change our relationship with convenience foods,” so that it is now just a neutral concept.If you want it and you have access to it, go for it. If you don’t want it, that’s fine. But you don’t really have to talk about why it is or isn’t a good thing,VirginiaI’m certainly someone who has really embraced convenience foods in my own life. And I talk about a lot on the podcast and in my writing about how important it is to stop demonizing them.ChristynaYou don’t have to explain that to anybody. You have those convenience foods because that’s what works for your life. And that’s that. VirginiaAnd yet, how often do I hear from a friend, “well, I guess it’s okay, we’re doing pizza tonight,” as if they’ve failed at some larger purpose.ChristynaPizza has carbs, fat, and protein. It serves a purpose and it meets the needs of the people. It’s okay.VirginiaYou talk a lot about the intersection of consumerism and diet culture. On the one hand, we’re talking about understanding the history of convenience foods, and saying let’s not demonize them anymore. Let’s not moralize that. And I’m here for that.On the other hand, there’s a lot of consumerism bound up in not just convenience foods—you know, my CSA was also a form of consumerism. So, talk to me about how you think about these issues.ChristynaI think it in some ways goes back to that performance piece of like, have you objectified your relationship with food where it’s no longer just for you, but it’s for these other people around who observe it? Are you looking at it through the lens of these other people who are observing it?I think that’s when we really start to step in to this consumerism piece. Are we performing it for the internet? Where now our objective is to see how are the people on the internet gonna respond? Likes, clicks, shares, whatever? Are we performing this for the other people in our life because we want them to think a certain thing about us or perceive this certain thing from us that will drive us to buy these things?But then, we are also constantly served ads. Ads are everywhere. I have a neutral relationship with ads at this point in time, but sometimes it can be whatever. How am I interacting with this? Am I using this as a way to deal with my feelings as opposed to other ways of dealing with my feelings? And then using this as escapism, am I using this as a form of status? If I buy this thing, then people will accept me in this particular crowd that I want to exist in. I’m looking at the Stanley Cup.It’s an interesting line, because it’s so individual. But I think the way that I conceptualize it to teach it to other people is the idea of like, what do you need to feed yourself adequately, consistently? And then where are you adding some bits of fun in there? Because we can’t sacrifice fun, otherwise things stop being sustainable. So now we’re getting into the intention of this. Why am I buying another of a cup that I already have in three other colors? Why is it that I need this new color? Is the cup now my purse? Why?I was listening to another podcast about the Stanley Cup and the one of the girls in that episode had 11 of them. Each of them cost $50. Why? What are you doing with 11 cups? How do you plan to use those 11 cups that all do the same thing?Also, what are you going to do when the tide shifts? Because it’s going to shift, right? What do you do with those 11 cups that you’ve purchased that are no longer cool or trendy? With food: What are you doing with this food item that you didn’t have a plan for? Or maybe only had one purpose for and never found another purpose for? It’s just sitting in your pantry collecting dust.VirginiaI’ve definitely done that with water bottles for sure. Trying to think of a food example. I have many boxes of quinoa or other grains that I bought thinking this was something we were going to get really into eating, and then realizing my kids don’t like it. I’m not sure I like it. ChristynaI went on a pantry clean out for that express purpose, to eat my way through some of the things that I have. And I was like, after I finish this, I probably will never buy this again because I don’t like it. It serves no purpose for me. But I already spent my money and we use what we have.VirginiaI could do that for a while, I think. I’m just sitting with some discomfort, realizing how long I could probably feed us out of our pantry. But we wouldn’t like what we were eating!ChristynaThat’s where you start to get a little creative. Figure out some sauces, figure out some spices, remix a couple of things, right? Put it with the stuff that you like. I still made that pantry little adventure fun, because otherwise it would have been like, this is miserable.VirginiaLike, I really don’t want to keep eating this box of farro.ChristynaIt’s like, okay, only pair this with other stuff that I do enjoy to balance this back out. It still comes back to that I should want to do this thing, right? I should want to eat this way. I should want to enjoy this thing. Other people are enjoying it. And I want to be like these other people. So I should enjoy this, even though we don’t and that’s totally okay. You don’t have to enjoy that thing.VirginiaI think it’s so important to understand those “shoulds” as a pattern of consumerism, and that this is diet culture, teaching us consumerism. Because often when we talk about food and excess and buying things we don’t need, we start shaming the processed foods and the convenience foods, right?People tend to be like, “Americans are so wasteful,” because we buy these giant bags of chips at Costco, ignoring the fact that a lot of us are wasteful because we’re buying trendy wellness branded or health branded items that we actually don’t end up eating. ChristynaYeah, I’m pretty sure that bag of chips is gonna get eaten. I’m not worried about you wasting a bag of chips or disposing of these chips that expired or went stale. I don’t see that too often. That supplement that’s been in the pantry that you spent $30 on that you didn’t do anything else with? The Greens powder that you realized was gross and you spent $50 on and it’s just sitting in the closet collecting dust? Like, I’ve seen it somewhere and they keep telling me it’s good for me, and that I should want this. And I have now abdicated my life’s desires to whatever other people to tell me what I like, to tell me what I want, what I need.VirginiaSo it’s not necessarily that we should all buy less in general—we should buy more thoughtfully. We should buy what we want to buy as opposed to buying what we’re told to buy.ChristynaBuy what you want to buy. In theory, buying what you want to buy will oftentimes lead to less because you’re not double spending on like, I bought all these groceries and I didn’t really know what to do with them. I had no plan for them and I’m overwhelmed so now I just ordered out.VirginiaThat would end up being less because you’re not buying all the shoulds along with it.ChristynaI think that having that space to explore why you’re buying what you’re buying, really will help you reengineer or evolve your relationship with spending in general, with that sort of consumerism in general. Unfortunately, we can’t exactly escape consumerism because we have to exchange money. Thank you, capitalism. But I think doing it more intentionally is the goal here.VirginiaIt feels like there is a potential here for being more thoughtful about consumerism to become another way of saying like, “I’m just watching what I eat,” or “I’m trying to make healthy choices.” This could end up being another type of restriction—exactly the type of restriction we’re trying to esc…
Full show notes at the publisherIt’s time for your March Extra Butter. This month we’re answering a reader question about baggy, black clothes. Then Virginia takes Corinne down a rabbit hole to unpack the rainbow produce, and subtle food- and fat-shaming, of Kids Eat in Color.
