The Burnt Toast Podcast

“The main problem with the BMI is not that it sometimes thinks thin people are fat. The main problem with the BMI is that trans people who exceed a certain BMI can't get life saving, gender affirming care. The main problem with the BMI is that there are surgeons who will not operate on fat people and require them to lose hundreds of pounds before they can access X, Y, or Z surgical procedure that they desperately need. But magically, they absolutely can manage surgery when it's weight loss surgery.”You're listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fat phobia, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.I recorded this intro like six times because they got way too gushy every time, but today I am so excited to be talking to Aubrey Gordon. If you don't know Aubrey, she is the co-host of the Maintenance Phase podcast. She is also the author of what What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat and her brand new book, which is out this week. Run, don’t walk, to get "You Just Need to Lose Weight" And 19 Other Myths about Fat People.I'm going to let us get right into it because Aubrey is awesome and this conversation is a total delight. So here's Aubrey!PS. If you missed Aubrey’s last Burnt Toast episode, you can catch up here.Episode 76 TranscriptVirginiaOkay. So I am looking at your childhood scale. AubreyYeah, you sure are. VirginiaWhat is happening.AubreySo I am in Los Angeles. I come down here for a good chunk of time at the end of each year. Since I started freelancing, I was like, I would like to spend more time with my family. So I do. And the one place that I can record while I'm down here—which is a big part of my job, recording audio. VirginiaIt is.AubreyYou know, it's Los Angeles! It's the second largest city in the country, hard to find a truly silent place. So, I'm inside my mother's closet, which just works on a number of levels, yes? And one of the things that she stores in her closet is the scale that we had in my childhood. It's one of those, like, if you went to a doctor's office in the 70’s, maybe? VirginiaIt's not a small digital scale. It's tall. It has the weights that slide back and forth. It's a full-on doctor's office scale.AubreyYour journalistic integrity is really shining through here. VirginiaThis was the scale your family had in your house?AubreyUh huh, absolutely. VirginiaI also have the question of why do we still own the scale? AubreyI don't know. She's told me she only uses it like a few times a year. She's a person who doesn't like things to go to waste.VirginiaYeah, and what do you do with that scale if you want to get rid of that? Like, how do you not waste it?Aubrey,Totally. And also, at this point, not only does she have not a lot of people looking for scales at this particular moment, but not a lot of people looking for big, heavy, loud scales from 50 years ago.VirginiaIt would be hard to give away, even on the freecycle page.AubreyI was telling her she should take it to a scrap metal place. Or to an artist of some kind, like a welder could do some interesting things? I don't think any of that's gonna happen.VirginiaNo, I think it’s gonna stay in the closet there and you're going to see it every year.AubreyIt's the greatest icebreaker to every interview I have.VirginiaIt's very off brand and somehow on brand, also.AubreyYes, it is the absolute nexus of things I stand against and things I spend all of my time on. VirginiaAnd stand next to, while doing your work. AubreyBut not stand on anymore!VirginiaYeah, not anymore. AubreyI was like, I get to show this to Virginia today and that feels like a win to me. What a treat.VirginiaSo how are you doing? You are a couple of weeks out from book launch. How are you feeling? How's it going?AubreyI mean, you know. Anytime you make a big thing and then there's like a year between when you make it and when people get to experience it, that's a year of always feeling a little bit like you're about to barf, you know? Just a tiny bit. Just always a low grade barf energy. So, I'm in the thick of that. I'm at the crescendo part of the barf energy.VirginiaThat makes sense. AubreyBut also, it's fine and great. And I get to talk to a bunch of fun people who I like talking to and it gives me an excuse to do that. How about you? You're how many months out now?VirginiaIt's the end of April. So I haven't reached peak nausea. But low-level-constant-background-noise-hum barf, sure. I'm getting second pass back this week, which I think is the last time I get eyes on it. But it's the week before getting we're going on a big trip for the holidays so I'm completely not in work mode. I'm trying to pack my kids up for this big trip and I have to read the book again. And I don't want to read it again. That phase where I can't look at it anymore. But also, what if I don't look at it enough and then something terrible goes in?AubreyEven if you look at it seven times, you're gonna catch something at some point and feel bad about it. Because it's forever now.VirginiaI don't pick up my first book anymore. Because I know if I pick it up, I will find something and just be like, why didn't we catch that? You can't look back at it at a certain point.AubreyThat's really smart of you.VirginiaThe whole pre-book-launch is a very weird phase. It's this liminal state you're in. But I'm so excited for you, because you're close to it being out, it being a thing.AubreyIt's happening. It's happening at this point. Whether I'm barfing or not, it's happening.VirginiaWith me barfing along for the ride! AubreyAnd you, too! I'm so excited! The front end of this week for me is a ton of interviews and the back end of this week is spending a couple days with your new book. I'm over the moon about it. I'm so excited.VirginiaYou’re the best. I felt awful even asking, you have so much going on. AubreyListen, this is one of those things where I'm like this needs to be out in the world. This is the kind of thing that the world very desperately needs right now. As an elder millennial child of a boomer, most of my peers who have kids at this point are in this space of being acutely aware that their upbringing around bodies was fucked.VirginiaIt was a hot mess.AubreyIt was bad news. And they're like, “So it can't be that. But also, I don't know what else to do.”VirginiaExactly, exactly. AubreyI feel like this is like gift of a set of tools. That's my hope. And sort of like an analysis for folks to go. You're not just rejecting one lens, right? You're applying a new one. Here's the new one. VirginiaOnce you start to see diet culture, once you start to name anti-fat bias, especially when it comes to kids, you now want to protect them from it. And that can lead to this all or nothing thinking that feels very familiar. People are like, “how do I get the schools to stop this? What media can my kid watch that won't be fatphobic?” And I'm like, “Are you just not going to show them a cartoon?” So, it's really about how do we give kids these tools, too? How do we normalize these conversations? How do we change the language in our household so fat is just a word that we're using all the time and not this loaded concept. Because we can't put them in these bubbles and be perfect in our anti-fatness, if that makes sense.AubreyI kind of feel like everything we do in the system that we're currently in and the culture that we're currently in is just some measure of harm reduction, right? So it’s thinking about things through that lens and not through the lens of, “I'm going to somehow create a perfect bubble in which my kids will not be exposed to any of the like harmful forces that exist out in the world.” Because that is not reasonable. I feel like most parents I know, on most fronts, have gotten there. Just figured out we're in a messy world with a lot of messy stuff. And you're going to be in control of some of it and totally out of control of some of it. But I think that that can be a harder thing for folks to come to terms with around anti-fatness and bodies.VirginiaI think it comes from that diet culture mentality of like, if I do X, Y, and Z, if I follow these rules, then it'll all be okay. And we're just applying that in a new way. So it just gets very tangly and we have to realize this is not something that there's five easy steps for, you know? There was never anything that there was five easy steps for, but for sure, not this. And that gives us a great segue to your new book, because I think what is so exquisite about it is how it helps us start to do this work and ask ourselves these really hard, painful, difficult questions. But also, there's just this clear recognition in the book that the work is not ever going to be done, but we are going to keep doing the work.AubreyI appreciate that. That's the goal, right? Everything's a mess, everything's hard. It's easy to get overwhelmed by how much mess there is and to be like, it'll never get cleaned up. We can't do anything, we can't have nice things, whatever. I had a conversation to this effect the other day with a health and wellness reporter, who was having a real galaxy brain moment around like, “I've never had a fat editor, I don't think I've ever worked with another health and wellness reporter who was a fat person. We use the language in our internal style guides, we use language of overweight and obesity with specific guidance around that being less hurtful to fat people and I don't think that's true anymore.” Blah, blah blah. And it felt like a little microcosm of what I see a lot of folks doing when exposed to sort of this set of information, which is just like so much overwhelm. And that turns into a sort of barrier to taking action.VirginiaWhere do I even begin to scale the mountain?AubreyTotally. And like, it's all going to be messed up! All of our actions are going to be imperfect. But we are not living in a world where too many people are trying too many things to defend fat people, right? Like, that's not the world that we're in. There are many issues, there are many communities where you can try things and there's a pretty good body of writing and thinking and research about like why those things may or may not be super helpful. On anti-fatness there is a lot less research. And there is a lot less of a track record of people trying things and not having those things work out. I think for me as a fat person, the best thing somebody can do is try something. Even if it's wrong, the distinguishing thing at this point in my life as a fat person is people who try something. Because the people who don't do anything, I cannot distinguish from people who are deadset anti-fat people. The action is the distinguishing mark. And it's the thing that like gets us on a road to somewhere.VirginiaYeah, you can then start to evaluate what's helpful and what's not helpful, because we will be trying things as opposed to not doing anything and accepting this entrenched place. When you're talking about that less of a body of research, we are also seeing that what does work for other forms of bias doesn't seem to work as well here and trying to understand why that is. AubreyAbsolutely. Your conversation with Jeff Hunger about this was top notch on that front.VirginiaJeff was awesome. His work is so helpful. AubreyHe's so great. We're at a different point in this movement than we are in other movements, right? And I think it's worth noting, how far have we come? What have we been working on? And how are the sort of contours of this issue different than the contours of other issues?VirginiaI feel like we skipped over the part where I should ask you to tell people what the book is and what it's about and what inspired it. So how about we do that real quick? AubreyGreat. Let's do it. So, it is my second book, and it's called, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths about Fat People. It came in part from a proposal from my publisher who has a series of books on myth busting. They've got books on immigrant communities, they've got books on unions, they've got books on a number of communities and issues that have been… willfully misunderstood, we’ll say. And I will be honest that—this is a weird thing for me to say, given the show that I co-host and the book that I am putting out now—I have a weird, conflicted relationship to myth busting because I think that we think it does more to change people's minds than it does. It's predicated on this very enlightenment era idea that if we're presented with facts, we change our minds. And I'm like, nah. We now have hundreds of years of evidence that that's not the case.VirginiaPeople just dig in deeper on what they believe.AubreyTotally. But at the same time, we've got more and more folks who are in that galaxy brain, I can't do anything mode. It felt really important to have something, to have a tool for those folks to be able to feel grounded enough in their own sense of facts and history to feel like they can handle what comes their way. We already kind of know how to get our parents to move off of outdated language, we already kind of know how to get our friends to knock it off when they're saying unhelpful things, right? These are all things that we know through our own relationships. And the barrier is more people feeling grounded and confident enough to say the things that they know how to say and do the things that they know how to do and work that change process with the people and institutions in their lives. This felt like an important tool for those folks. It could be for your jerky uncle who won't leave people alone about his fitness routine or whatever. But it could also be for you, the person who knows the jerky uncle with the fitness regime to figure out what your way in is.VirginiaThat's what I kept thinking about, reading it. You and I think and work on these issues quite a lot—some might say, obsessively. And yet, there are still moments where I'm in a store and they don't have my size, and I just sort of freeze and don't know what to do. The vulnerability takes over, right? And I just thought reading this, this is something you can come back to if you have one of those experiences. You can come back to this and be like these are my values, this is what I understand. Even if in the moment of facing the thing you've become untethered from that. This is a way of re-tethering yourself. It's just such a gift that way.AubreyOh, I'm so glad to hear it. My hope would certainly be like, you go to the doctor's office, you get your after visit summary, and it has your BMI in big bold letters, or your kid’s BMI or your partner's BMI or whatever. You can come back and hopefully read this chapter on the BMI and go, oh, right. It's nonsense.VirginiaI will light this on fire.AubreyOh, right. I shouldn't feel sad and ashamed about this. I should feel angry and indignant. Oh, I'm so glad that you experienced it that way. VirginiaHow did you narrow it down to just 20 myths?AubreySo the initial list was like 36.VirginiaI would imagine.AubreyBut a bunch of them collapse into one another. I had a bunch of separate ones that were like, fat people are the biggest drivers of health care costs or X number of fat people die every year just because they're fat and they just drop dead. That's how science works apparently. And I had one about the obesity epidemic and the construction of the obesity epidemic. As it turns out, you can tell that last story and it will get you to all of the other stuff along the way. VirginiaThey're all recurring characters in each other's nightmares.AubreyTotally. So to me, it felt more important to get to all of the information, whether or not there was a chapter title for it. And also like, if you do the health care cost one, that's like two pages. That's not much of a chapter. That's a leaflet. So I think it was much more figuring out how to choose some mother myths and figure out what the little tributaries were to those mother myths.VirginiaI was just thinking about the planning of this book and thinking, there was probably a beautiful mind moment of like, where does it all go? AubreyI definitely have an obsessive amateur investigator’s bulletin board covered in red string at my house somewhere.How did you land on your book’s structure? Because parenting and fatness and body image is like, oh boy…VirginiaWhat I wanted to do in the first chunk of the book was deal with the, quote, childhood obesity epidemic, because what I find so often is that even if adults are starting to question BMI and they're starting to grasp it about adults, there's something about “but the children” that's like this third rail where it's like, okay, but you can’t argue with childhood obesity not being terrible, right? Aubrey“We still have to be terrible to children.” It’s really one of those ones that, like, you can totally get where people are coming from when they say it. And also, if you spend like 15 seconds on it, you're like, oh no.VirginiaRight. So I felt like we need to start there because that's the core terror that parents are carrying around. The “but my child,” you know? It's so easy to play on parental fears for children's health, wellbeing, happiness, etc.Then the way I structured the rest of the book was to think about where are the instances in family life where fatphobia really lives and shows up. It's the dinner table, it's your kid’s classroom, it's coaches and kids sports, puberty, social media, these different arenas. So the rest of the book kind of marches through these different places, and asks, what does it look like? What are your things coming up? What are your kids getting from other people, from the teachers, the coaches? Who are all well-meaning hardworking people—I don't ever want to sound like I’m bashing teachers—but schools are a hotbed of anti-fat bias. Those are the questions I get from readers and podcast listeners, which I'm sure is similar for you. These are the things that come up over and over where it's like, we need to be able to tackle this.AubreyAbsolutely. And I would say for me—and I'm curious about this for you—there are a number of things that people say thinking that they are drawing an allegiance to a movement and they might not be recognizing those things might be undercutting the movement.VirginiaYes. You have some really good myths about that in the book.AubreyAnd I would imagine there are lots of parents who really think they've hit on the thing and we're sort of like, “almost.”Virginia The number one example is parents who email me outraged that the pediatrician is upset about their child's BMI. AubreyOh, because they're “not that fat?”VirginiaThey’re not that fat. AubreyOh, so close, but also really far. VirginiaNow you’re reinforcing the whole problem. AubreyNow you're just going, “My kids shouldn't be treated like this because that behavior should be reserved for the fat kids and my kid isn't one of them.” Which is not what people mean to say when they're saying it.VirginiaAnd they'll even come with like, “of course, nobody should be treated this way! But also, my kid is thin.”Aubrey It’s extra galling when they're definitely not fat. There's a similar thing with the BMI where people will do that—like, I'm sure you've seen this a million times—here's a picture of me, clearly socially defined as a thin person. The BMI thinks I'm fat. That's how you know you can't use it. And I'm like, that's not the biggest problem, right?VirginiaIt's really not. Shaquille O'Neal's BMI is hurting nobody. That's not the concern. AubreyYeah, The Rock is fine. We can all talk about The Rock being muscular and then the BMI thinks he’s fat. WHOAAA. And also, that is a real third rail.VirginiaThat is definitely one of those moments where I think people don't realize they're articulating their bias so clearly. And it's hard to figure out how to reflect it back. In a direct conversation, that doesn't always work. But you did a great job with that in—I'm looking at my notes now—Myth 14. “I don't like gaining weight, but I don't treat fat people differently.” AubreyThat one's a tricky one, because people are trying to draw this line vaguely around the idea of body autonomy, right? That this should actually be my choice that I get to do what I'm going to do and that doesn't mean anything about anyone else and my choice should be respected. Which is all true, right? All of that is true, you should totally be able to do whatever you want and see fit with your body. And also, because our brains are actually not that sophisticated to be like, I only believe this about me, but no one else in any other contexts ever. There is enough research and knowledge about implicit bias out in the world to know that that's not what we're doing, guys. That's not what we're doing.VirginiaYou didn't come up with your opinion about your own body in a vacuum with no influences from anybody else.AubreyYour idea that you need to be thinner didn't come from nowhere, right? Here's where it gets really, really tricky. There is some data and some academic tools that actually use one's own beliefs about one's own weight loss as a metric for and as an indicator for how much anti-fat bias that person will have. If you believe, fundamentally, that weight is manipulable and people can control their weight across the board, including yourself, you are more likely to see fat people as failing to manipulate their own weight. Which is tricky. That's not the whole picture. I think in all these conversations about implicit bias, the one thing that this should illustrate to all of us is that we are bad judges of our own biases. Part of the logic that this plays into is, “I didn't mean to hurt you, so I can't have hurt you” which cuts off any kind of continued relationship building. It cuts off any kind of accountability and changing course, right? It cuts off all kinds of things, because it says that my intentions matter more than anything that you might have experienced as a result of what I consider just to be my own good and pure intentions. Again, it's tricky. I don't expect anyone to have escaped that completely. We live in a world that makes that impossible. But I do think it's an important thing to acknowledge that when we are pursuing weight loss, we are feeding ourselves a series of messages about what it means to lose weight, what it means to be a thin person and what it means to be a fat person. Those messages are also being fed to us by weight loss compliments from friends and family. Those messages are being fed to us by people who say, “I was really worried about you before” or “you looked really rough before and now you look great,” right? The idea that we could step outside of that constant stream and go, “but I'm making this decision only for myself and nothing else is influencing it.” It's just not really the world we live in. I would love it if it were, but it's not.VirginiaI think we see that so much in healthcare, as well. The reluctance across—I shouldn't say across the board because there are lots of doctors who are trying to do this work. Because “Do No Harm” looms so large in that culture, they're like, “I don't mean to be biased against people, I have the best intentions about their health.” And then it's like, we hit this brick wall where we can't help them see that the harm is happening.AubreyIt is really fascinating. I wonder if you have encountered this much at all, I think particularly through Maintenance Phase this has come up more and more, that the number of health care providers and particularly MDs—which feels like a notoriously tricky pocket of healthcare providers to get to—the number of folks who have written in and gone, “all of my training was to do this.” Like, “for days and days and days on end, I was instructed and evaluated based on do I tell the fat patient they're fat. And now you're telling me I shouldn't be doing that. And now I don't know what to do.”It feels really indicative to me of how few folks are getting meaningful feedback, are positioned in such a way and encouraged to take that feedback. And how few people have gotten an invitation into this conversation through any other mode than direct feedback from someone who has been harmed by their actions, which is a rough entry point for anybody, right?VirginiaYou're immediately on the defensive.AubreyIt has felt really striking to me how many folks are just like, “Oh, I've just genuinely never thought of this before.” And that part feels both disheartening and heartening.VirginiaYeah. Because they are thinking about it. I've been hearing from a lot of medical students lately, which is very exciting to me. AubreySame! Thrilling! VirginiaGood job, med students. That's really cool. That gives me a lot of hope to think the new generation of doctors is grappling with this in a way that the current people you can see are likely not always. AubreyYeah, for sure. VirginiaI had another experience like this. Recently, I had posted a coat I found and I was really excited. J. Crew had gone up to a 3x in this coat—obviously, not far enough, but it was encouraging for a brand like J. Crew. And then after we linked to the coat, in the newsletter, we got all these emails from readers being like, it's only going up to an XL. They’d erased the sizes. They were just gone from the website.Aubrey What?Virginia I know. Corinne put the link in on Tuesday, I double checked it on Wednesday, the podcast dropped on Thursday, and the coats were gone. Like, what? What is that? And so I was talking about this on Instagram, and this person DM’ed me, and they were saying, “Well, probably the coats just sold out.” And I said, “Well, if that was the case, the sizes would still be listed, because I can see the medium is sold out and the M is still there with a little line through it. These sizes are just gone.” And she was like, “I just think you're reading into it.” Like I'm reading into the sizes being erased. She was like, “I work in retail. I don't work for J. Crew but I work in corporate retail. And I think usually when that happens, it's because the size order has been sold out. The brand is probably really excited it's sold so well.” So excited that we’re no longer identifying it on the website?!?AubreyThey're doing a great job of showing that excitement.VirginiaWith their total lack of fat models and the fact you no longer see a plus size section on J. Crew. It was there for like five minutes and now it's gone.It just was a fascinating conversation where I was like, Oh, you received this articulation of harm, which wasn't even about you. And immediately went to this place of “fat people are so defensive.”AubreyYeah, totally. And I think part of the thing that starts the catalyst of that response is being a fat person raising this issue. So I would say, particularly for folks who are not perceived as fat people, regardless of how you feel about your own body, if you're able to go into any store and buy clothes, congratulations! You have some measure of thin privilege. This is one of those conversations that would go potentially fundamentally differently if a thin person had that conversation.Because I think one of the hard things about all this stuff is, I'm like, oh, man, you are just seeing my fatness. And me saying, as a fat person, anything—like fill in the blank for whatever. “As a fat person, I like lemon meringue pie.” “As a fat person, I didn't sleep very well last night,” whatever. Doesn't matter. All of those things are registering as you're clenching up in anticipation of some kind of negative feedback rather than opening yourself up to I wonder what comes next. Or I'll wait for this sentence to end.VirginiaThis is making me think of a question I just got from a mom that I want your input on. She's fat. Her daughter is currently straight sized and struggling with some teenage body stuff. And she said, “I feel like my input isn't landing, because she's looking at me and being like, well, you're fat,” you know? Like, it was like a credibility issue. And what do I do about that?There's probably like some truth to that, if her daughter is thinking that thinness feels really important right now, trying to fit in in eighth grade or whatever. Thinness matters so much. Your fat mom's perspective doesn't hold so much water because she has “failed” to achieve the thing that feels so crucial to you. I have empathy for both of them. But it's one I've been thinking about and I would love your thoughts. AubreyIt's tough. It's such a tough one. Because then what do you do? What what do you do if you, as mom, are not a credible messenger in your own parenting? Ugh God. Yeah. I also have empathy for both of them. Particularly that mom’s position feels like a real gray-eyed Athena moment of like, you know everything that's about to happen and that you can't really intervene in the ways that you would hope or with the effectiveness that you would hope. God, that's a rough one.VirginiaI do think we have research showing that parents influence teenagers, even when teenagers are not appearing to accept our thoughts or feelings. You do have more influence than it looks like you have in the moment. I mean, I see this even as a parent of a nine year old, who's often going on thirteen. It appears that I am having no impact and I'm the most mortifying person in the world, but actually I see through other actions that she craves my approval and trusts me, and that we have this strong bond.So I would hope that there's that in play, that it may look like a reduction right now, but it ultimately won't be. It still feels really important for you to be modeling. that you can be a fat person who's good with their body, or even if you don't feel good with your body that you can be modeling ‘I am worthy of respect and dignity’ and all of these things. Because she may not always be thin. She needs to have that even if it doesn't in the moment connect. It's going to matter later on. AubreyI just keep coming back to ‘Boy, that's a tough one.’ That's just an emotionally tough position. VirginiaWell, it's a rejection from your kid, which just sucks. And kids are good at figuring out how to reject us and part of that is developmentally appropriate. They're supposed to be separating, but when it's over something like this? It's like the fear you're gonna raise a conservative, you know? These are really important core values that I want my child to be living.AubreyI mean, I'll say this. There's a thing that my sister-in-law in particular does with her kids that I enjoy immensely, which is when they start doing the kid thing of like, '“don't be like this, don't show up in this way, and could you not wear bright colors? Could you not make too many sounds? Could you figure out how to disappear?” and she goes hard in the other direction. Like, “Oh, do you want me to wear this? What if I put on glittery eyeshadow? What if I showed up with a kettle drum and just started beating it going, “I'm their mom here I am.” It's both really fun and that's how she engages with the world anyway, right? Like, that's true to who she is.But I think there's really something to go to the source of the anxiety and be like, “sorry, is this really what you're afraid of?” Like, my niece, at one point wanted me to watch her debate tournament—which was the most fun thing I have done a long time. It was on Zoom during the pandemic and she was like, “your camera needs to be off, you could probably just put in a different name. It can't be a picture of you.” Like, it was like all of these things. And I was like, “oh, man, I'm so sorry. Because I was really planning to show up in a leopard print sweater that just says ‘Proud Aunt’.” Like, I think there's some use to that kind of stuff, too, depending on the tone of the conversation, but it gives people a way out and allows them to see sometimes the kind of outlandishness of their particular their fears, you know?VirginiaIt's also saying to a kid in this situation, you can't really reject me. You can reject me but I am still your mom. I still love you, show up for you, still here in my fat body, being your mom. That is really powerful. Again, maybe not right now. But when I compare that to the stories I hear from readers who are looking back on parents who were ashamed of them, parents who were correcting and controlling them.There's a great line—this was Myth 4: thin people should help fat people lose weight—and I really loved and underlined this line. “I love you doesn't ring so true when it's followed by ‘I just want to fix you.’” I don't think you were talking about parenting at that point, but that absolutely connects to parenting in a huge way.AubreyFor sure. I did policy change and community organizing for a long time before starting the work that I do now. And one of those campaigns was to ban so-called “reparative therapy,” ex-gay and ex-trans therapy, in Oregon, which we were successful in doing, which is amazing. Part of my job was to recruit witnesses and people who could testify about the impact of ex-gay and ex-trans therapy on their lives or on their kids lives. The thing that really stood out to me in that prep—like, I'm a gay person, those were really hard testimony preps to do. The thing that stayed with me the most and that feels like a lesson to transfer here is that 100% of the parents who signed their kids up for conversion therapy, thought they were doing the best thing for their kid. And I think it's one of those really hard, really human things. We can think we're doing the rightest thing and still cause harmful outcomes or still not know the whole picture yet or still not be far along enough in our own political education on an experience or an issue or a community to know how to make the right decision.So I think just approaching all of this with enough humility and enough willingness to mess up along the way feels like really essential. Because even if we don't think we're messing up, we're definitely messing up. That's happening all the time whether or not we mean to. So being able to start from the place of “I might mess this up, but I'm gonna do something anyway,” feels really, really essential to all of this within and beyond parenting world, just like as a human. VirginiaIt's that balance of try something and be open to the feedback that what you're trying is not working. That's the combination we really need here, versus try something, be sure it's right despite the fact someone's telling you it was harmful because you didn't want it to be harmful. AubreyFor parents that I've spoken to who don't want their kids to be fat when they talk about what they're afraid of, they're afraid of social experiences of exclusion. And those are not fixed by not having a kind of privilege. And then having that kind of privilege, in my own experience with weight loss and weight gain, that makes it emotionally a lot harder to see what is available to you, but is being denied to you when you are fat, is a genuine heartbreaker. And I think it's worth flagging that, too, right? That like when your answer to the BMI is messed up because it thinks my thin kid is fat or I'm afraid if my kid gets fatter, they're going to be treated in such a way. The external conditions remain the same, You're just giving them temporary shelter. In a bus shelter of thinness, you're giving them temporary shelter.VirginiaYou're not giving them any tools to actually navigate through it. You're just saying the only solution is to make yourself into what they want.AubreyYeah, totally. You will probably become fat at some point in your life, or at least gain weight. And that will feel like a personal failure to you. And you will see all of this slip away, and you will blame yourself for not managing your own thinness appropriately. It comes from a good place of wanting your kid to be okay and to be treated well in the world. But I would argue that the answer to that isn't to spare them from the social context, but to fix the social context.Even if your kid is a thin kid who's perceived as fat by the BMI, or even if your kid is afraid of getting fatter or whatever, the best thing you can do in all of those cases is make the world a safer and more dignified and more respectful place for fat people. And let your kids and loved ones and colleagues and friends and neighbors all see you doing that. That's where we start cooking with gas. I mean, that's where we really start going for it.VirginiaThe last thing I wanted to be sure to ask you about, because I think these will be helpful things for my audience to be thinking about, in the book and also on social, you've been talking a lot about the distinctions between diet culture, and anti-fat bias. And Myth 11 is about body positivity and that very footnoted version of “you can feel better about yourself, as long as you're happy and healthy.” I think there's some some really useful stuff we should talk about there because I think for so many people, the starting point is body positivity. The starting point is recognizing diet culture. And we need to articulate why that does not go far enough.yrfatfriendA post shared by Aubrey Gordon (@yrfatfriend)AubreySo I think whatever your starting point is awesome. Welcome! Come on down! So happy to have you! And I think it's important in any movement, in any issue, in any struggle, to make sure that your starting point is not also your ending point.So, first things first, “body positivity is for anyone as long as you're happy and healthy.” I think this '“happy and healthy” phrase has become a real meme amongst people who are critical of diet culture without really thinking about what that means. What I would say to “body positivity is for anyone as long as you're happy and healthy” is: Depressed and disabled people deserve to feel okay about their bodies, right? Fat people and people who are not perceived as being healthy and people who are not perceived as being happy deserve to feel okay about their bodies. The last thing that people who are already being marginalized need is more caveats on what additional steps they have to take to be treated like they deserve to feel okay. Cause I don't know about you, I am a person who tends toward depression quite a bit. And I would love not to be written out of a movement space!VirginiaPretty fucking simple when you put it like that.AubreyI mean, I think the other thing to know is that there is an eagerness that is part of the galaxy brain thing, it's part of the starting to recognize it everywhere, to label everything as a facet of diet culture. And what I would say is that if there is a bedrock here, the bedrock is not diet culture, the bedrock is anti-fatness. Diet culture does not exist without a profound fear of becoming fat, without a profound fear of being treated the way that fat people are treated. And without what social psychologists call “social distancing”—it's a different kind than the one that we've been talking about. VirginiaNot the six feet kind. AubreyNot the six feet kind. Going back to this “the BMI is wrong because it thinks some thin people are fat” stuff. That is a critique, like look at how cockamamie this whole thing is, that doesn't actually address that this is a thing that is very specifically on a daily basis, restricting life saving care for fat people.The main problem with the BMI is not that it's sometimes thinks thin people are fat.The main problem with the BMI is that trans people who exceed a certain BMI can't get life saving, gender affirming care.The main problem with the BMI is that, because they are concerned with liability, there are surgeons who will not operate on fat people and require them to lose tens or hundreds of pounds before they can access X, Y or Z surgical procedure that they desperately need. But magically, they absolutely can manage surgery when it is weight loss surgery. So, I think that identifying diet culture is a good thing. Like, that's a good thing to be able to do and it is a pressure that all of us face. What anti-fatness as a lens requires us to do is ask, not only is everybody paying a price, but who's paying the greatest price? And what would it look like to make life less punishing for the person who's paying the greatest price? Not only that, but who profits? Both who financially profits, but if you're looking at diet culture from a lens of ‘it hurts everyone,’ which sort of implies it hurts everyone equally, right? Then you go, Oh, these fat cats are getting rich, Weight Watchers or whatever. And you don't go, well hang on a minute, they are putting out a narrative that allows fat people to be seen as failures. But that's being put out so that thin people can see their bodies as accomplishments, right?So, it's not just about what it allows you to believe about other people's inferiority—the perceived inferiority or failures of people who are fatter than you—but it also allows each of us to believe that because I'm not as fat as that fatter person, I did something right. And I should actually help them because clearly, I know how to do something right if it has lent me this body that is so much better than the body that they have, right? Like, which is a wild thing that I don't think most of us would say out loud. But that is absolutely sort of the underlying logic.Everything looks like a nail when you got a hammer in your hand. If you're only looking for diet culture, you're only going to find diet culture. But if you look a little deeper and you look at who is this designed to hurt and harm, I think things that we label as diet culture or as food panic is considered classism and racism. It’s a very thin veil. Some of it is straight up anti-fatness, under a very thin veil or no veil at all.If we want to dismantle these things, if we want to end them, we are going to have to get really precise about what we are personally impacted by and what we are personally not impacted by or what we personally benefit from. We talk a lot about diets and how hurtful and harmful they are,—including many, many straight sized people—without really reckoning with what that allows them to believe about themselves. And that feels like a really important part of the conversation, too.VirginiaI really appreciate this, in the book and the way you're talking about it now because I write about both diet culture and anti-fatness and it can feel murky sometimes. It's just so helpful to remember, okay, I have to keep coming back to the the bedrock. It is useful to unpack things like perfectionism and these other concepts that are in the constellation of diet culture—I've been thinking a lot about diet culture in the home or other realms, but we have to keep bringing it back to the bedrock. AubreyThere are a bunch of those things that we consider to be facets of diet culture that are also facets of—like perfectionism—facets of white supremacy culture, right? Like, we've got to be able to hold multiple concepts in our head at once and say, Yes, I am hurt by this thing. And also other people are hurt in different ways.VirginiaAnd way more probably, than me, a fairly privileged person. AubreyThis is the other thing that I would say is tricky about diet culture stuff. Often on the internet, where everything goes to get flattened and robbed of any nuance, we talk about diet culture as being two things: one, the effects on our internal lives and two, the result of some a amorphous culture that exists outside of ourselves, and not as something that we are interacting with, not as something that we are reinforcing, not as something even that affects other people differently than it affects us.I think it can be a really tricky thing to figure out how to critique diet culture and only diet culture and still have a conversation about accountability and the mechanics of change. If you're just saying there's this big, scary, cloudy thing that is called diet culture, and then there's me and I feel really hurt by it. There are like a bunch more steps along the way and we got to be able to chart those steps so that we can take a different path at some point.VirginiaIt's so easy to stay locked in making it a personal project. That's what diet culture taught you to do in the first place, right? Is to treat your body as a personal project that you should always be perfecting and chasing these ideals, but also that keeps you from understanding the larger narrative. AubreyHere's a question I've been getting asked a lot—and I imagine it's a question that you get, as well—when did you finally give up and see once and for all, that dieting was not the way and that you could just be a fat person?And my answer to that is always like, there's not a point of arrival because you can't step outside of the culture that we’re in. Like, that's not a… no, nope.VirginiaThere’s no opting out. AubreyBut I think that is a question about a sense of liberation, like an internal feeling of liberation that is totally packaged up in a diet culture frame. VirginiaYes. AubreyThat question is like “when did you finally lose the baby weight?” or whatever, but for anti-fatness. That's a real lightbulb moment for me. Thank you for that.VirginiaIt's people looking for a solution that will fix their own thing, right? Which is so understandable, because there is a lot of pain around all of this. We are struggling to feel like we can put clothes on and exit our houses many days. And that is totally real. But it keeps the conversation in this personal project space, as opposed to this larger space.AubreyAnd then any kind of further conversation about what would it look like to change it? Or what does accountability look like? Or what do you do when you accidentally play back into that thing? comes back to a sense of, you're somehow taking something away from my own personal hurt and harm rather than going, Oh, that's also hurt and harm and I should figure out how to help that person with theirs. And maybe they can help me with mine or whatever.There's got to be some sort of sense that our own struggles have integrity and are not threatened by acknowledging that other people have different and sometimes bigger or more complex problems than the ones that we have. And that there are more responses to that than just being grateful that that's not you. Which doesn't help that person.VirginiaWhich is actually pretty patronizing. Because even if there was that moment—that's when it all clicked and I opted out and I was free of all of this—my answer wouldn't help anyone else. It wouldn't apply to anyone else. What works for you isn't gonna work for me.AubreyFor sure. God, I enjoy talking to you so much. It's been a minute and it's really fun.VirginiaIt’s really good to see you.ButterAubreyListen, the thing that has been my butter most of all, is the thing that I would not recommend to people who have children nearby, young children in particular, which is I have been really enjoying Nicole Byer’s stand up. Folks may know Nicole either from her podcasting work or from Nailed It. Her stand up is almost entirely about her own sexuality and sexual experiences and she spends a bunch of time in that stand up playing with the audience's expectations of what her sexuality ought to be, as a fat person. VirginiaThat's super good.AubreyIt's great. Again, don’t watch it with kids.VirginiaI mean, or do and be ready for some conversations?AubreySure. Absolutely. The other one that I would say is much more fun and kid friendly is there's a show that I am an absolute fiend about a can't stop watching it. It is a show out of the UK called Taskmaster. Have I yelled at you about taskmaster? VirginiaNo, yell at me.AubreyOkay. It's wonderful. They’re on their 14th season, so it's been around. Each season, there are five different comedians or performers who compete for the approval of another comedian who goes by The Taskmaster. His name is Greg Davis. And they complete these totally meaningless but deeply frustrating tasks, like get all three yoga balls to the top of a hill on a windy day. You have two hands, work it out. You're watching people get more and more frustrated about something they know doesn't matter. But they do know it's going to be on television. It fits into a similar category to like Nailed It, which is like don't take yourself too personally. Don't take yourself too seriously. Don't take any of this too personally kind of genre. And I just really enjoy it. One of my personal favorites is a task that is make the most exotic sandwich—the most exotic sandwich wins. One of the people makes one that is a full loaf of bread and between each layer is candy bars and marshmallows. VirginiaWow. Okay, well my kids would really love that.AubreySo then the next task is whoever eats your exotic sandwich fastest wins. VirginiaGood luck to you. AubreySo again, just a recipe for frustration and watching people be thwarted but have a good time. Yeah, it's very funny and they have fully bleeped versions if you're nervous about any kind of swear words or any kind of inappropriate whatever, they make a fully bleeped family friendly version. It doesn't come up very often, but when it does, you might be glad it's there.VirginiaThat sounds excellent. Well, my butter is also a TV show. I was really laughing when you brought up Nicole Byers because my butter is a different flavor. It is Murder She Wrote reruns. Could not be more wholesome, like opposite of Nicole Byer in many ways, although you know, Angela Lansbury seems like she was a great hang. So yeah, probably they would be friends. But I think around the time you did your Maintenance Phase episode about her diet book—which was delightful, one of my favorites. I was like, Murder She Wrote! I used to watch it with my Grandma Betty. I would like fall asleep because I was like six and honestly, it's a slow moving show. AubreyYeah. The Pacing in the 80’s versus the pacing today.VirginiaIt's very gentle. AubreyVery different.VirginiaBut I when I'm like between shows, like I'd finished Derry Girls. I'm working on a puzzle in the evenings and I just need something super mind erasing. It's also a good one to do a puzzle with becauseIt's fine if you miss some stuff. But it's just delightful. The reruns are on Amazon Prime. AubreyI'll tell you this. I have a Murder She Wrote superfan in my life, somehow miraculously in my age peer group, where I'm like, wow, okay, great. Interesting. She watches it every night. And I found there is a cookbook called Murder She Cooked that I fully just sent to my friend and apparently is getting good reviews. So heads up. I found that while I was searching for the Colombo cookbook, which I'm eagerly awaiting now.VirginiaI will say there was one episode where she gets like mugged on the streets of New York City and I was like, this doesn't hold up great on race relations. I don’t love it.AubreyCorrect. VirginiaDon't love it, Angela. Don't love it. But for the most part, it's so low stakes because it's murder in her small Maine town that like it actually ages fine because it was never anything to begin with.AubreyMy childhood version of that was Matlock. Oh, the degree to which I would watch Matlock! And I'm imagining it's similar, like a mix of really weird, fully swing and a miss moments and then a bunch of stuff that was like, well, this wasn't au courant ever.VirginiaBut also, how great that there was a show with a—I don't know how old she was when she made Murder She Wrote, but she was at least over 25. She was allowed to be visible. It was ahead of its time in tiny ways, I would say. AubreyThe fixer of every murder in the murderiest small town in Maine. Cabot Cove. VirginiaWhy it keeps happening there. And the police, like have so much respect for her. They're like, yes, we do need you to come solve this.Aubrey“Thanks for your help, writer.”Virginia“Go back to writing your novel.” Oh, my gosh, Aubrey, this was so much fun. Let's make sure we don't forget to tell people where to find you, where to get the book, all that good stuff.AubreyAbsolutely. I am on Twitter and Instagram. You can get both of my books wherever you get your books. They are both out now. And you can listen to Maintenance Phase, if you want to hear us make fun of very silly diets and debunk them.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. I’ll talk to you soon. 

