The Burnt Toast Podcast

Today’s episode is our October Ask Us Anything with Virginia and Corinne Fay of @SellTradePlus! We get into unlearning fatphobia, managing treats with kids, and our very unpopular opinions about Halloween. If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.And don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSVirginia (Corinne) joined TikTok.The good seltzerHow to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davislazy can also be a very racialized term@LordTroyour last reader surveyBody Liberation Hiking ClubSTP's Philadelphia Clothes SwapChristy Harrison’s provider directoryCorinne's cheesy songEllyn Satter/DORKid Food InstagramAubrey Gordon has a great argument for why we should say anti-fat bias and not fatphobiaHow to Raise Kids Who Aren't Assholes by Melinda Wenner MoyerThe $58 plus size Rockford Peach Costume on Amazon. Noihsaf BazaarCorinne is making this chocolate sheet cake with brown butter frosting.Lizzo playing James Madison’s fluteVirginia is into Lauren Leavell FitnessWant to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.CREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter. Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe. Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell. Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!Episode 66 TranscriptVirginiaI’m excited we’re doing this. I’m opening a seltzer.CorinneI also have seltzer.VirginiaI’m opening the good seltzer.CorinneEssential.VirginiaOkay. I’m ready. We’re going to answer some questions. We’re going to talk about Halloween. We’re going to talk about some good stuff.CorinneOkay. I’m gonna ask you the first one.I’d love for you to talk about the intersection between diet culture and being freezing. The temp where live has dropped below 80 finally, and suddenly all of these very thin moms are super bundled up at drop off. Meanwhile, I’m sweating still and shedding all my layers. Feels like one of those weird things where it’s expected that women are small and freezing. Is this a thing? Just me being self conscious about still being sweaty in October?VirginiaI think it’s a thing. Don’t you think it’s a thing?CorinneI don’t know. I was confused by this question.VirginiaI have often noticed that I will not be wearing a coat and my skinny friends will be in scarves and very bundled. CorinneI definitely am hot. I definitely am hot and sweaty.VirginiaAll the time, year round. And maybe because you don’t live in a cold climate you don’t see this juxtaposition? But I know what she’s talking about. I mean, I could rant for several minutes about my hatred of coats, particularly coats and cars together. It’s the worst because you just feel like bunched up and stuffed into this thing.CorinneYeah, like your shoulder mobility.VirginiaAlso I have garage privilege. We have an attached garage to our house where I spend most of my life because my office is above it. So when I leave my house I don’t have to put a coat on because I’m going to walk into my attached garage. And so it takes until bitter cold here, like February, before I actually wear a coat. Do you know what I mean? I live in suburbia and so I’m driving everywhere and I get in my car without a coat and then I get to the grocery store and I just run in. Like, do I need a scarf and a cute hat to walk across a grocery store parking lot? I don’t. But I definitely notice this and people will always be like, “Aren’t you cold?” And I’m like, “No, I’m fine.” I have padding.Corinne“No, I’m not cold, I’m fat!”VirginiaThank you.CorinneIt’s funny because I actually love coats. But I don’t get to wear them very often. I like a light coat. But I do understand what you’re saying about wearing them in the car.VirginiaI was just fighting with a raincoat earlier today, picking my kid up, because it’s pouring rain and I was like, “Oh, I guess I need to wear a raincoat.” And I got in the car and I was like, “I am being suffocated!” CorinneYeah. That’s not a good feeling. Raincoats in particular just make me sweat. VirginiaBecause you’re wearing a garbage bag! Even if it’s a cute garbage bag, it just is.CorinneAre people expecting women to be small and freezing?VirginiaWell, we know they’re expecting women to be small. I think there’s some cheesy romcom tropes around this, don’t you think? Like, “Oh, she’s wearing his big sweater.”CorinneI feel like people are expecting fat people to be hot and sweaty. And I am living that.VirginiaI am meeting their expectations. I guess I would just say, be comfortable? I mean, who cares? Let those ladies have their sweaters and their scarves. We’ll get there. CorinneYeah, it definitely seems better to just be honest about it than to try and bundle yourself and make yourself uncomfortable.VirginiaOn the flip side, I will say I have one thin friend who runs very, very cold. Thats just her journey and she has said that people will comment on that.CorinneIn conclusion: Stop commenting on what people are doing with their bodies.VirginiaAll right. I’ll read the next question. I think this is from a teacher.My colleagues constantly called fat children lazy. What to say? It’s obviously fatphobic. I usually challenge them about the individual child. Also, do they think I’m lazy, too? Hard to trust now.It was sort of truncated because she put it in an Instagram question box. But yeah, that sounds awful. Awful.CorinneMy first question is what profession is this? Because that’s so sad.VirginiaWhy are these people allowed to work near children? I’m guessing it’s either a teacher or some kind of health care provider.CorinneYeah, I was guessing health care. Just sad to imagine that people that take care of kids are calling them lazy. Virginia I think it’s great to challenge them about the individual child. I also think is there a way to say something thing like, “I’ve been really trying to unlearn some of those stereotypes.” Or, “I think it’s such a bummer that we are so hard on fat kids.” You’re not specifically calling out your colleague for saying the terrible thing, but you’re talking about the fatphobia. I always like to bring it to the larger system. CorinneMy suggestion was, if someone says like, “Oh, that kid’s lazy,” ask some follow up questions. Like, “Oh, what makes you say that? I’m so curious why you think that?”VirginiaYou’re kind of putting them a little on the spot, not in an aggressive way. And then if they have to really spell it out, hopefully they hear themselves. CorinneI think you could also continue that into the more broad thing and just say, “Why are we calling people lazy? It’s sort of mean.”VirginiaThis is reminding me, I just finished KC Davis’s book, How to Keep House While Drowning. CorinneI really want to read that.VirginiaIt’s so good. I’m obsessed with KC. She talks about how lazy doesn’t exist. I’m just thinking this might be a good read for this person because she’s not talking about it in the context of weight. She’s talking about it in the context of how clean your house is and if you’re neurodivergent, how thats challenging. But it could be great to just be like, “I was just reading this book and lazy is a social construct.” People being lazy need to rest. Resting is valid.CorinneI think you’re right. It makes sense maybe a teacher would be calling someone lazy because you’re supposed to be ‘hardworking’ in school. But I don’t know, I think calling someone lazy is mean. So just don’t do it, whether they’re fat or not. VirginiaYeah, it’s a really unhelpful term. It’s super ableist and super fatphobic.CorinneIt’s trying to shame someone into doing something that they maybe don’t want to do.VirginiaWhich is always a successful strategy. We’re really sorry you have to deal with that. It sounds terrible. And in terms of can you trust your colleagues, I think that’s valid, to feel like you can’t trust them. I don’t know how safe you would feel doing this because it does not sound like a super supportive environment, so consider this part very optional, but you could also say: “That does not feel safe for me as a fat person to hear you say that.” I think that would make them deeply uncomfortable and hopefully they’d shut the fuck up. But I throw that out there with all the caveats of, that may not feel like an option.CorinneI also feel like we should probably mention that lazy can also be a very racialized term. That could also be playing a part. So let’s not call anyone lazy. Okay.Recommendations on finding and building fat community as a fat person unpacking their diet culture BS?VirginiaI feel like you should answer this first because you have been building selltradeplus as a wonderful, fat-positive community. CorinneI think it’s kind of that question of how to make friends as an adult. And I guess my first answer is: Online. VirginiaIt is often the safe starting point, right? You don’t have to leave your house or put on pants. CorinneAnd I think also people can be a little more upfront about how they feel about things online in a way that… You know, sometimes you meet someone in person and you like them and then you realize like, we disagree about a lot of things.VirginiaI shared a reel the other day from @LordTroy being like, “I don’t trust it when I see a group of friends and they’re all thin.” (Sorry, we can’t find the specific reel anymore but everything @lordtroy posts is gold.)CorinneOh, I saw that.VirginiaI was like, YES.So obviously there’s Burnt Toast, where I think we are building a great community that is quite size diverse, according to our last reader survey. So, I would not say we are a specifically fat community, but there’s certainly a lot of fat folks centered in the community. And I think that’s been really lovely. In terms of in-person community, really, my only experience with it is this Body Liberation Hiking Club I keep talking about. Alexa, who is a teacher here in the Hudson Valley, just decided that she wanted to build fat community and started this hiking group and made a Facebook and an Instagram and started putting up schedules for hikes. And people go on the hikes, it’s so awesome. I mean, I’ve only been on one hike, but I aspire to go on more.It made me realize I had never hiked without—I’m married to a thin guy, and I’d never hiked with other fat people! And I was like, I’ve been doing it all wrong. It’s so much nicer. Just not having any of that noise of comparison or anything and just all being really supportive and safe together.So, I guess, look for a group like that. And if there’s not one, start one! It doesn’t have to be hiking either. Obviously hiking has a little built-in ableism because not everyone can hike, but it could be a book club? I think book clubs are great. Someone told me about starting an articles club, because reading books takes too much time. And I was like, I love it. CorinneWow, that’s a great idea! Oh, Pool Party.VirginiaPool party, always always. CorinneI like the suggestion of starting something if you can’t find something in your area, because there are definitely fat people everywhere who probably want other fat friends.VirginiaYes, I don’t know if you’ve heard the talk about this epidemic…? You can find us. Although, I will just say as an introvert, starting an in-person thing sounds scary. I would be so anxious that no one would come and I would feel bad. So maybe if you have like one friend, even if they’re not fat, but they’re just supportive that you can like anchor it with, you know? CorinneFrom SellTradePlus, there have also been a few groups of people meeting up that met on SellTradePlus. So you could come to SellTradePlus and see if there’s people in your area. There’s now a Philadelphia Clothes Swap that’s very big and happening at the end of October. So, if you’re in Pennsylvania, you could go to that.VirginiaThat’s awesome. I fantasize about Burnt Toast meet ups! My hope is when the book comes out, maybe book events can be a useful starting point for that.CorinneOkay, next question.If your eyes are wide open to diet culture and fatphobia, but you still hate your body, how do you move forward? For example, I know why I find being bigger triggering, but that doesn’t stop me wanting to be smaller. How do you unwire that?VirginiaI do think it’s important to know that you can have your eyes wide open to these things, you can be a good advocate working to dismantle fatphobia, and you can still be in your own personal struggle. Like, you do not have to have the shit worked out in order to be a good ally or advocate or any of that. So, cutting yourself some slack here and giving yourself permission to be struggling might be helpful. It can often be really beneficial to work with a therapist, a good anti-diet, fat-positive therapist. I can link again to Christy Harrison’s directory for finding folks. What are your thoughts?CorinneYou can’t completely unwire this without solving fatphobia on a global level. It’s just the air we’re breathing. Everything around you is telling you that you should hate being bigger. And, it’s uncomfortable! It can be very uncomfortable to be in a body that doesn’t fit places or breaks chairs or whatever. So, that’s valid.That said, my recommendation would probably be to try and find some stuff that you could do where you’re enjoying just being in your body. Whether that’s some type of exercise or swimming or meditating or yoga, or like taking pictures of yourself and looking at them without feeling disgusted or just some way to appreciate what your body can do for you, even if it’s not like the body that society tells you you should have or should want.VirginiaThat’s so smart. And yeah, appreciating your body for what it does versus how it looks, like releasing yourself from the expectation. I just described 10 years of therapy for a lot of us.But at least noticing. I think it can be good just to notice. I’ve talked about this before, when I have wardrobe anxiety about things not fitting or it doesn’t look right, when I take a minute to say, “Wait, what else is going on?” It is always not about the clothes. It is always that I’m cranky and hormonal or because I have to see people in the world and my social anxiety kicked in or I’m stressed about work and taking it out on pants.I think it’s good you’re noticing that you’re getting triggered because I think for a long time people stay stuck in this perpetual triggered state that feels like normal. You’re at least like, Oh, I’m getting triggered and now I’m having these thoughts that don’t align with my values. That’s a useful place to be.CorinneEven if being in a bigger body doesn’t allow you to do certain things like run marathons, maybe you can still like smell flowers or like feel the rain on your skin and now I’m singing a cheesy song.VirginiaGot a little Julie Andrews there, but that’s fine. But no, you’re right. Finding ways to enjoy the tactile experience of your body. Like cozy blankets. If you’re not too hot. CorinneLaying on the couch. Having a body allows you to lay on the couch which is fun.VirginiaIt’s so great! Let your dog sit on you, it’s awesome. Finding ways to appreciate that or just noticing that. Maybe while you’re noticing being triggered, also noticing positive sensations in your body could be useful. CorinneWe solved fatphobia on a global level.VirginiaWe did. We broke down a lot of systemic bullshit.CorinneOkay, here’s the next question.We’re trying to be an Ellyn Satter/DOR house and avoid labeling any food as “treats” so as to present food more neutrally. In our own unlearning, sometimes this goes better than others. But we’ve been doing the Ellyn Satter deal for his whole life, four and a half years now, yet he regularly asks us for “treats” or why there isn’t a “treat” at every meal or snack. We bake often and we’ll do snacks where the treat is on the menu. And he gets unlimited access to those things. We try to do it regularly. But still his talk of treats persists, he goes to daycare and gets a heavy dose of this kind of messaging there even if implicitly. Ideas?VirginiaOkay, so this is fascinating because it makes me realize something that I think we’re doing wrong when we talk about keeping foods neutral. I do think it’s important to avoid labeling foods as junk or bad foods or trash, but I think also some foods are treats and that’s okay. I think it’s okay to say that something is a treat. Maybe a treat is something you eat daily and maybe I have a treat at most meals, you know? It doesn’t mean it’s something I can’t have. We could reclaim the word treat.He maybe is just asking for foods that feel fun to him to eat. It’s okay that he’s noticing that some foods are more fun to eat than other foods. He’s figuring out preferences. And people have different ideas of treats. I was just hanging out with a bunch of girlfriends this weekend, and I made brownies because me and one friend really wanted brownies, but the other two just wanted cheese. And like I love cheese, too, but that’s not dessert to me. But they were like no, that is our dessert. And like, that’s a valid life choice to feel that cheese is your dessert, but it’s a valid life choice to feel the brownies are your dessert.CorinneDoes Division of Responsibility say that you shouldn’t call things treats?VirginiaI don’t think that’s textbook. It does emphasize the importance of not labeling foods as good and bad and it is true that there are certain contexts where treat equates with bad. I do think the messaging he’s getting at preschool may be like, “Oh, don’t eat too many treats.” You see that on Kid Food Instagram a lot.But what I’m saying is, I think you’re going to be making your life hard and also sort of doing a disservice to your larger goals if you’re trying to correct him when he’s using the word. You don’t have to get so hung up on the word treat. If he was saying “junk food” or “it’s bad for me” or something, that would be different. But treat is not an inherently negative word. So maybe we’re overthinking a little bit. CorinneDoes the fact that he’s asking why there isn’t a treat at every meal or snack mean that he’s not getting enough treats?VirginiaWell, that was where I was going to go next. I’m just looking at the question again, this person says “we bake often, and we’ll do snacks where the treat is on the menu, and he gets unlimited access to those things. We try to do it regularly, but still his talk of treats persists.” So, what is regularly is my question. Because if it’s once a week, that may not be regularly enough.And the advice, if you’re gonna go back to Ellyn Satter canon—which you don’t have to do. You don’t have to follow all of those rules, this is a choice. But the official advice is you can serve dessert at most meals in a smaller portion and then also have snack times where treats are unlimited, so that kids get these opportunities, at least once a week, it could be more often, to eat as many cookies as they want. and there’s a cookie available at dinner. Now in my house, we are not that precise about it. My kids eat treats—foods that I think this four year old would call treats—pretty much every day as after school snack. They tend to have cookies or chocolate or whatever they want along with what other other food they want for snack. So we don’t always do dessert every night at dinner because I know they’ve got that like built in snack time and that’s always unlimited access at snack time. And then also usually on the weekends, there’s going for ice cream or making brownies or something where it’s really unlimited, like you’re gonna have as much as you want.My point is, they call them treats, but they don’t have like a lot of hang ups about the idea of treats. And I think that’s our goal. It’s okay to describe cake as a treat but not have a restrictive attitude towards treats. The other thing I want to say, because what I think I’m really picking up on in this question is a level of perfectionism around how to do these concepts. And I think that’s so understandable, but it is also what diet culture teaches us. So it is diet culture showing up in your attempt to not do diet culture, which: Valid. But I think it is useful to know is that your four year old bringing home some messaging around treats from daycare is not a disaster. It’s expected. That’s how most daycares talk about like “eat your sandwich before your cookie.” Do I agree with it? No. Do I think it’s going to lead your child to have an eating disorder? Really not. Especially if what’s happening in your home is we love all foods, we embrace all of this, we don’t have a restrictive mindset. CorinneAll right. This is another question for you.You said the book title changed love the title, but can’t find the old one in my brain? Explain more also?VirginiaThe original title of the book was Fat Kid Phobia. I think the subtitle was still going to be “parenting in the age of diet culture” or something like that. And I was very attached to it, because I liked how it was taking fatphobia and putting kids in there and, you know, sort of exploding that. I know Aubrey Gordon has a great argument for why we should say anti-fat bias and not fatphobia, but I think when it comes to parents, a lot of it is fear driven as well as bias. So I did really love the title, and my publisher and my agent liked it, too, initially. And then as we got kind of further along in the process, they became concerned for a couple of reasons that were interesting to unpack. A big one was they felt like parents would not want to read a book and leave it lying around the house with “fat kid” on the cover. They worried that would be triggering to kids to see. CorinneThat totally makes sense.VirginiaIt does. And it also broke my heart because the whole point is that we’re reclaiming fat and there’s nothing wrong with being a fat kid and fat kids are awesome. But the kid may not have read the book and the parent reading the book may be where they are with their work. They may not even want to buy it in the store, you know? So I thought that was really right, but in a way that made me sad.I was like, “Fat has to stay on the title.” I can’t remember all the other titles we left on the cutting room floor. But there were various versions that didn’t have fat in it and I was like, No. I mean, this is a book about anti-fat bias. We’ve got to say it. CorinneYeah, I remember growing up seeing books around the house and not loving it. So I think that makes sense, like Reviving Ophelia or whatever. VirginiaWell, and I had a whole conversation with my friend Melinda Wenner Moyer who is the author of How to Raise Kids Who Aren't Assholes. And they did stick with that because they felt like it was such a central idea of what that book is about, which is basically you don’t want your kid to be Donald Trump. Here’s how we do that. CorinneI can imagine not liking that as a kid though.VirginiaRight. And she said some kids are offended by the title.So it was sort of interesting that that one made it through and fat kid was where we decided it was too hurtful. And I have feelings about that. But I do think Fat Talk is a great title because it also works on multiple levels. We are talking about the issues of fatness and anti-fat bias. Fat Talk is that thing that people do to hate on their bodies, like women do it together, and we’re challenging that idea. And it’s also a play on “sex talk,” like how you have to have the sex talk with your kids. A big argument of the book is you have to talk to your kids about anti-fat bias. You have to talk about how it manifests and how to push back against it. The last chapter of the book is called “How to Have the Fat Talk.” And of course, it’s many talks. It’s not one talk. If you like the title, you can go ahead and preorder it. CorinneWhere would we preorder it?VirginiaAnywhere you get your books! My local independent bookstore is doing signed copies. I will sign the copies, that sounded awkward how I said that. Pre-Order a Signed Copy of Fat TalkCorinneDid you come up with a new title or did the publisher?VirginiaThey came up with Fat Talk and so also I had to get over my ego because Fat Kid Phobia was mine. But the more I thought about it, the more I was like, I do like it. I do think just putting fat in the title at all does automatically mean there are people who won’t pick up the book. And that is what it is because it’s a bummer because they maybe most need to. But I just couldn’t see a way around that. All right. People want us to talk about Halloween costumes.Do you dress up? What are you going to be this year?Also got some questions about Halloween candy. We could talk about that a little bit, too.CorinneOkay, well, I do not dress up. And I do not have children. So no one in my household dresses up.VirginiaNot even Bunny?CorinneI mean, no. She doesn’t love having clothes on. And I personally feel like having to dress up as a human every day is enough of a costume.VirginiaI am right there with you. We’re about to make ourselves very unpopular. I hate Halloween and this is a very unpopular opinion in my town. I live in a big Halloween town. So having kids in this town means that there is a school parade, there is a town parade, there is a neighborhood party. and there is trick-or-treating at this one street in town that goes crazy for Halloween and everyone in town goes there. So it is like a four day situation. And adult costumes are strongly encouraged for all of this except maybe the school parade. I hate it so much. It was just ranting to Sara Petersen about it because it’s awful.CorinneSo are you being pressured into dressing up?VirginiaEvery year I just half-ass it and at the last minute think of something. Like last year I wore a floral sweatshirt and carried a watering can and I said I was my garden. CorinneThat’s cute. VirginiaIt was cute. It was fine. Nobody wants to do a family costume except me because I want to do it so that I don’t have to make a decision about myself. I’m like, can you all think of a cool family costume and I’ll just be Marge Simpson or whatever you make me be? And they’re like, we’re all doing our own cool thing. You need your own cool thing. But can we also talk about how this is also a fat tax issue. Halloween costumes are harder if you’re fat, I think.CorinneYeah, that seems right. I mean, I was thinking part of the reason I don’t like dressing up is because I just feel like I don’t need anything else to make me feel more uncomfortable. Like, I just want to be comfortable.VirginiaYeah, completely. And the sizing issues on costumes.CorinneIt’s not like you can just walk into Spirit Halloween and buy a whatever costume.VirginiaAnd, also, I don’t know, I feel like this is going sound preachy, but it’s like everyone’s environmentalism goes out the window around Halloween? The only way to efficiently do Halloween is to Amazon Prime some shit. And the whole rest of the year I’m supposed to feel guilty about Amazon. And then suddenly, for Halloween, everyone’s like, I’m Amazon-ing an astronaut costume. And I’m like, What are you going to do with it afterwards? Do you have a closet full of costumes in your house? I mean, I guess people do, but why? I don’t need a closet full of grown up costumes.So I don’t know what I’m doing. I have a lot of angst about it already. My one idea for a costume is to be a Rockford Peach from “A League of Their Own.” Topical, witty, aesthetically pleasing to me. And I did look and there seems to be a plus size option on Amazon. CorinneWow.VirginiaBut I’m still like, number one, will it fit? Like will their 1x or 2x be the 1x or 2x I need? Question mark. Number two, it’s $58. Do I need to spend $58? But I have to go to all these damn Halloween events.CorinneI mean, I feel that it’s impressive that you haven’t just bought a witch hat and worn all black because that’s what I would do.VirginiaMaybe. And then I just, that’s what I do forever. Because there’s like just a huge mental load piece of it, too, figuring out your costume. Like I’ve already had to figure my kid costumes with them and like lock them in and be like, it’s panda and ladybug, guys. We’re not changing our minds.CorinneThat’s what they’re being this year?VirginiaYes. The older one is being a panda. And the younger one is now being a ladybug, which I’m thrilled about because the older one was a ladybug for like four years. So we own so much ladybug stuff. CorinneYeah, that’s great. Do you follow Noihsaf Bazaar on Instagram? It’s another like buyer/seller Instagram and they now have a website. And they have historically done like a Halloween costume like resale thing. VirginiaOh, interesting.CorinneWhere I think you can buy used Halloween stuff. So that might be something to look into.Virginia I’m gonna investigate this. That would be useful. I do feel like I need to just lock in on one thing and just be like, this is my costume for the next 10 years.CorinneDo you have a preferred Halloween candy?VirginiaIt’s Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups or Mini Snickers. The end. CorinneI like Butterfinger. VirginiaOkay, yeah, respectable. And people are gonna want to know how we manage Halloween candy. And the answer is we let our kids eat all of it. I don’t care. I don’t think about it.CorinneDo you sneak or steal candy from your kids?VirginiaNo, but I buy Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Mini Snickers for myself. I make sure we have the candy I’m going to want to have in the house. I also buy these candies at any point in the year I want them, because they are treats but I don’t have a restrictive mindset around them. See this in action right here, guys?I let them have all the candy they want. I have literally no rules. They can eat it while we’re walking around trick-or-treating. Some people are very big on “wait till we get home so I can check it for razor blades.” And I’m just like, if this town makes me go to five freakin Halloween events and someone’s putting a razor blade on this candy? There’s no way.So they can eat it while they walk around, I don’t care. They can come home and sit there and eat as much as they want before they go to bed. I don’t care. The next day they can eat as much as they want. Usually by day three, they’re so over it. Like, we ate all the good stuff and we’re done. And then we just throw away what they don’t feel like eating. You’re just setting yourself up for negotiations and power struggles if you try to put a lot of rules around it.CorinneYeah. I will say I was very obsessed with Halloween candy as a child. I definitely noticed when my parents took one single piece out of the collection. VirginiaThat’s mean! They worked hard to get it. They wore the costume. They walked around.Butter for Your Burnt ToastCorinneMy butter this week is a recipe. I was at my mom’s house this summer and she gets Bon Appétit. And she was like, looking through it and she was like, “Look at this cake. It looks amazing.” And the cake is this chocolate sheet cake with brown butter frosting. And we proceeded to make it a few times over the months that I was staying with her. And it is delicious. The cake part is a chocolate cake, but it’s one of those chocolate cakes that you don’t have to use a mixer for. You can just mix it in the bowl, which I love.VirginiaYeah. Not Having to haul down the mixer is big.CorinneYes. So you just mix it in a bowl with your spatula and dump in a pan and bake it and then the frosting has brown butter in it and it is delicious.VirginiaQuestion: Is brown butter a type of butter or you have browned it in a pan?CorinneYou have to brown it in a pan. Okay, so brown butter is when you cook butter until the milk solids in the butter turn brown and toasty. It’s very delicious.VirginiaThat sounds yummy.CorinneYeah and in this particular recipe, you actually add milk powder to the butter and to get extra brown toasty bits before you whip it into frosting. And I have been putting sprinkles on top of it. And that is also very beautiful.VirginiaThat sounds really, really delicious.So I just want to circle back to Lizzo and the flute and just say how much I loved her playing James Madison’s flute. And of course the discourse around it got ridiculous because people are absurd. But it was so great. Oh, I am going to also talk about Lauren Leavell Fitness. I will link to her Instagram. I have just started doing her workouts and she does bootcamp, which I haven’t tried yet, cardio barre, and regular barre. And they’re just joyful. Her whole energy is delightful, super anti-diet, super fat positive.CorinneYou do it through Instagram or she has like a Youtube or?VirginiaShe has a membership. I think it’s $40 a month. She is doing a couple of live Zoom classes per week in each of these categories. I never make it to the Zoom live because they’re like 11 on a Sunday and I have to parent my dumb kids, but she then uploads the Zoom so you can do them anytime afterwards. And so I do them at seven in the morning before my children are awake, which is when I can do them.[Post-publication note from Virginia: A kind reader pointed out that it was unproductive and potentially harmful to listeners to call my kids “dumb” here, even as a throwaway joke, since that’s the kind of word that is often weaponized against children. I am so sorry for inadvertently triggering anyone. My kids know I think they are brilliant and beloved on a lot of levels, but I do regret this poor choice of phrase.]CorinneDo you need any stuff? VirginiaWell, for barre you need a yoga mat. I do have some little two pound weights. You could probably use like a seltzer can. And then you just need like, like I just use my desk chair like as the barre. Or you could do it by a kitchen counter.I have done barre in the past and really hated it. I did—I’m just gonna throw them under the bus—Barre Three when I was in a more diet-y place. Now I understand they have had an evolution and now they’re very body positive. But from what I could see they have hired no fat instructors. So how far have they gone?CorinneThere’s another good one, I think body posi barre on Instagram?VirginiaThere’s definitely a couple of people doing barre in a body positive way. And I was curious to try it because I knew the exercises are similar to what I’ve been doing in PT to build up my core and work through all my back issues. It’s like a slightly more aerobic version.Lauren is very funny, I love her energy. I just decided I am so done with having to filter it out. Do you know what I mean? Like people will be like, “I love this workout, but sometimes they talk about...” And I’m like, no. Why are we paying these people money? Why are you encouraging them? CorinneYeah, I don’t need the baggage.VirginiaYeah, I don’t want to have to like turn down that volume and be like SHHSHHH. I just want a safe space. I am confirming that Lauren is a very safe space.CorinneWait! We have one other thing we need to talk about. VirginiaOh, yeah? What is it?CorinneVirginia, you joined TikTok.VirginiaI did. I did join TikTok. You’re right. Let’s be clear when I say I joined TikTok.CorinneI made Virginia a TikTok account.VirginiaCorinne was already on TikTok.CorinneI am obsessed with TikTok, unfortunately.VirginiaFortunately for me because I was like “Corinne I think I have to do it and I don’t want to and I don’t know how.”CorinneSo, we’re trying out TikTok. VirginiaWe are. Burnt Toast TikTok. CorinneCome find us. Yes. It’s @v_solesmith. VirginiaYeah, we just made it the same same as my Instagram so it’s easy to remember, and my Twitter. It’s a lot of cross posting from Instagram. Because now that I have to do reels on Instagram, we could do a whole other episode about my feelings about all of this. Oh, god, it’s the worst.But we’re really trying and we’ll do some stuff probably just for Tiktok, too. Especially if more than the two of us start following me. CorinneYes. Yes. So come find us on TikTok. We will follow you back.And if you see stuff on TikTok that you think Burnt Toast should know about, send it to us. At @v_solesmith.VirginiaPlease do. Corinne is making it happen. Thank you for doing this.CorinneYes. So if any Burnt Toast people need a little extra push to get on TikTok, maybe this is it. It is really cool and fun. You will lose hours of your life.VirginiaI enjoy watching the Tiktoks that people post Instagram. As an elder millennial, that is how I have chosen to engage with that.CorinneYes. You’re just seeing them weeks late.VirginiaI like being three weeks late to something. I think that’s good for me.Alright, I think we did an episode. Thanks for being here. Appreciate it. Tell people where to follow us on all of the places.CorinneWell, you can follow me personally at @selltradeplus on Instagram or at @selfiefay my personal account. And you can find Virginia @v_solesmith on Instagram, Twitter, and now TikTok!VirginiaWait, what’s your TikTok? Are you on TikTok? CorinneYes, I’m on TikTok. I think my TikTok is @SelfieFay which is the same as my personal Instagram. I will say I rarely post. I think I’ve only posted like dog stuff, but maybe that will change.VirginiaI mean, we’re here for the dog content. But you’re not doing @selltradeplus on TikTok.CorinneOh, God. Well, stay tuned.VirginiaAwesome. Well, thank you for doing this. This was great. 