To listen to the full episode and read the full transcript, you’ll need to join Extra Butter, our premium subscription tier.
Extra Butter ensures that the Burnt Toast community can always stay an ad- and sponsor-free space—which is crucial for body liberation journalism. Join us here!
(Questions? Glitches? Email me all the details)
This episode includes affiliate links. Shopping our links is another great way to support Burnt Toast!
Corinne
Okay, we're going to start today with a listener question, and then we're going to dive into one of the influencers that you all ask us about most often.
Virginia
You might call her the Ballerina Farm of kid food influencing. I'm really proud of that little teaser there, just so you know.
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 the brand new book 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. 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, hosted on the website of my local independent bookstore, Split Rock Books—and take 10% off this title and a whole bunch of other great books, through the end of March with the code bookgospel.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 132 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 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 friendSara Petersenand 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.”LyzSir, 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, period.So, how do you know when it’s time? For someone who is thinking that and maybe still really scared to hear that an…
Full show notes at the publisherYou’re listening to Burnt Toast!We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for your January Indulgence Gospel.This month instead of the usual listener questions, we are doing a late winter / early spring books forecast where we’re going to tell you about a whole bunch of books we are very excited to be reading!All of these titles are available in a special Book Gospel section of the Burnt Toast book store over at Split Rock books, where you can take 10% off any title from today’s episode with the code “bookgospel” through March 31, 2024.Indulgence gospel episodes are usually paywalled, but we’re keeping the entire books discussion free today. You will need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to listen to Butter, which includes recommendations from some of the authors featured in today’s episode for:A specially engineered wireless braAn under the radar TV showWhere to get the best cannoliand MORE!This transcript contains affiliate links. Shopping our links is another great way to support Burnt Toast!Episode 131 TranscriptCorinneAre you ready to talk about pants?VirginiaWhen are we not talking about pants?CorinneThat was my smooth segue.VirginiaThat was good. In the outline it just says “Corinne segue us to pants chat” and you did it.CorinneI think the the thing that we can’t avoid talking about right now is leggings legs. If you’ve been on Instagram or TikTok, you have probably heard leggings legsVirginiaI have and I wish I had not. CorinneThe thing about leggings legs is I learned about it because I’m seeing everyone on TikTok and Instagram have a reaction to it. When I tried to find out what leggings legs were specifically, I started by searching TikTok. Now when you search “leggings legs” on TikTok now it gives you the number for National Eating Disorder Awareness hotline. So this has quickly been turned around. The only thing I could even find was some very small scale influencer responding to a comment on her video where someone said “you have the perfect legs for leggings,” and she was like, “oh, thanks, I didn’t know,” and did a little spin. From what I can gather, the perfect leggings legs are you have a thigh gap.VirginiaRight? It’s a new way of saying thigh gap. CorinneYes. Everyone reacted so quickly being like, “this is bullshit,” that it’s over. VirginiaWell, you know what? I’m going to just say hi five team, then. This was a great rapid response effort. If you Google it, you immediately get all the news coverage being like, “people are outraged about the leggings leg trend.”CorinneYeah, but none of the news stories even link to the origin of this leggings legs thing.VirginiaI wonder if it’s like a wag the dog situation where there was no origin. Was this planted? Are we being distracted from a larger issue?CorinneI would love to know. Did Lululemon plant the story so everyone is googling “leggings”?VirginiaNow all your targeted ads are serving you leggings? We are contributing to that effort by having this conversation. I want to mostly be thrilled that our services weren’t even needed. I think the Gen Z activists were like, shut it down. But it also makes me wonder like, was it ever anything? CorinneEven if we didn’t have the term leggings legs, I feel like everyone already knew—Virginia—about thigh gaps. Do we need to explain that you don’t need to have a thigh gap? That it’s normal for human thighs to touch one another? I don’t know. It feels like it’s not a conversation we even need to have anymore.CorinneMaybe I’m just too old for this now that I’m 38.VirginiaThat was never one of my body hang ups to begin with. It’s so interesting what different body parts we get sold the narrative about. My peak bout body anxiety years were not thigh gap years, they were torso years. It was like the Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, exposed midriff. That’s my trauma. Did you have thigh gap trauma? CorinneI think thigh gap just always felt so out of reach for me. My thighs didn’t gap from the day I was born. Even as like a mid size teen, still was not close. VirginiaOkay. So leggings legs has come and gone. We are deeming it over.CorinneNobody needs to worry about it. Jeans legs, on the other hand…VirginiaYou’re excited about some new jeans and I think I want to order to them, but you need to teach me what to order. CorinneOkay, well, first of all, these are not new jeans. VirginiaThey’re new to you? They’re new to me. CorinneThey’re new to no one. They’re old. I’m just trying to get more people to buy them because people are constantly asking, “what are the best jeans?” and I’m always like, “these are the best jeans.” No one is listening to me.VirginiaI mean, I did spend all that time telling people there are no good jeans. So I may have undercut you. Apologies. CorinneOh yes, that’s true. There are good jeans. Well, for me.I like jeans from Universal Standard. I only like their like straight leg styles. Everyone recommends these skinny jeans from Universal Standard and I really don’t like the fabric of them. It’s too thin. It wears out instantaneously. VirginiaDue to my lack of thigh gap, I have busted through those thighs. CorinneSame and also I think it’s like too stretchy to the point