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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).
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Today Virginia is chatting with Elise Hu, the author of the brand new book Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital, which explores the intersections of beauty culture and diet culture in South Korea. If you have ever purchased a sheet mask or a babyfoot peel or any other K beauty products or if you’ve just been aware of the absolute phenomenon of Korean beauty culture, you need to read Flawless.Remember, if you order Elise's book (or any books we mention on the pod!) from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSTED Talks Dailybabyfoot peelmothers get held responsible for their children’s weightbut what if I just want to lose weight?Heather WiddowsEscape the Corset the squiggly noodles from Trader Joe’s new spring Birkenstocks.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 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 96VirginiaYou lived in Seoul for four years to be the NPR bureau chief there. What did you know about Korean beauty culture going into it? Did you think there would be a book in it?EliseNever. No. I did not think there was going to be a book in it at the time and I still can’t believe one exists, knowing my personality. I have a very short attention span. I also don’t like to write alone or even be alone with my thoughts. And as you know… VirginiaThere is some of that required. It’s hard to get around that. EliseI didn’t know a whole lot about Korea, period, when I got posted out there. I think that was part of the motivation for NPR. They liked my journalistic style of being a fish out of water and exploring a place and explaining it and reporting it out with the listener. That was the end of 2014 when we first started having conversations about opening up a Northeast Asia Bureau. So by the beginning of 2015, never having set foot in South Korea before, I moved my husband, my toddler, my geriatric Beagle, two cats, and a baby in my belly all over to Seoul, a place where I hadn’t so much as had a layover at the airport.Part of the excitement in it for me was that it was Northeast Asia, a place where we hadn’t turned the lights on as a news organization before. We just really hadn’t had anybody permanently posted there. So I would cover not just South Korea, but also North Korea and Japan—and what an exciting region. There’s a huge US military presence there, too, that I think gets under-covered. I think half of all of US military stationed overseas is in Korea and Japan. VirginiaOh, wow. I didn’t know that. EliseThere was so much to learn. What did I know about Korean beauty culture at the time? I knew that sheet masks were getting cool. A lot of my friends who were the more in-the-know, hip ones, the ones that read The Cut every day and knew about all the coolest ingredients and the best treatments that were available, they were really into K beauty culture already. Because K beauty culture, as I found, is often not just years ahead, but a decade ahead when it comes to various skincare innovations.So I knew about sheet masks, I knew a little bit about the packaging, I knew that Chinese tourists were going to Seoul a lot to try and load up on various products. I knew about the plastic surgery. I think I really saw it as vanity at the time. I had my Western judgmental attitude about it, when I first got to Seoul.VirginiaYou really explode this concept of vanity and this myth that women engage in beauty work because we’re shallow or we’re looks-obsessed. You talk about understanding beauty work—whether it’s skincare, plastic surgery, weight loss, all of it—is a survival strategy, particularly in a culture with high rates of lookism and fatphobia.EliseIt absolutely is. I mean, the entire concept, the term “lookism,” was new to me. When we say lookism, it’s appearance-based discrimination. Lookism works in all these insidious ways, obviously to marginalize people, but also it can reward those who do focus on their appearance and do the work of improving it to better match the prevailing culture and beauty standards of the day.Having good looks is framed as your personal responsibility. Obviously it’s a very feminine look—you’ve seen Korean K-pop girl groups—so that generally is the model for how a Korean woman should look. If you don’t at least try to match that standard or if you fail, it’s seen as a personal failing.And hard work then means work on your body. And it problematizes all sorts of bodies that don’t fit. Something that I learned very early on was that my size wasn’t welcome in Korea.VirginiaI do want to talk about the concept of the “free size,” which is one size fits all/one size fits no one? I mean, what?EliseI have a chapter called “Free Size Isn’t Free.” Because at so many of the boutiques for the cutest clothes—the stylish ones, the indie boutiques—the clothes come in “free size,” but free size is the equivalent to the to a US size 2. I felt so unwelcome in Seoul in my own body and just appearing as I did. It wasn’t just size, though I think thinness is such a pillar of global beauty standards that it cannot be divorced from lookism, the venn diagram almost overlaps such that it’s one circle. But it was also having freckles! VirginiaYes! I was fascinated by the freckles thing!EliseHaving freckles, it was like I might as well have had pus-eating boils on my face.But freckles are a window into how South Korea not only exports these images of beautiful Koreans and sells that all tangled up with K-pop, K-drama and its pop culture might around the world. It also exports the medical aesthetic upgrades that you can get to improve your face and skin and bodies. The comments I would get were something like, “Oh, you have freckles, we can fix that. Why wouldn’t you fix that?” So, if the technology or the solution exists to fix the problem, of course you should get rid of your freckles. Of course you’re not good enough as you are. When we have a solution, like, why not? It makes no sense.VirginiaIt’s a really strong parallel with the conversation we’re having now around Ozempic, where people are like, well, if it finally exists, there’s a drug that you can help you lose weight, why wouldn’t you lose the weight? And there’s no discussion. Well, Burnt Toast knows I’m discussing it, but the mainstream conversation has not been discussing how much that is erasure of people’s bodies. Freckles are natural, they are part of skin! Like, why do we need to erase them?EliseDiversity is part of the human experience. It’s actually part of nature, too. I don’t go to a pet adoption center and only find Golden Retrievers worthy, right? It just doesn’t make any sense to me. Our adherence to beauty culture, our adherence to lookism is so familiar that we barely notice it. But as you have said, the appropriate response to homophobia isn’t to make everyone straight, and the appropriate response to anti-fat bias isn’t to make everybody skinny. The appropriate response to lookism isn’t to make everybody pretty. Except when I lived in South Korea, I found that it was completely logical to make yourself prettier—because of the professional and personal and social costs if you didn’t.VirginiaIt is asking people to pay this high price to opt out of a system when it’s that entrenched.Another piece of this that was really helpful for me to learn about was I thought I understood a lot of the Korean beauty ideals as being rooted in Whiteness, but they’re really not. I wondered if you could talk us through that a little bit because that was super fascinating.EliseThe desire for white skin certainly predates war and colonization, even. The desire for white skin was about a class performance dating to the earliest dynasties in China, Korea and Japan. The aristocratic women, the ones who didn’t have to go outside, had the fairest skin. And those who had to work the fields had darker skin. So there was a real aspiration to Whiteness that was about class. We see throughout civilizations and various time periods that beauty work really is about class. So often, when we see people who you would describe as conventionally pretty, you’re really describing that they’re conventionally wealthy.VirginiaIt’s money. EliseRight. The people who can look the closest to physical ideals are often the ones who can afford to spend the most money. Another strain that comes out of this is the idea of the no-makeup makeup look, or affecting effortlessness out of effort. Being able to look like you just got out of bed and didn’t put on any makeup is largely the work of lasers or eyelash extensions or skincare treatments that cost thousands and thousands of dollars and lots of time and research and the labor of other people, which can be extractive, especially in the US. And that doesn’t get factored into the equation at all. We should just be aware of it.VirginiaAnd concepts like glass skin. That was another fascinating concept and how that is a completely manufactured attempt to look natural, sort of.EliseRight, right. Think about how many serums or how much care and attention and how much free time you would have to have to devote to getting your skin to a level of looking reflective like glass. I don’t have that kind of time. I think most women do not.VirginiaNo, I know you’re a mom of three. I’m a mom of two. I don’t have ten step cleaning practices in my day. I don’t want a recipe to have 10 steps. Nothing can have ten steps.EliseSome of the interview questions I’ve gotten as I’ve launched this book include “What do you do for your skin?” And first of all, it focuses on the wrong thing because this is not the an individual thing, right? When I get questions like, “should your daughter shave or laser?” I actually think that we’re putting the focus on individuals when we shouldn’t because it ends up resulting in us judging one another when the focus really should be these cultural forces that keep us on a hamster wheel.But also, my answers are so just boring. I’m just like, “well, I wash my skin and I moisturize.”VirginiaSunscreen seems nice. EliseSunscreen is the main takeaway. I am a thinker on beauty topics, but I am no beauty blogger. These are separate things.VirginiaI get a lot of those “what do you do?” questions, too, and I think it also speaks to how much the system has sold us this idea of personal responsibility and personal labor, as you’re saying. That this is your job, to take care of your body in this way. So then even when we’re critiquing it, we’re like, “but what do you do?” because we want you to tell us what we can opt out of. It’s a very diet culture mindset.EliseThis personal responsibility then extends to maternal responsibility or parental responsibility. Like the way that mothers get held responsible for their children’s weight is something that I saw in South Korea not just with regard to weight, but also with regard to their children’s looks. So mothers and grandmothers were often the ones who were gifting plastic surgery to their high school graduates because they wanted to ensure a brighter and happier future for them.Never mind that we have tangled up health and happiness with good looks. That is already questionable and problematic and wrong, but then your maternal love gets wrapped up into whether you are helping and assisting your child in or teenager in looking “better.” And that was really heartbreaking.An anecdote that was shared with me by one of the women that I interviewed who talked about how her father made her watch pageant videos so that she could learn how to walk properly and learn how to walk more like a lady. So she would have to watch those videos every night and then and feel anxious and self conscious about her body and then she would have to actually walk and perform for her father to see whether she had absorbed the lessons of what she was watching on the pageant videos.And I asked her, “What happened if you didn’t? What happened if you refused?” and there was just no notion that she could even refuse. There was the filial piety involved. But she said she worried that her parents would have starved her because it mattered to them so much that she be able to have a fulfilling life and that meant being thin enough to find a husband.VirginiaYes, she said, “They basically already were so I just thought it would get so much worse.” It was chilling. And it’s so easy to want to judge those parents and think, like, what a creepy thing to do to your kid.EliseBut it’s economically rational.VirginiaIt’s hard to know that your child will face such stigma and derision if you don’t participate in this. EliseI’m curious, with the parents that you talked to who felt as though they needed to restrict their children’s eating, where did they end up landing for the most part? After being presented evidence on how the long tail effects aren’t good, nor do they even necessarily maintain whatever weight they were trying to achieve. VirginiaIt was a real range. There’s one mom in the book who I still think about a lot who was really on board with wanting to do things differently and then the pediatrician shamed her for how much weight her son gained during the pandemic. And she was like, “I’m back on Weight Watchers. He’s going to the Healthy Weight clinic. We’re back in.” And then there were others who were really relieved to realize they could opt out of the system. But I think there’s a lot of privilege involved and who can safely opt out. EliseThat’s true for opting out of beauty culture, as well. There are plenty of women who don’t have the privilege of being able to opt out. Notably, the trans women of South Korea. There’s still no anti-discrimination law in South Korea and trans women feel unsafe all over the world, but in South Korea they are such outcasts. There’s not a lot of social understanding about transgender people. There are plenty of trans women who said, “We do not support the beauty culture that we live in and find it oppressive. At the same time, appearing femme is a matter of survival for us. We need to pass in order to safely move about the world without being assaulted.”VirginiaIt is so scary. There were parts that were so familiar, too, like the way you said the only Korean words your daughters learned were cute and pretty because that’s how everyone addressed them. That’s true for American little girls, too, right? You’re in the diner and the waitress is like, “You’re so pretty.” And I’m just like, “and smart…”There’s definitely a universality to how we engage with g…
Full show notes at the publisherToday Virginia is chatting with Cole Kazdin, author of What's Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety, whichexplodes a lot of the problems with our current eating disorder treatment system.Remember, if you order Cole's book (or any books we mention on the pod!) from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSShira RosenbluthFor anyone who needs to recover into a fat body, you’re asking them to sacrifice the safety of their eating disorder in the sense that it’s harder to exist in this world in a fat body than in a thinner one.Gloria Lucasjust journal or do a crossword puzzlebacklash against the diagnosis of atypical anorexiaa very good piece about atypical anorexiaVirginia's story on KurboMadeline DonahueLindsey GuileCole on InstagramFAT 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 95 TranscriptColeI’m a journalist and now author. I worked in television news for many, many years and then left that work about 10 years ago to return to print journalism. If you’re a freelance journalist, you end up reporting about everything, right? Crime and the environment and breaking news. But I found myself focusing more and more on mental health reporting and in part that was because I was in a very unsatisfying moment of eating disorder recovery myself. And when I started reporting on mental health, specifically mental health around eating disorder recovery and the eating disorder epidemic, it really shifted the focus of my work to the point where it was all I wanted to really write about and thus the book. VirginiaIt’s called What's Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety. It’s incredible, Cole. Your reporting is top notch and then you also put your own story into this which I know can be difficult to do—to really go there—and you weave in other people’s stories. It’s just a beautiful mix of memoir and reporting.ColeThank you. VirginiaWhat made you decide this needed to be a book and this kind of book?ColeI had an eating disorder on and off through most of college and into my adult life. When I finally got treatment, I was very prepared for that treatment to be excellent and I’m done and now we don’t have an eating disorder anymore. It was so unsatisfying to me that it wasn’t remotely like that. It was more than the residue of the eating disorder. I was not very healed.So, I started approaching it as a journalist, with the idea of seeing if I was the only one that felt this way. Is this in my own head? Am I crazy? Am I not able to recover because it’s just me? And also, as you know, as a journalist you can access people that would never talk to you if you are a patient. VirginiaOh yes. It’s a definite perk. ColeSo I was writing short pieces about why doesn’t eating disorder