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).
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Today’s episode is our October Ask Us Anything with Virginia and Corinne Fay of @SellTradePlus! We get into unlearning fatphobia, managing treats with kids, and our very unpopular opinions about Halloween. 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 LINKSVirginia (Corinne) joined TikTok.The good seltzerHow to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davislazy can also be a very racialized term@LordTroyour last reader surveyBody Liberation Hiking ClubSTP's Philadelphia Clothes SwapChristy Harrison’s provider directoryCorinne's cheesy songEllyn Satter/DORKid Food InstagramAubrey Gordon has a great argument for why we should say anti-fat bias and not fatphobiaHow to Raise Kids Who Aren't Assholes by Melinda Wenner MoyerThe $58 plus size Rockford Peach Costume on Amazon. Noihsaf BazaarCorinne is making this chocolate sheet cake with brown butter frosting.Lizzo playing James Madison’s fluteVirginia is into Lauren Leavell FitnessWant 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 anti-diet, body liberation journalism!Episode 66 TranscriptVirginiaI’m excited we’re doing this. I’m opening a seltzer.CorinneI also have seltzer.VirginiaI’m opening the good seltzer.CorinneEssential.VirginiaOkay. I’m ready. We’re going to answer some questions. We’re going to talk about Halloween. We’re going to talk about some good stuff.CorinneOkay. I’m gonna ask you the first one.I’d love for you to talk about the intersection between diet culture and being freezing. The temp where live has dropped below 80 finally, and suddenly all of these very thin moms are super bundled up at drop off. Meanwhile, I’m sweating still and shedding all my layers. Feels like one of those weird things where it’s expected that women are small and freezing. Is this a thing? Just me being self conscious about still being sweaty in October?VirginiaI think it’s a thing. Don’t you think it’s a thing?CorinneI don’t know. I was confused by this question.VirginiaI have often noticed that I will not be wearing a coat and my skinny friends will be in scarves and very bundled. CorinneI definitely am hot. I definitely am hot and sweaty.VirginiaAll the time, year round. And maybe because you don’t live in a cold climate you don’t see this juxtaposition? But I know what she’s talking about. I mean, I could rant for several minutes about my hatred of coats, particularly coats and cars together. It’s the worst because you just feel like bunched up and stuffed into this thing.CorinneYeah, like your shoulder mobility.VirginiaAlso I have garage privilege. We have an attached garage to our house where I spend most of my life because my office is above it. So when I leave my house I don’t have to put a coat on because I’m going to walk into my attached garage. And so it takes until bitter cold here, like February, before I actually wear a coat. Do you know what I mean? I live in suburbia and so I’m driving everywhere and I get in my car without a coat and then I get to the grocery store and I just run in. Like, do I need a scarf and a cute hat to walk across a grocery store parking lot? I don’t. But I definitely notice this and people will always be like, “Aren’t you cold?” And I’m like, “No, I’m fine.” I have padding.Corinne“No, I’m not cold, I’m fat!”VirginiaThank you.CorinneIt’s funny because I actually love coats. But I don’t get to wear them very often. I like a light coat. But I do understand what you’re saying about wearing them in the car.VirginiaI was just fighting with a raincoat earlier today, picking my kid up, because it’s pouring rain and I was like, “Oh, I guess I need to wear a raincoat.” And I got in the car and I was like, “I am being suffocated!” CorinneYeah. That’s not a good feeling. Raincoats in particular just make me sweat. VirginiaBecause you’re wearing a garbage bag! Even if it’s a cute garbage bag, it just is.CorinneAre people expecting women to be small and freezing?VirginiaWell, we know they’re expecting women to be small. I think there’s some cheesy romcom tropes around this, don’t you think? Like, “Oh, she’s wearing his big sweater.”CorinneI feel like people are expecting fat people to be hot and sweaty. And I am living that.VirginiaI am meeting their expectations. I guess I would just say, be comfortable? I mean, who cares? Let those ladies have their sweaters and their scarves. We’ll get there. CorinneYeah, it definitely seems better to just be honest about it than to try and bundle yourself and make yourself uncomfortable.VirginiaOn the flip side, I will say I have one thin friend who runs very, very cold. Thats just her journey and she has said that people will comment on that.CorinneIn conclusion: Stop commenting on what people are doing with their bodies.VirginiaAll right. I’ll read the next question. I think this is from a teacher.My colleagues constantly called fat children lazy. What to say? It’s obviously fatphobic. I usually challenge them about the individual child. Also, do they think I’m lazy, too? Hard to trust now.It was sort of truncated because she put it in an Instagram question box. But yeah, that sounds awful. Awful.CorinneMy first question is what profession is this? Because that’s so sad.VirginiaWhy are these people allowed to work near children? I’m guessing it’s either a teacher or some kind of health care provider.CorinneYeah, I was guessing health care. Just sad to imagine that people that take care of kids are calling them lazy. Virginia I think it’s great to challenge them about the individual child. I also think is there a way to say something thing like, “I’ve been really trying to unlearn some of those stereotypes.” Or, “I think it’s such a bummer that we are so hard on fat kids.” You’re not specifically calling out your colleague for saying the terrible thing, but you’re talking about the fatphobia. I always like to bring it to the larger system. CorinneMy suggestion was, if someone says like, “Oh, that kid’s lazy,” ask some follow up questions. Like, “Oh, what makes you say that? I’m so curious why you think that?”VirginiaYou’re kind of putting them a little on the spot, not in an aggressive way. And then if they have to really spell it out, hopefully they hear themselves. CorinneI think you could also continue that into the more broad thing and just say, “Why are we calling people lazy? It’s sort of mean.”VirginiaThis is reminding me, I just finished KC Davis’s book, How to Keep House While Drowning. CorinneI really want to read that.VirginiaIt’s so good. I’m obsessed with KC. She talks about how lazy doesn’t exist. I’m just thinking this might be a good read for this person because she’s not talking about it in the context of weight. She’s talking about it in the context of how clean your house is and if you’re neurodivergent, how thats challenging. But it could be great to just be like, “I was just reading this book and lazy is a social construct.” People being lazy need to rest. Resting is valid.CorinneI think you’re right. It makes sense maybe a teacher would be calling someone lazy because you’re supposed to be ‘hardworking’ in school. But I don’t know, I think calling someone lazy is mean. So just don’t do it, whether they’re fat or not. VirginiaYeah, it’s a really unhelpful term. It’s super ableist and super fatphobic.CorinneIt’s trying to shame someone into doing something that they maybe don’t want to do.VirginiaWhich is always a successful strategy. We’re really sorry you have to deal with that. It sounds terrible. And in terms of can you trust your colleagues, I think that’s valid, to feel like you can’t trust them. I don’t know how safe you would feel doing this because it does not sound like a super supportive environment, so consider this part very optional, but you could also say: “That does not feel safe for me as a fat person to hear you say that.” I think that would make them deeply uncomfortable and hopefully they’d shut the fuck up. But I throw that out there with all the caveats of, that may not feel like an option.CorinneI also feel like we should probably mention that lazy can also be a very racialized term. That could also be playing a part. So let’s not call anyone lazy. Okay.Recommendations on finding and building fat community as a fat person unpacking their diet culture BS?VirginiaI feel like you should answer this first because you have been building selltradeplus as a wonderful, fat-positive community. CorinneI think it’s kind of that question of how to make friends as an adult. And I guess my first answer is: Online. VirginiaIt is often the safe starting point, right? You don’t have to leave your house or put on pants. CorinneAnd I think also people can be a little more upfront about how they feel about things online in a way that… You know, sometimes you meet someone in person and you like them and then you realize like, we disagree about a lot of things.VirginiaI shared a reel the other day from @LordTroy being like, “I don’t trust it when I see a group of friends and they’re all thin.” (Sorry, we can’t find the specific reel anymore but everything @lordtroy posts is gold.)CorinneOh, I saw that.VirginiaI was like, YES.So obviously there’s Burnt Toast, where I think we are building a great community that is quite size diverse, according to our last reader survey. So, I would not say we are a specifically fat community, but there’s certainly a lot of fat folks centered in the community. And I think that’s been really lovely. In terms of in-person community, really, my only experience with it is this Body Liberation Hiking Club I keep talking about. Alexa, who is a teacher here in the Hudson Valley, just decided that she wanted to build fat community and started this hiking group and made a Facebook and an Instagram and started putting up schedules for hikes. And people go on the hikes, it’s so awesome. I mean, I’ve only been on one hike, but I aspire to go on more.It made me realize I had never hiked without—I’m married to a thin guy, and I’d never hiked with other fat people! And I was like, I’ve been doing it all wrong. It’s so much nicer. Just not having any of that noise of comparison or anything and just all being really supportive and safe together.So, I guess, look for a group like that. And if there’s not one, start one! It doesn’t have to be hiking either. Obviously hiking has a little built-in ableism because not everyone can hike, but it could be a book club? I think book clubs are great. Someone told me about starting an articles club, because reading books takes too much time. And I was like, I love it. CorinneWow, that’s a great idea! Oh, Pool Party.VirginiaPool party, always always. CorinneI like the suggestion of starting something if you can’t find something in your area, because there are definitely fat people everywhere who probably want other fat friends.VirginiaYes, I don’t know if you’ve heard the talk about this epidemic…? You can find us. Although, I will just say as an introvert, starting an in-person thing sounds scary. I would be so anxious that no one would come and I would feel bad. So maybe if you have like one friend, even if they’re not fat, but they’re just supportive that you can like anchor it with, you know? CorinneFrom SellTradePlus, there have also been a few groups of people meeting up that met on SellTradePlus. So you could come to SellTradePlus and see if there’s people in your area. There’s now a Philadelphia Clothes Swap that’s very big and happening at the end of October. So, if you’re in Pennsylvania, you could go to that.VirginiaThat’s awesome. I fantasize about Burnt Toast meet ups! My hope is when the book comes out, maybe book events can be a useful starting point for that.CorinneOkay, next question.If your eyes are wide open to diet culture and fatphobia, but you still hate your body, how do you move forward? For example, I know why I find being bigger triggering, but that doesn’t stop me wanting to be smaller. How do you unwire that?VirginiaI do think it’s important to know that you can have your eyes wide open to these things, you can be a good advocate working to dismantle fatphobia, and you can still be in your own personal struggle. Like, you do not have to have the shit worked out in order to be a good ally or advocate or any of that. So, cutting yourself some slack here and giving yourself permission to be struggling might be helpful. It can often be really beneficial to work with a therapist, a good anti-diet, fat-positive therapist. I can link again to Christy Harrison’s directory for finding folks. What are your thoughts?CorinneYou can’t completely unwire this without solving fatphobia on a global level. It’s just the air we’re breathing. Everything around you is telling you that you should hate being bigger. And, it’s uncomfortable! It can be very uncomfortable to be in a body that doesn’t fit places or breaks chairs or whatever. So, that’s valid.That said, my recommendation would probably be to try and find some stuff that you could do where you’re enjoying just being in your body. Whether that’s some type of exercise or swimming or meditating or yoga, or like taking pictures of yourself and looking at them without feeling disgusted or just some way to appreciate what your body can do for you, even if it’s not like the body that society tells you you should have or should want.VirginiaThat’s so smart. And yeah, appreciating your body for what it does versus how it looks, like releasing yourself from the expectation. I just described 10 years of therapy for a lot of us.But at least noticing. I think it can be good just to notice. I’ve talked about this before, when I have wardrobe anxiety about things not fitting or it doesn’t look right, when I take a minute to say, “Wait, what else is going on?” It is always not about the clothes. It is always that I’m cranky and hormonal or because I have to see people in the world and my social anxiety kicked in or I’m stressed about work and taking it out on pants.I think it’s good you’re noticing that you’re getting triggered because I think for a long time people stay stuck in this perpetual triggered state that feels like normal. You’re at least like, Oh, I’m getting triggered and now I’m having these thoughts that don’t align with my values. That’s a useful place to be.CorinneEven if being in a bigger bo…
Full show notes at the publisherToday’s episode is a delightful conversation with Shelly Anand and Nomi Ellenson, co-authors of the wonderful new picture book I Love My Body Because. 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 LINKSWant to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.Shelley's first book Laxmi’s MoochErika Medina, illustrator of I Love My Body BecauseRoxane Gay's book HungerSonya Renee Taylor's book, The Body Is Not an ApologyTyler FederNabela Noor (Beautifully Me)More body positive picture books studies on representation of kids of color in children's booksNomi's Butter: The Cycles JournalCREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter. Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe. Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!Episode 65 TranscriptVirginiaWhy don't you each introduce yourselves?Shelly I'm Shelly Anand and I am a picture book author. I'm an attorney. I'm an immigrant and worker rights attorney. I'm a mother of two. And I'm really excited to be on your show!NomiHi, I'm Nomi. I'm a photographer and I specialize in a genre called boudoir photography, which is about empowering women in their bodies, connecting with that inner goddess, and all of that good stuff. I have a photo studio in Brooklyn and I'm also expanding. I live in Montego Bay, Jamaica and I'm starting to do photo shoots here, as well.VirginiaWe are here to talk about your wonderful book I Love My Body Because. It is very beloved in my house already, I can tell you. So I want to hear the story, how do a boudoir photographer and an immigrants rights attorney decide to write a body positive kid's book?NomiIt seems so random, but it really was such a moment of flow. Shelly and my sister are best friends from Wellesley College and when Shelley's first book came out, we were hanging out at the beach. As a boudoir photographer, I'm constantly talking to women about their bodies and how they feel about themselves, their sensuality. So much of what I say to them is what you would say to that inner child in all of us. And I said to Shelley, “What are your thoughts about doing a body awareness children's book?” and she was automatically like, “Let's do this.” It just all felt like it was in the stars and meant to be. That's the short version of how it all happened.VirginiaShelly, I would also love to hear how you came to do Laxmi’s Mooch. And how you see these books as connected?ShellyI didn't set out to become a picture book writer. I've always loved stories and storytelling, and reading, but I think becoming a parent and being a brown mom in the Deep South, raising biracial children—my kids are half Indian, and my husband's a white white man from Wisconsin. We were looking for books that were important to us, that instilled values that were important to us. So children's literature became something that I got interested in as a mom. I was on maternity leave with my second when a friend of mine from from college who lives close by, who's also South Asian, also raising hairy Desi kids in the south, called me and said that her daughter had been teased in school for having a mustache. And she was only six years old.It just was a very poignant moment for me. I had given birth to my own daughter who inherited my hairiness and it just brought back a flood of memories of body hair removal and being teased myself as a young, brown, hairy child. And really thinking that I wanted it to be different for for my children and for all children, that that they not go through what what we went through and it really be a choice that you know, you don't feel this pressure to wax or bleach or thread a part of your body off because other children or other people are teasing you or because that's what Western society is pushing on you.And so that's where the idea for Laxmi’s Mooch came from, I wanted to create a story about a young girl discovering her body