Stay ConnectedBurnt Toast is your body liberation community. We’re working to dismantle diet culture and anti-fat bias, and we have a lot of strong opinions about comfy pants.
Co-hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (NYT-bestselling author of FAT TALK) and Corinne Fay (author of the popular plus size fashion newsletter Big Undies).
Copyright: © Virginia Sole-Smith
“The main problem with the BMI is not that it sometimes thinks thin people are fat. The main problem with the BMI is that trans people who exceed a certain BMI can't get life saving, gender affirming care. The main problem with the BMI is that there are surgeons who will not operate on fat people and require them to lose hundreds of pounds before they can access X, Y, or Z surgical procedure that they desperately need. But magically, they absolutely can manage surgery when it's weight loss surgery.”You're listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fat phobia, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.I recorded this intro like six times because they got way too gushy every time, but today I am so excited to be talking to Aubrey Gordon. If you don't know Aubrey, she is the co-host of the Maintenance Phase podcast. She is also the author of what What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat and her brand new book, which is out this week. Run, don’t walk, to get "You Just Need to Lose Weight" And 19 Other Myths about Fat People.I'm going to let us get right into it because Aubrey is awesome and this conversation is a total delight. So here's Aubrey!PS. If you missed Aubrey’s last Burnt Toast episode, you can catch up here.Episode 76 TranscriptVirginiaOkay. So I am looking at your childhood scale. AubreyYeah, you sure are. VirginiaWhat is happening.AubreySo I am in Los Angeles. I come down here for a good chunk of time at the end of each year. Since I started freelancing, I was like, I would like to spend more time with my family. So I do. And the one place that I can record while I'm down here—which is a big part of my job, recording audio. VirginiaIt is.AubreyYou know, it's Los Angeles! It's the second largest city in the country, hard to find a truly silent place. So, I'm inside my mother's closet, which just works on a number of levels, yes? And one of the things that she stores in her closet is the scale that we had in my childhood. It's one of those, like, if you went to a doctor's office in the 70’s, maybe? VirginiaIt's not a small digital scale. It's tall. It has the weights that slide back and forth. It's a full-on doctor's office scale.AubreyYour journalistic integrity is really shining through here. VirginiaThis was the scale your family had in your house?AubreyUh huh, absolutely. VirginiaI also have the question of why do we still own the scale? AubreyI don't know. She's told me she only uses it like a few times a year. She's a person who doesn't like things to go to waste.VirginiaYeah, and what do you do with that scale if you want to get rid of that? Like, how do you not waste it?Aubrey,Totally. And also, at this point, not only does she have not a lot of people looking for scales at this particular moment, but not a lot of people looking for big, heavy, loud scales from 50 years ago.VirginiaIt would be hard to give away, even on the freecycle page.AubreyI was telling her she should take it to a scrap metal place. Or to an artist of some kind, like a welder could do some interesting things? I don't think any of that's gonna happen.VirginiaNo, I think it’s gonna stay in the closet there and you're going to see it every year.AubreyIt's the greatest icebreaker to every interview I have.VirginiaIt's very off brand and somehow on brand, also.AubreyYes, it is the absolute nexus of things I stand against and things I spend all of my time on. VirginiaAnd stand next to, while doing your work. AubreyBut not stand on anymore!VirginiaYeah, not anymore. AubreyI was like, I get to show this to Virginia today and that feels like a win to me. What a treat.VirginiaSo how are you doing? You are a couple of weeks out from book launch. How are you feeling? How's it going?AubreyI mean, you know. Anytime you make a big thing and then there's like a year between when you make it and when people get to experience it, that's a year of always feeling a little bit like you're about to barf, you know? Just a tiny bit. Just always a low grade barf energy. So, I'm in the thick of that. I'm at the crescendo part of the barf energy.VirginiaThat makes sense. AubreyBut also, it's fine and great. And I get to talk to a bunch of fun people who I like talking to and it gives me an excuse to do that. How about you? You're how many months out now?VirginiaIt's the end of April. So I haven't reached peak nausea. But low-level-constant-background-noise-hum barf, sure. I'm getting second pass back this week, which I think is the last time I get eyes on it. But it's the week before getting we're going on a big trip for the holidays so I'm completely not in work mode. I'm trying to pack my kids up for this big trip and I have to read the book again. And I don't want to read it again. That phase where I can't look at it anymore. But also, what if I don't look at it enough and then something terrible goes in?AubreyEven if you look at it seven times, you're gonna catch something at some point and feel bad about it. Because it's forever now.VirginiaI don't pick up my first book anymore. Because I know if I pick it up, I will find something and just be like, why didn't we catch that? You can't look back at it at a certain point.AubreyThat's really smart of you.VirginiaThe whole pre-book-launch is a very weird phase. It's this liminal state you're in. But I'm so excited for you, because you're close to it being out, it being a thing.AubreyIt's happening. It's happening at this point. Whether I'm barfing or not, it's happening.VirginiaWith me barfing along for the ride! AubreyAnd you, too! I'm so excited! The front end of this week for me is a ton of interviews and the back end of this week is spending a couple days with your new book. I'm over the moon about it. I'm so excited.VirginiaYou’re the best. I felt awful even asking, you have so much going on. AubreyListen, this is one of those things where I'm like this needs to be out in the world. This is the kind of thing that the world very desperately needs right now. As an elder millennial child of a boomer, most of my peers who have kids at this point are in this space of being acutely aware that their upbringing around bodies was fucked.VirginiaIt was a hot mess.AubreyIt was bad news. And they're like, “So it can't be that. But also, I don't know what else to do.”VirginiaExactly, exactly. AubreyI feel like this is like gift of a set of tools. That's my hope. And sort of like an analysis for folks to go. You're not just rejecting one lens, right? You're applying a new one. Here's the new one. VirginiaOnce you start to see diet culture, once you start to name anti-fat bias, especially when it comes to kids, you now want to protect them from it. And that can lead to this all or nothing thinking that feels very familiar. People are like, “how do I get the schools to stop this? What media can my kid watch that won't be fatphobic?” And I'm like, “Are you just not going to show them a cartoon?” So, it's really about how do we give kids these tools, too? How do we normalize these conversations? How do we change the language in our household so fat is just a word that we're using all the time and not this loaded concept. Because we can't put them in these bubbles and be perfect in our anti-fatness, if that makes sense.AubreyI kind of feel like everything we do in the system that we're currently in and the culture that we're currently in is just some measure of harm reduction, right? So it’s thinking about things through that lens and not through the lens of, “I'm going to somehow create a perfect bubble in which my kids will not be exposed to any of the like harmful forces that exist out in the world.” Because that is not reasonable. I feel like most parents I know, on most fronts, have gotten there. Just figured out we're in a messy world with a lot of messy stuff. And you're going to be in control of some of it and totally out of control of some of it. But I think that that can be a harder thing for folks to come to terms with around anti-fatness and bodies.VirginiaI think it comes from that diet culture mentality of like, if I do X, Y, and Z, if I follow these rules, then it'll all be okay. And we're just applying that in a new way. So it just gets very tangly and we have to realize this is not something that there's five easy steps for, you know? There was never anything that there was five easy steps for, but for sure, not this. And that gives us a great segue to your new book, because I think what is so exquisite about it is how it helps us start to do this work and ask ourselves these really hard, painful, difficult questions. But also, there's just this clear recognition in the book that the work is not ever going to be done, but we are going to keep doing the work.AubreyI appreciate that. That's the goal, right? Everything's a mess, everything's hard. It's easy to get overwhelmed by how much mess there is and to be like, it'll never get cleaned up. We can't do anything, we can't have nice things, whatever. I had a conversation to this effect the other day with a health and wellness reporter, who was having a real galaxy brain moment around like, “I've never had a fat editor, I don't think I've ever worked with another health and wellness reporter who was a fat person. We use the language in our internal style guides, we use language of overweight and obesity with specific guidance around that being less hurtful to fat people and I don't think that's true anymore.” Blah, blah blah. And it felt like a little microcosm of what I see a lot of folks doing when exposed to sort of this set of information, which is just like so much overwhelm. And that turns into a sort of barrier to taking action.VirginiaWhere do I even begin to scale the mountain?AubreyTotally. And like, it's all going to be messed up! All of our actions are going to be imperfect. But we are not living in a world where too many people are trying too many things to defend fat people, right? Like, that's not the world that we're in. There are many issues, there are many communities where you can try things and there's a pretty good body of writing and thinking and research about like why those things may or may not be super helpful. On anti-fatness there is a lot less research. And there is a lot less of a track record of people trying things and not having those things work out. I think for me as a fat person, the best thing somebody can do is try something. Even if it's wrong, the distinguishing thing at this point in my life as a fat person is people who try something. Because the people who don't do anything, I cannot distinguish from people who are deadset anti-fat people. The action is the distinguishing mark. And it's the thing that like gets us on a road to somewhere.VirginiaYeah, you can then start to evaluate what's helpful and what's not helpful, because we will be trying things as opposed to not doing anything and accepting this entrenched place. When you're talking about that less of a body of research, we are also seeing that what does work for other forms of bias doesn't seem to work as well here and trying to understand why that is. AubreyAbsolutely. Your conversation with Jeff Hunger about this was top notch on that front.VirginiaJeff was awesome. His work is so helpful. AubreyHe's so great. We're at a different point in this movement than we are in other movements, right? And I think it's worth noting, how far have we come? What have we been working on? And how are the sort of contours of this issue different than the contours of other issues?VirginiaI feel like we skipped over the part where I should ask you to tell people what the book is and what it's about and what inspired it. So how about we do that real quick? AubreyGreat. Let's do it. So, it is my second book, and it's called, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths about Fat People. It came in part from a proposal from my publisher who has a series of books on myth busting. They've got books on immigrant communities, they've got books on unions, they've got books on a number of communities and issues that have been… willfully misunderstood, we’ll say. And I will be honest that—this is a weird thing for me to say, given the show that I co-host and the book that I am putting out now—I have a weird, conflicted relationship to myth busting because I think that we think it does more to change people's minds than it does. It's predicated on this very enlightenment era idea that if we're presented with facts, we change our minds. And I'm like, nah. We now have hundreds of years of evidence that that's not the case.VirginiaPeople just dig in deeper on what they believe.AubreyTotally. But at the same time, we've got more and more folks who are in that galaxy brain, I can't do anything mode. It felt really important to have something, to have a tool for those folks to be able to feel grounded enough in their own sense of facts and history to feel like they can handle what comes their way. We already kind of know how to get our parents to move off of outdated language, we already kind of know how to get our friends to knock it off when they're saying unhelpful things, right? These are all things that we know through our own relationships. And the barrier is more people feeling grounded and confident enough to say the things that they know how to say and do the things that they know how to do and work that change process with the people and institutions in their lives. This felt like an important tool for those folks. It could be for your jerky uncle who won't leave people alone about his fitness routine or whatever. But it could also be for you, the person who knows the jerky uncle with the fitness regime to figure out what your way in is.VirginiaThat's what I kept thinking about, reading it. You and I think and work on these issues quite a lot—some might say, obsessively. And yet, there are still moments where I'm in a store and they don't have my size, and I just sort of freeze and don't know what to do. The vulnerability takes over, right? And I just thought reading this, this is something you can come back to if you have one of those experiences. You can come back to this and be like these are my values, this is what I understand. Even if in the moment of facing the thing you've become untethered from that. This is a way of re-tethering yourself. It's just such a gift that way.AubreyOh, I'm so glad to hear it. My hope would certainly be like, you go to the doctor's office, you get your after visit summary, and it has your BMI in big bold letters, or your kid’s BMI or your partner's BMI or whatever. You can come back and hopefully read this chapter on the BMI and go, oh, right. It's nonsense.VirginiaI will light this on fire.AubreyOh, right. I shouldn't feel sad and ashamed about this. I should feel angry and indignant. Oh, I'm so glad that you experienced it that way. VirginiaHow did you narrow it down to just 20 myths?AubreySo the initial list was like 36.VirginiaI would imagine.AubreyBut a bunch of them collapse into one another. I had a bunch of separate ones that were like, fat people are the biggest drivers of health care costs or X number of fat people die every…
