The Burnt Toast Podcast

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.)

Today, Virginia is chatting with Julia Turshen. Julia is a New York Times best-selling cookbook author. Her latest book is Simply Julia, she writes a fantastic newsletter, and she’s the host and producer of the podcast, Keep Calm and Cook On. Julia lives in the Hudson Valley, with her spouse Grace and their pets. And she teaches live cooking classes every Sunday afternoon. Follow her on Instagram: @Turshen.If you'd like to support the show, 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 me to offer an honorarium to expert guests, which is key to centering marginalized voices in this space.BUTTER & OTHER LINKSVirginia and Julia talk about a presentation that Julia recently gave at the Culinary Institute of America about fatphobia and diet culture in the food industry.Julia's Butter is the Body Liberation Hiking Club. Find them on Instagram and Facebook. Virginia's Butter is cutting up the cheese before you serve it, the way Julia taught her. 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 56 TranscriptVirginiaI am a huge fan of your work. I know my listeners are a huge fan of yours. Today, I wanted you to come on specifically to talk about this talk you just did at the Culinary Institute. Because when I saw you post about it on Instagram, I just thought yes. There are so many dots that need to be connected between fatphobia and the food industry. So for starters, I would just love to hear you know, how did this come about? Were they open to having this conversation?JuliaGreat question. This conversation was so meaningful and the origins of it are a little bit funny, which is I heard from a professor at the Culinary Institute in like January 2020 asking if I would come speak to the students as part of a speaker series. We set a date for spring 2020. Obviously, that didn’t happen and I kind of forgot about it.And then a few months ago, I heard from her again, re-inviting me to campus. It was a very surreal email chain to look through. Our last emails were just like, “good luck,” like, “hold on tight.” And so when she re-invited me, I realized that there was an opportunity to speak to this group of students who are all—for the most part, not exclusively—really young. A lot of them are just out of high school and I thought this would be a really great opportunity to do what you said, to connect some of the dots between fatphobia and the food industry. Because I think it’s incredibly prevalent, in a very interesting and very kind of sticky way in the food industry.My own life has changed a lot in the few years and a big part of that is just rejecting diet culture. And taking accountability for how I participated in it, realizing just how much I struggled in it, which is sort of clearer to see when you’re a little bit more out of it. So I thought this was the thing that felt most important to me right now. And if I was going to accept this very kind invitation, I wanted to talk about the thing that felt most important to me and the thing that I thought could potentially be really helpful for the students.So the original topic, which we talked about years ago was like a broader topic, like how food can help build community, which it absolutely can. That’s super important. I’m happy to talk about that. But this just felt a little bit more pressing to me right now. So I replied to their email and basically said what I just said to you. And honestly, there was no pushback. She was like, “We haven’t had anyone talk about this and we would welcome it.” And for that, I’m really grateful. I felt a little bit surprised. I was sort of ready to make my argument for why this was important, but I didn’t have to, which was awesome. VirginiaI do often find—and I’m sure you’re experiencing this as well—once you bring up this topic, there’s often a little bit of a sigh of relief. Where other people are like, “Yes. Can we talk about that?” You’re naming something that they’ve already been thinking about.JuliaI think so. I mean, I don’t know the inner workings of the CIA—meaning the Culinary Institute. I definitely don’t know the inner workings of the other CIA! But there were two professors I was in touch with who I will just name because they were great to work with: Dr. Willa Zhen and Dr. Anne Henry. I don’t know the CIA very well, but it strikes me as a pretty conservative institution. So I was ready to defend what I think was a pretty critical talk. But yeah, no one asked to see any notes or anything and I just figured if they’re not asking, I’m not gonna volunteer it and so yeah, that’s how that went.VirginiaIn the talk, you articulate something that I have certainly noticed anecdotally for years. It’s this thing where people who work in food and/or are obsessed with food more recreationally, are often also struggling with food. So let’s break that down.JuliaFor me personally, I had what I thought was a weird relationship to food for my entire life. It’s what I now understand to be a decades long eating disorder. I didn’t quite have the vocabulary to express that at the time. And that developed for a number of reasons. A few include the water we all swim in, just the diet culture we all live in, a lot to do with my upbringing, a lot to do with what was modeled by a lot of adults in my life. But it was very much reinforced by the fact that I have spent my whole professional life working in food, specifically cookbooks. I’ve made my career out of measuring food down to like the teaspoon. It’s about having the sense of control over food, like here’s how you make this thing. Here’s a recipe. I think a lot of what I was seeking in my life, as someone who’s lived with an eating disorder for a long time, was just control. And my career as a cookbook author offered that to me.I’ve been thinking so much about that, especially as I, for the first time in my adult life, have taken a step back from working on cookbooks. Just thinking about what that was all about. The more I do that, and the more I talk to other people, the more I see exactly what you’re saying. Just how prevalent this is, and how it shows up in so many ways. Because the food industry—that’s a huge umbrella term, there’s so many industries within it. There’s the restaurant industry, there’s the cookbook industry, there’s just food media at large, there’s farming, agriculture, all the things that go into food. And, you know, eating disorders, disordered eating, fatphobia, anti-fat bias, this stuff is everywhere and it definitely shows up for people who work in food. Because I think when you work in food, it gives you this very socially acceptable place to put your obsession. Like when I made it my career, the more I obsessed, the more I succeeded, the more I was rewarded and validated, which is really confusing, and really tricky, especially when so much of this just really like harmful stuff goes unspoken.I wouldn’t be able to be having the conversation I’m having with you if I didn’t talk to anyone about this stuff. I needed to open up to people about it and talk about it in order to get through it. So I think those conversations just don’t really happen. It’s this just unacknowledged thing. VirginiaIt’s making me think about lifestyle and food media, where there’s so much pressure to execute these really sort of perfectionistic images of what meals are supposed to be. Of course, just that the pressure to do that is going to feed into the eating disorder, but then also the sort of praise and the success you get from doing that.JuliaWhether it’s lifestyle magazines, cookbooks, or social media—so many people consume this media, but it’s not held to the same kind of journalistic standards or rigor as other types of media. Especially types of media that include things about people’s health and their bodies and the things that we put into our bodies. All of this information is shared in this anything kind of goes way. I enjoy the freedom of expression, but I think there’s also something pretty like dangerous about that. The stuff doesn’t get fact checked. I’m not just talking about someone’s Instagram posts, like big national publications will often publish things that are false. Because things about food, things about “lifestyle” are seen as like not really counting. They’re not serious, they’re not real. So a lot gets just kind of slipped in and ends up really hurting people. Talking about like, “oh, eat this thing because it’s better for you.” It’s like, better for who? What does that mean?VirginiaYeah, better how? Certainly you see this in how recipes are tagged or marketed, you know, like “sugar free” or “lower sugar,” these buzzwords that don’t have specific meanings and are just resting on a premise that nobody’s questioning, that, obviously, you should only eat in order to pursue or maintain thinness, and thinness equals health.Did you feel, earlier on in your career or at various points in your career, like you had to participate in that? How did you navigate that? Especially prior to where you are now, doing all this hard work?JuliaI appreciate you asking because I think a big part of the work I’m doing now, both professionally and personally, is just holding myself accountable for work I’ve done in the past. So, I feel like the way you phrase that—did I feel like I had to do that?—I think that’s generous of you to phrase it that way, because I mean, I absolutely participated in diet culture and in putting it into food media. And I did that not because I felt like I had to, but because I don’t think I knew there was another choice. I was so in it that I just I didn’t know there was an alternative. So I wasn’t doing it in spite of knowing there were other options. It was all I knew.Again, it’s what I was raised in, it was what I was surrounded by. But I also take total responsibility for not questioning those systems. And I think a lot of that work, just to be quite frank, I think it caused harm, for myself included. So I think for me, the question is not so much did I feel like I had to do it? I think it’s more like, how did I realize there was another option?VirginiaRight, right. Well, you’re talking to someone who wrote diet stories for women’s media. We’re all trying to take accountability for previous harm. What was the turning point for you? When did you start to connect these dots?JuliaIt was a build up of many moments. And I would say, the biggest turning point that inspired all those small moments was meeting Grace, who I am now so happily married to. Grace and I fell in love nearly a decade ago and Grace was in a relationship with someone who hated her body. That was me. And I think that was really challenging. Grace has spoken about the following openly, so totally cool to share—but Grace has a history of having a pretty challenging eating disorder. I don’t know why I gave it that adjective—I think all eating disorders are challenging I can’t speak for Grace, but I think I came into Grace’s life as a positive thing, but also as a huge trigger. And that just sucked. And it was a lot for us to work through. Because again, I just didn’t see an alternative. And for a really, really long time, Grace just kept telling me that there was a version of my life that was possible, where I didn’t hate my body. It just took me a while to actually believe that. And then to work towards that. I would say that was like my biggest turning point.The rest has been a lot of small moments. Some of which include, honestly, just feeling really tired. Having any type of eating disorder, it’s exhausting to try and just have that much control over something you ultimately don’t have that much control over. It was exhausting for me to spend that much mental and physical energy trying to change the size of my body. I got to a point where honestly I was just really sleepy and just wanted to be a bit more awake, I guess. I mean, there’s a million little details, but I think the biggest turning point was really Grace and just that encouragement, and also having that incredibly safe and supportive, just partner and home and kind of place to land because I think navigating this stuff is really hard. And I mean, it’s definitely one of the hardest things I’ve done. For me, a big thing is I get so angry and sad when I think about how much time I spent when I could have been doing so many other things, including taking a nap or creating something. I think about how much creative work is lost to all sorts of mental health struggles that aren’t supported, including eating disorders. It just makes me so sad. Like I think about how many songs we’ll never hear, that kind of thing.VirginiaI think about that, too. I think about books not getting written and all sorts of things. I also want to shout out the episode you did of your podcast a few months back with Grace, where you talked about all of this together. It is the most beautiful conversation. I think I cried three or four times listening to it. Obviously, the relationship you have is beautiful, but the compassion that they showed for you, the way that you were able to talk. It’s just a master class in communication with a partner, even above and beyond the topic. It was really special to hear because it gives you such a sense of what’s possible with recovery. I think for folks who are earlier in the recovery journey, you know, it can feel like, well, I’ll never get there, or what does that even look like? What would it even look like not to be active in my eating disorder? Because you haven’t done it and you can’t imagine that. And so, yeah, I loved that conversation. JuliaThank you. I appreciate that. It was really great to have that conversation and be able to share it.VirginiaI want to talk a little more about perfectionism and also urgency. These were two big themes in the talk you did for the Culinary Institute. And it’s also something we talked about quite a bit when I was on your podcast. I like how we’re doing this crossover appearance, like a 90s sitcom. This week the Buffy and Angel characters are in each other’s episodes! Anyway. But we talked about the intersection of diet culture, and workaholism. You had some specific examples in the talk about how these themes show up in the food world that I just thought would be really interesting to talk more about. JuliaI love talking about perfectionism because I definitely describe myself as a recovering perfectionist. I wouldn’t say I’m on the other side of it. It’s something I have to just keep working through. This also ties into your last question, kind of like the turning point moment. For me, understanding that diet culture comes under the umbrella of white supremacy and comes under the umbrella of patriarchy and capitalism, that has also been a really helpful turning point for me. Realizing that it’s a system. It’s not me, it’s not personal. It’s not that there’s something particularly wrong with me in any direction. It’s that my experiences are influenced by various systems. When you change who the bad guy is, it’s just a much more helpful way of seeing things. Understanding that my difficulty with my body image throughout my life, my struggles with an eating disorder—understanding that these things were symptoms of much bigger problems that aren’t so personal, helps me move my energy towards understanding that, as opposed to trying to change myself.So perfectionism comes under this to me. Perfectionism, I think is, one of the most annoying parts of white supremacy. It seeps in in all these different ways. And we see it in our personal lives. The social media example, like whether it’s a photograph of something you ate, or it’s a photograph of someone’s vacation or the car they’re driving, whatever it might be. This idea that there is more to strive for. This constant striving, striving, striving, and feeling like there’s only room for one person at the top. That scarcity mentality, that is perfectionism. Feeling like there’s a right way to do anything is perfectionism. I see perfectionism as a tool of white supremacy to kind of bolster itself. And it’s a definitely a big tool of fatphobia of anti-fat bias and of eating disorders. Eating disorders are such a clear example of perfectionism, like striving to have a certain weight, a certain body, a certain look, whatever it might be, and doing things to achieve that that are incredibly harmful.VirginiaYou had some interesting examples of perfectionism in the food industry. Julia I think anytime in like a food magazine or in a cookbook—again, I’m guilty of this—where you see anything labeled as “the best whatever.”Virginia“The Best Roast Chicken.”JuliaExactly. The idea that there’s a best way to roast a chicken. They’re in classes where they’re most likely being taught this is the best way to do this, this is the “right” way to do this, this is the proper way to do this. There are a lot of ways to cook a chicken. A lot of them are really good. I think it’s helpful to think about that. There are people all over the world putting a chicken or any thing they’re going to eat into a hot oven, pulling it out a little bit later. And they’re gonna have a good meal. It just doesn’t have to be this complicated. VirginiaOften “best” is equal to hardest to execute, right? Like, this has the most steps, or it has the most components from scratch.Julia This idea that everything has to be made from scratch or be homemade to be better, to be best. I think we see it in the restaurant industry, just in the way many professional kitchens are structured. I feel like a lot of us have been watching The Bear, and just that brigade system that’s in place. There’s one person at the top. It’s a hierarchical system. Perfectionism comes in everywhere, you know? There’s a perfect way to make that sandwich. There’s a perfect way to make those donuts. All of that is really seductive. You feel like you have a purpose when you’re striving for perfection. And in a world that can feel really challenging, it’s really seductive to feel like there’s a purpose there. But I think when we make our purpose perfectionism, we’re just forever disappointed. And that just sucks.VirginiaThis is such a hard concept for me also, as a recovering perfectionist. Because a part of me, even as you’re talking, is saying, but shouldn’t we want to work hard? I don’t even know what voice that is. Is it my dad? Saying like, but shouldn’t we want to do the best we can at these things? And is that so wrong? But I’m also aware, there’s this cost that comes with it.JuliaI think it’s such a “yes, and…” I enjoy working hard. I enjoy challenging myself, whether it’s physically or mentally. I do a lot of writing. I also have had experiences farming. I think working really hard can feel really good. I think, at least for me personally, it can make me really happy. It’s just understanding what’s the goal of that? What am I trying to get out of that? What am I trying to prove with that? Asking myself these types of questions is really helpful. And again, just following those thoughts to understand where they’re coming from helps me see those systems. Like in your question about perfectionism in the restaurant industry, I think another just great example that many people can identify with just as customers is how, at least in American restaurants, how tipping continues to be the norm. VirginiaGreat example. Julia Understanding that the American restaurant system is rooted in slavery. It’s rooted in unpaid labor. It’s rooted in people not making any money for the work they’re doing. So tipping comes in, in this way that’s actually incredibly terrible. I’m not an expert on this by any means, but I feel like laws are bent to allow people to work incredibly hard and not even make minimum wage because they’re entitled to tips, which is just this totally unstable way of living.It also causes all sorts of tension within communities that work together. Not everyone in the restaurant is necessarily entitled to those same tips. It allows the customer to have this power dynamic that is also just, just terrible. And the way people treat people who work in restaurants can be just so awful. And you know, you’re holding 20 percent, often less, above people in this way that is just really mean and doesn’t really serve anyone.Virginia Yeah, it trains us to think that we’re allowed to grade people’s performance. Even people who I think of being super liberal, I’ll be surprised when I go to dinner with them, how harsh they are if the service isn’t absolutely impeccable. They’ll say things like, “well, they lost their tip.” Do you not realize that you’re being so Marie Antoinette? It’s this weird class power thing that you are deciding whether someone’s worthy. It’s creepy. JuliaIt’s archaic. VirginiaYeah. Bottom line: if you go to restaurants, you need to tip until we actually pay restaurant workers a fair wage. You just have to tip well, I don’t care how bad the service was. It’s the cost of being there.JuliaThat’s their salary. VirginiaIt’s completely wild.I’m also thinking how all of this perfectionism and urgency stuff gets in the way of enjoying food for those of us who are just home cooks. Like, this just makes me think about all the pressure I’ve put on myself over the years for dinner parties to be executed in a certain way, or even just regular dinner with my family to be executed in a certain way. And how much letting go of that is important. And understanding when it’s like, oh, it’s a Sunday, and I have time to mess around with the soup recipe and that seems like a fun way to spend the afternoon, even if it becomes labor intensive, versus I am holding myself to some artificial standard about what what our food needs to look like on a daily basis.JuliaI think one of the ways that is really harmful to all of us is that it makes it harder to actually connect with the people you’re eating with and to enjoy the company you’ve had in your home. Or, for you, if it’s just with your kids, your husband, whatever it is. Because I think when we’re holding ourselves to these standards, where we have this idea of perfectionism and urgency in our home cooking, when we’re reaching for a standard that is just impossible, and then we’re thinking about all these ways we could have done it better or things will change next time. Every time someone apologizes for not getting it perfect, you are just creating more and more disconnection. It’s another chance to just feel isolated, which again, to me is just a tool of these horrific systems.Okay, my dogs are going crazy.VirginiaThey’re just joining you.Julia They hate perfectionism.VirginiaThey want everyone to tip. It’s totally fine.JuliaI imagine there’s probably a package being left on our door. Also I’m like a floor away and the door is closed.VirginiaThey’re just so good at making themselves heard! There’s a lesson there. They’re unafraid to take up space.I also was curious to talk a little bit about what changes you could see being made in the food industry, whether that’s restaurants or grocery stores or food media, like cookbooks? Since I know that’s sort of where more of where you’ve spent your time, what would it look like if we made these spaces fat positive and anti-diet? What would happen?JuliaI have a few