hair and hair removal not being the answer. I started reading a bunch of kidlit and joining writers groups and things like that and that's how Laxmi was born.So when Nomi was like, “I'd love to work with you on a book about body positivity,” it felt like a natural next project for me, because they are very much connected. Laxmi’s Mooch is very specific about body hair positivity. But when Nomi and I were talking about this, there weren't a lot of picture books out there on body positivity and specifically fighting fatphobia and dispelling the word fat being something negative. Like Nomi said, it was a very different process than writing Laxmi’s Mooch. Laxmi had more of a narrative and this is more like an ode to your body and all the amazing things our bodies can do—not just physically but intellectually. That we can read and we can learn and we can take care of ourselves. It really just poured out of us and it was a very, very healing. Both books were a very healing experience for me.VirginiaOh, I bet, I bet. I work particularly in the anti-fat bias space. And the body hair conversation does not come up nearly enough. I was thinking the other day, my kids have—because I'm their mom and we talk about this stuff all the time—they have really good fat positive vocabulary. But they've seen me shave my legs or tweeze my chin hairs and been like, “What are you doing?” And I'm like, Oh, I don't have the narrative I need for this piece. This is another part I need to work on.I'm always just like, “It's a choice, you don't have to do it.” But I feel very panicked in the moment, realizing I haven't thought about it. So, I love that you are giving us language and giving us a story that we can use to have these conversations. And not just when you're being barged in on in the shower, when I don't do my best parenting.ShellyI mean those are the moments, when when our children come to us, in the shower or on the toilet.VirginiaIt’s like, Okay, let's do this. ShellyLet's have this conversation. Yeah, absolutely. Uma, my daughter, now asks me, “Why are you shaving your legs?” Because of this narrative that was created when she was born around being being proud of your body hair. She is kind of like, “What are you doing? Why are you removing your body hair? You don't have to do that.” I'm like, Okay, Uma. Thank you.VirginiaIt’s so cool to see that happening.It sounds like this was like a real mind meld of a process. How did you each think about what bodies you wanted to represent in the new book? Nomi What we were thinking about with different bodies is anchoring in the gratitude for what our body enables us to do. And anchoring in that respect, and that love, and that feeling of celebration, because it is such a gift. Often, everything in the outside world can make us feel negative towards various aspects of ourselves. Creating vocabulary around what's positive and what feels good, enables a new kind of conversation to take place.We would receive sketches from Erika Medina, our illustrator—she really did an amazing job—and we would be like, “We would love to see this representation and that representation,” and just making sure that it was visually aligned with what we felt in our hearts. While we were writing it, we were definitely thinking about the visuals of the words. For us, it was very intertwined. We wanted the words to be meaningful, but also for the book to evoke a certain kind of imagery.ShellyTwo books, in particular really inspired me. They're not children's books, but they both address children and perception of bodies. The the first book was Roxane Gay's book Hunger. Something that stood out to me was her talking about children looking at her and pointing at her and being like, “Oh my God, that woman is so fat” and being horrified. Thinking of myself as a parent, but not wanting my children to ever do that to another human being.[Virginia’s note: This piece is a good read for strategizing on that kind of comment.]And then Sonya Renee Taylor's book, The Body Is Not an Apology. She talks about children having this sense of joy and wonder and curiosity about their bodies that goes away, and is eroded by messages from the culture about having to look a certain way, having to be skinny and light skinned and blue eyes, and blonde hair, all of that. And I, unfortunately, like so many people, grew up in a fatphobic household and a fatphobic culture. It's actually something I'm starting to think about that's specific to South Asian culture. We have a word for fat, “moti,” and it's pejorative. And it was a word that I feared. It was so negative for me. I think having my children and the pressure that postpartum people feel to have their bodies somehow go back to the way they were before giving birth to other human beings. VirginiaBecause that’s a realistic goal. ShellyI mean, that had a huge impact on me. And not wanting my kids to have to go through what I went through in terms of being so mean and self-critical to myself. So there were things in this book that were really important to me, like talking about stretch marks, right? And how they're tiger stripes. Those were things that were really important for me. Because I have these stretch marks now and I see them as a sign of my strength that I carried two human bodies in my body. I think children are taught that there are things about their body they should be ashamed. When in fact, they're quite beautiful, and they should be celebrated.Even though this is a children's book, it's very much a book for everyone, not just children. It's a book of, like Nomi said, of gratitude. This phrase, “I love my body, because…” can be a gratitude practice, and a reminder, when you're feeling unsure, or insecure, or whatever. Just reminding yourself, I love my body because it helps me move through the world. It helped me start that practice, writing this book, creating that gratitude practice for myself.VirginiaI'm just thinking too, as you're talking about these inspirations and the wonder that Sonya Renee Taylor talks about that comes so naturally to kids. Little kids—like three or four year olds before the world descends on them in this way—don't feel like they have to justify these things about their bodies, right? They don't feel like they have to give a reason for having stretch marks. It can just be that you're growing or this is your body. We, as adults, have learned this other language of needing to say, “Well, the stretch marks are because of pregnancies.” Some of my stretch marks are just fat, you know?And I love this idea of starting in this place of gratitude and meeting kids where hopefully at least some of the kids reading this book still are, in this place of “of course, I love my body, why wouldn't I love my body?”That's so powerful to think about how at some point, however fleetingly, we all started there.ShellyYou're exactly right. All of us have signs of our growth and our development and we're told that it has to look a certain way. Like, for some reason, having a mooch or a moustache at two or three is okay, but at 12 and 13, it's not. I went through my mother putting bleach on my skin and trying to turn my hair blonde. So unnatural. And I think it was her way of protecting me, but I think it has to be a choice. And it has to be something that a person wants to do, versus “This is what I have to do to make myself acceptable.” NomiWith kids, these neural pathways are being highly developed and we want to be building up that muscle memory of feeling good about their bodies. When they're met with that resistance of the negative narrative, they build that internal muscle that much more where they're able to actually think about it for themselves, rather than just accepting what they've been taught.VirginiaWhat I really love about the book is that you do expand this idea of body beyond just physical to talk about intellectual gifts. It takes the focus off the aesthetic completely, right?NomiBoth of my parents are rabbis and I grew up with a sense that our external bodies were not the most important thing at all. Not that we were like schlumpy, but it definitely was not about pop culture and whatever the trends were growing up. So when I started doing fashion photography and I saw that the focus was so based on the external, I was like, “There's a disparity here.”There's a disconnect between the value we place on our external looks—even though there's value to that and it's okay to want to feel good externally. I think we lose that conversation. Because we get so stuck in this fat skinny/binary convo versus like, actually, what does it mean to self care and take pride in this external, in our looks, versus this internal. That's how we're able to actually live our lives and be connected more to our internal souls and everything.ShelleyGrowing up as a woman, in any culture, but in this culture in particular, there's so much emphasis on having to be beautiful or considered beautiful or being attractive. It's certainly an aspect of South Asian culture, as well, that's pretty problematic. We want kids to be thinking about what our bodies are capable of —beyond whether or not someone thinks we're pretty or cute or handsome. And we're capable of so much, right? The way we can move through the world, the way we can read and learn. We talk in the book about building bridges and skyscrapers. The possibilities of what we're all able to do is so much more than our physical appearance. That's definitely important to me. I'm very mindful of what we say, especially to girls. “Oh, you're so pretty,” is the first thing that will come out of someone's mouth about a girl versus her intellect versus her capabilities.VirginiaYou also have kids using wheelchairs and you're speaking to mobility on a lot of different levels, which I appreciated.NomiWe have a child with a hearing aid, too! VirginiaThat's great. I'm curious to talk a little bit too about how you feel publishing is doing on this front. Book publishing in general is super white, super not evolved on a lot of these issu…
Full show notes at the publisherToday’s episode, a conversation with blogger and fat liberation activist Linda Gerhardt, is the kind of story I can only tell on Burnt Toast. Because lipedema—despite impacting some 11 percent of women worldwide—isn’t a Sexy News Story. It doesn’t have the kind of hook mainstream media outlets want. Lipedema patients aren’t the kind of victims (i.e. thin white ladies) that America loves to rally around. But there are millions of them living quietly, in pain, unable to access healthcare or even clear answers because, as Linda puts it, “lipedema lives in this cursed intersection of medical fatphobia and medical misogyny.”If you want more conversations like this one—about the true costs of anti-fat bias, told in ways that center fat folks—please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a 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.CW: This episode does contain some discussion of medical fatphobia and medical trauma, as well as prescription weight loss and weight loss surgery. If any of that wouldn't be good for you to listen to, please take care of yourself and give this one a miss.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 LINKSWant to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.Linda blogs at Fluffy Kitten PartyLinda's (awesome!) Instagram is @littlewingedpotatoesThe Standard of Care for Lipedema in the United States by Dr. Karen HerbstRagen Chastain on why movement doesn’t have to be joyful and health is not a moral obligationVirginia is watching Bad Sisters (on Apple TV). CREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter. Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe. Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!Episode 64 TranscriptVirginiaWhy don’t we start by having you tell people a little bit about yourself and what you do?LindaMy name is Linda and I run a blog called Fluffy Kitten Party, which I chose because I couldn’t find a domain name that was allowed and available, so that was what I chose. I haven’t written in it for a while, but on that blog I wrote about fat liberation and Health at Every Size and my own experiences within the health care system.I also have an Instagram account, @littlewingedpotatoes, which is a Mystery Science Theater 3000 reference, for anybody who’s curious. That was another desperate choice when I couldn’t find a name and everything I tried was taken. I post a mix of memes and personal nonsense and fat liberation health and every size content. It’s a real grab bag, but you can always follow me there if you’re curious about what I do.This isn’t my full-time job, I have a full-time job doing something completely different as a consultant. I’m just a fat lady who’s really invested in fat liberation and Health at Every Size. I need it. And so I share my story, and my experiences and my thoughts and feelings and opinions in the hopes of moving things along. VirginiaI just want to say right now, anyone who’s not already following Linda, please follow Linda, because just there have been so many issues over the years. I think you’re the first person who taught me about terms like “small fat.” You’re doing 101 stuff for those of us who need it. LindaThank you. The real feather in my cap is that I am one of the top search results for “Fat at Disney.” I will rest on that for quite a while, if not my whole life.VirginiaHow much higher can one fly? LindaIt’s the dream. VirginiaToday we are going to talk about lipedema, which is a condition you have been struggling with for many years. But you’ve only recently gotten properly diagnosed and started talking publicly about this.littlewingedpotatoesA post shared by Linda (@littlewingedpotatoes)LindaHindsight is 20/20 and having the diagnosis, I can look back and reconstruct when it started for me. I was a thick, chunky kid, but at puberty, I got really lumpy. Like, I was hoping for boobs and I got giant thighs and a fat ass instead. I was like, “Well, that kind of sucks.” I looked around at my peers and I’m like, “Yeah, I’m lumpier than you guys. I’m shaped very differently.” But I just kind of carried that and lived my life.It wasn’t until I was in my mid 20s, I was working as a photographer—very active job, lugging equipment up and downstairs, setting it up and taking it down multiple times a day—and I started to have problems with swelling and pain in my legs. And just for context, I was a baby photographer. So this involves getting down on baby level. I spent 20 to 30 minutes at a time on my knees without any real issue. So when I started having this pain and swelling, like first of all, this could affect my livelihood if I can’t kneel anymore. I went to the doctor, and they were kind of like, "Huh, well, your legs are really weird. They’re kind of firm and full of fluid, but we don’t know what that is. But you should probably just get weight loss surgery.” So I ended up at a weight loss surgery seminar. Went through a few beginning steps of getting weight loss surgery, but ended up not getting approved because I had terrible high deductible pre-Affordable Care Act insurance. So I was kind of saved by my bad insurance. So I just said, “Okay, well, I’ll just keep living my life and do my best.” Then in my early 30s, I started getting a lot of pain right underneath my knees. I had developed this pad of fat, for lack of a better term, that was on both sides, so symmetrical, and just extremely painful. If my little eight pound cat placed one paw beneath my knees, I hit the ceiling. It was like somebody was stabbing me.Pain is normal to some degree in life but legs that are throbbing with pain all the time is not quite normal. So, I started the journey of going to different doctors and saying, “Do you have any idea what’s going on with me?” Didn’t really get anywhere. I had many, many scans done of the veins in my legs. Veins are healthy. Ruled out things like congestive heart failure. And it was actually really frustrating because it’s great to be healthy, but when you’re in pain and you know something’s wrong, when you get that clean bill of health, it’s really frustrating. I didn’t have a lot of those metabolic issues that doctors were looking for. They didn’t know what to do with me.VirginiaMeanwhile, you’re still in pain and you have no answers as to what’s happening.LindaYeah, and my mobility decreased. It had really inhibited my ability to do a lot of things because my legs were heavy and painful and swollen. A friend of mine, I was complaining to her about my sore legs, and she said, “Have you ever heard of this person on Instagram? She has painful legs and looks pretty similar to you.” So I follow the link that my friend sent me and I went to this woman’s Instagram. And it was like running into a wall because this woman had my body.Her legs looked like mine. And she had a condition called lipedema, which I had never heard of. This was I think 2018 or so. And so I started researching lipedema like, what is this? Is this lymphedema? I didn’t know anything about it. And as I was looking at the description of the condition, I thought, Oh my God, this is me. This is what I have.I started this process of going to doctors and being like, Have you heard of lipedema? I think I might have it. And either they had no idea what it was, or they were just like, “eh probably not.” Because there is this misconception about lipedema that it only is present in thin women who have large lower bodies, which is not the case.VirginiaOh, so it was like, they only diagnose it in someone they don’t expect to be fat.LindaPrecisely. That’s it on the nose. I’m kind of fat everywhere and that’s how I’ve always been—like I said, I was a chunky kid, I was a chunky teenager, I’m a chunky adult. And so they would think, “Oh, well, you can’t have that because you are fat elsewhere.” And I thought, oh, okay, well, maybe I don’t have it. But you know, I just I had it, I knew I had it.Eventually I found a doctor who specializes in lipedema. He’s a surgeon and he was able to diagnose me on sight because lipedema has a very characteristic look. You can see it on people’s bodies. You can also feel it, because the texture of the fat with lipedema is not normal. It kind of feels like marbles. Which