where they just don’t stay up. VirginiaNo, they don’t. CorinneSo my personal favorite jeans from Universal Standard are the Donna style1, which is a “curve” style. I would not consider myself someone who needs to buy “curve” jeans. What they mean by curve is you have a more than 10 inch difference between your waist and hips.VirginiaI mean, I might but it goes in the other direction.CorinneI somehow ended up buying these probably without ever reading that and this is the fit that I like.The other thing that you need to know about these jeans is that when I measure my body and when I look at the size chart, I’m between like a size 26 and a 28 on the size chart. The size of jeans that fits me is a 24. So, a full size below the smallest measurement of my body according to the size chart. VirginiaIt does say right on the website that the fit runs generous! So others have confirmed that. That’s not just a Corinne fluke.CorinneIt’s not just me. Everyone needs to size down at least one size, possibly two. I know that’s very stressful and basically maybe means ordering more than one pair and returning them.Then I just want to shout out a few other styles which is the Etta which is the same style as Donna but in a straight cut. VirginiaIt also looks like it has a longer leg? The Donna looks a little cropped to me. CorinneEtta has one inch longer leg. And the Donna, if you look at the back view has a dart between the pocket and the waist. The Etta has no dart, so that’s the difference between like curve and straight. I don’t have like a huge butt, so I don’t know that I need a dart, but I do have a big belly, so maybe it helps with that. And then the other style that I like is Stevie. Stevie has a cuff and has a thicker, lower elastic denim and is also like the “straight” style cut. So less than 10 inch gap between your waist and butt.Then the other one I like is Bae, which has a 30 inch inseam (also comes in crop style!). Bae is the style that I originally got from Universal Standard, the first pair I tried. And they lasted me like so long. I’ve had them through size fluctuation and I still haven’t worn through the thighs I will say a lot of these are sold out right now, but just sign up for the notifications because they come back all the time.VirginiaI mean, by the time we finished recording, they’re going to have restocks.CorinneOr have just cancelled all these styles and now no one can get them.VirginiaI’m going to have to spend some time thinking about which of these I’m going to try and I will report back to everybody. I’ve had a lot of personal growth and I’m embracing a straight leg and I’m proud of it. CorinneI can’t wait to see.Corinne in the Donna JeansVirginiaI still struggle with boots and straight leg jeans. I’m just still on my unlearning journey there. But I think I think I can get into some of this. Oh, the Etta comes in fun colors, too.CorinneI would never, but you do you. I do white jeans. I actually haven’t tried their white styles. Maybe I should.VirginiaThat feels like an oversight.CorinneAs a tiny add on, I will say that Universal Standard just came out with some 100% Cotton denim jeans, which I have ordered, but have not arrived.2 VirginiaWe have no Intel but they might be worth exploring, too. But that means there’s going to be no stretch.CorinneNo stretch. But I think they say you order your size. I was confused about whether I would order my normal Universal Standard denim jeans size or my size according to the size chart. I bought two sizes, so we’ll see. VirginiaTo be clear, we are not sponsored by Universal Standard. I think they are a great company and they are the best for a wider range of fat fashion options. And, I want to make sure I can maintain the ability to be critical of them because they are not a perfect company. I want to make sure we’re always not getting clouded by them offering us free stuff or money. I think they’re an important company for Burnt Toast to be paying attention to, but not for financial gain. They’re kind of all we have. I also want to say that as I’ve been living in my joggers and I continue to live in my joggers, I did have the realization that part of the reason I was living in my joggers is that none of my other pants fit. It was time for a size up. I don’t know why I didn’t put it together more quickly. I put jeans on to get dressed up, as discussed they are formal wear for me now. And was like, oh, they just don’t fit. That’s the problem. They just got too tight. Which happens! Because bodies change. It’s all good. And even my Universal Standard Ponte pants I just ordered in the next size up because they had also gotten too tight and those are a very stretchy pant. I just need a bigger size. CorinneIt’s helpful to have a little stretchy, soft pant phase while you’re figuring it out. VirginiaI think if I noticed it more quickly, I would have just bought more jeans real quickly. I wasn’t in denial necessarily, but sometimes you don’t notice and it was nice having the soft pants and not having to think about it, I guess. I have compassion and grace for myself as I size up and look forward to my pants no longer cutting into my internal organs. I think I’m going to love that for me. CorinneI love that for you as well. VirginiaOne last pants update is because the snow pants recs are still coming in. I got some secondhand Eddie Bauer 2X snowpants off SellTradePlus. The seller sent them so quickly. So my snow pants needs are met. I haven’t had a chance to fully test them because we haven’t had that kind of snow again. But for $65 versus the $400 pair I was close to impulse purchasing? And they’re a very pretty emerald green.CorinneAwesome. That’s so great.VirginiaShould we get into books? I’m excited to do a books episode. What’s your first book for us, Corinne?CorinneThe first book I want to talk about is Sewing the Curve: Learn How to Sew Clothes to Boost Your Wardrobe and Your Confidence by Jenny Rushmore who runs the website Cashmerette. She’s one of the original fat sewing bloggers. And this book is really cool. It’s just a great guide if you’re getting started sewing plus size patterns. It covers tons of basics like tools, choosing the right pattern, how to measure yourself for sizing, troubleshooting sewing machines, grading between sizes if you want to make a dress but you’re one size on top and one size on the bottom. There’s also some really cool stuff that I haven’t seen elsewhere, like a little section on sewing with chronic illness or disability and how to go about that in a way that is less taxing on your body, which I thought was cool. The book also includes six printed patterns that go up to size 32.I also wanted to just like quickly mention this other thing that Jenny does, which is called MyBodyModel. It’s a