recovery feel better? And what are the inequities in eating disorder care and in diagnosis? And the more I started reporting this, and the more people I spoke with both everyday people like myself who were suffering, and the clinicians, the researchers, the more I started to understand that not only was this not just in my head, this is the way it is. And understanding the scope of that, I felt an urgency to write a longer piece about this, to write a full book where I could reach all those points.I use a lot of memoir because I think the transparency piece is very important. Eating disorders are very lonely and you really feel like you’re the only one suffering even though you know on paper that you’re not. So, I just wanted people to know how messy and difficult it is, to normalize that. And that no one is alone if they’re suffering from this.VirginiaI mean, this whole concept of “full recovery” is so interesting. I feel like I’m beginning to see some pushback about that in the eating disorder therapist community. My good friend Shira Rosenbluth has talked a lot about her own eating disorder journey and this idea of full recovery being frankly unrealistic for so many people, given the current reality of treatments. Who currently gets to be fully recovered from an eating disorder?ColeWhat is so tricky about this is that no one can agree fully on what it means to be recovered from an eating disorder.VirginiaI mean, that’s mind blowing right there. ColeRight. So, some organizations and clinicians define it as “you’re no longer engaging in the symptoms:” Starving, binging and purging, or whatever combination of those. Like, that would be a metric of recovery, that you’re no longer engaging in those symptoms. But then, in so many treatments, your underlying traumas or anything else that’s contributing to why you might have developed that eating disorder are not addressed.I had a very good treatment, cognitive behavioral therapy, which is considered a gold standard—I don’t want to use the word “standard,” because there really is no standard of care with eating disorders. But the definition of recovery is so nebulous. NEDA, that National Eating Disorder Association, has a kind of definition where they say it’s addressing the physical medical issues, so whatever medical issues arose as a result of one’s eating disorder, then the behavioral symptoms, again whatever behaviors you’re engaging in that are disordered. And then the third category is the psychological piece, which no one can really define.VirginiaThat’s what we can’t nail down. And even right there, that feels complicated because you might make progress on behaviors and even the psychological piece, but have lingering medical complications, right? So that feels like a troubling metric. And then: In the same way that abstinence is not full recovery from alcoholism or drug abuse, just making someone “behavior abstinent” is not the same thing as actually working through the disorder.ColeRight. And that’s why I think it feels so tricky, especially because we move around in this world where all of these behaviors that supported our disordered way of being—dieting, restricting food, giving up whatever the thing is, they are completely normalized in our culture. So if we have a feeling, oh, I don’t think I want to eat pasta. Okay, is that the eating disorder? Is that just our world that we live in?I passed a store or restaurant in LA that said “Pasta! But with the calories of a salad.” Like, I don’t even know what that means. I won’t even unpack that here, we don’t have the time. But if that’s the world we’re moving around in once we’re recovered, then that’s the psychological piece—and that’s not even thinking about what your family history is and any other contributing factors.One thing I’m starting to shape in my mind when I think about recovery is this idea of safety. And I think that’s the missing piece of recovery: Safety in our own bodies, and safety in the world that we’re living in. If we don’t have a sense of safety, we cannot be recovered. And I think the way you insulate yourself from the diet culture world we live in is with community. So, I think safety and community go hand in hand. And that’s what makes recovery feasible.Because for especially people in marginalized communities who may feel the stress of say everyday racism, that person who may go through eating disorder treatment comes out into the world and still feels unsafe in their body. So will they be recovered? So, I don’t think you can have recovery without safety. And I think that’s one piece that’s not really being talked about.VirginiaThat becomes such a complicated piece of it. For anyone who needs to recover into a fat body, you’re asking them to sacrifice the safety of their eating disorder in the sense that it’s harder to exist in this world in a fat body than in a thinner one. So there’s that layer to it. And then also all of that plays into who even accesses treatment in the first place. Like, who gets diagnosed, right?ColeI spoke with Gloria Lucas for the book, who’s an educator who’s doing some really interesting work in this area. She works with a lot of indigenous people who have a real connection of their body to the land. Their body is the land, the land is their body. She said, “how can anyone recover until they give the land back?” I thought, oh shit. VirginiaThat’s not something we can sort out in our treatment protocols. It shows the need for systemic change here. It’s not just people’s personal work to do.ColeExactly. So we have to parse out what is the personal work that I can do? How can I kind of cobble this together? And you do, unfortunately, have to cobble this together. Because even if a person speaks to their general physician, that person may not know how to refer them or what what is the best treatment for them. So you have to piece this together yourself and know that there are a lot of systemic elements here that may not shift anytime soon.VirginiaYou have a lot of examples in the book of these moments in therapy where it’s just so clear that the treatment is not serving you or really anyone. There was one anecdote of the therapist who told you that when the need to purge arose, you should just journal or do a crossword puzzle. And you were like, Have you ever purged?I’d love to talk about some other examples of this one-size-fits-no-one advice and how that also becomes such a barrier to recovery for people.ColeI mean, one-size-fits-no-one is the perfect way to put it because I cannot imagine any actual human who could benefit from some of this guidance. It shows a profound lack of understanding of the disorder and I think that’s also why so many people who have suffered from eating disorders may go into the field of treatment because they actually understand what someone is going through.I think another not helpful and I would go so far as to say harmful piece of therapy was a sort of exposure therapy where the therapist wanted me to begin to include foods in my diet that I had previously restricted.Now, that is not a bad idea.VirginiaIt’s the goal ultimately. ColeRight. I think it’s important to have a diet where you can eat anything and you’ll choose what you like and don’t like, right? You don’t have to eat everything, but you can.So, she would give me assignments like “eat a food this week that you previously restricted.” Now, it was, I think, way too early in my recovery. Especially cognitive behavioral therapy, which did help me in many, many ways I do want to say, but there is a real textbook. This is a 20 week program. This is what we do week one, this is what we do week two, and there is no real attempt made to understand the individual because that’s not even what they’re trying to do. They want to change your behaviors using this way. I just envision that being studied for a population of people and not looking at individuals.So she would ask, “what’s something you never ate?” “Well, pancakes.” “Okay, so this week, eat pancakes.” Well, I don’t think I was ready to eat pancakes.And if we had talked a little bit more, just her getting to know me, Cole, and my behaviors, maybe she would have seen that and said, “let’s do that next year instead of week six or whatever,” right? Because then you’re white knuckling your way through the assignments And of course, many, many people with eating disorders do have black and white thinking, very rigid thinking. I went into treatment, really wanting to get an A+ so I was going to do every single thing she told me, whether it felt right or not, because I was still very sick. But it felt like a force feeding and it felt really violating. At the time, I went along with these things because I didn’t trust myself. And I shouldn’t have trusted myself, right? Because I had gone a very long time making very harmful choices. But there is somewhere in there where you also feel heard. Instead, I really felt like I have no agency. I’m kind of choosing to hand this over, because obviously I’m making harmful decisions. I want to get better, A+ to me for even wanting that, and I’ll do whatever you tell me.VirginiaI mean the parallels there to diet culture are so strong, right? Like, I can’t trust myself, I have to follow somebody else, I have to follow this program perfectly. If I don’t follow it perfectly and it doesn’t work, it’s my fault. That’s what diets teach us. So that’s disturbing when this is supposed to have the opposite goal.ColeI empathize with the clinicians sometimes, even the ones that give us advice that’s not helpful or that can even be harmful. Because eating disorders are so complex. For many people there is a neurological underpinning here that doesn’t explain the entire eating disorder, but explains part of it. I did not get hungry, I needed to be told when to eat. I still do that. I need to sometimes treat food like medicine, like, “you have to eat a yogurt right now. You’re not even remotely hungry, just eat it because you’re crashing right now.” So it’s difficult to understand that, while also understanding that someone may have grown up a certain way, where they treat food a certain way, maybe they had food scarcity, maybe they had a mother who always dieted.There are just so many factors in why these eating disorders manifest the way they do. And it can be different for every person, but the therapy does not usually approach eating disorders in that way.VirginiaRight. We have multiple diagnoses, but we still have this kind of catch-all approach. Like, we don’t really know what category you are. So we’ll lump you over here, in this diagnosis. And obviously, that’s doing such a disservice. Even within within a category like anorexia or bulimia, there’s going to be so many different versions of that. So to have the therapy be this kind of cookie cutter approach… and I don’t even know if classifying it as subtypes would be helpful or just like further stigmatizing, honestly. But at least, meet people where they are. And when it’s time to eat the pancakes, put the emotional support in place to help you eat the pancakes instead of just making it a homework assignment.ColeRight, and weight being still such a factor throughout. We’re hearing more backlash against the diagnosis of atypical anorexia, a diagnosis which still drives me crazy. And when I went into therapy for the first time, I was not weighed or medically checked or recommended to go to a doctor. I was very, very, very thin but I did not look like someone who could be cast in a movie about anorexia. So that made me wonder, Oh, am I not that sick? Am I not thin enough to be that sick? And and th…
Full show notes at the publisherToday Virginia is chatting with fat rights advocate Tigress Osborn. Tigress is Chair of the Board of NAAFA, The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, and helping to lead the Campaign for Size Freedom, which just scored a huge victory in New York City and there is more to come. Remember, if you order books we mention in today's pod from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSCampaign for Size FreedomNAAFA FLAREPHX Fat Force Smith College magazine profile of TigressClothestimeThe Overweight Lovers In The House & Heavy DDante Earle Tubbs from Contrast PhotosThe Crown ActTipping the Scales of Justice: Fighting Weight Based DiscriminationVirginia's piece for Slate in 2021International Weight Stigma ConferenceLast year Burnt Toast worked with The States Projectgive to NAAFAthe Association for Size Diversity And HealthNOLOSEsign the petitionWondermineBlack Fae Day@IoftheTigress.FAT TALK is out! Order your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. You can also order the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.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 94 TranscriptTigressSo I am the chair of NAAFA, which is the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance and I have been the chair since the beginning of 2021 and on the board for several years before that. But I actually started my life as a public figure of fat visibility and fat activism as a nightclub promoter in Oakland, where I created an event called Full Figure Fridays. So I’ve been doing some form of fat activism since about 2008.VirginiaAs I was prepping for our conversation, I read the profile on you that ran in the Smith College magazine. Burnt Toast’s own Corinne Fay went to Smith, my sister went to Smith and another friend of mine—so I had multiple people sending me that, like, look at Tigress on the cover!TigressLook at this fat lady on this magazine!VirginiaThey knew I would be overjoyed and I was. There was one quote I really loved in the piece where you said, “My aunts were the Lizzos of my neighborhood, but they still talked about how they should be on SlimFast.” Tell us a little bit about how you grew up understanding fatness.TigressI’m from a mixed race family and I had fat aunts on both sides of my family. My Black aunts were confident and were sexy and wore tight dresses and got dressed up to do fancy things and go out. My fat aunts on the other side of the family and the other people on the other side of my family who were fat or thought of themselves as fat didn’t have that same boldness. And I really received that as a racial difference.But I think we ended up with that quote in the magazine was because I was talking to the reporter about people’s perception that Black women have it easy when it comes to body image. I definitely saw a racial difference in my family, but I also still saw my aunts thinking that they were supposed to lose weight. I still saw other people talking about their bodies. As a smaller kid, I was a slim. Then puberty came around. My biology kicked in and I was a teenager who was curvy. I probably wasn’t even officially plus-sized until I was a late teenager, but I remember having a difficult time finding clothes for my graduation because we’d been advised to wear white under our gowns and finding something white and plus size in the limited stores that were available… I was a teenager before Torrid. There was none of this “just go to Torrid.”There was a store here called Stewart’s Plus and it was the trendiest of 90’s fashion, like bright prints and bright colors and stuff like that. It was the closest thing I could get to a teenager look because Lane Bryant, back then especially, was really matronly. Everybody else was going to Clothestime to buy their Guess jeans or whatever.And I was one of those teenagers who had subscriptions to all of the teen girl magazines. Those magazines were for me what Instagram and Tiktok are for teenagers today. Like, where you see the body standards that you are supposed to aspire to, where you’re told how to be beautiful, how you’re supposed to be as a girl or as a young lady. But they weren’t like Instagram and Tiktok in that they didn’t have also a vein of alternatives to that, right? In Seventeen magazine, the person who was supposed to be like the person who looks like me as a young Black girl is Whitney Houston. I don’t look like Whitney.VirginiaThat’s a realistic standard for one to aspire to.TigressExactly. So I grew up with all the messages from the culture—I’m an early MTV kid, I was really into really into music videos, I watched music videos any chance I had to watch them. And you didn’t see curvy people, let alone actually fat people, in music videos, except for a handful of men.I was thinking the other day about how much I love the rapper Heavy D when I was a teenager. One of the only places where I will allow the term ‘overweight’ is his song The Overweight Lovers In The House. So I had a burgeoning identity as a fat girl, not just in a sort of this-is-a-way-I’m-an-outsider or this-is-a-way-I-don’t-fit-in kind of way. I remember trying to write something for one of my teen magazines that I was going to send to them about how important it was for me to see the fat boys, to see that you could be cool even though you were fat.VirginiaWhy can’t we see fat girls, too?TigressYeah, it never occurred to me to be like, “where are the fat girls?” The only fat person was Oprah and her whole little red wagon thing was when I was in 8th or 9th grade.VirginiaShe’s fat but she’s actively, determinedly, pursuing not-fatness.TigressI remember as a late teenager I discovered BBW Magazine, Big Beautiful Woman magazine. I can remember my aunt being