You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I write the Burnt Toast Newsletter. When you hear this, I will—if all goes according to plan—be sitting on a beach in Thailand. Of course, that means I survived the 25 hour flight over and jetlag with my kids. And honestly, those both feel like very open questions as I’m recording this right now.I know New Year’s is a fraught time for a lot of us. Resolution culture means that diet noise and fitness noise are turned up to level 1000 right now. I was thinking about that and remembered this really lovely conversation that Amy Palanjian and I had with Christy Harrison on our old podcast Comfort Food and I decided that this episode called “New Year, No Diet” would be the perfect rerun to share with all of you this week. It originally aired on January 13, 2019. And wow, the world is different! But diet culture has remained so much the same. If you aren’t familiar with Christy, she is an anti-diet nutritionist, a journalist, and host of the beloved Food Psych podcast. She’s also the author of the book Anti-Diet, and her new book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being comes out the same day as Fat Talk. So we will be celebrating book birthdays together in April and I’m hoping Christy will be back on the podcast in real time then to talk to us about the new book.Christy is one of the most thoughtful journalists I know. She is truly a calm and reassuring voice in the anti-diet space. So if you are struggling with any version of the New Year’s bullshit right now, I think you’re going to find this conversation really grounding and helpful. And Burnt Toast will be back next week in your inboxes with an essay on Tuesday, January 10 and in your podcast feeds with an episode with the great Aubrey Gordon on Thursday, January 12. Subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss any of it!Episode 75 TranscriptAmyHappy New Year, guys! It’s 2019 which kind of blows my mind and this is our first episode of the new year. So you’re probably surrounded with a lot of diet talk this week, if not for the past few weeks already. People starting new year’s resolutions, detoxes, new wellness plans, everything flooding your your email box and your social media feeds. So, we are here to help you withstand that onslaught and make this year the year you actually feel good about yourself and your food, no matter what you’re eating.VirginiaI’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I’m a writer, a contributing editor to Parents Magazine and author of The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America. I write about how women relate to food and our bodies in a culture that gives us so many unrealistic expectations about both those things.AmyAnd I’m Amy Palanjian, a writer, recipe developer and creator of Yummy Toddler Food and Yummy Family Food. I’m a contributor to Allrecipes magazine and I love helping parents relax in the daily challenge of feeding their kids.VirginiaAnd today we have a very special guest! Joining us is Christy Harrison, an anti-diet dietitian, host of the amazing Food Psych podcast and the lead character in chapter two of The Eating Instinct. Christy, welcome! Thank you for being here.ChristyThank you so much for having me.VirginiaWhy don’t you tell us a little more about you for our listeners who might not have encountered your amazing work yet?ChristyAbsolutely. I’m a registered dietician, nutritionist, certified Intuitive Eating counselor and the host of Food Psych podcast, as you said. And I am also the author of a forthcoming book called Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating which will be out late 2019, in time for the New Year and holiday season of the coming year. VirginiaExcellent. Can’t wait.AmyWe’re so excited to have you with us today because this the start of the new year always feels like such a vulnerable place for so many people. It’s strange because most of us know that resolutions don’t really stick around and yet there’s all of this pressure for us to do it. Can you talk about like why we all get pulled into this?ChristyAbsolutely. I think the reason we all get pulled into this is what a lot of people call diet culture, which is a system of beliefs that really privileges smaller bodies and stigmatizes larger ones. It elevates some foods while demonizing others, and promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status and moral virtue and oppresses people who don’t fit those molds, the cultural ideal of thinness or the cultural ideal of what “health” is supposed to look like.So that’s a lot to unpack there. But basically, this system of beliefs is with us all year round, 24/7/365. It’s present in the media, of course, and that’s what often gets the most attention, like the photoshopped, airbrushed images of impossibly thin models. But equally important is the diet industry, or what’s now known as the wellness industry, which Virginia, you write about really, profoundly in your book. The wellness industry has become the new guise of the diet industry in the 21st century. So we have still the traditional diet industry and now the wellness industry, too.We also have the everyday cultural manifestations of this belief system, which can take the form of a parent making a negative comment about their child’s body size or kids teasing each other for their body size on the playground or your coworker making some comment, like, “Oh, are you going to eat that? That has gluten in it. That’s terrible for you.” You know, all these tiny little manifestations. A friend of mine was telling me that the TV show Peppa Pig has a bunch of fatphobia in it.AmyReally? VirginiaIt breaks my heart because my daughter loves Peppa Pig, but they shame Daddy Pig a lot for food stuff. It’s a hard one for me.ChristyIt’s everywhere. It’s in these cute cartoons that our kids watch and stuff. It’s really ubiquitous. Diet culture is particularly prevalent in the new year, because it’s become the season where the diet industry does its big push to sell you things. The idea of New Year and renewal, I think, lends itself to this concept that now you’ve just come through the holidays you’ve been eating and “indulging” so much that now it’s time to buckle down and really shrink your body and make a resolution to to change this year.It dovetails nicely with the fact that we know that diets don’t actually work long term. And by diets, I really mean everything from traditional Jenny Craig, Weightwatchers—although now they’re calling themselves WW for wellness. Everything from that to Whole30, paleo, keto, the things that hold themselves up as just an eating plan, or a “template” or a “protocol” or a “reset.” They use all these different words. They say they’re not diets, but they actually still fall under the umbrella of diet culture, they actually still are diets by another name.So this time of year, it’s their time for their big sales push, their time to get more clients on board. And those things don’t actually work long term. So we know, the research really shows that any sort of diet, whether it’s wellness or a traditional diet, the weight loss effects certainly don’t last beyond about the 3-5 year mark. That is when we see the vast majority of people have put back on all the weight that they lost. And oftentimes, up to two thirds of the time, people end up regaining more weight than they lost. So intentional weight loss—whatever brand, whatever sort of plan you’re using—doesn’t actually have long term effects. It results in weight cycling in the long run.AmyI find it so interesting to think about that marketing piece. VirginiaYeah, because we think of the new year as almost like a spiritual time or a tradition. In fact it’s a line item in someone’s business plan, like, “January’s where we do the big push.” It’s not really this organic thing in the calendar, it’s actually very manufactured. ChristyYeah, it’s really insidious. It’s like taking this thing that can be so beautiful and spiritual—like cultures around the world have a New Year’s traditions and New Year’s celebrations of some kind.VirginiaThere’s something really lovely about the idea of a fresh start. I’m someone who really enjoys celebrating New Year’s even though I know it’s sort of an arbitrary thing. It just feels like a lovely chance to like set an intention for the year. Something about it is appealing. But that’s interesting that it’s so industry driven. And just to circle back quickly to the holiday excess thing, because we’re probably all coming off that place. The holidays can be such a fraught time for folks with food. Can you talk a little bit, as a dietitian, why is it normal to “indulge” at the holidays? Why is it not actually like, “Okay, now you’ve got to fix this thing that you just did.”ChristyIt is incredibly normal and part of a balanced and healthy relationship with food to have these holiday moments where you’re enjoying foods that you might not have at other times of the year, that you’re really partaking in these traditions and celebrating with food and connecting over food. Those things have been part of human culture for millennia. Around the world, cultures everywhere have connected over food and had special holiday traditions that involved particular types of food that you don’t necessarily eat the rest of the year, or that you do, but maybe they’re in different configurations or whatever.It’s very normal to have that experience. Actually, I think it’s really part of a psychologically, mentally healthy relationship with food to have that and to allow yourself to have that and not to feel like you have to be guilty or ashamed or work it off or atone for it in some way.Intuitive eating is what I practice, as a dietitian, and what I teach. That is really the default mode that kids are all born with. And Virginia, you’ve talked about this with your daughter getting sidetracked from that pretty early in her life. But at first when when babies come out, they’re programmed to seek out food, to tell you when they’re hungry, to stop when they’re full, to be seeking out different flavors and textures to the extent that they’re developmentally able to. Their relationship with food—if left unmarred by diet culture or by other things like medical trauma or food insecurity, or things that can really interfere with people’s relationships with food. If they’re just allowed to maintain that intuitive relationship with food their whole lives, people can be incredibly balanced and not have that fraught relationship with food that causes them to feel like the holidays are just a free for all, you know?And I experience this now, for myself, as an intuitive eater and with my clients where once you come back around to that intuitive eating that we’re all born with, it’s like, eh, the holidays aren’t a huge deal. Like, it’s great. I love pumpkin pie, I love having my grandma’s or my my aunt’s weird jello salad that she only makes for Thanksgiving. That stuff is awesome. But, other than that, I’m not feeling like I’m eating excessively or restricting leading up to the holiday meal so that I can stuff myself at the at the meal and then feel uncomfortable. It’s not this restrict/binge cycle that it used to be when I was, and when my clients were, really steeped in diet culture. It becomes a much more relaxed, easygoing type of thing. It really can be this celebration, this enjoyment, this opportunity to connect with people over food, without having that extra layer of guilt that diet culture really piles on.AmyI always think about when I was a kid—I come from a big Italian American family. And at the holidays, there was a ton of food everywhere. But then, at the same time, we were, for some reason, not supposed to eat it all. There was just this very confusing situation for me. Now, as a parent, I am very aware of if we make a special thing, I want my kids to be able to enjoy it without putting all these restrictions and just confusing the heck out them.VirginiaKnowing that everyone’s so excited to see this food and simultaneously horrified by it is such a confusing message for kids and for all of us. ChristyYeah, it really is. Our culture sends those mixed messages so much, you know? We have so much food advertising and that gets blamed and the food environment gets blamed with the large portion sizes. People say that that’s the cause of so many health conditions and the quote unquote “obesity epidemic” in this country. But research actually shows that people who are intuitive eaters, who have not succumbed to diet culture, who have not been taken away from their body’s natural cues about food and are not fixated on weight can actually make the same choices, the same balanced choices that they would make without those sorts of cues around them. People can be in an environment with abundant food and still honor their hunger and fullness cues, still honor their desires and find satisfaction and pleasure in food and connect with other people over food without feeling like they’ve like gone too far or they have to atone.VirginiaI’m glad you brought that up because one thing I see also happening in January is when people are in this atone mindset, they often connect whatever plan they’re looking at to health right? They say “it’s not really about weight, I have high blood pressure. I’m not sleeping well.” They’re connecting it to all these health conditions that we link to food and weight. So we’d love for you to talk a little more about why dieting is not the solution if you’re struggling with one of those health problems.ChristyYeah, absolutely. It is so common in diet culture, whatever health condition you might have, anything under the sun, is pinned on food. Like, food is the answer. The food is medicine idea is really prevalent in our culture right now. But the problem with that is that diets don’t work longterm. As I mentioned earlier, the statistics show that the vast majority of people end up regaining all the weight that they lost, and also just not being able to stick to whatever diet or plan that they’re on because it really takes them away from the normal relationship with food that keeps people going. And psychologically, being on a diet where you’re restricting certain foods is really taxing. That sort of willpower that people have to exert to change their eating and restrict their eating over the long term just doesn’t hold up because we have an exhaustible supply of willpower. When we’re trying to govern our relationship with food through sheer will, it really doesn’t work. It doesn’t last, it’s not sustainable. Weight cycling, which is the inevitable cycles of of yo-yo dieting that happen because diets don’t work and the vast majority of people gain back all the weight they lost. Oftentimes people are doing these weight cycles again and again, often dozens of times throughout their lives. That’s actually an independent risk factor for things like heart disease, blood sugar abnormalities, all kinds of conditions that tend to get blamed on weight itself. And in fact, there’s research showing that the heart risks, the excess heart risks that are seen in people in larger bodies, can actually all be attributed to weight cycling alone. So not the fact of the larger body, but just to the fact that people in larger bodies are more likely to have dieted more often because of the pressures that they face, in diet culture, to shrink their bodies. And that in and of itself puts their heart at greater risk.VirginiaThat’s pretty mind blowing. So basically dieting to, quote, “improve your health” is going to end up doing the opposite.ChristyYep, it’s counterproductive. It’s counterproductive not only for physical health but also for mental health. And we know that mental and physical health are very strongly linked, so that if you’re doing something that negatively affects your mental health, you’re actually affecting your overall health as well. It’s really any sort of diet, any sort of plan or protocol or lifestyle change or whatever you want to call it, is actually creating disorder in your relationship with food. Because an ordered relationship with food, if you will, is intuitive eating. It’s what we’re all born knowing how to do. It’s that ability to seek pleasure and to have some consideration for nutrition, but mostly to follow your hunger and fullness cues. To seek out pleasure, to seek out balance, not to follow diet rules that govern how you eat. Diets take us away from that intuitive relationship with food and create disorder in our relationship with food. They create this sense of having to rely on something external to ourselves to govern our eating instead of knowing and trusting that our bodies will take care of this, that our bodies have got this and that we can really trust ourselves.So when when we’re taking ourselves away from that intuitive relationship with food, we’re also creating a lot of mental stress and strain that can additionally impact our physical health. And of course, mental health in general is really important to overall happiness. Having mental health be a priority is really important so that you can actually show up for your kids and be there in your life. So many of my clients say—and I know that I went through this too in my own experience with disordered eating—that it really takes away from being able to be present in your life. Your head is so full of calorie counts and macros and Whole30 rules or whatever it may be, that you’re, you’re missing out on the life that’s right here. Whether that’s the mundane stuff, like being able to share a meal with your toddler or the bigger stuff, like being able to get your career going again or have your relationship with your spouse be fulfilling or whatever it may be. There’s so many things in our life that we can miss out on when we’re so fixated on food that it becomes like this full time job or at least an all consuming hobby.VirginiaSo Christy, on our podcast, we have what we call our “mama manifesto” of feed yourself first. Amy and I came up with this because we were talking about how often moms literally don’t feed ourselves first because you’re so busy, like your two year old is like—Amy—ScreamingVirginia—Begging for cheerios and you haven’t even had breakfast yet and you’re throwing food at other people in your house all day long and then neglecting your own hunger and needs. I’m thinking about it in terms of New Years. And I’m wondering what do you think a “feed yourself first” I won’t say diet, but anti-diet, should look like?ChristyI love that, I love the feed yourself first concept because I think that’s an issue for so many people in our society. I think starting the new year off with an anti-diet is a great resolution to have. I go back and forth on whether I think resolutions are helpful or problematic. This idea of “New Year, New You” can be so problematic because it’s like you’re trying to just turn into a different person or something, and that’s never going to A. be sustainable or B. actually be caring for yourself. It’s not very self-caring to want to erase who you are completely, right? It’s not very self-accepting.I used to write for Refinery29 and they did a great package a couple years back called “New Year, Do You” which is just all about “you do you.” Like, “new year, take care of yourself.” Deepen your own connection with yourself. So that’s kind of what I would advocate, for a “new year, do you” kind of thing where you’re working to try to really connect more with yourself.  Maybe have a resolution to do that. I think an anti-diet approach really fits well there. Instead of making a resolution to try to lose weight or to “get healthy” by cutting out all kinds of different foods or going on the latest plan/template/protocol/lifestyle change, really to think about just getting back in touch with your own body’s needs. Do your best to reject diet culture and reject the diet mentality.Because research actually shows that when people can reject those Diet Rules and not be governed by them, they’re on a much better path in terms of their physical health or mental health. Their cholesterol levels are lower, their levels, levels of disordered eating are lower. Their self esteem and their mental health are better and all these benefits.So really, the first step to getting back into that intuitive eating practice is unearthing all of those diet rules and regulations that you’ve been holding on to that you might not even know. They can be so subtle, you know? You don’t have to be on an official diet to still be dieting, you don’t have to be on an official diet to still have the diet mentality and to still be governed by diet rules. Oftentimes, it’s vestiges of diets past or it’s things you’ve picked up from magazines or that your mom said to you when you were a little kid that stuck with you. Like, it’s all these different things that swirl around in our head about food and bodies that make it really hard to have this authentic connection with food and our bodies.I like to do and recommend a practice to my clients where you journal every day about this stuff. Make a little bit of time, maybe it’s five minutes in the morning or in the evening or when kids are taking a nap or something where you just catalog what’s come up in your head around food and body thoughts in the past 24 hours. Try to think about where that actually comes from, and whether you want to believe it or not, whether it’s something that you’re ready to start to let go of, and what might be an alternative to that kind of thought. So for example, one thing that I see a lot in my clients is that they won’t eat enough during the day. And I think that’s very true with parents in general. You’re taking care of your kid and like you said, you put them first.VirginiaYour lunch is the leftovers that they don’t eat. The crusts of their sandwich.ChristyThat’s not a satisfying lunch, you know? So by the time dinner rolls around, or evening rolls around, maybe you finally put the kids to bed and you’re just like, I’m ravenous and eat everything in the house. And people often blame themselves for that and think I have no willpower, I have no self control. That’s actually diet mentality talking, that thought shaming you for eating like that is actually the diet mentality saying you’re supposed to be controlling yourself, you’re supposed to be “good.” And actually what it is, is that you didn’t eat enough during the day. You didn’t care for yourself and nourish yourself as you needed. And so of course, your body’s just going to be like, well, let me get it by hook or by crook, like, whatever I have to do to get fed.A solution to that might be, like you said, feed yourself first. Making sure that you have a plan for how you’re going to feed yourself as well as your children throughout the day. Also maybe having snacks while they’re asleep, while they’re taking naps or whatever. Just as you would probably pack snacks for them when you’re going out, right? To make sure they don’t have a meltdown in the grocery store or whatever. Pack snacks for yourself to make sure that you’re nourishing yourself throughout the day, as well.AmyWhat do you do about all of the noise that we’re hearing on social media and in real life from friends or family members who are talking about their cleanse or their detox, or even like a doctor who might say something unhelpful about your weight. I know at one of the companies I used to work for, there was always this weight loss challenge. And you had to join it in order to get a discount on your health insurance. It was this very convoluted thing. But there are all of those factors that come up in the course of our daily life that can be hard to filter out.VirginiaYou’re surrounded by other people’s diets even if you’re trying to choose a different path.ChristyI know. That’s why diet culture is so hard and that’s actually why I started talking about it, because I think it’s one thing to be an individual trying to recover and doing your best to get over diets on your own or with the help of a professional. But then if you’re having to go back out into this culture that’s constantly pushing diets in your face, you’ve got your work cut out for you. So I really think it’s kind of a social responsibility as well. It’s not an individual responsibility, really, there’s only so much we can do as individuals. I think we need a huge cultural change.That being said, there are ways to be resilient to this culture until we have the major cultural shift that we need to have. One thing is having a very liberal delete and block policy or unfollow policy on your social media. I’m all about unsubscribing from the email lists of people who are trying to sell you cleanses, unfollowing the people who are doing Beachbody and trying to get you to be on their team or whatever. Unfollow, unsubscribe, spend some time scrolling through your feeds and see who makes you feel bad about yourself or see who makes you feel like, oh, maybe I should really try that thing that they’re doing. If that comes up for you, just identify that. Notice that as like, okay, that’s a diet culture trigger that I actually don’t need in my life so I’m going to choose to unfollow this person. Even if it’s a good friend! You can actually mute people on Facebook without unfriending them, so they’d never have to know that you unfollowed their news feed or whatever.VirginiaAnd if it’s in person, how do you handle? I have to confess to a total fail on this front at my Thanksgiving dinner. Some relatives started estimating the calorie counts in the whole meal. I was so shocked that it came up that I didn’t speak out. I felt afterwards like, oh, my gosh, this is my platform. But I think I was so surprised they brought it up with me in earshot. I was just like, what is happening right now. But I did think afterwards, it’s also very socially awkward. And for people who do this work, you can say, like, “Hey, guys, remember this work that I do?” But for people who are just going through their normal life and this is just something they’re struggling with, how do you advocate for yourself in a group conversation or iwhen all your coworkers are gathered around the water cooler trading these diet tips?ChristyYeah, it is really socially awkward. I want to just empathize with that and say, it’s not always going to be easy. You’re not always going to find the right words. You might not always be able to challenge it. And that’s okay! Don’t feel like you have this responsibility to do it every single time because we all have our own stuff going on. Sometimes even I’m like I just don’t have the energy to deal with it. VirginiaI just can’t do this one. Christy HarrisonI think it’s a matter of a couple things. One is simply leaving the room, if you can, or leaving the conversation or changing the subject. That’s a little easier to do if it’s a bigger gathering where you can sneak off somewhere and nobody’s going to be like, oh wow, why did she just walk out of this room or whatever. But you can always do that, you have the ability to leave.You can also set boundaries with people in your life, to the extent that you feel comfortable with them, to the extent that you have a close enough relationship to do that. I find that it’s easier to start with yourself and start with the personal rather than getting into the science or talking about why diets are bad and shaming the other person for being on a diet or something. Putting it on yourself and saying like, “for me, honestly, diet talk is really hurtful and problematic because I’ve had a really hard time with diets. I’ve had really disordered relationship with food over the course of my life. I’m trying to heal from these issues and hearing people talk about diets is really harmful for me right now. I’m just asking if we could please not talk about that. I know that you’re doing your paleo thing and you’re really excited about it. That is great for you, but let’s talk about something else.” So if it’s a close enough friend where you can say something like that, I think that can be really helpful.If it’s someone that you’re a little less close to, maybe a small seed is the only thing you can do. Saying something like, “diets have never worked for me” or “I’d rather allow myself to eat everything and enjoy myself and I find that it’s a lot a lot healthier for me in the long run to do that,” or whatever. Say something small in the moment that might not totally address the situation, but might at least plant the seed or open the door to a larger conversation.Know also that the people in your life who are really caught up in diet culture can often be kind of defensive about it. Especially if they’re really on a soapbox about something at the moment. They can be evangelists about it sometimes. And if that’s the case with someone you’re talking to, realize that they’re probably going to be defensive, they’re going to argue with you. It might not be the best conversation. And so that might be a situation where you just say,”I’d like to change the subject, I’m really uncomfortable talking about diets,” or you excuse yourself and leave the room.Something that I really like, actually, is to someone that you’re close enough to or a family member say “I love you no matter what size your body is or no matter what you’re eating, and there’s so much more about you that I really value then then how you look or the size of your body.” Or like, “tell me about this thing that you enjoy talking about,” you know? “Tell me about how your career is going well,” whatever, like changing the subject to something you know that they’re going to resonate with.AmyI was gonna say, the changing the subject approach, which I use on my children when they’re complaining about what’s for dinner, is very effective during dinner parties. A lot of times if you’re sitting around a table, and there’s more than four people, the conversation sort of gets a little bit random anyway. Just toss something else out, it probably won’t seem that awkward to other people. It might just seem like you have something that you really want to talk about.VirginiaYou guys are making me feel better because that’s basically what I did. I felt like I should have made a bigger statement. Just changing the topic can be really helpful.ChristyYeah, totally. Sometimes that’s all you can do.VirginiaChristy, I know, you talked a little bit about your concerns about resolutions in general, which I definitely share. Do you feel like it’s possible for folks to set intentions for the year or say you want to do something like run a marathon or learn to swim or do some new body- or food-related thing that’s not necessarily weight-related? How can you adopt a goal like that for yourself and keep the weight stuff out of it?ChristyYeah, it’s really challenging in diet culture to adopt goals like that and not have the weight stuff creep in. It’s just a matter of being in continual dialogue with yourself and taking a critical look at why do I really want to do this. Is it for a sense of a sense of accomplishment? Is it for a sense of something to do that makes me feel really present, like a meditative practice that I enjoy? Is it to prove something to myself? All of those reasons could potentially be valid and something that you want to pursue.But is there something in there about wanting to change my body? Is there something in there about feeling like I need to be smaller, or I need to be more quote unquote, “toned” or more fit? And what is that about? What is that really about? Am I feeling like the body I’m in right now isn’t good enough? If that’s the case, I would recommend not actually pursuing that goal until the motivation around changing your body goes way down on the list.In diet culture it’s very hard for it not to be present at all, especially at first when you’re working on changing your relationship with these things. But if you know your motivation for physical activity is 1. to feel good 2. to shrink my body 3. to be more toned, to look better in a bikini, I would say push pause on that activity. Step away and do some work on your relationship with exercise your relationship with your body, your relationship with food, and then see if you can come back to it where maybe those ideas are still in the back of your mind. Maybe it’s like seven or eight down the list of why you want to do this thing, but it’s not the main driving force.VirginiaThat makes a ton of sense.ChristyI know that in my own relationship with exercise, that was a huge key to healing it. Because, I was—in my disordered eating days—very much an over-exerciser, very much using exercise to punish myself or to try to make up for the binges that I was doing, which were really just due to not eating enough throughout the day. When I was really was focused on trying to heal my relationship with exercise and not be so instrumental and disordered about it, I found that practicing that and saying I’m not going to let myself even do this yoga class if the primary motivation or secondary motivation is Oh, my pants are tight today, I need to get back into the yoga practice. Like, No, I’m going to like spend that time doing some self-development work or just something that makes me feel good that has nothing to do with my body.AmyThat’s such a smart way to to think about it. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone explain it like that, so thank you.VirginiaWell, it requires a lot of radical honesty with yourself. I’ve definitely done it where I’m like, “no, no, no, I’m sure it’s just that I want to swim across the Hudson River.” Which, it really was in large part that I wanted to show I could swim across the Hudson River. But for sure, number two on the list was I had just had a baby and I was struggling with all of the postpartum body image stuff. It’s tough to sit with that and parse through what is really motivating you, but that’s really smart advice.AmyThank you so much for joining us. This has been really awesome way to start the new year. Can you tell our listeners where they can find you?ChristyAbsolutely. The best way is on my website, Christyharrison.com. From there, you can find pages for the podcast and my writing and other work. You can also just type in Food Psych to whatever podcast provider you’re listening to this on. I produce new episodes every week. And I’m on Instagram and Facebook as well. But you can find that all on my website, Christyharrison.com.VirginiaFor this week’s unrelated, I wanted to talk about the last week of my life where I’ve basically questioned all of the choices that led me to become a parent. Our baby Beatrix, who’s 13 months old, has had a terrible ear infection. I want to be clear right now, I have had a kid with true medical catastrophes. Ear infections are not life or death. They are not a serious medical issue. So please don’t think I’m trying to equate our drama to any serious thing, because it wasn’t. But it’s so aggravating because she was pretty miserable. Dealing with fevers and the snotty nose, and then it went to an ear infection and she hates taking amoxicillin. But the big thing was, she really stopped eating. It was so interesting because of course, again, I’ve had the more severe version of this. But, suddenly my baby who, from birth has been a very food motivated child and just happily eats everything. Solid food went out of the window on day one, she was not interested in breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Like, throwing food off her highchair, just totally refusing.AmyDid you know she was sick at that point?VirginiaWe knew she had a really snotty nose but I don’t think she had broken a fever yet. The appetite went away pretty quickly. She’d had a cold for about a week and the snottiness was getting grosser, not less gross. So then last Monday, she just shut down on solid foods. Then by day two, she was rejecting her bottles too. And that’s even scarier, because at first you’re like, solid food, whatever. She’s got formula, it’ll be fine. And then when she started pushing away the bottle—she’d have like an ounce, maybe two ounces and push them away. It just reminded me how nerve wracking it is when your kid won’t eat. And I know she’s been growing very well. I know she’s got reserves—again not a crisis situation. It just really drove home for me how unsettling it is. And it gave me renewed empathy for when parents talk about like, “oh my kid is really not eating,” you really get that right in the in the gut kind of fear about your kid. AmyYeah, we had something similar with Tula who basically had a cold for like a solid month and would occasionally spike a 102 fever and then she’d be fine two hours later. So we had all these days where I’d keep her home from daycare and then by like 10AM, she was like bouncing off the wallsVirginiaNothing cures a fever like derailing your work day.AmyAnd she’s old enough that I thought, like I kept asking you, “Do your ears hurt? Does your head hurt?” She’s old enough that she can talk really well and she’s pretty eloquent for a two year old, but she didn’t have the words to explain.VirginiaYeah, I’ve definitely noticed that even with a pretty verbal kid, they can’t always express pain or where the pain is. It’s hard for them to get that across.AmyWe had a number of dinners where she just wanted someone to hold her and would just cry. It just isn’t her personality and I was not prepared for it. VirginiaYep. This was totally my week. AmyAnd it was like two nights in a row. And I was like, “what’s happened to our child?” And like, “is she ever coming back?”VirginiaPlease can I have her back? I want the nice kid back. This one’s really hard.So some things I did that did help—because I mean, Beatrix basically did not eat proper meals. I would say on a normal day, she drinks still around 20 ounces of formula, or formula and regular milk, we’re kind of transitioning. And this week, she was like eight or less per day. Sometimes six ounces, so it was a pretty big drop off. But she did still go for water in her sippy cup. So I knew she was staying hydrated, and as long as your baby’s making wet diapers, you don’t have to worry too much about the dehydration. So, she was still drinking water. And then we had some luck with things like popsicles and fruit. She would go for fruit, like strawberries. I think it was cold and a lot of water and I really just didn’t push it very hard one way or the other. Because I think it is important that you can have faith that this is temporary, they’re gonna get their appetite back. I think what can go off the rails in these situations is when parents freak out—again, very understandably—and push too hard on the food. Then, especially with this age group, you’re really at risk for setting up a power struggle that could stay with you long after the illness. You can really get yourself into a bad pattern.AmyYeah, what was it like when she started eating again? Were there any issues with any habits that she’d picked up?VirginiaThe biggest thing that we’re gonna have to reset is holding her during meals because she was so miserable and not eating. She would scream and so I would take her out of the highchair and then basically, just like you said, hold her while she sobbed while I tried to eat my dinner. It was a fun week, you guys. Children are a gift.But now, even though she does want to eat again—the appetite when it came back was like gangbusters. She’ll sit there, inhale all her food. Then as soon as she’s done, wants to scream, come on my lap and eat off my plate. Because that was the other thing, because I was letting her get in whatever she could, I was letting her eat off my plate, use my fork when she did show some interest in food because we wanted to get a few bites in here and there. And now she thinks that’s like how we eat. Which, it’s not.AmyIt’s so interesting that we have such similar experiences with the year age gap in between. Because Tula, when she’s done, she like looks at me. She’s like, “are you done? Can I sit with you? Are you done Daddy? Can I sit with you? Who can I sit with? Whose lap is free?”VirginiaBeatrix just goes, “Up? Up? Up?” Yeah, so that’s cool. So this will keep happening.AmyWell, it’s only happening with Tula because she was sick, too. We’re very firm, “you cannot sit in our lap while we are eating.” Obviously, this didn’t exactly happen when she was sick. But we’re firm about it now that when she’s finished, she has to get down and go do something or she can sit next to us on a little chair. Not on our bodies if we have food on our plate.VirginiaSo yeah, that’s what we’re gonna do. And I’m just like, I haven’t quite had the willpower yet to muscle through the three nights of crying that are going to ensue while I get us back on schedule.AmyIt might only take one, who knows!VirginiaThat’s very optimistic of you. But yeah, I mean, she’s better. She’s eating. She’s happy again. These winter months are tough with the colds and ear infections and everything that go around.AmyOne other thing I want to say is, trust your gut with this stuff. Because I really was like, “I’m going to take her to the clinic,” and then someone in my life was like, “I don’t know, she seems fine.” And so I like canceled our appointment and then two days later, she was still spiking a fever. The doctors are always like, “just wait, see what happens in a few days.” And I think if you’re really worried, just make an appointment. Pay your copay. Just do it.VirginiaI agree because the other thing about Beatrix is ear infection is she never grabbed at her ear so I hadn’t even thought of ear infection. We just were taking her in because she’d spiked this fever and so I was starting to worry about what if we did pick up the flu despite having the flu shots or what if it’s one of these other things. So it was actually incredibly reassuring to know it was just an ear infection, as horrific as that was. I agree, go and see the doctor and get the reassurance that it’s okay. Because A. you don’t want to miss it if it is something serious and B. even if it isn’t anything serious, it’ll just help you keep it in perspective when you’re doing the daylong clinging, screaming toddler thing. Like, okay, this is terrible but it’s not life or death and that’s good to know.AmyAlways. Always good to knowVirginiaSo, courage to all of the moms and dads listening as we carry on through the germ-y times and hopefully it’ll be spring soon.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. Leave us a rating and review—those really helped people find the show! And we’ve got Aubrey Gordon coming up next Thursday! You don’t want to miss it. The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti diet journalism. I’ll talk to you soon. 

Being able to feed yourself without the observation of someone around you just really changes things. You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fat phobia, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.Today we are revisiting a newsletter essay, one that I actually published just last month. It’s called “Do I Wear Spanx to Family Court?”I’m going to read the piece, and then my good friend Lyz Lenz is coming on to discuss divorce and diet culture with us. If you don’t know Lyz, she writes the excellent substack newsletter Men Yell at Me. She’s also the author ofGod Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America,andBelabored: A Vindication of the Rights of Pregnant Women. And she has a third book coming out in 2024 calledThis American Ex Wife. Lyz is a really amazing political journalist, memoirist, all around phenomenally talented writer and my local divorce expert, so I’m really excited to have her on the episode.Okay, here’s the essay. It ran on November 1. VirginiaSo Lyz, you have written so brilliantly about divorce. You are the smartest person I know about divorce. I text you whenever I want to know about divorce.LyzWhich isn’t that often, for her husband who’s listening.VirginiaYou are extremely knowledgeable about this topic and your next book, This American Ex Wife, is about divorce. So you are here as my divorce expert and I’m curious: Do you see diet culture playing a role in American divorces?LyzOh, absolutely. Something initially with divorce that hits on diet culture is the “revenge body.” Anybody who’s gotten divorced will tell you about the stress and the weight loss associated with it—or not! Sometimes it’s weight gain. But there is the expectation of having that “post-breakup revenge body.” I’ve seen TikToks that are kind of making jokes like, you want to sit on the couch and relax, but you remember you have to be the hot one in the breakup.VirginiaI never thought about this. LyzYou know, like the “getting back out there” body. I know for a lot of men, divorce involves some free time, which, that time used to be managed by someone and now they don’t know what to do. So there is an aspect to the culture of the Divorced Dad in the gym. I follow quite a few TikTok accounts of divorce influencers which are out there…VirginiaWow, divorce influencers.LyzSo the divorced dad going to the gym, the mom trying to get hot and get back out there. It hit me so personally when I got divorced because I was so stressed out, and my response to stress is to not eat. I lost a lot of weight, and it was not healthy. And I remember people being like, “Oh, you look so good,” and me being like, “I’m so stressed out, I’m not sleeping or eating. You should be asking me if I’m okay.” I would get so angry about it, too, because then also people—as you know—people treat you differently. All of a sudden the men would see me differently because it was a very unhealthy amount of weight [to lose].VirginiaIt sounds like a a parallel with postpartum “get your body back” pressure.LyzYes. VirginiaSo for a lot of women you’ll have just done that in recent years and now you have to do the “revenge body.” And why are we not allowed to just let our bodies be during times of stress and trauma?LyzRight, right. And I think, too, it’s so hard when you layer on that the idea that exists in the divorce world that you now have to find someone else. I hate that. I hate that whole idea. That’s what most divorce books are. It’s like, okay, well, you did it, now how do you find love again? So that comes with that added pressure of being good looking which then translates to diet culture. Thinness, muscles.VirginiaI’m just remembering a piece of yours1 where you were like, “actually all women want is to live alone in the woods with our wolves.” No, we don’t want to get remarried. That’s not the goal but that is immediately the expectation. Why do you want to get right back into the thing you just got out of?LyzWell, I think there’s that pressure of singleness, right? There’s that stigma of singleness. But you’re right, most women post-divorce don’t remarry. It’s the men who remarry. It’s somewhere around 70% of women initiate divorces and I think it’s less than 40%—I need to fact check myself on that.2 But it is a lower number who then get remarried. It’s an overwhelming number of men who then try to remarry because, like, “I don’t know how to find mustard in the grocery store without a woman.” But no, you’re right. I mean, every married woman I know wants to just live alone in the woods with a wolf, so.VirginiaAnd part of that freedom would be not needing to be hot while you do it, just being able to be. LyzYes, not being a hot witch. VirginiaJust want to be a witch.LyzWhy do we have to have weird witch beauty standards? There’s this great moment I think about a lot in the book Don Quixote where he’s traveling along and he meets all these shepherds. And they’re like, “There’s this one bitch, she’s awful. She broke all of our hearts. She’s so beautiful. We hate her. She’s evil.” And then they’re talking about her and she just walks up to them and goes, “I’m not evil. I don’t like any of you. Stop talking to me. I didn’t try to seduce you. I just existed and you thought I was in love with you.” And then she’s basically like, “I don’t want to be in your narrative.” And then she goes back into the woods and she never shows up in the book ever again. VirginiaShe’s our queen. LyzI think about her all the time. VirginiaThat’s icon behavior for sure. So, what else besides revenge body comes up? Anything about divorce and diet culture.LyzThen there’s that whole aspect of divesting yourself of the body ideas that come from the relationship. I think there are so many ways that happens. You might have married a person looking a very specific way but, as we all know, time and life and children take a toll. And then the other person is like, “Well, you don’t look how you used to” and you’re like, “Well, I never will.”VirginiaThat’s life. That’s time passing.LyzAnd marriage is so physical. It’s a bodily connection, right? So having divorce enables you—especially if you’re in a bad marriage. I mean, obviously people can have good marriages. My bias is that I think marriage is inherently unequal and bad. You can have good relationships within a bad system, but it’s still a bad system. So I’m gonna get that out there.But so when you do divorce, part of that rebuilding of identity and rebuilding of sense of self comes with, like, who am I now? Like, what is my body now? And now I don’t have to manage that other person’s toxic body / diet stuff. I don’t have to manage the expectations of another person on my body and on my sense of self. I don’t have to have somebody judging what I’m eating. And then you can also make your own food. That was something that blew my mind that I didn’t expect. Like, I am not cooking for this other person who wants boneless, skinless chicken breasts every single fucking night. VirginiaThe saddest of proteins, trulyLyzHe would have lived on boneless, skinless chicken breast and microwaved frozen vegetables. I’m like, “let’s roast a chicken from Ina Garten. Let’s make vegan stew!” and none of that would fly. So, yeah, being able to feed yourself without the observation of someone around you just really changes things. And since we have 50/50 custody—and it’s always different with children around—but I get to sit and be like, “what is it that I actually want to eat? And when do I want to eat? And how do I want to eat?” It just makes me so much more thoughtful and grateful about what I’m consuming in my body.Men Yell at MeThe Subversive Joy of Being a Single MotherThis is the mid-week essay for Men Yell at Me, a newsletter about the places our politics and our personhood collide. This week’s newsletter is about being a single mother and the stigma and joy of building a life outside the nuclear family. If you love this newsletter, consider becoming a subscriber…Read more3 years ago · 249 likes · 107 comments · lyzVirginiaOne woman I interviewed described it as a “food rumspringa” because she was free from his expectations. For her it was embracing stuff like Annie’s Mac and Cheese—like I don’t have to cook, I can just enjoy eating a box of mac and cheese for dinner and watching Gilmore Girls and be so happy. What was your favorite thing you ate when you realized this liberation? LyzFor a while I got really into cooking complicated recipes from the New York Times. That kind of stopped. I did the opposite of everybody in 2020, in the shutdown year. Everybody got into cooking and I was like, “I’m done, peace out. I will now be ordering food exclusively.” So another one was eating out because my ex does not like to go out to eat and and it was very stressful around, like, if you go out to eat and then what you order. You know, should you get a glass of wine or god forbid order dessert? That’s, like, so extra and why are you doing that? So just going out to eat by myself and an ordering whatever I wanted and dessert was a game changer. VirginiaI love that.LyzAnd then I’d make complicated recipes just for myself because I’m like, “oh, he didn’t like curry so now I will make curry.”VirginiaNow you can have all the curry! Revenge curry seems way better than revenge body, I’m just gonna put that out there. LyzYes, yes. And all bodies handle stress in different ways. Divorce is stressful, even if it’s a good change. And that expectation that you then get thinner because of stress is not everybody’s experience.VirginiaSomething that came up in my conversations with the women I interviewed for this story was was how little faith they had that a judge or the legal system would do anything to intervene when they were seeing their ex continue to parent in very controlling ways around food. Like the dad who, if you didn’t finish dinner, you got it served for breakfast the next morning, so the kid was showing up at school hungry and having meltdowns because he hadn’t eaten two meals. That seems so clearly problematic to me. But I guess I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about why family court systems aren’t set up to deal with this.LyzFamily court systems aren’t set up to deal with a lot of different types of abuse. Going to my lawyer—who was great and wonderful—she basically was like, family court operates like an equation. You punch in the numbers, you just assume everything’s equal, and there really isn’t room for understanding some of those nuances and the different ways of talking about abuse. I mean, it’s abuse. If a parent is controlling their food access, that is abusive behavior. But you have to navigate it very, very, very delicately. Because I think, especially for women, you’re getting divorced, so already there’s a little bit of a stigma on you, right? Like, you’re a little shrewish. I noticed people treated me differently, too, around their husbands. I was like, “listen, I don’t want your nasty husband, I don’t even want my nasty husband. I don’t want anybody’s husband .”VirginiaWeird energy.LyzSo there was a little bit of weird energy. My lawyer was just really upfront, like, “Listen, if you go before a judge in Iowa or a mediator—we got everything mediated—most of them are middle aged white men. They’re look exactly like your husband. You go in and you start making all these claims, well these could be things that they do to their children.”VirginiaThis could be their parenting style. LyzYou could turn them against you. So, it’s like, if you go in there being the “shrill divorced lady” who only nitpicks and says horrible things about her husband, which I got actually. Divorced women, when I was getting a divorce, told me not to be the “negative divorced lady.”VirginiaBut like, you’re getting divorced for all these reasons, right? Some of which are negative, right? LyzI think the problem is that we don’t talk honestly about our relationships. Nobody knows what is actually supposed to be good in a marriage because we’ve spent so much time hiding some of these things. I would tell people, “Oh, we’re not gonna go out to eat” or “How about you just come over to our house?” just to manage things, so we wouldn’t have to get into a fight later if I had a glass of wine. But I’m not being honest with my friends about that. I’m not like, “No, we can’t go to a restaurant because jerkface over there won’t let me order wine.”VirginiaRight. LyzSo anyway, you are coming into a system that very much thinks its objective but as we all know, objectivity favors the white man and favors the system. So it really is a balancing act. I’ll just tell a story that about religion. My ex was saying that I was awful because I wanted to go to a liberal Lutheran Church—and now I go to no church, which is even worse. He was telling the mediator, “She will not raise her children with the values that she agreed to when we entered the marriage contract so it is a breach of contract,” and my lawyer is like, “You can’t react. You can’t nod. Even if he’s being unreasonable, you just have to be calm and placid so that you look like the reasonable one here.”VirginiaSo you’re not the angry divorced lady.LyzRight. You’re managing so much just to get out of this situation and letting so many things go. And I know women whose exes did awful things and even then the courts were just like, “well, it’s a he said/she said situation.” So you’re just doing what you can to get out with the skin of your teeth.VirginiaAnother thing I heard was women worrying about how their bodies would be perceived by lawyers and judges. Like, if you’re fat, that’s going to be an added strike against you coming into that, especially if you have a thin ex.LyzYes. Oh, yes. The clothes you wear. I had to buy a whole new outfit for mediation. I mean, I’m a writer, I don’t have a lot of business clothes. My lawyer gave me suggestions. She’s like, “button up, nothing low cut.” Which works for me because I have no boobs. But God forbid you actually have boobs and then they’re like, “don’t dress slutty.” And you’re like, well, they’re there. Like, I have a body.VirginiaI can almost never get them to go away. LyzRight? Like, where shall I put them that would make you feel more comfortable. The whole courtroom appearance, which of course, again, is judged more for women. Men just have a uniform they can pop into or out of, you know. I can’t just buy a dress shirt.VirginiaIt has to be an outfit.LyzAnd of course, it’s expensive to do this. And you’re already like, I don’t have any money. That’s such a big aspect I think, not just of divorce but of our court and legal systems. VirginiaThe body policing. LyzYeah. We’ll judge you immediately based on appearance.VirginiaAnd how we judge mothers in general, right? The fitness of motherhood is often tied to bodies and presentation of bodies.LyzAnd then if you and your ex have very different types of bodies, then people are thinking “Well, of course they’re getting divorced because she really let herself go.” And then you get into co-parenting, which is fun.VirginiaThis is maybe a very naive question, but how much advice do you get on how to co-parent and co-parent around food?LyzEvery state does it a little differently. Iowa, God bless, is a no fault divorce state. So it’s really hard to upset the balance of that, like it’s going to be 50/50 no matter what, unless you get your former partner on video doing something horrific, right? It would be very, very, very hard. So, we had to take mandatory divorce parenting classes. And I’m sure it’s different in every state, but what that involved was going to this nonprofit called Kids First Law Center here in Iowa. They’re really great. They do amazing work, helping to represent children for low cost or free. So, you sign up for your time and you go sit in a conference room with a bunch of other divorced parents and then you watch a video that’s like a basically about how not to put your kids in the middle of fights. First of all, it’s kind of shaming because the beginning of the video, at least the one I watched was just kids being like, “this is awful. My parents are ruining my life.”VirginiaLike you’re not already worrying about that!LyzI just remember a child literally drawing a broken home and I’m like, wow, already I feel like the worst person in the world. And then it shows these different scenarios of couples fighting. There’s one where the harried divorce mom comes in from her late work shift and the kids are watching television and they’re like, “we’re so hungry mom.” And she’s like, “well, we don’t have food cause your father’s late with the child support check.” Then it’s like, “don’t do this.”There’s another one where it was like, a dad is dropping his son off back at the sad mom’s divorce department. And he’s like, “Oh, son, I would really love to take you to the big game this Saturday, but it’s your mom’s day and she won’t let me take you.” And then it’s like, “don’t do this.” VirginiaI mean, agreed, that seems not helpful to your child. But it’s not giving you a lot to work with. Like, what do you do instead would be helpful.LyzAnd it does show you better ways to say it. But it’s really basic, it’s like, “Talk to the other adult, don’t talk to the children. Don’t send messages through the children.” And I remember at the time being like, “God, this is so basic,” but then going through divorce and then having to constantly remind my ex like, “Hey you need to just text me instead of telling the kid” or whatever.VirginiaThe video is assuming that you can still communicate with this other adult.LyzYes. And that was something I had to go to therapy to talk about. There are so many times when my ex, I’ll say something to his face and he will not respond. I’ll send an email, he won’t respond.VirginiaYou can’t force two people to be grownups if one of them isn’t being a grown up.LyzThat was a lot of my summer was trying to handle some of these diet culture things that were being taught to my daughter. Our daughter, who is 11, is going through puberty and is in swimming. At her dad’s house they were restricting access to food and snacks, I think out of concern for her weight—which, already lots of different layers of problems there. Her response was to start hoarding snacks and hiding them and this is immediately terrifying to me because this is the age when girls develop eating disorders. Out of everything that I want for my children, I want them to love themselves, right? And to not think that there’s something wrong with themselves.So that was something where I’m like, Okay, how do I send this email which I know will get read, but I know will not be responded to. But you can’t be combative, right? And you can’t betray the confidence of the child. A lot of the things she’s told me have been in confidence. I had to have multiple therapy sessions where it was just writing an email about how to tackle diet culture with your ex and his wife, the kids’ stepmom. There is no handbook.VirginiaNone of this written into the custody agreement. You’re just figuring it out in these murky spaces. LyzAnd you have to assume that you have a therapist who understands these things, which I’m so lucky. My therapist specializes in disordered eating, which is something that she and I tackle a lot, and I’m still unpacking in my own life, right? So I’m lucky. She was already right there with me. I mean one of the reasons I wanted to write a divorce book was because I was looking for books about divorce, and they’re all like, “the happy divorce how to” and that’s just basically tips on how to manage your ex’s emotions.VirginiaLike, the reason you’re not married is because you don’t want to keep managing his emotions.LyzRight, which, learning how to stop managing their emotions is pretty dang difficult, especially when there are kids involved. So no, there is no manual and they’re not talking about it in that divorce class, which by at the end of the video, we all had to get into little small groups and talk about little scenarios, and then talk about what’s the good way to handle this scenario.VirginiaHow can you ever cover all the scenarios you’re actually going to encounter?LyzThey’re mostly focusing on like, money.VirginiaAnd schedule, like, I want to do something this Saturday and it’s your day with the kids, which are logistical issues. Which are not not stressful, but they’re not emotional in the same way as something like how we’re feeding the kids or how we’re talking about bodies. These are things that just trigger such deep core beliefs and emotions for everybody.LyzAnd I think something that is really, really difficult—and I think I’ve talked to you about this, too—is then trying to help your child unlearn a lot of things that they’re learning from your partner, which you’re also trying to unlearn. Like, I am on a journey and I will always be on a journey, right? I’m trying to help my kid unlearn stuff that I don’t even fully have unlearned and it triggers me to remember those moments from my own childhood. But you can’t put that on your kid because they’re different. You are just unraveling this whole complicated issue in the moment with somebody who doesn’t want to work with you. VirginiaOh, man, it’s so much. I do want to quickly say—you and I have talked about this, of course, but I want to say for listeners—what your daughter was doing hoarding food, this came up in the piece as well. I really appreciated the advice from Hilary Kinavey, one of the therapists I interviewed, of reframing that as a really smart strategy for a kid in that situation. It’s a really smart coping strategy to get herself fed when that wasn’t available.So for anyone parenting through the same kind of dynamic, it’s so important that we recognize the wisdom of how our kids are responding to these moments. Like, of course we don’t want that to be her only coping strategy in life, but I think what she was doing was actually brilliant.LyzYes. Virginia and I have a little text thread about our newsletters, but also I’m just asking Virginia for advice on parenting. So I remember telling you that and you saying, “that’s so great that she’s feeding herself,” and that helped me to immediately reframe the way I was thinking about it.And another thing I really liked in the piece was about kids correcting with food. Like the mother who talked about how her kids might seem like they binge a little when they come back to her house. I notice those kinds of behaviors at my house, and of course that really stresses me out because you’re raised to be like, “no more chips! No more candy!” and just learning how to see that as a positive thing, as a way of your child getting their needs met. Now I say, “in our house, if you’re hungry, you eat.” Know what you’re hungry for, trust yourself, trust your body. That helped alleviate a lot of my fears.Because again, this is not something that is really talked about. Hearing that it happens in someone else’s house immediately makes me think, Okay, this is a normal coping mechanism.VirginiaIt is obviously not ideal for a kid to be moving from a restrictive household and then having to respond in that way. It is a stress response and that’s concerning. But it also is a real power of divorce, that you have control over what’s happening in your house, and you can make your house the safe space for food. If you were still in the marriage, those safe spaces would be much harder to find.LyzYes. That that is something I think about a lot because I’ve got regrets about the person I chose to have children with. We all decide we’re going to be better than our parents, and we’re going to do things. So I think one of the biggest heartbreaks of my life was being in this marriage and realizing I’m not any different. I did the exact same thing. The only way out is by breaking this all apart and relearning life again. But then knowing that some of those same things will now be happening to your kid because that’s what you chose. I can’t control what happens in that house. I think, especially, too, for mothers, it’s really hard, because you’re used to controlling every single aspect. Like, you know where the shoes are, you know where everything is, you know where the milk is and the ketchup is. And then divorce is letting go of that control. And it’s really scary, because you’re like, are they even gonna get fed? And what are they gonna get fed? And how?But it also helps you build something better. I just have to focus on in my house. I can create a space where we can talk about these issues without fear, where we’re not managing other people’s emotions, where I can have a candy bowl on the kitchen counter. You know, just feed yourself, feed your body, and de-stigmatize a lot of the food.Something my ex would do and does is say, “You have to eat so many bites of so many things.” It just makes dinnertime miserable! Especially, like, my son is the most stubborn. He’s just a sweet little boy and everything’s easygoing until the moment you see his little jaw kind of like click into place. And then you can’t move him. He will not.VirginiaHe will die on this mountain forever. Good luck to you. LyzAnd sometimes the mountain is his foot is on the table, and you say, “hHey, buddy could you get your foot off the table?” And then you look under the table and he’s got his foot up touching the top of the table because he is not gonna let you win. So you can imagine that energy when… VirginiaCounting broccoli bites. LyzRight, one more bite of broccoli. When he was a toddler and he moved to solids, he dropped off the weight scale for a little while which was very scary for me. We had to get him monitored because they were like, does he have a healthy home? Which of course is like, oh my god, I’m a terrible parent. And I did have to unlearn some things! I remember the doctor being like, “well, what protein will he eat?” And I was like, “Go-Gurt, but they’re so full of sugar I don’t like to feed them.” I know, I’m terrible!VirginiaNo, no, I had the same thing.LyzAnd I’ve been going to this doctor for, gosh, 17 years now. So, you know, we know each other and it’s a small town, so we know each other. But she’s just like, “Lyz. If he’s eating it, feed him.”VirginiaFeed him the Go-Gurt.LyzYeah, feed him the Go-Gurt! And so making dinnertime a place that is not stressful is is just so nice.VirginiaYes. I’m so glad you can do that for them. Cooking complicated recipes that make you happy or not cooking because that also makes you happy.LyzOh my god, eating cheese over the sink for dinner. Amazing. Love it. VirginiaLove that.Butter for Your Burnt ToastVirginiaSo what is your butter for us? LyzMy recommendation is not going to be super deep, but when I saw that question, I immediately thought that the thing I recommend right now is “Wednesday,” a TV show on Netflix. It’s so good. I’m watching it with my 11 year old daughter. I love it. She loves it. It’s so fun. It’s so smart. It’s so interesting. The mother / daughter relationship is great. VirginiaOh, I can’t wait. Do you think my 9 year old can watch it? Will she be into it?LyzMy 9 year old is kind of a weenie beanie and got scared by the horse in “Tangled.” VirginiaThat was a very large horse, in their defense. I can understand that. LyzWhat I’m trying to say is my kid’s threshold for scary things is very low and I know other people’s kids’ are much higher. So, it is too intense for my 9 year old but my 11 year old loves it. But I think if I was 9. I’d be totally into it because I was a weirdo. VirginiaShe is really into the Lemony Snicket show which we’ve been watching and that is quite dark. LyzIf she can do Lemony Snicket she can do Wednesday. It’s also very hilarious and smart and interesting. This should be fun because at least this has a happy ending. I remember watching Lemony Snicket with my daughter and getting to the end and her being like, there has to be another episode and it was like, “No, honey, sometimes life is just bad like that.” And then I was like, Oh my God, you’re the worst parent ever. But also, suck it up.VirginiaWell, my recommendation is a game that my kids and Dan and I have all been really into called Ransom Note. Have you ever played this? I think you and your kids would like it too, Lyz. So it’s magnetic poetry, the little word tiles. It’s basically a box full of the word tiles and then everyone gets their own little board and you draw a question and it’s like a prompt. Like the reason it’s ransom notes, it could be like “write a ransom note for kidnapping someone,” or it’s like write a parking ticket for very absurd, funny scenarios. And then you have however much time to play with all your magnetic poetry words and write your own little sentences. And then you just judge whose is funniest. That’s the whole game.We really love it, our nine year old is weirdly great at it. She’s very funny and often wins the round. Also we’re just judging each other which is a fun family activity. Even my five year old, she’ll play on a team with me because she’s like half-reading and she can pick out high frequency words. Or we just let her pick random words and then it’s funny to see what she comes up with. Anyway, it’s so fun. It’s low stakes because I guess you could play it in a competitive way, but we just like to make up the word things. It is marketed for ages 17 and up, so if you care you can edit the cards and the words a little bit because there’s some vulgarity. But my nine year old did a great job with a sentence involving genitals the other day.LyzI love those games, especially now as they’re getting older. We played one on my sister’s Switch. I don’t remember what it was called, but it was something a little similar where you had they come up with scenarios and you had to invent a solution to the problem. And the scenario was how do you make a fish be modest? My daughter’s solution was to was to convert fish to Christianity. And I mean, like she’s obviously joking but I was just like, you’re twisted. Your mind is twisted. It’s just so rewarding as a parent because you’re like, “Oh thank God, you have a personality.”VirginiaWell, and as writer parents to be so proud when they come up with clever little word combinations. I was like, Oh, I think this may actually be an educational game but we will not think of it that way. It’s a very cards against humanity kind of vibe but you can play it with your kids because the skills translate. LyzWell, we love games so we will be picking this one up. VirginiaLyz, thank you so much for being here! This was awesome. I am very excited for everyone to read your book even though I know it’s not out for a while. But stay tuned for that. Tell folks where they can follow you and support your work.LyzI also have a newsletter! It’s calledMen Yell at Meor Lyz.substack.com. You can find me there. I’m alsoon Twitterbut I guess the internet’s dying. But I’ll be there tweeting along until I get hit by a meteor. Those are two of the best places to find me unless you’re in Iowa, then you know how to find me because you live here.

We’ve done the same thing with housekeeping that we did with physical health: You are morally obligated to have this very clean, very organized, very aesthetically pleasing home, particularly if you are socialized as a woman. And if you do not do that, you deserve my shame and derision and criticism and all that stuff. So that’s when I started talking about this idea that care tasks are morally neutral.You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.Today I am super excited to be chatting with KC Davis! KC is a licensed professional therapist, author, speaker and the person behind the mental health platform Struggle Care. She is domestic blisters on TikTok. And she is the author of How to Keep House While Drowning, a book that I read earlier this year and just cannot say enough good things about.I started thinking about this conversation after I wrote an essay on organization as a hobby. KC is very, very good at helping us break down all of the assumptions we make about what our houses need to look like, about what care tasks need to look like, and at offering ways to reframe all of that so that your space actually serves you instead of measuring up to some unsustainable ideal, which you know, we are all about doing here. So here’s KC!Episode 73 TranscriptKCI started my TikTok channel, gosh, I guess we’re coming up on three years ago. I primarily use it to talk about how we can take care of ourselves when we’re in a hard spot. So for some people that’s a hard season of life. For other people that is a lifelong disability or maybe a bout with mental illness. Maybe it’s just being overwhelmed or being burnt out or any number of barriers that can make it difficult to care for ourselves.I think that when we think about caring for ourselves, there are two main things out there mainstream and one is the “self care” movement, which in my experience can get very privileged. You know, a lot of bubble baths and pedicures and talking about things that require the privilege of extra time and money. And then when we talk about care tasks, like doing the laundry, and the dishes and things like that, if you want help with that, I often find that a lot of the resources out there are what I call like “boot camp” style motivation, where it’s like “Get up! Figure it out! Have some self respect!” like, “Do it!” And I don’t find those very motivating.So my content is the cross-section between mental health and and care tasks, and how we can use self compassion and accessibility and accommodations to raise the quality of our life and make it a little bit easier to take care of ourselves.VirginiaI first got obsessed with your work when my friendSara PetersenofIn Pursuit of Clean Countertopssent mea postyou did about super pretty laundry rooms, and it says “this is a hobby.” It was such an epiphany for me, I have to tell you. I don’t know, I’d always sort of thought that pretty laundry room kind of content was supposed to be about organization. That it was supposed to be about making your life easier. AndI had this sense of “Well, it’s intended to be helpful and if it’s making me feel bad, it’s just because I’m not doing doing it right.” And as I was making notes for our conversation and I wrote that down, I was like, “Oh, that’s diet culture.That’s perfectionism.”I would love for you to talk a little bit about how you came to realize that so much of what we’re told we should do or have to do in terms of domestic work is unrealistic and unsustainable and unhelpful?KCWhen people ask how I fell into talking about this philosophy, I can point to several things in my life that led to that moment. I could talk about my history with addiction, I can talk about my history as a therapist, I can talk about my history in high control groups. But one of the main things was probably two or three years prior to starting my TikTok channel, I got into the anti-diet movement and opened my eyes to this idea that we might say, “Oh, it’s about health, it’s about health, it’s about health,” but we’ve also moralized “being healthy” to mean if you’re not striving to be the best human specimen that ever existed, that’s a moral failing on your part. And because that’s a moral failing, you deserve derision and shame.So I learned that from listening to anti-diet creators, from listening to fat liberation advocates, and it really sunk in and changed my relationship to food and my relationship to my body. And then fast forward two years, I found myself postpartum with a toddler, in a new city where I didn’t know anybody. My husband had just started a new job as a lawyer and the pandemic shutdown happened. We both were—all of us in the house—were just drowning in trying to keep up with the dishes and the laundry, and the cleaning, and the tidying and the bottles and the this and the that. And as I began to talk in my videos about like, “hey, here’s a way that I’m making cleaning a little bit easier,” so many people started to speak up and say this similar sentiment of “I love seeing your house because it looks like my house and I’ve always felt so much shame over it.”And that’s how I kind of naturally pivoted into you know what, dishes are also morally neutral. We’ve done the same thing with housekeeping that we did with physical health, which to say, you are morally obligated to have this very clean, very organized, very aesthetically pleasing home, particularly if you are socialized as a woman. And if you do not do that, it is a moral failing of laziness and immaturity and irresponsibility, and therefore, you deserve my shame and derision and criticism and all that stuff. So that’s when I started talking about this idea that care tasks are morally neutral. They don’t make you a good or bad person, right? It’s not about whether you’re doing it perfectly, or whether you’re doing it aesthetically pleasing, or whether you’re doing it in a way that your father or sister in law likes, right? It’s about does your home function for you? And if it does, it doesn’t matter if it’s aesthetically pleasing. And if it doesn’t, then you deserve compassionate help and support to help get you to a functioning place.VirginiaI’m thinking, too, as you’re saying this, how another way the house and health parallel each other is how much we have class signifiers bound up in both of them, right? The thin ideal is very much a white, upper class ideal. And the house you’re describing, this kind of Martha Stewart house—that’s what I grew up thinking of it as—is absolutely a white, upper middle class or wealthy ideal. The messy house, the house with dirty dishes in the sink, all of that signifies class, right? In a way that we don’t really like to talk about and that’s a really interesting piece of this.KCYeah and I’ve gotten my fair share of critical hate comments online from people that think that messiness is a moral failing. But even so, I have noticed that I don’t receive half as much shame and derision as people who make similar videos whose homes are older or who are judged as not having as as much money as me.My husband and I, this was our first house, but we also bought it as an inventory house, like it was just built. So the inside of our house is nice. And I think that that goes into a lot of the reason why there are people that go, “Oh, KC, that nice woman that helps people clean.” And I think it would be very different if I was a fat woman, if I was a Black woman, if I was a poor woman. Then I think those other systemic, oppressive sort of biases and prejudices would obscure anyone from actually learning because they’d have that all those judgments about, “Well, if you’re poor, then that’s a moral failing and I’m allowed to be judgmental.”VirginiaRight. We are performing for each other when we’re trying to maintain the perfect home and when we’re trying to maintain the perfect body. This is health as cultural capital. This is a way of performing our value. But it’s making us complicit in this larger system that I think a lot of us don’t want to be complicit in. I don’t want my house to be reinforcing all these toxic ideals and oppressive systems. So if that means leaving dishes in the sink, like, sure. I can radicalize that way.KCExactly. It’s always funny to me the the comments that I get that are like, “You’re so lazy, why don’t you just clean your house?” Those kinds of comments are always on videos of me cleaning my house. There’s almost that direct parallel to when people are harassing a fat woman at the gym. Where it’s like, what do you want?VirginiaI’m literally doing what you said you wanted and you still want to shame me.KCThat always just, to me, pulls that curtain back. It’s not actually about health. It’s not actually about your kids deserve A,B,C. Most people don’t give a shit about other people’s kids. And if you did, you’d be on board because a non-judgmental approach to finding ways to make your home more functional is absolutely the best thing for a parent who is struggling and not able to provide that for their child.VirginiaOne reason I think I’ve had a block on this for a long time is because I do have a lot of these privileges. I am a naturally tidy, organized person. This is something I’ve written about in my newsletter. It has certainly been a problematic thing in my life, but it also gives me comfort and security to have clear countertops. There’s a lot to unpack there.But I think there’s probably a lot of us for whom this perfect house ideal just feels like just a little bit out of reach. And I think that’s another diet culture parallel, right? Often, the people who struggle the most to identify diet culture and anti-fat bias are naturally thin people for whom a “perfect” body feels very in reach. If they just commit to the gym workout, if they just cut out whatever food group, you know?As opposed to those of us for whom the perfect body is just nowhere in our worldview. And so it makes more sense to say, “Well, I’m gonna reject this whole system.” I can see that whole system, because it doesn’t apply to me.KCYeah, I definitely think there’s that aspect of, if you look at a system and realize I am disempowered in the system, I’m never gonna win, it’s easier to reject that system outright than it is for someone who’s like, “Oh, I’m being disempowered in the system but I’m so close to having power in the system.”VirginiaIt’s like, “One more trip to the container store!” KC“If I just lost 10 pounds,” right?I think that there are a lot of people that read my book that come to my content, and their main issue they would say is “I have trouble starting.” So, “I feel overwhelmed. I feel like I don’t have the skills. I feel sensory overload at dealing with it. I’m struggling with motivation, with task initiation, and therefore everything’s kind of building up and becoming overwhelming.”And then the flip side is I have just as many people that say, “I don’t have any problem starting. I’m a naturally tidy person. I actually have trouble stopping.”VirginiaI’m raising my hand.KC“I have trouble sitting down and resting, if everything is not done or put perfectly in its place.”And like you said, if it’s “Oh, but it’s almost perfect, so if I just put a little more effort.” And that would make sense, if you were creating a painting or a craft that had an end point. But care tasks are cyclical. They’re always moving. And so if you have the mindset that you’re not allowed to rest, you’re not allowed to recreate, you’re not allowed to blow something off until everything is done, you’re going to exhaust yourself. Because nothing’s ever done.As soon as it was safe to do so, I hired a cleaning service to come in once a month, do a deep clean, help me out. And one of the interesting observations I had about myself is that the hours right after that cleaning are my most anxious hours, my most anal retentive hours, my most on guard, snapping at my family hours, because there’s this like, “Okay, it’s done. Let me just have it for a couple of hours.” And so it’s like, the first juice that spills I blow my top, right? And I think that that really represents that even in me, there’s this idea that we’re supposed to get everything to the done stage and just hold it there.VirginiaYes, yes! I have the exact same experience when my wonderful cleaning person comes and I dread my children coming home from school later that day because I just want it. I guess what I struggle with is: It also is calming to me, right? A clean house calms me down. I am someone who is stressed out by a lot of clutter. I grew up in houses that were pretty clutter-y and I think this is a response to that in some ways. So what of this is helpful? And what of this is me buying into this really unhelpful ideal?And where do you find that line if you’re like, “This does meet a need of mine but it’s also part of this larger system I don’t want to be a part of and it’s making my life hard.” I mean, there have definitely been times when I’ve not wanted to have friends come over because I’m thinking I can’t get the house together in time. And then I’m shortchanging myself of that experience.I don’t mean to make you do therapy on me, but…KCNo, no, I love questions like this. I think it’s a perfect question. Because, I think that when we think of that question, we feel very either/or. So, is it wrong that I want to put everything in its place? Or is it valid that I could put everything in its place?I think it’s more like, let’s try to bring in both sides. Let’s try to close the gap on either end. So on the one hand, there are some ways in which your childhood has created neural pathways between the experience of clutter and perhaps the experience of unsafety or chaos or feeling out of control or maybe feeling not cared for, or fill in the blank, I don’t know the situation enough to say what it might actually be.And that association has less to do with the inherent clutter and more to do with the emotional context of that clutter. Now there are definitely hoarding level situations where it’s like, it doesn’t matter how happy the family is, this is non-functional and traumatizing. But a lot of people will say, “My house was really cluttered, but we were a chaotic, artistic, loving, close knit family that flew by the seat of our pants and my mom never cleaned a dish right in her life but she was at every soccer game,” right? And you hear this very different emotional context than someone who says, “My house was really cluttered. And sometimes it’s really severe, like my mom wouldn’t get out of bed. And my dad wouldn’t help around the house.” And so there’s this emotional context.And I think unpacking that emotional context and diving into what that is, is helpful. I think that creating some affirmations for yourself in your own home about the functionality of your home is helpful. And, I don’t think this is one of those things where anybody should be saying just spiritualize your way out of it. You know what I mean? Let’s work on those things not because there is a moral obligation for you to heal these wounds, but because you’ll be happier in your space if you can unpack and roll through and process out some of those stressors. But also, let’s look at your physical environment and let’s see how that environment can serve you without making you serve it. So I don’t want you running around thinking “I can’t sit down, I’m really having a ton of stress. I can’t ever let my friends come over.” Because, that’s distressing for you. VirginiaTotally.KCSo we’re not looking at is it healthy or unhealthy because you have to be healthy. We’re looking at what’s your level of distress and where’s the distress coming from? And what things can we do to lower your distress? Some of those things will be the emotional work around it, but some of those things will be the physical accommodation. Maybe you’re someone who needs a lot of closed storage in your life, right? VirginiaI am that person.KCIf you decide you need more storage, you are not someone who should go out and get a bookshelf, you are someone who should go out and get an armoire, or something that closes because then you will be able to get your space into that sort of serene, Zen space quicker, without exhausting yourself and without having to be perfect, because it doesn’t have to be perfect on the inside of the cabinet.And if you’re privileged enough to have the extra bedroom, maybe that’s just the Doom Room. Like, that’s the room that you let not be, you know... Or maybe there’s one part of your house that you go, “This is my spot.” This is my room, or this is my chair, or this is my corner, and it’s perfect, and it’s going to be perfect, and I will anal out on it all day long—that’s probably a very weird way to put that! But you will allow yourself to be anal retentive about it. And you’ll tell your spouse and your kids to kick rocks if they come near it. And you allow yourself to have that in that space.So I think it’s both, right? Like I think, yeah, unpack it, great. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about—my husband actually just purchased a new home. And it’s a little bit bigger than the home we’re in now because our kids, when we moved into this home, I was pregnant and had a toddler and they had a playpen. And now they’re like running through the halls. VirginiaAnd you realize how much space children take up. It’s a lot. Yes. KCSo, interestingly enough, as I’m thinking about moving into this bigger house,  my immediate thought was, before I do this, I have to declutter. I have to downsize my stuff. I have to have less stuff. And that seems counterintuitive to a lot of people, because they think, Well, no, you’re getting more space, you’ll finally have space. But for me, I understand that if I have so many things in a bigger space, it will be harder for me to feel like I can keep it functional. It will take much more time to keep it functional. VirginiaThat makes sense. KCAnd so that’s the way I’m thinking about it, because it is going to be more functional in a lot of ways for our kids to be able to run around, for us to be able to have my mother-in-law come without making her sleep in a kids room. And at the same time, this is also going to present some challenges for me, because I’m not a naturally tidy person. VirginiaIt’s more to keep up with. KCYeah, it’s way more to keep up with and so how can I get ahead of that? And one of those ways would be not having as much stuff.VirginiaWe actually did something similar when we moved from our first smaller home to a bigger home. We hired a dumpster before we left that smaller home and our new house has a really big, like the entire footprint of the house is an unfinished basement. So there is this place where I can always dump when I need to just get the clutter out of the way. I can only just throw it down to the basement.But then the basement starts to stress me out a little bit because it gets out of control and I just realize like having this big place to dump everything is not going to solve the problem if there’s too much stuff.KCAnd maybe, if it was a smaller area, it would be more functional because you would still have a place to go okay, I’m just gonna put it over here. But if a smaller area gets kind of stuffed and full and you go oh, it’s time to clear this out. You know, looking at a closet and going time to clear this out is a lot less overwhelming than looking at a huge basement the entire footprint of your house.VirginiaYeah, we can tackle it in stages at a time but it’s it’s painting the Brooklyn Bridge or whatever. We get one corner cleaned out, we finally get to the end, and that first corner is a disaster again and we just keep rotating and it’s like, why?KCBut here’s the thing I would also say: There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not saying to not change it if you want to change it, but sometimes the distress we feel about our house isn’t about that’s not functional for me. It’s about “it shouldn’t be this way.” VirginiaYes. KCRight. So you’re wanting this basement to be done. Well, but if, like, if that works for you, though—working in that little circle, where you’re always creating a little more space when you need it—that might be a care cycle that is functioning just fine. And maybe it’s not, but I’m just saying like, it actually is fine. If you’re actually getting rid of things, if you’re organizing at a quick enough rate to free yourself up space to be able to dump something there when you feel overwhelmed. That is a system that could work fine for you. Does that make sense?VirginiaYour making me realize there’s no gold star for an organized basement. Like, when am I expecting to get the prize for that?KCLike maybe that’s the function of your basement. It’s that workspace to process through your stuff in a place where at the end of the day, you can still shut the door and sit on your couch and enjoy a space that is clean and tidy and put together.VirginiaWell you’ve just solved a huge issue in my life, so that’s amazing. We say all the time—we bought our house in 2016, and had we known the pandemic was coming. Like, one thing we did really right was we bought a house that had office space above the garage because we both work from home and we knew we needed that space.But one thing we did really wrong was we bought a house with an open concept downstairs. And during the pandemic I was like, “I can never escape them. I can never escape the children. I can never escape the mess.” If I’m in the kitchen, I can see all the way to the other end of the house. There was no way to close the door on any messes.I mean, we’re never moving, we love our house. But one thing we did was part of the unfinished basement is now a kids’ playroom area, even though it’s an unfinished basement, just because I was like, some of this stuff cannot be in the main living space, for my peace of mind. And I just want to underscore the privilege that I’m talking about, a large house with a basement. I realized not everyone has this much space to work with. It’s just interesting realizing how much picking the house initially was on some level buying into a larger aesthetic standard, right? These beautiful, open concept houses were very trendy. And I think that started to shift in a lot of ways because of the pandemic and how we actually live in our space.KCAnd I do think it brings up a concept that’s applicable to anyone, which is that rooms don’t have rules. We actually have, because of the layout of our house, what they did was they took the floor plan and they put it on these like zero lot line, almost like townhomes. So there’s three stories, but each story is actually kind of small, right? So we have good square footage, but the way that it’s kind of chopped up and put on top of each other means that if me and my husband and both of our kids are downstairs in the living area, we kind of feel like we’re on top of each other. Especially a two and four year old that are running around like crazy, spreading their toys everywhere. And one of the things that we did right when we moved in was, the corner that was supposed to be the dining room? We just didn’t put a dining room in. Like, we don’t own a dining room table. We turned that into a play corner so that we could still see our kids while we were cooking dinner. Our kids had a place to go where we knew where they were. That’s an example of okay, it’s not some separate place, but do you need a dining room table? My husband and I eat in front of the TV. The dining room table would just collect stuff.VirginiaFor the like two times a year you would want to host a big dinner or whatever.KCExactly! Versus the every single day, my kids need a functional space to play. And the other idea is if you have a space where you don’t have any extra bedrooms, but maybe you have two kids and they each have a bedroom, some people they have found wait, if my kids are just sleeping in their bedrooms, and they’re not opposed to the idea of sharing a room, maybe my kids would rather have a shared living space that is only a bed and a dresser, no toys in there. In fact, almost nothing in there to even make it messy. So it’s not an extra room to clean. That’s just where we go to sleep at night. And then the other bedroom is a play space or is a gross motor movement space.VirginiaI tried to sell my kids on that. They’re four years apart and the age difference is just big enough that it doesn’t work. They were really into it when they were three and seven. We tried doing some sleepovers for a while to test out the idea and then the older one was like, “Yeah, no. I don’t actually want her in my room.” So that idea is on the back burner for now. But I do think it’s a great concept, especially if you have kids close in age.KCSame with closets.VirginiaYour family closet is genius. Genius! KCAll of my family have their clothes in one closet. And some of that’s the layout, my my primary walk-in closet opens to the laundry room. So it’s really convenient to take laundry out, take three steps, put all of it away. And my kids still need assistance dressing, so this makes sense for us in this period of time. And what happened when we moved to a family closet was all of a sudden, we had two whole closets that were completely empty now. VirginiaOh, that’s amazing. KCSo then we could think about well, now I could use these closets for something else.VirginiaOh, that’s really, really smart. If it’s close to the laundry, why would you ever want the clothes to be anywhere else in your house? So smart.KCMy downstairs coat closet was stuffed to the brim with coats we never wore. And what I realized one day is that it’s not that I want to get rid of this stuff, but this is not stuff I’m accessing every day and this little coat closet is one of the only downstairs storage spaces that I have. So I really need to use it for the things that I needed access to every day because there’s nowhere to put those things. And the other part of that is like I live in Houston, Texas.VirginiaHeavy coats are not a thing.KCRight. Like we don’t need coats. We need maybe a sweater and a coat two months out of the year. So I try never to say, “Here’s what everyone should do.” But instead, talk about having the creativity to think about who you are in the context of your home and your own needs and your own functioning and going okay, maybe a person who only has one downstairs closet in Houston, Texas doesn’t need to be keeping it shoved full of winter coats all year long. It was totally sufficient to put hooks on the back of that door, hang all of our one little coat that we need, and then put shelving in it. And now I finally have downstairs storage to put things away so that they aren’t sitting out.VirginiaI want to talk a bit more about the appearances piece of this because again, that’s the piece where I’ve realized I have the work to do. And that’s also where it intersects so much with diet culture.Is it worth challenging ourselves if the aesthetic piece has felt really important? Do I leave the dirty laundry out the next time friends come over for dinner? Like do you sort of challenge yourself to break some of those roles and see that you can survive it? Or is there another more helpful way to think about this?KCI certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong with that if you want to do some exposure therapy, but I don’t think you have to. I think what’s interesting to me is that when people will say, you know, I don’t want to sit down because having a perfectly clean house is relaxing to me. AndI’ve always thought that that was interesting. Because I mean yeah, I also find a perfectly clean house relaxing, but like—the beach is relaxing. I experienced the beach as relaxing, but I don’t experience not being at the beach as being anxiety producing.VirginiaThat’s a helpful distinction.KCObviously, when I walk into a showroom or for that one hour when everything’s perfectly this place, or when I look at magazines of homes, like I feel that visceral response of “Oh, wow, how beautiful.” And I think that’s okay to feel that. I think though, if that is one of your only tools for coping with anxiety or one of your only tools for release, or if you’re trying to make that one particular tool carry more weight in your life than it’s capable of carrying, then I would just say that you’re somebody that deserves to have more coping skills than having to clean.I actually do love a well put together, aesthetically pleasing, almost minimalist looking space. But I also have two kids. And I think for me the freedom comes in going, “Yes, it’s relaxing to have something aesthetically pleasing, but that’s not a value of mine that ranks higher than being able to function in my space.”It’s not a value of mine that ranks higher than being able to spend time with my kids. It’s not a value of mine that ranks higher than being able to spend every single night on the couch with my husband watching some silly show that we like.It’s the freedom to say, it’s okay to value these things, but if you find yourself feeling morally obligated to value them over other things in your life, or to the detriment of your own health and wellbeing, you deserve to rearrange some things, right?VirginiaYeah, and to value rest just as much.KCAnd to value other things! Like, it’s wonderful to have a beautiful home. And I like to have a beautiful home, my home does not always look beautiful. And maybe one day, I will have a different season of life where I have more time and energy to put into that particular hobby or stress release activity, but I can’t afford to put that at the top of my list right now because other more important things in my life would suffer.VirginiaLike, when I’m having that anxiety of “oh, we can’t have people over the house as a mess,” I need to say, wait, but actually, time with our friends is a value of mine. I want that. I love when we have friends over and our kids get to play with their kids. That’s something that I want to cultivate us doing more often.So, if that means letting the house go so we can do it, that’s better than the alternative of making myself stressed out about the house in ways that make the whole experience so tense and weird for everybody. KCAnd I think there are some parallels to diet culture there. Like I have some some health stuff going. I found out recently that I have fatty liver. And there were a couple of things in my labs that were like, almost like a high normal, if that makes sense. And I met with a dietitian, and I was like, “Listen, I need to make some changes so that I can address some of these things”. And I almost feel my body go into like fight or flight when I talk about making food changes just because of all of the unpacking that takes.But I purposely met with a dietitian who is also a licensed clinical counselor. And at one point in going through that, she said, “I want you to also recognize you do not have to make any of these changes right now. This doesn’t have to be a priority right now. Nothing that you’re looking at or dealing with is something that if you don’t do it this year, you’re going to have some major health consequence.”VirginiaThat’s so freeing.KCWould it be great for you to prioritize eating this over that because of the effect that it might have on your cholesterol or your fatty liver? Sure. But also, you’re allowed to look at the other things going on in your life this year and make the call on whether you’re capable of integrating that change into your life while still maintaining your quality of life.Because if you’re also dealing with your postpartum depression, transitioning your children into a new school, writing a book, dealing with your mental health, you are not morally obligated to put this on the list. And I think that that is a very similar parallel.VirginiaI just wrote a piece for the newsletter about seasonal exercise and how we have such an all or nothing mindset about exercise that comes entirely from diet culture. It’s entirely bound up in equating exercise with weight management when the reality is for so many of us, there are weeks, months, years where exercise cannot and should not be the priority. We need to give ourselves permission to move through periods where it fits and periods where it doesn’t fit, and odds are you’ll exercise more consistently in the long term if you give yourself that permission, than if you think of that as something you have to do perfectly or not at all.ButterKCOkay, so I recently—I don’t know if this is part of my ADHD or what—but I get really fixated on like, one certain meal and just eat it over and over and over. And recently, I got fixated on tuna poke bowls. And then my bank account was screaming at me about it. So then I tried to making them at home. And I realized that my grocery store sells frozen ahi tuna filets. So I started buying those and I started making that home. I just sear it two minutes on both sides, add it to some rice and avocado, put some ponzu and soy sauce on it. And to me, that’s heaven. But, you have to thaw it for like 24 hours. And that’s a big deal for me to tell you what I want to eat in 24 hours. So there were several times where I would do that, and then it would come time to make myself dinner, and I would be really exhausted. My kids have been really sick lately. We’ve got some other stuff going on. And I would just be like, “I don’t have it in me to spend the 15 minutes cooking rice that I need to.” And so then I would end up having to throw the tuna fillet away—VirginiaOh that hurts. KCYeah, it hurts. But it’s one of those things where it’s like, I probably shouldn’t. It’s like, it’s raw tuna…VirginiaOh yeah, you can’t roll the dice. But it’s just like, you spent money on it. It hurts a little to have to throw it out. KCI didn’t want to keep doing that, right? I didn’t want to keep wasting it. And then I was at the grocery store the other day—and I often buy those Uncle Ben’s microwaveable rice packs for dirty rice or Spanish rice or whatever—and then I saw that they had just plain white rice. And I just had this like gentle moment with myself where I was like, “KC just get a few.” Just get a few for those moments, those those nights when this was the meal that you planned, but all of a sudden you don’t have it in you to cook the rice. You know, get the pot out, put the water out, or whatever. And I did that for myself. And it was just such a kind of moment of self care because within the week, I had that exact thing happen. And it was like okay, thank God I only have to put a bag into the microwave for 90 seconds. VirginiaI love short cut anything that makes getting dinner easier. I’ve recently gotten super into salad kits for the same reason. I was like wait, the dressing comes in a little packet in the bag? Where has this been my whole life? All I have to do is open packets and dump things? It’s so great.Well, my butter actually ties into what we were talking about before, in terms of needing to create a space for yourself in your house that’s your own. So I am very privileged, I have this lovely home office above our garage. I have been a work from home person since the early 2000s. And I learned early on that for my mental health, I needed to not have my work where I slept. I couldn’t combine the two. Which was challenging when we lived in studio apartments in New York City, but anyway. But now that I am a parent and a work from home person, I need separation from my kids even more. So I now have a secret iPad in my office. My kids don’t know about this iPad. Well, they’ve seen it, but they don’t care. It’s not their iPad. I bought one of the refurbished, many-generations-past iPads just so it can stream things. It’s got my Netflix on it. And I have a little corner up here with my secret iPad and my jigsaw puzzles, and I come up here for like an hour. And I love it.KCI love a puzzle. Can I just tell you that one of the things I’m excited about about our new house, is that I am gonna do something similar? Like, have a home office. And I’m gonna have a puzzle. I love a puzzle, and I haven’t really been able to do them since I had kids. VirginiaThey’re not toddler compatible. KCNot only do I have kids, but I have two cats. And I just didn’t have the time and there wasn’t a safe surface that I could do it on. So I’m gonna butter my toast with that soon. VirginiaI really recommend it if you can fit a puzzle corner into your home office, because I was doing them down in our living room. But then the clutter of the puzzle would trigger my clutter stuff. I mean, obviously, there’s more I can unpack there, where I didn’t want the puzzle left out, but I don’t mind having it out in my office because then when I’m trying to l think through something I’m writing, I’m like, “Let me go do the puzzle for a few minutes.” And it gives my brain a break.KC, thank you so much. This was fantastic. Tell listeners where they can follow you and how we can support your work?KCI’m on TikTok, that’s kind of my main channel. I do have an Instagram, @struggle care. My website is strugglecare.com. And from there, you can kind of get to everything that I do. You can buy my book, you can listen to the podcast. My podcast is called Sstruggle Care. You can download some free things. You can purchase some downloads. You can read some free resources. You can watch my TEDx talk, like you can do everything from my website, so feel free to head over there.VirginiaAmazing. Thank you so much for being here!KCThank you.

