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We have to disconnect the idea of good parenting from health and fitness. Because people don’t have a moral imperative to health.You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting and health. Today I am chatting with Amanda Martinez Beck. Amanda is a fat activist, author and host of the Fat and Faithful podcast. She focuses on the ways that fatphobia and ableism have intertwined with American Christian culture. We are discussing Amanda’s second book, More of You: the Fat Girls Field Guide to the Modern World which came out this week.Some news: Beginning with today’s episode, I’m now able to pay every podcast guest a $100 honorarium, to compensate them for their time and labor. This will make it easier for the podcast to center the voices of marginalized folks (a goal I previously discussed here). And our incredible community of Burnt Toast subscribers is making this possible! So thank you so much, if you’re already subscribed, for helping me do this. And if you’re not, but want to hear more conversations like this one, consider joining us. (I also offer comp subscriptions—just email if that would be helpful to you.)PS. If you enjoy this episode, please also subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! That’s free and a great way to help more folks find the show. And: I wanted to note that Amanda and I recorded this conversation before news of the Uvalde school shooting broke, so you won’t hear us discuss it, though of course it is now all I can think about. As I said, all too recently, after the Buffalo shooting: Remember that gun reform is now a states issue. Everytown has a website that lets you see — state by state — what the laws are in each state. We know that electing new majorities in our target states will make it possible to pass gun safety legislation. The States Project helped flip Maine in 2018, and were able to deepen that new majority in 2020 — this was an outcome in their 2021 session. So this is, yet again, where the Burnt Toast Giving Circle can do some good. Join us, if you need a place to put your rage. Episode 45 TranscriptVirginiaHi Amanda, I’m so glad to have you on! And big congratulations on the new book. Why don’t we start by having you tell us a little bit about yourself, your work, and your family?AmandaOkay. I am a fat activist. My middle name is Martinez, which alludes to my Cuban background. My dad was a Cuban refugee, so I grew up in a home that was half Latinx, half white. My husband Zachary is a university professor and we have four kids, and they’re in bodies that don’t conform to societal standards, most of them. So I’m doing this work for myself and for my kids. I have a podcast called Fat and Faithful, which talks about fat liberation through a Christian lens. I wrote a new book, which we’re going to talk about. And I have an Instagram, which is called @your_body_is_good. In addition to my body image coaching that I do, that’s the work that I’m doing right now.VirginiaThat’s not a short list of work, so thank you for all of that. We met when I interviewed you for a story on how anti-fat bias was impacting the treatment of fat folks with COVID. You were in early recovery, at that point, from COVID. I would love, if you don’t mind, to talk a little bit about how that’s gone. How are you doing?AmandaI’m doing really well, but it has been a long road. I was hospitalized for 40 days and was on a ventilator for two weeks and lost the ability to walk, in addition to just all the respiratory things that come along with COVID. While I was in the hospital, I encountered fatphobia in some very glaring ways and some very systemic ways—you wrote a whole piece on that. But I am on a good path right now. I have been off of oxygen since October of 2021. I was on oxygen for about a year. My lungs are doing really well. And I have more mobility than I did even before going into the hospital. I credit that to a fabulous doctor who’s taken my post-acute COVID syndrome really seriously, or what we call long COVID, to help me with getting on the right medicines, and specifically, to help with the brain fog, to get on medicine for that, and I feel like a new person. Really.VirginiaI worried about you for a long time. I know there are a lot of us who have been rooting for you. I’m glad to hear you’re in a better place and also so grateful that you did share your story, because it was so important, I think, for us to continue to follow this path, past the initial COVID and through long COVID. I know when you’re in the middle of something like that, I know how much additional labor it is to share that and put that out there, so thank you for doing that. I’m curious to hear a little more about what misconceptions came up the most? What do you still find yourself having to challenge or correct with folks around COVID and weight?AmandaIn the beginning, I felt really guilty for getting COVID because there was definitely a narrative that fat people were at higher risk for developing complications from COVID. Even though those risks were correlated, not necessarily caused by, body size, I always felt like people were blaming me. I got blamed explicitly by people on social media for catching COVID in a fat body. I think that people still believe that fatness is an underlying condition or a precondition to getting COVID—which, it’s not. People of all sizes get COVID complications. And long COVID is affecting all types of people. COVID is an equal opportunity virus.VirginiaWe have so much work to do to reframe that conversation. People want to be able to say like, “Well, I’ll be safe, because I can blame this person for getting it. I don’t have the same risk factors,” or whatever, but it’s such a callous way to approach this global pandemic. AmandaFor sure. Not necessarily connected to weight bias, but I think one other misunderstanding about long COVID is the effect that it has on mental health. You remember watching update videos from me in the hospital, and I go back and watch those now and realize just how impaired COVID had me. I’m also encountering heightened mental illness in long COVID. I think that’s something that’s a part of COVID that people are still not taking seriously, which affects so many aspects of health.VirginiaAnd again, there’s the stigma. Anytime there’s a mental component to it, it’s very easy to stigmatize that as well. Well, somehow, while you’ve been doing both your own recovery work from COVID, and putting the story out in the world, you’ve also been writing a book.AmandaI have. VirginiaSo, let’s talk about that. The new book is called More of You. Tell us what inspired you to write this. I also do want to hear how you got it written during all of this.AmandaThe memory of writing is a bit of a blur, but I have a fantastic editor, who walked me through the process very graciously. So the book is called More of You: the Fat Girl’s Field Guide to the Modern World. Before I had COVID, I realized I’d stumbled through fatness, learning how to exist in my today body and how to take up space. I wished that I’d had some sort of guidebook that could walk through these different things before I had to experience them. And I didn’t have anything like that. And so I wrote More of You to be the guidebook that I wish that I had had, when I was first coming to accept my body and not wanting to take up less space. Specifically, I targeted it towards what I wish I had known in grade school: That I have the right to exist in my body today, that I have the right to take up space, that I have the right to wear what I want, and eat what I want, and that I have the right to compassionate medical care. And just stating those things, what I call The Fat Girl’s Bill of Rights, is transformative for me today. I can’t imagine how transformative it will be for my own children and the children who get to know these truths that their parents are trying to put into practice in their lives. I know that you’re doing that work, too.VirginiaOne of the things I find most valuable about the book is the way you hold fatphobia and ableism accountable for each other. I think this is a common tension in the disability rights and fat rights communities. We often see fat folks leaning into “But I’m healthy” as this defense against anti fat bias. I’ve certainly done it. And I would imagine there may be a parallel experience of wanting to perform being a “good” disabled person through your thinness. And we know that relying on health as this sort of marker of virtue is really problematic. How does this hold us back from making progress on both of these issues?AmandaSo I first encountered the idea of performative fatness, “I’m healthy, so I’m a good performing fat person,” in a web comic by the fat activist Stacey Bias called The Good Fatty Archetypes. And she has a list of 12 different ways that fat people can adapt to their environment to prove that they’re worthy of dignity. And one of them is the Fat Unicorn, where it’s like, “I am just fat even though I exercise all the time. I’m just, you know, a unicorn.”She talks about the different ways that you can perform fitness virtue signaling. And it’s setting up this idea that we have to earn our our position of dignity, to earn respect. That’s really a very capitalistic idea, which Stacy talks about in her comic. We don’t have to earn dignity, we possess inherent dignity. To be able to look at a fat body as morally neutral or even morally good takes digging below those good fatty archetypes of, “but I’m healthy, but I’m an athlete.” In a disabled fat body, there is inherent goodness. So we have to look at how assuming that someone’s health and ability is based on their moral virtue, how that is not a fair assumption. That’s actually ableism. I’m coming from a Christian lens, so we see this in the Christian scripture when there’s a man who was born blind, and the people asked Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” And Jesus is like, “Neither.” And so I really feel that for a parallel to fatness. It’s not a moral failing of anyone that someone is fat. It just is. And fat people themselves perpetuate this idea that “as long as I’m healthy, it’s okay to be fat.” I say, “If it’s not okay for everyone to be fat, it’s not okay for anyone to be fat.”VirginiaI’m just looking at how Stacy explains the Fat Unicorn here and she says, “What does it mean to seek legitimacy for the fat body on the basis of its capacity for health? Who gets excluded or silenced when we do so?” AmandaSomeone much wiser than me has said that ability is a temporary condition. We are all headed towards disability of some sort or another. We have to separate that from morality. In the same way we have to separate body size from morality. Because body size and ability are a lot of genetics, systemic issues, and societal issues. We can’t just say A plus B equals C when we’re looking at a body like that.VirginiaAnother line that really resonated with me from the book, is when you wrote that “Nobody has a moral obligation to be healthy, and we don’t owe health to our community or our families or our kids.” And that believing that you do is this cornerstone of ableism. I think this is often a line people come up against where they may say, Okay, i’s fine to be unhealthy. But of course, we we should all be trying to be healthy for our kids. And I think particularly for mothers, right? There’s this huge pressure that being a good mother is synonymous with being a mother who can chase your kids around the playground. AmandaThe question that I probably get asked most frequently, when I talk about being okay with my fatness is, but don’t you owe it to your kids to be healthy? To live a longer life to be with them? There’s two layers happening there. One, I’m accused often of being on the verge of death, like I’m just about to keel over—which, post-COVID, okay, there were some rough moments. But just because I inhabit a fat body does not mean that I am more susceptible to early death. The numbers actually show that people in the BMI category of overweight live longer than people in the normal category. People assume that I’m going to die young, which is really hard to encounter day in and day out. When I was young, someone I loved, told me, in tears, “I just don’t want you to die of a heart attack at age 20.” Which is a very emotionally manipulative thing to say to a teenager—and to anyone, because none of us is guaranteed another day. We’re all in the same boat. My life is lived, as as much as I can choose, in a morally upright way. And I define morality as treating my neighbors as I would treat myself. So, number one, it’s not good for mental health to live with that assumption. Number two: The claim that I can’t be a good mom, if I’m in a disabled or, quote, “unhealthy” body is really an ableist thing to say. Because there are parents of all stripes, with all different levels of ability, who are amazing parents. And just because someone’s in a wheelchair, we don’t automatically assume they’re a bad mother. But if I’m fat and walking with a cane, there is that assumption. And it is inherently ableist to say because you don’t have full capacity of your body, you cannot be a good parent. And this has real consequences, because children are being taken from their fat parents. It’s not something that we’re just fearmongering about. We have to disconnect the idea of good parenting from health and fitness because people don’t have a moral imperative to health.VirginiaIt’s such a narrow definition of good motherhood. And it’s implying that there’s only one way to love your kids. That there’s a right way to love your kids, as opposed to allowing for this diversity of experiences. I’m glad you brought up the issue of how it gets used around parental rights. I did some reporting on that for Slate and what I heard from lots of folks in the foster system is that it’s not always the top reason that parents lose parental rights, but it’s something that caseworkers know to look for. It’s something that they can add to the list when they’re building the case. That struck me as, in a way, almost more chilling. Because if you’re a parent going through a really hard time with mental health, addiction, whatever, the knowledge that your body will also be weaponized against you in that conversation is really scary. I admit I myself, in the past, have started and stopped at well, of course, I want to be healthy for my kids. But it’s just like, “of course, you want a healthy baby” without unpacking the ableism of that. Children are born with disabilities every day, and they are very worthy of our love. AmandaI think that we all have this innate desire for goodness. We’re looking to be good, to experience goodness. And I think a lot of people assume that to have a good body means to have a healthy and fit body. But I like to go old school and look at Aristotle. Aristotle says that a thing is good when it fulfills its purpose. So this is where the conversation about what is the purpose of my body comes to the fore. And when you say that the purpose of my body is health, then you have to also acknowledge that health is much bigger than just physical health—it’s also emotional health, mental health, and spiritual health. If you have an ATV four wheeler and you just pump up the air on that one physical health tire, it’s gonna be a rocky road. So, even if we agree at some point that health is the purpose of my body, we have to recognize that physical health or the way that we look cannot be the end all be all. But I say that the purpose of my body isn’t health or thinness or perfection. It’s relationship. My body can be good, no matter my ability or my size, because I can have relationship with anyone and it can be a fruitful and deep relationship. And that’s what really keeps me going with my kids. When I do feel that shame of sitting i…
