Can We Conquer Anti-Fat Bias?

General levels of explicit and implicit bias against other groups have just rapidly decreased over the past 30 or 40 years. Whereas for weight, it’s actually still going up. So, you know, we’re up against a pretty big battle.

You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith and I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.

Today I’m chatting with Jeff Hunger who is an assistant professor of social psychology at Miami University in Ohio and my very favorite weight stigma researcher (if you’re allowed to have favorite weight stigma researchers and I say that you are!).

Jeff is someone I got to know several years ago when I was reporting on weight stigma in healthcare. We’ve evolved into internet buddies with a shared passion for hidden kitchens, which you will hear us discuss if you stick all the way through to the Butter. Our focus of this episode is Jeff’s work on anti-fat bias, understanding how we internalize it, the difference between implicit and explicit bias, and how we start to separate out concepts like body image struggles from the larger conversation of anti-fat bias. We cover a lot of important ground. Including Taylor Swift. So here’s Jeff!

Episode 71 Transcript

Jeff

So I’m Jeff Hunger. I’m a social psychology professor at Miami University. That’s the one in Ohio not the one in Florida. 

Virginia

Fewer palm trees. 

Jeff

No slipping out to South Beach after our chat, unfortunately. I’m also a husband, a cat dad, and if you follow me on Instagram, an annoying foodie is probably the easiest way to classify me.

Virginia

I consider you a delightful foodie, not an annoying foodie. I have a lot of foodie envy when I see your content. 

Jeff

I think that just means that you might be in the in group with me. 

Virginia

I’m not in the group because I have to feed small children and I don’t get to be in the group anymore. But I dream of coming back someday.

Jeff

One of these days we’ll just have to have you out to Ohio. We can do a foodie weekend.

Virginia

Yes, please, that sounds great. 

Jeff

Maybe more relevant to the folks listening: I’m a stigma researcher. So a lot of my research looks at how weight stigma in particular shapes our mental and physical health. And recently we’ve been focusing a lot on how this plays out with respect to disordered eating and body image.

Virginia

We started talking about doing this episode when I sent you a question I got from a reader which I’m going to read, because it gets into all these big questions about bias that you work on.

Hi Virginia, what does the research and or other sources say about how to truly rid ourselves of anti-fat bias, both internal and external? Obviously, self awareness is key. But I’m curious if you have come across what works. I see it in my own mind constantly, and try to bring awareness to it. But it seems fairly intractable in spite of now several years of educating myself. It comes out in how I view myself, my bigger bodied child and is tied up in shame and judgment. Who is doing therapeutic somatic intellectual meditation, etc work to really uproot this type of bias? I know there are studies on mindfulness and implicit bias. Are there any studies showing the kind of therapy or other modality that works?

So basically, how do we fix our bias?  I think this is a brick wall we all come up against at some point. 

Jeff

This is a fantastic question and I do think that it is one that needs a lot more research attention. But there is a recent review of this work that is really interesting, because it basically found that a lot of intervention approaches that have been tried just don’t seem to reliably work. And these are approaches that we took from other forms of bias reduction. You know, there’s a larger literature on how we reduce explicit and implicit bias that’s only recently—you know, past 10 or 15 years—being done as it relates to weight. This is things like trying to reduce the belief that weight is controllable, having folks get exposed to fat targets who are counter stereotypical and trying to invoke things like empathy or perspective taking. All of these have been tested and it turns out none of them seem to really be effective.

Virginia

So they’re effective for other kinds of bias, like racism or sexism, but not for anti-fat bias. 

Jeff

From my read of the bias reduction literature, yeah. They seem to be more effective with other groups but tested in the weight domain, they don’t really seem to hold up.

Virginia

So what’s going on? That’s so weird. Is it weird?

Jeff

I do think it’s weird, a little bit. But what I think is really interesting was that the review also found that the interventions that were effective were better able to reduce self-directed bias or internalized bias, as opposed to the bias that we direct towards other people.