Today’s episode is a delightful conversation with Shelly Anand and Nomi Ellenson, co-authors of the wonderful new picture book I Love My Body Because. If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.And don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSWant to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.Shelley's first book Laxmi’s MoochErika Medina, illustrator of I Love My Body BecauseRoxane Gay's book HungerSonya Renee Taylor's book, The Body Is Not an ApologyTyler FederNabela Noor (Beautifully Me)More body positive picture books studies on representation of kids of color in children's booksNomi's Butter: The Cycles JournalCREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter. Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe. Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell. Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!Episode 65 TranscriptVirginiaWhy don't you each introduce yourselves?Shelly I'm Shelly Anand and I am a picture book author. I'm an attorney. I'm an immigrant and worker rights attorney. I'm a mother of two. And I'm really excited to be on your show!NomiHi, I'm Nomi. I'm a photographer and I specialize in a genre called boudoir photography, which is about empowering women in their bodies, connecting with that inner goddess, and all of that good stuff. I have a photo studio in Brooklyn and I'm also expanding. I live in Montego Bay, Jamaica and I'm starting to do photo shoots here, as well.VirginiaWe are here to talk about your wonderful book I Love My Body Because. It is very beloved in my house already, I can tell you. So I want to hear the story, how do a boudoir photographer and an immigrants rights attorney decide to write a body positive kid's book?NomiIt seems so random, but it really was such a moment of flow. Shelly and my sister are best friends from Wellesley College and when Shelley's first book came out, we were hanging out at the beach. As a boudoir photographer, I'm constantly talking to women about their bodies and how they feel about themselves, their sensuality. So much of what I say to them is what you would say to that inner child in all of us. And I said to Shelley, “What are your thoughts about doing a body awareness children's book?” and she was automatically like, “Let's do this.” It just all felt like it was in the stars and meant to be. That's the short version of how it all happened.VirginiaShelly, I would also love to hear how you came to do Laxmi’s Mooch. And how you see these books as connected?ShellyI didn't set out to become a picture book writer. I've always loved stories and storytelling, and reading, but I think becoming a parent and being a brown mom in the Deep South, raising biracial children—my kids are half Indian, and my husband's a white white man from Wisconsin. We were looking for books that were important to us, that instilled values that were important to us. So children's literature became something that I got interested in as a mom. I was on maternity leave with my second when a friend of mine from from college who lives close by, who's also South Asian, also raising hairy Desi kids in the south, called me and said that her daughter had been teased in school for having a mustache. And she was only six years old.It just was a very poignant moment for me. I had given birth to my own daughter who inherited my hairiness and it just brought back a flood of memories of body hair removal and being teased myself as a young, brown, hairy child. And really thinking that I wanted it to be different for for my children and for all children, that that they not go through what what we went through and it really be a choice that you know, you don't feel this pressure to wax or bleach or thread a part of your body off because other children or other people are teasing you or because that's what Western society is pushing on you.And so that's where the idea for Laxmi’s Mooch came from, I wanted to create a story about a young girl discovering her body hair and hair removal not being the answer. I started reading a bunch of kidlit and joining writers groups and things like that and that's how Laxmi was born.So when Nomi was like, “I'd love to work with you on a book about body positivity,” it felt like a natural next project for me, because they are very much connected. Laxmi’s Mooch is very specific about body hair positivity. But when Nomi and I were talking about this, there weren't a lot of picture books out there on body positivity and specifically fighting fatphobia and dispelling the word fat being something negative. Like Nomi said, it was a very different process than writing Laxmi’s Mooch. Laxmi had more of a narrative and this is more like an ode to your body and all the amazing things our bodies can do—not just physically but intellectually. That we can read and we can learn and we can take care of ourselves. It really just poured out of us and it was a very, very healing. Both books were a very healing experience for me.VirginiaOh, I bet, I bet. I work particularly in the anti-fat bias space. And the body hair conversation does not come up nearly enough. I was thinking the other day, my kids have—because I'm their mom and we talk about this stuff all the time—they have really good fat positive vocabulary. But they've seen me shave my legs or tweeze my chin hairs and been like, “What are you doing?” And I'm like, Oh, I don't have the narrative I need for this piece. This is another part I need to work on.I'm always just like, “It's a choice, you don't have to do it.” But I feel very panicked in the moment, realizing I haven't thought about it. So, I love that you are giving us language and giving us a story that we can use to have these conversations. And not just when you're being barged in on in the shower, when I don't do my best parenting.ShellyI mean those are the moments, when when our children come to us, in the shower or on the toilet.VirginiaIt’s like, Okay, let's do this. ShellyLet's have this conversation. Yeah, absolutely. Uma, my daughter, now asks me, “Why are you shaving your legs?” Because of this narrative that was created when she was born around being being proud of your body hair. She is kind of like, “What are you doing? Why are you removing your body hair? You don't have to do that.” I'm like, Okay, Uma. Thank you.VirginiaIt’s so cool to see that happening.It sounds like this was like a real mind meld of a process. How did you each think about what bodies you wanted to represent in the new book?  Nomi What we were thinking about with different bodies is anchoring in the gratitude for what our body enables us to do. And anchoring in that respect, and that love, and that feeling of celebration, because it is such a gift. Often, everything in the outside world can make us feel negative towards various aspects of ourselves. Creating vocabulary around what's positive and what feels good, enables a new kind of conversation to take place.We would receive sketches from Erika Medina, our illustrator—she really did an amazing job—and we would be like, “We would love to see this representation and that representation,” and just making sure that it was visually aligned with what we felt in our hearts. While we were writing it, we were definitely thinking about the visuals of the words. For us, it was very intertwined. We wanted the words to be meaningful, but also for the book to evoke a certain kind of imagery.ShellyTwo books, in particular really inspired me. They're not children's books, but they both address children and perception of bodies. The the first book was Roxane Gay's book Hunger. Something that stood out to me was her talking about children looking at her and pointing at her and being like, “Oh my God, that woman is so fat” and being horrified. Thinking of myself as a parent, but not wanting my children to ever do that to another human being.[Virginia’s note: This piece is a good read for strategizing on that kind of comment.]And then Sonya Renee Taylor's book, The Body Is Not an Apology. She talks about children having this sense of joy and wonder and curiosity about their bodies that goes away, and is eroded by messages from the culture about having to look a certain way, having to be skinny and light skinned and blue eyes, and blonde hair, all of that. And I, unfortunately, like so many people, grew up in a fatphobic household and a fatphobic culture. It's actually something I'm starting to think about that's specific to South Asian culture. We have a word for fat, “moti,” and it's pejorative. And it was a word that I feared. It was so negative for me. I think having my children and the pressure that postpartum people feel to have their bodies somehow go back to the way they were before giving birth to other human beings. VirginiaBecause that’s a realistic goal. ShellyI mean, that had a huge impact on me. And not wanting my kids to have to go through what I went through in terms of being so mean and self-critical to myself. So there were things in this book that were really important to me, like talking about stretch marks, right? And how they're tiger stripes. Those were things that were really important for me. Because I have these stretch marks now and I see them as a sign of my strength that I carried two human bodies in my body. I think children are taught that there are things about their body they should be ashamed. When in fact, they're quite beautiful, and they should be celebrated.Even though this is a children's book, it's very much a book for everyone, not just children. It's a book of, like Nomi said, of gratitude. This phrase, “I love my body, because…” can be a gratitude practice, and a reminder, when you're feeling unsure, or insecure, or whatever. Just reminding yourself, I love my body because it helps me move through the world. It helped me start that practice, writing this book, creating that gratitude practice for myself.VirginiaI'm just thinking too, as you're talking about these inspirations and the wonder that Sonya Renee Taylor talks about that comes so naturally to kids. Little kids—like three or four year olds before the world descends on them in this way—don't feel like they have to justify these things about their bodies, right? They don't feel like they have to give a reason for having stretch marks. It can just be that you're growing or this is your body. We, as adults, have learned this other language of needing to say, “Well, the stretch marks are because of pregnancies.” Some of my stretch marks are just fat, you know?And I love this idea of starting in this place of gratitude and meeting kids where hopefully at least some of the kids reading this book still are, in this place of “of course, I love my body, why wouldn't I love my body?”That's so powerful to think about how at some point, however fleetingly, we all started there.ShellyYou're exactly right. All of us have signs of our growth and our development and we're told that it has to look a certain way. Like, for some reason, having a mooch or a moustache at two or three is okay, but at 12 and 13, it's not. I went through my mother putting bleach on my skin and trying to turn my hair blonde. So unnatural. And I think it was her way of protecting me, but I think it has to be a choice. And it has to be something that a person wants to do, versus “This is what I have to do to make myself acceptable.” NomiWith kids, these neural pathways are being highly developed and we want to be building up that muscle memory of feeling good about their bodies. When they're met with that resistance of the negative narrative, they build that internal muscle that much more where they're able to actually think about it for themselves, rather than just accepting what they've been taught.VirginiaWhat I really love about the book is that you do expand this idea of body beyond just physical to talk about intellectual gifts. It takes the focus off the aesthetic completely, right?NomiBoth of my parents are rabbis and I grew up with a sense that our external bodies were not the most important thing at all. Not that we were like schlumpy, but it definitely was not about pop culture and whatever the trends were growing up. So when I started doing fashion photography and I saw that the focus was so based on the external, I was like, “There's a disparity here.”There's a disconnect between the value we place on our external looks—even though there's value to that and it's okay to want to feel good externally. I think we lose that conversation. Because we get so stuck in this fat skinny/binary convo versus like, actually, what does it mean to self care and take pride in this external, in our looks, versus this internal. That's how we're able to actually live our lives and be connected more to our internal souls and everything.ShelleyGrowing up as a woman, in any culture, but in this culture in particular, there's so much emphasis on having to be beautiful or considered beautiful or being attractive. It's certainly an aspect of South Asian culture, as well, that's pretty problematic. We want kids to be thinking about what our bodies are capable of —beyond whether or not someone thinks we're pretty or cute or handsome. And we're capable of so much, right? The way we can move through the world, the way we can read and learn. We talk in the book about building bridges and skyscrapers. The possibilities of what we're all able to do is so much more than our physical appearance. That's definitely important to me. I'm very mindful of what we say, especially to girls. “Oh, you're so pretty,” is the first thing that will come out of someone's mouth about a girl versus her intellect versus her capabilities.VirginiaYou also have kids using wheelchairs and you're speaking to mobility on a lot of different levels, which I appreciated.NomiWe have a child with a hearing aid, too! VirginiaThat's great. I'm curious to talk a little bit too about how you feel publishing is doing on this front. Book publishing in general is super white, super not evolved on a lot of these issues. As recently as like three or four years ago, when parents would ask me for book recommendations, I felt like I had nothing to give them. And now we have your beautiful book, we have Tyler Feder, we have Nabela Noor. In the picture book space, I feel like we are starting to make some progress. I mean, not enough. But I now have a list of like eight books I can put on the website, as opposed to one that was self published by someone 20 years ago. What do you think is changing? ShellyYeah, I definitely think there's a change. I think a lot of writers in the social justice space are looking to children's literature as a space to start having these conversations because that's when ideas and values are formed. I mean, there have been studies showing the percentage of books that feature children of color being so low compared to picture books about animals talking and things like that. VirginiaYes, we have more books about snails or something than about Black kids.ShellyAnd I think, more and more, authors of color are wanting to create narratives that are stories that children walking into a bookstore can relate and see themselves on the cover of a book and messages that are important for all children to learn. When I wrote Laxmi, I wanted something that was going to be empowering for hairy, brown girls all over the world. And I think more and more authors are wanting to do that, and publishers are seeing the value of that. I think we're recognizing as a culture that there's so much unlearning we all have to do from how we were socially conditioned to think about ourselves and about others and the value of starting really early, starting as young as you can with with reading these books. It does make a huge difference. I mean, I didn't believe it, but when Laxmi came out, people were saying, “Oh, my gosh, my kid discovered they had leg hair and is really excited.”VirginiaAww, I love this.ShellyAnd same thing with I Love My Body Because. Erica’s illustrations are phenomenal and kids are seeing themselves in this book, like, “Oh, that looks like me.” Or being able to be inquisitive and asking questions, like maybe they haven't seen someone in a wheelchair before, but then they're seeing it in a picture book. That's an opportunity for caregivers or teachers to have have those conversations about the diversity of what bodies look like. I think more is needed, right?There's this book Beautifully Me which is about a Bengali South Asian girl.VirginiaYes, that’s Nabela Noor’s book!ShellyThere has to be a point that we get to where you see a child, a fat child, and the book is not about her fatness or his fatness or their fatness and it's just about them going trick-or-treating or just about them playing. I think we have that discussion a lot as authors of color. There doesn't always have to be a book about our our struggling or us being teased or us having to confront oppression, right? We can just be kids. So I think that's the future and that's the next step that we need to get to.VirginiaCompletely agree. I do love Beautifully Me. But now I just want to follow that character doing something completely unrelated to how she looks.Any other fun responses you're getting from parents or kids when they're seeing the book and seeing themselves?NomiI have several clients who are teachers who brought the book to their classrooms and they've sent me these really adorable drawings of what the children love about their body. Shelly and I are actually in process of developing some curriculum and worksheets to help people who are reading the book to others to have the conversation. Because it's about reading the book, but it's really about the discussion that flows from reading it and continuing that conversation after you're done turning the final page.ShellyWe we went to a local library here in Georgia, in Lilburn. We read the book to the kids and to the families. And at the end, whenever we're reading the book, even at home, the last phrase is, “So what do you love about your body?” And we turn that question to the audience. And this boy, he must have been eight or nine years old, he said, “I love my body because I'm Black and I’m me.” And he was there with his younger siblings and it was just so, so powerful. So beautiful. And you know, his mom was there, smiling with pride. That's why we wrote the book.Butter for your Burnt ToastShelleyI have a pretty robust mental health self care regimen which includes a therapist, a life coach, but I've added in incense. I light incense in the morning and it helps me relax and set the mood for the day. I've gotten into crystals, as well. And then I recently started going to this local healing arts center. It's called Decatur Healing Arts and there's a woman there who's trained in Reiki and in gong baths which is like sound baths and it has been amazing. It has changed my life.VirginiaSo wait is a sound bath… I've been confused about sound baths for a long time, so I'm glad you brought this up. Is there water involved? Or you're bathed in sound?ShellyYou’re bathed in sound.VirginiaThank you for clarifying what was obviously a dumb question.ShellyNo, not at all. I mean, I didn't know anything about it. But I was talking to my therapist and I was in like, a difficult space with my my day job, and I needed to find release. She's like, “You're Indian, have you tried ayurveda? Have you done any of these things?” I'm like, no, I haven't. And I've been taking SSRIs for forever. VirginiaAlso a useful tool.ShellyYeah, SSRIs are great. I'm very pro but I needed more than that. And gong baths, incense, and crystals have been a great addition to my mental health regimen. So I wanted to share with folks.NomiSo my butter on toast situation is I found this journal called the Cycles Journal, which allows you to track your flow with the moon. I'm interested in continuing this internal work as a way of empowering women to view the things that maybe have made us feel less than, like getting your period is a negative and being like, actually, how can we harness our flow as a way of empowering ourselves to live our best lives, basically. So, this woman named Rachel Amber created it. And you can track where you are in your cycle with the moon and all the different ways to kind of check in with how you're feeling, what your body is doing. I'd highly recommend it.1VirginiaI love anything that helps people understand our bodies, more especially stuff like menstruation, which has such a ridiculous taboo.My recommendation this week is a gardening recommendation—I don't know if either of you are gardeners, but my podcast listeners have to indulge a lot of gardening talk. And where I am, in the Hudson Valley, it is now Dahlia season. Dahlias are native to Mexico. They are a spectacular, spectacular flower. We have to plant the tubers in the middle of May. And then you really wait all summer because they have to like grow up from just a root. They start to bloom at the end of July, but they really hit their stride in September and October. It is just something I really need in my fall because I don't have seasonal depression exactly, but I definitely have seasonal anxiety. I am not someone who likes like traditional cliched fall things like pumpkin spice and all that because it just means the end times are coming. That is not exciting for me.But realizing that I could grow dahlias and still have really spectacular flowers in my garden at this time of year helps me. Now I really look forward to September and October. Last year, they even bloomed into November. So, fingers crossed for a late frost this year.Thank you both for being here. Again, the book is I Love My Body Because. Tell listeners where else they can follow you both?ShellyYou can follow me on Twitter at @maanandshelly. You can also follow my organization, Sur Legal Collaborative which is a nonprofit immigrant and worker rights organization at @SurLegal_ATL and that's the same on Instagram. And then my Instagram is @LikhoShelly. Likho means ‘to write’ in Hindi.NomiThe best way to see what's happening is my Instagram @boudoirbynomi. It's a place with my photography, but I also talk a lot about mindfulness and getting more in touch with your body. Then also I have another Instagram handle, @nomifoto, and that's where I also post stuff about the book and just some other things going on in my life. So Instagram is the best way to see what's up.---We just want to acknowledge that not everyone with a uterus has, or can have, or wants to have a regular monthly menstruation cycle. And that is totally fine and totally normal!

Today’s episode, a conversation with blogger and fat liberation activist Linda Gerhardt, is the kind of story I can only tell on Burnt Toast. Because lipedema—despite impacting some 11 percent of women worldwide—isn’t a Sexy News Story. It doesn’t have the kind of hook mainstream media outlets want. Lipedema patients aren’t the kind of victims (i.e. thin white ladies) that America loves to rally around. But there are millions of them living quietly, in pain, unable to access healthcare or even clear answers because, as Linda puts it, “lipedema lives in this cursed intersection of medical fatphobia and medical misogyny.”If you want more conversations like this one—about the true costs of anti-fat bias, told in ways that center fat folks—please  rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.And don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.CW: This episode does contain some discussion of medical fatphobia and medical trauma, as well as prescription weight loss and weight loss surgery. If any of that wouldn't be good for you to listen to, please take care of yourself and give this one a miss.Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSWant to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.Linda blogs at Fluffy Kitten PartyLinda's (awesome!) Instagram is @littlewingedpotatoesThe Standard of Care for Lipedema in the United States by Dr. Karen HerbstRagen Chastain on why movement doesn’t have to be joyful and health is not a moral obligationVirginia is watching Bad Sisters (on Apple TV). CREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter. Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe. Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell. Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!Episode 64 TranscriptVirginiaWhy don’t we start by having you tell people a little bit about yourself and what you do?LindaMy name is Linda and I run a blog called Fluffy Kitten Party, which I chose because I couldn’t find a domain name that was allowed and available, so that was what I chose. I haven’t written in it for a while, but on that blog I wrote about fat liberation and Health at Every Size and my own experiences within the health care system.I also have an Instagram account, @littlewingedpotatoes, which is a Mystery Science Theater 3000 reference, for anybody who’s curious. That was another desperate choice when I couldn’t find a name and everything I tried was taken. I post a mix of memes and personal nonsense and fat liberation health and every size content. It’s a real grab bag, but you can always follow me there if you’re curious about what I do.This isn’t my full-time job, I have a full-time job doing something completely different as a consultant. I’m just a fat lady who’s really invested in fat liberation and Health at Every Size. I need it. And so I share my story, and my experiences and my thoughts and feelings and opinions in the hopes of moving things along. VirginiaI just want to say right now, anyone who’s not already following Linda, please follow Linda, because just there have been so many issues over the years. I think you’re the first person who taught me about terms like “small fat.” You’re doing 101 stuff for those of us who need it. LindaThank you. The real feather in my cap is that I am one of the top search results for “Fat at Disney.” I will rest on that for quite a while, if not my whole life.VirginiaHow much higher can one fly? LindaIt’s the dream. VirginiaToday we are going to talk about lipedema, which is a condition you have been struggling with for many years. But you’ve only recently gotten properly diagnosed and started talking publicly about this.littlewingedpotatoesA post shared by Linda (@littlewingedpotatoes)LindaHindsight is 20/20 and having the diagnosis, I can look back and reconstruct when it started for me. I was a thick, chunky kid, but at puberty, I got really lumpy. Like, I was hoping for boobs and I got giant thighs and a fat ass instead. I was like, “Well, that kind of sucks.” I looked around at my peers and I’m like, “Yeah, I’m lumpier than you guys. I’m shaped very differently.” But I just kind of carried that and lived my life.It wasn’t until I was in my mid 20s, I was working as a photographer—very active job, lugging equipment up and downstairs, setting it up and taking it down multiple times a day—and I started to have problems with swelling and pain in my legs. And just for context, I was a baby photographer. So this involves getting down on baby level. I spent 20 to 30 minutes at a time on my knees without any real issue. So when I started having this pain and swelling, like first of all, this could affect my livelihood if I can’t kneel anymore. I went to the doctor, and they were kind of like, "Huh, well, your legs are really weird. They’re kind of firm and full of fluid, but we don’t know what that is. But you should probably just get weight loss surgery.” So I ended up at a weight loss surgery seminar. Went through a few beginning steps of getting weight loss surgery, but ended up not getting approved because I had terrible high deductible pre-Affordable Care Act insurance. So I was kind of saved by my bad insurance. So I just said, “Okay, well, I’ll just keep living my life and do my best.” Then in my early 30s, I started getting a lot of pain right underneath my knees. I had developed this pad of fat, for lack of a better term, that was on both sides, so symmetrical, and just extremely painful. If my little eight pound cat placed one paw beneath my knees, I hit the ceiling. It was like somebody was stabbing me.Pain is normal to some degree in life but legs that are throbbing with pain all the time is not quite normal. So, I started the journey of going to different doctors and saying, “Do you have any idea what’s going on with me?” Didn’t really get anywhere. I had many, many scans done of the veins in my legs. Veins are healthy. Ruled out things like congestive heart failure. And it was actually really frustrating because it’s great to be healthy, but when you’re in pain and you know something’s wrong, when you get that clean bill of health, it’s really frustrating. I didn’t have a lot of those metabolic issues that doctors were looking for. They didn’t know what to do with me.VirginiaMeanwhile, you’re still in pain and you have no answers as to what’s happening.LindaYeah, and my mobility decreased. It had really inhibited my ability to do a lot of things because my legs were heavy and painful and swollen. A friend of mine, I was complaining to her about my sore legs, and she said, “Have you ever heard of this person on Instagram? She has painful legs and looks pretty similar to you.” So I follow the link that my friend sent me and I went to this woman’s Instagram. And it was like running into a wall because this woman had my body.Her legs looked like mine. And she had a condition called lipedema, which I had never heard of. This was I think 2018 or so. And so I started researching lipedema like, what is this? Is this lymphedema? I didn’t know anything about it. And as I was looking at the description of the condition, I thought, Oh my God, this is me. This is what I have.I started this process of going to doctors and being like, Have you heard of lipedema? I think I might have it. And either they had no idea what it was, or they were just like, “eh probably not.” Because there is this misconception about lipedema that it only is present in thin women who have large lower bodies, which is not the case.VirginiaOh, so it was like, they only diagnose it in someone they don’t expect to be fat.LindaPrecisely. That’s it on the nose. I’m kind of fat everywhere and that’s how I’ve always been—like I said, I was a chunky kid, I was a chunky teenager, I’m a chunky adult. And so they would think, “Oh, well, you can’t have that because you are fat elsewhere.” And I thought, oh, okay, well, maybe I don’t have it. But you know, I just I had it, I knew I had it.Eventually I found a doctor who specializes in lipedema. He’s a surgeon and he was able to diagnose me on sight because lipedema has a very characteristic look. You can see it on people’s bodies. You can also feel it, because the texture of the fat with lipedema is not normal. It kind of feels like marbles. Which are these nodules. And some of those nodules can get extremely large. So when I was 13 and saying, “Hey, I’m so much lumpier than my peers,” that was a big part of it.A lot of things clicked into place once I had a name to call it. But the bummer is that there really isn’t much that can be done for lipedema, because doctors, especially in the US don’t really know a whole lot about it. As a condition, we’ve known about it since the 1940’s. But it’s still kind of a mystery and if you went to your family doctor and wanted to talk about lipedema, they would probably have no idea what it is. I’ve heard of people going into their doctor’s office, telling them to Google Images of lipedema and then the doctor goes, “Oh, well, you absolutely have that.”VirginiaThat is wild.LindaIt’s been interesting to see the gaps in medical knowledge among medical professionals. It’s kind of the saddest club because you have a name you can call the thing that you experience, but nobody can really help you in any significant way. There is help available. But it’s very tricky to get because this is all very new and experimental and nothing is really evidence based at this point because people are not interested in helping lumpy fat ladies.VirginiaSo just to do the 101 thing for all of us who are learning here, let’s just say what lymphedema is versus lipedema and how they’re related. LindaSo lymphedema is something that you’ll often see in people who have had cancer and have lymph nodes removed, where the lymph fluid—which we all have, it’s just this waste fluid that flows through our cells—is pooling in a particular area. So, in lymphedema, somebody will have like one arm, typically, that’s very large and swollen and painful, or a leg. And in lipedema, it’s all over and it’s slightly different.How lipedema works: It’s believed to be hereditary, so your genes are kind of a loaded gun and hormones are the trigger. So a lot of women will start to see symptoms of lipedema at puberty. And then if they get pregnant or start birth control, that can kick it into high gear. A lot of women who have lipedema, notice it after a pregnancy. I noticed it after starting Depo-Provera. People gain weight on Depo-Provera, but I gained a significant amount of weight on Depo-Provera. And that was around the time I started having the symptoms that worried me, like the pain under my knees.All of us have fat cells that are moving fluid in and out all the time—that’s how our cells work. With people who have lipedema, the cells are letting fluids in and not cycling them out fast enough. So these fat cells are just full of this garbage fluid that your body is supposed to be getting rid of. And it causes pain, it causes swelling.And one thing I did want to note because I keep saying women, lipedema affects almost exclusively women and people assigned female at birth. I haven’t read any cases of cis men with it. Lipedema is hormonal and lives in this cursed intersection of medical fatphobia and medical misogyny. Because people aren’t interested in learning how women’s bodies work.VirginiaNo, nope, definitely not. Or including them in medical studies until like 10 years ago. LindaSo these fat cells that are holding onto fluid, it can cause overgrowth of fat. It almost kind of spreads and builds upon itself. So that can cause compression on your lymphatic vessels in your lymph nodes and that can cause lymphedema. Later on when you have widespread lymphatic dysfunction—which is where I live right now, I have leg lipedema and I also have a mild case of lymphedema that is nonetheless very painful and annoying in one of my legs. That is called lipolymphedema, which is the final stage of lipedema. And it’s hard to deal with, medically, because you’ve got two things going on. You’re full of fluid and nobody wants to work on you.VirginiaThis is a lot you’re dealing with. I just want to take a minute and say, as someone who considers you a friend, it’s been really tough to watch how much you’ve had to struggle and it’s really fucking unfair.LindaThank you. I appreciate the support. Just hearing that it’s unfair is really helpful to me because it’s the barriers to getting help are really significant. There’s not a whole lot of help available because, again, people don’t understand what it is, which I think is a travesty in and of itself. If I were an ob*sity researcher, I would be interested to find out what’s making all of these fat ladies so lumpy and miserable. Like, why are they in pain? Why are they lumpy? Why is their fat different? What is going on?I think it’s really fascinating. And there just isn’t really much research. The treatment options are limited. I wouldn’t even call them treatment, I would call them symptom management. Compression is the frontline treatment. Wearing compression garments, pneumatic compression pumps.Manual lymphatic drainage massage has been a life changer for me. It kind of gets that lymph fluid flowing and helps with pain and swelling and kind of loosens you up. It’s actually really wild, I’ll walk into a massage appointment and my shoes and pants will be tight. And I’ll leave and my shoes are loose and my pants are loose.VirginiaWow. So over the course of the session you really see a difference.LindaI can feel the lymph moving. It’s very strange. It’s almost like water trickling inside your body.VirginiaWhoa. That’s intense.Linda It’s it’s a little weird, but now I look forward to it. I need it every every couple of weeks—ideally every week, but it’s not covered by insurance.VirginiaI was going to say that sounds expensive.LindaIt’s definitely expensive. VirginiaYou’ve talked a little bit on Instagram about looking into surgical options.LindaYeah, at this point the major surgical option is liposuction. This is not normal, healthy fat, this is abnormal—I don’t want to use the term “diseased,” but it’s not healthy tissue. So removing that tissue also removes a lot of the pain, the nodules that cause that immediate sense of “oh my god, don’t touch me.” And there’s a network of surgeons, they’re not affiliated with each other, but they are plastic surgeons who perform liposuction on lipedema patients. It is different than standard liposuction because you’re not looking for aesthetics, you’re basically looking to remove as much lipedema fat as you safely can so that the patient experiences relief. I’ve heard of people getting liposuction who say that they feel better being wheeled out of the surgical room than they did going in, even though they come out with drains on.VirginiaRight and recovering from anesthesia.LindaBut again, your insurance isn’t likely to want to cover liposuction because people hear liposuction, they think, Oh, that’s cosmetic. That’s optional. And a lot of the plastic surgeons are frankly used to being able to pick and choose their patients and not operate on people that they don’t want to operate on. So, especially for larger patients, it can be a real difficult process to find a surgeon who wants to operate on you, especially if you also have lymphedema, which is another complicating factor.So that’s been where I’ve been looking into getting help and finding door after door getting slammed in my face. But that’s one of the treatment options that’s available. It is considered experimental because there haven’t been any longterm peer-reviewed studies. There has been some preliminary research into it. Dr. Karen Herbst is one of the researchers who has been really proactive about publishing research papers about lipedema. She also published [a paper called] The Standard of Care for Lipedema in the United States. But this is all really new. It’s kind of the wild West. And in terms of treatment, gosh, if you go into a Facebook community for people with lipedema, people are just gonna scream “keto” at you until you leave. VirginiaSo I want to get into the keto of it all in a minute, but on the surgery piece: Listening to you talk, I’m just thinking about what a disservice doctors are doing to patients here. Because plastic surgery has become this specialty that we associate with aesthetics, right? We associate it with nose jobs and boob jobs and lipo for thinner thighs. When it should be very focused on treating conditions like yours and things like burn victims. But because diet culture, because beauty culture, etc, the money for this specialty is not in helping lumpy fat ladies. The money is in doing it in this other way. And I’m just thinking about how much that has distorted the ethics of that entire specialty, but also your ability to access care.LindaI mean, plastic surgeons do a lot of non-cosmetic procedures. I would say most of them are trained to do things like help babies with cleft palates, and help people who have skin issues and injuries that require resetting bones and that kind of intense surgery. But people hear liposuction in particular, and they think of the only utility as making a person thinner for purposes of vanity. Literally, my legs could look like hamburger meat and if they didn’t hurt, I would be fine with that. They could give me like wooden pirate legs and I would be fine with that. The reason I want this surgery is not because I want to be smaller, I’m just looking for relief from this condition that is causing widespread lymphatic dysfunction in my body. And that’s it.I think there’s also this issue of capitalism within the doctors who treat lipedema. There’s a lot of marketing. They’re all in private practice. So some of them don’t work with insurance at all, right? And they’re looking to market themselves, so they’re also looking at a patient and saying, “will this give me a good before and after picture that I can put on social media?” And my legs are probably not gonna be beautiful after surgery. I just want them to not hurt. I want them to function. VirginiaAnd how bananas that this is not a success point that a surgeon feels like would market his or her