website that lets you make a little custom body drawing that you can use to plan your wardrobe or see how stuff would look on you. VirginiaThat sounds fun. CorinneI know! It uses your measurements, I think, to generate a little model of yourself. And I just feel like there are probably some people in the Burnt Toast community who would find that fun.VirginiaI’m on the website right now. This looks really fun. Is the idea for planning patterns and that kind of thing?CorinneI think there are a bunch of ways you could use it. You could use it if you’re a sewist and want to think about what fabrics you want to use or what garments you want to make, or you could use it if you’re like doing some kind of wardrobe clean out and you want to put together outfits or something like that.VirginiaIt’s almost like the closet from Clueless come to life. CorinneYes, totally. VirginiaI feel like they’re missing a branding opportunity by not mentioning that, but yeah, that is super, super cool. I am never going to sew my own clothes. But I really love how many sewists we have in Burnt Toast and I love that for everybody. I did have a brief fling with sewing in high school where I made some dresses and I think I just learned that I’m a little too Type A for that hobby. My skills did not match up to my perfectionist nature. There was a mismatch.CorinneThat totally makes sense. VirginiaI took a sewing class in high school and somehow made it through but it was sometimes frustrating. Anyway. Tell us the name of the book again!CorinneIt’s called Sewing the Curve: Learn How to Sew Clothes to Boost Your Wardrobe and Your Confidence and the author is Jenny Rushmore from Cashmerette.VirginiaLove it.My first book that I’m going to talk about is The Sicilian Inheritance by Jo Piazza, friend of the show. And I cannot put it down. I considered being very behind on all of my work today so that I could finish it this morning. I started it yesterday. Jo writes excellent—I believe she’s categorized as “women’s fiction,” but she’s been on the podcast before talking about her love of writing good food in fiction. And this book takes place mostly in Sicily. You need to understand what a good food novel it is. How do I plan a trip to Sicily? It’s really good food writing. The main character, Sara is a butcher / restaurant owner who has torpedoed her life in a bunch of ways, getting a divorce and drinking too much, and losing her restaurant. Then her great aunt dies and her final request is for Sara to go to Sicily to the village their family is from and scatter her ashes. When she gets there, she also discovers that she has to solve the murder mystery of her great grandmother, which is based on a true story from Jo’s family—she’s from Sicily and there is a mystery about the death of her great grandmother. Jo has also been recording a whole podcast about this which I’m really excited to dive into. The other amazing thing about it is I love stories about unexpected pockets of radical feminism. What I mean by that is like a lot of the book is a flashback to the great grandmother’s life growing up in like the 1910s and 1920s in Sicily, and they’re in this tiny village. It’s patriarchy and the women have very few options. But then because a lot of the men started leaving Sicily to go to America because they thought they would make more money there, the women end up basically running the village because there’s like no men left to do anything. It’s this cool story of how they become self taught doctors and bakers and all these different jobs. So if you like a good mystery, if you like… I don’t know what the genre is that includes unexpected pockets or radical feminism, but if that’s something you look for in books, and really good food writing—The Sicilian Inheritance. It’s delightful.CorinneThat sounds amazing. VirginiaYep. What have you got next?CorinneThe next one I want to talk about is this book Secrets of Giants: A Journey to Uncover the True Meaning of Stren…
Full show notes at the publisherYou’re listening to Burnt Toast! I’m Virginia Sole Smith.Today I am chatting with Jessica Jones and Wendy Lopez, who you probably know from their beloved Food Heaven podcast.Jess and Wendy are nationally recognized registered dietitian, nutritionists, and certified diabetes care and education specialists. I’ve known them a long time and one thing I’ve really admired is how they’ve built this really impressive online platform for all of these conversations, and yet also recognized when they were getting burned out and it was time to pivot. Today we are talking about that whole process, but we’re also talking about their new project, Diabetes Digital, an innovative platform designed to empower individuals to effectively manage and prevent diabetes through virtual counseling, digital resources, support and guidance.Paid subscribers will also get our bonus segment, where Wendy and Jess answer your questions about gestational diabetes, about managing diabetes with a history of disordered eating, and how to know if you need an RD or a therapist.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 130 TranscriptVirginiaWhen I said you were coming on, so many people were like, “I love Food Heaven!” It has a cult following. And you did this for 12 years, which is ancient in podcasting terms. You are like the great-grandmothers of podcasting—and I mean that as a compliment. This is a pro-aging podcast.WendyThat’s how it feels.JessWe did the podcast for seven years and Food Heaven for 12.VirginiaIt’s a long time to have an online brand. It’s a long time to do anything in your life. But you’ve made some really big pivots lately. I would love to hear a little bit about what inspired this.WendyIt was a combination of things. One of the biggest things was: We were burned out by being in the online space and the constant influx of content. Especially working in the nutrition space, there’s just so much content that is misinformed, that’s diet-y, that is just exhausting to consume. Even if we’re not engaging with or following that type of content, you still get it one way or another. Then also being in this anti-diet space, that can be exhausting as well.It was very fulfilling up until it wasn’t. And we also wanted to just spend more time offline. VirginiaI relate to this so much. WendyWe’re still very passionate about nutrition education but we wanted to take that offline. That’s why we started the new business. We want to connect more with people one-on-one and have really complex, tough conversations that can’t be captured in an infographic or reel or whatever. It’s just so polarizing online.We were like, how do we get back to why we originally came into this line of work? How do we have those conversations with people and make a meaningful impact? So