Full show notes at the publisherYou’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I write the Burnt Toast Newsletter. When you hear this, I will—if all goes according to plan—be sitting on a beach in Thailand. Of course, that means I survived the 25 hour flight over and jetlag with my kids. And honestly, those both feel like very open questions as I’m recording this right now.I know New Year’s is a fraught time for a lot of us. Resolution culture means that diet noise and fitness noise are turned up to level 1000 right now. I was thinking about that and remembered this really lovely conversation that Amy Palanjian and I had with Christy Harrison on our old podcast Comfort Food and I decided that this episode called “New Year, No Diet” would be the perfect rerun to share with all of you this week. It originally aired on January 13, 2019. And wow, the world is different! But diet culture has remained so much the same. If you aren’t familiar with Christy, she is an anti-diet nutritionist, a journalist, and host of the beloved Food Psych podcast. She’s also the author of the book Anti-Diet, and her new book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being comes out the same day as Fat Talk. So we will be celebrating book birthdays together in April and I’m hoping Christy will be back on the podcast in real time then to talk to us about the new book.Christy is one of the most thoughtful journalists I know. She is truly a calm and reassuring voice in the anti-diet space. So if you are struggling with any version of the New Year’s bullshit right now, I think you’re going to find this conversation really grounding and helpful. And Burnt Toast will be back next week in your inboxes with an essay on Tuesday, January 10 and in your podcast feeds with an episode with the great Aubrey Gordon on Thursday, January 12. Subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss any of it!Episode 75 TranscriptAmyHappy New Year, guys! It’s 2019 which kind of blows my mind and this is our first episode of the new year. So you’re probably surrounded with a lot of diet talk this week, if not for the past few weeks already. People starting new year’s resolutions, detoxes, new wellness plans, everything flooding your your email box and your social media feeds. So, we are here to help you withstand that onslaught and make this year the year you actually feel good about yourself and your food, no matter what you’re eating.VirginiaI’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I’m a writer, a contributing editor to Parents Magazine and author of The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America. I write about how women relate to food and our bodies in a culture that gives us so many unrealistic expectations about both those things.AmyAnd I’m Amy Palanjian, a writer, recipe developer and creator of Yummy Toddler Food and Yummy Family Food. I’m a contributor to Allrecipes magazine and I love helping parents relax in the daily challenge of feeding their kids.VirginiaAnd today we have a very special guest! Joining us is Christy Harrison, an anti-diet dietitian, host of the amazing Food Psych podcast and the lead character in chapter two of The Eating Instinct. Christy, welcome! Thank you for being here.ChristyThank you so much for having me.VirginiaWhy don’t you tell us a little more about you for our listeners who might not have encountered your amazing work yet?ChristyAbsolutely. I’m a registered dietician, nutritionist, certified Intuitive Eating counselor and the host of Food Psych podcast, as you said. And I am also the author of a forthcoming book called Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating which will be out late 2019, in time for the New Year and holiday season of the coming year. VirginiaExcellent. Can’t wait.AmyWe’re so excited to have you with us today because this the start of the new year always feels like such a vulnerable place for so many people. It’s strange because most of us know that resolutions don’t really stick around and yet there’s all of this pressure for us to do it. Can you talk about like why we all get pulled into this?ChristyAbsolutely. I think the reason we all get pulled into this is what a lot of people call diet culture, which is a system of beliefs that really privileges smaller bodies and stigmatizes larger ones. It elevates some foods while demonizing others, and promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status and moral virtue and oppresses people who don’t fit those molds, the cultural ideal of thinness or the cultural ideal of what “health” is supposed to look like.So that’s a lot to unpack there. But basically, this system of beliefs is with us all year round, 24/7/365. It’s present in the media, of course, and that’s what often gets the most attention, like the photoshopped, airbrushed images of impossibly thin models. But equally important is the diet industry, or what’s now known as the wellness industry, which Virginia, you write about really, profoundly in your book. The wellness industry has become the new guise of the diet industry in the 21st century. So we have still the traditional diet industry and now the wellness industry, too.We also have the everyday cultural manifestations of this belief system, which can take the form of a parent making a negative comment about their child’s body size or kids teasing each other for their body size on the playground or your coworker making some comment, like, “Oh, are you going to eat that? That has gluten in it. That’s terrible for you.” You know, all these tiny little manifestations. A friend of mine was telling me that the TV show Peppa Pig has a bunch of fatphobia in it.AmyReally? VirginiaIt breaks my heart because my daughter loves Peppa Pig, but they shame Daddy Pig a lot for food stuff. It’s a hard one for me.ChristyIt’s everywhere. It’s in these cute cartoons that our kids watch and stuff. It’s really ubiquitous. Diet culture is particularly prevalent in the new year, because it’s become the season where the diet industry does its big push to sell you things. The idea of New Year and renewal, I think, lends itself to this concept that now you’ve just come through the holidays you’ve been eating and “indulging” so much that now it’s time to buckle down and really shrink your body and make a resolution to to change this year.It dovetails nicely with the fact that we know that diets don’t actually work long term. And by diets, I really mean everything from traditional Jenny Craig, Weightwatchers—although now they’re calling themselves WW for wellness. Everything from that to Whole30, paleo, keto, the things that hold themselves up as just an eating plan, or a “template” or a “protocol” or a “reset.” They use all these different words. They say they’re not diets, but they actually still fall under the umbrella of diet culture, they actually still are diets by another name.So this time of year, it’s their time for their big sales push, their time to get more clients on board. And those things don’t actually work long term. So we know, the research really shows that any sort of diet, whether it’s wellness or a traditional diet, the weight loss effects certainly don’t last beyond about the 3-5 year mark. That is when we see the vast majority of people have put back on all the weight that they lost. And oftentimes, up to two thirds of the time, people end up regaining more weight than they lost. So intentional weight loss—whatever brand, whatever sort of plan you’re using—doesn’t actually have long term effects. It results in weight cycling in the long run.AmyI find it so interesting to think about that marketing piece. VirginiaYeah, because we think of the new year as almost like a spiritual time or a tradition. In fact it’s a line item in someone’s business plan, like, “January’s where we do the big push.” It’s not really this organic thing in the calendar, it’s actually very manufactured. ChristyYeah, it’s really insidious. It’s like taking this thing that can be so beautiful and spiritual—like cultures around the world have a New Year’s traditions and New Year’s celebrations of some kind.VirginiaThere’s something really lovely about the idea of a fresh start. I’m someone who really enjoys celebrating New Year’s even though I know it’s sort of an arbitrary thing. It just feels like a lovely chance to like set an intention for the year. Something about it is appealing. But that’s interesting that it’s so industry driven. And just to circle back quickly to the holiday excess thing, because we’re probably all coming off that place. The holidays can be such a fraught time for folks with food. Can you talk a little bit, as a dietitian, why is it normal to “indulge” at the holidays? Why is it not actually like, “Okay, now you’ve got to fix this thing that you just did.”ChristyIt is incredibly normal and part of a balanced and healthy relationship with food to have these holiday moments where you’re enjoying foods that you might not have at other times of the year, that you’re really partaking in these traditions and celebrating with food and connecting over food. Those things have been part of human culture for millennia. Around the world, cultures everywhere have connected over food and had special holiday traditions that involved particular types of food that you don’t necessarily eat the rest of the year, or that you do, but maybe they’re in different configurations or whatever.It’s very normal to have that experience. Actually, I think it’s really part of a psychologically, mentally healthy relationship with food to have that and to allow yourself to have that and not to feel like you have to be guilty or ashamed or work it off or atone for it in some way.Intuitive eating is what I practice, as a dietitian, and what I teach. That is really the default mode that kids are all born with. And Virginia, you’ve talked about this with your daughter getting sidetracked from that pretty early in her life. But at first when when babies come out, they’re programmed to seek out food, to tell you when they’re hungry, to stop when they’re full, to be seeking out different flavors and textures to the extent that they’re developmentally able to. Their relationship with food—if left unmarred by diet culture or by other things like medical trauma or food insecurity, or things that can really interfere with people’s relationships with food. If they’re just allowed to maintain that intuitive relationship with food their whole lives, people can be incredibly balanced and not have that fraught relationship with food that causes them to feel like the holidays are just a free for all, you know?And I experience this now, for myself, as an intuitive eater and with my clients where once you come back around to that intuitive eating that we’re all born with, it’s like, eh, the holidays aren’t a huge deal. Like, it’s great. I love pumpkin pie, I love having my grandma’s or my my aunt’s weird jello salad that she only makes for Thanksgiving. That stuff is awesome. But, other than that, I’m not feeling like I’m eating excessively or restricting leading up to the holiday meal so that I can stuff myself at the at the meal and then feel uncomfortable. It’s not this restrict/binge cycle that it used to be when I was, and when my clients were, really steeped in diet culture. It becomes a much more relaxed, easygoing type of thing. It really can be this celebration, this enjoyment, this opportunity to connect with people over food, without having that extra layer of guilt that diet culture really piles on.AmyI always think about when I was a kid—I come from a big Italian American family. And at the holidays, there was a ton of food everywhere. But then, at the same time, we were, for some reason, not supposed to eat it all. There was just this very confusing situation for me. Now, as a parent, I am very aware of if we make a special thing, I want my kids to be able to enjoy it without putting all these restrictions and just confusing the heck out them.VirginiaKnowing that everyone’s so excited to see this food and simultaneously horrified by it is such a confusing message for kids and for all of us. ChristyYeah, it really is. Our culture sends those mixed messages so much, you know? We have so much food advertising and that gets blamed and the food environment gets blamed with the large portion sizes. People say that that’s the cause of so many health conditions and the quote unquote “obesity epidemic” in this country. But research actually shows that people who are intuitive eaters, who have not succumbed to diet culture, who have not been taken away from their body’s natural cues about food and are not fixated on weight can actually make the same choices, the same balanced choices that they would make without those sorts of cues around them. People can be in an environment with abundant food and still honor their hunger and fullness cues, still honor their desires and find satisfaction and pleasure in food and connect with other people over food without feeling like they’ve like gone too far or they have to atone.VirginiaI’m glad you brought that up because one thing I see also happening in January is when people are in this atone mindset, they often connect whatever plan they’re looking at to health right? They say “it’s not really about weight, I have high blood pressure. I’m not sleeping well.” They’re connecting it to all these health conditions that we link to food and weight. So we’d love for you to talk a little more about why dieting is not the solution if you’re struggling with one of those health problems.ChristyYeah, absolutely. It is so common in diet culture, whatever health condition you might have, anything under the sun, is pinned on food. Like, food is the answer. The food is medicine idea is really prevalent in our culture right now. But the problem with that is that diets don’t work longterm. As I mentioned earlier, the statistics show that the vast majority of people end up regaining all the weight that they lost, and also just not being able to stick to whatever diet or plan that they’re on because it really takes them away from the normal relationship with food that keeps people going. And psychologically, being on a diet where you’re restricting certain foods is really taxing. That sort of willpower that people have to exert to change their eating and restrict their eating over the long term just doesn’t hold up because we have an exhaustible supply of willpower. When we’re trying to govern our relationship with food through sheer will, it really doesn’t work. It doesn’t last, it’s not sustainable. Weight cycling, which is the inevitable cycles of of yo-yo dieting that happen because diets don’t work and the vast majority of people gain back all the weight they lost. Oftentimes people are doing these weight cycles again and again, often dozens of times throughout their lives. That’s actually an independent risk factor for things like heart disease, blood sugar abnormalities, all kinds of conditions that tend to get blamed on weight itself. And in fact, there’s research showing that the heart risks, the excess heart risks that are seen in people in larger bodies, can actually all be attributed to weight cycling alone. So not the fact of the larger body, but just to the fact that people in larger bodies are more likely to have dieted more often because of the pressures that they face, in diet culture, to shrink their bodies. And that in and of itself puts their heart at greater risk.VirginiaThat’s pretty mind blowing. So basically dieting to, quote, “improve your health” is going to end up doing the opposite.ChristyYep, it’s counterproductive. It’s counterproductive not only for physical health but also for mental health. And we know that mental and physical health are very strongly linked…