ideas. I’m curious, too, what you think. But I think in terms of anything that has writing on it, so cookbooks, but also restaurant menus, advertisements for all these things. I think just being aware of our language, because language has a really powerful effect on culture. So just being mindful of the words we use to describe food. When we describe any type of food as like “junk,” or “garbage,” or on the flip side of that, but equally, in my opinion, terrible, when we describe food as “clean,” or any of that kind of stuff. When we’re adding these types of moralizing adjectives to what people are eating, I think it would be great if we could stop doing that. There’s a lot of ways, honestly, a lot of very easy ways to change stuff. Just changing that word would make a really big difference or just leaving the word out. I think also pseudo medical terms that don’t really mean anything. For example: Detox, that kind of thing. I think getting rid of that would be awesome. And I think physical spaces where food is either like purchased or consumed—and again, I’m not an expert on this. A lot of people are paying more attention to this than I do. But in my observer opinion, I think a lot of decisions are made that makes spaces, physical spaces, incredibly fatphobic. And I think those decisions are made, really from a place of just capitalism. I don’t know that they’re made out of just hatred for fat people. But I think the effect they have on people—and not just fat people, but also people with physical disabilities—is just really, really harmful. Things like squeezing as many tables and chairs into a restaurant as possible. Like, I get it. You’re trying to get as many customers as possible. But you’re making this space just so incredibly inaccessible.A lot of the issues that come up in grocery stores have to do, again, with with words and language and marketing, and how food is advertised. And where things are displayed. And, if I could just wave my magic wand, I would also be able to change the prices on things and make things more affordable, but also be able to pay the people who produce the food in the first place a lot better and all that. It’s just a huge, huge topic.VirginiaOne thing I think about a lot in grocery stores is how we’ve all heard that diet culture advice of “only shop the perimeter and avoid the aisles where all the processed food is.” I would just love someone to reorganize the grocery store and put the fresh fruit in the middle and the other stuff on the perimeter. The way we talk about eating has trained us to think of the grocery store as having good and bad aisles.JuliaEven in general like the way we think about things like processed food and frozen food, stuff that’s incredibly helpful for so many people for a variety of reasons. Just not demonizing any of these choices.VirginiaAnd recognizing they can play a really useful role in people’s lives. They can also just be delicious. I am so glad you did this talk at that place. I feel the way I feel whenever I hear someone doing this kind of thing in a med school, where I’m like, this is what we need. We need this next generation of food industry people, of doctors, of health care providers, thinking about this differently, like, you know, and starting to challenge this because that’s what hasn’t happened for so long. JuliaI can’t remember like the study off the top my head, but I remember learning in Aubrey Gordon’s book, there was something about with medical students. Like, there was some study that I think it was like a 15 minute talk about this, like the effect that had just to let people know about this, totally changed the way they view their patients and interact with them. And you think about how many hours medical school is, how many years. And so you think like, if someone takes 15 minutes to just break this down in a way that is understandable and maybe not judgmental, not moralizing, like the impact that can have. So yeah, I think we need to do this in every industry, because it happens everywhere.VirginiaIt really does. Journalism for sure needs this kind of anti-bias training. I see this all the time in science and health journalism, where again, the premise was not questioned. You went into the reporting on the study or the whatever with all these assumptions intact. And so of course, the headline you’re giving us is just reiterating fatphobia all over again. So I agree. We need it everywhere. And I am grateful that you are doing the work. I’m grateful to be doing the work with you.Julia  I mean, ditto. Totally Ditto. Butter for Your Burnt ToastJuliaI will just have to shout out the Body Liberation Hiking Club. It was formerly called the Plus Size Hikers of the Hudson Valley. Alexa, who’s wonderful, who runs the group, recently changed the name again to just make that umbrella a little bit bigger. I know that everyone listening to your podcast probably doesn’t necessarily live in the Hudson Valley, as both you and I do. So this is a local group. It’s awesome. You can find them on Instagram and Facebook. We go for hikes all the time, and it’s so non-judgmental, come as you are. We go slowly. It’s great. It’s changed my life.But I also wanted to mention it because even if you can’t come to this particular group—groups like this exist. And if you live somewhere where you can’t find that group, you can just start that group. You can just like put it up on social media or whatever, tell your book club, the PTA, I don’t know, wherever people find out about things. And I just really encourage people to do whatever version of that makes sense. I mean, being outside and hiking isn’t for everyone. But it’s available for anyone who wants and being with this group has been just one of the most positive additions to my life and has helped me in all the things we’re talking about today. So I just definitely have to shout them out.VirginiaI’m so here for this. My fall goal is to come on a hike. I follow and I’m always like, “Oh man, I missed another good hike.” Once I get these book revisions done, my fall goal is to come on one of these hikes because it just looks delightful. JuliaAnd no rush. No worries. It will be great whenever you join me. I always bring extra snacks, so if you forget yours, I have some.VirginiaThe odds of me forgetting to pack a snack are like… I mean, I was thinking of our conversations about unapologetic hunger. I don’t know if you saw that meme going around that was like, I don’t understand people who forget to eat, because I immediately forget my own name.JuliaThat’s just never happened to me. I don’t get it. VirginiaDan sent it to me because it was something like “I’m turning on family members.” And that’s what happens if we’re 30 minutes past dinner time. So yeah, I remember snacks. Always have extra snacks. It’s very important. I love that.And speaking of snacks, my Butter this week is the tip you gave me about when you have a party and you are serving a cheese plate. And you get sad because people don’t eat the cheese. And a lot of times it’s because of diet culture reasons that they don’t eat the cheese. But a practical way to make it easier is to cut up the cheese for the cheese plate. And I did this for a dinner party we had and then also for my book club last week, and people ate so much more cheese, Julia! I’m so happy.JuliaI’m so glad! I saw you posted something about that on Instagram. And it just made me smile. Just, just the biggest smile.VirginiaIt is such a good tip. JuliaIt’s simple, right? I believe in big systemic changes and love imagining that. And I also believe so much in the power of these tiny moments, like for example, cutting up the block of cheese instead of just waiting for someone to start because then everyone just enjoys it.VirginiaYeah. And it made me realize the reason I wasn’t doing it more often it was totally a perfectionist/diet culture thing of wanting the cheese plate to look like a magazine photo shoot. Like, there’s those very artistic cheese plates you see where they don’t cut up the cheese because it’s more—I don’t even know what the aesthetic is that I was striving for. But I was like, this is so dumb.JuliaSliced cheese can be beautiful. Crumbled cheese can be beautiful. VirginiaIt can absolutely be beautiful. There was no reason to not be cutting up the cheese other than I had some arbitrary aesthetic I was applying to my cheese platter that I have released myself from.Julia Yes, I’m so thrilled you’ve broken free of this. Life is what happens next to the Instagram picture.VirginiaIt really is. It was also this ripple effect, where I started thinking about a lot of the ways I let perfectionism and these sort of aesthetic goals get in the way of enjoying food experiences. I was like, oh, it’s okay, if I don’t have everything laid out the second people arrive. We could go down a lot of rabbit holes of where these rules about entertaining had started to take up space in my brain. Obviously then with COVID, there was a long period of no entertaining now that we’re doing more—all outdoors I should note—I’ve been realizing, like coming back to it. I can let go of the pieces of it that weren’t fun for me in the past because I was making it too hard.JuliaTotally. Friday night, my parents came to spend the night and—we all took COVID tests, I just want to be clear—I was making dinner. I usually in the past have always, whenever anyone comes to our house, I’ve always had everything ready when they come. It’s been way less than the past few years, but now that I’m sort of getting back into it with family and stuff, I didn’t have everything ready when they came. Like I knew what I was gonna make, but I was doing other stuff. And I was like, they’re coming here at four o’clock. Dinner doesn’t need to be ready at four o’clock. I mean we’re early birds, but, you know. So I was making dinner while they were here, which was actually really fun. And then I had stuff in the mixing bowls I had mixed it in, that kind of thing. And I made these ribs and I had them on the sheet pan. I brought them from the grill on. And then I took out all these serving platters. And I was about to decant everything. And then I was like, What are we doing? You don’t need to wash double the dishes, right? We don’t need to take a photograph of this to put anywhere. I’m just having dinner with my family. I just threw the sheet pan on the table. You know, the metal mixing bowl. And it was great. It was just like this kind of moment of like, why am I making more work? Why am I making more labor? Like, let’s just enjoy this food.VirginiaI have to say shout out to Dan, because he has been anti-serving bowls for all of our relationship. He will be feeling very seen by that. He’s always like, can’t you just put it out? And you know, there are times where I just can’t. I’m like, No, I’m sorry. I need it to be pretty and I’m gonna use serving bowls.JuliaWe can have both.VirginiaIt’s nice to recognize when this is not actually something you care about and you can just let it go.JuliaTotally.VirginiaJulia, thank you so much. I could talk to you for many more hours, but we should wrap up. Well, we’ll do it again some time. Just to remind folks where they can find you and support your work.JuliaSure. My Instagram handle is just my last name, @Turshen. My website is just my name, JuliaTurshen.com. That has everything about my cookbooks, my cooking classes I teach, which I do every Sunday. All that kind of stuff, my podcasts, everything is there.VirginiaAmazing. Thank you so much!

They're dealing with a consumer that they've never marketed to before and they don't really have the tools to do that. They don't know what's going to speak to that consumer. And it's also fatphobia, right? Because the brand doesn't want to center fat people as their customer. So they have to put everybody together in order for it to be okay. You're listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I'm Virginia Sole-Smith and I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter. Today I am chatting once again with the fantastic Mia O'Malley. Mia is content creator on Instagram and Tiktok (@MiaOMalley and @plussizebabywearing). Mia has been on the show before, so you’re probably already a big fan. I asked her back today because we needed to have a deep dive conversation about everything happening at Old Navy with plus size clothing.Also! Substack has asked us to try out a new format for this episode. Paid subscribers, you’re getting the full audio and full transcript, below. (So nothing has changed, just consider this your July bonus episode!) Free list folks: You’re getting the first chunk of my conversation with Mia (both audio and transcript), but if you would like the full version, you’ll need to become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. Reader subscriptions enable me to pay guests like Mia for their time and labor, so please, consider investing in these conversations if this is work you care about. When you get full access to my conversation with Mia, you’ll get way more juicy details on the whole Old Navy situation. And you’ll find out the two brands we think are doing a surprisingly GOOD job on plus size clothes right now. I bet it’s not who you think! PS. You voted and the results are in: We’ll be reading ESSENTIAL LABOR by Angela Garbes for the August Burnt Toast Book Club! Mark your calendars for Wednesday, August 31 at 12pm Eastern.Episode 55 TranscriptVirginiaHi Mia. So we'll start by reminding listeners who you are and what you do.MiaI'm Mia O'Malley. I'm a content creator on Instagram. I have my account @MiaOMalley where I share a lot of resources for fat and plus sized people and some of my own style and life. And then I have an account called @plussizebabywearing on Instagram and I'm @plussizebabywearing on TikTok.VirginiaLast time, we had a pretty wide-ranging conversation where we talked about the intersection of fat activism and momfluencing, about finding a fat-friendly health care provider—all sorts of stuff. But this time, we have a very specific mission. When this news story broke, I was in the middle of writing my book, and I had no time to think about it, but you were on it. Your Instagram is this amazing resource. And I was like, Thank God, Mia will come on and explain to us what is happening with Old Navy and plus size clothing. I mean, it's a mess. How did this all start? MiaSo in August of 2021, old Navy launched what they called BODEQUALITY, and it was like, “the democracy of style.” They were going to offer sizes 0 to 30 and XS to 4x at the same price and then they would have it in 1200 stores. And they would be rolling out sizes 0 to 28 with no special plus size section. They also wanted us to know that there were going to be mannequins size 12 and 18. The CEO of Old Navy said, “It's not a one time campaign. It's a full transformation of our business and service to our customers, based on years of working closely with them to research their needs.” The marketing campaign included a TV commercial with Aidy Bryant from SNL and Shrill.VirginiaSo, none of this was subtle. This was a very full-throated, “We are here for plus sizes.”MiaWell, yes and no. The campaign was not subtle, but the campaign was also confusing. So many people did not even realize what BODEQUALITY meant.VirginiaWell, they made up that word. MiaAnd they made sure to include all diverse body types which, in general, is great. But it's part of a watered down body positivity, where we're not really getting to the heart of the matter and helping the people that are marginalized, that need to be helped and need to be lifted up. A lot of people did not recognize that this campaign meant that plus sizes were being carried in stores. It included people of “diverse body types,” it said “democracy of fashion.” But what does this really mean to someone? Does this mean that I can get my size in your store? It's not really clear. This is me editorializing, but I just think: We couldn't have a campaign that was just for fat people. We have to do it adjacent to thin people.VirginiaIt gives them this cover, because they're using this aspirational rhetoric, instead of saying explicitly, “We have screwed over fat customers.” MiaExactly. It just was not clear enough to the fat consumer that they were going to be able to access their clothes in store. It was muddled in the same way that body positivity gets muddled when we don't talk about the people that really should be centered in the movement. But as someone who has been critical of Old Navy in the past, even I wanted BODEQUALITY to work. We wanted it to be an example for other retailers and brands, that that this could be something they could do. Even though I had messages in my DMs talking about issues folks were seeing, I didn't really want to talk about it at first, because I wanted to see how far it would go. Well, less than a year later the Wall Street Journal reported that Old Navy would be pulling extended sizes from their stores. That article is a whole other thing that we can get into, too, because it's its own beast. VirginiaYeah, so that's what just happened, which blew this all up. It looked like they were blaming their sales dropping on the fact that they had added more plus sizes to the stores. That was the story out there, right?MiaYes, that's right. Suzanne Kapner—she wrote the article called “Old Navy Made Clothing Sizes for Everyone. It Backfired.” VirginiaI will say quickly, as a journalist, the headline is not Suzanne's fault. We never get to pick our headlines. However, the article itself is also problematic as you can now explain.MiaThere are a few issues with the article. Most specifically, it doesn't include comments from anyone in Old Navy corporate. They took quotes from other interviews that they had done, but Old Navy didn't comment on this article itself. So a lot of what they had was attributions to someone who worked in the store, a PR person, a city analyst—different things. They also have this quote from Diane Von Furstenberg, who spoke at the the Future of Everything Festival and they put that front and center. VirginiaSo all we really know is that Old Navy sales dropped, right? We don't really know why, or whether it is reasonable to blame that on plus sizes.MiaCorrect. First of all, they did not give this even a year to work. The CEO, Sonya Syngal, said on an earnings call that they “overestimated demand in stores” and they launched too broadly. They "over-planned larger sizes, with customer demand under-pacing supply. Someone else in Old Navy corporate said it was “a realigning of store inventory.” Which is not at all what the article says but sort of points to, they had an inventory problem. VirginiaWhich, it's been a pandemic! Everyone shifted to online shopping. They haven't yet gotten the customers back in the stores, period. Getting inventory right, regardless of sizing, is sort of a moving target right now. MiaWhat we're hearing from customers at Old Navy though, is they weren't even aware that plus sizes were in stores. That’s possibly because of the way that these stores are laid out. They took away or they didn't have a plus size section for a long time. But the plus size shopper is used to going to a specific section for their clothing. In this “democratizing of fashion,” Old Navy put everything together. And in some cases that made it harder for people to actually find their size. You had a lot of packed racks. You've had people struggling to find their sizes across the board. I'm also hearing that although Old Navy says that they went to great lengths to look at their fit when they did this inclusive sizing, that the fits are completely off for many, many items. So, Old Navy denim that people were used to buying for years, totally changed. People's sizes completely changed. Rockstar jeans, which they had been buying for over a decade, are now a completely different size. And in many cases, people were having to size up two or three sizes thinking that their body has changed in some drastic way, when really Old Navy sizing, completely changed in many items. VirginiaThat makes me wonder how inclusive they really intended to be. Because if I'm someone who normally wears a 1x and now I'm buying the 3x, the fact that you're stocking the 3x has not made your clothing any more accessible to bigger people, right? Like someone who wears a 3x in another store would need a 5x here and you're not carrying a 5x. Mia Correct. VirginiaI mean, we've seen this. Many companies do this. This is not a new tactic. But it is one of the most insidious tactics for brands, claiming size inclusivity but not actually executing it. Just changing the numbers on the clothes does not equal size inclusivity.MiaCorrect. And although Old Navy stated that they had had done digital avatars for 389 types of women, something is not clicking because across the board, you're hearing people coming back saying the size has totally changed. I don't even know what size I am. You know, the shorts are kind of all over the place. I was always fielding DMs from people and I'm certainly not the only creator who's been talking about this. I just want to point out MightyMurphinFashion on Tiktok has been covering this subject. She's very detail oriented and I highly recommend people go check her out if you want to hear more about the situation. But yeah, sizing has been all over the place. I have a highlight with people sharing their feedback on Old Navy sizing since the change. And every time I do talk about BODEQUALITY people are like, “Oh, I didn't even know.”VirginiaI want to talk more about this question of the plus size section, too. On the one hand, I think it's really stigmatizing to have plus size as its own little section. Often, it's not given as much square footage in stores. If you're in a department store, it can be like on a different floor. It has been a way to silo us and put us in like a little corner and have less attention given to plus fashion, which is ridiculous since the majority of people buying clothes are buying clothes from that section. But I'm understanding what you're saying, that for Old Navy to pull out the plus section and throw everything on the rack with everything else, especially without good communication around that decision, is perhaps even more frustrating. Especially because clothing stores always do that annoying thing of putting the smallest sizes in the front. So you always have to go reaching to the back of the rod to find that. I can definitely see how that is maddening. Do you want to see brands doing better plus size sections? Or do you want to see no more barriers between the sizes?MiaI mean, I would like to see no more barriers between the sizes. But I think when you are launching such a transformative campaign that wants to change the way people shop and you have a consumer that has been basically trained that they only have their sizes online, you have to do something to make sure that those clothes are super accessible for them. And again, the same issue with the marketing of the campaign, put those sizes as front and center as possible to raise awareness with that consumer that they could get used to and they can get comfortable shopping for their sizes in