we decided to transition out of the online space a little bit, to get some clarity on what it is that we actually want to do. We did a hard pause on the podcast and we will likely be phasing it out. We’re still figuring that out. But I think our energy is going to is going to be focused on the new business that moving forward.JessWe’ve also done a whole podcast series on this pivot because we didn’t want it to be something where a we just disappeared because that was definitely an option. Like, Goodbye.VirginiaJust, Irish goodbye the whole like internet.JessCtrl Alt Delete on all of this.I’m sure there are a lot of folks who can see themselves in this burnout and this “what’s next?” I really had no clue. I was like I’m going to be done with all of this. I think we were just taking that time in therapy or working with a business coach to just allow that space to ask these questions, to process the last 12 years. What’s worked, what hasn’t worked? How do you not get into the same patterns? I’m not saying that Food Heaven was a toxic work environment, but in some ways, it was because we’re very much like, “We can do everything.” We’ll take it all on and we’ll burn out and we can’t delegate. So, how do we work on those things? That’s pretty much what made us decide to pivot. I’ll never forget, I don’t know why I was listening to Jay Shetty—you know who Jay Shetty is?VirginiaI don’t think I do. JessHe is a former monk that some people find problematic because I guess there’s evidence that he steals his quotes? Celebrities love him. But he did say something that resonated with me and it was something like, “you know it’s time to pivot when you’re doing this work more for other people than for yourself.” And I don’t know if he used the word performance, but it’s like you’re doing what other people expect of you and not necessarily what you want to do. That resonated because I was like, we have been really invested in the conversations around intuitive eating and all these things, and they are so important. And—we have been having the same conversation for the past eight years, and we’re ready to have a new conversation. I think that that quote helped me realize this conversation, for me to be happy and fulfilled, needs to evolve a little bit. Does that make sense?VirginiaYeah, it definitely makes sense. I did just Google Jay Shetty, out of curiosity, and he describes himself as a monk turned millionaire.JessAnd that’s why people find him problematic.VirginiaSometimes people we feel complicated feelings about, can still say something useful. I’ve been thinking about all of this, just in watching you guys over the years. You make so much content for free between Instagram and the podcast. I think a lot about how much this kind of work asks us to make lots of things for free for people and how problematic that is. There are just so many layers to how the burnout can happen. So I think it completely makes sense that you’re looking to take the conversation somewhere deeper and different. WendyAnd there are also a lot of voices in this space. This whole idea of intuitive eating, Health at Every Size, it was very new, at least when I entered the world of nutrition. Now, there are a lot more people talking about this and bringing awareness. So it’s okay to gracefully bow out. We feel like, it’s in good hands. JessThat’s super positive. Because we were always about being culturally inclusive and culturally relevant, and a lot of our podcast focused on that, and especially before 2020, because I know that after 2020 there were a lot more people focusing on all those things. But for us, it had always been a part of the conversation for these past 12 years. Racism and social justice, and especially the intersections of food and nutrition and all those things. So I am happy that there are a lot more people who are incorporating this into their work because it means it allows for more diverse conversation from different folks. I think that’s a good thing. We are excited for what the future holds. VirginiaI think all the time about an episode you guys did in 2020 you were basically like, “Stop asking us to do so much.” It was a master class in boundary setting. You said, as Black women, we’re being asked to do all of this extra work right now because a bunch of you just arrived at this conversation that we’ve been having for years and that’s really invalidating. It was such a powerful episode. And this feels like a continuation of that very important boundary setting. So I’m very happy for both of you.WendyI remember that episode. We were completely over it.VirginiaI mean, as well you should have been, it was absurd. So let’s start talking about the new venture, Diabetes Digital. What inspired this project?JessAs we mentioned, we took some time to think and reflect on why we got into the field of nutrition in the first place, what we see for ourselves over the next like 10 or 20 years, and it definitely isn’t dancing on the gram—no shade to anyone who has fun dancing on the gram. We realized we want to do less social media, more direct impact. As Wendy mentioned, we’re both dietitians and diabetes educators and we both have a family history, too, with diabetes and with pre-diabetes. I mean, I had pre-diabetes during the pandemic. We know that there are so many people, especially Black and brown folks who are affected by these things. And we were thinking how great would it be to be able to bridge the gap with all the work that we do through Food Heaven, and being weight inclusive and culturally relevant and bridge that with something that so many people deal with on a day-to-day basis, whether it’s diabetes or trying to prevent diabetes, people who may have like borderline. So that’s kind of where the idea came from. There are a couple people who are doing this, but not many. There are people who are doing diabetes work like through a culturally inclusive lens. So I want to shout out Lorena Drago who’s been doing the work, Constance Brown-Riggs, both dietitians. But we haven’t seen many people who are bringing all these things together.We want things to be financially accessible, as well. There are so many people who wouldn’t be accessible otherwise to not use insurance. So we’re trying to be able to accept as many insurance carriers as possible. Many of the patients who we’ve worked with who have diabetes, they’ll come to us and say, “My doctor just gave me this list,” or “my doctor told me I have to cut out all these cultural foods.” So what we realize is doctors, for the most part, have a very limited training when it comes to nutrition and also with diabetes. They think that you have to cut out all these carbs and that’s just not the case at all. So part of this is helping with a lot of the