Full show notes at the publisherBeing able to feed yourself without the observation of someone around you just really changes things. You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fat phobia, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.Today we are revisiting a newsletter essay, one that I actually published just last month. It’s called “Do I Wear Spanx to Family Court?”I’m going to read the piece, and then my good friend Lyz Lenz is coming on to discuss divorce and diet culture with us. If you don’t know Lyz, she writes the excellent substack newsletter Men Yell at Me. She’s also the author ofGod Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America,andBelabored: A Vindication of the Rights of Pregnant Women. And she has a third book coming out in 2024 calledThis American Ex Wife. Lyz is a really amazing political journalist, memoirist, all around phenomenally talented writer and my local divorce expert, so I’m really excited to have her on the episode.Okay, here’s the essay. It ran on November 1. VirginiaSo Lyz, you have written so brilliantly about divorce. You are the smartest person I know about divorce. I text you whenever I want to know about divorce.LyzWhich isn’t that often, for her husband who’s listening.VirginiaYou are extremely knowledgeable about this topic and your next book, This American Ex Wife, is about divorce. So you are here as my divorce expert and I’m curious: Do you see diet culture playing a role in American divorces?LyzOh, absolutely. Something initially with divorce that hits on diet culture is the “revenge body.” Anybody who’s gotten divorced will tell you about the stress and the weight loss associated with it—or not! Sometimes it’s weight gain. But there is the expectation of having that “post-breakup revenge body.” I’ve seen TikToks that are kind of making jokes like, you want to sit on the couch and relax, but you remember you have to be the hot one in the breakup.VirginiaI never thought about this. LyzYou know, like the “getting back out there” body. I know for a lot of men, divorce involves some free time, which, that time used to be managed by someone and now they don’t know what to do. So there is an aspect to the culture of the Divorced Dad in the gym. I follow quite a few TikTok accounts of divorce influencers which are out there…VirginiaWow, divorce influencers.LyzSo the divorced dad going to the gym, the mom trying to get hot and get back out there. It hit me so personally when I got divorced because I was so stressed out, and my response to stress is to not eat. I lost a lot of weight, and it was not healthy. And I remember people being like, “Oh, you look so good,” and me being like, “I’m so stressed out, I’m not sleeping or eating. You should be asking me if I’m okay.” I would get so angry about it, too, because then also people—as you know—people treat you differently. All of a sudden the men would see me differently because it was a very unhealthy amount of weight [to lose].VirginiaIt sounds like a a parallel with postpartum “get your body back” pressure.LyzYes. VirginiaSo for a lot of women you’ll have just done that in recent years and now you have to do the “revenge body.” And why are we not allowed to just let our bodies be during times of stress and trauma?LyzRight, right. And I think, too, it’s so hard when you layer on that the idea that exists in the divorce world that you now have to find someone else. I hate that. I hate that whole idea. That’s what most divorce books are. It’s like, okay, well, you did it, now how do you find love again? So that comes with that added pressure of being good looking which then translates to diet culture. Thinness, muscles.VirginiaI’m just remembering a piece of yours1 where you were like, “actually all women want is to live alone in the woods with our wolves.” No, we don’t want to get remarried. That’s not the goal but that is immediately the expectation. Why do you want to get right back into the thing you just got out of?LyzWell, I think there’s that pressure of singleness, right? There’s that stigma of singleness. But you’re right, most women post-divorce don’t remarry. It’s the men who remarry. It’s somewhere around 70% of women initiate divorces and I think it’s less than 40%—I need to fact check myself on that.2 But it is a lower number who then get remarried. It’s an overwhelming number of men who then try to remarry because, like, “I don’t know how to find mustard in the grocery store without a woman.” But no, you’re right. I mean, every married woman I know wants to just live alone in the woods with a wolf, so.VirginiaAnd part of that freedom would be not needing to be hot while you do it, just being able to be. LyzYes, not being a hot witch. VirginiaJust want to be a witch.LyzWhy do we have to have weird witch beauty standards? There’s this great moment I think about a lot in the book Don Quixote where he’s traveling along and he meets all these shepherds. And they’re like, “There’s this one bitch, she’s awful. She broke all of our hearts. She’s so beautiful. We hate her. She’s evil.” And then they’re talking about her and she just walks up to them and goes, “I’m not evil. I don’t like any of you. Stop talking to me. I didn’t try to seduce you. I just existed and you thought I was in love with you.” And then she’s basically like, “I don’t want to be in your narrative.” And then she goes back into the woods and she never shows up in the book ever again. VirginiaShe’s our queen. LyzI think about her all the time. VirginiaThat’s icon behavior for sure. So, what else besides revenge body comes up? Anything about divorce and diet culture.LyzThen there’s that whole aspect of divesting yourself of the body ideas that come from the relationship. I think there are so many ways that happens. You might have married a person looking a very specific way but, as we all know, time and life and children take a toll. And then the other person is like, “Well, you don’t look how you used to” and you’re like, “Well, I never will.”VirginiaThat’s life. That’s time passing.LyzAnd marriage is so physical. It’s a bodily connection, right? So having divorce enables you—especially if you’re in a bad marriage. I mean, obviously people can have good marriages. My bias is that I think marriage is inherently unequal and bad. You can have good relationships within a bad system, but it’s still a bad system. So I’m gonna get that out there.But so when you do divorce, part of that rebuilding of identity and rebuilding of sense of self comes with, like, who am I now? Like, what is my body now? And now I don’t have to manage that other person’s toxic body / diet stuff. I don’t have to manage the expectations of another person on my body and on my sense of self. I don’t have to have somebody judging what I’m eating. And then you can also make your own food. That was something that blew my mind that I didn’t expect. Like, I am not cooking for this other person who wants boneless, skinless chicken breasts every single fucking night. VirginiaThe saddest of proteins, trulyLyzHe would have lived on boneless, skinless chicken breast and microwaved frozen vegetables. I’m like, “let’s roast a chicken from Ina Garten. Let’s make vegan stew!” and none of that would fly. So, yeah, being able to feed yourself without the observation of someone around you just really changes things. And since we have 50/50 custody—and it’s always different with children around—but I get to sit and be like, “what is it that I actually want to eat? And when do I want to eat? And how do I want to eat?” It just makes me so much more thoughtful and grateful about what I’m consuming in my body.Men Yell at MeThe Subversive Joy of Being a Single MotherThis is the mid-week essay for Men Yell at Me, a newsletter about the places our politics and our personhood collide. This week’s newsletter is about being a single mother and the stigma and joy of building a life outside the nuclear family. If you love this newsletter, consider becoming a subscriber…Read more3 years ago · 249 likes · 107 comments · lyzVirginiaOne woman I interviewed described it as a “food rumspringa” because she was free from his expectations. For her it was embracing stuff like Annie’s Mac and Cheese—like I don’t have to cook, I can just enjoy eating a box of mac and cheese for dinner and watching Gilmore Girls and be so happy. What was your favorite thing you ate when you realized this liberation? LyzFor a while I got really into cooking complicated recipes from the New York Times. That kind of stopped. I did the opposite of everybody in 2020, in the shutdown year. Everybody got into cooking and I was like, “I’m done, peace out. I will now be ordering food exclusively.” So another one was eating out because my ex does not like to go out to eat and and it was very stressful around, like, if you go out to eat and then what you order. You know, should you get a glass of wine or god forbid order dessert? That’s, like, so extra and why are you doing that? So just going out to eat by myself and an ordering whatever I wanted and dessert was a game changer. VirginiaI love that.LyzAnd then I’d make complicated recipes just for myself because I’m like, “oh, he didn’t like curry so now I will make curry.”VirginiaNow you can have all the curry! Revenge curry seems way better than revenge body, I’m just gonna put that out there. LyzYes, yes. And all bodies handle stress in different ways. Divorce is stressful, even if it’s a good change. And that expectation that you then get thinner because of stress is not everybody’s experience.VirginiaSomething that came up in my conversations with the women I interviewed for this story was was how little faith they had that a judge or the legal system would do anything to intervene when they were seeing their ex continue to parent in very controlling ways around food. Like the dad who, if you didn’t finish dinner, you got it served for breakfast the next morning, so the kid was showing up at school hungry and having meltdowns because he hadn’t eaten two meals. That seems so clearly problematic to me. But I guess I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about why family court systems aren’t set up to deal with this.LyzFamily court systems aren’t set up to deal with a lot of different types of abuse. Going to my lawyer—who was great and wonderful—she basically was like, family court operates like an equation. You punch in the numbers, you just assume everything’s equal, and there really isn’t room for understanding some of those nuances and the different ways of talking about abuse. I mean, it’s abuse. If a parent is controlling their food access, that is abusive behavior. But you have to navigate it very, very, very delicately. Because I think, especially for women, you’re getting divorced, so already there’s a little bit of a stigma on you, right? Like, you’re a little shrewish. I noticed people treated me differently, too, around their husbands. I was like, “listen, I don’t want your nasty husband, I don’t even want my nasty husband. I don’t want anybody’s husband .”VirginiaWeird energy.LyzSo there was a little bit of weird energy. My lawyer was just really upfront, like, “Listen, if you go before a judge in Iowa or a mediator—we got everything mediated—most of them are middle aged white men. They’re look exactly like your husband. You go in and you start making all these claims, well these could be things that they do to their children.”VirginiaThis could be their parenting style. LyzYou could turn them against you. So, it’s like, if you go in there being the “shrill divorced lady” who only nitpicks and says horrible things about her husband, which I got actually. Divorced women, when I was getting a divorce, told me not to be the “negative divorced lady.”VirginiaBut like, you’re getting divorced for all these reasons, right? Some of which are negative, right? LyzI think the problem is that we don’t talk honestly about our relationships. Nobody knows what is actually supposed to be good in a marriage because we’ve spent so much time hiding some of these things. I would tell people, “Oh, we’re not gonna go out to eat” or “How about you just come over to our house?” just to manage things, so we wouldn’t have to get into a fight later if I had a glass of wine. But I’m not being honest with my friends about that. I’m not like, “No, we can’t go to a restaurant because jerkface over there won’t let me order wine.”VirginiaRight. LyzSo anyway, you are coming into a system that very much thinks its objective but as we all know, objectivity favors the white man and favors the system. So it really is a balancing act. I’ll just tell a story that about religion. My ex was saying that I was awful because I wanted to go to a liberal Lutheran Church—and now I go to no church, which is even worse. He was telling the mediator, “She will not raise her children with the values that she agreed to when we entered the marriage contract so it is a breach of contract,” and my lawyer is like, “You can’t react. You can’t nod. Even if he’s being unreasonable, you just have to be calm and placid so that you look like the reasonable one here.”VirginiaSo you’re not the angry divorced lady.LyzRight. You’re managing so much just to get out of this situation and letting so many things go. And I know women whose exes did awful things and even then the courts were just like, “well, it’s a he said/she said situation.” So you’re just doing what you can to get out with the skin of your teeth.VirginiaAnother thing I heard was women worrying about how their bodies would be perceived by lawyers and judges. Like, if you’re fat, that’s going to be an added strike against you coming into that, especially if you have a thin ex.LyzYes. Oh, yes. The clothes you wear. I had to buy a whole new outfit for mediation. I mean, I’m a writer, I don’t have a lot of business clothes. My lawyer gave me suggestions. She’s like, “button up, nothing low cut.” Which works for me because I have no boobs. But God forbid you actually have boobs and then they’re like, “don’t dress slutty.” And you’re like, well, they’re there. Like, I have a body.VirginiaI can almost never get them to go away. LyzRight? Like, where shall I put them that would make you feel more comfortable. The whole courtroom appearance, which of course, again, is judged more for women. Men just have a uniform they can pop into or out of, you know. I can’t just buy a dress shirt.VirginiaIt has to be an outfit.LyzAnd of course, it’s expensive to do this. And you’re already like, I don’t have any money. That’s such a big aspect I think, not just of divorce but of our court and legal systems. VirginiaThe body policing. LyzYeah. We’ll judge you immediately based on appearance.VirginiaAnd how we judge mothers in general, right? The fitness of motherhood is often tied to bodies and presentation of bodies.LyzAnd then if you and your ex have very different types of bodies, then people are thinking “Well, of course they’re getting divorced because she really let herself go.” And then you get into co-parenting, which is fun.VirginiaThis is maybe a very naive question, but how much advice do you get on how to co-parent and co-parent around food?LyzEvery state does it a little differently. Iowa, God bless, is a no fault divorce state. So it’s really hard to upset the balance of that, like it’s going to be 50/50 no matter what, unless you get your former partner on video doing something horrific, right? It would be very, very, very hard. So, we had to take mandatory divorce parenting classes. And I’m sure it’s different in every state, but what that involved was going to this nonprofit called Kids First Law Center here in Iowa. They’re really great. They do amazing work, helping to represent children for low cost or free. So, you sign up for your time and you go sit in a conference room with a bunch of other divorced parent…