stores.VirginiaThats a great point. They didn't really spend any time on the emotional piece of this and the trauma that a lot of people have about trying to shop in stores. So if you're used to not even thinking of the store as a place you go, or you only go in to buy swimsuit for your kid, they needed to actually welcome in fat folks and say, “We are excited you're here. This is no longer place where you’re going to be  be discriminated against.”MiaIt's not only an awareness thing, but it's also just a practical marketing thing that we need. They needed to see their clothes front and center. And while I think overall, we should have all of our sizes together and be able to shop together, I think there needs to be a transition process when you are raising awareness with the consumer and that consumer is learning new habits, and saying “I can get comfortable in the store.” We've seen it happen with other retailers, where there's just not enough done to make sure that that consumer knows that this is a new habit. And a lot of times, the plus size consumer does not want to go in a store and ask those questions and be turned away, because we've all been through it.VirginiaIt feels miserable. MiaOld Navy introduced plus sizes in 2004. They had them in stores for a bit. They pulled them out in 2007. Then they launched this campaign in 2018. Called “Size Yes” and that went in a bunch of stores. They pulled them out again. So now they're coming back with BODEQUALITY and then they're pulling out of what they say is 75 stores.VirginiaYeah, it's feeling a lot like a bad relationship. It's not a great cycle we're in with that brand. But as you're pointing out, it's not just Old Navy. Should we talk a little more broadly about other companies that have sort of done similar things?MiaThe one example that garnered a lot of attention, and also was really sad, was Loft pulled plus sizes in 2018. And they had no announcement. Someone on Twitter just @’ed them and was like, “Hey, are you pulling plus sizes?” And they're like, “yeah, basically.”Again, I don't think that Loft did enough to work with fit models to get sizing right. They also didn't market it really. But a lot of people did rely on Loft for great plus size workwear and then that got pulled and just sort of vanished from stores and and online and and they completely discontinued it.It's also the way they do it, without announcement. I think that was why that Wall Street Journal article got so much attention, too. They were going to try to, I imagine, go a little under the radar about pulling it from the stores. Then American Eagle did something similar. I believe this was in 2016, they rolled out a 00 to 24 for all their denim, they were going to carry all the sizes in stores. They had some signage in stores that “we've got your size,” but a campaign was needed to let consumers know who were used to shopping online for their size, that they would be able to go in store in and show those sales. And then not only did they pull them out of stores, but they just stopped making over a size 20. VirginiaI get why brands pull it quietly because they're hoping not to have the PR nightmare that inevitably results. But why do you think they don't communicate it better from the start? Why aren't they saying, “we are so happy to have fat customers? We are so happy to center you in the store?”MiaI think one, they're dealing with a consumer that they've never marketed to before. And they don't really have the tools to do that. They don't know what's going to speak to that consumer. It's also fatphobia, right? The brand doesn't want to center fat people as their customer. They have to put everybody together in order for it to be okay. Otherwise they’re associated with just plus sized clothing. That's like this whole other beast, right? It's not an intense fatphobia, but it's just this general marketing fatphobia, right? That we can't have just fat people on signage. We can't just talk about plus sizes. We have to bring everybody in because we don't want our brand to be just about plus sizes.VirginiaI think it speaks to how much we need thin allies speaking up, because I think they're doing this because they think their thin customers don't want to shop in the same place as the fat ladies. I remember talking to someone who's in that middle ground space (high end of straight sizes low end of plus sizes) and she was asking for advice on where to shop. I suggested a couple of brands like Eloquii or a couple of brands like that, that are primarily plus sizes, and she was so offended. She was like, “I don't need to shop in those kinds of stores. I haven't let myself go that much yet.” Which is overt fatphobia, but I think that psychology is something the fashion industry has taught us and it's something that consumers perpetuate. That feeds into these decisions on how they communicate stuff about sizing.MiaCan I share a little story about Madewell and Abercrombie and Fitch—a little comparison? So, Madewell, almost all of their styles of denim used to go to their size 37 and that was equivalent to let's say, about a woman's 24. And you could go and search their jeans, and put in your size, and you could shop that denim online. They didn't have extended sizes in stores, but you could go online and find almost any style of jean in plus size in there.Then they pulled the plus sizes off online without any announcement. So you would just go and not see it, right? Other influencers picked up on this, and people were talking about it. And they came out and apologized for not having announced this, but said they were going to be launching a specific plus size line that was going to be a better fit. Okay, so we waited. They came out with their plus sizes. And you know, some some styles are great, but the denim is really different. It's a totally different fit, not necessarily a great fit. There are some people that are happy with that. But there are some people that are not quite happy with it. I was personally not happy with it, and I used to buy Madewell denim all the time. And now you'll find one or two different styles that are plus size, many times they're sold out. So that's a situation where they actually tried to market it directly to the plus size consumer. But the fits are a little off, and you can see this on their reviews of their denim. But it's interesting that they're trying to do something good there. [Virginia’s Note: For more on why and how Madewell denim has gone wrong, see Jeans Science Part 3.]On the on the other side is Abercrombie. And I know a lot of fat people have a problem with Abercrombie because of terrible stuff in their past. But they now have every pair of denim up to a size 37. Again, not in stores! But it's a much easier shopping experience online than going to a separate section of an online retailer and looking for a particular style. I think most retailers just don't really know what to do. And none of them are doing it very well.VirginiaI'm glad to know Abercrombie is an option people can be aware of because it’s certainly a brand I had written off years ago due to extreme body toxicity.But it's good to know when your shopping options are so limited. I wrote a bit about the Madewell saga in my jeans science series last year that I'll link to because that used to be my go-to brand for years. As soon as I crossed over to a 34 it all changed. Nothing fit right. It was shocking to have experienced buying the same style of jeans for so long, and then to go one size up and find it was much worse. Lower quality, fell apart, everything was wrong with it. And it fit worse. It was really stark. So, it's a mess everywhere.How are you thinking about that fashion activism now? Have we learned anything from this Old Navy saga? Or is it just like, yep, we knew clothes are tough?Mia I didn't have a lot of brand trust with Old Navy. They also excluded plus from sales and promotions.VirginiaThat feels like it shouldn't be legal, but okay. MiaRight. So they are saying now that even when there's in-store sales, that the promotions will still apply to the extended sizes, even though you can't actually get them in some of their stores. It's very confusing. I continue to watch Old Navy and wait for them to do better, as they've made so much money off the plus size consumer for so many years. I'm old enough to remember that and so they've made a lot of money off of the fat consumer, and they should know better what we need, because they have all the data.So I think that fat activism and fashion means continuing to demand that stores extend their sizes, that they put us on the rack. And that they do better marketing and outreach to the plus sized consumer.VirginiaI’ll also make a plug for thin listeners: This is a topic we really need allyship on. They need to stop thinking they're gonna scare off their thin customers by supporting fat customers. So thin people can be asking brands for this, too. You can say this is informing your decision to support a brand or not. Because I think that is a huge hurdle we need to get the industry over. MiaIt's going to take years, but there's already been some shifts so we just need to keep pushing and keep being vocal about it and keep asking questions because the demand is there. The average size of the American woman is a size 16. So we need to keep being vocal about that. They need to keep extending the sizes.VirginiaOh, one brand I wanted to ask you about, just quickly—I feel like Target is doing a better job lately? I'm not hearing as much discussion of this, but I am exclusively shopping at Target these days, in the plus section.MiaI'm so glad you mentioned this because I just got information that Knox Rose and Universal Thread are now providing extended sizing in stores. So keep a lookout for that. I haven't seen anything official announced and it's certainly not in all Targets but yeah I'm looking forward to seeing more. I also have seen their plus size sections expand in multiple places whereas I saw them shrinking before. I see them expanding now, but I haven't seen anything official on that.VirginiaI think it's totally hit or miss store by store. So, it's a maybe to keep an eye on. I'm not giving any brands a standing ovation, but…MiaNo, no. I also don't want to put all of it on the plus size consumer—and I hope that I'm not making anybody feel like that. But if you do see brands introducing extended sizes, give it a try! Like, absolutely give it a try. We have to try other things in order to get them to keep those extended sizes.There are a lot of reasons why people don't want to try new things.  Financially, it's not always possible, especially when you don't have anywhere to try something on. But I would encourage those who are kind of curious when a brand rolls out extended sizes to check those out. We're not used to having so much variety, but if we don't shop the stuff, it's not going to stay.VirginiaIt's true.Well, I am so grateful that you are doing this. Mia’s Instagram stories are just a wealth of information, really intensive reporting and collecting of stories and data points. It's a ton of work. It's a ton of work that you're doing on this. It's really appreciated by the community. So I'm really glad to have you here to explain all of this to us.Butter for Your Burnt ToastMiaOkay, so I have never had very good luck with tinted SPF. Although I really like wearing a tinted mineral SPF. I find I'm 37 And my skin is textured. I have redness and discoloration, things like that. So I like a little tinted moisturizer, but it doesn't always look the best on me. And this primer, the silicone-free priming moisturizer from Good Molecules is $12 and it feels amazing on your face. To begin with, you just leave this on, let it dry, then apply the tinted SPF with a beauty blender. I think you'll see a much better application for that that tinted SPF and it'll it'll stay in place. It won't become an oil slick. I just can't recommend this enough. And it's $12!VirginiaI am going to recommend a fun summer beach read. My friend KJ Dell’Antonia has a new novel out. It's called In Her Boots. It is such a fun read. It's about a woman whose life has blown up in various ways. And she's coming back to her hometown to try to put it back together. There are many great side characters. If you like quirky, small town life type of novels, this is a really fun one.And KJ actually reached out to me last year when she was finishing up her edits, and asked me to do a sensitivity read on the manuscript because there is one character who is struggling with diet culture, and some disordered eating themes. And KJ has thin privilege. She was like, “This is not my world and I want to know if I'm getting this right or wrong.” She had done a beautiful job. I gave her a few notes, but you know, it was 90% there. And I love to see that from a very mainstream commercial fiction writer who's not deliberately saying this is a story about this issue, but just thinking “I've got this in the background, how am I handling it?” Just to know that someone took that care is lovely, I think.It's also a really fun book and she does feature an amazing pair of cowboy boots and KJ has gotten the real boots and has been wearing them on her book tour. So if you're a cowboy boots fan or fun beach read fan check out In Her Boots by KJ Dell’Antonia.Well, thank you again, Mia! Remind listeners where they can find you and support your work because this is a ton of labor you are doing to research all of this for us.MiaThank you and it's a lot of labor of my audience who I crowdsource from. So come and join the conversation @MiaO'Malley on Instagram and we we share a lot of things and I do my best to give everybody all the info and they can make their own choices.VirginiaI mean, you were just covering pool floats for bigger bodies. You really run the gamut.

I think it's important for people to recognize that no matter how fascinated you might be by a Black person’s hair, we are not an exhibit or curiosity.You're listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, and I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.Today I am speaking with anti-racism activist, writer, and educator Sharon Hurley Hall. Sharon is firmly committed to doing her part to eliminate racism as the founder and curator in chief of Sharon's Anti-Racism Newsletter, one of my favorite Substacks. Sharon writes about existing while Black in majority white spaces and amplifies the voices of other anti-racism activists. Sharon is also the head of anti-racism and a special advisor for the Diverse Leaders Group. I asked Sharon to come on the podcast to talk about a piece she wrote on the newsletter a few weeks ago about the CROWN act, Black hair, and the ways in which white people perpetrate racism against Black people for their hair. We also get into how to talk about hair and skin color differences with your kids, which I found super, super helpful and I think you will, too. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! It’s free and a great way to help more folks find the show.And! It’s time to decide what we should read for the next Burnt Toast Book Club! I’ve culled through all of your suggestions and narrowed it down to these five (mostly because the Substack poll-maker limits me to five choices). I was going to stick with fiction because it’s summer and I’m in beach read mode, but I made an exception for Angela Garbes because, it’s Angela Garbes. (Which is to say, if we don’t pick her for August, we’ll do it for September or October!) You have until the end of this week to vote. I’ll announce the pick on Tuesday. (The discussion thread will go live Wednesday, August 31 at 12pm Eastern!) Episode 54 TranscriptVirginiaHi Sharon! Why don't we start by having you tell my listeners a little more about yourself and your work?SharonOkay, so I am an anti-racism writer and educator, a former journalist, and I have been writing about anti-racism-related stuff for longer than it appears. I actually wrote my first article in 2016, but I wasn't doing it consistently. I launched an anti-racism newsletter in 2020. So it's just been going for just about two years now. In it, I share my perspectives as a global citizen. I was born in England, I grew up in the Caribbean, I lived in England as an adult. I visited the US. I lived in France. I've been in a lot of places, and I've experienced racism everywhere. And so I bring that lens to what I write about. You know, quite often we think what we're experiencing is the only way it's being experienced or is unique to the location that we're in. And my experience is that there's a lot of commonality in how these things operate in different places. VirginiaOh, that's so interesting. I have British and American citizenship, but I've lived my whole life in America. And I definitely tend to think of racism as this very American issue. But as you're saying that, I'm realizing how incredibly reductive that is. Although Americans certainly are a big part of the problem. SharonYes, but—or yes and, I suppose. Let's not forget that all of this started with the British people—well, British and Europeans—who colonized everywhere.VirginiaSure did. Yup. Absolutely. SharonThere are many places besides the USA that share this history of enslavement. Barbados and the Caribbean being among those places. So there are similarities, there are commonalities, I think. It operates in a particularly American way, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist in other places. Because it does. It's sometimes less visible. And of course, because so many other places don't have a gun culture, you're less likely to end up dead as a Black person, even if people are being racist towards you. VirginiaYes. We add that extra layer of things. Well, I am having you here today to talk about a piece of American legislation because you wrote a really excellent piece for your newsletter. I want everyone to subscribe to your newsletter and to be supporting your work. Often you're putting things on my radar that I have missed and I just really appreciate the education that you do. This was a piece you wrote recently on the CROWN Act, which I have to admit I wasn't even aware of as something that was happening. So for starters, for folks who aren't who aren't familiar with this, can you tell us a little bit about what the CROWN act is and what inspired it? SharonThe CROWN Act stands for Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural hair. I believe it was (first) sponsored by State Senator Holly Mitchell from California. And then other states have since passed similar laws. There is also a federal act, which was passed by the House earlier this year. The idea is that Black people should be able to wear their natural hair, and not have it be a problem. In all post-enslavement societies, in all post-colonial societies, in many white majority places, the way that our hair grows out of our head is a problem for people. It can be seen as not professional. There are all sorts of ancient ideas about what Black people's hair is and isn't, that play into the way that it is treated. It's not just about being able to wear your hair, the respect piece is important as well. Because you'd be surprised how often—I mean, I worked in England for 15 years and there were people that would come and say, “Ooh, your hair! Let me…” (For those listening, I am running my hands through my hair.) “Your hair,” you know, “It feels so different. Let me…” VirginiaLike it’s okay to touch you. SharonIt's okay to just touch my hair. So there has historically been this thing where Black people's natural hair, and all the various styles that we put our hair in, were not seen as worthy of respect, were not seen as professional, were not seen as acceptable. All of that comes out of that whole white supremacist ideology.VirginiaWhat I really appreciated in your piece is you explain why the ability to have legal redress for microaggressions is obviously really important, given this really problematic history that you've just sketched out for us. But you also wrote, “Why the hell do we need to legislate for Black people to enjoy autonomy over our hair?” So, talk a little more about that piece. SharonWhite supremacy has weaponized Black hair in many ways. It's been a matter of control that extended to using hair as evidence of the reasons why Black people deserve to be enslaved, because our hair was seen as like wool, animal-like, somehow bestial, somehow not right. You could think of the Tignon Laws, which I think were in Louisiana, where Black women's hair was supposed to be covered. Because otherwise the white guys would not be able to control themselves. There was this idea of overt sexuality, as well.VirginiaThat being your problem to control as opposed to… SharonYes, our problem that they needed to control. Black women and Black people being what they are, we've made lemonade out of lemons. That's why you get these fabulous headdresses and head ties and so on. They look absolutely wonderful. But you know, the the original idea was to control it, to cover it up, to hide anything that would make us look more human and more beautiful. Often in the past, women have been encouraged to cover themselves up so that they don't get assaulted. This is another facet of that. As I've said, I don't know any Black person who's worked in a white majority space, especially a woman, who has not had some white person in their office space, make free with their hair. And you know, I would not do the same if the situation were reversed. I want to add something here, which is that a lot of white people say, “Oh, I went to a country in Asia, and people were fascinated by my straight blonde hair.” And I say, that is not the same thing, because the history is different. The agency that you have historically had over your own body is different. Coming out of a culture where we have not had that agency, somebody putting their hands in our hair lands very differently. VirginiaYeah, absolutely. It's always going to be a different experience. But you're right, people do make that comparison. I would imagine also there's some comparisons to when you're pregnant and people feel like they can touch your stomach. And that is also very violating. But that's a finite experience. You're only going to be in that mode for nine months. I'm not saying it's okay that it happens, it shouldn't happen. But this is something Black people are being asked to navigate daily, without other people adjusting. SharonI just actually want to address that particular because: Imagine if you're a Black pregnant woman.VirginiaOh god, yes.SharonBecause I was a Black pregnant woman. So people would be putting their hands in my hair, but they'd also be touching my belly. That felt extremely violating. VirginiaYes, it is. I mean, it just is.SharonAnd in a way that I couldn't even fully articulate at the time as to why it bothered me so much. But I know now why it bothered me so much. VirginiaDo you mind sharing a little bit about how you do navigate those moments? SharonAt the time when it used to happen most often, I was not often in a position to navigate that safely. Because people would then regard me as being the problem, regard