The Burnt Toast Podcast

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Ash Brandin of Screen Time Strategies, also know as The Gamer Educator on Instagram. Ash is also the author of a fantastic new book, Power On: Managing Screen Time to Benefit the Whole Family. Ash joined us last year to talk about how our attitudes towards screen time can be…diet-adjacent. I asked them to come back on the podcast this week because a lot of us are heading into back-to-school mode, which in my experience can mean feelingsss about screen routines. There are A LOT of really powerful reframings in this episode that might blow your mind—and make your parenting just a little bit easier. So give this one a listen and share it with anyone in your life who’s also struggling with kids and screen time.Today’s episode is free but if you value this conversation, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you! PS. You can take 10 percent off Power On, or any book we talk about on the podcast, if you order it from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, along with a copy of Fat Talk! (This also applies if you’ve previously bought Fat Talk from them. Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)Episode 208 TranscriptVirginiaFor anyone who missed your last episode, can you just quickly tell us who you are and what you do?AshI’m Ash Brandin. I use they/them pronouns.I am a middle school teacher by day, and then with my online presence, I help families and caregivers better understand and manage all things technology—screen time, screens. My goal is to reframe the way that we look at them as caregivers, to find a balance between freaking out about them and allowing total access. To find a way that works for us. VirginiaWe are here today to talk about your brilliant new book, which is called Power On: Managing Screen Time to Benefit the Whole Family. I can’t underscore enough how much everybody needs a copy of this book. I have already turned back to it multiple times since reading it a few months ago. It just really helps ground us in so many aspects of this conversation that we don’t usually have.AshI’m so glad to hear that it’s helpful! If people are new to who I am, I have sort of three central tenets of the work that I do: * Screen time is a social inequity issue. * Screens can be part of our lives without being the center of our lives. * Screens and screen time should benefit whole families.Especially in the last few years, we have seen a trend toward panic around technology and screens and smartphones and social media. I think that there are many reasons to be concerned around technology and its influence, especially with kids. But what’s missing in a lot of those conversations is a sense of empowerment about what families can reasonably do. When we focus solely on the fear, it ends up just putting caregivers in a place of feeling bad.VirginiaYou feel like you’re getting it wrong all the time.AshShame isn’t empowering. No one is like, “Well, I feel terrible about myself, so now I feel equipped to go make a change,” right?Empowerment is what’s missing in so many of those conversations and other books and things that have come out, because it’s way harder. It’s so much harder to talk about what you can really do and reasonably control in a sustainable way. But I’m an educator, and I really firmly believe that if anyone’s in this sort of advice type space, be it online or elsewhere, that they need to be trying to empower and help families instead of just capitalizing on fear.VirginiaWhat I found most powerful is that you really give us permission to say: What need is screen time meeting right now? And this includes caregivers’ needs. So not just “what need is this meeting for my child,” but what need is this meeting for me? I am here recording with you right now because iPads are meeting the need of children have a day off school on a day when I need to work. We won’t be interrupted unless I have to approve a screen time request, which I might in 20 minutes.I got divorced a couple years ago, and my kids get a lot more screen time now. Because they move back and forth between two homes, and each only has one adult in it. Giving myself permission to recognize that I have needs really got me through a lot of adjusting to this new rhythm of our family.AshAbsolutely. And when we’re thinking about what the need is, we also need to know that it’s going to change. So often in parenting, it feels like we have to come up with one set of rules and they have to work for everything in perpetuity without adjustment. That just sets us up for a sense of failure if we’re like, well, I had this magical plan that someone told me was going to work, and it didn’t. So I must be the problem, right? It all comes back to that “well, it’s my fault” place.VirginiaWhich is screens as diet culture.AshAll over again. We’re back at it. It’s just not helpful. If instead, we’re thinking about what is my need right now? Sometimes it’s “I have to work.” And sometimes it’s “my kid is sick and they just need to relax.” Sometimes it’s, as you were alluding to earlier, it’s we’ve all just had a day, right? We’ve been run ragged, and we just need a break, and that need is going to dictate very different things. If my kid is laid up on the couch and throwing up, then what screen time is going to be doing for them is very different than If I’m trying to work and I want them to be reasonably engaged in content and trying to maybe learn something. And that’s fine. Being able to center “this is what I need right now,” or “this is what we need right now,” puts us in a place of feeling like we’re making it work for us. Instead of feeling like we’re always coming up against some rule that we’re not going to quite live up to.VirginiaI’d love to talk about the inequity piece a little more too. As I said, going from a two parent household to a one parent household, which is still a highly privileged environment—but even just that small shift made me realize, wait a second. I think all the screen time guidance is just for typical American nuclear families. Ideally, with a stay at home parent.So can you talk about why so much of the standard guidance doesn’t apply to most of our families?AshIt’s not even just a stay at home parent. It’s assuming that there is always at least one caregiver who is fully able to be present. Mom, default parent, is making dinner, and Dad is relaxing after work and is monitoring what the kids are doing, right? And it’s one of those times where I’m like, have you met a family?VirginiaPeople are seven different places at once. It’s just not that simple.AshIt’s not that simple, right? It’s like, have you spent five minutes in a typical household in the last 10 years? This is not how it’s going, right?So the beginning of the book helps people unlearn and relearn what we may have heard around screens, including what research really does or doesn’t say around screens, and this social inequity piece. Because especially since the onset of COVID, screens are filling in systemic gaps for the vast majority of families.I’m a family with two caregivers in the home. We both work, but we’re both very present caregivers. So we’re definitely kind of a rarity, that we’re very privileged. We’re both around a lot of the time. And we are still using screens to fill some of those gaps.So whether it’s we don’t really have a backyard, or people are in a neighborhood where they can’t send their kids outside, or they don’t have a park or a playground. They don’t have other kids in the neighborhood, or it’s not a safe climate. Or you live in an apartment and you can’t have your neighbors complain for the fifth time that your kids are stomping around and being loud. Whatever it is—a lack of daycare, affordable after school care —those are all gaps. They all have to be filled. And we used to have different ways of filling those gaps, and they’ve slowly become less accessible or less available. So something has to fill them. What ends up often filling them is screens. And I’m not saying that that’s necessarily a good thing. I’d rather live in a world in which everyone is having their needs met accessibly and equitably. But that’s a much harder conversation, and is one that we don’t have very much say in. We participate in that, and we might vote for certain people, but that’s about all we can really do reasonably. So, in the meantime, we have to fill that in with something and so screens are often going to fill that in.Especially if you look at caregivers who have less privilege, who are maybe single caregivers, caregivers of color, people living in poverty—all of those aspects of scarcity impacts their bandwidth. Their capacity as a caregiver is less and spread thinner, and all of that takes away from a caregiver’s ability to be present. And there were some really interesting studies that were done around just the way that having less capacity affects you as a caregiver.And when I saw that data, I thought, well, of course. Of course people are turning to screens because they have nothing else to give from. And when we think of it that way, it’s hard to see that as some sort of personal failure, right? When we see it instead as, oh, this is out of necessity. It reframes the question as “How do I make screens work for me,” as opposed to, “I’m bad for using screens.”VirginiaRight. How do I use screen time to meet these needs and to hopefully build up my capacity so that I can be more present with my kids? I think people think if you’re using a lot of screens, you’re really never present. It’s that stereotype of the parent on the playground staring at their phone, instead of watching the kid play. When maybe the reason we’re at the playground is so my kid can play and I can answer some work emails. That doesn’t mean I’m not present at other points of the day.AshOf course. You’re seeing one moment. I always find that so frustrating. It just really feels like you you cannot win. If I were sitting there staring at my child’s every move in the park, someone would be like, “you’re being a helicopter,” right? And if I look at my phone because I’m trying to make the grocery pickup order—because I would rather my child have time at the playground than we spend our only free hour in the grocery store and having to manage a kid in the grocery store and not having fun together, right? Instead I’m placing a pickup order and they’re getting to run around on the playground. Now also somehow I’m failing because I’m looking at my phone instead of my kid. But also, we want kids to have independent time, and not need constant input. It really feels like you just can’t win sometimes. And being able to take a step back and really focus on what need is this meeting? And if it’s ours, and if it is helping me be more present and connected, that’s a win. When I make dinner in the evening, my kid is often having screen time, and I will put in an AirPod and listen to a podcast, often Burnt Toast, and that’s my decompression. Because I come home straight from work and other things. I’m not getting much time to really decompress.VirginiaYou need that airlock time, where you can decompress and then be ready to be present at dinner.I’m sure I’ve told you this before, but I reported a piece on screen time for Parents Magazine, probably almost 10 years ago at this point, because I think my older child was three or four. And I interviewed this Harvard researcher, this older white man, and I gave him this the dinner time example. I said, I’m cooking dinner. My kid is watching Peppa Pig so that I can cook dinner, and take a breath. And then we eat dinner together. And he said, “Why don’t you involve her in cooking dinner? Why don’t you give her a bag of flour to play with while you cook dinner?”AshOf all the things!VirginiaAnd I said to him: Because it’s 5pm on a Wednesday and who’s coming to clean the flour off the ceiling?AshA bag of flour. Of all the things to go to! VirginiaHe was like, “kids love to make a happy mess in the kitchen!” I was like, well I don’t love that. And it was just exactly that. My need didn’t matter to him at all. He was like, “h, well, if you just want to pacify your children…” I was like, I do, yes, in that moment.AshWell, and I think that’s another part of it is that someone says it to us like that, and we’re like, “well, I can’t say yes,” right? But in the moment, yeah, there are times where it’s like, I need you to be quiet. And as hard as this can be to think, sometimes it’s like right now, I need you to be quiet and convenient because of the situation we’re in. And that doesn’t mean we’re constantly expecting that of them, and hopefully that’s not something we’re doing all the time. But if the need is, oh my God, we’re all melting down, and if we don’t eat in the next 15 minutes, we’re going to have a two hour DEFCON1 emergency on our hands, then, yeah, I’m gonna throw Peppa Pig on so that we can all become better regulated humans in the next 15 minutes and not have a hungry meltdown. And that sounds like a much better alternative to me!VirginiaThan flour all over my kitchen on a Wednesday, right? I mean, I’ll never not be mad about it. It’s truly the worst parenting advice I’ve ever received. So thank you for giving us all more space as caregivers to be able to articulate our own needs and articulate what we need to be present. It’s what we can do in the face of gaps in the care system that leave us holding so much.That said: I think there are some nitty gritty aspects of this that we all struggle wit, so I want to talk about some of the nuts and bolts pieces. One of my biggest struggles is still the question of how much time is too much time? But you argue that time really isn’t the measure we should be using. As you’re saying, that need is going to vary day to day, and all the guidance that’s been telling us, like, 30 minutes at this age, an hour at this age, all of that is not particularly germane to our lives. So can you explain both why time is less what we should fixate on? And then how do I release myself? How do I divest from the screen time diet culture?AshOh man, I wish I had a magic bullet for that one. We’ll see what I can do.When I was writing this and thinking about it and making content about it, I kept thinking about you. Because the original time guidelines that everyone speaks back to—they’re from the AAP. And they have not actually been used in about 10 years, but people still bring them up all the time. The “no time under two” and “up to an hour up to age five” and “one to two hours, five to 12.” And if you really dig in, I was following footnote after footnote for a while, trying to really find where did this actually come from? It’s not based on some study that found that that’s the ideal amount of time. It really came from a desire to find this middle ground of time spent being physically idle. These guidelines are about wanting to avoid childhood obesity.VirginiaOf course.AshIt all comes back, right?VirginiaI should have guessed it.AshAnd so in their original recommendations, the AAP note that partially this is to encourage a balance with physical movement. Which, of course, assumes that if you are not sitting watching TV or using an iPad, that you will be playing volleyball or something.VirginiaYou’ll automatically be outside running around.AshExactly, of course, those are the only options.VirginiaIt also assumes that screen time is never physical. But a lot of kids are very physical when they’re watching screens.AshExactly. And it, of course, immediately also imposes a morality of one of these things is better—moving your body is always better than a screen, which is not always going to be true, right? All these things have nuance in them. But I thought that was so interesting, and it shouldn’t have surprised me, and yet somehow it still did. And of course it is good to find movement that is helpful for you and to give your kids an enjoyment of being outside or moving their bodies, or playing a sport. And putting all of that in opposition to something else they may enjoy, like a screen, really quickly goes to that diet culture piece of “well, how many minutes have you been doing that?” Because now we have to offset it with however many minutes you should be running laps or whatever.So those original recommendations are coming from a place of already trying to mitigate the negatives of sitting and doing something sort of passively leisurely. And in the last 10 years, they’ve moved away from that, and they now recommend what’s called making a family media plan. Which actually I think is way better, because it is much more prioritizing what are you using this for? Can you be doing it together? What can you do? It’s much more reasonable, I think. But many people still go back to those original recommendations, because like you said, it’s a number. It’s simple. Just tell me.VirginiaWe love to grab onto a number and grade ourselves.AshJust tell me how much time so that I can tell myself I’m I’m doing a good job, right? But you know, time is just one piece of information. It can be so specific with what am I using that time to do? If I’m sitting on my computer and doing work for an hour and a half, technically, that is screen time, but it is going to affect me a lot differently than if I’m watching Netflix or scrolling my phone for an hour and a half. I will feel very different after those things. And I think it’s really important to be aware of that, and to make our kids aware of that from an early age, so that they are thinking about more than just, oh, it’s been X amount of minutes. And therefore this is okay or not okay.Because all brains and all screens are different. And so one kid can watch 20 minutes of Paw Patrol, and they’re going to be bouncing off the walls, because, for whatever reason, that’s just a show that’s really stimulating for them. And somebody else can sit and watch an hour and a half of something, and they’ll be completely fine. So if you have a kid that is the first kid, and after 20 minutes, you’re like, oh my god, it’s not even half an hour. This is supposed to be an okay amount. This is how they’re acting. We’re right back to that “something’s wrong. I’m wrong. They’re bad,” as opposed to, “What is this telling me? What’s something we could do differently? Could we try a different show? Could we try maybe having some physical movement before or after, see if that makes a difference?” It just puts us more in a place of being curious to figure out again, how do I make this work for me? What is my need? How do I make it work for us?And not to rattle on too long, but there was a big study done in the UK, involving over 120,000 kids. And they were trying to find what they called “the Goldilocks amount of time.”VirginiaYes. This is fascinating.AshSo it’s the amount of time where benefit starts to wane. Where we are in that “just right”amount. Before that, might still be okay, but after that we’re going to start seeing some negative impacts, particularly when it comes to behavior, for example.What they found in general was that the Goldilocks number tended to be around, I think, an hour and 40 minutes a day. Something around an hour and a half a day. But if you looked at certain types of screens, for computers or TV, it was much higher than that. It was closer to three hours a day before you started seeing some negative impacts. And even for things like smartphones, it was over an hour a day. But what I found so so interesting, is that they looked at both statistical significance, but also what they called “minimally important difference,” which was when you would actually notice these negative changes, subjectively, as a caregiver.So this meant how much would a kid have to be on a screen for their adult at home to actually notice “this is having an impact on you,” regularly. And that amount was over four and a half hours a day on screens.VirginiaBefore caregivers were like, “Okay, this is too much!” And the fact that the statistically significant findings for the minutia of what the researchers looking at is so different from what you as a caregiver are going to actually be thrown by. That was really mind blowing to me.AshRight, And that doesn’t mean that statistical significance isn’t important, necessarily. But we’re talking about real minutiae. And that doesn’t always mean that you will notice any difference in your actual life.Of course, some people are going to hear this and go, “But I don’t want my kid on a screen for four and a half hours.” Sure. That’s completely reasonable. And if your kid is having a hard time after an hour, still reasonable, still important. That’s why we can think less about how many minutes has it been exactly, and more, what am I noticing? Because if I’m coming back to the need and you’re like, okay, I have a meeting and I need an hour, right? If you know, “I cannot have them use their iPad for an hour, because they tend to become a dysregulated mess in 25 minutes,” that’s much more useful information than “Well, it says they’re allowed to have an hour of screen time per day so this should be fine because it’s an hour.”VirginiaRight.AshIt sets you up for more success.VirginiaAnd if you know your kid can handle that hour fine and can, in fact, handle more fine, it doesn’t mean, “well you had an hour of screen time while I was in a meeting so now we can’t watch a show together later to relax together.” You don’t have to take away and be that granular with the math of the screens. You can be like, yeah, we needed an extra hour for this meeting, and we’ll still be able to watch our show later. Because that’s what I notice with my kids. If I start to try to take away from some other screen time, then it’s like, “Oh, god, wait, but that’s the routine I’m used to!” You can’t change it, and that’s fair.AshYes, absolutely. And I would feel that way too, right? If someone were giving me something extra because it was a convenience to them, but then later was like, “oh, well, I have to take that from somewhere.” But they didn’t tell me that. I would be like, Excuse me, that’s weird. That’s not how that works, right? This was a favor to you, right?VirginiaYeah, exactly. I didn’t interrupt your meeting. You’re welcome, Mom.Where the time anxiety does tend to kick in, though, is that so often it’s hard for kids to transition off screens. So then parents think, “Well, it was too much time,” or, “The screen is bad.” This is another very powerful reframing in your work. So walk us through why just because a kid is having a hard time getting off screens doesn’t mean it was too much and it doesn’t mean that screens are evil? AshSo an example I use many times that you can tweak to be whatever thing would come up for your kid is bath time. I think especially when kids are in that sort of toddler, three, four age. When my kid was that age, we had a phase where transitioning to and from the bathtub was very hard. Getting into it was hard. But then getting out of it was hard.VirginiaThey don’t ever want to get in. And then they never want to leave.AshThey never want to get out, right? And in those moments when my kid was really struggling to get out of the bathtub, imagine how it would sound if I was like, “Well, it it’s the bathtub’s fault.” Like it’s the bath’s fault that they are having such a hard time, it’s because of the bubbles, and it smells too good, and I’ve made it too appealing and the water’s too warm. Like, I mean, I sound unhinged, right?Virginia“We’re going to stop bathing you.”AshExactly. We would not say, “Well, we can’t have baths anymore.” Or when we go to the fun playground, and it’s really hard to leave the fun playground, we don’t blame the playground. When we’re in the grocery store and they don’t want to leave whichever aisle, we don’t blame the grocery store. And we also don’t stop taking them to the grocery store. We don’t stop going to playgrounds. We don’t stop having baths. Instead, we make different decisions, right? We try different things. We start a timer. We have a different transition. We talk about it beforehand. We strategize, we try things.VirginiaGive a “Hey, we’re leaving in a few minutes!” so they’re not caught off guard.AshExactly. We talk about it. Hey, last time it was really hard to leave here, we kind of let them know ahead of time, or we race them to the car. We find some way to make it more fun, to make the transition easier, right? We get creative, because we know that, hey, they’re going to have to leave the grocery store. They’re going to have to take baths in a reasonable amount of time as they grow up into their lives. We recognize the skill that’s happening underneath it.And I think with screens, we don’t always see those underlying skills, because we see it as this sort of superfluous thing, right? It’s not needed. It’s not necessary. Well, neither is going to a playground, technically.A lot of what we do is not technically required, but the skill underneath is still there. So when they are struggling with ending screen time, is it really the screen, or is it that it’s hard to stop doing something fun. It’s hard to stop in the middle of something. It’s hard to stop if you have been playing for 20 minutes and you’ve lost every single race and you don’t want to stop when you’ve just felt like you’ve lost over and over again, right? You want one more shot to one more shot, right?People are going to think, “Well, but screens are so much different than those other things.” Yes, a screen is designed differently than a playground or a bath. But we are going to have kids who are navigating a technological and digital world that we are struggle to even imagine, right? We’re seeing glimpses of it, but it’s going to be different than what we’re experiencing now, and we want our kids to be able to navigate that with success. And that comes back to seeing the skills underneath. So when they’re struggling with something like that, taking the screen out of it, and asking yourself, how would I handle this if it were anything else. How would I handle this if it were they’re struggling to leave a friend’s house? I probably wouldn’t blame the friend, and I wouldn’t blame their house, and I wouldn’t blame their boys.VirginiaWe’re never seeing that child again! Ash I would validate and I would tell them, it’s hard. And I would still tell them “we’re ending,” and we would talk about strategies to make it easier next time. And we would get curious and try something, and we would be showing our kids that, “hey, it’s it’s okay to have a hard time doing that thing. It’s okay to have feelings about it. And we’re still gonna do it. We’re still going to end that thing.”Most of the time, the things that we are struggling with when it comes to screens actually boil down to one of three things, I call them the ABCs. It’s either Access, which could be time, or when they’re having it, or how much. Behavior, which you’re kind of bringing up here. And Content, what’s on the screen, what they’re playing, what they what they have access to.And so sometimes we might think that the problem we’re seeing in front of us is a behavior problem, right? I told them to put the screen away. They’re not putting the screen away. That’s a behavior problem. But sometimes it actually could be because it’s an access issue, right? It’s more time than they can really handle at that given moment. Or it could be content, because it’s content that makes it harder to start and stop. So a big part of the book is really figuring out, how do I know what problem I’m even really dealing with here? And then what are some potential things that I can do about it? To try to problem solve, try to make changes and see if this helps, and if it helps, great, keep it. And if not, I can get curious and try something else. And so a lot of it is strategies to try and ways to kind of, you know, backwards engineer what might be going on, to figure out how to make it work for you, how to make it better.VirginiaIt’s so helpful to feel like, okay, there’s always one more thing I can tweak and adjust. Versus “it’s all a failure. We have to throw it out.” That kind of all or nothing thinking that really is never productive. The reason I think it’s so helpful that you draw that parallel with the bath or the play date is it reminds us that there are some kids for whom transitions are just always very difficult—like across the board. So you’re not just seeing a screen time problem. You’re being reminded “My kid is really building skills around transitions. We don’t have them yet.” We hope we will have them at some point. But this is actually an opportunity to work on that, as opposed to a problem. We can actually practice some of these transition skills.AshAnd I really like coming back to the skill, because if we’re thinking of it as a skill, then we’re probably more likely to tell our kids that it’s a skill, too. Because if we’re just thinking of it as like, well, it’s a screen. It’s the screen’s fault, it’s the screen’s fault. Then we might not say those literal words to our kids, but we might say, like, it’s always so hard to turn off the TV. Why is that, right? We’re talking about it as if it’s this sort of amorphous, like it’s only about the television, or it’s only about the iPad, and we’re missing the part of making it clear to our kids that, hey, this is a skill that you’re working on, and we work on this skill in different ways.VirginiaI did some good repair with my kids after reading your book. Because I was definitely falling into the trap of talking about screen addiction. I thought I was saying to them, “It’s not your fault. The screens are programmed to be bad for us in this way” So I thought, I was like at least not blaming them, but being like, we need less screens because they’re so dangerous.But then I read your book, and I was like, oh, that’s not helpful either. And I did have one of my kids saying, “Am I bad because I want to watch screens all the time?” And I was like, oh, that’s too concrete and scary.And again, to draw the parallel with diet culture: It’s just like telling kids sugar is bad, and then they think they’re bad because they like sugar. So I did do some repair. I was like, “I read this book and now I’ve learned that that was not right.” They were like, oh, okay. We’re healing in my house from that, so thank you.AshOh, you’re very welcome, and I’m glad to hear that!I think about those parallels with food all the time, because sometimes it just helps me think, like, wait, would I be wanting to send this message about food or exercise or whatever? And if the answer is no, then how can I tweak it so that I’m sending a message I’d be okay with applying to other things. And I like being able to make those parallels with my kid. In my household right now, we’re practicing flexibility. Flexibility is a skill that we’re working on in so many parts of our lives. And when I say we, I do mean we. Me, everybody is working on this.VirginiaParents can use more flexibility, for sure.AshAbsolutely. And so like, when those moments are coming up, you know, I’m trying to say, like, hey, like, what skill is this right now? Who’s having to be flexible right now? Flexible can be a good thing, right? We might be flexible by saying yes to eating dinner on the couch and watching a TV show. That’s flexibility. Flexibility isn’t just adjust your plans to be more convenient to me, child, so that I can go do something as an adult. And coming back to those skills so they can see, oh, okay, this isn’t actually just about screens. This applies to every part of these of my life, or these different parts of my life, and if I’m working on it here, oh, wow, it feels easier over there. And so they can see that this applies throughout their life, and kind of feel more of that buy in of like, oh, I’m getting better at that. Or that was easier. That was harder. We want them to see that across the board.VirginiaOh, my God, absolutely.Let’s talk about screens and neurodivergence a little bit. So one of my kiddos is neurodivergent, and I can both see how screens are wonderful for them at the end of a school day, when they come home and they’re really depleted. Screen time is the thing they need to rest and regulate. And they love the world building games, which gives them this whole world to control and explore. And there’s so much there that’s wonderful.And, they definitely struggle more than their sibling with this transition piece, with getting off it. One kid will naturally put down the iPad at some point and go outside for a bit, and this kid will not. And it creates more anxiety for parents. Because neurodivergent kids may both need screens—in ways that maybe we’re not totally comfortable with, but need to get comfortable with—and then struggle with the transition piece. So how do you think about this question differently with neurodivergence? Or or is it really the same thing you’re just having to drill in differently?AshI think it is ultimately the same thing, but it certainly is going to feel quite more heightened. And I think especially for certain aspects of neurodivergence, especially, I think it feels really heightened because of some of the ways that they might be discussed, particularly online, when it comes to how they relate to technology. I think about ADHD, we’ll see that a lot. Where I’ll see many things online about, like, “kids with ADHD should never be on a screen. They should never be on a device, because they are so dopamine-seeking.” And I have to just say that I find that to be such an ableist framing. Because with ADHD, we’re talking about a dopamine deficient brain. And I don’t think that we would be having that same conversation about someone needing insulin, right? Like, we wouldn’t be saying, like, oh yeah, nope, they can’t take that insulin. VirginiaThey’re just craving that insulin they need to stay alive.AshA kid seeking a thing that they’re that they are somehow deficient in—that’s not some sort of defiant behavior. VirginiaNo, it’s a pretty adaptive strategy.AshAbsolutely, it is. And we want kids to know that nobody’s brain is good or bad, right? There’s not a good brain or a bad brain. There are all brains are going to have things that are easier or harder. And it’s about learning the brain that you’re in, and what works or doesn’t work for the brain that you’re in.And all brains are different, right? Neurotypical brains and neurodivergent brains within those categories are obviously going to be vastly different. What works for one won’t work for another, and being able to figure out what works for them, instead of just, “because you have this kind of brain, you shouldn’t ever do this thing,” that’s going to set them up for more success. And I think it’s great that you mentioned both how a screen can be so regulating, particularly for neurodivergent brains, and then the double-edged sword of that is that then you have to stop. VirginiaTransition off back into the world.AshSo if the pain point is a transition, what is it really coming from? Is it coming from the executive function piece of “I don’t know how to find a place to stop?” A lot of people, particularly kids ADHD, they often like games that are more open-ended. So they might like something like a Minecraft or an Animal Crossing or the Sims where you can hyperfocus and deep dive into something. But what’s difficult about that is that, you know, if I play Mario Kart, the level ends, it’s a very obvious ending.VirginiaRight? And you can say, “One more level, and we’re done.”AshExactly. We’ve reached the end of the championship. I’m on the podium. I quit now, right?But there’s a never ending series of of tasks with a more open-ended game. And especially if I’m in my hyper focus zone, right? I can just be thinking, like, well, then I can do this and this and this and this and this, right?And I’m adding on to my list, and the last thing I want to do in that moment is get pulled out of it when I’m really feeling like I’m in the zone. So if that’s the kind of transition that’s difficult. And it’s much less about games and more about “how do I stop in the middle of a project?” Because that’s essentially what that is.And that would apply if I’m at school and I’m in the middle of an essay and we’re finishing it up tomorrow. Or I’m trying to decorate a cake, and we’re trying to walk out the door and I have to stop what I’m doing and come back later. So one of the tricks that I have found really helpful is to ask the question of, “How will you know when you’re done?” Or how will you know you’re at a stopping point? What would a stopping point be today? And getting them to sort of even visualize it, or say it out loud, so that they can think about, “Oh, here’s how I basically break down a giant task into smaller pieces,” because that’s essentially what that is.VirginiaThat’s a great tip. Ash“Okay, you have five minutes. What is the last thing you’re going to do