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

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 am delighted to be chatting with Alyson Gerber, author of the critically acclaimed novels Focused, Braced, and, most recently, Taking Up Space. Alyson, welcome! AlysonThank you so much for having me. VirginiaI'm so excited to talk to you. I have followed your work for a long time, so this is a real treat. So why don't we start with you just telling us a little bit about yourself?AlysonSure. As you said, I'm an author. I write middle grade books for readers 8 and up, and the adults who care about them, so teachers and parents, doctors, anybody who's interacting with kids of this age. I really started to write for this age group because I experienced a lot of trauma right around sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. I wore a back brace to treat my scoliosis, which was the beginning of my journey to body image struggles. And at the same time, I had undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and I cover those topics in my first two middle grade novels, Braced, about scoliosis, and Focused, about a girl, a chess player, with undiagnosed ADHD.And Taking Up Space was really the novel that I pushed off writing because I knew how difficult and challenging it would be for me to dig into it. I started writing it when I was pregnant with my daughter and I had a pretty significant disordered eating relapse. I really wanted to talk openly about what it feels like to struggle under the diagnosis. To really be facing food struggles and body image and not have a way to talk about it, I think it can become very complicated. Because there isn't a medical diagnosis for disordered eating, it becomes something that people don't talk about. So I'm always curious and interested in—and most of my books really cover—the topics that we'd rather brush under the rug because we're ashamed of them, for whatever reason.VirginiaRight. That's such an important point. What Sarah struggles with in the novel isn't necessarily what would meet criteria for an eating disorder, but it is really serious and really difficult and way too common. You're giving voice to that struggle, which I think we are all inclined to normalize or push away or have reinforced by people in our lives, by diet culture, all that kind of stuff. I was curious because I knew the first two novels were very personally inspired: It sounds like with Taking Up Space, the topic is something you've really dealt with, as well. Are any of the characters drawn from your own life? Or was it more taking the issue and putting it into a fictional world?AlysonThat's a great question. For all three of my books, actually, I really wrote the story of the main character from the heart of what I experienced. So from the ups and downs and the pain of feeling misunderstood and feeling alone and unsupported and confused about whether or not what I was going through was worthy of attention and deserving of comfort—even conversation—and deserving of support. And so especially with Taking Up Space, I really drew on that experience of being confused about what are the rules of eating. Are there rules of eating? And how do you learn how to eat and feed yourself? Sarah's journey to understand that she has all the tools she needs within herself by listening to her body, that really has been a lifelong journey for me. And so the emotional arc of the character is from my real life, and the plot of what happens to her as this incredible basketball player whose family identity is about basketball—she wants to be part of it and she wants to continue to play at an advanced level because it's so important to her identity—that is fiction. I never played basketball. I was not a basketball star.VirginiaWow. I am a complete non-athlete, so I can't say how authentic it was, but it felt very authentic to me—the team culture, the coach relationship. I thought you did such a nice job. I think something that a lot of parents with kids in sports struggle with is how body stuff gets handled in sports. We think about it a lot with gymnastics or cheerleading, which are very aesthetic-based sports, but even in sports like basketball, there's so much emphasis on your body being a certain way to be good at the sport. And the way Sarah was struggling with, “Is my body changing? And do I have to fix that in order to be good at my sport?” I thought that was so, so important to articulate that struggle. AlysonThank you. I actually purposely picked a sport that wasn't endurance or aesthetic because it is such a problem in all sports and I wanted to really showcase that this is an issue that's impacting a big part of the population. It's not just the stereotypes. I wanted her to be outside of that. And I played sports. It was sort of forced upon me. This is one of those things where I went to a school where it was a required, three seasons of sports. VirginiaOh god.AlysonI was also not an athlete. I was very much a benchwarmer. But one of the things I took away—and I brought that to Braced because Sarah is a soccer player and chess, in a lot of ways, is a team sport—was there was something about being on a team that I loved. I loved the orange slices and I loved the cheering and I loved being there for your friends and wanting to win together. That is the one takeaway of being forced to play sports. It was really not great, but—VirginiaYou had that experience.AlysonExactly, and I'm able to use it in a way that really benefits me now. That's one of the things I love about writing: You get to imagine you're good at something you really can't do at all.VirginiaI love that. I think I played field hockey for two days, and then I was like, “we have to run a lot at practice and I'm not going to do that.”AlysonAlso, there are a lot of rules in field hockey. I was always in the wrong place.VirginiaIt was very stressful. I literally lasted less than a week on the team. I was like, Nope, not for me. But I was a theater kid, and so I can relate to that sense of the group experience of building something and creating something as a team. You have that in the theater world too. It is a really special experience and it's definitely the real strength of athletics and activities like that. Another thing I love about the book is the mother-daughter relationship. This must have been pretty tough to write. I obviously don't want to give away spoilers about the book because I want everyone to go read it, but the mom is struggling quite a bit and you really show how her struggles impact Sarah in really major ways. But they also have this beautiful relationship. They have these things they can really bond over. They love the same kind of murder mysteries and there is a closeness to their relationship, as well as this distance that's happened around food and body. And I thought that was so beautifully done because I think so often, in the way we talk about eating disorders culturally, there's a lot of mom-blaming. And in the way they're often portrayed in fiction and movies or books or whatever, the not-really-examined evil mother figure comes up a lot. So I loved that you steered so deliberately away from that.I wanted to hear a little bit about your thinking there. Was that a conscious choice? Did you have to resist the urge to make Sarah’s mom the bad guy? How did you think about developing their relationship?AlysonI'm so glad that this is not a video, I should say, because you just made me cry in everything you said. I'm just totally tearing up because I think you said that so perfectly. I think there's so much mom-blaming and I think there's so much black-and-white thinking around mother-daughter relationships: that we have a good relationship, or we have a bad relationship. And I think mother-daughter relationships are really complicated, and especially for characters like Sarah and her mother, I really intentionally wanted her not to be the bad guy. And I wanted the reader to understand that she might be making bad choices as a parent, but those bad choices are because she's also a victim of diet culture. She's a victim of her own experience, and a victim of the time, of growing up in a time where it wasn't as easy to go to therapy. It was not as socially acceptable to talk about your feelings, and so those feelings got buried. Even now, when both mothers and daughters can have access, I think there are places, there are families, there are communities, where it's less accepted. And I hope that's not always going to be the case, but I think for a long time, it probably will be the case. And so when you have a parent who has complicated feelings that aren't being addressed, those feelings are going to come out in their relationship, and that's where the relationship gets complicated and messy. But it doesn't mean that it's not an amazingly close relationship, like you just said. You can be an incredible parent and also be somebody who has struggled with something in your life that makes that piece of your relationship really hard. And I think we have to get rid of the black-and-white thinking around parenting because it's just not. I'm a parent now, so I can say, "I'm such a bad mom today!" But then I have to consciously say, "No, I was challenged today and this is how I managed it, and it wasn't my favorite day that I ever had parenting, and I'm going to try to do better tomorrow." And even cutting that black-and white-thinking in the way that we talk to ourselves as parents and as kids, just rethinking it and reframing it for ourselves so that we can really see it for what it is, which is that you can be an incredible parent and have a real deficit in one area, a real blind spot. And there's also room to always change and grow, and that's one of the things—and I don't want to give anything away—but one of the open pieces of the book that I wanted to keep in place is that some things are resolved and some things aren't, and the door, I think, is left open. And that's one of the special things about middle grade is you can give hope without resolving everything and putting a bow on it. And you can always work on it, you know? VirginiaYeah, and the closeness that they have is in these other ways. Because this question comes up all the time with my listeners or my readers of, “How do I talk to my own mom about this? Or, Am I a bad parent because I'm struggling?” And it's this other closeness that you have—bonding over murder mysteries, or whatever it is—that can be the foundation of a lot of healing in this area, if the person is in a position to do the work—and not everybody is. That's the other thing. Not everyone, as you're saying, has the resources, is in a culture that's going to be encouraging of that.So it can be both a really complicated thing because it's like, how can you love this parent so much when they are also doing things that are harmful to themselves and to you? But it can also be a really cathartic, beautiful opportunity for growth. I think you pack so much nuance into their interactions. It was very powerful to read, and I have a feeling for a lot of parents reading it, it will be, at times, painful, but also there's something powerful about seeing that struggle play out that way.AlysonThank you. I hope it's a conversation-starter for parents and kids, and even teachers and kids. I think there's real space in the classroom to talk about this and say, How can we listen to each other better? How can we respond more thoughtfully to each other? What you just said about a parent might not be willing to work on it and do the work, but are they willing to listen to your feedback? And can they do some of the work? Maybe it's not only for themselves, but can they do that for you? And so I think it's more complicated than just, yes, they can heal themselves, because not everybody is in a place to be able to do that. But if they can give you the space you need and the safety you need, then that can often really help.VirginiaAbsolutely. Another thing I thought about a lot while I was reading the book, because it's something I struggle with a lot in my own reporting when I read about eating disorders and disordered eating, is the level of detail to include or not include. It felt like you had probably made some very thoughtful choices about, you know, you have to tell a good story and you have to bring the reader into the experience.But my first job out of college was at Seventeen Magazine, and whenever we reported on eating disorders, I was like, “are we just teaching these kids how to have eating disorders?” Because we were including way too much detail about the vomit and all those sort of things. But as I've continued to work in this area, number one, I'm more thoughtful than I was, I think, at that point in my career. But I also think there's a reality in which kids who are struggling with this need to feel seen, and that can mean seeing descriptions of behaviors or thought patterns that may be quote-unquote triggering, but also may be like, Okay, I'm not the only one with that thought. Or, I'm not the only one who was doing that behavior. So how do you think about that issue? Because I'm sure you also struggle with this question.AlysonI think this was the hardest part of writing this book and the thing I wrestled with the most. As a middle grade author, one of the things I always think about is, How am I keeping all my readers safe? That means the reader who has never interacted with this, the reader who is struggling with an eating disorder, the reader who is struggling with constantly being bullied because of fatphobia. I'm trying to think about everybody in the room, and also let that go at some point to write the story. But then when I go back and revise, they're often on my mind in the language that I choose, especially in this book, in the detail that was given. I wrote this book many times. In the first version, there were more details. Sarah's size was more clear. And as I revised, I really started to get rid of that because I realized it was only hurting the story. We know from some indicators that Sarah is a straight-size person. You know the fashion term. We know that because she doesn't consider things like her chair and her uniform. There's no question about the sizing for her uniform. There are other things that would come up if that weren't the case, but other than that, I really tried to eliminate all those pieces because I didn't want readers walking in comparing themselves to Sarah.VirginiaThat was really smart.AlysonThat's something that I really struggled with, and have always struggled with: Am I as sick as this person? That sort of comparison, really, at the lowest points, was really hard for me. I know that that can be a struggle for a lot of people, so I wanted to keep those readers safe. And there's no scale in the book, which is also another choice, and I could have made a different choice. I tried to make a different choice at some point. Every choice that felt like the thing you think of as a stereotype when you think of an eating-disorder book or movie, I ended up getting rid of because it didn't serve the story. Truly, it's not the story I wanted to tell. This is a story about somebody who doesn't value themselves and who has learned to value herself based on outward things, based on her success at basketball, based on the way that she looks. And I wanted her to be able to recognize that and say, I really need to value myself based on myself, on who I really am. That, for me, has actually been the biggest struggle in overcoming all of my many issues. But in particular, self-worth has been the thing. And I think at the root of a lot of eating disorders is this: Does society value me? Does my job value me? Do my friends value me? How do I fit into the world? And the truth is, it's really how do you value you that matters the most. And it took me a long time to really understand that.VirginiaAnd you're completely right. If you had included the more cliché descriptions of her getting on a scale and tracking numbers and that kind of thing, that wouldn't have helped tell that story. That would have just been the more Lifetime-movie version—or Seventeen-Magazine-article version—of this story that isn't particularly helpful because it doesn't encourage readers to take these questions deeper. It doesn't help kids think beyond the behaviors about the underlying struggle, which I think Taking Up Space does so well. Because you do have other people in her life—the coach and various other people—who are able to reframe things for her and help her understand these larger questions. And that's really effectively done and, I think, contributes to that sense of safety that you're talking about, as well, for readers.AlysonThe other thing I thought of when you were sharing that is that I really wanted the reader who had no experience with this—the person who maybe thinks, Well, why don't they just eat? Why can't you just sit down and eat a piece of pizza? What's the big deal? I don't understand—to really be able to understand and to really be able to empathize. I taught over the course of the pandemic virtually, and I met with a lot of middle school kids who felt that whatever their pain, their mourning, their loss that they were experiencing, because it wasn't as big as other people's, that it didn't count.So they really talked down their pain and dismissed their own pain and made themselves feel bad for feeling bad when, really, everybody's pain counts. There's a spectrum of pain and you deserve support wherever you are. And I think that's something that took me a really long time to understand: that somebody can have it worse, and I can also still need help.VirginiaYes, yes. That is a tricky spot, for sure.AlysonAnd I can also be grateful for everything I have. You can be so thankful for the things that are going well, and also feel a lot of pain and be struggling in big ways. And I think as an adult, there's this tendency for adults to be like, "It'll get better. It's going to be fine. This isn't that big of a deal." But if a kid is telling you this is a big deal, that they feel something, it's a big deal, and it doesn't feel like it's going to get better. And they do need help.VirginiaAbsolutely.AlysonEven if we don't think that they need help, they sometimes do, and they need to know that. So that's one of the things I hope readers get out of Taking Up Space is a sense of empathy for other people and kindness for themselves.VirginiaAnd another thing, I'm realizing, that I think is so effective about the book is because you didn't focus in the traditional way on her weight, you were able to show that the struggle really isn't about, Are you losing a lot of weight? Or, Is your body changing? It really is this internal struggle. And I think that's so important because, going back to what you were saying earlier about, often, we feel like we're not as sick as someone else, one of the main ways that plays out is when an eating disorder doesn't result in this extreme weight loss that we expect. And, of course, the majority of eating disorders don't do that. And so all these people's struggles get swept under because you don't look like the cliché super-emaciated person. So I loved that you showed that, and you showed, too, that the tinkering with disordered eating can have pretty immediate effects on someone's ability to function and how they're feeling moving through their day, and all of that. That felt really powerful for kids to read, both either if they're going to see themselves in it, or if this is a newer concept to them, to understand that the stakes are quite high, even when you're just in the "early stages" of something. AlysonDefinitely. VirginiaI know you said your daughter is almost 4. I don't know exactly when you wrote this because books always take forever to come out, but did becoming a mom change how—and as a fellow mom who's a writer, I hate when we get reduced to being mom writers; I'm not trying to do that—but because you write for kids, and you write about these issues, I'm just curious if your relationship to the work or to this book has changed now that you are a mom of a daughter who may someday be dealing with some aspects of this.AlysonSo interesting. I started writing this book when I was pregnant with my daughter, and I think I was really thinking a lot about home and what it means to be a parent and what it means to create a sense of home, and I do so much home-creation in my storytelling. Because for 8 to 14 year olds, home is really the center, even though friends are slowly becoming the center. But it's where you come back to for safety. I thought a lot about what does it mean to have a home that's safe, emotionally and physically, and a place where you could really be yourself.And so I've given that a lot of thought in my parenting, and also I think it's really impacted my writing, and changed it. It's made me see some of the things that were safe for me in my own home growing up that maybe I wouldn't have considered before as being safe. It made me rethink things a little bit. And it made me realize some things that maybe I hadn't seen as being problematic. And I'm working on a mystery—it's very mysterious!—right now. The character's sense of home and sense of self is a major part of the story. And so I've been thinking about it a lot. It's interesting. The way that my daughter interacts with me has changed the way that—because now I'm seeing it from the other perspective. I'm not writing from the adult perspective interacting with kids, but now I am living the adult perspective interacting with kids. And even though Juliet is younger, I'm still imagining and thinking a lot about how this will play out. The three-nager years really showed me a lot about what I'm in for.VirginiaYes, that is a real phase, for sure, having done it twice. Definitely is a phase. I do think there's something to, like, the dynamics you're dealing with now will be the dynamics. Of course, kids change so much, but there are certain throughlines, for sure.AlysonAnd there are certain things that I find that will be a pain point for me. I'll feel the pain point as a parent and be like, Oh, I need help. I can't do this on my own. And seeing that from the other side is really interesting.VirginiaI was just thinking, with the mom character we talked about, she has such a richness to her, and I think your experience being on the other side maybe helped inform that too. Because it's sometimes left out—and it's understandable because kids don't see us as fully formed people, nor should they have to. But I think it's great for them to read books where the parents are flawed and struggling and fully formed people because that's useful for them to start to experience.AlysonDefinitely. A big part of my writing process is really thinking about each character as having their own arc and writing a little bit from each—sort of journaling from their perspective so that they feel like fully formed people. So I understand where they start at the beginning of the book and where they end up and how they get there. It's not just the main character. And the adults are always the hardest, which makes sense.VirginiaYeah, it does. Okay, so a question I always love to ask fellow writers is, Where do you do your writing? Tell me a little: Do you have a workspace? What do you love about it? What do you hate about it, if you don't love it? I love hearing about where people write. AlysonSo I live in Brooklyn and I have an office in my home here. I love it because it's my own space and I can close the door and shut everybody out, and it's quiet. And I really need that. I really need quiet, although I do like to draft at a coffee shop. So I have missed that a lot during the pandemic, hearing other people typing. There's a YouTube channel where you can hear other people typing. So I've done a little bit of that, which has been helpful. And the thing I dislike about my workspace is that it's—well, I like that I can see out into the front of the house, but also other people can see in. So I get scared often because I'm in another world when I'm writing and then the person delivering the UPS package will knock on the window and wave to me, and I go flying.VirginiaThat's so funny. Yes. My office is on a side where I can't see our door, which means I miss every UPS package, which is its own hassle. But it is nice from that perspective of being startled out of your work mode because it's so hard to get back to it, too, once you've broken the flow. Well, you mentioned you're working on a new mystery. Anything else you're excited about right now? Whether it's a new writing project, something else new in your life. My kids started school today. That's what I'm excited about. AlysonThat is exciting.VirginiaOh god, it's so exciting.AlysonMy daughter's about to start school next week, which is very exciting. I'm really excited about this book that I'm working on. It's taken over my brain, which is great. And it means that it's going to work and it's singing. At first, I always feel like I'm putting pieces together and I'm trying to layer the onion back together. It works or it doesn't work, and it's working. And it's working in a way that I really wanted it to work.VirginiaThat's so satisfying.AlysonAnd just like the characters in Taking Up Space, I'm a huge mystery fan. I'm sort of obsessed, actually. I've watched, like, every British mystery. That's the one thing about the pandemic is I've actually gotten to watch—there were a couple of old ones that were on my list that I got to.VirginiaWhich ones?Alyson“Vera.” I had really wanted to get through that.VirginiaI've never seen that. My mom loved it, I think.AlysonThey're a little bit older, like “Foyle's War,” which is very long. It's nine seasons long. I was able to get through that.VirginiaWell, that's nice because you've got a lot. I hate when something's only two or three seasons.AlysonSo it's both exciting because I'm loving the book, but also exciting because this is a genre that has always interested me, and those were the books that I read most growing up and the books that kept my attention. So this is keeping my attention.VirginiaThat's awesome. And will this be middle grade, as well, or are you doing an adult mystery?AlysonNo, it's middle grade. And I'm hopeful that it will be a series. I'm trying to work to figure out how to do that.VirginiaThis is very exciting. All right. Well, when you're ready to talk more about that, you'll have to come back and tell us all about it because that sounds awesome. AlysonPerfect. I would love to. VirginiaAnd tell listeners where we can find more of your work and follow everything you're doing.AlysonSo my website is my name, alysongerber.com, and I am basically everywhere @AlysonGerber. So on Instagram @AlysonGerber. On Twitter @AlysonGerber. And you can find all my books also through the Scholastic website. Scholastic is my publisher.VirginiaAwesome, and I will link to all of that in the transcript. Thank you so much for coming on. This has been such a great conversation. I'm just so thrilled there are writers like you in the middle grade space doing these books because we really need more. This is a question I'm asked a lot: What can my kid be reading? And it's so great there's finally more than just Blubber to tell them about, so thank you so much.AlysonTotally. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.VirginiaAnd thanks to all of you for listening to Burnt Toast. If you like this episode and you aren't yet subscribed, please do that. If you are a subscriber, thank you so much. Please consider sharing Burnt Toast on social media or forwarding this to a friend. Our 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 or Twitter. I am @v_solesmith. Thanks so much 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!Audio newsletters are like podcasts in your email. You can listen to the episode right here and now by pressing play, or you can add it to the podcast player of your choice and listen whenever, by clicking that “listen in podcast app” link, above. And just in case you don’t like listening (or that’s not accessible to you), I’m including a full transcript (edited lightly for clarity) below.Today, I’m really thrilled to be chatting with Nyemade Boiwu and Janet Conroy-Quirk, who are the creators of the National Plus Guide. Welcome.NyemadeThank you for having us. VirginiaThank you so much for being here. So why don’t we start with each of you telling my listeners just a little more about you, your background? And what drew you to doing this work?NyemadeSure! This is Nyemade, I actually created the National Plus Guide just off of my own experience. I had moved to a new town from Florida to Delaware, and I was trying to find a new doctor, which anyone who lives in a larger body or marginalized body knows can be difficult sometimes. Just finding someone who doesn’t have that fatphobia. So I found myself just wishing there was somewhere I could go for recommendations or see who other people would suggest in that area. And there wasn’t anything like that, so I figured I should try to create something.Originally, I was thinking about just doing it for that purpose, specifically doctors, but then I’m like, well, there are so many areas where, you know, sometimes we struggle to find the right thing. I know, like if my friends want to go out, I pull up Yelp to look at pictures of the restaurant, see what the seating is like, what the stairs are like, things like that. So I’m like, it’d be so great if there was a place where people could just go to get all that. So that’s where the idea came from. And that’s basically what we’re trying to build!A little bit about me, I realize I totally skipped over that.VirginiaNo worries!NyemadeLittle bit about me: I work full time at a bank, but I do a lot on the side as well. I do a lot of advocacy around mental health and mental illness, I volunteer with Nami [National Alliance on Mental Illness]. I also do communications stuff, I do a lot of IG Lives: I do self-love on Sundays, mental health on Tuesdays, and then whatever other topics come up in between. And then I have a show called More Than My Size that I do with my friend Alicia, where we’re just two larger bodied women living life. Because we feel a lot of times, when there is representation of larger bodies, it’s always like this depressed place, like, oh, we’re so lazy, or we’re not doing anything and blah, blah, blah. And we wanted to show some of us are out here kicking butt. So we started that show. So that’s on YouTube. So that’s what I do with my time! I talk a lot.VirginiaI love it. I mean, that’s what you're supposed to do on a podcast. And I will definitely link to all of that in the transcript so folks can follow you in all of those places, because that sounds amazing.Janet, tell us a little bit about yourself.JanetSo I’m an MSW. I was a social worker in New York City for about 15 years working with different populations. I worked with homeless individuals, the older population. And then I kind of transitioned out of that, it’s a pretty high stress job. I started doing some writing and a lot of acting, and then I became involved in the fat positivity movement. I started to write about my experiences, in theater and in the world and a big body, and eventually went on to start doing more freelance writing. I was briefly the editor of a plus magazine that I’m no longer with, which was at least a good experience. So I have just been getting back into doing more acting, a lot more writing, and when Nyemade told me that she was working on this, I was so drawn to it, because I’d had the same experiences. In medical settings, of course, and also just in things like, you know, buying a wedding dress—I have a horrific story about that. Or just going to places like restaurants and being either physically not able to feel comfortable or being mistreated in some way. So it’s so important to me to be able to help create this database, this place where people can go and make sure that they’re going to be respected and comfortable and safe, is so important to me.VirginiaIt’s so important, and I’m so grateful to both of you for doing this work and for getting this project off the ground. I mean, this comes up all the time in my reporting and conversations with friends, exactly what you were saying about how I want to go to a restaurant, but need to do this sleuthing online and try to find photos of what the chairs look like. It’s so much added emotional labor that people are asked to do just to feel like they can be safe in their bodies out in the world. And it’s so important to challenge that. So you both touched on medical experiences, restaurants, what other types of businesses or what other like sort of spaces do you feel like this comes up that are really important to include in the database?NyemadeUltimately, with the database, we want it to be both a mix of plus positive spaces, and then also highlight plus-sized business owners as well. Because you can shop anywhere and spend your money anywhere, I’m just big on spending it where it has a bigger impact, whether that be, you know, I’m Black, so I try to support Black businesses and women-owned businesses and plus businesses. So it’s a mix of highlighting that and then also highlighting, as you mentioned, places that are plus positive. So like, like bed and breakfasts, hotels, sometimes people don’t really think about that. But it matters: the bedding, the showers.You said doctors, restaurants. Honestly, we should be able to live our life to the fullest, no matter what size we are. And for me, that’s what it boils down to. Maybe it’s because I’m big on reviews, like, I’m all over reviews on Amazon and Yelp and stuff, before I make decisions, I always want to try to make things easier and efficient where I can. So for me, having this guide, hopefully it grows into a space where people can just go hey, I’m traveling, like I love traveling, I’m going to this city, I can just pull it up real quick, or, you know, I’m moving, where I can pull things up really fast, instead of really having to not only search for the category I need, and then deep research into that to figure out if it’s plus positive or not like. I want to remove that extra step for peoples so it’s more streamlined, and it’s just as easy for us to find things as it is for our smaller counterparts.VirginiaI was talking to a friend about going to Disneyland recently. And Plus Mommy has an awesome guide to being in Disney in a larger body and what you need to know about different rides and all these different components that you’re talking about. And that also just really struck me: Disney World should be a place for everybody, it shouldn’t be a place where you feel like you might not fit. That’s ridiculous.JanetWe have a recreation section, too. So it covers, you know exactly what you’re talking about, like amusement parks, but then also theaters and camping sites and things that you just don’t think about and realize, I need to know about that. So that’s in there, too.We also included salons and places for personal services. And we want to include plus events, and groups that gather in different parts of the country. So we’re working on that too, as well as plus positive media. So, you know, maybe that could look like theater that is very, very, progressive in their casting. I mean, that’s maybe a little further down the road, but I think it’s probably related and would definitely fit in so. There’s a lot of categories. And we’re hoping more people will come up with different ideas and send more stuff to us. We even thought about a section for kids. You know, like for camp, I know of a couple that are really devoted to building up young people, not focusing on size. Because I know people who’ve gone to camps and had an awful experience.VirginiaUniforms and clothes for kids is also really tough. A friend of mine, I’ve written about this in the newsletter, recently, her daughter’s in a bigger body and trying to find softball uniform pants that fit. They were all slim cut softball pants for kids. I mean, it’s just mind boggling. Then when we talk about, you know, this sort of stereotype that kids in bigger bodies don’t play sports, it’s like, well, yeah, if they can’t wear the uniform! If you’re not literally not making a space for them! How does this perpetuate this cycle? It’s really messed up.So I love all of these ideas. And I really love spotlighting plus creators, makers or, you know, focusing on those businesses that people can support. Because I think that’s a huge part of this conversation, too. Something I think about a lot as a writer and a journalist is which stories are not getting told, who is not getting to tell their own story. And certainly, we see this in publishing, you know, when you look at books on body positivity, a lot of them are written by thin white women, and that’s something we really need to change.NyemadeYeah. And besides just having the directory, it’s definitely something that we want to grow into a community, as well. So we have the IG page. We try to repost interesting things that we see. We do like a Man Crush Monday, we shout out a business person on Tuesdays, Woman Crush Wednesday, just to highlight and promote people.We also have a newsletter that’s going to come out. So we’re always going to be looking for people who want to write. Sometimes it’s hard breaking into the social sphere, it sometimes feels like a bubble that you can’t quite get your foot into. So you know, anywhere where we can make it a little easier. Everyone wants the person with like 1000s and 1000s of followers, but like, who’s taking a chance on the person with like, 100 followers, who might be just as brilliant as the person with 1000s and 1000s of followers, we just don’t know about them yet? So I really want to create a space for anyone plus sized or marginalized to be like, hey, I have this great idea, I want to try this series on your page, or be a part of the newsletter or something like that, just to help give them that extra platform, that space. So we also try to do lives, as well, just talking to different people to spread information about them. And we’ve been also trying to highlight plus love, just because so it came to me because I was on the page, you know, Me And Somebody’s Son? Have you ever seen that?VirginiaI don’t think I have—NyemadeThey’re just like, cute couple pictures. I was scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and not seeing any plus size. I saw maybe like one. But there’s love for us out there. I mean, I know my DMs aren’t dry. People like plus size women. People who are plus size find love with slim people, other plus size people, other sexes, but where do we see that? We don’t really, I mean, I don’t know if you can really think of anything. But I can’t really think of a place where it’s like, oh, plus love. I think that matters for everyone, but especially for younger people. You know, when I was younger—and also much slimmer than I am now—I remember thinking I was too big to find love, like, nobody really likes me. But that’s not true. That's a lie that society puts on us. And we kind of want to help show that that’s not true, help highlight and show and spread pictures of loving couples being happy. So whenever we scroll across one on IG, we try to repost it and share it. I think we’re gonna start trying to see if we can bring some couples in to do lives with us, just to talk about their relationship.VirginiaI love that because you’re completely right, it’s not the default representation. And often when you do see a woman in a bigger body with, say, a thinner man, the commentary is very derogatory, like, what’s he thinking? And that’s crap. It’s not reflecting the real experiences of people in larger bodies, and it’s a terrible message to perpetuate. I love pushing back against that.Just going back to what we were talking about in the beginning about the challenges of navigating these spaces. Obviously, the database is going to be a huge help to folks, but while it’s still building and we’re still kind of figuring out where are these safer spaces: Are there strategies that you have found to be useful when needing to advocate for yourself in a medical setting or the sort of online sleuthing you have to do to figure out if the restaurant is going to work? Are there other strategies along those lines that you can share? Because I’m sure some of my listeners have been navigating those kinds of spaces and hitting those same brick walls.Nyemade I’ll let Janet take this one since I shared a few of mine. If I think of any more, I’ll let you know.JanetJust recently, this was really helpful last weekend, I was going in for a general eye exam. Now, most people wouldn’t be nervous about that. But I just carry so much with me from being in any medical setting and having people not listen to me or assume that there’s going to be a problem because of how my body looks. So this person was recommended through a fat support Facebook group, and it was a little further away from my home than I probably normally would have traveled, but it was worth it. And I took the time to write something about my anxiety and about my past experiences. And they read it and they were ready for me and they were so accommodating. And it just made the biggest difference. I think that taking the time to communicate ahead of time is really so key. But also communicating afterwards.Sometimes when things happen, and you’re mistreated in a restaurant, salon, or store, you don’t have your words ready. And sometimes it’s hard because as large people, a big stereotype is that we’re aggressive, or we’re angry. So getting into it with somebody in the moment can sometimes be detrimental. So, for instance, last year, my husband and I stayed at a hotel, and we loved it, everything was great. But we went down one night to get dinner at the bar to bring it up to our room (because it was COVID and you had to do that). And the bartender made a comment about how much food we had ordered. And it was really inappropriate and really rude. In the moment, I decided not to confront him and make a scene. But afterwards, I wrote to the hotel, and I wrote to the general manager, and I explained what happened. And he got back to me and was so kind and he acknowledged, he said, you know, my wife is plus sized. If anybody ever said that to her, I’d be so sad. And he handled the situation, and it was really effective. Sometimes it’s so hard to advocate in the moment, even though we want to. You don’t have to deal with it just then but dealing with it beforehand is a great strategy, and so is addressing it afterwards. So you always have a chance to go back and do it if you didn’t get the chance. And I think sometimes it’s even the wiser choice, because like I said, we, fat people, we are often seen as adversarial when we’re really just being assertive.VirginiaRight? We’re really just saying what we need, like any person should be able to do. That’s such good advice. I think that makes a ton of sense. It just doesn’t always feel safe to speak up in the moment or you feel panicked and stressed and it’s hard to find your voice in that moment. So it’s great to think about following up afterwards.NyemadeJust to add to that really quick, part of it that there’s a level of shame we feel about our size, no matter how much work we do. I know I’m constantly putting in work to have self-love, self-acceptance, but we live in a society that’s told us our whole lives that our bodies are bad, our bodies are wrong. And not only that, that it’s our fault, that we look like that, no matter what your medical issue is, or blah blah blah genetics, it’s always like, well it’s your fault you’re fat. So I think that sometimes when we’re placed in situations where we don’t fit, or we don’t feel comfortable, while we know we deserve to feel comfortable like everyone else, there’s still a part of us that’s like, well, it’s my fault that I’m so fat, that this isn’t working or that they’re being like this. So I think sometimes it’s hard for us to stand up for ourselves. Or at least for me, maybe I’m saying us and I really just mean me.Virginia I think that’s a pretty universal experience.NyemadeYeah. So sometimes that’s hard. That’s why I love Janet’s takeaway about sometimes it’s okay to wait and deal with it after if you don’t feel comfortable in that moment.VirginiaAbsolutely, that comes up too in my conversations with parents, you know, I think when we think about how to talk to our kids about these issues, that theme can come up. Because, if you’re calling out racism, or you’re calling out homophobia, like you can feel very confident in saying, that person is wrong. And this is the right way to do it.But with weight stigma and fatphobia, because we’ve so internalized that idea that it’s our problem, it can be harder to say this is wrong, and it can be harder to push back against it in some way. There’s that nuance to dealing with this particular form of oppression that is really difficult because you have to kind of be navigating it for yourself, as well as navigating the message the world’s giving you.The last thing I wanted to chat about a little bit is the idea of thin allyship. I often hear from readers in straight-sized bodies, saying, you know, I want to be a better ally. I want to support the plus people in my life and you know, what should I be doing? How can I be helpful? I just wondered if y’'all had any thoughts about that. Are there ways that straight size folks have showed up for you? That’s been helpful? Are there things that people have done that have been really not helpful, like, don’t do this?NyemadeI have a few. First thing is most fat people know that they’re fat. So they don’t need you to tell them that they’re fat.VirginiaAmen.NyemadeIt’s not helpful in any way, shape, or form. I’ve never had someone tell me that I was unhealthy in my comment section, and then suddenly, I was like, Oh, my God, I should change my life! It doesn’t work that way. So if you want to be an ally, definitely stop with that.I think first and foremost is treating the people in your life, no matter what their size is, like they’re a normal size person. They’re just a person, which we are. I do think as far as being a good ally, family or friend, know what the person that you’re with is dealing with. I don’t fit in booths, I haven’t for a while. So if I’m going out with my friends, I appreciate when they get a table. Because it’s actually one of those things where, because I get nervous about it, I try to get there early to make sure I ask for a table, because once my friends got a booth, and it felt horrible being like, oh, we have to move, or let’s pull up a chair. So just be aware of stuff like that, when you’re in spaces with them. How can you help to make them feel comfortable without them necessarily having to say something? Again, that shame I mentioned earlier might make it so they’re just painfully uncomfortable the whole time, because they’re not comfortable speaking up for themselves.I also think anytime that you can advocate for larger bodies is so helpful. I say it all the time that people who, like if someone doesn't have respect for a certain type of person, whether it’s because of their race, gender, or size, they’re not going to hear the message from that person. So if someone doesn’t have respect for larger bodies, I could say, I deserve respect all day long. They don’t care, because they already don’t have respect for me. But they might hear a slimmer person saying, hey, even though that person is larger, they still deserve respect. And I say this all the time, whether I’m talking about larger bodies, or whether I’m talking about racism, if you’re part of the group, that is in a way oppressing or just being a problem for the other group, like it really takes your voice to make a huge difference. Because we can stand on the outside saying let us in all day long, but if you’re already in, it’s a little bit easier to open that door and let people in. So use your voice to advocate for them, whether they’re there or more importantly, when they’re not there.VirginiaYes, agree. And that’s huge. Janet, anything you want to add?JanetI completely agree, all of that is so so perfect. I would also just say, you know, and this is a little sticky, because, you know, we’re all victims of diet culture, we know that. And it’s normal that everybody at every size has some feelings about their body. I do always try to help people remember that when you are not in a fat body, and you’re not experiencing the effects of that, and you complain about your own body, you comment on having gained weight, or how you feel unattractive, your bigger friends are hearing you and what they’re hearing is that you have some feelings about their body. Now that may sound harsh. And of course, we may say, that wasn’t my intent. Well, of course, it was not the intent. But let’s remember the impact. So I would say that’s something that we should all strive for. I’m a big fan of eliminating the talking about physical complements in any way. And I’m working really hard on that.I think also just learning a little bit more about, you know, what representation looks like. Something that really helped me and really touched me, I was very, very affected by it, was when I was working with the plus size magazine, a bunch of friends bought some subscriptions. And a friend of mine sent me a photo of her two little girls who were three and four, reading—looking at the magazine not reading it—but looking at, you know, pictures of big women in bikinis, and it was so wonderful. And I thought, this is how we’re going to fix things in the future. They’re already seeing that that body belongs in a magazine. That’s great, and it’s wonderful. And it’s a lot of progress. Showing up and learning about the movement and learning why things are offensive, what fat phobia is and what it looks like, is so important.And in terms of friendship, listening, thinking about sitting at a table rather than a booth; my friends have become very good about making sure that temperature wise I’m okay because I get very, very warm, and then I sweat. And then I get even more nervous about the sweating. My friends are not the ones who are going to be like, oh, let’s sit outside, it’s only 85 degrees. No we’ll go inside because she’s gonna be uncomfortable. And it’s not the world’s biggest deal. And I appreciate that a lot. VirginiaIt really is these small ways of being thoughtful that I think would be just a courtesy, you want to extend to anyone in your life. You’re just sort of seeing people for who they are and what they’re dealing with and how to meet them with what they need. But it is a sort of a flexible form of thinking that people haven’t been taught, you know, when we’re teaching our kids manners, we kind of forget to cover this stuff.NyemadeJust to piggyback off of that, it impacts how much we go out as well, right? Not everybody who’s in a larger body is introverted, but some of us just because of the uncomfortableness, like Janet said, like you’re sweating, or you’re walking or whatever, it’s just easier to stay home than deal with that. I remember I went out with some friends once, and they were like, well, it’s not that far of a walk from this point to that point. I was like, well, is it normal size, not that far of a walk or like, for me, not that far of a walk, because that is a walk. So thinking about stuff like that and like, I have my friends who I know are almost like safe spaces for me, like we can hang out, I’m not going to be embarrassed if I’m sweaty and I know, they’re not going to plan something or do something that might make me feel uncomfortable or where I might be embarrassed. So I think if someone’s listening with larger body friends, think about the activities that you’re inviting them to. Maybe there’s a reason they’re saying no. And it’s not always just because they don’t want to. I’ve had times where people have invited me to things and I’m like, that’d be so awesome, but I would be so miserable in my body. And again, like, that’s on me to work on my body and what I want to do, and blah, blah, blah. So I’m very much about body autonomy, whatever your goals are, whether it’s to stay the same or lose weight, whatever, that’s fine. But if you are trying to invite people into your space, just think about how their body would be in your space. And if you’re really making a space where they would feel comfortable saying yes.VirginiaThat’s a great tip. Yeah, we were buying some patio furniture recently. And I was like, oh, I need to really consider how accessible this furniture is for people. And that’s just a layer of thinking that we can all get used to doing and just, you know, would this work for somebody in a bigger body? I love that. And it speaks so well to what you both are doing with this project, trying to highlight businesses that are already doing this work and making these spaces for us. So amazing. Thank you so much.Why don’t you each tell our listeners where they can find more of you, more of your work, follow you, support what you’re doing?NyemadeAbsolutely. Definitely find National Plus Guide. That’s the main directory we’re talking about and trying to build up. We really want your suggestions, your tips, there’s a spot to go in there to either promote your business or recommend other businesses, and we’ll contact them to see if they’re cool being put in. So that is huge for us, spread the word on that, because there’s no way Janet and I are going to be able to find all the businesses in the country. We need your help. So please go to the website and try to add businesses or recommend businesses.And then as far as me personally, I’m across all social media platforms as @thatafricanbutterfly. The best way to find me is on Instagram, which will lead you to all my other things. I also have a website, it’s being updated, but it’s still available now. Which is just www.thatafricanbutterfly.com and that gives you a bio and a linktree to all of my stuff.JanetMy website is www.JanetConroyQuirk.com. It is under construction right now, like really under construction. On all other platforms, on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, it’s just Janet Conroy Quirk. No hyphens. So you can find me there!VirginiaIt is a project. It’s a part time job managing social stuff. Well, thank you both so much for joining me. This was such a great conversation.NyemadeYes. Thank you so much for having us!VirginiaAnd thank you all so much for listening to Burnt Toast. If you like this episode and you aren’t yet subscribed, please do that. If you are a subscriber, thank you so much and please consider sharing Burnt Toast on your social media platforms 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 designed 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 where I am @v_solesmith. 