me as being the angry Black woman, regard me as making something out of nothing. Now I would be in a position to say something like, “Because of the history of enslavement, this does not feel good to me. This feels like a violation.” And I could say it as plainly as that. And I think if you said it like that people would would pause and think about it. I've not often had the chance to do that, but it's definitely something that I would do the next time it happens. And of course, you know, the other weapon is a glare. A glare, the right kind of glare. Sometimes you can see someone coming towards you and you just give them that look and they think better of it. It's the bomb look, the look that you give your kid when they're about to do something that's really problematic and you don't even want to have to talk about it and it stops them in their tracks. Sometimes you need to pull that look out.VirginiaYou need that look. I mean, and again, not to equate the experiences, but I did notice that getting touched while pregnant happened much less the second time. I think because I had learned that look a little. I think I was much clearer with the nope, you're not allowed in this space. I was wondering if we could also talk a bit about texturism, that’s a concept you hit on in that piece as well. How do white people perpetrate this, and also how does it play out within the Black community?SharonOkay, so I'm going to start with the second question first. This is another offshoot of enslavement, of that white supremacist ideal and ideology. The societies that we grew up in that say that “white is right” and that's what you aspire to. And it is true that in those times and even subsequently, if you had lighter skin, if you were closer to looking European, you had more opportunities open to you. One of the ways this revealed itself was in your hair. So you will hear people—I mean, I certainly did when I was growing up. I would hear older people talk about good hair, right? And good hair meant it had a little wave in it, it was closer to what they would think of as European hair. This happens in Black majority Caribbean countries, in Black communities all around the world, and in so many post-colonial spaces. What is also interesting is that many white people feel more comfortable with those people that they see as having more proximity to them, than the people that are darker skinned, that they see as having less proximity to them. I'm not sure they're always consciously aware of it, but I know that it does happen. For example, you can look at things like casting in films and TV series, and who gets what kind of roles. Where are the darker skinned people? What kind of roles do they get? What do the lighter skinned people with the wavy hair get? Who are the people that are representing Black people in the ads? Who are the models? I mean, it's not 100 percent that way, but if you were to look at it, you would see that there's definitely this idea that having that wavy hair texture, and that lighter skin can buy you some additional visibility and acceptability. So, it plays out in what hair is deemed acceptable and professional within the Black community and beyond the Black community. VirginiaI'm thinking, as you mentioned casting, how even when a very dark-skinned Black person is cast in a role, it's then the subject of, “look at how we're breaking ground, look at what a big deal this is.” It has to be this huge conversation because it's so rare. So the assumptions prove the rule here, because you're still in a place where that's news, when that shouldn't be news. I'm hoping we can also talk a little bit about how to navigate this conversation with our kids, because I do think hair—and of course skin color, as well—is often one of those physical differences that little kids—I'm thinking like three, five, seven year olds—will notice and point out about people when they meet them. And often white parents have this instinct to rush in with, “That's not nice, don't say anything.” And, maybe they're speaking in terms of “don't comment on that person's body, because that's rude.” But it also reinforces to white kids, that there's something wrong with Black hair, that this is something we can't talk about, that this is off limits in some way. SharonI remember when I was living in France and I was driving somewhere with a white friend and her kid who was maybe three or four at the time. He was fascinated by the fact that my skin was a different color. So he asked if I'd stayed out in the sun too long. And his mother was absolutely mortified. And I laughed, because, you know, he was three or four, he wasn't coming at it from a hurtful point of view. And I explained that people had different skin color. That's just how we are. I often think when you're dealing with these things, going with the factual is the way to go. A recognition that the differences exist, but no suggestion that they mean something positive or negative in terms of how we interact with those people, you know? You have to, at the same time, avoid suggesting that there's something negative about having darker skin or Black skin, but also avoid suggesting that there's something particularly positive about having white skin. You have to do both things. Because kids are going to notice, kids are going to see it. I think for young, very young kids, that kind of thing doesn't matter to them. We have to not shy away from the fact that there are aspects of society that are going to see these things as major differences and treat people differently. But we can also teach them that this is not something that they themselves have to do or perpetuate. VirginiaSo in that moment, what would you have wished your friend had said to her kid? It sounds like you handled it beautifully, but it shouldn't be your job to handle it. What do you want white parents to be doing?SharonDefinitely not to come down on the kid like a ton of bricks, suggesting that they've done something wrong in even asking the question. Possibly reframing the question. Parents have to educate themselves so that when they get these questions, they have the answers. Because I don't know that that particular parent would have even known what to say or how to explain it. VirginiaI think often, the reason we panic is because we are having our own stuff called out, we're suddenly realizing, Oh, I don't have the right language for this. And that's on me. I should have done that work. SharonIf you're going to raise anti-racist kids, you have to be an anti-racist parent. And that doesn't mean that you're not going to make mistakes. It means that you recognize that this is the route that we have to travel for all our humanity. And for equality and equity for all.VirginiaAnother way I get asked this question often is how to respond if your three year old says, “Why is that lady so fat?” You know, comments on body size, and I always go with something like, “Bodies come in all different shapes and sizes—”Sharon—And colors!VirginiaAnd colors! Hair comes in all different colors and styles and, you know, hair comes in different textures. You can just normalize that without getting into some intense thing about it. SharonEspecially for young kids. You have different conversations with your kids about things like this at different ages. If your kid is three, you don't necessarily have to give them the whole history of colonialism, you know? If your kid is 12, that might be different. VirginiaYou should be doing that, absolutely. SharonExactly. Because we we teach our kids at a very young age about stranger danger and unwanted touching. And it's a good time to say that that also extends to touching people's skin and hair when they have not asked for it. I think that is something that would fit very nicely with that lesson, right? VirginiaYeah, to just say, “No one can touch your body without permission. You don't touch other people's bodies without permission.”SharonExactly. VirginiaAnd fortunately, young children will give you plenty of opportunities to reinforce that.Sharon Because they're curious. They're always, you know, sticking their hands in things. VirginiaBlack hair is obviously such a huge topic. What haven't I asked you that you think is really important for us to be thinking about? SharonI think it's important for people to recognize that no matter how fascinated you might be by a Black person’s hair, we are not an exhibit or curiosity. Just don't touch the hair. You know, just don't touch the hair. Some people are so traumatized by it, even if you asked to touch the hair, they'd still be upset. We're coming out of a history where Black people for centuries had no agency. Where in some countries, we were put on display. And those very features that you now want to treat as a curiosity were the things that were displayed. So, it's not just about it being wrong in this moment, it's all the generational trauma that is awakened by that. So it's really best avoided. Google is available, if you want to find out more. If you have a real Black friend—and I'm not talking about somebody you work with that you don't even sit with at lunchtime. I'm talking about somebody that's actually in your life—then maybe you can have those more in depth conversations with that person. But if we're talking about your colleagues and casual acquaintances, for best results, just keep your hands out of their hair. I was just going to add that from the point of view of your workplace, what you can do is you can look at what your policies say and make sure that they are equitable in terms of what's seen as professional. Do your bit to change things where you are. VirginiaThat's a great idea. And I just wanted to share your rage for a moment that it is 2022 and we are having to say don't touch people's hair. And we are having to pass laws to protect people from this. I mean, it is astounding to me that body autonomy is not more of a—well, I live in the United States where they're taking bodily autonomy away in so many different ways right now. SharonYou know, if you think about how the country started, it started by taking stuff away from the people that were here. It started by taking autonomy away from the Black people they brought in. It started in a time when women didn't have very many rights at all. Yeah, and all of this was still the case at the point when the country became the country.VirginiaRight. SharonSo maybe it's time to rethink what the country is and should be and could be, instead of going back to what was the norm in 1776.Virginia Which protected only one type of person. SharonI mean, exactly, exactly. It's the 21st century, we should be beyond that. VirginiaDefinitely. Well, I so appreciate you giving us this education, taking the time to talk through this issue more. I think it's one that all of us can be doing better on. And encouraging us to think about how it's playing out in our workplaces, and our kids’ schools, all of that. Butter for Your Burnt ToastVirginiaWe wrap up every podcast with my butter for your burnt toast segment. This is where we give a fun recommendation of something we are loving or learning from right now. So Sharon, what's your butter?SharonWell, the funny thing about it, it's a little bit of a self promotion, in a way, because I've just started a new gig at Diverse Leaders Group, a brand new startup as the head of anti-racism. Our aim is to identify development support leaders at all levels. That's anyone wanting to lead the way to equality in their own lives and for their communities. We're starting with anti-racist leaders. So I'm pumped about developing community support and educational resources to help people really live anti-racism and create a more equal world for everybody. VirginiaThat's fantastic. My recommendation, related to our conversation about Black hair, is a kid's book that my both my daughters have really loved over the years called Don't Touch My Hair by Sharee Miller. It is a great story of a Black girl who has amazing hair and everybody when she walks down the street wants to touch it, and she doesn't like it. She uses her voice to tell people to stop and they have to listen. We talked about how with your three year old, you're not gonna explain all of colonialism, but you can start to talk to your three and four year old about how Black kids have to deal with this and your straight hair doesn't attract the same attention. So that was a conversation I wanted to be having with them. But they also relate so deeply to this experience of a kid getting unwanted attention, and how do you sort of say your body is yours, and so there's certainly a universal theme, as well as it being a great way to have this conversation and help kids understand this issue. So I wanted to recommend that. Sharon, tell everyone the name of your newsletter and anything else you want us to be following?. How can we support you? SharonMy newsletter is Sharon's Anti Racism Newsletter. You can support me by taking a paid subscription because one day I would like to run the newsletter full time. And you could also join the Anti-Racist Leaders Association, which I mentioned earlier and take the lead in fighting racism wherever you are. VirginiaAmazing. Thank you so much for being here. I really loved this conversation. SharonThank you, Virginia. I enjoyed it, too. Thanks so much for inviting me.Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode.The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

People don’t have a choice about whether or not to fight these things. You have to keep learning all you can, you have to keep finding the allies you can. And to despair is to abandon all the people who need us most.You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, and I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter. Today is a very special episode because I am interviewing one of my very favorite people in the world: My stepmother, Mary Summers. Mary is a Senior Fellow in the Fox Leadership Program and a lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s also a former physician assistant, political speechwriter, and a lifelong activist. And 52 years ago, she and three other activists made a 28 minute black and white film about what it was like to live in a country where abortions were illegal. (Watch it and get involved!) This was in 1970. The Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion throughout the country was three years in the future. And of the approximately 800,000 abortions performed in 1970, only 1% were obtained legally. 300,000 resulted in complications and 8000 resulted in death. We are now living in post-Roe America. There is much about this fight that has changed in the past 52 years, but also much that stays the same. So, I asked Mary to come chat with me about her work on the film as well as what we can learn from the people who fought for legal abortion before as we begin to do it again. PS. Mary was delighted to donate her $100 podcast honorarium to the National Network of Abortion Funds. Thank you to the Burnt Toast paid subscribers who made that possible! And big news: The Burnt Toast Giving Circle has exceeded our goal! We’ve raised $20,111 and counting for Arizona state legislature races. You can join us here, and read more about why that helps in the fight to legalize abortion here. Episode 53 TranscriptVirginiaLet’s start by telling listeners a little bit about you and about your work.MaryI am a senior fellow with the Robert Fox Leadership Program at the University of Pennsylvania. I’ve been, for the last 20 years, a lecturer in political science, teaching service learning courses on the politics of food and agriculture and on schools as sites where inequalities and economic status and and health, health especially, can either be addressed or reproduced. My students, as well as being in class with me, are working in schools and after-school programs and food stamp snap enrollment campaigns and programs like that, so that they’re learning about institutions on the ground as well as in the classroom.VirginiaAnd that just one of many things you have done in your life. Do you want to also just go back a little further and tell us what you did, especially around the time you made the film?MaryI got involved in making the film right as I was graduating from college in 1970 I was at Radcliffe. And I had gotten interested in film, and interested in the women’s movement. That period at Harvard was the height of the anti-war movement. We basically were on strike most spring semesters that I was there. Especially the Harvard strike of 1969 was really important to me, seeing the entire university mobilized around stopping ROTC on campus. People who had been meeting in tiny rooms trying to organize, by the end of that strike, were meeting in the football stadium. Faculty and students were working together, voting on the demands of the strike and passing them overwhelmingly and the administration basically conceding everything we were fighting for. That gave me a real sense that we could change the world. In the years both prior to and after graduation, I was also getting more interested in the women’s movement as one more important way of thinking about relationships within the anti-war movement, within the student movement, and in society as a whole. Men were clearly very dominant. And women were starting to be very interested in talking to each other, about everything from clitoral orgasms to shared housekeeping in ways that were exciting and interesting. And then, a person I was taking some classes from told me about a group of women who were making a film about abortion. So I contacted them. They originally started out of the same group of women who eventually would become the founders of Our Bodies Ourselves. It was a big Bread and Roses office that was generating all this activity around women’s health and consciousness raising groups and just lots of excitement about thinking about the inequalities of gender roles, and how could we address that. So I wrote a little grant to a program called Education for Action that that gave me funding to join this group of four women who were making this film on abortion. It had originally been inspired, I think, by Jane Pincus, the person who made it possible to make a film because her husband was a documentary filmmaker then at MIT and we were able to use the MIT film lab equipment, and both cameras and editing. She had been listening to what was then the equivalent of NPR, about efforts to get the Massachusetts legislature to legalize abortion, and just couldn’t believe that the only voices you could hear debating it were men’s voices. So she thought, well, if we could make a film that would raise up women’s stories and voices that would make a big difference in these debates. And that made a lot of sense to me. VirginiaCan you talk a little more about why the conversation on abortion in particular was being only had by men? MaryLiterally, the Massachusetts legislature was all men. I mean, if there were any women in it, they, their voices were not on the radio. And really, that was a time when electoral politics was overwhelmingly dominated by white men.VirginiaLet’s also be clear, this was three years before Roe, so abortion was illegal, which was why you were doing the film. How did you think about the potential risks you were facing by doing this work? MaryThis was a period in which it looked as if the way we would win abortion rights was state by state, with the legislatures passing it. Hawaii had legalized abortion before we started, but that, it’s so far away.VirginiaRight, not very helpful.MaryPeople were not going to Hawaii for abortions. Then the big question was that a lot of states were starting to legalize abortion, but you had to get permission from a doctor, meet with a psychiatrist. Abortion on demand sounded like a very, very radical idea to a lot of people. So, we were very interested in making a film that would say that should be the norm, that women should get to decide if they needed an abortion. Obviously, you can understand why people who are fighting just within state legislatures were feeling like, we aren’t going to be able to get any legalization at all, unless we allow for all these permissions and doctor involvement, “it has to be between a woman and her doctor” kind of talk.VirginiaThey were taking a kind of incremental approach.MaryRight. So it seemed really important to have more pressure and organizing outside the legislatures and the courts that would help push the idea that this should be women’s decisions. Now on the question of risk—there was certainly a lot of stigma. But there was also tremendous pent up trauma that women did want a chance to talk about. I mean, that was what was so exciting about the women’s movement at that time, was all these women who had experienced a whole range of different types of very real oppression, either in their own homes or in—I mean, I went to my college infirmary and asked for birth control and they wouldn’t give it to me. The range of humiliating experiences women had been through, much less the women who had been through illegal abortions, which for many were so terrifying and so scary. There was this lovely doctor in the hills of Pennsylvania that apparently gave many women very good abortion experiences, but there were a lot of people who did not have that. So, for some of them, just being able to tell their stories was huge, even if they didn’t want their name associated with it. We started receiving tapes of women wanting to tell their stories and several of the filmmakers had stories that they taped. So I think more we were really excited and energized about doing this work. I mean, there was a lot of debate about whether we wanted our names on the movie. So in that sense, there was worry about stigma, I would say.VirginiaIt’s so moving to think about all those women sending in those tapes. Like pre-internet, that’s a lot of work, right? You’ve have to get a tape made, put it in the mail. It’s just, it’s amazing.MaryThat’s one of the things I remember, is trying to splice those tapes together and you know my technical skills! To create the story in the first part of the film. I do want to emphasize that all around the country there were women who were who were becoming amazingly strong and militant around the fact that they weren’t going to put up with this anymore. We knew about the Janes in Chicago—which I think a lot of your listeners are going to know about—where women had trained themselves to do abortions on kitchen tables. To me, at least, that seemed extraordinary and, and really scary. I was like, well, thank goodness, I’m just making a film. Because that was also risking very long term prison sentences. Both, you know, could you harm somebody and could you go to prison for this. Both of those things seemed much more scary than anything we were doing.VirginiaAs you mentioned, the original goal as activists was to work towards passing abortion laws, state by state, that’s where you were when Roe happened. I would love for you to talk a little bit about how that conversation shifted. Was there a feeling that like, we really still need to do the state work? Or