Post-Publication Note: Many of you have emailed to let me know that the J. Crew coat we talk about in this episode is no longer available in plus sizes! The link has changed since we put it in the transcript and we’re so sorry. Anti-fat bias in fashion is REAL, y’all.You're listening to Burnt Toast. I'm Virginia Sole-Smith and I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.And today Corinne is back! She got bangs, you guys! And it is time for a very special holiday themed Ask Us Anything. As always, we record these once a month. (Except last month when Thanksgiving threw us off. But here’s October if you missed it!) So if you have questions, you can email them over by hitting reply to any newsletter or drop them here.One quick piece of advocacy, first: Please sign this petition in support of clemency for Nikki Addimando, a mom in my community currently serving a five-year prison sentence for killing her abusive partner in self-defense. It’s long past time that we stop criminalizing survival. As Nikki said at her sentencing trial: "I wish more than anything it ended another way. I wouldn't be in this courtroom right now, but I wouldn't be alive either. This is why women don't leave. They so often end up dead or where I'm standing — alive, but still not free.”We are asking the governor of New York to commute Nikki’s remaining sentence and bring her home to her children this year. You can read more of Nikki’s story here (CW for sexual assault and abuse), follow the #FreeNikki campaign on Instagram, and share the petition with friends here.Episode 72 TranscriptVirginiaHow are you? How are you doing?CorinneI’m doing good. As discussed, I got bangs. VirginiaYes, and you were on an emotional journey with them. But now you’re feeling good about the bangs?CorinneYeah. I think I’m feeling good about the bangs. This time of year is so crazy. Do you have any upcoming travel holiday stuff?VirginiaFor Christmas we are doing this big trip. My brother-in-law and his family live in Bangkok. They have been there for years and we haven’t visited yet. And you know, when the pandemic happened we couldn’t go. So we’re finally doing it. CorinneSo you’re going to Thailand? In, like, a month? Wow.VirginiaYeah. For Christmas. With my children.CorinneOh my God.VirginiaAnd my amazing 15-year-old niece who I’m hoping is really going to hold the whole thing together. No pressure, Lorelai! I’m super excited. It’ll be such a great adventure. I’m also a little bit glad we couldn’t go in 2020 when we had a two-year-old. I think that would have been much harder. But still, listeners: If you have any tips about long haul travel with a five- and nine-year-old, tell me in the comments! I need all of the advice. CorinneWell, it’ll definitely be an adventure! VirginiaOh, it will be. I’m super excited.Alright, should we do some questions? We have many questions this time. I tried to group them into categories for us. And since this is our December episode, we’re going to do some December-y type questions. Winter Fat FashionCorinneYes. Okay! Your recommendation for soft pants has been life changing. Thank you for introducing me to Eileen Fisher Lantern pants. Any recommendations for winter coats like a soft coat?VirginiaWell, that’s a thank you to you because you introduced us all to Eileen Fisher lantern pants. CorinneI’ve never been more flattered in my life. I feel like I’m finally being seen.VirginiaI now really need to get some because this is like a double endorsement. It’s very exciting.CorinneThey are great. You just got a coat!VirginiaI did just get a coat, so I do have a coat recommendation. Basically, I wanted a quilted barn coat like my five year old wears, and I wanted it in my size. And I went on an odyssey to find it. I was sent many links over Instagram for coats, and I ended up getting the J.Crew quilted cocoon puffer in olive green. I love it a lot.We previously discussed the issues of being hot / running warm when you are fat. And this coat is warm in cold weather but very lightweight. Like, it doesn’t make me sweaty. So it’s really threading that needle.CorinneYeah. And the shoulder restriction in the car?VirginiaRestriction is good. And I will say I have heard very mixed things about J.Crew plus sizing in general. But this coat I feel optimistic about because I think I bought the XXL, which suggests to me that like the 1x, 2x, 3x are sized appropriately. It’s a roomy coat. I think it’s a pretty inclusive option for folks. I will say the zipper was stiff but a reader told me to run a wax candle over it and that helped. What about you? You’re a big coat fan. CorinneI do like coats. I’m more of a light coat person. I just recently got a fleece from Alder Apparel, which is a Canadian outdoor brand that has very inclusive sizing. VirginiaYeah, they’re supposed to be great. CorinneThey are great. Some of the stuff is pretty pricey, but it’s great. I love it. And I would definitely call it a soft coat. Sometimes I wear it around the house. Another thing I really like about it is that it has snaps. VirginiaOh, yeah, that’s good. CorinneI’m very into snaps on a shirt or a jacket. I feel like they last longer than buttons. You never accidentally pop them off. I’ve also, in the past, gotten coats from Universal Standard and Girlfriend Collective, puffy style coats. They both have a lot of sizes and styles.VirginiaWhile I was doing my coat research Universal Standard sent me approximately 18 emails about coats because that’s how that works. And I didn’t end up buying one, but they have some strong contenders. Definitely wait for sales and if you do the J Crew coat for sure wait for a sale because I got my I think I paid like $90 dollars for it. I got a really good deal. CorinneOh wow, thats a really good deal. VirginiaWe also got a request for fleece leggings. And I have the same request. I have a pair from LL Bean but I don’t love them. I need to hike them up a lot. They don’t hold their shape super well. CorinneI don’t have any fleece leggings. I don’t know if I would wear them, but here is what I’ve heard. There’s a Canadian brand called Anne Mulaire and they have a pair of bamboo fleece leggings.VirginiaOooh, that sounds exciting. Yes.CorinneAnd then I have also heard Land’s End and Target have fleece leggings but I can’t personally endorse any of those. VirginiaNo, but that’s good to know to check out. Yeah, that’s exciting. I was also thinking this might be a place for the Naadam cashmere pants we discussed previously. I get their emails and I put them in the cart every week and then I don’t quite pull the trigger because they’re kind of expensive.CorinneThey are kind of expensive. VirginiaI mean, they’ve definitely been doing some 25% discounts. So I know they go on sale.CorinneWait until 40%.VirginiaYeah, yeah, that’s exactly. I mean, I know you love your shorts from them.CorinneI have also had pants from them, which got eaten by moths, but they were great.VirginiaThat’s the miserable part about Cashmere. All right, what’s next? How do you balance feelings around bodies and clothing? Especially when it feels like buying and finding clothes would be cheaper and easier in a smaller body?CorinneThis question makes me sad.VirginiaI know, I know. Because there’s like a kernel of truth to it, right? There are more clothing options for small bodies. That’s true.Corinne It’s just like, how do you balance feelings around it? You can’t really. It just sucks. I guess you balance feeling around it by finding things that you like to wear.VirginiaI wouldn’t normally say shop your feelings, but I think here I would say shop your feelings. I do think when you can find even just one piece you’re really excited to wear, it helps so much. And when you’re in a transition with your body, that happens, right? Nothing fits and you’re trying so hard. It can just feel so miserable.It’s not an easy solution, like “just go buy something great!” And you’re like, but there is nothing great. But I’m trying to think what’s the easy starting point? Like, maybe it’s a top? I feel like tops can be easier to fit than pants. Depends on your body, maybe? A dress might be easier? CorinneOr even an accessory, like a hat or something where it’s something anyone could wear.VirginiaI mean, I think this is why I leaned into glasses so much. When I have my cool glasses on, I feel stylish no matter what. That’s a nice baseline. So finding that anchor piece. And then, it’s still going to suck. It’s just gonna suck. CorinneI think the glasses are good advice. I would also say maybe this is a time for remembering: You’re still a cool, interesting person even if you don’t have all the right clothes.VirginiaAbsolutely. Absolutely. Yes! Write that down if you need to. Put that somewhere you can read that, by your closet. And I just want to underscore that neither of us are saying pursue a smaller body in order to make this easier. That’s not the answer. It won’t really work. It won’t make you happier.CorinneIt will definitely make you miserable. Okay, next question.When you’re in a store, and they don’t carry your size, do you have any cute snarky comeback or response?VirginiaYou know, I had such a fail on this recently. Dan and I were away for the weekend. We were in Kingston, New York, which is a very cute Hudson Valley town. And we went into this super cute boutique that had clothes and home stuff. And I realized right away, they had nothing in my size. And I completely did nothing about it. I said nothing. I purchased nothing. I just wandered around the store. Dan bought a shirt because they had his size. I advised him on buying the shirt. And then we left and I was just grumpy about it.And I was like, Why didn’t I speak up? Like, this is literally what I do. But I was looking around for who I would talk to and the store was very crowded also. So even getting a salesperson… it was a Saturday. Getting someone’s attention was gonna be hard. And then I saw who I thought was the manager, and he was this skinny, hipster guy. And I just was like, he’s not gonna get it. It was a combination of a lot of things. But I was also furious, because I would have spent a lot of money and they had really cute stuff. I would have bought things. I think what happens is you suddenly have this feeling of like, I don’t belong here. They don’t want me here. Yeah, it’s hard to overcome in the moment. CorinneThat really does suck. I don’t think that I’ve ever said anything about that to anyone, either. I feel like there might have been times where there’s been a bigger person working in the store and then I’ve just been like, “Oh, I really wish you guys carried bigger stuff,” and they’ve been like, “I know.”VirginiaYeah. I probably would have felt safer saying something in that context.CorinneI feel like I’m just so accustomed at this point to stores not having my size.VirginiaRight. I was expecting it.CorinneIt’s just so much the norm.VirginiaIt was a moment where I thought to myself, you know, I’ve been really working on doing this advocacy in doctors offices, like I decline to be weighed. I work on saying why and I am working on that piece of it. And I was like, I need to start building these skills in retail, as well. I so rarely shop in person. So if this is something you want to work on, I think it’s a great place for activism. But I also think if you just feel like it feels hard, it’s okay to just leave the store and shop online instead or whatever. Or you can always like, I think it can be effective to do some calling out in social media, depending.CorinneI’d be curious to hear from readers / listeners, if they have done this or have good thoughts on how to do it. Or maybe someone’s done it and the shop has started carrying bigger sizes!VirginiaI did have a nice exchange with a thin friend, recently. She DM’ed me a brand and she was like, “this brand has amazing jeans and they’re size inclusive. They go up to whatever.” And I looked at the size chart and I was like, “no they don’t.”CorinneOh yeah, like they go up to a 4x and it’s a size 12.VirginiaExactly. It was not extended sizes. And she was like, “Oh my God, I didn’t understand that.” I mean, she’s skinny, she’d never had to try on the 4x and realize this. So she was like, “Well, I’m friends with her so I’ll talk to her about it” and I was like, “Good, yes.”CorinneThat’s really awesome.VirginiaIf you are a good customer in a store that’s not size inclusive, especially these local boutiques, that does feel like a place where you can do this. And I also hear from local boutique owners about how there’s many layers making it difficult for them to do this. But they totally should still get this feedback from customers.CorinneOkay, the next question is:Virginia, could you do a bra science project like you did with Jeans Science?VirginiaNo. Don’t make me. Don’t make me do it. CorinneYou need a PhD for that. You need an advanced degree in mathematics.VirginiaOh my God. I have shared before the bra brands that I like that I shop at barenecessities.com. They have really good customer service. They carry a really wide array of sizes and styles. I have found decent bras there.I do not feel amazed about my bras regularly, but I feel fine about my bras. I do think there is a deeper investigative story to be done about the way bras are marketed and the weird pseudoscience around bra fits and the way you have to be such an educated customer to understand bras. Like, I do think there’s a fascinating American marketing story to be told there. So I will think about it. But I do not think it will translate to me trying on 600 bras for you.CorinneMaybe not a bra science journey.VirginiaYeah, not like a try-on experience. Because I don’t want to try on bras.CorinneAs bad as jeans are, bras would be worse.VirginiaIt has occurred to me that another way to do fashion science in the future would be to get some Burnt Toast reader-volunteers who want to try stuff on and maybe we make some kind of test panel?CorinneInteresting. VirginiaI haven’t worked out any details around that, like logistics. It would be people having to shop and put it on your own credit card and manage your own returns.CorinneYeah, like crowd-sourced…VirginiaBut yeah, like if we could get a panel of readers in different body sizes that might be really interesting. CorinneI also think the last time that we talked about bras, I plugged this, but there’s an incredible Reddit that’s called a bra that fits. They’re definitely doing bra science. They can advise you and you can submit photos. And they’ll be like, it’s not fitting, right. They’re doing bra science.VirginiaSo maybe this need is being met and maybe we don’t need to do it for bras. But I’m open to doing it for something else. Maybe? Well, we’ll see what people think.Holiday Survival ModeVirginiaSo that was all our clothing questions for this month. Now we’re going to get into holiday questions, since by the time this airs, we will have just had Thanksgiving. I hope you all survived. And for many of us, now we’re getting into Hanukkah and Christmas, et cetera, et cetera. It’s an intense time of year for bodies and food and all of the feelings.CorinneYes. Okay. Let me ask you the first question:So we’re having Thanksgiving with a family who has one kid with extreme picky eating, and it’s somehow always a focus of conversation. Can’t possibly be comfortable for the kid. Plus, my daughter is old enough to pick up some of the terrible food messaging. Is there anything to do here except just change the subject?VirginiaOh, so this is interesting. So the picky eater is presumably a nephew or niece or something, not your child but another child at the table where relatives are focusing on that kid’s picky eating. Yeah, that’s a bummer. I mean, my go to line in these situations is “We trust their body. We’re not worried about this.” But if you’re not the parent, that might feel weird, for you to be like, “I trust your body.” He’s like, “Thanks. I haven’t seen you in eight months.”CorinneOr then the kids’ parents feeling like you’re criticizing them.VirginiaExactly. Depending on the relationship, you may not really have a way to wade in. I think changing the subject is good. I think, don’t worry so much about what your daughter will pick up from it, you are modeling a different way of thinking about food to her and that matters most. If you feel like it’s contributing to negative talk at the table, like now everybody’s being weird about food, you can definitely try to pivot that. Talk about how delicious things are. You’re so excited to be having this meal. There’s so many good foods to try.But also, make sure your daughter knows she’s under no obligation to eat food she doesn’t like. It’s fine! She can say yes or no to things and I think as long as your own boundaries are clear, she can understand that other families handle this differently. And yeah, it’s kind of a bummer that her cousin doesn’t get to just eat rolls or whatever it is he wants to do. But you know, I think you have to go carefully here. Because however the parents are choosing to handle it, this is probably a huge source of stress and worry for them and I think you want to be respectful of that and a big family meal is not the place where you’re going to have a real heart to heart about it.CorinneUm, I feel like this is probably the wrong answer. But I think if I were in this situation, I would probably take the aggro approach of being like, “wow, we’re really talking about what this kids eating a lot.”VirginiaOh, I like it. It’s a little spicy. I like it.CorinneI have very low tolerance for bullying.VirginiaI think that’s kind of great. CorinneI think sometimes a neutral observation about what’s going on can make people realize they are acting weird.VirginiaYeah. Especially if it’s coming from mutual relatives. Like, if it’s your mom, who’s the grandma saying this stuff, by all means get in there and help set some boundaries. And probably the parents will really appreciate it, even if they are doing their own sort of weird stuff around food with this kid. CorinneYeah, that’s good. I just like the approach of just stating an observation and other people can take that chance to reflect.VirginiaExactly. That’s perfect. CorinneHow to navigate a mother-in-law who won’t stop expressing worry about a six year old grandson’s body to my husband who doesn’t push back against it or shut it down. She won’t say it to me, so I can’t address it directly. Their family is rail thin. I am fat. Kiddo has been big since babyhood and is a healthy, active, happy little boy who loves goldfish crackers. Makes me so mad.VirginiaThis is your husband’s problem. You need to talk to him about advocating for you and your child with his mom. This is his territory. Especially because she’s not saying it to you. So either you have set a boundary or she just realizes it would be pushing things too far. But if she is expressing worry about the kid in front of the kid to your husband, your husband needs to shut that down. This is where he needs to say, “We trust his body. We’re not worried. We don’t see a problem here.”  And if he’s not willing to do that, I have questions for him, and some notes.CorinneThe question I have about this question is, if the mother-in-law is expressing worry to the husband, how is the question asker finding out about it?VirginiaProbably because he’s coming back and saying “I can’t believe what my mom said.”CorinneIs he saying, “Can you believe this horrible thing my mom said?” or is he saying “You know, my mom is really worried about…” Like, whose side is he on here? Which is maybe not a nice way of putting it. VirginiaNo, I think this husband has some explaining to do of his position. And why he’s not backing his kid and his wife better. That’s what it comes down to. I don’t think you have to take on your mother-in-law. If she does say it in front of you, I feel pretty confident you will address it directly. And just keep letting your kid love his goldfish crackers. And you do you. But yeah, your husband needs to step up.CorinneWhat are your favorite one liners to respond to common fatphobic comments from family during the holidays?VirginiaWell, now I’m going to use yours of like “We’re really talking about this?” because I love that.CorinneYeah, not a one liner. But I do think a good approach is just to be like, “Wow, it’s so interesting that you’re commenting on my body.” It’s like, I don’t know, you’re taking like the anthropologist approach. I mean, how often am I actually able to do that and not just be like “shut up you idiot?” Definitely not very often.VirginiaBut this is the goal. The way this stuff comes out in events that I’m at, it’s usually more food shaming than body shaming. When people are talking about how I’m being so bad, I can’t eat X. So then I do a lot of like, “no bad foods, no bad foods.” And I just like will keep dropping that in as needed. I also often disengage. I’ll just steer clear, change the subject. Depending on what I have the energy for. You don’t have to fight every one of these because there’s too many. And it’s exhausting. But yeah, I think if it’s around kids, I always do jump in. Then I always do say, “there are no bad foods, and we trust their bodies and this is not a problem.” I wish I had more funny lines. I don’t feel like I have good funny lines here.CorinneYeah. Me neither. I think the funny line is so appealing because it can just turn something that’s so uncomfortable into like a “gotcha!” moment. But it’s really hard to think of them.VirginiaIt’s really hard because a line you could memorize now won’t actually apply to the comment that comes out. CorinneYeah, you never quite see it coming.VirginiaI also think if it’s possible to set some boundaries ahead of time, that can go a really long way. This is if you have someone in your family that is a problem. If you could like send a note ahead of time and be like, “I love you. I can’t wait to see you. I really don’t want to talk about bodies or food.”CorinneYeah. VirginiaAnd if they can’t respect that, then when it comes up, you could do like, “It’s so interesting that you’re talking about bodies and food, despite my email.”CorinneDo you have any tips for holiday treats and potluck season in the workplace?VirginiaI didn’t totally understand this question. Because I think my main tip would be to just enjoy the food?CorinneI interpreted it as being a little like the last question where there’s a lot of treats and food around people make weird comments. Mostly because that was my experience of holiday treats and parties at work.VirginiaOh yeah, office parties are the literal worst for that. CorinneYeah. So not to be the one trick pony, but I feel like that same thing works really well in the office because you’re not getting emotional about it. “Oh, it’s so interesting that you don’t let yourself eat chocolate.”VirginiaI love this. The “It’s so interesting” is the go-to framing.Corinne“I’m noticing that you’re being really hard on yourself about food.”VirginiaThat’s really good.CorinneI do think the holiday food at the office thing is really stressful. VirginiaI mean, another thing is like, can you just not go to some of these events? How important is it to attend? I’m a big fan of doing less around the holidays and if there’s something where you just know it would be impossible to just sit and enjoy the cookie plate because everyone’s going to be so toxic about it, make your own cookies at home and just skip it if you can. If that feels okay to do in your job.CorinneI’ve worked a lot of places where at the holidays the company gets sent holiday treats. And then there’s always just tons of caramel popcorn and weird boxes of chocolate and fruit trays and cookie trays. And yeah, people are just so weird about it.VirginiaYeah, that’s exhausting.CorinneI mean, it is nice to have cookies around.VirginiaI think that’s another way to go into it, right? You talk about what you’re enjoying. And you can do sort of the same quizzical thing of like, “I’m really enjoying this cookie plate. You don’t seem to be.”Corinne“So interesting that you don’t like cookies.”Virginia“That sounds like not a really fun way to have this party for you.”CorinneThe longer I look at this question, now I’m like maybe they’re asking how should you deal with not feeling like you need to restrict your eating around this stuff?VirginiaI mean, I do think these events can be big triggers. If you’re someone who struggles with restriction, you’ll feel like you need to compensate beforehand or after. And I think remembering that you don’t, that your body knows what to do with food. Even if you eat a lot of cookies and your stomach hurts for a little while. This is not a fatal condition, you’re gonna feel better in the morning. Just really giving yourself permission if you have been restricting a lot in the past. This is probably a really important time for you to lean into permission, lean into “I’m going to let myself have as much as I want of everything.” And then be very non-judgmental about what that looks like. Because the temptation is going to be to start counting and calibrating and all of that, and you just need to have some good support people around hopefully, like have some folks who can help you remember, “I am leaning into permission. I’m leaning into I can have whatever I want.”Because these treats are not around all the time, it is understandable that they do trigger a little scarcity mindset. Like, Oh, these Christmas cookies that I only eat at Christmas, I want to get a lot of them because I only eat them at Christmas. That’s not a problem. That’s a normal way to react to a food you don’t see often. It is often a situation where you’re kind of noticing how scarcity mindset shows up. But if you can remember that this is like a benign scarcity mindset, if that makes sense. And it doesn’t necessarily need to trigger any kind of response afterwards. You don’t need to do anything differently the next day.CorinneAnd no matter how bad it is, it will be over in a month.VirginiaYou will make it through. You will make it then we’ll be in January, which is a whole other journey.CorinneIs it really okay that I don’t restrict how much sugar my kids eat? I do not feel confident.VirginiaIt is really okay. It is really, really, okay. It’s not only really okay, it’s really important that you don’t restrict how much sugar your kids eat. Because the more you restrict it, the more they will fixate on it and the more this will become a source of stress for both of you. I suspect you don’t feel confident because you are early on in this process of releasing restriction and you’re probably seeing them eat a lot of sugar and that feels uncomfortable to you. But your discomfort is not a reason to put restrictions back on because they’re not actually doing anything wrong. They are responding to a release from restriction by eating which is what their bodies are supposed to do. You need to sit in this discomfort and let this happen and see where it goes. And you may always have kids who love a lot of sugar or you may have kids who love sugar, but get to a more take it or leave it place. And neither of those is better or worse than the other. You’re gonna let them figure out their own relationship with sugar. And that’s the goal. But yeah, you have to sit in this discomfort right now. And it is hard because it’s going against the grain of so much of what you’ve been taught to do. But it is really, really okay.More sugar reading:Why It's Not Sugar AddictionAsk Virginia When Is It Restriction, and When Is It Good Parenting?CorinneGood advice.VirginiaHow to navigate the doomsday scroll of bodies, body comparison of old photos in a smaller body?CorinneI mean, put down your phone.VirginiaStop looking.CorinneYeah. I mean, why? It’s just, why. That sounds miserable.VirginiaTake the photos off your phone. If you need to delete a whole year of photos off your phone, do it. Just do it.CorinneJust start watching TikToks, you’ll lose hours of your life and you’ll forget what you look like. You’ll forget you even have a body. You’ll be in the metaverse. Okay, this is maybe not helpful advice.VirginiaI mean, I get it. I think we’ve all done it. One reason I’m trying very hard to divest from Facebook is because of the Facebook memories thing that shows you old photos. CorinneDoes your iPhone not just do that? My phone just does that. VirginiaYeah, my phone does that, too. But my phone is new enough that I only have the last couple of years, so it’s not bringing up body stuff. Facebook has this tendency to show me like pictures of when my daughter was in the hospital and I’m just like, you know what? Didn’t need that. Didn’t need that today.CorinneThat’s what I have with my phone. I’m like, “Oh great! Photos of people who are dead.” VirginiaNot helpful. But also, that’s hard because you don’t actually want to get rid of those. Well, I’m happy to take them off Facebook, but you wouldn’t want to delete those photos of that loved one or that difficult experience. CorinneI think also sometimes when you’re comparing yourself to old photos, it can be helpful to look at the bigger picture. You may have been smaller. You may have also been dumber. VirginiaOr hungrier. CorinneOr in a worse place. And now you’re different and it’s good.VirginiaYes. If I see photos of myself at 25, I think a lot about the many foot injuries I gave myself from obsessive running. And you know, those foot injuries stay with me to this day at 41. I could have not screwed up my knees and my ankles as much as I did. So it’s useful to think about that. This may be something that it’s helpful to work through with a therapist. I think this is something that like therapists who specialize in eating disorders are really good at knowing how to help you look at. Like there can be a time and a place for looking at these photos and processing your feelings around them and that’s different from a doomsday scroll, but it’s not something you should sort of like attempt to do on your own. You need support to do that.CorinneAny foods you hated as a kid because it was only prepared or purchased diet-y?VirginiaRice cakes. I feel like people like rice cakes now and I just cannot understand that. They only exist to me as a diet food. I don’t want to eat them. More recently, green juice. Don’t really need a green juice in my life. Don’t actually like it. Kale is one I’ve had to really like tussle with. Like, do I actually like kale? Do I like it in certain things but actually don’t like it most of the time. I had to give myself permission to not like kale. That wasn’t as a kid, that was as a young adult. CorinneMy family was vegetarian for a while growing up. My dad was a Buddhist, so it was a philosophical thing. VirginiaSure. CorinneHowever, I did not love it. And I now am just not interested in fake meat products. It does kind of go both ways because there’s some I actually like and have an almost nostalgic childhood food thing and there’s some I’m just like, disgusting. Like vegan hotdogs. I’m just like, No. Absolutely not. Give me the real hot dog.VirginiaHave they gotten better? I feel like vegan hotdogs from the 80s and 90s were probably particularly terrible. CorinneYeah, I mean, maybe! It’s just one of those things. I’m just now like, eh. Or like Impossible Burger. I’m like, I don’t care. However, like Morningstar vegan breakfast sausage? It’s delicious. VirginiaInteresting. CorinneThe other thing is like growing up my mom always bought this butter yogurt spread stuff. VirginiaOh, gosh. Like one of those it’s not butter?CorinneYeah, but it was a more like nature-y version. It was made with yogurt. Anyways, if that still exists, ban it. Did not like it. VirginiaI think ban all the fake butters. CorinneYeah, there’s probably people out there who like it.VirginiaOh, yeah, I can also put on this list Sweet’n Low, which, at various points in my childhood if I wanted to put sugar on my cereal Sweet’n Low was the option I was encouraged to use. And that’s not delicious on cereal. And I mean, Diet Coke is technically a diet food, but it’s also essential to my life. So that’s one I’ve totally reclaimed. We did a really good Friday thread about reclaiming diet foods ages and ages ago. It was really interesting to hear which diet foods stay in the torture category and which ones people are like, actually, I do love that. And like, what is it about the food that makes you like realize like, oh, I can actually love that in a non diet-y way now. I think that’s so interesting.CorinneInteresting. I’m gonna look back at that.ButterI’d love to hear about any books you’re reading lately.VirginiaI have already plugged it, but I really love Helen Hoang’s romance novels The Heart Principle and Kiss Quotient. They’re delightful. Feminist romance in general is a genre I really got into this year and I’m super here for it.The non-romance novel I will endorse is Flight by my friend Lynn Steger Strong. It is so beautiful and awesome. It just came out a couple of weeks ago. It’s a great holiday read. She’s having to deal with the whole like, it’s a mom book, it’s a Christmas book. And it’s also like actually brilliant fiction that if a man wrote it would not have those labels on it.CorinneI’m in a weird phase of I haven’t been reading a lot, but this summer I read This Time Tomorrow. VirginiaOh, yes. CorinneBy Emma Straub. And I loved it. And I’m kind of annoyed that more people I know haven’t read it.VirginiaThat was the number one book I read this year.CorinneOh, it was just so good. And then I went on a rabbit hole of like reading everything she wrote.VirginiaAll her books are good.CorinneI want everyone to read that.VirginiaI keep wanting Dan to read it. I’m like, this is such a beautiful father/daughter story that’s just, like, amazing.CorinneAnd yeah, I would say especially if you’re someone who’s lost a parent or lost a father, it’s really good.VirginiaBut also be prepared for it being a hard read. It’s beautiful. And she lost her own dad this year. That’s all a part of it. And oh my god, it’s so beautiful.CorinneYeah, I have a feminist romance question. I’m curious if you’ve read this book, Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake. It’s a romance that takes place on the Great British Bake Off, basically. I mean, fictionally. My mom has gotten into romance and she listened to it and then I listened to it on her audible account. And it’s great. The main character is bisexual, so i guess thats what makes it Feminist. But I thought it was really good.VirginiaThat is an excellent recommendation. Okay, I mean, we just gave some but do you  have other Butter recommendations?CorinneMy recommendation is for you to make yourself a monte cristo sandwich.VirginiaThis sounds delicious.CorinneDo you know what that is? VirginiaNo, say more. CorinneOkay. So it’s a sandwich. It’s a ham and cheese sandwich. The inside is ham and cheese. And you put bread on the outside, and then you put the bread in egg. Like French toast-y. And then you cook it. So the inside is like melting ham and cheese and outside is like french toast bread. And then traditionally you sprinkle sugar on it. So if you like a slightly sweet thing, you could do that. Or you could not do that.VirginiaThis sounds like it solves my perpetual brunch conundrum of whether I want to go sweet or savory, the eggs or pancakes debate.CorinneYes. And I mean, this is maybe a little annoying, but I feel like the way to do it is to sprinkle sugar on it and then torch it or put it under the boiler. So it’s like a brulee sandwich. VirginiaOh, so as you are toasting the sandwich, just like you would do with French toast, right?CorinneDo you do that with french toast?VirginiaYeah, I dip it in the egg mixture and I put it on the griddle. Then when I flip, I sprinkle the cinnamon sugar on and then I flip and sprinkle the cinnamon sugar on and so that that’s caramelizing on that as the French toast is cooking. If you’re making french toast, this is French toast with ham and cheese inside. CorinneYes. It’s delicious. It’s genius. VirginiaThat’s really good. Well, we could link to a recipe, but also I think you’ve just explained it to us. CorinneWhat’s your butter? VirginiaOkay, so my butter is I just discovered “Derry Girls.” Have you watched? CorinneI also have just started watching it.VirginiaIt’s so good. It’s so good. I’m obsessed. I don’t know how to express my love for it. I feel about it the way I felt about “A League of Their Own.” Which is to say extremely enthusiastic. And I was in a mourning period because I just finished “Bad Sisters” and I felt like I didn’t have anything to watch. Corinne“Bad Sisters” is so good. VirginiaIt was so good! And I wasn’t ready to leave Ireland, it turns out. So “Derry Girls,” if you haven’t seen it, is set in Northern Ireland in the 1980s when they’re at the height of…CorinneThe Troubles. VirginiaBut it’s very funny about being a teenager in a country where bombings happen a lot. And also very moving. And oh my God, I’m obsessed. I watched the whole first season in like two nights,I’m watching on nights when Dan is out and I’m on my own, which happens a couple times a week. And I’m doing a very good puzzle while I watch Derry Girls, and it’s just like my little blissful evening routine.Alright, I think we did an episode! Thank you, Corinne. This was great. Do you want to tell people where to find you?CorinneYou can find me on Instagram @selltradeplus or @selfiefay is my personal account.VirginiaThanks again for listening to Burnt Toast!

