[PREVIEW] Intentional Weight Loss and Other Rationalizations.

Hello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!

This is a newsletter where we explore questions (and some answers) around fatphobia, diet culture, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture, and the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia. Today, we’re going to do another solo episode where I answer your questions.

But first! I’m curious to know what folks think about the guest episodes versus the solo episodes. Right now I’m doing like one solo a month, and then three guest ones. Maybe you would like a different balance of guests to solo? I’m also always curious to know how many folks download and listen or how many listen to the audio versus read the transcript. I’m happy to keep doing both—I think they’re both really useful—but you know, I’m just interested. So if you have any thoughts about that, please comment on this post. That is a long way of saying any feedback is always very welcome.

Let’s dive into questions! Sometimes I manage to group these with a theme and this week, I don’t think there is a theme. It’s just kind of a grab bag. I mean, there’s the obvious themes of diet culture and fat phobia, but I don’t think I have a narrower theme than that. But that’s okay! There’s a lot of really interesting stuff in your questions this week.

Q: I loved your book and I’m just starting to try to disentangle myself from my own diet and body image hang-ups, most of which were absorbed through my loving, amazing, subtle fat-shaming family. Occasionally we engage in discussions over weight and health and while I can bust out all the stats and research I can about health and weight they inevitably bring up their ace in the hole to win the argument every time: Namely, there aren’t many obese/fat old people. And I can’t counter it because I’ve seen it myself every time I visit a relative in a long-term care home; everyone there is very old, and very thin. Any thoughts/research on this? If weight doesn’t automatically equal unhealthy outcomes, where are all the old fat people at?

A: This is such an interesting question: Where have all the old fat people gone?

What I think is happening here, is confirmation bias. I think we are confusing what we see in our own lives and our own bubbles with, this must be true for everyone. And this happens all the time in conversations around weight and health. Think of every Thin Man in your life who, even if they do gain weight, sort of effortlessly loses it just by starting to run once a week or something. And then they think everybody could lose weight so easily if they just did this. That’s confirmation bias. That’s thinking that your own lived experience is representative of everybody’s lived experience. And we know it’s not. But this comes up a lot.

But this is definitely a new twist on it, this idea that just because fat old people are invisible to you, they must not exist.

I will link to Katherine Flegal’s research on this. We know that folks in the “overweight” and “low ob*se” BMI ranges have the longest mortality. So we know that those folks are living longer than people in the “normal weight” or “underweight” ranges. At the extreme ends of the spectrum, the data is a little less clear. Folks in the very highest-weight bodies may have more complicated health issues, just like the folks at the most underweight level. And in both cases, this may impact longevity. But in the sort of skinny to small fat/medium fat space, we’re seeing that bigger bodies live longer.

So why aren’t you seeing them in the nursing home that you visit? Maybe because the nursing home you visit caters to a demographic that doesn’t have higher rates of larger body sizes. If you’re in an affluent, mostly white community, you may not see bigger body sizes as often in general, and certainly not in the nursing home setting.

Also: If Flegal’s research suggests that higher body weight is protective in aging, then those folks might not be in long term care facilities. Fat old folks might be able to live independently at home longer. And so you don’t see them in the nursing homes that you’re going to, you’re seeing there the frailest and sickest people, perhaps, and those might not be the people in the larger bodies. So this is just playing with this assumption that you’re having—I’m not saying this is definitively what’s happening in the nursing home that you visit.

Of course, as much as we know that larger body size is linked with longer mortality, we don’t know that that’s a causal relationship. It’s a correlation. So we don’t know that body weight really has much of anything to do with how long you live. You may be seeing smaller bodies in this nursing home, but that is not reflective of the general aging experience. Or these people may have been in bigger bodies earlier in their lives that enabled them to live longer. As we reach our later years, the elderly and the geriatric population does tend to lose both body fat and muscle mass with aging. So people are again frailer and also thinner once they are very old. That doesn’t mean they were that thin their entire life, that just means that’s the body you’re seeing them in right now.

So yes, you’re seeing this. But you’re not seeing the entire experience. One nursing home is not representative of even your entire community, let alone your state, your region, your country. There could be good reasons that you’re not seeing bigger bodies there. There could be bad reasons. It could be that folks in bigger bodies receive worse health care. So even if we’re seeing some protective benefits of larger bodies, we may also see that folks receive worse health care, have less access to health care, and maybe they are less likely to access the type of long term care facility you’re talking about. So there is a lot of nuance there. But I do think that “I don’t see old fat people” is not proof that they don’t exist. They are out there. Hopefully that gives you some nuggets to take back to your family conversations.