Full show notes at the publisherYou’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting and health. Today we’re doing a very fun Ask Me Anything episode. A lot of great questions came in, so I’ve asked Corinne to help out with this one. For folks who don’t know, Corinne works on Burnt Toast with me and she is also the founder of @selltradeplus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. She very graciously agreed to come ask me your questions and even answer one of her own. Also! We’re planning another AMA ep for next month, to celebrate ONE YEAR of Burnt Toast (in its current fully-formed newsletter/podcast iteration). So if you’ve got even more questions for us, and especially if you have questions about the newsletter, or my book (which is also getting done next month!) put them here. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! And subscribe to the Burnt Toast newsletter for episode transcripts, reported essays, and more.Episode 44 TranscriptVirginiaHi Corinne! I have drafted you to come on and help with this AMA episode. These things are always so weird and I have feelings about them. So, I’m glad you’re here to do it with me.CorinneI love an AMA.VirginiaThey are the kind of thing that I kind of hate doing myself but also love other people’s. So I recognize that people enjoy it. CorinneHere’s our first question: I’d love to know if there’s any body related topic you ever have a hard time discussing with your kids. And if when that happens, what do you do to get better at having the conversation / beginning the conversation?VirginiaSo for context, my kids are four and eight. I’m sure there are many body conversations we have yet to have that may be hard for me in the future. But, I have covered genitalia in a lot of detail. I’ve explained what the clitoris is for. And certainly, there’s a lot of fat positive talk in our house. All of those conversations I sort of weirdly enjoy. I guess because often in parenting, you’re not really having meaningful conversations with your kids, you’re just trying to move them through the day. When they ask a question like that, it’s like, oh, this is an opportunity to actually tell you something I know something about, it’s weirdly rewarding. So those questions don’t throw me too much. The stress point for me on this is more related to food, when I’m navigating my children’s strong feelings about not wanting to eat what I’m serving, what they wish I was serving, that kind of thing. I’m just more exhausted by it and annoyed by it, whereas with the curiosity about bodies I’m like, “Yeah, man! Let’s be curious about bodies! That’s great!” But when it’s more feelings about me wanting to keep all foods neutral but maybe once a week we eat a vegetable, I can sometimes feel more unsure in the moment. My kids also can use my work against me, which is very smart of them, but also frustrating. There will be a lot of, “It’s my body, my choice” when it’s like, “But can you brush your teeth?” And then it’s like, well, crap. Good work, guys. I would also say there are definitely conversations where I was overwhelmed the first time we had them. The great thing is you never have the conversation just once. I remember trying to explain periods to both my kids. The first time I kind of traumatized them a little bit. I explained what a period was and my younger daughter was like, “Then it’s over and you’re better, right?” And I was like, “Oh, no. You do it every month for the rest of your life.” And then she sobbed “I don’t want to bleed forever,” and went upstairs to her room. And I was like, Do I explain about IUDs? Or have I already taken this too far?I have plenty of examples of we had a conversation, and I kind of fucked it up. But then you get another chance! And you can normalize it and come back to it. Even if you feel like you really freeze in the moment, or tell them more than they’re asking for and they cry, you can fix it later. Or, you know, it’s good for them to have stuff to work on in therapy. CorinneThat seems like good advice. Next question! I am pregnant with my second, due in mid July. My first kid will have just turned four. Seems like your kids have a similar age gap. Got any tips for handling this major life transition for our four year old? I feel like he will inevitably hate us and the baby occasionally, but hoping to find ways to maintain some sanity and happiness at the same time. Hopefully?VirginiaI love this age spread! My kids are four years and two months apart. It was awesome in the baby stage because the older kid can really get into being a big kid. When my kids were three, they didn’t really want to be big kids, they still wanted me to do everything for them. Then sometime around four, they both have switched into “No, wait. I can do it!” and feeling good about that. So, you could lean into like, “Can you go get me the diaper? Can you go get the bottle?” and they would like having the jobs and like being in charge. And the other thing about four, I don’t know what your situation is, but mine was in a full day of preschool at that age. So she had her own world. And she would get a lot of attention for being a big sister, but she also could just be with her friends and get attention and wasn’t competing. I think that is easier than when you have two under two. That would be a lot more exhausting. I did buy some new cheap coloring books and stickers and that kind of thing and I stuck them in a box and it was called her “big sister box.” Then when I was breastfeeding or bottle feeding or going to be stuck in one place with the baby for a bit, I could say, “Do you want to get out your big sister box?” and she would have an activity she could do so that she was less enraged that I wasn’t actively paying attention to her. We didn’t end up having to use it a ton, but it definitely helped in the first couple of weeks. But it will be a huge shift. My relationship with my older child did change a lot, just because now there are two of them. So just looking for ways to carve out time with your older kid can be helpful to reinforce your bond with with him. Especially in the early stages, there would be a lot of like, “The baby’s just gonna like sleep on the floor here while I’m doing something with the bigger kid.” It is funny because with your first kid you would think I should be paying attention to you all the time. You do ignore the littler one a little more the second time, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.The other thing I will say for four years apart, there are ages where they can really play together and be really close. Ours were really close at six and two and three and seven. Four and eight, there’s a little bit more of a developmental change. But it’s actually starting to come back again. I give two thumbs up to this age spread. CorinneWhat’s your childcare situation? Do you feel like you get enough time for yourself and your marriage? I have a one year old and I’m definitely struggling on the enough time front, even though I outsource most tasks.VirginiaYou have a one year old, so it’s just terrible right now. And it will get better. I’m sorry, you’re in a very hard time. I think one is, in some ways, harder than the newborn stage when they’re like a little cute house plant and you can put them places. But one, you really can’t multitask because they’re always one head injury away from a hospital trip. Right now, we don’t have childcare outside of the school day. Our kids are in school from about 8:30am to whoever’s picking them up has to leave at 2:30pm. Except two days a week when they have after school activities, so they stay later and get picked up between four and five. Dan and I trade off on who does the afternoon pickups. I do Mondays and Fridays. And he does Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday (which includes their later activity days). So I get three days a week where I have a pretty full workday. I’m back from school drop off by nine-ish, and I’m at my desk till between four and five. So it’s pretty manageable, although I do have to plan carefully to remember to leave my desk at 2:30 on the days I have to pick them up from school. But it is not a 50 hour workweek, it’s not compatible with a corporate job. That’s for sure. We’re lucky that we both have pretty flexible careers. In terms of feeling like I get enough time for myself and my marriage, it’s like one or the other, I would say? There’s the hours they’re in child care, but there’s also the morning of getting kids out the door, then the afternoon and early part of the evening is very family focused. We’ve got one kid in bed by seven and one kid still around until about 8 or 8:30. And I like to go to bed at 8:30, so that’s kind of my day. So, yeah, it is tricky to fit in either time together or time alone. [Virginia Note: I completely forgot to give my best tip for getting alone time, which is: I get up between 5-6am and the rest of my family isn’t up till 7:30am. So I start my day with a chunk of time to myself. This is essential to my ability to love them when they wake up.]We’re still working on it, I would say. We do try to watch a show together a few nights a week, and on Friday nights, we feed the kids early and order takeout for ourselves after they go to bed, so we can have dinner without them. Other nights, he does his own thing and I do a puzzle and maybe the 8-year-old hangs out and reads. Now that we’re not in COVID craziness, we are able to get babysitters for date nights or nights out with friends. Also at these ages—and you are not here at the one year old—but with a four and eight year old, it is much less of a big deal for one of us to go away with friends for the weekend. So we’ve been doing that more, or even just saying, “I’m going to be out for a chunk of hours on the weekend.” Like I would feel rage at being left with small children when they were under three because it’s just so much work. Now it’s much more like my kids can entertain themselves and play together and I can be out in the garden while they’re doing stuff and it’s not as draining. So, it definitely gets better. But yeah, the one year old year is a time where having enough time for yourself is very hard.I feel like I just convinced a lot of people not to have kids. Well, maybe I’m not wrong.CorinneYou have mentioned that your husband is thin and athletic. So is mine. How do you manage your feelings around gaining weight while he has stayed thin. This is an area that I’m struggling with for myself.VirginiaYes, skinny husbands are the worst! One thing that has been helpful is, as I have been able to untangle weight and health, I understand that both of our health pictures are quite nuanced in different ways. Just because he’s thin and can run a lot does not necessarily mean he’s “healthier” than me by every marker, if that makes sense. I don’t feel like I need to compare our cardiovascular abilities. Which, obviously his are superior because he’s a marathon runner and I’m not. The other thing about me and Dan is we went to high school together. We actually went to middle school together, too. CorinneWhoa. Big reveal.VirginiaIt’s a whole thing. So we know a lot of people who knew us a long time ago and when we run into people who knew us a long time ago, I do have to do some self talk. I look very different than we looked 20 years ago and he looks like the same, but a little more gray hair. It just is what it is, you know? His whole family is built that way. They have of one type of person they make with their genes. My family has a different type of person that we make with our genes. And our person changes more through the years, and this is normal. It’s not a value judgment on either of our body types. But I’ve had a few moments over the years of feeling weird about that and needing to process it. What it also really comes down to is that he’s never made me feel weird about my body. He has been a fan of my body throughout its journey. So I think as long as you’ve got that in place, then it shouldn’t matter. My sense of my body does not hinge on my husband’s feelings about it. But if there is a way in which your thin partner is making you feel bad about your larger body, that’s a whole