like, “Oh, these are fat ladies who aren’t really fat because they’re fancy.”VirginiaThese are Fancy Fat Ladies.TigressBecause they had access to a completely different kind of clothes, because they are fashion models. As limited as that was, a magazine has access to different clothes than we had access to in small town Arizona. VirginiaYeah, and they can shoot you in a dress that doesn’t zip up in the back and it looks like it fits from the front. There’s this whole smoke and mirrors piece of it that they can manipulate. TigressYeah, all of that, but it was really meaningful to me to start to see. I can remember the expansion of print magazines in my early 20s because there was BBW. There was one called Grace, then there was there was a Black fat positive magazine called Bell. VirginiaYeah, I remember Grace and Bell. TigressI remember seeing that when I moved to California and I was in an area where there were more Black folks, then there were more Black magazines available to me. When I grew up, where I grew up, it was Essence and Jet only. Essence might have someone a little larger in it from time to time back then, but there wasn’t regular plus-size representation when I was a teenager in those magazines. And of course, Jet Magazine had the Jet Beauty of the Week that was like, a woman in a swimsuit. I remember them as being curvier than some of the women I saw in other magazines, but they were not arguably fat, right? VirginiaWhen you talked about your aunts still on the SlimFast, and still struggling in that way, even though they were also representing to you this joy in fatness that you weren’t seeing from your white relatives—do you think that the way Black magazines were portraying Black bodies at the time was a factor in that? Or where do you think that came from?TigressI think there sometimes are actually cultural differences around what body types are accepted. I think a lot of it was male gaze kind of stuff. Like, “men still find me attractive.” And there was a kind of creativity and community-mindedness around finding clothes or making clothes that was different. My community was a community of Black folks who love to show out. So when you have to show out, you’re going to find or make some clothes. You’re not going to just settle for whatever the clothes are available to you, if that’s limited. And so there was partly that. I think there were personality differences, there was cultural difference. It wasn’t all racial, but as a kid, I definitely received it as racial.As an adult, I can see more nuance. I can see all the ways that even if there is some community protection around body image, there is still body shaming and you’re still ingesting the messages of the regular culture.I was trying to explain to a Gen Z colleague, upon the passing of Sir Jerry Springer, what it was really like to be coming of age in the era of daytime talk shows and how much of that was very specifically body shaming. They would have these episodes all the time that were like, “Too Fat For That!” The Too Fat For That episode was the one where your BFF comes on with you to try to get the world to help save you from yourself, because you are wearing biker shorts and cut-off tops. “Just because they make it in your size or you can stretch it to your size doesn’t mean you should wear it in your size, girlfriend.” I think my aunts were somewhere along that spectrum of like, well, maybe I will wear these biker shorts or maybe I would be the friend who’s on TV telling her, girl, you shouldn’t be wearing that. I think the magazines were reflective of the culture, but also reflective of respectability politics. Respectability politics allow for a certain kind of fat, they allow for the church ladies to be fat, but there’s still all this stuff about appetite and control and what’s ladylike. So, I think it’s just a mixed bag across the culture and shows up in some really racialized ways and gets experienced in some really racialized ways. Whatever you’re getting in your home culture, you still have to participate in the mainstream culture, right?Because unless you go to an HBCU, you go to a predominantly white college. Unless you start or work for a Black-owned company, you are working for and with white folks. There are some protective elements around community standards or different beauty ideals, but you still have to operate in the whole rest of the world. Weight Watchers is still just dominating daytime television commercials and Oprah with her little red wagon and People Magazine every time you go to the grocery store with the “I lost 100 pounds and I’m half of myself.” All of that stuff is still there. And that was still there for me, even though I have these aunts who were just really glamorous and amazing to me.The folks that stand out to me the most from my younger childhood as glamorous were fat women—including one of my mom’s friends who was not a Black woman and who had this cloud of Miss Piggy hair. She just reminded me of Miss Piggy and she was an Avon lady so she always had the makeup. And my Aunt Linda is still doing it, with her and her wigs and her all things, outshining everybody when she shows up at a barbecue. I don’t know how much of that is just personality. I don’t know how much of it is despite being fat or how much of it is because of being fat. Like, “I better make sure I’m the best dressed and the best makeup and the best hair and the best everything else because I don’t have the body everybody thinks I’m supposed to have.”VirginiaYeah, there’s a little bit of the Good Fatty, maybe.TigressI think so.Virginia“I need to perform this in a certain way.” But it also sounds like it gives them a lot of joy.TigressAnd it gave me a lot of joy! But I was still very clear, especially as a teenager, that if you have a choice, you shouldn’t be fat. And if you have enough willpower you do have a choice. VirginiaOf course, that’s how bodies work. TigressI was in that sort of infomercial era of my early teen years my early years at Smith where the sort of like Richard Simmons Deal-A-Meal era and the Susan Powter Stop the Insanity era. Do you remember her? Everybody remembers Richard Simmons probably.VirginiaI think that’s safe to assume. Or if not: Children, Google your history.TigressLearn who Richard Simmons is. He is very important to our cultural understanding of bodies. I’m not even exaggerating, like, Richard Simmons is very important to our cultural understanding of bodies. But Susan Powter pitched herself as a feminist and was loud and unapologetic and had long nails and makeup and red lipstick and this platinum buzz cut haircut. She wouldn’t be exercising in stilettos, but she was posed in stilettos. She was an “it’s okay to be sexy” feminist. There were many things I loved about her message but she was always on these infomercials screaming about how dieting is insanity, stop the insanity! Here, buy all of my diet my exercise videos because they are the only ones that are not insanity.VirginiaJust starting to head in the right direction and then doubling back.TigressLooking back at some of that 80’s and 90’s super diet-y or intended to be anti-fat stuff, I think there’s a sort of rebellious read on it. Richard Simmons videos were the places of highest fat visibility for me outside of my own family and neighborhood. I could see fat people dressed in bright, colorful, fun clothes, dancing and sweating to the oldies as a dance party. My favorite part of those videos when I was in my late teens and early 20s was the part at the end where it’s almost like a soul train line and everyone dances down and then they put up the numbers of how much weight they lost. If you remove those numbers, that’s some of the best fat joy exploration! I think you could reclaim that stuff by by sweating to the oldies for 50 cents on the DVD at your local thrift store. You’re not supporting diet culture, but you can have a subversive read.VirginiaThere definitely needs to be a deep dive into this, because Richard Simmons was certainly making some deliberate choices in casting his videos in that way. In not just showing all the thin aerobics models. But then, of course, pairing it with the weight loss message.TigressExactly. It’s really an example of how everything came at me at that era of my life. I think I’m watching this at the end for the weight loss inspo, but really what I end up remembering about it 20 years later, is just how much fun those people looked like they were having and how they were getting in shape regardless of whether they had those numbers to put up. But they wouldn’t have been in that video if they didn’t have those numbers to put up, so that’s where the it takes the turn.VirginiaBut, they were in their bodies. They were joyful in their bodies. TigressSo in the midst of all this, I did learn about NAAFA whe…
Full show notes at the publisherIt's time for the May Indulgence Gospel! Instead of answering your questions this month, we're reading Virginia's hate mail. Buckle up! If you are already a paid subscriber, you’ll have this entire episode in your podcast feed and access to the entire transcript in your inbox and on the Burnt Toast 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 go paid. Also, don't forget to order Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture! Get your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books. (Or get the UK edition or the audiobook!) Disclaimer: Virginia and Corinne are humans with a lot of informed opinions. They are not nutritionists, therapists, doctosr, or any kind of health care providers. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions they give are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER & BOOKS_____ Is a Breakfast Food by Marjory SweetThe Unhoneymooners by Christina LaurenThe Ex Talk by Rachel Lynn SolomonSabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat PhobiaDa’Shaun Harrison Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blacknesschapter one of FAT TALKOrder any of these from the Burnt Toast Bookshop for 10 percent off if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)OTHER LINKS@SellTradePlusThe Cut did a profileFresh Air interviewthe face shieldinterview with Aubrey Gordonyes, fat marathon runnersvery popular article in The Atlantic about how eating ice cream is associated with lower rates of Type Two Diabetesa tweet about Elizabeth WarrenCREDITSThe 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!VirginiaYou’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.CorinneAnd I’m Corinne Fay. I work on Burnt Toast and run @SellTradePlus an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus sized clothing.VirginiaAnd it’s time for your May mailbag episode! But instead of answering your questions this month, I decided it would be fun—cathartic? something?—to open my other mailbag, which is the place in my computer and in my DMs where the trolls live.CorinneYes, you’ve been getting a lot of this lately.VirginiaIt started when The Cut did a profile on me, right before the book launch. There were a lot of feelings about orange crackers. Which I feel like we have spoken to?CorinneYou addressed it very directly on TikTok.VirginiaThen after the Fresh Air interview came out, and the book launched, it’s just been a lot of people in their feelings. CorinneYou made it to Fox News.1VirginiaI did. I did make it to Fox News. I always knew I could do it.CorinneI didn’t realize that that was a thing, that they’ll be like, “Oh, something that was on Fresh Air. Let’s twist this into something that will make our audience mad.”VirginiaNo spoilers, Corinne! Because we’re gonna get into just how mad they got. I should say, Corinne hasn’t read most of these. I’m making her come in cold because I’m a little numb to it all at this point. CorinneI’ll be reacting in real time. VirginiaI felt like we needed some human reaction. I also want to say: In choosing what messages to talk about in this episode, I was mostly looking for the it’s-so-bad-it’s-funny comments, the orange snack cracker type of thing. But I do also want to get into some of the repeat themes that come up that I think are super troubling in this conversation. We are going to read some fairly disturbing emails. Content warning for anti-fatness, misogyny, every other kind of bias you can think of, white supremacy. It’s going to be a wild ride. Take care of yourself if that’s not something you want to listen to.CorinneMake sense. This is also a paywalled episode. That means to hear the whole thing, you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It’s just $5 per month or $50 for the year.VirginiaAll right, before we dive in, Corinne, how are you doing? What is new with you?CorinneI’m doing good. It’s starting to get a touch hot here, so I’m feeling a little bit of dread.VirginiaIs it time to get out the face shield?CorinneI’ve been wondering if we were going to talk about that sun visor again. Why don’t I just admit now, that it did not get a lot of wear.VirginiaBut it seemed so great!CorinneThe thing is, I wear glasses and it’s really hard to wear with glasses. VirginiaYeah, that does feel like a big design flaw. CorinneI need a sun visor in prescription glasses.VirginiaImagine if your whole face was your prescription.CorinneYes, exactly. What I ended up doing instead was just buying prescription sunglasses, which was great.VirginiaIt does feel like that plus a hat does achieve a lot of the same goals as the sun face shield. CorinneI no longer need a face shield because I have prescription sunglasses. VirginiaAll right. Well, it is an official Butter recommendation so we should probably go back and add a footnote. But if you don’t wear glasses, it might be amazing for you?CorinneTotally. Or maybe if you have less chunky glasses? What’s new with you? Besides.VirginiaBesides the trolls? Things are good. It’s garden season. I am excited about that. It’s been very nice to have that safe space to be in when my introvert self—and I want to be clear, this is just like how I would respond as an introvert to any amount of… There’s a lot of output with this season. Before we even get into the trolls. So it’s good. We had a lot of shrubs not survive the drought last year, which I’m sad about. But I’m also like, it’s a reason to buy a new plant.CorinneYou’ve got to treat yourself.VirginiaI’m mourning but I’m moving on. Okay, should we dive in? Should we do our first letter? CorinneI think we should.VirginiaOkay. This is from Lou. This is the kind of email I like to file under “Men Who Listen to Podcasts and Send Me Thoughts.” So Corinne, I will have you read this.CorinneHello Virginia,I was just listening to your podcast on NPR and I have to say it's been scientifically proven that being obese is an health issue, that goes for children and adults! I disagree that it's a body image problem. It's costing the health care system millions of dollars! Your information is misleading and harmful to say it's not an issue! Please do your due diligence and research the health effects rather than dismissing it as an image problem and chastising the medical community for addressing the issue. These obese, people, Lizzo for example, promote that fact it's ok, now you're writing books not addressing the issue. If you thought it was ok next time you go to the doctors get on the scale! The fact you don't reiterates what I'm saying and does not go along with what you're saying.. This problem all started when junk food and fast food came along - look back to old photos even the eighties - people were not obese - this is insane what's going on!VirginiaLou has a lot of thoughts. Lou also uses a lot of exclamation points. And has very creative comma use.CorinneCreative comma use for sure. My first thought is: Did Loui listen to the interview or did Lou read the title and react immediately?VirginiaThis is a common theme of Internet trolls.CorinneWould you say that the point of your book is that there’s a body image issue?VirginiaNo. I would not say that. CorinneI would not say that either.VirginiaThat’s not how I would characterize my work, no. We’re talking about systemic bias and how it harms people, including their physical health. I’m always sad when they bring Lizzo into it. Can we just leave Lizzo alone? CorinnePoor Lizzo.VirginiaShe doesn’t need this. She didn’t ask for it. You’re mad at me, Lou, not at Lizzo. So yes, this is very much a greatest hits troll playlist. Like, “It’s been scientifically proven with,” but he doesn’t link to any research or supporting evidence. He’s not looking at the data. "It’s costing the healthcare system millions of dollars.” There’s so many people who have put in thousands of hours of work unpacking these premises.Ragen Chastainhas devoted decades of her life to this. And then, "please do your research." That's one of my favorite things because I do research this? For a living?CorinneYou think they just let Virginia write a book without doing any research?VirginiaThey came up to me on the street. It was the wildest thing.CorinneYou sent them an email and said, “We have a body image problem. Can I write a book?”VirginiaThis is not specific to just Lou. One guy sent me link after link after link and they were all fitness guru podcast episodes. I understand I am just a woman who researches this professionally and has written about these issues for decades, and you are a man who listens to podcasts. But it still does not mean you have to send me personal emails about it.CorinneThere’s also not a lot here, besides ranting.VirginiaYeah, ranting and claiming that I don’t have any facts on my side while they have all the facts but they never actually use facts. The thing that really gets to me is how men write these emails where it’s like “You are wrong. Let me tell you how you are wrong. Please do your research,” and I’m just like, well I have 50 pages of footnotes, Lou. Do you?CorinneYOU please do your research. You please do YOUR research.VirginiaHere’s another fun one from a man. This guy wrote:In response to your grifting nonsense I would usually say hush! back into the kitchen with you and make me a sandwich—CorinneOh no. Virginiabut, sadly, we all know how that would end.CorinneHow…how… how would that end? EPISODE CREDITSCo-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay. Producer: Kim Baldwin. Logo design: Deanna Lowe.Theme Song: Farideh.Video Editor: Elizabeth AyikuAudio Engineer: Tommy HarronFollow us on social! Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith. Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
