Kids turn one and our expectations change. Suddenly, we want them to eat for nutrition and “food is fuel.”You're listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast (and newsletter) about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. As you are listening to this podcast today, I am also writing the last pages of my next book. It is called Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. It will be out next April. I'm recording this with still about 6,000 words ahead of me. I'm hoping by the time you're hearing this, it's like a thousand or five hundred words left. Or even none left! That would be great! It's such a weird experience. I love writing books. I love being immersed in the research and the storytelling and the issues that I'm thinking about constantly. But I'm definitely also in the can-no-longer-see-the-forest-for-the-trees stage of this first draft. So, that is how I am feeling. Hopefully, by the time you're listening to this, it will be feeling much closer to relieved and celebratory! Because I am swamped with getting this manuscript finished, I am giving you a couple of weeks of rerun episodes so I can stay firmly locked into book world and do a little less bouncing between book, newsletter, podcast, the way I have been for the last many months. So this week's rerun is a conversation that Amy Palanjian and I had on our old podcast Comfort Food, about emotional eating. This episode first aired on February 27, 2020. And I think it's one where we were actually a little ahead of our time because once Covid happened, the conversation around comfort eating changed. There was so much demonization of comfort eating and stress eating that we did see this really powerful backlash of folks saying, “No wait, actually we're going through a global trauma, making sourdough and enjoying it is a great way to cope with your anxiety.” A lot of that is what Amy and I are talking about in this episode. We are longtime fans of comfort eating—that's why we named the podcast Comfort Food!—and of emotional eating as a benign coping strategy. It's something I continue to talk about: The importance of reclaiming these coping strategies for yourself, of removing the guilt and shame because that's what causes them to feel so harmful. A lot of what we talked about may not feel entirely new to you, if you've been following Burnt Toast for a while, but I do think we hit a lot of the key points really well. If you are struggling with feeling okay about feeding yourself in any way, it should be a really useful lesson. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! It’s free and a great way to help more folks find the show.And don’t forget! Today is your last day to fill out the reader survey and be entered in the Burnt Toast Book Giveaway! It’s also your last chance to enter the giveaway by becoming a paid subscriber (or renewing an existing subscription if yours was set to expire this month). AND it’s the last day to take 20 percent off that subscription price! PS. If you’ve already done the survey or gotten/renewed a subscription and aren’t sure you entered the giveaway, please fill out this form.And keep sending in your questions for Virginia’s Office Hours! If you have a question about navigating diet culture and anti-fat bias that you’d like to talk through with me, or if you just want to rant about a shitty diet with me, you can submit your question/topic here. I’ll pick one person to join me on the bonus episode so we can hash it out together.VirginiaHello and welcome to episode 64 of Comfort Food! This is the podcast about the joys and meltdowns of feeding our families and feeding ourselves.AmySo this week we are going to explore the concept of emotional eating and some of the myths and misconceptions that can come up and also to talk about is it okay to eat when you're not physically hungry?VirginiaI'm Virginia Sole-Smith, I'm a writer, a contributor to Parents Magazine and New York Times Parenting, and I'm the author of The Eating Instinct: Food, Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America, which is out in paperback now and it has such a pretty new cover. Maybe I'll get Amy to put a picture in the show notes, you should definitely check it out. Anyway, I write about how women relate to food and our bodies in a culture that gives us so many unrealistic expectations about those things.AmyAnd I'm Amy Palanjian, a writer, recipe developer, and creator of Yummy Toddler Food. And I love helping parents to stop freaking out about what their kids will and won't eat and sharing doable recipes that fit into even the busiest family schedules. Okay, so obviously, the name of our podcast is Comfort Food. So, we think that food should be comforting, but we realized we never explicitly talked about it in depth— about the concept of comfort as it relates to food and why we think it's important.VirginiaYeah. And it's a really fundamental to what we do. I mean, again, we named the podcast after it. I thought it would be fun to talk about some of the other names we went through. I really wanted to call the podcast Burnt Toast, which I still think is a great name. But we couldn't because there was one, even though it’s not around. AmyIt's not a functioning podcast, but yeah.VirginiaSo anyway, if you're listening, and you were affiliated with the prior Burnt Toast podcast, you should give us your name. I mean, we're kind of already here. But Comfort Food felt like the perfect name. I think what we liked about Burnt Toast was that it was like the sort of imperfect, meal on the fly situation that a lot of us are in.AmyWe went through a lot of iterations of something with pasta.VirginiaI know, I really wanted to name it something with pasta. Basically, you can tell from all the foods we considered, we were about comfort food. So then it was like, okay, let's just group it all together into that umbrella.AmyYeah. And you actually wanted to use that phrase in your book title, right?VirginiaYeah, my original title for The Eating Instinct was actually Comfort, Food. Now that feels dumb and a little twee—maybe that's why my agent vetoed it. But I thought that summed up what I was initially hoping to do with the book. My agent and the publisher liked The Eating Instinct better because it was a little more science-y sounding. Naming books is really hard. The reason that I wanted it to be the book title is the book starts with Violet’s story. A really big turning point for us in helping Violet learn to become an oral eater was in the summer of 2016, when she was in and out of the hospital a ton. She had actually gotten off her feeding tube and become a really successful oral eater, and then she got very, very sick again and she stopped eating. I remember being in the ICU with her and these hospital dietitians and doctors swarming and obsessing over why she wasn't eating, what was going on. It was just so clear to me that eating had ceased to offer her any comfort so she had no incentive to do it. It felt like just another horrible thing happening to her body in this really intense medical situation. She didn't turn the corner again, until she found a way to make eating feel safe and comforting. That really opened my eyes to how, in this hospital setting, it doesn't work with a sick kid. They need food to be comforting—we all need that. We are so consistently making nutrition the enemy of comfort and the way we relate to food. So that was really what inspired the book and also a lot of the conversations that Amy and I have.AmySo much of what we hear about nutrition or the way that we're “supposed” to eat is looking at macros and doing it by grams. It's so devoid of any emotion, but that's not what it's like when you sit down at the table. You can't separate the two.VirginiaI mean, it literally doesn't work without it. I think any of us who have successfully fed a baby, you intrinsically get why comfort matters. It is absolutely essential to a baby eating that they feel safe and comfortable. It's this really cozy, bonding, joyous experience to feed a baby, for both the parent and the child. But then suddenly, kids turn one and our expectations change and we want them to eat all these different foods, but now it's for “nutrition” and “food is fuel.” We want them to think of food as just this way to grow their bodies, but we're just much more anxious about comfort. A lot of the research I did for the book really showed that we are biologically programmed to seek comfort in food. This is a feature, not a bug. We evolved to do it because human survival depends on us eating so often. We have to eat very regularly—and babies in particular have to eat, over and over and over again, all day long. If we didn't find it inherently pleasurable and comforting, we wouldn't do it. Especially generations ago, when food was scarce and it was hard to do. We need this, this is fundamental to the whole thing.Amy PalanjianSo, last week Selway had his 12 month checkup and on the little paper that they gave us, it was like, “Your baby should be weaned off a bottle at this point.” Virginia Whoa. Whoa there.AmyLet's back up and look at like the emotional attachment that that baby might have. For adults, it's been drilled into us that we are supposed to eat when we're hungry and stop when we're full. And if we eat for any other reason, then we're doing something wrong. We feel guilty and we've failed ourselves.VirginiaYeah, I think both Christy Harrison and Evelyn Tribole have talked about that in their episodes on the podcast. There's a misconception that when you talk about intuitive eating, you're talking about the hunger/fullness diet. I actually had a friend, a few months ago, we were out getting ice cream, and she was like, “Oh, I'd love to have that but I'm not hungry and I'm doing intuitive eating, so I'm not gonna eat the ice cream.” And I was like, “Oh, no. That's not what it means. It doesn't mean you only eat when you experience physical hunger.” You can also eat because we're out with our kids eating ice cream and we want to share that. That is this other piece of it. We are both of these things.AmySo we're going to run through a few common myths about comfort food and emotional eating. Myth number one: Eating to comfort yourself is always bad.VirginiaI mean, that's what people think, right? They think the cliche of having a pint of ice cream after a breakup or wanting cheesy crackers when you're stressed out is somehow this big failure. But eating something tasty to cheer yourself up after a hard day is totally normal. It's totally human. And it's also a totally fine coping strategy.AmyI have come to terms with the fact that I always need some sort of chocolate at the end of the day. It has nothing to do with like my overall nutritional intake. It just makes me feel better.VirginiaYeah. I mean, you have three children running around your house!AmyI made it to the end of the day, guys!VirginiaYou made it to bedtime, you need chocolate. Yeah, I struggled with this when we were in the hospital for so many months with Violet. Some people when they're undergoing extreme trauma totally lose their appetite and stop eating. I've had friends say to me, “This is really hard. People will praise this weight loss, but actually my life's falling apart. It’s not really for a good reason.” So, you know, that definitely happens. I do not respond to trauma that way. I respond to trauma by seeking comfort in food. I did a lot of comfort eating during those years of Violet being so sick. I had to really kind of come to terms with that. I struggled with it. Like, oh, I shouldn't be comfort eating. Then finally, I was like, “You know what? I am eating this chocolate croissant in a corner of an ICU hospital. This is what's getting me through the day. I am glad it is here for me.” There is nothing wrong with it. It's a form of taking care of yourself, for sure. It just gets such a bad rap. Christy Harrison and I did an event for our books recently, and when we were doing the audience Q&A, a new mom raised her hand. She said, “You know, I really think I'm an emotional eater. Especially now that my baby's three months old, it just feels like I can't even have chocolate in the house because I can't stop eating it.” And we were both just like, of course you need chocolate, you are three months postpartum. You're not sleeping. Your life has been thrown up in the air. Give yourself this grace.AmyYou're grasping at straws for something to sort of make you feel a little bit better in the moment. I have this lactation cookie, which I'm renaming to be just mama cookies, and it has chocolate in it purely because I know that having that thirty seconds of something that tastes good in your mouth is incredibly helpful when you're taking care of a small child. You're super, super tired and you just need that small window of pleasure.VirginiaYou literally can't get more sleep probably, that’s not available to you. Like, probably you wouldn't crave the chocolate quite as much if you were getting nine hours of sleep a night, but that's not going to happen for a long time. The solution is not to deprive yourself of this other thing, it's to meet what need you can. That’s a way to reframe it.AmyMyth number two: Feeling compulsive around food is the same as emotionally eating.VirginiaThis is interesting because people often label something as emotional eating when what they really mean is, it's hard for me to stop eating X. Like, If I have a bag of potato chips, I'm going to eat the whole bag. Or, if I see a plate of brownies, I'm going to need to eat the whole plate of brownies. They think that this means they're eating emotionally, when it may just mean that they feel restricted about that food. They've restricted it for so long, and now they can't anymore. That's why they're eating in that uncontrollable, scary-feeling way. This is a really big misconception about binge eating disorder, that it's somehow really different from anorexia or bulimia, these other eating disorders that are more obviously restriction-based. People think, binge eating disorder, those people just eat all the time, they can never stop. But all the new research on it is showing in around 40% of cases, it's a response to restriction. Somebody has been on a more restrictive plan, or diet, or full anorexia, and then it hits a brick wall and it goes the other way. Binge eating disorder is a whole complicated thing, we don't have to get into all of it, but a lot of cases are also people responding to growing up with intense food insecurity. Not having enough food in your house is also a form of restriction. It's kind of threaded throughout. I think it's important to understand that because we punish the symptom—eating in this uncontrollable way—without dealing what's really causing that. I think for a lot of us, even if you're not in an extreme place with it, that feeling of “I can't control myself around this food",” what you really need to ask is, why are you restricting this food? Why are you not able to give yourself permission to enjoy it when it's here?AmyYeah, and I think if you've ever had a child who's been obsessed about one type of food, like goldfish, and then you buy goldfish and allow them to have them for snacks, you don't hide them or restrict them in any way, they lose a lot of their appeal. It becomes very clear that they weren't necessarily wanting to have them so badly because they love them so much, it was the feeling that they loved them and also they were not allowed to have them.VirginiaRight. The love is not the problem, it was the restriction that was the problem. It's also worth noting, there's a difference between using food to comfort yourself in a tough situation or after a tough day, and using food as a way to escape or numb your emotions. That can become a more self destructive way to go, just like drinking to numb your emotions can be destructive. Anytime we're escaping our feelings, it can be worrisome, but it’s not the food that’s the problem. The solution isn't to stop eating those foods, it's to figure out how to deal with the hard feelings and find other coping strategies. And I'd also argue even in the short term, sometimes emotions are too frickin’ big.AmyI was going to say, maybe it's okay to numb your emotions sometimes, if you need to.VirginiaMaybe you can't deal with it all in one day and you'll deal with some more of it tomorrow. Let's not demonize these strategies. It's interesting how much these really normal ways of coping with life become demonized because they don't line up with diet culture expectations. But we of course, blame ourselves. AmyOne thing that has been helpful for me, like if there's something that I feel like I just want to eat the whole thing of, I just ask myself, what if I'm just allowed to eat as much as I want? Does that change the emotional reaction to it? VirginiaDoes it? AmyUsually. I mean, I have asked my significant other that question, too, if there's something that he says he can't have in the house. I'm like, what if you were just allowed to have it? It’s an interesting exercise.VirginiaThat's really interesting. The third Myth is this idea that we should not let our kids eat for comfort either, and that we somehow have to rein in their emotions around food.AmyBack to the baby example, we talked a little bit about weaning. We're not weaning, but like, it's a little bit on my mind. No matter when Selway’s last bottle was, when I pick him up at daycare he always wants me to breastfeed him. That's obviously not about hunger, like, he could have had a bottle within an hour. He wants to do that because it's how he connects with me. VirginiaHe wants to see his mama. AmyIt's a totally normal. That would not be something that would be upsetting to anyone. That's very easy to understand. And I think taking that a few years forward, when the child is isn’t breastfeeding, but also has that relationship with food, it would be kind of weird if they weren't comforted by food, in some ways. VirginiaThis is something that's part of the human experience. Speaking as someone who had a kid who found no comfort and food, it is terrifying, actually, when you take it all the way to that extreme place. One of the most powerful memories of my life is the first time I saw Violet take comfort from food. She was a little older than Selway and snuggled on my lap eating an apple. What the food was doesn't matter, I suddenly had this experience of like, oh, she associates me and food and comfort all together again. The way she should. It's so powerful. We were also talking a little before we started recording about seeing our kids use food in this way is actually a sign that they are self-regulating. Beatrix often will, if something falls apart for her, she immediately says, “Where's my ubby?” which is her lovey, and then like, “I need my snack cup.” I'm not worried that she's addicted to the goldfish or whatever's in the snack cup. She's like, oh, I need some comfort right now. That's pretty cool to see.AmyI don't know that I would want a child to always turn to food for comfort, just as I would want for myself to have different options of things that would make me feel better. But I think having it in the arsenal with other things can be super helpful. I mean, we had a situation where one of the girls was able to calm themselves down, after a pretty horrific screaming battle, with some crackers and cucumber and a book. There's nothing wrong in that situation.VirginiaYeah, so many great strategies that she's using there.AmyI think when that happens, as a parent, your initial reaction might be, “Uh oh. I know she's not hungry. I'm supposed to be teaching her to honor her hunger cues.” But at the same time, I think we need to be aware that sometimes we have to look at the bigger context and realize that in that moment, that was a helpful choice.VirginiaYeah, absolutely. I mean I really talk about comfort as the third eating instinct. We've got hunger and fullness, but comfort is this other really important one. Jennifer Berry has talked about that, too, that it is an internal drive kids have to seek comfort. So, don't dismiss that even if it feels at odds with their hunger. But yes, of course, eventually Selway will not need to nourish the second he sees you at the end of the day. When we were weaning Beatrice’s bottle, we talked about how she wanted to read the exact same bedtime book every night for two weeks while we were dropping the bottles, because that was the new comfort thing. She wanted Curious George over and over and over. We can definitely encourage kids to find these other tools, but don't be afraid of the food.AmyThis was on my mind after the Super Bowl. I was thinking about how holiday foods can offer this type of—or food traditions— can offer comfort in this way, too. My husband grew up, he didn't have a TV, but his grandparents did. So on Super Bowl Sunday, he went to his grandparents and his grandfather and made him a root beer float. So he's always wanted to share that tradition with us. And at this point in time, my girls don't like the carbonation in drinks, so they don't like soda. The idea of having soda poured on ice cream is like ruining ice cream for them. So they were like, we just want the ice cream. And I don't know, a root beer float? It's not my favorite thing. But I realized after, I didn't handle that well. Because this is something that means a lot to him. There could have been a way that we could have all shared that experience, taking comfort in the food experience. There was a bigger meaning to that where it was more than just the food.VirginiaHe wanted to tell the story of drinking root beer floats with his granddad and that kind of thing. And you could have shared that while possibly serving the root beer in glasses separate from the ice cream.AmyOr we could have showed the girls what happens when we pour the root beer. It could have been the coolest science experiment. Like there could have been ways that we could have all shared the experience. The way that it turned out just was really disappointing. But I mean, this happens. Now with a lot of people having very specific dietary restrictions, this happens at the holidays, where the foods that you once were able to share with everyone, you can’t. Where do all of those feelings go, about those foods that you love when you can't share them in the same way?VirginiaThat's really tough. You see this on both sides. You see both the person with the restrictions struggling to enjoy their holiday in the same way, and I also feel for the people preparing the food. You know, grandma or whoever makes these amazing cookies every year, and suddenly people aren't eating them. That's a little bit heartbreaking because she's done that to show her love. You have to think about the feelings on both sides of that. It's not to say you can't find new and different traditions, but also that these traditions do really matter and shouldn't just be sort of tossed aside, right?AmyI think we can get laser-focused on the specific food aspect of it when we are in the culture that we're in, that does often boil it down to whether or not it has gluten, or whatever the thing might be.VirginiaThere's so much talk around the holidays about how there's too much focus on food. And to my mind, it's so sad that we can't just let this be about food, because it is. Because, again, that's very fundamental to human experience. To celebrate through food is something that every culture around the world does. This is part of what we do, being able to enjoy that and appreciate it for what it is. Then it doesn't have to dominate in this intense way because, again, you've removed the restriction around it. You can take the comfort from it without feeling this compulsive, out of control thing.AmyOkay, do you guys have questions? Questions about emotional eating or comfort food? We're here to take them on.VirginiaWant me to find the old list of other podcasts names? We can see if any of them are any good. I think we landed on the right one. I think it speaks to our souls.Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you'd like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode!And consider a paid subscription to the Burnt Toast newsletter. For today (June 30) only, you can take 20 percent off and pay just $4 per month or $40 for the year! You get a ton of cool perks and you keep this an ad- and sponsor-free space.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

The reason people are angry at thin women is because they hate fat. Yes, of course, we should not be yelling at skinny people. But it’s important to hold that together with, when those jokes get made, they’re actually anti-fat jokes. They’re not anti-thin jokes.You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health.Today we are doing another Ask Me Anything episode! Corinne Fay is back by popular demand, and we’re both answering a whole bunch of your questions. We intended this one to be writing-themed but we ended up talking about houseplants a lot. You’re welcome. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! It’s free and a great way to help more folks find the show. Of course, the other best way to support the show is with a paid subscription. And as we wrap up June and Burnt Toast’s one year anniversary, I’m giving you a week to take a permanent 20 percent off your subscription price! That gets it down to just $4/month or $40 for the year ($3.33/month, the cheapest this ever gets). Yes, you can both get this discount AND enter the Burnt Toast Book Giveaway. Sometimes life rewards procrastinators. Also: I’m always happy to offer comp subscriptions if paying isn’t feasible for you. And you can still enter the giveaway by completing our reader survey!PS. If you’ve already done the survey or gotten/renewed a subscription and aren’t sure you entered the giveaway, please fill out this form. And keep sending in your questions for Virginia’s Office Hours! If you have a question about navigating diet culture and anti-fat bias that you’d like to talk through with me, or if you just want to rant about a shitty diet with me, you can submit your question/topic here. I’ll pick one person to join me on the bonus episode so we can hash it out together.Episode 49 TranscriptVirginiaAll right, we’ve got a whole big list of questions we’re gonna work through. Where do you want to start?CorinneThe first question is: How did you get started as a writer?VirginiaI have written about this before, so here is one of the early episodes of the podcast where I give the whole story. I was an English and creative writing major in college. I went to school in New York, so I did a bunch of free internships at magazines. My first job out of college was as an editorial assistant at Seventeen magazine. That is where I got my start writing, so a lot of “get your best bikini body” stories and prom bodies. Lots of event-based bodies in the teen magazine world. We did also do some really good health reporting. I remember doing a big story about vaginas. A misconception about women’s media is that everyone who works there hates women, when it’s actually mostly run by feminists who are up against advertising and always caught in that vortex. So, I learned a ton. There was a lot of very good journalism happening there, but always under this umbrella of how do we sell beauty products and clothes to teenage girls. From there I went to another women’s magazine and then in 2005, I went freelance and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. Okay the next question is for you! How and why did Corinne start @SellTradePlus? It is such a unique community and vision. CorinneI started @selltradeplus in 2018. I started it because I was addicted to looking at other buy/sell/trade accounts on Instagram and was never seeing my size. I just thought, if I were going to a used clothing store, I would just go to the section that was my size. So why not just make a size-based Buy Sell Trade account? And that’s kind of how it got started. And then I really liked the people that I was meeting. And I think it’s turned into a bit more of a community.VirginiaIt is a lovely community. You’re very good at community building. Corinne Thank you. VirginiaI hear a lot of Corinne love from people who find my work through you.CorinneThat’s so nice. VirginiaAs well they should be. And we will also link back to the first time you were on the podcast, because you kind of told your whole origin story in more detail there, too. So folks can catch up there. And you do those weekly discussion posts where people chat about all sorts of different things. It is much more than just the clothes, although the clothes are excellent. CorinneIt’s a fun place to be. Okay, the next question is: Can you share a little bit about your own progression from dieting to anti-diet mentality? VirginiaI think we should both answer this one, if you’re up for it. So, as I mentioned, I started in women’s magazines and wrote a lot of shitty diet stories. Very much in the diet world, while also feeling conflicted about it and rationalizing many of those stories to myself. Like, “this one’s not really a diet, it’s just about portion control.” Or, you know, “this one’s not really a diet, it’s eating the way Michael Pollan told you to eat, so that’s fine,” etc, etc, and increasingly getting frustrated about that. But not really understanding a different way to think about food. The turning point in my story is around the time my first daughter was born, and she was born with a rare congenital heart condition that required her to be on a feeding tube. We spent two years helping her learn to eat again, so it was like the reverse of dieting. I was grasping for all these external rules, wanting someone to tell me how to do this, how to get eating right for her, and then increasingly realizing there were no rules. There was nobody who could fix it. We had to get her back to a safe place with food by helping her learn to trust her body again. And that started to connect a lot of dots for me about the way I had been eating over the years and not trusting my body. Diet culture separates all of us from being able to trust ourselves. That was my big, “okay, I’m done with this,” moment, even though it wasn’t like one moment. I mean, it was a long process. I can remember when she was around 18 months old, saying something shitty about my body and having her repeat it back to me, and then thinking like, Well, okay, I’m done with that now. This kid has fought too hard to feel safe in her body. I’m not going to be the one to screw it up for her. CorinneThat’s a lot of pressure. VirginiaIt is, but it also made it so clear. Do you know what I mean? This is one of those things that in a way I sort of hate, being like, “becoming a mother liberated me from diet culture,” because it feels like, honestly, sort of a b******t narrative. I hate when we credit motherhood with being this mystical thing. It’s honestly mostly just diapers. It’s not that glamorous. But it is true that it is often easier to do things for other people than it is to do them for ourselves. And since I had this very clear goal of not wanting to pass this on to her, it was like failure is no longer an option, in that sense. CorinneThat makes sense.I feel like I don’t have a good answer. I’m not a mom and I think it hasn’t always been just like a linear progression for me. I’ve wavered back and forth, and I think I also, even from a younger age, had kind of an oppositional personality where I was always just kind of like, “Screw anyone who’s telling me what to do.” There was a long time where I went back and forth between being on one hand, f**k diets or whatever anyone else is telling me to do, and on the other hand, thinking the only way I can be happy is by losing weight. I wish I had a moment when I was just like, I’m done. But I mean, I think eventually it just is exhausting and you’re tired of it.VirginiaYou realize how much mental energy it takes, and physical energy. And it’s like, other things are more interesting? I think everyone can relate to it not being linear. I mean, mine wasn’t linear. I thought I was fully out of diet culture and in 2015, I wrote a story about detox diets where I went on a detox diet for a month to write the story. And at the time, I would have been like, No, I’m not dieting anymore. I’m very much out of diet culture now. And I reread the article recently, it was like…CorinneIt’s very easy to get sucked back in. VirginiaYeah, it really is. CorinneThey’re always finding new ways to get you.VirginiaThey really are. They’re very good at that. I understand why this person asked that question because getting to the anti-diet mentality feels like a goal and it is because there’s obviously a lot of benefits that come with it. Like, you are not obsessing about food and beating yourself up when you eat and that’s really lovely. But I am almost wary of framing it as a goal to work towards because that can be a sort of parallel dieting experience. Do you know what I mean?CorinneYeah, that’s a good point. I don’t think it feels like you ever get to a point where you’re just like, “now I’m at peace forever.” I still am sometimes like, “oh, I don’t want to deal with airplane seats.”VirginiaIt’s maybe more like getting to a place where you can more quickly recognize the pattern of, “Oh, I am responding to this larger cultural situation. It’s not my fault.” Being able to place the blame where it belongs is in some ways more the goal, if we’re going to talk about it as a goal.CorinneSo that the next question is: Is there a balance between slamming the thin ideal, but inadvertently slamming, less fat, slender-ish, petite bodied people as crappy?VirginiaThis is a very interesting question. It does remind me of the column we did where the question was, “what if I just don’t want to be fat?” I think there’s often something that comes up for less fat, slender-ish, petite-bodied people, when they start to hear us pushing back against the thin ideal, and they take it really personally. I’ve interviewed lots of women in thin bodies who talk about the constant shaming they get for being thin. And this is a real thing, right? People will say to a thin woman, like, “I hate you. You’re so skinny,” or “How can you eat whatever you want and never gain weight? Oh, my God, I’m so angry.” They get a lot of hostility for their thinness. But, the hostility is rooted in anti-fat bias. The reason people are angry at the thin woman is because they hate fat. Like, yes, of course, we should not be yelling at skinny people, but I think it’s really important to hold that when those jokes get made, they’re actually anti-fat jokes. They’re not anti-thin jokes. So in terms of finding this balance, personal attacks help nobody, but it is fine to be critical of the thin ideal that is oppressive to all of us, and particularly oppressive to people in larger bodies. In doing that, you are not causing harm to thin people. CorinneThe next question is part two of the previous question: Is there a balance of accepting nutrition or GI research as beneficial and informative and slamming probiotic supplements, foods, and quick convenience powders?VirginiaOkay, so I would flip this. As it currently stands, nutritional research is not terribly beneficial or informative for individuals. In part because it tends to be very poorly done. Most nutrition studies rely on people self reporting. People are really bad at self-reporting what they ate. A lot of nutritional research will do stuff like study what broccoli does if we feed it in huge quantities to a rat, and you’re not a rat who eats huge quantities of broccoli, so the fact that it prevented cancer in that rat is not applicable to your life. There is a lot about nutritional science that is useful to nutrition scientists. But it gets reported on and marketed and communicated to the public as if we should be living by these lessons. It gets turned into best selling diet books. And then when you look at the source material, it’s like, this was a study on 30 people and we didn’t follow them very long. We didn’t ask them the right questions and it was only men, or something like that. There are all these limitations to the research. So I think that it’s really good to be critical and curious about nutritional science and to realize that it often doesn’t have a big place in your life. At the same time, I’m much more forgiving of people finding a quick convenience protein powder as an efficient way to have breakfast in the morning. In my house, we have protein powder in smoothies every morning because my kids are both cautious eaters and they like it. It’s a useful way of making sure they get like a good amount of energy for the day, if they want to otherwise live on, you know, carpet lint, and Tic Tacs or whatever. I will certainly be critical of the marketing hype that these products come with. I don’t love when they’re claiming to be super foods, and everyone’s heard my rant on Athletic Greens. But if your take is, “These Clif Bars are so helpful to keep in my bag because I work an eight hour shift and I don’t get a lunch break and I can eat one and not starve,” that’s great. When I say let’s not shame foods, I mean all of the foods. We don’t have to shame any of the foods. But you don’t have to buy into the hype around these foods. You don’t have to buy into the claim that they should replace other foods in your diet or anything like that.CorinneThat seems like a good distinction. Okay. The next one is a parenting question: How do you deal with judgment from health care providers who disagree with choices you make, i.e. breastfeeding past one year, not doing cry it out. So, not harmful choices, but choices that may fall outside the mainstream.VirginiaI almost didn’t answer this question because I did not breastfeed past five months and I definitely did cry it out. So, I’m not judging your choices, but I am someone who can only offer the other side of this. But, if you only breastfeed your baby for four to five months, you’re gonna get judgment for not doing it long enough. So, I do know what you mean in terms of making a choice