other thing you need to unpack and work through. And that’s not a part of our story. It’s very tricky because it’s not just about what your weight is. It’s also about how you both think about weight. Corinne There was a TikTok going around for a while where some thin lady was like, “I have to tell you, try on your boyfriend’s jeans! They’re amazing!” and then all these bigger women responding like, “LOL, Yeah. They go up to my knees.”VirginiaThe other day, I grabbed the wrong coat to take the dog out to pee. And I was like, “Why doesn’t it zip?” Oh, right. It’s not mine. We have similar looking Northface coats. And that is irritating, but also should not be irritating. It is such a stupid stereotype. It is rooted in no reality that women can’t be bigger than their male partners or that you can’t be bigger than your partner of any gender. This is such an odd thing that we are so locked into. Another thing I would say is anytime you start to feel weird about it, remember that the person to blame is not your thin husband and not your fat body. It’s the culture that’s making you think there’s something wrong with a totally normal dynamic. There are millions of thin men married to fat women who think that their fat wives are amazing. And they are not heroes, by the way. That’s the other thing. CorinneThe next question is, What do you guys think about the “you gotta find the perfectly fitting bra” craze?VirginiaOkay, I’m going to want to know your thoughts about this because you are more of a fashion expert than me. My first feeling is, it is a ton of marketing hype. And, I do hate a badly fitting bra. This one’s tricky! What do you think?CorinneGod, I don’t know. I have such a complicated relationship with bras.VirginiaThey’re a very hard garment. It feels like such an industry-created problem, though. Maybe we should do bra science at some point. CorinneI go through waves of like, “Fuck bras!!!” where I don’t want to wear a bra or I just want to wear a sports bra. And then like, “No, I really need this architectural garment that fits me perfectly.” But it does sometimes seem like they just don’t make enough sizes. There are too many variables.VirginiaIt is a complicated garment. I shouldn’t say it would be so easy to make bras that fit everybody. The human body has infinite variations. And this is a particularly variable section of anatomy. At least not since I had kids—I don’t know if it’s a pregnancy/postpartum thing that never quite went away—I cannot say fuck bras. I wear a bra every day, even in COVID when everyone was not wearing bras. I was like, I’m wearing one. What’s wrong with me? Am I bad feminist? I just am more comfortable in one.CorinneI mean, that sounds like an argument for finding the perfectly fitting bra! Weirdly, I just want to ask you, what is it?VirginiaWhat is the perfect bra?CorinneIs that TMI for the podcast?VirginiaNo! I buy them from barenecessities.com and I think they carry the best variety of brands. I have found their customer service quite helpful. There are two brands I like on there. One is Birdsong, for like more of a structured like, you take it off and it’s still shaped like boobs kind of bra. The other one is Curvy Couture. Terrible name. CorinneI’ve never heard either of those. VirginiaThis is not sponsored! We don’t do sponsored content. But I’ve been wearing both those brands for years. Because I wear a bra every day, they do wear out after a year or two and I replace them. I find them both pretty comfortable. I’m not saying I put them on and it’s like I’m in a warm bath. They’re still an underwire bra. But I have issues with chafing and movement. I don’t feel comfortable. I am a large…
Full show notes at the publisherWe hear so much about Betty Friedan, and the Feminine Mystique. And the whole thing was women find power and fulfillment and identity outside of the home by working professionally. Right? The thing that that leaves out is when you go outside of the home, who’s in the home? Like that work never went away.Hello and welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting and health.Today I am chatting with Angela Garbes, author of Like a Mother and the brilliant new book Essential Labor. I am a huge fan of Angela’s. We’ve been sort of admiring one another from afar over the internet for several years now, and this is our first IRL conversation (Well, IRL+Zoom, if you will.) We talk a ton about her new book, which is about the social construction of modern motherhood and what we need to do to truly support mothers, but also all caregivers and care work. It’s a really fun and sort of surprisingly funny conversation for what’s a pretty heavy topic. I think you will get so much out of it and even more out of her book Essential Labor, which I really recommend you run right out and get. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! And subscribe to the Burnt Toast newsletter for episode transcripts, reported essays, and more.PS. The Burnt Toast Giving Circle is over $11,000! You are all amazing. We will be picking which state election to fund in the next few weeks, so stay tuned for details there. And if you’ve been thinking about joining, we still need you! Here’s the Burnt Toast episode where I announced it, ICYMI, and the link to donate.Episode 43 TranscriptVirginiaSo the new book is just incredible. How are you doing? How are you feeling? AngelaThank you for asking! I’m feeling so many things. I’m feeling tired. I hate to be the person that leads with “I’m tired,” but I feel like writing a book is is a frankly terrible process. I feel like my brain is still sort of recovering from that. And I was on kind of an accelerated timeline. I finished edits on the book in like December/January. And now it’s coming out. But I mean, I’m excited. I feel like I have been cooped up with these ideas and these thoughts for like, two years, and I am ready to like, be on the loose. COVID variants willing, I’m ready to go on tour and connect with people. I’m really desperate for that contact and conversation. So I feel really good. And I feel proud. I feel really proud of the book I’ve written. I’m trying to just hold on to that because amidst all the chaos that is going to happen, and hearing what other people think, I want to always remember how good I feel about this book and how that’s really the only thing that matters.[Virginia Note: So far, people think it’s amazing. Here’s Jia Tolentino and Sara Louise Petersen saying so, among others.]VirginiaYour book is very of the moment. Did the idea come out of the pandemic? Or was it something you’ve been thinking about, because it also ties so closely to your first book?AngelaThe secret history of this book is that I sold a second book right after my first book came out in 2018. It was a book of essays about the human body, like the body as a lens for how we move through the world and how we process the world. I was trying to write that book for two years, and it was due the summer of the pandemic. A couple of weeks into lockdown I contacted my editor and I was like, “There’s no way. There’s no way I can meet this deadline.” I’m a professional, like, I always get it done. And luckily, she was totally understanding because she was like, “I just told my husband, I think I have to quit my job.” So like everyone was going through this thing. So we pushed the deadline back several times. I used to co-host a podcast called The Double Shift with my friend, Katherine Goldstein. She invited me, during the pandemic, to cohost this with her because she wanted to continue to make the podcast during a time in which it felt almost impossible to do it and during a time in which we both felt mother’s voices, and the voices of caregivers, were both vitally important, but on the edge of being erased. And just consumed by domestic work. In September 2020, 865,000 women dropped out of the workforce in one month, because no one could be a caretaker, a virtual school proctor, and a professional worker at the same time. So I said, “women’s participation in the workforce is directly tied to their participation in public life. And what happens if women disappear for a year? Or more?”So, from that lighthearted thought, I had a wonderful editor who reached out to me and she was like, “Do you want to write about this? I want someone to write about it and I think you need to do it.” I had not been writing and I was scared to do it. But I basically put every bad thought I’d been having about disappearing, about feeling unsatisfied by domestic labor, about questioning ambition, about just everything, and I wrote this piece for The Cut that ended up going a little bit viral. Elizabeth Warren retweeted it—career highlight for me. And I realized I’ve been isolated and alone with my depression and my concerns, but I’m not alone. So many people are feeling this way now, as everyone’s trying to force us out of the pandemic. Which, facts to the contrary. These problems aren’t going away. Childcare, figuring it out on your own. Our society’s treatment of mothers and care work. We have not solved that problem. It is a longstanding problem that we have never properly reckoned with. So that’s a very long answer to how I wrote this book. The one nice thing about it is that there’s a lot about embodiment in this book. And while I was not unfortunately able to cannibalize everything from the first book, it did feel good because all of that research that I had done that I couldn’t figure out how to make it work. A lot of that research and some snippets of writing made it into this book. And it also made me feel like everything I’ve been doing has not been a waste of time.VirginiaYou give us this whole history of care work, tracing your family’s history. It helped me, and I think it will help a lot of people, put what happened in the pandemic into context. People with privilege were caught by surprise by how hard it is to live. Obviously, it was not news to the majority of people, but it helped me put in context, like, what is happening right now? And why is it so bad? Why is it happening in this way? So it absolutely transcends the pandemic because you’re explaining this much larger systemic issue and also looking ahead into where do we go from here with that.There is a snippet from the book I wanted to talk about in detail. Okay, so actually two little quotes I’m gonna read. You wrote: The pandemic revealed that this can happen to anyone. That work won’t save affluent white women, despite Betty Friedan’s theorizing. Ultimately, they cannot ever fully outsource domestic labor, it still comes down to them. And then later you wrote: It makes white women uncomfortable to think that they are no different from their hired help. What they chase and have been given is validation, acceptance, and success—but only on terms set by white men.I mean, Angela! So good! I read those, I underlined them, I came back and read them again. I was just flashing back to so many phone calls with editors. So many reporting trips. I remember being on a reporting trip when I was visibly pregnant with my second daughter, and feeling like I had to hide it and downplay it. This weird guy who worked for the Philadelphia Mayor was making comments about it. It was like a whole thing where I was like, I can’t be pregnant in this public space because it’s getting so weird for everybody.Angela I can’t be who I am. VirginiaThis is what my body’s doing right now and I have to do this work. There are these ways in which we are conditioned to downplay our kids, to downplay our responsibility to our kids, in order to seem professional and successful. For a lot of us, the pandemic is what made it impossible to maintain that lie. Like your editor, I was in the same boat of like, “Okay, I’m just not working for several months here.” I would love for you to unpack for us a little further why this is so specifically a problem of white feminism.Angela I mean, I want to start by saying that I’m really glad that you want to talk about this. As I was writing it, I was like, “This feels risky.” Do I want to call out white women? As a woman of color that felt and still feels a little bit risky. But this really gives me hope, because you know my joke is “some of my best friends are white women.” And I feel like there’s a reckoning that’s happening. I know that word has been overused in the last couple of years. But I think that people really want to understand what’s happening and why they feel so betrayed, and why so many white women felt and were righteously angry, you know? I want to harness that power which is why I want to keep talking about it. Mainstream feminism, which is white feminism, has always had a race problem, just like the United States. We have never fully acknowledged the history, right? Susan B. Anthony, a great suffragette, did not think that black women deserved to vote. Betty Friedan—and I shouldn’t have to say this, but these women contributed to society. I am not trying to take away, I’m not trying to come for them. VirginiaYou’re not canceling Susan B. Anthony. AngelaExactly. I just feel like these people were human. We hear so much about Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique. The whole thing was women finding power and fulfillment and identity outside of the home by working professionally. The thing that that leaves out is when you go outside of the home, who’s in the home? That work never went away. There’s a history of slavery in this country. We have a history of Black women working for free in the home and taking care of children and cooking and cleaning, black women as property. And so it was easy to slot women of color and Black women into these roles as domestic workers because they’d always been doing this labor. So, I just want to point out that women—and specifically affluent white women—were sold a bill of goods. I think Boomer women especially. I think a lot of white women now are reckoning with this.A lot of Boomer women were like, “I can have it all.” And that’s the huge lie that we’re still grappling with. Like, you cannot