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
You’re listening to Burnt Toast! I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today, my conversation is with Laura Birek. You probably know Laura as co-host of The Big Fat Positive Podcast, but today she’s here to talk about her new book, co authored with Gia Gambaro Blount. It’s called Good to Go: A Fresh Take on Potty Training for Today's Intentional Parent.I'm years past potty training (thank God!!), but I honestly remember the pain of it better than childbirth. This is often a very fraught parenting milestone. And as with all things parenting: That means we encounter a ton of societal expectations and pressures around how to get potty training right, which makes it all even harder. If you, too, have been a victim of that viral three day potty training method, you'll want to hear this conversation. Laura has amazing advice about how to recover and do it differently. But even if you’re child-free or years out from this experience: What we’re really talking about today is how perfectionism and performative parenting can make life harder for parents (especially moms!) and really get in the way of kids’ body autonomy. And of course, promoting body autonomy is core to the work we do here on Burnt Toast.Today’s episode is free! But don't forget, if you were a Substack subscriber, you have until October 28 to claim your free access to our paid content. Check your email for your special gift link! And drop any questions or concerns here.PS. You can take 10 percent off Good to Go or any book we talk about on the podcast, if you order it from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, along with a copy of Fat Talk! (This also applies if you’ve previously bought Fat Talk from them. Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)Episode 215 TranscriptLauraI am the co-author of a new potty training book that just came out called Good to Go: A Fresh Take on Potty Training for Today's Intentional Parent. You can find it everywhere. And then I am also the co-host of a long running parenting and pregnancy podcast called The Big Fat Positive Podcast. I’ve been doing that for over seven years now. Every week for seven years! VirginiaYou are an OG podcaster! I love the podcast. I’ve been on the podcast. But today we are going to talk about Good to Go. Because you reached out to me and you said, "Potty training culture is such a thing. Can we talk about it?" And I am not going to share my own children’s stories. But I’m going to say, yeah, it is such a thing. And it really messes with our heads. And of course, my work is all about investigating cultural messages that mess with our heads, aka diet culture. So yes, let’s talk about potty training diet culture today. You kick off the book with the story of how you tried and failed to train your older kiddo, who you call Augie in the book. And the impetus was that you read the super popular three day potty training book that I think most of our listeners who have potty trained a child have encountered. Why did the idea that you could magically change potty train your child in three days go so wrong?LauraSo we kind of fell into that new parent trap of "This kid’s a genius!" He was hitting all his milestones early. He was such a talker. And I had been given that very, very popular three day potty training method that shall not be named. And I read it and really took it as gospel. And in the book, there were all these signs of readiness. And I was like, check, check, check, for Augie. It was stuff like, is he interested in the potty? And I thought, oh, this kid is ready, according to this book. And there were extenuating circumstances--namely, the pandemic. We were deep in the pandemic. We were also stuck indoors because there was a wildfire nearby, so we weren’t even able to go outside. That’s Southern California life for you. And I was in my second trimester with my second pregnancy. So all of these things came together to be like, well, you know, what the hell? Let’s give it a try. VirginiaWe’re trapped indoors anyways. LauraWe’re trapped indoors. Let’s spend three days naked and see what happens. And so the very first sentence of our book is: "I’m a failure at potty training." Which is a very weird way to start a potty training book.VirginiaBut so relatable. LauraOh, I hope it’s relatable! Because the thing is, we thought we were a success at the very beginning. Right after those three days, he was mostly making it to the potty. We were like, okay, we can take away diapers. But what we didn’t realize is that we had just entered into a state of constant vigilance with him. We were constantly reminding him to go, and we were always nervous about going anywhere and doing anything with him, like even just going to the park. We never got over the stress level, right? My mom would say, "He wasn’t potty trained. You were potty trained."VirginiaYou were trying to take him to the potty obsessively and monitor all the signs.LauraExactly, exactly. And the other thing was, I had this idea that having two kids in diapers was going to be hard. I don’t know where I got this idea! Everyone is like oh, you can’t have two kids in diapers.VirginiaIt feels like a really common cultural message. I’ve heard a lot of friends say that, who have kids close in age. "Oh we have got to get her out of diapers before the next one comes!" LauraActually having two kids in diapers is way more convenient than one who’s in a very early stage of potty training and a newborn! That was our first mistake. But we just continued to deal with this stress around going places. And at some point, I ended up having the baby. Augie was still out of diapers, but he was having accidents. In our book, we call them misses, but this author called them accidents, so we’ll stick with accidents. It’s the more familiar term. And he was having accidents all the time, and I was really stressed out about it. Then I take my new baby, we call him Sebastian, to a local place called the Family Room, which is where I did mommy and me classes, and then toddler and me classes with my now co-author, Gia Gambaro Blount. I brought him for a lactation support group. But Gia happened to be there, and I descended upon Gia. I was like, "Gia, I need your help. Augie is having all these problems with potty training. I don’t know what to do." And she looked at me, and said, "Can I ask you something? When you decided to potty train him, did you tell him it was going to happen?" And I was like, "No." Because the book specifically tells you you’re not supposed to do that. VirginiaYou just spring it on them.LauraThe book tells you, do not even have the little potties out, because it will confuse their little brains. And I didn’t know anything about potty training at the time, so I was like, "Sure, that sounds legit. Whatever." So Gia was like, "You need to go back and ask him how he’s feeling about this." So I go back and I look Augie in the eyes. I’m like, "Hey baby. I know we’ve been having a lot of accidents. Do you think you want to go back to diapers for a little bit?" And he was like, "Yes!" Instantly. "Yes, yes, yes, I want to go back to diapers!" And I was shocked by that, because I thought he was going to be like, "No, I’m a big boy!" VirginiaHe was like, no, I’m really not ready for that. LauraAnd so we went back to diapers, which, by the way, in the 3 day method is a big no no. Like, huge regression. And there was also this strict thing about having to potty train between 18 and 30 months, and if you don’t do it between those times, you’ve ruined them forever. At least, that’s that’s the takeaway I had.VirginiaAnd if you could do it beforehand, even better.LauraYes! So I was really worried about all that. But the minute we put him back in diapers, the stress went away. And you know, TL/DR, he is not ruined forever. We ended up actually potty training him using Gia’s help just after he turned three. VirginiaEverything in your story is so deeply relatable. Because I think those first years of parenting are such chaos. And this is certainly not all moms... but there’s a certain kind of mom who is vulnerable to this message of "control as much of it as you can." Have the feeding schedules, track the ins and outs when they’re newborns. There is a need to have a lot of information and structure around what is otherwise just this sea of "when will we ever sleep again? When will anything happen?" That makes us really vulnerable to messages like "You want to achieve this milestone by a certain age." Or "You want to achieve this milestone before you have another baby." There is this idea that we somehow get a gold star if we get it done at a certain point. And now that I have kids who are way, way older, and I’m just like, "I don’t even remember when it all happened." You don’t look at a bunch of seventh graders, and think, "Well, I can tell you didn’t potty train till 3.5." LauraAnd I think that I am one of those moms who is totally susceptible to that. We had a sleep schedule with my first. And I think part of it is that I had my kids later in life, I already had a career. And when you have kids, any control you have over your days, over your schedule, over your life, just flies out the window. So I think I was grasping at anything that would give me a sense of control in my life. And rightfully so! So I’m not saying that those things don’t help people —I actually do think some of the sleep schedule stuff helped us. Or we got lucky, and that just happened to align with my kid's personality.VirginiaYou had a baby who was like, "Yes, fine, we’ll do a schedule."LauraExactly. I don’t know. There’s no way to know, but it did give me a sense of control. The trap with that is, say you have a good experience, like I did with sleep training , and then you go to potty training and it’s not as successful. Suddenly you think it’s some kind of referendum on your own parenting. VirginiaYes! LauraHaving a second kid is really helpful — or third or fourth, I imagine, even more— but having more than one kid has really helped me realize that so much of parenting is luck of the draw with your kid’s personality and temperament and all that stuff. But with your first, it can feel like such pressure and such responsibility for you to be the person who figures it all out. When it turns out that a lot of things are just not figure out-able, or need time or a different approach, or you need to be flexible.VirginiaSocial media has not helped in all of this, for sure. I mean, not that everybody documents their kids potty training on social media, but it’s of a piece with needing to celebrate milestones in this public way, I think.LauraHopefully one of the gifts that we give with our book is this concept that potty training is not a light switch. It’s not a binary. You’re not either potty trained or not in some clear crossing the finish line manner. Instead, we describe it as a continuum in terms of how much parental involvement is required. So at the very, very beginning, those first days, weeks, even months, you’re in the highly involved phase, where you are doing a lot of reminding and you’re doing a lot of cleaning up of pee on floor. You’re doing a lot of thinking about it. Then you go into the occasionally involved phase, which is fewer accidents, they know they need to go, but you still have to wipe their butts until kindergarten, at least usually. That’s something that the other books don’t really tell you. They frame it as, "oh, you’re done after three days." But these kids need help! There are just some physiological reasons why little kids have trouble wiping their own butts. Their heads are huge! Their proportions are all off. Some kids physically cannot reach their butts. But no one’s telling you that. So our goal in the book is to try to shorten the highly involved phase so that you’re in the occasionally involved phase quicker, and then finally you'll get to the point where you’re rarely involved. We say that there’s some day in the future where you won’t know the last time your kid went to the bathroom. But that’s years away. I mean, in my house, it’s still getting announced! So if you can think of it as the spectrum of where you’re in this process, then you can be a little bit less like, oh, okay, so and so just posted "oh, my two year old potty trained in one weekend." You can know in your head: Okay, yeah, that just means they’re not wearing diapers on a daily basis, right? But caregivers are still involved.VirginiaYeah, it doesn’t mean the two year old is like, "Okay, mom, I’ll be back in a minute!"LauraPeople will come out of the woodwork and be like, "My two year old self potty trained, they won’t let me be involved. They do everything!" And it’s like, I am so happy for you. But that is not the majority of kids and we need to just understand that’s not an expectation we should have.VirginiaI also appreciate understanding the stages more, and the fact that you and Gia really emphasized that this means you can decide readiness, not just based on your kid. So: Are they achieving these certain milestones? Are they checking these boxes? But also: Consider yourself. Are you, the parent, ready? Maybe when you’re about to have a newborn, you don’t want to be in the highly involved potty training phase. If you don’t think you can get all the way to "less involved" by the time the baby comes, maybe put this on hold for a while. And that just gives us so much more permission to center our own needs in the process. And to actually have needs, which is another thing the three day discourse really leaves out. The idea that you as the parent would have any other things going on other than potty training.LauraMost of the 3 day experts say you cannot leave the house for three days. Okay, that’s great for a stay at home parent who has no other kids. But what happens when you have an older kid that needs to go to soccer practice? What happens if you have a prescription you need to pick up from the pharmacy?VirginiaOr you’re a single parent.LauraOr a single parent doing it all. Exactly.We were in a pandemic, in a wildfire, and that’s why I was like, okay, we can stay home for three days. There has been no other time in our lives we’ve been able to stay inside for three days. Those unrealistic expectations really set you up for failure. And then on top of that, the message in all these other methods is, "If your child is still having issues after the three days, you must have done something wrong. You must have not followed my method perfectly."That’s with so much of parenting, right? But no, every kid is going to react differently and have a different timeline. And also, sometimes prescriptions need to be picked up at the pharmacy. VirginiaMy listeners frequently get a little annoyed when I say everything is a diet. But: A system that tells you that if it didn’t work, it’s because you didn’t do it right is 100 percent classic diet culture. It’s classic like, well, if only you’d followed it, if only you’d have better discipline... as opposed to: This just isn’t a match for what you’re trying to do right now. This isn’t the way for you. Laura And it’s trying to police this thing that everyone has to do, too. I think that’s just such an interesting analog to diet culture as well. We all have to eat. I know you’ve written about this, right? Even the most restrictive diet is going to have to provide some food, because you will die. And we all have to eliminate our waste and, save children with medical issues that may prevent them from potty training, almost all of us are going to end up having to learn to use a toilet at some point. It’s this thing we all have to do. And yet, we’re being told there’s this one rig…
Full show notes at the publisherWe're going to chat about:
⭐️ How we're feeling about the BIG MOVE.