did it feel like okay, now that conversation is over?MaryWell, a couple of things were going on. I think in terms of the bigger political picture, there was this sense of, Oh, okay. We’ve won this in the courts. That’s where we’re going to be protected. No matter what happens in the state legislature, the Supreme Court has given us this right. So, I think especially for the the people who are devoting their lives to winning abortion rights, that that just made sense. I did think grassroots organizing and changing people’s hearts and minds, and reaching out to people with women’s stories was very, very, very important. That, to me, was the way you could make more fundamental and more lasting political change. I mean, it was incredibly important to protect women’s individual rights. But to me, we needed these bigger social and political changes that weren’t going to happen through the courts. So that was the bigger political picture.The personal picture was: It took us almost a year longer to finish this film than we thought it would. We weren’t getting any funding. We had been this very small, intense group of women, trying to figure out how to make this film, how to tell these stories, how to guarantee that it would put abortion in a broader context in a way that we all felt proud of. Some of the major forces funding the push to win abortion rights were associated with organizations like Zero Population Growth, that had this big push on, we can solve poverty by making sure poor women don’t have children. We didn’t want our film to be used by people who had a class perspective that we thought was wrong. But it was really hard to figure out how to how to do that. So there were a lot of tensions among ourselves as we were figuring all that out. And we had to get out of the MIT Film Studio! So, we finished it quite abruptly. There were a couple of showings and we each tried to arrange other showings. My parents were in Rochester then and I went off to show it at the University of Rochester and RIT and a former professor had me come show it at Mount Holyoke. Meanwhile, we needed to get jobs, we needed to move on with our lives. And, and it was very clear that now that abortion was legal— our film was mainly about how incredibly frightening illegal abortions were, which was not the main message that young women should be hearing. What they needed was assurance that legal abortions are safe. And so like the Guttmacher Institute, folks, for example, were kind of horrified by our film. VirginiaPlus, the abortion pill was not an option back then. MaryThe only thing was a D&C. VirginiaAnd that does change even what a legal abortion looks like now.MaryIn fact, legal D&Cs were not the intense, scary, painful experience that the film portrays. The broader issues that we wanted to address in the film were about the huge percentage of the people that were actually dying from illegal abortions being Black and poor women. They were also the people with the higher maternal mortality rates. Our eagerness was to address issues of inequality with regard to race and class and women’s health. Clearly all that was still very relevant. Winning abortion rights didn’t mean winning abortion access.Virginia Right. You see abortion as just one piece of this much larger puzzle. And at times, this has put you at odds with other feminists who’ve taken a single issue approach to this topic. So let’s talk a little bit about why it is so important to connect abortion to other issues, especially poverty, and how that helps work towards building these broader movements.MaryI’m somewhat reluctant to be critical, because I’m old enough now and also have studied history enough to be able to see, again and again, that what happens when you have these big broad movements trying to fight for social justice is: We never win everything we’re fighting for. And there’s a tendency afterwards to blame the people fighting for not having won it all, as opposed to blaming their opponents. One reason I want people to see the film is because I think there is this impression of “Oh, those second wave feminists, all they cared about was middle class white women,” and you can see from the film how concerned we were that that the people who were dying were Black. And how concerned we were about forced sterilization. We did not succeed in raising up those issues in ways where we won but we were raising them up. I do think the important thing to remember is that Roe v. Wade is won in 73. And throughout the 70s, going into the 80s, we have an increasing reaction against these efforts to fight for greater equality and to use government to protect people’s rights. There’s a growing reaction against the civil rights movement, against the women’s movement, against the environmental movement. I mean, they’re achieving their greatest victories. But the reaction against them is growing and is fully articulated when Ronald Reagan gets elected and is saying, the problem is government. The world in which you grew up is a world in which everybody was being told governments, our bureaucracy, they don’t do anybody any good. We need to work with markets to make the world a better place. That that became the mantra, which worked very well for people who had enough money. I mean, it didn’t work, it wasn’t even great for them, but it was way better for them than for people who didn’t have enough money to participate in markets. But that was the world in which people were still trying to fight for women’s equality. So the definition of equality became narrower and narrower. It was like, we need for women to get to be part of that narrow group of elites that are dominating this economy.VirginiaIt was just about accessing the white man’s power, it wasn’t redefining it.MaryWell, and only a very few white men’s power. Wealthy white men’s power. Very well educated and professional white men’s power. So that is happening at the same time that millions and millions and millions of white men and women and people of color, who throughout the 60s and 70s, had lived in an economy of greater equality, higher wages, jobs with benefits, pensions, funded pensions, are losing all of that. So you can completely understand why if we’re going to live in a world dominated by wealthy elites, it should seem right that women and black people should be part of those elites. You can understand why those struggles became narrowly focused. But it also then lost you the broad base that you need to sustain a greater social movement for a vision of social justice that that speaks to more people.VirginiaI think it’s important for folks doing this work now to understand that second wave feminists weren’t all working under the Betty Friedan model. That there was the Johnnie Tillman model (as I discussed with Angela Garbes), and this focus on what if we were dismantling this whole system of elitism as opposed to just getting a couple people promoted?MaryWhich we thought we were doing! We won significant victories. I don’t want to lose track of that. It means a tremendous amount that we are not in the same place in this struggle that we were when I was young, much less when my mother was young. She couldn’t get a diaphragm until Massachusetts passed laws saying married couples could get birth control. So the victories we won were really significant. But the Reagan Revolution was really significant in ways that I see as resulting in the election of Donald Trump, which is why we lost abortion.VirginiaAnd right now, as we’re all reeling from everything, there’s this new, divisive conversation emerging. I think there’s value to this push on using inclusive language around abortion to acknowledge that people of all genders have abortions. And then we’re hearing from folks like Pamela Paul—you and I talked about her op-ed—saying we have to keep this as a women’s issue. I think you are such a great example of someone who has been through all the different iterations of this, who has embraced inclusive language. I’d love you to talk a little bit about how you see that piece of it. What can we learn from that conversation? What do we need to be doing? MaryI think of social and political movements as as playing several different functions, all of which are really important. And one is, they get their strength, from the fact of people recognizing their own experience, you know, “oh my gosh, I’ve been living with this, you’ve been living with this.” We can say out loud what was terrible about this, and we can name it, we could say how horrible it was that our husbands thought they don’t even have to do the dishes, much less share the cooking. Obviously, this was going to make our husbands defensive. But it was still so important for us that we do this. And I just think that’s always true. We need to recognize the needs of people to speak to their own experience, to name it, and to name it in ways that may make others uncomfortable. At the same time, I just so deeply believe that most of us want the same things. We all want clean air, we all want a planet that’s not going to burn to a crisp, we want our kids to go to schools—VirginiaAnd not get shot at.MaryWhere they’re not killed and where they’re nurtured, where they learn stuff.VirginiaOh so, raising the bar a little higher even than not getting killed. Sure. I like how you dream big, Mary. MaryWe want to live in safe neighborhoods. All of these are things that all of us want and right now, the politics of this country do not reflect that. Issues have been defined in ways where we just need to do a lot, a lot. Those of us who can stand to, those of us who aren’t too hurt by what we’ve been through—I don’t think any of us should be trying to force anybody who’s been through something horrendous that makes them not want to talk to anybody who sounds homophobic or sounds anti-trans. People need to be safe and to be in community. There’s so much work to be done, that no matter what your trauma, you can be doing something really useful to help others who suffered trauma like yours, right? But those of us who have led pretty protected, privileged lives—and many extraordinarily strong and amazing people who haven’t— I do think we need to be doing everything we can to be reaching out and to be listening and to not limiting our language. We need to be able to talk to all kinds of different people who use all kinds of different language. I do think it’s important to be able to say to our trans brothers and sisters, “There are times I want to talk about women because this is so overwhelmingly a women’s experience and this is an audience I need to reach.” But to me, it’s also very liberating to go back to being able to speak very generally about people.  The issues that are affecting Black lives are the same issues of health care, and housing, and jobs, and global warming, pollution. These all have more impact on Black lives than on white lives. But to address those issues, we need movements that speak to white people, too. For a long time, in the women’s movement, we sort of weren’t speaking to men at all. And that wasn’t a way to win.VirginiaRight, that just made everything very easy to dismiss as a women’s issue. That’s why we’ve made no progress on paid leave, because it’s only women who need to take paid leave, because it’s only women who have the babies. We’re not going to get anywhere on a lot of this until it matters to men.MaryThat’s why I think it’s actually quite exciting to challenge gender roles. Let’s speak to “people.” VirginiaRight, let’s talk about how people have abortions, and people are impacted by abortion.MaryYeah. And obviously, you know, there can be grammatical issues. I’m sort of against people getting too self righteous about the grammar either way. I remember a time when amazing civil rights leaders didn’t want to start saying “African American” or “Black,” who were sticking with Negro. And they had led extraordinary struggles and then started to get dissed by militant young Black leaders. Those stories happen again and again, in our movements. I do think it’s very understandable how and why it happens. The more we say, the more voices we have speaking in as many languages as possible about how most of us want the same thing, the better. Let’s make good faith efforts to get there. Let’s not attack each other. Let’s try to listen. Let’s try to understand why people are hurt and acknowledge that. And let’s follow leadership’s that’s getting us where we want to go.VirginiaAnd as you said, those of us with privileged lives, who can do more work, we can do this work of learning new language. This is not the hardest thing anyone’s been asked to do! If this makes things safer and more comfortable for more people to participate, then we should be doing it.MaryWhat bothers me about the Pamela Paul piece is: No one is saying to her, don’t go out there and speak to women. She’s the one who’s choosing—Virginia—to feel attacked by other people’s choices. Other people’s language doesn’t actually have to impact her at all. So, here we are post-Roe. You and I spent the week together after the decision was announced and I think I cried every day. People who know you and know your work were saying to me, “Isn’t your stepmom just devastated by what’s happening right now?” But you were one of the people giving me a lot of hope. So I would love for you to share some of that. We had a whole thread discussion here, and I was hearing from lawyers who were feeling like they had to question their careers, like, how do I keep doing this work? I was hearing from health care providers, from parents, everybody is very scared right now. And I think, pretty depressed, in my generation.MaryI do understand how and why people decided to rely on the courts to protect abortion and I want us to pass laws that will allow us to do that again. I see abortion rights and access as critical to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I think we have to get the majority of Americans to see that that’s the case and pass laws that will protect all of us. I understand that when it looked like you could just get those rights protected without getting people to vote for them, why people went in that direction, even though it meant giving up on building on the hearts and minds. It seemed like a safer way to go, right?VirginiaEven though there were big trade offs to it.MaryThe truth is that 50 years ago, we probably could have won. Before there was 50 years of anti-abortion organizing. We could have won hearts and minds more easily than we’re going to do now. 50 years of anti abortion organizing, 50 years of people’s becoming increasingly embattled and increasingly embittered by losing so much. Which has given the people that call themselves right to life their power. They seem to be the ones that are standing for principle and reaching out to others and saying, “We have principles, we value life, you know, and we may lose everything else, but we’re going to stand up for life.” And those of us who want better lives for all people can’t allow them to be the ones in that position. I do think we need to reach out to all the presumably good hearted people who are embracing that. If they want to support women and having children, we need to say, “Okay, work with us to support healthcare for all, the Child Tax allowance…”VirginiaPaid leave, day care…MaryI do think that’s one front we need to move on. We need to embrace a broader truly pro-life agenda. There’s so much work to be done to promote access, that actually people have had to be working on all these years ever since Medicaid stopped paying, much less people who don’t have access to Medicaid. People have been doing amazing work at that. They now need even more support, there’s all the work to support individual women directly. And then there’s the broader, how do we change the politics of this? And then, obviously, we’ve got to continue the court battles. We need people passionately defending freedom of speech in the states where doctors and health care providers are being told, you have to tell patients lies. Either they’re being forbidden from talking to people about abortions at all, or they’re being told they have to read scripts where abortions are associated with breast cancer and suicide.VirginiaNone of which is true.MaryIt’s completely false science! It’s just a correlation of the fact that it’s the poor people and people of color who are an overwhelming number of the people who need abortions, and they’re also the people who face the worst health consequences on every issue. That correlation is being read as if it’s a scientific thing that has to be read to patients. Every law school in the country should be helping people think, how do we challenge this? And every medical and nursing student school should be thinking, how do we help? I am very interested in how this is all going to play out in terms of thinking, how can we support people legally? Because we do need all these organizations that are trying to provide abortion rights and access. We can’t have them all go under. I think a lot of them do have to follow whatever the law is, and provide whatever help they can. I think a whole lot of the rest of us do need to be like the Janes in the 70s, thinking, Well, if you have to break the law in order to help women, how are we going to do it? How are we going to do it in ways that makes the law unenforceable in the ways that civil rights people did? I mean, I think there are enormous challenges. But we have to meet them. I have to say the one other thing that really keeps me going is thinking about history. When you think about all that Black people went through after Reconstruction. People don’t have a choice about whether or not to fight these things. You have to keep learning all you can you have to keep finding the allies you can. To despair is to abandon all the people who need us most.VirginiaWell, now I’m going to cry again. Yes, you’re right. You’re right! It’s just, it’s hard. It’s scary. We have a lot of lives at stake and I think just sometimes I have to sit with that for a minute. But I appreciate you sketching out what these different fights are going to look like. I think it helps us all think about how we’re going to contribute. MaryAnd the sense of solidarity you can feel once you’re working with other people does support you. It’s very important not to do this work in ways that make you feel burned out or under attack in ways that you can’t handle. You have to find what works for you. And the community that can support you and the ways in which you can support yourself.VirginiaWe should say, too, there is a very robust reproductive justice movement. There are people who have been planning for this, who knew this was coming. Our work is to figure out how to support them. There was an initial response on social media, of people posting things about like, “you can come stay in my guest room if you need an abortion in my state!” And we may come to that, but there are also systems in place that we can be supporting. Individual acts of heroism going rogue is not going to be how we get this done. MaryAnd there are organizations organizing the guest rooms! People have been doing that all along because because for all these decades many women have been lacking access and then having to come to other states.Butter For Your Burnt ToastVirginiaWell, on the note of figuring out how to do this work without burning out, we can turn to our Butter for Burnt Toast segment where we give a recommendation. I would love to know what you were doing to take care of yourself right now?MaryWhat do I do every day, or try to do every day, it is to have breakfast on my porch, where I get the look at my garden, and read the paper. And talk to my husband, to the extent that he’s willing to have breakfast on the porch! He’s more willing on weekends, sometimes weekdays, as well. It’s a way of sharing the news, even when it’s really bad news, getting to talk about it together makes you feel more in control. And then, the way the sunlight hits the trees around my garden, that early in the morning is just so beautiful. And then I take the time to make myself a breakfast with yogurt and fruit and granola. It’s sort of the food preparation I most enjoy and enjoy eating.VirginiaPeople should know that Mary is not someone who enjoys cooking dinner, certainly not on a nightly basis. All of the other conversations we’ve had about mental loads of planning meals, and all of that come directly from lived experience! But yes, breakfast preparation. I also enjoy that for myself, not for other people. I have the same breakfast ritual, except I do it before anyone else is awake in our house so that I can just sit out on the porch and look at the flowers and the trees and rage about the news. And sometimes text Dad my Spelling Bee score, even though he’s probably already done it. It is really important to have that quiet time at the beginning of the day. It is really lovely. Well, Mary, thank you so much. This was a really helpful conversation. I hope it helps people feel clearer on what we’re doing. And you know what this work needs to look like now, and I want to make sure people watch the film and get involved. So let’s wrap up by telling people where to find the film.MaryYou can see the film for free at our website Abortion and Women’s Rights 1970. We really hope people will find it helpful for thinking talking and organizing around abortion rights and access. It’s 28 minutes long. It’s a good length for either a public screening or inviting some friends over to watch it and discuss it over coffee or a glass of wine. And the website’s “get involved” page provides links to organizations that they can work with or donate to, which support individuals in need of abortion care, helping people access medication abortions, as well as organizing and lobbying at local, state, national, and international levels. We would really love for that the link to that website in the film to be widely shared and posted!Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode.The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