that’s different from “gold standard” advice about parenting. I think it’s so hard with your first because you don’t know what the hell you’re doing and it’s very easy to feel super unnerved by it all. I think that confidence is something that just comes with time. The more you parent your own kids and see what works for them, you feel more comfortable saying, “that best practice doesn’t actually apply to our life in any way.” Where I do certainly relate is the advice on kids below two should have zero added sugar. I mean, what? That’s not useful, it’s not realistic. If your kids are eating food at daycare, if they have an older sibling who gets given a cupcake, you’re of course going to let your toddler or your baby have some sugar. And they’re going to be great and suffer no consequences from it. So, certainly around nutrition is a piece where I find myself often making the “unpopular” decision with a healthcare provider. We can link to that episode Sara Louise Peterson and I did on gentle parenting. We went a lot deeper into this. Because it’s not just healthcare providers, it’s also social media and mom friends and mom groups on Facebook that can get like really weird and dogmatic fast. All those places where they tend to present parenting in a binary state, that you’re either doing it right or you’re doing it wrong. And anyone who’s actually spent any time with a kid knows that you’re always doing it a little bit wrong, but it’s fine. That’s the best we can do on any given day.CorinneMan, I do not envy parents.VirginiaIt’s real fun to be doing something that requires you to be regularly sleep deprived and hungry at odd hours.CorinneAnd always slightly failing. VirginiaI do have one quick story. So, my four year old has been home sick like every week for the past month with some nonsense because ever since we took masks out of schools, the kids are getting all of the diseases they didn’t get for the last two years. Last week she was home for three days straight. It was the third week in a row with this really bad cough. We’ve tested and tested and it’s not COVID. So by the end of the third day, I was like, we’ve got to get out of the house. We’ve got to go do something. It’s a beautiful day. She’s been watching TV for three days straight because Dan and I have to work and she’s here. So, we pick up her older sister. We go to get ice cream and we’re down by the river. It’s a beautiful afternoon. I’m feeling so successful. Like, I got both kids out. We’re getting ice cream. How lovely. She inhales her ice cream, spills it all the way down herself, and then gets a coughing fit and throws up her ice cream all over herself and the park bench and multiple other surfaces. And I was just like, why do I try? There was an older woman on the park bench next to us, dramatically turning her head to the side. Literally like, “I can’t look at you, this is so revolting.” And then another mom from school and her kids were a little further down. Here’s my kid starting to gag and she’s like, “Do you need help?” And I’m just like, what help can you even offer?CorinneOh my God. VirginiaSo there’s quite an audience for this whole experience. The parenting win there is that I had remembered to bring baby wipes. I was so f*****g proud of myself because we’re past the stage where we need baby wipes all the time so I don’t always think to have them. But I went through a pile of baby wipes. I got a bottle of water, I was cleaning puke off the sidewalk and off this park bench. And then, I want to get her back in the car, but I don’t want her to puke again. So I’m like, “Okay, guys, why don’t you just play while we make sure she’s done puking?” And other people are clearly like, WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE? There was a lot of judgment. CorinneI am so sorry. VirginiaIt was fine. I was rage texting Dan while I’m cleaning puke off the park bench. But once you’ve survived your first—I mean, it’s not even my first, it’s probably like my dozenth—public vomiting, it’s like whatever! They can think what they want. Unless you’re the one here cleaning the puke off the park bench, you don’t get to judge. I’m sorry for that disgusting story. We can move on.CorinneNo, I love it. Well, this is also kind of a tangent, but where does that advice about not giving kids sugar before two years come from? VirginiaOh, I think it’s the American Heart Association.CorinneIs that based on facts? VirginiaWe should do a deep dive on this. CorinneOr is this where we’re like take nutritional studies with a grain of salt. VirginiaYes, I think it’s definitely that. I would have to look into the source material on this, but based on where some of these other guidelines have come from, my guess is they’re taking a large-scale study and they’re finding a small correlation of kids who ate less sugar had lower rates of X, Y, and Z health conditions later on. So, it is correlation, not causation, right? Because you cannot prove a negative. You can’t prove that not eating sugar prevented it. All you can say is some households feed their kids more sugar than others and those households correlate to these other conditions. But what else might be contributing to that? Like, if you’re a low-income family, and McDonald’s is a really reasonable way for you to get calories in your kid, your kid is consuming more sugar than the Whole Foods mom’s kid has consumed.The other thing that research doesn’t tell us is the harm caused by restricting sugar. It may be that you could even prove a causal link between kids who eat less sugar and future heart disease risk, but you may also be able to prove a causal link between kids who eat less sugar and kids who have eating disorders. And if I’m worrying about my kid’s mortality, kids are more likely to die of eating disorders than they are of heart disease. So, if we’re really gonna get serious about health risks, we have to consider all aspects. Being restrictive around sugar leads to kids who fixate on sugar. We see this over and over. We’ve seen this in experimental studies that are really well done. So we know that that is just not practical advice for parents.CorinneWell, too bad it’s not practical, because it’s everywhere.VirginiaYep, they’re still gonna make you feel bad about not doing it.CorinneAll right. Let’s move on to our favorite topic! What’s your favorite house plant? And how do you keep it alive?VirginiaI mean, I cannot pick a favorite house plant, people. It’s is really hard.CorinneOkay, do you have a least favorite? VirginiaOh, that’s a good question. CorinneI have a least favorite. VirginiaLet me think. Okay, what’s your least favorite? Because I’m thinking…CorinneMother of Thousands? It’s the one that makes a million babies and I hate it. I literally just threw it away because I was like, I can’t. Too prolific.VirginiaIt is very prolific. I have one of those that my stepdad brought back from a trip. My mother was like, “please take this thing out of my house.” Because they can get really tall, too. They’re quite enormous. CorinneIt’s messy. I don’t want to be just throwing away all these little things all the time. VirginiaYeah, you actually don’t need thousands of that one plant. CorinneI don’t even want one. Virginia I have it in a very small pot, so I think I’m containing it a little bit. One plant that I am frustrated by, because I love it, but I’m having trouble with is my string of bananas. I’m doing really well with a string of pearls. String of bananas is similar to string of pearls, but instead of little pearls, they are shaped like little bananas. They’re just so finicky! If you overwater them, they don’t like it, but they do want some water and so we’re kind of in a little love/hate relationship where I’m like, I really like you but you don’t seem happy here. Is it me? We’re trying to work it out. One of my favorite houseplants is my polka dot leaf begonia. She’s just really lovely. And also a little high maintenance but I get it, you’re very pretty, you’re loud. I’ve got her in a good spot and she’s doing well. They’re really, really cool. Any of the fancy leaf begonias are pretty cool if you have the right conditions for them.CorinneDo you have a fiddle leaf fig?VirginiaOh God no. I’ve killed two, if not three, fiddle leaf figs.CorinneI killed one and I was like, that’s enough.VirginiaYeah, because they’re expensive if you buy a big one. I don’t think I have the right conditions in my house for a fiddle leaf fig because we have only have one south facing room and I don’t have space in there to get another giant plant in. I don’t know, figs are so hard. They’re the hardest.CorinneThey seem like they’re always just slowly dying.VirginiaYeah, and they look so gorgeous when they’re working and then they’ll just drop all their leaves. And then they are just a stick. I had one that was just a stick for a year. I kept hoping it would come back. I feel like if you like a big leaf plant like that, which of course I love big leaf plants, like you can do a Monstera. That’ll get just as giant for you. I have a Dieffenbachia that’s got pretty big leaves. And Elephant’s Ear. Elephant Ears can be a little finicky in the winter but they’re worth it. There are other options. You don’t have to fall for the fiddle leaf fig, is what I’m saying.CorinneThe next question is: What does work life balance look like for you right now? And what do you wish was different?VirginiaI was thinking about this because last month there was a question about how I get time for myself and I realized I forgot to share in that question that one of the main things I do is wake up really early. The rest of my family sleeps till like 7:30 and I get up at five and I have time to myself then. When my work life balance is not great, I get up at five and I work before my kids are awake for two hours. And since I’m finishing my book right now, a lot of my early morning time is working. So, when I’m done writing this book, I will get that chunk of morning time back, and then I really like to go out in the summer and be in the garden during that time, or read, or just not be talked to by my family. In terms of general work/life balance: I love my family very much, but I am the only member of my family (of origin) who doesn’t work weekends. And it’s a really big accomplishment for me to be breaking the generations of workaholism, in that sense. My sister is an urban education high school teacher. It’s really hard not to work nights and weekends with that job. My dad and my stepmom are college professors. Working on weekends is what I grew up with. And I totally get it and I didn’t want it. So I’m very proud that I don’t work weekends, for the most part. What about you, you’re kind of going through a big transition right now. Do you want to talk about that?CorinneSure. I don’t know what my work life balance is gonna look like. I just left my full-time job and I’m focusing some time and energy on @selltradeplus and Burnt Toast and some other freelance-y things. I’m very much figuring it out and I’m trying to have a little break where I’m just spending less time on my phone, hopefully. VirginiaYeah, because you have been working weekends, as I know, because you often do Burnt Toast work on the weekends. You have been doing a lot.Corinne Yes, for a long time my schedule was do @selltradeplus before work, go to work for eight hours, do @selltradeplus after work, do Burnt Toast on the weekends. So, just trying to shift that a little bit!VirginiaI think we all want you to have more downtime. I’m really a big fan of changing that. CorinneThis past week has been my first week without going into my job and I have felt really weird. Just, it’s really weird not having like coworkers. But yeah, I’m sure I’ll adjust.Alright. This is kind of a follow up question: Could you talk about finding time to write with young children? Especially making mental space for it. Young children being under four.VirginiaWell, so, as I said, getting up at five in the morning. I realize it’s the least sexy advice ever. Something about having kids broke me and made me a morning person. I also go to bed at like 8:30 at night now. I just became my mother immediately when I had kids and got on that schedule. Obviously, if you are wired differently, you could make it a nighttime writing time. I know lots of folks who do that. Once the kids go to bed, that’s when they get time. I’m assuming with this question, this is not your full-time job. Because I do want to acknowledge the privilege of, I was already a full-time professional writer before my children came on the scene. I was making a full-time income from it, therefore it had to continue because it was bringing in 50 percent of my household income. We’ve had daycare or a nanny, or now they’re in school, but we’ve had childcare built into our lives from the time they were really little, because it was necessary for both of us to work. Of course, COVID made that very different because then they were home all the time. The hardest point for me is the days I pick them up from school and have them in the late afternoons. Because young children are terrible in the late afternoons, they’re really grumpy and need snacks. That’s why the ice cream seemed like such a good idea at the time, before it ended in puke. And my brain is still really in my work at that point, like I don’t have a transition. This is where I can understand having a commute must be nice, because you have thirty minutes in the car to transition out. So, often I’m parenting and still looking at my phone to check work emails or I’ll think of something and want to make notes. It’s really hard, having half attention for both. My advice is, whenever you can, even if it’s not a lot of time, carve out whatever time you can separate and protect that ruthlessly as your writing time. Even if it’s a couple hours a week when you can get a babysitter. Don’t try to do the half in both worlds thing because I think that’s where the burnout really comes.CorinneThe next question is: Recommendations for a new homeowner to learn about gardening? VirginiaThis is a fun one. This came from Instagram because I’ve been sharing incessant garden pictures because this is the best time of year for my garden. So you’re just going see it constantly, at the moment. If you are on the East Coast, and you want to be a gardener, my number one tip is the blog A Way to Garden by Margaret Roach. She gardens here in the Hudson Valley. She was a garden editor for Martha Stewart a long time ago and has the most exquisite garden in the world.  She’s a genius. She has a wonderful podcast. She knows just everything about everything. And the website is like a treasure trove of what kind of mulch to get, how to use mulch, how to start seeds, how to think about design, all of these different things. So that would be my first step. I think it’s probably useful even for people in other gardening zones, like the specific plants change if you’re in the Southwest, like Corinne, or on the west coast. But a lot of the principles are the same. Otherwise, what I did with our second house that was more useful, was I did spend some time making a master plan of all the different little areas. Like, this is where eventually a fire pit might go. This is where a shade garden could go or whatever. And then like, just tackle one of those projects per year instead of trying to do it all at once. So we’re now five years into what is probably a ten year list of projects, but I’m more realistic about what we can get done. The other tip I will give if you are a new homeowner and this is your first season in your house: Don’t do much this year, because you haven’t lived there through a whole growing season. You don’t even know what you have, where the light is, what your soil is like. So even though you want to get going and there’s stuff you want to change, like, just take a break. Get some containers and pot some stuff up and put it on your porch instead. Because doing too much before you really understand your property, I think can lead to wasting money and effort. What about you, you’re starting to work on a garden now, right, Corinne? Corinne I have lived in my house for a couple years and that advice is definitely good. There’s still stuff I’m discovering, like, “Oh, there’s irises planted here, which makes no sense because they’re getting no water.” But yeah, someone definitely put a lot of like time and thought and care into my backyard. So, we’ll see. I’m hopefully going to start doing some more work. I’m very envious of your raised beds. I’m also curious if you’ve ever watched any Monty Don?VirginiaOh my god. We could do a whole Monty Don fan episode. CorinneOkay, great, because I was going to recommend Big Dreams, Small Spaces or Gardener’s World.VirginiaYes, Gardener’s World, for sure. I can’t believe I didn’t start there. He was my COVID survival strategy. My older daughter and I would watch it together in the evenings and make lots of plans. I love it so much.CorinneIt’s so soothing. VirginiaSo soothing. CorinneAlso less relevant for the Southwest, but still just great to watch.VirginiaI know. I’m interested that you like it because you’re gardening in such a different climate.CorinneI mean, I’m always like, “Maybe they’ll do an episode in the desert.” But yeah, I mean, I just think Monty Don is so lovely.VirginiaYes, and his dogs are so lovely.CorinneHe has great style. VirginiaOh, yes. My mom is British, so the reason I’m a gardener is because of my British DNA. Like, everyone in England gardens, pretty much. CorinneI mean, there’s a gardening celebrity.VirginiaLiterally one of their number one celebrities. My grandfather was a really intensive gardener, my aunt, both my cousins garden… It’s a big part of our family. And, yes, he’s the epitome of British gardening style. It makes me so happy. He’s always in a little cardigan and Wellington boots and it’s just delightful. Everything about it so good and there’s tons of really practical advice.CorinneYes. And tons of episodes if you need something to watch for hours.VirginiaYeah. They’ve been making that show for like a hundred years. Definitely recommend a Monty Don deep dive.CorinneOkay, here’s another fun one. What is your dream vacation?VirginiaThis is hard because since we’ve been travel-starved for so long and we’re just getting back to travel, I have such a long list. A dream vacation that I am waiting until my children are older to take is, I really want to do a very foodie trip in Italy. I did a trip like that when I was in my 20s and it was amazing. It’s the kind of trip I want to recreate with my kids, but I want them to be more fun to eat with first. Because right now, going out to restaurants is still hard with my four year old. And the fact that Italians eat dinner at 10 o’clock at night, all of that would be tricky right now. So we’ll get there. That’s a big one. I also have never been to Greece and that’s been on my list forever. What about you?CorinneI would love to go to Italy and Greece. The one that comes to mind for me, which is kind of a never-gonna-happen one, I think. But have you heard of Amangiri?VirginiaNo. What is it?CorinneIt’s a crazy resort, I think it’s in Utah. It just it’s like it looks very beautiful. Like it’s just like this kind of stark…VirginiaI’m googling.CorinneIt just looks beautiful and incredibly serene. I feel like celebrities always go there. I know one time I tried to guess how much it was, and I was like, maybe like $500 a night? Like thinking that was like wild. It’s so much more than that.VirginiaNo, it’s so much more than that. I’m on their website now, I can confirm it’s definitely going to be more than $500. CorinneBut it looks awesome, right? It just seems fun to go there and like turn off your phone for a week. It’s also on an incredibly large, like hundreds of acres, property where you can hike around and stuff. VirginiaOh my gosh, this looks beautiful. This is a good fantasy one. Speaking of completely over the top hotel fantasies, I’m so mad at Highlights Magazine for this. Highlights Magazine had an article that was like cool hotels, which, like, why?CorinneWhat? For kids? That makes no sense. VirginiaIt was supposed to be hotels that would be like very kid friendly. So there was like a Disney one, which whatever. But then there was one in, I want to say, I think it was in Bali? And it’s literally under the ocean. So it’s like the bedroom was like a giant aquarium basically. I will find it and link it.CorinneThat sounds incredible. VirginiaAnd it’s $10,000 a night.CorinneAnd now your daughter’s like, “Please? For my birthday?”VirginiaAnd I couldn’t stop laughing and she was like, is that a lot of money? She’s a kid, she doesn’t get money. She’s like, “What do you think? Are you saying we don’t have $10,000?” I’m like, “We’re not gonna spend it on that!!”[Virginia’s Note: After we recorded Corinne did find this underwater hotel room for the comparatively bargain price of $1840 per night. I’m still not taking my 8-year-old!]CorinneYeah, that’s very reasonable. Okay, what about favorite podcasts?VirginiaWe have to give Maintenance Phase a shout out. Obviously, if you’re looking for anti-diet content and you’re listening to us and not Maintenance Phase, you did that backwards because you should have started there. They do excellent work, Aubrey gordon and Michael Hobbes. That’s a big one that I never miss. I’m also really into Everything Is Fine with Kim France and Jennifer Romolini. It is a podcast for women over 40, which I admit just hearing that tagline I was like, fine, put us in a box. But it’s so good. They’re both former women’s magazine people. Kim France was the editor in chief of Lucky magazine during like Conde Nast’s big towncar heyday years. They’re very funny and smart. They did a great episode on Roe. They have really interesting authors on and the chitchat between the two of them is really good. It’s a great listen. And not just for women over 40, I feel like anyone could enjoy it. What about you?CorinneI’m really into this astrology podcast, Ghost of a Podcast. So if you’re into the woo side of things, I recommend that. I also love Reply All, which I know is very popular. I’m sure everyone’s listening to that. VirginiaThat’s a good one. CorinneThe last question is, what’s the most destructive health or diet culture message you’ve received?VirginiaI think one message that has taken me personally the longest time to work through was the message that exercise is only for weight management. When I was a kid, I was a skinny kid, and I hated sports and hated moving my body. I was an indoor cat, for sure. I just wanted to read and play pretend and not be physical. And it was fine because I was skinny, right? But that meant that then when I was no longer skinny, I felt like this obligation to exercise to get back to my thinness, which did not work. I had a pretty disordered relationship with exercise in my 20’s. No one ever said, maybe you would love moving your body for other reasons, right? There was no option on the table to enjoy exercise or just joyful movement, whatever you want to call it, on its own terms or for its own pleasures. So it has taken me most of my 30’s to really get to a place where I do notice implicit benefits to exercise that are not related to body size. I want to do it when I wake up in the morning. I feel joy when I do it. And I don’t even have that all the time still, you know? There was a long time where I really couldn’t do any cardio because it was too triggering. What about you?CorinneWell, that’s a really good answer. I think for me it would be that the path to happiness is thinness. Like, don’t you just want to be happy? Stuff like that, I guess.VirginiaLike feeling like your life needs to be on hold until you lose weight?CorinneAnd also just that being thinner will make you happier. That has not been the correlation in my life. VirginiaNo, it very often is not. I think that’s a really common and super insidious one. And it’s holding a lot of people back from just living their lives. Butter For Your Burnt ToastVirginiaAll right. Well, let’s bring us up. I realized when I ordered these questions, I picked a sad one to end on. “Let’s talk about terrible diet messages. Okay, goodbye!” No. We will bring it up now with Butter for your Burnt Toast. Corinne, last time you were on, you set a very high bar for yourself.CorinneI know I was actually struggling a little bit because I don’t think I can really live up to that.VirginiaI don’t think anyone ever can, so you can release yourself from that pressure.CorinneOkay. My endorsement is slightly related to what you were just saying, which is that sometimes, I’m just living my life and I get a feeling in my body of , I want to do something other than walk the dog and garden, which are like my usual exercise activities. I subscribe to a lot of Substacks, but one of my favorite is She’s a Beast, which is Casey Johnston’s newsletter about being strong and lifting weights. She recently started a couch-to-barbell program called Liftoff, so I decided that I would just look into it. I don’t have a good track record with finishing programs or following programs. But it’s divided into three phases and the first phase requires only your house and a broomstick. And there’s a YouTube video that you can follow along with and it takes less than 15 minutes, which is incredible!VirginiaOh my gosh!CorinneYou just do like six exercises maybe? And they’re all probably stuff you’ve done before. I love that it starts off like so simply and I don’t know if I’ll make it to phase two, but I’ve done phase one.VirginiaYou’re enjoying phase one. That’s awesome.CorinneI’ve done it six times or something. I just think it’s great. So I want to just recommend that program and also Casey’s newsletter which is about fitness-y stuff, but she definitely has an anti-diet lens.VirginiaYeah, very fat-positive, strong critiques of fitness culture which are really well done. I want to do this, too, now. You’re influencing me. This looks great. CorinneWell, let me know if you do.VirginiaI will. I am endlessly in physical therapy, as people know, because of my back and ankle. I’m trying to get out now, but I can’t. The other week I was like, “I feel like I’m done.” And she was like, “No, I feel like you’re in that place where you’re no longer in active pain but if you leave, you will re-injure yourself immediately.” And I was like “Touché.” But I am getting bored. For a while I was an A student with physical therapy and would do my exercises every morning and now I’m just losing interest. I need a new program, so I’m gonna check this out.CorinneYeah, it’s really so fun and easy to just follow a YouTube video. I just put it on and like put it on silent and listen to a podcast while I’m waving my little broomstick around.VirginiaSo, I am recommending an absurdly large water jug. A while back I posted on Instagram that I get migraines and I loosely tie getting migraines to the days when I drink only Diet Coke. This is not a criticism of Diet Coke, it’s necessary to my wellbeing, but I should drink water, too, to be a person. Sometime I want to do a reported piece on hydration culture. It’s a whole thing, for sure. However, I do need to drink water and I asked for recommendations and a couple of people recommended this. It is the Stanley GO IceFlow 64oz Stainless Steel Flip Straw Jug. It’s a beast. It’s enormousCorinneIs 64 ounces a gallon?VirginiaIt is a gallon. Yes.CorinneOkay, I also have a gallon water jug.VirginiaThis is maybe why we were destined to be friends. CorinneYours looks really good though.VirginiaI appreciate the size, but I have never once drunk 64 ounces in a day. I’ve had it for a couple weeks now, I have never once drunk 64 ounces in one day. Like, that’s just, I cannot drink that much water in a day. That’s a ridiculous amount of water. But what I love about it is, it is so well insulated that it stays cold all day long. I do not like drinking tepid water. That is not interesting to me. It was 90 degrees here all weekend. We were out at the pool. I was out gardening the whole day. And I would fill this thing up in the morning with a bunch of ice cubes and cart it outside with me. And last night at eight o’clock, I was like Dan, you have to drink this water. It’s so cold. And he was like, thank you for sharing with me that your water is cold. CorinneDo you have to like lift it over your head to drink it?VirginiaNo! You don’t have to lift it. It is not a barbell workout. You can just hold it up and tilt it a little bit to drink. I have been self conscious to drink out of it like on a Zoom. Because I don’t know, it’s so preposterous. I want to get their 20-ounce one, I feel like that might be more for daily use. But this is very useful for being outside when I’m out with my kids and like we all need water and they don’t have to carry multiple water bottles. CorinneIt looks sleek, too, at least.VirginiaI have the petal, the light pink.Well, Corinne, thank you so much for doing this again. This was really fun! Do you want to remind people where to find you once again?CorinneOh, sure. You can find me on Instagram at @selltradeplus that’s where I spend most of my time. And then my personal Instagram is @SelfieFay.Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! Once again, if you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player. Leave us a rating or review and tell a friend, maybe a mom friend, about this episode.And consider a paid subscription to the Burnt Toast newsletter. Until June 30, you can take 20 percent off and pay just $4 per month or $40 for the year! You get a ton of cool perks and you keep this an ad- and sponsor-free space.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

Like yesterday, I included goldfish crackers in a lunch picture. And I’m like, how long is it going to take before someone yells at me about the goldfish?You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today I am chatting with fan favorite, and my best friend, Amy Palanjian. Amy is the creator of the blog Yummy Toddler Food, and she’s on Instagram and Tiktok, as we’ll talk about. She’s also my former podcast co-host of the Comfort Food podcast, and a frequent flyer here on Burnt Toast. Today we’re talking about the business of kid food blogging, and the line Amy walks in trying to present realistic relatable content, but also have people be aware that this is a business and have that labor be somewhat visible. No one has ever asked Mark Bittman (or any other male food writer) if they are making a living writing recipes. We know and understand they run a business—but when women do this, and especially when moms do it, we act like it’s not work. We also get into broader themes about how we make domestic work visible and what happens when we do that. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! It’s free and a great way to help more folks find the show.For an upcoming bonus ep, I’m trying out a new format: Virginia’s Office Hours. If you have a question about navigating diet culture and anti-fat bias that you’d like to talk through with me, or if you just want to rant about a shitty diet with me, you can submit your question/topic here. I’ll pick one person to join me on the bonus episode so we can hash it out together.Bonus episodes are for paid subscribers only, so join us here so you don’t miss out! VirginiaThis conversation is inspired by a piece you wrote for your newsletter a little while ago where you kind of… came out to your audience. You were like, “Guys, this is a business. I’m a blogger, recipe developer, influencer, cookbook author. This is a business.” So I just want to start by saying it feels weird that you had to explain this to people. My first thought in reading it was: Does Mark Bittman have to explain to people that he runs a business? I don’t think so.AmyThere’s this assumption maybe that the recipes that I share are like, a food diary. That I’m taking pictures of the food I’m making for my kids, and then just happening to share them. And I think that’s the way that blogging started many, many years ago. Blogs were sort of diaries. And there are a lot of people on social media now that are stille doing that. They don’t have fleshed out websites. They’re just sharing stuff on Instagram or Tiktok. I think the assumption is, Oh, she just happened to make this for her family and she’s sharing it with us. But most of the time when I’m cooking for work, my children are not even home. I have a content calendar that is scheduled out many, many months ahead of time. I am doing almost nothing in real time. Because I can’t! There’s production time on shooting everything and writing all the content and doing all the videos. I have to be ahead of schedule, because that’s the way you run most businesses.VirginiaYou do run them with a plan. You don’t tend to just show up one day and be like, Hey, let’s make some stuff.AmyI think there are people that do that. But I run my website like we ran magazines. I have gotten a lot of requests like, “Can you show the ‘after’ plate?” Like, I’m not gonna sit there and videotape everything that my kids are eating, right? Because a that’s a giant pain. And it’s such a strange thing to do to a kid.VirginiaIt’s a real invasion of privacy to be like, “Okay, eat dinner, I’m just going to be here cataloging whether you like it and what you eat!”AmyAnd how much my kids eat has no bearing on how much your kids eat. It’s a strange request for information because it’s basically meaningless.VirginiaThey just either want some reassurance that your kid doesn’t eat it either. Or they want to feel bad because your kid eats something that their kid won’t eat. No good comes from these comparisons. AmyAnd my kids don’t eat everything that I make for the website. They are a sample size of three! I have enough food experience that I can taste a recipe and judge whether or not it’s good, from a much different lens than my children can. VirginiaThat’s another way I feel like the labor of all of this is made invisible. Because you are writing recipes for kids, there is an assumption that your children are the experts on your work. As opposed to understanding that you develop recipes because you have years of experience developing recipes, and you know what tastes good because this is your work. Again when any male food writer is like, here’s this amazing stew, we’re not like, But did your wife like it? Did your friends eat it? We trust them when they say this was amazing. I’m insulted on your behalf that people are like, Did Selway eat it? No offense, Selway, but it’s not really your job.AmyThat would be the most maddening way to have my website.VirginiaWhen your kid is going through the inevitable only eats mac and cheese for six months phase, what are you supposed to do for content? Just keep putting out mac and cheese recipes? It’s very strange. When we’re consuming social media content, I think all of us need to understand the amount of work that goes into producing those images. And because they are images of domestic life, we assume that no work went into creating them. That feels really devaluing of your professional work and of domestic life. AmyWell, it’s also questions like, Why do you need daycare? You’re just cooking. Why can’t your kids just be home? There was a lot of that during COVID. Like, what’s the big deal? I mean. Have you ever tried to write anything with a toddler on your leg?VirginiaThe way your photos are so beautifully shot and you’re so carefully styling the plate—you can’t do that with kids underfoot. AmyI know some people who have Instagram accounts who do it with their kids at home. There’s one person in particular who, once a month, will send me emails about how she’s drowning, and she can’t do all the things. I’m like, But you have no childcare! You’re comparing your output to mine and I have full-time childcare, because I’ve chosen that and you haven’t. [Virginia’s Note: Or maybe it’s not in the budget/unavailable for other reasons. But that’s all the more reason not to expect to do all the things. The system is failing you!] You have to give yourself a break. It’s completely not fair for people who are trying to do it while they’re taking care of their kids to think that they should be able to do all of the things. It’s all very muddy.VirginiaThat’s an example of the way these myths get perpetuated on Instagram by both the creators of the content and the viewers of the content. I’m not surprised someone thinks they can get into this work without needing childcare, because that’s an image that gets sold. You are very transparent about having childcare, but that’s not everybody. There are plenty of influencers who aren’t thanking the nanny or the daycare center workers, and are letting you believe that it’s all happening with their kids in tow. That sets women up to fail.AmyOr you see someone on TikTok who’s making an income by posting videos dancing with their babies. And you’re like, well I should be able to do that—TikTok in particular has really changed what is possible because it pays people once you have a certain number of followers. But I still feel like the assumption that you should be able to do all the things is just really murky.VirginiaAlso, let’s not discount the amount of labor that goes into making those videos. Like what if the baby’s cranky and you need to make them dance? We’re supposed to watch the video and think that she just happened to catch this totally charming moment with her child, but she learned a dance routine, figured out how to do it with the music, and then edited it afterwards. It’s a lot of production. AmySo, for the most part, I try to let my kids eat without being videotaped, unless we’re gonna do something for a video and I tell them. But the other night, I was making dinner and my husband had the girls out of the house, so it was just the little guy and I. I had made some roasted carrots while the rest of dinner was cooking. And I honestly and truly do not know what made me start filming. There was nothing about me that was camera ready. I just was in whatever clothes I was wearing. My hair is kind of a mess. And I started filming it. So it actually was real. I put the carrots down and I asked Selway if he wanted them. And we went through this whole thing where he said I made the wrong carrots because I cut them into sticks versus circles. Then I just talked him through the carrot situation as I would in normal life. I compared the carrots to his crayons because they were sitting on the table. We got out some ketchup he wound up eating the whole thing of carrots. So I shared it on Instagram. It went like kind of nuts. [Virginia Note: By “kind of nuts” Amy means that Selway eating carrots now has over 5.4 million views between Instagram and TikTok.]As I was about to post it, I thought, okay, but now everyone’s going to think that my kids eat everything. Because this just happened to be a moment that went with this particular way. And I have not happened to catch a moment that went the other way. I do think the things I did along the way in that video do show the way I talk about food because I was not claiming that the carrots were gonna make him fly, I was not selling health messaging. It was like, “These are really yummy. These are mommy’s favorite. I’m gonna eat them all.” But there is this false promise when you see a kid eating something and you think, well my kids should eat that. And if they don’t, it’s either I’m failing or my kid is failing. I posted it and it immediately started doing really well and I’ve just been feeling so uncomfortable about it.VirginiaBecause you’re worried you were putting out that false expectation?AmyRight and I tried really hard to clarify that this doesn’t always happen in the caption. But anytime you videotape something, you are taking it out of context. It’s not what would be like if you didn’t have the phone on. And I think that’s the thing that we all forget. If you’re videotaping food, it is going to look different than if you didn’t videotape food, because you want the food to look a certain way. You’re going to choose something in the beginning that grabs people’s attention. You might put it in a different bowl or a cup that’s going to make people ask a question. You’re going do stuff to get people to engage in a way that you would not if you were just making yourself a bowl of oatmeal.VirginiaRight. You wouldn’t be like, “I need to sprinkle something on top of the oatmeal because beige oatmeal doesn’t actually look good.” All of that is manufactured. AmyI think it’s really, really hard to remember, when you’re looking at videos of food, that there were lots of decisions made because people are going to be looking at it that are just a few steps away from “real.”VirginiaI am curious to hear more about what motivated you to start filming. Does it feel hard to just be making dinner for your family and not thinking with one part of your brain, is there content here? AmyI go through periods that are better than others. I think it’s harder now because of the way that Instagram has changed in the past six months, where if you want to be growing, you have to be posting a lot of video. And so I can’t really turn that part of my brain off. To some extent, I am always like, “Is this something?” We pretty much don’t tape anything at dinner. I try to do most of it during the day, but that is always on in my head.  