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 sometimes answers around 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 and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia.My voice is a little raspy because I was at my sister’s wedding all weekend screaming at the top of my lungs. Not like in an angry way, in a joyful way. You know. Dancing Queen came on. Anyway! Today I am, raspily, but very excited-ly, chatting with Tyler Feder, an artist whose work explores big feelings, feminism, and pop culture, all of which are things I’m obsessed with.Tyler is the author of the young adult graphic memoir Dancing at the Pity Party. She also illustrated Together We March and Unladylike: A Field Guide to Smashing the Patriarchy and Claiming Your Space. She runs the very awesome Etsy shop Roaring Softly. And her newest project, which we’re going to talk about today is a body positive picture book for preschoolers called Bodies Are Cool.Tyler, welcome.TylerThank you so much for having me.VirginiaI’m so excited to chat with you. I really fangirl about your work. Your illustrations are amazing. And you know, this new book is the book that I feel like my readers, everyone in my life really, has been asking for, for so long. And I’ve been looking for as the mother of a former preschooler and a current preschooler. It’s just so needed. So thank you.Before we talk about the new book, I’d love to hear a little bit of your story, how you became an artist. And specifically, an artist who focuses on feminism and big feelings, because I mean, those really are my favorite things.TylerI grew up always very into art. I was always doodling more than I was supposed to be in my notebooks in school. I would like take every art class that I could. But I always thought it was just like, my special thing, that is just like, a cool talent or whatever, but not a career. And I went to college and studied screenwriting.VirginiaAlso a solid career path.TylerThat one felt more legit, a lot of classes on how to market yourself. And somehow I ended up combining the two things that I love art and writing, and doing comics. I did comics for a school newspaper growing up, and they’re really embarrassing. Like, I can’t believe that I was showing that to a lot of people.VirginiaI feel like all of us who work in creative professions have some—I wrote a lot of one act plays in high school, and I had a lot of big teenage feelings that went into those plays. And I really can’t quite think about them now.TylerI have a lot of compassion for the person that I was.So, my mom got cancer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, and then she died during spring break of my sophomore year. So that is what my first book Dancing at the Pity Party is about. I had always liked just drawing pictures, but I never put them into a project of that length before. Definitely not anything that deep. I mean, when my mom first died, I was taking a lot of writing classes in college and I did a lot of poetry and screenplays, and play scripts, and everything was about dead moms. And it was very on the nose because that’s all that I had in my brain.VirginiaI mean, you had to write through it. That makes sense.TylerSo I made this book 10 years after my mom died, so there was a little time to work on actually making it more thoughtful and working on the tone and having it not be just like 100% a death march, just this, horrible, horrible sad like—I mean, it’s still pretty sad, but I tried to make it a little light, too.VirginiaIt’s such a tricky thing. I’ve written quite a lot about my older daughter’s heart condition and honestly probably needed more distance than I had when I was writing some of those pieces. I was writing about it while we were still going through intense open heart surgeries and long ICU stays. And that’s completely not the same thing as a personal loss like yours. But it was very traumatic in its own way. There’s a weird experience of needing to write to sort of survive your trauma, but trying to figure out, is that the part that goes out in the world? Or is that writing as therapy? Sometimes the line there is very blurry.TylerJust because something is in your journal, does that mean it’s a book that people who aren’t you should read?VirginiaThat is a strange space to navigate. So tell me about the new book. What inspired Bodies Are Cool? I mean, like I said, I feel like this is such a needed book when I saw it I was like, finally it exists, but I’d love to know what led you to doing it?TylerAfter I finished Pity Party, I was like, I need to do something fun and colorful and playful and positive and less intense. And this was a perfect fit for me. I’ve been really into the body positivity and fat liberation movement for many years. My family has a history of a lot of mental health issues and eating disorders and my immediate family was extremely diet-y growing. My mom had grown up a chubby kid and got made fun of a lot. And I think she just really didn’t want her kids to feel that way. I think it came from a really wholesome and loving place, but the way it presented itself was a lot of calorie counting. My sisters and I went on Weight Watchers when we were kids and it was just not a good thing.And I had this moment when I was little, before any of that really had come up yet. I was still so young. And I was in the basement with my dad, and he was doing sit-ups on the floor. I think I was just watching him, I was probably six or something, talking about how he wanted his stomach to be hard, to have abs. And I remember being like, why? It’s so nice that it’s soft. I had seen soft as a positive thing. Like, why would you want your pillow to be hard?VirginiaYes. It’s so illogical. It’s so understandable that a child would find that illogical, and then we internalize this illogical thing.TylerWhy should my dad be different than how he already is? Like, I love how he is.VirginiaOh my gosh, I love that.TylerWhen I was much older and had gotten into learning about diet culture and everything, I thought back on that time, and I was like, oh my god. There was an age where when I thought about different bodies, it was just with a sense of wonder and awe. Just in a very neutral to positive kind of way. Like, my grandma’s arms were saggy, because she’s old and they were so soft, and we just liked to play with them, completely positive. And it was just cool. It was part of my grandma.So with this book, I wanted to catch kids when they’re still having those positive responses to people’s bodies and really try to instill that that’s correct for them to feel that way before they start being really aware of their own bodies and differences and in a way that is free of judgment.VirginiaPreschool is such an important age because we know that’s the age when they start absorbing this, which is heartbreaking to think about, that it starts that early, but it does. So we have to get out in front of that. I love that the book is very diverse in terms of body size, but also so many different aspects of bodies you cover. And I was curious, what was your process for figuring out what those different aspects would be that you wanted to highlight?Tyler It was a big challenge. I knew tackling this type of project, the goal was people to feel accepted, and seen. That means showing as many different combinations of traits as I can. I wanted each page to be diverse, but I also wanted the whole book to be diverse. I didn’t want it to be like, every person in a wheelchair is the same race on every page, the whole book had to be shaken up, and sprinkled with the different traits everywhere. So at one point, I made this huge spreadsheet.VirginiaI wondered, because it is so meticulous. The book reads like this beautiful kaleidoscope but when you look, there’s so much detail. And there’s so much thought into every little piece of the drawings. I was like, how did she keep track of all that? How did she possibly not repeat things? So yes, tell me about the spreadsheet, I love a spreadsheet.TylerIt just had like 100 columns and 100 rows: skin color, body shape, body size, age, hair, hair length, or texture, disabilities, every possible thing I could think of. And I also did like a lot of passes after I had finished most of the illustrations, I would go back and add beauty marks, or scars. It was a lot to think about and a lot of research. I was very lucky to work with some really great sensitivity readers, one for race, one for disability and one for trans representation. And that was super, super helpful.When the book came out, I was bracing myself for people to like, be like, oh, I didn’t see my specific combination of traits in there, I feel left out. I just really hoped that I could avoid that at all costs.VirginiaI feel like even if that happens, surely it is clear that you worked very hard to like, cover a lot of bases.There are two kids books that I enjoy, and I have and I read with my kids, but they talk about body positivity through metaphors There’s one that’s like, “we’re all works of art.” And it shows different paintings and different bodies in paintings. But it’s still sort of narrow in that sense, and very abstract because, you know, a child knows they’re not a painting. There’s that sort of distance. And there’s another one where the characters are all different, like literal shapes, like a triangle and a square. And that’s cool. But it’s like, why are we using a metaphor instead of the real thing.I don’t want to sound like I’m being critical those books because they’re very useful in their own way. But, you really are showing bodies, like human bodies, and it’s so great for kids, and for parents, to see these actual bodies. Were any of them based on real people or were they all fictional?TylerThat’s a really good question. I think because I was so careful about the spreadsheet and everything there wasn’t as much room for sneaking people that I know in illustrations, which is something that normally I really enjoy doing.VirginiaI could see that’s tricky with the bigger goal of this book.TylerThere is on the body hair page, there’s this girl with two braids with dark hair and glasses sitting under a tree and that was like, vaguely inspired by me when I was a little kid. Like, hairy legs, mustache. Everyone’s playing and having a campfire she’s kind of off to the side.VirginiaI love that little girl. I think I was also a little bit that girl. I think I told you over email, I really appreciated the scars page. Because again, my older daughter has a zipper scar, she’s got numerous scars from her various procedures, and she’s super proud of them. They’re part of her story, her little sister’s quite jealous of them. You know, there’s lots of “well, you didn’t get to have a feeding tube, so you don’t have two belly buttons in our house,” which is pretty great. But I often think about, you know, the representation of that and wanting her to see bodies like that. So it was really special, as I think the first children’s book I found that really showed that. So, you know, special shout out from the heart parent community, because we really need that.TylerIt’s so cool to hear from people who point out individual elements that meant so much to them.VirginiaWell, it just shows how hard you worked to think of all these different aspects of bodies that we need to see and that we don’t normally get to see. I’m curious to know, as you think about parents reading this book with their kids, and the kinds of conversations that might come up. What do you think we need to be talking to kids about in terms of bodies? Obviously, your book is sort of a great starting point for these conversations, but where are you hoping it will lead families with this?TylerI’m really hoping that people, families are talking about how different we all are, but in a neutral or positive way. A comparison I like to make a lot is, if you go to a flower garden, there’s all different kinds of flowers, big, floppy ones, little ones in clusters, and they’re all different colors. And we don’t think like, obviously this one is the best because of its features. The fact that they’re all different is what makes the flower garden so pretty to look at.I also talk about dogs, like dogs look so different. And we think they’re all cute. You see a really chubby dog you’re like, oh he’s so chunky, then you see a really lanky one, and they’re so cute with their limbs flailing around. And I would like kids and their parents to be able to notice that their body is different from other people’s. But that that’s cool, that’s what makes the world beautiful, that we’re all different. And then also that they notice when they see other people that look really different from them that like, it’s cool that they’re different.I think a lot of the focus of body positivity can be on just liking our own bodies, or liking our own bodies as they are right at this moment without gaining or losing any weight, or disability or any thing like that, or aging or whatever. And I think building empathy is a really important part of body positivity, and it can lessen fatphobia and all the things that come along with that, and racism, sexism, just like just thinking that it’s cool that we’re all different, and everyone should be included in spaces accessible for them.Virginia I think a lot about how with little kids in particular, we celebrate growth, for the most part, we celebrate that your body is changing. And then kids reach a certain age. And often it’s still pretty young, it might be just before puberty, or once puberty starts and suddenly the changes are bad. And that kicks off this whole lifetime of feeling any way your body changes, unless it’s becoming smaller, is a bad thing. And it’s so messed up. Both because it makes it more difficult to feel okay about your own body, and because of what it says about everybody else’s bodies, any body that is different than yours is somehow less than or you know, it creates these strange hierarchies. I love the idea of celebrating change and bodies because we all need that freedom to change.TylerIt doesn’t end in puberty, there’s a lot of changes that keep happening.Virginia Absolutely. I think that’s really useful.I think parents often really worry and this is a question I get often, what if my kid calls out something about somebody’s body, whether it’s, you know, that they’re using a mobility aid or that they have a different skin color or that they’re fat, calls it out in a public way and then that’s so mortifying, you know, what do I do with those kinds of moments. And I’m just curious if you have any thoughts about, you know, if we’re going to encourage noticing difference, how do we pair that with respect?TylerI wouldn’t ever want to speak over anyone in a community that’s more targeted by this kind of stuff. But in general, if your kid is like, wow, look at that person. They’re different, I think you can just be like, yeah, that’s great. That might have sounded sarcastic, and I didn’t mean it that way. Just, yeah, it is cool. That person’s hair is super curly, and yours is super straight. Isn’t it cool how hair can be all different shapes? And to just to not hush the kid away and make them think that it’s something bad to acknowledge that we’re different, because there’s nothing wrong with that.VirginiaAbsolutely. I think particularly white parents or particularly thin parents, anyone with a certain amount of privilege, has this idea that noticing the difference is going to be mortifying to the other person. But that’s actually their own internal biases, because what they’re really saying is it’s worse to be that way. So let’s not point out this bad thing. But if you can let go of the idea that it’s bad to be bigger, it’s bad to be brown or any of these things, then it is just different and different is good. I have a feeling the people reading your book, like the parents are having to do a lot more work than the kids. We all have all this stuff to let go of.TylerThe adults are the ones that have been like swimming in this diet culture soup for their whole lives.VirginiaYes, and trying to do the work, but it’s not easy work, you know, when you’re having to unpack stuff that happened when you were six with your dad doing sit-ups or whatever. It takes a really long time. But this is such a great tool.People are always asking me for other book recs, so if there’s another body positive book, either for older kids or just another book in this space you really love we always love recommendations.TylerYeah, for sure. I did a panel about body positivity with this author Shelly Anand, she wrote a children's book called Laxmi's Mooch.VirginiaOh, I don’t know this one.TylerIt’s about a little Indian girl who has hair on her upper lip. Mooch is a Hindi word for mustache. And she gets teased about it in school, and then she goes home and her mom tells her about all the women in her family that have this and all these historical figures like Frida Kahlo, and then the girl goes back to school the next day and is like, so excited about her mustache. And she’s like, I’m like a lion, or tiger or something. It gave me goosebumps. I can’t stop thinking about it. I think it’s great in general. But also, I had a mustache when I was a little kid. And it was something that would get pointed out a lot by other kids and sometimes adults. And it was really embarrassing. And I love the idea that it’s okay that you have this. You don’t have to hide it. But it’s like, it’s cool.I mean, I cannot imagine in a million years, if when I was little, I had thought that my little mustache was cool.VirginiaRight? If someone had given you space to embrace it. Oh, my gosh, that’s so powerful. I also love it from like, you know, fighting the gender binary perspective, like normalizing the idea that we can have all different bodies and that’s amazing. I’m really excited to check that out.Tyler, tell us where we can find more of your work where people can follow you, how we can support your work.TylerI’m on Instagram @TylerFeder. That’s my main space for posting art. I sell my art at roaringsoftly.com.VirginiaAnd of course, we’ll link to the book, we’ll link to all your books so people can check those out as well. And I’m so glad I got a chance to talk to you, this was awesome. And yeah, Bodies Are Cool is just a must have in every parent’s library. So thank you for your work. 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 sometimes answers around 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 and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia.Today I am chatting with Christy Harrison, a dietitian, host of the beloved Food Psych podcast and author of Anti-Diet, one of my favorite books, and the forthcoming Rethinking Wellness. Welcome, Christy!ChristyThanks, Virginia. So good to be here. VirginiaI’m so glad to have you on. Christy and I have been guests on each other’s podcasts over the years, so it is fun to be doing it again. Christy, I am sure most of my listeners are going to know your work because you are kind of a legend in this space. But why don’t you give us a little background on you and your work?ChristyLike you said, I’m a journalist and dietitian. I started my career as a journalist, and also had my own undiagnosed eating disorder at the time. It kind of made me obsessed with food, nutrition and health, and that’s what I sort of fell into reporting on. And that can really exacerbate disordered eating. Even people who don’t have pre-existing disordered eating, sometimes falling into those beats can create some disorder in one’s relationship with food. So I really struggled with that, but was slowly recovering and had a therapist and had some good people around me, supporting me to at least expand my horizons a little bit with food. I ended up working at a food magazine, Gourmet—RIP—and worked there for a couple years until it folded. And during that time, I realized that the magazine was maybe a little bit on the rocks, and the magazine industry in general was not a great—VirginiaNot a sustainable business model—Christy Yeah, not the most sustainable, and that has really kind of proven to be true. So I went back to school to get my dietitian’s license and get my master's in public health nutrition. And at the time, my goal was to be the next Michael Pollan, or like, Michael Pollan meets Marion Nestle. I wanted to write about sustainability and food systems and ending the “obesity epidemic.” I had really bought into that rhetoric. I think it came out of my own disordered relationship with food and how much I had bought into to diet culture, and specifically the version of diet culture that I now call the wellness diet, which was sort of birthed by the Michael Pollan paradigm. You know, “eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” which is enough to just drive a person up a wall, thinking about the minutiae of that. And of course, my thinking about calories and carbs, and all the sort of overt diet-culture stuff never really went away, either. So it was just a hot mess in my head.Fortunately, when I was in grad school, I started researching a book that I never ended up writing, but that kind of, in a roundabout way, became the basis of Anti-Diet 10 years later. And that original book that I was researching was about emotional eating. I considered myself an emotional eater at the time. I now can see that it’s because I wasn’t eating enough. When people are deprived of food, it makes them eat more in response to emotions, and it also can make them eat more and attribute it to emotions, when really it’s attributable to the deprivation itself, to hunger.I wasn’t really aware of all that. But I started to find research on restrained eating and the effects of that. And I discovered the book Intuitive Eating. And those things started to shift my relationship with food, especially the book Intuitive Eating, and I started to try to practice that and brought it into my therapy. Fortunately, I had been an intuitive eater up until the age of 20, when my eating disorder started. Luckily, no one had interfered in my relationship with food growing up, so I was able to have that intuitive relationship with food, I think largely because of thin privilege—which is the privilege of being thin enough to have nobody say, “you’re too big, you need to lose weight,” and also the privilege of having food security. Those things allowed me to keep on eating intuitively through my adolescence, and I think it was a little bit easier to click back into it because I had that base. It did still take a long time, it took years to really heal my relationship with food, get back to a place of intuitive eating. But I think having that sort of memory was helpful.Once I had gone through that I, you know, was now a nutritionist and soon to be full-fledged dietitian, and I worked for three years as a nutritionist at the New York City Department of Health. And that’s while I was recovering, and sort of re-learning intuitive eating. So the cognitive dissonance of what I was teaching and preaching to people, and what I was doing in my own life, started to be pretty clear to me. I started thinking a lot more about people’s relationships with food, and what makes someone a disordered eater versus having a peaceful relationship with food. And I realized that was the direction I wanted to go in my career. That’s what led me to the eating disorder field and to starting the podcast in 2013, and where I ended up now, I guess. Along the way, of course, I picked up more about Health at Every Size, and an anti-diet approach that I think is really necessary for working with disordered eating, but also for working with any client on any nutritional issue. People of all shapes and sizes, and people of all backgrounds really deserve to have an intuitive relationship with food and a peaceful relationship with food and not to be told what to eat or policed about their food choices.So that’s the perspective I come from now: How can I partner with people and support people through my journalistic work to reconnect with their own innate wisdom about food and nutrition in their bodies?VirginiaThat’s the piece of the conversation that I see missing over and over, when we look at the work of the Michael Pollans of the world or the wellness industry where it is today. There’s no recognition of the emotional piece of this, the oppression that many people face around their bodies and the way the world treats them for their bodies.ChristyIt’s really seen as education is the answer to everything. And I don’t know anyone I’ve seen as a client who hasn’t sort of “known what they were supposed to be doing,” right? They come in saying, you’re gonna tell me I’m bad. I eat this. I’m so ashamed of myself, I eat a lot of processed food, or whatever. People know what the “rules” are. The fact that they’re not following them speaks to the arbitrariness and messed-up-ness of the rules themselves.VirginiaAnd the unsustainability of them, ironically, given that it’s often framed as this effort to find sustainability.I got to know Christy when I interviewed her for The Eating Instinct. Her story is in chapter two, which was excerpted in Medium. When we first met, we both had these early experiences in the magazine world. I was at a magazine called Organic Style, so it was sort of in the same realm, but not a food magazine full on, but very much an incubator of a lot of this wellness industry stuff in the early years of that, and we both had these complicated journeys out of that space. So it’s kind of cool that we both ended up where we are.I’ve got some listener questions that I wanted to put your way. The first is getting at this intuitive eating versus processed food concept, which you sort of touched on a little bit there, and is something folks struggle with a lot. I get a version of this question all the time, but this person wrote: “I love the idea of intuitive eating, but wonder how it works with modern processed food, which is designed to keep us eating more and more. I have heard the processed food hijacks our body’s natural impulses, that sugar and white flour are addictive. I’m especially interested in this question as I get ready to introduce solid food to my baby.” A lot to unpack there.[Editor’s Note: You can read Virginia’s full response to this question here.]ChristyI get versions of this question a lot, too, and I think it’s fascinating because when I first was coming into the intuitive eating space, I still had a lot of that Michael Pollan baggage with me. And I thought, well, maybe there’s a way to bridge these two worlds and think about food politics and how “bad” processed foods are, but do it through an intuitive eating lens where we’re not demonizing anything. And through a lot of reflection on that, I sort of realized, it’s not really possible to bridge those two worlds because the Michael Pollan world is so rooted in—and I keep calling him out as the exemplar of this, but it’s so many people now, the whole wellness industry basically, now—but that world is so rooted in this concept that fat is bad, that eating certain foods makes us fat, and makes us inherently unhealthy, so we need to cut out those foods and it really demonizes certain foods and elevates others. I’ve come to see that that’s really a hallmark of diet culture, and very much a hallmark of this modern guise of diet culture that I call the wellness diet, which is really diet culture disguising itself as health and wellness. It’s still about restriction and deprivation and fatphobia, shaming certain types of bodies and elevating others, and shaming certain types of foods, both because of their perceived connection to higher weights, and also because of other baggage about those foods being “unhealthy” in and of themselves. So now I think that is just fundamentally incompatible with intuitive eating, because one of the principles of intuitive eating is make peace with food, and this full unconditional permission to eat all foods.What I’ve found and what the research bears out, is that when people are truly not deprived of anything, when they don’t see anything as bad or off limits, they paradoxically are able to modulate their eating in a way that is much more aligned with their body’s desires and needs. They’re not in this restrict-binge cycle, with particular foods or with food in general. There’s some research that I cite in my book about the effect of dietary restraint on people’s eating and even their brain activity in response to certain types of foods specifically like sugar, processed foods, you know, “processed” foods and highly palatable foods that are so demonized in our culture. What researchers found is that people who are restricted and deprived, people who are restrained eaters aka chronic dieters, do eat more in the presence of highly palatable foods, do eat more, get more brain reward from sweet foods [Editor’s Note: use of weight-stigmatizing language], and also eat more in the presence of food advertising, and also diet advertising. There are ads encouraging people to eat more foods that are delicious, and also ads encouraging people to eat less, or eat more diet foods, and all of those things dieters are actually more susceptible to doing. Dieters will eat more of the foods that they are told are “good” as well as foods that diet culture deems “bad” in the presence of that kind of marketing. And their brain activity in response to sweet foods is far greater. People who are not restrained eaters, people who are not chronic dieters, don’t show that same response. They actually eat the same amount in the presence of food industry and diet industry marketing, they have way less brain activity in response to sweet foods, they might still have some activity in the pleasure centers because, of course, sweetness is pleasurable. And we all deserve that, we all deserve to have pleasure in food, but there’s not this immense reward because there wasn’t the immense deprivation. When you’re more deprived of something, you tend to gravitate towards it more, and you tend to have a greater reward from that food. And then of course, the corresponding guilt afterwards.VirginiaThat’s so interesting, and what I’m just thinking about, as you’re talking, is how we so often hear this conversation demonizing highly palatable foods, processed foods, and demonizing food marketing for making us want more and more, but we don’t talk very often about how much that marketing is playing into the restrict-binge cycle. So much of the advertising around foods that are “highly palatable” or whatever you want to call it is sort of playing into that rhetoric that you should indulge, that message is not subtle at all in the advertising. And then the diet industry messaging is really the flip side of the same coin in terms of the marketing. We don’t think enough about how it’s not really the food itself. It really is this conversation around food that’s making us feel addicted to it or out of control around it.ChristyAnd I think people like Michael Pollan, and Eric Schlosser, and Marion Nestle—VirginiaAnd that new guy, Michael—ChristyYeah, yes. Michael Moss, Salt, Sugar, Fat.They all sort of make this connection, which actually, in research methods, we call the ecological fallacy, which is like “X thing happened in this community around a certain time, and Y thing also happened, so X was the cause of Y.” In this case, processed food advertising increased, portion sizes increased, and then “obesity” increased, and therefore, these increases in portion sizes, and the type of marketing, made people fat.My response to that is, if we actually step back and look at the cultural context, what was happening leading up to, most people will cite the 1970s as sort of when people’s body sizes supposedly started increasing. Diet culture existed for, you know, about 100 years before that, and really, in a concerted way for 50 years or so before that, and the market share of the diet industry was steadily increasing, and the number of people who were dieting and restricting really increased every decade from, you know, the 1910s, onward, 1920s onward, and reached kind of a fever pitch in the 1970s. So that was the context in which portion sizes also increased and food advertising increased. You have to think, well, what does that sort of mass food deprivation do to people? It makes them crave more food.So if the industry was, in fact, increasing portion sizes and so on, some of that may have had to do with increased demand from an increased number of starving or deprived people. People want bigger portions when they’re deprived of food. You have to sort of take it as a whole, right? We can’t just blame the food industry—and also, blaming anything for people’s body size is inherently fatphobic and stigmatizing. I think looking for a reason for why people are larger is missing the point. We really don’t need to be talking about weight in that kind of pathological way. But we need to talk about this cultural context that makes people think their bodies are too large, makes people fear fatness and demonize fatness and want to do anything to outrun it, including these really extreme, but sometimes also, “less extreme” or “light” or “healthy” diets. Any sort of restriction and taking yourself away from that intuitive relationship with food interferes with that innate connection with food that we’re all born with, and sets people up for that restrict-binge cycle and other forms of disordered eating and exercise.VirginiaYes to all of that. On a related note, the other thing I wanted to chat about is diet foods as a sort of cultural concept. I wrote a piece a few weeks ago about how I continue to love Diet Coke, and also protein powder. I’m somehow more embarrassed about the protein powder. But anyway.Even though it’s been, you know, a good six years plus, since I went on an official diet, and I’ve been out of diet culture in terms of my own head for that long, these are foods that, once I stripped away the diet stuff, I just enjoyed them, and I just eat them without the diet mindset. When I wrote about this, there were a couple of really interesting responses. Quite a few folks said something like, oh, I don’t eat diet foods, I just eat small portions of the real thing I want. And that, to me, is diet mentality. Right? Christy I think it’s so interesting that people are saying, “I just eat small portions of the real thing.” There’s something about this need to limit, that is very much the diet mentality. Because why not just say, I eat however much I want of the real thing?In your case, I mean, I read that piece. And I thought it was really fascinating, the way that you sort of analyze your relationship with those products. Especially in the case of Diet Coke, where it’s something that you grew up with where you weren’t dieting when you were first exposed to it. It was like the taste, the just literal flavor of the diet version, instead of the regular version is what appeals to you.VirginiaBecause my family was dieting, but I was not. Like, they bought it out of a diet mindset for sure.