So unlike other categories, weight is one in which there’s a really, really strong internalization piece and one that I think is a little bit more intractable, because the boundaries between these groups, between being fat or being not, it’s kind of permeable. It’s a lot more permeable than other groups, like when we think about race or sexual orientation, there’s far, far less movement between them. 

What this review found that did work was interventions like adopting a Health at Every Size perspective. This seemed to be an effective tool, at least for reducing that internalized weight bias, as was research that uses the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.1

So there are a few approaches that we seem to see from this literature, at least from this recent review, that help us at least tackle internalized stigma or self-directed stigma. I think where we need to go then is knowing that we have a little bit of a success story, if we can kind of build on that to see if there are ways to modify those approaches to not just reduce the self-directed stigma, but also the anti-fat bias that we’re directing towards other people.

Virginia

This is making me realize we should also define a couple of terms for folks who are less familiar with this conversation. 

Jeff

I’ll put on my social psychology professor hat. So, when we think about internal versus external, we can direct weight stigma towards someone else, we can direct anti-fat bias toward a person in our social world—a partner, a child, a stranger. At the same time, we can direct that same sort of anti-fatness towards ourselves. We can turn it inward and start to devalue ourselves and stereotype ourselves because of our weight. 

Now, implicit bias is bias that isn’t as easily reportable. You know, we can’t just walk up to you and go, you know, Virginia, what’s your level of implicit anti fat bias? It’s assessed in more indirect ways because it’s below conscious level. And that’s in contrast to explicit bias which is where I can just walk up to you and say, okay, Virginia, how do you think about fat people or what do you think about fat people? I can readily report on that form of bias.

Both are important, but I think more recently implicit bias has kind of gotten a lot of media attention and attention in other spaces.

Virginia

And it’s interesting because my first thought is, oh, there must be a very bright line between these two types of bias, but the more I’m thinking about it, I’m wondering, can someone experience something as implicit bias, but other people experience it as explicit bias? Does that make sense?

Jeff

That’s another interesting and thorny question. My bias might be at the implicit level and so it could lead me to behave in a way that you pick up as explicit, that you end up feeling discriminated against because of your race, your gender, your weight, when I didn’t really notice that I was doing anything wrong, because my implicit bias was leaking out. So it may not look the same as shouting a derogatory term at someone, but it might be the ways in which I position my body, subtle nonverbal behaviors that I engage in as we interact with one another, things that can shape the outcomes and the experience of the other person, even if I don’t notice them.

Virginia

It just speaks to the level of awareness we need to start to unlearn these biases, right? Because you can be executing them in ways you are not aware of. 

Jeff

And I think as the reader that contributed this question noted, a lot of that is thinking about self-reflection and trying to be self aware. But at the same time when we think about anti-fat bias, we also need to be thinking about how bigger, broader, structural forces are shaping our anti-fat bias, both internal and external. Because if all we do is emphasize and try to make gains at the individual level, I imagine that those are going to be hard to sustain against the continued backdrop of anti-fat fuckery in our society, excuse my language.

Virginia

You never have to excuse your language here. And absolutely. It’s making a personal project out of something that is this much larger societal question that we have to grapple with.

When we look at how the research shows what we know works for other forms of bias doesn’t work as well for anti fat bias, do you think that has something to do with the way as the larger system doesn’t support that personal work? 

Jeff

I think that that very well could be why we are not seeing these maybe tried and true, or at least more well-established bias reduction tools work when it comes to weight. We also see that just general levels of explicit and implicit bias against other groups has just rapidly decreased over the past 30 or 40 years. Whereas for weight, it’s actually still going up.

So, you know, we’re up against a pretty big battle, an uphill fight to reduce this. Because not only is it a little bit resistant to these techniques that we have tried before, in general, across the country, at least in the US, that bias seems to keep creeping up when things like bias against gay individuals has gone down over the past 20 years.

Virginia

Right. It just shows how much it’s being reinforced in healthcare, in schools, in these different places that have made some progress—not enough progress, but some progress on other forms of bias—that here we really are still on the starting blocks, so to speak.