My phone’s usually nearby, so I can turn on the camera pretty quick. [Another time] Selway had gone to the freezer and was getting himself a popsicle completely on his own, so I videotaped that because I was like, well, I might use this. I mean, it’s hard. I sort of hate it because it’s putting my kids in a position that they didn’t ask to be in. And, you know, they’re getting older. This is a temporary phase of their life. But the potential for the number of eyeballs to see my content has drastically changed and it makes me feel really differently now to think about sharing them. But I’m not quite to the place where I feel like I can stop because it does seem so integral to my brand. Like, I posted that carrot video on TikTok an hour ago. I do not have a lot of TikTok followers and 30,000 people have already seen it. [Virginia Note: By publication time, that number was over 700,000 on TikTok alone]I also find it to be incredibly difficult to take days off because of the nature of how connected this all is to my business.VirginiaLet’s talk about how these misunderstanding about the business of making food content plays into diet culture standards. I think those “What I Eat in a Day” videos are such a good example. I was thinking about a reel I saw Cassey Ho do—she’s Blogilates. So she’s a fitness influencer and a diet influencer, straight up. She had a reel where she started by showing a beautiful shot of her protein pancakes covered and blueberries with the syrup dripping down them. And the caption says “sometimes I eat like this.” And then the shot changes, and it’s her eating canned chicken, plain out of the can, and lettuce out of a bag of salad. And she’s like, “and some days, I eat like this.” And her message with the video was that you don’t have to always be pulling off this beautifully produced meal. Like, she was trying to show that the pancakes are fake and manufactured. But in her case, well, when you strip away what makes that meal pretty, it turns out, she’s just eating canned chicken and lettuce because she’s living on a really restrictive diet. So it was very revealing in a way that I don’t think she intended because it shows that in a lot of this “What I Eat in a Day” content, we’re making food look pretty to make up for the fact that it’s not very filling or satisfying. Which is obviously very different from your recipes, which are delicious and not diet culture content.AmyWell, like take the assumption that all the food I’m making is the food that my kids are eating. The reality is that 99 percent of what my kids eat, nobody ever sees. I’m not like taking videos of them eating their goldfish for snack because, there’s nothing to see. It looks the same in my house as yours! But then people say, “I wish my kids ate like your kids eat.” And I’m like, “Well, I think they probably do.” Or, “I wish I was as good of a mom as you.” I’m like, “This is my job.”VirginiaAnd why are we measuring people’s quality as a mom by the food they serve? It’s a little more than that. Not to reduce what you do! But, that isn’t your mom work. That’s your business. That’s not what you do as a mom.AmyI think in kid food, particularly, the thing where it intersects with diet culture is in the types of food that we’re deciding to show or the types of food that we now expect kids to eat. Like which type of crackers you use. Yesterday I included goldfish in a lunch picture and I’m like, How long is it gonna take before someone yells at me about the goldfish? It’s making those choices. There’s a lot of behind the scenes thinking that goes along with that, so I think you have try really hard to not be sending those messages. VirginiaIt’s hard too because you have to decide if you’re up for the goldfish fight, right? But if you don’t include the goldfish, then you’re upholding this standard you don’t agree with, even if it’s just inadvertently. AmyHere’s another example. I do a lot of content on storing produce or making your produce last longer or freezing things. I have six reusable stasher bags, like the fancy silicone ones that come in colors. I typically use those in videos, because they look nice. They are expensive, I’m not gonna lie. The big ones are like $30 apiece. I got them for free. And again, I have six of them. I do not have a whole stash of them. You literally see the same one in most posts. But a lot of people call me out for using something that’s expensive. And yet, if I showed a regular Ziploc bag, there would be a cascade of people complaining about the plastic. So, like, which is better?VirginiaYou can’t win.AmyRight, but I do think that showing the reusable fancy eco one is also perpetuating that feeling that you have to use this.Virginia And that your freezer should be pretty this way. AmyOr that this is the only safe option. I did have a whole DM conversation with someone where she was like, “I’m trying to switch to all glass and silicone for my freezer it because I need it to be safe for my baby.” And then I have to explain like which plastic is actually problematic, what not to put in plastic, and then all the ways you can use plastic. But, so many assumptions are being drawn from those visuals and that’s tricky.VirginiaFor the record, I cheer whenever you put goldfish in the lunch and share it whenever you put more than three M&M’s in something. Oh and I also loved your banana sushi reel. Let’s talk about that one. AmyOkay, so banana sushi is where you put peanut butter or another nut or seed butter on a tortilla, you put a banana in the middle, you roll it up and slice it, so they look sort of like spirals. They’re cute. So I made the thing and then I took one apart with my hands and smashed it all together, acting like I was a toddler. I was like, this is either gonna do really well or it’s gonna look really dumb. And it did really well. I think it’s helpful for people to see that I’m going to make this thing for my kid and they’re going to rip it to shreds and maybe eat it. Because kids are really tactile. I did not want to make that video and be like, this is an amazing toddler lunch and leave it at that. Because I know there is no way I could give that to any of my children and they would actually just put it in their mouth.VirginiaRight, right. I’ve done peanut butter and jelly that way and then watched my children unravel it all and I’m like, “Why are you monsters?”AmyI know. Why didn’t I just make a regular sandwich?VirginiaWhy are you not appreciating the adorable aesthetic of the sandwich I’ve made you? Occasionally, it has delighted my children when I’ve made stuff in shapes. I do have some of those little Japanese sandwich cutters and my younger one went through a phase where she was enchanted. And then they started coming back not eaten in the lunchbox and I was like well, back to regular regular peanut butter and jelly for you, kid. I’m not going to any extra trouble here. But it does seem really challenging to talk about that honestly with your audience, especially because I feel like influencers are under a lot of pressure to seem “authentic,” right? And often that version of authenticity is not authentic, right? AmyIt’s manufactured.VirginiaIt’s often like, “Mama, I see you.” And showing the chaos without being like, “If we had a better society, this would not be so hard.” So then we’re continuing to perpetuate the expectation that motherhood is so hard and you’re crumbling all the time, without directing the anger that we should have about that towards the institutions responsible.AmyYeah, I’m trying when I can, especially with voiceovers, to be more realistic. But you have to do it on purpose. There’s someone that I follow, Sarah Crawford, her account is @bromabakery. So, she does all this baking. She makes a giant mess. And I’m like, at what point did she realize that that was her thing? Because I doubt if she didn’t have her camera on that she would be playing it up that much.VirginiaOh, interesting. Do you think she’s making it messier than it has to be? AmyI think she might be.VirginiaSarah, we want to know! DM us. AmyShe is very good at social media. She has a whole program that she sells, she’s very good at it. And that’s the thing that she’s decided that she’s doing, which, like, kudos to her for figuring it out. But also, it’s maybe not real?VirginiaGod. It’s like, none of its real. It’s so fascinating. I think the takeaway for those of us who just consume this content is just keep the lack of reality in mind all the time. I don’t know what shifted. I was reading Real Simple magazine last night. And I know none of that is real, right? And maybe that’s because I worked in magazines and I saw what went into photoshoots. Maybe you didn’t know all the tricks that they use to make the food look perfect, but you certainly knew—well, maybe you don’t know. I do remember when we used to shoot lifestyle stories together, being shocked at the first photo shoot when it’s like, oh, wait, we’re not going to eat the food that you had all these people over to be at a party. We’re shooting a party at our house, but…AmyYou’re not actually having a party and taking pictures.VirginiaRight. It’s also totally manufactured thing. So maybe we didn’t even know about magazines and that’s why we don’t know about social. But I do think we even more don’t know it about social. We expect that we are seeing what people are really cooking to feed themselves and it creates these unrealistic standards for the viewers And it devalues the work of content creators, too. AmyI think it’s giving us completely unrealistic expectations for what we should be making and feeding our families. VirginiaLike family dinner should look like a photoshoot every day?AmyOr you should have the baby who is like stuffing all the food into their mouths happily. There’s so much comparison that comes out of it that I think really is problematic. It’s hard to remember to run it through the filter of your own life.VirginiaAgreed. Well, we also had a request from folks on Instagram to talk about maintaining mom friendships, which I think is a lovely topic. Amy and I have been best friends since.. How old were we? 22? 23?Amy I think we were 23. VirginiaWe were babies. Babies!AmyMaybe I was 23 and you were 22.VirginiaSo it’s almost 20 years of being friends. And the other thing about us is we lived in New York City together for five years and then the whole rest of our friendship has been long distance. You moved to Iowa. I moved to the Hudson Valley. Now you’re in Pennsylvania. So we’re still hours apart, and yet here we are. So how did we do it, Amy? How are we so great?AmyI think our texting is really the magic glue.VirginiaIt’s just texting.AmyI’ve got nothing besides that.VirginiaConstant texting.AmyI mean, I think obviously it helped that we were working in the same industry. So we’re constantly talking about both work and life and we have a lot in common because of that. We’ve often been, I was gonna say freelance, but that seems like the wrong word, but like making your own businesses. VirginiaI use freelance, for sure. You were an editor at magazines that kept folding. So it was a little different.AmyAnd then I learned how to be a freelancer for you.VirginiaWe were both figuring it out.AmyI think that had a lot to do with it. We did email a lot, before we started texting. We had these really amazing rainbow email threads.VirginiaYeah, that was a pre-kids thing. We couldn’t sustain that. We used to write long emails and we would respond in-line and we would change our font colors so you could keep track of the conversation. I hope our grandchildren discover those emails someday. AmyThose were amazing. That’s like how we planned our weddings.VirginiaI was going to say baby showers. And then we switched to texting because it was just much more efficient. It also helps that we’re on similar sleep schedules. We’re both awake early in the morning. There’s you and maybe two other people that I can text at five in the morning and fully expect a response, and who won’t text me at 10pm because I will lose track of the text because I’m asleep. So, I think texting is the only answer. I don’t know how previous generations did it. But I do think, keep your mom friends close. They’re very important. Very key to our survival. Butter for your Burnt ToastAmySo I recently finished Book Lovers by Emily Henry. VirginiaOh, that’s a good one!AmyIt was delightful read I was very sad when it was over. VirginiaMy recommendation is also a book, but it’s nonfiction. It is our dear friend Kate Tellers' book How to Tell a Story. I figured this was a good episode to shout it out because Amy and I are both Kate superfans. So I’ll even link to our very old Comfort Food podcast episode where Kate came on and we talked about family dinner. Kate Tellers is one of our longtime friends, also from our New York City days. She works for The Moth, the storytelling organization, and they have an incredible new book out about how to tell a story. It is great if you are someone who wants to do oral storytelling. I also got a lot out of it in terms of thinking about writing. It’s just a great craft book. It helps you really understand why some people are great storytellers and some people, when they start to tell a story, you just die inside, because you know the anecdotes going to take so long. They guide you through the process. So, it’s wonderful. I do think we have to agree that on an anecdotal level, Kate is the best storyteller I think we both know, hands down.AmyYes. Sometimes in our text messages it’s very funny because she’ll just start halfway through the story and then we’re like, but wait…VirginiaKate, bring us in. We need a little backstory! Yes, she’s also on the group mom text chain and we are regularly brought into car trouble or various shenanigans. It’s great. But the book is excellent and she’s not the only author, there are five co-authors and they all do a really great job. So, I recommend that if you are interested in working on your writing game or your storytelling game or just want to learn more about how stories get made. Thank you, Amy, for coming back. Always a delight to have you on Burnt Toast. I really appreciate it. Tell people where they can find you!AmyI’m at yummytoddlerfood.com or @Yummytoddlerfood on all the socials now.VirginiaIncluding her TikTok, guys.AmyYeah, that was a decision that I did not take lightly. But it is what it is now.VirginiaI’m watching and dreading maybe having to join you. I’m still on the fence. I appreciate you blazing the trail for those of us who may or may not follow.AmyYeah, I often just have to cover my eyes if I’m on there.VirginiaWell, thank you for doing this. We really appreciate it.Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! Once again, if you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player. Leave us a rating or review and tell a friend, maybe a mom friend, about this episode. And consider a paid subscription to the Burnt Toast newsletter. It’s just $5 per month or $50 for the year. You get a ton of cool perks and you keep this an ad- and sponsor-free space. 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

Because this is what we do to ourselves every day. We put in so much effort to just exist as basic people in the world. Like, we’re not like knockout celebrities. We’re not like stunning anybody. Like, we put in all of this work for a reward that doesn’t actually ever come.You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today I’m chatting with Jessica Defino. Jessica is a pro-skin, anti-product beauty reporter who is dismantling beauty standards, debunking marketing myths, and exploring how beauty culture impacts people. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, Allure, and more. She also writes the beauty-critical newsletter, The Unpublishable. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! It’s free and a great way to help more folks find the show.For next month’s bonus ep, I’m trying out a new format: Virginia’s Office Hours. If you have a question about navigating diet culture and anti-fat bias that you’d like to talk through with me, or if you just want to rant about a shitty diet with me, you can submit your question/topic here. I’ll pick one person to join me on the bonus episode so we can hash it out together. Bonus episodes are for paid subscribers only, so join us here so you don’t miss out! Episode 47 TranscriptVirginiaI feel a weird compulsion to tell you that as I contemplated this conversation, my skin broke out very dramatically. And I was like, do I need to disclose this to her? And then I was like, No, it’s fine. It’s fine.JessicaIt’s totally fine. You’re just a normal human being with skin.VirginiaYes, exactly. But it was very funny timing. Why don’t we start by having you tell listeners a little bit about yourself and your work?JessicaI describe myself as a pro-skin, anti-product beauty reporter. I report on beauty and skincare, mostly through the lens of skin first, and then what we put on the skin and the consumerism of it all second, which is pretty rare in the beauty space. It’s also really hard in the beauty space. I was finding all this information about skin and skincare culture and beauty culture and really wanting to report on it, and found that I had a hard time placing these more controversial pitches. My bread and butter is still freelancing. I write for places like the New York Times and Vogue and Allure, but mostly these days, I’m working on my own newsletter The Unpublishable where I can dive a little deeper and explore some of these not industry-friendly topics.VirginiaYou’re speaking to my soul. As my readers know, I started Burnt Toast so that I could write diet culture stories that I can’t write in the outlets that run diet ads next to my work. I spent a long time at women’s magazines and the ethical conundrum of the beauty department is fascinating. And I don’t think people understand the extent to which advertising and beauty content are interwoven. Sketch that out a little bit for us.JessicaIt’s intense. I had no idea until I started reporting on the beauty industry, too. Beauty media is pretty much funded by beauty advertisers, which means it’s not within a publication’s best interest to publish anything that goes against advertisers’ interest—which means a lot of beauty content is very product focused. It’s very sort of light and airy, and not diving deep to question, like, how are these products affecting our skin, our health, our endocrine systems. Beauty media makes money in one of two ways: Through advertising or through affiliate sales. So there’s a big internal incentive to push a lot of products on people, because the publication will get a cut of all those products that are sold online. It’s very interwoven. I have had so many stories killed or completely edited to remove brand names, softened, just really toned down in order to appease advertisers. VirginiaI want to tell you my story of this, which is taking us all the way back to 2007, pre- social media. I did my first big investigative feature piece, which was a deep dive into working conditions in nail salons. I wrote it for Jane magazine, when Jane was the coolest women’s magazine, and also the sort of counterculture women’s magazine. I spent all this time with these nail salon workers, exploring every aspect of this, and they killed it right before we went to press because of nail polish advertisers. And because a big portion of subscribers were nail salons, and they thought they would lose subscribers. That was such a transformative moment for me as a journalist. I was like, Oh, I have to figure out different ways to do this. Because that was a media outlet that I don’t think you would have expected to be as beholden to their advertisers as they were. I can talk about this all now because they folded a million years ago and the piece did end up finally running in The Nation, which obviously has no beauty advertisers. But it also was read by a much smaller audience, not all of whom understood what nail salons were. I mean, the overlap between nail salon customers and The Nation readers is probably not that big.JessicaThat’s the thing! It is a little bit easier to get some harder hitting pieces published in more news-driven outlets, but that’s not where the majority of people who are interested in beauty are getting their beauty information. And so I try really hard to infiltrate those spaces. But it is hard and your story doesn’t surprise me at all. Still, every time I hear something like that, it hurts.VirginiaAnd when you’re trying to publish in the other outlets, you have to convince them that these issues matter. Because now it’s a women’s issue. It’s fluffy. It’s beauty. There’s that whole piece of it. Well, we could rant about that forever, but I feel like we also need to talk about Kim Kardashian. And I probably need to apologize for making you do this, because it’s maybe bringing up some trauma. But we are recording this, it’s a week after the Met Gala when Kim wore Marilyn Monroe’s dress and went on this crazy diet losing a stupid amount of weight in three weeks. You wrote an incredible piece for Vice about your experience working for the Kardashians’ app company. You draw so many smart parallels in that piece between underpaid media work and beauty work. So what is your take on the whole Met Gala thing?JessicaSo Kim was boasting about spending three weeks basically starving herself working out twice a day in a sauna suit. She did an article for Vogue where she said she spent 14 hours the day before getting her hair bleached. Like, that’s so much effort. And my thought was: She looked fine. It was a pretty boring look. It wasn’t a standout moment at the Met Gala. And that makes it such a perfect parallel for mass beauty culture because this is what we do to ourselves every day. We put in so much effort to just exist as basic people in the world. We’re not knockout celebrities. We’re not stunning anybody. We put in all of this work for a reward that doesn’t actually ever come and I thought it was a pretty interesting parallel there.VirginiaYes, it’s an amazing metaphor of what we’re all doing. She just compressed it all into three weeks. My other thought was, this is a woman for whom beauty work is so non-negotiable. If she wants to leave the house without makeup, this is something that’s going to be covered and talked about. So for me, it just kind of felt like why are we even surprised? She’s saying out loud what a lot of other people were also doing to get into their dresses, they just weren’t making a media stunt out of it. It’s not uncommon for a celebrity to spend three weeks before a big event doing insane things to fit into a dress.JessicaIt’s not uncommon for anyone. I had tweeted something to that effect and someone was like, “Please, this is what women do before their wedding day all the time. It’s not that big of a deal.” And I was like, “Just because it happens all the time doesn’t mean it’s not that big of a deal.” That’s a huge deal. That’s a huge deal that so many people are doing it constantly. It’s not just celebrities.VirginiaA line I loved from the Vice piece is: “Beauty standards have always been physical manifestations of systems of oppression.” This, of course, applies to the diet industry just as much as it does to beauty and skincare. So I really want to explore the intersections of these two cultures. How are skincare culture and diet culture really one and the same? “Beauty standards have always been physical manifestations of systems of oppression.” JessicaI always say that skincare culture is dewy diet culture. There are so many parallels. In both instances people have been made to believe that a certain aesthetic signifies health, when that’s not the case. We’re sold products to help us achieve that aesthetic at the expense of our health. We’re sent to doctors who reinforce beauty standards and call it medical care. There are all sorts of doctors who subscribe to BMI as a marker of health, and will tell a patient “just lose weight” when they actually have cancer—and dermatologists are really not that different. I don’t mean this as a slight against dermatologists. This as an indictment of the entire western medical system where beauty standards have been subsumed into medical care. When you’re going to a dermatologist, very often, aside from skin cancer screenings, you are getting treatments to help you look a certain way without ever exploring the root cause of why your skin is reacting the way it’s reacting. The entire thing is “how do we get rid of this as quickly as possible?” And very often achieving that goal goes against your actual skin health.VirginiaAnd they’re often treating things that aren’t even health problems, right? Wrinkles are not a health problem. Even breaking out is normal.JessicaYes. I hate skin types. I hate this idea of “normal” skin because normal skin reacts to the world around it. That is actually the the job your skin is supposed to play. It’s supposed to alert you to any potential imbalances, any internal health issues, any issues in your external environment. So when your skin is reacting in that way, that’s health. That is exactly what it’s supposed to be doing. It’s our job to figure out if is this actually a cue about my health, and if so, what’s going on? Or to say, this isn’t actually about my health. This is just a normal thing that happens to people as they age or as they go through pregnancy or as they go through menopause, whatever. So much of it has nothing to do with health. I think the other parallel is that we’re told that subscribing to this certain standard of beauty, whether it’s your body size or your skin, will increase your confidence and make you feel good. But the data bears out a very different story. Feeling held to this impossible standard of beauty to have like skin like a doll or a model who has been through Photoshop and filters and FaceTune and plastic surgery, increases appearance anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, facial dysmorphia, eating disorder, self harm and even suicide. We’re told that it’s going to be good for us and make us feel better and really makes us feel like s**t.VirginiaThe thing about dermatologists gets me so fired up. We have a history of melanoma in my family so I do go in for my skin checks and one year, I couldn’t get my annual skin check appointment for 18 months. She was booked out that far for the annual cancer screenings, but they could get me in the next week to talk about acne. I just remember thinking, Isn’t making sure I don’t have cancerous moles like more pressing? It said a lot to me. There’s no product she can sell me related to cancerous moles, but there are many products to sell me related to breakouts. JessicaThat’s horrible. And it’s also not surprising. I’ve had so many women tell me specifically that they have gone in for their annual skin cancer screenings and their dermatologist will start talking about Botox or filler and selling them during this health appointment. That messes with your mind because it’s coming from a medical doctor. They’re suggesting alongside a cancer screening, “Hey, maybe you should get your crow’s feet done. Maybe you should get your frown lines done. Maybe you should get your lips filled.” It starts to feel like these things are part of being a healthy human being when they’re not.VirginiaI’m thinking about the intersections, too, with anti-fat bias. I think for a lot of us in bigger bodies, there’s often some added pressure around skincare. Like, if I’m not meeting the size beauty standard, I have to have good skin. There’s a tension between these two things. And we can also talk about the vulnerability of going into these appointments, to any medical appointment when you’re braced for medical weight stigma. Similarly, I think going to the dermatologist is often really anxiety provoking about appearance because you’re expecting to be dissected and told everything about your skin is wrong.JessicaI have a long history of being obsessed with dermatology and taking any pill or prescription that they would give me, starting from probably age 14. I started antibiotics for acne. I was put on birth control pills at 15 for acne. I was on retinoids, tretinoin, Accutane for too long. Then a topical steroid prescription that actually ended up causing something called skin atrophy. This is what kick-started my whole interest in beauty and skincare to begin with, because my skin just stopped working. It was peeling off of my face in chunks. It was a terrible experience at the hands of my dermatologist. I remember after I had pretty much healed my skin myself by learning about how the skin actually works and how unnecessary most products actually are and really paring back, I went to a dermatologist again for my skin cancer screening, and he was like, “Your skin is really dry,” in this very judgmental tone. I was like, “Yeah, it’s dry, because you and your colleagues put me on Accutane for years, which killed my sebaceous gland function and now my skin can’t moisturize itself. That’s not my fault. It’s actually your fault.” It is really frustrating. Especially as somebody who has been through the wringer with dermatology to still get that judgment. Because I’ve actually tried everything you’ve suggested, and it doesn’t work.VirginiaOh, my gosh, that’s so infuriating. I loved the piece you wrote in the newsletter where you talked about Katie Sturino, who is a really great body positive fashion influencer. But she did this whole thing about Botox. It felt like a very weird left turn.JessicaYeah, for sure. I actually see this a lot in the body positive community, especially on Instagram. When it gets to your face, when it gets above the neck, all of that rhetoric goes out the window. In Katie Sturino’s post, she celebrated Botox’s anniversary with a huge cake. So it was like, “eat the cake!” but “freeze your frown lines.” These things really are the same and I see them put together so often, as if they don’t stem from the same exact tenants of oppression. It’s harmful to position yourself as taking a stand against beauty standards, and then use that same platform to feed people another set of beauty standards. People trust you, so it’s really easy for them to internalize that as something that is good and healthy. So what I like to tell people is: Take the beauty content that you consume and swap out certain phrases. For instance, if instead of “frown lines” this Instagram caption had said “fat rolls,” would it feel good to you? If they were like, “get rid of your fat rolls in five minutes?” No, that would obviously be problematic. But for some reason, when we put frown lines in there, it’s like, oh, yeah, no, I have to get rid of this. Or wrinkles and stretch marks, or acne and cellulite, or dull skin and that extra five pounds. It’s a good exercise to insert one for the other and see how empowering it feels to you. I think in the large majority of instances, you’ll see, oh, this is really harmful messaging coming from these these beauty influencers.VirginiaI am so glad you are connecting these dots. I think that ageism hasn’t been touched by the body positive movement, at least not online. I don’t think it’s a conversation we’re having yet. Shout out to my mom, who will be listening to this and saying, “Yes, that’s why I text you every week and say write about ageism.” I’m on it! But she’s right. Even among friends of mine, or folks in this community who would no longer say “I feel fat” in a pejorative way, it’s still very normal and acceptable to say, “I’m so old” or to express remorse about your birthday and about any physical signs of aging. Why do you think we’re still so locked into anti-aging as the goal? Especially since, as you put it in the newsletter piece, it is literally the most unattainable of all beauty standards.JessicaIt’s physically impossible. Never gonna happen. Which is great for the beauty industry. The reason they can push this so hard is because it’s a never-ending goal. There is no point at which you will have bought the right product or gotten the right Botox shot, and think, “I’m done. I’ve anti-aged.” They get you forever once they sell you on anti aging. I also think that this attraction to anti-aging has very spiritual roots. I think that it’s an extension of our fear of death, and our fear of facing our mortality. That’s a very human thing to fear, but we don’t live in a culture where we actually explore those feelings. And then, because we live in a society that also rvalues external appearance, it’s like, okay, well, if I can just look young forever, I won’t actually have to face any of these issues. A big thing I hear from women who are telling me that they need to get Botox, they need to get filler, they need to get the facelift, is: “I look in the mirror, and I don’t look like myself anymore.” And that’s a really scary thing for a lot of people to face. And I get that. But also the point of life is not to look like yourself forever. The point of life is to grow and evolve and change and find a way to be comfortable with that change. If we keep reverting back to former versions of ourselves and calling that progress, that causes a lot of problems.VirginiaPeople say the same thing about weight gain, and particularly postpartum weight gain: “I just don’t feel like myself anymore.” But why is your 16-year-old self or your 26-year-old self the only you that you’re allowed to be? Why did you have to freeze in time with that body? Why can you not change and grow in terms of your physical appearance?JessicaThat’s such a beautiful way to put it. I think with anti-aging, too, there’s a lot of it tied up in productivity culture and also in the way that we treat our elderly community. If we really wanted to address our fear of aging, we would need to start investing in community care and advocating for human rights and health equity and economic security for the elderly and age diversity in the workplace. This idea that once you stop being able to produce output for the economy, that your value as a person diminishes—I think all of that is tied up in what we’re doing to our faces as well. VirginiaI’m thinking this also intersects so heavily with misogyny, right? Because women are held to very different aging standards than men. In the workplace, that plays out in terms of whether you can get a job and whether you can literally financially support yourself. I’ve talked to women who’ve said, “I don’t care about gray hair, but I can’t show up to work with gray hair.” How do you navigate that piece of it?JessicaIt’s really tough. When I get the same question, I do tend to draw a line here between beauty culture and diet culture. Because we’ve gotten to the point in diet culture where we can all agree that life is easier for you in terms of how people treat you, when you’re thin. Is that a good justification to starve yourself and put yourself through these unhealthy practices in order to be thin? I think most people would agree that’s not a good justification. But when it comes to beauty, when it comes to wrinkles, when it comes to gray hair, we allow that. We say okay, yes, this is a good justification. I would like to see us get to the point as a culture where we can agree that giving into these beauty demands is similarly not a sustainable way to exist in the world. Sometimes we feel like we do have to alter our appearance in order to deal with these external judgments. And coping mechanisms aren’t always bad. But you have to understand what is a coping mechanism in your beauty routine and what is truly something you’re doing for your health. What is for “feeling good,” what is a self-expression lipstick and what is actually giving into a really harmful, ageist, sexist standard in order to exist in the world. And then: Where can we divest? Where can we invest in changing those standards instead?VirginiaMaybe a first step is just being honest with yourself. If job security is on the line, you’re not going to stop dying your hair, and I don’t think either one of us is saying you should. You can only challenge what makes sense to challenge. But there’s probably some clarity that comes with being clear and honest with yourself about why you’re choosing these different standards. It can be so interrelated and hard to sort out for yourself why these different things matter.JessicaRight? There’s a great quote that I love to reference from Tressie McMillan Cottom’s book Thick: “‘I like what I like’ is always a capitalist lie.” Oh my gosh, when I first read that it hit me so hard. I repeat it constantly to people because just saying, “Oh, I like doing this,” or “I do this for me,” isn’t really a good enough answer, because there’s always something deeper that informs why you like it and why it makes you feel good. And it normally stems from something in the external culture making you feel really bad first, and that is the thing that we have to address.VirginiaA reader question I answered recently that I think made people the most uncomfortable was someone saying but, what if I just don’t want to be fat? Like, what if that’s just my preference? It’s so hard for us to recognize we didn’t get there in a vacuum. Butter For Your Burnt ToastJessicaI’m working on a post for my newsletter now and I’m trying to create a list of songs, movies, poems, art that reference ugly women—not necessarily ugly, but things you wouldn’t necessarily find attractive. Just to romanticize these features that are often neglected by mainstream beauty media. I was listening to “Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen the other day, and I love that line where he’s like, “You ain’t a beauty, but hey, you’re alright.” And then it’s just this like bleeding heart love song to this woman who’s like, fine, I guess. I just love that and I want more. I want more art about plain, ugly people.VirginiaYes! That’s a great recommendation. Mine is also music, we’re in sync there. This is actually a double recommendation. So novelist Emma Straub, who I recommend just as a human, as a fashion icon, as a writer, everything. I recommend her, and I recommend her new book This Time Tomorrow, which is the best novel I’ve read all year. So that’s your first recommendation. But, a very cool thing Emma does, that she talked about in her newsletter, is she makes playlists for each of her novels, which you can find on Spotify. And they are so good. Particularly for my peers who were teenagers in the 90’s. The one for This Time Tomorrow was really great. It starts with the Kinks song, which is not a 90s song, but it’s a beautiful song. And the one for her novel Modern Lovers, I’m really obsessed with. It starts with Melissa Etheridge. This is the soundtrack that I’ve been putting on—I talked in a recent podcast about how I’m into puzzles now. So that’s my puzzle soundtrack when I’m working on a puzzle. And my eight-year-old really loves it, too. I was like, “do we need a different soundtrack because we’re starting a new puzzle?” And she was like, “No, we need Modern Lovers again.” So we’re really into it.JessicaI’m gonna go listen to it now. VirginiaIt’s so good. Jessica, thank you for being here! Tell us where we can find more of you and support your work.JessicaThank you so much for having me! Pretty much all my work now is through my newsletter The Unpublishable.Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast. If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode. And consider a paid subscription to the Burnt Toast newsletter! You’ll help keep this an ad- and sponsor-free space, and as you know from me and Jessica, that is hard to find. If you subscribe, renew, or gift a subscription to someone this month, you can also enter to win one of 15 books that have been featured on previous Burnt Toast podcasts.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

