Stay ConnectedBurnt Toast is your body liberation community. We’re working to dismantle diet culture and anti-fat bias, and we have a lot of strong opinions about comfy pants.
Co-hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (NYT-bestselling author of FAT TALK) and Corinne Fay (author of the popular plus size fashion newsletter Big Undies).
Copyright: © Virginia Sole-Smith
How you feel about your body does not exist in a vacuum. It’s not just about your body, it’s about all the things in your life. So I ask people to really reflect on how size-friendly is their life? Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today I am chatting with Mia O’Malley, a content creator on Instagram and the creator of @plussizebabywearing. Mia’s work sits at the intersection of fat advocacy and momfluencing. She’s doing a lot of important work on access to fat friendly doctors and we also talk about influencing—and the potential and promise for fat advocacy in the space. PS. Friends! The Burnt Toast Giving Circle is up to almost $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 36 TranscriptVirginiaHi Mia! Can you tell listeners a little bit about you and your family and your work?MiaHi, I’m Mia. I am @MiaOMalley on Instagram and @plussizebabywearing on Instagram and TikTok. I’m a content creator. I’m based out of Connecticut. I’m a mom of an almost four year old and I do a lot of work on my social platforms on advocating for people in larger bodies and sharing resources for people in larger bodies and how to navigate the world. I’m a babywearing educator, as well, with a focus on celebrating parenting in larger bodies.VirginiaSara Peterson was on the podcast recently and we sang your praises on the babywearing piece in particular. That was something I struggled with, with both of my babies. The bias against fat bodies, fat moms— all of that came into play for me. So I’m grateful for the work you’re doing to change that conversation. As I was doing my homework for this episode, I read your interview on Cup of Jo—which has great fashion inspiration—and I love that you said you look at fashion as an advocacy issue. Was this always your plan? How did this come about?MiaI was pregnant with my son around 2017-2018 and I felt very isolated as a fat pregnant person. I had taken these beautiful maternity photos. But when I shared them, I was like, “This isn’t the whole story.” Because those photos were really hard for me to take. I couldn’t find anyone who looked like me who had done maternity photos. Like for inspiration, if you looked on Pinterest, there were no bodies like mine. And that’s how I felt going through all of my pregnancy. I never saw people in similar bodies being pregnant. I felt very underrepresented and isolated. So when I posted my maternity photos, I kind of said that quiet part out loud. I said, “I feel invisible as a plus-sized pregnant person.” And my world kind of opened up with that post, just in the sense that I kept saying those things that I kept to myself. I realized that there are other people like me who are feeling the same way. To be in community with those other people is amazing. It made me realize that the fat experience is so, so shared. We’re all going through a lot of the same things, across generations. And fashion is just another one of those issues. I can’t talk about fashion without seeing it as an advocacy issue. There are people who can’t find winter coats! There are people who literally don’t have a bra that fits them at their size. It doesn’t exist. I talked to someone who was a C-suite executive and she has nothing to wear to meetings with her colleagues! She had no suits that fit her. She talked about just how humiliating that was for her. When we say those quiet things out loud, they become advocacy issues because so many people have that shared story. So yeah, I talk about fashion, but it often becomes about sharing resources because there’s so many people that feel like certain things are inaccessible for them—and are truly inaccessible for them. The same thing goes for babywearing. So many parents said to me, “I didn’t even think I could wear my baby at this size.” And that’s not true! There are plenty of options for all bodies to wear their babies. But there’s a perception that this is an inaccessible thing to do because of marketing, because the lack of representation. VirginiaWas it scary to start sharing? Because I think a lot about how what advocacy asks of us is to share in this very personal way. It’s so important because you’re articulating something that someone else hasn’t been able to say out loud, but that also means you’re the person who has to say it out loud. MiaI have to take really long breaks from some of the work that I do. I will take a week or two long break where I don’t post content and I step away, because I hold so many people’s stories. Most of my time spent online is in DMs, sharing stories and resources. But that comes a lot with having to face my own experiences that were hard. It’s a lot to hold on to. So I do take a lot of breaks and I do experience burn out, but I also find it incredibly rewarding. It’s the part of this work that I love the most.VirginiaI’m glad you have that strategy. It has taken me a long time to figure out that I also need those breaks and need to build in that time. Previously my experience as a writer / advocate was as “medical mom,” and a sort of similar thing happens where once you’ve been public about your experiences, people send you their stories and those stories are often tragic and linked to my own trauma. I can imagine there’s a similar thing here where people are sharing with you traumatic experiences that you have also lived. MiaThat’s why I’m so passionate about resources. Some people will ask, “What’s your advice for feeling better about your body?” And there are so many strategies and there are people who do this professionally. But I tell people that how you feel about your body does not exist in a vacuum. It’s not just about your body, it’s about all the things in your life. And so I ask people to really reflect on how size-friendly their life is. How comfortable are you in your body on the day-to-day? Is your work chair comfortable? Is your partner supportive of you? Is your car comfortable? Do you have a winter coat to wear? What is your workspace like? How comfortable is your bed? Is your couch comfortable? You know, all these things. It’s about the world that we operate in and how comfortable we are in the body that we’re in right now. That really influences how positively we can feel about our body. It’s just not about how positively we feel about our thighs or our belly. It’s much bigger. VirginiaDiet culture teaches us that weight is this personal responsibility project. And we know that’s bullshit. But often, the next part of the conversation is that loving yourself is a personal responsibility project. And that’s also bullshit, in a world that’s not built to support your body. Instead of saying, “How do you do this internal work?” which may or may not need to happen at some point, it’s “How do you recognize how the larger systems of your life are failing to support you?” MiaYeah, it has to be looked at that way. And we can’t discount how chronic discomfort and chronic pain influence how we feel about our bodies. Sometimes there are small changes that can make you physically comfortable. But a lot of us who exist in larger bodies are so disconnected from our actual bodies that we can’t even tap into that. VirginiaSo I recently wrote about this big debate that comes up every so often about whether to get weighed or not at the doctor’s office, and if you do want to decline it how to decline and I think it’s an important conversation. If you have a fat friendly doctor, it basically becomes moot because even if you get on the scale, they’re not going to use that number against you. If you don’t have a fat friendly doctor and you’re fat, your weight will be weaponized whether or not you get on the scale. So you have been doing the hero’s work of building this database of fat-friendly health care providers. So tell us about this project.MiaI would love to, but first I do want to shout out Jen McLellan from Plus Size Birth. She’s @PlusMommy on Instagram. Literally, her work changed my life as a pregnant person. She wrote the book on plus sized pregnancy. Her resources on plus size birth are so critical. And she does a lot of work training other medical professionals on how to be more size friendly. I just want to shout out Jen, who I’m proud to say is my friend. She has a directory for for doulas, OBGYN, and midwives on her page. There’s another colleague of mine, Nicola Salmon, who runs Fat Positive Fertility. She also has a book and resources on fertility services for people who exist in larger bodies and how to support yourself as you’re navigating how to conceive in a larger body, which is incredibly fatphobic and very hard to do. She also has a directory! So I want to shout out those two resources. Obviously, there are other directories that exist, but my community is a very interactive community for Instagram. We share a lot of recs and I couldn’t get around not sharing recommendations for health care providers. People need size-friendly care providers. I don’t know that a lot of people understand how critical it is to connect with a medical professional that does not operate with a weight bias or weight discrimination. It’s a literal life or death issue. So I have a sheet—a Google Doc, basically—of providers that have been recommended to me that I’m pulling together into a more formal database as we speak, actually. But right now, it’s a Google sheet of shared recommendations. Having a size-friendly care provider means that you have people who are going to see a doctor more. A lot of preventative care can happen there. It also can mean a vastly different experience in your pregnancy, your birth, your postpartum. I have spoken to countless people who have been trying to conceive for years and have been told to freeze their eggs and seek weight loss surgery first. I have talked to people who have been unable to have doulas at their birth because of a high risk determination that was not evidence-based, because they are with a non size friendly care provider. I’ve talked to people who have serious issues, life or death issues, that were ignored for years because everything was so focused on weight. This is such a critical resource for people in larger bodies to have. Just to be able to do that work is the most important thing to me, out of all the things that I spend my days doing. VirginiaWe will definitely link to the size friendly care provider list. You also have a form for people who want to submit their providers. MiaYes, I hope that there’s going to be more of a universal database. Also Jen is focused on the training, and I think that’s something that needs to be talked about more. As well as the sharing of these gems of care providers that are somehow treating us with dignity and giving us medical care that we need. I was four months postpartum and I had decided to go to my PCP at the time. I had horrible, painful water retention and my legs were swollen. It was hard to move my legs. It was hard to sit down. She barely looked at my legs, she was focused on the fact that I had gained weight after my pregnancy. She really dismissed me. It was because of my community that six months later, I went back and I demanded that I get a water pill. Within like a week after that, my swelling was gone. I’m not directing anyone to go get a water pill, but I am directing them to advocate for themselves if they feel they’ve been dismissed. And immediately.VirginiaThat’s six months you were in pain.MiaI was in so much pain! Immediately, you have to seek out those other care providers. Those care providers that will treat you well and will listen to you, they do exist. You have to decide that you want this for yourself. If your insurance allows for it, if you’re able to make that change, please make that change. Because those care providers do exist.VirginiaI’m so glad Jen is working on the training piece because it seems like we haven’t even yet agreed upon the standards that you should have to meet to be a weight inclusive provider. What I was seeing come up in a lot of my DMs were people saying like, “Well, I don’t know if this person is really Health at Every Size, but at least they didn’t give me a hard time about X.” The bar is way too low about what we’re willing to accept. We need more of a consensus about what this really should look like and what you should be able to demand. I think fat people are just so used to expecting nothing—or worse than nothing—that it can be hard to even know where to start advocating for yourself. MiaIt also becomes really tricky, because fatness is a spectrum, right? So, someone who goes in at a certain weight might be treated one way. Someone who is 30 pounds over that weight might be treated vastly different and categorized completely different. Then you have further intersections of that—if you are BIPOC, if you are of the LGBTQI+ community—those intersections would make one healthcare provider considered size friendly by one person be completely different with another. So it does get tricky. I would always tell people to call first. Or if you don’t feel comfortable calling, maybe have a friend or a partner come with you or advocate for you. Or you can go in and and talk to the front desk and just say these are the things that I’m looking for. Or you can email, whatever. Somehow to just start the conversation and go in advocating for yourself and be ready to advocate for yourself because even with these directories, you never know what the experience is going to be like and you have to be prepared to advocate for yourself.VirginiaShilo George, who is a wonderful advocate on these issues, I interviewed them for a Health.com piece last year, and a strategy they have is writing up a one sheet of your primary health concerns and stating some of your boundaries. Just being clear about what you need from the provider. I think that can feel very scary and people are worried that they’re going to make the doctor angry or start off on the wrong foot. That tool may not be for everybody, but I just want to throw it out as another suggestion. I think there are ways to do it that can be really empowering and very helpful.MiaYeah, it could be good. It could be a gentle hand. There’s a lot of different ways to do it. Ragen Chastain, on Instagram, has amazing resources and a course that you can take and a lot of free resources, and has been doing this work for so long—discussing medical fatphobia and how to advocate for yourself. VirginiaI do think it’s worth thinking through what strategy feels comfortable to you. Maybe you want to write down that sheet and it’s not something you hand to the doctor but it just helps you organize your own thoughts. That could be a useful tool. MiaI just want people to know that if you are in a larger body, you deserve to be treated with respect in a doctor’s office. Shame is not a an effective tool. If you don’t want to talk about weight, you do not have to talk about weight. I want more people to realize that that’s even a thing, because there was a time in my life where I didn’t realize that was a thing.VirginiaI’m curious, for someone who’s doing the work and doing the work in a fat body, how do you think about your work as an influencer? What do you love about it? What do you want to see change?MiaThat is such a good question. I don’t know where the industry is going, but I do know that the representation has gotten much better since I started doing this in 2017. As more body positive influencers become parents, it’s changing the momfluencer world to be a little more inclusive. But I think that some of the strongholds in mommy brands and parenting brands need to also change with that. I’m not necessarily seeing that change in terms of choosing parents that are in different bodies or represent different c…