Full show notes at the publisherWe’ve done the same thing with housekeeping that we did with physical health: You are morally obligated to have this very clean, very organized, very aesthetically pleasing home, particularly if you are socialized as a woman. And if you do not do that, you deserve my shame and derision and criticism and all that stuff. So that’s when I started talking about this idea that care tasks are morally neutral.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 I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.Today I am super excited to be chatting with KC Davis! KC is a licensed professional therapist, author, speaker and the person behind the mental health platform Struggle Care. She is domestic blisters on TikTok. And she is the author of How to Keep House While Drowning, a book that I read earlier this year and just cannot say enough good things about.I started thinking about this conversation after I wrote an essay on organization as a hobby. KC is very, very good at helping us break down all of the assumptions we make about what our houses need to look like, about what care tasks need to look like, and at offering ways to reframe all of that so that your space actually serves you instead of measuring up to some unsustainable ideal, which you know, we are all about doing here. So here’s KC!Episode 73 TranscriptKCI started my TikTok channel, gosh, I guess we’re coming up on three years ago. I primarily use it to talk about how we can take care of ourselves when we’re in a hard spot. So for some people that’s a hard season of life. For other people that is a lifelong disability or maybe a bout with mental illness. Maybe it’s just being overwhelmed or being burnt out or any number of barriers that can make it difficult to care for ourselves.I think that when we think about caring for ourselves, there are two main things out there mainstream and one is the “self care” movement, which in my experience can get very privileged. You know, a lot of bubble baths and pedicures and talking about things that require the privilege of extra time and money. And then when we talk about care tasks, like doing the laundry, and the dishes and things like that, if you want help with that, I often find that a lot of the resources out there are what I call like “boot camp” style motivation, where it’s like “Get up! Figure it out! Have some self respect!” like, “Do it!” And I don’t find those very motivating.So my content is the cross-section between mental health and and care tasks, and how we can use self compassion and accessibility and accommodations to raise the quality of our life and make it a little bit easier to take care of ourselves.VirginiaI first got obsessed with your work when my friendSara PetersenofIn Pursuit of Clean Countertopssent mea postyou did about super pretty laundry rooms, and it says “this is a hobby.” It was such an epiphany for me, I have to tell you. I don’t know, I’d always sort of thought that pretty laundry room kind of content was supposed to be about organization. That it was supposed to be about making your life easier. AndI had this sense of “Well, it’s intended to be helpful and if it’s making me feel bad, it’s just because I’m not doing doing it right.” And as I was making notes for our conversation and I wrote that down, I was like, “Oh, that’s diet culture.That’s perfectionism.”I would love for you to talk a little bit about how you came to realize that so much of what we’re told we should do or have to do in terms of domestic work is unrealistic and unsustainable and unhelpful?KCWhen people ask how I fell into talking about this philosophy, I can point to several things in my life that led to that moment. I could talk about my history with addiction, I can talk about my history as a therapist, I can talk about my history in high control groups. But one of the main things was probably two or three years prior to starting my TikTok channel, I got into the anti-diet movement and opened my eyes to this idea that we might say, “Oh, it’s about health, it’s about health, it’s about health,” but we’ve also moralized “being healthy” to mean if you’re not striving to be the best human specimen that ever existed, that’s a moral failing on your part. And because that’s a moral failing, you deserve derision and shame.So I learned that from listening to anti-diet creators, from listening to fat liberation advocates, and it really sunk in and changed my relationship to food and my relationship to my body. And then fast forward two years, I found myself postpartum with a toddler, in a new city where I didn’t know anybody. My husband had just started a new job as a lawyer and the pandemic shutdown happened. We both were—all of us in the house—were just drowning in trying to keep up with the dishes and the laundry, and the cleaning, and the tidying and the bottles and the this and the that. And as I began to talk in my videos about like, “hey, here’s a way that I’m making cleaning a little bit easier,” so many people started to speak up and say this similar sentiment of “I love seeing your house because it looks like my house and I’ve always felt so much shame over it.”And that’s how I kind of naturally pivoted into you know what, dishes are also morally neutral. We’ve done the same thing with housekeeping that we did with physical health, which to say, you are morally obligated to have this very clean, very organized, very aesthetically pleasing home, particularly if you are socialized as a woman. And if you do not do that, it is a moral failing of laziness and immaturity and irresponsibility, and therefore, you deserve my shame and derision and criticism and all that stuff. So that’s when I started talking about this idea that care tasks are morally neutral. They don’t make you a good or bad person, right? It’s not about whether you’re doing it perfectly, or whether you’re doing it aesthetically pleasing, or whether you’re doing it in a way that your father or sister in law likes, right? It’s about does your home function for you? And if it does, it doesn’t matter if it’s aesthetically pleasing. And if it doesn’t, then you deserve compassionate help and support to help get you to a functioning place.VirginiaI’m thinking, too, as you’re saying this, how another way the house and health parallel each other is how much we have class signifiers bound up in both of them, right? The thin ideal is very much a white, upper class ideal. And the house you’re describing, this kind of Martha Stewart house—that’s what I grew up thinking of it as—is absolutely a white, upper middle class or wealthy ideal. The messy house, the house with dirty dishes in the sink, all of that signifies class, right? In a way that we don’t really like to talk about and that’s a really interesting piece of this.KCYeah and I’ve gotten my fair share of critical hate comments online from people that think that messiness is a moral failing. But even so, I have noticed that I don’t receive half as much shame and derision as people who make similar videos whose homes are older or who are judged as not having as as much money as me.My husband and I, this was our first house, but we also bought it as an inventory house, like it was just built. So the inside of our house is nice. And I think that that goes into a lot of the reason why there are people that go, “Oh, KC, that nice woman that helps people clean.” And I think it would be very different if I was a fat woman, if I was a Black woman, if I was a poor woman. Then I think those other systemic, oppressive sort of biases and prejudices would obscure anyone from actually learning because they’d have that all those judgments about, “Well, if you’re poor, then that’s a moral failing and I’m allowed to be judgmental.”VirginiaRight. We are performing for each other when we’re trying to maintain the perfect home and when we’re trying to maintain the perfect body. This is health as cultural capital. This is a way of performing our value. But it’s making us complicit in this larger system that I think a lot of us don’t want to be complicit in. I don’t want my house to be reinforcing all these toxic ideals and oppressive systems. So if that means leaving dishes in the sink, like, sure. I can radicalize that way.KCExactly. It’s always funny to me the the comments that I get that are like, “You’re so lazy, why don’t you just clean your house?” Those kinds of comments are always on videos of me cleaning my house. There’s almost that direct parallel to when people are harassing a fat woman at the gym. Where it’s like, what do you want?VirginiaI’m literally doing what you said you wanted and you still want to shame me.KCThat always just, to me, pulls that curtain back. It’s not actually about health. It’s not actually about your kids deserve A,B,C. Most people don’t give a shit about other people’s kids. And if you did, you’d be on board because a non-judgmental approach to finding ways to make your home more functional is absolutely the best thing for a parent who is struggling and not able to provide that for their child.VirginiaOne reason I think I’ve had a block on this for a long time is because I do have a lot of these privileges. I am a naturally tidy, organized person. This is something I’ve written about in my newsletter. It has certainly been a problematic thing in my life, but it also gives me comfort and security to have clear countertops. There’s a lot to unpack there.But I think there’s probably a lot of us for whom this perfect house ideal just feels like just a little bit out of reach. And I think that’s another diet culture parallel, right? Often, the people who struggle the most to identify diet culture and anti-fat bias are naturally thin people for whom a “perfect” body feels very in reach. If they just commit to the gym workout, if they just cut out whatever food group, you know?As opposed to those of us for whom the perfect body is just nowhere in our worldview. And so it makes more sense to say, “Well, I’m gonna reject this whole system.” I can see that whole system, because it doesn’t apply to me.KCYeah, I definitely think there’s that aspect of, if you look at a system and realize I am disempowered in the system, I’m never gonna win, it’s easier to reject that system outright than it is for someone who’s like, “Oh, I’m being disempowered in the system but I’m so close to having power in the system.”VirginiaIt’s like, “One more trip to the container store!” KC“If I just lost 10 pounds,” right?I think that there are a lot of people that read my book that come to my content, and their main issue they would say is “I have trouble starting.” So, “I feel overwhelmed. I feel like I don’t have the skills. I feel sensory overload at dealing with it. I’m struggling with motivation, with task initiation, and therefore everything’s kind of building up and becoming overwhelming.”And then the flip side is I have just as many people that say, “I don’t have any problem starting. I’m a naturally tidy person. I actually have trouble stopping.”VirginiaI’m raising my hand.KC“I have trouble sitting down and resting, if everything is not done or put perfectly in its place.”And like you said, if it’s “Oh, but it’s almost perfect, so if I just put a little more effort.” And that would make sense, if you were creating a painting or a craft that had an end point. But care tasks are cyclical. They’re always moving. And so if you have the mindset that you’re not allowed to rest, you’re not allowed to recreate, you’re not allowed to blow something off until everything is done, you’re going to exhaust yourself. Because nothing’s ever done.As soon as it was safe to do so, I hired a cleaning service to come in once a month, do a deep clean, help me out. And one of the interesting observations I had about myself is that the hours right after that cleaning are my most anxious hours, my most anal retentive hours, my most on guard, snapping at my family hours, because there’s this like, “Okay, it’s done. Let me just have it for a couple of hours.” And so it’s like, the first juice that spills I blow my top, right? And I think that that really represents that even in me, there’s this idea that we’re supposed to get everything to the done stage and just hold it there.VirginiaYes, yes! I have the exact same experience when my wonderful cleaning person comes and I dread my children coming home from school later that day because I just want it. I guess what I struggle with is: It also is calming to me, right? A clean house calms me down. I am someone who is stressed out by a lot of clutter. I grew up in houses that were pretty clutter-y and I think this is a response to that in some ways. So what of this is helpful? And what of this is me buying into this really unhelpful ideal?And where do you find that line if you’re like, “This does meet a need of mine but it’s also part of this larger system I don’t want to be a part of and it’s making my life hard.” I mean, there have definitely been times when I’ve not wanted to have friends come over because I’m thinking I can’t get the house together in time. And then I’m shortchanging myself of that experience.I don’t mean to make you do therapy on me, but…KCNo, no, I love questions like this. I think it’s a perfect question. Because, I think that when we think of that question, we feel very either/or. So, is it wrong that I want to put everything in its place? Or is it valid that I could put everything in its place?I think it’s more like, let’s try to bring in both sides. Let’s try to close the gap on either end. So on the one hand, there are some ways in which your childhood has created neural pathways between the experience of clutter and perhaps the experience of unsafety or chaos or feeling out of control or maybe feeling not cared for, or fill in the blank, I don’t know the situation enough to say what it might actually be.And that association has less to do with the inherent clutter and more to do with the emotional context of that clutter. Now there are definitely hoarding level situations where it’s like, it doesn’t matter how happy the family is, this is non-functional and traumatizing. But a lot of people will say, “My house was really cluttered, but we were a chaotic, artistic, loving, close knit family that flew by the seat of our pants and my mom never cleaned a dish right in her life but she was at every soccer game,” right? And you hear this very different emotional context than someone who says, “My house was really cluttered. And sometimes it’s really severe, like my mom wouldn’t get out of bed. And my dad wouldn’t help around the house.” And so there’s this emotional context.And I think unpacking that emotional context and diving into what that is, is helpful. I think that creating some affirmations for yourself in your own home about the functionality of your home is helpful. And, I don’t think this is one of those things where anybody should be saying just spiritualize your way out of it. You know what I mean? Let’s work on those things not because there is a moral obligation for you to heal these wounds, but because you’ll be happier in your space if you can unpack and roll through and process out some of those stressors. But also, let’s look at your physical environment and let’s see how that environment can serve you without making you serve it. So I don’t want you running around thinking “I can’t sit down, I’m really having a ton of stress. I can’t ever let my friends come over.” Because, that’s distressing for you. VirginiaTotally.KCSo we’re not looking at is it healthy or unhealthy because you have to be healthy. We’re looking at what’s your level of distress and where’s the distress coming from? And what things can we do to lower your distress? Some of those things will be the emotional work around it, but some of those things will be the physical accommodat…