⭐️ How to think about clothes after a significant size change. What even IS your style now?!
⭐️Figuring out fall uniforms!
⭐️ Diet culture in disaster prep.
⭐️ The one thing we wish straight-sized style bloggers would do differently.
And so much more! To hear the full conversation, you'll need to be a paid subscriber.
You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Emily Ladau, a disability rights activist, and author of Demystifying Disability. Our conversation today is about the many intersections between anti-fatness and ableism. This is such an important conversation, even if you feel like you’re new to both of these worlds. We investigate who is considered a “worthy” disabled person or a Good Fatty — and how these stereotypes so often pit two marginalization experiences against each other. Today’s episode is free but if you value this conversation, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you!PS. You can take 10 percent off Demystifying Disability, or any book we talk about on the podcast, if you order it from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, along with a copy of Fat Talk! (This also applies if you’ve previously bought Fat Talk from them. Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)Episode 213 TranscriptEmilyI am a disability rights activist. I am a wheelchair user. I’m the author of a book called Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but all of that is really just to say that I am very passionate about educating people about the disability experience, and doing it through a lens that recognizes that we’re all at a different point on the journey of thinking about disability and talking about disability. I really want to welcome people into what I know can be a sometimes overwhelming and uncomfortable conversation.VirginiaYou have been a disability rights activist since you appeared on Sesame Street as a 10 year old. I saw the clip. It’s just adorable, little baby Emily. I mean, first tell us about that if you want! Or if you’re sick of talking about it, I get it. But I would also love to know: When did your disability rights work morph into fat liberation work? And how do you see these two spheres intersecting?EmilyOn the Sesame Street note, my family likes to joke that I am totally milking that, because it happened when I was 10. But that was the first moment that I really understood that disabled people do have a place in the media. Prior to that, I had not seen almost anyone who looked like me, with the exception of two books that I read over and over again. And one other little girl who was also on Sesame Street who used a wheelchair.VirginiaWow.EmilyAnd I’m sure maybe somewhere else out there, there were other things. But I was an early 90s kid, and the media had just not caught up to showing me that I belonged. So having that experience is something that I really don’t take for granted.I like to joke that in many ways, I am the “typical” disabled person. If you look up a stock photo of someone with a disability, it’s probably a white woman using a wheelchair. Oddly enough, she’s probably also on a beach, holding her arms out. You know? VirginiaAs soon as you said it, I have a visual. I’ve seen that picture. Obviously, she’s on a beach.EmilyYes, so I am sort of the cliche version. But at the same time, I’m not. Because there’s sort of an “acceptable” disabled person, and she is the thin, pretty, white woman who is sitting in a wheelchair. I meet, I suppose, some of those traits, but I am someone who, in later years so far, has come to identify as fat and no longer sees that as the derogatory term that it was always leveraged towards me as.Any relationship that I have to fat liberation work has been sort of an evolutionary process for me. It’s newer to me. I didn’t understand when I was younger how that fit into disability rights work. But I see now that we can’t have those conversations separately. First of all, every issue is a disability issue. So every issue impacts disabled people. And second of all, the disability community encompasses every identity, every body type, every experience. There are more than a billion disabled people around the world. So you absolutely have every single possible body type within the disability community. And if we are not talking about fat liberation, if we are not talking about LGBTQIA+ rights, if we are not talking about ensuring that our work is meaningfully intersectional, then it’s not actually disability rights work.VirginiaBut it is tricky to figure out how all those things intersect and fit together for sure.EmilyI feel like I’m constantly playing a game of Tetris with that. And I don’t mean that to say, oh, woe is me. But more so, how do we get society to recognize how those pieces interlock with one another?VirginiaDo you mind sharing a little bit about how anti-fatness shows up in your own experiences? Sometimes it’s helpful to name those moments, because some people listening might think, oh, I’ve had that too, and I didn’t know to name it as anti-fatness, or, oh, I’ve been on the wrong side of that. And it’s helpful to hear why that was not helpful.EmilyThere is no clear direction to take this answer, because it’s impacted me in two diametrically opposed ways.The first is that I have been judged incredibly harshly as being lazy, as being unhealthy, as being someone who maybe doesn’t take care of myself in the way that I should. And the wheelchair is seen as the cause of that.On the flip side, I have also been treated as though disability is the only cause of anything going on in my body, and therefore I should be given a free pass if I am considered, as doctors would say, “overweight.”VirginiaIt’s like, Oh, it’s okay. You’re in a wheelchair. What can we do? We can’t expect you to go for a run.EmilyExactly. So you see what I mean. It’s either one or the other. I’m either bad and lazy or it’s like, oh, poor you. You can’t get up and exercise.VirginiaBoth of those are such judgmental, patronizing ways to talk about you and your body.EmilyThey’re super frustrating. I think that both of those are anti-fatness in their own right. But for me, it sends conflicting messages, because I’m trying to seek medical support for certain issues. And some doctors are like, “Lose weight!” And other doctors are like, “Well, we can’t do anything because you’re in a wheelchair.” And so both of those are very unhelpful responses.VirginiaOh man, it really speaks to the lack of intersectional care in medicine, that people don’t know how to hold these two facts together and also give you comprehensive medical care at the same time.EmilyI wish that we could just have disabled people speaking with medical students as a requirement in every single medical school program. But instead, I feel like we’re either completely relegated to the sidelines of conversations in medical school, or maybe we’re brought up in very clinical and dehumanizing ways, and we don’t stop to think holistically about a person.It’s interesting, because my mom has often said—and I should note, she has the same disability that I do. So she’s a wheelchair user as well. But she feels very strongly that a lot of other medical issues that I am dealing with now were overlooked when I was younger, because everybody was so hung up on my disability that nobody was offering me the support that I needed for other things that could have, in turn, prevented some of what I’m now navigating.So it seems like healthcare can’t hold multiple truths at once.They can’t think about your body and think about everything going on. It’s either you’re fat or you’re disabled.VirginiaGod forbid you have a health condition that is not weight linked and not linked to your disability. That’s going to throw them completely for a loop.EmilyYeah, it’s very much a binary. I think that it’s led to a lot of confusion among healthcare providers. Certainly, I know there have been delayed diagnoses on many, many things. I’ve also had it leveraged against me in terms of what I would consider chronic illness, because I would get sick pretty regularly when I was a child, and every time I would throw up, it would be thrown in my face: “Well you’re eating poorly. You’re not taking care of yourself.” And nobody thought to do anything to check what was actually going on. They just thought that I was not taking care of myself. Turns out I had gallstones and needed my gallbladder removed. But when people see the wheelchair, they don’t take me seriously.VirginiaNo, and let’s be clear: Gallstones is not a condition you can treat by eating salad. Like, that’s not something you can nutrition your way out of.EmilyI could not lettuce my way out of that one.VirginiaAre there any strategies you’ve figured out that helps you get a doctor to cut through some of those biases, or cut through some of that noise and actually focus on what you need them to focus on?EmilyI have to rehearse what I want to say in a doctor’s appointment. And I don’t think I’m unique in that. I’m sure that there are plenty of people who put together their notes and think through very carefully what they want to say before they go. As much as doctors tend to be frustrated when the patient comes in and it’s clear that they were reading WebMD, I’ve found I need to point them in the right direction, because at least it gets them started down the path that I’m hoping to explore.And I’m not saying that I think that I have years of medical school worth of expertise, but when I was little, I used to always complain to my parents, “You’re not in my body. You don’t know how I’m feeling.”VirginiaSo wise.EmilyAnd I think that that remains relevant. I’m not trying to be a difficult patient. But I have very strong awareness of what is happening internally and externally. And so if I come in and I seem like I have it together and I’m prepared, I feel like doctors take me more seriously. And I have a lot of privilege here, because I am a white woman. I communicate verbally. English is my first language. So in a lot of ways, I can prepare in this way. But I don’t think I should have to, to get the medical care that I need.VirginiaDoctors should be meeting us where we are. We shouldn’t be expected to do hours of homework in preparation in order to be treated with basic respect and dignity. And yet, it is helpful, I think, to hear okay, this labor can be beneficial, But it’s a lot of extra labor, for sure.EmilyIt is, and I’ve broken up with doctors over it. And I’ve also had doctors who I think have broken up with me, for lack of a better way to put it.I have had multiple doctors who have just kind of said, “We don’t know how to deal with you, therefore we are not going to deal with you.” And in seeking the care that I need, I have run into walls because of it, whether it’s a literal, physical wall in the sense that I tried to seek care, because I was having GI distress. I tried to go see the doctor, and the doctor’s office was not wheelchair accessible, and they told me it was my fault for not asking beforehand.VirginiaI’m sorry, what? They’re a doctor’s office.EmilyThe one place I actually thought I would be fine and not have to double check beforehand. So that’s sort of the physical discrimination. And then getting into the office, I’ve had doctors who have said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to help you.” Go see this specialist. I’m sorry, I don’t know what I can do for you, and then not return my calls.VirginiaOh, I knew this conversation was going to make me mad, but it’s really making me mad.EmilyAnd I say all of this is somebody, again, who has health insurance and access to transportation to get to and from doctors, and a general working knowledge of my own body and the healthcare system. But I mean, if it’s this much of a nightmare for me, multiply that by other marginalized identities, and it’s just absurd.VirginiaIt really is. You’ve kind of led us there already just in talking about these experiences, but I think there’s also so much ableism embedded in how we