Q: Do you think intentional weight loss (and/or intentional weight change, including gaining weight) is always bad? Do you think there is any room for folks to intentionally change this aspect of their bodies just like we might change any number of other physical and aesthetic characteristics? Is there any way of decoupling intentional weight change from diet culture? (That last part is my biggest concern, of course.)

I think what this person is asking—well, they may not be asking it, but what I am often asked under the guise of this question is: Can I be anti-diet and still be dieting?

You can absolutely fight weight stigma, you can think that fatphobia is wrong, you can call it out, you can parent in ways that are weight-inclusive, you can support weight-inclusive health care, you can do all of that… and still not love the body you’re in. Our individual body struggles are quite separate from this as a sort of political social justice movement, so I think that is worth acknowledging and saying pretty explicitly. I think most people who do this work have our own stories of dieting and body acceptance struggles, and so relate very much to the idea that personally, you may not be where you want to be politically or publicly.

But do I think that personal struggle can happen separately from diet culture? At this stage? I do not.

Anytime we pursue intentional weight loss and try to change ourselves in an aesthetic way, we are driven, at least in part, by the central diet culture message that we should take up less space. It’s just the water we’re swimming in. It’s the social conditioning we have received since we were children. It is incredibly hard to turn off that noise and say, no, I definitely would want this in a void, I would want to be thinner for X, Y, and Z reasons, even if diet culture didn’t exist, and thinness gave me no social currency, and didn’t make it easier to buy clothes, and didn’t make my body feel more acceptable to society. I don’t think you can even really run that thought experiment because we cannot silence that noise. So, do I think intentional weight loss is always bad? I’m not going to shame behaviors because hey, who does that—diet culture, right? If you are dieting or intentionally losing weight, because that is something you feel you need, I am not here to judge your personal struggle. I think this is especially important to say when we’re talking about folks who live in fat bodies and decide to pursue bariatric weight loss surgery. If you have not lived in a larger body, and faced that pressure and faced the daily onslaught of weight stigma and the difficulties in accessing health care, and the reasons why that surgery might feel necessary, you are not in any position to judge that person’s decision to pursue intentional weight loss.

At the same time, I think I always feel a little bit sad, because it’s a reminder that our world could be so much better. And it’s not. We are not making the world a safe place for fat people. We’re really not making the world a safe place for anyone with a body, but particularly not for fat people. So anytime I hear about someone intentionally pursuing weight loss, I’m just reminded of how much work we have to do.

Because yes, if we could get to a point where weight loss was something you could manipulate as easily as, say, dying your hair, then maybe you could say that this is a temporary aesthetic change, and you’re making it for fun and self expression.

[Virginia’s post-recording note: Something I forgot to add here is that even if it was truly harmless to the individual, weight loss would still be a way of reinforcing the idea that thin bodies are more valuable than fat ones—which they aren’t. The anti-fat bias is impossible to escape.]

But even hair dying is not a great example of that, right, because often women dye our hair to cover our grays, to look younger, because we live in an ageist society. So pretty much any aesthetic change we make has some component of cultural pressure and cultural conditioning attached to it. And it doesn’t mean you should completely stop making any of these changes. I dye my hair, you know, and we all wear clothes, and people wear contact lenses, etc, etc. And it can certainly be a part of personal expression, and feeling good about your body and also be a response to these cultural messages.

But the reason to put weight loss, intentional weight loss, in a separate category from say, hair dye, is because intentional weight loss can be really dangerous physically. It can lead to a disordered relationship with food and your body. It can cause spiraling and anxiety and ruminating and compulsive thoughts and compulsive behaviors in a way that making choices about shoes or hair doesn’t because these other more easily changeable choices don’t have quite the same impact on our physical health, or our mental health. And again, I’m speaking broadly here—there’s going to be someone who comments and says, no, actually dyeing my hair is like this hugely complicated, dramatic journey for me, and I want to hold space for you in that journey. But we don’t have an epidemic of hair disorders, and we do have an epidemic of eating disorders.