Full show notes at the publisherPost-Publication Note: Many of you have emailed to let me know that the J. Crew coat we talk about in this episode is no longer available in plus sizes! The link has changed since we put it in the transcript and we’re so sorry. Anti-fat bias in fashion is REAL, y’all.You're listening to Burnt Toast. I'm Virginia Sole-Smith and I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.And today Corinne is back! She got bangs, you guys! And it is time for a very special holiday themed Ask Us Anything. As always, we record these once a month. (Except last month when Thanksgiving threw us off. But here’s October if you missed it!) So if you have questions, you can email them over by hitting reply to any newsletter or drop them here.One quick piece of advocacy, first: Please sign this petition in support of clemency for Nikki Addimando, a mom in my community currently serving a five-year prison sentence for killing her abusive partner in self-defense. It’s long past time that we stop criminalizing survival. As Nikki said at her sentencing trial: "I wish more than anything it ended another way. I wouldn't be in this courtroom right now, but I wouldn't be alive either. This is why women don't leave. They so often end up dead or where I'm standing — alive, but still not free.”We are asking the governor of New York to commute Nikki’s remaining sentence and bring her home to her children this year. You can read more of Nikki’s story here (CW for sexual assault and abuse), follow the #FreeNikki campaign on Instagram, and share the petition with friends here.Episode 72 TranscriptVirginiaHow are you? How are you doing?CorinneI’m doing good. As discussed, I got bangs. VirginiaYes, and you were on an emotional journey with them. But now you’re feeling good about the bangs?CorinneYeah. I think I’m feeling good about the bangs. This time of year is so crazy. Do you have any upcoming travel holiday stuff?VirginiaFor Christmas we are doing this big trip. My brother-in-law and his family live in Bangkok. They have been there for years and we haven’t visited yet. And you know, when the pandemic happened we couldn’t go. So we’re finally doing it. CorinneSo you’re going to Thailand? In, like, a month? Wow.VirginiaYeah. For Christmas. With my children.CorinneOh my God.VirginiaAnd my amazing 15-year-old niece who I’m hoping is really going to hold the whole thing together. No pressure, Lorelai! I’m super excited. It’ll be such a great adventure. I’m also a little bit glad we couldn’t go in 2020 when we had a two-year-old. I think that would have been much harder. But still, listeners: If you have any tips about long haul travel with a five- and nine-year-old, tell me in the comments! I need all of the advice. CorinneWell, it’ll definitely be an adventure! VirginiaOh, it will be. I’m super excited.Alright, should we do some questions? We have many questions this time. I tried to group them into categories for us. And since this is our December episode, we’re going to do some December-y type questions. Winter Fat FashionCorinneYes. Okay! Your recommendation for soft pants has been life changing. Thank you for introducing me to Eileen Fisher Lantern pants. Any recommendations for winter coats like a soft coat?VirginiaWell, that’s a thank you to you because you introduced us all to Eileen Fisher lantern pants. CorinneI’ve never been more flattered in my life. I feel like I’m finally being seen.VirginiaI now really need to get some because this is like a double endorsement. It’s very exciting.CorinneThey are great. You just got a coat!VirginiaI did just get a coat, so I do have a coat recommendation. Basically, I wanted a quilted barn coat like my five year old wears, and I wanted it in my size. And I went on an odyssey to find it. I was sent many links over Instagram for coats, and I ended up getting the J.Crew quilted cocoon puffer in olive green. I love it a lot.We previously discussed the issues of being hot / running warm when you are fat. And this coat is warm in cold weather but very lightweight. Like, it doesn’t make me sweaty. So it’s really threading that needle.CorinneYeah. And the shoulder restriction in the car?VirginiaRestriction is good. And I will say I have heard very mixed things about J.Crew plus sizing in general. But this coat I feel optimistic about because I think I bought the XXL, which suggests to me that like the 1x, 2x, 3x are sized appropriately. It’s a roomy coat. I think it’s a pretty inclusive option for folks. I will say the zipper was stiff but a reader told me to run a wax candle over it and that helped. What about you? You’re a big coat fan. CorinneI do like coats. I’m more of a light coat person. I just recently got a fleece from Alder Apparel, which is a Canadian outdoor brand that has very inclusive sizing. VirginiaYeah, they’re supposed to be great. CorinneThey are great. Some of the stuff is pretty pricey, but it’s great. I love it. And I would definitely call it a soft coat. Sometimes I wear it around the house. Another thing I really like about it is that it has snaps. VirginiaOh, yeah, that’s good. CorinneI’m very into snaps on a shirt or a jacket. I feel like they last longer than buttons. You never accidentally pop them off. I’ve also, in the past, gotten coats from Universal Standard and Girlfriend Collective, puffy style coats. They both have a lot of sizes and styles.VirginiaWhile I was doing my coat research Universal Standard sent me approximately 18 emails about coats because that’s how that works. And I didn’t end up buying one, but they have some strong contenders. Definitely wait for sales and if you do the J Crew coat for sure wait for a sale because I got my I think I paid like $90 dollars for it. I got a really good deal. CorinneOh wow, thats a really good deal. VirginiaWe also got a request for fleece leggings. And I have the same request. I have a pair from LL Bean but I don’t love them. I need to hike them up a lot. They don’t hold their shape super well. CorinneI don’t have any fleece leggings. I don’t know if I would wear them, but here is what I’ve heard. There’s a Canadian brand called Anne Mulaire and they have a pair of bamboo fleece leggings.VirginiaOooh, that sounds exciting. Yes.CorinneAnd then I have also heard Land’s End and Target have fleece leggings but I can’t personally endorse any of those. VirginiaNo, but that’s good to know to check out. Yeah, that’s exciting. I was also thinking this might be a place for the Naadam cashmere pants we discussed previously. I get their emails and I put them in the cart every week and then I don’t quite pull the trigger because they’re kind of expensive.CorinneThey are kind of expensive. VirginiaI mean, they’ve definitely been doing some 25% discounts. So I know they go on sale.CorinneWait until 40%.VirginiaYeah, yeah, that’s exactly. I mean, I know you love your shorts from them.CorinneI have also had pants from them, which got eaten by moths, but they were great.VirginiaThat’s the miserable part about Cashmere. All right, what’s next? How do you balance feelings around bodies and clothing? Especially when it feels like buying and finding clothes would be cheaper and easier in a smaller body?CorinneThis question makes me sad.VirginiaI know, I know. Because there’s like a kernel of truth to it, right? There are more clothing options for small bodies. That’s true.Corinne It’s just like, how do you balance feelings around it? You can’t really. It just sucks. I guess you balance feeling around it by finding things that you like to wear.VirginiaI wouldn’t normally say shop your feelings, but I think here I would say shop your feelings. I do think when you can find even just one piece you’re really excited to wear, it helps so much. And when you’re in a transition with your body, that happens, right? Nothing fits and you’re trying so hard. It can just feel so miserable.It’s not an easy solution, like “just go buy something great!” And you’re like, but there is nothing great. But I’m trying to think what’s the easy starting point? Like, maybe it’s a top? I feel like tops can be easier to fit than pants. Depends on your body, maybe? A dress might be easier? CorinneOr even an accessory, like a hat or something where it’s something anyone could wear.VirginiaI mean, I think this is why I leaned into glasses so much. When I have my cool glasses on, I feel stylish no matter what. That’s a nice baseline. So finding that anchor piece. And then, it’s still going to suck. It’s just gonna suck. CorinneI think the glasses are good advice. I would also say maybe this is a time for remembering: You’re still a cool, interesting person even if you don’t have all the right clothes.VirginiaAbsolutely. Absolutely. Yes! Write that down if you need to. Put that somewhere you can read that, by your closet. And I just want to underscore that neither of us are saying pursue a smaller body in order to make this easier. That’s not the answer. It won’t really work. It won’t make you happier.CorinneIt will definitely make you miserable. Okay, next question.When you’re in a store, and they don’t carry your size, do you have any cute snarky comeback or response?VirginiaYou know, I had such a fail on this recently. Dan and I were away for the weekend. We were in Kingston, New York, which is a very cute Hudson Valley town. And we went into this super cute boutique that had clothes and home stuff. And I realized right away, they had nothing in my size. And I completely did nothing about it. I said nothing. I purchased nothing. I just wandered around the store. Dan bought a shirt because they had his size. I advised him on buying the shirt. And then we left and I was just grumpy about it.And I was like, Why didn’t I speak up? Like, this is literally what I do. But I was looking around for who I would talk to and the store was very crowded also. So even getting a salesperson… it was a Saturday. Getting someone’s attention was gonna be hard. And then I saw who I thought was the manager, and he was this skinny, hipster guy. And I just was like, he’s not gonna get it. It was a combination of a lot of things. But I was also furious, because I would have spent a lot of money and they had really cute stuff. I would have bought things. I think what happens is you suddenly have this feeling of like, I don’t belong here. They don’t want me here. Yeah, it’s hard to overcome in the moment. CorinneThat really does suck. I don’t think that I’ve ever said anything about that to anyone, either. I feel like there might have been times where there’s been a bigger person working in the store and then I’ve just been like, “Oh, I really wish you guys carried bigger stuff,” and they’ve been like, “I know.”VirginiaYeah. I probably would have felt safer saying something in that context.CorinneI feel like I’m just so accustomed at this point to stores not having my size.VirginiaRight. I was expecting it.CorinneIt’s just so much the norm.VirginiaIt was a moment where I thought to myself, you know, I’ve been really working on doing this advocacy in doctors offices, like I decline to be weighed. I work on saying why and I am working on that piece of it. And I was like, I need to start building these skills in retail, as well. I so rarely shop in person. So if this is something you want to work on, I think it’s a great place for activism. But I also think if you just feel like it feels hard, it’s okay to just leave the store and shop online instead or whatever. Or you can always like, I think it can be effective to do some calling out in social media, depending.CorinneI’d be curious to hear from readers / listeners, if they have done this or have good thoughts on how to do it. Or maybe someone’s done it and the shop has started carrying bigger sizes!VirginiaI did have a nice exchange with a thin friend, recently. She DM’ed me a brand and she was like, “this brand has amazing jeans and they’re size inclusive. They go up to whatever.” And I looked at the size chart and I was like, “no they don’t.”CorinneOh yeah, like they go up to a 4x and it’s a size 12.VirginiaExactly. It was not extended sizes. And she was like, “Oh my God, I didn’t understand that.” I mean, she’s skinny, she’d never had to try on the 4x and realize this. So she was like, “Well, I’m friends with her so I’ll talk to her about it” and I was like, “Good, yes.”CorinneThat’s really awesome.VirginiaIf you are a good customer in a store that’s not size inclusive, especially these local boutiques, that does feel like a place where you can do this. And I also hear from local boutique owners about how there’s many layers making it difficult for them to do this. But they totally should still get this feedback from customers.CorinneOkay, the next question is:Virginia, could you do a bra science project like you did with Jeans Science?VirginiaNo. Don’t make me. Don’t make me do it. CorinneYou need a PhD for that. You need an advanced degree in mathematics.VirginiaOh my God. I have shared before the bra brands that I like that I shop at barenecessities.com. They have really good customer service. They carry a really wide array of sizes and styles. I have found decent bras there.I do not feel amazed about my bras regularly, but I feel fine about my bras. I do think there is a deeper investigative story to be done about the way bras are marketed and the weird pseudoscience around bra fits and the way you have to be such an educated customer to understand bras. Like, I do think there’s a fascinating American marketing story to be told there. So I will think about it. But I do not think it will translate to me trying on 600 bras for you.CorinneMaybe not a bra science journey.VirginiaYeah, not like a try-on experience. Because I don’t want to try on bras.CorinneAs bad as jeans are, bras would be worse.VirginiaIt has occurred to me that another way to do fashion science in the future would be to get some Burnt Toast reader-volunteers who want to try stuff on and maybe we make some kind of test panel?CorinneInteresting. VirginiaI haven’t worked out any details around that, like logistics. It would be people having to shop and put it on your own credit card and manage your own returns.CorinneYeah, like crowd-sourced…VirginiaBut yeah, like if we could get a panel of readers in different body sizes that might be really interesting. CorinneI also think the last time that we talked about bras, I plugged this, but there’s an incredible Reddit that’s called a bra that fits. They’re definitely doing bra science. They can advise you and you can submit photos. And they’ll be like, it’s not fitting, right. They’re doing bra science.VirginiaSo maybe this need is being met and maybe we don’t need to do it for bras. But I’m open to doing it for something else. Maybe? Well, we’ll see what people think.Holiday Survival ModeVirginiaSo that was all our clothing questions for this month. Now we’re going to get into holiday questions, since by the time this airs, we will have just had Thanksgiving. I hope you all survived. And for many of us, now we’re getting into Hanukkah and Christmas, et cetera, et cetera. It’s an intense time of year for bodies and food and all of the feelings.CorinneYes. Okay. Let me ask you the first question:So we’re having Thanksgiving with a family who has one kid with extreme picky eating, and it’s somehow always a focus of conversation. Can’t possibly be comfortable for the kid. Plus, my daughter is old enough to pick up some of the terrible food messaging. Is there anything to do here except just change the subject?VirginiaOh, so this is interesting. So the picky eater is presumably a nephew or niece or something, not your child but another child at the table where relatives are focusing on that kid’s picky eating. Yeah, that’s a bummer. I mean, my go to line in these situations is “We trust their body. We’re not worried about this.” But if you’re not the parent, that might feel weird, for you to be like, “…