talk about weight and health. And I thought we could unpack some of that a little bit. One that you put on my radar is all this fearmongering about how we all sit down too much, and sitting is killing us. And if you have a job that requires you to sit all day, it’s taking years off your life. And yet, of course, people who use wheelchairs are sitting down. EmilyI think about this a lot, because I would say at least a few times a year some major publication releases an article that basically says we are sitting ourselves to death. And I saw one I know at least last year in the New York Times, if not this year,VirginiaNew York Times really loves this topic. They’re just all over there with their standing desks, on little treadmills all day long.EmilyI actually decided to Google it before we chatted. I typed in, “New York Times, sitting is bad for you.” And just found rows of articles.EmilyThe first time that this ever really came up for me was all the way back in 2014, and I was kind of just starting out in the world of writing and putting myself out there in that way as an activist. And I came across an article that said that the more I sit, the closer I am to death, basically.It’s really tough for me, because I’m sure there’s a kernel of truth in the sense that if you are not moving your body, you are not taking care of your body in a way that works for you. But the idea that sitting is the devil is deeply ableist, because I need to sit. That does not mean that I cannot move around in my own way, and that does not mean that I cannot function in my own way, but it’s just this idea that sitting is bad and sitting is wrong and sitting is lazy. Sitting is necessary.VirginiaSitting is just how a lot of us get things done every day, all day long.EmilyRight, exactly.VirginiaSure, there were benefits to lifestyles that involved people doing manual labor all day long and being more active. Also people died in terrible farming accidents. It’s all part of that romanticization of previous generations as somehow healthier—which was objectively not true. EmilyYou make such a good point from a historical perspective. There’s this idea that it’s only if we’re up and moving and training for a 5k that we’re really being productive and giving ourselves over to the capitalist machine, but at the same time, doing that causes disability in its own way.VirginiaSure does. Sure does. I know at least two skinny runners in my local social circle dealing with the Achilles tendons ruptures. It takes a toll on your body.EmilyOr doing farm labor, as you were talking about. I mean, an agrarian society is great until you throw your back out. Then what happens?VirginiaThere are a lot of disabled folks living with the consequences of that labor. EmilyAnd I’ve internalized this messaging. I am not at all above any of this. I mean, I’m so in the thick of it, all the time, no matter how much work I read by fat liberation activists, no matter how much I try to ground myself in understanding that fatness does not equal badness and that sitting does not equal laziness, I am so trapped in the cycle of “I ate something that was highly caloric, and now I better do a seated chair workout video for my arm cycle.” And I say this because I’m not ashamed to admit it. I want people to understand that disabled people are like all other people. We have the same thoughts, the same feelings. We are impacted by diet culture.VirginiaGetting all the same messaging.EmilyWe are impacted by fat shaming. And I know that no matter what I would tell another person, I’m still working on it for myself.VirginiaWell, I always say: The great thing about fat liberation is you don’t need to be done doing the work to show up here. We are all in a messy space with it, because it’s it’s hard to live in this world, in a body, period, And you have this added layer of dealing with the ableism that comes up. I mean, even in fat liberation spaces, which should be very body safe, we see ableism showing up a lot. And I’d love you to talk a little bit about how you see that manifesting.EmilyI think that this is a problem across pretty much every social justice…
Full show notes at the publisherWelcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!We are Corinne Fay and Virginia Sole-Smith. These episodes are usually just for our Extra Butter membership tier — but today we’re releasing this one to the whole list. So enjoy! (And if you love it, go paid so you don’t miss the next one!) Episode 212 TranscriptCorinneToday is a family meeting episode. We’re catching up on summer breaks, back to school, and a whole bunch of diet culture news stories that we’ve been wanting to discuss with you all.VirginiaWe’re also remembering how to make a podcast, because we haven’t recorded together in like six weeks. And it didn’t start off great. But I think we’re ready to go now.CorinneSomeone definitely said, “What day is it?”VirginiaIt’s hard coming out of summer mode. I don’t know if you feel that because you don’t have kids, during back to school, but it is a culture shift.CorinneI don’t think I feel the back to school thing as much, but I’m still in Maine, and it’s actively fall. It’s actively getting cold, and I’m just like, what is happening? I feel this pressure to do something, but I’m not sure what? Hibernate?Virginia“Should I buy a notebook? Should I be wearing fleece? I could go either way.” I don’t know. It’s weird. It is the start of fall. So we are moving into fall mindset. But like, don’t rush me, you know? The dahlias bloom till first frost. That’s my summer.CorinneSummer is so brief.VirginiaI’m having a lot of clothing feelings right now. I am not in a good place getting dressed, and it is for sure weather related, shoulder season-related. I’m in my annual conundrum of when do the Birkenstocks go away? When must our toes be covered for polite society? Am I showing arms? I just I don’t even know how to get dressed. I hate all my clothes. Everything’s terrible.CorinneI think this is part of what I’m feeling. I don’t have enough warm clothes and I also don’t want to buy another pair of sweatpants.VirginiaAnd you’re traveling. So you’re like, “I have warm clothes at home.” Didn’t bring them because you didn’t understand, even though you grew up in Maine and should remember that fall starts quite early there.CorinneI need to get it tattooed on my body. Bring a sweater, bring sweatpants.VirginiaWell, to be fair for this Maine trip, you were really focused on your sister’s wedding. You had your nephew. You’ve had a lot going on.CorinneI was very focused on August, and really not thinking about September.VirginiaWill we even exist after? I mean, that’s how it always is when you’re gearing up for a big event, the post-event doesn’t exist.And I don’t know if you do the thing where you’re like, well, I can deal with that after the big event. And then suddenly it’s after the big event. You’re like, well, now there’s 47 things I need to deal with.CorinneI absolutely do that. Now I’m like, wait. How and when do I get back to New Mexico? Am I going back to New Mexico ever? In which case maybe I do need to buy sweatpants?VirginiaIt’s so hard. Even without a wedding —I feel like all summer, because I have pretty skeleton childcare and I’m wanting to take time off, and it’s a privilege that our job allows some flexibility like that, so when I get requests to, like, do a podcast, do a special thing. I’m like, “Talk to me in September. I can’t do it this summer. Summer mode Virginia can’t do anything extra!” And now I’ve just spent the week saying no to lots of things, because September me can’t do it either. That was folly. I should have just said no the first time!That’s one of those life lessons I’m always relearning that’s really funny. If it’s not an instant yes, it’s a no. And I so often fall into the trap of it’s not an instant yes, so let me kick that can down the curb a little bit, and then then I feel ruder because they come back and I’m like, no, I’m sorry. Actually, we were never going to do that.CorinneAs someone who’s been on the other side of that where, like, I’ll reach out to someone for the Style Questionnaire, and they’ll be like, “Oh, can you ask me in two months?” And then when I reach out in two months, and they’re like, “No.”VirginiaTotally. I’m on the other side of it all the time when we’re booking podcast guests. So I’m completely aware of how shitty it feels. So I have a resolution. Summer Virginia just has to say no to things and not push it to Fall Virginia. Everyone hold me accountable next summer, because I’m so sorry to everybody I’ve said no to this week, but September is a real intense parenting month. There are just a lot of moving parts.I get 62 emails a day from the school. The middle school just announced back to school night will be tomorrow. They told us yesterday! One cool thing is, my older kid is in seventh grade now, so I no longer have to scramble for babysitters, which is a real achievement unlocked. Although she’s going to realize at some point that she should increase her rates with me.CorinneOh, you pay her!VirginiaFor stuff where I’m going to be out of the house and need her to put her sister to bed. It’s one thing, if I’m like, “I’m going to the store, you guys don’t want to come.” Fine. You can doodle around at home. And it’s not even really babysitting. She’s going to ignore her the whole time. But I’m going to be out from 6 to 8pm tomorrow night. I need her to actually make sure her younger sibling gets in pajamas and brushes teeth and, moves towards bed. I’m not expecting them to be in bed when I get home, but I would like them to not be nowhere close.CorinneThat’s really sweet.VirginiaPlus we have some big stuff in the works for both Burnt Toast and Big Undies, which we cannot discuss just yet. Yes, I am actively teasing it for you all.CorinneYou’re going to bring that up now?! I feel like we should mention it at the end.VirginiaI think we can mention it whenever we feel like? I think they’re probably like, “Why are they both doing reader surveys? What’s going on?” And we can’t say yet, but there’s something going on, and it’s also requiring a lot of our time and attention.CorinneWe’re really busy. But I think it’s going to be really good, and everyone’s going to love it.VirginiaIn the meantime, though: What are we wearing? Real talk, what are we wearing to get through this weird it’s not summer, it’s not fall, it’s some hybrid state. Are you still wearing open toed shoes? Sandals?CorinneNo, I’m not.VirginiaOkay. Should I stop, too?CorinneI mean, I’m only not because I’m cold. It depends on if you’re cold. I also think now is kind of the perfect time for socks with sandals.VirginiaMost of my sandals are something between my toes style. CorinneOh, I was thinking, like, socks with Birkenstocks.VirginiaAh! I do have some of the two strap Birkenstocks, and I don’t tend to wear them a lot in summer. Maybe I should experiment!CorinneI feel like, when you wear socks with the two strap Birkenstocks, they become really cozy.VirginiaI don’t wear them a lot in summer because I don’t have particularly wide feet, and they’re a little wide on me. But the sock would solve for that! And they would be cozy… all right, I’m going to experiment with this, as part of my shoulder season style.CorinneI’m still figuring out my fall must haves, which is one of my favorite topics. Although I will say I feel like this year I’ve seen a lot of people posting like, “I don’t want to hear about back to school, or I don’t want to hear about fall fashion.”VirginiaI have terrible news for people about this podcast. CorinneI feel it’s very light hearted. It could be literally anything like, who cares? We are entering fall, so…VirginiaTime is passing.CorinneI am getting cold. I do want to put on socks with my sandals and sweatshirts.VirginiaTrigger warning for anyone who is not available for a fall fashion conversation.CorinneMaybe by the time this comes out, people will be ready.I know this is like florals for spring, but I’m feeling