Full show notes at the publisherI remember the my daughter’s gastroenterologist saying, “Wow, you’ve really found a lot of great foods.” And, “We have so many patients who are less compliant than you.” I said, “Well, you know, it was really hard. It was, at minimum, a halftime job. Do all of your patients, families have the time and energy for this?” And he said, “Well probably not.”Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today I’m chatting with Debi Lewis, author of the beautiful new memoir Kitchen Medicine: How I Fed My Daughter Out of Failure to Thrive. Debi has also written for the New York Times, Bon Appetit, Huffington Post, and many other outlets. She lives in the Chicago suburbs with her husband and teenage daughters. This conversation is close to my heart. As most listeners know, my own daughter spent the first two years of her life dependent on a feeding tube. So reading Debi’s memoir hit home in all sorts of ways that we talk about, but I think this is a book that will resonate with so many of you. If you are a parent who has fed a kid—even if it went swimmingly, without medical complications—there is so much here that you will relate to about Debi’s journey, and the struggle to live up to external expectations about what feeding our kids looks like, and what it means for motherhood. CW: We do discuss critically ill kids, medical trauma, and fatphobic comments that people (maddeningly) make in those situations. Take care of yourself. PS. Friends! The Burnt Toast Giving Circle raised over $6,000 in less than a week! I am so insanely proud of us. And if you’ve been thinking about joining, we still need you! Here’s last week’s Burnt Toast ICYMI and the link to donate. Episode 35 TranscriptVirginiaHi Debi! Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your family, and your work?DebiMy name is Debi Lewis and I am the mom of two teenage girls, 19 and 16, and married to my husband and we live in the suburbs of Chicago. This is my first book that I’m very excited to share with all of your listeners. And in the rest of my day I make websites.VirginiaWe are here to talk about your new book Kitchen Medicine and when this episode airs, it will be your launch week. So folks, it’s in bookstores everywhere! It is just the most beautiful memoir of your experiences feeding your daughter, Sammi, who was diagnosed with failure to thrive at a really young age. Let’s start by talking a little bit about that failure to thrive diagnosis. Tell us about your experience with it, because I think it is such a horrific term in a lot of ways. It’s both very common and deeply misunderstood.DebiI think there’s a lot of things wrong with the term. “Failure to thrive” is not a very specific diagnosis. It’s kind of a catchall and the real search is for why. Why would you diagnose a child with that? It’s not the end, it’s a symptom. And the other problem is that it’s a wildly inaccurate term. Because if you had met my daughter during most of the years in which she fell under that umbrella of “failure to thrive,” you would never look at her and think this child is not thriving. This was a pink cheeked, energetic, bubbly, cute little girl, meeting all her developmental milestones except for the ones that required her to be tall enough. FTT was really diagnosing the fact that she wasn’t growing on the trajectory that doctors wanted. If you looked over many years, you could see that that growth trajectory was her own and steady and she didn’t drop very often and it was nothing that, in retrospect, I should have been worried about. But because she was tiny and because she wasn’t getting less tiny compared to her peers, we kept hearing that. And the way that diagnosis comes out is when a doctor or nurse points their finger at the parent and kind of wags it a little and says, "Whoops, Mom! She’s still failure to thrive! Got to get a few more calories in her," as though that isn’t the one thing you spend most of your life trying to do. As though I wasn’t chasing her around our house with a cup of Carnation Instant Breakfast already. So that’s the problem with that term. The diagnosis says “Failure To Thrive,” but what it sounds like, at least what it sounded like to me, is failure to feed.VirginiaThere’s so much inherent judgment and blame in that failure concept. The idea that we would be labeling a child’s body as a failure in some way is horrifying. And that we would be putting that on parents without giving the benefit of the doubt that, of course, this is a parent who loves their child and is trying so hard. It reminds me, too—on the flip side, obviously on Burnt Toast we talk a lot about kids in bigger bodies—and it’s so often the same thing. It’s the same judgment and the same assumption that somehow a parent needs to be informed of their child’s body, when you’re living in the world with this kid who’s not in the 50th percentile in whichever direction, so you’re getting the comments from strangers and family members and people all the time. People are watching your child eat or not eat. The idea of the medical establishment feeling like it’s their job to educate parents about this is something that I find problematic.DebiThere are things that we miss when all we’re focusing on is the amount of food or the number of calories, either too many or too few. You miss the the the mechanisms behind whatever you want to call it instead of Failure To Thrive—not meeting standard growth trajectory or some other kind of more descriptive term. The question should always be, if this is a problem, why do you think it’s a problem? And why do you think it’s happening? That is really hard for a parent to dig into, when all they can hear is that they’re doing it wrong.VirginiaIt’s narrowing the conversation in this really unhelpful way. The why is the piece that the parent can’t solve without the help of the medical establishment most of the time. If there is an underlying medical condition, of course you need doctors to be doing their best work to help you figure that out and treat that. Instead, when you’re put into this confrontational, adversarial relationship with doctors, then there’s this lack of trust, and no good comes of that.DebiIn both directions, right? We need to be able to find doctors that will work with us, but doctors also need to see us as parents as part of the team. If we’re shut down because we’re told we haven’t fed our kids enough Carnation Instant Breakfast that day, it’s hard to participate fully when you’re sort of drowning in shame. The erasure of self when you’re being called “mom” by someone who is not your child—it’s intense.VirginiaOh my gosh, I remember that from our years of hospital living with my older daughter. Yeah, just being “mom” and thinking, “I am Virginia. I’m a person beyond this.” And I get that doctors are busy and overworked—to be clear, Debi and I are also big fans of the doctors who have helped our kids. But taking that extra three seconds to learn someone’s name and look at them as a human is everything. DebiYeah, in a hospital setting I understand that every single person can’t learn my name, but a doctor who I’ve worked with, with my daughter, for three years should have written my name somewhere on the top of the chart.VirginiaSo, you and I both have this experience of the child who’s struggling to eat enough. And the medical system both blamed us and also did not have the answers. They’re saying “do Carnation Instant Breakfast,” as if that’s a newsflash. They don’t have any more revolutionary guidance for you. When did you realize that figuring out the food piece of this was falling completely on you? DebiIt happened several times that a medical professional would prescribe a specific diet to my daughter. She was on several restrictive diets over the years, trying to uncover what was going on. So they’d prescribe the diet and they’d hand me a packet of photocopied sheets with food information on them and then say, “Do you have any questions?” If I couldn’t think of something in the moment, reaching them later was really hard. There were actually several moments—because we’re a family that is vegetarian, most of these doctors didn’t want us to add meat to our daughter’s diet and complicate the process since it never had been in there before. But so many of these diets had a lot of meat in them. And when I would ask, "What would you replace meat with, in our case?" There would sort of be a blank stare and the question of had we’d ever tried beans. As vegetarians, we’ve heard of beans. We’ve tried them a few thousand times. So I think it was one day sitting on my kitchen floor with the photocopies and all my cookbooks, and realizing, there wasn’t another roadmap for me. Nobody was coming to rescue me. I was just going to have to figure this out. And partly, that’s why I wrote this book, because I think that’s a very common situation. If you enter any kind of online support group for any medical issue that has a diet associated with it, whether that’s families with children with type one diabetes or Celiac’s disease. It’s very peer supportive because there isn’t anything out there that we can find elsewhere. Feeling that it was all on me was overwhelming but also it meant I didn’t have to consult with anybody. It was quite empowering. Once I had my groove going, knowing that I could do it myself and seeing it as a creative challenge was sometimes really satisfying. In the course of all of this, as hard as it was, learning to cook this way helped me fall in love with food in a way that I couldn’t before. I had to see it as important fuel, and also love and nurturing. Doing that for my daughter was a way of doing it for myself, too.VirginiaThere was a phase in our journey when Violet was still on her feeding tube and we were doing a blended diet for the feeding tube, which is not something I recommend everyone do. It’s incredibly labor intensive. But at the place I was then, with our relationship around food, it was also the first opportunity I had to feel like I was feeding my child directly. And this is not to formula-shame, because formula also saved her life. But I had spent the first year and a half just pumping formula into her feeding tube. So to be able to take a more active role in cooking for her, even though she couldn’t yet eat by mouth, was healing. Whether or not that was an important part of her recovery, it was an important part of my recovery. So if you’re a parent in this kind of situation, finding the ways to find your confidence with it and find some joy in it is everything.DebiYeah, absolutely.VirginiaI wanted to talk a little more about the experience of being on these medically supervised diets. You talk about a couple of different ones in the book. We also had to do fat-free for a while, and that is a brutal diet to do with a small child. When you’re on one of these weird diets, people say really idiotic things to you about how your kid is eating and their own food stuff comes up. So you did touch on this a few times in the book, but I’m just curious to hear a little more about how diet culture intersected with all of this for you.DebiIt was bananas. I assumed that if an adult was on a diet like this, for medical reasons, that they would hear these kinds of things. I wouldn’t have been surprised. But I was horrified and shocked to hear people talking like this about my four-year-old to eight-year-old. There’s there’s one instance, I don’t talk about this in the book, but my daughter was on a six food elimination diet, which was no dairy, no soy, no eggs, no nuts, no wheat, and no fish—but we were already vegetarian. The results of that trial, of taking all of those things out, if it was successful, was that her esophagus would heal the damage it had sustained prior. And then we would be able to start adding things back in. But if she didn’t heal, then at the age of five, she would have been put on an elemental formula. Anybody who’s fed their babies elemental formula will recall the smell of elemental