today?” Because then it’s concrete in terms of, like, I’m not asking the last thing, and it will take you half an hour, right? I’m at, we have five minutes. What’s the last thing you’re wrapping up? What are you going to do?Then, if it’s someone who’s very focused in this world, and they’re very into that world, then that last thing can also be our transition out of it. As they’re turning it off, the very first thing we’re saying to them is, “So what was that last thing you were doing?”VirginiaOh, that’s nice.AshThen they’re telling it to us, and then we can get curious. We can ask questions. We can get a little into their world to help them transition out of that world. That doesn’t mean that we have to understand what they’re telling us, frankly. It doesn’t mean we have to know all the nuance. But we can show that interest. I think this is also really, really important, because then we are showing them it’s not us versus the screen. We’re not opposing the screen, like it’s the enemy or something. And we’re showing them, “Hey, I can tell you’re interested in this, so I’m interested in it because you are.” Like, I care about you, so I want to know more.VirginiaAnd then they can invite you into their world, which what a lot of neurodivergent kids need. We’re asking them to be part of the larger world all the time. And how nice we can meet them where they are a little more.AshAbsolutely. The other thing I would say is that something I think people don’t always realize, especially if they don’t play games as much, or if they are not neurodivergent and playing games, is they might miss that video games actually are extremely well-accommodated worlds, in terms of accommodating neurodivergence.So thinking about something like ADHD, to go back to that example, it’s like, okay, some really common classroom accommodations for ADHD, from the educator perspective, the accommodations I see a lot are frequent check ins, having a checklist, breaking down a large task into smaller chunks, objectives, having a visual organizer.Well, I think about a video game, and it’s like, okay, if I want to know what I have available to me, I can press the pause menu and see my inventory at any time. If I want to know what I should be doing, because I have forgotten, I can look at a menu and see, like, what’s my objective right now? Or I can bring up the map and it will show me where I supposed to be going. If I start to deviate from what I’m supposed to be doing, the game will often be like, “Hey, don’t forget, you’re supposed to be going over there!” It’ll get me back on task. If I’m trying to make a potion that has eight ingredients, the game will list them all out for me, and it will check them off as I go, so I can visually see how I’m how I’m achieving this task. It does a lot of that accommodation for me. And those accommodations are not as common in the real world, or at least not as easily achieved.And so a lot of neurodivergent kids will succeed easily in these game worlds. And we might think “oh because it’s addicting, or the algorithm, or it’s just because they love it” But there are often these structural design differences that actually make it more accessible to them.And if we notice, oh, wow, they have no problem knowing what to do when they’re playing Zelda, because they just keep checking their objective list all the time or whatever—that’s great information.VirginiaAnd helps us think, how can we do that in real life? AshExactly. We can go to them and say, hey, I noticed you, you seem to check your inventory a lot when you’re playing that game. How do we make it so that when you look in your closet, you can just as easily see what shirts you own. Whatever the thing may be, so that we’re showing them, “hey, bring that into the rest of your world that works for you here.” Let’s make it work for you elsewhere, instead of thinking of it as a reason they’re obsessed with screens, and now we resent the screens for that. Bring that in so that it can benefit the rest of their lives.VirginiaI’m now like, okay, that just reframes something else very important for me. You have such a helpful way of helping us divest from the guilt and the shame and actually look at this in a positive and empowering way for us and our kids. And I’m just so grateful for it. It really is a game changer for me.AshOh, thank you so much. I’m so glad to hear that it was helpful and empowering for you, and I just hope that it can be that for others as well.ButterAshSo my family and I have been lucky enough to spend quite a lot of time in Japan. And one of the wonderful things about Japan is they have a very huge bike culture. I think people think of the Netherlands as Bike cCentral, but Japan kind of rivals them.And they have a particular kind of bike that you cannot get in the United States. It’s called a Mamachari, which is like a portmanteau of mom and chariot. And it’s sort of like a cargo bike, but they are constructed a little differently and have some features that I love. And so when I’ve been in Japan, we are on those bikes. I’m always like, I love this kind of bike. I want this kind of bike for me forever. And my recent Butter has been trying to find something like that that I can have in my day to day life. And I found something recently, and got a lovely step through bike on Facebook Marketplace. VirginiaSo cool! That’s exciting to find on marketplace, too.AshOh yes, having a bike that like I actually enjoy riding, I had my old bike from being a teenager, and it just was not functional. I was like, “This is not fun.” And now having one that I enjoy, I’m like, oh yes. I feel like a kid again. It’s lovely.VirginiaThat’s a great Butter. My Butter is something both my kids and my pets and I are all really enjoying. I’m gonna drop a link in the chat for you. It is called a floof, and it is basically a human-sized dog bed that I found on Etsy. It’s like, lined with fake fur.AshMy God. I’m looking at it right now.VirginiaIsn’t it hilarious?AshWow. I’m so glad you sent a picture, because that is not what I was picturing?Virginia I can’t describe it accurately. It’s like a cross between a human-sized dog bed and a shopping bag? Sort of? AshYes, yes, wow. It’s like a hot tub.VirginiaIt’s like a hot tub, but no water. You just sit in it. I think they call it a cuddle cave. I don’t understand how to explain it, but it’s the floof. And it’s in our family room. And it’s not inexpensive, but it does basically replace a chair. So if you think of it as a furniture purchase, it’s not so bad. There’s always at least a cat or a dog sleeping in it. Frequently a child is in it. My boyfriend likes to be in it. Everyone gravitates towards it. And you can put pillows in it or a blanket.Neurodivergent people, in particular, really love it, because I think it provides a lot of sensory feedback? And it’s very enclosed and cozy. It’s great for the day we’re having today, which is a very laid back, low demand, watch as much screen as you want, kind of day. So I’ve got one kid bundled into the floof right now with a bunch of blankets in her iPad, and she’s so happy. AshOh my gosh. Also, it kind of looks like the person is sitting in a giant pita, which I also love.VirginiaThat’s what it is! It’s like a giant pita, but soft and cozy. It’s like being in a pita pocket. And I’m sure there are less expensive versions, this was like, 300 something dollars, so it is an investment. But they’re handmade by some delightful person in the Netherlands.Whenever we have play dates, there are always two or three kids, snuggled up in it together. There’s something extremely addictive about it. I don’t know. I don’t really know how to explain why it’s great, but it’s great.AshOh, that is lovely.VirginiaAll right, well tell obviously, everyone needs to go to their bookstore and get Power On: Managing Screen Time to Benefit the Whole Family. Where else can we find you, Ash? How can we support your work?AshYou can find me on Instagram at the gamer educator, and I also cross post my Instagram posts to Substack, and I’m on Substack as Screen Time Strategies. It’s all the same content, just that way you’re getting it in your inbox without, without having to go to Instagram. So if that’s something that you are trying to maybe move away from, get it via Substack. And my book Power On: Managing Screen Time to Benefit the Whole Family is available starting August 26 is when it fully releases.VirginiaAmazing. Thank you so much. This was really great.AshThank you so much for having me back.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 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! We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.For our last August hiatus episode, we’re looking back at a conversation we ran back in February of this year — exploring the work of attorney turned self-help guru Mel Robbins.Did Mel steal the concept of “let them?” Is she just Andrew Huberman for the “We Can Do Hard Things” crowd? Is high-fiving yourself in the mirror every morning a diet? As you’ll hear, Corinne and I didn’t totally agree… until we did. Let’s get into it.To hear our discussion, you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. Subscriptions are $7 per month or $70 for the year.Episode 207 TranscriptCorinneToday, we are talking about motivational speaker and author Mel Robbins and we have maybe some surprising opinions on this topic.VirginiaWe 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.CorinneI’m going to introduce this topic by saying that I first heard about Mel Robbins a few weeks ago. My coach at the gym was like, “Have you heard of Mel Robbins?” And I was like, “Hmm, sounds familiar? What is that?” And she was like, “I just listened to her on this podcast, and I saw she was on Glennon Doyle, and I was just wondering if you knew who she was.” And I didn’t know who she was, but I was like I’ll listen to her Glennon Doyle episode.I listened to it, and I liked it. I found it interesting and helpful.And then, just a few days later, you messaged me, and you were like, “should we talk about this person on the podcast?”VirginiaYes, because I had no idea who she was. We should be clear, this is someone with 22 million followers on Instagram. Us not knowing her was an oversight. She’s an enormous celebrity, but I had somehow missed her completely. Amy texted me one of her reels and was like, this feels like a Burnt Toast episode waiting to happen and I sent it to you.CorinneAnd I was kind of like… No.VirginiaYou were like, she’s not a diet. I like her. It’s fine.CorinneI enjoyed her episode on We Can Do Hard Things. She’s a run of the mill self help-y person.Just to give a little background, she has been a self help person for a long time. One of her first biggest things was she did one of the early TEDx talks that went insanely viral.VirginiaIn about 2011 or 2012.CorinneShe had this book called The Five Second Rule. The concept is basically if you’re thinking about doing something, count down to five and then do it. Which, like, how is that helpful? But okay, a lot of people found it extremely helpful.VirginiaIs it that it’s supposed to make quicker to do a thing you don’t want to do, or make you pause before doing a thing you should not do?CorinneI think it’s preventing you from overthinking / talking out yourself out of something.VirginiaI guess that’s not my struggle. But I can see for people for whom that is a struggle, having somebody push you off the diving board—I mean, as someone who would never jump off a diving board, I would need to be pushed. I get it.CorinneShe also has a podcast.VirginiaThe Wall Street Journal calls her “a billion view podcaster,” and Time Magazine says she gives millions of listeners around the globe a reason to believe in themselves.CorinneShe’s very, very, very popular.VirginiaVery popular. I also want to note that she is someone who is writing books about how to change your habits, how to overcome emotional hurdles. She is not a psychologist. She is not a social worker. She is not a therapist of any kind. She is a former attorney who first became famous because she started doing legal analysis on CNN. She covered the George Zimmerman trial for them and then that led to her first book in 2011 which was called, Stop Saying You’re Fine. So this high powered lawyer backstory to self help Guru is a is an interesting path.CorinneSo I did get her book to research for this episode—VirginiaYou got the newest book?CorinneI have her newest book, The Let Them Theory, but I want to talk about that later.But at the beginning of that book, she goes over her story, and to be honest, sitting here right now, can’t remember the details. But she has a struggle. Either she or husband got laid off, they’re having a hard time, and then she’s depressed, and that’s where the five second rule comes from. You’re saying she’s this high powered lawyer who goes into self help, but her story is like “I was struggling. I came up with this theory.”VirginiaOkay, I also just want to note that—not to take away from her truth about herself—but Wikipedia also taught me that she and her husband own homes in three locations.CorinneI mean, she’s very wealthy right now.VirginiaI’m just holding her personal struggle, overcoming how hard things were, and she is a former-attorney-turned-self-help-guru who owns three homes. So we can just hold those things together.CorinneHer struggle was 15 years ago.VirginiaDifferent time! Maybe one home, one-and-a-half homes tops at that point.CorinneDo you want to talk kind of about her Instagram reels and the diet culture of it all?VirginiaYes. My assignment for this episode was Mel Robbins’ social media, which I spent some time on, and I’m still recovering from a little bit.Her whole aesthetic on Instagram—you know how every influencer has their branding? Hers is very talk-to-the-camera, intense little pep talk videos. Or it’s excerpts from the podcast. She always starts the intense pep talks with like, “Hey, it’s your buddy Mel.” That’s her little like, “Hey, it’s your buddy Mel.” So this is our buddy, Mel, we’re going to talk about.And, you know, they’re a real mix. Some of them are the five second rule. Sometimes it’s about letting go of your expectations for other people.There was one reel I really liked where she’s just saying, like, if you’re going through a really hard time, like you have a terrible ex, or you are surviving some kind of trauma and you’re feeling overwhelmed and stressed out, that is actually what you should be doing. That’s not you failing, that’s you having a logical reaction to a hard thing. And I was like, yes, okay, I’m on board that seems right. It is important that it’s okay for us to be sad when things are sad and angry, when things are unfair. Especially given the current state of the world. That vibe I’m here for.But in this reel, she talks about how important it is to drink a glass of water in the morning before you drink your coffee.And again, this is a former attorney turned life guru, so I’m not clear why is Mel Robbins the expert for me on water before coffee?CorinneI mean, I don’t know, but it does seem like a good idea.VirginiaI’m not saying it’s not a good idea. I’m just saying, why is she presenting it?CorinneShe’s famous now, she gets to give advice on anything she wants.VirginiaShe starts talking about hormones and it gets very science-y, but there are no citations. There’s not even a nutritionist sitting next to her. Maybe this is from a podcast interview she did with a nutritionist? I don’t know. But there is no sourcing. She has this very emphatic way of speaking, and she’s like, this is the thing you need to do. And I just watched this, and I was like, oh, so she’s a Huberman bro! This is Huberman husband stuff, right?CorinneI mean, it’s self help! She’s telling you what to do.VirginiaMel Robbins would love to tell us all what to do.CorinneIn the intro to her book, where she’s talking about how she got into writing these books, she refers to having done PhD levels of research.VirginiaBut on what? Because the science about hydration and coffee intake is very different from the research on how we move through big feelings during trauma. These are not related concepts, Corinne. So she’s doing PhD level research on everything?CorinneShe has a PhD in giving advice.VirginiaDo you want to talk us through the morning routine post?CorinneSo, “this is the morning routine that’ll supercharge your energy all day.”Virginia“Backed by science,” that’s what she says.CorinneStarts with getting up when the alarm goes off. Once again, it’s not bad advice. Like, yes. But also is Mel Robbins telling you to do it going to make you do it? I don’t know.VirginiaSometimes you’re just not going to do that, and you might still have an okay day. It doesn’t mean the whole day fell apart because you didn’t get up the second your alarm went off.CorinneThe next thing, making your bed, tidying your space—another very common self help tip!VirginiaIt’s “the simplest way to practice discipline,” Corinne. “A promise kept no matter what.”CorinneI’m going to be honest, I feel okay with the first two. Number three, “high five yourself in the mirror.” Like, no. I’m never going to do that. I hate that. I really hate it.VirginiaI can’t stop laughing. She’s so serious in the photo. She has a selfie of her high fiving herself, and she’s so serious in the photo. Like she is earnestly high fiving herself.CorinneLet me tell you, “giving yourself a high five in the mirror rewires your brain to focus on self love and positive reinforcement.”VirginiaThe science behind that is all in her book, The High Five Habit. So there you go. The PhD level science that she’s done to confirm. I just imagine saying to someone actually struggling with depression or anxiety, like, “why don’t you just high five yourself in the mirror?” And, like, I think they would be justified in throat punching you. Like, “I’m sorry your mom just died. Have you tried high fiving yourself in the mirror?” Like, fuck you.CorinneThis is the thing, right? This is what we talk about. It’s like, exercising does make us feel better, but you can’t tell someone struggling, “Just exercise.” Like, this advice is good. Like, get out of bed, have a glass of water. Exercise. And, no one needs that advice. Everyone knows that.VirginiaHigh fiving yourself in the mirror I’m going to say is not good advice. Like, I’m going to say for most of us, that’s not going to be transformative in any way. It’s just going to be dumb.Okay, then we get to the hydration stuff again. “Delay your caffeine one to two hours.” And then here we are. Andrew Huberman again, “Take in the morning light. Get outside ASAP.”I currently have to wake up at five o’clock to get my middle schooler on the bus and it is dark for the next two hours. So I would be going outside in the dark. I do take in the morning light when I then drag an exhausted 11 year old out to the bus stop every morning. That counts. Okay, I get a gold star.CorinneSo she definitely has a self help-y thing going on.VirginiaThen the next reel I want you to look at is the one that references intermittent fasting.In this one, she says, if you’re going through a divorce, if you’re feeling kind of lost in life, if you have no clue what you want to do, here’s a tip from your friend Mel Robbins, just do something really, really hard. As well as doing the really hard thing you’re going through. So she did five days of intensive intermittent fasting “for her gut health”—I’m using air quotes—and that is how she got through some hard time.CorinneYeah. I mean, her other suggestion is training for a marathon. I sort of see a kernel of something here, but I can’t imagine actually giving someone this advice.VirginiaHaving gone through a divorce in recent memory, we can use me as an example. I felt like during those months, I was doing pretty good to keep the ball moving on my divorce. Like, keep parenting my children as best I could. Keep my business afloat. I did not need to be intermittent fasting on top of any of that. I didn’t. I was doing a lot. It was hard. I was doing all these hard things. I felt like I had enough. I don’t think training for a marathon would have done fucking anything for me. I just truly don’t. And I just needed to get through. The hard thing was enough.I never want to demonize coping strategies, and so if someone’s like, training for my marathon did help me through my divorce. Like, amazing. But it feels like choosing a coping strategy that will give you a big block of time that’s filled with something else to distract you. And I just think, if it wasn’t diet- or exercise-related. Like, if it was like, “I’m binge drinking every Saturday night as my coping strategy,” that also fills a lot of time, also distracts you, takes your mind off your problems. But then suddenly we have a totally different narrative around it, you know? So it’s like the combining of we’re going to give you this big, all consuming thing, and we’re going to make it something that we attach a lot of moral virtue and like social performance to. And that somehow is going to be why it’s going to be helpful.CorinneYes, the things she’s suggesting are committing to dry January fitness goals, building better money habits.VirginiaYeah, all good. But are they all projects you need? They’re all in and of themselves hard, complicated projects. Do you need to do them while in some other crisis?CorinneNo, I don’t think you do.VirginiaSo this is why I’m saying yes, Mel Robbins is a diet. There’s just this make it as hard as possible, push yourself to do more. Everything Sounds like a simple, easy tip, but she wants you to do 900 of them. That’s what I’m pushing back against. And then, I mean, there were a couple other reels. We don’t need to take them one by one, but, she’s done podcast episodes on how to boost your metabolism for weight loss. She’s done podcast episodes about working out for menopause, where they’re just like, you want to be strong, not skinny. But everyone talking in that conversation is extremely skinny.CorinneOkay, I want to talk a little bit about her book. Probably the reason we both have just come across her is because she has a new book out. The book is called The Let Them Theory. And this is what she was talking about on We Can Do Hard Things. So this is what I listened to a podcast episode about and was like, I like it.The Let Them Theory is basically letting other people do what they want to do. So it’s like, instead of making yourself miserable trying to control what other people are doing, let them. The story that she gives at the beginning to set this all up is her kid was going to prom, and they went to go take Prom pictures with a big group of kids before the event, and it started pouring rain. And then it turns out her son didn’t have a restaurant reservation for where to eat with his 20 friends before prom, and he decided he wanted to go to an outdoor taco restaurant. And she was just like, everyone is going to get soaking wet. It’s going to be horrible. Blah, blah, blah. And then her daughter was just like, Mom, let them. If they want to get soaking wet eating tacos, let them.And I do think that’s helpful. I also think there’s a way in which, that is anti-diet, you know? Like, let people eat what they want to eat. Let kids eat brownies before dinner, whatever.VirginiaNot to get too personal with my buddy Mel, but you were really going to control your child’s prom experience that much? They’re 17 years old and you’re weighing in on where they need to go for dinner. It’s their problem!CorinneIt’s an anxiety thing, right? It’s like, oh my God, 20 kids are going to walk into a restaurant without a reservation. I think we all have those type of spirals where other people are doing things in a way that bothers us. And instead of getting worked up about it, I’m just going to let it go.VirginiaI mean, I fully subscribe to this. I wrote an essay maybe two years ago about working on my own control issues and then realizing control isn’t love. And yes, this resonates very deeply with me. It is something that I am a perpetual work in progress on. And I feel like I’m having a really hard time squaring this “release people, stop trying to change people, don’t control other people” with have a 12 step morning routine. She’s like, I can’t control other people, but here’s what I can control.CorinneHow does the let them theory square with giving anyone else advice really?VirginiaAlso that.CorinneSo that is something that I’ve been thinking about, just as we’ve been talking.Another thing I wanted to mention was the book definitely mentions weight loss, like she uses it as an example of if someone’s wanting to lose weight or something, but they’re not eating in that way, like, let them. Let other people’s problems be other people’s problems. But like, just noting it as this is not a person who’s necessarily versed in body liberation.VirginiaShe has clearly done no work interrogating the idea that you maybe don’t need to lose weight. She’s willing to just take that as a foregone conclusion, which is common to this kind of self help person.CorinneOne thing that I found myself grating up against was she has a few kids. She has two daughters, and I guess they have really different bodies, and she talks about her older daughter’s feelings about her younger daughter’s body. And I have no idea how old the daughter is. I think the daughter is an adult or close to being adult. But I was just like, I really don’t like this.VirginiaYeah, did you have to go there? Even if they consented, why are you telling your kid’s story and talking about your kid’s body in that way?CorinneAnd, as you said, there are episodes about, weight loss, how to boost your metabolism, eat these five things or whatever.VirginiaShe brings on “experts” for all of those episodes. But this is a former attorney. I’m just like, what is your vetting process for these guests? How are you deciding? What criteria are you using? All of that is very unclear.CorinneThen the last thing that I want to mention is that this morning, as I was getting ready to record this episode, getting ready for my day, doing my morning routine—VirginiaHigh fiving yourself.CorinneAs I was not high fiving myself in the mirror.VirginiaYou do a high 10, you do both hands.CorinneI was like, I’m going to relisten to the Glennon Doyle episode, just so I can remember some of the things that Mel Robbins was saying on that podcast episode, which I enjoyed. So I opened my podcast player, I went to my We Can Do Hard Things feed, and the episode was gone!1And I was like, this must be some phone glitch. I checked every podcast app. I texted a friend, also gone in their feed. I texted you, you also couldn’t find it. So then I start Googling, and there’s a Reddit thread about this podcast episode disappearing, and someone links to a Substack post where a person is accusing Mel Robbins of plagiarism.VirginiaOh my God!CorinneThis other person named Cassie Phillips had written a poem that basically has the words and the concept “let them” and “let me,” which is like the basis of the book. And I guess that poem went really viral in 2022 and then Mel Robbins came up with the let them theory in 2023 so very close timelines.I did read the Substack post. I feel like it’s one of those kind of like, one person says one thing, the other person says something else, situations. I don’t know if you could ever prove that Mel Robbins heard it from the poem. And in fact, Mel Robbins says that she heard it from her daughter, so I don’t know what the truth is.Then the other thing I just wanted to mention, and this is something I had been thinking about, is that idea of “let them” and not trying to control other people. Like, that’s also just not Mel Robbins’s idea. A lot of different cultures use that. I know a lot of people in Al Anon who have embraced that as a way of just being like, you can’t control other people’s drinking, that kind of thing. So just want to acknowledge that it’s not an original idea. It’s possibly plagiarized. We don’t know.VirginiaWe cannot know about the plagiarism. But those are valid questions to be raising, given the timeline. But even if that was not a contributing factor, she definitely took this very well established concept—again, like, I wrote an essay two years ago about my own work in therapy on this idea. It’s out there. And it’s not that she can’t write about it. I wrote about it! But to then turn it into the Mel Robbins’ secret method of fixing your life, which is very much how the book is marketed and how her Instagram is marketed. It’s very much like, only Mel Robbins can tell you this hard truth. That is a real neat trick. And I think speaks much more to her ability to build a brand and build an audience than it does to her actually being a wise and research-based expert on personal growth. That’s not necessarily what she is, but she is a pretty genius marketer and packager of an idea.VirginiaI’m just really struggling to square it with the rest of her messaging. It doesn’t actually feel very consistent. Like, let them I understand. It’s more about other people. But you count to five and throw yourself out of bed the second the alarm goes off. Like, what? It just doesn’t feel internally consistent to me at all.CorinneTo me it’s just like if you’re just going to let them then why are you giving people advice? Why are you trying to control how people get out of bed?VirginiaYeah, and whether they drink coffee or water first? It’s not just that she’s giving advice. She gives really specific, granular advice about how to structure your day. She wanted to control whether her son took his friends to a taco place or not on prom night. Like, she’s real interested in people doing very tiny things, especially according to her specifications. So it’s kind of feels like maybe she got really into this idea because she knows it’s her own biggest struggle, which is totally fair. But there’s a lack of introspection to then peel back a few more layers and be like, well, where am I not letting them? I’m not letting people do a lot of things.Another thing that feels slightly like a disconnect to me with the “let them” and this let people go thing is, when you look at how Mel Robbins is presenting herself, it’s a very specific aesthetic. She is definitely someone who—I mean, she talks about working out a lot, intermittent fasting, all of that. Her body is presenting as a highly controlled body. She’s very thin, she’s very blonde. That is not a natural blonde. That’s her body, her choice, of course. But again, it’s this interesting tension between this message that is very expansive and trying to give you room to take up space in your life, and then what she’s presenting to us in in her embodied self feels very different. And again, this is not a criticism, because it’s also like one of those things where, like, what other option does she have? She got famous as a CNN commentator. She’s now a big deal on Instagram. Thinness, blondeness, whiteness, all of that is required for those jobs. So it’s just interesting seeing that like someone else with this message, who is not a tiny blonde woman would probably not be able to blow it up to the level that she is.CorinneYeah. And I also think she is older. I think she’s in her 50s.VirginiaShe has got to play the game.CorinneThis is how people are going to pay attention to her.VirginiaWell, that’s Mel Robbins. We learned a lot. We now know who she is, and also quite a lot about her. I’m interested to hear from listeners who have been following her. You may have more thoughts on the whole plagiarism piece, or the missing Glennon episode piece, or just have more nuanced takes on her work. So I’m excited to hear what people think.CorinneDo we want to definitively say, Is Mel Robbins a diet?VirginiaI’m comfortable definitively saying it is. You have been on more of a journey. I don’t know if you’re ready to say it.CorinneI don’t know if I would say that Mel Robbins is a diet. I do think she’s a whole thing.VirginiaShe’s a whole thing.CorinneI think she’s like perfectionism culture maybe?VirginiaShe is high fiving herself in the mirror so hard.CorinneIs high fiving yourself in the mirror a diet?VirginiaIt’s not not a diet is where I’m going to land on that.CorinneWow. I don’t know if I agree with that, but there’s a lot to think about.VirginiaOkay, let’s do butter, because my butter is going to possibly undermine my credibility for this entire episode.CorinneIs your butter drinking a cup of water before you drink coffee?VirginiaI am not doing that, but my butter is my new hydration tracking app that I’m using!CorinneAre you freaking kidding me?VirginiaI knew I was going to... I knew this was going to..CorinneA hydration tracking app.VirginiaIt’s called Water llama. It’s adorable. Every day there’s a different animal. Today I’m tracking on this little bunny. And then it shows how much of how the water fills up on the little illustration. So I’ve drunk 2/3 of a bunny according to my goal. I am not doing this as a diet. This is not a weight loss goal. It has nothing to do with that.I have so many migraines. My migraines have been getting worse in the last couple months. I was looking back at how often they are happening. They’ve really increased. I live in a frozen tundra. My house is so dry. I’m waking up every morning with headaches and sore throats. I have a humidifier. But I realized I really think I need to work on hydration. I’m also going to get a work up with my neurologist, but the appointment is three months out. So I was like, this is something I can work on in the meantime and see if it makes a difference.And I have tried to just be mindful about water consumption in the past, but I will forget all about it. I hyper focus on work all day long and drink nothing, and then it’s eight o’clock and I’m very thirsty. So I was like, alright, I’m going to do this water tracking app. And I’m a week into it, and I’ve drunk so much water in the last week.CorinneDoes it give you reminders?VirginiaYou can set it to remind you every one or two hours, if you want. So it nudges you. I haven’t even really needed the reminders, because so far I’m just excited to fill in my little numbers.I will say I put in a custom goal that I made up. I’m not going to say what my goal is, because I think it’s somewhat absurd honestly. I’m really just trying to drink as much as possible until I don’t wake up with a headache, and then use that number as the target and see if it helps.I deliberately put in a custom goal, because otherwise they calculate it based on your weight. So if you don’t want to mess around with that, you can just put in your own goal.There is a weight loss challenge thing you could do, but there is an option to hide that, and I did that right away, so I don’t have to look at any weight loss content.So you know it’s with a caveat. Like, tracking is not for everybody. Tracking is usually not for me. If this doesn’t feel good for you, please don’t do it. But if you are thirsty and need to drink more water, I’m liking it.CorinneCool.VirginiaDo you feel like I’m such a hypocrite right now?CorinneUm, I don’t know if I would say hypocrite? The tracking thing is interesting. Like when tracking is triggering versus when it’s not.VirginiaI think because I have a very specific metric, which is no headaches. Like, I’m doing this for a very niche reason. It feels okay and that’s what I can come up with.But I’m also paying attention to it, and if it starts becoming stressful, I’m putting some parameters around it where I’m like, okay, then we delete the app. But water llama, it’s pretty cute.CorinneWell, I hope water llama helps your migraines.VirginiaTBD. What about you?CorinneI want to recommend a book that I just read. It’s called The Safekeep. I don’t want to say too much about it, because I went into it knowing almost nothing and was shocked at various points.VirginiaBy Yael van der Wouden.CorinneYes, I think she’s Dutch. What will I say about it?VirginiaI can read the summary line, which is “an exhilarating, twisted tale of desire, suspicion and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the summer of 1961.”CorinneThat seems like a good summary.VirginiaI mean, I want to read it. That sounds really good.CorinneIt takes a few different turns and I think has a surprising ending that seems like it wouldn’t work, and it kind of did work for me. And I would say, like, I also just did not expect it to be as spicy as it was!So, I recommend The Safekeep and I would say, don’t read too much about it before you read it!VirginiaJust dive in. That’s a great butterWell, should we high five on Zoom to wrap up this episode? Because our buddy Mel would want us to?CorinneI need some science behind why high five.VirigniaYou can read her whole book called The High Five Habit and just start high fiving everybody all the time.CorinneNo.

