“I think in general, we all know too much about nutrition. I say that as a dietitian. Even the most intuitive eating of kids will be a picky eater. And that’s fine. We don’t need to nutrition them out of that. There isn’t of a nutrient in broccoli or kale that they can’t get from something else, I promise.”Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia.Today’s guest is Amee Severson. Amee is co-author of How to Raise an Intuitive Eater with Sumner Brooks, RD. Amee is also a registered dietitian who specializes in eating disorder recovery, healing and preserving food/body relationships, and provides gender-inclusive and LGBTQ-affirming care.Amee joins us today to discuss their new book. We will be talking about feeding kids but also about doing your own work and why we need to forget everything we know about nutrition.If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! And make sure you’re subscribed to the Burnt Toast newsletter for episode transcripts, reported essays, and so much more. (Here’s a 20% discount if you’d like to go paid!)Have a question or a topic you want us to tackle in a future episode? Post it as a comment on this episode of the newsletter or send it to virginiasolesmith@substack.com. Episode 26 TranscriptVirginiaI am so excited. I’ve interviewed you a few other times for articles and things, but it is always such a pleasure to chat with you.Today we are talking about your new book, How to Raise an Intuitive Eater. This is the book I’ve been dying to be able to hand to people. This is a resource we desperately need. I think a lot of people are expecting that they’re going to pick up this book and be told, “Step one to feed your child. Step two to feed your child.” Instead you spend the first 150 pages or so—really half the book—talking about parents. Why we as parents need to do our own work and how we can do that work. So, why start there? Especially because it is so hard, Amee. You’re making us do really hard work.AmeeI know. I wish I could make it easy and just have it be a complete step-by-step guide, but we would have been missing a lot.It’s not an uncommon question: Why make so much extra work in there? I remember when I was a kid, every woman in my family had super short hair. Over the age of like 35 or 40, everyone just cut their hair short. I had this assumption that you got old (because that was old to me when I was seven) and you cut your hair short. You didn’t have long hair when you were old. That’s ridiculous, you know? There’s just this assumption that this is what you do. And it was the same for dieting for my family. You reach teenage-hood and you joined Weight Watchers. You hated your body and you tried to lose weight. I just assumed that’s what you did as an adult. I know that I’m not alone because we see it everywhere. The way parents or caregivers talk about not just their body, but food in general. You don’t ever have to say anything explicitly to your child. You never have to say, “I think your body is wrong,” or “I think you’re eating wrong,” or “This is your fault.” If you are saying it to yourself, if you are living your life like that, your kids are tiny sponges who soak up all that and reflect it back in the world.VirginiaSomething I hear a lot from parents is, “My child is three or my child is thirteen and I’m now realizing I need to do this. And is it too late?” They’re wishing this was something they fixed about themselves before they became parents. Of course, we cannot go back to our pre-child selves and work on this. AmeeJust like with intuitive eating, it’s never too late to start working on it. I think at a certain point, it is probably more beneficial for your older teenage child to do their own work, as opposed to you having different rules or attitudes around food. It can feel so overwhelming to start, like, oh, I have to fix myself and master the first half of the book before I’m allowed to start trying to introduce these concepts to my kid. Especially when your kid is older, it can feel more urgent, too, like I need to do this now. I already screwed up so much. As a parent, I get that. You, as a parent or as a caregiver, are repairing your own relationship with food while continuing to foster your kids having a good relationship with food—those two things can happen concurrently. It can be very important, especially if your relationship with food isn’t what you want your kid to grow up with or if you get that sinking feeling that this is not what I want to see my kid doing in 20 years. Then doing it concurrently is important.VirginiaI think that’s reassuring, too, because it lets us know that we don’t have to fix it completely to do better for them. I hope people find that liberating. I know I do! I just think, okay, I don’t have to be getting an A+ on this, you know? I was trying to get dieting perfect for so long and now I have to get this perfect?AmeeYeah, there’s a lot of pressure to be the perfect parent all the time. Especially in this way I am so tired of, like “My kid eats kale, so they’re perfect.” My kid knows that kale goes to work with my husband. He puts it in a seafood case at work because it’s pretty, but we don’t eat it. And that’s totally fine! Because perfect parenting is a myth, I think. Sumner Brooks and I really emphasize throughout the book how faking it till you make it is totally okay. Having a lot of compassion for yourself for not having it all figured out and not being perfect is fine.VirginiaLet’s talk about your Three Keys concept. This is what you see as the building blocks of the feeding relationship. The first key is providing unconditional love and support for your child’s body. Am I right that this is often one of the hardest parts for folks?AmeeYeah, it definitely is. Partly because I think that it can be hard to recognize that we aren’t providing unconditional love and support for our kids. If someone is picking up this book, if someone’s listening to this podcast, if someone is looking up any sort of parenting advice online, they’re probably trying their damnedest to help their kid as much as possible. It’s not malicious, it’s none of that. They’re trying their best and hearing that we can be harming, for lack of a better word, our kids through setting expectations on their bodies or even praising bodies—any of that can be hard to hear. Like, oh crap I’m doing something wrong. We live in a society that has put conditional love and support on bodies and we want to change that, because one of the least important things about a person is what their body looks like or even what their body can do.VirginiaWhat is an example of when someone may think they’re providing that support, but they really aren’t? AmeeI think praise is a big one. Like, “You’re so pretty,” or “You’re so strong,” or “You’re so handsome.” It also can be subtle things. Something like, “are you sure you really want to wear that? You look really pretty. But are you sure you want to wear that?” It’s a lot of the buts, the “You’re doing really well at this thing, but your body is taking away from it.” And those are those unintentional jabs that build up over time.VirginiaI was just interviewing someone for my book and we were talking about athletics. Kids get told way, way, way too young that they don’t have “the body” for a particular sport, even if they love a sport. You might love running, but you don’t have a “runner’s body” or “You’re not tall enough to play basketball.” Even if you’re still putting your kid on the team or encouraging them to love that sport, you’re letting them know that they won’t be the best at it, and so that it’s somehow not worthwhile because of their body.Key number two is to implement a flexible and reliable feeding routine. This is something that you all articulated so well in the book that was really helpful for me. Often, we can either be very structured about meals or have zero structure and both can be really problematic. You said that what kids really need is to know they’re going to get enough food. The point of structure is to let them know that this is a need that will be met. I was like, oh, it’s not about trying to get the kid to eat on a certain schedule. It’s about reassuring that they are going to be fed. How did you come to that realization and why that is so important for parents to realize?AmeeOne of the reasons why it felt so important to talk about enough-ness is because of the central importance of enough-ness in all of nutrition. It’s not about what you’re eating or the timing of it, or anything. It’s just enough-ness, overall. It can feel really uncomfortable to say no, because that’s often how we’re told to do it as an adult for ourselves is if you want something, you eat it, regardless of when you want it, regardless of how you want it. That’s totally fine. Absolutely encourage that. Kids have very one track brains. They’re not quite as prefrontal cortex-developed as we are as adults. It can be harder for them to recognize, like truly recognize, that if I’m hungry and I don’t eat now, I will get enough food later. Especially if there has been a time where they were maybe presented with food, like a dinner for example, that they didn’t want to eat. It’s a lot of food, maybe on a plate, that they don’t enjoy. They’re going to probably leave the table hungry. And the same with snacks, the same with lunches, breakfast, all of it. If they’re not given enough and given the option to have enough, they develop the sense of okay, I need to get it when I can. And we want to make sure that they know that if you don’t eat all your lunch, that’s fine. And you can have more when you get home. I have an elementary school kid. And elementary school lunches are a whole thing where they only get like 10 minutes to eat food. My kid is a very slow eater. So I know she never finishes her whole meal. So she comes home hungry. We’ve fallen into the routine that she gets  another lunch when she comes home from school. Because otherwise she’s hungry. We want her to know that like, okay, you don’t have to feel sad or upset that you didn’t finish your lunch. You don’t need to feel chaotic when you come home and just go for whatever food is available. You can make yourself some mac and cheese, or we can. She’s figured out the microwave and it’s beautiful. So she can do more.VirginiaWe love that. Yeah, my eight year old has the toaster and the microwave down now.AmeeSame! It’s beautiful. It’s a lovely day as a parent when that happens.One other thing that comes up in that space is if we’re about to have dinner and she’s hungry, I will say “No, we’re not gonna have a snack right now because I want you to eat dinner. It will come and it’s food that you like. There will always be one part of it that you will eat. So I want you to be hungry for that.” It’s normal to be hungry leading up to a meal and there will be enough food for you to eat. My seven year old does not understand that whole sentence, but her brain will conceptualize and understand if we do it again and again. And that’s the goal.VirginiaYes, that’s helpful. I think you’ve just articulated this thing that parents struggle with. There are times when kids want to eat a lot of food and it’s not, in our brains, a time to eat. We think you had lunch at school but now you’re coming home starving. But you’re compensating for a lack, where she’s not getting enough time to eat her lunch at school. Versus, it’s 20 minutes to dinner and I’m not creating a lack by saying no at this point. Your enough-ness will be achieved very shortly, I’m just helping you understand 20 minutes. When you’re saying no, are you saying no in a way that’s restrictive or supportive? AmeeThat phrase right there—restrictive or supportive—is a conversation Sumner and I had a lot as we wrote this book. How can we phrase this in a way that is supportive and not restrictive? VirginiaYes. That’s a helpful phrase for us all to keep in our hearts and come back to in those moments when there’s a request for food that’s catching you off guard. And then the third key is to develop and use your intuitive eating voice. What is my Intuitive Eating voice, Amee? AmeeIt’s the voice that tells us we are hungry, we want food, that we don’t really want to eat this food tonight, but we want to eat that one. It’s I want to move my body today because I feel like I’ve got energy. It’s I don’t have energy and I think I need to take a nap. We are all born with that voice, all of us are, and sometimes we shut it down. Sometimes we’re just raised and in this culture that is not allowing us to foster that, not allowing us to hold on to that and to trust it. So, by developing and using that intuitive eating voice, we get the chance to pull it out of hiding and keep it from being lost. By doing that as a caregiver, as a parent, we show how safe it is, how okay it is to do that. We get to be the home base forever, for these kids. Like, this is what my my family did and it was fine. This is what I learned is safe and okay. We can really allow that space to be held for ourselves. For our kids, it looks like not letting this thing that is really cool and really important fade away and be locked in a deep dark corner of our brain. Because it’s a really cool space where we get to trust our bodies.VirginiaI’m almost tearing up as you talk about that because it’s really such an honor to be able to do that for our kids. It’s a privilege that we can be that space for our kids. So, you take us through these three keys and then we start to talk about nutrition. I love how late in the book nutrition comes because all too often this is where the conversation starts and stops, right? Why do you think it’s so important to shift the focus off nutrition? When is there a place for nutrition in the conversation?AmeeI think in general, we all know too much about nutrition. I say that as a dietician. 90% of the work that I do is un-teaching nutrition to people because there’s so much that’s contradicting itself or so overblown. How the heck are you supposed to navigate all of that? The last thing Sumner and I want to do is throw on even more rules. The rules are not the point. We didn’t want to make it the main focus of the book because it’s not the main focus of intuitive eating. It’s not the main focus of raising kids. If you are shoving vegetables on your kid, they’re not gonna eat it. My kid ate a bite of a carrot last night. That was it. Her vegetable for the day was a single bite of a carrot. And that was fine. I was glad she ate a bite of the carrot because they were good. Because when we obsess about nutrition—did you eat enough vegetables, did you eat enough fruit, protein, fat—we take away from that intuitive eating voice. We take away from that instinct that it’s okay to eat food. It’s okay to to not like things. It’s normal to have a picky kid. It’s not a screw up on parents part. it’s not a broken thing within your kid. Even the most intuitive eating of kids will be a picky eater, and that’s fine. We don’t need to nutrition them out of that. There isn’t of a nutrient in broccoli or kale that they can’t get from something else, I promise. We can expose our kids to these things, expose them to us as parents, normally eating food andtaking the pressure off of ourselves and off of them to find the most important thing that we could possibly eat on our plate is the brussel sprout. It’s just a piece of food, same as this chicken, same as this french fry. I don’t need to fight with you about this one. I’m allowed to not like this and I’m allowed to try it. That comes up, too, how many exposures it takes for a kid to be willing to try a food, to be willing to accept a food. It’s a lot, like 18 to 20 exposures, which is just looking at the food existing.VirginiaRight, without pressure to eat it. I think so often people hear that exposure number and think that means they have to push it on their kid 18 to 20 times. They just need to be in a room with it.AmeeYeah, It’s like sparkling water, like if the essence of it exists in a room with you.VirginiaIt’s the Lacroix of vegetables. Just a waft. Check, we got another exposure down. The hyper focus on nutrition and the anxiety parents have about nutrition so often gets in the way of the meal being relaxed, fun, maybe you have a conversation you enjoy with your child. All of that gets lost, right? We’re not getting that opportunity for food as connection and food as comfort. AmeeYeah, when it turns into a food fight at the table, like just eat this food, it takes takes the focus away from a time where we can hang out or just be together. My daughter, she’s almost eight and she goes in and out of more picky periods, but she’s also a kid and her tastes do not line up with that of mine and my husband’s. I like really spicy curry. She does not, to my great disappointment, like really spicy curry. So if I’m going to make curry, I don’t expect her to eat it. I don’t even really expect to present it to her because she knows what it is. She isn’t gonna touch it. But I know she’ll eat some of the dino nuggets I keep in the freezer. So she can have that and some white rice and she’ll eat one of those things.The other night we had fish tacos, again spicy and fish, two big no-no’s. So, we made her a quesadilla because we figured she would eat a quesadilla. It did not land that night. I don’t know why, could not figure it out. But it was not the ticket. And she was visibly really sad. She ate a couple bites and was like, “I’m full.” And we were like, “No, you’re not, like, we know you’re not full. What’s wrong?” Just very quietly, she was like, “I just don’t like this tonight.” And we’re like, “Oh, just go get something else then. You can make yourself a sandwich or have some mac and cheese.” Like, “Eat food, please.” She got up and made herself an easy mac. It was beautiful.VirginiaYes, that’s awesome. It does get easier when they can use the microwave themselves so you’re not the one having to get up and make the whole second meal. That’s the tension, right? Is all the labor that goes into that. AmeeThe food she can make herself, she can switch out a dinner for. That’s the rule.VirginiaThat’s a great rule. That’s a great way to put it.AmeeAnd we always, always have some foods that–well, there’s a really weird Uncrustables shortage right now. It’s very sad, actually, because it makes lunches a lot harder to pack. But, even before she could use a microwave, we would have Uncrustables in the freezer, and she would just pull those out and eat those. Or a bowl of cereal, which is totally fine, too.VirginiaI think folks are gonna find this deeply reassuring. I want to talk a little more about the nutrition piece. I liked how you said that you do a lot of un-teaching in your work because I think a big problem is we’ve absorbed so much of this nutrition knowledge and accumulated it so intensively over the years. Is there a way to incorporate nutrition in a more useful way into your life? Or is it a matter of just letting a lot of that information go? AmeeYeah. I think there is a little bit of case-by-case for that because there is some nutrition information out there that is really valuable for some people, given their circumstances in life or what’s happening for them. And some of that same information is really not useful for anyone else. For example, my partner is diabetic. He needs to count carbs because he needs to dose insulin. If he doesn’t, It could be bad. I however, don’t need to count carbs. Neither does my kid. The only reason my kid is learning any carb ratios at all is for “Daddy has low blood sugar. Can you please go get him a soda?” She did absolutely bring him a Diet Coke one time.VirginiaLove the effort but…AmeeSo, we’re learning this one has carbs so we need you to bring this one to Daddy. But so many of those little specific nutrition like tidbits can be really important for one person but really unimportant for another. We are in such like a black and white society that if this thing is important for one, we assume it’s important for all. If this thing is unhealthy for one person, we assume it’s unhealthy for all, but that’s not true. We can pick and choose what is important and for the most part, we also get to pick and choose that forever. For example, I like to use my husband’s example. He doesn’t drink sugar sodas, for example, because he didn’t drink them growing up and he doesn’t think it’s worth his insulin. But Fritos and queso, like Fritos scoops and the crappy Fritos queso, is his jam. He will eat an entire bag in 30 minutes. That’s one of his Christmas presents every year. That’s worth his insulin.There are a few exceptions to that, like allergies is one. But for the most part, we get to pick and choose when it’s important and when it’s not. We don’t have to cut anything out ever. If it will kill you, then maybe. But for the most part, we don’t have to. If we are interested in or willing to do the work to unpack our own internal diet culture beliefs, internal fatphobia, and the way we externalize that as well, then we really get to pick it apart, which is a lot of work and sometimes not the most fun work. But that’s what leads to having a better relationship with all of this. I find most of the work we do around nutrition is unpacking what’s not important.VirginiaThat’s a really empowering way to frame it. I think people think they don’t get to choose. Nutrition is given to them as the set of cardinal rules they have to follow instead of something you can filter through your own life and your own context.I really love that you call the last chapter of the book “what to do when this feels harder than you thought.” I do not want to give away the ending of the book. There’s so much more in this book than Amee and I have talked about—you need to read the whole thing. But I do think when people are working on divesting from diet culture and fatphobia it just feels so hard some days. You hit these brick walls and you don’t know where to go. Then you end up worrying that what you did caused more harm because you’re trying to reduce harm. So what do we do when we hit those brick walls? AmeeI think accepting, believing, expecting that we will hit a wall at some point. There’s always a wall, whether it’s exhaustion or just confusion or frustration because we all have limits. We don’t have to be ready for every circumstance that’s gonna come our way. And we can have a lot of compassion for ourself in that space. I expect it to be hard. I haven’t met a single person that’s like, “Oh, my God, that was the easiest thing I’ve ever done.” Most people come to me, as a clinician, and are like, this is so much harder than I thought it would be. It is challenging. And it is for our kids, too. The longer we’ve been stuck in our own diet culture mindset, the harder it can be to encourage our kids to re-trust this space. It can feel really frustrating and hard and that’s okay. I think self compassion is probably the most important thing we can hold.In our house we have a lot of conversations about how we’re not going to have any more candy right now. We’re gonna save this candy for later and you can have more tomorrow. Or no, you don’t get to eat more Halloween candy before bed because you just brushed your teeth and I’m tired. You’re going to bed and you can have more tomorrow.VirginiaI had a cool moment with my four year old recently. We had popcorn and we hadn’t had popcorn in the house for a while because my kids are really messy with popcorn so I stopped buying it for a few months. Then I was like, Oh, they love popcorn, I should get popcorn again. And the first day we had it, my four year old wanted only popcorn. At dinner she was having a plate of popcorn. And then she wanted another plate of popcorn and another plate of popcorn and I could see Dan, my husband, getting a little tense. Like, are we gonna watch her eat a whole bag of popcorn? Is that okay? I knew that it was just because it was new and we hadn’t had popcorn for a while and she loves it and she was really happy to have it. I said to her, “Just so you know, I want you to have as much as you want with dinner. We can also, if you’re getting full, save your plate and have this popcorn with breakfast tomorrow.” Immediately her posture changed and she was like, “Oh, oh yeah, I’m full.” and gave me the plate and we put it aside for breakfast and she ate it for breakfast the next morning. And it was clearly that she was just like, “I better eat all the popcorn right now because I don’t know when I’ll have it again.” As soon as I explained that it’s here in the house now and we’ll have it again, she was like, “Oh, Okay, got it.” That was very cool to watch happen  in real time with her.AmeeYeah, once you see your kids start to do it, it’s really cool. We had a similar experience with a chocolate orange, those ones you whack on the table and they break apart. That fun, interactive food is really exciting for my kid right now. We found one at Trader Joe’s and she was so excited about it, and we bought it. She ate that first one within a few days. Then we went back to Trader Joe’s a couple days later and there was another one. So we got it. It’s been like a week and a half and it’s still sitting in the cupboard and she keeps forgetting it exists because it’s just not exciting anymore.Butter For Your Burnt ToastAmeeWe are currently watching—we’re late to the game—Succession. That is what we spend our nights doing. I’m very invested in all these people that I really hate so if you want to hate watch something…VirginiaIf you have not read it yet, the New Yorker profile of Jeremy Strong is a fascinating and hilarious read. Definitely check it out.It turns out he is just as horrible as Kendall Roy is. He’s not actually acting at all. At times I even found it a little triggering because I find all the men on Succession a little triggering. I was like, “Oh, God, he’s like so many like, boys I had crushes on in high school who turned out to be these theater jerks.”AmeeThat’s the whole reason we stopped watching House of Cards after one season. We’re like, this is too close to home. We have to stop.VirginiaExactly. Okay, my recommendation is also something to watch. It is a movie I watched recently. As folks know, I do a monthly movie club with my siblings. My siblings are significantly younger and cooler than me, so we each take turns picking movies and my movie is always a terrible pick and then they all pick these amazing things. This was my brother-in-law’s pick, actually, it’s called The Sound of Metal. It is a really moving film about a musician. He’s a drummer in a heavy metal band and he loses his hearing overnight. He goes completely deaf and you never really find out why he loses it. But you watch him coming to terms with being deaf. It’s also a powerful story about addiction. He’s in recovery and you see his quest to get his hearing back almost as like a form of relapsing. It’s just a beautiful movie, it takes you into the deaf community. It’s very thought-provoking about addiction, mental health, and disability and it’s beautifully shot and acted. So Amy, thank you so much for joining us. This was such a great conversation. The book is How to Raise an Intuitive Eater. Tell folks where they can find more of your work.AmeeMy website for my professional work is Prosper Nutrition Wellness. I’m based in Washington State. You can find me on Instagram or Twitter at Amee Severson. Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode. Or consider a paid subscription to the Burnt Toast Newsletter. It’s on sale this month for just $4 per month or $40 for the year. You get a ton of cool perks and you keep this an ad- and sponsor-free space. The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti diet journalism! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