Jeff

Absolutely. There’s this really interesting study that I reviewed and read recently that basically found that things like large scale, fat-shaming events against celebrities can actually push around implicit bias at a grand scale. 

Virginia

Oh, that’s fascinating.

Jeff

They basically had all of these large scale, public fat-shaming events, whether it was all of the many times that Lizzo has been the target of this or a lot of other celebrities. It was basically celebrity fat shaming, and they see that it does have a small effect. We’re not going to see this jump up a ton every time, but if we think about cumulative exposure, think about how many times we see a fat celebrity get talked terribly about online or in the news, even if each one of those events only has a tiny, tiny little bit of an impact on our implicit bias, over time it’s just gonna build. We’re dealing with shit like that as well, having to push back against things like seeing anti-fat bias continually reemerge.

Virginia

I always think when that happens, when I see progressives fat-shaming Donald Trump. Like, Donald Trump does not care. He is not going to see your tweet and there are so many other reasons to eviscerate Donald Trump! You don’t need to talk about his body at all. And yet, your fat friend just saw your tweet. And you equated them to this person who I would describe as a monster in most ways.

Jeff

It’s not the “gotcha” take that I think a lot of otherwise progressive or liberal folks on Twitter would think it is. One, it’s incredibly lazy and unfunny. And two, like you say, Donald Trump doesn’t give a shit about what you tweet about him. But fat people in your sphere online, do they see it and they take note?

Virginia

So, to get a little more into the internal versus external piece of it all, one thought I had in reading this person’s question is that they seem to be equating anti-fat bias with body image struggles, and with shame about their own body and shame about their child’s body. And this made me wonder if these two concepts are always intertwined or if we can, and maybe should, separate them. Can you be fatphobic but not struggle with your own relationship to body? And on the flip side, can you be struggling, maybe even have an eating disorder, etc, and not be fatphobic?

Jeff

I personally think that these ideas need to be separated. I do think that issues with body image and anti-fatness can and do operate independently from one another. Of course, anti-fat bias living in a structurally anti-fat society is going to contribute to poor body image, but they, to me, are not one and the same. Like you said, I think someone can be incredibly fatphobic and perfectly content with their own body. And on the flip side, I do think that folks can struggle with body image and not be inherently fatphobic.

Virginia

I think that is really helpful to hear. Because I often hear from people having that added layer of guilt on top of their own struggle. Like, “I feel bad about my body and I feel bad that I’m perpetuating this thing. And how do I separate those?”

Jeff

I think that’s a really important insight for folks to make, that they can both feel bad about their own body and worry that feeling bad about their own body is going to contribute to perpetuating fatphobia. I think that acknowledging how one’s body image struggles may inadvertently be contributing to this sort of anti-fat system is different than what I’ve seen, which is occasionally folks using their body image struggles as a justification for their anti-fatness. I think that’s that’s a different animal altogether. I think recognizing how your own body struggles and how your own feelings about your weight might reflect bigger, broader anti-fatness is an important one to have. It’s not an excuse for you to be shitty to fat people.

Virginia

How does Taylor Swift fit into all of this?

Jeff

I am going to out myself as not a Swiftie. I think I just lost my gay card. But I think that from my very loose sort of understanding, it basically was that she steps on the scale and it just reads “fat” on the scale? 

Virginia

Yeah, exactly. And it’s supposed to be a comment on her eating disorder struggles, that she gets on the scale, and it says fat.

Jeff

And I think that it probably could be approached in a way that still communicates that she is not liking her body without having to say she doesn’t like it because it is a fat body specifically. She can express struggles with disordered eating and with her eating disorder that she has disclosed previously, but I think doing it in a manner that doesn’t necessarily equate feeling bad about your body with being fat.

I mean, I will probably get annihilated on Twitter for all of that, because I think there was a heated debate about this.

Virginia

There was a very heated debate. Taylor Swift fans came out fast and furious in support of her and it got very complicated. I say this as someone who really can’t name a Taylor Swift song? So they can come at me, too, if they want. 