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark! We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.Today, we’re going to revisit our conversation about Emily Oster, and her evolving views on kids, weight and health.This episode first aired in November 2024, right after the presidential election. We’re now 8 months into Trump’s second term, and continuing to grapple with how America has slid to the right. So the story of a public health advocate and scholar who is now aligned with conservative media feels incredibly timely—especially because many of you are starting back at school this month, and Emily’s take on school lunches is particularly complex. That said, we also want to hold space for how much Emily’s work has meant to so many of us (including Virginia!).This is a complicated conversation. To hear the whole thing, read the full transcript, and join us in the comments, you’ll need to join Extra Butter, our premium subscription tier: http://patreon.com/virginiasolesmithExtra Butter costs just $99 per year. (Regular paid subscribers, the remaining value of your subscription will be deducted from that total!)In these monthly episodes we get into the GOOD stuff like:Dating While FatWhat to do when you miss your smaller bodyIs Kids Eat In Color anti-diet?And did Virginia really get divorced over butter?Extra Butters also get exclusive weekly chats, DM access, and a monthly bonus essay or thread. And Extra Butter ensures that the Burnt Toast community can always stay an ad- and sponsor-free space—which is crucial for body liberation journalism. Join us here!(Questions? Glitches? Email me all the details, and cc support@substack.com.)PS. If Extra Butter isn’t the right tier for you, remember that you still get access behind almost every other paywall with a regular paid subscription.Episode 206 TranscriptVirginiaI’m just going to say up front, I am nervous about doing this episode. It is a complicated one. People have very strong feelings about Emily Oster. But we are in our Extra Butter safe space, and I am trusting that.So Corinne. You are coming in somewhat cold to this topic, because you don’t have kids, and Emily is primarily a parenting expert. What do you know about Emily Oster and her work?CorinneI know two things about Emily Oster. One is that she wrote a book about parenting or maybe pregnancy? And my main takeaway about that book is that it’s okay for you to drink a small amount of alcohol when you are pregnant. VirginiaYes. This is a gift that Emily has given to the world. Unquestionably.CorinneAnd I basically just know about that from having friends who are pregnant. Then the other thing I know is that she was involved in some COVID controversies. VirginiaUh huh. CorinneThe book came out before COVID, and then during COVID she started to become a controversial figure.VirginiaShe actually had two books come out before COVID, Expecting Better, about pregnancy, and then Crib Sheet, which is a parenting book. Expecting Better actually came out in 2013, the same year my first child was born. So it’s 11 years old. She’s been around for a long time!CorinneDid you use those books as a pregnant and child-having person?VirginiaWell, Expecting Better was published on August 20, 2013 and Violet was born on August 18. So I did not use it for that pregnancy. But I did later read a lot of Emily’s work, and in particular the work she was doing around breastfeeding not being the most essential you-have-to-do-it-or-you’re-a-terrible-mother thing. She did a lot of really great research breaking down some of those myths and showing that the benefits of breastfeeding over formula are not as extreme as we’ve been told. All of that was super helpful to me during my own breastfeeding situations. So yes, she’s definitely been a parenting voice on my radar for a long time. Emily is also actually from New Haven, Connecticut, as am I. We are around the same age, but I don’t think we knew each other as kids. But we are both ladies from Connecticut. Emily has a PhD in economics from Harvard. She then went on to pursue research in health economics and is a professor of economics at Brown University. She is a mother of two, and her official bio says, “Emily was inspired by her own pregnancy and lack of clear information to guide her decisions. She decided to use her expertise in reviewing and analyzing data to help other parents navigate those topics. She’s a New York Times best-selling author.”So we are both 40-something moms, originally from Connecticut. I think the other place our work has overlapped is that we both do some of this work of, “here is this mainstream thing you’ve been told that’s actually quite punitive towards mothers, and what if we looked at the data and flipped some of that on its head.” The work she did on pregnancy and breastfeeding was super helpful to me. It’s been super helpful to so many of my friends. My younger sister just had her first baby this summer, and she was reading Expecting Better. So I just want to go into this conversation saying I really think all of that work is valuable. Then more recently, as you noted, Emily launched ParentData, which started as a Substack newsletter that she sent out during COVID. Now it is its own standalone website. And during COVID she started sending out these newsletters that I think a lot of us, as parents, were living and dying by, because she was helping us calculate the risks. And then she started to push for schools to reopen before a lot of people were ready for schools to reopen. There was a lot of controversy around her takes at that point and how she was calculating risks. And in particular, I think, how she was calculating risks for kids from more marginalized backgrounds. It often started to sound more like she was just thinking about, “I want my kids back in school.” It was messy. I’m not going to talk a lot about her COVID stuff today, because we have a whole other issue to work through. But I do want to acknowledge that COVID is when a lot of folks started to feel very divisive about Emily. I also want to acknowledge right off the top that Emily blurbed Fat Talk and was a big supporter of Fat Talk and of my work. She’s interviewed me on ParentData twice, once before Fat Talk came out, once after. A lot of the early Burnt Toast community came from Emily’s community. So this is all the more reason why we should have this conversation. There are a lot of Emily Oster fans in our community. There are a lot of Emily Oster critics. We’re gonna talk about all of it. CorinneI feel like we should say the reason that people have been asking us to do this episode is because she has recently joined forces with conservative journalist Bari Weiss and they are doing a podcast together. And there was an episode about childhood obesity? Feeding kids? Which a bunch of people have written to you, with questions about. VirginiaThe new podcast is called Raising Parents with Emily Oster. It is produced in partnership with The Free Press, which is Bari Weiss’s publishing empire.Do you want to talk to us a little bit about what The Free Press is, and that whole piece of things before we talk about this episode?CorinneSure, yes. The Free Press is a website started by Bari Weiss. Bari Weiss is a journalist. She was hired by The New York Times after Trump was elected in 2016, in an effort to platform conservative voices at The New York Times. VirginiaThey were trying to both sides it.CorinneYes. And she notoriously quit with a manifesto-y letter, claiming that she was bullied or not really taken seriously. And then I think after that, she started this website, The Free Press. She’s someone who started out as somewhat moderate, and has become more of a conservative person. She’s very “anti woke,” I guess is what I would say. She’s very pro-free speech and anti-identity politics, that kind of thing.VirginiaYeah. I think Emily’s involvement with The Free Press is surprising and not surprising. I think what’s interesting about Emily Oster, kind of all the way along, is that she’s an incredibly smart person. I think her work really connects with a certain kind of smart, data conscious parent or person—especially moms. And I think she would say her personal values or political beliefs should not be in the mix at all, that what she’s doing is not political. And yet, of course, it is political. Health is political. If you’re going to talk about COVID, if you’re going to talk about breastfeeding, if you’re going to talk about—as we’re going to talk about—kids’ weight, it’s going to get political very quickly. It’s been interesting to watch this evolution. I think this sort of smart, data driven mom—which I certainly identify as. A lot of those types of moms who would identify as feminist were like, “yes, let me drink during pregnancy.” “Yes, tell me I don’t have to breastfeed.” That felt really resonant to us. And then there was this move in this other direction that’s been subtle, and sort of confusing at times. But I think aligning yourself with The Free Press is not subtle or confusing. So yes, we’ve got the new podcast, “Raising Parents with Emily Oster.” And episode three of the new season is called, Are We Feeding Kids The Wrong Foods? And this is the episode that a ton of you have been in my DMs and my email being like, what is happening here? So Corinne, do you want to read this quote from the top of the episode? This is from Emily, and it lays out the premise that she took into this projectCorinneYes.While BMI is just a number and doesn’t magically determine health, it is the case that BMI in this higher range is associated with a substantially elevated risk of many metabolic or other chronic illnesses. The United States ranks 12th worldwide on obesity prevalence. The question is, why? And why haven’t we been able to reduce childhood obesity rates?VirginiaSo what’s your thought about just that quick summary?CorinneIt seems like she’s both saying that BMI is a bad marker of health, and using it to determine that there is a problem.VirginiaShe’s saying the question is, “why do we have high rates of obesity in the United States?” She’s not saying, why should we care? Is that even the question? Is that even the problem? CorinneShe’s saying BMI is just a number. And also, let’s use that number to say that we have a problem. VirginiaThere’s some both/and-ing here that’s uncomfortable to me. And, a refusal to question the basic premise. If we have elevated risks and metabolic and other chronic illnesses, why are we not talking about those illnesses? Why are we focusing the conversation squarely on BMI, which we just acknowledged is not a useful measurement? So that’s the starting point for the whole episode.I’m not going spend a lot of time explaining why BMI is a bad measurement. I’m assuming a lot of us have that working knowledge, but we can link in the transcript to some background if you are new and are like, but wait a second, I thought BMI was great, and what is the problem? I will also link to a really great analysis that Christy Harrison wrote about this episode that we’re going to refer to a few times during this conversation. Because she did dig more into what is really just bad, lazy science that Emily is doing here. So I have a little snippet if you want to read. This is Christy Harrison, MPH, RD now talking about what has kind of gone wrong at face value here:CorinneIn her previous work, Oster has always harped on how correlation, aka Association, is not causation, and how there are many other confounding variables that can explain these sorts of relationships. Yet in this episode, she takes at face value that the link between BMI and the risk of some diseases automatically means higher weight is unhealthy. In fact, there are many confounding variables to challenge and complicate that narrative.VirginiaAnd then Christy links to a whole bunch of other resources that we can include as well. Why Is Emily Oster Suddenly Pro–Diet Culture?So right off the bat, I was just struck by, Wait a second, Emily. My understanding of your work is that you are data driven. You analyze this so carefully, and yet, these basic tenets of good data analysis—correlation, not causation, and understanding the confounding variables—you are suddenly willing to throw out the window in order to do a whole episode about how do we get kids’ BMIs down. And then immediately after setting up the problem, she’s like, “We’ve tried all these things, to fight childhood obesity, and none of them have worked.” And she specifically starts to talk about, Let’s Move, which was Michelle Obama’s big initiative in 2008 where she danced with Big Bird and overhauled school lunches and was really focused on, we are going to get the childhood obesity rate down by 5 percent. And instead, that did not happen. Child obesity rates went up. So, you know, by its own metrics, Let’s Move was a pretty big failure. Then Emily also talks about Cookie Monster, who was part of the whole Michelle Obama stuff. There’s a famous Cookie Monster bit where he’s debating whether to eat cookies or broccoli. Then she says, “Cookies are very tempting. At the core of concerns about children’s weight is the fact that kids are eating an inordinate amount of unhealthy food.”CorinneYikes. VirginiaI’m just already frustrated because we’re leapfrogging wildly. To be fair, the title of the episode is, “Are we feeding kids the wrong foods?” She wanted to do an episode about food. But then why do we need to frame it in weight?CorinneSo her rise to popularity was for questioning these correlations we have between babies’ health and breastfeeding, or pregnancy and alcohol, but now that it’s about weight…she’s just buying into it. VirginiaIt’s a really strange pivot. The next chunk of the episode is where Emily starts getting upset about food advertising and talking about how much advertising kids get, which, like, I don’t disagree. Food advertising to children is shady. She quotes a mom from Ohio who talks about her kids getting influenced by Mr. Beast to want to drink some sugary energy drink. But then she also starts to blame parents, and in particular, she talks about how the average parent now only cooks four meals per week, as if this is like a major fail.CorinneYikes. I mean, who has time? I might only cook four meals a week.VirginiaI mean, that’s actually a lot of meals. Like, that’s most weeknights. You figure Friday and Saturday you might do something more fun and you probably need a break some other night. Why I Hate Cooking Right NowCorinneEspecially if you’re working 40 hours a week or more than that. VirginiaOr work a job that has you out of the house at dinner time.There are a million reasons why the average parent only cooks four meals a week. What I’m also noticing is this subtle, parent-blaming thread starting to come through. Which, again, feels so at odds with her earlier work, which was so grounded in the data. You can make your own choices about whether to drink. You can make your own choices about breastfeeding. Let’s give people the information and let them make their own choices. This is not that.CorinneIt also seems like even if you were kind of following her logic up until this point, you could reach a different conclusion. Even if you’re saying, okay, yes, certain chronic diseases are on the rise, maybe part of the problem is the food system. Then leaping to blame parents for not cooking enough is just… tough. VirginiaWell, and it’s a very conservative approach, right? To use that angle, as opposed to looking at what are the larger systemic reasons. If we really need all American parents to be cooking dinner, what support do American parents need to be cooking dinner? You need to let people go home from their jobs at four o’clock. There needs to be an entire culture or shift that we have not made, and have made no steps towards. CorinneYeah, I’m thinking the problem might be capitalism, white supremacy culture, perfectionism. Lack of community care and involvement in raising children. VirginiaYes, yes, yes. Who’s watching your kids while you’re cooking dinner? So many reasons why. Like, relying on American parents—and let’s be honest, we’re saying American mothers to cook dinner, to fight the childhood obesity epidemic? This cannot be the answer, guys. This is some Michael Pollan retrograde bullshit that I can’t believe I’m still having to talk about. CorinneAnd that’s not even the end.VirginiaOh we are nowhere near the end. So the episode then pivots into a weird clip which is not credited, and I could not tell who it was, but it was some body positive influencer talking about the evils of diet culture. It’s a little sound bite she throws in and then Emily responds to the sound bite. So, Corinne, can you read this next block?CorinneThere is today less stigma about weight, which is good. It’s really good. When I was growing up, I remember how cruel people were to overweight kids, and I know from being a mom that that kind of bullying still sometimes happens. What I think has changed is that such behavior is now considered wrong and despicable, and there is a growing stigma against people who bully in that way, rather than towards the overweight person. But the other thing that’s happened, perhaps inadvertently, is that people, including health experts, have stopped speaking out loud about the real health risks of obesity.VirginiaCorinne, how do you feel about that the weight stigma is gone now?CorinneI mean. Said like a true thin person. Like, how the heck would she know?VirginiaWell, she just knows. As a mother, she knows? CorinneI really haven’t heard about anyone being stigmatized for bullying fat people. VirginiaNo, that is new to me.CorinneIs there any evidence to back this up? Or is this just pure Emily Oster speculation?VirginiaJust her musings, I think. I do think that, much like you were saying about the whole Bari Weiss, anti-woke culture, there is a certain group that complains, like, “you can’t even make fat jokes anymore.” In kind of the same vein as, “men can’t even harass their secretaries anymore!” I think it is hard that now we have standards for not being an asshole to people. But I actually don’t think that standard is that rigorous around weight. In a lot of social settings, fat jokes are still pretty accepted. I don’t think that we have made this much progress!CorinneThis kind of reminds me of the whole #MeToo thing and how people were like, “But Louis CK’s career is ruined!”  VirginiaHow will these white frat boys get to a good law firm after Stanford?CorinneObviously this is speculation on my part, but is she saying this because…you wrote a book? VirginiaI fixed it. Did you not know that? Did you not know that my book fixed it? CorinneIs this your fault actually??VirginiaYou’re welcome.CorinneYou wrote a book about fat stigma, and it stopped existing, and so this is your fault.VirginiaI erased it, so now you can go back to being mean about fatness, because we have to make everyone thin. That was actually the master plan all along. I mean, this was a real heartbreak moment for me, because again, Emily has been personally lovely about my work and supportive of it in many ways in the past.But I think that a lot of folks who work on “obesity prevention” have started to really grasp that it is important that they name the existence of weight stigma or anti-fatness. Anytime I interview someone who does mainstream obesity research now, they are fully willing to acknowledge that that is a terrible thing. Whereas five years ago, 10 years ago, when I was reporting on these issues, they were not willing to acknowledge stigma was real. They were framing weight as a personal responsibility problem. And now the party line is absolutely, weight is not a matter of personal responsibility. It’s biology—and that’s why we made these drugs. So we can fix it for you. That’s where they’ve gone. But that is not the same as saying that there is no stigma.Their rhetoric against weight stigma is being used to sell more weight loss, which perpetuates the stigma. CorinneYeah. I mean, it’s obvious to me that weight stigma still exists.VirginiaBecause you fly on airplanes and buy clothes and move through the world.CorinneBecause I live in the world. Is there a way to measure weight stigma? VirginiaWell, actually, yes. We can link to the interview I did with Jeff Hunger. Jeff Hunger is a weight stigma researcher who I think would be quite surprised to hear that weight stigma no longer exists. Can We Conquer Anti-Fat Bias?CorinneYeah, I recall him saying in that episode that there was a lot of proof that becoming aware of stigma and doing implicit bias training didn’t actually get rid of stigma.VirginiaYes. They don’t really know yet what works to reduce the stigma from a data perspective, because the traditional things have not been working. Because the stigma has not been going down. Then there is a study that came out of Harvard in 2019 which found that while some forms of bias are decreasing—like we are making some progress towards less homophobia, less anti-Black racism, there’s some shift towards neutrality there, not to say those biases aren’t still huge problems because they absolutely are. [Post-recording note: Again, this was recorded before the election!] But we were seeing tiny drops. We are not seeing that drop when it comes to anti-fat bias, and that was the bias in the study that was actually increasing the most. CorinneOh.VirginiaOkay, so it’s going to get even worse. Well, I don’t know if worse is the right word? But it’s definitely going to get really weird and super, super retrograde. Something I kept thinking throughout this whole episode was: Did you make this podcast in 2009 because so much of the conversation just feels like, how are we still having this conversation? The thing that happens next is Emily brings on Sam Kass, who is the Obama’s former private chef. He made them dinner every night when they were in the White House. And he also partnered with Michelle Obama on Let’s Move. He was kind of like her chef consultant. So I want to be clear that Sam Kass is not a nutritionist. He is not a public health researcher. He is not a doctor. He is a private chef who has a lot of opinions about food. He’s also now on the board of Plezi Nutrition, which is Michelle Obama’s fruit juice brand, which I wrote about last year.Michelle Obama Is Not Coming To Save UsI don’t consider him a thought leader on the question of our children’s health, because he has no medical or scientific qualifications to be a thought leader on children’s health. But Emily brings him on the podcast and he starts to explain to Emily that his plan was to get into the White House, and the big thing that he and Michelle originally wanted to do was to get rid of the crop subsidies for corn and sugar that have made the American diet so unhealthy. Which, I don’t know how much you followed that story, especially back in the mid 2000s.CorinneI remember that being a big Michael Pollan thing. VirginiaTotally, totally. And I think that there’s a lot of logic towards changing the way the crop subsidy situation works, and not giving industry so much incentive to grow so much corn.However, the Obamas were not able to achieve that in Washington. They made zero progress on crop subsidies. And so, as Sam Kass explains to Emily, that actually wasn’t ever the solution. That wasn’t the right thing that they should have done in the first place. So, why don’t you read the Sam Kass quote here?CorinneI came running into the White House ready to go, like we’re empowered now we can fix this. It’s not the subsidies that are producing our food environment, it’s our culture. And it’s our culture that has been influenced and shaped by the industry who has pumped billions, probably trillions of dollars, over the last 40 to 50 years to shape our attitudes, norms and behaviors, but fundamentally, our culture is supporting what we choose. I think we have a culture that has separated the connection between what we put in our bodies and the impact it has on our health.VirginiaSo again, this is another way of saying, “it’s our fault.”But what is culture? That is a vague entity.CorinneIt kind of feels like they were like, “Actually, you know what? It’s too hard to fight back against the billions of dollars that the industry is using to lobby our government, and instead we’re going to blame individual personal behavior.”VirginiaWhich, again, is a weird conservative pivot. And there are lots of food activists and child health activists who have been critical of Let’s Move because of this, because they didn’t get this done. And clearly he has decided that it didn’t matter that they didn’t get it done, because if American moms would just fucking cook dinner, then we wouldn’t have this problem. Okay, so that was a lot. But then Emily brings on Pamela Druckerman. So Corinne, do you know who Pamela Druckerman is?CorinneI do not.VirginiaOkay. Pamela Druckerman, is best known for writing a book called Bringing Up Bebe. She is a journalist who lives in France and writes about French culture. Bringing Up Bebe —which came out in 2011 so it’s almost 15 years old— is a book all about how the way French children are brought up leads them to be gourmet eaters and the way American kids are brought up leads them to be terrible eaters.My main memory of her—the book came out before I was a parent, but I remember her appearing on The Today Show wearing a beret. And again, she’s American. But she was living in France and deciding to write about how amazing French children are and how amazing the whole French parenting system is. So it is a book about how to parent like a French person, and how to feed your child like a French person.CorinneYou know what else I hear is really amazing about France?VirginiaWhat’s that?CorinneThe healthcare and postpartum care and stuff. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.VirginiaThe government-funded free preschool is probably also a pretty amazing thing. But Pamela Druckerman says no, specifically it’s the way French kids eat. Because, according to her, French kids from the age of like three are capable of sitting through a multi course dinner. They are capable of having dinner later at night. This is somehow super important, I guess, because it makes you cooler if you don’t eat dinner at 5pm? They can behave in restaurants. They don’t need to bring iPads into restaurants. They don’t eat Goldfish. They don’t need sippy cups, they are eating like tiny gourmet adults at all times.CorinneThis also reminds me of the French Women Don’t Get Fat thing. VirginiaCorrect, correct. CorinneIt’s also just like, what? So the solution is just we all moved to France? Or…?VirginiaYes, yes, that is one solution on the table.CorinneOr we get government-funded childcare? VirginiaThat would probably do so much more. That never gets suggested in this episode. Emily never suggests that the government should fund child care. But she does talk to Pamela for a long time about how the French people get their kids to like food.Pamela explains that you can make kids like vegetables, if you just tell them they are delicious and serve them sitting down at a table.So that’s some really useful advice for all of us. CorinneYeah, it notoriously works great to just tell someone they like something they don’t.Virginia“Carrots are delicious!” I can just imagine my children staring at me in absolute disgust. So Emily responds to Pamela talking about the carrot thing by saying, “I can hear all the American parents now, but what about my picky eater? In their defense, there’s pretty clear data that between the ages of two and six, children get pickier, but France has a fix for that!”And then Pamela explains what the fix is. This is a really long quote, but do you want to read this?CorinnePartly, what happens in France is that kids don’t eat between meals. So when they come to the table, they’re hungry. You kind of learn from an early age to tolerate not starvation level hungriness, but like having a slight pit in your stomach where you want to eat, and that pit has not been satisfied. So you get to the table and you’re more apt to eat what’s put in front of you because you’re hungry for it. You haven’t been snacking. You know, your mom didn’t give you a banana 20 minutes ago, because you were whining, she said, We’re going to eat in 20 minutes. Go play and come back, and then the first thing that’s served in this moment in the meal is a vegetable. It’s not rocket science, any of this.VirginiaI want Pamela to come to my house and talk to my children 20 minutes before dinner. I just am so annoyed about this! I don’t know. Tell me what you’re thinking.CorinneIt just sounds like if your kids are hungry enough, they’ll eat vegetables.VirginiaYes, and that they should be accustomed to walking around with a pit in their stomach all the time because you don’t let them have snacks.CorinneHungry children are annoying. VirginiaThey are!  CorinneI mean, even just speaking for myself, I am not the nicest, funnest, smartest person when I’m hungry.VirginiaNope, nope. I find this really insidious, this idea that we should teach kids to tolerate hunger is a really creepy notion to me. because I think any girl who came of age in the 90s has a lot of experience with learning to, quote, tolerate hunger. And it didn’t work out great for us. This is not the goal. This is a dieting behavior. CorinneIsn’t the whole thing that when you feel really hungry, that often backfires and ends up with like bingeing or overeating?VirginiaIt just seems like you’re teaching kids to live with this experience of deprivation, which some kids bodies might do totally fine with, right? People get hungry at different rates. There are people who can eat only three times a day, and that works really well for them, and that’s awesome. But that doesn’t mean that’s going to work really well for everybody. And little kids in particular have small stomachs that empty fast. They don’t want to go six hours without eating. That is going to be meltdown city.CorinneIt’s also like, when does this start? Because I don’t think anyone’s telling breastfeeding mothers, “Wait until your baby is starving and has a pit in their stomach to feed them.” You know?VirginiaI think as soon as they’re off, breast milk is when it starts. Because she talks about being at the playground at 10am with the toddlers, and nobody’s carrying around little bags of Cheerios because the kids don’t expect to have snacks at the playground. Because they know they’re going to wait till they go home and eat lunch. I drive around in my Subaru at all times with a box in the back of my car filled with snacks. And we don’t always need them. It’s fine. But I don’t want to get caught somewhere with a hungry, grumpy child. If I’m sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office and it’s taking 40 minutes when I thought it was going to take 15, I’m really glad to have that bag of Goldfish. She’s equating snacking with sloth and excess when it’s just like parenting your child, responding to their needs, recognizing that they are getting hungry, and maybe you are too, and everyone will feel better with a snack.CorinneYeah, it feels like a confusing solution.VirginiaAnd again, just not very replicable. She describes the way the French schools serve lunch and how it’s this very elaborate presentation, and they get three year olds to sit around a table and use silverware. Nobody is trying that in the United States. Even if there are lessons we can learn from that, nobody is attempting to replicate that here. So any individual parent trying to replicate that at home is just making their lives really complicated.CorinneThis is where we get into the systemic versus personal stuff again, too. Maybe it works in France because they have a totally different system. Maybe parents have more energy to tolerate kids screaming when they’re hungry because they’re not working 60 hours a week. Maybe kids are less hungry when they get home from school because they have a nice five course meal at school. You can’t take one part of the system and and bring it over here and just blame parents for not doing enough. VirginiaExactly.So then Emily decides she needs to find an American mother who is doing this so we can all learn from her. She brings in a woman named Ellie, who I think we would affectionately call an almond mom. Ellie never lets her kids buy the school lunch. She cooks from scratch at home. They are a vegetarian household. She doesn’t shop the middle of the grocery store. She only shops the perimeter, and she doesn’t let her kids have fast food or really, any processed food. Do you want to read this quote? CorinneWait, I need more information. Is Ellie, like a friend of Emily’s? Who the f is Ellie?VirginiaNo. She’s just a mom. Sprinkled throughout this episode, she just brings in regular moms to share their stories of feeding their kids. Her producers probably cast around to find people.CorinneUm, does she also share Ellie’s income?VirginiaShe does not.  CorinneOkay. Anyways, Ellie says about her children. They say, can we have Cheetos and mac and cheese? And we’re like, there’s nothing in that that nourishes you. Every single element of that meal is chemicals. So we might look at the box or something and talk about the difference between the way chemicals make things taste good and just the taste of food.VirginiaSo to be clear, this quote is presented with zero context or follow up, even though it contains wildly inaccurate statements. First of all, all food is chemicals, water is a chemical, air is a chemical. Christy Harrison broke this down really clearly about why Emily should have called out the chemical thing as just being blatantly wrong. You cannot say that mac and cheese contains more chemicals than homemade pasta. They are all foods. So Emily is bringing in this woman’s story and holding her up as an example, even though the woman’s position is “no processed foods, no matter what.” But Emily has already written about the fact that the processed foods debate is overblown and the health risks have not been proven by the data.CorinneYeah, it’s also like, what is the proof that this parent is doing something better? That her kids aren’t fat?VirginiaYeah, that’s a great point. We never hear actually any details about her kids. But I’m going to go out on a limb and guess they aren’t fat just because I don’t think Emily would have brought in the mom of a fat kid and held her up as an example.CorinneBut also, just because the kids aren’t fat now doesn’t mean that they won’t be fat someday.VirginiaIt also doesn’t mean they’re not freaking losing their minds and eating all the Cheetos when they go to their friend’s house.CorinneYeah, they go to your house and eat nine Oreos. VirginiaYou don’t let them buy school lunch and you control the food in your house, but your kids are growing up and going out into the world where all of this food is—and you have been telling them that it’s poison and they shouldn’t want it, and yet they know it tastes good.And Emily really celebrates that this mom says, “we have a dialogue about it. And we always explain why something is bad and they can’t have it.” And that is held up as if, that’s good communication between the parent and child. But it reminds me a lot more of the protein mom weighing her food and explaining to her daughter why she’s weighing her food. Just because you’re giving your child a lot of information about your food decisions does not mean you are teaching them to have a healthy relationship with food. Protein Moms and the "Eating Enough" MythThe other reason I know Ellie’s kids are not fat is then because Emily does want to hear from the mom of a kid in a bigger body. So she brings on Karen, and Karen has a six year old in a bigger body who she’s really worried about in terms of feeding her child. And Karen’s story in this episode really breaks my heart, because she’s the only person in this whole episode who has directly experienced any anti-fat bias. She talks about having experienced herself growing up, and then how it’s kind of doubled since she had a child who’s in a bigger body. She’s constantly made to feel like she’s doing something wrong, that it’s a moral failing that her daughter is in a bigger body. She also talks a lot about her guilt that she had to formula feed her daughter as a baby, and how she was constantly wondering if she was overfeeding her or if formula is the reason why she’s bigger.She says the constant thought in the back of her mind was, “Are you giving your baby too much food?”CorinneOh, that’s so sad.VirginiaIt’s so sad. I’ve heard that story a lot, that that is the message, especially parents of bigger babies get around formula. And it’s just, I mean, to your point earlier, no one would say to a breastfeeding mom, are you feeding them too much? Like it’s such hypocrisy.This clip, I think, was Emily’s attempt to throw a bone towards the importance of combating anti-fatness, because Karen does sound like she’s really trying to push back against that pressure. She wants to raise her daughter to feel good about her body. She tells a story of a kid at a birthday party called her daughter fat, and her daughter was just like, we don’t talk about people’s bodies. And good for that kid, for handling that so well. So she sounds conflicted, but like she’s trying to not raise her daughter to feel ashamed about all of this. But then Emily just kind of drops that story and gives no support for that perspective. And she makes this really odd speech. So another long one for you to read, Corinne.CorinneKaren’s experience with her daughter brings up the bigger question, how much of obesity and overweight is in our control and how much is just biological? Shaming people for being overweight is unequivocally wrong, but sometimes, especially in recent years, the goal of trying not to offend people has led to a shift in the conversation and a lot of confusion about the very real effects of obesity on health.You might hear it’s possible to be healthy at Every Size. While yes, it’s absolutely possible to be healthy at a range of weights and sizes. And no, not everyone needs to be a size two to be healthy. And in fact, for some people, a size two would mean they are not healthy. But it’s also true that, on average, many diseases and health complications and health outcomes are more likely for people who are obese.VirginiaSo again, it’s like, “Don’t shame people. Shaming people is so bad. Also, people are so unhealthy if they’re fat.”CorinneShe’s saying people have become scared to say that the problem is being fat or something. VirginiaYes, yes. They’re being silenced. And again, I think every fat person who’s been to the doctor really feels like that message isn’t getting out to us.CorinneRight? And again, the correlation versus causation thing, she’s implying that all of these diseases, health complications, and health outcomes are the cause of obesity, when we really don’t know that.VirginiaJust to break down correlation causation further: When we say these diseases are more likely for people with high BMI, we don’t know that the high BMI is what causes the increased risk for thes diseases. We know that these two things happen together in some cases, but we don’t understand the relationship. So it could be that the diseases cause the weight increase. It could be that the weight increase sometimes causes the diseases. It could be that they are two unrelated things, but they have a shared root cause.And in every one of those scenarios, the concern should be the disease, not the body size. What can you do for the disease? And if that changes body size, fine. But if it doesn’t change body size, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed if you can make improvements on the disease.I feel like I have been making a version of that speech for 10 years now, and yet this episode is still out there, so that’s fine. I’m tired. CorinneIt just sucks because it felt like Emily Oster was someone who could wrap her head around that.VirginiaI did think that.But part of why I think she is not wrapping her head around that anymore—at least in this episode,—is because she then brings in another expert, this guy, Robert Davis, PhD, who is the author of The Healthy Skeptic. He is a health journalist with a public health PhD, but again, he’s not a doctor or a researcher. He writes mainstream, commercial books. But if you didn’t understand his background, you would interpret him in this episode as being the voice of medicine and science. He is brought in as a very credentialed expert who we are going to take seriously as having the final word on this topic. And this is what Robert Davis has to say about Health at Every Size:CorinneThe pendulum has swung too far when it comes to the idea of body positivity and HAES. The effort to fight those ideas from diet culture is a good thing. But if we then say, well, let’s just forget about promoting weight loss or promoting a healthy weight and let’s just say people should be able to sort of eat what they feel like and eat dessert at dinner and go with intuitive eating and what they feel like eating. I think that’s a big mistake, because, again, we know that these foods that we’re talking about are designed to trick our brains and make us want more of them.VirginiaSo, it’s great to fight back against diet culture, but don’t go so far as to eat dessert at dinner. That’s a bridge too far for Robert Davis.CorinneFighting diet culture is good, but we shouldn’t go far as to say that weight loss isn’t good.VirginiaIt’s unclear what he wants to fight from diet culture, because he really wants to keep quite a lot of diet culture. And I should also say Robert Davis just published an article on The Free Press, with the headline, “Diets are Bad. Ignoring Childhood Obesity is Even Worse.” The subhead is “Activists tell parents not to fat shame an overweight child, or make them go on a diet, but parents who refuse to tackle the issue are putting their kids’ lives at risk.”And by activists, he means me, because he calls me out in the article as a “prominent ‘fat activist,’” who he thinks is getting everything wrong about this. So obviously, Robert and I are not going to, like, go to dinner and hang. CorinneEven if we agreed that child obesity was a problem, there’s still not a solution. Dieting or putting your kid on a diet isn’t going to solve it. So it’s just very confusing to be like, “parents aren’t fighting back against this thing.”What does Robert want us to do? VirginiaI’m glad you asked. Let’s go to his article, because he does have a lot of a lot of specific ideas that I will try to read with a straight face. So he says: “Avoid restrictive diets. They don’t work and they can make the problem even worse. Instead, children should be encouraged to eat mainly whole foods, including colorful fruits, veggies, beets, beans, nuts, seeds, fish, lean poultry and whole grains.”Children, famously fans of seeds.CorinneAnd fish. VirginiaThat’s an easy sell. Virginia“Involving kids in grocery shopping and cooking their own food gives them a sense of agency and will get them excited about eating well and using cookie cutters to slice fruits and vegetables into fun shapes like hearts and stars, where serving veggies with dips can make these foods more enticing.”CorinneThis is really reminding me of Kids Eat In Color.The Ballerina Farm of Kid Food InstagramVirginiaYes, yes, it is. CorinneAnd once again, I feel like the problem is capitalism. Like, sure, I will cut celery into stars if I don’t have to have a job.VirginiaI cannot listen to a white man tell women to cut their kids fucking vegetables into hearts and stars. I cannot do it.I am incandescent with rage about this. I am sorry.  Mothers have enough to do. We do not need your guilt trip. I do not need to hear that I need to stop using Instacart and take my kids to the grocery store, an experience that will make all of us cranky and tired.CorinneDo we think that Robert J. Davis has children? VirginiaHe probably does? But does he have a wife who does all of this? Also probably yes.This advice is so simplistic. It is so ignorant of the context of family’s lives.If you have a kid who is picky, I mean, genuinely picky and rigid around food choices.If you have a neurodivergent kid who’s reliant on a lot of processed foods as the safe foods.If you are on a tight budget.There are one thousand reasons that you cannot eat like this.He does go on to say, “How about we also get rid of screen time?” So that’s another helpful suggestion. “Have a regular game day on weekends where the entire family enjoys a fun physical activity out of the house, like hiking or bike riding.”CorinneMy God. I just really feel like these people don’t live in the real world.VirginiaLike, my kid’s dad takes them hiking every weekend. They may still end up in bigger bodies. If it’s something you all enjoy, that’s wonderful. This may not move the needle on body size, because body size is not determined solely by lifestyle habits. And if you’re telling people that they have to do all of these things to control body size, and it doesn’t work, that’s going to backfire and cause bigger problems.So I’m just very tired. I’m very tired of all of this. CorinneI am determined to find out if this guy has kids, and just for the record, he’s not wearing a wedding ring in his videos. I just feel like there’s no way this guy is speaking from personal experience, you know? Like he’s just spouting bullshit that he read somewhere. VirginiaHe talks about having been in a bigger body himself and his mom putting him on diets as a child. And I have all the empathy in the world for that. But please do not think you are helping anybody by telling us to cut fruit into a fucking heart shape. I will take my cookie cutters and melt them down. My child would not eat a kiwi if it was shaped like a star if I paid her. It’s not gonna happen.  So, I think it’s pretty clear where we land on all of this, but Emily does have one final speech in the episode which sums up where she is landing on this. And we can read that and then have feelings. CorinneWhat will it take to get more vegetables and fruits into the hands of kids and families? That, in my view, is the core question. But the cultural problem is just as pernicious. As we learned from Pamela in France, Carrots are just delicious, objectively. In America, that’s not a fact. I’d say here, Doritos are objectively delicious, and therein lies the problem.What would it take to have more parents like Ellie who simply refuses to give her kids fast food, who prioritizes fruits and vegetables for them because she knows and has told her children that that’s what’s good for bodies. She’s setting them up for a much better chance at good health.VirginiaShe’s also setting them up for a much higher risk of an eating disorder. I mean, the fact that we’re ending the episode by saying Ellie—who is the most restrictive parent in the episode—is doing it right, really says a lot to me about where Emily is landing on these issues now. And, just how useful this whole conversation could be to any parent, if the takeaway is you need to be rigorously cooking from scratch, getting your kids to like fruits and vegetables at any cost.None of this is new advice. None of this has worked before. This is the Let’s Move playbook, which Emily herself acknowledges did not do anything to move the needle on childhood obesity. CorinneYeah, and this whole thing about it being like a cultural problem is so mind boggling to me, because when I hear “but it’s a cultural problem,” I’m like, yes, it’s a systemic problem. How is Ellie telling her kids that carrots are delicious solving a cultural problem? That’s just one person? VirginiaYou’re defining culture as social systems and structures, and she’s defining culture as personal preferences. And that is not accurate. This whole pivot into personal responsibility, again, I feel like, is really at odds with her earlier work. And it’s just very aligned with The Free Press and with being in a more conservative media outlet, which is what’s happening here. And I’m sorry to see it.Again, I do think Emily is fundamentally a smart person. I’ve had a lot of respect for her work over the years, and it’s hard to see this transition. The last thing I’ll say is on a personal note: Emily, if you listen to this episode, I hope you’re still letting your kids eat their Halloween candy. Because one thing I did achieve a few years ago was persuading her not to count out her kids Halloween candy anymore. And I just hope you haven’t changed on that one, because I really want your kids to enjoy their candy. All right, well, I’m excited to hear what everyone thinks about all of this. I’m sure there will be many diverse opinions. We welcome you in the comment section.This section contains affiliate links. Shopping our links is a great way to support Burnt Toast!ButterCorinneFor my Butter, I want to shout out this new collaboration between Universal Standard and Jordan Underwood. They did send me a pair of pants and a tank top for free, So little caveat there. And I will say that I tried them on and then ordered some more stuff, so…VirginiaThey sent it for free and and were effective in getting you to buy more of it! CorinneYeah, it definitely worked. It’s a little capsule collection of some clothes that I think Jordan had something to do with designing, and they’re more androgynous pieces. There’s a pair of cargo pants and a cropped tank and a flannel and some sweats. But they’re really cool, and I think people should check them out.VirginiaI am obsessed with the crop tank. I think I need it.CorinneYeah, it’s really nice because it’s both high neck, which I feel like can be kind of hard to find in a tank, and it hits right at your pants waistline. VirginiaIt’s like, the perfect amount of crop. It’s not belly-baring, which would be fine, but we’re getting into colder weather here. It’s just the right fit. CorinneAlso seems like it would be really great to wear under stuff, because sometimes you don’t want a long tank under a shorter shirt.VirginiaI’m very excited to check out the collaboration. CorinneWhat’s your Butter?VirginiaMy Butter is something I have talked about many times, but it is not in the official library of Butter, which seems important to remedy. So my Butter is Meredith Dairy Marinated Sheep and Goat Cheese, which is the world’s best cheese. I will die on this mountain forever. I thanked this cheese in the acknowledgements of my book, CorinneOh my gosh. VirginiaI thanked other people, too, Corinne. I thanked you! But you know, I did shout out the cheese. And when I updated the paperback edition, I continued to shout out the cheese. Stand by that forever.It is a really good creamy goat slash sheep cheese, and it comes in this really delicious oil. Again, I’ve talked about it so many times. I feel like people are gonna be like, yeah, yeah, we know the cheese. But I just need it to be officially in the records as the best cheese. CorinneI have never tried it, so I am going to search this out. VirginiaI know Costco sells it. It’s not a super hard to find thing anymore. A lot of grocery stores are carrying it. I know at Costco you can even get a bigger jar. I get it from a local grocery store, but I’ve definitely seen it more and more places. Because whenever I talk about it, people around the country tell me how much they love this cheese. So I know people in Wisconsin are having it, people in Oregon are having it.It is a great cheese, and you can eat it straight. You can put it on toast with some jam of some sort. It’s very delicious. I also like to as when the jar is almost empty, save the like final bit of cheese in the oil and use that in pasta or salad dressing, and it’s life changing and delicious. CorinneThat sounds really good. VirginiaYep, I’m just glad to have it officially in the record of butter. That was something I needed to remedy, so thank you.

Today Virginia is chatting with Anna Maltby. Anna is a health journalist, editor, content strategist, personal trainer, and author of the newsletter How to Move. Anna also created Pilates For Abortion Funds, a monthly online class that has raised about $30,000 for abortion funds since July 2022. She has been an ACE-certified personal trainer since 2015, and a certified mat pilates instructor since 2021. She’s also a certified prenatal and postpartum exercise specialist. Anna lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two kids, and two extremely cute cats.Anna was previously a guest on one of Burnt Toast’s most popular ever episodes, The Myth of Visible Abs. What’s so great about Anna—and what makes her different from a lot of fitness writers and personal trainers out there—is that she’s so smart about bodies, she’s truly anti-diet and size neutral as a fitness professional…and, she’s been in the belly of the beast. Anna worked in women’s magazines with me long enough to know all the diet culture tricks. So she’s one of my favorite people to talk fitness with, because she can dissect what is marketing, what is diet culture, and what is actually maybe useful for your body.Two content warnings for today:1. We are going to talk about specific forms of exercise. This will always be through a weight neutral lens, but if you’re recovering from an eating disorder or just otherwise in a place where exercise is not serving you, please take care.2. CW for Butter, because we ended up talking quite a lot about toilets! And while I feel it’s all incredibly practical information and you’re going to thank me for my great Butter recommendation this week, I do realize that toilet conversation is not for everyone. It’s usually not for me! So I get it! You’ve been warned.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. 

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark! We are Corinne Fay and Virginia Sole-Smith, and this month we’re discussing… Things Thin People Say. 👀 The list includes: ⭐️ The most bananas comment about swimsuit shopping⭐️ That thing where they think their boyfriend’s clothes will fit you ⭐️ How Caroline Chambers’ thin privilege shows up⭐️ Our thoughts on Haley Nahman’s sugar addict essay. ⭐️ And more! To hear the whole thing, read the full transcript, and join us in the comments, you’ll need to join Extra Butter, our premium subscription tier.Extra Butter costs just $99 per year. (Regular paid subscribers, the remaining value of your subscription will be deducted from that total!)Extra Butter subscribers also get access to posts like:Is weight loss surgery the new Ozempic? Does Dr. Becky have a privilege problem? Is Kids Eat In Color anti-diet?And did Virginia really get divorced over butter?And Extra Butters also get DM access and other perks. Plus Extra Butter ensures that the Burnt Toast community can always stay an ad- and sponsor-free space—which is crucial for body liberation journalism. Join us here!(Questions? Glitches? Email me all the details, and cc support@substack.com.)PS. If Extra Butter isn’t the right tier for you, remember that you still get access behind almost every other paywall with a regular paid subscription.Episode 204 TranscriptCorinneSo, today we’re going to talk about the fatphobic things that people say without realizing it. And I think any fat person you talk to probably has an example of this.VirginiaOr a dozen examples of this.CorinneOr a dozen examples of this.We asked Burnt Toast readers to share stories. And we’re going to talk about a couple of examples that we stumbled across recently…VirginiaOn the Internet.CorinneIn the course of our jobs.VirginiaWe are going to talk about Caroline Chambers. We are going to talk about Haley Nahman. We’re going to get into some stuff that’s been happening with the thin folks.Obviously, since I just mentioned some high profile people, you might think this is going to be a really juicy, gossipy episode. That’s not really the goal here.I think of this as more an opportunity to have some moments of catharsis. As fat folks, we so often have to endure these comments, which can be unintentional but still really harmful. And that’s something we all live with. So it’s just good sometimes to list them and be like… Yep. That happened.And hopefully, this is instructive for thin listeners. If you’re listening to this podcast, I assume it’s because you are interested in divesting from diet culture. You are interested in unlearning anti-fatness. And that is not always easy or comfortable work. Sometimes we have to be willing to look at ourselves. You might realize, “wow, I did say a not cool thing, and that was my thin privilege.” And I hope the place you go with that is: I didn’t even realize it was harmful. But now I know, so how can I show up as a better ally?CorinneI also think a good thing to mention about that is that, as fat people, we experience thin people making these type of comments. But as humans, we also make these types of comments about other groups of people. I’m sure I’ve made an offhanded comment that was harmful to someone who’s Black, or to someone with kids. You know?VirginiaYou offend me all the time, as a person with kids.CorinneI am so sorry. I try not to. I love kids.VirginiaYou have literally never said anything offensive about children.CorinneWell, I just can imagine—we don’t always have other people’s sensitivities in mind.VirginiaRight. The whole thing about privilege is it makes you unaware of other experiences. This is why we have to look at it.CorinneSo anyone who does this is not bad or evil. It’s a normal part of life and still worth talking about.VirginiaOK, soI think I first sent you the Caroline Chambers piece we’re going to chat about a few weeks ago. She wrote about what she was wearing during her fourth pregnancy. It’s called Getting Dressed Is Kind of Hard Right Now, and that is very relatable. Getting dressed during pregnancy is very hard, no quibbles with that.CorinneI was going to pretend that I had just organically stumbled across this article about getting dressed while pregnant, Virginia.VirginiaHow would you?CorinneI was going to be like, “I write about clothes… Caroline Chambers, of whom I’m a fan. I own her cookbook.”VirginiaAll true. But I am the one who was like, “Oh, did you see that piece?” Because there were a few comments in it that that made me pause.CorinneThe comment that made me pause—which I then quickly highlighted and restacked—was Caroline saying, “I think loose dresses like this polo number”—with a link to the dress— “are really cute while pregnant, until your stomach extends past your boobs, and then it starts to look like you’re wearing a circus tent. I’ve reached circus tense status.”VirginiaAnd you said, “here to tell you that it is, in fact, cute to wear loose dresses when your stomach extends past your boobs, whether you’re pregnant or not.” Which I support 100 percent.CorinneI stand by that.VirginiaThis is just a perfect example of these kinds of comments. When you are a thin person and you gain weight during pregnancy, it’s a disorienting experience. Your body feels very unfamiliar. I mean, everybody’s body feels unfamiliar during pregnancy, but this aspect is disorienting. Suddenly, your shape is more similar to a shape you have been told is not desirable, and so you have to reckon with that. And I don’t want to say what her intention was, but I read this and thought, “She’s saying this, and she doesn’t know what she’s saying.” Caroline Chambers probably hasn’t considered how many people in the world have stomachs that extend past boobs. That’s a pretty common way to have a body regardless of pregnancy status.CorinneYeah, I think it was one of those kind of slightly self-effacing comments that you don’t realize can be hurtful. You think you’re critiquing yourself, but… there’s actually a lot of other people that fall into that category.VirginiaI think we’re going to see this as a recurring theme. One of the most common ways thin people display their anti-fatness is by saying something critical about themselves, without realizing they’ve just described every fat person’s regular body.CorinneI do also want to say that I posted this on the Substack social media, and Caroline Chambers saw it and responded to it and edited the post and was apologetic.VirginiaProps for that. She wrote, “I’m sorry that this clearly came off in a way I didn’t mean it to. I love your Substack, and I did not mean this to be a global commentary. I’ll do better.”Yeah, we want people to be doing better. Also, read Big Undies, everyone. Corinne’s Substack is great, and I’m glad Caroline knows that.CorinneYeah, there’s definitely a lot on my Substack about wearing loose clothing.VirginiaYour recent loose clothing roundup definitely inspired me to do some shopping for big loose clothing. And it’s entirely possible I will be mistaken for pregnant in those outfits, and that’s fine. I will be very cute.Another high profile one we wanted to chat about is a recent piece by Haley Nahman. The essay is called Making Bad Decisions On Purpose. This one is really interesting because there is anti-fatness in it and there’s a lot that I agree with. And this is another common theme where I think people get it like, 40 percent or 60 percent right, but there’s still that piece they haven’t looked at because they haven’t had to look at it.CorinneThis one I had complicated feelings about.The essay was about Haley’s experience eating sugar. She frames it as an almost compulsive relationship with eating sugar. This one was complicated for me, brought up a lot of feelings. Because I think a lot of it is very relatable! But it’s one of those things where she’s talking about her own experience, her own eating habits, and it’s just hard to not extrapolate out into your own experience.The part that really stuck with me after I read it, and which I had to follow up on, was where she lists out what she’s been eating:On heavy rotation over the last year: homemade chocolate chip cookies the size of saucers; bags of sour gummy bears or chocolate-filled cookies shaped like panda bears; pints of Häagen-Dazs ice cream finished in two to three sittings; salted brown-butter rice crispy treatsShe goes on and on. She’s listing all this stuff as if it’s a lot.VirginiaIt’s like, you should be scandalized that she’s eating.CorinneAnother thing in there is “chopped up green apples dipped in greek yogurt mixed with peanut butter.” But that’s not a sugar snack.And then this one thing is driving me freaking nuts. I was like, “a pint of Haagen Dazs finished in two to three sittings?”VirginiaThat’s how long a pint lasts.CorinneI went to my freezer. I opened my freezer. I pulled out a pint of Haagen Dazs to see how many servings it contains. It’s two and a half! What the heck? How much ice cream does she think you’re supposed to be eating? A tablespoon? I don’t know. I was just like, what the heck? A pint is two cups.VirginiaAnd: Even if you’re finishing a whole pint in one sitting, that’s not necessarily a destructive eating habit. Portions are very personal and different for all of us. She’s just talking about eating ice cream several times a week. The way people do.This section reminded me a lot of that Caity Weaver essay that was in the New York Times a few months ago, which I wrote about.How That Sugar Addiction Piece Became a Journey Into HellI understand that thin people have complicated relationships with food and dieting. understand that they may have internalized diet culture messaging so they think that eating ice cream is bad and that taking three sittings to finish a pint is a problem when it’s not. Like, I get that. And: A fat person could not publish an essay listing out the food they’d eaten without expecting serious blowback.I couldn’t be in the New York Times telling people that my children ate processed snack food crackers without getting relentless anti-fat commentary. I didn’t even say if I ate them, you know?Why the Internet Cares So Much About My Snack CabinetThere is so much criticism and blowback directed at any fat person acknowledging that we eat sugar or any kind of “junk food.” So for a thin person to wax poetic and lean into listing all the details like you’re going to be so scandalized—that alone is so irritating to me. The reason you could even publish this essay is because you clearly fit the trope of skinny woman who can eat whatever she wants and have no consequences. This is a Loralei Gilmore essay.CorinneAnother thing that kind of complicates this one is at the end, she talks about how she would like to eat less sugar. And then she says,But until I feel more capable of adjusting without triggering old (worse) patterns, I’m trying to appreciate what being lax about it has done and is doing for my mind at this time in my life.So, she’s acknowledging the value of this as a coping skill.VirginiaThat’s the part I liked. She’s talking about being in a really challenging season of early parenthood and needing a lot of sugar as a coping strategy. This is something she’s letting herself have because things are hard. And it’s a great coping strategy for that! Nothing wrong with this.Obviously, she’s struggling a little bit because she had to write a whole essay articulating why she’s allowed to do that. But, I mean, I publish those types of essays, too, so I get that. I get that. That’s a great use of a newsletter.I think what this essay really needed, though, was just that added layer of awareness that she can publicly wrestle with her sugar consumption and not experience any criticism for it. People are going to chime in and be supportive and say, “You absolutely deserve that ice cream. You’re working so hard, Mama.” All that kind of stuff.And she’s not acknowledging that the main reason she’s uncomfortable with how much sugar she’s eating is, as she puts it, “my longer term needs,” which we all know is code for “because I might get fat if I keep eating this way.”CorinneThat’s another layer that’s missing here. She is sort of saying she wants to eat less sugar but it’s like, why? It’s just because you have absorbed the cultural message is you should eat no sugar.VirginiaAlright, well, those were the two on the Internet moments we wanted to talk about. Should we now run through some listener submissions?CorinneLet’s do it.VirginiaSome of these are honestly, kind of delightful in their terribleness. I’m excited to read these. We’re going to do it all anonymously. Do you want to read the first one?CorinneYeah.The best one ever came from my mom, because, of course. “I told your sister, you don’t eat like a fat person.”VirginiaThe passive aggression of “I talked to your sister about you, and now I’ll also tell you that we talked about you?” No thanks. No thanks, Mom, you don’t need that.All right, this next one—I’ll read it, but I may laugh a lot during it.My mom once told me I wasn’t as good a driver as my sister, who is thin, because I wasn’t “as athletic.”I’m so confused. How athletic do you have to be to drive a car?CorinneI thought driving was something that fat people could really succeed at.VirginiaI think body size doesn’t really correlate to driving skill?CorinneI agree.VirginiaI do often feel that not having played enough video games as a child is why I can be a nervous driver. I think if I’d played more video games, I’d be better at driving.CorinneI played no video games as a child, and I’m a great driver.VirginiaYou are a great driver. I’ve driven with you. That’s true.I never really got super solid on left and right. I just have to make the L with my left hand a lot, and I can get real turned around.CorinneYou don’t have a good sense of direction?VirginiaOh, zero sense of direction.CorinneThat is an athletic ability.VirginiaI have an instinct to always turn left no matter what. No matter where I’m going, I just turn left. To the point that now if we’re driving somewhere, Jack will just be like, “left turn, left turn.” Because I just always take us to the left. I don’t know why.CorinneThat’s also the hardest turn.VirginiaI know! It’s like I’m facing my fear. I don’t know. I hate making left turns. I also do it leaving a hotel room. I always turn left, even if the elevators down to the right. It’s like I can’t keep track of where we are in a building.It’s okay. I have other other skills. Not athletic skills! But anyway, fat people can be good drivers. Virginia is not one, but it’s not because I’m fat.CorinneOkay, here’s the next one.[CW for violent anti-fat imagery!]I worked in retail for a bit, and the amount of horrendous things older, thin women would say about their own bodies, completely oblivious to the fact that they were obviously much smaller than me was mind boggling. One woman literally said that she should just shoot herself in the head because she hadn’t yet lost the COVID weight. This was 2021.But even crazier was I told that story to my two best thin friends with the closing thought of, “I just hope that when I’m in my 60s and beyond, I’m not using any of my energy on worrying about losing weight.” And one of my friends responded, “I’m just focused on making choices right now that will help me be as healthy as I can for as long as I can.” And my other friend said, “Same.” And I thought I had walked into the Twilight Zone.VirginiaAll three of the thin people in this story had no idea of their privilege whatsoever.CorinneThe thing that really struck me about this was just how incredibly violent it is to say you would shoot yourself in the head because you haven’t lost weight.VirginiaAnd specifically, hadn’t lost the COVID weight, when it was 2021 and COVID was still a real big deal. A lot of us still weren’t going a lot of places.I mean, that is one of those heartbreaking comments that just tells you so much about that person’s struggle. And is a horrifically violent thing to say in front of a fat person. Don’t do that. Don’t suggest that death is better than fatness, because that’s not true.This one is very cringey. The comment the thin person made is,I’m sure you could borrow a sweatshirt from (male) partner, if you’re cold. Translation, the male partner’s clothes are adorably oversized on me, so they would definitely fit you. Narrator, they definitely did not fit me.CorinneOh, man, yeah. This one is very relatable. This happened to me in elementary school. I threw up on the bus.VirginiaPoor Baby Corinne!CorinneIt was on a field trip. And one of the moms of a very skinny boy was like, “Oh, so and so has an extra pair of pants that you can wear.” And I was like, “Um, those are not going to fit me.” And she was like, “Just try them.” And I was like, “Yeah, they don’t fit.”I think I was in fourth grade.VirginiaOh my God. That is so painful and mortifying on so many levels! Puke on the bus, terrible. You have to wear a boy’s pants, in fourth grade, terrible. You don’t want to have to wear some boy’s pants! That’s traumatizing. And then for them to not fit because, like, I mean, of course not. In fourth grade, all the boys are tiny. No, you’re not going to be able to wear Kevin’s pants.This is super obnoxious, and it’s such an easy fix, too. Just say, “Do you want to try this sweatshirt?” Instead of saying it definitively, like I have the answer to your problem. Why would you, you’re not this person’s body. You don’t have this context. Ask a question. Ask how you can help instead.CorinneWell, and the assumption that of course you’d be smaller than a man.VirginiaNo, obviously, yes. Men are enormous, don’t you know? It’s real cool. I’ve written about the whole mixed weight relationship nonsense. Many women are larger than the men we are with. That is true.Every Relationship is a Mixed Weight RelationshipCorinneOkay, here’s the next one:I’ve noticed that almost all women only compliment my hair now, the color, the cut, et cetera. I guess because it’s still my appearance, but not my body or clothing, so it feels like a safe zone. The funny thing is that I have gone full pandemic mode recently, and haven’t had my hair cut or colored in nine months. It looks fine, but it certainly isn’t the best it has ever looked.VirginiaI mean, I kind of love that, and I feel like, take the compliment! But also, yes, this is under the general heading of “You have such a pretty face!” which is a very common way that fat people get compliments. People pick out the one or two details about you that they can decouple from your fatness. And they do this as if you wouldn’t know that’s what they were doing. We all know!Have you had this one happen?CorinneI can’t say I’ve noticed it. I mean, this person says, “All women only compliment my hair now.” So it sounds like maybe their body has changed. And I was thinking sometimes this kind of feels like someone is saying, “I noticed something, and I know I can’t say it.” You know what I mean?Like, they want to say “Your body has changed,” so instead they say, "You cut your hair!”VirginiaHow about just don’t comment on people’s bodies, guys? That’s another tip for thin folks. Or give genuine compliments. Also, you can compliment people who are fat. You don’t have to look for the one thing about them that doesn’t remind you of their fatness. You could just give them a compliment like, “you look really good today!” You don’t have to say anything else after that.All right. Next up:That thing of adding a physical descriptor of someone’s body when it’s not needed to tell the story, especially when complaining about someone and then mentioning the size of their body or weight when it’s not relevant, as if that further proves how annoying or awful the person is.This is also something white people of a certain demographic tend to do about race or sexuality. You know, like, when it’s like, “that Black nurse” or like “I was at the dentist and the receptionist, who’s really gotten fat, said….” People feel the need to include marginalizing details when you don’t need that information to understand the story because now they’re just going to tell you something that has nothing to do with their body size.CorinneWhen I first read this one, I was like, I don’t know if I’ve heard that. But when you said that about people mentioning race, I can kind of imagine what you’re talking about.VirginiaOften people think they’re being inclusive? And it is true, we don’t want to be colorblind or ignore people’s size. It’s fine to acknowledge people’s identities. But when you’re inserting their identity in a story that’s negative about them, you’re inserting it because you want to emphasize that this is why they were sloppy or lazy, or any other stereotypical trait that you link to fatness.It’s bad. Don’t do it. Be better. That’s my take on that one.CorinneOkay.When bathing suit shopping with my mom and sister, without fail she’ll show me cute one pieces and she’ll always show my sister who is thin cute two pieces.VirginiaNope.CorinneTo make a point, when she holds up the skimpiest bikini, I’ll reach for it and say, “That’s my style. Wow, so cute.”VirginiaPerfect response. I also want to note that all these mom/sister stories are from different people. This isn’t one person repeating anecdotes. The mom/sister dynamic is not okay! And, yeah, buy the two piece, obviously, if you want to wear a two piece. Because they are more practical to go to the bathroom in. You are allowed to, regardless of body size.The condescending, chirpy, “good for you!” if I mentioned something about my habits or routine that they perceive as a diet.I mean, you’ve had this when you’ve been congratulated for being at the gym.CorinneThat’s exactly what I was thinking about. The first time I ever went to a gym, when someone said, “good for you. I see you here all the time.”VirginiaAlso, to be clear, the first time you went to that gym. It wasn’t your first time going to the gym. You probably could have bench pressed that man, and he was thinking you’d just shown up to take your first brave steps.CorinneNo, I had just shown up and he was congratulating me on having been there.VirginiaOh, yeah. That was even weirder, because it was like, all fat people look alike.CorinneHe was like, “good for you. I see you here all the time.” And I was like, you’ve definitely never seen me here before. He was like, “you’re putting in the work.” And I was like, I’m not putting in the work that you think I am.VirginiaThis is why I don’t work out in public spaces. I don’t need to deal with this shit.CorinneWell, I work out in public spaces three times a week for almost the past three years, and it’s only happened to me once.VirginiaI’m glad to hear that, but I can understand why people are ambivalent about doing that.CorinneThe smugness of assuming their bodies are a pure result of all their lifestyle choices, rather than genetics or other factors, and therefore, if other people just did the same work, they would look the same.I would love the phrase “it’s all about moderation” to be forever retired.VirginiaAs someone who has had so many men on the Internet explain calories in, calories out to me in response to all of my work, even when it has nothing to do with calories, I co-sign this one completely.CorinneI had really never thought much about the phrase “It’s all about moderation” before.VirginiaI think it’s a pretty toxic phrase. I think it’s heavily coded with, “you’re not going to eat the pint of Haagen Dazs in two sittings.” There’s a lot of implied restriction in “it’s all about moderation.”CorinneYou’re allowed to do that now, as long as you’re not always doing that.VirginiaRight. It very quickly becomes, “you can do it this one time.” You can have a cheat day.CorinneThat’s what I’m saying.VirginiaI also see this happening when thin people are undertaking a project of weight loss. They’re getting really excited about their new lifestyle habits. Or if they’re doing Ozempic, or whatever they’re doing. And they often want to frame this new weight loss intervention as the reason why they’re feeling so good, their energy is so high, etc.It makes sense, because we’re taught that weight and lifestyle is the total explanation for any health issue you could ever have. But it’s so problematic to take credit for health and say it’s because of your lifestyle habits without acknowledging all of these other factors that contribute to health. Just because you’re eating an avocado a day or something does not mean that someone else could do that and would have the same amazing health results that you’re having.CorinneTrue, very true.VirginiaAll right, I’ll read the next one.I’m a flight attendant, and while we no longer have weight requirements, we are still required to fit into the jump seat seat belt, which can vary quite a bit in length, similar to passenger seat belts. Some of the seat belts I have to put on the loosest setting they can go. One time, I was working with someone who was probably half my size, and she was on the jump seat next to me. We buckled in for landing, and she couldn’t stop talking about how big she was and how much weight she needed to lose after I actively made my seat belt as loose as it could go in front of her. I really wanted to say something to her, and I chose not to, but I still think about the ridiculousness sometimes.This makes me want to do a whole piece on flight attendants. I have so many questions!CorinneYeah, all I can think about reading this is how horrible it would be to be a fat flight attendant. For so many reasons.VirginiaBut the more relatable part of the narrative is the thin person talking about how she needs to lose weight right in front of you. And even if you haven’t had to do something like adjust a seat belt, you’re sitting there in your bigger body. You’re just sitting there being bigger, and they’re saying how they need to be smaller. Like, what? How do they not hear it? How do they not hear it?CorinneOkay, here’s the last one:A friend who was an extra extra small wanted to go shopping in New York City. I was dreading it, but had no real good reason to say no. We went to H&M, and she’s like, they do have some bigger sizes, too. Size 16 was where they maxed out. Size 16 was not even remotely close to fitting me. She’s a lovely person, but the absolute cluelessness about it struck me hard.CorinneOh, that’s so real. I feel like I’ve had people recommend brands to me, and they go to, like, an XXL. And I’m like, “Baby…”VirginiaThis is something I will take the note on, too. I think even those of us on the smaller end of the fat spectrum need to be mindful of this. Because there are a lot of brands that fit me, and then when I go to check, they go up to a 3x but it’s not a particularly generous 3x and a lot of people are bigger than a 3x. So anyone who has shopping privilege of any kind needs to be really careful about this one.I just hate that this person’s friend was like, “let’s go shopping!” and just didn’t even think about it. And the way she’s like, “They do have some bigger sizes.” Like you hadn’t thought to check. You were just assuming your friend would want to come along and watch you shop. Like, what? That’s terrible.CorinneI do feel like there’s a thing where a thin person thinks they’re being flattering by being like, “This size 16 would fit you.” You know?VirginiaOh, I don’t like that at all. No, thank you.All right, we’re going to end with two really nice stories that people sent in, just because we’ve got to bring it up a little and not end too dark.So the first one isA random man was sitting on the side of the road and shouted after me, “fat, pretty lady running for the bus!” And you know what? Hell yeah, accurate on all counts.CorinneThat’s cute. I don’t want to be yelled at either way, but.VirginiaNo. I mean, to be fair, it’s also fine if you interpreted that as extremely aggressive. But I can understand with the right delivery, and if you’re in the right mood, it’s like yeah! that’s what I’m doing! Great. Thanks for noticing. So that’s cute.CorinneOkay, the next one is:A skinny salesperson at the high end plus size boutique Marina Rinaldi, when a pair of pants didn’t fit, said, those pants don’t deserve you and whisked them away as if to the guillotine to find another size. It wasn’t that deep for me, but I still find this so funny. And say it all the time, a subpar margarita does not deserve me, etc.VirginiaI mean, I’m definitely adopting this phrase.CorinneYeah, love that.VirginiaThat’s great. Those pants don’t deserve you.CorinneGreat salesperson.VirginiaPerfect response. Also filing it away for talking to my kids about when they’re outgrowing clothing sizes, or if we order something that doesn’t fit. Like, what a good way to talk to a teen or a tween about clothing sizes. Like, they don’t deserve you. So that’s really cute.ButterVirginiaMy Butter is an update on the chickens! We finally finished building the chicken coop, and they moved into their coop this weekend. So they’re off my back porch, which is great. If you’re following along on the chicken saga. They were first living in a closet of my house in a Tupperware container, and then they got too big for that, so they moved to a dog crate on my back porch, which was good, but extremely messy.And now they’re out in my yard in this very cute chicken coop.CorinneWow, that’s awesome.VirginiaIt’s super exciting. The kids are jazzed. They’re chickening around eating. I’m hoping they’re going to eat every tick that comes into my yard. We’re having a horrendous tick season. So I really want them to earn their keep that way. And then in September, we should start getting eggs.CorinneThat’s awesome.VirginiaAlso, when I say we built the coop, Jack built the coop. I did nothing. I did paint some of the coop. And I picked out the color palette. It’s very adorable.CorinneThat sounds great. My Butter is Fat Swim because it happened this weekend and it was really fun.VirginiaIt looked magical in the photos you posted. You wrote about it on Big Undies. I really want to come to Fat Swim one year.CorinneI think you should organize one!VirginiaI know, should we?There is a pool in the next town. My town does not have a town pool.CorinneBut there’s Swimply, or go to the river. Or, you have a little pool!VirginiaIt’s little, though, and we wouldn’t be able to have a lot of people. I could have a mini fat swim? That would be really fun. It just looked great. And yeah, and you said like, what? 40 people came?CorinneYeah, more than 40.VirginiaThat’s awesome. And were they people you knew, or just people who came?CorinneA mix. At this point, there are people I recognize from having done it the past two years that I don’t see anywhere else. And then, yeah, also some friends, and also some new people.VirginiaAww, I love that, because it’s creating a community opportunity for people who maybe need that.CorinneThat’s kind of the whole point.VirginiaThat is a really good Butter. I hope that the summer involves lots of swimming and chickens for everybody.CorinneMe too.

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Mara Gordon, MD. Dr. Mara is a family physician on the faculty of Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, as well as a writer, journalist and contributor to NPR. She also writes the newsletter Your Doctor Friend by Mara Gordon about her efforts to make medicine more fat friendly. And she was previously on the podcast last November, answering your questions on how to take a weight inclusive approach to conditions like diabetes, acid reflux, and sleep apnea.Dr. Mara is back today to tackle all your questions about perimenopause and menopause! Actually, half your questions—there were so many, and the answers are so detailed, we’re going to be breaking this one into a two parter. So stay tuned for the second half, coming in September! As we discussed in our recent episode with Cole Kazdin, finding menopause advice that doesn’t come with a side of diet culture is really difficult. Dr Mara is here to help, and she will not sell you a supplement sign or make you wear a weighted vest. This episode is free but if you value this conversation, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you.PS. You can always listen to this pod right here in your email, where you’ll also receive full transcripts (edited and condensed for clarity). But please also follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and/or Pocket Casts! And if you enjoy today’s conversation, please tap the heart on this post — likes are one of the biggest drivers of traffic from Substack’s Notes, so that’s a super easy, free way to support the show!And don’t miss these: Healthcare is Ground Zero for FatphobiaIs Dr. Mary Claire Haver Making Menopause a Diet?Episode 203 TranscriptVirginiaWhen I put up the call out for listener questions for this, we were immediately inundated with, like, 50 questions in an hour. People have thoughts and feelings and need information! So I’m very excited you’re here. Before we dive into the listener questions, let’s establish some big picture framing on how we are going to approach this conversation around perimenopause and menopause.MaraI should start just by introducing myself. I’m a family doctor and I have a very general practice, which means I take care of infants and I have a couple patients who are over 100. It’s amazing. And families, which is such an honor, to care for multiple generations of families. So, perimenopause and menopause is one chunk of my practice, but it is not all of it.I come from the perspective of a generalist, right? Lots of my patients have questions about perimenopause and menopause. Many of my patients are women in that age group. And I have been learning a lot over the last couple of years. The science is emerging, and I think a lot of practice patterns amongst doctors have really changed, even in the time that I have been in practice, which is about 10 years. There has been a huge shift in the way we physicians think about menopause and think about perimenopause, which I think is mostly for the better, which is really exciting.There’s an increased focus on doctors taking menopause seriously, approaching it with deep care and concern and professionalism. And that is excellent. But this menopause advocacy is taking place in a world that’s really steeped in fatphobia and diet culture. Our culture is just so susceptible to corporate influence. There are tons of influencers who call themselves menopause experts selling supplements online, just selling stuff. Sort of cashing in on this. And I will note, a lot of them are medical doctors, too, so it can be really hard to sort through.VirginiaYour instinct is to trust, because you see the MD.MaraTotally. There’s a lot of diet talk wrapped up in all of it, and there’s a lot of fear-mongering, which I would argue often has fatphobia at its core. It’s a fear of fatness, a fear of aging, a fear of our bodies not being ultra thin, ultra sexualized bodies of adolescents or women in their 20s, right? This is all to say that I think it’s really exciting that there’s an increased cultural focus on women’s health, particularly health in midlife. But we also need to be careful about the ways that diet culture sneaks into some of this talk, and who might be profiting from it. So we do have some hearty skepticism, but also some enthusiasm for the culture moving towards taking women’s concerns and midlife seriously.VirginiaThe cultural discourse around this is really tricky. Part of why I wanted you to come on to answer listener questions is because you approach healthcare from a weight inclusive lens, which is not every doctor. It is certainly not every doctor in the menopause space. And you’re not selling us a supplement line or a weighted vest, so that’s really helpful. So that’s a good objective place for us to start! Here’s our first question, from Julie: It’s my understanding that the body naturally puts on weight in menopause, especially around the torso, and that this fat helps to replace declining estrogen, because fat produces estrogen. I don’t know where I’ve heard this, but I think it’s true? But I would like to know a doctor’s explanation of this, just because I think it’s just more evidence that our bodies know what they’re doing and we can trust them, and that menopause and the possible related weight gain is nothing to fear or dread or fight.MaraOof, okay, so we are just diving right in. Thank you so much for this question. It’s one I get from many of my patients, too. So I looked into some of the literature on this, and it is thought that declining estrogen—which happens in the menopausal transition—does contribute to what we call visceral adiposity, which is basically fatty tissue around the internal organs. And in clinical practice, we approximate this by assessing waist circumference. This is really spotty! But we tend to think of it as “belly fat,” which is a fatphobic term. I prefer the term “visceral adiposity” even though it sounds really medical, it gets more specifically at what the issue is, which is that this particular adipose tissue around internal organs can be pathologic. It can be associated with insulin resistance, increasing risk of cardiovascular disease, and risk of what we call metabolic—here’s a mouthful—metabolic dysfunction associated steatotic liver disease, which is what fatty liver disease has been renamed.So I don’t think we totally understand why this happens in the menopausal transition. There is a hypothesis that torso fatty tissue does help increase estrogen, and it’s the body’s response to declining estrogen and attempts to preserve estrogen. But in our modern lives, where people live much longer than midlife, it can create pathology. VirginiaI just want to pause there to make sure folks get it. So it could be that this extra fat in our torsos develops for a protective reason —possibly replacing estrogen levels—but because we now live longer, there’s a scenario where it doesn’t stay protective, or it has other impacts besides its initial protective purpose.MaraRight? And this is just a theory. It’s kind of impossible to prove something like that, but many menopause researchers have this working theory about, quote—we’ve got to find a better term for it—belly fat. What should we call it, Virginia? Virginia. I mean, or can we reclaim belly fat? But that’s like a whole project. There is a lot of great work reclaiming bellies, but we’ll go with visceral adiposity right now.MaraAnyway, this is an active area of menopause research, and I’m not sure we totally understand the phenomenon. That being said, Julie asks, “Should we just trust our bodies?” Do our bodies know what they’re doing? And I think that’s a really philosophical question, and that is the heart of what you’re asking, Julie, rather than what’s the state of the research on visceral adiposity in the menopause transition.It’s how much do we trust our bodies versus how much do we use modern medicine to intervene, to try to change the natural course of our bodies? And it’s a question about the role that modern medicine plays in our lives. So obviously, I’m a fan of modern medicine, right? I’m a medical doctor. But I also have a lot of skepticism about it. I can see firsthand that we pathologize a lot of normal physiologic processes, and I see the way that our healthcare system profits off of this pathology.So this is all to say: Most people do tend to gain weight over time. That’s been well-described in the literature. Both men and women gain weight with age, and women tend to gain mid-section weight specifically during the menopausal transition, which seems to be independent of age. So people who go through menopause earlier might see this happen earlier. This weight gain is happening in unique ways that are affected by the hormone changes in the menopausal transition, and I think it can be totally reasonable to want to prevent insulin resistance or prevent metabolic dysfunction in the liver using medications. Or can you decide that you don’t want to use medications to do that; diet and exercise also absolutely play a role. But I think it’s a deep question. I don’t know, what do you think? Virginia, what’s your take?VirginiaI think it can be a both/and. If everybody gains weight as we age, and particularly as we go through menopause transition, then we shouldn’t be pathologizing that at baseline. Because if everybody does it, then it’s a normal fact of having a human body. And why are we making that into something that we’re so terrified of?And I think this is what we’re going to get more into with these questions: It’s also possible to say, can we improve quality of life? Can we extend life? Can we use medicine to help with those things in a way that makes it not about the weight gain, but about managing the symptoms that may or may not be caused by the weight gain? If the weight gain correlates with insulin resistance, of course you’re going to treat the insulin resistance, because the insulin resistance is the concern. Does that mean weight loss is the thing we have to do? Not necessarily.MaraTotally. I define size inclusive medicine—which is the way that I practice medicine—as basically not yelling at my patients to lose weight. And it’s quite revolutionary, even though it shouldn’t be. I typically don’t initiate conversations about weight loss with my patients. If my patients have evidence of metabolic dysfunction in the liver, if they have evidence of diabetes or pre-diabetes, if they have high blood pressure, we absolutely tackle those issues. There’s good medications and non-medication treatments for those conditions.And if my patients want to talk about weight loss, I’m always willing to engage in those conversations. I do not practice from a framework of refusing to talk with my patients about weight loss because I feel that’s not centering my patients’ bodily autonomy. So let’s talk about these more objective and less stigmatized medical conditions that we can quantify. Let’s target those. And weight loss may be a side effect of targeting those. Weight loss may not be a side effect of targeting those. And there are ways to target those conditions that often don’t result in dramatic or clinically significant weight loss, and that’s okay.One other thing I’ll note that it’s not totally clear that menopausal weight gain is causing those sort of metabolic dysfunctions. This is a really interesting area of research. Again, I’m not a researcher, but I follow it with interest, because as a size-inclusive doctor, this is important to the way that I practice. So there’s some school of thought that the metabolic dysfunction causes the weight gain, rather than the weight gain causing the metabolic dysfunction. And this is important because of the way we blame people for weight gain. We think if you gain weight, you’ve caused diabetes or whatever. This flips thta narrative on its head. Diabetes is a really complex disease with many, many factors affecting it. It’s possible that having a genetic predisposition to cardiometabolic disease may end up causing weight gain, and specifically this visceral adiposity. So this is all to say there’s a lot we don’t understand. And I think at the core is trying to center my patients values, and de-stigmatize all of these conversations.VirginiaI love how Julie phrased it: “The possible related weight gain in menopause is maybe nothing to fear, dread, or fight.” I think anytime we can approach health without a mindset of fear and dread and not be fighting our bodies, that seems like it’s going to be more health promoting than if we’re going in like, “Oh my God, this is happening. It’s terrible. I have to stop it.”And this is every life stage we go through, especially as women. Our bodies change, and usually our bodies get bigger. And we’re always told we have to fight through puberty. You have a baby, you have to get your body back as quickly as possible. I do think there’s something really powerful in saying: “I am going through a big life change right now so my body is supposed to change. I can focus on managing the health conditions that might come along with that, and I can also let my body do what it needs to do.” I think we can have both.MaraYeah, that’s so beautifully said. And Julie, thank you for saying it that way.VirginiaOkay, so now let’s get into some related weight questions.I was just told by my OB/GYN that excess abdominal weight can contribute to urinary incontinence in menopause. How true is this, and how much of a factor do you think weight is in this situation? And I think the you know, the unsaid question in this and in so many of these questions, is, so do I have to lose weight to solve this issue?MaraYes. So this is a very common refrain I hear from patients about the relationship between BMI and sort of different processes in the body, right? I think what the listeners’ OB/GYN is getting at is the idea that mass in the abdomen and torso might put pressure on the pelvic floor. And more mass in the torso, more pressure on the pelvic floor.But urinary incontinence is extremely complicated and it can be caused by lots of different things. So I think what the OB/GYN is alluding to is pelvic floor weakness, which is one common cause. The muscles in the pelvic floor, which is all those muscles that basically hold up your uterus, your bladder, your rectum—all of those muscles can get weak over time. But other things can cause urinary incontinence, too. Neurological changes, hormonal changes in menopause, can contribute.Part of my size inclusive approach to primary care is I often ask myself: How would I treat a thin person with this condition? Because we always have other treatment options other than weight loss, and thin people have urinary incontinence all the time.VirginiaA lot of skinny grandmas are buying Depends. No shame!MaraTotally, right? And so we have treatments for urinary incontinence. And urinary incontinence often requires a multifactorial treatment approach.I will often recommend my patients do pelvic floor physical therapy. What that does is strengthen the pelvic floor muscles particularly if the person has been pregnant and had a vaginal delivery, those muscles can really weaken, and people might be having what we call genitourinary symptoms of menopause. Basically, as estrogen declines in the tissue of the vulva, it can make the tissue what we call friable.VirginiaI don’t want a friable vulva! All of the language is bad.MaraI know, isn’t it? I just get so used to it. And then when I talk to non-medical people, I’m like, whoa. Where did we come up with this term? It just means sort of like irritable.VirginiaOk, I’m fine having an irritable vulva. I’m frequently irritable.MaraAnd so that can cause a sensation of having to pee all the time. And that we can treat with topical estrogen, which is an estrogen cream that goes inside the vagina and is an amazing, underutilized treatment that is extremely low risk. I just prescribe it with glee and abandon to all of my patients, because it can really help with urinary symptoms. It can help with discomfort during sex in the menopausal transition. It is great treatment.VirginiaItchiness, dryness…MaraExactly, yeah! So I was doing a list of causes of urinary incontinence: Another one is overactive bladder, which we often use oral medications to treat. That helps decrease bladder spasticity. So this is all to say that it’s multifactorial. It’s rare that there’s sort of one specific issue. And it is possible that for some people, weight loss might help decrease symptoms. If somebody loses weight in their abdomen, it might put less pressure on the pelvic floor, and that might ease up. But it’s not the only treatment. So since we know that weight loss can be really challenging to maintain over time for many, many reasons, I think it’s important to offer our patients other treatment options. But I don’t want to discount the idea that it’s inherently unrelated. It’s possible that it’s one factor of many that contributes to urinary incontinence.VirginiaThis is, like, the drumbeat I want us to keep coming back to with all these issues. As you said, how would I treat this in a thin person? It is much easier to start using an estrogen cream—like you said, low risk, easy to use—and see if that helps, before you put yourself through some draconian diet plan to try to lose weight.So for the doctor to start from this place of, “well, you’ve got excess abdominal fat, and that’s why you’re having this problem,” that’s such a shaming place to start when that’s very unlikely to be the full story or the full solution.MaraTotally. And pelvic PT is also underutilized and amazing. Everyone should get it after childbirth, but many people who’ve never had children might benefit from it, too.VirginiaOkay, another weight related question. This is from Ellen, who wrote in our thread in response to Julie’s question. So in related to Julie’s question about the role of declining estrogen in gaining abdominal fat:If that’s the case, why does hormone replacement therapy not mitigate that weight gain? I take estrogen largely to support my bone health due to having a genetic disorder leading to fragile bones, but to be honest I had hoped that the estrogen would also help address the weight I’ve put on over the past five years despite stable eating and exercise habits. That hasn’t happened, and I understand that it generally doesn’t happen with HRT, but I don’t understand why. I guess I’d just like to understand better why we tend to gain abdominal fat in menopause and what if anything can help mitigate that weight gain. I’m working on self acceptance for the body I have now, and I get frustrated when clothes I love no longer fit, or when my doctor tells me one minute to watch portion sizes to avoid weight gain, and the next tells me to ingest 1000 milligrams of calcium per day, which would account for about half of the calories I’m supposed to eat daily in order to lose weight or not gain more weight. It just feels like a lot of competing messages! Eat more protein and calcium, but have a calorie deficit. And it’s all about your changing hormones, but hormone replacement therapy won’t change anything.Ellen, relatable. So many mixed messages. Dr. Mara, you spoke to what we do and don’t know about the abdominal fat piece a little bit already in Julie’s question, so I think we can set that aside. But yes, if estrogen is playing a role, why does hormone replacement therapy not necessarily impact weight? And what do we do with the protein of it all? Because, let me tell you, we got like 50 other questions about protein.MaraI will answer the first part first: I don’t think we know why menopausal hormone therapy does not affect abdominal fat. You’re totally right. It makes intuitive sense, but that’s not what we see clinically. There’s some evidence that menopausal hormone therapy can decrease the rate of muscle mass loss. But we consider it a weight neutral treatment. Lots of researchers are studying these questions. But I don’t think anybody knows.So those messages feel like they’re competing because they are competing. And I don’t think we understand why all these things go on in the human body and how to approach them. So maybe I’ll turn the question back to you, Virginia. How do you think about it when you are seeking expertise and you get not a clear answer?VirginiaI mean, I’m an irritable vulva when it happens, that’s for sure. My vulva and I are very irritated by conflicting messages. And I think we’re right to be. I think Ellen is articulating a real frustration point.The other thing Ellen is articulating is how vulnerable we are in these moments. Because, as she’s saying, she’s working on self-acceptance for the body she has. And I think a lot of us are like, “We don’t want weight loss to be the prescription. We don’t want to feel pressured to go in that direction.” And then the doctor comes in and says, “1000 milligrams of calcium a day, an infinity number of protein grams a day. Also lose weight.” And then you do find yourself on that roller coaster or hamster wheel—choose your metaphor. Again, because we’re so programmed to think “well, the only option I have is to try to control my weight, control my weight, control my weight.” And you get back in that space.What I usually try to do is phone a friend, have a plan to step myself out of that. Whether it’s texting my best friend or texting Corinne, so they can be that voice of reason. And I would do this for them, too! You need help remembering: You don’t want to pursue intentional weight loss. You’re doing all this work on self-acceptance. Dieting is not going to be helpful. So what can you take from this advice that does feel doable and useful? And maybe it’s not 1000 milligrams of calcium a day, but maybe it’s like, a little more yogurt in your week. Is there a way you can translate this to your life that feels manageable? I think it’s what you do a great job of. But I think in general, doctors don’t do a great job with that part.MaraYeah, I bet you Ellen’s doctor had 15 minutes with her. And was like, “Well, eat all this calcium and definitely try to lose weight,” right? And then was rushing out the door because she has 30 other patients to see that day.I think doctors are trying to offer what maybe they think patients want to hear, which is certainty and one correct answer. And it can feel hard to find the space to sort of sit in the uncertainty of medicine and health and the uncertainty of like our bodies. And corporate medicine is not conducive to that, let’s put it that way.VirginiaBut so how much protein do we need to be eating?MaraI have no idea. Virginia, I don’t think anybody knows. I think exercise is good for you. It’s not good for every single body at every single moment in time. If you just broke your foot, running is not a healthy activity, right? If you’re recovering from a disordered relationship with exercise, it’s not healthy.But, movement in general prolongs our health span. And I’m reluctant to even say this, but, the Mediterranean diet—I hate even calling it a diet, right? But vegetables, protein—I don’t even want to call them healthy fats, it’s just so ambiguous what that means. But olive oil. All those things seem to be good for you. With the caveat that it’s really hard to study the effects of diet. And this is general diet, not meaning a restrictive diet, but your diet over time. But I don’t think we know how much, how much protein one needs to eat. It is unknowable.VirginiaAnd that’s why, I think what we’ve been saying about figure out how to translate this into something that feels doable in your life. It’s not like, Oh, olive oil forever. Never butter again. MaraOf course not. I love butter. Oh, my God. Extra butter!VirginiaRight. Butter is core to the Burnt Toast philosophy. I know you wouldn’t be coming here with an anti-butter agenda.MaraOh, of course not. Kerry Gold forever.VirginiaBut it’s, how can you take this and think about what makes sense in your life and would add value and not feel restrictive? And that’s hard to do that when you’re feeling vulnerable and worried and menopause feels like this big, scary unknown. But you still have the right to do that, because it’s still your body.MaraBeautifully said.ButterVirginiaWell, this has all been incredibly helpful. Let’s chat about things that are bringing us joy. Dr Mara, do you have some Butter for us? MaraI had to think about this a lot. The Butter question is obviously the most important question of the whole conversation.We have been in a heat wave in Philly, where I live, and it’s really, really hot, and we have a public pool that is four blocks from our house. Philly actually has tons of public pools. Don’t quote me on this, but I’ve heard through the grapevine—I have not fact-checked this—that it is one of the highest per capita free public pools in the country. I don’t know where I heard that from. I know I should probably look that up, but anyway, we’ve got a lot of pools in Philly. And there’s one four blocks from my house.So I used to think of pool time as a full day, like a Saturday activity. Like you bring snacks, you bring a book, you lounge for hours. But our city pool is very bare bones. There’s no shade. And so, I have come to approach it as an after work palate cleanser. We rush there after I get my kid from daycare, and just pop in, pop out. It’s so nice. And pools are so democratic. Everybody is there cooling off. There’s no body shame. I mean, I feel like it’s actually been quite freeing for my experience of a body shame in a bathing suit, because there’s no opportunity to even contemplate it. Like you have to hustle in there to get there before it closes. There’s no place to put your stuff. So you can’t do all those body shielding techniques. You have to leave your stuff outside of the pool. So you have to go in in a bathing suit. And it’s just like, all shapes and sizes there. I love it. So public pools are my Butter.VirginiaWe don’t have a good public pool in my area, and I wish we did. I’m so jealous. That’s magical. Since we’re talking about being in midlife, I’m going to recommend the memoir, Actress of a Certain Age: My Twenty-Year Trail to Overnight Success by Jeff Hiller, which I just listened to on audiobook. Definitely listen to it on audiobook. Obviously, Jeff Hiller is a man and not in menopause, but he is in his late 40s, possibly turned 50. He’s an actress of a certain age, as he says. If you watched “Somebody Somewhere” with Bridget Everett, he plays her best friend Joel. And the show was wonderful. Everyone needs to watch that.But Jeff Hiller is someone who had his big breakout role on an HBO show at the age of, like, 47 or something. And so it’s his memoir of growing up as a closeted gay kid in Texas, in the church, and then moving to New York and pursuing acting and all that. It’s hilarious. It’s really moving. It made me teary several times. He is a beautiful writer, and it just makes you realize the potential of this life stage. And one of his frequent refrains in the book, and it’s a quote from Bridget Everett, is Dreams Don’t have Deadlines, and realizing what potential there is in the second half of our lives, or however you want to define it. Oh my gosh, I loved it so much. There’s also a great, great interview with Jeff on Sam Sanders podcast that I’ll link to as well. That’s just like a great entry point, and it will definitely make you want to go listen to the whole book.MaraI love it.I will briefly say one thing I’ve been thinking about during this whole conversation is a piece by the amazing Anne Helen Petersen who writes Culture Study, which is one of my favorites of course, in addition to Burnt Toast. She wrote a piece about going through the portal. That was what she calls it. And she writes about how she’s talking with her mom, I think, who says, “Oh, you’re starting to portal!” to Anne. And I just love it.What she’s getting at is this sort of surge of creativity and self confidence and self actualization that happens in midlife for women in particular. And I just love that image. Whenever I think of doing something that would have scared me a few years ago, or acting confident, appropriately confident in situations. I’m like, I’m going into the portal. I just, I love it, it’s so powerful, and I think about it all the time.VirginiaWell, thank you so much for doing this. This was really wonderful. Tell folks where they can find you and how we can support your work.MaraThank you so much, Virginia. I’m such a fan of your work. It has been so meaningful, meaningful to me, both personally and professionally. So it’s such an honor to be here again. You can find me on Substack. I write Your Doctor Friend by Mara Gordon . And I’m on Instagram at Mara Gordon MD, too. And you can find a lot of my writing on NPR as well. And I’m writing a book called, tentatively, How to Take Up Space, and it’s about body shame and health care and the pursuit of health and wellness. So lots of issues like we touched on today, and hopefully that will be coming into the world in a couple of years. But yeah, thanks so much for having me, Virginia.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 by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

Hello on this steamy Summer Friday! We’re popping in to share the (unedited! very casual!) video from the Live we did Wednesday… just generally catching up on some urgent summer news like: * Our new favorite tank tops* Why we hate And Just Like That (but can’t stop watching)* Why we love Lena Dunham but are…complicated?? maybe in love?? with Too Much. * Plus some Butters! As a reminder, we use the Substack Live feature super casually. These haven’t been edited to audio or visual perfection. We’re at the mercy of Substack tech (and our iPhones and Airpods) to sound good. And there is an AI-generated transcript attached (click the video to access it!) but it won’t be as beautifully edited as podcast episode transcripts, which Corinne and I spend hours on every week. Totally get if these low production values are not your jam! But if you want to debate who wears light yellow best… here you go. Links to everything we chatted about here are:The yellow tank top we both love! (Virginia wears 1X, Corinne wears 5X, avail up to 6X.)Corinne’s other favorite tank top.Corinne is making me put this in against my will: The True Spring Yellow.And this is a True Summer Yellow:Kate Manne on the toxic masculinity of Felix. (Corinne is still rooting for him!)Full details on how to make your own Mosquito Dunk Bucket. And here’s mine:

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Tracy Clark-Flory. Tracy is the feminist writer behind the newsletter TCF Emails and the author of Want Me: A Sex Writer's Journey into the Heart of Desire. She’s also the cohost of the new podcast Dire Straights where she and Amanda Montei unpack the many toxic aspects of heterosexual relationships and culture. I brought Tracy on the podcast today to talk about my feet, but we get into so much more. We talk about porn, sexual identity, and the male gaze—and, of course, how all of this makes us feel in our bodies.My Feet Are On the InternetThis episode is free but if you value this conversation, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you.PS. You can always listen to this pod right here in your email, where you’ll also receive full transcripts (edited and condensed for clarity). But please also follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and/or Pocket Casts! And if you enjoy today’s conversation, please tap the heart on this post — likes are one of the biggest drivers of traffic from Substack’s Notes, so that’s a super easy, free way to support the show!Episode 202 TranscriptVirginiaI am so excited. We’ve been Internet friends for a long time, and it’s so nice to finally have a conversation. I’m very jazzed! TracyRight? I feel like we’ve talked before, but we have not, which is such an odd sensation. We’ve emailed.VirginiaWe’ve emailed, we’ve DM-ed, we’ve commented on each other’s things. But we have not, with our faces and mouths, had a conversation. The Internet is so weird.Well, the Internet being weird is a lot of what we’re gonna talk about today. Because where I want to start today is feet.TracyWhy not?VirginiaSo I initially emailed you when I was working on my essay about my Wikifeet experience, because you have written so extensively about porn and the Internet’s treatment of women. And when I discovered my Wikifeet, one of my first thoughts was, “I need to talk to Tracy about this.” TracyThat makes me so happy. I want to be the first person that everyone thinks of when they find themselves on Wikifeet.VirginiaI was like, “I don’t know how she’ll feel…” so I’m glad you take that as a compliment.I don’t even know where to start. Even though I wrote a whole essay about this, my brain is still, like, “record scratch moment” on the whole thing. Sojust talk to us a little bit where in your vast reporting on porn did you kind of become aware of fetish sites and what’s your read on them? What’s going on there?TracyI think I first became aware of Wikifeet in 2008-ish when they launched, and that’s when I was a proper, full-time sex writer, on the sex beat, covering every weird niche Internet community. And then in the years since, I’ve unfortunately had many women colleagues—often feminist writers—who have ended up on the site. So unfortunately, you’re not the first person I know who’s ended up on there.VirginiaIt’s a weird thing that a certain type of woman writer is gonna end up on Wikifeet. Why?TracyThere are no shortage of women who are consensually volunteering photos of their feet online for people to consume in a sexualized way, right? So the fact is that this site is providing a venue for people to do it in a very nonconsensual way, where images are taken from other venues that are not sexualized. They’re stolen images, you know? Things that are screenshotted from Instagram stories, that kind of thing—and then put into this sexualized context. Not only that, but put into a sexualized context where there is a community around sexualizing and objectifying and even rating and evaluating body parts.My take is that this violation is part of the point. Because there is having a foot fetish—great, have at it, enjoy. And then there’s consuming images that are nonconsensual. So I think that the violation is part of the point. And to the point of feminist writers, women writers online, ending up on it—I don’t think it’s an accident. Because I think that there is—perhaps for some, maybe not all—some pleasure taken in that aspect of trespass.VirginiaYes. My best friend is a food blogger, and I immediately searched for her because she’s way more famous than I am, and she’s not on there. And I’m glad, I don’t want her non-consensually on there! But I was like, oh, it’s interesting that I’m on there, lyz is on there. It is a certain type of woman that men are finding objectionable on the Internet. And putting us on WikiFeet is a retaliation or just a way of—I don’t know. It’s not a direct attack, because I didn’t even know about it for however long my feet have been up there. But it is a way for men to feel like they’re in control of us in some way, right?TracyOh, totally. And it’s because there is something interesting about taking a body part that is not broadly and generally sexualized, and sexualizing it. There is this feeling of a “gotcha!” in it.There is something, too, about feet—I mean, I think this is part of what plays into foot fetish, often. There is this sense of dirtiness, potentially, but also the sense of often being hidden away. It’s secret, it’s private, it’s delicate, it’s tender. Feet are ticklish, there’s so much layered in there that I think can make it feel like this place of vulnerability.I’ve written about upskirting. This was maybe like 15 years ago. But it’s these communities where men take upskirt videos and photos of women on the subway or wherever, and then they share them in online forums. And that’s very clearly a physical trespass. You’re seeing something that was not meant to be seen. So it’s quite different. But it’s feels like it exists on a spectrum of trespass and violation and taking sexualized enjoyment out of that.VirginiaFrom someone who had no intention of you taking that enjoyment, who’s just trying to ride the train to work.TracyTotally. And the foot thing, it just makes me think of all these different ways that women experience their bodies in the world. You can’t just be at ease in your body, because someone might think your feet are hot.VirginiaIt’s really interesting. I’ve talked about this on the podcast before: A little bit after I got divorced and I started having, weekends totally to myself in my house, it was the first time I’d been alone in my house in a long time. Obviously, usually my kids were there. My husband used to be there. And I had this strange sensation of being observed, even when I was completely alone in the house.It’s just me and the dog. She’s asleep. I’m making dinner or watching TV or doing whatever I’m doing. And I couldn’t shake the sensation that I was watching myself, still thinking about what I was going to wear. It was so weird, and I realized it actually isn’t particularly a comment on my marriage. It’s more a comment on women are so trained to always feel observed. It’s really hard for us to actually access a space where we’re not going to be observed. It was wild.TracyWe adopt that perspective of the watcher, and we are the watched. We experience ourselves in that way, as opposed to being the watcher, the person who sees and consumes the world and experiences the world. It’s like we experience ourselves being experienced by someone else—an imagined man often.VirginiaYes, you’re always self-objectifying. It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to please that gaze, whether you’re trying to protect yourself against that gaze. Whatever it is, we’re always aware of how we’ll be perceived in a way that I don’t think cis men ever have to consider. I don’t think that’s a part of their experience of the world in the same way.TracyAnd how messed up is that tension between trying to please and trying to protect oneself? What an impossible tightrope walk to be constantly doing.VirginiaRight, and to not even know which one you want sometimes. Like, which one you need, which one you want.TracyYeah, going back and forth between those extremes. You’re always kind of monitoring and on edge.VirginiaAnd, it did shift. Now when I’m alone in my house, I don’t feel like I’m watching myself. Like, it did lessen. But it was this very stark moment of noticing that. And I think the way our work is so online, we are so online, it doesn’t help. Because we also have all learned through the performance art of social media to constantly be documenting. And even if you’re by yourself, you might post something about it. There’s that need to narrate and document and then also objectify your experience.TracyThe sense of, like, if I don’t take a photo of it, it doesn’t exist. It didn’t happen. It’s not real. It must be consumed by other people. I mean, when you were talking earlier about that sense of being surveyed, I think that is a very just common experience for women, period. But then I think, for me, growing up with reality TV, the explosion of reality TV, like that added this like sense of a camera on one’s life.And then I think, like, if you want to bring porn into it, too—Like, in the bedroom, that sense of the watcher, so you have this sense of being watched by men, but then you have the sense of kind of performing for an audience, because that’s so much of what I came up with culturally.VirginiaI mean, the way we often conceive of our sexuality is through performance and how are you being perceived not how are you experiencing it yourself? I mean, you write about that so well, that tension.TracyThat was my whole thing. My sexual coming of age memoir is so much about what it meant to try to move out of that focus on how I’m being perceived by my partner and into a place of what am I experiencing? What do I even want beyond being wanted?VirginiaMan, it’s amazing we’ve all survived and gotten where we are. Another layer to this, that I thought about a lot as I was processing my Wikifeet, was how instantly I felt like I had to laugh it off. I really felt like I couldn’t access my true reaction to it. I just immediately sort of went into this Cool Girl, resigned, jaded, like “What do you expect from the Internet?” This is why I wanted to talk to you. Because I was like, oh, this feels very similar to stuff Tracy struggled with and wrote about in her memoir.TracyOh, totally. It makes total sense to me that you would go to that default place. It makes me think of how I, especially early in my career writing online as a feminist blogger, I would print out the very worst, most misogynistic hateful comments and post them on my fridge because I was willing myself to find them funny, to be able to laugh at them and just kind of distance myself from them and to feel untouched by them.I think that Cool Girl stance is a way of putting on protective armor. So I think that makes sense as a woman writing online, but I also think it makes sense in the context of sex. So much of what I did—this performative sexuality, this kind of sense of being down for whatever in my 20s—was, subconsciously, a kind of defensive posture. Because I think I had this feeling that if I’m down for anything, then nothing can be done against my will, you know? And that was the mental gambit that I had to engage in, in order to feel safe enough to explore my sexuality freely. Granted, it wasn’t very freely, turns out. But it makes total sense that you would want to default to the laughing at what is really a violation. Because I do think that there’s something protective about that. It’s like, “No, you’re not going to do this to me. You’re not going to make me feel a certain way about this.” But that only takes you so far.VirginiaWell, because at the same time, it also is a way of communicating, “Don’t worry, I can take a joke. I’m not one of those feminists.” It also plays right into that. So it’s protective and you can’t rattle me. And, I’ll also minimize this just like you want me to minimize it. So I’m actually doing what you want. Then my brain breaks.TracyRight? And then we’re back to that thing we were just talking about, the wanting to please, but then wanting to protect oneself, and the impossible balancing act of that. VirginiaLike you were saying you’ve experienced these horrific misogynistic troll comments. I experienced them in the more fatphobic sense, but like a mix, misogyny and fatphobia, very good friends.So I think when you’ve experienced more extreme things, you then do feel like you have to downplay some of the minor stuff. It feels scarier for men to say that my children should be taken away from me than it does for them to take pictures of my feet. I can hold that. And yet I’m still allowed to be upset about the foot thing. Just because some things are more awful, it doesn’t mean that we stop having a conversation about the more mundane forms of violation, because the more mundane forms of it are also what we’re all experiencing all the time.TracyRight? Like the daily experience of it. I mean, unfortunately, there just is a full, rich spectrum of violation.VirginiaSo many choices, so many ways, so many body parts.TracyI do think that the extreme examples do kind of serve to normalize the less extreme, you know? And what we sort of end up putting up with, you know? VirginiaWhat would you say was a helpful turning point for you? What helped you start to step back from being in that cool girl mode? From being in that “I’m performing sex for other people” mode? What helped you access it for yourself?TracyI mean, honestly? A piece of it was porn. It’s funny because I turned to porn as a teenager online in the 90s as a source of—I felt at the time—intel about what men wanted. Like, here’s how to be what men wanted. And I tried to perform that, you know? And there were downsides to that, of course. There are some downsides. But I would also say that like in the midst of plumbing the depths of 2000s-era, early 2000s-era tube sites to understand what men “wanted,” I also started to kind of explore what I wanted.I wasn’t drawn to it from that place of self discovery, but I kind of accidentally stumbled into it because I was watching these videos. And then I was like, oh, wait, what about this thing? Like, that’s kind of interesting to me. And then, you start to kind of tumble down the rabbit hole accidentally. Women are socialized to not pursue that rabbit hole for themselves, right? So it was only in pursuing men’s desires that I felt like I was able to unlock this whole other world of fantasy and desire for myself that I wanted to explore and that I was able to get into some non-mainstream, queer indie porn that actually felt very radical and eye opening.It was this circuitous route to myself. That was just a piece, I think, of opening up my mind to the world of fantasy, which felt very freeing. Then, getting into a relationship where with a partner who I could actually be vulnerable with, was a huge piece of it. To actually feel safe enough to explore and not be performing, and to have those moments of awkwardness and that you’re not just this expert performer all the time. Like, that doesn’t lead to good sex.VirginiaNo, definitely not.There’s a part in the memoir with your then boyfriend, now husband, and you say that you wanted—you call it “a cozy life.” And I think you guys put that in your wedding vows. I think about that all the time. I think it’s so beautiful. Just like, oh right, that’s what we’re looking for. It’s not this other giant thing, the performing and the—I don’t know, there’s something about that really stuck with meTracyThat’s so interesting. I haven’t thought about that for a while. It’s really interesting, and it’s funny, because it was part of our wedding vows. VirginiaCozy means safety with another person, that felt safety with another person, right? And the way we are trained to think of sex and relationships really doesn’t prioritize women’s safety, kind of ever.TracyI mean, yeah, it’s true. There is something very particular about that word cozy—it’s different from when people say, like, “I want a comfortable life.” VirginiaYeah, that’s bougie.TracyCozy is like, I want to be wrapped in a cozy blanket on the couch with you. And feel safe and intimate and vulnerable. So thank you for reminding me of that thing that I wrote.VirginiaWell, It was really beautiful, and I think about it often, and it was kind of clarifying for me personally. And it’s not saying sex won’t be hot, you know? It’s just that you have that connection and foundation to build whatever you’re going to build.TracyRight? And I think coziness kind of is a perfect starting point for being able to experience sexiness and hotness. I think we have this cultural idea that one must have this mystery and sense of otherness in order to be able to build that kind of spice and fire. And at least in my experience, that was not ever the case. I know that other people have that experience, but for me, I never had the experience of that sense of otherness and kind of fear even, and trepidation about this other person leading to a really exciting experience. It was more like being able to get to a place of trust and vulnerability that could get you there.VirginiaAnd obviously, there are all different ways people enjoy and engage in sex. And I don’t think every sexual relationship has to be founded in any one thing, but I think when we’re talking about this transition that a lot of women go through, from participating in sex for his pleasure, for performance, for validation, to it being something you can do on your own terms, I think the coziness concept is really helpful. There’s something there.All right, well, so now you are working on a new podcast with Amanda, as we mentioned, called Dire Straights. Tracy, I’m so excited, because Heterosexuals are not okay. We are not okay, as a population.TracyJust like, literally, look at anywhere. Open up the front page of The New York Times. We’re not okay on so many levels.VirginiaSo tell us about the pod.TracySo it’s a feminist podcast about heterosexual love, sex, politics and culture, and every episode, we basically pick apart a new element of straight culture. So examples would be couples therapy, dating apps, sex strikes, monogamy, the manosphere, pronatalism, the list goes on and on. Literally this podcast could just never end. There’s too much fodder. Unfortunately, I’d love for it to end for a lack of content, but that’s not going to happen.So we look at both sex and dating alongside marriage and divorce, and the unequal realm of hetero parenting. We examine celebrities and politicians and consider them as case studies of dire heterosexuality. Tech bros, tradwives, terfs, all the whole cast of terrible hetero characters are up for examination, and our aim is to examine the worst of straight culture, but it’s also to step back and kind of try to imagine better possibilities.It’s not fatalist, it’s not nihilistic. I think we both have this sense of wanting to engage in some kind of utopian dreaming one might say, while we’re also picking apart what is so awful and terrible about the current state of heterosexual culture.So our first episode is about dark femininity influencers. I don’t know if you’ve ever encountered them online.VirginiaYes, but I hadn’t connected the dots. So I was like, oh, this is a thing.TracyThat’s that thing, yeah. That’s how I experienced it. It was, like, they just started showing up on my TikTok feed, these women who are usually white and wearing a bold red lip and smokey eyes, and they’re essentially promising to teach women how to use their sex appeal in order to manipulate straight men into better behavior. They’re selling this idea of seduction as liberation, and specifically liberation from the disappointments of the straight dating world. This idea is that by harnessing your seductive powers, you can be in control in this terrible, awful straight dating sphere.VirginiaIt’s like, if Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer wrote a dating book. I don’t know if that reference speaks to you or not.TracyI’m a little rusty on my Buffy, I have to say.VirginiaShe’s like, pale skin, red lips, black hair, and tortures men. But yeah, it’s this idea that you harness all your like, seductive powers to torture men to get what you want, which is men. Which is a husband or a boyfriend or gifts or whatever. They’re shooting for a heterosexual relationship by exerting this power over men, and so the idea is it is somehow it’s giving them more power in a patriarchal dynamic. But it doesn’t really because they end up in the same place.TracyIt’s the same place, it’s the same exact place. It feels to me, in some ways, like a corrective against the cool girl stuff that we’re talking about that kind of emerged in the 2000s, where, you know, it’s this sort of like being down for whatever, that kind of thing. These women are kind of saying, you’re not going to sleep with him on the first date. You’re going to make him work for it, you know? And so there’s a sense of like, I’m in control, because I’m not giving it away for free. It plays into all these awful ideas about women and sex and power. But it is ultimately ending up in the same place, and it is just ultimately about getting a man, keeping a man. And so, you know, how different is it really? I don’t think it is.VirginiaI mean, it’s not. It’s the same rules and conversations that Charlotte’s having in the first season of Sex in the City, which is ancient at this point. How are we still here? Are we still here?TracyWe’re just inventing new aesthetics to kind of repackage these very old, retro, sexist ideas, you know?VirginiaI also think it’s really interesting and helpful that you are interrogating straight culture as someone inside a heterosexual marriage. I’ve written about my own divorce, my critiques of marriage, and it triggers great conversations, but it always triggers a very uncomfortable response from a lot of married women who don’t really want to go there, don’t really want to pick up the rocks and look underneath it because it’s too scary. It makes sense. And I’m wondering how you think about that piece, and how that’s working for you.Is (Heterosexual) Marriage A Diet?TracyI think it’s very destabilizing for a lot of women in straight marriages and just straight relationships, period, to consider these things. I think it was over a year ago now that I wrote this piece about trying to coin this term hetero-exceptionalism in response to the backlash that I was seeing to the divorce memoir boom, where women reviewers, but also just people on Twitter or wherever, were kind of pointing at these authors and being like, well, I don’t know what’s wrong with you because my marriage is great.VirginiaThe Emily Gould piece in New York.TracyThere’s this sense of like, oh, well, either I chose a good man or I know how to conduct a healthy relationship.VirginiaI’m willing to put in the work.TracyGotta put in the work. You will love our next episode about couples therapy, because we talk about this concept of putting in the work, and the idea that marriage is work, and that if you’re not doing the work you’re lazy. You’re failing, the whole project of it.VirginiaThank you for unpacking that incredibly toxic myth! It really keeps women trapped in “I just have to keep working harder.”TracyWhich I think totally relates to this, the response to the divorce memoirs we’re getting from people and the discomfort of when women raise these issues in hetero relationships that are not individual. Like, yes, we all feel that our relationship issues are special and unique. But they all relate to these broader systemic factors.I think that is really, really, really uncomfortable to acknowledge. Because I think even if you’re reasonably happy in your hetero relationship, I think if you start to look at the way that your even more minor dissatisfactions connect to these bigger dissatisfactions that women are writing about that’s all part of this experience of love in patriarchy that it doesn’t feel good. That feels terrible. So I totally understand that.In the same way that we’re sold this idea of trying to find the one and that whole romantic fantasy, I think we’re also sold this idea of trying to achieve romantically within these patriarchal constraints. So it’s like, well, I found the good one. I found the unicorn man who checks all the boxes and I did my work and so I’m in a happy marriage.Virginia“I’m allowed to be heterosexual because I’m doing it right.” That’s feeling uncomfortably familiar, to be honest. You think you’re going to pull the thread, and you realize you’ll rip it all out.TracyThe thing is that a lot of people should be pulling the thread, and a lot of lives should be unraveling, you know? I think that’s the uncomfortable truth, right? I totally get the resistance to it. But on the other side of it, I think there are obviously, clearly, a lot of women who are wanting to look at it, and who do want to have these conversations.VirginiaIt sounds like this is what you’re trying to chart. There has to be a middle path where it’s not this defensive stance of, oh, I found the one good one. And we’re equal partners. It’s okay, but a relationship where we can both look at this, we can both acknowledge the larger systemic issues and how they’re showing up here, and we can work through it and it’s not perfect, because it is love in patriarchy, but it can still be valuable. There has to be this third option, right? Please tell me you’re living the third option, Tracy.TracyI mean, I do believe that I am but I also hesitate to put any man or any relationship on a pedestal. What I’ll say is that to me, it feels so utterly essential in my relationship to acknowledge the ways that our relationship is touched by patriarchy, because all relationships are touched by patriarchy, right? And to not fantasize about us somehow standing outside of it, but also to be having constant ongoing conversations within my relationship where we are mutually critiquing patriarchy and the way that it touches us and the way that it touches the relationships of people we know, you know? I think that’s part of why I think I’m able to do this podcast critiquing heterosexuality from within heterosexuality is because my partner showed up to the relationship with his own prior political convictions and feminist awareness. I wasn’t having to be like, here’s what feminism is and, here’s what invisible labor is, and the mental load and all that stuff. He got it, and so we’re able to have a mutual shared critique, and that feels very important.VirginiaThat’s awesome to know exists, and that you’re able to figure that out without it being such hard work. But where does that leave women who are like, oh yeah, my partner doesn’t have that shared knowledge? Like, I would be starting the education process from zero and encountering many resistances to it. And therein is the discomfort, I think.TracyI mean, and that is the discomfort of heterosexuality. It’s in this culture, because that is the reality is there are not a ton of men who have voluntarily taken women’s studies courses in college and have the basic background for this kind of stuff. It’s a really high bar and there is this feeling of what are you going to do? Are you going to hold out for the guy who did do that? Or are you going to try to work with him to get there? And I think that’s fine, but I think what’s essential is are you both working to get there, or are you pulling him along?VirginiaYeah, that’s the core of it.I think just in general, reorienting our lives to where our romantic relationships are really important, but so are our friendships. So is our community. I think that’s something that a lot of us, especially us in the post-divorce club are looking at. I think one of the great failings of heterosexual marriage is how it silos women into these little pods of the nuclear family and keeps us from the larger community.TracyTotally. I really do believe that the way that our lives are structured, this hetero monogamous, nuclear familydom, it works against these hetero unions so much. Which is so funny, because so much of this is constructed to try to protect them. But I actually think that it undermines them so deeply and drastically. And that we could have much richer and more vibrant, supportive, communal lives that made these romantic unions like less fragile and fraught.VirginiaBecause you aren’t needing one person to meet every single one of your needs, you aren’t needing this one thing to be your whole life.TracyWe put all of the pressure on the nuclear household for the cooking, the cleaning, the childcare, all of that. That is an impossible setup. It is a setup for failure. There’s I wish I could quote the writer, but I love this quote about marriage and the nuclear family being capitalism’s pressure cooker. If you think about it in those terms, it’s like, this is absurd. Of course, so many people are struggling.VirginiaIt was never going to work. It was never going to work for women anyway, for sure.Well, I’m so excited for folks to discover the new podcast. It’s amazing, and I’m just thrilled you guys are diving into all of this. It’s such an important space to be having these conversations. So thank you.TracyThank you! I’m very excited about it, and it does, unfortunately, feel very timely.ButterTracyI definitely do have Butter. And this is so on topic to what we’ve been discussing. This book of essays titled Love in Exile by Shon Faye. It is a brilliant collection of essays about love, where she really looks at the problem of love and the search for love as a collective instead of individual problem. It is so good. It’s one of my favorite books that I’ve read in the last five years.She basically argues that the heteronormative couple privatizes the love and care and intimacy that we all deserve. But that we’re deprived of in this late capitalist hellscape, and so she sees the love that so many of us are deprived of as not a personal failure, but a failure of capitalism and community and the growing cruelty of our world. It’s just such a tremendous shift of perspective, I think, when it comes to thinking about love and the search for love and that longing and lack of it that so many people experience.VirginiaOh my gosh, that sounds amazing. I can’t wait to read it. Adding to cart right now, that is a great Butter. Thank you.Well, my Butter is, I don’t know if you can see what I’m wearing, Tracy, but it is the friendship bracelet you sent me when you sent me your copy of Want Me.TracyDo you know that I literally just last night was like, oh, I’m going on the podcast tomorrow, I wonder if she still has that friendship bracelet.VirginiaI’m wearing the one you sent me, which says Utopia IRL, which I love. And then I’m wearing one that says “Fuck the Patriarchy,” which was made by one of my 11 year old’s best friends for me. So the 10 year old girls are going to be all right, because they’re doing that.TracyThat’s amazing.VirginiaI wear them frequently. They go with many outfits, so they’re just a real go-to accessory of mine. My seven year old the other day was reading them and was so delighted. And now, when she’s at her dad’s and we text, she’ll randomly text me, “fuck the patriarchy,” just as a little I love you text. And I’m like, alright, I’m doing okay here.TracyYou’re like, that’s my love language. Thank you.VirginiaSo anyway, really, my Butter is just for friendship bracelets and also mailing them to people, because that was so sweet that you did that.TracyCan I mention though? Can I admit that I literally told you that I was going to send you that friendship bracelet, and I made it, I put in an envelope, and it literally sat by my front door for a full year.VirginiaI think that makes me love it even more, because it was a year. If you had been able to get it out the door in a timely fashion, it would have made you less relatable to me.That it took a full year that feels right. And I was just as delighted to receive it a year later.TracyIt was a surprise. I was like, you probably forgot that.VirginiaI had.TracyI emailed about it and that we had an inside joke about it, because it had been a year.VirginiaI did, but then I was like, oh yeah!TracyYou know what? I think it’s a testament to you and how you come off that I like felt comfortable sending it a year later and just being like, fuck it, she’ll be fine with it.VirginiaYes, it was great. Anyway, my recommendation is send someone a friendship bracelet by which I mean put it in an envelope by your front door for the next year. Why not? It’s a great thing to do.So yes, Tracy, this was so much fun. Thank you for being here. Tell folks where we can follow you support your work, all the things.TracyYou can find the Dire Straights podcast at direstraightspod.com. And you can find my weekly newsletter about sex, feminism, pop culture at Tracyclarkflory.substack.com and you can find me on Instagram at Tracy Clark-Flory.VirginiaAmazing. We’ll link to all of that. Thank you for being here.TracyThanks so much for having me.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 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!We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for… part 2 of our 200th episode!We are continuing to revisit favorite moments from the podcast archives. Coming up:🔥We have feelings about aging!🔥What’s our current take on heterosexual marriage?🔥How do you set boundaries when you’re in eating disorder recovery but your partner is…on a diet?And so much more!This newsletter contains affiliate links, which means if you buy something we suggest, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only ever recommend things we love and use ourselves!Episode 201 TranscriptCorinneOkay, so here’s the first question that I picked, from a mailbag episode we ran in January 2023:Is It Ever Okay to Eat at Chick-fil-A?What are your personal philosophies on aging, and are you conflicted about it in any sense?VirginiaI feel firmly that I am someone who was born to be an older person. I think my whole life, I have been working towards being someone in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, who mostly stays in and does puzzles and has plans.And I think the story I kicked this off with about my one night of tequila sidewalk lying down illustrates how bad I was at being a fun young person, and I’m so glad. I’m so glad I don’t have to be fun and young anymore.CorinneWow, there’s nothing you’re conflicted about? Like, how do you feel about gray hair?VirginiaI actually feel fine about gray hair.CorinneDo you have any?VirginiaOkay, here is the thing about me and gray hair, I don’t have a lot. I do have several. I am not actively trying to dye them, but I do get highlights, and my very talented hair stylist often places the highlights in ways that distract the gray hairs. Doesn’t cover them completely, but yes. And because I made a self care decision to outsource my hair to her, like about a decade ago, and I just do whatever she wants to do with my hair, because I’m always happy with it. And that way I don’t get, like, worked up about what should I do with my hair? I haven’t yet said to her, like, we don’t have to actively cover the grays, but, like, I haven’t started not dying it, is what I’m saying, because I’m happy with how it looks. But it’s not because I’m happy it’s covered my grays. It’s just that I don’t want to think about my hair that much, yeah. But as I get more grays, I will not be trying to hide them. Am I conflicted about aging? When does it come up for me?CorinneSagging face? Menopause?VirginiaSagging face, I will admit to feelings about face sagging sometimes. I do have a lot more chin hair in my 40s. So much more chin hair. And managing that is a hobby I didn’t really want. So that one sure. Menopause, I don’t even know. I mean, my relationship with my menstrual health is like I’m suppressing it all with an IUD for as long as possible. So I don’t know. Menopause could be a gift. It could be a nightmare. I have no idea, but what’s going on currently isn’t great.it’s not like I’m gonna be losing out on some beautiful experience of menstruation. So yeah, mostly I just love having to give fewer fucks about stuff.But yeah, what about you? You sound a little more conflicted. And we should say I’m older. I’m several years older.CorinneNot by much.VirginiaI’m going to be 42 in a few months.CorinneI’m 37 when you listen to this podcast. If I did the math right.I always thought that I wouldn’t care, and then when I started getting gray hairs, I was like, Oh, I do care. And I have the color of hair that you can’t really see them unless you’re like, up close. But yeah, I just was like, Oh, I feel sad that I’m gonna have different hair in like, a few years. I just feel like tI, like, identify with how my hair looks. But yeah, I don’t know that I will start, like, dyeing it because it seems like a lot of work and money. I think I feel like low key sad about it, but also, like I do feel also good about still being alive and giving fewer fucks.VirginiaI mean, I think there’s a lot of ways in which I haven’t had to contend with a lot of ageism yet. Because I work from home, I’m not in an office where I think it would be dealing with ageism much more concretely on a daily basis. I think that that would be harder and may become harder. I’m at this point like mostly when I sort of suddenly realized that my age or my weight, either one, has rendered me invisible, like to a man or something. I’m usually like, amused, slash, fine with it, like, annoyed sometimes, but also like, Oh, God, are you really gonna be this cliche?But I mean, again, there’s like, privilege there. My job is not hinging on how people perceive my age yet. Obviously, the idea of, like, adding more oppression is not, like, exciting, and, you know, the idea of dying one day isn’t like, a cheery thought. But, God. I don’t miss my 20s at all.CorinneDon’t miss lying on the sidewalk?VirginiaIt was one night. I can’t underscore that enough.CorinneYou’re never going to live that downCorinneSo I wanted to revisit this one, because when we recorded this, we were merely 37 and 42. And now I’m 39 and you’re 44! And we were talking about aging. We have aged. Just curious if we feel the same way or or what?VirginiaWell, first of all, I just got really excited that you’re turning 40 next year, and I want to know what we’re doing for that.CorinneOh God, I’m already having so much anticipatory anxiety about what I should do.VirginiaI’m so excited. It’s a great birthday. I had my 40th birthday during COVID. Don’t necessarily recommend that, but it’s a good birthday.I think my feelings are still very similar. I am still someone who was always born to be middle aged or elderly. I still enjoy an early bedtime. I like puzzles. I like gardening. I am extremely comfortable being in my 40s. I feel just delighted by it all the time. I feel so glad that I feel no pressure to be young and cool. That sounds exhausting.CorinneWell, I wanted to bring this up because I feel like I’ve heard you mention in some recent episodes, like the one with Sarai Walker—you were like, “I feel rage sometimes about getting older and not getting noticed or being ignored.”"I've Thought About Unleashing Jennifer on MAGA."VirginiaOh, so now you’re calling me out because I was like, I love being older?CorinneI didn’t mean it to be a call out! I just thought, oh, maybe this is something where your opinion has changed. Because I originally had much more mixed feelings about aging as a mere 37 year old.VirginiaYes, what was your deal? You were an infant!Though I actually think that’s normal. I think a lot of times, aging is something where we fear it coming. We get really worked up in advance, and then you do it. And you’re like, “Oh, right, I’m still the same person.”CorinneThat’s deep. That’s what anxiety is!VirginiaIt’s actually not that deep. That’s just what that is.So, my feelings about the stage of my life I’m in are the same, which are positive. This season of life is a great season compared to previous seasons.My feelings about how my aging is perceived by the world, yes, I think are a little more complicated now. Like, when I was like, “I feel great about gray hair. I mean, yeah, I don’t have any, but I would be fine with having it.” I think that’s still true, but I continue to not say, “Hey, let’s stop covering up my grays!” I have yet to be like, you know what? I want to see what my hair is doing!One change we talked about though: I mentioned my chin hair, and the hobby of managing my chin hair, and I did finally, a few months ago, do laser hair removal.CorinneWait! Why have you not written an essay about this?VirginiaI don’t know! Okay, this is kind of breaking news? I’ve just finished my eighth session or something.CorinneWow! Is it so painful?VirginiaOkay, I really probably should write an essay.CorinneYeah, maybe save it for the essay? I just have so many questions.VirginiaThe lip is crazy painful. With the lip, you tear up and want to die for a second, painful. The chin, not so bad. And I have to do my jowls, my whole beard area.Anyway, so, I guess that is me participating in beauty labor to resist aging. Because my facial hair increased with age, and I didn’t like it and I took it down. I would also say for me, it feels a little gender affirming?CorinneIt’s gender affirming care.VirginiaThank you. I don’t know if that’s problematic to say, as a cis woman?CorinneI think it’s actually really good to normalize cis people also participating in gender affirming care.VirginiaOkay, well, I am for sure participating in gender affirming care then, with my laser hair removal. And it’s the kind of thing that I didn’t do for so long. Even though it is painful and it is expensive, too, so those are reasons not to do it, of course. But it’s briefly painful, and then it removes this daily stress from my life because I’m not every morning like, “Oh, do I have to shave? What am I doing with my chin hair?”So that’s one change. I did decide this is one aspect of visible aging I didn’t like. And I decided to do something about. I still have yet to do anything like Botox. I have yet to really adopt a skincare routine of any kind besides sunscreen. So otherwise I feel the same. What about you? Any aesthetic-related aging differences?CorinneI also haven’t done anything aesthetic. I have done no injectables.VirginiaWell, we have fat privilege so we don’t wrinkle as much.CorinneI definitely have wrinkles.VirginiaNot as much as if you were thin, Corinne. I am telling you. That famous French actress always said, “You choose between your ass and your face.” And I think we’ve chosen our asses.CorinneThe thing I’ve been thinking about aging lately is how, if you’re a certain type of person who grows up being precocious in some way? Like you’re smart, and you’re a young, smart person, and then as you get older, you’re kind of like, wait now, I’m just an average old person.VirginiaYou can be a smart old person!CorinneBut I’m never going to be like a 30 under 30.VirginiaYes. Your prodigy days are behind you.CorinneSometimes it’s just weird to not be a young person. Like, oh yeah, I’m just a middle-aged person on TikTok. It’s not a great feeling all the time. But that’s where I am at!VirginiaI don’t know. I find that sort of relaxing. I think I felt a lot of pressure to be some kind of very special young person. I like that I no longer feel like I have to deliver some degree of unprecedented excellence at all times.CorinneI think the self-consciousness of trying to be a young, interesting, smart person probably kept me from actually making TikToks or whatever.VirginiaAnd now you do make TikToks!CorinneBecause I don’t fucking care!VirginiaYeah, you’re liberated!CorinneI mean, I wouldn’t go that far, but.VirginiaYou’re comfortable with middle-aged mediocrity. We are sitting in our unremarkable era. We are comfortable just existing.I do feel a lot more comfortable just existing than I did when I was young. I don’t know, people might feel differently. I’m sure it relates a lot to how much you’ve been able to go after things you want to do in your life, so I don’t want to downplay that struggle. I feel less ambitious than I was in my 20s, for sure, which is interesting.Anne Helen Petersen writes about the portal and how our 40s is often this time of huge ambition for women. And I’m like,Did I just go too hard?I don’t know or maybe it’s still coming! But right now, I’m good just coasting along.CorinneFor me, the way I think about it is kind of about values. It makes sense that some women or people in their 40s would be like, “I’m going for it.” Like, I’ve realized I really want to do this! Whatever “this” is. And other people are like, “Oh, I realize I actually really value spending time with people and gardening.”VirginiaYes! I think that is the shift. I’m like, I want to enjoy my weekends. Leisure time matters more than when I was younger. When it was kind of always like, well, couldn’t you be working harder?Well, I think we sound very evolved now! Good for us.Is "Mom Rage" Actually "Marriage Rage?"I decided to go back to some of our guest interviews because, I mean, Corinne and I are really smart, as just referenced, especially in our youth. But we have so many brilliant guests on the show!So this is a clip from my interview with lyz, which ran in February 2024 when we were celebrating her bookThis American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life:LyzI was talking to a friend the other day who was like,my job is just so hard to do with three kids, and so I’m really angry at my job. And I was like, is it hard for your husband to do his job with three kids. Why? Why is it not hard for him? And like, it’s easier to take that rage and channel it to things that we cannot change. Because I think we’re really afraid of what it would look like, like what that other side would look like. I think deep down inside, we know what’s gonna break our relationships. Let’s be mad at what deserves our rage! It’s this system that’s oppressing us. Like it’s not your job because your partner has a job and he can do it. Get mad at the person who’s not wiping the counters. Andit’s exhausting, right? You’re like, Oh, I love him. OKAY.VirginiaMm, I love you so much. I mean, we get that people love their husbands.LyzI mean, do we?VirginiaWe hear you.LyzIt’s a concept that intellectually I grasp.VirginiaYes, right? We’re just suggesting that building your entire life’s happiness based on the premise of romantic love is a shaky business.LyzIt’s a shaky business at best. And then people will say like, well, he is a good man, and I’ll never find anything better.One of the reasons I wanted to write this book is to say you are that something better. And even if you are in a good relationship, you have to be that something better, because, again, you do not know what is going to happen, right? Like he could Charles Lindbergh you! And like, have a second family in Germany. Or, God forbid, die in a car accident, right?So, like, we have to find ways to center our happiness. And women are not taught to center our happiness. We are taught that life is miserable and that our happiness is frivolous and that we have to throw ourselves onto the pyre of marriage and motherhood. And I’m saying, Take yourself down off that cross, because we need the wood.VirginiaI picked this because I think we ran this interview when I was—well, I was divorced. I mean, I’m still divorced. But I was more newly divorced. And I still stand by everything we talked about here. I actually really agree with it. But I am interested to note that I feel a little less… militant about some of it, I guess?I think the core of what she’s saying—that women need to center our own happiness and we don’t need to sacrifice ourselves for marriage and motherhood—that 1,000 percent. I feel in my bones to be this truth that I think so many women are grappling with now.But I will say, I think we were like, “Can anyone love a husband?” in a way that now I’m a little more like, I get that people do love men.CorinneNow that you’re loving another man?VirginiaYeah, that’s probably a factor here. I don’t know. I’m curious for your take on this.CorinneI mean, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think as time passes, our sometimes militant views soften and evolve. I also think, as someone who has never been married, I can really see both sides. I can completely see why women would be enraged at the institution of marriage, and I can understand why you could come back around to it, you know?VirginiaYeah. This isn’t any kind of announcement, people! I’m still pretty angry at the institution of marriage. I want to be really clear about that. I do think she’s articulating something when she says, “I think deep down inside, we know it’s going to break our relationships to name our anger.” I think that is really something I see so often, especially with heterosexual married women.And I do think that it’s important that we still keep pushing women to name that. Even if a lot of marriages don’t survive that pressure. Those aren’t the relationships that maybe should survive, is where I land.But I think I’m more interested now in the question of, how can we make something different? What does it look like to be in a relationship that doesn’t replicate all these same systems of oppression? Is that possible? I’m a little more curious about the possibilities now, I think.CorinneI think it’s also the difference between being mad at one specific man that you’re married to versus the institutions that uphold these systems.VirginiaI do consistently look at these relationships all around me, and think, “This man is choosing to participate in something that’s clearly not equitable.” Sir. How are you okay with that?I mean, I get we all participate in inequitable systems. Any time I buy fast fashion I’m participating in someone’s exploitation. But to live in the same house as the person being exploited by your participation in a system? It does just really stun me from time to time that that happens.So I still agree with it, but I am a little more like… “What else could this look like?” And I think there’s a lot to be learned from people who are in relationships that are not traditional heterosexual marriages. So I’m learning a lot from that."This Was Before It Was Normal for Makeup to Give You New Skin."CorinneThis next one is about how relationships intersect with diet culture. It’s from another mailbag episode, which also ran in February 2023.I’m curious about navigating anti diet culture and fat acceptance with a partner—in this case, he’s male and I’m female—who still subscribes to a baseline of healthy eating and exercise that is quite triggering for me. I’m in a small to medium fat body and in recovery from atypical anorexia and exercise disorder. I’ve been invested in anti-diet and fat acceptance for about six years now.But my husband, though encouraging of my mental stability and happiness, still eats less than me, has some generalized rules about when to eat and what to eat. For example, if you have pizza one night, you can’t have pasta the next night. And he does some form of exercise—stationary cycling, yoga, walks most days. I’m in the process of separating from the web of exercise that has plagued me for the last 20 at least years, and what that looks like for me is canceling all or most forms of regular exercise, even neighborhood walks, and letting the space settle before I decide what if anything I would like to do in that arena.Basically, I’m just asking what your experience of navigating all this has been like while being with a partner who has been with you before, through and after the shift from diet obsessed to ditching diet mentality. What did / does this look like for you? And any tips you can share on keeping on with figuring out your way of doing things while they keep doing their thing?VirginiaOh, this is such a good question. First, I just want to say congratulations on being in recovery and doing this really, really hard work. And I love that you are giving yourself space from exercise and taking care of yourself, that’s amazing.I have a thing I want your husband to read. It is a piece that ran on autostraddle. I linked to it recently. Do you know what I’m talking about?CorinneYes. The piece is called You Fat-Shamed Your Beautiful Girlfriend and the author is Heather Hogan.VirginiaI mean Heather, chef’s kiss, all of this. It’s perfection. I want you to share this piece with your husband, because Heather articulates so perfectly the ways in which a partner can harm a partner over this issue. Like the ways in which your husband may not realize or be reckoning with his own fat bias, his own stuff, and like how it’s showing up in your relationship and how unfair that is for you.Heather talks so well about how loving a person is something we do regardless of what’s happening with their body. If you can’t stand with your partner through body changes, how are you going to stand with them through real crises, like other health issues or job loss, depression, etc, you know?And it’s just a perfect piece for kind of summing up what I want your husband to be doing for you, which it sounds like maybe he’s not quite there.And I, you know, I don’t want to, like, shame him for that, like we’re all part of this whole situation. But you were doing this really, real work, and it is valid to say to your partner, your partner, I need you to do some work, too.CorinneI don’t even know where to start. Like, I feel like my experience has generally been that it’s really hard to get people on board if they’re not and like, how it’s like, not always possible to convince someone.VirginiaYeah, and it sounds like he’s got kind of his own stuff, right? I mean, he’s got a lot of rules about what he eats. Yeah, he’s pretty religious about his exercise habits. And, yeah, I am curious if some of that’s triggering for this question writer.CorinneYeah. I mean, I think this person says it’s triggering.VirginiaYeah, yeah.CorinneAnd then it’s like, have you had that conversation with him? Does he know that it’s, actively upsetting for you?VirginiaHow much have you communicated this with him, and what responses are you getting? But I do think just generally being able to radically communicate where you are with this, what you need, not feel bad about stating those needs. That kind of honesty is the only way through and I think. Even if it may lead to some really hard conversations, because he’s in a very different place than it sounds like you are.CorinneYeah, do you have other places that you recommend that people start if they’re trying to get a partner on board?VirginiaThe fact that you have a diagnosis and you’re in recovery, it just says to me that this is so serious and you should be on board with your recovery.So maybe it’s a question of like, I really appreciate how much you support this in the big picture sense, but in our day to day lives, there are ways that your behavior creates something I have to deal with, you know? And I just feel like, if I knew that some daily routine of mine was causing harm to my partner, I would want to know that so I could assess whether I needed to maintain that routine, you know? And most likely, if I love this partner and am supporting their recovery, I do not need to maintain that routine.But if that’s hard for me to give up, then that suggests that’s some stuff I have to look at. Because I would argue that your partner’s mental health is more important than you not eating pizza and pasta two nights in a row. Yeah, it sounds like a tricky one. We’re sending you a lot of love, and I hope that this leads to some good conversations for you guys.CorinneSo since we answered this question, you’ve had experiences navigating body liberation with a new person. And I was just curious if you had any tips or tricks or different changes of opinions on this?VirginiaI mean, I really stand by all our advice here.If you’re partnered with someone who’s in recovery from eating disorders, or even just trying to divest from the stuff, it’s really not okay to put your own diet stuff on them. So I think everything we said about like you need to set boundaries, he needs to be more supportive of all of this, I totally stand by.I think because I put such strong barriers up in my dating profile from the get-go, this has been a boundary that’s been easy to hold, because the people that gravitated towards me were people who are on the same page about this for the most part.I did go on one date with a guy—not my current boyfriend. Just a one date guy. Where I thought we’d had conversations about this over text… and this is Corinne’s advice forever. Don’t get too hung up on text! But I thought we’d have conversations over text that showed we were really on the same page. And then when we went to dinner, it was very clear that there were a lot of foods he didn’t eat. And he sort of alluded to health reasons, but I don’t know if it was truly health. It was like… vague health things. It was suddenly very clear that this was someone who was not at all comfortable in their own body. And that food was a major source of stress, and something he was putting a lot of energy towards managing.And, I mean, there’s a reason there was only one date there. I was like, “I can’t take that on.” I don’t want to say it’s a deal breaker, but… I now am with someone who loves food as much as I do, and sharing food together is a major source of joy and delight. We’re both extremely not picky eaters who like to cook together and it’s just so fun. So it would be really hard for me to not have that with someone again.What about you? Any food stuff coming up in your dating life?CorinneI was trying to think about that. I mean, I’m not dating right now. I was thinking in the past, I want to say five years, um, I’ve only dated very briefly someone who wasn’t fat. And I did have a conversation with them that was just like, “Have you ever dated a fat person? Do you have any questions?”I’ve never really set boundaries, like, “I will absolutely not talk about this or not do that.” But yeah, I do think dating fat people kind of establishes some overlap?VirginiaAlthough, I mean, the bad date was with a fat guy. Alas.CorinneFor me, the dread around those topics is less around food and more around, I hate trying to navigate seating stuff. Like, if we’re like, where are we going to meet? I’m like, is it going to be somewhere comfortable? I don’t want to sit in a booth—that kind of stuff.VirginiaOh, totally. And needing a partner who’s going to get that sort of instinctively and know how to navigate that.CorinneYeah, yeah. And I find having to explain that and have that conversation just really unpleasant.VirginiaYes. That sucks. That should be more something people think of and anticipate.CorinneYeah, even with friends. Just not my favorite.VirginiaValid.ButterCorinneI have a special future Butter. We’re recording this in the past, but this episode is coming out on July 10th. And today is the day thatLena Dunham’snew showcomes out!VirginiaOooh, that’s exciting!CorinneAnd my Butter — because nobody is sending me screeners for that — is “Girls.” I love to watch “Girls.” I think that show has really held up in a way that a lot of comedies of the past have not. I also think at the time, for whatever reason, people didn’t think it was as funny as it is? It’s really funny.VirginiaI never watched it all the way through! I loved the first season and then I lost track of it.CorinneOh my God.VirginiaYeah, alright, you’re making me want to revisit it! I mean, if I’m still watching “And Just Like That,” which is an absolute train wreck.CorinneIt’s way better than “And Just Like That.”VirginiaAnd Lena Dunham is just a brilliant human. I’m excited for her new show, which I didn’t even know about! Hello, Hollywood, we would cover that.CorinneWell in the meantime, I recommend revisiting “Girls.” It’s become popular again on TikTok.VirginiaOh Gen Z found it? Oh the kids today.CorinneYeah. Still not kid-friendly, I would say!VirginiaYeah, my middle schooler and I are finishing up Ted Lasso right now. Which is not not raunchy! But overall more wholesome.Corinne“Girls” deals with some dark topics.VirginiaIt goes there! Alright, well my Butter is the dress I’m wearing nonstop, because it’s been 100 degrees all week. This was very much inspired by your recent Big Undies newsletter about clothes that barely touch you, for when it’s very hot but you want coverage. And I shopped many of those links but then I ended up over on Old Navy…and yes this is a fast fashion rec and we said we weren’t going to do those anymore! But I am going to really hope this one holds up. It is a Butter of the moment. I hope it will be a long-term Butter. We will see when we review the year’s Butters.Clothes That Barely Touch YouBut it’s just a very light, crinkly fabric. Really breezy. It’s very inexpensive, I think I paid $30. A great pool cover-up. You could dress it up. And it goes up to 4X and I had to size down, so I think it’s a very size-inclusive 4X.CorinneYeah. It’s a great color.VirginiaIt’s a very fun red. There’s also a more muted olive green and a lavender. And I will also say, I’ve been getting tons of questions about what bra to wear with it, because the straps narrow at the top. And I just let my bra be visible. So my other Butter is not worrying about bra straps. I’m fine with visible bra straps. It’s 100 degrees outside. And if the jig is up, because people were otherwise assuming I didn’t wear a bra, like…I’m okay dissuading them of that fantasy. So I wear one that’s the same color as the dress and don’t care about it.CorinneI feel like a bathing suit top could be fun. In a contrasting color.VirginiaYes! Well, thank you all for being here for 200 episodes! We are so grateful. We love making this podcast for you.We want to hear what you want to hear more of in the coming months. And we’re going to keep doing it. Let’s do another 200, Corinne!CorinneWow.VirginiaCorinne is not committing.CorinneOh, I’m committing! I’m just like…Wow.VirginiaCan you imagine we’re at 500 episodes? We’ll be so, so much older and wiser! Maybe I’ll have embraced my gray hair by then, who knows?CorinneOr fully rejected it.VirginiaIt could go either way. Stay tuned.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 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!We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for your July Indulgence Gospel!And… it’s our 200th episode! To celebrate, we’re making today’s Indulgence Gospel free to everyone and offering a flash sale — 20% off to celebrate 200 episodes!This newsletter contains affiliate links, which means if you buy something we suggest, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only ever recommend things we love and use ourselves! One Good ThingNow that it’s summer, ice cream is a daily state of being here and I’ve been using my East Fork ice cream bowls constantly (they are also the perfect size for cherries and for many of your favorite snacks). If you are also an East Fork disciple, heads up that their annual Seconds Sale starts today! This is where they sell pots that are slightly imperfect but still 100 percent functional and food safe for 30-40% off. And yes, there are a lot of cute ice cream bowls. PS. You can always listen to our episodes right here in your email, where you’ll also receive full transcripts (edited and condensed for clarity). But please also follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and/or Pocket Casts!Episode 200 TranscriptCorinne200! Can you believe it?VirginiaI can and I cannot. It’s one of those things where I feel like we’ve always been making the podcast, but also 200 feels like so many.CorinneI went back through, to look at some old episodes. And I was like, you know, I kind of remember all of them. I was like, surely there are some I have forgotten. But yeah, kind of not.VirginiaWhen I was looking back at the old episodes, it was like visiting old friends. I was like, I know you guys. We’re cool.CorinneIf you write into us with a question and we answer it, it really sticks with us!VirginiaWe continue to think about you. And would like updates, honestly. We don’t always get them, so putting that out there. We’d like to know.CorinneTo celebrate, we have a special two part episode for you. We’re picking favorite moments from the archives to revisit, to see if our feelings and opinions have changed.VirginiaAlright, I decided to look back at our many excellent guest conversations and pull out some favorites. First up, I thought I’d look back at our work ultra-processed foods since it is such an annoyingly evergreen topic. We did a great pair of episodes with Laura Thomas, PhD, who writes “Can I Have Another Snack?” which ran in July 2023. Here is a little excerpt from the first conversation.VirginiaIt feels like it’s important to say very clearly that processed is not synonymous with has no nutrition, and that actually processing foods is a good thing to do in order to eat, right?LauraYeah, well, all forms of cooking are a process, right?So unless you like want to go down some raw vegan path, you can’t really avoid processing your food to some extent.Now, advocates of NOVA, I think, would say that’s a bit of a red herring, because what we’re actually talking about is this additional level of processing, this ultra processing sort of phenomenon.But even within that category, I think there are merits to processing–even Ultra processing–our foods. One of the things that happens when we process food is we extend the shelf life of it, and that means that we are wasting less food overall, which I think we would all agree is probably a helpful thing.But industrial food processing, it reduces foodborne pathogens. It reduces microbes that would spoil food and make things like oils turn rancid faster. It also significantly cuts down on the time and labor that it requires to cook a meal. And I think that’s for me as a parent, and I know for you as well, like, that’s huge.VirginiaIt’s really everything, honestly. For me personally. Nothing should be everything for everybody, but limiting the amount of time I spend cooking dinner is the thing that enables me to eat dinner with my family at night.LauraBut it’s not just like super privileged white women that have a lot of you know nutrition knowledge, right, that benefit from ultra processed foods. I’m also thinking about kids with feeding disorders that would struggle to get all the nutrition that they need without processed foods. I’m thinking about elderly or disabled people who can maintain a level of independence because they can quickly cook some pasta and throw an ultra processed jar of pasta sauce on that and have a nourishing meal. I’m thinking about pregnant people who otherwise might not be able to stomach eating because of morning sickness and nausea, which we know lasts forever, not just morning, right?So there are so many groups of people that benefit from ultra processed foods, and they just seem to be missing entirely from the conversation around these foods.VirginiaSo often there’s this pressure of like, we have to just get poor people cooking more and get them cooking more. And it’s like, okay, but if you live in a shelter, you don’t have a kitchen. If you are crashing on a couch with family member, you know, in a house with lots of different people, and it’s not easy for you to get time in the kitchen. There’s so many different scenarios where cooking is not a practical solution, and having greater shelf stability is very important.LauraBut it also says a lot about where we place our values, right? And who is making decisions about where we cook our values? Because it’s not everyone’s value system to spend more time cooking from scratch and buying fresh ingredients and spending more time in the kitchen.VirginiaI picked this clip because I think Laura is summing up so many important pieces of this conversation that I just continue to see nowhere in the mainstream media discourse around ultra-processed foods. Like the fact that they are useful and convenient. And convenience is not a moral failing. I don’t know where we decided food should be inconvenient to be valuable and healthy? But it seems like that’s a thing that we believe.CorinneI know Maintenance Phase just did an ultra processed food episode. I listened to that.VirginiaOh, it’s excellent. CorinneAnd both they and you and Laura got into the way that “processed” is just such a moving target. It means so many different things.VirginiaIt means literally anything.CorinneAnd also nothing.VirginiaYes, when I say this is missing from the discourse, I don’t mean Maintenance Phase, who I think we’re very much in conversation with. As Mike and Aubrey kept discussing on their episode—I think Laura says some of this, too—depending whose classification system you go by, honey is ultra-processed or it’s not ultra-processed. Foods are moving categories all the time.And as Aubrey said: Really what it comes down to is they’re categorizing foods so that the ones that “people who make less money than you buy” are bad. And I was like, yep, there it is. This is really classism and racism and all the other isms to say let’s demonize these foods that people rely on. Which is not to say we shouldn’t improve the overall quality of food in the food system! But doing it through this policing of consumer habits just will never not make me furious.CorinneReally feels like this hasn’t gotten better since the episode aired two years ago? VirginiaIf anything, I think it has intensified. I think RFK and MAHA has really put this one in their crosshairs, and it’s just getting worse and worse. It’s really maddening, because we’re just not having any of the real conversations we need to have about how to improve food quality in this country or anywhere.CorinneWhat a bummer. All right, let’s listen to this next quote, which is about jeans.VirginiaOh, jeans.VirginiaSo the backstory is on recent Indulgence Gospels, we have talked about how Corinne converted me to the universal standard straight leg jeans, and I do really like them. But earlier today, I had to be in photos, and we had a plan. The three of us had a plan that I was going to wear those jeans, and at the last minute, I texted Dacy. I didn’t even text Corinne because I knew she’d yell at me. I texted Dacy, and I was like, I can’t do it. I’m in my skinny jeans for the photos. And, yeah, it was like, do I look too sloppy? Are these, like, saggy in a weird way that I have no control over?And I feel like for something like having your picture taken, like, wear the pants, you’re not going to feel like you’re only thinking about your pants. You know what I mean?CorinneOkay, so I wanted to revisit some of your feelings about jeans. You may recall that we used to open like every podcast episode by chatting about pants!VirginiaWe did. We haven’t done that!CorinneWe kind of fell off pants chat, and I don’t know why.VirginiaBring back pants chat! CorinneBut I do feel like since we started doing the podcast, your feelings about jeans have evolved? True or false?VirginiaThey have evolved. They definitely have. I mean, I still own a pair of emotional support skinny jeans. The same pair I mention in that episode. CorinneWhen is the last time you wore them?VirginiaI actually have not worn them very much at all. I did wear them two weeks ago under a shirt dress because it turned out to be colder than I thought. And I was like, “Oh, it’s not a bare leg dress day.” So I put on skinny jeans under it, but I haven’t worn them for any other reason in a really long time.And I will say: I’m wearing my Gap straight leg jeans the most, the baggier fit ones the most. So I do think I’ve evolved to embrace a more relaxed fit of jean, which does make it much easier to get jeans to fit your body.I still think the primary finding of Jean Science was correct, that jeans are designed terribly, that fashion in general is terrible at fitting people’s bodies, but particularly when it comes to fitting pants onto fat people. They’re really bad at it. And so I think all the jeans are bad.But I will say if you can embrace a wider leg or a more relaxed fit, you will have more options.CorinneYeah, I think that’s true.VirginiaI still cannot solve for the factor of, if you wear a more relaxed fit, they will still stretch out when you wear them, and they will be falling off you by the second day, if not later in the first day. And nobody has solved this.CorinneI think someone did solve it, and it’s belts.VirginiaThat is not a solution that is available to me, personally. I don’t like belts. I guess I should try belts? I don’t know about belts. Okay, that’s a whole other thing.CorinneThis is kind of neither here nor there, but I just read this post from Em Seely-Katz who writes Esque, and I think they were actually writing about something else, raw hem jeans. But they were saying that men’s jeans, the zipper goes all the way from the bottom of the crotch up to the top. Why don’t women’s jeans do that?VirginiaWait, men’s jeans have a different zipper?CorinneLike, the zipper on women’s jeans is shorter. It doesn’t go all the way down.VirginiaIs it because they don’t want men to pee on their pants?CorinneWell, I think it’s so you can open them up more to get your… whatever but, but I think women’s jeans should also have that option for access.VirginiaI just really have to pause on how uncomfortable Corinne was saying penis right there. She was like… whatever you’ve got down there.CorinneI think I was going to say dick and then I was like, is that inappropriate?VirginiaWhatever, we swear all the time. Anyway, the zipper is longer so that men can deal with their junk.CorinneI think women should have the option of being able to deal with their junk as well.VirginiaAgreed, agreed. Pro longer zipper.CorinneAlso, I feel like it would be easier to to get jeans on if they opened up more at the top.VirginiaNow that you’ve put this very important issue on my radar, I’m ready to adopt it as a primary cause.CorinneOkay, thank you.VirginiaWe will have a petition for everyone to sign shortly. You are a diehard jeans person. You always look great in jeans. You’re inspiring on the topic.CorinneThis year I have adopted drawstring jeans, which feels like it’s barely jeans.VirginiaBut also sounds like a life hack.CorinneYeah, it’s very comfortable.VirginiaI love drawstring. In the summer, I wear a lot of drawstring. I don’t wear a lot of drawstring in the winter.CorinneDrawstring would probably solve your stretching out after a couple wears problem, similar to a belt.VirginiaIt would be like a belt, but not a belt, so it wouldn’t trigger my belt concerns.I think my other struggle with jeans—that is maybe not really even about jeans—is that since I have broken up mostly with dark skinny jeans, there is sometimes a category of outfit I am trying to achieve where I’m trying to be dressed up, but not too dressed up. And I feel like the dark skinny jean really filled that need. Does that make sense?Like, you want to look like kind of polished because you’re going to your kid’s chorus concert or out to dinner with friends, but it’s not like all the way to a dress level? That might feel like too much. I feel like the dark skinny jean really threaded this needle.This stems from having been in my 20s in the early 2000s and being trained in the School of the Going Out Top. The going out top and dark jeans was a uniform. And I think I’m still like, “So what replaces the dark jeans and the going out top?” And then I realized, like… anything? That’s me trying to dress like it’s 2003 and it’s not.But that is one place I still struggle, because I don’t feel like the lighter, more relaxed denim can can do that same category?CorinneHmm, what about darker, wide leg jeans? Is that not a thing?VirginiaMaybe I just haven’t found a pair I really like that are darker. That’s a good thought.CorinneOr maybe with wide leg jeans, you need a slightly fancier top, I don’t know.VirginiaI think a lot of our dependency on the skinny jean was just because we’d really learned the outfit formulas for it. And I do feel like sometimes when I gravitate back towards it, it’s because I’m feeling at sea with how to put an outfit together without them.CorinneThis is not about jeans, but I’m really into these Old Navy shorts I have that have stripes down the side. They’re sweat shorts. And they’re so comfortable. But then sometimes when I’m going out, I am like, wait, what do I put on the top so that it doesn’t look like I’m just in sweats?VirginiaI just came here in pajamas. Yeah, don’t you feel like that’s a struggle with shorts and tank tops in general in the summer? And I feel like more of a struggle for fat folks?CorinneMaybe.VirginiaIt’s harder to look like you got dressed or something, right?CorinneLike, how do I look like I’m not just wearing a t-shirt and jeans?Lately, I’ve been experimenting with the answer to that being socks. Right now I’m wearing—am I about to try and show you my socks? Nope.I’m wearing chartreuse socks, kind of like a chartreuse dress sock. I’ll send you a pic after. But I feel like that with the tank top and shorts kind of makes it look more outfit-y.@selfiefayStay for the pitbull cameo #ootd VirginiaYou should know my 11 year old is doing the same thing this summer.CorinneOh, that’s cool.VirginiaThere are a lot of brightly colored socks with regular shorts and t-shirts. Also, she has a lot of animal print socks. So you’re blessed by Gen Alpha or whatever she is.CorinneAmazing.VirginiaGood job.All right. Well, for the final clip, I went back to another favorite guest conversation. To be clear, I love all of our guest conversations. But this was one that was just like one of my favorite ever. It was with Martinus Evans, who is the author of Slow AF Run Club: The Ultimate Guide for Anyone Who Wants to Run. Martinus also runs the Slow AF Run Club, which is a running community for folks to run in the bodies they have. He is so hilarious and delightful. This episode ran in June 2023 so here’s the clip.MartinusSo what that looks like is like letting them know that obstacles and rising up in the face of adversity is a good thing. Because for a lot of people, they think it’s a bad thing. Like, oh, I face adversity. I’m slow.Or, here’s the thing I always get, is that I started running, and then I got a little tired, and I started walking, and I felt absolutely horrible that I had to walk. And then me come in and say, Well, what was wrong with that? Did you start running again? Yeah, I did. Well, fuck like, let’s celebrate that then? It’s that thing of letting people know that it’s okay to bumble and stumble and figure this thing out because you’re doing something with your body that you have not been A. celebrated to do, right? But B. You’re kind of stifled, like being a plus size person, like you may have even been stifled with movement, because you haven’t had the liberty to actually explore the things that your body might be able to do. You got to explore and figure all this stuff out.So, like, that’s where providing psychological safety is letting them know that it’s okay. It’s almost like, imagine a kid who’s like, riding a bike for the first time. They ride the bike, you let it go, they lose their balance, they fall, they scrape their knee. They’re going to cry. They’re going to be like, Oh, I don’t want to ride this bike anymore. It’s horrible. I don’t want to do this. Don’t make me do this. But as a good parent or as a good coach, you’re going to like, okay, let’s cry it out. You done crying? Okay, now let’s get your ass back on that bike. The same thing is true with physical activity. All right. You did it. You got a side stitch? Okay, cool. Let’s figure this out. Oh, you got shin splints. Okay, cool, yeah, let’s figure this out. Oh, oh, you got delay, onset, muscle soreness? Great. Let’s figure this out. But guess what? Yeah, that’s going to continue to move.That’s the approach that I take. Like we’re all going to fall off, and somewhere around us being grown start to be embedded in us, like doing something and then like failing or like not getting it right on the first time is a bad thing. I think it’s school.VirginiaI think school is a lot of it, yeah. I’m thinking, like, when a baby’s learning to walk, they fall a million times, and people aren’t like you should stop trying to walk. You know what I mean?MartinusImagine that like walking a baby trying to walk. And I said, screw you baby! Like you suck you’re not. Damn you for trying to walk.VirginiaYeah, you are a fat baby who can’t walk. And yet we have this narrative that then kicks in of somehow, if I have to stop to walk during my run, that’s like a moral failing. Like walking and running are morally equivalent activities, right? Like if you’re walking, some of it, if you’re running, some of that, as you said, like the pace of your running, if you are slow, that is still running. There’s no need to be attaching all these values to it.But it does seem like the culture of running at large is so built on that paradigm, and you are really challenging an entire paradigm here.MartinusYes, I am. Here’s why. If you’re not an elite athlete who’s like their life depends on winning prize money and like going to the Olympics, all of us are then paying for a participation medal to participate in a parade.CorinneI love this. He’s really delightful.VirginiaHe’s so good. And the reframing of running marathons as participating in a parade will just make me happy forever. It’s so correct.I mean, obviously we stand by everything Martinus said. There’s not really a lot more to say. So I thought we could also talk a little bit about how working on the podcast has changed each of our relationship with exercise. Because I think we’ve done a lot of good fitness content over the last 200 episodes, and I personally feel like I’m in a better place with exercise than I was when I started this project.CorinneHmm, that’s awesome. Well, I think I started lifting around the same time that I started doing the podcast.VirginiaThere was an early episode where you were, like, “I’m using a broomstick.”CorinneOh, that’s right! I was doing Couch to Barbell!VirginiaAnd look at you now, power lifter.CorinneI mean, one thing that is interesting about maybe starting any exercise, or maybe specifically powerlifting, is I think, in the first like year that you do it, you get better fast. Like, really consistently, almost every time you go to the gym, you’re lifting more weight. And that is so rewarding. And probably a little addictive.Now that I have been doing it for two and a half years, I’m not getting better every time. Sometimes I can’t lift weights that I have previously lifted for various reasons. Even if I’m maxing out, sometimes not hitting my previous maxes. I think it can be hard to figure out what am I doing? I took a little bit break last summer. I went to visit family, and I decided to just not go to the gym.VirginiaI remember, that seems good. I feel like it was good you took that break.CorinneYeah, it was good. And it sucked getting back. So yeah, I’m still figuring it out.VirginiaI guess that’s the tricky thing about any sport where there’s progress attached to it, which power lifting is still a sport organized around progress.CorinneI mean, there are different ways you can measure progress, too. Like how many reps, versus just straight up how much weight.VirginiaBut it’s still measuring progress. It’s still expecting there to be progress, which is both exciting, and I think progress can be very motivating. And what do you do then when you’re in a period with it where it’s not really about progress? How do you find value in that relationship? That’s a tricky question.CorinneOr when the progress is just much smaller.VirginiaAnd can you still feel good about that?. Or do you start feeling like what’s the point? I think for me, it’s so funny that I love this conversation with Martinus so much, because I am just never going to be a runner again. Running was such a bad relationship that I’m so glad to be done with.I think for me, so much of finding joy and exercise is about not having progress goals of any kind. Like just having different activities I like doing for their own sake, and kind of rotating. Like, I like weight lifting. It was exciting when I went up to larger weight, heavier weights. At some point I hope to go up to heavier weights again.But I’m not tracking it. I’m like, these still seem hard. I don’t know, it seems fine.Then the other stuff I do, like walking the dog and gardening, are really not things you would be like, wow, I weeded two more flower beds this week. It’s not progress.But I do feel good that I, in various flavors, work out much more consistently than I have at other points in my life. Because it’s more built into my lifestyle. And, I think talking to people like Martinus, Anna Maltby, obviously Lauren Leavell, Jessie Diaz-Herrera and all the folks who’ve come on and talked to us about different approaches to fitness have just really helped me claim it for myself in a way that I really was struggling to do. So that’s been cool.CorinneYeah, that is cool. That’s inspiring.ButterCorinneWell, this was fun to look back on some favorite episodes! Should we do butter?VirginiaI just came up with my Butter while I was eating lunch. And it is what I ate for lunch. And it is Sushi Salad. I invented this today. I had some leftover sushi, but it wasn’t quite enough to be lunch by itself. So I chopped up the spicy tuna roll, with the rice and everything, chopped it up into little chunks, and I put it over a bed of greens with some some chopped bell peppers, some red onion, and then I kind of made up a fake spicy mayonnaise Asian-ish salad dressing. I’m not saying this is culturally authentic in any way. I need to underscore that a lot. But it was such a good lunch. So Sushi Salad is my Butter.And in general, I’ve been a big fan of leftovers plus salad as a lunch formula. A lot of leftovers lend themselves well to being a chopped ingredient in a good salad, and then it’s like a new take. If you’re someone who gets sick of leftovers, it’s a whole new experience.CorinneI’m also going to do a food.VirginiaGreat. We love food Butter.CorinneI had some friends over for dinner earlier this week, and I made this Smitten Kitchen recipe, she calls it garlic lime steak and noodle salad.VirginiaOh, sold.CorinneIt’s a really good hot weather meal, because it’s rice vermicelli that you basically dunk in hot water for a few minutes and can serve cold or room temp. Then you chop up cucumbers and tomatoes and green beans, and then you make a marinade that also doubles as a dressing that has fish sauce, sugar, stuff like that, and and grill some steak and put that on top.VirginiaOh my gosh, I’m making this this week. I love this kind of recipe. Also, a great salad. Don’t sleep on main course salads.CorinneYes, I had the leftovers as a salad yesterday. So good.Well, coming up next week, we’re going to visit another bunch of favorite moments. Including: Feelings about aging, heterosexual marriage and what happens when your partner is on a diet.VirginiaThat episode WILL be paywalled, just like all our other Indulgence Gospels, so you should become a paid subscriber so you don’t miss it! 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 by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!