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!
We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for a bonus March Indulgence Gospel!
Today we’re chatting about:
⭐️ How to talk to your kids about (your) weight loss and/or GLP-1 use.
⭐️ How to handle medically-advised diets without getting…diet-y.
⭐️Our favorite leggings (we stand by all these recs!)
⭐️Dealing with haters… and more!
To hear the full story, you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber.
If you’re already a paid subscriber, you can add on a subscription to Big Undies, Corinne’s newsletter about clothes, for 20% off.
Today’s episode is a rerun; we’re bringing you episode 100, which ran in June 2023—such a simpler time! But we had a really valuable conversation about how to talk to kids about body changes, especially if you’re losing weight on Ozempic and we thought it might be a helpful one to revisit now. Plus there is our usual smattering of assorted random Indulgence Gospel topics. And dahlias! Enjoy.
PS. This transcript does contain affiliate links; shopping our links is a great way to support Burnt Toast!
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
Follow us on social!
Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.
Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.
Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.
Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
You’re listening to Burnt Toast!
We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for your March Extra Butter.
Today we’re talking about Dr. Becky Kennedy, the beloved parenting influencer. We’ll get into:
⭐️ The Dr. Becky mantra that Virginia uses…often.
⭐️Why you don’t need to cook dinner for your kids at 3pm.
⭐️ The infamous “school nurse call” post.
⭐️ Is Dr. Becky — and parenting content more broadly— a diet or diet-adjacent?
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
Follow us on social!
Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.
Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.
Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.
Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
You’re listening to Burnt Toast!We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for your March Indulgence Gospel!Indulgence Gospel episodes are usually only for paid subscribers but we’re releasing this one for free! If you like it, you can get even more Virginia by becoming a paid Burnt Toast subscriber.Today we’re chatting about:⭐️ Navigating fitness spaces designed for smaller bodies!⭐️ Feelings about hair color!⭐️ Do Virginia and Corinne like sports now? 👀⭐️ And what to do when it seems like everyone is on a weight loss drug.The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is byFarideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!Episode 184 TranscriptVirginiaOkay, I just want to say: We got a lot of clothing-related questions this month, which we’re sending over to the Big Undies space. Not that we’ll never talk about clothes on Burnt Toast! But if you’re someone who’s coming to us for that content, you really need to be reading Big Undies because Corinne is doing the Lord’s work over there.CorinneYep,. I am doing the Lord’s work.VirginiaYou are the most size-inclusive fashion Substack. I’m going to just claim that title for you. I think it’s correct?CorinneI mean, a size-inclusive fashion Substack.VirginiaWell, admittedly, the competition for Most Size-Inclusive is not stiff, since most fashion Substacks are not at all size inclusive. But there are a handful of great ones! You are just my favorite.CorinneYou can always DM or email me your questions!VirginiaCorinne has answered many of my fashion questions. So send more of them to Corinne!Okay, so what’s new? How are you doing?CorinneI’m doing good. Is there something I should talk about other than the weather?VirginiaWell, it’s March, which is my least favorite month of the year weather-wise in New York. So if you have good weather tidings, you can bring them to us. Because I don’t.CorinneWe have had a few unseasonably warm days, I’m talking low 70s, and the bulbs are starting to come up.VirginiaI’m jealous of everybody else’s spring. I live in a very cold part of the world and it will not be spring for many, many more weeks. But that’s nice for you.CorinneYes. Shall we get to the questions? I’ll read the first one.I turned 49 in January. My hair is brown, ash blonde and going silver along the hairline. I have a hair stylist who loves to do color and is very good at it. I’ve been thinking about doing color or streaks as a way to mark this fifth decade. But what color? In my dreams, it’s sparkling gold, but I’m not actually Galadriel. I don’t want anything neon. If you’ve colored your hair, how did you choose which color? Especially if it wasn’t for overall beauty labor reasons, but more as pleasure.VirginiaI love this. I love the idea of dyeing your hair to mark turning 50, specifically dyeing it what sounds like a not found-in-nature color.How many hair colors have you had Corinne?CorinneMainly one. I dyed my hair pink in high school. I think I dyed my hair darker brown in college once, just box dye. I’ve never seen a professional hair colorist. But I have been thinking a lot about this because, you know, I recently got my colors done.VirginiaOh, that’s right! We are going to have a whole episode about getting your colors done, people! The early teaser for that is that I’m still waiting for my results. But yes, so you got your colors done. And did it make you rethink your hair color?CorinneWell, yes, and no. I think a lot of people use that framework for choosing hair color when dyeing their hair. So that is one way to think about it. And I did sort of have the question, like: Well, if gray isn’t one of my colors, and my hair is starting to go gray, what does that mean? Should I think about coloring it?VirginiaBut wouldn’t your hair naturally go the right gray for you?CorinneI mean, I think there are different interpretations.VirginiaIs there a right gray? Maybe you have no grays in your approved colors.CorinneI’m a true spring so I think I would want like a lighter gray? I don’t know.VirginiaMore of like a blonde gray ? There’s so much to discuss on this whole colors thing, because I am something of a skeptic. I started as a devotee, now I’m a skeptic. So stay tuned for the colors episode. But I could see it being both helpful and stressful when it comes to thinking about hair color.I have never had fun colored hair. I have a child with blue hair, so I do know quite a lot about the maintenance involved in living with fun color hair, and it’s a part time job of mine to maintain that. But I’ve never had it for myself. I had a brief blonde period in college—if I can find photographic evidence, I will consider revealing that to the world. You can see the color of my eyebrows. They are dark, dark brown, so it was very like 90’s Tori Spelling. It was not a natural state for me.So that was a mistake. And then I stayed my natural color, which is dark brown, all through my 20’s and 30’s. But sometime after I had my second child, my hair stylist—who is one of the most important long-term relationships of my life, she’s been cutting my hair since I was maybe 29—slowly nudged me over into color, and now I do get my hair colored, and it’s a mix of a base color and highlights. I don’t really understand what happens, I just let her do what she wants because I trust her implicitly with my head. And I like not having to make decisions about it, and that it always looks good.But it is a point of reckoning, because I don’t actually care about the beauty labor piece. Like, I don’t actually care about covering my grays, but she is covering my grays most of the time anyway.CorinneSo how do you know you don’t care about it?VirginiaBecause when they grow back in, I’m like, “Oh, hey, that’s fun. Gray hairs!" When I’m in between, you know? I’m not, like, I want to cover the grays. That’s not why I’m doing it. I’m doing it because I like going to see her and hanging out with my friend, and I enjoy what it looks like when she’s done. Like, it is pleasure. And it’s pleasure that upholds a beauty standard, so I feel complicated about it.But the way I choose the color is I just go to the salon and I trust the person who knows very well what to do. And it sounds like this reader, this listener, has someone in their life who does that. So I think I would start there! Go to your hair stylist and be like, “Okay, let’s do something fun.” And I feel like she’s going to blow your mind.CorinneI agree. And I also think I wouldn’t let not being Galadriel stop you from getting or wanting sparkling gold hair.VirginiaI think it could be pretty sparkling! Hair color technology has come a really long way. If you’re doing salon color, they can do quite a lot, especially if you have some silver you’ve already got some bleached parts. I think it could be pretty awesome.CorinneJust based on your description, brown ash blonde, going silver, sounds like a good match for sparkling gold.VirginiaIf you do it, please send us pictures! We would love to see this.Okay, next question:Even though I’ve been in the anti-diet space for years, once in a while, I think maybe I should just try Zepbound and see what happens. Has anyone else been pulled into these thoughts?Corinne“See what happens.” What are we talking about here?VirginiaWe’re talking about weight loss. We’re talking about seeing how much weight loss will happen.CorinneOne good thing to remember about these drugs is that they do cause weight loss in most people, but they don’t cause weight loss in everyone. And, if you ever want to stop taking them, you will likely regain the weight.So I think the question is: Do you want to go on this drug, see how much weight you can lose, then go off it and regain the weight? Is that a net positive?VirginiaThat’s a really useful framing. Because what you’re