Yoga Journal, which is the long standing print magazine for yoga professionals, and the yoga community, is owned by the same parent company that publishes Clean Eating magazine. So there’s a lot of intersection in the writing and the journalists between them. And I find it very problematic. Extremely problematic. But that’s capitalism, right? You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today I’m chatting with Jessica Grosman! Jessica is an experienced anti-diet registered dietitian and certified Intuitive Eating counselor, weight inclusive health practitioner, and yoga teacher. She is on the faculty of Yoga for Eating Disorders, where she teaches the popular compassionate and mindful yin yoga series. And she’s a co-founder of Anti-Diet Culture Yoga, a platform with a mission to keep diet culture out of yoga spaces by providing training and educational opportunities for teachers. So, as you can probably guess from her bio, Jessica and I are discussing the intersection of diet culture and yoga today. This was such a fascinating conversation for me, because I truly did not know the extent to which yoga has been colonized and appropriated by white people and diet culture. If you have a fraught relationship with yoga, or have had that over the years like I have, I think you will get a lot out of this one. I do want to acknowledge that Jessica and I are two white, privileged ladies having this conversation. I’m very aware that in order to divest from yoga from diet culture and white supremacy more completely, we need to be learning this from people of color. We do shout out some of those voices towards the end of the episode. But I would love to know who else you are learning from—post suggestions in the comments so we can continue this conversation! If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! It’s free and a great way to help more folks find the show.Keep sending in your questions for Virginia’s Office Hours! If you have a question about navigating diet culture and anti-fat bias that you’d like to talk through with me, or if you just want to rant about a shitty diet with me, you can submit your question/topic here. I’ll pick one person to join me on the bonus episode so we can hash it out together.PS. Also hi new subscribers/listeners! I think a bunch of you found me through Julia Turshen’s podcast Keep Calm and Cook On. I have loved her entire series on Unapologetic Appetites and was delighted to join her for this conversation. Post-Publication Note from Virginia: After this episode aired, a listener let us know that Jessica’s Instagram contains some old content that may be triggering to folks in eating disorder recovery. I don’t expect Burnt Toast Podcast guests to align with me on every single issue; I also don’t expect podcast guests to have lived their lives free from diet culture influences (if I did, I’d have no one to interview!). And I find tremendous value in the conversation we had on this episode. But I wanted to offer this word of caution for folks in the Burnt Toast community who are in recovery. Please take care of yourselves.Episode 52 TranscriptVirginiaHi, Jessica! Why don’t we start by having you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your work?JessicaMy work is primarily patient-focused nutrition therapy, and I work to help individuals reestablish a comfortable connection with food and body most often after years of living and diet culture. I am a member of ASDAH, the Association of Size Diversity and Health and use HAES principles in my individualized care. I’m also a yoga teacher, as I mentioned, and really love bringing together all sorts of ways to help people feel comfortable in their body.VirginiaI think you’re our first yoga teacher on the podcast and today that’s going to be our focus — this intersection of diet culture and yoga. I think for a lot of listeners, this probably isn’t breaking news. We’ve all kind of seen the Lululemon version of yoga, and the Gwyneth Paltrow / Goop version. I think a lot of us may assume that diet culture has been baked into yoga from the start. But is that true or do you see this as a more recent co-option of yoga?JessicaI want to start by asking you if you know what the word yoga means. So I want to spin this question back to you. VirginiaI feel like I knew this when I did a lot more yoga, and now I’m going to fail this quiz. JessicaIt’s okay! Yoga is a Sanskrit word that means “to yoke” or “to join.” So right there, the word yoga does not mean acrobatics, leggings, green juice, restrictive diets, or any other stereotype that has been portrayed in the media through diet culture. I want to acknowledge that right from the start that yoga has nothing to do with diet culture in its origin. I’m going to give you a little history lesson here. There are eight limbs of yoga, with only one being the physical practice of yoga, the poses and postures that we see so often. In the classic, traditional sense, yoga really is about the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. The physical practice of yoga was developed to help rid the body of distractions, of impulses, to be able to sit and meditate. So if you think about kids in a classroom, we know that if we want kids to sit and concentrate, first we let them get all their energy out, and they run around on a playground have play time before they’re able to sit calmly and concentrate. Yoga, the physical practice of yoga, is in the same vein, to give the body time to rid itself of the distractions to be able to turn inward and sit and focus in meditation.VirginiaI love that framing and I’d never thought of it that way. And nothing you mentioned has to do with weight loss or changing your body size or shape. So when did the shift happened? JessicaSo, yoga was brought to the west from southern Asia about 100 years ago—and notice I said Southern Asia and not India, because yoga’s inception was not just in the land that is currently India, but all throughout southern Asia. So we want to give respect and honor to those lineages. But it was brought to the West about 100 years ago by a Russian woman named Eugenia Peterson who later changed her name to Indra Devy. She was an actress and a spiritual seeker who traveled to India and became the first female student of Krishna Macharia, who was considered the father of modern yoga. He created the posture-based yoga practice, the physical yoga that was influenced by martial arts and wrestling and British calisthenics. Remember, this was in colonized, British-occupied India. And so Indra was able to bring her yoga studies to the west with her when South Asians were not able to come West due to the Immigration Act of 1924, which set quotas for immigration from “less desirable” countries. Indra came back to the west, came to Hollywood dressed in saris and was emulated by movie stars and Hollywood types seeking exotic practices from the East to keep themselves young and beautiful. This was the start of the modern wellness movement and with yoga at the core. VirginiaShe’s like a proto-Gwyneth Paltrow.JessicaExactly. And you know, how ironic that she was on Gwyneth Paltrow land?VirginiaSo, the Western conception of yoga has always been more linked to diet culture. We wouldn’t have called it diet culture back then, but certainly this idea of the body and controlling the body. JessicaI would say so, especially in the yoga space that is full of white practitioners. I think South Asians in the West practicing yoga that are coming from that lineage, from their motherland, it’s a different type of practice. But the yoga of diet culture is very whitewashed.VirginiaLet’s talk specifics about how that manifests. What are some of the most surprising ways you’ve seen diet culture infiltrate yoga?Jessica Yoga is part of wellness culture and wellness culture is that friendly guise of diet culture which is rooted in capitalism. Yoga in the West is rooted in capitalism. I can tell you that working as a yoga teacher, to earn a living as a yoga teacher is not sustainable in our capitalistic society. There’s just no way to go about doing that for most people, other than those elevated—and I’m going to use air quotes—“gurus” of yoga, the ones that we see in the ads for Lululemon and all of the other brands.So yoga studios—we have yoga studios in the West, not so much in South Asia. But yoga studios in the West are for profit, and you can just look at what they sell beyond classes: The food, the drinks, the clothing, the apothecary items. This is all so steeped in diet culture. So before setting foot in a yoga studio, there’s this assumption that certain clothing is required to practice yoga, and that clothing is most often indicated for particular bodies. That keeps diversity out of yoga spaces. We don’t have to look too far to see that the ad campaigns for leggings, for activewear that is indicated for yoga practices, is usually on very small bodies. VirginiaAs you’re saying that, I’m just thinking I would feel weird going to a yoga class not wearing yoga pants. Like, we have this sense that you have to. But you also don’t have to. When I practice yoga at home, I often do it in just my pajama pants or any loose clothing. Why we have this idea that you have to wear this one type of pants to go to a yoga studio is fascinating.JessicaIt’s all about that culture of fitting in and needing to feel like you’re worthy of being in that space. VirginiaYep, that makes sense. And yet the pants so rarely have pockets and are not efficient for many of my needs.JessicaWell, that’s why you need more of the swag to go along with them.VirginiaOh, of course. JessicaYou need the correct bag to hold your yoga mat. And it has to be the correct yoga mat. And then the correct yoga bag, which has the pockets for this, that, and the other. VirginiaThere’s many more products we can buy.JessicaSo yoga studios, right? They’re selling more than classes. They’re selling a lifestyle. And I can tell you that walking into many studios—and I have not been in many studios since the pandemic, that’s been the beauty of the pandemic for me is the ability to both practice and teach yoga from the comfort of my home which I think is very, very important. But yoga studios have to make a profit and they do this by selling more than classes, by selling more than experience. So there is the clothing, there is oftentimes food—and I can tell you that it’s not chips and candy that are sold in yoga studios. It’s whatever bar or superfood of the moment is capturing the attention of wellness culture. It’s specific filtered water and kombucha and all sorts of other foods and foodstuffs that really have nothing to do with yoga or wellbeing, but just offer that glimmer of hope that by being in the space, by drinking this liquid, eating this snack, you’ll become more than who you were when you walked in the door. VirginiaAnd they’re also selling restriction too, right? There’s often an emphasis on cutting out food groups. I’m hoping you can tease this out a little bit. I know being vegetarian is linked to some of the history of yoga, but cutting out sugar seems more of just a straight up diet culture intervention. JessicaSo there are many different lineages of yoga. As I mentioned, yoga is not just based in the land that is currently referred to as India, but all over South Asia. And different lineages do have different traditions when it comes to food. There’s this assumption, though, that to practice yoga, to be a quote unquote “good yogi,” means that you are vegetarian, if not vegan, and that cannot be further from the truth. Really what we are looking for in a yoga experience is to feel well in your body. One of the ethical precepts of yoga is a Ahimsa and I’m sure a lot of people have heard this term Ahimsa, which means “no harm” and oftentimes gets co opted into meaning veganism as no harm, you’re not harming another living organism. But I like to turn back Ahimsa to no harm upon yourself. And really, when you’re not harming yourself, you’re loving yourself and taking care of yourself. The notion that to practice yoga means that you have to eat a certain way or not eat a certain way is completely false for the general population. As I said, there are pockets of yoga lineages and people practicing yoga that do take a different stance, but for the general public that wants to bring yoga into their life, keep on eating whatever you want and feel well in your body.VirginiaThat’s a really powerful reframing because yes, I’ve gotten stuck on that ahimsa, do no harm piece. And I think that’s really useful to consider that we have to include ourselves in that doing of no harm. I also want to circle back quickly to the guru concept that you touched on. I’m curious to hear more about to what extent the idea of a guru is important to what yoga was originally and how you see the guru concept working out today, because it seems like that’s often where a lot of the diet culture comes in, right? Because people in a studio or in a yoga community are so revering this one teacher to the point that there’s a lot of opportunities for harm. JessicaCorrect. Yoga in its origin was taught from teacher to student, and there wasn’t a set number of hours that you study with your teacher and then are declared a yoga teacher. It was a lifelong relationship of learning and reciprocity between student and teacher, and continuous learning. We don’t see that sort of student teacher relationship in modern yoga in the West. There is more of that Guru culture where teachers are revered. They’re oftentimes put on a pedestal and whatever a teacher says is often taken as the right thing to do, the right way to be. That’s really dangerous because the scope of practice which is a set of rules and policies set forth by Yoga Alliance, the governing body of yoga teachers, does not include any talk of food, diet or nutrition. Yet we know that to be far from the truth, that is definitely an area that is abused by many teachers who share their thoughts, their opinions, their personal experiences as the way things should be done, on and off of the mat. And that’s where the danger comes in. VirginiaI’m looking back on my own relationship with yoga over the years and so many workshops I went to with male gurus who were very hands on in their adjustments of the women who came in with the right Lululemon leggings. There’s just a whole whole lot going on there.JessicaAbsolutely. I mean, I didn’t even touch on the hands-on adjustments. Partly from teaching outside of studios, in the online space, I think we’ve gotten away from adjustments a lot, because my students are on the other side of the screen. But that sort of abuse in teacher/student relationships definitely has been well documented. I think the more subtle abuse or harm is the teacher or the guru that inflicts on their students their own beliefs, opinions, and knowledge that isn’t their place to share.VirginiaIt can be hard when you’re seeking something from yoga, which a lot of people are. You’re in a vulnerable position, right? This person seems to have a lot of answers. They’re personifying this lifestyle that’s extremely seductive. And often you’re getting some real tangible benefits from the yoga practice. So it can get very murky and hard to sort out. Like, which aspect of what I’m doing in yoga, what’s coming from the breathing or the meditation or the physical work and what’s coming from now I’m doing this cleanse with 30 people in my studio?JessicaExactly, exactly. It gets blurry, as you said, and I think it’s important for anyone that is currently practicing yoga or looking to begin a yoga practice to really examine their intention for being in a space or for being in the presence of a particular teacher. VirginiaYeah, let’s talk more about that. There’s obviously so much that’s great about yoga and making yoga more accessible for all bodies is so important. So how can we think about separating yoga from diet culture? How do you start to suss out where a studio falls in all of this? And how do you figure out what to wear if you don’t want to wear skinny yoga pants?JessicaYou never need to wear skinny yoga pants. The most important thing from the start is to be comfortable. So skinny yoga pants aren’t comfortable for you, then that’s not what you should be wearing. But I think the most important thing from the start is to read class descriptions. If you’re looking for a yoga class, read class descriptions. There should not be any promise of changing a body or any regimented requirements for diet involved, right? Along the lines of diet, culture and wellness culture and its roots in white supremacy and patriarchy, we have to look at classes and specifically about levels of classes and saying that a class is advanced and has advanced poses is not a place that welcomes everyone, right? If you go to a class and feel like you’re being told to just rest while everyone else is doing some fancy shape pose, then that class is not for you, and that class shouldn’t be taught that way, either. We have autonomy as yoga students to practice the way we want to in our body, our bodies are unique and individual and have unique capabilities that change from day to day. So there is no one pose or practice is more advanced than another. It’s learning how to honor your body and its unique abilities from day to day, from moment to moment.VirginiaI certainly have had and I’m sure many people listening have had that feeling of failure, when you’re told, “okay, you can just go into child’s pose now,” and that feels very stigmatizing. I think a lot of teachers mean it kindly. I think they mean, like, listen to your body and take your time and whatever. But if you’re the one person in the room, and especially if you’re in a bigger body than everybody else, it doesn’t feel kind. JessicaI also pay attention to the languaging used by the teacher and the languaging used within a yoga studio. You want language to be qualitative, and not descriptive. Descriptive language can be inappropriate and stigmatizing. So for example, if a teacher says, “place your hands on your fleshy thighs” versus “place your hands on your upper legs,” there’s a big difference right there. “Rest your hands on your abdomen” versus “rest your hands on your soft belly.” Well, it just isn’t comfortable, right? This is something that’s very nuanced. My experience in teaching yoga for eating disorders and those suffering from eating disorders—that’s very trauma informed work—really informs the language that I use. But I think it’s something that all yoga teachers need to have exposure to and be taught the nuance of qualitative and descriptive languaging. Because there is something very uncomfortable about being told to put your hands on your fleshy thighs, on your soft belly.(Note from Virginia: Obviously fleshy thighs and soft bellies are not inherently bad! Jessica is referencing how these descriptions can feel not great when used by thin teachers, in a diet culture context.)VirginiaI had a yoga teacher once who taught triangle pose by telling us to imagine our body between two panes of glass. It took me years to even recognize how stigmatizing that was because I don’t want my round body flattened between two panes of glass. That’s not a helpful note. I don’t really want anyone’s body being flattened between two panes of glass. That sounds painful. It’s an incredibly anti-fat image.Jessica I couldn’t agree more. I want to point out that yoga is an embodied practice. So that means listening to your body’s cues and messages and trusting yourself and your instincts. So, if you don’t feel comfortable in a space, if you don’t feel comfortable in the presence of a teacher, if it’s online or in person, trust your body. Trust your nervous system, if you have that awareness because it’s very hard to have an embodied practice and embodied experience in a body that is heightened and on alert and not relaxed and not comfortable.JessicaSo in terms of where diet culture comes in to yoga, and especially in social media, at this point, Yoga Journal, which is the long standing print magazine for yoga professionals, and the yoga community, has a large online presence. And it is owned by the same parent company that publishes Clean Eating magazine. There’s a lot of intersection in the writing and the journalists between Yoga Journal and Clean Eating. I find it very problematic. Extremely problematic. But that’s capitalism, right? VirginiaIt sure is.JessicaThe other very alarming situation that I’ve seen time and time again is this notion that some students, especially in a more active yoga class, will leave before savasana, before the end of class. Savasana is this time to reconnect with the body, to integrate all of the practice into the body. Its definition is “corpse pose.” Not to be gruesome, but just laying on the back in stillness that is savasana. There are a number of people, as I said, especially in more active classes that will leave class before savasana because it’s not a calorie burning pose. They feel like they need to keep the body moving and active and that rest is for the weary. It’s very sad to me.VirginiaI admit, savasana is the pose I often struggle with most, not because I want to burn calories but just because I’m, feeling like I need to get on with my day. But that’s also why it’s important, right? That’s what I need to be challenging. But yes, thinking of yoga as a workout, period, is so problematic. But certainly then thinking every minute of it has to be this really intense workout is that’s just straight up diet culture, for sure.JessicaYoga as a workout is straight up diet culture, because as I said, at the beginning, yoga is for the purpose of being able to sit and meditate. One thing I didn’t say at the start is the way that I define yoga is the integration of body, mind, and breath in the present moment. So, Virginia, we’re practicing yoga right now. We are having this conversation. We’re here, we’re breathing. We’re present. We’re in the present moment. We are practicing yoga. We are not doing handstands and contorting our bodies. VirginiaWe are not, for people who can’t see us. Nobody’s in a  headstand right now. JessicaMaybe when we’re done recording, I will go and get in that headstand. But for now…VirginiaThat’s such a more inclusive way to think about it because so many of the Yoga Journal cover poses are so inaccessible for bigger bodies. We should talk about that, too. I have a longtime hatred of shoulder stand because if you are a person with a stomach and large breasts, being in shoulder stand can feel like your body is suffocating you. It puts me immediately at war with my body when that’s not at all how I want to feel during a yoga practice. It always strikes me as a very male body designed pose. I don’t know if there are other examples like that you want to mention, in terms of getting away from this specific idea of doing yoga for certain bodies.JessicaI want to acknowledge that any body—any shape and size body—can be challenged by different yoga shapes, yoga poses. Someone in a thin privileged body may not have the ability to get into every shape and that is due to bone structure. Bone structure and the uniqueness of anybody’s bones and joints and tissues, regardless of their body size. So this assumption that you need to be in a smaller frame body, in a thin, privileged body to practice yoga is completely false. Just because you have a smaller body doesn’t mean that you’re able to do every shape either. So there are ways for every body, every single body shape and size, to get into nearly all of the shapes and postures and poses that are out there. I’ve done training on how to teach yoga for those that are bedbound, yoga for people in wheelchairs. There actually is bed yoga, which is so lovely and really beneficial for people that don’t have the ability to get out of bed, don’t have the ability to get out of a wheelchair or some other mobility device. VirginiaAs you’re saying this too, I’m realizing another way that the diet culture shows up is we so often think of modifications for poses as either failure or as a starting point and you have to progress beyond. Like, you have to eventually be able to do inversions in the middle of the room is always a big one that comes up in class. I have no interest in doing a headstand in the middle