misinformation out there as well.VirginiaOne of the most common questions I get asked whenever I write about weight and health or doing an interview about it, is “okay, but what about diabetes?”It’s almost framed as “this is how we’re going to catch you out, with your weight inclusive health care talk.” What other misconceptions do you see in terms of what people commonly encounter around weight and diabetes management?WendyOne of the biggest misconceptions is that you have to lose weight in order to improve your blood sugar. We know that significant and intentional weight loss is very hard, long term. Oftentimes achieving glucose control becomes synonymous in medical settings with weight loss. So we see providers all the time saying, “You have to lose weight in order to improve your A1C,” which is an indicator of your blood sugar balance. They might even recommend extreme diets, like Jess said, cutting out carbohydrates, which is misinformed, or really rapid weight loss methods. Now it’s even more complicated because these GLP1s are have become even more popular, like Ozempic, for example, which is intended for Type Two Diabetes, but now it’s also being promoted as this weight loss drug. So weight and blood sugar becomes intertwined, when it’s possible to achieve glucose balance at a higher weight independent of weight loss. It’s two separate things.Then, once you start recommending these extreme diets and weight loss measures, you start having other issues like nutrient deficiencies. You start having a lot of fluctuations with your glucose because you might be restricting and bingeing. And that becomes really hard, especially when you’re on medication. For example, if you’re on insulin, and you’re doing these restrictive diets, your risk for hypoglycemia—which is when your blood sugar drops too low—is much higher. And that becomes very dangerous because you can pass out, you can go into ketoacidosis. There are a lot of complications that can happen if your blood sugars are running really high and then are running really low when you start having these ups and downs. I think reframing the conversation and removing the focus from weight, instead having conversations around improving someone’s relationship to food and also exploring what other things can impact blood sugars. Their stress, mental health, sleep are all big ones; medication adherence, like are you taking your medication consistently? Do you understand the dosing and the frequency of medications? Because there can be huge gaps with that as well, because maybe providers focus a lot of their session on weight loss and then didn’t really go over what the plan is for medication. Because these diabetes medications can be very, very complicated, especially if you’re on multiple medications and you’re on different types of insulin. So, if we focus more so on all these other things that are likely to like impact blood sugar a lot more than weight, I think there would be improved health outcomes for people with diabetes, especially type two diabetes. You can develop type two diabetes at any weight, especially if there’s a genetic predisposition. If you have a strong family history, you’re at a higher risk. So it’s really important to look at the labs, the metabolic markers, to inform what the intervention is going to be versus what the number on the scale is.VirginiaAs you’re talking, I’m thinking so much of the focus on weight loss comes from the fact that we really blame people when they get type two diabetes. How do you see that bias against folks with type two intersecting more broadly with medical racism and the other cultural biases we see playing out in healthcare?JessMore often than not, patients from marginalized communities may encounter health care providers who make assumptions about their lifestyles or what they are or aren’t doing. I will always use this example of myself. I asked a doctor, “Can you check my vitamin b12 and iron?” And she was like, “You don’t need to check those. That would only be people who follow a vegetarian diet.” And I was like, “Well I do, so can you check?”VirginiaShe just assumed you wouldn’t be a vegetarian? JessSo many assumptions. And the same thing happens with diabetes. People make a lot of assumptions that it’s your fault. I’ve seen doctors tell patients, “You brought this on yourself because you’re eating too many of these foods,” or “You’re overindulging.” It’s kind of this God complex. It’s ridiculous.I think that for a lot of patients who feel like their diabetes is their fault, they are going to be more disempowered and less likely to engage in health promoting behaviors or in self-management, because they’re getting, from not only their doctors, but from the world, this message that they failed. They’ve done something wrong.It’s really important to take away these cultural biases and stereotypes because if you go into it thinking this is this person’s fault, you think that they eat a certain way or all these things, and there are no other factors that can be involved that might be out of the patient’s control, like maybe living in a food desert or what some people might call food apartheid, all these different things. So I think that that can definitely lead to worse health outcomes, including complications with diabetes.VirginiaThat feels like such a huge piece of it, which is so rarely there when doctors are handing over generic, one size fits all advice on how to approach this treatment. Tell us a little more about how Diabetes Digital will work. Like let’s say I just got diagnosed with diabetes. How do I find you? What am I going to do with you?JessOkay, so if you have been diagnosed with diabetes, or had it for a long time and want more support, or you have pre-diabetes, or even just have a strong family history: Go to our website, and fill out our Get Started form. We’ll let you know if we work in your state. We’re in 23 states right now, and we accept insurance in all 23 — Aetna, Cigna, United Healthcare, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Medicare, with more to come. And the amazing thing is that most of our patients actually don’t pay anything — under their preventative benefits, they pay nothi…
Full show notes at the publisherIt’s time for your February Extra Butter. 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!
To listen to the full episode and read the full transcript, you’ll need to join Extra Butter, our premium subscription tier.
Extra Butter ensures that the Burnt Toast community can always stay an ad- and sponsor-free space—which is crucial for body liberation journalism. Join us here!
(Questions? Glitches? Email me all the details)
This episode includes affiliate links. Shopping our links is another great way to support Burnt Toast!