Jeff

We’re both canceled. 

Virginia

But I just kept thinking: If this was someone who I loved and admired in the way that the Taylor Swift fans love and admire Taylor Swift, why would I not also hold them to this higher standard?

In comparison, when Lizzo used an ableist term in one of her songs and people noted it, she immediately took the term out and apologized. It was very straightforward and everyone was like, “That was fine. We’re over it, we all learned something.”

And Taylor did eventually edit the video, but hasn’t, as far as I know, made a statement. I just think there was a lot of white lady energy around it. It shows how uncomfortable we are getting this kind of feedback and having to admit to wrongdoing. And it certainly spoke to all the implicit bias stuff that you’re talking about. 

Jeff

I also think that instances like this really show us the darker side of Stan Culture, like online internet fandom, you know? Because we should want to hold each other—including celebrities that we look up to—to account for what they do, what they say, how they produce certain things, whether that’s a music video or a song. And I think that Lizzo’s swift and clear response to her use of the ableist term was just a master class in how you should be doing this.

Virginia

It was like, Taylor, did you miss that? Like, it was like, last month? She literally gave you a blueprint for how to navigate this situation.

Jeff

Didn’t Beyonce also have an issue with this and kind of stumbled as well? You’d think someone on Taylor’s team would have been like, “Okay, Lizzo did it really well. Beyonce stumbled a little bit and we saw how the Internet reacted. Let’s get on top of this.”

Virginia

I think it ties back to what you were saying about fatphobia is on the rise. There were so many people pushing this argument of like, “Oh, you’re just being too sensitive.” It wasn’t taken seriously by her fan base as a real form of oppression. It was just sort of like, “Oh, these are people getting their feelings hurt. She’s trying to tell us her truth.”

 Jeff

Yep, absolutely. And it doesn’t have to be an either or. It doesn’t have to be she is speaking her truth or reflecting on her own struggles. It can be that and she could have gone about it a different way. And I think it seems like an appropriate level of criticism was leveled at her. But I need to fully dive into this. 

Virginia

I think it’s had its moment, and we can all move on. But it does set us up well for the next topic I wanted us to get into, which is who gets to call themselves fat?

I think the Taylor situation is kind of a perfect example of when it is problematic for a thin person to call themselves fat. But I’m really curious to hear your thoughts about this.

Jeff

This is a big question. And I would agree with you that a person with thin privilege calling themselves fat is unacceptable because this is almost exclusively done in a demeaning or a condescending manner. I think we absolutely agree on that.

What I’m curious to get your thoughts on, too, is where along the weight spectrum do we then draw the line to say, okay, that person can call themselves fat? Like, obviously I’m not about to be like, “Let’s breathe life into BMI again and give that another shitty purpose.” But where and how and who decides where that cut is made? And I really don’t have a a good answer to this question. But I think it’s an important one, because it ties back to the conversation about body image and weight stigma not necessarily being the same thing and equating them as such being problematic. Because if we flatten those ideas, if we flatten body image struggles and weight stigma, we lose sight of who truly faces the brunt of interpersonal, instructional anti-fatness—and that’s fat people.

And so if we lose sight of that we are losing sight of the way in which our social structures are disproportionately impacting and harming higher body weight individuals. Even though folks across the weight spectrum can “feel fat,” (or however we want to use that also problematic language) that’s not the same as being fat and being the target and the ire of a whole lot of people because of your body size.

Virginia

Right? It reduces the whole conversation to your personal feelings about your body and minimizes the fact that this is the systemic form of oppression that is showing up in paychecks, in access to public spaces, and access to health care, and all of these other arenas.

Jeff

Maybe this is the time to mention that I think that we, as weight stigma researchers, are kind of doing a disservice because this type of thinking has crept into the research on internalized weight bias. So, we’ve seen work in this area grow exponentially over the past decade, but it’s become increasingly common to see research on internalized weight bias being done with predominantly or or exclusively thinner participants.2 

Virginia

Oh, wow. 