of the room. I want the wall there. I want to know that I’ve got that support. The idea that I’ve somehow never achieved a true headstand because I don’t feel safe doing it in the middle of a room is so frustrating. And there are so many examples of that.JessicaUsing props, including the wall, the wall is the greatest of all props is not a sign of inadequacy, or of being a beginner being a failure. Oftentimes, and more often than not, the use of a prop can help you get further into a shape into an area of the body that you didn’t know you had access to. VirginiaWho else do you love who’s fighting this diet culture definition of yoga? Who are you learning from? I would love to shout out some names.Jessica There are a lot of people bringing awareness to the origins and to the roots of yoga, the South Asian roots. Names like Susanna Barkataki. There’s two podcasters from the Yoga is Dead podcast, Jesal Parikh and Tejal Patel. Those three women in particular are bringing a lot of awareness of the roots of yoga and what has happened through colonization and cultural appropriation of yoga practices. I don’t see as much of the resistance to diet culture, because I see this is a little different from the fat positive or body positive movement within yoga. There is a small but mighty group of us registered dietitian and yoga teachers and a very small group that I know of that are in the anti-diet, weight inclusive space and practicing as Registered Dietitians as well as yoga teachers that are really trying to make sure that diet culture does not continue to bring harm or the harm of diet culture into the yoga space. One of my colleagues and I have started Anti-Diet Culture Yoga as a training platform for yoga teachers to help them decipher what is the true teachings of yoga versus what is the influence of diet culture. VirginiaThere are so many ways we need to rethink what modern yoga has become. It makes sense that not everybody is doing all of the work, because there’s so much work. I’ll shout out a couple of people I love on Instagram who are doing yoga and fat bodies. Jessamyn Stanley has been a longtime go-to for me. I love her underbelly app videos. They were really a turning point for my yoga relationship, both in terms of being able to do yoga outside of a studio and do yoga with someone who wasn’t in a thin body. All of that was really liberating for me. I also love @fringeish on Instagram. Shannon does a lot challenging people’s perceptions of what fat bodies can do with yoga, and creating safe spaces. Dianne Bondy is another one I’ve learned a lot from. So they’re there. You’re right, there’s not nearly enough. Different people are working on different aspects of this, but it is encouraging to see this kind of small community of voices emerging.JessicaI also I want to give a shout out to accessible yoga, specifically to Jivana Heyman, who has done a tremendous amount for bringing yoga to all people and that recognition that any body and everybody, regardless of shape, size, color, ability, disability, so on and so forth, can practice yoga in a meaningful way. I also want to mention Yoga for Eating Disorders which is an online school that I’m on the faculty of. One thing that we didn’t touch upon, which is a whole other conversation is that not all yoga is good yoga. Yoga and its intertwining with diet culture has been harmful and in the perpetuation of disordered eating and development of eating disorders. Not all yoga is good yoga for all bodies and for all people, especially those suffering with issues of disordered eating and eating disorders. At yoga for eating disorders we teach in a way that is safe is trauma-informed and is available to help heal the relationship with the body in a way that is neutral and supportive. VirginiaIt’s so important to have that safe space. Butter For Your Burnt ToastVirginiaWell, Jessica, we always wrap up, as you know, with our butter for burnt toast segment, so I would love to know what is your butter for us today?JessicaI’m so glad you asked! Because it’s summertime, and there’s nothing better in the summer than ice cream. And I’m talking about real ice cream. I’m not talking about Tasti D-lite. I’m a former New Yorker that thought that Tasti D-lite was a good thing. Now is the time on a beautiful sunny afternoon or a rainy afternoon like I have today here to go and enjoy a bowl of ice cream, cone of ice cream, whatever it may be. I just can’t think of anything better. VirginiaIt really is one of the most perfect things about summer. I’m gonna do a plant recommendation for my plant obsessed listeners. My butter is the Great Umbrella Plant, Darmera Peltata. Okay, so Darmera looks like a giant rhubarb. It has a very round umbrella shaped leaf. It’s a garden plant, not a house plant. I should have started with that. It’s native to the Pacific Northwest but it grows really well in shade gardens if you have enough moisture. I’ve just put some in and they get huge and they put up these really pretty pink flowers in the spring. And then you get these giant leaves for the rest of the season. So if you’re looking for a good plant for a shade garden, check out Darmera. It’s like an alternative to a hosta but even more giant big leaves. Very cool.All right. Well, thank you so much, Jessica, for being here! Where can we follow you and learn more about your work?JessicaYou can find me at with health and gratitude which has all the information for how to work with me for nutrition therapy. I teach weekly online yin yoga classes which are accessible for everyone—there is no previous experience required. Links to my classes are at yoga for eating disorders. I have hundreds of recipes on my website, original recipes—I used to do work and recipe development and culinary education. So my website has lots of information regardless of what you’re looking for. There’s something for everyone. VirginiaWe will link to that. Thank you so much for being here!Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode.Consider a paid subscription to the Burnt Toast newsletter! It’s just $5 a month or $50 for the year you get a ton of cool perks and you keep that’s an ad- and sponsor-free space.The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! We have another Comfort Food rerun for you this week. Hopefully, by the time you’re listening to this, I have turned in my book manuscript, and I am taking this week to chill out. It’s the first week of July and we’ve got family visiting. My whole goal for this first week is to just spend a ton of time in my pool and my garden, and let my post book brain melt. There’s a stage in book writing where you just feel like you have used all the words. There is nothing left and you have nothing to say. But don’t worry, it’s temporary! It always comes back. And I will be back in your feeds next week with a brand new podcast episode, so make sure you’re subscribed to get that in your podcast player.In the meantime, we are revisiting the Comfort Food archives again. This is episode 53 which aired on December 5, 2019. Our guest on this episode was Jennifer Berry, who is a feeding therapist and founder of Thrive by Spectrum Pediatrics. I’m a huge fan of Jeni’s. I first met her when I was reporting a story for the New York Times Magazine in 2015. I mean, we go way back. I spent a lot of time reporting on the approach that Jeni and her colleagues take towards child-led weaning off feeding tubes and child-led feeding therapy in general—or responsive feeding therapy, as it’s now known. Jeni is just a really trusted source on all questions related to family feeding, all the dynamics, how to think about the different skills, the emotional development piece of it, and the nutrition piece of it.This conversation is about why nutrition is much less important to successful family meals than we think. I know that may feel uncomfortable for a lot of us. We hear all the time that our big responsibility as parents is to feed our kids a healthy diet and more fruits and vegetables and all of that. But that so often gets in the way of feeling good about how you’re feeding your family. So we talk about how to set aside your nutrition anxieties at the family dinner table and how that might improve some of the struggles you’re having there. But Jeni is a trained therapist with a strong research background. I’m a health journalist. So we also talk a lot about the way that nutrition science gets done, and how flawed and misleading both the studies themselves can be and the media coverage of nutrition science. We talk about how to interpret what you’re seeing in the media and by media, I mean mainstream media outlets and I also mean social media. When you see people throwing out statistics throwing out these really broad claims about different foods, or making claims about “healthy” eating in general. So I think this is another super useful episode! Keep sending in your questions for Virginia’s Office Hours! If you have a question about navigating diet culture and anti-fat bias that you’d like to talk through with me, or if you just want to rant about a shitty diet with me, you can submit your question/topic here. I’ll pick one person to join me on the bonus episode so we can hash it out together.And don’t forget: Next Wednesday, July 13 is our first Burnt Toast Book Club! We’re reading The School of Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan and wow is that book even more of a gut punch now than when I picked it. CW for child endangerment, prison abuse, foster system abuse, mother shaming (to put it mildly) and psychological torture… but also know that this book is compulsively readable, heart-breaking, and thought-provoking in all the best ways. I’ll post the book club thread at 12pm Eastern on Wednesday, and be on there live for the hour. (But if you can’t join us at that time, feel free to join the discussion later—that’s the beauty of a thread chat!) Episode 50 TranscriptVirginiaHello and welcome to episode 53 of Comfort Food! This is the podcast about the joys and meltdowns of feeding our families and feeding ourselves.AmyThis week we’re talking about what to do and everything you know about nutrition is starting to make you a little crazy. Because sometimes what you know about nutrition seems to not be true depending on the day. So we’re gonna brainstorm some ways you can find a better balance for yourself and your family with a very special guest.VirginiaI’m the author of The Eating Instinct: Food, Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America. I write about how women relate to food and nutrition and our bodies in a culture that gives us so many unrealistic expectations about all those things.AmyAnd I’m Amy Palanjian, a writer, recipe developer, and creator of Yummy Toddler Food. And I love helping parents to stop freaking out about what their kids will and won’t eat and also about nutrition news because lately it’s been like every week, there has been something in the news that is just…VirginiaIt’s been kind of crazy. So this week, we are so happy to have Jennifer Berry of Thrive by Spectrum Pediatrics back on the podcast. Jeni, welcome.JeniThank you. Hi! How are you guys doing today?VirginiaWe are good. We are so excited to be talking to you. You are a fan favorite on the podcast and our listeners mostly will be familiar. But for folks who are new to the podcast, let’s remind them or tell them who you are and what you do.JeniSo I am an occupational therapist by trade and a feeding therapist by specialty. And I’m the owner, as you said, of Thrive by Spectrum Pediatrics. We work with families near our headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, but also all over the United States and beyond, helping families help their children overcome feeding challenges. We work with kids that are feeding tube dependent, helping them wean from their feeding tubes, we help kids that have severe feeding aversions, motor problems with eating, all the way through the kind of everyday common hurdles that families face at the table.AmyAnd for listeners who want to know more about Jeni and her approach to food, check out episode 28, when she was on last. We talked about what to do when your kids just don’t eat dinner.VirginiaA perennial problem. So, today’s episode came out of an email conversation that the three of us had after Jenny listened to episode 46, where we talked about the new nutrition guidelines from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation saying that kids should not drink chocolate milk or juice before age five. So, we were then talking afterwards with Jenny about how hard it is to balance the “knowledge”—and I put that in quotes because, as Amy said, the information can change so wildly. We have all this information these days about nutrition and what we think our kids and we ourselves need to be eating. But how do you incorporate that into just being present with your families at meals. And Jeni had this really beautiful analogy, comparing it to yoga. So Jeni, tell us about that?JeniBecause I’m so immersed in this world, both as a mom who feeds kids, and also as a feeding therapist who looks at these studies that you’re talking about, that have so much different information, some of it good, some of it competing. It occurs to me that we get so caught up in that information. The yoga analogy was, if you’re learning a yoga pose, for example, you have to first learn all the technical aspects, like the posture and the breath, positioning—all of that is really important. You can’t do without the technical knowledge. But in order for it to be like truly yogic or in order for you to experience the pose as it was meant to be, or this probably applies to sports and other performance, and other areas of life. But in order to really experience the yoga pose the way that it was designed, you kind of have to take all of that technical knowledge, and set it aside and be in the pose. I tend to look at feeding kids in the same way. We have all of this information on the macro level. We are really fortunate to have access to all of this information that floods us every day about what foods we should feed our kids and why. And then not let it seep into everyday decisions because it takes us away from our kids. I feel like it also leads to a really unhealthy kind of dynamic for us as parents and between our kids that we can get really stuck and overly focused on doing things the right way. The trick is to have the knowledge and then to let it go and then be with your kids and try to make decisions. I don’t know that it’s easy. I know it’s not easy for me. But I think it is possible to work towards that and have a little bit more freedom for you and your child.AmyIs this something that you see your clients struggling with often?JeniIt’s universal. Yeah, not only my clients but my friends that are parents. I don’t really know many parents that don’t struggle with it, honestly.AmyI was thinking, as you were explaining that, the other night we went out to dinner and it happened to be a restaurant that had calories listed on the menu. I was like, oh!VirginiaIt’s everywhere in New York, but I think it varies by state.AmyIt really threw me because I’m not used to having that information when making food choices. I feel like I’m a pretty informed person and I feel like I usually can push that stuff aside, but I was really stuck.VirginiaBecause it’s right there in front of you! And then it feels like, oh wait, is every decision I make around the meal supposed to focus on this one aspect? But, you know, of course not! Especially when you’re trying to like help your three year old decide what to have for dinner.JeniAnd keep your sanity.AmyAnd keep the three year old from climbing underneath the table.VirginiaThat ship has sailed at my house.JeniI think that’s a great example of the burden that can come with information. I do think it’s really hard to negotiate and that’s a really concrete example. But there’s lots of really subtle ways, too. We want our kids to be healthy across the board, not just around food, and so it carries a lot of weight with us. I do think it’s a real challenge. I think it can be done, to kind of hit that just right balance between having the knowledge and using it at the right time to make decisions.AmyVirginia, could we just pause for a minute, so that you can tell us like some examples of where we might be getting this information just so that we can be a little bit more clear with our listeners about what we’re talking about here?VirginiaAs someone who’s been a health journalist for 15+ years now, I both experience this as a consumer of media, like we all are, but also this is what I do day-to-day, putting these messages out there. For a long time, this is what I did. So what we’re talking about is the nutritional information you get when the morning news is talking about how everything you know about red meat is wrong. Or, the New York Times reports on it. Then it gets distilled further, because it comes not just from these news sources, but also from a meme on Instagram or Facebook or a thread on Twitter where everyone’s weighing in. A lot of them maybe are experts, and maybe they aren’t. We’re getting our knowledge about nutrition from a lot of different sources these days. And the problem is these sources are definitely not all created equal. Just because somebody puts it on a pretty graphic on Instagram does not mean they bothered to look up the study that was done or actually evaluate the quality of the research to see whether it’s a useful tidbit to share. This is not just to put Instagram on blast, although I do think it’s a huge issue there and Pinterest, and other places where this gets disseminated. But I think it can be useful to know a little more about how to actually evaluate the information when you get it.Some strategies that I use as a journalist that I think are not hard to learn—I think anyone can do this—always, when you’re given a new piece of nutrition news, figure out the primary source for it. Don’t just trust the Instagram meme. But also don’t just trust the New York Times or any media reiteration of it. Because that means a journalist—it’s like a game of telephone. You’re that much further away from the source. What is really useful to do is to go look up the actual study they’re reporting on. In newspaper articles, especially if you’re reading online, they’ll usually hyperlink to it. Or, if you Google the researcher’s name and the study topic, you’ll find it pretty quickly. You may only be able to read the abstract, which is the research summary, because often you have to pay to read full research papers. But even the abstract, you can get a pretty good sense of how robust it was, this research. It’s important to know, especially with nutrition research, it’s very difficult to do high quality nutrition research. It’s very expensive and time consuming. So, a lot of small studies come out that are done much more quickly and the data is just not as robust.So, a couple of things to look for when you’re dissecting and abstract. Start by looking at how many people were involved in the study. If it was a study done on 16 people, it’s not very relevant to anybody’s lives. It’s a case report. It’s interesting, but it’s not. If it’s data collected on 1,000 people and they were a nationally representative sample where they tried to make sure that 1,000 people in the study have characteristics—age, socioeconomic status, gender, race—that are representative of the United States, or wherever you are, that’s more of a useful population. Or if it’s a study done on 50 year old men and you’re a 30 year old woman, it’s not going to be relevant to you, particularly. You want to look at research that was done on a population that’s comparable to you and your family.You also want to look at how long they were followed. So often, this is happens all the time with weight loss studies. They’ll see a big result after about six weeks of following some program. But they won’t bother to follow up with people at six months, 12 months, two years, five years. And you really want to know what happened at that point. How long did they see this benefit? Whatever big takeaway they’re claiming about the study, did it really last?And then the other thing with nutrition research, because it’s expensive for researchers to make food and feed people directly for two years, usually they’re just having themselves report what they ate. And people are not very reliable with that. So that’s another one to really pay attention to. Because if it’s all self reported data, it’s probably not as ironclad as if they sat in the lab for two years. On the other hand, if they sat in the lab for two years, it’s not real life. So that’s a drawback with that kind of research.AmyJeni, do you have other strategies that you would want to add here?JeniJust to just to reinforce what Virginia’s saying, those same tips I would use. The two that stand out to me are the length of time. We often get a study about a certain nutritional ingredient or a certain way of feeding a child—an example would be in my feeding therapy world, there’s ways of feeding kids and they have a protocol, they apply it to a small group of people, and then they examine them, they see how the kids are doing with eating, expanding their food choices for kids that have a limited amount. They’re using a behavioral approach. This is the example I’m thinking of right now, where they’re kind of rewarding the kids for eating it. And what the study shows, in the study that I’m thinking of, is that the kids eat more. What the study doesn’t do—it’s just good to know what’s not there, and I think you’ve pointed that out, Virginia. What it doesn’t do is show what impact it has to reward kids for eating in two years, four years, five years. There is research out there about how we feed kids that has been out there for a long time that does follow kids more longitudinally, over long periods of time. But so to me, the biggest one that affects most parents in the work that we do, is that they’re looking at short term studies or studies that don’t follow them. And then this other thing that came up in our email exchange that we were referring to, which is the correlation versus cause.VirginiaYes, this is really, really big. Jeni, explain this, because this is critical to understand about nutrition, all kinds of research, really.JeniWe often, as consumers who are not sitting around in a research lab and analyzing data, it’s really easy to to see a study and think that one thing is linked to another. In the example that we were talking about after the the last episode, about the chocolate milk and drinks, there was a study that said that kids who are exposed to different flavors, had an increased incidence of being more willing to eat flavors, or having a broader diet later. And they were exposed when they were babies. So lots of different flavors, it was a predictor of more choices or variety later on. And while that may be true, it wasn’t saying that that’s why. It wasn’t saying that the reason that the children were eating more foods later in life was only the food choices that they tasted or were exposed to. So I just think it’s helpful to point that out, because there are lots of factors that go into it. And in that that example, in particular, what’s more important to look at is the big picture. If the children were forced to eat those foods in wide variety, forced or coerced to eat them, my guess would be that the results of the study would be very different. Based on what we know about responsive feeding and lifelong healthy relationships with food. I just think it’s super important that we not mistake, something being correlated or a predictor of another thing as being the black and white answer of what’s causing it. Those are different things.VirginiaIt’s easy for parents to misinterpret that and think, I have to get my baby to eat tons of different foods.AmyThis is why there are like, if you Google “baby food chart,” there’s all of these charts of 100 foods to give your baby before they turn one because if you do that you won’t have a picky eater and it’s just not true.JeniThen the moment your child throws number three on the list on the floor, you’re left questioning yourself and it’s stressful. And then you’re less likely to offer those foods in the future. To take it back to the longitudinal aspect of things and looking at things in the long term, there actually is a lot of research, but also just information about the long view, and what we know works best for kids. What we know is what you guys talk about in most episodes. Which is that if kids are taught healthy messages about their own bodies; if they’re not being subjected to messages that are negative about their parents or other’s bodies; if they are not having foods that are viewed as unhealthy restricted completely from their diet or shamed for eating them; if they’re not being pressured or forced to eat foods that are viewed as healthy by the people that are feeding them; and then if they’re allowed to read their cues for fullness and hunger, which is not always easy—but if that happens, there is a lot of weight behind those things in the research. But also in my clinical practice, you can just see those kids become more confident, healthy eaters in the long run.Then, if I may just go back to that study about exposure, because that’s what prompted our whole conversation. Exposure is super important. It’s really important that we expose our kids to different foods, but that exposure doesn’t necessarily mean it goes in their mouth. We can expose kids to a wide variety of foods while honoring their bodies, while not forcing them or having them silence any fear or discomfort or disinterest they have around a food. We can expose them to it by eating it ourselves, by having them be involved in the preparation of it, by taking them to the grocery store. There are lots of ways to expose kids, in a healthful way, to a variety of different foods without putting that insane pressure on ourselves, that they have to eat that huge list that you saw on Instagram or Pinterest. And so I just like to keep reminding parents of that, that our job isn’t to dictate what goes in.AmyI think a lot of times that the exposure issue gets misconstrued as your child needs to taste this thing 20 times before they will like it. That’s just not that’s not the way that that works.JeniNo, it’s not the way kids work. So there’s an actual thing out there called “neophobia,” which you guys have talked about on here before, which is that it’s a developmentally appropriate around preschool age for kids to be afraid of trying new things. So it’s not that that’s going to make them like it, it’s for them to feel comfortable enough to try it, the newness has to go away. And the newness doesn’t go away in two offerings or five offerings and often not in ten. Your kids need to see things consistently, in different settings by different people. That doesn’t mean you should be like having a notebook next to your table with and checking off how many times you’ve offered sweet peppers or whatever. But it does mean that it takes a minute. It’s normal that your child doesn’t try things in the beginning and that when they try them, they reject them. That’s a typical part of development.VirginiaThat is super reassuring to hear. And I think again, framing it around not getting too literal about how we interpret this research is really helpful.JeniWe try to coach parents that when you’re just making decisions about how to feed your kids, you’re not making big decisions about whether you’re doing it right or big shifts in how you’re doing it in the moment when your kid is throwing the food on the floor. You’re going to do it away from the mealtime. You’re going to do it in a time where things are relatively unstressful. We call it checking in with yourself or checking in with your partner about how the mealtimes are going. You make the decisions about what your kids eat at the grocery store and when you decide who you surround them with, what school you send them to, and then whether or not you decide to team with those people and collaborate with them in a trusting way. And then when you’re assessing if it’s going well, a meal, it hasn’t to do much with what goes in their mouth. It has more to do with the internal drives to eat. And the internal drives to eat are not just hunger. Hunger is a big one, but togetherness is an internal drive to eat. Curiosity is an internal drive to eat. Novelty is a natural internal reason that kids want to eat. And comfort! Here we are talking about comfort food, but those are the those are the natural drives in childhood for learning to eat.So if you step back, and try to keep those at the forefront of your mind when your child is eating. At the meal or at the party or wherever it is where you’re feeling conflicted about what choice to make, try to just think about those. And if you’ve got one of them, things are going okay. If your child is enjoying time together around food with a peer, then one of the internal drives to eat is being met and that’s important and valuable. Even if it’s just comfort, there’s a time and a place for that those are really important things and we’ve talked about that before. And it’s also okay, occasionally, if those things aren’t present. because we all know that that does happen occasionally and we have to give ourselves a break. It doesn’t mean that if you mess up, or if a situation comes up, there’s a surprise or whatever, somebody said something unfortunate at a birthday party to your child about their food choice, that doesn’t unravel everything else you’ve done. It doesn’t erase it. The message is about what you’re sending on the whole. It’s a more of an umbrella message that you’re sending that matters, that stays with the kids versus those tiny, little individual episodes.VirginiaThat is a really helpful perspective. I love that it.AmyAnd it can for sure be hard to do that in the moment. But I think the more that you practice this sort of the easier that it gets.JeniEverybody’s different in terms of the way that they need to be reminded about things or the way that they learn or help themselves through tasks that are difficult. I’ve had parents write down the internal drives to eat and keep them on the refrigerator or have a list of them on their phones.VirginiaOh that’s a great tip!AmyI guess we’re gonna be making a little printable for everybody. Unless you have one that you want us to share.JeniI don’t! Make it, it sounds great. I want one.So that is one strategy that people use. I think another one that people have used is really looking at your child and how they’re doing in other areas. Health is about more than food. Health is about the whole child. If they’re happy, and participating in school, and if they’re affectionate and emotionally doing okay, if they’re able to be themselves and they are meeting milestones and they’re progressing, then we’re in a good spot. We don’t have to have it be all about the food all the time.I’m a developmentalist, by training. And so I look at development, but in childhood, we don’t expect kids—or adults for that matter—to perform at their best 100% of the time. Mastery we consider when we look at developmental milestones is 80% of the time. 20% of time, it is not going to be happening. So a decent meal, not their best meal, is going to happen 80% of the time. It doesn’t mean that everything’s going to be easy. It doesn’t mean what your kid is eating, it means these other components.VirginiaHow well the overall meal experience goes.JeniBased on these internal drives to eat, which includes togetherness. 80% of the time, if you’re there, you’re doing it, because that’s human nature. That’s the nature of learning to develop and figuring things out. Nobody’s at 100%. And there’s a lot of pressure at 100%. If we’re expecting ourselves and our kids to do their best and to be in the moment and we’re as parents incorporating all of this information that we’re being bombarded with, not just about food, but about how to plan a birthday party, and how to be the best parents and juggling our work and our home lives, there’s no way that we can do it at our best 100% of time. And we also are then setting our kids up with unrealistic expectations.They need to be able to go out into a world where there is non-responsive messages being sent all the time around food. If we if we create a world for them around food where they only are experiencing the messages that we really want them to experience, those responsive messages as I call them, then what’s going to happen when they need to learn how to contend with the non-responsive things, too? And that’s what we’re here to help them do that as parents.VirginiaThat’s so interesting. Do you find that the percentages change when kids are struggling with something else? And the reason I’m asking is, on last week’s podcast episode I talked about both my girls, their list of safe foods had gotten a little shorter recently. Beatrix just turn two, so neophobia arriving. And then with my older daughter, when she’s going through different periods of stress in her life this is the area where we often see she’ll get a lot more particular about food. She’ll get much less adventurous again. I’m wondering if that’s something that people might commonly see and you might zero in on feeling like food is the problem, but is it helpful to sort of look more broadly at like, oh, well, they’re just learning to read or they’re mastering potty training or something else is going on that’s maybe causing meals to sort of plateau a little bit. Does that make sense?JeniYes, it does make sense. Absolutely. Yeah. These are more like umbrella averages for the big picture of how our years and our months are going. The literature that shows—although we have to, again, be careful about these studies—but what we know is that when a child learns to walk, sometimes they talk a little bit less or vice versa. We have a finite amount of energy and bandwidth on certain things. And so, of course, it makes sense that if you’re going through a challenge in one area, you’re going to hunker down at a different level than you might have the week before in another area of development. So yes, that’s absolutely true with food, too. It’s true across areas of development.VirginiaAnother reason not to get so hung up on the nutrition piece. If you take a more holistic look at your kid and think about why broccoli is less interesting this week, it might not have anything to do with the broccoli.JeniExactly, it probably doesn’t. I hesitate often with families to ever talk about numbers, honestly, because so much of the most important predictors of how well kids are going to do with food feeding challenges, but then how well they’re going to relate to food later, has to do with qualitative stuff. And if we focus on anything with a number, it takes us away.VirginiaPeople are suddenly calculating.JeniAs long as you’re changing your the framework that you’re assessing things by. Is your child thriving? Are they growing? Are they meeting milestones? Are they relatively happy? And then, are you looking at those internal drives to eat: togetherness, curiosity, hunger, novelty and comfort. You know, if those things are there 80% of the time, you’re good. And I think we’re hard on ourselves. I think they are there most of the time. I think some of those components are present in most of the meals. I think you’re there, most people that are listening are probably already there. It’s just because we have all of this other information, we get lost. We get distracted from what’s the most important and what is truly the best predictor of a child feeling safe and comfortable around food. And now and then later, which is, which is these more qualitative things.AmyOn that note, I did want to just remind everyone that when you’re seeing headlines, from news organizations or websites, like I put myself in this list, all of these sites are making money from people being on their site. So they have a very real reason to make you want to click on that link. The headline may be completely misleading. And it may be completely taking whatever the study was out of context. So just take a minute to realize that someone is trying to make a dollar.Virginiaand don’t email the author of the article and yell at her because we don’t get to write our own headlines. The editors do that to us. Anyways, Jenny, thank you so much! This was such a great conversation. This was super, super helpful. Will you tell our listeners where we can find more of you?JeniOh, sure. We can be found at Thrive With Spectrum and we can be found on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. We’d love to hear from people.AmyAnd we’ll have all of those links in the show notes. And if anyone has follow up questions for this or wants more information on anything we talked about, you can either send us a message or comment on our show notes.VirginiaAll right now coming up. I have some breaking news on the Beatrix bottle, so stay tunedUnrelatedAmySo, Virginia, the other day you had posted something on somewhere—I can’t remember where—how about you put Beatrix to bed without a bottle!VirginiaIt finally happened, you guys!AmySo we’ve been talking about this since the spring, I think?VirginiaYes, Episode 37. It was the end of season two, was when we went like deep dive into milk weaning and that is like our most popular episode ever. So I have a feeling I’m speaking to a lot of you right now. Because people really like to talk about milk weaning. We talked about both breastfeeding weaning and bottle weaning. And this was a journey for me, because I’ve talked about the traumatic feeding experiences with my older daughter and how cathartic It was to be able to first breastfeed Beatrix successfully, and then make the decision around four or five months that I was ready to just go over to formula and really embrace that. And I just derive so much joy out of feeding her. I mean, that’s not breaking news to anyone who listens to this podcast, feeding babies is great. When it works well, it’s really wonderful.I am not someone who is super sentimental about losing the baby stage. Like my husband and I basically throw a party on every birthday like, oh my God, our lives are finally getting easier. I don’t ever want another newborn in my life. I like other people’s, but I don’t want to have one. But the bottle was the one thing that I was sentimental about. This was a big stage. So I think a lot of this was me needing to be ready as much as her needing to be ready. But she’s also a kid who loves her bottles.So what we did last spring, I think it was like her 18 month checkup, our pediatrician was like, “Yeah, you have got to get started on this. There’s no medical or physiological need for her to have a bottle.” We had switched, when she turned one, over to regular milk from formula. And she was still, around 18 months, she was still on like five bottles a day. And it was like, how are we going to do this? So I talked in those episodes—you can go back to Episode 37 and hear how we dropped down to just having a 4-6 ounce bottle before nap and before bedtime, and we were able to pretty seamlessly drop the daytime bottles. Then we just, we just stayed there for a while. We were like, it’s fine. We’re going to just hang out with these bottles because they were part of her bedtime routine and they were really comforting. And we were all, both me, Dan, and our babysitter were all like, “Oh, this is not gonna go well.” So then when we had her two year checkup, the pediatrician was like, Aren’t you done? Which, you know, pediatricians, I feel like they just think it’s this really easy thing. And they forget how emotional this is. It’s not just like I want to just put it away and be done with it.AmyMy pediatrician asked me at our nine month checkup if meals had been replacing nursing sessions, and I was like, What? No, he’s a baby. How long has it been since you’ve had a baby? Because I feel like that’s really out of touch.VirginiaIt’s really out of touch. That’s really weird.So anyway, we kind of hemmed and hawed about it. And so we have taken this very gradual approach. And I don’t know, maybe if we had just put all the bottles away at 18 months, it would have been fine. That is entirely possible. I think that works great for a lot of kids. So when I’m talking about what we did, guys, I’m not saying anyone needs to do it the way we did. But, if you are feeling ambivalent about this, or have a lot of emotions to process, I think a gradual approach can be helpful because it gives everybody time to get there. So after her two year checkup, we decided, Okay, we’re gonna take the pre-nap, pre-bedtime bottle, which at that point was four ounces, and we’re gonna take it down to two ounces, which sounds really silly. But I’m really glad we did it, because it gave her a few days. She was mad about it, like she would finish it, and she would be like, let’s go back downstairs, I need more bottles. There’s not much milk here, Mommy. She was very straightforward, like, you didn’t put enough in. Then I would say, “Nope, that’s all we’re having today.” And she would throw the bottle and be mad about it. And it just let her let out some of the feelings about it.We did that for a full week. On Sunday and Monday of that week, she was furious. It was like a thing. And by Wednesday, she was sort of like, ugh fine. And by Friday, she was barely finishing the two ounces. It just gave her that time to work through it and accept the change in routine. The other thing we did, not deliberately, but looking back I think was helpful, was we kept everything else very consistent and down to the books that she wanted to read. I think we all read Curious George and the Dump Truck 900 times that week. We just kept reading the one book that she was most reassured and comforted by over and over and over. So I think that helped reinforce not that much is changing. You’re still getting your snuggles you’re still getting all the cozy bedtime reading and everything, just a little less milk in the bottle. That’s it.And then Sunday night. So, we never want to mess with weekend naps because you know, obviously. So we kept it over the weekend, the two ounces, so she would still nap and we would have our break. But then Sunday night bedtime, I was like Okay, let’s do it. We went upstairs and I had this last minute thought, I was like, Oh, maybe a toothbrush. Let’s brush your teeth, which we had a miss on at bedtime. And we went and got her toothbrush, which was super excited about and then she brushed her teeth the whole time I read the story, and she didn’t even ask about the bottle at all. It did not come up. She was totally happy.AmyWow. Had you been giving her a bottle before nap time?VirginiaYeah, we had had both. That’s why I’m saying, over last weekend we didn’t drop the nap time bottle, so that bedtime was the first time because I didn’t want to lose that two hours of unconscious toddler. I didn’t want her to not nap. So I waited until the bedtime to do it. And she still didn’t even really reference that.Now, the next day, Monday, she did remember. When our babysitter took her up to nap, she remembered about the bottle and she asked for it. And same when Dan put her to bed that night. And there was maybe, both times, five minutes of feelings. And then she was happy to sit with the toothbrush brush her teeth while being read a story. And last night when I put her to bed, it was like on the way up the stairs, she was like, “no more bottle.” And I was like, “that’s right.” She does this thing where she puts her head down and she goes, “it’s gone forever.” She’ll say this about anything, though. She said this about her baby gate. The baby gate is gone forever. She’ll finish her Cheerios, it’s gone forever. So, it’s like just her way of acknowledging. And then I was like “yeah, you’re a big girl now, you know, isn’t that exciting? Let’s go get your toothbrush.” And she was fine.AmyThat’s so sweet. You had also mentioned something about saying goodnight to all the..?VirginiaOh, yeah, that was the other thing. She has actually been building that herself—I think it’s bedtime stalling. It’s definitely a bedtime stalling tactic. We’ll get halfway up the stairs and she’ll go, “I need to say goodnight to the playroom.” We’ll go back downstairs and she’ll go, “Goodnight playroom, good night trampoline, goodnight sofa, goodnight pillow.” She’ll just like pick random things she needs to say goodnight spoon. And so we did that as well. That and the toothbrush combination seemed to just give her the touchpoint she needed. She has other ways to self soothe, that was just one option. I don’t feel like this has in any way undermined her sense of security with anything. So that was my goal.I think the takeaway is there’s no right way to do this. It’s going to be different for everyone. There’s this kind of myth out there that like you have to rip it away and it’s going to be brutal for two weeks, and then it’ll be fine. And I don’t know that it has to go that way. I think you can find a gentler approach and that can be good too.AmyYeah, and there’s no timeline that works exactly the same for everybody.VirginiaAnd honestly, if I felt like she was still really clinging to it, I would have waited a little longer even. I was not like just because the pediatrician said she turned two we need to do this. But we could generally tell her fixation was lessening. She was more interested in the stories than she was the bottle. Her whole bedtime energy had changed, like she’s running over to pick out a book. She’s been like getting distracted with a toy. She’s wanting less to be held like a little baby. She’s transitioning into more of being a toddler, so it felt like the right time.AmyThank you. Thank you for sharing that. It’s very sweet.VirginiaIt’s a big milestone. I’m excited. Yeah, I’m excited. It’s good stuff.Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode.Consider a paid subscription to the Burnt Toast newsletter! It’s just $5 a month or $50 for the year you get a ton of cool perks and you keep that’s an ad- and sponsor-free space.The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

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

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