Stay ConnectedBurnt Toast is your body liberation community. We’re working to dismantle diet culture and anti-fat bias, and we have a lot of strong opinions about comfy pants.
Co-hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (NYT-bestselling author of FAT TALK) and Corinne Fay (author of the popular plus size fashion newsletter Big Undies).
Copyright: © Virginia Sole-Smith
You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about anti-fat bias, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole Smith.Today I am chatting with Vashti Harrison, number one New York Times-bestselling author and illustrator of Little Leaders,Little Dreamers, and Little Legends— about her newest picture book, Big.Big is such an important contribution to the representation of Black girls, and of fat kids, in literature. And this is a really moving conversation. I absolutely loved getting to know Vashti, hearing about her process, and about everything that went into this book. I hope it is really helpful to you in thinking about how to have conversations about anti-fat bias, but also about anti-Black racism and adultification, with your kids.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!)AND - we have signed copies of Bigand several of Vashti’s other books in the Burnt Toast Bookshop right now! Plus you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)Shop the Burnt Toast Bookstore!And don’t forget to check out our new Burnt Toast Podcast Bonus Content!This week we have stunning behind-the-scenes illustrations from Big in its early stages. You don’t want to miss this.Episode 116 TranscriptVirginiaYour book Big is a major favorite in our house, I just found it in my daughter’s bed the other day. It really, really means a lot to our family. Why don’t we start by having you tell listeners a little bit about yourself and your work?VashtiI am primarily an author and illustrator of children’s books—although author still feels like an awkward new term for me! I feel like I was thrust into the world of writing, but I came to it through drawing. I’ve always expressed myself through images.My background is actually in filmmaking. I used to make experimental films, primarily shot on 16 millimeter, very kind of like artsy fartsy, definitely in a world outside of the commercial art world and definitely outside of making work for young people. But through the process of learning all of the tools and techniques and traditions of formal art making, I learned a lot of discipline and how to tell stories and when I rekindled a love for drawing I felt like so charged and excited to be expressing myself through my hands. It felt so different than making movies, which felt laborious and always required lots of gear and help. I felt so empowered to be able to tell any kind of story I wanted through illustration.Not to jump right into the politics, but around the time of the Trump election, I just felt like I wanted to be making positive work. I wanted to be making work for young people. It just became only thing I was excited or interested in creating: Images and stories that felt like they were uplifting for young people.VirginiaI think 2016 had that impact on a lot of us. I can relate to that feeling of: The world is burning, how am I going to put anything good into it? VashtiI felt powerless. I felt like I can’t do much in this world. I can’t change too much or too many people. But if I can create enough images that connect to people… Weirdly enough, I was thinking about Winnie the Pooh. I was thinking about Pikachu. I was thinking about characters that when people see them, they say, “Oh my gosh, I love that character!” That’s what I wanted to create for Black children. I wanted people to see these images of Black children and have that same response. VirginiaI think a lot about how Winnie the Pooh is a sort of stealth fat icon. He’s very proud of being short and fat. There’s a lovely way to read both the books and the movie as being fat positive. And yet, there is this huge problem in children’s media. Kids’ books feature talking animals more often than they feature Black kids and Black girls, for sure. We need more, and we need different.So tell us about Big. What inspired this story in particular?VashtiWell, around the time that I started working on my first book, Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History, I read this study that came out of the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality called Girlhood Interrupted. It was my first introduction to the term “adultification bias.” That is the perception that some children are more adult, more mature, more responsible, and more knowledgeable than their age would suggest. Adultification is inherently racialized, because it happens at a disproportionate rate to Black children and especially Black girls. The study found that adults view Black girls as young as the age of five as less innocent and more adult than their white counterparts. This results in adults believing that Black girls need less nurturing, less protection, that they need to be comforted less, that they know more about adult topics—and the list goes on. When I read this study, I felt so emotionally wrenched because I remember being a really shy kid who took a really long time to come of age. I just thought about how harmful it is, or would have been for me to have been presumed old enough or mature enough for things that I was definitely not ready for. I also thought about all the different metrics that feed into this bias: Skin color, height, voice, body shape, size and weight. I just feared for the girls that were being judged for being too something: Too big, too tall, too loud. I was thinking about this intersection of adultification bias and anti-fat bias and I felt so charged to tell a story that centered on these things because I felt like I was going through my own emotional journey. I was reflecting on my my body and feeling like I wanted to make art that spoke to self-love and confronted how anti-fat bias had affected me. I didn’t know how I would tell that story, but the idea was ruminating while I was working on the other books.Those were nonfiction books and required a lot of research and I had agreed to do one every year. So I was just working for a couple years straight. Around the same time, I illustrated Sulwe by Lupita Niyong’o, which is about colorism. Which is a heavy, heavy topic to put in a children’s book. So I think in the process of working on all these other books, I was thinking about how to tell my own story. This is my first piece of fiction and it’s my first picture book that I’ve written and illustrated by myself. The process of working on other people’s books and those few years of just kind of ruminating on the ideas helped it all kind of cook. It was slow cooking for a while while some other ideas are in the Instant Pot, this one was a slow cooker.VirginiaI love that you brought up the Georgetown research, I want to talk about that a little more.I also was really moved by that study when it was published and I use it a lot in my book in talking about bias against fat kids and particularly Black girls in schools, how it comes up in dress codes and in the conversations around puberty. And something that really moved me about that research was hearing from the girls themselves. One girl said something like, “I get dress coded way more than anyone else because I’m in a bigger body. I know that something that’s low cut on another girl goes unremarked on and on me it’s a problem.” That is so important.I quote a couple of them in my book because that is the huge problem with research on these issues often, right? We don’t hear from the kids who are experiencing this. So I recommend everyone spend some time with that research. It’s important to hear from these girls. I think we often don’t realize how much kids are exquisitely aware of how all of these biases are being used against them.VashtiYes. I can say these words “adultification bias,” and “anti-fat bias,” but I was connecting with the stories of actual girls. Georgetown Center put out a really approachable, accessible short animated video where they use some of those words and it’s like, it really just puts it it out there for you to really understand, like, these aren’t just datasets. These are real people, these are children who deserve so much more than what they’re being offered. So I think that’s what I wanted to capture in Big. VirginiaSo what is the story of Big?VashtiBig follows the story of a young girl who, when she’s first born, the people around her, the adults around her, use such positive words of affirmation. “You’re such a big girl, you’re a big girl now.” And that is a good thing. I wanted to talk about how, at a certain point in most girls’ lives, particularly in America, “big” goes from being a positive thing to being a negative thing. I wanted the inciting incident to be something that felt nearly innocuous. It’s an event, it’s something that happens, and she is changed after it. She takes in the words that people say to her, and it changes the way she she feels about herself and experiences the world. It is a story about the words we say to one another and also about how we offer children or how we don’t offer children the space to change and grow because of these weird expectations about what innocence looks like. VirginiaAs I’m listening to you talk, I’m thinking about how it is very easy to read Big as a somewhat straightforward story of this girl who loves ballet and is too big. Because you use text quite sparingly, the pictures are telling the story. So it’s easy to do one read of it. And as I’ve read it over and over with my daughter, I’ve gotten deeper and deeper into it.So now talking to you, I’m understanding just how radical the foundation of this book is. It is easy to pick up Big and think, “Oh, it’s a book about little girls and ballet.” It’s actually something way more subversive and more powerful than that.VashtiI think that is something I kind of struggled with, because I worried about all of the subtext. I wondered, is this too adult? Am I writing the story as an adult who has gone through and processed all these feelings and making something that is not quite for children? There is a surface level story and then there’s a subtextual story.On the surface, it is about a young girl who is full of self love and that changes after an incident on the playground. She starts to internalize these negative words she hears from the people around her and it makes her physically grow on the page to the point where she doesn’t fit anymore. At that point, she has to be confronted with not fitting, with people having problems with that. Fortunately she finds enough self love. She finds a way to identify what she loves about herself and what she knows to be true about herself and lets go of the things that she knows are not true about her and she makes more space for herself. It’s not a book about ballet. Ballet is a tool that is a metaphor in this story for the thing that we love. In this case, it felt important to show that the thing that she loves is also about freedom, about moving your body freely. Her joy gets taken away by these negative words from the people around her. And they are just passing comments, I don’t think many of the people know that those words stuck with her and are changing her, changing the way she feels and exists. One of the one of the things that changes for her as her body starts physically growing—for anyone who hasn’t seen it, things start changing for her and she grows larger than the size of her bed. Then in the next image, she’s 10 feet tall and can’t fit in her desk at school. That’s a visual image that’s kind of silly, but I was thinking about the way that Black girls get pushed out of school. They are not offered the opportunity to have different bodies or be silly and be loud because they are being judged for being too much or too something or too adult and are regularly getting punished at higher rates. That is directly correlated to the school to prison pipeline. So there are things that I was thinking about in this book that you wouldn’t quite know if I didn’t tell you, but it’s all there for me.VirginiaI love that you’re saying maybe it’s not a book for kids. I think the best children’s books often aren’t entirely for kids, or at least work on many different levels.This is not a perfect comparison by any means because your book is doing something quite different and more groundbreaking, but I wrote a piece recently revisiting Eloise with my daughter. Eloise was not intended to be a book for children. Kay Thompson actually didn’t even like kids and was really adamant about the fact that she wrote it for her gay cabaret fans. And of course children adore it, right? Little girls adore it and people embrace this rambunctious little girl’s story, which is powerful, especially so at the time.I think there’s something really valuable in kids books when the author has this whole other mission. And I think kids do get it.I think the reason I loved Eloise as a little girl is because she represented some freedom to me that I wasn’t feeling in my own life. I was such a good girl, not a rule breaker, ever. It was helpful for me to see this representation of femininity that wasn’t just perfect little good girl. I think the kids reading your books are having an even more profound experience of seeing themselves and seeing you put into pictures. The emotional experiences they’re having in their lives, that’s huge. It’s huge. VashtiYeah, I appreciate that. It is the highest form of praise when I hear that a kid loves the book, that a kid is reading it over and over again. I was just scared throughout the entire process if I was doing the right thing.Mainly because I read a review—you’re not supposed to read the reviews, but I read one. When I illustrated this book by Lupita Nyong’o called Sulwe that is a fictionalization of her childhood experiences growing up as the darkest person in her family. In this in this story, this little girl has to go on this adventure and hear the stories of night and day and in the end she learns to love the color of her skin.But I read this review by a parent who said, “My kid did not have any anxieties about the color of her skin before this book, and now she does, and it’s all your fault.” And I was like, it is all my fault. But I also believe this book couldn’t have created something that didn’t exist. So I, I try to keep that thought a little bit closer to me because it is my fear that this book would incite an anxiety or a fear that wasn’t present in a child beforeVirginiaThis was something I wanted to ask you about. I do a lot of work reporting and thinking about how we talk to our kids about the issues of anti-fatness and diet culture. Often parents will say to me, “It’s too early. I don’t want to bring this up now because I’ll put this in their heads.”But I feel that the research shows quite clearly, with both adultification bias and anti-fat bias, that kids are learning about it really young. VashtiI’m reminded of when folks say “It’s too early to talk to your kids about race and racism.” But for for Black children, that is rarely an option. It is a thing that exists and we’re going to encounter it no matter what. It comes from a place of privilege to say “It’s too early for my kid.”Obviously, each individual adult and child experience is different. And as a very sensitive kid, I definitely would have appreciated someone taking care in the way they spoke to me about this. But when addressing these these larger, heavy things in our society, it is rarely an option that we won’t encounter it. I think particularly with Big, we’re talking about the way that adults use words with children. It is so ubiquitous in our society to talk about children’s bodies as this good or bad thing. And the call might be coming from inside the house. I’m trying to appeal to all of us to address the way we use this language. I think in order to dismantle hatred, we h…
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 just beyond delighted to be chatting with musician and comedian Farideh, who I have been high key obsessed with on Instagram for months now.Farideh is known for relatable and hilarious takes on motherhood. In December 2022 her song Such a Good Dad went viral, generating over 10 million views in just three weeks. Her new album, “The Mother Load” came out on October 24. It is so good!Farideh’s music hits that sweet spot of super relatable, mostly elder millennial discussions of motherhood, about bodies, gender norms, and socialization. There’s just so much good stuff here. She’s a delight. This is a really fun episode and we’re going to play some of her music, too—so even if you’re usually a transcript reader, consider listening today!PS. If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)Episode 115 TranscriptFaridehSo I’m a musician. I’m a comedian, I guess now. I’ve been a musician most of my life and then I’ve just kind of been foraying into the comedy later in life. People can find me on Instagram at @IloveFarideh, same handle everywhere. I started getting into content creation a couple years ago and I’ve been mostly focusing on music for moms nowadays. VirginiaI want to talk about the mom thing. But I first got into your work when literally 900 of my followers were DMing me the diet song. They were like, “do you know about Farideh? Have you heard the diet song?” I know in your bio you said the “good dad” song is what went super viral, but in our world, it was the diet song. In the Burnt Toast community and I think also just in fat activism, anti-diet communities in general, the diet song really went quite viral locally.FaridehThat’s good to know. Of course you have your views, but that doesn’t always mean something permeates communities in the way that you thought. So that’s really cool to know.VirginiaOh my God, we’re obsessed with that. What I love is you when you first released it, you did a very funny video of you being a pirate and dancing with gnomes, which is great. And then you later released a version that makes me cry. And I was just like, how is she so brilliant? She can do both. FaridehI was a musician my whole life and then I kind of thought I had ended that career. I didn’t know what to do, so I started content creation and then I was doing funny stuff. And then just before the diet song come up, I had made the most obvious to everybody else but me connection of like, “Ph, I should be writing funny songs because that’s actually two abilities of mine together.” I should combine these things that I like, instead of separating them out. So it was around December and I was just like, okay, so I need to build up a body of work really fast. Because I didn’t really have a collection of funny songs at my disposal. But it was the end of the year and I just knew that the vultures were circling. You know, the beginning of the year, let’s start the shame spiral. So I was like, this is a song that’s like half funny, half true.This is part of the journey of music and comedy, because they both actually really live in the vein of truth. I also want to give myself freedom that I don’t have to be a comedian. I am a musician, and I will always be a musician. And while I’m experimenting with comedy, it can be both. I can be serious, I can be comedic, because that’s who I am. Of course, the diet song comes from a very personal place. I was very heavily into diet culture as a young person. I was given a lot of messages from a very, very young age—like I’m sure many of your listeners were—about how my body needed to be smaller, and I kept it smaller as best as I could. And then one day, my body was like, no thank you and just decided to be not only unresponsive to diet culture, but would retaliate and rapidly rapidly gained weight, which I’ve come to understand is probably PCOS. So I had to come to a place of being like, oh, diets are not serving me. They’re, in fact, harming me. It’s hard for people to understand a reality that I’m sure most of your listeners understand, which is that calories in calories out ain’t true. When I had the ability to make my body smaller, it was a full time job. It was my whole mind. And what a waste of a mind!If a woman is only thinking about how to be smaller, she’s not thinking about the inequities in the world. She’s not thinking about how to make this world a better place. And that was a cost to myself. It was like, what a waste of whatever light I have in this world, but then you go macro and every night people are falling asleep being like, “I had two bites of a brownie,” Instead of being like, “Oh, that was a great day. I loved looking at my kids. Tomorrow, I can’t wait to do it again.” Right? Like, what a macro loss. I was just like, the vultures were circling. And I was like, I’m just going to write this song. Please don’t tell me about your juice cleanse. I love you so much, but I don’t want to know.VirginiaI don’t want to know.I think a lot about the songs that aren’t getting written, the books that aren’t getting written, the art that is not being made because women in particular, but anybody, so many people are just swept up in this project of body management and this failing project that then becomes so all consuming.FaridehYeah, the thing of just like lay that weapon down and just live a life, just step into it.VirginiaSo let’s also talk about the mom bod song. This is another one that people send me constantly, and that I felt extremely seen by. It captures this weird dichotomy where dad bods are sort of affectionately held up as an ideal.FaridehThey’re attractive. VirginiaThere’s something cute about them getting a little doughy or whatever. FaridehMoms in general aren’t allowed to be sexy. The mom bod is so trashed on. It’s a sign that you’ve let yourself go. It’s like just like yeah, well, if he got hit by a truck multiple times would he be bouncing back?VirginiaHow great would he look?FaridehGrowing a person and delivering it is incredibly hard on the body. And yeah, our bodies change and we’re allowed to. I wanted to just have fun with the song and it was really come from that privilege. I was in an all girl group for nine years and I would get on stage and I would sing every night. We would often be wearing outfits that complemented each other. That was sometimes very hard as the largest woman in the group because a lot of comparison would come up. At that point, I was the only one who was married. And I would have to consciously process that thought of like, actually, the thinner women in this group are single. Which was not the messaging, right? The messaging is, if you want a heterosexual relationship you have to be thin and if you’re not, then you’re not going to have a relationship. But of course that’s just not true.VirginiaRight, these things are unrelated.FaridehBut once again, because of privilege, I can say those things. Because I know deep down I am attractive with my mom bod.VirginiaI’ll also just footnote for the child-free listeners: You don’t need to have a mom bod to justify your body changes. You are allowed to be fat and shaped however you’re shaped regardless. You don’t have to earn it through childbirth. Especially because a lot of folks don’t get their kids through childbirth. There are a lot of ways to be a mom.FaridehTotally. Our bodies are just allowed to change. Dad bods don’t come from being a dad.VirginiaThey just come from existing and aging. But I think it’s like a great song for capturing that. Like, let’s normalize bodies changing. Let’s celebrate the changes, whatever the backstory.FaridehI’m all for celebrating the dad bod. I think dad bods are sexy and also I think mom bods are sexy. Let’s celebrate them both because we happen to be gifted to age.VirginiaThe big theme of your work and the focus of the new album is definitely motherhood and the way modern motherhood comes with all of these insane expectations. The details! Your detail work is incredible. You get all of the details of the day of being a mom involves, from laundry and all that. But also the invisible labor, the mental load bullshit, and the way it is just always disproportionately falling on us, no matter how hard we fight for it to be more balanced.You were told not to write songs about motherhood and that motherhood is not a sexy topic to write songs about. And then I started think about it. And I was like, that’s true. But also what the fuck?FaridehI’m sure anybody who’s listening will think wait, how many songs do you know about motherhood? They don’t exist. VirginiaI’m drawing a total blank. And there are some songs about fatherhood. Like Cat’s In The Cradle.FaridehBecause men can get away with that, right? They’re allowed to age. I remember sitting down with songwriters and presenting a song that briefly said I was a mom—this is before I was one, this was just me exploring a song about it. And they were just like, “Oh, yeah, you never write songs that even briefly suggest that you’re a mom.” Like it was just known. If you ever want a song to do well, you would never ever write about motherhood.I mean, and my career did probably the best after I became a mom. I toured with my child and the musical world was just really unprepared. There’s just no place for children even in like the best settings, right? And I saw how people would resent artists who became moms. It’s just because it makes you look old and unattractive.There’s really nothing less cool than a mother. And the music industry is about being cool in so many other ways. And young. So what happened was, I took a comedy class to learn how to be funnier, because I was enjoying learning about that online. And in that class, they were like, “Write about motherhood!” And I was like, no thank you, I would like to be relevant. But so much of our writing comes from our personal experience. And then you start writing and you’re like, oh, my goodness, I have lived a whole life that is creatively completely unexplored.Then I also in that class realized I was leaving my music at the door. Both of these things are overcoming my own snobbery that you learn as a young person, right? Old women, mothers, are boring and uncool. And musical comedy is not serious art. Right? So there was two things I had to overcome being like, oh, this is kind of cringey. But then, of course, when I did it it leads to the greatest or at least a whole new career. Like, I didn’t imagine it would happened. I was definitely like, my music career is over. I need to find another reason to exist.VirginiaAnd it turns out you just needed to find a new subject. FaridehI just turned 40. And as a musician, I always lived with the clock ticking being like how much longer can I really do this? Because people don’t invest in people who are old, they invest in 17-year-old prodigies who are incredibly talented, but also easily morphable. Easily sexualized, like, it’s not the same.That’s why it took me so long to start writing comedy songs, as well, because I just was like, my music career is over. There is no point in me pursuing this. And that’s when I moved into creating my own audience.Because the other thing is, people also don’t think that women are a market. That’s why people are like, Barbie movie? She’s done so well! It’s like, yeah, because women buy. It’s just like, they don’t make clothes for plus sized people. And you’re like, but that’s the majority of the people.VirginiaIt’s all the people who need to wear clothes. FaridehI don’t understand. It’s so nice to be like, oh, but I could just build my own audience and meet and create music for women or parents and who are needing this kind of music who need to be heard, who need to be seen. VirginiaAnd who you can reflect the experience of. And I’m thinking too about the discourse around Rihanna’s pregnancy or Beyonce’s pregnancy. We get so weird when women musicians become moms, right? We have such a weird, uncomfortable relationship with it, that we have to like dissect their bodies. There’s no parallel. No male musician who becomes a father has to do anything about it. It’s not even an interesting point in the interview. FaridehNo, it’s not a thing.VirginiaThey’re just allowed to become fathers and carry on. And it makes sense that trying to tour with kids you would encounter all kinds of hurdles. Music, as an industry, it sounds like, is very much leaving out an entire population. FaridehAbsolutely. I was just like, man, one day when I get the cash I’d love to make a grant for single mothers. Because I was able to do so much because of the support of my family. My dad is a musician. So, people came on tour with me. My husband came on tour with me, my dad came on tour with me, my mom came on tour with me, my aunt came on tour with me. But like man, single moms? Like where are they? There has to be so little single mom art in the world which means a whole voice is missing from our society.VirginiaSo, tell us about the new album. I got to listen to it this morning. It is amazing.FaridehI didn’t actually anticipate writing an album, it just kind of happened. I was like, oh, I guess I have enough songs here for an album. It’s always good to collect your body of work into something. I called it “The Mother Load” to explore many of the elements and the challenges we face as moms.And I don’t know if it’d be obvious for people if they’re listening to the songs to know that they’re about identity. Because when you become a mom, you are cast as a character of Mother. You have no past, you have no future, you are just a servant of the family. So I wanted to have a couple songs that were a bit like, you know. I have a song called Used to be a Ho because it’s like, man, people, she used to have a past. She does still have a past and that’s okay. That’s normal. I wanted to press up against a few of those kinds of things.And of course, division of labor is a big issue that moms face. Incontinence is a big one myself and my friends face a lot of and just removing that shame. Or I don’t know if it’s even removing shame, just we’ve been talking about it, just normalizing it. VirginiaJust even talking about it with a lot of body related changes. You have a reel about hairy nipples and I was like, thank you!! Somebody finally said it. Can we please just discuss these things? FaridehCan we just be human beings? I also recognize that I have a lot of privilege to say a lot. When I talked to other friends who were like, “Oh, I would just never say that part of it.” I happen to be inside of a very stable, healthy marriage. I’m not like trying to attract anybody or impress anybody and I can say things without blowback. A lot of people will be concerned about my marriage or be like, “you should just leave him” because of the division labor issues. And I’m like, well, I could not write these songs if I was inside the fire of that part of my marriage, right? Because when you’re a new parent, there’s so much growing and learning to be done. And, of course, those songs come from a truth! Of course, we did struggle. We did. There was not the language that there even is today.I think COVID did something to that. It provided us with language for what we were all experiencing inside of our marriages. But we didn’t have words or at least it hadn’t permeated culture enough that we understood emotional labor, mental load, division of labor, how do we actually overcome this? Not just from our husbands, from ourselves, for myself. Invisible labor was just as invisible to me as it was to my partner.VirginiaI can relate.FaridehThe great thing is I’m writing the songs when my child is eight…
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 Christine Yu, author of Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes.Christine is an award-winning journalist whose work focuses on the intersection of sports science and women athletes. Her writing has appeared in Outside, The Washington Post, Time, and other publications. And friends, her new book is fascinating! It is full of “holy shit” moments, like the fact that even though you’ve probably thought since middle school gym class that of course, men are the faster stronger athletes, women actually outperform men in ultra marathons and all the other bananas endurance events that are arguably the hardest physical challenges that human beings can undertake. Christine also unpacks why sports science has ignored women’s bodies for so long and the very real harm this has caused. This is such an important episode if you are a woman who exercises in any capacity, or if you are parenting a child athlete. But even if neither of those categories apply to you, I promise this is such a good and fascinating and often enraging conversation.PS. If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)If you order Up to Speedfrom the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)Shop the Burnt Toast Bookstore!Episode 114 TranscriptChristineI’m a journalist and I cover sports and science and health. And I’m the author of the book Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes, which just came out in May. I live in Brooklyn with my husband and two kids. I tend to report on women’s sports and sports science and this intersection of the two of them. It has been lots of fun.VirginiaAnd we are here to talk about the new book, which is so smart. It’s so impeccably researched. As I was reading it, I just kept thinking, holy shit, holy shit. Like, why don’t people know this? Why is this not more widely known? So, thank you. It is a real gift of a book. ChristineThank you! Your “what the heck?” reaction was, frankly, what I felt when I actually started to think about this a little bit more. As someone who reports on science and health all the time, you read all these studies but you have these short deadlines, and you’re just like, “I need studies to look at and read.” It made me feel like I wasn’t doing my job. Like, how could I miss or not even think about the implications of all this? I felt like my personal guilt went into this a lot.VirginiaI relate. I did a lot of fitness reporting in my women’s magazines days. And we were just accepting some really limited science as fact and running with premises that were not borne out by the research. ChristineOn the one hand, we have been hearing so much about how medical research doesn’t include women. But as someone who grew up playing sports and is still fairly active, I’m really trying to understand what that means for girls and women in the long term. How does that affect, sure, athletic performance — but really long-term athletic development, health, wellbeing? Because what I was uncovering were all of these issues that we don’t talk about, we don’t really understand, and we don’t communicate to girls and women about. And yet they have long-term health repercussions on bone health, on cardiovascular health, on everything. VirginiaMental health..ChristineYes! And we don’t communicate that. And knowing that sports is such a growing part of a lot of people’s lives, or just physical activity, and we tout that so much. So I was really trying to understand what are we missing here because we don’t study women?VirginiaI want to get more into some of those specific implications you touched on, but before we get too deep into all of this, I do want to quickly address the question of gender