“This is exactly what diet culture, and everyone who gives advice on Instagram  doesn’t want you to know, because it’s not straightforward. And there’s no clear solution.”Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about why your kids should be eating more waffles and frozen burritos for dinner. We also talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and a bunch of other stuff. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia.Today’s guest is Burnt Toast fan favorite and friend of the show, Amy Palanjian. Amy is the creator of the kid food blog Yummy Toddler Food. She’s also a mom of three, my lifelong work wife, and my former co-host on the Comfort Food Podcast. Amy joins us today to dissect the concept of the “back-up meal.” If your kids hate what’s for dinner, should you let them swap it out for something else? And more to the point: Since many of you have told us you are doing this, how do we let go of the guilt they can inspire?If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! And make sure you’re subscribed to the Burnt Toast newsletter, for episode transcripts, reported essays and so much more. Have a question or a topic you want us to tackle in a future episode? Post it as a comment on this episode of the newsletter or send it to virginiasolesmith@substack.com. PS. Amy’s and my last conversation was about Halloween candy. If you are stressing about holiday food right now, this might be a good one to go back and listen to because all the strategies we talked about for Halloween candy definitely still apply. Episode 25 TranscriptVirginiaToday we are talking about backup meals. This first came up when I wrote an essay on Burnt Toast about how my grandmothers fed their families. My British grandmother did not cook a weeknight dinner, ever. In England, they have tea as an evening meal. In my grandmother’s house, tea meant literally a cup of tea and two pieces of toast, maybe some sponge cake. That is all you serve and it is possibly genius. I do love that this newsletter is called Burnt Toast. I didn’t know this story about her when I named it that, but it feels very appropriate. A lot of readers, after that essay, said, "We don’t do exactly that, but if our kids don’t like what we’re eating for dinner, we let them pick a backup meal like peanut butter and jelly or a bowl of cereal." And then you, Amy, messaged me and said, "Oh yeah, our backup meal is a frozen burrito." And my head exploded because you and I have been talking about how we feed our kids for the last eight-and-a-half years and I had no idea you did this! AmyWe did it with our first kid. She could have toast if she didn’t like the main meal. Then we had more children and I stopped doing it regularly because it seemed like too much work. Instead, I leaned in hard to making sure that there were easy sides on the table. But I’ve got a kid who’s nine, and she likes what she likes. Sometimes she’s willing to try new things and sometimes she’s not. I have discovered that I don’t actually need to make her eat food she doesn’t want to eat. So we have easy options that I don’t actually have to get up and cook. The only problem with our current backup meal is that it requires me to buy a lot of frozen burritos, which I should maybe just embrace. But there’s a particular one from Amy’s that all three of my kids really like. It’s just bean and cheese. I should just buy it by the case.So, maybe twice a month she really dislikes the meal. She will get up and make herself a frozen burrito. Right now I’m testing recipes for a cookbook, so my kids are seeing recipes that they’ve never seen before, or they’re seeing things in slightly different ways, because we tend to eat the same thing and I can’t make a cookbook with five recipes.VirginiaNo. You need, like, 75 recipes and that is a lot of new food to throw at your kids all the time. That’s like the cobbler’s kids have no shoes. Or in your case, many, many pairs of shoes that they don’t want to wear.So, an interesting thing to me about the whole backup meal conversation is that when people started telling me they were doing it, it was a little apologetic or ashamed. Like, “Yeah, we know we’re not supposed to, but this happens at our house.” And I just thought, where have we gone wrong here? Because to me, this does not sound like a failure. You have a nine-year-old who’s capable of making her own burrito for dinner! This feels like a triumph! So, let’s unpack this a little bit. Where do you think this sense of backup meals as a parenting failure comes from?AmyI think a lot of it is this pressure on family meals, that we’re all eating the same thing. The point of family meals is to expose kids to a range of foods over time so that they eat them. Which, as you and I know, is not really the way that humans work. Backup meals feel like a departure from what we’ve been taught. So I think it’s both the pressure on family meals to look a certain way and also the way that we talk about the Division of Responsibility. The way that we talk about how we feed our kids doesn’t really allow for the option of the kids just choosing something else. VirginiaDivision of Responsibility can reduce a lot of pressure. But what happens if the kid refuses every piece of food you put on the table? The backup meal is definitely not strict DOR because it’s what they’re trying to get you away from. But there’s also this reality.AmyYeah, I think there’s also something about if we let our kids eat the food that they want, we’re somehow not doing our job. It feels like we’re not succeeding in our parenting goals of raising kids who want to eat a bunch of different foods. VirginiaOften the foods they want to eat are not foods that we have been told we can feel good about them wanting to eatAmyEspecially not for dinner.VirginiaRight. This is where the diet culture piece of it comes in. You’ve made a delicious kale salad with a runny egg on top and some goat cheese and your kid is turning all of that down and would rather have Eggo waffles (not like that’s a story that’s happened in my own house or anything.) You’re not supposed to live on Eggo waffles. But kids are not programmed to want confusing textures like kale and runny eggs all the time.AmyI mean, honestly, I don’t ever even want to eat kale. I also think, we serve more vegetables probably at dinner than most other meals, because it’s the meal that we cook more. So, I think if we know that our kids are just going to eat some crackers that we’ve doubly failed.VirginiaRight, you’ve missed this opportunity to get vegetables into them. We’ve equated dinner with vegetable consumption in a way that’s counterproductive, both to teaching kids to like vegetables and to enjoying dinner.  AmyRight. Also, kids are the most tired at that time of the day. So giving them the more challenging foods in that context is just silly.VirginiaIf you’re approaching this from that Division of Responsibility mindset, there’s this equating of backup meals with short order cooking. I think we need to sort out the gray area between these things. A backup meal is not helpful if I sit down at the table and my kid immediately demands something different and I have to get up and go prepare another meal. That’s short order cooking. That does legitimately both make me cranky and create a not-great power dynamic between me and my kids and food. So a backup meal is not that. But what is it? What’s your line?AmyWell, I’m not getting up.VirginiaThat is the line. Amy’s not getting up.AmyI’m not getting up. The kids need to be able to get it on their own. So, we have done the frozen burrito, which my two girls can make on their own, and we have done cereal, which they can bring to the table. The five-year-old needs help because she can’t pour. And we’ve done toast. In my mind, this is a fairly rare occurrence. It is a way to make sure that the meal is still pleasurable for everyone and that we can have a good experience regardless of what the food is, so I want the food to be super straightforward.VirginiaI’ll also say, as someone for whom the backup meal is becoming a less rare occurrence—more like a twice a week occurrence—don’t feel bad, if it’s more frequent. For kids with more complicated histories around food, this might be where you are. If settling on a backup meal that they feel good eating an doesn’t create extra work for you enables you to share the meal, and have a fun conversation with your kid, that’s great. That’s going to do so much more for their confidence and comfort level around food than dying on the “But I put rolls on the table and that’s your safe food and why won’t you eat the rolls” mountain. They’re like, “Because these rolls have seeds on them and I hate rolls with seeds.” Now you’re in a whole hellscape. AmyMy kids can spot a seed from like seven miles away.VirginiaSeeds are such a problem, and yet my children love everything bagels which are covered in many kinds of seeds. Speaking of bagels, I want to list some of the options people said they use as backup foods because I think these all fall into that criteria you’re sketching out of very minimal prep, kids can access themselves, and you can quickly move on with the rest of the meal. So: yogurt, cereal, simple sandwiches, PB&J type things, bagel and cream cheese, sliced turkey, peanuts, cheese and crackers.I also appreciate the mom who said, “Whatever they can safely get out of the fridge by themselves” because that seems like a fair bar. Any other options that you would recommend or that I haven’t listed there?AmyFrozen foods, like burritos. You mentioned waffles.VirginiaWaffles are huge in my house.AmyWe don’t do mac and cheese as this option, but you could get those individual microwavable servings.VirginiaAnother piece we need to talk about is the timing. I have been experimenting with, rather than having it happen in that moment of everyone sitting down at the table, I have been talking to my kid ahead of time and saying, “Here’s what I’m making for dinner. Do you want that? Or would you like a bagel or a waffle?” And the reason I like that is because then we don’t have the super stressful panic attack moment at the table where she feels overwhelmed by stuff she doesn’t want to eat. It gives her more confidence going into the meal that she knows there’s going to be something there she likes. But I don’t know if that would work for everybody. AmyI would much rather bring everything to the table, including whatever easy sides I’ve decided to include, and see how that goes first. Because if I offered a frozen burrito every night, they would probably always take it. Usually the reactions that my kids have about food are worse when they don’t see it. Like if I was saying, “I’m making pasta,” they’d be like, “What shape? What color? Is there cheese?” I don’t have the bandwidth to have the pre-negotiation. So I would rather just wait, even though, it could create a hiccup.VirginiaI think you have to know your kid’s temperament. We were stuck in a bad pattern of kids sitting down to the table and screaming. That was super triggering for me, because I literally just finished putting effort into this meal. I want to sit down and enjoy my food and instead I’m having to sort out whether or not you’re going to eat it. So deciding ahead of time, even if it means she’s defaulting to the backup meal more often, is reducing our dinnertime conflict so much that it feels worth it. But I completely agree. I’m saying, “Do you want ramen noodles and kimchi or do you want a bagel?” It’s not shocking that she’s like, “Bagel, please.” She may be saying that more because I’m asking. So another work-around is to think about how you can still make the meal feel inclusive for them. I still serve the rest of the dishes family style, and every now and then if she sees something she does want a bite of, or there’s a new food, and I’ll say, “Do you want some of this on your plate?” I’m not ruling out the idea that she would eat the rest of the meal. I’m just like, “Okay, you want a bagel on your plate and then there’s this other stuff you can choose from.” This is why we have to get away from these hard and fast rules about how family dinner has to go, because this is what’s working in my house. But it needs to play out differently in your house.AmyI think we need to give ourselves plenty of room for this to change and adjust to whatever phase that you’re going through. This is exactly what  diet culture and  everyone who gives advice on Instagram doesn’t want you to know, because it’s not straightforward: there’s no clear solution. The key here is being responsive to your family in the context. I think as my kiddo is getting older, I’m trying to see where I can give her more independence and let her be more in charge. And that’s not every night, but we want them to be able to respectfully speak up when they want to add something else to their plate. Even if it’s a condiment, or if they want a different drink. These are subtle ways that they can advocate for themselves in those situations. So, practicing that a little bit more, especially as kids get into middle school, and they might start hearing stuff. I just want some of those tools to be practiced. VirginiaThat’s a useful way of reframing this. I think the reason people were embarrassed to admit they did the backup meal is because it felt like overly catering to their kid, and because the food that the backup meal is isn’t “good” food for family dinner. But when we think about our big picture goal, it’s not to have a kid who eats everything that we serve. It’s to have a kid who can navigate the strange waters of, “What am I hungry for? What do I need at this meal? Is that different from the messages I’m getting?” The family dinner is a place to practice that before they’re out in the world, and the messages they’re getting are diet culture messages. Having them be firm and able to stand their ground in knowing, “this is how my needs will be met at this meal.” That’s the whole goal. That’s what we’re doing.AmyI’ve been thinking about this more this past year, because it’s been very hard for me to feel excited about food through COVID and all the stress. I’m hungry physically, but not much is appealing. So I am very aware of what it feels like when someone else offers me food that I don’t want. It’s a horrible feeling when someone wants you to eat something and you don’t want it. It’s that pressure that comes with knowing someone wants you to do something that you just, in your body, don’t want to do. I’m not saying this is always going to happen at the dinner table. But It’s liberating to look at this as part of raising a competent eater.VirginiaA kid who can advocate for themselves and who knows that what feels safe in their body matters more than making other people happy. That’s important.AmyOn Instagram recently, I had posted this reel that gave ways to help kids engage with their food and to help them feel more in control of their food. There were a lot of comments from people saying things like “This generation of parents gives their kids too many choices.” It’s not like previous generations of adults had great relationships with food.  Why would we not do something different?VirginiaWe’re actually trying to unlearn some stuff here.Okay, so back to nuts and bolts. Do you think it should always be the same option, no matter what? Or would you rotate? One idea I got from a follower was that the backup meal is always cereal, but the kids can pick which kind of cereal, which seems like a nice framework if you’re a family that stocks multiple kinds of cereal, which we are. AmyIt rotates based on what we have in the house. Some weeks, we might have frozen burritos. And then some weeks, we might just have a lot of bread. Or we might have muffins that I made.VirginiaYou could get caught in a really frustrating power struggle if your backup meal is a burrito and she’s like, actually, I don’t like burritos anymore. And then it’s like well, now what am I doing?AmyYeah. I keep it fairly loose.VirginiaWhat about if you’re dealing with multiple kids? Do siblings get the same backup meal option? Or would you kind of customize it for each kid? AmySo, the last time that we had a burrito with the oldest, I thought that the younger two were going to ask for one, but they wound up not. We did have one meal where nobody was happy so they brought cereal to the table, and then all the kids had a bowl of cereal. Sometimes, one of them asks for cheese and crackers and they’ll just bring it to the table and then anyone who wants it can have it. It just gets very chaotic when you’ve got multiple kids. And I don’t want the whole kitchen on the dining table.VirginiaBecause that’s overwhelming for kids, too. And messy and frustrating for you. But this is not hard and fast. There are going to be scenarios where it would make sense to customize, certainly if you have kids with an age difference that impacts their chewing ability, like a young toddler and a preschooler, you might have to do different backups. But I agree, if our big picture is less work for us, then whatever reduces the chaos makes sense. The other piece of it we should talk about more is, should kids be in charge of getting it themselves? I know that’s what your nine-year-old is doing. I was all for this at first, because it does sound like the best way to reduce the work, especially if you’re waiting to make the backup meal call at the table. But when I talked about this on Instagram, Diana Rice of @anti.diet.kids raised some great points. She works with kids with ARFID and other traumatic feeding histories, and her concern was that if you have a kid who is regularly needing a backup option, leaving them to fend for themselves could make them feel really isolated and could add to the stress of managing that condition. I think that’s a piece that’s worth considering.AmyI think it's all about what your reaction is in the moment when you're having that conversation with your kid. It would be very easy to take their disinterest in the meal personally, and to say something like, “Well, fine, go get your own food.” It's hard to not have emotional reactions when the kids don't want the food that we make. But I think the more you can remember that dinner is a time to be together, everyone may or may not eat the same thing, that's not really the end all be all goal here. There could be a way that your kid can go get their food, and then you ask them to tell you a joke, or you get the conversation off of the food. Or if their backup meal is always the same thing—like if it is always bagels in your house—maybe you put those bagels someplace that your kid can reach near the toaster with the stuff that she would need. Just like we have a snack bin, so after school the kids can get their own snacks.VirginiaI think this comes down to intention. You don't want the child to feel like they have failed because they're opting for the backup meal option. Just like you shouldn't perceive this as a failure of your own parenting or food prep skills. The goal is to have a kid find this empowering. My eight-year-old has a traumatic feeding history and this has always been our way through: Giving her as much control as makes sense to give her. So for her, it's confidence-building that she can make her own waffles or she can go get something she wants from the fridge. But for another kid who is in a different place with that struggle, it could feel like they aren't being cared for.  AmyEspecially if they're younger, too. VirginiaYes, obviously we're not saying expect your three year old to hop up and go peel a banana. Another piece of advice from Diana is to consider making the backup meal into a bedtime snack. So if your kid doesn't eat a lot of dinner, you don't have to worry about them going to bed hungry because you can give them the cereal, or whatever, as the bedtime snack. Make that something sort of predictable and something they can rely on and that is minimal prep work, which is similar to how you do bedtime snacks at your house.AmyYeah, ours is a banana or no banana. That's the option that we have, just because it's very straightforward. And I don't want to be negotiating with small children at that time of the day. For my two-year-old, if he didn't eat dinner and he ate a banana, that would be enough food for him. Because he, at this time in his life, has a very small appetite at that time of the day. I just don't know that that would be enough for some kids. You have to read the room.VirginiaMy four-year-old basically never has a bedtime snack because her bedtime comes really soon after dinner. But my eight-year-old does. She's our night owl kid. And she, regardless of whether she eats dinner or not, will often make two or three more waffles, because who doesn't love a bedtime waffle? I think we, as parents, are always looking for food rules. That's what diet culture teaches us to do. And also, parenting kids is hard and it's more helpful to do it with a roadmap. You want to make these rules, like we don't do a backup meal, or if we do a backup meal, it's only this. But the way the math plays out at your house might be different.AmyI think it's okay to trust yourself a little bit more, even if what you decide to do is not the conventional wisdom. Or if what we're saying makes no sense to you, I think that's fine, too.VirginiaYes. If you've gotten this far into the episode and think, Well, they are crazy and unreliable, that’s fine. We're comfortable with that. I'll wrap up by talking a little bit about how this has worked at our house. I was blown away by this whole concept when people introduced it to me. I was thinking and talking about it all week on Instagram. That weekend, Dan was cooking—he cooks on Sundays a lot. He was doing a roast chicken and some vegetables, which is a meal three out of four of us like. As he was getting started, he said to our eight year old, "I'm doing chicken and vegetables for dinner. Do you want a bagel?" And she said yes. And then she just happily went off to play and that was it. And I said to him, “Oh, that reminds me, were you following my Instagram this week? We need to decide if we're going to do backup meals.” And he goes, "Oh, I hate that idea." And I was like, "Wait, but you just did it. That's the backup meal." It turned out that he thought I meant short order cooking. Like, we sit down to dinner they don't like and we'll get up and cook you a backup meal at that point. And I was like, “No, no, no, no, no. It's the thing that you just did of giving her another option.” And he was like, "Well, that's what I always do. Why wouldn't we do that?" It was not something I was doing, but it's how he has been approaching it whenever he cooks family meals. I hadn't noticed, somehow. So, we've apparently been doing it all along with great success. Butter For Your Burnt Toast AmyI have a relatively new recipe for gingerbread muffins. They're straight up holiday-spiced goodness. They store incredibly well. And they have molasses in them, so they're crazy moist. I usually make a double batch and put half in the freezer. I've been putting very pretty gold sugar on top (from Wilton) so they're kind of festive.VirginiaThey're really cute. I appreciated them on your Instagram.AmyI guess it's a unique enough flavor that it feels special. Even though it's just a muffin. It makes me feel like I've tried harder even though it's just stirring stuff together in a bowl.VirginiaMy recommendation is a little bit random and has nothing to do with food. But I am a broken human being and I do not like to tie shoelaces because it's just time in my day that I don't want to invest in that task. This is how I feel about you know, teeth brushing and showering, too. But I do do those things every day. AmyI was just going to say that I don't actually ever untie my shoes. Is that unusual?VirginiaHow do you get them on your feet?AmyI guess they're loose enough that I just slide my feet in? I don't know. VirginiaI didn't know that was an option, so I spent $12.95 on these special shoe laces that I'm about to tell you about. Maybe there's something to my foot shape? Don't shame my foot shape. I need these! Okay, so the laces are called Xpand Laces. They are basically just elastic that comes in colors. So, I got white to match my sneakers. You lace them just like you would lace a normal sneaker and then there's a little clip thing at the end that holds the lace inside your shoe so you don't have to tie your laces. And then you can just shove your foot in. I have these cute Veja sneakers that I got for fall / winter. I just pretend the V stands for Virginia. I'm so happy because now I'm wearing them a ton. You can cut the laces to any length, so they would be a great option for kids. I'm secretly hoping that laced-up shoes for kids are just gonna go the way of cursive handwriting because it is a mountain we have yet to climb in my house. We're still buying velcro shoes. Fortunately, my children have smallish feet so I can still find velcro shoes in their size, but that ship is gonna sail. And we're going to have to either learn how to lace their shoes or get these shoe laces.AmyAlso, the amount of energy that I spend telling my oldest child to tie her shoelaces instead of just walking on them? That would be nice not to have to do.VirginiaLet's just remove shoelaces from our mental load.AmyYou're solving everyone's problems. VirginiaYou're welcome. Alright, Amy, thank you, as always for being here! Remind listeners where they can find more of your work. AmyYou can find me at Yummy Toddler Food Or @Yummytoddlerfood on social.Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast. Once again. If you'd like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode and consider a paid subscription to the Burnt Toast newsletter. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year.The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti diet journalism. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

We need our own place to critique diet culture and combat fatphobia, without the continual compromise required by corporate media. And, we need this podcast. Because you will never need to worry that the host is going to pause mid-episode and tell you how much I love Noom.Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we explore questions (and some answers) about fatphobia, diet culture, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture. I’m the author of The Eating Instinct, the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia and the newsletter Burnt Toast. This is technically Episode 24 of the Burnt Toast podcast, but also for a lot of you it’s going to be Episode 1. So we’ll start with some backstory on how I went from a writer of women’s magazine diet stories to a diet culture dismantler and why having a space to do independent, anti-diet journalism is so important, right now. I’ll also be answering your questions: How to help a 3-year-old who won’t stop grazing? How can we respond thoughtfully to casual fatphobia? What should I do if I’m a houseguest and my host is on a diet? And can my kid really eat ice cream every day? If you enjoy this episode please subscribe and rate and review Burnt Toast in your podcast player. And sign up for the Burnt Toast newsletter, to get episode transcripts, reported essays and more. [Editor’s Note: Regular newsletter readers will recognize the first half of this episode from this essay. Feel free to scroll down to the next line break to get to your questions!]So, I thought today we would start with some backstory. Eighteen years ago I graduated from college and started my first job the very next day as an editorial assistant at Seventeen Magazine. I was living in a shoebox studio apartment next to the Queens Midtown Tunnel. I walked to work in my Reef flip flops because I couldn’t actually stand up for more than ten minutes in the shoes we wore around the office. I made $27,000 a year. But for those first few months, I was in heaven at Seventeen. My bosses were these smart, feminist editors who thought that the intelligence of teenage girls was undervalued. We did features on things like hookup culture and youth marketing. And yes, I realized that last one now sounds a little ironic. One of my tasks as an assistant at the magazine was to track down statistics or expert quotes when the editors were working on a feature and realized that it needed some things like that, that the writers had failed to deliver. Seventeen is where I started to learn how to report.I was learning to report in a way that would pass muster with our research chief who was this completely terrifying person who would throw your reporting file out of her office if you tried to use a non-primary source or a newspaper, or couldn’t backup a controversial fact to her liking. Yes, this is the same Seventeen that published “I got my period in front of my crush,” the horror stories you remember from Trauma-Rama. And yes, this is the same Seventeen that first published Sylvia Plath. I learned really quickly that being a feminist in women’s media, but also all mainstream media, meant that you had to hold these strands together as lightly as you could. It meant successfully pitching a story on birth control, only to have your editor write in the margins, “But wait, isn’t Plan B the same thing as having an abortion?” No, it is not. And it meant every day reading letters from girls who hated their thighs, girls who tried to cut the fat off their stomachs, girls who skipped breakfast and made themselves throw up after lunch, girls who were trying to shrink their bodies in every conceivable way. And then going into a meeting where we would brainstorm five new ways to put the phrase “bikini body” on the cover.I didn’t last long at Seventeen. A few months after I was hired, a new editor came in with a new team and a new vision. Suddenly there was a lot less meticulous reporting about teenage health and a lot more of that “Bikini Body” stuff, glossed over, of course, with the kind of “Girl Power” talk that wooed so many of us into thinking weight loss could be a valuable self improvement project. So, I moved on. First to another junior editor job at another women’s magazine, and then, when that publication folded, to being a full-time freelance writer. That move freed me up to move out of the city, to wear shoes I could walk in, and to write stories I really cared about. But: I ran into the same tension everywhere I went, especially when I wrote about weight and health. So I spent most of the next decade still deep inside the diet culture beat, at first rationalizing it with the usual, “Well, this one’s not a diet, this one’s a lifestyle plan.” That same song and dance we talk about all the time. And then slowly, but determinedly trying to crack it apart. And that was uphill work. I found myself translating the principles of Health at Every Size into language that a women’s magazine could handle. And yet I was continuing to use terms like “ob#se” without any awareness of their toxic history. I made compromises. I added health warnings to stories so the editors would run them because I figured it was better to get a few seeds planted where I could, rather than see the story killed. And also, I had to get paid. For a while, I even backed away from critiquing the diet industry directly. Wellness culture was shifting things so fast, I wasn’t even always sure who I was mad at. Instead, I started to focus on the beauty industry. In a weird way, it was easier to report on how I learned to do Brazilian waxing so I could interrogate our obsession with it, or to expose the exploitation of nail salon workers than it was to reckon with my desire to diet and detox. But in other ways, it was harder. I couldn’t run either of those stories in women’s magazines where hair removal is gospel and nail polish brands pay the bills. It was and is a tough sell to persuade “real” media outlets (emphasis on the quotes around “real,”) to care about stories in which no men would appear. Then, a little over eight years ago, I had my first daughter Violet. And as many of you know, she stopped eating when she was just one month old. She needed me to make food feel safe again. That’s the experience that started to connect the dots for me that led to my first book, The Eating Instinct, and that pushed me all the way out of diet culture. I started to explore how we relate to food, and then realized how much fatphobia underpins everything we think we know about food. And health: I wrote about how weight stigma shows up in fertility treatment, in eating disorder treatment, and in science, full stop. Fatphobia is pervasive in parenting culture too, whether it’s as overt as a diet app for kids or more implicit in our anxiety about kids and sugar.      