for fall… brown pants.VirginiaWait, what? You’re blowing my mind? You’ve been feeling brown for a little while. CorinneBrown has been ramping up. I’m wearing brown pants right now.VirginiaIs it one of your colors, as a true spring?CorinneWell, I do think there are definitely some camels. And I think brown is preferable to black. So I’m thinking brown pants instead of black pants.VirginiaOh, I don’t even know what I’m thinking about pants. I’m thinking frustration with pants. I have my one pair of jeans that I reliably wear. I think I need to order another pair in case they stop making them. I’m at a scarcity mindset point with those Gap jeans. I mean, they aren’t going to stop making them. They’ve had them for years, but I just feel like I need an insurance policy.CorinneDo you fit other Gap pants, or just the jeans?VirginiaI only buy that one pair of jeans. I mean, I generally try not to shop at the Gap because they do not have a plus size section.CorinneBut they do have some really cute stuff.VirginiaIt’s gross though! Make it bigger.CorinneIf it fits you, maybe you should buy it.VirginiaCorinne is like, “Or counterpoint, don’t take a stand.”CorinneI’m always sending links to my straight-size sister for stuff at the Gap that I think she should buy.VirginiaThey do have some really cute stuff, but it infuriates me that Old Navy can make plus sizes, and Gap cannot, and Banana Republic really cannot. It’s just like, hello, class system, capitalism. It’s so revolting.CorinneOh, my God. Do you know what else I’m feeling outraged about? I went thrift shopping here a couple weeks ago, and I found some vintage Land’s End that was in sizes that they don’t make anymore.VirginiaWow, that’s rude.CorinneIt was a 4X! So they used to be way more 26/28 or 28/30. So they also, at some point, kind of cut back.VirginiaThey do, at least legitimately have a section called plus size, though.CorinneThey do, but it clearly used to be bigger.VirginiaNo, no, no. I’m not saying it’s great. I am wearing my favorite joggers a lot, because I think I’m really resisting the shift back to hard pants.CorinneHow do you feel about trousers, like a pleated trouser kind of pant?VirginiaIs that comfortable for working from home? A pleated trouser?CorinneWell, I feel like they’re comfortable because they’re kind of baggy but narrower at the bottom, you know?VirginiaI do love a tapered ankle. I also unpaused my Nuuly. And I did get a blue corduroy pair of pants from them that it hasn’t been quite cold enough to wear because shoulder seasons. Corduroy, to me is like a real like we are fully in cold weather fabric. And when it’s 50 in the morning, but 75 by lunchtime, am I going to be hot in corduroys? I guess I should just start wearing them and see.CorinneAre they jeans style? VirginiaThey’re slightly cropped so that’s another reason to wear them now, while I can still have bare ankles. They’re slightly cropped and slightly flared, and they’re like a royal blue corduroy.They’re Pilcro, which is an Anthropologie brand and I know we feel gross about Anthropologie. But when it comes to pants, I think Corinne is saying we can’t have moral stances because pants are so hard to find. Other things, yes.CorinneIt’s just hard.VirginiaI’m not excited about clothes right now. I want to feel more excited. Maybe I need to think about what my fall must haves are. Maybe I need to make a pin board or something.CorinneI think that’s a good idea. Is there anything you’re feeling excited about? I remember the last episode you were talking about those Imbodhi pants.VirginiaOh yeah. They’ve really become lounge around the house pants, and they’re great, but they’re very thin. Imbodhi feels like a brand you could not wear once it gets cold.Although, the jumpsuit I have from them in periwinkle—which does feel like a very summery color to me—I also got black. And over the summer it felt a little too black jumpsuit. It felt like too formal or something. But I’ve been enjoying it as a transition piece. I am still wearing it with sandals. I think it would look cute with maybe my Veja sneakers, though, and then layering over my denim shirt from Universal Standard, like open over it.I’m glad we’re talking about this, because that’s what I’m going to wear to back to school night tomorrow night, which is a high pressure dressing occasion.CorinneI can see that.VirginiaYou don’t want to look like you tried too hard, but you also don’t want to look like you came in pajamas. Lots of yoga moms, a lot of pressure. Okay, I’m going to wear that black jumpsuit. I’m glad we talked about that. That’s been a good transition piece.CorinneYeah, okay, well, speaking of transitions, I want to ask you about something else. Are you familiar with the Bechdel Test?VirginiaYes.CorinneDon’t you think we should have a Bechdel test for anti-fatness? And/or diets? Like, does this piece of culture have a fat character who’s not the bad guy, or on a weight loss journey, or being bullied for their size?[Post-recording note:Rebecca Bodenheimer reached out after this episode aired to let us know she wrote about this exact concept for the LA Times in 2020. Read her excellent piece here!]VirginiaOohhh… OK, so what would our terms be? They can’t be the fat villain.CorinneWell, I feel like there’s one list for anti fatness, and one would be a piece of culture or whatever that doesn’t discuss dieting or weight loss. And I don’t know if it should all be one under one Bechdel test umbrella, or if it should be two different tests.VirginiaI feel like it’s related. Wait, I need to look up the actual Bechdel Test criteria.CorinneIt’s like, does the movie have two female characters talking about something other than a man.VirginiaThe work must feature at least two women.They must talk to each other. And their conversation must be about something other than a man.I was just watching Your Friends and Neighbors, that new John Hamm show about super rich people stealing from each other, and it’s very entertaining, but it fails the Bechdel test so dramatically. It’s got Amanda Peet in it! She’s so smart and funny, and all she does is talk about her ex husband and how much she loves him. And I’m just like, fail, fail, fail. Anyway, okay, I love this idea.CorinneSo it’s like, does it have a fat character?VirginiaWait, I think it should have more than one fat character.CorinneThat bar is too high. I feel like we have to be able to name something that passes the test. And what are we calling the test? The Burnt Toast Test?VirginiaWe can workshop names in the comments.CorinneWe need a famous fat person to name it after, maybe.VirginiaWell, I guess Allison Bechdel named it after herself. So it could be the Fay test, because you did this. The Corinne Fay test.CorinneOh, God.So it has to have one fat character, they have to talk about something other than weight loss, and they can’t be the villain.VirginiaI would like them not to be the sidekick, too. I think it’s a central fat character.CorinneCan we name anything that passes?VirginiaShrill by Lindy West. And Too Much. Well, Lena Dunham doesn’t totally pass the Bechdel Test, but she passes the fat test.CorinneSee, it gets very complicated. This is intersectionality!VirginiaWe strive for an intersectional world where the shows pass all the tests. This is such an interesting topic. I love this.CorinneI was also thinking about it because on my drive out, I read two of these Vera Stanhope mysteries. Have you read any of these?VirginiaI have not.CorinneThe main detective woman is fat, and I feel like it’ mostly fine. Like, 90% of the time they’re just talking about her, she’s fat, and she’s sloppy. She’s a sloppy fat person. And then, like, occasionally, there’ll be like, a sentence or two where I’m like, Ooh, I didn’t like that.VirginiaIt’s so deflating when you have something that’s seeming good, and then it takes a turn on you real fast.CorinneSo would that pass the the fat Bechdel Test? Or whatever? Probably would.VirginiaBecause it’s as good as we can get.CorinneShe’s the main character and not talking about dieting, really.VirginiaYeah, w…
Full show notes at the publisherYou’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Denise Hamburger, founder and director of Be Real USA. Be Real is a nonprofit that imagines a world where every child can grow up with a healthy relationship to food and their body. They work with body image researchers, psychologists, teachers and public health officials to design curricula about nutrition and body image that are weight neutral, and inclusive of all genders, abilities, races and body sizes.So many of you reach out to me every September to say, “Oh my God, you're not going to believe what my kid is learning in health class.” Food logs, fitness trackers, other diet tools are far too common in our classrooms— especially in middle and high school health class. Denise is here to help us understand why those assignments are so harmful and talk about what parents and educators can do differently. This episode is free — so please, share it with the parents, teachers and school administrators in your communities! But if you value this conversation, consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you.PS. You can always listen to this pod right here in your email, where you’ll also receive full transcripts (edited and condensed for clarity). But please also follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and/or Pocket Casts! And if you enjoy today’s conversation, please tap the heart on this post — likes are one of the biggest drivers of traffic from Substack’s Notes, so that’s a super easy, free way to support the show!Two Resources You’ll Want From This Episode: BeReal Let’s Eat Curriculum is attached.And here’s a roundup of everything I’ve written on diet culture in schools:The Burnt Toast Guide to Diet Culture in SchoolsEpisode 211 TranscriptDeniseWell, this all started I would say about 10 years ago. Actually, about 12 years ago. I was an environmental lawyer in my first career—that's what I'm trained to do. I went to law school, was practicing in big law firms. Which has nothing to do with body image, except I was an environmental lawyer who weighed herself every day and got her mood affected by the number on the scale for 40 years. So that's four decades.VirginiaSo many times getting on a scale.DeniseI really felt like I didn’t want anyone else, especially young women today, to waste the amount of time and energy that I had wasted distracting them from what they need to be doing in their lives, figuring out their own person possibilities. That’s really what you’re here to do. And it takes us away from what we’re supposed to be doing.With that in mind, I went back to school at the University of Chicago, and I was thinking of get a social work degree and doing something with body image. But then I wrote a paper on my own body image for one of my classes at the School of Social Work and I found 50 years of research on body image. And then 30 years of discussion and research on how to prevent eating disorders and body dissatisfaction. Like, wow, there is so much out there, so much research on this. But I haven’t heard any of this. It feels like it’s not making its way into resources that people can use.So I started speaking on it, and I was speaking to middle-aged women, and I thought the message that we all would really benefit from would be everybody’s got this. Because I feel like, especially my generation, where we didn’t really talk about how we felt about our bodies. I’m at the tail end of the Baby Boom. So I’m 62 and I felt that people in my generation—again, I was 50 at the time—weren’t in touch with their own feelings on body image. After talking about this for so many years, younger generations have access to it I think a lot more. But I felt like we could all benefit from knowing that everybody’s got it—so kind of a common humanity. It’s not our fault, which helps with the shame around it.So everyone has it, it’s not our fault, and society has given it to us. And I think that this is something that would resonate with my generation. So I started speaking in local libraries and community houses to women my age, and quickly learned that it is really hard to undo decades worth of thought patterns and feelings around food, body and eating. People came to hear me talk about body image, and I think, in general, when I started out, they were hoping I had a new diet.VirginiaOh, I’m sure they were. I’m sure they were like, “Oh, we’re going to go hear her talk about how to love your body by making it smaller!”DeniseAbsolutely. And all of the women, because they were women in my workshops, were starting to talk about their daughters. They’re saying that my daughter’s got this, and she’s coming home and saying this. Then in one of my audiences, I had a health teacher at my local high school. There was a health teacher who came and said—this is about 2015—you should hear what the young girls are saying. They’ve got this new thing called Instagram and and they’re seeing pictures of, “perfect” looking people and feeling bad about themselves or feeling flawed in comparison.So she said, “What resources are there for for the students in my class?” And I said, there has got to be something because there is 50 years’ of research there, there has got to be something fabulous for you. And I called the professors listed on the the studies. The granddaddy of the industry, Michael Levine, I called him up. I said, “Michael, just tell me, what can I recommend to these teachers?” And he’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t know. We don’t have it. It’s not there. Even though the research is there.”So there was a curriculum created for high risk kids. It needed to be given by facilitators called The Body Project. And I called one of the professors who wrote The Body Project and said, “Listen, I’d like to give this tool to a teacher for universal,” which means giving it to everybody in the classroom, and and she wants to bring it to her high school, but it looks like you need to be trained. And it was a script. The Body Project was a script. And this teacher said to me, I’m not reading a script in a classroom. You’re not going to get a high school teacher to read a script.VirginiaYeah. I would imagine high school students sitting in a classroom aren’t going to respond to someone just reading a script at them.DeniseNobody wants to hear it. It’s not useful. It wasn’t created for that use. So this professor, Carolyn Becker, had actually written a paper on how the academics need to work with stakeholders to make sure that their research makes it to the public. And I said, I’m calling you. I’m a stakeholder. What do you need? And she said, “We need somebody to translate it.” And I said, “I’m your girl.”VirginiaI mean, it’s wild that the research has been there. We’ve known what works, or what strategies to use for so long, and yet it’s not in the pedagogy, it’s not in the classrooms.So you started with the body image curriculum, BodyKind. And now this year, you’ve just released your weight neutral nutrition curriculum for middle and high school students, called Let’s Eat.Full disclosure: I got to be a early reader of the of the curriculum and offer a few notes. It was already amazing when I read it.DeniseThank you.VirginiaI did not have to add a lot at any by any means, but it was really cool to see the development process, and see where you ended up with it. It’s really remarkable. So let’s start by talking about why nutrition. You’ve done the body image thing, that’s really powerful. Why was nutrition the next logical place to go?DeniseI have spoken at this point to probably 10,000 teachers. And they’re always asking me, what nutrition curriculum do you recommend? Same deal. There’s not one out thereAnd I had asked one of my interns to give me her textbook on it, like what are you learning about nutrition? And in my intern’s textbook, it was 2018, you saw encapsulated the entire problem of what’s wrong with nutrition curriculum.They are asking the children to weigh and measure themselves, and they’re asking the children to count calories in different ways, and to track their food. Food logs. Again, these were best practices in the 90s and and 2000s on how to teach nutrition. So this is all over the nutrition curriculum.Then, of course, they’re talking about good and bad foods, which foods can you eat, which foods you can’t you eat, and all of these things in the research we know cause disordered eating and eating disorders, they all contribute to it. I have a list of probably nine research papers that point to each of these things and tell you why these are bad ideas to have a nutrition class.And we also know there have been two papers written, where they polled students or young people coming in for eating disorder treatment and asked them, what do you think triggered your eating disorder? And around 14% in both studies said, “My healthy eating curriculum at school was where I started getting this obsession.” So you know, what’s out there hasn’t been helpful, and even worse, has been part of the problem in our society.[Post-recording note: Here’s Mallary Tenore Tarpleywriting about this research in the Washington Post, and quoting Oona Hanson!]VirginiaIt’s so rooted in our moral panic around “the childhood obesity epidemic.” Educators, public health officials, everyone feels like, that’s the thing we have to be worried about if we’re going to talk about kids and food. It all has to be framed through that lens. And what you are arguing is: That weight-centered approach causes harm. We can see from the data that it’s not “fixing” the obesity epidemic. Kids aren’t thinner than they were 40 years ago. So it didn’t work. And it’s having all these unintended ripple effects, or sometimes, I would say, intended ripple effects.DeniseYes, exactly. Studies on nutrition curriculum have shown that over 11 years, teaching diet and exercise did not do anything, in two age groups. One was elementary/middle school, another one was a high school group. And they found no changes in body size or nutritional knowledge and and only the effects of what they call weight stigma. Which is just anti-fat bias. So it only causes harm. And these meta studies were from “obesity researchers,” right? So they are even acknowledging we don’t know how to prevent obesity.VirginiaSo you could see very clearly why the current landscape is harmful. How did you think about how to design a better curriculum?DeniseWe had been working on the back burner on an intuitive eating for students type of curriculum. Because the question I get from my teachers is, “What should I be teaching?” So we had been kind of working on an intuitive eating curriculum, and then one of my ambassadors, Selena Salfen, she works in Ramsey County Public Health in Minnesota, said, “Hey, we’re looking for a nutrition curriculum. Why don’t we do one together?”It really turned into how to eat, not what to eat. So we started working on body cues and building trust with your food. And then started really focusing on empowering the student as an authority on their own eating behavior, teaching them how to learn from their own eating experiences. Which is part of responsive feeding. And Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility In Feeding. So we have pieces from all of these. We are empowering students to be experts on their own eating.VirginiaIt’s also so much more respectful of students’ cultural backgrounds, as opposed to the way we learned, like the food pyramid or MyPlate, saying “this is what your plate should look like.” And that doesn’t look like many plates around the world. That’s not what dinner is in lots of families. Your curriculum is saying, let’s empower students to be the experts is letting them own their own experience.DeniseAbsolutely, and trust their own experience. And trust themselves. And they don’t have to go outside of themselves. We want to teach them to act in their own best interests. That’s part of self-care, teaching them to take care of themselves. They need to learn it somewhere.So if you do what they’ve done for years and tell them you need to cut out sugar and you need to cut out carbs, or you need to get this this many grams of protein, it leaves off all of the wonderful parts of eating that we get to experience many times a day, which is the joy, the pleasure, the sharing of food. So in our curriculum, we ask the kids, what do you do in your culture around food? How do you celebrate in your culture with food? What do you eat?We get the discussion going with them and allowing them to feel pride in how their family celebrates. And so it’s really bringing in all these other aspects that we experience with food every day into talking about food. And we talk about pleasure, what do you like, what food do you like, what food do you enjoy? And we want them to be able to hold what foods they like, what their needs are that day.So you talked about MyPlate, MyPlate is stagnant. It always looks the same. But your nutritional needs change every day. If I’m sick, my needs around nourishment are different from if I’ve got a soccer match after school that day. So we’re trying to teach them to be flexible and really throw perfectionism out the window, because it’s unhelpful in any area of life, but especially around eating, especially around food.VirginiaI’m wondering what you’re hearing from school districts who are worrying about the federal guidelines. Because they do need to be in compliance with certain things. DeniseSo we spent a long time with the Food and Nutrition guidelines. The CDC food and nutrition guidelines, and we spent a long time with the HECAT standards, which are the health curriculum standards. We know that teachers are trying to match up what they’re teaching to the federal standards and the state standards. Because every state has their own discussion of this, and they write their own rules. Usually they look like the federal standards, but we find with food and nutrition, sometimes they go off. You’ll get somebody on the committee who hates soda, and will write 10 rules around soda. So every state has their own idiosyncratic rules around it as well.VirginiaI mean, on the flip side, that means there have been opportunities for advocacy. For example in Maryland, Sarah Ganginis was able to make real progress on her state standards. But yes, the downside is you’re gonna have the anti-soda committee showing up.DeniseTotally. And half of the country. We really tried to hit the big standards. I’m actually thumbing through the curriculum right now. We have two pages of the HECAT model food nutrition lessons and which ones this curriculum hits. And then if you’re interested in talking about some of the others — like some of them really want to talk about specifically sugary drinks— we give links in the curriculum to discussions that we agree with. So we may mention sugary drinks in a little piece of the curriculum, but if you want to get the article or the discussion on it that frames it the way we’d like to see it framed, we’ve got links in the curriculum for that.VirginiaSo tell me about the response so far. What are you hearing from teachers and districts?DeniseThe biggest response I’m getting is, “It’s a breath of fresh air.” It’s safe, as you say. And for the teachers out there that are familiar with all of the things that we’ve been teaching that haven’t been working, this is important. And I just want to say to all the health teachers who have been teaching nutrition out there because this is the way we’ve taught it for years: This is how it’s been done. But when you know better, you do better. And that’s the point we’re at now. I know people have been weighing and measuring kids and telling them to count calories for decades because that was best practices at the time. But we’re beyond that. The research has figured out that that’s not the best practices going forward.VirginiaThat…
Full show notes at the publisherYou’re listening to Burnt Toast!