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! This is the podcast about anti-fat bias, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole Smith.Today I am chatting with Ash Brandin, a middle school teacher librarian better known as The Gamer Educator.Ash has over a decade of teaching experience, and uses their love of video games to connect with their students and enhance student learning in the classroom. On Instagram as @thegamereducator, Ash helps caregivers navigate screen time boundaries, to ensure it benefits the whole family. I turn to Ash’s work whenever I am feeling panicked about our family’s relationship with screen time. So, heads up that this whole episode is a little bit of a therapy session for me—but I think you’ll get a lot out of it too! Yes, even if you don’t have kids. Because we’re going to talk about how screen time attitudes can intersect so much with diet culture and anti-fatness. And as usual, there’s a lot of unlearning we can all do.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 128 TranscriptVirginiaSo, I want to disclose going into this that I’m a parent who regularly panics about screen time. I’m trying. But I’m on my unlearning journey. AshWell, what’s very funny is that I could say exactly the opposite. Like, I’ve tried to do so much unlearning around food and the associations I have with food and eating to make sure I’m raising my kid very differently than my upbringing. And I’m still not there yet for myself. So we’re coming from different sides, but—VirginiaIt’s very much the same conversation. AshOh, very much. Yes. VirginiaI do want to report one victory, which is: This weekend I spent three hours watching my 10-year-old play Animal Crossing, and it was really good for both of us. We’re at an age where there can be a lot of tween feelings. So we had a morning while her sister was on a playdate and I decided to just really go down the Animal Crossing rabbit hole with her. And she was so thrilled!So, that was a helpful homework assignment I gave myself, in anticipation of the conversation.AshWell done! Some exposure therapy. VirginiaYou posted a reel recently about the problems with the term “Screen Time Detox,” and I was like, Oh, okay. Ash needs to come on Burnt Toast. Screen time diet culture is a thing! We need to get into this.AshI should say, probably the go-to analogy I use most often when talking about screens is food. I make food analogies all the time.So, screen detox is a term that we see a lot, particularly from screen time platforms that are not necessarily neutral about screen time. Maybe they’re saying that they’re neutral about screen time, like, “oh, screens are a tool,” but as soon as you start involving words like “screen detox,” very similar to food, immediately there’s going to be an association there. If we need to detox from screens, then what does that imply that a screen is to begin with? That it is toxic or poisonous or somehow depleting us in some way that we need to escape from. So a kid hearing that we’re taking a detox from screens, might think, So this thing I really love is bad for me? This thing that I enjoy doing is somehow not good for me? I have to take a break from that? That can be confusing to a child who might really enjoy it. And they’ve been allowed to do it. Now their parent is turning around and saying “You can’t do it anymore because you need to take a break, because it’s somehow bad for you.”Screen Time Detox enters us into a restrict and binge cycle with our devices. If we feel like we’ve allowed it too much and then our reaction is to say, “We need a detox,” well—that’s restriction. And that’s not necessarily a sustainable relationship with something like screens, just like it’s not sustainable with food.If what we really want is for our kids to be able to have screens be just another neutral part of their lives, then we have to treat it as another neutral part of their lives. That doesn’t mean we allow it the same as every other part of their life, but the way we talk about it, and the way we frame it can do a lot in that conversation. And there’s also a whole lot, which you probably know way more about than I do, about the origins of talking about “detoxing,” and the way that that aligns with a lot of racist and white supremacist beauty standards. So I think there are many reasons to divest from that term when it comes to using it outside of food. But that’s what really comes up for me. VirginiaI often see folks who would identify as body positive activists or fat activists talk about “taking a detox from social media,” with the goal of seeing fewer normative beauty standards and to turn off a lot of diet culture noise. But I always bump on it because—why are we using that term?AshWe don’t like it over here, why are we okay with it over there, right? VirginiaWhy can we not see the disconnect?I do think it can be useful to curate your feed or take a break and notice how you feel without that diet culture noise, of course. But let’s not invoke diet culture language to do that. AshJust as we can speak neutrally about using screens, we can also speak neutrally about taking a break from it. When we do that, it changes our attitude from “I am being prevented from having this thing, and therefore it’s all I’m going to think about because scarcity mindset is a real thing.” To: “I’m going to pay attention to how do I feel differently when I have less time on a certain app? Or when I don’t follow this person, or when I put my phone away at this time? How does my kid respond when we go outside before screen time? How do they respond when we have 10 fewer minutes every day?”This lets us really look at what happens during a break like data. Then we can really think about, “Is this benefiting us in a positive way?” Or see, “Nah, it didn’t actually make any difference. I guess it doesn’t matter.” Or, “This made a huge difference. This is something I want to adopt into the way we have screens in our family.”That becomes much more sustainable. If we want to take a break, it’s fine to say “we’re going to take a break.” We can speak about taking a break from screens as neutrally as we would say “we’re going to watch a movie.”VirginiaI’m curious if there are other ways you see diet culture and anti-fatness showing up in broader conversations around screens?AshWhen people are newly coming to me, the first thing that I feel like I have to address is the fact that it will be much harder to change the way we talk about screens or our kids’ relationships to screens or our own family’s relationship to screens, if we are not changing how we view screens in general as a source of leisure time. Because that’s essentially what they are.And I think that is often the crux of the problem. Sometimes you’ll hear people say, “What is screen time replacing?” This is a phrase I really take a lot of umbrage with. I’ve never liked this phrase, but it is a common one you hear in a lot of parenting advice or goals. Just ask yourself what screens are replacing? Well, imagine if I said “It’s fine to have cake, just ask yourself what is cake replacing?”VirginiaOh God. I hear it now.AshYeah, immediately, I’m sure you can go, Oh, okay. My issue with the phrase “what is screen time replacing?” is that if you are someone who thinks that there is something wrong with screens, then you’re going to fill that with literally everything you think is better than screens—which is like everything, right? They could be reading, they could be sitting and staring in space, they could be cleaning the banisters, they could be…You’re going to come up with everything that they could be doing because the implication there is that screens should always come last. Screens should be done after literally every other thing worthy of doing has been done.But leisure has a purpose. Leisure is something we need in our lives. Rest and doing things we like purely for the sake of enjoyment, is something that we need. I think even within leisure time, there is a lot of internalized capitalism and probably some fatphobia that comes in with the belief that my leisure should still be, quote unquote, good. I should use my leisure time to go on a walk. I should work out. I should