In the past five years, telling these stories has gotten so much easier. We are now in a cultural moment where terms like “body positivity” and “intuitive eating” are embraced by popular culture; where magazines like Good Housekeeping and InStyle ask me to write about pushing back against the pressure to lose your pandemic weight gain, and nobody tries to water down the rhetoric at all. Could these brands be doing a better job owning their own historical complicity in diet culture? Yes, absolutely. But they recognize the importance of the conversation now. I cannot underscore to you enough how much that was not the case, even as recently as when I sold The Eating Instinct.Still, any time I write for a major media outlet--and again, that has been the primary way I’ve made a living for almost two decades--I am aware that my story, my project is like this little boat tacking its way through a great, churning ocean of other priorities. It gets stuck in a holding pattern if the hook isn’t newsy enough, it gets chopped in half because the word count is too tight, it gets cut altogether because a new editor comes in with a different vision. Or it runs, but I’m asked to add caveats and softeners that make everyone more comfortable while making the story less accurate. Or it runs, and then the next week, the same outlet runs a pro-weight-loss story. And I hear from confused readers who feel betrayed by the switch in tone. I still see the value in publishing traditional journalism. I adore working with smart editors who tear my words apart and find something so much better buried beneath them. I love writing for outlets with copy editors and fact checkers and art departments, who are all so brilliant at their essential jobs. And I adore seeing how a story resonates across a broader platform, even when that means the comment section goes bananas or all of the angry men in America send me emails. We can’t only preach to the choir. I started Burnt Toast because I realized that after almost twenty years of doing it their way, we need our own place to critique diet culture and combat fatphobia. Without the continual compromise required by corporate media. Where I don’t have to worry that a sidebar for flat tummy tea will run alongside my explanation of why the “obesity epidemic” was overhyped. We need a place where we can publish stories that I can’t tell in other outlets because they are too niche or aren’t newsy enough but still matter deeply to people’s lives. We need this podcast because you will never need to worry that the host is going to pause mid-episode and tell you how much I love Noom. I absolutely do not love Noom. So, most weeks Burnt Toast will be a conversation between me and a guest. So far we’ve had really amazing fat activists like Aubrey Gordon and Marquisele Mercedes on. We’ve had authors like Crystal Maldonado, Alyson Gerber, and Tyler Feder, and a bunch of other folks who I would call thought leaders on fashion, culture, health, and parenting. Once a month, I’ll also release a solo episode, like this one, for paid subscribers, where I’ll answer your questions directly. So now, let’s get into those! Q: My three year old is recovering from a minor illness which came on the heels of a long vacation. So we’ve been out of our usual routine for a few weeks and eating, which had been mostly non-stressful, has become a hot mess. Through traveling and then trying to nourish a feverish child, we were in survival mode, and our snack game was strong. Now, my kid demands only snack foods, is obsessing over sweets, and wants to graze all day. I want to get back on our meal/snack routine for both our sakes. I cannot dispense food all day long and my high energy kid needs the structure of sitting down to eat in order to focus and notice hunger and fullness. But it seems like there must be a feeling of restriction around snacks and sweets and I’m worried about exacerbating that. So, normally when we talk about this issue, you guys hear me say over and over again that if your child is fixating on a particular food, it’s probably because they think they don’t have enough access to it and the answer is to lean in and give them more freedom. But I do think there’s a slight exception for that in the situation that this mom is outlining, where you’ve been traveling or you’ve been sick, so you haven’t been on your normal schedule. When we go through seasons like that, it’s very normal for everything that kids understand about food to go out the window. I don’t think that your child is feeling restricted about snacks and sweets, I think they’re just feeling generally uncertain because of the lack of structure. When we feel uncertain, we can fixate more on our comfort foods, right? Because food is feeling a little unpredictable. In a way, your child asking for that favorite food all the time is their way of saying, “I need more routine, I need more predictability, please.”So, what I would do is not mess with the particular foods your kid wants. I would work on getting back on the schedule first, even if it means your child is eating Oreos at every meal and snack for a few more days. Serve the favorite snack foods, but just work on breaking the grazing pattern and getting to eating at a more regular schedule. Sometimes what is happening with grazing is kids are feeling like they need to be in charge of making food happen. Which is not to say you haven’t been feeding your child, you obviously have been. And I know when you’re in that snack mode, you’re like, all I do is give you food. But they somehow feel like it’s their responsibility to make sure they get enough because there’s no schedule and it’s not predictable. So, if we work on making it predictable, but you serve the foods that they’re most anxious about having access to, you can ease the scarcity mindset. You can give them that comfort of structure. Once it feels like you’re back in a routine around eating, then I would start to bring in other foods, have more variety, maybe start to say things like, “Oh my gosh, I love Oreos so much, too. We’re going to have them for a morning snack, but not for breakfast.” (I’m always using Oreos, as the example, but whatever your child’s comfort food is, of course, insert here.) Work on structure, then you can work on food variety. Don’t try to tackle it all at once. That will be too big of a change. And good luck. Q: How can we respond to casual fatphobia and weight stigma?This is the challenge with holiday gatherings, right? Because this is when people make those side comments like, “Oh, I need my stretchy pants for this meal” or, “diet starts Monday!” Even if it’s not directed at you, it can feel really awkward to tackle it because you look like the buzzkill. You’re the one who’s suddenly taking it really seriously and oh, we were all just joking. But I think we do need to start to build our muscles for how we push back in these moments.Someone I follow on Instagram, who posts a lot of memes, recently posted a meme that was super fatphobic. [TW: I’m going to describe it.] It was one of those dogs that has very thin legs and very round bellies, and for some reason, this photo of the dog was standing on two legs and wearing jeans. The caption was something like “how men over thirty look in jeans.” I am sure she posted it thinking, “I’m laughing at men and we are allowed to laugh at men.” Which, you know, is sort of true. I think that was her intention on one level. But it’s not okay to make fun of the bodies of fat men or fat women or fat people of any gender. It’s not okay to equate fat people with animals. And the meme did both those things. So I sent her a message and said, “I know your intention was to be humorous, but this meme equates fat people’s bodies to animals. That is very harmful.” She was immediately defensive. She said, “You know my account is a humor account, try to take it in that spirit. I’m really sensitive about body image issues. That’s not what I was doing here. I’m just making fun of men over thirty!” Of course, it’s also not okay to be posting ageist memes, so that wasn’t a super helpful argument. But I didn’t get into a long explanation of why the meme was wrong. Instead I said, “I am saying, as someone in a bigger body than you, with a body that looks quite similar to this animal, that I find this harmful. And I’m also saying this to you as someone with a fair amount of privilege as a small fat person. There are people in bigger bodies who will find this meme even more harmful, who won’t feel safe speaking up. And so I hope you’ll reconsider this in the future.” I stayed really polite, I didn’t get super inflammatory. I felt annoyed, to be honest, that I had to be that thoughtful and careful about it because this is part of the labor of engaging on these issues, right? Someone else has said the offensive thing but somehow it’s our job to keep it light and friendly, as we are calling them out on their offensiveness. I want to hold space for that piece of it. But I also think the reality is, you’re not going to get anywhere with someone if you come in and say, “This is horrible. How dare you post it?” They’re only going to get defensive, and they’re not going to start to think about it. She did come back to me after that follow-up and said, “I appreciate you for speaking up on this.” And I haven’t seen a fatphobic meme go up on her account again. So I’m hopeful that there was maybe an opportunity for some learning there. Figuring out some ways where you can, in a friendly way—and again, holding space for the fact that it’s annoying that we have to be so friendly about this—say, “Oh, hey, I’m not really here for fat jokes,” or, you know, “Let’s not go after their bodies.” I think about this a lot. When people make jokes about Donald Trump, there is so much material about Donald Trump, you can make a million jokes about him, you don’t have to talk about the fact that he’s a fat person. We don’t need to go there. There are many other reasons to hate on him. If someone comes back to you, though, it’s useful to say, “Look, these comments do cause harm. And, you know, I’ve been thinking about this more. I’ve been trying to do my own work.” I think it’s useful to own, “I don’t always get this right myself.” Then it’s not you versus them. You’re saying that this is learning we all need to be doing and this is learning I’m doing right along with you. Q: I have a really odd food etiquette question about being a guest of someone who is massively restricting calories and we do not. I felt guilty eating the entire week at her house and was really hungry, and we are back there over Christmas. She has a very good friend from high school and not anorexic, but suddenly super aware of every calorie and kept bugging me if I ate. Any polite way to handle this?This is another one I think a lot of us may be encountering over the holidays. Some of the people hosting us may be on diets, and that’s going to be a drag. I think it’s important, as a guest in someone’s home, to stay aware of the amount of work they’re doing to host you with these meals. There is a lot of labor being performed by your friend and by women in general around the holidays. Even if that labor comes with an infusion of diet culture, we want to be respectful of the labor and make it clear that we see the labor. To that end, I think one easy solution might be to say, “You know, you did so much to host us last time, we are so grateful. This time, when we come to stay, please let us buy the groceries!” And go and buy groceries and take her list and buy whatever she needs for cooking Christmas dinner, but also buy food you want to have in the house. Buy the food that you like to have for breakfast, or some snacks you want to have on hand. To be honest, this may still be super stressful to her because people who are restricting are often very anxious about having more food in the house. But I think if you keep framing it as, “we want to take all this work of hosting off your shoulders, you don’t need to feed us every meal,” that makes it easier for her. And at least you’re acknowledging her labor even while you’re also meeting your own needs. If buying all the groceries isn’t an option, pitch in to help with the cooking as much as you can. If you’re staying for more than just Christmas Day, say, “Okay, you’re cooking Christmas dinner, but can we please handle breakfast that day? Or can we please make lunch the next day?” So you’re acknowledging her labor, you’re helping to reduce her labor, and then at the same time, you’re making sure there are a few meals in there that are going to have enough food and food that you like to eat, as well. If grocery shopping and cooking isn’t an option, I would offer to pick up takeout. Suggest eating out in restaurants for other meals. Go out and get bagels in the morning for breakfast. Look for other ways to bring in more food, not in a way that’s rejecting the food that she is making, but in a way that is supplementing. And then that way, when you are placing restaurant orders, you can order what you want and it’s really not her problem. If none of that feels like an option, or it helps but doesn’t help that much, you can also pack some snacks to keep in your room or wherever you’re staying. So if she makes a very sad diet-y dinner, you can at least go have some chips or some granola bars afterwards and not be starving. That’s awkward and it doesn’t feel great, but if you do that, do not feel ashamed about the eating you’re doing that as a way of managing your own self care during the holidays. Holidays are stressful for a million different reasons. You not having enough to eat is not going to make it better. As for her comments bugging you about what you eat, I think that’s another thing where setting a really friendly boundary, maybe over email before you get there or the first time the comment comes up, could be helpful. You can say something like, “Our bodies are all different. We just need different amounts of food.” Just make it clear that you’re not going to get into a nickel and dime-ing conversation about she’s eating this way or you’re eating that way. Sometimes people start to have this diet talk war, where they’re comparing health strategies, and that’s not at all helpful. So make it clear, you’re not here for that. However you eat, you’re not going to defend it to her. And you’d really rather talk about other things, it’s more interesting. It sounds like she’s deep in her own struggle here. So anything she does say about your eating is a reflection of her own anxiety, it is not actually about you, even though it’s going to feel like it’s about you. Just remember, if you want to take seconds at a meal, if you want to order something different, if you suggest going over to another friend’s house, because that way you’ll get a meal you like, you don’t owe her an explanation for that. You can just say, “Oh, this is so delicious. I’m excited to eat it. So and so’s a great cook,” and leave it at that.Okay, and now we are going to wrap up with a segment that I think is going to be a regular feature on solo episodes, called, “Can my kid eat that?” And the answer is always going to be yes! I get a version of this question every single week, so I’m going to keep answering it every time we do these episodes because I get it. I get this anxiety and I think it’s really important that we keep speaking to it. So this week’s can my kid eat that is: Q: I have a question that I am truly confused about. How many days a week can my newly two year old toddler have an ice cream cone as a snack or dessert? He is obsessed. He created his own sign language for it. He brings books open to the page with a picture of an ice cream. Not that it matters, but he’s under 5% for height and weight. So I usually give him whatever he wants. I just have all of the voices in my head on this. First: It doesn’t matter that he’s under 5% for height or weight. Yes, your child can have ice cream every day for a snack or dessert. If your child is in the zero percentile if your child is in the 99th percentile. The food we serve our children is not dependent on their body size, ever. How many days a week can your two year old have ice cream? Seven. There are seven days in a week, your child can have ice cream seven days a week. There is no law against this. Yes, you can serve ice cream every day. I say this as someone who did serve my two year old ice cream every day. My younger daughter was two in the summer of 2020 When we were in lockdown, and I was stuck at home with two children and zero childcare and nowhere to go and nothing to do. We had “ice cream o’clock” every afternoon on our front porch. The reason we did this was because as the weather started warming up, my kids were both asking for ice cream pretty often and fixated on when we would have ice cream again. I realized they had a scarcity mindset about it just because when it’s cold, we don’t eat ice cream. So then when it’s warm, and we start eating ice cream again, it’s super exciting, and they want to have it all the time. So we made ice cream o’clock a daily thing and we ate it every single day. After about three weeks, they were completely over it, they would leave it to melt in puddles while they went off to play. It was not a concern. We kind of switched it to popsicles, sometimes ice cream sandwiches, sometimes they didn’t want ice cream and they had a different snack. And the issue completely faded. And that was true for the two year old and for the then-six year old. So them being a younger toddler doesn’t impact this they will be able to adjust and habituate to having access to the food just as well as an older kid. I would make it a specific ritual like that though, because you can tell him this is the time we will have ice cream. And you don’t have to have ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and every snack. You can say “Oh, I know you love ice cream so much” when he makes his little sign (by the way, that’s adorable.) When he makes his ice cream sign or shows you the book with ice cream, say “Yes, I can’t wait! We’re going to have ice cream after your nap.” Tie it to something he can really understand because at two he doesn’t grasp the schedule well and that’s why he’s asking so often, as well. So, hearing we’ll have it tomorrow or we’ll have it this weekend is probably too vague and too far off for him.Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast!Once again, if you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode. And consider a paid subscription to the Burnt Toast newsletter. It’s just $5 per month or $50 for the year. You get a ton of cool perks and you keep this space ad and sponsor free.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.  This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

Hello, and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!Today, I am so so thrilled to be chatting with Ragen Chastain, who is a professional speaker and writer, trained researcher, and co-author of The HAES Health Sheets. Ragen is also a multi-certified health and fitness professional, and a queer fat woman. Ragen, thank you so much for being here!RagenThanks for having me. I love your work so much. I’m giddy as a school girl! VirginiaRagen and I have been in each other’s orbits for a very long time. We were talking about something that we worked on where the website doesn’t even exist anymore. RagenVirginia gave me my very first paid freelance work in this space. She was leaving a platform and recommended me, so she’s been supporting my work, and just be an awesome leader in her own right, for a long time.VirginiaThat’s very lovely of you to say. When I first found your work in the mid-2000s you were extremely patient with my learning curve. For folks who don’t know, Ragen created the beloved fat activism blog Dances With Fat. She is now writing a Substack called Weight and Healthcare. So let’s start with that, Ragen. You have this amazing blog, you’ve been doing it forever, you have, I don’t even know, 1000 posts there. What inspired you to also say I need a newsletter?RagenI started Dances With Fat in 2009. There are a little over 1800 posts on there now. In the same year, I started doing talks for healthcare professionals around working with higher weight patients: Best practices, weight, stigma, weight science, health care. I wrote about that on Dances With Fat, but recently I’ve started to do more of that work and to do it at a higher level, and when I’m talking with a VP of a major healthcare group, sending them to Dances with Fat is not ideal, even though I’m very proud of that blog. It’s not quite the the thing that they’re looking for. I knew about Substack and I knew about Burnt Toast, so I reached out to Virginia, who helped give me a sense of how Substack worked. It seemed like a really good platform for this type of work. I got a little logo made from Toni Tails, a little researcher Ragen icon, and then put together some of the posts from Dances With Fat that were classics. Now I’m going to be writing new stuff, as well. VirginiaI sort of love the idea of healthcare CEOs going to Dances With Fat. It gives me a lot of joy. But it’s a smart activism strategy to have it all in one place. We’re recording this, I should say, right after your first launch week. So you’ve been putting up a lot of pieces that I will be linking to forever. You are covering these really fundamental questions that can be kind of exasperating, like, “This question is coming up again?” But for people who are new to challenging this huge paradigm, you do have to start with these fundamental questions and grapple with stuff. One question people often ask is, “Isn’t obesity a disease?” So, walk us through it, Ragen.RagenThis is something that has been coming up more and more, this idea that just existing in a fat body is a chronic lifelong health condition for which people should get treatment. This has been pushed for a while now by people who sell dangerous and expensive “treatments” for weight loss. I first started seeing it happening in the most insidious way, with organizations that claim to be advocacy organizations—like the Obesity Action Coalition—but that are actually well-funded by diet drug manufacturers and weight loss surgery purveyors. For the diet drugs, for example, their product doesn’t work long term. People gain the weight back as soon as they go off the drugs. So the drug companies say, “Oh, well, it’s a chronic and lifelong condition, then we can just keep them on the drugs forever,” which is exactly what Novo Nordisk is doing, and why they’re pushing this so hard right now. It also expands their market to every fat person alive. That helps them with what is their golden goose, which is insurance coverage. They can’t get insurance to cover these things because they’re expensive and because they don’t work. So by saying, “Oh, well, it’s because you haven’t let us do it long enough,” they are expanding their market. But that it doesn’t make any sense, and here’s why: Thin people get all the same health issues that fat people do. So, being thin can neither be a sure preventative nor a sure cure. That’s just not how that works. This idea that if fat people experience a health problem more often than thin people, then obviously their body size is the problem and making them thinner is the solution is not a science-based conclusion. We have to look at what are the confounding variables that could be causing this? And in this case, weight cycling, weight stigma, and healthcare inequalities are well researched for their negative impacts on fat people’s health. And this idea of fat being a chronic condition increases those three things. I want to be super clear, there is no shame in having a health condition. There is no shame in seeking treatment. The shame here is trying to make simply existing a pathologized condition for which people can sell dangerous treatments that risk people’s lives for an outcome that isn’t shown to be positive. It’s actually shown to be harmful a lot of the time. So, the AMA studied this. They had their Committee on Science of Public Health study whether or not being fat should be a disease and the committee came back and said no. And the AMA said, “Okay, well, thanks for your time, but we’re gonna go ahead and declare it a disease anyway.” VirginiaI just want people to really take that in. The American Medical Association’s committee that was asked to study that question, should we medicalize weight higher body weights, said no, the evidence does not support that. And the AMA said, Okay, so we’re gonna do it. RagenYeah, it’s a “let me just take a minute to bang my head on the desk and then I’ll complete this post that I’m writing” sort of situation.It’s important because this seems so science-y and medical-y, right? BMI is an equation and that’s math and math is science. We have these words like “obesity” that pathologize body size, and that can sound really legitimate, right? But then you start digging and learn that Body Mass Index is just a complicated ratio of weight and height that is racist in its origins. Sabrina String’s Fearing the Black Body and Da'Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast are books I recommend to everyone to read about this and other racism and body size intersections. The term obesity comes from a Latin word meaning “to eat until fat.” This is not science. It’s a term that was created to pathologize bodies. It was invented for that purpose. The AMA saying, “Oh, yes, this is this constitutes a chronic health condition or disease,” sounds very science-y until you find out that the actual science had to be ignored to make that happen.VirginiaYes and this “chronic lifelong condition” we’re talking about, the treatments that they are pushing actually exacerbate the condition, because the condition is living with weight stigma, living with social inequities around health care, all of these other issues that these treatments further. Fat is not a chronic lifelong health condition.RagenIt really isn’t. It’s gotten out that intentional weight loss interventions fail the vast majority of the time. The majority of the time weight loss has the opposite of the intended effect, right? People gain back all of their weight and up to 66% of people gain back more than they lost. But the response wasn’t, “Hey, there’s a mountain of evidence that shows that there are better ways to support the health of fat people than trying to make them lose weight.” The suggestion was, “Well, then let’s do it harder, and more and more dangerously.” And that’s what we’re seeing with the pharmaceuticals. That’s what we’re seeing with the surgery. We’re getting healthcare for fat people based on the premise that it is acceptable to kill fat people in an effort to make them thin.VirginiaAnd yet they’re saying we need to get insurance coverage for these things, even though they don’t work. They frame that as an example of the stigma. They’re like, “Look, it’s so misunderstood that the insurance companies won’t even pay for these treatments that these people desperately need.” They don’t see the inherent disconnect there. RagenI’m going to say they aggressively don’t see the disconnect, possibly negligently, purposefully don’t see it. They’re saying, “We don’t want to stigmatize fat people, we just want to eradicate them from the earth and make sure no more ever exist.” That’s not an anti-stigma message. It’s a profitable one. One of the things that frustrates me is the way that they are co-opting the rhetoric of anti-weight stigma, which the fat liberation community has spent so long trying to get out there, and then using that to sell even more dangerous intentional weight loss methods. It is super gross.They are creating weight stigma and then selling their dangerous product as a “solution.” It’s this idea that if you don’t want to be oppressed, you should change yourself to suit your oppressors.VirginiaThat’s what I want my kids to learn: Make the bully like you better.RagenGive them your lunch money, and maybe they’ll stop beating you up! It’s not a perfect comparison, obviously, but as someone who is both queer and fat and who came out in the mid-90s in Texas, I see parallels between that and this idea of just doing whatever dangerous thing you need to do to make yourself straight, so that you don’t experience homophobia; this idea of changing yourself to move yourself out of the oppressed category, rather than fighting oppression. I spent years fighting my body on behalf of weight stigma. Weight stigma is real and weight stigma does real harm, including to me, but now I fight weight stigma on behalf of my body.VirginiaThat’s a really helpful framing. You took one for the team by taking on one of the most common and irritating troll comments around fat activism: That all these fat people are a drain on the system because they’re costing us so much money in terms of tax dollars in health care. This is an argument that hits me really personally, not around weight, but I have a daughter with a chronic heart condition. I wrote a piece for Slate about the fact that we had $3 million in medical bills before she turned three years old. That’s why universal health care is essential, to help families avoid destroying themselves financially to save their children. The number one troll response I got was: “She’s a drain on the system. Some kids aren’t meant to live.”RagenIn the piece I tackle that from two aspects: The reality and then if it were true that fat people are this drain on the system. The first thing I always do when somebody comes at me with this “my tax dollars” argument is I say, “Well, I want to see your yes/no tax list.” They say, “What yes/no tax list?” And I say, “Oh, the one that shows all the things your taxes pay for broken down into what you do and don’t want to pay for, and the interventions you’re involved in for everything you don’t want to pay for.” This isn’t about their tax dollars. This is about trying to find a justification for their fat bigotry. This is what they’ve arrived at that people sort of find acceptable. Like, “Oh, well, I’m paying for their health care.” But that’s what civilized societies do, right? I am paying for the health care of people who jumped out of helicopters wearing skis and people whose attempts to climb mountains are dramatically unsuccessful. I want to do that. Anytime you say, “Okay, this group of people who we can identify by sight is a drain on society and we should eradicate them to make things cheaper for everyone,” you have gone down a bad bad road. This is a straight up eugenics argument. We have to really recognize that. I find that people who want to say this about me don’t want other people to be doing it to them. Whether they are a raw foods vegan or a keto or paleo person, they believe that they’re right, and they are not interested in other points of view. This is where it really starts to break down. Who gets to decide for all of us? If somebody finds that, for example, a raw food vegan diet is the most healthy, do we all have to do that? VirginiaAnd do we all have to do that in order to access healthcare? What do we owe in order to access healthcare?RagenExactly. This is a really dangerous argument that’s being made by people flippantly, in many cases, just to justify discriminating against fat people, just to justify their weight bigotry. They don’t follow it to the end of where that goes. So that’s really dangerous. And also, fat people pay taxes, too. My taxes go to fund a government war on “obesity” that makes my life terrible and has negative impacts on my health. In general, this argument, when you scratch the surface even a little bit, just becomes a thin veil for fat bigotry that is unsupportable by any kind of evidence.VirginiaAnd ableism! It’s saying that the only people worthy of health care are people who are making virtuous choices that we approve of or who won the genetic lottery and don’t really need health care. What strikes me when it’s levied against fat folks is that it’s often because people are blaming people for their body size and assuming that it’s your lifestyle that led to this, as opposed to the fact that people just come in different body sizes. With something like my daughter, you can’t say, “The baby’s responsible for her heart condition, but we still don’t want to pay for it.” Either way, it becomes this ableist thing to say some lives are more valuable because they have this genetic luck. RagenThere are a lot of places where the intersections of ableism and healthism and fatphobia come together, and this is certainly one. One of the things that is also frustrating is that the idea of body size as a choice is obviously really problematic, but even if we believed that that was true, also a choice is playing sports, which cost billions of dollars in sports injuries every year that are completely unnecessary. Research shows that moderate walking gives us the health benefits that can come out of movement, so nobody needs to be playing sports.VirginiaI love this so much as someone who just hates sports.RagenI’m someone who loves sports and who does ridiculous fitness-y things. Just to be super clear, health and fitness, by any definition, is not an obligation, not a barometer of worthiness, not entirely within our control. There is this good fatty / bad fatty thing, so I always want to be clear that completing a marathon or having a Netflix marathon are morally equivalent activities. I’ve done both, so I can tell you for sure. So, it’s not about that, but I enjoy fitness. I’m also aware that when you go to a triathlon or when you watch the CrossFit Games and people have an exoskeleton of physio tape, that’s a lot of injuries that people don’t need to have in their lives, but they’re choosing that lifestyle. Shaq got knee surgery even though he for sure caused his knee problem and was going right back to the lifestyle that caused it. The NFL was created to risk people’s short and long term mental and physical health in the hopes that one day their team will score enough points to get a shiny piece of jewelry. You’re allowed to do that, but let’s not act like it prioritizes health because it doesn’t. This is a whole group of people purposefully not prioritizing their health and the average player is broke by two years out of the league. VirginiaAnother piece I love is where you break down why diets fail. A line that really jumped out to me, in your piece, is “the entire basis of prescribing weight loss for greater health is built on the decidedly unscientific premise that if we make fat people look like thin people, they will have the same health outcomes.” RagenWhen I did my original literature review of weight loss, looking for the best diet, I was still in diet culture, but my background is research methods and statistics and I’d never really researched this. I had been yo-yo dieting for years. I decided to read every study and break it down and find the best diet. What I found was that, as you said, there wasn’t a single study were more than a tiny fraction of people were succeeding at long term, significant weight loss. The thing that really blew me away was that there wasn’t a single study that showed that the people who were successful had better out health outcomes or similar health outcomes to thin people. That study doesn’t exist, in large part because there aren’t enough people who are successful to commission such a study.VirginiaIt’s hard to do research on unicorns.RagenThe National Weight Control Registry tried it, they’ve got 10,000 successes since 1994. There have been over a billion attempts, but okay. What they found were just some commonalities among outliers. 