essentially saying is: Do you want to go back on a diet? It’s not that different from what I presume most of us have done with intentional weight loss in the past. It’s just a different delivery vehicle. You want to try the drug approach versus the diet approach now. Or a lot of people end up doing both, whatever.I think all of us have had these thoughts, right? It’s hard. The drugs are everywhere. People are talking about them constantly. We’re human. Of course there are moments where I’m like, “Am I going to be the last fat mom in the Hudson Valley?”CorinneOh God!I do just want to also make the point now though, that a lot of people also go on these drugs, lose a lot of weight, and are still fat.VirginiaThank you for saying that. Excellent note. Or don’t even lose that much weight. Not everybody responds the same way. That’s the thing.So you can have the thought. There’s nothing wrong with having the thought. But it’s important to put the thought into the context of what’s actually happening with these drugs. Which is the same thing that always happens with dieting. Yes, some people are losing weight on it for some unspecified amount of time. And not everybody is losing dramatic amounts. It’s just dieting. So yes, we’re constantly tempted to reconsider an anti-diet stance because we live in a culture that’s constantly telling us to.CorinneTotally. I do think within the anti-diet space, we’ve become so anti-these drugs that I can sort of understand being like, “What if I just tried it,” you know? And I think if you want to try it, that’s fine. But I do think it’s good to just have a reality check of what that’s actually going to look like.VirginiaBe realistic about where you’re going with it.CorinneYou could even just start by looking into how much it might cost.VirginiaOh, yeah. That might clarify some choices.CorinneYeah. It might be like, well, if I can get it for free, sure, I’ll try it. But if I have to pay $2,000 a month, no thank you.VirginiaIf it’s a second mortgage payment.Yeah, and how do I feel about chronic nausea? I was thinking about this because I just had food poisoning at the end of my vacation, and we won’t talk about it because Corinne is very triggered by discussions of food poisoning and specifically airplane-adjacent vomiting.But when it happened I was like, people are signing up to feel this way? It feels so awful feeling nauseous! It’s an awful feeling. If you’re on the drugs and you don’t feel nauseous—I get it, not everybody does. But that’s the most common side effect. And to voluntarily be like, “Let me do something where I’m going to walk around feeling nauseous.” I’m like, I have been pregnant twice. I have had stomach bugs. I could be retired from that feeling, thank you.CorinneI think nausea is one of the worst feelings in the world. And, I can understand the calculus between, would I trade feeling nauseous to experience less fatphobia? Like, that’s real. There’s a lot to think about.VirginiaI think we’re saying it makes sense you’re pulled into these thoughts. We’re offering some larger context in which to put the thoughts. We support you doing whatever you want to do, but that’s the calculus we’re landing on. We get the thoughts, and then we put it in the larger context and we move on in our fat lives. But your mileage may vary, and that’s fair. You’re still welcome here.CorinneGood luck!Alright, here’s the next question.I would love to hear a discussion on the ways movement spaces are geared towards smaller bodies, even in subtle ways—because it pisses me off, and I can’t be alone in this! For instance, I enjoy a morning spin class with a friend of mine, and when the gym got new bikes, the new models moved the lever to adjust intensity to the front/middle. Now, as a fat person, my stomach bumps the dang thing and resets it throughout my workout. Clearly, bigger bodied people were not considered when creating this piece of exercise equipment. Not shocking, but super frustrating! Keep your anti-fatness out of my delightful morning spin.VirginiaI’m so annoyed about this.CorinneYeah, that’s horrible.VirginiaOt’s so dumb. I hope you’ve complained to the gym, because they should know they bought equipment that does not serve their clients. That’s irritating.CorinneYou should definitely complain to the gym and possibly also the company that manufactures the bikes.VirginiaIt’s just rude. I mean, my solution to this is that I don’t work out in mainstream fitness spaces. I work out in my home where it is sized to me. Because I find this constantly maddening.And I think it is subtle stuff. It’s the equipment, it’s the physical built space, and it’s also the felt experience of being the fat person in a space that is oriented around thinness. I just don’t like putting myself into it.So that’s not very helpful. I’ve spent a bunch of money on weights for my house, and I have space to use them. But that’s not everybody.CorinneThis question was interesting to me, because I actually feel like I don’t encounter this a lot at my gym.VirginiaSay more.CorinneI feel like a lot of the equipment at my gym is designed to hold really heavy weights, because people are lifting really heavy weights. And a lot of the equipment is extremely adjustable. There are two bikes at my gym—they’re what are called assault bikes. Is that the real name? You pump your arms and pedal your feet. But the seat moves up and down, and it moves forward and back. So you can really kind of adjust it. When one arm is pulled all the way back, sometimes I do hit my belly, but it’s fine.VirginiaI am googling an assault bike. We’ll put a visual for people like me who have not heard of this. I just have to say, there’s just no end to fitness equipment that looks like torture devices. And why do they keep inventing these things?CorinneIt’s literally just a bike with with arm pedals. One thing I really like about it is the front is, I guess it’s like a flywheel or something? So it blows air on you. It’s cooling.VirginiaOh, that’s nice. Why does that have such an aggressive name, though?CorinneI do not know. That’s why I was like, is that the real name? I’m not sure.VirginiaWhy can’t it be called the breezy bike?CorinneOkay, I don’t know.But my other thought about this was, I was recalling that I encountered this a lot in yoga studios where you would get a strap and sometimes it wouldn’t be long enough. If there was a place I was going all the time, I would know which strap I had to get.VirginiaAnd yoga mats are not cut for everybody, they can be too skinny.CorinneYeah, not wide enough or not long enough.VirginiaAnd depending on the number of people they’re trying to cram into the class if you go into a popular yoga studio, you can feel really cramped. The space my body will need to move comfortably here is not available. I hate that.It makes sense that a sport like powerlifting would be better on this since lots of different body sizes powerlift and you’re lifting heavier weights. And I think there’s more inclusivity in terms of the size of athlete it attracts. Whereas something like spin or yoga, which are thin lady sports, are going to be really annoying on this front. Which is not to say you have to be a powerlifter, but I think if you love a sport that really emphasizes thinness or has a thin ideal, you’re going to have to advocate more.CorinneI am also curious: Are you sure the bike doesn’t adjust at all? But maybe it doesn’t adjust in a helpful way.VirginiaI’m kind of guessing maybe this person has already explored that.CorinneI will say I experienced this a lot in other spaces. Anywhere else that has seats. Bathrooms sometimes. Why is the toilet paper blocking where I need to sit.VirginiaBathroom stalls are so narrow. That’s really real. Oh, I will link Dr. Rachel Millner, who is a wonderful eating disorder therapist and fat activist. She has been posting a lot of content on Instagram—she’s on a mission to become a fat Peloton…
Full show notes at the publisherYou’re listening to Burnt Toast!I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, and today my guest isAmy Palanjian.Amy is my work wife and best friend of over 20 years. She’s also the creator of Yummy Toddler Food and author of the nationally bestselling cookbook Dinnertime SOS: 100 Sanity-Saving Meals Parents and Kids of All Ages Will Actually Want to Eat.Amy joined me last month at Split Rock Books to celebrate the launch of FAT TALK in paperback. They also host the Burnt Toast Bookshop for us, and are forever the place to get my books signed and personalized however you like!So we talked about the book, of course, but we also got into how family dinners have changed for us post-divorce, why cooking with kids is terrible, and then Amy outed my (not so) secret love of protein powder. 