are these nodules. And some of those nodules can get extremely large. So when I was 13 and saying, “Hey, I’m so much lumpier than my peers,” that was a big part of it.A lot of things clicked into place once I had a name to call it. But the bummer is that there really isn’t much that can be done for lipedema, because doctors, especially in the US don’t really know a whole lot about it. As a condition, we’ve known about it since the 1940’s. But it’s still kind of a mystery and if you went to your family doctor and wanted to talk about lipedema, they would probably have no idea what it is. I’ve heard of people going into their doctor’s office, telling them to Google Images of lipedema and then the doctor goes, “Oh, well, you absolutely have that.”VirginiaThat is wild.LindaIt’s been interesting to see the gaps in medical knowledge among medical professionals. It’s kind of the saddest club because you have a name you can call the thing that you experience, but nobody can really help you in any significant way. There is help available. But it’s very tricky to get because this is all very new and experimental and nothing is really evidence based at this point because people are not interested in helping lumpy fat ladies.VirginiaSo just to do the 101 thing for all of us who are learning here, let’s just say what lymphedema is versus lipedema and how they’re related. LindaSo lymphedema is something that you’ll often see in people who have had cancer and have lymph nodes removed, where the lymph fluid—which we all have, it’s just this waste fluid that flows through our cells—is pooling in a particular area. So, in lymphedema, somebody will have like one arm, typically, that’s very large and swollen and painful, or a leg. And in lipedema, it’s all over and it’s slightly different.How lipedema works: It’s believed to be hereditary, so your genes are kind of a loaded gun and hormones are the trigger. So a lot of women will start to see symptoms of lipedema at puberty. And then if they get pregnant or start birth control, that can kick it into high gear. A lot of women who have lipedema, notice it after a pregnancy. I noticed it after starting Depo-Provera. People gain weight on Depo-Provera, but I gained a significant amount of weight on Depo-Provera. And that was around the time I started having the symptoms that worried me, like the pain under my knees.All of us have fat cells that are moving fluid in and out all the time—that’s how our cells work. With people who have lipedema, the cells are letting fluids in and not cycling them out fast enough. So these fat cells are just full of this garbage fluid that your body is supposed to be getting rid of. And it causes pain, it causes swelling.And one thing I did want to note because I keep saying women, lipedema affects almost exclusively women and people assigned female at birth. I haven’t read any cases of cis men with it. Lipedema is hormonal and lives in this cursed intersection of medical fatphobia and medical misogyny. Because people aren’t interested in learning how women’s bodies work.VirginiaNo, nope, definitely not. Or including them in medical studies until like 10 years ago. LindaSo these fat cells that are holding onto fluid, it can cause overgrowth of fat. It almost kind of spreads and builds upon itself. So that can cause compression on your lymphatic vessels in your lymph nodes and that can cause lymphedema. Later on when you have widespread lymphatic dysfunction—which is where I live right now, I have leg lipedema and I also have a mild case of lymphedema that is nonetheless very painful and annoying in one of my legs. That is called lipolymphedema, which is the final stage of lipedema. And it’s hard to deal with, medically, because you’ve got two things going on. You’re full of fluid and nobody wants to work on you.VirginiaThis is a lot you’re dealing with. I just want to take a minute and say, as someone who considers you a friend, it’s been really tough to watch how much you’ve had to struggle and it’s really fucking unfair.LindaThank you.I appreciate the support. Just hearing that it’s unfair is really helpful to me because it’s the barriers to getting help are really significant. There’s not a whole lot of help available because, again, people don’t understand what it is, which I think is a travesty in and of itself. If I were an ob*sity researcher, I would be interested to find out what’s making all of these fat ladies so lumpy and miserable. Like, why are they in pain? Why are they lumpy? Why is their fat different? What is going on?I think it’s really fascinating. And there just isn’t really much research. The treatment options are limited. I wouldn’t even call them treatment, I would call them symptom management. Compression is the frontline treatment. Wearing compression garments, pneumatic compression pumps.Manual lymphatic drainage massage has been a life changer for me. It kind of gets that lymph fluid flowing and helps with pain and swelling and kind of loosens you up. It’s actually really wild, I’ll walk into a massage appointment and my shoes and pants will be tight. And I’ll leave and my shoes are loose and my pants are loose.VirginiaWow. So over the course of the session you really see a difference.LindaI can feel the lymph moving. It’s very strange. It’s almost like water trickling inside your body.VirginiaWhoa. That’s intense.Linda It’s it’s a little weird, but now I look forward to it. I need it every every couple of weeks—ideally every week, but it’s not covered by insurance.VirginiaI was going to say that sounds expensive.LindaIt’s definitely expensive. VirginiaYou’ve talked a little bit on Instagram about looking into surgical options.LindaYeah, at this point the major surgical option is liposuction. This is not normal, healthy fat, this is abnormal—I don’t want to use the term “diseased,” but it’s not healthy tissue. So removing that tissue also removes a lot of the pain, the nodules that cause that immediate sense of “oh my god, don’t touch me.” And there’s a network of surgeons, they’re not affiliated with each other, but they are plastic surgeons who perform liposuction on lipedema patients. It is different than standard liposuction because you’re not looking for aesthetics, you’re basically looking to remove as much lipedema fat as you safely can so that t…
Full show notes at the publisherThis week, we're taking it old school with a solo Virginia episode! She's reading her most popular essay to date, about why you should stop romanticizing your child's lunchbox. (Note: We recorded this before the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health; check the transcript for some thoughts on these new developments.) If you'd like to support Burnt Toast, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. 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.We've got an urgent call to action for the Burnt Toast Giving Circle! Details in the transcript. Help us fight for a blue majority in the Arizona state legislature. And don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culturecomes 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 LINKSWant to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.The original essayHere's the Biden administration’s new National Strategy on hunger and nutrition, including school lunches. The pandemic school lunch scramble.Jennifer Gaddis on school lunchesSchool lunches are healthier than you thinkSo, what about processed foods?Meal planning mental loadstress-organizing my kitchenTomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrowby Gabrielle ZevinCome hiking with this amazing groupCREDITSThe 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.Please Stop Romanticizing Your Child’s Lunchbox(This is a reprint of last year’s essay, with a few new additions in footnotes. If you read it before, just scroll down for the rest of the episode’s analysis and your Butter recs!)Back in April 2021, the USDA announced that it would extend a waiver that allows schools to serve free meals to all students through the entire 2021-2022 school year. Families no longer have to apply or demonstrate eligibility for free lunches in most districts; cafeterias are just feeding every kid who shows up for lunch. This effort started as a response to the pandemic-fueled increase in childhood hunger, as I reported for the New York Times last year. And anti-hunger advocates are hoping to make it a permanent change by getting Congress to pass the Universal School Meals Act.1 So we are now officially back to school in every district in the nation, and most kids are walking into a radically different cafeteria than ever before. There are some nuances to this, of course. “Please note that USDA is not providing a free universal meal program,” a USDA spokesperson told me via email because I guess the government never wants to look like it’s caring too much. States have to opt in to the waiver before schools can serve free meals to all; otherwise they can participate in the normal National School Lunch Program, where kids pay full price, reduced price, or nothing based on their family’s income eligibility (meaning schools and families still have to do that application process).And some, such as the Waukesha School District in Wisconsin, have opted not to participate. In that case, it was because school board members worried that feeding kids lunch would make them “spoiled” and also, rather inexplicably, pave the way to mask mandates. (The school district has since reversed that decision.) The USDA does not yet have data on how many districts around the country opted in or out, but the same spokesperson confirmed that “the majority” of states are in. So we can expect to see a big spike in participation numbers from the last time this data was collected, in 2014-2015, when just one in five schools offered free lunch to all students. I also did some extremely un-scientific Instagram polling (on my own account, and then I borrowed Yummy Toddler Food’s much larger one), 81 to 89 percent of followers who voted said lunch is free at their kids’ school this year. Unless you are a heartless Wisconsin school board member, universal free lunch is unequivocally great for the estimated 12 million American kids who can’t get enough to eat at home. There is no debate about that (which is why we should have been doing it for decades already). But what if you don’t have a financial need for school lunch? The real question—that may very well determine whether or not universal free lunch becomes a permanent part of the American education system—is: Will Nice White Parents let our kids eat school food? So far, the answer appears to be: An awful lot of us won’t. “Roughly 20 million eligible children, mostly from middle- and upper-middle-class families, continue to opt out of the national program by bringing lunch or by buying special à la carte food items not covered by the program,” wrote Jennifer Gaddis, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of The Labor of Lunch, in a New York Times op-ed from February 2020. We don’t yet have data on how the shift to free lunch will change that for this school year, so I once again turned to Instagram for more insight. In my (again, totally unscientific!) poll of 210 parents, 49 percent of parents said yep, their kids are eating the free school lunch, and 51 percent said no, they are still sending in lunchboxes. In other words: Just over half of this group of parents are paying for a meal—and investing time and labor in preparing said meal—that their children could be eating for free. I suspect the vast majority of these folks were horrified by that Wisconsin school board. These are parents who support free lunch programs, in theory, at least, for other kids. Indeed, some said they didn’t want to take free lunch away from kids who need it. But the reality is that participation rates drive this program’s funding: “When millions of families [pack lunch], their actions reduce the political will and financial resources necessary to make public school lunches better for everyone,” wrote Gaddis last year. I checked in with Gaddis yesterday and she confirmed that this is still true, even though lunch is now free. The federal government reimburses schools per student eating lunch and they reimburse at the highest rate per students eating for free, so schools can now receive the maximum subsidy.2Perhaps even more important: When lunch is free for everyone, then the kids who need free lunch aren’t stigmatized by the kids who don’t. “You can often see huge divides along income and racial lines in cafeterias between the kids who get free lunch and the kids who bring lunch from home,” notes Gaddis. “If we want to create spaces in our schools that are inclusive and welcoming for all, participation really matters. When people with the economic means opt out of school lunch, it sends the message to policy makers that this is a program they don’t really have to care about.”So why aren’t more parents—especially progressive parents—sending their kids to the lunch line? Diet culture has taught us that school lunches aren’t good enough for our kids. I asked the lunch-packers for follow-up and this lesson came through explicitly in about 14 percent of my respondents, and was implied by many more. “While the lunch is free, it’s not actually healthy and I like knowing my kids aren’t eating junk,” said one mom. In fact, school lunches are pretty darn healthy: A 2018 analysis of over 16 years of data concluded that schools “are now the single healthiest place Americans are eating.” This shift is due, in large part, to the 2010 Healthy and Hunger-Free Kids Act, championed by Michelle Obama, which overhauled school nutrition standards and changed the nutritional intake of school children in several important ways. And, as Gaddis argued in her piece, with more kids eating, school lunches could get even healthier: “The food-service director of the Austin Independent School District, Anneliese Tanner, told a local news outlet that the district could afford to serve grass-fed beef if the kids who currently opt out of the national program would eat school lunch just once a week.” (Tanner is now the director of research and assessment at the Chef Ann Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to helping schools do more from-scratch cooking.)But no, cafeteria meals likely won’t pass muster if your definition of healthy comes from diet culture. “We eat plant-based,” or, “There aren’t enough whole foods” came up a lot in my Instagram DMs. See also: “Kid says school lunch tastes like plastic,” and many similar comments equating school food with “processed food,” “fast food,” or “diner food.” And it’s not just my followers. In Royal Oaks, Michigan, parents protested when the elementary school’s free lunch included grab-and-go items like bagged Goldfish crackers and Scooby-Doo Graham Cracker Sticks. And the Chef Ann Foundation where Tanner now works had to apologize recently after posting a meme unfavorably comparing school meals to ultra-processed foods. It’s also true, as Bettina Elias Siegel reported last week (CW for o-words), that due to Covid restrictions, labor shortages, and supply chain issues, many schools have been forced to switch out hot meals for grab-and-go lunches. Gaddis acknowledges that these issues may be impacting menu composition right now: “What you’re likely to find in a typical cafeteria right now is more processed food and less scratch cooking than you would have seen pre-pandemic,” she says. And, Covid or not, many schools incorporate processed foods into their meals, both because such foods are cheap and convenient when you’re mass-producing meals (and don’t have the budget to hire experienced school cooks), and because their pre-printed nutrition labels make it easy to ensure they are meeting complex government nutritional standards. But Graham Cracker Sticks are not our enemy. Nutrition perfectionism is.As I’ve written before, the problem with processed foods isn’t their ingredient lists; it’s our culture’s dysfunctional relationship with them. Your fear of snack crackers is a big reason why your kid seems so obsessed with them. Letting kids eat these foods at school, alongside the fruits, vegetables, and other foods that school districts are also required to serve, could be a great way to lessen a child’s scarcity mindset around them.But to do that, we have to sift through the layers of classism and racism that underpin our feeling that kids eating “fast food” for lunch is proof of lazy or bad parenting. Many parents who are using school lunch this year told me that they feel guilty for taking such an “easy” way out, as if letting your child eat the same meal that another kid has no choice but to eat is being a #badmom. Meanwhile, one school lunch abstainer wrote that she has “been dreaming about packing lunches for kids 4ever ♥️.” Instagram, Pinterest, and the rise of the momfluencer has turned school-lunch packing into a cross between competitive sport and creative self-care practice. We’re flooded with images of $60 PlanetBoxes and $42 OmieBoxes, rainbow produce cut into stars and hearts, and the message that all of this is a valid measure of our mothering. But that’s only true if your definition of motherhood is almost exclusively white and upper-income. Possibly related: Around 40 percent of my followers said they were skipping school lunch because “my kid won’t eat it.” As the parent of one child with a traumatic feeding history, and another doing the typical picky preschooler thing, I absolutely feel this. But within this “picky” group, I noticed that responses ranged from “ARFID! She needs her safe foods,” to a more shrugging, “My kid doesn’t like it.” I wonder here whether it’s always the kid who doesn’t like the food, or the parent, or the kid internalizing a parent’s rigid standards. Children with true feeding disorders or other sensory challenges do need extra support and may be overwhelmed by trying to eat in a cafeteria setting. And, of course, kids with food allergies, especially life-threatening ones, may need a packed lunch to eat safely. (That group made up about 8 percent of my respondents.) But: Our more garden-variety picky eaters may get more adventurous in the cafeteria than you’ll ever see at home. Research shows that kids tend to eat a larger variety of foods when they get repeated exposures to them in a peer setting, as Sally Sampson and Natalie Digate Muth, M.D., wrote for the New York Times back in 2015. This is also another reason not to freak out about processed foods on school lunch menus; Goldfish and the like are often the familiar, predictable foods that cautious kids need to use as stepping stones and to feel empowered when navigating a new eating situation.About one-fifth of the parents in my poll said they took a hybrid approach, letting kids study weekly school lunch menus and decide which days to bring or “buy.” Gaddis and I agree that this seems like a great work-around for most picky kids because it lets them build confidence eating in a new setting with foods they like, and still encourages involvement in school meals—which benefits everyone. Some of this group even require kids to pack lunch themselves on the days they don’t want to eat the school meal, which is a rather genius way to get kids more involved in their own meal planning mental load.I also heard from a vocal minority of parents who really want to do school lunches but have opted out because of logistical issues, especially long lines that don’t leave their kids time to eat (especially in places limiting lunch periods to 15 minutes right now to reduce Covid risk). I too worry about kids who need to stand in line, eat, and get to the bathroom during this timeframe—solidarity to all the kindergarten teachers dealing with afternoon wet pants! If a lunch logistic is your deal-breaker this year, Gaddis says, “Just don’t make this your permanent decision about school lunch.” And do contact your elected officials and let them know that you want them to support the Universal School Meals Act and several other pieces of legislation pending now.So no, school lunch is not perfect. But the problems likely aren’t what you think. And it could be so much better if we started to shift away from this diet culture-fueled hierarchy of kid lunches, with cafeteria trays always on the bottom. Letting go of these standards for perfect kid lunches and perfect parenthood is hard. More than one mom told me they pack lunch because, “This way I know what food she’s offered,” or, even more bluntly, “I like the control.” But our kids will have a healthier relationship with food in general if we empower them to eat this meal without our micromanagement. Releasing some of this control can be a way to let our kids know we trust them; to encourage their curiosity; to enable more community building in cafeterias, instead of div…