General levels of explicit and implicit bias against other groups have just rapidly decreased over the past 30 or 40 years. Whereas for weight, it’s actually still going up. So, you know, we’re up against a pretty big battle.You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith and I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.Today I’m chatting with Jeff Hunger who is an assistant professor of social psychology at Miami University in Ohio and my very favorite weight stigma researcher (if you’re allowed to have favorite weight stigma researchers and I say that you are!).Jeff is someone I got to know several years ago when I was reporting on weight stigma in healthcare. We’ve evolved into internet buddies with a shared passion for hidden kitchens, which you will hear us discuss if you stick all the way through to the Butter. Our focus of this episode is Jeff’s work on anti-fat bias, understanding how we internalize it, the difference between implicit and explicit bias, and how we start to separate out concepts like body image struggles from the larger conversation of anti-fat bias. We cover a lot of important ground. Including Taylor Swift. So here’s Jeff!Episode 71 TranscriptJeffSo I’m Jeff Hunger. I’m a social psychology professor at Miami University. That’s the one in Ohio not the one in Florida. VirginiaFewer palm trees. JeffNo slipping out to South Beach after our chat, unfortunately. I’m also a husband, a cat dad, and if you follow me on Instagram, an annoying foodie is probably the easiest way to classify me.VirginiaI consider you a delightful foodie, not an annoying foodie. I have a lot of foodie envy when I see your content. JeffI think that just means that you might be in the in group with me. VirginiaI’m not in the group because I have to feed small children and I don’t get to be in the group anymore. But I dream of coming back someday.JeffOne of these days we’ll just have to have you out to Ohio. We can do a foodie weekend.VirginiaYes, please, that sounds great. JeffMaybe more relevant to the folks listening: I’m a stigma researcher. So a lot of my research looks at how weight stigma in particular shapes our mental and physical health. And recently we’ve been focusing a lot on how this plays out with respect to disordered eating and body image.VirginiaWe started talking about doing this episode when I sent you a question I got from a reader which I’m going to read, because it gets into all these big questions about bias that you work on.Hi Virginia, what does the research and or other sources say about how to truly rid ourselves of anti-fat bias, both internal and external? Obviously, self awareness is key. But I’m curious if you have come across what works. I see it in my own mind constantly, and try to bring awareness to it. But it seems fairly intractable in spite of now several years of educating myself. It comes out in how I view myself, my bigger bodied child and is tied up in shame and judgment. Who is doing therapeutic somatic intellectual meditation, etc work to really uproot this type of bias? I know there are studies on mindfulness and implicit bias. Are there any studies showing the kind of therapy or other modality that works?So basically, how do we fix our bias?  I think this is a brick wall we all come up against at some point. JeffThis is a fantastic question and I do think that it is one that needs a lot more research attention. But there is a recent review of this work that is really interesting, because it basically found that a lot of intervention approaches that have been tried just don’t seem to reliably work. And these are approaches that we took from other forms of bias reduction. You know, there’s a larger literature on how we reduce explicit and implicit bias that’s only recently—you know, past 10 or 15 years—being done as it relates to weight. This is things like trying to reduce the belief that weight is controllable, having folks get exposed to fat targets who are counter stereotypical and trying to invoke things like empathy or perspective taking. All of these have been tested and it turns out none of them seem to really be effective.VirginiaSo they’re effective for other kinds of bias, like racism or sexism, but not for anti-fat bias. JeffFrom my read of the bias reduction literature, yeah. They seem to be more effective with other groups but tested in the weight domain, they don’t really seem to hold up.VirginiaSo what’s going on? That’s so weird. Is it weird?JeffI do think it’s weird, a little bit. But what I think is really interesting was that the review also found that the interventions that were effective were better able to reduce self-directed bias or internalized bias, as opposed to the bias that we direct towards other people.So unlike other categories, weight is one in which there’s a really, really strong internalization piece and one that I think is a little bit more intractable, because the boundaries between these groups, between being fat or being not, it’s kind of permeable. It’s a lot more permeable than other groups, like when we think about race or sexual orientation, there’s far, far less movement between them. What this review found that did work was interventions like adopting a Health at Every Size perspective. This seemed to be an effective tool, at least for reducing that internalized weight bias, as was research that uses the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.1So there are a few approaches that we seem to see from this literature, at least from this recent review, that help us at least tackle internalized stigma or self-directed stigma. I think where we need to go then is knowing that we have a little bit of a success story, if we can kind of build on that to see if there are ways to modify those approaches to not just reduce the self-directed stigma, but also the anti-fat bias that we’re directing towards other people.VirginiaThis is making me realize we should also define a couple of terms for folks who are less familiar with this conversation. JeffI’ll put on my social psychology professor hat. So, when we think about internal versus external, we can direct weight stigma towards someone else, we can direct anti-fat bias toward a person in our social world—a partner, a child, a stranger. At the same time, we can direct that same sort of anti-fatness towards ourselves. We can turn it inward and start to devalue ourselves and stereotype ourselves because of our weight. Now, implicit bias is bias that isn’t as easily reportable. You know, we can’t just walk up to you and go, you know, Virginia, what’s your level of implicit anti fat bias? It’s assessed in more indirect ways because it’s below conscious level. And that’s in contrast to explicit bias which is where I can just walk up to you and say, okay, Virginia, how do you think about fat people or what do you think about fat people? I can readily report on that form of bias.Both are important, but I think more recently implicit bias has kind of gotten a lot of media attention and attention in other spaces.VirginiaAnd it’s interesting because my first thought is, oh, there must be a very bright line between these two types of bias, but the more I’m thinking about it, I’m wondering, can someone experience something as implicit bias, but other people experience it as explicit bias? Does that make sense?JeffThat’s another interesting and thorny question. My bias might be at the implicit level and so it could lead me to behave in a way that you pick up as explicit, that you end up feeling discriminated against because of your race, your gender, your weight, when I didn’t really notice that I was doing anything wrong, because my implicit bias was leaking out. So it may not look the same as shouting a derogatory term at someone, but it might be the ways in which I position my body, subtle nonverbal behaviors that I engage in as we interact with one another, things that can shape the outcomes and the experience of the other person, even if I don’t notice them.VirginiaIt just speaks to the level of awareness we need to start to unlearn these biases, right? Because you can be executing them in ways you are not aware of. JeffAnd I think as the reader that contributed this question noted, a lot of that is thinking about self-reflection and trying to be self aware. But at the same time when we think about anti-fat bias, we also need to be thinking about how bigger, broader, structural forces are shaping our anti-fat bias, both internal and external. Because if all we do is emphasize and try to make gains at the individual level, I imagine that those are going to be hard to sustain against the continued backdrop of anti-fat fuckery in our society, excuse my language.VirginiaYou never have to excuse your language here. And absolutely. It’s making a personal project out of something that is this much larger societal question that we have to grapple with.When we look at how the research shows what we know works for other forms of bias doesn’t work as well for anti fat bias, do you think that has something to do with the way as the larger system doesn’t support that personal work? JeffI think that that very well could be why we are not seeing these maybe tried and true, or at least more well-established bias reduction tools work when it comes to weight. We also see that just general levels of explicit and implicit bias against other groups has just rapidly decreased over the past 30 or 40 years. Whereas for weight, it’s actually still going up.So, you know, we’re up against a pretty big battle, an uphill fight to reduce this. Because not only is it a little bit resistant to these techniques that we have tried before, in general, across the country, at least in the US, that bias seems to keep creeping up when things like bias against gay individuals has gone down over the past 20 years.VirginiaRight. It just shows how much it’s being reinforced in healthcare, in schools, in these different places that have made some progress—not enough progress, but some progress on other forms of bias—that here we really are still on the starting blocks, so to speak.JeffAbsolutely. There’s this really interesting study that I reviewed and read recently that basically found that things like large scale, fat-shaming events against celebrities can actually push around implicit bias at a grand scale. VirginiaOh, that’s fascinating.JeffThey basically had all of these large scale, public fat-shaming events, whether it was all of the many times that Lizzo has been the target of this or a lot of other celebrities. It was basically celebrity fat shaming, and they see that it does have a small effect. We’re not going to see this jump up a ton every time, but if we think about cumulative exposure, think about how many times we see a fat celebrity get talked terribly about online or in the news, even if each one of those events only has a tiny, tiny little bit of an impact on our implicit bias, over time it’s just gonna build. We’re dealing with shit like that as well, having to push back against things like seeing anti-fat bias continually reemerge.VirginiaI always think when that happens, when I see progressives fat-shaming Donald Trump. Like, Donald Trump does not care. He is not going to see your tweet and there are so many other reasons to eviscerate Donald Trump! You don’t need to talk about his body at all. And yet, your fat friend just saw your tweet. And you equated them to this person who I would describe as a monster in most ways.JeffIt’s not the “gotcha” take that I think a lot of otherwise progressive or liberal folks on Twitter would think it is. One, it’s incredibly lazy and unfunny. And two, like you say, Donald Trump doesn’t give a shit about what you tweet about him. But fat people in your sphere online, do they see it and they take note?VirginiaSo, to get a little more into the internal versus external piece of it all, one thought I had in reading this person’s question is that they seem to be equating anti-fat bias with body image struggles, and with shame about their own body and shame about their child’s body. And this made me wonder if these two concepts are always intertwined or if we can, and maybe should, separate them. Can you be fatphobic but not struggle with your own relationship to body? And on the flip side, can you be struggling, maybe even have an eating disorder, etc, and not be fatphobic?JeffI personally think that these ideas need to be separated. I do think that issues with body image and anti-fatness can and do operate independently from one another. Of course, anti-fat bias living in a structurally anti-fat society is going to contribute to poor body image, but they, to me, are not one and the same. Like you said, I think someone can be incredibly fatphobic and perfectly content with their own body. And on the flip side, I do think that folks can struggle with body image and not be inherently fatphobic.VirginiaI think that is really helpful to hear. Because I often hear from people having that added layer of guilt on top of their own struggle. Like, “I feel bad about my body and I feel bad that I’m perpetuating this thing. And how do I separate those?”JeffI think that’s a really important insight for folks to make, that they can both feel bad about their own body and worry that feeling bad about their own body is going to contribute to perpetuating fatphobia. I think that acknowledging how one’s body image struggles may inadvertently be contributing to this sort of anti-fat system is different than what I’ve seen, which is occasionally folks using their body image struggles as a justification for their anti-fatness. I think that’s that’s a different animal altogether. I think recognizing how your own body struggles and how your own feelings about your weight might reflect bigger, broader anti-fatness is an important one to have. It’s not an excuse for you to be shitty to fat people.VirginiaHow does Taylor Swift fit into all of this?JeffI am going to out myself as not a Swiftie. I think I just lost my gay card. But I think that from my very loose sort of understanding, it basically was that she steps on the scale and it just reads “fat” on the scale? VirginiaYeah, exactly. And it’s supposed to be a comment on her eating disorder struggles, that she gets on the scale, and it says fat.JeffAnd I think that it probably could be approached in a way that still communicates that she is not liking her body without having to say she doesn’t like it because it is a fat body specifically. She can express struggles with disordered eating and with her eating disorder that she has disclosed previously, but I think doing it in a manner that doesn’t necessarily equate feeling bad about your body with being fat.I mean, I will probably get annihilated on Twitter for all of that, because I think there was a heated debate about this.VirginiaThere was a very heated debate. Taylor Swift fans came out fast and furious in support of her and it got very complicated. I say this as someone who really can’t name a Taylor Swift song? So they can come at me, too, if they want. JeffWe’re both canceled. VirginiaBut I just kept thinking: If this was someone who I loved and admired in the way that the Taylor Swift fans love and admire Taylor Swift, why would I not also hold them to this higher standard?In comparison, when Lizzo used an ableist term in one of her songs and people noted it, she immediately took the term out and apologized. It was very straightforward and everyone was like, “That was fine. We’re over it, we all learned something.”And Taylor did eventually edit the video, but hasn’t, as far as I know, made a statement. I just think there was a lot of white lady energy around it. It shows how uncomfortable we are getting this kind of feedback and having to admit to wrongdoing. And it certainly spoke to all the implicit bias stuff that you’re talking about. JeffI also think that instances like this really show us the darker side of Stan Culture, like online internet fandom, you know? Because we should want to hold each other—including celebrities that we look up to—to account for what they do, what they say, how they produce certain things, whether that’s a music video or a song. And I think that Lizzo’s swift and clear response to her use of the ableist term was just a master class in how you should be doing this.VirginiaIt was like, Taylor, did you miss that? Like, it was like, last month? She literally gave you a blueprint for how to navigate this situation.JeffDidn’t Beyonce also have an issue with this and kind of stumbled as well? You’d think someone on Taylor’s team would have been like, “Okay, Lizzo did it really well. Beyonce stumbled a little bit and we saw how the Internet reacted. Let’s get on top of this.”VirginiaI think it ties back to what you were saying about fatphobia is on the rise. There were so many people pushing this argument of like, “Oh, you’re just being too sensitive.” It wasn’t taken seriously by her fan base as a real form of oppression. It was just sort of like, “Oh, these are people getting their feelings hurt. She’s trying to tell us her truth.” JeffYep, absolutely. And it doesn’t have to be an either or. It doesn’t have to be she is speaking her truth or reflecting on her own struggles. It can be that and she could have gone about it a different way. And I think it seems like an appropriate level of criticism was leveled at her. But I need to fully dive into this. VirginiaI think it’s had its moment, and we can all move on. But it does set us up well for the next topic I wanted us to get into, which is who gets to call themselves fat?I think the Taylor situation is kind of a perfect example of when it is problematic for a thin person to call themselves fat. But I’m really curious to hear your thoughts about this.JeffThis is a big question. And I would agree with you that a person with thin privilege calling themselves fat is unacceptable because this is almost exclusively done in a demeaning or a condescending manner. I think we absolutely agree on that.What I’m curious to get your thoughts on, too, is where along the weight spectrum do we then draw the line to say, okay, that person can call themselves fat? Like, obviously I’m not about to be like, “Let’s breathe life into BMI again and give that another shitty purpose.” But where and how and who decides where that cut is made? And I really don’t have a a good answer to this question. But I think it’s an important one, because it ties back to the conversation about body image and weight stigma not necessarily being the same thing and equating them as such being problematic. Because if we flatten those ideas, if we flatten body image struggles and weight stigma, we lose sight of who truly faces the brunt of interpersonal, instructional anti-fatness—and that’s fat people.And so if we lose sight of that we are losing sight of the way in which our social structures are disproportionately impacting and harming higher body weight individuals. Even though folks across the weight spectrum can “feel fat,” (or however we want to use that also problematic language) that’s not the same as being fat and being the target and the ire of a whole lot of people because of your body size.VirginiaRight? It reduces the whole conversation to your personal feelings about your body and minimizes the fact that this is the systemic form of oppression that is showing up in paychecks, in access to public spaces, and access to health care, and all of these other arenas.JeffMaybe this is the time to mention that I think that we, as weight stigma researchers, are kind of doing a disservice because this type of thinking has crept into the research on internalized weight bias. So, we’ve seen work in this area grow exponentially over the past decade, but it’s become increasingly common to see research on internalized weight bias being done with predominantly or or exclusively thinner participants.2 VirginiaOh, wow. JeffThis is an issue because asking a thinner person about their internalized anti-fat bias is a bit like asking me my level of internalized anti-straight bias. I’m very gay. It’s not my internalized bias, it’s just my bias, you know? And so, I would love if we, as researchers in the weight stigma domain, would engage more thoughtfully with this idea. Just because supposedly internalized weight bias is associated with some outcome, what does it mean when we’re measuring it among people that aren’t part of that group? Are we capturing something like internalized societal ideals around around thinness? Which is totally fine. But if we are, let’s call a spade a spade. Let’s not coopt this idea of internalized anti-fatness almost exclusively in thinner people. Because again, then what it does is it washes out this idea of who’s disproportionately impacted.Some people want to want to flip that on their head and be like no, look, everyone can be impacted by weight stigma. Which is true, everyone can be impacted by living in a structurally anti-fat society. But again, it’s fat people that see it show up in their paychecks, in their doctor’s visits, in their insurance premiums. And not everyone across the weight spectrum gets that same treatment at the hands of anti-fat bias.VirginiaCan we draw a parallel with sexism? I would argue sexism is really harmful to cis men as well because it narrows the conversation around masculinity and being able to express emotions if you’ve labeled all of that as “girly.” But it still hurts women more because we’re the people not getting paid equally and being denied rights to our own bodies.JeffI think that is a really helpful parallel. Folks can experience consequences of that structure, of the heterosexist patriarchal society that we live in, and like you say, men will be hurt by it. They are not hurt in a necessarily systematic way like women are, however. VirginiaAnd it does sound like you’re saying that, in terms of the research conversation, the implicit bias of thin people is maybe getting more research dollars and energy than explicit bias experienced by fat people?JeffYeah, I think that there’s a lot of attention being paid to internalized, self-directed weight stigma, that is not centering the experiences of fat people.VirginiaThat’s maddening. That’s very maddening.JeffThere’s a commentary that’s been brewing in the back of my brain for about five years that I’m hoping to put pen to paper about this topic. If I end up writing it, I’ll send it to you.VirginiaThank you. I really want you to write that because this feels like such an important shift in the conversation. It’s something I struggle with, even just as a journalist covering these topics. Most of the questions I get are about people’s personal relationships with their bodies. I think about it in the balance of the newsletter content, but it’s hard when this is how people enter this issue, in this very personal way.I think it’s so crucial to say, no, this is part of this larger, systemic thing. You have to recognize the larger system. I think it’s actually crucial to working on the personal piece of it to understand that your struggle fits into this larger puzzle. But it’s also like, how do we get the conversation past the personal struggle piece and onto the systemic piece? And how do we focus on making that kind of systemic change?JeffThose are really important questions. And maybe it’s something like we saw in that literature review that I mentioned earlier, that folks who are engaging in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy seem to reduce their levels of internalized or self-directed stigma. So maybe that’s step one. Maybe step one is fixing things at home and then taking that newfound freedom and that newfound energy and trying to figure out strategies to also reduce the ways in which your bias towards other people might be manifesting. Once you’ve reduced it, the anti-fatness that you’re directing towards the self, maybe that’s going to free up people with the resources and the energy and the ability to also make sure that they’re not turning around and being assholes to fat people in their social world.VirginiaAnd we really have to hold all of ourselves accountable to not stopping at step one, right? Let’s not be white feminists about it. We have to keep doing it. And that’s, I think, the tricky piece, especially as it sounds like we don’t have as much clear direction from the research yet about what step two looks like. JeffAbsolutely. And I think that’s why if there’s any budding social psychologists or bias researchers out there, this is a big area of needed attention. Run with it, it’s so vital.VirginiaOne last thing I wanted to talk about and maybe this gets us starting to think along these step two lines is: A lot of the Burnt Toast audience is parents and a main way that we see anti-fat bias presenting itself most acutely is when a kid comes home and reports that someone called them fat or has otherwise teased or bullied them for their weight.So this is maybe a little less about unlearning our own biases, although I think they still come into play here, and more about helping kids cope with the reality of this bias in the world. I’m just wondering if you have thoughts on strategies here? Is there anything promising in the research on weight based bullying about what works here?JeffIn the weight stigma domain, I haven’t seen a ton of work that has directly addressed this, what is a really important question. Like, how are we to help our kids cope when they come home and say, "okay, I’ve been the victim of weight based bullying.” I do wonder if this is a place for having a conversation with kids ahead of time about bias. An analogue might be when minoritized parents talk to their kids about the potential for discrimination. So maybe we can work to have developmentally appropriate conversations about how some bodies are unfairly treated, how others are unnecessarily glorified. Maybe this is going to help kids be better equipped to face the bullying, if it happens, or maybe help them stop internalizing their own mistreatment, you know?We can’t always stop the experiences that they’re going to encounter at school. But if we can stop them from internalizing and turning that negativity to themselves, maybe we can at least sort of buffer a little bit.VirginiaYeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. And parents of thin kids have the work to do to educate our kids about this issue as well, right? About their privilege and not being part of the problem? JeffYeah, absolutely. I think that there’s a place for everyone in this conversation,. And I did want to also mention that I know that Mary Himmelstein at Kent State does have some research showing that kids who are bullied or teased because of their weight, would just love more support from their parents. They’ve also indicated that they want to see stronger policies in schools to prevent being bullied in the first place. VirginiaYeah, that would be great.JeffYou know, is weight explicitly named in the anti-bullying policies in your school or your school district? If not, work to change that. If the policy does include weight, is it being enforced? Are teachers and staff being trained to identify and intervene on this type of bullying?So there are ways to be an ally like this that can hopefully even start to cut off those experiences before they manifest or before they happen. And what I like about that is, because it’s at a bigger policy level, it’s going to support your own kid, but it’s also going to help other fat kids and other kids in the school as well.Butter For Your Burnt ToastJeffMy only recommendation would be to stop commenting on people’s weight. You know, whether it’s the weight of your friends, the weight of your family, celebrities like Lizzo, assholes like Donald Trump, yourself. Just stop it. You’re going to be better off for it. The folks around you are going to be better off for it. VirginiaYes!JeffAnd also build hidden rooms in your kitchens because they’re so cool.VirginiaThey’re so cool. Oh my gosh. So for people who are like, “What are they talking about?” JeffWe sound crazy right now. VirginiaWe sound a little crazy. Can you explain? Because I feel like you DM’ed me about it first. Well, I don’t know how we discovered this mutual love for them, but why don’t you explain what we’re talking about.JeffYeah, so it’s this big Instagram trend where you’re in this gorgeous kitchen, then all of a sudden a pantry pulls open and there’s this gorgeous second room, like a butler’s pantry or a hidden coffee nook. Or you know a full second kitchen. It’s just like ridiculous shit that people are hiding behind a single door. I think I DMed you because I think I told you to have Dan build one. It was a very specific request for you, on your behalf, to have Dan build you a hidden room.VirginiaAnd he still has not, I have to report. I feel like it got inspired by the appliance garage concept where like God forbid anyone sees your toaster. They make a slide down cover for it. And then people were like, if we’re hiding the appliances, what if we also hide… and it’s just gotten bigger and bigger and more absurd. And I’m so here for it. It’s so entertaining. I also, as a feminist, have many qualms about it and like how it is requiring us to perform domesticity and hide the mess and all of this, but also I want one. I’m conflicted and I love it.JeffYeah, I can totally see the problematic nature of it. To me, it’s like from when I was a kid I always wanted secret passageways because I was like a nerd like that. And so to me, it’s like I want a hidden library or a hidden something behind a book. I just want something cool like that. And these are real. They’re really hitting that like 11 year old Jeff fantasy that’s now kind of blended with the fact that I’m 35 and an annoying foodie. It had to manifest this way.VirginiaI think that’s totally what it is. When I was nine, we moved into a house that was built in 1832. And like, for a year I was hunting for secret passageways. I never found one. I was so determined that there would be one. It was not a large house. It was not a fancy house. It was a small New England farmhouse. They don’t have secret passageways. But I was just like, there will be one. So yes, I think it totally taps into that.I think that’s why my very favorite example of this trend is not a kitchen thing at all, but it’s Elsie Larson of A Beautiful Mess.You’re in her upstairs hallway and you push on the wall, and then it goes into that little hidden library. Did I send you that one?JeffOh, no, but I really need you to.VirginiaI will. It’s this tiny little nook. I can’t figure out where in her house it is, but it’s just like a little hidden library for her kids. And it’s like, oh my gosh, the most adorable thing.JeffLike slightly related, but we have a friend who works at a social media company and they have a name tag that they just tap on this random part of the wall and a door shows up and you really can’t see the door. It’s mind-boggling. And then it’s a hidden bar.VirginiaWow. Okay, they’re living the dream. I mean, if they like their job there, that part of their job is living the dream.JeffI was living my dream for a day because I just got to wander around this place and do all of the fun things at the social media company without the work, you know? I will be in the game room, I will be in the hidden bar.VirginiaIt’s actually really hard to look at your house and figure out where… I mean, I have started to obsess over this. But it basically means you have to wall something off in a way that unless your house is absolutely enormous would create other problems. So do we think that the influencers with the hidden kitchens just have like huge like mega-mansions? Is that what we’re seeing? JeffI have to assume so.VirginiaLike, how do you have space for it?JeffBecause the public kitchen is also usually huge. VirginiaIt’s usually huge! It’s got a giant island in it. And then you push through and you get to this whole other space. JeffMy dream is that our next house has an unfinished basement so that I can make this a reality because if you have an unfinished basement, then it’s a lot easier to hide something, you know? I’m just going to take away a kid’s library or playroom somewhere. So, if my husband is listening to this he knows that’s on my long term list of house goals.VirginiaSomething we’re working towards. I’m remembering the way Elsie did it was I think it had like one of those double height foyers when you walk in—you know, like a lot of McMansions have like the double height foyer? And she closed it off. I’ve seen a couple influencers do this. If you have a McMansion with a double height foyer and you put a floor halfway up it, you can make yourself a hidden room of some sort. So that’s just a little life hack for everyone with a McMansion who’s listening to this.JeffA very casual reno tip. Add a floor, just add an entire floor.VirginiaJust add a floor then you can also build in a hidden room.JeffI think we should disavow anyone out there that thinks a professor would be able to do that on a professor’s salary. VirginiaIt’s nice to dream. So yes, people can follow us for more inspirational life hacks like that.JeffYeah, maybe our next podcast should just be one that where we give those like really down to earth life hacks like that together.VirginiaJust like really useful practical advice for people about expensive home renovation projects. I am very good at spending other people’s money on their home renovations. JeffOh, yes.VirginiaDefinitely a superpower of mine. Well, Jeff, thank you. This was so much fun. Tell people where they can follow you for your food, cat, and hidden kitchen content and also your work.VirginiaWell, thank you first off for having me. This was fantastic. I always love chatting with you. So, for research related content, you can find me at jeffreyhunger.com. All of my research is going to be up there so that’s typically the most up to date place to find any of the published work that we’ve been doing. Otherwise you can find me on Twitter and Instagram @DrHunger on both platforms. But as Virginia just mentioned, that’s going to be a mixture of research, food posts, and my cats, so if you’re into that sort of thing, by all means, please find me there.VirginiaI mean, it’s pretty great. I recommend it. 1 - Here’s a good introduction to ACT, and here’s an example of research on its utility in reducing weight stigma (ironic warning for weight-normative language there!).2 - Jeff noted after we recorded that this is a trend he’s noticing personally, not something documented in the literature (yet).

You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.Today I am chatting with Emiko Davies, an award winning Australian-Japanese food writer, photographer, and cookbook author based in Italy.Emiko grew up in a diplomatic family and spent most of her life living in countries other than her own, from China to the United States. After graduating from art school, she ended up in Florence, Italy in 2005 to study art restoration, and fell in love with a Tuscan Sommelier. They live with their daughters in a charming hilltop village between Florence and Pisa and plan to open their own space for sharing food and natural wine experiences in San Miniato in 2023. (Book your travel now!) Emiko has also written five cookbooks, most recently Cinnamon & Salt, and she also shares her recipes on her Instagram and in her Substack newsletter, Emiko’s Newsletter.But today we’re talking less about Emiko’s amazing food (although I always have time to talk about Emiko’s amazing food). We’re talking about Emiko’s experiences parenting her daughter Luna who is in a bigger body. And as you can imagine, that gets especially complicated for Emiko, as a semi public figure who shares pieces of her life and her kids online. Episode 70 TranscriptVirginiaYou have been on my radar for such a long time as someone who produces this beautiful and delicious food. You live in Italy and live out my dreams in many ways—or at least it looks that way. I’m allowed to fantasize. But I didn’t realize until you started doing your Substack about a year ago that you were also very firmly anti-diet. And I am always so thrilled to discover food people who feel that way. Because, as I’ve discussed in the past (here with Julia Turshen!), the food world has a complicated relationship with all of these issues, as I know I don’t need to tell you.EmikoWell, I actually didn’t realize that there was a term for anti-diet until I started reading some of your work. I’m pretty sure you had a lot to do with it, Virginia, so thank you. But I once I started reading about that I realized I’ve been anti-diet my whole life. Because I, like my daughter Luna, grew up in a in a bigger body. I basically went through puberty and then became thin, like over the summer. My body completely changed. And then I was a thin teenager and have been all kinds of body shapes as my through my 30s and now I’m 42. Especially having babies and everything else.VirginiaWe all try out a lot of bodies, a lot of shapes.EmikoYeah, exactly. But one thing I have never been into was diets. I was just very lucky that growing up, that was something that my family never hinted at or never suggested that we needed to do. So I realize now, looking back, that I went through those periods of my life where I was in a bigger body completely unscathed really. I don’t really remember anytime ever feeling ashamed of myself or hating myself. For that, I feel really grateful. Restricting food was never something I was gonna do. I loved eating and I loved cooking. So when I realized there was a term for anti-diet, I was like, wow, this is, this is me. I found my home.VirginiaWhat a gift your family gave you. Do you have a sense of why your parents or the adults in your life were able to provide that safe space? EmikoI don’t know why I was so lucky. My mother is Japanese and she’s very tiny. She’s a really tiny Japanese lady. My father, though, is in a bigger body. And I don’t know if that had something to do with it. Body commenting or any of that sort of thing, it just was never something that we did in my family. I have a younger brother, who was always stick thin and still is stick thin and has never changed. My sister, though, was just like me, she had a bigger body as a child and as an adolescent. So maybe it was just a combination of the fact that we we all had different shaped bodies. And that was just who we were.VirginiaThey didn’t feel like, “We have to fight this.”EmikoI feel very lucky. Looking back on this now, I didn’t realize how lucky I really was. VirginiaSo you had this realization when you started sharing pictures—particularly of Luna, you have an older daughter, too—that suddenly you were in this conversation in a different way, that you weren’t just sharing pictures of your kids.EmikoSo my older daughter is nine and she’s straight sized. And actually, we had a few years of really difficult eating, where she basically was only eating a handful of things. She was so anxious about school that she wouldn’t eat breakfast or eat at school. So she would come home at four in the afternoon and hadn’t eaten a thing and she was getting so skinny. So she was a whole different thing. I was always trying to make sure she was really comfortable around food and that mealtimes were just really the chillest and most peaceful place to be. I didn’t want to create any more anxiety than what she was already going through. And then Luna came along when we were in the middle of this really difficult eating phase. I’m gonna say its a phase because she is getting out of it now that she’s nearly 10. But the ages between four and eight were really, really difficult years.And Luna was born when she was five and a half, so right in the middle of this. And Luna was just this bubbly, funny, kind of crazy, little second daughter. When she was a toddler, I was posting photos and videos as I had always done on on Instagram and on my blog, of food things that we do together, which is basically like what we do whenever we have any free time. Almost every day, on the weekends or after school, we’re making something or at least I’m cooking something and my kids usually jump in and want to play with whatever it is that I’m making.And when when Luna was a toddler, people loved seeing Luna content. You could tell she really loves food. She loves trying anything, eating anything, sticking her hand in a bag of flour or whatever it was. You know, making a mess. I’m usually in the kitchen testing recipes and things like that and I would post all these photos and videos and sometimes we’d be making pasta or baking something, whatever it was. And so that was great, people love seeing little Luna doing that.And one of her one of the videos that that people still talk about when they write to me about her is Luna drinking a bowl of minestrone which was her favorite thing. She literally will pick up the bowl and drink every last drop out of there. And then like put it down and give this big sigh. Like, “That was so good.” So I was sharing these things. And when she was little, people just loved it and saw the joy and the innocence. That was the main thing people would write to me: This is just pure joy.VirginiaI mean, her reaction to minestrone is exactly correct. It’s delicious. EmikoThe first time I got some really startlingly negative, really hateful comments was about a year ago. I happened to be making a tiramisu when Luna popped in like she always does no matter what I make in the kitchen. She’ll be there like, what are you doing? Can I come and help you? And she’ll stick her hands in whatever it is I’m making. I was gutting a fish and she did the same thing with a fish, right? She’s just in there, curious about whatever it is that I’m doing.But this time, it happened to be a tiramisu, which, you know, is a dessert made with mascarpone, eggs, cream. I had some persimmons that were super ripe and I was using them in the tiramisu. And I think it’s kind of… what’s the word? Maybe predictable? That this was going to happen with a photo of Luna with a dessert. Not minestrone, which was full of vegetables, but a dessert. And the only actually the only times I have ever gotten negative comments is when they see Luna with something sweet. In this case, it was a tiramisu and she wasn’t actually eating it. She was helping me make… I wouldn’t even say she was helping me. She was just making a mess! VirginiaShe was in the process.Luna and the TiramisuEmikoShe was like, “What’s this?” And literally stuck a savoiard, like the lady finger biscuit, in the egg and sugar before I had even put the mascarpone in there. And she was just messing around. So I had these photos and I have the recipe that I was sharing in my newsletter. That was the first time that I got some really negative comments and the comments were basically, “What are you doing to this child?” This was clearly something that they saw as my fault. “What kind of parent does this to their child?” The assumptions are that she’s eating too much and that she has this really like hearty appetite, which also she doesn’t. She eats regularly! Thank god, she’s not a difficult eater, like my older daughter, but she’s not a particularly big eater, either. I just don’t think that that has anything to do with anything at all. But it’s this assumption that people have when they see her, especially coupled with an image of cake or dessert or sweets, right? The assumption is that I am to blame for how she looks. And I think that’s the problem.VirginiaThe problem is that they’re seeing her body as a problem, when it’s absolutely not a problem. It’s just her body. I have so much anger about this whole situation. They’re taking this one tiny snapshot of your day —I can’t even say it’s a snapshot of your life. It’s a moment of a day!—And they’re assuming that they know everything about your parenting, your feeding, her relationship with food, who she is. The number of assumptions being made here is staggering.But what makes me saddest is that it puts you in this place of having to defend yourself—which you don’t owe them or owe anybody—and of feeling like you have to explain what her appetite really is, when that’s none of our business. Nobody needs to know how Luna eats or doesn’t eat. That’s this dynamic that we force on kids in bigger bodies and parents of kids and bigger bodies that you have to justify that things are okay. And you’re never asked those same questions if your older daughter is in the tiramisu picture. Nobody would have had anything to say about it.EmikoExactly. Because I do have so many more photos and videos of Mariù, my older daughter, making cupcakes, making cream buns. They just see this thin, “normal” looking girl and there’s no problem there for them. Whereas when they see Luna, they think there is something wrong with that picture.VirginiaRight, which is just anti-fat bias. You have also had a lot of really positive comments about Luna. So I wanted to also talk a little bit about that piece of that because I mean, I love Luna content. She is such a joyous child. She’s such a sunshine-y kid and I love seeing her explore foods. EmikoI’ve actually been blown away by the positive responses from people, to be honest. They far outnumber the negative comments. People have have written privately and publicly to me—all kinds of people, younger people who don’t have kids, older people who were a kid like Luna, people who are in food, people who aren’t, so many people wrote to me—not only about this negative comment, but just in general. Whenever they see something of Luna, they just write to me to say, “I love this, I love seeing this celebration of food and joy and life.” So that has actually been something that has always encouraged me to continue sharing Luna and sharing just these little snippets of our life. Because I do get so many really, really heartwarming messages and actually quite often tearjerking messages, as well. One of the ones that really stuck out to me, for example, was I got a private message from Karen Barnes, the editor of Delicious Magazine in the UK. She wrote to me to say that she had grown up in a bigger body and how she was put on a diet. Like for Easter, she wasn’t given an Easter egg, they’d given her some tights or something else. And she felt many, many, many years of complete shame about her body and went through yo-yo dieting. She’s still now battling all of these issues, because of what was put on her as a child. And she wrote to me just to tell her her story, and to say how how happy she is to see that Luna is going down another path, and that there’s somebody showing that there is another path.You can just continue with life and celebrate food as it is, encourage a good relationship with food, and do it no matter what size your child is. So when I when I get messages like that, I think, yeah, I’m not doing anything wrong. I should continue sharing this. emikodaviesA post shared by Emiko Davies (@emikodavies)VirginiaI just had a message today from a reader who had taken her daughter in a bigger body to the pediatrician. And the pediatrician had made comments about “Are you eating healthy foods?” And she was questioning herself . When you get the negative comments, our culture has trained us to then think What am I doing wrong? They’ve called me out in some way. You sharing Luna and sharing the way your family is so joyful with food and so respectful of your kids bodies is helping families to say, “Oh, I can keep parenting my child in a larger body from this place of trust and respect and love. And I don’t need to do anything differently.” And it’s so powerful and we really need that representation. But I’m also very aware that it’s coming with a cost to you, because you have to deal with these other reactions.EmikoYeah, it feels—and I’m sure you you feel like this, too—like you’re swimming against the stream. And sometimes I wonder, should I keep doing this? What am I doing? But on the other hand, I also think the percentage of negative comments I got were actually tiny compared to the outpouring of warm and supportive messages. I think I need to maybe learn to just to block those hateful comments and try not to take them personally, which is super hard. When it’s about me, it’s easier for me to not take it personally, but when it’s about my child, that’s that’s really that’s really tough.VirginiaIt’s so vulnerable. I completely get that. And, you know, in my case, my older daughter’s story was shared in a very public way. I wrote a book about it, I wrote a New York Times Magazine article about it. I’ve done dozens of podcasts about it. And I did reach a point where I thought, “I’m going to talk a lot less about her.” I don’t put her picture on my public Instagram anymore, unless you can’t really see her face. Because I wanted to start to give her, as she was getting older, more privacy. And with the younger one, I’ve started to move in the same direction. Even though she doesn’t have a dramatic story like that. It’s easier to share when they’re little, when they’re toddlers and babies and preschoolers, there’s something much more innocuous about sharing them at that point. So I really relate to the struggle you have of like, they’re a joyful part of my life, I share my life as part of my work and where do we draw these lines? How do we figure out what guardrails our kids need? There are no easy answers to this one.EmikoYeah, the lines are very blurred.VirginiaI don’t know if you’ve thought about either turning off comments on Luna posts or putting a clear disclaimer of “I’ll be blocking negative comments.” Having some clear boundaries set with your audience can be really helpful. What’s nice about it in a way is the the people who are going to make the negative comments are still going to make the negative comments, but it gets everyone else on the same page. Your audience, the ones who support you, the ones who get it, the ones who appreciate what you’re doing and realize the value of what you’re doing. So then I find it helps the audience step up. I’ll see people dealing with the negative comments for me, which is lovely and so supportive when people want to take on that work. It also clarifies, for me, when someone breaks one of my rules that I have set, it’s an instant delete, instant block. I just don’t even engage with it because I’ve set that clear boundary. I don’t engage with it, I don’t try to convince that person of anything. EmikoI recently discovered that I can turn off commenting and only allow comments from people who follow me. VirginiaYes, I did that! That was a game changer.EmikoYes, it was. The most recent negative comment that I got about Luna, I just decided, I know that my community are the supportive ones. In fact, that one about the persimmon tiramisu, there were two people who wrote some comments and they got eaten up by my followers. I didn’t even have to say anything to them. They just got ganged up on in the comment section until they deleted their own comments. So it was incredible. I have such a supportive group. I really do. But yeah, turning off comments but allowing your followers to comment.VirginiaThat’s another reason why comments are a paid subscriber benefit on Burnt Toast. I don’t want Burnt Toast to be a place where I have to deal with trolls, or at least if I do they have paid for the privilege.EmikoThat is really brilliant.VirginiaIt keeps this community safe. And as a result, it is a place where I feel like I can talk more about more complicated or personal things in a way that Instagram doesn’t always feel like the right venue for. So that’s really nice.EmikoOne of the one of the places where I found this whole conversation really difficult actually is with a family member when I was recently back in Australia for the first time in nearly three years. They hadn’t seen Luna since she was one year old and they felt it necessary to comment. They again assumed that I was doing something really wrong, that there was something wrong to begin with all of that. That’s been more difficult because you can’t just block your family member. Well, some people do, but it’s a bit harder.VirginiaYeah, that is a tricky one. I think often in those moments—I don’t know if this comment was made within earshot of Luna—but I think what’s really important is to think, what do I want my kid to take away? I want my kid to see me trusting them. This person or family member making this comment has no business making this comment to you, so their feelings are sort of immaterial even if you have to be kind of careful because family social dynamics are complicated. I still feel like the most important thing is just, “We trust her body, we trust her, we are not worried. We don’t see her body as a problem.” And then that way, whatever that other person says, the kid is taking away that “Mom is not worried about this. Nobody in my immediate core family is seeing a problem.” And that is really powerful and something I’m sure Luna is getting from you regularly.EmikoI think that I actually read those exact words from your newsletter. I have them written down. This is something that I wanted to practice because it is so hurtful when when somebody says something about your child, and I wanted to be calm and collected and have the best thing to say back and those words are the best thing to say.VirginiaIt shuts it down because what does this person want to say? “Don’t trust your child?” They can’t combat that, they sound like an idiot. I developed that strategy when my older daughter was at the height of her feeding challenges, I developed that strategy because that’s another place where people feel very free to weigh in on what your child is eating or not eating or they’re only eating white foods or that kind of thing. I’ve actually used it with both my kids quite often, for a variety of reasons. It’s really all purpose, because these are very much the same problem even though they’re manifesting differently. In both cases, someone sees a child who only eats five foods or who in my case was on a feeding tube, and they see something’s gone wrong. There’s a problem and this child’s body is a problem. We see someone in a bigger body and we assume this is a problem to solve. In both cases, there’s this unsolicited input, feeling like they need to undermine or question your parenting in some way. It’s all coming from this larger cultural messaging about there being one right way for a kid to eat, one right body for a kid to have, and that the right way to eat should equal the right body when of course we know these two things are totally unrelated. EmikoI have actually used that phrase as well with my older daughter in a parent teachers meeting where her teachers pointed out to me that she wasn’t eating anything at school and they were very, very, very concerned. They would watch her like a hawk and if she did take a bite, they would get the whole class to applaud. They were doing this for a couple of months and she didn’t tell me about this. I didn’t know the teachers had done this. And she had developed this fear of eating in front of other people. She felt really ashamed. She didn’t even want to go over to her best friend’s house if it involved a lunch or dinner. She was like, “You have to pick me up before dinnertime. I don’t want to eat there.” Because I think she had become so afraid of the adults judging her.VirginiaIt’s an amazing erasure of body autonomy. It just stuns me that people think just because this is a child, they have no right to any privacy. It’s a such a boundary violation.EmikoMind boggling.VirginiaSo I think it is using all these skills you built with your older daughter and repurposing them for the same kind of boundary violation. I’m curious, too—I know Lunas only four, these conversations are very much probably just starting with her. But does she have an awareness of her body being different? Does she have any sense of that? Has any of that started to come up for you guys?EmikoI don’t think that she really knows or maybe doesn’t have the language for it yet. But we have had a couple of instances, especially this summer, like when we were at the beach, where other children have pointed at her and within earshot said something about her body. And I just had to whip around to them and say, “I’m sorry, but it’s really not polite to talk about other people’s bodies.” And just leave it at that. But either she didn’t hear it or she didn’t seem to care or she didn’t know really what they were saying.But what breaks my heart is when she does say that she doesn’t look like Mariù, her older sister, and she wants to be beautiful. She only ever wants to wear dresses, the fluffier and the tutu-ier, the more sparkly it is, the better. She she wants to be ultra feminine. So it’s got to be pink or maybe purple, it’s got to be glittery. It’s got to be a dress. So at the moment, all she wears to school are dresses when all the other kids are wearing stuff they can get messy on the playground. But I’m fulfilling her ballerina dreams by letting her wear tutus to school.VirginiaThat is another form of body autonomy, letting kids lean into their own aesthetic choices. I say this as the parent of a child with blue hair at the moment. We’re embracing her aesthetic choices. And it’s pretty fun to see what they come up with and see their version of these things. I mean that “I want to be beautiful” piece is of course heartbreaking because bigger bodied is beautiful. These things are not in opposition to each other. And that’s a conversation that I’m sure will evolve as she gets older. There’s that wonderful kids’ book Beautifully Me by Nabela Noor. I don’t know if you have that one.EmikoI don’t, but I’m on the lookout for any book or film or anything that’s that has somebody that is bigger bodied and beautiful.VirginiaNabela is an influencer, she started as a beauty YouTuber. She is Bengali, she’s in a bigger body. And it’s a picture book she wrote a kind of about her own childhood. The main character is probably like five or six and aware of like her older sister on a diet and her mom saying something about her body and picking up on all these anxieties about the adults in her life. And then starting to worry, “Can I be beautiful if they feel like they can’t be beautiful. “The upshot is a really lovely message about you decide what’s beautiful and beauty is inside us, as well. I was surprised by how thoughtful and how nuanced the story is. So that’s certainly one to add to your library when you have a kid who is really interested in being beautiful.The other piece of it is we have to help kids understand that beauty is the least important thing about them, that that’s not what we’re defining ourselves by, and that it’s an optional standard you can opt in and out of. That’s a conversation that takes longer. And when you have a kid craving this experience of feeling beautiful, it’s nice to be able to give them this book and give them the tutus and the sparkly dresses and let them enjoy that. EmikoYeah, that sounds great. VirginiaWhile we’re on the subject of kids clothes, you and I have also talked a little bit about the challenges of plus sized kids clothing. I’d love to hear any recent breakthroughs you’ve had on that front or, or struggle points that you’re having.Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-SmithWhere Are All the Plus Size Kids' Clothes?Listen now (41 min) | It’s hard to be fat as an adult. When you are fat adult with a fat child, you’re a particularly kind of terrible in society. You’re listening to Burnt Toast. I'm Virginia Sole-Smith and I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter. Today I am chatting with Pam Luk, founder of…Listen now3 years ago · 21 likes · 31 comments · Virginia Sole-Smith and Pamela LukEmikoDresses are, I think, the easiest way to dress Luna. And the fact that she loves them and always wants to wear them tells me 1. She’s comfortable in them and 2. They make her feel good. Sometimes I do try to put leggings on her. The choice of girls’ clothing here in Italy is is really a disaster. Everything is made out of stretchy material so it’s more meant to be like skin tight, skin hugging. I think that she finds tights and leggings too restrictive because they are tight. She doesn’t like that feeling. So we’re still having quite a balmy autumn at the moment, so she’s still wearing her summer dresses. I usually look for A-line dresses. Nothing with a waist because those also like cinch in and are not comfortable. Anything that she can move around easily in because she’s really active. She’s a really active four year old. VirginiaYes, she wants to be able to play. I was a big sparkly dress kid, too. I can remember one of my grandmothers being sort of horrified that I was playing in the mud in a sparkly princess dress. I think it was a bridesmaid’s dress, like I’d worn it to be a bridesmaid in the wedding and then I was still wearing it every day.EmikoThat sounds familiar.VirginiaAnd my mom was like, “Well, if she wants to wear party dresses and she wants to play then the party dresses are just gonna get dirty. I’m not going to say ‘Oh, you have to be so careful because you’re wearing a fancy dress,’ because then the dress is this barrier.”EmikoA barrier to having fun and being yourself.Leave a commentVirginiaThe other thing I wanted to touch on quickly, is: You talk a lot in your work about your approach to family dinner. As you said, prioritizing comfort and relaxation above all else. This is so crucial and something I am always also struggling with. I would love to hear a little more about what you’ve figured out, and any sort of policies you have at your family table. EmikoOur family has quite an unusual dinner time because my husband works six nights a week in a restaurant so he’s not there. It’s just me and the girls. And before even Luna was was here, it was just me and my older daughter. It was just the two of us. And so two things happened with that dynamic.One was that lunchtime became our main family meal where we could all have lunch together because the girls come out of school early enough to have lunch, so like 1 pm. And it’s before my husband goes to work. So lunch was our main meal together. And I think that lunch just feels a little bit more casual. I feel like there’s a like a lot less pressure, as opposed to dinner.For people who have trouble getting the family dinner together, what if it was breakfast or what if it was lunch that was your time together? Just a time that you are all at the table together and you’re all relaxed. My experience of dinnertime is this is the time of the day where my kids are there crankiest, I am my most tired. And then I’m on my own, on top of it, and having to get them ready for bed, get them ready for school the next day, make dinner, get them bathed, get them in their pajamas, get them to bed. It’s just all so much work for one parent to be doing or even two parents to be doing that. Or if you’re outnumbered. There was so much pressure in the evening. So I kind of liked that lunchtime became our our family meal time. And that really took the pressure off in the evening.So dinner, when it was just me and the girls, has always just been what do you feel like? I would basically let my daughter choose what she wanted to eat based on how she felt because of her unpredictable appetite. I would say that whenever I did try to assume she would like this thing for dinner, even if it was one of her favorite safe foods, quite often she wasn’t in the mood for it. And then I would have wasted all this time like preparing something.VirginiaYeah, I’ve had that dinner about 4000 times.EmikoExactly. So because it was just me and her, by around like 5pm I’d be like, “okay, so what do you feel like eating?” And let her tell me how she felt. And then I would usually have whatever the basics were there, whatever their safe foods were, I usually have those around. And then that way I would make her the dinner that she that she wanted based on what she she chose. It’s usually something quite simple because we have already have had a nice lunch together with with the whole family at lunchtime. So dinner might be like a bowl of rice with like a fried egg or something. And then whatever fruit was around or whatever other little things I could add, other little dishes. I could build on that and make like a little meal out of it and make something that I would like to eat. I always have something else that I want for myself. That’s important, too. Like, we’ll both be eating a bowl of rice as the base, and then she’ll have her thing and I’ll have my thing. That’s kind of how our family dinners evolved, when it was just her and me having dinner together.And then when Luna came along, I just I just kept going because that was still quite a big thing for us. When we were at the table together, I just wanted that to be the most safe, comfort, comforting, comfortable place for her to be so that she could just be herself she could eat if she wanted to. She didn’t have to eat if she didn’t. I just wanted us to sit around a table together and and be able to connect and maybe chat.VirginiaI think that’s a really helpful reframe. I mean, my family’s schedules and lives does make it so dinner is the time when we can come together. But I’ve been thinking a lot about how do we prioritize that this is the safe space and a relaxed place, and not prioritize what everybody’s eating or how much people are eating and all of that and just I think that’s a useful touchstone to keep coming back to so I really appreciate you speaking to that. ButterEmikoThis might be wildly unpopular, but at the moment what is on my mind is tofu. And the reason for that is because I’ve just come back a couple of days ago from Japan. I haven’t been back to visit my family there in five years so it was a really special trip for me to be able to go back there. Also, before the country officially opened to tourists and travelers, because Japan has been closed this whole time.VirginiaWow. EmikoSo it’s a really special time to be there. And one of the things that I had organized to do, which was like a dream of mine, was to learn how to make tofu. And so my mom came from Australia to meet us there and my sister came as well and we all went to the mountains in Japan and we made tofu together, which was just so so wonderful, because I can’t get good tofu here. I always had the most amazing tofu at my grandmother’s home in Japan. I don’t know, maybe in the states you get better tofu, but in Italy you get really really bad tofu. There’s only one kind and it’s like ultra vacuum packed and it’s just…VirginiaThat’s certainly my experience of it here, but I’m not a tofu expert.EmikoSo homemade tofu or artisan made, actual really freshly made, like made that day tofu, I would often liken this to Italians, I’d be like, “that’s like having really fresh buffalo mozzarella, like a proper mozzarella. And so doing this doing this tofu making class was was exactly what I was hoping for. It was exactly that. It was just like making cheese. We were able to eat it right after the class and it was just the most amazing. I was just trying to capture this very nostalgic childhood memory I have of eating tofu at my grandmother’s table and I have never found that tofu again until the other day when I was tofu making class. So I am now going to make it at home. I can get back to that flavor and that sort of that really like creamy, melt in your mouth kind of texture.VirginiaI love that. I have to admit, that makes me want to try better tofu and give it another try.EmikoYeah, it makes a difference. It was like a whole world of difference.VirginiaOkay, well mine is like the opposite of this experience. Now I’m a little embarrassed, to be honest. There are no bad foods—I’m very big believer in that. But I’m recommending frozen dumplings.EmikoOh no, frozen dumplings are a staple in our house!VirginiaOh good, because I was like, she’s making tofu from scratch, like as it should be made in Japan and I’m like, “this box of frozen dumplings just really improved my family dinner.”But yeah, I had never made them before! I don’t know why or where they’ve been all my life, but we are doing this family meal planning where we sit around as a family every Sunday and everyone’s grumpy about it and I love their grumpiness and I make them pick meals. And I had seen a recipe in New York Times Cooking for a dumpling soup made with ramen noodles or rice noodles or whatever and vegetables and broth, like very simple. And I just thought, I’m gonna pitch this for my night where I get to pick because I knew at least one of the kids would likely eat the noodles. I was like, I can deconstruct this into elements they might go for and it looks really tasty and its fall and I’m craving good soups and soups that like fill you up because I feel like a lot of soups are not a full meal. And we don’t talk enough about that, but anyway.EmikoAbsolutely.VirginiaAnd it was so simple because you make the noodles, you make the broth for the soup with ginger and garlic and miso paste and stock and then just drop in the frozen dumplings. You can just drop them straight in and they cook in the pot. And it was a 75 percent success rate, which is the most I can ever hope for with the four of us. I will never get 100 percent. 50 percent success with the kids, one kid was delighted. And what was cool and I have to give props to their school, both of the kids had done some kind of dumpling lesson around Lunar New Year last year. So they had a passing reference for it and were like, “Oh, dumplings. We know dumplings.” And I was like, I didn’t know that your school had done this, I would have gotten on this bandwagon so much sooner. Now I’m just like, I’m gonna buy all the dumplings and I want to try other ways to cook them.EmikoYeah, actually, frozen dumplings are a staple. We always have them in the freezer, because that’s something that everybody loves. So on those nights when you only want to cook one thing, It’s like dumplings. We’re all just gonna have dumplings. And actually what you were saying that soup, I was going to say that when we’re doing one of our family meals, one of the things that I really like is the dishes that you can build on or take away from. You’re basically giving everyone the same base, like tacos. You’ve got all the ingredients, you put what you want in them. Or like a noodle soup. I do a plain noodle soup, like the one you were just describing for the girls. And then for Marco and I, I will put all kinds of things in.VirginiaYeah! We added chili garlic sauce, I’m so excited about it. That is really helpful to think about.Well, Emiko, thank you so much. This was a wonderful conversation. I loved getting to talk with you. I feel like we could do this for hours. Thanks for being on the podcast!EmikoThank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure to chat with you. VirginiaTell listeners where they can follow you and support your work and get more Luna content.EmikoYou can find me at @EmikoDavies on Instagram or my website is Emikodavies.com. And I have a Substack newsletter, which is just calledEmiko’s Newsletter.

Today Virginia is chatting with Naureen Hunani, the founder of RDs for Neurodiversity, a neurodiversity-informed online continuing education platform for dietitians and helping professionals. Naureen also has her own private practice in Montreal, where she treats children, adults, and families struggling with various feeding and eating challenges through a trauma-informed, weight-inclusive, and anti-oppressive approach. If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.And don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSRDs for NeurodiversityOn the Division of Responsibility and diet cultureMelinda Wenner Moyer on core strength and sitting at the dinner tableFor little ones, Yummy Toddler Food has roundups of good baby and toddler highchairs, booster seats, and toddler tables.For older kiddos, we're hearing good things about this chair and these wobble stoolswhat is misophoniaAgainst ImpulsivityThe Heart Principle by Helen Hoang Want to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.CREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia 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.Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.Episode 69 TranscriptNaureenSo I am a multiply neurodivergent person. I’m also a mom of two multiply neurodivergent kiddos. Both of my children have feeding differences. And professionally, I’m a registered dietitian. VirginiaCan you talk a little bit about why neurodivergent folks may have a hard time with eating? How much of this is due to being neurodivergent—and how much of this is due to our culture’s neurotypical expectations around food and around mealtimes? NaureenI love that question. That is something that I have been exploring the last couple of years. How much of this struggle or difference is really related to the neurotypical expectations? Who gets to define what is and isn’t a problem?  It’s really interesting because people of all neurotypes can can have challenges when it comes to eating. We do see, however, that neurodivergent children, in general, will present with a lot more feeding differences, compared to children who are developing more typically. What we often see is selective eating, or what a lot of people call “picky eating,” and those types of feeding/eating behaviors. It could be related to sensory needs or the child’s feeding ability. But I think what harms neurodivergent children the most are neurotypical developmental milestones related to feeding and eating—the shoulds and the expectations, right?I know, as a pediatric dietitian, this is huge. I remember talking to parents and saying things like, “By 12 months, they should be able to eat like the rest of the family and by 18 months they should be able to self feed.” And this is what we see in daycares, schools, these expectations that we have for children to develop a certain way. And when that doesn’t happen, a lot of parents struggle. Because parents are given prescriptive advice, right? So when there are differences that show up, it becomes really difficult to access support.So, I really see this as a difference and not necessarily a problem. And that’s what I encountered also, as a parent, right? When I was struggling to feed my family, it was really difficult to find support if people didn’t fully understand what I was struggling with. I didn’t have the language and my children, of course, didn’t have the language. I think that it’s definitely a bit of both, but I do think that these milestones can can be quite damaging to children who are developing differently.VirginiaI love the language choices you’re making. I love that you’re saying “feeding difference” instead of “feeding problem.” As someone with a kid with a lot of feeding differences, I really resonate because it just is so negative. It can feel like a problem, right? Because you’re really struggling. And people are telling you that something’s not okay. But to reframe it as a difference and not something you’re blaming your kid for, or that everybody’s doing wrong—that you are doing wrong, that the kid’s doing wrong—that alone feels like such a powerful reframing.NaureenThank you. For me personally it has made a huge difference and the families that I work with feel very much affirmed by that type of language. VirginiaSo in terms of the expectations, I completely hear you on the milestones. My older daughter definitely did not eat like the rest of the family at 12 months or 18 months, or any of that. We had to throw out that whole timeline. And a lot of these expectations that are on parents today come from diet culture. What rules or misconceptions from diet culture in particular do you see getting weaponized against neurodivergent kids?NaureenI think diet culture impacts all children in a negative way. I think for kids who are neurodivergent or disabled, it’s particularly problematic. Because we know that diet culture is rooted in white supremacy and so is ableism, so then you’ve got these two systems of oppression coming at you.Because when we look at what diet culture pushes—it’s not carbs, right? Carbohydrates are softer, easier to chew, easier to digest. And a lot of the foods that kids who are more sensory sensitive gravitate towards are demonized by diet culture.There are different pieces, the ability piece, the texture perspective, and all of that and the sensory perspective can be difficult because of feeding abilities. Kids who are choosing certain foods because they’re easier to consume, often those foods—boxed foods, processed foods, packaged foods, all of those are—are demonized by diet culture. So I feel like it can become really, really messy. We see also that neurodivergent children have more feeding defenses. And when you look at the adult population, they’re also more likely to develop eating disorders later on in life, right?VirginiaYes and how much of that might be rooted in the shaming they’re experiencing around those food preferences? NaureenAbsolutely.VirginiaI think about this all the time, how the way we’ve been told to think about feeding our kids is just so wildly out of line with how our kids want and can eat. And that is true for neurotypical kids, too. But you’re right. The demonization of carbs, the demonization of processed foods—if we could get rid of those two things would make everyone’s lives so much easier when it comes to feeding kids.So I think a diet culture version of feeding kids is pushing vegetables really hard, being anxious about carbs, that kind of thing. And there’s also the clean plate stuff, like “finish this before you can have this,” those kinds of rules. And then the model we’re given as the alternative to those rules is usually Division of Responsibility, which is the idea that parents are in charge of what foods are offered and when they’re offered, and kids are in charge of whether they eat and how much they eat. You and I have also talked about how that model doesn’t always work for neurodivergent folks. So I’d love to have you spell out what you see as limitations there as well.NaureenYes, I think that DOR is something that can be adapted, right? So, if we look at, for example, the parents’ job—the what, when, and where—I find that if the parent isn’t necessarily informed about how the child’s developing, and if the idea here is to get the child to eat like the rest of the family and to appear as neurotypical as possible, that’s not going to work. I think that’s one of the reasons why DOR can fail.I do think there is still a lot of value in the child’s jobs in feeding, in terms of deciding whether or not they wants to eat and the quantity. But it’s the what, when, and where that I feel like a lot of people struggle with. Because a parent might think that the family meal table is the best place for the child to eat, but maybe it’s not. I think this is where things get really, really messy, where I have had to sometimes even separate different family members, because it’s just doesn’t feel safe. Or what the other members are eating is just so aversive from a sensory standpoint, the smell. Plus all the demands that come with socializing, when it comes to eating. Some children don’t have the capacity at the end of the day to be able to socialize and, quote unquote, behave well and sit down and all of that.So for some children, having a little table on the side works better. Or it could be in front of screens, even. For some children that works better because it provides self-regulation and some predictability instead of adding those social demands and all of that. With the what and when and where, we have to really look at the child’s development abilities, feeding abilities, preferences, all of that, and then make the right decision, whatever that looks like.VirginiaOn the one hand, I hope what you’re saying is giving a lot of parents a moment of real relief and giving them permission to think “Oh, I don’t have to try to execute the family meal in this rigid way. I can make more of my own choices here. And really meet my kid where they are ,as opposed to trying to drag my kid into the situation that’s not working.”But I imagine, too, that you sometimes encounter folks who have a knee jerk reaction of, “This is too permissive. How will they ever improve if we make it this easy for them?”I’m deliberately playing devil’s advocate here. This is not how I feel about it. But I have encountered that perspective and I wonder if you have as well. How do you talk through those concerns? NaureenI think it’s important to have these conversations. We live in a society that is so ableist, so we do internalize a lot of these ableist beliefs, too. But if we think of the changes that parents are making as “accommodations,” (because that’s what they really are) then it makes a lot more sense. It’s like saying, “Why are we going to put a ramp? If we do that wheelchair users will never walk.” You would never say that.So, when we start thinking of eating in that same type of way, then it makes sense. Children want to learn. They naturally want to be like others and please their caregivers, but sometimes they just can’t eat the way the rest of the family does And so, these accommodations can be so supportive and actually help build a safer relationship with the caregiver. And that leads to healthy attachment because you’re meeting the child’s needs. Being responsive will not spoil the child. The children will still be intrinsically motivated. If they see something interesting that they want to eat, they’re going to take it. They’re not going to not eat it, because you’re offering preferred foods alongside that newer food. VirginiaI also think, a lot of times when parents are having that reaction, we have to take a moment and say, “Well, what we’re trying to force here is not happening.” The kid is not sitting at the dinner table or not eating the vegetables, or whatever it is. So why wouldn’t we give this a shot? As opposed to just continually trying to get this round peg into the square hole or whatever metaphor you want to use. NaureenIt’s interesting, Virginia, because a lot of parents are already implementing a lot of these strategies on their own because parents are, typically, in my opinion, quite attuned. They know what’s happening. But they just feel a lot of shame and guilt. They’ll share, “We are doing this” but feel so shameful about it. And I’m like, “This is a brilliant strategy.” So sometimes it’s really about how about maybe we remove some of that shame. How do we empower parents because they, they’re the ones who are feeding their kids, all day long. I mean, providers can be helpful and supportive for sure. But I think that at the end of the day, we need to empower parents so they can make the right choice without feeling all of that guilt and shame.VirginiaRight, and without feeling like you’re being graded. I had a mom reach out recently, she mentioned that they were doing a lot of meals in front of the TV because that’s what’s working right now. She was like, “I just think about how our meals look like from the outside,” and I just thought, but who’s looking in your windows at night? Who is on the outside that you’re so worried is seeing this and judging you? If that’s someone in your life, who loves you, that person is not being supportive. And if it’s the sort of  amorphous, larger world of Instagram and culture and whatever—none of them are invited to dinner so it doesn’t matter. I would love to get into some practical strategies. And I’ve got a bunch of listener questions I’ve gathered that I thought we could go through. The first one says:“I would love any practical tips for making dinners more doable. My child often only sits for three to five minutes tops. And as soon as she’s done, her younger sister is done, too. So it’s like the whole meal just kind of unravels at that point. Would a different chair or other physical support help her stay longer? Or is it just not realistic at this time of day for dinner to last longer than five minutes?”NaureenDefinitely, seating makes a really big difference. Make sure that you have a chair that supports the child. because often what ends up happening is that if the child is not well-supported, a lot of energy is going towards sitting down, the core muscles, and then you just don’t have the capacity to engage in the fine motor skills. Sometimes that means that just having a smaller table. Like a kiddie table with smaller chairs can work well.Virginia’s Note: For more on kids, core strength and sitting at the dinner table check out Melinda Wenner Moyer. For little ones, Yummy Toddler Food has roundups of good baby and toddler highchairs, booster seats, and toddler tables. For older kids, I hear great things about this chair and these wobble stools and like that they are both much less expensive than the beloved Stokke Tripp Trap, though you likely won’t regret that investment since it does grow with kids. If you have experience with a great kid-friendly chair or other dinner table supports you love, post in the comments!And, of course, we need to manage expectations, too, right? We don’t necessarily want kids to be at the table for 30 minutes. That’s way too long. Sometimes getting them to move a little bit can be helpful and provide a little bit of that input because sitting down can be difficult for some children. There are weighted objects that can be placed on the lap, which can be supportive too.Something else to consider, and I’m not saying this is the case, but this is just something that I thought about: A lot of people with misophonia have these very strong reactions when they hear other people chewing or yawning. So sometimes, later on, we find out this is why this particular kid was running away constantly.So the first thing is chairs, seating, all of that. If that’s adjusted and the child still escaping? Well, it’s because they’re telling us something. Something’s going on, right? And so then we have to see what can we do to make this more comfortable and figure out what type of accommodations we need.VirginiaI’m also just thinking, and I don’t know if this is that letter writers perspective, but: For kids who have had a hard time with eating and feeding dynamics, the dinner table can just be this thing, right? It can just be a trigger.NaureenOh, yeah, absolutely. The fight or flight response. So if there has been trauma or a lot of pressure or other factors that we don’t necessarily think about, if there’s sensory differences, like the smell of what others are eating is a lot. I really think the child’s behavior is telling us a story. And then we need to figure out what does this really mean because children don’t just behave a certain way for no reason. There’s always a reason.VirginiaThis next question is about an adult child, which I think is interesting.