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
Welcome to a very special episode of Burnt Toast!We recorded this on December 3, at Seattle’s Town Hall, with an absolutely delightful crowd. This was the official end of the Fat Talk book tour, but I promise it’s not a regular book promo conversation. Because it’s Angela Garbes and me, talking about books sure, but also talking about bodies and big life transitions and other good stuff.Both of Angela’s books, and mine, are available in the Burnt Toast Bookshop!Don’t forget, you can always take 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talkfrom Split Rock Books! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)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 126 TranscriptVirginiaWelcome to the first ever live recording of Burnt Toast!This is the podcast about anti-fat bias, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. AngelaAnd I’mAngela Garbes. That’s right. We’re here in Seattle, Washington! Live at Town Hall!VirginiaAngela is my co-host, and hype woman, tonight because we are in Seattle! Thank you, Town Hall. Thank you all, for coming out. Let’s do this! Let’s make a podcast!AngelaSo as you can see, there’s a large projection of Virginia’s book Fat Talk here. We’re here to talk about Virginia’s book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. We’re also going to talk about bodies and we’re going to talk about big life transitions—but we’ll put a little pin in that for the moment.I had the pleasure of reading Fat Talk before it came out, and I remember being so blown away by it. I think in the blurb I wrote like, “Virginia Sole-Smith is a visionary.” But it’s true because Virginia took so many disparate things that I understood about American culture and about bodies and about diet culture and put it all together. One of the things that I was just saying—we had dinner before this. We were talking about the male gaze—you can boo for things like that. VirginiaIt might come up a few times.AngelaBut I was like, when we talk about the male gaze, we’re talking about American culture in many ways. We’re talking about diet culture. And what Virginia helped me see when she threaded together beautifully through research and reportage is that American culture is diet culture is white supremacist culture is anti-fat culture is all of these things. When we talk about one, they are inextricably linked. No matter how much we would like to separate them out, and the powers that be would like us to separate them out, or not talk about them at all, they’re so deeply linked. And she presented that in such a way that I was like, “Well, there’s no turning back now.” I see it differently.The other thing that I love about this book is, it’s about parenting. And I’m the mother of children, but I desperately needed this book for myself! There’s so much that we, as the grownups, have to unlearn. There’s a lot of parenting and reparenting that we have to do for ourselves around diet culture and anti fat bias. Virginia’s work has been very meaningful to me. I was so honored that she asked me to read it. I was so honored when Virginia blurbed my book, and I asked her to blurb mine after. I think we have kind of cute meeting story, actually. We met in our Instagram DMs. VirginiaI think I slipped into your DMs! Or did you slip into mine?AngelaYou slipped into mine. I had posted a picture, when I was working on Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, of The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America, which is Virginia’s first book—which nobody should sleep on! Shout out for The Eating Instinct, real ones know! It was a huge part of my research process and informed several chapters of my book. So I had posted, you know, like, behind the scenes process shot, and one of Virginia’s friends sent the post to her.VirginiaAnd was like, “OMG, Angela Garbes read your book!” And it was a really big deal because Angela is a really big deal. AngelaSo then we had a real meet cute. We’re like, “No, I’m a huge fan.” “No I’m a huge fan.”And now we get to be on stage!VirginiaMutually fangirling. AngelaIn our year of becoming friends.Okay, so we are going to talk about BLTs—big life transitions. I just coined that right now.And one of the hugest transitions—and I know this—as a writer, is when you transition from being in intense research and writing mode, which is private. I mean, you have a podcast and a newsletter, but it’s very intense, private work. Sometimes I feel like until the book is out, I’m just sitting on my ass. That’s all I’ve been doing. Just thinking and having thoughts.What is it like to have published a book that was an instant New York Times bestseller? Which, we don’t live for measures of success! But that’s a pretty big one, right? Any writer who tells you it’s not a big deal is lying. So it’s been an intense time of having that come out. I’d love to know, what does it feel like to have been living with this book out in public to have it be a transformative book for your career and what has the transition to book promotion been like? VirginiaWell, some really good advice you gave me back in the spring was: You won’t really know how to answer that question for three years. So I don’t totally know. But I mean, it’s been a really surreal year, for a lot of reasons. And a lot of that was going from being very private with this conversation, to being very public with this conversation, which of course was the goal of having the conversation—for other people to come to the conversation.And obviously, while researching the book I was pretty sure anti-fat bias was a thing. But publishing a book about anti-fat bias and going out to talk about it as a fat person really confirmed for me that anti-fat bias is alive and well! Mostly for the men who email and send me DMs and have comments.And, you know, I was prepared for it—AngelaI think anyone who writes about fatness…VirginiaAnd is a woman on the Internet… AngelaYou expect a certain amount of feedback and trolling, I guess. VirginiaBut you’re still somehow surprised by how personal it can feel at times. Which isn’t to say it’s always upsetting! Like, Steve on the internet telling me that he doesn’t find me attractive is not something that’s keeping me up at night. The DMs that are like, “but men don’t like fat chicks.” I didn’t actually write this book for them? So it’s okay. I’m not looking for that. And look, although I do identify as a fat person and have lived for the last decade or so in a fat body, I was a skinny kid and then a thin younger adult, through intensive dieting efforts, not through genetics. So I grew up with a lot of thin privilege, which is a concept I talk about in the book. Thin privilege is the experience of the world as being built for your body. You fit into the seats on airplanes, the chairs here are supporting your body. You’re not worried when you go to an event like this, will the chair hold me?And I’m still what’s called small fat, which is on the lower end of the plus side spectrum. So there are a lot of ways that being fat doesn’t negatively impact my daily life because I’m not experiencing the constant oppression that folks in bigger bodies are experiencing. But going out as a Public Fat Person kind of inches you a little closer to that experience. So it gave me a firsthand appreciation of: This is what we’re asking fat people to navigate all the time without making them New York Times bestsellers. Just because they live in fat bodies, they are going into doctor’s offices unable to access health care. They’re being turned away and told to lose weight before they’re given fertility treatments or other basic medical care. They’re earning less at jobs. And for our kids in schools, they’re experiencing bullying and discrimination on a daily basis. So yeah, it really just drove all that home, thanks to Steve on the internet. AngelaYeah, thanks Steve.Obviously you did a lot of interviews, including Fresh Air with Tanya Mosley. But you told me about one, I’m assuming it was local news?VirginiaNo, it was WGN, Chicago Morning News. It was a live TV interview for the book and the thin white male news anchor audibly sighed before he could talk to me. He was like, “It sounds like you blame parents for being concerned with their kids’ health?” He was so upset to have me there. AngelaPeople really don’t want to hear this stuff. The average size of females in America is a 16 or an 18, right? There is this idea of the standard of beauty, which is thinness, which is whiteness, like, we’re coming for you. That was a construct and it’s falling away. VirginiaIn the book, I unpack everything that’s wrong with the BMI, but yes, around 60 percent of Americans have an overweight or obese BMI. So in terms of bias, this is everyone. This is not a tiny, marginalized group of people who, even if it was tiny, wouldn’t deserve the treatment they get, of course. But like, this is everyone. AngelaThis is the majority of the population. VirginiaWe can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. This is humans in bodies. AngelaSo we spent some time on Steve on the internet. But by and large, the reception and the process of being out in the world with this book is, I’m hoping, has been positive.VirginiaI get teary just thinking about the emails I’ve gotten from parents saying this helps me think about how to keep my kids safe in the bodies that they have, how to advocate for them at the pediatrician’s office. It is marketed as a parenting book, but people saying “I don’t have kids, but this is helping me understand stuff that I experienced in my own childhood.”One person said to me, “For so long, I understood my body as a problem, that it was my job and my responsibility to make myself fit in as opposed to understanding this is a whole system that wasn’t built for my body. And that’s a systemic problem.” Even more exciting to is hearing from doctors, hearing from medical researchers saying, yes, you’re right, we have not been paying attention to the impact of anti-fat bias on people’s health. When we are studying diets, we are never controlling for the fact that when we’re documenting health benefits from weight loss, we’re never documenting the fact that if you lose some degree of weight, you will experience less anti-fatness. And that might be some of the reasons that your health appears, quote unquote, better, right? Because the world is now treating you differently, because suddenly you’re able to access the health care you weren’t able to access before. It’s opening doors, and maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it’s not how do we make everyone thinner so that they can be treated better? Maybe we flip that a little bit. AngelaI mean, that’s really a dream, as writers who work in this space of service journalism, but also wanting to give voice to these things, and then be like, hey, this is going on, this is important. This is significant. That feeling of, I don’t know, sometimes I feel like, I’m part of changing the cultural conversation. But that’s so nebulous. Like, what is that? But hearing from someone like that, it’s small, but it’s significant. That idea of change happening within those institutions is huge. VirginiaIf we can change the way weight and health get studied, to make sure any study on weight and health has to examine the presence of weight stigma and the impact on people’s health. They have to look at when people go on diets and lose weight in the short term and you get excited because their biomarkers improve, what happens to them in five years when the weight has been regained, both in terms of physical health, but also in terms of things like disordered eating and increased rates of eating disorders. None of that is getting tracked most of the time because of all of this baked in bias that says, well, fat people must want to lose weight that must make them healthier.AngelaI’m thinking about when I wrote my first book which was about pregnancy and why don’t we know anything about pregnancy? Why hasn’t it been studied? The idea that just having a fat body is like an aberration, not just a variance of a body or just having a different body. I learned this when writing Like a Mother that it wasn’t until 1993 that Congress passed a law saying that if you receive funding for clinical trials from like the federal government, which is most clinical trials and anything in a research based institution, you have to include females and people of color. Our very definition, not even just of health and wellness, of like what a human being is, doesn’t include most of us who are here. We’re up against really nothing less than that. So it’s really heartening to hear about change. VirginiaMost studies that are done on anorexia nervosa, or actually most eating disorders, use BMI cut offs when they screen for applicants. So people with a BMI above 25, which is the cutoff for the “normal” range, don’t get included in the study. Because they think that fat people don’t get eating disorders. So then we have no research on the fact that actually that happens quite a lot. Because when fat people engage in disordered eating relationships, doctors are likely to congratulate us, ask us to do it more, ask us to go further with it. That bias, those are people’s lives we’re talking about. One of the most deadly mental health conditions. AngelaOkay, do you want to talk about our our own big life transitions and how our bodies are doing with that? Because it takes a little bit of what’s hard and what’s good and what is just showing up in our vessels every day. We’ve continued throughout this year, with lots of text messages and DMs about these changes that we’ve made in our life, which is that I am coming up on one year of sobriety. I made that change for a number of reasons. One being that I realized I was an alcoholic. But so that’s big. I’m 11 months sober. And there are so many changes that show up in my body.And Virginia’s big news, if you don’t know—I’ll let you say. What’s going on in your life, Virginia? VirginiaOh, I’m getting divorced. So that’s a big change. You can clap! That’s right, you can clap that one, too. Thank you all for not just immediately going awwww. It’s good, it’s a hard thing. But a good thing. AngelaSo I’d like to ask you, the experience of separating and getting a divorce and being in the process of that—how does your body feel in that? Where do you see that showing up? VirginiaI’ve talked about this a little bit on the podcast already, but there has been this real freedom in how I feel about my body. I’m not going to talk negatively about my ex husband, who’s a really good guy and a good dad. But suddenly my body is not in relationship to anyone else. I mean, it’s also being out of the early years of motherhood, where your body belongs to your children so intensely. AngelaI think that’s a huge piece of it. VirginiaWe don’t talk enough about that. AngelaMy youngest child is now five and she and I are still very close, but it’s different. It’s just different. I’m not wiping anything anymore. There’s a lot less contact with fluids.VirginiaI’m allowed to pee with the door closed, which feels big. This is an established thing now, that company is not welcome.AngelaSo you have freedom from your children.VirginiaThere’s just this added layer, which is really interesting. It wasn’t immediate. And I think at first—this was the male gaze thing we were talking about—I was very aware of when I would be alone in my house, when my kids would be at their dad’s. The first few weekends, I felt like I was watching myself. I was observing my body still. Maybe my brain was like, well, no one’s watching you anymore, so I will. Like, someone should still be watching, right?Because especially for women, this is how we’re condition…