Full show notes at the publisherThis week, Corinne joins Virginia for another Ask Us Anything episode! We have a lot of thoughts about pants. So buckle up for that. We also talk about snacks. Pants and snacks, and I know, you're already in.If you'd like to support Burnt Toast, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And considering becoming 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.You can also now officially preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culturecomes 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 LINKSWant to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.For previous Corinne episodes, start here and then go here and here. Corinne's amazing jumpsuitShould you get rid of your scale?Jeans ScienceUniversal Standard black leggingsUniversal Standard ponte pantUniversal Standard buttoned down shirt similar pink clogs to Virginia'sEileen Fisher lantern pantDraper James dressDacy Gillespiecashmere bike shortsCorinne’s Barbell Lift Off experiencethe conversation I had with SerenaCREDITSThe 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.Episode 62 TranscriptVirginiaI feel like we should catch up a little! I haven't talked to you, I mean, we haven't recorded one of these in a few months. We talk frequently but it's like text and email. How are you?CorinneI'm good. This summer has been a whirlwind. VirginiaYou have been all over the place, right? CorinneI have. I came out to the east coast for the summer. I've been staying with my mom and I've been spending a lot of time with family—my mom, my sister, extended family, and traveling to see lots of old friends.VirginiaThat sounds so great. I was so mad, you were in the Hudson Valley like an hour from me but I was in the final days of book revisions and we couldn’t make it happen. CorinneAnd how are you doing? You've had a busy summer as well.VirginiaI am good. It was unexpectedly extra busy because it turned out my book timeline was different than I thought it would be. But now September Virginia is so happy because this morning I turned in the revise, as opposed to when I originally thought I'd be starting the revise in September. Now I'm like, it was totally worth it because it's done.Preorder FAT TALKCorinneCongratulations!VirginiaThank you. It's so huge. It's now 400 pages in Word. It won't be a 400 page book—I don't want to terrify people. Word page counts and book page counts are different. And like 50 pages of it is just end notes, which I assume nobody reads but I'm still very obsessive about. Writing the end notes really almost ended me, but I made it. I made it through.CorinneThat's so awesome.VirginiaIt's good stuff. My kids are back in school and the book is someone else's problem for a few weeks. I'm living life. All right, should we do some listener questions? We've got a lot of good ones this time.CorinneWe do. Let's dive in. Should I read the first one? Q. How do you work with yourself when you are having one of those days when you either feel bloated, feel like you're carrying some extra weight or just feel lousy and a little bigger in your body? Does it trigger any anxiety or fatphobic thinking? If so, how do you work with yourself?I ask because as a human, I assume we all have some of these days with normal body fluctuations if we are connected with our bodies. It is a normal part of living in a body, but I tend to get really anxious and my fatphobic mind starts up when I'm having a day when I may be holding on to some extra weight.VirginiaMy first response is like, yes, I think this is how we're taught to think about our bodies. It's normal for these feelings to come up and to have this moment. But let's push back on the phrase “extra weight” a little bit. Let's be curious about that because that is sort of tricky language, right? That's the fatphobia. I have a lot of empathy, these are very real feelings that come up because you've been taught to feel this way about your body. And bodies do change. Our bodies change size throughout the month, and the year, and the seasons. And it is hard to not have that knee jerk response to it because that's what you were taught to do since you were a kid.What do you think?CorinneI'm struggling with this question. One, because I think what you're picking up on, it is coming from a very real place. And it is slightly equating “feeling bigger” with feeling lousy. I feel like the word “bloating” is like a trigger for me. What do you mean when you say “bloated?” Are your clothes uncomfortable? Are you seeing the way you look and not liking it? VirginiaDo you just need to poop? Are you constipated?CorinneAre you having trouble with mobility? Or are you like weighing yourself? I'm curious what the feeling is.VirginiaI think you're right. What is coming up? I think in this person's effort to be careful in how they're talking about this, they're not giving us all the details, which is understandable but makes it harder for us to answer your question.For me, there are some times, like a change of season, when I bring out the next season's clothes and something is tighter than I expected it to be. That is, I think, a common point where people suddenly are like, wait, did something go wrong? And then I have to reframe. If my body has changed, that is fine. It is not my body's fault. It's the pant’s problem, not mine.I also try to take a step back and ask what else is going on with me. Because often, worrying about how clothes fit is a place my brain goes with anxiety because it's got that groove worn into it. But actually, I'm anxious because I have a work meeting where I have to be on camera or be in person with people or we're gonna see friends we haven't seen in a long time. Often it's my social anxiety that manifests in body and wardrobe anxiety. And so taking it back to like, Oh, I'm just anxious about this social encounter because I'm an introvert who works from home and isn't great at seeing people. Then I can sort of keep it there versus going to the body negativity place.CorinneRight. And those two things are so linked, because anxiety makes you uncomfortable but also if your clothes physically feel weird, it can amplify it.VirginiaI think where this has gone really badly for me in the past is if I haven't taken enough time in advance to figure out what I'm going to wear to the thing and now the thing I thought I could wear is uncomfortable to wear. So now my anxiety about the thing is compounded by the fact that I feel miserable in this outfit that doesn't fit right. Then you're in this whole vortex. So one workaround is I try now to plan further out. I’m going to take author photos next month, and I'm already thinking about what I'm gonna wear so it's not the morning of author photo shoot day and nothing works.CorinneThat thing where you’re throwing everything you own…VirginiaYes, Exactly. Let's avoid the flailing and hating everything. CorinneMaybe this person just needs some soft pants.VirginiaDon’t we all just need soft pants? CorinneYeah. If you're feeling that discomfort, put on your soft pants.VirginiaI don't know if we totally answered that. CorinneI hope that didn't sound dismissive because that's not how I meant it. VirginiaWe don't want to dismiss the really real feelings that come up. But look at what's underneath it. Don't feel bad that your brain went there because you've learned to go there, but recognize that that's not where it needs to stay.CorinneAnd whatever you can do to make yourself physically feel more comfortable will probably help.VirginiaWell, on the subject of soft pants, these next questions are ones I'm very excited to talk about with you.Q. What are some of your favorite or go to “business casual” clothes outfits?Q. Fall wardrobe essentials?So I feel like we should talk about like fall clothes in general. I don't know that either of us would describe ourselves as business casual.CorinneOh man, the business casual is straight up triggering. That is a situation where I'm throwing everything in my closet on the bed and, so uncomfortable. I'm so sorry for everyone who has to try and figure that out.VirginiaYou guys can't see us but Corinne is in an adorable Target jumpsuit that we just discussed in great detail. I am in cutoff shorts and a tank top because it's really hot in my office. So, we did not go business casual for this Zoom recording CorinneOh my gosh, no. VirginiaBut I do want to give a plug for soft pants for fall. I decided after having spent months on Jeans Science as everybody knows, that I am going to try not to buy new jeans this fall. Because they will be bad. All the jeans are bad. They will inevitably be disappointing and I won't like them. So why would I spend money on them?I have three or four pairs left from Jeans Science. I tried them on all last week. Two pairs didn't fit anymore, so I threw them out immediately. But I think I still have two or three left that are fine. They're not great because there are no good jeans, but they're fine for the days when I really feel like I need jeans. And otherwise, I am embracing leggings. I got some great Universal Standard black leggings. I also got the Universal Standard ponte pant, which is a very difficult phrase to say on a podcast. CorinneI’ve always said “pont-y,” just throwing that out there.VirginiaThat could be right. It sounds like panty, but okay. Pont-ay?CorinneThere we go. Yes, say it with an accent.VirginiaOkay, so question mark on how to pronounce it. But I feel like it's like a dressier legging. It's very versatile. I just have a black. I have a black pair and I have a bright red pair. The other thing I'm really excited about for fall is I also bought—another word I can't pronounce, “chambray.” Is that how you would say that? The denim but it's the soft denim? I bought a buttoned down shirt to wear with the black leggings or the ponte pant and also like maybe my cute pink clogs (Charlotte Stone doesn’t have my exact color anymore but these are similar, also for sure wait for sales!). I'm pretty excited about this as a look for fall. Sort of transitional. Could go to a clog boot once it gets cold here. What about you? What are you wearing?CorinneWell first I want to address business casual. My business casual go to is just Eileen Fisher, whether new or secondhand. I feel like they have so much comfortable stuff that's like that “artsy” business casual. I'm a particularly huge fan of their lantern pant, which is like kind of like a wider style that like goes in at the bottom a little bit. It comes in like a million different fabrics and slightly different styles every season.VirginiaOh, I know this pant. CorinneIt’s great. Goes with everything. And comfortable! You could wear it on an airplane.VirginiaThey're kind of like pajama pants, but like a little more tailored? But not super tailored.CorinneI would also say Universal Standard also has great stuff. I used to be more of a dress-wearing business casual person and now I'm like, I don't want to wear a dress. I want to wear pants all the time.VirginiaYeah, I'm in more of a pants place, too, although I have I'm doing some shopping for dresses right now because of the author photoshoot. So I just got one from Draper James (and hat tip to Dacy Gillespie who found this for me, I’ll talk more about that soon!). It's not a super inclusive line, but they do go up to 3x, I think. Yeah. I'm very excited about it. But I haven't like worn it out in the world so I feel like I can't fully endorse it.(Update: I wore it out in the world after we recorded! To a work event! And I loved it though I did worry about sweat stains but it was okay.)But if you're preppy—and I'm from Connecticut, so I can't not be preppy sometimes—I recommend. When I was looking at Draper James, they had some really cute tops that I think would certainly qualify as business casual, particularly if paired with a ponte pant or linen pant. Dresses are tricky because then you also have to make decisions about tights.CorinneAnd shoes. I don't like the shoes/dress situation because I don't want to wear heels ever. VirginiaGod no. Yeah. I left women's magazines for a reason and not having to wear heels is one of the top reasons.CorinneCan you wear it with Blundstones? That's my question. VirginiaYou can totally wear cute dresses with Blundstones. That's a great look.CorinneBut might not be business casual. VirginiaWell, as we established up front, we do not have the credentials to speak very well to business casual. But I do think a dress with tights and Blundstones could work in a lot of more creative corporate settings. If you work at a bank, I don't think I can help you. I mean, I think a jumpsuit can totally work too for business casual. I mean, as you are proof right now. I have one from Athleta that's like a nylon-y fabric. (Guys I lied, it’s from Target and they don’t have it anymore, sigh.) It kind of reminds me a parachute fabric. But I feel like I can dress it up a little if I need to. Jumpsuits get tricky in the winter with shoes, at least here on the East Coast where you don't want bare ankles. It always comes back to the whole bare ankles thing. California has really done a number on us.CorinneSo true. I will say one thing I've been wearing a lot in this cold damp summer thing we're having is I got a pair of cashmere bike shorts.VirginiaWait, what?CorinneFrom Naadam. Do you know that brand? VirginiaI do not!CorinneThey're so great for that sort of humid, cool, but it's summer weather. Could maybe work for fall in some places?VirginiaThis is reminding me of that old photo of Princess Diana wearing a blue sweatshirt and white shorts. People post it on the one day a year where the weather is appropriate for this combination. But in Maine that’s like a lot of time actually?CorinneI love long sleeve top and shorts. These are also very good for if you're “feeling bloated” because they're just very soft and very stretchy comfortable.VirginiaYes. I am excited about this. I also want to know if they make like a longer pant? I have long wanted a pair of le…