[Editor’s Note: Virginia’s dad says it was about dental health! Do with that what you will…] But that was not my introduction to it or my experience of it.ChristyRight, which is so interesting and different, because it’s like this second hand inheritance of diet culture, but you weren’t being pushed to diet yourself.VirginiaBecause I had thin privilege, I should underscore, because I was a thin kid. And so people weren’t expecting that of me. I was allowed to just experience the magic of Diet Coke. But also as diet culture has morphed into wellness culture, there is now this disdain for something like Diet Coke. Other people were saying to me, “Oh, I don’t let myself drink Diet Coke because of the chemicals or because of the aspartame.” Someone said, “Actually, that was something I didn’t let myself drink when I was dieting, because I was clean eating. And now I’ve reclaimed it.” So there’s layers upon layers, this sort of Venn diagram happening between our feelings about processed foods and our feelings about these diet foods. And in both cases, it seems to me that we’re really just food shaming, right? We’re still playing into this idea that there’s this hierarchy around food we need to ascribe to.ChristyEspecially with that idea of “chemicals” or that Diet Coke, or regular Coke, for that matter, can’t fit into someone’s plan because it’s not healthy, or it’s demonized by this strain of wellness culture. So I think there’s so many different ways that people can relate to it. Your experience is one way where you kind of came by that flavor craving, honestly, you know, you were introduced to it in a way that was, for you at least, devoid of diet culture, not necessarily for the people introducing it to you. But for other people, maybe that was a staple in their dieting days, or in their disordered eating days. And that’s complicated too, right. Because if it’s a disordered eating thing, someone is drinking a lot of caffeine to try to avoid eating, then maybe they need to wean off of those kinds of products for a while and eat more food, and not have that disordered behavior of using caffeine to mask hunger. But maybe for other folks, like you said, the person who wouldn’t allow themselves to have it in their orthorexia clean eating days, maybe the sort of way of breaking out of that and of challenging diet culture is to actually have it and to reclaim it. It’s really different for everyone.Then there’s a political consciousness that comes in that says, you know, I don’t want to buy something that has died on the label, because I don’t want to contribute to that. That’s another way of potentially relating to that, too. But then I think if you’re shaming yourself for what you really want, then maybe the real trick is to drop that political consciousness for the moment so that you can engage with the food you really want, so that you’re not creating this sense of deprivation or lack of permission with something that you really love. If it’s something you don’t really love, and you’re sort of like, take it or leave it, then maybe that’s a situation where you can say, I don’t go in for that stuff. You know?VirginiaWe were then talking about the diet foods that we’ve reclaimed and Skinny Pop Popcorn came up a lot. And I thought, oh, God, I’ve never bought that, and it’s completely a reaction to the word skinny. I’m just really turned off by this sort of overt fat shaming of that product. But while that’s sort of a logical response to that marketing campaign, it also means that I’m banning a food. As it happens, I don’t really like popcorn, so I don’t think in this case, I’m depriving myself of something I would love. But you can really overthink this one.ChristyYou really can but sometimes you just got to go with what you love. When I was in my orthorexia days, I never got into juicing or green juice, because it was kind of early for that, in the early 2000s. For me, the juicing trend didn’t really come until the late 2000s, early 2010s. But these days, occasionally if I see green juice on the menu or something, or just out somewhere, I’m like, oh, that seems really good. Like, I want that flavor. And I’ll sometimes be like, oh, do I want to participate? Do I want to buy from this company that’s like so gross and wellness-y, and that’s sort of against a lot of what I stand for. Sometimes I’ll be like, I don’t want it that much. And other times, I’ll be like, that seems really good. I’m gonna have it. So it can be case by case, too, how you’re feeling on a given day.VirginiaIt’s useful too to remember that the rhetoric around voting with your dollars, that really comes out of the alternative food movement and the wellness industry. And, you know, there certainly is some power to it, consumers have a lot of power. But certainly in my case, if I was like, I’m not gonna buy Diet Coke, because it has diet on the label, but I’m gonna buy a different soda, I’d probably buy regular Coke. So the same company would be profiting off my decision. And I just would enjoy my beverage less. So it’s useful to remember that your individual purchase is not rocking the boat. There’s so much guilt that goes into being an ethical grocery shopper, and a lot of that is more diet culture messaging. ChristyIt really is out of this sustainability, Michael Pollanized wellness-diet version of how we’re “supposed to eat.” We don’t have as much power as individual consumers or even as a block of consumers, as we’re made out to have. VirginiaUnfortunately, but it’s also somewhat freeing to realize that you can truly operate from that intuitive eating place and have what you love and not worry so much about it.The last question that came in that I would love help unpacking is a little more complicated. This reader wrote: “Okay, but what about diet foods you may not love, but which make you feel better. I am very sluggish and tired after eating rice. So I avoid it and make cauli rice. Not saying I love cauli rice, but I do prefer how I feel after eating it compared to actual rice. I don’t eat cauli rice with the intent to be dieting, but I’m aware of the impact certain foods have on me, and then make choices with that knowledge. I’m still trying to figure out if I’m attempting anti-diet culture properly.”ChristySuch a good question. There’s so many layers to that too, right?I don’t know where this person is in their intuitive eating process, but I think it takes years for people to truly be able to look at how they feel after eating a certain food without having it be colored by their diet culture beliefs about that food. In the case of something like rice versus cauliflower rice, it definitely raises a red flag for me. Where does this belief about how rice makes you feel come from? Is it actually because we’ve been fed so much about carbohydrates, and, as I’ve personally evolved in my own relationship with food — and I’ve seen this in clients too; this demonization of carbs, and this sense of like, carbs make me sluggish or make me crash or I don’t feel as good after eating them. But then over time, as the prohibition on carbs starts to fade, and you make peace with them, there’s the sense, like now, I actually am not satisfied by a meal or don’t feel energized after a meal if I don’t have carbs. And I think that’s really coming from a place of having gotten rid of all that diet cultural baggage about carbs and truly listening to my body and how it feels.Playing with that, asking yourself, do I even need to be thinking about this right now? With clients and people in my online course, I often say: Put aside questions about how particular foods make you feel at first and focus on the other principles of intuitive eating. Gentle nutrition, which is the 10th and last principle, is the last principle for a reason because it is so tricky. And gentle nutrition doesn’t even have that much to do with how particular foods make you feel. It’s also about building meals that are going to be satisfying and sustaining and snacks that are going to be satisfying and sustaining and learning how to energize and nourish yourself. There’s this misconception about intuitive eating, that probably comes from the wellness diet, that comes from the strain of diet culture that’s like, X food makes you bloated and Y food makes you sluggish. And you know, those words, sluggish, bloated, like—VirginiaThey have a lot of implicit fatphobia. And they’re vague symptoms. I don’t want to discount her lived experience of her body, but they are symptoms that are difficult to name and pin down and tie to a concrete thing. There are a lot of reasons you might feel sluggish and tired on any particular day, totally unrelated to what you’re eating.ChristyDiet culture has conditioned us to look to food as the source instead of thinking about how much sleep did I get, how stressed am I. So many different things can affect how we feel in our bodies, our level of fatigue, or energy, our sense of bloating and digestion and stuff like that. So I think kind of broadening the lens to what beyond the food is going on. We’ve talked previously about the nocebo effect or the converse of the placebo effect. The placebo effect is, you think something’s gonna make you feel better, and so it does, because there’s the power of that mind-body connection to actually help improve symptoms, like pain and fatigue and stuff like that. And then conversely, the nocebo effect is, you think something’s gonna make you feel worse, so it does.That’s not to say it’s all in your head, because I know how dismissive that can feel, because I have had so many health conditions and concerns myself that doctors implied were in my head when that was not the case. What I mean is that our thoughts about particular foods and other things, medications and such, do really have an effect on how we feel when taking that food or medication. Thinking about that in relation to this question, too. Can this person sort of think through how much of this maybe is the nocebo effect? And how can you change your beliefs about regular rice so that you’re not putting all this pre-existing baggage on it, that might end up making you feel worse after eating it? Versus if you can divest a little bit from those beliefs?Your relationship with rice and how you feel after eating rice might change.VirginiaI think I also just came away with a little sadness, where she’s saying, “I’m not saying I love this food that I’m eating.” I just want people to eat the foods that they love. If you’re not loving it, then I think it’s worth looking at why you’re making yourself eat it. That’s where I land at the end of the day. And I think that goes for, you know, any diet foods.ChristyAs you were talking, it sort of struck me how it’s this conversation about rice versus cauliflower rice, but also why not rice versus pasta, or bread? Is there something about that? Are you actually avoiding all carbs and thinking that carbs are bad. Or gluten? [Editor’s Note: Of course, all rice is gluten-free, but fear of gluten often leads to a broader fear of carbs.] Is there a belief about gluten that is sort of coming from that nocebo place or that wellness diet place too that’s making you avoid those foods? If the only option feels like it’s cauliflower rice, then I think there’s definitely some work to be done unlearning those negative beliefs about the other food. Of course, there’s a tiny percentage of people, like 1%, or less than 1% of the population, who has Celiac Disease and would need to avoid gluten. I’m not talking about that. But even people who do have Celiac, I think it’s worth working through the harmful negative beliefs you might have about gluten-containing foods so that you’re not demonizing anything in your mind, even if you’re not eating them for self care. Just allowing yourself to drop the negativity about particular foods can help you feel a little more grounded in your food choices. I definitely know some people with Celiac Disease who sort of rebel against that deprivation and restriction by eating gluten. And that’s not super helpful for their well-being, you know, that can be definitely physically uncomfortable and potentially harmful in the long term too. And so, you know, I think getting yourself to a place where you’re not in this restrict binge cycle is always helpful.VirginiaThat totally makes sense.Christie, thank you so much. This was a really super helpful conversation. I always love chatting with you. Why don’t you tell listeners where they can find more of your work?ChristyPeople can find more of my work on my website, ChristyHarrison.com, I actually do a weekly newsletter as well, at ChristyHarrison.com/newsletter. And I also have my book and podcast and all the other stuff I do there as well. 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

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’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture, and the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia. Today I am chatting with my good friend and neighbor, Melinda Wenner Moyer. Melinda, welcome.MelindaThank you so much. I’m so excited to be here.VirginiaFor folks who don’t know Melinda, she is a science journalist and author of a brand new book coming out a couple days after you listen to this, called How To Raise Kids Who Aren’t A******s. And she writes a really fantastic Substack called “Is My Kid the A*****e?”—much like the subreddit, Am I the A*****e?—where she helps us navigate these really tricky parenting questions.I wanted to bring her on today because a) her book is wonderful, and you should all go preorder it. But also because Melinda does a really great job breaking down the science on parenting to help us understand why our kids do the things they do and how the choices we make influence their behavior. And I found as I was reading the book that I kept thinking, oh, this is also about food. Oh, this is also about food.Melinda is actually the first person I’ve had on the newsletter who’s not fully in the diet culture space—not that she’s a pro-diet culture person!—but it’s cool to see someone else’s work in a different genre overlapping so much with the conversations we have here.So the book is really doing two things. I’m sure you’re getting all kinds of reactions to the title—it was a great opportunity to teach my own seven-year-old the word ‘a*****e,’ so thank you for that. But really, what you’re saying is: Parents need to understand that sometimes kids have to be a******s. It’s a part of growing up. They don’t have the skills that we think that they have. And they’re just going to be a******s sometimes. But at the same time you’re helping parents raise kids who don’t grow up to be permanent a******s in the sense of Donald Trump or Brett Kavanaugh. So can you explain that distinction a little bit?MelindaThere has been understandable confusion about the title and what I actually mean by ‘how to raise kids who aren’t a******s.’ What I’m really saying is ‘how to raise kids who don’t grow up to be a******s.’ Because as parents, it’s important for us to manage our expectations, and to realize that there is no such thing as a perfectly behaved kid.There are so many reasons for this. Kids’ brains and bodies are so very different from ours. The part of the brain that is responsible for planning and self regulation, and rational thinking, in general, is just not developed yet. And it doesn’t fully develop until kids are in their mid-20s, actually. So kids just don’t have the skills, like you said, to do adult-like things, like follow directions, or stay calm when they’re sad or angry. They also don’t have the muscle tone to do things like sit still at the dinner table for 30 minutes, which I learned when I was reporting my newsletter a few weeks ago. So they’re going to be doing things all the time that are out of line with what we would expect of adults and what we consider “good behavior.” And that’s because they really just don’t have the capacity for those things yet. So yes, kids are going to be a******s. Another part of that, too, is that a lot of what we consider good behavior is learned. It’s not innate, and it’s based on customs and traditions. These are cultural expectations that we have to teach. And it takes a long time. So, for instance, what could be more unnatural than using a fork? Our kids are not born knowing how to use a fork or napkins, that’s kind of a weird concept. Why not use your hands?These are customs we have to remember that are not natural and the way that kids learn about these kinds of customs is in a way by breaking them. They have to break the rules in order for us to know that we need to teach these things to them. They’re opportunities for us as parents to learn about what we need to work on with our kids. My parents live in this very posh community. And my son, I think he was going to like a tennis clinic or something, and the tennis pro came over and held out his hand to shake my son’s hand. And I had not taught my kid, he was like six, at that point, what handshakes were. And so he looked at this tennis pro’s hand and made a face and ran away. And of course, to the tennis pro, my kid is a total a*****e, right? Like, what could be more a*****e-ish than that? But I mean, I hadn’t taught this to him. How would he know what to do in that situation? They need practice. And of course, in situations like that temperament matters and other traits and differences that kids have, circumstances matter. Kids not being polite to adults in social situations, not looking them in the eye, not answering their questions—so much of that can stem from fear and anxiety, even if they know what to do, even if we’ve talked to them about what we expect. They just don’t have the capacity to function in the way we want them to. Shy kids are going to struggle more with those kinds of skills. We also have to remember, there’s so much variation among kids that make them excel in certain areas and be deficient in others. And they all have different starting points.So when we see two different seven-year-olds behaving very differently in a situation, we shouldn’t necessarily jump to the conclusion that ‘oh, s**t, my kid was more of an a*****e than that other kid. And therefore I’m failing as a parent.’ We just have to remember where our kids are coming from.There was a very salient example of this, actually, yesterday, my daughter’s turning seven on Saturday, and we had a really small gathering with just four of her friends yesterday in the backyard. And some of the friends were from one school and some of the friends were from another school. They didn’t all know each other really well. And there was a moment where one of the kids was feeling left out. And I was really hoping my daughter would step up and go out of her way to be extra kind to this girl who was feeling left out. And what happened was another girl stepped up and did this wonderful thing and helped this girl feel included. And it was not my daughter. And I was like, Oh my God. I felt like I failed as a parent. Why isn’t my daughter the one doing this? But then I realized, okay, this is her birthday party. She’s been so anxious about it for like two weeks. She hates being in the spotlight. She’s got so much on her emotional plate that day. I shouldn’t feel bad that she couldn’t step up and do this.VirginiaShe’s probably not even noticing the other kid’s struggle, she’s dealing with her own thing.MelindaAll these circumstances matters. What I’m getting at is there’s so much that shapes the day-to-day choices that our kids make that we have to keep in mind when we’re thinking about our kids and how they’re behaving. But with the book, what I’m really trying to do is thinking bigger and broader than these little bloopers. How can we instill values, and virtues in our kids that will shape their choices and behaviors for the rest of their lives? They can make plenty of mistakes now, but how do we help them learn from them? How do we instill the kinds of priorities that we want them to have?It’s not so much, how do I make sure that my five year old doesn’t have tantrums? It’s how do I make sure that my five-year-old doesn’t grow up to be a 75-year-old man who throws tantrums like Donald Trump? How do I give them the skills to develop the emotional regulation and all of these other things so that over time, they become adults who are kind, good people who are fighting injustice instead of contributing to it. So that’s the bigger picture thing that I’m working on with the book.VirginiaIt’s reassuring, because I think anyone who is parenting young children has moments or days or weeks where you think, I am raising a legitimate sociopath. They have no compassion or awareness of other people. And you get into this in your chapters on racism and sexism, but: Kids say really awful things. This comes up a lot when we talk about bodies: kids call other kids fat, or use that word as an insult. Sometimes they don’t even understand they’re using it as an insult. So I think it’s helpful to understand that this is part of learning, and this is where the work is.Your book does a great job of giving parents tools to navigate those conversations. One area I found especially fascinating that intersects with questions my readers often have is the part about rewards. You explain that rewards can often be short-term fixes for behavior problems, but can hinder some of our bigger goals as parents. I get this question often because food is so commonly used as a reward. You know, we’re giving M&Ms for potty training, or teachers give out Starburst or other candy in class for good behavior. And from where I’m sitting as someone who’s concerned about kids overly fixating on different foods or giving too much value to foods, there’s a reason to be worried about rewards. Why don’t you tell us how you initially used rewards with your own kids? And how your thinking evolved on that question?MelindaIt’s such a big issue. And it’s gnarly. When my now 10-year-old was maybe six or something, we were struggling with some of his behavior. We went to see a psychologist who was firmly in the behavioral psychology camp, which is essentially to say, he really liked to use rewards. He suggested that we set up this point system with our son, and anytime our son did something that we thought was good or pro social, like he said, ‘Please,’ or ‘Thank you,’ or he helped his sister or cleaned his room, really anything. In that moment that he did it, right afterwards, we would say, two points for picking up that piece of trash and putting it in the trash can. And every point that he would get, we would keep track of it on a spreadsheet, and every point equalled one cent or one minute of screen time. And every week, if you’d gotten 100 points, you’d have 100 minutes of screen time, I can’t remember exactly how many points you would get over a week. But it helped us control his allowance, his screen time, and was supposed to be a behavior management system.At first, it was great. It did seem to solve these problems that we had: We didn’t know how to deal with allowance, we didn’t know how to deal with screen time. And it was this really nice system for organizing all this stuff. And his behavior started to improve immediately. We saw him doing stuff that he hadn’t been doing that was, you know, pro social and great and kind.I can’t remember how long we used it for, at least a year, maybe longer. But we started to see some ickiness surrounding it. You could see the wheels turning in his head. He would think about doing something good or kind or something, and then he would stop and say, “Will I get points for doing this?” And it became like this contingency thing where he’s only going to do it if he would get points. So I started digging into the research more.Originally, when I read some of the research on rewards, and I wrote a Slate column about it, and I was really under the impression that it’s not generally a good idea to reward kids for doing things they already like, but that it was really fine to use rewards to motivate them to do things they didn’t like. But I started reading all of the studies done on rewards back from the 1970s, even. And that’s when I was like, hmm, I think we need to stop this point system.There are a ton of studies that suggest that when kids are given rewards for doing things, it makes them feel controlled and manipulated. I mean, that’s essentially what we’re doing. They know they’re being controlled, and they don’t like it. Just like we don’t like being controlled or manipulated, they don’t like it. It removes the intrinsic value of the thing that we have rewarded them for doing so that it is inextricably tied to the feeling of being controlled so that they don’t really like it anymore, for itself. If they got joy out of being generous to someone and making them feel better, they couldn’t get that kind of intrinsic satisfaction out of doing good things anymore, because it’s tied up with the reward they were getting.In one study, researchers put drawing paper and markers in a preschool classroom and watched all the kids in the preschool classroom to see whether they drew with the markers. Then they took the kids who seemed to really liked drawing, and the next week they pulled those particular students out one by one and brought them into another room. For some of them, they offered the kids a reward for drawing. For the other kids, they just said, here’s some drawing materials, if you want to draw, you can, if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. And so half of them were given rewards, half of them weren’t. And then in the third week of the study, they repeated the first part, they just had all the kids in a room with drawing paper and markers out. And they saw that the kids who had been offered rewards for drawing in the second part of the study were much less likely to want to draw in that third week compared to the kids who hadn’t been offered any rewards. So, once they had been rewarded for it, they were much less interested in doing it when they were given the opportunity. And there’s been research in adults that has shown this same pattern. So for whatever reason, it sucks out whatever sort of value that behavior had to the child inside, like deep inside of them, whatever value they got out of doing that thing, and just took it away, which is, of course, the exact opposite of the outcome we want.VirginiaThere’s a great food study I feel like I reference in practically every article I write, but I’ll recap here. It’s the “Finish Your Soup” study by Leann Birch, where they told some kids, if you finish your soup, you get dessert, and then they had other kids who were told they can have as much soup as you want, and you can have as much dessert as you want. The kids who had to finish the soup liked the soup less, they ate less of the soup, they really just cared about getting the dessert, whereas the kids who were freely choosing between the soup and the dessert actually liked the soup better and ate more of it.So it’s cutting off kids ability to find intrinsic motivation, or intrinsic pleasure in activities or in foods. And you know, parents might say like, well, they’ll never like Brussels sprouts, or whatever. But the truth is, you aren’t even giving them the option to like them, when you’re setting them up as just currency, or