inclusive language. You talked about it at the top of the book and I just thought, for our audience, it would be helpful here. You were really focused on the way science has underserved the biology of people assigned female at birth, but then also in the broader cultural dismissal of women athletes, regardless of biology. ChristineYeah, it’s really tricky, especially because both sports and science are two fields that are so predicated on the sex and gender binary, right? In science, we have male specimens, female specimens, and they’re very separate things. And similarly, in sports, we have those two categories. So when we’re thinking about not only women athletes, but thinking about trans athletes and nonbinary athletes, how can we talk about this in a way that isn’t excluding folks, but really trying to find language that was more inclusive? Because when you think about sports and when you think about science, it very much prioritizes male bodies and cis het men. So how we can talk about this in a more inclusive way, because when we just focus on those cis het men and male bodies, we do exclude not just female people living in female bodies, but we do exclude all these other folks that are marginalized by sex and gender.VirginiaOne really big consequence of not studying people assigned female at birth, ever, for all of science, is this absurd misconception that too much exercise will damage a female body. Like, literally, people believing that your uterus will fall out. I had Martinus Evans, 300 pounds and running, on the podcast a few months ago. And we were kind of joking about how that had been a barrier to women joining the marathon, but it’s completely true. It was what happened! Talk us through that one a little.ChristineIt’s wild because this is an idea that has existed since forever, right? Since the time of the ancient Greeks and the Romans, people have thought it wasn’t appropriate for women to enter into the athletic arena. And in the cases where women were allowed to compete, the distances of races were shortened. Because of our fragile bodies. But for me, it highlighted this idea that women’s roles were centered around our reproductive capacity, our ability to bear children and carry children. That was so central to everything, that anything that could potentially damage that capacity was considered off limits. We can’t do that. And that just became an idea that was never really interrogated. Or actually, that’s a lie. It was interrogated and it was interrogated mostly by women scientists and doctors in the 18th century. They were looking at this and doing studies and saying, “No, we’re fine actually.”Virginia“We’re doing great.”ChristineActually, this doesn’t affect menstrual cycles. This doesn’t affect reproductive capacity. Uteruses are intact, ovaries haven’t burst. But those women weren’t taken seriously, even though they were actually doing scientific studies. The men in power and the men who were leading all of these efforts were like, yeah, that’s great. We’re still not going to listen to you. Virginia“You’re biased by being a woman. You couldn’t do this objective science on your own body.”ChristineExactly.VirginiaI will say, I did love the reference you made to one early scientist who did advise that noblewomen could exercise by yelling at their servants. So problematic. Clearly so problematic in so many ways we could unpack. Also, I mean, I do kind of love yelling? Is that my new workout?ChristineThis was a Spanish doctor. He had put out one of these first books on exercise and there was a specific chapter looking at exercise for women. But a lot of these observations came from his travels from Europe to Mexico. He had stopped, I believe, in the islands, maybe like Cuba or something like that. And he was observing the nuns there. And they were like, super healthy, right? Mainly because they were not reproducing and dying in childbirth.VirginiaNot risking their lives to have babies every two years. ChristineBut they were singing, right? So he believed that that was conducive to their health. VirginiaAnd all the exercise you need. ChristineIt was interesting. He also separated it out by class, right? For upper class women it was “walk around after dinner and yell at your servants,” and for women of lower class, because they’re working in the fields, working in the house, it was “that’s enough exercise.”VirginiaNo yelling from you, lower classes. ChristineOh, no, no, no, no.VirginiaWe don’t need to hear your voices. Only one kind of yelling and no women yelling at men.ChristineNo, no, no.VirginiaYes. Like I said, really problematic. But also, I could get on board with the yelling. I could see a yelling workout being a big trend.ChristineCan you imagine? It totally would be.VirginiaI would go to that group fitness class is all I’m saying.So, on the one hand, you’re absolutely right, the conventional thinking has been “we have to protect fertility and the woman’s body is so fragile, and the uterus is made of glass and we have to revere it.” And then on the flip side, as women do enter sports in a bigger way, there becomes this new narrative and this really dangerous misconception that exercising to the point that you no longer get your period is okay, normal, maybe even the goal of the whole thing.ChristineIt’s this contradiction, right? In the sense that it’s almost as if, if women were going to participate in sports, we had to make our bodies more like men. And I feel like that’s where a lot of this myth and misconception around losing your menstrual cycle being a good thing, being a sign that you are really fit and are training really well, I feel like that’s where that comes from. This idea that if we are entering into this arena and are deemed appropriate to enter into this arena, we almost have to shed all of these markers of being in a in a female body. Like losing your menstrual cycle, generally having smaller boobs, too, probably. There’s less stuff bouncing around and distracting and all of that stuff. Having this super lean body for a lot of sports, as well. I think there are a lot of really problematic things that go along with that.VirginiaAnd the menstruation myth is especially problematic for teen athletes, obviously, because of how it can delay the onset and really mess with the puberty trajectory. What do you want parents and girls to understand about athletic performance during like the tween and teen years?ChristineIt’s so hard, right? There’s so much change that’s going on, and it’s so awkward. And but when you think about it, the amount of change that that kids are going through at this period of time, right? It’s like akin to when they’re babies. And it’s so alluring, especially if you have a girl who is playing sports and seems to be doing well. We see this a lot in sports like cross country running, that younger girls perform really well. They run really fast. And then older girls, once they do start to go through puberty, their performance seems to drop off. So the idea is, “Well if I just don’t go through puberty, then I can keep being fast.” But this is what our bodies need to do. We need to go through puberty. We need to go through this maturation process in order to get to our adult form. It’s really important that they understand and know that this is critical. This is a critical piece of development. It’s not just about fertility, right? This ties back to how we learn about, about our bodies as girls is we only learn about it in terms of reproduction and fertility and how to not get pregnant and that type of thing. But we don’t understand the intricate things that our menstrual cycle does in our body and all those hormones that are involved in it, and the impacts that it has throughout the body and all these other systems and ways. As parents, it’s knowing it’s a hard line. Anything is going on with your period, that’s the hard line. VirginiaWe’re not going to risk your future bone health. ChristineYeah, exactly. I feel like that that’s a really important message that parents need to know and understand that it’s not normal.VirginiaI think they need to know to push back because I think there has been a change in conversation. Your book is a really big contribution to that. But I think you are likely to still encounter coaches—in certain sports, in running or gymnastics—where they’re going to have this mindset of keeping you as small as possible is good. Parents need to know to push back against that.Christine1,000 percent. It’s also understanding that, because the body changes so much during this period of time, of course there’s going to be this period of transition as girls get used to their new bodies. So it makes sense, if we just think about athletic progression, maybe their athletic progression does stall or like seems to go backwards. But that’s not the end of the world. Just understanding this as a period of transition, that we do have to acknowledge, we do have to be supportive of, and patient with. But then once you get through to that other side, things get better.VirginiaThat seems like such an important reframing because you talk in the book about how for folks assigned male at birth, the puberty process is like more of a straight line towards athletic performance. Like, you gain more muscle, you get taller and bigger and faster. And we need to understand that not all bodies are going to follow that trajectory. Because why did we decide that the male trajectory is the best trajectory for a body?ChristineYeah, I think it’s largely because that’s all we’ve known. Boys and men have largely been the ones participating in sports. Those are the ones we’ve studied, those are the ones that we’ve mythologized, in a way. That’s the trajectory that we tend to look at. We see a standard, so we just compare girls and women to that same standard. I think it’s also just our bias to want to see progression inch up in this very linear way, right? We’re constantly just slightly improving. But not recognizing that we’re humans. We are not an algebraic equation, right? There are going to be dips. And that’s part of being a human.VirginiaI mean, that really gets to a whole paradigm shift in terms of sports culture, right? I mean, if it’s always about winning, if it’s always about the next championship, if it’s about working towards that college scholarship—None of that allows for this idea that there’s going to be a few years where your performance dips but it’s all part of your overall growth.ChristineI think we’ve lost sight of that a lot in sports, over the years. I mean, definitely within the youth sports culture. I know you write about this as well, but just that emphasis on early specialization and success and winning and this focus on getting college scholarships and going pro, and all of our kids are going to be the next great Olympian superstar.But especially in childhood and adolescence, we lose sight of sports being just this amazing developmental tool and space to experiment and perform and not only get to know your own body, but develop your skills, right? Your understanding of who you are and what you’re capable of in a way that is within a specific sphere that you can you can practice and experiment in a way that I don’t think you can in a lot of other ways. We lose sight of that when we just focus on this end goal of being the best.VirginiaIt does seem like there’s a little bit of a shift happening. You have a lot of great stories in the book and I feel like the way someone like Simone Biles or Abby Wambach has talked about their athletic careers, I think we’re starting to see this narrative of it’s not always just excellence, excellence, excellence. It can be more complicated and that there are also many opportunities for growth. It also feels like it’s no acci…
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’m chatting with the brilliant Mecca Jamila Sullivan, author of Big Girl.Originally from Harlem, Mecca is now an associate professor of English at Georgetown University and lives in Washington DC. She is also the author The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora and Blue Talk and Love. Big Girl was a New York Times Editor’s Choice winner of the 2023 next generation indie Book Award for first novel. It was also one of my very favorite books that I read in 2022 and probably of all time. It is an utter delight to talk about writing, fatness, and bodies with Mecca.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!)If you order Big Girlfrom the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)Shop the Burnt Toast Bookstore!And don’t forget to check out our new Burnt Toast Podcast Bonus Content!This week we have a reading list—with suggestions from me and Mecca—of other incredible memoirs and novels that tell the coming of age stories we don’t hear often enough.Episode 113 TranscriptMeccaI always think of Big Girl as a novel about women, about bodies, about queer people and the paths we take across generations to make space for ourselves in the world. It follows a big Black girl through her coming of age in Harlem in the 1990s. Honestly, a large part of what inspired me to write this novel was living an experience very similar to the main character—her name is Malaya. In my own experience growing up as a fat kid, and as a big teenager, and as a fat woman, there are so many elements of those experiences that intersect with major conversations about race, about gender, about class about sexuality. It was really important to me, from that standpoint, to bring all of those together in this work of fiction. In many ways, it’s the book that I have always wanted to write. It is the first book that I imagined writing, even though is the third book that I ended up publishing.VirginiaOne big myth that Big Girl explodes right off the bat is this idea that thinness and the pursuit of weight loss is only pushed on white girls by their thin white mothers, that whiteness somehow owns disordered eating, that this only happens in affluent white communities. What does the thin ideal represent to Malaya? And to her mother and her grandmother who are really involved in her body?MeccaThat Black people and Black communities don’t experience fatphobia and weight bias, and that the priorities of thinness are not internalized in Black communities and Black families is absolutely a myth. And I think it’s a really dangerous myth. We’re talking about power, right? And if we’re thinking about how thinness is a centerpiece of several forms of power, including the power of normative gender, right? The notion that a normatively gendered body also has to look a certain way and has to achieve a certain body weight, right? Class, of course—you mentioned affluence, right? This idea that fitness is a kind of sign of a class mobility, of an affluence also related to power. So in that sense, it only makes sense that then disempowered communities are internalizing those same ideals right? It’s not like there’s some sort of parallel world where Black communities have access to power outside of the dominant American power structure. Thinking about it structurally, in that way, it makes sense. There’s just sound logic. One of the things that fiction has the power to do is really distill that and make it personal, tell the story. And so for Malaya, my hope is that we see those structures play out in her life in this personal way that perhaps is maybe even more relatable or legible for some readers. Because she’s this little girl. She has no language for social power structures, right? But what she knows is that her mother and her grandmother are really obsessed with thinness in this way that just doesn’t make sense to her. She sees food as a source of joy, especially early on, joy, pleasure, sort of escape, right? It’s fun, comfort. She loves the colors of food, she loves the smell, sort of a sensory experience of pleasure, joy, and freedom. And yet, she’s very much aware that her mother and her grandmother are looking at food very differently, and are looking at their bodies very differently. She comes to see that that is informed by this white thin ideal that is very much tied to a kind of class mobility and class ascendancy. As she’s coming of age, part of what she has to do is parse out where the all of these ideas around thinness and around bodies come from and figure out sort of what parts of the messaging she’s getting around her own body she wants to hold on to and what she wants to reject.And so, to my mind, that has a lot to do with how she comes into her own identity, right? Navigating those structures and figuring out what she wants to say goodbye to, what of these family legacies she needs to just decide are not for her.VirginiaI thought a lot as I was reading, how it’s all tangled up with their love for her as well. They’re trying to protect her. They’re trying to keep her body safe.MeccaAnd isn’t that always the thing, right? How we define safety, especially when we’re talking about multiple generations of women and families, this notion of safety and how we protect the younger generations of people in our families is always kind of messy and complicated. Because, of course, we are only capable of offering protections that we can imagine.I think, for Malaya’s grandmother, for example, she does think that the way to protect her own daughter and her granddaughter is to kind of enforce this rigid ideal of body shape and size through diet culture. She, of course, imagines that she’s protecting them from heartbreak from job discrimination, from all kinds of things that she’s experienced in her own life and that are real to her. Similarly, Malaya’s mother believes that she’s protecting Malaya from all of those things and from the ridicule of her grandmother, right? So there’s this interesting sort of compounding.VirginiaProtecting against the protecting.MeccaExactly. And so again, Malaya has to sort of figure out what she actually wants protection from and how to protect herself. I think part of what enables her to do that in a different way is that she’s also aware that she’s got an inner world to protect. And that’s something that is clear to her because of that process we were talking about earlier, where she wants to retain her sense of joy, and her sense of pleasure in food, and also, just like in her body in general. There’s something that very early on, she knows is not quite right about the messaging she’s getting around food and bodies. She doesn’t know exactly how she knows that there’s something internal to her that she wants to protect. And that opens up another space for her to at least sort of look for other ways of engaging her body and engaging in food.VirginiaAnd it helps her to be able to understand the harm that’s embedded in their protection. There’s so much truth in all of them. I mean, they’re right. It is easier to be in the world in a thin body. And yet she has the agency to make these different choices. The book also tells the story of gentrification and the cultural erasure in Harlem in the 90s. The writing of place in this book is so beautifully done. You’re just right there in that neighborhood, walking the streets. It’s wonderful and there are lots of parallels between the attempts to control and shrink Malaya’s body and the way Harlem itself, as a community, is being shrunk. MeccaI see Malaya’s body and the neighborhood as constantly in conversation with one another over the course of the novel. When we meet Malaya, again, she has this fierce determination to hold fast to who she is, even though she’s constantly growing and changing. She’s eight years old, when we meet her. The family has actually newly moved to Harlem, so she’s encountering herself through the music of the neighborhood, through the food of the neighborhood, through the visual landscape. And she’s a visual artist, she’s taking all of this in, as kids do. But I think she’s got a particularly keen sense of the meanings and the importance of the sensory world. And so she’s taking all of this in. The neighborhood is an important part of her identity at that age. Then, as she begins to change, as teenagers do, so does the neighborhood.Suddenly, there are external forces that are coming in, changing the feel of the neighborhood, changing the landscape of the neighborhood, and absolutely trying to shrink the neighborhood. At the same time, there’s an effort of resistance, right? There are community groups that are insisting on claiming black diasporic culture as the center of the neighborhood’s identity and that plays out in the landscape as well. So in some ways, watching the onslaught of gentrification and Harlem’s internal resistance to gentrification is part of Malaya’s own struggle, or at least part of what catalyzes her eventual coming into into her sense of self. That she’s constantly observing the neighborhood efforts to resist and push back. Of course, on a macro level, the connections between diet culture, and gentrification are similar to what we were just talking about—this idea of a white hegemonic cultural dominance. There is a particular ideal of who is in power, who should retain power, for whom what resources are meant. If we’re talking about the resources of a neighborhood or the kind of inner resources of a body, there is an external ideal. Whoever it is, it’s not Malaya. It’s not the little Black girl who should have power in this space, even when the space is her own body. Watching Harlem’s resistance to gentrification helps Malaya see and recognize an internal power within herself. It’s not a simple path, certainly, the story of Harlem. It bears this out, that you can’t just will gentrification away and the same way you can’t just will diet culture away. But shifting that locus so that for Malaya, she can decide that she herself is at the center of her world. I’m born and raised in Harlem. For many of us Harlemites, there’s still that sense that we are really what Harlem is, even if it doesn’t necessarily look that way to that outside perspective. VirginiaEven though Starbucks has arrived. MeccaYes. That’s right. It’s so fascinating how a coming of age novel has the power to really speak to these bigger questions that we honestly all need to be asking. I’m just so happy to have a chance to talk that through with you. VirginiaIt was the first time I’d thought about those two concepts in relation to each other, and it just felt like such an important metaphor to explore. Because a mistake we make when we talk about diet culture is if we only talk about it in terms of bodies, right? It’s this bigger thing, it’s related to white supremacy, and it’s related to all these power structures. The same is true with gentrification, it becomes this thing about, like, “We don’t want the Starbucks,” and yet there is a bigger system here that we need to be talking about and dismantling. I also just absolutely love how you write about Malaya’s body. It’s very visceral and messy and raw. I think writing about fatness can go so wrong—like so very, very wrong—and become fetishizing or objectifying. There’s The Whale, too many examples. We won’t name them. We don’t need to relive them. But I would just love to hear how you think about writing bodies.MeccaAs a writer, I tend to be drawn to voice and description. For me, I think in some ways, I almost want to say it’s an advantage, but it’s also a real challenge. I tend to write from a deep place within the experiences of my characters or sometimes a deep place within the setting. But either way, I think a lot through, again, sensory detail and description. When I’m writing bodies, I’m thinking of writing from within the body, by which I mean I’m thinking first of how the body feels. I’m thinking about how the body sort of resonates for the character before I’m thinking about how it might look or how it might smell or that kind of thing. I’m centering the body itself.In the case of Malaya, where part of what she has to do over the course of the novel is find the language to describe her body, it’s important that the narrator sometimes supply the language that Malaya doesn’t have. So that’s how I approached writing about her body. For example, when she’s experiencing the pleasure and the comfort of eating, the language may slow down because she herself was feeling more at ease and more at peace. There’s a calm, you know what I mean? But then when she’s thinking about the excitement of French fries, the the writing might sort of pick up and it becomes more vibrant. I really want the reader to feel what the body is feeling in that moment, rather than imposing an external, objectifying gaze. I really am not interested in what the reader thinks Malaya looks like. I want the reader to think about what Malaya’s body is feeling. This is why I feel like writing from the perspective of someone who’s drawn to description is an advantage in a way. I love that stuff. The very first draft of this novel was like 500 pages and it was almost all description. Because I just love it.VirginiaWas it hard to cut?MeccaSo hard, so hard, so hard. Because I knew this is what we don’t get to see, right? This is why really why I wanted to write this novel. Living in a fat body is such a beautiful and complicated sensory experience that we just don’t see often enough. We don’t see the complexities of all that bodies in general experience, but fat bodies in particular. So I really enjoyed in that first draft just lavishing in all of it, in the pleasure and the desire, the yearnings and the longing and the pain. I felt that it was important to let the reader in to some of those physical and psychic experiences of fat embodiment in a way that language makes possible. So why not go for it?Virginia I think you writing the 500 page version is what enables this version to feel so real. You got in there, even if we don’t get all of it. And I feel for you, because I hate cutting. I’m also an over-writer and it’s so, so hard if you write long, and then they’re like, “We need a little less.” And you’re like, “Do we though? I feel like we need it all.”MeccaYou do, right? As the author—I don’t know if you feel this way—I feel like I definitely needed to write that first version. Because as you said, like, that’s how I really got to know the character and her relationship with her body, you know what I mean? VirginiaDefinitely. You feel that. It comes through in how embodied she feels and that you are in her body with her, not looking at her body, not objectifying her. I felt the same way about how you wrote the mom’s body and the dad when he’s sick. You embody all of them. And the grandmother’s physicality is really powerful as well. All of it gave me a lot to think about because so often when I’m reading a book that’s attempting to do this, you see when it fails—because you see when the author starts thinking of their character as an object and loses that connection.MeccaFrom a craft standpoint, when I talk with students about this, one of the things I always say is even if you’re using an omniscient narrator, one of the great things about an omniscient narrator is that they do have access to the sensibilities of each character, right? If you ground the description in the sensibility of the character, you’re going to get a fresher and more nuanced perspective.Malaya happens t…
Full show notes at the publisherVirginia
You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about diet culture, anti-fat bias, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole Smith. I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.
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
It is time for your September1 Indulgence Gospel!
We are going to answer your questions like we do every month. We have so many good ones. We’re going to get into fall shoes. I have a lot of thoughts about how do you give compliments and just a lot of good fall chat.
Corinne
This is also a paywalled episode. That means to hear the whole thing you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber.
Okay, I have an update for you, Corinne. Are you ready?
Corinne
I’m so excited.
Virginia
I have something to show you, which is I finally got around to ordering—
Corinne
Oh my gosh, it’s beautiful!
Virginia
Your Indulgence Gospel t-shirt! Which I will put in the mail to you this week.
Corinne
Oh my God! It’s so cute.
Virginia
Isn’t it so cute? For listeners who don’t know, some very devoted fans of the show—friends of the show—designed their own Priestess of the Indulgence Gospel t-shirts. It’s not official Burnt Toast merch, but they are lovely and the proceeds are being donated to the National Network of Abortion Funds. I also ordered them for my kids, who were confused. My 10 year old doesn’t like baggy clothes—it’s like a whole thing—but she’s wearing it as a pajama shirt. It’s so cute.
Corinne’s really cute. They have a little crown made out of pizza on them.
Virginia
A pizza crown. The fabric is really nice. We’ll report back on the sizing—I felt like my sizing was pretty good, so fingers crossed.
Corinne
That is a very exciting update.
Virginia
What else is new with you?
Corinne
Well, fall here is really nice and also always feels too short. It’s like four weeks where like the temperature is actually, nice during the day and then it gets really cold at night. The green chile is roasting and there’s a Hot Air Balloon Fiesta in October.
Virginia
I guess I kind of thought New Mexico didn’t have fall at all! That’s lovely.
Corinne
It is lovely. It’s not New England fall, but yeah.
Virginia
I like a place that’s ready to claim its own type of fall.
Corinne
Yeah, you might prefer green chile to pumpkin spice.
Virginia
I mean, I don’t hate pumpkin spice but does it need to be in everything? One of the questions for this week that I didn’t bother to put on the list was Pumpkin Spice related and I was like, I don’t feel qualified to speak to that. But there was a really fun episode of It’s Been A Minute where she talked about the history of pumpkin spice. So if you are a pumpkin spice lover, or like me, you have complicated feelings about it, I recommend that episode.
Corinne
I’ll check that out.
Virginia
What else is new with me? I think I’m done with Twitter.
Corinne
You know, I think Twitter is over.
Virginia
I think it’s done, right? I think we can be done.
Corinne
I was looking on Twitter for something we’re going to talk about later. And first of all, I had so much trouble finding it on my phone because it’s not called Twitter anymore. Who wants to be like pulling up a website called x.com? It sounds sounds like you’re searching for—
Virginia
For porn.
Corinne
Like a porn.
Virginia
I just broke 10,000 followers on there this year, which feels like a milestone. But with troll management, I’ve been feeling like I really need to streamline all these platforms because I cannot be worrying about trolls in all the places. So I changed my account to protected—I couldn’t quite bring myself to delete. I closed DMs, and I tweeted something that was like, “Okay, I can’t quite press delete, but I’m not looking at this anymore.” It’s been great. I haven’t even thought about it. And you may be upset about this, but I’m considering also whether I’m going to be done with TikTok soon. I don’t know.
Corinne
I’m in favor of people getting rid of whatever social media they don’t want to be on. I was never a big Twitter poster, but I kind of miss the commentary. It was so funny. It was really so smart sometimes, and now it’s just bad to use. I don’t know where that commentary has really gone, either. Substack, I guess.
And also like Threads had a meteoric rise. And is anyone still using Threads?
Virginia
I don’t know. I am on all of those places. I am doing nothing with any of them right now. I have this compulsive need to be there, but I similarly just turned off comments on my TikTok, because that was getting really spammy. I was getting a bunch of trolls there. So now I’m just on Instagram and maybe that’s good. I’m curious to hear what people’s thoughts are about this. I was thinking maybe we do a Friday thread on this soon.
Corinne
Yeah, that’s a good idea. What’s everyone doing about social media?
[Post-recording note from Virginia: We’re doing this thread on Friday! Hold your comments on this till then, so we can have a good deep dive!]
Virginia
We’re in a weird moment with it. If I’m thinking of it from a business perspective, honestly, none of it serves me! Twitter stopped being remotely a driver to Substack because there’s bad blood between the companies. Even Instagram and Tiktok are not big drivers of traffic to Substack. So if I’m just using it for fun? I don’t know. I like puzzles more, I think.
Corinne
Yep.
Virginia
Alright, the last thing I wanted to talk about before we dive into questions is Philly Fat Con. Corinne, do you want to tell people what Philly Fat Con is?
Corinne
Yes. So this year is the first Philly Fat Con. In the past, there’s been a really amazing, plus size clothing swap in Philly. This year Burnt Toast is an official sponsor of Philly Fat Con. It’s a two day convention curated for fat people, by fat people, taking place October 28 and 29th in Philly. There’s a really amazing list of speakers, panels, fashion, healing from fatphobia, fat influencers, yoga, dance, meditation, and twerking.
Virginia
Corinne and I can’t be there this year, but we were really excited to have Burnt Toast be a sponsor and there will be a Burnt Toast subscription discount coupon available for folks who attend. We’re very excited to be supporting and hopefully in future years we can be an in-real-life a part of it. I
Corinne
A bunch of people who are active in the @selltradeplus community go. And the clothing swap seems really cool. They have a mending table!
Virginia
I love that. It seems like such a great resource. So if you are in Philly, or anywhere Philly-adjacent, October 28 and 29th. You should check it out!
Alright, should we do some questions?
Corinne
Hi Virginia and Corinne,
How do we all feel about the standard practice of including the number of servings on a recipe, not to be confused with the serving sizes as determined by the FDA. I’m talking about when a pasta recipe calls for 12 ounces of pasta—three quarters of a box—and says it’s for four servings. My partner and I inevitably always end up eating the four servings of pasta between the two of us and then feel weirdly guilty for no reason. I’m a recipe developer by trade, so I obviously have an agenda here. But my question is, are serving information on recipes inherently anti-fat? Is there a better way to do this while still informing people on what quantity of food they’re preparing?
Virginia
The first thing I’m going to say on this is I have never in my life cooked three quarters of a box when I could cook a whole box of pasta. What are you doing leaving me with a quarter of a box of pasta to deal with? That’s just irritating.
Corinne
I definitely have quarter boxes of pasta in my pantry from this very fucking thing.
Virginia
It’s so rude.
Okay, free list! This is where we leave you. Subscribe to get all of our thoughts on the tyranny of portion control, fall shoes and is my house really as clean as it looks on Instagram?
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
Follow us on social!
Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.
Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.
Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.
Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
Today Virginia is chatting with Katy Geraghty. Katy is an actor in New York City, most recently seen as Little Red in Into The Woods on Broadway as well as the national tour. We asked Katy to come on the show, because she knows firsthand what it’s like to be a fat kid in theater, and a fat professional working actor in theater. If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. Philly Fat Con is coming up! And Burnt Toast is a proud superfat sponsor. It’s going to be an amazing weekend of fat joy, with speakers, movement classes, the Philly Plus Swap and more. All the info and tickets here.Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she and her guests give are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSKaty on Instagram and TikTokKaty as Little Red in Into The WoodsSister Actanti-fatness in sportsJo Malone is expensive AF but Katy loves her Nectarine Blossom and Honey cologne. FAT TALK is out! Order your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. You can also order the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.CREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram. Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe. Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism. Episode 111 TranscriptKatyI started acting really young, kind of accidentally. But I’ve been kind of involved in theater since being a small child. And then all throughout high school I was doing a lot of regional theater around me and all of that stuff. I went to college, at UMass Amherst instead of a full theater school, and did a lot of other majors as well as theater. But Broadway for me was very immediate. I booked it right after I graduated, like 36 hours, which is wild. VirginiaA lot of people must hate you a little bit.KatyEverybody asks me, “how did this happen?” I’m like, “Please don’t ask me I’m not the right person to ask.” Anyway, Broadway happened, I worked a lot as a professional actor all over the country. And then in this last year, I was a part of both & Juliet which is about to go to Broadway and then I left that cast to join Into The Woods as Little Red Riding Hood and went on tour with them and it was amazing. I’ve had a really wonderful career, I’ve been very lucky VirginiaAnd now you’re working on Sister Act, right?KatyI am. I am in Sister Act at The Muny in St. Louis. It’s a two-and-a-half week process and it’s all outside and we’re in habits. So, that’s so hot. It’s so hot. I’ve never been sweatier in my entire life.VirginiaOh my gosh, oh my gosh. What a fun show! That’s my childhood nostalgia right there.KatySame. It’s one of my favorite movies and always has been. VirginiaWell, I definitely want to talk more about your work, but I really wanted to have you on today to talk about the issue of anti-fat bias in theater. And particularly how it impacts kids. KatyIt’s embedded in theater for sure. In the same way that when you think about a Disney Princess, a certain image comes to mind, when you think of Broadway ingenue, a very similar silhouette and person is in your head. And that’s not just body type, that’s also skin color and so many other things, like standing instead of in a wheelchair. If that’s what it is in people’s heads, that’s what the producers are going to want to give because it’s sparkly and fun and supposed to be the height of romanticizing the idea. So it’s embedded.And then of course, there is the Hairspray of it all, which I have played so many times, and I always joke that it’s because I’m fat and breathing. I love to watch people get uncomfortable when I say it. There’s Hairspray, so everybody is like, “Oh, you’ll be Tracy, it’ll be fine.” That’s one role in the musical theater canon and people genuinely use it as like, “Oh, you’ll be fine.”VirginiaLike, “We’ve made so much progress, we have this one role for you.”KatyOne role. Look out world! Or you get to be the ugly, fat best friend and that kind of stuff. It’s still very much in the sidekick place or being laughed at, which is not always a bad thing. I am a comedic actor! I live off of laughter! But there’s a difference between people laughing with you and laughing at you.Honestly, growing up in theater and in school, I didn’t always get to do it because I was often working already. But I actually got really lucky because the person who was costuming, all of those things, is a dear friend and neighbor. She did not leave me out in the lurch ever. She also had the capacity to build things from scratch. She had the skills and often, with me, that’s what she had to do. But she did. I know that that is a budget thing, that is a skill set thing. Yes, there are a few more steps that teachers have to take, but you can and you should. I didn’t experience not being able to fit into a costume because I had somebody to make it for me from scratch. But there were not costumes readily available for me ever. And like, Linda? Icon. Love that woman. VirginiaThank you, Linda. We love you, Linda.KatyThank you, Linda. We love you so much. So I got really lucky on that front, because the biggest part of all of it is usually how they’re costumed. VirginiaThat is definitely something I’m hearing from readers and listeners, as well. So many stories of “My theater career ended when in ninth grade, I auditioned for the high school play and was told, ‘we don’t have anything to put you in.’” A similar thing happens in sports when team uniforms often don’t come big enough. So often when we think about the stereotypes we have about fat kids, like lazy or whatever—is it? If you’re not making space for kids in these places, then what? That’s the root of the stereotype. It’s ridiculous.KatyWho wants to join the team that you literally don’t fit into? That’s such a big ask for a kid. It can be wildly embarrassing. It’s very othering. When you actually take more than three seconds to think about it, like, why would they join? That’s awful.VirginiaYou’re asking kids to feel unsafe in their bodies to do something that involves their bodies, right? With sports, of course, but theater is also very physical and very much about your body being looked at. To do that in a place where we just told you your body’s not safe and welcome? Okay, yeah, no, I’m staying home.KatySame thing with dance, too! When you’re ordering costumes from catalogs or whatever. I didn’t get into competition dance until I was in high school and my teacher is still a very dear friend and really did the work to make sure that any costume that she was giving us—because we got to vote on the top five or whatever it was. She did make sure always that she never gave us options that didn’t come in my size. VirginiaThat’s great. KatySo I always say, I know that I am a wildly confident human being. But I also came from I guess the opposite of a perfect storm of just like all teachers being pretty supportive. So the first time a hateful comment came my way about how I looked, it just bounced right off of me. They had built an armor that I wasn’t even aware I was wearing. VirginiaWow. KatyI was like, “I just don’t think that’s true.” That was what came to my head. And I will never be able to repay the lack of trauma that my teachers provided me. But at the same time, I’m going to do that by doing this and yelling about the amount of times that it’s wrong, because it’s not like people haven’t said terrible things to my face. They have, but I guess I was just taught early enough that they were wrong and I shouldn’t care. VirginiaYou had the foundation in place. That should be the baseline for all kids and it so often is not. KatyAbsolutely. VirginiaI want to go back to what you were saying about being cast in a role where you’re going to be laughed at for your body, because I think that is really insidious, especially because so many school programs are using older shows because of what they can license. There is so much embedded fatphobia in jokes and in the way the fat characters are portrayed. KatyI had a moment in one of the 8000 Hairsprays, where our director was talking to “the nicest kids” who are mean to her—which is hilarious, but that’s what they’re called. He was describing the distaste when Amber sees me. And I was in the room. So it’s not like he wasn’t saying these things about me and slightly in my direction as a directorial note. But eventually, he caught himself and he turned around, he was like, “I’m so sorry. I don’t believe that you—you aren’t...” And he just kind of stammered over himself.And I was like, “I know. But the fact that you just brought it up makes everybody think that that’s not a thing anymore.” Like it’s on the page, right? But then that allowance made me so uncomfortable. Because I was like, “yeah, no, I am aware that I am not a beached whale, as they’re saying. I know.” So it’s kind of uncomfortable when you don’t have the right people directing because there are some truly hateful things said in all sorts of shows.I’m thinking about Hairspray specifically, especially because like when you think about it, she’s in an audition room when most of the main things are said to her. So you’re already so vulnerable standing in front of a group of people and they’re spewing these hate comments at you. I would be mortified. I would sink into a puddle. It’s great because she overcomes it, but as somebody who’s fat you still have to stand there and take it for a few minutes. And if you’ve heard them before, that’s so hurtful. And if the theater industry is going to capitalize on making fun of me, I’m going to have an opinion.VirginiaYeah, that seems right. Katy I mean, even in Sister Act—this isn’t in the script anymore. It is on the London recording that this is how you meet Sister Mary Patrick, which is the Kathy Najimy part from the movie, and an amazing character. But there is nothing in the movie that signifies that she needs to be fat. She just is. So she’s just like this joyful person and nothing that she talks about has anything to do with her size, right? VirginiaWhich is pretty remarkable for back then! KatyAnd then the first round of Sister Act came out, the musical, which was in London. When you first meet the nuns, I think it’s called “How I Got the Calling” is how you meet them. This is the song and they’re talking about how they came to Jesus and what they thought about and whatever. And Sister Mary Patrick’s verse is all about starting to see apostles in food. Like, she sees it on a piece of toast, that kind of thing.And it’s not in the script anymore. I don’t know if they took that out after London. I don’t know if it came to previews and then was taken out or whatever, but it’s not in the Broadway recording. That song is called, “It’s Good To Be A Nun” and there’s nothing that she sings it has anything to do with her weight. She’s actually just exactly how Kathy is, like overly joyful about these things that if you said in a sarcastic tone would sound very different. Which is delightful and so fun to play. But it kind of baffled me, like why would you add it? If it already exists that way, okay, but why add it? VirginiaWe actually have an older show that didn’t have a lot of embedded anti-fatness, and they were like, “Let’s just give a little sprinkle. Let’s make sure we don’t miss that opportunity.” That’s really disappointing, but it’s great that they took it out.KatyYes, I’m thrilled that that’s not a thing at all.At one point, I was saying that I was in Sister Act to a friend and they were like, “Oh, are you playing the the young postulate?” Because that’s also a part that I absolutely could play. And I said, “No, I’m playing the fat one,”and I laughed about it. And he’s like, “Katy, come on, you’ve got to stop phrasing it in that way.” And I was like, “I will stop phrasing it that way when they stop casting it that way.”VirginiaThis is what’s happening, I might as well just name it. KatyExactly.VirginiaWhat about with Into The Woods? Was there anything that you had to navigate there? KatyIt’s so interesting when you perform a show for very different people who live in very different states. Things are just going to get laughed at differently. So it’s always a joke that Little Red is eating the whole show. It’s in the stage directions and they refer to it many times. She’s supposed to sing certain things with her mouth full. And like, I will never eat a muffin ever, that’s how many I shoved one in my face. But there’s a line later on —because the wolf has now eaten her— the narrator says, “Well, it was a full day of eating for both.” It’s just talking about the fact that she, in every single scene before that, has had a piece of food in her hand. But I had to watch that show four or five times when I was learning it to replace Julia Lester in New York. And she is, in my opinion, mid-size. I don’t know how she identifies, I’ve never asked, but I am much larger than she is. And her laugh was very clearly the “there’s been food in her hand the whole time.” And my laugh is something different.You can hear sometimes when people do the surprise chuckle, that one came sometimes. I think we were in North Carolina and I heard like a hateful laugh. And I was like, Oh! Okay sir. And for me, it’s just like, you’re a terrible person. It doesn’t hurt me, but I’m aware of it.But I’m also aware that all of a sudden Little Red is getting cast as fat everywhere, which is so cool. And my roommate said, “You are aware that this is happening because you exist,” and I just burst into tears. I couldn’t handle that at all.VirginiaBut it’s right. It’s right. KatyYou just have to have somebody be the first one. There’s something about maybe that armor, like maybe I am well suited to always be the first one because it doesn’t hurt me. So if I need to be the person that’s on the horse, then fine. Give me a sword. I’m already up here. Let’s do it.VirginiaI feel really protective of you and of all the fat actors who are going play this part. It’s not an explicit fat joke, so the fact that we react differently because of body size is the audience bringing their own anti-fatness to the text. But that’s a tricky nuance. It’s one of those things about art, people are bringing their own things to it. So I don’t know if it would have made sense to rewrite the way food is handled in that show, just because it’s going to trigger an anti-fat laugh. At the same time, there’s a part of me that’s like, “Well, what would it look like to do that?”KatyRight. That could be a different conversation for someone who is playing Little Red and it makes them feel uncomfortable.I’ve been very vocal about how much I hate those muffins all over my Instagram and TikTok. And at one point, somebody was bringing up the fact that she’s about to play this part and she’s really anxious about the eating on stage because she’s fat. She said, how do you handle that? I was like, “well, have you talked to them about it? Like, you don’t have to. Just cut it!” And she said, in all capitals, “I CAN DO THAT!?” And I was like, “Yeah!…
Full show notes at the publisherToday Virginia is chatting with Dr. Devorah Heitner, author of the brand new book, Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World. She’s also the author of Screenwise: Helping Kids Thrive (and Survive) in Their Digital World and has a PhD in media technology and society from Northwestern University and has taught at Northwestern and DePaul.GIVEAWAYIn lieu of taking our usual guest honorarium, Devorah asked me to host a book giveaway, which is so much fun. We have four copies of Growing Up in Public from Split Rock Books, who can ship them anywhere in the United States. To enter, just make sure you are on the free or paid list for the Burnt Toast newsletter, and then enter here. We’ll pick four winners at random next Thursday, September 28.And! If you order Growing Up in Public from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she and her guests give are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSDevorah's Instagram, Substack and website for speaking engagements. Dr. Stephanie ZerwasGreat safer sexting tips from Sameer Hinduja and Justin W. PatchinPageboy by Elliot PageSkylight CalendarFAT TALK is out! Order your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. You can also order the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.CREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram. Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe. Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism. Episode 110 TranscriptDevorahHi, I’m Devorah Heitner and I research and write about kids growing up in the digital world. My goal is to demystify these issues for parents, educators and other people who are supporting kids because there’s a lot of panic and stress out there.VirginiaA question we are constantly exploring here on Burnt Toast is how do we foster bodily autonomy in kids? As you know, we mostly talk about it here in terms of food and body size. But as I was reading your new book, Growing Up in Public, I just kept thinking: This is also the body autonomy conversation. You talk about how to help kids preserve body autonomy in digital spaces, and in terms of their technology use. So just to set the stage, how can bodily autonomy be lost or diminished in this new era, where kids, as you say, are growing up in public?DevorahWell, a huge issue is that kids have very little control over what other people share about them. And that starts at home with parents. Most of us are sharing about our kids in social spaces. That gives kids a whole record of the way that they look at different times in their lives, and that’s shared with people that they may not even know.It was a real wake up call for me when my son was eight years old. We were visiting another city and someone recognized him and said his name out loud to him. We have a weird first and last name—all of us in our family have weird names—so he knew it was him. And he turned around and he was like, “Who is this person?” And someone had recognized him from my Facebook. VirginiaOh, wow. DevorahIt was a family friend. It wasn’t anybody creepy. My Facebook wasn’t that huge. But it was enough for us to both have this wake up call. He was like, “Wait a minute, why does someone I don’t even know recognize me just from how I look?”And it made me realize I need to be asking him before I share, that we need to have a consent-based policy around sharing pictures of one another in the family. And that I just wanted to limit my sharing, especially when my kid is young. Because although an eight year old, I think, can give consent, I also think they may be like, “put this on TikTok,” or “put this on your Insta, mommy!” And you might think, “maybe this moment is better just for us.” Because you have an adult’s context about that sharing.VirginiaEven if you’re just talking about a private Instagram that has maybe 100 or 200 followers—it’s hard for kids to grasp how big that audience is.DevorahAbsolutely. And I think a lot of us think that teenagers in particular don’t care about privacy, because they can be so public in their own sharing. But they absolutely care if you share a cringey photo of them that their friend’s mom sees, and therefore their friend ends up seeing. They absolutely do care.VirginiaI have to tell you my wake up call. This was when my older daughter was in third grade. I posted in my personal Instagram Stories a photo—I can’t remember what the photo was, but some funny moment. And she had said, “oh, so-and-so in my class told me about that.” I forget, it was a dance or something. So I posted it and I tagged the mom of that kid, like “LOL, we’re doing the thing your kid told my kid about.” And then I said to my daughter, “Oh, your friend’s mom thought it was so funny.” And she was like, “You posted this?? He saw? Are you kidding me?” She was horrified with me. And I was like, “Oh, right, like, you having this other kid in your class see you—I don’t know what the social dynamics are here. I don’t know if you guys are really friends or if you were just telling me about this person.” I felt horrible. It was just a clear moment of: Oh, right. You need to give consent. I cannot assume that I understand the inner workings of your social network and what you are comfortable putting out in the world.DevorahI think that that wake up call often comes around ages 7, 8, 9—once kids have a more autonomous social circle, and yet they’re still very connected to us. So if you’re part of an elementary school community, a lot of your social circle might be also their peers’ parents, and that’s a very tricky place where maybe you don’t want to share about their social anxiety or school avoidance or a new diagnosis of dyslexia or something else. Because that’s that’s theirs to share with their friends or not.VirginiaIn the book, you describe this moment when a lot of kids do get on social media and realize how much their parents have been documenting them since birth and feel really violated. This is something I’ve wrestled with a lot as someone who’s semi-public and writes about parenting. And I have been setting increasingly stricter boundaries around what of my kids goes into my work and on the Internet. But it’s true in these personal spheres as well. How do you suggest parents think about what we’re posting?DevorahIt’s really important to talk with kids once they can engage with you. So, certainly your 7 & ups, and especially tweens and teens. A 10 year old, a 12 year old, they will let you know. If your kid is saying, “Don’t take my picture,” I think we have to respect that. I have been known to beg and my kid doesn’t want to be photographed at all. I’m like, I need at least 12 a year, just for the grandparent calendar. We have three grandparents, they get a calendar, I need 12 photos a year.VirginiaThat seems like a reasonable ask. I ask for one family photo a year with my older daughter. She hates photos. I’ll be like, “Can we have one shot, one family photo that I can count on?” And this year I got it in January and honestly, I wish I waited a little bit because now there have been all these moments where I don’t get the picture.DevorahI think listening and giving them consent, like with so many other things with their bodies and their image, is so profoundly important because it reminds them that when their peers start taking photos of them, they are free to say no thank you. They’re free to go to their friend’s house and have their friend be like, Let’s do TikTok dance. And your kid is free to be like, I’d love to dance with you but I don’t want this on your channel, or I do, and that’s okay. Or I don’t want to be on your YouTube, right? I’ve talked to kids who were even recorded by other kids on Discord where they’re playing a game together and then the kid is like live streaming the gaming session and the other kid doesn’t know. So we really want to make sure that kids understand that you have a right to say no thanks. You don’t even have to have a reason, you can certainly be ready with a reason, like my strict parents won’t let me be on YouTube when I’m 10. Or, I don’t like how my hair looks right now, whatever you want to say. But you can also just be like, no thanks. And that’s okay. You don’t have to have an excuse or a reason. VirginiaI am realizing I have had moments where I really want the photo and she says no. And I’ll be like, “well, you have to tell me why.” And now I’m just like, “Oh, God, no. Why did I do that?” Like, you’re absolutely right. No is a complete sentence. We don’t owe anyone that explanation. So okay, that is something I can change. Noted. DevorahIt reminds them that they should ask permission, that they shouldn’t snap that photo or take a video and put it up into the world without their friend saying yes. And if their friend is putting their hand over their face, you don’t take the picture. Modeling consent is is so huge. I have had parents tell me it improved their relationship with their child, that their child felt like they were paparazzi. It was stressing them out or they were moderating their behavior and not being as silly and loosey-goosey at home. The last thing any of us would want is our kid curtailing their childhood and their innate silliness and adorability, because they don’t want those bunny slippers shared with their fourth grade class.VirginiaYou also talk about having a rule of waiting 24 hours before you post something, even if your kid has said it’s okay to share that. Just because there’s so often that caught up in the moment feeling of, “I have to post this right away.” And if you wait a day, you might be like, meh, whatever, it’s fine. That seems super smart.DevorahThat’s great for kids, too. Especially when we talk about the age where they might start feeling like they’re being left out more or leaving other people out sometimes. Those early middle school years where you can be really keyed into that exclusion channel in your brain. I don’t need to see the pictures of other people ice skating. So maybe you do share some pictures from that outing to the beach with your friends. Or maybe you sit on it and realize I’m just happy to have these in my own phone memories.I think all of us are having a moment with social media where we’re like, “Wait, how much of our lives do we need to share?” As the very media changes, as we move from some that we liked before to other spaces and think about how even if I move away from an account, how much of my memories are in this legacy account that I don’t even use anymore? Do I wish I just had it all in one place so that those family photos are available to me. Do I want Mark Zuckerberg or anyone else to have my family album? Like, maybe I want to go back to even printing photos.VirginiaAnother tip I loved was your advice to limit how many full body shots you post of your kids. DevorahI got that from Dr. Stephanie Zerwas who studies eating disorder prevention and treatment. I spoke with her because I wanted to really understand what role social media can play in exacerbating the risk of eating disorders and what the rules should be if somebody is in recovery. She said she thinks that all parents should just limit how many full body photos or things like bathing suit photos and things like that, because it just gives our kids something to look at and kind of obsess over. It can become a space where they go back and ruminate and look at their 9 or 10 year old body and compare it to their 12 or 13 year old body with longing or rumination, and that’s not healthy. So, again, that doesn’t mean we can never take pictures of our kids. To me, fully clothed in our sweatshirts sitting around the fire is probably less provocative of body rumination than a bathing suit photo or a gymnastics photo in a leotard or something like that.I think we all are familiar with the fact that puberty can feel like being taken over by aliens. For some kids, it’s a lot to manage. The body image pressure on kids is intense in that time anyway, in our culture. So it’s worth just thinking about how many pictures you had of yourself from ages 8 to 15 where you’re able to micro analyze things about your body. I mean, for me, they’re just holiday pictures and school pictures. Lighting Hanukkah candles is less likely to be a body rumination moment provoker. VirginiaRight? I remember taking a disposable camera on a camp field trip to an amusement park and developing the film later—this was eighth grade. And it was the first time I had that really disassociating experience of looking at photos of my body and not really recognizing myself, and feeling strange about it. And I’m just thinking, that was one roll of film I developed. So, nine photos? When today, there are thousands, right? Your phone is just full of photos. Turning down the volume on that seems so helpful, if even just one photo can trigger big feelings like that.DevorahLess is more. VirginiaYou argue that another way parents are—with good intentions but nevertheless— violating their kids’ body autonomy, is with our routine use of geotracking, and by monitoring kids texts and other digital communications.We’re not up to texting yet, because my kid is only 10. But I have used geotracking. She has one of those Gizmo watches and when we were trick-or-treating last year, as she was racing around the neighborhood in the dark, I could be like, “Okay, she’s down at so-and-so’s house.” It was reassuring to use in that very specific capacity. But your chapter on this made me rethink it. What do you see as the costs of continually knowing where our kids’ bodies are in space?DevorahI’d start by saying you’re not alone. I think a lot of parents find the technology to be both reassuring and anxiety provoking. So it’s both/and, right? The fact that we can do it makes us feel like we should. Our parents didn’t have that option, as we were racing around the neighborhood in the dark collecting candy, and they just had to live with whatever anxiety that provoked. And because we have the choice to, you’re able to geotrack them that way. I think a lot of people do find that reassuring. People I talked to for the book definitely said that. At the same time, the fact that you can do it raises a lot of questions. Halloween might be a special case. But are we tracking our kids on their walk to school, even though that’s their routine walk to school? Historically we live in a very safe time, our kid is probably pretty safe walking to school most of the time. The things that we worry about in our culture are these huge events like school shootings—obviously really terrifying things, right? But it’s not clear that geotracking would actually help or make us feel safer if that happened. We need to do things as a society to make the world safer, but geo tracking our…
Full show notes at the publisherToday Virginia is chatting with Phoebe Wahl, an award winning illustrator, surface designer, and author of several books, including the brand new illustrated young adult novel Phoebe’s Diary.If you order Phoebe’s Diary from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes—including the director's cut of this conversation where VA and AHP answer all of your gardening questions. Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSSonya’s ChickensLittle Witch HazelThe Blue HouseBackyard Fairiesfat in picture booksStrega Nonajournals from LEUCHTTURM1917journals from Hand BookRotring pensPentel markers Kuretake brush pensDaniel Smith watercolorsLauren LeavellI don’t care about your diet sticker Phoebe on InstagramPhoebe's shopFAT TALK is out! Order your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. You can also order the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.CREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter. Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe. Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!Episode 109 TranscriptPhoebeMy name is Phoebe Wahl and I am an author, illustrator, surface designer, occasional art teacher, and mom to an 18 month old.VirginiaAn adorable 18 month old from what I see on Instagram. Really a highly edible baby. But we are here to talk about your new book, Phoebe’s Diary, which is out this week! I love it so much. You captured everything about that time of life and how everything is confusing and intense and wonderful and awful all the same. It is so many teenage emotions.PhoebeYes, very raw teenage emotions.VirginiaYou drew on your own teenage diaries to write this. And I mean, I want to die just thinking about rereading my own teenage diaries, let alone publishing or having any part of them be public. So please tell us how you did this, both the process, like do you draw first? Do you write first? But also, how did you decide to excavate such vulnerable years of your life?PhoebeGenerally, I write first. Sometimes I kind of get an instantaneous download in my mind of all the writing and all the images at once, and then the process of creating a book is kind of figuring out how to retroactively make that thing. I would say for this book, when I found this diary—so my mom brought it over. I live in the same town as my mom, which is fun, because she often brings boxes of my childhood stuff over that then I have to deal with that I can’t just eternally store in her house, whereas my sister gets to permanently store stuff at my mom’s house.So I had this diary that my mom brought over. I started looking at bits and pieces of it while I was organizing things and putting stuff away. And I was really struck by the way that I wrote when I was a teenager, because it almost felt like I was writing for an audience. It had this tone about it that felt kind of like the tone of a book. It’s probably because I was a huge reader and a huge nerd and read a lot of diaristic books when I was a teenager. But I was kind of surprised by the fact that it already felt a little bit like a story.Reading through it, I continued to be surprised by the loose bones of a plot. A lot of the plot is fictionalized—the book is overall fiction—but still, there were elements that felt like the beginning of a story. And even the way the book starts, where I’m like, “I’m starting this new diary, but I never finish things, so it’ll be interesting to see if I finish this one.” And then I do actually finish it. And even that almost feels like a weird setup. Like, why? How did I write that? It felt really interesting. I was like this could lend itself so easily to being an actual book. A few years ago I made a zine called Old Diary Entries About Sex. That was just a couple of different key entries that I pulled that I thought were funny or charming or meaningful, and made it into a short, really limited edition zine and sold it at a couple festivals. I don’t even think I sold it online. But it was popular enough and fun enough to make that I was kind of like, “Maybe this would be fun to expand someday.”But it wasn’t until I was stuck inside during early COVID and was organizing things again and going through the journal. We were in a pod with my best friend and I started reading her little bits of the journal and also actually started reading little bits to another friend who one of the characters in the book is based on, an old high school friend. We had a couple of nights in COVID where we were like outside in the freezing cold in the winter, huddled reading our high school diaries to each other, and just laughing about the insane drama of the stories, but also how painfully relatable they were, even to our adult selves. There are these moments of extreme lack of self-awareness coupled with this hyper awareness of why I’m feeling the things I’m feeling or what that’s influenced by. Just through sharing it with friends and their reactions to it, and how much they related to it, and were laughing at it, I was kind of like, okay, well, maybe this could be something bigger that isn’t just like a little project for me. And so I started by transcribing the whole diary, which was about 25,000 words. VirginiaOh my goodness. PhoebeTo be clear, I am also extremely mortified by this diary. Like totally excited for it to be in the world, but also very nervous and embarrassed. And transcribing the raw diary—if you think the final book is cringey, the original diary was just beyond. It was really hard not to self censor the most awkward parts as I wrote and just be like, Nope, this is a transcript. The next part will come later. VirginiaRight, now I just have to deal with how I said that thing. And I want to be clear, I don’t think the final book is cringey, I think it is beautiful and so full of heart. But I can imagine this looking in the mirror phase was not the easiest. PhoebeFor sure.But yeah, so I started by transcribing it and then when I transcribed it, I just started to have all these thoughts of like, oh, like, what are the things I could add to heighten this plot or to raise the stakes of the story and make it more interesting.And, of course, in a real diary there is just a wide variety of people, family, friends, neighbors, school friends. A lot of the fictionalizing and editing process had to do with condensing all these different things that happen to you in real life into a much smaller world so that it’s more contained and understandable for a reader.And then, I kept workshopping it with friends and ended up sending it to my agent, like really, really embarrassingly, and was like, “maybe this is the worst thing that anyone’s ever written in history but if you’d ever want to look at it and at least tell me that then I can move on from the pressure.”VirginiaAnd instead, they were like, “Yes, I’ll make it a book,” and “keep going.”Phoebe Instead she was like, “I’m obsessed.” We ended up selling it to Little Brown.VirginiaThat’s so cool. So, of course I want to talk about the body stuff a little bit. It’s odd because Phoebe is you but Phoebe is a character in the book, so I’m going to talk about the character Phoebe. Phoebe’s experiences with anti-fatness are a thread in the book, but not the central plot of it. There are comments, like her dad says a weird thing about bacon. And she sees a play with a fat actress in it and has that moment of profound recognition. But she’s also just super focused on her crushes and her sexuality and theater and friends. And all of that has nothing to do with body size, which I found to be a relief to be honest, that we have this fat character with so many dimensions beyond her experience of fatness. I would love to hear how you thought about writing Phoebe’s body.PhoebeIt’s funny because the book is promoted as being body positive and it’s not like I think it’s necessarily body negative or something, but I feel like “body positive” has become a euphemism for “has a fat character.”VirginiaA fat person wrote a book.PhoebeYeah, exactly. I think the way you describe it as there being these threads of anti-fatness feels a lot more accurate. There are positive parts, like her finding her fat style icon and being just totally enamored. But there are also a lot of complex parts, or a few at least, about her not feeling entirely positive about her body.It was really hard to balance those parts. I didn’t want those parts to come off as an example for teenagers because there are real teenagers reading this book. I mean, especially because this book was set in 2006, which is just like such a bleak time.But also, it didn’t feel realistic to not include some moments of that. Because I also didn’t want it to be a book that’s too shiny. There are a lot of moments in the book where my character, the character of Phoebe, isn’t always the best person in the book, you know? and I think the body stuff kind of mirrors that. She’s not necessarily this paragon of body positivity, but she hopefully feels like a real person, which felt more important to me. There was some discussions of, like, should we include more passages about her relationship with her body, and I kind of landed on no. A part of that was because my real diary had a few things sprinkled throughout, but for the most part I was just focused on my crushes and theater and my other stuff going on in my life. It’s complicated, too, by the fact that I was in a smaller body than I am now in high school. I was the highest end of the straight size spectrum, I would say. But in making a fictional book, I was like, well, now my experience feels so tied to the body I’m in now as this small/mid fat person, that it felt much more alive to me to make her body closer to what it is now. And also, just putting a book out into the world for teenagers, it felt more important to me to have fat rep than to have large straight size to mid size rep.VirginiaI agree with that. And I think you’re doing all of it. The fact that you draw her in a bigger body and we see her, even if she has these tough moments with her body, which every teenager does, and certainly every fat teenager does, but you’re also showing that she’s so much more than her body. That is very radical and important fat rep.PhoebeThank you. VirginiaI thought you got it really right.I also loved these moments where she would put on some cool early 2000s fashion and be like, “I feel so cute.” And I was like, yeah, that’s right, that is a great sweater or whatever. She had a lot of moments of going to parties and being like, “I feel good about this look.” That was really fun.PhoebeWell, thank you.VirginiaYou have given us the gift of Little Witch Hazel. Anyone who doesn’t have Little Witch Hazel in your children’s library, what are you doing? It’s just the most beautiful, wonderful, fat positive without discussing fatness character. Then of course you have your hobby Instagram, fat in picture books where you show a lot of fat characters, which is completely delightful. So how do you think about fat rep in kids books, in general? Where do you think we’re making progress? Where do you think we still need to work on it?PhoebeIt’s getting so much better than it used to be. I only entered the industry 10 years ago and I feel like there is so much more body diversity now. I feel like where it’s really getting better is in new people entering the industry. There are a lot of newer books and newer folks entering the industry who seem to have more of an awareness of casually incorporating body diversity of all kinds.I think where it still could grow is in more established and maybe especially some old guard kind of illustrators and authors. I get this inclination that, you’re in your work mode, you’re in the way you already do things and so maybe there’s less continual analysis of like, what if I did this differently? What if I included this new kind of person? So I think that’s where it could still improve. I think it could absolutely still improve overall, you know? The improvements we’re seeing are absolutely not enough. But I do feel like I am consistently surprised now when I go to the bookstore or the library and I’m like, hey, there’s like a casual fat person in the background of this book and they’re not, like, gorging themselves on sausages or something.It’s definitely going in a really good direction. I just really hope that this current regression, culturally, that I feel like we’re in that feels maybe like some pushback to the body positive fat liberation movement—I really hope that that doesn’t swing into picture books and that they just keep improving.VirginiaI get readers DMing me whenever they’re outraged when they’re reading a book with their kid, and often it’s the books from our childhood—or I’m a little older than you, so my childhood. It’s the Berenstein Bears’ Too Much Junk Food. People will pick up an older kids book and be horrified to realize it has fat jokes and fat stereotypes. And then of course, we have Strega Nona. There are some iconic characters in older children’s books, but yeah, a lot of it is like we all need to do the work to find and support the new authors. PhoebeEven icons like Strega Nona, who I absolutely love, I think still kind of sometimes fit into this archetype of like a mother-y archetype. Maybe she doesn’t have her own children, but she’s still kind of the one who’s like, okay, I guess I’m going to save big Anthony from another chaotic situation. VirginiaYes, for sure. I agree. She’s upholding a lot of gender norms and expectations. She literally spends book after book just making pasta. So there is that, but also she’s wise and all knowing.PhoebeYeah, she’s the profile pic on @fatinpicturebooks for a reason, because she is an icon.I’m so glad that you enjoy that account. I feel really bad because I’ve totally fallen off the bandwagon posting on that account. I am kind of a chronically eyes-are-bigger-than-my-plate person, hobby-wise. I’m always getting really excited and starting things and then being really overwhelmed one week later. VirginiaOh I think that’s fine!PhoebeThat one especially I was so excited about and then I went to crowdsource ideas of things to post. And I was like, this is amazing! People have so many ideas of fat characters that I don’t have. And then I was like, Oh shit, now I have to make a spreadsheet with all these things.It got complicated, too, like, how much analysis? How much analysis do I post along with the image? Like I started being like, I’m just going to post a picture of that character, say what book it’s from, and there’s no commentary. But then that felt shitty if it’s a really fatphobic book. It felt like there needed to be some commentary, but it gets hard, too, because if we’re…
Full show notes at the publisherToday Virginia is chatting with Amy Palanjian, creator of Yummy Toddler Food and author of the brand new cookbook, Dinnertime SOS: 100 Sanity-Saving Meals Parents and Kids of All Ages Will Actually Want to Eat. We get into what makes family dinner a hellscape, diet culture in kid food, mom friends, and more. If you order Dinnertime SOS from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes—including the director's cut of this conversation where VA and AHP answer all of your gardening questions. PS. No podcast next week; we'll see you after Labor Day! Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSDivision of Responsibilityfamily meal planningComfort Food episode about weaning Beatrix off bottlesOur ebookChocolate Almond Butterzucchini banana breadAmy's rice noodle saladFAT TALK is out! Order your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. You can also order the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.CREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter. Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe. Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!Episode 108 TranscriptAmyIt’s nice to see your face. VirginiaI know, not just my texting. So, this is definitely a hotly requested episode. “When is Amy coming back on the podcast?” is a frequent listener question. So here you go, people. I made it happen. I got you Amy, so enjoy! And we are talking about your new cookbook.AmyYes, the book is called Dinnertime SOS: 100 Sanity-Saving Meals Parents and Kids of All Ages Will Actually Want to Eat and it is 100 recipes to help you feed your family at the end of the day when you would rather be doing all the other things, but everyone still needs to eat. It is through the lens of understanding that families are tired at that time of the day and also hungry. How do we make it realistic for parents to feed everyone, given all of the long list of challenges that we all have?VirginiaI just have to say, there are other books that claim to help you with family dinner and I always have encountered them and felt very inadequate, because I think their goal is to help me cook from scratch more every night or to help me achieve some level of elegance on my table every night, to achieve some kind of vision.AmyTo make this recipe. VirginiaAnd this book is like, “I actually understand that you need to feed people and here is how you will do it.” And the food is still pretty! Like, the book is so, so pretty. The photos are gorgeous, the food looks amazing. But it’s doable in a way that so many cookbooks about dinnertime are not doable for me. AmyI made a lot of deliberate decisions about the types of ingredients that I was using, and also the methods. Because one complaint that I get—not specifically about my recipes, although sometimes it applies to me if I’m being honest—is the way that we creators sell recipes with the words “easy” and “quick.” It doesn’t take into consideration all of the thinking that you’ve done up until the point that you get the food out. There’s the time of finding all the ingredients and then, yes, there’s the cook time captured that may or may not be accurate, and then there’s all of the cleanup. So the time that we tell you that a recipe will take is not accurate. And the book doesn’t tell you how long it’s going to take you to find the ingredients in your kitchen, but the actual part of making the food is as streamlined as possible. I was like: How can I use a knife less? What can I not chop here and figure out a different thing that’s going to add flavor? What’s an easier way to do this? Could I do this if I was holding my three year old at the same time? VirginiaI mean, the ingredients lists are short. We don’t talk enough about how long it takes me to find things in my kitchen, like how long it takes me to remember if I have that one specific Asian condiment that I bought for a recipe eight months ago and haven’t used since. And is it still good? Like, all of that. The book is so helpful and refreshing and just a really, really supportive approach to this very complicated topic. I also love that right off the bat, in introduction very early on, you say that your starting point when deciding what’s for dinner is what do you want to eat. Which, yes, I mean, this goes back to when we did our Comfort Food podcast. We were very big on our mantra of “feed yourself first” as a way to survive family mealtime. So, I feel like I helped play a little small role in that being in the in the cookbook.AmyI have more energy to make something when I know I’m going to get to enjoy food that I like. Also it can reduce your feelings if someone else decides that they do not want it if you still wind up with a meal that you like. This doesn’t mean to not take other people’s preferences into consideration. It means to not leave yourself out and to make yourself a central figure so that you have intrinsic motivation to prepare this meal that’s not just feeding everybody else. I see all of these videos on social media of moms meal prepping for their kids, and I’m sort of like, what are you eating? It’s not fair that that’s the way that we’ve set it up.VirginiaSome of the most crushing dinners I’ve had are when I have leaned into what I think my kids will eat. Like, I’ve made pancakes for dinner—and I love pancakes but I wouldn’t normally want pancakes for dinner—but I’m like, “We’re doing pancakes for dinner!” And then nobody eats pancakes because this is the week when no one in my house likes pancakes. And I’m like, “Well I didn’t freaking want pancakes!”AmyRight? and then you’re stuck with it.VirginiaWe have like 40 pancakes that I just made because I thought you all would eat them and you don’t want to eat them and I would have loved to just get sushi. So I definitely agree with thinking about what you want to eat first and then how can you make that work for them, as opposed to starting just from the kids’ perspective and then kind of forgetting that you also are going to eat this.AmyI think it’s also important modeling because in so much of our daily life, we’re doing things for other people. I think it’s good for the kids to see us being able to enjoy something as our primary reason for doing it. That just doesn’t really happen that much.VirginiaEspecially if the thing you’re enjoying is feeding yourself. That seems good for kids to see. Again, women especially, sitting down at tables of food that they enjoy, and then eating it and enjoy eating it. Right? I love it. It’s wonderful. You also talk quite a bit about how you think about feeding your kids. It’s definitely rooted in the Division of Responsibility model. This is something you and I have definitely both ascribed to for a long time, but become somewhat looser with in how we have used it over the years. I would love to have you talk a little bit about your approach.AmyOne of my goals when making dinner for everyone is that the the food on the table is the food that we have available for dinner, simply to limit the chaos. It’s not, for me, a way to get anyone to eat certain foods. It is really to streamline the number of people in the kitchen taking things out of cabinets and such. And I want to create a dynamic where we can share a meal and have that be part of our normal life with the flexibility in there that everyone can eat whatever they want from the table.So I do follow it pretty clearly for dinner. I’m the one who decides what the dinner is and what the components are, where it’s served, and when. And then once we get there, the kids can decide how much and which foods. But I keep in mind what I think the kids will eat. I put things on the table like applesauce or hummus and pita or add some other random food if I don’t think that they’re going to like the stir fry that I made, as a way to achieve the other goal of eating together. If I can have a meal where no one has to get up and get something else, I feel like that’s kind of what I’m aiming for.VirginiaIt always feels like a fine line that we’re all navigating of how much am I being in charge of what’s offered, putting options on the table that are considerate of every eater at the table, and when does that bleed over into becoming a short order cook? Like am I just making five separate dinners. That is such a gray area for so many families.AmyI don’t cook separate food, so that would be the difference. I’m not making mac and cheese for the kids when I make a stir fry for myself because I think they’re not going to eat it. I assume that there may be one or two kids who are going to like part of the stir fry. Maybe I left some of the bell peppers raw in a bowl because I know they prefer them that way. And I have the rice separately. I have chopped peanuts separately, and I have some fruit on the table. And I sort of know my kids well enough to know that everyone can find at least one or two things in there.It’s the cooking of a separate thing that I think is where it can really quickly feel so overwhelming. That is why flexibility with the way that you’re serving meals is important. So with toppings, if you have a bowl with a variety of elements, and then you can have yogurt and herbs and hot sauce and like chopped nuts or seeds. And one kid might just eat yogurt, but, like, hooray! I don’t really care what the thing is as long as we can have it be one thing.VirginiaThis resonates and I admit it is something that is still a struggle in my house. I’ll decide I’m putting out bread and butter as the extra thing and then one kid will be like, “But I want peanut butter instead of butter.” It’s not short order cooking to go get the peanut butter, but the peanut butter doesn’t go with the rest of the meal? For anyone who’s listening to this and feeling stressed out by it, we hear you. There are these moments.AmyI guess in that situation, though, I would consider peanut butter a condiment. VirginiaAnd so fine, we can get another condiment. AmyRight, because we’re not cooking. That would be the same as if I put carrots on the table and one of my kids was like, “You need to get the ranch.”VirginiaFair. But what if you put carrots on the table and they were like, “I wanted a banana?”AmyI would be like, you can have a banana before you go to bed. I don’t know, it depends on the context. I don’t want anyone to listen to this and be like, “They said no bananas at the dinner table!” It depends on your bandwidth. It depends how many kids you have. It depends on how many bananas you have.VirginiaRight, do you need the bananas tomorrow? I think what often goes awry for families is you get stuck down these little rabbit holes of the banana or the carrots or the ranch or whatever it is. But you’re saying that you can make those calls in the moment however you want to make them and not be straying from the bigger picture of “one family, one meal.” You’re not saying this has to happen in a certain way every night.AmyAnd when you remove the perspective that “dinner is a time to get everyone to eat a certain amount of food,” a lot of this becomes easier because you’re not trying to find that perfect food that everyone is going to want to eat. You recognize that some kids will eat more, some kids will eat less, some kids might need a bedtime snack. This is just one opportunity. It doesn’t have to hit every mark. Especially with my youngest who often doesn’t eat dinner still, like, he’s the most unpredictable of my kids. I can’t reliably put something on the table that I know he’ll eat because I honestly never know where he’s going to be with his hunger. So, I do my best and I remember he can always have a snack later. It’s not like this is the only point.VirginiaThat is so helpful. I think a lot of times you view—not you, but we, people, individuals, maybe me?—view them needing the bedtime snack as a failure of dinner. Do you know what I’m saying? I failed to get them to eat at dinner so now that they need a bedtime snack. It feels symbolic of how it all fell apart.And it’s like, no, that just they weren’t that hungry at dinner. Now they’re hungry. Give them a snack, it’s fine. AmyYou—because I know you so well—often need a mid-morning snack or a second breakfast. And it is not a failure of your first breakfast.VirginiaNo, absolutely not. First breakfast and second breakfast are a symbiotic relationship actually.AmyFor my son, if he eats a full dinner, he will still want a bedtime snack. It’s not one or the other. It just totally depends on the kid. And also, this might come and go in phases. Whatever you decide to do that works for your family now might not be the same as two years from now. I was on someone else’s podcast recently and she was like, “We started doing the backup meal because I heard you and Virginia talk about it,” and I was like, “I don’t do that anymore.”VirginiaOkay, we’re going there! Breaking news on the podcast. I forget when when you told me you don’t do backup meals. AmyI think I was with you at some point, in person.VirginiaThat’s right. Whenever Amy and I get together, I make her do a therapy session with me where I troubleshoot what’s happening with my family dinners and why they’re falling apart and she fixes them. It’s a real perk of having her as your best friend.The last time you were on this podcast, though, I think was the backup meal episode. So I will link to it so folks and listen to it. But what you all need to know is that I continued doing backup meals for a very long time. And my family dinner really went off the rails for a while and Amy very sensibly recognized when it was a tool that no longer served her. So, discuss.AmyYes, so I do not remember when we had that conversation about the backup meal, but I do know that having three children who are capable of getting into the fridge by themselves rendered the backup meal complete chaos. VirginiaI think Selway was maybe not on solids or maybe still in a highchair. AmyYeah, and I think I did it when I had two children and only one of them was capable of getting herself backup meal. That’s the difference. Now that there are three of them, if one person gets up to get toast or to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, it’s like a snowball. It doesn’t matter what else is on the table, they will want the other thing, too. VirginiaOr they’ll want a different the one. That’s what was happening with me. They never wanted the same backup. So, one kid is microwaving a frozen burrito and the other kid is like, “I want puffy Cheez-Its for my backup meal.” And I’m like, what is happening? All those foods are great but they weren’t what I made for dinner!AmyRight, and then you have all this food that that doesn’t have a chance of being eaten. So for me, it was simply too chaotic. I remember Li…
Full show notes at the publisherIt's time for your August Indulgence Gospel! Corinne is here. We’re getting into power lifting, fruit rage, menstrual taboos and YouTubers telling you how to eat. If you are already a paid subscriber, you’ll have this entire episode in your podcast feed and access to the entire transcript in your inbox and on the Burnt Toast Patreon.If you are not a paid subscriber, you'll only get the first chunk. To hear the whole conversation or read the whole transcript, you'll need to become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber.Also, don't forget to order Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture! Get your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books. (Or get the UK edition or the audiobook!) Disclaimer: Virginia and Corinne are humans with a lot of informed opinions. They are not nutritionists, therapists, doctosr, or any kind of health care providers. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions they give are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER OTHER LINKSlast month’s Indulgence Gospelour conversation with Martinus EvansCorinne's writing on power liftingMia O’Malley beach chair highlightfat friendly chairs from Targetstudy on athletic performance and menstrual cycles Serena Williams was winning tennis matches while pregnant.Virginia's menstrual taboos piece for Scientific AmericanAmy PalanjianWrayGeneva dress.our New York City weekend,Tiny Dollhouse storeShiny By Nature socks for fat calves CREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter. Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe. Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!---VirginiaSo, Corinne, how are you?CorinneI’m doing good. I’m trying to think of something to talk about besides the weather, because it’s just been really, really hot here.VirginiaI feel like every week the newspaper is like, “It was the hottest day in the history of the world yesterday.” And yeah, we all just hold on for dear life because the planet is burning. CorinneFeeling a lot of climate anxiety.VirginiaWell, I have two updates for us based on last month’s Indulgence Gospel.One is a very important text I received from Julia Turshen, friend of the show, cookbook author, friend of my heart. She texted to say, “I listened to Indulgence Gospel, great as always. Here’s something I learned a couple of years ago that I wish I learned decades ago: You can just hold the crotch of your one piece swimsuit to the side if you need to pee. No need to take the whole thing off!”I believe this is in response to us saying we don’t like one pieces. CorinneYes. I knew that. I do that. VirginiaAnd you still don’t like one pieces?CorinneYou’ve never done this? Were you not aware? VirginiaI think I’ve done it, like, in a moment of panic, but I don’t think I realized it was a legit thing that we are all just doing with our one pieces. I have been fully taking one pieces on and off and hating my life.CorinneWell, I do this. I still find that two piece are sometimes easier to deal with. VirginiaBecause you can just take it off like underwear, like one normally does. Well, Julia says this changed her life. I said, “I will read this and credit you appropriately for this swimsuit crotch gospel.” And she said, “Yes, please do the more people who know the better.” So, here we are. CorinneYes. Thank you for this swimsuit crotch gospel.VirginiaJust here to provide a full service experience. CorinneI am glad we’re announcing that, because everyone should know and feel empowered to do that.VirginiaI think I’ve done it thinking, what am I doing? And now I do feel a sense of peace that it’s just like, this how you are supposed to pee in a one piece.CorinneLike I said last time, I’ve been wearing a long sleeve one piece. Like, there’s no WAY that’s coming off.VirginiaOnce you’re in, you’re in.CorinneYou’re stuck. Sometimes if I’m too sweaty, I can’t even get it on.VirginiaAlright. The second breaking news update is from commenter Kelly who posted:Hi, I am the one who asked about frozen treats and I was trying to say in an Instagram answer short way that I put frozen cherries in a mug, microwave them for 60 seconds, then scoop rocky road on top and let the melty cherries and their juices mix with the chocolate ice cream. CorinneOkay, that sounds freaking amazing. So embarrassed for us that we did not figure that out.VirginiaWe apparently could not read that day.CorinneKelly did such a good job! She really sent us this delicious treat tip. I’m a cherry super fan, so I really want to try this. And yes, we just totally missed it. VirginiaOther commenters were like, “You guys, it was ‘microwave for 60 seconds,’ like that’s how you thaw the cherries.” But no one else had put it together with the Rocky Road ice cream, which…CorinneI know. I just totally missed that it was all one thing. And I love that it’s a multi ingredient frozen treat.Virginia She just set a new bar for how I want to operate with frozen desserts. CorinneYes. I really want to try this. Sounds delicious. Thanks for the tip, Kelly, and sorry that we really bungled that.VirginiaOkay, let’s do some questions. I’ll read the first one because it is for you. This person writes,I’m curious to hear Corinne’s thoughts on sports with weight classes like powerlifting. I love Olympic lifting, but weight classes keep me from competing because of my scale issues.CorinneYeah, this is such a great question. I have so many thoughts about it. I also just want to say: I’m relatively new to the sport, and I’m not an expert, so I definitely might get some things wrong. So powerlifting competitions have weight classes. At the meet I did, the top three lifters from each weight class get prizes, and then there’s also a prize for best lifter overall. They use some complicated math formula to calculate who is the best lifter based on how much they lift taking into account body weight. VirginiaOh, because as you explained to us, the bigger you are, the more you can lift. CorinneYeah. Although, I’m sure we’ll get people writing in because there are a bunch of powerlifting fans in the Burnt Toast community. And I’ve heard that past a certain point, that’s not really right. Like it might actually disadvantage people in much bigger bodies.It’s also all in kilograms. So, the heaviest class was 110+ kilograms which is like, around 240 pounds. I’m way beyond that. So first of all, I’m not nervous about making weight or something because, like, it’s just not even close. VirginiaYou knew you were firmly over the threshold. CorinneI don’t need to worry about that.The meet that I went to, when you have to weigh in, you just went into a private room with someone and stepped on a scale. And it was in kilograms, so it means nothing to me. I have no idea what those numbers mean.But I did think about it, because the roster is publicly available. So yeah, anyone who knows me could look up the roster and find out how much I weigh. VirginiaEspecially if they know the metric system.CorinneYeah, or can Google.VirginiaThat is personal information that is being displayed publicly. That is uncomfortable. CorinneI just decided I was more interested in competing than worrying about that.VirginiaI have what is maybe a very basic question, but if you were on the line between two weight classes, is it like I want to be in the higher weight class or I want to be in the lower weight class relative to performance?CorinneUsually people want to make a lower weight class so that they’re competing with people who weigh less than them and presumably lifting more. VirginiaOh, so you they would have an advantage being like the higher weight. CorinneThat’s the thinking, but for the meet that I did, if I had been in the weight class below mine, I wouldn’t have placed.VirginiaGot it. There’s some variety of how skilled people are, how long they’ve been lifting, that kind of stuff is going to come into play, too. CorinneThe meet that I did, I think the organizers pushed to have higher weight classes. They got rid of some of the lower weight classes—because they start really low, like around 95 pounds or something. So they got rid of some of the lower weight classes and added some higher ones, because some meets will only go up to, I would have to check, but it’s like 85 kilograms would be like the highest weight class, which is like, I don’t know, 180 pounds or something. VirginiaI mean, yeah, if this matters, then that’s clearly not serving people.CorinneIt is definitely an interesting, complicated issue. It also makes me think a lot about the conversation with Martinus Evans about accessibility. Who we are encouraging to participate in sports when there is a weight class for somebody who is well under 100 pounds, but not one for someone who is 300 pounds. VirginiaRight. Right. That does say quite a lot. CorinneSo, to the person who wrote this in: I would just say you should go for it. If you want to talk about it more, message me. Maybe also Julia Turshen would have something to say about this.VirginiaI think she will. Julia, we will be awaiting your texts and comments. And it is upsetting because this is a sport, as you’ve written, that should be very body size inclusive, like pro-larger bodies. So the fact that you’re still going to have to navigate anti-fatness in the way that a lot of these meets are structured is super disheartening. CorinneI do think the reason for weight classes is to try and make it fair, so you’re competing against people who are relatively your size. But it’s still hard to include all the natural body variations within that.1VirginiaAnd I mean, it’s just so reductive, right? How many kilograms you weigh is just one aspect of your overall fitness and strength and performance and all of these things.CorinneIn a lot of meets, there are regular and also masters, which is over 40. So there are just different ways to divide people up to try and keep it fair.VirginiaInteresting. There’s a lot here. You want to read the next one?Fat Life QuestionsCorinneYes.My body has changed so much in the last 15 years and I’m learning to be neutral about it and just buy new clothes or shoes or whatever I need in the body I am in now. I’ve gotten pretty good at this except for my wedding rings. I like my wedding rings but my body is changing so frequently that constantly having them resized doesn’t feel viable. I bought a cheap stand in but it doesn’t feel the same. What do we do with the things that no longer fit but we also miss and don’t want to let go of entirely? I’m sure rings aren’t the only thing that fall into this category, but it’s the one I struggle with the most. Does anything fall into this category for you?VirginiaOkay, free list, this is where we leave you!If you want to hear our answer to this question and also get our thoughts on Bobby Parrish, you’re going to need to become a paid subscriber. Thank you for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism.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!
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