practice effectively? And is it your impression from being as active you are in the lipedema community, that the thin woman with the bigger lower body, that she is more able to access this treatment than someone like you?LindaOh, 100 percent. I’m in a couple of communities online for people who are pursuing or have had or will get liposuction for their lipedema. It’s much easier for thinner patients not only find surgeons who will happily operate on them, but to get insurance coverage. Because that’s sort of the new frontier, is getting your insurance company to actually cover all or some of the procedure. And it is sequential, so typically for people with lipedema, we’re not talking one and done. We’re talking five, six procedures, possibly things like thigh lifts and skin removal, because it really can be disfiguring in a lot of ways.VirginiaI was wondering if there was recurrence. I have endometriosis and I had surgery to remove all my endometrial cysts, but my body keeps making more endometrial cysts. They can remove the current issue, but they can’t turn off the problem completely.LindaExactly. It’s exactly like that. So if you have liposuction for lipedema, you’re not looking for a cure. You’re just looking to improve your quality of life in the short term or the long term. It’s hard to say because there haven’t been many studies. Anecdotally, people can see it come back in other areas. I’ve heard of patients saying, “Okay, my abdomen is growing lipedema now, now that it’s been removed from my legs.” So it can recur. It’s really just sort of the last hope for people who are in a lot of pain and want to have some option to live a normal life, even if it’s just for five years after surgery.VirginiaI mean, that’s huge. LindaIt’s definitely not a cure because, frankly, we don’t understand why it happens. And until somebody is curious enough to investigate that question of why this is happening to certain people and what is kicking it into gear, how can we slow it down? How can we stop it? There’s not really anything that we can do significant for people with lipedema, aside from manage those symptoms and try to provide a decent quality of life and mobility for as long as possible.VirginiaI’m just filled with white hot fury right now. Because it is, as you said, this intersection with women’s healthcare in general. How little we understand endometriosis, how little we understand migraines, how little we understand PCOS, all of these conditions that, like lipedema, we have known about for decades. And yet, because they primarily happen not to cis white men, we haven’t bothered to do the science and that bias is just holding us back.And because there’s this expectation that women should be okay with living with pain, right? Women’s pain is so dismissed and minimized. That it’s just part of being a woman that your life’s gonna be full of this hormonal driven constellation of pain, and that we should accept that.LindaI sometimes wonder what I would be capable of if my legs didn’t hurt. Like, what would somebody with endometriosis achieve if they weren’t, like out of commission in like horrible pain for like a week of every month? It’s unreal that it’s allowed.VirginiaIt’s completely ridiculous. White hot fury for that.The other thing I have white hot fury about is that of course as you’ve been on this journey, trying to access the liposuction or any other type of treatment you’ve been able to find, the number one thing doctors have been saying to you over and over is just lose weight, right?LindaYeah, sometimes with no modifier. Like, just that. And I’m like, “You acknowledge that I have this condition, that is a fat disorder, that makes it difficult or impossible for me to lose significant amounts of weight. But I also need to lose like 70 pounds so that you will feel more comfortable putting me under anesthesia? Even though if I went to a different surgeon in your same hospital system, and was like, ‘Well, I would like one weight loss surgery, please,’ they would happily put me under?”VirginiaNo problem with that anesthesia. LindaAnd I think the root of it and how this intersects with fat liberation is people have an expectation that—and I think it’s a very Calvinist American idea—that the outcome is the proof of your virtue. So, if you have a fat body, that is evidence that you have done something un-virtuous to get to that point. And that is very hard to untangle because it’s so ingrained in who we are.It’s so ingrained in our medical system that if you do the right things, and you follow the path, and you eat the right foods, and you exercise the right amount, if you do the correct things, you should be the ideal of the thin person. That is the expectation that most of us have is that we see a thin person and we think that they have done something correct. We see a fat person and we think they have done something incorrect and wrong and that they need to take some sort of corrective action, they need to change their behavior.The doctor who diagnosed me told me very clearly: “There’s no diet, you could have gone on, no exercise program you could have joined, that would have prevented you from having this body. This is lipedema. This is the condition that you have, and there’s nothing you could have done to prevent it.” And I wept. Because that’s the opposite of what I’ve heard my whole life, which is “Well look at you. You are clearly doing something wrong.”So either you’re at home with your secret Cheetos shovel or you’re lying to me in some way. There’s this suspicion—and there’s almost this desire, because the thing that has been suggested to me was, of course, weight loss surgery. And I haven’t read any evidence that it helps with lipedema. In fact, that’s how a lot of women discover they have lipedema. They’ll undergo weight loss surgery and they lose weight up top, in their face, in their chest, and their arms. And then they have this large lower body and it doesn’t budge. And so that’s when they go, “Oh, well, there’s something else going on here.”But weight loss surgery is also presented to me, like, “well, let’s just cross that off the list.” I don’t think that 75 percent of my stomach is a reasonable barrier for entry. It’s not like it’s something that we’re just going to try to exclude just for funsies.VirginiaI mean, what you’re outlining here about the puritanical Calvinist nature of it, I think, is just dead on. Because what they’re really saying to you is: “Even if this underlying lipedema is through no fault of your own, you need to atone for your body before we’ll help you.”What happened to meeting people where they are? What happened to “do no harm?” Even if you did have the Cheeto shovel, right? You still deserve health care, you still deserve to be treated like a human being. And that’s what’s missing.LindaYeah, for sure. And no disrespect to people with Cheeto shovels. Like, I love Cheetos. But there’s this desire to rake us over the coals, make us walk through the fire, jump through some hoops before we can get the thing that we need. I really think of it as proving our virtue. We understand that we have to atone and we have to sort of come to this place where we’ve been brought to our knees by all of the things that we’ve had to do just to prove that we’re not actually sinners. VirginiaAnd it removes your ability to advocate for yourself. You’re having to meet this arbitrary standard and perform the Good Fatty for them. Just the way you’re being asked to play this game is so insidious.LindaI think that one thing that a lot of lipedema patients have in common is that we approach every appointment as preparing for battle. And the end result is unfortunately that these interactions with doctors don’t tend to go well. Because we go in with our dukes up, because we’re expecting a fight, because that’s all we’ve ever gotten from people in those white coats.I wish that I could make myself smaller. I have tried. I’ve tried everything short of surgery. I gave myself gallstones when I tried Atkins. I’ve given myself kidney stones. I have put myself in the hospital. I have starved. I’ve exercised until my ankles were screaming at me and I could barely walk, and it doesn’t move the needle in any significant way. So at a certain point, I’m not willing to play that game anymore.I’m willing to play ball a little bit. Like if they said, “Well, we want you to follow this diet before [liposuction surgery.]” Sure, I can do that. But I’m not willing to allow myself to be raked over the coals in quite the way they want to and I’m certainly not willing to try out amputating part of my stomach, in case I’m lying and I do actually just eat a ton of food. I’m not willing to shrink my stomach just to prove to medical professionals that I’m worthy of treatment.We know that when we get a 90-year-old patient, they’re going to have certain risks. And there’s certain things you have to keep in mind if you’re operating on a 90 year old person who needs surgery. But you know you can’t change them. You can’t make them younger. Same thing with babies! Like, operating on small babies and children. It happens a lot. And it’s not a standard surgery, it’s not an ideal situation. But you can’t make them into fully grown a healthy adults. VirginiaWe have all these protocols to make pediatric surgery safe for their tiny bodies. LindaBut for fat people, it’s, “Well, let’s make the bodies smaller and more convenient for us,” instead of just allowing for the fact that, yeah, they might be harder to intubate, but we can do it. Again, if I wanted weight loss surgery, they would find a way. Because that’s highly profitable for them. VirginiaSo that is the super depressing story on the health care side.Another piece of this is how the Health at Every Size community has really let down folks with lipedema and in our haste to untangle health and weight, we often gloss over the lived experiences of chronically ill fat folks. So take us through that.LindaYeah, so for me personally, there’s a lot of shame in not being the Good Fatty and being the chronically ill fatty, who can’t go on a long hike because my legs are heavy and swollen and hurt. There’s this focus on “well, you can be healthy at any size, just do the health behaviors.” And, you know, some people can’t.Some people can’t be healthy, sometimes the literal problem is in your fat. So, it’s kind of this interesting contradiction, which I’ve been grappling with. Because I identified with Health at Every Size. I care about Health at Every Size. I want people to be able to access better medical care, and I want us to have this broader understanding of health, and maybe treat it more as a resource than an end goal. But we’re just not included in the conversation.And it can be a really weird place because, it’s a lot of thin yoga ladies giving advice that you can eat the cookie and you should engage in joyful movement. And literally, the only movement that I can manage these days is “I hate every second of it, but I did it anyway,” because I needed to get lymph flowing in my body. So it just kind of feels like we’re left out.I also think that there’s been a lot of capitalism that has infiltrated Health at Every Size. People marketing services as dietitians and coaches. And you know, get that bread. I want everybody to be able to make money. But the activism of going inside these systems and making substantive changes that produce better healthcare for fat patients—that isn’t happening because we’re all busy doing webinars and attending conferences where we all talk about the things that everybody already agreed upon.And there’s no outward looking, like how can we actually make life tangibly better for fat people and make it easier for them to access medical care? The house is on fire. People are dying. You can’t sit on the lawn and talk about the architecture of the building. I need you to get in the house and pull some people out. And that’s why I stopped really identifying as heavily with Health at Every Size as a movement and moved into fat liberation because this is ultimately oppression. This is systemic oppression of a certain population of people based on something that is not within their control. I think that I just want to see more action and more attempts to get inside the building and pull out the people who are suffering. VirginiaIt feels like what HAES ends up doing is not that different from what you’re experiencing from these doctors that are asking you to perform Good Fatty stuff for them. They’re asking you to say, “Of course I want to lose weight, of course I’ll do anything to be thin.” And then the Health at Every Size folks are saying, “You have to pretend you can be healthy, even if you’re not healthy.” And so there’s still this performance element. And there’s this discomfort in acknowledging: Yes, some fat people are chronically ill. Sometimes that chronic illness is related to fatness. As you’ve said, lipedema is essentially a fat disorder. And weight loss is not the answer. Healthcare is the answer. But in the haste to promote this idea of being healthy at every size, we’re rendering invisible these other struggles. LindaThe point where I started feeling this disconnect between HAES and and my own life was when I started developing lymphedema in my left leg. And again, it’s pretty mild. But even the most mild case of lymphedema is very uncomfortable and painful. And it was affecting my ability to walk around and comfortably engage in any sort of movement. There was a lot of shame that came with lymphedema with the realization that this is growing. I can’t control it. It scares the shit out of me. And it’s also making it so that I am one of those fat people.Because I think there is a challenge point with fat people for HAES in particular, where we start seeing people who have lymphedema, people who have chronic illnesses, and their weight is not immaterial, that’s the body that they exist in. And sometimes that can come with unattractive conditions like lymphedema.But I think that HAES spaces are very uncomfortable with those types of people who have some issues that may be associated with their weight. And I’m not saying caused by, but associated with, because people at the higher end of the weight spectrum, oftentimes do struggle with lymphedema and other issues and there can be a lot of shame in it. I can feel the discomfort sometimes, when we talk about these issues, because they’re seeing a fat person who’s not healthy, who can’t go put on yoga pants and go hike around and engage in joyful movement. And lumpy fat ladies who are not engaging in joyful movement just kind of get left out. And that makes me very sad as as one of the lumpy fat ladies.VirginiaI think it’s not even discomfort. I think they’re worried it’s gonna blow up the whole thing. They’re worried that doctors are going to be able to point to a case like yours and say, “Well see, you can’t have Health at Every Size. You can’t do it.” And that is such bullshit. They’re afraid. LindaYou can see that in who HAES spaces lift up as the icons. Like, you look at somebody like Ragen Chastain, who does amazing work. I think she’s fantastic! She’s also famous for being a fat person who ran marathons. So, those are the people that HAES wants as the mascots. And I hate to say it, but there are mascot fat people in HAES. And fat people who have messy medical conditions that are difficult to untangle and may have some association with weight. And it feels like if we admit that that is the case, then the whole worldview just gets blown up. VirginiaAnd I do like that Ragen has a great piece she wrote about how movement doesn’t have to be joyful and health is not a moral obligation. But you’re absolutely right, the way her work gets quoted by others is often reinforcing this very thing that I don’t think she wants to reinforce.So, not to make you do the thing of like, “tell us all how to fix it.” But what change do you want to see? How can people be good allies? LindaThe thing that I would really like to see is thinking strategically about social change. How do we create change? What’s our theory of change here? So that we can make a plan to do outreach to medical professionals. How can we get this message that fat people deserve health care in the bodies they currently have? How can we get that to exist in hospital systems? How can we take that nugget of wisdom that everybody deserves the right to health care? How can we put that into action so that when a fat patient walks into an office they can be met with compassion and a desire to care for them?Because that’s what’s not happening. I don’t work in the healthcare industry so I am not great at understanding what the path is to get into the right spaces, get in front of the right people, get in front of the right organizations, I don’t really know. But I think that HAES has often split off and offered this place that operates outside of the mainstream medicine. And I want to see it infiltrate mainstream medicine. I want to see a takeover, where if a fat patient walks into an office, they have nothing to worry about. They will be met with somebody who wants to help them and can care for them and is not going to blame their body for the failings of training of medical professionals. That’s what I want.And I guess that’s not really as a strategy. But that’s the end result I want to see. And I really want to look to the people who do have those connections that experience that clout to think about that problem. VirginiaI actually am really encouraged how often I do get an email from someone in medical school right now, saying they’ve listened to the podcast or they’ve read something. I just got one from someone saying, “I was listening to the podcast, I had to pull over and cry,” and I’m like, “good.” I mean, I’m sorry you cried, but good. This is what we need. It is these people who are going to be health care providers going in and thinking about how they can blow it all up and rebuild something better. LindaI am encouraged because I do see change happening. It’s not happening overnight, but I do see small shifts. And one thing that I am also seeing is that people are learning about lipedema and getting diagnosed. Again, saddest club, we can’t really help you.VirginiaBut it is true knowing what it is is the first step of anything happening. That is something. Leave a commentButter for Your Burnt ToastlittlewingedpotatoesA post shared by Linda (@littlewingedpotatoes)LindaI want to say my adopted kittens. Go adopt a kitten everybody. I adopted two of them recently and they bring such joy into my life. I could literally just stare at them all day. So adopt a pet, go to your shelter, find some cute animals, adopt them and love them. They make everything better, I swear to God.VirginiaAnd wait, one you thought was a girl and then turned out not to be a girl. So remind me their names?LindaLuke and Liam. Liam used to be Leia until Leia was walking across my desk and I looked under the tail and I was like, “Oh, you are not Leia.” The Star Wars theme is gone. But they’re still very cute and fluffy and adorable.VirginiaThey are so adorable. One of them has a little heart on his fur. Oh my gosh, they’re so sweet.LindaHe’s a real life Care Bear. My husband sent me a picture of this kitten that was at a local rescue and he had a heart, it’s like a perfect tabby heart. He’s a white cat with Tabby spots. He’s got a tabby heart. And I just lost my cat Pixel after 17 years of living with her. And I thought okay, well my heart is broken. And this kitten has a heart on his side. VirginiaMy older daughter is a devoted passionate animal person who would like us to have about 900 more pets than we currently do. And we have a dog, a cat, and a fish tank, but it’s not enough and I often show her your kitten content. We have a couple celebrity pets we follow on Instagram and Luke and Liam are on the list. We like to check in on them,LindaLove it. I’ll tell them that they are famous.VirginiaAt least locally, in my house. Yes.Well, my recommendation for butter this week is a TV show. I’m obsessed with Bad Sisters. It’s on Apple TV with Sharon Horgan. She was in that really awesome show “Catastrophe” a few years ago. She’s an Irish comedian, actor, writer. And it is kind of like Irish “Big Little Lies,” but better. If you like dark comedy. It’s about this family of five sisters—and this is not a spoiler because it’s in the first episode—one of them is married to a total asshole. And the other four are plotting to kill him. And I just love ladies murdering a shitty man.LindaI also love to see that. I love to see it. VirginiaI just love any kind of content about destroying a terrible man. And the sisterhood relationships are beautiful. It’s really funny. It’s beautiful because it’s in Ireland. So check it out.Linda, thank you so much. This was an amazing conversation. I am so appreciative of your work, and you taking the time to educate all of us and share all of this. Tell listeners where they can follow you and how we can support your work.LindaThank you so much for having me! I really love that you’re talking about this and that you invited me on. You can follow me on Instagram @littlewingedpotatoes. Again, lots of memes, lots of cats, but you’ll also get some fat liberation content occasionally. And you can also check out my blog Fluffy Kitten Party. I haven’t written there for a while, but I think I should start doing that again. So, maybe there will be a new post.

This week, we're taking it old school with a solo Virginia episode! She's reading her most popular essay to date, about why you should stop romanticizing your child's lunchbox. (Note: We recorded this before the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health; check the transcript for some thoughts on these new developments.) If you'd like to support Burnt Toast, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.We've got an urgent call to action for the Burnt Toast Giving Circle! Details in the transcript. Help us fight for a blue majority in the Arizona state legislature. And don't forget to preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSWant to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.The original essayHere's the Biden administration’s new National Strategy on hunger and nutrition, including school lunches. The pandemic school lunch scramble.Jennifer Gaddis on school lunchesSchool lunches are healthier than you thinkSo, what about processed foods?Meal planning mental loadstress-organizing my kitchenTomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle ZevinCome hiking with this amazing groupCREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.Please Stop Romanticizing Your Child’s Lunchbox(This is a reprint of last year’s essay, with a few new additions in footnotes. If you read it before, just scroll down for the rest of the episode’s analysis and your Butter recs!)Back in April 2021, the USDA announced that it would extend a waiver that allows schools to serve free meals to all students through the entire 2021-2022 school year. Families no longer have to apply or demonstrate eligibility for free lunches in most districts; cafeterias are just feeding every kid who shows up for lunch. This effort started as a response to the pandemic-fueled increase in childhood hunger, as I reported for the New York Times last year. And anti-hunger advocates are hoping to make it a permanent change by getting Congress to pass the Universal School Meals Act.1 So we are now officially back to school in every district in the nation, and most kids are walking into a radically different cafeteria than ever before.   There are some nuances to this, of course. “Please note that USDA is not providing a free universal meal program,” a USDA spokesperson told me via email because I guess the government never wants to look like it’s caring too much. States have to opt in to the waiver before schools can serve free meals to all; otherwise they can participate in the normal National School Lunch Program, where kids pay full price, reduced price, or nothing based on their family’s income eligibility (meaning schools and families still have to do that application process).And some, such as the Waukesha School District in Wisconsin, have opted not to participate. In that case, it was because school board members worried that feeding kids lunch would make them “spoiled” and also, rather inexplicably, pave the way to mask mandates. (The school district has since reversed that decision.) The USDA does not yet have data on how many districts around the country opted in or out, but the same spokesperson confirmed that “the majority” of states are in. So we can expect to see a big spike in participation numbers from the last time this data was collected, in 2014-2015, when just one in five schools offered free lunch to all students. I also did some extremely un-scientific Instagram polling (on my own account, and then I borrowed Yummy Toddler Food’s much larger one), 81 to 89 percent of followers who voted said lunch is free at their kids’ school this year. Unless you are a heartless Wisconsin school board member, universal free lunch is unequivocally great for the estimated 12 million American kids who can’t get enough to eat at home. There is no debate about that (which is why we should have been doing it for decades already). But what if you don’t have a financial need for school lunch? The real question—that may very well determine whether or not universal free lunch becomes a permanent part of the American education system—is: Will Nice White Parents let our kids eat school food? So far, the answer appears to be: An awful lot of us won’t. “Roughly 20 million eligible children, mostly from middle- and upper-middle-class families, continue to opt out of the national program by bringing lunch or by buying special à la carte food items not covered by the program,” wrote Jennifer Gaddis, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of The Labor of Lunch, in a New York Times op-ed from February 2020. We don’t yet have data on how the shift to free lunch will change that for this school year, so I once again turned to Instagram for more insight. In my (again, totally unscientific!) poll of 210 parents, 49 percent of parents said yep, their kids are eating the free school lunch, and 51 percent said no, they are still sending in lunchboxes. In other words: Just over half of this group of parents are paying for a meal—and investing time and labor in preparing said meal—that their children could be eating for free. I suspect the vast majority of these folks were horrified by that Wisconsin school board. These are parents who support free lunch programs, in theory, at least, for other kids. Indeed, some said they didn’t want to take free lunch away from kids who need it. But the reality is that participation rates drive this program’s funding: “When millions of families [pack lunch], their actions reduce the political will and financial resources necessary to make public school lunches better for everyone,” wrote Gaddis last year. I checked in with Gaddis yesterday and she confirmed that this is still true, even though lunch is now free. The federal government reimburses schools per student eating lunch and they reimburse at the highest rate per students eating for free, so schools can now receive the maximum subsidy.2Perhaps even more important: When lunch is free for everyone, then the kids who need free lunch aren’t stigmatized by the kids who don’t. “You can often see huge divides along income and racial lines in cafeterias between the kids who get free lunch and the kids who bring lunch from home,” notes Gaddis. “If we want to create spaces in our schools that are inclusive and welcoming for all, participation really matters. When people with the economic means opt out of school lunch, it sends the message to policy makers that this is a program they don’t really have to care about.”So why aren’t more parents—especially progressive parents—sending their kids to the lunch line? Diet culture has taught us that school lunches aren’t good enough for our kids. I asked the lunch-packers for follow-up and this lesson came through explicitly in about 14 percent of my respondents, and was implied by many more. “While the lunch is free, it’s not actually healthy and I like knowing my kids aren’t eating junk,” said one mom. In fact, school lunches are pretty darn healthy: A 2018 analysis of over 16 years of data concluded that schools “are now the single healthiest place Americans are eating.” This shift is due, in large part, to the 2010 Healthy and Hunger-Free Kids Act, championed by Michelle Obama, which overhauled school nutrition standards and changed the nutritional intake of school children in several important ways. And, as Gaddis argued in her piece, with more kids eating, school lunches could get even healthier: “The food-service director of the Austin Independent School District, Anneliese Tanner, told a local news outlet that the district could afford to serve grass-fed beef if the kids who currently opt out of the national program would eat school lunch just once a week.” (Tanner is now the director of research and assessment at the Chef Ann Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to helping schools do more from-scratch cooking.)But no, cafeteria meals likely won’t pass muster if your definition of healthy comes from diet culture. “We eat plant-based,” or, “There aren’t enough whole foods” came up a lot in my Instagram DMs. See also: “Kid says school lunch tastes like plastic,” and many similar comments equating school food with “processed food,” “fast food,” or “diner food.” And it’s not just my followers. In Royal Oaks, Michigan, parents protested when the elementary school’s free lunch included grab-and-go items like bagged Goldfish crackers and Scooby-Doo Graham Cracker Sticks. And the Chef Ann Foundation where Tanner now works had to apologize recently after posting a meme unfavorably comparing school meals to ultra-processed foods. It’s also true, as Bettina Elias Siegel reported last week (CW for o-words), that due to Covid restrictions, labor shortages, and supply chain issues, many schools have been forced to switch out hot meals for grab-and-go lunches. Gaddis acknowledges that these issues may be impacting menu composition right now: “What you’re likely to find in a typical cafeteria right now is more processed food and less scratch cooking than you would have seen pre-pandemic,” she says. And, Covid or not, many schools incorporate processed foods into their meals, both because such foods are cheap and convenient when you’re mass-producing meals (and don’t have the budget to hire experienced school cooks), and because their pre-printed nutrition labels make it easy to ensure they are meeting complex government nutritional standards. But Graham Cracker Sticks are not our enemy. Nutrition perfectionism is.As I’ve written before, the problem with processed foods isn’t their ingredient lists; it’s our culture’s dysfunctional relationship with them. Your fear of snack crackers is a big reason why your kid seems so obsessed with them. Letting kids eat these foods at school, alongside the fruits, vegetables, and other foods that school districts are also required to serve, could be a great way to lessen a child’s scarcity mindset around them.But to do that, we have to sift through the layers of classism and racism that underpin our feeling that kids eating “fast food” for lunch is proof of lazy or bad parenting. Many parents who are using school lunch this year told me that they feel guilty for taking such an “easy” way out, as if letting your child eat the same meal that another kid has no choice but to eat is being a #badmom. Meanwhile, one school lunch abstainer wrote that she has “been dreaming about packing lunches for kids 4ever ♥️.” Instagram, Pinterest, and the rise of the momfluencer has turned school-lunch packing into a cross between competitive sport and creative self-care practice. We’re flooded with images of $60 PlanetBoxes and $42 OmieBoxes, rainbow produce cut into stars and hearts, and the message that all of this is a valid measure of our mothering. But that’s only true if your definition of motherhood is almost exclusively white and upper-income. Possibly related: Around 40 percent of my followers said they were skipping school lunch because “my kid won’t eat it.” As the parent of one child with a traumatic feeding history, and another doing the typical picky preschooler thing, I absolutely feel this. But within this “picky” group, I noticed that responses ranged from “ARFID! She needs her safe foods,” to a more shrugging, “My kid doesn’t like it.” I wonder here whether it’s always the kid who doesn’t like the food, or the parent, or the kid internalizing a parent’s rigid standards. Children with true feeding disorders or other sensory challenges do need extra support and may be overwhelmed by trying to eat in a cafeteria setting. And, of course, kids with food allergies, especially life-threatening ones, may need a packed lunch to eat safely. (That group made up about 8 percent of my respondents.) But: Our more garden-variety picky eaters may get more adventurous in the cafeteria than you’ll ever see at home. Research shows that kids tend to eat a larger variety of foods when they get repeated exposures to them in a peer setting, as Sally Sampson and Natalie Digate Muth, M.D., wrote for the New York Times back in 2015. This is also another reason not to freak out about processed foods on school lunch menus; Goldfish and the like are often the familiar, predictable foods that cautious kids need to use as stepping stones and to feel empowered when navigating a new eating situation.About one-fifth of the parents in my poll said they took a hybrid approach, letting kids study weekly school lunch menus and decide which days to bring or “buy.” Gaddis and I agree that this seems like a great work-around for most picky kids because it lets them build confidence eating in a new setting with foods they like, and still encourages involvement in school meals—which benefits everyone. Some of this group even require kids to pack lunch themselves on the days they don’t want to eat the school meal, which is a rather genius way to get kids more involved in their own meal planning mental load.I also heard from a vocal minority of parents who really want to do school lunches but have opted out because of logistical issues, especially long lines that don’t leave their kids time to eat (especially in places limiting lunch periods to 15 minutes right now to reduce Covid risk). I too worry about kids who need to stand in line, eat, and get to the bathroom during this timeframe—solidarity to all the kindergarten teachers dealing with afternoon wet pants! If a lunch logistic is your deal-breaker this year, Gaddis says, “Just don’t make this your permanent decision about school lunch.” And do contact your elected officials and let them know that you want them to support the Universal School Meals Act and several other pieces of legislation pending now.So no, school lunch is not perfect. But the problems likely aren’t what you think. And it could be so much better if we started to shift away from this diet culture-fueled hierarchy of kid lunches, with cafeteria trays always on the bottom. Letting go of these standards for perfect kid lunches and perfect parenthood is hard. More than one mom told me they pack lunch because, “This way I know what food she’s offered,” or, even more bluntly, “I like the control.” But our kids will have a healthier relationship with food in general if we empower them to eat this meal without our micromanagement. Releasing some of this control can be a way to let our kids know we trust them; to encourage their curiosity; to enable more community building in cafeterias, instead of dividing kids up into those with lunchboxes and those without. This could be how we turn school meals into something different, and better. And probably, still containing Graham Cracker Sticks.Essay DiscussionSo there were several threads to the reaction to this piece that are interesting to discuss a year later. One: I heard from many parents of picky eaters and parents of kids with true feeding challenges who said that eating school lunch has been really helpful for their kids. It can be more neutral place to try new foods than the family dinner table. And because school lunches are designed to be kid-friendly, they often do feature foods that selective eaters do well with. This is not to say that school lunch will work for every selective eater – but don’t rule it out as an option full stop just because you have a picky kid. It can absolutely be a helpful tool. A lot of you also told me about the logistical issues with your school’s lunch program that make buying lunch too hard. Super short lunch times, long lines, even food shortages in many districts. That was particularly hard during the pandemic and I get it if you packed lunch for your kids under those circumstances. But I do think those of us with the privilege to pack should not check out of those issues completely. We still need to be thinking of lunch as a school community event that we all participate in and work on. But the really fascinating thing is how many comments I get—and this just happened on Instagram when I did a repost of this piece at the start of September—from people saying they can’t buy school lunch because the food isn’t healthy and is too processed or has too much sugar. This is the whole problem. We have to stop defining “healthy” as a plate full of fresh vegetables. Lunch does not need to be a salad to get a gold star. Most kids won’t even eat a salad. (Also plenty of schools serve salad!)We can define a healthy lunch as a meal that kids are able to navigate themselves, as a meal where they share food with their community, as a meal where they can get full enough and get the energy they need to learn and play the rest of the school day. All of that can come in the form of an Uncrustable. We don’t need to make this so hard. The last thing I want to talk about is what we’re doing in my house, this year, for school lunch. One thing I didn’t share when I wrote the piece last year was that my kids were attending a small private school that didn’t offer a lunch program. This was a super hard decision that we made during Covid due to my older daughter’s high risk status—and it was absolutely a decision we were able to make due to a pile of privilege. But let me tell you how much I missed the school lunch program during the two years we spent there! This year, we are so happy to be back at public school. Our school, like many schools, is no longer offering free universal lunch because the federal government program expired June 30. So we are paying $3.10 per lunch and I am happy to do it. My younger daughter buys every day and gets the exact same thing every day; Peanut butter and jelly and chocolate milk plus whatever fruit they have that day. The first day she told me she ate mango and carrots, and believe me when I say those are two foods she has never willingly eaten at home.My older daughter, who is more selective and also more independent at age 9, is studying the cafeteria menu each week and buying some days and packing her own lunch some days. I told her she could make that decision as long as she packs her lunch herself—because I know if she forgets, she can eat the cafeteria PB&J even if it’s not her favorite. (She has opinions about the thickness of their bread.) And this is working really well for her because she loves the control of picking her own lunch. We also had some good conversations about the importance of the school lunch program and the role of privilege in packing. So she is buying less frequently than her sister, but still buying at least once or twice a week and I’ll call that a win for now. Butter for Your Burnt ToastYou’re just getting my recs this week, but I’m giving you three of them! These are all things I did over Labor Day weekend, when I had my house to myself for THREE WHOLE DAYS and, as newsletter readers know, spent a lot of that time finishing my book and stress-organizing my kitchen. But that’s not all I did! I read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, and loved it. Someone on Instagram compared it to A Little Life and I got scared, but can now reassure fellow literary-trauma-avoiders that it is NOT on that scale. (But yes there is heartbreak and loss.)I went hiking with this amazing group and yes, I want to write more about that experience soon. (You can spy me here!)I watched so many episodes of the new A League of Their Own and sobbed through the last two. Fervently hoping for season 2.