just this thing you do to get to the better thing.MelindaRight. In a different Leann Birch study, or it might have been the same one, if there was a second part, they just had adults pressure the kids to eat soup. And again, that’s a controlling impulse. And the kids feel controlled, and the kids who were pressured to eat a particular soup ate less of it than the ones who were just left alone. And that was really interesting, too.VirginiaPositive pressure, is still, pressure and rewards are positive, but as you said, it’s still a form of trying to control kids. And especially around food, we know, they do so much better when they can listen to themselves versus following these external rules. I also liked that you highlight in the book that even these sort of chores can be intrinsically satisfying, like, it can feel good to set the table or it can feel good to clean your room, and realize, oh, I like my room better when it’s not covered in all of my clothes or whatever. But we’re not giving kids that opportunity to experience that if we’re saying clean your room in order to earn your points or whatever. You also talked about this concern about making the rewards too valuable. And again, we see this happen so much with food, where kids are much more interested in the treat food and don’t want the other food. I’m curious if you saw that happening with screen time, as well, since that was sort of the primary thing you were using. I often feel like there’s a lot of parallel conversation happening around sugar and screen time.MelindaI mean, it’s tricky. I do feel like my kids have never not been obsessed with screens. Can I say there’s been a vast improvement since we stopped using the point system, especially because you have the pandemic in the mix? There’s so much conflation, right? We relied on screens so much this past year.But, when we used screen time as reward, it certainly led to a focus on screens. Every time my son did anything good, and we gave him a point, that that made him think of screens, so it just highlighted screens so much more at times when it was unnecessary to be highlighting screens. I feel like that probably does fuel the obsession with screens, if you’re constantly making this connection in your head. There’s also a lot of research showing that kids look to the world around them, to adults in power, to figure out how to behave, what to care about, what’s important, what matters in the world. I talk about this a lot in my chapters on sexism and racism, but they’re constantly making these observations. We are making choices for them that communicate that there are certain things that everybody likes, whether that’s screens or dessert, if we’re choosing that as the reward. That’s a really powerful way of telling our kids what matters and what they they should care about, too. And so it’s confirmation, again, to our kids, that sweets and desserts are the things that they should be obsessed with, because that’s what everybody cares about.VirginiaAnd if you’re then pairing this thing everybody cares about with lots of restrictions on how and when you access it, and what you have to do to access it, that is a perfect storm to set up a scarcity mindset. Which is going to make a kid more fixated on the sugar, more fixated on the screen, because they think of it as this thing that they have to be manipulated to acquire or they have to manipulate circumstances to acquire. I do feel like the pandemic threw a wrench in this, because a lot of us had pretty much like no limitations on screen time this year, and our kids still have lots of screen time. So there are obviously some nuances here. But I will say, when my older daughter spent several months in the hospital and had a Peppa Pig free for all—like we were watching Peppa Pig at three in the morning for weeks on end because she couldn’t sleep in the hospital. And it was like, what else do you do with a two-year-old in the hospital at three in the morning? We were convinced we had completely broken her and she would be screen addicted forever. But when she got back to her normal routine at home when she was healthier, she could play again. She could do other things, and the screen thing really worked itself out without us having to detox her or anything. She was just like, Oh, we don’t watch Peppa Pig breakfast, lunch and dinner anymore? This is fine.I’m hoping we’ll see a similar thing as people come out of lockdown and kids get back to school and camp and normal routines and we can replace screen time with the other things that they love.MelindaI agree. We went on vacation last week and and we just created a whole new normal surrounding screens, totally different from what the kids had had. And they were completely fine with it. They’re so adaptable. We put them in a new situation. And they recognize not everything is going to be the same. We’re not going to be able to use screens all the time, we’re going to be swimming more. And they were perfectly fine with it. It was really interesting.VirginiaI think if you had been like, this is going to be a completely screen free vacation, you might have gotten some pushback, because that would have fueled more of the scarcity mindset. But if it’s like, we are adjusting our relationship with this thing, they can handle that. The other thing I think about a lot is physical activity. I think we tend to use more pressure around wanting kids to play certain sports, wanting kids to be physically active. I’m reporting my chapter on doctors at the moment for the next book, and this comes up a lot in the way doctors push physical activity, this sort of very prescriptive, is your kid getting an hour of exercise a day? And it’s like, you just made exercise sound like the least fun thing in the world, when you’re like, is it 30 to 60 minutes.On the other hand, we want our kids to challenge themselves, we want them to learn new skills. One of my children loves rock climbing, and when she’s trying something, she’ll say, it hurts. And I’ll be quick to say, Oh, you don’t have to do it, don’t hurt yourself, don’t hurt your body. And she’ll be like, No, no, I want to push through and learn, and now I can do this cool trick. And I’m like, oh, right, there’s also something satisfying in pushing yourself physically, and I want you to enjoy that as well. So, how do you think about physical activity? How can we encourage kids to push themselves but not block the intrinsic motivation that feels really key to them finding movement joyful?MelindaThat’s a really good question. I feel like I have a lot of weird childhood memories that make it hard for me to be totally unbiased answering this too, I mean, don't we all. My parents made me play soccer when I was a kid, and I hated it. Like, I hated it so much. I felt so I was terrible at it. And I just remember being so ashamed that I kept not being good at it and letting down my team and my coach.Five years ago, I got my eyes checked by a developmental optometrist—my eyes were crossed when I was a kid—and he said, you know, you don’t have any depth perception. Then he asked, ‘Did you find that you weren’t very good at ball sports when you were a kid?’ I was like, Oh, my God, that’s why I was so bad. And that’s why I hated it so much. I literally could not see the ball the way other kids did. And it was so validating.Forcing kids to do activities that they just don’t like, or they know that they don’t have the aptitude for, is not necessarily constructive. But I will say, it depends on why they don’t like the activity. I think a lot of kids sometimes don’t want to do an activity because they’re scared, they’ve never done it before. It’s new, it’s scary. And sometimes, when kids have phobias or fears, you do want to expose them to the thing they’re afraid of, slowly, carefully, to help them get over that fear. Figuring out what their dislike is rooted in—fear of novelty, or just fear in general—sometimes it is good to push them out of their comfort zone and to help them learn that they don’t need to be afraid of it. If an activity isn’t rooted in fear, but lack of interest, or they just don’t enjoy it, then, I think that’s not necessarily constructive.I’m thinking about Angela Duckworth’s advice, she wrote a book called Grit. It’s a really interesting book, I talk a lot about it in one of my chapters, and she talks about the importance of pushing—not pushing—of encouraging your kids to try something that’s fun and hard, but they get to choose what it is. So they have some autonomy of choice there. And having them stick with something for like a semester or a year before they can quit, so that they have to get over any hurdles, but but the key thing is letting them choose it. There are so many kinds of physical activities, and our kids only need to find one or two that’s going to give them joy and provide the physical movement that their bodies need.I think as parents, sometimes we have expectations of what we want our kids to do, we want our kids to play a particular sport, because we did or, or because we think that they’re good at running, and therefore they should do cross country or something. And I think we have to realize that our kids might be different from what we were expecting and what we’re hoping and that we should let them have the choice. I remember really wanting my son to play music forever. Like I was really into music, and he started playing cello. And he was good at it. But he hated it. And it was so hard for me to let him quit when he did want to quit. We kept him in it for a year or so, but then when he wanted to quit, we let him quit. Because I didn’t want to force him and I think it was the right decision. It’s so hard for us sometimes because we have these ideas about what we want our kids to be doing. But it’s important to let them have that autonomy.VirginiaIt is a fine line but I like the idea of having them choose the activity and not privileging certain types of activity. Especially with physical activity, not privileging team sports. I mean, I say that as someone who never played team sports and hates team sports, and is possibly denying her children the experience of team sports, because they haven’t seemed interested and we haven’t volunteered it, it’s just not happening in our house.It might not be soccer for every kid. And that’s really okay. It might be just playing out in the backyard a lot, that might be the thing that they love, and maybe that turns into hiking or that turns into birdwatching, or who knows what. I’ve talked before about how we often privilege outdoorsiness over being an indoor kid. And there are lots of ways that these other sort of cultural beliefs around what’s a “healthy” way to live impact this conversation. I like the idea that it’s very child led, but if they do choose it, understanding that there’s value to them working through not liking it every week, and sticking out the semester, or sticking out the six weeks.MelindaWe have so many hang ups that shape what we think our kids are going to be good at and what we expect of them. My son wanted to play soccer, and he also doesn’t have depth perception. And I was like, Oh no, I don’t want him to play soccer, because he’ll be bad at it and he’ll feel ashamed, and it’ll be tough. But we let him do it and he loves it like, and he’s not as bad, he’s certainly not as bad as I was. I was totally wrong. This is now his joy. He loves soccer. I’m not going to tell him that he shouldn’t be good at it. But it’s so interesting, right? All the ways that our own experiences bias our choices and our thoughts about our kids and what they should do.VirginiaYes, definitely.So, steering away a little bit from food and movement, but definitely still about bodies, I wanted to talk about your gender chapter, which is excellent. You talk a lot about the importance of de-emphasizing how we talk about gender with kids. There are some really mind blowing statistics about how often teachers reference gender in the course of a school day, how often parents reference gender. I remember when I was reading an earlier draft of the chapter, we had this conversation, because I thought, I’m a really good feminist mom, and I’m raising two girls, and I’m raising them to be feminists. So I talk about gender, but in a very empowering way. You know, I’ll say, you’re a strong girl, when my kids do something physical. I certainly reference their gender, but never in a pretty little girl way, but what I thought was an empowering way. Reading your work, and then talking to you about it, I recognized that is a bit of a trap, that first, I’m assuming that I know what their gender is, which is not necessarily the case, and also, that I’m still over emphasizing gender. So let’s talk a little bit about why gender neutral language is so important with kids of all genders in terms of fighting this discrimination. And how that plays into how they develop a healthy relationship with their body.MelindaI’ll start off by saying, I definitely think it’s important to talk to kids about sexism and gender stereotypes. We should be talking to our girls about how unfair it is that girls are treated differently from boys. [Virginia Note: Melinda also writes extensively about the importance of having these conversations with boys!] We want to do this because they are seeing this already. To give you an example that still makes me angry. A couple years ago at the end of the school year, my son’s teacher gave out awards for each child, individualized awards at the end of the year. And I looked at the list, and it was awful how sexist they were. Almost all of the girls got awards for things like looking nice, being kind, or being a good listener. Four of the boys got rewards for being smart. It was just so disturbing. Kids are noticing things like that. The reality is these sexist stereotypes exist in their world too. And they’re being communicated to our kids through teachers, the media, sometimes us, inadvertently. So we need to talk about those things so kids recognize what they are and challenge them. We want the girls in that class to realize that when the teacher chose to give out those awards the way she did, that was reflecting her bias and not reflecting any kind of actual innate difference, because that’s really important for them to be able to ascertain. If we don’t make that clear to our kids, the easiest conclusion is, oh, gosh, I guess I’m just not as smart or girls aren’t as smart. And girls should look nice.VirginiaAnd it matters that I’m a good listener, because I’m a girl. The relationship implications of that are horrifying. Anyway.MelindaThere’s research, too, that shows that when kids are taught that the reason there are fewer female scientists in the world is because of sexism and discrimination, not because girls are less good at science, that those girls who were taught that become much more interested in science than girls who are not taught the reasons for this discrepancy. It gives them the confidence, they realize, oh, these differences are because our culture is screwed up not because of me or whatever innate ability I have. So screw that. I can do this, and screw our culture. It gives them more of a fighting instinct.So it is good to talk about discrimination, to talk about sexism, and gender stereotypes, to make our kids aware of it, but: When you look into the roots of these gender stereotypes, a lot of it has to do with this innocuous language that we use all the time surrounding gender. As I was saying earlier, kids are always paying attention to what matters in the world. And that includes what kinds of social categories matter, they’re like little detectives walking around making observations. And so if you think about it: What is something that we communicate about a person almost every time we refer to them? We don’t refer to their hair color, or their height or their skin color, but we almost always highlight their gender, because it’s built into our pronouns. Every time we refer to a person, we’re saying, he or she, or the lady or the man, and when we do this day in and day out, our kids notice it. Their inference is, well, gosh, gender must be a really important distinction, if my parents are referring to it 800 times a day, it must be that boys and girls are different in important ways. Why else would you do this?Add into that the fact that there are different bathrooms for different genders, different sports teams, different aisles in the toy store, different clothes, different toys in a happy meal, all of these things are emphasizing to kids that the two genders are different, and they’re very different. Where the problems begin is this idea that we are communicating day in and day out, that boys and girls are different in important ways. Then they take that inference, and, again, being these little detectives, look around the world. And they see that there’s a gender hierarchy, that’s very obvious. They see that there’s never been a woman president, that there are fewer women who are CEOs and senators and all the ways in which there is gender hierarchy in our society. And they see that and combine that with this idea that boys and girls are different. And they make this inference that well, maybe men are just better, and smarter. Maybe boys, and men, are just better and smarter. Both boys and girls make these come to these conclusions.There’s one study that breaks my heart whenever I describe it, involving five to seven year old girls and boys, illustrating that girls start internalizing that girls aren’t as good as boys when they’re about six or seven, which I noticed with my daughter. Researchers read a story to these boys and girls, about a very, very smart protagonist, like the story had a very, very smart protagonist. And it was described that way. Very, very smart. And then the researchers, after reading the story, said, okay, well, do you think that that really, really smart protagonist was a boy, or was it a girl? And when they asked the five year olds, all the girls said, Oh, it’s a girl. And all the boys said, Oh, it’s a boy. And that’s exactly what you would expect with in-group, out-group psychology, the group that you belong to, you think they’re better. That’s what you would expect. But around the age of six to seven, the girls started switching over and they would say, oh, the really, really smart protagonist is a boy. The boys just always said boys, of course, but the girls switched over. And that’s so heartbreaking, age six.VirginiaThat’s what makes me want to say things like you’re a strong girl, right? Because I think I’m subverting that stereotype that my daughter may have already internalized. But it sounds like I’m also reinforcing it, because it could be interpreted as, you’re strong for a girl or you are a girl who happens to be strong, unlike other girls.MelindaThe way I think about this distinction is that I try to not call attention to gender when gender is not part of the conversation I’m having with my child. If we’re talking about people doing something and it happens to be a girl, I try to de-emphasize gender and not refer to it when it’s not relevant.But I have plenty of conversations, especially with my daughter, about sexism and when I’m doing that, I certainly am talking about gender and I’m certainly saying you can do anything you want even though the world might tell you otherwise. And things like that.VirginiaYou can say you’re a strong kid. You’re a tough kid. The more I think about it, there’s no reason to use girl there. If your kid falls down on the playground, and is getting over a scraped knee or something, I can just say you’re a tough kid instead of, you’re a tough girl. It’s so weird that I do that now that we’ve had this conversation.MelindaBut if you’re in the middle of a conversation about sexism, then it’s different. You might be referring to the fact that she’s a girl, because sexism is gonna affect her. And she’s got to, you know, recognize it and see what see it for what it is.VirginiaIt’s also just reinforcing the binary. When I do that, it’s assuming that my three year old is a girl. As it happens, she has identified to us as a girl, but. It’s not creating a lot of air in the room for other genders who are not represented at all in these binaries. So, there’s that piece of it, too, as a reason to sort of like ease off the girl power rhetoric. It was a really helpful chapter and made me rethink this language.Well, this was a great conversation. Where can listeners find your work? Of course, everybody needs to go preorder the book right now, I am linking to it in the transcript. And it is out on Tuesday. So you don’t have a lot of time. But you should get your pre-order in!Melinda Pre-orders are awesome, they really make a difference. What might be easiest if I just give my website because if you want to subscribe to my newsletter, which is on Substack, there is a signup link on my website, MelindaWennerMoyer.com. It also has links to information about the book and pre-order links and all of those things. 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

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’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture, and the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia. And today, I’m really pleased to be chatting with Anna Sweeney, who is a social-justice oriented disabled dietitian. You probably Anna know from Instagram where she is @dietitiananna. She is also behind the awesome “You’re Nicer With Carbs” t-shirts.I just ordered a shirt this morning, I’m super excited about it. Anna, welcome.AnnaThank you so much.VirginiaI’m really into the t-shirt. It took me a long time to pick a color. I might need more than one. It’s really good.Anna I am just digging on the mug. I use it as a communication vehicle. When I’m talking to people on Zoom, like, read my mug.Virginia Alright, now I need the mug, too!Why don’t we start with you telling us about you and your work?AnnaI am an eating disorder dietitian, I’m very fortunate to have dedicated the last, I think 13 years of my life to this field, which has become for me increasingly about social justice, in every single way. I’m so fortunate to have the following that I do on social media. I don’t know how that happened. But I am most grateful that it did. I’m just a multi-privileged person who is trying to use that privilege for good and make people a little bit uncomfortable in the process.Virginia I love it. It is not an accident that your Instagram has done so well, because you do a great job of communicating around very complex issues in a very thoughtful way. You have so much practical advice on there for people and you’re having really important conversations. So thank you for doing that.I also want to tell listeners how we first got to know each other. I interviewed you for my first book, which some folks will have read, but for folks who haven’t, Anna appears in chapter two of The Eating Instinct, which is called Chasing Clean. And it’s where I explored how the diet industry became the wellness industry, but is still the diet industry. Anna shares her own story of living with multiple sclerosis and the ways in which the wellness industry preys on folks with chronic conditions and promises miracle cures through food and diet. And she’s rolling her eyes.So debunking these kinds of myths and scams is still a big part of the work you do on social and it’s so important. But as someone else who also tries to do that, it can really feel like we’re playing whack-a-mole, because there’s always a new trend, a new celery juice or whatever. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on why that core message of “if you control your food, you’ll control your life and your health” is still resonating with people even when we see over and over that there’s nothing there?AnnaIf you are suffering by virtue of living with a chronic illness or just want to extend or enhance your life, or you are told by your doctors and your friends and the world that your body is a problem because of its size, it makes so much sense that the diet industry—which is really no longer the diet industry, it really is about that core value of “wellness”—preys on that. The messaging is really, really pervasive. There are going to be people who say, I did this thing, I cured myself, I healed myself of secondary progressive MS. Which is not a thing that you can do, because that is not how Multiple Sclerosis works.I am an educated person, and as my disease changed, I wanted to also heal myself of a secondary progressive disease, which I know is impossible but I tried anyway. And, you know, I think the messaging is so pervasive but also so shape-shifting. This is about morality, and if you’re not trying for this thing, well, then you’re not trying and you deserve whatever malady you get.VirginiaIt’s really preying on people’s very real fears, and processing the ways in which our bodies change, and that that can be uncomfortable and scary. And then there’s this industry that’s like, “I will take your fear, and I will attach a product to it.”AnnaAnd the really hard part about that—so the diet industry has billions of dollars backing it up. And then there’s the neighbor down the road telling you that her cat feels better because she took out gluten, or whatever. Which is crazy. If celiac disease affects 1 percent of the U.S. population, and in 2019, something like 40 percent of Americans reported eating “gluten free,” it’s not because people are actually gluten intolerant. It’s because gluten has been elevated as this thing that we can’t have. If you want to be a healthy person, you don’t eat wheat, or whatever.Diet culture and the wellness industry has so much money behind it. And I am trying really hard to actually articulate the difference between the industry and the culture, because I think the industry, that's the $74 billion. The culture is your cousins, your uncle recommending this thing. And the trickle down effect of sharing these practices that have been helpful or effective—and talk to me again, in two or three or four or five years and like, maybe you have a different feeling about a thing—but it’s contagious.VirginiaThat’s such an interesting distinction, the industry versus the culture. The industry is certainly helping to create the culture. But you’re right, there is this more informal way that these ideas get passed around and embedded that is important to identify. I know that’s what a lot of my readers often talk about struggling with, it’s the comment grandma makes at dinner, or the way that your dad talks about his diet. That sort of stuff is so insidious, because it makes it harder to put the blame where it belongs, which is on this industry, that’s under-regulated and running wild, because you end up mad at the person and not at the larger system.So, speaking of companies we can be mad at that. I’m hearing a lot of folks asking about Noom at the moment, and would love to hear your thoughts. We’ve been hearing for years: “It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle plan,” or “it’s a lifestyle change,” and Noom’s whole thing is, “it’s not a diet, it’s psychology.” So Anna, what is it?AnnaWell, cognitive behavioral therapy is a really practical tool for changing behaviors. But Noom, suggesting that they are not a diet, it is about changing your brain—and I have to be really honest Virginia, I haven’t done a ton of digging because anytime I look at it, I’m just repulsed and I don’t want to play anymore.But everyone that has spoken with me about Noom has said yes, they said it was psychology, but I was also eating a very low number of calories in concert. So like, it’s “let’s use cognitive behavioral therapy to teach your body to semi-starve.”To me, this is the ultimate manipulation, speaking to people’s intellect. We acknowledge that the diet industry, as in conventional dieting, like SlimFast, their market share is in the shitter. That’s not a thing now. And in the 90s, it was a really, really, really big thing. But conventional diets like those are not selling anymore. So: Noom. To me, this is the ultimate gaslighting, where they say: You are so smart, you know diets don’t work; let’s change your brain. And we’re just not talking about the fact that it’s a semi-starvation diet. And there is one conclusion that follows semi-starvation diets. VirginiaI'm sure that’s resonating with a lot of people who have tried it and are sort of sitting uncomfortably because you feel like you got played, and I think it’s important to articulate that it’s not your fault, this is very powerful marketing. A lot of work went into figuring out how to manipulate you in this way.Anna100%. I don’t even know if Kurbo is still a thing, but when Weight Watchers presented Kurbo for young people; they are different, but it was the same sort of manipulation. Like, if you’re a good parent, and you have a fat kid, you get Kurbo because you want them to learn these skills. I don’t even know if Noom will let young people in, it’s certainly not marketed to young people. It’s marketed to people kind of in our age bracket. But it’s emotional and psychological warfare, because, you know, you’re not good if you’re not using your brain to starve.VirginiaThey’re also literally the same thing, because they both use the stoplight diet as their basis. So they want to both argue that they’re not diets they are, in fact, all about restricting calories and grouping foods into good and bad categories.[Editor’s Note: Here’s Virginia’s 2019 New York Times piece on Kurbo.]Alright, now I have some listener questions that have come in that I would love for you to tackle. So first up, and I wanted to give this one to you, because of your whole “you’re nicer with carbs” thing. And it just made me laugh because the whole email is: “What is the deal with pasta? Why is it seen as unhealthy?” This is from someone who loves pasta, I think, and I do too. So I really want to help reclaim pasta for this person.AnnaOur bodies have no judgment about where food comes from. If you are eating carbohydrates, by way of pasta, your body assimilates those carbohydrates the same way it assimilates carbohydrates from toast, or crackers, or chips or any other food that might be a little bit more neutral.What has happened to the pasta industry in the last three or four years is pretty bloody tragic. It has happened in the context of this stupid, sensationalized documentary about plant-based power lifters or something. [Editor’s Note: Anna is referencing The Game Changers, which we’re not linking to here because it calls itself a documentary but has been criticized for bias, misrepresentation, and cherry-picking.]And then there was this uptick in this desire for plant-based everything, which is just a prettier way of saying “be vegan without the ethical piece.”You don’t need chickpeas or beans or whole wheat or any of those things to have and enjoy pasta. You are allowed to just eat normal pasta. [Virginia Note: Which, by the way, is usually plant-based!]I am appalled by what has happened to the pasta aisle which used be exciting, because you can choose different shapes. Now it’s like, let me choose a different macronutrient profile to make sure that I’m rounding out my meal. If you are looking for a higher fiber pasta experience, maybe add some vegetables to the pasta. If you’re looking for a higher protein pasta experience, maybe add some cheese or proteins some other way. It’s so silly. Carbohydrates are the mainstay of our existence, right? We need most of our energy to come from carbs. What has happened is the vilification of normal white pasta, which is just pasta. This is an unfortunate trickle down of the diet industry suggesting that you need to healthify all of the things. It’s just not true. You body can handle pasta. It’s delicious. You should eat it.VirginiaYou really should. And for parents, kids love pasta, and then parents have all this guilt about how much their kids love pasta, but pasta is a great food for introducing other foods. If you’re trying to diversify your kid’s palette, pasta is the base of everything. In my house, at least, they have that sort of safety there, and then they can get more curious about other foods.AnnaAnd there are so many fun things that go with pasta! All of the things go with pasta. It’s sad to hear that parents feel badly about feeding their kids carbs like pasta, because again, our prefrontal cortex—you are making a decision about what you’re feeding yourself with your prefrontal cortex, but the rest of your brain and all of your cells have no awareness of where carbohydrate energy comes from. The last thing I wish for parents, is to be putting that much energy into a bowl of pasta. It’s just pasta, it’s the same as a bowl of cereal.VirginiaI love that. All right, so we have redeemed pasta for anyone who is feeling anxious about pasta, I hope you eat it after you listen to this podcast.Next question: This person writes, my biggest issue is stopping when I’m full. How would you recommend dealing with the impulse to eat past fullness?AnnaI think hunger and fullness and eating in accordance to those sensory-specific experiences is something that takes skill and practice. That being said, I think my first question to this person would be: Are you having enough food all day long? Like, when you get up in the morning, are you having breakfast? Are you having snacks? Are you having regular meals? Are you feeding yourself with food when you feel tired instead of having a cup of coffee? And are you actually feeling satisfied by the foods that you’ve eaten? If you are not, I am going to encourage you to eat more food and to eat more food that leaves you feeling satisfied at the end. For some of my clients that actually means taking a break from high fiber things if fullness is part of the equation or something that makes them uncomfortable. The most important thing is, are you actually eating enough food during the day? And I promise you, you need a lot more food than you believe that you do. You just you need more food.VirginiaAlso, feeling the need to eat “past fullness” can be either not quite understanding what fullness is. You may be sort of feel like you should be full but you’re not actually full, you just think you’ve eaten “too much.” And so you think you’re eating past this but you’re not actually eating past your own fullness. That comes up quite a lot too, I would imagine.AnnaI also want to say really, really clearly: Your fullness is different from my fullness, and your fullness on Monday in the morning is different from your fullness on Tuesday in the afternoon. We have to really regard our relationships with our stomachs similarly to the way that we regard our relationships with our bladder. They’re both stretchy muscles, sometimes you really have to pee, sometimes you’re like, I need to pee, because I’m gonna be in the car for a little while. And your stomach can be the same way.In regard to this question, I would totally experiment with a bunch of different foods and feeling through what feels more filling and what feels more satisfying. And I’m still coming back to you’re probably not eating enough during the day.VirginiaI think that’s dead on for sure. Okay, last one, which sort of ties us back to where we started this conversation. This person writes: “Even though I stopped dieting and believe in intuitive eating, the dieting thoughts are in my head, so often. Any advice for coping with relentless diet thoughts?” And I think this sort of comes back to that sort of onslaught of messaging we were talking about in some parts, but I’m curious to hear what else you think of in response to this.AnnaFirst thing, please have so much compassion for yourself. Even as you are working to step away from valuing these numbers or rules, it doesn’t mean they disappear from your brain. Some of this is about neural plasticity. So if there was a time when following diet plan rules felt like it was advantageous for you, you made a neural connection that said, I feel uncomfortable in my body—and I’m not sure that I’m actually speaking to this person, specifically, but I’m just using an example—I feel uncomfortable in my body. So I’m going to make this dietary intervention. And every time, they feel uncomfortable, they make that one specific, or doesn’t have to be one, it can be all of the dietary interventions that they have followed over a period of time. And so that thought pattern becomes instantaneous, it becomes a thing that you don’t think about.With regard to thinking about the fact that our brains are plastic, we are here and ready to learn new things all the time. And I’m going to ask your listeners, do you remember learning how to drive? I remember learning how to drive, you know, like hands at 10 and 2, get your mirrors, make sure your seatbelt is buckled, and turn off all the music, like no sound, focus, focus, focus, focus, focus. And I don’t think it was until I actually had my license, and my mother and father were out of the car that I was like, “Oh, I got this, this is fine.” But in this one practice, driving a car my proprioceptive sense, I go from being this like five foot something person to now being this two ton vehicle, and it’s really challenging. (Psychologically, it’s actually crazy that we let kids drive.)It’s so, so hard. Until you get to a point where you can drive and have something to eat and change the radio, and be looking at your phone. And I will tell you, I have done ridiculous things while driving a car. But it’s because my brain, from a neural plasticity perspective, I desired so much to have a license that and to be independent driving a car that I practiced, practiced, practiced. And now I can do a million things. Well, it’s not actually a million, but I can do several things while also driving a car and not think twice.[Virginia’s Note: This is not an endorsement of texting and driving! Please do not look at your phone while you drive.]It makes so much sense, if you have been embedded in the wellness industry, diet industry, and those beliefs and doctrines for so long, it makes sense that those automatic thoughts are going to show up. My ask for you and my ask for everyone is — and this is actually using a little bit of CBT, thank you, Noom — what would it feel like to stop the thought or even to recognize it and say, wow, this is a diet culture thought, and try and replace it with something else. You think, so there’s a diet culture thought, this is my healthy thought, or this is my self-care thought. It will not be instantaneous, right? Because one that has been built in there is based on wellness culture mumbo jumbo, but with practice, and dedication to, you know, finding the other side, I feel really certain when I say it is possible to turn down that that noise. Does it mean it’s going to go away entirely? No, not necessarily. But you can shift some of it. And be gentle with yourself, this will take time. And, you know, if you devalue those messages, preferentially replace them with something else. This is a practice thing, but your brain was trained to do the dieting things, you can also train it to do something else.VirginiaIt really does feel like learning a new language or driving a car in the beginning. I was terrified of learning to drive as a kid. I remember how hard and scary it felt. And then after I lived in Manhattan for 10 years, and then we moved up to the country, and I had to basically relearn that skill, it was also terrifying, and didn’t go that well that first six months, and there was a garbage can in my driveway that I backed into. So I think that's a great way to think about it, like you are learning a whole new skill here. It’s a really complicated skill, and it’s gonna take some time before it becomes even remotely automatic.AnnaAnd the wellness culture punch in the gut part is, you’re not likely to have your healthy self-care oriented practices mirrored back at you. There has to be some acknowledgment of the fact that doing something different is automatically going to put you in a special category. And so you’re going to have to come back to self-care first, acknowledging that everyone in your life is also prey to the industry in the same way that you have been.VirginiaIt’s like you’re learning to speak a language no one around you speaks, and then they’re going to keep speaking to you in their regular language and wondering why you’re doing something different. And that is really hard.Well, Anna, thank you so much. This was wonderful. I feel like we covered so many different topics. Let us know where we can find more of you and your work.AnnaI would love for you to come hang out on Instagram! I had no idea that I would love it so much there but it is like a creative outlet. I am @dietitiananna. I actually do respond to most messages. So pop in a question.I started Virtual Connection at the beginning of the pandemic, and I haven’t stopped it yet. So there’s a free hour of me answering questions on Mondays at three o'clock EST. I would love to see you there. 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, about fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture, and the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia. I’m so excited today to introduce my guest, Marquisele Mercedes, or Mikey. She is a writer and doctoral student from the Bronx who is completing her PhD at Brown University School of Public Health, specializing in weight stigma, racism and critical public health studies. And oh my goodness, we need her work so much. I’m putting Mikey’s Patreon right here at the top of the transcript, because I hope everyone reading/listening will check it out and support her work. Welcome, Mikey. Thank you for being here.Mikey Thank you for having me!VirginiaThe first thing we have to talk about is the piece you did a couple weeks ago, a brilliant, searing takedown of Wegovy, the newest FDA-approved weight loss drug. Honestly, anyone who hasn’t read it yet, go read Mikey’s piece. One of the things that really jumped out to me is how the diet industry finances these drugs, because whenever we see these headlines, it’s presented as unequivocally good news. People may sort of know that scientists are required to disclose whether they have a financial stake in the research they’re doing, but—I have been reporting on this stuff for a really long time and I don’t even totally understand all the ways that the financial disclosure on a study does not tell the whole story. So why don’t you walk us through that a little bit.What does a financial disclosure do? And what does it tell us? What does it not tell us? And why, in the case of Wegovy, is there just so much more money at stake?Mikey The first thing to know is that to publish in most journals—especially those that have biomedical research—any journal that you try to publish in, if it’s peer reviewed, will ask if you have any financial conflicts of interest. But people who aren’t familiar with that process usually don’t understand that there isn’t a point at which the journal editors will say, “Oh, you have too much of a vested interest. We’re not going to take this article.” That doesn’t really happen. So, for example, there are three different authors on that Wegovy study that are employees of Novo Nordisk and then there’s also two that additionally hold stock, and that was not enough to not have this paper published.VirginiaSo it’s like: We’ll disclose it, but we’ll go right ahead and report this as unbiased science.Mikey Honestly, with a lot of areas of research, especially pharma or biomedical tech or whatever, having corporate ties is not a thing people really question. It’s definitely not a thing that journal editors question because it’s normal. So people are like, oh, okay, you’re a stock-owning employee of this of this pharmaceutical company. And you also receive fees from whatever and you invest actively in these companies, okay, we’ll note it at the bottom of this article. But it’s not like we’re not going to take your research, especially when it’s something like this. So there’s a lot of publication bias at work here too where, the medication had such distinct results, you know, an average of 15% loss of weight from participants’ initial weights, and a lot of people lost a third of their initial weight. When you have a result like that, it’s almost impossible for that to not get published, even in a journal like the New England Journal of Medicine, which is one of the most prestigious journals in the world.So you have publication bias on your side, because you got positive results, and no one in this area is really going to question whether or not to publish this on the basis of your financial conflicts of interest, they’re just going to note the conflicts of interest, and then go on and publish it anyway. On top of that, you have this culture within medicine, especially in biomedical sciences, where, you know, there are just certain forms of research where corporate influence is seen as okay. And a lot of the time, pharmaceutical companies are part of that culture. And definitely when it comes to weight loss.I’ve said this before: In science, there are some things that we get outraged about in terms of corporate influence, and others not. Like with tobacco. If a tobacco company tries to start an organization or a research foundation and do studies on the health outcomes related to smoking that may portray cigarettes in a less negative light, then people in public health especially are going to be pissed off about that. And they’re going to raise the alarm. But when it comes to Nestle funding research foundations, everyone’s like, oh, cool, private-public partnership, when it’s really private influence over what should be public work.VirginiaWhy that double standard? Why are we outraged that a tobacco company would do science to try to make their products seem safer, but not outraged that a pharmaceutical company will do science to make a drug they can sell and profit off of?Mikey Fatphobia. It’s literally just fatphobia. Public health is very proud of how it’s solved tobacco. It’s weird. They’re like, yeah, like, we managed to cut the smoking rate and blah, blah, blah. It’s one of the main examples that people use in health communication classes or science communication classes, when we’re talking about how to encourage or discourage people from doing certain things. Tobacco is the main example, as well as that health communication campaign, “Verb: It’s what you do.” Which actually wasn’t that effective, but that’s a whole other conversation.It mostly boils down to fatphobia. And I’ve found that’s amplified by the way that corporations have always been part of, the “obesity prevention” area. So it’s less jarring when something like this happens because it’s like, oh well, this is the way it’s always been done.VirginiaRight, you don’t question this whole system. It feels very radical to say pharmaceutical research should only be government-sponsored or that there shouldn’t be a capitalist stake in this. When I say it out loud, it seems quite logical yet also anathema to the way we are programmed.Mikey If you were to say that in a room full of like, researchers, I think people would be like, whoa, hold up. That’s a bit much.Virginia These corporations do have huge amounts of money, they do directly impact people’s health. If we could get them to put that money towards useful things like that could be a good thing. The problem is, they’re only putting it towards—Mikey Profit-making.VirginiaRight profit-making, and in this case, creating a drug that you and I both feel strongly is going to be more harmful than it could ever be good.Mikey Exactly. This is all aside from the fact that these corporations should not have the money they have anyway. So that’s a whole other thing, that we might not have enough time to get into.VirginiaYeah, that’s a whole separate conversation. But definitely worth noting.So let’s talk a little bit more about the drug itself. I mean, as you said, it’s had these “positive results” and people are reporting more weight loss while on the drug then you usually see in these studies, but you also talked in your piece about our short-term memory when it comes to this industry, and specifically weight loss drugs. So tell us a little bit about what we’ve forgotten about this drug’s predecessors that’s clouding our ability to assess this drug?Mikey If the diet industry was held accountable for all of its past failures, and not-delivered products, then it wouldn’t exist. Let’s be clear about that. The diet industry—and when I say the diet industry, obviously, I’m talking about manufacturers of weight loss drugs, but also like, companies like Weight Watchers, or individuals who actively profit off of selling weight loss, not necessarily as a thing that happens, but as a dream.VirginiaRight, a very important distinction.Mikey And that’s the distinction that I think is really core to this cycle. Somehow we are so drawn to the promise of weight loss, that we choose to forget that if you’re a fat person living in this country, you have probably tried more than one, more than multiple forms of weight loss, dieting, some kind of weird cleansing program. You’ve probably tried some of those things, if you haven’t, I think you would be in the minority of fat people.VirginiaMinority of all people but especially fat people.Mikey And I think the normalization of that activity, engaging in this collective fat hate, paired with the fact that like, there are tangible benefits to being smaller—and then also the fact that this industry has so many resources to make sure that we never forget that weight loss is a good idea—obviously, we’re sort of slowly seduced into forgetting the fact that most of us have definitely tried to lose weight and it hasn’t happened or it’s sent us off into spirals of disordered eating, or has had other kinds of negative implications on our lives. I think it’s really hard to remember that these things don’t usually work the way that we’re told they work because all those other things are happening.We’re constantly being reminded that fat is bad, constantly reminded that weight loss is good. And then we see that reified by all of this media explosion when something like this comes out. It’s being talked about as a game changer: “This is gonna change people’s lives.” There’s always, always, always, always a steady supply of people waiting in the wings to advocate for something like this on a large scale. Which, honestly, the application of a weight-loss recommendation or technique for community-level or population-level health, that’s f*****g unethical. That’s unethical as hell.We know that encouraging weight loss, encouraging body comparison, encouraging body dissatisfaction, does all kinds of messed up things to our health. And we also know that it’s incredibly rare that people lose weight and then sustain that weight. And we also know that the consequences of putting people into a cycle of weight gain and weight loss has serious implications on our metabolic health. And yet, it is completely acceptable to recommend those things on a community level, on a population level. And there are people in the medical community who will absolutely advocate for that. And there are lots of reasons why. And sometimes those reasons boil down to dollars, and it’s a really uncomfortable thing to sit with. Regardless of how much we complain about how bad healthcare is in this country, I think that a lot of us still hold on to the hope that the people who give us healthcare services have our best interests in mind. And being confronted with information that suggests the opposite, or suggests that the story might be a little bit more complicated, is incredibly uncomfortable.I strongly believe that people are the best experts of their own bodies. We live in these bodies every every damn day. We know when things don’t feel right. We know when we’re content. And when we’re at ease. The fact is that most doctors don’t know what to do with fat bodies. There are plenty of studies that suggest that doctors do not feel equipped to deal with patients that are “obese.” [Virginia Note: I summarized a lot of that research in this article.]They don’t know how to do nutrition education, they spend less time giving health education to people who are fat. A lot of the restrictions that fat people face, especially when they’re looking to get life-saving surgical procedures or transplants—there’s this idea that at a certain weight you are less able to get through that procedure. That is also something that I’m very sure is born from doctors just straight up not knowing how to deal with fat bodies. In medical school, a lot of cadavers when they’re fat, people are just like, “Oh, I have to, like, cut through all of this. Oh, my God.”Virginia So dehumanizing.Mikey And it also just turns treating fat patients into a burden from the get go. So, yes, people are absolutely, probably the best experts on their own bodies. But also, a lot of doctors don’t know what the f**k they’re doing when it comes to fat patients.VirginiaIt’s so important to highlight that. With this drug in particular, it had this initial 15 percent weight loss or up to a third weight loss, which sounds like some brand new achievement. But let’s talk briefly about what are the concerns about Wegovy?Mikey Someone who engaged in the study and was receiving Wegovy, is quoted in multiple articles about the medication, saying that she ended up gaining back most of the weight that she lost while she was on the medication, and then also lost some of it and then also gained some of it back. That’s the textbook definition of weight cycling. The fact that this medication is being heralded as this game changing diet drug—there’s nothing game changing about it. When you’re on it, it f***s with your pancreas enough that you are sent into a process of losing weight that probably is not healthy or organic or makes sense for your body. And then once you’re off the drug, you gain it back.Novo Nordisk has sort of perfected the playbook of taking one drug and finding that it has a side effect of weight loss and then just like, selling it in bigger dosages so that weight loss happens more quickly.They did this with another drug, Saxenda is just Victoza at a higher dosage. The only difference between them is the dosage and Saxenda is also specifically marketed as a weight loss drug whereas Victoza is not.VirginiaRight, it’s a diabetes medication.Mikey Right, it’s a type two diabetes medication, and it is very effective at doing that. But it’s not meant for weight loss. And then you have Ozempic which is the drug that they amplified the dosage of, to get Wegovy.So Victoza was the subject of a major 2017 federal case against Novo Nordisk. Novo Nordisk was ordered to pay $58.65 million to the federal government and state Medicaid programs for intentionally minimizing the risks of developing a rare form of cancer to physicians who would be prescribing this medication to their patients.I’m not saying that what happened with Victoza is what’s going to happen with Wegovy, that doesn’t even need to be the case for this to be just a failure and hazard to everybody’s health. The point is that if a company has a history of doing things for profit that intentionally did endanger people’s lives, maybe that company should not still be making things that people will ingest. Moving on from that, if we know that a medication has risks, like serious risks, even in small doses, and then you rebrand that medication into a weight loss medication…like, why, how was that allowed to happen?It’s really hard to find out if people from the FDA have taken corporate money. I’ve tried to figure that out, because I really didn’t see any other way for Wegovy to have been approved. It’s been a few years since a drug has been approved for weight loss by the FDA. So this is a big deal and I don’t know. I’m not sure if the FDA has ever approved a potentially risky medication, especially after a corporation has been found to have intentionally mislead physicians. I don’t know if that’s something that has happened before in history. But clearly, this is something that we should be worried about.VirginiaThere’s so many red flags, except none of them were being reported in any of the mainstream media.Mikey I’m sure you saw how the American Academy of Pediatrics like came out supporting bariatric surgery for tweens, and it’s the same thing. I was like, damn, NPR should be ashamed of itself, because—VirginiaThat story was a travesty.Mikey Like, how is it that the only risks focused on in that piece were like, trisks of promiscuity following weight loss? They were like, she’ll be socially relevant. Are you f*****g kidding me? VirginiaThe girl’s mom was against her getting it, but not because she was worried about the risks of the surgery, but because she thought she hadn’t tried hard enough to lose weight. And that was completely unexamined.Mikey Portraying that doctor that helped her get the surgery as a kind of savior, especially since that particular doctor is like, honestly, I want to I want to start like, I don’t know, I want to gamble basically on the chance that this specific doctor shows up in an article about weight stigma, because she’s always always always around. And she’s heralded by medicine as this crusader for dismantling weight sigma. And I’m like, what the f**k is so different about her from the people who are just more obvious about hating my body? I honestly find it more dangerous, that someone would hide their disgust for fatness in like, not genuine concern for my well being.VirginiaThe tell is always when they come around and say we’re helping these kids lose weight to avoid weight stigma. It’s like, that’s not how you fight stigma. You don’t fight stigma by taking the marginalized person and making them assimilate. That’s the opposite of fighting the stigma, that’s reinforcing the stigma.Mikey And then we can’t really rely on most journalists, at least to give us the the real on what is happening with these. I mean, a colleague of mine tried to write something about Wegovy, they really tried to get something published. And they were told that it was just too controversial. And I’ve pitched this to no less than 15 places and no one will get back to me. It’s ridiculous. I think that with how pervasive weight stigma is, it makes it seem like there’s no one that gives a s**t about it at all. But there are people like you, like me, like my colleagues, like fat activists, people that really do this every single day. They’re constantly thinking about weight stigma, how to dismantle it, constantly working to do that, but they get shut down at every single angle. And, it’s exhausting. VirginiaI often run into this attitude of “yes, we’re very worried about weight stigma, I guess it’s this terrible problem, but oh my God, ob*sity equals death. And that’s the real danger.” It’s almost like we have to sacrifice people’s mental health to fight this public health war. And I think that discourse comes out of the public health world. And it really is about how the diet industry has infiltrated public health discourse. So talk a little bit about that, how you see diet culture and fatphobia showing up in public health and how these two things got so enmeshed?MikeyIn terms of public health, I mean, I don’t see an area of research that is not impacted in some way by diet culture, by the diet industry. I’m doing my PhD in a behavioral science department. I’m surrounded by people who do behavioral interventions on obesity, and it’s just the most whacked s**t ever. A lot of people are completely disconnected from how certain areas of science really come to be, how certain areas of public health really come to be. And so when you try to say like, “Oh, hey, maybe what we’re doing in public health is shitty. Like to a lot of people.” When you bring that up, they’re just like, what are you talking about?This is research that I’m currently doing now for my own book proposal. Like, how deep do obesity prevention initiatives really go? A year ago I was reading Fit to Be Citizens? by Natalia Molina, who talks about Mexican Chinese and Japanese immigrants in the 19th century, late 19th century, early 20th century, and their experiences being actively marginalized by the Los Angeles county and city public health departments. And it’s a really good read, I recommend that people pick it up. It’s very accessible language. Molina is a really, really good writer. But even in those health interventions that they would target towards Mexican moms in the early 1900s, late 1800s, a lot of that was critiquing their diet, and the way they ate. So even that falls into the parameters of an obesity prevention initiative. And that’s something wouldn’t necessarily be classified as one because it falls into the realm of maternal and child health, which is honestly one of the most fatphobic areas of research I’ve ever seen in my life. But I mean, it’s the same reason why that survey returned that ob-gyn is one of the most fatphobic areas of medicine. These things are not a coincidence. VirginiaWe like to police women’s bodies, mothers’ bodies, mothers of color’s bodies. It all needs to be policed and controlled as much as possible.Mikey We have to understand that critiquing people’s diets—especially people from other cultures—critiquing people’s diets, critiquing the way they feed their kids, critiquing their cultural foods, really became bolstered by public health initiatives justified by the faulty science that they put out to justify their bigotry. And now it’s a whole area of research. Now, that’s not just critiquing immigrant mothers, that’s obesity prevention research. Like that’s a thing like that has journals, that has grants, that has clout. So it goes really, really deep. And it's not just relegated to the areas of research that look at eating, it’s also about physical activity research. And also people who do research on racial health disparities often fall back on like fatphobic racist logic for why some people are healthy and why others are not.Virginia Say more about that. Mikey I mean, so first of all, there's the enduring, long-lived fallacy that race is biological, which it is not. But when you make race biological, and you essentially make culture something inherent to an individual, then you can make the case that their way of eating and their way of cooking is an inherent pathology. And some people don’t even bring race into the picture, they’re just like, oh, you know, some cultures are just so unhealthy, and we need to help them. And all of its b******t, because of how malleable and subjective it is, like, now quinoa and avocado are seen as super foods like, now it's okay that people of color were the ones who like, really eat them.VirginiaAnd collard greens..Mikey And kale and collard greens. Yeah, like, f**k off, like, whenever I see something like that, I'm just like, this is how I know that none of this is really rooted in anything but our internal hatred for certain kinds of people. When you start to look at things through that lens, it’s a really depressing lens. I don’t recommend doing it all the time. But it’s often the perspective that I use when I’m thinking of things like Wegovy, because I’m like, who is benefiting from this drug being approved? Who is benefiting from what it does in the meantime, and also, who was benefiting from what happens afterwards? Because I remember, someone made such a wonderful comment when I first put out my article, and they were just like, this is going to lead to a whole generation of diabetics, the way that this messes with people’s insulin production. That’s a consequence that I think will happen. Even if a few years from now the FDA is like, this is not a thing that should have ever been approved, by that point, the damage is already done. And since it’s fat people that are going to be prescribed this drug, right, that just feeds into the idea that fatness is inherently inherently pathological. Thus the cycle begins again.VirginiaThe last thing I want to talk to you about is the how all of this stuff plays out in food culture. A lot of my listeners are parents, so I get a lot of questions around kids and processed foods, and there’s a lot of fears around processed foods. I want to hold space for the fact that parents are under a huge amount of pressure to feed our kids perfectly. But I think it’s very useful to unpack how much the anti-processed food argument is rooted in fatphobia and racism and classism. There are a bunch of new studies that came out this week looking at processed food and kids’ diets and then immediately linking them to health problems. There’s this never ending onslaught of research in that area, much like with the weight loss drugs, and we see these headlines and we think, Okay, well, there it is, salt, sugar and fat is so bad for us. You know, processed foods, the ultra processed foods are so bad for us...Mikey This is more of a new thought, but I wonder about the utility of making certain kinds of foods that are more widely available to people of color, especially Black people, low-income black people, I think about the utility of marketing those foods as something health conscious, respectable people shouldn’t be eating. Who benefits from that? A lot of the discourse that demonizes certain foods over others is honestly some form of marketing ploy to push some kind of new form of eating, whether that's clean eating or, or being like, oh, we all have to be vegan, or we all have to eat clean, or we all have to buy organic foods, you know, whatever that means. The way I see it, the more we impose hierarchies on food, there will always be certain foods that we have a fixation on, because those are the foods that we shouldn’t be eating. In terms of parenting, I feel like that is so relevant.When I was younger, my fixation on eating more and more, first originally stemmed from hunger, because like, I was restricted, you know, in terms of my diet. I have always lived in a fat body at any age. And so when it came to the point where restriction was an enforceable thing, that was when I became most fixated with food. I didn’t become fixated with, you know, ultra processed food, or like, that wasn’t the thing that I really even gave a s**t about. When I was a kid, I was like, I want to eat more of the food that I had for dinner, because I was still hungry. And I live in this body, and my body is telling me that it needs food. And eventually, that fixation moved away from being something that I physically felt was necessary, and more a compulsion that I had to fulfill. Because if I didn’t have it, it meant that I had let some kind of need go unfulfilled. And that caused me a lot of distress. So when we talk about ultra processed foods, I feel like especially in areas of parenting, we’re just like, how do we make kids less fixated on these foods? How do we make kids like these foods less, you know, like, marketing for these foods is all bright and colorful and draws people in. And kids are always told not to eat them. So you know, they might like them more, but I honestly tell people to start with their relationship with the food they eat on a regular basis. The idea that food abuse starts with foods that are, you know, “unhealthy” I feel is misinformed and incorrect. But it’s something that so many of us feed into. And it’s extremely prominent in literature that is targeted towards parents, because just because of the way that a lot of these foods are age-coded. Is there a reason why Lunchables and other forms of prepackaged ultra-processed foods are so bad? I think that’s a conversation worth having. But I also think that a lot of the time, it’s a distraction.VirginiaI think you’re articulating a key tension I think about a lot which is: The processed food industry, much like the diet industry, could certainly use more oversight, could certainly stand to have someone coming in and saying hey, stop with the predatory marketing tactics, stop disproportionately marketing communities of color, stop disproportionally marketing to kids. All of that would be super, and is really important. But we often lose that nuance, and it becomes: these foods are bad. You are bad if you feed them to your child. And it’s so much more complicated than that, these foods in and of themselves are not terrible, it’s the excessive marketing and the way that’s done in this disproportionate way that is the problem. Mikey It’s the way that these foods give in to the fixation we already have about eating. Like, if I'm a child, and I am already thinking about food, and then I am suddenly bombarded by food marketing, those are things that feed into each other. It’s not like food marketing started my issues with food.VirginiaBecause if you hadn’t been restricted, you could have navigated the marketing much easier.Mikey Do not restrict kids. I hear things like, Oh, well, if I don’t restrict my kid, then they’ll eat whatever they want, until they’re sick. And, you know, sometimes we need to have that experience. You need to have that outcome in order to be able to learn from that experience.VirginiaIt’s part of learning how to navigate these foods. And if you restrict your kid around them, they will have that experience at a friend’s house on a play date or something, you know, they will, it’ll happen one way or the other. Mikey And we have to think about how the fixation that we have on ultra processed foods in general, and the insistence that we eat a certain way that’s cleaner, healthier, blah, blah, blah. All of those things just demonize other people.VirginiaRight.Mikey That’s where a lot of that comes from, it comes from the inherent distaste that we have for poor people, for fat people, for Black people, who are often more often than not forced into a position to buy foods that fall into the category of processed or ultra processed, because of the fact that they have restricted access to resources to buy other kinds of foods.This is literally just another way to push bigotry and enforce hierarchies. And the more we think about it like that, then the next time, you know, it’s easier for us to be like, well, this thing is telling me that unless I have this prepackaged meal, that will help me lose weight, then I’m a bad person, it becomes easier to unpack that and point out why that’s b******t when we understand that these are not fueled by health promoting goals. They’re promoted, they’re fueled by profit seeking goals that are also amplified by division and bigotry.VirginiaSomething I often think about when parents are articulating these anxieties to me is: How much of this is honestly about your concern for your child’s health, and how much of this is about your concern for your perception as a parent? I’m thinking about kids lunches, and the standards for kids lunches have gotten just, you know, there’s supposed to be like four types of produce and a rainbow and you know, it’s insane. And it’s all white ladies on Instagram, performing their parenting in this way and performing their white savior lady thing, right?MikeyPerformance is a crucial social tool, right? But it’s not a thing to base your lifestyle on. Like, it’s okay to be like, oh my god, I made this really cute lunch for my kids. This sandwich looks like a face and it’s smiling. And I can’t wait to talk about this with like, the other parents that I know. That’s totally cool. The thing that’s not okay is taking those values that you have around that sandwich and applying it to how you’re treating your human child.VirginiaAnd that you’re then judging the other parents such as myself who are packing Uncrustables for our kids lunch, right?MikeyI have Uncrustables because as a semi-functioning adult, If I don’t have them, I might not eat anything. They’re amazing. I also want to say that just because you’re a parent doesn’t mean that you’ve resolved your own issues with food, so unpack that s**t. Figure out your hangups around food and how you might be projecting those onto your child. Because, you know, a lot of the times, we’re guided by these conventional nuggets of wisdom, but those conventional nuggets of wisdom are just trauma that we’re still holding onto.VirginiaSuch a good point. Mikey, thank you so much. This was an amazing conversation.Mikey Thank you for having me. I don’t usually talk about this kind of stuff.VirginiaTell us all of the ways that people can follow you and support your work. MikeyOn Twitter, which I spend way too much time on, I’m @marquisele. On Instagram I’m @fatmarquisele. I'm also on Patreon: patreon.com/marquisele. I’m currently working on a fat studies public health syllabus. So if that’s of interest to anyone, I break down a lot of what we’re talking about right now, in terms of how fatphobia became a thing, especially in the sciences. And if there are some concerns or questions that you have around fatphobia, I’m always always always taking questions through my website. And those are the subject of my semi bi-weekly newsletter I put out through Patreon as well. 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 sometimes answers, on fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture and the author of The Eating Instinct, and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia. I am so thrilled today to be chatting with Aubrey Gordon. Aubrey is the author of What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat. She is @yrfatfriend everywhere on social media, and the co-host of the very beloved Maintenance Phase podcast. Aubrey, welcome.Aubrey Thanks so much for having me, it’s a delight to talk to you. As always. VirginiaI’m delighted, and I know my readers are going to be so delighted. So I’m bringing you on to talk about the concept of thin privilege, because I think, this is a concept that’s very hard for folks to wrap their brains around. Whenever I talk about it on social media, it inspires a lot of angry comments, a lot of defensiveness, and just a lot of feelings that come up around this concept. I’m hoping we can unpack that, and discuss how parents can explain thin privilege to our kids. Because part of the problem is that people haven’t heard of thin privilege, and now they’re grown up. So let’s start with the basics. What is thin privilege?AubreyI would say thin privilege is how folks benefit from a proximity to thinness. So whether or not you feel like you yourself qualify as “being really thin,” the closer you are to looking thin, the more thin privilege you get. Congratulations! And that includes many fat people, right? I have more thin privilege at about 350 pounds than someone who’s fatter than me does. The idea is that the closer that you get to thinness, the more you actually don’t have to think about your body or your size in terms of how other people relate to it and treat it. You may think about it quite a bit internally, but most of your struggles with your body relate to internal challenges and not to institutions rejecting you, or individuals treating you differently.So, someone with more thin privilege than me might not have to worry about strangers on the street shouting “hey, fatso” at them. Or they might not have to worry about whether or not a doctor will agree to treat them. Or they might not have to worry if they get on a plane, will they be allowed to stay on that plane, or will they be escorted off the plane without a refund and without recourse. It doesn’t mean that folks in smaller bodies don’t have challenges to work through with relationship to body image. I think it’s really important to note that thin privilege is about how other people treat you, not how you feel about your own body. So you can still have profound body image struggles, but that doesn’t change how other people treat you, even with body dysmorphia, even with eating disorders, even with whatever you’re working with. Other people still perceive you as a thinner person and treat you as a thinner person, regardless of how you perceive yourself.Virginia I think that distinction between your own emotions about your body versus how the world perceives your body is crucial. And that’s what makes it hard for folks who feel like, “I’m miserable in my body, so how can I have thin privilege?” But it’s all the things you just said, it’s that you can move through the world freely, even though you might be tormented in some way by your body.AubreyIt can be upsetting and call up defensiveness in the same way that talking about any kind of privilege can. As someone who has grown up white and middle class and remains white and middle class, I have been told consistently throughout my life that my accomplishments are my own. I haven’t really had to look at the ways in which the wind is at my back, right? And the ways in which structures are built to support me specifically as a white person and a middle class person. And I think this is a similar thing. It doesn’t mean that you’re less accomplished. It doesn’t mean that you don’t struggle with your body image, it doesn’t mean that anything inherent about you has changed. It just means becoming more aware of the ways in which the world receives your body.VirginiaSo I was reading some of your writing about this (and I’ll link in the transcript to all the many fantastic articles you’ve written on thin privilege [like this one and this one], and one statistic that really jumped out at me was that just under 50 percent of American adults tried to lose weight between 2013 and 2016, according to the CDC. And you noted that white people and people with higher incomes were the most likely to be engaged in weight loss efforts, meaning that those of us with particularly pronounced privileges are the ones most likely to be engaged in activities to try to reduce our size. Is thin privilege something that already privileged people are actively seeking out?Aubrey Absolutely. Part of that, to my mind—there’s less research on this, this is all just me spitballing—but, to my mind, that is tied to the very explicit history of racism broadly, and anti-Blackness in particular. It’s tied to how we think and talk about fatness and fat people. It’s also tied to our relationship between class and fatness. Overwhelmingly, we are met with these media caricatures of fat people as being poorer than thin people, we are met with caricatures of fat Black folks, particularly as being the most abrasive of fat people, right? And most domineering or least intelligent or whatever—it sort of supercharges any of our existing associations with a community. So, yes, thin privilege is something that we seek, and it’s something that we seek in order to escape the ways that we actually do see fat people being treated: frankly, significantly worse than thin people. So folks will feel defensive of and disconnected from a sense of their own privilege, while at the same time on some level, kind of consciously cashing in on it or trying to figure out how to gain more of that privilege.Virginia I was talking to Deb Burgard about this a few years ago, and she said, a lot of the body positivity movement is small fat women trying to get their white privilege back, trying to move themselves back up the ladder, in a way. The intersection of all of this is fascinating, and uncomfortable. It’s hard to look at how we’ve benefited from these systems.AubreyI also think the hard thing about bodies is that we do live and operate in a culture that makes absolutely all of us feel like garbage in our bodies. Like 100 percent of people. It’s set up so that all of us feel bad. And part of the challenge is that we conflate how we feel about our bodies and how we’ve been made to feel about our bodies, with how much privilege comes with being in that body. And we’ve got to do a better job of disentangling those things, which will allow us to actually honor both of them more.Virginia Let’s talk about thin privilege with kids. I see this coming up in a couple different ways. One example that I talked about recently on social was a friend shopping for softball pants for her 8-year-old daughter, and finding that her daughter can’t wear the same uniform that her peers are wearing.AubreyThat’s so—listeners cannot see my face. But it’s a sad, bummed face. VirginiaI was a thin kid. I never had to think about whether the uniform would fit me. Or how that becomes a barrier to participation. If you’re the kid wearing sweatpants when everyone else is wearing the uniform, you don’t feel like you can play the sport in the same way. What other ways do you see thin privilege show up for kids?AubreyI think a big one is the built environment. For me in middle school and high school, those desks with a chair attached were like a real special kind of hell. I couldn’t flip the desk down, I would just have to sort of like, sit in the chair with the desk flapped up, which was like a little flag waving like, “Hi, everybody. I’m the fat kid. Hello! Look over here.”So I would try and write on my knee. And my notes were kind of garbage. It just made things—not insurmountable, but it was more difficult than it should have been.It is rare that schools or teachers are outfitting schools—and the same can be true of parents at friend’s houses—with furniture, knowing the weight capacity and that sort of thing. I ended up opting out of a lot of playdates with friends and physical games. I remember going to laser tag, and there was a point at which I stopped going, because I thought the laser tag vest thing wasn’t going to fit me anymore. So I stopped going to friend’s birthday parties. There is sort of a social isolation element that comes with all of this stuff. And I think, you know, it never would have occurred to me at the time. But boy, oh, boy, like just a thimble full of awareness from anybody’s parents could have gone just miles and miles and miles.VirginiaWhat should that look like? A lot of my readers are parents. Some of them are parents of fat kids, a lot of them are parents of thinner kids or kids with degrees of thin privilege. How do we talk to our kids about this concept? How can we be more mindful of exactly what you’re saying: thinking through the logistics of the birthday party, thinking through the logistics of the sports team, or whatever it is to make environments more inclusive for kids?AubreySo I come to this conversation, not as a parent, but as a very proud and engaged aunt. So a grain of salt from a guy who’s not taking care of kids around the clock. But I do think that talking to your kids about, “Do you think everybody can do this? Do you think everybody would be comfortable doing this? Who do you want to have there? Oh, I’m not sure if this kid could do that.” I think this works around size, I think it works around disability, I think it works on a lot of stuff.I have, as you can imagine, been very open with my niece and nephew both about what I do and what I write about, and why it matters. And I felt nervous about it, because it feels sort of “controversial” or high stakes or something to talk to kids about body stuff. But as with talking to kids about trans issues, or race, or disability, or any sort of social issue, they are totally down. And it has opened up this vein of conversation that I don’t think I would have had with them. My niece, who’s now 14 will come to me and be like, “My friend is constantly telling me how fat she feels, and I’m actually fatter than her, so it feels really bad to me. But I don’t want to take away how she’s feeling, but also she calls her little brother ‘fat’ as an insult.” So we have these pretty rich conversations to unpack all of those competing things.Because when you just sit down with a kid and you’re like, “Listen, man, sometimes people are fatter than other people. And sometimes people are mean to people who are fatter than other people or think that they don’t deserve the same things. And so we’re going to do a little looking out for fat people. What do you say?” That’s pretty much it and I don’t actually know a kid who isn’t moved to be a helper. So just tapping into that goes a long, long way.VirginiaI’ve found that in talking to my own kids about body size, they can use the word fat in this very unaffected, natural way that is so beautiful to me, as someone who had to go through the process of reclaiming it. It’s like, this won’t be something you have to reclaim. This will just be a word for you. Oh!AubreyI feel like the conversations that I have with folks who are parents is with parents who are not fat, raising kids who are not fat, right? And they’re really nervous that they’re going to have the thin kid who’s calling everybody fat.The way that I’ve handled that is to just be like, “Hey, this is a totally neutral word. Some people get their feelings hurt by it. So check in with people about what words they’re okay with. And then if they're okay with it, you can use it, it’s fine.” Creating even a sliver of daylight between what the word itself means and how people experience that word, can help kids navigate that. We do this all the time with words related to your private parts. There are lots and lots of times that we’re sort of teaching kids about when and whether words are appropriate. And this is another one of those.Virginia I also think you can talk about bodies in a really positive, normal way, and also teach your kids that we don’t talk about the bodies of other people, just like we don't touch the bodies of other people without their consent. If your 5 year old yells it out in a grocery store, that’s a great opportunity to say, “Hey, you know, we don’t actually yell out people’s physical characteristics in public, because you just don’t know how that’s gonna land. But it doesn’t mean that their bodies are bad. It just means that we respect that people’s bodies belong to them.”AubreyI think a totally neutral parallel is: You don’t show up at a party unless you get an invitation to that party. It doesn’t have to be like loaded and heavy. You don’t take a book from the library, if you haven’t checked it out and made sure it’s available. There are lots and lots and lots of ways that we check on something first before we go ahead and do it.VirginiaThose are great examples. So steering away from kids for a little bit: You talk a lot about fat people having these different levels of thin privilege, and why it’s so important to articulate the difference between what I as a size 16 experiences versus what you experience. And that’s something that the body positive space, the Health At Every Size space, we haven’t always been great at doing that. The small fat ladies like myself have done a lot of damage, and we have some karma to work off. So I have a question from a reader that’s actually a little more about health privilege than thin privilege, but I think they’re very related and I would love to get your take on this.She writes: “I’d like there to be more conversation about fat people who do have chronic health issues that medical professionals insist are brought on by how we eat or how we move, particularly diabetes, which is the dirty word of our culture right now. So many people dealing with this health issue are given poorer care because of the fatphobia of their doctors. Having this disease is like an open invitation to be judged and demeaned. The discourse stressing that it’s possible and even likely to be perfectly healthy and fat, while true, leaves out those of us who aren’t ‘perfect’ or ‘healthy in this paradigm. This is more of a screed than a question.” AubreyThere’s so much to unpack and I’m so deeply glad that this person wrote in about this, because this is a thing that I feel extremely passionately about. When we’re trying to defend ourselves against anti-fat bias and anti-fat attitudes and behaviors, the thing that is most tempting and the easiest to do is to grab on to the closest other privilege that we have, and go: I might be fat, but I eat really healthy and I shop at the farmers market; or I might be fat, but I workout all