The Burnt Toast Podcast

Hello, and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!For this episode, I thought it would be fun to both answer some of your questions and just talk a little bit about a recent piece I did on Division of Responsibility and Instagram.The response to this piece was very interesting. I heard from so many dietitians and other kinds of kid food influencers on Instagram saying, “Thank you for articulating this. This is a conversation I’ve been afraid to have on here. I’ve been afraid to talk about this.” I’m even seeing a few folks changing the way they talk about Division of Responsibility and admitting more openly when it’s not working for their own families. I’m excited about that. And I want to be clear: That’s not because I think Division of Responsibility is evil. I will be forever grateful to the role DOR has played in my own family and I think has a lot of potential to help families. But I do think there are some problematic elements baked into it that we need to reckon with. As I explained in that piece: The way we talk about DOR on social media both distorts it and focuses on some of those problematic elements. And so I think people are starting to rethink when they are being rigid for rigidity’s sake. When am I refusing to question my family’s mealtime structure? Is this a plan that I jumped on, is it something that I have decided on, or am I considering how my kid is responding to it and is this really working for them? I’ll be honest and say I am still figuring this out in my own life. One example I can give you is my preschooler’s feelings about wanting snacks before dinner. I feel like we’re never getting this right. She obviously is hungry before the rest of us. She’s smaller and goes to bed the earliest and she would probably prefer dinner to be at 4pm every day, and we’re trying to make her last till 5:30. So we have a snack when she gets home from school at 3-3:30pm. She’s allowed to have a big snack, as much as she wants to eat, but inevitably in that half hour before dinner, she gets cranky again. I think it’s really about wanting attention, particularly attention from me when I’m distracted with cooking dinner. So we’ve tried using lines like, “The kitchen is closed, but it’ll be open really soon,” and hoping that doesn’t feel restrictive. We’ve tried having rules like, “you can have a fruit or vegetable now,” and that’s not because I’m pushing fruits and vegetables hard on my kids, but just because I know if I give her another snack, she will not be hungry when we sit down to dinner. But ultimately, maybe I just have to be okay with the fact that she would like to be eating earlier. She may not fully participate in our family dinner right now. Maybe that’s not the end of the world. It feels deflating to me personally if I let her have snacks right before dinner and then we sit down and she’s done in one bite and doesn’t want to eat the meal that I’ve worked hard to make, even if it’s got foods that she really likes in it. But that might just be where we are. If I was rigidly following Division of Responsibility, the answer would be absolutely no snacks. Let’s get her to come to the table hungry and then she’s more likely to try new foods. But if I’m recognizing where my kid is and what my bandwidth is at 5:00pm on a Wednesday night and how much I’m willing to die on that mountain with a four-year-old, the answer for us might be something different. And that’s my big takeaway from this whole conversation: There are going to be times when not following DOR makes the most sense for you. We need to get away from this idea that there is an external answer and instead empower parents to say, “This is where my kid is and this is what makes sense to them.” At the same time, we still need to give guidance and structure, so it’s such a tricky conversation to be having. Q: I’ve got a question inspired by your newsletter on DOR. How do we balance eliminating diet culture with nutrition? You highlighted how a lot of the kid-feeding advice out there still feeds off diet culture, like in wanting to keep dessert portions small. But when I want to give my kid or myself “healthy” meals, how do I root out diet culture? This occurred to me when I was making a pizza for myself for lunch today and thinking, well, there are some diced tomatoes on there, that’s a vegetable. Is that diet culture? Or is that trying to include nutritionally dense foods alongside foods that are tasty and satisfying? I don’t give my toddler juice. Is that diet culture or just sound decision making? This is starting to feel more like a question for therapy. How do I identify my motivations? I’m curious about your take. If my child were in charge, he’d be eating Raisin Bran and milk and raisins for most meals. Though DOR folks might tell me his body would eventually inspire him to make other choices, I know that’s not the case for picky kids. So for him and for me, how do I make choices for our meals that aren’t steered by diet culture, but also aren’t steered by cravings for the tastiest foods? We need to care about nutrition way, way, way less. So much less. We live in a culture of abundance around food. We live in the modern era of white flour fortified with vitamins. Many foods offer many different nutritional profiles. If you are not food insecure—meaning if you are able to feed your child as much food as they’re hungry for—the odds of your child being malnourished are really, really, really small. There are exceptions to this; poverty is the biggest exception. If you can’t afford to feed your kid, then yes, nutrition is a concern. And there are definitely kids with ARFID or other feeding disorders who aren’t taking in enough calories and nutrients to grow and to thrive, because of their struggles. And I don’t mean to downplay the severity or complications of those situations. But: Anyone with a garden variety picky eater can relax knowing that their child not going to be malnourished, even if they’re living a life of Raisin Bran, milk, and raisins. Or mac and cheese, Uncrustables, and Cheerios, as is the diet of the picky eaters in my household. At the baseline, if you have enough food, you have nutrition. Anything beyond that, to be honest, is a little bit diet culture. This is not to say that fruits and vegetables aren’t great, but they aren’t what’s going to fill you up in terms of hunger, right? They don’t give kids enough calories to grow, by themselves. In and of themselves, fruits and vegetables are nice to have, but they are not essential for human survival in the same way that carbohydrates, fat and protein are. [Virginia Note For Dietitian Readers: Yes, I know many vegetables provide some, if not all of those macronutrients. But if your kid won’t eat them, you can cover those bases in lots of other ways.]We need to re-evaluate the importance we put on kids eating vegetables. Is really because they are so nutritionally important, or is it because diet culture has convinced us of their importance? This is not a hard and fast thing. I do think kids should be exposed to different foods to help them develop different preferences. I like vegetables, I eat them at many meals, but definitely not every meal. When I’m having a pizza lunch, vegetables are not a huge concern.So often, when we talk about nutrition, we’re talking about diet culture. When we are trying to escape from diet culture, putting nutrition aside is really important. When we are thinking about how to feed our kids, as counterintuitive as it sounds, putting nutrition aside is important. And I always say we shouldn’t give parents hard and fast rules, but I’m about to give you a hard and fast rule. What really matters around family meals is connection. It’s kids feeling comforted by the experience; feeling confident that they are going to be fed enough and trusting that they can feel emotionally connected to caregivers. If you start from there and continue to prioritize that, then the meal that you are serving will meet nutritional needs because you will be assuring them that they have enough food and foods they can eat. You don’t need to get hung up on vegetables or juice or no juice or any of these other questions because the primary purpose of the meal is met. From there, a child can grow up to be an adult who eats vegetables or they might not grow up to be an adult who eats vegetables. That’s not really your job as a parent to ensure. I realize that may feel uncomfortable to a lot of people, but that’s what I keep coming back to. We have overemphasized nutrition. If we could care a lot less about nutrition, our kids would have a healthier relationship with food. Q: My husband is really struggling with food waste. My daughter eats a very limited range of foods, which is totally fine, but the list of acceptable foods changes weekly—and sometimes daily—usually right after I’ve bought it in bulk at Costco. So, a packed lunch that delighted her Monday is completely rejected on Friday. I’ve gotten into the habit of packing pretty much all her favorites every day, and just hoping that something gets eaten. My husband can’t bring himself to pack foods that he knows will just get thrown away or composted at the end of the day. It’s not a cost thing for him, it’s just a real, ingrained reaction to waste. My daughter often overhears his negative reaction when her food returns uneaten. Ideas?The food waste thing comes up a lot with DOR because we are taught that we need to keep offering, offering, offering this wide variety of foods. And that means, at every meal, you’re putting food on the table that your kid is probably not going to eat. What I would say is if you’re sending lunch to school, take the pressure off that. School lunch is not the time you need to expose a kid to new foods. School lunch is a stressful eating experience for many kids. Them feeling comforted—again, I’m coming back to this idea of comfort—by familiar offerings in their lunchbox is more important than them eating a vegetable at lunch. If the meal is comforting and familiar, it increases the odds that they will actually eat lunch when they’re feeling anxious or worried. That’s really all you want them to get out of lunch: Food that they can eat and enjoy. If it is coming back rejected, even when you’ve put in something that’s a favorite on Monday and by Friday it’s not, I would involve your daughter more in the planning of what goes in her lunch every day. I didn’t get an age, but even with a preschooler you could be doing this. Involve her in a no pressure way and make sure she has space to say if she no longer likes this food, even if you’ve already bought it and are hoping that was the thing you could pack. Really involve her in that process. If she’s older, you can even start involving her in packing the lunch. In a follow up comment this mom did say, “We try to ask her what she wants in a given day, but if she doesn’t eat it, my husband will bang dishes and angrily scrape stuff into the compost all while asking her repeatedly why she didn’t she eat the lunch she specifically asked for.”It sounds like he’s feeling secretly (or not so much!) that she’s doing it on purpose. So right there, we see the pressure coming in, and that’s going to cause her to clamp down more on not eating the food he wants her to eat. The stakes are too high. It is not traditional Division of Responsibility to let the kid take more ownership over her lunch, but I think if you could let her be more fully in charge of the what, then you would find she eats more reliably.So that would be my tip there, even though I understand it sounds like you’re already doing it. Because I think maybe you’re doing it, but then there’s this pressure coming from her dad that she’s not eating it and she’s being wasteful. That might be taking up some space there. Having your husband say less of those things out loud—maybe he saves that rant and shares that with you after your daughter is in bed at night? Saying less to her and putting her more in charge of the lunch-making process to whatever extent is age appropriate might help there. This is a great example of, if you’re trying to be a stickler for following DOR, I’ve just broken a whole bunch of rules. I’m not interpreting the “what” to mean “expose them to lots of new foods every chance you get.” You’re giving them more responsibility and more say over the what, but I think that might be necessary right now because this kid’s not eating their lunch and that’s stressful for everybody. Q: Wow, this hit home! As a fat mother of a picky toddler who was a pediatric feeding disorder baby (so pickiness is quite an improvement) I’m super familiar with DOR and all these Instagram accounts and I’ve been having such feelings. Every time I feed my daughter food that is classified as “unhealthy,” I struggle so much because there is such a big part of me that feels like it’s my responsibility to help her avoid becoming like me, i.e. fat. This is despite the fact that I’m very much into fat acceptance—my whole job is about it. I haven’t dieted in many years, but there’s still the sense that she’s a tabula rasa and if I could just guide her to a healthy diet that she could avoid the stigma and difficulties that come with being in this world in a fat body. Plus, what will people think if they see this fat mother feeding her kids sweet potato fries and ketchup for dinner? I already haven’t been sticking to DOR because there’s a limit to how many times I can cook something “healthy” for her and put it straight in the trash. So, in reality, I allow her to eat her guacamole and cheese wrap every day for lunch. And after a child who would eat nothing, I actually appreciate it if she’ll eat pancakes and tons of syrup for breakfast because at least she isn’t about to go on a feeding tube anymore. Anyhow, I just wanted to let you know this reporting was spot on and you’re doing a fantastic job. Thank you. Thank you for that lovely note. I really feel you as a parent of pediatric feeding disorder survivor, that upgrading to pickiness is a major victory. I celebrate that with you. Interestingly, guacamole and cheese wraps were a long preferred food of my daughter, as well. They’re out of favor at the moment, but they were actually a super great lunch. I look forward to them coming back eventually. I just want to hold space for everything you’re saying here. Feeling like we want to protect our kids from experiencing the stigma we experience, especially for folks in fat bodies, makes sense. It’s completely logical. Also, it is just a reality that if you are a fat mom, you are getting judgment from some faction of the world about that. We just know that fat moms experience a ton of stigma. It’s wrong, and you shouldn’t have to experience it, but it’s the reality. So of course it’s impacting how you feel about feeding your kids! I’m holding space for all the feelings, because that is real, and a struggle that a lot of us can relate to. But of course, it is not your responsibility to help her avoid becoming like you. Serving her sweet potato fries and ketchup for dinner sounds like a great meal and nobody should be judging you for doing that. I think what this also speaks to is what Christin Dow said in my piece on Division of Responsibility: Although there are strengths to this method, it is not trauma-informed. DOR doesn’t take into account the stories that parents bring to the table or the emotional toll that trying to follow this protocol might take if you’re struggling with other forms of stigma or other stress. It makes sense that DOR isn’t totally working for you. It is just a framework, and it is not designed to address all these things. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe it doesn’t need to be all of those things. I do think it promises that it will solve almost every single type of feeding issue and every single challenge, and that’s not realistic. And again, the feelings about waste. DOR does require that you just serve things that your kid isn’t going to eat a lot of the time. One workaround I have for that is serving things family style. Don’t plate your kid a plate full of foods that they are unlikely to eat. Because then they poke around at them and spit on them and sneeze on them, and then you’re not gonna want to save those leftovers. If you instead are serving something family-style, they can decide whether to take it or not and the leftovers are going to be a lot more useful to you. Also make sure that the foods you’re serving are foods you want to eat, that they’re things you’ll eat as leftovers. There’s such a sadness to parents who sort of end up eating the scraps that their kids leave, and I’m not suggesting you do that. If you’ve made a stew or curry or something you really enjoy and the kids don’t touch it, maybe now you’ve got your work from home lunch sorted for the next three days. That’s sort of a win. Reframe exposure to mean they’re watching you eat something. And if they ask for a bite, give it to them, rather than putting a lot of food on their plate or encouraging them to take stuff that they don’t want. They can just be around you eating something. They can be eating something different. It’s okay. They can be eating just the rice or just the bread, and you’re eating the rest of the meal. Maybe you’ve pulled out some strawberries or some cheese sticks or something else. That’s not short order cooking. It’s not creating a lot of extra stress for you, but it’s just other things you can throw on the table so you know they’re going to get enough to eat.Q: This. Newsletter. I am jumping for joy, shedding tears of frustration, and feeling so validated. Thank you, again, for what you bring into the world. I’ve been at this for 20+ years and often wonder why no one is talking about XYZ, and then you talk about it! I have a few questions and I am hoping you might have a moment to consider them. I am a Mom, RD, and Parenting Educator who works with families and individuals, mostly in the Seattle area. As you’ve mentioned in podcast interviews and in writing, Satter’s DOR is great in so many ways (theory, validated tool), but HARD to implement in the real world. I, too, want to be clear that Satter’s contributions to this work are indispensable, and yet I have questions. Have you written about or are you interested in conversation about why BIPOC practitioners aren’t talking about DOR (or why am I not finding them)? What does the fact that the Instagram sites you so eloquently write about are all run by thin, privileged white women say about DOR? I’ve got my own theories here. For example, the Ellyn Satter Institute itself has zero representation or willingness to explore implicit bias and racism as it relates to their work, generalized poor representation in Dietetics, etc. Please correct me if I’m wrong (I so want to be wrong). This landscape feels barren when trying to find people who are willing to talk about openly about the limitations of DOR. I’m just not sure we ought to be using it as the go-to in parenting our children toward body love and food satisfaction. Based on the experiences of families I serve, the model does not feel holistically inclusive. There’s an itch I can’t quite scratch here. I assert that it is time to progress. We can simultaneously offer appreciation for those who came before me without necessarily wanting following in their footsteps.This is a really key thing that you’re articulating. Yes, dietetics, as a profession, is predominantly white. This is a huge problem. Diversify Dietetics is a group doing a lot of work to try to improve this and support Black dietitians and other dietitians of color. Folks like Whitney Trotter and Jessica Jones are much better qualified to speak to the nuances of this conversation. I need to have one of them on the podcast here to talk this through with us in a broader way—so stay tuned for more on that.The fact that the Instagram accounts are all run by privileged white women is not at all an accident. Kid food Instagram is very, very white. It is performing an ideal of white motherhood that is problematic and very much considered the norm in parenting. And yet, it is not representative of so many parents and so many families. My guess is the reason DOR is not a bigger part of the conversation with BIPOC practitioners is because it, too, is articulating a sort of white parenthood that doesn’t work for other families and other cultures. I was just chatting with Naureen Hunani of RDs for Neurodiversity for book research. And Naureen, who is South Asian, explained that DOR is not culturally sensitive to her family. It doesn’t acknowledge the fact that they eat with their hands or that it would not be culturally appropriate to use a line like “the kitchen is closed” to a child. That is not language that would resonate with that family. That is, frankly, a very white way of talking to your kids about food and having rules around food. That wouldn’t work for a lot of other cultures. I’m a white lady here. I can’t speak with a ton of the nuance about this, but I’m really glad you raised this question and I’m going to look into having more conversations about this on the podcast soon, with folks who who can speak to more of what’s happening here. But one takeaway, as a white mom thinking about this, is a note to self to diversify my own feed. I need to look for food accounts that are not run by thin, white women. And: I need to think harder about which elements of DOR resonate because they make sense for my family and which elements resonate because they reinforce internalized white supremacist ideals about motherhood.For all of us who’ve gotten swept up in the rigidity of Division of Responsibility and needed to back off a bit, this is probably an underlying factor. This is something we need to reckon with. It’s disappointing that the Ellyn Satter Institute hasn’t done a better job of reckoning with their fatphobia and with the race piece of their work. I definitely will be writing about this more and will have more to say on this soon. As always, if you have a question you want me to tackle on one of these episodes, you can just hit reply on this post or email me at virginiasolesmith@gmail.com and I’ll put your question on the list to answer in an upcoming episode. Thank you so much for listening to Burnt Toast. If you like this episode and you aren’t yet subscribed, consider subscribing. To my current subscribers, thank you so much for supporting the newsletter and definitely consider sharing this one on social media or forwarding it to a friend.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.I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. You can find more of my work at virginiasolesmith.com or come say hi on Instagram or Twitter. Thanks for listening. Talk to you soon!Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

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

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

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

Hello, and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!This is the newsletter where we explore questions (and some answers) about fatphobia, diet culture, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture. I’m the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia. I am doing another solo episode this week, but as we discussed last week, I’m open to feedback on how you feel about the balance of guests versus Q&A episodes. I’m recording this before people got a chance to comment on last week’s post, so if you already told me what you think—don’t worry, I saw it! I’m still figuring out the right schedule here. I have some really good questions this week and they all deal with a perennial Burnt Toast favorite topic: How do I have conversations about Health at Every Size and Intuitive Eating with people who are still buying into diet culture?What’s especially tricky is that these conversations either come up with people whom we are otherwise very close to, and suddenly this is a real tension point in the relationship, or, as one of these questions touches on, it comes up in a context where we don’t feel comfortable being controversial, like with school parents or work colleagues. It’s difficult to find the middle ground between staying true to your values, saying what you need to say, setting boundaries you need to set, and also not alienating people or creating a disruption. That’s the balance we’re going to try to find today with these questions. Q: I had a question about promoting intuitive eating and HAES (Health at Every Size) as a thin person. I believe pretty strongly in Intuitive Eating because it was instrumental in ending my years-long battle with anorexia. Many of my mom friends love to complain about their weight or discuss their current diet and weight loss goals. I often want to join the conversation and share about Intuitive Eating as an antidote to that, but I’m never sure if it’s appropriate because I’m usually the thinnest person in the conversation. My natural body type has always been very thin, even without anorexia. I could just envision my friends thinking, well, it’s easy for me to say that since I’m already thin. I’d love to share some of what I’ve learned, but I never want to be condescending. Is this one of those situations where I should just shut up?I’m going to link to the episode I did with Aubrey Gordon because we talked quite a lot about how to be a thin ally and what a thin person’s role in these conversations is. But if you don’t have time to listen again, Aubrey’s advice boiled down to: Ask your fat friends what they need, and then do that. If these friends are talking about living in significantly larger bodies than you, if they are on the receiving end of weight stigma and oppression around their body size, then it’s not your place to say, “Have you tried intuitive eating?” because you don't have their lived experience and you can’t really know what it’s like to deal with what they deal with—despite having absolutely had your own personal struggles. Figuring out how to support them is the most important goal. From there, there might come a time where they want to hear about your experience with intuitive eating, but they also might not ever want to hear about that from you. And that’s okay, you don’t have to be the person who brings them that message. If you’re talking about friends who are larger than you but still straight size, I think it’s a little bit different. I think it’s still worth acknowledging the privilege difference that you have, but you all have some degree of privilege. I still wouldn’t necessarily start with, “Hey guys, have you heard of intuitive eating?” because it may just not hit right if they are really struggling and wanting to diet or in the middle of a diet. I think once someone has already made the decision to diet, that’s not the moment to come in and say, “No, let’s try this another way.” Look for more neutral times in your friendship, where it might make sense to bring this up. Often people dip in and out of dieting, so if they’re coming off a diet that went badly, that may be a time when intuitive eating is something they’re open to learning more about. When they’re in a more neutral place with their body, they may be more interested in your experience.The other thing, too, especially if we’re talking about this with other straight-size friends, is that it’s okay for you to set boundaries. It may be not great for your recovery to hear friends talk about diet and weight loss. Even for folks who don't have an eating disorder history, it’s just not fun to hear about diet and weight loss. It can be stressful. So, it’s definitely okay to say, “I love you so much, but I really would love to not talk about dieting. It’s something that has been pretty harmful to me, and it would really help me if we could keep that off the table.” Are these people you need to set boundaries with to protect yourself? Go ahead and do that. Otherwise, start with what support they actually need. Ask how you can be supportive. With other straight size folks, feel free to look for opportunities when they might be receptive to this message. When someone is deep in complaining about their weight or feeling excited about a weight loss plan, it’s probably not the time. Q: I’d love to hear how you handle other adults’ diet culture-y, self deprecating comments, even if they are comments that don’t require a response. Like when you go to a kid birthday party, and another parent is like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe I just ate two pieces of pizza. I’m such a lard ass.” I usually either ignore the comments or smile and say something like, “I had two pieces of pizza, too.” Is there something more constructive, but also supportive and non-snarky, that we can say to get them to reframe their thinking a bit?This is in some ways trickier because these social moments often are not the right time to bring up a controversial topic or challenge somebody. But they are also the times where it can feel really important to do so, right? If someone makes a fat joke at a party, I do think anyone who feels safe doing so has a responsibility to call it out—just like I would hope we would all call out a racist joke or a sexist joke. The self-deprecating nature complicates that a little bit because you’re calling out someone for being mean to themselves, but they’re also being mean to other people. So there is some nuance there, but I do think it’s worth addressing. I often do what you do, just smile and try to say something positive like, “I love pizza. Pizza is so delicious.” This is the lowest stakes way to engage, but I think it does have value by adding a layer of positivity to the way food is being talked about. And that’s really useful for the kids who might overhear these comments. If kids are busy trying to enjoy their birthday party food, and the parents are all being weird about pizza, it’s great for someone to say, “I also love pizza.” Then the kids know that even if their mom or dad is worried about pizza, someone out there isn’t. So, thinking about adding positivity so that it’s not all just food shaming is step number one. The other thing I like to do with the self-deprecating comments is help the person take the blame off themselves and put the blame onto diet culture. You might say something like, “Isn’t it such a bummer that we feel like we have to apologize for eating delicious food?” You’re not calling them out or saying, “I can’t believe you just said that!” You’re saying, “Isn’t it a bummer that we live in a culture that makes us feel this way?” This is a way to reframe it and to stop being self-deprecating and apologetic about eating in that way that so many people—and especially women— are conditioned to be.Instead you’re saying, “Hey, I get that instinct. I have that instinct, too. I’m really mad that our culture has taught us that we need to atone for eating, because that is not something we were born with. That is something we have learned from diet culture.” Sometimes that can open up a really different conversation.Obviously, you can’t always have a script ready. These comments are random and it’s hard to know when or how they’re going to come up. But if you can say, even just in your own head, when people food shame, I’m going to try to turn it back on diet culture, that might help you to be more ready when these things do come up. That way you don’t feel like you’re commiserating with them or denying their experience, you’re just saying, “Yeah, it sucks to feel this way. I’m so mad that the culture makes us feel this way.” If it’s a straight up fatphobic comment, and you feel able to do it, I hope you will say, “That is a really harmful thing to say.” I hope you will say that you are not comfortable with that kind of comment about people’s bodies or that you don’t think it’s okay to talk about people’s bodies or people’s eating habits.I have found I feel best doing that in contexts where I am the host. I will say something like, “We don’t food shame at my house. Sorry, guys!” to set the boundary.Even if I’m out in the world somewhere and fatphobia comes up, I am going to try to call it out most of the time because I have the privilege to be able to do so safely, which is not true for folks in bigger bodies. I also want my kids to see that I think those types of comments are not okay and that other adults recognize that those comments are not okay. If your child overhears you letting it go, then I would follow up with them later and say, “I was really bummed that that dad kept telling his daughter not to eat more cookies. You know that’s not how we handle food at our house.” Follow up directly with them so that your child has some context for what they heard. Where I will end on this: None of us are going to get every one of these right. You’re not going to hit every pitch. There are going to be times when a comment comes up, it catches you off guard, and you don’t have a response. You just have to let it go in the moment and be frustrated.Q: My husband wants to go on a diet. I don’t know how to navigate. He thinks intuitive eating is bullshit. This is a bummer. Especially because I’m guessing that if you’re writing this, you do not think intuitive eating is bullshit. His being dismissive of something that you have found helpful or liberating is probably very, very hurtful. It’s frustrating to feel like you’re not being heard or seen by him or that your struggle is not being recognized. That is most likely because he is deep in his own struggle with this stuff and he just can’t see it yet. But it still just sucks. So, I just want to hold space for this being really hard. I’m really sorry. It’s hard to not be on the same page with your partner. I get this question from straight women with straight cis male partners a lot. I think it’s because men are so conditioned to engage with food in a very black and white way. The term “intuitive eating” strikes them as woo-woo or emotional. That’s something that they’ve been kind of conditioned to reject, right? They’re conditioned to count their macros, eat their burgers, and engage with food in this very straightforward way. This is why “calories in, calories out” dieting makes sense to them. It feels straightforward and understandable. Instead you want him to have an emotional process with food and that feels hard because he doesn't have language for that. I’m speaking very generally here and I also realize I’m not making space for non-heteronormative relationships. I’m sure this plays out in similar ways in different types of relationships and different gender pairings. A benefit of that black and white thinking is that sometimes these people do respond well to data. I will link to my favorite evidence review, demonstrating that diets do not work, and, in fact, are bullshit. This might be something you share with him. I’ll also link to a piece I wrote a few months ago called The Thing Your Husband Really Needs to Read. This piece is more about how not