have it all. Even if you come close to it, someone will be like, “can you hide your pregnant body?” It’s very inconvenient that you are overflowing with life, right? Because white women are also oppressed, right? But there’s a better chance for white women to attain success or to fit in. You know, oppression sucks. The thing that marginalized communities and marginalized women and people of color understand is that this world wasn’t built for us. So success is sort of unattainable. At least, I’m speaking for myself now, this classic, shiny version of white feminist success is out of reach. I started self-identifying as a feminist when I was 12 years old. But nothing I read ever talked about my mother, who was an immigrant from the Philippines who worked and raised three kids. Marginalized people have a better understanding of who is left out of conversations. White women haven’t been challenged to imagine themselves in other people’s shoes. They’ve been encouraged to lean in. But to go back to history, when we think of feminism, we don’t think about Johnnie Tillmon or the National Welfare Rights Organization, who were contemporaries of Betty Friedan. Their work was organizing to make sure that women and families who received welfare, which was called aid for families with dependent children at the time, were able to access aid from the government. There was a time when women receiving that aid were subjected to impromptu searches of their home because the government thought that if they were giving them money, then they had the right to come in and make sure they weren’t sleeping with men. Because if men were in the picture, then they shouldn’t have any support. So the NWRO and Johnnie Tillmon were working in a multiracial coalition for poor people. And their analysis, when faced with the same scenario that Betty Friedan had, was that we should have a universal basic income. We should eliminate poverty and we should make life better for as many people as possible. And that’s also history that we don’t hear about. What white women are taught is white feminism, and actually, there is and has always been a much more inclusive feminism. The feminism of women of color, of marginalized people. It’s time for people to understand that and reckon with it and realize that it’s solidarity. I quote Sylvia Federici in the book: “All women are in a condition of servitude when it comes to the male world.”VirginiaThis distinction between Johnnie Tillmon and Betty Friedan is so important because it shows us that the answer was never to try to live on men’s terms. What you’re arguing for is that we need to reject that whole system. We need to do something really different. AngelaCare work is essential to life. It is the work that makes all other work possible. It’s mind boggling when you realize the extent to which we have tried to make care work invisible. The way we have devalued care work. You either do it as a labor of love as a woman or you outsource it to women of color and you pay them poverty wages. Domestic workers are three times as likely to live in poverty than workers in any other field. The median wage in America is close to $20. The median wage for domestic workers is $12. What I’m arguing is that, actually, the only work that matters as a human being is taking care of people. I was struggling with this in the pandemic with the “mask debate.” I’m at a loss. I don’t know how to convince people that they should care about other people if they don’t already have a sense of that. I think it’s a very human and innate and beautiful urge that we have to take care of each other. And I think our culture has beat it out of us. This culture of individual, of hustle and grinding, every man for themselves, I’m looking out for number one. It’s not working. The pandemic showed us that we can’t do it alone. What I’m arguing for is the visibility of care work, the absolute insistence on the importance of care and viewing care as labor that should be respected and valued, culturally and financially.VirginiaIt makes a ton of sense and is tricky to implement because you just keep coming up against the ways in which the systems don’t allow for it. Do you know what I mean? But I think holding that as the starting point and the goal feels critical to making any change.AngelaI do feel hopeful that we’re having a moment. I think it’s going to take longer than I thought. When we got the Biden administration, we were talking about paid leave. We had been experimenting with direct stimulus payments to people. There was, in the American Rescue Plan, the advanced Child Tax Credit which did lift a lot of families and children out of poverty—like four million of them for the brief time. Even though we have a Democratic leadership in Congress that died and the funding lapsed and so we’re backsliding. I definitely have felt really disappointed and disheartened by that. But the fact that we are talking about these things, the fact that we had those things, there are these glimmers of hope. I also just see, too, that maybe the government isn’t coming to save us, right? Like we’ve known that since the start of the pandemic. Certainly the Trump administration wasn’t going to come and save us. The Biden administration feels like a grave disappointment to me in this sense, too. But what I do see and what I always saw through the pandemic is that we take care of each other. We have pods. We have mutual aid societies. We have playdates, we have community fridges…
Full show notes at the publisherHello and welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today is your May bonus episode for paid subscribers! Thanks for being here.
This month, I decided to do more of a grab bag. We’re going to do one reader question, one diet, and one recommendation—because I really like doing the Butter for your Burnt Toast segment on the regular pod and I thought, why not bring it here and give the bonus folks a little extra butter?
PS. If you enjoy this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player!
Q: I have an upcoming 15 year reunion with my college roommates. We will be sharing a vacation rental for a weekend, and spending all of our time together. So eating, there and at restaurants, will obviously be involved.
When we first started living together in college, one of the roommates’ sisters was in a public health program and was a teaching assistant for an intuitive eating course. Our roommate told us about it, and invited us all to take the class together and five of the six of us did. (Ironically, the one roommate who was not interested was studying to become a dietitian.) It is not an exaggeration to say the class was absolutely life changing and was the turning point for shaping my relationship with food today, as well as the launchpad for my passion for learning anything I can about anti diet culture, media literacy, food with kids, body image resilience, etc.
In the 15 years since taking the class, I have continued to see several of the roommates on rare occasions due to living in the same state. Through comments some of them have made over the years, it has become apparent that they have not all continued practicing intuitive eating. I will fully own that my personal journey with intuitive eating has had its moments of ups and downs, especially due to doctors trying to push specific dieting techniques to “help with medical conditions.” I’m really not trying to be judgmental about my friends here, just trying to prepare in advance for what to do and say when dieting and weight conversations will inevitably come up on this weekend where a group of 35 year old moms are all together after years apart.
In the past, I’ve generally just been silent. I think my friends are aware that I am still trying to eat intuitively. But I’m feeling more empowered now and want to be prepared for how to handle this scenario, both to protect myself when triggering topics come up, and because they feel a greater responsibility now for helping show others that there are alternative paths to lifelong dieting.
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
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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.
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If you asked any of these gentle parenting experts, they would say parenting is the most important work in the world. But they are also perpetually downplaying the hardest parts of it—which means not ever making visible the parts of parenting that we most need to change.Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today I am chatting again with Sara Louise Petersen. She’s the Burnt Toast resident momfluencer expert, and you can catch her previous episodes here and here. Sara is also the author of an upcoming book about momfluencers and the awesome new Substack newsletter In Pursuit of Clean Countertops, which is a must-subscribe!Today, Sara and I are chatting about the gentle parenting trend—and how it intersect with our conversations around gender roles, diet culture, and more. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! And subscribe to the Burnt Toast newsletter for episode transcripts, reported essays, and more.PS. The Burnt Toast Giving Circle is almost to $9,000! We are so close to our goal and will soon be picking which state election to fund. So if you’ve been thinking about joining, we still need you! Here’s the Burnt Toast episode where I announced it, ICYMI, and the link to donate.Episode 41 TranscriptVirginiaHi Sara! You are the resident Burnt Toast momfluencer expert, which I admit is not a category of expert I knew that I needed when I launched the podcast, but it turns out it very much is. And you just started your own Substack newsletter! So let’s talk about that first.SaraIt’s called In Pursuit of Clean Countertops. It’s not about countertops. It’s not about cleaning. The title is a nod to all of the things that momfluencer culture invites you to pursue and desire and want. I started it a little over a month ago based on an inflammatory post by @BallerinaFarm, Hannah Neeleman. She’s a big one. Her husband Daniel Neeleman started his own Instagram account relatively recently. He posted about the way that Hannah loves to clean and natural light and children like to congregate around her. It just made me feel a lot of a lot of feelings, Virginia. So that was the the post that started it at all.VirginiaI had a lot of feelings about that post, as well. I also love your new Weekly WTF which is so cathartic to read. SaraMy goal is to take the text threads that we all have with our friends, which can be more like, “Holy shit. Did you see this? This is enraging this is infuriating,” and explore why is it infuriating. Why am I feeling these feelings? To expose the systemic issues at play.VirginiaToday you are coming back on this podcast because we want to dissect a sub-trend of momfluencing culture. We’re talking about “gentle parenting.” I also see it called “positive parenting.” It’s important to say right off the bat, there is no official definition of this concept. Jessica Grose wrote a piece for The New York Times where she described it as “a sort of open-source mélange, interpreted and remixed by moms across the country.” And yes, that is really what it is. Sara, do you want to read this definition that we found in this piece in The New Yorker by Jessica Winter, just so everyone’s on the same page about what we’re talking about here.SaraSo, okay:In its broadest outlines, gentle parenting centers on acknowledging a child’s feelings and the motivations behind challenging behavior, as opposed to correcting the behavior itself. The gentle parent holds firm boundaries, gives a child choices instead of orders, and eschews rewards, punishments, and threats—no sticker charts, no time-outs, no “I will turn this car around right now.” Instead of issuing commands (“Put on your shoes!”), the parent strives to understand why a child is acting out in the first place (“What’s up, honey? You don’t want to put your shoes on?”) or, perhaps, narrates the problem (“You’re playing with your trains because putting on shoes doesn’t feel good”).The gently parented child, the theory goes, learns to recognize and control her emotions because a caregiver is consistently affirming those emotions as real and important. The parent provides a model for keeping one’s cool, but no overt incentives for doing so—the kid becomes a person who is self-regulating, kind, and conscientious because she wants to be, not because it will result in ice cream.VirginiaThat is what I want my children to be, is the thing. This is the goal I think a lot of us have for kids. And yet the path for getting there is so convoluted. Let’s talk about when we each first became aware of this trend and how it’s showing up in our parenting.SaraI became aware of it by way of attachment parenting, which was just everywhere when I had my first kid, who is now almost 10. Attachment parenting is the whole 'if the kid is crying, the kid is not being annoying. It’s expressing needs or desires and it’s your job as the parent to interpret the cries.’ In attachment parenting, you’re not thinking of the kid’s behavior as an impediment to your life, but as the kid expressing his or her or their individuality. I was all about this when I was pregnant. I read all the Dr. Sears books. And then, almost immediately after having my first child, I just felt like I was being gaslit. I remember reading something... Kelly Something?VirginiaOh, yes, KellyMom. Oh, I’m having a trauma response. It’s been a minute.SaraI know. So my kid was not sleeping and I remember reading on KellyMom something like “when cluster feeding happens and baby only wants mom, consider it a compliment.” And I was just like fuuuuuck this. Fuck this!!VirginiaIt’s not a compliment. I’m so tired.SaraAttachment parenting kind of feeds into gentle parenting really well in that it’s all about prioritizing the child’s needs. And very rarely are the parent’s needs anywhere in the conversation.VirginiaI had a pretty knee jerk reaction against attachment parenting, although, you know, my oldest is eight, so same time period. It was everywhere. But I was like, this is just code for the woman does everything. And I didn’t sign up for that. It’s not what we’ve agreed upon in my house. We’re not doing it. But then the gentle parenting thing for me, it was discovering Janet Lansbury’s work when my older daughter was a toddler and the toddler tantrums started. (Note from Virginia: I forgot to mention in our conversation that I’ve interviewed Lansbury for parenting articles a few times and think she’s incredibly smart and thoughtful, even if her tantrum advice didn’t always land for me. If you are also a Lansbury fan, this Ariel Levy profile is a must-read.)I was constantly having to negotiate with this person who is totally irrational, according to the way I understand the world. And who is demanding a lot from me in ways that just don’t make sense anymore. At least with a baby, you’re like, well, you’re hungry, or you’re cold or—their needs are just more concrete and not emotional. But suddenly, in the toddler years, you’re sorting through this emotional stuff, as well as—I’m now going to get mail from people saying babies have emotions. I know they do. I know they have emotions. But there’s something about engaging with a tiny verbal child or quasi-verbal child that is just much harder for me. So this whole gentle parenting approach, I sort of clung to it like a life raft. Will someone explain why these children scream so much? And gentle parenting has these '“answers” for you. But what was interesting, even when my older daughter was two or three, was how much it didn’t work with her. All this advice about, like, “What’s up? You don’t want to put your shoes on? Or you’re playing with trains because shoes don’t feel good?” She would just be enraged when I did that. I think it felt like very patronizing to her. She was like, “I am telling you how I feel through my yelling. You putting words to it is not making me better.” SaraWell, one of my challenges that you’re speaking to is: You’ll get this script and the lines that you’re reciting are at odds with your feelings, which are often rage, impatience, annoyance, frustration, despair. So if you’re reciting this script that is like, “I can see you’re having really big feelings right now. And that’s okay. Your big feelings are valid,” kids, I think can tell that you are feeding them a line from a script. Or at least my kids definitely can. It oftentimes in my household has made things worse.VirginiaYes. Because then you’re getting more frustrated while trying to recite the script.SaraAnd then you’re doubly frustrated because the script isn’t working.VirginiaSo, let’s talk more about the scripts because they are one of the most common tropes of the way gentle parenting is performed online. I want to talk about this Dr. Becky post. (Above.) If I have a child screaming, “I hate you! I hope you die!,” which has happened in my life, me responding with calmness is almost denying the feeling. The goal, ostensibly, is to label their feeling, but you’re denying the feeling because you’re responding so stoically to their feelings. Something about it feels so inauthentic.SaraThe other thing that just really stands out to me in this mantra is “the real story is my child’s pain.” There’s no room for the parents’ feelings in this mantra.VirginiaI don’t disagree with the argument here that a small child using that word doesn’t really mean the word the way an adult does. Like, this isn’t them being verbally abusive. I understand that. But that doesn’t stop it from feeling bad when it happens. And we are supposed to so totally center the child’s emotions to the point of having no emotional response to it. It’s just never going to happen, that way.SaraWhat if the kid is saying “I HATE YOU” to the sibling? You have to attend to the kid who’s having feelings and saying I hate you. And you have to attend to the kid who is the target of the “I hate you.” It’s just so much more complicated than any of these scripts would have you believe.VirginiaI think what’s interesting about this movement is there’s a lot of emphasis on not being punitive towards kids when they do bad things. When they hit, when they bite, when they say I hate you. An older model of parenting would have been to punish those behaviors. And their argument is: We’re never going to help kids move past these behaviors if we demonize the kid who’s doing the bad thing. Which I understand. But if you have a dynamic where an older brother has just slapped his little sister in the face, what is that girl learning? That someone who loves you can hurt you like that?SaraWe don’t want our children to internalize our feelings. But I also don’t think it’s terrible if our kids see us have an emotional reaction, such as anger or frustration. It’s natural to have a reaction when somebody says, “I hate you,” or when you get slapped in the face. We need to allow for the parents’ humanity in all of this. If your facial expression becomes angry, that’s okay. You can still value the child’s humanity and individuality and hold space for both things.VirginiaThere’s a lot of talk about how if you tell your child how you feel, you’re making them codependent. I just feel like this is a real big leap because the alternative is you’re teaching your child their emotions should always be centered. That feels like a terrible model for future relationships.SaraIn the Jessica Winter piece, she gives the example of if your kid is having a meltdown and you’re in the middle of vacuuming, you should by all means stop vacuuming and say to the kid, “your feelings are more important than housework.” Winter writes: The housework that [Robin] Einzig says to put off is a synecdoche for everything that the gentle parent—and, perhaps, the gently parented child’s invisible siblings—must push aside in order to complete a transformation into a self-renouncing, perpetually present humanoid who has nothing but time and who is programmed for nothing but calm.”Virginia And when is the vacuuming getting done? Maybe you don’t want to spend your whole day being interrupted during a chore that should take 15 minutes. This feels very much of a piece with what we see in momfleuncer culture. That’s @BallerinaFarm cleaning her house with a smile while the kids are frolicking around. This image of joy and calmness through domestic life doesn’t line up with anything I’ve ever experienced in domestic life. I don’t think it lines up with most people’s experience.SaraNo. I constantly talk to my kids when I’m feeling overwhelmed or how a lot of work goes into keeping a house and raising kids. I’m sure some gentle parenting advocates would tell me I’m burdening my kids with my own suffering or whatever. But it’s true and nobody ever talked to me about this openly, about how being a parent and being a grown up is hard.VirginiaMaking that work visible is so important for so many reasons. We are never going to make progress on our larger cultural gender roles if we are continually downplaying this work. I’m sure if you asked any of these gentle parenting experts, they would say parenting is the most important work in the world. That’s why they’ve devoted their careers to giving us all the scripts! But when you’re perpetually downplaying the hard parts of it, and when you’re needing to perform it in this really controlled way, you’re not actually ever making visible the parts of it that we need to change. SaraI can see a future where kids who are parented perfectly according to the gentle script, turn into parents themselves and say, like, “What the fuck? This is hard as shit! Why did my parents always present as so calm and pulled together?”VirginiaI mean, that assumes anyone’s able to actually execute gentle parenting. I f\have my doubts that anybody is this parent, even three days a week. The other night, my child who, like I said, screams in fury if I try a gentle parenting script, we were having a thing. I finally said to her, “I am a human being with emotions, and you are hurting my feelings right now.” And one part of my brain was like, You are breaking all the rules. You aren’t supposed to tell her that she’s hurting your feelings. But that was what turned the corner in that particular moment. I’m not saying she was like, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I hurt your feelings.” There was no apology. But it did make her pause for a moment and have this recognition of, Oh, right. I am powerful here. My words have impact. She took a slight step back and we were able to then get on a much better track. A thought I had a lot, especially when I was parenting toddlers was: If an adult treated you like this, it would be an abusive relationship—and yet we are supposed to accept this wholeheartedly from children. It’s one of the things that is so hard about parenting. Because they are children and emotional capabilities are not fully developed, so you literally sign up for accepting abuse for several years. It’s not abuse, but it does not feel great.SaraI’m sure you’ve had this experience, where you are heated, you are furious, you’re having big emotions and the person you’re arguing with is stoic and calm and seemingly unaffected by your big emotions. VirginiaIt’s the worst! SaraIt’s the worst. So I can totally understand why being the kid at the receiving end of these scripts would be infuriating. Like, I’m kicking and screaming and like spitting at you. Why isn’t this having any impact? VirginiaIt feels kind of manipulative in that way, like you’re trying to make them feel powerless. Because kids want a reaction. They’re looking for connection. Often the yelling is an attempt to get your attention and get your connection. So if you’re giving them Robot Mom, you’re not connecting with them authentically. VirginiaOkay, so another big theme, and also m big division point with gentle parenting, is the fact that they frame timeouts as an act of trauma. This is a @biglittlefeelings…
Full show notes at the publisher“Sometimes I’ve just shoved some granola in my face, because I knew that I needed to have some fuel in my body. I didn’t really enjoy it. And that’s okay. That’s absolutely appropriate for that moment.”Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health.Today I am chatting with Leanne Brown who is the author of the cookbooks Good and Cheap and Good Enough. Leanne focuses on making cooking more accessible and affordable. She also does a lot of important work challenging our perceptions around what cooking should be and how we can make it into whatever we want it to be, including stuff on toast or bowls of cereal. If you’re feeling stressed about family meals or about feeding yourself, or if cooking is feeling hard for you, whether it’s because of who you’re feeding or your relationship with food: Leanne’s work may be a helpful starting point in terms of growing your confidence around food and cooking and recognizing what’s useful and what’s not useful. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! And subscribe to the Burnt Toast newsletter for episode transcripts, reported essays, and more.PS. The Burnt Toast Giving Circle is almost to $9,000! We are so close to our goal. And if you’ve been thinking about joining, we still need you! Here’s the Burnt Toast episode where I announced it, ICYMI, and the link to donate.Episode 40 TranscriptVirginiaHi Leanne! Why don’t we start by having you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work?LeanneI’m a cookbook author, but at the same time, I don’t think that that really describes what I do. It’s certainly a huge part of what I do—I love the creating cookbooks aspect. What I really want to do is welcome anyone and everyone into the kitchen. And I think I have a particular soft spot in my heart for people who don’t really think of themselves as cooks or aren’t necessarily as naturally attracted to cooking. I believe that they have a place in the kitchen. Becoming comfortable with cooking—not even cooking but simply making food for oneself and for those in your life that you want to make food for—brings so much empowerment. My passion is in connecting with people, and finding a way to make peace with food in your life. VirginiaI am someone who loves cooking, but I’m also very big on not putting cooking on such a pedestal, because it’s so often held to these impossible standards. So I went on this little journey reading your work where at first I was like, Oh sure, cooking solves everything, fine. And then I was like, Oh, wait, but she’s also saying it’s okay if you don’t like cooking!LeanneWhen I introduce myself as a cookbook author, it puts me into the world of food media. Which is all these videos, TV shows, and beautiful magazines, and it’s all this glorification of food. There’s obviously a place for that. I think it adds so much to our lives and our culture. There’s this artistic aspect to it, and there’s so much beauty in it. But at the same time: I hear from so many people who say, “Oh, I’m a terrible cook.” Why are any of us judging ourselves like that? So long as you’re able to feed your body every day, that’s really all that matters. I’ve been going through a lot of family emergency stuff and that means that I don’t have a very big appetite a lot of the time because I have a nervous tummy. So sometimes I’m just like, well, I just shoved some granola in my face, because I knew that I needed to have some fuel in my body. I didn’t really enjoy it. And that’s totally okay. That’s appropriate for this moment. There are so many times in life like that and I shouldn’t internalize them as ‘I’m a failure,’ or ‘what kind of a cook am I?’ But I’ve gone through periods of life where I’ve felt that way. So I really want to share this message with others, because I think it’s such an important balance to all that beautiful, curated stuff that we see all the time.VirginiaAs you’re talking, I’m just thinking: Why do we expect ourselves as home cooks to live up to this standard? It would be like expecting to do your taxes as well as a professional accountant or solve your own medical crisis. We need professionals! Cooking is a professional skill. And it’s this thing we have to do day-to-day. But why do you expect yourself to execute it like someone who’s had years of training and has a whole team and a huge budget? I feel like this has to be somewhat rooted in the way we devalue cooking as women’s work. We’re socially conditioned to have cooking be a default part of our gender identity, so it’s not valued or made visible—and yet we’re also expected to be effortlessly great at it. LeanneWe could absolutely do a whole episode trying to unpack that. VirginiaWell, let’s talk about the new cookbook. So it’s called Good Enough and it is so much more than a cookbook. It’s a different genre of book because you have recipes—and the recipes are wonderful—but then you have just essay after beautiful essay. Many of them are about why it is okay, and even necessary, to lower the bar and to lower our standards around food and ourselves. You’re giving us permission to do less. Tell us a little more about what made you want to write a cookbook that essentially gives people permission not to cook. LeanneThat’s such a great way of framing it. That’s exactly what I’m doing! So my last book, Good and Cheap was a book created for people on a very, very tight budget, people who are on a food stamps budget. It was this surprise hit. It sold really well, a ton of people were interested in it. It was also this project that was created to be freely available for people. So I ended up traveling all over the country and getting to meet so many people from so many different kinds of backgrounds. And I kept having this one experience over and over and over, where someone would come up to me and they’d say, “Oh, I love what you’re doing. This is so cool. But I am hopeless. I’m a terrible cook.” This really, really struck me and I just couldn’t stop thinking about this. I would try to have a deeper conversation. I’d say, “What makes you say that? Why have you judged yourself this way?” And it was almost always something so innocuous, like, “My kid doesn’t like my food,” or I’ll never forget this woman who said she put on a dinner party, and she said, “I poisoned someone.” I was like, “Oh my gosh, that sounds terrible.”VirginiaThat, you could carry with you for a bit. LeanneI get that. But then I delved deeper into it and it turned out that a person was allergic to something and they just hadn’t disclosed that to her. VirginiaOh, well, that’s not on her!LeanneRight? I know! Oh, it’s so heartbreaking. But there are these experiences that we carry around with us. There just needs to be more to support these people. Because I can see this longing. They are walking toward cooking, toward food. They want to have a good and healthy relationship with it. And yet they feel less than for some reason or other. My heart went out to them. I also had to notice that I was seeing myself reflected in that, to a certain extent. I’ve always been, I think, naturally gifted with cooking and food. But a year or so after Good and Cheap came out, I got pregnant and I ended up being really, really sick, for longer than the first trimester. I was really ill, really nauseous everyday. Throwing up a lot of the time. Food was just not a fun place for me. And I found myself having an identity crisis. If I can’t do this, who am I? What do I even have to offer? What do I do? How do I approach this? Everything I’ve ever said to people, is it all a lie? And then, in the early days of parenting, when life changed so much, my relationship to cooking and to how I fed myself was also changing all the time. I realized we need to change our approaches to cooking all the time, depending on which phase of life you’re in, and what is going on. No one really talks about that. It’s all about like, you’re good cook or you’re bad cook and that’s just such nonsense. It’s so disempowering, and it leaves us so confused. I wanted to create something that talked about cooking as a part of our real messy lives.VirginiaI want to spend a little more time on this thing you noticed, of people feeling like they need to apologize. I interview people a lot about their relationships with food, and I see this all the time too. We’re all conditioned to apologize for how we eat, whether that’s our cooking ability or the fact that we’re eating someone else’s food. It’s that thing of apologizing with, “I can’t believe I’m having the third brownie.” I would love to hear more on how you’ve been working to break that cycle for yourself?LeanneI think the journey begins in the noticing. Noticing and then asking, why do I feel compelled to apologize when someone is offering me food? What if I didn’t do that? What if I believed that this person who is offering this genuinely wants me to have it? What if I took them at their word and just did what my body is wanting right now, which is to take another brownie? And then I can appreciate that and thank them for it. What if I did that, rather than apologizing for how I’m not showing up in this gendered, sort of perfectionist way where we’re supposed to “only take one” and not eat indulgent food and not be a bother to others or not be an inconvenience?The last chapter in the book is about putting on a dinner party. I think having people over is often what we’re motivated by when it comes to cooking. Like, “I want to put on a big show for others.” But I think it should actually be one of the later steps. It’s really important to learn first to feed yourself, in your life. Because otherwise, you’re only seeking others’ approval around food, and that it’s never going to really feel good enough, right? Like, no matter how much they say, “We love that it’s great,” if something inside you is like, I don’t know if I deserve that, it’s never going to feel like enough. So I think it’s important, when you have people over, to be honest about “this has been a lot of work for me.” And to really welcome them into your home and really offer with full openness, that you want to love them. For me, having people over and feeding them, is an act of love. And I think I’ve always tried to minimize that act by being like, “Whatever. It’s no big deal.” Because it’s uncomfortable. It’s vulnerable to be like, “I love you so much that I went to the store and got all these things and obsessed over this. And I worked really hard on it and here it is. And now I hope you like it and if you don’t, I still love you and that’s okay.” That is just a lot to hold! So, I think about, in that moment, when I, as the visitor, want to do that thing of, “Oh, I won’t take too much,” it helps to remember that when I’m in their shoes, I want people to take it! I want them to like it! I want them to feel that joy, I want to feel that connection. We’re so often doing this dance of connection where we all long to be in true, intimate connection with others, but it’s terrifying. There’s this will-you, won’t-you, do you like me as much as I like you? All that comes up. It’s hard. VirginiaI’m thinking about that standard we talked about where not only do we expect ourselves to execute meals like professional chefs, we also want the work of it to be invisible, right? That’s what you’re talking about when you have people over but trying to hide how much that is an act of love. You don’t want them to know that actually your kitchen was a wreck an hour ago. You don’t want them to see the dishes. You don’t want them to know how much you stressed about whether the sauce turned out right. Is this the legacy of Martha Stewart? We feel like we have to effortlessly present a meal to communicate love. But all that really does is devalue the labor further. Because we’ve made it invisible.LeanneAnd it puts up a wall, too. It’s a way of shutting people out from the truth of your experience. Because it makes you look anxious or it makes you look like you care too much. It’s so self-defeating. Because I actually want people to know how much I care.VirginiaSo do you leave the dirty dishes in the sink before people come over? Or do you still ry to get it all cleaned up? LeanneI think for the longest time, I absolutely would always clean up. And to be honest, I think sometimes I still do, just out of practicality. Because I do tend to clean as I go when I’m making food. But I’ve really tried to make it a practice that when people exclaim over a meal, I don’t say, “It was nothing.” I say, “Thank you so much for noticing. I worked hard on it.” And I try to allow people to help. It was my daughter's fifth birthday a couple of weekends ago. I was trying so hard not to do everything myself. We had some friends from out of town over a little early and I tried to keep stuff aside for them to do when they would arrive and to allow others to help me. It kind of worked. But it was hard. Because when you don’t do everything yourself, you also have to release your own standards and your own perfectionism. When you ask others for help, they may not do it the way you want them to. And that’s okay, actually! It doesn’t mean they don’t care and they don’t love you. That’s part of being in community.VirginiaAnd maybe the end result is better for it. Even if it doesn’t align with that Instagram version of the meal that you felt like you were supposed to be executing. Maybe there’s something more beautiful in that fact.LeanneYes. Why did it need to be that way for it to be okay? The answer really is just building more awareness around all the ways in which food is just so inextricably linked with connection for all of us, with connection with ourselves, and then so much with others and the way that we want others to view us.VirginiaSince you mentioned your daughter, there was a quote in a profile of yours in Input Magazine that I loved: People tell me, ‘Oh, your kid must eat so well because you’re a cookbook author,’ but I eat takeout all the time,” she adds. “I frequently skip meals. My daughter eats way too much mac and cheese, just like every other kid. There is no “right” way to feed yourself. Where do you think your ideas about the “right” way to feed yourself have come from?LeanneFrom the sea we swim in. From diet culture and food culture. And I think for me, personally, I have long wanted to be seen as a good person. What I’ve had to reckon with is: That idea comes from outside of me. It is a performance for others. Say I’m with a group of other food industry people. To be a “good” eating performer there would be to be an adventurous eater, to eat everything that’s there. And say “It’s no big deal. Of course, I’ve had this a million times.” That might be the way that we perform goodness in that space. Maybe at a children’s birthday party, at least in certain socioeconomic situations, it would be about making sure you have a lot of veggies and really healthy snacks. So we’re all performing how much we care about making sure children eat a variety of fruits and vegetables. That is the the way in which nutrition absolutely has become conflated with morality. They have really nothing to do with each other. VirginiaYou said your daughter is five now. Does feeding a kid look different than you would have expected?LeannneYou know, I’m doing my best. I try not to get hung up on what she eats in a given day. I really, in general, try not to analyze it too much and to trust. I think that’s something that I’ve learned from my daughter over these last years: To trust myself and to trust her. So often it can feel like, oh my gosh, they’ve been doing this behavior, they’re not eating something, or they’re not sleeping—you know, sleep is always such a big thing. And it feels like something is wrong. But when you look at it, it’s really that this is inconvenient. For me, as a parent, this is challenging.…
Full show notes at the publisherNOTE: We're planning a special AMA episode of the podcast and we want your burning questions! Please submit your questions via this Google Form to help us stay organized.Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast and newsletter where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. We don’t have a brand new episode for you today because I’m on spring break this week. As many of you know, I used to co-host another podcast with my best friend Amy Palanjian, the creator of Yummy Toddler Food. Our podcast was called Comfort Food and we had to retire it in 2020, for a whole lot of reasons. Amy has given me her blessing to occasionally pull some of our best episodes and share them, which I’m really excited to do because there were a lot of great conversations. A lot of these are more parenting-focused, but I’m hoping everyone can get something out of it.The episode I am sharing today first aired on March 5, 2020, right before the world shut down. Definitely do listen to this like you’re a historian, looking back at our earlier work. You can see where a lot of my thinking on these issues started—I don’t think I was all the way there yet. We’re all works in progress. In particular, Amy and I were really just beginning to understand how we wanted to talk about kid diet culture on Instagram. You’ll hear moments where we’re both chafing against some diet mentality of our own. I think we do a pretty good job of naming those things as they come up, but I just want to be clear that I wouldn’t necessarily repeat all of this today and neither would Amy. If that makes you nervous or if you’re worried about potential for harm, certainly feel free to skip this one. We do talk about different forms of restrictive eating. If that’s something you’re interested in hearing and puzzling out with us and you bump on something as you’re listening, feel free to put it in the comments so we can discuss! I welcome that accountability and the chance to revisit and give you a take on where I would land now. Episode 39 TranscriptVirginiaHello and welcome to episode 65 of Comfort Food! This is the podcast about the joys and meltdowns of feeding our families and feeding ourselves.AmyThis week we’re exploring how food restriction can creep into our everyday without us even really being aware of it, and the impacts that this can have on our own relationship with food and the way that we’re feeding our kids.This topic has been on my mind lately because often when we talk about food restriction, we think of it as a calorie counting diet or strict portion control, but there are a lot of other ways that it can creep in and cause harm or confusion, or just make us not super clear on our goals with both how we eat and how we’re feeding our kids.VirginiaTotally. I have also had those moments of kind of recognizing in yourself that this is a restriction thing. It can just pop up because it’s so conditioned into us. This might sound a little radical, but if you think back to like elementary school, when we were given the food pyramid—the food pyramid may not be the most harmful diet out there, but it still was like teaching us this hierarchy of foods, good and bad and less of this and more of that. It’s really difficult with kids who think so concretely in black and white about food, to tell kids how to eat in that way. Then we all grow up and get into diet culture, and more messages and more messages about restriction. So I think restriction is like at the core of how a lot of people interact with food in ways they just don’t even realize.AmyIt’s extra hard, because as you’re talking about that my gut reaction is “but I want my kids to eat more nutritious foods.” How do you do that without limiting the other foods? Some foods tastes better than others and that’s the primary driver that kids have when they’re eating. They want it to taste good. They don’t have the capacity to understand about nutrients in different foods. VirginiaNor should they! That’s not an age appropriate expectation, that a six year old is like, “You know, what I’m worried about today? Cholesterol. What’s happening with my arteries in 40 years?” It’s not where we want their minds to go. Let’s back up and talk about why restriction does backfire. Because some people listening may be thinking exactly like you, like "give me back my food pyramid or my ‘my plate’ or whatever, this is totally fine. What we need to understand is that research shows over and over that the more limited you feel around a food, the more you feel like you don’t have permission to eat it, the more fixated on it you will be and the more you will crave it. Just saying to kids, “I want you to eat more fruits and vegetables” makes the fruits and vegetables less interesting. We can put in the show notes the famous study done by the iconic food researcher Leann L Birch, where they told half the kids in the study that they could have as much soup as they wanted, and then have dessert. And then they told the other kids you have to finish your soup before you’re allowed to have dessert. The kids who had to finish their soup, both ate less of it and liked it less than the kids who were allowed to self regulate between all the foods on offer. It’s a really powerful piece of research and it’s been replicated many, many times. It really showed that primary human psychology of feeling limited makes you crave it more. That is why this cannot be the way we approach nutrition with our kids.AmyWhat do you say to someone who doesn’t have a lot of understanding of nutrition, but they still want to raise their kids eating a “healthy” diet? How do you do it without having any of those boundaries?VirginiaThis is where I think Division of Responsibility is so helpful, because Division of Responsibility isn’t about good foods versus bad foods. Instead, it’s a way of feeding your family that lets kids play to their strengths. Kids, when left alone, really do know when they’re hungry and when they’re full. They will apply that knowledge to any type of food—even the “treat food” or higher flavor food, things that they’re really drawn to. None of us need nutrition degrees to feed our families. You don’t actually need to know all this nitty gritty about macros and micronutrients and potassium and sodium. All you need to know is that you’re in charge of offering a range of foods. That can mean lots of different things based on your budget, preferences, cultural values around food, whatever. You offer a range of foods, you’re in charge of what is served at the meal, and kids are in charge of how much they eat. That sounds overly simplistic—and of course, we’ve done plenty of episodes where we get into the nitty gritty of all of that—but fundamentally, that’s letting you bypass this whole issue of “is it nutritious enough?”AmyI’m on the same side as you, and I’m still like, “But wait!” On some level, it might be even easier if you didn’t have nutrition information.VirginiaThat is completely true. Let’s be real, when we say “nutrition information,” we don’t mean unbiased, exactly right, unequivocally true statements about food. We mean a whole mishmash of what we’ve learned in the media, what we read in diet books, what we’ve picked up from something a doctor said, something our mom said, something my neighbor said, my yoga teacher said such-and-such. All of this information in our brains about food is not all necessarily useful and it is really difficult to silence. I think that’s important to think about when you’re getting fixated on the nutrition piece. Is it really nutrition? Where are you getting those messages? Why does this feel so important?AmyWhen you are fixated on something, I think asking yourself, “What is my goal here?” When you’re worried about whether your kids eating enough protein, what’s the underlying goal? What’s your underlying worry? VirginiaBecause if you drill down into that, you may realize this is a restriction thing. This is actually me worrying about their body size or me worrying about whether I’m feeding them in a “perfect” way because I feel a lot of judgment about how I feed my kids. That’s not just basic nutrition, right? It’s often other anxieties we have that we’re filtering through this lens of wanting to control how our kids eat. It’s a way of spotting your own hidden restriction traps—which, to be clear, I have, too.AmyThey’re never going away. It’s just a process of recognizing them.VirginiaRecognizing them and then realizing you can let go a little bit. We had it just the other day. One of my daughters was eating some cookies with her afternoon snack, and we had bought the ones that come in little baggies of six cookies. She finished them and wanted more, and my husband was like, “But that was the portion.” And I was like, “Yeah, but that was just the portion the manufacturer decided. That’s not like some unequivocally correct amount of cookies for her. If she wants two more cookies, it’s fine.” These restriction traps come up all over the place, and social media does not help because they are everywhere.AmySo we’re going to share some other examples of where we’ve seen this and realized that there might be something else going on with restriction, just as a fun exercise. VirginiaThe first one is a message we have seen on Instagram where there’s a message that “processed foods will make kids feel grumpy.” What even are processed foods? That’s an enormous category. They all make kids grumpy? Bread? Everything makes kids grumpy? Those kinds of statements are definitely rooted in restriction because it’s definitely playing into good foods and bad foods.AmyThat’s such a common belief, too. It’s hard. Even when you know that it’s not necessarily true, because those messages are just everywhere.VirginiaThis is one I see parents like apologizing for a lot. Like, “I can’t believe I’m letting them eat this,” or “I’m being such a bad mom today.” And this is where we have to push back because it’s not fair for moms or for dads to feel shamed about feeding kids perfectly nutritious and valid food choices because of this mysterious hype that doesn’t really make sense. I’m actually starting to dig in right now for my next New York Times column into the sugar high thing. Because none of this is cut and dry, it’s definitely not. It’s been interesting to look at the data and realize just how much myth goes into those kinds of messages.AmyLast week, I did an Instagram story on sodium because I was getting so many questions on it. That same day, I shared a snack plate of my three year old’s lunch. I looked at it and I was like, okay, so she basically hit her sodium, like a “maximum level,” in that lunch. Because there was cheese and there was crackers and there were veggie straws. But that’s actually the lunch that she ate, and she was happy. And that’s the lunch that I chose to give her. And it doesn’t mean that it’s wrong just because one of the nutrients is high. When you take that out of the context of the rest of what someone might be eating, it’s possible for any meal to look like it’s not balanced or “healthy.” VirginiaYou tell parents all the time to take the big picture view on their kid’s intake! Look over the course of a couple of days or a week to get a sense of how things are balancing out. Because unless you are an intense bodybuilder or Hollywood celebrity who has to control your nutritional intake to the gram, I don’t see why anyone needs to obsess over this to that degree. It’s not a happy or healthy way to live. I think a lot of us can recognize that and don’t want to go down that crazy path. It’s just hard in the moment. If your kids have a few snack-based meals for a few days in a row, and you suddenly think, wait, do I remember the last time they had a vegetable? Then you can spiral off.AmyThe second example is one that has been really bugging me lately. This has come up maybe four times for me in the past month: that there’s only one right way to feed a baby. And that you 100% cannot do baby-led weaning and purees at the same time—I’ve actually had two different people say that to me, that you can’t do them both at the same time because you will confuse the baby. You’re basically putting the baby at risk for choking because they cannot possibly understand how to manipulate those two different foods at the same time. That’s not true.VirginiaWhy do these people think babies are so dumb? It feels very anti-baby. I have one child where baby-led weaning was the only option that was going to work for her and I had one child who was so ravenous that she needed purees because she lacked the motor skills to feed herself well enough. In both cases, we also basically did both at all times. Because, as humans, we do both, right? As an adult, I eat both solid and pureed food. I don’t know why you need to make this distinction. Or you may have a kid who’s really not doing well with purees but doing great with self-feeding. Again, I had that child. There’s definitely going to be kids on the extremes that need one approach or the other. But that doesn’t mean that that’s the only way to do it.AmyA lot of the supporters of baby-led weaning feel that it is the right way to start solids and if you do that, you are going to set your kid up to be a healthy eater. You’re not going to have a picky eater and you’re going to have a perfect child. No matter how you feed a baby, they’re going to get to be one and a half or two, and they’re going to hit that developmental stage where they’re fearful of new foods. I don’t care what they ate when they were nine months old, it’s not going to be the same. VirginiaThe pressure we’re putting on ourselves! It’s not a realistic expectation to think that your child will never ever be a picky eater, because being picky is part of having preferences and will. As frustrating as it is for all of us, it’s normal for toddlers to go through this because it’s how they’re becoming independent people. And we want that for our children! So number one, let’s stop making picky eating the enemy of everything, because it is part of normal child development. But also, I think you’re totally right. This ties into needing to raise a “perfect” eater and this idyllic, perfect nutrition at every meal type of approach. It’s so much pressure on yourself, it’s so much pressure on your kid. It’s not realistic, it’s not sustainable. There’s just so many other ways to measure yourself as a parent. You are not how your child eats. AmyThis falls into the category of restriction because you’re putting up these artificial boundaries on what’s right and what’s not right.VirginiaTotally agree. If you’re literally saying, “I’m not going to spoon feed my child yogurt,” that is a restriction you are making that may at times be quite inconvenient. AmyOr you have a child who goes to daycare and that’s the way they feed them! You may not always have the choice.VirginiaYou’re setting up a certain inflexibility. I’m painting with a broad brush, but I do see a certain trajectory between the parents who are very hardcore about baby-led weaning, who then pack the rainbow bento lunchboxes, who then also don’t let sugar in the house. This can be putting you down a whole path of being very controlling about how your kid eats.AmyYeah. And just to say this again, we empathize if that’s where you are because it’s so easy to find yourself there. VirginiaYeah. Feel free to read chapter one of my book, you guys. It’s free on my website. I was there with you in a pretty intense way. The next one that we have noticed is definitely pretty clear cut restriction. It’s when you see pictures on social media, of kid meals and they’ve added a portion of dessert or fun food and it’s like three M&Ms in the lunchbox around the dinner plate. I think people really believe in their hearts that that is an appropriate portion size for a kid. I remember struggling because I would see this all the time and I would…
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Welcome to Burnt Toast! It’s time for your April bonus episode.
We’re gonna do what we did last month, where I asked you for the diet trends that are showing up the most in your life. I’m going to look them up on the internet, tell you what I think, and we’re gonna chat about it. Here we go!