We have to disconnect the idea of good parenting from health and fitness. Because people don’t have a moral imperative to health.You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting and health. Today I am chatting with Amanda Martinez Beck. Amanda is a fat activist, author and host of the Fat and Faithful podcast. She focuses on the ways that fatphobia and ableism have intertwined with American Christian culture. We are discussing Amanda’s second book, More of You: the Fat Girls Field Guide to the Modern World which came out this week.Some news: Beginning with today’s episode, I’m now able to pay every podcast guest a $100 honorarium, to compensate them for their time and labor. This will make it easier for the podcast to center the voices of marginalized folks (a goal I previously discussed here). And our incredible community of Burnt Toast subscribers is making this possible! So thank you so much, if you’re already subscribed, for helping me do this. And if you’re not, but want to hear more conversations like this one, consider joining us. (I also offer comp subscriptions—just email if that would be helpful to you.)PS. If you enjoy this episode, please also subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! That’s free and a great way to help more folks find the show. And: I wanted to note that Amanda and I recorded this conversation before news of the Uvalde school shooting broke, so you won’t hear us discuss it, though of course it is now all I can think about. As I said, all too recently, after the Buffalo shooting: Remember that gun reform is now a states issue. Everytown has a website that lets you see — state by state — what the laws are in each state. We know that electing new majorities in our target states will make it possible to pass gun safety legislation. The States Project helped flip Maine in 2018, and were able to deepen that new majority in 2020 — this was an outcome in their 2021 session. So this is, yet again, where the Burnt Toast Giving Circle can do some good. Join us, if you need a place to put your rage. Episode 45 TranscriptVirginiaHi Amanda, I’m so glad to have you on! And big congratulations on the new book. Why don’t we start by having you tell us a little bit about yourself, your work, and your family?AmandaOkay. I am a fat activist. My middle name is Martinez, which alludes to my Cuban background. My dad was a Cuban refugee, so I grew up in a home that was half Latinx, half white. My husband Zachary is a university professor and we have four kids, and they’re in bodies that don’t conform to societal standards, most of them. So I’m doing this work for myself and for my kids. I have a podcast called Fat and Faithful, which talks about fat liberation through a Christian lens. I wrote a new book, which we’re going to talk about. And I have an Instagram, which is called @your_body_is_good. In addition to my body image coaching that I do, that’s the work that I’m doing right now.VirginiaThat’s not a short list of work, so thank you for all of that. We met when I interviewed you for a story on how anti-fat bias was impacting the treatment of fat folks with COVID. You were in early recovery, at that point, from COVID. I would love, if you don’t mind, to talk a little bit about how that’s gone. How are you doing?AmandaI’m doing really well, but it has been a long road. I was hospitalized for 40 days and was on a ventilator for two weeks and lost the ability to walk, in addition to just all the respiratory things that come along with COVID. While I was in the hospital, I encountered fatphobia in some very glaring ways and some very systemic ways—you wrote a whole piece on that. But I am on a good path right now. I have been off of oxygen since October of 2021. I was on oxygen for about a year. My lungs are doing really well. And I have more mobility than I did even before going into the hospital. I credit that to a fabulous doctor who’s taken my post-acute COVID syndrome really seriously, or what we call long COVID, to help me with getting on the right medicines, and specifically, to help with the brain fog, to get on medicine for that, and I feel like a new person. Really.VirginiaI worried about you for a long time. I know there are a lot of us who have been rooting for you. I’m glad to hear you’re in a better place and also so grateful that you did share your story, because it was so important, I think, for us to continue to follow this path, past the initial COVID and through long COVID. I know when you’re in the middle of something like that, I know how much additional labor it is to share that and put that out there, so thank you for doing that. I’m curious to hear a little more about what misconceptions came up the most? What do you still find yourself having to challenge or correct with folks around COVID and weight?AmandaIn the beginning, I felt really guilty for getting COVID because there was definitely a narrative that fat people were at higher risk for developing complications from COVID. Even though those risks were correlated, not necessarily caused by, body size, I always felt like people were blaming me. I got blamed explicitly by people on social media for catching COVID in a fat body. I think that people still believe that fatness is an underlying condition or a precondition to getting COVID—which, it’s not. People of all sizes get COVID complications. And long COVID is affecting all types of people. COVID is an equal opportunity virus.VirginiaWe have so much work to do to reframe that conversation. People want to be able to say like, “Well, I’ll be safe, because I can blame this person for getting it. I don’t have the same risk factors,” or whatever, but it’s such a callous way to approach this global pandemic. AmandaFor sure. Not necessarily connected to weight bias, but I think one other misunderstanding about long COVID is the effect that it has on mental health. You remember watching update videos from me in the hospital, and I go back and watch those now and realize just how impaired COVID had me. I’m also encountering heightened mental illness in long COVID. I think that’s something that’s a part of COVID that people are still not taking seriously, which affects so many aspects of health.VirginiaAnd again, there’s the stigma. Anytime there’s a mental component to it, it’s very easy to stigmatize that as well. Well, somehow, while you’ve been doing both your own recovery work from COVID, and putting the story out in the world, you’ve also been writing a book.AmandaI have. VirginiaSo, let’s talk about that. The new book is called More of You. Tell us what inspired you to write this. I also do want to hear how you got it written during all of this.AmandaThe memory of writing is a bit of a blur, but I have a fantastic editor, who walked me through the process very graciously. So the book is called More of You: the Fat Girl’s Field Guide to the Modern World. Before I had COVID, I realized I’d stumbled through fatness, learning how to exist in my today body and how to take up space. I wished that I’d had some sort of guidebook that could walk through these different things before I had to experience them. And I didn’t have anything like that. And so I wrote More of You to be the guidebook that I wish that I had had, when I was first coming to accept my body and not wanting to take up less space. Specifically, I targeted it towards what I wish I had known in grade school: That I have the right to exist in my body today, that I have the right to take up space, that I have the right to wear what I want, and eat what I want, and that I have the right to compassionate medical care. And just stating those things, what I call The Fat Girl’s Bill of Rights, is transformative for me today. I can’t imagine how transformative it will be for my own children and the children who get to know these truths that their parents are trying to put into practice in their lives. I know that you’re doing that work, too.VirginiaOne of the things I find most valuable about the book is the way you hold fatphobia and ableism accountable for each other. I think this is a common tension in the disability rights and fat rights communities. We often see fat folks leaning into “But I’m healthy” as this defense against anti fat bias. I’ve certainly done it. And I would imagine there may be a parallel experience of wanting to perform being a “good” disabled person through your thinness. And we know that relying on health as this sort of marker of virtue is really problematic. How does this hold us back from making progress on both of these issues?AmandaSo I first encountered the idea of performative fatness, “I’m healthy, so I’m a good performing fat person,” in a web comic by the fat activist Stacey Bias called The Good Fatty Archetypes. And she has a list of 12 different ways that fat people can adapt to their environment to prove that they’re worthy of dignity. And one of them is the Fat Unicorn, where it’s like, “I am just fat even though I exercise all the time. I’m just, you know, a unicorn.”She talks about the different ways that you can perform fitness virtue signaling. And it’s setting up this idea that we have to earn our our position of dignity, to earn respect. That’s really a very capitalistic idea, which Stacy talks about in her comic. We don’t have to earn dignity, we possess inherent dignity. To be able to look at a fat body as morally neutral or even morally good takes digging below those good fatty archetypes of, “but I’m healthy, but I’m an athlete.” In a disabled fat body, there is inherent goodness. So we have to look at how assuming that someone’s health and ability is based on their moral virtue, how that is not a fair assumption. That’s actually ableism. I’m coming from a Christian lens, so we see this in the Christian scripture when there’s a man who was born blind, and the people asked Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” And Jesus is like, “Neither.” And so I really feel that for a parallel to fatness. It’s not a moral failing of anyone that someone is fat. It just is. And fat people themselves perpetuate this idea that “as long as I’m healthy, it’s okay to be fat.” I say, “If it’s not okay for everyone to be fat, it’s not okay for anyone to be fat.”VirginiaI’m just looking at how Stacy explains the Fat Unicorn here and she says, “What does it mean to seek legitimacy for the fat body on the basis of its capacity for health? Who gets excluded or silenced when we do so?” AmandaSomeone much wiser than me has said that ability is a temporary condition. We are all headed towards disability of some sort or another. We have to separate that from morality. In the same way we have to separate body size from morality. Because body size and ability are a lot of genetics, systemic issues, and societal issues. We can’t just say A plus B equals C when we’re looking at a body like that.VirginiaAnother line that really resonated with me from the book, is when you wrote that “Nobody has a moral obligation to be healthy, and we don’t owe health to our community or our families or our kids.” And that believing that you do is this cornerstone of ableism. I think this is often a line people come up against where they may say, Okay, i’s fine to be unhealthy. But of course, we we should all be trying to be healthy for our kids. And I think particularly for mothers, right? There’s this huge pressure that being a good mother is synonymous with being a mother who can chase your kids around the playground. AmandaThe question that I probably get asked most frequently, when I talk about being okay with my fatness is, but don’t you owe it to your kids to be healthy? To live a longer life to be with them? There’s two layers happening there. One, I’m accused often of being on the verge of death, like I’m just about to keel over—which, post-COVID, okay, there were some rough moments. But just because I inhabit a fat body does not mean that I am more susceptible to early death. The numbers actually show that people in the BMI category of overweight live longer than people in the normal category. People assume that I’m going to die young, which is really hard to encounter day in and day out. When I was young, someone I loved, told me, in tears, “I just don’t want you to die of a heart attack at age 20.” Which is a very emotionally manipulative thing to say to a teenager—and to anyone, because none of us is guaranteed another day. We’re all in the same boat. My life is lived, as as much as I can choose, in a morally upright way. And I define morality as treating my neighbors as I would treat myself. So, number one, it’s not good for mental health to live with that assumption. Number two: The claim that I can’t be a good mom, if I’m in a disabled or, quote, “unhealthy” body is really an ableist thing to say. Because there are parents of all stripes, with all different levels of ability, who are amazing parents. And just because someone’s in a wheelchair, we don’t automatically assume they’re a bad mother. But if I’m fat and walking with a cane, there is that assumption. And it is inherently ableist to say because you don’t have full capacity of your body, you cannot be a good parent. And this has real consequences, because children are being taken from their fat parents. It’s not something that we’re just fearmongering about. We have to disconnect the idea of good parenting from health and fitness because people don’t have a moral imperative to health.VirginiaIt’s such a narrow definition of good motherhood. And it’s implying that there’s only one way to love your kids. That there’s a right way to love your kids, as opposed to allowing for this diversity of experiences. I’m glad you brought up the issue of how it gets used around parental rights. I did some reporting on that for Slate and what I heard from lots of folks in the foster system is that it’s not always the top reason that parents lose parental rights, but it’s something that caseworkers know to look for. It’s something that they can add to the list when they’re building the case. That struck me as, in a way, almost more chilling. Because if you’re a parent going through a really hard time with mental health, addiction, whatever, the knowledge that your body will also be weaponized against you in that conversation is really scary. I admit I myself, in the past, have started and stopped at well, of course, I want to be healthy for my kids. But it’s just like, “of course, you want a healthy baby” without unpacking the ableism of that. Children are born with disabilities every day, and they are very worthy of our love. AmandaI think that we all have this innate desire for goodness. We’re looking to be good, to experience goodness. And I think a lot of people assume that to have a good body means to have a healthy and fit body. But I like to go old school and look at Aristotle. Aristotle says that a thing is good when it fulfills its purpose. So this is where the conversation about what is the purpose of my body comes to the fore. And when you say that the purpose of my body is health, then you have to also acknowledge that health is much bigger than just physical health—it’s also emotional health, mental health, and spiritual health. If you have an ATV four wheeler and you just pump up the air on that one physical health tire, it’s gonna be a rocky road. So, even if we agree at some point that health is the purpose of my body, we have to recognize that physical health or the way that we look cannot be the end all be all. But I say that the purpose of my body isn’t health or thinness or perfection. It’s relationship. My body can be good, no matter my ability or my size, because I can have relationship with anyone and it can be a fruitful and deep relationship. And that’s what really keeps me going with my kids. When I do feel that shame of sitting in my car when they’re playing on the playground. I know that the other 95 percent of the day, they’re with me, and we’re investing in our relationship. And it’s part of my relationship to let them go and experience things that I don’t have experience with.VirginiaI love reframing it around relationships. That’s so beautifully put.AmandaWhen we treat health as a moral imperative, we wind up applying individualistic “answers” to a complex, system-wide situation. Because if we see morality on an individual basis, which we do, then person A, person B, Person C all have the same responsibility to health, but they might have vastly different access to resources. We don’t have universal health care. That’s a big deal. And then the racism, transphobia, and fatphobia that exists in our current system makes it look like certain types of people are not being morally upright if they don’t achieve some sort of health level that we think they should. VirginiaYou also talk a bit in the book about the anti-fat bias you’ve experienced in the church, and as someone who’s not Christian, I would just love to understand this a little more. How do diet culture and Christian culture intersect? And how do we start to untangle them?AmandaI grew up believing that thinness was next to godliness. That the smaller I was, the more my body would reflect the submissive woman that I thought God was calling me to be. And there’s nothing small or submissive about me. I’m very big and my personality is big, my voice is loud. I take up more space than a lot of people. My journey of clawing my way out of a fundamentalist, elitist version of Christianity to find that that’s not what God is requiring of me showed me that diet culture and Christian culture in the United States have a lot in common. Number one, that idea that being smaller is morally better. Number two is purity rules. Christian culture is full of ways that you can be sexually pure, but also there’s this idea of being dietetically pure. In diet culture, we see that where we talk about “clean” and “unclean” food. We’re moralizing food. Bad and good food, that all that kind of language is religious language.VirginiaNow that you spelled that out, that makes total sense that that didn’t just begin and end with Gwyneth Paltrow, but has deeper roots. It’s fascinating.AmandaI’m reading the Christian New Testament, and there’s a scene where the The apostle Peter, who’s the first pope, right? This really important guy gets his vision of all these different kinds of foods, foods that he thought were unclean. And God says, “Don’t call what I’ve made clean, unclean.” And there’s this way that Peter applies it. “Oh, I can’t call people who eat unclean foods unclean either because God has made them clean.” And so what for whatever reason, there’s this thing that we do when we talk about clean and unclean foods, we apply it to the people that eat those things. VirginiaYeah, we go right to their bodies.AmandaWe go straight to their bodies, and that is classist AF. Because access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and what we our culture considers, quote, “good food,” it’s just inaccessible to a large swath of the population. It enables people to discriminate against the poor, those who live in food deserts, people who eat free lunches at school, like my kids. There’s there’s just a huge amount of classist behavior there—and of course, racist and fatphobic behavior. So really finding that all food is good food is has been something instrumental in my journey towards fat liberation.Butter For Your Burnt ToastAmandaI am lately obsessed with Jon Batiste, the musician. He is the leader of the band on the Stephen Colbert show, but he is much more celebrated than that. His album called We Are won Album of the Year at the Grammys this year, and he helped write, or did most of the writing for the soundtrack to “Soul.” the Pixar movie.VirginiaOoooh, excellent.AmandaAnd I’m just obsessed. I highly recommend his new album and also the Soul soundtrack.VirginiaAmazing. We have not watched “Soul” yet. My kids adore “Inside Out,” but I’ve been holding off on “Soul” because my four-year-old is in that phase of being very anxious about death. AmandaBeen there. Yeah, I have one sentimental kid who laments over the death of leaves. VirginiaThe other week, she picked a flower and said, “Can we put it in a vase?” And I said, Yes. And she said, “But will it die?” And I said, “Well, yes.” And she was like, “I don’t want it in the house then, it’ll make me too sad.”AmandaI feel you strongly.VirginiaBut I am dying to see “Soul.” And in the meantime, I can listen to his music. So that’s a great recommendation. My recommendation is a podcast. I just listened to the first episode of Ghost Church by Jamie Loftus. Sara Louise Petersen, who was on the podcast a few weeks ago, recommended it in her newsletter, and I checked it out. It is fascinating. She is investigating American Spiritualism, which is the tradition of communing with the dead. It’s a fringe religion, I guess, is the technical term. I just knew nothing about this whole world. And I think it’s always challenging with this kind of journalism, trying to understand a culture in a world that you don’t belong to, whether you’re going to come in and completely interrogate it and take it down, or whether you’re going to fall on that spectrum. And she walks the line really nicely. She’s very respectful of the people. She is herself, somewhat of a believer in some of the concepts, but also has a lot of questions. It’s a really well done exploration where you’re sort of allowed to draw your own conclusion. She’s not saying it’s all garbage. She’s not saying it’s all true.Well, Amanda, thank you so much for being here. I really loved this conversation. And again, cannot encourage readers enough to get your book. We covered some of the heavier aspects of the book, the book itself is a really delightful read. Amanda is a very light and fun writer. So I hope people will check it out. Tell us where we can find more of your work and support you!AmandaI am on Instagram as @your_body_is_good. I’m on Twitter at @AmandaMBeck. And I am on the interwebs on Facebook, too. I’m a millennial, so good Facebooker. I have a group on there called All Bodies Are Good Bodies. It’s a fat positive, body neutral space where people can have community apart from diet culture. VirginiaThank you for being here!Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting and health. Today we’re doing a very fun Ask Me Anything episode. A lot of great questions came in, so I’ve asked Corinne to help out with this one. For folks who don’t know, Corinne works on Burnt Toast with me and she is also the founder of @selltradeplus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. She very graciously agreed to come ask me your questions and even answer one of her own. Also! We’re planning another AMA ep for next month, to celebrate ONE YEAR of Burnt Toast (in its current fully-formed newsletter/podcast iteration). So if you’ve got even more questions for us, and especially if you have questions about the newsletter, or my book (which is also getting done next month!) put them here. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! And subscribe to the Burnt Toast newsletter for episode transcripts, reported essays, and more.Episode 44 TranscriptVirginiaHi Corinne! I have drafted you to come on and help with this AMA episode. These things are always so weird and I have feelings about them. So, I’m glad you’re here to do it with me.CorinneI love an AMA.VirginiaThey are the kind of thing that I kind of hate doing myself but also love other people’s. So I recognize that people enjoy it. CorinneHere’s our first question: I’d love to know if there’s any body related topic you ever have a hard time discussing with your kids. And if when that happens, what do you do to get better at having the conversation / beginning the conversation?VirginiaSo for context, my kids are four and eight. I’m sure there are many body conversations we have yet to have that may be hard for me in the future. But, I have covered genitalia in a lot of detail. I’ve explained what the clitoris is for. And certainly, there’s a lot of fat positive talk in our house. All of those conversations I sort of weirdly enjoy. I guess because often in parenting, you’re not really having meaningful conversations with your kids, you’re just trying to move them through the day. When they ask a question like that, it’s like, oh, this is an opportunity to actually tell you something I know something about, it’s weirdly rewarding. So those questions don’t throw me too much. The stress point for me on this is more related to food, when I’m navigating my children’s strong feelings about not wanting to eat what I’m serving, what they wish I was serving, that kind of thing. I’m just more exhausted by it and annoyed by it, whereas with the curiosity about bodies I’m like, “Yeah, man! Let’s be curious about bodies! That’s great!” But when it’s more feelings about me wanting to keep all foods neutral but maybe once a week we eat a vegetable, I can sometimes feel more unsure in the moment. My kids also can use my work against me, which is very smart of them, but also frustrating. There will be a lot of, “It’s my body, my choice” when it’s like, “But can you brush your teeth?” And then it’s like, well, crap. Good work, guys. I would also say there are definitely conversations where I was overwhelmed the first time we had them. The great thing is you never have the conversation just once. I remember trying to explain periods to both my kids. The first time I kind of traumatized them a little bit. I explained what a period was and my younger daughter was like, “Then it’s over and you’re better, right?” And I was like, “Oh, no. You do it every month for the rest of your life.” And then she sobbed “I don’t want to bleed forever,” and went upstairs to her room. And I was like, Do I explain about IUDs? Or have I already taken this too far?I have plenty of examples of we had a conversation, and I kind of fucked it up. But then you get another chance! And you can normalize it and come back to it. Even if you feel like you really freeze in the moment, or tell them more than they’re asking for and they cry, you can fix it later. Or, you know, it’s good for them to have stuff to work on in therapy. CorinneThat seems like good advice. Next question! I am pregnant with my second, due in mid July. My first kid will have just turned four. Seems like your kids have a similar age gap. Got any tips for handling this major life transition for our four year old? I feel like he will inevitably hate us and the baby occasionally, but hoping to find ways to maintain some sanity and happiness at the same time. Hopefully?VirginiaI love this age spread! My kids are four years and two months apart. It was awesome in the baby stage because the older kid can really get into being a big kid. When my kids were three, they didn’t really want to be big kids, they still wanted me to do everything for them. Then sometime around four, they both have switched into “No, wait. I can do it!” and feeling good about that. So, you could lean into like, “Can you go get me the diaper? Can you go get the bottle?” and they would like having the jobs and like being in charge. And the other thing about four, I don’t know what your situation is, but mine was in a full day of preschool at that age. So she had her own world. And she would get a lot of attention for being a big sister, but she also could just be with her friends and get attention and wasn’t competing. I think that is easier than when you have two under two. That would be a lot more exhausting. I did buy some new cheap coloring books and stickers and that kind of thing and I stuck them in a box and it was called her “big sister box.” Then when I was breastfeeding or bottle feeding or going to be stuck in one place with the baby for a bit, I could say, “Do you want to get out your big sister box?” and she would have an activity she could do so that she was less enraged that I wasn’t actively paying attention to her. We didn’t end up having to use it a ton, but it definitely helped in the first couple of weeks. But it will be a huge shift. My relationship with my older child did change a lot, just because now there are two of them. So just looking for ways to carve out time with your older kid can be helpful to reinforce your bond with with him. Especially in the early stages, there would be a lot of like, “The baby’s just gonna like sleep on the floor here while I’m doing something with the bigger kid.” It is funny because with your first kid you would think I should be paying attention to you all the time. You do ignore the littler one a little more the second time, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.The other thing I will say for four years apart, there are ages where they can really play together and be really close. Ours were really close at six and two and three and seven. Four and eight, there’s a little bit more of a developmental change. But it’s actually starting to come back again. I give two thumbs up to this age spread. CorinneWhat’s your childcare situation? Do you feel like you get enough time for yourself and your marriage? I have a one year old and I’m definitely struggling on the enough time front, even though I outsource most tasks.VirginiaYou have a one year old, so it’s just terrible right now. And it will get better. I’m sorry, you’re in a very hard time. I think one is, in some ways, harder than the newborn stage when they’re like a little cute house plant and you can put them places. But one, you really can’t multitask because they’re always one head injury away from a hospital trip.  