Full show notes at the publisherYou’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 author and feminist philosopher Kate Manne, about her new book Unshrinking: How To Face Fatphobia.Kate is also an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University and author of Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny and Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women.In Unshrinking Kate has given us an impeccably researched history of how anti-fat bias developed and develops within us all, as well as a thorough and incisive dissection of our modern moral panic about fatness, all woven throughout with her powerful story of reclaiming her own body. If you have ever struggled to feel safe in your body as it is, if you have ever wondered who your body is for, Kate has the answers. Our bodies belong to us. All of Kate’s books, including Unshrinking, are available in the Burnt Toast Bookshop!Don’t forget, you can always take 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talkfrom Split Rock Books! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)And if you love today’s conversation you should come see Kate and I together at Community Bookstore in Brooklyn on January 26. We’ll be celebrating the launch of Unshrinking and we would love to see you there!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 125 TranscriptKateSo I am a philosopher by trade. I’m an academic. Most of my work for the last 10 years, on paper at least, has been about misogyny. So I’ve been very much mired in thinking about incels, and thinking about the misogyny women face online, and thinking about ways in which women and girls face harassment, and the forms of misogyny that can be also very subtle on a daily basis. And in the last three years, I turned my attention to the intersection between misogyny and fatphobia or anti-fatness. It’s kind of a dark topic to work on. But it’s also one I find kind of liberating to try to think through in community with others.VirginiaWe’re so grateful for your work. We are talking about your new book Unshrinking, which explores how anti-fat bias develops in all of us. It is profoundly well researched, because everything you do is, but this is one where you’re also using your personal story of reclaiming your body and identifying as a fat person. So I wondered if we could, if you don’t mind, starting by just sharing a little bit of that now?KateSo, in this work that I have been doing on misogyny, people often want to know: Why did you get invested in this topic? And I have been unable to tell my story about how misogyny came to affect me personally, without telling a story about fatphobia. So to me, misogyny and fatphobia were crucially interconnected and intersected in this really deep way back when I was growing up in Australia. Because I was, at the age of 16, one of three girls who joined an all-boys school the year it integrated. VirginiaYou have told me that before and it will never not blow my mind. KateIt was such a strange decision to send me there. The backstory was, I wanted to do this special international baccalaureate certificate so that I could potentially come to the States to study, which didn’t end up happening for a bunch of reasons. But yeah, I was just someone who walked into this all male environment and was very much perceived as a girl who was on the boys’ hitherto undisputed turf. And so it was an incredibly misogynistic environment to be in. I think it’s fair to say, it was a really traumatic two years after a pretty happy childhood. And the way that the misogyny was often practiced was via fatphobia and by making my body a kind of punch line, a target for jeering and teasing and bullying, from the ostensibly littler things, like having fat bitch scrawled on my locker—VirginiaYeah, just those little things. Tiny, little micro aggression like that.KateYeah, kind of macro aggression when I say it out loud. I was just labeled the fat one, the fat girl who was undesirable, and who wasn’t serving male interest by not being quote, unquote “hot.”So there was this particular incident that I talk about in the book, at the high school assembly where, you know, it’s always kind of horrifying. We had these prizes that are always awarded for “person most likely to commit white collar crime” and “person most likely to have children out of wedlock,” and all sorts of really actually noxious stuff that’s presented as a joke. But then they said, “and the person most likely to have to pay for sex is…” and I kind of braced myself ready for it. And sure enough, it was “that person is Kate Manne.” And the auditorium just roared with laughter. Because my body was a joke.And I should say, I am speaking as someone who has a certain amount of privilege when it comes to size. I identify as a small fat person, I was at most a small fat at the time. And I can’t even imagine how horrifying the treatment would have been for someone who was a larger fat person. But it was a really eye-opening way of being exposed to the sheer cruelty, as well as the material barriers that fat people face, and the way that misogyny weaponizes any hierarchy that’s ready to hand and derogates a girl a woman in terms of it. We value intelligence, so call her stupid. We value rationality, so call her hysterical. We value thinness, so call her fat. And we value sexiness, so call her the kind of person that no one could ever want.That is how it came to be something that I became fascinated with because even though I knew the word misogyny, it wasn’t a word that I reached for to explain the kind of treatment I’d faced. Similarly, I didn’t even have a word like anti-fatness or fatphobia back at the age of 16. It wasn’t until a few years later that I discovered an online community of people who were really pushing back against anti-fatness. People like Kate Harding, people like Marianne Kirby and Lesley Kinzel, who I discovered in the early 2000s, doing this amazing work of reclaiming the bodies that had been so socially derogated partly through this intersection of misogyny and fatphobia that was my formative political experience. And it’s an experience that I tried to get personal about in the book because I have found opening up about these things is a great way, for me at least, of finding community and finding other people who have similarly been shamed, who’ve been othered. It’s that moment when we can lift our heads and meet each other’s gaze that often feels really empowering and liberating, after having had our heads bowed in shame for so long.VirginiaI had so many emotions when I read that scene in the book, and I’m revisiting them right now. I just really hope some of those boys who are now grown men read this book and feel in their hearts that they know what they did. I want them to have that moment of That was that was what I did. And I have to look at it.So that is perhaps petty. But I am actively hoping for that. KateI love that. That’s one of the reasons for this subtitle How to Face Fatphobia. Like, it’s not just me facing it. I want others who, you know, we’ve all been complicit in it to some extent, but those who have been really active in it. I have that same hope that it will be something that we collectively reckon with and face in ways. People who’ve often thought of themselves as kind and progressive and not complicit in oppression, have often perpetuated fatphobia in these ways that remain really under examined.VirginiaI’m also thinking about how you didn’t even have the word of fatphobia or anti-fatness to name what you’re experiencing. That really was such a lack back then. I mean, it’s still a lack in too many places. And what it meant was that what we often did was to try to deny fatness. The counter argument would be, “She’s not even that fat. Why are you saying that about her?” KateCompletely. Imagine how liberating it would have been for someone to say to me, instead of, “well, you’re not really fat—” because I was kind of on the borderline at that stage—but “fat people are awesome and this is such a warped value system.”And I was someone who had been raised with really strong, anti-racist values and was taught to recognize problems in society. So that critical thinking lens was something that I think could have been opened up and widened to include thinking about how irrational and immoral anti-fatness is, and also how it intersects with those forms of oppression that I had already been taught to be critical of.When I came to the early 2000s fatosphere, it was this wild moment of wait, what if there’s nothing wrong with fatness? What if fat bodies are awesome and valuable and just as good and don’t need to change to comply with these values that are so noxious and oppressive? That was a lesson that I didn’t have any trouble digesting as a political message. It took me a long time to get there in my personal practices. But it was a political message I found so powerful and so resonant. VirginiaI’d love to talk about some of the other big misconceptions around what it means to be anti-fat. You spend a lot of time in the book really eloquently talking to the weight and health myths, which we talk about a lot here on this podcast, but I’d love to go even a level deeper. What do you think people misunderstand about fatness, sort of fundamentally? And how does that make the bias so hard to unlearn?KateI think one of the pieces of this puzzle that was really striking to me when researching the book is the finding that it’s actually not that we find fat bodies unsexy or undesirable or inherently aesthetically inferior. I mean, just a little statistic about this is: Fat bodies are one of the most common search terms in pornography. So people are, at least when they’re in the privacy of their own bedrooms or studies or wherever, they’re finding fat bodies actually quite desirable and quite sexy and quite hot. But fat bodies are derogated socially in ways that make that desire and that attraction really verboten and forbidden. So oftentimes we think, well it’s just a fact of life that we don’t find fat bodies sexy. And it’s just not true. I mean, we need to look at the history of this. So fatphobia anti-fat bias is something that is a very recent prejudice. This is something brilliantly brought out by the work of Sabrina Strings, the sociologist who has shown that it really wasn’t until the mid-18th century, that fatphobia really took off. And that was in response to the burgeoning transatlantic slave trade. That meant that in Britain and France, white people had to cast about kind of desperately for a way that Black bodies were, quote unquote, inferior in order to differentiate Black bodies who are being enslaved so quickly, and so brutally, in numbers that were previously unseen. They had to cast around for a way of differentiating Black and white bodies, and there began to be this association of Blackness and fatness, which meant that for the first time, fatness became to be this socially recognized code for a body that was primitive and, quote unquote, inferior.So it’s not that fatness was derogated and then Blackness began to be associated with fatness, it’s the other way around. Fatness was first associated with Blackness and then fatness came to be derogated in this really widespread and systemic way, for kind of the first time. I mean, it’s not that there are no hints of anti-fatness in previous history, but it’s more of a mixed bag until white people needed a way to differentiate their white bodies, from the Black bodies who they were treating in such brutal and dehumanizing ways.VirginiaAnd that’s when we start to see it institutionalized, embraced in this structural way, as opposed to just beauty ideals. You can look at how the Ancient Greeks certainly prized very muscular lean bodies, but this brought it to a different level.KateAnd, in some ways, in Plato and Aristotle, there’s a lot of judgment about gluttony, but there isn’t a lot of judgment about fat or “mega bodies,” which is kind of interesting, partly because, according to the historian Susan Hill, Plato and Aristotle recognize that a body can be bigger and maybe fat, without that having anything to do with someone’s eating habits. Gluttony they certainly frowned on, in ways that I’m critical of in the book. Because bring on the food pleasure, bring on the gluttony.VirginiaAbsolutely. KateSo the dislike of fatness is this very recent historical phenomenon. And it’s very contingent on historical processes steeped in anti-Blackness. It’s not something that is this inevitable product of human history or human preferences. And even today, we see that fat bodies continue to be liked and considered sexy. It’s just that people are reticent about expressing these preferences in as much as they’re trying to access social capital via the dating and mating as public history. So it’s not that we down-rank fat bodies because we inherently dislike them. We don’t inherently dislike them. Rather, we dislike them, because they’re often down-ranked nowadays, due to this highly contingent, historically recent way of thinking about fat bodies that is steeped in anti-Black racism.To go back to the earlier part of your question, I do think that makes this kind of bias difficult to unlearn. Because, of course, we all want to have access to forms of capital and forms of just human interaction that are going to confer prestige on us and going to be something that it’s hard for someone who is dating or someone who is just trying to be a person in the world to realize that their body is being rated on this hierarchy, that is based on this category weight, that is linear and infinitely gradable. And is sort of, in some ways, superficially, or at least temporarily, changeable. So it became so tempting to try to lose weight in order to access more capital in the dating market, especially for girls and women whose value is so often seen as dependent on how we present to a white male and non-disabled, wealthy audience of kind of imagined or real people viewing our bodies and judging us and comparing us with others. VirginiaIt’s just wild. I mean, I’m thinking again, about that moment for you, in the high school award ceremony with all of those boys performing anti-fatness, and performing this idea that fat bodies can’t be sexually attractive in order to uphold their own social capital, when, as your research shows—the reality is probably that plenty of them thought you were attractive. We’re all performing this dance around that that’s not actually reflecting what people really value or really find attractive is.KateAs fat women, we are often regarded as fuckable, but not lovable, to put it really bluntly. I know for a fact that many of those boys did find me attractive, but they felt ashamed of that attraction. You see how the system is so set up to just perpetuate these human hierarchies. Weight is a quality that is so gradable that it allows us to place everybody on this kind of linear hierarchy in proportion to body mass, or in inverse proportion to body mass. So it’s this very, very powerful, ready to hand way of ranking every single body in ways that keep us scrambling to find a higher place in a human hierarchy designed to make us not only shrink our bodies, but shrink ourselves. VirginiaAnother piece that the book does a really excellent job with, is dealing with the issue of body positivity, which I think has been pushed for too long as the solution to all of this. Like, Kate, if only you had known you were fuckable and lovable in high school, then it wouldn’t have been so harmful for you when the entire school ridiculed your body? And so you really rightly take that to task in the book. And…
Full show notes at the publisherIt’s time for your January Extra Butter episode. This month, we’re doing a few listener questions on how to find fat-friendly fitness spaces, how to deal with those coded “you look so great!” compliments, and how to tune out the mainstream media’s often relentless fatphobia (especially in January).