Jeff

This is an issue because asking a thinner person about their internalized anti-fat bias is a bit like asking me my level of internalized anti-straight bias. I’m very gay. It’s not my internalized bias, it’s just my bias, you know? And so, I would love if we, as researchers in the weight stigma domain, would engage more thoughtfully with this idea. Just because supposedly internalized weight bias is associated with some outcome, what does it mean when we’re measuring it among people that aren’t part of that group? Are we capturing something like internalized societal ideals around around thinness? Which is totally fine. But if we are, let’s call a spade a spade. Let’s not coopt this idea of internalized anti-fatness almost exclusively in thinner people. Because again, then what it does is it washes out this idea of who’s disproportionately impacted.

Some people want to want to flip that on their head and be like no, look, everyone can be impacted by weight stigma. Which is true, everyone can be impacted by living in a structurally anti-fat society. But again, it’s fat people that see it show up in their paychecks, in their doctor’s visits, in their insurance premiums. And not everyone across the weight spectrum gets that same treatment at the hands of anti-fat bias.

Virginia

Can we draw a parallel with sexism? I would argue sexism is really harmful to cis men as well because it narrows the conversation around masculinity and being able to express emotions if you’ve labeled all of that as “girly.” But it still hurts women more because we’re the people not getting paid equally and being denied rights to our own bodies.

Jeff

I think that is a really helpful parallel. Folks can experience consequences of that structure, of the heterosexist patriarchal society that we live in, and like you say, men will be hurt by it. They are not hurt in a necessarily systematic way like women are, however. 

Virginia

And it does sound like you’re saying that, in terms of the research conversation, the implicit bias of thin people is maybe getting more research dollars and energy than explicit bias experienced by fat people?

Jeff

Yeah, I think that there’s a lot of attention being paid to internalized, self-directed weight stigma, that is not centering the experiences of fat people.

Virginia

That’s maddening. That’s very maddening.

Jeff

There’s a commentary that’s been brewing in the back of my brain for about five years that I’m hoping to put pen to paper about this topic. If I end up writing it, I’ll send it to you.

Virginia

Thank you. I really want you to write that because this feels like such an important shift in the conversation. It’s something I struggle with, even just as a journalist covering these topics. Most of the questions I get are about people’s personal relationships with their bodies. I think about it in the balance of the newsletter content, but it’s hard when this is how people enter this issue, in this very personal way.

I think it’s so crucial to say, no, this is part of this larger, systemic thing. You have to recognize the larger system. I think it’s actually crucial to working on the personal piece of it to understand that your struggle fits into this larger puzzle. But it’s also like, how do we get the conversation past the personal struggle piece and onto the systemic piece? And how do we focus on making that kind of systemic change?

Jeff

Those are really important questions. And maybe it’s something like we saw in that literature review that I mentioned earlier, that folks who are engaging in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy seem to reduce their levels of internalized or self-directed stigma. So maybe that’s step one. Maybe step one is fixing things at home and then taking that newfound freedom and that newfound energy and trying to figure out strategies to also reduce the ways in which your bias towards other people might be manifesting. Once you’ve reduced it, the anti-fatness that you’re directing towards the self, maybe that’s going to free up people with the resources and the energy and the ability to also make sure that they’re not turning around and being assholes to fat people in their social world.

Virginia

And we really have to hold all of ourselves accountable to not stopping at step one, right? Let’s not be white feminists about it. We have to keep doing it. And that’s, I think, the tricky piece, especially as it sounds like we don’t have as much clear direction from the research yet about what step two looks like. 

Jeff

Absolutely. And I think that’s why if there’s any budding social psychologists or bias researchers out there, this is a big area of needed attention. Run with it, it’s so vital.

Virginia

One last thing I wanted to talk about and maybe this gets us starting to think along these step two lines is: A lot of the Burnt Toast audience is parents and a main way that we see anti-fat bias presenting itself most acutely is when a kid comes home and reports that someone called them fat or has otherwise teased or bullied them for their weight.