98% of the people who have lost 30 pounds and kept it off for a year ate breakfast. They don’t know how many of the other billion also ate breakfast. VirginiaA lot of us eat breakfast without successfully losing weight. RagenHad I turned in the study plan of the National Weight Control Registry research in my freshman year research methods class, the dean would have been telling me, “There are a lot of majors here and I think you should choose another one because you don’t understand this at a pretty basic level.” We know that cis male pattern baldness is highly correlated with cardiac incidents. So it would be like if they stopped there and said, “We have to get these people to grow hair” And when their initial attempts didn’t work, they were like, “We need more dangerous ways to grow hair! Drugs and surgeries and a war on baldness!” That is exactly what they did when it came to weight and health. They simply stopped and those who didn’t stop are getting ignored. Lucy Aphramor did an incredible paper about the validity of the research within dietetic articles. It’s a great piece and I recommend it for people who are trying to look into this. VirginiaI’m thinking of a doctor I saw when I was six months postpartum and my baby wasn’t sleeping through the night. The doctor was concerned about my weight. She was like, “Oh, well, I walked an hour a day when I had a newborn.” And I was like, “That’s nice for you, but I have a job and two children and I don’t have an hour to walk. If I had an hour to walk, I would sleep.” It’s just not realistic. A friend of mine was just telling me that she’s pursuing treatment for various medical conditions and the guy was like, “Intermittent fasting will solve all your problems.” And she’s like, “I am parenting and working full time, during a pandemic. I have two chronic conditions. Starvation is not a great way for me to go.” The way that diet and fatphobia show up in the healthy habits conversation feels really problematic to me. It ends up becoming another form of shame and stigma. What can we do, as patients, to advocate for ourselves in these conversations? RagenOne way to go is to try to bypass it. My magic question is, “What would you recommend to a thin person in this situation?” Often that bypasses some of the fatphobia and some of the recommending of healthy habits just because they believe if you did them, you would lose weight. I was at a regular physical with a new doctor and at the end he said, “I just need you to do something for me and it’s going to be so hard. So hard. But if you can do it, it is going to change your life.” And he said, “I just need you to start walking ten minutes a day.” And to his credit, ten minutes a day is reasonable! He didn’t say you have to walk an hour, like your doctor said. But I was training for my first marathon and I had done eighteen miles the night before. So I told him that and said, “I’d be glad to do ten minutes a day because I’m going to claw back a lot of time that way, but I don’t think it’s going to meet my goals at all.” And he said, “Look, you don’t have to lie about it if you’re not going to do it.” So one thing to always know is that this isn’t your fault. This shouldn’t be happening. You can’t make a doctor practice ethical, evidence-based medicine. I also teach ego management techniques—because I live in LA, I can fire a doctor a day, and I will, there there are tons of them around—but if someone lives in a rural area and there’s only one doctor, they have different options. So you can say things like, “oh, I’m actually already doing a weight loss diet, and I’ve lost some weight, but it hasn’t really helped.” This doesn’t have to be true, by the way. Then you say, “What would you do for a thin person? Let’s try that as well.” Like, “Sure, I’m gonna take this diet advice you’re giving me and I can’t wait to put food in baggies of certain caloric amounts. I’m super excited. But in the meantime my cousin had this and she was given this medication.” When a thin person gets an evidence based treatment for their symptoms and a fat person gets a diet, it delays them getting that evidence based treatment for who knows how long. Probably forever, because that diet isn’t gonna work. So, unless the doctor says, “Okay, this isn’t working, I’ll give you the treatment,” it can delay treatment forever. The person maybe doesn’t go back. This is just one of the ways that these healthcare inequalities impact fat people’s health. Just to be clear, don’t do the diet. And I also want to be clear that lying to your healthcare practitioner is not ideal. Ideally, you wouldn’t need to do that. The fact is that weight stigma in healthcare forces fat people to make some really difficult choices that we shouldn’t have to make. This is one of them. In the past when I needed care and was not been able to get it, I said, “I already lost 75 pounds. It hasn’t helped at all. What else is there? What else do you have?” That was, in that moment, effective. Suddenly I’m somebody who is compliant and deserves ethical, evidence-based care. But what they recommended was also recommendable ten minutes before, when I was just fat. Our choices are often not ideal.VirginiaIt’s frustrating because you are then stuck needing to play into that “good fatty” stereotype. But if that gets you the treatment you need and it’s a way to preserve your mental health through the shitty ordeal, then it’s worth doing.RagenA lot of privilege goes into this too. Not just good fatty privilege, but like as a white, cisgender, currently able-bodied, currently neurotypical person. For those with multiple marginalizations, for those who are higher weight, these solutions are less effective because of intersectional oppression and because of the greater oppression that higher weight people face. That’s a your-mileage-may-vary-due-to-oppression -situation.VirginiaThe HAES health sheet website that you’ve put together, is a phenomenal resource for folks. Ragen worked with Dr. Louise Metz and Tiana Dodson, who are amazing as well. They’ve put together this whole library of different health conditions and information on the weight inclusive approach to this health condition, as opposed to the weight-loss-centered approach that many doctors take. If you’re preparing for a medical encounter, this is a great place to go and prep yourself for what’s to come. So we’re gonna wrap up with our recommendation segment. It can be about a product anything and experience you’ve had recently so, Regan, what have you got for us?RagenI have for you Latoya Shauntay Snell’s Running Fat Chef podcast. Latoya Shauntay Snell is this incredible, Black, fat, disabled athlete and activist. She put together this podcast with different athletes talking about the intersections of weight stigma and fitness in the athletic world and how to overcome that. I love all of her work, and her podcast is incredible.VirginiaThat sounds phenomenal. I will definitely be subscribing and downloading immediately. That’s an awesome recommendation. Mine is a little more out of left field, given the whole context of our conversation, but very much in the field for the context of my life right now. It is a parenting book I’m finding very helpful called Why Is My Child in Charge? by Claire Lerner. If you have a preschooler or a toddler who is often trying to be in charge of your life this book is great. I am not a big fan of parenting writing, which is weird to say since I get labeled as parenting writer, but it’s true. Melinda Wenner Moyer, who’s a friend and parenting writer I love, actually loaned me her copy because I was texting her about various tantrums happening in the house. Lerner frames parenting as understanding that you cannot control your child’s behavior. So your job is not to persuade them to agree with every rule you make or to get them to change their minds about stuff, but actually to keep providing the framework they need to be loved and nurtured without needing to stay up an hour past bedtime and ruin your life.It actually applies to a lot, like what we were just talking about with doctors, you can’t change their minds either. It’s a useful message for going through life. I’m not here to change other people’s behavior. I’m just here to set my boundaries and set the framework I need to function. It’s been very helpful for me with a certain four year old at the moment. (Virginia Note: I finished the book after recording this episode and sadly, cannot recommend the chapter on mealtimes. But the rest is still great!)RagenI feel like I need to read it for my little Maltese. We named him after three drag queens and he acts like it. Don’t name your dog after three drag queens.VirginiaWe also have a dog whose behavior I cannot control, but I can control the framework. Alright Ragen, where can Burnt Toast fans find more of your work?RagenSo my newsletter is Weight and Health Care. You had mentioned the HAES Health Sheets and then Dances with Fat. I also do a monthly workshop and the one coming up is on dealing with fatphobia at the holidays. We will be talking a lot about how we can’t control their people’s behavior but we can control our reactions and boundary setting. If you go to Dances with Fat, you’ll also find all of my social media and past writing outside of the healthcare sphere. VirginiaAwesome. Ragen, thank you so much for doing this.Thank you all so much for listening to Burnt Toast! 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. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

Hello, and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!Today, I'm delighted to be chatting with Corinne Fay, who is my awesome newsletter assistant and the founder of @SellTradePlus, an amazing Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.VirginiaWelcome! Thanks for being here.CorinneThanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to be a tiny crumb of Burnt Toast.VirginiaIf we're going to use this metaphor, you would be the butter or some other very important component. The crust? You are a really crucial part of Burnt Toast, behind the scenes. For folks who don't know, Corinne edits the newsletters every week. She catches my many typos and word repetitions and things like that. She also, even more crucially, edits the transcripts (that you may well be reading right now) and makes them legible. She takes out all the times I say “you know,” and “um,” which is really a gift. You also do many other amazing things. So, tell us a little bit about yourself—where you live, what else you do professionally, and anything else you want to share.CorinneI live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My main full-time gig is doing social media—mostly Instagram, actually—for a local design and manufacturing studio. Our main product is very high-end commercial wall covering. It's the kind of thing that you would see in the Bank of America corporate offices or a tech company office. It's made out of merino wool felt and has very geometric designs. It’s sound absorbing. It’s a very nice product! I have no children, but I do have a very rambunctious dog named Bunny. Hopefully we will not hear her barking in the background. If you follow me on Instagram, I post many photos of her. VirginiaShe's so freaking cute. She's gray and adorable. And you're in New Mexico, home to the most amazing burritos, which we're going to talk about later. I am regularly jealous of your burrito content. More importantly, you do @SellTradePlus! Tell us about that. Tell us the origin story of what inspired you to to launch this because it is a very crucial service in the plus size community.CorinneI started @SellTradePlus in 2018. At the time, I was following two other sell/trade accounts on Instagram. I was following them because they were reselling clothes that I was interested in buying, but also could not afford. I had post notifications on, so I'd get a little ding on my phone every time something posted. But every time something posted, I'd get incredibly sad and frustrated because it was never my size. Maybe like one piece out of hundreds might fit me. So, I started thinking about how if I were shopping in real life—at a thrift or secondhand store—I would just go to the section that was my size. That made so much more sense to me, as a way to shop. I decided that I would start an account that focused on size, first and foremost.When I started @SellTradePlus in 2018, it felt like there were no slow fashion brands or independent designers doing plus sizes. I was also interested in meeting other people who were interested in the same kind of clothes and who wanted to chat about which brands we could squeeze into or make work.The way @SellTradePlus works is, if you have something you want to sell, you send in an email. In the body of the email is the text of the post—we have a format we use with the item, size, condition price, etc—and then you attach photos of the garment. Then it goes into a queue and eventually, I post it on Instagram. People who are interested will leave their zip codes in the comments. Twenty-four hours after the post goes up, the seller randomly selects a person to sell the piece to. This is a little different than some other sell/trade accounts. We do it that way just so people have more of a window to think, “Do I want this? Is this something I need?”VirginiaThat's nice. It takes away the pressure of first come first serve, and maybe you don't actually need the thing but you’re afraid you'll miss your chance. CorinneExactly. So it's not always just the first person commenting who wins. And then, if and when the garment sells, I take a small fee. That’s how I keep things running.VirginiaAs well, you should, because this is a lot of work you’re doing. It's such a smart model. I really hear you about that experience of just wanting to be able to go to my size range and cut out all that other noise. It is so difficult to do, both because in person shopping has become increasingly not a thing for many of us for reasons, and then even when you're shopping online, it's exhausting. Then if you add in that you are wanting more ethically produced fashion, there are so few brands doing that in the plus size space. There have been some improvements, but not enough. So buying buying secondhand is a nice workaround for that. It's very genius. I think you're doing a real service. In addition to solving all these practical problems for people, you've been building this really lovely Instagram community. You have these great, awesome open thread posts that you do on Fridays where people talk about all kinds of different things. I got advice recently on plus size underwear brands, which was useful to me. All different topics come up. I'm curious, was that also part of your original goal? Was it something you cultivated? Or did it just kind of happen that way?CorinneIt was definitely part of my original goal. I was really looking for a place where I could connect with other people who were a similar size, who were interested in similar types of clothes, so that we could share info about what brands fit us or what things we could make work. The community aspect has definitely become a huge part of it for me. Even sharing stuff like fast fashion pieces that are better than you think they would be. If there's a really good Target jumpsuit that fits plus size bodies and is made out of a nice material, it's just a good place to share info like that. [Corinne Edit: The jumpsuit linked there is good, but it isn’t as good as last year’s version!]And I actually have a few people that I've met through @SellTradePlus who live in Albuquerque that I've met in real life. Someone just did an in-person plus size clothing swap in Philadelphia. The community is definitely a big part of it for me and when I think about what might be next for @SellTradePlus, I don't want to lose that element.VirginiaI agree. I think it's really special. It's interesting, too, because I'm noticing a lot of tension over which brands do we want to support, which brands do we not want to support. We don't have to get into specifics, especially because by the time this airs the whole conversation will change. That tension comes from a very real place, right? This is a marginalized group who hasn't had enough options and emotions, understandably, run very high. But I appreciate that you have created a space that's positive and supportive. There is space for people to have those feelings, of course, but is more focused on solutions and helping each other, rather than some of the tear-each-other-down stuff I’m seeing in other spaces.CorinneWe definitely have drama sometimes—but who doesn’t? We're realizing now that is the very nature of social media: Drama makes it work.VirginiaOnce you start to get a little bit bigger, it's inevitable because you're not talking to only 300 people anymore—it’s thousands of people. Overall, I feel like you keep a very positive tone and I appreciate it.CorinneThank you. I feel lucky that—maybe because it's clothes—we're not on the troll radar. I fear that as we get bigger, that might change. VirginiaIt's good that you don't talk about parenting or health, because I can say from experience those are troll-heavy subjects, especially where they intersect with weight. A lot of my life choices I have to question.CorinneOh God, I'm so sorry!VirginiaIt's fine. It's all part of the gig. It's a fraction of what I deal with, honestly. I mostly have really positive interactions with people, but it is a part of the job. I'm just glad you can protect yourself from that to some extent. Let's talk a little bit more about fat fashion. I've seen really beautiful pieces go up on @SellTradePlus. There are great clothes, but you're also seeing things that haven't worked for people, right? That's why they're passing them on. I'm curious if you've identified any themes. Are there certain brands where the sizing is really inconsistent so they don't work out for people? Are there certain types of garments? Other things that are real problem areas in fat fashion?CorinneThis is something I could talk about for hours. The number one biggest thing that comes up over and over again is sizing. When brands decide they're going to start making plus sizes, a lot of times it seems like they just go for it without doing any research. Sometimes there's a whole different sizing scale where you think you're ordering a 3X but it's actually the equivalent of like a standard plus size 18.Often there are huge issues with pattern grading. Pattern grading is really complicated, but basically when an item of clothing is designed, they design one base size, and then grade that up and grade it down from there. The problem is that when you grade up or down, eventually the pattern becomes distorted. If a brand offers sizes 0-12 and wants to expand to a size 26, they have to create a whole new base pattern. If they don't do that, the typical problems you see are things like the sleeve on the upper arm is too tight or the ankle is like weirdly big and not in line with the original look of the pants. It turns out ankles don't get fat at the same rate as butts! It's a problem of trying to linearly make a piece of clothing bigger and that's not how fatness and bodies work. That's probably the number one problem. There are some brands where it's just so obvious that they haven't done the grading right.There are also certain fabrics that are just really hard to get right, like linen pants where you're going to wear out the thighs really fast if your thighs rub together or wear out the seams if they're a little bit tight. Also non-stretch stuff, like 100% cotton denim or canvas. It can just be uncomfortable sometimes. There's so much variance in like how large bodies carry weight so it's just so hard to get the fit right sometimes.VirginiaWhen I was doing my jeans research people kept saying—because I kept complaining that the jeans were stretching out so fast—that I need non-stretch denim. Maybe? But, in plus sizes, that is very hard to find. And if it doesn't work that's going to feel miserable on my body, like wearing a suit of armor. CorinneExactly. With the 100% cotton denim, you either have to stretch it out—so you're wearing it while it’s incredibly uncomfortable, which can be really triggering for some people—or they don’t stretch at all. I also had a non-stretch pair that I just ripped bending over because… they don't stretch.VirginiaThey don’t move with your body. That's a good point about it being triggering for folks.When clothes don’t fit, it’s a really emotional thing.CorinneFor people that already struggle with feeling comfortable in their bodies, it just doesn't feel good.Another thing is that now that we live in this post-/ongoing pandemic, there are a lot of styles that just are not selling right now. Like business casual stuff. Like Ann Taylor, LOFT, blazers, blouse-y stuff. This may change when people go back to the office, but who knows? Maybe the world has changed forever. And the other thing that is consistently a hard sell is shoes. I think they're just really hard to buy online, especially if you can't return them.VirginiaThat's fair. If the shoe doesn’t fit, there’s no faking it. CorinneNo. No one's going to tell you to stretch out the shoe. Or maybe they are, I don't know.VirginiaIt's not going to work.The business casual stuff totally makes sense, that you would be seeing more of that right now. The sizing thing is so, so tricky. That's why I think this is such a smart resource. I had an experience recently where I ordered two jumpsuits from Big Bud Press. And I’ll call them out: The sizing was atrocious! I measured myself, I used the chart, and I couldn't get them up over my hips. And then to return them, I had to send an email within 14 days of purchase and get blessed to return them, which is a lot of hassle. I did manage to get them in under the wire and get my money back, but the whole time I was thinking, well maybe I could post them on @SellTradePlus because this is so stressful. CorinneTheir sizing is just whack.VirginiaIt makes no sense and it's very frustrating. So I like having this alternative option if you get screwed on returns, which unfortunately happens a lot.You're seeing what trends people are really responding to and getting excited about. What kinds of items are gold on @SellTradePlus? Things you know will go fast. CorinneThe most popular posts, the ones that have just dozens and dozens of people interested in them, are often the most colorful stuff: a pair of like Lucy & Yak overalls with a bright floral pattern, or the NorBlack NorWhite dress with the rainbow-y plaid, or even a sweater from Target that's just like a really good shade. Those items are just the most consistently popular, across brands and across sizes. Fat people have been told, “Wear a black sweater.” And either because everyone already has twenty-five black sweaters and they are not as hard to find, or maybe because a black sweater doesn't stand out in the grid as much, sometimes that more generic stuff is a little bit harder to sell, even when it's a popular brand. The colorful stuff really gets people, I think.VirginiaThat makes sense. I think it is speaking to a craving a lot of people have. You're working within the Instagram model, too, like what stands out when people are scrolling.CorinneI'm always really excited to see larger sizes just because they are less common—like size 24 and up. We just don't get as much of that and also that's my size range. I'm way less picky with the larger size stuff and way more picky with the smaller sizes.VirginiaThat totally makes sense. The smaller sizes have more options, period. Well, I have a couple of things I think I have to send you soon. I have a very sad story about a Tanya Taylor dress I bought it for my sister's wedding. I ended up with a different dress for the wedding, but I missed the return window and Tanya Taylor dresses are an investment. It's a really cool dress. I think it will be fabulous for somebody. So I will get some pictures. CorinneGreat, I will keep an eye out. If you need Big Bud Press sizing advice, I may be able to help you.VirginiaI was left with such a bad taste in my mouth. I have to have some distance before I'm ready to try again. CorinneI understand that. That's definitely one brand that shows up a lot.VirginiaIt's frustrating because there's a lot to love about what they're doing. If you want to support a small brand, they check all those boxes. But I don't feel like they're doing the best job with their size chart. So maybe they'll improve.CorinneYeah, they have been improving. I don't know when you ordered or which item, but they're improving sizing garment by garment. It’s hard to keep track of whether you're in the new sizing or the old sizing.VirginiaOkay, that's encouraging. I'll try them again down the road, I guess. It’s too cold for jumpsuits right now, so that's another reason to put it on hold. So this is where we each recommend something we're loving lately. Corinne, what do you have for us?CorinneThis is very niche, but I'm hoping it's something everyone can appreciate in some way. I live in New Mexico and breakfast burritos are a huge thing here. I'm from the East Coast originally, and breakfast burritos have a real culture here. There are tons of places in Albuquerque where you can go and get a drive-thru breakfast burrito. Probably most listeners won't be able to do that. If you can't get a drive-thru breakfast burrito, you could make one. Just make sure it has green or red chile on it.VirginiaI want to plan a trip to New Mexico solely based around the breakfast burritos. Whenever you post one, I'm filled with sadness that I live in the Hudson Valley, where we have really good Mexican food, but we do not have breakfast burritos like that. CorinneIt’s such a specific thing! I didn't understand until I lived here. So, have a breakfast burrito. If you need some inspiration, you can look at my personal Instagram where I do post a lot of breakfast burrito pictures.VirginiaVery impressive and inspiring. I should make them, you’re right. One of my kids would really go for them and one of my kids would just eat the tortilla. You're inspiring me. I feel like they're also not just for breakfast, like I can make this for dinner.CorinneThey’re good for every meal.VirginiaThey just have eggs in them. That's what makes them breakfast, right? An egg burrito? That sounds sort of gross, I can see why they branded it differently. Well that is a very good recommendation.I'm actually going to recommend two things. The first is a novel called Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters. It is out in paperback, so a lot of people may have already read it, but I just got to it. It's a hard read, at times, but it's a really beautiful book about the trans community in New York City. It’s about what happens in this relationship—it's two trans women—when one of them detransitions and goes back to living as a man even though he/she (pronouns change frequently throughout the book) doesn't identify as a cisgender man either. That whole journey is so fraught for both of them. The book really takes you into that community in New York City and the history and how folks in the trans community have had to be each other's parents and look out for each other across generations.CorinneI read this and I also endorse. It's so good. Actually, I listened to it and the audiobook is also really good.VirginiaThis is a double recommendation! I could see it being good listen. It was great. I'm dying for it to be a movie. It would be a really amazing movie. It’s one you keep thinking about afterwards. My second recommendation isn’t really related, except that they both take place in New York City. Last week, we watched the movie Can You Ever Forgive Me? starring Melissa McCarthy. It came out in 2018 and I had a baby in 2017, so I have cultural black spots related to the years my children were little. But I'm a longtime Melissa McCarthy fan. It's a serious film—but you know, it's Melissa McCarthy, so there's humor too. She plays Lee Israel, who was a queer writer in the 90’s, who couldn't make a living as an artist. She ended up becoming a literary forger and forging letters by Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward and selling them. The movie follows her whole journey of doing that and getting caught—I'm not spoiling anything because it's a real thing, she got caught. The movie takes you into this little community in New York, her friendships, her life, and I love it. I love it because it's the type of story that we would not remember necessarily. Her narrative is not one that gets told often. It was another one that I just keep thinking about. So if you haven't seen that, I recommend. Corinne, thank you so much. This was a really great conversation. I'm so glad to be able to share @SellTradePlus with Burnt Toast folks who haven't already discovered it. Tell us where we can find more of you and more of your work.CorinneThank you so much for having me! You can find @SellTradePlus on Instagram and you can find my personal account (where I'm posting breakfast burritos) at @SelfieFay. VirginiaThank you to everyone listening to Burnt Toast today. If you liked this episode, and you aren't yet subscribed, please do that. If you are a subscriber, thank you for being here and please consider sharing burnt toast on social media or forwarding this to a friend (maybe a friend who is shopping for clothes!) Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by the fantastic 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.I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. You can find more of my work at virginiasolesmith.com or come say hi on Instagram or Twitter. Thanks for listening. Talk to you soon! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!Today I’m delighted to be chatting with Crystal Maldonado who is the author of Fat Chance, Charlie Vega, one of my favorite YA books—maybe one of my favorite books, period. Crystal also has a new book coming out in February called No Filter and Other Lies.CrystalThank you so much for having me. I can’t believe you said it’s maybe one of your favorite books. I’m gonna go cry.VirginiaI cried when I read it. I love it very deeply. So I’m excited to talk about it. I’ve been fangirling you on social media since the book came out. CrystalI fangirl you! When you reached out, I was like, “Oh my god, my dreams are coming true!”VirginiaWell, get ready for a mutual fangirl episode because that’s what we’re doing. Why don’t you start by telling us a little more about yourself?CrystalAs you mentioned, I am the author of Fat Chance, Charlie Vega, which was my first book ever. I have a day job where I do social media marketing for higher education. I live in Western Massachusetts. I have a great husband, who was the inspiration behind the love story in Fat Chance, Charlie Vega. Together we have this adorable dog, Toby, and we have a two-year-old named Maya. I love things like glitter. I love Beyoncé. I love having a lot of feelings and I love trying to dismantle things like fatphobia and capitalism.VirginiaI am so here for dismantling fatphobia and capitalism with glitter.CrystalWe all bring something, and I bring glitter.VirginiaGlitter is a controversial topic in my house because my husband hates cleaning it up. He can’t even talk about it without becoming enraged. My daughters and I are like, “But, GLITTER!”CrystalIt sparkles! What more do you need?VirginiaI’m always like, “Okay, let’s do the glitter project outside,” because I want to hold space for his mess intolerance. It’s fair. But glitter nail polish isn’t messy, so… CrystalGlitter nail polish, that’s a good one! I’m going to keep that in my back pocket because my husband wants me to feel like I can do whatever I want with glitter, but then sometimes he finds a rogue glitter on his head.VirginiaIt is true that once glitter enters your home, it will never not be in your home. I don’t think we’ve purchased glitter for an art project in five years and I still find it places. It is problematic in that way, but it is also very joy-inducing. CrystalIt’s just sprinkling joy that you find later. VirginiaSome joy on your bathroom floor!Okay, let’s talk about Fat Chance, Charlie Vega. When I read it last year, it was such a bright spot in pandemic life. I love so much about Charlie and how you’ve subverted a lot of expectations and stereotypes about her. What is Charlie’s origin story for you?CrystalI really went into this book wanting to write a fat romcom. As someone who just loved reading love stories and romances, especially within the young adult genre, I felt like I spent my whole life wondering if there was room for fat folks to fall in love. It seemed like I never saw that. I was lucky if fat people existed at all in young adult books. If they did exist, they had to fit into these weird boxes that didn’t make sense and certainly weren’t anything like me. I was a total dreamer, like Charlie, and I wanted to be kissed and I wanted someone to love me. I wanted to make Charlie into this person who is soft. She is dreamy, and wants what she wants. She embraces that yearning, in ways that I think fat people don’t always get to do.I have always felt that if I, as a fat person, yearn for something, it’s considered pathetic. I’m not supposed to want anything, you know? That’s weird! I am a human. I’m allowed to want.I wanted this fluffy book that had all of these typical romance tropes, but for a fat girl to be the main character. She gets to be desired. She doesn’t lose weight. And she gets to fall in love with herself, too. I wrote the book during the 2016 election, as well. I was really going through it at that time, feeling like I was living in a society that was telling me I didn’t belong in any realm. This book was my response. Like, “Oh yeah? Well, I’m going to write a book that celebrates all the things you don’t like about me.” VirginiaYearning is such a big part of that life stage! But we don’t have representation of kids yearning and getting what they yearn for when they are in marginalized bodies. I love that she has desires. Those are some of the most fun parts to read. It’s really sweet and sexy. I can imagine so many girls in all body types, but particularly bigger girls, appreciating that.CrystalWe deserve that, too.VirginiaLet’s talk a little bit about what you were writing against. Obviously there was Trump, but also the way fat kids are portrayed in YA literature. Charlie does talk about her weight. She is aware of her size and how her mom is dealing with it, but it is not a book about her needing to change. She just has to own the fact that she does accept herself. Can you talk about what you were trying not to do?CrystalIt’s really important for fat folks to have both stories that talk a lot about being fat and that don’t acknowledge fatness at all. With this book, I was trying to immerse the reader in being fat and how it invades everything you think about because it is what society sees. That’s the world Charlie’s living in. She knows she would probably love herself a whole lot more if the rest of the world didn’t have big opinions about her body and her eating habits and exercise habits.But I wanted to push back on the idea that all fat people hate themselves inherently. Charlie doesn’t hate herself. Is she down on herself? Yeah, of course. Does she experience insecurities? Yes, she’s a teenager. She’s a human. We all feel that. I wanted to show that it’s way more complicated than that. So she’s not this fat girl who wants to hide herself. She wants to wear cute clothes and she wants to have all of these great experiences. I wanted her to have all of that without ever dieting or losing weight. I’ve read a lot of books where there’s a fat person and then they lose weight, or they get thin, and then they live happily ever after.VirginiaI love Jennifer Weiner’s books so much, but I still remember in Good in Bed when Cannie starts riding her bike a lot. She doesn’t lose weight, but it says she “shifts it around.” I just remember thinking, why was that necessary? We love Cannie! We’ve been rooting for Cannie this whole book. Why does weight have to be part of it? [VA Note: It’s possible I’m thinking of Rose in In Her Shoes here. It’s also possible they both have this plot line!]CrystalIt feels so demoralizing when you’re the fat girl reading these stories. It’s like, “Well, I guess I inevitably have to lose weight if I want happiness or love.” There’s also this idea that the fat people in stories are the sidekick-bestie-asexual-funny person. They don’t get to desire or be desired. I didn’t want that for Charlie. I wanted her to come out first thing and say, “I dream about being kissed.” I think that’s way more accurate. She is this person who wants to go buy a cute bra and also be super funny and sarcastic. Why not both?VirginiaSpeaking of sidekicks, you populate her world with such an amazing friend group. They are not one-dimensional sidekicks at all. All of her friends are very fully formed characters, dealing with their own stuff in different ways. You layer in many intersections of race and gender identity along with body diversity. And also, Charlie lives in this mostly white town and struggles with that experience. How did you think about what other stories you wanted to tell through her friends?CrystalIn my experience growing up in a mostly white town, anyone with any semblance of a marginalized identity is drawn together and finds community with one another because, for whatever reason, you don’t fit in with the majority. That is how I viewed Charlie and her friends, as this tight group of people who come together because they feel othered in some way. I wanted her friends to have beautifully robust and nuanced lives with their own things going on. I spent a lot of time on Tumblr when I was growing up. We would complain about how there’s a wonderful black best friend, but they never get to do anything. They clearly exist only to help this white main character achieve something. I wanted to think of every one of Charlie’s friends as characters who I would want to read a book about. That’s what it’s like in real life! People have their own lives, they have their own experiences. At the same time, I am a fat Puerto Rican girl and I’m cisgender. I didn’t feel, with some of those identities, that I could tackle them in that first person, intimate way that I can with Charlie. Amelia is black, pansexual, and very sporty. I don’t know about any of those identities (I identify as bi, not pan) but I have friends who have had these experiences. I wanted to talk about these experiences but not in a first person way because I didn’t feel like I could do them justice. At the same time, I wanted to shed light on some of these different identities to make you think about things in ways that you might not have. Especially if you’re from a very white town, or a town that doesn’t have these other identities, you can meet these people through Charlie.VirginiaWhen Amelia comes out to her parents, it’s so moving. I love how you followed those journeys and wove them in.What are you hearing from readers? What kind of responses have you gotten, especially from fat kids reading the book?CrystalIt has been so incredible. People have reached out and shared an appreciation and a sense of validation in reading Charlie’s story. It’s not just people who are her age and it’s not just people who are fat, it’s different age ranges and it’s different body types. Some people who reach out are fat, but they're not brown, or they're brown, but they're not fat. To hear from people who have a similar identity to me, to hear them say they get to look at this book and see a character that looks like them, is meaningful. That’s exactly what I wanted and yearned for when I was fourteen or fifteen. It’s been really humbling to hear from people who are like, “Oh, I consider myself a Charlie” and “I have an Amelia.” That is the best. I’ve even had a couple of people who have recreated the cover. I’m like, “Oh my God, can I just be besties with all of you? Because you’re incredible.”VirginiaWhat I often hear from parents of kids in bigger bodies is that they want a book where the fat kid is just the hero or the heroine, where it’s not about their body acceptance journey. As much as Charlie is reckoning with her weight in this book, your book is one of the best examples of that. She has her own journey. So, for parents who are looking for that, this is the book that you’re looking for. There is no weight loss. This is a really good one to have in family libraries for that reason. My older daughter is eight and she’s probably a couple years out from reading it, but not that far. I think it works for a wide variety of age ranges. CrystalEspecially as you’re getting into those awkward middle school years, Charlie’s your girl because she has not been kissed at the start of the book. She’s sixteen and she feels like her peers have surpassed her. She’s dealing with a complicated mom and grief in her household. There’s a lot that younger folks might relate to. Some YA is more mature, and we need that, too, but when we meet Charlie, she still feels like she is just at the beginning. VirginiaAnother thing that you navigate in the book is the online communities that Charlie is a part of. She finds fat influencers and she’s in that body positive space online. That’s something I really struggle with, with our kids, especially right now with everything we’re hearing about Instagram and how great it is at teaching kids to have eating disorders. I am definitely wrestling with thr desire to never let my children online. Your book is a reminder to me that kids in marginalized bodies need to find community and if they’re not finding community at school, which not everyone is going to in middle school in high school, online can be that portal. Do you see online communities as a force for good? Or a force that needs to be tempered? How are you thinking about it?CrystalI think it can be good and it can have very toxic sides as well. I see this a lot as someone who manages social media for a brand. I use social media as myself, of course, but I also see the flip side where there’s a lot of hate and a lot of anger. I wanted to show that social media has the power to be toxic, but at the same time it can bring you together with people who are like you, that you might otherwise struggle to meet. When I was growing up, I was very much the girl on Tumblr and—I’m dating myself—I was also on LiveJournal a lot. There was this amazing community there called the Fatshionista community. It was just fat people posting pictures of themselves wearing clothes. It was before the super posed, beautiful Instagram photos. It was truly just fat people being like “Here’s what I’m wearing today. What do you think?” At that time, the internet was very ugly and toxic, and especially for fat folks. Let’s be real, it still is, but this was a little safe haven. It was a nice place where I could go and see bodies that looked like mine for the first time in my life. So I think social media can be super, super powerful. But when you’re part of a marginalized community, you have to curate your feed. Sometimes that means not following mainstream media, even well-meaning ones. You’re following hashtags or you’re finding people through those hashtags. You can find influencers or people who are thinking about this stuff and talking about it.For Charlie, the most powerful thing is just being able to see girls like her who are out there rocking cute outfits, and getting style inspiration. That helps her build her confidence because she’s like, “Hey, this person has a body like mine, and they look amazing. So could I look amazing.” I would say unfollow literally anybody who makes you feel even a tiny bit bad about yourself.VirginiaAs parents, we’re figuring out how to teach our kids media literacy skills, which we all need to learn, too. We are 100 percent learning with our kids. If your kid is begging to get on Instagram and you’re on the verge of losing that battle, how can you experience it with them and help them seek out these little pockets of goodness, as opposed to just mindlessly following every influencer?CrystalIgnore who Instagram suggests you should follow and you make the list.VirginiaThis is the type of stuff I wish they were teaching in middle school and high school. I think teaching kids how to navigate these spaces would be really powerful. You are a writer and you have a day job and you’re a mom, so you’re juggling all of the things. I love to ask fellow writers a little bit about their writing process, like where do you write? When do you write? What do you like about your process? What do you hate about it? It sounds like you’re probably fitting it in around a lot of things, so tell us what that’s like.CrystalBefore I had my kid, my writing routine was more about the vibe and curating this feeling and going to coffee shops. Now I’ve gotten pretty good at writing anywhere. I just need my laptop and my headphones and a good playlist on Spotify and my toddler not to be ripping my laptop out of my hands.I have a desk set up in my bedroom, in this small alcove, and it feels really cozy. I hung up little twinkle lights and it’s got some natural light. I’m very much a feelings and mood person, so that combo helps me get out of my head and move into a different space so that I can think about characters and dialogue. As long as I can put my headphones in and turn the world off, that’s where I’m at.The thing I hate the most about my current writing process is that it is so chaotic. I never know when I’m going to have the time to actually sit down and write. Sometimes, at the end of the day, if my kid went to sleep early, and I don’t have any chores to do (knock on wood) and I’m caught up on things, now I can write—but I’m so tired. Vegging out wins a lot of the time, I’m not going to lie.VirginiaI mean, it needs to happen. You need to rest. There are weeks where I’m like, “There are just no more words. I have nothing. I can’t write today.” CrystalI know some people like writing every day, they live and die by that and that’s what works for them. I am envious, but I’m just going to write when I can. I also like to think that daydreaming is part of the writing process, at least for me, and thinking about characters. I count that as writing now.VirginiaI think that absolutely is the work. It’s the work that we can do while driving and running errands, thinking through an article in my head while walking the dog. You can do that work while you’re doing the rest of your life in a way that you cannot when it’s time to sit down and be at the computer. You need to shut out the world. I think building that daydreaming muscle is actually quite helpful because it makes it easier to focus once you sit down.I feel like there is a parallel between the write-everyday people and the workout-everyday people, where you have to ask, “Is this perfectionism serving you? Or is it an obsession that you can’t step back from?”As a journalist, I literally can’t write every day because often I’m researching and reporting and I need to do that in order to write. I tend to have one week of the month when I’m producing a book chapter that I’ve been researching and reporting all month. I’ll have 3,000-word days of getting out a chapter. For a long time, I felt guilty, like I should be doing it more systematically and writing smaller chunks. And then I just realized, this is how I do it. CrystalIf people write every day and that works for them, I think that’s truly incredible and I’m in awe. Writing is so individual. You can try every method that you hear about from great writers and you could fail at all of them, because it’s just not how your brain works or how you think creatively. You have to find what works for you. VirginiaAnd then you have to make peace with that being what works for you, because it often doesn’t feel very satisfying.CrystalIf you’re not a morning person, being a part of the 5 am writers club is never gong to work, so don’t bother.VirginiaAnd if you are a morning person, like me, trying to push yourself to work after your kids go to bed is always going to fail. TV will win every time. Tell us about the new book that’s coming out in February! CrystalThis book is called No Filter and Other Lies. It’s another young adult book and it features another fat brown girl.VirginiaI was hoping it would!CrsytalWe were just talking about social media and that’s really what this next book deals with, Instagram specifically. It’s about a 17-year-old girl. Her name is Kat Sanchez, and she is a an artist, a photographer. She really wants to gain clout and gain recognition for her work, but it’s not happening. Every time she posts, it falls flat. She’s seeing her classmates get recognition, and her friends followers growing, but not hers. She has this complicated family and weird romance going on. She feels like a fraud in a lot of ways and she doesn’t have everything figured out. Then there’s this particularly bad night that leads her down a rabbit hole of not wanting to be herself anymore. So she decides that she’s going to steal her friends’ pictures and become someone else entirely on Instagram, and be a literal “Kat-fish,” with a “K.”VirginiaOh, I see what you did there.CrystalThe book explores these ideas of what is real versus what is fake on Instagram, and how even people who are the closest to it—like Kat who is a photographer and knows there’s photo editing—still struggle to see that not everything we see is is real. It really dives into how to manage yourself on social media, how to stay sane and come out on the other side and appreciate who you are, and appreciate your existence as it is.VirginiaOh, my gosh, I can’t wait to read that. Again, you’re writing a book that will resonate with kids because they’re struggling with this, and will also be so helpful for adults because we also don’t know how to do this. I always hate to ask, when you’re getting ready to promote one book, if you’re working on another book, but I am curious to know. CrystalI am working on a third book. No Filter and Other Lies comes out February 1, 2022. Then this next book I’m working on returns to a fluffy, rom-com-esque world. It’s about all of the delightful things that come with fall in New England. It features this fat girl who realizes she has polycystic ovarian syndrome and wants to hide this from the world, while also trying to figure herself out. That’s all I’ll say for now. VirginiaI already want to preorder it. I’m so excited, Crystal, that you are writing these books and that there are going to be so many of your books out there for all girls. It is so needed, so thank you. We will wrap up with my new recommendation segment, where we talk about just anything we’re loving. It doesn’t have to be a product, but it can be a product, or it can be an experience. What do you have for us?CrystalSo, speaking of being at the end of the day and just needing to like lean into TV, Nailed It! on Netflix just came out with a new season. It’s the baking show that Nicole Byer hosts. I am a huge fan of Nicole Byer. I just think she’s so funny and she’s also fat and she has these fabulous outfits on in each episode. You get to kick back and watch a bunch of bakers be terrible at baking while she makes jokes at their expense, but in the most wholesome and sweet way. I have been watching this new season and just loving every second because I get to turn my little brain off. I look at her amazing outfits and just wonder if Nicole is looking for a bestie. Virginia I haven’t watched this at all and I’m now asking myself how I’ve missed it. It’s going in the queue.I’m going to recommend pencil cactuses. People who follow me on Instagram know that I am a plant lady. People always ask what’s a good house plant to start with, and there’s a bunch that you see all the time. But pencil cactuses are a really good starter house plant that gets overlooked. They’re very hard to kill. You only have to water this one maybe every two weeks. It does need a fair amount of light; it wants your sunniest window. It’s actually not a cactus—it’s a Euphorbia, if you want to get technical—and it has all these little, narrow shoot things. As it gets colder, they start to develop this red color that’s really pretty. So pencil cactuses are just delightful and I feel like nobody’s talking about them and I want to be the person who makes them trendy.CrystalNote to self: Buy a pencil cactus.VirginiaYou won’t always find them in the big box store plant sections, but any smaller plant store should have them. You can definitely find them on Etsy. You can get a little one and it will grow big, so don’t feel like you have to really invest. (Yes, mine is now giant but it started small!) Just get a small one and put it on your window sill and enjoy.CrystalI really want one, you’ve totally sold me.VirginiaWell, my work here is done. Crystal, tell listeners where they can follow you and stay tuned for all your book updates.CrystalIf you want to follow me and feel my feelings and see Beyoncé pictures and see where glitter is going to end up, I am @CrystalWrote (past tense of write) everywhere. I’m on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, and my website is CrystalWrote.com.VirginiaThank you, Crystal! And thank you so much for listening to Burnt Toast. If you liked this episode and you aren’t yet a subscriber, please subscribe!If you are a subscriber, thank you so much. Please consider sharing Burnt Toast on social media or forwarding this to a friend.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy & sell plus size clothing.Thanks for listening! Talk to you soon! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

Hello, and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!Today I am chatting with Dacy Gillespie, a personal stylist and creator of Mindful Closet. If you follow me on Instagram, you might have noticed I have been posting a little more fashion content. If you think anything I’ve been wearing is cute, it is because of Dacy. She is brilliant at fashion. She is even more brilliant at helping us release the patriarchal rules that we have felt like we had to follow about getting dressed. Dacy does it all from a weight-inclusive, Health at Every Size perspective. She is an amazing unicorn in the fashion universe.DacyThank you, Virginia, for the really kind words.VirginiaAll extremely true. For folks who don’t know you, let’s start by having you give us a little of your story. You are a classical musician-turned-stylist. You are also very much not what people think of when they think of a stylist! I would love to hear a little more of how you got into this work.DacyI appreciate that you say I’m not what you would think of when you hear “stylist.” For me, that is a good sign that someone connects with what I feel like I’m doing, in a weird way. I truly feel that way myself, so it’s nice to be recognized. I’ll try and give the short version of the story. I know we’re going to talk later about the messages that people get around clothing and fashion. My story started with a message I got from my parents, which was: If you care or think about clothes or fashion, you’re superficial and silly, and not a serious, caring person. I know a lot of people can relate to that. Fashion was something I always, always loved. If it weren’t for that message, I probably would have gotten into something in the fashion field much earlier on. Instead, I went into classical music which was an approved field of study. It was an interesting career for a while, but ultimately a really high stress one. When I decided to change careers in my mid-thirties, style and fashion was what I went back to. I did some research on fields within the industry and realized that something I’d been informally doing for people my whole life actually was a job: Personal styling. I was always that person who would come over and help you clean out your closet or help you decide what you were going to wear to an event. It never felt validated as something that I could actually do, partially because of that message from my parents, and partially because I just never felt cool enough to be in fashion. Thanks to a really supportive husband and a lot of privilege, I started this business about nine years ago.VirginiaI went into fashion magazines, but worked in the health departments. I was like, “I’m not cool enough for the fashion people.” Which was both true and not true. The fashion industry is very insular and puts up barriers, but it’s ridiculous that these barriers exist and that we internalize them. We’ve been working together in your one-on-one coaching program. It’s been low-key life-changing. And it’s a lot more like therapy than I expected, in a good way. I was like, “Oh, I want to work with Dacy because I need to figure out what styles work on my body,” and like, “maybe she’ll just tell me what to wear and that’ll be so great.” And instead, you were like, “What messages have you absorbed about your body? Let’s unpack this! Where did this come from?” I started realizing I had all these ideas, like that I should only wear flowy tops or I should only wear dark colors. You helped me sort through that and figure out where it comes from. So, I’m curious to hear why you think it’s so important to start with those stories that we tell ourselves about clothes.DacyWell, I think awareness is always the first step towards growth and change. You have to be aware of those stories that you’ve been told before you can let them go. You have to hold them and look at them and say, “Is this true for me? Or is this just someone else’s idea of what I should be doing?”As women, we’re so used to taking in others’ opinions and changing our actions around those opinions. I see this as an entry point to getting in touch with what your true needs are. Fashion is just a way to practice that. You talk about intuitive eating and Health at Every Size, and there are so many similarities and parallels in this work. It’s about listening to your body and what it needs. I always ask, “Is it external influence or is it an internal motivation?”The whole first session when I work with someone is called “Style Stories.” It’s about asking, “What has your relationship with clothes been over the course of your life? Who dressed you? Who took you to buy clothes? Who influenced what you thought you should be wearing? Who gave you messages?” It can be anyone, from our mothers to fashion magazines and of course, social media. It’s so important to acknowledge those messages and decide whether you want to accept them or let them go.VirginiaYes, yes, absolutely. We talked a lot about middle school for me. It was all about Cool Girls, and because I moved schools around that time, wondering if I had the right thing to wear. I realized that here I am, a 40-year-old adult, still worrying about having the right thing to wear. One of my big takeaways was how much joy I had gotten out of clothes as a kid, and even as a teenager and young adult. That joy had been really sucked out of fashion for me, and a lot of that was because of my body changing. I grew up as a thin kid. I’m a small fat adult. That was a big transition because clothes just aren’t accessible to me in the same way. There were also feelings of wanting to fit in and play it safe and wear black all the time. When we started digging deeper into it, you asked me to show you what I love. I showed you people like Emma Straub and Nora Pelizzari who are wearing tons of color and mixed prints and bright patterns. They’re like walking rays of sunshine! It was so interesting to realize that’s actually what I’m really drawn to. We realized that wanting to play it safe is really a fear of taking up space. It’s really a fear being noticed. Is this is a common fear you encounter? Does this fear of being noticeable come up a lot, especially for people in bigger bodies?DacyYeah, for sure. This is what I hear especially people who have lived in a larger body for most of their life. They felt excluded, that clothing and fashion were not things that they could participate in—in some cases, literally! Like, “When I went to the store with my mom and my sister, my sister could buy the clothes in this store and I couldn’t.”People have this experience of feeling excluded and getting messages that if you are not in a socially acceptable body, you should hide yourself. You don’t deserve to be noticed. Something is shameful about your body and it should be hidden. You should just be grateful if you can find anything that fits your body. Of course, we have a long way to go, but steps are being taken, thankfully. There are options if you love and enjoy fashion, so that you don’t have to wear shapeless, black sacks. I, however, am someone who loves a shapeless black sack.Something I was thinking about talking to you, Virginia, is that—and I think this is common for a lot of mothers—the period of time when you lost your spark of joy about fashion was the period of time when you became a parent. That was a somewhat traumatic experience for you. People get to the point where they just have to get through the day, just have to get by, and fashion is not something that they have the luxury to think about. You are somewhat through that, and finally able to feel more of the things that bring you pleasure. It was really lovely to be able to help you connect to that.VirginiaWhen we were going through our more traumatic years with my daughter’s medical condition, I did a lot of stress shopping. I remember sitting attached to the breast pump in the ICU, and