formula. And babies don’t know any different, but four-year-olds and five-year-olds certainly do. So we had been warned that if she ended up on this formula, there was a chance she wouldn’t be able to bring herself to take it in and she’d need an NG-tube or a G-Tube. I was really afraid of that. I know I would have been grateful for it if it had kept her alive and healthy, but I really hoped it wouldn’t happen. And a friend of mine said, "Well, the upside of that, if she ends up living on that kind of food for the rest of her life, is that she’s never going to be fat. And she’s never going to have, you know, all these emotional issues around food. At least you could know that." I remember where I was when she said it. I remember how it felt when she said it. My instinct was to kick her out of my house. I never wanted to talk to her again. I just couldn’t believe someone would say that there was an upside to never eating food again.VirginiaI’m just taking a minute with that one. This idea that being fat is something to be so avoided, even if the cost is actually eating food. That’s so wrong and harmful. DebiIt was awful. And I was angry, really angry in the moment, especially because I like food. I’m not afraid to say I think food is fantastic. I think it’s delicious. I think it’s adventure and joy, and love and community, and all of those things. I didn’t want my daughter to miss out on it. But when I really thought about it, I also felt really sad for my friend that her relationship with food was so fraught and so negative, that she could see the upside to never being able to eat again. I mean, it’s a sign of sickness to feel that way.VirginiaIt is a deep heartbreak to feel that alienated from food that the idea of injecting a formula into your stomach feels better, which is what life on a G-tube with elemental formula is. I also have so much gratitude for G-tubes and they are a valid way to feed somebody who needs to be fed that way. But you are missing out on a lot of life if that’s how you’re eating.DebiIt’s not that I think there wouldn’t have been joy, community, family, and love in my daughter’s life without eating regular food. Of course, there would have been. But it was a big part of our lives, as it is a big part of most people’s lives. I was hoping that it wouldn’t be necessary.There were other times that people said other crazy things to us about about her diets, including on that fat-free diet. Like when an administrator at her school crouched down and asked her how it was going. We both said it was awful and we only had three weeks left or whatever. And then this administrator asked my eight-year-old daughter to make a list of all of the foods she was eating so this person could then use that list to take off her holiday weight or whatever. I said “No!” loudly in that moment and pulled Sammi away from her. And I said, "This isn’t safe. Eating this way isn’t healthy for anybody. It’s only for right now because of the complications she has had in surgery, and it wouldn’t be good for you." Her response was, "Oh, I don’t care. As long as it helps me lose this weight." And she wasn’t the only person who talked like that. Not everybody talked like that to Sammi, but many people talk like that to me about it.VirginiaYeah, we got a lot of those comments, too. I remember combing the grocery store aisles because the other thing about doing a fat-free diet when I did it about five years ago, is fat-free is really out of vogue with diet culture in general. So it’s hard to find fat-free foods now. I’m combing the aisles looking for the one dusty box of Snackwell’s. Because what cookie can I give a three year old who can’t eat fat? And people were still saying, “Oh, lucky kid,” or something. It’s enraging. And, as you say, it’s also deeply depressing because it’s speaking to thi…
Full show notes at the publisherThese are the folks who are going to a state capitol and deciding whether to expand Medicaid or deciding whether there’s one abortion clinic left in the state or deciding whether there’s LGBTQ protections for folks on the job. It’s wild that there aren’t more eyes on it, but it’s not the way we’re trained.Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fat phobia, parenting and health. Today I am chatting with Melissa Walker, who is the head of Giving Circles at The States Project. This is a little bit of an unusual episode for Burnt Toast! I know you come here for the analysis of diet culture and anti-fat bias, but today we’re gonna save democracy. I am so excited to launch the Burnt Toast Giving Circle, which will raise money to flip state legislatures in battleground states. If you have been in a rage about the state of our country and you want to do something about it, I am hoping this will be your thing! Because together we can have a huge impact. I’m setting a goal that our can raise $10,000 — which is 1,000 Burnt Toast listeners giving ten bucks each. There are a lot more than a thousand people who listen to this podcast and read this newsletter. So even if you’ve only got five dollars or two dollars to give, please join us. And if you want to give more, that is great, too. (And keep listening, we’ve got more ideas for how you can get even more involved.) Episode 34 TranscriptVirginiaWhen I think about the political issues that are keeping me up at night, it’s stuff like: What’s going to happen when we lose Roe? Why did Build Back Better fail so spectacularly around paid family leave and child care? What is happening in Ukraine right now? Thinking nationally about politics is how I’ve been trained to think about politics. So, let’s start by helping people (me) understand why does state government matter so much? MelissaState governments have really been overlooked for a very long time. When I started looking into this work, which honestly was in late November 2016, I started to understand that most folks don’t really know who their state representatives are. When I looked up who my state senator was, I had never heard of him. I did not have eyes on the people going to Albany for me. I started to understand that everything that I was worried about, and everything that I cared about, in terms of our country was actually being controlled in state legislatures and not in Washington, DC. State legislatures are in charge of everything from environmental policy to education funding to gun safety to healthcare to civil rights. They’re also in charge of the very core of our democracy: Voting rights are decided state by state. State legislatures decide whether to suppress or expand voting. They have the power to gerrymander. They are drawing the district lines that decide who goes to the state legislature, who goes to Congress, who goes to Washington DC. So I started to see that there were all these kitchen table issues being decided in state legislatures and that they were also incredible tools of federal power. A lot of things started to make sense to me that hadn’t before. I started to think about things like my home state of North Carolina, where the bathroom bill passed, and I started to understand that lawmakers in Raleigh did that. Things like the Stand Your Ground gun law in Tallahassee that let Trayvon Martin’s murderer go free (and then passed in 25 other states)—that was lawmakers in Florida, and then in those other states. And in Flint, Michigan, I realized, oh, that’s a Lansing problem. That’s not a Washington DC problem. VirginiaThis is blowing my mind. Why do you think we are so trained to focus on Washington? Why am I now having this epiphany? Why don’t we think about states?MelissaWell, it’s complicated. There are really 50 mini Congresses in this country and they’re deciding things state-by-state. These are local races. They do not get national attention. The truth is that there is someone who’s been paying attention to state legislatures and it’s the radical right. They’ve been organizing for state legislative power for a very long time. From 2010 to 2016, we lost nearly 1,000 state legislative seats. And in those states where Republican majorities took over, people’s lives got bad. They defunded education. They put in right to work laws. They gutted environmental protections. And when people’s lives got bad, they didn’t say, oh, that must be my state senator, I’m gonna go down to Main Street and talk to them, because they have an office there (because they do). Most people don’t know who their state senators are, even maybe that they have one. So they blame what they could see on what they hear about on the news every day, which is Washington DC, often the president, sometimes something about Congress. The roots of Trumpism were being seeded in state legislatures. It’s a body that operates in darkness and it really has been overtaken by special interests.VirginiaIt makes me think a lot about the role of the media here. You and I both come from journalism and those headlines are always Washington-based. Local media is so decimated right now. Local newspapers are so underfunded, and non-existent in so many places, that they’re not able to play that crucial role. And I mean, how many times as a national magazine editor did you say, “That story is too local, that’s not going to be interesting to our national readers.?” It happens all the time. Melissa When we hear “Oh, Texas just passed this law limiting abortion,” people say, “Well! That Ted Cruz is terrible.” And this law has nothing to do with Ted Cruz. This is lawmakers in Austin who are in the state legislature and they only officially have session every two years. Something that people don’t know about state legislators is that in 40 states, it’s a part time job. It pays very, very little. These are the folks who are going to a state capitol and deciding whether to expand Medicaid or deciding whether there’s one abortion clinic left in the state or deciding whether there’s LGBTQ protections for folks on the job. This is where this stuff has been decided. It’s wild that there aren’t more eyes on it, but it’s not the way we’re trained.VirginiaFor those of us who live in blue states, why should we care about the laws in other states? MelissaWell, states are meant to be laboratories for democracy. Like marriage equality going from state to state to federal or healthcare going from Hawaii to Massachusetts to becoming the ACA. They really are meant to be incubators of good policy, ideally. Right now, a lot of states are incubators for voter suppression bills and bans on choice and bans on trans kids playing sports. Those laboratories for democracy should not be allowed to be laboratories for autocracy. We should also care about state legislatures because they are immense tools of federal power. As I said, state legislatures in most states have the power to draw the district lines that decide who goes to Congress. So they are promoting their own party in many cases in the drawing of those lines and making it so that the folks in power at the federal level are coming from from the party of their choice. They also control voting laws. So if you care who wins the presidency, you should care whether votes are limited in certain states or not. The last thing I’ll say is, if you care about the Supreme Court, you should care about state legislatures. Because the Supreme Court does not write laws, they rule on laws, many of which are written in state legislatures—sometimes explicitly written in state legislatures to rise up and challenge a Supreme Court ruling, like in the case of the Mississippi law that’s currently challenging Roe v. Wade.VirginiaThis feels like something we should have been covering in 10th grade social studies and we definitely didn’t. Of course, some of my listeners are going to be like, “Why are we talking about state legislatures on a podcast about diet culture?” So we’re going to connect those dots for everyone right now. Yes, this is a podcast about anti-fat bias and diet culture, and there are a lot of reasons why people don’t realize how political those issues are. You know, we think in terms of body positivity and body image and we don’t think enough about ending weight discrimination, which is absolutely a legal and social justice issue. And a really great example of the potential of state legislature is Massachusetts, which right now as we’re recording this, has a bill pending that would prohibit size discrimination. That’s one of the first places in the country that would be formally legislating against fatphobia. I’m curious if that’s at all on your radar. As you said, states are incubators. So is this the place where we could be getting this work done?MelissaAlthough we know that federal law does prohibit employers from firing employees on the basis of race, color, age, gender, religion, or national origin, those laws don’t provide any protection for weight discrimination, even though obviously, there’s plenty of evidence that it’s a real phenomenon. And that’s also true for LGBTQ+ discrimination—federal law does not protect against that, but certain state laws do. Many states have made progress on that front. But so far, the only state that I found that has an explicit law on the books that forbids discrimination and employment based on weight is Michigan. So Michigan has a law that passed in 1976. It also forbids discrimination on the basis of age and height, but that is the only state at this point that has that on the books. I believe Massachusetts would be the second.VirginiaWell, way to go Michigan! There was some amazing fat activism happening in the 70s and I’m guessing a lot of those folks were in Michigan and got that done. And I guess the point we want to make here is that another reason to be focusing on state legislatures is that there’s real potential for this issue to get traction in states with your state senator down on Main Street, where you can go have a conversation about this, as opposed to ever getting this issue to have traction in Congress.MelissaLooking up who your state reps are, knowing them, and then making them people you that you talk to and really engage with and advocate with is a great thing. State reps will take your call. They will take your meeting. They are not as busy as your federal reps, and they are interested in having an engaged voting bloc—or they should be. You have a lot of influence there. I’ll also say that this is a method that’s been used by really big movements. After Sandy Hook, when federal gun legislation just didn’t move, Moms Demand Action focused on state legislatures. That’s why you may have seen the Moms Demand folks out there in their red t-shirts, gathered in state capitals. Because they know the only way to move on this right now is state by state by state by state. They’ve been able to pass red flag laws in a lot of states and get things done. So it is definitely a way in. I would also like to argue that it is a more foundational shift than changing federal law, because when you shore up something at a state by state by state level, you’re really shoring it up. A law like the Affordable Care Act, that is a federal health care law but twelve states still haven’t expanded Medicaid. You’ve got these majorities in states that are in charge of implementing federal law and if they don’t have that law as part of their state priority, it’s just not always a guarantee. So it’s really great to shore things up at the foundations.VirginiaAnd the the legal and social justice issues that come up around size, things like parental rights, health care access—all of these really are local issues. These are issues where you need to see the change made in your school or in your local child welfare office, or in the doctor’s offices in your community. Okay, let’s talk a little bit about what is happening this year. Talk to us about what states are you most worried about or focused on? Where do we have the chance to have some real impact?MelissaAbsolutely. So, yes, the midterms are coming. There will be so much national media focused on Congress, on the US House, the US Senate—and, of course, those are important. This year, we have so far identified six states where we think we can be most impactful and those are Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania. And then Maine, where we want to protect a blue majority, and Nebraska where we’re trying to defend against a Republican supermajority. In the first states I mentioned, we are trying to change the balance of power in the legislature to flip those states. What’s interesting about these races is, as I mentioned, they’re still local. They’re often won on the margins and we’re very, very close in states like Arizona, where just one seat in each State Chamber would tie the chamber and two seats in each State Chamber would flip the chamber. Michigan, it’s the same low numbers: three seats in each chamber would tie; four seats in each chamber would flip. After the 2020 census, we’re seeing in certain states that we have fairer maps. In Michigan it’s because of a ballot initiative that instituted the drawing of maps by an independent commission. VirginiaWait, I just need to pause there. That’s new that they’re not always drawn by an independent commission?MelissaIt’s true.VirginiaOkay, taking a breath with that.MelissaI know. They’re drawn by the legislative majority who, of course, want to secure their own power. VirginiaThat’s not at all screwed up. So yeah, good job, Michigan!MelissaSo, we’re seeing better maps in a couple of states. These are places where we really see the potential to shift power. And, I will say this: It is often cheaper to change the balance of power in a State Chamber than it is to win a single competitive congressional seat. Because congressional races cost millions and millions of dollars and state legislative races don’t. It is absolutely a place where there is major bang for your buck, in terms of trying to affect the outcomes.VirginiaWe are distracted by those congressional campaigns and by the whole federal narrative when this is where real work is happening. MelissaOne moment to define it is that in 2020, we saw Sarah Gideon run against Susan Collins in Maine for the Senate seat. She finished her campaign with $15 million left over. Which was much bigger than The States Project’s entire budget in 2020 to work on twelve state legislatures. We know that these big races get a lot of attention and a lot of emotional giving, right? You’re angry at Susan Collins, you’re gonna give money to her opponent. You’re angry at Mitch McConnell. You’re angry at Lindsey Graham. And those races tend to kind of eat up people’s emotions and have them just doing that panic giving. And that’s not strategic political giving.VirginiaIt’s not. It’s just what I do at five in the morning when I’m angry. So, panic giving is not actually sound political strategy?MelissaRight. But it’s hard to know where to dig in. Those are the places that are in the spotlight. That’s why I think it’s really exciting to do something like a Giving Circle where folks are coming together and have this strategic focus on the specific district in a state that it’s going to take to change the balance of power.VirginiaYes. Let’s talk about how this works. What is a Giving Circle? And how is the Burnt Toast Giving Circle going to either help flip a state or shore up a majority? Walk us through the process.MelissaGiving Circles are groups of people who come together to raise resources to try to change the balance of power in a state. Every Giving Circle starts with one person who says, “Okay, I’m raising my hand, I want to start this, I want to do it,” and then engaging the other people in their orbit, whether it’s neighbors, friends, listeners, readers. And saying to them, “Will you do this with me?” And what it…
Full show notes at the publisherI think any time you’re wondering, “is it a diet?” And they have a bridal program? The answer is obviously yes.
We’re doing something a little different with this month’s bonus episode! I polled folks on Twitter and Insta about the diet trends that are bugging you most right now, so I could spend this episode deconstructing their marketing. And also just, um, reacting to the nonsense? My algorithm is a mess now, but that’s how committed I am to helping you sort the bullshit from the… other kinds of bullshit. We’ve got mysterious green powders, we’ve got Internet doctor scams, we’ve even got a gizmo you can breath into every day for a little dose of oxygenated judgment!
So enjoy this preview. And if you’d like to listen to the whole thing, you’ll need to be a Burnt Toast subscriber. It’s just $5 per month or $50 for the year.
Producing a weekly podcast and newsletter requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people, and paid subscriptions make all of our work possible. Subscriber support also makes it possible for me to keep most Burnt Toast content free and accessible to all, and to offer comp subscriptions to those who need them. (If that’s you, just email and let me know, no questions asked!)
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Thanks for supporting independent, anti-diet journalism!
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
Follow us on social!
Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.
Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.
Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.
Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
I think any time you’re wondering, “is it a diet?” And they have a bridal program? The answer is obviously yes.
Hello and welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. It’s time for your February bonus episode!
We’re doing something a little different this month, because I’ve realized that bonus episodes are a great chance to play around with some different formats and workshop ideas that may become regular episodes. So please tell me if you like this and think it’s genius or if you don’t ever want me to do this again.
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
Follow us on social!
Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.
Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.
Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.
Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
Teens have the ability to know how much they need to eat. And when we interfere with that, as parents, we start to break down their natural ability. When we model that we trust our children to listen to their bodies, that they are in charge of their bodies, it also models consent.Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today I’m chatting with Signe Darpinian who is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, certified eating disorder specialist, and host of Therapy Rocks, a personal growth podcast. She is also the co-author of No Weigh!: A Teen's Guide to Positive Body Image, Food, and Emotional Wisdom and the new book Raising Body Positive Teens: A Parent’s Guide to Diet-free Living, Exercise, and Body Image. I’m really thrilled to have Signe on the podcast because she is someone who can answer all your questions about intuitive eating and anti-diet life with teenagers.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.ICYMI! I joined Signe on her podcast last week. We focused on how to talk about fatness and fatphobia with teenagers; listen here.VirginiaI am such a fan of your work, and especially the new book. Can you tell our listeners a little more about yourself and your work?SigneI’ve been treating eating disorders now for over 20 years. And I actually had the good fortune of being exposed to non-diet and weight-inclusive approaches right in the beginning, when I was really green. It’s something that I was very lit up about right from the beginning. It’s been interesting in 20+ years to see the different trends. Like you talked about in your book, The Eating Instinct, to see the trends of diet culture, which were more straightforward in the beginning, like Jenny Craig, to today’s wellness culture. A couple other things about me: I started a podcast right in the beginning of the pandemic. And I’m what some people call a single mother by circumstance, a little bit different than a single mom by choice. It was a happy accident! It can be interesting being a single parent and doing this food piece. My lived experience is more like, well, we’re going to do it this way. That’s not always a parallel to what other people experience — doing food when partners feel differently about diet culture can be tough.I have a 12-year-old daughter and this book was a much bigger project. My daughter threatened to stab the book in the heart when it comes out. VirginiaIs that because of the time it took or because she disagrees with the content?SigneShe doesn’t really know the content. It’s a funny question because the teen book is actually just perfect for her. Age 12 would be a great starting age. She has it on her bookshelf and I asked her if she would consider reading it. She’s like, “Only if you pay me.” I’m like, “Are we talking about twenty bucks?” She’s like, “More like one hundred.” I’m like, “Forget it.” So no, it’s not the content because I don’t think she’ll ever know. She has no interest. It’s more like, you know how it is with writing. It took a lot of time. It was a much bigger project and those last few weeks are pretty daunting. It’s a lot of hard work—and really fun! But she was ready for it to be done, which I understand.VirginiaMy eight-year-old often asks, “Oh, are you still writing that book?” And there’s a little tone there! A little judgment. She’s like, “How many chapters are you trying to do?”SigneVirginia, what about your recent post about your eight-year-old never wanting to be a writer unless she had to for the money?VirginiaI was like, “Oh, how do I explain to you that if you have to do things for the money, this is not the thing?”SigneI’ve definitely got a reluctant reader over here.VirginiaMine’s a reader, but she does not like writing. She feels sorry for me with this career choice. Okay, so the big reason I wanted to have you on is because I get lots of questions from parents of teenagers. I really relate to the sense of panic I get in these emails where parents say, “I’m just now discovering concepts like intuitive eating or diet culture or fatphobia.” Maybe during their kids’ earlier childhood they were more controlling around food or they were on diets themselves. And they’re just feeling like, well, now, what do I do? My kid is 14 or 16 or 20, and this is a shift we want to make. But is it too late?SigneThe short answer is: It’s never too late. We’re not modeling perfectionism, as parents. We’re modeling humanity. I don’t know about you, Virginia, but I try to do my best in modeling good mistake-making. I’m really taking ownership for my part in things more than I’m trying to model being perfect. Well, because I couldn’t anyway. I’ve tried that it doesn’t work. We are all immersed in diet culture and it’s really, really sneaky. There’s so much morality around food. Parents are in the same culture. Just thinking about their evolution, the evolution of their body image, and the messaging they received when they were young. What was going on at their table with food? What was happening with body image? And the conditioning that they come with. So on one hand, I think parents hold a lot of power. Our hope in writing the parent book is that we can give parents a point of reference for what a friendship with food might look like or a friendship with body might look like. Because we’ve really lost our way as a culture. We hope for them to become awake and aware about when did they become disembodied? When did they become disconnected from their own body? Thinking about ways that they might like to be different as it relates to food and body image, so that they can extend it outward. I have friends, for example, that by now know about body positivity and intuitive eating. They know the right things to say, but there’s an incongruency with what they’re saying and what they’re doing themselves. Our kids and our teens, they can sniff out those incongruencies. So we can think about the ways that we would like to be different and think of it in terms of a process, not a finished product. I think that’s a great starting place for parents.VirginiaWhat you’re really modeling is recognizing mistakes and learning from mistakes. Because kids know we’re making mistakes all the time. They’re not fooled. For us to own that and say, “Yeah, I’ve been getting this wrong, and I’m trying to do it differently.” That feels so powerful. I would imagine kids would appreciate it, even if they don’t say, “Oh, thanks, Mom, I really appreciate that.” What does this shift look like if you’re starting this with older kids? Concepts like Division of Responsibility can be so helpful when you’re developing this with younger kids but the guidance gets a little hazier as kids get older. They are more adept at preparing their own food, they’re out in the world more. They can take more responsibility in some senses. Parents often don’t know how and when to really hand over that responsibility.SigneThe Division of Responsibility, the way that I understand it, is the parent is in charge of the when to eat and the what to eat. I like to put a lot of emphasis on being very mindful about the what to eat not being only “healthy” food. It can be problematic when somebody is in charge of the what to eat and they are immersed in their own diet culture. That could go really badly. Then of course, the child or the teen is in charge of the how much. I want to make one disclaimer about Division of Responsibility. In my caseload, by the time people come to me, there is already a very serious problem. There is already a clinical eating disorder. The thing that I’m hearing most often from parents, when there’s already a clinical eating disorder, is “I just thought they were trying to eat healthier and exercise more.” That’s the way this looks right now. I’m on the frontlines in this work. If my daughter came to me and said she wanted to eat healthier, I would respond to it in the same way as if she told me she wanted to start smoking cigarettes. VirginiaSo it’s a big red flag.Signe“Eating healthier” is a big red flag. And just don’t want to do any false advertising around Division of Responsibility. VirginiaIt doesn’t work for people in the acute stages of an eating disorder. That’s not where you start when you’re in treatment. SigneExactly. Division of Responsibility is going to really look very different with my 12-year-old than it is with somebody else’s. At one end of the continuum, we have households that may have been modeling externally imposed restriction. Externally imposed restriction might look like a parent micromanaging a teen or a child’s food and feeding them in a way that really has to do with their concern about their weight. On the other end, you might have a household that almost looks too loose. That’s actually the the household that I had, up until my daughter was in kindergarten or first grade. I was so aware of attuned ways of eating and how important a more connected way of eating is that I actually wasn’t providing enough structure for my particular child. That doesn’t mean that other children couldn’t do just fine with a very loose household with food. In my own circumstance, my daughter was needing more structure and guidance around food the same way she needed a bedtime. With teenagers, I think parents can still incorporate a lot of the Division of Responsibility paradigm. Making sure that the foods are there. One of the guidelines that we use in our book is making foods equal. Not only equal in morality, but equal in availability. Equal in availability might look like if the refrigerator was full of foods that sort of matched an “all foods fit” paradigm, not just the ones deemed “healthy.” Foods are there and equally easy to grab. Maybe there’s cubed up fruit and there’s cheese sticks and there’s fun size candy. They’re equally easy to grab. We can then grab the food that our bodies are actually calling for versus what’s easiest. I also want to make the disclaimer that we don’t always have the time to do the preliminary work to make foods equally easy to grab, equal in availability. So I just want to name that sometimes we will, sometimes we won’t. No big. One of the things that really resonates with me is not micromanaging what they’re up to with their food during the day. They’re clearly going to have a lot more autonomy with food. Some of them are driving now. They have their own money. They’re going to friends’ houses. So you would never assess or take an inventory of what was eaten that day and base your dinner decision or dessert decision on what they had during the day.VirginiaThat’s their opportunity to be practicing these skills. It’s not on you to say that if they had ice cream after school, then they can’t have cookies with dinner.SigneExactly. If I asked my daughter, “What did you guys have for snack today?” Like, if I know somebody brought something in. If my intention is to see if she had sweets and that will determine if we have dessert tonight, then I’m not going to say anything. But if my intention is just genuinely, I’m curious, then I might ask. With teenagers there’s another component that comes in and this piece would really come more from my co-author Wendy Sterling, the dietitian. She says the teenage years are also a really nice time to start introducing some basic food prep skills. Maybe they’re in charge of one recipe for dinner or maybe they’re putting together their own lunch. You’re making the food available and accessible, but they’re in charge of some of those chores that are related to food prep or cleanup as it relates to a meal. One other thing I want to bring in around that, and this comes from a podcast I did with somebody who’s an expert on adulting, Julie Lythcott-Haims. She was talking about how when we grew up we didn’t experience a culture of busy-ness in quite the same way that we’re seeing today. Sometimes, these meal prep chores, we’re not having our kids do them, because they’re too busy. Everybody is too busy. I can empty the dishwasher quicker than they can, I can set the table quicker than they can, so I might as well just do it for them. So I just wanted to bring in how the culture of busyness may show up in what we’re talking about, as well.VirginiaI think that applies for parents of all ages. I even think about that now with my eight-year-old, she could be clearing the table more. We do have them clear their own plates, but we were just having a conversation about starting to build in small opportunities for these skills. Because I want a 16-year-old who can make her own lunch! I don’t want to be packing lunches when they’re 16.SigneBefore before I did that interview, I don’t know that I was as aware of it, you know? My 12-year-old is like, “Can you get me some water?” I’m like, “Hey, you’re as tall as I am. Go get it yourself!” Right now I’m noticing how often I’m like there’s no time for her to empty the dishwasher. I’m just going to do it. Julie Lythcott-Haims, who was a Stanford Dean for several years, noticed a trend that a lot of these kids that are entering school nowadays, it looks like somebody has been cutting their meat for too long. Way too long.One other skill, as far as parents thinking about first steps that they might take in getting more attuned and connected to their body’s wisdom, is the hunger meter. We have a pretty basic hunger meter, which is one to ten. At the higher end is fullness. So, say six to ten, those are the fullness gradations of the hunger meter. At the lower end, the one would be famished, starving. A three would be the first sign of appetite, whatever that feels like for a particular person. When somebody is going from eating with a diet mentality or eating “from the chin up,” which means reducing their food choices to nutrients only and what I “should” and “shouldn’t” eat. When you go from years of eating from the chin up in a very disconnected, disembodied way and you’re going to start trying to eat from your body’s cues, the hunger meter can be a nice tool. Some people aren’t calibrated enough to start eating intuitively and so they might need to do mechanical eating. A simplified definition of mechanical eating might be eating by the clock on the wall. It may require some calibration first.VirginiaThat’s for folks who maybe in the past have been skipping meals or eating really erratically, so this is to make sure you are eating during the day and not skipping and ending up over-hungry.SigneThinking about getting recalibrated, doing some mechanical eating, ultimately that might give you some access to your body’s cues. And then the hunger meter as a tool may come in handy. We get told a lot that that’s probably one of the most helpful tools, and we have a chapter on the different gradations. Here’s what it would look like once you’re recalibrated. Maybe you just ate lunch at noon and it’s two o’clock and you’re feeling a pull toward food. Okay, so just trying to identify where you might be on, on the hunger meter. Maybe you’re at a five and you’re neutral. You’re not hungry and you’re not full, but you’re feeling that pull toward food. The hunger meter is meant to really just be used as a tool that you’re checking in and deciding from the inside. Becoming awake and aware about where you are. It’s all about choice. The target behavior here is really about creating a little bit of space between you and the food and just assessing where you are. oh, I’m at a five, I’m neutral. I’m not hungry, I’m not full. Just to be awake and aware of what’s going on for you—and then what you do after that is up to you. That’s your choice. The intervention or the target isn’t so much what you end up doing with the food—maybe you eat it, maybe you don’t, who cares? The intervention is just becoming awake and aware so you have…
Full show notes at the publisherI have only recently put my foot down and said, “No, I deserve to be here and I will be here and I’m staying here,” and I’ve been in the industry almost 10 years. It’s taken a really long time to not only convince people that I have the talent and the staying power, but also convince myself.Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today I am chatting with Kyeshia Jaume, a senior apparel designer for Forever21. She’s also one of the only working designers at a major corporate fashion label, who both makes plus size clothes and lives in a larger body. Regular newsletter readers will know Kyeshia from Jeans Science. She’s working hard to change things in fashion from the inside. Her story is really important and I’m so excited to share this conversation with you. 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.Also! I had a great chat with Signe Darpinian, host of the Therapy Rocks! Podcast on Monday. We focused on how to talk about fatness and fatphobia with teenagers; listen here. Episode 31 TranscriptVirginiaHi, Kyeshia. Thank you for being here. KyeshiaHi, Virginia. I’m so excited to be joining you.VirginiaTell us how you got into fashion design. What called you to this work?KyeshiaUp until maybe 11th grade, I wanted to go to music school to pursue music. I just wanted to be a singer and I loved music. But I took a fashion merchandising class my senior year of high school and just fell in love with it. And I was like, I could do this. I could be in the fashion industry. I feel like I could really influence and impact it in some way. My fashion merchandising teacher was amazing, really encouraging, really excited about hearing that I wanted to be in the industry. And I remember she said something specific to me: “We need more people like you in the industry.” VirginiaWere you interested in clothes as a kid? Like always playing dress-up, that kind of thing? KyeshiaYeah, I was. My mom is a very fashionable person. She always made sure that we had really fashionable things to wear. And she was always very strong about individuality and really making sure that we stay true to ourselves and not follow trends that other people were doing. It’s so interesting, too, being a child who loves fashion, but also a child who couldn’t wear the fashion. Because I remember only being able to shop at like, Dillards and JC Penney. I couldn’t go into Limited Too. We would get Delia’s catalogs and I remember just flipping through and circling things I wished that I could wear. Back then that’s how you shopped.VirginiaThe Delia’s catalog was formative to my existence. Remember the belts with the seatbelt buckles? Which, now that I think about it, is many layers of problems. We know airplanes are not a size inclusive space, but I didn’t really think about it as an eighth grader. I just wanted that belt so badly. KyeshiaI wanted to be a Delia’s girl! I wanted to wear the denim. I wanted to wear the fun prints. Even like the house section, the bedding. I was all about it. Also I was a Nylon girl. I remember just dreaming and wishing that could be me. I wished I could have that stuff for myself and just being really sad that I couldn’t. VirginiaEspecially back then, those were not brands that were remotely size inclusive—or really any kind of inclusive. You were seeing the same skinny white girl over and over again in that Delia’s catalog. The low rise jeans and all that visible torso really, really did a number on our generation. And fashion, historically and currently, is a very thin, white industry. So how has that been for you, as a plus size woman and a woman of color getting into those rooms?KyeshiaI was born and raised in Utah. Utah’s like a bubble. You don’t understand anything outside of what your world is inside this very cookie cutter picture. Not only that, but I was a biracial brown girl who was not Mormon being raised in the middle of Utah. Religion is a very big part of the community in Utah, especially where I was living. The county that we lived in everybody calls “Happy Valley.” VirginiaIt’s an evocative name.KyeshiaSo I don’t think that I was fully aware of my diversity and how different