This week, Corinne joins Virginia for another Ask Us Anything episode! We have a lot of thoughts about pants. So buckle up for that. We also talk about snacks. Pants and snacks, and I know, you're already in.If you'd like to support Burnt Toast, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And considering becoming a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.You can also now officially preorder Virginia's new book! Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture comes out April 25, 2023 from Henry Holt. Preorder your signed copy now from Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books.Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSWant to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.For previous Corinne episodes, start here and then go here and here. Corinne's amazing jumpsuitShould you get rid of your scale?Jeans ScienceUniversal Standard black leggingsUniversal Standard ponte pantUniversal Standard buttoned down shirt similar pink clogs to Virginia'sEileen Fisher lantern pantDraper James dressDacy Gillespiecashmere bike shortsCorinne’s Barbell Lift Off experiencethe conversation I had with SerenaCREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.Episode 62 TranscriptVirginiaI feel like we should catch up a little! I haven't talked to you, I mean, we haven't recorded one of these in a few months. We talk frequently but it's like text and email. How are you?CorinneI'm good. This summer has been a whirlwind. VirginiaYou have been all over the place, right? CorinneI have. I came out to the east coast for the summer. I've been staying with my mom and I've been spending a lot of time with family—my mom, my sister, extended family, and traveling to see lots of old friends.VirginiaThat sounds so great. I was so mad, you were in the Hudson Valley like an hour from me but I was in the final days of book revisions and we couldn’t make it happen. CorinneAnd how are you doing? You've had a busy summer as well.VirginiaI am good. It was unexpectedly extra busy because it turned out my book timeline was different than I thought it would be. But now September Virginia is so happy because this morning I turned in the revise, as opposed to when I originally thought I'd be starting the revise in September. Now I'm like, it was totally worth it because it's done.Preorder FAT TALKCorinneCongratulations!VirginiaThank you. It's so huge. It's now 400 pages in Word. It won't be a 400 page book—I don't want to terrify people. Word page counts and book page counts are different. And like 50 pages of it is just end notes, which I assume nobody reads but I'm still very obsessive about. Writing the end notes really almost ended me, but I made it. I made it through.CorinneThat's so awesome.VirginiaIt's good stuff. My kids are back in school and the book is someone else's problem for a few weeks. I'm living life. All right, should we do some listener questions? We've got a lot of good ones this time.CorinneWe do. Let's dive in. Should I read the first one? Q. How do you work with yourself when you are having one of those days when you either feel bloated, feel like you're carrying some extra weight or just feel lousy and a little bigger in your body? Does it trigger any anxiety or fatphobic thinking? If so, how do you work with yourself?I ask because as a human, I assume we all have some of these days with normal body fluctuations if we are connected with our bodies. It is a normal part of living in a body, but I tend to get really anxious and my fatphobic mind starts up when I'm having a day when I may be holding on to some extra weight.VirginiaMy first response is like, yes, I think this is how we're taught to think about our bodies. It's normal for these feelings to come up and to have this moment. But let's push back on the phrase “extra weight” a little bit. Let's be curious about that because that is sort of tricky language, right? That's the fatphobia. I have a lot of empathy, these are very real feelings that come up because you've been taught to feel this way about your body. And bodies do change. Our bodies change size throughout the month, and the year, and the seasons. And it is hard to not have that knee jerk response to it because that's what you were taught to do since you were a kid.What do you think?CorinneI'm struggling with this question. One, because I think what you're picking up on, it is coming from a very real place. And it is slightly equating “feeling bigger” with feeling lousy. I feel like the word “bloating” is like a trigger for me. What do you mean when you say “bloated?” Are your clothes uncomfortable? Are you seeing the way you look and not liking it? VirginiaDo you just need to poop? Are you constipated?CorinneAre you having trouble with mobility? Or are you like weighing yourself? I'm curious what the feeling is.VirginiaI think you're right. What is coming up? I think in this person's effort to be careful in how they're talking about this, they're not giving us all the details, which is understandable but makes it harder for us to answer your question.For me, there are some times, like a change of season, when I bring out the next season's clothes and something is tighter than I expected it to be. That is, I think, a common point where people suddenly are like, wait, did something go wrong? And then I have to reframe. If my body has changed, that is fine. It is not my body's fault. It's the pant’s problem, not mine.I also try to take a step back and ask what else is going on with me. Because often, worrying about how clothes fit is a place my brain goes with anxiety because it's got that groove worn into it. But actually, I'm anxious because I have a work meeting where I have to be on camera or be in person with people or we're gonna see friends we haven't seen in a long time. Often it's my social anxiety that manifests in body and wardrobe anxiety. And so taking it back to like, Oh, I'm just anxious about this social encounter because I'm an introvert who works from home and isn't great at seeing people. Then I can sort of keep it there versus going to the body negativity place.CorinneRight. And those two things are so linked, because anxiety makes you uncomfortable but also if your clothes physically feel weird, it can amplify it.VirginiaI think where this has gone really badly for me in the past is if I haven't taken enough time in advance to figure out what I'm going to wear to the thing and now the thing I thought I could wear is uncomfortable to wear. So now my anxiety about the thing is compounded by the fact that I feel miserable in this outfit that doesn't fit right. Then you're in this whole vortex. So one workaround is I try now to plan further out. I’m going to take author photos next month, and I'm already thinking about what I'm gonna wear so it's not the morning of author photo shoot day and nothing works.CorinneThat thing where you’re throwing everything you own…VirginiaYes, Exactly. Let's avoid the flailing and hating everything. CorinneMaybe this person just needs some soft pants.VirginiaDon’t we all just need soft pants? CorinneYeah. If you're feeling that discomfort, put on your soft pants.VirginiaI don't know if we totally answered that. CorinneI hope that didn't sound dismissive because that's not how I meant it. VirginiaWe don't want to dismiss the really real feelings that come up. But look at what's underneath it. Don't feel bad that your brain went there because you've learned to go there, but recognize that that's not where it needs to stay.CorinneAnd whatever you can do to make yourself physically feel more comfortable will probably help.VirginiaWell, on the subject of soft pants, these next questions are ones I'm very excited to talk about with you.Q. What are some of your favorite or go to “business casual” clothes outfits?Q. Fall wardrobe essentials?So I feel like we should talk about like fall clothes in general. I don't know that either of us would describe ourselves as business casual.CorinneOh man, the business casual is straight up triggering. That is a situation where I'm throwing everything in my closet on the bed and, so uncomfortable. I'm so sorry for everyone who has to try and figure that out.VirginiaYou guys can't see us but Corinne is in an adorable Target jumpsuit that we just discussed in great detail. I am in cutoff shorts and a tank top because it's really hot in my office. So, we did not go business casual for this Zoom recording CorinneOh my gosh, no. VirginiaBut I do want to give a plug for soft pants for fall. I decided after having spent months on Jeans Science as everybody knows, that I am going to try not to buy new jeans this fall. Because they will be bad. All the jeans are bad. They will inevitably be disappointing and I won't like them. So why would I spend money on them?I have three or four pairs left from Jeans Science. I tried them on all last week. Two pairs didn't fit anymore, so I threw them out immediately. But I think I still have two or three left that are fine. They're not great because there are no good jeans, but they're fine for the days when I really feel like I need jeans. And otherwise, I am embracing leggings. I got some great Universal Standard black leggings. I also got the Universal Standard ponte pant, which is a very difficult phrase to say on a podcast. CorinneI’ve always said “pont-y,” just throwing that out there.VirginiaThat could be right. It sounds like panty, but okay. Pont-ay?CorinneThere we go. Yes, say it with an accent.VirginiaOkay, so question mark on how to pronounce it. But I feel like it's like a dressier legging. It's very versatile. I just have a black. I have a black pair and I have a bright red pair. The other thing I'm really excited about for fall is I also bought—another word I can't pronounce, “chambray.” Is that how you would say that? The denim but it's the soft denim? I bought a buttoned down shirt to wear with the black leggings or the ponte pant and also like maybe my cute pink clogs (Charlotte Stone doesn’t have my exact color anymore but these are similar, also for sure wait for sales!). I'm pretty excited about this as a look for fall. Sort of transitional. Could go to a clog boot once it gets cold here. What about you? What are you wearing?CorinneWell first I want to address business casual. My business casual go to is just Eileen Fisher, whether new or secondhand. I feel like they have so much comfortable stuff that's like that “artsy” business casual. I'm a particularly huge fan of their lantern pant, which is like kind of like a wider style that like goes in at the bottom a little bit. It comes in like a million different fabrics and slightly different styles every season.VirginiaOh, I know this pant. CorinneIt’s great. Goes with everything. And comfortable! You could wear it on an airplane.VirginiaThey're kind of like pajama pants, but like a little more tailored? But not super tailored.CorinneI would also say Universal Standard also has great stuff. I used to be more of a dress-wearing business casual person and now I'm like, I don't want to wear a dress. I want to wear pants all the time.VirginiaYeah, I'm in more of a pants place, too, although I have I'm doing some shopping for dresses right now because of the author photoshoot. So I just got one from Draper James (and hat tip to Dacy Gillespie who found this for me, I’ll talk more about that soon!). It's not a super inclusive line, but they do go up to 3x, I think. Yeah. I'm very excited about it. But I haven't like worn it out in the world so I feel like I can't fully endorse it.(Update: I wore it out in the world after we recorded! To a work event! And I loved it though I did worry about sweat stains but it was okay.)But if you're preppy—and I'm from Connecticut, so I can't not be preppy sometimes—I recommend. When I was looking at Draper James, they had some really cute tops that I think would certainly qualify as business casual, particularly if paired with a ponte pant or linen pant. Dresses are tricky because then you also have to make decisions about tights.CorinneAnd shoes. I don't like the shoes/dress situation because I don't want to wear heels ever. VirginiaGod no. Yeah. I left women's magazines for a reason and not having to wear heels is one of the top reasons.CorinneCan you wear it with Blundstones? That's my question. VirginiaYou can totally wear cute dresses with Blundstones. That's a great look.CorinneBut might not be business casual. VirginiaWell, as we established up front, we do not have the credentials to speak very well to business casual. But I do think a dress with tights and Blundstones could work in a lot of more creative corporate settings. If you work at a bank, I don't think I can help you. I mean, I think a jumpsuit can totally work too for business casual. I mean, as you are proof right now. I have one from Athleta that's like a nylon-y fabric. (Guys I lied, it’s from Target and they don’t have it anymore, sigh.) It kind of reminds me a parachute fabric. But I feel like I can dress it up a little if I need to. Jumpsuits get tricky in the winter with shoes, at least here on the East Coast where you don't want bare ankles. It always comes back to the whole bare ankles thing. California has really done a number on us.CorinneSo true. I will say one thing I've been wearing a lot in this cold damp summer thing we're having is I got a pair of cashmere bike shorts.VirginiaWait, what?CorinneFrom Naadam. Do you know that brand? VirginiaI do not!CorinneThey're so great for that sort of humid, cool, but it's summer weather. Could maybe work for fall in some places?VirginiaThis is reminding me of that old photo of Princess Diana wearing a blue sweatshirt and white shorts. People post it on the one day a year where the weather is appropriate for this combination. But in Maine that’s like a lot of time actually?CorinneI love long sleeve top and shorts. These are also very good for if you're “feeling bloated” because they're just very soft and very stretchy comfortable.VirginiaYes. I am excited about this. I also want to know if they make like a longer pant? I have long wanted a pair of leggings made out of sweater material for winter. And J. Crew sells them but they're not size inclusive enough for me.CorinneYou should definitely check out Naadam. They go up to a 3x but it's a very generous 3x. They definitely have a jogger style. And they have a lot of sales, so if you're interested, I would subscribe to their emails and wait for them to be like 40% off.VirginiaI don't know if a knit cashmere jogger counts as business casual. If it doesn't, that's not a world I want to live in.CorinneYou should be able to wear cashmere pants anywhere. VirginiaYou're so fancy! CorinneAlways in fashion. VirginiaAll right. The next question is:Q: Can we have an update on Corinne’s Barbell Lift Off experience, if you're comfy and want to talk about it?CorinneYes. I mean, the update is that I am not doing it. Basically, as I mentioned, I came out to the East Coast and once I got to my mom's house, I just kind of gave up. Partially because I was at the point where I needed to actually obtain weights.VirginiaYou'd progressed beyond the broomstick. Which is exciting! Congratulations!Corinne I mean, yes. I just got like, overwhelmed by having to get stuff. But it is on my radar to restart when I get back to New Mexico and can have my own space and my own dumbbells or whatever.VirginiaI think this also just speaks to how so many workouts are location and schedule specific. And then we beat ourselves up—and I'm not saying you beat yourself up, I hope you didn't. But there's this tendency to be like, “I'm gonna do this thing.” And then you don't do the thing and you might feel bad, but it's like, the thing stopped working. The thing was great for that month and then your needs changed. And maybe you're doing something else or maybe this isn't a month where exercise makes sense. And that's cool. That's life. CorinneTotally. Yeah, and I think in general in summer, I would rather just go outside.VirginiaTotally. I agree. Next someone would like to know:Q: Favorite Snacks!CorinneSo many, so many ideas.VirginiaYou just took a pause to just prepare yourself for that.CorinneI mean, hard to know where to start. Big topic. Especially this time of year when like I feel like all the best snacks are like seasonal fruit.VirginiaIt is a good fruit time of year.CorinneMy first answers were peaches and cucumbers. But my favorite grocery store or roadtrip snack would be Cheetos probably. Or like any cheese cracker. Goldfish!VirginiaYou know me and Extra Toasty Cheez-Its. I feel like I don't even really need to answer this one because I've discussed this. CorinneDo your kids like Cheez-Its?VirginiaOne of my kids does, one of my kids doesn't like any crackers. I know. I'm just trusting that she's going to come through this. She likes potato chips. I'm not saying she doesn't have any crunchy carbs in her life. But she's a potato chip, tortilla chip type kid. Not so much a cracker type person. CorinneInteresting. VirginiaBut yes, Extra Toasty Cheez-Its for me. The Ghirardelli Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips, I like to eat by the handful. That's a snack often when I'm writing and I feel like my brain just needs a steady drip of glucose to keep me going. What else am I snacking on lately? We make a lot of the Ghirardelli brownie mix. That is very popular in my house. A brownie is a delightful after school snack. It's very popular. I feel like I'm on a little bit of a snacking rut to be honest. I feel like I always give the same answers. (San Fran people, sorry, I know, I mispronounce Ghirardelli every time!!!)CorinneI was gonna say, in a few weeks I'm driving back to New Mexico and if anyone has any car snack suggestions, I'm always looking for stuff.VirginiaThat's a great Friday thread. Your best car snacks. Or anytime snack. Do you want to ask the next question?CorinneYes.Q. Would you put your pet on a diet if your vet said it was necessary?VirginiaThis one, I had a lot of emotions.CorinneSame. This was just hitting a little too close to home.VirginiaSo we did have a cat—this is a fatphobic story, but it is also a little bit funny, and it's about a cat, so I'm giving that setup. When we lived in the city and our cat was an apartment cat, so his world was quite small because we lived in like a 600 square foot apartment. And I took him to the vet and the tech lifted him out of the carrier and said “Jesus Christ!” because he was—he was amazing. He was very chunky and delicious and I loved him so much. But I did feel that she fat shamed my cat. And they did suggest a diet. And I don't think we did the diet.But we ended up moving out of the city to a house where then he had a bigger space to run around and he did slim down. But no, I didn't alter how I fed him because we had two cats and it was gonna be too hard. I feel like they are good intuitive eaters. I don't want to mess with that. What about you?CorinneI have a dog named Bunny. When I got her, from an Albuquerque city shelter, she was fully grown and 38 pounds and now she's close to 60 pounds. When I got her I took her to the vet, they were like “she's the perfect weight. She looks great.” And I was like, “Are you joking? She looks like a lollipop.” Like, her huge Pitbull head on like a little scrawny body. So I just fed her normally and she grew to be a normal size. And when I take her to the vet now, they're also like, “she's the perfect weight.” I’m like, she weighs almost twice as much, but whatever. So recently I took her to the vet because she's been having some issues with UTIs and they gave me this whole explanation of how—I don't know. Basically like if dogs’ vaginas get too fat, urine can pool in weird places, and then they get UTIs a lot. 1VirginiaUm, wait. This cannot be a thing. Corinne I mean, I don't know. But so I have recently been faced with a question of whether I would put her on a diet to try and help with her UTI issue.VirginiaHow are you feeling?CorinneI have tried to gently cut back her food a little bit. I have no idea if it's made any difference or effect. It's just such an interesting question because I also feel like people are so weird about pet weights. VirginiaYeah, it feels like not a very evidence based statement. “Her vagina got fat.”CorinneI mean, I'm doing a little bit of interpretation.VirginiaPeople have asked me this question over and over, and I keep being like, Oh, I'll do a reported piece on pet health. And then I keep not doing it. But now you're making me feel like maybe there's a story here? I also wonder how much of it is the vet's own anti-fat bias and making judgments about owners. You know what I mean? I want you to say to that vet just like Ragen Chastain teaches us: What treatment would you give to this dog in a thin body? Let's start there.CorinneYeah, interesting question. It's one of those situations where people will say stuff to pets or about pets that they would never think of saying to people. I mean, my dog also gets a ton of treats because she's reactive and I use hot dogs to train her. So I've always just been like, who cares? Give her as many hot dogs as she wants. VirginiaI do feel like I would interrogate your vet on this a little bit. Like, how much of it is the weight? How much of it is them wanting to prescribe that versus medication? And obviously, that's complicated. It's hard to give pets medication. So maybe this feels easier in some ways to control. The quality of life matters, too! And hot dogs are great. And also managing your dog's reactivity matters. So yeah, that's tricky.CorinneAlso, having pets “fixed” also really changes their body. So it sometimes feels like we're getting pets. We're changing their hormone profile. We're controlling how much they eat and how much they exercise. VirginiaAnd then we're getting mad at them for being fat. CorinneYeah.VirginiaSocial determinants of health for pets matters, too! Okay. If anyone listening has good anti-diet vet sources let me know! Part of why I haven't reported that is because I can't figure out how to find the counter perspective. I'm sure the mainstream veterinarian view is that animals weights should be managed. So if anyone knows someone taking a different approach, send me resources if you have them.CorinneAll right. This is another good question for you.Q. I'm the mom of a three and a half year old who is in a major “why” phase. I've read from you and others that it's not advisable to talk deeply about nutrition with kids before around middle school age and to avoid labeling foods as “good,” “bad,” “healthy,” etc. My kid is very curious about why he can't eat chocolate and candy exclusively. In his own words, “they taste much better to me so that's what I want to fill my tummy with.” I don't know how to answer this question without talking about nutrition. So far, i've tried to place value on eating a variety of foods, something like “different foods do different things in our body. So it's good to eat a lot of different things.” Do you have any other tips for good language to use here? My major concern is not his sugar consumption, but rather being able to respond to his curiosity honestly and accurately for his age.VirginiaI like the language that this person is using: “Different foods do different things in our body.” I also often say, “Well, we couldn't eat just broccoli all day either.” The point is you can't eat any one food. That way you're neutralizing it. Like you can't eat chocolate all day, you can eat broccoli all day, these foods are equivalent.I do think, though, you might want to do a gut check on the fact that your kid is asking this question enough that you are now asking me about it. That says to me that this kid might be fixating on treats, which suggests there may be some unconscious or not restriction of the treats? So, another way around this is to let your child eat chocolate and candy exclusively. And let them figure out how that feels.Because nothing really bad will happen if your child eats nothing but chocolate for a day, right? Unless they're allergic. Like, they're maybe gonna have a stomachache and maybe poop weird because they only ate one food, but nothing bad's gonna happen in a day or two of this. So maybe declaring a chocolate day, and just go with it and see what happens. And probably not much happens, other than, if you do this maybe for a day and maybe once a week, maybe in some regular fashion, they should, over time, become less fixated on the idea of wanting to eat only chocolate and candy. So that's something you can play with.I would definitely make sure you have times in their day, like maybe it's after school snack or dessert after dinner, separate from whatever you eat at dinner, where they can determine the quantity of the treat. CorinneThat's a good answer.Q. I'm not sure this is the right place for this question. But it's happening in my life. And I don't know what to do. A friend, not in my inner circle of friends, but in the next ring, so very important, has gotten Lyme disease after having COVID. He is treating it by fasting. I feel as though he and his wife are headed down the rabbit hole of eating disorders. As a person who loves them, I feel like there's something I could say or do that would at least give them the heads up. But I do not know what skillful action I could take.VirginiaWell, first, just really sorry. That sounds scary and stressful. And Lyme disease, when it's really severe, is horrific. So I'm super sorry you are going through this and your friend is going through this. I definitely understand your concern. Experimenting with diet in order to treat a medical condition can be a really fraught thing to do. There's a lot of wellness culture around Lyme. There's a lot of practitioners that push dietary restrictions without necessarily having evidence on their side. Would you agree with that?CorinneI would agree with that.VirginiaSo it is worrying that your friend may be getting some advice that's not evidence-based. What's also concerning is most likely whoever's encouraging them to do this has not screened them for risk of eating disorder, has not talked about the ramifications of it. On the flip side, it's his struggle. You want to center his experience, you don't want to come in and be like, “Don't do that. That's a terrible idea.” Because that's not supportive or helpful. I think I would just try to be the person who makes a space for him to talk about how it's hard. This kind of reminds me of the conversation I had with Serena in the office hours episode that just aired a couple of weeks ago. When you're told you have to do something for your health, all too often we don't make any space for the conversation about what else is it going to do to you? How is it going to mess up your relationship with food? How is it gonna impact your mental health? So, just being someone who makes space for that, I think could be helpful.CorinneMy ideas around this were basically, first: Do you need to protect yourself? If you need to be like, “I don't want to be around this,” then take care of your own stuff. I feel like the thing that's really hard to do but might be helpful would just to say how it's affecting you. Like, “hearing you talk about this is making me feel anxious or I'm having anxiety hearing about this,” or something like that.VirginiaYes. I mean, it's hard when your friend is the one who's going through the really hard thing and you don't want to center your emotions over his. But I think just expressing concern like, “That sounds so hard. How are you feeling mentally about it?” Or “In the past when I've tried something, I've tried something like that and it really fucked with my head and just checking out how are you feeling?”CorinneI think sometimes when this stuff comes up in relationships, we think that if we give enough research and evidence to someone that they'll come around and agree with us. My experience has been that that doesn't usually work. So either they're gonna figure it out themself or maybe not, who knows? VirginiaI mean, that's the other thing. You may be feeling like it's your responsibility to save them. And it's not. If this is a rabbit hole, they go down, it's not your fault.You can express concern, you can be a place for them to put the feelings about why it's hard, and maybe help them process that. But if that's not something that they want right now, they may just be so laser focused on trying to manage these symptoms and feeling like they have to try everything to do that even though, again, I don't think the evidence around fasting and Lyme recovery is there. Yeah, I think that would just create more tension and create more distance between you when I think your goal is to maintain connected to this person.CorinneIt's a really tough situation.CorinneQ. What's one topic or piece of research, you have to cut from the book that you want to tell us about?VirginiaI love this question. I'm not going to tell you too much because these are all things I'm hoping to turn into features for the newsletter. So, I don't want to give away the story, but just a little teaser. One story I'm really interested in that I couldn't fit into the book is how BMI cut offs are used to ban fat parents from adopting, especially in certain countries.CorinneI hate that. VirginiaYeah. So that's a story I want to dig into some more and find out more with what's going on about it. And I say that also understanding that adoption is like this hugely complicated topic. And there are lots of feelings on all sides, but at the very least, we could take weight out of the conversation that would be cool.The other one I'm really dying to do is a story on co-parenting when your ex is really deeply enmeshed in diet culture. There is some stuff on this in the book. I think there's so so much to say about that topic. I should say, I'm going to start looking for sources very soon so feel free to email me if one of these is like, “Oh, that's my life,” because I would love to talk to you.And then the last one, I know I've been promising to do this forever, it really is going to happen this fall: Plus size clothes for kids. I'm getting into it. I didn't have space for that in the book either and I also felt like that was a story that it wouldn't age well. If I do find any good brands, we can't trust brands to still be good a year later, as we all know from Old Navy. So I didn't want to put brands in the resource section of the book. But I think it would be a great newsletter piece. So those are three I'm excited about.CorinneI'm excited about those too.Q. Curious what productivity methods work for each of you, especially as writers slash editors, stuff like writing at a certain time of day for a certain amount of time, special email answering strategies, et cetera. I love hearing about how people organize their days.VirginiaThis is a fun question. Do you want to go first?CorinneYes, although I feel like my advice will not be helpful. My advice is that I find it really helpful to do a bunch of phone work in my bed before I get up, which is just the opposite of every productivity thing. VirginiaIt is, but I love it. CorinneI do some work on Instagram, so @SellTradePlus and some social media stuff. I find just doing that before I've even gotten up and had breakfast or caffeine makes me feel like I'm on top of it. VirginiaBecause those are tasks, you just want to blow out of the way and you've done it and you can start your day feeling like you've gotten stuff done.I mean, my strategies are not dissimilar. I don't do the in bed thing because I try to keep my phone out of my bedroom at night. Because when I don't, I stay up too late and it ruins my life. But I'm a fan of the early morning work hours which I've talked about. Before my family is awake and before I'm getting emails and stuff. I often get a lot done between 6 and 7 am. Post coffee, I do need coffee and breakfast first, before I can be a remotely functional human being.I also am trying to do more batch working. I feel like that's a trendy concept but it's kind of resonating with me. Because now that the book is mostly done, like the newsletter work, because that's like the bulk of my work week, is very discrete tasks like research a newsletter, record a podcast, prep for a podcast, and so I did map out all those tasks. Wait, I'm gonna show you something and you're either gonna be mortified for me or think this is amazing.CorinneThat's beautiful. VirginiaThis is a piece of my children's construction paper with many colored post-it notes. It is color coded. The orange is editing, like getting the next day's newsletter ready. Pink is writing or researching newsletters, and blue is all the podcast stuff. And they're blocks of time of when I'm doing stuff. I'm trying to mostly record podcasts on Wednesdays now because when I'm recording a podcast any old day of the week that kind of throws off like when do I need to prep, if I'm trying to also write that day, and then I lose a block of time anyway.My other suggestion—this is also a batch working thing—is emails that don't require an urgent response I put in a folder called “Friday.” And every Friday morning, I just go through and deal with all those emails at once. So it's not the death by a thousand cuts where you're trying to answer lots of emails throughout the workday. There are surprisingly a lot of things that I’ve found can wait till Friday. Some of it is like life stuff, like make a doctor's appointment or whatever, sending invoices, or I don't even know. There's so many things that every Friday it's like, “Surprise! What's in the Friday folder?” All that stuff that is not that huge of a time suck, but it takes you out of whatever else you're trying to do for three to fifteen minutes. I like to deal with it all at once.CorinneI love that tip. What do you use to do that? Do you use Gmail or Outlook?VirginiaYeah, I just have a Gmail label and I set it up so it's the top third of my inbox, but I close it. So the rest of the week, I don't see those emails. And I just throw stuff in. And then on Fridays, I open it and just race down them all.CorinneWhen you're done you just delete them?VirginiaYeah, or file them if it’s something I need to keep. But yeah, I take them out of the Friday admin folder. So yeah, you feel very accomplished because then it's empty. You did it all.CorinneThat's a really good idea. VirginiaYeah. And you don't obviously have to do Friday because your schedule might be different. I don't work a full day on Fridays because that's my life day when I go to the grocery store and have the doctor's appointments and run errands. So like, it makes sense to like have a chunk of that Friday morning be dealing with all those thingsCorinne Totally. Yeah. VirginiaOh, this is a very interesting one.Q. I'd love to hear your thoughts on Sober September and if/how you think it intersects with diet culture and restriction.I have two friends doing it now and a part of me completely understands why they want to drink less and have a healthier relationship with alcohol. Drinking less can help people feel better and I want to be supportive. But another part of me feels uncomfortable with the restrictive nature of the campaign, especially when one friend is saying “drinking less is also good because it cuts out sugars, which are the real culprit for my body.” That text made me so sad and I honestly didn't know how to respond, so I didn’t. I wanted to send them the Comfort Food episode on sugar not being addictive, but it feels pushy. So I listened to it as a way to calm myself down instead.I don’t want to be the person who’s always chiming in with “hey, that’s diet culture talking and restriction is the bigger issue here!” bc people don’t love that, haha, and I know everyone is on their own journey, but I’m struggling to be supportive of the pursuit to cut out a substance that can actually be harmful to your health (unlike sugar & food), bc it feels like it’s part of the same old diet culture/healthism scam.For some context, I drink, and while I don't think it’s excessive, I do sometimes take breaks, so I get that impulse to cut back (I also wonder why I do it). But I kind of hate public campaigns for this kind of thing— It’s like an ice bucket challenge for restriction and my eyes can’t help but rolling. Any thoughts you have on this newish campaign to abstain from alcohol (for one month— to reset! To cleanse your body! To test your willpower! And then you just go back to drinking for the rest of the year…?) would be welcome. Thanks for all the work you do, Virginia & Corinne! I’m so incredibly grateful for this community. <3Oh, this is a big question. CorinneI know. This one is so complicated.VirginiaSo, I actually wrote a piece for Medium a couple years ago about the whole sober-curious, dry January phenomenon. I started out with the same skepticism. I was like these feel like diets, this feels weird. I also have people in my life who struggle with addiction and who are sober. So I know what like “real sobriety”—that's sort of a judgy way to put it—but I've seen people get sober. I know how hard that is, and what a huge accomplishment and how necessary and life saving it is for a lot of folks. And so the experiment-y, trendy way of doing it just felt sort of insulting to me, to people who are doing this really hard work. So I get that.But then I interviewed a bunch of really smart people for that piece, including Lisa Du Breuil, who was on that Comfort Food episode. She had a much more generous framing that really changed the way I thought about it. Basically, she was like, “It's an opportunity to be curious about your relationship with alcohol. It can be harm reduction.” For some people the idea of getting sober be really daunting. And taking a break and seeing how you feel can be really useful to people.She saw it quite differently as from a diet, I think because alcohol is such a different substance than sugar, right? I mean, it is addictive. Sugar is not physically addictive. It is not necessary for life in the same way that sugar is. There's just all these distinctions. And so that made me feel like I totally agree the marketing around it is really irritating, and there's often a lot of diet-y language and like this sort of add sugarphobia gets in there, but if someone wants to take a break, and see how they feel, that can be a really useful thing. So I ended up being more pro- it than I expected.CorinneI think I more come from the Lisa perspective that it could be useful to see what's going on. But it also sounds like in this case, your friends maybe have more diet culture-y reasons for doing it. Are you doing it to explore your relationship with alcohol or are you doing it because you don't want the calories or something like that? And those two things are not necessarily separate. VirginiaI think, too, a lot of it depends on what you do with the information. So if you're counting down the days, and then going to the bar like we're free from the Dry January or sSober September, that's sort of revealing about your relationship with alcohol. And it does imply you did more of the “diet until your cheat day” approach, which we know is not a helpful strategy for anything. I think if people don't use it as an opportunity to look at the relationship, then that is more troubling.I just think when it comes to addiction, we need so many tools in our toolbox. If taking a break and thinking about it, even if you then decide, “Nope, I'm going back,” and maybe this is the first step of many towards a path towards true sobriety or maybe you are someone who doesn't need true sobriety, but this helps you figure out what you do need, that can be good.CorinneYeah, it is really complicated. I also don't know if binge drinking or heavy drinking is usually in response to restriction in the same way that binge eating might be? Just something to think about. I drink a lot less as I've gotten older because it makes me feel horrible, which I think is kind of an intuitive response to alcohol, but it can be hard to listen to that. VirginiaYeah, taking a month off, I think it can be a chance to both physically and emotionally see. Like seeing how you feel in social situations without it, seeing how you feel in your workday. There's so many ways that it can be interesting to understand your life without that if thats something that's in your life in a big way.I guess another thing I want to say is, I think it is important to classify alcohol differently from sugar. Because if we don't, we're kind of grouping them together and that's the diet culture thing, to frame sugar as addictive. And I think that's something you can push back on with your friends. Like, it's not really about the sugar. CorinneThat comment is definitely troubling.VirginiaI would certainly be like, “I think if you're trying to restrict sugar, we know where that will go. That won’t work for most of us. And the people it does work for usually works in dangerous ways.” That's quite different and it's not a necessary restriction the way for some folks alcohol is a necessary restriction.I really also liked Jessica Lahey, who's the author of The Addiction Inoculation: Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence, I liked her approach to it. She talked about how taking breaks was helpful for her in the lead up to becoming sober as a way of understanding her relationship.The last question is a fun one we'll wrap up with.Q. I'm curious how you all Virginia and Corinne met and became friends.Oh, sweet. We met because Corinne applied to be my assistant, right? We didn't know each other before that.CorinneNo, I was a Burnt Toast subscriber and I saw that you were hiring someone.VirginiaAnd it was meant to be.CorinneIt's worked out great for me.VirginiaLike we said, we still have not met in person and I'm very excited for that to happen eventually. But yes, we are now buddies and in all of the different computer ways you can be friends. In our first conversation, I was like, “Oh, she's who I want.” We also figured out much, much later—so this wasn't a nepotism thing at all—that Corinne went to college with my sister. Although I think at slightly different times?CorinneYes. I don't think I knew your sister, but I did go to Smith.VirginiaIt's a very cool thing about working online in this way that you get to know people. You're in New Mexico, I'm in New York, I don't think our paths would have crossed otherwise.CorinneMaybe you can do a book event in New Mexico.VirginiaThat would be amazing. That would be really fun.ButterCorinneWhen I got out to the East Coast and was starting to work at my mom's house, I was working at this little desk upstairs with a window open. And there was a bird screaming at me. It was driving me freaking crazy, despite being a very beautiful, warbly noise. Yes, so lovely, but it was driving me nuts. And it was so loud. So I downloaded this app, and I'm curious if you know about this, or have this. Merlin?VirginiaOh, I know about that.CorinneOkay, so it's an app, like a bird watching / listening app. So you download it and then you download a pack that lets you like identify birds by their call. It's kind of like Shazam for birds. You can you just turn it on and press a button and it will like identify the birds like as they're singing, which is really cool. So yeah, being in a more nature-y setting, I've been really enjoying just using Merlin to listen to all the birds that are around me. VirginiaAnd what kind of bird was it? CorinneIt was a robin. An evil, evil robin.VirginiaThey can be kind of bossy. Big personality.CorinneYeah, and now just a few months later they’re not here at all. So it was maybe some kind of mating or defending their nest situation. But yeah, the robins have died down and we've moved on to, I don't know, blue jays or something. VirginiaMy mom is a huge birdwatcher, so she uses that app all the time. And she taught my daughter how to use it. And last weekend actually when I was on a hike with my local body liberation hiking club we whipped out Merlin to identify some warbler that we all were excited to hear and it was this great little moment.CorinneI guess if you're a bird watcher you probably already have it but if you're not a bird watcher it's still really fun.VirginiaLike you don't have to learn all the bird calls, that feels hard to me. I can barely tell like three bird calls apart that I've mastered over like 41 years of being told about bird calls. My recommendation is sort of dorky but I'm very excited about it. It’s these little—I'm holding it up—food storage containers that I just got. Isn’t that the cutest thing? CorinneThe cutest thing I've ever seen. It's like a small, round container in like a beautiful light blue collar with little windows on the side.VirginiaOkay, so people who are parents may have encountered Life Factory, which is a very expensive and very adorable line of baby bottles and they’re glass, but they have like a silicone overlay with little holes in it. For a while they did food storage containers and they don't seem to be doing them anymore. I held on to my Life Factory bottles for years past my children using bottles, because they were just so cute. Literally, I'm just letting the last two go and my children are nine and almost five.So then I was cleaning out my Tupperware drawer last weekend, which is something I just wrote an essay about. And we needed to replace some of our food storage containers because they were done. And so I found this brand called Ello at Target. They make bigger sizes too. They make both plastic and glass with the silicone overlay. They're not that expensive. This is the size I'm using for my kids snacks, like they take like yogurt or fruit in it. Actually, I had it on my desk with my chocolate chips earlier. It’s really delightful they come in so many cute colors.I feel like this is like peak white mom recommendation and I'm sorry, but I love them so much. CorinneYeah, they look great. VirginiaWell, Corinne. I think we did an episode! Thank you for being here. This was super fun.CorinneYeah, it was.VirginiaDo you want to remind people where to find you and follow your work?CorinneOh, yes, you can find me mostly on Instagram @SellTradePlus, where I am posting people's plus size clothes for you to buy. And my personal Instagram which is @SelfieFay where you can see my dog.Thanks so much for listening to the Burnt Toast podcast! If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and leave us a rating or review. It really helps folks find the show. You can also consider a paid subscription to the Burnt Toast newsletter! It’s just $5/month or $50 for the year. You get a ton of cool perks, like commenting privileges, the Burnt Toast Book Club, and our awesome Friday Thread discussions. You also help keep this an ad and sponsor-free space, and enable me to pay podcast guests for their time and labor. ---Corinne here: I did not do a great job explaining this, but Bunny has a somewhat recessed vulva, so the vet’s explanation was that extra body fat in the pelvic area can sometimes exacerbate the condition by creating extra crevices or folds which can then get irritated or infected.