So this is maybe a little less about unlearning our own biases, although I think they still come into play here, and more about helping kids cope with the reality of this bias in the world. I’m just wondering if you have thoughts on strategies here? Is there anything promising in the research on weight based bullying about what works here?

Jeff

In the weight stigma domain, I haven’t seen a ton of work that has directly addressed this, what is a really important question. Like, how are we to help our kids cope when they come home and say, "okay, I’ve been the victim of weight based bullying.” I do wonder if this is a place for having a conversation with kids ahead of time about bias. An analogue might be when minoritized parents talk to their kids about the potential for discrimination. So maybe we can work to have developmentally appropriate conversations about how some bodies are unfairly treated, how others are unnecessarily glorified. Maybe this is going to help kids be better equipped to face the bullying, if it happens, or maybe help them stop internalizing their own mistreatment, you know?

We can’t always stop the experiences that they’re going to encounter at school. But if we can stop them from internalizing and turning that negativity to themselves, maybe we can at least sort of buffer a little bit.

Virginia

Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. And parents of thin kids have the work to do to educate our kids about this issue as well, right? About their privilege and not being part of the problem? 

Jeff

Yeah, absolutely. I think that there’s a place for everyone in this conversation,. And I did want to also mention that I know that Mary Himmelstein at Kent State does have some research showing that kids who are bullied or teased because of their weight, would just love more support from their parents. They’ve also indicated that they want to see stronger policies in schools to prevent being bullied in the first place. 

Virginia

Yeah, that would be great.

Jeff

You know, is weight explicitly named in the anti-bullying policies in your school or your school district? If not, work to change that. If the policy does include weight, is it being enforced? Are teachers and staff being trained to identify and intervene on this type of bullying?

So there are ways to be an ally like this that can hopefully even start to cut off those experiences before they manifest or before they happen. And what I like about that is, because it’s at a bigger policy level, it’s going to support your own kid, but it’s also going to help other fat kids and other kids in the school as well.

Butter For Your Burnt Toast

Jeff

My only recommendation would be to stop commenting on people’s weight. You know, whether it’s the weight of your friends, the weight of your family, celebrities like Lizzo, assholes like Donald Trump, yourself. Just stop it. You’re going to be better off for it. The folks around you are going to be better off for it. 

Virginia

Yes!

Jeff

And also build hidden rooms in your kitchens because they’re so cool.

Virginia

They’re so cool. Oh my gosh. So for people who are like, “What are they talking about?” 

Jeff

We sound crazy right now. 

Virginia

We sound a little crazy. Can you explain? Because I feel like you DM’ed me about it first. Well, I don’t know how we discovered this mutual love for them, but why don’t you explain what we’re talking about.

Jeff

Yeah, so it’s this big Instagram trend where you’re in this gorgeous kitchen, then all of a sudden a pantry pulls open and there’s this gorgeous second room, like a butler’s pantry or a hidden coffee nook. Or you know a full second kitchen. It’s just like ridiculous shit that people are hiding behind a single door. I think I DMed you because I think I told you to have Dan build one. It was a very specific request for you, on your behalf, to have Dan build you a hidden room.

Virginia

And he still has not, I have to report. I feel like it got inspired by the appliance garage concept where like God forbid anyone sees your toaster. They make a slide down cover for it. And then people were like, if we’re hiding the appliances, what if we also hide… and it’s just gotten bigger and bigger and more absurd. And I’m so here for it. It’s so entertaining. I also, as a feminist, have many qualms about it and like how it is requiring us to perform domesticity and hide the mess and all of this, but also I want one. I’m conflicted and I love it.

Jeff

Yeah, I can totally see the problematic nature of it. To me, it’s like from when I was a kid I always wanted secret passageways because I was like a nerd like that. And so to me, it’s like I want a hidden library or a hidden something behind a book. I just want something cool like that. And these are real. They’re really hitting that like 11 year old Jeff fantasy that’s now kind of blended with the fact that I’m 35 and an annoying foodie. It had to manifest this way.