I was from other people. I lived in my own little world. I moved to LA after university, to pursue fashion. I went to FIDM. I was aware of how different the world is outside of Utah, but not fully aware of how I would be treated differently, not only for the color of my skin, but also being a fat, brown woman in the industry. Going through fashion school, I think a lot of my peers underestimated me. I didn’t understand how hard it was going to be to get in the industry. I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to advocate for myself and to really say, “I deserve a seat at this table.” I have only recently put my foot down and said, “No, I deserve to be here and I will be here and I’m staying here,” and I’ve been in the industry almost 10 years. It’s taken a really long time to not only convince people that I have the talent and the staying power, but also convince myself. The fashion industry is such a girls club and a popularity contest. No matter what company I’ve been at, that has been consistent. There’s always the cool girls. There’s always the people who have each other’s backs. Even if they’re not very good at their jobs, because they look the part and they play the part, they’ll keep the part.VirginiaDo you feel like people have a preconceived notion of what the fashion girl needs to look like?KyeshiaAbsolutely. Not only that, but my name is Kyeshia. Straight out of the gate, you’ve already got an idea about who I am, without even meeting me. You’re probably already overlooking my resume because my name is too hard to say and you’re probably assuming what race I am, without even diving deeper to see what kind of skill set I have. It was hard, for a long time, to constantly feel like every single day I was going to work I don’t belong here. But this is what I love to do. And once you enter corporate fashion, you’re also up against people who have such thin bodies. Their whole lives are about diet culture and being thin and fitting into clothes and fitting a certain beauty standard. Lunches are always talking about who’s dieting and the next diet you’re on. I was very concerned about why we always had to talk at the lunch table about what we’re eating and why we’re eating it. VirginiaSo exhausting. And it’s so boring.KyeshiaIt’s so boring! Like, “Oh, Kyeshia. What did you bring for lunch today? Your food always looks so good. Oh, I just have a salad today. I’m so bummed about it.” When I’m eating leftover pasta for lunch. Like, it doesn’t matter. I’m feeding my body. The whole thing is uncomfortable. You start thinking well, I should just eat at my desk because I can’t handle another day of this diet talk and listening to people hating their bodies. Because if they hate their bodies, I can’t imagine what they think about mine.VirginiaThat narrative is so toxic. I remember when I worked in women’s magazines, my nightmare was office birthdays. Magnolia Bakery cupcakes were very big back then—they were the Sex and the City cupcakes. So someone would always order this tray of amazing cupcakes and then it was like cupcake chicken. Nobody could eat the cupcake. All these women would just stand around being like, “Oh, no, no! I couldn’t! Oh, I’ll just have like a little lick of the frosting.”KyeshiaThe funniest thing is when you bring donuts into a design room. Everybody wants the donuts. You know everybody wants the donuts. But you know what we will do? We’ll take a knife and we’ll cut it into fourths and we’ll just eat little pieces. Everybody is going back and forth to the table to get a little bite of donut and it’s just like, take the freakin’ donut. Just eat the donut and be okay with it! But it’s weird, every company I’ve been to is like that.VirginiaThe irony, too, of food on photoshoots for fashion. These elaborate spreads for lunch?KyeshiaIt’s such a waste. There is also this feeling of, I have to constantly look like I’m busy because of the stigma of I’m fat, so I must be lazy. I’ve always heard I have no sense of urgency. I don’t know what that looks like. What does a sense of urgency look like? Running from place to place? For what? VirginiaYou’re not putting out fires, you’re designing clothes. KyeshiaI’m answering the emails. I’m hitting my deadlines. I’m doing my job. So I don’t know what you mean by, “there’s no sense of urgency.” If I’ve completed my task, isn’t that urgency enough? VirginiaIt sounds like a lot of very coded language.KyeshiaIt feels that way. Because you don’t say that to other people who have been scrolling on their computer for days now, but the second you see me pick up my phone to answer a text message, I have a lack of urgency for my job.VirginiaThat’s a really toxic double standard. KyeshiaYeah. And a super big microaggression. What do you mean when you say I have no sense of urgency?VirginiaI would be interested to hear them try to explain it, even though it would not go well. They would only dig themselves deeper.KyeshiaI started out in handbag design, straight out of fashion school, because that was the only assistant designer job I could find. My second job was at an activewear company. So it was my first experience with women’s apparel and I had a lot to learn. I was maybe two weeks in and we were sprawled out on the floor, going over line sheets. I remember her saying to me, “Can I give you a little bit of feedback?” And I’m like, “sure, yeah, I welcome it.” Like, anything I can do to improve. She said, “I need you to hustle a little bit more.” And it completely spun me around. Because I was like, I’m trying. I just don’t know the processes yet. It was my first experience dealing with a sample room, with sample makers, and I wasn’t used to the process. So two weeks in, I’m brand new, and you’re telling me I need to hustle? Like, Okay. Loud and clear. And by the time I was three months, she still wasn’t satisfied with my performance and she handed me off to a different brand, which was fine. I think that there’s just a little bit of a disconnect in leadership if you’re not willing to teach.VirginiaAnd also, not willing to, sort of understand that people’s contexts are different and results can be achieved in different ways. This isn’t assembly line work where everyone needs to do the same job in the exact same way. KyeshiaYeah, and in order to get the results that you want, you have to be willing to teach. I think that that’s a huge part of a disconnect in the industry, nobody is willing to teach.VirginiaNot willing to teach and also not willing to learn! Another way of saying you don’t hustle is to say you are careful and methodical. And isn’t that a useful skill? There’s a way there’s a way of reframing these concepts to understand that someone might be bringing real strength to the table. Not to get away from the fact that probably you were hustling just fine and that was just a coded way of talking about your body. Well, it sounds like now you’re in a place where it’s not perfect, but you are able to accomplish more of what you set out to do, which is exciting to hear about. KyeshiaYes. So my career goal this whole time I’ve been in the fashion industry is to be a part of inclusive design. I would not be living my truth if I wasn’t able to produce things that I could actually wear. I work at Forever21 now. I am a senior designer on the plus team. We’re on this path to make an impact in the plus business. As you know, the plus business is a billion dollar industry and there are only a handful of companies who serve plus women. And we make up about 67% of the population, which is bananas. We’re underserving this community that makes up more than half the population. So, I’m really excited about the future work of what we’re doing at Forever21. I think in order to prove ourselves and gain the trust of the community, we have a lot to work on. We have a lot of work to do for the Plus Forever21 customer. I think we have really disappointed her in the past. I think in the beginning, she was so excited that we were available to her at an affordable price point. But I think over time, we’ve just really disappointed her—and I can understand that because I was her. I still am her! I’m really, really excited about the direction that we’re heading in serving the Forever21 Plus girl. It’s going to take a little bit to get to where we’d like to be, but there are a lot of things happening about maybe mid year that I’m really really excited about. And a new denim launch is one of them. VirginiaYou and I touched on this in our last interview: There are not a lot of folks in bigger bodies working in fashion design. Is there some kind of secret network of fat designers we can all be showing up for? How do we get more of you?KyeshiaI want in, if there is. How do I put out a mating call for my fellow plus size designers?VirginiaA bat signal? KyeshiaWhere do I find them? Yeah, within my career, I’ve only run into probably three other plus size designers working in the plus size industry. I’m sure there are more out there, but I don’t know where they’re hiding.VirginiaThat’s staggering. Because it’s such a loss of talent and a loss of knowledge. It explains so much. If you want to understand why plus customers are so often disappointed, why the clothes haven’t worked for so long, this is why.KyeshiaIf I were not in the industry, I don’t think that I would be encouraged to be in the industry. Because beauty and fashion standards are so white, so thin. I would be intimidated by that. I would be like, there’s no way that a person like me could get a job in an industry like that.VirginiaAnd your early experiences show it was not easy. KyeshiaIt’s not easy. It’s so interesting, because when I leave companies or when I talk to different managers and leadership, they’re always very encouraging. They’re always like, “We need people like you!” and I’m like, “Well, why don’t you hire people like me?”VirginiaYeah, that says a lot.KyeshiaI want to know that there’s more people who look like me who are out there in corporate fashion who are doing the work and making the change within. Because we’re the ones that really get it. I so often sit in rooms where people who don’t look like me say, “Oh, the girl’s not gonna like that.” And then I look and I immediately think, why not?VirginiaOh, interesting. Like what? Give us an example of that.KyeshiaOh, right now cutouts are a trend. And sometimes people are very apprehensive about how a plus girl would feel about cutouts. People are like, “Oh she’s not gonna wear that, that’s gonna show too much.” Well, maybe one girl might not wear it. But what about the other girl who is like, “I love this trend. I wish it was my size?”VirginiaThat’s interesting. I often hear from folks saying stop with the cutouts! I just need to finda basic tee shirt. I’m just looking for solid, functional clothes. Like, L.L.Bean doesn’t make plus sizes. So what if you want to go hiking? But you’re absolutely right, there are also lots of us craving design and not getting that. Especially when you’re getting fewer SKU numbers, how do you meet all those needs?KyeshiaIt’s difficult. Because especially with core things like tee shirts and jeans, you have to project your numbers for how much you can buy in these categories. Then you have a small SKU count for what you actually want, as far as fashion. What makes it even smaller is bringing in the juniors designs and what you’re going to tag on for those. Then you have like, this much of a pool for exclusive designs, designed by women who actually understand a plus body. So it’s hard to decipher what you lean into and when you say, “this…
Full show notes at the publisherIn a perfect world, the specter of that perfect, white, thin, cishet mom wouldn’t be there at all. We wouldn’t be tasked with defining ourselves against that ideal because she wouldn’t be the biggest thing in the room. You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today I’m bringing back Sara Louise Petersen for another installment of momfluencer talk. Sara is a writer based in New Hampshire, and currently working on a book called Momfluenced. She came on a few weeks ago and you folks had a ton to say about that episode! Hearing your thoughts and questions made us realize there is a lot more to discuss here. This might become a new subgenre of the Burnt Toast podcast.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.Also! I’ll write more about this in a newsletter soon, but I’m very thrilled to announce that I’ve started a Burnt Toast Giving Circle with The States Project. We will be raising money to help flip a state legislature Democratic this November because radical right wing state governments are dismantling free and fair elections in swing states, suppressing the right to vote, denying people quality, affordable healthcare and eradicating our right to choose. But we can take those states back! And early money matters. I’d love if you could make a donation of any size; Burnt Toast will match the first $1000 we raise. We’ll talk soon about which state to support and the issues on the table. Stay tuned! And: The brilliant folks behind the Sunny Side Up Podcast spent this episode talking about Instagram and how we feed kids, inspired by this essay of mine. Great companion listen to today’s Instagram deep dive! Episode 30 TranscriptVirginiaSo today we want to talk about whether it is possible for momfluencer culture to diversify, and to represent different types of moms. And w e’re also asking: Should that even be the goal? SaraThere totally is room to follow moms that do not subscribe to cishet, white, normative, nuclear family ideal. So many moms have disrupted that narrative and have used their platforms in really cool, energizing ways to form really needed communities online. They have a different vibe than the stereotypical beachy waves, white momfluencer, the the type that we were talking about in our last episode. It feels like a totally different world.VirginiaI want to read this really great email I got from a listener after your episode because she is articulating the problem in a way that I hadn’t quite thought about before. So this is from Tori, and she writes: I noticed that at the beginning of this missive you mentioned that you and Sara are both cis, straight moms with varying levels of thin privilege, who gave birth, and at the end, you say that the next “phase” is seeing non-thin, non-white, non-straight, non-cisgender moms shifting the narrative. That struck a nerve with me. I’m a white, cis, lesbian with a non-binary partner (she gave birth to our child.) Our kid is four and does not call either of her parents mom, in my partner’s case, because that word is feminine, and my partner is transmasculine. And in my case, mostly because even as a femme lesbian, I didn’t want to embody the culture of motherhood that has been pretty toxic in my life and it didn’t feel right for me. I read today’s newsletter with some distance, because I have found that even engaging with these momfluencers by critiquing them gives them too much space in my brain. I feel lucky that I do not generally feel mom guilt. I do not buy into most of the cultural pressures that straight, white moms often struggle with. And I think that’s because I had a way out from the beginning. The queer parents I know just don’t even talk about it and we don’t compare ourselves. We talk about the absurd things our kids do, and arguments with our partners, and we share gossip about queer celebrities, but we do not really participate in this aspirational stuff. I am grateful to queer people for offering that pathway out of straight, white mom culture, and also from the fatphobia of that culture. Many lesbians are fat and I’m grateful to my people for showing me how to love other women’s interesting bodies as I learn to love my own. I guess I just want to gently suggest that all of this is optional. White moms—because I do think this is a whiteness problem—can stop putting their eyeballs on the momfluencers. I know that as a cultural critic, they’re available for you to talk about since Instagram is a visual medium, etc. And there’s comments and captions to analyze. But even the critique feels like adding fuel to the fire. I just want to offer up that focusing on people who do things differently (the ones you spoke about at the end of your conversation) is an even more powerful way of shifting around the way we talk about bodies. As a journalist, I’m sure you’ve engaged with the concept of de-platforming. And this is sort of a mini version of that. You have influence yourself and lifting up the alternatives rather than continuing to reinforce white dominant culture, even by picking it apart, is especially effective. We’re out here doing it differently and a whole other parent culture is possible.Tori, thank you. Reading this, I had a moment of feeling like, oh, right, it is optional. It is easy to get just sucked into feeling like this is the paradigm we’re in. SaraI also loved that email. It reminded me of a conversation I had with Rebekah Taussig, who wrote a book called Sitting Pretty. We were talking about this “ideal mother” that we’re all defining ourselves against or aligning ourselves with or comparing ourselves to. She said, in a perfect world, the specter of that perfect, white, cishet mom wouldn’t be there at all. We wouldn’t be tasked with defining ourselves against or in opposition to that ideal because she wouldn’t be the biggest thing in the room. There would be freedom to define our own parenting journeys, separate from the fetters of that looming ideal. That whole notion feels so radical to me because the ideal, white, cishet mom does loom so large in our culture.For me, I think it is still valuable to dissect where this ideal is coming from and to look at who has the power in this narrative. Where is the power coming from? You can’t look at any of this without examining whiteness, first and foremost. I think we have to keep asking ourselves how are we approaching this cultural criticism? Which voices are we centering? VirginiaFor those of us who are white moms and who do check more of those boxes, this is also our work to do, to hold the other privileged white moms accountable. We can’t completely eradicate whiteness from motherhood—or maybe that is what we should be doing, but that feels very difficult. So as we consider the process of doing that, can we ask more of our fellow white moms? Can we ask each other to reckon with these biases and to name these problems? That’s not work I want to ask parents with marginalization to do. It’s not their job to come in and fix the white moms. And Sara and I are the white moms, so we have to be doing this work. But also, I’m really here for the idea of how do we make space for these other voices? SaraThe popular narrative about how we talked about momfluencer culture is “Oh, I’m just sick of comparing myself to the perfect mom in her perfect house.” That is a really small concern in the grand scheme of things. A lot of marginalized moms, like, they don’t give a shit. Their biggest concern is not having a kitchen that matches up to momfluencer standards. So, there is a way that white moms do perpetuate the ideal of whiteness, in holding ourselves to those standards and prioritizing those standards as worthy of our emotional and mental energy.VirginiaEven in prioritizing our ability to separate from those standards. There’s a strong parallel here with what we see in the fat community versus the “body positive” community. “Body positivity” has become reduced to this project of loving your body. Aubrey Gordon writes about this so well: loving your body doesn’t do shit for fat rights. It doesn’t do shit for narrowing the pay gap or making clothing more accessible or stopping discrimination on airplanes. Body positivity doesn’t actually address these larger systemic ways that fatphobia is baked into our culture. This is a perpetual problem of whiteness and of white women, that we take what is really this larger systemic issue and we make it all about like ourselves and our feelings. How does her clean kitchen make me feel? I feel like a bad mom. That’s not what it’s about at all.SaraTotally. That’s a classic tenet of specifically white feminism. When you’re looking at intersectional feminism, you’re looking at the the the community that is suffering the most and the most marginalized and working up to concerns about the clean countertops. Like, that’s not where we start. VirginiaWe’ll do a quick shout out here for Angela Garbes’ new book Essential Labor. She articulates the problems with white motherhood so well, and I think it’s a must read for all white moms. I had a lot of moments reading that of looking in a mirror in an uncomfortable but necessary way.Sara I also love her first book Like A Mother. Best book on pregnancy I’ve ever read. She looks at pregnancy from all different angles and it’s a beautiful, beautiful book.I’m also going to plug Koa Beck’s White Feminism. It was absolutely earth-shattering for me in terms of dismantling everything I thought I knew about feminism. VirginiaOkay, so we are going to talk about some case studies like we did last time, and this time, we really are focusing on momfluencers who are not in that traditional skinny-white-mom box at all. SaraSo should we start with Nabela Noor?VirginiaShe’s not technically a full momfluencer yet because she’s pregnant with her first child. She comes from the world of YouTube beauty influencers. I did not know about her until she wrote a children’s book this year called Beautifully Me, which I love. I actually interviewed Nabela on the @Parents Instagram a few months ago. And my younger daughter is obsessed with Beautifully Me. It’s a great kid’s book. (I also talked about it here.) And yet, there is also this continual emphasis on the importance of beauty, both in the book and in Nabela’s work. Her aesthetic on Instagram is all neutrals. Everything in her house is white and brass handles and beautiful flower arrangements. There’s a lot of emphasis on her look and her makeup. There’s this tension between the way she is challenging norms—but then there is some upholding.SaraI’m looking at her feed, and just the aesthetic tropes—she’s checking all the boxes. The all white everything, interior design-wise. The caressing her pregnant stomach, with a beautiful dress. Hyper-feminine imagery. The ultrasound photos, the very joyful, domestic Goddess Mother-vibe.But I wonder how fair or even productive it is to critique someone for adhering to those norms when she didn’t create them. It feels like critiquing a fish for swimming in the wrong water or something. Do you know what I mean? It’s tricky. What do you think?VirginiaI see that. The belly caressing in particular really moved me because she started caressing her belly like that when she was, like, nine weeks pregnant. To see this woman, who has a belly, caressing her belly without apology with so much joy and reverence for it, at a time when there’s often still a lot of negativity about the belly. We’re conditioned not to really celebrate the bump until it’s like the perfect basketball bump on your tiny body. And she’s never gonna have that perfect basketball bump on a tiny body. That’s not how she’s built. There was something very radical and moving to me to see her being so proud of that. That does feel powerful for me in terms of representation of pregnancy that doesn’t look like the way we’re told pregnancy needs to look. And yet, it does unsettle me to then see her grasping at holding up every other possible standard of perfect pregnancy. It’s like she’s only allowed one out or something.SaraYeah, that’s so interesting. Mia O’Malley went viral for sharing her own pregnancy photos and she wrote an essay accompanying them. This was, I think, three-ish years ago, and she still gets comments and emails from other moms saying they never even considered taking pregnancy photos because they had so internalized that this was a thin person thing to do. Like the basketball bump—if you don’t have that, your pregnancy is not worth celebrating or beautiful or whatever. The mere fact of representation is really powerful.VirginiaAnd for someone who reaches such a wide audience who haven’t reconsidered their feelings on fatness or beauty, she is asking them to do that. SaraYeah. If a mom disrupts any part of the stereotypical ideal—like in this case she’s disrupting thinness and whiteness—that’s a net positive.VirginiaYes, I agree. But I do think of what Tori was talking about in her email. Nabela is not opting out. She’s opting all the way in and saying, “I belong in this room.” SaraWell, and I think back to what you were saying before. The responsibility and the onus should be on white moms, with the most privilege, for them to opt out.VirginiaI agree with you. I think if anyone’s going to be making the big momfluencer bucks off the endorsement deals, I’m glad it’s Nabela. What else do we want to say about Mia? SaraIn addition to her main feed, she has a baby wearing feed. She became a babywearing consultant because when she was pregnant and when she had her newborn, every time she was shopping for a baby swing or a baby wrap, it was modeled on a thin model. Did you ever baby wear?VirginiaI was really uncomfortable babywearing and size was definitely a factor in that. SaraRight. I didn’t babywear until my third baby because I was just generally overwhelmed. Those wraps are like a mile long. They’re hard no matter what kind of body you have. But to have a body that’s never represented or to not have tutorials that speak to your particular shape is a real barrier to entry. It’s like, is this even going to work? Is it even going to be safe? VirginiaYeah, and I do have one fat friend who like came over with her Moby Wrap and helped me figure it out. That was very helpful, but I remember envying mothers for whom it felt effortless. It did not feel effortless for me, ever. We’re making babywearing into something that you’re supposed to innately know and understand at a time when your body is a complete stranger to you.SaraAnd the baby’s a complete stranger!VirginiaThey’re very small and squishy. It’s very disorienting. SaraThere are a ton of fat moms and plus size moms who are creating networks of healthcare providers who don’t have anti-fat bias. This world of momfluencing is worlds away from the one we talked about last week. VirginiaThat is the real potential and promise of mom influencers, to help break down barriers and create communities that can share information. PlusMommy is another one who’s awesome in this space. She does really great advocacy, helping moms know what questions to ask at prenatal appointments. She also talks a lot about being a fat mom going to Disney World or being a fat mom at the playground. Our physical spaces are not built for larger bodies very often, and particularly our parenting spaces. SaraI want to bring up Andrea Landry, who runs the account Indigenous motherhood. She points out that indigenous mothers have always created their own communities, calling each other and saying, “don’t go to this doctor, you’re gonna face discrimination and racism at this practice.” But since Instagram, that community-building has a way broader-reaching impact.And in terms of looking at issues that maybe white moms should be focusing our atten…
Full show notes at the publisherWhen your providers are emphasizing weight to you, I think this is something you can feel free to push back on and say, “Look, if I am at higher risk, we don’t know that the problem is really my weight—or the care you’re going to give me because of my weight.”
Hello and welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia.
This is the monthly subscriber-only episode where I answer your questions. So thank you to all my paid Burnt Toast subscribers. I love you. Let’s get right to it.
Q: I’m 20 weeks pregnant and trying to navigate mainstream healthcare’s view that my body is too big to have a healthy pregnancy. I can’t believe how stuck my providers have been on my weight. Do you have any advice for dealing with this experience?