meditate. I should do something productive that contributes to something in some way. I shouldn’t just lie on the couch and watch Netflix. But sometimes that is absolutely what we want and absolutely what we need! Like what you talked about with Animal Crossing, sometimes that is genuinely what we need. We just need some leisure. So I see some overlap there with, we need to be able to say that there is validity in leisure for the sake of leisure, of doing something you like purely because you like it and not because of a skill or a productivity or a contribution that you or your kids might be getting out of it. VirginiaSo we’re not just unpacking the diet culture of this—I feel like we’re getting into perfectionism culture, too. [Post-recording note: Which is a function of white supremacy.] The demonization of screen time intersects with so many other biases and identities that we are taught to hold.AshI think that’s why it’s very hard for people. I don’t hear that come up in this conversation very often. I’m sure there are other people saying it, but every time I bring it up, I feel like it’s not something that we’re hearing very much. I think that’s very hard, especially for caregivers of kids, because we feel pressure for our kids to be better than we were, or we need to be giving them what we didn’t get, or we need to be setting them up for the most success. And that all still plays into it. If I let my kid play video games because they just want to play video games, what does that say about me as a parent? What does that say about me as a caregiver if I am letting them do something that is a “waste?” And I think there’s also a pretty clear throughline there to this myth of laziness. I think that can probably go into a anti-fat and fatphobic place pretty easily. This idea of like, that’s not a good use of time. It’s a waste. It’s lazy. But again: All leisure is worthy of time. We all need leisure. Who hasn’t sat down to rewatch the show for the 10th time? Because you don’t want to think, because you need a break.VirginiaI need to actually evacuate my brain for an hour.AshExactly! Or you listen to the same album over and over again, and you read a book over and over again, because you want to escape, because you want something comforting. And it’s not unreasonable to think that our kids might want that same feeling from technology as well. I think people worry—again, probably a lot of overlap here [with food messages. I think they worry, “If I were to allow it, then I’m sending the message that it’s okay to be on screens all the time.” But that sounds kind of absurd. We that balance in our lives. We model watching TV, and then we get up and we do other things. So we can have leisure and fun be part of our kids’ lives. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be all they ever do. We wouldn’t let them take a bath for three hours. We put boundaries around other parts of their lives and we still keep them morally neutral. If our kid wanted to stay in the bath for hours, we wouldn’t blame the bath for them having a hard time.We wouldn’t be like, “Oh, it’s all that dopamine you’re getting from the warm water!” We wouldn’t go there, because we’d recognize: Transitions are hard or they don’t want to end something fun. We would see the reason behind it. But I think that feeling of oh my gosh, I must be doing something bad, I must be bad as a caregiver or as an adult really comes through with with screens and technology. Probably also with food. Virginia I do frequently hear from readers and listeners who are more uncomfortable with the screen time relationship of their kid in a bigger body versus a thin kid. I think that’s something, too, that’s really interesting to explore. I heard this a lot, especially during the pandemic. Pandemic weight gain got tied to increased screen time. As opposed to like, bodies changed because it was years passing and also a stressful time. I think we have to say, who do we allow to have screen time? Who do we feel more okay with having the screen time? AshOh, absolutely. We see that too with aspects of neurodiversity and neurodivergence, which I speak kind of broadly about, but I try not to get too in the weeds because that’s not an expertise area of mine. But we totally see that.There’s some great accounts out there by parents or educators of neurodiverse kids— check out mrsspeechiep and school_run_mum_autism. They will call that in and say, “From the outside you’re seeing my autistic child on a screen, but what you’re not seeing is this is how they engage with the world.”One account I follow, Rainbow Homeschool, made the incredible point that for their autistic child, screens were one of the only ways that they could experience certain parts of the world in a way that was accessible to them. They could not go to a children’s museum. It would be too overwhelming. But they could watch a Blippi video of him alone in a children’s museum playing with bubbles. That was the way they were going to be able to engage with that. In that way, it was making it accessible to that child. We don’t want to feel like we’re failing our kids. So if we feel like they need something else or they are not, quote unquote, worthy of a screen yet, they haven’t earned it in some way. Their grades are low or they have forgotten to do something or they could be doing something else. I think we hold ourselves and our kids to a very high standard. The thing we’re quick to remove is that access to leisure for the sake of leisur,e or hobbies that are purely just fun, and for enjoyment.Or at least they look that way from the outside world—because the the other side of this is that there are many valid things that people get from screens. It could be regulation, but it can also be a feeling of control, a feeling of power. A lot of kids can do things in digital worlds that they can’t do in the real world that can involve really intense critical thinking and executive functioning skills and backwards design. If we are not willing to see screens as a valid use of time, we can easily miss those things. And then we think, oh, they’re just sitting there. Like, I don’t even know what they’re doing. And then we’re missing what they’re doing. I’m sure you saw this when you were watching Animal Crossing for three hours. I’m sure you saw so many things where you were like, oh that’s what is going on?VirginiaSo I will say, I still do not love the audio track of Animal Crossing. If the characters could just say words and not that weird little voice they do? But that’s my sensory thing. And the other thing that I want to hold space for that I think is both an issue to unpack and maybe very real, like we’re allowed to feel some type of way about this, is: For a lot of us, this is bound up in like maybe you hoped your child would share something of yours, and screens seem the thing that’s taken over. So for me, I never played video games as a kid—not because my parents banned them, my younger siblings did play them. I just wasn’t game-oriented. I was a big reader. I did a lot of playing with dolls. And I thought I was going to raise two kids who would love reading and dolls. And I can tell you, they have no interest in dolls and I don’t actually care that much about that one. And they are big readers, so I’ve done it, right? I should just be like, great! They love books! And also screens. But instead, I get very in my head about like, well they don’t want to read the same books I loved as a kid. Or they don’t turn to a book for comfort as quickly as they turn t…
Full show notes at the publisherWe are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for your January Indulgence Gospel.
Today, we’re getting into three big questions for you:
Does sugar destroy your immune system?
How do we stay hopeful when fat activism gets hard?
What’s the deal with 1000 Hours Outside—is it good parenting, or is it diet culture?
And we’re going to get into favorite books, favorite snacks, good shows to puzzle by, Corinne’s new favorite jeans, and (inexplicably?) Virginia’s strong feelings about children’s birthday parties.
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!
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