We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for your September Indulgence Gospel!
It’s time for a mailbag episode, so we’ll be diving into your questions about:
⭐️ How to clap back when people say, “Wow, you’ve changed!”
⭐️ What to do with ageist grandparents? (We’re surprisingly…Team Grandparent on this one?)
⭐️ Why it’s so hard to like photos of ourselves!!!
⭐️ Is Back To School (the hype, the myth, the culture)…a diet?
And so much more!
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Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
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Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
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You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Mara Gordon, MD.Dr. Mara is a family physician on the faculty of Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, as well as a writer, journalist and contributor to NPR. She also writes the newsletter Your Doctor Friend by Mara Gordon about her efforts to make medicine more fat friendly.Dr. Mara is back today with Part 2 of our conversation about weight, health, perimenopause and menopause! As we discussed last time, finding menopause advice that doesn’t come with a side of diet culture is really difficult. Dr Mara is here to help, and she will not sell you a supplement sign or make you wear a weighted vest.This episode is free but if you value this conversation, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you.PS. You can always listen to this pod right here in your email, where you’ll also receive full transcripts (edited and condensed for clarity). But please also follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and/or Pocket Casts! And if you enjoy today’s conversation, please tap the heart on this post — likes are one of the biggest drivers of traffic from Substack’s Notes, so that’s a super easy, free way to support the show!And don’t miss these: Dr. Mara Will Not Sell You a Weighted VestHealthcare is Ground Zero for FatphobiaIs Dr. Mary Claire Haver Making MenopauseEpisode 209 TranscriptVirginiaSo today we’re going to move away from the weight stuff a little bit, into some of the other the wide constellation of things that can happen in menopause and perimenopause. Before we get into some nitty gritty stuff, I want to do Laurie’s question about hormone replacement therapy, since that is still one of those topics that people are like, Is it good? Is it bad? I don’t know.So Laurie asked: Is there a reason why a doctor would not want to prescribe hormone replacement therapy? My doctor seems more willing to treat individual symptoms instead of using HRT. Is that maybe because I’m still getting my period?MaraI love this question. Now my professor hat can nerd out about interpretation of scientific research! So first, I’ll just briefly say, Laurie, no big deal that you said HRT. But just so everyone’s aware, the preferred term is menopausal hormone therapy, MHT, or just hormone therapy, and it’s not a huge deal. But I think the North American Menopause Society now uses “menopausal hormone therapy.” The thinking is, hormones don’t necessarily need to be replaced. It comes back to that idea of, menopause is a natural part of life, and so the idea that they would need to be replaced is not totally accurate. VirginiaWe’re not trying to get you out of menopause, right? The goal isn’t to push you back into some pre-menopausal hormonal state. MaraBut again, not a big deal. You’ll see HRT still used, and a lot of doctors still use that term. So I graduated from medical school in 2015 and I remember one of the first times that a patient asked me about using menopausal hormone therapy, I was terrified. And I was still in training, so luckily, I had a mentor who guided me through it. But I had absorbed this very clear message from medical school, which is that menopausal hormone therapy will cause heart disease, cause pulmonary emboli, which are blood clots in the lungs, and cause breast cancer.And I was like, “Ahhh! I’m gonna cause harm to my patients. This is scary.” I had also learned that hot flashes–they weren’t life threatening. So a patient could just use a fan and she’d be fine, right? She didn’t need medicine for it.VirginiaCool.MaraI think the dismissal of symptoms here is just straight up misogyny. That message of, oh, you should just live with this You’re tough, you’re a woman, you can do it. This is just the next stage of it. Is just misogyny, right?But the fear of using menopausal hormone therapy has a specific historical context. There was a major study called the Women’s Health Initiative, and it was a randomized control trial, which is the gold standard in medical research. People were given estrogen and progestin to treat menopausal symptoms or they were given a placebo, and they didn’t know which pill they took. But WHI was actually halted early because they found an increased risk of breast cancer. This was on the front page of The New York Times. It was a really, really big deal. That was 2002 or 2003. So even 15 years later, when I was starting out as a doctor, I was still absorbing its message. And I think a lot of doctors who are still in practice have just deeply absorbed this message.But there’s a lot to consider here. The first issue is in the way that information about the Women’s Health Initiative was communicated. Nerd out with me for a second here: There is a big difference between absolute risk and relative risk. And this is a really subtle issue that’s often communicated poorly in the media.So I looked it up in the initial paper that came out of the Women’s Health Initiative. There was a relative risk of 26 percent of invasive breast cancer, right? So that meant that the people who got the estrogen and progestin, as opposed to a placebo, had a relative increased risk of 26 percent compared to the placebo arm.VirginiaWhich sounds scary,MaraSounds terrifying, right? But the absolute risk is the risk in comparison to one another. And they found that if you’re a patient taking the estrogen/progestin, your absolute risk was 8 people out of 10,000 women a year would get invasive breast cancer. So it’s very, very small.And this is an issue I see in medical journalism all the time. We talk about relative risk, like your risk compared to another group, but the absolute risk remains extremely low.And just to round it out: I looked all this up about cardiovascular events too. Things like a heart attack, a stroke. So the absolute risk was 19. So there were 19 cases of a cardiovascular event out of 10,000 women in a year. People just freaked out about this because of the way that it was covered in the media. VirginiaI was fresh out of college, doing women’s health journalism at the time. So I fully own having been part of that problem. We definitely reported on the relative risk, not the absolute risk. And I don’t understand why. I look back and I’m like, what were we all doing? We ended up taking this medication away from millions of women who could really benefit from it.MaraI found a paper that showed between 2002 and 2009 prescriptions for menopausal hormone therapy declined by more than 60 percent. VirginiaI’m not surprised. MaraAnd then even up until the time I started my training, right in 2015, we’re just seeing a huge decline in hormone therapy prescriptions.One other thing that’s also super important to acknowledge about the Women’s Health Initiative is that they enrolled women over 60, which is not really representative of women who want or need hormone therapy. So the average age of menopause is 51 and the vast majority of women who are experiencing symptoms that would respond well to hormone therapy are much younger. We’re talking here mostly about hot flashes. Which we call vasomotor symptoms of menopause, but it’s basically hot flashes. Women dealing with this are much younger, right? So they’re approaching menopause, late 40s, and right after the menopausal transition, early 50s, and then they don’t necessarily need it anymore, after their symptoms have improved.VirginiaAnd it will also be true that with women in their 60s, you’re going to see more incidence of cancer and heart disease in that age group than in women in their 40s anyway, right? MaraRightVirginiaSo even the 19 cases, the eight cases—they were looking at a higher risk population in general. MaraYeah. And so there have been all these subsequent analyses, which is why now we’re seeing menopausal hormone therapy sort of on the upswing. There’s a lot of increased interest in it. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends it, the North American Menopause Society, the British Menopause Society; here’s a full run-down. It’s not that everybody needs it, and we’ll get to that in a second, but it is a totally safe and appropriate treatment for—specifically and most importantly—for vasomotor symptoms of menopause. Like hot flashes. There’s been all these further analyses of the Women’s Health Initiative data and and then from other studies, too. And basically, it shows that when the hormone therapy is initiated before age 60, or within 10 years of menopause, there’s a reduced risk of heart disease and reduced mortality.VirginiaWow! MaraSo the timing matters. Isn’t that so interesting? The timing matters.Also, the route of administration matters. So what that means in English is that an estrogen patch seems to have a lower risk of blood clots. So one of those fears of the, you know, initial Women’s Health Initiative data was that you might have an increased risk of blood clots. But it’s something about the way that the estrogen is metabolized. It’s not metabolized through the liver when it’s absorbed through the skin, and something about that process seems to decrease the risk of blood clots.So that’s why your doctor, if you’re interested in menopausal hormone therapy, might recommend an estrogen patch rather than a pill.VirginiaGot it. MaraThere’s a lot of ambiguity in all of this data, because, you know, we’re talking about just huge numbers of people, and it’s hard to sort of isolate variables when you’re studying just like massive cohorts of people and trying to understand what you know, what factors affect your risk for which diseases. It’s not clear that taking hormones prevents heart disease. And that’s one of the big claims I see with menopause influencers, that every single person needs this.The data don’t support it at this point in time, and the major menopause organizations do not recommend it as a universal preventative treatment for everybody. But it seems like there might be some sort of association that may become clearer as research continues. That said, now it seems like the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction. I learned, “be afraid of menopausal hormone treatment.” And now all these menopause influencers are saying everyone should be on hormone therapy.I don’t know the answer. And so the way that I try to parse through all of this noise is, you know, go to trusted sources, right? So I stick to society guidelines, like the North American menopause society, the British menopause society, they’re run by world experts in menopause.VirginiaOkay, so we don’t need to be terrified of hormone therapy, and you can be on it if you’re still getting your period