Full show notes at the publisherToday Virginia is chatting with her longtime friend and colleague Christy Harrison, MPH, RD! Christy is a journalist, registered dietitian, and certified Intuitive Eating counselor. She’s the author of Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating. And today we are talking about Christy’s new book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses, and Find Your True Well-Being.And remember, if you order The Wellness Trap or Anti-Diet from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSchristyharrison.comListen here for Virginia's conversation on Christy's new podcast, Rethinking Wellness. Virginia's first bookthe SIFT checkLove Is a Revolution by Renee WatsonFAT 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 92 TranscriptVirginiaSo this is the first time we’ve gotten to catch up since you became a mom! And I just want to say: It’s very annoying that I’m leading with this question. Women get asked all the time to talk about this. Men rarely do. Although, I would ask it, if I had more male podcast guests who had recently become dads. But yeah: How are you doing? How do you feel like entering motherhood has changed or informed your relationship to everything you work on? ChristyI’m doing okay. But I’m having a really hard time balancing mom life and work life. A big part of me just wants to leave work and be a stay-at-home mom. But honestly, we can’t afford to do that. And right now, I’m the primary earner and my husband is the primary childcare. So there’s that piece, the capitalism piece. And, I do love my work. I couldn’t imagine not having that be at least part of my life. So it’s just been a real adjustment of switching gears, switching back and forth.I work from home and my daughter’s home. And so I will go fill my water and she’s there and wants to play or go to the bathroom. It’s great, but.VirginiaIt’s a constant mindset shift. Am I in work mode? Or am I in mom mode? And somehow you’re always in both, which is tough.ChristyEspecially in this day and age, when your email is in your pocket. So when I’m watching her, one eye is on the phone and then I feel terrible because I’m not present. And then, when I’m working, one ear is out for her or wanting to be with her. My heart is pulled in that direction. I just love her so much, and I want to spend all my time with her. She’s just at such a cute age right now, too. She’s starting to talk and walk and you know, all the things. All the milestones. So it’s been a real adjustment. But in terms of how it’s affected or informed my relationship to the topics I cover, that’s also been really interesting. It’s made me so grateful that I was fortunate enough to heal my own relationship with food before having kids. And that is such a huge privilege. And expensive, right? That was like a decade of psychotherapy, at least.VirginiaA lot of hard work and resources.ChristyExactly. It feels like it’s paid off in the sense that, yes, my body has changed, but I’m not fixated on that. Yes, food is sometimes tricky with her, like getting her to eat , but I’m not fixated on that.It’s one thing to say, “yes, Division of Responsibility, trust your child’s body,” when you’re not in it. But it’s quite another when you have a toddler sitting in front of you screaming or fussing because they’re hungry but refusing to eat. So, there’s that piece, too, of wanting to make sure she has enough. Thankfully it’s not coming from this orthorexic place of “I need to get her more vegetables.” It’s literally like, “what will this child eat?”VirginiaAnd how do we avoid hunger meltdowns an hour from now? ChristyYeah, exactly. It’s a strategy thing of managing her day and your day. If she’s hungry in an hour, you just give her more in an hour. And that’s fine. But as she’s starting to have more scheduled stuff going on there is that reality of having to plan.VirginiaRight, what if we’re in the car in an hour and it’s actually not that easy? And yet that’s when they realize that they wish they ate that yogurt. We have all these best practices but in the moment, you can just forget it all.ChristyWhen it’s your kid and you want to do the best for them. A lot of it is not life and death, but some of it really feels that way, like with the choking stuff. That’s something I have gotten kind of anxious about and been really meticulous about. “Okay, we have to cut this in this way and squish this thing,” and now it’s getting so vague because my daughter is over one. And so now a lot of the guidance that you see from reputable sources online is like, “well, if they’re under one cut the blueberries this way, but maybe they can have a whole blueberry once they’re one but maybe no.” Like, “see what your child’s capacity is,” you know?VirginiaJust try it out. Figure it out. Can you measure their esophagus?ChristyAnd I’m like, “No, thank you! Let’s just keep squishing them!” And. of course, my husband might have a different idea of what to do. It just feels so fraught. Even when you go to the pediatrician, for guidance, right? What should we do about this question that feels so fraught and we can’t come to an agreement? And they’re like, “Well, you could do it this way but you also could do it this way.” And like, “see what you think.” And it goes back to this do what feels right for you situation.And we go to a pediatrician who’s a very conventional MD, not integrative or functional, or anything like that. But for a lot of things, I think there aren’t clear cut answers. It’s been really a lesson in having to let go and trust and just do the best we can to set our boundaries and our strategies and then maybe change them as things evolve. VirginiaI think it’s such an exercise in learning to trust, getting to know your child and yourself as a parent and learning what makes sense for you. But the problem is, you don’t know that immediately. So there’s this gray area where you’re trying to figure out how to trust that and nobody ever has really good advice for getting to that place. It’s just time and experience that gets you more comfortable navigating those things. And it’s so much emotional and mental labor.ChristyYeah, it really is. Thankfully, I’m sort of out of the place where I was furiously googling at 3 in the morning. That first six months where you’re just like what is even happening? Like, “is this crying normal?” I feel like that all is somewhat in the rearview now. No one really talks about the toll that that takes on our mental health, right? That sense of not knowing what the hell is going on and feeling like you’re responsible. VirginiaOh, it’s a trauma for sure. And it has a long tail, I think, of processing how deep that fear was. Those 3 am rabbit holes, that’s a real thing.ChristyAnd I mean, I didn’t even have to go through what you went through with a medical trauma.VirginiaOh, yeah. But just for everyone, across the board. Having a human that you are now responsible for keeping alive. It’s a whole thing for sure. ChristyAnd they just send you home with them. Like, “okay, good luck!”VirginiaWhat are they thinking? ChristyUgh, its ridiculous.VirginiaWell, I think you are doing an amazing job. And at the very same time that you’ve been doing all of this, you’ve also been getting a new book ready and that’s what we’re here to talk about. So first of all, big applause for that! I think you had a similar timeline with this book as I had with my first book where you were writing it while you were pregnant.ChristyThat’s right. VirginiaI think we were emailing about due dates of babies and books and how close together you want them to be. And then, of course, coming back from your maternity leave, and jumping right into getting ready to launch a book. It’s a lot. ChristyIt’s a lot. VirginiaSo the new book is called The Wellness Trap. It is a deep dive into the underbelly of modern wellness culture. It is fascinating! So impeccably researched, of course, because it’s Christy. Tell us what inspired this and what made you want to go deeper into wellness, especially right now.ChristyIn late 2020 I was seeing how the pandemic was making us so much more vulnerable to wellness culture, and how the wellness industry, wellness influencers, were capitalizing on COVID to sell products that had no good evidence behind them. Wellness culture in general was like leading people down rabbit holes of myths and disinformation and driving increases in conspiracism. We were starting to see QAnon popping up in wellness spaces and driving the anti-vax movement further into the mainstream, and just generally leading to some really weird and dangerous places. So, that was the impetus to do the book at that time. I had covered wellness in a chapter in my first book and that’s a chapter that seemed to really resonate with a lot of readers. Wellness is the new guise of diet culture and it’s so insidious. People like will be like, “I’m recovering from my eating disorder. Now I’m just gonna get really into wellness.” It’s such a such a fraught territory. That’s a lot of what we talked about when you interviewed me for your first book, right? The sustainable food movement, Michael Pollan, and all the problems with that. The anti-fat bias that’s inherent in those arguments, but also the anti-food bias, right? The demonization of certain foods and lionization of others and the orthorexic mindset that can come out of that. I see that so much with my clients who are recovering from disordered eating.But something I’ve also seen a lot over the years with both clients and readers and listeners, is that people will come to me saying, “my functional medicine doctor diagnosed me with leaky gut syndrome,” or “my naturopath told me I have adrenal fatigue,” or “this person online told me I have chronic Candida and they told me to cut out all these foods and take out all these supplements as a way to treat it but it’s really messing up my relationship with food,” like, “How do I do these things that I need to to take care of my health while maintaining a peaceful relationship with food?” And I feel like that’s been happening more and more in recent years. VirginiaYes, and I just want to pause here for a minute because I have a feeling a lot of folks listening are like, “yes, yes, that’s me.” It is so common.Talk a little bit about how you do approach this with clients? How do you think about it in terms of the book? Are there conditions where elimination diets are sometimes helpful and informative? Or do you see this very much as misdirecting people from really working on things that would actually be health promoting?ChristyIt’s such a good question. I want to empathize with anyone who’s in that position, first and foremost. I’m someone also with multiple chronic illnesses and things that took years to get diagnosed and have been down wellness rabbit holes myself, so I very much empathize with the desire for answers.And yet, for those those three conditions I mentioned, which I cover in the book—chronic Candida, leaky gut syndrome, and adrenal fatigue—there’s this whole other layer to this. Not only is it not evidenc-based to cut out foods and do elimination diets for those conditions, but actually there’s not really good evidence that those conditions really exist. The symptoms people experience are very real, and there are grains of truth in each of each of those conditions. People might be fatigued, but it’s not coming from your adrenals being exhausted or overworked. People might have digestive issues or acne and bloating and dry skin and all these disparate symptoms that might be related to something underlying, or might be all kinds of different conditions that are going on, that are not caused by a chronic overgrowth of yeast in your body. Or people might have digestive issues that are causing them distress, and that have a real medical explanation or are in part driven by disordered eating and some underlying medical stuff, but that’s not because your gut is leaky, and it’s causing all these all these symptoms throughout your body.It’s really hard to untangle that. I think it’s become more common for people to want to seek out a holistic provider or someone who’s going to get to the root cause of things because so many of us are disillusioned by the health care system. I definitely have gone through my own experiences that left me feeling like conventional medicine was really lacking for chronic diseases and illnesses that I have. And so we get sort of excited by and attracted to providers who say, “I’m going to get to the root cause. I’m not just going to give you medicine, but I’m also going to figure out what’s actually going on give you a treatment that’s holistic.”VirginiaI have endometriosis and I have migraines. I completely remember just feeling so dismissed. No one in my regular doctor’s office was considering my symptoms as anything more than just pain management. Like, “Let’s try Advil. If that doesn’t work, let’s try more Advil. And then let’s try some kind of prescription painkiller,” was the beginning and end of the conversation. So of course, it was so appealing to try to find some more cohesive explanation, right? Like some other condition or some thing that would link all of these murky symptoms together. It’s such an understandable place to be at and it makes me really angry at mainstream medicine for ignoring particularly women.ChristyThere are these things that I think conventional medical care is not necessarily set up to address. These quick 5 to 15 minute appointments that we have with most of our providers don’t really allow enough time to get into the details. One thing that integrative and functional and alternative medicine providers of all stripes provide really well is empathy and time. But my experience and that of many people I’ve talked to, has been that can outweigh, at first, the fact that some of these providers aren’t giving evidence-based treatments, and in many cases are actually doing the thing that they accuse conventional medicine of: Prescribing a one size fits all solution. It’s painted in wellness culture, as if conventional medicine just wants to slap a bandaid on it, they want to just give you medicine to make the symptoms go away. They just care about symptom management, they don’t want to get to the root cause. Everybody’s treated the same. It’s not personalized o…