😂(Bear with some imperfect audio, since we weren’t recording with our usual set-up — but Tommy worked his magic as usual so it’s still highly listen-to-able!)If you find today’s episode valuable, a paid subscription is the best way to support this work!Guest interviews are always free on Burnt Toast, but paid subscriptions enable us to pay guests for their time, labor and expertise. (This is extremely rare in the world of podcasting, but key to centering marginalized voices!)The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is byFarideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!Episode 183 TranscriptAmyOkay, so we are here to celebrate your paperback release, and we had a burning question from the front row. Can you tell us if and how this book is different than the hardcover?VirginiaYes! Okay, so I don’t know how familiar folks are with publishing, but a lot of hardcovers don’t ever get a paperback. It’s just the way the industry is working these days, fewer and fewer books make it to paperback. So it was very exciting to make it to paperback! And part of how you make it to paperback is you and your editor brainstorm all the ways you can make the paperback really good so they’ll want to print it.Most of the book is the same, but there is a foreword written by Kate Manne who is an amazing fat activist and feminist philosophy professor at Cornell. She’s the author of the incredible book, Unshrinking. She wrote a beautiful foreword. And then there’s an afterword by me where I talk about what it was like to launch this book at the height of Ozempic Mania, and how that played a role in the conversations around the book, how it led so many men on the Internet to have feelings about me.AmyI was going to ask if you can talk a little bit more about how the world feels different or how your maybe your intended audience feels a little bit different from when you first released the book to now? If it does.VirginiaObviously there’s the huge conversation happening now around the semaglutide drugs and this idea that now weight loss is within all of our reach. Now, I think what we’re seeing increasingly from the data is that it doesn’t put weight loss within everyone’s reach. There’s also a very valid conversation to be had about whether we need weight loss to be within everyone’s reach. Everyone is allowed to make their own choices for their bodies. But what would it actually do for the world if we could make everyone thin?Audience MemberThat’s funny. Sorry, that’s ridiculous.VirginiaYes! So in short, it’s ridiculous. But I think what it does mean is that the conversation around weight loss is louder in a lot of ways. I mean, in some ways, I think traditional diet conversation it is less because that’s not what people are doing now to lose weight. But the fact that anytime, as a person in a larger body, I go to the doctor, this is likely to come up. You’re just navigating it in a whole other way now. And what the Ozempic conversation has really done is given anti-fatness and diet culture this “well, why not?” sort of answer. Like, “Well, we’ve got this now, so why wouldn’t you?”And again, this is not to demonize anyone’s personal choices! We’re all allowed to do what we want with our bodies. But there are lots of us that feel like that shouldn’t be the only answer, or shouldn’t be where the conversation stops and starts.What I’m also noticing is that we have a lot of people who are like, “Well, I am doing this because my doctor said it was important for my health. Can I still be for fat liberation? Can I still be against diet culture?” And the answer is absolutely yes. So I think we need to create space for the fact that people are going to make their own choices for their bodies, because that’s core to body autonomy and body liberation. But we can also still name anti-fatness and calling it out and trying to dismantle it. So it’s more nuanced now. Because we have to hold those two things together.AmySo, say you go to the doctor because your knee hurts and the subject of weight loss comes up, or weight loss drugs come up. What are some questions that you might ask for more context?VirginiaWell, I think the first question that’s always useful to ask is: How would you treat this condition for a thin person? Because someone in a thin body that shows up with knee pain is not prescribed weight loss. We know for any health condition, there are multiple ways of going about it because weight loss isn’t the answer for everybody. So asking them to think about, “what would you do for a thin person? Can we start with that for me?” is a useful starting point.Then I think having a direct conversation is important. And this is scary and vulnerable and really hard to do. But most of us who are fat, we’ve done weight loss. That’s not something we have no experience with. So saying, like, “I’ve done this, it hasn’t worked for me. This is what happens when I’m dieting.” This is the toll it takes on my mental health and my emotional health. This is why it’s not realistic for my lifestyle, because of my job schedule or my parenting schedule. And helping the doctor understand that while yes, that might solve a problem that they’re trying to solve for you, the ripple effect of that “solution” in your life also matters.So does that actually solve your problem, or does that give you many other problems? That’s going to be a different answer for everybody. But that’s the nuance that I want doctors to have. It’s not that I never want doctors to talk about weight, it’s that I want them to be understanding that the conversation doesn’t start and end with weight loss, and that you’re allowed to be a person with a whole context to your life.AmyOkay, so, speaking of versions of your book, I have a 12 year old who was obsessed with your hardcover book, and she has heard that you are noodling around the idea of a YA version. She has volunteered herself to be as helpful as possible, and would really like to know if this is happening.VirginiaOkay, we are in early conversations—this is early, early, early!—to do a middle grade version of the book. I would be delighted to have your 12-year-old write it! She and I need to talk. We’re figuring out what of the book needs to go into a middle grade version.One interesting thing that came up, actually, in a conversation with the editors was they are concerned—and the same thing happened with the hard cover. With the hard cover, people said, “Should we call it FAT TALK? Because maybe that means only parents of fat kids will buy the book!” Like, as if parents of thin kids never think about fatness or have no relationship to this concept. And I was like, no, I don’t think that will be the case. And it wasn’t.But with FAT TALK for kids, they’re saying, is this a title that makes sense to put on a middle grade book? Will only fat kids read it? Will that create stigma? Like, what do we do about that?So this is a conversation I need to have with your kid and other kids, because I think it’s a fair point. I think there are lots of great books for kids that talk about body image. I don’t think there are books that explain to kids that we’re talking about a systemic form of oppression, that explain it as a system, that explain what diet culture is, what this industry is, and what they’re trying to sell you. That’s information kids in every body size need, because we’re all navigating it. But how do we bring that to the kids? So that’s what we’re working on right now.AmyYou can ask her and I’m sure she will talk at you.So this is not meant to sound as—I don’t know how this could sound. But okay, so you really love protein powder? It seemed like a good segue. I would like to hear about your relationship with protein powder. Because it is, you know, like… protein is… yeah. So tell us about that.VirginiaAmy has decided to out me. This is all going on Reddit right now.Okay, yes, I enjoy protein powder in my smoothies. I learned about protein powder on my last diet, which was in 2015 which was a time in my life where I thought I was being really critical of diet culture, but I definitely..wasn’t. So I was writing a piece for Self Magazine about whether detoxes are worth it, and following a detox diet for two months as “research.” So I was obviously still very much in that world. I mean, I was still writing for women’s magazines. But I did this terrible detox where they didn’t let me eat anything except protein powder and chicken broth or whatever. And I did quit the detox, I think after only a couple weeks. Do you remember this?AmyWas this the chicken thighs one?VirginiaThat was a different one. Oh man. Our 20s were a bad time.I can’t remember how long I did it for it, but I did, in the course of the detox, get really into this protein powder. Even though it has now been almost 10 years since I’ve tried to lose weight in any intentional way, I still love this protein powder in my smoothies every morning. It’s just tasty. And I think part of it is, we’re allowed to reclaim these pieces of diet culture that actually we do really like. You don’t have to reject it wholesale just because it got marketed to us.But I did have to spend some time divesting from my relationship with the protein powder.AmyWhat are some other foods that you reclaimed, besides Diet Coke? Because I feel as though maybe we all know about that one. But are there others?VirginiaI’m recently getting back into kale and I think you’re going to be mad. Amy does not like kale, which is a controversial position for a food blogger to take! Because there are a lot of expectations that you would like kale, I think. It’s expected to be part of your brand. But I think I do like kale?AmyIn what way?VirginiaJulia Turshen had this really great recipe. I actually made it on Christmas Day but I have made it since, where you take Lacinato kale and you slice it up pretty thin and you really massage it with a lot of lemon and oil and stuff, and then there’s a chickpea thing you make up the air fryer and you put on top. And I think it’s delicious!AmyOkay. I have this recipe for kale bites. I did legitimately make them a lot when my oldest was a toddler and she ate them. I mean, it’s kale in a bucket of cheese. It’s one of the oldest recipes on my website and almost all of the content has been updated at least once, and I keep seeing that in the list, and I’m like, I cannot make them. I’m sorry.What is your go-to line when you are at a meal with, say, family, and someone says something either disparaging about themselves and what they’re eating or about food in general.How do you react? If you do.VirginiaI mean, I just want to say it’s hard to have one line for this. I get asked this a lot and people want one go-to line but it’s so context specific. And, it’s really okay if you just don’t engage. I’m actually doing less engaging these days, because I feel like it just often goes badly, and you’re not going to change hearts and minds by being combative in these moments. They are where they are. It’s better to preserve your bandwidth for things you really need to do. So often I don’t say anything.But where I will say something is if someone comments on how my child is eating, or my child’s body. That is one where I will insert myself. Because that’s not okay. And then I’ll probably say something like, “Oh, we trust them. We’re not worried about this.” Like, this isn’t something we’re worrying about right now. We trust them to eat how they need to eat.I frame it this way because I’m less concerned with “how do I convince this person that I’m correct,” and more concerned with “what do I want my kid to hear in that moment?” And what I want my kid to hear is, “My mom trusts me and trusts my body, and is not concerned about how I’m eating.”AmyI will also say that, as my kids have gotten older, when comments from other people happen about what someone is eating themselves, talking about it afterward has become very interesting. Even just asking, “Did you hear what whoever said at the table? What did you think of that?” Just so that they start to develop the ability to notice those types of comments and then get to have their own opinion about them. It’s very interesting to see what they say.VirginiaDefinitely.AmySpeaking of kids, what is your go-to family meal?VirginiaMy children have many great qualities, but they’re not adventurous eaters. They’re wonderful, spectacular human beings. But. My house is me and my two daughters. I would say our go-to family meal these days is some kind of pasta with some kind of red sauce, plus a snack plate that includes Cheez-Its and sliced cheese and fruit. Because one child won’t eat pasta, and so she’s going to have the cheese and crackers for dinner. And I’ve just kind of made my peace with that’s how family dinner looks like in our house right now.What I’m really more focused on is, how do we foster connection at the family table? How do we make sure that they feel safe and welcome showing up there? And I have not always gotten it right! This has been a really rocky part of my parenting a lot of the time. But at least if the food is familiar and comforting to them, then I know we have that in place.And when in doubt, those smoothies with the protein powder make me feel less freaked out about their overall intake. So we all do those for breakfast.AmySo, Virginia and I are both divorced. I’ve always felt pretty detached from what my kids eat. I mean, I put out what’s for dinner, and then they eat what they eat. And I have three very different eaters. But once I took another adult out of the equation, somehow there is just less pressure overall on family meals. There’s no other fully grown person having any opinion whatsoever. It’s just little kids. So our meals have gotten a lot more fun. Not the food! But we will often go around the table and each person gets to pick two songs and then we play them.So my bandwidth has changed a lot as I’ve put some distance in between that value on family dinner in the same way. I think it’s also because the kids are older. There’s no high chair situation. They can actually put food in their own mouths without it falling on the floor.VirginiaThey don’t need to be touching you while they’re eating.AmyI mean, that is brand new. And I have an-almost six-year-old. But there is a lot more room for it just to be about safety and connection and the food is there. So that’s been nice.What are some meals that you make just for yourself?VirginiaI order sushi a lot. That’s what I make for myself. The Uber Eats app. I also eat a lot of pasta. My child comes by that very honestly.What else do I eat? Amy, you stumped me.AmyI actually don’t know. You eat The Cheese.VirginiaOh, right. Thank you. There’s this really good marinated sheep goat cheese by Meredith Dairy that I thanked in the acknowledgements of this book. I love it so much, and I will build a lot of meals around that cheese. It’s good on pasta, it’s good on toast, it’s good on…
Full show notes at the publisherToday Virginia is chatting with Brianna Campos. Bri is a licensed professional counselor and body image coach who works with folks recovering from eating disorders, and finding body acceptance through grief. You may know Bri from Instagram, or from her newsletter, Body Image with Bri.Bri and I talk about why this concept of body grief is so important—and yet so often overlooked in this work. And she shares how doing her own body grief work has led her to have a happier relationship with her body and to start dating again—confidently and with a lot of joy as a superfat person. If you find today’s episode valuable, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription!Guest interviews are always free on Burnt Toast, but paid subscriptions enable us to pay guests for their time, labor and expertise. (This is extremely rare in the world of podcasting, but key to centering marginalized voices!)To tell us YOUR thoughts, and to get all of the links and resources mentioned in this episode, as well as a complete transcript, visit our show page.If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. And don’t forget to check out our Burnt Toast Podcast Bonus Content! Disclaimer: You’re listening to this episode because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore has a lot of informed opinions. Neither my guest today nor I are healthcare providers, and this conversation is not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice.FAT TALK is out in paperback! Order your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. You can also order the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.CREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay. Follow Virginia on Instagram, Follow Corinne @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing and subscribe to Big Undies.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism. You’re listening to Burnt Toast!I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, and today my guest is Brianna Campos.Bri is a licensed professional counselor and body image coach who works with folks recovering from eating disorders, and finding body acceptance through grief. You may know Bri from Instagram, or from her newsletter, Body Image with Bri.Bri and I talk about why this concept of body grief is so important—and yet so often overlooked in this work. And she shares how doing her own body grief work has led her to have a happier relationship with her body and to start dating again—confidently and with a lot of joy as a superfat person.Bri is such a delight, and I learned so much from talking with her. You are going to love this episode!If you find today’s episode valuable, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription!Guest interviews are always free on Burnt Toast, but paid subscriptions enable us to pay guests for their time, labor and expertise. (This is extremely rare in the world of podcasting, but key to centering marginalized voices!)This episode contains affiliate links. Shopping our links is a great way to support Burnt Toast! You’ll find all of the links aggregated here.Episode 182 TranscriptBriMy name is Bri. I am on Instagram as Body Image with Bri. I am a trained mental health counselor in the state of New Jersey, and I transitioned to body image coaching and education somewhere around 2018 or 2019. The way I work with folks in helping to make peace with your here and now body is through this concept of body grief.VirginiaI think the whole idea of “body grief” is something that gets left out of a lot of the conversations around bodies, and fat liberation. So tell us how you use this phrase and why you think it’s so important to make space for this grief work?BriI was working in eating disorder recovery. And it’s funny, because I was with clients, and thinking, “Huh, do I have an eating disorder? No, I can’t have an eating disorder, I’m fat!” And not using fat in a reclaimed way.I started to notice, wow, what’s being prescribed as a person in a fat body is being diagnosed in a thin body as an eating disorder. That’s a quote from Deb Burgard, an eating disorder therapist and one of the founders of Health At Every Size. The dissonance for me was huge. Like, wow, so the only difference is because I exist in this body.So when I’m telling these girls—I worked in a facility that was only girls— “we just have to accept your body,” and they had a hard time with it, and they lived in socially acceptable bodies, it dawned on me how much harder it’s going to be for me to accept my own body. I felt like that was the piece of the conversation that was getting left out. Acceptance doesn’t actually mean that you have to like it or love it. If you look at the stages of grief according to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, acceptance is sort of the outcome. It’s not a destination.But first we have this place of denial and bargaining—I see a lot of people who get stuck in this bargaining phase. Between the bargaining of “maybe I can still fix this” and “this is my body.” It’s “I don’t love that this is my body” and “this is where I’m at.” Most of us don’t want to enter that.The working definition I have for body grief is: The distress associated with the perceived loss around body change.The reason I make it such an expansive definition is because that works for people going through puberty. That works for people going through perimenopause and menopause, people who are aging. It works in alignment with gender dysphoria. It’s a change in one’s body that’s causing you distress because of what you will lose, or perceive yourself to lose.VirginiaI’m interested that you say perceived loss, because there are tangible losses sometimes, with body changes. But also, sometimes, not. Or they aren’t the losses we expected.BriCorrect. That’s what makes this so tricky. We have systemic anti-fat bias that exists in the world. So as somebody in what I would identify as a superfat body, there are times where I won’t fit in a booth at a restaurant. I may have to ask for additional seating at a venue. I can’t clothes shop in most stores. That loss is real, but it’s very easy for me to identify that as a systemic issue.To me, the grief was more in the emotional pieces that I thought I was going to lose out on. One of the stories that I very much believed when I was starting to do this work is that if I don’t exist in a smaller body, no man will ever find me attractive. I date men, unfortunately. They are a liability. And I know some really great men, right??Virginia#notallmen, but also…BriBut also. Come on.I had been exposed to a lot of anti-fatness, especially in the dating world. I’ll rephrase that, I don’t think I was exposed to it as much as I was observing other people experience it. And I was like, Oh no, no, no. I don’t want to experience that at all.VirginiaI’m not going to put myself out for that.BriI also thought I would lose the respect of of potential clients I had. I worked for a company once that said, “If a family is uncomfortable with your body size, we’re going to remove you from the case.” They tried to make it seem like it was for me. And I was like, oh, that’s fucked up. But I was so new in my own body image exploration, that I was just like, I know this is wrong but I don’t know why. And now I’m like, now I know why. Now I get it.VirginiaI’m just taking a minute with that one. So, if a family is uncomfortable with your body size, we’ll remove you from the case. Rather than the entire thing we’re here to work on is is overcoming that discomfort and internalized fatphobia.BriIt was like, “Well, we wouldn’t want to subject you to that.” And I took the job anyway, so, I mean, there’s that.And I think there’s something to be said about the societal and social pressure of existing in a smaller body. Something else I grieved so bigly was the the fear of never being “healthy” enough for my doctors. I just wanted to do a good job!VirginiaThat one’s a mix of emotions and systemic, right? Because it’s the fucked up system that results in doctors treating you that way. But it’s also so vulnerable and emotional to go into the doctor’s office.BriPeople will look at my body as a billboard for my health. Somebody will look at me and believe that they know my health status without ever looking at any other criteria. So what I felt was not only the loss of privilege, which is that systemic piece, but was no longer even being able to hide with privilege. If I was aggressively working out and dieting, at least I could come with evidence of here’s all that I’m doing, and my body isn’t changing, right?What I realized was: It was never going to be enough. There was no amount of weight that I could lose that would actually allow me to experience quality medical care. I remember I had been working out so aggressively, while also working in eating disorder recovery. I was passing out while I was working out because I have orthostatic hypertension and I shouldn’t be bending over. Didn’t know this. And every single doctor was like, “I really just want to talk about how concerned I am for your BMI.” And I lost it. I was like, “What would you like me to do? I’m working out five, six days a week.” And he was like, “Well, I just want you to keep trying.” I’m like, I’m here because I’m working out and passing out.VirginiaIt’s that Good Fatty thing. You can follow all the rules but they’re not ever going to give out the gold stars.BriI think that was my diet culture breaking point. I realized it was never going to be enough for the world. Every time I’d hit a goal post, the goal post would change. And I realized this is an exercise in futility. I am just going to keep doing this over and over and over again. As somebody who loves to succeed—I love a gold star, I love to hit check boxes—I was like, I’m just going to always fail at this.So I really had to sit with myself and say, “If I fail at shrinking my body, and I say, I surrender and I just allow my body to do what it’s going to do, what is the worst thing that could possibly happen, truly?”I recognized I would lose a lot of privilege. I would lose accessibility. I would lose the praise and adoration from society. I could potentially miss out on partners and jobs and respect. And at the end of the day, I know that that didn’t align with my own values.I don’t measure somebody’s enoughness, or humanity, based on how many days a week they exercise ,and how many vegetables they eat, or how good they are at shrinking their bodies. The true connections that I have with people don’t revolve around that.But it was a lot easier for me to accept that, because nothing I did worked. I find that people who are able to hold onto thin privilege can stay stuck in that bargaining phase a lot longer.VirginiaYes, I think that’s right. Because it’s just within reach.BriI was always fat.VirginiaThe seduction of thin privilege is so intense. It’s hard for people to recognize they’re never going to get there either. The goal post is always moving for everybody.BriSonya Renee Taylor talks about it and talks about in her book, The Body Is Not an Apology. 10/10 recommend to anybody who is on a healing journey. I’ve had clients tell me this feels advanced for me, which I get, and also breaks my heart, because what she’s talking about is radical self acceptance. And that is too hard for people. If that’s the case, I recommend starting with Jes Baker’s book Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls.VirginiaAlso wonderful.BriA great starting point of like, oh shit. This is where all this started. This is how I can check in with myself. But Sonya Renee Taylor talks about beauty standard sas this ladder, and she says, You can climb this ladder, but it has to be knowing that you’re never going to get to the top. How do we know that there’s no top? Look at Oprah. Look at the Kardashians. Look at these people who have infinite amount of resources to attain the impossible and how long have they been able to hold it for? If not even the most privileged people in the world can reach that, what hope do the rest of us have?VirginiaIt’s a rigged system.BriShe says, you have two choices. You can climb the ladder knowing that you’re never going to get to the top, or you can choose not to climb the ladder.VirginiaYou already mentioned that one of the things you had to grieve was what would this mean for future partners. And yet, you’ve been talking on Instagram recently about being out there on the dating apps!So clearly that fear was not entirely realized and I want to talk about this.BriIt’s honestly, like—it’s so fun for me. If you had told 2018 Bri, “Not only are you going to get through this, but you’re going to get to the other side, and you’re going to start talking about your own dating life,” I would have been like, “That’s not gonna happen. That’s not my story.”So I’m so excited to talk about it. It’s still raw and new and exciting and emotional. So we’re going to just kind of navigate it together. I consider myself somewhat of a late bloomer. I didn’t really date extensively when I was younger. I would say 85 percent of that was body image shit, and then the rest of it was religious shit.VirginiaThat’s a fun combination for you.BriOh, it’s super cool. It’s great. Doing my own deconstructing of faith and beliefs and and self. And what I can say through the last several years of doing this body image work is: Body image wounds often are a mask for a deeper wound. And bear with me on this, because I think there are some times where it is like, yes, my body is just uncomfortable, but the connection isn’t the problem. It’s the interpretation of what that connection means.Let’s say you change over your seasonal clothes and your pants don’t fit. There might be physical discomfort in your clothes not fitting, but usually what’s activating is that there’s an emotional story of “oh my God, my pants don’t fit. This is bad. This is not a good thing.” And then we start to panic. So the analogy I’ll use is it’s a little bit like a fire alarm going off, and your brain telling you we have to stop drop and roll. I’m a child of the 90s. The amount of training we did for stop, drop, and roll—I thought the probability of catching on fire was so high. Nobody talked to me about emotional regulation.VirginiaWe were prepared to roll flames out of our bodies at a moment’s notice. But name our feelings, no thank you.BriSo when we feel connected to our bodies sometimes, or most times I would argue, we associate it negatively. I did everything I could to not connect to my body. So then, anytime I had connection, I interpreted as it is something bad.So like, clothes not fitting, not fitting in public spaces, feeling bloated, having a stomach ache—everything was just like, oh, this is a negative connection. There was no awareness of like, hey, you know what feels really good? Drinking a warm cup of coffee! That feels good in your body. You know what feels good? A nice hug. A cozy sweater. We can feel good in our body. The problem is we minimize that experience and we exacerbate the distressful experience.So I remember starting to really seriously date in my 20s, and I hated it so much. It was not for me. I was like, “This feels effortful in a way that I just would rather be home and not trying.” And I kind of just let dating and relationships and all that go to the wayside.During the pandemic, I am a provider. It was a very stressful time for providers, especially. And I would get off my calls at the end of the day, a…
Full show notes at the publisherToday we're 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.
Corinne
Today, we are talking about motivational speaker and author Mel Robbins and we have maybe some surprising opinions on this topic.
Virginia
We have different takes about Mel Robbins. Some evolving takes as well. In the course of researching this episode, I think we went on a little Mel Robbins journey.
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!
Today Virginia is chatting with Helen Rosner. Helen is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has been covering food for more than a decade as a writer and editor, and won a 2024 James Beard Award for her weekly restaurant-review column, The Food Scene. She is an expert on sandwiches and many other important subjects. And I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Helen last month at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn (hi Emma Straub thank you so much for having us!!), at a live event to celebrate the paperback release of Fat Talk. (They should still have a few signed copies in stock if you need one!)We talked about the book, of course, but we talked about so many other fat- and food-adjacent topics, that I knew I wanted to bring it to you as a podcast episode.(Bear with some imperfect audio, since we weren’t recording with our usual set-up — but Tommy worked his magic as usual so it’s still highly listen-to-able!)If you find today’s episode valuable, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription!Guest interviews are always free on Burnt Toast, but paid subscriptions enable us to pay guests for their time, labor and expertise. (This is extremely rare in the world of podcasting, but key to centering marginalized voices!)To tell us YOUR thoughts, and to get all of the links and resources mentioned in this episode, as well as a complete transcript, visit our show page.If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber — subscriptions are just $7 per month! —to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. And don’t forget to check out our Burnt Toast Podcast Bonus Content! Disclaimer: You’re listening to this episode because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore has a lot of informed opinions. Neither my guest today nor I are healthcare providers, and this conversation is not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice.FAT TALK is out in paperback! Order your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. You can also order the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.CREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay. Follow Virginia on Instagram, Follow Corinne @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing and subscribe to Big Undies.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism. You’re listening to Burnt Toast!I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, and today my guest is the great Helen Rosner.Helen is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has been covering food for more than a decade as a writer and editor, and won a 2024 James Beard Award for her weekly restaurant-review column, The Food Scene. She is an expert on sandwiches and many other important subjects.And I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Helen last month at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn (hi Emma Straub thank you so much for having us!!), at a live event to celebrate the paperback release ofFat Talk. (They should still havea few signed copies in stock if you need one!)We talked about the book, of course, but we talked about so many other fat- and food-adjacent topics, that I knew I wanted to bring it to you as a podcast episode.(Bear with some imperfect audio, since we weren’t recording with our usual set-up — but Tommy worked his magic as usual so it’s still highly listen-to-able!)Guest interviews are always free on Burnt Toast, but paid subscriptions enable us to pay guests for their time, labor and expertise. (This is extremely rare in the world of podcasting, but key to centering marginalized voices!)This episode contains affiliate links. Shopping our links is a great way to support Burnt Toast! You’ll find all of the links aggregated here.Episode 180 TranscriptThank you Kim Baldwin for this cute pic of the livestream!HelenI was telling Virginia backstage—and this is true—I read a lot, but I'm a really bad nonfiction reader. I tend to feel like nonfiction books—I shouldn't say this in a bookstore, all nonfiction books are great. You should buy all of them. But I think there's a tendency for nonfiction books to have one really, really good idea and then say it over and over again for 300 pages. It’s like, this could have been a tweet. But I read every single page of this book in total joy. Actually, a lot of it was anger, but it flew by. It is such a great book. It’s funny and smart and so rigorous and has exactly the right kind of anger that is also transmuted into exhortation and action, and it made me feel really good about myself and hopeful by the end. I think that’s the best thing any book can do.VirginiaWhere were you when we were getting blurbs? Because that was amazing. Thank you so much. That really means a lot.HelenIt’s really exciting for me to be talking to you about this. I’m a newish parent. I don’t know at what point I just call myself a parent instead of a new parent? I have a two year old.VirginiaI think you’re getting there.HelenBut this came out right on time for me. Shortly after my daughter was born this was sitting in my stack of prominently placed books in my living room, and my mother was visiting. She just sort of touched it and looked at it. It was like watching a deer approach—VirginiaDon’t look at it. Don’t look at it.HelenDon’t look right at it. My mom, who was born in 1952 and who eats four almonds as a snack, literally. And it happened! Like, it happened. This is a great book, but it is also such a good passive aggressive prop.VirginiaI really thought about that a lot in my cover design. How will this look on people’s coffee tables when their moms come over? And I think it’s eye catching with the yellow so you want to pick it up, but then you see “fat,” and you’re like, oh my God, what’s happening.It brings up a lot for the moms. But I’ve heard this story a few times, and it gives me a lot of hope.HelenI assume it had a good impact. I mean, we haven’t directly discussed it.VirginiaNo, no. No one’s saying that has to happen.HelenOne of the things that was really striking for me about this book that I want to talk to you about is the fact that it is a parenting book. I assume everybody is here because you are on some fundamental level interested in the concepts of body liberation and fat activism and the notion of the inherent dignity of the body, and how do we untie the knots of garbage that have prevented our society from allowing that to just simply be.VirginiaThat’s just the baseline. Everybody’s there? Good.HelenSo what is the function and what is the effect and what does it do to frame that as a conversation about parenting?VirginiaI love this question.There are a couple things that made it end up being a parenting book. One is, when you are a writer who is a mom, people then assume you’re a parenting writer. So it was a path I was on a little bit, somewhat reluctantly.But the bigger thing was: There are so many important voices in the fat activism space. There’s Aubrey Gordon, there’s Sonya Renee Taylor, there’s Ragen Chastain, there are just so many people who I’ve been learning from for years.So when I thought about what can I contribute to the conversation—you know, I am a multiply privileged white woman. I’m a small fat woman. There are many parts of this conversation that I should not be centered in, that I do not own, and shouldn’t be taking up space in.But there wasn’t a book about how to talk about anti-fat bias with kids, how to think about this issue as a parent. And because I was writing in a lot of parenting spaces, and because I am a parent, I knew that this issue is something parents are terrified of and really deeply struggling with.So I felt like, well, this is the place I can contribute to the larger work of body liberation. I can take my background as a health journalist and parenting writer and all of that, and bring it into this space.And my book editor—who’s here!—also doesn’t really love parenting books. So this is something we talked about a lot, is not necessarily wanting to be a parenting book, but how do we help parents. But the really beautiful thing that’s happened since the book came out is that I hear from a lot of folks who are not parents who read it and say “This is helping me reparent myself around these issues.”So I think just framing the conversation as, how would we talk to kids about this? How would we advocate for children about this? that helps people start to think, “Well, what didn’t I get as a kid? Who didn’t stand up for me? Who didn’t advocate for me?”That gives you permission to start really dealing with some of that and sitting with some of that. That’s been the the cool thing. It is a parenting book, but I think it doesn’t have to be. You can be parenting yourself, and that’s part of it, too.HelenThis is maybe the big and unanswerable question. But I feel like this is cover-to-cover just chock full of irrefutable scientific studies and rigorously researched and peer reviewed data that shows that raising kids in diet culture is massively more harmful to them than whatever physical effects, primary or secondary, being overweight might do to them. So why is this still even a conversation?The whole focus in contemporary parenting—I assume this is always with the focus in parenting, but the way that the internet and our cultural trajectories have have allowed things to really become so filtered and focused, this obsession with optimization, right? Like, “I want my kid to have the perfect toy, the perfect book,” like…VirginiaThe best preschool.HelenEverything has to be the best. Here is this abundance of data showing how to create someone who is best set up to be emotionally healthy, physically healthy, psychologically healthy. And then our entire society is like, nah, fuck that. Like, what? How do we reconcile that?VirginiaI mean, it’s money, right? What you just said doesn’t make pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars. Raising children to be emotionally and physically healthy and feel safe in their bodies—that’s not the economy of Denmark. Novo Nordisk is. So that’s the bottom line. Weight loss has always been an incredibly profitable business model. Not a successful business model, right? Like, people lose some weight, but then they regain it. But that’s the profit.HelenWell, the business is successful.VirginiaYes, the business is successful. The weight loss is not successful, which is what makes the business successful.So that’s what we’re up against. And it’s really frustrating because to do this book, I talked to so many mainstream obesity researchers, so many doctors, so many people who really do I think in their hearts—not all of them. Not the Novo Nordisk guys—but in their hearts, I think a lot of people are like, “We’re really concerned about children’s health. We’re really concerned about raising rates of diabetes.” And they think they’re approaching this from the right place. Because they just haven’t drilled into the fact that most of the science getting done on this, is rooted in anti-fat bias and capitalism.So until our entire healthcare system is open to a major reckoning where they look at that, that’s not going to change. We’re always going to be slamming against that brick wall.HelenOne of the tensions I feel like you try to navigate throughout this book is the relationship between what we can do as individuals, within our families, within our friend groups, and what we can’t do, because there is a system. We can want the system to change, and we can work on our way for the system to change, but the system is much greater than we are.So as a parent, but also as a person who is one of the most knowledgeable people in the world probably about this whole thing, where does that leave us? Is it really going to make a difference if I have a fat child, if my child grows up to be fat, if I say all of the right things and create exactly the right space for her, and then she still goes out into a world that is equipped to make her feel like crap?VirginiaThe world will tell our kids all of these terrible things. The world tells all of us these terrible things about our bodies. But if you can have this foundation to come back to, and for kids, if they can know that home is a safe space, it does make a difference. Your daughter will know you’re never going to expect her to change her body. And that just gives her more options.And like, I don’t know about you, but that’s not what I had in the ‘90s. It’s not what I had as a middle schooler and as a high schooler. It was like, “No, obviously, change your body.”HelenI can’t believe I’m about to use a sports analogy, because I don’t do that.VirginiaI’m uncomfortable that we’re going there, but okay.HelenI’m also probably going to get the terms wrong. But you know how professional swimmers shave their entire bodies right before the actual meet? But they do all their training with their body hair. So they’ve trained with drag and then when they go out in the world, they’re super strong, and they’re ready to go.VirginiaYes! I thought that was a beautiful metaphor for the book, and for the experience it gives you navigating this.HelenWalking with weights? I don’t even, I don’t know. So I read this when it first came out, when I was a brand new parent, like I had a seven pound potato.VirginiaI’m just impressed you were reading at that point.HelenI don’t know how much I retained.VirginiaI was just watching a lot of Gilmore Girls reruns at that stage of my parenting.HelenAnd then I reread it, a month or two ago now, as the parent of a toddler, and it’s been interesting for me to trace the arc of my own relationship to my body, becoming a parent.I sort of optimistically was like, “It’s not going to change me. I’m just going to poop out a baby and I’ll continue being me.” And it’s not the pregnancy that changed me, or the parenting even that changed me. It’s that there is now a person where I am acutely aware at all times that I am the model. And I share that modeling with my husband. But like, I am a model. And I thought I was really good at not doing negative self talk. And now I’m acutely aware of it. Oh my God, it’s everywhere. Like, I hate myself. What has happened? I didn’t realize how much of this was there. Like, I get Botox, but then I stopped getting Botox because I was, like, she’ll know.VirginiaTwo year olds being famously good at spotting Botox.HelenThe level of self-parenting that reading parenting books has asked of me has been really healing and exciting, and also a little bit annoying and terrible.VirginiaThat seems right.HelenHave you had an arc of change in the two years since the book has been out? Your relationship to the book itself, or the way that you feel like people have reacted to it?VirginiaI mean, I said to you backstage that I didn’t want to talk about Ozempic because I’m tired of it. [To audience] Don’t worry, if you have Ozempic questions, it’s fine we can do it in the Q&A. But obviously, the big thing that happened in the two years since the book came out is that Ozempic has really dramatically changed the way diet culture and weight loss gets talked about.So what I will say is that I think it has made two things clear to me. One is what we’re up against, and that this is, again, a multi-billion dollar industry that is relentless. The fact that they’re marketing these drugs to kids, that they’re testing them on six year olds now—it’s very clear that the priorities are not health. The priority is how do we make as much money off these drugs as possible. And that is something I can see and talk about, and that’s fine.The sec…
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 February Indulgence Gospel.
Today we’re updating you on our great experiment: How did we do with 30 days of NO AMAZON? We’re going to get into:
⭐️ Why did we quit Amazon in the first place?
⭐️ Is quitting Amazon a diet—or at least, diet culture-adjacent?
⭐️ What was our biggest fail?
⭐️ Will we keep going???
To hear the full story, you'll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber.
To hear more, visit patreon.com/virginiasolesmith
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!
Today Virginia is chatting with Frankie De La Cretaz. Frankie is an award-winning journalist whose work sits at the intersection of sports, gender and culture. They are the co-author ofHail Mary, the rise and fall of the National Women’s Football League, and their writing has been featured in The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, The Atlantic and more.Frankie also writes Out of Your League, a newsletter about queer sports and pop culture, which I consider a must-subscribe. If you have been remotely following the issues of trans women in sports, you likely already know how well Frankie calls out that bias and discrimination. As Frankie points out, the way bodies are policed and controlled in the sports world is really just a microcosm of how the bodies of queer, trans, and otherwise marginalized folks are being policed and controlled throughout our culture right now.So even if you think you don’t care about sports, I promise you’ll care about this conversation.If you find today’s episode valuable, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription!Guest interviews are always free on Burnt Toast, but paid subscriptions enable us to pay guests for their time, labor and expertise. (This is extremely rare in the world of podcasting, but key to centering marginalized voices!)To tell us YOUR thoughts, and to get all of the links and resources mentioned in this episode, as well as a complete transcript, visit our show page.If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber — subscriptions are just $7 per month! —to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. And don’t forget to check out our Burnt Toast Podcast Bonus Content! Disclaimer: You’re listening to this episode because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore has a lot of informed opinions. Neither my guest today nor I are healthcare providers, and this conversation is not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice.FAT TALK is out in paperback! Order your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. You can also order the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.CREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay. Follow Virginia on Instagram, Follow Corinne @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing and subscribe to Big Undies.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.---Episode 178 TranscriptFrankieMy name is Frankie de la Cretaz. I am an independent journalist, and my work mostly sits at the intersection of sports, gender, and culture.VirginiaEven if you identify as a deeply un-athletic and not-sports-fluent person, such as myself, Frankie’s work will make you understand sports in a whole new way—and how much it intersects with politics, culture, everything else that’s going on.So everyone needs to subscribe toOut of Your League.FrankieI appreciate that. I actually consider myself someone who writes about sports for people who don’t think they care about sports, so I’m glad that’s coming across.VirginiaWe’re going to talk about something that you’ve been writing about for a long time, which is the potential of sports to be fat positive, and the many barriers in place there. But before we go there: I want to acknowledge we are having this conversation a day after the inauguration. It’s going to drop about a week out from the inauguration. It’s a rough time in America right now.And one of Trump’s first presidential actions was to publish an executive order that I have had to read three or four times because it is so jarring to see such anti-trans, misogynist language on the White House website.So Frankie, how are you? Where are we? How are you doing?FrankieI mean, as a trans person, generally, this sucks. But as a journalist who has been documenting the rise of transphobia and anti-trans rhetoric in this country, I’m not surprised. We have been saying for a while that the goal of anti-trans sport legislation is actually this, what we’re seeing—which is to legislate trans people out of existence.This was the ultimate goal of the rightwing anti-trans groups that pushed all of this legislation that now exists in over half of the states Because sports was the place where they could make trans people, and trans women in particular, seem threatening. They could couch it in language around fairness, and advantage, and the real marginalization that cis women, and women in general, have faced over time. So sports became the acceptable place for prejudice and discrimination to happen. But the thing is, once you make trans people or any group of people a threat in one arena, it becomes much easier to make them a threat in other arenas.So a lot of these bills attempted to redefine biological sex. A lot of states that passed these anti-trans sports bills went on to pass more extreme anti-trans legislation against healthcare and education and things like that. So I think there’s this very direct link from the attack on trans people in sports to what we’re seeing now.The other thing I will mention is the reason that so many people were nervous about the bill that the House just passed—which is banning trans women and girls from girls’ school sports—is that bill also has language that defines gender as binary, as one or the other. And we could see the potential for that language to be broadened to all areas of life. And that is what we’re seeing.VirginiaThat’s what this executive order clearly intends to do. It’s really chilling.And as a cis woman, it makes my skin crawl the way the language is framed as if it is protecting fragile women and girls. As if a president who is a sexual predator and an anti-choice administration has our best interests at heart.FrankieYes, and I think that’s what makes me as angry as it does, how they have leveraged real marginalization, real harm, real oppression, that women have faced in our society. Instead of pointing the finger at the patriarchy and agents of the patriarchy—often that is cis men—they point the finger at trans women and girls. Even though trans women and girls are actually the most vulnerable and the most likely to be victims of violence. This prevents actual progress for women as a whole, because it pits these two marginalized groups against each other.This has been a really effective strategy of the anti-trans movement. Instead of allowing cis women to see their own protection and freedom as tied up with trans women, and seeing cis women and trans women as part of the same fight, they have pitted them against each other, and it has endangered both groups even more.VirginiaIt’s dangerous, and it’s just frankly insulting. It’s just like, Trump?? Really?? This known rapist is a heroic protector of women?? I can’t. It’s wild.But obviously, we know there are plenty of women who voted for him. So we have a lot of work to do. But I appreciate you giving us that larger context and helping people understand why it is so important to talk about trans rights in sports, and how that that is the stepping stone that leads to where we are now.FrankieI’ve called it “gateway legislation.” I know that’s making light of something that’s quite serious, but really, the sports legislation has served as that. Because it’s “just sports,” a lot of people didn’t pay attention until it was much too late.VirginiaWell, not to pivot from one depressing topic to another depressing topic—FrankieWelcome to my beat, Virginia.VirginiaThis is where we are! But a story you’ve been following that I really want to talk to you about is the rise of weight loss drug advertising during sports events, specifically during WNBA and women’s college basketball. What is going on here?FrankieGreat question. Just this past weekend I was watching the new women’s basketball league, Unrivaled, which is so exciting. Until I got an ad for Hers injectable weight loss medication right in the middle. And I was like, Oh, we are continuing the trend, I see.I think there are a few reasons that this happens. I think there’s an assumption that people who watch sports, and particularly women who watch sports, are going to be more health conscious than the average person. And, as you know very well, in our culture, we associate health with thinness.For a long time, coverage of women’s sports was folded into fitness coverage, like Health, Women’s Health, and Fitness—those kinds of magazines. And when we talk about fitness culture, we also are talking about these elements of diet culture and beauty culture that come with it.On top of that, we have this massive boom in women’s sports in terms of funding and sponsorships. Audiences are growing massively. Seemingly every month they’re telling us that there’s hundreds of thousands more people watching women’s sports than there were even like last month. So brands love this, right? They’re desperate to cash in on this audience. So it’s Hers, which is specifically marketed for women, that has this very feminine advertising. Ro is another one that markets explicitly for women.So there’s this insidious thing happening where in women’s sports, we have this narrative of women’s empowerment and “by women for women,” and the way we talk about them. And then you’ve got this women’s medication that continues on this theme. I think all of that is coming together to really make women’s sporting events an appealing place for these drugs to market themselves.VirginiaIt does really make a sick kind of sense when you lay it out like that. I spent the first decade or so of my career in women’s magazines and writing for places like Self and Fitness, and we regularly featured women athletes, but asked them about their beauty routine and their diet, you know? It was very much like, let’s take this athlete and let’s make sure we talk about her the same way we talk about an actress or a pop star. We want to know her beauty work. We want to know her diet secret. We want to know how she looks so great. So it completely makes sense to take that same framing which was always really patronizing towards these world class athletes, not at all on par with the kinds of questions male athletes get asked, and then assume that the audience is like, “Well, I want to look like her. I need the weight loss drug as well.”FrankieThe other piece that’s quite paternalistic is the “see her, be her” theme. This is where we position these pro women athletes as role models for the next generation and as inspiration for little girls. And research has shown that girls ages 12 to 18, are the fastest growing market and viewership for women’s sports.So when you add in the fact that they’re being exposed to these ads, that’s cause for concern, right? Because this is the age group where they’re going to be the most vulnerable to eating disorders. Use of weight loss medications among this age group is also skyrocketing right now. Sometimes that’s for the medical conditions that these medications are designed to treat. But often it’s just because teenage girls who are fat are dealing with so much bullying because of the culture that we live in. So they’re being prescribed these drugs for weight loss. They are the fastest growing age group for these drugs. So these ads feel incredibly insidious. They’re preying on our pre-existing culturally ingrained body anxiety. They’re doing so during these sporting events where we assume that the athletes on the field or the court are able to do what they do— this is implied— because they are in “peak shape.” They are not fat, right? So it’s all just, really icky.VirginiaLike, really deeply icky.FrankieI always want to be really clear that the ads that we’re talking about here, they’re not talking about diabetes as the presenting condition. They’re not talking about some other co-morbid or coexisting condition. They’re talking about being fat as the presenting condition. They’re talking about weight loss as the thing they are selling. So this is the difference between marketing for an actual medical condition that these drugs might treat and marketing by fear-mongering about body size.VirginiaYes, super important. I appreciate you teasing that out.It feels like we need to talk about Ilona Maher a little bit in all of this, because she is a peak example of this, of the role model athlete who is inspiring girls. And, you know, I have felt complicated about her. She’s delightful. She has been really outspoken about celebrating that she’s in a bigger body. She is by no means fat. But she’s tall and muscular, and not, kind of, normative, I guess? By some measures?And she did that reel that went viral over the summer, challenging body mass index. So I think a lot of folks spent last summer thinking she represents this major positive sea change for how we think about women’s bodies in sports. But as you and I have discussed on the sidelines, we don’t quite see it this way.FrankieThere’s a world in which she could be representing a sea change, but that’s not the world we live in. I feel kind of bad that Ilona Maher gets caught up in this discussion, because I think it’s emblematic of what happens when we talk about individual people rather than systemic issues. She is being used as an example, perhaps unfairly, right? But I think it’s important because she’s straight and she’s white and she’s cis and her body is acceptable, because of what it can do in a sporting context. I think we’ll probably talk a little bit more about this idea as we keep talking about fatphobia in sports. But her body is acceptable because it otherwise conforms to a lot of traditional ideas of femininity. She wears lipstick, and she was on Dancing with the Stars. She’s joked that she wants to be the next Bachelorette, which is really playing up that straightness.Ben Watts/Sports Illustrated source here.VirginiaThe hair. She’s got very Pretty Girl Hair, for sure.FrankieAnd that’s fantastic. Ilona Maher is an example of someone who can be both athletic and feminine. But what about athletes who aren’t feminine? Where do they fit in here? We don’t celebrate them in the same way.But also: What choice does Ilona Maher really have here? During the Olympics, she was the subject of speculation over her gender because of her presumed “masculine” qualities. We’re in a time of trans investigations in sports, where we are questioning the gender of women athletes who don’t fit into certain ideas of femininity. So what option does she really have, aside from leaning into that femininity? Especially if she wants to continue to get sponsorships and recognition. So she’s kind of been backed into an impossible corner here. And at the same time, she’s upholding a lot of these really oppressive ideas of femininity. But, through no fault of her own, either. And again, that’s where I think we really run into trouble, is upholding one particular person as emblematic of a systemic change, or a systemic issue, because it’s impossible.VirginiaIt’s impossible. She kind of can’t get it right.FrankieSo this is less about actually Ilona Maher and more about the way that culturally, we have responded to her. She’s not the first, or only, woman athlete to put out social media content that challenges beauty norms or body norms. So why is the athlete that we’ve chosen to rally behind the one who is white and straight and cis and all of these more normative factors? There’s a reason that she is the chosen one.VirginiaJust to go back to the weight loss commercials piece of it for a second, I realized w…
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 January Indulgence Gospel.
It’s time for another mailbag episode, so we’ll be answering questions like:
⭐️ Is it anti-fatness to care that your partner eats faster than you?
⭐️ What ultra processed foods can we not live without?
⭐️ What should you do when your friend starts weight loss drugs for “wardrobe” reasons?
⭐️ Did Virginia buy the air fryer and if so, what is she air frying?
To hear our answers, you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. Subscriptions are $7 per month or $70 for the year.If you’re already a paid subscriber, you can add on a subscription to Big Undies, Corinne’s newsletter about clothes, for 20% off.
To get all of the links and resources mentioned in this episode, as well as a complete transcript, visit our show page.
Also, don't forget to order Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture! Get your signed copy nowfrom Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books. (Or get the UK edition or the audiobook!)
Disclaimer: Virginia and Corinne are humans with a lot of informed opinions. They are not nutritionists, therapists, doctors, or any kind of healthcare providers. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions they give are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.
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The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.
Our theme music is byFarideh.
Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.
Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
Follow us on social!
Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.
Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.
Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.
Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
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