To listen to the full episode and read the full transcript, you’ll need to join Extra Butter, our premium subscription tier.
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
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You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about anti-fat bias, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole Smith.Since we’re on winter break this week, I picked one of my favorite episodes to rerun for you—and it’s a conversation that feels more relevant (to my life, anyway!) than ever.Today we’re chatting with lyz about divorce in diet culture.This conversation was inspired in part by a piece I wrote in fall of 2022 about how diet culture shows up in co-parenting. And it was previously paywalled, but I’m releasing the whole episode for free today because it’s just such a good one!Lyz writes the excellent newsletter Men Yell at Me. She’s also the author of God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America, and Belabored: A Vindication of the Rights of Pregnant Women. And she just launched a brand new podcast, This American Ex-Wife, which is also the title of her next book, coming out in February and available to preorder now!Don’t forget, you can always take 10 percent off that purchase at Split Rock Books if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)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 123 TranscriptVirginiaSo Lyz, you have written so brilliantly about divorce. You are the smartest person I know about divorce. I text you whenever I want to know about divorce.LyzWhich isn’t that often, for her husband who’s listening.VirginiaJust… when I have general questions. About people. In general. You are extremely knowledgeable about this topic and your next book, This American Ex-Wife, is about divorce. So you are here as my divorce expert and I’m curious: Do you see diet culture playing a role in American divorces?LyzOh, absolutely. Something initially with divorce that hits on diet culture is the “revenge body.” Anybody who’s gotten divorced will tell you about the stress and the weight loss associated with it—or not! Sometimes it’s weight gain. But there is the expectation of having that “post-breakup revenge body.” I’ve seen TikToks that are kind of making jokes like, you want to sit on the couch and relax, but you remember you have to be the hot one in the breakup.VirginiaI never thought about this. LyzYou know, like the “getting back out there” body. I know for a lot of men, divorce involves some free time, which, that time used to be managed by someone and now they don’t know what to do. So there is an aspect to the culture of the Divorced Dad in the gym. I follow quite a few TikTok accounts of divorce influencers which are out there…VirginiaWow, divorce influencers.LyzSo the divorced dad going to the gym, the mom trying to get hot and get back out there. It hit me so personally when I got divorced because I was so stressed out, and my response to stress is to not eat. I lost a lot of weight, and it was not healthy. And I remember people being like, “Oh, you look so good,” and me being like, “I’m so stressed out, I’m not sleeping or eating. You should be asking me if I’m okay.” I would get so angry about it, too, because then also people—as you know—people treat you differently. All of a sudden the men would see me differently because it was a very unhealthy amount of weight [to lose].VirginiaIt sounds like a a parallel with postpartum “get your body back” pressure.LyzYes. VirginiaSo for a lot of women you’ll have just done that in recent years and now you have to do the “revenge body.” And why are we not allowed to just let our bodies be during times of stress and trauma?LyzRight, right. And I think, too, it’s so hard when you layer on that the idea that exists in the divorce world that you now have to find someone else. I hate that. I hate that whole idea. That’s what most divorce books are. It’s like, okay, well, you did it, now how do you find love again? So that comes with that added pressure of being good looking which then translates to diet culture. Thinness, muscles.VirginiaI’m just remembering a piece of yours where you were like, “actually all women want is to live alone in the woods with our wolves.” No, we don’t want to get remarried. That’s not the goal but that is immediately the expectation. Why do you want to get right back into the thing you just got out of?LyzWell, I think there’s that pressure of singleness, right? There’s that stigma of singleness. But you’re right, most women post-divorce don’t remarry. It’s the men who remarry. It’s somewhere around 70% of women initiate divorces and I think it’s less than 40%—I need to fact check myself on that.2 But it is a lower number who then get remarried. It’s an overwhelming number of men who then try to remarry because, like, “I don’t know how to find mustard in the grocery store without a woman.” But no, you’re right. I mean, every married woman I know wants to just live alone in the woods with a wolf, so.VirginiaAnd part of that freedom would be not needing to be hot while you do it, just being able to be. LyzYes, not being a hot witch. VirginiaJust want to be a witch.LyzWhy do we have to have weird witch beauty standards? There’s this great moment I think about a lot in the book Don Quixote where he’s traveling along and he meets all these shepherds. And they’re like, “There’s this one bitch, she’s awful. She broke all of our hearts. She’s so beautiful. We hate her. She’s evil.” And then they’re talking about her and she just walks up to them and goes, “I’m not evil. I don’t like any of you. Stop talking to me. I didn’t try to seduce you. I just existed and you thought I was in love with you.” And then she’s basically like, “I don’t want to be in your narrative.” And then she goes back into the woods and she never shows up in the book ever again. VirginiaShe’s our queen. LyzI think about her all the time. VirginiaThat’s icon behavior for sure. So, what else besides revenge body comes up? Anything about divorce and diet culture.LyzThen there’s that whole aspect of divesting yourself of the body ideas that come from the relationship. I think there are so many ways that happens. You might have married a person looking a very specific way but, as we all know, time and life and children take a toll. And then the other person is like, “Well, you don’t look how you used to” and you’re like, “Well, I never will.”VirginiaThat’s life. That’s time passing.LyzAnd marriage is so physical. It’s a bodily connection, right? So having divorce enables you—especially if you’re in a bad marriage. I mean, obviously people can have good marriages. My bias is that I think marriage is inherently unequal and bad. You can have good relationships within a bad system, but it’s still a bad system. So I’m gonna get that out there.But so when you do divorce, part of that rebuilding of identity and rebuilding of sense of self comes with, like, who am I now? Like, what is my body now? And now I don’t have to manage that other person’s toxic body / diet stuff. I don’t have to manage the expectations of another person on my body and on my sense of self. I don’t have to have somebody judging what I’m eating. And then you can also make your own food. That was something that blew my mind that I didn’t expect. Like, I am not cooking for this other person who wants boneless, skinless chicken breasts every single fucking night. VirginiaThe saddest of proteins, trulyLyzHe would have lived on boneless, skinless chicken breast and microwaved frozen vegetables. I’m like, “let’s roast a chicken from Ina Garten. Let’s make vegan stew!” and none of that would fly. So, yeah, being able to feed yourself without the observation of someone around you just really changes things. And since we have 50/50 custody—and it’s always different with children around—but I get to sit and be like, “what is it that I actually want to eat? And when do I want to eat? And how do I want to eat?” It just makes me so much more thoughtful and grateful about what I’m consuming in my body.VirginiaOne woman I interviewed described it as a “food rumspringa” because she was free from his expectations. For her it was embracing stuff like Annie’s Mac and Cheese—like I don’t have to cook, I can just enjoy eating a box of mac and cheese for dinner and watching Gilmore Girls and be so happy. What was your favorite thing you ate when you realized this liberation? LyzFor a while I got really into cooking complicated recipes from the New York Times. That kind of stopped. I did the opposite of everybody in 2020, in the shutdown year. Everybody got into cooking and I was like, “I’m done, peace out. I will now be ordering food exclusively.” So another one was eating out because my ex does not like to go out to eat and and it was very stressful around, like, if you go out to eat and then what you order. You know, should you get a glass of wine or god forbid order dessert? That’s, like, so extra and why are you doing that? So just going out to eat by myself and an ordering whatever I wanted and dessert was a game changer. VirginiaI love that.LyzAnd then I’d make complicated recipes just for myself because I’m like, “oh, he didn’t like curry so now I will make curry.”VirginiaNow you can have all the curry! Revenge curry seems way better than revenge body, I’m just gonna put that out there. LyzYes, yes. And all bodies handle stress in different ways. Divorce is stressful, even if it’s a good change. And that expectation that you then get thinner because of stress is not everybody’s experience.VirginiaSomething that came up in my conversations with the women I interviewed for this story was was how little faith they had that a judge or the legal system would do anything to intervene when they were seeing their ex continue to parent in very controlling ways around food. Like the dad who, if you didn’t finish dinner, you got it served for breakfast the next morning, so the kid was showing up at school hungry and having meltdowns because he hadn’t eaten two meals. That seems so clearly problematic to me. But I guess I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about why family court systems aren’t set up to deal with this.LyzFamily court systems aren’t set up to deal with a lot of different types of abuse. Going to my lawyer—who was great and wonderful—she basically was like, family court operates like an equation. You punch in the numbers, you just assume everything’s equal, and there really isn’t room for understanding some of those nuances and the different ways of talking about abuse. I mean, it’s abuse. If a parent is controlling their food access, that is abusive behavior. But you have to navigate it very, very, very delicately. Because I think, especially for women, you’re getting divorced, so already there’s a little bit of a stigma on you, right? Like, you’re a little shrewish. I noticed people treated me differently, too, around their husbands. I was like, “listen, I don’t want your nasty husband, I don’t even want my nasty husband. I don’t want anybody’s husband .”VirginiaWeird energy.LyzSo there was a little bit of weird energy. My lawyer was just really upfront, like, “Listen, if you go before a judge in Iowa or a mediator—we got everything mediated—most of them are middle aged white men. They’re look exactly like your husband. You go in and you start making all these claims, well these could be things that they do to their children.”VirginiaThis could be their parenting style. LyzYou could turn them against you. So, it’s like, if you go in there being the “shrill divorced lady” who only nitpicks and says horrible things about her husband, which I got actually. Divorced women, when I was getting a divorce, told me not to be the “negative divorced lady.”VirginiaBut like, you’re getting divorced for all these reasons, right? Some of which are negative, right? LyzI think the problem is that we don’t talk honestly about our relationships. Nobody knows what is actually supposed to be good in a marriage because we’ve spent so much time hiding some of these things. I would tell people, “Oh, we’re not gonna go out to eat” or “How about you just come over to our house?” just to manage things, so we wouldn’t have to get into a fight later