I resist saying it’s always bad, because that sounds like I’m saying the person pursuing the weight loss is bad, and I’m not. But I do think intentional weight loss is never simple. I think it’s never just about health, or just about, oh, I don’t like how my pants fit, but I’m fine with other people being in bigger bodies. I think we find lots of ways to rationalize the desire for intentional weight loss to ourselves. And I did this for years. I wanted to support Health at Every Size, and I was dieting myself. So I really relate to this place that this questioner is in, wanting to say, I’m doing this for me, but that’s separate from the larger struggle. The truth is, we’re always intertwined with our personal and our political. With something like intentional weight loss, where the side effects can be so serious and so severe, I think it is especially important to approach that with caution.

If weight loss is something you’re pursuing because you’ve been told it’s necessary for your health, I would encourage you to check out the HAES Health Sheets that were created by Louise Metz and Ragen Chastain. They are a phenomenal resource for thinking about weight-linked conditions, from a weight-inclusive perspective. That might give you some other options to think about, do I really need to pursue weight loss for my health? Or is there another way to treat my high blood pressure? Or my acid reflux?

And if it’s about aesthetics, well, then I think you already know the answer that that’s a diet culture-driven thing. The thin ideal is driven by diet culture, it’s driven by white supremacy, it’s driven by patriarchy. It is uncomfortable to acknowledge that we are all complicit in it, but there it is. So yeah, I think we’re a long way from being able to decouple this and I’m also not sure that that should be the goal, because if we say we’ve decoupled unintentional weight loss from all of these toxic narratives, and it’s totally fine to pursue it, you’re still saying fundamentally, that smaller bodies are better, you’re still saying that this whole group of people who live in larger bodies, for whom intentional weight loss is not an option or would never achieve a thinner, a truly thinner body, that their bodies are somehow less than. So yeah, I don’t see it untangling anytime soon.

Okay, next question. The TL/DR version of this question is: My daughter “binges” on food and I don’t know how much I should control this.

Q: My 10-year-old daughter hit puberty young and has a larger body. She has not displayed any body dissatisfaction, or said anything negative about her body in front of me. She is very active and she loves food. Food is what motivates her. Food is what she turns to in boredom. She gets a lot of pleasure from food. I don’t see any of that as a problem. My concern (and my husband’s concern, who doesn’t handle it the way I would like) is that with being home all the time the last 1.5 years and counting, she is eating all day. She eats 3 “meals” in a row, each time saying she is still hungry. I try to advise her to wait a little while between meals so her body has time to realize she already ate, but she won’t do that. She’s also cooking and preparing her own food, which I love and think it is wonderful that she is independent in this area. I’m just not sure if she is ready to have all limits off on quantity of food. This might look like a tortilla with eggs and bacon, followed by frozen tamales, followed by melted cheese and crackers. She never chooses fruits or veg. If there is any sort of candy, ice cream, or baked good, she will eat it all right away and not choose any other food until that is gone. Part of the reason this is triggering for me is that I am a binge eater and it looks like she is binging when she loads up on food like this and when she is hyper-focused on the sweet foods.

A: I think there’s a lot going on here. I want to be clear that I am not a therapist or a dietician or a healthcare provider trained to diagnose or treat eating disorders, and also a podcast would not be the setting to do that even if I was. So I encourage you to reach out to a therapist who approaches weight and family feeding dynamics from a weight inclusive Health at Every Size perspective. I like Christy Harrison’s list of providers so linking that here. And I’m saying that, not because I think your daughter is showing so many red flags of a huge eating disorder, but because you are really struggling with her eating, and I think you deserve support and help to navigate what this is bringing up for you so that you can best support your daughter.

Now, as a lay person who reports on this a lot and who hears a lot of people’s eating stories, a lot of what you’re describing sounds like fairly normal 10-year-old, hungry 10-year-old in puberty behavior. When you listed the meals, the tortillas and the tamales and the cheese and crackers, I don’t know that that sounds like a binge as much as it sounds like a kid who’s exploring lots of different foods, maybe getting a lot of pleasure out of the fact that she can independently make foods like bacon, which is kind of hard to make well, and that she has that independence in the kitchen, which I love that you’ve given her. So is it necessarily that she’s eating three huge meals in a row or is she just experimenting and enjoying lots of different foods?

What we need to step back and acknowledge is: It’s not about the food. If your daughter is struggling in other ways, if she’s very anxious, if she’s depressed, if she is coping with any big negative feelings right now, and you see this eating as the way she’s coping, you want to support her in working through the negative feelings, you want to get her the help she needs with that. You don’t take away the coping skill that she has, if that’s food, before she has other coping skills, and before she has the support she needs with the underlying problem. So it’s really not about the food if this is binge eating is a way to either numb and escape emotions or cope with emotions.