This week, Virginia chats with Chelsea Conaboy, author of an amazing new book, Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood.If you'd like to support Burnt Toast, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And considering becoming a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space. BUTTER & OTHER LINKSWant to come on Virginia's Office Hours? Please use this form.Chelsea's NYT Op-ed: Maternal Instinct Is a Myth That Men CreatedChelsea's chapter book read-aloud picks: The Wild Robot, The Wild Robot Escapes and (strong co-sign from Virginia) Dory FantasmagoryVirginia's Instagram Gardening Content.CREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.Episode 61 TranscriptVirginiaHi Chelsea! Why don't we start by having you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work?ChelseaI'm a longtime newspaper journalist. I was a reporter and editor for a long time and for the past few years I've been a freelancer writing a lot about public health, in its broadest definition, and health policy. And I'm a mom of two kids, ages five and seven.VirginiaWe are here to talk about your new book, Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood. I should, full disclosure, note that Chelsea and I share a publisher and editor. So we were set up as author friends in that way, but I would be asking you to be on the podcast regardless because the book is fantastic. And just exactly the kind of conversation we need to be having and that I love having here. So, the title is Mother Brain, but you're very clear from the get go that you take a more inclusive definition of that concept. So talk a little bit about who you're speaking to in this book and also how gender and biology impact this idea of the “Mother Brain.”ChelseaI'm glad we're starting here, it's really important. A parent is anyone who commits their time and energy to caring for children. And there are different mechanisms for how we get to a parental brain depending on whether we're gestational parent or not, but we arrive at very similar places regardless. The one key point that I make over and over in this book is that it's experience that matters most. Time and attention are the things that shape the brain. I wanted to get at how not only have we created such an incomplete understanding of what “mommy brain” is, as something that undermines women, but we've also oversimplified the idea of who gets to do this, whose biology determines them to be really good caregivers. And the answer is everyone. Everyone who commits themselves to this work is changed by it at a neurobiological level.VirginiaWe think of that as a modern invention that (some?) men now take an active role in caregiving and that nonbinary and trans folks can be parents. But I loved how you talked in the book about how this has actually always been happening. It's a core thing that distinguishes humans from other species, that we've always had this idea that everyone can be a caregiver.ChelseaIt's really ancient. It predates humans in the sense that the circuitry for caregiving is this fundamental evolutionary lever that shapes social structures of species across time. It's why we have such a diversity of parenting structures across animals, and of fathering. But in humans, it became important in the way that it wasn't for other primates before us, because human mothers started having babies closer together, and human babies couldn't rely only on their mothers to take care of them. So there were other adults that stepped in and kind of allowed the species to flourish the way it did, and created the hypersociality of the human brain. That is rooted in the idea that mothers couldn't do it all, that other adults had to help.VirginiaAnd not necessarily just female adults. We can think more comprehensively about gender with this, too, right?ChelseaI mean, it was actually thought that it was probably grandmothers who were like the original helpers. Grandmothers who lived a little bit past their reproductive years started helping and allowed their daughters to have more kids more quickly. But the idea is also that they passed on their willingness to engage and be captured by their babies. And that became a human trait, it enabled what is referred to as “alloparenting,” or other parenting, that it's not just mothers, anyone can do it.VirginiaFascinating. And such an important part of the conversation when we talk about how motherhood is portrayed now as this solo operation of self sacrifice.ChelseaIt was never meant to be that.VirginiaLet's talk a little more about some of the popular culture misinterpretations. I mean, we hear about terms like “mommy brain,” as you said, that serves to undermine women. We also talk a lot about maternal instincts. I was thinking, reading your book, that I'm planning to give it to my father-in-law.1 Because an anecdote he loves to tell is how his wife would always wake up for the crying babies and he would sleep through it. And he always framed this to me as like, “It's just the mother's instinct! You'll hear the baby cry before your husband will.” And, “That's just the mother's instinct to just be tuned into the baby that way.” So can you debunk that for me, please?ChelseaI mean, it's possible that she did hear it more than he did because she had thousands of nights of practice of getting up and doing it. Sometimes she probably woke up before the baby even cried because she knew that they were going to be hungry soon because she had the practice. You know, experience matters. So it became part of how her parental brain worked. Also, maybe because she couldn't rely on her husband to get up, too, so it was up to her.I mean, maternal instincts are a really tricky thing to talk about in some ways. It's kind of like a comforting idea for some people to feel like we have this maternal intuition that will get us through the hard stuff. The issue that I have with it is how we arrive at this idea that the maternal instinct, as it sounds like your father in law might say, is innate and automatic and uniquely female. That is a myth. It's just not true. The parental brain is something that takes time to develop. It's not automatic. It's something that grows in us, and it can be really grueling, especially at the beginning. And it keeps growing and changing as we grow and change. And it's a major transformation. And it's one that needs time and support and attention to go well. And it's one that comes with real risks, too. The idea of “maternal instinct” ignores all of that. It was written into science by men who held fast to these religious beliefs around womanhood and who also had a stated interest in compelling women, especially white well off women, to have more babies. There were feminists at that time, in the early part of the 20th century, who were saying, “You know, this is a ruse. We know that what you're trying to do here is to make it look easy, and it's not easy.”VirginiaOne of the things I took away from your book is just like, it's so comforting to realize I’m not alone in that experience of expecting to have the baby arrive and just immediately know what to do, and then realizing you have no fucking clue what to do. It's so hard, that transition that a lot of us go through. You can end up feeling like it's something you did wrong and that it's your fault for not tapping into this more immediate sense of maternal wisdom or whatever. ChelseaI mean, that's why I wrote this book. That's how I felt when my son was born in 2015. I was just completely blindsided, especially by the intensity of the worry I felt for him and the complete lack of certainty that I knew what to do, or that I could even figure it out. And how consuming that feeling was and my complete lack of words to describe it. I mean I went looking for them and really went down the rabbit hole of the of the brain research and found a completely different story than the one I feel like I had been fed.Virginia I want to circle back to what you were just talking about with male scientists creating this narrative, because I was fascinated by your reporting on the history of scientific research on motherhood, and on parenting advice. I think of parenting content as another modern invention, but clearly not. Men have been telling women how to parent for centuries, and yet, doing so little of the actual parenting work. How do you make sense of that? How has it done a disservice to all parents?ChelseaI think this has a lot to do with the rise of the expert. In 1877, Charles Darwin published a journal about his own son's development, and that kind of launched the field of child development. Following his example, lots of women started forming child study societies documenting their own children's growth and sharing what they learned. Very soon after that, they were told that they couldn't be trusted for this work that their own maternal instincts made it impossible for them to be objective observers.VirginiaWow.ChelseaAnd at the same time, medicine and science was really walled off to women. So instead, we got this long string of men publishing books about child rearing. Some were better than others. Some were absurd. My favorite is John Watson in, I think. 1928, telling women to put their kids in a hole in the backyard from the time they were born and to avoid kissing them at all costs.VirginiaI think I wrote “holy fuck” in the margins on that part. He was like, “Just put your baby in a sandpit?”ChelseaYes, yes. And I mean, that book sold tens of thousands of copies in its first months and it really influenced parenting for about a decade. It's really laughable, but then sometimes I think, well, some of the parenting advice we get today is no less laughable? It's just the landscape is different now. Things can be critiqued in real time, there's more diversity of ideas, there are more women and nonbinary parents giving the advice, but we still definitely have this sense that good mothers produce good children and that if we just Google enough, we'll find the answers. And that's almost never true.I think the disservice that this causes is really the anxiety that it creates in us all and the judgment. And, how that can deflect from what we really need and what our kids need, which is connection. They need our our time and attention and also a community of adults around them who can connect with them as well. VirginiaI mean, there's a great parallel with diet culture here, which is always where my brain goes. It's ignoring the fact that you can be a really “good” mother, but if you can't afford rent or you don't have childcare, you know, these larger structural issues that we just don't have to deal with, if we're too busy telling parents the one thing you have to do to have a healthy baby is co-sleep or put your child in a dirt hole or whatever the trend.I was thinking about it, too, and I was like, this dirt hole thing could totally become some new Instagram parenting trend. Like, “free range!” It has sort of gentle parenting vibes of, “just put up a Montessori gate” or “use a floor bed.”ChelseaChild-led sandpit exploration.VirginiaOh my God. That's a hashtag. That's great. I do want to talk a bit more about the brain chemistry piece of it, because that's obviously a big focus of the book. How parenting changes our brain in these important and necessary-for-the-good-of-society ways is very interesting. Talk a little bit about what happens, on a fundamental level to our brains. What about these brain changes surprised you the most?ChelseaThe changes to the parental brain are fundamentally adaptive. I think that's an important place to start because it's so counter to the narrative we often talk about with mothers and brains. They occur because this new role is just dramatically different than what we, at least the vast majority of us, have been in before. We become wholly responsible for the survival of a tiny, nonverbal, human who is vulnerable, and who doesn't have the brain development yet to regulate themselves and their own physiology.So at first, the parental brain changes in ways to make us really hyper responsive. We talk a lot about the dramatic shifts in hormones that happen during pregnancy and what they mean for our bodies and childbirth. But that talk typically ends at baby blues and the sense that for most people, things sort of settle out after a few weeks. When in reality, this flood of hormones primes the brain for this period of plasticity or malleability, so that babies, who are these powerful stimuli, can go to work and shape us to meet their own needs.What happens is brain regions that are related to motivation, and vigilance, and how we make meaning of the world around us become really active. And at least in that early postpartum period that can feel really intense and also deliberately colored by worry. We're driven to pay attention to our babies, to respond quickly to their needs, and to try and try again to meet them. Knowing that we're going to make mistakes and that and we're going to have to respond really quickly.So that's hyper-responsiveness and then over time, it's thought that things shift to this more regulated state, that parents fine tune their ability to recognize their child's cues, and to predict what they need. So brain regions involved in self-regulation and social processing, and what's called theory of mind, or how we read and respond to other people, those also change both in function and in structure. One researcher described it to me as if the neural networks that support our ability to understand ourselves and our own needs in a social context, get extended to also now include our children and like our extension of ourselves at a neural level.VirginiaThat's fascinating because you do have a felt experience of getting better at parenting. I mean new things happen. It gets hard again at different ages, but I do think a lot of us have an experience of competence increasing and feeling more qualified to make these calls. So it's just fascinating to understand that your brain has literally done that work, that you're evolving in this role.ChelseaAnd there's some research that looks at second or subsequent pregnancies and everyone's experiences are different. I know people have had harder second pregnancies in terms of their mental state, but there is some research that indicates that you become less hyper reactive in terms of your neural activity, because you've got that infrastructure in place that, you kind of know how to do the prediction piece better. So it's less intense the second time around. VirginiaAnd again, I just want to reiterate that you're saying most of this is coming from the experience of caretaking, not the biological process of pregnancy, right?ChelseaLet's clarify that. So, the vast majority of research in this area is still in gestational, cisgender mothers. But what there is in fathers in particular, and some other non-gestational parents, foster mothers and adoptive mothers, shows that there are similar neuro-like hormonal shifts that occur when you become a parent, even if you're not a birthing parent. That is thought to also prime the brain for this hyper responsiveness. And there is a global circuitry that develops over time. With parenting, it's a little bit different, but it's more similar than not, and it is, remarkably, really tied to how much time you spend with your baby. VirginiaInteresting. ChelseaSo there are these fascinating studies that look at heterosexual male-female couples, and then gay fathers, half of whom are biologically related to their children, and looks at their their brains over time. And they found that for primary caregiving fathers, the circuitry was very similar to the mothers who were in the study considered primary caregivers also. And in certain measures of connectivity, it was more profound the more time they actually logged with their children.VirginiaI appreciate that clarification. And this is not to downplay the profound changes that one does experience if you're a birthing parent, obviously.ChelseaIt’s kind of like a jumpstart intensity. But yeah, it's not the only way, there are multiple paths.VirginiaWe can take a more inclusive approach to it.The other thought I just kept having as I was reading your book was how refreshing it was to read this analysis of parenting, and of motherhood as a brain-based activity—as something that we bring experience and skills and learning to—because so often the cultural conversation is the dismissal of the mommy brain that we talked about. But then also it's like all about mothers’ bodies, right? Like it's how your body changes, will you get your body back, the shame of having a mom body.And that's another way we both narrow who can qualify as a parent and we reduce the experience and the work that's going into it—because we're making it all this sort of embodied thing. What do you think we gain when we change the focus to talking about parenting in terms of brains?ChelseaI mean, most importantly, I think we what we gain is a chance to really prepare for what this life stage means for us. It would have made a huge difference to me, if I had understood this neurobiological process, before I was in crisis mode, you know, as a new parent. I think the science can help us to talk to expectant parents about what they need, and also put our own individual experiences into into context.There's a really interesting parallel here with the teenage brain research and we've really come to understand much more in recent years about what happens in in our teenage years and to see it as a time that the brain requires extra support. Science has been shaping policies around school start times. Delaying start times for teenagers, that comes from brain research and the science on on how much sleep the brain needs to really go through the changes that that people are experiencing then. It's changed policies around approaches to discipline. It's changed public health messaging around substance use and other risky behaviors. It's also been used in schools to help teenagers to understand themselves and their own mental health and what they're experiencing.I feel like the parental brain science can be sort of like that, too, if we use it the right way. It should affect the policies that we make—or fail to make as is often the case right now—around what young families need. It should also change how we talk about ourselves and how we how we prepare people to make this transition to parenthood. And I think the other point I'd make is talking about the parental brain in a broader way should give us more of an appreciation for ourselves. I think one of the most surprising pieces of the the parental brain science is this stuff that's looking at how long lasting these changes are. There are these fascinating studies that are taking big data banks of brain imaging, like thousands of people, and comparing the brains of parents and non-parents in older age. So people who are in their 50s, 60s, 70s and older. And what they're finding is that parents brains are what they say what they call “younger looking,” like they've had fewer effects of aging. One group of researchers described parenthood as, you know, a lifetime of cognitive and social demands, as a kind of enrichment. And that is very different than how we typically talk about it. And I love thinking of it that way.VirginiaYes, yes. I will quickly add that, of course, we're not saying you have to have children, there are certainly other ways to seek enrichment in your life. And enjoy all the sleep that you get by being child-free.But that is a really interesting reframing because the typical narrative is that parenting ages you so fast. Parenting is all gray hairs, which is both an ageist way of looking at it and so reductive.I also want to circle back to what you just mentioned about using the science for better policies, because you and I were talking before we started recording, and you're saying how there's also a lot of opportunity here to serve reproductive justice.Chelsea I think there's two pieces to this one. There's been a lot that's written and been said in the past couple of months about, what does it mean to carry a child and what are the real risks and long term effects of that and and how the law doesn't account for them at all to the to the birthing parents life. I think this brain science just adds evidence to the case that's already clear. But reproductive justice, as it's been defined by the the black women and trans people who have really led that movement, is about access to reproductive health. We typically think of abortion and contraceptives, but it's also about being able to thrive in parenthood if you choose it, to have access to both the perinatal care you need and the resources to parent well. And many people lack those things now.And I mean, the perinatal care in particular, we need so much on that front. I think that the parental brain science can be used to improve it. We don't routinely screen expectant parents for risk factors for postpartum mood and anxiety disorders, even though we know some of them and we know that referring people to therapy can help. There's so many pieces of this to talk about in terms of post childbirth. Mortality and morbidity, but also the absolute absence of postpartum care in the United States is really awful and like glaringly in need of correction. We have one six week postpartum appointment. That's the standard and yet, we know that many people experience crises of mental health long before that. And there's research that indicates that significant percentage of people screen negative at that six week appointment, but then go on to develop postpartum depression. There are so many layers here where we can do a better job and I think the science can help.VirginiaWe really couldn't be doing a worse job, so any opportunity to improve. Paid leave, more affordable childcare. I mean, it's a very long list. But I'm really excited for your book to be out there and helping to bolster the fight.You talked a little bit about what inspired you to write the book, because of landing in that postpartum period and having that experience. How has doing the book—especially, you've been working on the book during a pandemic with young children—changed and informed your own parenting?ChelseaIt helps me cut myself some slack, primarily. It's something that I really struggle with a lot. But it's definitely helped me to shed some of the societal expectations around how I should feel as a mother and how mothering my particular kids should feel. All of that. The whole section of the book dissecting parenting advice, I wrote a lot of that during the height of the pandemic, when things felt so impossible and messy. And it was pretty grueling to go through all of that, and to grapple with my own internalized messaging around motherhood. But ultimately, I arrived back at this basic point that I think the science makes, which is just about connection, that I can look at my kids and figure out what they need and that I will make some mistakes and that those are prediction errors that will help me to do better next time.And all of that can sort of like sound trite, except it's real, like on a brain level. We're growing and getting better at this all the time.VirginiaIt's a message we try to teach our kids, right? That making mistakes is part of learning. I think I've said to my kids, “this is how your brain grows.” So why are we not giving ourselves the same? I'm definitely going to use that the next time I screw up, which will surely be later today. While my brain is growing, I am becoming a better parent through this experience.ButterChelseaMy kids are finally at the stage where they're both into chapter books, and I couldn't be more excited about it. I pretty much wanted to have kids just so that I could read to them. And that was really fun in these first few years, but then how many times can you read Grumpy Ladybug. So I'm excited to be in this new stage, and we just read The Wild Robot and The Wild Robot Escapes. I just love them so much. We live in Maine and the author's from Maine so it feels like the island that the wild robot ends up on is from Maine. So we've been like going out and pretending that we're the wild robot and on the coast of Maine. VirginiaThat is so fun. My older daughter read those recently. My younger one is about to turn five, so she's probably ready for that as a read aloud soon. Yeah, that's a great suggestion. We've been reading a lot of Dory Fantasmagory.ChelseaOh, that's our one of our all time favorites.VirginiaMy younger daughter really is Dory and my older daughter is named Violet so Beatrix really connects with Dory and having a bossy older sister named Violet. It’s a real emotional journey she's on with that. ChelseaI feel like the first time I saw my kids laugh at a book to the point of uncontrollable laughter was with with those. They’re just so good.VirginiaThey’re so good. I wish she would write more. Beatrix will like quote lines. We’ll be somewhere else and she'll quote a Dory line. ChelseaBanana phone.VirginiaYeah, so many things. I could have a whole Dory appreciation episode. You and I were also talking about how you are interested in meadows, like making a meadow in your garden. So I was like, oh, I'll do my butter about how much I love my meadow!We live on a small mountain in the Hudson Valley. So our yard is all sloping, we have no flat backyard. So having a big sloping area of lawn made no sense to us so we have turned it over to a wildflower and wild grasses meadow. We're fortunate we have this big area we could do. You could do a smaller scale version, absolutely. But especially this time of year, the pollinators are out in full force. And every morning I'm out there, just like getting very excited. This morning I was like watching a monarch and I was like, the monarchs I'm so worried about them. And I have them here. This is a monarch sanctuary. So what are you thinking about doing? Tell me!ChelseaThere's a part of our yard that the woods are kind of taking it over again. But it's just messy and I don't want more lawn, I know that for sure. I love the idea of deliberately creating something where the point is to not maintain it, or like minimal maintenance. And yeah, the pollinator piece is huge. One thing I'm not sure is like, how do you keep it from becoming woods again? I guess that's just the mow.VirginiaUsually, once a year you mow it. That keeps the woody shrubs and trees from getting too much of a foothold. You time your mowing, usually, like late spring. You leave it up over the winter, if you can handle how messy it looks. And I actually think it's sort of beautiful, the dead seed heads and grasses can look really beautiful. It did mean we lost our sledding hill. So it was controversial locally in my house. But it is what it is. So you leave it up for the winter because it creates a lot of habitat for hibernating animals and bugs, and then once spring hits and things have kind of warmed up and critters have woken up and are out of their burrows and leaves or whatever, then you mow it for the season and let it grow up fresh. So yeah, so you don't really have too much of a problem with woody plants if you stick to that.The bigger issue is sorting out if you have invasive weeds. We did have a situation where like 95% of the meadow was this plant called Mugwort which doesn't have a lot of wildlife value. And just in becoming a monoculture was not as pretty as I wanted it to be. It doesn't have a nice flower. And it was preventing us from planting other things. So we did ultimately spray. We tried hand pulling, but it was such a big infestation that would have been like years of our life. We sprayed last summer, all the invasives, let them die down. We mowed in November, so that it was kind of just scorched earth at that point, and then we did a big wildflower seed mix that we spread out in December because a lot of them need a cold period. So we did a big heavy seeding in December. And then this year, it's mostly been grasses coming up, because the grasses kind of wake up first. We've had a lot of milkweed. There's some that come up right away. But then next year, there's some wildflowers that start by pushing down their roots and then hopefully next year, we'll get more flowers in there. So it's a it is a long process, and it's surprisingly complex. But those are the basic things: figuring out what you have, if you need to eradicate invasives, doing that, and then doing a seeding. You can also just like, let it grow and see what comes up. You may be better off than I was.ChelseaI think we'll be somewhere in between. We have a little bit of invasives but it's a smaller space, I think, than what you have. So I think we'll be able to manage some of that. But I love it. Yours is beautiful. We also have turkeys in our backyard often and I just feels like it could be a good wildlife space, too.VirginiaYeah, definitely. Oh, that's really cool. Well, keep me posted.On that note, Chelsea, thank you so much for being here. We want everyone to go get a copy of Mother Brain, which is out this week or the week that this airs. Where can folks find you and support your work?ChelseaThey can buy the book at their local bookstore and they can read more about it at MotherBrainBook.com.VirginiaAmazing. Thank you so much for being here.ChelseaThank you for having me. It's been such a pleasure.The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti diet journalism. I’ll talk to you soon. 1Just noting for the record that I love my in-laws and we enjoy a good scientific debate. I also previously corrected my father-in-law’s long-held belief that a cat would eat its owner’s dead body but a dog would never with science and he was delighted to be wrong.

It's our September bonus episode! And we're trying out a new format: Virginia's Office Hours, where a Burnt Toast subscriber comes on the pod to chat with Virginia about fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health. Our first guest is Serena, who is trying to navigate family gatherings while in eating disorder recovery—but her relatives aren't just diet-y, they are diet culture creators. If you are already a paid subscriber, you’ll have this entire episode in your podcast feed and access to the entire transcript in your inbox and on the Burnt Toast Patreon.If you are not a paid subscriber, you'll only get the first chunk. To hear the whole conversation or read the whole transcript, you'll need to go paid. This episode does contain some discussion of eating disorders, eating disorder recovery, and family medical crisis. If any of that wouldn't be good for you to listen to, please take care of yourself and give this one a miss.Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSVirginia has previously discussed her daughter's medically necessary (but awful!) fat-free diet in this episode. Serena recommends this poem by spoken word poet Andrea Gibson. CREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.---Today we’re trying out a new format for the podcast called Virginia's Office Hours! This is a chance for a Burnt Toast subscriber to come chat with me about any question they're mulling over related to diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, health, etc.The way I think of both the Ask Virginia column and what we do on the podcast with listener questions is not so much “here is an expert sharing their wisdom.” I think that’s the model we're all trained to expect with advice content—in large part thanks to diet culture. But I think of this as much more smart people having thoughtful conversations…the same way I do, and I bet you do. over wine or coffee with friends or over my group text chats with my friends. And, a big problem with trying to get advice about any these topics is that people boil it down to an Instagram post or a little nugget of wisdom and that just isn't applicable to all of our lives. So, a much deeper, richer and more nuanced conversation is what I'm aiming for with these Office Hour episodes. I see it as a chance to have the kind of conversation we often have on Friday Threads. But here we are, conversing more directly, Zoom face to Zoom face.Today's Office Hours guest has asked me to change her name to protect privacy, so we are calling her “Serena.” We’ll be talking about how she can navigate encounters with extended family members who aren't just diet-y and on diets, they are diet culture creators. It's your uncle who's really obsessed with Paleo, but if your uncle invented Paleo. (Her uncle did not invent Paleo, just to be clear.)This episode does contain some discussion of eating disorders, eating disorder recovery, and family medical crisis. If any of that wouldn't be good for you to listen to, please take care of yourself and give this one a miss. Everyone else, it's an awesome conversation and I can't wait to hear what you think of this new format!Want to submit a question or volunteer to be an office hours guest? Please use this form.Note: I am a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. I am not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions I give are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.Episode 60 TranscriptVirginiaHi Serena! This is the inaugural Virginia’s Office Hours episode, so we’re figuring out the format together and I appreciate you being game for the experiment. I would like to start by having you read us the question you sent. SerenaOkay, great. So the question is:How do I maintain a relationship with or move on from my extended family members whose livelihood is rooted in wellness culture, selling, “food as medicine,” and weight loss as a cure for everything from heart disease to type two diabetes to rheumatoid arthritis and lupus? During my years following their rigid vegan / whole food, plant-based, no salt, oil, sugar, etc diet, I developed severe anorexia from which I am just now extricating myself with lots of professional help and support of anti-diet journalism and podcasts like yours and Food Psych, for example.It feels awkward to be around my family now that I’m trying to follow Intuitive Eating instead of the whole food, plant-based diet rules. They are famous, revered, and well-loved in their circles. I’m not necessarily here to bash them, though I now see their messaging as privileged, fatphobic, not at all aligned with my social justice values and the opposite of intuitive/anti-diet.VirginiaThis question jumped out at me because you’re in a very specific situation with who these folks are and the work that they do, but I think there’s a lot that’s relatable here. Like even if someone’s cousin or grandfather isn’t like the father of Keto—which is not who her family member is, we’re not disclosing their identity. But you know, even if you’re not related to the founder of the Paleo diet, you might have a relative who’s a doctor or a dietitian or in health in a diet-y way in some other arena. And the authority that we give these folks in their professional lives can often show up in the personal interactions as well. So I just thought, Oh, I bet a lot of people can relate to what you must be feeling when you go to Thanksgiving dinner.Why don’t we have you tell us a little more of your own story because I think that’s going to be really important to how we talk about how you’re navigating this. So, tell us a little more about when your eating disorder started. And what were some of the key ways you saw your relatives’ work in forming your disorder?SerenaSo my mom was kind of an early vegetarian in the 1970s, when she was pregnant with my brother, after me. And then my dad had a GI cancer in the mid-70s. Part of his treatment was a major operation of his whole GI tract that basically they weren’t sure he was gonna survive or recover from. So my family went into full on survival mode and a lot of that was figuring out how best to eat. Now I know it’s orthorexia, and yet it came out of this real fear of my dad may not make it if we don’t eat right. My extended family, about whom this question is focused, started their vegan path in the mid-80s. So that was around when my immediate family also adopted this pretty strict way of eating. My first round of anorexia was probably my last year of high school and definitely grew out of a lot of that restriction, no animal products and all of that. But I pretty much recovered and found a somewhat of a middle ground, until it came roaring back in the last decade of midlife and changes with my children. I think it’s pretty common, coming around again during the changes of midlife.Part of what did it was being diagnosed with Lyme disease and a fairly well-meaning health care provider suggesting that part of my recovery could be giving up other food groups. Kind of classic wellness culture around gluten and other things. So that got me back into that mode of “food as medicine” or rather, restricting food as the only path to wellness. So by the time 2015 rolled around, I was definitely deep in it and it was only just reinforced by not my immediate family necessarily, but my extended family.VirginiaSo your whole relationship with food is rooted in this big trauma, right? This experience with your dad. That sounds so terrifying. And how that kind of informed the way your family was navigating food when you were a kid, is that right?SerenaYeah, I was five when he was sick. VirginiaThat’s a lot. And it was all under the guise of “this is what we need to do to make him better.” And I’m guessing less attention was paid to, “what is the toll this is taking on all of us?”SerenaOh, for sure. No. It was all about how do we keep him alive and we’ll do anything. VirginiaWhich, of course you would. But also you’re five and you’re having to eat in this really difficult way. Were you aware, as a kid, that your family ate differently from other families? SerenaOh, yes. And it was always kind of a “we’re better, we’re superior, we’re righteous, we’re healthy,” you know? “We’re eating clean.” So there was always kind of a comfort there to me. Not a shame or like, ooh, we’re different. And it wasn’t the kind of thing where I couldn’t eat birthday cake at a friend’s party or something. But at home, it was all very clean because of dad’s survival. And he is still alive!VirginiaWhich we’re delighted about!SerenaFor sure, yeah. Whether it was the food or something else.VirginiaI’m just thinking about how that set you up to interact with food in a really specific way from the get go.I’ve talked in the newsletter about my daughter’s medical experiences. We spent a lot of time with her on a really strict fat-free diet. It was necessary to save her life at that point in time, and because I was the adult in the situation, I was able to look at it and say: It’s a no brainer to do this to save her life right now. And, what are the broader implications of this? How is this going to impact her longterm relationship with food? What is it doing to us?I think that part of the content of the conversation so often gets missed when we’re thinking about food as medicine. It may be that there’s a food restriction that’s necessary for a health condition, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t bring along all this other stuff.  We’re given this message of “well, if it’s what you have to do, then you have to just be all in on it,” and you don’t get to have feelings about it being a hard way to live.What was your turning point, if there was one? I understand you recovered from the first round that happened when you were a teenager and then this later around related to the Lyme disease?SerenaThere probably wouldn’t have been one because I really thought I had it nailed. I had gotten all the bad foods out of my diet, and I was eating as healthy as anyone could and you know, all that righteousness that comes with the territory. But during the pandemic, I was out running, and a friend of mine who also works in healthcare saw me, and emailed shortly after and said she was concerned because I looked like I was emaciated and not doing well, which was a shock to me. It hadn’t occurred to me that all of my healthy stuff was leading actually down a really dangerous path.So, it was having a fellow healthcare person say that she was concerned that really got me to go for an assessment, plus the concern of my husband and other people in my world. I was referred for residential treatment, but I was in denial that that was really necessary. But I did get on board with a really amazing all virtual recovery team. And I’ve been doing that for most of the pandemic, all by telehealth.I continue to just see how how sick I was where I had no clue. I really thought I was doing everything perfectly.VirginiaYeah, the eating disorder can be so loud and very good at talking you into certain thought patterns. So in terms of both your earlier struggles and what you’ve been working through recently, are your extended family members, the ones who are so entrenched in this world, are they aware of what you’ve been going through?SerenaI came out to most of my family and extended family pretty soon after I was engaged in recovery. Partly because I just needed them to know that I was kind of hopping off the train or exiting the cult or changing the narrative or whatever metaphor you want to use. I really felt kind of naughty and it was impossible to think of another way of living at first. But  I did call them and I think I was looking for some sort of acknowledgement of, “Oh, yeah, I could see how all this restriction could have led down that path and I’m really sorry that happened for you.”But I mean, there’s just such a… I don’t know if it’s blindness? Or just the assumption that it’s still really the best way to live and be and it’s your own personal failing if you take it to this unhealthy place. Or it was still very much my fault that it happened that way. And no one has really changed their beliefs.Even just this couple of weeks ago, we were out there visiting, and there was still a lot of talk about clean eating and weighing yourself. And, “we don’t eat these bad animal products” and stuff. So coming out was important for me, but it also hasn’t really changed much. I still feel really self conscious doing things differently. Virginia That is frustrating. Of course, we can never control other people’s reactions, but still such a letdown that they couldn’t say, “Wow, we’re really sorry this happened and we’re willing to look at the broader implications of this.”SerenaWell, I think it would throw into question everything that is held as truth. It is a lot easier to see things in a very black and white, binary way. I think I kind of throw a wrench in their whole understanding of the world, that whole dogma, because it didn’t work for me or it worked so well that it just went bad.VirginiaRight, they don’t know what to do with you. You’re not the story they want to tell. But you can’t be the only person who has shared this with them, given what we know about the way these kinds of eating programs contribute to disordered eating and eating disorders. It’s fascinating to me, how often I see big diet brands, give this total stonewall response that’s like, “Well, that’s not what we’re doing. We don’t do that. We don’t want people to get eating disorders, we’re doing something else.” Even though the evidence clearly shows that what they’re doing is contributing to eating disorders.SerenaYeah. And the messaging around it all, as you’ve touched on before, is very slippery. It’s a lifestyle. It’s not a diet. It’s just how we eat, always, with all these rules that are just sort of baked in. It does feel a lot like being gaslit because there really is no problem there. I’m the problem.VirginiaWhat is food like when you do get together with these relatives or in family gatherings? SerenaThey are very exuberant around food. Very much it’s about color and presentation and fresh and it’s delicious and it’s usually abundant. There’s still a lot of rhetoric around, well, we don’t eat processed foods. So, we’re not going to have chips with the salsa. And for dessert we will do something with fruit. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it. But there’s always that level of, we’re doing this pristine and doing it right. So we’re not going to ever serve fun foods. Maybe there’ll be some chocolate that appears at the end of the meal, but it’s dark chocolate of the bitterest sort.VirginiaThe least tasty of chocolates.SerenaThere aren’t a whole lot of get-togethers, it’s maybe once or twice a year. And so it’s not the kind of thing where I face it regularly. It’s more how to maintain that relationship over the years and over time, not like the every weekend gathering. But yeah, food is is scrumptious and follows lots of amazing recipes. And it’s all based on very much restrictive, all whole food, all plant-based.VirginiaInteresting. Do you feel like you can get enough to eat at those meals? Is there enough food, even though it’s sort of specific? Or do you walk away feeling dissatisfied?SerenaI’ve found ways, especially in the disorder, to feel full. But satisfaction, as you just named, is definitely something I’ve really only started to name and discover in recovery. Because the trick for me during a lot of those years was like I have to get as full as possible but on things that were just hella fiber-rich and are filled with juice or water or something that would kind of make me feel full versus satisfied.My kids, however, are the ones who actually started to flag it for me pretty early on because they were like we’re never full or we never get enough. Or why can’t we have eggs for breakfast? Or, you know, where’s the yogurt? VirginiaWhy can’t we have eggs? Yes.SerenaOr there’s no butter for the toast! Speaking of Burnt Toast…VirginiaRight! Oh God, toast without butter is a crime.So there’s a performance of abundant food and a celebration of food, but not necessarily either the types of foods or quantities of food that you would find satisfying, or that your children find satisfying.SerenaRight. I think that the kids were the canary in the coal mine. Like, wait, hold on. Yeah, it’s all very much of one type of thing. There’s no fat and there’s no substance.VirginiaAnd I’m just thinking so many kids—littler kids, but even older kids, too—just don’t eat those kinds of foods. I would take my children to a meal like that and they would be like, shat do I do? They’re just not there yet with eating lots of vegetables. They want white bread, they want french fries, grilled cheese, and especially when they’re in a new experience like a big overwhelming family gathering. They are not their most open minded about trying lots of food, they want to get something satisfying and go back to playing. And this is a normal way for kids to interact with food.SerenaYeah, I remember one particularly fraught gathering when one of my family members asked my kids with genuine curiosity, “So what are your favorite foods?” And I just knew that my oldest was in a phase of loving fried chicken. And I was just like, oh, no, no, no, no. Because I knew it was coming. And lo and behold, he said fried chicken and mashed potatoes. And there was this kind of like, oh, your mom is really not doing a good job—or at least that’s how I took it. You’re not doing it right if your kids know what fried chicken tastes like.VirginiaI mean, are you not doing it right or are you letting them experience one of the true joys in life? It sounds like you and your kids are on the same page, which is helpful. Do you feel like you have other allies in the family? Like other folks who are at these gatherings who are also loosely on the same page with you about this stuff?SerenaFor sure, my husband. From the get go, he’s been like, I love all foods. And so that’s been really helpful for me to kind of come back to. I think my dad has really, I’ve had to talk with him about the orthorexia of our upbringing and you know how it came out of an understandable place with his cancer, but how it really became something that was unhealthy. And he remarkably, in his 80s, has been able to say, I see how that could have been hurtful or damaging or restrictive from the get go.VirginiaThat’s amazing.SerenaYeah. But otherwise, I do feel like I have to be on guard and protect myself and keep that boundary of, I know I’m in recovery. And it’s the best thing that I can be doing for myself. And I just have to let go of the rules that I subscribed to for so long, even though that was something that I got so much feeling of superiority and identity from in the eating disorder.VirginiaThis may not be an idea that resonates right now and feel free to say so. But one thing I often think about, and I think someone mentioned this in a Burnt Toast discussion recently, is: When you’re eating with people who are eating in a much more restrictive way than you, it can be really helpful to reframe it as “I get to eat what I want.” Instead of feeling like I’m so bad, because I’m not adhering to their standards.It’s I’m free from their standards, I get to feed myself, and they don’t get to do that. Does that land at all?SerenaIt does land. Yeah. I mean, it’s so tricky, because I was so young when it all started, so it never really felt wrong. It felt safe. You know, we’re doing this for my dad’s survival. And then it just felt right because it was always portrayed in this, like, “we’re so much better than the standard American person eating crap.”So, I like that and I would try that on for sure. But it’s not something that’s really comes easily yet. I still feel like, well, I know I’m supposed to be doing this. But I really remember how much comfort there was in knowing that this was a safe way to eat, no danger here, you know? VirginiaThat makes sense. That’s a way in which your story differs a bit from a more common story I hear, which is like, “as a kid, I got to eat whatever I wanted. And then when my dieting set in, as you know, all these foods were suddenly off limits.” And so often, for folks who’ve had that experience, it’s about reclaiming these comfort foods that you were denied, reclaiming this experience of comfort that you then didn’t let yourself have. But for you, comfort was defined differently. So now you’re having to redefine comfort and find food as a source of comfort in a different way, which sounds really hard. SerenaYeah. I hadn’t thought of that. The return to comfort food is not really... It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. VirginiaRight. Do your kids have comfort foods that are things that kind of fall outside what you as a kid would have considered comfort food?SerenaOh, for sure. Well, the fried chicken. I think my husband’s been a good influence. So they love burgers, and they love mac and cheese, and they love pizza, and all that standard stuff that I’m actually having to discover as comfort food now. I think of them as being clear channels of what tastes good, what feels good.VirginiaYes, yes. I love that. I feel like that can be helpful to see, especially when it’s our kids, right? Because seeing your kid experience comfort and pleasure is of course rewarding to you as a parent, kind of what we’re hard-wired to want. It can be helpful even if your brain is not responding the same way to it, to see your child having that experience, when you’re dealing with seeing these other family members pushing this other message. I’m also wondering if when you go to these family gatherings, if it’s worth making a plan for when your nuclear family will actually eat. Like, making a plan to stop for ice cream afterwards. Like, considering the big family meal as more of an appetizer and then letting yourself go out for like a really nice dinner later because why should you all feel deprived. It’s just something to play with maybe.SerenaI like that. VirginiaOften on days when there’s a big family meal, there’s not a lot of attention paid to breakfast. Like, we’ll have family over for lunch and then I will still want dinner at six o’clock, even if we had a big meal at noon. And sometimes my husband or someone will be like, oh, but we had that big meal. And I’m like, yeah, but four hours have passed. I think sometimes in our culture we have this idea that on big feast days, that’s all you need. But that’s not how a lot of our bodies work. And that’s a feature, not a bug.So making a plan for how you will still get fed throughout that day takes some pressure off that meal needing to be something that it can’t be, right? Because the odds of you coming in and being like, Hey, guys, we’re bringing fried chicken to the family potluck…SerenaThat will be my next stage of recovery,VirginiaI mean, I love that as a goal. I love that as a goal for us. But I can see that that might not feel doable yet. You know, if you were seeing them every week, I would feel like that would be more important to push. But if it’s a once or twice a year thing, it’s probably in some ways not worth the hassle. SerenaYeah, I think the the family meals will potentially always be fraught if things continue as they have been. But I think my hope is to have just a lessening of food and this lifestyle stuff as a central part of what we talk about or how we relate. I think if I continue to get stronger in this, you know, I’m different and it’s okay, then I could see bringing something along. I actually did bring some banana bread to this last gathering, but it had white flour in it and it had oil in it. And it definitely sat on their counter. I’m not even sure they ate it. VirginiaI mean, that’s on them. You get to eat the banana bread. In terms of shifting the conversation, you’ve had this coming out process that went the way it went. When you’re with them, this is still a big theme of general family conversation is talking about the diets and the food rules and that kind of thing.SerenaYeah, it’s truly their professional focus. It’s not just “this is how we eat,” it’s “this is what we teach. This is what we produce. This is how we are in the world and want as many people to get on board as possible.”VirginiaGod, that sounds exhausting. There’s so many jobs that are boring to talk about in a lot of detail. Like if they were accountants, like, would it be okay for them to talk about taxes for the whole meal? It’s just interesting, when people’s professions become this sort of calling/cult experience that they then can’t recognize how boring this is.What do you think about the idea of trying to set a boundary with them, like, “heads up, before the next family meal, here’s where I am with my recovery, and it’s really important that I don’t talk about X,Y, and Z. Would love to catch up on all of your lives, but hoping we can do it without…” How does that feel as an idea to you?SerenaI love that the way that sounds. It would be a huge step for me for sure. Because I think the way it’s felt the last two years is just Oh, I have to power through I have to make sure I don’t regress and use this as a reason to go back into the eating disorder. And not let it make me feel like I’m doing the wrong thing, or I’m somehow bad or failing, because I’m not on the family bandwagon anymore.So I love that idea of kind of proactively saying, Hey, this is what I need. And can we please enjoy a meal together but not talk about food or what’s right and wrong as far as what we prefer? And what can I bring? You know, that kind of thing.VirginiaAbsolutely. I also want to hold space for like hosting a big family meal is a lot of work and whatever diet ideology you’re overlaying is added work. But just the sheer act of feeding people is always labor, so contributing where it makes sense to contribute and then also that lets you bring something you do enjoy eating, like the banana bread. There’s one thing on the table that your kids like even even if you don’t go as far as fried chicken. That can be a really nice way to do it.And it softens a little bit, what may make them feel defensive about you setting that boundary. But I also want to be clear that we can’t control their reactions, right? Them getting defensive because you set a boundary for your health is a Them Problem, not a You Problem.Because if you think about it, what everyone in your family did was to rally around your dad when he was sick and make all these dietary changes because they were what your dad needed. Your health is just as important. And now you have a health issue that requires a different approach to food to save you. And what if everybody rallied around that and said, “What Serena needs is for us to change the way we’re talking about food and have doughnuts on the table at breakfast and eggs. What if we did this because her health really matters.”SerenaThat gives me goosebumps, actually. That reframing is so generous and I would have a really hard time with my extended family going that way. Because eggs are evil and butter is evil. And you know, it’s just, there’s really no getting through a lot of that stuff.VirginiaI agree. I don’t think you would win them over on all of this. I mean, it sounds like they’ve built their lives and their business around these beliefs. But I do think it might be helpful for you to hold on to that framing of if they couldn’t do that for you, that is them choosing their business model over a family member’s health. And it is what it is.I think they probably have a lot of active disordered eating in their own lives they’re not looking at. I’m just totally speculating here, because I don’t know them at all. But they may have their own reasons that we should feel compassion for, for why they couldn’t support you in that way. But it still sucks that they wouldn’t support you in that way.SerenaYeah, having compassion for that sort of not really blindness, but maybe, I don’t know, having blinders on. I think that that’s something that I am coming to as more of the nuanced, you know, year three of recovery or two whatever this is. I can’t change the way people think or feed themselves and that’s not really my job. My job is to find ways of relating to them as humans and finding that place of connection.It’s hard to jump off the bus and want to keep up with the bus at the same time. I still want to be accepted and approved of and all those sorts of little kid feelings. This is why we do what our family does, because we want to be part of this community. So yeah, it is hard to take that separate path, but stay connected or stay alongside.VirginiaI think that’s something you and your recovery team will be working on for a long time. Food brings up such deep stuff for all of us. It really, really does. That question of feeling accepted is just enormous. And how do we ever truly get there? Because in a way it would be easier if you felt like estrangement was the appropriate path for you, the necessary path. It would be painful. There’s grieving. I don’t want to simplify estrangement, but it’s a choice people make when it’s so bad, they can’t maintain the relationship and they have to protect themselves and it’s a really valid choice, but you are not, it sounds like, in that place. You want to maintain connections with these people. And that’s valid, too.And so it’s like okay, what does that look like? What do I need to protect myself when I’m with them? What strategies? Maybe it’s conversations you have with your husband about like, when x topic comes up, you jump in and and pivot us quickly to sports or something. Having some of those like plans in place of like, if you see me stuck with Aunt so-and-so, come over and rescue me because probably she’s just talking about how much she hates eggs.And maybe have the plan to have a meal afterwards that you guys will actually enjoy. Or a meal beforehand. Eat first, feed yourselves first! I don’t know why I said afterwards, actually. Now I want you to have the meal before you go. So you don’t have to feel sad while you’re there that you’re hungry and can’t be fed. That feels really important and will probably have your kids be in better moods about being there, too. Because they’re not getting cranky hungry. I just think managing everyone’s hunger is always so important. SerenaIt’s interesting that you bring up estrangement because I’ve wondered if that was something that would have to happen. But I think the reason I sent in my question is because I don’t want that to have to be the end of the road. But I think the more committed I am to my recovery, the clearer it will become what actually is possible. But I like to think that using these strategies is kind of a middle ground.VirginiaWell, it’s always an option, right? No decision you’re making is the final decision on how you interact with these people for the rest of your life. There may come a place where that feels right. Or it may be more of the work of how do you detach your sense of your own value and your relationship with food? How can that become its own thing, separate from this dynamic?Because I’m guessing your husband is probably annoyed by it, but not as triggered by it. Like, he’s like walking into this strange world like, wow, these people have strong feelings about stuff and so glad I’m gonna go get a burger later. It’s still kind of gets to a point where it’s exasperating but not triggering in the same way.SerenaYeah. I think that’s a good distinction. VirginiaI mean, it sounds like you’re pretty clear on what your goal is, for right now, of wanting to be able to maintain the relationships without so much food talk. Do you talk to them much in between visits? Do you have other ongoing communication? Or not really?SerenaNot as much as I used to honestly, because when I was so on board and going to all the conferences and all the things, too, that revolved around plant based, it was kind of exciting to be part of the same team. But that’s really dropped off quite a bit.VirginiaThat sounds like probably a good thing.SerenaYeah, not really intentionally, but it just kind of happened because that’s just not where my energy is going and can’t.VirginiaAbsolutely. But it is a change in the relationship, if you had more points of contact with them throughout the year before and now there’s a separation. It’s tough. One thought I had was: Can you find other ways to connect with them that are not about food? But it sounds like this is so fully their lives and their world. It would be hard for you to be like, “I’m getting really into embroidery. Who else likes embroidery?” My sister-in-law and I talk about knitting all the time. And we’re also on the same page about food, but if we weren’t, we could just talk about knitting. Having those safe topics that you can get into with people.SerenaThere is a lot about exercise.VirginiaAh, well, that’s a…SerenaMixed blessing?VirginiaThat’s not at all a land mine. I was thinking more hand crafts, but okay.SerenaMaybe gardening? I mean, occasionally, it’s like books or what podcasts? Or, like, about Ukraine.VirginiaWe can only spend so much time thinking about the end of the world.SerenaAnd it’s hard because eating plant-based is a way to save the planet. So there’s that whole piece of like, well, here’s what we’re doing!VirginiaRight. I was thinking even with gardening, they could bring it back around really quickly to like, we’re growing our own food, because blah blah blah and you’re down the rabbit hole.SerenaMaybe it’s worth me taking up a hobby just to have that talk about.VirginiaJigsaw puzzles? I’m just trying to think of hobbies that would be really hard to pull into a diet context.SerenaRight, Zero to do with fiber.VirginiaIt’s tricky.SerenaMaybe that could be a Friday Thread. VirginiaOh my gosh, I love that. We’re gonna do that the Friday this airs. That’s a great. What are your non-diet-culture hobbies? is a really great question.SerenaNot even food adjacent. VirginiaRight. Totally outside the realm, like board games is another one maybe. SerenaBird watching. VirginiaBird watching. It’s hard to get into diet talk around bird watching.SerenaYeah, unless hiking is involved, but yeah. VirginiaOf course, yes. Okay, there we are. I only watch in my own garden. My mom does more hiking birdwatching, but I’m sitting on my front porch. It’s great. Oh Man. Well, I hope this has been somewhat helpful. I really appreciate you sharing. Is there anything we haven’t talked about? That would be sort of helpful to brainstorm further on?SerenaOh, gosh, no. I was really nervous because I don’t want to get into that, like, “You’re wrong. I’m right. You’re bad. I’m good,” that kind of stuff.VirginiaTotally. SerenaBut this has felt really productive to try to just find a way through that’s supportive, that’s protective, that’s connected, that also takes into account the fact that my children are usually part of this, and that I really want to change the narrative for them. So no, I think it’s just been really fruitful. And it’s not like we did tie it up in a neat little bow.VirginiaNo, no, I mean, I don’t think this is the kind of thing one can tie up. Because I think you’re going to be navigating this in different ways. For a long time.But I think just sort of centering your own needs in the conversation is helpful, and and how much it matters that you’re doing this really hard work of recovery, how much that matters for your health your kids and this is so important and worth protecting.SerenaI think it wasn’t until you said about calling ahead of time and saying, “This is what I need for my recovery or for my health or my progress.” Because I’ve, until now, I think I’ve just been so apologetic and ashamed A. that I couldn’t make the plant-based thing work and look what happened to me and B. part of my recovery involves eating all the things. I’m now not part of the hierarchy of perfect plant based poster children.VirginiaYou reacted like a person with a body reacts to restrictions. You did what humans do. And I know that you’re looking at these family members and thinking, Well, they didn’t ever go this way, they’re able to sustain this. But it is such a small percentage of people who can live on these plans long term and not end up where you’ve ended up. This is what our bodies do in the face of restriction. They either push back and we can’t sustain it or some of us have the brain chemistry that goes deeper, deeper, deeper into restriction and gets really dangerous. And neither of those is a failing! They’re your body sounding alarm signals and saying, this isn’t okay, this isn’t safe.And I can understand that sense of failure because this is all so tied to what you grew up with and the expectations that were wired into you about how you should relate to food. But you’re a human and humans need to eat, right? Many times a day, even, and many food groups. Butter For Your Burnt ToastSerenaA friend just read this poem out loud to me by Andrea Gibson today. They are a spoken word poet who did a performance out in Colorado for an eating disorder recovery center. It was about goosebumps and how finding the magic in life can bring us goosebumps. And it did give me goosebumps while I was listening to it. So I want to look up more of their poetry. So that’s one thing that’s exciting to me.VirginiaThat sounds really wonderful. My recommendation this week is a little callback to birdwatching, which is we put a bluebird box up in our yard for the first time this year and had a nest of blue birds. I saw the blue birds arriving and they were like flying around, considering the box. I was like an anxious real estate agent. I was like, how do I make it more appealing to them? Like, oh, they’re coming for another open house? Our school district is very good. There are not a lot of predators in our neighborhood! But they did choose us. And then we had this whole experience this summer of watching them build the nest and then spotting the eggs and seeing the baby birds, seeing the baby birds fledge. Oh, it was so lovely. And it was very easy! And I didn’t have to do any work other than the initial 10 minutes of hanging a bluebird box.So I recommend it for just something that’s nothing to do with food and body and diets and just kind of take you out of that whole space. Also watching how hard bluebirds work to feed their—I mean, all birds—work to feed their babies. They are feeding them all day long. It’s so much effort. They’re just flying out for something, flying back. And flying out, flying back in. And it’s great for remembering how essential it is and how much work it is to feed kids, feed ourselves. I had a lot of respect for this little blue bird family. I hope they come back next year. SerenaI love their color, too. It’s such a happy blue. VirginiaYes, yes. And the eggs are blue. It’s really cool.Thank you again, Serena. This was such a great conversation. I just really appreciate you being open to it and sharing with us and I think everyone’s going to learn a lot from this.SerenaI hope so. I’m here for the conversation!

This week, Virginia chats with with Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant, cofounders of the Center for Body Trust, and authors of a new book out this week, Reclaiming Body Trust: A Path to Healing and Liberation.If you'd like to support Burnt Toast, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And considering becoming a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.Post-Publication Note: Dana let us know after this episode aired that credit for this episode title (which she also quotes in the conversation below) belongs to Dr. Crystal Jones. We apologize for not properly attributing that during the conversation. BUTTER & OTHER LINKSWe're getting ready to do another AMA episode soon. And we need your questions! Put them here, so we stay organized. Hilary and Dana were on the Dear Sugars podcastVirginia previously interviewed them for a Health Magazine pieceOne of the frameworks Hilary and Dana use is Barbara Love’s liberatory consciousness, which is something they learned from Desiree Adaway and Ericka Hines.Nonbinary psychologist and Body Trust provider Sand Chang contributed to their book.Hilary is obsessed with the show on Apple TV called Home and her dog Arrow. Dana is obsessed with her hot tub, heated or not, and English muffins from Sparrow Bakery.Virginia and her lower back are obsessed with this $29 heating pad from TargetCREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.VirginiaLet’s start by having each of you introduce yourselves.HilaryI’m Hilary. I am a cofounder of the Center for Body Trust, formerly BeNourished, and I am a therapist and a coach and I spend a lot of time doing training with healthcare professionals around helping them be better around people’s relationship with their body and addressing weight stigma in their work. And my business partner is Dana.DanaI’m Dana Sturtevant. I’m the dietitian. Sometimes I say “I’m the dietitian.”VirginiaIn your spookiest voice, I like it.DanaWe’re a therapist/dietitian team. I worked in the dominant weight paradigm early in my career where I didn’t believe I was promoting dieting behaviors. I thought I was promoting healthy lifestyles. And then through years of that work and becoming disillusioned and starting to feel unethical, I was really curious about offering people a different approach. At the time, I was a yoga teacher—I no longer teach yoga—but I was really curious about the mindfulness and self-acceptance practices of yoga and also coming back into our bodies and how that could change people’s relationship with food and their bodies. And I knew nobody would hire me to do what I wanted to do. So I started a private practice and shortly thereafter met Hilary. And the other hat that I wear in my business is I train healthcare providers in motivational interviewing, which is a counseling style that is collaborative and less pathologizing and more humanizing of people.VirginiaThe two of you have written a brand new book called Reclaiming Body Trust. I was very lucky to get to read an early copy. It is absolutely remarkable. It’s really unlike anything else out there in this space. I think it’s meeting a need for a book that meets people where they are and helps them work through all of these issues and put them into the larger context of systems of oppression. There’s the self help books and then there’s books talking about systems of oppression, but you are bringing it all together. So, let’s talk a little bit about what inspired you to say, “We run this really all consuming business but also we should write a book.”HilaryWe had always thought about writing a book, but it didn’t rise to the top because we’ve always been really immersed in running our programs and that is very consuming and is a full time job. And we’ve had practices and do trainings on the side. So it totally has not fit in. And then we got to a place where we wanted folks to have all these things that we’ve been saying for years in trainings and in workshops in a format that they can hold, really. That’s really exciting and that’s really accessible, you know? We were approached to write a book proposal after we were on the Dear Sugars podcast and we did that. And here we are, just a mere two years later. A pandemic, a few house moves, no problem.VirginiaI’m sure it was a very relaxing book writing experience. Kind of one of those zen retreats.HilaryVery easeful.But we really wanted this to be accessible. I consider myself to be a politicized therapist and coach. I do not separate politics from the change process. Our work is situated liberatory frameworks. We believe that this movement of weight inclusion is a liberatory process. And so that’s what we wanted this book to be about. Not so much situated in the bodies of individual people. Like, “How do I heal my relationship with food and body?” is a valid question, but what is the context in which we are trying to heal cannot be left out, and it’s so frequently left out in eating disorder settings and disordered eating settings. And it can’t be. People aren’t getting well and we’re missing this big piece of that big conversation.VirginiaWhy do you think it’s so often left out? HilaryWell, I think everything in the food and body space is tied to capitalism and white supremacy. And there is a lot of money to be made, in dieting and fitness and cosmetic industries, off of telling people what is wrong with them and then selling them solutions to that. In the eating disorder treatment space, we have a really big problem with only having services that are really fit for thin white women. And we tend to relegate folks with larger bodies, fat bodies, we continue to outsource them to diet culture spaces instead of really understanding that the overall climate around thinness, around healthism, around all of these things, is really creating the problem of disordered eating and eating disorders and dissatisfaction with the body. But there’s no money to be made if we dismantle and divest from these systems. VirginiaThis is true. HilarySo herein lies the problem. I think people don’t know how to tie these things together. I think people have suffered greatly in their bodies. And from what I know of talking to some folks who have suffered greatly in their bodies, it’s really hard for them to build a bridge between what’s happening in the world around bodies and what’s happened in their relationship with their own bodies.VirginiaThey don’t see how their struggle connects to these larger struggles.HilaryYeah, I think we outsource our struggle to critical voices and shame and things within us that tend to uphold the dominant paradigm within us, right? Tend to keep us trying to perform and better ourselves. And we struggle to know that letting go, not suppressing our weight, things like that are actually what gets us free  instead of trying to do it all right, or better.VirginiaOne thing I loved about the book is that you give these very concise explanations of a few concepts that I also think a lot about and I think are really tied to the need to put our personal struggles in this broader social context. So, I thought we could chat about a few of them. The first is healthism. What is healthism and how does it show up?DanaHealthism is this belief that our health is the be all and end all of our existence. If we’re not actively pursuing health through personal lifestyle changes, that we are somehow morally failing. It seems to be pretty individualistic and focused on individual lifestyle behaviors instead of looking at the broader context and social determinants of health and how social determinants of health have far greater impact on people’s health and wellbeing than their individual lifestyle choices.One reason we started to talk about healthism in our work is how weight and health are always conflated. So many of our clients believe they gave up dieting years ago because they knew that it didn’t work. But they’ve been just trying to “watch what they eat” or just “being healthy.” And people really get stuck in that place because it upholds this dieting mindset. To really unhook from it all we need to keep laying down our thoughts about our health and our weight and nutrition and saying “not now” to nutrition, because to get out from underneath all of this conditioning, it’s really challenging. We talk about it in the book how it’s this bargaining phase of grief, where people make their lifestyle changes about their health, not their weight but they’re secretly dieting. So, that’s what I’m thinking about when I think about healthism.HilaryIt’s a social construct. Some of it we can see, but a lot of it we can’t see. It’s hard to figure out what’s ours and what was never ours to begin with. What doesn’t belong to us, what doesn’t help us, what doesn’t need to live under our skin at all. So in the book, we talk a lot about ways to see that and begin the process of divesting from these cultural constructs and systems of harm that uphold themselves within us.VirginiaThe question that I hear often from readers and I’m sure you encounter all the time, too, is when folks will say something like—trigger warning for fat phobic comment— “Well, I can’t move the way I used to or my body hurts and I need to lose weight in order to feel better in my body.”You don’t want to discount that they’re experiencing discomfort and pain in their knees, you don’t want to discount that they’re feeling like there has been a perceived loss of health that’s impacting how they function or move or feel in their bodies, but how do you take that experience of what’s happening in their body, but separate that from weight and separate that from healthism?HilaryAnything that we experience as a so-called side effect of weight, which, there could be a long debate about what those things are. We’ve all been conditioned to think that’s bad and correctable. Instead of really holding it to maybe something more akin to a disability justice framework that would say all bodies go through stuff. We’re not guaranteed able bodies for our lifetime. Hustling to become more able may actually cause me more harm in the long run or may put me down a path of having such an overemphasis on doing and production that I never achieve a relationship with myself that I want to be in for a lifetime. There’s a lot to unpack there.And I want to say that just based on what I said, it can be so easy to get pulled into like, “okay, so be good, then I need to embrace that idea.” And the truth is that everything that we do to survive in the system that only values certain bodies is okay. But we want there to be an honesty  within yourself to say, “I’m doing this to put up with these systems. I’m doing this to survive in a system” instead of “I’m doing this because I’m not good enough.” Or “I’m doing this because I’m bad.”VirginiaThat is a useful reframing. And it also gets a little bit at the next concept I wanted to talk about which is personal responsibility rhetoric. And I think that’s very related, right? DanaI think healthcare in general relies on a lot of personal responsibility rhetoric. One of the things I’m always doing when I’m training in motivational interviewing—I train in all kinds of fields, outside of our echo chamber. I’ve trained people who have never heard about Health at Every Size—is to talk about how health care really puts the responsibility of health on an individual person, instead of seeing it through a systemic lens and the way racism and poverty and oppression and stigma, trauma impact our health and our well being. I think health care providers and institutions at the leadership level, there’s a lot of pressure on frontline providers to get people to make these lifestyle changes so they’re not costing us so much money.Let’s face it, it’s not about people’s health and wellbeing, it’s about costs. And so I think health care providers tend to rely on personal responsibility rhetoric, like “if you get sick, it’s your fault.” That’s a big part of healthism, is if you get sick, it’s your fault. There’s something you could have done to prevent it and there’s some magical eating plan that’s gonna make it all go away and be better. There’s a fitness plan that will make it all go away and be better. That’s what I think of when I think of relying on that personal responsibility rhetoric.VirginiaIt’s interesting, too, because it’s making it our problem while telling us to define our health according to all these external rules. It’s such a fascinating disconnect that you’re the one getting it wrong, but it’s because you’re not doing it how we told you you have to do it.HilaryIt’s pretty insidious.DanaYou can put all these healthcare providers in a room and ask them to define health, and nobody’s going to be able to come up with a definition that everybody agrees on. So, when we’re talking to our clients and they’re telling us that health is important, it’s a value of theirs. We say, “Nobody is required to pursue health to be deemed worthy of love, respect, or belonging.” When people are really hooked into that place of wanting to be healthy and we talk to people about what does that mean to you, when you say the word ‘health’? How do you define it? How would you know if you were ‘healthy’?Having them unpack the ways we’ve been socialized to think about health, so that they have a stronger analysis around all the factors that impact our health and our wellbeing.VirginiaI remember the last time we spoke, it was an interview for a Health Magazine piece about cultural competency and healthcare. I think we were talking about this idea that health is actually a very personal concept to define on your own terms. I think you said something like “daily heroin use could be health for somebody,” and I couldn’t use that quote in the Health magazine piece. But I think about it really often when I think about trying to unpack healthism, because, it was a great example of how this is such a personal thing. Somebody’s goals and priorities and access to resources and all of that is going to vary so much. So why are we trying to ascribe this giant overarching definition to everybody?HilaryYeah, we can’t. There’s lived experience and access and what kind of support and help is available, what kind of community care is available. All of these factor into what is the best decision for me to maintain my life and to stay connected to my people in my life. The things that make me me.VirginiaThen the last concept I just wanted to quickly touch on which may be newer to my audience is this idea of bootstrapping, which I think certainly dovetails into the whole personal responsibility thing. But it’s such a uniquely American value, I think.HilaryIt is. In the United States, if you do it all right, you can have the American dream. And if you just work your ass off endlessly forever, you will arrive. In the context of immigration survival, it’s about access to resources and things like that. In the context of diet culture, we keep just trying to be better and better and better. Making ourselves into this two dimensional version of health or wellbeing. What has irked me throughout my career as a therapist in this space is like, Okay, what gets left behind if all we’re doing is trying to become an image of something that may or may not even exist, or that may be a caricature anyway?Bootstrapping to me is like all that we put aside within ourselves in order to make something possible. And that is something that’s very American and very survivalist, of course. But we often leave out that that has an impact on our emotional and psychological well being, and that we don’t necessarily get to know ourselves well if we’re always trying to become something else.VirginiaDefinitely. And it just reminds me of, again, this, this narrow definition of what health is, and the idea that you should sacrifice so much to achieve it. When folks are told weight loss is necessary for X health health outcome, setting aside the fact that you probably won’t achieve that weight loss, there’s never any discussion of the side effects of the pursuit of that weight loss and the toll that takes.HilaryExactly. Yes, yes.VirginiaSo many books around body positivity and intuitive eating are written fairly directly to, as you said with eating disorder treatment, white, cisgender, thin women. I mean, that’s a valid criticism of my own work, something I’m definitely working on. But I was just struck over and over again, in reading your work, how inclusive it is. And especially, how much time you spent in really thoughtful explorations of trans bodied experiences. So I would just love to hear a little more about why that was so important to you to do and also how you, as two white women, went about prioritizing and achieving this inclusivity in the work.DanaWe have been working on our own liberatory consciousness for many, many, many years now. One of the frameworks we use is Barbara Love’s liberatory consciousness, which is something we learned from Desiree Adaway and Ericka Hines, who have both consistently put upon us that we must situate our work in liberatory frameworks. When we’re doing our anti-oppression work and our anti-racism work, we’re developing this liberatory consciousness.I was thinking about, when Hilary was talking about eating disorder treatment earlier, I was like, “all are welcome here” is very different than “this was made with you in mind.” So, a lot of treatment centers out there are “all are welcome here.” “You’re all welcome here!” We don’t have gender neutral bathrooms, but you’re welcome here. We’re gonna do a body acceptance group where we’re primarily talking about cisgender people, but all are welcome here. Well, I don’t think we should talk about body acceptance with trans and nonbinary people. Initially, that’s not what we talk about, eventually it could be helpful. That’s not where we start, we’re talking about gender affirmation not body acceptance with people who are trans and nonbinary.One of the biggest things was, as a more diverse group of people were showing up to our workshops and retreats, as we were developing our own liberatory consciousness, we really started to revise all of our programs and workshops so that people really felt like they weren’t just welcome here, but we were really speaking to them directly. And you know, it’s through our own learning and unlearning and devoting time to reading books only written by people of marginalized identities and going to trainings and learning about neurodiversity, and all of these things that helped us try to create a book that speaks to a broader audience than simply white women.VirginiaFor a long time in women’s media, there was this push to be more inclusive. But what that would mean is the editor would say, “when you find five women to interview for this piece, make sure two are women of color, and one is gay.” Just like boxes we’re checking to make sure we’re hitting the diversity buttons. And it’s such a different thing. I mean, that’s not inclusivity. It’s just not.HilaryWell, and with the number of books out there around eating and disordered eating and body positivity, it’s remarkable that they don’t speak to the trans experience. Because trans folks, we know, have the highest rate of eating disorder. And while we, I don’t think, as two white women should ever be the ones primarily addressing that or developing programs that support that, I could not think of putting out a book without having a way of speaking more directly to that trans experience. So we did have a nonbinary psychologist, Sand Chang, who’s a Body Trust provider, write a letter to trans folks in the book and that felt like one way we could say we see you and we see your experience and we don’t want it to be erased.Virginia It’s a beautiful part of the book. So important.DanaWe really wanted to feature people’s stories, too, and make sure that we weren’t speaking for people. So we asked people to submit body stories, we did a questionnaire of people who’ve been in our programs, and we pulled a lot of quotes so people could hear directly from folks who’ve done this work who hold a variety of identities and positionality on things.HilaryWe don’t want our book to be the like, “here’s your 10 steps to freedom, follow our path.” We’re trying to shine a light on all the things that are in the way of people having fuller access to their own experience and the healing process that’s inherent within them. And that is really more of what the book is trying to do. Not so much trying to prescribe a path for all people.VirginiaWell, I guess to wrap up, I’d love to just give some thoughts—for folks who are just beginning this work or even just thinking about beginning—on common misconceptions. I mean, I’m sure a big one is people come in assuming this is what’s gonna finally make them lose weight. But anything else like that, that you think’s important for people to know or be thinking about at the beginning of this work?HilaryI would say this isn’t going to feel like anything you’ve done before. So, good news and bad news, right? You’re not going to get that initial new plan high from this book, but you are going to be introduced to parts of yourself that have been orphaned off or lost to this extreme hustle around our bodies. This is a slightly longer game. And I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by it. We want everyone who approaches our work to know straight off the bat that we don’t believe the ways you’ve suffered around your body have been your fault. And we want to show you why we know that.DanaI think the common misconception of this work is that it’s the “fuck it” plan. Especially when people are new to this and they start talking to their relatives about it or the people in their life about it. This is like developing a language and when we’re new to it, we’re hardly understanding it ourselves, and then we’re trying to tell people, if people are asking us or wanting to tell people, sometimes we don’t have the language for it. And then, people often misinterpret this, you know, if you’re not focusing on your weight, and your health people interpret it as the “fuck it” plan. And so, this is just a really radically different way of showing up for yourself in the world and for other bodies in the world and challenging our conditioning. But there’s a big difference between letting go and giving up. We would not describe this as the “fuck it” plan.VirginiaYou’re actually fighting for something way more profound. DanaAnd we need people to do this work. There’s a phenomenon we see in this work where people want it for everybody else, but believe there’s a different set of rules for people like “me,” in air quotes. That can be a common misconception: “Oh, this is good, but I have diabetes,” or “this is good for them but I have joint pain.” And this is for everybody. There is not a different set of rules for people like you.VirginiaSo important. Well, thank you. I’m so excited for this book to be reaching folks because everybody can be doing this work. Butter for Your Burnt ToastHilaryI’m obsessed with the show on Apple TV called Home. I want to talk to anyone else who is watching it. It’s like a docuseries kind of thing on people who have made homes that fit their lives or address a problem in some way. It’s leading me into an investigation around ideas of home and how we make ourselves at home. How we include others in it. I don’t even have words for why I’m obsessed with it, but I’m totally obsessed and I want everyone to watch it. There’s two seasons. VirginiaSounds fascinating.Hilary And I’m obsessed with my white golden retriever, Arrow.VirginiaOh, I’ve seen pictures of Arrow. Very, very cute. HilaryHe’s a dream. He’s a dream boy for sure. VirginiaThat’s a good one. Dana, what about you?DanaWell, I just got my hot tub back up and running yesterday. I filled it up yesterday. And it was 100 degrees here and I got in the water. I filled it up and then didn’t turn it on and just got in the water. VirginiaOh, got in the cold water. DanaYeah, hung out for the afternoon. And it was amazing. I’m a water girl. I go to the Japanese garden here in Portland and there’s lots of water features in there, so you can’t walk through there without hearing the water trickle. VirginiaI love that. DanaI love spending a morning a week up in there. I come out a different person compared to when I walk in. My nervous system is so calm when I walk out of there. And then I’m loving these these local English muffins. HilaryFrom Sparrow Bakery, I just had them this morning, too, for breakfast, and they are so damn good.VirginiaI am also a big hot tub proponent and water proponent. We have a debate in our house about the appropriate water temperature based on the weather because I kind of always want it to be a hot tub. I just love being in hot water so much. But other people I live with feel that because it’s 100 degrees, It should be cool and refreshing. It’s a current debate we’re having.HilarySounds like you need two hot tubs.VirginiaRight? Feels like such a great solution.HilaryYeah, you’re welcome. You’re welcome. No problem.VirginiaMy recommendation this week is also heat related. It’s my heating pad that I am living on right now. Because I am in a lower back spasm situation, it’s an ongoing journey in my life at the moment. And I just want to give a shout out to heating pads and heated car seats that are really making my life a lot more functional.HilaryYeah, heating pads are kind of a forgotten item. But they’re so essentialVirginiaAnd they’re not expensive. This is a $29 one from Target. I just carry it around the house with me as needed. HilaryAnd plug it in?VirginiaDepending on the day, yup. One of my daughters is actually always trying to steal it and I’m like you don’t need this, you’re a child. No. You can’t have it. Maybe for a birthday or something, I’ll get her her own heating pad. So yeah, anyway, I realize it is summer it is 100 degrees. Nobody actually wants to be as hot as I do. So that’s my recommendation if you have any kind of pain or just like cozy things.DanaYes.VirginiaWell let’s wrap up by having you tell listeners how we find you? How do we support your work? I want everyone to go buy Reclaiming Body Trust. What do we need to know?DanaWe have recently rebranded. We’ve changed our business name from BeNourished to Center for Body Trust so you can find us there. We are not on TikTok, but we’re on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Instagram is kind of our primary engagement. If you go to our website, you can learn more about the book and you can sign up for our newsletter, where you’ll get updates from us. We have a Body Trust Tuesday newsletter that we send out every Tuesday with body trust message. The book is out now!VirginiaSo people should go buy it immediately! Well, thank you both so much for being here. It’s such a pleasure.