buying boots on my phone in this compulsive way. I just needed something good. I’ll never shame anyone’s coping strategies, but for me, it wasn’t super satisfying. Shopping is hard to do in a spontaneous, joyful way. The whole structure of online shopping, in particular, is difficult to navigate. Recognizing that I needed joy and deserved joy and didn’t have to do it in a furtive, stressful way was helpful.The other realization I had as we were doing this work, was how much I had lowered my standards. I think of myself as someone with high standards, so that was surprising. As shopping got harder, I ended up keeping stuff I didn’t really like because returns seemed like a hassle. Maybe I really loved it but it didn’t fit quite right. Or I didn’t love it, but it fit okay, so I would convince myself it was fine. There was a lot of accepting stuff that wasn’t great. There was some inertia and some fear that it would be hard to find something better. I want to hold space for the fact that for folks on tight budgets, for folks in larger bodies, it often does feel somewhat impossible to find better options. I think you’ve mentioned that you’ve encountered that belief a lot, too. But why is this important to challenge? And how do we challenge it?DacyPeople who are in larger bodies or people whose bodies change, as yours did and as mine is right now, have been given this message that we don’t matter, that we’re not worth the effort. If we have something that that fits, we should just shut up and be thankful. It’s a real expression of self-value to say, “No, this is not quite right.” Maybe you need this item right now, because there’s not always a perfect solution, but just knowing that this isn’t what expresses yourself in the most pure way can be helpful. It may not be what makes you the most happy, and you can continue to look for that.As mothers, we would never say to our kids, “Make do with the rain boots with the hole in them.” or “You grew out of those but I’m not going to buy you new clothes.” But we often let our needs fall to the bottom of the priority list. VirginiaHow do you advise people to start to shift that? Is it finding more time to spend on shopping? Is it thinking differently about what you’re buying? What’s the starting point? DacyThe starting point is awareness. Allow yourself to feel what you feel about your clothes. When you get dressed in the morning, if you are putting on two or three things and taking them off because you don’t want to wear them that day, just try and sit with and understand what is going on there. Is it because it doesn’t fit well? Is it because it makes you feel squeezed? Is it because it’s a very bright color that you feel uncomfortable in? Is it because it’s black and you feel drab? It’s going to be so different for every single person, but start allowing those things to come up. We’re not supposed to complain about these things; we should be grateful we have clothes. Allowing yourself to start to think, “Okay, this is the reason why I don't want to wear this today. I'm gonna put it on because I don't have any other options, but this is going to start a process of thinking about what I want my clothes to be for me.”A huge part of it is also finding visual inspiration and really not censoring yourself when you’re doing that. People will create Pinterest boards and they’ll put things on where they love that print but have been told that doesn’t work for someone in a larger body. Or they may say, “I love that fitted shape, but God forbid someone see my stomach!” So, if you can reach out for visual inspiration that truly resonates on a gut level without filtering in that way, you’ll just start to see things a little bit differently and see what you’re wearing a little bit differently. It comes down to this awareness of rejecting what you’ve been told. You can decide what it is that you like the look of, and then later on you can figure out a way to translate it into your life. VirginiaI went in thinking I knew what clothes I liked. If you’d asked me previous to this, “What is your style?” I think I would have said, “Whatever the Anthropologie plus size collection has, that’s probably what I want to wear.” It turns out, it’s actually not at all what I want to wear! We didn’t end up buying anything from them. It’s not a style that really speaks to me. I realized how much I was just accepting, like, aren't we so lucky that Anthropologie makes plus sizes now, I must want to wear that. There are lots of ways this plays out. Then there was this process of refining and realizing I love when Emma Straub wears a giant, multicolored muumuu. But I don’t actually want to wear a muumuu, I want something with that feel, but with smaller pops of color. That still feels very bold to me, as someone who came from black t-shirt land.DacyYou start with that visual inspiration, then at some point you have to put it into practice and see how it feels. There’s a little bit of a swing to the extreme sometimes, too. I think maybe you did this a little bit. This thing of, I need to wear all the prints and all the colors, because now it’s available and it has never been available before. And yet, you still have to do what feels good for you. I think you experienced some of that. Some of those more colorful things made you uncomfortable and didn’t get worn and therefore weren’t really useful for you.VirginiaYeah, absolutely. We also did a much bigger closet purge than I was expecting. That was cathartic. It was exciting to realize how much stuff I had hanging in there that I wasn’t wearing. What are some other common beliefs that come up with clients, especially folks in bigger bodies, that you help them break through?DacyThese ideas that that style is not for you, that you can’t take up space, that you can’t just be the physical person that you are, and that you should strive for an optical illusion that makes you appear smaller, which we then call '“flattering.” And that “flattering” should be the priority above all else. I like to start by reversing that and saying, “What do you like, without considering what is socially appropriate or conventionally appropriate for your body?” Let’s start with what you actually like the look of and let’s prioritize that. That way you get some say in it, you get some control. Otherwise, you’re just saying, “Well Tim Gunn or Elle Magazine or whoever says, ‘you have to wear fitted waist and full skirts,’ all for the sake of appearing as small as possible.” What if you just don’t like how that looks? People in larger bodies have been pressured to do this as much as they possibly can. God forbid you show up in your full size, that would be so offensive. Let’s use all the tricks in the book that we can come up with to try and make you appear smaller than you actually are.VirginiaIt’s so exhausting and the tricks don’t work either. People will still see your body.DacyYou’re a three dimensional object. You’re showing up in the world, and nobody is fooled. It just makes you feel uncomfortable and you’re trying so hard to achieve something that is impossible.VirginiaIt also triggers so much comparing and that’s not helpful, as opposed to focusing on what makes you happy and what makes you feel good in clothes. I remember reading an interview with Lindy West where—thinking of your comment about black shapeless sacks—she said something like, “I would love if someone put me in that for a photoshoot, but they always put me in the like 1950’s hourglass silhouette with a bold red lip.” That’s the way that fat girls are allowed to feel pretty, to really lean into the retro vibes. What if you don’t— and I don’t—particularly love a retro vibe? What if you don’t want to be Marilyn Monroe? What if you don’t love a puff sleeve, at the moment? Or certain silky flower prints that we get over and over? It probably sounds very hard to start with what you love, but I think you’re right that it’s a very pivotal step to take.DacyYou and I, and probably a lot of people listening, have been challenging this concept of flattering. Some people get very worried, like “Why would I wear something if it’s not flattering, because flattering makes me feel good.” It comes down to the meaning of the word and what you consider the word flattering to mean. In my in my opinion, it has always meant to appear as small as possible. If to you “flattering” means something that makes you happy because you put it on and you light up, that’s great.VirginiaThe clothes I ended up buying after working with you are, in many cases, silhouettes that I would not have thought would be “flattering” on my body. I would now say they actually are flattering, if we redefine the word. I look better in these clothes because I’m comfortable and happy in them. I’m not trying to hide my body.DacyIt’s because we started with what you liked the look of, right? If we had stuck to the rules, we wouldn’t have gotten to those clothes.VirginiaI want to talk about detaching from your clothing size. I truly do not care what the label says anymore. When I look at what we bought, which I was doing because I was posting on Instagram and wanted to give people sizes, we bought like 47 different sizes. I think that’s often a stumbling block for people. They’re really caught up in their head about wanting to stay a certain size and buying the next size up feels like this big, scary step to take. Can you explain, as someone who understands retail so well, why are clothing sizes such b******t and what do we do with that?DacyI don’t know if I have perfect answers for either of those questions. I mentioned this in passing before, that my body is changing. I do feel that little bit of sadness when I realized that the sizes I bought for years don’t fit anymore and I’m in a different size now. We want to acknowledge that, it is definitely a thing. And also, sizing is so meaningless. It’s absolutely meaningless. One size in one store equals a size four sizes up in another store. So how can you say you’re one or the other? I always say to my clients that 100 or 150 years ago there was no size. There were no clothing sizes. Clothes were made for your body. If you were wealthy, someone made them for you. If you were poor, you made them for yourself. This concept of needing our bodies to fit into certain clothes or certain styles is a new concept. It’s new since industrialization; it’s new since globalization. Sizing is a construct that ultimately makes a lot of people feel bad. But it’s imaginary. VirginiaYeah, you have to start viewing it as white noise, in a way. The relief of finding a clothing item that fits well is so powerful. It feels so good that I can stop caring about the number. That was a helpful turning point for me. There is a mourning process, you’re right. You have to grieve. It’s frustrating, too, because clothes are expensive, to realize that the entire closet that I had before each of my children is gone. That is infuriating. But you have to detach from those numbers and just see them as this strange system that the store is using to chart out its clothes, that doesn’t have any reflection on us.You also explained to me about taking your measurements and studying the size charts. It is a little more labor intensive and can also be triggering because anything with numbers and bodies can be triggering. But, if you can do measurements in a way that feels safe to you, it’s a much more reliable as a way to buy clothes. Look at the size charts and match up your measurements. That was really helpful.DacyThe alternative is that you order something in a size you hope will fit and it comes and it doesn’t fit and you feel bad about yourself. You feel frustrated and you give up and end up with no clothes that make you feel good about your body. If you’re not feeling comfortable in your body and your clothes on a daily basis, you’re just a little more restricted in your thoughts and your movements. It’s such a valuable thing to have clothes that fit. While it’s hard, I don’t see an alternative because I don’t think wearing clothes that don’t fit is a good option for most people.VirginiaIt’s a lot like living on a diet. Even if you’re living on one of those less punitive diets and it’s a “lifestyle plan,” it’s sapping your energy in this small way every day because all this mental energy is going towards what you’re eating or not eating. And wasting mental energy on jeans that feel uncomfortably too tight is such a life suck. Why do that? The system you encourage is ordering multiple sizes, trying things on, and returning. This is something that I started doing years ago because it felt like the only practical way to shop. We should also talk about the returns piece of things, because this is a topic that is complicated. I would love your thoughts on how we navigate that part of it.DacyIt’s funny, you’re a huge outlier. Almost everyone I work with is shocked by the idea of ordering multiple things to try!VirginiaSo people are just buying one thing at a time? And then returning it?DacyOr not returning it because it feels frustrating and they don’t want to order the next size and so they just get stuck. A lot of people just need permission to know that there is absolutely no way to know if something is going to fit based on the size chart on a company’s website. Even if they have a well laid out size chart, and you take your measurements, and you match up to a certain size. There’s just no way to know. You are setting yourself up to get stuck in the process by only ordering one thing and then feeling like you failed. You haven’t failed, it’s the system, which doesn’t work for anyone.VirginiaI bet it’s people being really hesitant to order the larger size and being attached to that clothing number. Maybe they’ve already gone up one size but don’t want to go up two sizes. I think we need to reckon with why that is so scary. This is a meaningless number.DacyI have a lot of people who always ordered one size, no matter what store. How on earth do you know if that’s going to fit? If we were in a dressing room in a store and you tried on something and it didn’t fit, of course you’d get the next size. By not doing that you’re stilting the whole process. In terms of returns, I do not have all the answers. It’s an environmental concern. It’s something that a lot of us take personal responsibility for and feel guilty for. But in reality, it’s another big system that needs to be managed by corporations and the people making money off of us. It is not our personal responsibility to save the planet by never returning anything and keeping clothes that we don’t like or that don’t fit.Virginia Which you would just end up throwing out anyway, at some point.DacyExactly. Good point. It’s even more wasteful to keep them, in some ways. A lot of people are really concerned about shipping and carbon emissions and—if anyone has any data about this, I’d love to hear it—in my neighborhood, there’s a delivery guy going from house to house to house, which is probably more efficient than everyone in my neighborhood driving separately to buy something.The thing that I value the most is women feeling good in their clothes because I feel like it allows them to have that freedom of thought and freedom to be an activist for the things that are important. At the moment, the system only allows us to get clothes that fit by trying a bunch of things and returning some of them. Unfortunately, that’s our option. The only other option is getting clothes that don’t fit or sticking with clothes that you ordered and feel guilty about returning and are a waste of money because they’re not quite what you need.Virginia Amanda Mull had a great piece in The Atlantic about returns, for anyone who wants to read up. The big concern is that a lot of retailers destroy inventory instead of putting it back into inventory, which is pretty disgusting and neither of us are saying it’s not bad. It’s bad. DacyYes. But there’s a lot of nuance to it. I believe the article said that 25 percent of returns are not going back into inventory. I’m going to guess that a majority of those are fast fashion retailers. Very cheaply made things are just not worth the cost of being put back into the inventory system to resell. So, here’s a little plug for trying to buy more sustainably made clothing. I can tell you for sure that a lot of the brands that I work with and follow are not putting garments in the trash. If a piece is worth a certain amount of money and it’s well-made, like out of organically grown cotton, it’s not going in the trash.VirginiaYeah, they are going to put it back in inventory. It’s also true that, for plus size folks, fast fashion is often the only way to get your sizes. It is a broken system and you still deserve to be able to put clothes on your body, even if you’re on a tight budget, even if you don’t have a lot of size options. Our individual choices only go so far here. I often hear from from other folks in the fat community that the returns process is a burden unique to us. So, it was really interesting to read that Atlantic piece and realize this is happening across all retail, not even just clothing. It is true that folks who can’t shop in brick and mortar stores, because they don’t carry our sizes, are stuck with this model. But, it’s also true that everyone is doing this. It’s not our unique burden or unique failing. It’s helpful to understand the scope of the problem even though it’s also depressing.DacyYeah, I think what you just said is really important. People feel like they’re failing if they can’t immediately buy an image on a computer screen and have it work out. That is so unrealistic. Just know, shopping is hard for everyone. I buy and return many, many things before I find what I want, personally. And I’m someone who knows the landscape out there and knows about lots of options and and I still cannot determine until I put it on my body.VirginiaOne other option I will shout out is that my new newsletter assistant, Corinne Fay, runs a really awesome Instagram @SellTradePlus. It is a great option to know about for buying secondhand clothes. And, if you did buy something that you can’t return because you’re worried they’re gonna destroy it or you’re past the return window, you can sell it on SellTradePlus. It’s an awesome community.I wanted to end by giving a recommendation of something we are loving or something that is making our lives easier. Dacy, do you have a recommendation for us?DacyI really had to think hard about this and I have I have three answers.Over the last couple of years, I have started to get into a better relationship with movement and movement that makes me feel good. It’s more for my mental health than anything. It’s faux-hiking. It’s walking, but it’s hiking. It’s a paved path, but it’s very steep. I’m sure real hikers would be like, “That’s not hiking.” But it’s not walking around my neighborhood, okay? And I went to REI the other day and actually bought a pair of good shoes for that. I’ve just been wearing just running shoes and I’m terrified of slipping and falling, especially now as we’re getting into fall and winter. So, that’s one thing.Along with that, something that I will need to do this year is buy myself a new winter coat because I’ve outgrown mine. Cold weather gear is so important. I’m from the South and I currently live in St. Louis. I do not enjoy the cold, but for so long I just wore an extra sweater or two pairs of gloves. Buying winter gear was kind of a revelation. So, I’m looking forward to having a great new winter coat. And then the last thing that’s making my life really a lot better, since pandemic parenting—I also have two young children—is that I have taken a couple trips. Obviously this is not something that’s available to everyone and I’m extremely lucky. Last week I went to Tucson and in a month or so I’m going to to New York with a friend. Just having those on my calendar is bringing me a lot of joy.VirginiaOh my gosh, yes. I love recommending faux-hiking, winter clothes, and abandoning your children. DacyOne hundred percent.VirginiaMy recommendation this week is going to be this song that I’m obsessed with called White Woman’s Instagram by Bo Burnham. I’m probably the last person to discover it because it does have 10 million views on YouTube. During the pandemic, Dan, my husband, got really obsessed with Bo Burnham, who is apparently a YouTube-sensation-slash-stand-up-comedian person. This making me sound really out of touch with the kids, but I am, so that’s accurate.DacyIf it makes you feel any better, I have not seen the video, so I’m even behind you. VirginiaOh, well, then there is delight awaiting you, Dacy. Bo Burnham did this comedy special that he produced during lockdown. He shot it all in his house in Los Angeles. It’s definitely a privileged person’s experience of the pandemic, but he shot this whole special at home. Dan watched it and was obsessed with it, and kept trying to make me watch it. And I kept refusing. Sometimes when he’s really excited about things, I don’t get excited. Finally, I watched it last week, because we do a monthly Movie Club and it was Dan’s turn to pick the movie. He was able to make everyone watch Bo Burnham: Inside. I have somewhat complicated feelings about the movie, which I will not go into (but if anyone wants to discuss in the comments, feel free!). But! White Woman’s Instagram is satirizing white women on Instagram very accurately. My favorite line is when he talks about seeing some random quote from “Lord of the Rings” incorrectly attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr. The video is really fun to watch because he recreates very well-known tropes of Instagram, as a man, and it’s just very funny. If you are someone who, like Dacy and me, has to navigate Instagram for your job and you feel exasperated by it often, then you will enjoy this.Alright, thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you like this episode and you aren’t yet a subscriber please subscribe! If you are a subscriber, Thank you so much. Please consider sharing Burnt Toast on social media or forwarding it to a friend.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus. Our logo is by Deanna Lowe.And I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. You can find more of my work at virginiasolesmith.com or come say hi on Instagram or Twitter. I’m @v_solesmith. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!Today is a very exciting crossover episode with my best friend Amy Palanjian, who is the creator of Yummy Toddler Food; parts of this conversation will also run next week on Amy’s newsletter. Longtime listeners will remember Amy from our podcast Comfort Food (RIP) and from her previous Burnt Toast. And! Just a reminder that guest episodes of the audio newsletter are now free for all listeners! That means you can go back and listen to Rachel Millner, Gwen Kostal, Alyson Gerber, the founders of the National Plus Guide, Tyler Feder, Christy Harrison, Anna Sweeney, Marquisele Mercedes, and Aubrey Gordon, all for free.I’m able to make this content accessible with the help of paid subscribers. If you’d like to support what I’m doing, click here to take 20 percent off your subscription and get cool perks.VirginiaI’m so happy we’re together again! I mean, we’re sort of always spiritually together.AmyIt’s funny, someone the other day someone was like, “When is the podcast coming back?” and I was like, “What are you talking about? Virginia and I talk all the time.”VirginiaWe do miss doing the podcast. It stopped making sense for a variety of reasons related to childcare. Also, it’s very expensive to run a podcast that doesn’t make money. It wasn’t our best business decision, but we both loved doing it. Now Amy can join us on Burnt Toast and we can still have some of that magic.So this crossover episode was Amy’s idea because we are both getting questions about Halloween candy—something that causes stress for parents every year. We do have an old Comfort Food podcast episode I will link, for people who want even more on this.AmyI would like everyone to know that I actually found a bag of our Halloween candy from last year as I was looking for some candy to photograph. Apparently, lollipops are not super popular in my house!VirginiaMeanwhile, the other day, Violet said, “We haven’t had lollipops in a very long time,” as if I had greatly wronged her. I said, “Okay, tell Daddy to put them on the grocery list.” But I was thinking the same thing, that the last time I bought lollipops, we had a box sitting in the pantry for months. They pick out the three red ones and then they don’t want the rest of the bag. Do people like other colors of lollipop? There’s a very strong red bias when it comes to lollipops. And popsicles, too.AmyTrue. It’s logical. They taste better.VirginiaWho likes a yellow lollipop? Anyway, we’re not here to shame your lollipop preferences. Everyone knows Amy and I strongly believe that there are no bad foods—though possibly there are some bad lollipops. The question that comes up over and over is parents wanting to know how to limit or regulate candy consumption for sugar obsessed kids on Halloween. We got several versions of this question: What are the best low sugar options for toddlers? How do I prevent the sugar tantrums? Guys, sugar is not heroin. It's okay. Take a deep breath.AmyThere’s also the question, “What’s the best time to eat candy?” As if eating candy at 2pm might be somehow better. We put all this pressure on the food. We forget that Halloween is super exciting! It only happens once a year and you’re wearing a costume and you get to run down the street ringing doorbells! It’s novel for kids. If you took the candy out of the equation, they still might have a tantrum just because it’s new and their routine is upset. We want to control what we can, so we immediately go to the candy. It’s sort of an easy scapegoat, but it makes us forget the bigger picture.VirginiaIt’s the birthday phenomenon! People think the cupcakes at the birthday party make kids crazy. But no, it’s the fact that the birthday party was at a trampoline place for two hours! They are overstimulated from being around screaming children bouncing on things. Lots of research has debunked the sugar high phenomenon. I will link to things that I have written for anyone still saying, “But wait, really? I think it makes me kid super hyper.” It doesn’t. It’s circumstantial. Step one is recognizing that candy is going to be a big part of Halloween. Candy is, along with the costumes, the entire point of the day. The more you can relax and lean into the joy of that, instead of trying to limit, the less stressed you’re going to be. Trying to control sugar is going to end up with you in a power struggle with your kid about what this day can be for them. That’s not a fun way to experience a holiday!AmyYeah, it would be like trying to limit the amount of presents that your kids get on Christmas. I guess you could ignore the candy part of Halloween if you just didn’t leave your house. But this is a temporary situation. Whatever happens on this day is not an indicator of the health or well-being or emotional state of your child for the rest of their life. It can sometimes feel like we’re bad parents for giving our kids these foods that are culturally shamed, especially with the emphasis on no added sugars for kids under two. There is a lot of pressure.VirginiaYes, especially for parents who have a lot of fears around processed foods! Candy is the ultimate processed food. This is one day of the year when a lot of foods that you may not normally buy are suddenly on your child’s radar. It’s important to keep in mind that kids may seem especially fixated or obsessed with these foods because this is the first time they’re experiencing a Mars Bar or a Butterfinger. One way to think about lessening the obsession on Halloween is to be a little more relaxed throughout the year. If it’s more normal for your child to encounter a Snickers, then they might not need to eat 100 in one sitting. If you have candy around, kids will become more discerning. They will be quicker to say, “I don’t need to take a bite out of every single piece because I already know which ones I like and don’t like. I can I can focus and enjoy my favorites.”It’s so sad and confusing that this should be a joyful day and instead kids are having to navigate these complicated feelings about wanting things that a parent doesn’t want them to have. We’re layering this whole emotional experience about food being something you have to feel really complicated about.Amy“We went out as a family! We had so much fun! I got this bag of stuff with my parents and now they’re taking it away from me. And I don’t quite understand why.”VirginiaSo, I think we’ve established why being really controlling around Halloween candy is not the way to go. Let’s talk a little bit about what we each do and what our approaches are to managing this. We can also touch on the ever-controversial Switch Witch. AmyUp until 2020, we had always gone trick or treating in the dorms at the college where my husband works. We would go through the dorm, which was full of kids giving out candy. They dress up and decorate the hallways and it was really fun. Then, we bring all of our candy home and we sort through anything that is too crunchy, like a round hard candy, or anything that’s too chewy for the younger kids, and put it off to the side. We talk about safety. I’m not trying to do it on the sly. I’m very open about it. I’ll say, “We're just gonna put this over here and maybe one of us parents will eat it.” Then we talk about the candies my kids haven’t seen. I tell them the names, we talk about what they taste like, we do a taste test. The kids try a bunch of stuff! They spit a lot of stuff out that they don’t want. In that process, if there’s a thing that they don’t like, they'll just push all those off to the side. If they know they don’t like the thing, they don’t want it in their bowl. We usually have water or milk and we sit at the table and we do it together. It’s a later night than usual. They eat a lot of candy. I try to eat all of this Snickers. It’s fun! I didn’t do this when my oldest was little, because I was intensely fearful of sugar. As I learned more, I understood that my fear was not helping. So, I embrace it. Each kid then has a bowl with whatever candy is left. After that first night and we put it in the pantry. We don’t hide it or take it away. And then we let them pick out a few pieces every day and they can decide if they want it with breakfast or with dinner, but I do try to have the kids all have it at the same time so that there’s not fighting.VirginiaOh, that’s smart.AmyYeah, like they might say, “She’s having her thing and it’s not fair!” So we try to line them up so that they’re happening at the same time. Then if we do go trick or treating on actual Halloween we do the whole thing again.VirginiaWe take a very similar approach, maybe with a little less reverence than your tasting process. On Halloween night we dump all the candy out of the coffee table and say, “Go nuts! Have as much as you want!”Candy is not an off limits food in our house, so the kids already know things they really love. They throw out the ones they don’t like. Then it goes into a bowl in our pantry. The kids do try some new candies, too. Keep in mind, for picky eaters, trying a new candy is still trying a new food. Candies have weird textures and flavors, so it can be a great thing if your cautious eater is willing to try some strange looking candy. The advice that gets circulated a lot is to do a free-for-all on Halloween. We do a free-for-all on the second day, as well. Amy doesn’t need to do that because she’s got the double trick-or-treating thing, so there is going to be another opportunity. But I do think for a lot of kids just the one night is not enough. Once we’re getting back into our routine, I’ll say, “When do you want to have your candy?” Other traditional advice is to limit candy thereafter to one piece a day which feels like not enough to me. I feel sad with only one mini Snickers! So we do two or three pieces. I don’t get hung up on the number because you’re very quickly going to find yourself doing a lot of weird negotiations. Why make yourself crazy? I’ve also found, as my oldest daughter gets older—she’s eight now—she manages the candy very effortlessly. We are transitioning to her having more authority over her food experience. She manages the candy easily on her own because we’ve always done it this way. I notice there are a few days where she wants some candy with breakfast, lunch and dinner. Then she’s lost interest by the end of the week. With a younger kid, where you’re opening wrappers and you’re the delivery vehicle, I think it makes sense to pick a time for candy. Don't get too hung up on your role for managing the candy. Instead, ask yourself, did I give them enough access, and enough time to really enjoy this experience? If you’ve done that, they will gradually lose interest in the candy stash over the next couple of weeks. They won’t be fixated on it because they don’t have a scarcity mindset about it.AmyIf you’re noticing that your your kid is throwing tantrums when you say, “Just one piece,” the counterintuitive answer is to relax the rules. Your kid is responding to those rules in a way that is showing you that they don’t feel like they have access to that food. That can be a hard thing for parents to do, especially with little kids, because it often feels like we’re giving in or that it’s a slippery slope and now they're only going to eat candy. My two-year-old will have the candy with dinner, and he’ll eat some of the dinner and he’ll eat some of his candy. He’ll go back and forth. Candy is a food that we sometimes have more of at this particular time of the year.VirginiaSome kids are going to be the kids who are want to savor every little piece and they’re going to make it last till March and that’s totally fine.AmyThe goal of this is not to have kids who lose interest! The goal is to have kids who do not lose their minds over candy.VirginiaRight, kids who can enjoy and revel in Halloween and enjoy candy. It’s part of their life, not an obsession or something to feel anxious about. Are there any treats you wouldn’t let your kid eat?AmyAnything they’re allergic to. Anything that would be too hard for a younger kiddo to chew. That’s it.VirginiaThis isn’t something you get trick-or-treating, but maybe something like fancy chocolates with coffee in them. I might be concerned about the caffeine. Even then, it's one tiny chocolate. I’d probably say, “Let’s have a bite and see what happens tonight.” There’s definitely no good that can come from saying, “We let you have this kind of candy, but not that kind of candy” or “Nothing with artificial dyes!” AmyYeah, someone asked, “Where can I buy honey sticks?” I was like, “Please don’t give out honey sticks.”VirginiaDon’t be that house giving out honey sticks. I mean, if your kid loves them, great.AmyThere was a question about what to do when little kids want what the older kids have? I have a two-year-old and a nine-year-old. Having them eat the things at the same time, even if the things are different, can be helpful. Then the younger kid is not feeling left out. Make sure that whatever the younger kid has feels very fun to them. This issue of who has what and is it fair and is it the same is currently the biggest source of me wanting to run for the hills. “Hers is bigger,” or “She has more milk” or “She has a blue cup.” There may not be a magic solution to this, depending on your children. If this is my house, I am sure that this is going to be an issue. Even if it’s just like, “She has the red lollipop, but I got stuck with the green one.” VirginiaYeah, the lengths I go to ensure parity in lunch components! The other day, I cut a sandwich perfectly in half. And one child immediately said, “She has the better half!” And I was like, I give up. It’s literally the same.I'm wondering with this question if there’s an element of trying to limit the toddlers’ candy exposure. Unless it’s a choking hazard—which of course with ages three and under you do have to be careful about certain candies—let them have what the older kids are having. There is no reason they can’t enjoy the same stuff.