But from what you’ve also said: She’s a kid stuck at home. We’re all bored, we’re all eating more because it’s novelty, and we’re programmed to seek novelty, and that’s one of the few ways we can get it. She also gets a lot of pleasure from food, and that’s great. And she’s enjoying the sort of independent cooking experience, which is really fun. And I think that the best strategy through all of that is just to continue to support her in building those skills. And along the way, she’ll be learning to listen to her body more. When you’re advising her to sort of wait in between meals, you know, or if you are coming in and trying to control quantities, that’s when you’re gonna start interrupting her own ability to listen to her body. It’s understandable, it’s natural, but it sounds like you’re trying to control too many things possibly. This happens a lot when parents freak out at their kids eating patterns and try to come in with a lot of structure. And then we both try to control the how much and the how often.

Division of Responsibility, which is the model that I sort of loosely follow and find is a good starting point for families, says the parent should be in charge of how often kids eat, but not in charge of how much. And at 10, you would probably still also have some control over what food she’s offered in terms of, you’re doing the grocery shopping, but you are starting to hand over more independence at that age about individual meal choices, and yes, cooking skills and things like that. So if you are going to try to impose structure around what the schedule looks like, you really have to back off and let her decide how much to eat in any one of those settings. And I find this is often tricky, because we will have a portion size in our mind and then the child will want more of it. You know, it happens to me often because like if we buy snack foods, like granola bars, or little packages of goldfish crackers that come in a single serve package. That’s not a single serving to my kid, she wants two or three or four of them in a sitting to make a meal or make a snack that honors her hunger. And so I’ll think wait, you’re eating more than a serving, but it’s like, I’m sorry, does the packaging company know what a serving is to my child? No, of course they don’t.

Similarly here, if it’s snack time, or it’s lunchtime, and she and you have said this is the time we’re going to eat, you need to allow her to eat as much as she needs to feel full and good in that meal. And then you can say, “Okay, now we’re going to wait until after this next activity, and then we’ll have a snack.” Versus going straight into another meal. Transitioning to more of a schedule is itself pretty hard to do. And it’s really hard to do if you’re also trying to control how much, or which food, she’s eating.

So I would pick one and I would pick the schedule to work on and not work on the how much. Let her be in charge of the how much. You truly don’t know how hungry she is. Kids in puberty need a lot of food, they are growing really fast. And it may look like much more food than you as an adult would eat in a meal. And that’s okay, that’s normal. I’m going to link to a piece I did earlier in the summer on when is it restriction and when is it good parenting, and that may give you some more ways to think about how to have this conversation with her.

Q: I, like you, consider myself a “small fat person.” I also consider myself someone that’s engaged with and interested in topics like dismantling diet culture, the toxicity of the wellness movement (and the consumerization thereof), and how it all fits in with questions of intersectional feminism. At the same time, I work as a strategist for an advertising agency that has recently been asked to work on a major diet brand campaign. In the theoretical, I can argue it is an opportunity (to affect change, to influence decision makers, to enable further understanding in an organization that doesn’t understand why it’s quite so hated today) — but in the practical, I’m struggling with it, big time. So I’m curious, as someone who started her career in the world of women’s magazines and wellness and then found an enlightened path out, how would you feel in this situation? What might you do?

A: This is tricky, because the idealist in me wants to say, don’t work for the big evil diet company. Just like, I would hope you would not work for a tobacco company or gun brand. There are certain jobs where, that door feels closed in my brain. But then there is the reality of your life. I do not know the reality of your financial situation, I do not want to assume that you can just like up and quit this job or make life difficult for yourself at this job and then weather whatever storm that would cause in terms of lack of job security, financial uncertainty, etc. So I’m certainly not going to tell you absolutely don’t take this, don’t work with that brand, if that’s your job, and I assume you need your job, as most of us do, to pay your bills.

So thinking of it as an opportunity to try to influence decision makers is the way to go about it, right? Because you need this job. And now you do have this opportunity to try to turn some tides within this company. I am not using the brand name in this because I want to protect this reader’s privacy, but I will say it is a brand that I am extremely skeptical will actually ever change on this topic. They are pretty much a weight loss brand at their core. And it’s hard to imagine that changing. So I do think you’ll have your work cut out for you.