Full show notes at the publisherFAT TALK is now out in the world! To celebrate, Corinne is here to chat with Virginia about the writing and reporting process. If you love what you hear, you can order the hardcover, ebook, or audiobook (or if you’re in the UK and the Commonwealth, the paperback) anywhere you buy books. Split Rock has signed copies (feel free to request a personal inscription!). If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. Disclaimer: Virginia and Corinne are humans with a lot of informed opinions. They are not nutritionists, therapists, doctosr, or any kind of health care providers. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions they give are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.LINKSThe Eating InstinctDiet Coke, obviously.a great review in the Washington PostRead an excerpt from Chapter 11 herelast week’s podcastAmyLynn Steger StrongAubrey GordonSabrina StringsDa'Shaun HarrisonMarquisele MercedesGirls and Sex and Boys and Sex by Peggy OrensteinVirginia's sensitivity reader Doman excerpt of the dads chapter in The AtlanticThe 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!VirginiaYou’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.CorinneAnd I’m Corinne Fay. I work on Burnt Toast and run Selltradeplus. I am super excited because today we’re talking about FAT TALK, which is officially out this week. I thought it would be fun to ask Virginia some questions about writing the book and that whole process—because it has been a process.Order FAT TALK here!VirginiaIt has been a process. And you have been along for a lot of the process! I appreciate you. I appreciate you doing this. Thank you. CorinneI’m really excited to hear a little more behind the scenes and I think our little Burnt Toasties will be excited, too. VirginiaIt’s a little weird to be interviewed on your own podcast, but let’s do it. I’m into it! This is stuff you’re not going to hear in the other media coverage. It is Burnt Toast exclusive content!CorinneSo, this is your second book. I’m really curious about how the idea for this one came about.VirginiaAfter I wrote The Eating Instinct I was doing press and events and talking to people. I was hearing a lot from parents, in particular. It was a little surprising to me because I don’t think of that one as a parenting book, although my motherhood story is in it, but it has a lot of non-parenting stuff, too. But that’s definitely who gravitated to the book. So, I was hearing these questions over and over from folks. “What do I do about my kid and food and my kid and weight and what the doctor says?” and all the things we always talk about. It became clear to me that people were really saying, “I want my kid to have a good relationship with food. I want them to love their body. I don’t want them to get an eating disorder. But I don’t want them to be fat.” And we can’t have it both ways.You can’t encourage a child to have a healthy relationship with food and body if we are only allowing certain bodies to have that. That’s where I realized, in a way, The Eating Instinct did not go far enough. It started with food, which I think is the place a lot of people start with this work, but what we had to get to is anti-fat bias. That’s the bedrock of the whole conversation. So I thought, oh, I need to write a book for parents about anti-fat bias. Like what it is, why you have it, how to unlearn it, how to raise kids in a world that throws so much of that at us.CorinneThat makes a lot of sense. How did you start the writing process? Was there a first sentence or a first chapter you wrote? Did you make an outline first? Where does it all begin?VirginiaI actually tried to write a totally different book after The Eating Instinct for a while. That’s something that I think only me and my agent know. I thought I was going to write a book about girl culture and girlhood… I don’t really remember. It didn’t work. So I spent a long time writing that proposal and I knew it wasn’t going to work. I sent it to my agent—and I love my agent, we have a great relationship. But when something’s not working, she does not email me back super fast. Some time went by and it was also COVID. I think I got it to her in early 2020 and then the pandemic hit and everything was crazy. But she was like, “Yeah, this isn’t hanging together as a book. There’s no hook.”I’m trying to remember when I had the epiphany of like, oh, wait, it’s Fat Talk, that’s the book. Well, originally I was calling it Fat Kid Phobia. But that concept came to me at some point in 2020. And of course, I had zero child care. I was potty training a two-year-old and house training a puppy and trapped in my house with both of them. So the book proposal was definitely happening around the edges of the chaos of COVID lockdown. But once this book came to me, it was so much clearer.I spent months slogging through the proposal for the idea that didn’t work. And this proposal I was able to—when we finally got some childcare later in 2020—just bang out in two weeks. It really came together fast. I think that’s often a sign for me that I’m actually headed in the right direction, if writing does not feel super slow and torturous. In order to sell a nonfiction book, you write a very full proposal that includes an outline. So you kind of have to do an outline whether you like outlining or not. As a writer, I—it will probably not surprise people to know—do like outlining for big projects. I’m a somewhat compulsively organized human being. Corinne knows there’s a lot of spreadsheets in my life, color coded things. CorinneSome really beautiful work in Excel. VirginiaYes, thank you.So you do have to do an outline. And I just want to say: Writing a book proposal is the worst. It’s the hardest, most horrible part of the process because you’re basically trying to put together a whole book that you haven’t researched yet. You don’t actually know everything that you need to know. So it feels like you’re making it up and there’s a lot of impostor syndrome.Because it was my second book, I did not have to write a sample chapter. Usually, you have to write a sample chapter, as well. So that was nice. My agent was like, “They know you can write a book now.” But you have to write this whole overview that explains what the book is, and who the reader is, and why it matters, and why now, and all of these things. Then you have to do a table of contents and detailed chapter summaries. So I had done all of that and once I had the contract and it was time to start working on it, I did have the outline to work from. I was basically taking it chapter by chapter—except I always leave the introduction for last. That I don’t write until the very end. So the first sentence of chapter one is the first sentence I wrote, which is very linear. There were other chapters where I started it one way and then threw that out and found a different way. That definitely happens. It’s not so paint by number. But for getting it started, the outline was really, really helpful. I was also doing all the reporting, finding sources, doing all the interviews. And that was really different this time around because of COVID. I wasn’t doing any in person interviews, really. It was all over Zoom which is such a different reporting experience after doing years of in person reporting, but I ended up really liking it. I could talk to way more people because I didn’t have to travel to them. And unless people blur their backgrounds, you do immediately get dropped into someone’s life in a nice way, whereas if you meet them in a coffee shop or something you don’t always have that sense of them.CorinneYeah, that is interesting.VirginiaSo from January 2021 through June 2022. It was just slogging through chapter after chapter, researching, writing, researching, writing. Rinse, repeat.CorinneAnd while you’re writing, do you have a spot that you like to write? Is it your office? Is it somewhere else? A dreamy Airbnb?VirginiaGod, I wish. No, I am not that romantic writer. I’ve never been to a writer’s retreat. I would love to but I feel like I’m just not cool enough for that. Plus, they don’t usually involve childcare. They seem like something that’s great for single men. If folks know about good writer retreats for moms, hit me up because I would go to one. But no, I write in my office right here where I’m sitting talking to you. This is where it all happens.I don’t actually like to work outside of my office in my house. I have a funny video from midway through COVID of me working on the couch because, again, we had no childcare, and Beatrix who was two-and-a-half, repeatedly closing my laptop saying, “Mama no work.” Me sobbing like, “But I have to work.” Funny memory. Trauma. Anyway!I prefer to work in my office and keep that work/life division but often because I’m with my kids after school, I’m bringing my laptop downstairs to finish stuff in the living room while they’re getting snacks. My boundaries are not perfect, but that’s the idea. I do a lot of early morning writing, too. I just find I can get like 2000 words written in two hours in the morning if I start at like 5am. And if I started at 9am, the same 2000 words will take me three days. I don’t understand what it is, just so many more distractions. Something about that early morning time is helpful. CorinneInteresting. And what about snacks? Any snacks that made Fat Talk possible?VirginiaChocolate chips! Ghirardelli semi-sweet chocolate chips by the bowlful. They are really important to my process.CorinneBeverages? VirginiaDiet Coke, obviously.CorinneOh right, I forgot.VirginiaThis book definitely ran on Diet Coke. So much Diet Coke. Extra toasty cheez-its. When I’m in intense, head-down, book-writing mode I don’t have a lot of time for food prep. So it is very grab-and-go. Oh, and here I have one on my desk right now: Uncrustables. My little snack for later.CorinneNot just for kids? VirginiaNo, I think uncrustables are like the unsung genius. They’re tasty. They’re portable. They’re very efficient. If you like a power bar or one of those things, an Uncrustable is the same concept. It’s just peanut butter.CorinneOkay, I need to try.VirginiaThey’re delicious. They’re in a little pillow of bread. What’s not to love?CorinneSounds good!I feel like a really important part of Fat Talk is all the stories and interviews and anecdotes that are within the chapters. I’m so curious about how those work. How do you find people to interview? What are the logistics—you mentioned Zoom? And is it ever super awkward? Because I imagine it would be.VirginiaYeah, it’s really changed a lot over the years. This is probably the aspect of my professional life that has been most impacted by the internet and the way we live now.When I started my career as a journalist, if you worked in women’s magazines, finding we called them “real people stories” was the bedrock of every feature. You always had to have your real people’s stories. Often, at Marie Claire or whatever, it was sending a junior editor like me out into Times Square. There’s a story I did—one of my real, real proud moments as a women’s magazine story writer—was my first coverline piece, which was “I Dumped Him During Sex!” where I found a bachelorette party in Times Square to get their wildest breakup stories, one of which was the girl who broke up with her boyfriend during sex.CorinneI could see why that was a coverline. I am buying that magazine.VirginiaI know, it was very compelling. My editor was really happy with me. I mean, it fell apart fast in fact checking because she was sober when we had to call back to fact check. We did manage to keep it, I think we changed her name because the next day, she was like, “I do not want to be quoted telling that story.” And I was like, “Why? I can’t imagine!”Traditional journalism was that man-on-the-street or drunk-bachelorette-on-the-street reporting. And obviously, now I live in the woods so that’s not how my life works anymore. Thank God, honestly. That was not my proudest moment.Then it shifted to doing a lot of call-outs on social media. And it is weird because you feel like you’re casting almost sometimes. You’re like, “I want to write a story about this so I need to find someone who’s experienced this.” And you have to think how to word the call out in order to connect with people who will resonate with the story, but not so that you’re like manipulating who will respond to you. You put a lot of thought into how to explain the story in vague yet enticing terms. I don’t know, it’s very strange. So for this, it was a lot of me posting. I would do it on my own social media, I would put the call outs on Burnt Toast, so there are a lot of Burnt Toast readers who contributed stories to the book!Corinne Oh, cool!VirginiaBut also Facebook Mom groups and different Health at Every Size or fat activism groups on Facebook were really useful. Just trying to find the forums where people people who would resonate with the topics are already talking about this stuff and might have stories that they want to share. It is interesting, because some people love talking to a journalist and are really excited to open up their lives and some people think they like the idea and then when you actually get on Zoom or on the phone with them, it suddenly feels incredibly invasive. Which is very valid because it is very invasive. You know, it’s really tough. I think that’s the awkward part. I really care about my sources and I really care about them feeling safe and feeling good about sharing their story, especially in a book like Fat Talk. I even care about that drunk bachelorette and I should not have interviewed her. That was a violation of trust between us, having met in the bar that night. Especially for the type of reporting that this book is, where I was often going back and having multiple conversations with a family, interviewing different members of a family, getting to know them over a few months.I feel really protective of them and I have to balance that with, I need to ask certain questions, or pull out certain details in order for the story to work and make sense to the reader who doesn’t know them and needs to be brought into this full picture of their lives. So it is a weird tension. The best you can do is just try to make clear that you are trying to do justice to their story. It usually helps for folks to care about the issue and want to help raise awareness. There have been times in my career where I’ve been like, yeah, that was our goal but I don’t know that we achieved it and you still had to tell this really personal story. The other thing that we did in this book was we changed the names of all the kids and any grownups affiliated with the kids, unless they were someone who had already been public with their story in a different article or something. Because I just really felt—and my editor agreed with this, too—that if you’re 14 and you talk to me about your eating disorder, that doesn’t need to show up in your Google results ten years from now.CorinneTotally.VirginiaWe ended up even changing names of people who probably didn’t care, didn’t even have like a…
Full show notes at the publisherToday is a very special episode: You are all going to be the very, very first people to hear me read Chapter 1 of FAT TALK: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, which comes out in just 5 days, on April 25. We are excerpting this from the audiobook, which I got to narrate. If you love what you hear, I hope you will order the audiobook or the hardcover (or if you’re in the UK and the Commonwealth, the paperback) anywhere you buy books. Split Rock has signed copies and don’t forget that when you order from them, you can also take 10 percent off anything in the Burnt Toast Bookshop.If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. Disclaimer: Virginia and Corinne are humans with a lot of informed opinions. They are not nutritionists, therapists, doctors, 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.LINKSThat photo by Katy Grannanarchived in the National Portrait Gallery’s Catalog of American PortraitsAnamarie Regino on Good Morning AmericaLisa Belkin's NYT Magazine articlea report published in Children’s Voicea judge ordered two teenagers into foster care2010 analysis published in the DePaul Journal of Health Care LawFat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American CultureFearing the Black BodyHilde Bruch's research papersNational Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA)Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran wrote the first “Fat Manifesto”Several studies from the 1960sresearchers revisited the picture ranking experimentthe 1999–2000 NHANES showed a youth obesity rate of 13.9 percentreaching 19.3 percent in the 2017–2018 NHANESData collected from 1976 to 1980 showed that 15 percent of adults met criteria for obesity.By 2007, it had risen to 34 percent.The most recent NHANES data puts the rate of obesity among adults at 42.4 percent.The NHANES researchers determine our annual rate of obesity by collecting the body mass index scores of about 5,000 Americans (a nationally representative sample) each year.A major shift happened in 1998, when the National Institutes of Health’s task force lowered the BMI’s cutoff points for each weight category, a math equation that moved 29 million Americans who had previously been classified as normal weight or just overweight into the overweight and obese categories.in 2005, epidemiologists at the CDC and the National Cancer Institute published a paper analyzing the number of deaths associated with each of these weight categories in the year 2000 and found that overweight BMIs were associated with fewer deaths than normal weight BMIs.in 2013, Flegal and her colleagues published a systematic literature review of ninety-seven such papers, involving almost three million participants, and concluded, again, that having an overweight BMI was associated with a lower rate of death than a normal BMI in all of the studies that had adequately adjusted for factors like age, sex, and smoking status.But in 2021, years after retiring, Flegal published an article in the journal Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases that details the backlash her work received from obesity researchers.After her paper was published, former students of the obesity researchers most outraged by Flegal’s work took to Twitter to recall how they were instructed not to trust her analysis because Flegal was “a little bit plump herself.”the BMI-for-age chart used in most doctors’ offices today is based on what children weighed between 1963 and 1994. a 1993 study by researchers at the United States Department of Health and Human Services titled “Actual Causes of Death in the United States.” the study’s authors published a letter to the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine saying, “You [ . . . ] cited our 1993 paper as claiming ‘that every year 300,000 deaths in the United States are caused by obesity.’ That is not what we claimed.”“Get in Shape, Girl!”The Fat Studies ReaderToo Fat for Chinaas I reported for the New York Times Magazine in 2019, it has become a common practice for infertility clinics to deny in vitro fertilization and other treatments to mothers above a certain body weightMichelle Obama 2016 speech, another speech, a 2010 speech to the School Nutrition Association, 2013 speechMarion Nestle, a 2011 blog postfood insecurity impacted 21 percent of all American households with children when Obama was elected TheHill.com story on SNAP“I could live on French fries,” she told the New York Timesin 2009, explaining that she doesn’t because “I have hips.”Ellyn Satter's an open letter to Obamaseveral other critiques of “Let’s Move"“I don’t want our children to be weight-obsessed"The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by 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!---You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and body liberation. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, and I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.And, as I may have mentioned, I’m the author of FAT TALK: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, which comes out in just five days. WHAT. So we have a very special episode of Burnt Toast for you today. You are all going to be the very, very first people to hear me read Chapter 1.We are excerpting this from the audiobook, which I got to narrate. It was way more intense than I expected, more difficult than podcasting, but also very fun and one of the most rewarding creative experiences I’ve ever had. I will also say that Chapter 1 was the most physically exhausting one to record because it’s the longest chapter in the book. (No I did not know that sitting still and talking for hours would be physically exhausting but it is!) So if you’re daunted by the length of this episode, please know that other book chapters are easy breezy! Maybe not easy breezy, but they are shorter, whether that is on paper or in your ears. But this is also the chapter I am most proud of, in a lot of ways. I’m so excited for you to hear it. (Content warning for explicit discussions of medical anti-fat bias, childhood trauma, dieting, eating disorders and some unfortunately necessary use of weight numbers and o words. Take care of yourselves!)And of course, if you love what you hear, I hope you will order the audiobook or the hardcover (or if you’re in the UK and the Commonwealth, the paperback) anywhere you buy books. Split Rock has signed copies and don’t forget that when you order from them, you can also take 10 percent off anything in the Burnt Toast Bookshop.Preorder FAT TALK!Thank you so much for supporting this entire process. I give you: The Myth of the Childhood Obesity Epidemic.Chapter 1: The Myth of the Childhood Obesity EpidemicAnamarie Regino is a 25-year-old in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who looks a lot like every other 25-year-old on TikTok. She posts videos of her dogs and her tattoos. She lip syncs and tries out new ways to wear eyeliner. And she participates in sassy memes: “Soooo . . . this whole meme that’s going around with ‘decade challenge’?” she says in a video from 2019. “I just want to say: I think I won that.” Then Anamarie’s current lipsticked smirk is replaced by a photo of her from 2009. In both shots, Anamarie is fat. In fact, in other recent TikTok videos and Instagram posts, Anamarie proudly describes herself as fat, affectionately calls out her double chin, and uses hashtags like #PlusSize and #BBW (short for “big, beautiful woman”). But this video is also tagged #WeightLossCheck, because in the 2009 photo, Anamarie is significantly larger than her adult self. Twelve-year-old Anamarie has a half-hearted smile, but her dark bangs are swept over most of her face. It is the classic awkward “before” shot.It’s not, however, the most famous photo ever taken of Anamarie. That photo, shot by Katy Grannan when Anamarie was just four years old, first ran in a 2001 New York Times Magazine story and is now archived in the National Portrait Gallery’s Catalog of American Portraits. Anamarie’s body became part of our historical record when she was removed from her parents’ custody by the state of New Mexico because she weighed over 120 pounds at age three, and social workers determined that her parents “have not been able or willing” to control her weight.The case made international headlines, with Anamarie’s parents telling their story to Good Morning Americaand to Lisa Belkin of the New York Times Magazine, for the article that accompanied Grannan’s portrait. Anamarie’s mother, Adela Martinez-Regino, had long been concerned about her daughter’s appetite and her rapid growth, and then, her delayed speech and mobility. She sought help from medical professionals repeatedly from the time Anamarie was just a few months old, and multiple tests ruled out any known genetic cause, such as Prader-Willi syndrome, a rare chromosomal disorder that causes children to never feel fullness. But Anamarie continued to grow. And doctors grew frustrated by what they perceived to be a dangerous pattern: Anamarie would lose weight when undergoing their intensive medical regimens, including prescription liquid diets that provided her no more than 550 calories per day. But she would regain the weight when the protocol ended and she was once again left in her family’s care. To the doctors, the risks to Anamarie lay not in their use of aggressive weight loss tactics on a toddler but in what happened when her family let her eat. “They treated her for four years, doctor after doctor. Not one of them could help. Then they took her away for months, and they still couldn’t tell me what was wrong,” Martinez-Regino told Belkin. “They’ve played around with her life like she was some kind of experiment. [ . . . ] They don’t know what’s wrong, so they blame us.”Martinez-Regino also reported that when Anamarie was taken from her parents, they had to listen to their daughter screaming for them as a nurse wheeled her away. During her months in foster care, Anamarie lost some weight and got new glasses but also stopped speaking Spanish (her father’s native language) and was understandably traumatized by the separation from her parents. The state’s decision to take custody of Anamarie was immediately controversial: “If this were a wealthy, white, professional family, would their child have been taken away?” Belkin asked in her piece, noting how often doctors and social workers perceived a language barrier with the Regino family, even though English was Anamarie’s mother’s first language. As a nation, we debated the question in op-eds, on daytime talk shows, and at water coolers: Should a child’s high body weight be viewed as evidence of child abuse?Anamarie Regino wasn’t the first or the last child to be removed from parental custody due to her weight. In 1998, a California mother was convicted of misdemeanor child abuse after her thirteen-year-old daughter, Christina Corrigan, died weighing 680 pounds. A handful of similar cases popped up in Indiana, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas over the subsequent decade, according to a report published in Children’s Voice, a publication of the Child Welfare League of America. And in 2021, a British case made international headlines when a judge ordered two teenagers into foster care because their parents had failed to make them wear their Fitbits and go to Weight Watchers meetings. A 2010 analysis published in the DePaul Journal of Health Care Law by a legal researcher named Cheryl George summarizes one prevailing cultural attitude on such tragedies:Parents must and should be held accountable for their children’s weight and health. Parents can be a solution in this health care crisis, but when they are derelict in their duties, they must be held criminally responsible for the consequences of their actions.George acknowledged the “fear and anxiety” caused when a child is removed from parental custody but quickly dismissed that as a priority, quoting an earlier article on the subject: “If a child remains with his or her parents in order to affirm the ‘attachment,’ we may be overlooking the looming morbid obesity problem,” she wrote. Never mind that removing custody in an effort to address this “morbid obesity” overlooks a child’s emotional and developmental needs, as well as several basic human rights.A New Mexico judge dismissed charges against Anamarie’s parents after a psychiatric evaluation of Martinez-Regino found no evidence of psychological abuse. But the family was left to sort through the wreckage of those harrowing months, while continuing to seek answers that doctors could not provide to explain Anamarie’s accelerated growth. And Anamarie’s story embedded itself in our national consciousness. She became a kind of “patient zero” for the war on childhood obesity. Even Belkin’s piece, which is largely sympathetic to the family, frames Anamarie’s body as the problem. Belkin makes sure to emphasize how this toddler’s weight made her unlovable, describing Anamarie’s “evolution from chubby to fat to horrifyingly obese” in family photos, and noting that Martinez-Regino “knows that the sight of her daughter makes strangers want to stare and avert their eyes at the same time.” Having a fat child was framed as the ultimate parental failure. Anamarie’s story confirmed that our children’s weight is a key measure of our success as parents, especially for mothers.Nowhere in the public conversations around Anamarie’s early childhood was there ever any attempt to understand what Anamarie herself thought of her body or the treatment she received because of it. Today, her social media makes it clear that she’s proud to have lost weight but also proud to still identify as fat, and maybe also still working it all out. (Anamarie—quite understandably—did not respond to my interview requests.) But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, our anxiety about the dangers of fatness in children far outstripped any awareness of their emotional health.Today, this conversation has evolved, but only so far: We want our kids to love their bodies, but we also continue to take it for granted that fat kids can’t do that. A child’s high body weight is still a problem to solve, a barrier to their ability to be a happy, healthy child. This thinking is the result of a nearly forty-year-old public health crusade against the rising tide of children’s weight. We’ve been told—by our families, our doctors, and voices of authority, including First Lady Michelle Obama— that raising a child at a so-called healthy body weight is an essential part of being a good parent.But when we talk about the impossibility of raising a happy, fat child, we’re ignoring the why: It’s not their bodies causing these kids to have higher rates of anxiety, depression, and disordered eating behaviors. Even when high weight does play a role in health issues, as we’ll explore in Chapter 2, it’s often a corresponding symptom, a constellation point in a larger galaxy of concerns. The real danger to a child in a larger body is how we treat them for having that body. Fat kids are harmed by the world, including, too often, their own families. And our culture was repulsed by fat children long before we considered ourselves amid an epidemic of them. “It is easy for us to assume today that the cultural stigma associated with fatness emerged simply a…
Full show notes at the publisherIt's our April Ask Us Anything episode! We're covering Ozempic, clogs, chafing, and what if you just don't want your kid to be fat. If you are already a paid subscriber, you’ll have this entire episode in your podcast feed and access to the entire transcript in your inbox and on the Burnt Toast 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 go paid. Also, don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books. (Or get the UK edition or the audiobook!) Disclaimer: Virginia and Corinne are humans with a lot of informed opinions. They are not nutritionists, therapists, doctors, 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 LINKSSellTradePlusUniversal Standard body shortsGirlfriend Collective also has a shorts body suit thingCasey Johnston's couch-to-barbell programVirginia's book launchDacy Gillespie, Mindful ClosetJia Tolentino’s Ozempic pieceThe mainstream media's bad Ozempic coverageMarch mailbag episodeKatherine ZavodniReclaiming "treats"the lunchbox pieceVirginia's Charlotte Stone clogs Clogs for wider feetClogs with a strapCorinne, resident Burnt Toast underwear expert.Panty DropKade & VosChafing Shorts: Snag, Thigh SocietyMegaBabe Thigh RescueTrouble Cookies.Mother GrainsBob’s Red Mill sorghum flourTrue & Co brasCREDITSThe 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.---VirginiaYou’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.CorinneAnd I’m Corinne Fay. I work on Burnt Toast and run SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus sized clothing.VirginiaAnd it is time for your April mailbag episode! We have so many good questions this month. A lot of parenting food questions. I think maybe because I just ran the lunchbox piece in the newsletter it’s on everybody’s minds. But also, as usual, some fat fashion stuff. Clogs are coming up later. And Ozempic, because obviously. So it’s gonna be a good one.CorinneThis is also a paywalled episode, which means to hear the whole thing, you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It’s just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Here’s how to join us.VirginiaSo before we dive in, how are you doing? What’s new with you, Corinne?CorinneI’m doing well. One thing that’s new with me is: I just signed up to do a powerlifting meet. So I’m feeling nervous. VirginiaWell, yeah. Is this like a competition thing, where people come and watch? CorinneI think so. I mean, obviously, I’ve never done something like this before. It’s in Albuquerque, and it’s being run by my gym. And it’s all women’s. VirginiaThat sounds very cool. CorinneI’m just having a little of like, Oh, what did I do? Let’s see. Wow. Am I going to be the most amateur, weakest person there? I might.VirginiaBut you’ll still be super strong and amazing. Because the weakest person at a powerlifting competition is still the strongest person in most other rooms.CorinneThat’s a good point. And I think one great thing about lifting is, it’s really more about your own goals and competing with yourself. But still.VirginiaSo is it like whoever lifts the most is the winner?CorinneSo my understanding is very loose, but I know there are different weight classes. So you compete against people who are roughly around the same size?.VirginiaInteresting. Okay.CorinneAnd then I think it’s a cumulative weight of how much you lift, like combined squat, deadlift, bench press. VirginiaWow, that’s so cool. Julia Turshen recently did one of these.CorinneI feel like I was slightly influenced by Julia Turshen.VirginiaDid she enable you? Julia, good job! The pictures and videos she posted of it looked super exciting. And it looked like a very professional athletic setting. I would be intimidated for sure.CorinneThe other thing that I’m sure we’ll end up talking about again, but you have to wear a singlet which is like, where am I gonna find a singlet? And knee socks.VirginiaKnee socks! Why knee socks? CorinneI’m like, oh my God, I’m never gonna find knee socks that fit me, but I’m trying to figure out if I can wear Universal Standard body shorts as a singlet, because I already have one of those. VirginiaThat feels like a great solution. CorinneIt’s singlet-esque? But I don’t know what the actual requirements are.VirginiaGirlfriend Collective also has a shorts body suit thing.CorinneI should look into that. VirginiaBut I feel like you should be able to work with what you have. Especially for your first one. Once you’re a pro and doing this all the time, you’ll get, like, something with rhinestones. CorinneOnce I’m a sponsored Olympic athlete. Yes.VirginiaI love that like we’re getting to follow along on the journey. Obviously we’re going to need another installment on this afterwards.CorinneOkay, yes. And just to be clear, the meet isn’t until July, so, so I have a lot of time to think about it.VirginiaI’m just saying though. A few months ago, you were recommending Casey Johnston and her couch-to-barbell program. And you were like, “I’m just using a broomstick.”CorinneIt’s true. VirginiaAnd now!CorinneIt’s true and now I’m lifting actual pounds.VirginiaVery, very cool. CorinneYeah, what’s new with you? VirginiaI feel like what’s new with me is that I am surviving, not thriving a little bit. So this is going to come out in mid-April. So we’ll be two weeks out from book launch. So I will either be better or I will be way worse. I mean, having had two children, it’s sort of similar to the last month of pregnancy when you’re like, it’s all you can think about, this thing is happening, but you have no control over it. I mean, at least with the book, you know, like the date it’s coming. Which with pregnancy, they have yet to really figure out, unless you’re scheduling. But I counted it up this morning, I have recorded 18 podcasts so far. Of other people’s podcasts. Like for talking about the book. 18 people’s podcasts. CorinneOh whoa. That’s wild.VirginiaAnd like, seven of them were in the last week and a half? So I feel like my voice is hanging on by a thread. And I’m just getting a little mush-brained about it. I need to step back a little.Obviously, I am super grateful. I love that people want me to talk about the book. I love that people are excited about the book. I cannot wait for it to be out. But it’s just at a point where there are a lot of details. Like, review all the press release materials, review the marketing plan…. I forgot we were recording today. And it’s not the first thing I’ve forgotten. Like, I forgot the kids had a dentist appointment. We made it, but I’m just like, my brain is holding too many pieces of information. Some things are getting dropped. I’m just coming in with a sort of scattered energy. But I’ve got the Throat Coat Tea that I’m living on right now. And we’re gonna do it! CorinneDo you have any upcoming book promo stuff that you’re really excited to do?VirginiaWell, I did an interview yesterday that I can’t talk about yet, because I don’t think it will be out by the time this launches. CorinneTop secret. VirginiaThere are two top secret ones that will be coming out in the week or two after this podcast episode. And they’re both very exciting. And I will say that I was very happy with my outfit for one. So that was good. And the other one the outfit matters less because it is not visual. I will say no more! Preorder FAT TALK!And yeah, that part’s been fun, actually figuring out clothes for like the book tour Dacy has been helping me and maybe some time we’ll do a follow up about finding clothes for this. Because it’s a very specific level of, how dressy do you want to be versus comfortable? So maybe there will be an essay of what I wore for the book tour.CorinneI would love to read that.VirginiaOkay, so we’re going to do some questions! The first one is a hot take opportunity. This came in over Instagram multiple times. People would like to know what we saw of Jia Tolentino’s Ozempic piece in The New Yorker.CorinneOkay, well, now is my time to be embarrassed when I admit that I read it really lightly. I did a really light skim sort of read, and was like, seems fine. And then I’ve seen everyone else being like, “This article is horrible.” And I’ve been like, wow, I really need to revisit that and find out why people are so upset.VirginiaI’m glad to hear people are saying they’re upset! I felt like no one was talking about it at all for a little bit. And I was like, what is happening? I feel like the New York magazine piece came out, which I wrote about and that was not great. And then this piece comes out two weeks later, and I’m just like, why? Why did it come out? It’s the same piece really. And I want to be clear that I love Jia’s work. I loved Trick Mirror. I think she writes phenomenal stuff. The piece she did on Angela Garbes last year was just incredible. And this was… not that. It is very much centering the story on thin people who would like to be thinner if they take Ozempic. There’s one fat person interviewed for the story. And, you know, of course, every fat person is entitled to their own experience of fatness. But her quotes just reinforced so many stereotypes. She talks about wanting to lose weight because she feels like she can’t hike or run at her current size. And it’s like, come on. We can do better. CorinneIf you want to hike and run, you could work on hiking and running?VirginiaRight! There are so many fat hikers and runners on Instagram. CorinneI thought the compounding pharmacy thing was kind of interesting.VirginiaOh, like explaining how sort of like loosey goosey it is and getting the drugs? CorinneBecause I’ve seen a lot of people on TikTok being like, I’m getting this patented drug from a compounding pharmacy. And I’m like, wait, is that real? Like, what is that? So I thought that part was interesting.VirginiaIt was interesting. But when she goes through the process of getting it herself, I always just worry—this is the eating disorder handbook stuff.Corinne True true. You’re literally telling people how to do it. VirginiaAnd I get that that’s not hard to find. We all have Google. But is that something The New Yorker should be doing? Does The New Yorker need to teach us how to get our weight loss drugs? I don’t know. I feel like the general trend in the Ozempic coverage–And this is not just Jia, not just New York Magazine. But by and large, this coverage has this underlying question of: If we have now found a silver bullet that will make people thin, does that mean we can just forget about anti fat bias? And that is so dark. We cannot just say, now that we have a way to make everybody thin, it’s okay to hate fat people, because we can just make them thin.CorinneThat’s a good point.VirginiaI’m not judging anyone’s individual decisions about this. But this larger discourse is not helpful. That’s my hot, grouchy take. CorinneThat’s the hot take! I would love to know also, if any listeners have strong feelings about it? VirginiaYes. Comments are open!CorinneOkay, the next question is:Q: The one thing I can’t shake as a new mom is worrying about making my daughter fat. How do I shake that? I grew up fat and it was hard. I want better for her. But does that mean dieting?EPISODE CREDITSCo-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay. Producer: Kim Baldwin. Logo design: Deanna Lowe.Theme Song: Farideh.Video Editor: Elizabeth AyikuAudio Engineer: Tommy HarronFollow us on social! Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith. Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
Full show notes at the publisherToday's episode is a Comfort Food rerun featuring a conversation between Virginia, Amy Palanjian, and Darcy Lockman. Darcy is a clinical psychologist and author of All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership. All the Rage explores how egalitarian relationships become traditional ones when children are introduced to the household and why a disproportionate amount of parental work falls on women, no matter their background, class or professional statusDarcy’s book was foundational for me in starting to understand this issue more deeply. One thing I really like about Darcy’s work is that she does invite men into the conversation. It’s not just ranting, it’s about how we can change the conversation and move forward. And remember, if you order All the Rage from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off if you also preorder (or have already preordered) Fat Talk (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder a signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. And! You can now preorder the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player and become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.LINKSDarcy's WebsiteKids Don’t Damage Women’s Careers — Men DoMommastrongCREDITSThe 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!---You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith and I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.This week I am out on spring break. It’s been a while since we did a rerun, so for new listeners reruns come from Comfort Food, the sadly now retired podcast I made with my very best friend Amy Palanjian of Yummy Toddler Food.This episode was called mealtime mental load struggles. It’s an interview that Amy and I did with Darcy Lockman, who is the author of All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership. We aired this episode on September 19, 2019, so you have to put yourself in the pre-pandemic world. It’s definitely a conversation that’s ahead of its time because we were still months away from the pandemic which really laid bare all the disproportionate ways that mothers, and really all non cis men people, carry families.Darcy’s book is one of the texts that was just so foundational for me in starting to understand this issue more deeply. One thing I really like about Darcy’s work is that she does invite men into the conversation. It’s not just ranting—not that I don’t love ranting about straight men—but it’s not just ranting about how they’re failing. It’s also talking about how we can change the conversation and move forward. One quick note I want to make before we dive in: Darcy’s book does focus on heterosexual partnerships, and therefore this conversation is very cis/het focused. If I were to do it today, I would definitely broaden that out a lot. I have since heard from plenty of queer couples who also struggle with this issue. Though it is also true that queer couples are often a lot more proactive about addressing and working through mental load divisions, just because they aren’t falling back on the hetero gender conditioning bullshit. So there’s obviously a lot more layers than we could get into here and I am aware that that piece is missing. It is one I would love to circle back on in the future.Episode 88 TranscriptVirginiaHello, and welcome to episode 43 of Comfort Food. This is the podcast about the joys and meltdowns of feeding our families and feeding ourselves.AmySo, we’ve talked about the challenges of sharing the mental load of meal times in past episodes, check out episode 15, 31, and 35. But this week, we brought in an expert who really knows what the research says about how and why this gender divide happens and we’re going to talk about what we think everyone should be doing about it.VirginiaI’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I’m a writer, a contributing editor to Parents Magazine and author of The Eating Instinct. I write about how women relate to food and our bodies in a culture that gives us so many unrealistic expectations about those things,AmyI’m Amy Palanjian, a writer, recipe developer and creator of Yummy Toddler Food. I love helping parents stop freaking out about what their kids will and won’t eat and sharing doable recipes that fit into even the busiest family’s schedule.VirginiaI am so excited to introduce our guests today, Darcy Lockman, who is the author of All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership. I am trying to remember where I first found out about Darcy’s book, but I mostly just remember rushing to buy it and reading it voraciously in about three days. I encourage you all to do the same. Darcy is a clinical psychologist practicing in New York City, also a journalist who’s written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and many other places. Darcy, welcome to the show!DarcyThank you so much for having me, Amy and Virginia.VirginiaWhy don’t you tell us a little more about yourself and your family, especially because I think everyone’s going to be interested to know what prompted you to write a book about all this equal partnership stuff at home.DarcyWell, when I tell you, I have two kids and I’m married to a man, I bet you can imagine. I live in Queens and I have two daughters. They actually started school today, second and fifth grade. I live with them, and my husband, and our dog. And I was really surprised when we had kids, starting with our first daughter, but kind of snowballing through our second, how much of the workload of all of it fell to me. It was hard to articulate and name. My husband, despite the fact that we both work full time—we actually met in grad school, we’re both therapists—he seemed to be sailing through his life without much having changed. And that wasn’t the same for me. Which is not to say that he didn’t spend time with and adore our children because he certainly did and does. But his life was still going to work and then coming home and like hanging out with the kids. Whereas I suddenly had like 1000 new things to do every day. And it wasn’t anything that we planned that way. We would have certainly identified as progressive and egalitarian before we had kids. And if it had just been our problem, I would have thought, Okay, what am I doing wrong? But I noticed that all of the women around me with young kids spoke about what happened at home in the same way. So every day in the early years of parenthood, I just found myself asking this question: Why are we all still living this way? This wasn’t what we expected. What’s going on? And it became such a burning question that I ultimately decided to try to answer it by writing a book.VirginiaYou’re speaking to a lot of our souls right now.DarcyI’m sure. AmyWe talk a lot about mental load issues in the kitchen in many of our episodes. And in your book, you have an anecdote about making chicken nuggets that I’m sure will speak to a lot of us. Can you talk a little bit about why you think family meals in particular remain such a gendered issue and also tell the chicken nugget story?DarcyI’ll start with the chicken nugget story because I think that everyone has this chicken nugget story. We had been at the beach all day, my husband and my kids. This was not this summer but the past one. We stayed all day. It was a gorgeous day, and we didn’t eat dinner. So we’re driving home in the car and I’m thinking, okay, what are the kids going to eat? They’re starving, they need to get to bed. So you know, I said to my husband, “oh, we have chicken nuggets in the freezer. Let’s give them those when we get home,” and he said, “Okay.”So, we get home and the kids need to shower off because they’ve been at the beach. My little one was five at the time, so I was helping her shower. My older daughter went to shower herself, and my husband went into the kitchen. So I assumed he was making dinner for the kids, because we had discussed it in the car. So about five minutes later, after my younger daughter and I had showered, we came out together, I dried her off, she was getting dressed. And I walked into the kitchen and my husband was just standing there drinking a beer and there were no nuggets in the oven. They hadn’t even been gotten out of the freezer. I mean, clearly, nothing had happened. And it wasn’t even like an elaborate dinner. This kind of thing happens all the time, wherein I’m the only one thinking about what the family needs. And my husband’s not a bad guy. He’s not a selfish guy.VirginiaHe’s not thinking those steps ahead.AmyI mean, my husband is not a bad guy either. But it’s like you are telling the story of my house.VirginiaI was just thinking about every day this summer we would—like not every day but a lot of weekends, we would take the girls to the pool. And I was always like, “let’s eat lunch at the pool.” You know, they have like hot dogs or chicken fingers or whatever. And I was always like, “let’s just eat lunch at the pool before we go home.” Because I’m picturing getting home in a wet swimsuit, figuring out lunch, and he was always like, “Ah, it’s so expensive. Let’s just go home for lunch.” And I was like, I don’t understand how you don’t understand why that’s so much worse.DarcyYou do understand why he doesn’t understand. I mean, “Let’s go home and you make them lunch instead, while I go clean up.”VirginiaRight, while I take a shower. And we’ve saved $40 on pool food, which I get is ridiculous, but it’s aggravating. DarcyWell he didn’t pay you $40 for your time, right? VirginiaExactly. DarcyThis is the thing. There’s all this unpaid labor that women end up doing. And it really adds up over the life course. And it makes a big difference to people’s financial lives. I read recently—I keep coming across this stuff that I wish I could have put this in the book. Women over 65 are twice as likely as men over 65 to be living in poverty and a lot of that is attributable to how much more time they have spent in their lives to in free labor.VirginiaThat is staggering. That is really staggering.DarcyWe laugh about it, understandably, because this is our experience and it’s hard not to laugh, because we are living it—laugh and be enraged.VirginiaLaugh and cry a little bit. DarcyBut there really are serious consequences to the fact that women are the ones who carry most of this stuff. So, the chicken nuggets story. Everyone has that story. And it happens so regularly. And I think women remain more responsible for the mental labor of meals because they’re more responsible for everything. So I think it’s of a piece, I don’t know, a special piece of it. It’s one part of it. It’s just consistent across the board.VirginiaAnd it’s such a big source of labor at home that if you’re doing everything, of course, you’re going to be doing this giant thing.DarcyRight. And kids eat three times a day. The lawn needs to be mowed, I don’t know how often because I don’t have a lawn.AmyOnce a week.VirginiaYeah, like maybe every once every two weeks.AmyDuring the growing season.DarcyAnd if it doesn’t get done the consequences are not catastrophic. You can’t stop feeding your family.VirginiaRight, the lawn is far more optional than the chicken nuggets. DarcyI got a lot of notes from men after the book came out saying, “I do all the yard work.”VirginiaYeah, I hear that a lot. Yeah, “I’m in charge of the outside.” Like the outside is not where the kids are most of the time. It’s just not where most of the work is.DarcyThere was a great study that came out after my book came out that I wish I could have in my book, but urban men who don’t have outdoor work to do, such as in my family, we don’t really use a car, we don’t have a yard, there’s no gutter to clean. Urban men don’t make up for the difference in the labor they don’t have to do outside by doing more inside.VirginiaInteresting. They’re just really living their best lives. DarcyLying on their beds playing on their phones. That’s their best lives. I’m sorry, I do get really cynical. VirginiaWe’re not putting anybody’s husband, including yours, who has obviously been a good sport about this whole project, we’re not putting anyone on blast here. But I remember reading the chicken nuggets story and circling it in my copy of the book. When you’re talking about it in the book you wrote, “it was not laziness, it was something I had no name for and nothing I could hope to understand.” And that really struck me because it does feel like this opaque thing, where if you’re the person, the woman, who’s thinking the six steps ahead and used to figuring out like, “Okay, what do they need to eat? And when are we doing this?” and juggling all of that, it feels so hard to understand why the other person can’t see the same needs. But what did the research show you about why that’s happening? Why are men failing to see and let alone act on these really basic needs of kids needing dinner?DarcySociologists have really good language for this. They talk about how girls are really raised to be communal, to think about other people and their needs and concerns a lot of the time, and how boys are raised more to think about their own sense of agency, to be agentic, as they say, about their ambitions and their pleasures, and not think about others quite as much. So in that context, it makes sense that when in adulthood, you have a man and a woman living together, these two different ways of being are going to come together in a household in exactly this way.VirginiaWow, that’s fascinating. So it’s very much a socialized thing versus like, oh, women are just natural caregivers?DarcyWomen are no more natural caregivers than men. We do make a lot of false assumptions about biology. Women can gestate babies, but beyond that, men and women are equally capable of thinking about others and doing all of this stuff. Even when they study the physiological responses of mothers and fathers to babies, they’re exactly the same. They don’t really find any differences. In the 70’s they started looking at dads, which hadn’t been done before that. And they did studies in nursery wards of men’s heart rate, skin conductance and blood pressure when interacting with their infants with their newborns, and they rose at the same rate as women. There were no physiological differences in responses. So the only thing that differs between men and women is that men take a step back in the presence of their wives.But what happens is parenting skills are learned and not innate. So if men are always taking a step back, that way the learning curve is going to be much different for men and women. So women tend to spend more time with babies early on and then they learn more and then they…
Full show notes at the publisherToday Virginia is chatting with Jessica Wilson, MS, RD. Jessica is a dietitian and community organizer who co-created the #amplifymelanatedvoices challenge which went viral in 2020. She is also the author of It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women’s Bodies which came out in February. If you are someone who has been in the anti-diet, intuitive eating, Health at Every Size spaces for a while, this conversation may give you some really big questions to sit with—it definitely did for me. If you’re newer to these spaces, I hope that this work helps you feel more welcome and more seen. And remember, if you order It’s Always Been Ours from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also preorder (or have already preordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. And don't forget to preorder! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. You can preorder your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. And! You can now preorder the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSJessica's Instagram: @Jessicawilson.msrd. Jessica's TikTok: byJessicaWilson.Critiquing the Health at Every Size communitySabrina StringsDa'Shaun Harrisonyet another women’s magazine story about Ozempicintuitive eating and chocolate cakethe kid who can enjoy Oreosnecklace extenders for fat necks! 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 87 TranscriptJessicaSo I have been a clinical dietitian for over a decade. I started in college health and I was taught zero things about eating disorders. I was very excited because people in their late teens and early twenties must just want to eat food and just learn how to adult!VirginiaThat sounds right. JessicaThat was my assumption. I was not ready for people to not want to eat food. Like, I became a dietitian because I wanted to talk to people who wanted to eat food. Like, that makes sense.VirginiaThat does make sense.JessicaSo, I was not ready. I was probably bad at it for a good two years, working with people with eating disorders and disordered eating because the nuances and complexities were just not what was written in books. It was all about, “They probably experienced trauma and this is why they have eating disorders so this is what you have to do,” and “ideal body weight.”VirginiaOh man.JessicaYeah, that was the books.Virginia“Ideal body weight” should definitely be part of a conversation about eating disorders. That sounds great. JessicaSo, I went from there into the Health at Every Size community and then I went out of the Health at Every Size community and into more body political spaces.VirginiaWe are talking about your incredible new book It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women’s Bodies which came out last month. I mean, Jessica, the book is powerful. So important, so beautifully written. I really could not put it down. You can ask my family, I was reading it last night and ignoring them. I want everyone who works in food and bodies in any capacity to read it because it feels like such an important and desperately missing piece of this conversation.You argue that our continued focus on body positivity, on diet culture, on wellness culture, all of this is keeping us distracted from systems and structures that truly oppress bodies, and that this focus is enabling us to avoid a deeper, and I would say probably much harder, conversation about liberation. So let’s start there. Why do we need to do this reframing?JessicaI really appreciate that you teased that out and were actually open to this conversation because I don’t feel like this is where our field is. We’re still using “anti-diet” and “diet culture” and thinking that is good enough, thinking that is an umbrella-enough term to speak to everyone and their experiences.Sabrina Strings has done a great job, Da'Shaun Harrison has done a great job of really breaking down how anti-fatness is connected to anti-Blackness and therefore structural racism and systemic inequalities. But somehow, we get caught. We just jump into what’s easier. And it’s easier to talk about a drive for thinness, or diet culture, or Ozempic, and how that’s impacting people’s bodies and thinking that is the problem. Or Ozempic is the problem. When, like, why are people shrinking themselves? Why is that happening, in a cultural context? Why are we not talking about white supremacy and capitalism and the safety and survival that is gained from folks by shrinking themselves?But when we talk about just the drive for thinness or the thin ideal, or any of these simple conversations, it’s easier. It’s a harder conversation to talk about structures and so it keeps us really comfortable. It doesn’t ask us to stretch, it doesn’t implicate us in any of this stuff. Those of us who are white, those of us who are thin, we just get to talk to our people about not wanting to be on a diet anymore. People aren’t seen in those conversations. We already know that folks of color, especially Black folks, don’t see themselves within the eating disorder diagnosis. That is for many reasons, but a lot of our choices to shrink our bodies and make us not as hyper visible come from safety and survival. So the more we talk about thinness, the more we talk about the cures and wellness or body positivity, the less we’re going to see our clients. And of course that has an impact on the care we give. That impacts who sees themselves within the field.VirginiaI’m coming at this as a journalist—I’m not a clinician of any kind—and in reading your book, I was thinking a lot about how much the media has contributed to this through the eating disorder stories that we tell. I came from women’s magazines. I did a lot of harm. The eating disorders stories we told (and that the media continues to tell) always centered the thin white girl. That’s another layer to this I just want to name that. It’s the way that dietitians and therapists are approaching this work through the white lens. It’s also then being reinforced by the media’s discussion of these issues. And we’re seeing it for sure in the Ozempic coverage right now, which is just yet another women’s magazine story about weight loss.Let’s talk a little more about this misconception that eating disorders develop when people are so concerned about their own bodies, disturbed by their own bodies, and how this leaves out anyone who’s struggling because their body disturbs other people. JessicaThe body positivity conversations are always meant to fix this misconception that we have about our bodies. It’s the idea that our bodies are fine just the way they are and we just need to think they’re fine and then they will be fine. [Body positivity teaches that] the problem is within us, in the way that we can think about our bodies.But that says nothing about the messages that we’re getting about our body from society. I may feel great about my body, but I still have to leave my house. Making me feel great about my body does nothing in the context of society. Thinking a size twelve is fine when I really want to be a size six, or whatever it is for white women. Yes, you can do that work, because it’s fine. But when we’re talking about other folks, it’s not fine. I can’t think myself out of my reality.VirginiaI can’t think myself into accessing medical care. JessicaOr jobs.VirginiaJobs, clothing access, all of that stuff. And it’s tough because people’s individual pain is valid and real. But it’s just so much attention going towards this one very specific experience of that pain and not enough attention going to the rest.Can you talk more about how eating disorder treatment fails Black women? I’d also love if you wanted to talk to us about Lexi who’s so important in the book and why concepts like diagnosis and recovery just don’t even necessarily make sense as treatment goals for some of these folks.JessicaI’ll start with a brief overview of Lexi’s story. She was a gymnast from age three and was always literally judged alongside thin white girls. As a Black gymnast, she was inherently “too muscular,” or “too powerful” for the more ‘elegant’ events. And she wanted to do the ‘elegant’ events, like beam and bars. So in order to be judged as appropriate for that, shrinking her body was something that meant winning. She never thought that her purging, that her laxative or whatever cleanse was disordered, because it just made sense. VirginiaIt was what she was being told to do.JessicaRight. Her scores were improving. She was “winning.” What was wrong with it? It was totally just normal for her. It wasn’t until I was like, “you might want to eat more than broccoli for dinner.” She was like, “hmmm, no.” I was like, “so this is the work that I do.” She’s like, “Yeah, this isn’t disordered. This is normal. Black girls don’t get eating disorders. That is for frail people. I’m not interested in being thin at all. This is about winning. This is not about thinness.” VirginiaInteresting.JessicaRight. So it just wasn’t the language that we use, like a drive for thinness or whatever it is. She also wasn’t underweight. She’s probably technically, according to BMI standards, overweight and always being told by medical and professional folks to lose weight. VirginiaPurging, all of that, was never getting flagged by any health care provider as something to worry about.JessicaExcept for the dentist.VirginiaWell, I’m glad someone noticed, but they aren’t exactly equipped.JessicaNo, and they’re not going to coordinate any care. They’re just going to be like, hmm this thing, and be like that’s, that’s what’s going on here.And then all our recovery models that are focused on “ideal body weight” and weight gain and all of these things. Why would that be something someone would consider when their life is, I wouldn’t say exponentially better because that’s entirely subjective, but what they’re doing is working, is how I put it. So this recovery questionnaire or these steps of meal plan exchanges or whatever it is, why would I be doing that? I don’t even have an eating disorder to begin with. What are you telling me to do? VirginiaThat definitely makes sense in the gymnastics context, but then how is this failing all Black women, not just Black gymnasts? JessicaSo Lexi found safety and survival in what she was doing in gymnastics. But I was talking about Black women who are invisible but also hyper visible in any situation. For those of us who have been told we’re too much or we literally don’t fit into certain scenarios. There can be professional and social capital gained when we literally shrink our bodies because we become less literally and less of a threat to people around us, more palatable.I tell the story of Mia in the book, who was in an all white grad program and saw that people were treating her differently as she went on her “wellness journey” and ended up losing weight. Me saying, “Hi, I saw in your chart—” which I did, “—that you have an eating disorder diagnosis.” She’s like, “No, that’s not why I’m here. That’s might be what it says.” But what she wanted was supplements to make her hair grow back. And that was it. She was like, “That’s not what I have. This is what I’m doing because it’s working.” And I’m like, I don’t have tools to deal with this situation. This is not what I was taught. So what do I do now?VirginiaWhat do you do? Obviously, the practices that Mia and Lexi are engaging in are taking a toll on their health, but they’re also logical ways to keep their bodies safe. How do you navigate this obvious need for safety, and also this concern that you’re not eating enough?JessicaI think it’s great that you use the word navigate because I feel like some people would use the word treat, you know? Because what they have going on is, in theory, not a diagnosis. We’re not going to pathologize what they’re doing.This is when the conversation becomes broader. So again, keeping it small and talking about the societal pressures of basic thinness or whatever it is really scapegoats a conversation about systems and structures and white supremacy. The solution, in theory, is changing society. But in those moments, all I can do is validate their reality, rather than saying, “actually, what I need you to do is…” or “you would feel better if…” I did get caught up into that, because it was like a desperation for me. It made it all about me in a moment. I was pushing what I thought she needed or what I wanted to see for myself because I wanted to be able to help this person. But the solution is not a clinical intervention, it’s a societal change.VirginiaWhich is hard.JessicaRight, what do you do?VirginiaIt’s a difficult place to find ourselves.JessicaSo, I introduce Fearing the Black Body and she’s like, “Yes! This is what it is. And maybe I’ll read this later.” But right now, this is not, a conversation that I can have because this is how I need to survive right now.VirginiaThere’s a lot of heartbreak to this work you’re doing. A lot of heartbreak. JessicaYes. It wasn’t until like a month ago that I just cried after an appointment. It wasn’t even like I let it build up. I was just able to sit in that moment and shed a few tears just because it was sad, not because it had anything to do with me or anything to do with that patient. This society is just trash and I’m going to be sad about that right now rather than making it about me and whether or not I’m able to cure this patient or whatever it is. And then I moved on. It was like, that was sad and I’m allowing it to just be sad.VirginiaThat sounds really important but really hard. I can imagine the struggle to to sit there in the moment and not make it about you. Not push like “but wait, we need you to eat bread.”Jessica“I need to problem solve this. I’m here to give the solution.”VirginiaThat’s really hard. And I mean, not to push for solutions because I understand it’s the systemic change, but I guess I’m just curious, what you would want to see from particularly all the white dietitians and folks in the field who are who are not going to innately have this context?JessicaAs dietitians or therapists, we just focus on the food. You know, I am seeing someone like Mia get an eating disorder dietitian, when it’s not about the eating at all. So can I get you somebody who can talk to you about your identity development in context, so that you can see what is going on. You still get to make your own choices, but I want you to know that your body is not the problem. That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about society. I always think that healing comes from community. And that isn’t our body…
Full show notes at the publisher
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