Full show notes at the publisherGeneral levels of explicit and implicit bias against other groups have just rapidly decreased over the past 30 or 40 years. Whereas for weight, it’s actually still going up. So, you know, we’re up against a pretty big battle.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.Today I’m chatting with Jeff Hunger who is an assistant professor of social psychology at Miami University in Ohio and my very favorite weight stigma researcher (if you’re allowed to have favorite weight stigma researchers and I say that you are!).Jeff is someone I got to know several years ago when I was reporting on weight stigma in healthcare. We’ve evolved into internet buddies with a shared passion for hidden kitchens, which you will hear us discuss if you stick all the way through to the Butter. Our focus of this episode is Jeff’s work on anti-fat bias, understanding how we internalize it, the difference between implicit and explicit bias, and how we start to separate out concepts like body image struggles from the larger conversation of anti-fat bias. We cover a lot of important ground. Including Taylor Swift. So here’s Jeff!Episode 71 TranscriptJeffSo I’m Jeff Hunger. I’m a social psychology professor at Miami University. That’s the one in Ohio not the one in Florida. VirginiaFewer palm trees. JeffNo slipping out to South Beach after our chat, unfortunately. I’m also a husband, a cat dad, and if you follow me on Instagram, an annoying foodie is probably the easiest way to classify me.VirginiaI consider you a delightful foodie, not an annoying foodie. I have a lot of foodie envy when I see your content. JeffI think that just means that you might be in the in group with me. VirginiaI’m not in the group because I have to feed small children and I don’t get to be in the group anymore. But I dream of coming back someday.JeffOne of these days we’ll just have to have you out to Ohio. We can do a foodie weekend.VirginiaYes, please, that sounds great. JeffMaybe more relevant to the folks listening: I’m a stigma researcher. So a lot of my research looks at how weight stigma in particular shapes our mental and physical health. And recently we’ve been focusing a lot on how this plays out with respect to disordered eating and body image.VirginiaWe started talking about doing this episode when I sent you a question I got from a reader which I’m going to read, because it gets into all these big questions about bias that you work on.Hi Virginia, what does the research and or other sources say about how to truly rid ourselves of anti-fat bias, both internal and external? Obviously, self awareness is key. But I’m curious if you have come across what works. I see it in my own mind constantly, and try to bring awareness to it. But it seems fairly intractable in spite of now several years of educating myself. It comes out in how I view myself, my bigger bodied child and is tied up in shame and judgment. Who is doing therapeutic somatic intellectual meditation, etc work to really uproot this type of bias? I know there are studies on mindfulness and implicit bias. Are there any studies showing the kind of therapy or other modality that works?So basically, how do we fix our bias? I think this is a brick wall we all come up against at some point. JeffThis is a fantastic question and I do think that it is one that needs a lot more research attention. But there is a recent review of this work that is really interesting, because it basically found that a lot of intervention approaches that have been tried just don’t seem to reliably work. And these are approaches that we took from other forms of bias reduction. You know, there’s a larger literature on how we reduce explicit and implicit bias that’s only recently—you know, past 10 or 15 years—being done as it relates to weight. This is things like trying to reduce the belief that weight is controllable, having folks get exposed to fat targets who are counter stereotypical and trying to invoke things like empathy or perspective taking. All of these have been tested and it turns out none of them seem to really be effective.VirginiaSo they’re effective for other kinds of bias, like racism or sexism, but not for anti-fat bias. JeffFrom my read of the bias reduction literature, yeah. They seem to be more effective with other groups but tested in the weight domain, they don’t really seem to hold up.VirginiaSo what’s going on? That’s so weird. Is it weird?JeffI do think it’s weird, a little bit. But what I think is really interesting was that the review also found that the interventions that were effective were better able to reduce self-directed bias or internalized bias, as opposed to the bias that we direct towards other people.So unlike other categories, weight is one in which there’s a really, really strong internalization piece and one that I think is a little bit more intractable, because the boundaries between these groups, between being fat or being not, it’s kind of permeable. It’s a lot more permeable than other groups, like when we think about race or sexual orientation, there’s far, far less movement between them. What this review found that did work was interventions like adopting a Health at Every Size perspective. This seemed to be an effective tool, at least for reducing that internalized weight bias, as was research that uses the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.1So there are a few approaches that we seem to see from this literature, at least from this recent review, that help us at least tackle internalized stigma or self-directed stigma. I think where we need to go then is knowing that we have a little bit of a success story, if we can kind of build on that to see if there are ways to modify those approaches to not just reduce the self-directed stigma, but also the anti-fat bias that we’re directing towards other people.VirginiaThis is making me realize we should also define a couple of terms for folks who are less familiar with this conversation. JeffI’ll put on my social psychology professor hat. So, when we think about internal versus external, we can direct weight stigma towards someone else, we can direct anti-fat bias toward a person in our social world—a partner, a child, a stranger. At the same time, we can direct that same sort of anti-fatness towards ourselves. We can turn it inward and start to devalue ourselves and stereotype ourselves because of our weight. Now, implicit bias is bias that isn’t as easily reportable. You know, we can’t just walk up to you and go, you know, Virginia, what’s your level of implicit anti fat bias? It’s assessed in more indirect ways because it’s below conscious level. And that’s in contrast to explicit bias which is where I can just walk up to you and say, okay, Virginia, how do you think about fat people or what do you think about fat people? I can readily report on that form of bias.Both are important, but I think more recently implicit bias has kind of gotten a lot of media attention and attention in other spaces.VirginiaAnd it’s interesting because my first thought is, oh, there must be a very bright line between these two types of bias, but the more I’m thinking about it, I’m wondering, can someone experience something as implicit bias, but other people experience it as explicit bias? Does that make sense?JeffThat’s another interesting and thorny question. My bias might be at the implicit level and so it could lead me to behave in a way that you pick up as explicit, that you end up feeling discriminated against because of your race, your gender, your weight, when I didn’t really notice that I was doing anything wrong, because my implicit bias was leaking out. So it may not look the same as shouting a derogatory term at someone, but it might be the ways in which I position my body, subtle nonverbal behaviors that I engage in as we interact with one another, things that can shape the outcomes and the experience of the other person, even if I don’t notice them.VirginiaIt just speaks to the level of awareness we need to start to unlearn these biases, right? Because you can be executing them in ways you are not aware of. JeffAnd I think as the reader that contributed this question noted, a lot of that is thinking about self-reflection and trying to be self aware. But at the same time when we think about anti-fat bias, we also need to be thinking about how bigger, broader, structural forces are shaping our anti-fat bias, both internal and external. Because if all we do is emphasize and try to make gains at the individual level, I imagine that those are going to be hard to sustain against the continued backdrop of anti-fat fuckery in our society, excuse my language.VirginiaYou never have to excuse your language here. And absolutely. It’s making a personal project out of something that is this much larger societal question that we have to grapple with.When we look at how the research shows what we know works for other forms of bias doesn’t work as well for anti fat bias, do you think that has something to do with the way as the larger system doesn’t support that personal work? JeffI think that that very well could be why we are not seeing these maybe tried and true, or at least more well-established bias reduction tools work when it comes to weight. We also see that just general levels of explicit and implicit bias against other groups has just rapidly decreased over the past 30 or 40 years. Whereas for weight, it’s actually still going up.So, you know, we’re up against a pretty big battle, an uphill fight to reduce this. Because not only is it a little bit resistant to these techniques that we have tried before, in general, across the country, at least in the US, that bias seems to keep creeping up when things like bias against gay individuals has gone down over the past 20 years.VirginiaRight. It just shows how much it’s being reinforced in healthcare, in schools, in these different places that have made some progress—not enough progress, but some progress on other forms of bias—that here we really are still on the starting blocks, so to speak.JeffAbsolutely. There’s this really interesting study that I reviewed and read recently that basically found that things like large scale, fat-shaming events against celebrities can actually push around implicit bias at a grand scale. VirginiaOh, that’s fascinating.JeffThey basically had all of these large scale, public fat-shaming events, whether it was all of the many times that Lizzo has been the target of this or a lot of other celebrities. It was basically celebrity fat shaming, and they see that it does have a small effect. We’re not going to see this jump up a ton every time, but if we think about cumulative exposure, think about how many times we see a fat celebrity get talked terribly about online or in the news, even if each one of those events only has a tiny, tiny little bit of an impact on our implicit bias, over time it’s just gonna build. We’re dealing with shit like that as well, having to push back against things like seeing anti-fat bias continually reemerge.VirginiaI always think when that happens, when I see progressives fat-shaming Donald Trump. Like, Donald Trump does not care. He is not going to see your tweet and there are so many other reasons to eviscerate Donald Trump! You don’t need to talk about his body at all. And yet, your fat friend just saw your tweet. And you equated them to this person who I would describe as a monster in most ways.JeffIt’s not the “gotcha” take that I think a lot of otherwise progressive or liberal folks on Twitter would think it is. One, it’s incredibly lazy and unfunny. And two, like you say, Donald Trump doesn’t give a shit about what you tweet about him. But fat people in your sphere online, do they see it and they take note?VirginiaSo, to get a little more into the internal versus external piece of it all, one thought I had in reading this person’s question is that they seem to be equating anti-fat bias with body image struggles, and with shame about their own body and shame about their child’s body. And this made me wonder if these two concepts are always intertwined or if we can, and maybe should, separate them. Can you be fatphobic but not struggle with your own relationship to body? And on the flip side, can you be struggling, maybe even have an eating disorder, etc, and not be fatphobic?JeffI personally think that these ideas need to be separated. I do think that issues with body image and anti-fatness can and do operate independently from one another. Of course, anti-fat bias living in a structurally anti-fat society is going to contribute to poor body image, but they, to me, are not one and the same. Like you said, I think someone can be incredibly fatphobic and perfectly content with their own body. And on the flip side, I do think that folks can struggle with body image and not be inherently fatphobic.VirginiaI think that is really helpful to hear. Because I often hear from people having that added layer of guilt on top of their own struggle. Like, “I feel bad about my body and I feel bad that I’m perpetuating this thing. And how do I separate those?”JeffI think that’s a really important insight for folks to make, that they can both feel bad about their own body and worry that feeling bad about their own body is going to contribute to perpetuating fatphobia. I think that acknowledging how one’s body image struggles may inadvertently be contributing to this sort of anti-fat system is different than what I’ve seen, which is occasionally folks using their body image struggles as a justification for their anti-fatness. I think that’s that’s a different animal altogether. I think recognizing how your own body struggles and how your own feelings about your weight might reflect bigger, broader anti-fatness is an important one to have. It’s not an excuse for you to be shitty to fat people.VirginiaHow does Taylor Swift fit into all of this?JeffI am going to out myself as not a Swiftie. I think I just lost my gay card. But I think that from my very loose sort of understanding, it basically was that she steps on the scale and it just reads “fat” on the scale? VirginiaYeah, exactly. And it’s supposed to be a comment on her eating disorder struggles, that she gets on the scale, and it says fat.JeffAnd I think that it probably could be approached in a way that still communicates that she is not liking her body without having to say she doesn’t like it because it is a fat body specifically. She can express struggles with disordered eating and with her eating disorder that she has disclosed previously, but I think doing it in a manner that doesn’t necessarily equate feeling bad about your body with being fat.I mean, I will probably get annihilated on Twitter for all of that, because I think there was a heated debate about this.VirginiaThere was a very heated debate. Taylor Swift fans came out fast and furious in support of her and it got very complicated. I say this as someone who really can’t name a Taylor Swift song? So they can come at me, too, if they want. JeffWe’re both canceled. VirginiaBut I just kept thinking: If this was someone who I loved and admired in the way that the Taylor Swift fans love and admire Taylor Swift, why would I not also hold them to this higher standard?In comparison, when Lizzo used an ableist term in one of her songs and people noted it, she immediately took the term out and apologized. It was very straightforward and everyone was like, “That was fine. We’re over it, we all learned something.”And Taylor did eventually edit the video, but hasn’t, as far as I know, made a statement. I just think there was a lot of white lady energy around it. It shows how uncomfortable we are getting this kind of feedback and having to admit to wrongdoing. And it certainly spoke to all the implicit…