Right now, we don’t have childcare outside of the school day. Our kids are in school from about 8:30am to whoever’s picking them up has to leave at 2:30pm. Except two days a week when they have after school activities, so they stay later and get picked up between four and five. Dan and I trade off on who does the afternoon pickups. I do Mondays and Fridays. And he does Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday (which includes their later activity days). So I get three days a week where I have a pretty full workday. I’m back from school drop off by nine-ish, and I’m at my desk till between four and five. So it’s pretty manageable, although I do have to plan carefully to remember to leave my desk at 2:30 on the days I have to pick them up from school. But it is not a 50 hour workweek, it’s not compatible with a corporate job. That’s for sure. We’re lucky that we both have pretty flexible careers. In terms of feeling like I get enough time for myself and my marriage, it’s like one or the other, I would say? There’s the hours they’re in child care, but there’s also the morning of getting kids out the door, then the afternoon and early part of the evening is very family focused. We’ve got one kid in bed by seven and one kid still around until about 8 or 8:30. And I like to go to bed at 8:30, so that’s kind of my day. So, yeah, it is tricky to fit in either time together or time alone. [Virginia Note: I completely forgot to give my best tip for getting alone time, which is: I get up between 5-6am and the rest of my family isn’t up till 7:30am. So I start my day with a chunk of time to myself. This is essential to my ability to love them when they wake up.]We’re still working on it, I would say. We do try to watch a show together a few nights a week, and on Friday nights, we feed the kids early and order takeout for ourselves after they go to bed, so we can have dinner without them. Other nights, he does his own thing and I do a puzzle and maybe the 8-year-old hangs out and reads. Now that we’re not in COVID craziness, we are able to get babysitters for date nights or nights out with friends. Also at these ages—and you are not here at the one year old—but with a four and eight year old, it is much less of a big deal for one of us to go away with friends for the weekend. So we’ve been doing that more, or even just saying, “I’m going to be out for a chunk of hours on the weekend.” Like I would feel rage at being left with small children when they were under three because it’s just so much work. Now it’s much more like my kids can entertain themselves and play together and I can be out in the garden while they’re doing stuff and it’s not as draining. So, it definitely gets better. But yeah, the one year old year is a time where having enough time for yourself is very hard.I feel like I just convinced a lot of people not to have kids. Well, maybe I’m not wrong.CorinneYou have mentioned that your husband is thin and athletic. So is mine. How do you manage your feelings around gaining weight while he has stayed thin. This is an area that I’m struggling with for myself.VirginiaYes, skinny husbands are the worst! One thing that has been helpful is, as I have been able to untangle weight and health, I understand that both of our health pictures are quite nuanced in different ways. Just because he’s thin and can run a lot does not necessarily mean he’s “healthier” than me by every marker, if that makes sense. I don’t feel like I need to compare our cardiovascular abilities. Which, obviously his are superior because he’s a marathon runner and I’m not. The other thing about me and Dan is we went to high school together. We actually went to middle school together, too. CorinneWhoa. Big reveal.VirginiaIt’s a whole thing. So we know a lot of people who knew us a long time ago and when we run into people who knew us a long time ago, I do have to do some self talk. I look very different than we looked 20 years ago and he looks like the same, but a little more gray hair. It just is what it is, you know? His whole family is built that way. They have of one type of person they make with their genes. My family has a different type of person that we make with our genes. And our person changes more through the years, and this is normal. It’s not a value judgment on either of our body types. But I’ve had a few moments over the years of feeling weird about that and needing to process it. What it also really comes down to is that he’s never made me feel weird about my body. He has been a fan of my body throughout its journey. So I think as long as you’ve got that in place, then it shouldn’t matter. My sense of my body does not hinge on my husband’s feelings about it. But if there is a way in which your thin partner is making you feel bad about your larger body, that’s a whole other thing you need to unpack and work through. And that’s not a part of our story. It’s very tricky because it’s not just about what your weight is. It’s also about how you both think about weight. Corinne There was a TikTok going around for a while where some thin lady was like, “I have to tell you, try on your boyfriend’s jeans! They’re amazing!” and then all these bigger women responding like, “LOL, Yeah. They go up to my knees.”VirginiaThe other day, I grabbed the wrong coat to take the dog out to pee. And I was like, “Why doesn’t it zip?” Oh, right. It’s not mine. We have similar looking Northface coats. And that is irritating, but also should not be irritating. It is such a stupid stereotype. It is rooted in no reality that women can’t be bigger than their male partners or that you can’t be bigger than your partner of any gender. This is such an odd thing that we are so locked into. Another thing I would say is anytime you start to feel weird about it, remember that the person to blame is not your thin husband and not your fat body. It’s the culture that’s making you think there’s something wrong with a totally normal dynamic. There are millions of thin men married to fat women who think that their fat wives are amazing. And they are not heroes, by the way. That’s the other thing. CorinneThe next question is, What do you guys think about the “you gotta find the perfectly fitting bra” craze?VirginiaOkay, I’m going to want to know your thoughts about this because you are more of a fashion expert than me. My first feeling is, it is a ton of marketing hype. And, I do hate a badly fitting bra. This one’s tricky! What do you think?CorinneGod, I don’t know. I have such a complicated relationship with bras.VirginiaThey’re a very hard garment. It feels like such an industry-created problem, though. Maybe we should do bra science at some point. CorinneI go through waves of like, “F**k bras!!!” where I don’t want to wear a bra or I just want to wear a sports bra. And then like, “No, I really need this architectural garment that fits me perfectly.” But it does sometimes seem like they just don’t make enough sizes. There are too many variables.VirginiaIt is a complicated garment. I shouldn’t say it would be so easy to make bras that fit everybody. The human body has infinite variations. And this is a particularly variable section of anatomy. At least not since I had kids—I don’t know if it’s a pregnancy/postpartum thing that never quite went away—I cannot say f**k bras. I wear a bra every day, even in COVID when everyone was not wearing bras. I was like, I’m wearing one. What’s wrong with me? Am I bad feminist? I just am more comfortable in one.CorinneI mean, that sounds like an argument for finding the perfectly fitting bra! Weirdly, I just want to ask you, what is it?VirginiaWhat is the perfect bra?CorinneIs that TMI for the podcast?VirginiaNo! I buy them from barenecessities.com and I think they carry the best variety of brands. I have found their customer service quite helpful. There are two brands I like on there. One is Birdsong, for like more of a structured like, you take it off and it’s still shaped like boobs kind of bra. The other one is Curvy Couture. Terrible name. CorinneI’ve never heard either of those. VirginiaThis is not sponsored! We don’t do sponsored content. But I’ve been wearing both those brands for years. Because I wear a bra every day, they do wear out after a year or two and I replace them. I find them both pretty comfortable. I’m not saying I put them on and it’s like I’m in a warm bath. They’re still an underwire bra. But I have issues with chafing and movement. I don’t feel comfortable. I am a larger breasted person, but it’s not like, “Oh, I wish they were smaller.” It’s just like, I feel uncomfortable with the way they move around without support. I don’t enjoy that experience, from a physical pain perspective. I’m more comfortable in one. But this feels like a problem the industry created by not making good bras and then they could say 60 percent of women are wearing the wrong size bra. You need to buy all new bras. If you had just made them better from the beginning, Oprah wouldn’t have had to reveal that to us. CorinneAlso like, could there be a little standardization? It just feels so confusing.VirginiaOne thing I like about Bare Necessities is they convert the sizes between brands. So like, I’m like a 38DDD in most brands, but in some brands that’s a 38H and in some brands, that’s a 36F. They seem to have grasped how the different brands change. That’s a very helpful feature that saves me a lot of returns.I will say Thirdlove bras are s**t. With all their claims of so many sizes. Nope. Nope. Didn’t work for me.CorinneAt some point, during the pandemic, I did the—there’s a bra Reddit that goes really deep into measuring yourself. And I did that. They have a calculator. Then you can post photos for fit feedback. So, I did that and I was like, oh, none of these fit. And it was like a lot of math.VirginiaI don’t want to do math when I’m shopping. CorinneIf I were going to try again, I would try to go somewhere in person, which is another recommendation I’ve heard. Go get measured by a person who knows what they’re doing. VirginiaI haven’t done that in years. I haven’t done that since pre-COVID, if not longer. I live an hour from any good stores. I’d have to be like, “Instead of taking an afternoon to have lunch with a friend, I’m devoting four hours to a bra shopping mission.” Like, I don’t have that much time to myself.Corinne“I’m taking a weekend just to find a bra.” Yeah.VirginiaThat is not what I’m going to do with my precious child-free hours.CorinneThat’s a good point. It’s definitely just not a priority for me. VirginiaOn the sports bras, have you found a sports bra that you feel like is actually supportive? CorinneI’m more in the soft bra zone right now. There’s a few I like. I like the Free Label Dani Bra. It’s bamboo. The Dani is the biggest bust Free Label style and that is the one that works the best for me. I also wore those True & Co bras for a long time. They’re very thin and very stretchy and I’m definitely outside of their size zone, but it kind of fits.VirginiaYeah, I do feel like there is a place for the soft t-shirt-y kind of bra. Mostly just like giving you a piece of elastic and that’s it. Yeah, I do I have ARQ. That’s the one that crazy high waisted underwear, right? I have the one of their bras and I like it for that.CorinneWow, I hate their bras, so… VirginiaSo guys, don’t feel like we’re giving you hardcore recommendations!CorinneThere is no perfectly fitting bra.VirginiaDon’t be influenced. We’re not here to influence. But I do enjoy that ARQ bra because I feel like underwire is wearing permanent grooves in my body at this point. CorinneSometimes I feel like underwire bras like push my boobs out too far. You’re creating an impediment for me going around corners or whatever. You know what I mean?They just need to be strapped down and we’re good to go.VirginiaJust be efficient and not too much in my way. That’s what I’m looking for.CorinneExactly. So that’s the perfectly fitting bra.VirginiaIn conclusion, yes, we think it’s marketing hype. Also, we wish the the bras fit better. CorinneAlright. Next question. Would you rather 1. talk about food or 2. talk about bodies?VirginiaI was thinking when we were talking about conversations that are hard to have with your kids, I for sure am more comfortable having the body conversations. But my whole entry point into this world and my authority as someone in this world definitely began with food, because I wrote about my experiences with my older daughter and the feeding tube. And then, breaking out of diet culture. I’ve done so much reporting on diets. So it’s kind of funny that in my own life, I don’t want to talk about food. And I can’t decide if that’s actually because it’s hard or I’m sick of it because this is also my work. But I do find food really annoying to talk about. I feel like when you talk to friends or family members about food, or just in the world about food, food brings up so much. People get really performative and people want to tell you about their diets and they want to be really definitive about it. It’s such an annoying thing to navigate. They want to apologize for how they’re eating like, then you have to deal with that. So I guess I still would rather talk about bodies. There’s pros and cons to it. Where would you land on that one?CorinneI agree with you. Food is really annoying to talk about. Similarly, I used to work with cookbooks and I worked in restaurants. I’ve done a lot of work with food. I feel like maybe people are less aware of cultural stuff around food, like people are more willing to just be like, “I’m Paleo and sugar is bad for you.” And I think people are a little more like connected to their bodies and understand how criticizing how people look can be bad. Or something like that?Virginia I mean, they can both be landmines, for sure. But yeah, I think people tend to say more definitive things about food. And then you’re in this position of like, do I question that? Do I agree with that? What do I do? It can be trickier to navigate.CorinneMaybe everyone has a little more sensitivity about their own bodies? VirginiaA smidge more sensitivity, depending on the room. I mean, from a journalistic perspective, I would say I enjoy both equally, like researching a diet and debunking it, that’s very satisfying. And I like writing about questions about our bodies. I guess I’ve just done more of the food stuff and so now it’s sometimes the body questions are more interesting or feel fresher to me just because of like my trajectory.CorinneHow did you decide that sharing your personal life, home, children, husband, vacation, etc, will be part of your public professional persona? I follow you on social media because I’m interested in your writing, but because of that, I see what feels like a lot of your personal life. Was this a conscious choice? Can you be a writer in the era of social media without the sharing?VirginiaI don’t think you can and I hate it. It feels necessary to share in order to be a person people want to follow on Instagram and then hopefully read their work. There’s also the fact that I did make the conscious decision to write about a personal experience, which was having a child on a feeding tube. In doing that, I sort of tipped myself into a category of writer who shares some personal things. I could have made the decision to stay a much more straightforward journalistic reporter. Prior to having that experience, I don’t think a lot of my life was on the internet in the same way. I had my first kid in 2013. Instagram was just a baby. All of it was new. I don’t think we were having to do as much sharing in the same way. If I had stayed in the more traditional New York Times health reporter type of beat, you don’t know a lot about those people’s lives. But that type of writer doesn’t get to take stands on issues and has to stay in a very traditional model of journalism that I was ready to break out of and do a little more activism journalism, like I do now. So some of it was conscious. I do also want to say that, yes, there are categories of my life that I share on Instagram, but there is so much of my life you are not seeing. I think it’s really important that people understand that even when it feels like you’re seeing quite a lot, you’re seeing so little. I share houseplants and gardening because they are actually quite impersonal topics that are fun to talk about with people. I do have other interest that would feel more sensitive to share, you know what I’m saying? Well maybe I don’t. That’s kind of all I do. But I could! Also: I no longer show my children’s faces on social media. That was a decision I made a few years ago, as they’ve gotten older and more distinctive looking. Every now and then one slips into a story, but I pretty much don’t. And I don’t share a lot of specifics about their personalities or struggles they’re having. I’ve never talked about toilet training either one of them, and I never will. There is a lot that is off limits. If I have a fight with my husband, you’re not going to hear about it. I think everybody in this space is constantly drawing and redrawing those lines for ourselves. And it’s really hard because there is the pressure to share more and more. I can draw a direct line towards when I’m being more open and personal on Instagram, I get more engagement and then that brings more people over to the newsletter to engage with my work. That is a shitty thing you have to decide. Getting a dog was helpful because dog content feels innocuous. I can talk about the dog and then share less about the kids, I guess. Penelope has no boundaries with social media. What are your thoughts on all of that?CorinneI am glad to not have to do more of it. It seems really hard. I definitely appreciate that there are lots of things people aren’t sharing on social media.VirginiaBut people do often feel like they know you really well. And I get that because I do it too with people I follow! And it’s sort of funny to then exchange DMs with someone or get an email from someone. Like, of course it feels like you know me because you see my face talking to you or I’m showing you the garden. It’s an odd way of knowing people, I guess.CorinneHave you ever gotten recognized on the street?VirginiaNo, that would be so weird. I am not big enough for that. I have friends who have, though, and it is a weird experience. Interestingly, some of the weirdness has come less from social media and more from traditional media. When I first wrote about my daughter’s condition in some bigger media outlets, we did get some really weird emails and mail. Nothing that was endangering my family—although that absolutely happens, and is revolting. Just things where people were assuming a familiarity with my family that I was not comfortable with. One other small decision I made is that I never show the exterior of my house on Instagram. Even though I show you the garden, I don’t show you the house. And I don’t plan to change that because that doesn’t need to be a thing people who live in other states can find. So it is an ongoing question. And it is something everyone I know who is any kind of public persona on Instagram has revisited and struggled with.CorinneHow does newsletter writing compare to book writing, compare to magazine writing? And which do you prefer?VirginiaI love this question. I have to say writing the newsletter is probably my favorite job I’ve ever had. It is for sure better than magazine writing. Watch me block myself out of any future magazine work! When I say magazines, there’s only like three magazines left in the world, so I’m really talking about magazines and websites. Any sort of prestige media outlets, I guess we could say. The big difference is when you write for other people like that, the pro is you have an editor and a fact checker and a copy editor and an art person and a whole team, in most places, going over the piece making it really perfect. There’s a lot of added support that I have had to, with the newsletter, figure out which parts I need to replicate and how to replicate. And Corinne, you are doing it—so, thank you. There were also times when I wrote pieces that were really controversial and it was nice that the publishing house had a lawyer who would vet it and make sure we wouldn’t get sued. But when you’re writing for another outlet, you have to fit your work into their vision. If you want to write about fatphobia, that’s hard because a lot of these media outlets either haven’t heard of it or are perpetuating it daily in their health coverage. It’s such a relief to not have to make those have those negotiations and make those compromises. I don’t miss that at all. I will also say from a work/life balance perspective, it’s so much better, because when you are freelancing for many different outlets, the odds of somebody emailing you the night you go on vacation to say they need a complete revise of a 3,000 word story—Oh my God, it probably happened to us at least 50% of vacations, if not more? I have friends who are just always working on vacation. They bring the laptop, they know that an editor is going to need something. So the fact that I can now carve out that time for myself and do a rerun episode that week—that control has been amazing. Newsletter subscribers don’t seem to get mad if we skip a week. So that’s been really lovely!Book writing I do also really love, although I am at the point with this book where I’m ready to be done writing it because I have written over 80,000 words. It’s a lot of words, and I’m tired. But I do really love it. The thing about book writing is you’re kind of alone, right? You’re in this little world writing the book. You don’t get a lot of feedback. So you do sort of worry at times, I’m thousands of words into this thing. And if it’s bad, no one’s checking on it right now. And with newsletters, we’re getting feedback from readers every week. So that part of it also I do love. That’s been a nice balance because I have days where I’m in book mode, really feeling really detached from the world and then I get to come back to the newsletter and this conversation is happening and I’m participating in it.They are three very different mediums for sure. I’m sure I will write for magazines again. So, magazine editors, don’t take it too personally that I don’t like it. Now, can we have one question that came in for Corinne! So I’m throwing it over to you now. What is @selfiefay’s favorite thing to cook for company? And how does she rule so hard? @selfiefay is Corinne’s personal Instagram handle. Corinne, tell us, what do you cook? And why do you rule so hard?CorinneThe best, most recent thing I’ve made for company—which, such a funny question, because who’s having company right now? I’ve had company not very often recently, which is sad. But the thing I’ve made that was great most recently was this “a nice lasagna” from Julia Turshen’s cookbook, Small Victories. It is special because you make your own pasta, which is both easier and more delicious than I was expecting. You also use a food processor, so it’s a little bit less messy. And you mix creme fraiche into the tomato sauce instead of using ricotta or making béchamel. It was very delicious and sort of impressive.VirginiaYou made your own pasta. That’s very impressive!CorinneYeah, I would definitely recommend that recipe and that cookbook and Julia Turshen in general.VirginiaYes! General recommendation of Julia Turshen. She is amazing. The lasagna sounds awesome.CorinneDo you have a favorite thing to cook for a company?VirginiaI was actually just thinking about this because we have not had friends over for dinner. We have not had a dinner party since COVID and I really do want to have one soon. But I was paralyzed trying to remember what to make. I often do a pasta because I make really good pasta, but I have a couple friends who are gluten-free by necessity, so then it’s figuring that piece out. I need some dinner party inspiration, for sure, so I will check out Julia’s cookbook. That’s a great suggestion.CorinneIf you could do any job in the world, including the one you invent, what would it be?VirginiaI mean, I think I’ve invented it, to be honest. I do not and have never, for the last 20 years, had a job that is easy to explain to people at parties. My grandmother was always like, what does she do? Now when I’m like, “Well, I used to write a column for the times and now I have this Substack,” people are like, “What?” So yeah, I did invent it. That said, if I couldn’t be a writer, for some reason, you know, like writing didn’t exist, I think my other dream job would be garden designer. Not a landscaper, but I would come out and putter around and prune things and plant things for people. The design piece of it I really love. What would yours be?CorinneThis is a tough question. When I think of my dream job, I think I want to be somewhere really beautiful and not have to work a lot. Making jam in the countryside or something. I’d make tiny batches of jam and sell them for a lot of money. VirginiaThat sounds delightful. I would buy your overpriced jam. CorinneI also really need a garden designer. VirginiaWell, we can trade services. I’ll design the garden where you grow the fruit for your jam.CorinneOh, perfect. I’m loving this future. Okay, what are your goals for the podcast for your writing? And for your advocacy? What is next for you?VirginiaSo, I will say, I am finishing a book. So it is hard. Every writer hates when people ask what your next book is going to be about. I’m like, “There are no other books. I’m just trying to finish this one book. All the words go to this book.” So, I don’t know is one answer. But certainly finishing this book, getting it out into the world. It’ll be out next spring, 2023 some time. So that will be the big focus of my work in the next year and a half because launching a book and promoting a book is a full time job for at least three months and often longer.In terms of the goals for the podcast, I just want to keep bringing on more people we need to hear from in this space, more diversity of voices. I think it’s really important that my platform be available to folks who need this platform. And similarly, I do have a goal for the newsletter of bringing on other writers. I’m not quite ready to launch that because I want to make sure we’re in a place where I can pay really well. Because I have been underpaid as a writer in the past and I know how shitty it is and I will not do it. So, that is something we are working towards being able to do. In terms of advocacy issues, I really want to tackle the issue of kids plus size clothing. That is one that’s burning a hole in my brain right now. Always open to feedback and thoughts from folks! You all are in this community with us and have a sense of what work we need to be doing. So tell us!Butter For Your Burnt ToastCorinneAs true fans may remember, I live in New Mexico. And it is sadly already getting very hot. So my butter recommendation this week is for sun protection. I’m really hoping this recommendation inspires a lot of people because I really want to feel less weird walking around my neighborhood wearing a solar face shield, which I just purchased.VirginiaI don’t even know… I’m googling it. What is a solar face shield?CorinneI don’t even know if that’s really what it’s called. But it’s basically sunglass material that covers your whole face.VirginiaOh my gosh. Yeah, it looks like when people were wearing the shields during COVID?CorinneYeah, it looks like a COVID shield, but it’s sunglasses. Like, tinted. VirginiaYou are committed to your sun protection.CorinneYeah. I just bought that and I do feel self conscious wearing it around the neighborhood. I’ve worn it driving. It’s great for driving. And then I also got one of those fold up-able Baggu hats that everyone had last summer. And I got some prescription sunglasses. VirginiaWait, so do you need the sunglasses and the face shield?CorinneWell, I’ve had these just like really ugly over-glasses sunglasses. They look terrible. Like, not even in a cool way. They’re always really dirty and they get scratched super easily and they feel too expensive for what they are. So I was like, Well, if I get the sunshield, I can just wear that over my glasses and it covers your whole face. I mean, it seems like a great product. Aside from making you look like a space alien.VirginiaAlso, let’s deal with the fact that in the first Google image search result, it’s a woman in a bikini top and the face shield. I feel like these things are at odds with one another. If you  were so concerned about sun exposure that you’re wearing the face shield, why are you not also in a rash guard? CorinneMy request to listeners is, can we make this cool?VirginiaCan we embrace the face shield?CorinneAre you gonna get one, Virginia?VirginiaWell, I’m wondering about how it would be for gardening? Where I live, bugs are a big problem, like we have a few weeks of gnats. And then we have a few weeks of mosquitoes. Would it help keep bugs from flying in my face while I’m gardening? I think of myself as someone who take sun protection seriously. There is skin cancer in my family. We are a very white, pasty people. But I have settled apparently for decent prescription sunglasses and a strong sunscreen and you’re making me realize I could take that further. Do I have to buy the $68 face shield from Nordstrom? Or can I buy the $15 one?CorinneI will say I bought these $68 one from Nordstrom. I don’t know. It also very tight on my head. So I would be interested in maybe checking out some other models. It’s adjustable, but maybe I just need to break it in. It’s tight. VirginiaLike shoes. CorinneWhen I take it off I have like a little imprint on my forehead, just making it even cooler.VirginiaI mean, I have I do own a bug net that I wear during these peaks. So yes, I could see it also being helpful for like holding the bug net because a breeze comes in and it’s like smushed up against your face in an annoying way.This is an amazing recommendation. This might be the best recommendation we’ve ever had. I’m very excited. I’m recommending an app for your house plants called Planta. I have been using it for a few months. I didn’t want to recommend it right away in case I didn’t like it. But I learned about it when Anne Helen Peterson did her houseplant series, which I also recommend. It’s a great read on the history of houseplants and someone in the comments said they were using this app. If you are a person who regularly kills your houseplants or you are a person like me with an excessive number of houseplants that are hard to keep track of this, it is worth it. You do have to spend some time upfront. You have to take pictures of all your plants and put them in the app and get them all organized. I spent a whole Saturday on that and it was a very satisfying project to catalog my plants. Then it gives you reminders of when you need to water them and fertilize them. Some plants like a lot of fertilizer and some plants, you really can kill them if you over fertilize. So the Planta app is helping me keep track. It does make me feel a little guilty because sometimes they want me to be doing more. It thinks I should be misting and I don’t really believe in misting house plants. So, sometimes I have to ignore the notifications. But yeah, if you’re trying to keep houseplants alive, it’s a good one. I recommend it. Well, this was very fun! Thanks for being here to help me, Corinne. Remind everyone where they can find you and follow your work?CorinneMainly you can find me on Instagram at @selltradeplus, which is an Instagram where people buy and resell plus size clothes. My personal Instagram is @selfiefay.Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode.Or consider a paid subscription! It’s just $5 a month or $50 for the year. 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

We hear so much about Betty Friedan, and the Feminine Mystique. And the whole thing was women find power and fulfillment and identity outside of the home by working professionally. Right? The thing that that leaves out is when you go outside of the home, who’s in the home? Like that work never went away.Hello and welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting and health.Today I am chatting with Angela Garbes, author of Like a Mother and the brilliant new book Essential Labor. I am a huge fan of Angela’s. We’ve been sort of admiring one another from afar over the internet for several years now, and this is our first IRL conversation (Well, IRL+Zoom, if you will.) We talk a ton about her new book, which is about the social construction of modern motherhood and what we need to do to truly support mothers, but also all caregivers and care work. It’s a really fun and sort of surprisingly funny conversation for what’s a pretty heavy topic. I think you will get so much out of it and even more out of her book Essential Labor, which I really recommend you run right out and get. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! And subscribe to the Burnt Toast newsletter for episode transcripts, reported essays, and more.PS. The Burnt Toast Giving Circle is over $11,000! You are all amazing. We will be picking which state election to fund in the next few weeks, so stay tuned for details there. And if you’ve been thinking about joining, we still need you! Here’s the Burnt Toast episode where I announced it, ICYMI, and the link to donate.Episode 43 TranscriptVirginiaSo the new book is just incredible. How are you doing? How are you feeling? AngelaThank you for asking! I’m feeling so many things. I’m feeling tired. I hate to be the person that leads with “I’m tired,” but I feel like writing a book is is a frankly terrible process. I feel like my brain is still sort of recovering from that. And I was on kind of an accelerated timeline. I finished edits on the book in like December/January. And now it’s coming out. But I mean, I’m excited. I feel like I have been cooped up with these ideas and these thoughts for like, two years, and I am ready to like, be on the loose. COVID variants willing, I’m ready to go on tour and connect with people. I’m really desperate for that contact and conversation. So I feel really good. And I feel proud. I feel really proud of the book I’ve written. I’m trying to just hold on to that because amidst all the chaos that is going to happen, and hearing what other people think, I want to always remember how good I feel about this book and how that’s really the only thing that matters.[Virginia Note: So far, people think it’s amazing. Here’s Jia Tolentino and Sara Louise Petersen saying so, among others.]VirginiaYour book is very of the moment. Did the idea come out of the pandemic? Or was it something you’ve been thinking about, because it also ties so closely to your first book?AngelaThe secret history of this book is that I sold a second book right after my first book came out in 2018. It was a book of essays about the human body, like the body as a lens for how we move through the world and how we process the world. I was trying to write that book for two years, and it was due the summer of the pandemic. A couple of weeks into lockdown I contacted my editor and I was like, “There’s no way. There’s no way I can meet this deadline.” I’m a professional, like, I always get it done. And luckily, she was totally understanding because she was like, “I just told my husband, I think I have to quit my job.” So like everyone was going through this thing. So we pushed the deadline back several times. I used to co-host a podcast called The Double Shift with my friend, Katherine Goldstein. She invited me, during the pandemic, to cohost this with her because she wanted to continue to make the podcast during a time in which it felt almost impossible to do it and during a time in which we both felt mother’s voices, and the voices of caregivers, were both vitally important, but on the edge of being erased. And just consumed by domestic work. In September 2020, 865,000 women dropped out of the workforce in one month, because no one could be a caretaker, a virtual school proctor, and a professional worker at the same time. So I said, “women’s participation in the workforce is directly tied to their participation in public life. And what happens if women disappear for a year? Or more?”So, from that lighthearted thought, I had a wonderful editor who reached out to me and she was like, “Do you want to write about this? I want someone to write about it and I think you need to do it.” I had not been writing and I was scared to do it. But I basically put every bad thought I’d been having about disappearing, about feeling unsatisfied by domestic labor, about questioning ambition, about just everything, and I wrote this piece for The Cut that ended up going a little bit viral. Elizabeth Warren retweeted it—career highlight for me. And I realized I’ve been isolated and alone with my depression and my concerns, but I’m not alone. So many people are feeling this way now, as everyone’s trying to force us out of the pandemic. Which, facts to the contrary. These problems aren’t going away. Childcare, figuring it out on your own. Our society’s treatment of mothers and care work. We have not solved that problem. It is a longstanding problem that we have never properly reckoned with. So that’s a very long answer to how I wrote this book. The one nice thing about it is that there’s a lot about embodiment in this book. And while I was not unfortunately able to cannibalize everything from the first book, it did feel good because all of that research that I had done that I couldn’t figure out how to make it work. A lot of that research and some snippets of writing made it into this book. And it also made me feel like everything I’ve been doing has not been a waste of time.VirginiaYou give us this whole history of care work, tracing your family’s history. It helped me, and I think it will help a lot of people, put what happened in the pandemic into context. People with privilege were caught by surprise by how hard it is to live. Obviously, it was not news to the majority of people, but it helped me put in context, like, what is happening right now? And why is it so bad? Why is it happening in this way? So it absolutely transcends the pandemic because you’re explaining this much larger systemic issue and also looking ahead into where do we go from here with that.There is a snippet from the book I wanted to talk about in detail. Okay, so actually two little quotes I’m gonna read. You wrote: The pandemic revealed that this can happen to anyone. That work won’t save affluent white women, despite Betty Friedan’s theorizing. Ultimately, they cannot ever fully outsource domestic labor, it still comes down to them. And then later you wrote: It makes white women uncomfortable to think that they are no different from their hired help. What they chase and  have been given is validation, acceptance, and success—but only on terms set by white men.I mean, Angela! So good! I read those, I underlined them, I came back and read them again. I was just flashing back to so many phone calls with editors. So many reporting trips. I remember being on a reporting trip when I was visibly pregnant with my second daughter, and feeling like I had to hide it and downplay it. This weird guy who worked for the Philadelphia Mayor was making comments about it. It was like a whole thing where I was like, I can’t be pregnant in this public space because it’s getting so weird for everybody.Angela I can’t be who I am. VirginiaThis is what my body’s doing right now and I have to do this work. There are these ways in which we are conditioned to downplay our kids, to downplay our responsibility to our kids, in order to seem professional and successful. For a lot of us, the pandemic is what made it impossible to maintain that lie. Like your editor, I was in the same boat of like, “Okay, I’m just not working for several months here.” I would love for you to unpack for us a little further why this is so specifically a problem of white feminism.Angela I mean, I want to start by saying that I’m really glad that you want to talk about this. As I was writing it, I was like, “This feels risky.” Do I want to call out white women? As a woman of color that felt and still feels a little bit risky. But this really gives me hope, because you know my joke is “some of my best friends are white women.” And I feel like there’s a reckoning that’s happening. I know that word has been overused in the last couple of years. But I think that people really want to understand what’s happening and why they feel so betrayed, and why so many white women felt and were righteously angry, you know? I want to harness that power which is why I want to keep talking about it. Mainstream feminism, which is white feminism, has always had a race problem, just like the United States. We have never fully acknowledged the history, right? Susan B. Anthony, a great suffragette, did not think that black women deserved to vote. Betty Friedan—and I shouldn’t have to say this, but these women contributed to society. I am not trying to take away, I’m not trying to come for them. VirginiaYou’re not canceling Susan B. Anthony. AngelaExactly. I just feel like these people were human. We hear so much about Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique. The whole thing was women finding power and fulfillment and identity outside of the home by working professionally. The thing that that leaves out is when you go outside of the home, who’s in the home? That work never went away. There’s a history of slavery in this country. We have a history of Black women working for free in the home and taking care of children and cooking and cleaning, black women as property. And so it was easy to slot women of color and Black women into these roles as domestic workers because they’d always been doing this labor. So, I just want to point out that women—and specifically affluent white women—were sold a bill of goods. I think Boomer women especially. I think a lot of white women now are reckoning with this. A lot of Boomer women were like, “I can have it all.” And that’s the huge lie that we’re still grappling with. Like, you cannot have it all. Even if you come close to it, someone will be like, “can you hide your pregnant body?” It’s very inconvenient that you are overflowing with life, right? Because white women are also oppressed, right? But there’s a better chance for white women to attain success or to fit in. You know, oppression sucks. The thing that marginalized communities and marginalized women and people of color understand is that this world wasn’t built for us. So success is sort of unattainable. At least, I’m speaking for myself now, this classic, shiny version of white feminist success is out of reach. I started self-identifying as a feminist when I was 12 years old. But nothing I read ever talked about my mother, who was an immigrant from the Philippines who worked and raised three kids. Marginalized people have a better understanding of who is left out of conversations. White women haven’t been challenged to imagine themselves in other people’s shoes. They’ve been encouraged to lean in. But to go back to history, when we think of feminism, we don’t think about Johnnie Tillmon or the National Welfare Rights Organization, who were contemporaries of Betty Friedan. Their work was organizing to make sure that women and families who received welfare, which was called aid for families with dependent children at the time, were able to access aid from the government. There was a time when women receiving that aid were subjected to impromptu searches of their home because the government thought that if they were giving them money, then they had the right to come in and make sure they weren’t sleeping with men. Because if men were in the picture, then they shouldn’t have any support. So the NWRO and Johnnie Tillmon were working in a multiracial coalition for poor people. And their analysis, when faced with the same scenario that Betty Friedan had, was that we should have a universal basic income. We should eliminate poverty and we should make life better for as many people as possible. And that’s also history that we don’t hear about. What white women are taught is white feminism, and actually, there is and has always been a much more inclusive feminism. The feminism of women of color, of marginalized people. It’s time for people to understand that and reckon with it and realize that it’s solidarity. I quote Sylvia Federici in the book: “All women are in a condition of servitude when it comes to the male world.”VirginiaThis distinction between Johnnie Tillmon and Betty Friedan is so important because it shows us that the answer was never to try to live on men’s terms. What you’re arguing for is that we need to reject that whole system. We need to do something really different. AngelaCare work is essential to life. It is the work that makes all other work possible. It’s mind boggling when you realize the extent to which we have tried to make care work invisible. The way we have devalued care work. You either do it as a labor of love as a woman or you outsource it to women of color and you pay them poverty wages. Domestic workers are three times as likely to live in poverty than workers in any other field. The median wage in America is close to $20. The median wage for domestic workers is $12. What I’m arguing is that, actually, the only work that matters as a human being is taking care of people. I was struggling with this in the pandemic with the “mask debate.” I’m at a loss. I don’t know how to convince people that they should care about other people if they don’t already have a sense of that. I think it’s a very human and innate and beautiful urge that we have to take care of each other. And I think our culture has beat it out of us. This culture of individual, of hustle and grinding, every man for themselves, I’m looking out for number one. It’s not working. The pandemic showed us that we can’t do it alone. What I’m arguing for is the visibility of care work, the absolute insistence on the importance of care and viewing care as labor that should be respected and valued, culturally and financially.VirginiaIt makes a ton of sense and is tricky to implement because you just keep coming up against the ways in which the systems don’t allow for it. Do you know what I mean? But I think holding that as the starting point and the goal feels critical to making any change.AngelaI do feel hopeful that we’re having a moment. I think it’s going to take longer than I thought. When we got the Biden administration, we were talking about paid leave. We had been experimenting with direct stimulus payments to people. There was, in the American Rescue Plan, the advanced Child Tax Credit which did lift a lot of families and children out of poverty—like four million of them for the brief time. Even though we have a Democratic leadership in Congress that died and the funding lapsed and so we’re backsliding. I definitely have felt really disappointed and disheartened by that. But the fact that we are talking about these things, the fact that we had those things, there are these glimmers of hope. I also just see, too, that maybe the government isn’t coming to save us, right? Like we’ve known that since the start of the pandemic. Certainly the Trump administration wasn’t going to come and save us. The Biden administration feels like a grave disappointment to me in this sense, too. But what I do see and what I always saw through the pandemic is that we take care of each other. We have pods. We have mutual aid societies. We have playdates, we have community fridges, we have little free libraries. I’ve seen a flourishing of that and that, again, is to me the most beautiful human thing of caring for each other. Maybe we don’t name that as such, but I want to spend some time naming that and acknowledging that and saying that that is how people survived. VirginiaI’m glad you brought that up because that was a big takeaway I had from the book. I would read a chapter, and I I would think, I am craving community so deeply. AngelaDidn’t you have COVID at the time?VirginiaOh right! I read it while I had COVID. I was like, why did I feel so alone? It was because I couldn’t leave my house. AngelaI think I was like, “Virginia! You don’t have to do that!” VirginiaNo, it was actually amazing to read it while I had COVID! I highly recommend it to anyone getting COVID now.AngelaWell I’m honored that I got to keep your company during this dark moment in your life.VirginiaIt was fantastic. Well, and because it was this moment where I was having to parent really intensively because the four of us were locked in our house together. So, it was a great book to be reading. I was like, I am really in this care work right now in a very intense way. I want to go back to the community thing in a minute, but this does remind me. One other thing I thought about as I was reading was that I often don’t like care work. I don’t enjoy it. I love my children—you know, standard disclaimer—but I don’t enjoy a lot of the minutia of negotiating with someone about socks or making a potty try happen. I’m not someone who was ever like, “I would love to be an early education teacher.” Maybe this is my white feminism coming up again, or maybe it’s just my being a heartless person who doesn’t like children enough. Or both. But I have fallen into this trap of no, no, my career still needs to matter so much. My motherhood is going to be a smaller part of my identity because I am not taking the pure pleasure in it that I thought it was supposed to. What I like about what you’re arguing for is: If we really value care work and elevate it, I think we can make it more pleasurable, right? Because it can be less isolating and draining. And it creates an opportunity where, if you don’t love it, it’s less awful that you’re outsourcing. You’re valuing who you’re outsourcing it to, right? It creates a more collaborative community approach towards it. AngelaThe thing that I feel when you say that is like, you shouldn’t have to choose. That’s the thing, you should not have to choose. I hate that. So many of us are left feeling bad or like, “Is it me? Am I heartless? And am I a bad feminist?” We internalize that and I just really want to press pause. Let’s back the drone camera up and be like, this is a systemic issue. We hate women. Our country hates women. It really hates women of color, and it doesn’t value care work. That’s not for you or me to solve individually. We can’t. I just want to point that out, too, because I think that’s a very familiar feeling that people have. I am someone who actually did take great pleasure in care work. Not all of it. Straight up, a lot of it is drudgery. So many fluids. Little silver corners torn off of fruit snack things are everywhere. That’s my thing these days. And also just the feeling that no matter what happens in life, it somehow always comes down to me, on my hands and knees, with a sponge. So, you know, care work is not great when that’s all you have to do, right? Which is what the pandemic showed us. Like, as someone who actually enjoys like a certain amount of care work, like loves to cook, is satisfied by sweeping, I felt like I saw the pleasure bleed out from it in the pandemic. It was really hard to enjoy the things that I used to enjoy. So I don’t expect everyone to be suddenly like, “Oh, I love doing care work and domestic labor.” But I’m talking about some of those physical pleasures of care and how satisfying it can be to care for yourself, too. Meaningful self care, taking care of your body, it feels so nice to give yourself a rest. And I just wanted to give people space and I wanted to give myself space to reimagine these things. If I’m going to be doing this care work, I can’t hate it. Life is so hard. If you do nothing else today but keep yourself alive and love on somebody else, you did a lot. That’s a really good day. VirginiaThis allowed me to take more pleasure in the parts I do enjoy. I do find it really rewarding and have sometimes felt embarrassed to admit I enjoy it, too. That’s the other piece.AngelaOh right. Because then you’d be like, “I’m a housewife.”I mean, I don’t like imaginative play with my children. I don’t want to play hide and seek. I don’t like to do the kitty cat game or meow. It’s just not really my thing. And I’m always like, “Oh, my husband’s more fun,” because he’s willing to do that stuff. But I have more patience to sit and read on the couch with them. The other thing is, young children are so different. My children are seven and four now and I feel like I’m emerging from a dark tunnel. VirginiaMy youngest is four, too, and it is a turning point.AngelaYeah. Thank f*****g god. Because it was really hard for a while there.VirginiaSo as I said, while reading your book is trapped in my house, I really missed community. But you know, I’ll be honest, even when I don’t have COVID, I’m an introverted person. We live in a fairly rural area in the Hudson Valley. We are part of a small town but we don’t even live down in the town. We live out in the woods. What advice do you have for us? Being a better part of our communities feels so fundamental to mothering as social change to valuing care work, but how do you start if you’re not naturally good at that?AngelaThat’s a great question because I think a lot of people feel challenged or like, I want to do something but I don’t know what. The first thing I would say is that small is great. I remember  when you were in COVID, you had posted that a friend brought you groceries. So I think part of it is just that these little gestures actually do go a long way. If it’s safe to have a playdate, having a kid over to explore the woods by your house is very cool. Maybe it’s reaching out to someone you don’t know very well, maybe even a parent that you suspect you might not like that much, but just inviting them. Community doesn’t have to look any particular way. I think it is stepping outside yourself, feeling part of something bigger than yourself, and contributing to it in a hopefully positive way. If you’re in a position of privilege, one great thing to do is to be a community member who does not reap the benefit of community. Who is in fact the person who is giving, whether that is money, or time.  It actually feels really good to care for somebody else and expect nothing in return. We always think community works in a reciprocal way. But maybe the effects are not immediate. This is my existential, philosophical answer. I think you can start small and simple. VirginiaI like focusing on small, it feels doable. Angela It’s the littlest things that are so meaningful and that make you feel like a human being and make you feel like part of something. We are not all made for the grand gesture. You know, like, I am not. I’m so grateful to activists who are in DC, not giving up, talking to people. That’s not my role. Those are not where my energies are best served. I used to think maybe that I was rationalizing and then I was really just lazy and not that good a person. VirginiaI do struggle with that. AngelaI think Everyone has a role to play and sometimes it takes some work to figure out exactly what that is.Meanwhile, you just started a fund through your newsletter to support democratic elections happening in states! I’m not blowing smoke up your ass. Like, that’s huge. And it’s really important and engaging your community.VirginiaI appreciate that. I do think, especially for us introverted types, online community can be much more doable. I also, of course, want to discuss your beautiful chapter “Mothering as Encouraging Appetites. I am quoted in this chapter, so full disclosure, I’m obviously biased to loving it.AngelaYour writing and your work is definitely a guiding force and spirit in the chapter. So thank you for your work.VirginiaThank you. Well, it’s a really powerful piece of writing. You’re talking about owning our appetites, coming to terms with our bodies, and how one of the most powerful things we can do as mothers is help cultivate that in our kids. You wrote about realizing you don’t take after your own mother physically. You wrote:I decided that being a little bit fat was the price I paid for always wanting seconds. I don’t know why I didn’t shrink myself, only allowed myself to expand both in size and in personality.I love this so much. This is my mission for my children, just not wanting them to shrink themselves. And realizing that if this is the body that you have that allows you to be a happy and fully present person, this is the right body.AngelaYeah, that’s a perfect body. VirginiaSo can you tell us a little more about how you arrived at that place? And how it informs how you’re parenting your daughters now around food and body?AngelaI’m not a stereotypical petite Filipino woman. I really struggled with that. I mean, now I look at pictures of myself in high school, and I’m like, I can’t believe I thought I was fat. But the message is so clear. Being thin and being white, that’s how people will recognize you as beautiful. I have struggled with my own self esteem issues with my own body acceptance and body issues. But I feel so grateful that diet culture didn’t interest me. I just really love eating. And I was like, I’m not gonna stop. I mean, part of it is that I really think like, to go back to something we were talking about earlier, I am just all about physical pleasure. And leisure. I love fudgy cheeses. I love really sour vinegar. I love spicy soup. I love chewy bread. I love all of these things and they make me so happy. And I’ve never been good at denying myself pleasure, which isn’t great in terms of impulse control as an adult sometimes. Definitely not in my 20s. But there was something in me, this spirit, that I’m so grateful to little baby Angela for. There was just this spirit that was like, “No. I’m not I’m not going to be crushed.” And so, and I don’t know how I did it. Honestly, like, I’m not sure what I did. So there’s part of me that’s like, I want this to be the same for my girls but I’m not sure how to replicate it.Part of it goes back to white feminism. I was just like, I’m never gonna fit in, so I might as I might as well just be me. And there’s something very freeing in that.VirginiaI wondered if that was a piece of it. I often find women in very small bodies who live very close to the ideal have large struggles, in terms of internal struggle, because it’s like they’re so close and they can’t get there. I mean, fat people are experiencing oppression for their fatness. That’s different. But I’m talking about the internal stuff. And it’s not to say that fat folks don’t also have those struggles, because we do. But I think that when you are like a 98% on a scale that is completely unrealistic, the extreme tactics to get there feel reasonable because you could get there. Whereas I think if you have a body type that is never going to be it, you have to reckon with that earlier in some way. AngelaThere is still a very dominant image of beauty in the United States. But I have this language now where I can say to my kids, like, “Being beautiful, it’s not like the most important thing. Because you decide what’s beautiful. And because it’s not the most important thing to be. The most important thing to be as a nice person, an empathetic person or a kind person.”We have a long way to go, but representationally they see more. They go to school with mixed race kids now. My girls are mixed race. You know, my daughter’s already talking about how I am Brown Filipina, Daddy is American White. My daughters looked at a picture of me from like 10, 12, 14 years ago, and they were like, “Mommy, you got fat.” And I was like, stay in it. Stay in it. You’ve been training for this, Angela. You’ve been training for this. And it was so hard, but I was like, “Yep, I got fat.” They weren’t weird in the moment. Fat to them is an adjective. And that’s all it is. The person who was making it hard was me! And I have tenderness for myself in that moment. But I felt like, oh, no, I’m doing a good job here. One of the things that I hear mothers committing to is like, I am going to continue to struggle with my body, but I want to do my best to not say disparaging things about my body in front of my children. Or to be honest with them about what’s hard about it. What do you do?Virginia I’ve had that same conversation of “Yep, I’m fat. That’s right. Fat bodies are great bodies.” And I definitely have had that same experience of like, “Oh, God, this is the moment that I have been preparing for. And also people ask me for advice on this and so I really better get it right now.”AngelaNo, totally, that’s a lot of pressure.VirginiaI better get a newsletter essay out of this. AngelaWriters are such traitors. When that was happening to me, I was laying on my bed and having that discussion with my girls like about how I’m fat. I’m trying not to cry, and I’m having all of these feelings. And this thing popped Into my mind. I was like, “Well, I’m gonna have to write about this.”VirginiaThanks, kids. Sorry that I do this with our conversations.The other piece of it that you were emphasizing: That being beautiful doesn’t matter that much, and that it needs to matter less—that we both need to broaden our definition of beauty and we need to care less about beauty. It’s hard to hold both of those together, but it’s really the crux of it. You had this line in the book which I really think you need to put on t-shirts: “Eating is a necessity. Being beautiful is not.” Thank you. That’s it.AngelaThat’s what it comes down to.VirginiaYou are allowed to reject this whole system that’s telling you your body isn’t good enough. You’re allowed to just say f**k it, and center your own pleasure and your own hunger. AngelaAnd you’re allowed to talk about how that is really hard sometimes. I’m contributing to the conversation and cultural change. But we can’t solve problems that we don’t talk about. And there’s so much shame and stigma around talking about bodies and how we feel about our own bodies. But yeah, like, 100% I just want to enjoy my life and my body. I could spend my whole life trying to make my body do a thing or I could just live my life in the body that I have. I take option two.VirginiaOption two sounds much easier and less stressful. And more fun, for sure. Butter For Your Burnt ToastAngelaI recommend falling in love with your friends. I just went away on a weekend. It was supposed to be a writing retreat with my friend, the novelist Lydia Kiesling. We became friends because we published our books around the same time, our first books, and our books were both about mothering, so naturally, we were lumped together. But we’ve never lived in the same city and I’ve met her just a couple of times, but I’ve always had this feeling like I think we would be friends. And then I was like, how would we ever figure out how to do that? And then, one of the things in the pandemic is, I’ve just been like, I don’t want to waste time. I want to see my friends, I want to spend time with them. I want to make the most of it. And I want to invest in this friendship. And so I invited her to go away on a weekend with me and we were gonna write. We had these adjacent little studio cabins, I would bring her coffee and a bagel with a fried egg. And then I would get into her bed and we watched “Love Is Blind” together. Like, speaking of physical pleasure, these are the things that we have been denied. And you know, I’m not saying, everyone go jump in bed with all of your friends. But thank God for vaccines, right? Like, that’s an option that is open to us again. I want to remind everyone that we can reawaken to things that are pleasurable and spending time being in the company of friends. What is better than friendship? There’s nothing better. Sex is great, but have you had a friend?VirginiaI did a weekend with my three best friends from when we were in our 20s. And now we live in all different places. We haven’t seen each other, obviously, in a whole pandemic. We did a weekend together last month. I came home feeling high. Like I was just like, I had long conversations with these women that I love so much. Oh, it was amazing.Angela It was like three days of one running conversation. VirginiaIt is such a good feeling. Well, that is a wonderful recommendation. Mine is also very pleasure related, because I felt like that was gonna be a theme in our conversation. I am recommending romance novels, specifically Talia Hibbert and Jasmine Guillory. I have just discovered both of them. Two Black novelists who write about Black characters. The women are usually in larger bodies, and they are really hot and there’s a lot of good sex in these books. They’re romances, so happy endings are guaranteed, but they’re fun and sexy and I haven’t read romance in years and years. My image of Harlequin romance was very like, skinny white lady and you know, big ripped brooding guy and there’s been a total evolution in the genre. There’s all these great feminist writers writing very sex positive, women-centered—like the woman always get taken care of first. Like, chapters ahead, often. She gets hers and then they get around to him much later on. It’s pretty great.Angela I love it! I feel like that’s all the stuff that were taught we don’t deserve. And to see it really front and center? It’s beautiful.Virginia They’re just delightful. And very heteronormative so disclaimer on that. If listeners know of good, queer romance novelists, drop them in comments, because I’m here for that too! I just want people to be having sex and loving their bodies. Well, Angela, thank you again, this was an amazing conversation. Tell people where they can find you and follow your work.AngelaThank you so much, Virginia. It was a little bit like falling in love. You can find me on my website and on Instagram.VirginiaAnd you all need to go and get Essential Labor. It is everywhere you get your books and required reading for Burnt Toast listeners. If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player or tell a friend about this episode.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

If you asked any of these gentle parenting experts, they would say parenting is the most important work in the world. But they are also perpetually downplaying the hardest parts of it—which means not ever making visible the parts of parenting that we most need to change.Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today I am chatting again with Sara Louise Petersen. She’s the Burnt Toast resident momfluencer expert, and you can catch her previous episodes here and here. Sara is also the author of an upcoming book about momfluencers and the awesome new Substack newsletter In Pursuit of Clean Countertops, which is a must-subscribe!Today, Sara and I are chatting about the gentle parenting trend—and how it intersect with our conversations around gender roles, diet culture, and more. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! And subscribe to the Burnt Toast newsletter for episode transcripts, reported essays, and more.PS. The Burnt Toast Giving Circle is almost to $9,000! We are so close to our goal and will soon be picking which state election to fund. So if you’ve been thinking about joining, we still need you! Here’s the Burnt Toast episode where I announced it, ICYMI, and the link to donate.Episode 41 TranscriptVirginiaHi Sara! You are the resident Burnt Toast momfluencer expert, which I admit is not a category of expert I knew that I needed when I launched the podcast, but it turns out it very much is. And you just started your own Substack newsletter! So let’s talk about that first.SaraIt’s called In Pursuit of Clean Countertops. It’s not about countertops. It’s not about cleaning. The title is a nod to all of the things that momfluencer culture invites you to pursue and desire and want. I started it a little over a month ago based on an inflammatory post by @BallerinaFarm, Hannah Neeleman. She’s a big one. Her husband Daniel Neeleman started his own Instagram account relatively recently. He posted about the way that Hannah loves to clean and natural light and children like to congregate around her. It just made me feel a lot of a lot of feelings, Virginia. So that was the the post that started it at all.VirginiaI had a lot of feelings about that post, as well. I also love your new Weekly WTF which is so cathartic to read. SaraMy goal is to take the text threads that we all have with our friends, which can be more like, “Holy s**t. Did you see this? This is enraging this is infuriating,” and explore why is it infuriating. Why am I feeling these feelings? To expose the systemic issues at play.VirginiaToday you are coming back on this podcast because we want to dissect a sub-trend of momfluencing culture. We’re talking about “gentle parenting.” I also see it called “positive parenting.” It’s important to say right off the bat, there is no official definition of this concept. Jessica Grose wrote a piece for The New York Times where she described it as “a sort of open-source mélange, interpreted and remixed by moms across the country.” And yes, that is really what it is. Sara, do you want to read this definition that we found in this piece in The New Yorker by Jessica Winter, just so everyone’s on the same page about what we’re talking about here.SaraSo, okay:In its broadest outlines, gentle parenting centers on acknowledging a child’s feelings and the motivations behind challenging behavior, as opposed to correcting the behavior itself. The gentle parent holds firm boundaries, gives a child choices instead of orders, and eschews rewards, punishments, and threats—no sticker charts, no time-outs, no “I will turn this car around right now.” Instead of issuing commands (“Put on your shoes!”), the parent strives to understand why a child is acting out in the first place (“What’s up, honey? You don’t want to put your shoes on?”) or, perhaps, narrates the problem (“You’re playing with your trains because putting on shoes doesn’t feel good”).The gently parented child, the theory goes, learns to recognize and control her emotions because a caregiver is consistently affirming those emotions as real and important. The parent provides a model for keeping one’s cool, but no overt incentives for doing so—the kid becomes a person who is self-regulating, kind, and conscientious because she wants to be, not because it will result in ice cream. VirginiaThat is what I want my children to be, is the thing. This is the goal I think a lot of us have for kids. And yet the path for getting there is so convoluted. Let’s talk about when we each first became aware of this trend and how it’s showing up in our parenting.SaraI became aware of it by way of attachment parenting, which was just everywhere when I had my first kid, who is now almost 10. Attachment parenting is the whole 'if the kid is crying, the kid is not being annoying. It’s expressing needs or desires and it’s your job as the parent to interpret the cries.’ In attachment parenting, you’re not thinking of the kid’s behavior as an impediment to your life, but as the kid expressing his or her or their individuality. I was all about this when I was pregnant. I read all the Dr. Sears books. And then, almost immediately after having my first child, I just felt like I was being gaslit. I remember reading something... Kelly Something?VirginiaOh, yes, KellyMom. Oh, I’m having a trauma response. It’s been a minute.SaraI know. So my kid was not sleeping and I remember reading on KellyMom something like “when cluster feeding happens and baby only wants mom, consider it a compliment.” And I was just like fuuuuuck this. F**k this!!VirginiaIt’s not a compliment. I’m so tired.SaraAttachment parenting kind of feeds into gentle parenting really well in that it’s all about prioritizing the child’s needs. And very rarely are the parent’s needs anywhere in the conversation.VirginiaI had a pretty knee jerk reaction against attachment parenting, although, you know, my oldest is eight, so same time period. It was everywhere. But I was like, this is just code for the woman does everything. And I didn’t sign up for that. It’s not what we’ve agreed upon in my house. We’re not doing it. But then the gentle parenting thing for me, it was discovering Janet Lansbury’s work when my older daughter was a toddler and the toddler tantrums started. (Note from Virginia: I forgot to mention in our conversation that I’ve interviewed Lansbury for parenting articles a few times and think she’s incredibly smart and thoughtful, even if her tantrum advice didn’t always land for me. If you are also a Lansbury fan, this Ariel Levy profile is a must-read.)I was constantly having to negotiate with this person who is totally irrational, according to the way I understand the world. And who is demanding a lot from me in ways that just don’t make sense anymore. At least with a baby, you’re like, well, you’re hungry, or you’re cold or—their needs are just more concrete and not emotional. But suddenly, in the toddler years, you’re sorting through this emotional stuff, as well as—I’m now going to get mail from people saying babies have emotions. I know they do. I know they have emotions. But there’s something about engaging with a tiny verbal child or quasi-verbal child that is just much harder for me. So this whole gentle parenting approach, I sort of clung to it like a life raft. Will someone explain why these children scream so much? And gentle parenting has these '“answers” for you. But what was interesting, even when my older daughter was two or three, was how much it didn’t work with her. All this advice about, like, “What’s up? You don’t want to put your shoes on? Or you’re playing with trains because shoes don’t feel good?” She would just be enraged when I did that. I think it felt like very patronizing to her. She was like, “I am telling you how I feel through my yelling. You putting words to it is not making me better.” SaraWell, one of my challenges that you’re speaking to is: You’ll get this script and the lines that you’re reciting are at odds with your feelings, which are often rage, impatience, annoyance, frustration, despair. So if you’re reciting this script that is like, “I can see you’re having really big feelings right now. And that’s okay. Your big feelings are valid,” kids, I think can tell that you are feeding them a line from a script. Or at least my kids definitely can. It oftentimes in my household has made things worse.VirginiaYes. Because then you’re getting more frustrated while trying to recite the script.SaraAnd then you’re doubly frustrated because the script isn’t working.VirginiaSo, let’s talk more about the scripts because they are one of the most common tropes of the way gentle parenting is performed online. I want to talk about this Dr. Becky post. (Above.) If I have a child screaming, “I hate you! I hope you die!,” which has happened in my life, me responding with calmness is almost denying the feeling. The goal, ostensibly, is to label their feeling, but you’re denying the feeling because you’re responding so stoically to their feelings. Something about it feels so inauthentic.SaraThe other thing that just really stands out to me in this mantra is “the real story is my child’s pain.” There’s no room for the parents’ feelings in this mantra.VirginiaI don’t disagree with the argument here that a small child using that word doesn’t really mean the word the way an adult does. Like, this isn’t them being verbally abusive. I understand that. But that doesn’t stop it from feeling bad when it happens. And we are supposed to so totally center the child’s emotions to the point of having no emotional response to it. It’s just never going to happen, that way.SaraWhat if the kid is saying “I HATE YOU” to the sibling? You have to attend to the kid who’s having feelings and saying I hate you. And you have to attend to the kid who is the target of the “I hate you.” It’s just so much more complicated than any of these scripts would have you believe.VirginiaI think what’s interesting about this movement is there’s a lot of emphasis on not being punitive towards kids when they do bad things. When they hit, when they bite, when they say I hate you. An older model of parenting would have been to punish those behaviors. And their argument is: We’re never going to help kids move past these behaviors if we demonize the kid who’s doing the bad thing. Which I understand. But if you have a dynamic where an older brother has just slapped his little sister in the face, what is that girl learning? That someone who loves you can hurt you like that?SaraWe don’t want our children to internalize our feelings. But I also don’t think it’s terrible if our kids see us have an emotional reaction, such as anger or frustration. It’s natural to have a reaction when somebody says, “I hate you,” or when you get slapped in the face. We need to allow for the parents’ humanity in all of this. If your facial expression becomes angry, that’s okay. You can still value the child’s humanity and individuality and hold space for both things.VirginiaThere’s a lot of talk about how if you tell your child how you feel, you’re making them codependent. I just feel like this is a real big leap because the alternative is you’re teaching your child their emotions should always be centered. That feels like a terrible model for future relationships.SaraIn the Jessica Winter piece, she gives the example of if your kid is having a meltdown and you’re in the middle of vacuuming, you should by all means stop vacuuming and say to the kid, “your feelings are more important than housework.” Winter writes: The housework that [Robin] Einzig says to put off is a synecdoche for everything that the gentle parent—and, perhaps, the gently parented child’s invisible siblings—must push aside in order to complete a transformation into a self-renouncing, perpetually present humanoid who has nothing but time and who is programmed for nothing but calm.”Virginia And when is the vacuuming getting done? Maybe you don’t want to spend your whole day being interrupted during a chore that should take 15 minutes. This feels very much of a piece with what we see in momfleuncer culture. That’s @BallerinaFarm cleaning her house with a smile while the kids are frolicking around. This image of joy and calmness through domestic life doesn’t line up with anything I’ve ever experienced in domestic life. I don’t think it lines up with most people’s experience.SaraNo. I constantly talk to my kids when I’m feeling overwhelmed or how a lot of work goes into keeping a house and raising kids. I’m sure some gentle parenting advocates would tell me I’m burdening my kids with my own suffering or whatever. But it’s true and nobody ever talked to me about this openly, about how being a parent and being a grown up is hard.VirginiaMaking that work visible is so important for so many reasons. We are never going to make progress on our larger cultural gender roles if we are continually downplaying this work. I’m sure if you asked any of these gentle parenting experts, they would say parenting is the most important work in the world. That’s why they’ve devoted their careers to giving us all the scripts! But when you’re perpetually downplaying the hard parts of it, and when you’re needing to perform it in this really controlled way, you’re not actually ever making visible the parts of it that we need to change. SaraI can see a future where kids who are parented perfectly according to the gentle script, turn into parents themselves and say, like, “What the f**k? This is hard as s**t! Why did my parents always present as so calm and pulled together?”VirginiaI mean, that assumes anyone’s able to actually execute gentle parenting. I f\have my doubts that anybody is this parent, even three days a week. The other night, my child who, like I said, screams in fury if I try a gentle parenting script, we were having a thing. I finally said to her, “I am a human being with emotions, and you are hurting my feelings right now.” And one part of my brain was like, You are breaking all the rules. You aren’t supposed to tell her that she’s hurting your feelings. But that was what turned the corner in that particular moment. I’m not saying she was like, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I hurt your feelings.” There was no apology. But it did make her pause for a moment and have this recognition of, Oh, right. I am powerful here. My words have impact. She took a slight step back and we were able to then get on a much better track. A thought I had a lot, especially when I was parenting toddlers was: If an adult treated you like this, it would be an abusive relationship—and yet we are supposed to accept this wholeheartedly from children. It’s one of the things that is so hard about parenting. Because they are children and emotional capabilities are not fully developed, so you literally sign up for accepting abuse for several years. It’s not abuse, but it does not feel great.SaraI’m sure you’ve had this experience, where you are heated, you are furious, you’re having big emotions and the person you’re arguing with is stoic and calm and seemingly unaffected by your big emotions. VirginiaIt’s the worst! SaraIt’s the worst. So I can totally understand why being the kid at the receiving end of these scripts would be infuriating. Like, I’m kicking and screaming and like spitting at you. Why isn’t this having any impact? VirginiaIt feels kind of manipulative in that way, like you’re trying to make them feel powerless. Because kids want a reaction. They’re looking for connection. Often the yelling is an attempt to get your attention and get your connection. So if you’re giving them Robot Mom, you’re not connecting with them authentically. VirginiaOkay, so another big theme, and also m big division point with gentle parenting, is the fact that they frame timeouts as an act of trauma. This is a @biglittlefeelings post. They are big in this space and I have a lot of feelings about that. Because, with both my kids, there are times when timeouts save my family. We all need to step away from each other. I don’t think it is punitive or traumatizing to teach a kid that when your feelings are so big that you can only deliver them in hurtful ways that you need to take some time alone We call them “cool downs” which is totally trying to soften the language. But giving myself permission to use those with my kids has helped so much. SaraI have a kid who, when she’s having her biggest feelings, will remove herself. Like, her instinct is to go and sob sob, sob for 15 minutes. But if I try to go in before 15 minutes, it’s bad. It’s only after that she has that cathartic release that she’s even capable of connecting. VirginiaI am sure there are kids who want to collapse on you and need that sort of experience. But recognizing that, if you yourself are someone who needs to go be alone to think through your big feelings, maybe your kid needs that, too. And maybe it’s okay.SaraAnother thing that I want to highlight that’s giving me some big feelings is the caption. It says:When the parental response is to isolate the child, an instinctual psychological need of the child goes unmet. In fact, brain imaging shows that the experience of relational pain–like that caused by rejection–looks very similar to the experience of physical pain in terms of brain activity. This is not great. VirginiaThere’s no citation, there’s no science. We would need to fact check the heck out of that.SaraIt just feels so manipulative and like playing into parental shame and guilt.VirginiaI bet it’s stemming from the same research used to argue for attachment parenting, about how if you let a baby cry it out, you’re inflicting physical pain on them. And then when we looked at which data they were using, it was children who’d been neglected for months in orphanages. It was not children in loving homes who are being asked to cry for 15 minutes to fall asleep. I’m guessing this is orphanage research again and that research is very important for understanding the impact of true trauma. But it is not helpful to give to parents who are trying really hard to be decent parents. The other trope I wanted to hit on is: Speaking in the child’s voice. This is a post from Robin Einzig’s Facebook page: SaraI just want to describe the image because it’s doing a lot of work. It’s a painting of a very cherubic looking three or four year old, whose eyes are just full of innocent wonder and who has like rosy little pursed lips. She just looks like a blank canvas that you as the parent might be in danger of destroying. So it says, “When you cut it for me, write it for me, open it for me, set it up for me, draw it for me, and make it for me or find it for me. All I learned is that you do it better than I do. So I’ll let you do it. In the textbooks, this is called learned helplessness, but actually I call it clever on the part of the child and less than clever on the part of the adult.”VirginiaSick burn from a gentle parenting expert. SaraAlso the quote says “quote unknown.”VirginiaI mean, obviously the quote is unknown. They just made it up. They’re not quoting a human child because no child has ever said, “You know Mom, when you do this for me, all I learned is that you’re better at things than me.” SaraSo this one’s really thrown me for a loop.VirginiaIt’s another one of those super paralyzing pieces of advice. I remember reading some advice like this. The argument was, if you’re drawing with your child and if they see how you draw a cat, then they’ll never learn how to draw a cat themselves, like in their own vision of a cat. And I remember trying to do that and being like, well, this just sucked all the fun out of drawing. I’m actually kind of good at drawing cats and now I feel like I can’t draw a cat. You’re simultaneously supposed to do nothing for them so they can have all of these learning experiences, yet also be emotionally available to the point you can’t get your vacuuming done.SaraHow the hell are you supposed to get anything done if you’re letting a two-year-old do all these things? You will spend your entire day having the two-year-old cut something. VirginiaThis is just one of those constant tensions of parenting where of course they have to eventually learn to do these things for themselves. But when you’re trying to get out of the door or set them up with an activity, so you can get things done, of course, you’re going to do the hard parts for them. Because life demands it.SaraBecause of life! Like really. Because of life.VirginiaOne more good quote from the Jessica Winter piece: Gentle-parenting advocates are near-unanimous in the view that a child should never be told that she “made Mommy sad”—she should focus on her internal weather rather than peering out the window. “Good job!” is usually not O.K., even if you corroborate why the job is good. “Because I said so” is never O.K., no matter how many times a child asks why she has to go to bed.So Sara, when we were talking about this trend, you really found the mom influencer to end all momfluencers. She’s definitely at the most extreme end of the spectrum. So tell us about @milkgiver, please.SaraSo I’ve been following her for a long time. This type of momfluencer is catnip for me because they present with this very cool hipster, maybe used to live in Brooklyn type of vibe. So I’m initially attracted by their Shaker style fisherman’s sweaters. And then I get lured into the messaging, which often gets into very intense prescriptive nutrition stuff. There’s a lot of beef liver gummy making. VirginiaShe’s in a striped caftan type garment. I mean, I think I have the same mug as her right here because you know, #influenced. I’m pretty sure she has an East Fork pottery mug. So I’m not here to hate on her mug choice.SaraI have yet to pull the trigger, but I’m sure I will, Virginia. I’m sure I will.VirginiaYou will not be sorry. Anyway, she’s basically buried in children while having her morning coffee, is the image.SaraYou know Mary Cassatt paintings? It’s giving me those vibes. Like, you know, adoring children, beatific mother. It’s a long post, the thesis of which is that we, as mothers have so much power over giving our children happy, trauma-free childhoods. She says, …for the most part, I, as a mother, hold the incredible power of creating happy childhoods for my little ones or not so happy childhoods… And this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. there have been so many recurring themes in my life and something I keep hearing in the health and wellness circles is how disease or illness can be caused by past trauma. how interesting is that to think about? So, I’m not loving the direct connection between “I slammed the door or put my kid in timeout or lose my temper” and “down the road my kids might get cancer.” VirginiaIt defies the major thesis of all parenting research, which is that good enough parenting is all you really need. It’s reminding me quite a lot of the shaming that fat moms get. That your unruly body will be the cause of all of this downfall to your children. And again, that’s not borne out by research. SaraI have a therapist friend who is always like, “I actually take a lot of comfort in the fact that like, my kids can talk about whatever parts of their childhood in therapy later down the road. That’s okay.”VirginiaThat’s a great point.SaraIt’s okay if 20 years from now, my kid is like, “Mom always bitched about cleaning and how hard childcare was.” That’s not the end of the world.VirginiaThere are a lot of tools we can give our kids—including future therapy—to make up for our imperfections. I’m just looking at @milkgiver’s grid now and it is many whimsical hats. It is a lot of homemade. A homemade dollhouse, a homemade garland. Oh, and we should talk about the nutrition piece a little more because I definitely want us to hit on the way gentle parenting intersects with diet culture. Did you say she’s into calf liver gummies?SaraThere are so many gummies. So many.VirginiaHow do you even make liver into a gummy? I know she’ll have a tutorial for me. [Note from Virginia: Our post-recording fact-check revealed that @milkgiver actually makes beef gelatin gummies. We regret this error but not too much because calf liver gummies will surely be next.]Wait, can we also talk about the fact this woman doesn’t have a name? She’s just @milkgiver. SaraI do know her first name just because I’ve been following her forever, but yeah the fact that her identity is the giving of milk to children by way of her Instagram handle says a lot. VirginiaEven in the bio line, it’s just wife and mother of three, homeschooling, gentle parenting, Orthodox Christianity, knitting, nutrition, simple living. No name, no identity for you outside of how you serve your family. SaraDo you see the photo on the grid with the dried oranges? VirginiaOkay, so she writes: How did I get here? From being a fast food junkie, to vegan teen, to full out cigarette and alcohol addicted young adult to mama of three religiously wearing her blue blocker glasses in the evenings, taking raw liver shots and avoiding fluoride at all costs. This crunchy mama road isn’t always an easy one, and high five to anyone else desperately trying to keep their kids away from the junk being thrown at them right and left, I see you! It’s not always an easy path, but it is one I enjoy and ultimately follow because I like feeling good, I like keeping my kids healthy, and I like having energy, because that helps me to be a better mom. That’s my top goal in life currently, and being mostly healthy helps A LOT with it. It’d also be cool to live a long time. But who knows 😉🤎 #crunchymama #embracethecrunchOh, Sara. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.SaraI knew you wouldn’t.VirginiaI mean, she’s just combining so many different things. “Fast food junkie” is not the same thing as an alcoholic. Let’s be real clear about that. Addiction is a terrible disease that destroys lives. Eating a lot of fast food is not the same thing.SaraEven even the term junkie in that context.VirginiaYou are not a junkie because you like fast food. And then this, this whole message of, okay, you have to take the hardest road to do everything. Even if you don’t want to eat fast food every day, there’s a big gulf between that and taking raw liver shots and avoiding fluoride. We’re just combining every possible wellness trend. It’s like she needs to check every single box here in a way that’s exhausting and overwhelming, and not at all doable for anybody. And also not necessary. Nobody needs to take raw liver shots in their lives. People have lived to be 100 years old without ever taking raw liver shots.SaraI also don’t like the the use of the word “desperate.” She says, “high five to anyone else desperately trying to keep their kids away from the junk.” How about we desperately try to like give all kids access to food, period?VirginiaThat would be cool.SaraIt just feels like such a classic trope of the self-optimizing white motherhood stuff. “Because I like feeling good. I like keeping my kids healthy.” The implication is that if she were not to follow all these super strict guidelines, she would knowingly be not giving her kids a healthy life. VirginiaAlso this vibe of, “oh well, that’s just me! I like feeling good. I like having healthy kids.” Oh, really? Do you think mothers living in poverty don’t like to feel good? They’re not feeding their kids enough food every day because they don’t like having healthy kids? This isn’t a whimsical choice for you. This is something you can do because you have a ton of privilege. Let’s also talk about if you are a parent desperately trying to keep your kid away from junk food, how fast that’s going backfire and harm your child’s relationship with junk food. I mean, how many letters do I get? (For starters: This one, this one, this one, and this one.) This is probably the number one question I am asked. Sneaking food is just how it plays out every time because your kids know that your raw liver gummies are not as delicious as their friends gummy bears. SaraThe other thing that’s kind of hysterical to me is this is also not in agreement with gentle parenting. We’re supposed to enable our kids to have the tools within themselves to navigate life. So this feels like a direct contradiction. VirginiaThe interesting thing about the way gentle parenting and diet culture intersect is most gentle parenting folks are really big proponents of Division of Responsibility, which is about empowering kids to listen to their bodies and trust their own hunger and fullness. So you’re not counting bites, you’re not requiring them to finish stuff or eat their broccoli before they have the cookie. The problem is, it gets layered in with this idea of, “I have to choose things like calf flavored gummies and green smoothies and all of these perfectly healthy things.” And then I’m frustrated because my kids still is asking for Little Bites muffins and not my homemade spelt muffins or whatever. It’s using Division of Responsibility as a script for diet culture. You’re still trying to control them, but you’ve coopted this other rhetoric to do it. SaraI’m sure you’ve written and talked about this before, but what happens if you are so hyper-controlling the environment that your kid is choosing from? What happens when your kid enters the real world of actual food choice?VirginiaThose are the kids who go on playdates and eat the whole sleeve of Oreos at their friend’s house or eat sugar by the spoonful. I am not shaming those kids, I am not shaming those parents. It’s a totally natural response. You’ve been restricted, these foods have been banned. Forbidden fruit is really powerful and really tempting. Your mom’s not gonna let this stuff in the house. So it’s super understandable. This is another thing where they give us a lot of scripts! Let’s talk about this @biglittlefeelings post (above). SaraMy response as my kid is, “I don’t want either bowl. F**k the bowl, lady!”VirginiaGiving them a choice of the bowls is not going to distract them from the fact that they want cereal. Especially if you’re not offering cereal very often. I’m not saying you should cave in the moment and be a short order cook and just like immediately whisk off the bowl of yogurt and granola and give them the cereal. But you might do better to say, “let me pack cereal for your snack for school,” or “I totally hear you. Let’s make sure we have cereal for breakfast tomorrow.” If we’re gonna give kids permission to have all their big feelings, let’s spend some time on the big feeling about cereal instead of just like moving right past it and trying to distract them with the bowl choices. Again, it runs so counter to the larger message of what they tell us to do. But she doesn’t want to give in on the cereal, so she’s trying to control the food from a diet culture perspective— and then the gentle parenting quickly falls apart in the face of that goal. I also want to say it’s fine if sometimes you do say, “yeah, you know what, I’m gonna grab you the bowl of cereal.” Making a bowl of cereal is not the most time consuming thing. If this allows you to move on with your morning because it’s just been one of those mornings, it’s fine. It happens. We don’t need to feel like we failed because we did that. That’s another piece of this: When you don’t follow the scripts, you have to feel like you got it wrong.SaraTotally.VirginiaLet’s wrap up by talking about some parenting folks we do like. The person that I really liked that I wanted to talk about is Claire Lerner. She is the author of the book, Why Is My Child in Charge. I am going to put in a caveat that her chapter on food is not totally there. There’s definitely some diet culture stuff in it. But this was a really useful book for me to read because she does help parents understand why we end up in those power struggles. And a big thing I like is that she’s pro-timeouts when the kid needs it. She recognizes a place for them. She also really encourages parents to hold boundaries and not feel guilty about it. One line that she uses that I like is “you don’t have to like this.” I’ve started using this when I do say no to my kids about something and they throw a fit. I’m like, “You don’t have to like it, but this is what we’re doing.” And that has been so liberating. Because of course they’re having a tantrum. They don’t like being told TV is done for the day. But they don’t have to like it, we’re just doing it.Sara@Destini.Ann is someone I love. She’s just so approachable and the mother’s emotions are always valued. Her Instagram bio says “sign up for parent coaching below. Peaceful parent, but real AF.” That kind of tells you what you need to know. VirginiaYeah, I like it. I like it a lot. “Gentle is not my default.”SaraYes. Let’s acknowledge that gentleness is not everybody’s default and is labor.Another great one is @EricaMBurrell. I’ll limk to one of her reels where she’s talking about how gentle parenting is not something that white people own.VirginiaThat’s really interesting because that certainly is the impression you get on Instagram. SaraBlack parents have talked a lot about how Black culture plays into parenting mores and how there is a lot of judgment lobbed by white people towards Black parenting, without bothering to engage with Black culture. VirginiaYeah, that’s excellent. And then @supernova_momma?SaraIn her Instagram bio it says “Certified Positive Discipline Parent Educator, Mother of Two, Autism /Neurodiversity Acceptance, Sometimes I twerk.” A lot of her content speaks specifically to neurodiversity, which I can imagine being so so tricky to maneuver in the gentle parenting space.VirginiaI think anytime your kid is dealing with something extra—whether it’s a disability, neurodiversity, or certain life experiences—there is this disconnect. You try to follow the rules they’re laying out and your kid has a completely opposite reaction to it and then you feel like you did something wrong, when in fact, the advice wasn’t inclusive and wasn’t thinking about your kid at all. SaraAlmost all the problems with gentle parenting arise from not respecting both the parent’s individuality and the kid’s individuality. Both you and I have talked about specific parenting experiences where we recognize, we intuit what our kid needs in that moment. We can intuit that this script is not going to work for either of us. So we make a choice based on our knowledge of our kids’ specific needs and specific personalities and our own specific needs and specific personalities.VirginiaI think it speaks to the fact that, as a culture, we don’t really empower parents—we especially don’t empower moms—to have that confidence in ourselves. You’re simultaneously expected to know exactly what to do and to have all this motherly intuition that guides you perfectly. But you’re also not really empowered to feel like you can make the right choices without outside experts, because we have such rigid standards and expectations. I just think it is helpful to start to realize you can make choices for yourself on this stuff. There is not a parenting police. Dr Becky’s not going to come to your house and edit your scripts. Butter For Your Burnt ToastSaraMy new obsession is Jessica Defino’s newsletter. It’s called The Unpublishable and it’s a takedown of the beauty industry. I just find it so, so delicious. She’s so funny. She’s so smart. I interviewed her recently for my newsletterVirginiaIt is so rare to find beauty content that is not tied to advertising—like so, so, so rare. So she’s a great voice. Hopefully she will be on a Burnt Toast episode soon. Stay tuned! It’s in the works. Okay, my recommendation is a recommendation that I feel I’ve been journeying to for a long time, that I was always meant to be this person and now I finally am. I am now someone who does puzzles. I think no one is surprised, if you know me at all, that I am now in the puzzling phase of my life, that I am I am a puzzler. I started it while we were on vacation. We had two days of a sick kid because that’s how family vacations roll. And so we were in our Airbnb and they had a bunch of puzzles. And I was like, I’m gonna do some puzzles while we’re hanging out here. It was so soothing! I think my husband always knew this about me, before I knew it about myself because several years ago for Christmas, he had given me an 1000 piece puzzle and he’d given me this cool felt mat thing (similar to this one). So you can do the puzzle but you can also roll it up if you’re not done. Because I have a dog and kids and you know, I can’t leave the puzzle out all the time. So I came home and dug it out of the closet and now I’m working on this puzzle in the evenings. I’m so happy. I’m just so happy. It was definitely at the point on vacation where my kids were like, “can we have lunch?” And I was like, “No, I’m doing this puzzle.”SaraIt sucks you in. VirginiaYeah, I was like, “I’m not a parent right now. I’m a puzzler. You have to raise yourself.”SaraWhen I will start a puzzle, the kids will be nowhere in sight to do the hard edges or whatever, and then they’ll come in like little vultures as soon as I’m down to like 50 pieces. Like, back off. Don’t steal my thunder.VirginiaYeah, mine did not want to do it at all. My older daughter did sort of like sit and haze me while I was doing it for a while, which was fun for both of us. But I think she’s got a puzzler in her, too. She’s just not there yet. I think it’ll come out, especially now that this is my life. SaraAnd your identity. VirginiaIt’s my identity now. And what it’s really great for is, this week I had a piece getting some pushback on Twitter and I was having a day where looking at Twitter was not going to be helpful to me. That evening, I put the phone down and puzzled away instead of looking at Twitter. I was really proud of myself!All right, Sara. Thank you so much for being here. Tell everyone where we can find you and find your newsletter!SaraDefinitely check out my newsletter, it’s called In Pursuit of Clean Countertops. I’m on Instagram at @SLouisePeterson and I am on Twitter as the same thing. 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

“Sometimes I’ve just shoved some granola in my face, because I knew that I needed to have some fuel in my body. I didn’t really enjoy it. And that’s okay. That’s absolutely appropriate for that moment.”Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health.Today I am chatting with Leanne Brown who is the author of the cookbooks Good and Cheap and Good Enough. Leanne focuses on making cooking more accessible and affordable. She also does a lot of important work challenging our perceptions around what cooking should be and how we can make it into whatever we want it to be, including stuff on toast or bowls of cereal. If you’re feeling stressed about family meals or about feeding yourself, or if cooking is feeling hard for you, whether it’s because of who you’re feeding or your relationship with food: Leanne’s work may be a helpful starting point in terms of growing your confidence around food and cooking and recognizing what’s useful and what’s not useful. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! And subscribe to the Burnt Toast newsletter for episode transcripts, reported essays, and more.PS. The Burnt Toast Giving Circle is almost to $9,000! We are so close to our goal. And if you’ve been thinking about joining, we still need you! Here’s the Burnt Toast episode where I announced it, ICYMI, and the link to donate.Episode 40 TranscriptVirginiaHi Leanne! Why don’t we start by having you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work?LeanneI’m a cookbook author, but at the same time, I don’t think that that really describes what I do. It’s certainly a huge part of what I do—I love the creating cookbooks aspect. What I really want to do is welcome anyone and everyone into the kitchen. And I think I have a particular soft spot in my heart for people who don’t really think of themselves as cooks or aren’t necessarily as naturally attracted to cooking. I believe that they have a place in the kitchen. Becoming comfortable with cooking—not even cooking but simply making food for oneself and for those in your life that you want to make food for—brings so much empowerment. My passion is in connecting with people, and finding a way to make peace with food in your life. VirginiaI am someone who loves cooking, but I’m also very big on not putting cooking on such a pedestal, because it’s so often held to these impossible standards. So I went on this little journey reading your work where at first I was like, Oh sure, cooking solves everything, fine. And then I was like, Oh, wait, but she’s also saying it’s okay if you don’t like cooking!LeanneWhen I introduce myself as a cookbook author, it puts me into the world of food media. Which is all these videos, TV shows, and beautiful magazines, and it’s all this glorification of food. There’s obviously a place for that. I think it adds so much to our lives and our culture. There’s this artistic aspect to it, and there’s so much beauty in it. But at the same time: I hear from so many people who say, “Oh, I’m a terrible cook.” Why are any of us judging ourselves like that? So long as you’re able to feed your body every day, that’s really all that matters. I’ve been going through a lot of family emergency stuff and that means that I don’t have a very big appetite a lot of the time because I have a nervous tummy. So sometimes I’m just like, well, I just shoved some granola in my face, because I knew that I needed to have some fuel in my body. I didn’t really enjoy it. And that’s totally okay. That’s appropriate for this moment. There are so many times in life like that and I shouldn’t internalize them as ‘I’m a failure,’ or ‘what kind of a cook am I?’ But I’ve gone through periods of life where I’ve felt that way. So I really want to share this message with others, because I think it’s such an important balance to all that beautiful, curated stuff that we see all the time.VirginiaAs you’re talking, I’m just thinking: Why do we expect ourselves as home cooks to live up to this standard? It would be like expecting to do your taxes as well as a professional accountant or solve your own medical crisis. We need professionals! Cooking is a professional skill. And it’s this thing we have to do day-to-day. But why do you expect yourself to execute it like someone who’s had years of training and has a whole team and a huge budget? I feel like this has to be somewhat rooted in the way we devalue cooking as women’s work. We’re socially conditioned to have cooking be a default part of our gender identity, so it’s not valued or made visible—and yet we’re also expected to be effortlessly great at it. LeanneWe could absolutely do a whole episode trying to unpack that. VirginiaWell, let’s talk about the new cookbook. So it’s called Good Enough and it is so much more than a cookbook. It’s a different genre of book because you have recipes—and the recipes are wonderful—but then you have just essay after beautiful essay. Many of them are about why it is okay, and even necessary, to lower the bar and to lower our standards around food and ourselves. You’re giving us permission to do less. Tell us a little more about what made you want to write a cookbook that essentially gives people permission not to cook.  LeanneThat’s such a great way of framing it. That’s exactly what I’m doing! So my last book, Good and Cheap was a book created for people on a very, very tight budget, people who are on a food stamps budget. It was this surprise hit. It sold really well, a ton of people were interested in it. It was also this project that was created to be freely available for people. So I ended up traveling all over the country and getting to meet so many people from so many different kinds of backgrounds. And I kept having this one experience over and over and over, where someone would come up to me and they’d say, “Oh, I love what you’re doing. This is so cool. But I am hopeless. I’m a terrible cook.” This really, really struck me and I just couldn’t stop thinking about this. I would try to have a deeper conversation. I’d say, “What makes you say that? Why have you judged yourself this way?” And it was almost always something so innocuous, like, “My kid doesn’t like my food,” or I’ll never forget this woman who said she put on a dinner party, and she said, “I poisoned someone.” I was like, “Oh my gosh, that sounds terrible.”VirginiaThat, you could carry with you for a bit. LeanneI get that. But then I delved deeper into it and it turned out that a person was allergic to something and they just hadn’t disclosed that to her. VirginiaOh, well, that’s not on her!LeanneRight? I know! Oh, it’s so heartbreaking. But there are these experiences that we carry around with us. There just needs to be more to support these people. Because I can see this longing. They are walking toward cooking, toward food. They want to have a good and healthy relationship with it. And yet they feel less than for some reason or other. My heart went out to them. I also had to notice that I was seeing myself reflected in that, to a certain extent. I’ve always been, I think, naturally gifted with cooking and food. But a year or so after Good and Cheap came out, I got pregnant and I ended up being really, really sick, for longer than the first trimester. I was really ill, really nauseous everyday. Throwing up a lot of the time. Food was just not a fun place for me. And I found myself having an identity crisis. If I can’t do this, who am I? What do I even have to offer? What do I do? How do I approach this? Everything I’ve ever said to people, is it all a lie? And then, in the early days of parenting, when life changed so much, my relationship to cooking and to how I fed myself was also changing all the time. I realized we need to change our approaches to cooking all the time, depending on which phase of life you’re in, and what is going on. No one really talks about that. It’s all about like, you’re good cook or you’re bad cook and that’s just such nonsense. It’s so disempowering, and it leaves us so confused. I wanted to create something that talked about cooking as a part of our real messy lives.VirginiaI want to spend a little more time on this thing you noticed, of people feeling like they need to apologize. I interview people a lot about their relationships with food, and I see this all the time too. We’re all conditioned to apologize for how we eat, whether that’s our cooking ability or the fact that we’re eating someone else’s food. It’s that thing of apologizing with, “I can’t believe I’m having the third brownie.” I would love to hear more on how you’ve been working to break that cycle for yourself?LeanneI think the journey begins in the noticing. Noticing and then asking, why do I feel compelled to apologize when someone is offering me food? What if I didn’t do that? What if I believed that this person who is offering this genuinely wants me to have it? What if I took them at their word and just did what my body is wanting right now, which is to take another brownie? And then I can appreciate that and thank them for it. What if I did that, rather than apologizing for how I’m not showing up in this gendered, sort of perfectionist way where we’re supposed to “only take one” and not eat indulgent food and not be a bother to others or not be an inconvenience?The last chapter in the book is about putting on a dinner party. I think having people over is often what we’re motivated by when it comes to cooking. Like, “I want to put on a big show for others.” But I think it should actually be one of the later steps. It’s really important to learn first to feed yourself, in your life. Because otherwise, you’re only seeking others’ approval around food, and that it’s never going to really feel good enough, right? Like, no matter how much they say, “We love that it’s great,” if something inside you is like, I don’t know if I deserve that, it’s never going to feel like enough. So I think it’s important, when you have people over, to be honest about “this has been a lot of work for me.” And to really welcome them into your home and really offer with full openness, that you want to love them. For me, having people over and feeding them, is an act of love. And I think I’ve always tried to minimize that act by being like, “Whatever. It’s no big deal.” Because it’s uncomfortable. It’s vulnerable to be like, “I love you so much that I went to the store and got all these things and obsessed over this. And I worked really hard on it and here it is. And now I hope you like it and if you don’t, I still love you and that’s okay.” That is just a lot to hold! So, I think about, in that moment, when I, as the visitor, want to do that thing of, “Oh, I won’t take too much,” it helps to remember that when I’m in their shoes, I want people to take it! I want them to like it! I want them to feel that joy, I want to feel that connection. We’re so often doing this dance of connection where we all long to be in true, intimate connection with others, but it’s terrifying. There’s this will-you, won’t-you, do you like me as much as I like you? All that comes up. It’s hard. VirginiaI’m thinking about that standard we talked about where not only do we expect ourselves to execute meals like professional chefs, we also want the work of it to be invisible, right? That’s what you’re talking about when you have people over but trying to hide how much that is an act of love. You don’t want them to know that actually your kitchen was a wreck an hour ago. You don’t want them to see the dishes. You don’t want them to know how much you stressed about whether the sauce turned out right. Is this the legacy of Martha Stewart? We feel like we have to effortlessly present a meal to communicate love. But all that really does is devalue the labor further. Because we’ve made it invisible.LeanneAnd it puts up a wall, too. It’s a way of shutting people out from the truth of your experience. Because it makes you look anxious or it makes you look like you care too much. It’s so self-defeating. Because I actually want people to know how much I care.VirginiaSo do you leave the dirty dishes in the sink before people come over? Or do you still ry to get it all cleaned up? LeanneI think for the longest time, I absolutely would always clean up. And to be honest, I think sometimes I still do, just out of practicality. Because I do tend to clean as I go when I’m making food. But I’ve really tried to make it a practice that when people exclaim over a meal, I don’t say, “It was nothing.” I say, “Thank you so much for noticing. I worked hard on it.” And I try to allow people to help. It was my daughter's fifth birthday a couple of weekends ago. I was trying so hard not to do everything myself. We had some friends from out of town over a little early and I tried to keep stuff aside for them to do when they would arrive and to allow others to help me. It kind of worked. But it was hard. Because when you don’t do everything yourself, you also have to release your own standards and your own perfectionism. When you ask others for help, they may not do it the way you want them to. And that’s okay, actually! It doesn’t mean they don’t care and they don’t love you. That’s part of being in community.VirginiaAnd maybe the end result is better for it. Even if it doesn’t align with that Instagram version of the meal that you felt like you were supposed to be executing. Maybe there’s something more beautiful in that fact.LeanneYes. Why did it need to be that way for it to be okay? The answer really is just building more awareness around all the ways in which food is just so inextricably linked with connection for all of us, with connection with ourselves, and then so much with others and the way that we want others to view us.VirginiaSince you mentioned your daughter, there was a quote in a profile of yours in Input Magazine that I loved: People tell me, ‘Oh, your kid must eat so well because you’re a cookbook author,’ but I eat takeout all the time,” she adds. “I frequently skip meals. My daughter eats way too much mac and cheese, just like every other kid. There is no “right” way to feed yourself. Where do you think your ideas about the “right” way to feed yourself have come from?LeanneFrom the sea we swim in. From diet culture and food culture. And I think for me, personally, I have long wanted to be seen as a good person. What I’ve had to reckon with is: That idea comes from outside of me. It is a performance for others.  