“What age is appropriate to offer candy for the first time?”I forgot how fraught that feeling is when you have a one-year-old and you’re like, “Do we do it?” Especially if it’s your first child. This is definitely a question that goes out the window when you have multiple kids. If it’s your first child, and Halloween will be happening around them, like at daycare, do you bring them into the fold on the candy? Or do you wait and why? AmyIf you’re going to encounter it in the course of whatever you’re doing, then yes. If you’re not, like if your kid doesn’t go to daycare and you’re not going to go trick-or-treating and trick-or-treaters come to your house after the baby goes to bed, I wouldn’t stress about it. I don’t think you need to make a big deal about introducing chocolate. You will encounter it in the normal course of life. If the urge is to keep them away from this thing because it makes me wildly uncomfortable or because I’m scared that they won’t eat any other food, I just would maybe sit with that a little bit and think about whether it’s true. I think we waited until my oldest was two. She had a really early bedtime when she was one so we just skipped it. We didn’t go to any Halloween parties. But I think it’s a personal choice.VirginiaMy older daughter was not an oral eater when she was one, so I probably would have done backflips if she had wanted to eat candy. That was not where we were in her feeding disorder. So I didn’t have to navigate this in quite the same way as most parents. If you have a favorite Halloween candy and it would give you joy to share that with your child, do not feel bad about introducing your young toddler to that candy. Let’s be honest, Halloween for one- and two-year-olds is for the parents anyway. Kids don’t really care. You’re dressing them up in a cute costume for your own amusement or because Grandma wants to see them in the costume. It could be fun for you to say, let’s try this favorite candy and have that as part of enjoying Halloween. If you’re like me and actually don’t enjoy Halloween, it’s fine to just not deal with it. However, I agree with Amy that if it’s about insulating kids from sugar, let’s sit with that. “If my two-and-a-half-year-old doesn’t really get it, can I just disappear some of his candy? It seems simpler.”AmySeems simpler to you! But what happens when a kid asks where his candy is?VirigniaIt is true that they have short memories at that age. They might not remember at two?AmyMy two-and-a-half-year-old would for sure remember. I would be worried that the child would just wind up so much more confused and maybe have their feelings hurt because you took something. VirginiaIt sounds like this person is saying, “Can we just enjoy it on Halloween and then it’s gone the next morning?” I would be careful with that. And this is probably where we should talk about the Switch Witch. This is the idea that you let the kids have candy on Halloween night. The next day, you have them turn in all the candy in exchange for a toy. It’s a thing that dentists started. I personally hate it. Some people say the kids get to savor the candy and just give away the stuff they don’t like. But I also don’t like it because now I have to come up with a toy. Halloween is already so freakin’ hard! Why are you giving me more to do? So, I’m pretty anti-Switch Witch, but you’ve been a little more open to it.AmyYeah, we’ve done it the kids have a bunch of stuff that they don’t want. VirginiaBut isn’t that just what a garbage can is for? AmyI know! You can bring your unwanted candy to the dentist and they’ll send it to soldiers. Like, that's not nice! Send them the good stuff! I have written about the switch witch. I do think that it is a convenient way to get candy out of your house if you don’t want candy in your house. But, the reason that people primarily do it is because they don’t want their kids eating sugar. There is a way to do it that is helping the kids identify what they like and don't like, but then again, you’re having to go buy a thing when the kids already got all of this stuff. It is an extra thing to do and it’s not necessary. The real Switch Witch involves buying a doll, and there’s a book. It’s like Elf on the Shelf! I’m not spending $40 on that.VirginiaPeople can send me all the hate mail they want, Elf on the Shelf does not come to our house and never will. Absolutely not. I do not have time in my life for that. If one of these becomes a fun Halloween tradition for your family, if you love doing Switch Witch and you’re not doing it to ban sugar, then great. But it is not necessary to have a good Halloween. “Is organic candy any better?”AmyNo. It’s still made of the same stuff. VirginiaAnd it’s fine.AmyBut it’s more expensive.VirginiaIf you like to spend more money on things because of a word on their wrapper, then it is better for you. Yes.AmyAn organic lollipop has the same base ingredients as a regular lollipop, but it will cost you more.VirginiaAnd I refuse to believe that sustainable agriculture hinges on lollipop manufacturing. I don’t know that you will be making enough of a difference for the planet to justify the added cost or the sort of limitations you’re putting on your kid by telling them they can only have organic candy.AmyBecause then they would not be able to eat anything that you get out in the world.VirginiaThat does not seem like a great plan. “How do I limit my consumption as a parent?” This is what is underpinning all the other questions. Parents are afraid of sugar and they’re afraid of their relationship with sugar.AmyCan I tell you a story that makes me so happy? This was a huge deal. A couple of weeks ago, I was in the grocery store walking by the giant bags of candy. And I was like, “You know what, I really want some peanut M&M’s.” But I had never bought peanut M&M’s in that big of bag before! And I was like, “I’m gonna do it!” I was very excited. I put them in the fridge because I only like them cold. Every day, I would have some whenever I wanted them. I was headed toward the end of the bag and then there were a couple days where I didn’t eat them. It was fascinating because I love peanut M&M’s, yet I didn’t want them! I have gotten to that point with a lot of foods. We have chocolate and all sorts of stuff in our house and I don’t really care about any of it. I just had never bought a big bag of M&M’s for no reason. It was a good exercise. If you are feeling nervous about a certain type of thing, just buy some. Let yourself have some if you’re at a place where that feels safe. I know that for some people, it might just be too much anxiety. But it was really helpful. And to that end, I started buying potato chips every week. And sometimes we eat them and sometimes we don’t. It can really remind you that all of these things that we say about feeding kids—that there are no good or bad foods, that we can eat a variety—it applies to us, too. We can really put that into practice and then also be modeling that we can eat all of these foods and that it’s actually not a big deal. And also, if you’re going to eat peanut M&M’s, they must be cold.VirginiaThat’s the real takeaway for this episode.AmyAll I want my kids to know is, “Don’t eat peanut M&M’s unless they’re cold because it’s a waste.”VirginiaThey don’t taste as good, it’s true! We have a bag of mixed candy in our pantry and I got a packet of peanut M&M’s and they taste almost stale if they’re not cold. It’s a completely different experience. Now I’m going to go put them in the fridge so I can enjoy them more. I think the answer to this question is that you don’t need to limit your consumption of candy as a parent. This is another sneaky way diet culture shows up at Halloween. There’s a lot of TikTok videos of moms sneaking in to steal their kids candy and eating it furtively. I’m sorry, but no. Just enjoy eating candy and eat it in front of your children. And on your own later, because children are a lot and you want to be away from them, of course. But be a part of celebrating candy with your kids. Buy the candy you really like and have it! I will be buying a large bag of mini Snickers because sometimes trick-or-treaters don’t get enough mini Snickers. Some houses are not giving out the good candy. Make sure you’re going to have your favorite Halloween candy on hand to enjoy so that you’re not dueling your kids for the candy they want to eat. AmyI remember seeing one of those videos last year and I was just like, “Why are you in the closet?”VirginiaShe’s in the closet because she doesn’t feel like she can publicly eat candy without apologizing for it.AmyI mean, I understand why she’s in the closet, but like, just get out of the closet.VirginiaStop feeling like you have to eat candy in secret. Don’t apologize for eating candy. Eat candy in public. Also, with those videos, you’re secretly eating candy, and then putting it on TikTok, so.AmyI want the world to know that I secretly eat candy.VirginiaI want the world to know that I only candy in this sneaky way. That is not the relationship with candy you want to model for your kids! It’s not good for you. It’s not good for them. The moral of today's episode is put your peanut M&M’s in the fridge and buy the extra large bag of mini Snickers so you don't have a sad Halloween where there’s not enough mini Snickers. Any other final Halloween candy thoughts that we haven’t covered?AmyOne thing I realized when we were asking for questions on Instagram is that apparently there are a lot of Halloween parties at schools, which I just have never experienced. There were a lot of angst about what to bring to the Halloween party. VirginiaWe used to have food, but with COVID we’re not doing food at kids’ Halloween parties. Our school does do wear your costumes to school. They have a little parade around the school, but we don’t have to send food. I shouldn’t say I like anything about COVID, but I like not having to send food to school.AmyOne year you made pumpkin clementines!VirginiaI did because I was on maternity leave and I was really bored. And that was for a preschool Halloween party where we had to send in food. Because of having a new baby and being in a fog, I had missed signing up for cups and plates, which is all I ever sign up for for class parties. This is something anyone who knows me should understand: I will fight you to get the cups and plates spot on the signup sheet. And I didn’t get it that time and I had to bring fruit. It was sad.AmyOur daycare doesn’t celebrate holidays. It’s kind of a blessing.VirginiaI mean, it really is. That’s something to be very grateful for. All right, well that is some advice about candy from people who love candy and are less excited about the work related to children’s holidays. You’re welcome. As always, if you have questions, you can post them in the comments or email us or find us on Instagram with your questions for future episodes. I’m @v_solesmith and Amy is @yummytoddlerfood. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Burnt Toast! If you liked this and you aren’t yet a subscriber, please subscribe! It is the best way to support Burnt Toast. If you are a subscriber, thank you so much! Please consider sharing this on social media or forwarding it to a friend. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy & sell plus size clothing.Thanks for listening! Talk to you soon! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!This is a newsletter where we explore questions (and some answers) around fatphobia, diet culture, parenting, and health. I am Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture, and I’m the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia.Today, I’m pleased to be chatting with Dr. Rachel Millner, a psychologist based in Newtown, Pennsylvania who specializes in eating disorders. Welcome, Rachel! I’m so excited to talk to you. Before we dive into our big topic, why don’t you tell our listeners a little more about yourself and your work?RachelAs you already said, I’m a psychologist, outside of Philadelphia, I’m in private practice here. I work primarily with folks who are dealing with eating disorders, disordered eating, those wanting to heal their relationship with food and body. I do a lot of work around anti fat bias and weight stigma. And I frequently talk about “atypical anorexia” and weight stigma and how those issues play out within the eating disorder field.VirginiaAnd you have an awesome Instagram that I will link to in the transcript. I also interviewed you for a New York Times piece last year. (And this Good Housekeeping story!) What I wanted to chat with you about today, what kind of inspired this conversation, is an Instagram post you did back in June, and I’ll just read the text here. You wrote: And I sort of had a real like, yes moment reading this. I think this probably resonated with a lot of folks, and for other folks, this might be sort of confusing. There are a lot of misconceptions about the relationship between trauma and weight. There’s just a lot we can unpack here.So first, I would love to hear a little bit of the background of what inspired this post for you.RachelI think, you know, there is so much nuance here. And it’s one of those topics that I think does bring up a lot for people, because of all the weight stigma. You know that when we start a conversation around trauma and fatness, given the weight stigma in the culture, of course, we all kind of go into high alert and brace ourselves for like, okay, what’s coming next? What prompted this Instagram post was just sitting with clients and hearing their stories and feeling like their stories aren’t being told. And wanting to name that for some people, there might be a connection between fatness and trauma. The other side of that narrative that’s so harmful, is this idea that if we heal trauma, then somehow we’re magically not going to be fat anymore. This is something that’s projected onto my clients all the time. So I was just thinking about these conversations that I have in my office all the time, that are never told.VirginiaI’ve heard this from readers before, where they almost feel like they’re being a “bad fatty” if they say, “I think my body size is related to this experience I had.” That really denies their truth. And it makes it difficult for them to tell their story.I mean, it gets really messy, it gets really messy. So, I guess, you know, for folks who are newer to this conversation, it might be useful to start by talking about some of those relationships you’re seeing among your clients? How does trauma sometimes relate to body size? What scenarios are you kind of referencing here?RachelThe story that I hear from my clients is that when they were going through trauma, particularly childhood trauma, although I think it’s also true for people who have experienced trauma as an adult, that oftentimes food is what’s available to cope. If somebody is in a home where they’re being traumatized, or a child who doesn’t have access to therapy or other ways of getting support, food is often available. And it’s a really effective coping mechanism. It can be really helpful to eat in response to sadness or pain or suffering. And for some people, that eating may lead to weight gain, not for everybody, but there’s, you know, people who, that eating in response to emotions over time might lead to them gaining weight.Then too, I think for a lot of people who have trauma around weight stigma, and are put on diets at a very young age, we know that dieting often leads to weight gain. A lot of my clients talk about what it was like to have trauma around weight stigma, being told that their body was wrong at a young age, and being forced to restrict their food intake, which then, of course, leads to bingeing and leads to weight gain.VirginiaAnother narrative I often hear about is what Roxane Gay wrote about in Hunger. She framed it as almost more of a deliberate decision to eat as a form of protection. What are your thoughts are on that, if that’s something you also see coming up for folks?RachelI appreciated Roxane Gay’s book so much, because I think this is a narrative that doesn’t get told. And I’m really of the belief that we need to believe people. And you know, when people share their story, we can trust that what they’re saying is true and real. When I have clients who talk about intentionally gaining weight, or thinking about fatness as a way to be protected from the male gaze, that makes a lot of sense. And we still know that that’s rooted in weight stigma. Because this idea that if we’re in bigger bodies, then men are not going to be attracted to us is rooted in weight stigma. And it’s real, right? This is the water that we swim in. It doesn’t mean, you know—there are many people in fat bodies who are in wonderful relationships and have lots of people that are attracted to them. But I think this idea, especially, I hear a lot with my clients who have had sexual trauma, is that there’s a feeling of protection when their body is bigger.VirginiaRight, that somehow they can hide more that way. Which, yes, again, there’s the layers of fatphobia built right into that, but it’s also an understandable path to seek when you’re struggling in that way.RachelAnd we know that when people either lose weight, or their body is smaller that, especially for those socialized female, oftentimes their body is sexualized, is put on display, people feel free to comment and you know, “compliment.” And that can be really vulnerable for people, for anybody, but especially people who have trauma history, especially around sexual trauma.VirginiaI think that’s really important to articulate. The more you’re talking about this, the more I’m realizing how weight stigma plays into it right from the beginning, for so many folks navigating trauma and weight. Even, as you were saying earlier, that the sort of idea of emotional eating, getting demonized, that’s something we talk about a lot here—I’ve certainly experienced it myself. We tend to praise the idea of people losing their appetites while undergoing trauma, like that gets celebrated as if that was a good coping strategy, when actually, that’s quite alarming. That weight loss that can result, again, doesn’t always result but sometimes results, isn’t a good thing.I remember when my daughter went through a lot of intensive medical experiences, and we lived in a hospital for weeks and months at a time at various points. And people would always sort of encourage me to get out and go for a walk, like that’s what you should do as a “healthy coping strategy.” And I was like, hey, I can’t leave her hospital room. We live here. And I’m terrified if I leave, she’ll stop breathing. So no, I’m not going for a walk. And actually, eating Au Bon Pain chocolate croissants while I sat in this hospital room for hours a day like felt good, and was comforting and it alleviated boredom and stress. I just remember wondering, through that trauma, why is my chosen coping method feeling wrong to everybody around me? And that’s weight stigma. It’s because they didn’t see it as “healthy” because it might result in weight gain, or did result in weight gain.RachelInstead of being able to see the wisdom in that, that having access to food while sitting in a hospital room is so wise and comforting. If we were neutral about food and body size, then it would be like, okay, bring all the croissants, and have as many as you want, and comfort yourself and try to get through this really horrific time. Instead, we hold up some coping mechanisms and vilify others, which is ridiculous. VirginiaI will say, for the people in my life listening to this, that I did have people who supported me on the croissants and understood when I said, “No, I really can’t. Yes, my husband can leave and go for a run, and that’s really helping him through this time, but me leaving is not something that will feel—like, that feels terrifying.” And people did respect that, but it was tricky to articulate. And it’s tricky that when you’re in the active experience of trauma, to have to articulate your need and defend a need. You shouldn’t have to assert to other people that your need is valuable at that point.RachelRight, you shouldn’t have to defend it. Even just thinking over the past year and a half with COVID, there is some subset of people who have coped by eating, and there is some subset of people who have coped by restricting. And we don’t name the restriction as harmful. We praise it when really, restriction weakens your immune system and makes you more vulnerable to stress and the impact of stress. But instead, what we say is, oh, if somebody is restricting and losing weight, that that’s a positive thing. We don’t name the harm of it, where, you know, eating to cope actually makes a lot of sense. And is way more beneficial than restricting.VirginiaBecause that’s at least meeting a physical need. It’s getting you through. Absolutely.So, we see the weight stigma showing up in the active trauma space, and as people are kind of navigating coping strategies. And then we also see it, you know, I don’t want to say after, because of course, trauma can be a long unfolding process, but in terms of how these fat bodies are then pathologized by the world, right? So talk a little bit about what is often the approach to when, you know, whether it’s in eating disorder treatment, or in trauma therapy, in general, when you know, providers encounter someone in a bigger body, and the focus goes to weight loss, and why that is not actually going to help with the healing from the trauma.RachelWhat I often hear and see from clients is, there’s two paths that come up the most: I see clients who went to therapy, are in a fat body, and the provider made an assumption that because they’re fat, they must have had trauma, without even assessing or asking questions. And then there’s clients who do connect their fatness to trauma, and so they have gone to therapy, wanting to talk about their trauma history, and sometimes also starting out in therapy saying, and I would like to lose weight, or just not even focusing at all on body size, but just wanting to talk about their trauma. And what happens is that therapists then say, “Well, yes, we can work on your trauma. And if we work on your trauma, then you’ll lose weight.” Because if we’ve decided that eating in response to trauma lead to weight gain, then the belief is, if we heal your trauma, then your eating is gonna change, and you’ll release the weight. That’s the word that comes up.VirginiaThat phrase is really yucky.RachelIt seems to be the one that my clients hear quite frequently. People are in fat bodies for endless reasons. There are so many different reasons, and we don’t need to know them in order to know that promoting weight loss is harmful. It doesn’t matter if somebody is fat because of trauma, or for any of the other reasons that influence body size. It’s not like diets differentiate, that one diet says, okay, this person had trauma, so, this diet is effective.VirginiaI can totally see the trauma diet becoming some new creepy trend on Instagram: Intermittent fasting to heal your inner child or something.It’s just so missing the point because it’s not helping people work on, you know, processing what’s really happened to them or figuring out what they really need. It’s like solving this problem that’s, as you say, possibly related, possibly even completely unrelated, and not actually a problem at all. And giving them this other thing to focus on and then measure their “success” based on whether they can control it or not. RachelI think it’s so important to name really clearly that fatness is not the trauma. Weight stigma is a trauma, and clients have all kinds of other traumas that they’re coming in with. But fatness is not the trauma, and trying to you know “fix fatness” is actually re-traumatizing. So if somebody is coming in, and a therapist is saying, '“Okay, I’m going to help you with your trauma, and I’m going to help you lose weight,” they’re actually re-traumatizing somebody who’s already been through significant trauma.VirginiaSo where do you think that sort of line of thinking in the provider community is coming from? I mean, why? Why is that an accepted practice when it’s so clearly causing harm? RachelIt’s an important question. I think some of it is that providers are still being trained in really stigmatizing programs. I don’t think people are learning about the impact of anti-fat bias and weight stigma. I think, unfortunately, a lot of providers haven’t done their own work around it, so they may still be trying to suppress their own weight or still trying to diet in their own life. As providers, we’re always going to be in process. It’s not that, you know, as a therapist, you suddenly get to this place where you’ve worked through everything.But I think if we haven’t done our own work around weight stigma and our relationship with our body, then we are likely to harm clients that are coming in wanting to address those issues. I think the trauma field still supports this, I think some of it comes from the eating disorder field. But I think a lot of it comes from the trauma field. If you read some of the main books about trauma, this narrative is written about, and they are not HAES-informed books. So if you don’t already have some footing in Health at Every Size, and you’re looking for a trauma book to read, or to learn about, that narrative is going to be reinforced.VirginiaIt also makes me think about how much our internalized vision of healthy or recovered or happy is intrinsically linked to thinness, so if someone achieves weight loss—however temporary that’s likely to be, and no matter what they have to do in order to achieve it—we’re going to view that as “success,” because that narrative is so embedded in our culture. And we’re not going to look deeper than that, we’re not going to see that that isn’t actually dealing with the underlying issues.Do you think there’s a degree to which the underlying stuff feels harder, you know, that it’s that work that might be scarier to people? And going on a diet feels like, well, this is what I can control. So let me do that.RachelAbsolutely. I mean, I think that all of us have been socialized to believe that weight is under our control. And that if we can just find the right diet and lose weight, then it’s going to solve other problems. And there’s so many providers who reinforce that.VirginiaAnd the science that’s getting done is reinforcing this, too. I mean, I was looking at a couple of studies that were done recently on adverse childhood experiences, and they are all trying to document this phenomenon. One is called “Adverse childhood experiences are associated with an increased risk of obesity and early adolescence.” (I apologize for using the O-word, I’m quoting the fatphobic research.) And there are several others I’ll link to in the transcript. It seems like the goal of this research is to say, we should worry about childhood trauma because people might get fat from it, as if that is the outcome we’re worried about, not the trauma.I’m curious for your thoughts on that research, I think we see the similar thing happening in research on childhood poverty and childhood hunger. Like if fat is the outcome, then it’s really bad.RachelI think that we want to believe that research is objective and neutral. And the truth is that it’s not. The questions that are being asked in these research studies are inherently biased. And so they are asking a question that they think they know the answer to. I would love to sit down with somebody like Deb Burgard or somebody who’s really great at pulling through statistics, because just glancing at this research, I’m not sure that there’s actually a difference between the percentage of kids who are in higher weight bodies in this study where they’re connecting it to adverse childhood experiences, and just the percentage of kids who are in higher weight bodies in general.VirginiaOh, that's interesting. Yeah.RachelSo I’d be really curious for somebody who’s really great at statistics to kind of pull all of that apart.VirginiaYeah, because if it’s like we’re trying, what it feels like, in a way is that they’re looking at the “childhood obesity epidemic.” They’re saying kids are in bigger bodies now, let’s find this explanation for it. And then that’s a way of pathologizing the fact that kids come in different sizes. Then you’ve decided, all those kids are traumatized or broken in some way. Now, you’ve explained it to yourself. Just yeah, that’s a pretty fatphobic way of going about the problem.RachelRight. And it’s like you said, I mean: You’re identifying fatness as the problem, like, how about if we identify the problem is that so many kids have childhood trauma? This idea that, a kid’s coming in and identifying that they’ve had a history of physical abuse, sexual abuse, and the thing that these studies are worried about is fatness?!It’s just so harmful. And it’s scary that this is how we’re responding to kids’ body size and to trauma, that the thing that these studies are focused on and asking questions about is how do we make kids not be in bigger bodies? And ignoring like, how do we protect kids from being physically and sexually abused? VirginiaRight, right. It’s a really similar thing that played out in childhood hunger research, which was like, in order to get funding and attention on childhood hunger and childhood poverty, there was a huge effort to document the connections to higher weight. And it’s like, do I really need to explain to you, that you should care about kids being hungry? You needed some other outcome—you needed to make it about fatness? In order to care about this problem? We couldn’t just care about feeding hungry kids? It’s mind blowing. And it feels very similar.This also feels very tied to the older conversation about whether “obesity” should be classified as a disease. And, a lot of folks who were in favor of that argued that it would reduce stigma, if we could understand high body weight as a “chronic condition” because you would understand that it was beyond people’s control, and they needed intervention and support. That has definitely not been the result of classifying obesity as a disease. We know that it has only furthered weight stigma, and it feels like a similar parallel here that if we’re trying to understand weight as always trauma related. You could argue that that’s a way of increasing empathy. But it doesn’t seem like that’s how that conversation plays out.RachelYeah, I am fascinated by this kind of line of thinking. I really am curious about who thought it was a good idea to classify body size as a disease. And like, how they convinced themselves that that was actually going to decrease stigma or not pathologize people. I understand the narrative they’re telling themselves but I would love to dig deeper and really pick apart like, what actually is going through their mind when they thought that that was a good idea.Of course labeling body size as a disease was not going decrease stigma. I think, first of all, it contributes to the idea, like when we think disease states, we think of something that requires treatment. And so then you’re reinforcing that body size needs some sort of intervention. So naming it as a disease is not going to reduce the stigma in the culture, like we actually have to address the stigma and not try to find creative ways to describe body size, and pretend that that’s actually going to be the thing that’s beneficial. We have to find ways to reduce stigma. I’m just sick in general of our need to pathologize these expected and typical responses to being in a body, and being in a culture that harms bodies. I think this happens with lots of different diagnoses. I don’t think this is unique to labeling body sizes as disease, but I think we’ve just got to get away from pathologizing people and name the problem in the culture and you know, in the environment, instead of saying that body size is the problem.VirginiaCompletely agree. And on the other side of this conversation, what we sort of started touching on in the beginning that I just want to hit on quickly, before we wrap up, is that it makes it harder for people to talk about what’s happened to them, because they’re worried if they own their full story, that they’re going to be pathologized for their weight. And I do sometimes feel within the Health at Every Size community, we don’t do a great job of making space for this story, right? Because we’re so quick to fight against the pathologizing. Then I hear from folks in fat bodies that feel like, I’m not allowed to be a fat person with health problems here. So I don’t know if you have any thoughts about that, because I’m sure you sort of see that tension, often.RachelTotally. And it makes sense to me, I understand why that’s the reaction from the Health at Every Size community. When you’ve been oppressed for so long, and there’s such a difficult time holding nuance within the larger environment, that anytime there’s a narrative, that there’s a fear it’s going to increase oppression or marginalization, of course, people want to defend and protect against it. So it makes a lot of sense to me. But what it does create is this reinforcing of stigma and it silences people. And we want to do the opposite within the Health at Every Size community, we want everybody’s story to be able to be told. So I think we have to be able to hold space for these conversations. Because, one, they’re true, right? Like this is real. These narratives are true and real. There’s a ton of nuance within the research around, you know, fatness and health conditions that we need to be able to talk about. And when we don’t talk about them, we prevent people from getting help with the things that there actually are interventions for, and weight loss is not one of them. If somebody in a fat body can’t talk about whatever health conditions they might be dealing with, then how are they going to get appropriate interventions for whatever those health conditions are? So we’ve got to be able to talk about it. VirginiaThat makes total sense. And I am so grateful for how you articulate this nuance. Thank you so much for your work and for being here.RachelThanks for having me on for these hard conversations.Virginia They are hard but they’re really important and I hope it helps people feel more seen in their own experiences and more like they can own their stories.Thank you all so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you like this episode and you aren’t yet subscribed, please do so. If you are a subscriber, thank you so much for being here. And please consider sharing Burnt Toast on social media or forwarding it to a friend.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Jessica McKenzie, who writes the fantastic Substack, Pinch of Dirt. Our logo is by Deanna Lowe. And I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. You can find more of my work at virginiasolesmith.com or come say hi on Instagram and Twitter. I’m @v_solesmith. I’m barely on Facebook anymore, so don’t worry about that. Thanks for listening and talk to you soon! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!This is a newsletter where we explore questions and some answers around fatphobia, diet culture, parenting, and health. I am Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture, and I’m the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia.On Tuesday we talked about why parents need to question our own biases around school food. Today we are getting into all of your concerns about the diet culture your kids encounter at school. I am very excited to be chatting with Gwen Kostal, a Canadian registered dietitian and the co-founder of Dietitians4Teachers. Welcome, Gwen!GwenThank you. It’s so great to be here. I’ve followed your work. VirginiaWell, likewise. You are who I always send everybody to when I get school questions, because your Instagram is amazing. These topics come up in such complicated ways and I always want to make sure I’m sending them to someone who is a dietitian and really understands this issue from multiple sides. So why don’t you tell us a little more about yourself and your work? How did you end up launching Dietitians4Teachers?GwenThat’s a great question and a little bit of a funny story because we sort of stumbled into it. So I started this work with a colleague of mine, who’s moved into consulting for this, but we were honestly going for a walk in September of last year and sort of grumbling around, like, Oh, shoot, it’s started already. The comments are back. And then we had a really great chat about, Well, how come this isn’t working? So many dietitians, so many people are talking about this. How come it’s not landing? I’m trained in change management and quality improvement, which is really a fancy way of saying solving problems that people think, well, it’s just the way we’ve always done it. And so we started to look at the problem a little differently. And we said, Oh my gosh, what if we showed up for teachers, instead of just chastising people and making people feel like they’re always wrong? What if we showed up and started to help people unlearn this? And so we started testing the water, seeing if there was interest with an Instagram account, and talking to some teachers we knew, and it’s just gotten so exciting. And so it’s me, and then I consult with different dietitians, depending on the expertise needed, but I’ve worked with so many great teachers, and many, many of them are ready and they want to do this differently. They know it feels icky. They just don’t have the time, the resources, and the knowledge. And when we keep wagging our fingers and not showing up to help, nothing’s going to change. So that’s a big part of where it’s come from, and it’s just been so exciting. Teachers are incredible to work with.VirginiaI love this because, you know, I’m mostly hearing from the parents, as I’m sure you do, too. And often, the moment a parent notices this is an issue is when something has happened to their child. So they’re very emotional, understandably. They’re feeling extremely concerned about harm being caused to their child. But then immediately, we’re in this parents-versus-teachers place, which is really uncomfortable, really unfair to the teachers, really hard to navigate out of. And so I love the idea of, let’s not start there. Let’s start by engaging with these incredibly hardworking professionals, and in a respectful way. That’s fantastic.So let’s talk big picture. I’m sure I have some listeners who aren’t parents or teachers and are kind of new to this conversation, or parents of preschoolers who haven’t totally experienced it yet. How is diet culture showing up in schools? What are you noticing the most? And why is it there?GwenThis is such a complicated question because it’s there for so many reasons. It’s in the curriculum to teach healthy eating, in every curriculum you come across. It’s there somehow, and 99 percent of the time, it’s written in super vague language, which is then on the teacher to interpret. Dieting has been the lay of the land for the last 50 years, so most of our teachers grew up in pro-diet culture space. So when our curriculum writers have left things really vague, they’ve left that interpretation into a space where the diet culture machine has programmed us to think healthy eating means X, Y, Z. A healthy snack is X, Y, Z. So the curriculum is part of why we’re here. Even national food policies, like food guides, they’re new. It’s just over 100 years since the first micronutrient was identified. This is not something that’s been around a really long time. And our first food guides came out of scarcity, right? They came out of war measures and all of that, and then they got adopted more widely. And anytime there’s a national policy on something—when curriculums are national, or here, provincial, and I think in the U.S., state—they get adopted because it’s endorsed material. They don’t have to source out new things. So that’s how we got here. And diet culture is showing up because there are companies that profit by make programs for schools, and schools are resource-tight. They don’t have a ton of time to research and read all the up-to-date evidence on what would be good. If someone’s offering them a canned, ready-to-go way to teach a certain set of subjects, that’s great news for teachers and schools and educators. The other thing is sort of innocent. Teachers inherit resources from whoever taught the classroom before, or they’re googling online on their own time, looking for things and up comes Teachers Pay Teachers or different types of resources and free things that they’re like, “That looks good.” And because they’re not dietitians, they don’t really have a way to vet it. And it’s super important to remember that teachers were taught, at least in the Canada and Ontario context, teachers were taught how to teach. They weren’t taught all the minutiae of every topic they’re going to teach. Some of them cover aerospace!VirginiaYes, yes, absolutely. Yes. That makes sense. The standard teaching certification doesn’t include a quick six months through nutritional science to get you ready for this.GwenAnd, you know, food and nutrition and health is often not the testable material. And so in Canada, we have standardized testing. It’s on math and reading and all these sort of things. So when it comes to pressures on, what do we need to standardize and make sure is taught the same way? Those are the subjects that are getting the attention. So we see it coming out of curriculums and health class and gym class and different assignments that are trying to reach these teaching points. We also, though, see it in something I think your followers have commented quite a bit on: in just comments, or a funny policy-not-a-policy. VirginiaRight, right.GwenYou know, rules that are in school, like, you have to eat your vegetables before you eat your cookies. Those kind of things. So we see it there, too.VirginiaYeah, absolutely. It seems like there’s the official curriculum-version of this, and then there are the unofficial comments on lunchbox contents and general off-the-cuff remarks that people make in these settings. And they can both be really tricky. So yeah, this is definitely an issue where parents feel a lot of anxiety over how, or even whether, to engage. I’ve gotten a couple questions recently, like, Should I try to lobby for change in my public schools before my kid is attending them? If so, what? To which I would say, No. Maybe wait until you’re there and see what’s happening. Get to know the community. But on the flip side, is there any way to even start making this kind of change without it becoming a full-time job? I can also relate to that overwhelming feeling of, how do I even begin to push this boulder up the mountain?So how do you suggest we begin to think about these conversations? From the parents’ perspective, what can be helpful? How do you start to engage on this?GwenI think the instinct or the gut-reaction that we’re going to need to do it 100 percent and for every child and for the whole school board, district, state is there and it’s real—and some reassurance to parents that there are really fabulous people working on that. There are ways you can get involved. I know there are people, especially in the States, working on that, and there are groups up here working on that, as well. What I would say is, should you try and lobby—lobby is a really tough word. So, lobby is a fighting word. Maybe I’ll start with when your kid is already in school and you’re noticing something, and work back to whether you should approach it before your kid’s even there. My general approach is, remember that this teacher, especially in September, you’ve got eight months, and there’s a whole lot more relationship with this teacher than just around the food part.VirginiaYes, great point.GwenThe food part is really important, but so is learning safety and good communication, and building a relationship of respect and honesty and transparency is going to ripple effect through your whole year. So when you when you have a hunch that something’s going on at school, whether you’ve read something that came home and you explicitly know something’s going on at school, or you’ve heard little comments here and there, you see the cookie come back every day, the very first thing I’d say is, take a minute. And that’s not intending to sound disrespectful. I take lots of minutes. When you’re in this space, we’re so aware, right? Once you start learning about diet culture, you see it everywhere. VirginiaYes. GwenSo we do need to remind ourselves to approach with calm. The next thing I would do is, depending on the age of your kid, but if they’re school age, it’s probably appropriate, is ask some curious questions, like, what happened at lunch? Tell me about lunch? Who’s in the classroom? Is there a movie playing? And what’s going on? Does it feel rushed? Do you feel like you have to hurry? Try and understand what’s actually going on before jumping to conclusions because we assume that this is ill-intentioned. And we know that impact and intent are different and separate. But a reminder that no teacher is intentionally doing harm. They’re stuck with some unlearning to do of their own or some policies that they don’t like and they have to find ways to work around.If you determine that you want to go forward and talk about it, I would get out of email space. We’re so comfortable with email, and teachers are so great at it after last year, but email is the land of misinterpreted tone and miscommunication. I would see if I could get a call, or even in person, if your school is doing that, and just listen to understand first. So there’s a few different models from the change-management side of things that help you approach this. And you really just want to say, Here’s what I’m seeing, or, here’s what I heard. I’m curious, or—depending on how bad or severe it is—I’m curious about it because I’m concerned about it, because I’m worried about it. All these feeling words are appropriate. You can attach them. And stay focused on your kid because you are in a parent-teacher partnership for the next year.VirginiaYes, yes. That’s great. And what happened to your kid is kind of the only piece you really can be knowledgeable about, right? You don’t know what’s happening in other kids’ lunchboxes, so that’s really helpful language.GwenThe other thing I would say is a lot of things that do happen at school are counter to evidence. So when I’ve heard from people who have reached out to parents, and they say, oh, I got an email back, but it says we do this because we know that sugar makes hyperactivity in the afternoon and worse behavior. We know the evidence doesn’t support that. That is based on one study from the 70s with one child. Feingold is the pediatrician that did that work. Thank you. VirginiaThanks, Feingold. Big help. (Note to readers: For more on why sugar doesn’t cause hyperactivity, check out this piece.)GwenAnd, you know, it’s really tricky territory when you feel the need to start sharing resources, and journal articles, specifically. So once you have this conversation of, I’m worried, I saw. What can we do together? What can we do about it? If you built that with trust and empathy and understanding that teachers have a ton on their plate, you may get to the point where you say, Do you want me to send you some stuff to read about this? I’ve been doing some learning. I’ve been changing the way I see this. Would you be interested? That’s the moment to share resources. It’s very much like your New York Times article around teachers and virtual learning. Teachers were highly watched last year, right?VirginiaYes.GwenSo we have to give them a bit of grace and a bit of space to breathe, but remember that, if they’re getting like, Hey, so-and-so parent is on line three for you, they’re probably feeling a bit of a sense of, Oh, gosh. So they might be entering that conversation with tension.VirginiaDefensive, sure. GwenYeah, and it’s normal, right? VirginiaYeah, absolutely. That’s great. And I like the asking if you can send—I mean, I’m definitely the parent who has to hold myself back from being like, Here’s some stuff I’ve written. Here’s some stuff other people have written. Here are all the things that have been written. And it’s not what they need, it’s not helpful. So I like the idea of asking first, before you start peppering them with links. I mean, we’ve seen that in every Twitter thread ever. Out-linking somebody never results in that other person being like, Okay, I got it now. They just feel bad because you gave them six things to read and they have a lot of other things to do.Let’s talk about some more specific concerns that have come up.You know this policy that a lot of schools have of encouraging kids to eat their sandwich before their cookies or their vegetables before—the order in which children eat food comes up a lot. There’s that great lunchbox note that Katja Rowell wrote. Do you recommend something like that? Or is there another tactic you’d suggest?GwenYeah, I do, but as a third defense. I really, really encourage parents to strive for partnership and understanding and compassion. Even if that means you try an opt-out without a template note—maybe borrowing the language without saying, Look, I found a PDF online and I’ve filled it out. That can feel really off-putting, I think.VirginiaThat’s a great point, to take the time to write it yourself.GwenBut there will be situations that you may need to use that. So if you get a really sort of traditional teacher, or someone who’s really rooted in their own body image struggle, their own diet culture stuff, and they absolutely cannot meet you where you’re at, then opt-out is a really good option. And in a situation where the school is not providing the food, you’re the one providing the food, in a packed lunch environment, that is outside of their domain. And so you have to say, I respect that you have a way that you’re running your classroom. It won’t work for my child. I’m giving permission for my child to not participate in that. Please let me know if we need to do anything to make that happen. And you don’t need to have a lot of explaining with that. There’s that line that goes around that says, You don’t need to explain your no. Well, a little. But you can just sort of say, I respect that we see this differently. This isn’t going to work for my kid. Please opt them out.VirginiaI love that. That’s really helpful language. Would you do something similar—obviously, it’s going be a little different when we’re talking about the class assignments, like the health class that’s having the kids keep food logs and exercise logs and calorie-tracking, school BMI stuff, which I’m going to be doing a newsletter about soon, but certainly it is a very common practice here in the United States still, despite being pretty under-supported by evidence. Those are things where parents officially can opt out, but again, would that be sort of a last resort? How do you approach that?GwenYeah, I think anytime you opt out or kind of throw the flag on the play—I cannot believe I just used a sports analogy; my husband will be so proud—anytime you’re going to do that, you’re going to raise awareness that there’s conflict or tension, right? And sometimes your kid doesn’t want you to do that—VirginiaYes, I’ve heard that a lot.GwenAnd sometimes that damages the parent-teacher trust, right? However, that being said: Tracking, analyzing, weighing kids at school is dangerous. It’s dangerous. I would be a lot more apt to let it slide with the lunchbox policing and do some home-coaching with my kids and be like, I can appreciate that people see things differently and everybody has a different relationship, but we can be empathetic that different people think different things and you’re going to see diet culture. Here’s what it looks like, etc. When it comes to a dangerous practice, like weighing kids at school, I would probably recommend saying: I’m concerned. I’m worried about it because this is damaging and dangerous and promotes eating-disordered bodies, fatness dissatisfaction, and these are 13-year-olds. I really would like to see an alternative assignment for this. Can you tell me what else is available for my child? Or, can you explain to me why this is still an assignment, given what’s known about the danger of these assignments? So I think you can be a bit more clear and to the point in these situations. And this is probably one that I would move up the chain a little bit more aggressively on than, say, carrots before cookies. That’s probably not an involve-the-principal conversation. I bet you can deal with it in the class. But weighing kids at school is.VirginiaYeah, absolutely, because the school administration has signed off on that as a policy. And that’s a helpful line to think about in general. When it’s a teacher’s off-the-cuff comment that is displaying their own struggle or just where they are with this issue, that feels like a really different thing to me, than, this is baked in. This is the curriculum. The whole school has decided we’re weighing kids, that there’s been this decision that the seventh grade keeps calorie logs. That feels like a bigger fight. And I think that’s maybe helpful for us all to think about because the off-the-cuff comment can feel like the big fight when it happens to your kid. And that’s understandable because it can be really upsetting to the child. But I like that distinction you’re making. You also touched on what was going to be my last question, which is, How do we talk to our kids about this? We’re obviously not going to get all of diet culture out of the classroom, so there are going to be times where—and a reader wrote in and said, our school has a no-candy, no-soda rule. How do I explain this to my kids on a kid-level without engaging in diet-culture reasoning? That is a tricky conversation.GwenIt is. And my first question is, How old is the kid? And every time I ask that, I think about healthcare and how there really is no age. You can start these conversations pretty young. You just might have to change how you talk about it, but avoiding diet-culture reasoning is probably not the goal. I think what we want to be showing our kids is that this is out there: school, workplaces, co-ops, on the bus. It’s around. And we want to be building up kids’ critical thinking to see it, spot it, reject it, and still be respectful, participating people in their classrooms, etc. But know that, Oh, that’s a bit funny. And come home and ask their parents about it, if that’s the safer place. I think how I would explain that one is the same way I would explain, you know, grandma’s on a diet and talks about it all the time. I would be having a conversation with grandma and saying, you know, I really would prefer if you don’t talk about that. We can talk about that on the side, or separately, but not in front of the kids. And then I would talk to the kids and say, you know, This is happening, or, This conversation comes up and different people believe different things, and different people have been taught things, and we have to respect that everybody’s learning things at their own pace, but in our house, in our family, in our classroom—for teachers that are further along with this—in our classroom, we believe this. Because I do have teachers that are really doing awesome stuff, but that may not be the case when they go to their friend’s classroom, or they do reading in the library.VirginiaSure, that’s a great point. I think that’s really helpful framing, again, to help with that parental panic of feeling like you have to—we often have this feeling like we have to insulate our kids from these messages, and we just can’t. So thinking, instead, how to help them identify them and question them is just going to be a more useful set of skills. This is so, so helpful, Gwen. Thank you so much for talking it through with us. Tell us anything else about what you’re working on, where we can follow your work, anything else I should be throwing in the transcript links?GwenI would say the Instagram is where we’re the most exciting. We are on Facebook also, but I’m a bit of one of those old millennials that is still figuring out all the different social media platforms.VirginiaWith you right there.GwenI think they call us geriatric millennials. VirginiaYes, yes. GwenBut we do have a Facebook page, as well. We are launching more and more education for teachers that are either ready to come individually or as a group. So I do professional development, and it actually doesn’t matter what state, country, province you’re in. As long as we speak the same language, then we can we can do it because there are no boundaries for this, and most of the curriculums are public space. And we do have a website, dietitians4teachers.ca, which gets updated when it gets updated, and all of those things.VirginiaI hear you.GwenAnd there are a few resources to try and compete with the ocean of bad nutrition resources. We’re starting to put some up on Teachers Pay Teachers.VirginiaOh, that’s fantastic.GwenHoping that teachers have new options.VirginiaYeah, absolutely. And I’m sure there are some teachers listening to this, so I hope they will check out your work and this will be helpful to them and the work they’re trying to do. And for parents, if you do get to the stage of sharing resources with a teacher, obviously Gwen’s stuff is your first stop. So thank you so much, Gwen. This was great. GwenThanks for having me. This was so fun. VirginiaThank you all so much for listening to Burnt Toast. If you like this episode and you aren’t yet subscribed, please do so. If you are a subscriber, thank you so much for being here. And please consider sharing Burnt Toast on social media or forwarding it to a friend. Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Jessica McKenzie, who writes the fantastic Substack, Pinch of Dirt. This week we also had help from the also fantastic Rebecca Nathanson. Our logo is by Deanna Lowe. And I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. You can find more of my work at virginiasolesmith.com or come say hi on Instagram and Twitter. I’m @v_solesmith. I’m barely on Facebook anymore, so don’t worry about that. Thanks for listening and talk to you soon! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe