The Burnt Toast Podcast

It was just this overnight conversion. Like, oh, okay, yep, the way I've been doing things my entire career is super wrong, and super harmful, and has hurt a lot of people. And that's terrible. And I'm very done with that.Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet, culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today I'm chatting with Anna Maltby. Anna is a longtime magazine and digital editor and someone I've worked with many times over the years, including at Medium’s Elemental Magazine, where I wrote features on diet culture and fatphobia that she edited. And right here on the Burnt Toast newsletter, Anna is often the person who does a top edit for me on particularly tricky reported essays. Another cool thing about Anna is that she’s a certified personal trainer and Pilates instructor. In addition to her editorial work, she does a lot of fitness consulting and training. That gives her this pretty unique perspective on the world of fitness journalism and the fitness industry —and on the harm that these industries have caused to folks in marginalized bodies, what changes are happening, and where we still need to make these spaces better and safer for all kinds of marginalized folks. But Anna is really here to talk to us about the myth of visible ab muscles.I want to say really clearly before we start the show: Health and fitness are not moral obligations. Core strength is certainly not a moral obligation, although it is practically useful. We are talking about core strength in a very different and much more functional and accessible way. But if even that feels triggering to you, I get it. There was a long time where I just couldn't engage in abs talk at all. One more disclaimer that Anna is a thin white lady. We both have a lot of thin and able-bodied privilege in this conversation. I'm seeing this episode very much as the start of a conversation about fitness I want to have on Burnt Toast. There are lots of folks in marginalized bodies doing really amazing work in the fitness space that we also need to center and hear from and we talked about some of them on the show. I'm hoping some of them will be joining me in future episodes. PS. Friends! The Burnt Toast Giving Circle is over $8,000! We are so close to our goal. And if you’ve been thinking about joining, we still need you! Here’s the Burnt Toast episode where I announced it, ICYMI, and the link to donate.Episode 37 TranscriptVirginiaHi Anna! Why don't we start by having you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work?AnnaI started my career as a magazine editor. I worked mostly in the service space, so magazines that tell you how to do things: Men's Health and Self and Marie Claire and Real Simple. I've worked in the digital space as well for a while: Refinery29 and one of the in house publications at Medium. I've done a lot of things, but but health has been a main thread for me. I've also been a certified personal trainer for about seven years. I'm a pre- and postnatal certified exercise specialist, and I received my mat Pilates certification about a year ago. I now do a bunch of freelance editorial and fitness-y things, like fitness programming, fitness performance coaching, and then I also train a few clients every week. I do a mix of Pilates and weight training.VirginiaDid you start out as a journalist and then go into the health and fitness stuff? AnnaI definitely was not into sports or exercise or movement at all, as a kid. I always loved reading magazines and that was what I focused on in school. I sort of fell into this internship at Men's Health when I was in college, and my manager there was like, “Okay, if you're going to write stories for us, you're going to need to know some of the basics of scientific reporting.” Like how to read a study, how to talk to a researcher, how to interview a medical expert. I loved that process. I suddenly had at my fingertips just being able to pull a study and understand what it said. Then, through a random series of magazine world misfortunes—which I'm sure you're very familiar with—I ended up going freelance. I got a job as the fitness editor at Fit Pregnancy magazine and I really loved that work. I found more flow in it, honestly, than more hardcore health reporting. One of the things that I did for that job was to be on set during workout photoshoots. We would always have to hire a personal trainer to be on set as well, to oversee the form for the models to make sure everything was safe and accurate. I was just so interested in it and I felt like I kind of had the basics of what these people were doing. So I was like, “For the cost of this person's day rate, my company could just pay for me to become a personal trainer.” Which was like a lot easier said than done, because it's really hard. All of the studying that you have to do and the reading and the test is really intense. I recently made kind of a big career change and went freelance again and started building my own business and training clients has become part of my week to week work, which has been so cool—just working with real people and seeing how their bodies work and how they respond to movement and how they learn things and seeing them get stronger and more motivated and more confident in the way they move. It has also really informed the sort of content work that I do. Like, how do I explain this to my client? I've seen in practice, that this concept is difficult for people or that this movement is not actually that accessible to people.VirginiaThat makes sense because so often people who are naturally good at certain types of exercise are not necessarily the greatest at explaining them to other people.AnnaHaving an editor brain is really helpful for training clients, as well, because I'm so in tune with what language people understand and how to break things down in a way that's accessible. I think the two things really do complement each other. VirginiaI want to go back to you being not athletic as a kid because I completely relate. I was a very un-athletic child. I think I played one season of Little League and just sat down in the outfield for several months and was like, why are we doing this? I think I tried one season of field hockey in middle school. Oh, no, I did not try a season, I tried one practice of field hockey in middle school. I got there and they didn't wear the cute skirts to practice and they had to run a lot of laps. And I was like, “Nope. Peace out. Not for me.” I should also say, I was a skinny kid and I was really given a free pass to not be athletic because of that thin privilege. People didn't think I needed to be athletic because my body was already the acceptable body. My then my understanding of exercise was definitely in this category of either you're some kind of hardcore jock or you do this because you're making yourself thinner. And if I'm already thin, I don't have to worry about it. AnnaTotally, I find that very relatable. I was a very skinny kid and very inactive. I remember in maybe in fifth or sixth grade, we played this game called mat ball, which was sort of like kickball, except they put big gymnastics mats out for the bases and for some reason as many people could be on the base as could fit. And I was like, great! I'm going to kick the ball. I'm going to run to the mat, and then I'm going to sit down. My teachers loved me. I have to say, I think I might have been sheltered from the fatphobia of it all. It wasn't really on my radar at that point, that exercise was for weight loss. I just didn't understand what it was for. But then in my early 20s, a couple of things happened. For a few years, I had been throwing my back out. I was a young, relatively healthy person and I was just throwing my back out. I would sneeze and not be able to turn my head for three days—that kind of thing. My first job out of college, I worked at Men's Health. I was the assistant to the editor in chief. They gave us all really cheap gym memberships, so I got a fancy gym membership for like 10 bucks a month. And I was surrounded by this Men's Health gym bro culture thing. I was like, okay, I've been working on some of this content, I'm starting to understand it a little bit more, I feel like I can stand to get stronger. That sounds interesting. I had a couple of sessions with a free personal trainer. I joined the gym and started doing some of the exercises that person taught me and I was like, Wait a second, I don't have back pain anymore. My back does not hurt. I'm not throwing it out. Although if I skip the gym for a couple of weeks, I throw it out again. It was just a really clear connection between pain and to my ability to function and live my life comfortably. And that became this incredible motivator for me. I need to work out because if I don't, I will feel terrible.VirginiaYou talking about your back pain leads me perfectly into what I want to talk about next, which is the real reason I was like, “Anna you have to come on the podcast.” It was this great Twitter thread you did recently about the myth of visible abs. AnnaI got this mat Pilates certification a year ago and a lot of my work is focused on sort of the prenatal and postpartum period. I think a lot about the core, the pelvic floor, the diaphragm—all of the things that we work on in Pilates, all of the things that change and are affected by pregnancy and the postpartum period. I think the core is so amazing, especially for the pelvic floor, and is not talked about enough. It's something I think about from a very functional perspective. So, a few weeks ago I got a message from a friend of mine, who is a few months postpartum after having her second kid. She sent me this message and she said something along the lines of like, “Can You please help me get my abs back? I am doing everything I can think of. I'm doing Pilates a few times a week, I'm doing HIIT workouts a few times a week.” She said, “I'm restricting. I'm doing Whole 30 about like, 80% of the time, I'm not drinking alcohol. I feel really strong and feel really toned but I can't get to my lower belly pooch. Like, what's your secret? What do you do?” It really took me by surprise and made me feel sad. For someone who has two children and a really busy professional life to like, be spending so much time—VirginiaSo much time in pursuit of this one thing.AnnaExactly. And of course, hearing that she was restricting was pretty disturbing to me. I tried to respond in a very kind and non-judgmental way while also being like, “Please don't do this. Please eat bread, please take care of yourself, please feed yourself please do movement that feels good to you. It's great that you're building your core, but…” I actually, I sent her a mirror selfie. I was like, “I want you to see my stomach right now. It's not flat. It’s not ‘toned.’ It's bloated and round and cushiony.”VirginiaBecause that’s what bodies look like when they’re not fitness models on photoshoot.AnnaThat's what a belly looks like. So I was thinking about that and this is the time of year when a lot of us start getting advertisements on the internet about workout plans and supplements and workout clothes, and all of those things. I noticed a couple of them popped up in my feeds that had people with very visible, cut abdomens. And I was really surprised, by my initial gut reaction to those ads, which was, “Oooh!” I was so drawn to those images of people with really defined, visible abdominal muscles. Of course, immediately, it was like, What are you doing Anna? You know that's not achievable. You know they're trying to sell you this thing. Move on. But those two experiences started me thinking, what is this pull that abs have on us? I'm sure you remember from your magazine years the many cover lines that we had to write about “get a toned, taut, tummy” or whatever. Or when I was at Men's Health, like “get shredded in six weeks” and stuff. You always had to have some kind of abs cover line. VirginiaIt sells magazines, it sells media. You have to talk about abs.AnnaAbs just have this pull on us and marketers know this. Companies know this. It's such a central point of insecurity for so many people. So it inspired me to write this thread that you're talking about on Twitter. Because the way that our culture deals with abs is so messed up. Look, abs are so amazing! They do so many things for you. They're this like miraculous muscle group that we don't really show the right kind of love to because we're so focused on how they look. But how abs look is the one thing that you're never really going to be able to affect unless you engage in potentially disordered eating patterns or pretty toxic exercise habits. VirginiaI just want to say this really clearly: The ability to do ab workouts and develop really visible abs is primarily genetic, right?AnnaIt's primarily genetic, because it's really about the way that you carry weight and fat, like how much subcutaneous fat you have on top of your abdominal region. Fitness models and people who compete in fitness competitions, there are things that those people do to change their nutritional intake to really minimize the amount of fat that's showing so that the muscle definition can show through. But even those people only do that some of the time because they know it's not sustainable. It's not actually good for their for their muscles. It's not safe. They eat to build muscle a lot of the time, and then for a very short period of time they eat to cut down on visible fat.VirginiaI'm so glad that is not how I spend my life. That just sounds exhausting. It's powerful to think that you, who has all this knowledge, are still looking at a photo of visible abs and feeling that pull towards them. Even people who know that it’s all fake are still caught up in what we're seeing. We can't say often enough that this isn't real, this isn't realistic, this is unsustainable. My reaction to a lot of this has been to stop doing ab exercises, to be very honest. Exercise for a long time was only about weight loss for me. As I divested from that and stopped dieting, stopped pursuing thinness, it was really important for my mental wellbeing not to do abs exercises because I knew they would trigger a whole set of body aspirations that were not good for me. So I didn't do the ab exercises for a long time—including during the period when I had two children and my abs had to work real hard. I've been through some stuff, they've seen some things. As all my listeners know, in January, I threw my back out and couldn't walk for five days. That is probably the 10th time in two years that has happened. That was when I emailed you in a panic and was like, “What is happening?” So talk about what abs do, and why they matter, in the non-aesthetic sense.AnnaIt frustrates me so much, as someone who personally has benefited from this kind of exercise, who's seen my clients feel so much better after strengthening their core. It’s so fraught, it's so tied to these feelings for so many people. But in reality, your core is the most important area of your body to build strength, because it supports your spine that supports your pelvis. It supports these centers of the way your body functions and moves. Your abdomen is where all your organs are too. It's also important for the health of your back, your posture, the way that you breathe, the way you walk, if you're a runner, the way that you run, protecting yourself against injury—even things that seem like totally far away and unrelated, like people who have wrist issues or ankle issues or foot issues, some of that can really be tied back to the core and the pelvic floor. Another part of all of this that gets me is that fitness is so fraught for so many people for lots of reasons. But, getting into a really like healthy and positive movement practice—I think we can agree that that's a really lovely thing for people. It really makes you feel good. It's good for your mood and your sleep and your health, by and large, if it's something that's available to you. When you look at the science around motivation, like what gets people to start and stick with a new habit, there's good evidence that things like reducing pain, feeling good, moving more smoothly, feeling more energetic—all the things that can come from a movement pattern like Pilates or focusing on core and strength—those kinds of things are way stronger motivators. You're much more likely to stick with that kind of practice, if that's what's driving you, than external motivators like pounds lost or visible abs, partly because those things are really hard to attain. Even if you ‘achieve’ a certain visible goal, you're probably not going to be able to sustain it. We all know the research about that. So that's another area about this that frustrates me. Visible abs is such a bad motivator. Strong abs, functional abs—that's a great motivator.VirginiaIt's a fascinating disconnect. We've really been taught to focus on the aesthetics. It helps you find the lie in the “We're worried about people's health” bullshit. If we were really worried about people's health, we would be focusing much more on how to motivate people to exercise for all those reasons that really work. You and I both started on the dark side, in women's media and Men's Health, these creators of the pro-ab agenda. You've had this evolution and so have I. I would love to hear your evolution story and what got you into a different place with fitness. Anna Looking back, I was 100% one of the bad guys. To forgive myself a little for that, I think it was pure cluelessness, not anything malicious. I wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to work at magazines. Here's the magazine where I got my job, this is what they do. Sure, like, I will do it. Like I said, I started my career at Men's Health and I was specifically spending almost all of my time helping write and edit this series called “Eat This, Not That.” It started off as a little column in the magazine. It was like, if you're at McDonald's, get the this thing instead of this other thing because it has fewer calories and less saturated fat. So they turned that into a book. They turned it into its own website, my boss went on the Today show all the time to talk about it. I was like helping write and edit those books, writing and editing blog posts, and Today show appearance scripts. All of those were all entirely focused on weight, all entirely focused on calorie counts, which I didn't enjoy. It wasn't the diving into science that had drawn me to that field. So I did move away from that, although unfortunately not like for “the right reasons.” A few years later, I was at Self Magazine—I was not like editing the drop 10 plan or anything each each year, but I was very adjacent to it.  Then when I was fitness editor at Fit Pregnancy, our postpartum fitness story every issue was called “Bye Bye, Baby Weight.”Virginia Oh, that is so cringe-y. I wrote for Fit Pregnancy a lot in my early freelancing days and I had blocked out that part of it. AnnaIt sucks. It was actually such a great magazine. Then I started talking to Refinery29, in about 2015, about an opportunity there to be the health director. The person I was interviewing with, Kelly Bourdet, gave me some links and some things to look at as I did the interview process. One of the things was the first year of their Take Back the Beach project. I don't know if you remember the project, but it was sort of in response to all of the like “bikini body” stuff. I think there were those big ads that year in Times Square with the really skinny person in a bikini and like maybe it was for some kind of weight loss supplement or something. I'd been seeing things around the internet about body positivity. This was like really the first large scale, very thorough takedown I'd ever really ingested about diet culture and all the messages the media sends to people, especially women, about what makes an acceptable body and how harmful those messages are. It was so eye opening for me. It was this overnight conversion, like, oh, okay. The way I've been doing things my entire career is super wrong and super harmful and has hurt a lot of people probably. And that's terrible. I'm very done with that.VirginiaSo that's what led you into, as you were doing your own work becoming a trainer, taking a really different approach. AnnaI think all of those building blocks that were set for me at Refinery29 really changed the way that I edit. It changed the way that I work on content. Even after Refinery29, I continued to work in health coverage for several years, taking the reins at different publications and saying, “Okay, this is the stance that we're gonna take on this.” I fought those battles, I brought in fat voices, I made sure that we were doing right by that subject matter. That has all really deeply informed the way that I approach fitness with my clients. I think also, continuing that education process by following other thinkers in this space, especially people who aren't thin or white or straight or cis, like Mikey Mercedes is just amazing. She's been with you before on the show.VirginiaYeah. Someone I learn so much from all the time,AnnaShe's just brilliant and she's really helped push my thinking. I think I owe her a lot. I try to support her as much as I can. And then people more specifically in the fitness space, Ilya Parker of Decolonizing Fitness is someone. I'm a supporter of their Patreon, and they just have amazing resources for fitness professionals, making sure that the spaces that we're creating are trauma informed and welcoming to people of all body sizes and abilities. Especially as a thin white lady, how can I make sure I'm creating a safe and positive relationship to movement for my clients and in whatever content that I'm helping create.VirginiaI felt like the fitness industry for a long time was really lagging behind the anti-diet conversation. There has been this sort of steady growth of Health at Every Size, anti-diet, weight-inclusive dietitians trying to get away from the weight loss focus that most dietetics is based on, but there wasn't a parallel shift happening in fitness for a long time. I think in mainstream fitness brands, it's still really in its infancy. I look at what brands like Peloton are doing, and there's certainly lip service and use of rhetoric, but I am not yet convinced it is backed up by a full rejection of intentional weight loss. I think that they're still trying to have both. Like, for the folks who want weight loss, we do that and then for the folks who want something else, of course we want you to love your body. But I think there is more creeping progress in fitness now. The folks you mentioned like Ilya and other people who have just been doing the labor for so long. We owe them so much for starting to shift these conversations. AnnaWhat I'm finding now in my consulting work is that people are really open to it. When I come in and I say, “Okay, if you want to create this body of editorial work or this fitness program, it's going to be it's going to be body neutral. We're not going to talk about visible results. We're not going to talk about calorie burn. We're not going to talk about weight loss. Here's how we're going to approach this.” They're actually surprisingly really open to it. I don't get pushback on that. But it's things like sizing. What are we going to put people in for a shoot? It's things like casting. Like, “Oh, it's, it's kind of hard to find somebody in the larger sizes. I hope this like size 12 person is good enough.” There are all these process hurdles which are ultimately pretty bullshit. If people cared enough about it to invest the time and money, they would. VirginiaAll fixable problems. AnnaAll fixable problems, but when you're in the room and you're trying to make it happen, it is hard. It isn't as easy as waving a wand and magically a size 20 model appears. Like, are they working with a casting agency that offers those options? It's those little cogs in the machine where each one has to be set up for success. If that kind of representation and accessibility and inclusivity isn't centered in the process, it's just going to end up being not a priority.VirginiaWe've been kind of bashing women's media and I'm comfortable with that, but brands like Self have done a real 180 on these issues. It's not a print magazine anymore, but self.com is very committed to an anti-diet, weight-inclusive, pro diversity perspective. That's just a world away from what it was, ten years ago. Man, if you had told me I would live to see the day that women's magazines would care about fat people. AnnaSelf has gone through such an interesting process now. When I started there, there was no fat representation. Of course, it was talking about weight loss and all of that stuff, but the vibe overall of the magazine was about being kind to yourself and about exercising and participating in sports because it made you feel good and felt fulfilling and felt like putting yourself first and taking care of yourself, which is a pretty positive message, if you take out the weight stuff. VirginiaAnd if you ignore the fact that they're only showing skinny white people.AnnaAbsolutely, absolutely. I remember while I was there, we went through this rebranding, like they brought in some outside consulting agency. And the determination was we need to go younger. The way to reach a younger audience is to focus entirely on aesthetics. So any recommendation we were giving, even if it was in a freaking like breast cancer story, “Make sure you get at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week. As a bonus, you'll get toned for the summer!” Every single story had to take it back to being hot which just like, I hated that. A lot of people that work there hated that. We started getting letters from readers who were like, this isn't why I read Self. So it just kind of sucked. Then a few years later, the magazine folded and they went digital only. I know Carolyn Kylstra, the prior editor in chief, did so much work to bring that brand to where it needs to be from the lens through which they cover health and bodies and from the visual representation standpoint. VirginiaOh, man, I feel like we could talk about different women's media brands all day. But I do want to go back to abs. So, as I was saying, like, I have had this experience of throwing my back out. I finally started physical therapy, in large part because you encouraged me to—thank you very much. It is amazing how well it works. Maybe because I took a fairly long hiatus from doing any kind of ab exercises, this is the first time in my life I'm noticing when I do ab exercises how much better I feel the rest of the day. I have to admit, as someone who has this whole other experience with fitness being really toxic, I almost feel like a traitor to myself being like, Wait, doing core exercises makes me feel good. It's like this weird, disconnect. But if I do five minutes of core exercises in the morning, my back doesn't hurt. I'm sleeping better. I'm feeling better walking up a flight of stairs in my house and picking up my four year old who I really felt like I'd gotten to the point where I couldn't pick her up that much anymore. And now I'm like, oh, I can pick you up again. I feel like I've been lied to for a long time. But I also just want to hear more about like, is that the deep core? What is that that just doing a few minutes of ab exercises can actually produce that. I feel like I'm in an infomercial now.AnnaThe visible abs, if you were to able to see them are the rectus abdominus, which is sometimes called the “six pack muscle,” unfortunately. It's those muscles that are right on the front of your stomach. Basically, when you're bending at the waist those are the muscles that are working. They certainly serve a purpose—abdominal flexion is a functional movement, like you use it to get out of bed and off of the sofa and things like that. The deep core muscles that that you mentioned—specifically the transverse abdominus, the multifidus, which is like a really small, deep muscle on the back of the deep core, and then the diaphragm at the top, and the pelvic floor muscles at the bottom. That’s the deep core. That's what really has to expand to accommodate a pregnancy. Obviously, the rectus abdominus has to expand for that as well, but working the deep core during pregnancy really helps protect you from the activities of daily life putting too much pressure on the pelvic floor and potentially leading to a pelvic floor dysfunction. They really are what supports the spine and the pelvis. Strengthening those deep core muscles—the TA especially—really supports any other kind of movement that you want to do, whether it's picking up a kid or walking up and down the stairs or standing. Bringing strength and bringing activity to that area is so good for you. It feels amazing. It's a different. Sometimes working the TA, working the deep core can be as simple as a deep breath—breath work essentially. I like to teach this: if you place your hands either on your ribcage or on your belly—you could even do one hand on your ribs, one hand on your belly. You take a really deep inhale and really send the air down into your belly. Instead of just letting your chest rise, you're really breathing, you're sending the air as deep as you possibly can. And you're feeling your belly get bigger on the inhale, like there's a balloon inside your stomach. And that inhale fills it up with air so the balloon gets bigger, your belly relaxes and expands. Hopefully your pelvic floor is also relaxing and expanding on that inhale. And then on the exhale, it kind of zips back up into more of a neutral position. If you really use a strong exhale like a “ssss” or like a “hah” you could actually feel those deep core muscles kind of tightening and turning on underneath your hand. It should move in just a little bit. VirginiaFor listeners at home, I'm doing it and I'm feeling it.AnnaYeah, so that kind of breath work. Both the inhale and the exhale are really important. Because being able to relax and release the tension in that area is almost as important as like building the strength. It's so functional, because your breath and your deep core are so connected. You could do this kind of breath work any time of day. You can do it before bed. It'll help you get stronger, it'll help you get more relaxed. Your deep core, your pelvic floor in particular, holds a lot of stress and tension. If you have a really stressful day, sometimes your pelvic floor tightens up a little. So deep breathing at the end of the day will both release that tension in the pelvic floor and also help you relax a little bit emotionally.VirginiaI love that. The idea of relaxing and letting your belly expand runs so counter to the diet culture version of abs. Like, that's all about sucking in and keeping everything tight. Whereas what you're saying is actually much more beneficial and also lets you relax. That seems great. Anna A healthy pelvic floor can do both—can be strong and engaged when it needs to and can be relaxed and released when it needs to. So many of us are just by habit, since we were kids probably, going around trying to suck in our gut all day. It is so bad for your pelvic floor to do that. It puts so much pressure on that part of your body, it can end up causing more discomfort and bloating and all that stuff.It's really hard if you're used to walking around that way and you feel self conscious about your stomach, but: Anytime you can, let your stomach go.VirginiaI love this. This is the new Burnt Toast mission. AnnaLet it go. The other thing that's ironic to me about sucking it in is it actually doesn't like align with anatomy. Exhaling brings your stomach in. You can't suck it in. When you suck air in, your belly gets bigger.VirginiaAll of this stuff you're talking about isn't going to give you a visible ab definition. That's not the mission. So another misconception I want to have you speak to is the misconception that fat people can't have strong cores and that if you're fat, all of this is out of reach for you. Can you help us debunk that? AnnaYeah, I think it is so similar to health misconceptions about body size. Just like you can't look at someone's body and tell whether they're healthy or unhealthy—whatever definition of that you subscribe to—you can't look at someone's body and tell whether they're strong or weak. I mean, obviously, there are people—The Rock, of course he's strong. VirginiaI'm willing for us all to make a snap judgment about The Rock.AnnaAlthough, I don't know what's going on with his pelvic floor. I hope it's okay. You know, you never know.VirginiaHe's not keeping us updated on that.AnnaThere's certainly research out there about—I hate to say the word BMI—people with higher BMI sometimes have more muscle strength than those with lower BMIs. It's on an individual level, there's no correlation.VirginiaWeight is not predictive. They may be finding research showing that people in larger bodies have less abdominal strength, but it doesn't mean that's their weight that's the deciding factor there right? Like there could be other things at play AnnaI follow all kinds of like amazing like fat fitness influencers on Instagram and they post their workout routines and they do like ab exercises that would have me panting on the floor. I am definitely not as strong as they are. It's so important for everyone to feel like this is something that that is accessible to them and that they can work on and that they can feel the benefits of. That's such a good thing for everybody.VirginiaI love that. You know, health is not a moral obligation. Fitness is not a moral obligation. Nobody needs to do these exercises. But if you're listening to this, and you're thinking, huh I am interested in a weight neutral approach to abs, here is what Anna recommended. You can take it or leave it, but it's stuff I've been personally finding really useful. AnnaYeah, and on that note, I do want to say I am a thin white person. I did used to write this column where I posted a move of the week on Medium. That's what I sent you, a few exercises that I really recommend for abs strength and back strength. I stopped writing that column because I just started to feel uncomfortable with being a thin white lady putting more images of thin white bodies performing fitness on the internet. It just didn't feel useful or additive. So I want to caveat those resources by saying, “Hey, you're gonna see a thin white lady doing ab exercises.” If that feels like something that would be fine for you, great. If not, don't look at it, it's fine. I agree that it's not the most necessary perspective to have out there.VirginiaI so appreciate that. And we will also link to the other folks of color, fat fitness folks you talked about. We'll put some resources in so people can see what they're doing. I think that was a tough, but kind of important conclusion to come to. But also your take on fitness is really helpful. You do write exercise moves very clearly. And I appreciate that. So thank you for that. Butter For Your Burnt ToastAnnaWell, we are talking in late March and I have been—I'm sure you'll appreciate this—daydreaming about gardening, and just plotting. I haven't had time to do any seedlings or anything like that, but we had kind of a warm day yesterday in New York and I went out on my balcony and started clearing things out. I noticed my little strawberry plants are starting to regenerate. I was on hold or something and I just spent three minutes clearing out old, dead branches and taking a look at what was going on in the beds that I haven't touched for a few months. It was such a wonderful, restorative feeling and just held so much promise. So I would recommend spending a little time with some dirt.VirginiaI love that. I mean, I am a well known plant lady so I've given a couple gardening recommendations lately. I think getting out with some dirt is so calming. My recommendation is the movie “Turning Red,” which I'm hoping everyone has already seen. If you haven't and if you have kids in your life of any age and any gender—and I really want to emphasize that part—Turning Red is such an important movie to watch with your family. It is the story of this 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl who is going into puberty. It turns out in her family when girls go into puberty, when they have big feelings, they turn into a big red panda. It is obviously a metaphor for periods. There's also some great normalization talk of periods and bodies and teenage girls having crushes and sexual desire. I love it so much. The backlash is hilarious and very irritating and outrageous. Particularly the older white men who say that they can't relate to the movie because I guess they were never a child or a person with emotions because that's all you really need to have to relate to this movie. So Turning Red, we love it so much. So Anna, thank you so much for being here. Tell people where they can follow you and find more of your work.AnnaThey can follow me on Twitter at @amalt.VirginiaAwesome. Thank you for being here.---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.

How you feel about your body does not exist in a vacuum. It’s not just about your body, it’s about all the things in your life. So I ask people to really reflect on how size-friendly is their life? Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today I am chatting with Mia O’Malley, a content creator on Instagram and the creator of @plussizebabywearing. Mia’s work sits at the intersection of fat advocacy and momfluencing. She’s doing a lot of important work on access to fat friendly doctors and we also talk about influencing—and the potential and promise for fat advocacy in the space. PS. Friends! The Burnt Toast Giving Circle is up to almost $8,000! We are so close to our goal. And if you’ve been thinking about joining, we still need you! Here’s the Burnt Toast episode where I announced it, ICYMI, and the link to donate.Episode 36 TranscriptVirginiaHi Mia! Can you tell listeners a little bit about you and your family and your work?MiaHi, I’m Mia. I am @MiaOMalley on Instagram and @plussizebabywearing on Instagram and TikTok. I’m a content creator. I’m based out of Connecticut. I’m a mom of an almost four year old and I do a lot of work on my social platforms on advocating for people in larger bodies and sharing resources for people in larger bodies and how to navigate the world. I’m a babywearing educator, as well, with a focus on celebrating parenting in larger bodies.VirginiaSara Peterson was on the podcast recently and we sang your praises on the babywearing piece in particular. That was something I struggled with, with both of my babies. The bias against fat bodies, fat moms— all of that came into play for me. So I’m grateful for the work you’re doing to change that conversation. As I was doing my homework for this episode, I read your interview on Cup of Jo—which has great fashion inspiration—and I love that you said you look at fashion as an advocacy issue. Was this always your plan? How did this come about?MiaI was pregnant with my son around 2017-2018 and I felt very isolated as a fat pregnant person. I had taken these beautiful maternity photos. But when I shared them, I was like, “This isn’t the whole story.” Because those photos were really hard for me to take. I couldn’t find anyone who looked like me who had done maternity photos. Like for inspiration, if you looked on Pinterest, there were no bodies like mine. And that’s how I felt going through all of my pregnancy. I never saw people in similar bodies being pregnant. I felt very underrepresented and isolated. So when I posted my maternity photos, I kind of said that quiet part out loud. I said, “I feel invisible as a plus-sized pregnant person.” And my world kind of opened up with that post, just in the sense that I kept saying those things that I kept to myself. I realized that there are other people like me who are feeling the same way. To be in community with those other people is amazing. It made me realize that the fat experience is so, so shared. We’re all going through a lot of the same things, across generations. And fashion is just another one of those issues. I can’t talk about fashion without seeing it as an advocacy issue. There are people who can’t find winter coats! There are people who literally don’t have a bra that fits them at their size. It doesn’t exist. I talked to someone who was a C-suite executive and she has nothing to wear to meetings with her colleagues! She had no suits that fit her. She talked about just how humiliating that was for her. When we say those quiet things out loud, they become advocacy issues because so many people have that shared story. So yeah, I talk about fashion, but it often becomes about sharing resources because there’s so many people that feel like certain things are inaccessible for them—and are truly inaccessible for them. The same thing goes for babywearing. So many parents said to me, “I didn’t even think I could wear my baby at this size.” And that’s not true! There are plenty of options for all bodies to wear their babies. But there’s a perception that this is an inaccessible thing to do because of marketing, because the lack of representation. VirginiaWas it scary to start sharing? Because I think a lot about how what advocacy asks of us is to share in this very personal way. It’s so important because you’re articulating something that someone else hasn’t been able to say out loud, but that also means you’re the person who has to say it out loud. MiaI have to take really long breaks from some of the work that I do. I will take a week or two long break where I don’t post content and I step away, because I hold so many people’s stories. Most of my time spent online is in DMs, sharing stories and resources. But that comes a lot with having to face my own experiences that were hard. It’s a lot to hold on to. So I do take a lot of breaks and I do experience burn out, but I also find it incredibly rewarding. It’s the part of this work that I love the most.VirginiaI’m glad you have that strategy. It has taken me a long time to figure out that I also need those breaks and need to build in that time. Previously my experience as a writer / advocate was as “medical mom,” and a sort of similar thing happens where once you’ve been public about your experiences, people send you their stories and those stories are often tragic and linked to my own trauma. I can imagine there’s a similar thing here where people are sharing with you traumatic experiences that you have also lived. MiaThat’s why I’m so passionate about resources. Some people will ask, “What’s your advice for feeling better about your body?” And there are so many strategies and there are people who do this professionally. But I tell people that how you feel about your body does not exist in a vacuum. It’s not just about your body, it’s about all the things in your life. And so I ask people to really reflect on how size-friendly their life is. How comfortable are you in your body on the day-to-day? Is your work chair comfortable? Is your partner supportive of you? Is your car comfortable? Do you have a winter coat to wear? What is your workspace like? How comfortable is your bed? Is your couch comfortable? You know, all these things. It’s about the world that we operate in and how comfortable we are in the body that we’re in right now. That really influences how positively we can feel about our body. It’s just not about how positively we feel about our thighs or our belly. It’s much bigger. VirginiaDiet culture teaches us that weight is this personal responsibility project. And we know that’s bullshit. But often, the next part of the conversation is that loving yourself is a personal responsibility project. And that’s also bullshit, in a world that’s not built to support your body. Instead of saying, “How do you do this internal work?” which may or may not need to happen at some point, it’s “How do you recognize how the larger systems of your life are failing to support you?” MiaYeah, it has to be looked at that way. And we can’t discount how chronic discomfort and chronic pain influence how we feel about our bodies. Sometimes there are small changes that can make you physically comfortable. But a lot of us who exist in larger bodies are so disconnected from our actual bodies that we can’t even tap into that. VirginiaSo I recently wrote about this big debate that comes up every so often about whether to get weighed or not at the doctor’s office, and if you do want to decline it how to decline and I think it’s an important conversation. If you have a fat friendly doctor, it basically becomes moot because even if you get on the scale, they’re not going to use that number against you. If you don’t have a fat friendly doctor and you’re fat, your weight will be weaponized whether or not you get on the scale. So you have been doing the hero’s work of building this database of fat-friendly health care providers. So tell us about this project.MiaI would love to, but first I do want to shout out Jen McLellan from Plus Size Birth. She’s @PlusMommy on Instagram. Literally, her work changed my life as a pregnant person. She wrote the book on plus sized pregnancy. Her resources on plus size birth are so critical. And she does a lot of work training other medical professionals on how to be more size friendly. I just want to shout out Jen, who I’m proud to say is my friend. She has a directory for for doulas, OBGYN, and midwives on her page. There’s another colleague of mine, Nicola Salmon, who runs Fat Positive Fertility. She also has a book and resources on fertility services for people who exist in larger bodies and how to support yourself as you’re navigating how to conceive in a larger body, which is incredibly fatphobic and very hard to do. She also has a directory! So I want to shout out those two resources. Obviously, there are other directories that exist, but my community is a very interactive community for Instagram. We share a lot of recs and I couldn’t get around not sharing recommendations for health care providers. People need size-friendly care providers. I don’t know that a lot of people understand how critical it is to connect with a medical professional that does not operate with a weight bias or weight discrimination. It’s a literal life or death issue. So I have a sheet—a Google Doc, basically—of providers that have been recommended to me that I’m pulling together into a more formal database as we speak, actually. But right now, it’s a Google sheet of shared recommendations. Having a size-friendly care provider means that you have people who are going to see a doctor more. A lot of preventative care can happen there. It also can mean a vastly different experience in your pregnancy, your birth, your postpartum. I have spoken to countless people who have been trying to conceive for years and have been told to freeze their eggs and seek weight loss surgery first. I have talked to people who have been unable to have doulas at their birth because of a high risk determination that was not evidence-based, because they are with a non size friendly care provider. I’ve talked to people who have serious issues, life or death issues, that were ignored for years because everything was so focused on weight. This is such a critical resource for people in larger bodies to have. Just to be able to do that work is the most important thing to me, out of all the things that I spend my days doing. VirginiaWe will definitely link to the size friendly care provider list. You also have a form for people who want to submit their providers. MiaYes, I hope that there’s going to be more of a universal database. Also Jen is focused on the training, and I think that’s something that needs to be talked about more. As well as the sharing of these gems of care providers that are somehow treating us with dignity and giving us medical care that we need. I was four months postpartum and I had decided to go to my PCP at the time. I had horrible, painful water retention and my legs were swollen. It was hard to move my legs. It was hard to sit down. She barely looked at my legs, she was focused on the fact that I had gained weight after my pregnancy. She really dismissed me. It was because of my community that six months later, I went back and I demanded that I get a water pill. Within like a week after that, my swelling was gone. I’m not directing anyone to go get a water pill, but I am directing them to advocate for themselves if they feel they’ve been dismissed. And immediately.VirginiaThat’s six months you were in pain.MiaI was in so much pain! Immediately, you have to seek out those other care providers. Those care providers that will treat you well and will listen to you, they do exist. You have to decide that you want this for yourself. If your insurance allows for it, if you’re able to make that change, please make that change. Because those care providers do exist.VirginiaI’m so glad Jen is working on the training piece because it seems like we haven’t even yet agreed upon the standards that you should have to meet to be a weight inclusive provider. What I was seeing come up in a lot of my DMs were people saying like, “Well, I don’t know if this person is really Health at Every Size, but at least they didn’t give me a hard time about X.” The bar is way too low about what we’re willing to accept. We need more of a consensus about what this really should look like and what you should be able to demand. I think fat people are just so used to expecting nothing—or worse than nothing—that it can be hard to even know where to start advocating for yourself. MiaIt also becomes really tricky, because fatness is a spectrum, right? So, someone who goes in at a certain weight might be treated one way. Someone who is 30 pounds over that weight might be treated vastly different and categorized completely different. Then you have further intersections of that—if you are BIPOC, if you are of the LGBTQI+ community—those intersections would make one healthcare provider considered size friendly by one person be completely different with another. So it does get tricky. I would always tell people to call first. Or if you don’t feel comfortable calling, maybe have a friend or a partner come with you or advocate for you. Or you can go in and and talk to the front desk and just say these are the things that I’m looking for. Or you can email, whatever. Somehow to just start the conversation and go in advocating for yourself and be ready to advocate for yourself because even with these directories, you never know what the experience is going to be like and you have to be prepared to advocate for yourself.VirginiaShilo George, who is a wonderful advocate on these issues, I interviewed them for a Health.com piece last year, and a strategy they have is writing up a one sheet of your primary health concerns and stating some of your boundaries. Just being clear about what you need from the provider. I think that can feel very scary and people are worried that they’re going to make the doctor angry or start off on the wrong foot. That tool may not be for everybody, but I just want to throw it out as another suggestion. I think there are ways to do it that can be really empowering and very helpful.MiaYeah, it could be good. It could be a gentle hand. There’s a lot of different ways to do it. Ragen Chastain, on Instagram, has amazing resources and a course that you can take and a lot of free resources, and has been doing this work for so long—discussing medical fatphobia and how to advocate for yourself. VirginiaI do think it’s worth thinking through what strategy feels comfortable to you. Maybe you want to write down that sheet and it’s not something you hand to the doctor but it just helps you organize your own thoughts. That could be a useful tool. MiaI just want people to know that if you are in a larger body, you deserve to be treated with respect in a doctor’s office. Shame is not a an effective tool. If you don’t want to talk about weight, you do not have to talk about weight. I want more people to realize that that’s even a thing, because there was a time in my life where I didn’t realize that was a thing.VirginiaI’m curious, for someone who’s doing the work and doing the work in a fat body, how do you think about your work as an influencer? What do you love about it? What do you want to see change?MiaThat is such a good question. I don’t know where the industry is going, but I do know that the representation has gotten much better since I started doing this in 2017. As more body positive influencers become parents, it’s changing the momfluencer world to be a little more inclusive. But I think that some of the strongholds in mommy brands and parenting brands need to also change with that. I’m not necessarily seeing that change in terms of choosing parents that are in different bodies or represent different communities. I think they could be doing more to use different bodies in marketing. Why am I not seeing more bodies that represent the average? When you go on Pinterest, and you’re looking for maternity outfits for your photoshoot, or you’re downloading an app for your pregnancy and the first thing it talks about is “belly only weight gain”— is that influence really happening? Is it influencing the spaces that it really needs to to change how people feel about their parenthood? VirginiaIt’s making me think about when we do see influencers in bigger bodies doing a campaign with a brand, it’s often because the brand has decided they want to brand themselves as body positive, right? We’re not yet at the point where body diversity is a given, and you would just be the influencer selling this brand of cute diapers because you had the platform and the metrics they wanted. You’d be selling cute diapers because they went about running a body positive campaign this one month and that’s it. That kind of thing is coopting the rhetoric of the movement rather than furthering the movement.MiaThis is such a pain point for me, too, because there are so many brands that will do a campaign about plus size clothes that they have, right? They will work with plus size influencers to market that campaign and use the budget to market that campaign for those clothes. And you walk into the store, you can’t buy those clothes.VirginiaRight. They’re not stocked.MiaSo, they’re using these campaigns to look good as a brand and you’re not actually given the access that everyday people can use to make their, their lives easier. Old Navy was one of these! They’ve changed. I forgot what they called their campaign, but they’re now have all sizes in stores except for size 30. That one is that one’s online.VirginiaSo close, Old Navy! Almost there.MiaBut for so long, they excluded plus size from coupons. They excluded plus size from stores. Not to make it about Old Navy, but they have such a huge customer base that’s plus size and they actually were excluding us from so many different things, yet doing campaign work with plus size influencers. The same thing happens within the momfluencer space with brands. I think there are brands that are doing great things, especially in the babywearing community. But some of the very popular websites and apps and things for pregnancy where pregnant people really need to see themselves represented to feel good in their bodies and to feel good going through this special time. We need to see more.VirginiaAubrey Gordon had a great tweet recently where she said when brands do that kind of thing, they’re really using plus size people as cover to make their thin customers feel better. This is a brand that’s trying to be inclusive without having done the work of talking to fat customers, of making things that that customers need. I think it’s important for all of us with any degree of thin privilege to think about. We might feel good that Anthropologie is carrying our size now, but who are they not serving? How much further do they need to go? And how do we hold them accountable? MiaWho’s not at the table with me? That’s something that I’m asking myself a lot, as I do this work. I gained weight after my pregnancy and that shift from a size 16 to a size 20 was so eye opening for me. Because I was either out of certain ranges for certain brands, fashion-wise, or I was like the last size, right? So I found that things I was sharing, people were like, “I wish it came in this size!” or “Oh, that won’t work for me.” It’s really hard to share something with your community and then realize that so many people are left out. So I try to share as many inclusive brands as I can that have an extended size range or have a very inclusive size range. I wish there were more of them. The same thing is true of the momfluencer space. Who isn’t coming with me? You have to look around.VirginiaI just love that you are using your role as an influencer so thoughtfully and raising these questions that are sometimes uncomfortable but that really need to be asked. It’s really important work, so thank you.MiaI try. It’s a lot of reflection and I’m certainly not showing up perfectly. But, I hope I’m getting better every year. Butter For Your Burnt ToastMiaClothes-wise, Universal Standard has some amazing pieces out, like these foundation turtlenecks. They have my favorite t-shirt, which is the Tee Rex, and they have the essential tee. I highly recommend those. They are pricier but they last and they are really worth it. You’ll be happy with the quality. VirginiaYou’ve been influencing me about this turtleneck the whole time we’ve been chatting. It’s very cute. I’m very glad that that was your recommendation because now I can go look it up. My recommendation is going to be pretty off topic, as they usually are. My recommendation is to go buy yourself some flowers. It is March. March is very long. I live in the Hudson Valley of New York where March is 19 months long every year because spring does not happen. This is when I’m just really grateful we have a very cool local flower store. So I go in once a week and buy myself some flowers. You don’t have to spend a ton of money on this, but the amount of hope I feel having like something green and pretty is worth it.Thank you so much for being here! Tell listeners where they can follow and support your work.MiaThanks, Virginia. Mia O’Malley and Plus Size Babywearing on Instagram and you can find me on TikTok on under Plus Size Babywearing, which is not just baby wearing—it’s a lot of everything.---The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.

I remember the my daughter’s gastroenterologist saying, “Wow, you’ve really found a lot of great foods.” And, “We have so many patients who are less compliant than you.” I said, “Well, you know, it was really hard. It was, at minimum, a halftime job. Do all of your patients, families have the time and energy for this?” And he said, “Well probably not.”Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today I’m chatting with Debi Lewis, author of the beautiful new memoir Kitchen Medicine: How I Fed My Daughter Out of Failure to Thrive. Debi has also written for the New York Times, Bon Appetit, Huffington Post, and many other outlets. She lives in the Chicago suburbs with her husband and teenage daughters. This conversation is close to my heart. As most listeners know, my own daughter spent the first two years of her life dependent on a feeding tube. So reading Debi’s memoir hit home in all sorts of ways that we talk about, but I think this is a book that will resonate with so many of you. If you are a parent who has fed a kid—even if it went swimmingly, without medical complications—there is so much here that you will relate to about Debi’s journey, and the struggle to live up to external expectations about what feeding our kids looks like, and what it means for motherhood. CW: We do discuss critically ill kids, medical trauma, and fatphobic comments that people (maddeningly) make in those situations. Take care of yourself. PS. Friends! The Burnt Toast Giving Circle raised over $6,000 in less than a week! I am so insanely proud of us. And if you’ve been thinking about joining, we still need you! Here’s last week’s Burnt Toast ICYMI and the link to donate. Episode 35 TranscriptVirginiaHi Debi! Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your family, and your work?DebiMy name is Debi Lewis and I am the mom of two teenage girls, 19 and 16, and married to my husband and we live in the suburbs of Chicago. This is my first book that I’m very excited to share with all of your listeners. And in the rest of my day I make websites.VirginiaWe are here to talk about your new book Kitchen Medicine and when this episode airs, it will be your launch week. So folks, it’s in bookstores everywhere! It is just the most beautiful memoir of your experiences feeding your daughter, Sammi, who was diagnosed with failure to thrive at a really young age. Let’s start by talking a little bit about that failure to thrive diagnosis. Tell us about your experience with it, because I think it is such a horrific term in a lot of ways. It’s both very common and deeply misunderstood.DebiI think there’s a lot of things wrong with the term. “Failure to thrive” is not a very specific diagnosis. It’s kind of a catchall and the real search is for why. Why would you diagnose a child with that? It’s not the end, it’s a symptom. And the other problem is that it’s a wildly inaccurate term. Because if you had met my daughter during most of the years in which she fell under that umbrella of “failure to thrive,” you would never look at her and think this child is not thriving. This was a pink cheeked, energetic, bubbly, cute little girl, meeting all her developmental milestones except for the ones that required her to be tall enough. FTT was really diagnosing the fact that she wasn’t growing on the trajectory that doctors wanted. If you looked over many years, you could see that that growth trajectory was her own and steady and she didn’t drop very often and it was nothing that, in retrospect, I should have been worried about. But because she was tiny and because she wasn’t getting less tiny compared to her peers, we kept hearing that. And the way that diagnosis comes out is when a doctor or nurse points their finger at the parent and kind of wags it a little and says, "Whoops, Mom! She’s still failure to thrive! Got to get a few more calories in her," as though that isn’t the one thing you spend most of your life trying to do. As though I wasn’t chasing her around our house with a cup of Carnation Instant Breakfast already. So that’s the problem with that term. The diagnosis says “Failure To Thrive,” but what it sounds like, at least what it sounded like to me, is failure to feed.VirginiaThere’s so much inherent judgment and blame in that failure concept. The idea that we would be labeling a child’s body as a failure in some way is horrifying. And that we would be putting that on parents without giving the benefit of the doubt that, of course, this is a parent who loves their child and is trying so hard. It reminds me, too—on the flip side, obviously on Burnt Toast we talk a lot about kids in bigger bodies—and it’s so often the same thing. It’s the same judgment and the same assumption that somehow a parent needs to be informed of their child’s body, when you’re living in the world with this kid who’s not in the 50th percentile in whichever direction, so you’re getting the comments from strangers and family members and people all the time. People are watching your child eat or not eat. The idea of the medical establishment feeling like it’s their job to educate parents about this is something that I find problematic.DebiThere are things that we miss when all we’re focusing on is the amount of food or the number of calories, either too many or too few. You miss the the the mechanisms behind whatever you want to call it instead of Failure To Thrive—not meeting standard growth trajectory or some other kind of more descriptive term. The question should always be, if this is a problem, why do you think it’s a problem? And why do you think it’s happening? That is really hard for a parent to dig into, when all they can hear is that they’re doing it wrong.VirginiaIt’s narrowing the conversation in this really unhelpful way. The why is the piece that the parent can’t solve without the help of the medical establishment most of the time. If there is an underlying medical condition, of course you need doctors to be doing their best work to help you figure that out and treat that. Instead, when you’re put into this confrontational, adversarial relationship with doctors, then there’s this lack of trust, and no good comes of that.DebiIn both directions, right? We need to be able to find doctors that will work with us, but doctors also need to see us as parents as part of the team. If we’re shut down because we’re told we haven’t fed our kids enough Carnation Instant Breakfast that day, it’s hard to participate fully when you’re sort of drowning in shame. The erasure of self when you’re being called “mom” by someone who is not your child—it’s intense.VirginiaOh my gosh, I remember that from our years of hospital living with my older daughter. Yeah, just being “mom” and thinking, “I am Virginia. I’m a person beyond this.” And I get that doctors are busy and overworked—to be clear, Debi and I are also big fans of the doctors who have helped our kids. But taking that extra three seconds to learn someone’s name and look at them as a human is everything. DebiYeah, in a hospital setting I understand that every single person can’t learn my name, but a doctor who I’ve worked with, with my daughter, for three years should have written my name somewhere on the top of the chart.VirginiaSo, you and I both have this experience of the child who’s struggling to eat enough. And the medical system both blamed us and also did not have the answers. They’re saying “do Carnation Instant Breakfast,” as if that’s a newsflash. They don’t have any more revolutionary guidance for you. When did you realize that figuring out the food piece of this was falling completely on you? DebiIt happened several times that a medical professional would prescribe a specific diet to my daughter. She was on several restrictive diets over the years, trying to uncover what was going on. So they’d prescribe the diet and they’d hand me a packet of photocopied sheets with food information on them and then say, “Do you have any questions?” If I couldn’t think of something in the moment, reaching them later was really hard. There were actually several moments—because we’re a family that is vegetarian, most of these doctors didn’t want us to add meat to our daughter’s diet and complicate the process since it never had been in there before. But so many of these diets had a lot of meat in them. And when I would ask, "What would you replace meat with, in our case?" There would sort of be a blank stare and the question of had we’d ever tried beans. As vegetarians, we’ve heard of beans. We’ve tried them a few thousand times. So I think it was one day sitting on my kitchen floor with the photocopies and all my cookbooks, and realizing, there wasn’t another roadmap for me. Nobody was coming to rescue me. I was just going to have to figure this out. And partly, that’s why I wrote this book, because I think that’s a very common situation. If you enter any kind of online support group for any medical issue that has a diet associated with it, whether that’s families with children with type one diabetes or Celiac’s disease. It’s very peer supportive because there isn’t anything out there that we can find elsewhere. Feeling that it was all on me was overwhelming but also it meant I didn’t have to consult with anybody. It was quite empowering. Once I had my groove going, knowing that I could do it myself and seeing it as a creative challenge was sometimes really satisfying. In the course of all of this, as hard as it was, learning to cook this way helped me fall in love with food in a way that I couldn’t before. I had to see it as important fuel, and also love and nurturing. Doing that for my daughter was a way of doing it for myself, too.VirginiaThere was a phase in our journey when Violet was still on her feeding tube and we were doing a blended diet for the feeding tube, which is not something I recommend everyone do. It’s incredibly labor intensive. But at the place I was then, with our relationship around food, it was also the first opportunity I had to feel like I was feeding my child directly. And this is not to formula-shame, because formula also saved her life. But I had spent the first year and a half just pumping formula into her feeding tube. So to be able to take a more active role in cooking for her, even though she couldn’t yet eat by mouth, was healing. Whether or not that was an important part of her recovery, it was an important part of my recovery. So if you’re a parent in this kind of situation, finding the ways to find your confidence with it and find some joy in it is everything.DebiYeah, absolutely.VirginiaI wanted to talk a little more about the experience of being on these medically supervised diets. You talk about a couple of different ones in the book. We also had to do fat-free for a while, and that is a brutal diet to do with a small child. When you’re on one of these weird diets, people say really idiotic things to you about how your kid is eating and their own food stuff comes up. So you did touch on this a few times in the book, but I’m just curious to hear a little more about how diet culture intersected with all of this for you.DebiIt was bananas. I assumed that if an adult was on a diet like this, for medical reasons, that they would hear these kinds of things. I wouldn’t have been surprised. But I was horrified and shocked to hear people talking like this about my four-year-old to eight-year-old. There’s there’s one instance, I don’t talk about this in the book, but my daughter was on a six food elimination diet, which was no dairy, no soy, no eggs, no nuts, no wheat, and no fish—but we were already vegetarian. The results of that trial, of taking all of those things out, if it was successful, was that her esophagus would heal the damage it had sustained prior. And then we would be able to start adding things back in. But if she didn’t heal, then at the age of five, she would have been put on an elemental formula. Anybody who’s fed their babies elemental formula will recall the smell of elemental formula. And babies don’t know any different, but four-year-olds and five-year-olds certainly do. So we had been warned that if she ended up on this formula, there was a chance she wouldn’t be able to bring herself to take it in and she’d need an NG-tube or a G-Tube. I was really afraid of that. I know I would have been grateful for it if it had kept her alive and healthy, but I really hoped it wouldn’t happen. And a friend of mine said, "Well, the upside of that, if she ends up living on that kind of food for the rest of her life, is that she’s never going to be fat. And she’s never going to have, you know, all these emotional issues around food. At least you could know that." I remember where I was when she said it. I remember how it felt when she said it. My instinct was to kick her out of my house. I never wanted to talk to her again. I just couldn’t believe someone would say that there was an upside to never eating food again.VirginiaI’m just taking a minute with that one. This idea that being fat is something to be so avoided, even if the cost is actually eating food. That’s so wrong and harmful. DebiIt was awful. And I was angry, really angry in the moment, especially because I like food. I’m not afraid to say I think food is fantastic. I think it’s delicious. I think it’s adventure and joy, and love and community, and all of those things. I didn’t want my daughter to miss out on it. But when I really thought about it, I also felt really sad for my friend that her relationship with food was so fraught and so negative, that she could see the upside to never being able to eat again. I mean, it’s a sign of sickness to feel that way.VirginiaIt is a deep heartbreak to feel that alienated from food that the idea of injecting a formula into your stomach feels better, which is what life on a G-tube with elemental formula is. I also have so much gratitude for G-tubes and they are a valid way to feed somebody who needs to be fed that way. But you are missing out on a lot of life if that’s how you’re eating.DebiIt’s not that I think there wouldn’t have been joy, community, family, and love in my daughter’s life without eating regular food. Of course, there would have been. But it was a big part of our lives, as it is a big part of most people’s lives. I was hoping that it wouldn’t be necessary.There were other times that people said other crazy things to us about about her diets, including on that fat-free diet. Like when an administrator at her school crouched down and asked her how it was going. We both said it was awful and we only had three weeks left or whatever. And then this administrator asked my eight-year-old daughter to make a list of all of the foods she was eating so this person could then use that list to take off her holiday weight or whatever. I said “No!” loudly in that moment and pulled Sammi away from her. And I said, "This isn’t safe. Eating this way isn’t healthy for anybody. It’s only for right now because of the complications she has had in surgery, and it wouldn’t be good for you." Her response was, "Oh, I don’t care. As long as it helps me lose this weight." And she wasn’t the only person who talked like that. Not everybody talked like that to Sammi, but many people talk like that to me about it.VirginiaYeah, we got a lot of those comments, too. I remember combing the grocery store aisles because the other thing about doing a fat-free diet when I did it about five years ago, is fat-free is really out of vogue with diet culture in general. So it’s hard to find fat-free foods now. I’m combing the aisles looking for the one dusty box of Snackwell’s. Because what cookie can I give a three year old who can’t eat fat? And people were still saying, “Oh, lucky kid,” or something. It’s enraging. And, as you say, it’s also deeply depressing because it’s speaking to this larger dysfunction that we have normalized anti-fatness to the point that we will say these things to children. And, it’s minimizing their struggle. It’s minimizing their experience going through this really tough thing. DebiSure, and also what other people think of as a fat-free diet from the 80’s or whatever was actually not really fat-free. Because a real fat-free diet that’s used for the treatment of, for example in Sammi’s case, chylothorax—where there was a break in one of her thoracic ducts—means that you need to limit yourself to under half a gram of fat per serving. An example of something that has more than that is air-popped popcorn. Chickpeas. Edamame. All these are foods that we think of as really healthy and we don’t think of them as fatty, but that’s too much fat. Can you imagine feeding a child on that little fat? I mean, it has huge effects on their mental health. It’s awful to watch.VirginiaIt was also chylothorax in our case. At the time Violet’s favorite food was guacamole. My best friend, Amy Palanjian who runs Yummy Toddler Food, worked so hard to figure out a fat-free guacamole. She came up with a recipe with I think we were trying to use peas in Greek yogurt, like fat-free Greek yogurt. And Amy, thank you again for going down that rabbit hole for me! But it tasted terrible. I could see the betrayal on my child’s face because I was like, “This is a guacamole you can eat!” and it tasted nothing like what she was hoping to have. DebiWhat fat does to food, from a culinary perspective, is all kinds of things you don’t think about. Even that spritz of olive oil on the bottom of your pan helps the spices stick to the food. It creates a mess when you take fat away. On top of it, that little dietary fat in anybody’s diet affects how your brain operates. It really made me understand the 80’s in a totally different way. All these angry women pushing their carts through the grocery store with their Snackwell’s. Like, of course they were cranky.VirginiaI think the experience you and I both share is this understanding that these medical system failures are reinforcing this larger cultural failure, where we make feeding kids the main project and problem of mothers. In reading the book, I resonated with how much feeding Sammi became central to your identity during these years. It was something you were spending hours every week on and it really becomes your whole world. Yet it feels so unfair to reduce mothering just to food, just to the act of feeding kids. I’m curious to hear how you have reckoned with that relationship between food and mothering? How do you see these things relating to each other now?DebiI became the default person at home for some of the same reasons that a lot of women end up the default person at home. When doctors told us that Sammi would end up in the hospital with every cold and she really couldn’t go to daycare, I looked at the cost of a nanny and what I was making, and it would have been like a treadmill for as long as we needed a nanny. We didn’t make as much money as we would have spent on one. And also she was was breastfeeding and I was the one with the breasts, so it just made sense for me to be the one that was home. Then whoever was home with her had to be the one who learned best how to feed her. I will say also that my mother, who was the cook in our house when I was growing up, had said to me when I first quit my job and was worried that I was becoming boring and that all I was was a stay at home mom. It wasn’t enough for me in the moment. My mom said to just try to get into whatever it was I was doing at the time. So if that meant that was home and I just had to get into the mothering thing, I got into it. It was good advice for the moment for me. I really tried to get into it and find my little daily small wins in the kitchen. Sometimes that was a good strategy and sometimes it was not. But it did become my whole world for a long time. I don’t think that’s so different from the ways in which other parents who are parenting medically complex children have their whole world become how to move their child who’s in a wheelchair from place to place and advocate for better services. Parents who are parenting kids with any kind of disability spend a lot of energy and effort on the things that will make their children’s lives better. Because we love our children, you know? We want to make everything as easy as we can. So in that way, it was not so different from other ways in which parents get really dug in on their thing.VirginiaBecause the world’s not built to get the wheelchair from point A to point B, because the world’s not built to help kids learn to eat when they’re struggling in this way. The culture is set up so that in general, with parenthood, to assume that there’s going to be this undue burden on the mother most of the time. Then certainly, when you add medical complexity to that, it just pushes so many of us into this box. This is not about not loving our kids, but some larger systems in our culture that were there for us would also be really useful. We should also acknowledge, we both have a fair amount of privilege at play. And you in particular are, obviously, a very gifted chef, who is able to cook just from scratch to a degree that most people—myself included—cannot. Which is why things like formula are so important because not everyone can do the alternatives.DebiI would love to talk about that for a moment because the cost of feeding a child on one of these elimination diets is intense. It is wildly expensive. Our grocery bill at minimum doubled on that diet, on the six food elimination diet. I thought all the time about how could parents with less means ever do this successfully? I remember my daughter’s gastroenterologist saying, “Wow, you’ve really found a lot of great foods. You’ve really figured this out. We have so many patients are less compliant than you.” And I said, “Well, you know, it was really hard. It was like, at minimum a halftime job. Do all of your patients’ families have the time and energy for this?” And he said, “Well, probably not. But they should just do the formula then if they’re not going to do what you did.” That was horrifying to me. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a consultant in that office who could, say, take a family to the grocery store and walk them through the brands of gluten-free noodles that work on this diet. Here is a coconut milk yogurt that you can usually get on sale. VirginiaHis use of the word “compliant” is so interesting there, because it shows how much more marginalized parents—whether we’re talking about parents of color, lower income parents, parents with their own disabilities, fat parents, etc—get dismissed by the medical system and judged. And to bring it back to the whole “Failure To Thrive” concept, often that diagnosis is used as a justification for removing parental rights. For privileged white moms not so much. But if you’re a lower income mom of color, that’s gonna be a really terrifying diagnosis in a different way. DebiI remember, when my daughter was in the hospital for her final surgery, a friend of mine had his kid in the hospital getting treated for leukemia. He asked me how I had found the social work team, was I getting a lot of help. And I said, “What social work team?” And he said, “Oh, when we got the diagnosis, they were literally waiting outside the door.” You know, when you get a cancer diagnosis for your kid, there’s a trigger in the hospital system that just activates the Social Work team. And I thought, why are there not triggers like that for any diet that a doctor prescribes? Why is there not an immediate trigger for both nutrition and dietitian teams and a social worker? Because changing your diet like this, it changes your whole life. And it’s emotional. Food is love and emotion and care. When there isn’t an immediate set of supports, other than someone handing you a sheet of paper with a list of foods on it, it’s a recipe for failure. No pun intended.VirginiaUnfortunately, if there were those triggers, I would worry in our current system it would become a way to stigmatize parents struggling to follow the diet, right? Because maybe you’re going to bring in people who have these different biases that they haven’t reckoned with and are going to hold them against the parents. What you really want is a psychologist or social worker who’s trained in disordered eating and trauma-informed care. But that’s a whole level of support that I don’t think is even part of the puzzle, usually. So then that means the only people who can access it are people with other means. For other parents, who are in this boat now, it might be really helpful to hear a bit about how you were able to hold on to your identity during that time —as Debi and not as the anonymous “Mom” the doctors talk through. Or. how have you worked to find your way back to that?DebiYeah, I think probably during that time, not so much. I might have been indignant. I certainly was lonely, sometimes. But I had no time to be involved in the things that would have made me feel more like me. The exception would be that I did have a regular band that I played in. I’m an old-time Quebecois fiddler. I was lucky to get out and do that, usually once every week or two for an evening or an afternoon. That was great. It was actually great to be in that world where not everybody was even a parent. They didn’t really know or understand my kids or my situation. So it was a little bit of an escape. But other than that, no. Feeding Sammi was the main job. I certainly worked and when I look back, I’m kind of amazed at the places and situations in which I worked. In hospital rooms, waiting outside surgeries, or in the midst of 500 other things. I would have a computer on the counter, finishing a website for a client while also soaking some weird starch in some weird liquid to try to form the ingredient for some weird thing I was trying to make that night. So you know, I fit it all in. But I was probably mostly running on an autopilot, as I think a lot of a lot of parents are. I’m lucky, I’m so lucky, our family is so lucky that in the end, Sammi was curable. Sammi’s issue, it turned out, really had nothing to do with what she was eating at all. And so once we resolved the problem fully, I didn’t have to do this anymore. That took some getting used to: Trusting myself, trusting her, knowing that she would eat what she needed to eat and she was capable of it. And that I didn’t have to push. It took some time. I think writing this book was the thing that brought me back to myself, to appreciate all that we had achieved together, Sammi and I, and to appreciate all that I had survived. And to appreciate that, in the end, both of us are thriving.VirginiaI look back on those years of my parenting and wonder how I was functioning as a person. I think that’s normal. I think it’s good to know that it won’t be that way forever. In my own family’s case, it’s not a curable condition. It’s something we continue to live with. But there have still been ways to find myself again. We hear all the time, you have to take care of yourself to help everyone else and whatever. And it’s sort of a garbage message a lot of the time. But it is true that you cannot care for a kid in any circumstance, but especially not a complicated circumstance, if you aren’t holding on to one little piece of yourself. Even if it’s just and every two weeks band practice. Butter For Your Burnt ToastDebiWe are loving this season of Kids Baking Championship on the Food Network! This is one of our family favorites. It is a baking competition show, but all the contestants are kids. This season is the youngest group of bakers ever! There are some as young as eight or nine. They are making amazing baked goods that I could never achieve here in my 40’s. I absolutely love this show. I feel like sometimes these baking shows were what brought me back to the creative and joyful part of cooking. I learned to make layer cakes and eclairs and macarons and all kinds of other fancy things from watching these baking shows.VirginiaI love that! I want to watch it with my eight-year-old because we’re at the stage where she’s still a cautious eater and when she knows how to make something herself it is hugely empowering. I think her seeing other kids baking and loving food would be good. I’m definitely gonna watch that. That’s a great recommendation. Thank you!DebiIt’s very, very sweet. No pun intended there either.VirginiaWe love a good food pun here, obviously. My recommendation is for folks who are, like Debi and I, in northern climates. Probably the ice and snow is making you crazy, even though it’s March. If you have a garden or anywhere you can grow things, I recommend you get some poppy seeds. You just throw the poppy seeds out into your flower bed. You don’t have to dig holes. You don’t have to do anything fancy, you just literally scatter them around. Come July, you will thank me when you have spectacular poppies. I just sowed mine and I have a couple of raised beds. I just did the poppy seeds last weekend right on top of the snow and it’s just this little moment. I try to do it around this time every year when I’m giving up all hope that spring will return because it gives me that minute of like, okay, it’s coming back. Then I look at pictures of last year’s poppies and I feel really happy. So if you are a gardener or a garden-aspiring-person, poppy seeds is my recommendation. Well, Debi, thank you so much for being here! I loved this conversation so much. Listeners, you need to get Kitchen Medicine right now! Debi, how can we follow your work?DebiYou can follow me on on Twitter at @growthesunshine—my Sammi’s nickname is Sammi Sunshine—and also on Instagram @growthesunshine. If you have ordered the book, send me a message on Twitter or Instagram and let me know that you have. I will dedicate one of my quirky weird kitchen tools to you with a little story about it up on my Instagram account. VirginiaThose have been so fun to see. You have the most amazing collection of kitchen tools. Thank you for being here!---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.

These are the folks who are going to a state capitol and deciding whether to expand Medicaid or deciding whether there’s one abortion clinic left in the state or deciding whether there’s LGBTQ protections for folks on the job. It’s wild that there aren’t more eyes on it, but it’s not the way we’re trained.Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fat phobia, parenting and health. Today I am chatting with Melissa Walker, who is the head of Giving Circles at The States Project. This is a little bit of an unusual episode for Burnt Toast! I know you come here for the analysis of diet culture and anti-fat bias, but today we’re gonna save democracy. I am so excited to launch the Burnt Toast Giving Circle, which will raise money to flip state legislatures in battleground states. If you have been in a rage about the state of our country and you want to do something about it, I am hoping this will be your thing! Because together we can have a huge impact. I’m setting a goal that our can raise $10,000 — which is 1,000 Burnt Toast listeners giving ten bucks each. There are a lot more than a thousand people who listen to this podcast and read this newsletter. So even if you’ve only got five dollars or two dollars to give, please join us. And if you want to give more, that is great, too. (And keep listening, we’ve got more ideas for how you can get even more involved.) Episode 34 TranscriptVirginiaWhen I think about the political issues that are keeping me up at night, it’s stuff like: What’s going to happen when we lose Roe? Why did Build Back Better fail so spectacularly around paid family leave and child care? What is happening in Ukraine right now? Thinking nationally about politics is how I’ve been trained to think about politics. So, let’s start by helping people (me) understand why does state government matter so much? MelissaState governments have really been overlooked for a very long time. When I started looking into this work, which honestly was in late November 2016, I started to understand that most folks don’t really know who their state representatives are. When I looked up who my state senator was, I had never heard of him. I did not have eyes on the people going to Albany for me. I started to understand that everything that I was worried about, and everything that I cared about, in terms of our country was actually being controlled in state legislatures and not in Washington, DC. State legislatures are in charge of everything from environmental policy to education funding to gun safety to healthcare to civil rights. They’re also in charge of the very core of our democracy: Voting rights are decided state by state. State legislatures decide whether to suppress or expand voting. They have the power to gerrymander. They are drawing the district lines that decide who goes to the state legislature, who goes to Congress, who goes to Washington DC. So I started to see that there were all these kitchen table issues being decided in state legislatures and that they were also incredible tools of federal power. A lot of things started to make sense to me that hadn’t before. I started to think about things like my home state of North Carolina, where the bathroom bill passed, and I started to understand that lawmakers in Raleigh did that. Things like the Stand Your Ground gun law in Tallahassee that let Trayvon Martin’s murderer go free (and then passed in 25 other states)—that was lawmakers in Florida, and then in those other states. And in Flint, Michigan, I realized, oh, that’s a Lansing problem. That’s not a Washington DC problem. VirginiaThis is blowing my mind. Why do you think we are so trained to focus on Washington? Why am I now having this epiphany? Why don’t we think about states?MelissaWell, it’s complicated. There are really 50 mini Congresses in this country and they’re deciding things state-by-state. These are local races. They do not get national attention. The truth is that there is someone who’s been paying attention to state legislatures and it’s the radical right. They’ve been organizing for state legislative power for a very long time. From 2010 to 2016, we lost nearly 1,000 state legislative seats. And in those states where Republican majorities took over, people’s lives got bad. They defunded education. They put in right to work laws. They gutted environmental protections. And when people’s lives got bad, they didn’t say, oh, that must be my state senator, I’m gonna go down to Main Street and talk to them, because they have an office there (because they do). Most people don’t know who their state senators are, even maybe that they have one. So they blame what they could see on what they hear about on the news every day, which is Washington DC, often the president, sometimes something about Congress. The roots of Trumpism were being seeded in state legislatures. It’s a body that operates in darkness and it really has been overtaken by special interests.VirginiaIt makes me think a lot about the role of the media here. You and I both come from journalism and those headlines are always Washington-based. Local media is so decimated right now. Local newspapers are so underfunded, and non-existent in so many places, that they’re not able to play that crucial role. And I mean, how many times as a national magazine editor did you say, “That story is too local, that’s not going to be interesting to our national readers.?” It happens all the time. Melissa When we hear “Oh, Texas just passed this law limiting abortion,” people say, “Well! That Ted Cruz is terrible.” And this law has nothing to do with Ted Cruz. This is lawmakers in Austin who are in the state legislature and they only officially have session every two years. Something that people don’t know about state legislators is that in 40 states, it’s a part time job. It pays very, very little. These are the folks who are going to a state capitol and deciding whether to expand Medicaid or deciding whether there’s one abortion clinic left in the state or deciding whether there’s LGBTQ protections for folks on the job. This is where this stuff has been decided. It’s wild that there aren’t more eyes on it, but it’s not the way we’re trained.VirginiaFor those of us who live in blue states, why should we care about the laws in other states? MelissaWell, states are meant to be laboratories for democracy. Like marriage equality going from state to state to federal or healthcare going from Hawaii to Massachusetts to becoming the ACA. They really are meant to be incubators of good policy, ideally. Right now, a lot of states are incubators for voter suppression bills and bans on choice and bans on trans kids playing sports. Those laboratories for democracy should not be allowed to be laboratories for autocracy. We should also care about state legislatures because they are immense tools of federal power. As I said, state legislatures in most states have the power to draw the district lines that decide who goes to Congress. So they are promoting their own party in many cases in the drawing of those lines and making it so that the folks in power at the federal level are coming from from the party of their choice. They also control voting laws. So if you care who wins the presidency, you should care whether votes are limited in certain states or not. The last thing I’ll say is, if you care about the Supreme Court, you should care about state legislatures. Because the Supreme Court does not write laws, they rule on laws, many of which are written in state legislatures—sometimes explicitly written in state legislatures to rise up and challenge a Supreme Court ruling, like in the case of the Mississippi law that’s currently challenging Roe v. Wade.VirginiaThis feels like something we should have been covering in 10th grade social studies and we definitely didn’t. Of course, some of my listeners are going to be like, “Why are we talking about state legislatures on a podcast about diet culture?” So we’re going to connect those dots for everyone right now. Yes, this is a podcast about anti-fat bias and diet culture, and there are a lot of reasons why people don’t realize how political those issues are. You know, we think in terms of body positivity and body image and we don’t think enough about ending weight discrimination, which is absolutely a legal and social justice issue. And a really great example of the potential of state legislature is Massachusetts, which right now as we’re recording this, has a bill pending that would prohibit size discrimination. That’s one of the first places in the country that would be formally legislating against fatphobia. I’m curious if that’s at all on your radar. As you said, states are incubators. So is this the place where we could be getting this work done?MelissaAlthough we know that federal law does prohibit employers from firing employees on the basis of race, color, age, gender, religion, or national origin, those laws don’t provide any protection for weight discrimination, even though obviously, there’s plenty of evidence that it’s a real phenomenon. And that’s also true for LGBTQ+ discrimination—federal law does not protect against that, but certain state laws do. Many states have made progress on that front. But so far, the only state that I found that has an explicit law on the books that forbids discrimination and employment based on weight is Michigan. So Michigan has a law that passed in 1976. It also forbids discrimination on the basis of age and height, but that is the only state at this point that has that on the books. I believe Massachusetts would be the second.VirginiaWell, way to go Michigan! There was some amazing fat activism happening in the 70s and I’m guessing a lot of those folks were in Michigan and got that done. And I guess the point we want to make here is that another reason to be focusing on state legislatures is that there’s real potential for this issue to get traction in states with your state senator down on Main Street, where you can go have a conversation about this, as opposed to ever getting this issue to have traction in Congress.MelissaLooking up who your state reps are, knowing them, and then making them people you that you talk to and really engage with and advocate with is a great thing. State reps will take your call. They will take your meeting. They are not as busy as your federal reps, and they are interested in having an engaged voting bloc—or they should be. You have a lot of influence there. I’ll also say that this is a method that’s been used by really big movements. After Sandy Hook, when federal gun legislation just didn’t move, Moms Demand Action focused on state legislatures. That’s why you may have seen the Moms Demand folks out there in their red t-shirts, gathered in state capitals. Because they know the only way to move on this right now is state by state by state by state. They’ve been able to pass red flag laws in a lot of states and get things done. So it is definitely a way in. I would also like to argue that it is a more foundational shift than changing federal law, because when you shore up something at a state by state by state level, you’re really shoring it up. A law like the Affordable Care Act, that is a federal health care law but twelve states still haven’t expanded Medicaid. You’ve got these majorities in states that are in charge of implementing federal law and if they don’t have that law as part of their state priority, it’s just not always a guarantee. So it’s really great to shore things up at the foundations.VirginiaAnd the the legal and social justice issues that come up around size, things like parental rights, health care access—all of these really are local issues. These are issues where you need to see the change made in your school or in your local child welfare office, or in the doctor’s offices in your community. Okay, let’s talk a little bit about what is happening this year. Talk to us about what states are you most worried about or focused on? Where do we have the chance to have some real impact?MelissaAbsolutely. So, yes, the midterms are coming. There will be so much national media focused on Congress, on the US House, the US Senate—and, of course, those are important. This year, we have so far identified six states where we think we can be most impactful and those are Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania. And then Maine, where we want to protect a blue majority, and Nebraska where we’re trying to defend against a Republican supermajority. In the first states I mentioned, we are trying to change the balance of power in the legislature to flip those states. What’s interesting about these races is, as I mentioned, they’re still local. They’re often won on the margins and we’re very, very close in states like Arizona, where just one seat in each State Chamber would tie the chamber and two seats in each State Chamber would flip the chamber. Michigan, it’s the same low numbers: three seats in each chamber would tie; four seats in each chamber would flip. After the 2020 census, we’re seeing in certain states that we have fairer maps. In Michigan it’s because of a ballot initiative that instituted the drawing of maps by an independent commission. VirginiaWait, I just need to pause there. That’s new that they’re not always drawn by an independent commission?MelissaIt’s true.VirginiaOkay, taking a breath with that.MelissaI know. They’re drawn by the legislative majority who, of course, want to secure their own power. VirginiaThat’s not at all screwed up. So yeah, good job, Michigan!MelissaSo, we’re seeing better maps in a couple of states. These are places where we really see the potential to shift power. And, I will say this: It is often cheaper to change the balance of power in a State Chamber than it is to win a single competitive congressional seat. Because congressional races cost millions and millions of dollars and state legislative races don’t. It is absolutely a place where there is major bang for your buck, in terms of trying to affect the outcomes.VirginiaWe are distracted by those congressional campaigns and by the whole federal narrative when this is where real work is happening. MelissaOne moment to define it is that in 2020, we saw Sarah Gideon run against Susan Collins in Maine for the Senate seat. She finished her campaign with $15 million left over. Which was much bigger than The States Project’s entire budget in 2020 to work on twelve state legislatures. We know that these big races get a lot of attention and a lot of emotional giving, right? You’re angry at Susan Collins, you’re gonna give money to her opponent. You’re angry at Mitch McConnell. You’re angry at Lindsey Graham. And those races tend to kind of eat up people’s emotions and have them just doing that panic giving. And that’s not strategic political giving.VirginiaIt’s not. It’s just what I do at five in the morning when I’m angry. So, panic giving is not actually sound political strategy?MelissaRight. But it’s hard to know where to dig in. Those are the places that are in the spotlight. That’s why I think it’s really exciting to do something like a Giving Circle where folks are coming together and have this strategic focus on the specific district in a state that it’s going to take to change the balance of power.VirginiaYes. Let’s talk about how this works. What is a Giving Circle? And how is the Burnt Toast Giving Circle going to either help flip a state or shore up a majority? Walk us through the process.MelissaGiving Circles are groups of people who come together to raise resources to try to change the balance of power in a state. Every Giving Circle starts with one person who says, “Okay, I’m raising my hand, I want to start this, I want to do it,” and then engaging the other people in their orbit, whether it’s neighbors, friends, listeners, readers. And saying to them, “Will you do this with me?” And what it really is, is a math problem. Because again, like I said, small dollars are hugely impactful in these races. When a Giving Circle comes together and raises $10,000—that’s 100 people giving $100—that kind of money can be incredibly impactful in a state legislative race. And that is what we’re seeing when we have giving circles come together. We have giving circles who choose Michigan and giving circles who choose Arizona, and some giving circles raise a lot more and some giving circles raise less. But everyone together walks with power. That’s one of the most incredible parts of being part of the giving circle. In my giving circle, I know that there are individual donors who give $10 and there are individual donors who give $10,000. But we all come together and walk into a state with a total that makes an impact. And that’s what we’re trying to do.VirginiaThat is very powerful. So for the Burnt Toast Giving Gircle, I am the person raising my hand saying I am doing this and I want Burnt Toast listeners and readers to all join in. There are way more than a hundred of you, like many times that, so we have the potential to raise some real money here. And Burnt Toast, the newsletter, is going to match the first $1000 that we raise. And at some point we are going to pick which state the money’s going to—right, Melissa? That’s phase two of this?MelissaYes, absolutely. The second piece of this is which state from The States Project’s targets do we want to choose? And that’s a decision that giving circles often make together through a vote, or sometimes the leadership team comes up with a decision. Either way, it’s participatory and fun. Then you get to dig into the stories that are coming out of the states that you choose and you get to see the landscape and the stakes and the opportunity. What the balance of power is, which districts do we need? Which candidates are we with? That’ll happen after the primaries. At some point, another Giving Circle leader said to me, “Oh, I get it, we’re a giving circle, we hit our goal, and then we become a learning circle. And we learn all this together.”VirginiaYes! I want it to be a participatory process. I want everyone who wants to join in to join in today and give money. Then in future podcast installments, we will talk about these different states. We will have some sort of poll. I think that’s really important. I want everyone to feel like we all are making this decision together and that we all have a stake in this. MelissaOne more thing, just in terms of practical actions for the Giving Circle, if someone’s thinking like, Okay, I want to donate but maybe I also want to join in somehow in a deeper way. There are a couple of things. If you feel moved, like “Oh my gosh, we’ve got to focus on state legislatures and I want to help Burnt Toast get over the top,” I would ask that folks think about: Can I give some and can I raise $1,000 for the Burnt Toast Giving Circle? Raising $1,000 for the Burnt Toast giving circle means asking 25 people for $40 or asking 40 people for $25. It’s really a math problem. De-emotionalizing the money part of it and saying, “I have a mission. I really believe in trying to change the balance of power and state legislatures for all these reasons. And I’m going to talk to my friends about it” does two things: Hopefully it raises $1,000 for the circle. It also helps people understand that they should be looking in this direction and thinking about state legislatures because part of our goal is to just get more people reading the news in a different way. When they read about the Texas abortion ban, they’re not cursing Ted Cruz. They’re finding out the name of the Texas Republican legislators who passed that bill. VirginiaIf there’s anyone who wants to take it to that level, I can help with that. We’ll put some language in the transcript for this episode that you can forward around to your twenty-five to forty friends. Obviously, sharing this episode will be a great way to do that, but I’ll try to make it real easy with some bullet points to help with this. I’m really excited. [VSS note: Scroll down for a template you can copy and paste!]MelissaWe are in this moment when there are so many kind of big doom and gloom articles about the death of democracy and what we’re really facing here. And I am glad those articles are being written because they’re absolutely true. We are on the precipice. We are on the brink of a really big moment. But we need to not get tired in that moment. And those articles can make you feel like you want to lie down on your couch or pull a blanket over your head. Let’s be honest, like, how could you possibly plug in and do anything about what’s happening? And how could one little person do something?But here’s the thing, those articles don’t light a path to action, they just lay out a big plan by the radical right to steal the presidency in 2024. If you read them carefully, you’ll see that they’re laying out a plan to steal the presidency in 2024 through state legislatures. So the answer is: It’s one State House seat in Arizona and one state Senate seat. It’s three State House seats in Michigan and three state Senate seats. It’s 12 State House seats in Pennsylvania on better maps than we’ve had in a decade. I could go on and on. But there is a path to action here and it is not as big and scary as federal races. It’s about getting involved at this level and understanding that when you get involved at this level, you are working on the foundations of democracy, the place that is starting to crumble and the place that we have to shore up. So I’m excited that the Burnt Toast Giving Circle is lighting that path to action. Butter For Your Burnt ToastMelissaSo at the risk of being a one trick pony here, I will say that the the book that I’m currently recommending is a book called Laboratories for Autocracy by David Pepper. He is an amazing former head of the Ohio state party. He has really laid out why state legislatures matter so much and what has been going on in them for a very long time. So I’m really loving that book and recommending it. He’s doing some amazing organizing around it as well. And I’m also going to recommend a podcast called PoliticsGirl, because, yeah, she’s wonderful. She talks about politics in very tangible terms. And she always brings us so much hope. Her drumbeat is hope and action. I think we can all use a little bit of that right now.VirginiaOh, man, we really can. Those are great recommendations. My listeners are often much smarter than me, but I have definitely approached this whole conversation with an awareness of how much learning I have to do about these issues. I think that is a common experience for a lot of us who have been just doing the panic giving and the raging. So, if you’re listening and you’re new to this, we are all learning together, and I really appreciate these recommendations to help with the learning. My recommendation is going to be totally off topic as they very often are. My recommendation is, if you have an injury, you should go to physical therapy and actually do your exercises. Because as loyal listeners know, in the last month I both threw out my back and sprained my ankle. It was a real good January. And I am now going to physical therapy twice a week. It’s kind of amazing how well it’s working. I was feeling very much like, well I’m over 40 now and this is my life. My body just hurts all the time. The thing about physical therapy exercises is they’re super boring and unglamorous. It’s not a workout where you’re like, “Wow, I crushed that. That was an amazing experience.”MelissaOh my gosh, I feel like this is a metaphor for state legislature.VirginiaIt kind of is! Okay, we’re really in sync, even though I didn’t intend it. It’s very boring, like I’m gonna move my ankle 20 times to the left, and then 20 times to the right.MelissaBut then what do you have? You have a working ankle! Amazing! Big changes!VirginiaThe foundation of my body’s democracy! Obviously, physical therapy is not accessible to everyone due to all of the problems with our healthcare system. But I just want to say if you’re struggling with any kind of injury and not dealing with it, as I did not deal with my back pain for about three years, it turns out that actually dealing with these things is a good thing to do. So that’s my little tip for the week. Melissa, thank you so much for being here. This was a great conversation, and I’m really excited about where we’re going to go with this. Tell our listeners how they can learn more about The States Project and your work.MelissaAbsolutely. So if you go to The States Project you’ll be able to read more about what we do, look at our target states, dig in and see the balance of power in each State Chamber and go as deep as you want. So we’ll be there.VirginiaAwesome. And again, here is the link for the Burnt Toast Giving Circle. So click that right now and make your donation. Thank you so much for listening to Burnt Toast!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.Sample EmailFeel free to copy and paste this, or make it your own! Hi friends! Wow, so things are terrible right now. Texas is investigating the parents of trans kids. States are shutting down abortion access all around us. Voter’s rights are decimated in too many states. Ukraine. And, although this year is not a presidential election, it’s never too soon to start worrying about what will happen in 2024. Our democracy is on a precipice right now, in so many ways. I’ve been trying to figure out what I can possibly do and one path to a better democracy, and a better world, has become clear: We need Blue majorities in as many state legislatures as possible. Abortion rights, trans rights, healthcare access, voters’ rights and so many other issues are decided by state governments—and in ways that then determine who makes decisions at the federal level. I’ve decided to raise $1000 for the Burnt Toast Giving Circle, which will be working to flip a state legislature in November. Small dollars and early money make all the difference in these races, which are usually incredibly tight and won on the margins. But that also means we have a chance to make a huge impact. I just need 100 of you to give $10, or 40 of you to give $25, or 25 of you to give $40 and we’re there. To learn more about the importance of state legislatures, and the power of giving circles, here’s a podcast episode from Burnt Toast creator Virginia Sole-Smith in conversation with Melissa Walker, head of Giving Circles for the States Project. I hope you’ll join us! PS. Any questions? I’m keeping comments open to everyone this week, so if you have questions or suggestions on how we can make our Giving Circle as successful as possible, post them here and Melissa or I will weigh in! (I do this with some trepidation and will be moderating closely for toxicity, so be cool! We’re all working towards the greater good here.)

I think any time you’re wondering, “is it a diet?” And they have a bridal program? The answer is obviously yes.We’re doing something a little different with this month’s bonus episode! I polled folks on Twitter and Insta about the diet trends that are bugging you most right now, so I could spend this episode deconstructing their marketing. And also just, um, reacting to the nonsense? My algorithm is a mess now, but that’s how committed I am to helping you sort the bullshit from the… other kinds of bullshit. We’ve got mysterious green powders, we’ve got Internet doctor scams, we’ve even got a gizmo you can breath into every day for a little dose of oxygenated judgment!So enjoy this preview. And if you’d like to listen to the whole thing, you’ll need to be a Burnt Toast subscriber. It’s just $5 per month or $50 for the year. Producing a weekly podcast and newsletter requires a significant investment of time and resources from several talented people, and paid subscriptions make all of our work possible. Subscriber support also makes it possible for me to keep most Burnt Toast content free and accessible to all, and to offer comp subscriptions to those who need them. (If that’s you, just email and let me know, no questions asked!) In addition to getting these fun monthly bonus episodes (with transcripts!), you’ll also become a part of the Burnt Toast community with commenting privileges and full access to my Ask Virginia columns, and our awesomely helpful Friday Threads. You can read more about my decision to add paid subscriptions to the newsletter here.Thanks for supporting independent, anti-diet journalism!

I think any time you’re wondering, “is it a diet?” And they have a bridal program? The answer is obviously yes.Hello and welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. It’s time for your February bonus episode! We’re doing something a little different this month, because I’ve realized that bonus episodes are a great chance to play around with some different formats and workshop ideas that may become regular episodes. So please tell me if you like this and think it’s genius or if you don’t ever want me to do this again. One quick note: I am not going to link to any of the programs we discuss today because these are not companies that need your clicks. Corinne and I debated and decided that we would screenshot things because it may be helpful (or just more entertaining) to see what I see while you listen/read the transcript. But if seeing lots of diet marketing is not safe for you, this is def one to skip! Episode 33 TranscriptToday’s episode experiment is called: “Is it a diet? The answer is always yes.” I wanted to do this because I got a press release a few weeks ago with the subject line, “Don’t be triggered. The word cleanse is in here, but it’s not what you think.” This was clearly a publicist who followed me enough to know that I would immediately delete a straightforward diet pitch. (Which is not most publicists, to be honest with you. They still send so many!) But she thought that she could get me to pay attention to her brand this way. Of course, it worked in the sense that I opened her email. But it was exactly what I thought. You were not allowed to eat sugar-containing fruit or any other sugar. Monk fruit was okay. So that feels accessible and realistic! It doesn’t matter if you’re saying it’s not about weight loss. When your cleanse involves that many restrictions, it’s obviously about weight loss. I hear this from you guys all the time, too: “My mother or my sister or my friend is talking about this new plan. Please explain! Is it a diet? Or is it okay?” As I wrote in January, it’s always a fucking diet. So I asked you on Twitter and Instagram for the diets people are hearing about most right now. And because I am not someone who actively participates in diet culture, these brands are actually all new to me. So I’m going to go on each of these websites and give you my hot take.One other note: I’m not doing the diets that claim to analyze your microbiome through your poop samples, or to analyze your blood to tell you what to eat. Number one, we know those are diets because they advertise much more clearly that they are diets. Number two, they just require a little more digging and research to explain why they are selling bad science. Which I can do another time. But what I really want to do here is show you how to spot the bullshit when these ads come at you. Because once you kind of learn what you’re looking for, it jumps out pretty fast. Athletic GreensOkay, I’m on their website. It says, “Welcome to the essentialist nutrition movement.” So that is a sentence that means nothing and yet sounds very exciting, I guess? There’s a lot of video of beautiful people drinking green juice and sweating and pouring their green powder in the water. Riding a bike in some beautiful location, lots of yoga, powder spilling everywhere. This does not sell me because that just looks messy. But that’s the first impression. “Made from the highest quality ingredients, obsessively improved based on science.” Obviously, obviously. Right away, I’m seeing a bunch of things that sort of look like official certifications but mean nothing. “NSF certified sport,” “52 iterations and counting.” That just means they went through 52 recipes before they found when they wanted to sell. But the font and the way they formatted it makes it look like it’s some kind of official seal. Once you have tried your recipe 52 times you get a sticker! Here’s the part that gives it all away: Their tagline is, you’re going to need a smaller cabinet. Because you don’t need food now? Because you have Athletic Greens? I don’t know, I’m not really looking to evolve beyond food. And holy shit, you guys, a one time purchase is $99? Don’t tell me that’s $3 per serving! Come on, that’s garbage. Okay, so this is clearly nonsense. It is overpriced, overproduced. You’re buying green powder in a very expensive bag. Clean, comprehensive, essential… there’s a long list of everything that’s not in it. They haven’t actually told me yet what 75 ingredients that are in it. Oh, and then of course Tim Ferriss loves it. So, there you go. We don’t really need to say anything more about it. Some people who are really into working out do like these for recovery or while they’re working out. Look, if these drinks taste good to you… why? Are you drinking other things? There are other things that taste better, I promise. But if they legitimately taste good to you or make you feel good, fine, have at it. If you are someone who has $99 to spend on powder, your life sounds like it’s going pretty well for you. But nothing about this is going to wildly improve your health. Nothing about this is going to guarantee sustained weight loss, other than the fact that they told you to get a smaller cabinet because you don’t need food now. So yeah, if you stop eating food, you’ll lose weight. But I think I probably don’t need to explain to this audience why that’s not a great plan. SakaraOkay, this is another powder-y one. Sakara sounds like a nice made up word that’s supposed to invoke some sort of spirituality or indigenous culture, but is probably not those things. I’m feeling white women, possibly Gwyneth-Paltrow-investor-type vibes here. These seem to be functional foods supplements. Okay, let’s pause on functional foods. All food is functional, in that you can eat it. What other function is there, to a food? Is it supposed to also do your taxes? They’re gonna say it’s like stuff about gut health. I mean, you just know, with a brand like this, gut health is coming. But really, the function of food is to be eaten, so if you can eat it, it is a functional food. If it is impossible to chew or swallow, then I guess it would be lacking in function. Lots of pictures of beautiful produce, very clean labeling, very high-end packaging. “Nutritionally designed, plant rich…” Nutritionally designed? This is just word salad. They’re selling me salad with word salad. “Organic meals delivered to your door ready to eat.” That sounds like it’s going to be budget friendly and accessible, but let’s click to learn more. “Clean eating designed for results.” So here they’re not even pretending it’s not a diet. It says right away “Reduce bloat, shed excess weight,” and then all the bullshit stuff like, “boost energy, increase focus, improve skin clarity.” How do you even measure those things? I’m seeing a quote from Vogue. Good job Vogue, always on the right side of history. This just looks like fancy small food. Small meals with lots of greens. So again, I’m not surprised if they achieve temporary weight loss because there’s significant caloric restriction happening. And I’m not even seeing pricing. They’re really burying the pricing here. It’s going to be expensive because this whole website is expensive. “Our meal delivery includes up to three meals a day,” so no pressure guys, if you’re eating fewer meals than that. Like if you’ve also got Athletic Greens and you’ve thrown out half your kitchen. Also: Detox tea for daily use and our potent complete probiotic. You knew it was gonna be about gut health. There we go. We found it. So this is just a meal service diet. There are many of these. This is not a new model. Meal delivery programs have been around for decades. They change their packaging. They look fancy. This one has Goop-y vibes, so that’s clearly a big part of it. This is like white lady Instagram all over the place… and OH, it’s an MLM! Okay. Okay, I got there. I got to the Ambassador Page and here we are applying to become an ambassador. Grow your income by earning commissions on new client referrals. No cap on Commissions. Share an exclusive discount towards Sakara meal programs and products to help others live the Sakara life. Chance to earn monthly product bonuses. Align yourself with a brand rooted in cutting edge nutrition science and healing wisdom. So, either it’s a full-on MLM or it’s recruiting Instagram influencers to advertise for them and just be paid in commission as opposed to actually being paid for the value of their audience. Either way, we’re screwing women out of money and getting them to market a diet. So that’s neat. Feel good about this one. Also, please note that they definitely have a level two detox in case that first meal that we talked about didn’t sound sad enough for you. And of course, there’s a bridal program. I think anytime you’re wondering, “Is it a diet?” And they have a bridal program? The answer is obviously yes. Anything marketing to brides is always around how can we make you as thin and white and blonde as possible. So, that’s Sakara. Athletic Greens feels more gender neutral. I would say probably more guys are going to get into that one. Sakara is definitely playing into white lady femininity bullshit. So there’s an extra ick factor for me. But they’re one and the same, I’d say. Second NatureThis just looks like a Noom knockoff. It’s an app. There are recipes. I think it’s a meal delivery service? No, it’s a recipe service. Okay, you don’t get the food, but for $60 a month you get a “tailored 12 week program with digital support, full access to our app and platform, and hundreds of exclusive recipes.” So it’s like Noom with a lot of recipes, I think.  And there is this: We don’t believe in strict, rigid diets that demand unrealistic lifestyle changes. There’s a good reason why many have cycled through different diets with varying degrees of success. If a new regime demands too much, there’s a greater chance the wheels will come off, and you’ll be right back where you started.This is right out of the Noom playbook. There is a belief in the diet industry right now that if they get out in front of the whole “dieting is icky ” thing and say, “It’s not a diet. We also hate diets,” that you will accept that. It’s really patronizing.I can see the menu for the day they’ve suggested is peanut butter, jam, and oats for breakfast; courgette boats (that zucchini for Americans) for lunch—so a zucchini with some cheese in it; and then butter chicken for dinner. I’m seeing no snacks. I’m seeing no sides. I’m seeing not enough calories to keep a toddler fed. Yeah, I’m gonna say it’s a diet. I think this is just European Noom. Except it’s obviously here in the US, too. SunbasketSunbasket really tries not to be a diet. It’s marketed in the vein of Blue Apron, and certainly you hear about it on a lot of podcasts, in the same way that those other meal delivery kits are advertised. They’re also known for being very big on eco stuff, like compostable trays. I’m seeing “zero mess, zero cleanup” because the meal “arrives on a heat safe tray.” So you can get pre-made meals or you can get meal kits where you cook from the ingredients they send. But when you’re on Sunbasket’s website, you get really quickly to: “Meal delivery for any diet. Choose a home meal delivery plan for your taste or mix and match with our any of our weekly recipes.” They cover paleo, vegetarian, “lean and clean,” gluten-free, carb conscious, Mediterranean, diabetes-friendly, and pescatarian. So, this is a gray area. Sunbasket is not a diet in that they’re not going to tell you how many calories a day to eat. But, they are marketing themselves as compatible with those diets. So their recipes have presumably been checked for calorie counts. I don’t love this. Even though I could just choose the “Chef’s Choice” option and not go for any of those diet options, it’s a big bummer that so many of the recipes are falling into those diet categories. They’re assuming that people are on these diets and they’re not challenging that concept at all. This is not to hate on meal delivery kits. I think they make a lot of sense for a lot of folks. But I don’t feel good about giving this much money to a brand that’s happily diet-promoting in this way. I mean, there is no perfect brand. How can you really do good as a consumer under late stage capitalism? You can’t. But I don’t love it. I don’t feel great about it. I also think about not only what my dollars are supporting, but also: What is it going to do to me mentally when I click on to their website every week to see their recipes and encounter all this diet talk? That feels like it’s just going to be a bummer and mess with my head every week in a way. This would be a hard pass for me. But I will say it’s not quite the same. It’s definitely not not a diet. CalibrateThis one is interesting because it seems to be Noom plus medication. They are putting you on GLP-1s (Glucagon-like peptide-1s) and it says, “Calibrate doctors prescribe these medications.” So they have a doctor who can prescribe you a medication. So… who is the doctor? Are they seeing you in person? An Internet doctor feels weird, but okay. They’re prescribing either semaglutide or liraglutide, and what we know about these drugs is that they have been shown to achieve a small amount of weight loss. Calibrate is guaranteeing 10 percent weight loss in one year or your money back. We also know, these drugs have side effects. I will link in the transcript to some really good reporting that Mikey Marquisele has done on this. Ragen Chastain has also been keeping tabs on Novo Nordisk, one of the biggest manufacturers of these drugs, here and here. (Also, read Ragen on the myth of that 5-10% weight loss claim.) Mikey and I also did a podcast episode where we dug into this a lot. You can read those and catch up on the safety profile and the really questionable science that was done in order to get these drugs FDA-approved. But the other thing about this is: Weight loss drugs only “work” if you are on them, which means you have to be on them for the rest of your life. That’s the deal with weight loss drugs. I am not a fan, both because I think asking people to stay on a drug for the rest of their life without a clear medical reason is extremely dubious, and because obviously I’m against intentional weight loss for all the reasons we always talk about here. Calibrate combines the drug with video coaching and lifestyle tweaks. That’s the other piece of it: If these drugs really worked you wouldn’t also have to do all these “lifestyle tweaks.” That’s a nice way of making sure that if it doesn’t work, they can blame you. You must not have done those “lifestyle tweaks” hard enough. There’s no mystery about whether it’s a diet because right there on the homepage, it says, “Sustainable weight loss based on biology.” That’s what they’re in the business of doing here at Calibrate. There’s no mystery here but there is lot of marketing designed to make you think that because there are doctors behind this, because there’s scientific research behind this, that all of this is safe and reasonable and responsible to do. I’m seeing very little discussion about side effects or complications or efficacy and safety. They’re also trying to lean into the fact that they accept insurance, you can use your FSA dollars for it. So that adds to their branding as medical weight loss, if you can get your insurance to pay for it or use your FSA money for it. It helps offset how much it costs, which is a lot! A “one year metabolic reset” is $135 a month. I mean, I guess you’re getting pills and for $99 you only get green powder from athletic greens. But that’s not sounding like a bargain. Or you can pay $250 just once to have a video appointment with your Calibrate doctor and learn more about what the one year program would look like. Which sounds to me like you’re paying $250 to have someone advertise to you. That’s really gross. Okay, I’m grouchy about this one. This one just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. LumenThe first thing I see here: “Lumen users share how they hacked their metabolisms. 1 million breaths around the world.” You do wonder if they listen to the words that they put on these websites. Does anyone read them out loud before they hit publish? Okay, so Lumen is a metabolism-monitoring device. Or an app? It must be a device because you have to breathe into something. The next thing I’m seeing is a quote from “Bernadette” who “lost 15 pounds and broke through her plateau.” She says, “It’s crazy. I use it like I use a scale. I’ve come to rely on it every day. Lumen has transformed my life.” Bernadette, I want better for you. Even though I’m pretty sure you’re just an actress paid to be in this video. I don’t think anyone should be weighing themselves every day. I think adding another device to your life that you have to use every day to monitor your weight sounds really crazy-making. “The accountability of having my Lumen coach has helped me stay focused. My performance at the gym keeps improving.” That’s from “Anthony.” This is another one that’s gender neutral—they have a lot of men talking about it. And they’re really focusing on athletic performance. And: Every person on this website is thin. I’m not seeing any fat people. They’re all already thin, and yet they’re talking about losing twelve pounds, fifteen pounds. So that’s a thing. The focus is on hacking your metabolism, losing body fat, breaking through plateaus, getting overall stronger and leaner, decreasing your running time. So, it’s a lot more about athletic performance, but it’s obviously still a diet. It’s a diet only for skinny people, which is weird. If I were a fat person seeking weight loss, this brand wouldn’t even feel accessible to me. I mean, I don’t want people seeking weight loss, but it’s really leaning into this idea that you are super fit. There’s strong Peloton vibes here. You’re doing this to take it to the next level. Maybe we don’t have to go to all these levels, guys. Maybe you can just be a person in the world who doesn’t hack your metabolism and your performance is just fine. That is true no matter what body size you’re in. I can guarantee you everyone using Lumen is also buying Athletic Greens. I feel like I just brought it full circle there with this little tour through what diet culture is doing right now. Well, I think I need a shower. RIP my algorithm. My ads are gonna be bonkers after this. And I’m going to have to leave you with that.Should we do this more? Shall we riff on more shitty diets? Send me ones you want me to look into! Post them in the comments and let me know and I’ll keep a list and we can do this again sometime. ---Thank you so much for listening to Burnt Toast! 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.

Teens have the ability to know how much they need to eat. And when we interfere with that, as parents, we start to break down their natural ability. When we model that we trust our children to listen to their bodies, that they are in charge of their bodies, it also models consent.Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today I’m chatting with Signe Darpinian who is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, certified eating disorder specialist, and host of Therapy Rocks, a personal growth podcast. She is also the co-author of No Weigh!: A Teen's Guide to Positive Body Image, Food, and Emotional Wisdom and the new book Raising Body Positive Teens: A Parent’s Guide to Diet-free Living, Exercise, and Body Image. I’m really thrilled to have Signe on the podcast because she is someone who can answer all your questions about intuitive eating and anti-diet life with teenagers.If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! And subscribe to the Burnt Toast newsletter for episode transcripts, reported essays, and more.ICYMI! I joined Signe on her podcast last week. We focused on how to talk about fatness and fatphobia with teenagers; listen here.VirginiaI am such a fan of your work, and especially the new book. Can you tell our listeners a little more about yourself and your work?SigneI’ve been treating eating disorders now for over 20 years. And I actually had the good fortune of being exposed to non-diet and weight-inclusive approaches right in the beginning, when I was really green. It’s something that I was very lit up about right from the beginning. It’s been interesting in 20+ years to see the different trends. Like you talked about in your book, The Eating Instinct, to see the trends of diet culture, which were more straightforward in the beginning, like Jenny Craig, to today’s wellness culture. A couple other things about me: I started a podcast right in the beginning of the pandemic. And I’m what some people call a single mother by circumstance, a little bit different than a single mom by choice. It was a happy accident! It can be interesting being a single parent and doing this food piece. My lived experience is more like, well, we’re going to do it this way. That’s not always a parallel to what other people experience — doing food when partners feel differently about diet culture can be tough.I have a 12-year-old daughter and this book was a much bigger project. My daughter threatened to stab the book in the heart when it comes out. VirginiaIs that because of the time it took or because she disagrees with the content?SigneShe doesn’t really know the content. It’s a funny question because the teen book is actually just perfect for her. Age 12 would be a great starting age. She has it on her bookshelf and I asked her if she would consider reading it. She’s like, “Only if you pay me.” I’m like, “Are we talking about twenty bucks?” She’s like, “More like one hundred.” I’m like, “Forget it.” So no, it’s not the content because I don’t think she’ll ever know. She has no interest. It’s more like, you know how it is with writing. It took a lot of time. It was a much bigger project and those last few weeks are pretty daunting. It’s a lot of hard work—and really fun! But she was ready for it to be done, which I understand.VirginiaMy eight-year-old often asks, “Oh, are you still writing that book?” And there’s a little tone there! A little judgment. She’s like, “How many chapters are you trying to do?”SigneVirginia, what about your recent post about your eight-year-old never wanting to be a writer unless she had to for the money?VirginiaI was like, “Oh, how do I explain to you that if you have to do things for the money, this is not the thing?”SigneI’ve definitely got a reluctant reader over here.VirginiaMine’s a reader, but she does not like writing. She feels sorry for me with this career choice. Okay, so the big reason I wanted to have you on is because I get lots of questions from parents of teenagers. I really relate to the sense of panic I get in these emails where parents say, “I’m just now discovering concepts like intuitive eating or diet culture or fatphobia.” Maybe during their kids’ earlier childhood they were more controlling around food or they were on diets themselves. And they’re just feeling like, well, now, what do I do? My kid is 14 or 16 or 20, and this is a shift we want to make. But is it too late?SigneThe short answer is: It’s never too late. We’re not modeling perfectionism, as parents. We’re modeling humanity. I don’t know about you, Virginia, but I try to do my best in modeling good mistake-making. I’m really taking ownership for my part in things more than I’m trying to model being perfect. Well, because I couldn’t anyway. I’ve tried that it doesn’t work. We are all immersed in diet culture and it’s really, really sneaky. There’s so much morality around food. Parents are in the same culture. Just thinking about their evolution, the evolution of their body image, and the messaging they received when they were young. What was going on at their table with food? What was happening with body image? And the conditioning that they come with. So on one hand, I think parents hold a lot of power. Our hope in writing the parent book is that we can give parents a point of reference for what a friendship with food might look like or a friendship with body might look like. Because we’ve really lost our way as a culture. We hope for them to become awake and aware about when did they become disembodied? When did they become disconnected from their own body? Thinking about ways that they might like to be different as it relates to food and body image, so that they can extend it outward.  I have friends, for example, that by now know about body positivity and intuitive eating. They know the right things to say, but there’s an incongruency with what they’re saying and what they’re doing themselves. Our kids and our teens, they can sniff out those incongruencies. So we can think about the ways that we would like to be different and think of it in terms of a process, not a finished product. I think that’s a great starting place for parents.VirginiaWhat you’re really modeling is recognizing mistakes and learning from mistakes. Because kids know we’re making mistakes all the time. They’re not fooled. For us to own that and say, “Yeah, I’ve been getting this wrong, and I’m trying to do it differently.” That feels so powerful. I would imagine kids would appreciate it, even if they don’t say, “Oh, thanks, Mom, I really appreciate that.” What does this shift look like if you’re starting this with older kids? Concepts like Division of Responsibility can be so helpful when you’re developing this with younger kids but the guidance gets a little hazier as kids get older. They are more adept at preparing their own food, they’re out in the world more. They can take more responsibility in some senses. Parents often don’t know how and when to really hand over that responsibility.SigneThe Division of Responsibility, the way that I understand it, is the parent is in charge of the when to eat and the what to eat. I like to put a lot of emphasis on being very mindful about the what to eat not being only “healthy” food. It can be problematic when somebody is in charge of the what to eat and they are immersed in their own diet culture. That could go really badly. Then of course, the child or the teen is in charge of the how much. I want to make one disclaimer about Division of Responsibility. In my caseload, by the time people come to me, there is already a very serious problem. There is already a clinical eating disorder. The thing that I’m hearing most often from parents, when there’s already a clinical eating disorder, is “I just thought they were trying to eat healthier and exercise more.” That’s the way this looks right now. I’m on the frontlines in this work. If my daughter came to me and said she wanted to eat healthier, I would respond to it in the same way as if she told me she wanted to start smoking cigarettes. VirginiaSo it’s a big red flag.Signe“Eating healthier” is a big red flag. And just don’t want to do any false advertising around Division of Responsibility. VirginiaIt doesn’t work for people in the acute stages of an eating disorder. That’s not where you start when you’re in treatment. SigneExactly. Division of Responsibility is going to really look very different with my 12-year-old than it is with somebody else’s. At one end of the continuum, we have households that may have been modeling externally imposed restriction. Externally imposed restriction might look like a parent micromanaging a teen or a child’s food and feeding them in a way that really has to do with their concern about their weight. On the other end, you might have a household that almost looks too loose. That’s actually the the household that I had, up until my daughter was in kindergarten or first grade. I was so aware of attuned ways of eating and how important a more connected way of eating is that I actually wasn’t providing enough structure for my particular child. That doesn’t mean that other children couldn’t do just fine with a very loose household with food. In my own circumstance, my daughter was needing more structure and guidance around food the same way she needed a bedtime. With teenagers, I think parents can still incorporate a lot of the Division of Responsibility paradigm. Making sure that the foods are there. One of the guidelines that we use in our book is making foods equal. Not only equal in morality, but equal in availability. Equal in availability might look like if the refrigerator was full of foods that sort of matched an “all foods fit” paradigm, not just the ones deemed “healthy.” Foods are there and equally easy to grab. Maybe there’s cubed up fruit and there’s cheese sticks and there’s fun size candy. They’re equally easy to grab. We can then grab the food that our bodies are actually calling for versus what’s easiest. I also want to make the disclaimer that we don’t always have the time to do the preliminary work to make foods equally easy to grab, equal in availability. So I just want to name that sometimes we will, sometimes we won’t. No big. One of the things that really resonates with me is not micromanaging what they’re up to with their food during the day. They’re clearly going to have a lot more autonomy with food. Some of them are driving now. They have their own money. They’re going to friends’ houses. So you would never assess or take an inventory of what was eaten that day and base your dinner decision or dessert decision on what they had during the day.VirginiaThat’s their opportunity to be practicing these skills. It’s not on you to say that if they had ice cream after school, then they can’t have cookies with dinner.SigneExactly. If I asked my daughter, “What did you guys have for snack today?” Like, if I know somebody brought something in. If my intention is to see if she had sweets and that will determine if we have dessert tonight, then I’m not going to say anything. But if my intention is just genuinely, I’m curious, then I might ask. With teenagers there’s another component that comes in and this piece would really come more from my co-author Wendy Sterling, the dietitian. She says the teenage years are also a really nice time to start introducing some basic food prep skills. Maybe they’re in charge of one recipe for dinner or maybe they’re putting together their own lunch. You’re making the food available and accessible, but they’re in charge of some of those chores that are related to food prep or cleanup as it relates to a meal. One other thing I want to bring in around that, and this comes from a podcast I did with somebody who’s an expert on adulting, Julie Lythcott-Haims. She was talking about how when we grew up we didn’t experience a culture of busy-ness in quite the same way that we’re seeing today. Sometimes, these meal prep chores, we’re not having our kids do them, because they’re too busy. Everybody is too busy. I can empty the dishwasher quicker than they can, I can set the table quicker than they can, so I might as well just do it for them. So I just wanted to bring in how the culture of busyness may show up in what we’re talking about, as well.VirginiaI think that applies for parents of all ages. I even think about that now with my eight-year-old, she could be clearing the table more. We do have them clear their own plates, but we were just having a conversation about starting to build in small opportunities for these skills. Because I want a 16-year-old who can make her own lunch! I don’t want to be packing lunches when they’re 16.SigneBefore before I did that interview, I don’t know that I was as aware of it, you know? My 12-year-old is like, “Can you get me some water?” I’m like, “Hey, you’re as tall as I am. Go get it yourself!” Right now I’m noticing how often I’m like there’s no time for her to empty the dishwasher. I’m just going to do it. Julie Lythcott-Haims, who was a Stanford Dean for several years, noticed a trend that a lot of these kids that are entering school nowadays, it looks like somebody has been cutting their meat for too long. Way too long.One other skill, as far as parents thinking about first steps that they might take in getting more attuned and connected to their body’s wisdom, is the hunger meter. We have a pretty basic hunger meter, which is one to ten. At the higher end is fullness. So, say six to ten, those are the fullness gradations of the hunger meter. At the lower end, the one would be famished, starving. A three would be the first sign of appetite, whatever that feels like for a particular person. When somebody is going from eating with a diet mentality or eating “from the chin up,” which means reducing their food choices to nutrients only and what I “should” and “shouldn’t” eat. When you go from years of eating from the chin up in a very disconnected, disembodied way and you’re going to start trying to eat from your body’s cues, the hunger meter can be a nice tool. Some people aren’t calibrated enough to start eating intuitively and so they might need to do mechanical eating. A simplified definition of mechanical eating might be eating by the clock on the wall. It may require some calibration first.VirginiaThat’s for folks who maybe in the past have been skipping meals or eating really erratically, so this is to make sure you are eating during the day and not skipping and ending up over-hungry.SigneThinking about getting recalibrated, doing some mechanical eating, ultimately that might give you some access to your body’s cues. And then the hunger meter as a tool may come in handy. We get told a lot that that’s probably one of the most helpful tools, and we have a chapter on the different gradations. Here’s what it would look like once you’re recalibrated. Maybe you just ate lunch at noon and it’s two o’clock and you’re feeling a pull toward food. Okay, so just trying to identify where you might be on, on the hunger meter. Maybe you’re at a five and you’re neutral. You’re not hungry and you’re not full, but you’re feeling that pull toward food. The hunger meter is meant to really just be used as a tool that you’re checking in and deciding from the inside. Becoming awake and aware about where you are. It’s all about choice. The target behavior here is really about creating a little bit of space between you and the food and just assessing where you are. oh, I’m at a five, I’m neutral. I’m not hungry, I’m not full. Just to be awake and aware of what’s going on for you—and then what you do after that is up to you. That’s your choice. The intervention or the target isn’t so much what you end up doing with the food—maybe you eat it, maybe you don’t, who cares? The intervention is just becoming awake and aware so you have more choice around your food.VirginiaThat’s a helpful distinction, because I do think there’s a risk of using hunger meters and feeling like, Well, I’m not hungry enough. There’s definitely a way to turn it into a diet,SigneYou can turn it into a diet in a nanosecond. It’s just creating that space between you and the food. VirginiaAnother thing you have in the book that I really love is the chapter on boundaries. I loved one you just highlighted, setting a boundary of not policing what your kid eats out of the house. What else do parents of teenagers need to understand about boundaries? What kind of boundaries should we be trying to respect when kids set them around food and body?SigneOne of my favorite excerpts around boundaries and food is from the chapter co-written with Anna Lutz, RD. [You can also hear Anna on Burnt Toast here!]Anna says: “Teens have the ability to know how much they need to eat. And when we interfere with that, as parents, we start to break down their natural ability. When we model that we trust our children to listen to their bodies, that they are in charge of their bodies, it also models consent.” So I think this really illuminates the importance of not interfering with children’s or teen’s stopping place. You are really helping them strengthen the muscle of listening to their instinct and honoring it. We might be talking about food right now, but in allowing them to do that with their food and not saying like, “you’re not going to get up from the table until you eat your broccoli,” or “you can’t have your dessert until you do this,” or “you’re not going to have another piece of pizza,” or whatever it is. VirginiaThat’s such a powerful moment, for parents to realize that the concepts that we’re working out around the dinner table is going to translate into how your kids trust their bodies in so many different settings. And that’s all we want, right? We want our kids to listen to their bodies first and foremost, in dating, all of a that.SigneThat’s my favorite boundary as it relates to food. In the body boundaries chapter, we did this effective communication model, we call it ad libs for effective communication. It’s an effective communication model that I see in a lot of places, it’s pretty well documented. When you have a body boundary to not let other people comment on your body, whether it’s positive or negative, letting them know where you stand. Like, “Hey, it’s not okay when you comment on my body without my consent.” So you stick with the facts, then you grab in one or two feeling words: “I feel angry.” And then the because. Because is what it is about them commenting on your body that makes you feel this way. “Because it gives me the impression that you’re scrutinizing my body.” So it’s a really simple formula and of course, you want to make it yours. You don’t want to sound like a therapy session. The person may come in and say, “Well, gosh, I just thought you looked great and I thought I would just tell you. It looks like you’ve lost weight.” The best way to win the game is to not play. So you just say, “That maybe be your perspective, but I wanted to let you know how those comments affect me.” Sometimes it helps to practice in your journal or with a therapist or to a friend that you’ve really felt safe with. Sometimes it’s helpful to just write out what you would have liked to have said that you didn’t feel comfortable saying, as you’re practicing and getting ready to do boundaries. Something I think we leave out when we talk about boundaries is they’re really hard. Especially if somebody has been taught to not make waves in their family of origin or if somebody’s temperament is conflict avoidant, it’s not very comfortable. I think it’s important, when we’re talking about boundaries, instead of just saying, “Oh, be sure to have a boundary and don’t let anybody comment on your body,” to also bring in this preparation. We need to tell people: When you do have these boundaries for the first time, it may feel really bad. I mean, really, really bad. In the chapter, I talked about my own experience, where I would feel so awful in practicing boundaries for the first time, like I robbed a bank or something. It might feels bad in that situation, not because your boundary is wrong, but because you’re breaking a pattern. VirginiaI appreciate the script you’ve given us because I think the other person’s reaction is often what makes it feel so dangerous. You can’t control whether or not the boundary will be respected or how they’ll respond. So that follow up of, “That may be your perspective, but I wanted you to know how these comments affect me,” is so helpful, because that gives you a way to get out of that. SigneYou’re right, you’re right. Because it of course it depends on who you’re giving the boundary to. If it’s a person that feels really safe and you have an egalitarian relationship with, then then they’re going to hear it and be very receptive. That’s going to be different from delivering a boundary from somebody who is out of balance. When you give a boundary to some people, they’re not going to be happy and that’s okay. It’s important for us to really get comfortable with tolerating somebody not being okay with us.VirginiaAnd not feeling like it’s our job to fix them not being happy about the boundary we needed to set. SigneYeah, you can say it in the most eloquent way, and some people may still not be happy and that’s alright.VirginiaThe last thing I wanted to talk to you about was your social media chapter. This is a major route that teenagers are being exposed to diet culture. Talk a little bit about how you advise parents to engage with kids on this. How do we talk about the negative food and body messages that kids are encountering online while holding that kids want to be on social media and that there’s a real need for it. SigneOne thing that I learned while writing this book comes from dialoguing with Sara Pipher Gilliam about social media. In preparing for the 25th Anniversary of Reviving Ophelia, they did 18 months of focus groups with adolescent girls and their parents. What was interesting is that every single one of those teenagers were told up front when they first got their devices, “We are going to be checking in on your social media on a regular basis. Whatever you put out there in a text or group chat, it’s for the whole world to see. I am going to be looking at it regularly.” And almost every single one of the parents never did follow up on that. This is something I’m dealing with regularly with with my particular caseload, but also with my 12-year-old. We have really good intentions and we know that the technology genie is out of the bottle and not going back in. We want to check their social media on a regular basis. But it’s mind numbing. It’s not fun. We want to be sitting down every few days or weekly and scrolling through and having them give us a tour of their TikTok or what they’re seeing and talk to them about it. But it’s just not very fun and we don’t want to do it. There’s a little bit of avoidance.VirginiaI already feel that way hearing my eight-year-old talk about Animal Crossing, so I can’t even imagine how I’ll feel when it’s TikTok.SigneYeah, it’s super boring. So let’s just say that out loud. In that chapter, we did use one of Sara’s interventions that she calls peer-to-peer peer agreements. I think we need to have parent-to-parent agreements, where we’re checking in with each other. Did you check your kid’s TikTok this week?The peer-to-peer agreements are really powerful, more so than what they might hear from a teacher or from a parent. It’s not uncommon for me to have a teenager in my caseload totally distraught because her friend was mad at her for not being on call at 2AM because she had a breakup. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes with social media, a lot of expectations. So maybe one of the agreement is we’re putting our phones away at 10PM, depending on the age. So that people know ahead of time and they don’t have unrealistic expectations for accessibility to each other. The other thing is, I’ve seen parents who are checking social media too often. It feels a little like dimming the kid’s light. It’s really different for everybody, but we need to be finding something that’s that sort of in the middle of being too strict or too loose with social media.VirginiaYou’ve talked about needing to respect to what kids are getting out of it, too. There’s the social piece and the creative expression that comes with social media. SigneI did an interview with a colleague and good friend of mine who is a registered Art Therapist. She talks a lot about how we really see our kids trying to express themselves creatively through social media, through music and dance. They’re looking for art, as well as creating it themselves. On one hand, that can be okay. On the other hand, we know that not all the images that they’re seeing are positive. What she says so eloquently is that social media is not meant to take to take the place of going to see art in real time or doing our own art. Over this last holiday, my mom was in town and she really had to push us out the door to go to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. I didn’t really want to go, like the parking, you know. We ended up getting there and I’m so glad. We brought my daughter and one of the times we brought her friends, too. They didn’t love everything, but it’s good for them to get exposed to art in different ways than on an online platform.VirginiaIn a museum, there is still an audience for the art, but it’s a much different audience than when you’re only putting things on social media and thinking of art as something you make for the whole internet. It’s really powerful for kids to realize that art is something they can do just for themselves. I think that’s really helpful for parents who are trying to appreciate what kids are getting out of it. But also figuring out the self regulation piece and kind of helping them learn those tools. It’s a messy thing we have to keep muddling through.SigneAnd making sure that there’s plenty of time where we allow our kids to be bored, and not sort of swoop in and rescue them from the boredom. Having art supplies available and accessible would be great. I do want to mention, the ability to have art supplies, and to go see art, depending on where you are, can be a privilege. Nowadays, places like the dollar store have a lot better art supplies than they did 10 years ago. So there are ways to get it cheaper than you used to be able to, so that’s cool. I like the idea of making sure they have a fair amount of time just hanging out in their boredom and learning to tolerate it and giving them an opportunity to come up with their own creative and imaginative expression through their own art.Butter For Your Burnt ToastSigneSomething that I’ve been up to lately that I used to do in my 20s and 30s and I rediscovered it recently is collaging. What’s really cool about collaging is that I don’t have art skills. I don’t know how to draw, I don’t necessarily know how to paint. So collaging can be one of the least daunting forms of creative expression. What I like about it, too, is that you can use the catalogs that come in the mail to just kind of spend time cutting out images that inspire you, which can be really meditative. My colleague calls it visual journaling. It’s kind of cool because it can give your journaling a three dimensional quality. For teens that maybe don’t want to be writing in their journal because they’re afraid a parent might see it, journaling through art or visuals can be a way to express and get your dark thoughts out on paper so that they’re not staying private. Only you really know what the symbols and the metaphors mean in the art. So it’s something that I’ve been doing myself and I’ve also been doing with clients. It’s been really helpful. I have a couple of clients that I’m doing that with right now that struggle with unhealthy perfectionism. So just spending time cutting out images and doing collage in a way that you can’t really get it wrong teaches is a nice mindfulness practice. It helps them pace themselves. And lately, I’ve been making collage cards. Cards are pretty expensive, at least the ones that I really like. You can personalize a collage card for a birthday card and make it uniquely for somebody that you’re close to. It’s just a fun way to share your art.VirginiaI mean, I’m obsessed. I want to start collaging immediately. It sounds like a great thing to do with teenagers with younger kids. It’s something I also did for a while and sort of dropped. And now as you’re talking about it, I’m like, where did that go? I need to bring collaging back. That’s a wonderful idea.SigneIt’s a really fun thing to just get totally lost in.VirginiaWell, my Butter this week is a movie recommendation. It’s not a new movie, so probably most people have seen it. I think it came out one of the years I had a baby because the year you have a child, you’re kind of culturally illiterate. It’s Inside Out and I had a feeling you would be a fan, Signe. We just watched it with our kids a few weeks ago. It was so funny because our four-year-old was really resistant. She had a lot of feelings before we started, but then she was just mesmerized. I think she has watched eight times since then. I mean, we were all stuck in the house with COVID for two weeks. It’s been so cool because she is really using the tools from it. So for people who don’t know, the premise of inside out is that it’s this 11-year-old girl Riley, who’s going through some big life stuff. And the movie is narrated by the emotions in her head. So you see the sadness and joy and anger, and disgust and fear constantly narrating what’s happening to Riley and what’s happening within her head. Now when my four-year-old gets mad, she goes, “Oh, angry guy, you’re being so loud in my head right now.” It’s amazing because she’s labeling the emotions and it takes her down a notch. She’ll scream and be frustrated and then we can talk about what the angry guy is so angry about. So yeah, if you’re looking for a way to talk about feelings with kids in a super accessible way, it’s such a beautiful movie. SigneIt is so well done. My co-author, Shelley Aggarwal, MD, she’s an adolescent medicine doctor. We were just talking about Inside Out because in our friendship with body image chapter, we have this section on how it’s really normal for adolescents to over-identify with their peer groups. She was talking about how perfect the movie is to explain and show over-identification with a peer group. Diversifying our interests is a really great way to protect ourselves from body image dissatisfaction or eating issues. I’ve been talking about watching it with my daughter again.VirginiaI can see it being something we come back to throughout the years. You’ll get different things out of it. Right now the four-year-old loves angry guy,- and she loves the imaginary friend Bing Bong, because she has many imaginary friends. My eight-year-old is a little more close to the vest with feelings and she, I think, felt very seen by the movie. Like, oh, other people have all these big feelings inside them. That was so wonderful to see. SigneIt’s just a brilliant movie. That’s going to be our movie this week.VirginiaGood to hear. Well, Signe, tell listeners where they can find more of you.SigneSo the pre-order link for Raising Body Positive Teens: A Parent’s Guide to Diet-free Living, Exercise, and Body Image is now available. My website has a books tab and both books are there. VirginiaThank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it,Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast. Once again. If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode and consider a paid subscription to Burnt Toast. You get a ton of cool perks including next week’s bonus episode and you will 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.

I have only recently put my foot down and said, “No, I deserve to be here and I will be here and I’m staying here,” and I’ve been in the industry almost 10 years. It’s taken a really long time to not only convince people that I have the talent and the staying power, but also convince myself.Welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today I am chatting with Kyeshia Jaume, a senior apparel designer for Forever21. She’s also one of the only working designers at a major corporate fashion label, who both makes plus size clothes and lives in a larger body. Regular newsletter readers will know Kyeshia from Jeans Science. She’s working hard to change things in fashion from the inside. Her story is really important and I’m so excited to share this conversation with you. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! And subscribe to the Burnt Toast newsletter for episode transcripts, reported essays, and more.Also! I had a great chat with Signe Darpinian, host of the Therapy Rocks! Podcast on Monday. We focused on how to talk about fatness and fatphobia with teenagers; listen here. Episode 31 TranscriptVirginiaHi, Kyeshia. Thank you for being here. KyeshiaHi, Virginia. I’m so excited to be joining you.VirginiaTell us how you got into fashion design. What called you to this work?KyeshiaUp until maybe 11th grade, I wanted to go to music school to pursue music. I just wanted to be a singer and I loved music. But I took a fashion merchandising class my senior year of high school and just fell in love with it. And I was like, I could do this. I could be in the fashion industry. I feel like I could really influence and impact it in some way. My fashion merchandising teacher was amazing, really encouraging, really excited about hearing that I wanted to be in the industry. And I remember she said something specific to me: “We need more people like you in the industry.” VirginiaWere you interested in clothes as a kid? Like always playing dress-up, that kind of thing? KyeshiaYeah, I was. My mom is a very fashionable person. She always made sure that we had really fashionable things to wear. And she was always very strong about individuality and really making sure that we stay true to ourselves and not follow trends that other people were doing. It’s so interesting, too, being a child who loves fashion, but also a child who couldn’t wear the fashion. Because I remember only being able to shop at like, Dillards and JC Penney. I couldn’t go into Limited Too. We would get Delia’s catalogs and I remember just flipping through and circling things I wished that I could wear. Back then that’s how you shopped.VirginiaThe Delia’s catalog was formative to my existence. Remember the belts with the seatbelt buckles? Which, now that I think about it, is many layers of problems. We know airplanes are not a size inclusive space, but I didn’t really think about it as an eighth grader. I just wanted that belt so badly. KyeshiaI wanted to be a Delia’s girl! I wanted to wear the denim. I wanted to wear the fun prints. Even like the house section, the bedding. I was all about it. Also I was a Nylon girl. I remember just dreaming and wishing that could be me. I wished I could have that stuff for myself and just being really sad that I couldn’t. VirginiaEspecially back then, those were not brands that were remotely size inclusive—or really any kind of inclusive. You were seeing the same skinny white girl over and over again in that Delia’s catalog. The low rise jeans and all that visible torso really, really did a number on our generation. And fashion, historically and currently, is a very thin, white industry. So how has that been for you, as a plus size woman and a woman of color getting into those rooms?KyeshiaI was born and raised in Utah. Utah’s like a bubble. You don’t understand anything outside of what your world is inside this very cookie cutter picture. Not only that, but I was a biracial brown girl who was not Mormon being raised in the middle of Utah. Religion is a very big part of the community in Utah, especially where I was living. The county that we lived in everybody calls “Happy Valley.” VirginiaIt’s an evocative name.KyeshiaSo I don’t think that I was fully aware of my diversity and how different I was from other people. I lived in my own little world. I moved to LA after university, to pursue fashion. I went to FIDM. I was aware of how different the world is outside of Utah, but not fully aware of how I would be treated differently, not only for the color of my skin, but also being a fat, brown woman in the industry. Going through fashion school, I think a lot of my peers underestimated me. I didn’t understand how hard it was going to be to get in the industry. I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to advocate for myself and to really say, “I deserve a seat at this table.” I have only recently put my foot down and said, “No, I deserve to be here and I will be here and I’m staying here,” and I’ve been in the industry almost 10 years. It’s taken a really long time to not only convince people that I have the talent and the staying power, but also convince myself. The fashion industry is such a girls club and a popularity contest. No matter what company I’ve been at, that has been consistent. There’s always the cool girls. There’s always the people who have each other’s backs. Even if they’re not very good at their jobs, because they look the part and they play the part, they’ll keep the part.VirginiaDo you feel like people have a preconceived notion of what the fashion girl needs to look like?KyeshiaAbsolutely. Not only that, but my name is Kyeshia. Straight out of the gate, you’ve already got an idea about who I am, without even meeting me. You’re probably already overlooking my resume because my name is too hard to say and you’re probably assuming what race I am, without even diving deeper to see what kind of skill set I have. It was hard, for a long time, to constantly feel like every single day I was going to work I don’t belong here. But this is what I love to do. And once you enter corporate fashion, you’re also up against people who have such thin bodies. Their whole lives are about diet culture and being thin and fitting into clothes and fitting a certain beauty standard. Lunches are always talking about who’s dieting and the next diet you’re on. I was very concerned about why we always had to talk at the lunch table about what we’re eating and why we’re eating it. VirginiaSo exhausting. And it’s so boring.KyeshiaIt’s so boring! Like, “Oh, Kyeshia. What did you bring for lunch today? Your food always looks so good. Oh, I just have a salad today. I’m so bummed about it.” When I’m eating leftover pasta for lunch. Like, it doesn’t matter. I’m feeding my body. The whole thing is uncomfortable. You start thinking well, I should just eat at my desk because I can’t handle another day of this diet talk and listening to people hating their bodies. Because if they hate their bodies, I can’t imagine what they think about mine.VirginiaThat narrative is so toxic. I remember when I worked in women’s magazines, my nightmare was office birthdays. Magnolia Bakery cupcakes were very big back then—they were the Sex and the City cupcakes. So someone would always order this tray of amazing cupcakes and then it was like cupcake chicken. Nobody could eat the cupcake. All these women would just stand around being like, “Oh, no, no! I couldn’t! Oh, I’ll just have like a little lick of the frosting.”KyeshiaThe funniest thing is when you bring donuts into a design room. Everybody wants the donuts. You know everybody wants the donuts. But you know what we will do? We’ll take a knife and we’ll cut it into fourths and we’ll just eat little pieces. Everybody is going back and forth to the table to get a little bite of donut and it’s just like, take the freakin’ donut. Just eat the donut and be okay with it! But it’s weird, every company I’ve been to is like that.VirginiaThe irony, too, of food on photoshoots for fashion. These elaborate spreads for lunch?KyeshiaIt’s such a waste. There is also this feeling of, I have to constantly look like I’m busy because of the stigma of I’m fat, so I must be lazy. I’ve always heard I have no sense of urgency. I don’t know what that looks like. What does a sense of urgency look like? Running from place to place? For what? VirginiaYou’re not putting out fires, you’re designing clothes. KyeshiaI’m answering the emails. I’m hitting my deadlines. I’m doing my job. So I don’t know what you mean by, “there’s no sense of urgency.” If I’ve completed my task, isn’t that urgency enough? VirginiaIt sounds like a lot of very coded language.KyeshiaIt feels that way. Because you don’t say that to other people who have been scrolling on their computer for days now, but the second you see me pick up my phone to answer a text message, I have a lack of urgency for my job.VirginiaThat’s a really toxic double standard. KyeshiaYeah. And a super big microaggression. What do you mean when you say I have no sense of urgency?VirginiaI would be interested to hear them try to explain it, even though it would not go well. They would only dig themselves deeper.KyeshiaI started out in handbag design, straight out of fashion school, because that was the only assistant designer job I could find. My second job was at an activewear company. So it was my first experience with women’s apparel and I had a lot to learn. I was maybe two weeks in and we were sprawled out on the floor, going over line sheets. I remember her saying to me, “Can I give you a little bit of feedback?” And I’m like, “sure, yeah, I welcome it.” Like, anything I can do to improve. She said, “I need you to hustle a little bit more.” And it completely spun me around. Because I was like, I’m trying. I just don’t know the processes yet. It was my first experience dealing with a sample room, with sample makers, and I wasn’t used to the process. So two weeks in, I’m brand new, and you’re telling me I need to hustle? Like, Okay. Loud and clear. And by the time I was three months, she still wasn’t satisfied with my performance and she handed me off to a different brand, which was fine. I think that there’s just a little bit of a disconnect in leadership if you’re not willing to teach.VirginiaAnd also, not willing to, sort of understand that people’s contexts are different and results can be achieved in different ways. This isn’t assembly line work where everyone needs to do the same job in the exact same way. KyeshiaYeah, and in order to get the results that you want, you have to be willing to teach. I think that that’s a huge part of a disconnect in the industry, nobody is willing to teach.VirginiaNot willing to teach and also not willing to learn! Another way of saying you don’t hustle is to say you are careful and methodical. And isn’t that a useful skill? There’s a way there’s a way of reframing these concepts to understand that someone might be bringing real strength to the table. Not to get away from the fact that probably you were hustling just fine and that was just a coded way of talking about your body. Well, it sounds like now you’re in a place where it’s not perfect, but you are able to accomplish more of what you set out to do, which is exciting to hear about. KyeshiaYes. So my career goal this whole time I’ve been in the fashion industry is to be a part of inclusive design. I would not be living my truth if I wasn’t able to produce things that I could actually wear. I work at Forever21 now. I am a senior designer on the plus team. We’re on this path to make an impact in the plus business. As you know, the plus business is a billion dollar industry and there are only a handful of companies who serve plus women. And we make up about 67% of the population, which is bananas. We’re underserving this community that makes up more than half the population. So, I’m really excited about the future work of what we’re doing at Forever21. I think in order to prove ourselves and gain the trust of the community, we have a lot to work on. We have a lot of work to do for the Plus Forever21 customer. I think we have really disappointed her in the past. I think in the beginning, she was so excited that we were available to her at an affordable price point. But I think over time, we’ve just really disappointed her—and I can understand that because I was her. I still am her! I’m really, really excited about the direction that we’re heading in serving the Forever21 Plus girl. It’s going to take a little bit to get to where we’d like to be, but there are a lot of things happening about maybe mid year that I’m really really excited about. And a new denim launch is one of them. VirginiaYou and I touched on this in our last interview: There are not a lot of folks in bigger bodies working in fashion design. Is there some kind of secret network of fat designers we can all be showing up for? How do we get more of you?KyeshiaI want in, if there is. How do I put out a mating call for my fellow plus size designers?VirginiaA bat signal? KyeshiaWhere do I find them? Yeah, within my career, I’ve only run into probably three other plus size designers working in the plus size industry. I’m sure there are more out there, but I don’t know where they’re hiding.VirginiaThat’s staggering. Because it’s such a loss of talent and a loss of knowledge. It explains so much. If you want to understand why plus customers are so often disappointed, why the clothes haven’t worked for so long, this is why.KyeshiaIf I were not in the industry, I don’t think that I would be encouraged to be in the industry. Because beauty and fashion standards are so white, so thin. I would be intimidated by that. I would be like, there’s no way that a person like me could get a job in an industry like that.VirginiaAnd your early experiences show it was not easy. KyeshiaIt’s not easy. It’s so interesting, because when I leave companies or when I talk to different managers and leadership, they’re always very encouraging. They’re always like, “We need people like you!” and I’m like, “Well, why don’t you hire people like me?”VirginiaYeah, that says a lot.KyeshiaI want to know that there’s more people who look like me who are out there in corporate fashion who are doing the work and making the change within. Because we’re the ones that really get it. I so often sit in rooms where people who don’t look like me say, “Oh, the girl’s not gonna like that.” And then I look and I immediately think, why not?VirginiaOh, interesting. Like what? Give us an example of that.KyeshiaOh, right now cutouts are a trend. And sometimes people are very apprehensive about how a plus girl would feel about cutouts. People are like, “Oh she’s not gonna wear that, that’s gonna show too much.” Well, maybe one girl might not wear it. But what about the other girl who is like, “I love this trend. I wish it was my size?”VirginiaThat’s interesting. I often hear from folks saying stop with the cutouts! I just need to finda basic tee shirt. I’m just looking for solid, functional clothes. Like, L.L.Bean doesn’t make plus sizes. So what if you want to go hiking? But you’re absolutely right, there are also lots of us craving design and not getting that. Especially when you’re getting fewer SKU numbers, how do you meet all those needs?KyeshiaIt’s difficult. Because especially with core things like tee shirts and jeans, you have to project your numbers for how much you can buy in these categories. Then you have a small SKU count for what you actually want, as far as fashion. What makes it even smaller is bringing in the juniors designs and what you’re going to tag on for those. Then you have like, this much of a pool for exclusive designs, designed by women who actually understand a plus body. So it’s hard to decipher what you lean into and when you say, “this isn’t going to be a thing.” The other designer and I sit together, and we look at the assortment that the buyers have chosen for the month and we give our feedback. If we see something in fittings, and we’re like, “I love the direction that you’re going here with this, but I don’t think that it’s going to execute the way that you want it to,” we have to flag it. We have to say, “Hey, I don’t know about this. It’s not gonna work for a plus girl. How can we change it? How can we enhance it to make it fit our girl?” For example, last week, I had a jumpsuit come in. Really, really cute for a skinny girl. Like, super deep V cut and the V ended at the waistline, and it was tie up halter at the neck. Then there was another piece that tied in the back as a tie panel. And I was like, “Okay, this isn’t going to work. The leg shape is nice, but it’s too open on the sides.” So I reached out to the buyers and I was like, “Hey, listen, I have some reservations about this.” And they were like, “Yeah, it doesn’t look great on the model. How can we fix it?” So I sent over the sketch and I was like, “Here’s something that I think that we could change to, that she would resonate with, but it’s more wearable.” If there’s something that we think is absolutely like unsalvageable, we have to say this is not going to work. We have to make it wearable because the plus girl is going to look at that and be like, “Ain’t no way.”VirginiaYeah, where are my boobs going? KyeshiaFirst question: “What bra can you wear with that?”VirginiaThat was my first thought when you described the jumpsuit.KyeshiaBecause not every girl is gonna be okay with doing boob tape, right? It just doesn’t work. So you have to think about what bra is she gonna wear with this, because I’m gonna tell you right now, she’s not going to go braless in this with no support. VirginiaOf course, for listeners who go braless, you do you. We’re not shaming anyone for not wearing bras!KyeshiaNo, no no. I love to free the nip. But there was nothing holding you at all. VirginiaSo a big part of your job is taking these juniors designs and enhancing them—I love that you’re using the word enhance—for the plus girl. But what would you be doing differently from the get-go to design better clothes for bigger bodies? Or what problems do you see as fixable but no one is really tackling them right now?KyeshiaThe number one thing is fit. We could be putting more investment into fit, it just takes too long. Way too long to adjust, way too long to put on different bodies. We fit twice a week, and the other designer and I, we dedicate a lot of time to it. Probably like, each day we’re fitting up to four hours, sometimes five. It’s a lot of work. If I were to start from scratch, I know it would be putting a lot of investment into fit because that is the number one thing that people and brands get wrong about plus clothing.VirginiaYeah, it feels like a very under-resourced area. For a longer discussion with Kyeshia and other designers on the problems with plus size fit, see Jeans Science Part 2.KyeshiaIt’s interesting because the industry is changing. Not only for plus, but for straight-size bodies, too, as far as like different measurements and different body shapes that they take into consideration. But there’s still designers out there that don’t take into consideration different body shapes, even for straight size women.VirginiaThe legacy of Karl Lagerfeld is very rich, I think. The “bodies should be clothes hangers for our vision” kind of ethos.KyeshiaBut what if the hangers are like a little curvier? VirginiaWhat if I don’t want to be a clothes hanger? What if I want to be a person wearing clothes? It’s a really an insulting proposition, frankly.KyeshiaI’m not just here to just be perceived. So yeah, I think my number one thing would be to focus on fit. Number two is fabric. I think sometimes even if something fits good, if it doesn’t feel right on your body, you’re uncomfortable. So I think comfort and fit and comfort and feel are two heavy hitters for me.VirginiaThat makes so much sense. You just articulated why some clothes I’ve bought that I’ve sort of liked—even when I see them on my body, I like them—but I don’t reach for them. It’s often a comfort issue. Even if it works, it doesn’t work because it doesn’t feel good to wear. So the last thing I wanted to talk about is: What can consumers be doing? How much does our feedback matter? On Instagram, there are always lots of different campaigns trying to attract the attention of brands to take the plus consumer more seriously. But I don’t know how effective those are. And if they’re not effective, what’s a better way? I’m just curious to hear your thoughts as someone who’s inside the industry.KyeshiaI think if you’re straight size, and you don’t know what it’s like to struggle to find clothes as a plus size body, start learning and advocate for that. Tell brands: Do you know how cool it is, for everybody be able to wear your clothes? That is an amazing thing. I think to advocate for that, as a straight size person, you are doing your brothers and sisters justice. Because I don’t know what it is about fashion companies, when they hear feedback from skinny white women, they actually listen. VirginiaHmm, take note, thin and small fat listeners. We have work to do.I’m glad to know that you think that is feedback brands will listen to you. I mean, obviously, it’s ridiculous that they will hear it best from thin, white women and not from plus customers. But it is good to know that it’s useful to do that because I think sometimes people worry that it’s just hashtag activism or sort of performative.KyeshiaAt Forever21 we have a newsletter that goes out pretty much every week, that highlights top comments and not-so-great comments. Consistently, across the board, there’s always a comment that’s like, “Why isn’t the plus in more stores? Why is the plus section so small? Why is your Online Plus section not great?”VirginiaYou’re like, “I’m on it, I’m on it!”KyeshiaI’m like, literally ask me the questions, and I’ll tell you exactly what people are feeling. Because I live it. I live it every single day, right? Even coming to work, I’m seeing it like, “Damn, I wish I could wear that.”VirginiaYes, I just want to have a moment for the rage I feel that you often can’t wear the clothes you design. KyeshiaIt’s hard. When I was doing private label for Target, it was such a cool feeling walking into a Target store and being like, “That’s what I did. That’s a part of me, I put in the work for that.” That was really, really cool. This goes back to having more plus bodies in the design room—I feel like people would be more supportive if they knew who was actually designing their things.VirginiaOh, I agree with that. I would love to be putting my dollars behind brands that were hiring plus designers. Brands who were really doing it and not just doing the Madewell version of inclusivity that’s not particularly inclusive and that is clearly something a marketing focus group told you to do. KyeshiaYeah, and I think a good example of sort of a brand that has really put in the effort is Anthropologie. Of course, they have room to do better and improve, but I think as far as being inclusive and also being, really on-brand with their plus style.VirginiaYes, I see what you’re saying. They definitely deliver the same level of fashion to the plus sizes and the straight sizes. There’s still often that thing of like, I wanted it in blue and only the straight size has it. Which is the whole economics piece that you and I talked about. KyeshiaIt’s hard. Within the community of plus size people, if we can start supporting the brands who actually run those extended size ranges, you put the data behind actually pushing forth that movement. Because I’ve talked to people. It’s such a nuanced conversation, because yes, it should be happening. We should have up to size 40. But it’s just the lack of dollars that the consumers put into supporting it. It’s hard to keep it alive.VirginiaIt’s such a catch-22. The products are not what people want, so they don’t buy them. But then the companies don’t have the sales, and around and around we go.KyeshiaSo in supporting the plus size fashion conversation, straight size women can advocate for their favorite brands to extend. But also, plus women can advocate for their dollars being put into really supporting these companies who do actually go up to size 40 or 32, because then they’ll see the momentum that people want this. Of course people out there need clothes and want fashionable clothes to fit their bodies, but if we don’t see the data and the dollars behind it, it’s hard to keep it going.VirginiaYeah, absolutely. That’s a great reminder for small fat folks like me that, just because we’re excited we can shop in Anthropologie now, there are other brands that need our support. We have work we can do. Butter For Your Burnt ToastKyeshiaI’ve been reading Brene Brown’s new book. It’s phenomenal. It’s so good. And it’s helping me with a lot of healing. I just love the way that she writes. And I recommend that you journal and drink your water every day.VirginiaI love both of those recommendations. Because I am in the northeast and it is four degrees outside and we all are questioning our life choices, my recommendation is to get yourself a winter-blooming house plant. It is snow and ice outside, but my African violets are blooming this week and it’s bringing me so much joy to see some little spark of green and life. KyeshiaSee, I can’t keep plants alive. That’s the one thing that I can’t do.VirginiaAfrican violets are pretty easy. You just need a bright windowsill and they do like to stay moist but they don’t really require a lot of special care or anything. They’re also pretty inexpensive. Mine are $3 from the grocery store so you can just enjoy them while they bloom and then let them go with love. It’s all good. Well, Kyeshia, thank you so much for joining us. Let folks know how they can follow more of your work!KyeshiaI am @KLV on Instagram. I don’t share much of my work on there. It’s kind of like a blog / personal / influencer, but you can find me there. VirginiaThank you so much for being here! ---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.

In a perfect world, the specter of that perfect, white, thin, cishet mom wouldn’t be there at all. We wouldn’t be tasked with defining ourselves against that ideal because she wouldn’t be the biggest thing in the room. You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today I’m bringing back Sara Louise Petersen for another installment of momfluencer talk. Sara is a writer based in New Hampshire, and currently working on a book called Momfluenced. She came on a few weeks ago and you folks had a ton to say about that episode! Hearing your thoughts and questions made us realize there is a lot more to discuss here. This might become a new subgenre of the Burnt Toast podcast.If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player! And subscribe to the Burnt Toast newsletter for episode transcripts, reported essays, and more.Also! I’ll write more about this in a newsletter soon, but I’m very thrilled to announce that I’ve started a Burnt Toast Giving Circle with The States Project. We will be raising money to help flip a state legislature Democratic this November because radical right wing state governments are dismantling free and fair elections in swing states, suppressing the right to vote, denying people quality, affordable healthcare and eradicating our right to choose. But we can take those states back! And early money matters. I’d love if you could make a donation of any size; Burnt Toast will match the first $1000 we raise. We’ll talk soon about which state to support and the issues on the table. Stay tuned! And: The brilliant folks behind the Sunny Side Up Podcast spent this episode talking about Instagram and how we feed kids, inspired by this essay of mine. Great companion listen to today’s Instagram deep dive! Episode 30 TranscriptVirginiaSo today we want to talk about whether it is possible for momfluencer culture to diversify, and to represent different types of moms. And w e’re also asking: Should that even be the goal? SaraThere totally is room to follow moms that do not subscribe to cishet, white, normative, nuclear family ideal. So many moms have disrupted that narrative and have used their platforms in really cool, energizing ways to form really needed communities online. They have a different vibe than the stereotypical beachy waves, white momfluencer, the the type that we were talking about in our last episode. It feels like a totally different world.VirginiaI want to read this really great email I got from a listener after your episode because she is articulating the problem in a way that I hadn’t quite thought about before. So this is from Tori, and she writes: I noticed that at the beginning of this missive you mentioned that you and Sara are both cis, straight moms with varying levels of thin privilege, who gave birth, and at the end, you say that the next “phase” is seeing non-thin, non-white, non-straight, non-cisgender moms shifting the narrative. That struck a nerve with me. I’m a white, cis, lesbian with a non-binary partner (she gave birth to our child.) Our kid is four and does not call either of her parents mom, in my partner’s case, because that word is feminine, and my partner is transmasculine. And in my case, mostly because even as a femme lesbian, I didn’t want to embody the culture of motherhood that has been pretty toxic in my life and it didn’t feel right for me. I read today’s newsletter with some distance, because I have found that even engaging with these momfluencers by critiquing them gives them too much space in my brain. I feel lucky that I do not generally feel mom guilt. I do not buy into most of the cultural pressures that straight, white moms often struggle with. And I think that’s because I had a way out from the beginning. The queer parents I know just don’t even talk about it and we don’t compare ourselves. We talk about the absurd things our kids do, and arguments with our partners, and we share gossip about queer celebrities, but we do not really participate in this aspirational stuff. I am grateful to queer people for offering that pathway out of straight, white mom culture, and also from the fatphobia of that culture. Many lesbians are fat and I’m grateful to my people for showing me how to love other women’s interesting bodies as I learn to love my own. I guess I just want to gently suggest that all of this is optional. White moms—because I do think this is a whiteness problem—can stop putting their eyeballs on the momfluencers. I know that as a cultural critic, they’re available for you to talk about since Instagram is a visual medium, etc. And there’s comments and captions to analyze. But even the critique feels like adding fuel to the fire. I just want to offer up that focusing on people who do things differently (the ones you spoke about at the end of your conversation) is an even more powerful way of shifting around the way we talk about bodies. As a journalist, I’m sure you’ve engaged with the concept of de-platforming. And this is sort of a mini version of that. You have influence yourself and lifting up the alternatives rather than continuing to reinforce white dominant culture, even by picking it apart, is especially effective. We’re out here doing it differently and a whole other parent culture is possible.Tori, thank you. Reading this, I had a moment of feeling like, oh, right, it is optional. It is easy to get just sucked into feeling like this is the paradigm we’re in. SaraI also loved that email. It reminded me of a conversation I had with Rebekah Taussig, who wrote a book called Sitting Pretty. We were talking about this “ideal mother” that we’re all defining ourselves against or aligning ourselves with or comparing ourselves to. She said, in a perfect world, the specter of that perfect, white, cishet mom wouldn’t be there at all. We wouldn’t be tasked with defining ourselves against or in opposition to that ideal because she wouldn’t be the biggest thing in the room. There would be freedom to define our own parenting journeys, separate from the fetters of that looming ideal. That whole notion feels so radical to me because the ideal, white, cishet mom does loom so large in our culture.For me, I think it is still valuable to dissect where this ideal is coming from and to look at who has the power in this narrative. Where is the power coming from? You can’t look at any of this without examining whiteness, first and foremost. I think we have to keep asking ourselves how are we approaching this cultural criticism? Which voices are we centering? VirginiaFor those of us who are white moms and who do check more of those boxes, this is also our work to do, to hold the other privileged white moms accountable. We can’t completely eradicate whiteness from motherhood—or maybe that is what we should be doing, but that feels very difficult. So as we consider the process of doing that, can we ask more of our fellow white moms? Can we ask each other to reckon with these biases and to name these problems? That’s not work I want to ask parents with marginalization to do. It’s not their job to come in and fix the white moms. And Sara and I are the white moms, so we have to be doing this work. But also, I’m really here for the idea of how do we make space for these other voices? SaraThe popular narrative about how we talked about momfluencer culture is “Oh, I’m just sick of comparing myself to the perfect mom in her perfect house.” That is a really small concern in the grand scheme of things. A lot of marginalized moms, like, they don’t give a shit. Their biggest concern is not having a kitchen that matches up to momfluencer standards. So, there is a way that white moms do perpetuate the ideal of whiteness, in holding ourselves to those standards and prioritizing those standards as worthy of our emotional and mental energy.VirginiaEven in prioritizing our ability to separate from those standards. There’s a strong parallel here with what we see in the fat community versus the “body positive” community. “Body positivity” has become reduced to this project of loving your body. Aubrey Gordon writes about this so well: loving your body doesn’t do shit for fat rights. It doesn’t do shit for narrowing the pay gap or making clothing more accessible or stopping discrimination on airplanes. Body positivity doesn’t actually address these larger systemic ways that fatphobia is baked into our culture. This is a perpetual problem of whiteness and of white women, that we take what is really this larger systemic  issue and we make it all about like ourselves and our feelings. How does her clean kitchen make me feel? I feel like a bad mom. That’s not what it’s about at all.SaraTotally. That’s a classic tenet of specifically white feminism. When you’re looking at intersectional feminism, you’re looking at the the the community that is suffering the most and the most marginalized and working up to concerns about the clean countertops. Like, that’s not where we start. VirginiaWe’ll do a quick shout out here for Angela Garbes’ new book Essential Labor. She articulates the problems with white motherhood so well, and I think it’s a must read for all white moms. I had a lot of moments reading that of looking in a mirror in an uncomfortable but necessary way.Sara I also love her first book Like A Mother. Best book on pregnancy I’ve ever read. She looks at pregnancy from all different angles and it’s a beautiful, beautiful book.I’m also going to plug Koa Beck’s White Feminism. It was absolutely earth-shattering for me in terms of dismantling everything I thought I knew about feminism. VirginiaOkay, so we are going to talk about some case studies like we did last time, and this time, we really are focusing on momfluencers who are not in that traditional skinny-white-mom box at all. SaraSo should we start with Nabela Noor?VirginiaShe’s not technically a full momfluencer yet because she’s pregnant with her first child. She comes from the world of YouTube beauty influencers. I did not know about her until she wrote a children’s book this year called Beautifully Me, which I love. I actually interviewed Nabela on the @Parents Instagram a few months ago. And my younger daughter is obsessed with Beautifully Me. It’s a great kid’s book. (I also talked about it here.) And yet, there is also this continual emphasis on the importance of beauty, both in the book and in Nabela’s work. Her aesthetic on Instagram is all neutrals. Everything in her house is white and brass handles and beautiful flower arrangements. There’s a lot of emphasis on her look and her makeup. There’s this tension between the way she is challenging norms—but then there is some upholding.SaraI’m looking at her feed, and just the aesthetic tropes—she’s checking all the boxes. The all white everything, interior design-wise. The caressing her pregnant stomach, with a beautiful dress. Hyper-feminine imagery. The ultrasound photos, the very joyful, domestic Goddess Mother-vibe.But I wonder how fair or even productive it is to critique someone for adhering to those norms when she didn’t create them. It feels like critiquing a fish for swimming in the wrong water or something. Do you know what I mean? It’s tricky. What do you think?VirginiaI see that. The belly caressing in particular really moved me because she started caressing her belly like that when she was, like, nine weeks pregnant. To see this woman, who has a belly, caressing her belly without apology with so much joy and reverence for it, at a time when there’s often still a lot of negativity about the belly. We’re conditioned not to really celebrate the bump until it’s like the perfect basketball bump on your tiny body. And she’s never gonna have that perfect basketball bump on a tiny body. That’s not how she’s built. There was something very radical and moving to me to see her being so proud of that. That does feel powerful for me in terms of representation of pregnancy that doesn’t look like the way we’re told pregnancy needs to look. And yet, it does unsettle me to then see her grasping at holding up every other possible standard of perfect pregnancy. It’s like she’s only allowed one out or something.SaraYeah, that’s so interesting. Mia O’Malley went viral for sharing her own pregnancy photos and she wrote an essay accompanying them. This was, I think, three-ish years ago, and she still gets comments and emails from other moms saying they never even considered taking pregnancy photos because they had so internalized that this was a thin person thing to do. Like the basketball bump—if you don’t have that, your pregnancy is not worth celebrating or beautiful or whatever. The mere fact of representation is really powerful.VirginiaAnd for someone who reaches such a wide audience who haven’t reconsidered their feelings on fatness or beauty, she is asking them to do that. SaraYeah. If a mom disrupts any part of the stereotypical ideal—like in this case she’s disrupting thinness and whiteness—that’s a net positive.VirginiaYes, I agree. But I do think of what Tori was talking about in her email. Nabela is not opting out. She’s opting all the way in and saying, “I belong in this room.” SaraWell, and I think back to what you were saying before. The responsibility and the onus should be on white moms, with the most privilege, for them to opt out.VirginiaI agree with you. I think if anyone’s going to be making the big momfluencer bucks off the endorsement deals, I’m glad it’s Nabela. What else do we want to say about Mia? SaraIn addition to her main feed, she has a baby wearing feed. She became a babywearing consultant because when she was pregnant and when she had her newborn, every time she was shopping for a baby swing or a baby wrap, it was modeled on a thin model. Did you ever baby wear?VirginiaI was really uncomfortable babywearing and size was definitely a factor in that. SaraRight. I didn’t babywear until my third baby because I was just generally overwhelmed. Those wraps are like a mile long. They’re hard no matter what kind of body you have. But to have a body that’s never represented or to not have tutorials that speak to your particular shape is a real barrier to entry. It’s like, is this even going to work? Is it even going to be safe? VirginiaYeah, and I do have one fat friend who like came over with her Moby Wrap and helped me figure it out. That was very helpful, but I remember envying mothers for whom it felt effortless. It did not feel effortless for me, ever.  We’re making babywearing into something that you’re supposed to innately know and understand at a time when your body is a complete stranger to you.SaraAnd the baby’s a complete stranger!VirginiaThey’re very small and squishy. It’s very disorienting. SaraThere are a ton of fat moms and plus size moms who are creating networks of healthcare providers who don’t have anti-fat bias. This world of momfluencing is worlds away from the one we talked about last week. VirginiaThat is the real potential and promise of mom influencers, to help break down barriers and create communities that can share information. PlusMommy is another one who’s awesome in this space. She does really great advocacy, helping moms know what questions to ask at prenatal appointments. She also talks a lot about being a fat mom going to Disney World or being a fat mom at the playground. Our physical spaces are not built for larger bodies very often, and particularly our parenting spaces. SaraI want to bring up Andrea Landry, who runs the account Indigenous motherhood. She points out that indigenous mothers have always created their own communities, calling each other and saying, “don’t go to this doctor, you’re gonna face discrimination and racism at this practice.” But since Instagram, that community-building has a way broader-reaching impact.And in terms of looking at issues that maybe white moms should be focusing our attention on more than clean countertops, Andrea and I were talking about the huge amount of Indigenous children that are placed in foster care. They are removed from Indigenous communities, which is further colonizing these communities and preventing them from learning their traditions and languages. She was saying that even up until the early 2000s, Indigenous women were still experiencing forced sterilization. In Saskatchewan, they would wake up from C-sections having had hysterectomies without their consent. These things are still happening. It’s not helping us to stay in our bubble and it’s certainly not helping the greater motherhood cause.VirginiaShould we talk about disabled motherhood? SaraI mentioned Rebekah Taussig. She has really educated me on the structural issues impacting disabled moms that non-disabled moms are probably not aware of. In 30 states there are still discriminatory laws that mandate that custody can be removed from a disabled Mom on the basis of their disability. Like, not having the burden of proving that there was neglect or child endangerment or abuse. Just on the basis of the disability. VirginiaWow, this is a great country. I’m really proud.SaraIt’s so fucking bad! It’s bad for all moms, but it is so much fucking worse for marginalized moms. Okay, Daniizzie. So, she has twins. And yeah, a movie is being made, a documentary about her experience. She’s really cool. She posts a lot about access, in terms of specifically parent-related activities. Yeah, like inclusive playgrounds.VirginiaShe uses a wheelchair and she’s parenting twins. And yeah, of course, how would you play on most playgrounds with your kids? The ground is gravel. There are so many instant barriers. SaraReal safety issues. You have to follow your toddler up the huge curly slide or whatever.VirginiaI mean, sidebar: I hate playgrounds. Until my children became old enough to play independently on them, I just viewed them as parent punishment. But I will also fully acknowledge the privilege in that. I didn’t want to get up on the slide, but I could do it.SaraOh, I just discovered KC Davis. She has a book called How to Keep House While Drowning. She has a post about laundry where she has a bunch of photos of beautiful laundry rooms, and all she says is, “This is a hobby.” VirginiaThis is blowing my mind a little bit right now.SaraIt is an actual task that we must do to keep our family in clean clothes. But we’ve also internalized that it should look good and be pretty.VirginiaAnd is that actually going to make the task of laundry more enjoyable? Is it more delightful to stain treat skid marks in a room with shiplap? No, it would still be gross. And there’s then the added labor of trying to make the room continually look like that photo. Because it will not. The whole point of a laundry room is to be filled with dirty laundry. So it’s never going to look good unless you’re not doing laundry in it.SaraI think so much about this. I’m really into pretty houses and shit, but I am constantly thinking about how it’s only pretty if it’s clean. The biggest battle is the actual domestic labor.VirginiaHer account is strugglecare. And before people who have beautiful laundry rooms all DM us, she says: There’s nothing wrong with being someone who likes this. Just call it what it is. This is a hobby. It’s a fine hobby to have.  There’s a great parallel here with diet culture because I often think about fitness in the same terms. Fitness is a great hobby! But somebody loving to train for triathlons and having the “triathlon body” doesn’t make them better than people who don’t like to train for triathlons. It’s the same weird infusion of hobbies with moral value because they relate to thinness and whiteness. This kind of laundry room personifies a certain kind of mom, that’s why we’re making it “better” than other laundry rooms.SaraI really want to talk about Cia. They identify as queer and non-binary. They have a lovely, illuminating post about gender dysphoria in regards to breastfeeding. They talk about how breastfeeding in our culture is so wrapped up in the image of a beautiful white mother luxuriating in her femininity. Cia talks about feeling really good about feeding their child and bonding with their child, but also feeling like they don’t fit into this prescribed norm of what breastfeeding should look like.VirginiaYeah, this is a really important conversation. I think about, for non-binary folks going through pregnancy, the importance of communities around that. Because the body changes could be so dysmorphia-inducing. But also, you deserve to be just as proud of what your body’s doing as anyone else. It’s ridiculous that they aren’t included in the conversation.SaraWell, and the reason it feels disorienting and not great is because, again, of the ideal.VirginiaRight, right. It’s the thin white mom taking up way too much space in this conversation. I’m also loving all the normalizing the body changes in this feed, like there’s a lot of photos of their belly, and their postpartum belly. Yeah, this is very cool. When we were talking earlier about disabled mothers losing custody rights, it also reminded me we were going to talk a little bit about The School for Good Mothers and process our feelings about that book. We’re going to try to do it without plot spoilers, because people may want to read it. Although, it’s very important to know that you don’t have to read it. Sara read it and wrote a piece about it. And I was like, “Oh, I’m reading it right now!” And she texted me to say, are you? Do you want to stop? And then I was texting her at 6am when I finished it, in tears. But! We wanted to bring it into this conversation because it articulates the ways that the standards of white motherhood creates these huge disparities and very real trauma.SaraRight now, I can only watch basically like tea and crumpets television. So, if you’re in a space like that, maybe wait a hot second on this book and read it when you’re feeling a little less tea and crumpet-y?VirginiaI would say when the world is better, but I don’t know when that will be. SaraMaybe when there’s more sun?It just hits close to home, which is why it’s such a harrowing read. Just the very arbitrary ways we define good mothering—mothering, specifically, because I think it’s important to note that mothers are held to a different standard than fathers. There is one character who isn’t harrowing—I find her hilarious. So, she has basically a momfluencer character in the book named Susanna. She’s not a momfluencer, but she follows all the like, you know, “essential oil will heal all things.” VirginiaShe is the new girlfriend of the ex-husband of the main character. So the main character’s daughter is now being raised by this new girlfriend and the father. So, she’s watching her child be parented by a momfluencer, basically, and it’s kind of your worst nightmare.SaraAt one point this wellness-y, culty momfluencer removes carbs from the toddler’s diet.VirginiaYes, it’s like, who’s the child abuser? Obviously, it’s not good for a two-year-old to not eat carbs. That’s science. Meanwhile, this woman of color whose parental rights have been terminated over a very minor issue, is watching this happen. Jessamine Chan does such a good job of articulating how the system continually rewards and reinforces Susanna’s style of parenting, even when it is patently bad, like with the decision around the carbs. But there’s a totally different set of standards used to measure mothers of color.SaraThe standards are funny in that they are so over the top. Like the teachers at the school test them on their hugs. This is the hug you give when your toddler is having a meltdown about sharing and is the hug seven seconds too long? Are you doing the bedtime hug? Are you communicating the right kind of maternal warmth through this embrace? VirginiaSo much in there comes out of parenting influencers and the parenting advice that we see on social media. You might have to come back and we’ll do a whole episode about parenting influencers because the way that positive parenting is pushed on social…Butter For Your Burnt ToastSaraSo I have a tortilla recommendation. Do you know the podcast Home Cooking with Samin Nosrat?VirginiaYes! It was everyone’s coping strategy during lockdown.SaraShe recommended these tortillas and I immediately bought them. You put them on a super hot pan for 15 seconds and they balloon up into this crispy, delightful, salty... It’s so good. They’re so good.VirginiaThey have pork fat tortillas, duck fat tortillas, and avocado oil. This sounds amazing. I will be getting them immediately.SaraYeah, I got the duck fat and avocado oil. They were both good. VirginiaWe do a lot of tacos because it’s one of the few meals my family can agree on eating. So I would really like to up our tortilla game. Thank you! I am also going to recommend a food. So, as people know, I had COVID. By the time this airs, I’m hopefully over it. But as we are recording this, I am on day seven and I’m still testing positive. For the first few days I couldn’t even move. But as the fog began to lift, I was like okay, now I need comfort food so I have to bake something. We had a bunch of bananas going brown on the kitchen counter, so I made this banana bread recipe. I did not think I had strong opinions about banana bread. I thought that it was a food that you could just Google any banana bread recipe and it would all turn out the same. Yep, no, no, this is the best banana bread. It is smitten kitchen’s the ultimate banana bread recipe and she is correct. It has this amazing, thick crust and then the inside is still really squishy and gooey. Just make it. Thank me later. It’s very easy to make, too. There’s not a lot of ingredients. I mean, I made it while still having COVID and not being able to stand for more than fifteen minutes at a time. I ate it all week and no one else in my family wanted it and I was so happy. Well, Sara, thank you so much for doing this again. Remind us where we can follow you. SaraOkay, so I’m on Twitter and Instagram.VirginiaThank you for being here.SaraThank you, Virginia!---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.

When your providers are emphasizing weight to you, I think this is something you can feel free to push back on and say, “Look, if I am at higher risk, we don’t know that the problem is really my weight—or the care you’re going to give me because of my weight.” Hello and welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia.This is the monthly subscriber-only episode where I answer your questions. So thank you to all my paid Burnt Toast subscribers. I love you. Let’s get right to it.Q: I’m 20 weeks pregnant and trying to navigate mainstream healthcare’s view that my body is too big to have a healthy pregnancy. I can’t believe how stuck my providers have been on my weight. Do you have any advice for dealing with this experience? The first resource I’m going to point you to is Plus Mommy. The blog, the Instagram, the podcast, all created by Jen McLellan, who is a mom in a larger body, a really tremendous advocate, and super knowledgeable about these issues. Plus Mommy is your first stop when you are educating yourself as a pregnant person in a bigger body, who, because of our very fatphobic medical system, is going to have to do some extra labor of self-advocacy during this experience. Also, I forgot to say congratulations. Congratulations! This is wonderful news. So sorry for skipping over that and getting right to the resources. Next, I wanted to just own that I don’t have personal experience with this because I was still straight-sized during both of my pregnancies. I was sort of on the line with the second pregnancy, but my providers did not really focus too much on weight. (It was a high-risk pregnancy for other reasons. So, they were distracted, I guess.) I have a fair amount of thin privilege when it comes to this conversation. I haven’t had to advocate for myself in a pregnancy setting around weight and health care.But even though I don’t have lived experience for you on this, I did spend a long time reporting on the research on weight and pregnancy outcomes for a feature I wrote for The New York Times Magazine. (TW for anyone dealing with infertility because it is about weight stigma in the infertility industry specifically. Although ultimately a hopeful story for the moms I interviewed in the piece, it definitely sketches out a lot of problems in that industry, like using BMI cut-offs to deny services, which is horrible and fatphobic.) In the process of reporting that piece I went through all the research on weight and pregnancy outcomes, because that’s the main thing that comes up when you ask infertility doctors why they are denying care to women in larger bodies. There’s a lot of paternalistic language about is this person fit to be a mother? And who do we consider fit to be a mother? Okay, so what does the research really say about weight and pregnancy outcomes? The first thing to know is so much of this comes down to provider bias. Larger pregnant people receive less careful prenatal care. That is because doctors and other health care providers have high levels of anti-fat bias. One study published in 2017 in the Journal of Patient Education and Counseling found that when researchers analyzed audio recordings of prenatal appointments between 22 providers and 117 pregnant people, they found that providers treating patients with higher BMIs asked those patients fewer questions about their lifestyle habits and shared less information. So, right off the bat, the conversations are shorter. They’re not getting as much information on these people. That’s going to impact the quality of care. That’s going to impact the pregnant person’s experience of being in that healthcare setting. It’s going to impact a whole bunch of stuff. An Australian study on prenatal health care found that doctors express less sympathy and less approval for their larger pregnant patients. I don’t see how you offer good health care to someone you feel no empathy or approval for. That’s a toxic dynamic to be in. I interviewed Sharon Bernecki DeJoy, an associate professor of health at Westchester University, who studies maternity care in the United States, for this piece. She told me that many providers see a larger woman and say things like, “‘Don’t eat cheeseburgers,’ even though she’s a vegetarian. There’s a lack of recognition of the evidence that shows you can be healthy and still have an ‘unhealthy’ BMI.” I think that’s a really nice way of summing up how provider bias is informing the experience you’re having in your healthcare right now and is, across the board, informing the way that pregnant people in larger bodies are treated when they seek prenatal care. The data about whether weight itself does impact pregnancy is really murky. And that’s in large part because no one is controlling for that provider bias when they do these studies. When they start to try to pin down whether it’s the weight itself that causes some of the outcomes we see, they’re not factoring in the stigma question and how that’s impacting things. They’re also generally not proving causal relationships. This is a classic case of correlation is not causation. Another expert I interviewed for the piece is Chloe Zera, MD who is a maternal fetal medicine specialist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Dr. Zera told me, “I wouldn’t go so far as to say we understand why maternal weight is associated with negative outcomes. Obesity can require special care, but a majority of women with BMI over 30 don’t have a complicated pregnancy and do have healthy babies.” This is someone whose job it is to care for high risk pregnancies and she is saying this is not something the data has nailed down. The reason she’s saying that is when we look—on a population level, which is what most of these studies do—we can find correlations between higher body weight and certain birth outcomes, but we’re still talking about really rare events. Even if the risk increases as body size goes up, we’re still talking about only a handful of occurrences. When Stanford University researchers analyzed more than 1.1 million birth records in California, they found the overall prevalence of stillbirths was five per 1000 deliveries. And among women with a BMI above 30, the rate ranged from seven to ten stillbirths per 1000 deliveries. So, that’s as much as a twofold increase, but still a rare event: Ten or fewer stillbirths per 1000 babies born. I just want to underscore that Stanford study did not establish a causal relationship between BMI and stillbirths. It may be that the medical care that fat pregnant people are getting is increasing their risk for stillbirth, not their bodies. Some experts I talked to for this piece talked about how it can be harder for doctors to detect fetal complications in bigger bodies as a result of technological limitations. Mostly what they’re talking about is doing those early ultrasounds in larger bodies there can be limitations with what the wand picks up. This is technology’s fault! We need better ultrasound equipment for fat people. Once again, stigma compromises care. It’s not your body. When your providers are emphasizing weight to you, this is something you can push back on and say, “Look, if I am at higher risk, we don’t know that the problem is really my weight or the care you’re going to give me because of my weight.” If they say, “Yeah, we don’t feel like we can safely do your ultrasounds or perform your routine prenatal care,” then I want you to be with a doctor who can. I don’t want you to stay in a practice that doesn’t feel like they are equipped to deal with your body. You deserve better than that! And I know that’s easy to say and not easy to do, because switching doctors, especially mid-pregnancy, is really stressful. Sometimes you’re limited by insurance and with travel logistics. But to whatever extent that is possible, or if there’s an option to bring in a doula or a support person who can help you advocate in these appointments, I think that’s worth doing. It’s certainly more worth doing than pursuing weight loss, which is suggested far too often for pregnant people in larger bodies. We know that won’t work. And we also know that weight loss during pregnancy can be dangerous. Bottom line, Richard Legro, MD who is a professor of public health services and Chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Penn State University, told me, “There is no BMI cut point above which it is absolutely unsafe to have a pregnancy.” And I just want to add to that all of the doctors that I interviewed for this piece were super mainstream. They were not Health at Every Size advocates. They were not ready to throw out BMI. They were not radicalized on these issues at all and they were still saying, “No, we are taking this conversation too far.” So, whatever your providers are telling you, it is not evidence based, and it is not the final word on this conversation. I wish you luck in engaging in these conversations with your providers or, if you have to, seeking help from a different provider.Q: What is your advice for a kid who has gotten extremely concerned about wasting food? My seven year old has a lot of anxiety about wasting things in general: scraps of paper, toys with missing pieces. A lot of that is a whole separate bag of issues, but when it intersects with food, it’s creating a dynamic I’m not really sure how to respond to. I want him to try new things and to eat as much as he wants and to listen to his own hunger cues. I have never, ever put an emphasis on clearing your plate or shamed the throwing away of food. To my mind, whether you eat it or toss it, it’s gone, but he’s gotten extremely obsessive about it. Anyway, if he gets full before all his food is gone, he sits there begging someone else to finish it so it doesn’t get wasted. And if no one will, he will often sit there, crying and stuffing bites into his mouth. It’s extremely frustrating and upsetting. I serve him small portions but some things come pre-portioned, like the Pillsbury biscuits at Thanksgiving dinner for example; bagels which I already serve cut into quarters to try to minimize anxiety over wanting more but not so much more, etc. I am struggling with neutral language to use when it comes to this. When he begs me to eat his food, I have gone as far to say, with mild frustration, that my body is not a trash can, that it isn’t a place to just throw food we don’t want and that I don’t want to eat food I’m not hungry for any more than he does, and that that’s okay. It’s okay to thank the food for being there and also decide we don’t want it. We’ve also talked about going back for seconds versus taking huge servings the first time around as a way to make food more, quote, save-able. But I don’t know. There’s so many feelings mixed into this issue: his, mine, and our culture’s. And in the moment, I always find myself casting about for neutral words and phrases to use to stop him from sobbing and cramming more food than he wants into his body, or begging and pleading with someone else to eat his scraps. A: Oh, this is really tough. I love that you said your body is not a trash can. I think that is a great answer and a great point to underscore with kids. I think, kids in general, in this age and younger, and probably older, too, have a tendency to view their parents as not quite human. Like, we should just be available to take their gross tissue or lick something off their face. Children do not expect us to have boundaries around this and I think it’s good to set some boundaries and say, I don’t have to put food in my body just because you don’t want it. This is a mutual body respect thing that I think it’s good to start cultivating. You are also modeling intuitive eating to him, which is great. You are modeling trusting your body and respecting your body. I think you’re doing everything really right there and I’m sorry it’s not immediately fixing the problem. Like so many things with kids and eating, and with parenting in general, you can be doing the right thing and it doesn’t mean that the problem magically disappears. Progress is often slow. You mentioned that this is part of a constellation of anxiety issues, so of course my other advice would be to work with a therapist to help with some reframing and strategies. It sounds like you’re already on that, but a responsive feeding therapist could be a useful touchpoint or conversation to bring into this. I will link to a resource for that, if that’s something you want to explore. In terms of other more practical stuff to throw at you, I like that you said you’re already serving small portions. I would also involve him in seeing how you store leftovers, Maybe that can even be his job, to put the leftovers away in containers. Maybe you get creative together in how you’re going to repurpose the leftovers. Like if it’s fruit, stuff like a banana that he’s taken one bite out of—that’s how every banana is eaten in my house, one bite taken out of them and then the child is done with that. Those go in the freezer and we use them for smoothies. Amy Palanjian of Yummy Toddler Food has a good blog post about food waste that might give you some more ideas. I think you want to engage him in being part of the problem-solving on all of this and not just say “Don’t worry, this is what’s happening to it.” Because it sounds like he’s wanting to control the food experience by wanting you to finish the food, so instead you can say “I’m not the solution, but here is the solution you can seek out.”The other thing I’m going to suggest, if you’re not doing it already, is composting. You might even just try getting some books about composting. We have this funny board game my brother-in-law found called Rush to Recycle, where the whole point of the board game is to sort your recycling and your compost. My four year old loves it. Who doesn’t love a board game about recycling? So you could just start by talking about the whole process if you don’t want to actually do it, but I think it could be a good project to consider. You can compost most if not all of your food scraps and then the food is not wasted. It’s going to turn into dirt which is food for plants! This is something kids can grasp really easily and clearly and I think it’s super reassuring if they’ve got anxiety around this. I do hate suggesting a project that does come with a little bit of work and mental load. There’s definitely a learning curve to composting and the equipment is a bit of an investment. You need a bin to keep in your freezer or under your counter where you collect all the kitchen scraps, like at meals and when you’re cooking. Here is the bin we use for under-counter collection and then the composting tumbler that we keep in our garden. That’s where, when the bin is full, you empty it into the tumbler and you spin it every once in a while. It’s amazing how much the tumblers can hold and you eventually get compost to use in your garden, if you care about that. Your kid will just feel reassured that it’s going to a “purpose,” whether or not you end up using the compost. There are definitely cheaper ways to do it. If you don’t want to buy a lot of stuff, you could just have a gallon Ziploc bag you keep in your freezer where you’re adding food scraps and then eventually that goes out to a compost pile in some corner of your yard, if that’s an option. And there are also smaller scale composters, there are worm composters, which I bet a seven year old would be obsessed with. I don’t want my kids to know that’s a thing because I don’t really want to take on worms, but you can go to town with this. Corinne Fay, who works on this newsletter with me, endorses composting in a cardboard box, which looks so cool. As much as possible, if you decide to compost to help manage his anxiety around this, make the composting his project. This is something he can learn about. He is, at seven, definitely old enough to be in charge of collecting everybody’s scraps and taking them out to the compost heap. I think that’s a great chore for a kid to be in charge of, and may help ease a lot of the anxiety around this issue. Because he will then be seeing the entire process from A-to-Z. From eating the food, to composting the food, to doing whatever you want to do with the compost later. You could find a community garden to donate it to or give it to a friend who gardens, that kind of thing, if you don’t have a personal use for it. If composting is totally unappealing, my last suggestion is, if you don’t have one, maybe get a dog because dogs are also great at eating your leftovers! But also, again, you’re doing everything right, this may just need to be a storm you ride out. Q: Thanks so much for your newsletter. I originally subscribed because I was working as a nanny and trying to understand what the heck was going on with the kids at lunchtime and I’ve since been exposed to so much helpful anti-diet stuff through your work, which I’m very grateful for. I’m now in grad school and no longer a nanny. And I’m here to ask you a question about feeding yourself on a budget, especially while a single person. I’ve been buying a lot of cheap TV-dinners lately, which I find much easier than taking on the mental load of meal planning. And honestly, I get more vegetables that way. Many of them are advertised as being for “two people,” clearly something intended for couples to share instead of cooking themselves. I often find myself taking that to heart and trying to make myself only eat one half of whatever it is and saving the other half for the next meal. I told myself I was doing it for many reasons, but that’s not true. It’s because I feel guilty eating two people’s worth of a meal in one sitting, even though I’m usually hungry enough for it. Can you offer any advice or guidance for thinking my way out of this food-limiting mindset? A: First, I think it’s great, you’re recognizing this for what it is. Yes, this is a food limiting mindset. You are limiting yourself and not honoring your hunger when you try to follow this very arbitrary rule. The next thing I want to say is, TV dinners are great! They are a super practical, easy way to feed yourself on the cheap. And I’m here for that. But a lot of these brands are marketed with a fair amount of diet culture rhetoric, or what I consider oppositional diet culture rhetoric. Like playing into the idea of “indulgence” and “being bad” and whatever. So either way, whether it’s like an “indulgent” TV dinner or a “responsible” TV dinner, they often play into this mindset. And that doesn’t make the food bad or the meals bad but it does mean you have to deliberately decide when you buy the meal to be tune out the noise. So after you go grocery shopping, as soon as you get the TV dinners home, take them out of their packaging. If you need to, cut out the cooking time instructions or take a picture of just that part of the label on your phone. Do that, and then throw out the packaging, and especially throw out the nutrition facts and the portion size because you don’t need it. If you don’t want to completely throw it out, you could use a black Sharpie to scribble out all the calorie counts and all the other information that’s just going to mess with your head. And again, do that right when you get home. So then when you go to eat them later, it’s not a conscious decision you have to make during the process of feeding yourself. You’ve dispensed with that information. It’s not relevant to you. It’s not something you’re going to be looking at when you’re preparing the meal. So, hopefully just doing that will help you then eat the meal the same way you would eat the meal if someone had put down a bowl of pasta for the whole table and there were more people there. You would take a serving, but you would eat as much as you were hungry for. You wouldn’t be thinking I am only entitled to exactly one half or one quarter of this. If that doesn’t quite do it, some other thoughts on how to reframe this. Since you used to nanny, consider whether you would have policed a kid in the same way? A lot of kids’ snacks are sold in single serving pouches. But the person who decided the size of the granola bar or the yogurt tube, does not know your child and does not know their hunger. And they cannot say that this is not a two- or three-granola-bar-day versus a one-granola-bar-day. You deserve that same permission. Your hunger is valid. You eat these at a time of day when you’re really hungry. It completely makes sense to be as hungry as you are because that’s what your body is telling you. And you deserve to eat as much food as you’re hungry for. The food delivery framework should not change that. And no one else knows your hunger the way you do. Certainly not a faceless corporation that never met you before they wrote up their serving size information. So I hope that helps and I hope you enjoy your TV dinner tonight.---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!