When I started in women’s magazines, I absolutely went in thinking, “I’m making change from the inside.” I think I put that in my cover letter for the job and it’s amazing I got the job, because I was not at all quiet about that as my mission. But I will be honest about what happened next, which is: I began very quickly to rationalize content that I found objectionable as not that bad. I’d think, oh if we make this change, it won’t be so bad, this isn’t really a diet. Because number one, I wasn’t actually as clear on my own values as I thought I was at that point. Shocking, that at 22, I didn’t have that all worked out. And also because I needed the job, and because now I was working with people who I liked personally, even if I disagreed with some of the editing calls they were making. And because I wanted to make a career in this world, and it felt like I couldn’t die on every mountain and also make that happen.

So I think what you’re going to really struggle with, if you stay on this job and do this work, is being able to do it in a way that feels ethical, and in line with your values, and not like you’re rationalizing the decision. (I guess maybe the theme of today is rationalizing, or at least it was in a couple of these questions?) I think it’s very understandable that we do this. Because, again, cultural indoctrination, we’ve been hearing these messages since we were kids, and also, when we’re talking about things like job security, that’s kind of a non-negotiable. So I’m not saying, don’t do the job, because I’m sure it’s something you really need in your life. But I am curious to hear what you decide, I would love an update.

Maybe find a way to have someone outside of that world who can be a sounding board or a check-in person for you. Someone who you can come to and say, “Well, they wanted to do it this way, and I pushed back, and here’s what I won.” And that person can either celebrate that victory with you or say, “Okay, but here’s what you left on the table, here’s what they’re still doing.” And kind of keep you accountable as you try to make change from the inside. Because how do you know if you’re really making change? What are the benchmarks you’re going to use for that?

For me, personally, it was in many ways murkier. Did we make change from the inside? Yes. And no. I think there were articles that I was involved in, that caused less harm than they would have otherwise, because I was involved with them. But they still caused harm, I still own that, absolutely. Also, looking back now on where women’s magazines were in the early 2000s and where they are now, there has been an enormous sea change. I think every women’s media brand is trying much more now to lean in to critiquing diet culture, and calling out fat phobia. This is a topic that I’m regularly asked to write about for these places now, whereas years ago, I was pitching these stories, and they were falling on deaf ears. I am not personally taking credit for the entire sea change—I’m glad to have played a small part in it—but that took 20 years, first of all, so it’s not like I was able to get in there and make all these changes overnight and feel really good about the work I was doing right away. I mean, there were years when I felt not good at all about the work I was doing. And it took a long time, and we still haven’t made nearly enough progress.

So I think that’s the way to think about it: If you are going to be working to make change, it’s going to be slow, it’s going to be very uphill work. And in this particular case, I’m skeptical that this brand will really evolve. Even if it does evolve, the thing you have to watch for, the thing I still watch for with women’s magazines, and I see all the time happening with these brands, is that they’re evolving because they’re responding to consumer demand. They’re not evolving because they’ve actually made progress on the issue, or they actually are ready to acknowledge the harm that they’ve done. I have yet to write an anti-diet piece for a women’s magazine where I get to say, here’s a piece I wrote a decade ago that was actually horrible, or here are all the other ways this brand has caused harm over the years. I think there are a lot of people working in that space who are really eager to do things better now, but it still feels really scary and really untenable to acknowledge what happened in the past. That’s just sort of a hard reality of where we are.

I don’t know that I really answered this question. I don’t think I can answer it for you because I don’t know you or your life. But I hope I’ve given you some stuff to sort of ponder as you decide what to do. And everyone listening, if I answer one of your questions in one of these epsiodes, I love updates, and if you send me an update, you know, maybe I’ll update listeners as well, in a future episode. It would be really fun to hear how these things unfold for you and what you continue to work on. And if you think I got it totally right or I got it totally wrong. I’m open to hearing that too!

Thank you all so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you like this episode and you aren’t yet subscribed, please do so.

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Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Jessica McKenzie, who writes the fantastic Substack, Pinch of Dirt. Our logo is by Deanna Lowe.

And I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. You can find more of my work at virginiasolesmith.com or come say hi on Instagram and Twitter. I’m @v_solesmith. I’m barely on Facebook anymore, so don’t worry about that. Thanks for listening and talk to you soon!

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