right? Just to finish Laurie’s question.MaraIf you’re still getting a period regularly, you’re more in perimenopause than past the menopausal transition. And we will often use contraception to help and that you can have a lot of the same benefits from using contraception in that stage. It’s also useful just because unintended pregnancy still can be totally a thing in your 40s. But yes, you can absolutely use traditional regimens of menopausal hormone therapy while you’re still getting a period too. Just know it won’t prevent pregnancy. VirginiaSince we talked a little bit about hot flashes, I’m gonna jump to Judy’s question so we can kind of round that piece out: One of the things I am really struggling with is the way I have lost all ability to regulate temperature. I am boiling hot almost all the time, and the slightest thing makes me break out into a full sweat, which makes me not want to move at all.My doctor has not been super helpful in navigating this. What can I do to mitigate this issue? If anything, it is so very hard for me not to blame the size of my body for this, since the correlation seems so clear, smaller body less sweating, larger body sweating all the dang time.MaraJudy, I empathize first of all. Just one caveat I can’t really give medical advice to Judy. There are a lot of things that could be going on, and it’s really important that you see a doctor and get a full history and physical exam. But I will say that this is one of the things that menopausal hormone therapy is extremely helpful for, is hot flashes.VirginiaThat was my first thought! MaraThere are a lot of influencers who really overstate the benefits of hormone therapy, right? Hormone therapy is not really going to cause significant weight loss or prevent weight gain. It’s not totally clear that it helps with mood symptoms or even sleep is a little more ambiguous. But the one thing it really works for is hot flashes. So that would be my thought: Start there. VirginiaAnd on the feeling like you want to blame your body for it: I don’t know if Judy identifies as fat, but as someone who identifies as fat, I often feel like I’m sweatier now than when I was thinner. I run warmer. All my skinny friends will be bundled up in coats, and I still won’t be wearing one in October. I do notice that. And I think that this is a situation where that is, even if those two things correlate— you’re larger and you’re sweatier—is that worth putting yourself through the hell of weight loss? You may decide yes, it is, if hormone therapy doesn’t work for you.But that’s one of those times where I bring it back to “What would actually make my daily life miserable?” I can drink water, I can be in AC, I’m gonna find a link to this nighttime cooling bed thing that my friend Claire Zulkey really loves. MaraI’ve heard of those!VirginiaI think there are options to mitigate your suffering with this. Medicine is definitely an option. Before you go to “okay, my body size has to be the thing that changes.”MaraI totally agree. I just deal with this all the time where people tell me in my clinic that they want to lose weight. And when I sort of gently ask, what are you hoping to achieve? What are your goals? They’re often things that can be achieved through other means. Like, people say my clothes don’t fit, right? And most of my patients are low-income, right? I’m not trying to be flippant about the idea that everyone can just go and purchase a new, you know, multi $1,000 wardrobe at the drop of a hat. But it is possible to get new clothes in affordable ways. Don’t torture yourself with clothes that don’t fit because you feel like weight gain is a moral failing. And I think that there are things that we can do to help keep us at a comfortable temperature, right wear clothes that feel, you know, that feel good. Air conditioning is an amazing modern invention. And, you know, cool beverages, ice cream. VirginiaPopsicle O’Clock is very important in my summer right now, very important. MaraWait, what’s a popsicle clock?VirginiaOh, Popsicle O’Clock. It’s just the time of day where you eat popsicles. It could be 9am it could be 4pm just whenever I feel like we need to add popsicles to a situation.MaraI think we all need more popsicles in our life, that is absolutely for sure.So I think what I’m hearing from Judy’s question is once again, shame about body size, and also this myopic zooming in on weight loss as the only possible solution. Which I blame doctors for in many ways! Some people do benefit from weight loss, right? I’m not opposed to the idea that anybody would ever want to lose weight. I don’t think that that’s a betrayal of fat solidarity, necessarily. But that there are other things you can do just to make your life feel better in the meantime, or even if you choose to never pursue weight loss. There are things you can do to feel better, and we shouldn’t deprive ourselves of those things.VirginiaAnd you don’t know that it is the weight gain. It could be age and hormones, and those coincided with the weight gain for you personally. But there are lots of thin women getting hot flashes all the time too.Okay, this next question is from Michaela: I am super curious about the connection between perimenopause, menopause and mental…
Full show notes at the publisherYou’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Ash Brandin of Screen Time Strategies, also know as The Gamer Educator on Instagram. Ash is also the author of a fantastic new book, Power On: Managing Screen Time to Benefit the Whole Family. Ash joined us last year to talk about how our attitudes towards screen time can be…diet-adjacent. I asked them to come back on the podcast this week because a lot of us are heading into back-to-school mode, which in my experience can mean feelingsss about screen routines. There are A LOT of really powerful reframings in this episode that might blow your mind—and make your parenting just a little bit easier. So give this one a listen and share it with anyone in your life who’s also struggling with kids and screen time.Today’s episode is free but if you value this conversation, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you! PS. You can take 10 percent off Power On, or any book we talk about on the podcast, if you order it from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, along with a copy of Fat Talk! (This also applies if you’ve previously bought Fat Talk from them. Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)Episode 208 TranscriptVirginiaFor anyone who missed your last episode, can you just quickly tell us who you are and what you do?AshI’m Ash Brandin. I use they/them pronouns.I am a middle school teacher by day, and then with my online presence, I help families and caregivers better understand and manage all things technology—screen time, screens. My goal is to reframe the way that we look at them as caregivers, to find a balance between freaking out about them and allowing total access. To find a way that works for us. VirginiaWe are here today to talk about your brilliant new book, which is called Power On: Managing Screen Time to Benefit the Whole Family. I can’t underscore enough how much everybody needs a copy of this book. I have already turned back to it multiple times since reading it a few months ago. It just really helps ground us in so many aspects of this conversation that we don’t usually have.AshI’m so glad to hear that it’s helpful! If people are new to who I am, I have sort of three central tenets of the work that I do: * Screen time is a social inequity issue.* Screens can be part of our lives without being the center of our lives. * Screens and screen time should benefit whole families.Especially in the last few years, we have seen a trend toward panic around technology and screens and smartphones and social media. I think that there are many reasons to be concerned around technology and its influence, especially with kids. But what’s missing in a lot of those conversations is a sense of empowerment about what families can reasonably do. When we focus solely on the fear, it ends up just putting caregivers in a place of feeling bad.VirginiaYou feel like you’re getting it wrong all the time.AshShame isn’t empowering. No one is like, “Well, I feel terrible about myself, so now I feel equipped to go make a change,” right?Empowerment is what’s missing in so many of those conversations and other books and things that have come out, because it’s way harder. It’s so much harder to talk about what you can really do and reasonably control in a sustainable way. But I’m an educator, and I really firmly believe that if anyone’s in this sort of advice type space, be it online or elsewhere, that they need to be trying to empower and help families instead of just capitalizing on fear.VirginiaWhat I found most powerful is that you really give us permission to say: What need is screen time meeting right now? And this includes caregivers’ needs. So not just “what need is this meeting for my child,” but what need is this meeting for me? I am here recording with you right now because iPads are meeting the need of children have a day off school on a day when I need to work. We won’t be interrupted unless I have to approve a screen time request, which I might in 20 minutes.I got divorced a couple years ago, and my kids get a lot more screen time now. Because they move back and forth between two homes, and each only has one adult in it. Giving myself permission to recognize that I have needs really got me through a lot of adjusting to this new rhythm of our family.AshAbsolutely. And when we’re thinking about what the need is, we also need to know that it’s going to change. So often in parenting, it feels like we have to come up with one set of rules and they have to work for everything in perpetuity without adjustment. That just sets us up for a sense of failure if we’re like, well, I had this magical plan that someone told me was going to work, and it didn’t. So I must be the problem, right? It all comes back to that “well, it’s my fault” place.VirginiaWhich is screens as diet culture.AshAll over again. We’re back at it. It’s just not helpful. If instead, we’re thinking about what is my need right now? Sometimes it’s “I have to work.” And sometimes it’s “my kid is sick and they just need to relax.” Sometimes it’s, as you were alluding to earlier, it’s we’ve all just had a day, right? We’ve been run ragged, and we just need a break, and that need is going to dictate very different things. If my kid is laid up on the couch and throwing up, then what screen time is going to be doing for them is very different than If I’m trying to work and I want them to be reasonably engaged in content and trying to maybe learn something. And that’s fine. Being able to center “this is what I need right now,” or “this is what we need right now,” puts us in a place of feeling like we’re making it work for us. Instead of feeling like we’re always coming up against some rule that we’re not going to quite live up to.VirginiaI’d love to talk about the inequity piece a little more too. As I said, going from a two parent household to a one parent household, which is still a highly privileged environment—but even just that small shift made me realize, wait a second. I think all the screen time guidance is just for typical American nuclear families. Ideally, with a stay at home parent.So can you talk about why so much of the standard guidance doesn’t apply to most of our families?AshIt’s not even just a stay at home parent. It’s assuming that there is always at least one caregiver who is fully able to be present. Mom, default parent, is making dinner, and Dad is relaxing after work and is monitoring what the kids are doing, right? And it’s one of those times where I’m like, have you met a family?VirginiaPeople are seven different places at once. It’s just not that simple.AshIt’s not that simple, right? It’s like, have you spent five minutes in a typical household in the last 10 years? This is not how it’s going, right?So the beginning of the book helps people unlearn and relearn what we may have heard around screens, including what research really does or doesn’t say around screens, and this social inequity piece. Because especially since the onset of COVID, screens are filling in systemic gaps for the vast majority of families.I’m a family with two caregivers in the home. We both work, but we’re both very present caregivers. So we’re definitely kind of a rarity, that we’re very privileged. We’re both around a lot of the time. And we are still using screens to fill some of those gaps.So whether it’s we don’t really have a backyard, or people are in a neighborhood where they can’t send their kids outside, or they don’t have a park or a playground. They don’t have other kids in the neighborhood, or it’s not a safe climate. Or you live in an apartment and you can’t have your neighbors complain for the fifth time that your kids are stomping around and being loud. Whatever it is—a lack of daycare, affordable after school care —those are all gaps. They all have to be filled. And we used to have different ways of filling those gaps, and they’ve slowly become less accessible or less available. So something has to fill them. What ends up often filling them is screens. And I’m not saying that that’s necessarily a good thing. I’d rather live in a world in which everyone is having their needs met accessibly and equitably. But that’s a much harder conversation, and is one that we don’t have very much say in. We participate in that, and we might vote for certain people, but that’s about all we can really do reasonably. So, in the meantime, we have to fill that in with something and so screens are often going to fill that in.Especially if you look at caregivers who have less privilege, who are maybe single caregivers, caregivers of color, people living in poverty—all of those aspects of scarcity impacts their bandwidth. Their capacity as a caregiver is less and spread thinner, and all of that takes away from a caregiver’s ability to be present. And there were some really interesting studies that were done around just the way that having less capacity affects you as a caregiver.And when I saw that data, I thought, well, of course. Of course people are turning to screens because they have nothing else to give from. And when we think of it that way, it’s hard to see that as some sort of personal failure, right? When we see it instead as, oh, this is out of necessity. It reframes the question as “How do I make screens work for me,” as opposed to, “I’m bad for using screens.”VirginiaRight. How do I use screen time to meet these needs and to hopefully build up my capacity so that I can be more present with my kids? I think people think if you’re using a lot of screens, you’re really never present. It’s that stereotype of the parent on the playground staring at their phone, instead of watching the kid play. When maybe the reason we’re at the playground is so my kid can play and I can answer some work emails. That doesn’t mean I’m not present at other points of the day.AshOf course. You’re seeing one moment. I always find that so frustrating. It just really feels like you you cannot win. If I were sitting there staring at my child’s every move in the park, someone would be like, “you’re being a helicopter,” right? And if I look at my phone because I’m trying to make the grocery pickup order—because I would rather my child have time at the playground than we spend our only free hour in the grocery store and having to manage a kid in the grocery store and not having fun together, right? Instead I’m placing a pickup order and they’re getting to run around on the playground. Now also somehow I’m failing because I’m looking at my phone instead of my kid. But also, we want kids to have independent time, and not need constant input. It really feels like you just can’t win sometimes. And being able to take a step back and really focus on what need is this meeting? And if it’s ours, and if it is helping me be more present and connected, that’s a win. When I make dinner in the evening, my kid is often having screen time, and I will put in an AirPod and listen to a podcast, often Burnt Toast, and that’s my decompression. Because I come home straight from work and other things. I’m not getting much time to really decompress.VirginiaYou need that airlock time, where you can decompress and then be ready to be present at dinner.I’m sure I’ve told you this before, but I reported a piece on screen time for Parents Magazine, probably almost 10 years ago at this point, because I think my older child was three or four. And I interviewed this Harvard researcher, this older white man, and I gave him this the dinner time example. I said, I’m cooking dinner. My kid is watching Peppa Pig so that I can cook dinner, and take a breath. And then we eat dinner together. And he said, “Why don’t you involve her in cooking dinner? Why don’t you give her a bag of flour to play with while you cook dinner?”AshOf all the things!VirginiaAnd I said to him: Because it’s 5pm on a Wednesday and who’s coming to clean the flour off the ceiling?AshA bag of flour. Of all the things to go to! VirginiaHe was like, “kids love to make a happy mess in the kitchen!” I was like, well I don’t love that. And it was just exactly that. My need didn’t matter to him at all. He was like, “h, well, if you just want to pacify your children…” I was like, I do, yes, in that moment.AshWell, and I think that’s another part of it is that someone says it to us like that, and we’re like, “well, I can’t say yes,” right? But in the moment, yeah, there are times where it’s like, I need you to be quiet. And as hard as this can be to think, sometimes it’s like right now, I need you to be quiet and convenient because of the situation we’re in. And that doesn’t mean we’re constantly expecting that of them, and hopefully that’s not something we’re doing all the time. But if the need is, oh my God, we’re all melting down, and if we don’t eat in the next 15 minutes, we’re going to have a two hour DEFCON1 emergency on our hands, then, yeah, I’m gonna throw Peppa Pig on so that we can all become better regulated humans in the next 15 minutes and not have a hungry meltdown. And that sounds like a much better alternative to me!VirginiaThan flour all over my kitchen on a Wednesday, right? I mean, I’ll never not be mad about it. It’s truly the worst parenting advice I’ve ever received. So thank you for giving us all more space as caregivers to be able to articulate our own needs and articulate what we need to be present. It’s what we can do in the face of gaps in the care system that leave us holding so much.That said: I think there are some nitty gritty aspects of this that we all struggle wit, so I want to talk about some of the nuts and bolts pieces. One of my biggest struggles is still the question of how much time is too much time? But you argue that time really isn’t the measure we should be using. As you’re saying, that need is going to vary day to day, and all the guidance that’s been telling us, like, 30 minutes at this age, an hour at this age, all of that is not particularly germane to our lives. So can you explain both why time is less what we should fixate on? And then how do I release myself? How do I divest from the screen time diet culture?AshOh man, I wish I had a magic bullet for that one. We’ll see what I can do.When I was writing this and thinking about it and making content about it, I kept thinking about you. Because the original time guidelines that everyone speaks back to—they’re from the AAP. And they have not actually been used in about 10 years, but people still bring them up all the time. The “no time under two” and “up to an hour up to age five” and “one to two hours, five to 12.” And if you really dig in, I was following footnote after footnote for a while, trying to really find where did this actually come from? It’s not based on some study that found that that’s the ideal amount of time. It really came from a desire to find this middle ground of time spent being physically idle. These guidelines are about wanting to avoid childhood obesity.VirginiaOf course.AshIt all comes back, right?VirginiaI should have guessed it.AshAnd so in their original recommendations, the AAP note that partially this is to encourage a balance with physical movement. Which, of course, assumes that if you are not sitting watching TV or using an iPad, that you will be playing volleyball or something.VirginiaYou’ll automatically be outside running around.AshExactly, of course, those are the only options.VirginiaIt also assumes that screen time is never physical. But a lot of kids are very physical when they’re watching screens.AshExactly. And it, of course, immediately also imposes a morality of one of these things is better—moving your body is always better than a screen, which is not always going to be true, right? All these things have nuance in them. But I thought that was so interesting, and it shouldn’t have surprised me, and yet somehow it still did. And of course it is good to find movement that…
Full show notes at the publisherYou’re listening to Burnt Toast! We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
For our last August hiatus episode, we’re looking back at a conversation we ran back in February of this year — exploring the work of attorney turned self-help guru Mel Robbins.
Did Mel steal the concept of “let them?”
Is she just Andrew Huberman for the “We Can Do Hard Things” crowd?
Is high-fiving yourself in the mirror every morning a diet?
As you’ll hear, Corinne and I didn’t totally agree… until we did. Let’s get into it.
To hear our discussion, you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. Subscriptions are $7 per month or $70 for the year.
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!
Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark! We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
This episode first aired in November 2024, right after the presidential election. We’re now 8 months into Trump’s second term, and continuing to grapple with how America has slid to the right. So the story of a public health advocate and scholar who is now aligned with conservative media feels incredibly timely—especially because many of you are starting back at school this month, and Emily’s take on school lunches is particularly complex. That said, we also want to hold space for how much Emily’s work has meant to so many of us (including Virginia!).
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!
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