the time, and I have a gym membership; or I might be fat, but I’m perfectly healthy, and my blood work is probably better than yours. All of which makes sense as a desire to defend ourselves.When we do that, what we’re saying is that fat people who are disabled and chronically ill are not deserving of the same things that we’re deserving of. That’s not necessarily our intention when we say those things, but that is the function. It sends a really clear exclusionary message, in the same way that when thin women tell me that body positivity is only for people who are happy and healthy, which is sort of code for, like, not fat, right? So, not you, everyone else can feel okay about their bodies, but not you, is sort of what we’re doing when we say that we’re perfectly healthy. And we’re reinforcing the idea that our perception of someone else’s health is acceptable data to use in deciding how to treat that person. And it is, I would argue, categorically not.I mean, what we know about diabetes is that it is—well, I should start out by saying, what we don’t know about diabetes is almost everything. Just to be real clear: Everybody everywhere is walking around out in the world, like, “Oh, you just have to not eat sugar and not get fat and you won't be diabetic.” Currently, the research is reckoning with, do you get fat because you’re diabetic, or are you diabetic because you’re fat. And there’s some data showing that your body might actually hang on to fat, as it becomes insulin resistant, pre-diabetic and diabetic, right? So we might actually be thinking of it in a completely backwards way. We also know that it’s linked to the stress of experiencing discrimination. So all of that judgment about being diabetic, or maybe becoming diabetic, is rooted in ableism. It’s rooted in these kinds of misconceptions. I’m starting to dive into that research now, and I’m realizing the degree to which that is all categorically false. We are all walking around with this weird false sense of superiority like we’ve all outsmarted diabetes. And anyone who has been forced to take that deep dive knows that that is not the case. We think of it as an earned fate, and we talk about it as something that fat folks should have thought about before they got fat and stayed fat.VirginiaIt all ties back to this belief that we have to dismantle that fat is a behavior. That this is all a choice, that it’s all an option that you checked off on a list of like, yes, I will take fat and I will take diabetes.But attaching moral virtue to things that have to do with your genetic and socioeconomic and other lotteries of life really just doesn’t make sense.AubreyThere’s a sociologist named Robert Crawford, who coined this term in the 1980s called healthism, which is about the ways in which we seek out these signifiers that we are people who are seeking health, so we can perform that for people. I would say we are in a real boom time of healthism. Like people are Instagramming their celery juice, they’re wearing athleisure clothes everywhere. People are opting for things like Peloton and Equinox, right? And all of these see-and-be-seen things are very class coded. They are not just a way of saying I’m healthy, but a way of saying I’m healthy and I have disposable income. So it’s worth thinking about creating a sliver of daylight between what is your actual current health status, and what are the things that you are either judging other people on or seeking to be judged on in a particular way, positive or negative? That feels really important for all of us, regardless of size, and regardless of ability.VirginiaThat leads me to my last question. Another reader wrote in and asks: What do I do as a thin person to be an ally in all of this? I think when we’re talking about thin privilege, that’s an important piece of it. But she also says, when I talk to my friends in bigger bodies, do I acknowledge my privilege? Or is that unnecessary? This question also comes up from people who want to post about, like some workout achievement, but the performative aspect of that makes it really icky. So I’m curious to hear your thoughts on some of that.AubreyI’m also curious to hear yours. I would say, in talking to friends, and folks that you have close social relationships with, ask them how they want to talk about it. And then do those things. Ask them what kind of support that they want and need and do those things. If they say, God, I’m getting ready for a doctor’s appointment, and I feel really nervous about it, you can say, what makes you feel nervous? Do you want me to go with you? Do you want moral support? Should we check in afterwards, and like get cocktails so you can decompress? What would be helpful? I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to already know what the right thing is, and to know how to read somebody else’s mind. And there’s enough difference in experience and desire here to be able to say, what’s helpful here? What are the words that you use to describe your body? What are the words you’d like me to use? Do you want to talk about this stuff? Do you never want to talk about stuff? You tell me. I think just opening up that conversation is a really great starting point.The other thing I would say—I’m in my office right now, Virginia can see it, there is a guest bed behind me. We just replaced the bed frame. I made weight capacity a priority for it. It’s our guest bed and I found a really inexpensive bed frame that is rated for up to 1000 pounds. So now I know, whoever comes to see us, they can stay in our guest bed. So thinking about stuff like that, like when you’re in the market for chairs, or for a bed or whatever, being mindful of like, does this chair have arms? How close together are they? Could somebody fit into these? What’s the weight capacity? Do I know who it’s built to fit? It will make it harder, but it’ll make it harder in a way that it’s already hard for fat people.VirginiaClothing is my other one on this. Something great that thin folks can do is support brands that are somewhat inclusive. I mean, it’s impossible to support brands that are fully inclusive, because they don’t exist, but to whatever extent that’s possible. I had an unpleasant interaction yesterday with a small fat woman who was asking for, oh, where should I look for summer dresses, and I suggested some plus size brands, and she was offended. She was like, “I mean, I’m not that big. I don’t need that.” And I thought, oh, I can’t talk to you about this anymore. I’m putting up a boundary, we’re done. Because, it’s okay, you can be at the smaller end of a clothing line just as much as you were otherwise at the upper end of the clothing line. Why is that somehow a problem for you?AubreyI think this actually gets us right back to thin privilege. That is someone who, in that moment, was like, “You are aligning me with fat people, I know how people think about and treat fat people, I will be over here with the thin people, thank you. How dare you.”VirginiaEven though I’m barely fitting into these clothes, and I’m complaining because I don’t have good options. But I’m going to be over here, you know, cramming into that size 14 or whatever.When it comes to talking about personal experiences, I do think there’s an argument for people not performing workouts on social media. And certainly not performing weight loss on social media, because you just don’t know who that’s going to be triggering for. And if you’re talking about your struggles, maybe don’t talk about it in the “I feel fat” way. Because that’s saying, I don’t want your body, and that’s really harmful to people.AubreyI also think asking for consent about that stuff is important, too. Like, “I’m having a bad body image day, are you up for talking about it?” Getting consent both for fat folks, for people with eating disorders, for all manner of folks, is a helpful thing. And doing that in a way that checks yourself in the process, not just for the person that you’re talking to, but also for your own perception. Like “I’m having a really hard time finding clothes that fit,” and “I know people who wear larger sizes than I do, and I can’t imagine what it’s like for them. This is so frustrating, right?” So at least you are in the process acknowledging the experience of either the person that you’re talking to or fat people more broadly. It broadens the conversation, even if you’re talking to another thin person, to reintroduce the awareness that you ideally have, but maybe don’t carry with you into those conversations. I will say there are, on a personal level, few things more frustrating to me than when a thin person sees me—a thin person who feels badly about their own body—and will go, “Look how fat she is, she must feel terrible, I gotta tell her all of my insecurities, and all of my bad feelings about my body.” Which then translates to me as, okay, this person hates their body and they must be absolutely repulsed by mine. So then it’s like, oh, great. Now everyone feels terrible. What have we accomplished here? Everyone feels worse? Cool.The other thing that I would say on the body image front is that there’s actually quite a bit of research into negative body talk. When we talk about our own bodies in a negative way, when we talk about other people’s bodies in a negative way, we think of that as being a thing that like, expels and gets rid of, and vents a lot of that.Virginia...and bonds us to other people...AubreyYeah, and bonds us to other people. The research actually shows the exact opposite, that it worsens our own mental state, it weakens our relationships, it leads to less sexual satisfaction, it leads to weaker friendships, it leads to all of these things, just when we talk about it, not how we feel to begin with. But when we give it more air time, it expands to fit the space that we give it. And it doesn’t only impact us when we talk about it, anyone within earshot experiences those negative outcomes. So I think it’s also worth thinking about body shaming as a pollutant. What’s the pollutant that you’re putting into the environment? Is it in a well ventilated area? Does everybody know that it’s being polluted? Like, how do you want to go about this? I also just think this is another one, sort of like the diabetes stuff, where we are pretty sure we know how this works. And the research shows us that it is in fact, you know, maybe the opposite.VirginiaThat thing you thought was so helpful is making everything worse.Aubrey For you and for people that you care about.VirginiaTo bring it back to parenting, that’s why the number one advice I give parents is please do not narrate your own body stuff to your kids, you are directly passing that baggage on to them at that point.AubreyAbsolutely. And I think it’s important for parents to note, there’s been a teeny tiny bit of research on this, you probably know it better than I do at this point, that it is actually just as powerful a negative force for kids to hear their parents talk negatively about their own bodies as it is to hear their parents talk negatively about their bodies. Your kid is not distinguishing between when you say that they are too fat versus when you say that you are too fat, or when you say that their thighs are hideous, or when you say that your thighs are hideous. Whatever the things are, right? Those have the same impact. That’s really tough to hear. It was really tough for me to learn. It feels so hard to be like people are honestly struggling, and the impacts are still tough.VirginiaOn the flip side, there is also a nice study (that I wrote about here), which showed that when parents who are struggling stopped talking, the kids did better. It’s nice to know there’s something you can do and that you can find a therapist or somebody else with whom you can have that conversation and your child is not that person in your life.AubreyOr a friend who consents, or whatever the framework needs to be, just like a consensual relationship that is about that thing. Totally take it there. It doesn’t mean you have to never talk about it. It just means being more mindful about when and whether and with whom?VirginiaWell, I could talk to you all day about this, but I know you have an appointment. Thanks so much for joining us!AubreyThank you for having me! This was a treat. 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

Welcome to the now-weekly audio newsletter! It’s like a podcast in your email. You can listen to the episode right here and now, or add it to the podcast player of your choice and listen whenever. And just in case you don’t like listening (or that’s not accessible to you), I’m including a transcript (lightly edited for clarity) below.Audio newsletters are now coming out every Thursday. But starting next week, they’ll be for paid subscribers only. If you’d like to be one of those people, click here. If you’re wondering what “paid subscriber” means, read all about it here.VirginiaHello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast! This is a newsletter where we explore questions (and some answers) about fatphobia, diet, culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, 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 really pleased to be chatting with Anna Lutz, a dietitian who specializes in eating disorders and family feeding in Raleigh, North Carolina. Anna also blogs at Sunny Side Up Nutrition and co-hosts the Sunny Side Up Nutrition podcast with Elizabeth Davenport and Anna Mackay. Welcome, Anna, it's so good to have you here!AnnaI’m so glad to be talking with you today! Thank you so much.VirginiaI’m bringing you on today to talk about growth charts. I hear from parents of kids who are low on the growth chart and are getting pressured to move them up higher, and of course, I hear from lots of parents whose kids are in the 90/95th percentile and are being told that this is a huge problem.And I think there’s a weird mindset, which I see from both from parents and pediatricians, that somehow our goal is to get everyone into the 50th percentile. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about what growth charts are supposed to do? And what are the misconceptions that you see coming up about them?AnnaThe way I like to explain growth charts is that they are made up of data pulled from thousands and thousands and thousands of children, that gets put into a chart that we can read, as a visual representation. And each time your child goes to their doctor for their well child visit, they’re plotted on this chart. And so if you take your eight-year-old to the doctor, they’re plotted, weight for age, let’s say it’s the 25th percentile. All that means is if you had 100 eight-year-olds in a room together, 75 of them would weigh more than that child and 25 of them would weigh less. So it’s putting them on a bell-shaped curve at that moment.What we know is, over time, most children follow their own curve. So for example, this child, most likely, from age two to 20, will most likely fall somewhere along this 25th percentile. Now, there are exceptions to that, and we can get into that. But I think you hit the nail on the head. Growth charts do not mean that we’re all supposed to be at the 50th percentile. All it does is look at a population of kids, and see where does your child fall? And their point on the growth chart is just information.VirginiaBreaking it down like that, it makes me realize that it also really only tells you this one data point about your kid. And we give this data point a huge amount of weight, right? I mean, we think this says whether they're healthy or not healthy, but the way you’re explaining it, it’s got nothing to do with that.AnnaExactly. And, you know, it’s going to depend on, are they in the middle of a growth spurt? You know, what is happening at that particular moment, when you happen to take them to their well child visit? Did they just have a stomach bug for the last two weeks, and they’ve lost some weight that they’re going to regain pretty easily in the next month or so? Well, that plot point is going to look really different than if you had taken them to their well child visit a month from now. So I really like to help people see it as information that we can interpret. I think there is some value in it. But sometimes we misinterpret it, and put too much value on it.VirginiaAnd you and I have talked before about the way growth charts were constructed. In terms of the populations that they’re based on, they don’t necessarily represent kids today that well.AnnaRight. The CDC growth charts that we all are using came out in 2000. So now, they’re 21 years old, and they were based on data that was collected before that, clearly. I’m not sure what the plans are for making new growth charts, but just having that information is important. They are really big sample sizes, so that's a positive thing, you know; they were created using data from lots of children from that time period, across the whole United States. But again, if we’re taking one child, and we’re comparing them to a huge population, again, it’s just information. If you're thinking about a very specific demographic, it may not make sense to compare this child in a specific demographic to the whole United States population.VirginiaWhen I looked it up, I saw that the data for the BMI-for-age chart was collected somewhere between the 1960s and the 1990s. And it was predominantly white kids that were in their samples at that point. So again, this is going to be very not reflective of lots of kids today. Let’s talk a little more about when kids fall off their curve, or jump up their curve, all the different negative ways that it gets talked about. You mentioned something like a stomach bug should not be cause for alarm, puberty is another time where kids often appear to be losing their curve or their trajectory in some way. So talk a little bit about why that’s not a time to panic.AnnaRight around puberty, a few years before, a few years after, there’s—for both girls and boys—a jump in height and a jump in weight, and the rate of height gain, and the rate of weight gain is higher. But again, these growth curves are all based on averages. If you have a child that goes through puberty earlier than average, their increase in rate of weight gain and increase in rate of height gain is going to be earlier. So it’s going to look like they’ve veered above their growth curve. And if you have a child that has a later onset of puberty, they’re going to look like they start to fall off their curve, because they’re not gaining in height or weight at that same rapid pace that this average visual representation shows. What happens is, usually, after puberty, the child kind of goes back to where they were. And again, that’s typically, every child is different.VirginiaI hear from lots of parents, and I’m sure you do, too, that around age 10 is when the pediatrician says, “Well, let’s think about a diet” or, “we’re concerned about this big jump they’ve had.” And it’s sounding like what you’re saying is, first of all, a) diets for kids are always a terrible idea, and b) this may not be any kind of problem, this may just be where they are. AnnaWith a 10-year-old, you might not know yet that this child is going through an earlier puberty. It just might be this kind of “jump in their growth curve” that’s the first indication that they might be going through an earlier puberty. And that’s not all that abnormally early, just earlier than average. So yes, we all need to take a deep breath and trust that the body knows what it’s doing. And, you know, growth curves, I like using them, because I think they can give us some information. But I don’t think we need to kind of hold them up as the be all, end all. VirginiaI had a question from a reader saying her kid had always been in the 60 and 70th percentiles, and when they went in for their checkup, post-pandemic, he’s jumped up to the 80th percentile. I think this was a six year old. And the pediatrician was immediately very alarmed about this and immediately jumped to, you know, it’s all the junk food, it’s the pandemic, and the way there’s so much snacking and went to this whole place with it. That feels like several leaps. What are you hearing right now, in terms of how people’s fear about the “pandemic weight gain” is fueling this?AnnaI feel like it’s putting blinders on us trying to talk about what’s important. You know, I think people’s weight changed during the pandemic. First of all, you know, you and I have talked about this, but: Kids’ weights were supposed to change. So first of all, yay. But, for children and adults whose weight went up maybe more than “expected,” I don’t think that’s the conversation that needs to be happening. We need to look at how are we all doing with our mental health, how are we doing with taking care of our bodies? I would expect for people’s weight to change in a year that our schedules changed so much. So what I worry about is how this hyper focus on that change over the last year is keeping us from having the conversations that we need to be having about how the pandemic has affected all of our mental health and well-being.VirginiaAbsolutely. So this may be a symptom of something going on with your kid, but the solution is not to cut out snack foods. That’s not going to deal with the underlying stuff.AnnaExactly. That’s how I like to think about it, this information from a growth curve is some information. It’s like a little flashing yellow light, like something might be going on, let’s be curious about it, it could be an indicator of something else. But we can’t only try to just turn off that light, and then assume everything will be okay.VirginiaIt’s like, if your “check engine” light comes on, saying yes, I will be putting duct tape over that!AnnaExactly. That doesn’t solve it.VirginiaI’m interested too in how often I hear that seeing kids in a higher spot on the growth curve immediately translates to a conversation about food. This actually happened with my younger daughter who’s always been on the higher end of the growth curve. And when she was around, you know, 18 months or so, my husband took her in, and it wasn’t our usual pediatrician. I think at that point, she was 90th percentile or wherever she was. And immediately, the pediatrician looked at her spot on the growth chart and turned to my husband and said, “So is she eating a lot of white foods?”Anna18 months old? Virginia! Goodness gracious.VirginiaI knew you’d love that. By the way, at that point, she was a very eclectic eater who tried everything. My other child, who’s in a small body, tends to be the “white food kid” in our house. And this is not to shame white foods—they’re great! But he immediately saw her body size and made this assumption without asking questions, without gathering more information. And, you know, it was a baseless assumption. I think naming that as what it is, which is fatphobia, is really important.AnnaIt is. There is research that shows that children in larger bodies do not eat more than children in smaller bodies. [NOTE FROM VIRGINIA: This research can be found here, here, and here.] This assumption that because someone’s in a larger body, the pediatrician then needs to figure out in what way that child is “eating too much”—it’s not even based on any fact that children in larger bodies do eat more. It’s just amazing that that’s exactly where we all go. And, to be realistic, unfortunately, that’s how pediatricians are being trained right now. Their whole training needs to be adjusted.VirginiaYes, it really does. I’m going to link in the transcript to the letter that you’ve put together that parents can take to their pediatricians. But let’s talk a little bit about how parents can take the focus off weight in these appointments. What are some strategies for navigating that?AnnaI really like to encourage parents to ask their pediatrician not to discuss weight in front of their children. You know, these concepts are super abstract. They’re confusing, even for adults. So if you have these two adults, the doctor and the parent, sitting there looking over a chart saying this is too big, this is too little, what’s going on? Is your child eating too many white foods? It can be super confusing and scary to a child. The whole message is: There’s something wrong with this child that the doctor is so worried about, that the parent needs to figure out how to fix.There’s the letter that I wrote with Katja Rowell on our website that you can email to a doctor, or you can print it out and hand it to them. What I’ve done with my children is—I said it verbally when the children were younger, and then before I take them in to their well child visit, I send a quick message through the patient portal. And I just say: “As a reminder, please do not discuss weight in front of my children. If you have any concerns, feel free to print out the growth chart and we can talk about it privately.” And I’m still amazed that when that conversation is taken out of the visit, so much more important stuff can be discussed.VirginiaBecause then you can actually talk about things like mental health and these other factors. I think that’s great. For someone who hasn’t had a chance to do that, or the message didn’t get through, which can also happen, and it comes up during a visit anyway, is there language you like to use to help change the conversation, shut it down? What do I say in the moment, if it’s coming up in front of my kids?AnnaThat’s a great question. I think I would say, “That is not something I’m concerned about, but we can talk about it later if you’d like.” I’d say something like that, or I would say, “I’m not concerned about how my child is growing, let’s move on to something else.” I do want to acknowledge, I have a lot of privileges—I mean, my kids’ doctor knows what I do for a living. So there’s a lot of reasons that I feel comfortable doing that, and it might be harder for other people. That’s one reason we wrote that letter, to make it a little easier. You can hand it to someone and the research is all laid out. But any way you can steer the conversation to something else is helpful. And if the doctor is not open to it, is it a possibility to find a different doctor? Again, that might not be a possibility, but consider it.VirginiaAnd if they go the food route? The mom who wrote to me was saying the doctor’s immediate comment was “no more juice boxes” without asking how often they even have juice boxes. You as a dietitian can navigate that really easily, but what are some talking points we can use? How do we push back? I think the food shaming is hard because you feel very attacked. It’s “oh, God, I’ve been caught out doing this bad thing.” And it’s hard in the moment to remember that there are no good foods and bad foods. How do I communicate that to a doctor? Anna That’s a great question. I think coming up with a line that feels true to you ahead of time can help. So could it be, “I’m not concerned about my child’s eating.” It could be, “if you want to talk more specifics about my child’s food, we’ll need to talk about it later or on email.” But not getting into the nitty gritty of all those questions about—I just went last week, you know, it’s the juice, it’s the “how many fruits and vegetables are they eating? Are they drinking milk?” And for a more sensitive child, they’re gonna start to latch on to these messages.VirginiaYeah, I’ve heard that kids will come home and say, “Mommy, the juice is bad.”AnnaExactly: “Why are you giving me that, I don’t understand?”or “I don’t eat enough vegetables.” For a sensitive kid who maybe is a “pickier eater” and they hear the doctor saying these things, it can feel super scary. If you are worried about your child’s eating, then maybe say, “Is there a referral you could give me? Is this a conversation we could have later?” I just don’t think it’s appropriate to have it when your 4, 5, 8, 9 year old is sitting there.VirginiaOne line I started to use is “she’s really good at listening to her body.” I kind of figured this out when my older daughter was going through her early feeding challenges, and as we were getting to sort of firmer ground with that, that’s how I’d answer the nutrition questions. And now I do it for my younger daughter, too. Because I feel like that way I’m not even getting into it with you about fruits and vegetables or juice or anything, it’s just, “she’s really good at listening to her body.” And then whatever food shaming the doctor said, at least my child has heard me affirming that they trust their bodies.AnnaThat’s awesome. VirginiaIt’s been helpful. I can see the doctors looking puzzled, but that’s a little bit enjoyable to me.AnnaMaybe you’re planting a seed?VirginiaYes! Well, thank you so much, Anna, this was a great conversation, I think there’s lots of really helpful stuff in here. Where can people find more of you and your work?Anna Check us out at sunnysideupnutrition.com, that’s where we write about simple cooking and family feeding. And then also the Sunny Side Up Nutrition podcast.You’re reading Burnt Toast, a newsletter by Virginia Sole-Smith. Virginia is a feminist writer, and author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia. Comments? Questions? Email Virginia. If a friend forwarded this to you and you want to subscribe, sign up here: 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