if I had a glass of wine. But I’m not being honest with my friends about that. I’m not like, “No, we can’t go to a restaurant because jerkface over there won’t let me order wine.”VirginiaRight. LyzSo anyway, you are coming into a system that very much thinks its objective but as we all know, objectivity favors the white man and favors the system. So it really is a balancing act. I’ll just tell a story that about religion. My ex was saying that I was awful because I wanted to go to a liberal Lutheran Church—and now I go to no church, which is even worse. He was telling the mediator, “She will not raise her children with the values that she agreed to when we entered the marriage contract so it is a breach of contract,” and my lawyer is like, “You can’t react. You can’t nod. Even if he’s being unreasonable, you just have to be calm and placid so that you look like the reasonable one here.”VirginiaSo you’re not the angry divorced lady.LyzRight. You’re managing so much just to get out of this situation and letting so many things go. And I know women whose exes did awful things and even then the courts were just like, “well, it’s a he said/she said situation.” So you’re just doing what you can to get out with the skin of your teeth.VirginiaAnother thing I heard was women worrying about how their bodies would be perceived by lawyers and judges. Like, if you’re fat, that’s going to be an added strike against you coming into that, especially if you have a thin ex.LyzYes. Oh, yes. The clothes you wear. I had to buy a whole new outfit for mediation. I mean, I’m a writer, I don’t have a lot of business clothes. My lawyer gave me suggestions. She’s like, “button up, nothing low cut.” Which works for me because I have no boobs. But God forbid you actually have boobs and then they’re like, “don’t dress slutty.” And you’re like, well, they’re there. Like, I have a body.VirginiaI can almost never get them to go away. LyzRight? Like, where shall I put them that would make you feel more comfortable. The whole courtroom appearance, which of course, again, is judged more for women. Men just have a uniform they can pop into or out of, you know. I can’t just buy a dress shirt.VirginiaIt has to be an outfit.LyzAnd of course, it’s expensive to do this. And you’re already like, I don’t have any money. That’s such a big aspect I think, not just of divorce but of our court and legal systems. VirginiaThe body policing. LyzYeah. We’ll judge you immediately based on appearance.VirginiaAnd how we judge mothers in general, right? The fitness of motherhood is often tied to bodies and presentation of bodies.LyzAnd then if you and your ex have very different types of bodies, then people are thinking “Well, of course they’re getting divorced because she really let herself go.” And then you get into co-parenting, which is fun.VirginiaThis is maybe a very naive question, but how much advice do you get on how to co-parent and co-parent around food?LyzEvery state does it a little differently. Iowa, God bless, is a no fault divorce state. So it’s really hard to upset the balance of that, like it’s going to be 50/50 no matter what, unless you get your former partner on video doing something horrific, right? It would be very, very, very hard. So, we had to take mandatory divorce parenting classes. And I’m sure it’s different in every state, but what that involved was going to this nonprofit called Kids First Law Center here in Iowa. They’re really great. They do amazing work, helping to represent children for low cost or free. So, you sign up for your time and you go sit in a conference room with a bunch of other divorced parents and the…
Full show notes at the publisherVirginia
This is the podcast about diet culture, anti-fat bias parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith.
Corinne
And I’m Corinne Fay, I work on Burnt Toast and run @selltradeplus an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus sized clothing.
Virginia
And we are here with your December Indulgence Gospel.
We have so many good questions this month. We’re going to get into holiday diet culture. We’re also getting into fat travel, which is a really complicated one. And of course, we’ll have your fat fashion recs.
This is also 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
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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 Jessie Diaz-Herrera. Jessie is a body affirming dancer, health and wellness influencer, and fitness enthusiast. You might know her on Instagram as @curveswithmoves, or from her Free the Jiggle classes.The first half of this episode is for everyone, and then paid subscribers will get to hear Jessie answering your listener questions about size-inclusive fitness. We’re going to talk about:How to take our focus off how we look and onto how our bodies feel during exercise.How to feel safe and supported at the gym in a fat body.How to find time to exercise in the first place, especially for exhausted new parents.Here’s how to join us to hear the whole (amazing!) conversation!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 121 TranscriptJessieSo I am a body affirming fitness instructor. I own Power Plus Wellness, where we curate fitness and wellness events for plus-sized bodies to practice wellness in safe spaces. My work revolves around movement and what that looks like outside of diet culture.VirginiaYou were a dancer as a kid, but you stopped around age 12. It took a while for you to get back to it, to rediscover the passion. JessieAs a kid, I was very active. I had ADHD as a kid and still do now. At the time, my parents were just like, “We need to tire this girl out.” So I was in a myriad of programs and I’m very grateful to my family, to my parents, for putting me in a bunch of different things. Dance was one of the things that I felt the most focused in and also the program I wanted to go to the most. I couldn’t wait to go to dance classes on Saturdays. I was a ballet, tap, and jazz girly from four years old until we hit the teen programs. And I was committed to the studio in Brooklyn for my whole childhood basically, I grew up in the studio. And it was in the 90s, so prime diet culture, very skinny era. And also I’m in the world of ballet. VirginiaDouble whammy, triple whammy. JessieSo like, put all of that together. And I remember, we had to audition to the ballet academy. It was this certificate that you got and it was this huge honor to get into the program, especially as kids who grew up in ballet, tap, and jazz. You’re looking forward to like, Oh, I’m going to graduate to this next phase in in this program and in my life as a dancer.Puberty hit for me pretty early on, I think I was 9 or 10. I just started developing a lot faster than the other girls in my program. So I remember practicing really hard for this program and for the certificate from the Ballet Academy of Dance. I did the audition, I felt great. And afterwards one of the instructors told me, “You were really great.” And I got in, but they advised me to lose weight. I can’t remember the way they said it.You have to remember how much I looked up to these people. These were my instructors that I wanted to impress and I wanted to do well. Also just thinking about being a kid in that era, like, what does dieting even look like? What is that? You know, there’s no advice out there.VirginiaRight, what were they asking you to do? JessieIt was just like, “You need to lose10 pounds,” or whatever. The head ballerina in our program, she was very skinny. She was a beautiful Russian teenager. I just was like, “Why don’t I look like that? I don’t understand. My body doesn’t fit the program anymore.” I started to feel shame. I didn’t tell my mom that they told me to lose weight, because I knew that was wrong. But also because I was motivated to do it and I know that my mom would just be upset about it. I just sort of started skipping meals. Like, I’m not hungry, I don’t feel well. And my mom was like, you don’t have a fever. Like, what’s wrong? So I consistently started skipping meals and eventually I fainted. My mom was super pissed. “What is going on? Tell me what it is.” And I told her they had told me to lose weight and I was just trying to lose 10 more pounds. My mom is ’s one of the people that you don’t mess with her daughters. She’s Nuyorican, she is just a spicy New York Latina. So she stormed off into the studio. Nobody tells my daughter, what to do, how to how to eat. And she cursed everybody out. I was so mortified. At the time, I was mortified. I was like, “My mom ruined my life. She ruined my chances with the program.” I didn’t know that she was defending me at a time that I couldn’t. So yeah, I kind of left dance for a while after my mom pulled me out of the program. VirginiaShe was like, “We are not doing this.”JessieRightfully so, but I was devastated because that was what I loved to do. But I was also in sports at the time, and so I dedicated my life to sports after that. I played softball, I played basketball, if there was another sport, even like a recreational sport, I was playing. Anything that I could do to keep active because I knew that when my body was active, my brain wasn’t going crazy and I wasn’t stressing out. I even knew that as a kid, I just wanted to always move. I needed to expel this energy. But it wasn’t until college really, that I started dancing again. And there was a big change from being ballet, tap, and jazz in the 90s and then going into college in the 2000s into the hip hop kind of time where it was just more acceptable to have a different body. They were seeing dancers of every color. In that way, college felt a little bit more acceptable. But even then, there were times where everyone had to wear this costume and they would send you the link to buy your costume and of course it only went up to a large. But because I felt so guilty, I would never tell the instructor. I actually found—I was trying to think about her name the other day, bless her heart—I found someone in Idaho who was actually making me custom outfits. VirginiaOh, wow.JessieFor every single show I had! I think of how ridiculous that is now, but at that time I would be so mortified to tell them that they would have to change their costume because it doesn’t come in my size.VirginiaBut they should have. That shouldn’t have been your burden to have to find a custom costume lady. JessieYeah. It’s funny, we think about how we consider ourselves big. I think I was maybe a size 12/14. So it was an interesting time. But I know that when I danced, everyone was like, “Man, you’re so good at dancing. You’re so great, this energy, this personality.” I started just to gain more confidence in myself. So something that I felt like was stripped away from from my body actually, in a way, gave me confidence later on. VirginiaI have to say, big props to your mom. It was definitely the right move but also such a hard call, right? Of course she knew she was breaking your heart, but also keeping you safe. That is such an impossible position to be put in as a parent. But I think it’s a great takeaway for parents. You might have to make a tough call. And it’s helpful to hear that even if my kid doesn’t do this program this year, and it feels like a big missed opportunity, it doesn’t mean the door to dance is closed forever for this kid.JessieI will say, I recently took a ballet class for the first time since that had happened, like maybe two months ago. It was with a fat instructor, it was someone that I felt comfortable. We actually were testing them for one of our newest classes for Power Plus Wellness. But I remember being in the class and feeling anxiety, and I was like, oh my god, like, I really want this feeling to go away. And eventually it did. I mean, it may not be ballet for me anymore, but it may be something else.VirginiaI was just thinking: Maybe it’s not ballet for anyone, you know? Should we be reclaiming and remaking this institution into something that’s inclusive and welcoming for everyone or should we be saying ballet, your track record is pretty bad. At what point do you decide it cant be reclaimed? It’s not my call to make. I’m not a dancer. JessieTotally. Yeah, I will say probably that would be like — we’ve made it.VirginiaIf we have fully body inclusive ballet.JessieTotally. I think it is probably the most restrictive in my head. VirginiaIt really is. So once you started designing your own dance classes and moving more into the fitness space, both these worlds are so laden with diet culture, how did you navigate through it? JessieBecause of diet culture, I had to create my own lane after college. I was in social dance clubs. Even though I was a great choreographer, in those situations they wouldn’t let me be a choreographer. People wouldn’t understand, like, “Man, you’re so good at dancing, why is it that she’s not putting you in this space?” And I’m like, it is what it is.I realized that I was always following by other people’s rules, about what they wanted to see for their company or what they wanted to see for their vision of what it looked like on stage. I just was limiting myself because I was putting myself in these positions where people were telling me what I can and can’t do when it comes to dance. At the time I was in my 20s already and I was like, I don’t have to really confine to that. So I was actually working with a bunch of different choreographers, just taking classes weekly just to perfect my craft. And I got really close with an instructor—shout out to Rick. He knew I was a great dancer and he knew that I taught and so he was like, “You know all my routines whenever I’m out, would you mind covering the class? Like, everyone knows you and you’re such a great, energetic person.” And I was like, oh my God, yes. So I would sub for him every now and then he gave me my first break to start teaching classes in New York, outside of a social dance club. That felt really, really great to have someone who saw my work ethic who saw my commitment and knew that I could do this, regardless of my body. You know, not only am I plus size, but I’m short. And the idea of a dancer is long and graceful and I just wasn’t fitting that criteria of what we normally think of as a dancer.It was just really nice to have those opportunities and I think that’s what really led me to start creating classes myself. So in the 2010s, we started what we then called body positive dance classes. That was at the time where body positivity was really claimed by the plus size community before it was more universal, I want to say? And it was actually a two hour workshop. We held these once a month, it wasn’t something that I did regularly every week. But it was a lot of intention behind it.A lot of the time, when I was dancing, I would realize I’m the only plus size and sometimes the only person of color in the room. I was like I know there are other dancers out there like me. I know that I’m not an anomaly. I danced with other people in college, where are they?So I started posting on social media and creating these classes. I really wanted to create intention behind it. I realized people were saying to me online, “I wish I could go to class, but I don’t have the courage.” A lot of it was like, finding the confidence just to get to the class. So I was saying, “Hey, I look like you. I am also in this space where I know it can be scary. Come and let’s be scared together.”So the first half hour, we didn’t dance. We talked. We gave out affirmation cards. Sometimes we would talk about like, hey, does that resonate with you? Why? We’ve had vision boards. We’ve had stuff where we did some cord cutting, where we wrote notes about things that we didn’t want to take with us in the New Year and burned them. There’s just so many things that we really did that felt like we had a close knit community before we started to move. We also got silly, and I think that’s what people are afraid of—sometimes they’re afraid to look silly. But when we’re all purposely being silly, It just takes away that barrier of like, "Ph, I don’t want to look silly.” It’s, “Oh, wait, we’re supposed to be silly here.”VirginiaYou were making a safe space for people to show up in their bodies.JessieThis was after I had my daughter and my body changed. Because tour body just changes immensely once you have a kid. I think some people don’t realize this, but it’s not about the weight or anything, it’s more just like even the shape. Just like looking at your body saying this is not the body I’m normally seeing in the mirror. So now I have to adjust myself to what I’m now seeing. I think all of that kind of plays a role. VirginiaI’m glad you brought up your daughter because I wanted to talk about her a little bit. We both have daughters named Violet.JessieOh my God, I love that. VirginiaI love how you talk about modeling fitness for yourself and how you’re modeling it for her. It feels really different from the diet culture version of “mom fitness” that we are sold so often.JessieIt will say again, I think it’s the silliness factor. I’m not afraid to be silly. And I think sometimes as parents, we sometimes we lose that silliness a little bit. But especially with our kids, we can be silly! With our kids there’s a comfort in being silly. I know that especially with my daughter, she loves to be active. And I always wanted to make sure that she felt comfortable doing whatever activity that that it is for her. But also that mom can participate if she wants to. For me, fitness is really all about the functional, like what I want to do as a parent, what I want to do in my life. I want to have more endurance to keep up with my kid. She likes to be carried a lot still—my daughter is on the spectrum and really loves being held. And she’s just going to be tall, like her dad. She’s almost 8 and four feet, and I’m five feet. VirginiaYou need to be strong. JessieI want to be able to hold my kid if she wants to be held. After becoming a mom I think just my shift of fitness changed into what I want to continue to keep doing and how I want to move through life with her with with my with my future kids. Even just talking about bodies in general. It’s so interesting because my daughter is obsessed with my boobs!VirginiaKids are so helpful that way!JessieThey are so funny, right? She’s like, “They’re so wiggly.” My daughter is saying, like, I love how wiggly they are. It’s playful, and it’s fun and I like to touch it. It makes me happy. It makes me giggle. Like, she’s laughing. It brings her joy. So, you know, you start to look at it differently. And not just with bodies, but just with movement in general, we just want to look at things a little bit differently. VirginiaSo you posted a reel recently of you at a trampoline place with your daughter. My kids love trampolines. I don’t love them. What I really don’t love, honestly—I actually like trampolines. I don’t love the trampoline place, which is like a sensory nightmare to me.JessieYeah, it’s chaotic.VirginiaAll the kids and then the ball pit and I’m like, “Someone’s gonna get pinkeye.” The whole thing is just is not my jam. And their dad is the fun dad who will take them to the trampoline place. But my older daughter has been saying to me lately, “I want you to come to the trampoline place. Why don’t you go with us?” And I’m like, “Damn it, I’ve got to do it, right?” I don’t want her to think only her skinny dad who’s a big runner guy—he’s very traditionally fit—I don’t want her to think that that’s the only type of body that goes to the trampoline place. JessieLook, I’m one of the only moms that is jumping out there, regardless of body. Two things I will say: 1. Find out the times where there are not a lot of kids around because I rarely go when it’s the busiest. And 2. I think is overstimulating for both of us. And sometimes I’m like, “There are a lot of kids there, I don’t think I need to jump. I think you’re…
Full show notes at the publisherYou’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 Crystal Maldonado, a YA author who writes inclusive rom-com novels about fat brown girls.Crystal is the author of Fat Chance, Charlie Vega, which was a New England Book Award winner and a Cricket’s Best YA fiction of 2021; No Filter and Other Lies which was named a Pop Sugar and Seventeen Best New YA. Her latest book is The Fall of Whit Rivera which we’re going to talk about today. Crystal’s books explore body politics, Latine and queer identity, relationships, complex family dynamics, and love. And they’re all available in the Burnt Toast Bookshop!Don’t forget, you can always take 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)Or you can take 10 percent off if you order all three of Crystal’s books, or any three books from the Burnt Toast Gift Guide with the code TREAT.We’re going to get into Crystal’s new book, which I especially love because it features a protagonist who is navigating PCOS, which makes all sorts of things about bodies more complicated, while also just trying to be a normal teenage girl and planning her Fall Fest and having an awesome time. We’re also going to get into Britney Spears, which just doesn’t fit into anything except I needed to talk about Britney Spears to someone and Crystal is who you do that with.Then, because Crystal is so very awesome, I asked her to stick around for an extended Butter segment. We have a bunch of amazing recs that you may want for yourself, but you will definitely find useful if you’re shopping for any teens and tweens, or young adult fans in general. You will need to be a paid subscriber to get all the good recs!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 120 TranscriptVirginiaIt’s so great to have you back on Burnt Toast! CrystalI’m so excited to be back. It must mean you liked me last time.VirginiaSo for any folks who missed your first episode, why don’t you just quickly introduce yourself?CrystalI am Crystal Maldonado. I’m a young adult author who writes romcoms for fat brown girls. My first my debut novel was called Fat Chance, Charlie Vega. That came out in 2021 and it followed the story of Charlie who was a 16 year old girl who had never been kissed before. Her whole story was about trying to get that first kiss, falling in love for the first time and learning to love and appreciate her body, her fat body, for what it was.I also wrote No Filter and Other Lies which came out in 2022. This is another young adult story but it follows a 17 year old named Kat Sanchez, who was also Puerto Rican and also fat. She was drawn to catfishing and the life of just lying.VirginiaShe really goes on a journey. She gets into some stuff. CrystalYeah, it’s complicated. But there are lots of dogs, so that adds the wholesome factor where her story otherwise could be a little dicey.Then most recently, I wrote The Fall of Whit Rivera, which just came out in October. And this tells the story of Whit Rivera who is a 17-year-old fat Puerto Rican girl who is obsessed with fall. She’s just coming off of a really tough summer and has vowed to make her fall semester the best one ever. She’s hoping to plan her school’s homecoming dance, which they call the Fall Fest, but then it all kind of goes sideways when she gets paired up with her ex boyfriend to do the planning. And, oh no! He’s kind of cute.VirginiaYeah he’s really cute. Can confirm. Not in creepy way! Like, imagining myself as a teenager while reading the book. Now I’m making it weird. Continue. CrystalExactly. So I write those books. I’m also in higher ed marketing for my day job. I’m a mom. I have a four year old. I’m a wife. I have a dog. I love glitter. I love Beyonce. I think that about covers it.VirginiaI do want to talk a little more about Whit since she is the newest in the Crystal Cannon. As you said, she’s starting her senior year. She wants everything to be perfect. So those of us who are sort of compulsive overachievers can relate to her journey. But she’s also dealing with this new diagnosis of PCOS—polycystic ovarian syndrome. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a novel about a character with PCOS, let alone a young adult novel.CrystalOh, well, thank you. I don’t want to say this is the first because I don’t know for sure. But, I hadn’t read a novel that focused on this illness ever really.I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome when I was 16 years old. And I just think about how much of a difference a story like this could have made in my life if I had been exposed to something like this, if I felt like it wasn’t just me that had PCOS. That was really a driving force behind the story. Like, of course, I wanted to write another romance. Of course, there’s the autumn aspect, and all of the fun fall apple picking, and all of that. There’s a lot of fun and joy. But I also wanted this story to have something a little bit more to it. For Whit that comes in the form of this chronic illness that is technically invisible—nobody can see it by looking at her—but it definitely affects her daily life. She, as you said, just got the diagnosis. That’s what derailed a lot of her summer because she spent all of this time going to these doctor’s appointments and figuring out how to deal with the symptoms that have been seeing pop up. And does she want to tell her friends? And what does this mean for her her daily life? It gets complicated very quickly for her. VirginiaIt just feels so important. I mean, like, I’m a 42-year-old who deals with a lot of facial hair in my life. And I find it awkward to talk about and navigate. A 16-year-old dealing with that? I just want to hug her! Like, it’s just like so vulnerable. And there’s so little understanding for it. Obviously facial hair is not the most important part of PCOS, but I think, when you’re 16, it feels like one of them.CrystalOh, totally. There is this scene very early on where Whit has already had this terrible phone call with her soon to be ex-boyfriend—I swear it’s not a spoiler, you know from page one, they’re not going to end up together. She’s coming off of all of these things where she hasn’t been talking to her friends and she’s trying to get ready and hype herself up for this first day of school. Then she sees she’s got this facial hair that she hadn’t noticed before and it really throws her off. It sends her into this spiral of, Oh my God, how long have I had this facial hair and how do I get rid of it? She totally panics.I think that that’s a very real reaction to the realization that you’re not meeting society’s beauty expectations in yet another category. There are already so many ways Whit feels like she doesn’t check the boxes of beauty. She’s not thin, she’s not white, she is queer, all of these things. And now she’s adding growing facial hair. That is now a thing that I have to deal with in my day to day. I had that same thing. Facial hair was one of my symptoms and is one of my symptoms. And there is so much shame, I will say, around facial hair. Sometimes we talk about how we have little mustache hairs or little chin hairs. But it can be so much more for people who have PCOS. Sometimes it is a beard or sometimes it’s sideburns, or it’s a lot of hair to deal with. Nobody talks about that. It feels very much like you’re on your own dealing with these symptoms, even though I think the statistic is something like one in five people who have uteruses have PCOS.1 It’s a very prevalent and “common” illness, but still one that is couched in so much shame and one that we don’t talk about very often. VirginiaI just want to say, too: A lot of folks claim their facial hair and are really into their facial hair. That’s amazing. We’re here for facial hair. I absolutely don’t want anyone to feel weird about that, or othered. But it’s part of this whole thing Whit is going through of feeling out of control in her body. And again, when you’re 16 and everything is rough, it’s a lot. CrystalI also want to reiterate, Go team facial hair. You do you!For Whit, it ends up being just yet another way that her body feels like it’s not hers. She finds it difficult to deal with on top of all of these other symptoms and all these other ways that her body feels like it’s not listening to her. So I thought that is a kind of an in your face way to talk about one of the more common symptoms of PCOS. Especially because this illness is something that really varies for each person. In the book, there’s this long list that Whit has where she talks about all of these different ways that PCOS can manifest in your body. She’s very clear, like, oh, but it’s different for every single person. So you actually have no idea which of these symptoms are going to show up. And that’s part of the exhaustion, too. Because as doctors do, they often are like, “just lose weight and it’ll fix itself.” And of course with PCOS, it’s extremely difficult to lose weight.Weight and HealthcareHigher-Weight Patients, Gynecological Care, and PCOSThis is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! Recently I’ve received a number of reader questions about ob/gyn care for fat* patients, so I reached out to Nicola Salmon, fat-positive fertility coach and author of “Fat and Fertile" who agreed to work with me on a series of artic…Read more4 years ago · 7 likes · Ragen ChastainVirginiaIt’s such a frustrating diagnosis and such a frustrating treatment to be given for this diagnosis.I live with endometriosis, which also no one really understands. With all of these menstrual conditions, there is just so much stigma and there’s such a lack of knowledge and sensitivity and nuance in how they get talked about. I think it’s just great to have a novel dealing with that right at the edge when a lot of kids are getting these diagnoses and trying to navigate them. CrystalThat’s really meaningful for me to hear. My diagnosis was 100 percent self diagnosis. I had been going to doctors sporadically because I was a fat kid. Very early on, I did not want to go to the doctor. That became a pain point for me. I did not regularly want to see medical professionals and everyone in my family was also fat, so they were also anti-doctor. So we weren’t really seeing doctors regularly, but I knew something was going on with my body around the time I was 14, 15, 16. Usually people notice it when their periods are all over the place and are not predictable. That was what was happening with me so that was a very clear one.I ended up just reading one of those magazines like Cosmo Girl or YM, and it was in the health section, there was this teeny tiny paragraph about this little known illness that some women can experience. That was how I found out about it. I clipped that out and I was like, “I have to go to the doctor and talk to them about this illness, this PCOS thing.” I had to do a bunch of tests, and it turned out to be correct. But I just think God, if this book can help even one person do that self diagnosis or even just feel less alone in their diagnosis, then that will be all I can ask for.VirginiaIt gives them something to ask their doctors about to advocate for themselves. I love that you found it in a teen magazine. You know I started my career in teen magazines. I’m like, Okay, we did a few good things. CrystalYou did. You certainly did. Especially for the families that didn’t talk at all. I had teen magazines and that was about it.VirginiaThere were a lot of great editors at those magazines who were thinking about how do we get more body literacy in here in between all of the CoverGirl ads and bikini body stories. CrystalReaders like me appreciated that. VirginiaTalk a little more about how you see the PCOS stigma continuing to show up?CrystalThere is more familiarity with it now, which I’m very grateful for. At the same time, the narrative still very much feels the same when it comes to PCOS. I don’t want to say that every person out there is still saying just lose weight and it’ll fix itself. But overwhelmingly, that is the advice.I am a fat activist and I am anti-diet culture. So trying to examine having this illness, while also trying not to set myself back in terms of all of this work that I’ve done to push back on dieting and to try and appreciate my body as it is—those two things often feel like they don’t go well together at all. It’s like oil and water. It’s difficult, I think, to find specialists who understand that and who are talking about it in that meaningful, kind of nuanced way. Let’s be honest, a lot of medical advice out there now is from influencers and that’s always dicey. How do you navigate finding someone who understands what your illness is, gives you correct and healthy and safe advice, and isn’t trying to do harm or trying to monetize your illness. That’s a really difficult landscape that we’re in right now. People who have been harmed by the medical industry, who have been harmed by doctors, who have dealt with these biases are seeking out alternative forms of support, of medicine in general. We’re just trying to find some some people out there who understand us. I think that’s especially true of typically issues that people who identify as women end up having, like endometriosis and PCOS. We tend to have to find these pockets of the Internet where we feel like we’re being talked about and heard in a respectful way. But that also brings up these other issues. So it’s like yes, we’ve made some progress. We’re talking about these things now. But also, have we really?VirginiaI think these menstruation related conditions are really vulnerable to diet culture and wellness culture marketing because you’re struggling with them, aren’t getting good information from doctors, often they’re being dismissed. It can take years to get a diagnosis.So then, you, you know, because you’re still suffering and struggling, you turn to other sources for information. These diets that are geared all around supporting your menstrual cycle, the seed cycling of it all, all of that stuff. Some of that may be really beneficial to folks, but nobody’s really vetting it yet. People deserve to be heard. And yet the people now, the brands and the influencers, are stepping up and saying, we hear you. We see you. Like, they aren’t necessarily doing anything all that different from what the mainstream doctors are. It’s still kind of one size fits all advice about diet and exercise and that kind of thing. CrystalAnd I think it’s really frustrating and also scary when we think about teenagers or really anybody at any age, looking this information up and just being so desperate to find that sense of community. But who is looking at this information and who’s vetting it and who’s making sure that we’re not causing more harm? I don’t have good answers for that. So I thought, well, at least I can write a book and talk about this and hopefully raise some awareness around this. I wanted Whit to be the kind of person who exists both as someone who has this illness, but who is also anti-diet culture and who appreciates her body. VirginiaI thought you threaded that needle incredibly well.I was really interested in how you wrote about weight in this book. In Fat Chance, Charlie Vega, that very much is Charlie’s story of coming to terms with her body, finding fat politics, finding fat community. Whit’s relationship with her weight, even with the PCOS stuff, is a little more in the background in a in an interesting way. I love that as she embarks on the relationship that is the big relationship in the book, she never really questions w…
Full show notes at the publisherIt’s time for your November Extra Butter episode. This month, we’re doing a listener question (on post-divorce bodies!) and a segment if It’s Not NOT a Diet on 75 Hard (or Hard 75, as Virginia likes to call it).
To listen to the full episode and read the full transcript, you’ll need to join Extra Butter, our premium subscription tier.
These episodes tend to be a little more personal. They’re also where we’re working out ideas, and having conversations that are definitely worth having—but maybe aren’t quite ready for primetime. (Last month we dug into the anti-diet to alt-right pipeline.) And biased, but, we think they’re very fun.
And Extra Butter is the hands down best way to support this work. This subscription tier is why we’re able to pay Corinne and Tommy for their invaluable contributions, why we’re able to offer unlimited comp subscriptions (just email! no questions asked!, and why we’re able to pay podcast guests a small honorarium to thank them for their time and labor. And Extra Butter ensures that the Burnt Toast community can always stay an ad- and sponsor-free space—which is crucial for body liberation journalism.
Corinne
Okay Virginia, our listener question today is for you.
How have your thoughts and feelings about your body changed since you got separated?
Virginia
Oh, man. This is a GOOD question.
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
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You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about anti-fat bias, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole Smith.Today I am chatting about body autonomy, diet culture, and chronic health conditions, with Leigh Kamping-Carder, who writes The Heart Dialogues.The Heart Dialogues is a newsletter for people with congenital heart conditions and the people who care about them. Leigh was born with a complex heart defect called tricuspid atresia and had three heart surgeries before she was four years old. She is also an award winning journalist. As a lot of you know, I’m a mom to a 10-year-old with a heart condition very similar to Leigh’s, so I’ve been following Leigh’s Substack for a while because she explores so many questions that we’re also navigating. Like, why not everybody with this diagnosis wants to be known as a “heart warrior.” Or how to advocate for yourself at doctors’ offices. And how living with a chronic condition impacts your relationship to your body in ways you’ve maybe never considered. Diet culture and anti-fatness show up, often quite reflexively, in even this kind of super specialized healthcare.There is a lot here and I do want to throw in a quick content warning: If you are currently navigating a super fraught medical situation for yourself or with a loved one, today’s episode may not be for you. I know there are times when I am personally ravenous for this kind of conversation and times when I just can’t go there. So please take care of yourself. 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 118 TranscriptLeighMy name is Leigh Kamping-Carder and I’m the writer of The Heart Dialogues newsletter on Substack, which is a newsletter for people who have congenital heart disease, which means they were born with some kind of complication with their heart.I was born with a heart defect called tricuspid atresia, which means that the tricuspid valve, one of the valves in your heart, doesn’t form. As a result, I only have one ventricle, which is the main pumping chambers in the heart, instead of two. So I had several surgeries when I was like a little kid, and mostly lived a normal life. Then I think in the last few years I started to really realize that this is kind of a lifelong issue and more things can crop up as you get older. Congenital heart defects are actually the most common birth defect in the US. They affect roughly 1 in 100 babies. What’s been really incredible over the last few decades, is that, medical advances have allowed people to really live into adulthood and even old age. The flipside of that is that we’re realizing more and more that this is something that does affect people for their whole lives. There’s actually about 2.5 million people in the US who have congenital heart defects and the majority of them are adults. VirginiaOh wow, that’s a big change.LeighYeah. It’s really something that for centuries was a death sentence, and then, was something that affected children. And now it’s this sort of prevalent thing, yet it’s also not talked about. There’s no fundraising run like there is for like cancer or Alzheimer’s or something like that. Which, not that it’s a competition or anything. But you probably know someone with a congenital heart defect, and yet you probably don’t know that you know someone. So what this means is that you can live your whole life without ever meeting anyone like you. That was certainly my experience. I didn’t meet anyone else with a heart defect until I was well into adulthood. I didn’t have friendships with anyone until I was in my mid-30s. In parallel to that, I live this normal life. I grew up in Toronto, Canada, I moved to New York, I became a journalist, and kind of got to this point where I was like, “I want to create a community.” And I thought, hey, I have skills. I’ve been reporting and editing and launching newsletters and doing all these things in my professional life. So I thought that was a way to create this community for people, and hopefully help people who have grown up with congenital heart defects, but also their parents and families and medical providers and their friends. VirginiaFor listeners who don’t know: This is a subject that means a lot to me personally because my older daughter lives with a complex congenital heart condition. She’s 10. From when she was a baby through about age three, we were in the intensive, active management of her condition going through multiple surgeries. I’ve talked about this before. But we have for the past few years lived this, quote, normal life with her. She’s in school, she’s doing great, she’s thriving. And yet, her condition is lifelong. It is something that we will be managing—we meaning me for as long as she lets me be involved in her medical care. At some point she’s gonna take over. LeighThat’s a good thing!VirginiaI know, I know. The whole mother-daughter hand off of that is something else we’ll unpack later with my therapist. But this is something she’ll be managing her whole life. So I think a lot, as we’re getting into the tween years and the teen years are not too far away, about these questions you’re raising of community. We don’t know other kids with her specific heart condition. We don’t even currently know any other kids with any heart conditions. So that’s the community she doesn’t have right now. I can only imagine as you get into the teenage years and then into adulthood, how much more important that community might feel. So I just really love that you are doing this. LeighThank you. I do get responses from readers along those lines where they feel heard they feel seen. It’s really gratifying.VirginiaAnother piece of this that I think a lot about as the mom, especially of a daughter with CHD, but certainly all genders this would apply to, is how this experience of living with a chronic condition impacts your relationship with your body. This is a complicated one. There’s not only the standard diet culture messaging that all kids, and all of us, are bombarded with. But we also live in a very ableist healthist culture that’s bombarding you with a lot of messaging.LeighAs a kid, it wasn’t something that came up too much. I mean, I was really lucky to survive these surgeries and to really be doing all right. I didn’t have limitations on physical activity and things like that. But certainly as I got to be your daughter’s age and a teenager, I think I really felt like my body was a failure. I think that’s something that a lot of kids have. But for me, it was this feeling of, “I can’t run as fast or as far as people.” No matter what I did, my body didn’t work as well as other people’s. And I don’t think there was ever anyone who sat me down and said, “That’s okay. You have a heart that’s really complicated. Your heart is not like other people’s hearts. And it’s okay.” But also, no one sat me down and said, “Hey, even if you didn’t have a complicated heart, it’s okay.” You can move for the love of it, you don’t have to get on the treadmill and hit a certain minute or mileage or calorie count or whatever.VirginiaMovement isn’t something we have to be the the best at.LeighI think that really underscored how I thought about my body was just, it was a failure. Which is so sad for me to say now, and I don’t feel that way now. But I think the remedy I found to counteract that was, “Okay, if my body can’t work the way everyone else’s bodies work, it can at least be skinny.” I spent many years deep in diet culture, disordered eating, what was eventually diagnosed as an eating disorder. I mean, obviously, it was informed by everything in our culture, and my family which was very focused on everyone being thin. So all of that. But a big piece of it was: My body doesn’t work like other people’s, but I can find some sort of greatness in my body if it’s skinny, if it looks good, if it’s hot.VirginiaWas control a part of it too? Because I mean, just as a parent, I have struggled with this idea that we live with this thing that happened beyond all of our control. I wonder if that also would then play into it. Like, if I can’t control that, can I control my weight?LeighThere were many moments when I was growing up where I didn’t have control over my body in just a very literal sense. Every year I would go for tests at the hospital, echocardiograms or ultrasounds of the heart. You know, lying on a bed with my shirt open as a 13-year-old and having a stranger rub jelly on me. And of course, no one says, “That’s a problem,” because they’re medical professionals and they saved your life. And you have to do it. But I do think I have a sense of my body where I kind of want to protect it and be able to kind of have agency over it. VirginiaFor anyone who’s watched a kid go through any kind of intensive medical experience, there are so many moments where a child’s body autonomy is violated. It is, as you’re saying, medically necessary. And I think our medical system could do a much better job navigating that.We always fight to give her whatever control we can, even if it’s just choosing which arm the blood pressure cuff goes on, or which finger they put the pulse ox on. Any sense of control she’s allowed to have I tried to give her in those moments. A big one we always tell them is, “She’s going to take the EKG stickers off herself.” Because it doesn’t feel good when someone’s ripping stickers off your body. And if she does it herself, she has this full system of how she takes them off. It makes her feel more in control of it. But you’re right. So much of that process is just having no control over what’s happening to your body.LeighYou’re absolutely right that there’s so much more to do. And at the same time, I think it has gotten a lot better.VirginiaI can only imagine how incredibly terrible it was.LeighThis is not to say anything negative about my individual nurses or cardiologists, many of whom were and are wonderful and caring and lovely. But there are so many pieces about having a lifelong medical issue that aren’t about pain, they’re about other things. I think people are really focused on “Oh, don’t worry, it’s not going to hurt,” and that if it doesn’t hurt, then it’s okay. But I think for me, the things that physically hurt were actually less uncomfortable than the things where I felt like, “I don’t have autonomy. People are treating me not like a human being, like an object.” And I think those are lower on the list of priorities for medical personnel. Understandably, right? You want to make sure that the patient isn’t in pain. But I think it’s also important to recognize that there are little things that can really help make people feel like they aren’t a piece of meat.VirginiaAbsolutely. Just to give listeners some further context: It is only shockingly recently that pain management has become as big of a focus as it is in pediatric care. There’s this weird history where doctors thought babies didn’t really experience pain. So they didn’t worry about it, which is truly horrific to contemplate. And that has been a big shift. But you’re absolutely right, this goes so far beyond pain.I can remember so many nurses saying to us in the hospital in those early years, “Well, don’t worry, she’ll never remember any of this.” At the time I was like, “I think that’s what you tell yourself to do this job.” I don’t think that’s necessarily true for these kids. I think that’s what you tell yourself to feel better about how much you have to manipulate a kid’s body and take away their autonomy in order to do this. But a better way would be for us to be thinking about how we maintain more of that autonomy while doing these necessary things.[Virginia note: For a deep dive into how intense medical experiences impact children and what recovery can look like, I love this book.]LeighYeah, absolutely. There’s a lot that I don’t remember from those surgeries, just because I was so young but it absolutely affected me. And and I think there would have been ways to make those experiences better.VirginiaYeah, I think there’s like the literal, okay, they won’t remember this particular blood draw, fine. But is this shaping their understanding of their body and their felt safety in the world?LeighIs this giving them a lifelong phobia of needles?VirginiaIs it going to be surprising to be unpacking this 10 years later? Really not. And I think that’s another layer that many medical professionals still don’t want to look too closely at, because they’re constrained by the way their job has to get done, and the way the whole system is. If they had to look at that, they wouldn’t know how to get from point A to point B, maybe. LeighI do think that these days, the cardiology care I get is much more sensitive about those things. Nurses ask me how I’m doing, they tell me what they’re going to do before they do it. I typically say that I don’t want to get weighed and I’ve never gotten pushback on that. VirginiaThat’s amazing. In a cardiology setting, particularly.LeighI don’t know what it’s like in the pediatric centers these days. But certainly the adult care I’ve experienced is remarkably different from when I was a kid.VirginiaWell that is encouraging. And I don’t want to scare folks who are maybe somewhere in the pediatric process, I think there is progress being made. When I have advocated for a different approach, we usually get it—it’s just not necessarily the starting point. This is evolving sort of across the board in pediatrics. It’s amazing how many people will come in to do something to your kid and not introduce themselves to the child. The simple thing of me being like, “Hi, what’s your name? Oh, great. This is…” and introducing my child. Like, let’s just like look at each other like people.So there are definitely small things parents can do to improve that dynamic. But then I think the other thing is being aware that this does have a long tail, and that this does impact kids’ relationships with their bodies in all sorts of ways you can’t predict. And so it’s important to have a plan for therapy or support as they navigate that in subsequent years.LeighYeah, absolutely. I think that’s really important.VirginiaI’m curious about that timeline for you. You had your surgeries were when you were a little kid. And when did you sort of start struggling with what became your eating disorder?LeighWhen I was 15 or 16.VirginiaSo it was like a decade later?LeighThat’s when it comes up for a lot of kids. I will say that I didn’t ever think of it as an eating disorder until 2019, when I was actually formally diagnosed. VirginiaOh wow. LeighI think it ebbed and flowed. It wasn’t a continuous kind of thing. But it was a long time. Many years.VirginiaOne thing we know about eating disorders is that they can put a lot of strain on people’s hearts. So I don’t know if there’s any piece of that you want to speak to in terms of managing eating disorder treatment and managing your heart health?LeighWell, I did not tell anyone about it until, honestly, like the last couple of years of my life. And I’m 39 now, so you can do the math.VirginiaYou’ve been going through it for a long time.LeighHonestly, I wish I had a better answer. But I don’t think that for congenital heart disease, there is really any research into eating disorders. I know that in the last decade or so there has been more research on other mental health conditions, you know, anxiety, depression, PTSD, but that’s really just starting. I would love someone to prove me wrong and send me the link to this, but I’ve never seen a study in terms of how many people with CHD have eating disorders. I think it’s something that hasn’t been studied yet. VirginiaThat would be super fascinating to understand. It feels so important to look at that relationship more c…
Full show notes at the publisherVirginiaYou’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about diet culture, anti-fat bias parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith.CorinneAnd I’m Corinne Fay. I work on Burnt Toast and run SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus sized clothing.VirginiaAnd it’s time for your November Indulgence Gospel!This was supposed to be your October Indulgence Gospel, but we ran September in October and now, it’s November. We are going to answer your questions like we do every month. We are going to get into a lot of really good fat fashion recs. We are going to talk about hair. And I’ve got a little divorce update at the end, if you’re curious.This is also a paywalled episode. That means to hear the whole thing you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. CorinneWell, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about pants.VirginiaWe’ve decided this podcast’s version of talking about the weather is pants, because there is always a lot to say about pants. So you can just know that we’re always going to talk about pants. You don’t have to panic about whether there’s going to be the pants-related content that you need in these episodes.CorinneYes, and it’s somewhat weather related. But we are definitely not alone in having pants problems. VirginiaIt’s a universal struggle of the Burnt Toast community.CorinneSo here’s what I’m struggling with right now. It just got cold enough to start wearing pants again, so I’m pulling my pants out of my closet. All summer I’ve been wearing bike shorts. And I can’t figure out what the pants equivalent of bike shorts should be. It seems like it would be leggings, but it’s not. VirginiaWhy is it not? They’re literally bike shorts that go down to your ankles?CorinneI feel like the type of shirts that I’m wearing with bike shorts are sort of fancy shirts, like a like button-up or something. And when I wear that with leggings, it just looks wrong.VirginiaWait, I need to stand up.CorinneOh no! That’s literally what you’re wearing.VirginiaFor the listeners: I’m wearing a button-down shirt with leggings right now. Corinne, are you telling me I am wrong?CorinneI feel like it looks cool on you, but okay. To be discussed. The other thing is, I pulled out my jeans from last year and I don’t know if over the summer jean styles changed? But now my jeans that I thought seemed cool last year don’t feel cool anymore. They feel weirdly kind of too short.VirginiaAre we finally done with bare ankles? Is the tyranny of the cropped ankle finally behind us? CorinneI don’t know. I don’t want to do flares or JNCOs or low-rise.VirginiaNo, I’m unavailable for all of those. I know some people have sensory issues and really hate high-rise but I have the opposite sensory issue and really hate low-rise. And flares, I don’t need to relive my trauma. That was a dark time for Elder Millennials. CorinneGrowing up in New England, no.VirginiaSlush just dragging around all of the pavement with you, everywhere you went.So I am wearing last year’s jeans as well. CorinneYour Gap ones.VirginiaThe Gap ones. I did also pull out my Madewell skinny jeans. I’m a basic bitch, I don’t know what to tell you, I’m still wearing skinny jeans. They still fit me. They’re like leggings but they’re not as comfortable as leggings. But sometimes it seems fine.I do find myself wishing there was a category of jeans between the skinny jeans and straight leg jeans. Like straight but also not skin-tight.CorinneLike a tapered but baggy?VirginiaThat’s sounding wrong. I don’t think I want to taper exactly?I think what happens with plus size jeans is they often continue to cut the leg wide which makes sense for lots of folks plus sized bodies but doesn’t make sense for my plus sized body. I rememberDacy Gillespiebought the same pair of Gap straight leg jeans that I have, and because she is straight-sized they are just two entirely different pants. Mine are much baggier than hers. So I would like a jean that’s like a little narrower than a straight leg, but fits like a wide leg.CorinneWell, that’s what I mean by tapered.VirginiaI guess that’s what I want. CorinneI really want a pair of corduroy pants. VirginiaOoh, that sounds fun.CorinneBut it feels like all the plus size ones aren’t quite what I’m looking for. They look like corduroy pants that I wore in the 2000s. Or they are elastic waist, like toddler pants. I want something that’s a little more like trousers, but corduroy.VirginiaYou’re not in the market for a corduroy jogger? I guess that would be a toddler vibe. I have not seen any good corduroy pants. Hopefully people will put that in the comments. Because I’m also interested. I did try the Gap ones last year and they were really bad.CorinneI found one good pair at Target. But they’re sold out in my size, so I ordered every adjacent size to try to see. They’re also only in white or pink, which feels like a lot.VirginiaWe need to get back to this legging shirt conundrum because I’m wondering if the issue is that with a bike short, you would wear a slightly shorter shirt than you would want to wear with a legging? I don’t think that I would wear this button down shirt with my bike shorts. Because if the shirt is too long with bike shorts, does it look like I forgot pants? Does it look like I’m wearing a too short dress and I meant to put something underneath and I forgot?CorinneI like that look though. VirginiaWell, I’m not here to style shame you. If that’s your look, that’s great. But I feel like one of my children would be like, “Where are your pants?” I would feel shamed by them and their superior style. But with leggings, I wear a slightly longer shirt.CorinneMaybe also going to the gym so much, I now feel weird wearing leggings out in the world.VirginiaThey’re just such a workout vibe for you right now.I’ve been living in this. I’m wearing a chambray button down shirt from Universal Standard [no link, sorry folks, it vanished!] that I have been wearing with all of my leggings and my Veja sneakers. I mean, it is very Suburban Mom. I’m not saying it’s not. I feel like the fact that the sneakers are a cool brand helps a little. And I’ve got a bright pink sports bra on underneath, so that’s kind of fun.But on Friday, I was going to dinner my cousin’s and I was texting my sister, like, “I’m having hard time deciding what to wear.” I was exactly what I’m wearing right now. Leggings, sneakers, button down shirt. And I was like, “But should I dress it up for dinner?” Sometimes I don’t know how dressed up I need to be to go eat dinner in someones house. We’re not going to a restaurant. So we were texting, and then I ended up switching and I sent her a picture because I switched to black leggings and a linen button down shirt. And I was like, it’s the same outfit, but it’s different colors. CorinneSo much fancier. VirginiaThe dressy leggings and shirt combo. Maybe my new uniform? I don’t know.CorinneI mean, it’s a good uniform.VirginiaI am who I am. I’m here drinking my tea in my East Fork mug and my chambray shirt. I’m a coastal grandma just trying to get through the day and it is what it is.But I do hear you, I feel like it’s like the fanciness of the button down shirt. It does need to be a casual shirt with leggings.CorinneYeah. And you have to like, get the proportions right. I don’t know. I’m going to have to experiment. Also, are you wearing socks with your sneakers, if you’re wearing leggings?VirginiaNot yet, because it hasn’t cooled enough here. Probably once it’s cold enough to require socks I will switch to ankle boots with my leggings.CorinneOkay. Because I feel like sometimes the sneakers, socks, legging thing gets weird.VirginiaIt gets complicated. If I’m going to be walking a lot, my feet get sweaty. So I wear the no show socks. But my Target clog boots will come out soon, or another kind of ankle boot. All right. I think that’s all our pants news! I have one other quick update from a past podcast. This was two Indulgence Gospels ago. I was mentioning that I wasn’t wearing my favorite Universal Standard jersey dress and other things because of the oil stain right in the middle of your boobs. We talked about how that’s a common struggle. People had so many thoughts about stain removal, which I really appreciated. And I tried several methods and the combination that got all the stains out of that dress—which I thought was history, like it had been through the dryer, it was done for—was this product called Puracy, which is this foaming stain remover thing that I put on and let it sit for like a day or two. Then right before I washed it, I put on a dab of Dawn dish soap. And that combination has brought back a lot of my t-shirts and sweatshirt type things from the dead.CorinneThat’s really cool. I’m going to try that because I have the same problem. VirginiaI think Dawn by itself for a less set in stain will totally do the job. But for this, like had been through the dryer, like I thought it was baked-in forever. This worked.CorinneOne other thing that has happened since the last time we talked is that I got the updated COVID vaccine. And as everyone on the internet was talking about, people who weigh over 200 pounds are supposed to get a bigger needle. So when I went to get it, I went to a Walgreens and when I got into the little consultation room, I was like, “So I heard that people that weigh over whatever are supposed to get a bigger needle,” and the guy was sort of like, “Oh, yeah, I have heard that.” And I was like, “Okay, so are we going to use a bigger needle?” And he was like, “Well, how big are your arms?”I was just like, “they’re really big!” What? I don’t know. Like, how would you quantify that? First of all, you’re looking at me! You can tell how big they are.VirginiaIt’s not like you know the individual weight of one arm. CorinneAnd yeah, just to be clear, I’m way over that weight threshold. There’s not even advice for being over that. Like, it’s not like “over this weight use 1.5 inch needle and then over this weight, use a 2 inch needle.”But they did have 1.5 inch needles and he did use one. When you see it, it’s not even that much bigger. I was just like, oh, that’s not even really making a difference, but whatever.VirginiaBut you’re glad you did it. CorinneIt was fine.VirginiaI’m glad you did it, too. That is absurd.CorinneIt was so funny. Just like, have you ever talked to a person before? Virginia“Sir, how often do you leave your house? Is this a new experience for you?”CorinneHow big are your arms?VirginiaLike, you’re sitting right there with your arms.CorinneAnd they are big. You can see them. Like, I don’t know.VirginiaThat’s so funny and weird. Yeah, I mean, I’m sorry. That’s really funny.You and I texted about this before I got my COVID booster, and I also went to a Walgreens. And even though I made an appointment, I ended up waiting for 45 minutes. So by the time I got in there, I was so over the whole experience I completely forgot to ask. So I just got the regular needle. And who knows? Who knows whether that is going to be okay or not. I rolled some dice. I literally got back in my car was like, fuck! But I was not about to go back and be like, “Can I have another one with the bigger needle just in case it didn’t work?”Alright. Let’s get into some questions. Do you want to read the first one?CorinneQ: But what if I really have to stop eating certain foods for my health?I’ve been staunchly anti-diet for several years now. Earlier this year, I was diagnosed with a condition and was told changing my diet could help keep it from progressing. I spiraled because I’ve been taught to believe that any diet change is just bullshit anti-fatness, and doctors don’t know what they’re talking about. But I’m coming to realize sometimes that’s true, and sometimes it’s not. I haven’t made diet changes yet and my condition has worsened, despite other measures. I’m considering small changes to see what happens.I feel like there’s no nuance in this space. Yes, you can be Healthy At Every Size, but what if you aren’t and food is part of the treatment? I now feel like I’m deconstructing both diet culture and anti-diet culture to figure out what’s going to help me. It’s hard and scary and I wish this was something that was discussed in these spaces. Not every piece of nutrition advice is bullshit. How do we bring more nuance to the space?VirginiaOkay, free list this is where we leave you! To hear our response to this plus so much more fat fashion talk, fat hair, fat friends, lots of good stats, of course our Butters, you will need to be a paid subscriber. EPISODE CREDITSCo-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay. Producer: Kim Baldwin. Logo design: Deanna Lowe.Theme Song: Farideh.Video Editor: Elizabeth AyikuAudio Engineer: Tommy HarronFollow us on social! Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith. Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
Full show notes at the publisher
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