Virginia

I think that’s totally what it is. When I was nine, we moved into a house that was built in 1832. And like, for a year I was hunting for secret passageways. I never found one. I was so determined that there would be one. It was not a large house. It was not a fancy house. It was a small New England farmhouse. They don’t have secret passageways. But I was just like, there will be one. So yes, I think it totally taps into that.

I think that’s why my very favorite example of this trend is not a kitchen thing at all, but it’s Elsie Larson of A Beautiful Mess.You’re in her upstairs hallway and you push on the wall, and then it goes into that little hidden library. Did I send you that one?

Jeff

Oh, no, but I really need you to.

Virginia

I will. It’s this tiny little nook. I can’t figure out where in her house it is, but it’s just like a little hidden library for her kids. And it’s like, oh my gosh, the most adorable thing.

Jeff

Like slightly related, but we have a friend who works at a social media company and they have a name tag that they just tap on this random part of the wall and a door shows up and you really can’t see the door. It’s mind-boggling. And then it’s a hidden bar.

Virginia

Wow. Okay, they’re living the dream. I mean, if they like their job there, that part of their job is living the dream.

Jeff

I was living my dream for a day because I just got to wander around this place and do all of the fun things at the social media company without the work, you know? I will be in the game room, I will be in the hidden bar.

Virginia

It’s actually really hard to look at your house and figure out where… I mean, I have started to obsess over this. But it basically means you have to wall something off in a way that unless your house is absolutely enormous would create other problems. So do we think that the influencers with the hidden kitchens just have like huge like mega-mansions? Is that what we’re seeing? 

Jeff

I have to assume so.

Virginia

Like, how do you have space for it?

Jeff

Because the public kitchen is also usually huge. 

Virginia

It’s usually huge! It’s got a giant island in it. And then you push through and you get to this whole other space. 

Jeff

My dream is that our next house has an unfinished basement so that I can make this a reality because if you have an unfinished basement, then it’s a lot easier to hide something, you know? I’m just going to take away a kid’s library or playroom somewhere. So, if my husband is listening to this he knows that’s on my long term list of house goals.

Virginia

Something we’re working towards. I’m remembering the way Elsie did it was I think it had like one of those double height foyers when you walk in—you know, like a lot of McMansions have like the double height foyer? And she closed it off. I’ve seen a couple influencers do this. If you have a McMansion with a double height foyer and you put a floor halfway up it, you can make yourself a hidden room of some sort. So that’s just a little life hack for everyone with a McMansion who’s listening to this.

Jeff

A very casual reno tip. Add a floor, just add an entire floor.

Virginia

Just add a floor then you can also build in a hidden room.

Jeff

I think we should disavow anyone out there that thinks a professor would be able to do that on a professor’s salary. 

Virginia

It’s nice to dream. So yes, people can follow us for more inspirational life hacks like that.

Jeff

Yeah, maybe our next podcast should just be one that where we give those like really down to earth life hacks like that together.

Virginia

Just like really useful practical advice for people about expensive home renovation projects. I am very good at spending other people’s money on their home renovations. 

Jeff

Oh, yes.

Virginia

Definitely a superpower of mine. Well, Jeff, thank you. This was so much fun. Tell people where they can follow you for your food, cat, and hidden kitchen content and also your work.

Virginia

Well, thank you first off for having me. This was fantastic. I always love chatting with you. So, for research related content, you can find me at jeffreyhunger.com. All of my research is going to be up there so that’s typically the most up to date place to find any of the published work that we’ve been doing. Otherwise you can find me on Twitter and Instagram @DrHunger on both platforms. But as Virginia just mentioned, that’s going to be a mixture of research, food posts, and my cats, so if you’re into that sort of thing, by all means, please find me there.

Virginia

I mean, it’s pretty great. I recommend it. 

1 - Here’s a good introduction to ACT, and here’s an example of research on its utility in reducing weight stigma (ironic warning for weight-normative language there!).

2 - Jeff noted after we recorded that this is a trend he’s noticing personally, not something documented in the literature (yet).