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
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It was just this overnight conversion. Like, oh, okay, yep, the way I've been doing things my entire career is super wrong, and super harmful, and has hurt a lot of people. And that's terrible. And I'm very done with that.Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet, culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today I'm chatting with Anna Maltby. Anna is a longtime magazine and digital editor and someone I've worked with many times over the years, including at Medium’s Elemental Magazine, where I wrote features on diet culture and fatphobia that she edited. And right here on the Burnt Toast newsletter, Anna is often the person who does a top edit for me on particularly tricky reported essays. Another cool thing about Anna is that she’s a certified personal trainer and Pilates instructor. In addition to her editorial work, she does a lot of fitness consulting and training. That gives her this pretty unique perspective on the world of fitness journalism and the fitness industry —and on the harm that these industries have caused to folks in marginalized bodies, what changes are happening, and where we still need to make these spaces better and safer for all kinds of marginalized folks. But Anna is really here to talk to us about the myth of visible ab muscles.I want to say really clearly before we start the show: Health and fitness are not moral obligations. Core strength is certainly not a moral obligation, although it is practically useful. We are talking about core strength in a very different and much more functional and accessible way. But if even that feels triggering to you, I get it. There was a long time where I just couldn't engage in abs talk at all. One more disclaimer that Anna is a thin white lady. We both have a lot of thin and able-bodied privilege in this conversation. I'm seeing this episode very much as the start of a conversation about fitness I want to have on Burnt Toast. There are lots of folks in marginalized bodies doing really amazing work in the fitness space that we also need to center and hear from and we talked about some of them on the show. I'm hoping some of them will be joining me in future episodes. PS. Friends! The Burnt Toast Giving Circle is over $8,000! We are so close to our goal. And if you’ve been thinking about joining, we still need you! Here’s the Burnt Toast episode where I announced it, ICYMI, and the link to donate.Episode 37 TranscriptVirginiaHi Anna! Why don't we start by having you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work?AnnaI started my career as a magazine editor. I worked mostly in the service space, so magazines that tell you how to do things: Men's Health and Self and Marie Claire and Real Simple. I've worked in the digital space as well for a while: Refinery29 and one of the in house publications at Medium. I've done a lot of things, but but health has been a main thread for me. I've also been a certified personal trainer for about seven years. I'm a pre- and postnatal certified exercise specialist, and I received my mat Pilates certification about a year ago. I now do a bunch of freelance editorial and fitness-y things, like fitness programming, fitness performance coaching, and then I also train a few clients every week. I do a mix of Pilates and weight training.VirginiaDid you start out as a journalist and then go into the health and fitness stuff? AnnaI definitely was not into sports or exercise or movement at all, as a kid. I always loved reading magazines and that was what I focused on in school. I sort of fell into this internship at Men's Health when I was in college, and my manager there was like, “Okay, if you're going to write stories for us, you're going to need to know some of the basics of scientific reporting.” Like how to read a study, how to talk to a researcher, how to interview a medical expert. I loved that process. I suddenly had at my fingertips just being able to pull a study and understand what it said. Then, through a random series of magazine world misfortunes—which I'm sure you're very familiar with—I ended up going freelance. I got a job as the fitness editor at Fit Pregnancy magazine and I really loved that work. I found more flow in it, honestly, than more hardcore health reporting. One of the things that I did for that job was to be on set during workout photoshoots. We would always have to hire a personal trainer to be on set as well, to oversee the form for the models to make sure everything was safe and accurate. I was just so interested in it and I felt like I kind of had the basics of what these people were doing. So I was like, “For the cost of this person's day rate, my company could just pay for me to become a personal trainer.” Which was like a lot easier said than done, because it's really hard. All of the studying that you have to do and the reading and the test is really intense. I recently made kind of a big career change and went freelance again and started building my own business and training clients has become part of my week to week work, which has been so cool—just working with real people and seeing how their bodies work and how they respond to movement and how they learn things and seeing them get stronger and more motivated and more confident in the way they move. It has also really informed the sort of content work that I do. Like, how do I explain this to my client? I've seen in practice, that this concept is difficult for people or that this movement is not actually that accessible to people.VirginiaThat makes sense because so often people who are naturally good at certain types of exercise are not necessarily the greatest at explaining them to other people.AnnaHaving an editor brain is really helpful for training clients, as well, because I'm so in tune with what language people understand and how to break things down in a way that's accessible. I think the two things really do complement each other. VirginiaI want to go back to you being not athletic as a kid because I completely relate. I was a very un-athletic child. I think I played one season of Little League and just sat down in the outfield for several months and was like, why are we doing this? I think I tried one season of field hockey in middle school. Oh, no, I did not try a season, I tried one practice of field hockey in middle school. I got there and they didn't wear the cute skirts to practice and they had to run a lot of laps. And I was like, “Nope. Peace out. Not for me.” I should also say, I was a skinny kid and I was really given a free pass to not be athletic because of that thin privilege. People didn't think I needed to be athletic because my body was already the acceptable body. My then my understanding of exercise was definitely in this category of either you're some kind of hardcore jock or you do this because you're making yourself thinner. And if I'm already thin, I don't have to worry about it. AnnaTotally, I find that very relatable. I was a very skinny kid and very inactive. I remember in maybe in fifth or sixth grade, we played this game called mat ball, which was sort of like kickball, except they put big gymnastics mats out for the bases and for some reason as many people could be on the base as could fit. And I was like, great! I'm going to kick the ball. I'm going to run to the mat, and then I'm going to sit down. My teachers loved me. I have to say, I think I might have been sheltered from the fatphobia of it all. It wasn't really on my radar at that point, that exercise was for weight loss. I just didn't understand what it was for. But then in my early 20s, a couple of things happened. For a few years, I had been throwing my back out. I was a young, relatively healthy person and I was just throwing my back out. I would sneeze and not be able to turn my head for three days—that kind of thing. My first job out of college, I worked at Men's Health. I was the assistant to the editor in chief. They gave us all really cheap gym memberships, so I got a fancy gym membership for like 10 bucks a month. And I was surrounded by this Men's Health gym bro culture thing. I was like, okay, I've been working on some of this content, I'm starting to understand it a little bit more, I feel like I can stand to get stronger. That sounds interesting. I had a couple of sessions with a free personal trainer. I joined the gym and started doing some of the exercises that person taught me and I was like, Wait a second, I don't have back pain anymore. My back does not hurt. I'm not throwing it out. Although if I skip the gym for a couple of weeks, I throw it out again. It was just a really clear connection between pain and to my ability to function and live my life comfortably. And that became this incredible motivator for me. I need to work out because if I don't, I will feel terrible.VirginiaYou talking about your back pain leads me perfectly into what I want to talk about next, which is the real reason I was like, “Anna you have to come on the podcast.” It was this great Twitter thread you did recently about the myth of visible abs. AnnaI got this mat Pilates certification a year ago and a lot of my work is focused on sort of the prenatal and postpartum period. I think a lot about the core, the pelvic floor, the diaphragm—all of the things that we work on in Pilates, all of the things that change and are affected by pregnancy and the postpartum period. I think the core is so amazing, especially for the pelvic floor, and is not talked about enough. It's something I think about from a very functional perspective. So, a few weeks ago I got a message from a friend of mine, who is a few months postpartum after having her second kid. She sent me this message and she said something along the lines of like, “Can You please help me get my abs back? I am doing everything I can think of. I'm doing Pilates a few times a week, I'm doing HIIT workouts a few times a week.” She said, “I'm restricting. I'm doing Whole 30 about like, 80% of the time, I'm not drinking alcohol. I feel really strong and feel really toned but I can't get to my lower belly pooch. Like, what's your secret? What do you do?” It really took me by surprise and made me feel sad. For someone who has two children and a really busy professional life to like, be spending so much time—VirginiaSo much time in pursuit of this one thing.AnnaExactly. And of course, hearing that she was restricting was pretty disturbing to me. I tried to respond in a very kind and non-judgmental way while also being like, “Please don't do this. Please eat bread, please take care of yourself, please feed yourself please do movement that feels good to you. It's great that you're building your core, but…” I actually, I sent her a mirror selfie. I was like, “I want you to see my stomach right now. It's not flat. It’s not ‘toned.’ It's bloated and round and cushiony.”VirginiaBecause that’s what bodies look like when they’re not fitness models on photoshoot.AnnaThat's what a belly looks like. So I was thinking about that and this is the time of year when a lot of us start getting advertisements on the internet about workout plans and supplements and workout clothes, and all of those things. I noticed a couple of them popped up in my feeds that had people with very visible, cut abdomens. And I was really surprised, by my initial gut reaction to those ads, which was, “Oooh!” I was so drawn to those images of people with really defined, visible abdominal muscles. Of course, immediately, it was like, What are you doing Anna? You know that's not achievable. You know they're trying to sell you this thing. Move on. But those two experiences started me thinking, what is this pull that abs have on us? I'm sure you remember from your magazine years the many cover lines that we had to write about “get a toned, taut, tummy” or whatever. Or when I was at Men's Health, like “get shredded in six weeks” and stuff. You always had to have some kind of abs cover line. VirginiaIt sells magazines, it sells media. You have to talk about abs.AnnaAbs just have this pull on us and marketers know this. Companies know this. It's such a central point of insecurity for so many people. So it inspired me to write this thread that you're talking about on Twitter. Because the way that our culture deals with abs is so messed up. Look, abs are so amazing! They do so many things for you. They're this like miraculous muscle group that we don't really show the right kind of love to because we're so focused on how they look. But how abs look is the one thing that you're never really going to be able to affect unless you engage in potentially disordered eating patterns or pretty toxic exercise habits. VirginiaI just want to say this really clearly: The ability to do ab workouts and develop really visible abs is primarily genetic, right?AnnaIt's primarily genetic, because it's really about the way that you carry weight and fat, like how much subcutaneous fat you have on top of your abdominal region. Fitness models and people who compete in fitness competitions, there are things that those people do to change their nutritional intake to really minimize the amount of fat that's showing so that the muscle definition can show through. But even those people only do that some of the time because they know it's not sustainable. It's not actually good for their for their muscles. It's not safe. They eat to build muscle a lot of the time, and then for a very short period of time they eat to cut down on visible fat.VirginiaI'm so glad that is not how I spend my life. That just sounds exhausting. It's powerful to think that you, who has all this knowledge, are still looking at a photo of visible abs and feeling that pull towards them. Even people who know that it’s all fake are still caught up in what we're seeing. We can't say often enough that this isn't real, this isn't realistic, this is unsustainable. My reaction to a lot of this has been to stop doing ab exercises, to be very honest. Exercise for a long time was only about weight loss for me. As I divested from that and stopped dieting, stopped pursuing thinness, it was really important for my mental wellbeing not to do abs exercises because I knew they would trigger a whole set of body aspirations that were not good for me. So I didn't do the ab exercises for a long time—including during the period when I had two children and my abs had to work real hard. I've been through some stuff, they've seen some things. As all my listeners know, in January, I threw my back out and couldn't walk for five days. That is probably the 10th time in two years that has happened. That was when I emailed you in a panic and was like, “What is happening?” So talk about what abs do, and why they matter, in the non-aesthetic sense.AnnaIt frustrates me so much, as someone who personally has benefited from this kind of exercise, who's seen my clients feel so much better after strengthening their core. It’s so fraught, it's so tied to these feelings for so many people. But in reality, your core is the most important area of your body to build strength, because it supports your spine that supports your pelvis. It supports these centers of the way your body functions and moves. Your abdomen is where all your organs are too. It's also important for the health of your back, your posture, the way that you breathe, the way you walk, if you're a runner, the way that you run, protecting yourself against injury—even things that seem like totally far away and unrelated, like…
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