to talk about food around kids, but I think there are probably some useful nuggets in there. Those are both pieces that you could suggest he read if he is asking for your advice or if he is asking if he should go on a diet.What I will also say is: This is your husband’s problem to solve. We’re conditioned, as women in heteronormative relationships, to be our husband’s emotional support. We’re conditioned to help them navigate and solve problems. And that’s not always fair. Of course, in relationships, we want to support our partners, but there can be such an imbalance. If he is saying, “I’m gonna do this diet. I’m psyched about it. Intuitive eating is bullshit,” and he’s not actually asking for your input, I don’t think it serves you to put in the emotional labor to try to change his mind or coach him through this or try to get him to open up about his feelings about food. That’s work for a therapist to do. That’s not work for a wife to do. I think you can say, “Okay, that’s where you are. I’m in a really different place. I need to protect my own relationship with food.” If you have kids, you need to protect your kids’ relationships with food, too. So, “Good luck with that diet, but I don’t want diet talk at the family table. We’re gonna all keep eating the way we always do. This is something you’re doing for yourself. We get it, but we don’t have to be on this journey with you.”That might sound a little harsh, but I think it’s important to recognize that you cannot fix other people. You can’t change them, especially on something this complicated. This is something he’s going to have to muddle through for himself. It’s really hard to watch someone caught in a long-term dieting cycle. Maybe this is a new thing he’s trying, and he’ll quickly realize that it doesn’t work and he’ll come back around. If he’s coming to you saying, “Intuitive eating is bullshit and I want to do this diet,” then he’s not looking for the kind of support you can give. If he’s asking for information, we’ve got the information for him. If he’s just informing you of this, then you’ve been informed. Set the boundaries you need to set. I hope this is helpful, especially with holidays on the horizon in whatever COVID state they’re going to be. We might be seeing friends we haven’t seen for a long time or reconnecting with folks. So these conversations will likely keep coming up because we didn’t have these conversations for a year and a half. We’re back in the space of trying to figure this out. I hope this gives you some helpful strategies to play around with. As always, I love updates! If you try this, if you have these conversations, report back let me know how it goes. If you’ve got other strategies you like to use, drop them in the comments!Thank you so much for listening to Burnt Toast. If you liked this episode and you aren’t yet a subscriber, please subscribe! If you are a subscriber, thank you so much. Please consider sharing Burnt Toast on social media or forwarding this to a friend. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe. Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy & sell plus size clothing. And I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. You can find more of my work at virginiasolesmith.com or come say hi on Instagram or Twitter. I’m @v_solesmith. Thanks for listening! Talk to you soon!Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Hello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!This is a newsletter where we explore questions (and some answers) around fatphobia, diet culture, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture, and the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia. Today, we’re going to do another solo episode where I answer your questions.But first! I’m curious to know what folks think about the guest episodes versus the solo episodes. Right now I’m doing like one solo a month, and then three guest ones. Maybe you would like a different balance of guests to solo? I’m also always curious to know how many folks download and listen or how many listen to the audio versus read the transcript. I’m happy to keep doing both—I think they’re both really useful—but you know, I’m just interested. So if you have any thoughts about that, please comment on this post. That is a long way of saying any feedback is always very welcome.Let’s dive into questions! Sometimes I manage to group these with a theme and this week, I don’t think there is a theme. It’s just kind of a grab bag. I mean, there’s the obvious themes of diet culture and fat phobia, but I don’t think I have a narrower theme than that. But that’s okay! There’s a lot of really interesting stuff in your questions this week.Q: I loved your book and I’m just starting to try to disentangle myself from my own diet and body image hang-ups, most of which were absorbed through my loving, amazing, subtle fat-shaming family. Occasionally we engage in discussions over weight and health and while I can bust out all the stats and research I can about health and weight they inevitably bring up their ace in the hole to win the argument every time: Namely, there aren’t many obese/fat old people. And I can’t counter it because I’ve seen it myself every time I visit a relative in a long-term care home; everyone there is very old, and very thin. Any thoughts/research on this? If weight doesn’t automatically equal unhealthy outcomes, where are all the old fat people at?A: This is such an interesting question: Where have all the old fat people gone?What I think is happening here, is confirmation bias. I think we are confusing what we see in our own lives and our own bubbles with, this must be true for everyone. And this happens all the time in conversations around weight and health. Think of every Thin Man in your life who, even if they do gain weight, sort of effortlessly loses it just by starting to run once a week or something. And then they think everybody could lose weight so easily if they just did this. That’s confirmation bias. That’s thinking that your own lived experience is representative of everybody’s lived experience. And we know it’s not. But this comes up a lot.But this is definitely a new twist on it, this idea that just because fat old people are invisible to you, they must not exist.I will link to Katherine Flegal’s research on this. We know that folks in the “overweight” and “low ob*se” BMI ranges have the longest mortality. So we know that those folks are living longer than people in the “normal weight” or “underweight” ranges. At the extreme ends of the spectrum, the data is a little less clear. Folks in the very highest-weight bodies may have more complicated health issues, just like the folks at the most underweight level. And in both cases, this may impact longevity. But in the sort of skinny to small fat/medium fat space, we’re seeing that bigger bodies live longer.So why aren’t you seeing them in the nursing home that you visit? Maybe because the nursing home you visit caters to a demographic that doesn’t have higher rates of larger body sizes. If you’re in an affluent, mostly white community, you may not see bigger body sizes as often in general, and certainly not in the nursing home setting.Also: If Flegal’s research suggests that higher body weight is protective in aging, then those folks might not be in long term care facilities. Fat old folks might be able to live independently at home longer. And so you don’t see them in the nursing homes that you’re going to, you’re seeing there the frailest and sickest people, perhaps, and those might not be the people in the larger bodies. So this is just playing with this assumption that you’re having—I’m not saying this is definitively what’s happening in the nursing home that you visit. Of course, as much as we know that larger body size is linked with longer mortality, we don’t know that that’s a causal relationship. It’s a correlation. So we don’t know that body weight really has much of anything to do with how long you live. You may be seeing smaller bodies in this nursing home, but that is not reflective of the general aging experience. Or these people may have been in bigger bodies earlier in their lives that enabled them to live longer. As we reach our later years, the elderly and the geriatric population does tend to lose both body fat and muscle mass with aging. So people are again frailer and also thinner once they are very old. That doesn’t mean they were that thin their entire life, that just means that’s the body you’re seeing them in right now.So yes, you’re seeing this. But you’re not seeing the entire experience. One nursing home is not representative of even your entire community, let alone your state, your region, your country. There could be good reasons that you’re not seeing bigger bodies there. There could be bad reasons. It could be that folks in bigger bodies receive worse health care. So even if we’re seeing some protective benefits of larger bodies, we may also see that folks receive worse health care, have less access to health care, and maybe they are less likely to access the type of long term care facility you’re talking about. So there is a lot of nuance there. But I do think that “I don’t see old fat people” is not proof that they don’t exist. They are out there. Hopefully that gives you some nuggets to take back to your family conversations.Q: Do you think intentional weight loss (and/or intentional weight change, including gaining weight) is always bad? Do you think there is any room for folks to intentionally change this aspect of their bodies just like we might change any number of other physical and aesthetic characteristics? Is there any way of decoupling intentional weight change from diet culture? (That last part is my biggest concern, of course.)I think what this person is asking—well, they may not be asking it, but what I am often asked under the guise of this question is: Can I be anti-diet and still be dieting?You can absolutely fight weight stigma, you can think that fatphobia is wrong, you can call it out, you can parent in ways that are weight-inclusive, you can support weight-inclusive health care, you can do all of that… and still not love the body you’re in. Our individual body struggles are quite separate from this as a sort of political social justice movement, so I think that is worth acknowledging and saying pretty explicitly. I think most people who do this work have our own stories of dieting and body acceptance struggles, and so relate very much to the idea that personally, you may not be where you want to be politically or publicly.But do I think that personal struggle can happen separately from diet culture? At this stage? I do not.Anytime we pursue intentional weight loss and try to change ourselves in an aesthetic way, we are driven, at least in part, by the central diet culture message that we should take up less space. It’s just the water we’re swimming in. It’s the social conditioning we have received since we were children. It is incredibly hard to turn off that noise and say, no, I definitely would want this in a void, I would want to be thinner for X, Y, and Z reasons, even if diet culture didn’t exist, and thinness gave me no social currency, and didn’t make it easier to buy clothes, and didn’t make my body feel more acceptable to society. I don’t think you can even really run that thought experiment because we cannot silence that noise. So, do I think intentional weight loss is always bad? I’m not going to shame behaviors because hey, who does that—diet culture, right? If you are dieting or intentionally losing weight, because that is something you feel you need, I am not here to judge your personal struggle. I think this is especially important to say when we’re talking about folks who live in fat bodies and decide to pursue bariatric weight loss surgery. If you have not lived in a larger body, and faced that pressure and faced the daily onslaught of weight stigma and the difficulties in accessing health care, and the reasons why that surgery might feel necessary, you are not in any position to judge that person’s decision to pursue intentional weight loss.At the same time, I think I always feel a little bit sad, because it’s a reminder that our world could be so much better. And it’s not. We are not making the world a safe place for fat people. We’re really not making the world a safe place for anyone with a body, but particularly not for fat people. So anytime I hear about someone intentionally pursuing weight loss, I’m just reminded of how much work we have to do. Because yes, if we could get to a point where weight loss was something you could manipulate as easily as, say, dying your hair, then maybe you could say that this is a temporary aesthetic change, and you’re making it for fun and self expression. [Virginia’s post-recording note: Something I forgot to add here is that even if it was truly harmless to the individual, weight loss would still be a way of reinforcing the idea that thin bodies are more valuable than fat ones—which they aren’t. The anti-fat bias is impossible to escape.]But even hair dying is not a great example of that, right, because often women dye our hair to cover our grays, to look younger, because we live in an ageist society. So pretty much any aesthetic change we make has some component of cultural pressure and cultural conditioning attached to it. And it doesn’t mean you should completely stop making any of these changes. I dye my hair, you know, and we all wear clothes, and people wear contact lenses, etc, etc. And it can certainly be a part of personal expression, and feeling good about your body and also be a response to these cultural messages.But the reason to put weight loss, intentional weight loss, in a separate category from say, hair dye, is because intentional weight loss can be really dangerous physically. It can lead to a disordered relationship with food and your body. It can cause spiraling and anxiety and ruminating and compulsive thoughts and compulsive behaviors in a way that making choices about shoes or hair doesn’t because these other more easily changeable choices don’t have quite the same impact on our physical health, or our mental health. And again, I’m speaking broadly here—there’s going to be someone who comments and says, no, actually dyeing my hair is like this hugely complicated, dramatic journey for me, and I want to hold space for you in that journey. But we don’t have an epidemic of hair disorders, and we do have an epidemic of eating disorders. I resist saying it’s always bad, because that sounds like I’m saying the person pursuing the weight loss is bad, and I’m not. But I do think intentional weight loss is never simple. I think it’s never just about health, or just about, oh, I don’t like how my pants fit, but I’m fine with other people being in bigger bodies. I think we find lots of ways to rationalize the desire for intentional weight loss to ourselves. And I did this for years. I wanted to support Health at Every Size, and I was dieting myself. So I really relate to this place that this questioner is in, wanting to say, I’m doing this for me, but that’s separate from the larger struggle. The truth is, we’re always intertwined with our personal and our political. With something like intentional weight loss, where the side effects can be so serious and so severe, I think it is especially important to approach that with caution.If weight loss is something you’re pursuing because you’ve been told it’s necessary for your health, I would encourage you to check out the HAES Health Sheets that were created by Louise Metz and Ragen Chastain. They are a phenomenal resource for thinking about weight-linked conditions, from a weight-inclusive perspective. That might give you some other options to think about, do I really need to pursue weight loss for my health? Or is there another way to treat my high blood pressure? Or my acid reflux?And if it’s about aesthetics, well, then I think you already know the answer that that’s a diet culture-driven thing. The thin ideal is driven by diet culture, it’s driven by white supremacy, it’s driven by patriarchy. It is uncomfortable to acknowledge that we are all complicit in it, but there it is. So yeah, I think we’re a long way from being able to decouple this and I’m also not sure that that should be the goal, because if we say we’ve decoupled unintentional weight loss from all of these toxic narratives, and it’s totally fine to pursue it, you’re still saying fundamentally, that smaller bodies are better, you’re still saying that this whole group of people who live in larger bodies, for whom intentional weight loss is not an option or would never achieve a thinner, a truly thinner body, that their bodies are somehow less than. So yeah, I don’t see it untangling anytime soon.Okay, next question. The TL/DR version of this question is: My daughter “binges” on food and I don’t know how much I should control this.Q: My 10-year-old daughter hit puberty young and has a larger body. She has not displayed any body dissatisfaction, or said anything negative about her body in front of me. She is very active and she loves food. Food is what motivates her. Food is what she turns to in boredom. She gets a lot of pleasure from food. I don’t see any of that as a problem. My concern (and my husband’s concern, who doesn’t handle it the way I would like) is that with being home all the time the last 1.5 years and counting, she is eating all day. She eats 3 “meals” in a row, each time saying she is still hungry. I try to advise her to wait a little while between meals so her body has time to realize she already ate, but she won’t do that. She’s also cooking and preparing her own food, which I love and think it is wonderful that she is independent in this area. I’m just not sure if she is ready to have all limits off on quantity of food. This might look like a tortilla with eggs and bacon, followed by frozen tamales, followed by melted cheese and crackers. She never chooses fruits or veg. If there is any sort of candy, ice cream, or baked good, she will eat it all right away and not choose any other food until that is gone. Part of the reason this is triggering for me is that I am a binge eater and it looks like she is binging when she loads up on food like this and when she is hyper-focused on the sweet foods.A: I think there’s a lot going on here. I want to be clear that I am not a therapist or a dietician or a healthcare provider trained to diagnose or treat eating disorders, and also a podcast would not be the setting to do that even if I was. So I encourage you to reach out to a therapist who approaches weight and family feeding dynamics from a weight inclusive Health at Every Size perspective. I like Christy Harrison’s list of providers so linking that here. And I’m saying that, not because I think your daughter is showing so many red flags of a huge eating disorder, but because you are really struggling with her eating, and I think you deserve support and help to navigate what this is bringing up for you so that you can best support your daughter.Now, as a lay person who reports on this a lot and who hears a lot of people’s eating stories, a lot of what you’re describing sounds like fairly normal 10-year-old, hungry 10-year-old in puberty behavior. When you listed the meals, the tortillas and the tamales and the cheese and crackers, I don’t know that that sounds like a binge as much as it sounds like a kid who’s exploring lots of different foods, maybe getting a lot of pleasure out of the fact that she can independently make foods like bacon, which is kind of hard to make well, and that she has that independence in the kitchen, which I love that you’ve given her. So is it necessarily that she’s eating three huge meals in a row or is she just experimenting and enjoying lots of different foods?What we need to step back and acknowledge is: It’s not about the food. If your daughter is struggling in other ways, if she’s very anxious, if she’s depressed, if she is coping with any big negative feelings right now, and you see this eating as the way she’s coping, you want to support her in working through the negative feelings, you want to get her the help she needs with that. You don’t take away the coping skill that she has, if that’s food, before she has other coping skills, and before she has the support she needs with the underlying problem. So it’s really not about the food if this is binge eating is a way to either numb and escape emotions or cope with emotions.But from what you’ve also said: She’s a kid stuck at home. We’re all bored, we’re all eating more because it’s novelty, and we’re programmed to seek novelty, and that’s one of the few ways we can get it. She also gets a lot of pleasure from food, and that’s great. And she’s enjoying the sort of independent cooking experience, which is really fun. And I think that the best strategy through all of that is just to continue to support her in building those skills. And along the way, she’ll be learning to listen to her body more. When you’re advising her to sort of wait in between meals, you know, or if you are coming in and trying to control quantities, that’s when you’re gonna start interrupting her own ability to listen to her body. It’s understandable, it’s natural, but it sounds like you’re trying to control too many things possibly. This happens a lot when parents freak out at their kids eating patterns and try to come in with a lot of structure. And then we both try to control the how much and the how often. Division of Responsibility, which is the model that I sort of loosely follow and find is a good starting point for families, says the parent should be in charge of how often kids eat, but not in charge of how much. And at 10, you would probably still also have some control over what food she’s offered in terms of, you’re doing the grocery shopping, but you are starting to hand over more independence at that age about individual meal choices, and yes, cooking skills and things like that. So if you are going to try to impose structure around what the schedule looks like, you really have to back off and let her decide how much to eat in any one of those settings. And I find this is often tricky, because we will have a portion size in our mind and then the child will want more of it. You know, it happens to me often because like if we buy snack foods, like granola bars, or little packages of goldfish crackers that come in a single serve package. That’s not a single serving to my kid, she wants two or three or four of them in a sitting to make a meal or make a snack that honors her hunger. And so I’ll think wait, you’re eating more than a serving, but it’s like, I’m sorry, does the packaging company know what a serving is to my child? No, of course they don’t.Similarly here, if it’s snack time, or it’s lunchtime, and she and you have said this is the time we’re going to eat, you need to allow her to eat as much as she needs to feel full and good in that meal. And then you can say, “Okay, now we’re going to wait until after this next activity, and then we’ll have a snack.” Versus going straight into another meal. Transitioning to more of a schedule is itself pretty hard to do. And it’s really hard to do if you’re also trying to control how much, or which food, she’s eating. So I would pick one and I would pick the schedule to work on and not work on the how much. Let her be in charge of the how much. You truly don’t know how hungry she is. Kids in puberty need a lot of food, they are growing really fast. And it may look like much more food than you as an adult would eat in a meal. And that’s okay, that’s normal. I’m going to link to a piece I did earlier in the summer on when is it restriction and when is it good parenting, and that may give you some more ways to think about how to have this conversation with her.Q: I, like you, consider myself a “small fat person.” I also consider myself someone that’s engaged with and interested in topics like dismantling diet culture, the toxicity of the wellness movement (and the consumerization thereof), and how it all fits in with questions of intersectional feminism. At the same time, I work as a strategist for an advertising agency that has recently been asked to work on a major diet brand campaign. In the theoretical, I can argue it is an opportunity (to affect change, to influence decision makers, to enable further understanding in an organization that doesn’t understand why it’s quite so hated today) — but in the practical, I’m struggling with it, big time. So I’m curious, as someone who started her career in the world of women’s magazines and wellness and then found an enlightened path out, how would you feel in this situation? What might you do?A: This is tricky, because the idealist in me wants to say, don’t work for the big evil diet company. Just like, I would hope you would not work for a tobacco company or gun brand. There are certain jobs where, that door feels closed in my brain. But then there is the reality of your life. I do not know the reality of your financial situation, I do not want to assume that you can just like up and quit this job or make life difficult for yourself at this job and then weather whatever storm that would cause in terms of lack of job security, financial uncertainty, etc. So I’m certainly not going to tell you absolutely don’t take this, don’t work with that brand, if that’s your job, and I assume you need your job, as most of us do, to pay your bills.So thinking of it as an opportunity to try to influence decision makers is the way to go about it, right? Because you need this job. And now you do have this opportunity to try to turn some tides within this company. I am not using the brand name in this because I want to protect this reader’s privacy, but I will say it is a brand that I am extremely skeptical will actually ever change on this topic. They are pretty much a weight loss brand at their core. And it’s hard to imagine that changing. So I do think you’ll have your work cut out for you.When I started in women’s magazines, I absolutely went in thinking, “I’m making change from the inside.” I think I put that in my cover letter for the job and it’s amazing I got the job, because I was not