Full show notes at the publisherYou’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.Today I am chatting with Emiko Davies, an award winning Australian-Japanese food writer, photographer, and cookbook author based in Italy.Emiko grew up in a diplomatic family and spent most of her life living in countries other than her own, from China to the United States. After graduating from art school, she ended up in Florence, Italy in 2005 to study art restoration, and fell in love with a Tuscan Sommelier. They live with their daughters in a charming hilltop village between Florence and Pisa and plan to open their own space for sharing food and natural wine experiences in San Miniato in 2023. (Book your travel now!) Emiko has also written five cookbooks, most recently Cinnamon & Salt, and she also shares her recipes on her Instagram and in her Substack newsletter, Emiko’s Newsletter.But today we’re talking less about Emiko’s amazing food (although I always have time to talk about Emiko’s amazing food). We’re talking about Emiko’s experiences parenting her daughter Luna who is in a bigger body. And as you can imagine, that gets especially complicated for Emiko, as a semi public figure who shares pieces of her life and her kids online. Episode 70 TranscriptVirginiaYou have been on my radar for such a long time as someone who produces this beautiful and delicious food. You live in Italy and live out my dreams in many ways—or at least it looks that way. I’m allowed to fantasize. But I didn’t realize until you started doing your Substack about a year ago that you were also very firmly anti-diet. And I am always so thrilled to discover food people who feel that way. Because, as I’ve discussed in the past (here with Julia Turshen!), the food world has a complicated relationship with all of these issues, as I know I don’t need to tell you.EmikoWell, I actually didn’t realize that there was a term for anti-diet until I started reading some of your work. I’m pretty sure you had a lot to do with it, Virginia, so thank you. But I once I started reading about that I realized I’ve been anti-diet my whole life. Because I, like my daughter Luna, grew up in a in a bigger body. I basically went through puberty and then became thin, like over the summer. My body completely changed. And then I was a thin teenager and have been all kinds of body shapes as my through my 30s and now I’m 42. Especially having babies and everything else.VirginiaWe all try out a lot of bodies, a lot of shapes.EmikoYeah, exactly. But one thing I have never been into was diets. I was just very lucky that growing up, that was something that my family never hinted at or never suggested that we needed to do. So I realize now, looking back, that I went through those periods of my life where I was in a bigger body completely unscathed really. I don’t really remember anytime ever feeling ashamed of myself or hating myself. For that, I feel really grateful. Restricting food was never something I was gonna do. I loved eating and I loved cooking. So when I realized there was a term for anti-diet, I was like, wow, this is, this is me. I found my home.VirginiaWhat a gift your family gave you. Do you have a sense of why your parents or the adults in your life were able to provide that safe space? EmikoI don’t know why I was so lucky. My mother is Japanese and she’s very tiny. She’s a really tiny Japanese lady. My father, though, is in a bigger body. And I don’t know if that had something to do with it. Body commenting or any of that sort of thing, it just was never something that we did in my family. I have a younger brother, who was always stick thin and still is stick thin and has never changed. My sister, though, was just like me, she had a bigger body as a child and as an adolescent. So maybe it was just a combination of the fact that we we all had different shaped bodies. And that was just who we were.VirginiaThey didn’t feel like, “We have to fight this.”EmikoI feel very lucky. Looking back on this now, I didn’t realize how lucky I really was. VirginiaSo you had this realization when you started sharing pictures—particularly of Luna, you have an older daughter, too—that suddenly you were in this conversation in a different way, that you weren’t just sharing pictures of your kids.EmikoSo my older daughter is nine and she’s straight sized. And actually, we had a few years of really difficult eating, where she basically was only eating a handful of things. She was so anxious about school that she wouldn’t eat breakfast or eat at school. So she would come home at four in the afternoon and hadn’t eaten a thing and she was getting so skinny. So she was a whole different thing. I was always trying to make sure she was really comfortable around food and that mealtimes were just really the chillest and most peaceful place to be. I didn’t want to create any more anxiety than what she was already going through. And then Luna came along when we were in the middle of this really difficult eating phase. I’m gonna say its a phase because she is getting out of it now that she’s nearly 10. But the ages between four and eight were really, really difficult years.And Luna was born when she was five and a half, so right in the middle of this. And Luna was just this bubbly, funny, kind of crazy, little second daughter. When she was a toddler, I was posting photos and videos as I had always done on on Instagram and on my blog, of food things that we do together, which is basically like what we do whenever we have any free time. Almost every day, on the weekends or after school, we’re making something or at least I’m cooking something and my kids usually jump in and want to play with whatever it is that I’m making.And when when Luna was a toddler, people loved seeing Luna content. You could tell she really loves food. She loves trying anything, eating anything, sticking her hand in a bag of flour or whatever it was. You know, making a mess. I’m usually in the kitchen testing recipes and things like that and I would post all these photos and videos and sometimes we’d be making pasta or baking something, whatever it was. And so that was great, people love seeing little Luna doing that.And one of her one of the videos that that people still talk about when they write to me about her is Luna drinking a bowl of minestrone which was her favorite thing. She literally will pick up the bowl and drink every last drop out of there. And then like put it down and give this big sigh. Like, “That was so good.” So I was sharing these things. And when she was little, people just loved it and saw the joy and the innocence. That was the main thing people would write to me: This is just pure joy.VirginiaI mean, her reaction to minestrone is exactly correct. It’s delicious. EmikoThe first time I got some really startlingly negative, really hateful comments was about a year ago. I happened to be making a tiramisu when Luna popped in like she always does no matter what I make in the kitchen. She’ll be there like, what are you doing? Can I come and help you? And she’ll stick her hands in whatever it is I’m making. I was gutting a fish and she did the same thing with a fish, right? She’s just in there, curious about whatever it is that I’m doing.But this time, it happened to be a tiramisu, which, you know, is a dessert made with mascarpone, eggs, cream. I had some persimmons that were super ripe and I was using them in the tiramisu. And I think it’s kind of… what’s the word? Maybe predictable? That this was going to happen with a photo of Luna with a dessert. Not minestrone, which was full of vegetables, but a dessert. And the only actually the only times I have ever gotten negative comments is when they see Luna with something sweet. In this case, it was a tiramisu and she wasn’t actually eating it. She was helping me make… I wouldn’t even say she was helping me. She was just making a mess! VirginiaShe was in the process.Luna and the TiramisuEmikoShe was like, “What’s this?” And literally stuck a savoiard, like the lady finger biscuit, in the egg and sugar before I had even put the mascarpone in there. And she was just messing around. So I had these photos and I have the recipe that I was sharing in my newsletter. That was the first time that I got some really negative comments and the comments were basically, “What are you doing to this child?” This was clearly something that they saw as my fault. “What kind of parent does this to their child?” The assumptions are that she’s eating too much and that she has this really like hearty appetite, which also she doesn’t. She eats regularly! Thank god, she’s not a difficult eater, like my older daughter, but she’s not a particularly big eater, either. I just don’t think that that has anything to do with anything at all. But it’s this assumption that people have when they see her, especially coupled with an image of cake or dessert or sweets, right? The assumption is that I am to blame for how she looks. And I think that’s the problem.VirginiaThe problem is that they’re seeing her body as a problem, when it’s absolutely not a problem. It’s just her body. I have so much anger about this whole situation. They’re taking this one tiny snapshot of your day —I can’t even say it’s a snapshot of your life. It’s a moment of a day!—And they’re assuming that they know everything about your parenting, your feeding, her relationship with food, who she is. The number of assumptions being made here is staggering.But what makes me saddest is that it puts you in this place of having to defend yourself—which you don’t owe them or owe anybody—and of feeling like you have to explain what her appetite really is, when that’s none of our business. Nobody needs to know how Luna eats or doesn’t eat. That’s this dynamic that we force on kids in bigger bodies and parents of kids and bigger bodies that you have to justify that things are okay. And you’re never asked those same questions if your older daughter is in the tiramisu picture. Nobody would have had anything to say about it.EmikoExactly. Because I do have so many more photos and videos of Mariù, my older daughter, making cupcakes, making cream buns. They just see this thin, “normal” looking girl and there’s no problem there for them. Whereas when they see Luna, they think there is something wrong with that picture.VirginiaRight, which is just anti-fat bias. You have also had a lot of really positive comments about Luna. So I wanted to also talk a little bit about that piece of that because I mean, I love Luna content. She is such a joyous child. She’s such a sunshine-y kid and I love seeing her explore foods. EmikoI’ve actually been blown away by the positive responses from people, to be honest. They far outnumber the negative comments. People have have written privately and publicly to me—all kinds of people, younger people who don’t have kids, older people who were a kid like Luna, people who are in food, people who aren’t, so many people wrote to me—not only about this negative comment, but just in general. Whenever they see something of Luna, they just write to me to say, “I love this, I love seeing this celebration of food and joy and life.” So that has actually been something that has always encouraged me to continue sharing Luna and sharing just these little snippets of our life. Because I do get so many really, really heartwarming messages and actually quite often tearjerking messages, as well. One of the ones that really stuck out to me, for example, was I got a private message from Karen Barnes, the editor of Delicious Magazine in the UK. She wrote to me to say that she had grown up in a bigger body and how she was put on a diet. Like for Easter, she wasn’t given an Easter egg, they’d given her some tights or something else. And she felt many, many, many years of complete shame about her body and went through yo-yo dieting. She’s still now battling all of these issues, because of what was put on her as a child. And she wrote to me just to tell her her story, and to say how how happy she is to see that Luna is going down another path, and that there’s somebody showing that there is another path.You can just continue with life and celebrate food as it is, encourage a good relationship with food, and do it no matter what size your child is. So when I when I get messages like that, I think, yeah, I’m not doing anything wrong. I should continue sharing this. emikodaviesA post shared by Emiko Davies (@emikodavies)VirginiaI just had a message today from a reader who had taken her daughter in a bigger body to the pediatrician. And the pediatrician had made comments about “Are you eating healthy foods?” And she was questioning herself . When you get the negative comments, our culture has trained us to then think What am I doing wrong? They’ve called me out in some way. You sharing Luna and sharing the way your family is so joyful with food and so respectful of your kids bodies is helping families to say, “Oh, I can keep parenting my child in a larger body from this place of trust and respect and love. And I don’t need to do anything differently.” And it’s so powerful and we really need that representation. But I’m also very aware that it’s coming with a cost to you, because you have to deal with these other reactions.EmikoYeah, it feels—and I’m sure you you feel like this, too—like you’re swimming against the stream. And sometimes I wonder, should I keep doing this? What am I doing? But on the other hand, I also think the percentage of negative comments I got were actually tiny compared to the outpouring of warm and supportive messages. I think I need to maybe learn to just to block those hateful comments and try not to take them personally, which is super hard. When it’s about me, it’s easier for me to not take it personally, but when it’s about my child, that’s that’s really that’s really tough.VirginiaIt’s so vulnerable. I completely get that. And, you know, in my case, my older daughter’s story was shared in a very public way. I wrote a book about it, I wrote a New York Times Magazine article about it. I’ve done dozens of podcasts about it. And I did reach a point where I thought, “I’m going to talk a lot less about her.” I don’t put her picture on my public Instagram anymore, unless you can’t really see her face. Because I wanted to start to give her, as she was getting older, more privacy. And with the younger one, I’ve started to move in the same direction. Even though she doesn’t have a dramatic story like that. It’s easier to share when they’re little, when they’re toddlers and babies and preschoolers, there’s something much more innocuous about sharing them at that point. So I really relate to the struggle you have of like, they’re a joyful part of my life, I share my life as part of my work and where do we draw these lines? How do we figure out what guardrails our kids need? There are no easy answers to this one.EmikoYeah, the lines are very blurred.VirginiaI don’t know if you’ve thought about either turning off comments on Luna posts or putting a clear disclaimer of “I’ll be blocking negative comments.” Having some clear boundaries set with your audience can be really helpful. What’s nice about it in a way is the the people who are going to make the negative comments are still going to make the negative comments, but it gets everyone else on the same page. Your audience, the ones who support you, the ones who get it, the ones who appreciate what you’re doing and realize the value of what you’re doing. So then I find it helps the audience step up. I’ll see people dealing with the negative comments for me, which is lovely and so supportive when people want to take on that work. It also clarifies, for me, when someone breaks one of my rules that I have set, it’s an instant delete, instant block. I just don’t eve…
Full show notes at the publisherToday Virginia is chatting with Naureen Hunani, the founder of RDs for Neurodiversity, a neurodiversity-informed online continuing education platform for dietitians and helping professionals. Naureen also has her own private practice in Montreal, where she treats children, adults, and families struggling with various feeding and eating challenges through a trauma-informed, weight-inclusive, and anti-oppressive approach. If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.And 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.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 LINKSRDs for NeurodiversityOn the Division of Responsibility and diet cultureMelinda Wenner Moyer on core strength and sitting at the dinner tableFor little ones, Yummy Toddler Food has roundups of good baby and toddler highchairs, booster seats, and toddler tables.For older kiddos, we're hearing good things about this chair and these wobble stoolswhat is misophoniaAgainst ImpulsivityThe Heart Principle by Helen Hoang Want to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.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 independent anti-diet journalism.Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.Episode 69 TranscriptNaureenSo I am a multiply neurodivergent person. I’m also a mom of two multiply neurodivergent kiddos. Both of my children have feeding differences. And professionally, I’m a registered dietitian. VirginiaCan you talk a little bit about why neurodivergent folks may have a hard time with eating? How much of this is due to being neurodivergent—and how much of this is due to our culture’s neurotypical expectations around food and around mealtimes? NaureenI love that question. That is something that I have been exploring the last couple of years. How much of this struggle or difference is really related to the neurotypical expectations? Who gets to define what is and isn’t a problem? It’s really interesting because people of all neurotypes can can have challenges when it comes to eating. We do see, however, that neurodivergent children, in general, will present with a lot more feeding differences, compared to children who are developing more typically. What we often see is selective eating, or what a lot of people call “picky eating,” and those types of feeding/eating behaviors. It could be related to sensory needs or the child’s feeding ability. But I think what harms neurodivergent children the most are neurotypical developmental milestones related to feeding and eating—the shoulds and the expectations, right?I know, as a pediatric dietitian, this is huge. I remember talking to parents and saying things like, “By 12 months, they should be able to eat like the rest of the family and by 18 months they should be able to self feed.” And this is what we see in daycares, schools, these expectations that we have for children to develop a certain way. And when that doesn’t happen, a lot of parents struggle. Because parents are given prescriptive advice, right? So when there are differences that show up, it becomes really difficult to access support.So, I really see this as a difference and not necessarily a problem. And that’s what I encountered also, as a parent, right? When I was struggling to feed my family, it was really difficult to find support if people didn’t fully understand what I was struggling with. I didn’t have the language and my children, of course, didn’t have the language. I think that it’s definitely a bit of both, but I do think that these milestones can can be quite damaging to children who are developing differently.VirginiaI love the language choices you’re making. I love that you’re saying “feeding difference” instead of “feeding problem.” As someone with a kid with a lot of feeding differences, I really resonate because it just is so negative. It can feel like a problem, right? Because you’re really struggling. And people are telling you that something’s not okay. But to reframe it as a difference and not something you’re blaming your kid for, or that everybody’s doing wrong—that you are doing wrong, that the kid’s doing wrong—that alone feels like such a powerful reframing.NaureenThank you. For me personally it has made a huge difference and the families that I work with feel very much affirmed by that type of language. VirginiaSo in terms of the expectations, I completely hear you on the milestones. My older daughter definitely did not eat like the rest of the family at 12 months or 18 months, or any of that. We had to throw out that whole timeline. And a lot of these expectations that are on parents today come from diet culture. What rules or misconceptions from diet culture in particular do you see getting weaponized against neurodivergent kids?NaureenI think diet culture impacts all children in a negative way. I think for kids who are neurodivergent or disabled, it’s particularly problematic. Because we know that diet culture is rooted in white supremacy and so is ableism, so then you’ve got these two systems of oppression coming at you.Because when we look at what diet culture pushes—it’s not carbs, right? Carbohydrates are softer, easier to chew, easier to digest. And a lot of the foods that kids who are more sensory sensitive gravitate towards are demonized by diet culture.There are different pieces, the ability piece, the texture perspective, and all of that and the sensory perspective can be difficult because of feeding abilities. Kids who are choosing certain foods because they’re easier to consume, often those foods—boxed foods, processed foods, packaged foods, all of those are—are demonized by diet culture. So I feel like it can become really, really messy. We see also that neurodivergent children have more feeding defenses. And when you look at the adult population, they’re also more likely to develop eating disorders later on in life, right?VirginiaYes and how much of that might be rooted in the shaming they’re experiencing around those food preferences? NaureenAbsolutely.VirginiaI think about this all the time, how the way we’ve been told to think about feeding our kids is just so wildly out of line with how our kids want and can eat. And that is true for neurotypical kids, too. But you’re right. The demonization of carbs, the demonization of processed foods—if we could get rid of those two things would make everyone’s lives so much easier when it comes to feeding kids.So I think a diet culture version of feeding kids is pushing vegetables really hard, being anxious about carbs, that kind of thing. And there’s also the clean plate stuff, like “finish this before you can have this,” those kinds of rules. And then the model we’re given as the alternative to those rules is usually Division of Responsibility, which is the idea that parents are in charge of what foods are offered and when they’re offered, and kids are in charge of whether they eat and how much they eat. You and I have also talked about how that model doesn’t always work for neurodivergent folks. So I’d love to have you spell out what you see as limitations there as well.NaureenYes, I think that DOR is something that can be adapted, right? So, if we look at, for example, the parents’ job—the what, when, and where—I find that if the parent isn’t necessarily informed about how the child’s developing, and if the idea here is to get the child to eat like the rest of the family and to appear as neurotypical as possible, that’s not going to work. I think that’s one of the reasons why DOR can fail.I do think there is still a lot of value in the child’s jobs in feeding, in terms of deciding whether or not they wants to eat and the quantity. But it’s the what, when, and where that I feel like a lot of people struggle with. Because a parent might think that the family meal table is the best place for the child to eat, but maybe it’s not. I think this is where things get really, really messy, where I have had to sometimes even separate different family members, because it’s just doesn’t feel safe. Or what the other members are eating is just so aversive from a sensory standpoint, the smell. Plus all the demands that come with socializing, when it comes to eating. Some children don’t have the capacity at the end of the day to be able to socialize and, quote unquote, behave well and sit down and all of that.So for some children, having a little table on the side works better. Or it could be in front of screens, even. For some children that works better because it provides self-regulation and some predictability instead of adding those social demands and all of that. With the what and when and where, we have to really look at the child’s development abilities, feeding abilities, preferences, all of that, and then make the right decision, whatever that looks like.VirginiaOn the one hand, I hope what you’re saying is giving a lot of parents a moment of real relief and giving them permission to think “Oh, I don’t have to try to execute the family meal in this rigid way. I can make more of my own choices here. And really meet my kid where they are ,as opposed to trying to drag my kid into the situation that’s not working.”But I imagine, too, that you sometimes encounter folks who have a knee jerk reaction of, “This is too permissive. How will they ever improve if we make it this easy for them?”I’m deliberately playing devil’s advocate here. This is not how I feel about it. But I have encountered that perspective and I wonder if you have as well. How do you talk through those concerns? NaureenI think it’s important to have these conversations. We live in a society that is so ableist, so we do internalize a lot of these ableist beliefs, too. But if we think of the changes that parents are making as “accommodations,” (because that’s what they really are) then it makes a lot more sense. It’s like saying, “Why are we going to put a ramp? If we do that wheelchair users will never walk.” You would never say that.So, when we start thinking of eating in that same type of way, then it makes sense. Children want to learn. They naturally want to be like others and please their caregivers, but sometimes they just can’t eat the way the rest of the family does And so, these accommodations can be so supportive and actually help build a safer relationship with the caregiver. And that leads to healthy attachment because you’re meeting the child’s needs. Being responsive will not spoil the child. The children will still be intrinsically motivated. If they see something interesting that they want to eat, they’re going to take it. They’re not going to not eat it, because you’re offering preferred foods alongside that newer food. VirginiaI also think, a lot of times when parents are having that reaction, we have to take a moment and say, “Well, what we’re trying to force here is not happening.” The kid is not sitting at the dinner table or not eating the vegetables, or whatever it is. So why wouldn’t we give this a shot? As opposed to just continually trying to get this round peg into the square hole or whatever metaphor you want to use. NaureenIt’s interesting, Virginia, because a lot of parents are already implementing a lot of these strategies on their own because parents are, typically, in my opinion, quite attuned. They know what’s happening. But they just feel a lot of shame and guilt. They’ll share, “We are doing this” but feel so shameful about it. And I’m like, “This is a brilliant strategy.” So sometimes it’s really about how about maybe we remove some of that shame. How do we empower parents because they, they’re the ones who are feeding their kids, all day long. I mean, providers can be helpful and supportive for sure. But I think that at the end of the day, we need to empower parents so they can make the right choice without feeling all of that guilt and shame.VirginiaRight, and without feeling like you’re being graded. I had a mom reach out recently, she mentioned that they were doing a lot of meals in front of the TV because that’s what’s working right now. She was like, “I just think about how our meals look like from the outside,” and I just thought, but who’s looking in your windows at night? Who is on the outside that you’re so worried is seeing this and judging you? If that’s someone in your life, who loves you, that person is not being supportive. And if it’s the sort of amorphous, larger world of Instagram and culture and whatever—none of them are invited to dinner so it doesn’t matter. I would love to get into some practical strategies. And I’ve got a bunch of listener questions I’ve gathered that I thought we could go through. The first one says:“I would love any practical tips for making dinners more doable. My child often only sits for three to five minutes tops. And as soon as she’s done, her younger sister is done, too. So it’s like the whole meal just kind of unravels at that point. Would a different chair or other physical support help her stay longer? Or is it just not realistic at this time of day for dinner to last longer than five minutes?”NaureenDefinitely, seating makes a really big difference. Make sure that you have a chair that supports the child. because often what ends up happening is that if the child is not well-supported, a lot of energy is going towards sitting down, the core muscles, and then you just don’t have the capacity to engage in the fine motor skills. Sometimes that means that just having a smaller table. Like a kiddie table with smaller chairs can work well.Virginia’s Note: For more on kids, core strength and sitting at the dinner table check out Melinda Wenner Moyer. For little ones, Yummy Toddler Food has roundups of good baby and toddler highchairs, booster seats, and toddler tables. For older kids, I hear great things about this chair and these wobble stools and like that they are both much less expensive than the beloved Stokke Tripp Trap, though you likely won’t regret that investment since it does grow with kids. If you have experience with a great kid-friendly chair or other dinner table supports you love, post in the comments!And, of course, we need to manage expectations, too, right? We don’t necessarily want kids to be at the table for 30 minutes. That’s way too long. Sometimes getting them to move a little bit can be helpful and provide a little bit of that input because sitting down can be difficult for some children. There are weighted objects that can be placed on the lap, whic…
Full show notes at the publisherToday Virginia is chatting with with Pam Luk, founder of Ember & Ace, a new line of plus size athletic clothing for kids. We get in what's wrong with the kids' clothing industry, and Pam has so many tips and hacks to making finding clothes for kids in bigger bodies more doable.
If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.
And 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.
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 LINKS
Virginia reporting on the weight/child custody case for Slate
what is a 10/12 plus
why I just always buy two sizes of everything
Target boots (yes, mostly sold out)
Want to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.
CREDITS
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 independent anti-diet journalism.
Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
Follow us on social!
Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.
Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.
Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.
Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter, and I’m author of the upcoming book Fat Talk.
This is the October bonus episode for paid subscribers! Today we are revisiting another essay from the Burnt Toast archives. We’re going to talk about gender roles and Halloween costumes. I’m going to read you the essay, then we’re going to chat about it, and you’ll get this week’s Butter.
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 my Substack. If you’re not a paid subscriber, you’ll only get the first chunk. So to hear the whole conversation or read the whole transcript you’ll need to go paid.
The essay I’m revisiting today is called Halloween in Girl World. I published it on October 3, 2019. This was back when only about 500 people read Burnt Toast. It was also, depressingly, a better and more hopeful moment to be a feminist in a lot of ways. So it made me a little sad to go back and realize how many things have gotten worse. But, I think that makes this conversation about Halloween costumes all the more relevant today. Girls and gender nonconforming kids are growing up in a culture that automatically objectifies them and these seemingly innocuous moments—like what they’re going to be for Halloween—are where a lot of that starts.
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
Follow us on social!
Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.
Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.
Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.
Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