“My daughter is 23 and living with us, is autistic and ADHD. She’s not intellectually disabled, but I’d say her emotional maturity lags by a good bit. She’s very impulsive, and she also takes medications that affect appetite and has since she was five. It complicates so much about decision making and hunger and eating.When I say impulsive: As a kid she could be sick and throw up and immediately want a milkshake and not understand why that might not be a good idea. I’m pretty sure this still holds true at 23. The hyperactivity is 24/7, so it’s her nature to wake up, walk around, eat a banana in the middle of the night, forage for breakfast number one at 5am, and then have another breakfast once I’m up. Then the meds kick in and hunger is back burnered until five, when it roars back with urgency.I try to be weight neutral. She and I are both in bigger bodies. She’s mostly comfortable in herself, much more than most young women, I think. Although every now and then I hear an ‘I’m fat’ type of comment. But I’m often lost in the quandary of what boundaries are okay to set and what’s really not. I often say, ‘Are you sure you’re still hungry? Can you wait 10 minutes and if you’re hungry, come back and find something?’ Or ‘Hmm I think you already had two breakfasts, are you really hungry?’ And sometimes, of course, as the human mom running in the kitchen. I’m just frustrated, and ‘how can you be hungry?’ But that’s probably unfair.” NaureenWe have to be careful because, often, neurodivergent people are more likely to get infantilized. Because 23 is an adult, right? With or without cognitive impairment. But if we want to generalize a little bit, children sometimes also have these behaviors, right? Where they’ll go and eat, and you feel like maybe it’s not the time to eat. And in this case, it seems like this person maybe has an eating pattern that wouldn’t be considered “typical.” It’s also important to remember that when we eat, we eat for different reasons. Sometimes it’s related to physical hunger, but it could also be to cope with certain emotions, it could be for stimming, because it provides certain sensory input, stimulation, self regulation, all of that. So it is important to acknowledge that whatever is going on, there is a reason behind this. There’s a purpose and it’s not just for nothing.In this case, I would really look at what does the day look like, aside from eating. What else is happening? Sometimes mornings are really difficult for a lot of neurodivergent kids. Getting through the routine. Let’s say this particular person has to go out to work, school, whatever their routine looks like, and there’s a lot of stress. Sometimes we want a little something to soothe us. So I wonder if maybe the mornings are a little bit stressful.It can also be related to interoception. Some people need to eat frequently throughout the day because their early satiety signals are sometimes uncomfortable or maybe even painful. So some children will eat more frequently. And that this is where you see that they’re grazing all day, and we see that in adults, too, right? I see a lot of adults that will have a lot of different small type of meals instead of sitting down because sitting down, eating a big meal can be understimulating, as well. Some even call it boring.VirginiaMy kids definitely say that.NaureenAnother thing I find that shows up—even for people who are totally on board with weight neutrality and size diversity—sometimes we can still, as parents, struggle with internalized fatphobia. So I notice that parents who have children in smaller bodies often don’t have these types of concerns. I’ll hear things like, “He eats like all day, but he has a good metabolism.” And it’s like, no concerns, right?I have a lot of compassion for parents who are in larger bodies and have children in larger bodies because it is violent. Our culture is so terrible, right? And so you want to protect your kids and you want to make sure that that they are accepted and all of that. So I think sometimes that shows up, too, because I do see often a difference in how parents will treat children who are in larger bodies versus smaller bodies when it comes to this type of eating pattern.VirginiaI’m just realizing, when I read her question, my screen cut off the last line of the email. She also wrote, “And the idea of not limiting sweets is blowing my mind trying to relax around that one,” which I also have a lot of compassion for. That, of course, is a message that’s drilled into us for so long. But I think you’re completely right here that some of this anxiety about this adult child’s eating patterns, is probably rooted in some of this weight and diet culture stuff, as much as it is also confusing and discombobulating to the mom to have a kid who’s not eating during the day and wanting multiple breakfasts. It sounds like the adult child’s schedule is not lining up with what the parent wants their schedule to be. NaureenAbsolutely. VirginiaSo there’s that conflict, which is hard, especially as you are two adults living together now. But then there’s this added layer of maybe this parent is worrying that that the adult child’s eating schedule is the reason for their body. And we need to disconnect that.NaureenAnd medications are involved. So what happens is meds really—depending on the medication—will impact appetite. So the person may not feel super hungry and then when the meds wear off—I see this all the time in my practice where parents think their kid is bingeing. No, this is just a natural response because they couldn’t eat enough earlier in the day, when the meds were really impacting the appetite. They eat smaller amounts and then at some point, they need to make up all that. So the fact that it’s happening a lot in the morning tells me that maybe this is maybe before the medication and there is more appetite. Bodies are brilliant, really.VirginiaYes, it seems really smart to eat a lot in the morning before the meds kick in so they have fuel to get through that long stretch when they won’t have appetite. It’s just a brilliant strategy and maybe just making some space for, “this is what she needs.” And then yes, at 5pm she’s going be really hungry again when the meds wear off. But that’s not a problem unless we label it a problem.NaureenAbsolutely, it’s a strategy and I work with families where their kids will have two or sometimes three suppers after dinner because they really are not eating much during the day because of the medication and all the other factors. VirginiaThat’s so interesting.Alright, another listener question:“Recently, I’ve found myself resorting to cajoling bites for my child (age five, uses they them pronouns.) They become so absorbed in play that they forget to eat or reject the suggestion that it’s time for snack. I suspect ADHD. Sometimes hours later, they’ll completely collapse into meltdowns lasting 20 to 40 minutes. I’ll sit there begging them to just eat the snack because I know it will make them feel better. But they always refuse my initial offers. At meals they will often only nibble on things, or take three bites from a happy meal before declaring “I’m full” and playing with the toy. Now I find myself resorting to “take three bites,” as my child retorts, “I know my body and I’m not hungry.”“I have ADHD time blindness1 and getting absorbed in tasks also makes me forget to eat. But I’ve been working on that more lately. How can I improve things for my kiddo? I’m worried about them not eating lunch at kindergarten.”NaureenYes, things can get quite messy when there are multiple neurodivergent people, because you want to make sure you can eat and it’s a schedule, and routine—and remembering all of that can be hard. When kids don’t eat when it’s time to eat can be quite stressful because it’s like okay now I have to remember to offer something else, maybe 30 minutes later. It really increases the executive functioning load.But there could be so many reasons why this type of behavior is like showing up. For some children, asking “would you like this or that?” creates a demand on kids who are more demand-avoidant or have demand anxiety. So sometimes leaving the food in the environment—and I know this is totally going against DOR again—but just very casually leaving it in the environment can be helpful. The important thing here is we’re giving frequent opportunities to kids to eat and nourish their bodies.Sometimes that could be like, “We’ll read a book or we’ll do something that doesn’t require a whole lot of focus and then have snack in the environment.” You’re just kind of eating and just engaging in that. For some kids, that works really well because they’ll say no if it’s a demand and they don’t want to be forced into this snack time because they’re busy doing something else. But when you pair it with another activity, that works. It has to be something that doesn’t require a whole lot of focus, though, because then you forget about the snack.VirginiaBecause they’re getting so absorbed in the playing. NaureenExactly. So it varies from child to child. But this is where we have to think about more creative strategies, right? And I love that child confirming “No, I know my body, I know my body.”VirginiaWe love body autonomy.NaureenI love it. I love it. But yeah, sometimes it’s really about creativity and letting them lead. Because again, some children won’t eat because it becomes a demand. So we have to find creative ways.VirginiaI’m also wondering about having a snack cabinet (here’s ours) or a snack drawer that the kid can access on their own. And again, this might lead to a grazing pattern that feels counter to what you’ve been told to do. But if it lets them engage a little more directly with feeding themselves, that might help with starting to hear some of those cues, too, right? NaureenAbsolutely. VirginiaAll right, and then this next question, oh, this is another person who has been burned by Division of Responsibility.“The strategies you often write and talk about don’t work for us, especially Division of Responsibility. My son is eight years old and has ADHD. He takes Ritalin which suppresses his appetite, so he doesn’t get reliable hunger or satiety cues. I would like to understand how to develop body trust when you have a body and brain that you can’t always trust because of medication, and because it struggles with self-regulation, impulse control, distractibility, et cetera. How much can we expect our kiddos to get this? And how do we help them with it, especially since impulsivity is also such a thing and I don’t want to demonize or pathologize his impulses, either.” NaureenThere’s this misconception that we can’t trust neurodivergent children when it comes to their bodies and food. And it’s because we are looking at neurotypical ways of eating and showing up in this world and then we’re comparing neurdivergent children.Again, when there are medications involved, typically children will eat a lot more food before taking the medication and then after the medication wears off, and that is totally fine. So I’m really curious about what the eating pattern looks like and what is it telling us right? And impulsivity is very interesting. Shira Collings, one of my friends and colleagues, wrote a blog on this topic, Against Impulsivity. And it talks about how the behavior we’re seeing is a result of unmet needs.I’m just going to make some assumptions here. Sometimes I’ll see parents say things like, “Oh, my kid is so impulsive when it comes to eating sweets or sugars or certain foods.” And I’m like, “Okay, well, I would be like that, too, if I wasn’t allowed to eat sweets and all the foods that I enjoy. I wouldn’t leave the sweet table either.” So I think often, it has to do with some type of restriction or unmet need. I think that again, we need to approach this with a lot of compassion and curiosity, and think about how these behaviors are actually serving this kiddo. Understanding the story can be really, really valuable.VirginiaI really understand where the parent is with their initial perception, but I love this idea of reframing impulsivity as a strategy, and as a way of expressing a need, that’s really powerful. I’m thinking about this medication piece of it, which I had not really considered before. And I’m just curious: Do you often see a lot of kids on these medications basically not eating lunch at school? I’m sure that’s worrisome to parents as well. Do you have any strategies to help with that?NaureenSo for some kids during the day, they can’t eat all that much because of the medication. But they’re okay drinking chocolate milk. So let’s pack three of those, please. We’re going to try and get in some nourishment that way. It’s about being creative, so when it comes to certain more palatable foods that bring a lot of joy and pleasure, those are easier to consume, right? And we’re like that too, right? Sometimes it’s like you’re full, but then you see the dessert and you’re like, well, I’d love to have a piece of that. So I think sometimes it’s about that, too. So this is how you feel, but what are some foods that might be interesting or easier to take in? For some kids that can work really well. You know, liquids or more snack type of foods, right? Not necessarily like pasta in a thermos, but maybe some cheese crackers and a little bit of fruit or something. And that might work.VirginiaI was going to ask about crunchy foods or foods that give a lot of oral feedback. Do they help ever?NaureenIf that is what the child is into, yeah, absolutely. We all have different sensory profiles. So it’s really about being creative. And about giving more opportunities before and then after. That’s where we see parents that are concerned, “My kiddo just ate dinner and 30 minutes later, they’re hungry again. What do I do?” And I’m like, “Well, if they’re hungry, it’s because they are hungry. Let’s offer more opportunities to eat.”So the pattern ends up looking different, and sometimes it looks very different, and it doesn’t align with how the rest of the family members are eating, and that’s okay. And that’s totally okay.VirginiaRight, it makes sense that these are kids who probably need a good bedtime snack. So in terms of these kids, who, at least from the parents’ perspective, don’t seem like they have strong hunger and satiety cues, or we know medication is a factor and it’s suppressing those cues: How do you talk to the kids about that? Is there language that’s helpful to a child to start to help them tune into that?NaureenI am very careful about teaching children hunger/fullness. That’s something that I’m actually quite uncomfortable with. I think that children, as they get older, they see how other people are eating and what eating looks like for others. I think that they make connections. They are very aware. When we start telling kids that they can’t feel fullness or they can’t feel hunger, we can run into a lot of trouble. Because how hunger and fullness show up in the body can look different for different people, depending on interoception.So for some kids, parents will say things like, “Oh, my kid doesn’t say that they’re hungry and then they have a meltdown.” I’m like, “What else happens before that?” Those are the signals that we should be looking at. We don’t want to hyper focus on like, “hunger should be felt in the stomach” and “this is what your tummy is telling you.” Because for a lot of people, that’s not where they will feel it. They will not feel it there. They will feel it as “I can’t focus and I have a bit of a headache.” Or “I’m not feeling super good. I’m thinking about food.” Or there are other ways, right? And that looks so different. So we can’t really teach that.VirginiaBecause you don’t know what their experience is.NaureenWe don’t know, right? And it’s so interesting because adults will tell me, “I don’t feel hunger, I don’t feel fullness.” And then a few months later, they are so aware of their eating experience. They’re like, “I can actually do my homework and I don’t feel tired. I’m in a better mood.” And like, these are your signals, right? This is what’s happening inside your body.I think that having a flexible structure and teaching children that we can develop a flexible structure where there are multiple opportunities to feed the body can be super valuable. And that’s the work I do with adults, too. They’ll say “I don’t feel hunger,” but like, okay, well let’s see what happens in your body when we start feeding it every couple of hours. Oh, wow, I feel different. Okay, do you like that feeling? Yes, I do. Okay, let’s keep doing this. So it’s really about helping them, giving them that structure so they can take care of their bodies, right?VirginiaAnd I think, too, a big part of this must also be accepting that it’s not going to look like what you the parent are expecting it’s going to look like. And it’s going to change. Kids are changing all the time. I think one of the most exhausting parts of feeding your family often, is that realization of, “This dinner that was working so well a month ago, now, everyone hates it.” Or this dinner time that we had picked based on our schedules doesn’t work because the kids are hungry an hour earlier or not till an hour later, or whatever. You’re constantly pivoting, which can be exhausting. NaureenIt can be, absolutely. But it’s also useful data. VirginiaI want to end on this last question because I just really love it:“What do you think our priorities should be in terms of helping neurodivergent kids with meals? What matters most to help them build and maintain healthy relationships with food?” NaureenHonestly, the first thing that comes to my mind is validation. We need to validate that their experiences are real. Whatever it is they are experiencing has meaning.I can share a little bit of my own personal experience here, as a mother who doesn’t have feeding differences, who is supporting children who do. I really had to learn to normalize their experiences. So I remember my daughter having these very unique experiences with food and then I would totally validate that. “You’re right, if you’re saying that this doesn’t feel good, then then that’s okay. That experience is real and we’re going to figure something out. If you don’t want those little pieces of whatever it is in your rice, we’re going to take that out and I’m not going to say you’re being too difficult or your brother’s eating them.”So, really offering validation and normalizing whatever it is that is coming up. I have one kiddo who likes spices and another one who doesn’t like spices. I often have to accommodate and modify my recipes. So, that’s a lot of work for me as a neurodivergent parent. And at the same time,I also want them to feel like their bodies are not broken, right? That these experiences are their experiences. They have the right to be able to find joy and pleasure in food. And I don’t get to define what’s pleasurable, they get to define that for themselves. And that is what I think is super important. VirginiaYes. Empowering them to have these experiences and to know that their experiences are real and valid. That feels like everything. ButterNaureenWell, I am in Montreal, and the fall weather here has been just fantastic. So I’ve just been spending a lot of time outdoors and just admiring the beautiful leaves, the colors. And that’s what I have been doing. It’s just so nice.  VirginiaEvery year I think of myself as someone who doesn’t like fall because I’m really someone who doesn’t like winter. And so I get a little sad at the end of summer because it means winter is coming. And then every year I’m like, oh, wait, fall is great. NaureenIt’s beautiful, it really is magic.VirginiaI grew up in New England, like I’ve experienced falls for 41 years. And I don’t know why every year I’m like, Oh! It’s beautiful.Okay. Well, my recommendation is a book I just read actually, over the weekend, while I was on a little admiring pretty fall leaves weekend away from my kids. It was great. I read the book The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang.It’s a really delightful romance novel and it is about the experience of a neurodivergent woman. She’s actually a violin player and she’s gone through a sort of traumatic experience with her violin playing and her relationship to music. And it is a romance. There’s a delightful romance plot. But it’s also her starting to understand her her identity as an autistic person and having to come out to her Chinese American family. There are a lot of complicated dynamics. I saw the title The Heart Principle and I thought it was just going to be a fun romance novel and it absolutely was. And I was also sobbing because the story of this woman’s experience was so beautifully done. The author is herself autistic, so it’s also very much grounded in her own experiences. I just loved it. It was much more than I had expected from the very cute cover and delightful in many ways.Naureen, thank you so much for being here! Tell listeners where they can follow you and how we can support your work.NaureenI have two social media accounts. For parents, I have an account Naureen Hunani Nutrition on Instagram and Facebook and then for providers It’s RDS for Neuro diversity. 

Today Virginia is chatting with with Pam Luk, founder of Ember & Ace, a new line of plus size athletic clothing for kids. We get in what's wrong with the kids' clothing industry, and Pam has so many tips and hacks to making finding clothes for kids in bigger bodies more doable. If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.And don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSEmber & AceJeans Science.Virginia reporting on the weight/child custody case for SlateJulia Turshenwhat is a 10/12 pluswhy I just always buy two sizes of everythingTarget boots (yes, mostly sold out)Want to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.CREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia 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.Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter, and I’m author of the upcoming book Fat Talk.This is the October bonus episode for paid subscribers! Today we are revisiting another essay from the Burnt Toast archives. We’re going to talk about gender roles and Halloween costumes. I’m going to read you the essay, then we’re going to chat about it, and you’ll get this week’s Butter. If you are already a paid subscriber, you’ll have this entire episode in your podcast feed and access to the entire transcript in your inbox and on my Substack. If you’re not a paid subscriber, you’ll only get the first chunk. So to hear the whole conversation or read the whole transcript you’ll need to go paid.The essay I’m revisiting today is called Halloween in Girl World. I published it on October 3, 2019. This was back when only about 500 people read Burnt Toast. It was also, depressingly, a better and more hopeful moment to be a feminist in a lot of ways. So it made me a little sad to go back and realize how many things have gotten worse. But, I think that makes this conversation about Halloween costumes all the more relevant today. Girls and gender nonconforming kids are growing up in a culture that automatically objectifies them and these seemingly innocuous moments—like what they’re going to be for Halloween—are where a lot of that starts.Halloween in Girl WorldIf you’ve been feeling over-confident about gender roles lately — maybe because so many women are running for president, or because She Said is on the NYT Bestseller list and Harvey Weinstein got indicted again — you can slow that roll by taking yourself over to any Halloween costume website or catalog. I’ve been deep down this rabbit hole for the past month because my older daughter is of the age where Halloween costume research starts before Labor Day. And my report from the trenches is: It’s not pretty.Or rather, it’s all too pretty. To be expected are the princess and fairy costumes and I think we all have to find our own peace with this because forbidding a princess obsession is a surefire way to ensure one. (Violet is currently debating between rainbow fairy and ladybug, or possibly a mash-up of these two concepts if she can persuade me to spend that much on her various costume components.) But I am dismayed to see we have made literally zero progress since Lindsay Lohan explained the true meaning of Halloween in Mean Girls some fifteen years ago:And so, as Violet paged through a catalog for HalloweenCostumes.com, she paused to ask me, “what is she dressed up as?” about a photo of a nine-year-old girl in a police officer costume. She was confused because the costume included a short skirt that no police officer has ever worn in the line of duty. Costumes like “doctor,” “pirate,” and “baseball player” are similarly gendered with skirts or lots of pink or both. Over on Chasing-Fireflies.com, boys can choose between costumes for doctors, firefighters and dinosaurs, while girls are given not one but three different options for waitress costumes including my favorite because it’s such a delightful mash-up of diet culture and misogyny (so, diet culture): Donut Waitress.I mean no disrespect to baked goods or service sector workers. But if our daughters like doughnuts, maybe instead of “look pretty and serve them to other people” a more fun game would be “eat them your goddamn self.” (No, there is no equivalent costume for boys. They cannot be a Donut Waiter.) I want to say, oh it’s just dress-up. Because I know that a parent hand-wringing about gender stereotypes is a surefire way to a child wanting to be a doughnut waitress with her whole heart and soul. And of course, plenty of parents aren’t going to be perturbed by the symbolism. Two moms we know from preschool, enamored of the friendship that had developed between their children, decided to put them in a coordinating “couple” costume for Halloween. The four-year-old boy dressed up as a hunter with a camo vest and toy rifle. The four-year-old girl wore a short-skirted, lace-trimmed doe costume. She looked very pretty. She was his prey.These moms weren’t thinking about the optics of this costume; how it communicates that boys should chase girls, and even try to hurt them. They thought it was sweet and silly and a fun way to celebrate their children’s friendship. But it didn’t surprise me that they landed on such a violent metaphor of domination, because those messages about boy/girl interactions are everywhere and thoroughly reinforced by the companies that sell toys, clothes and other products geared towards kids. The doe costume was not homemade.Seeing all of this, I have newfound respect for the parents that go viral each year with their baby dressed as Ruth Bader Ginsberg or Rosie the Riveter. I just wish, on behalf of working parents with no time or inclination to make a costume everywhere, that capitalism would catch up.PS. OK, a little more Googling and I did find a ready-made RBG costume on Etsy. And the very good humans at Mighty Girl have put together this excellent curated round-up of girl-empowering costumes, which, now that I’ve discovered it, will be the only way we shop.Okay, so some thoughts on this essay. Number one, it’s pretty gender binary. And I just want to note right off the top that there are kids of all genders struggling with this gender binary in Halloween costumes. Obviously, the whole premise of the essay requires the gender binary, but I could have done a better job folding in that basically everyone who’s not a cis male is getting left out of this Halloween costume situation. So let me note that here right now. One update I have to give, is that I have of course completely forgotten to use that Mighty Girl link for empowering Halloween costumes since I wrote this piece. As a lot of you heard me discussing in detail with Corinne last week, I kind of hate Halloween. And buying costumes stresses me out so much no matter what. So I often end up taking the easy-but-evil Amazon Prime way out a lot of years. This year my older daughter is being a panda which turned out to be a surprisingly fraught costume shopping journey. And my younger daughter is a ladybug which is great because we already own like three ladybug costumes because this is an evergreen choice at our house. I don’t feel good about buying cheap costumes we’ll wear once I often do try to go to like Hanna Andersson’s pajamas, you can turn into costumes, or other elements we can repurpose. But in thinking about this piece, I’m realizing I haven’t had to steer either of them away from that sexy donut waitress version of things yet. I think a lot of this is just luck and down to who they are. Neither one of them had a particularly prolonged Princess phase. We haven’t had a Barbie phase in our house. And I’m not saying like Oh, we did so well. We didn’t have to ban these things. They just never really came up. But a big reason they haven’t come up in my house is rooted in our privilege. We can afford to give our kids a lot more options in terms of toys, clothes and experiences. A lot of stereotypical gendered toys and clothes are the cheaper options. I’m going to link to a piece I wrote about Barbie that makes this point because if you price out Barbie is compared to, say, American Girl dolls—which while still very feminine, give you a lot more ways to be a girl—I mean, there’s a huge price difference. Barbies are like $12. American Girl dolls are like $85. So obviously, the gendered toy gendered clothing options. I mean, you see this as well brands like Primary and Hanna Andersson. Higher end kids clothes tend to be less pink princess versus blue and sports motifs. When you’re shopping at Target or Wal-mart, often it’s a lot more binary. So that’s a big piece of this.And we see that with Halloween costumes, too. The cheaper options offered on Amazon and at Spirit Halloween totally play into all the gender norm stuff. Although to be fair, Pottery Barn kid costumes, which I think are one of the priciest options, are equally gendered, and stupidly expensive, says the woman who once bought their flamingo costume and had it fall apart in her dress up box like a month later. So don’t fall into that trap. This is one aspect of pop culture and modern life where gender norms and expectations are just really tough to avoid. And while my kids have not wanted to go the sexy route yet, they have vetoed plenty of costume ideas over the years as quote “boy costumes.” And we’ve had to talk quite a lot about how actually, you can be a hedgehog or a dinosaur of any gender.One other thing I think is missing from this original essay, though, is the understanding that the real victory here is not overhauling the Halloween costume industry. That would be lovely. I don’t know that it’s ever going to happen. Like, this is not our biggest battle to fight when it comes to gender equity. What we really need to do is use moments like these to talk with our kids about the importance of subverting gender norms and expectations. And I get my initial rage here. When I reread this piece, I was like, wow, I was really pissed about this. And I still feel that rage. It’s super frustrating to have to explain that this is supposed to be a police officer costume, when no police officer my child has ever seen has dressed like that. I am no longer framing the sexy Halloween costumes as heroin because I know that’s counterproductive. If I were to ban that type of costume, of course, that’s what they would most want to wear. But the other reason I’m more relaxed about it is because I can trust at this point that my kids are developing some of the critical thinking skills they need to navigate these things. I think if you’re still choosing costumes with toddlers and preschoolers, obviously you have a lot more say over it. And you can do some curating of the options they see. If you have an elementary school kid like they’re going to beat you to the Halloween costume catalog in your mailbox. It’s just what it is. She also gets every toy catalog first. I don’t know how. So what matters then is: How are we using this media? How are we teaching her to think about this media?And I’ll report one sort of moment of hope here: We got our 900th American Girl catalog of the year last week. (They’ve been sending them to us almost daily since my children were born.) And my older daughter was the one to notice, “Wow, almost all of the dolls in this catalog are girls.” There is one token boy WellieWisher, which I think is a new addition to the lineup. And in the section where you can make the dolls look like a creepy version of you, there’s a boy option. But all the historical figure dolls and the girl of the year and all of that—always girls. And my kid was like, “Why do they think girls liked dolls so much anyway?” Because she is not a doll kid. She had a WellieWisher and a Nanea doll, and gave them both to her little sister several years ago. These are, like, the least played with toys in my house, which is enraging to me because they are, of course, some of the most expensive toys. And I don’t understand it. Childhood Me never got an American Girl doll and would have killed for a Samantha. Not the point of this podcast, but just while we’re here, I wish my children appreciated more of the things they have. Anyway!She’s not a doll kid. It’s confusing to her that there’s this assumption that just because she’s a girl, she’s going to be a doll kid. And so I was pleased to see that she was noticing that discrepancy and sort of wrestling with it, while looking at it. She, of course, still reads the catalog despite not liking dolls. And we were able to talk about like, “Yeah, this is weird, and they’re making so many assumptions about you. And you know, that doesn’t feel great.” So that’s a way to use this onslaught of capitalism that is all toy catalogs and especially Halloween, in your favor to have these more productive conversations.I will also say, I feel a little bit of exhaustion with the progressive parenting trend of dressing your child up as Ruth Bader Ginsburg or another feminist icon. Because honestly, this probably isn’t most kids first choice of a costume. I mean, yes, if your child came up with the idea herself, and she wants to be Jane Goodall, great. But: If you are pushing her into those options when she would rather be Elsa from Frozen, you’re undermining the feminism of the costume by limiting her body autonomy. So how is this better? This gets us into a much bigger conversation about girls’ bodies and clothes and what are we teaching them when we talk about an outfit not being quote “appropriate” for school or some other public space. This is something I thought about a lot when writing the book. So you’ll get more of all of this when you read Fat Talk in a few months. But suffice to say that for now, I always err on the side of letting kids dress “inappropriately,” if that means they are making their own choices about what goes on their body. That can come with lots of nuanced conversations about why certain outfits get overly policed, why girls are encouraged to be sexy in these ways, also whose bodies get police the most, etc, etc. But I think if we’re going to take anything away from this whole Halloween/gender binary thing: Halloween should be a time to to try on different personalities, different identities, explore, be creative. And whatever that looks like for your kid, it’s fine. It’s one day of the year. And you can use that as a jumping off point to have bigger conversations about gender norms and bodies and all of the shitty messages our kids are already getting about those things. Post-recording note from Virginia: I didn’t include a discussion of the fact that the other problem with hyper-gendered kids Halloween costumes is, of course, that they are never size-inclusive because Corinne and I touched on that last week. But in editing this transcript I wish I had! Lots of former fat kids have told me they stopped trick-or-treating pretty young because the costume was too stressful, to say nothing of the potential for candy shaming. So this is another way that the our culture’s obsession with Halloween reinforces super toxic messages about body autonomy. And if you have leads on great plus size kid costumes, or other ideas for how to support kids in marginalized bodies on Halloween, I hope you’ll drop them in the comments.ButterMy Butter this week is not a particularly revolutionary one. Because you should know by now: I like to be late to a trend. I like to ease my way into a cultural moment. So I’m going to recommend a movie that was a huge hit over the summer, and you probably already saw, but I feel it is timely to bring up now. Mostly because I just saw it, but also because there are amazing Halloween costume ideas in the movie.So the movie is Everything Everywhere All At Once. Michelle Yeoh stars in it, as well as Ke Huy Quan, the guy who was the kid in Indiana Jones and is now grown up and just like a brilliant, beautiful performer. It is a family drama. It is an action kung fu movie. It is a multiverse sci fi story.It is just one of those movies, I was saying to Dan, you know, if we were still in college, and like getting a little bit stoned? This is the movie we’d be talking about till four in the morning, trying to unpack all the layers of it, and rewatching it constantly. Now I go to bed at 9pm, so I’m not going to do that. But I am going to tell you all, if you haven’t seen it, it is a completely beautiful, wonderful, amazing film. And As regular Burnt Toast listeners know, I do a movie club with my siblings, and this was somebody else’s pick because I’m not cool enough to know about cool movies, but my siblings keep me in the loop. And we all really loved it and had such a good discussion about it. And so I was reading more about it after that discussion. And I came across an interview with Michelle Yeoh where she said that they actually originally wanted Jackie Chan for her part. What’s so powerful about the movie is that it’s the story of this Chinese immigrant mother trying to connect with her very Americanized daughter, and bridge the language gaps and the cultural gaps. And it’s also about her own sense of her identity as an older woman, and just, it’s so rich. And the idea that they were just like, “Well, we should make a story about Jackie Chan doing those things.” No disrespect to Jackie Chan, although he comes with a lot of baggage, but it just shows how far we have to go in Hollywood, in terms of representation that they were like, we want to make a Chinese movie, the only movie star we can think of as Jackie Chan. Like, so depressing. So anyway, they did not, he was too busy. They went to Michelle Yeoh, who they originally wanted to play his wife, but then they realized that she should not be second fiddle to anyone. They made her the star of the movie, and it’s incredibly good. And there are just like a million Halloween costumes in there. It does raise the whole cultural appropriation questions of if you’re a white person and dressing up as a Chinese character from a movie—that’s fraught. But white ladies, we have Jamie Lee Curtis in the movie. And I think hot dog fingers and a Jamie Lee Curtis outfit is an amazing choice. I hope to see that when I’m out trick or treating. I will say no more in case you haven’t seen it, but do put that on your calendar. The Burnt Toast podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and now TikTok! at @v_solesmith. Our transcripts 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 MaxwellAnd Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and supporting independent anti-diet journalism!