Full show notes at the publisherThis week, Virginia chats with Chelsea Conaboy, author of an amazing new book, Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood.If you'd like to support Burnt Toast, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And considering becoming 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. BUTTER & OTHER LINKSWant to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.Chelsea's NYT Op-ed: Maternal Instinct Is a Myth That Men CreatedChelsea's chapter book read-aloud picks: The Wild Robot, The Wild Robot Escapes and (strong co-sign from Virginia) Dory FantasmagoryVirginia's Instagram Gardening Content.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.Episode 61 TranscriptVirginiaHi Chelsea! Why don't we start by having you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work?ChelseaI'm a longtime newspaper journalist. I was a reporter and editor for a long time and for the past few years I've been a freelancer writing a lot about public health, in its broadest definition, and health policy. And I'm a mom of two kids, ages five and seven.VirginiaWe are here to talk about your new book, Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood. I should, full disclosure, note that Chelsea and I share a publisher and editor. So we were set up as author friends in that way, but I would be asking you to be on the podcast regardless because the book is fantastic. And just exactly the kind of conversation we need to be having and that I love having here. So, the title is Mother Brain, but you're very clear from the get go that you take a more inclusive definition of that concept. So talk a little bit about who you're speaking to in this book and also how gender and biology impact this idea of the “Mother Brain.”ChelseaI'm glad we're starting here, it's really important. A parent is anyone who commits their time and energy to caring for children. And there are different mechanisms for how we get to a parental brain depending on whether we're gestational parent or not, but we arrive at very similar places regardless. The one key point that I make over and over in this book is that it's experience that matters most. Time and attention are the things that shape the brain. I wanted to get at how not only have we created such an incomplete understanding of what “mommy brain” is, as something that undermines women, but we've also oversimplified the idea of who gets to do this, whose biology determines them to be really good caregivers. And the answer is everyone. Everyone who commits themselves to this work is changed by it at a neurobiological level.VirginiaWe think of that as a modern invention that (some?) men now take an active role in caregiving and that nonbinary and trans folks can be parents. But I loved how you talked in the book about how this has actually always been happening. It's a core thing that distinguishes humans from other species, that we've always had this idea that everyone can be a caregiver.ChelseaIt's really ancient. It predates humans in the sense that the circuitry for caregiving is this fundamental evolutionary lever that shapes social structures of species across time. It's why we have such a diversity of parenting structures across animals, and of fathering. But in humans, it became important in the way that it wasn't for other primates before us, because human mothers started having babies closer together, and human babies couldn't rely only on their mothers to take care of them. So there were other adults that stepped in and kind of allowed the species to flourish the way it did, and created the hypersociality of the human brain. That is rooted in the idea that mothers couldn't do it all, that other adults had to help.VirginiaAnd not necessarily just female adults. We can think more comprehensively about gender with this, too, right?ChelseaI mean, it was actually thought that it was probably grandmothers who were like the original helpers. Grandmothers who lived a little bit past their reproductive years started helping and allowed their daughters to have more kids more quickly. But the idea is also that they passed on their willingness to engage and be captured by their babies. And that became a human trait, it enabled what is referred to as “alloparenting,” or other parenting, that it's not just mothers, anyone can do it.VirginiaFascinating. And such an important part of the conversation when we talk about how motherhood is portrayed now as this solo operation of self sacrifice.ChelseaIt was never meant to be that.VirginiaLet's talk a little more about some of the popular culture misinterpretations. I mean, we hear about terms like “mommy brain,” as you said, that serves to undermine women. We also talk a lot about maternal instincts. I was thinking, reading your book, that I'm planning to give it to my father-in-law.1 Because an anecdote he loves to tell is how his wife would always wake up for the crying babies and he would sleep through it. And he always framed this to me as like, “It's just the mother's instinct! You'll hear the baby cry before your husband will.” And, “That's just the mother's instinct to just be tuned into the baby that way.” So can you debunk that for me, please?ChelseaI mean, it's possible that she did hear it more than he did because she had thousands of nights of practice of getting up and doing it. Sometimes she probably woke up before the baby even cried because she knew that they were going to be hungry soon because she had the practice. You know, experience matters. So it became part of how her parental brain worked. Also, maybe because she couldn't rely on her husband to get up, too, so it was up to her.I mean, maternal instincts are a really tricky thing to talk about in some ways. It's kind of like a comforting idea for some people to feel like we have this maternal intuition that will get us through the hard stuff. The issue that I have with it is how we arrive at this idea that the maternal instinct, as it sounds like your father in law might say, is innate and automatic and uniquely female. That is a myth. It's just not true. The parental brain is something that takes time to develop. It's not automatic. It's something that grows in us, and it can be really grueling, especially at the beginning. And it keeps growing and changing as we grow and change. And it's a major transformation. And it's one that needs time and support and attention to go well. And it's one that comes with real risks, too. The idea of “maternal instinct” ignores all of that. It was written into science by men who held fast to these religious beliefs around womanhood and who also had a stated interest in compelling women, especially white well off women, to have more babies. There were feminists at that time, in the early part of the 20th century, who were saying, “You know, this is a ruse. We know that what you're trying to do here is to make it look easy, and it's not easy.”VirginiaOne of the things I took away from your book is just like, it's so comforting to realize I’m not alone in that experience of expecting to have the baby arrive and just immediately know what to do, and then realizing you have no fucking clue what to do. It's so hard, that transition that a lot of us go through. You can end up feeling like it's something you did wrong and that it's your fault for not tapping into this more immediate sense of maternal wisdom or whatever. ChelseaI mean, that's why I wrote this book. That's how I felt when my son was born in 2015. I was just completely blindsided, especially by the intensity of the worry I felt for him and the complete lack of certainty that I knew what to do, or that I could even figure it out. And how consuming that feeling was and my complete lack of words to describe it. I mean I went looking for them and really went down the rabbit hole of the of the brain research and found a completely different story than the one I feel like I had been fed.Virginia I want to circle back to what you were just talking about with male scientists creating this narrative, because I was fascinated by your reporting on the history of scientific research on motherhood, and on parenting advice. I think of parenting content as another modern invention, but clearly not. Men have been telling women how to parent for centuries, and yet, doing so little of the actual parenting work. How do you make sense of that? How has it done a disservice to all parents?ChelseaI think this has a lot to do with the rise of the expert. In 1877, Charles Darwin published a journal about his own son's development, and that kind of launched the field of child development. Following his example, lots of women started forming child study societies documenting their own children's growth and sharing what they learned. Very soon after that, they were told that they couldn't be trusted for this work that their own maternal instincts made it impossible for them to be objective observers.VirginiaWow.ChelseaAnd at the same time, medicine and science was really walled off to women. So instead, we got this long string of men publishing books about child rearing. Some were better than others. Some were absurd. My favorite is John Watson in, I think. 1928, telling women to put their kids in a hole in the backyard from the time they were born and to avoid kissing them at all costs.VirginiaI think I wrote “holy fuck” in the margins on that part. He was like, “Just put your baby in a sandpit?”ChelseaYes, yes. And I mean, that book sold tens of thousands of copies in its first months and it really influenced parenting for about a decade. It's really laughable, but then sometimes I think, well, some of the parenting advice we get today is no less laughable? It's just the landscape is different now. Things can be critiqued in real time, there's more diversity of ideas, there are more women and nonbinary parents giving the advice, but we still definitely have this sense that good mothers produce good children and that if we just Google enough, we'll find the answers. And that's almost never true.I think the disservice that this causes is really the anxiety that it creates in us all and the judgment. And, how that can deflect from what we really need and what our kids need, which is connection. They need our our time and attention and also a community of adults around them who can connect with them as well. VirginiaI mean, there's a great parallel with diet culture here, which is always where my brain goes. It's ignoring the fact that you can be a really “good” mother, but if you can't afford rent or you don't have childcare, you know, these larger structural issues that we just don't have to deal with, if we're too busy telling parents the one thing you have to do to have a healthy baby is co-sleep or put your child in a dirt hole or whatever the trend.I was thinking about it, too, and I was like, this dirt hole thing could totally become some new Instagram parenting trend. Like, “free range!” It has sort of gentle parenting vibes of, “just put up a Montessori gate” or “use a floor bed.”ChelseaChild-led sandpit exploration.VirginiaOh my God. That's a hashtag. That's great. I do want to talk a bit more about the brain chemistry piece of it, because that's obviously a big focus of the book. How parenting changes our brain in these important and necessary-for-the-good-of-society ways is very interesting. Talk a little bit about what happens, on a fundamental level to our brains. What about these brain changes surprised you the most?ChelseaThe changes to the parental brain are fundamentally adaptive. I think that's an important place to start because it's so counter to the narrative we often talk about with mothers and brains. They occur because this new role is just dramatically different than what we, at least the vast majority of us, have been in before. We become wholly responsible for the survival of a tiny, nonverbal, human who is vulnerable, and who doesn't have the brain development yet to regulate themselves and their own physiology.So at first, the parental brain changes in ways to make us really hyper responsive. We talk a lot about the dramatic shifts in hormones that happen during pregnancy and what they mean for our bodies and childbirth. But that talk typically ends at baby blues and the sense that for most people, things sort of settle out after a few weeks. When in reality, this flood of hormones primes the brain for this period of plasticity or malleability, so that babies, who are these powerful stimuli, can go to work and shape us to meet their own needs.What happens is brain regions that are related to motivation, and vigilance, and how we make meaning of the world around us become really active. And at least in that early postpartum period that can feel really intense and also deliberately colored by worry. We're driven to pay attention to our babies, to respond quickly to their needs, and to try and try again to meet them. Knowing that we're going to make mistakes and that and we're going to have to respond really quickly.So that's hyper-responsiveness and then over time, it's thought that things shift to this more regulated state, that parents fine tune their ability to recognize their child's cues, and to predict what they need. So brain regions involved in self-regulation and social processing, and what's called theory of mind, or how we read and respond to other people, those also change both in function and in structure. One researcher described it to me as if the neural networks that support our ability to understand ourselves and our own needs in a social context, get extended to also now include our children and like our extension of ourselves at a neural level.VirginiaThat's fascinating because you do have a felt experience of getting better at parenting. I mean new things happen. It gets hard again at different ages, but I do think a lot of us have an experience of competence increasing and feeling more qualified to make these calls. So it's just fascinating to understand that your brain has literally done that work, that you're evolving in this role.ChelseaAnd there's some research that looks at second or subsequent pregnancies and everyone's experiences are different. I know people have had harder second pregnancies in terms of their mental state, but there is some research that indicates that you become less hyper reactive in terms of your neural activity, because you've got that infrastructure in place that, you kind of know how to do the prediction piece better. So it's less intense the second time around. VirginiaAnd again, I just want to reiterate that you're saying most of this is coming from the experience of caretaking, not the biological process of pregnancy, right?ChelseaLet's clarify…
Full show notes at the publisherIt's our September bonus episode! And we're trying out a new format: Virginia's Office Hours, where a Burnt Toast subscriber comes on the pod to chat with Virginia about fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health. Our first guest is Serena, who is trying to navigate family gatherings while in eating disorder recovery—but her relatives aren't just diet-y, they are diet culture creators. If you are already a paid subscriber, you’ll have this entire episode in your podcast feed and access to the entire transcript in your inbox and on the Burnt Toast Patreon.If you are not a paid subscriber, you'll only get the first chunk. To hear the whole conversation or read the whole transcript, you'll need to go paid. This episode does contain some discussion of eating disorders, eating disorder recovery, and family medical crisis. If any of that wouldn't be good for you to listen to, please take care of yourself and give this one a miss.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 LINKSVirginia has previously discussed her daughter's medically necessary (but awful!) fat-free diet in this episode. Serena recommends this poem by spoken word poet Andrea Gibson. 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.---Today we’re trying out a new format for the podcast called Virginia's Office Hours! This is a chance for a Burnt Toast subscriber to come chat with me about any question they're mulling over related to diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, health, etc.The way I think of both the Ask Virginia column and what we do on the podcast with listener questions is not so much “here is an expert sharing their wisdom.” I think that’s the model we're all trained to expect with advice content—in large part thanks to diet culture. But I think of this as much more smart people having thoughtful conversations…the same way I do, and I bet you do. over wine or coffee with friends or over my group text chats with my friends. And, a big problem with trying to get advice about any these topics is that people boil it down to an Instagram post or a little nugget of wisdom and that just isn't applicable to all of our lives. So, a much deeper, richer and more nuanced conversation is what I'm aiming for with these Office Hour episodes. I see it as a chance to have the kind of conversation we often have on Friday Threads. But here we are, conversing more directly, Zoom face to Zoom face.Today's Office Hours guest has asked me to change her name to protect privacy, so we are calling her “Serena.” We’ll be talking about how she can navigate encounters with extended family members who aren't just diet-y and on diets, they are diet culture creators. It's your uncle who's really obsessed with Paleo, but if your uncle invented Paleo. (Her uncle did not invent Paleo, just to be clear.)This episode does contain some discussion of eating disorders, eating disorder recovery, and family medical crisis. If any of that wouldn't be good for you to listen to, please take care of yourself and give this one a miss. Everyone else, it's an awesome conversation and I can't wait to hear what you think of this new format!Want to submit a question or volunteer to be an office hours guest? Please use this form.Note: I am a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. I am 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 I give are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.Episode 60 TranscriptVirginiaHi Serena! This is the inaugural Virginia’s Office Hours episode, so we’re figuring out the format together and I appreciate you being game for the experiment. I would like to start by having you read us the question you sent. SerenaOkay, great. So the question is:How do I maintain a relationship with or move on from my extended family members whose livelihood is rooted in wellness culture, selling, “food as medicine,” and weight loss as a cure for everything from heart disease to type two diabetes to rheumatoid arthritis and lupus? During my years following their rigid vegan / whole food, plant-based, no salt, oil, sugar, etc diet, I developed severe anorexia from which I am just now extricating myself with lots of professional help and support of anti-diet journalism and podcasts like yours and Food Psych, for example.It feels awkward to be around my family now that I’m trying to follow Intuitive Eating instead of the whole food, plant-based diet rules. They are famous, revered, and well-loved in their circles. I’m not necessarily here to bash them, though I now see their messaging as privileged, fatphobic, not at all aligned with my social justice values and the opposite of intuitive/anti-diet.VirginiaThis question jumped out at me because you’re in a very specific situation with who these folks are and the work that they do, but I think there’s a lot that’s relatable here. Like even if someone’s cousin or grandfather isn’t like the father of Keto—which is not who her family member is, we’re not disclosing their identity. But you know, even if you’re not related to the founder of the Paleo diet, you might have a relative who’s a doctor or a dietitian or in health in a diet-y way in some other arena. And the authority that we give these folks in their professional lives can often show up in the personal interactions as well. So I just thought, Oh, I bet a lot of people can relate to what you must be feeling when you go to Thanksgiving dinner.Why don’t we have you tell us a little more of your own story because I think that’s going to be really important to how we talk about how you’re navigating this. So, tell us a little more about when your eating disorder started. And what were some of the key ways you saw your relatives’ work in forming your disorder?SerenaSo my mom was kind of an early vegetarian in the 1970s, when she was pregnant with my brother, after me. And then my dad had a GI cancer in the mid-70s. Part of his treatment was a major operation of his whole GI tract that basically they weren’t sure he was gonna survive or recover from. So my family went into full on survival mode and a lot of that was figuring out how best to eat. Now I know it’s orthorexia, and yet it came out of this real fear of my dad may not make it if we don’t eat right. My extended family, about whom this question is focused, started their vegan path in the mid-80s. So that was around when my immediate family also adopted this pretty strict way of eating. My first round of anorexia was probably my last year of high school and definitely grew out of a lot of that restriction, no animal products and all of that. But I pretty much recovered and found a somewhat of a middle ground, until it came roaring back in the last decade of midlife and changes with my children. I think it’s pretty common, coming around again during the changes of midlife.Part of what did it was being diagnosed with Lyme disease and a fairly well-meaning health care provider suggesting that part of my recovery could be giving up other food groups. Kind of classic wellness culture around gluten and other things. So that got me back into that mode of “food as medicine” or rather, restricting food as the only path to wellness. So by the time 2015 rolled around, I was definitely deep in it and it was only just reinforced by not my immediate family necessarily, but my extended family.VirginiaSo your whole relationship with food is rooted in this big trauma, right? This experience with your dad. That sounds so terrifying. And how that kind of informed the way your family was navigating food when you were a kid, is that right?SerenaYeah, I was five when he was sick. VirginiaThat’s a lot. And it was all under the guise of “this is what we need to do to make him better.” And I’m guessing less attention was paid to, “what is the toll this is taking on all of us?”SerenaOh, for sure. No. It was all about how do we keep him alive and we’ll do anything. VirginiaWhich, of course you would. But also you’re five and you’re having to eat in this really difficult way. Were you aware, as a kid, that your family ate differently from other families? SerenaOh, yes. And it was always kind of a “we’re better, we’re superior, we’re righteous, we’re healthy,” you know? “We’re eating clean.” So there was always kind of a comfort there to me. Not a shame or like, ooh, we’re different. And it wasn’t the kind of thing where I couldn’t eat birthday cake at a friend’s party or something. But at home, it was all very clean because of dad’s survival. And he is still alive!VirginiaWhich we’re delighted about!SerenaFor sure, yeah. Whether it was the food or something else.VirginiaI’m just thinking about how that set you up to interact with food in a really specific way from the get go.I’ve talked in the newsletter about my daughter’s medical experiences. We spent a lot of time with her on a really strict fat-free diet. It was necessary to save her life at that point in time, and because I was the adult in the situation, I was able to look at it and say: It’s a no brainer to do this to save her life right now. And, what are the broader implications of this? How is this going to impact her longterm relationship with food? What is it doing to us?I think that part of the content of the conversation so often gets missed when we’re thinking about food as medicine. It may be that there’s a food restriction that’s necessary for a health condition, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t bring along all this other stuff. We’re given this message of “well, if it’s what you have to do, then you have to just be all in on it,” and you don’t get to have feelings about it being a hard way to live.What was your turning point, if there was one? I understand you recovered from the first round that happened when you were a teenager and then this later around related to the Lyme disease?SerenaThere probably wouldn’t have been one because I really thought I had it nailed. I had gotten all the bad foods out of my diet, and I was eating as healthy as anyone could and you know, all that righteousness that comes with the territory. But during the pandemic, I was out running, and a friend of mine who also works in healthcare saw me, and emailed shortly after and said she was concerned because I looked like I was emaciated and not doing well, which was a shock to me. It hadn’t occurred to me that all of my healthy stuff was leading actually down a really dangerous path.So, it was having a fellow healthcare person say that she was concerned that really got me to go for an assessment, plus the concern of my husband and other people in my world. I was referred for residential treatment, but I was in denial that that was really necessary. But I did get on board with a really amazing all virtual recovery team. And I’ve been doing that for most of the pandemic, all by telehealth.I continue to just see how how sick I was where I had no clue. I really thought I was doing everything perfectly.VirginiaYeah, the eating disorder can be so loud and very good at talking you into certain thought patterns. So in terms of both your earlier struggles and what you’ve been working through recently, are your extended family members, the ones who are so entrenched in this world, are they aware of what you’ve been going through?SerenaI came out to most of my family and extended family pretty soon after I was engaged in recovery. Partly because I just needed them to know that I was kind of hopping off the train or exiting the cult or changing the narrative or whatever metaphor you want to use. I really felt kind of naughty and it was impossible to think of another way of living at first. But I did call them and I think I was looking for some sort of acknowledgement of, “Oh, yeah, I could see how all this restriction could have led down that path and I’m really sorry that happened for you.”But I mean, there’s just such a… I don’t know if it’s blindness? Or just the assumption that it’s still really the best way to live and be and it’s your own personal failing if you take it to this unhealthy place. Or it was still very much my fault that it happened that way. And no one has really changed their beliefs.Even just this couple of weeks ago, we were out there visiting, and there was still a lot of talk about clean eating and weighing yourself. And, “we don’t eat these bad animal products” and stuff. So coming out was important for me, but it also hasn’t really changed much. I still feel really self conscious doing things differently. Virginia That is frustrating. Of course, we can never control other people’s reactions, but still such a letdown that they couldn’t say, “Wow, we’re really sorry this happened and we’re willing to look at the broader implications of this.”SerenaWell, I think it would throw into question everything that is held as truth. It is a lot easier to see things in a very black and white, binary way. I think I kind of throw a wrench in their whole understanding of the world, that whole dogma, because it didn’t work for me or it worked so well that it just went bad.VirginiaRight, they don’t know what to do with you. You’re not the story they want to tell. But you can’t be the only person who has shared this with them, given what we know about the way these kinds of eating programs contribute to disordered eating and eating disorders. It’s fascinating to me, how often I see big diet brands, give this total stonewall response that’s like, “Well, that’s not what we’re doing. We don’t do that. We don’t want people to get eating disorders, we’re doing something else.” Even though the evidence clearly shows that what they’re doing is contributing to eating disorders.SerenaYeah. And the messaging around it all, as you’ve touched on before, is very slippery. It’s a lifestyle. It’s not a diet. It’s just how we eat, always, with all these rules that are just sort of baked in. It does feel a lot like being gaslit because there really is no problem there. I’m the problem.EPISODE CREDITSCo-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay. Producer: Kim Baldwin. Logo design: Deanna Lowe.Theme Song: Farideh.Video Editor: Elizabeth AyikuAudio Engineer: Tommy HarronFollow us on social! Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith. Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
Full show notes at the publisherThis week, Virginia chats with with Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant, cofounders of the Center for Body Trust, and authors of a new book out this week, Reclaiming Body Trust: A Path to Healing and Liberation.If you'd like to support Burnt Toast, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And considering becoming 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.Post-Publication Note: Dana let us know after this episode aired that credit for this episode title (which she also quotes in the conversation below) belongs to Dr. Crystal Jones. We apologize for not properly attributing that during the conversation. BUTTER & OTHER LINKSWe're getting ready to do another AMA episode soon. And we need your questions! Put them here, so we stay organized. Hilary and Dana were on the Dear Sugars podcastVirginia previously interviewed them for a Health Magazine pieceOne of the frameworks Hilary and Dana use is Barbara Love’s liberatory consciousness, which is something they learned from Desiree Adaway and Ericka Hines.Nonbinary psychologist and Body Trust provider Sand Chang contributed to their book.Hilary is obsessed with the show on Apple TV called Home and her dog Arrow. Dana is obsessed with her hot tub, heated or not, and English muffins from Sparrow Bakery.Virginia and her lower back are obsessed with this $29 heating pad from TargetCREDITSThe 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.VirginiaLet’s start by having each of you introduce yourselves.HilaryI’m Hilary. I am a cofounder of the Center for Body Trust, formerly BeNourished, and I am a therapist and a coach and I spend a lot of time doing training with healthcare professionals around helping them be better around people’s relationship with their body and addressing weight stigma in their work. And my business partner is Dana.DanaI’m Dana Sturtevant. I’m the dietitian. Sometimes I say “I’m the dietitian.”VirginiaIn your spookiest voice, I like it.DanaWe’re a therapist/dietitian team. I worked in the dominant weight paradigm early in my career where I didn’t believe I was promoting dieting behaviors. I thought I was promoting healthy lifestyles. And then through years of that work and becoming disillusioned and starting to feel unethical, I was really curious about offering people a different approach. At the time, I was a yoga teacher—I no longer teach yoga—but I was really curious about the mindfulness and self-acceptance practices of yoga and also coming back into our bodies and how that could change people’s relationship with food and their bodies. And I knew nobody would hire me to do what I wanted to do. So I started a private practice and shortly thereafter met Hilary. And the other hat that I wear in my business is I train healthcare providers in motivational interviewing, which is a counseling style that is collaborative and less pathologizing and more humanizing of people.VirginiaThe two of you have written a brand new book called Reclaiming Body Trust. I was very lucky to get to read an early copy. It is absolutely remarkable. It’s really unlike anything else out there in this space. I think it’s meeting a need for a book that meets people where they are and helps them work through all of these issues and put them into the larger context of systems of oppression. There’s the self help books and then there’s books talking about systems of oppression, but you are bringing it all together. So, let’s talk a little bit about what inspired you to say, “We run this really all consuming business but also we should write a book.”HilaryWe had always thought about writing a book, but it didn’t rise to the top because we’ve always been really immersed in running our programs and that is very consuming and is a full time job. And we’ve had practices and do trainings on the side. So it totally has not fit in. And then we got to a place where we wanted folks to have all these things that we’ve been saying for years in trainings and in workshops in a format that they can hold, really. That’s really exciting and that’s really accessible, you know? We were approached to write a book proposal after we were on the Dear Sugars podcast and we did that. And here we are, just a mere two years later. A pandemic, a few house moves, no problem.VirginiaI’m sure it was a very relaxing book writing experience. Kind of one of those zen retreats.HilaryVery easeful.But we really wanted this to be accessible. I consider myself to be a politicized therapist and coach. I do not separate politics from the change process. Our work is situated liberatory frameworks. We believe that this movement of weight inclusion is a liberatory process. And so that’s what we wanted this book to be about. Not so much situated in the bodies of individual people. Like, “How do I heal my relationship with food and body?” is a valid question, but what is the context in which we are trying to heal cannot be left out, and it’s so frequently left out in eating disorder settings and disordered eating settings. And it can’t be. People aren’t getting well and we’re missing this big piece of that big conversation.VirginiaWhy do you think it’s so often left out? HilaryWell, I think everything in the food and body space is tied to capitalism and white supremacy. And there is a lot of money to be made, in dieting and fitness and cosmetic industries, off of telling people what is wrong with them and then selling them solutions to that. In the eating disorder treatment space, we have a really big problem with only having services that are really fit for thin white women. And we tend to relegate folks with larger bodies, fat bodies, we continue to outsource them to diet culture spaces instead of really understanding that the overall climate around thinness, around healthism, around all of these things, is really creating the problem of disordered eating and eating disorders and dissatisfaction with the body. But there’s no money to be made if we dismantle and divest from these systems. VirginiaThis is true. HilarySo herein lies the problem. I think people don’t know how to tie these things together. I think people have suffered greatly in their bodies. And from what I know of talking to some folks who have suffered greatly in their bodies, it’s really hard for them to build a bridge between what’s happening in the world around bodies and what’s happened in their relationship with their own bodies.VirginiaThey don’t see how their struggle connects to these larger struggles.HilaryYeah, I think we outsource our struggle to critical voices and shame and things within us that tend to uphold the dominant paradigm within us, right? Tend to keep us trying to perform and better ourselves. And we struggle to know that letting go, not suppressing our weight, things like that are actually what gets us free instead of trying to do it all right, or better.VirginiaOne thing I loved about the book is that you give these very concise explanations of a few concepts that I also think a lot about and I think are really tied to the need to put our personal struggles in this broader social context. So, I thought we could chat about a few of them. The first is healthism. What is healthism and how does it show up?DanaHealthism is this belief that our health is the be all and end all of our existence. If we’re not actively pursuing health through personal lifestyle changes, that we are somehow morally failing. It seems to be pretty individualistic and focused on individual lifestyle behaviors instead of looking at the broader context and social determinants of health and how social determinants of health have far greater impact on people’s health and wellbeing than their individual lifestyle choices.One reason we started to talk about healthism in our work is how weight and health are always conflated. So many of our clients believe they gave up dieting years ago because they knew that it didn’t work. But they’ve been just trying to “watch what they eat” or just “being healthy.” And people really get stuck in that place because it upholds this dieting mindset. To really unhook from it all we need to keep laying down our thoughts about our health and our weight and nutrition and saying “not now” to nutrition, because to get out from underneath all of this conditioning, it’s really challenging. We talk about it in the book how it’s this bargaining phase of grief, where people make their lifestyle changes about their health, not their weight but they’re secretly dieting. So, that’s what I’m thinking about when I think about healthism.HilaryIt’s a social construct. Some of it we can see, but a lot of it we can’t see. It’s hard to figure out what’s ours and what was never ours to begin with. What doesn’t belong to us, what doesn’t help us, what doesn’t need to live under our skin at all. So in the book, we talk a lot about ways to see that and begin the process of divesting from these cultural constructs and systems of harm that uphold themselves within us.VirginiaThe question that I hear often from readers and I’m sure you encounter all the time, too, is when folks will say something like—trigger warning for fat phobic comment— “Well, I can’t move the way I used to or my body hurts and I need to lose weight in order to feel better in my body.”You don’t want to discount that they’re experiencing discomfort and pain in their knees, you don’t want to discount that they’re feeling like there has been a perceived loss of health that’s impacting how they function or move or feel in their bodies, but how do you take that experience of what’s happening in their body, but separate that from weight and separate that from healthism?HilaryAnything that we experience as a so-called side effect of weight, which, there could be a long debate about what those things are. We’ve all been conditioned to think that’s bad and correctable. Instead of really holding it to maybe something more akin to a disability justice framework that would say all bodies go through stuff. We’re not guaranteed able bodies for our lifetime. Hustling to become more able may actually cause me more harm in the long run or may put me down a path of having such an overemphasis on doing and production that I never achieve a relationship with myself that I want to be in for a lifetime. There’s a lot to unpack there.And I want to say that just based on what I said, it can be so easy to get pulled into like, “okay, so be good, then I need to embrace that idea.” And the truth is that everything that we do to survive in the system that only values certain bodies is okay. But we want there to be an honesty within yourself to say, “I’m doing this to put up with these systems. I’m doing this to survive in a system” instead of “I’m doing this because I’m not good enough.” Or “I’m doing this because I’m bad.”VirginiaThat is a useful reframing. And it also gets a little bit at the next concept I wanted to talk about which is personal responsibility rhetoric. And I think that’s very related, right? DanaI think healthcare in general relies on a lot of personal responsibility rhetoric. One of the things I’m always doing when I’m training in motivational interviewing—I train in all kinds of fields, outside of our echo chamber. I’ve trained people who have never heard about Health at Every Size—is to talk about how health care really puts the responsibility of health on an individual person, instead of seeing it through a systemic lens and the way racism and poverty and oppression and stigma, trauma impact our health and our well being. I think health care providers and institutions at the leadership level, there’s a lot of pressure on frontline providers to get people to make these lifestyle changes so they’re not costing us so much money.Let’s face it, it’s not about people’s health and wellbeing, it’s about costs. And so I think health care providers tend to rely on personal responsibility rhetoric, like “if you get sick, it’s your fault.” That’s a big part of healthism, is if you get sick, it’s your fault. There’s something you could have done to prevent it and there’s some magical eating plan that’s gonna make it all go away and be better. There’s a fitness plan that will make it all go away and be better. That’s what I think of when I think of relying on that personal responsibility rhetoric.VirginiaIt’s interesting, too, because it’s making it our problem while telling us to define our health according to all these external rules. It’s such a fascinating disconnect that you’re the one getting it wrong, but it’s because you’re not doing it how we told you you have to do it.HilaryIt’s pretty insidious.DanaYou can put all these healthcare providers in a room and ask them to define health, and nobody’s going to be able to come up with a definition that everybody agrees on. So, when we’re talking to our clients and they’re telling us that health is important, it’s a value of theirs. We say, “Nobody is required to pursue health to be deemed worthy of love, respect, or belonging.” When people are really hooked into that place of wanting to be healthy and we talk to people about what does that mean to you, when you say the word ‘health’? How do you define it? How would you know if you were ‘healthy’?Having them unpack the ways we’ve been socialized to think about health, so that they have a stronger analysis around all the factors that impact our health and our wellbeing.VirginiaI remember the last time we spoke, it was an interview for a Health Magazine piece about cultural competency and healthcare. I think we were talking about this idea that health is actually a very personal concept to define on your own terms. I think you said something like “daily heroin use could be health for somebody,” and I couldn’t use that quote in the Health magazine piece. But I think about it really often when I think about trying to unpack healthism, because, it was a great example of how this is such a personal thing. Somebody’s goals and priorities and access to resources and all of that is going to vary so much. So why are we trying to ascribe this giant overarching definition to everybody?HilaryYeah, we can’t. There’s lived experience and access and what kind of support and help is available, what kind of community care is available. All of these factor into what is the best decision for me to maintain my life and to stay connected to my people in my life. The things that make me me.VirginiaThen the last concept I just wanted to quickly touch on which may be newer to my audience is this idea of bootstrapping, which I think certainly dovetails into the whole personal responsibility thing. But it’s such a uniquely American value, I think.HilaryIt is. In the United States, if you do it all right, you can have the American dream. And if you just work your ass off endlessly forever, you will arrive. In the context of immigration survival, it’s about access to resources and things like that. In the context of diet culture, we keep just trying to be better and better and better. Making ourselves into this two dimensional version of health or wellbeing. What has irked me throughout my career as a therapist in this space is like, Okay, what gets left behind if all we’…
Full show notes at the publisherThis week, we revisit an old episode of Comfort Food where Virginia Sole-Smith and Amy Palanjian chat with Lisa Du Breuil, an incredible fat activist and clinical social worker who specializes in eating disorders and addiction. They discuss sugar addiction and how to navigate endless treats with your kids.If you'd like to support Burnt Toast, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And considering becoming 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.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.Episode 58 TranscriptVirginiaHello and welcome to episode 24 of Comfort Food! This is the podcast about the joys and meltdowns of feeding our families and feeding ourselves.AmyAnd this week, we’re talking about sugar and whether we can really be addicted to it, if it makes our kids hyper, and how we can have a saner relationship with it, both ourselves and with our kids.VirginiaI’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I’m a writer, a contributing editor to Parents Magazine, and the 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 of 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 to help parents relax in the daily challenge of feeding their kids.VirginiaAs we’re recording this episode, I am just finishing the first month of my book launch and wrapping up my book tour for The Eating Instinct. I really loved all of the events, and if you guys are listening, anyone who has come out to the events, thank you so much. It’s been a total joy to talk about the book with people. But there’s one question that comes up at every single event, which has been really interesting, which is, “But what about sugar?” What I think happens is people hear me talking about the importance of trusting our bodies and listening to our hunger and fullness cues and not being afraid to take pleasure in food and how comforting eating should be at its core. And everyone’s with me. Everyone is nodding along like yes, yes, yes, we want to do that. We want to do that. And then someone raises their hand and says, “But wait, surely you don’t mean sugar?” And it’s so interesting that we just have, right now, this phobia around sugar. This cultural moment we’re having where we classify sugar in this different category from other foods. We really have started to think of it almost like alcohol or drugs.AmyAnd in terms of kids, there’s this giant fear of juice. There’s all of these fears of going to birthday parties and kids eating birthday cakes, that the kids are going to have these flaming meltdowns due to the sugar. And I think a lot of us believe these things because we hear our friends talking about it. But we don’t actually know what’s true and what’s not.VirginiaSo, we wanted to sort through all of this. And we wanted to bring in a really great expert to help us. So, we have Lisa DuBreuil with us. She is a therapist from Salem, Massachusetts, who works with clients on both eating disorders and addiction. So she’s kind of the perfect person to help us sort through these different issues. So Lisa, welcome! Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work and your family?LisaWell, thank you very much. I’m delighted to be here with you. So yes, I’m a clinical social worker. I work at Mass General Hospital in Boston, working with people who have substance use disorders and my particular clinical specialties are folks that have both eating disorders and substance use disorders, and also people that have developed different problems after weight loss surgeries. I also have a private practice in Salem, where I live with my family, and up here I see mostly people dealing with binge eating disorder, body distress, trying to recover from diet culture, things like that.VirginiaI should mention, Lisa is also quoted pretty extensively in chapter six of The Eating Instinct. So there will be more of her in the book.LisaAnd I’m married, I have a husband and a 13 year old daughter.AmySo, let’s start with the big question here. Is sugar addiction a real thing?LisaIn a word? No, it’s not. There’s obviously way more detail to that. But bottom line? No, it’s it’s not an addiction.VirginiaI think that is so important and so refreshing for people to hear. I hope people are breathing a sigh of relief, because this really is this misconception. It’s everywhere. So I really appreciate you saying that. Let’s get into that detail a little bit more. Why don’t you tell us a bit about the biology of addiction? And why is sugar not classified in that same way as drugs or alcohol?LisaThe first thing I want to want to say is, I really understand why people have this concern, because we are living in a cultural time when we’re being told that sugar is dangerous and addictive. I want to make it really clear, I have total sympathy for people that are worried about this and parents that are worried about this. But when we look at the science, we’re just not seeing the evidence that we respond to sugar the same way that we respond to what what are called “substances of abuse.”One of the most important things, I think, for people to know is that our entire nervous system requires sugar. It runs on sugar. That’s all your brain uses for energy is carbohydrates and all carbohydrates break down, in the end, to sugar. So, we do have a drive for sugar because we can’t survive without it. But that’s not the same thing as having an addiction. So that’s the first piece I think it’s important for people to know.The biggest piece I think that can be helpful to people is understanding the concept of habituation, which is what happens when a person is exposed to something and because of the exposure and the access, is able to regulate themselves around it. When I work with people with who are dealing with both a substance use disorder and an eating disorder, with the substance use disorder, we can we talk a lot about restriction and abstinence, because that’s the best way we know right now to help people stabilize and live a balanced life. When I’m helping them with their eating disorder, we are moving away from restriction. We’re moving away from abstinence, because that’s the best way we know how to help people be able to live in balance and feel like they can regulate themselves.AmyI think a lot of what stresses adults and parents out is just that it often seems like treats and sugar are everywhere that we go. That in itself can make it seem like sugar is out of control, because it’s all over the place. But that’s a very different thing than being physically addicted to it.LisaYes. And the piece that parents need to understand is that the more restrictive they are, that the more special and forbidden they make them, the more a child is going to be interested in them. That’s Parenting 101. The minute you say to your child, “don’t touch that,” what happens? That’s all they want. That’s all they want to touch. So, it’s the same thing with foods.VirginiaIt sounds like one of the key differences we all need to kind of wrap our minds around is that if you are talking about a substance that is physically addicting, it is important to avoid. An alcoholic can’t drink, a drug addict needs to avoid drugs, whereas in terms of managing our feelings of out-of-control-ness or anxiety around something like sugar, we actually need to be okay having it. We need to be comfortable with the exposure.LisaRight. So with with a substance use disorder, the exposure to the substance, heavy use of the substance—because of neuroplasticity, because of our brain’s ability to adapt, and change—we develop tolerance. Anyone who has struggled with substances can tell you, there was a time when one or two drinks was enough, and now I can’t seem to stop. And that has to do with physical changes that occur in the brain. And obviously, I also want to say that addiction is much more complicated than this. It also involves psychosocial factors and oppression and all these other cultural influences. It’s not just about someone’s biology, but when we are talking about the biology there’s this tolerance that develops because the brain adapts to the heavy use. And we don’t see that with fruits. We don’t see that with sugar. What we see is that through exposure, and abundance that people and animals actually are able to regulate. It’s the restriction that creates the drive, the over over attention to to these foods.AmyIs it the restriction that causes some people to then binge eat? Is that like an emotional response?LisaYes, yes. Really all eating disorders involve restriction, which also we can call dieting. I mean, that’s what dieting is, it’s restricting calories or restricting certain foods. And so when that happens, you can create a strong drive to then overeat, and ignore your own hunger and fullness cues. Because, oh my god, now it’s available, and I better get it while it’s still here.VirginiaSo when people say, “Oh, I can’t trust myself around the Oreos. I’ll eat the whole bag,” we’re kind of focusing on the wrong piece. It’s not actually the food, it’s everything you did leading up to encountering the Oreo with restriction that got you there.LisaExactly. And when I talk to people, how I try and break it down for people is, with permission plus abundance, you can get discernment. When you have permission—honest to God, deep in your heart permission—to eat as many Oreos as you really want, and you have plenty of Oreos, you can get to a place where you can actually tell how many do I really want?The other part of this is eating regularly throughout the day, eating lots of different kinds of food, making sure your nutritional needs are getting met. Because that’s the other piece is that if you’re undereating in other ways, you’re going to make it harder for your body and brain to hear the signals for all the different kinds of food your body needs. In the end, if you’re undernourished at the end of the day, your brain is going to prioritize its needs. And what does it need? Carbohydrates.The last thing I want to say about that piece is, this is a feature, not a bug. Because for most of human history, the biggest threat to our existence was starvation. So we have an amazingly powerful, not in our direct control drive to keep us alive. And so trying to push against that is like trying to train yourself to need less oxygen.VirginiaYeah, you’re just never going to do it.LisaYou’re never going to do it.VirginiaI think we’ve all met these people who give up sugar for some period of time. And they say, “Well, as long as I don’t eat it, I just don’t crave it.” What’s going on there?LisaSo, here’s the thing. I’m a big believer in believing people when they tell me about their lived experience. So, if someone says to me, “I have to tell you, I’ve cut out sugar,”— although I have to point out that no one can completely cut out sugar because it’s present in lots of different foods and we would die without it. But I know what they mean, they mean added sugar treats, etc. So, if someone says to me, “I’ve done that and I’m functioning well. I go where I want to go. I don’t get preoccupied, I feel satisfied. And life is going well,” I’m going to believe them. It’s not my job to convince people that what they’re doing isn’t working, if what they tell me is that it is working.But that said, lots of times in my experience, most folks find that in order to maintain that kind of restriction, it requires a lot of other limits in their lives. Places they don’t go, people they don’t hang out with, preoccupation that they have to manage. One of the ways you can think about it is, if I asked you to stand up and balance a quarter on your index finger, you probably wouldn’t have a hard time doing that. If I asked you to do it all day long, this simple task over time would start to get really difficult because you get muscle fatigue and focus fatigue, and it would it would start requiring more and more of your energy, psychological energy and physical energy, to continue that hold, right? So that can be what happens when people try and have such a restriction because carbs are present in so many of our foods. And nutritionally most human diets, 50 to 60% of it is carbohydrates. Because our brains need such a large amount of carbs to run. So, for most people, it’s very hard to pull off over an extended period of time. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some people that maybe can do that.VirginiaThat’s really good to be aware of, if you’re thinking about something like that. The odds are a little bit stacked, in terms of how your body’s gonna respond.LisaYes, and the more of a history you have of restricting and foods being forbidden, the more of an emotional pull those foods are going to have on you. So, lots of times the beginning of recovering with eating disorders is really healing from a lot of that restriction. So, in the beginning, sometimes people do over focus on those foods because they’re making up for all the years they weren’t allowed to have them.VirginiaBut then you see, as someone continues in their recovery, you see sort of a balancing.LisaYes, you do. Absolutely. And when I work with people, we don’t do it willy-nilly. We very planfully think about how to help someone move foods from the “forbidden” column into the “it’s okay to eat” column, and we do it in a way that feels safe and is planful. Because it can be very scary for people because they are afraid of getting completely out of control.VirginiaLisa, you work primarily with adults struggling with food in these profound ways, but I’m curious to know if there are any particular strategies that you use with your clients, particularly when it comes to overcoming these anxieties around the so-called forbidden foods, that you think are also useful for parents to incorporate.LisaSo, the first thing I would recommend is to look at the resources available through the Ellyn Satter Institute.VirginiaWe love Ellyn Satter on this podcast.LisaMy daughter is adopted from China, and when we brought her home, even though I was in recovery from my own eating disorder, I was really worried, like any parent would be, what if I pass this along to her? And a friend of mine said, “Oh, you have to check out Ellyn Satter.” And so I did andI discovered the Division of Responsibility. And that’s what I used when she came home. Although initially I just fed her on demand even though she was 18 months old, because she came to me undernourished because the orphanage didn’t have enough resources. She was very well loved, but they literally didn’t have enough food to go around sometimes. And so initially, I remember her eating big pats of butter because she was making up for lost time and her brain was growing exponentially and she needed fat. But eventually, as she was ready to do so, we moved into the division of responsibility and I found it incredibly helpful. So that’s always my go-to resource for parents.AmyI just want to jump in here and say if you guys haven’t listened to it, Episode 19, the whole episode is about the Division of Responsibilities. So definitely check that out.LisaI think It’s even helpful for adults. Lots of times…
Full show notes at the publisherThis week, Virginia chats with Dana Miranda, a certified educator in personal finance and the founder of Healthy Rich, a platform for inclusive budget-free financial education. Check out her podcast and her Substack newsletter, Founder Notes.If you'd like to support Burnt Toast, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And considering becoming 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.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSVirginia found Dana through this great Culture Study interview. Dana recommends literal burnt toast with butter, and also playing the flute.Virginia recommends the Maui Mat. 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.---Post-Publication Note from Virginia:I want to thank everyone who participated in the comments on this podcast episode. This is (I think?) the first time I’ve published something here that really did not land with lots of you. It was bound to happen! I swing at a lot of pitches! You all named some very valid reasons for why this one missed for you, and if Dana and I were to do the interview over again, we’d take the conversation in a few different directions—to better acknowledge the role privilege plays both in the ability to budget AND in the ability to reject budgeting, and to make it clearer that we were questioning systems and critiquing the marketing of budget culture, not giving personal finance advice (I know it got murky at the end when I asked for tools!).I also think this conversation hit a nerve at least in part because Dana does articulate so well some drawbacks and risks to budgeting that aren’t comfortable to name or look closely at. So I will continue to investigate how restriction, perfectionism and the myth of personal responsibility (all diet culture hallmarks!) show up in how we think about money and so many other aspects of life.All of that being said: As I was reading through the discussion, I just kept thinking how much care everyone was putting into their critiques. You helped me see how the conversation I published didn’t go far enough, and where it missed the mark. And you did so with such kindness and grace. I appreciate how willingly you come along for the ride when I take us in new directions but I appreciate even more that this is a community that offers smart constructive criticism and holds me accountable. Please keep doing that!Episode 57 TranscriptVirginiaHi, Dana! Let’s start by having you tell us just a little bit about yourself and your work.DanaSo I worked as a freelance writer for 10 years. Writing is my background. And I was just kind of getting by for about five years. I started in personal finance media in 2015, when I got my first full-time job working at The Penny Hoarder, a media startup in personal finance. I really had no personal finance background when I did that, I just got into it because it was a writing job and I liked the team. And I thought, I’ll try it out. Personal finance sounds really boring, but let’s see! It’s writing.I found that I really enjoyed the things that I was writing about because I was able to learn so much about our financial systems, like what goes into a credit score. I hadn’t been making a lot of money. I grew up working class and didn’t learn a lot about personal finance from my parents or my community. I just kind of buried my head in my 20’s around anything to do with money. So it was so fun to start learning about it.Then, as I got deeper into it, I started freelancing and writing for more sites and also working with some financial technology companies. I learned that the space is pretty much 100% dominated—like so many spaces—by middle-class, cis, white, straight men. So all of the advice that we’re getting is really just coming from that perspective. It’s leaving out so many people. I brought plenty of privilege to the work that I was doing, just as a white woman with a family network to fall back on. But even just coming from a working class background, I knew how much advice and personal finance was not speaking to me. And it was something that I was calling out to all my colleagues who had a middle class background that they didn’t seem to notice in the work that they were doing.I started to notice what I named “budget culture,” and wanted to explore that more. So I started my platform for financial education, Healthy Rich, last year, to invite more voices into the space, tell stories, to share more perspectives, and just kind of explore a new way to teach about money and kind of critique the system a little bit.VirginiaI’m so glad you’re doing this work. I discovered you through Anne Helen Peterson’s newsletter Culture Study, which is how many of us discover everything good in our lives. You did a great Q&A with her about Dave Ramsey and budget culture. It was so fascinating. And there was one quote that really jumped out for me and it’s the reason I was like, “Dana, come on the podcast.” You wrote:Budget culture is the damaging set of beliefs around money that rewards restriction and deprivation — much like diet culture does for food and bodies — and promotes an unhealthy and fantastical ideal of financial success.I had just never thought like, oh, wait, like tracking your spending is not that different from tracking calories. So I really want us to dive into this, let’s start with the concept of budget culture. DanaSo I think one of the biggest parallels is that the way that we teach personal finance is focused on the myth that there’s some “right” way to do money, and we just need to learn it. And we see that in diet culture, too. That there’s a right way out there and if you’re not happy with what’s going on with your money, it’s because you haven’t found quite the right way. You haven’t figured out how to follow all the right rules. That’s really how it’s taught. And also, that there’s this right way to be. You should be striving for some kind of nebulous idea of being rich, or a higher net worth, lower debt. And those are all just taken as fact in personal finance.The advice specifically around budgeting is, I think, exactly like dieting, because it’s focused on restriction. There are a few experts that talk about earning more money to do what you want with your finances. But most skip over that entirely, and just go to if something’s not right with your money, you need to start restricting how you’re spending it because it’s overspending that’s causing your problems. And again, the assumed goal is to become rich, like increase your net worth, decrease your debt and it’s all of these things that we take at face value as like, of course, that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to make more money, we’re trying to have less debt, we’re trying to spend less on taxes—all of these things that people just assume are the right goals. But if you start to examine them, there’s actually a lot of problems with them. Teaching those as the right way to do money can be really damaging or at best useless for a lot of people because they just don’t apply.VirginiaI mean, you are blowing my mind. You’re right. There’s this whole premise that we don’t question, which is that you must want to become as rich as possible. Just like you must want to become as thin as possible. But what if that goal is not relevant to you? What if that’s not a healthy goal for you to pursue? Or a realistic goal which for most people, it’s not. That completely changes the conversation about money. DanaAnd what is rich, too? I see the same thing in diet culture. Like, what is thin enough? Like, what’s the right amount to be? And then we also critique people who become too rich, which I don’t know where that line is. There’s really no right way to do it. You’ll find critiques either way. VirginiaYou’ll always move the bar on yourself. There’s not a number that you can get to, in either conversation, where you’re going to be like, I no longer worry about this, because this whole thing is a response to this culture telling you, you’re not good enough.DanaExactly. And we apply restriction to everyone, too, no matter how high your net worth is, or how much money you have coming in. We still look at the decadent purchases of celebrities and say that this isn’t how they should be spending their money. We look at working class and middle class people and say, you shouldn’t be spending your money this way because you don’t earn enough. So the idea is, well, if I earn more, shouldn’t I be able to spend more? But you realize that the point is just restriction the whole time.VirginiaI want us to break down why that’s so dangerous, because the other line from the Q&A with Anne Helen that really stopped me in my tracks was when you said, “budgeting, like dieting doesn’t work.” I wrote in my notes for this episode, “I REALLY THOUGHT IT WAS ME.” I thought people are either good at budgeting or they’re not. And if you’re not, you should try to be better at it. And now that I’m saying it out loud, I’m realizing how very much that sounds like a diet mentality. So why doesn’t it work? DanaThat’s a great question. It’s hard to know because, as far as I can tell, it’s studied very little. There’s very little research around whether budgeting works. It has kind of blown my mind because as I started hearing people dig into the research around dieting, and whether dieting works and the effects that it has on people’s lives, it made me interested, like, there’s got to be a parallel to that in budgeting and finance. And there’s so little around whether people can stick to budgets, and there’s basically no one questioning if people even do stick to a budget, what effect does it have on their finances? VirginiaThat feels so important to know. DanaBefore you start teaching this is absolutely what you need to do with your money, someone should be finding out: Is it the right thing? What effect does it have? Is it something that people can actually apply to their lives? Because if it’s not, then it’s not valuable advice. You can’t just keep saying, “This is the right thing to do. And so you’re wrong if you don’t do it,” when literally no one can do it.So, why doesn’t budgeting work? I can make guesses. I think it’s the restriction around it. It’s that set of rules. It’s the assumed goal of becoming rich, which, like you said, doesn’t apply to a lot of people, doesn’t make sense for a lot of us. What we’re mostly trying to do with money is just to be able to enjoy our lives day to day. There’s some long-term planning that people are doing, but most of us aren’t thinking, “What can this money become? What’s my legacy going to be?” Budgeting just makes your life difficult day to day because you spend your time constantly thinking about money, tracking your spending, restricting your costs and expenses. And constantly feeling guilty when you spend money on things that bring you joy.Even if you don’t stick to a budget, the mindset sticks around. Even if you start to splurge and start to do things that you enjoy, because you don’t want to track your spending anymore, then you still just feel guilty the whole time. VirginiaI mean, it’s the same as the sort of restrict/binge cycle that a lot of people get in with dieting where most of us cannot sustain restriction long term. People who can do that usually qualify for an eating disorder diagnosis. And the rest of us restrict as long as we can and then hunger sets in, you eat everything because you’ve been starving, and then you feel bad and feel like you have to start the cycle. It sounds like you’re seeing something really similar happened with money.And yeah, I just want to talk about the misery of doing it. I mean, I have failed every budget app I’ve ever downloaded. The idea of standing in the grocery store inputting numbers on my phone or or having to take photos of receipts or look back later and correct the way that my online banking miscategorized everything—It is really tedious. Would you say this applies to even like budget sites that have like pretty big cult followings, like You Need a Budget?1DanaSo I’ve looked into a lot of that stuff. It’s kind of interesting, especially budgeting apps and budgeting methods in particular, because none of it from the beginning has ever appealed to me personally. I’ve never really been into making a budget. But I can see the parallel because everything that you’re describing with budgeting, I did with dieting. I found and tried different food tracking apps and went through that whole experience. So, I understand the mindset that you have when you feel like it must be me. I can’t make this app work. Or I can’t stick to what the app is telling me I’m supposed to do.But as I started talking more about anti-budgeting and budget culture, a lot of the response has been people calling out certain apps or certain methods that work for them. They’re saying, “This budget culture is terrible, but that’s why I love YNAB,” when literally, the name is “You Need a Budget.”The 50/20/30 budget is also really popular, people don’t see it as restrictive because it’s percentage-based rather than category-based. But all of those ultimately still just come down to: There’s a lot of tracking your spending. So it’s just constantly being aware of and judging what you’re doing with your own money. And then also, they still set restrictions on how you spend your money, like 50/20/30 says only a certain percentage of your money can be used in this way. And you have to define what is a want versus a need. And, and you have to be saving a certain amount.You Need a Budget I just started exploring because people were sharing that as a piece of advice with me. It has a huge cult following, so I’m really paying attention because I want to know what is so appealing to people. But as far as I can tell from the app is that it is it’s kind of an envelope budgeting app. So you set a certain amount of money that you can spend in certain categories. I think what probably is appealing is that it doesn’t tell you how much those categories should be. But it’s still a way to internalize that restriction. And it allows you to move money from one category to another. But imagine that experience and the guilt that you would feel if you were like, Oh, I’m moving money from… VirginiaMy kids’ college fund!Dana…because I wanted to go have another vacation or night with my friends or something. It’s one of those things where, everyone is well-intentioned, but because we’re not questioning the premise of budget culture from the beginning, that it just continues to perpetuate.VirginiaI want to talk a little more about the role of privilege here. I mean, we see this in diet culture. So many of the gurus or diet plan creators are people who are actually genetically predisposed to being thin and then claiming that the way they eat and exercise is the answer and what you need to also be doing in order to sort of achieve their results. It sounds like you’ve encountered something similar in budget culture, where people claim they have all the answers to how to manage your money, but actually, they just have money. DanaIt’s kind of interesting to look for the parallels, too, because there’s not technically a biological predisposition to richness. But if you brea…
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