This week, we revisit an old episode of Comfort Food where Virginia Sole-Smith and Amy Palanjian chat with Lisa Du Breuil, an incredible fat activist and clinical social worker who specializes in eating disorders and addiction. They discuss sugar addiction and how to navigate endless treats with your kids.If you'd like to support Burnt Toast, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And considering becoming a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.CREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Episode 58 TranscriptVirginiaHello and welcome to episode 24 of Comfort Food! This is the podcast about the joys and meltdowns of feeding our families and feeding ourselves.AmyAnd this week, we’re talking about sugar and whether we can really be addicted to it, if it makes our kids hyper, and how we can have a saner relationship with it, both ourselves and with our kids.VirginiaI’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I’m a writer, a contributing editor to Parents Magazine, and the author of The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America. I write about how women relate to food and our bodies in a culture that gives us so many unrealistic expectations about both of those things.AmyAnd I’m Amy Palanjian, a writer, recipe developer, and creator of Yummy Toddler Food and Yummy Family Food. I’m a contributor to Allrecipes Magazine and I love to help parents relax in the daily challenge of feeding their kids.VirginiaAs we’re recording this episode, I am just finishing the first month of my book launch and wrapping up my book tour for The Eating Instinct. I really loved all of the events, and if you guys are listening, anyone who has come out to the events, thank you so much. It’s been a total joy to talk about the book with people. But there’s one question that comes up at every single event, which has been really interesting, which is, “But what about sugar?” What I think happens is people hear me talking about the importance of trusting our bodies and listening to our hunger and fullness cues and not being afraid to take pleasure in food and how comforting eating should be at its core. And everyone’s with me. Everyone is nodding along like yes, yes, yes, we want to do that. We want to do that. And then someone raises their hand and says, “But wait, surely you don’t mean sugar?” And it’s so interesting that we just have, right now, this phobia around sugar. This cultural moment we’re having where we classify sugar in this different category from other foods. We really have started to think of it almost like alcohol or drugs.AmyAnd in terms of kids, there’s this giant fear of juice. There’s all of these fears of going to birthday parties and kids eating birthday cakes, that the kids are going to have these flaming meltdowns due to the sugar. And I think a lot of us believe these things because we hear our friends talking about it. But we don’t actually know what’s true and what’s not.VirginiaSo, we wanted to sort through all of this. And we wanted to bring in a really great expert to help us. So, we have Lisa DuBreuil with us. She is a therapist from Salem, Massachusetts, who works with clients on both eating disorders and addiction. So she’s kind of the perfect person to help us sort through these different issues. So Lisa, welcome! Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work and your family?LisaWell, thank you very much. I’m delighted to be here with you. So yes, I’m a clinical social worker. I work at Mass General Hospital in Boston, working with people who have substance use disorders and my particular clinical specialties are folks that have both eating disorders and substance use disorders, and also people that have developed different problems after weight loss surgeries. I also have a private practice in Salem, where I live with my family, and up here I see mostly people dealing with binge eating disorder, body distress, trying to recover from diet culture, things like that.VirginiaI should mention, Lisa is also quoted pretty extensively in chapter six of The Eating Instinct. So there will be more of her in the book.LisaAnd I’m married, I have a husband and a 13 year old daughter.AmySo, let’s start with the big question here. Is sugar addiction a real thing?LisaIn a word? No, it’s not. There’s obviously way more detail to that. But bottom line? No, it’s it’s not an addiction.VirginiaI think that is so important and so refreshing for people to hear. I hope people are breathing a sigh of relief, because this really is this misconception. It’s everywhere. So I really appreciate you saying that. Let’s get into that detail a little bit more. Why don’t you tell us a bit about the biology of addiction? And why is sugar not classified in that same way as drugs or alcohol?LisaThe first thing I want to want to say is, I really understand why people have this concern, because we are living in a cultural time when we’re being told that sugar is dangerous and addictive. I want to make it really clear, I have total sympathy for people that are worried about this and parents that are worried about this. But when we look at the science, we’re just not seeing the evidence that we respond to sugar the same way that we respond to what what are called “substances of abuse.”One of the most important things, I think, for people to know is that our entire nervous system requires sugar. It runs on sugar. That’s all your brain uses for energy is carbohydrates and all carbohydrates break down, in the end, to sugar. So, we do have a drive for sugar because we can’t survive without it. But that’s not the same thing as having an addiction. So that’s the first piece I think it’s important for people to know.The biggest piece I think that can be helpful to people is understanding the concept of habituation, which is what happens when a person is exposed to something and because of the exposure and the access, is able to regulate themselves around it. When I work with people with who are dealing with both a substance use disorder and an eating disorder, with the substance use disorder, we can we talk a lot about restriction and abstinence, because that’s the best way we know right now to help people stabilize and live a balanced life. When I’m helping them with their eating disorder, we are moving away from restriction. We’re moving away from abstinence, because that’s the best way we know how to help people be able to live in balance and feel like they can regulate themselves.AmyI think a lot of what stresses adults and parents out is just that it often seems like treats and sugar are everywhere that we go. That in itself can make it seem like sugar is out of control, because it’s all over the place. But that’s a very different thing than being physically addicted to it.LisaYes. And the piece that parents need to understand is that the more restrictive they are, that the more special and forbidden they make them, the more a child is going to be interested in them. That’s Parenting 101. The minute you say to your child, “don’t touch that,” what happens? That’s all they want. That’s all they want to touch. So, it’s the same thing with foods.VirginiaIt sounds like one of the key differences we all need to kind of wrap our minds around is that if you are talking about a substance that is physically addicting, it is important to avoid. An alcoholic can’t drink, a drug addict needs to avoid drugs, whereas in terms of managing our feelings of out-of-control-ness or anxiety around something like sugar, we actually need to be okay having it. We need to be comfortable with the exposure.LisaRight. So with with a substance use disorder, the exposure to the substance, heavy use of the substance—because of neuroplasticity, because of our brain’s ability to adapt, and change—we develop tolerance. Anyone who has struggled with substances can tell you, there was a time when one or two drinks was enough, and now I can’t seem to stop. And that has to do with physical changes that occur in the brain. And obviously, I also want to say that addiction is much more complicated than this. It also involves psychosocial factors and oppression and all these other cultural influences. It’s not just about someone’s biology, but when we are talking about the biology there’s this tolerance that develops because the brain adapts to the heavy use. And we don’t see that with fruits. We don’t see that with sugar. What we see is that through exposure, and abundance that people and animals actually are able to regulate. It’s the restriction that creates the drive, the over over attention to to these foods.AmyIs it the restriction that causes some people to then binge eat? Is that like an emotional response?LisaYes, yes. Really all eating disorders involve restriction, which also we can call dieting. I mean, that’s what dieting is, it’s restricting calories or restricting certain foods. And so when that happens, you can create a strong drive to then overeat, and ignore your own hunger and fullness cues. Because, oh my god, now it’s available, and I better get it while it’s still here.VirginiaSo when people say, “Oh, I can’t trust myself around the Oreos. I’ll eat the whole bag,” we’re kind of focusing on the wrong piece. It’s not actually the food, it’s everything you did leading up to encountering the Oreo with restriction that got you there.LisaExactly. And when I talk to people, how I try and break it down for people is, with permission plus abundance, you can get discernment. When you have permission—honest to God, deep in your heart permission—to eat as many Oreos as you really want, and you have plenty of Oreos, you can get to a place where you can actually tell how many do I really want?The other part of this is eating regularly throughout the day, eating lots of different kinds of food, making sure your nutritional needs are getting met. Because that’s the other piece is that if you’re undereating in other ways, you’re going to make it harder for your body and brain to hear the signals for all the different kinds of food your body needs. In the end, if you’re undernourished at the end of the day, your brain is going to prioritize its needs. And what does it need? Carbohydrates.The last thing I want to say about that piece is, this is a feature, not a bug. Because for most of human history, the biggest threat to our existence was starvation. So we have an amazingly powerful, not in our direct control drive to keep us alive. And so trying to push against that is like trying to train yourself to need less oxygen.VirginiaYeah, you’re just never going to do it.LisaYou’re never going to do it.VirginiaI think we’ve all met these people who give up sugar for some period of time. And they say, “Well, as long as I don’t eat it, I just don’t crave it.” What’s going on there?LisaSo, here’s the thing. I’m a big believer in believing people when they tell me about their lived experience. So, if someone says to me, “I have to tell you, I’ve cut out sugar,”— although I have to point out that no one can completely cut out sugar because it’s present in lots of different foods and we would die without it. But I know what they mean, they mean added sugar treats, etc. So, if someone says to me, “I’ve done that and I’m functioning well. I go where I want to go. I don’t get preoccupied, I feel satisfied. And life is going well,” I’m going to believe them. It’s not my job to convince people that what they’re doing isn’t working, if what they tell me is that it is working.But that said, lots of times in my experience, most folks find that in order to maintain that kind of restriction, it requires a lot of other limits in their lives. Places they don’t go, people they don’t hang out with, preoccupation that they have to manage. One of the ways you can think about it is, if I asked you to stand up and balance a quarter on your index finger, you probably wouldn’t have a hard time doing that. If I asked you to do it all day long, this simple task over time would start to get really difficult because you get muscle fatigue and focus fatigue, and it would it would start requiring more and more of your energy, psychological energy and physical energy, to continue that hold, right? So that can be what happens when people try and have such a restriction because carbs are present in so many of our foods. And nutritionally most human diets, 50 to 60% of it is carbohydrates. Because our brains need such a large amount of carbs to run. So, for most people, it’s very hard to pull off over an extended period of time. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some people that maybe can do that.VirginiaThat’s really good to be aware of, if you’re thinking about something like that. The odds are a little bit stacked, in terms of how your body’s gonna respond.LisaYes, and the more of a history you have of restricting and foods being forbidden, the more of an emotional pull those foods are going to have on you. So, lots of times the beginning of recovering with eating disorders is really healing from a lot of that restriction. So, in the beginning, sometimes people do over focus on those foods because they’re making up for all the years they weren’t allowed to have them.VirginiaBut then you see, as someone continues in their recovery, you see sort of a balancing.LisaYes, you do. Absolutely. And when I work with people, we don’t do it willy-nilly. We very planfully think about how to help someone move foods from the “forbidden” column into the “it’s okay to eat” column, and we do it in a way that feels safe and is planful. Because it can be very scary for people because they are afraid of getting completely out of control.VirginiaLisa, you work primarily with adults struggling with food in these profound ways, but I’m curious to know if there are any particular strategies that you use with your clients, particularly when it comes to overcoming these anxieties around the so-called forbidden foods, that you think are also useful for parents to incorporate.LisaSo, the first thing I would recommend is to look at the resources available through the Ellyn Satter Institute.VirginiaWe love Ellyn Satter on this podcast.LisaMy daughter is adopted from China, and when we brought her home, even though I was in recovery from my own eating disorder, I was really worried, like any parent would be, what if I pass this along to her? And a friend of mine said, “Oh, you have to check out Ellyn Satter.” And so I did andI discovered the Division of Responsibility. And that’s what I used when she came home. Although initially I just fed her on demand even though she was 18 months old, because she came to me undernourished because the orphanage didn’t have enough resources. She was very well loved, but they literally didn’t have enough food to go around sometimes. And so initially, I remember her eating big pats of butter because she was making up for lost time and her brain was growing exponentially and she needed fat. But eventually, as she was ready to do so, we moved into the division of responsibility and I found it incredibly helpful. So that’s always my go-to resource for parents.AmyI just want to jump in here and say if you guys haven’t listened to it, Episode 19, the whole episode is about the Division of Responsibilities. So definitely check that out.LisaI think It’s even helpful for adults. Lots of times with binge eating disorder, as well as the other eating disorders, people don’t do a great job of making sure that several times a day they have opportunities to eat, and that they build predictability into their life. Even for grown adult, that can be a really great way to think about feeding yourself.The other thing I think it’s important for parents to understand is, because I’ve seen this where people create this sort of bubble of safe foods at home. When you’ve got your little one, your toddler, you’re just starting grade school, your baby’s heading out into the big wide world where there are lots of different kinds of foods available at all sorts of different times, and going into all different kinds of households. I’ve heard from people about their kid’s friend showing up at their house and eating huge amounts of a snack because they don’t get access to that snack at home. We all want to keep our children in these safe little bubbles, but they’re heading out into the world. So, you really want to think about preparing your child for for this environment. And, again, that’s why I really like Ellyn Satter’s approach about creating eating competence. So your child is really connected and their connection to their hunger and appetite cues have been have been protected, so that when they head out there, and there are all these different things they can explore, that they can tell what they really want to eat, they can tell when they’re full. Because sooner or later, they’re going to have access to those foods that you’ve decided are not allowed.VirginiaOne strategy we use, we actually just use the other night. We had a bunch of pie leftover from the holidays and I put it down on the table just as part of dinner. We do dessert alongside the rest of the food. And it was really interesting. My five year old definitely had apple pie as her primary dinner, which I thought was a very excellent choice because pie is delicious. But she still was done with the meal just as quickly as she always is. It wasn’t like, oh, I’m gonna really like go to town on this pie, because it was just there on the table with everything else. So, do you use that kind of, like neutralizing treats?LisaExactly. One of the greatest pleasures I’ve had, as someone who’s in eating disorder recovery, has been to, to watch my daughter be able to take or leave treats that I would have been obsessed about. It just feels really good to know that she’s so in tune. It’s very bad when when we train children in diet culture to not trust their bellies, that’s a very bad message to send, especially for girls. Don’t trust your gut. Don’t listen to your body. That moves out into other ways that they’re supposed to be paying attention to what their gut tells them. I think that’s another important angle that people don’t think about. We’re constantly telling kids, especially little girls, don’t listen to yourself. Don’t listen to your hunger. Don’t listen to what your gut is telling you. I don’t think that serves them.VirginiaTotally agree. Especially as your daughter is getting into the teenage years. I’m sure this is on your mind. There’s so many choices kids have to navigate as they gain that independence that we want them really trusting themselves for.AmySo, if a parent is feeling like there are just objectively a lot of treats in their life, what are ways that are not full of anxiety that we can help balance intake?VirginiaYou’re talking about like, every time you go to the bank and there’s a lollipop?AmyWe just came off for the holidays and there are class parties and then parties after school and there just is a lot of that and I think some people, without getting into wanting to restrict their children, are just also wanting to make sure that their kids have an opportunity to eat other foods and be hungry for other foods.LisaSo, the first thing I want to say is it’s normal for there to be feasts in our culture. And it’s okay if certain times of the year there’s more food available or more treats available. That’s not some sort of pathology. Every culture on the planet has feast days, and especially this time of year, because it’s the darkest, coldest time of year in many parts of the world, there’s lots of celebrations. And so that’s okay. That said, if a parent was worried about this, I think what I would recommend is, and what I’ve done with even done with my own daughter sometimes is said, “Yep, you can grab a lollipop, but I’m going to ask you to wait and have it at snack time. And that can be one of your options.” In my house, have always had a basket of treats that we’ve picked up hither and yon, that then are available to her for snack or dessert. So she might not be able to have something right now, but she knows that it will be available to her if she decides to have it later. So if you’re worried about that kind of thing, then as long as you’re making sure that there are opportunities on a daily regular basis for your child to have access to that, that has worked really well. And also like, if you’re in church service, if you’re someplace where you can’t eat anyways, there are always going to be times when we can’t stop and eat right now. So, building in regular snacks and meal times are opportunities to add that treat to the options.AmySo the American Heart Association has all these very specific recommendations for how many sugar grams we’re supposed to have each day. And I know that that has a tendency to freak a lot of parents out because it’s hard to actually keep track of that, like carrying a calculator around. But it does set up this model where we sort of feel like we have to be monitoring and keeping track of things. I think it’s confusing to get that message from that type of a large health association. And I just wanted to get some thoughts from you on that.LisaThat’s a fantastic question. So here’s the thing, anyone who’s raised a child from infancy knows that they tend to have like a protein day, and then they’ll have a carb day, you know? Or all they’re willing to eat is carrots, and then all they’re willing to eat is cheese. I think the idea that when left to their own devices that humans will eat three perfectly macronutrient-ly balanced meals every day ongoing, it doesn’t pan out. I think that what you need to think about is stepping back and looking at it, especially with younger children, in a bigger picture. I know that that some recent research done has shown that even though children are “overly” focused on one macronutrient day to day, that if you step back and look at a month’s worth of eating, it’s very balanced, because they’re listening to their hunger cues. So, yes, there might be a day when, Oh my God, we’ve mostly had these treats. But then again, assuming that you’re using the division of responsibility, and giving with permission and abundance, what you’ll notice is there will be other days when they’re not that interested in those kinds of foods. Even for myself, you know, I tend to, after the holidays, I tend to be looking for a lot of greens and soups and things like that. And I think it’s a reaction to all the richer foods that I’ve been enjoying in November and December.VirginiaBut it’s just a sort of natural balancing, not a furious like, Oh, God, I have to…LisaExactly. It’s not driven by “Oh my God, I have to make up.” It’s just literally like, wow, I’m kind of sick of those foods at this point. I don’t want any more. I’m looking for other things now. And it sort of balances itself out. The other thing I want to say is I know how scary it can be for parents. There’s so much pressure on parents to do it correctly and so much fear about children’s bodies and body sizes. And it can be really anxiety provoking for parents to step away from the the dominant culture and give this a different try. So, I really do want to encourage people to look into Ellyn Satter, to look into the resources out there for parents that are supporting children’s natural hunger and satiety cues. There are resources. There are other folks out there that are doing it this way. And it makes mealtimes so much easier when you’re not attempting to negotiate exactly what they’re putting in their mouths. There are other things we do need to be very controlling about what goes into our children’s mouths. It’s wonderful to be able to encourage kids that they can trust themselves around that.AmyI just want to say that like, that is one of my big goals with my website, because I just, it’s so much. Meals are happier, they’re less stressful, and you can just take this huge burden off yourself, if you’re not counting bites of broccoli, or worried that your child is getting enough and that if you just can get to a place of trusting them. But it of course does take a lot of work. And it’s not something that will just automatically click into place. It often takes some work and then take some more work. And it’s like a perspective that you need to keep reminding yourself is probably better.VirginiaAnd wouldn’t it be nice if big groups like the American Heart Association could get on board? Because I do think, like Amy said, people get really freaked out about these serious recommendations. And it’s hard to recognize, oh, that’s another metric, just like all the diet culture metrics that we don’t need. Just because it’s coming from a bunch of cardiologist doesn’t mean it’s actually good for your child’s mental health.LisaRight. And again, you can always ask about and get curious about, well, where’s that data coming from? Who told them that? And who’s influencing these campaigns? Because sometimes what you find out is they’re coming from pharmaceutical corporations or diet corporations that don’t necessarily have our best interests at heart.VirginiaThat is such a great point. Yes, absolutely.Lisa, thank you so much for joining us. This has been such an enlightening conversation. We could talk about this stuff all day long. So thank you for making the time. Will you tell our listeners where they can find more of you and where you are on social media?LisaMy website, which is constantly in development, is LisaDuBreuil.com. And I’m on Twitter at @LisaJDuBreuil. And I think that’s my instagram handle, as well.VirginiaI follow Lisa on Twitter, and she tweets, tons of great stuff. So I definitely recommend following her. Lots of good stuff out there.AmyOkay, so Virginia, you have had a busy few weeks, and you’re trying out a new approach to some dinners. So can you tell us what what happened?VirginiaSo, as everyone who listens to the podcast knows, I hate meal planning. See our episode with KJ Dell’Antonia for the full scoop on that. So we’ve had a couple of weeks where I have been on the road for the book nonstop, plus holidays. What I typically do is grocery shop on Fridays or Saturdays for the whole week and then just make up dinner on the fly from whatever I’ve bought. But there’s been a lot of weekends where I’ve been away for book stuff, so I haven’t been able to get to the grocery store. Dan has been doing the Walmart run to cover our usual staples, but it just seemed like we needed an easier plan. Often I was coming back from a trip just in time to make dinner, but not do anything in advance of making dinner.AmyThat’s the worst.VirginiaSo yeah, it is kind of mind bending. And I didn’t want to totally go over to take out, mostly because we eat takeout so much I’ve gotten a little sick of our local takeout options. I know. So I decided, I got a coupon in the mail for HelloFresh, which is one of those meal kit types of services, like Blue Apron or Sun Basket or all those different companies. And so let me say right up front, I paid for this myself. I mean, I did use the coupon they sent me but I didn’t get it because we’re podcasters. I’m sure everyone has gotten these coupons in their mailbox. They don’t know who we are, so it’s not a sponsoring or endorsement kind of thing. But I was like well, let me give this a try because the whole concept is that you hop on the website, pick out a few recipes you want to make for the week and then a box of groceries shows up on your doorstep with all the instructions and everything. And it definitely solved that issue of I can’t go to the grocery store or think about dinner until I need to be cooking dinner. I did like spend five minutes on the website randomly picking a few things to try. But then the box arrived, one day it got there right as I was getting home so I was able to unpack the groceries. And it’s nice! They send you stuff to make three meals and everything is in its own little bag. So you just take out your bag and then unpack and it’s got all the vegetables and everything you need. I think you have to provide olive oil and salt. But that’s about it.AmyDoes it come in a cooler?VirginiaIt’s a box that’s lined with cooler type material. And there’s an ice pack on the bottom. Everything was fresh, the ingredients all looked pretty good. The tomato was a little anemic looking. I mean, also, a tomato in November in the Northeast would be a tough sell. But everything was pretty good. So I really liked it for that ease of convenience. For non meal planners, I think it’s a great option because it totally takes away that 5pm panic. The downsides, I would say, are the meals are not very make-ahead friendly. So often when I’m not traveling, I want to get dinner figured out in the morning or on my lunch break. We’re busy doing something with the kids in the hour before dinner happens, like we’re at swim lesson or whatever. So all of these meals do require you to be able to be at the stove for like 30 minutes or so before you want to eat, which is a challenge for a lot of people juggling kids and work schedules. So that, I think, is a drawback to them. I would love to see them do more like “here’s a slow cooker recipe” or a make a head type of thing. I didn’t feel like they were marketing to families as much as I expected because you have to choose between a two person portion or a four person portion. But in my house, we are four people, but two of them are small people. So I wasn’t gonna get the four person portion, because that would have been way too much food. But there were nights where the two person portion wasn’t quite enough. Like there was one recipe that was like this taco flatbread thing, and Dan and I were both like, “Yeah, we want to eat this whole thing. What are we feeding the kids?” So I still had to figure out rounding it out with a few things to give the girls. So I would love to see them do like a parents eating with small children option. I mean, I feel like there’s a lot of us.AmyYeah, there is another company called One Potato box. But they’re not available everywhere because I have checked. It’s the Weelicious founder and then the woman who runs Shutterbean, the website, does the photos. And so I can’t tell if I just want them because their photos are so good or like whether it would really taste like that in my house, but I couldn’t get it in Iowa anyway.VirginiaWell, I’m going to check into that because I felt like they could be doing a better job. This is a great option if you’re childless and just cooking for two people or if you have older kids and like the four person portions would make more sense for you. I will say the recipes were super straightforward. The time estimates were correct, which I appreciated. I was churning out dinner super fast that week. On the one hand, it feels wasteful because all the food comes in this big box, and there’s extra packaging. But we didn’t waste food that week, because I only bought the ingredients that I needed. Like, they only had the ingredients to make these exact things, which if you don’t meal plan you often don’t have that. I’m not saying there’s not an easier hack to that, but I’m saying I don’t do it. So, I did like that there was no food waste. But I just felt like I often ended up having to like add on a little bit to the meals or improvise a bit to make it work for my family. And Dan did say he likes my cooking better overall, which I thought was sweet of him to say.AmyThat’s nice.VirginiaAs I’ve discussed, I’m kind of improvisational cook. So I did definitely play with the seasonings a bit and try to tailor things a little bit more to us. But it was great to have that starting point. Long story short, I definitely get why there’s a lot of pushback. I’ve always been really skeptical about this concept. I don’t know why I think I was just sort of being a snob about it.AmyI am too.VirginiaLike, you can’t just like cook on your own? You need someone to like send you a box? And then I was like, Screw it. Yeah, I do. No shame in that game. Send me a box of food so I don’t have to think about dinner! That part was pretty great. So I think if you’re someone who doesn’t have a lot of time to fit grocery shopping in, because that can be such a time suck on the weekends.AmyIt’s much easier to just go and look at their options to pick what you want to cook then like have to like deal with the entirety of the internet and find a recipe.VirginiaRight, it was really nice having all the noise cut out. That is totally true. Because they change the menus week to week but it was like, okay, here are these few choices that we are offering this week. Which, on the one hand, I was like, I’m really just picking three things with meatballs because I don’t think my kids will eat the other things. But on the other hand, I like that this has taken out decision fatigue for me. So, yeah, I think I might try some other ones.AmySo I’m not like a freeze-er. I talked about prepping for when baby comes a little bit, but I’m not a freezer meals person. But Pinch of Yum recently did this massive 12 recipe freezer meals and I was looking at recipes, and it was not what I expected. Because you don’t actually—so a lot of freezer meals, you cook ahead of time and then put in the freezer, at least I thought? Clearly I don’t do this very often. But this is just like you chop a bunch of things, put it in a bag, and then it has directions for what to do and like what to add after. That’s so much easier.VirginiaOh, that’s very similar to what this is, except it’s not frozen.AmyBecause then you have all of your stuff and you put it in the slow cooker and you add three ingredients that are from the pantry and you have dinner! I’m totally going to do that. And also the recipes are like things that I would actually want to eat. Like there’s a chicken meatballs recipe. There’s Tandoori chicken, Korean barbecue beef, chicken tinga, stuff with lots of flavor in it. I don’t know if my kids will like it, but I want to eat this.VirginiaI guess my question is, when are you going to do all the food prep?AmyYeah, see, I don’t know. In theory, this is a great idea.VirginiaFor that random free Saturday…AmyOr maybe this is one of the things that I have my mom or the mother-in-laws do.VirginiaWhen they when they come to help with the baby!AmyI hand them four recipes and then they prep them. Then all I have to do is add the—I’m just looking at what I would need to add for one of these. I’d need to get some tortillas. Done.VirginiaOh, that’s very smart. That sounds like a great strategy for that particular period of your life. Maybe I can just recruit general neighborhood volunteers who want to be nice. I’m not having another baby to get it.Anyway, I think my big takeaway was just I don’t know why I was being sort of snobby about these things. I think f you’re feeling panicked about dinner, as we also often are, to try something new and see whether it’s a good fit for you. And if I do try other meal prep kits like this, I will certainly report back if I find one that feels better for those of us in the small appetite children phase.AmyYeah, and if anyone has tried one potato box, I would love to hear what you think.VirginiaYeah, or any others that you think are really good that we should be doing.

This week, Virginia chats with Dana Miranda, a certified educator in personal finance and the founder of Healthy Rich, a platform for inclusive budget-free financial education. Check out her podcast and her Substack newsletter, Founder Notes.If you'd like to support Burnt Toast, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And considering becoming a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It's just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people. Paid subscriptions make all of our work possible and enable us to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSVirginia found Dana through this great Culture Study interview. Dana recommends literal burnt toast with butter, and also playing the flute.Virginia recommends the Maui Mat. CREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.---Post-Publication Note from Virginia:I want to thank everyone who participated in the comments on this podcast episode. This is (I think?) the first time I’ve published something here that really did not land with lots of you. It was bound to happen! I swing at a lot of pitches! You all named some very valid reasons for why this one missed for you, and if Dana and I were to do the interview over again, we’d take the conversation in a few different directions—to better acknowledge the role privilege plays both in the ability to budget AND in the ability to reject budgeting, and to make it clearer that we were questioning systems and critiquing the marketing of budget culture, not giving personal finance advice (I know it got murky at the end when I asked for tools!).I also think this conversation hit a nerve at least in part because Dana does articulate so well some drawbacks and risks to budgeting that aren’t comfortable to name or look closely at. So I will continue to investigate how restriction, perfectionism and the myth of personal responsibility (all diet culture hallmarks!) show up in how we think about money and so many other aspects of life.All of that being said: As I was reading through the discussion, I just kept thinking how much care everyone was putting into their critiques. You helped me see how the conversation I published didn’t go far enough, and where it missed the mark. And you did so with such kindness and grace. I appreciate how willingly you come along for the ride when I take us in new directions but I appreciate even more that this is a community that offers smart constructive criticism and holds me accountable. Please keep doing that!Episode 57 TranscriptVirginiaHi, Dana! Let’s start by having you tell us just a little bit about yourself and your work.DanaSo I worked as a freelance writer for 10 years. Writing is my background. And I was just kind of getting by for about five years. I started in personal finance media in 2015, when I got my first full-time job working at The Penny Hoarder, a media startup in personal finance. I really had no personal finance background when I did that, I just got into it because it was a writing job and I liked the team. And I thought, I’ll try it out. Personal finance sounds really boring, but let’s see! It’s writing.I found that I really enjoyed the things that I was writing about because I was able to learn so much about our financial systems, like what goes into a credit score. I hadn’t been making a lot of money. I grew up working class and didn’t learn a lot about personal finance from my parents or my community. I just kind of buried my head in my 20’s around anything to do with money. So it was so fun to start learning about it.Then, as I got deeper into it, I started freelancing and writing for more sites and also working with some financial technology companies. I learned that the space is pretty much 100% dominated—like so many spaces—by middle-class, cis, white, straight men. So all of the advice that we’re getting is really just coming from that perspective. It’s leaving out so many people. I brought plenty of privilege to the work that I was doing, just as a white woman with a family network to fall back on. But even just coming from a working class background, I knew how much advice and personal finance was not speaking to me. And it was something that I was calling out to all my colleagues who had a middle class background that they didn’t seem to notice in the work that they were doing.I started to notice what I named “budget culture,” and wanted to explore that more. So I started my platform for financial education, Healthy Rich, last year, to invite more voices into the space, tell stories, to share more perspectives, and just kind of explore a new way to teach about money and kind of critique the system a little bit.VirginiaI’m so glad you’re doing this work. I discovered you through Anne Helen Peterson’s newsletter Culture Study, which is how many of us discover everything good in our lives. You did a great Q&A with her about Dave Ramsey and budget culture. It was so fascinating. And there was one quote that really jumped out for me and it’s the reason I was like, “Dana, come on the podcast.” You wrote:Budget culture is the damaging set of beliefs around money that rewards restriction and deprivation — much like diet culture does for food and bodies — and promotes an unhealthy and fantastical ideal of financial success.I had just never thought like, oh, wait, like tracking your spending is not that different from tracking calories. So I really want us to dive into this, let’s start with the concept of budget culture. DanaSo I think one of the biggest parallels is that the way that we teach personal finance is focused on the myth that there’s some “right” way to do money, and we just need to learn it. And we see that in diet culture, too. That there’s a right way out there and if you’re not happy with what’s going on with your money, it’s because you haven’t found quite the right way. You haven’t figured out how to follow all the right rules. That’s really how it’s taught. And also, that there’s this right way to be. You should be striving for some kind of nebulous idea of being rich, or a higher net worth, lower debt. And those are all just taken as fact in personal finance.The advice specifically around budgeting is, I think, exactly like dieting, because it’s focused on restriction. There are a few experts that talk about earning more money to do what you want with your finances. But most skip over that entirely, and just go to if something’s not right with your money, you need to start restricting how you’re spending it because it’s overspending that’s causing your problems. And again, the assumed goal is to become rich, like increase your net worth, decrease your debt and it’s all of these things that we take at face value as like, of course, that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to make more money, we’re trying to have less debt, we’re trying to spend less on taxes—all of these things that people just assume are the right goals. But if you start to examine them, there’s actually a lot of problems with them. Teaching those as the right way to do money can be really damaging or at best useless for a lot of people because they just don’t apply.VirginiaI mean, you are blowing my mind. You’re right. There’s this whole premise that we don’t question, which is that you must want to become as rich as possible. Just like you must want to become as thin as possible. But what if that goal is not relevant to you? What if that’s not a healthy goal for you to pursue? Or a realistic goal which for most people, it’s not. That completely changes the conversation about money. DanaAnd what is rich, too? I see the same thing in diet culture. Like, what is thin enough? Like, what’s the right amount to be? And then we also critique people who become too rich, which I don’t know where that line is. There’s really no right way to do it. You’ll find critiques either way. VirginiaYou’ll always move the bar on yourself. There’s not a number that you can get to, in either conversation, where you’re going to be like, I no longer worry about this, because this whole thing is a response to this culture telling you, you’re not good enough.DanaExactly. And we apply restriction to everyone, too, no matter how high your net worth is, or how much money you have coming in. We still look at the decadent purchases of celebrities and say that this isn’t how they should be spending their money. We look at working class and middle class people and say, you shouldn’t be spending your money this way because you don’t earn enough. So the idea is, well, if I earn more, shouldn’t I be able to spend more? But you realize that the point is just restriction the whole time.VirginiaI want us to break down why that’s so dangerous, because the other line from the Q&A with Anne Helen that really stopped me in my tracks was when you said, “budgeting, like dieting doesn’t work.” I wrote in my notes for this episode, “I REALLY THOUGHT IT WAS ME.” I thought people are either good at budgeting or they’re not. And if you’re not, you should try to be better at it. And now that I’m saying it out loud, I’m realizing how very much that sounds like a diet mentality. So why doesn’t it work? DanaThat’s a great question. It’s hard to know because, as far as I can tell, it’s studied very little. There’s very little research around whether budgeting works. It has kind of blown my mind because as I started hearing people dig into the research around dieting, and whether dieting works and the effects that it has on people’s lives, it made me interested, like, there’s got to be a parallel to that in budgeting and finance. And there’s so little around whether people can stick to budgets, and there’s basically no one questioning if people even do stick to a budget, what effect does it have on their finances? VirginiaThat feels so important to know. DanaBefore you start teaching this is absolutely what you need to do with your money, someone should be finding out: Is it the right thing? What effect does it have? Is it something that people can actually apply to their lives? Because if it’s not, then it’s not valuable advice. You can’t just keep saying, “This is the right thing to do. And so you’re wrong if you don’t do it,” when literally no one can do it.So, why doesn’t budgeting work? I can make guesses. I think it’s the restriction around it. It’s that set of rules. It’s the assumed goal of becoming rich, which, like you said, doesn’t apply to a lot of people, doesn’t make sense for a lot of us. What we’re mostly trying to do with money is just to be able to enjoy our lives day to day. There’s some long-term planning that people are doing, but most of us aren’t thinking, “What can this money become? What’s my legacy going to be?” Budgeting just makes your life difficult day to day because you spend your time constantly thinking about money, tracking your spending, restricting your costs and expenses. And constantly feeling guilty when you spend money on things that bring you joy.Even if you don’t stick to a budget, the mindset sticks around. Even if you start to splurge and start to do things that you enjoy, because you don’t want to track your spending anymore, then you still just feel guilty the whole time. VirginiaI mean, it’s the same as the sort of restrict/binge cycle that a lot of people get in with dieting where most of us cannot sustain restriction long term. People who can do that usually qualify for an eating disorder diagnosis. And the rest of us restrict as long as we can and then hunger sets in, you eat everything because you’ve been starving, and then you feel bad and feel like you have to start the cycle. It sounds like you’re seeing something really similar happened with money.And yeah, I just want to talk about the misery of doing it. I mean, I have failed every budget app I’ve ever downloaded. The idea of standing in the grocery store inputting numbers on my phone or or having to take photos of receipts or look back later and correct the way that my online banking miscategorized everything—It is really tedious. Would you say this applies to even like budget sites that have like pretty big cult followings, like You Need a Budget?1DanaSo I’ve looked into a lot of that stuff. It’s kind of interesting, especially budgeting apps and budgeting methods in particular, because none of it from the beginning has ever appealed to me personally. I’ve never really been into making a budget. But I can see the parallel because everything that you’re describing with budgeting, I did with dieting. I found and tried different food tracking apps and went through that whole experience. So, I understand the mindset that you have when you feel like it must be me. I can’t make this app work. Or I can’t stick to what the app is telling me I’m supposed to do.But as I started talking more about anti-budgeting and budget culture, a lot of the response has been people calling out certain apps or certain methods that work for them. They’re saying, “This budget culture is terrible, but that’s why I love YNAB,” when literally, the name is “You Need a Budget.”The 50/20/30 budget is also really popular, people don’t see it as restrictive because it’s percentage-based rather than category-based. But all of those ultimately still just come down to: There’s a lot of tracking your spending. So it’s just constantly being aware of and judging what you’re doing with your own money. And then also, they still set restrictions on how you spend your money, like 50/20/30 says only a certain percentage of your money can be used in this way. And you have to define what is a want versus a need. And, and you have to be saving a certain amount.You Need a Budget I just started exploring because people were sharing that as a piece of advice with me. It has a huge cult following, so I’m really paying attention because I want to know what is so appealing to people. But as far as I can tell from the app is that it is it’s kind of an envelope budgeting app. So you set a certain amount of money that you can spend in certain categories. I think what probably is appealing is that it doesn’t tell you how much those categories should be. But it’s still a way to internalize that restriction. And it allows you to move money from one category to another. But imagine that experience and the guilt that you would feel if you were like, Oh, I’m moving money from… VirginiaMy kids’ college fund!Dana…because I wanted to go have another vacation or night with my friends or something. It’s one of those things where, everyone is well-intentioned, but because we’re not questioning the premise of budget culture from the beginning, that it just continues to perpetuate.VirginiaI want to talk a little more about the role of privilege here. I mean, we see this in diet culture. So many of the gurus or diet plan creators are people who are actually genetically predisposed to being thin and then claiming that the way they eat and exercise is the answer and what you need to also be doing in order to sort of achieve their results. It sounds like you’ve encountered something similar in budget culture, where people claim they have all the answers to how to manage your money, but actually, they just have money. DanaIt’s kind of interesting to look for the parallels, too, because there’s not technically a biological predisposition to richness. But if you break down white privilege, the privilege that makes it easier to become rich in our society—it’s all just stuff that people can’t work towards necessarily. And what I find kind of frustrating is that I don’t think a lot of personal finance experts, teachers, whatever you want to call them, I don’t think that a lot of people are trying to hide their privilege. I think they’re just completely unaware of it. I find that they talk about struggles of growing up middle class. And I know that there’s a big spectrum of people who qualify as middle class income. There are real financial constraints that you deal with, you’re not Bill Gates or Elon Musk, or whatever. But because people experience a little bit of friction financially, they don’t understand the massive amount of friction that so many, like the majority, of the people who are following them, have felt their entire life.So, the things they speak to where they think, “I was able to overcome the challenges that I had in my life, I wasn’t given everything and look at the college education that I got, and the degree that I got, and the jobs that I was able to get and the money I was able to save.” They expect that they can just give that advice to anyone in any situation and think “Well, you can overcome your circumstances as well and do the same thing,” without understanding the difference, the huge gap, between their situation and a lower-income, working class person, a single mother, a Black person, or someone who doesn’t have access to education in the same way, someone who’s living with a disability, and having trouble getting hired or keeping a job or just getting the resources that they need.VirginiaThe classic example is “stop spending that $5 a day on your latte.” And it’s like, yeah, you could do that. And then you could save up for your vacation, if you already have the privilege of secure housing, food security. If you’re already operating from a base of privilege, then cutting out one indulgence to free up some fun money for something else makes some degree of sense, perhaps. But if you don’t have all of those things in place, this latte advice is useless to you and feels laden with so much judgment. And it’s so condescending.DanaIt’s the condescension and then you’re like, “They cut out lattes and now they’re a millionaire. Why can’t I do that?” And it’s because you are struggling to pay your rent! It’s not that you’re overindulging on lattes and you want to put that money somewhere else. I grew up working class. We did fine, but we definitely had a paycheck to paycheck experience. So I saw my parents dealing with money a little bit. And then as an adult, as a freelancer, I was earning like $12,000 a year, it was absurd. And so I was in that situation where I had debt that I was ignoring, I was completely strapped for money, there was no way to just cut out a couple of things and make ends meet, it was like just this constant shuffling around of money, that’s all. And then I got into a job where I was suddenly making this full time salary and at a startup where then I was being promoted and getting raises very quickly. And so I was in a new income bracket. And at the same time learning about personal finance. But I realized pretty quickly, on reflection, that the reason that my credit score was going up, that I could suddenly get a credit card, that I was feeling a lot better about my finances, that my student loans were under control was because I just had the money to deal with all those things. And that gave me an enormous amount of privilege. It didn’t have anything to do with financial literacy that I suddenly knew more, I was able to take the steps. If I had learned all of that a year before starting the job, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything with that knowledge, because I didn’t have the money to address any of those issues.VirginiaSo what is the alternative? I actively encourage people to break up with dieting and divest from diet culture. How do we divest from budget culture, and what is sort of an anti-budget mindset to approaching money?DanaI think the challenge of it is really the same as divesting from diet culture, because so much of it is just internalized. There’s so much mindset work that you have to do. The simplest answer to instead of budgeting and tracking all of your spending and restricting your spending is just conscious spending. So being mindful and, and understanding how you’re using your money. Which sounds really scary, I think, to a lot of people because money feels really finite. It feels like “if I just spend as it feels good, eventually I’ll run out and I won’t be able to pay for things.” But as someone who has like, like I said, done kind of that money shuffle of not having very much money, it’s not really as finite as it seems. Tthere’s a lot of debt that you can set aside and deal with in a different way later. Money is just not as finite as it seems, you’re able to earn a little bit and get by for the week, or you’re able to shuffle things around. You can set certain bills aside or certain debts aside, or whatever it is. And so that’s a huge mindset shift to start to think about not being driven by paying down your debt. Not being driven by improving your credit score. Rethinking how you’re earning money, where it’s coming from, how you share money, and how you can utilize community resources and government resources. And again, rethinking just that goal of increasing your net worth and becoming rich, all of that mindset work, can help.But the simple answer is the alternative to budgeting, I think, is conscious spending. And then there’s just like a whole lot of work to get there. So I think it’s a lot of conversations about what is budget culture? What does budgeting really mean in your life? And how can you break away from it?VirginiaI mean, one thought I’m having, as you’re talking about this idea of thinking of money as less finite, of setting aside some debt to deal with later, that more fluid approach you’re describing, I’m thinking, well, that’s what rich people do all the time. We just don’t let people with less money do it. I mean, just a personal example—and I should acknowledge, I grew up upper middle class.2 I come from a very privileged background. I had some broke freelancing years in the beginning of my career, but obviously, with a big safety net. But you know, recently, we were talking to a financial planner about various goals and what have you. And I had this idea that our big goal should be paying off our mortgage. We should pay off our mortgage so we own our house free and clear. And isn’t that the goal for everyone? And this financial planner was like, “Noo, because you have a really good interest rate, that’s good debt. You don’t need to worry about that debt. Your money will do better invested in other ways.” And it was so eye opening to me to understand, OH, this is a different way of thinking about money, because we have some money to think about. As opposed to “I have to get on top of this credit card bill,” that frantic mindset that we tell people with less money to be in. Rich people walk around with all kinds of debt. I mean, look at Donald Trump! They’re used to having some giant amount of debt that they’re just ignoring, while they go on their yachts and whatever. Why are we penalizing certain kinds of debt, but having no problem with other people’s debt just because they have other money to play with?DanaI think it’s such an important question to ask, like, why do we consider some things good debt versus bad debt? Mortgage is a really good example. Because, you know, like, your advisor told you that’s “good debt”—and that’s a term that I tend to try to not use. Because it assigns a quality to different things. Why do we think of student loans as such a huge, heavy, awful debt that we need to get rid of? But mortgage debt is something that we can carry our whole lives? It’s really absurd, especially when student loans are a way safer debt for most people. If you have federal student loans, there’s so much safety net there. It won’t destroy your life. You won’t lose your home if you don’t pay off your student loans.That’s why I want to talk about money more in the sense of how it fits into our culture, overall. Because I suspect that the reason that we assign certain qualities to different kinds of debt is that we privilege certain lifestyles, like homeownership is this American dream. And it’s the way that you’re supposed to live. But that, as far as like getting a job, getting an education goes, you’re supposed to bootstrap. And student loans are just a way to help you if you can’t do that. Certain lifestyles are privileged. And so we privilege the financial choices that go along with those lifestyles.VirginiaThere’s so much moralizing. I’m erasing the term “good debt” from my vocabulary now. It’s just like saying “good food” and “bad food.” So, say a little more about what conscious spending is. Okay, so it’s not budgeting, but what is is?DanaThe biggest thing is that it’s kind of a nebulous concept on purpose. The idea is to let go of the rules and the methods and everything and be more conscious of how you’re using money. It’s not just about spending, it’s just about like how money fits into your life. But one tool that I often recommend for people is to use a spending diary for a very limited amount of time. I know it sounds really contradictory to “stop tracking your spending.” But it’s a really simple sort of mindfulness, like journaling is a really simple mindfulness activity, to help you understand what you’re doing with your money and what it means in your day to day life. And so I recommend keeping a spending diary for like a week. Very limited. Not to build the habit of tracking your spending, but to see where you’re spending your money. And then more importantly, like, reflect on it and take notes on what you got out of that spending, how it made you feel. Like start to think beyond just the numbers and the charts and things.I don’t recommend using a spend tracking app, because that’s what it’ll show you, it’ll show you like, here’s what that means for your net worth, or whatever. Do it in like a really like in just like a much simpler, more personal way of like writing it down on paper, and journaling about what that spending meant to you. Like, I put some money in the savings account today, or I spent money on a latte today and that was because I was meeting my friend Joanie and this was the conversation that we had. And start to connect all those things to the larger meaning in your life. I’m not a psychologist. So a lot of this is just this is what makes sense to me, based on what I kind of have learned about mindfulness. I think also, any mindfulness practice, that’s actually what’s been really valuable for me is any mindfulness practice you do, like meditation, or yoga or journaling can help you spend consciously because it just raises your awareness in general to the things that you’re doing in life and what it means on a grander scale in your life, and spending and how you use money is just one of those pieces.VirginiaWell, it sounds like what you’re saying is: It’s an opportunity to set your own values. To reject if you’re regularly not making your contribution to your savings account, because you’re investing in time with friends or experiences with your kids or, you know, plants for your garden would be in a category in my life, where spending happens with some wild abandon. Maybe that’s a chance to say like, but this is something I value so much, and this adds so much to my life. And maybe the goal of becoming rich or the goal of saving X amount for these future amorphous goals isn’t what I really truly care about. And that’s an okay thing to question and that I feel like probably feels very scary to people because again, it’s this thing that we’ve been all conditioned to have the same financial goals, but the more you talk about it the more I’m realizing how absurd that is.DanaYeah, absolutely. I would caution with that, though, to not try to then turn that into another kind of budget. Like, people actually talk about a values-based budget. I think you’ve pointed this out with intuitive eating, too—people try to turn it into another kind of diet. It’s not about just naming your values and then creating new categories and new restrictions around those values. And that’s where it kind of becomes nebulous. I can’t hand over the percentage of where you should be spending your money or give you any kind of framework to create that because the point is to be getting rid of that altogether. Enjoy life, use your money, that’s what it’s for. It’s very antithetical to what any kind of financial advisor would tell you.And this mindset is new for me, too. Even though a lot of specific budgeting never really appealed to me and the idea of becoming as rich as possible never appealed to me. There are still a lot of foundations that are sort of instinctual for me. And throwing away those rules is something that I’m still exploring. I really pulled back on the idea of saving for retirement, because I don’t know how I feel about the stock market and I’m trying to retool that and figure out what that means. And I still have the voice in my head that says—because it’s literally voices just all over, all around me from real people—so what are you going to do when you get older? And how are you going to survive? And I don’t know if that’s going to work out. I will only know at the end of my life, if the way that I used money really worked out the way that I wanted it to. So I’m making those decisions as I go and just kind of feeling it out.VirginiaBecause that’s the flip side of this, right? When people live so long with restriction, the flip side is often we go into these periods of denial, of not wanting to look at how we’re spending and not wanting to know what’s happening. I certainly have had months where I’m putting off looking at the credit card bill, because I know it’s gonna be “bad” and I have to deal with that. And you’re saying, because you’re letting go of the guilt and the “shoulds” and the rules around it, you can actually have a much more direct relationship with your money. Which sounds very appealing. You’re of opening up to the possibilities of maybe this won’t work, but it doesn’t mean I’m a failure with money or I’m a failure as a human being. And that’s such an important mindset to divest from.DanaExactly. I love the way that you’re explaining it. I talk a lot about your relationship with money and I think that’s where the focus needs to be. It’s about having a better relationship with money. Don’t let it be something that dominates you. If money were a person in your life, you wouldn’t let that person treat you the way that you let your finances treat you. So focusing on improving that relationship, rather than “becoming better” according to a certain set of rules, I think is, is a good way to shift that mindset and get on the right track.And I’ve also had that binge and restrict cycle with finances, which is like growing up in a very conservative household where they were very focused on budgeting and not overspending, and being very frugal, then I just thought that’s like what it meant to be good with money. And so then I got into my 20s, and I was in charge of all my money, and I wanted to throw all of that out the window because I was like that is very boring. I can’t have any fun in life. And so I’m gonna go completely the other way, and max out a credit card, ignore my student loans, bury my head in the sand about everything. But then once I got into the personal finance space and started learning about those things, it was exactly like you said, where I was able to figure out what that relationship with money could look like, because I understood how all of those financial pieces in my life, where they came from, and how they fit together and the effect they might have on the future. And then I could make those decisions for myself. So I could create the relationship with money that made sense for me, instead of just like one or two extremes, like I was either good or bad with money.VirginiaWow, there’s so much here. I am so excited to dive deeper into your work and I feel like there’s gonna be more conversations I want to have with you about all of this because this is super interesting and so important and just not a conversation that’s happening anywhere else. So I really appreciate you doing this work. It’s so crucial.DanaThank you so much. I really appreciate you inviting me into this space to talk about it. Because the conversation around diet culture, and especially your podcast and newsletter, were what really opened my eyes to this, like gave me kind of this language and this framework to understand what’s going on with personal finance. So, it’s been really helpful to be able to give words to kind of the things I was seeing. I think starting with the framework of diet culture, in a space like this where people are paying attention to that conversation, I think that it makes it a lot easier to have this conversation about money and budget culture.VirginiaWell, I appreciate that so much. And I’m so glad to have helped in any small way towards this great work you’re doing.Butter for Your Burnt ToastDanaI have two, if that’s all right. Because the first one is literal burnt toast with butter. It’s always been a comfort food for me. When I was growing up, I would visit my grandparents and my grandpa would make burnt toast. It kind of became this like joke between us because he I think he burned it one time and I was like, “this is so good.” And so he was always like, whenever i came over, “do you want burnt toast?” And then it was this wonderful memory. So it’s this great comfort food. But also I would try to make it on my own and it never tasted the same as how my grandpa made it. And I realized as an adult that that was because he was putting real butter on it. And at home we had like Country Crock or whatever.VirginiaYeah, that will do it. DanaYes, spread. And so it was just fat that I liked. It wasn’t necessarily burnt bread. VirginiaBut the combination is particularly delicious. DanaIt is delicious. Yeah. So it’s still a comfort food to this day.But my more contemporary Butter is that I have just started playing my flute again. Recently, I played in middle school and high school and set it aside because it wasn’t, you know, it was just like a school thing that I did and didn’t continue with the hobby. And I have been in this habit of like, as a freelancer and an entrepreneur and trying to build a career of everything that I pick up and put time into has had to be focused on how am I going to monetize this or how am I going to use it for self improvement or whatever. And I just got a really cheap flute and have finally moved into a house where I don’t share walls with neighbors. So I started playing it this week and it’s just really nice to enjoy that activity strictly for just the way it makes me feel. And I don’t have any goals. I don’t expect to ever get good or play with a band in town or perform for people or anything. It’s just for me. And I haven’t had something like that in a really long time. So that’s been making me really happy lately.VirginiaThat is amazing. What a great hobby to bring back into your life without any of the external pressures or expectations. That’s really wonderful.My Butter this week is just a sort of fun, summer indulgent thing that I thought would be fun to share with folks. We just got back from a family reunion in Lake Michigan, which shout out Lake Michigan. I had never been. It’s amazing. East Coast girl, a little bit of a snob about lakes, I grew up by the ocean. Lake Michigan is beautiful. DanaYeah, that one will convert you. I’m in Wisconsin.VirginiaYeah, it’s better than the ocean. You get it. You understand the evolution I needed to have. Yeah, and so I mean, it’s great because there’s no sharks, but it’s like still big and amazing. Anyway, so part of my butter is just go to Lake Michigan.But then while we were there, one of my cousins who lives locally and they go all the time, she rented this thing called a Maui mat, which is like a giant floating raft that you can put in the water and you can have like 20 people hanging out on it. And I had never done this before. It’s amazing. I think she said it was $75 a day and we had it over the weekend. So obviously it’s an expense but definitely the joy it brought this whole extended family and the way it created this gathering space in the water for us was very well worth robbing your retirement fund for or whatever you need to do. I don’t know if you could use them in the ocean. You totally could I guess. I had just never encountered the magic of it before. The kids are obsessed. My older daughter was literally on it for about six hours just jumping off. It’s like, you know, it moves. So when you walk around, it’s really fun. Highly recommend.DanaThey’re very magical. It must be a very Midwestern thing. Maybe it’s a big lake thing, I think, because lakes don’t have waves and everything, so it can kind of chill on top of the water. VirginiaIt was just this delightful experience. So anyone lake-bound in any way, look into whether you can hop on one or find a friend who has one because they seem great. Well, Dana, thank you so much. This was an awesome conversation. Please tell us where we can follow your work and learn more about what you’re doing and how we can support you.DanaYeah, thank you again. You can find anything about Healthy Rich at healthyrich.co That’s just kind of the hub for the platform. You can follow our work on basically any platform that you prefer. So all of our social media is there. The blog, listen to the Healthy Rich podcast and sign up for the email list, all at healthyrich.co. And I also have a Substack if you’re interested in following my personal journey a little bit more at notesnewsletter.substack.com. I talk about my journey from freelance writer to founder as I’m building this company.VirginiaAmazing. Thank you again for being here.DanaThank you so much for having me.The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.1Not linking, just like I don’t link to diet sites but if you somehow haven’t heard of YNAB, google away!2Post-publication, my mother reminded me our family’s financial story is much more complicated than this. It’s not all my story to share, but suffice to say: My teenage years were upper middle class; my early childhood and elementary school years were decidedly not. (We nevertheless benefited from white privilege, education privilege and other forms of cultural capital.)