Say I’m with a group of other food industry people. To be a “good” eating performer there would be to be an adventurous eater, to eat everything that’s there. And say “It’s no big deal. Of course, I’ve had this a million times.” That might be the way that we perform goodness in that space. Maybe at a children’s birthday party, at least in certain socioeconomic situations, it would be about making sure you have a lot of veggies and really healthy snacks. So we’re all performing how much we care about making sure children eat a variety of fruits and vegetables. That is the the way in which nutrition absolutely has become conflated with morality. They have really nothing to do with each other. VirginiaYou said your daughter is five now. Does feeding a kid look different than you would have expected?LeannneYou know, I’m doing my best. I try not to get hung up on what she eats in a given day. I really, in general, try not to analyze it too much and to trust. I think that’s something that I’ve learned from my daughter over these last years: To trust myself and to trust her. So often it can feel like, oh my gosh, they’ve been doing this behavior, they’re not eating something, or they’re not sleeping—you know, sleep is always such a big thing. And it feels like something is wrong. But when you look at it, it’s really that this is inconvenient. For me, as a parent, this is challenging. Like a kid being like, “I literally only want to eat mac and cheese.” Yep, that’s very challenging for us. So often we think this has to be a problem because I’m feeling so challenged by this. I’ve found that I have to ask, “Is this really just challenging for me? Or is this an actual problem?” And mostly, it’s “This is really challenging for me, but this is also normal.” And it’s okay. It’ll shift. And it always does!VirginiaYes. It’s often helpful to step back and say, “Is it a problem for me? Like, is there a real health concern with the way they’re eating? Or is it a problem for me because they’re not eating in the way I wanted to perform my child eating?”LeanneIs it embarrassing to me that my child will only eat white and yellow food? Does that make me feel like I’m a bad parent?It’s so normal during this age, and even a lot older, for them to restrict the amount of foods that they’re eating and to be really easily disgusted by new foods. It’s just exactly what their bodies are supposed to be doing because of this biological imperative that’s millions of years out of date. And it’s very annoying, but it’s still there. It’s a real thing they’re feeling in their bodies. Millions of years ago, if they were off in the woods and they ate an unfamiliar food, it could kill them. And their bodies still have that programming. So when you see your child’s nose wrinkle up and they look scared, they are! They’re not faking it. They’re not pretending to have that “I’m almost going to throw up” response. That’s real. I think that can bring a warmth and compassion, frankly, to the hearts of parents. Like, Oh, right. This is hard for them because this is a real thing that they’re experiencing. That, I think, is what brings in compassion and patience, which is really what parents need more than anything. VirginiaThis makes me think of where we started this conversation, about apologizing. Because so often we feel like we have to apologize for how our kids eat. LeanneYes! And how does your kid feel if you’re always apologizing for them? Because they’re listening all the time. You’re giving them that message of something’s wrong with them. And I think something’s not wrong with them almost all the time. VirginiaAnother thing I want to talk about was meal planning. You talked about, in the book, how you almost never meal plan. I love this. I have a lot of complicated feelings about meal planning. Do you still not meal plan? Do you aspire to do it? LeanneI do aspire to do it. I lately have been building more and more drive towards that. For simplicity, and to relieve some mental load, honestly. When I was younger, I loved to cook. It was such an important part of my life and it was something where I expressed my creativity, and it was fun. And I had a regular nine-to-five and so I could dream about what I was going to make for dinner. It was really meaningful to not decide and to just go with the flow. But where I’m at now, it would be so helpful to just not have to stress about that for multiple hours in the day. I would really like to get my my act together, and just have a basic meal plan figured out. That’s the place in my life that I’m at now, where I want to relieve myself of so much overthinking about food.I think recognizing that in the past, I really relied upon food as a source of pleasure in my day. And now, I am finding a wider variety of places to find pleasure. I’m not as reliant on food as the only place for pleasure. VirginiaThat’s interesting. LeanneThat is a growth for me.VirginiaThat’s kind of how they got me with meal planning, too. I still get very frustrated with the current culture of meal planning, and the performative aspects of it and how it can lead into all that perfectionist stuff, particularly for women. But yes, the reality of my life in a household with two working parents and two young children is that these decisions have to get made. And realizing that 5pm Me is so much happier when I’ve made the decision already.LeanneThere’s this point where it’s not serving you. When you’re just doing it because you haven’t figured out a better way.VirginiaSomething else I’ve found helpful, and that you do so well in your work, is to distinguish between: When are we cooking for pleasure? Like, when is it a weekend of puttering around in the kitchen that’s relaxing and creative? And when is it just getting dinner on the table? Let’s recognize that one is work that has to happen, and someone’s got to do it. And it’s really valuable labor, but it’s okay to not find it creatively fulfilling, LeanneTotally. And if making it creatively fulfilling is something that you value, there could be a way to work with yourself, or your kids, maybe, in the planning part, to find some creativity there. VirginiaYes. And I’ve saved myself that work of having to figure it out in the moment when everyone’s tired and hungry.LeanneRight, which is so predictable. What universe do I live in where I actually think I’m going to get smarter and more creative the later it gets in the day? I’ve lived in this body for 37 years and yet I still haven’t figured that one out.Butter For Your Burnt ToastLeanneI have gotten so into my yoga practice over the last year and a half. For me, what has been so beautiful about it has been developing a really different relationship with my body. I can notice more of the signals that are happening in my body because of that practice. And I have noticed how much it affects me outside of the actual time practicing. Like being able to notice and honor that I have a nervous stomach. And that makes sense because the stomach is a place where we digest food and we ask it to do that, but it needs to do that when it’s calm, and it’s not right now, so that’s okay. And of course, I’m not calm right now because there’s something difficult that’s going on. This practice happens to have been the place where I’ve really connected to that. For me, that’s been transformative because I’ve always looked so much outside myself. I love learning and want to connect to outside sources and learn more about the world and others, and what other people think and history and all of that. But there’s something so profound about being able to listen inward, and to trust our own bodies and our minds and to trust the wisdom that’s actually already there.VirginiaMy butter this week is libraries. I am a really big fan of our local library for many reasons. But the children’s librarian at our little town library just started a book club for elementary school kids. My eight-year-old is going and it is the happiest hour of my month, watching this group of seven- to nine-year-old girls. It’s all girls at the moment, but boys can join the book club, too! But for the moment, it’s this group of girls and they are all lit up talking about whatever book they just read. Seeing this love of reading thing is great, but also watching this group of girls find this connection and this confidence. They’re all talking over each other, they’re not waiting to raise their hand. They’re just so enthusiastic and this amazing librarian is cultivating this whole thing with them. LeanneThey’re learning that books are not this solitary thing! They are a beautiful, solitary, peaceful experience and they are something you can talk about with each other.VirginiaI’ve been working on this chapter in my own book about puberty, so I’ve been thinking a lot about how a lot of girls shut down in the middle school years. Just seeing these girls having this experience now of being loud and proud of their knowledge and taking up space with that. I’m just like, yes. Go Libraries! So shout out to local libraries for doing amazing work. We’ll also say, as authors: Supporting libraries supports authors, too. I think so often, people are like, “Oh, I’m sorry, I got your book from the library instead of buying it.” But it is really helpful because if libraries know that people want this book, they buy more copies. It’s all helpful! Well, Leanne, thank you so much for being here. I want everyone to check out Good Enough. Tell listeners where they can follow you and find out more.LeanneMy website is Leannebrown.com. And I’m on Instagram from time to time @LeanneEBrown and I would just be oh so delighted to hear from you anytime. If you want to talk about more deeply about any of this stuff, please do reach out. I’d be thrilled to hear from you!VirginiaAwesome. Thanks for being here!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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

NOTE: We're planning a special AMA episode of the podcast and we want your burning questions! Please submit your questions via this Google Form to help us stay organized.Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast and newsletter where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. We don’t have a brand new episode for you today because I’m on spring break this week. As many of you know, I used to co-host another podcast with my best friend Amy Palanjian, the creator of Yummy Toddler Food. Our podcast was called Comfort Food and we had to retire it in 2020, for a whole lot of reasons. Amy has given me her blessing to occasionally pull some of our best episodes and share them, which I’m really excited to do because there were a lot of great conversations. A lot of these are more parenting-focused, but I’m hoping everyone can get something out of it.The episode I am sharing today first aired on March 5, 2020, right before the world shut down. Definitely do listen to this like you’re a historian, looking back at our earlier work. You can see where a lot of my thinking on these issues started—I don’t think I was all the way there yet. We’re all works in progress. In particular, Amy and I were really just beginning to understand how we wanted to talk about kid diet culture on Instagram. You’ll hear moments where we’re both chafing against some diet mentality of our own. I think we do a pretty good job of naming those things as they come up, but I just want to be clear that I wouldn’t necessarily repeat all of this today and neither would Amy. If that makes you nervous or if you’re worried about potential for harm, certainly feel free to skip this one. We do talk about different forms of restrictive eating. If that’s something you’re interested in hearing and puzzling out with us and you bump on something as you’re listening, feel free to put it in the comments so we can discuss! I welcome that accountability and the chance to revisit and give you a take on where I would land now. Episode 39 TranscriptVirginiaHello and welcome to episode 65 of Comfort Food! This is the podcast about the joys and meltdowns of feeding our families and feeding ourselves.AmyThis week we’re exploring how food restriction can creep into our everyday without us even really being aware of it, and the impacts that this can have on our own relationship with food and the way that we’re feeding our kids.This topic has been on my mind lately because often when we talk about food restriction, we think of it as a calorie counting diet or strict portion control, but there are a lot of other ways that it can creep in and cause harm or confusion, or just make us not super clear on our goals with both how we eat and how we’re feeding our kids.VirginiaTotally. I have also had those moments of kind of recognizing in yourself that this is a restriction thing. It can just pop up because it’s so conditioned into us. This might sound a little radical, but if you think back to like elementary school, when we were given the food pyramid—the food pyramid may not be the most harmful diet out there, but it still was like teaching us this hierarchy of foods, good and bad and less of this and more of that. It’s really difficult with kids who think so concretely in black and white about food, to tell kids how to eat in that way. Then we all grow up and get into diet culture, and more messages and more messages about restriction. So I think restriction is like at the core of how a lot of people interact with food in ways they just don’t even realize.AmyIt’s extra hard, because as you’re talking about that my gut reaction is “but I want my kids to eat more nutritious foods.” How do you do that without limiting the other foods? Some foods tastes better than others and that’s the primary driver that kids have when they’re eating. They want it to taste good. They don’t have the capacity to understand about nutrients in different foods. VirginiaNor should they! That’s not an age appropriate expectation, that a six year old is like, “You know, what I’m worried about today? Cholesterol. What’s happening with my arteries in 40 years?” It’s not where we want their minds to go. Let’s back up and talk about why restriction does backfire. Because some people listening may be thinking exactly like you, like "give me back my food pyramid or my ‘my plate’ or whatever, this is totally fine. What we need to understand is that research shows over and over that the more limited you feel around a food, the more you feel like you don’t have permission to eat it, the more fixated on it you will be and the more you will crave it. Just saying to kids, “I want you to eat more fruits and vegetables” makes the fruits and vegetables less interesting. We can put in the show notes the famous study done by the iconic food researcher Leann L Birch, where they told half the kids in the study that they could have as much soup as they wanted, and then have dessert. And then they told the other kids you have to finish your soup before you’re allowed to have dessert. The kids who had to finish their soup, both ate less of it and liked it less than the kids who were allowed to self regulate between all the foods on offer. It’s a really powerful piece of research and it’s been replicated many, many times. It really showed that primary human psychology of feeling limited makes you crave it more. That is why this cannot be the way we approach nutrition with our kids.AmyWhat do you say to someone who doesn’t have a lot of understanding of nutrition, but they still want to raise their kids eating a “healthy” diet? How do you do it without having any of those boundaries?VirginiaThis is where I think Division of Responsibility is so helpful, because Division of Responsibility isn’t about good foods versus bad foods. Instead, it’s a way of feeding your family that lets kids play to their strengths. Kids, when left alone, really do know when they’re hungry and when they’re full. They will apply that knowledge to any type of food—even the “treat food” or higher flavor food, things that they’re really drawn to. None of us need nutrition degrees to feed our families. You don’t actually need to know all this nitty gritty about macros and micronutrients and potassium and sodium. All you need to know is that you’re in charge of offering a range of foods. That can mean lots of different things based on your budget, preferences, cultural values around food, whatever. You offer a range of foods, you’re in charge of what is served at the meal, and kids are in charge of how much they eat. That sounds overly simplistic—and of course, we’ve done plenty of episodes where we get into the nitty gritty of all of that—but fundamentally, that’s letting you bypass this whole issue of “is it nutritious enough?”AmyI’m on the same side as you, and I’m still like, “But wait!” On some level, it might be even easier if you didn’t have nutrition information.VirginiaThat is completely true. Let’s be real, when we say “nutrition information,” we don’t mean unbiased, exactly right, unequivocally true statements about food. We mean a whole mishmash of what we’ve learned in the media, what we read in diet books, what we’ve picked up from something a doctor said, something our mom said, something my neighbor said, my yoga teacher said such-and-such. All of this information in our brains about food is not all necessarily useful and it is really difficult to silence. I think that’s important to think about when you’re getting fixated on the nutrition piece. Is it really nutrition? Where are you getting those messages? Why does this feel so important?AmyWhen you are fixated on something, I think asking yourself, “What is my goal here?” When you’re worried about whether your kids eating enough protein, what’s the underlying goal? What’s your underlying worry? VirginiaBecause if you drill down into that, you may realize this is a restriction thing. This is actually me worrying about their body size or me worrying about whether I’m feeding them in a “perfect” way because I feel a lot of judgment about how I feed my kids. That’s not just basic nutrition, right? It’s often other anxieties we have that we’re filtering through this lens of wanting to control how our kids eat. It’s a way of spotting your own hidden restriction traps—which, to be clear, I have, too.AmyThey’re never going away. It’s just a process of recognizing them.VirginiaRecognizing them and then realizing you can let go a little bit. We had it just the other day. One of my daughters was eating some cookies with her afternoon snack, and we had bought the ones that come in little baggies of six cookies. She finished them and wanted more, and my husband was like, “But that was the portion.” And I was like, “Yeah, but that was just the portion the manufacturer decided. That’s not like some unequivocally correct amount of cookies for her. If she wants two more cookies, it’s fine.” These restriction traps come up all over the place, and social media does not help because they are everywhere.AmySo we’re going to share some other examples of where we’ve seen this and realized that there might be something else going on with restriction, just as a fun exercise. VirginiaThe first one is a message we have seen on Instagram where there’s a message that “processed foods will make kids feel grumpy.” What even are processed foods? That’s an enormous category. They all make kids grumpy? Bread? Everything makes kids grumpy? Those kinds of statements are definitely rooted in restriction because it’s definitely playing into good foods and bad foods.AmyThat’s such a common belief, too. It’s hard. Even when you know that it’s not necessarily true, because those messages are just everywhere.VirginiaThis is one I see parents like apologizing for a lot. Like, “I can’t believe I’m letting them eat this,” or “I’m being such a bad mom today.” And this is where we have to push back because it’s not fair for moms or for dads to feel shamed about feeding kids perfectly nutritious and valid food choices because of this mysterious hype that doesn’t really make sense. I’m actually starting to dig in right now for my next New York Times column into the sugar high thing. Because none of this is cut and dry, it’s definitely not. It’s been interesting to look at the data and realize just how much myth goes into those kinds of messages.AmyLast week, I did an Instagram story on sodium because I was getting so many questions on it. That same day, I shared a snack plate of my three year old’s lunch. I looked at it and I was like, okay, so she basically hit her sodium, like a “maximum level,” in that lunch. Because there was cheese and there was crackers and there were veggie straws. But that’s actually the lunch that she ate, and she was happy. And that’s the lunch that I chose to give her. And it doesn’t mean that it’s wrong just because one of the nutrients is high. When you take that out of the context of the rest of what someone might be eating, it’s possible for any meal to look like it’s not balanced or “healthy.” VirginiaYou tell parents all the time to take the big picture view on their kid’s intake! Look over the course of a couple of days or a week to get a sense of how things are balancing out. Because unless you are an intense bodybuilder or Hollywood celebrity who has to control your nutritional intake to the gram, I don’t see why anyone needs to obsess over this to that degree. It’s not a happy or healthy way to live. I think a lot of us can recognize that and don’t want to go down that crazy path. It’s just hard in the moment. If your kids have a few snack-based meals for a few days in a row, and you suddenly think, wait, do I remember the last time they had a vegetable? Then you can spiral off.AmyThe second example is one that has been really bugging me lately. This has come up maybe four times for me in the past month: that there’s only one right way to feed a baby. And that you 100% cannot do baby-led weaning and purees at the same time—I’ve actually had two different people say that to me, that you can’t do them both at the same time because you will confuse the baby. You’re basically putting the baby at risk for choking because they cannot possibly understand how to manipulate those two different foods at the same time. That’s not true.VirginiaWhy do these people think babies are so dumb? It feels very anti-baby. I have one child where baby-led weaning was the only option that was going to work for her and I had one child who was so ravenous that she needed purees because she lacked the motor skills to feed herself well enough. In both cases, we also basically did both at all times. Because, as humans, we do both, right? As an adult, I eat both solid and pureed food. I don’t know why you need to make this distinction. Or you may have a kid who’s really not doing well with purees but doing great with self-feeding. Again, I had that child. There’s definitely going to be kids on the extremes that need one approach or the other. But that doesn’t mean that that’s the only way to do it.AmyA lot of the supporters of baby-led weaning feel that it is the right way to start solids and if you do that, you are going to set your kid up to be a healthy eater. You’re not going to have a picky eater and you’re going to have a perfect child. No matter how you feed a baby, they’re going to get to be one and a half or two, and they’re going to hit that developmental stage where they’re fearful of new foods. I don’t care what they ate when they were nine months old, it’s not going to be the same. VirginiaThe pressure we’re putting on ourselves! It’s not a realistic expectation to think that your child will never ever be a picky eater, because being picky is part of having preferences and will. As frustrating as it is for all of us, it’s normal for toddlers to go through this because it’s how they’re becoming independent people. And we want that for our children! So number one, let’s stop making picky eating the enemy of everything, because it is part of normal child development. But also, I think you’re totally right. This ties into needing to raise a “perfect” eater and this idyllic, perfect nutrition at every meal type of approach. It’s so much pressure on yourself, it’s so much pressure on your kid. It’s not realistic, it’s not sustainable. There’s just so many other ways to measure yourself as a parent. You are not how your child eats. AmyThis falls into the category of restriction because you’re putting up these artificial boundaries on what’s right and what’s not right.VirginiaTotally agree. If you’re literally saying, “I’m not going to spoon feed my child yogurt,” that is a restriction you are making that may at times be quite inconvenient. AmyOr you have a child who goes to daycare and that’s the way they feed them! You may not always have the choice.VirginiaYou’re setting up a certain inflexibility. I’m painting with a broad brush, but I do see a certain trajectory between the parents who are very hardcore about baby-led weaning, who then pack the rainbow bento lunchboxes, who then also don’t let sugar in the house. This can be putting you down a whole path of being very controlling about how your kid eats.AmyYeah. And just to say this again, we empathize if that’s where you are because it’s so easy to find yourself there. VirginiaYeah. Feel free to read chapter one of my book, you guys. It’s free on my website. I was there with you in a pretty intense way. The next one that we have noticed is definitely pretty clear cut restriction. It’s when you see pictures on social media, of kid meals and they’ve added a portion of dessert or fun food and it’s like three M&Ms in the lunchbox around the dinner plate. I think people really believe in their hearts that that is an appropriate portion size for a kid. I remember struggling because I would see this all the time and I would think, oh, yeah, they only need three M&Ms. And my kids would just inhale three M&Ms and look at me like, why are you not giving me more M&Ms? Nobody is satisfied by three M&Ms. What’s underlying this is that you are anxious about giving them a treat food and you’re trying to control how much of it they eat. With Division of Responsibility, you stay in your lane. You’re blurring responsibilities there. You need to give them a little more freedom to decide. Maybe it’s six M&Ms or twelve. Or, you don’t count the M&Ms! That’s also an option. AmyThe thing that can be hard about this is Ellyn Satter says to give dessert with dinner and give one portion. Well, what’s the portion? Is this portion the same for me as it is for my child? Is it the same for an 18 month old as it is for a five year old? That’s a lot of choices that you need to make. VirginiaI disagree with this piece of Ellyn Satter. I think it is too confusing for parents. You do then get really hung up on portion size. I think it’s better to put out something that you can all share on the table and let the kids still help themselves to how much it is. Maybe you don’t put out 1,000 brownies, but you put out a plate so that everyone’s going to have one or two. Getting hung up on the different portion sizes for your 18 month old versus your six year old sounds crazy-making.AmyWe often have dessert with dinner and I often force myself to make the portion larger than I think it should be as a way to get myself out of the habit of trying to control how much of the dessert that they get.VirginiaFighting back against your restriction, I like it.AmyIt’s a very interesting. Last weekend I made rice krispies treats in a 9x11 baking pan. I remember very clearly standing there and debating how big to cut them. Then I was like, you know what? I’m gonna cut them as big of a size as I would want my rice krispies treat to be. That probably wound up being less bars than specified in the recipe. Everyone wound up having two and it was fine! Just be aware of what comes up. It can be a very, very interesting and eye opening experience to consider. And the same thing with ice cream!VirginiaYeah, I admit, we do tend to serve ice cream in smaller bowls, mostly because ice cream is expensive and I want the pint to last a little longer. There’s probably also some restrictive mindset of thinking surely they don’t need a full cereal bowl size. I think that the Satter advice of “serve one portion of dessert with dinner” is great if you are consistently serving dessert every single night with dinner. There’s always a treat food on the table and your kids can trust and rely on that. Then you could have it just be one thing because they know they’re gonna get more tomorrow. You’re not going to trigger the scarcity mindset. Whereas if you serve dessert a little more infrequently, I would probably peel back on needing to control the portion. View this as a learning opportunity for everybody to learn how much they want to eat cookies or ice cream or whatever, which she also does say you should do from time to time. Because we don’t tend to do it every single night, I take that approach of letting them regulate their own portion. And I definitely see them leaving stuff in the bowl. Some nights they want a lot and some nights they don’t really care about it. We’ve avoided the restriction of mindset there. I think if you find yourself counting M&Ms or really struggling, do exactly what Amy’s doing. Err on the side of giving more and just be curious about what happens.AmyMy overall goal is to expose and offer my kids a range of foods throughout the week. That includes all sorts of vegetables and produce, all sorts of food groups, and also to have these moments of food that is purely for pleasure. Aim for a mix of all of those experiences, so that at the end of the week, they’ve had a lot of different food types, and not to get caught up in the counting. That’s why it’s hard for me when people ask me about appropriate portion sizes. My answer is to always trust your child’s hunger and that is not a satisfying answer for a lot of people.VirginiaBecause they are still working through their own restrictive mindset.AmyAnd because that’s the cultural norm! Someone was telling me the other day that they went to their pediatrician and their pediatrician actually recited the Division of Responsibility to them, and I was like in Des Moines? Somebody knows what that is? I was so shocked. I’m going to drive an hour now to go find that person. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard a medical provider even know what that was. VirginiaYou’re definitely fighting some bigger cultural stuff. We can also put a link in to my column from December because I did get into a little more of the research supporting it. That’s a good thing to have handy if you are getting some pushback from doctors or other family members. I often hear from, interestingly, mostly women saying, “How do I explain this to my husband?” This article is a useful link to share. It can help explain why you are relaxing about portion size. If we are having a fun food experience, the first thing that kills the fun food experience is worrying about portion control. AmyDo you want to share a tip for, when we’re looking at health information or food or things we see online, how to spot this sort of thing? How to evaluate whether it’s information that we want to take in?VirginiaIf we’re talking about social media posts, I would say—I mean, Amy’s photography is lovely, so lovely photography is not an automatic reason to write it off. But, a photo that is hyper styled, hyper controlled, everything in the box or on the plate, and perfectly portioned out in this really beautiful jigsaw puzzle way, I think it’s a sign that they made that meal to shoot a photo and not to feed to an actual child. There’s probably some other stuff going on in the advice that’s not about what you actually need to think about with your kids. A great thing about social media is it has given more attention to things like division of responsibility, so there are a lot of people talking about it now, which is awesome. There are also plenty of people using those concepts to promote a diet mindset. If you see somebody claiming to be intuitive eating or division of responsibility but also talking about controlling a portion for food for a child, that’s a big red flag, because that goes against both of those concepts. Overly obsessing about different types of micronutrients and macronutrients, anything that feels like it’s really, as Leslie Schilling would call it, “health propaganda,” versus basic advice about how to feed your kids.AmyWe got this really awesome question from a listener. They have twins who are a little over two years. They do division responsibility. They’ve tried family style, they’ve done deconstructed meals, they try to always have one food on the table that the kids like. They’ve put at least two hours between snack and dinner and they sit down together. Basically, like, they’ve done all the things. A+, gold star students. Great family meals. But then the kids don’t want the food. They will sometimes eat plain rice or bread. She and her husband are underwhelmed by the meals because there’s a lot of leftovers and food waste. So, she’s gone back and forth between trying to make a meal the kids will like and trying to make a meal that she’ll like.At the end of the day, the kids still aren’t eating a lot. I think at the root of this, she—and often I and many parents—feel like they’re failing and that they’re not doing family dinner the right way. For some reason, they just can’t figure out what to feed their kids. Which is where I would say, it is 100% possible that your kids are just not hungry for dinner. That is a really, really normal thing. And which can make you also feel like you’re failing because nobody wants to send their kid to bed on an empty stomach. But it’s normal.VirginiaIt’s so normal and it comes in phases. Beatrix is right around the same age as these twins. And oh, dear listener, I am right there with you. She is so over dinner right now. Basically, I feel like I could set a watch for five minutes and both of my children would be gone from the table before the timer went off. That is what’s happening with dinner right now. We sit down, they eat like three bites, and then they’re both like ping pongs, just gone. Because they’re over it! They want to go play. They’re just not in a super hungry for dinner phase. A lot of it is in our schedule, they are having snacks closer to dinner. They’re both ravenous at 3:30-4:00 and so by 5:30 they’re actually not that hungry anymore. So it is what it is right now. AmyI ask, “How are the rest of their meals? Are they eating well, the rest of their meals? Are they meeting their milestones and gaining weight? Do they generally seem happy? Do you feel in your mama gut that something is wrong? Or does it seem like they’re not hungry?” The last thing they want to do is to work at eating something that they may not be super familiar with. They may just legitimately not be physically hungry. But that’s not a common message that we’re given. VirginiaDefinitely not. Just as you were running down that list, I was like, yep we’re fine on milestones, we’re fine on all that. She’s not eating a ton in general. She’s also getting over a cold like, I think her two year molars were coming in. There’s a lot of things that can just throw off eating for a short period of time that you don’t need to panic about. You just had this with your kid being sick and giving up on solids and then bouncing right back once he felt better. If that’s going on, don’t stress. The times to stress are when you feel like you’ve only got a handful of foods that they’ll consider and you’re worried about their growth and milestones. It is important to take that big picture view.AmyYeah. I like to remind people and also myself that Tula basically didn’t eat dinner for the entirety of her two year old year. She just wasn’t interested in it. And now she’s like, maybe 50/50. She will very happily stand in her Learning Tower to help me chop vegetables, and she’ll eat a pepper and then like that will be her dinner. Like, even if there’s pasta, she’s just not super hungry at that time in the day. So, public service announcement: you’re not doing anything wrong. This is a normal phase of childhood. It may come and go. They may go through months where they’re inhaling dinner. And then it may back up again and not be much. Keep it in perspective and trust that. Don’t make it your job to get them to eat a certain amount of food. Make it your job to give them the opportunity and then trust whether or not they eat.VirginiaThis may even be a time where you decide you are going to do a simple kid dinner early and then eat what you and your husband really want after they’re in bed. It’s completely valid if it’ll help reduce your food waste and your stress. Maybe try that out for a few weeks and see how that feels. Make a different meal of the day your family meal and worry less about the dinner piece. I would also say this is definitely a “feed yourself first” moment. Pick the meals you want keep offering, the one or two safe foods you know that they’ll eat if they are hungry. There’s bread or whatever on the table they can go for. But don’t kill yourself making meals that are overly catering to them and then feeling sad about what you’re having to eat. VirginiaThanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast and that flashback episode to Comfort Food March 2020. I hope you enjoyed it! I would love to hear your thoughts.If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player or tell a friend about this episode.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe