The Burnt Toast Podcast

VirginiaYou’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about diet culture, anti-fat bias parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith.CorinneAnd I’m Corinne Fay. I work on Burnt Toast and run SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus sized clothing.VirginiaAnd it’s time for your November Indulgence Gospel!This was supposed to be your October Indulgence Gospel, but we ran September in October and now, it’s November. We are going to answer your questions like we do every month. We are going to get into a lot of really good fat fashion recs. We are going to talk about hair. And I’ve got a little divorce update at the end, if you’re curious.This is also a paywalled episode. That means to hear the whole thing you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It’s just $5 a month or $50 for the year. Or you can join Extra Butter for just $10 per month. You’ll a monthly live Ask Me Anything chat and even more Indulgence Gospel.CorinneWell, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about pants.VirginiaWe’ve decided this podcast’s version of talking about the weather is pants, because there is always a lot to say about pants. So you can just know that we’re always going to talk about pants. You don’t have to panic about whether there’s going to be the pants-related content that you need in these episodes.CorinneYes, and it’s somewhat weather related. But we are definitely not alone in having pants problems. VirginiaIt’s a universal struggle of the Burnt Toast community.CorinneSo here’s what I’m struggling with right now. It just got cold enough to start wearing pants again, so I’m pulling my pants out of my closet. All summer I’ve been wearing bike shorts. And I can’t figure out what the pants equivalent of bike shorts should be. It seems like it would be leggings, but it’s not. VirginiaWhy is it not? They’re literally bike shorts that go down to your ankles?CorinneI feel like the type of shirts that I’m wearing with bike shorts are sort of fancy shirts, like a like button-up or something. And when I wear that with leggings, it just looks wrong.VirginiaWait, I need to stand up.CorinneOh no! That’s literally what you’re wearing.VirginiaFor the listeners: I’m wearing a button-down shirt with leggings right now. Corinne, are you telling me I am wrong?CorinneI feel like it looks cool on you, but okay. To be discussed. The other thing is, I pulled out my jeans from last year and I don’t know if over the summer jean styles changed? But now my jeans that I thought seemed cool last year don’t feel cool anymore. They feel weirdly kind of too short.VirginiaAre we finally done with bare ankles? Is the tyranny of the cropped ankle finally behind us? CorinneI don’t know. I don’t want to do flares or JNCOs or low-rise.VirginiaNo, I’m unavailable for all of those. I know some people have sensory issues and really hate high-rise but I have the opposite sensory issue and really hate low-rise. And flares, I don’t need to relive my trauma. That was a dark time for Elder Millennials. CorinneGrowing up in New England, no.VirginiaSlush just dragging around all of the pavement with you, everywhere you went.So I am wearing last year’s jeans as well. CorinneYour Gap ones.VirginiaThe Gap ones. I did also pull out my Madewell skinny jeans. I’m a basic bitch, I don’t know what to tell you, I’m still wearing skinny jeans. They still fit me. They’re like leggings but they’re not as comfortable as leggings. But sometimes it seems fine.I do find myself wishing there was a category of jeans between the skinny jeans and straight leg jeans. Like straight but also not skin-tight.CorinneLike a tapered but baggy?VirginiaThat’s sounding wrong. I don’t think I want to taper exactly?I think what happens with plus size jeans is they often continue to cut the leg wide which makes sense for lots of folks plus sized bodies but doesn’t make sense for my plus sized body. I rememberDacy Gillespiebought the same pair of Gap straight leg jeans that I have, and because she is straight-sized they are just two entirely different pants. Mine are much baggier than hers. So I would like a jean that’s like a little narrower than a straight leg, but fits like a wide leg.CorinneWell, that’s what I mean by tapered.VirginiaI guess that’s what I want. CorinneI really want a pair of corduroy pants. VirginiaOoh, that sounds fun.CorinneBut it feels like all the plus size ones aren’t quite what I’m looking for. They look like corduroy pants that I wore in the 2000s. Or they are elastic waist, like toddler pants. I want something that’s a little more like trousers, but corduroy.VirginiaYou’re not in the market for a corduroy jogger? I guess that would be a toddler vibe. I have not seen any good corduroy pants. Hopefully people will put that in the comments. Because I’m also interested. I did try the Gap ones last year and they were really bad.CorinneI found one good pair at Target. But they’re sold out in my size, so I ordered every adjacent size to try to see. They’re also only in white or pink, which feels like a lot.VirginiaWe need to get back to this legging shirt conundrum because I’m wondering if the issue is that with a bike short, you would wear a slightly shorter shirt than you would want to wear with a legging? I don’t think that I would wear this button down shirt with my bike shorts. Because if the shirt is too long with bike shorts, does it look like I forgot pants? Does it look like I’m wearing a too short dress and I meant to put something underneath and I forgot?CorinneI like that look though. VirginiaWell, I’m not here to style shame you. If that’s your look, that’s great. But I feel like one of my children would be like, “Where are your pants?” I would feel shamed by them and their superior style. But with leggings, I wear a slightly longer shirt.CorinneMaybe also going to the gym so much, I now feel weird wearing leggings out in the world.VirginiaThey’re just such a workout vibe for you right now.I’ve been living in this. I’m wearing a chambray button down shirt from Universal Standard [no link, sorry folks, it vanished!] that I have been wearing with all of my leggings and my Veja sneakers. I mean, it is very Suburban Mom. I’m not saying it’s not. I feel like the fact that the sneakers are a cool brand helps a little. And I’ve got a bright pink sports bra on underneath, so that’s kind of fun.But on Friday, I was going to dinner my cousin’s and I was texting my sister, like, “I’m having hard time deciding what to wear.” I was exactly what I’m wearing right now. Leggings, sneakers, button down shirt. And I was like, “But should I dress it up for dinner?” Sometimes I don’t know how dressed up I need to be to go eat dinner in someones house. We’re not going to a restaurant. So we were texting, and then I ended up switching and I sent her a picture because I switched to black leggings and a linen button down shirt. And I was like, it’s the same outfit, but it’s different colors. CorinneSo much fancier. VirginiaThe dressy leggings and shirt combo. Maybe my new uniform? I don’t know.CorinneI mean, it’s a good uniform.VirginiaI am who I am. I’m here drinking my tea in my East Fork mug and my chambray shirt. I’m a coastal grandma just trying to get through the day and it is what it is.But I do hear you, I feel like it’s like the fanciness of the button down shirt. It does need to be a casual shirt with leggings.CorinneYeah. And you have to like, get the proportions right. I don’t know. I’m going to have to experiment. Also, are you wearing socks with your sneakers, if you’re wearing leggings?VirginiaNot yet, because it hasn’t cooled enough here. Probably once it’s cold enough to require socks I will switch to ankle boots with my leggings.CorinneOkay. Because I feel like sometimes the sneakers, socks, legging thing gets weird.VirginiaIt gets complicated. If I’m going to be walking a lot, my feet get sweaty. So I wear the no show socks. But my Target clog boots will come out soon, or another kind of ankle boot. All right. I think that’s all our pants news! I have one other quick update from a past podcast. This was two Indulgence Gospels ago. I was mentioning that I wasn’t wearing my favorite Universal Standard jersey dress and other things because of the oil stain right in the middle of your boobs. We talked about how that’s a common struggle. People had so many thoughts about stain removal, which I really appreciated. And I tried several methods and the combination that got all the stains out of that dress—which I thought was history, like it had been through the dryer, it was done for—was this product called Puracy, which is this foaming stain remover thing that I put on and let it sit for like a day or two. Then right before I washed it, I put on a dab of Dawn dish soap. And that combination has brought back a lot of my t-shirts and sweatshirt type things from the dead.CorinneThat’s really cool. I’m going to try that because I have the same problem. VirginiaI think Dawn by itself for a less set in stain will totally do the job. But for this, like had been through the dryer, like I thought it was baked-in forever. This worked.CorinneOne other thing that has happened since the last time we talked is that I got the updated COVID vaccine. And as everyone on the internet was talking about, people who weigh over 200 pounds are supposed to get a bigger needle. So when I went to get it, I went to a Walgreens and when I got into the little consultation room, I was like, “So I heard that people that weigh over whatever are supposed to get a bigger needle,” and the guy was sort of like, “Oh, yeah, I have heard that.” And I was like, “Okay, so are we going to use a bigger needle?” And he was like, “Well, how big are your arms?”I was just like, “they’re really big!” What? I don’t know. Like, how would you quantify that? First of all, you’re looking at me! You can tell how big they are.VirginiaIt’s not like you know the individual weight of one arm. CorinneAnd yeah, just to be clear, I’m way over that weight threshold. There’s not even advice for being over that. Like, it’s not like “over this weight use 1.5 inch needle and then over this weight, use a 2 inch needle.”But they did have 1.5 inch needles and he did use one. When you see it, it’s not even that much bigger. I was just like, oh, that’s not even really making a difference, but whatever.VirginiaBut you’re glad you did it. CorinneIt was fine.VirginiaI’m glad you did it, too. That is absurd.CorinneIt was so funny. Just like, have you ever talked to a person before? Virginia“Sir, how often do you leave your house? Is this a new experience for you?”CorinneHow big are your arms?VirginiaLike, you’re sitting right there with your arms.CorinneAnd they are big. You can see them. Like, I don’t know.VirginiaThat’s so funny and weird. Yeah, I mean, I’m sorry. That’s really funny.You and I texted about this before I got my COVID booster, and I also went to a Walgreens. And even though I made an appointment, I ended up waiting for 45 minutes. So by the time I got in there, I was so over the whole experience I completely forgot to ask. So I just got the regular needle. And who knows? Who knows whether that is going to be okay or not. I rolled some dice. I literally got back in my car was like, fuck! But I was not about to go back and be like, “Can I have another one with the bigger needle just in case it didn’t work?”Alright. Let’s get into some questions. Do you want to read the first one?CorinneQ: But what if I really have to stop eating certain foods for my health?I’ve been staunchly anti-diet for several years now. Earlier this year, I was diagnosed with a condition and was told changing my diet could help keep it from progressing. I spiraled because I’ve been taught to believe that any diet change is just bullshit anti-fatness, and doctors don’t know what they’re talking about. But I’m coming to realize sometimes that’s true, and sometimes it’s not. I haven’t made diet changes yet and my condition has worsened, despite other measures. I’m considering small changes to see what happens.I feel like there’s no nuance in this space. Yes, you can be Healthy At Every Size, but what if you aren’t and food is part of the treatment? I now feel like I’m deconstructing both diet culture and anti-diet culture to figure out what’s going to help me. It’s hard and scary and I wish this was something that was discussed in these spaces. Not every piece of nutrition advice is bullshit. How do we bring more nuance to the space?VirginiaOkay, free list this is where we leave you! To hear our response to this plus so much more fat fashion talk, fat hair, fat friends, lots of good stats, of course our Butters, you will need to be a paid subscriber. VirginiaOkay, this is a really good question. What are your thoughts? CorinneMy first thought is just that I really feel for this person. I think I’ve probably had similar experiences. I have conditions where the first line of advice is often “make these dietary changes.” Plus I think there’s so much online that promises so much from dietary and nutrition tweaks. And also, the nutrition science often just isn’t there. Like the actual studies are not backing this up with evidence.VirginiaYeah, I want to be really careful because one thing we don’t know from this question is what condition they’re dealing with. Because this person did not share that, which is totally their business. So, I think there are health conditions where it really makes sense to start with nutrition and diet changes. But there are probably many more health conditions where you are told to start with nutrition and diet and that is diet culture. So we need more nuance in that conversation.CorinneYeah, definitely.VirginiaThis is it’s making me think of the piece I did on cholesterol recently, where when I dug into all the specific dietary advice around cholesterol. And a lot of it is bad. Telling people not to eat eggs because of the dietary cholesterol is super outdated and yet so many doctors are still giving that advice. So, in that case, that’s old research, bad science, and diet culture all showing up. But then, the saturated fat cholesterol link seems to be a lot stronger. So that is something to think about.But that in and of itself isn’t enough, right? Because anytime you make a dietary change, it has all these ripple effects in your life. For me personally, this is not the year where I’m cutting out food groups to manage my cholesterol because I’m going to manage my stress and do other things. But is there another year when I might cut out saturated fat? Because now it’s like, okay, I can see that this is like the thing that could make a difference? I don’t know, maybe.CorinneIf it’s within your means or your ability, it might be a great time to try and find a nutritionist or dietitian with a nuanced view on eating and bodies and fatness.VirginiaYeah, absolutely. That was a comment someone put in the cholesterol piece, that they got some diagnoses where the immediate advice was dietary, and they recognized this is going to trigger a bunch of my restrictive stuff, and so they waited to work with somebody to guide them through it and that was really helpful. Because a good anti-diet, fat positive dietitian who also really knows the research about your condition can say, “Actually this piece of advice your doctor gave you was not useful. But this one may be can help.” They can help support youand be paying attention to how did it feel to cut that food group out this week? So it’s how are you doing with that versus did you do it or not pass fail?But I take her larger point that we are often so quick to dismiss the idea that you would change your diet. There is an assumption that happens in these communities of any advice along those lines somehow represents a failure to divest from diet culture. But that, in and of itself, feels like we’re still holding on to a diet culture mentality. Because we’re grading people’s performance in a weird way.CorinneRight, like all or nothing. I also think it’s so hard to actually monitor this kind of stuff. If you did want to make a dietary change, it feels really hard to know how long it would take to have an effect on the condition, and to balance whether it’s helping or not helping and whether it’s affecting your wellbeing and your mental health.VirginiaThose would be good questions to ask your doctor or the dietitian. If making dietary tweaks is something that historically does not go well for you, I think it’s worth saying to your doctor, “What is our plan for mitigating that this time? How do I do this without increasing my risk for disordered eating? Because that is also bad for my health. And you, as my doctor, should care about that.”And find out how long are we going to do it for and what measure of improvement are we looking for, to know that it worked? How are we defining success here? Because in the cholesterol piece, Dr. Westby pointed out that dietary changes are associated with a drop of just three to six points in cholesterol. Which, like, if you’re borderline, sure. That might get you back down into the normal range. But for me that wasn’t going to make a difference. Or maybe it is better to be a little bit less high even if you’re still over. But this is the conversation you want to have with your doctor.So I think, just be really gentle with yourself if you start making these cuts. Because for me, whenever I’ve done this in the past, it’s like three days later, I’m looking at a meal where I’m like, oh, this breaks all those rules that I was told to set, and yet I still really want to eat this. Have a plan in place for support and for being gentle with yourself that you maybe can’t do this 100 percent and hold onto a quality of life. CorinneRight. If they’re suggesting three different things, maybe just start with one and see how that feels.VirginiaYeah. Because they are always suggesting 12 things and that’s so aggravating. No one needs to make 12 lifestyle changes at once.CorinneIf anything is going to make you crazy, it’s trying to adhere to six billion rules rather than seeing how it feels to eat one extra different thing at breakfast or something one day.VirginiaTotally, totally. I hope that is helpful. It’s good note for us to think about in stuff we’re writing and talking about on Burnt Toast and for the community.CorinneYeah. I’d love to hear an update if you feel like giving us an update.VirginiaThat would be great. Alright, we’re going to clothes questions now. First up:Where can I find quality long and flowy skirts online? I want comfy waist bands with tights.CorinneOkay, admittedly I’m not a skirt wearer, so you’re probably asking the wrong person. But I feel like a lot of people that I see online have really nice skirts from Reformation. I don’t know if I think those are flowy enough for what you’re talking about.VirginiaWhen I picture flowy skirts I go back to—remember those broomstick skirts that were big in the 90s? They were very gauzy with certainly culturally appropriated sort of pattern and you could like twist them up and they were crinkly. I don’t know why I think they called broomstick skirt. Did I make that up? CorinneI just Googled broomstick skirt and it did come up. Or broom skirt. Broomstick skirt. They’re both coming up,VirginiaBecause it kind of looks like a broom. But I don’t think that’s what this person was asking for. Although it did make me nostalgic for that trend. I mean, wear it with a choker and some Doc Martens. I’m just saying, it’s a look.CorinneReformation has some.VirginiaThey have some gorgeous long skirts. Yeah, I see the Lucy skirt right now, that’s very flowy. But that only goes up to a size 12? What are we advising?CorinneI filtered for 3x. So they do go up to 3x and size 24. VirginiaA long denim skirt is a trend I’ve been interested in. I don’t know that I would actually wear it to be honest, in my life, but I’ve been craving it. For borderline plus size, like for the mid size queens among us and the small fats, Boden does not do plus sizes. But if you’re on the on the line, they do a lot of great skirts, too. CorinneOh, that’s good to know. What about warm down winter jacket brands that take wider hips into into the design? My Patagonia won’t zip over my hips.VirginiaMe, too. Patagonia is so fatphobic. I’m so annoyed with them. And they dress it up with all of their environmentalism and their being good for the earth and it is just a bunch of nonsense. CorinneI will first say that for a long time as a smaller fat I wore men’s Patagonia. But yeah, it is a men’s fit.VirginiaI’m gonna say Land’s End and LL Bean are go-tos on this. Not all the way there but I think up to 3x.CorinneI know Eddie Bauer, Columbia, and REI all have down jackets up to a 3x, but the 3x only goes up to a 56=inch hip, which sucks. There are a lot of good bigger options which are not actually down but down-like. Both Universal Standard and Girlfriend Collective had them last season, so I’m assuming they will again this year. And they go up very big.1VirginiaI’ve done synthetic down lots and it works. It’s often lighter and easier to wash. What about Alder Apparel? CorinneI don’t think they have down, but they have a really good fleece. I have their fleece. They’re really, really nice and actually quite warm. I feel like I basically wore that as my winter jacket last year.VirginiaI’m looking now.CorinneI don’t think they have a down one. They have a fleece and a raincoat.VirginiaI think those are good options.For the next question: A fat friendly budget plaid blazer? Or just general plaid recs because I’m loving this trend.Now that I’m on Alder Apparel, I’m seeing their go far flannel might be what you want. CorinneOh, interesting. VirginiaVery cute. It’s a shacket and it’s a up to 6x. It’s a nice brown and cream plaid.CorinneThat’s adorable. I was not aware of this trend until we got this question, but then I did do some searching and I found a lot of really cute plaid blazers. Madewell has a cute double breasted one up to a 4x right now.Old Navy has a similar one.VirginiaFor probably fraction of the price.CorinneYep. Also up to a 4X. Then Target has this adorable one which looks like it also has matching pants and a vest or something. VirginiaOh my gosh, you can do a three piece. CorinneI know. I was very tempted to order this despite having nowhere to wear it. It’s a look.VirginiaThe Target one is by far my favorite because of the three piece option.CorinneYeah, hopefully they don’t all sell out before this airs.VirginiaI just admire anyone willing to wear a blazer. I find that to be a very uncomfortable item of clothing. Not something I’m interested in exploring. But I’m very excited for you.CorinneWhat about good sources for plus size natural fiber sweaters that don’t cost $600?This person is specifically looking for sizes larger than Sezane.VirginiaYes, I linked to Sezane in an essay recently, because they said they go up to 3x. And everybody was like, It’s a lie. I’m sorry. There was one adorable Burnt Toast reader who posted photos of herself in the 3x. She was probably about my size. It looked great on her. But it’s not larger. It’s not going to be good for everybody. I was gonna say that cashmere brand that you love?CorinneNaadam. Yes. I like them for cashmere. They go up to a 3x and I think it fits a lot more generously than their size chart. If you’re more like a 4x, or even a 5x which I sometimes I am, their stuff will probably will fit you. I also really like Tradlands for cotton sweaters. I don’t think they’re quite $600 but they’re maybe $200.VirginiaYeah, they’re not cheap. Naadam is pricey, too, I should say.CorinneBut they I think go up to a 4x. And also I would say secondhand is really good. You could try SellTradePlus or search for secondhand Eileen Fisher on eBay or Poshmark. VirginiaOkay, not to sound like a broken record about LL Bean, but I just ordered their heritage soft cotton fisherman’s sweater which is $99 which is not $600 and they often go on sale. It’s like a navy and cream stripe situation.CorinneThey go up to 3x. Yeah, this is very cute. Very New England chic.VirginiaI am obsessed with stripes. Everything I have bought for fall is striped. I’m actually returning this one even though it’s a great sweater just because I was like, Virginia, you’re out of control with stripes. Plus I don’t need that many sweaters because I run hot. I often fall in love with a sweater and then don’t wear it at all because it’s has to be so cold for me to want to wear sweater. So that’s the decision I made about this sweater and sent it back. But that was really strong of me. And I would love someone else to buy it because it’s super cute.I instead kept a striped turtleneck from them that’s in a stretchy t-shirt-y fabric because I will wear that more. It was navy and cream stripes and I just ordered a whole bunch of navy and cream stripe things.CorinneI mean, you have a look.VirginiaI have a look.CorinneYes. Chambray and navy and white stripes. Okay, I’m curious to know your take on this next one. I want to know if this is a me problem or a general problem or a fat person problem. All my knit shirts end up with holes around my lower belly. And I can’t figure out why. I only have one pair of pants with a metal button and two pairs of shorts with plastic buttons. So I don’t think that’s the reason. Is it cooking / dishes? Should I be wearing an apron? Is it because the fabric and knit shirts is so thin and cheap?VirginiaThis is totally a real thing. I think it is possibly a fat person problem but also an everybody problem? Because this happened to me with a really cute striped sweater that I got from Nordstrom, and when I was talking to Dacy about it, she was like, oh yeah, this always happens.And it’s not the buttons, but it’s the tab of your jeans—like the fabric tab of your jeans poking into cheap fabric. So I would imagine maybe it happens more to us because we’re bigger in the middle or especially if your shirts are a little tight, they’re like a little fitted in the middle and then they’re going to chafe more against the fabric of your jeans. But it’s the jeans poking through and it’s a super annoying hole. I ended up having to donate that sweater. And it made me sad.CorinneDamn. I was under the impression that it was from leaning on stuff like the dishes or a table or whatever.VirginiaI mean, I could definitely see that doing it, too. CorinneI guess maybe it’s coming from both sides, all directions. Because I feel like I get those the most in shirts that I wear to the gym, which I’m like wearing with leggings. So I don’t know.VirginiaBut you are lifting very heavy things there. CorinneBut not like…with my bellybutton?VirginiaI don’t know what happens in powerlifting! You guys are hardcore. VirginiaI think it’s related to a lot of knit shirts. It’s like the boob oil stain. I just feel like these are technical limitations of knit fabric that we have not as a society overcome yet. And I hope we do some day. But in the meantime, sizing up can help. Because that was the solution on that one sweater. Dacy told me to size up. You know how it is, you order the thing, and you’re like, Oh, I could do with a bigger size but who wants to deal with online returns. So you keep the thing that’s a little on the small side. I feel like that is increasing the odds, you’re going to have this hole because the fabric is being stretched a little bit.CorinneWell, not to contradict you, but I also have it in some really oversized t-shirts.VirginiaI don’t know what you’re doing at the gym.CorinneI don’t know either. Maybe from tucking in my shirt. I don’t know, I truly have no idea. I think this is one of life’s great mysteries and it can’t be solved by us. But I feel for you. It is very annoying.VirginiaIt’s very annoying. I thought I had the answer and now I’m questioning everything.CorinneI hope that it works for you. Report back.VirginiaAny advice on where to get haircut images or ideas for fat faces and double chins?This is a super interesting question.CorinneThis is a super interesting question and I feel like there’s not a good answer. I always do haircut research on Pinterest because you can find one thing you like and then it will show you a bunch of other stuff. And I think I started searching “fat haircuts.” And Pinterest was like, no, no, no, no, no, what you are looking for is “full face haircuts.” And I was like, No. I’m looking for fat haircuts.VirginiaI’m now googling it just to see and the fatphobia in this Google search results! Like, first of all, it’s like, “round faces.” And then it’s showing me a bunch of thin women who have round faces.CorinneAnd “flattering” hair. VirginiaIt’s all about flattering, and you need a shag cut, or the 52 most flattering hairstyles for fat faces and double chins. I’m so annoyed. I’m not going to click on that. I’m not gonna click on that even though there’s a really cute curly cut that I am curious about.CorinneI know.VirginiaBut I don’t need 28 slimming hairstyles for women with full faces. I mean, really what we’re talking about here is it’s not that I want my hair to make me look thinner. It’s that if I’m considering a haircut, it would be useful to see it on a face shaped similarly to mine. Just like it’s useful to see clothes on bigger bodies because seeing it on a size two gives me no pertinent information to how it’s going to fit my body. CorinneYeah, absolutely.VirginiaSomeone needs to start an Instagram or something. CorinneYeah. I don’t want to call anyone out, but even hair salons that I’ve gone to—whenever I see them posting pictures they’re not posting pictures of fat clients. Which is shitty!VirginiaIt is super shitty. So I think we’ve really identified some unreckoned-with anti -fatness in the hair community.CorinneYeah, I feel like your best bet may be to just look at pictures of fat influencers and see if you like any of their haircuts.VirginiaYou kind of have to reverse engineer this one. Find fat people whose style you like and sometimes you can go through and see different hairstyles they’ve tried. Like Marielle Elizabeth recently got a cute shorter cut. CorinneYeah, that’s true. VirginiaCorinne changes her hair all the time, so check in on her. CorinneMaybe there’s a Burnt Toast listener who wants to start a fat haircut website.VirginiaYeah, please do and we want to know all about it. CorinneI’ll submit pictures of all my haircuts.VirginiaIf we are wrong and this does exist, please drop it in the comments because we would love to know about this.CorinneDefinitely. Okay, I’ll read the next one.I’m rooted in anti-diet, pro-fatness culture, but I’m also trans and experiencing a lot of dysphoria about my body. Is it okay to have an aesthetic goal of a more masculine silhouette if dieting isn’t part of it, but weightlifting and eating a lot of protein is?VirginiaOkay, so first giant disclaimer: You asked this question of two cis women. We are limited to how much we can offer input on this because this has not been our life experience.CorinneYep. VirginiaBut I did report a piece for the newsletter. This was a letter from cis woman wanting to support her trans wife in the stress the body changes. We talked to a couple really good experts for this. Shannon Kaneshige who’s Fringeish on Instagram who is a fat non binary yoga teacher. I also looked a lot at pink mantaray’s work. And Jordan Underwood also gave some really good advice for this. I mean, I think what I learned from talking to all of them is, there’s understandable dysmorphia and a lot of stuff that comes up with the body transition itself. But then also there’s a lot of anti-fatness around trans body aesthetics and standards. So you’re dealing with two really complicated things at once.CorinneYeah, totally. I was just thinking reading the question like— is it okay? Of course it’s okay. Everyone wants to feel safe and normal in their body and to be able to access spaces without being targeted.VirginiaYup, that seems pretty okay.CorinneAnd I think as long as you’re being in solidarity with fat people, you’re probably fine.VirginiaAbsolutely. You don’t owe your personal body choices to fat politics. You can be in solidarity with fat people in lots of different ways.CorinneThere is tons of fatphobic advice about changing your body out there for for trans people, though.VirginiaIt’s seems really hard to wade through when safety in your body is so important. And this just is complicating the road to that safety.CorinneTotally. I would also say: Weightlifting and eating a lot of protein hopefully also make you feel different in your body. I think if you could focus on that experience, either in addition to, or instead of the aesthetic stuff, it might feel better. Maybe not. I don’t know.VirginiaNo, that’s a good point. I mean, part of my brain whenever I hear “weightlifting and a lot of protein,” my mind immediately goes to eating disorder red flags. Because those are behaviors that can become disordered very quickly. Or they could be behaviors that are extremely empowering and make you feel strong and safe in your body. And you know, it’s great for your mental health to be weightlifting.And it can go in two directions. It can be both. You can both derive benefits from something and be doing it in a disordered way, when it comes to exercise. So that’s so hard to tease out.So I guess I would also say like, do you have a support person in place? Whether that’s a therapist or someone who can help you process that piece of it. If you’re worried that the weightlifting and the protein eating is starting to feel not optional, or something you have to do in such a way that you’re missing other things you want to do in your day. Or if there are ways to tell whether this kind of behavior is becoming problematic, or is it supporting the life you want. And maybe talking to someone who can help you sort that out might be helpful. And I would say that to anyone weightlifting and eating a lot of protein for any reason really.CorinneTotally. There are a ton of really cool fat, transmasc creators. Jay, who’s comfyfattravels on Instagram and happy fat trans man on Tik Tok. There are a lot of fat trans people in their 20s on TikTok.Also, fat men exist. Not all cis men have huge muscles. Make sure that you’re seeing those people.And, I feel like we should say that—I don’t know exactly how to say this. But I do feel like I want to say that the goal of changing your silhouette is not something that’s possible or available to everyone.VirginiaThat’s a good point. Weightlifting and protein eating isn’t going to give everyone the same results. That’s worth saying. We definitely welcome more thoughts on that one, because it is complicated. I know we’ve got a lot of trans folks in the community who I’m sure will have more thoughtful, nuanced advice and other resources for this person. To be continued. Alright, next up:Can you talk about Fat Friends and how they’re different from Not Fat Friends?Delightful.CorinneYeah, I love this question. VirginiaI’m curious to know, of your larger friend universe—how many are fat? And how many are straight-sized?CorinneI mean, that’s a great question. The first thing that kind of came up for me when I was thinking about this was—there’s a range. Yes, I have friends who are straight up just thin. And then I have friends who are like mid-size, small fat, and then also friends who are closer to my size. And it’s different with all of them. I feel like a lot of my thin friends have kind of become aware of some stuff through just knowing me. But it’s still kind of feels awkward to talk about sometimes. And then some mid-size, small fat people can have some more different nuanced discussions about it, or stuff will come up. And then also, like, people who I feel like are more on the same level as me where I can just be like, “I am not going there because of the booths,” and it’s just understood. It would be hard for me to quantify how many, but I definitely have a lot of fat friends I would say. What about you?VirginiaIn real life, as opposed to the internet, I have mostly thin friends. Which is a thing? I have fat community for sure. One of my very best friends is fat. And there are several moms in town who I’m friends with, and that was our primary first bonding thing of like, “Oh, yay, another fat mom in this town of thin white yoga ladies.” Like, that definitely brought us together and there is a delightful shorthand that I so appreciate with them. But it’s very often that I am the fattest person in a room of people hanging out. CorinneWow.VirginiaJust because of the socio economic/diet culture/I don’t even know what makeup of my world? It feels limiting in a lot of ways. Like it feels limiting because I don’t have more in real life superfat friends, which I would love to have. I mean, my town is also very white. And there are friendships I’ve stepped back from a little bit because I’ve recognized that the diet culture or that thin person’s perspective is just not going to make space for my perspective, you know? That’s not going to be helpful.I do sometimes, as I’m sure you will feel even more than me, feel like I’m educating. But I will say the majority of my friends have really—like I am sure a lot of them are listening. Hey, ladies! And they’ve done the work. They’re interested in these issues. I feel much more seen and understood by my close friends for sure.CorinneYeah, that makes sense. The thing that comes up for me all the time is the seating thing because—like this just happened the other night. My friend was like, “Let’s get dinner or whatever. Where do you want to go?” And I’m like, “I’ll go anywhere as long as we don’t have to sit in a booth.” But do they know why I’m saying that? Do they? What do they think about that? I don’t know. And I do feel like, with fat folks they’re going to get it.VirginiaYeah, absolutely. And be putting some thought into it. Like, if they suggest a restaurant ahead of time, they’ve considered that.CorinneBut it is true even with fat people, you can’t always assume that you’re going to be on the same page about stuff. I have fat friends who are more into diet culture stuff.VirginiaSomething I’ve been conscious of is wanting to deliberately build more local in real life fat community. Like my friend Alexa’s Body Liberation Hiking Club, which I’ve talked about before. I remember the first time I did one of those hikes, and it was all fat people. And, you know, she sets it up so there’s no diet talk. You go as fast as the slowest person. We take lots of breaks. And the absolute joy of that experience for me, like having that in person experience was so great. I have definitely have started to build more relationships from that group. And my local artist friend Lindsey Guile. But it’s interesting that I have to push beyond my local mom community in a big way to find this. CorinneI mean, that makes me also just wonder how much of that is also by design. If fat people can’t get help with fertility stuff and I don’t know, it’s hard. VirginiaPlus straight men are a whole situation. CorinneOh, yeah. Gross.VirginiaThere’s that for us.CorinneI did one of the unlikely hiker hikes and it was incredible. I met people doing that. And I did a fat swim thing where I met other fat people who do other stuff that is cool and interesting around town. So, yeah, definitely if you can find or organize your own fat community thing, I think we would both recommend it.Virginia1,000 percent. Thin people we can be friends with you, too. We do have a lot of thin friends, you know? But I think fat community is an important thing to have in your life. And it makes sense that for a lot of us, it has to start online. But when you find the in person options, it’s so great.Alright, let’s do a couple kid questions and food questions CorinneYes.How do I manage food waste with kids who take one bite and don’t like something?VirginiaFirst of all, you fire your children. I mean, the most important thing that can help is to serve extremely small portions. And it’s tricky, right? Because you don’t want to trigger a restrictive mindset. My children like frozen pancakes or frozen Eggo waffles are a breakfast staple. And there are weeks where they’ll eat three pancakes. And then there are weeks when they will eat half a pancake. And it is really annoying if I have microwaved three pancakes to then have this plate of that the child has spit on and sneezed on and whatever. And I have to throw out these pancakes.So when I’ve noticed, wait, I just threw out too many pancakes this morning, the next day, I will be like, “It seemed like no one was super hungry for pancakes yesterday. So everyone’s getting one and if you want more, we’ll do more.” And that can trigger them being like, “We want our three pancakes!” And so I say, “You can eat three but can you eat them one at a time?”So you just have to be really clear. I’m not limiting you. You can come back for more. But I’m giving you a small amount because we’re spending your college tuition on microwave pancakes right now. So that’s the biggest thing, but it’s also just like an obnoxious, inevitable thing. You can’t ever get it totally right. It’s super annoying.CorinneI mean, I find this a tiny bit relatable like sometimes I make myself something and then I’m like, do I want this?VirginiaBut then you can eat your own leftovers in a way that I’m not going to eat some child’s sneezed-on pancake.CorinneOkay, I don’t want to eat that either. Fair.VirginiaAmy Palanjianof YTF Community has all these great tricks like if it’s a banana they took one bite out of, you can cut off the bitten part and freeze it for smoothies.CorinneHow do you all feed yourselves when nothing sounds good? Intuitive Eating is my starting point, but bodies need food to function, too. VirginiaThis is true. Intuitive Eating is great, but if your intuition is telling you not to eat, you cannot listen to that. You do need to eat.CorinneSo true. I definitely struggle with this as someone who lives alone. Sometimes I do not feel like cooking for myself. I end up relying a lot on quick, easy, or frozen stuff. Like like Trader Joe’s stuff or a quesadilla, like just a tortilla and cheese. I pretty much can always make myself eat that. VirginiaMaybe sit down and making a list, of three to five quick, easy meals that you can keep on hand and that you know, you can always pretty much eat. For me, I will always eat pasta with a jar of Rao’s sauce on top. That’s an easy solo dinner for me or me and the kids. My smoothie. Sometimes it’s like a sensory thing or whatever. Like a whole meal feels like too much but you can make a big smoothie and maybe I can get that down more easily.CorinneYeah, I also find fruit in general. Like an apple?VirginiaAn apple and peanut butter.CorinneSometimes if you’re at that point where you’re too hungry and grumpy to decide then I’ll be like, “Okay, just eat like an apple or plum or something,” and then try and figure out the next step.VirginiaOh, that’s a really good tip. Because sometimes what’s happening here is nothing sounds good because you’re past the point of being able to make a plan.CorinneYeah, your brain is like, “Give me sugar to work.” VirginiaI often do cheese and crackers for that.CorinneOh, yeah, cheese and crackers is such a good one. VirginiaYeah, cheese and crackers. And then sometimes that’s all I want. And sometimes it’s like, “Now that I’ve had some cheese and crackers, I’m ready to think like an adult and make a decision.”CorinneI’ve started to become more aware of this with weightlifting, because I usually go in the afternoons. So if I have a really light lunch and then I’m supposed to go to the gym I’m like, “Oh, no, this is not going to work. Why can’t I lift anything? Oh, because I didn’t eat enough for lunch or breakfast.” So I’ve also started making these protein bars2 for myself, which sounds horrible. But they’re really good. They’re almost like those no bake peanut butter bars. I just keep them like in my fridge. They have protein powder and ground flax in them. VirginiaThat’s exciting. Depending on your budget this may not be a helpful answer, but takeout is your friend. A lot of times it’s “I don’t want to do the work of making food” and there’s no shame in ordering to have food brought to you. Maybe you can get something that sounds more interesting or just having some standard takeout order that you know if this shows up, I will eat it. CorinneAnd if takeout isn’t in your budget, you could talk to someone about doing a meal exchange thing where one week you cook for them and the next week they cook for you.VirginiaThat’s a great idea. This person didn’t say who they eat with or who else is in their household. Even if you live alone, do you have a good friend who you can be like, when I don’t feel like eating, can we eat together? Or if you have a partner saying, I need you to figure out dinner tonight. Like, I have no bandwidth for feeding myself or you but I know that needs to happen. Can you please make that happen? That is a very fair thing to ask of a partner or good friend.CorinneAnd I love that idea. Just like FaceTiming and eating together? VirginiaI mean, this is very common for folks who are in eating disorder recovery. I’ve done meal support for friends who just need someone to sit and talk to them while they do the act of eating. That is a totally great strategy. I have a friend sometimes who will text me and be like, “I’m looking at this menu. What am I getting?” Because it’s hard to make that decision. And I’m like, “You are getting this.”CorinneThat’s so fun. I want people to be texting me that.VirginiaI mean, I’ll text you! Text me a menu. CorinneNo, I want to tell people what to get.VirginiaDammit,  I was so excited. CorinneYeah, seems really fun. VirginiaMaybe you can just say like, “I’m having a hard time deciding what to eat,” and you have a friend who knows your list of three to five things. Because maybe it’s the decision is the hard part. That’s something to think about. Like, is it that I am physically, sensory wise, I feel nauseous, like that kind of don’t want to eat? Or is it the work is too much, the decision is too much. And then thinking about how to bring in support to make all of those feel easier. And it’s totally fine that you’re not making some intuitive choice about what to eat for this meal. The intuitive part is that you’re recognizing how important it is to feed yourself. That’s your intuition. Check. You did intuitive eating because you recognized you should eat and if you had to outsource the decision of what to eat, that is fine. That’s just where you are.CorinneGreat point. We are definitely not saying. “If you don’t feel like eating, just don’t eat.” VirginiaNo, no. We’re saying, “Good job You, recognizing that you still need to eat but sometimes it’s really hard to make that decision or do that work or whatever.” It is not an intuitive eating fail at all.CorinneOkay, I’m gonna read the next one too.What is the most generous and fun and least intimidating way to serve food at a dinner party? Family style buffet in the other room? I like plating food for people, but sometimes I worry that it’s too controlling.VirginiaOkay, I kind of get liking plating food for people and I think it’s a little controlling. I say that with love, as a fellow controlling person. Because I do think for the most part people like to put food on their plates themselves. Unless you’re in a restaurant. I guess I have some very foodie friends who would do this because they’ve like had a whole vision for the meal, but I just feel like dinner parties in general is a different vibe. I don’t have another room because my downstairs is all one room, basically, but I often put the food up on the kitchen counter. Like, I’ll set the table, I’ll make the table pretty, but people will then grab a plate from the table and go make their own plate and come back and sit down.CorinneSo that’s buffet style. I do think buffet style is the way that is most encouraging or enabling of people to just get however much they want. Because you can put however much you want on your plate. And then also, it’s easier to go back. You don’t have to be like, “Can someone pass the bread?”VirginiaYeah family style is nice if it’s like, four people or fewer. Any more than that and I get stressed out because the thing I want is at the other end of the table, and is there going to be enough when it makes its way around to me? Or how am I going to ask for it to be passed? I just feel like I end up spending too much time worrying about that versus being able to get up and go to the buffet.CorinneI can see why if you have a vision for how the meal is going to look on someone’s plate, it could be annoying to watch people…VirginiaDump it on any old way.CorinneBut I also think hopefully, it would be less like wasteful. Like people aren’t going to take too much, they are actually going to eat what they take.VirginiaPlus, I just feel like it’s so common that you’re gonna have someone who’s a vegetarian or someone who can’t eat gluten or whatever. Like, are you plating to everyone’s needs? That feels like more work for you. I don’t know. Yeah, just let people make their own choices. CorinneI mean, that’s kind of division of responsibility, right? Like, do you let your kids serve themselves? VirginiaYes, division of responsibility is very big on family style. But that could be a buffet, depending how big your family is. For three of us, like, with little kids, you generally would put it at the table, because if I let my kids keep getting up, they’d wander off. Would they make it back to the table? But yeah, you tend to do family style and let them serve themselves. I have one kid who I do sometimes plate for because I just know her well enough to know she might say no to something or she might not take something but if it’s on her plate, she’s actually quite happy to eat it. There’s just a weird nuance to that, with some kids. Whereas I have another kid who I would never ever ever plate for, because I just know she likes that total control of deciding yes or no. Some of it is motor skill-related too? Younger kids just my need a little more help.CorinneI would also be curious about how this person would feel about someone else plating their food.VirginiaI bet that they don’t like it, speaking as a fellow control freak. I should not be labeling based on a 20 word question that this person is a control freak, but I feel like we can sense one another. I would not like having my food plated for me. I don’t really even like other people deciding what I’m eating! I like to make my own choices.CorinneYeah. Would you say if you’re going to other people’s houses for dinner most of your friends are doing family style or buffet style? VirginiaI feel like it’s usually buffet style. I have one very foodie friend. He did this amazing taco dinner party one time where he did put these very unusual taco combos together for the first round. But then after that, he was like, “Now you can do what you want.”CorinneThat’s another good suggestion. I guess if you wanted to plate the first round and then put everything out buffet style, you could do that.Next question:What do you wish someone did for you while you were in the thick of your marriage stuff ?Asking because I want to support someone close to me going through it.VirginiaThis is a very nice question.So when we say “in the thick of marriage stuff,” do we mean the part prior to the divorce being decided where it’s really, really hard, and you’re working towards that decision? Or to be honest, I’m still in the thick of it because we’re in the process of getting divorced—like we’re not done? So the past tense just made me laugh, because I feel like I’m still really in it.CorinneI feel like the part before you decide to get divorced, maybe would be like the thick of it but no one would know, probably.VirginiaRight. I mean, that’s the thing. Only a very few super close friends probably know. But it is super hard. That’s a hard stage to talk about, if that’s where this person is. Like, your friend may not know what they want to do yet. They may not know what their partner wants to do yet. There are just a lot of really big unknowns during that stage. But here are some things that were super helpful for me, even before I realized that this was going to be a path that would make sense for us:I was taking a lot of comfort in reading stories or hearing from people with good divorces. Like looking back, I’m like, oh, I was kind of gravitating towards that a little bit as a genre.CorinneAre we talking about fiction or TV?VirginiaAny media. I mean, I’m thinking of like Joanna Goddard’s divorce essay. But I read some novels with divorce plots or saw movies or whatever. I think real people examples are super helpful, right? Because it’s being able to visualize yourself. Like, I can’t underscore enough how different life feels married and separated. It is a real upending of a universe. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it is a huge thing. So it’s like asking someone to picture themselves living on the moon. It’s just such a big change from what they thought they were going to be doing, what they signed on for. Even if they want this, it’s just really hard to picture.But you do have to be careful, right? Because if they are not currently at a place where they want to consider divorce, even if they’re unhappy, you being like, “Look at this awesome divorced friend!” might be annoying. But just looking for ways to share some of that kind of thing can be helpful. The other thing that I really admire all of my close friends for—and my sister, and my therapist, man, who has earned her copays— is, I suspect it was clear to people for a little bit that this is where we were headed before it was clear to me. Because I feel like so often you have more like clarity about someone else’s life than you do about your own. And nobody was like, “This is where you should go.” Everybody let me get there. So that would be the biggest thing I would say, and that’s something I know I really struggle with, as a friend in that situation. Like thinking I know where somebody should be going and what I think they should be doing with their lives. See previous discussion of control freak! I tend to think that I have really awesome advice.But it is not our place to tell other people how their story is going to unfold. And so just as much as you can, being more in a listening role and if they want to think through all the different possibilities for themselves, then help them visualize that, but also don’t steer them towards anything. And don’t decide you know how this story needs to end. Giving them the chance to play it with their own life. That is a real gift that people gave me. CorinneI feel like you also got a good care package or something.VirginiaOh yeah. Once word did start to get out that was really lovely because people were so supportive. Dacy sent me an amazing care package. It had a puzzle, she found a butter candle, stickers, all this good stuff. That was delightful to receive. Heidi, who owns our bookstore in town, gave me a care package of romance novels featuring divorced women having affairs with firefighters and movie stars. Was not mad about that. My favorite was Nora Goes Off Script by Annabel Monaghan. If You Ask Me by Libby Hubscher is also fun.CorinneThat’s incredible.VirginiaAnd a couple of people sent flowers, which was really great. And none of that is necessary at all. Like, you don’t have to do some big over the top thing but did I weep every time just being like, oh my God people are so nice? Yes. It felt really good. I think otherwise just being available to go to dinner. And if alcohol is a part of your friendship, doing that together.CorinneThat’s good advice.VirginiaAlright. Our last question, we’re going to wrap up with a fun one.If you are going to go on a girls’ trip with college friends, where would you go?CorinneGod, it’s so hard for me to even think about this because travel has just been such a non-thing for the past few years. VirginiaThis is fantasy.CorinneI also don’t have a current passport. Okay, okay. You’re like, “Stop talking about facts.” VirginiaCorinne, you’re not booking the trip. We’re not trying to put it on your to do list, although we should get your passport updated.CorinneI know. What am I doing? I’m like, “This isn’t possible. Why are we talking about it?”VirginiaI thought this was like a fun fantasy question. Um, I mean, you can’t go wrong with a good house rental.CorinneI was going to say some kind of waterfront property during the summer? Someone’s lake house? You did a really nice lake house rental.VirginiaYes, for a family vacation. With my girlfriends, we did the Jersey Shore because one of them has a house there, which was also amazing. We also often use my house because it’s in the Hudson Valley, which is a pretty place to go to. I think any kind of house rental you can get to easily, because the thing is, you want the trip to see your friends and have time together.I mean, in fantasy we have no budget, all the passports are updated, we’re flying first class to Greece and going to the Greek islands. But if we’re just trying to make a plan of how do we have quality time with our friends? That’s probably anywhere you can rent a house with enough bedrooms. I personally don’t love to share a bedroom. I love my friends, but we’re in our 40s and we just sleep better. So, anywhere you can get a cheap four or five bedroom house rental in a pretty place with a view, if possible.CorinneGood answer.VirginiaAll right. Sorry we stressed you out.---ButterCorinneDo you have a Butter?VirginiaI do have a butter. I wanted to mention it because I put it in my Instagram recently and people were like where’s this from? And I have talked about how I don’t share links to random stuff on Instagram anymore because it’s making me be a free influencer and that’s not my job. But Burnt Toast paid subscribers, for you I will link things! This is a grow light by Soltech. I bought it from a local store but they sell them online. It is a cute plant light, which is a rare thing. Usually grow lights look like super ugly. But this one is so pretty.It looks like a fancy light fixture you would have in your house somewhere. It was a splurge, but if you are a serious plant person like I am, and yet cursed with a bedroom that has like almost no natural light, which I also am, then you need it.I realized for years, I have not liked my bedroom because it’s a part of our house that gets no light and I could have no plants in there. Now I have a tree in there! I have so many plants, and they’re so happy with the grow light. I do recommend putting it on an outlet with a timer. I did at first just leave it on, like turn it on first thing in the morning and turn it off when I went to bed at like 10 o’clock at night, and I fried a couple plants because I think they were like, “I am not prepared for 18 hours of sunlight.”So you have to tinker a little bit to figure out the right amount of light for your plants. But it’s a game changer if you love plants, but don’t have good natural light.CorinneThese are really cute. You would never know that they were grow lights.VirginiaI mean, the quality of light when they’re on, you can kind of tell that this is a very bright light. But especially because it’s in my bedroom, I have it go on during the day when I’m not in my bedroom. Do you know what I mean? I see it on like for a few minutes in the morning and I have it turn off around three or four o’clock. And then the rest of the night I’m just like looking at my pretty plants with my regular lights.CorinneDoes it make a huge difference for the plants? VirginiaThese plants would be dead otherwise. This room has just tiny windows, weirdly designed. You just couldn’t possibly put a plant in there otherwise, even like snake plants. But now I have a begonia in there, I have some succulents. I have so many things.CorinneThat’s really cool. VirginiaWhat’s your Butter? CorinneOkay, my Butter is that I recently started wearing earrings. Just tiny little hoops. I spent so long trying to find earrings because there are just so many. There are really expensive ones. There are really like thin, fragile ones. I ended up getting these ones which I feel like were maybe advertised to me on Instagram? I don’t know. They’re from this brand Ready-Made. They are just mini infinity hoops. They are supposedly hypoallergenic and “biocompatible,” whatever that means. I think they’re just made from steel. They have silver and gold ones. I’m now just wearing them all the time. Like I wear them in the shower. I wear them to sleep. And they’re holding up very well. They’re also cheap! They’re like $30 for a pair, so I don’t feel stressed about losing them. Because the other ones I was looking at getting were $300 and I was like I should at least start with the ones that cost 10 percent of that. So yeah, if you’re looking for little tiny hoops, I really like these.VirginiaThey’re really cute. I haven’t worn earrings in so long, my holes may have closed up. CorinneMine had closed up before I bought these and I just shoved them right through.VirginiaOh, that’s upsetting. My 10-year-old just got her ears pierced, which was exciting. We went to the local tattoo parlor, they did a fantastic job. It was very good experience. But she’s still on her starter studs. I have been thinking we have to start getting her an earring collection and I may order these for her because she was interested in hoops but I don’t want her to wear giant hoops because I have a fear of kids and hoops and them getting tugged on or something. And I’m liking the no green skin guarantee, that seems like a great quality in earrings.CorinneYeah, I would say these would be great for a 10 year old or a 37 year old. If she gets some, send a picture!!Virginia I will for sure. Cool. We did it!---The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti diet journalism!---1 - From Corinne: I want to add one more puffer recommendation: Shiny By Nature has one that is down and the bottom hem is 74” and it is specifically designed for bigger hips. I just ordered one of these myself and I was pleased with it.2 - From Corinne: The recipe recommends natural peanut butter but I usually just use JIF. Also I do keep these in the fridge or even the freezer because they can be a little melty.

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about anti-fat bias, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole Smith.Today I am chatting with Vashti Harrison, number one New York Times-bestselling author and illustrator of Little Leaders, Little Dreamers, and Little Legends — about her newest picture book, Big.Big is such an important contribution to the representation of Black girls, and of fat kids, in literature. And this is a really moving conversation. I absolutely loved getting to know Vashti, hearing about her process, and about everything that went into this book. I hope it is really helpful to you in thinking about how to have conversations about anti-fat bias, but also about anti-Black racism and adultification, with your kids.If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)AND - we have signed copies of Big and several of Vashti’s other books in the Burnt Toast Bookshop right now! Plus you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)Shop the Burnt Toast Bookstore!And don’t forget to check out our new Burnt Toast Podcast Bonus Content!This week we have stunning behind-the-scenes illustrations from Big in its early stages. You don’t want to miss this.Episode 116 TranscriptVirginiaYour book Big is a major favorite in our house, I just found it in my daughter’s bed the other day. It really, really means a lot to our family. Why don’t we start by having you tell listeners a little bit about yourself and your work?VashtiI am primarily an author and illustrator of children’s books—although author still feels like an awkward new term for me! I feel like I was thrust into the world of writing, but I came to it through drawing. I’ve always expressed myself through images.My background is actually in filmmaking. I used to make experimental films, primarily shot on 16 millimeter, very kind of like artsy fartsy, definitely in a world outside of the commercial art world and definitely outside of making work for young people. But through the process of learning all of the tools and techniques and traditions of formal art making, I learned a lot of discipline and how to tell stories and when I rekindled a love for drawing I felt like so charged and excited to be expressing myself through my hands. It felt so different than making movies, which felt laborious and always required lots of gear and help. I felt so empowered to be able to tell any kind of story I wanted through illustration.Not to jump right into the politics, but around the time of the Trump election, I just felt like I wanted to be making positive work. I wanted to be making work for young people. It just became only thing I was excited or interested in creating: Images and stories that felt like they were uplifting for young people.VirginiaI think 2016 had that impact on a lot of us. I can relate to that feeling of: The world is burning, how am I going to put anything good into it? VashtiI felt powerless. I felt like I can’t do much in this world. I can’t change  too much or too many people. But if I can create enough images that connect to people… Weirdly enough, I was thinking about Winnie the Pooh. I was thinking about Pikachu. I was thinking about characters that when people see them, they say, “Oh my gosh, I love that character!” That’s what I wanted to create for Black children. I wanted people to see these images of Black children and have that same response. VirginiaI think a lot about how Winnie the Pooh is a sort of stealth fat icon. He’s very proud of being short and fat. There’s a lovely way to read both the books and the movie as being fat positive. And yet, there is this huge problem in children’s media. Kids’ books feature talking animals more often than they feature Black kids and Black girls, for sure.  We need more, and we need different.So tell us about Big. What inspired this story in particular?VashtiWell, around the time that I started working on my first book, Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History, I read this study that came out of the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality called Girlhood Interrupted. It was my first introduction to the term “adultification bias.” That is the perception that some children are more adult, more mature, more responsible, and more knowledgeable than their age would suggest. Adultification is inherently racialized, because it happens at a disproportionate rate to Black children and especially Black girls. The study found that adults view Black girls as young as the age of five as less innocent and more adult than their white counterparts. This results in adults believing that Black girls need less nurturing, less protection, that they need to be comforted less, that they know more about adult topics—and the list goes on. When I read this study, I felt so emotionally wrenched because I remember being a really shy kid who took a really long time to come of age. I just thought about how harmful it is, or would have been for me to have been presumed old enough or mature enough for things that I was definitely not ready for. I also thought about all the different metrics that feed into this bias:  Skin color, height, voice, body shape, size and weight. I just feared for the girls that were being judged for being too something:  Too big, too tall, too loud. I was thinking about this intersection of adultification bias and anti-fat bias and I felt so charged to tell a story that centered on these things because I felt like I was going through my own emotional journey. I was reflecting on my my body and feeling like I wanted to make art that spoke to self-love and confronted how anti-fat bias had affected me. I didn’t know how I would tell that story, but the idea was ruminating while I was working on the other books.Those were nonfiction books and required a lot of research and I had agreed to do one every year. So I was just working for a couple years straight. Around the same time, I illustrated Sulwe by Lupita Niyong’o, which is about colorism. Which is a heavy, heavy topic to put in a children’s book. So I think in the process of working on all these other books, I was thinking about how to tell my own story. This is my first piece of fiction and it’s my first picture book that I’ve written and illustrated by myself. The process of working on other people’s books and those few years of just kind of ruminating on the ideas helped it all kind of cook. It was slow cooking for a while while some other ideas are in the Instant Pot, this one was a slow cooker.VirginiaI love that you brought up the Georgetown research, I want to talk about that a little more.I also was really moved by that study when it was published and I use it a lot in my book in talking about bias against fat kids and particularly Black girls in schools, how it comes up in dress codes and in the conversations around puberty. And something that really moved me about that research was hearing from the girls themselves. One girl said something like, “I get dress coded way more than anyone else because I’m in a bigger body. I know that something that’s low cut on another girl goes unremarked on and on me it’s a problem.” That is so important.I quote a couple of them in my book because that is the huge problem with research on these issues often, right? We don’t hear from the kids who are experiencing this. So I recommend everyone spend some time with that research. It’s important to hear from these girls. I think we often don’t realize how much kids are exquisitely aware of how all of these biases are being used against them.VashtiYes. I can say these words “adultification bias,” and “anti-fat bias,” but I was connecting with the stories of actual girls. Georgetown Center put out a really approachable, accessible short animated video where they use some of those words and it’s like, it really just puts it it out there for you to really understand, like, these aren’t just datasets. These are real people, these are children who deserve so much more than what they’re being offered. So I think that’s what I wanted to capture in Big. VirginiaSo what is the story of Big?VashtiBig follows the story of a young girl who, when she’s first born, the people around her, the adults around her, use such positive words of affirmation. “You’re such a big girl, you’re a big girl now.” And that is a good thing. I wanted to talk about how, at a certain point in most girls’ lives, particularly in America, “big” goes from being a positive thing to being a negative thing. I wanted the inciting incident to be something that felt nearly innocuous. It’s an event, it’s something that happens, and she is changed after it. She takes in the words that people say to her, and it changes the way she she feels about herself and experiences the world. It is a story about the words we say to one another and also about how we offer children or how we don’t offer children the space to change and grow because of these weird expectations about what innocence looks like. VirginiaAs I’m listening to you talk, I’m thinking about how it is very easy to read Big as a somewhat straightforward story of this girl who loves ballet and is too big. Because you use text quite sparingly, the pictures are telling the story. So it’s easy to do one read of it. And as I’ve read it over and over with my daughter, I’ve gotten deeper and deeper into it.So now talking to you, I’m understanding just how radical the foundation of this book is. It is easy to pick up Big and think, “Oh, it’s a book about little girls and ballet.” It’s actually something way more subversive and more powerful than that.VashtiI think that is something I kind of struggled with, because I worried about all of the subtext. I wondered, is this too adult? Am I writing the story as an adult who has gone through and processed all these feelings and making something that is not quite for children? There is a surface level story and then there’s a subtextual story.On the surface, it is about a young girl who is full of self love and that changes after an incident on the playground. She starts to internalize these negative words she hears from the people around her and it makes her physically grow on the page to the point where she doesn’t fit anymore. At that point, she has to be confronted with not fitting, with people having problems with that. Fortunately she finds enough self love. She finds a way to identify what she loves about herself and what she knows to be true about herself and lets go of the things that she knows are not true about her and she makes more space for herself. It’s not a book about ballet. Ballet is a tool that is a metaphor in this story for the thing that we love. In this case, it felt important to show that the thing that she loves is also about freedom, about moving your body freely. Her joy gets taken away by these negative words from the people around her. And they are just passing comments, I don’t think many of the people know that those words stuck with her and are changing her, changing the way she feels and exists. One of the one of the things that changes for her as her body starts physically growing—for anyone who hasn’t seen it, things start changing for her and she grows larger than the size of her bed. Then in the next image, she’s 10 feet tall and can’t fit in her desk at school. That’s a visual image that’s kind of silly, but I was thinking about the way that Black girls get pushed out of school. They are not offered the opportunity to have different bodies or be silly and be loud because they are being judged for being too much or too something or too adult and are regularly getting punished at higher rates. That is directly correlated to the school to prison pipeline. So there are things that I was thinking about in this book that you wouldn’t quite know if I didn’t tell you, but it’s all there for me.VirginiaI love that you’re saying maybe it’s not a book for kids. I think the best children’s books often aren’t entirely for kids, or at least work on many different levels.This is not a perfect comparison by any means because your book is doing something quite different and more groundbreaking, but I wrote a piece recently revisiting Eloise with my daughter. Eloise was not intended to be a book for children. Kay Thompson actually didn’t even like kids and was really adamant about the fact that she wrote it for her gay cabaret fans. And of course children adore it, right? Little girls adore it and people embrace this rambunctious little girl’s story, which is powerful, especially so at the time.I think there’s something really valuable in kids books when the author has this whole other mission. And I think kids do get it.I think the reason I loved Eloise as a little girl is because she represented some freedom to me that I wasn’t feeling in my own life. I was such a good girl, not a rule breaker, ever. It was helpful for me to see this representation of femininity that wasn’t just perfect little good girl. I think the kids reading your books are having an even more profound experience of seeing themselves and seeing you put into pictures. The emotional experiences they’re having in their lives, that’s huge. It’s huge. VashtiYeah, I appreciate that. It is the highest form of praise when I hear that a kid loves the book, that a kid is reading it over and over again. I was just scared throughout the entire process if I was doing the right thing.Mainly because I read a review—you’re not supposed to read the reviews, but I read one. When I illustrated this book by Lupita Nyong’o called Sulwe that is a fictionalization of her childhood experiences growing up as the darkest person in her family. In this in this story, this little girl has to go on this adventure and hear the stories of night and day and in the end she learns to love the color of her skin.But I read this review by a parent who said, “My kid did not have any anxieties about the color of her skin before this book, and now she does, and it’s all your fault.” And I was like, it is all my fault. But I also believe this book couldn’t have created something that didn’t exist. So I, I try to keep that thought a little bit closer to me because it is my fear that this book would incite an anxiety or a fear that wasn’t present in a child beforeVirginiaThis was something I wanted to ask you about. I do a lot of work reporting and thinking about how we talk to our kids about the issues of anti-fatness and diet culture. Often parents will say to me, “It’s too early. I don’t want to bring this up now because I’ll put this in their heads.”But I feel that the research shows quite clearly, with both adultification bias and anti-fat bias, that kids are learning about it really young. VashtiI’m reminded of when folks say “It’s too early to talk to your kids about race and racism.” But for for Black children, that is rarely an option. It is a thing that exists and we’re going to encounter it no matter what. It comes from a place of privilege to say “It’s too early for my kid.”Obviously, each individual adult and child experience is different. And as a very sensitive kid, I definitely would have appreciated someone taking care in the way they spoke to me about this. But when addressing these these larger, heavy things in our society, it is rarely an option that we won’t encounter it. I think particularly with Big, we’re talking about the way that adults use words with children. It is so ubiquitous in our society to talk about children’s bodies as this good or bad thing. And the call might be coming from inside the house. I’m trying to appeal to all of us to address the way we use this language. I think in order to dismantle hatred, we have to address it. f you’re not aware of all of these things, how can we properly fight it together? VirginiaI think often, when parents say, “It’s too early,” they’re really saying, “I’m not ready to have this talk. I don’t know what I’m going to say.”We need to give parents—and this is more my job than yours—more tools on how to have the talk so that they can tackle it. And texts like Big are this gift because they give you a way into it. This is another maybe tangential example, but I was just talking to a mom this week who was really anxious about letting her 10-year-old see the Barbie movie because she said, “I’ve always been so careful not to expose her to diet culture and to these body ideals. Is the Barbie movie age appropriate? Can she handle that? She has so much confidence right now and I don’t want to destroy that.”And I totally get that instinct. We want to protect our kids. But the Barbie movie is doing some subversive stuff. It’s not going far enough, but there’s a lot you can talk about in that movie with a 10-year-old.But I could see it was a lot of her fear of how will I navigate the conversations that come up there? I think we need to be a little less afraid of the hard conversations.But anyway back to your more important and more powerful book! Something you do so well is show adults talking about her body. And we see her absorbing what they’re saying. I think maybe some of this discomfort too comes from parents knowing “I’ve probably said something I shouldn’t and I know my kid really did absorb it.” And you hold up a mirror to that so powerfully.I really love the moment at the end of the book where she tells the grownups she doesn’t want to change her body and that they’ve been offering the wrong kind of help. That just feels so radical for kids to see a kid advocating for herself like that.VashtiI struggled with knowing exactly how to end this book. It doesn’t have that sort of third act triumphant win, but it’s there. It’s just way more quiet. I think on an unconscious level, I needed to share that the journey towards self love is a personal one. I remember having conversations with my editor about how the girl gets there about maybe needing another character or another conversation to achieve a clear story arc. But I kept pushing back against that. I couldn’t quite verbalize why she needed to just be alone. Looking back on it now, I feel like to include other characters, other adults or other kids, would be too easy. It would turn them into the heroes or villains of her story. And in the end, she saves herself. It’s quiet but it’s resolute. In the final spreads, she dances and moves her body. She is unhindered and taking up space and completely free within herself. I think I just knew that there were going to be people who were going to say, “I can help you, I can fix you, I can make you be smaller!” And I wanted her to have this look on her face like, “Oh, you just don’t get it It’s okay. Because I’ve got it. I’m okay.”Like, girl. I wish I could be that strong. It’s an aspirational thing.VirginiaIt also shows a very real facet of this, which is, often as we are working on becoming resolute and becoming accepting of ourselves, we also have to accept that people who love us can love us and get it wrong. You show her being able to love them, even though their advice and their solutions for her are not the right advice and solutions. I think that is a tension that’s something we’re all navigating all the time. VashtiThe people that were working on this book with me—my agent, my editor, my art director—to be fair about the publishing industry, they’re all predominantly white women. And I just think there was a misconception that this was a book about body positivity. They were expecting it to have a much more triumphant positive end, and while I do appreciate the body positivity, this wasn’t about that. It wasn’t just about changing her own mindset about herself. It was about dismantling a systemic oppression against big bodies. That felt like a much bigger thing to tackle that one person can’t do alone. But the journey towards self love, at least, I felt was very personal and quiet. The book is a very internal story. We see everything through her perspective. The other people aren’t fully rendered, everything is in this shade of pink. They’re sort of the ideas of other people. It doesn’t feel like we’re in the grounded real world. For me, that was to further push the idea that we’re inside of her lens, her perspective, her world. could have looked very different. It could have been a very different story if it was about body positivity.VirginiaI think we have picture books that are more firmly body positive and I think they can be useful additions to these conversations with kids. And I think body positivity has left so many people out. It has failed to deal with the systemic bias of it all in such a profound way. We don’t need to be teaching kids that there are simple solutions to any of this and that all you have to do is love yourself. What a disservice that is because that’s not going to help you survive the world. It’s nice to have, but it’s not the solution. I am curious though, as you were working on this book and clearly as it was such a long process, as you said, did working on it change your own thinking about bodies? Did it shift your relationship with your own body in any ways?VashtiI think this is an aspirational book. I can look to this girl as a hero, for me. I think she gets there, and I’m still on this journey. Even the process of writing it, I just felt like I was picking at an open wound. It just made it even harder to create, but I think it was a hopeful kind of creative process. My own journey has so many ups and downs. And, you know, I’m still struggling very day, I feel like am I going to be a hypocrite if I start going to this new gym? I don’t know. It’s hard. I don’t have too big of a community around me. My closest ally is an untrustworthy ally. They’re talking about Wegovy and joining the next diet. So it feels like I am constantly bombarded with diet culture. I’ve always felt like that in my own family. It’s really hard to try to be on a journey towards essentially neutrality. When, in my family, everyone values, like, working extra hard towards something. And so it can feel like, to them, I’m a failure. Or to them, I’m giving up or something.I don’t know, I’m still parsing all this stuff out. But I think that’s what’s helpful about making art is letting everything out and sorting through all these feelings through storytelling. I think my journey is sometimes like one step forward, two steps back. Sometimes it’s two steps forward, one step back. I think it’s so easy for me to want to stand up for other people. And it’s just still so hard to do that for myself. VirginiaOh, absolutely. VashtiI want to make a world where children do not have to face any of the diet culture nonsense that I had to face all through childhood, all through my family home life. I will go to the ends of the world to say they deserve as much time and space and care to have their bodies change and grow and look however they need to, as long as they are happy and healthy. But it’s a lot harder for myself to do that. VirginiaI think a lot about how it’s really important that people know you can be in this fight and you can be working towards this, even if you’re struggling yourself. I think there’s often this perception—and I think this is one of the things body positivity has not helped with—that in order to be a good advocate on these issues, you need to totally love yourself, you need to never be dieting, you need to be completely divested from diet culture, and have this unimpeachable resume of body acceptance.VashtiSometimes I think about that for myself, like, oh, gosh, I’m supposed to look this way. I’m supposed to have this for the people who look to me. But.VirginiaBut I mean, it’s a stealth diet mentality to hold yourself to that standard of body positivity perfection. That’s the other people telling us we have to follow all of these rules in order to be worthy, in order to fit in. You can be doing this in your own way. You can be messy. We are humans, we are messy.VashtiI think what you’re saying applies to so many other things, too. In my career I feel like I skyrocketed really, really fast. I didn’t get to spend enough time being a student of my field. I don’t have all the answers. I really don’t feel like I have the authority on these things. So, honestly, it feels like to expect perfection is a fallacy.VirginiaAll of this as a survival strategy, right? Participating in diet culture, beauty culture, whatever. It’s all just what we have been told we have to do to be safe and survive in this world. And how much you can let go of all of that is going to be such an individual thing. Some people can let go of a lot of it really easily. That’s probably people who have a lot of privilege in other ways protecting them. Other people who can’t let go of a lot of it, even if they can recognize all the problems in the system and don’t want to be supporting that system.Well, I am so grateful for this book I already adored it and talking to you about it gives me so many more layers of appreciation for what went into this. I understand it’s probably stressful to hear this, as you just talked about the pressures of skyrocketing fast, but I really think it is an instant classic that we are going to be reading for generations. So, no pressure there, but good job.VashtiThat is the hugest honor and the biggest fear. So scary. ButterVashtiI’ve got maybe two Butters, and one of them is related to Barbie. It’s the amount of pink that I’m seeing everywhere, which is related to my book Big, which features a lot of pink. And I think you know, it is related sure to ballet, the character in the book likes to dance. But my choice in making the book fully told through this lens is that pink is this girl’s character. This is her. This is this character’s color. I associate this color with her. And through the arc of the book, we see that color. We see glimpses of what it could be when she’s feeling really hopeful and full of love. We see that color get dimmed and it gets grayer and grayer. Then we see it fully return back to its saturation, where she is again seeing a future for herself, and seeing what she knows to be true about herself.I remember being a kid and pink being so uncool. Like you play with Barbies? Pink, ugh. And I love pink and I like seeing it everywhere. So that is my joy.And then my my other Butter is right now our economy is somehow being boosted by Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Barbie fans. I feel so excited to know that people are finding community this way. I heard today that Michaels had a 300 percent sales boost in crafting supplies because of people making friendship bracelets, which is also a call back to my childhood. So I feel really grateful to know that people are crafting and expressing themselves through these things that our culture has often told us are silly absurd, childish, girly things. Crafting and beading and making friendship bracelets. I’m all about celebrating girl power bringing our economy back.VirginiaI also really love pink. I do have two daughters who don’t like pink but I think that’s a stage. I think it’s a necessary rejection of their mother, it’s fine. Plus, as a feminist, I made a conscious choice not to give them a lot of pink clothes. It’s hard when you have two girls, all of the baby gifts are like pink Mary Janes. I had to draw some lines.But now that they’re older, and we can talk about all of these complicated conversations, I’m steadily bringing more pink into our home decor and into my wardrobe. So I’m also here for the reclaiming and the rebranding of pink I think is great.VashtiAlso, in color theory, pink is associated with gentle love and care and that is something that I want for Black girls. And I wanted that for this girl at the center of my story. So sure, pink has its connotations in our society but also I appreciate that when we think of pink flowers that represent nurturing and love I want to offer that to all girls.VirginiaWell those were amazing Butters. Mine is far more prosaic but it is something bringing me joy right now. It’s a set of photo frames I got off Amazon. I apologize— I’m trying to divest but as we just discussed, we are messy human beings and Amazon Prime does still own my soul. So these are these clear acrylic picture frames. They’re really chunky and they’re magnetic so they’re easy to open and close and swap out what you want to put in them.And I got the little four by four inch ones that are pretty small. And Phoebe Wahl has great set of anti-diet fat positive stickers that I picked up recently at my local bookstore. I wanted to do something special with them, so I put them in these frames. They’re so cute just popped around my house now and they’re bringing me a lot of fat positive joy. VashtiI discovered these frames somewhere in the middle of the lockdown of 2020, and started putting my little collages in there because I didn’t want to paste them down to look at how delicate they were. They’re perfect for these things. I’ve given a lot of them away at this point but I have a few left around my room.VirginiaI love that you already know about them! They’re such good frames. They come in a ton of different sizes and are not super expensive. And They’re acrylic so they can’t break which is useful in a house with children and an excited dogs.Well Vashti, thank you so much. This was incredible conversation. I loved having you here. Tell folks where we can follow you and how we can support your work?VashtiI am on Instagram and other platforms as @vashtiharrison. You can find my work and some of my illustrations on my website.---The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted byCorinne Faywho runs@SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about anti-fat bias, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole Smith.Today I am just beyond delighted to be chatting with musician and comedian Farideh, who I have been high key obsessed with on Instagram for months now.Farideh is known for relatable and hilarious takes on motherhood. In December 2022 her song Such a Good Dad went viral, generating over 10 million views in just three weeks. Her new album, “The Mother Load” came out on October 24. It is so good!Farideh’s music hits that sweet spot of super relatable, mostly elder millennial discussions of motherhood, about bodies, gender norms, and socialization. There’s just so much good stuff here. She’s a delight. This is a really fun episode and we’re going to play some of her music, too—so even if you’re usually a transcript reader, consider listening today!PS. If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)Episode 115 TranscriptFaridehSo I’m a musician. I’m a comedian, I guess now. I’ve been a musician most of my life and then I’ve just kind of been foraying into the comedy later in life. People can find me on Instagram at @IloveFarideh, same handle everywhere. I started getting into content creation a couple years ago and I’ve been mostly focusing on music for moms nowadays. VirginiaI want to talk about the mom thing. But I first got into your work when literally 900 of my followers were DMing me the diet song. They were like, “do you know about Farideh? Have you heard the diet song?” I know in your bio you said the “good dad” song is what went super viral, but in our world, it was the diet song. In the Burnt Toast community and I think also just in fat activism, anti-diet communities in general, the diet song really went quite viral locally.FaridehThat’s good to know. Of course you have your views, but that doesn’t always mean something permeates communities in the way that you thought. So that’s really cool to know.VirginiaOh my God, we’re obsessed with that. What I love is you when you first released it, you did a very funny video of you being a pirate and dancing with gnomes, which is great. And then you later released a version that makes me cry. And I was just like, how is she so brilliant? She can do both. FaridehI was a musician my whole life and then I kind of thought I had ended that career. I didn’t know what to do, so I started content creation and then I was doing funny stuff. And then just before the diet song come up, I had made the most obvious to everybody else but me connection of like, “Ph, I should be writing funny songs because that’s actually two abilities of mine together.” I should combine these things that I like, instead of separating them out. So it was around December and I was just like, okay, so I need to build up a body of work really fast. Because I didn’t really have a collection of funny songs at my disposal. But it was the end of the year and I just knew that the vultures were circling. You know, the beginning of the year, let’s start the shame spiral. So I was like, this is a song that’s like half funny, half true.This is part of the journey of music and comedy, because they both actually really live in the vein of truth. I also want to give myself freedom that I don’t have to be a comedian. I am a musician, and I will always be a musician. And while I’m experimenting with comedy, it can be both. I can be serious, I can be comedic, because that’s who I am. Of course, the diet song comes from a very personal place. I was very heavily into diet culture as a young person. I was given a lot of messages from a very, very young age—like I’m sure many of your listeners were—about how my body needed to be smaller, and I kept it smaller as best as I could. And then one day, my body was like, no thank you and just decided to be not only unresponsive to diet culture, but would retaliate and rapidly rapidly gained weight, which I’ve come to understand is probably PCOS. So I had to come to a place of being like, oh, diets are not serving me. They’re, in fact, harming me. It’s hard for people to understand a reality that I’m sure most of your listeners understand, which is that calories in calories out ain’t true. When I had the ability to make my body smaller, it was a full time job. It was my whole mind. And what a waste of a mind!If a woman is only thinking about how to be smaller, she’s not thinking about the inequities in the world. She’s not thinking about how to make this world a better place. And that was a cost to myself. It was like, what a waste of whatever light I have in this world, but then you go macro and every night people are falling asleep being like, “I had two bites of a brownie,” Instead of being like, “Oh, that was a great day. I loved looking at my kids. Tomorrow, I can’t wait to do it again.” Right? Like, what a macro loss. I was just like, the vultures were circling. And I was like, I’m just going to write this song. Please don’t tell me about your juice cleanse. I love you so much, but I don’t want to know.VirginiaI don’t want to know.I think a lot about the songs that aren’t getting written, the books that aren’t getting written, the art that is not being made because women in particular, but anybody, so many people are just swept up in this project of body management and this failing project that then becomes so all consuming.FaridehYeah, the thing of just like lay that weapon down and just live a life, just step into it.VirginiaSo let’s also talk about the mom bod song. This is another one that people send me constantly, and that I felt extremely seen by. It captures this weird dichotomy where dad bods are sort of affectionately held up as an ideal.FaridehThey’re attractive. VirginiaThere’s something cute about them getting a little doughy or whatever. FaridehMoms in general aren’t allowed to be sexy. The mom bod is so trashed on. It’s a sign that you’ve let yourself go. It’s like just like yeah, well, if he got hit by a truck multiple times would he be bouncing back?VirginiaHow great would he look?FaridehGrowing a person and delivering it is incredibly hard on the body. And yeah, our bodies change and we’re allowed to. I wanted to just have fun with the song and it was really come from that privilege. I was in an all girl group for nine years and I would get on stage and I would sing every night. We would often be wearing outfits that complemented each other. That was sometimes very hard as the largest woman in the group because a lot of comparison would come up. At that point, I was the only one who was married. And I would have to consciously process that thought of like, actually, the thinner women in this group are single. Which was not the messaging, right? The messaging is, if you want a heterosexual relationship you have to be thin and if you’re not, then you’re not going to have a relationship. But of course that’s just not true.VirginiaRight, these things are unrelated.FaridehBut once again, because of privilege, I can say those things. Because I know deep down I am attractive with my mom bod.VirginiaI’ll also just footnote for the child-free listeners: You don’t need to have a mom bod to justify your body changes. You are allowed to be fat and shaped however you’re shaped regardless. You don’t have to earn it through childbirth. Especially because a lot of folks don’t get their kids through childbirth. There are a lot of ways to be a mom.FaridehTotally. Our bodies are just allowed to change. Dad bods don’t come from being a dad.VirginiaThey just come from existing and aging. But I think it’s like a great song for capturing that. Like, let’s normalize bodies changing. Let’s celebrate the changes, whatever the backstory.FaridehI’m all for celebrating the dad bod. I think dad bods are sexy and also I think mom bods are sexy. Let’s celebrate them both because we happen to be gifted to age.VirginiaThe big theme of your work and the focus of the new album is definitely motherhood and the way modern motherhood comes with all of these insane expectations. The details! Your detail work is incredible. You get all of the details of the day of being a mom involves, from laundry and all that. But also the invisible labor, the mental load bullshit, and the way it is just always disproportionately falling on us, no matter how hard we fight for it to be more balanced.You were told not to write songs about motherhood and that motherhood is not a sexy topic to write songs about. And then I started think about it. And I was like, that’s true. But also what the fuck?FaridehI’m sure anybody who’s listening will think wait, how many songs do you know about motherhood? They don’t exist. VirginiaI’m drawing a total blank. And there are some songs about fatherhood. Like Cat’s In The Cradle.FaridehBecause men can get away with that, right? They’re allowed to age. I remember sitting down with songwriters and presenting a song that briefly said I was a mom—this is before I was one, this was just me exploring a song about it. And they were just like, “Oh, yeah, you never write songs that even briefly suggest that you’re a mom.” Like it was just known. If you ever want a song to do well, you would never ever write about motherhood.I mean, and my career did probably the best after I became a mom. I toured with my child and the musical world was just really unprepared. There’s just no place for children even in like the best settings, right? And I saw how people would resent artists who became moms. It’s just because it makes you look old and unattractive.There’s really nothing less cool than a mother. And the music industry is about being cool in so many other ways. And young. So what happened was, I took a comedy class to learn how to be funnier, because I was enjoying learning about that online. And in that class, they were like, “Write about motherhood!” And I was like, no thank you, I would like to be relevant. But so much of our writing comes from our personal experience. And then you start writing and you’re like, oh, my goodness, I have lived a whole life that is creatively completely unexplored.Then I also in that class realized I was leaving my music at the door. Both of these things are overcoming my own snobbery that you learn as a young person, right? Old women, mothers, are boring and uncool. And musical comedy is not serious art. Right? So there was two things I had to overcome being like, oh, this is kind of cringey. But then, of course, when I did it it leads to the greatest or at least a whole new career. Like, I didn’t imagine it would happened. I was definitely like, my music career is over. I need to find another reason to exist.VirginiaAnd it turns out you just needed to find a new subject. FaridehI just turned 40. And as a musician, I always lived with the clock ticking being like how much longer can I really do this? Because people don’t invest in people who are old, they invest in 17-year-old prodigies who are incredibly talented, but also easily morphable. Easily sexualized, like, it’s not the same.That’s why it took me so long to start writing comedy songs, as well, because I just was like, my music career is over. There is no point in me pursuing this. And that’s when I moved into creating my own audience.Because the other thing is, people also don’t think that women are a market. That’s why people are like, Barbie movie? She’s done so well! It’s like, yeah, because women buy. It’s just like, they don’t make clothes for plus sized people. And you’re like, but that’s the majority of the people.VirginiaIt’s all the people who need to wear clothes. FaridehI don’t understand. It’s so nice to be like, oh, but I could just build my own audience and meet and create music for women or parents and who are needing this kind of music who need to be heard, who need to be seen. VirginiaAnd who you can reflect the experience of. And I’m thinking too about the discourse around Rihanna’s pregnancy or Beyonce’s pregnancy. We get so weird when women musicians become moms, right? We have such a weird, uncomfortable relationship with it, that we have to like dissect their bodies. There’s no parallel. No male musician who becomes a father has to do anything about it. It’s not even an interesting point in the interview. FaridehNo, it’s not a thing.VirginiaThey’re just allowed to become fathers and carry on. And it makes sense that trying to tour with kids you would encounter all kinds of hurdles. Music, as an industry, it sounds like, is very much leaving out an entire population. FaridehAbsolutely. I was just like, man, one day when I get the cash I’d love to make a grant for single mothers. Because I was able to do so much because of the support of my family. My dad is a musician. So, people came on tour with me. My husband came on tour with me, my dad came on tour with me, my mom came on tour with me, my aunt came on tour with me. But like man, single moms? Like where are they? There has to be so little single mom art in the world which means a whole voice is missing from our society.VirginiaSo, tell us about the new album. I got to listen to it this morning. It is amazing.FaridehI didn’t actually anticipate writing an album, it just kind of happened. I was like, oh, I guess I have enough songs here for an album. It’s always good to collect your body of work into something. I called it “The Mother Load” to explore many of the elements and the challenges we face as moms.And I don’t know if it’d be obvious for people if they’re listening to the songs to know that they’re about identity. Because when you become a mom, you are cast as a character of Mother. You have no past, you have no future, you are just a servant of the family. So I wanted to have a couple songs that were a bit like, you know. I have a song called Used to be a Ho because it’s like, man, people, she used to have a past. She does still have a past and that’s okay. That’s normal. I wanted to press up against a few of those kinds of things.And of course, division of labor is a big issue that moms face. Incontinence is a big one myself and my friends face a lot of and just removing that shame. Or I don’t know if it’s even removing shame, just we’ve been talking about it, just normalizing it. VirginiaJust even talking about it with a lot of body related changes. You have a reel about hairy nipples and I was like, thank you!! Somebody finally said it. Can we please just discuss these things? FaridehCan we just be human beings? I also recognize that I have a lot of privilege to say a lot. When I talked to other friends who were like, “Oh, I would just never say that part of it.” I happen to be inside of a very stable, healthy marriage. I’m not like trying to attract anybody or impress anybody and I can say things without blowback. A lot of people will be concerned about my marriage or be like, “you should just leave him” because of the division labor issues. And I’m like, well, I could not write these songs if I was inside the fire of that part of my marriage, right? Because when you’re a new parent, there’s so much growing and learning to be done. And, of course, those songs come from a truth! Of course, we did struggle. We did. There was not the language that there even is today.I think COVID did something to that. It provided us with language for what we were all experiencing inside of our marriages. But we didn’t have words or at least it hadn’t permeated culture enough that we understood emotional labor, mental load, division of labor, how do we actually overcome this? Not just from our husbands, from ourselves, for myself. Invisible labor was just as invisible to me as it was to my partner.VirginiaI can relate.FaridehThe great thing is I’m writing the songs when my child is eight not two because there is a different fire, at least for our marriage that was the case. So there’s other privileges I get to explore. And also, I mean, he’s already used to me speaking the truth. So he’s just like, yeah, that’s what she does. Poor Matt, whenever he’s meeting somebody who is like, “Oh, I know who Farideh is. I love her videos.” He’s like, “they’re not all about me. They’re not about me.”VirginiaAnd a lot of them are audience suggestions!FaridehThey are! I don’t see this as only work of my own. I think that this is a collaboration, which has been a really fun artistic exercise. Because historically, everything comes from me, most of my artistic career. But now I’m like, well, no. I’m writing songs for others and therefore I want to reflect their lives. Not everything has to be my personal experience.I asked people for specifics, like, you know, laundry is a big one that people really dislike. And I would say that we don’t have much laundry in our house. So I had to ask them, like, why do you hate laundry? And just like, Oh, I just hate it exists and it never ends. I’m like, well, then that’s great because I wanted to take it in a different direction. So it’s like songwriting with thousands of people.VirginiaThe one about the husband and the 45 minute poop was another one that you had that was suggested by followers. And I was like, yes. It is good that Farideh is voicing this. FaridehExactly. And that’s not one of the issues in my marriage, but that is so common and the song did so well. People are just like, are we all just married to the same man? And it is a division of labor issue, right?VirginiaYes. Why is he checking out for 45 minutes?FaridehBecause if you just disappear, that’s not okay.What’s been really fun is that I’ve been experimenting with performing the songs live. Most, like 98 percent, of my followers are female. But then when I perform live, there are all these men in the audience and I play all these division of labor songs. And it is actually really wonderful to see men, because they laugh. They know they did that. Do you know what I mean? There’s a song called the vacation song about all the things a woman does and then he drives the car. And men will come up to me, and they’re like, “Oh, my God, I do this.”Not every man, but there are men who are very good at taking a joke and you can really see that in the audience. So that’s been a really enjoyable thing because every time I get up on stage, I’m like, I don’t know how this is going to go. Because my whole set is taking you to town.VirginiaAnd I’m okay if some of them are uncomfortable with it. You’re doing a real community service by making some men uncomfortable about this in live musical settings. That’s deeply enjoyable to me that that is happening. FaridehThere was this old saying I had from like a performance coach when I was very young, that was like, 3 percent of the audience will always not like you and they might have even bought tickets. Even when I toured and people bought tickets, not everybody liked it. And you had to just be like, that’s not about me, right?I know that my intention is not to rip men a new one. I have no interest in that. But my interest is to talk about the songs that I think are funny, that I think other people will enjoy, and that they do say something. That’s what I care about. And it’s not for everybody, especially if I’m going up on a stage and not everybody bought tickets to see me. That’s fine. It’s okay with me. That’s a blessing of being 40. That’s fine. I’ll just go back to my house. VirginiaThat is a celebration about being in our 40s. Knowing I don’t have to be for everyone. Well, speaking of not being for everyone, I did want to ask, how are your trolls doing? Any good troll stories you want to tell as that part of your work? Because that’s a reality of being a woman on the Internet. We have our little trolls.FaridehOh, the ones that get the most trolls is the song I’m a good mom, not a perfect mom where I talk about the ways in which I would say that I personally, if I’m being my harshest critic, that I fail at as a mom. I don’t always get her to brush her teeth. I don’t get her to read books. And people are just like, “But this is horrible. You should try.” And part of it is just like pushing that narrative of like, there’s so many expectations. If I was a dude and I was like, “Hey, I don’t always get my kid to brush,” everybody would be applauding me for existing. There are so many expectations on moms. And I know, personally, that when I try to be that perfect mother, I become a worse mother. Because control comes up. You know what I mean? I’m pushing from a place that I just don’t have. We can work on connection instead of compliance. That’s essentially where I’m going is like, actually, I’d like to be the person who when she crawls into bed, she tells me all about her hard day. And she’s not feeling angry, because I was like, “brush your teeth.” Yeah, obviously, those are great things to do. I aim and I hope to do those things, but.VirginiaWe can all aspire to dental hygiene. I mean, teeth brushing is something we really fall down on in my house, too. I’m not gonna lie. It’s the end of the day and you’re just like, I can’t die on one more mountain. It is one mountain too many.FaridehAnd your book also really helped me with the food piece, because I have a child who’s definitely an an extremely picky eater. She hasn’t fallen into the area where—I have a list on my desktop where I track how many foods she eats, because they say under 20 is a problem and we are at 26.VirginiaWe’re doing great.FaridehYour book really helped me—this is The Eating Instinct—so much with realizing that what was happening was that because I was so afraid that my kid wasn’t eating and I was afraid of not meeting my duties as a mom of her nutrition. What was coming through was all my diet culture, right? I thought I had had achieved so much healing, so much understanding of diet culture, and then you’re like, oh, there’s a whole level hiding under parenthood.VirginiaIt’s all showing up here. FaridehExactly. And I was like, oh, actually, the bigger issue to her nutrition is that I’m gonna give this girl an eating disorder if I keep with these messages. So I have to just back off, right? That’s the same thing with brushing teeth. Like, I can be a good mom, not a perfect mom. Actually, that means I’m a better mom.VirginiaThe response to that video reminded me so much of how diet culture teaches us to measure success according to these very narrow metrics. Like, your measure as a parent is absolutely never what your kid ate for their last meal. Parenting is so much bigger than that. It’s so much more complicated. FaridehWe’re playing a long game. Yes, teeth matter. But so does mental health and finding opportunities to connect at the end of the day.VirginiaNow this episode will get a bunch of people being like, but what about teeth? Seriously, guys. If your kid is already brushing their teeth, we’re not saying stop brushing their teeth. If you have achieved that, we admire you.FaridehWe bless your soul. I have a kid who just throws down every single day. So I’m just like, alright, we focus on the mornings because I know we can get that one done and out the door. We can really hit that hard. And the evening, it’s definitely a reminder, but I won’t be screaming at my kid. If you’re just going to throw down about that, I’m like alright we’re not going to have that. You know what? We got dental insurance for a reason. VirginiaCompletely. These standards don’t empower us to decide what matters in the context of our own relationship with our child, which is exactly the same with diet and health advice, too, right? Like when your doctor is telling you you have to cut something out of your diet. It’s forgetting the larger context. We need this larger context, always. FaridehAnd it’s also like, if you should ever dare to do “what I eat in a day” as somebody not trying to lose weight,” like how when somebody leads with the vulnerability. Like basically that song me leading with my vulnerability, right? Here’s all the ways in which I feel like I fail, so that that other person can see. Because if you don’t have close relationships, if you’re watching people on social media, they’re not showing you the ways in which they’re failing, right?So it’s an offering and not everybody wants that offering. Everybody is like, “wait, wait, wait.” And it scares them. Like, If I let these go, then my child will die and they’ll lose their teeth, and it will be a horrible thing. It’s just like, well, here’s an offering.VirginiaIt’s so true. It’s so important to just give ourselves permission to fuck it up more often. FaridehWe all have friends who had parents who are way worse than us and they’ve just turned out okay. VirginiaI sometimes think, if I’m not giving my kids some material to work with in therapy, like, am I doing my job? FaridehHow will they be artists? How will they be funny? How will they be full human beings?VirginiaThere must be some suffering and conflict. They need something to unpack.FaridehThat is the humility of parenting, isn’t it? That you have to get the challenge of being an imperfect person raising a child and the stakes are high. You don’t want to mess up. You want to do it perfectly, and yet to do it perfectly would be a disservice because they are imperfect.Like, I feel that my mom did a great job raising me. But also, my mom wasn’t perfect. And that is actually something I rely heavily on as a mom, that it’s okay. You know what? My mom did not play with me. My mom did not do crafts with me and my mom was exhausted 24/7. You know what I mean? Like, I don’t think she got me to brush my teeth. VirginiaIt happened or it didn’t. Yeah, there’s a funny line in the song where you’re like, “You had my aunt teach me the birds and the bees.” And I was like, “Taking notes! Outsourcing is an effective parenting strategy!”FaridehWhen my mom heard that she was like, “You didn’t have to tell them this.” I was like, Mom, I had to reach real hard to find like your mistakes.VirginiaSo sweet, though. I love it.You talked a little bit about your partner being supportive, but also having to occasionally say like, “I swear, I’m not that bad.” What about the rest of your family? I’m curious if your kid listens to any of your music and what they think. FaridehMy kid listens to my music, but she doesn’t really always connect it. There are things I would write about my kid, but I’m like, that is not mine, right? Like, my daughter would love to be my videos and I tell her I would be more successful with you in them, frankly. Like, I would. But you can’t make that choice for yourself until much later. And I have to think about that. Like, I have to think about the 16, the 18, the 22, the 30 year old version of you, not just the 8-year-old. And I know that other people make other choices and I don’t have a judgment over that. But that is just how I’ve chosen. My husband is terrified of social media. He’s just like, I never would do this. Never Never. There have been some conversations we’ve had with some of our songs. With the vacation song he was like, “But that is what happens, you do everything and then I drive.{“ I was like, “Yes, but you and I have an understanding in our house, where I have more time and freedom than other people because my job is to be a musician and to write the songs.” Whereas my husband has to leave the house, and he has a very demanding job. We have distributed it in this way. Like I get us out the door, you get us there. And then when we go on vacation, you play with a child and I read a book. But having to say, like, it’s not the same. So many of the people who listen to me are full time caregivers and full time workers and this has just been assumed she’ll do everything. VirginiaThat’s what you’re trying to name. FaridehThat’s what I’m trying to do. We have battled in our marriage, of course, that I’m not the default.And then my mom, I’ve been a musician for a long time so my parents are always like, “oh, yeah, so that’s what you do now. Okay, that sounds great.” Like, there are some songs where I did say to my dad. I was like, “there’s a couple songs I’m just going to tell you not to listen to.”VirginiaJust do yourself a favor.FaridehJust skip these.VirginiaIt doesn’t all have to be for everybody. FaridehThe other option is that I just don’t speak about it and then my dad will probably watch it and then pretend he never saw it. And then we’ll never discuss it.VirginiaWe’ll have this strange, unspoken tacit agreement not to talk about the ho song. Farideh People who like don’t like to talk about things, that’s also a blessing.VirginiaI’m definitely going to play your album for my kids. Because what I do like about your music—and I can see this as complicated with your own child—but for parents in general I feel like it’s a great way of making the work more visible to our kids, which is something I think about a lot. My kids are 6 and 10 so we are are out of the hell of the toddler and baby stage and I do think a lot about like, yeah, we’re trying to get them to do more chores now and it’s hard. It’s so much easier to just do everything myself, because kids are bad at things.FaridehThey really are and they fight you the whole way. I’m supposed to give my kid chores and I’m like that just like, that just sounds like more work for me.VirginiaSo when I’m failing on the giving of chores, much as I’m often failing on the teeth brushing, if I can at least make visible what I’m doing. Like, I have to clean up dinner right now so I am not doing whatever you want to be doing. Trying to clarify the amount of labor that goes into supporting the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. Its really banking on a lot of my free labor here, and let me make that clear to you, not in a guilt inducing way.FaridehWith my kid, she does listen to it but I don’t know if she’s making that connection. But maybe the connections aren’t made till later.VirginiaThat’s what I love about your music is like, it doesn’t need to be me giving a lecture in the middle of the kitchen holding a sponge. But if I have these songs on, it’s helping connect some dots that can be connected. ---ButterFaridehOh, well, I have a new hyperfixation on the whole like Sarah J. Maas book series. I did not allow myself to read for a long time because what happens is that I have a hard time existing in this realm if I’m into a really good book.VirginiaI can relate, absolutely.FaridehChristmas and summers, I would let myself read. And this summer all I wanted to do was read and I just fell down this rabbit hole.Until TikTok and BookTok I didn’t actually know what books I liked. I felt like nobody had good recommendations. I really like fantasy. That’s one of the things I like. So then I fell down the Sarah J. Maas hole. And you know what? I love living as a fae princess warrior. I don’t need to exist anymore. When I finished one series, my husband was like, “oh, that’s so great to get my wife back.” And I was like, “sorry. No, that’s just five books. I have another 11 to get through.”VirginiaA Court of Thorns and Roses? Is that her?FaridehYes. She has Crescent City and then now I’m in the Throne of Glass.I love like discovering new artists that you like and thinking about their life and then reflecting upon that on yours as yourself, right? Because part of me can be like, well, I’ve been doing this for nine months and I haven’t had this huge thing happen.And I’m like, this person has been at it, like they’ve been writing books for the last 15 years and I’ve just discovered them and what a wealth of material I get to dive into. So it just reminds me of like staying in these things for the long game. My success is not limited. It’s not downhill from here as it sometimes can feel. And then I’m just like, think about. I bet you she sat there at the page being like, I’m never gonna figure this out and why am I ruining my life? This is a waste of time, I should go get a nine to five job and just give up on this. I bet you she sat there thinking that, too.VirginiaOh my God, you’re so right.FaridehAnd then you get this beautiful thing. And you’re like, and I bet you she was just like, “I’m just going to have to write this badly. I’m just going to phone it in.” It’s nice to think about people and you have their work in front of you and you love their work and you’re just so grateful they struggled through those moments that are absolutely universal. You know, she’s probably like not figuring out the scene, not figuring out the scene. And then took two weeks off. She’s probably doing dishes and then the idea was like!VirginiaOh, that’s it. Yes, God and that is like the most frustrating. I’m sure this is true. For songwriting, too. It is the most frustrating thing about creative work where you’re like, I know it’s there, but I cannot see it and then it will come to you at some inane time.FaridehYou don’t know what people will resonate with. Like the poop song. I was just like, I don’t know what to write today. This is dumb. I’m like, Oh, 10 million views. Okay. Well. I guess people liked that. Every time I every time I decide “this is trash. It’s horrible. Nobody likes this.” And I’m like, well, you’re not actually good judge. You’re not 10 million viewers. And when I’m like, “this is it. This is the song.” Nope, nobody likes it.VirginiaThis happens to me with newsletters where something that I’ve really dug into, especially if it’s something more heavily reported, a little more science-y or whatever, it will do fine. People will like it. But compared to something kind of off the cuff emotional, like I just throw it out in an hour, that’s the newsletter that gets wide circulation and tons of comments and engagement. And I’m just like, cool, cool. Cool.FaridehSo, how hard I work is not actually…Virginia…Proportional to the success at all.FaridehThat’s how I always feel about songs. If they don’t come out right away, then they’re not coming. It’s not going to come out. It’s not going to be great. I will say that there have been times, especially in in this journey particularly, because writing comedy song is very different than writing an emotional song. They’re very, very different. Because my songwriting process used to be like, sit down at the guitar, play, some chords, start singing, words would come to me. Sing from my heart. “Oh, this song is about this thing I’m doing.” Like a very much come from the music from my intuition from my heart. Whereas comedy songs are more cerebral. They’re like, “I will write about this.”VirginiaBecause you start with the concept, “I will write about husbands pooping.”FaridehYeah, exactly. It comes from your mind instead of your heart. Like with “you’re such a good dad,” I kind of started writing and I struggled with it for a while figuring it out. I didn’t know what the punch line was. Because the song goes like “I did the cooking and the cleaning and the groceries and the laundry and then when you asked me what I did, I said I did nothing.” That was originally the idea of like the invisible labor to me. But then it kind of moved.Or like the song on the album “supermom” originally it was about super dads about like how they get applause for absolutely everything they did. But it’s like, actually, it’s not as funny. So it’s interesting, I have to work a little harder. I have to refine more than in my other work. Because it’s not coming from the heart, it’s coming from more of a brain place.VirginiaThat makes sense. Because you’re both thinking through, like, what do I want to communicate about this real issue that you’re talking about and what makes it funny, and then also, what makes it music? FaridehAnd what makes an impact.VirginiaSo, since you recommended a really good deep dive series, and I love a deep dive series, I’m gonna recommend two books. It’s not as deep as well as Sarah J. Maas but I am excitedly waiting for this author to do more. The author is Sophie Irwin. She has two books that I binged last weekend, because I was solo, my kids were at their dad’s. And I had them both on audiobook, which was great because these solo weekends, I can just listen to an audio book for 10 hours straight. It’s a little bit magical. While I was working on our dollhouse and doing garden stuff and just puttering around the house. The first one is A Lady's Guide to Fortune-Hunting and the second is A Lady's Guide to Scandal. She’s a modern writer, but clearly very Jane Austen-inspired. They are set in Regency England, so picture your Jane Austen, Bath, all of that kind of stuff. It’s a romantic comedy type of plot, but there’s just a lot of feminism. There are queer characters.FaridehOh, I can’t wait. VirginiaThey’re super delightful. So much world building. When you are building the world as a nonfiction writer, I’m like, well, the world is ready built. I just have to describe what is already happening. I don’t have to think of stuff.FaridehYeah, you just have to point out the stuff that people are missing.VirginiaMy sources give me all the details. I don’t have to make them all up. It blows my mind. So they’re just really, really fun audiobooks. The narrators are both British and do all the different accents but I’m sure they’re fun as a paper read, too. I just happened to do them as audiobooks.Well, this was so much fun. Tell us again where people can get the album, how we can support your work, get more of your music, all that.FaridehYou can find The Mother Load on any streaming platform that you listen to or follow me on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or Facebook, whatever you like. I would say Instagram is the best if you have to choose one. @ILoveFarideh because I’m conditioning your brain to love me.VirginiaWell, it’s working. Thank you so much, Farideh! This was so much fun. I love having you here. FaridehThanks for having me. ---The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay who runs@SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about anti-fat bias, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole Smith.Today I am chatting with Christine Yu, author of Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes.Christine is an award-winning journalist whose work focuses on the intersection of sports science and women athletes. Her writing has appeared in Outside, The Washington Post, Time, and other publications. And friends, her new book is fascinating! It is full of “holy shit” moments, like the fact that even though you’ve probably thought since middle school gym class that of course, men are the faster stronger athletes, women actually outperform men in ultra marathons and all the other bananas endurance events that are arguably the hardest physical challenges that human beings can undertake. Christine also unpacks why sports science has ignored women’s bodies for so long and the very real harm this has caused. This is such an important episode if you are a woman who exercises in any capacity, or if you are parenting a child athlete. But even if neither of those categories apply to you, I promise this is such a good and fascinating and often enraging conversation.PS. If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)If you order Up to Speed from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)Shop the Burnt Toast Bookstore!Episode 114 TranscriptChristineI’m a journalist and I cover sports and science and health. And I’m the author of the book Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes, which just came out in May. I live in Brooklyn with my husband and two kids. I tend to report on women’s sports and sports science and this intersection of the two of them. It has been lots of fun.VirginiaAnd we are here to talk about the new book, which is so smart. It’s so impeccably researched. As I was reading it, I just kept thinking, holy shit, holy shit. Like, why don’t people know this? Why is this not more widely known? So, thank you. It is a real gift of a book. ChristineThank you! Your “what the heck?” reaction was, frankly, what I felt when I actually started to think about this a little bit more. As someone who reports on science and health all the time, you read all these studies but you have these short deadlines, and you’re just like, “I need studies to look at and read.” It made me feel like I wasn’t doing my job. Like, how could I miss or not even think about the implications of all this? I felt like my personal guilt went into this a lot.VirginiaI relate. I did a lot of fitness reporting in my women’s magazines days. And we were just accepting some really limited science as fact and running with premises that were not borne out by the research. ChristineOn the one hand, we have been hearing so much about how medical research doesn’t include women. But as someone who grew up playing sports and is still fairly active, I’m really trying to understand what that means for girls and women in the long term. How does that affect, sure, athletic performance — but really long-term athletic development, health, wellbeing? Because what I was uncovering were all of these issues that we don’t talk about, we don’t really understand, and we don’t communicate to girls and women about. And yet they have long-term health repercussions on bone health, on cardiovascular health, on everything. VirginiaMental health..ChristineYes! And we don’t communicate that. And knowing that sports is such a growing part of a lot of people’s lives, or just physical activity, and we tout that so much. So I was really trying to understand what are we missing here because we don’t study women?VirginiaI want to get more into some of those specific implications you touched on, but before we get too deep into all of this, I do want to quickly address the question of gender inclusive language. You talked about it at the top of the book and I just thought, for our audience, it would be helpful here. You were really focused on the way science has underserved the biology of people assigned female at birth, but then also in the broader cultural dismissal of women athletes, regardless of biology. ChristineYeah, it’s really tricky, especially because both sports and science are two fields that are so predicated on the sex and gender binary, right? In science, we have male specimens, female specimens, and they’re very separate things. And similarly, in sports, we have those two categories. So when we’re thinking about not only women athletes, but thinking about trans athletes and nonbinary athletes, how can we talk about this in a way that isn’t excluding folks, but really trying to find language that was more inclusive? Because when you think about sports and when you think about science, it very much prioritizes male bodies and cis het men. So how we can talk about this in a more inclusive way, because when we just focus on those cis het men and male bodies, we do exclude not just female people living in female bodies, but we do exclude all these other folks that are marginalized by sex and gender.VirginiaOne really big consequence of not studying people assigned female at birth, ever, for all of science, is this absurd misconception that too much exercise will damage a female body. Like, literally, people believing that your uterus will fall out. I had Martinus Evans, 300 pounds and running, on the podcast a few months ago. And we were kind of joking about how that had been a barrier to women joining the marathon, but it’s completely true. It was what happened! Talk us through that one a little.ChristineIt’s wild because this is an idea that has existed since forever, right? Since the time of the ancient Greeks and the Romans, people have thought it wasn’t appropriate for women to enter into the athletic arena. And in the cases where women were allowed to compete, the distances of races were shortened. Because of our fragile bodies. But for me, it highlighted this idea that women’s roles were centered around our reproductive capacity, our ability to bear children and carry children. That was so central to everything, that anything that could potentially damage that capacity was considered off limits. We can’t do that. And that just became an idea that was never really interrogated. Or actually, that’s a lie. It was interrogated and it was interrogated mostly by women scientists and doctors in the 18th century. They were looking at this and doing studies and saying, “No, we’re fine actually.”Virginia“We’re doing great.”ChristineActually, this doesn’t affect menstrual cycles. This doesn’t affect reproductive capacity. Uteruses are intact, ovaries haven’t burst. But those women weren’t taken seriously, even though they were actually doing scientific studies. The men in power and the men who were leading all of these efforts were like, yeah, that’s great. We’re still not going to listen to you. Virginia“You’re biased by being a woman. You couldn’t do this objective science on your own body.”ChristineExactly.VirginiaI will say, I did love the reference you made to one early scientist who did advise that noblewomen could exercise by yelling at their servants. So problematic. Clearly so problematic in so many ways we could unpack. Also, I mean, I do kind of love yelling? Is that my new workout?ChristineThis was a Spanish doctor. He had put out one of these first books on exercise and there was a specific chapter looking at exercise for women. But a lot of these observations came from his travels from Europe to Mexico. He had stopped, I believe, in the islands, maybe like Cuba or something like that. And he was observing the nuns there. And they were like, super healthy, right? Mainly because they were not reproducing and dying in childbirth.VirginiaNot risking their lives to have babies every two years. ChristineBut they were singing, right? So he believed that that was conducive to their health. VirginiaAnd all the exercise you need. ChristineIt was interesting. He also separated it out by class, right? For upper class women it was “walk around after dinner and yell at your servants,” and for women of lower class, because they’re working in the fields, working in the house, it was “that’s enough exercise.”VirginiaNo yelling from you, lower classes. ChristineOh, no, no, no, no.VirginiaWe don’t need to hear your voices. Only one kind of yelling and no women yelling at men.ChristineNo, no, no.VirginiaYes. Like I said, really problematic. But also, I could get on board with the yelling. I could see a yelling workout being a big trend.ChristineCan you imagine? It totally would be.VirginiaI would go to that group fitness class is all I’m saying.So, on the one hand, you’re absolutely right, the conventional thinking has been “we have to protect fertility and the woman’s body is so fragile, and the uterus is made of glass and we have to revere it.” And then on the flip side, as women do enter sports in a bigger way, there becomes this new narrative and this really dangerous misconception that exercising to the point that you no longer get your period is okay, normal, maybe even the goal of the whole thing.ChristineIt’s this contradiction, right? In the sense that it’s almost as if, if women were going to participate in sports, we had to make our bodies more like men. And I feel like that’s where a lot of this myth and misconception around losing your menstrual cycle being a good thing, being a sign that you are really fit and are training really well, I feel like that’s where that comes from. This idea that if we are entering into this arena and are deemed appropriate to enter into this arena, we almost have to shed all of these markers of being in a in a female body. Like losing your menstrual cycle, generally having smaller boobs, too, probably. There’s less stuff bouncing around and distracting and all of that stuff. Having this super lean body for a lot of sports, as well. I think there are a lot of really problematic things that go along with that.VirginiaAnd the menstruation myth is especially problematic for teen athletes, obviously, because of how it can delay the onset and really mess with the puberty trajectory. What do you want parents and girls to understand about athletic performance during like the tween and teen years?ChristineIt’s so hard, right? There’s so much change that’s going on, and it’s so awkward. And but when you think about it, the amount of change that that kids are going through at this period of time, right? It’s like akin to when they’re babies. And it’s so alluring, especially if you have a girl who is playing sports and seems to be doing well. We see this a lot in sports like cross country running, that younger girls perform really well. They run really fast. And then older girls, once they do start to go through puberty, their performance seems to drop off. So the idea is, “Well if I just don’t go through puberty, then I can keep being fast.” But this is what our bodies need to do. We need to go through puberty. We need to go through this maturation process in order to get to our adult form. It’s really important that they understand and know that this is critical. This is a critical piece of development. It’s not just about fertility, right? This ties back to how we learn about, about our bodies as girls is we only learn about it in terms of reproduction and fertility and how to not get pregnant and that type of thing. But we don’t understand the intricate things that our menstrual cycle does in our body and all those hormones that are involved in it, and the impacts that it has throughout the body and all these other systems and ways. As parents, it’s knowing it’s a hard line. Anything is going on with your period, that’s the hard line. VirginiaWe’re not going to risk your future bone health. ChristineYeah, exactly. I feel like that that’s a really important message that parents need to know and understand that it’s not normal.VirginiaI think they need to know to push back because I think there has been a change in conversation. Your book is a really big contribution to that. But I think you are likely to still encounter coaches—in certain sports, in running or gymnastics—where they’re going to have this mindset of keeping you as small as possible is good. Parents need to know to push back against that.Christine1,000 percent. It’s also understanding that, because the body changes so much during this period of time, of course there’s going to be this period of transition as girls get used to their new bodies. So it makes sense, if we just think about athletic progression, maybe their athletic progression does stall or like seems to go backwards. But that’s not the end of the world. Just understanding this as a period of transition, that we do have to acknowledge, we do have to be supportive of, and patient with. But then once you get through to that other side, things get better.VirginiaThat seems like such an important reframing because you talk in the book about how for folks assigned male at birth, the puberty process is like more of a straight line towards athletic performance. Like, you gain more muscle, you get taller and bigger and faster. And we need to understand that not all bodies are going to follow that trajectory. Because why did we decide that the male trajectory is the best trajectory for a body?ChristineYeah, I think it’s largely because that’s all we’ve known. Boys and men have largely been the ones participating in sports. Those are the ones we’ve studied, those are the ones that we’ve mythologized, in a way. That’s the trajectory that we tend to look at. We see a standard, so we just compare girls and women to that same standard. I think it’s also just our bias to want to see progression inch up in this very linear way, right? We’re constantly just slightly improving. But not recognizing that we’re humans. We are not an algebraic equation, right? There are going to be dips. And that’s part of being a human.VirginiaI mean, that really gets to a whole paradigm shift in terms of sports culture, right? I mean, if it’s always about winning, if it’s always about the next championship, if it’s about working towards that college scholarship—None of that allows for this idea that there’s going to be a few years where your performance dips but it’s all part of your overall growth.ChristineI think we’ve lost sight of that a lot in sports, over the years. I mean, definitely within the youth sports culture. I know you write about this as well, but just that emphasis on early specialization and success and winning and this focus on getting college scholarships and going pro, and all of our kids are going to be the next great Olympian superstar.But especially in childhood and adolescence, we lose sight of sports being just this amazing developmental tool and space to experiment and perform and not only get to know your own body, but develop your skills, right? Your understanding of who you are and what you’re capable of in a way that is within a specific sphere that you can you can practice and experiment in a way that I don’t think you can in a lot of other ways. We lose sight of that when we just focus on this end goal of being the best.VirginiaIt does seem like there’s a little bit of a shift happening. You have a lot of great stories in the book and I feel like the way someone like Simone Biles or Abby Wambach has talked about their athletic careers, I think we’re starting to see this narrative of it’s not always just excellence, excellence, excellence. It can be more complicated and that there are also many opportunities for growth. It also feels like it’s no accident that we’re hearing that narrative mostly from women athletes, that they’re the ones speaking up about that.ChristineAbsolutely. Because it’s vulnerable to right to be able to show this other side and to at least acknowledge that there are these down points and these lulls and these deep trenches when you are trying to work your crap out, right? Trying to figure out how to work through this and keep going.VirginiaI also want to spend some time on your very excellent chapter about diet and sports. This was so well done. It feels like nutritional science, athletic research— all of this research—has only just recently given women permission to eat as athletes, and to eat enough to support their sports. This feels really staggering to me, that there has been this underfeeding of women athletes for so long.ChristineConsistently. All the time. And I think it’s in part because of just general diet culture in our culture and society and these ridiculous expectations that we have or we place on girls and women in terms of what their bodies need to look like. And then you have the sports performance side, you have this idea that certain body types are the ideal athletic body types. It’s almost no wonder that we create this perfect storm and a way for disordered eating and eating disorders and all these other problematic behaviors to take root. Especially because bodies are so central, obviously, in sports and performance. And we focus so much on bodies and how they look, what their body composition is, and all of these different things, the shape of you, all of that.It’s wild to me that it’s only been recently that we do acknowledge the fact you just need to eat. We talked so much about nutrition and sports as this idea of fueling your body, which I think was at first kind of helpful in the way of reframing food within this context. Your body needs fuel to be able to do all this stuff, in order to start to give folks a little bit more permission to eat or feel like they could eat what they needed. But that, I think, even still creates this idea that there’s a certain kind of fuel that you need to be eating in order to be an athlete, in order to fuel your body correctly, if that makes sense.VirginiaIt’s, again, mind blowing, but makes sense that we had to first embrace the idea of eating, period, as opposed to eating being the enemy. You have so many heartbreaking stories from athletes in this chapter talking about feeling like they were so tapped out at the end of a practice that they couldn’t function and that when they started eating enough, they were like, wow.ChristineTurns out!Virginia“I can do a 90 minute workout without a problem!” The fact that they were performing at all when they were being asked to do it while starving is ridiculous. It’s ridiculous what they were being asked to do. Then seeing that immediate and logical shift that if you feed yourself, you can perform better. But then from there, this idea of food as fuel can also become very limiting because, of course, athletes are human beings, as well. And food is more than fuel for all of us.ChristineIt’s really easy within sports and athletics to look at food as almost a hack, in a way. Like, as a way to like fine tune your performance. Oh, I need more iron, or whatever other very specific thing that you need. And again, I think it dissociates food from what it actually is. I think that also just makes it really ripe to encourage a lot of these behaviors that aren’t always helpful or healthy.VirginiaYou also do some amazing work in this chapter dissecting a couple of the modern big diet trends: Intermittent fasting, keto, and you even look at some of the less extreme ones like the Mediterranean diet, and show how they underserve athletes and especially women athletes. I wondered if we could just spend a little time talking about your findings there, because that felt super important to me. ChristineIn the last several years, we’ve seen things like intermittent fasting and keto pop up within athletic communities as this way to make your body a better machine. Especially, I think, within endurance sports, it’s this idea that your body can run longer or you can somehow create these these efficiencies, if you will.But the body likes to be in homeostasis, it likes to be in balance. So anytime energy levels start to dip, your body starts to send out these flares that are like, “Wait a second, hold on. Are we going to be starving real soon?” Because if so, I need to make some adjustments, physiologically. So with a lot of these diets, you’re actually ended up with these long periods of under-fueling your body. With intermittent fasting, you’re not eating for anywhere between eight to many, many hours. So you’re leaving your body in this huge deficit of energy so it starts to freak out and starts to shut down these non essential systems.And the thing with women is that our bodies are much more sensitive to these downturns in nutrition. It starts to send up those flares a lot earlier, it starts to make those those physiological changes a lot earlier. That can have repercussions on things like your menstrual cycle and all the hormonal things that your body does. Similarly, with keto, this whole idea of eating a lot of fat and very few carbs might seem like, Oh, I’m really full, I don’t need to eat as much. But it’s the same idea that you end up inadvertently underfueling your body. But more importantly, especially for women, by not eating carbs, it sends up those same flares to the body. Women’s bodies, in particular, need carbohydrates in order to function well, in order to do all the things it does. And when we don’t have carbs, the body starts to send all these warning signs.We tend to see intermittent fasting or keto “work” in men because it seems like male bodies can get away with that under-fueling a little bit more than female bodies. But when women tend to try these diets they end up feeling, unsurprisingly, really flat, really fatigued, a lot of brain fog. They don’t see this performance boost and then they wonder what they’re doing wrong because all the podcasts, all the influencers, say I should be intermittent fasting. This is going to be how I’m going to lose weight. This is how I’m going to cut time on my race. This is how I’m going to improve performance, improve body composition, all the stuff. But I’m not seeing that. I’m feeling flat. I’m not seeing all these other positive benefits. It’s because your body is essentially saying, ah, this isn’t working for me.VirginiaJust because it works for Peter Attia does not mean—and question mark on if it even works for these guys? Thats the other thing I just want to interject. It might improve athletic performance, it doesn’t mean it’s not having other consequences on their mental health or their relationships with food and body. But that’s fascinating to realize specifically, if your goal is improving athletic performance—one of these diets is not going to deliver for you the way you’ve been told it might. ChristineEspecially the idea around carbs. I feel like carbs still have like a bad rap. People are still really afraid to eat carbs and I just want folks to know it’s not a bad thing. Your body actually needs it. It wants them. VirginiaThe stories of these athletes who are living with these diets and the way they’re struggling, it just sounds miserable.ChristineMiserable. Well, and the sustainability of it too, just sounds horrible.VirginiaOkay, we also have to talk about sports bras. I wear a 38 G. Christine, why are all sports bras so bad? What’s going on? ChristineThey’re terrible. I will say, I didn’t really think a ton about this because I’m small-chested. Sure, I dealt with the crappy Champion sports bras and taking them off sweaty, and all this stuff. VirginiaGetting trapped in it. ChristineFeeling like I’m going to dislocate my shoulder. But I never really thought about it so much.But I think it’s in part that the sports bra wasn’t designed or invented until 1977, which is like, less than 50 years ago, which is totally absurd! These women sewed together two jockstraps and were like, wait a second, we have something here. But also because breasts were never really taken seriously. Because again, I feel like it’s this female body part associated with female bodies. So why do we need to study that? It’s largely associated with either nursing or sex, right? It’s very sexualized. We just have this dismissive view of breasts as, they just move up or down. Like, why do we need to study them? Like, what does that have to do with athletic performance? But as anyone who has breasts knows, they have a lot to do with how we feel in our bodies. When we move and we’re more physically active, it can be painful. It can actually change your running gait, so that you pull your arms in closer so you’re not bouncing around so much. You might shorten your stride. It has all of these repercussions, but we’ve never actually really studied it a lot.It really wasn’t until the 2000s and 2010s, that scientists actually got the technology to be able to study breast biomechanics in a lab. Before that, the sensors that they had were really big and bulky, like they couldn’t put it underneath the bra. All of these things that made it really hard, VirginiaIt’s not going to help someone run with a bra if you’re putting big sensors on them as well.ChristineExactly. And it’s dragging down, so you’re not capturing the movements accurately. But if you don’t study the movement, you can’t know what’s going on, you can’t actually design a garment that can accurately or effectively support and control that movement in a way that is comfortable. So I think that’s in part why it’s taken so long.I think sports bras are getting better. They’re not perfect by any means. But at least brands and companies are now starting to include this type of research in the research and design process and their product design process, so that they can really understand what’s going on. And wear testing them on a lot more people and people of different sizes, right? Because a lot of times it has always been a very traditional straight-size, thin, lean women who are trying this stuff out. But now we’re seeing that they’re they’re starting to expand that as well.VirginiaIt is just a fundamental barrier. I don’t think about running as a sport I feel like exploring for many reasons. I had a disordered relationship with it. But reason number two is that figuring out a sports bra is an exhausting process.I’ve figured out what works for lower impact, like strength training, yoga, even a HIIT class. I have bras that can work for that. I mean, it’s always that trade off of if it provides enough support, you’re straitjacketed into it and it’s super uncomfortable. And yeah, that sweet spot of comfort and support is is still a unicorn in the larger sizes, especially.ChristineWell, and then a lot of the women I spoke with, not all of them were included in the book, but just there are so many stories from women who felt like they lost out on something when they were younger because they didn’t have a sports bra that that was comfortable and supportive of them. They lost a piece of their athletic lives because of not having this garment. It is so essential that we don’t think about it. When we think about the number of girls that also drop out of a sport, during adolescence, I feel like this is a big piece of it, too. Whether it’s access to sports bras, just the money of it, or just not finding one that that fits well.VirginiaBecause the ones that do work are quite expensive. And if you’re a parent that includes for a kid who might outgrow it in six months, to spend $70 on a sports bra is going to be a real barrier for folks. It’s a fascinating history.You talked about Lululemon improving the technology. They are not fully size inclusive, but for smaller folks, it sounds like one to explore. And Bloom bras I think is the other brand you mentioned that is doing more size inclusivity.There’s so much in the book, we could talk about it for hours. Is there anything we haven’t hit on that you feel like is a really important aspect of this whole conversation?ChristineYeah, I think that we also see this a lot as women age, into what I’m calling mature adulthood. You know, I guess, I’m officially late 40s.When we think about the menopause transition, and I know menopause is like the hot topic now. But in similar ways, it’s literally this black hole of information and research, in which women were just left to kind of figure it out themselves, right? It’s like, oh, that sucks. Or, Oh, you’re not fertile anymore so why do we need to pay attention to you? Like, who cares that you’re still going to spend a good chunk of your life in this period of time. Who cares that you suffer these tremendously debilitating symptoms that affect quality of life, mental health, and all of these things? Good luck.VirginiaHave fun with this new body that is confusing and impacting the things you love to do in ways that we can’t explain. ChristineI think especially for women who have been active or have been athletes. I’m not even talking about any sort of professional or competitive level. But even for someone like myself, being physically active has been a big part of my life and my identity. And it’s really disorienting coming into this period of time right now, when your body is shifting and changing in so many ways. You feel like you have no resources or no idea or recourse, frankly, of what to do. This is a period of time where it’s just, it’s hard. I think people are starting to pay more attention to it and we’re trying to figure out some of the stuff, but I also worry at the same time because it also feels very ripe for the whole diet culture thing, where we’re selling supplements and diets and serums and all this other stuff for women to use to fit into this traditional idea of what we should look like and should be like.VirginiaWell, this is what we see over and over when science doesn’t include women, when mainstream medicine doesn’t include women. What fills the gap is diet culture. You’re left out of the mainstream work on this and yet you’re still struggling with the things you’re struggling with. And so who is there for you? Someone with a bunch of weird supplements, someone with a cool restrictive diet plan, some celebrity claiming this solved her hot flashes. It makes total sense that we are vulnerable. ChristineYeah, no, it absolutely makes sense that these things are cropping up because I think a lot of us are just really hungry for information and some sort of guidance as to what in the world is going on?The message that I hope that the book helps to get across, too, is this idea that we haven’t really been taught about our bodies or encouraged to really become body literate. What I hope is just encouraging folks to pay more attention to yourself and what’s going on in your body. Like tuning into that and understanding that, right? You don’t necessarily need like a cycle syncing plan for your workouts. But you do need to kind of understand what is my experience through my menstrual cycle, at these different phases? Because maybe that does explain how I feel so I’m not constantly blaming myself for feeling lazy or flat, or not able to complete my workout. Maybe it is because every third week of my cycle, I feel like this, so maybe it is my hormones. But just understanding that because this is our physiology. If you are in a female body, this is part of the physiology1 and we need to appreciate that and understand that in the same way that we may think about nutrition and we may think about cardiovascular fitness and all of these other aspects.VirginiaThe thing I kept thinking as I was reading the book was how much we have defined our bodies according to this standard that simply does not apply.And it is, as we were talking about, this standard related to male bodies, the male body trajectory, this whole culture of success and what success looks like and that it’s always linear and straightforward.You just think of the the guilt that people feel when they skip workouts or the way you feel like, “oh, but if I didn’t work out for 45 minutes, it doesn’t count.” If it was only 20 minutes, that’s not good enough or my pace was slow so this was a bad workout. Like all the ways we punish ourselves for not matching up to this all or nothing mentality. When it’s clear that the science we do have is showing that that does not serve our bodies in any way. So, I appreciate you. You’re walking us through that and making that so clear and so evidence based. It’s really helpful.ChristineYeah, no, it was really a lot for me just trying to understand like, well, who is making the rules, right? And do we need to listen to them? And understanding those underlying systems that prop all of this up. Because, again, like I was saying in the beginning, I didn’t really think about this as a journalist. I didn’t really think about all these blind spots that have been just built into the system and that we just take for granted and do not question. My hope is that we start to take just a little bit more of a critical eye to some of these issues.VirginiaYeah, it’s so important. And the book is so empowering. So thank you for putting it out there. It’s really great. ---ButterVirginiaChristine, what is your butter today?ChristineI actually have two.VirginiaOh, great. We have a lot of butter.ChristineMy first one is afternoon naps. Huge proponent of afternoon naps. A perk of working from home, but afternoon naps have just been really life giving lately. VirginiaThat’s awesome. ChristineThen the other one is I went to a conference over the summer and one of the things in the goodie bag was a sweatshirt that they gave us and it was a Champion sweatshirt but since it was summer I never got a chance to wear it. And so now since the weather is starting to get a little cooler here in New York I am wearing this Champion sweatshirt with a nice fuzzy inside, like the brand new sweatshirt fuzzy. It’s fantastic. I’ve probably worn it for way too long without washing it because I don’t want the fuzz to go away.VirginiaNew sweatshirt fuzz is a specific feeling and it does wear out after you start washing. New sweatshirt fuzz is a great butter. And a nap in your cozy sweatshirt. I’m loving that whole afternoon for you!My butter is a book that I’m almost finished in listening to as an audio book. It’s kind of an old recommendation because I think it made a splash a few years ago, but if you guys haven’t read When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill, it is fantastic. I don’t know what the genre is called… feminist sci fi? It’s kind of like A Handmaid’s Tale meets Lessons in Chemistry plus dragons.It’s set in the 1950s and the premise is that these women transform into dragons at critical junctures in their lives and often in response to bullshit from the patriarchy. And it tells the story of this one family in particular, and how they have tried to cover it up.It actually intersects really nicely with your book because there are a lot of moments where the main character is someone who’s like really great at math and science and trying to pursue that. And yet, in the 1950s, and in the world of this book, it’s just not at all allowed for girls to do it. People keep saying to her, “but you’ll make the boys feel bad, how do you think the boys feel when you’re getting such good grades, and you don’t even seem to be working that hard, and you’re top of the class.” And so they’re making her help and tutor the boys who are struggling because she’s good at it, but they don’t want the boys to feel bad. And I just thought I think similar things happened in sports for a long time.ChristineThat sounds fascinating.VirginiaIt’s a really fun read.Well, Christine, this was great. Thank you so much for being here. Why don’t you just tell listeners where we can follow you and how we can support your work.ChristineYou can find me on Instagram and my website. And from there, the links to all the other things and newsletter and all of that stuff.VirginiaPerfect. We will link to all of that in the show notes. Thanks so much for being here!---The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted byCorinne Fay who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!---1 - Just a reminder and acknowledgment that not existing in a female body and not having these cycles is also totally normal and fine.

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about anti-fat bias, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole Smith.Today I’m chatting with the brilliant Mecca Jamila Sullivan, author of Big Girl.Originally from Harlem, Mecca is now an associate professor of English at Georgetown University and lives in Washington DC. She is also the author The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora and Blue Talk and Love. Big Girl was a New York Times Editor’s Choice winner of the 2023 next generation indie Book Award for first novel. It was also one of my very favorite books that I read in 2022 and probably of all time. It is an utter delight to talk about writing, fatness, and bodies with Mecca.If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)If you order Big Girl from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, you can get 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)Shop the Burnt Toast Bookstore!And don’t forget to check out our new Burnt Toast Podcast Bonus Content!This week we have a reading list—with suggestions from me and Mecca—of other incredible memoirs and novels that tell the coming of age stories we don’t hear often enough.Episode 113 TranscriptMeccaI always think of Big Girl as a novel about women, about bodies, about queer people and the paths we take across generations to make space for ourselves in the world. It follows a big Black girl through her coming of age in Harlem in the 1990s. Honestly, a large part of what inspired me to write this novel was living an experience very similar to the main character—her name is Malaya. In my own experience growing up as a fat kid, and as a big teenager, and as a fat woman, there are so many elements of those experiences that intersect with major conversations about race, about gender, about class about sexuality. It was really important to me, from that standpoint, to bring all of those together in this work of fiction. In many ways, it’s the book that I have always wanted to write. It is the first book that I imagined writing, even though is the third book that I ended up publishing.VirginiaOne big myth that Big Girl explodes right off the bat is this idea that thinness and the pursuit of weight loss is only pushed on white girls by their thin white mothers, that whiteness somehow owns disordered eating, that this only happens in affluent white communities. What does the thin ideal represent to Malaya? And to her mother and her grandmother who are really involved in her body?MeccaThat Black people and Black communities don’t experience fatphobia and weight bias, and that the priorities of thinness are not internalized in Black communities and Black families is absolutely a myth. And I think it’s a really dangerous myth. We’re talking about power, right? And if we’re thinking about how thinness is a centerpiece of several forms of power, including the power of normative gender, right? The notion that a normatively gendered body also has to look a certain way and has to achieve a certain body weight, right? Class, of course—you mentioned affluence, right? This idea that fitness is a kind of sign of a class mobility, of an affluence also related to power. So in that sense, it only makes sense that then disempowered communities are internalizing those same ideals right? It’s not like there’s some sort of parallel world where Black communities have access to power outside of the dominant American power structure. Thinking about it structurally, in that way, it makes sense. There’s just sound logic. One of the things that fiction has the power to do is really distill that and make it personal, tell the story. And so for Malaya, my hope is that we see those structures play out in her life in this personal way that perhaps is maybe even more relatable or legible for some readers. Because she’s this little girl. She has no language for social power structures, right? But what she knows is that her mother and her grandmother are really obsessed with thinness in this way that just doesn’t make sense to her. She sees food as a source of joy, especially early on, joy, pleasure, sort of escape, right? It’s fun, comfort. She loves the colors of food, she loves the smell, sort of a sensory experience of pleasure, joy, and freedom. And yet, she’s very much aware that her mother and her grandmother are looking at food very differently, and are looking at their bodies very differently. She comes to see that that is informed by this white thin ideal that is very much tied to a kind of class mobility and class ascendancy. As she’s coming of age, part of what she has to do is parse out where the all of these ideas around thinness and around bodies come from and figure out sort of what parts of the messaging she’s getting around her own body she wants to hold on to and what she wants to reject.And so, to my mind, that has a lot to do with how she comes into her own identity, right? Navigating those structures and figuring out what she wants to say goodbye to, what of these family legacies she needs to just decide are not for her.VirginiaI thought a lot as I was reading, how it’s all tangled up with their love for her as well. They’re trying to protect her. They’re trying to keep her body safe.MeccaAnd isn’t that always the thing, right? How we define safety, especially when we’re talking about multiple generations of women and families, this notion of safety and how we protect the younger generations of people in our families is always kind of messy and complicated. Because, of course, we are only capable of offering protections that we can imagine.I think, for Malaya’s grandmother, for example, she does think that the way to protect her own daughter and her granddaughter is to kind of enforce this rigid ideal of body shape and size through diet culture. She, of course, imagines that she’s protecting them from heartbreak from job discrimination, from all kinds of things that she’s experienced in her own life and that are real to her. Similarly, Malaya’s mother believes that she’s protecting Malaya from all of those things and from the ridicule of her grandmother, right? So there’s this interesting sort of compounding.VirginiaProtecting against the protecting.MeccaExactly. And so again, Malaya has to sort of figure out what she actually wants protection from and how to protect herself. I think part of what enables her to do that in a different way is that she’s also aware that she’s got an inner world to protect. And that’s something that is clear to her because of that process we were talking about earlier, where she wants to retain her sense of joy, and her sense of pleasure in food, and also, just like in her body in general. There’s something that very early on, she knows is not quite right about the messaging she’s getting around food and bodies. She doesn’t know exactly how she knows that there’s something internal to her that she wants to protect. And that opens up another space for her to at least sort of look for other ways of engaging her body and engaging in food.VirginiaAnd it helps her to be able to understand the harm that’s embedded in their protection. There’s so much truth in all of them. I mean, they’re right. It is easier to be in the world in a thin body. And yet she has the agency to make these different choices. The book also tells the story of gentrification and the cultural erasure in Harlem in the 90s. The writing of place in this book is so beautifully done. You’re just right there in that neighborhood, walking the streets. It’s wonderful and there are lots of parallels between the attempts to control and shrink Malaya’s body and the way Harlem itself, as a community, is being shrunk. MeccaI see Malaya’s body and the neighborhood as constantly in conversation with one another over the course of the novel. When we meet Malaya, again, she has this fierce determination to hold fast to who she is, even though she’s constantly growing and changing. She’s eight years old, when we meet her. The family has actually newly moved to Harlem, so she’s encountering herself through the music of the neighborhood, through the food of the neighborhood, through the visual landscape. And she’s a visual artist, she’s taking all of this in, as kids do. But I think she’s got a particularly keen sense of the meanings and the importance of the sensory world. And so she’s taking all of this in. The neighborhood is an important part of her identity at that age. Then, as she begins to change, as teenagers do, so does the neighborhood.Suddenly, there are external forces that are coming in, changing the feel of the neighborhood, changing the landscape of the neighborhood, and absolutely trying to shrink the neighborhood. At the same time, there’s an effort of resistance, right? There are community groups that are insisting on claiming black diasporic culture as the center of the neighborhood’s identity and that plays out in the landscape as well. So in some ways, watching the onslaught of gentrification and Harlem’s internal resistance to gentrification is part of Malaya’s own struggle, or at least part of what catalyzes her eventual coming into into her sense of self. That she’s constantly observing the neighborhood efforts to resist and push back. Of course, on a macro level, the connections between diet culture, and gentrification are similar to what we were just talking about—this idea of a white hegemonic cultural dominance. There is a particular ideal of who is in power, who should retain power, for whom what resources are meant. If we’re talking about the resources of a neighborhood or the kind of inner resources of a body, there is an external ideal. Whoever it is, it’s not Malaya. It’s not the little Black girl who should have power in this space, even when the space is her own body. Watching Harlem’s resistance to gentrification helps Malaya see and recognize an internal power within herself. It’s not a simple path, certainly, the story of Harlem. It bears this out, that you can’t just will gentrification away and the same way you can’t just will diet culture away. But shifting that locus so that for Malaya, she can decide that she herself is at the center of her world. I’m born and raised in Harlem. For many of us Harlemites, there’s still that sense that we are really what Harlem is, even if it doesn’t necessarily look that way to that outside perspective. VirginiaEven though Starbucks has arrived. MeccaYes. That’s right. It’s so fascinating how a coming of age novel has the power to really speak to these bigger questions that we honestly all need to be asking. I’m just so happy to have a chance to talk that through with you. VirginiaIt was the first time I’d thought about those two concepts in relation to each other, and it just felt like such an important metaphor to explore. Because a mistake we make when we talk about diet culture is if we only talk about it in terms of bodies, right? It’s this bigger thing, it’s related to white supremacy, and it’s related to all these power structures. The same is true with gentrification, it becomes this thing about, like, “We don’t want the Starbucks,” and yet there is a bigger system here that we need to be talking about and dismantling. I also just absolutely love how you write about Malaya’s body. It’s very visceral and messy and raw. I think writing about fatness can go so wrong—like so very, very wrong—and become fetishizing or objectifying. There’s The Whale, too many examples. We won’t name them. We don’t need to relive them. But I would just love to hear how you think about writing bodies.MeccaAs a writer, I tend to be drawn to voice and description. For me, I think in some ways, I almost want to say it’s an advantage, but it’s also a real challenge. I tend to write from a deep place within the experiences of my characters or sometimes a deep place within the setting. But either way, I think a lot through, again, sensory detail and description. When I’m writing bodies, I’m thinking of writing from within the body, by which I mean I’m thinking first of how the body feels. I’m thinking about how the body sort of resonates for the character before I’m thinking about how it might look or how it might smell or that kind of thing. I’m centering the body itself.In the case of Malaya, where part of what she has to do over the course of the novel is find the language to describe her body, it’s important that the narrator sometimes supply the language that Malaya doesn’t have. So that’s how I approached writing about her body. For example, when she’s experiencing the pleasure and the comfort of eating, the language may slow down because she herself was feeling more at ease and more at peace. There’s a calm, you know what I mean? But then when she’s thinking about the excitement of French fries, the the writing might sort of pick up and it becomes more vibrant. I really want the reader to feel what the body is feeling in that moment, rather than imposing an external, objectifying gaze. I really am not interested in what the reader thinks Malaya looks like. I want the reader to think about what Malaya’s body is feeling. This is why I feel like writing from the perspective of someone who’s drawn to description is an advantage in a way. I love that stuff. The very first draft of this novel was like 500 pages and it was almost all description. Because I just love it.VirginiaWas it hard to cut?MeccaSo hard, so hard, so hard. Because I knew this is what we don’t get to see, right? This is why really why I wanted to write this novel. Living in a fat body is such a beautiful and complicated sensory experience that we just don’t see often enough. We don’t see the complexities of all that bodies in general experience, but fat bodies in particular. So I really enjoyed in that first draft just lavishing in all of it, in the pleasure and the desire, the yearnings and the longing and the pain. I felt that it was important to let the reader in to some of those physical and psychic experiences of fat embodiment in a way that language makes possible. So why not go for it?Virginia I think you writing the 500 page version is what enables this version to feel so real. You got in there, even if we don’t get all of it. And I feel for you, because I hate cutting. I’m also an over-writer and it’s so, so hard if you write long, and then they’re like, “We need a little less.” And you’re like, “Do we though? I feel like we need it all.”MeccaYou do, right? As the author—I don’t know if you feel this way—I feel like I definitely needed to write that first version. Because as you said, like, that’s how I really got to know the character and her relationship with her body, you know what I mean? VirginiaDefinitely. You feel that. It comes through in how embodied she feels and that you are in her body with her, not looking at her body, not objectifying her. I felt the same way about how you wrote the mom’s body and the dad when he’s sick. You embody all of them. And the grandmother’s physicality is really powerful as well. All of it gave me a lot to think about because so often when I’m reading a book that’s attempting to do this, you see when it fails—because you see when the author starts thinking of their character as an object and loses that connection.MeccaFrom a craft standpoint, when I talk with students about this, one of the things I always say is even if you’re using an omniscient narrator, one of the great things about an omniscient narrator is that they do have access to the sensibilities of each character, right? If you ground the description in the sensibility of the character, you’re going to get a fresher and more nuanced perspective.Malaya happens to always be, or quite often at least, be thinking about both color and food. She’s not going to give an overly familiar simile or metaphor when she’s describing somebody that she’s looking at, because almost everything that she’s seeing is filtered through the vibrancy of the color or whatever food is on her mind at that time.There’s this built-in way that the character herself can give you a pathway to a more nuanced and maybe richer and more interesting mode of description of bodies. Especially because Malaya is very deliberately observing the bodies of the people around her, especially the women around her, because she’s trying to make sense of what her body means to everyone, including these specific women. So the kind of attention she’s paying to her grandmother’s body, for example, is always sort of about her trying to navigate and think through her own body. So for that reason, too, she’s going to think about it in ways that are very precise and very detailed and very much connected to what’s on her mind and what matters to her.VirginiaOh, that makes so much sense. My work is a lot of interviewing people about their relationships with their bodies. So often what comes up is the way a mother or a grandmother, sometimes the father or grandfather but often a maternal figure, talked about the person I’m interviewing’s body, but also talked about their own body. Even if it wasn’t verbal, kids notice. They notice all of it. They see how we look in the mirror at ourselves, they see all the ways we hold ourselves or cover up or minimize and all of that. I want to be careful to talk about this next part without spoilers, because I really want folks to read the book if they haven’t already, but: Malaya’s body does change over the course of the book. I did not read this as a celebration of intentional weight loss. This is not like the cheesy, ugly girl gets her glow up moment at all. But I am curious to learn more about how you thought about this piece of things and why it felt important for her body to change or not change.MeccaIt’s true. Malaya’s body changes over the course of the novel. In fact, it changes several times over the course of the novel, partly because she’s growing up. She’s also growing up within diet culture. One of the first changes we hear about is a moment where she’s eight years old and she’s recalling that the one time that she on the Weight Watchers program lost two pounds and proudly reported the weight loss to her grandmother in a letter and then gains the weight back and is ashamed.Very early on we’re actually seeing her awareness of fluctuations or changes in her body and how much those changes mean to the people around her. Her task over the course of the novel is to find a way to relate to her body as something that is for her rather than something to be commented on or policed or critiqued or even celebrated or valued for its weight changes by other people. Which is a longer way of saying bodies do change, and they change and they change back and they age, and they experience different degrees of mobility, and health, wellness, all of these things.What Malaya has to do is find a way to define and claim her body for herself, regardless of where it might be in terms of any of these factors, including weight. And regardless of what others may think of it, for better or for worse. So where she ends up is a place where her body is in the process of a change. And the triumph here is that she is deciding that the weight doesn’t matter, right? And that what matters is how her body feels to her, how she feels in her body. She’s just beginning, as the novel closes, to shift that locus of power again, right? To define the body for herself and really recognize that her body is hers. It’s for her to enjoy, it’s for her to experience and that its value is what it can do for her rather than how it might be evaluated by anybody else. To me that’s the win, you know? In a world and in a life where we are told that our bodies are only supposed to change in one way and then after that, they should never change again. I mean, it’s just ridiculous. It’s one of these cultural stories that really is the underpinning of diet culture and arguably it’s very much tied to patriarchy and heteronormative ideas about family and certainly white supremacy. Malaya gets to say regardless of whatever my body is doing, it’s still mine. And that’s the point.VirginiaI think so much about how different all of our relationships with our bodies would be if we normalized change with our kids right off the bat and for ourselves throughout life. This is a little bit of a tangent, but I saw the the Barbie movie this week. I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet?MeccaYeah! What did you think? VirginiaI mean, I loved it. Most of me really loved it. I also think it doesn’t go far enough. But for what it is, I love it. But to me, the real heartbreak is Barbieland shows all these women—President, Supreme Court—but they are all unchanging and forever thin and beautiful. They’re all encased in that lack of change. And Barbie’s choice is then to go give up power in order to be a body that changes.MeccaThat’s interesting.VirginiaThere’s some real heartbreak there. I’m curious what you thought about it.MeccaI mean, I, too, had similar thoughts about the absence of an aging Barbie or an aging process in Barbieland. There’s that moment where there is a reference to the beauty of an older body toward the end of the film, which felt to me necessary, but as you said, perhaps not enough. And similarly, there was one fat Barbie. It’s this whole messy trap of representation in a way, right? You see an image. Is that really enough? Is seeing the image the kind of inclusion of this figure in the landscape of Barbieland? Is that enough? Or do we need to have more conversations truly about what that Barbie is doing, what that Barbie experiences?And as you’re pointing out, what if fat Barbie is not fat Barbie? What if fat Barbie is a person in Barbieland. It could be any Barbie. I see that as sort of a trap of representation, that it does require us to imagine identity as something that’s like fixed and static and completely disconnected from other aspects of identity. Obviously, a lot of this is coming from my perspective as an intersectionality scholar.VirginiaWell, it’s a fascinating text for that. The way they branded the doll is that there’s a lawyer Barbie, there’s a doctor Barbie. She is only ever one thing. Black Barbie is not also Astronaut Barbie or whatever. So on the one hand, it makes sense that Barbieland is built that way. They even go further it, like Black Barbie as president and Fat Barbie as a lawyer. There is some layering. But then there’s the fact that we’re still frozen. The only way women achieve this power is by upholding the majority of the beauty standards. Maybe you’re getting one box checked. That’s not that different from how our world is right now. I’m still deciding whether I feel like that was a very smart commentary on reality or something that they could have taken further.MeccaAnd it may be both in some ways. I have a lot of similar sort of questions and thoughts about the film. It’s trying to do so many things and appeal to so many audiences. They’re sort of having it both ways, I think.VirginiaI have talked to women who I think don’t usually feel like feminism is for them, who loved the movie. My hairstylist was like, “It changed me.” And I thought, okay, well, then you know what, this is great. This brings this conversation to folks who really need to hear it. And then I also talked to another person who was like, “I hated the ending. I want the ideal, I don’t want reality. I wanted her to just stay as the idea of Barbie.” And I thought that was like sort of heartbreaking, because what she was really saying is like, “I don’t want her to age. I don’t want to age. I don’t want to change. I want to be able to be frozen in beauty like this.” Mecca But I think you’re right. The fact that we are having conversations about patriarchy, about sexism and patriarchy, even if that’s where the conversation stops, I think that’s something. For a lot of people who recognize Barbie and who are invested in Barbie but have not heretofore been invested in feminism. This is a moment where that’s shifting for some people. I think that’s important.VirginiaWell, thank you for going on a Barbie tangent with me. MeccaWe’re also both wearing pink at the moment.VirginiaI think thats what put it in my head.---ButterMeccaMy butter is a book called Feelin by a phenomenal poet and scholar named Bettina Judd. Her first poetry collection was called Patient and it was a beautiful collection very much dealing with fatness and bodies and medical oppression and Feelin kind of extends some of those questions and concerns, but she’s talking about creative practice and Black feminist writing or Black women’s writing. It’s a book that brings together scholarly work and poetry. It’s just gorgeous. And I highly, highly recommend.VirginiaI am ordering immediately. That is a really good Butter. My Butter is also going to be a book today. I just finished reading Yellowface. Have you read that yet?MeccaI haven’t read it yet. I have it.VirginiaIt’s really fun and really smart. I mean, for those of us in publishing, it’s uncomfortably quite accurate.MeccaThat’s what I’ve heard.VirginiaShe nails it. It just captures all of the writing anxiety and Twitter of it all. And a Chinese woman writing in the voice of a white woman who is stealing from a Chinese woman—like the layers of it and the way she follows that through. It’s really, really uncomfortable and important and it’s still a really fun novel. MeccaCan’t wait to read it. VirginiaMecca, thank you again! This was absolutely wonderful. Tell folks where they can follow you and how we can support your work.MeccaYou can find me pretty much everywhere. I’m @MeccaJamilah on all the socials, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or X. I also am on TikTok, I have literally exactly one Tiktok doing the unboxing of the novel. So if you want to see that, it’s there. I’m most active on Instagram, so that’s a good place to find me.And yeah, in terms of supporting my work, the paperback of Big Girl came out in June and it has a really cool Readers’ Group Guide. So if you’ve already read it but are thinking of sharing it with your reading group or with a classroom or any kind of community setting, definitely check that out. I love engaging with classes and reading groups. So, if you are sharing it with your reading group or your class, you can contact me on my website.VirginiaOh, that’s amazing. That’s so generous of you. And because we have a lot of parents in the audience, what age would you recommend the book for? I was thinking about this. I would think certainly high school students would get a ton out of it, but I’m curious what you think.MeccaI’m not a parent, so that’s a difficult question for me. What I can say is that I have heard from several parents who have decided to read it with their kids and I just think that’s the ideal way. Hopefully, that will stimulate conversations about these larger questions of eating and diet culture and fatphobia and body shame. I’ve heard a lot of parents say—mothers, especially—that in the process of reading the book with some of their younger children, that they uncovered some things about their own parenting or that helped them think through their own parenting differently. So you know, I think at almost any age, maybe, if you’re guiding the child through it by reading it together. That, to me, would be an ideal way to approach that.VirginiaThat makes sense. That’s great. Well, thank you again, this was really wonderful.MeccaI had a great time. Thank you.---The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

VirginiaYou’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about diet culture, anti-fat bias, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole Smith. I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.CorinneAnd I’m Corinne Fay. I work on Burnt Toast and run @selltradeplus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus sized clothing.VirginiaIt is time for your September1 Indulgence Gospel!We are going to answer your questions like we do every month. We have so many good ones. We’re going to get into fall shoes. I have a lot of thoughts about how do you give compliments and just a lot of good fall chat.CorinneThis is also a paywalled episode. That means to hear the whole thing you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It’s just $5 a month or $50 for the year.VirginiaOr, if you want even more: You can now join Extra Butter at $10 a month where you get everything the regular paid folks get plus monthly live Ask Me Anything chat swith me and even more Indulgence Gospel.CorinneWho doesn’t want extra butter?VirginiaI literally just ate lunch, and I put extra butter on my toast.CorinneSounds really good. VirginiaOkay, I have an update for you, Corinne. Are you ready?CorinneI’m so excited.VirginiaI have something to show you, which is I finally got around to ordering—CorinneOh my gosh, it’s beautiful! VirginiaYour Indulgence Gospel t-shirt! Which I will put in the mail to you this week.CorinneOh my God! It’s so cute. VirginiaIsn’t it so cute? For listeners who don’t know, some very devoted fans of the show—friends of the show—designed their own Priestess of the Indulgence Gospel t-shirts. It’s not official Burnt Toast merch, but they are lovely and the proceeds are being donated to the National Network of Abortion Funds. I also ordered them for my kids, who were confused. My 10 year old doesn’t like baggy clothes—it’s like a whole thing—but she’s wearing it as a pajama shirt. It’s so cute.Corinne’s really cute. They have a little crown made out of pizza on them.VirginiaA pizza crown. The fabric is really nice. We’ll report back on the sizing—I felt like my sizing was pretty good, so fingers crossed.CorinneThat is a very exciting update.VirginiaWhat else is new with you?CorinneWell, fall here is really nice and also always feels too short. It’s like four weeks where like the temperature is actually, nice during the day and then it gets really cold at night. The green chile is roasting and there’s a Hot Air Balloon Fiesta in October.VirginiaI guess I kind of thought New Mexico didn’t have fall at all! That’s lovely.CorinneIt is lovely. It’s not New England fall, but yeah.VirginiaI like a place that’s ready to claim its own type of fall.CorinneYeah, you might prefer green chile to pumpkin spice.VirginiaI mean, I don’t hate pumpkin spice but does it need to be in everything? One of the questions for this week that I didn’t bother to put on the list was Pumpkin Spice related and I was like, I don’t feel qualified to speak to that. But there was a really fun episode of It’s Been A Minute where she talked about the history of pumpkin spice. So if you are a pumpkin spice lover, or like me, you have complicated feelings about it, I recommend that episode.CorinneI’ll check that out.VirginiaWhat else is new with me? I think I’m done with Twitter.CorinneYou know, I think Twitter is over. VirginiaI think it’s done, right? I think we can be done.CorinneI was looking on Twitter for something we’re going to talk about later. And first of all, I had so much trouble finding it on my phone because it’s not called Twitter anymore. Who wants to be like pulling up a website called x.com? It sounds sounds like you’re searching for—VirginiaFor porn.CorinneLike a porn.VirginiaI just broke 10,000 followers on there this year, which feels like a milestone. But with troll management, I’ve been feeling like I really need to streamline all these platforms because I cannot be worrying about trolls in all the places. So I changed my account to protected—I couldn’t quite bring myself to delete. I closed DMs, and I tweeted something that was like, “Okay, I can’t quite press delete, but I’m not looking at this anymore.” It’s been great. I haven’t even thought about it. And you may be upset about this, but I’m considering also whether I’m going to be done with TikTok soon. I don’t know.CorinneI’m in favor of people getting rid of whatever social media they don’t want to be on. I was never a big Twitter poster, but I kind of miss the commentary. It was so funny. It was really so smart sometimes, and now it’s just bad to use. I don’t know where that commentary has really gone, either. Substack, I guess.And also like Threads had a meteoric rise. And is anyone still using Threads? VirginiaI don’t know. I am on all of those places. I am doing nothing with any of them right now. I have this compulsive need to be there, but I similarly just turned off comments on my TikTok, because that was getting really spammy. I was getting a bunch of trolls there. So now I’m just on Instagram and maybe that’s good. I’m curious to hear what people’s thoughts are about this. I was thinking maybe we do a Friday thread on this soon.CorinneYeah, that’s a good idea. What’s everyone doing about social media? [Post-recording note from Virginia: We’re doing this thread on Friday! Hold your comments on this till then, so we can have a good deep dive!]VirginiaWe’re in a weird moment with it. If I’m thinking of it from a business perspective, honestly, none of it serves me! Twitter stopped being remotely a driver to Substack because there’s bad blood between the companies. Even Instagram and Tiktok are not big drivers of traffic to Substack. So if I’m just using it for fun? I don’t know. I like puzzles more, I think.CorinneYep.VirginiaAlright, the last thing I wanted to talk about before we dive into questions is Philly Fat Con. Corinne, do you want to tell people what Philly Fat Con is?CorinneYes. So this year is the first Philly Fat Con. In the past, there’s been a really amazing, plus size clothing swap in Philly. This year Burnt Toast is an official sponsor of Philly Fat Con. It’s a two day convention curated for fat people, by fat people, taking place October 28 and 29th in Philly. There’s a really amazing list of speakers, panels, fashion, healing from fatphobia, fat influencers, yoga, dance, meditation, and twerking.VirginiaCorinne and I can’t be there this year, but we were really excited to have Burnt Toast be a sponsor and there will be a Burnt Toast subscription discount coupon available for folks who attend. We’re very excited to be supporting and hopefully in future years we can be an in-real-life a part of it. ICorinneA bunch of people who are active in the @selltradeplus community go. And the clothing swap seems really cool. They have a mending table!VirginiaI love that. It seems like such a great resource. So if you are in Philly, or anywhere Philly-adjacent, October 28 and 29th. You should check it out!Alright, should we do some questions?CorinneHi Virginia and Corinne,How do we all feel about the standard practice of including the number of servings on a recipe, not to be confused with the serving sizes as determined by the FDA. I’m talking about when a pasta recipe calls for 12 ounces of pasta—three quarters of a box—and says it’s for four servings. My partner and I inevitably always end up eating the four servings of pasta between the two of us and then feel weirdly guilty for no reason. I’m a recipe developer by trade, so I obviously have an agenda here. But my question is, are serving information on recipes inherently anti-fat? Is there a better way to do this while still informing people on what quantity of food they’re preparing? VirginiaThe first thing I’m going to say on this is I have never in my life cooked three quarters of a box when I could cook a whole box of pasta. What are you doing leaving me with a quarter of a box of pasta to deal with? That’s just irritating.CorinneI definitely have quarter boxes of pasta in my pantry from this very fucking thing.VirginiaIt’s so rude.Okay, free list! This is where we leave you. Subscribe to get all of our thoughts on the tyranny of portion control, fall shoes and is my house really as clean as it looks on Instagram?VirginiaI think this is some real bullshit. 12 ounces of pasta as four servings is a scam perpetrated on our country, is how I feel.CorinneThis is one of those things where I would have thought that there was some kind of rule about this—like that a serving of pasta is however many ounces—that recipe developers were following. But I feel like this question makes it clear that there isn’t!Virginia No.CorinneI do feel like the New York Times is maybe the worst perpetrator of this.VirginiaOh, well that makes sense because they are very diet-y.I was raised in a house that believed if there is garlic in the recipe, it is a minimum of three cloves of garlic. Don’t give me this “one clove of garlic, finely minced.” It is three to five cloves of garlic. If there are chocolate chips in a recipe, we are not measuring the chocolate chips, we are just dumping in as many chocolate chips as we see fit.CorinneThis is… I can’t.VirginiaI do not subscribe to “quantities.”CorinneYou’re like those New York Times recipe commenters that are like “I didn’t have flour, so I used baking soda and it didn’t work!”VirginiaNo, I use the ingredients! I just cannot be hemmed in by the rigidity of the expectations that I’m going to measure all this shit. Like, I have to get dinner on the table!CorinneOkay, well, I try to follow recipes. But I’m one person who lives alone and I feel like I would be eating this recipe as two servings. VirginiaYes, like, this is dinner tonight, and lunch tomorrow. Perfect. I do think there is a lot of diet culture behind this. I mean, I think it’s also like they’re trying to be helpful. Like, you want to have a sense of how many people this recipe can feed. But how can the recipe developer ever know that? CorinneRight. Or it’s four servings of pasta as like a side pasta salad or something, versus the main thing you’re eating? VirginiaIt makes no sense.CorinneI do kind of wonder if it’s an older generation thing, too. When I saw this I was like, “oh, yeah, that would be four servings for my mom.” No offense, mom. VirginiaWe love you, Corinne’s mom. CorinneYou don’t eat very much.VirginiaI mean, we will link to the thing about do older people eat less. We got my mom to weigh in on that one. CorinneBut she kind of said no, didn’t she?VirginiaWell she was like, “I feel like maybe I do eat less but not as not as little as my diet-y friends.” Because a lot of Boomer women are dieting.There could also be some cost element, like depending if it’s a very budget friendly sort of recipe site. I think sometimes they’re trying to convince you you can make ingredients go longer. Although, this cannot apply to the pasta thing. Because if I’ve already bought the damn box of pasta, I cannot now make another recipe out of that quarter box of pasta! So irritating.CorinneIs it maybe that high end pasta comes in a smaller box or something?VirginiaI think it’s usually 16 ounces even for the fancy stuff. I buy bougie pasta because— CorinneBecause why not? VirginiaAnd you get the same standard amount as you get in your box of Barilla or whatever. Alright. Next question. What are your favorite ice cream flavors? Both little shop and grocery store. I will keep asking! This came in over Instagram from a follower who I believe has submitted this a few months in a row and we maybe forgot it. And I’m sorry. We just get a lot of questions.CorinneIt is a good topic. We do like talking about ice cream. VirginiaAnd with my pro-summer agenda I’m keeping it in, because we will continue to eat ice cream throughout the fall. The correct answer here is not pumpkin spice ice cream, just so we’re clear.CorinneI have a lot of grocery store favorites. Depending on what kind of grocery store you’re going to. I really like Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia, and it’s available at almost every grocery store. If we’re if we’re at the fancy grocery store, by which I mean Whole Foods, I really like Jeni’s Brown Butter Almond Brittle flavor. It’s expensive, but it’s worth it. And then I also really like Strauss ice cream, which I don’t think you have on the east coast but it’s really good. Just like vanilla and chocolate. They have a maple one that’s really good. Delicious.VirginiaPeople will not be surprised to hear that I am not very adventurous with ice cream flavors. I like my chocolate, my chocolate brownie, my mint chocolate chip. Maybe that’s like my getting wild flavor. Maybe something with chocolate peanut butter. CorinneOh, I like chocolate peanut butter, too.VirginiaIf it’s not a chocolate base I don’t really know what to do with it.CorinneDo you have a brand loyalty?VirginiaDefinitely Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie is the go-to, will never disappoint you, available everywhere. There is a great local ice cream brand that’s in our fancy grocery store called Adirondack Creamery and their mint chip is called “White Face Mint” because there’s a White Face Mountain in the Adirondacks. I like buying it for the awkwardness of that name. Like, how did they not focus group white face ice cream?CorinneIt is a little bit odd.VirginiaThen for local ice cream shops, Jane’s Ice Cream is a good local brand of ice cream you can get it at various ice cream shops. They do a chocolate peanut butter brownie that is superb, really bringing it all together.CorinneI think I’ve mentioned before that we have a really good local soft serve place. They just have vanilla and chocolate, but they do have really exciting toppings. VirginiaWell, that can be really important. CorinneThey have a sundae that has olive oil and hazelnuts on it! A very adult, savory type of sundae.VirginiaMy kids would riot, but it sounds great.My 10 year old’s favorite flavor is limoncello, which is an extremely annoying flavor to have be your favorite flavor, because it is not available in a lot of places. CorinneIs that like nondairy or?VirginiaNo, it’s an ice cream. There are three ice cream shops in our town, only one of them serves limoncello. It is the ice cream shop with no shade. So when it is August and you want ice cream, it is like eating it on the surface of the sun in their parking lot. I’m always like, can we please go to the shady ice cream? I really want to say to the shady ice cream place people, like, could you just get limoncello please?CorinneYeah, just buy them a pint and ask them to keep it in the back.VirginiaPlease, just for us. CorinneI mean, I love a child with strong opinions about ice cream flavors!VirginiaSo strong. It’s really great for me. I love it, too. Love how empowered she is. It’s so super. Corinne Okay, let me ask you another question. This person randomly was wondering,Do you still eat car sushi or are those days over?VirginiaI do still eat car sushi. I should probably explain what car sushi is because not everyone will know this. But during the pandemic, I wrote an essay for the New York Times about how my survival strategy, back in the days when we were all trapped with our families was that I would do the grocery shopping and I would get grocery store sushi. Then I would sit in the parking lot of the grocery store and eat my sushi and listen to a podcast. It was the perfect me time. And I was grocery shopping, I wasn’t abandoning my family. But I was having time to myself, which I desperately needed. It was amazing. And yeah, I still do it. It is less of a necessity. We leave our homes now. But I definitely still do it and I have even upgraded it to occasionally there’s a good local sushi restaurant I like and sometimes I like to take myself out for sushi and sit in the restaurant by myself. CorinneI was recently talking to some friends about how grocery store sushi can be such a lifesaver meal.VirginiaIt’s so good. Ours is honestly better than some of the sushi restaurants around us. I don’t know what sorcery that man is doing in there. I love him so much. I’ve never been bold enough to introduce myself to the sushi guy even though he totally knows me because I get it so often. It’s like past the point where we should have told each other our names. You know how that happens sometimes? I’m in a five year relationship with my sushi guy.CorinneYeah, he’s a close personal friend whose name you don’t know. VirginiaI love him so much. It’s just perfect you’ve just been stuck in the store and you need a snack. You’re running a bunch of errands you don’t have time to stop for lunch. Okay, next question.Any favorite meal train meals? Bonus for vegetarian options if you have any?CorinneI feel that the correct thing to bring for a meal train is lasagna.VirginiaSee, I feel that the worst thing to bring for a meal train is lasagna. CorinneOh shit! Oh God. Goodbye. This is our breakup.VirginiaWell, I will tell you why it is. When I was the recipient of many meal trains, when I had a critically ill child and was staying in the hospital a lot, guess what everybody brought?CorinneLasagna. Shit. Okay.VirginiaIt is the thing everybody is going to bring, so. CorinneOkay. Well, I will say I think I feel that way because that’s what my mom always makes. But I also feel like I would probably make a more exciting lasagna, I’d probably do like butternut squash or spinach or something. VirginiaThat, I would have completely appreciated. Lasagna is amazing when it’s amazing. But it also feels like you’re eating baby food when you’ve eaten it for so many days. CorinneWhen you’re reheating it, yeah. VirginiaI would get to this point where I was like, I can’t eat anymore fucking lasagna. This is not an anti-pasta statement, to be clear. CorinneNo, that is really fair. VirginiaPasta is central to my life. So what I do—this doesn’t work for absolutely every meal train, but for most of the time I think this is good. Like, it wouldn’t work for someone who’s like in the hospital and you need to bring them a meal they can eat completely. I also have thoughts on that. But if it’s like a new baby and they are home, or someone’s going through a hard time and you want to drop off a meal, I will make sauce and freeze it and bring it with a bag of the bougie pasta. CorinneOh, that’s smart. VirginiaLike, I’ll make like a really good Bolognese or a sausage ragu or something. And then that way, if they want to have it for dinner that night, they can just leave it out to thaw and all they have to do is boil water for the pasta. Because the other thing about meal trains is sometimes too much arrives at once and then you haven’t finished last night’s thing. So I also like bringing them something that if they don’t want it, they can just stash very easily. The pasta can go in the pantry. Sauce goes in the freezer. Boom. CorinneThat’s smart. That’s really smart. Well, I will also suggest as an alternative, enchiladas. VirginiaI mean, also a baby food potential.CorinneI think anything you’re reheating over and over.VirginiaIt can become a problem. But you can obviously do a vegetarian version of all of these. Also, not vegetarian, but if you are someone who knows how to roast a good chicken, that’s a nice one to bring. You could bring a roast chicken and a bagged salad. Maybe a nice loaf of bread. So they would have all the components. I just always really appreciated it when it was a meal that I could chew and had texture.CorinneOh God. I mean, that’s a good tip.VirginiaBut no, I mean, if you make an amazing lasagna, bring your amazing lasagna. I definitely had one friend who made an amazing lasagna and I was super happy to eat it. And then some people bring lasagna somewhere and I’m not gonna name names.CorinneYou know who you are.VirginiaYou brought me a subpar lasagna in my time of need.Corinne“If you brought me a mushy lasagna, I remember you.”VirginiaThat’s a good question though.CorinneAll right. This is a good question. Confession: I am a complimenter! I am a very extroverted person that appreciates fashion and personal style and I love to compliment people when out and about. I compliment the clothing, glasses, accessories, and overall look of all ages, sizes, genders, etc. I think this generally brightens someone’s day a bit. However, I want to make sure that I’m doing so in a way that is inclusive, fat positive, and generally kind. I never say that pieces of clothing are flattering because I think that is just code for “makes you look thinner.” I would appreciate any tips you have. Should I just stop and leave stylish strangers in peace?VirginiaI say no. Bring on the stylish compliments. I love a style based compliment. It feels like the perfect workaround to get away from body based compliments.CorinneI totally agree. I also recently heard someone say, instead of being like, “I like your shirt,” to be like, “you make that shirt look really good,” or something. VirginiaOh, that’s lovely. CorinneSo it’s more like complimenting the person rather than what they are wearing.Virginia“You are wearing the heck out of that shirt.” I mean, I will totally ask, “Where are your shoes from?” We can unpack the capitalism of this and the gender conditioning of this, but it is a skill, knowing how to find cute things. And I appreciate when someone is recognizing my time and effort, as well as how I’m wearing the thing.CorinneYeah, I do think it brightens someone’s day. VirginiaAbsolutely. CorinneYou could also say like “you have a nice smile” or something. I don’t know. Are we crossing the line into flirting?VirginiaThat feels like you’re hitting on me.CorinneI’m sorry. Never mind. VirginiaI feel like depending who said that, it could be fine, but it could get weird. And also, do I have to compliment back and be like, “you have pretty eyes”? I don’t know. This person is totally right, skip “flattering.” Definitely skip anything where you’re commenting on the person’s shape. Like, I wouldn’t be like, “that makes your stomach like very flat” or something. I don’t know, probably somebody has given that compliment, but I’ve never experienced it. But sometimes people might say something like, “oh it makes your legs look so good.” Like, I wouldn’t necessarily say “this makes this part of your body look good.” That feels like you’re getting more into objectifying and diet culture commentary. But if it’s like, “I love the pattern of that skirt,” or “that dress is so pretty,” or whatever, I feel like that is all good. And it’s a nice icebreaker. I mean, people comment on my glasses a lot. And I’m always like, this is helping us. I feel like I’m providing this service.Corinne“Here, talk about this.”VirginiaTalk about the glasses and then we can get on to other stuff.CorinneThat’s smart. VirginiaAlright. We got multiple questions about pants, specifically favorite work pants for apple shapes. Also, just pant recommendations in general. And a couple of people also mentioned “help it’s fall, I have to wear pants again.”CorinneWell as discussed, I’m not wearing pants yet. Are you? VirginiaI am currently wearing a jumpsuit. Does that count? I’m wearing my Universal Standard jumpsuit. It has a jogger style pant and it’s making me really want some joggers for fall. But it is difficult to find joggers for apple shapes is what I will say. CorinneInteresting. VirginiaBecause if it fits my waist, the legs end up more of like a wide leg and not the taper. This is a rare unicorn that does that. Which, I’m not against a wide leg but I’m just saying if I’m looking for a jogger cuff I don’t want it to be wide leg, that’s not the vibe.CorinneMy perpetual Burnt Toast pant recommendation is the Eileen Fisher lantern pants. I feel like it’s not a jogger but similarly it goes in at the bottom.VirginiaThis might be the year I do the lantern pants. CorinneI also like these pants called Monday pants from Free Label but they don’t have them on the site right now, so I feel kind of bad recommending them.VirginiaWell, by the time this airs, who knows. CorinneYou have the free label bras or no?VirginiaI have a free label bra. I tried their joggers and they were cut for an hourglass, not for me. They were too small on the waist. Okay, but now I’m looking at their wide legs. Their Loretta pant is really cute if you want a wide leg option.CorinneThey do different fabrications and I like the bamboo fabric because it’s really soft. I think the Monday pant is straight or tapered. VirginiaOh, I did the Sunday crop. That’s the one I had a not great experience with. CorinneAnd now they have these like Sophie slacks which also look like they would be good.VirginiaYep. I was just eyeing the Sophie slacks.CorinneYeah. I find the sizing on them like very flexible, I can wear two different sizes because it stretches.VirginiaI may have to try there Sophie slacks. They do have limited return windows because they’re a small company. No shade to them. That is how small companies do it. But if you order, you need to be on it with your returns if you need returns.CorinneYeah, and they are Canadian.VirginiaBut that looks really cool. My other go-to is the Universal Standard—every year we debate how to pronounce “ponte.”CorinneI say pont-tay pant. Ponte? I don’t know what I say.VirginiaYou sound like you’re saying panties, but with a weird accent.CorinneUgh I hate it. I tried those and I felt they didn’t work for me. So your mileage may vary.VirginiaI mean, this is the story of pants.CorinneI know. And I feel like we both would say that we’re apple shapes! VirginiaYes, we would. CorinneAnyways, I am a non-ponte apple. Maybe I’m not an apple. I don’t know.VirginiaWhat fruit am I?CorinneI feel like what I actually always want to say is like, “I’m a snowman.” But I don’t know what shape that is. Maybe it’s like a fat hourglass? Or something? I don’t know. VirginiaI’m picturing a snowman.CorinneYeah, I don’t know. It’s like stacked apples. I don’t know. VirginiaI am multiple apples.CorinneI’m a bucket of apples.VirginiaI am the more classic apple on toothpicks situation, which is a challenge. I mean, it’s all a challenge, clothes are not cut for our bodies. I don’t feel we’ve been very helpful here. I was just bracing myself to think about jeans and I don’t think I’m ready.CorinneI haven’t worn any of my pants since May. So I haven’t tried them on and been like, these are still working these aren’t, so I feel bad recommending stuff that I haven’t worn in like six months. VirginiaWell it’s also the thing where I have the one pair of Gap jeans that I like and I wear either the largest or the second largest size because Gap is not size inclusive. So I always feel bad talking about this, but they fit and nothing else does. So I wear them. And then they went on sale so I ordered a second pair in the exact same wash in the exact same size…CorinneOh no. I know where this is going. VirginiaI put them on and they felt tight. And I was like, I don’t get it. I give up.CorinneI have a pair from Universal Standard—and by a pair what I mean is I actually have four pairs of the same piece. I’m just like, I must have more of these. And I have them in two different sizes and I comfortably can wear both.But yeah, I also had recently heard from people on selltradeplus that Universal Standard changed their jean fabric and it’s not good anymore. So I’m scared to find out about that.VirginiaIt’s so hard and exhausting. I feel like we haven’t really helpfully answered this question. But I think we’ve offered a lot of solidarity. It’s hard. I’m sorry.CorinneI feel like, check out Target.VirginiaYou know Target is the stealth player of all of this. And even if it doesn’t work, it’s easy returns and you haven’t spent a lot of money. It just won’t last very long as the thing. You’re not getting an investment piece. But maybe there’s no such thing as an investment piece. Maybe we need to dismantle the myth of the investment piece. CorinneYeah, I think that might be a thing.VirginiaOkay, this is very fun question. Fall shoes. And this person wrote,Why do I only own sandals and boots, and nothing in between?And I felt really seen by that statement, actually.CorinneThis is maybe a regionally specific question. I just wear sneakers all the time.VirginiaI was about to say, I think the solution is sneakers. I think this person is missing the cute sneaker category.CorinneYeah. A pair of white sneakers.VirginiaYep. Do you have any are excited about right now?CorinneI think both of us wear Vejas, right? I also think that Reebok Club C 85’s are cute. They’re cheaper but they look really similar.VirginiaOh, they’re totally cute. CorinneDo clogs count? I feel like cogs could be a fall shoe.VirginiaClogs are absolutely! Just know that depending on the weather, unless you live in California, you have about six weeks in the spring and about six weeks in the fall. If it gets rainy, less than that, in which clogs are practical. And I will say that fashion clogs are not a super walkable shoe.I am thinking about a new pair of Boston clogs for this fall that I would wear out of the house. What are your feelings about Boston clogs or Birkenstock clogs?CorinneI mean, very on trend. I don’t know if I’ve ever owned a pair.VirginiaI don’t want that taupe color that all the influencers have. I don’t want to be that obvious.CorinneWhat color would you get?VirginiaThere’s a bright blue pair. Do you see the ultra blue? That blue is really pretty. CorinneI also kind of like the bright green. Might be harder, I don’t know. There’s a nice maroon. There’s an off white that I also like—antique white. VirginiaWell, I mean, that would last three minutes. Good luck. CorinneOkay, fair. That might be more of an Albuquerque color. VirginiaDon’t you you have dust?CorinneYeah, but I feel like it’s that color.VirginiaOff white suede just feels like it’s gonna be trashed so fast.CorinneOkay, I take it back. You know what else could be a good fall shoe is Sabahs.VirginiaOoh, yes. They’re like, a leather cross between a loafer and a moccasin sort of vibe. Oh and they do a backless one that’s sort of like a flat clog.CorinneYeah, like a slide. I feel like they’re good because they could be really casual or like a little more dressy.VirginiaOh, this is a new obsession for me. They come in hot pink! Okay.CorinneYeah, they have really cute colors.VirginiaThey are pricey. Don’t get mad at us that we said something expensive. Always go back to Target. The Target shoes are often excellent knockoffs of Madewell.CorinneYeah, you could definitely find a cheaper version of these. VirginiaBut these ones are beautifully made and the colors are amazing. What I will say is the challenge with the cute sneaker, the clog, or the slide is what do you do when it is cold enough that you want to wear socks? Is that when you move to boot territory and never look back?CorinneIt’s a perpetual question. I also feel like another shoe I’ve been seeing a lot of, which I am kind of interested in, is the chunky loafer.VirginiaThe chunky loafer has caught my eye as well.CorinneI feel like you can wear socks with those. VirginiaOh, interesting. Right? I guess you could. It’s a little more rugged.CorinneLittle white socks or cute socks? I don’t know. VirginiaI also feel like you could wear socks with the Boston Birkenstock clog.CorinneDefinitely. You could even wear chunky socks.VirginiaLike a chunky knit sock. Well, I think this was a good shoe brainstorming session.CorinneOkay.Virginia, I would love to hear more about your puzzle setup.VirginiaI’m so glad someone asked. My puzzle setup is very close to my heart. Very important to my self care. I’ve tried a couple different permutations around my house but where I’m mostly puzzling these days, is in the evenings while watching TV with my 10 year old. I was doing it at the coffee table and my 42-year-old back cannot handle that. It is not going to work. So over the summer I got a pretty cute chair, on sale from Anthropologie. I don’t know how size inclusive it is, but it’s better than my dining room chairs for sure. It’s basically like an arm chair, but more upright. Because I needed a chair that could sit at a little table.So I got a little table from Target,2 also on sale, that is like a 24 inch round bistro table. You could use like any dining chair, but I wanted something kind of comfy too because I don’t wanna be sitting on a hard dining room chair to do puzzles. So I’ve got my chair and my little table and then I’ve got my puzzle table, which sits on top and is a lazy Susan with a rotating puzzle board that you can also angle up.CorinneOh my God. The dream!VirginiaOh, absolutely. CorinneI love that you can angle it up. So smart.VirginiaIf you’re a hardcore puzzler, you need this. Your back needs this kind of setup.CorinneOkay, the next question is,how do you keep your house so clean with two kids?VirginiaThe headline answer of this is you only ever see like, two feet of my house on Instagram! If you see an area that looks clean, do not assume the rest of my house is clean. Often it is not at all and I have shoved things out of sight. That is the miracle of Instagram. I will also say I am privileged to have a cleaning person. And I am privileged to be an obsessive tidier. So that combination. I am privileged that tidying relieves my stress. And when I’m very stressed out, my house tends to get very tidy, which I know it’s not how everybody goes. But that is where I go. And this has been a stressful season in my life! So my house is looking pretty good. I do a lot of stress organizing and tidying. Then the last thing I’ll say is I was readinglyz’s incredible new book, This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life, and came across some really interesting research she reported on, which is that a husband adds on average seven hours of domestic labor to wives, and that many women notice when their husbands move out their houses get cleaner. We don’t need to unpack that extensively. But let me just say that I felt seen by that page of Lyz’s book.CorinneWow, I mean. Perks! VirginiaIt turns out, if you cut down on the amount of people dropping stuff everywhere then there’s less to pick up! So there we are. CorinneConsider a cleaning lady instead of a husband.VirginiaShe is the most important person in my life. I love you, Dawn. And I promise, there is at least always one room that looks like an absolute dumpster fire.CorinneNobody is asking me this question.VirginiaYou don’t show your house that much, though!CorinneYeah, there’s a reason!VirginiaI like the next question quite a lot. This the last question we’ll end on today, which isHow do you like to celebrate shifting into fall while resisting manic, back-to-the-grind urgency?I feel like this is all my anxiety right here in this question. This is why September is a hard month for me.CorinneYeah. It’s a very interesting question. I feel like every season kind of has its own manic urgency. Like, I feel like there’s a lot of manic urgency to summer, too, sometimes.VirginiaOh, because it feels like you have to do all the cool summer things?CorinneIt feels so short. I saw a meme and that was just like the whole year leading up to August. Everyone is like, blah, blah, blah every month, and you’re just looking forward to August. And then August is over in a flash. VirginiaWell, I think you’re right, that urgency is always there. So it’s more a question of can we identify the real sources of this that is not the calendar. Obviously the calendar is just a construction we’re using, and the urgency is really hustle culture and perfectionism. As discussed, I’m a massive work in progress there.CorinneYeah. Maybe you also feel more of this with actually having people in your house going back to school.VirginiaYeah, that’s true. Our lives are more organized around the idea that September is the back to school time. One small thing I have done, more for my kids than for me, but I think it mentally helps me, is the first few years I had kids in school, I sort of automatically put a lot of thought into what our first day of school outfits were going to be. This is because for me, as a kid, I always put massive amounts of thought into my first day of school outfits. This was a real project of mine. And this year and last year, I did not. I haven’t done back-to-school clothes shopping yet because the weather hasn’t changed. They don’t need new stuff yet, you know what I mean?And I had this moment of like, “Oh, God, they don’t have new clothes to wear for the first day of school. Am I a bad mom?” And then I’m like, obviously not. Obviously, that doesn’t matter. When I’ve said to my kids, a day or two before, “do you want to pick out a first day of school outfit? Or do you not care?” I’ve kind of left it up to them and they both get into it. But then they pick their own outfits, which are of course amazing. It’s just them putting together whatever from their summer stuff. And it’s like a whole job I’ve taken off my plate, right? Because I’m not responsible for acquiring cool new back to school outfits. It’s also great for their body autonomy, because it’s not me being like, “you need to wear this for the first day of school so you can look cute for the first day of school,” which like, like, let’s just unpack how fucked up that idea is! You’re going to school to learn. CorinneYeah, so true.VirginiaWhy is there a message that you should have a cute outfit to learn in?CorinneYeah.VirginiaSo that’s one option. I similarly have never made a big deal about Picture Day for my kids. I let them wear whatever the hell they want for picture day. I don’t even care if they brush their hair or not. We have our normal, please brush your hair to be a person in the world standard, but I’m not going out of my way and I think I like our pictures much more because they really reflect like the hot mess my children always are. CorinneMan, I’m so glad we don’t have to do picture day as adults. VirginiaOh god. Such a weird ritual. At least if I’m being manic, I’m being manic about things that matter slightly more to some extent. ---ButterCorinneShould we do Butter?VirginiaLet’s do Butter. What do you have for Butter?CorinneOkay, well, I have an expensive recommendation that everyone is going to be mad about.VirginiaIt’s the theme of this episode. We did expensive recommendations this time. It’s been a hard year. We deserve to treat ourselves. Here we are.CorinneOkay, I want to recommend this hat. It’s a baseball hat. The brand is called Blluemade. But it’s just a fancy linen baseball cap, but— VirginiaYou were not kidding about expensive.CorinneI’m sorry. It’s $100! However, I will say something about it that is so cool and amazing is that the the brim doesn’t have cardboard in it. So you can just wash it, you can just throw it in the wash and hang it up to dry and then wear it. It’s so stupid hot and sunny here that I’ve just been wearing it a ton and sweating in it. So it’ll get all sweaty and then I’ll just wash it.VirginiaAnd then you can wash it and not just be like, well I just have this gross hat now. Well and you are the originator of the face shield trend.CorinneYes. I know all of you out there are wearing your face shields.VirigniaI mean, you made that happen.CorinneAnd I’m wearing mine right now as we speak.VirginiaI’m just saying, you take face and protection very seriously, which I respect.CorinneYou have to here, it’s brutal. We’re at high elevation so the sun sucks.VirginiaI support you investing in a high quality hat. And it fits your  head? Because this is my big thing.CorinneIt does fit my head but I think I have a large head but I don’t know maybe not that large. Oh, I also feel like it’s a really nice gift. VirginiaThat is a lovely gift. CorinneMaybe you feel a little weird about buying $100 baseball cap for yourself. But if you want to give someone a nice baseball hat, it’s a fun thing to receive.VirginiaAnd to make feel people feel better about the price, I will drop a link to my favorite sun hat, which is this ridiculously oversized straw hat I got at Target at the end of the season, after my friend wore it when we were at the beach. It is huge and delightful.It was sold out online. It might still be sold out online, but I think it’s gonna come back next year because I think they do it seasonally. [Post-recording note: As of Wednesday Oct 4, it’s back and just $17!! Stock up for next year.] But I was in Target and I found the last one in stock, and I was so happy. It’s really great. A giant wide brimmed hat is a less practical sun hat, like it is hard to wear in the car because you don’t fit. But it’s so cute and it’s $20.CorinneOkay, and my $100 baseball cap is very much like you could throw it in your bag. You could wear it literally anywhere. Mine are always in the backseat of my car. Super versatile.VirginiaThis is adorable. I’m excited for you. CorinneWhat is your Butter?VirginiaMy Butter is totally free, just joy that I want to share with people just free joy. It is Griefcatpartytime on Instagram. They are my new obsession. They are a comedy musical duo. They’re so cute. They’re two fat singer / ukulele players. And the one I want to make sure that you hear—CorinneWell, okay, first of all these people are extremely cute and have extremely good style. VirginiaYou can just play that one I just sent you.CorinneOh my gosh. Okay. This song is called fat people poop the same amount as you. It is incredible. It’s so amazing. I mean, they’re doing important educational work. VirginiaThe caption is “A biology lesson for our haters.” CorinneSo funny. VirginiaI’ve already DM’ed with them and am working on getting them on the podcast so stay tuned. We will make that happen, but in the meantime, go follow them on Instagram and enjoy it. They have another one that’s like something about benevolent billionaires, like they just are doing great work.CorinneI love it. I want to know where they got these pink fuzzy jackets they’re wearing!VirginiaTheir fashion is excellent. There are also these rainbow sequined dresses that were in a lot of the videos. We will definitely ask them.CorinneCool. They look awesome.VirginiaAlright, I think we did this episode! Thank you so much for listening to Burnt Toast.---The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!---1 - Shhh, yes, we know it’s October.2 - If this link says $228, don’t pay it! I got it on sale for about $100, it will drop again.

Today Virginia is chatting with Katy Geraghty. Katy is an actor in New York City, most recently seen as Little Red in Into The Woods on Broadway as well as the national tour. We asked Katy to come on the show, because she knows firsthand what it’s like to be a fat kid in theater, and a fat professional working actor in theater. If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. Philly Fat Con is coming up! And Burnt Toast is a proud superfat sponsor. It’s going to be an amazing weekend of fat joy, with speakers, movement classes, the Philly Plus Swap and more. All the info and tickets here.Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she and her guests give are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSKaty on Instagram and TikTokKaty as Little Red in Into The WoodsSister Actanti-fatness in sportsJo Malone is expensive AF but Katy loves her Nectarine Blossom and Honey cologne. FAT TALK is out! 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. Follow Virginia on Instagram. Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe. Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell. Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism. Episode 111 TranscriptKatyI started acting really young, kind of accidentally. But I’ve been kind of involved in theater since being a small child. And then all throughout high school I was doing a lot of regional theater around me and all of that stuff. I went to college, at UMass Amherst instead of a full theater school, and did a lot of other majors as well as theater. But Broadway for me was very immediate. I booked it right after I graduated, like 36 hours, which is wild. VirginiaA lot of people must hate you a little bit.KatyEverybody asks me, “how did this happen?” I’m like, “Please don’t ask me I’m not the right person to ask.” Anyway, Broadway happened, I worked a lot as a professional actor all over the country. And then in this last year, I was a part of both & Juliet which is about to go to Broadway and then I left that cast to join Into The Woods as Little Red Riding Hood and went on tour with them and it was amazing. I’ve had a really wonderful career, I’ve been very lucky VirginiaAnd now you’re working on Sister Act, right?KatyI am. I am in Sister Act at The Muny in St. Louis. It’s a two-and-a-half week process and it’s all outside and we’re in habits. So, that’s so hot. It’s so hot. I’ve never been sweatier in my entire life.VirginiaOh my gosh, oh my gosh. What a fun show! That’s my childhood nostalgia right there.KatySame. It’s one of my favorite movies and always has been. VirginiaWell, I definitely want to talk more about your work, but I really wanted to have you on today to talk about the issue of anti-fat bias in theater. And particularly how it impacts kids. KatyIt’s embedded in theater for sure. In the same way that when you think about a Disney Princess, a certain image comes to mind, when you think of Broadway ingenue, a very similar silhouette and person is in your head. And that’s not just body type, that’s also skin color and so many other things, like standing instead of in a wheelchair. If that’s what it is in people’s heads, that’s what the producers are going to want to give because it’s sparkly and fun and supposed to be the height of romanticizing the idea. So it’s embedded.And then of course, there is the Hairspray of it all, which I have played so many times, and I always joke that it’s because I’m fat and breathing. I love to watch people get uncomfortable when I say it. There’s Hairspray, so everybody is like, “Oh, you’ll be Tracy, it’ll be fine.” That’s one role in the musical theater canon and people genuinely use it as like, “Oh, you’ll be fine.”VirginiaLike, “We’ve made so much progress, we have this one role for you.”KatyOne role. Look out world! Or you get to be the ugly, fat best friend and that kind of stuff. It’s still very much in the sidekick place or being laughed at, which is not always a bad thing. I am a comedic actor! I live off of laughter! But there’s a difference between people laughing with you and laughing at you.Honestly, growing up in theater and in school, I didn’t always get to do it because I was often working already. But I actually got really lucky because the person who was costuming, all of those things, is a dear friend and neighbor. She did not leave me out in the lurch ever. She also had the capacity to build things from scratch. She had the skills and often, with me, that’s what she had to do. But she did. I know that that is a budget thing, that is a skill set thing. Yes, there are a few more steps that teachers have to take, but you can and you should. I didn’t experience not being able to fit into a costume because I had somebody to make it for me from scratch. But there were not costumes readily available for me ever. And like, Linda? Icon. Love that woman. VirginiaThank you, Linda. We love you, Linda.KatyThank you, Linda. We love you so much. So I got really lucky on that front, because the biggest part of all of it is usually how they’re costumed. VirginiaThat is definitely something I’m hearing from readers and listeners, as well. So many stories of “My theater career ended when in ninth grade, I auditioned for the high school play and was told, ‘we don’t have anything to put you in.’” A similar thing happens in sports when team uniforms often don’t come big enough. So often when we think about the stereotypes we have about fat kids, like lazy or whatever—is it? If you’re not making space for kids in these places, then what? That’s the root of the stereotype. It’s ridiculous.KatyWho wants to join the team that you literally don’t fit into? That’s such a big ask for a kid. It can be wildly embarrassing. It’s very othering. When you actually take more than three seconds to think about it, like, why would they join? That’s awful.VirginiaYou’re asking kids to feel unsafe in their bodies to do something that involves their bodies, right? With sports, of course, but theater is also very physical and very much about your body being looked at. To do that in a place where we just told you your body’s not safe and welcome? Okay, yeah, no, I’m staying home.KatySame thing with dance, too! When you’re ordering costumes from catalogs or whatever. I didn’t get into competition dance until I was in high school and my teacher is still a very dear friend and really did the work to make sure that any costume that she was giving us—because we got to vote on the top five or whatever it was. She did make sure always that she never gave us options that didn’t come in my size. VirginiaThat’s great. KatySo I always say, I know that I am a wildly confident human being. But I also came from I guess the opposite of a perfect storm of just like all teachers being pretty supportive. So the first time a hateful comment came my way about how I looked, it just bounced right off of me. They had built an armor that I wasn’t even aware I was wearing. VirginiaWow. KatyI was like, “I just don’t think that’s true.” That was what came to my head. And I will never be able to repay the lack of trauma that my teachers provided me. But at the same time, I’m going to do that by doing this and yelling about the amount of times that it’s wrong, because it’s not like people haven’t said terrible things to my face. They have, but I guess I was just taught early enough that they were wrong and I shouldn’t care. VirginiaYou had the foundation in place. That should be the baseline for all kids and it so often is not. KatyAbsolutely. VirginiaI want to go back to what you were saying about being cast in a role where you’re going to be laughed at for your body, because I think that is really insidious, especially because so many school programs are using older shows because of what they can license. There is so much embedded fatphobia in jokes and in the way the fat characters are portrayed. KatyI had a moment in one of the 8000 Hairsprays, where our director was talking to “the nicest kids” who are mean to her—which is hilarious, but that’s what they’re called. He was describing the distaste when Amber sees me. And I was in the room. So it’s not like he wasn’t saying these things about me and slightly in my direction as a directorial note. But eventually, he caught himself and he turned around, he was like, “I’m so sorry. I don’t believe that you—you aren’t...” And he just kind of stammered over himself.And I was like, “I know. But the fact that you just brought it up makes everybody think that that’s not a thing anymore.” Like it’s on the page, right? But then that allowance made me so uncomfortable. Because I was like, “yeah, no, I am aware that I am not a beached whale, as they’re saying. I know.” So it’s kind of uncomfortable when you don’t have the right people directing because there are some truly hateful things said in all sorts of shows.I’m thinking about Hairspray specifically, especially because like when you think about it, she’s in an audition room when most of the main things are said to her. So you’re already so vulnerable standing in front of a group of people and they’re spewing these hate comments at you. I would be mortified. I would sink into a puddle. It’s great because she overcomes it, but as somebody who’s fat you still have to stand there and take it for a few minutes. And if you’ve heard them before, that’s so hurtful. And  if the theater industry is going to capitalize on making fun of me, I’m going to have an opinion.VirginiaYeah, that seems right. Katy I mean, even in Sister Act—this isn’t in the script anymore. It is on the London recording that this is how you meet Sister Mary Patrick, which is the Kathy Najimy part from the movie, and an amazing character. But there is nothing in the movie that signifies that she needs to be fat. She just is. So she’s just like this joyful person and nothing that she talks about has anything to do with her size, right? VirginiaWhich is pretty remarkable for back then! KatyAnd then the first round of Sister Act came out, the musical, which was in London. When you first meet the nuns, I think it’s called “How I Got the Calling” is how you meet them. This is the song and they’re talking about how they came to Jesus and what they thought about and whatever. And Sister Mary Patrick’s verse is all about starting to see apostles in food. Like, she sees it on a piece of toast, that kind of thing.And it’s not in the script anymore. I don’t know if they took that out after London. I don’t know if it came to previews and then was taken out or whatever, but it’s not in the Broadway recording. That song is called, “It’s Good To Be A Nun” and there’s nothing that she sings it has anything to do with her weight. She’s actually just exactly how Kathy is, like overly joyful about these things that if you said in a sarcastic tone would sound very different. Which is delightful and so fun to play. But it kind of baffled me, like why would you add it? If it already exists that way, okay, but why add it? VirginiaWe actually have an older show that didn’t have a lot of embedded anti-fatness, and they were like, “Let’s just give a little sprinkle. Let’s make sure we don’t miss that opportunity.” That’s really disappointing, but it’s great that they took it out.KatyYes, I’m thrilled that that’s not a thing at all.At one point, I was saying that I was in Sister Act to a friend and they were like, “Oh, are you playing the the young postulate?” Because that’s also a part that I absolutely could play. And I said, “No, I’m playing the fat one,”and I laughed about it. And he’s like, “Katy, come on, you’ve got to stop phrasing it in that way.” And I was like, “I will stop phrasing it that way when they stop casting it that way.”VirginiaThis is what’s happening, I might as well just name it. KatyExactly.VirginiaWhat about with Into The Woods? Was there anything that you had to navigate there? KatyIt’s so interesting when you perform a show for very different people who live in very different states. Things are just going to get laughed at differently. So it’s always a joke that Little Red is eating the whole show. It’s in the stage directions and they refer to it many times. She’s supposed to sing certain things with her mouth full. And like, I will never eat a muffin ever, that’s how many I shoved one in my face. But there’s a line later on —because the wolf has now eaten her— the narrator says, “Well, it was a full day of eating for both.” It’s just talking about the fact that she, in every single scene before that, has had a piece of food in her hand. But I had to watch that show four or five times when I was learning it to replace Julia Lester in New York. And she is, in my opinion, mid-size. I don’t know how she identifies, I’ve never asked, but I am much larger than she is. And her laugh was very clearly the “there’s been food in her hand the whole time.” And my laugh is something different.You can hear sometimes when people do the surprise chuckle, that one came sometimes. I think we were in North Carolina and I heard like a hateful laugh. And I was like, Oh! Okay sir. And for me, it’s just like, you’re a terrible person. It doesn’t hurt me, but I’m aware of it.But I’m also aware that all of a sudden Little Red is getting cast as fat everywhere, which is so cool. And my roommate said, “You are aware that this is happening because you exist,” and I just burst into tears. I couldn’t handle that at all.VirginiaBut it’s right. It’s right. KatyYou just have to have somebody be the first one. There’s something about maybe that armor, like maybe I am well suited to always be the first one because it doesn’t hurt me. So if I need to be the person that’s on the horse, then fine. Give me a sword. I’m already up here. Let’s do it.VirginiaI feel really protective of you and of all the fat actors who are going play this part. It’s not an explicit fat joke, so the fact that we react differently because of body size is the audience bringing their own anti-fatness to the text. But that’s a tricky nuance. It’s one of those things about art, people are bringing their own things to it. So I don’t know if it would have made sense to rewrite the way food is handled in that show, just because it’s going to trigger an anti-fat laugh. At the same time, there’s a part of me that’s like, “Well, what would it look like to do that?”KatyRight. That could be a different conversation for someone who is playing Little Red and it makes them feel uncomfortable.I’ve been very vocal about how much I hate those muffins all over my Instagram and TikTok. And at one point, somebody was bringing up the fact that she’s about to play this part and she’s really anxious about the eating on stage because she’s fat. She said, how do you handle that? I was like, “well, have you talked to them about it? Like, you don’t have to. Just cut it!” And she said, in all capitals, “I CAN DO THAT!?” And I was like, “Yeah! It’s you on stage! You can have the conversation.” And honestly, if you tell them that it makes you feel uncomfortable, and they don’t respond well, just back them into a corner in their own anti-fat bias right there. Like, easy. Because that’s my favorite thing is always to just keep asking why? Until somebody has big eyes and they don’t know what they’re doing anymore.VirginiaThat’s fantastic. KatyI have no problem doing that.VirginiaI’m curious now that you’ve played Red, do you feel like when you go in for parts, is there a different conversation? Do you feel like that is going to help casting directors see other leads as this could certainly be a fat person?KatyThe thing that’s so tricky about this all is that people are so slow to undo their own brains. So I do think that while they may not necessarily be thinking about other people in new roles, they are thinking about me, which is step one. Because the more I show up, the more they’re like, okay, well this really works. So maybe we should cast so-and-so who’s like Katy in these ways. Do you know what  I mean? I feel like I am a very early step in what could be they start casting a lot of different ways, right? Because I do think that that that’s going to be a slow burn, for sure. But the fact that I’m starting to be more on people’s minds and casting sheets is only a good thing. And it’s an enormous privilege. But I do believe that it is the beginning of a charge. I just don’t know how fast that charge is going.VirginiaLet’s talk a little bit about kids’ theater programs. What are some changes you’d love to see?KatyI think that casting is the first thing that teachers can always fix. I’m a part of this big theatre festival that I do every year that has 6000 teenagers in it, which is so many kids. We’re never supposed to bring up the directors because you never want to pit programs against each other. So you’re supposed to leave them out of it.But there was this one production—they’d have to be like, 15 minutes long—that I was watching of Seussical. I’ve never seen a bigger group of just wonderful little misfits all of a sudden coming in front of me. Like, what are what are we about to watch? I was so excited.So I have no idea what gender the kid playing The Cat in the Hat identifies as, and frankly, I don’t care. It’s a cat, right? What was technically the ingenue part in that show—I’ve never seen somebody looks so much like a cartoon, and aside from the fact that this girl had the biggest smile in the world, she looked exactly like Sadness from Inside Out. So cute with a big, big, big smile on her face. Horton was a bigger guy, which is always kind of how that’s cast because he’s an elephant. And then Maisie who’s supposed to be this hot girl, was played by this lanky, ginger boy who slayed.And the whole time I’m like, this is how theater should be. And I turned around and I said, “who cast this?” And I was breaking tons of rules when I said this, and the teacher raised her hand, very alarmed. And I just said, “Everyone in the room take note, because that’s how you’re supposed to do that.” Everyone succeeded so hard because she just saw them for who they were, right? It wasn’t even the fact that the cute little fat girl got to play the ingenue! It was that everybody was so perfectly suited. It was a huge celebration.So it starts with casting, where it’s like, just see them for the talent that they have and call it a day. We need to keep telling these kids that just because no one like you has played it doesn’t mean no one ever will. You could be that person. Because people always say, “I’m not the type for that role.” I hate the phrase typecasting, I hate it. It’s so annoying and it’s not true. It’s the smallest minded way of making theater and frankly, ends up being boring. So boring. But people always say “I’m not the type.” You are not the person who currently plays it. But they’re looking for a replacement. So why wouldn’t they be looking for something different?People literally won’t take auditions because they don’t think they’re the type.VirginiaWe keep ourselves out of the rooms.KatyExactly, this isn’t even just fat people. Why would you take yourself out of this race before you even begin? You have something so specific to bring to this. Why not come in and change their mind? That sounds like fun, frankly! VirginiaI love that so much.I’m sure you’d also want to see a greater focus on costuming being inclusive. KatyCostumes and set design. Some of my Sister Act castmates and I were talking—and to give credit where credit is due, it’s a very diverse cast, especially with the nuns, as far as body, age, and ability. They did their jobs here at The Muny. We’re very happy with that. However, we were kind of talking about how the risers that we’re on when they learn to sing are really small. And it’s the funniest thing because The Muny is like the biggest stage in the world. Its enormous!VirginiaIts not like they didn’t have space.KatyRight, so it’s it was funny that like the risers ended up being so small. In some ways, it sucks because if you’re going to be diverse in casting, then you also have to think about it through the whole show. Like, don’t just think about the fact that, yes, we did the job and they’re going to be on stage. That might also mean that you need two more feet on each step because you have some bigger bodied people on stage. You need more time to get from point A to point B because one of these people is over 65. If you’re going to cast that way, don’t then punish the people you cast.VirginiaDon’t make it hard for them to be there and do their job.KatyVery much in the same way where it would be somebody in sports playing in a uniform that’s too small. I feel like people do one step and then not the second one. And it’s because diverse casting is like trendy right now. But that still requires work.VirginiaWell, and it’s interesting that you bring up the physical space of the set, because of course the other big issue in the theater world is audience seats, right? Being way too small for a lot of bodies. Which is not anything I expect you to be able fix.KatyI’m going to gut every single theater in the world and start this all over.VirginiaBut it shows that as an industry, they’re not thinking about physical space. They haven’t made that leap yet.KatyAnd again, this is very different in each different space that we were in. Some were better, some were not. There were some places that had really decent wheelchair seating and accessible seating and also closed captioning and ASL interpreted. But yes. Theater seats are tiny. And that is capitalism at its finest. But, I can’t imagine being a fat little kid who can’t even fit into the seat. It’s like saying, you don’t even deserve to watch it, let alone be in it.VirginiaSo terrible.Often when parents are picking a program for their kid, they’re not going to have that much choice, right? It’s not like you can just shop around and find the most size inclusive theater program. Depending where you live, there may be a theater program. So what would you tell parents to do if they’re setting out a new program for their child, or if they have a kid already in love with theater, but are saying, I’m noticing the typecasting, I’m noticing the costumes, and so on?I want to focus on advice for parents of kids in bigger bodies. But if there are things that you think parents of thin kids should be doing, as well, to be good allies, let’s definitely name that too.KatyI mean, optics are your friends. If you don’t see any kid that looks like your kid, it’s because there isn’t one and you’re about to put your kid in that situation. And I also mean that for parents with thinner children, because they’re also learning something by that lack. Because their bodies are about to change, too. Like if they come into a program where they did fit, and then they change, then they don’t. That is so common. So look at who’s on stage and pay attention to who is not exactly the stereotypical theater dancer that’s in your head. Are they are on stage at all? Are they in the front? Are they the ones that look happy to be there? Because if they’re not, then you should probably not be there.The thing that is hard is that I know that it’s not easy to shop around for programs because arts needs so much more funding and space and availability, and all of that stuff, which is a much longer conversation. But I will say that, in so many ways, theater is going to keep being around. Your kid can always go to college for it. Your kid can always find programs later, when they move to a different place. I would say honestly, if it’s not a safe program, don’t let them stay in it because I think that they would be faster to fall out of love with theater by someone saying hateful things to them than not having the opportunity to do it. So if it’s not a safe space, don’t keep them there.VirginiaDo you think it’s worth parents trying to have conversations with the people running the program? KatyAbsolutely.VirginiaBefore you pull the cord, I mean. To see how open they are.KatyOh, yes, I do. And it’s all about talking to your kid too, about their comfort level, like, how do you feel about this. And keep tabs on the deadlines for costumes and such. Because when they say like, “Oh, we’re going to be in costumes at this date, or we’re going to have fittings done by this date,”usually that piece of information is somewhere on the first calendar that you get. And if your kid doesn’t have it by, then ask around. And if your kid is alone in that fact, that’s a red flag because that means that they’re finding a “problem” and they can’t find anything for them—with the biggest eyeroll I can possibly muster. Because if the deadlines are getting pushed, they’re about to be in a not great situation. There’s so much about theater that is people looking at you. So even though it may seem like a really frivolous problem, it can feel really intense.I always say that when we’re in technical rehearsals or in previews—when you’re rehearsing all day and the show is a little bit different every night and you’re figuring all of this stuff out—that every actor is just a toddler who hasn’t napped in days, and is ready to get set off at any point in time. I cannot even begin to tell you the amount of times that I’ve cried because a costume is ugly in that situation, right? It’s not even that it doesn’t fit. It’s just like this is awful. You lose it and it happens. That might seem like such a silly “tantrum” to be having. But like, it’s so personal. And I have them as an adult! So if your kid is having those feelings, please pay attention to them. Because what they like to do also requires being stared at for two and a half hours and if they don’t feel good about that...VirginiaIt may be that the costume is ugly, but that’s really just a way of verbalizing that it is really hard that I am being stared up for two and a half hours like that.KatySo I think, talk to them a lot about how they feel where they’re being placed. Do they think it’s funny? Did they enjoy the show? Do they feel good doing the show? Do they feel good in the costume? Like, ask them about how they feel, often, and about specific things.VirginiaSeems like that would be good to do pretty early in the process, too. I mean, I’m thinking when they first get the script, maybe reading it with them. KatyAbsolutely. VirginiaNot that you, as the parent, can necessarily edit the script. But if you read it and you notice some clear fat jokes, is it worth then reaching out to the director to say, how are you handling this moment?KatyIt’s hard because often you are not allowed to edit much. Licensing is a really, really specific thing as far as the edits that you’re allowed to make or not make. That’s what kind of sucks about theater in that way—that the script is kind of is what the script is.VirginiaBut can we have a moment for how much that sucks? Are people doing racist plays because they’re like, “well, I’m not allowed to edit it?” This is wild to me. In publishing, we have sensitivity readers who read your whole book and look for moments where your bias got in the way of being inclusive. Because writers—especially privileged white writers—don’t notice that we’re saying something that’s racist or otherwise harmful. How theater is not operating with a similar sort of process at this point feels wild to me.KatyI honestly have no idea. I’ve been a part now, of a few musicals from the ground up. And like, I’ve been a part of a musical that I believe in and love so much. Also, because it’s a whole new fat person that I just wish that this role existed when I was a kid and I want it for so many people. It’s about four sisters who are all just very different people. And it’s delightful, but I’ve been a part of that since 2018. It almost went to Broadway four times already. It’s not to say that it won’t, it still could. But I know how hard it is to write a musical, right? Outside of the fact that I literally didn’t write it. But I saw it all happen. There are so many people involved in that, there’s so much editing involved in that. There are so many legalities involved in all of that, because it’s been performed. Some of these writers are no longer with us. So then it’s in somebody’s estate and it’s just complicated. So I don’t know. But it should be happening.VirginiaAnd there’s a different conversation about how it should be happening when it’s professional theater and how it should be happening when it’s your elementary school play or your middle school play. Kids are much more vulnerable.KatyI will say I feel like most of the time, the juniors, like Into The Woods Junior, as opposed to Into The Woods, do an excellent job with that. VirginiaAnd I guess what I would want parents to think about if your kid is doing a show that has some embedded anti-fatness in it and changing the line is not possible: Is there someone in the program who can have a conversation with the cast about that part of the script and say something? I did theater very lightly as a child, but I remember being in a production of Bye, Bye, Birdie when I was in sixth grade. And the “How Lovely To Be A Woman” song is pretty cringey in a lot of ways. And this was like, 1991, or something. And the director sat us all down and was like, “We’re going to talk about this song for a little bit.” We’re still going to perform and we have to perform it. But we’re going to talk about what we’re hearing here and all the problems of this. So that would also go a long way, I think for for casts, too, to at least learn from the text in that way.KatyYeah, we have what’s called table work in theater and it’s more or less just sitting down and talking about motivations and where we are in the scene, the sensitive stuff and whatever, etc, etc. And I don’t know why we don’t do table work with people that are young because it’s making it sound like they can’t have a conversation. And they absolutely can. VirginiaAnd if you don’t have a conversation, you’re presenting the text to them as something that is just that is okay. You’re like, hey, this is a fine joke. You shouldn’t bump on this. Instead of saying this is a lot, we should unpack this. KatyAnd maybe that’s not a show that you should choose, right? As a teacher, I would think that one of the biggest things—and this is so hard, because you can’t ever please everybody ever. Maybe just because you love Thoroughly Modern Millie so so much because it’s a brilliant musical in so many ways, we just really shouldn’t do it anymore because there’s a lot of anti-Asian hate in there and just wild stereotypes that are awful. You’ll live to see another day If you don’t do Thoroughly Modern Millie. It’s a musical, everybody relax. It’s a musical. That’s what I say to myself so many times when it gets like big feelings because you get so in all of it. I’m just like, it is just a musical. We are singing and dancing. Somebody has scissors in somebody’s brain. This is not that serious. Like, it’s just not.VirginiaWhat about advice for kids themselves?KatyI think that as scary as it is, just keep talking. Because that’s what I love with the whys of it all, when you just keep asking and then they don’t have an answer for you. You’ll find out that the teacher really doesn’t either know what they’re talking about or knows exactly what they’re talking about and has not great intentions in mind. It’s a lot easier when you have a pal. In the shows where I’m supposed to be very othered because of my size, like Hairspray for example, that also means that effectively, I’m alone. So if I have an issue, it’s about me and me alone. And that makes it a lot harder for me to advocate for myself because I’m like, “Is this me just being dramatic?” It only applies to me. And that can feel really like I’m just making a mountain out of a molehill. When I get upset about something, I usually give myself the night and then come in the next day with where I’m at.Like I said, we’re all toddlers without a nap when things are getting intense in theater and you just feel things a little bit harder than you should. But that’s because you are thrown into this and asked to display your emotion in these bright flashing colors and just be perfectly fine with that. So there is some editing involved. But I’ve had people ask, how are you so vocal about this? And it’s because I pick and choose my battles. When it’s just something silly those are the smaller things to let go. I really reserve the word no for when I absolutely mean it. Because then when I say it, it gets heard. And it’s a full sentence, because they don’t just toss it around all the time. I hate this kind of advice, but I almost wouldn’t react in the moment. Because then you also don’t have a level head, right? The easiest way to figure out these things is to spit straight facts at these people and if your emotions are involved, it’s not always your friend. Sometimes we don’t have any control over that. I have absolutely had screaming crying moments, I have. But in retrospect, I would have loved to have been able to go home and cry that out there, and then come back the next day and be like, this is why that wasn’t okay. This is what’s going to happen from now on and if it doesn’t, I’m walking. Being able to say that calmly might have done the job better. I don’t want to say you have to edit your emotions to feel them. Because I don’t believe in that at all. But bringing a solution is always handled better calmly. And honestly, for all of the thin people listening, pay attention. I know it doesn’t apply to you. I know. But I have so many advocates in my life. My musical theater female friends are so hot. They just are. They are dancers that are tall and lanky, legs as long as I am tall. Beautiful women. And they are my biggest advocates. I’ve had the most beautiful dancer you can think of cuss someone out in a rehearsal room, because that’s how they were treating me. VirginiaI love this.KatyI feel so championed by them that then sometimes I’m like, “you know what? I actually got this.” They are like, “excellent! Go! I’m here.” Like, they bring out the pom poms and they’re ready. Please, please be allies for each other. You see it happening, I don’t care if it doesn’t apply to you. All you have to do is back that person up. You can see when people are upset.I do this thing always because we don’t often have a lot of time when something annoys us in theater. So sometimes you are rehearsing while you’re fully crying about something that happened six minutes ago. It happens especially when you’re in a fast process. I always go over to said cast mate, and say, “Do you need space or do you need a teammate?” And they will let me know which one that is. And if they say teammate, I say, “Okay, am I on your team or do you need me to yell for you? Because I will. What do you need?”VirginiaI love both of those framings so much. That’s such a useful way to think about how to support each other.KatyI think everybody just needs to pay a little more attention because so often in musicals because of the hot topic of diversity and wanting to check all the boxes, one of everything. That means that that person might feel really alone. So just go be a teammate, just stand next to them. It’s not that hard.VirginiaI love that as a skill we can be building in our kids, really I mean for anything but for theatre in particular, for any sport, any activity. How do you be a teammate? That’s perfect, absolutely perfect. The last thing I want to chat with you about a little bit is trolls. I mean, every public facing fat person has them. We have them, they are our special little treasures that come with us. You are challenging so many norms and expectations in your work. So, just, how are you doing? How are you doing with the trolls?KatyI mean, it’s one of those things that, like, you don’t care until one of them all of a sudden guts you. And there’s no difference in the type of comments that they are with the ones that affects you. The ones that don’t, like, they’re not any more or less mean than the other ones is really just where you’re available that day. It really is they like caught like the soft underbelly—pun very much intended—of your moment there. Not to shame anybody, but if you want to make yourself feel better just go to their profile. They’re usually an older white man who’s just not a nice person clearly, or it’s like a picture of their cat. They don’t want to show their face. They have exactly the same profile almost all the time. And like, if you are the person that is sitting behind the computer and this is how you really get off on yourself, you are the person that I feel sorry for, not the other way around. VirginiaAbsolutely.KatyPlus, there is like a really haughty answer where I’m like, “I’m on Broadway, what are you doing?”VirginiaI am here for that answer.KatyI’m here for that answer, too. I don’t always have the wherewithal to have it. Honestly, I think that those people are not real. Because they aren’t in the way that like they are sitting behind a computer screen yelling about people they don’t know. They are somebody who if you started a conversation with would turn to any easy insults just to make you feel worse. They aren’t real.If somebody that I knew and loved said something like that to me, it would make me think really hard about like, “Okay, what part of this have I brought on? What have I done in here? What what do I really not deserve in this?” Like, how do we have a conversation from this, but no part of those trolls warrants that response from me. I hear the voices of my friends and my champions and my family and directors and a photographer that’s taken a boudoir shoot of me, like I’ve had so many people see me in really vulnerable spaces and said beautiful things. And I would rather keep those ones in my head. So yeah, I just do.ButterKatyI’m on a big smell kick right now, like I’m big perfume gal. Jo Malone is expensive AF. It is. But Jo Malone, I’m assuming, is a woman. She is in my head. She’s like this fabulous, coastal grandma type. But there’s just something that that company has figured out about skin chemistry, where it either is going to smell delicious and hang on to you or it’s not. So I go into Jo Malone or Sephora or Ulta or whatever it is, and go and spray them all on like sticks that I’m interested in and then spray it on yourself and shop for the rest of the day and then see how you smell.VirginiaOh this is good advice. I am someone who’s totally confused by buying perfume. My favorite aunt had this amazing perfume that like, just I smell it and I’m there. I’m in her garden. I’m with her. I really love it. And I’ve always been like, “How do people find a signature scent like that?” That’s so confusing to me.KatyThat is how you do that. Go to that store first. Smell them outside of you. Once you found one that you like, spray it on your wrists and neck, and do whatever you’re going to do. Walk around for four hours, sweat a little bit, and then smell yourself. And if it smells great, then that is your perfume. But like, take the time. I’ve been having a really good time with it. And I found a Jo Malone scent called Nectarine Blossom and Honey. And I literally I put one spritz of it on, and everyone like whips their head. They’re like, what are you wearing? But it’s because I took the time to find out and it’s honestly really fun to figure out your own skin chemistry. That’s my delight.VirginiaOh, that’s such a good recommendation. My recommendation this week is going to be somewhat more amorphous. But I just came off of a really good weekend with my three best friends and our nine children. Between us, we have nine children. KatyThat’s so loud VirginiaFour moms, nine kids. There were points where it was so loud, and we would be like, y’all need to go on the porch. You cannot be in the house. There’s too much noise. So my best friend Amy’s parents have a beach house in Ocean City, New Jersey. They were very generous and leant it to us for the weekend. And it was just this epic time of the moms getting time together. The kids getting time together. And yes, it was chaotic. But also, less so than I expected. People slept, it was impressive. The youngest of all our kids is four now, so I think we’ve aged into this place where it can work. The kids sort of form their little groups and go off. KatyThere might be a sweet spot, right? VirginiaAnd there was a beautiful moment when the three oldest kids were singing Matilda, like at top volume on the front porch—some theater kids there in the making. And it was just so much joy. But the thing I want to really recommend—and this is more for the parents in the audience—is there were a lot of times where the kids would want something but the four of us were having so much fun hanging out that we would just be like, no go away. The moms were having mom time. And the kids got it. They were like, oh, okay, I guess I have to go figure out how to get a snack myself. And I just loved that we were prioritizing our friendship and modeling that for our kids that they were seeing four moms prioritize each other, somewhat over them at times, but that friendship was what they were seeing. So I don’t know if my recommendation is for friendship or for ignoring your children. A little of both.KatyPlease ignore your children.VirginiaI think investing hard in your whatever gender your best friends are. But in my case, female friendship. Every time we do it, I’m like, the best the best.KatyJust  female friendships in general is the recommendation. VirginiaYes. That’s the butter.Katy, this was delightful. Thank you so so much for spending the time with us. Tell folks, where we can follow you how we can support your work? KatyOh, thanks. I am on both Instagram and TikTok pretty actively. I have some concerts and such in New York that are coming up that I will start plugging on all of those handles. But yeah, follow me and talk to me. I’m always very open for conversations with both students and parents alike. I’ve had a lot of messages that come in, but I never don’t want to talk. Please just message and ask, let’s have this conversation.VirginiaWell, and I just want to say on behalf of all the spectacular fat kids who want to act like thank you for for being this representation. We really need it and it’s awesome. So thank you for doing that.

Dr. Devorah Heitner, author of 'Growing Up in Public', explores topics such as navigating privacy and consent in the digital age, the negative effects of monitoring kids' digital communications, rethinking sexting, and a tech-related recommendation for a family organization tool called Skylake.

Phoebe Wahl, an award-winning illustrator, surface designer, and author, discusses her new young adult novel, body positivity, and her favorite drawing tools. She reflects on embracing body acceptance through art and the process of including fat characters in her books. The conversation also touches on balancing work and parenting, writing a sequel, and a mutual appreciation for graphic novels and dahlias.

Virginia talks with Amy Palanjian, creator of Yummy Toddler Food and author of the cookbook Dinnertime SOS. They discuss the challenges of family dinner, diet culture in kid food, and the importance of prioritizing needs. They also share their experiences testing recipes, their long-term friendship, and their excitement over finding a rare houseplant.