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
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Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith.Today’s conversation is with Gregory Dodell, MD, a weight-inclusive endocrinologist in New York City, better known as @everything_endocrine or “that one good diabetes doctor!” on Instagram. I know so many of you have questions about weight and diabetes, and a newsletter essay on these issues is forthcoming! But in the meantime, I’m delighted to bring you this conversation with Dr. Dodell, which challenges so many of our assumptions about carbs, weight and diabetes risk. 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.VirginiaI am delighted today to be chatting with Dr. Gregory Dodell, who is an endocrinologist in New York City. Welcome!GregThanks for having me on.VirginiaI’m really excited to have you here. I think I get a question about diabetes about once a week. It comes up in a lot of different ways, from parents, from people worried about their own health or a parent’s health. It also comes up a lot from trolls, right? It’s the argument that they think you can’t fight back on. We’ll be having this very nuanced conversation about the relationship between weight and health and why it’s so important to separate weight from health, and someone will throw in, “But what about diabetes?” It feels like this third rail. Like, okay, people can be healthy at any size, but maybe not with diabetes. So, why don’t we start there? Why is diabetes so inextricably linked to weight and our collective understanding of this condition?GregYeah, it’s tough to tease out. It’s tough to answer, just because of what we hear in the media and what a lot of doctors probably say in the office. The first thing is, it’s really important to realize that correlation and causation are not the same things. There’s 40 some-odd things that impact blood sugar, just like there are many, many, many things that determine body weight. You can’t just say one causes the other when you look at weight and diabetes. There’s people across the size spectrum that have diabetes. I see people in my office across the BMI spectrum—of course, BMI is not a useful indicator of health—but just to put it in context. Not everyone who has a higher BMI has diabetes and there are many people with a “normal” BMI that have diabetes. A lot of the research doesn’t control for things like weight stigma, access to healthy food, stress levels, sleep—real behaviors that impact these things. So that’s really what I would say: Let’s focus on the behaviors. Let’s really look at the research critically, like a lot of people in the field are thankfully starting to do, to tease out the relationship and see. There may not be anything there and there may be something there. Even if there is, we need to treat people and focus on behaviors and things that we can do to improve health. Focusing on weight as a main marker of health just isn’t working.VirginiaRight, because we don’t have effective and safe ways for most people to lose weight. So prescribing that and zeroing in on that as the entire treatment plan is underserving people. And I’m glad you highlighted the stigma piece, too, because I think that’s difficult to tease out for folks. It’s not like researchers are acknowledging this bias as they’re doing the studies. Because this has been so baked into our culture for so long, a lot of researchers who are studying these questions are starting from the premise that there’s a causal relationship without the data to support that. GregRight. When you start with a research study and a protocol, you have to look at all the factors that impact all the different variables. I think, if you come into a study with a preconceived notion that weight is what’s gonna cause this, and you’re not controlling for other variables, it’s not a good study. Every research paper, or a lot of them, start outs by acknowledging we’re in this epidemic of people gaining weight. It’s an assumed thing, leading into this conclusion without really looking at all the other variables.VirginiaIt also means that if they are able to document any weight loss in the study, and they see that people’s numbers got better, they’ll say, well, the weight loss caused that improvement, without asking what else changed for people? Did they change behaviors? And what if it’s the behaviors that cause the improvement?GregTotally. And there is that great review paper that just came out that was like 250 reference articles documenting very clearly that independent of weight loss, increases in activity improve health and diabetes and cardiovascular function, all those things. So that has to be taken into account.VirginiaSo, obviously, you are somewhat unusual in your field, because you are taking a weight-inclusive approach to diabetes management and prevention. That is not the typical encounter that people have in an endocrinologist’s office. What does that look like for your patients? What are you doing differently from your colleagues?GregYeah, I’m not sure that I’m doing anything differently with regard to how I treat diabetes. I’m using blood sugar and other data points to treat overall health. I just take weight out of the equation. People may lose weight with behavior changes and with medications. They also may gain weight. If someone has uncontrolled diabetes and their blood sugar is really high and we work together with behaviors and medication to help control the blood sugar, they may start retaining muscle and gaining muscle and holding on to calories. Because what happens is if the blood sugar is really high, your body starts burning muscle and fat to create energy. So the weight may change in either direction. I think that’s why focusing on weight is not really that helpful. We should focus on the behaviors and we should focus on blood sugar and cholesterol and blood pressure, things like that. VirginiaAre patients surprised when you don’t focus on weight?GregTotally. I do get referrals from people that just know that that’s my approach. But I have a lot of patients that come in not knowing that. And when I say, “Well, I’m not going to focus on your weight, I’m going to focus on these other variables, and these behaviors and use the medication accordingly,” I think people are pleasantly surprised. Some of them just don’t say anything. They’re just surprised and maybe speechless. A lot of people come in saying, “I know, I need to lose weight. I’m working on it,” just because that’s what they’re expecting me to say.VirginiaThey’re used to doctors starting there. GregThe patients that are speechless when I say that—I wonder if they walk out shaking their head, like, “Who is this guy? He’s not gonna tell me to lose weight?” Like, in a bad way? Or if they’re like, “Wow, that was kind of interesting.” I don’t know.VirginiaYeah, I bet for a lot of them it’s pretty refreshing if they’re used to going to the doctor and having weight be this problem to solve. I mean, speaking from personal experience, whenever I find a doctor who doesn’t do that it’s a real ray of sunshine in my life. Of course, it does run so counter to people’s expectations, it can also be a little unsettlingGregYeah. Because obviously a lot of people want to lose weight. Statistics are out there, like 70% of women and 50% of men. They may be looking to the doctor to help them accomplish that objective. So it may be counter to their expectations and also desires.VirginiaWas this something you gradually started doing over the course of your years in practice? Talk a little bit about your evolution on this because I’m assuming this wasn’t how you learned it in medical school? GregNo. You know my wife, Alexis Conason at the Anti-Diet Plan. We had very similar trainings, we actually trained in the same hospital right out of our doctoral programs. She was in the bariatric surgery world and then went into private practice and started hearing from her clients all the stigma, avoiding doctors, and all this stuff. And thankfully she came across this HAES movement and started learning about and slowly telling me about it. It took me a while just because, I’ll admit, I’m just so entrenched in my training and what I’m reading from the medical community, it was really hard to break free from that. Like she would joke years ago and be like, “I think you’re almost there, but you’re not 100% HAES. I’m not sure I can send people to you.” But then I read her book, one of the first drafts, and I was like, “Whoa.” Like, I got it. I had that epiphany. I read it and the research studies, and I was like, “Okay, I can do this.”VirginiaThat’s awesome. So now we just need you to get all the other doctors to be on the same page with us.GregYeah, maybe I’m overly optimistic, but across the communities of medical professionals everyone is acknowledging that weight stigma is very problematic. There’s a big conference going on this week and stigma is a huge part of it. You know, people first language, all this kind of stuff. The problem is they are still thinking in terms of needing to help these people with their disease, versus not focusing on that. Let’s focus on behaviors because people are and can be possibly healthy across the size spectrum. So using different language is nice. And yes, trying not to stigmatize people is obviously a good goal, but let’s just take it out of the equation and then you definitely won’t stigmatize any.VirginiaRight. You need to recognize that you can say you don’t want to stigmatize people, but if you are still saying that their body size is wrong and needs to change, then you are inherently perpetuating stigma. There’s a tension there. I’ve seen that shift as well. Ten years ago, when I was interviewing doctors, they had never even heard of weight stigma. And that’s definitely shifted. But yeah, there’s still there’s still a little a little more pushing we have to do. The other stuff that comes up for folks around diabetes that I’m sure you hear all the time is the food anxieties, the feeling that diabetes means you can’t ever eat carbohydrates. Or even if you’re at risk for diabetes, that you shouldn’t eat carbohydrates. So can you drill into that relationship a little bit for us between carbs and blood sugar? How do you think about this?GregI think it’s very problematic to tell people you can’t eat a major food group. I have a couple patients out of thousands who can just not eat carbs but it’s unlikely and it’s not sustainable. I think the yo-yo dieting, the weight cycling, all those things are more problematic in the long term. The way I approach it is by saying what a lot of very good dietitians say, which is: Have the carbs but paired with proteins and fats, and that will help the absorption. And also, from an intuitive eating standpoint, check in with yourself after you have those things, a couple hours later, how do you feel? How’s your blood sugar? How do you feel when your sugar is high? And really key in and if you’re not feeling well, or you’re tired, or you’re more thirsty when your blood sugar is high, then that’s something to kind of take notice of and really have that conversation with yourself. So that’s my approach. Certainly people that are on insulin for type one diabetes, or even type two diabetes, can use medications to fit into your nutritional eating pattern and activity. We’re fortunate enough to have medications that we can use, so that you don’t have to change your life in order to manage diabetes, and you don’t have to sacrifice quality of life to do so and to be healthy.VirginiaThat’s an interesting shift. There’s often a mindset of, you have to be doing everything you can to avoid or minimize medication use, even if that means restricting your life in major ways, right? Because somehow it’s a failure, if you just can’t eat quote perfectly enough and avoid the need for medication. So, I like that you’re clearly taking a lot of the shame out of it and prioritizing people’s lifestyles along with their health.Greg,It goes hand in hand, right? So if someone’s really stressed because they’re at a party, and everyone else is having cupcakes, or pizza, and they’re like, “Oh, I can’t eat this, because my blood sugar is gonna go high” or, “The doctor said I can’t do that.” That creates stress, which, will probably also increase blood sugar. And then later on most likely this restrictive thing is going to be like, go and have the cupcake or pizza and maybe more. So, I would say, if it’s in front of you, try it, see if you’re enjoying it. And we can adjust the medication. I don’t want you to feel the stress around living your life and feeling that you can’t have or do something.VirginiaThat’s a very important mindset shift for us to make around this. I think one of the really tough things with type two diabetes in particular, is that people feel this sense of failure, that the sense of like, “I did this,” particularly folks in larger bodies. I did this because I couldn’t lose the weight. And there’s that whole cultural narrative of blaming people for this condition. So yeah, I don’t know if you want to speak to that a little bit because I think that’s a lot of what needs to get undone here.GregTotally, yes. So much of type two diabetes, or a big proportion of it, is genetic. Then there are other variables that cause blood sugar to go up, whether it’s stress, not getting enough sleep, certain medications raise blood sugar, so there’s a lot of different variables. It’s clearly not just what someone’s eating, or how much they’re moving, or how little they’re moving. There are a lot of things in life and with regard to health that we can’t control. And if it does happen, let’s figure out how to work together to control it and make sure that the quality of life is good, and that the health is as good as it possibly can be.VirginiaWe need to take it out of this sense of personal failure, which just speaks to this idea that we have to earn the right to health care. That only good people deserve these things is such a problematic concept, and really goes against what health care is supposed to do.GregRight, and there’s a huge overlap between diabetes and depression and anxiety. I think taking the shame out of it is a good first step. Acknowledge that a lot of this may have nothing to do with what you did or should have done. Okay, we’re in the present moment, let’s treat it the best we can. What happened in the past, whatever it is, It’s not your fault. It’s genetic. Blame whoever, doesn’t really matter. Like, let’s just take care of it.VirginiaAs you’re talking about behavior changes, which can be a really important tool for managing diabetes and health in general, I think we should talk about the fact that there’s a risk there of that becoming shame-based as well. Doctors prescribing very unrealistic goals for people in terms of the behavior changes they want made. Like, if you’re depressed, it’s hard to exercise regularly. Even if it would be helpful, there’s just these different barriers in people’s lives to achieving the kind of behaviors that doctors might be looking for. So I’m curious how you approach that with your patients to get over the shame. GregSo much about exercise has been linked with negative feelings, doing it just to lose weight—like “no pain, no gain.” With regard to movement, just saying, “What do you like to do?” Do you like to dance? Do you think you could try a yoga class or a spin class? Or, hey, could you just walk for five minutes? Let’s come up with something a little bit above and beyond what you’re doing now, something that you’re gonna enjoy and that’s gonna feel good. So that’s one thing I try to talk about. And then, being realistic and talking about what the access to food is. If someone’s working two jobs, you know they work all day, and…
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