at all quiet about that as my mission. But I will be honest about what happened next, which is: I began very quickly to rationalize content that I found objectionable as not that bad. I’d think, oh if we make this change, it won’t be so bad, this isn’t really a diet. Because number one, I wasn’t actually as clear on my own values as I thought I was at that point. Shocking, that at 22, I didn’t have that all worked out. And also because I needed the job, and because now I was working with people who I liked personally, even if I disagreed with some of the editing calls they were making. And because I wanted to make a career in this world, and it felt like I couldn’t die on every mountain and also make that happen. So I think what you’re going to really struggle with, if you stay on this job and do this work, is being able to do it in a way that feels ethical, and in line with your values, and not like you’re rationalizing the decision. (I guess maybe the theme of today is rationalizing, or at least it was in a couple of these questions?) I think it’s very understandable that we do this. Because, again, cultural indoctrination, we’ve been hearing these messages since we were kids, and also, when we’re talking about things like job security, that’s kind of a non-negotiable. So I’m not saying, don’t do the job, because I’m sure it’s something you really need in your life. But I am curious to hear what you decide, I would love an update. Maybe find a way to have someone outside of that world who can be a sounding board or a check-in person for you. Someone who you can come to and say, “Well, they wanted to do it this way, and I pushed back, and here’s what I won.” And that person can either celebrate that victory with you or say, “Okay, but here’s what you left on the table, here’s what they’re still doing.” And kind of keep you accountable as you try to make change from the inside. Because how do you know if you’re really making change? What are the benchmarks you’re going to use for that?For me, personally, it was in many ways murkier. Did we make change from the inside? Yes. And no. I think there were articles that I was involved in, that caused less harm than they would have otherwise, because I was involved with them. But they still caused harm, I still own that, absolutely. Also, looking back now on where women’s magazines were in the early 2000s and where they are now, there has been an enormous sea change. I think every women’s media brand is trying much more now to lean in to critiquing diet culture, and calling out fat phobia. This is a topic that I’m regularly asked to write about for these places now, whereas years ago, I was pitching these stories, and they were falling on deaf ears. I am not personally taking credit for the entire sea change—I’m glad to have played a small part in it—but that took 20 years, first of all, so it’s not like I was able to get in there and make all these changes overnight and feel really good about the work I was doing right away. I mean, there were years when I felt not good at all about the work I was doing. And it took a long time, and we still haven’t made nearly enough progress.So I think that’s the way to think about it: If you are going to be working to make change, it’s going to be slow, it’s going to be very uphill work. And in this particular case, I’m skeptical that this brand will really evolve. Even if it does evolve, the thing you have to watch for, the thing I still watch for with women’s magazines, and I see all the time happening with these brands, is that they’re evolving because they’re responding to consumer demand. They’re not evolving because they’ve actually made progress on the issue, or they actually are ready to acknowledge the harm that they’ve done. I have yet to write an anti-diet piece for a women’s magazine where I get to say, here’s a piece I wrote a decade ago that was actually horrible, or here are all the other ways this brand has caused harm over the years. I think there are a lot of people working in that space who are really eager to do things better now, but it still feels really scary and really untenable to acknowledge what happened in the past. That’s just sort of a hard reality of where we are.I don’t know that I really answered this question. I don’t think I can answer it for you because I don’t know you or your life. But I hope I’ve given you some stuff to sort of ponder as you decide what to do. And everyone listening, if I answer one of your questions in one of these epsiodes, I love updates, and if you send me an update, you know, maybe I’ll update listeners as well, in a future episode. It would be really fun to hear how these things unfold for you and what you continue to work on. And if you think I got it totally right or I got it totally wrong. I’m open to hearing that too!Thank you all so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you like this episode and you aren’t yet subscribed, please do so.If you are a subscriber, thank you so much for being here. And please consider sharing Burnt Toast on social media or forwarding it to a friend.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Jessica McKenzie, who writes the fantastic Substack, Pinch of Dirt. Our logo is by Deanna Lowe.And I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. You can find more of my work at virginiasolesmith.com or come say hi on Instagram and Twitter. I’m @v_solesmith. I’m barely on Facebook anymore, so don’t worry about that. Thanks for listening and talk to you soon!Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

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

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

Hello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!This is a newsletter where we explore questions and some answers around fatphobia, diet culture, parenting, and health. I am Virginia Sole-Smith. I'm a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture, and I'm the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia.Today, I am delighted to be chatting with Alyson Gerber, author of the critically acclaimed novels Focused, Braced, and, most recently, Taking Up Space. Alyson, welcome! AlysonThank you so much for having me. VirginiaI'm so excited to talk to you. I have followed your work for a long time, so this is a real treat. So why don't we start with you just telling us a little bit about yourself?AlysonSure. As you said, I'm an author. I write middle grade books for readers 8 and up, and the adults who care about them, so teachers and parents, doctors, anybody who's interacting with kids of this age. I really started to write for this age group because I experienced a lot of trauma right around sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. I wore a back brace to treat my scoliosis, which was the beginning of my journey to body image struggles. And at the same time, I had undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and I cover those topics in my first two middle grade novels, Braced, about scoliosis, and Focused, about a girl, a chess player, with undiagnosed ADHD.And Taking Up Space was really the novel that I pushed off writing because I knew how difficult and challenging it would be for me to dig into it. I started writing it when I was pregnant with my daughter and I had a pretty significant disordered eating relapse. I really wanted to talk openly about what it feels like to struggle under the diagnosis. To really be facing food struggles and body image and not have a way to talk about it, I think it can become very complicated. Because there isn't a medical diagnosis for disordered eating, it becomes something that people don't talk about. So I'm always curious and interested in—and most of my books really cover—the topics that we'd rather brush under the rug because we're ashamed of them, for whatever reason.VirginiaRight. That's such an important point. What Sarah struggles with in the novel isn't necessarily what would meet criteria for an eating disorder, but it is really serious and really difficult and way too common. You're giving voice to that struggle, which I think we are all inclined to normalize or push away or have reinforced by people in our lives, by diet culture, all that kind of stuff. I was curious because I knew the first two novels were very personally inspired: It sounds like with Taking Up Space, the topic is something you've really dealt with, as well. Are any of the characters drawn from your own life? Or was it more taking the issue and putting it into a fictional world?AlysonThat's a great question. For all three of my books, actually, I really wrote the story of the main character from the heart of what I experienced. So from the ups and downs and the pain of feeling misunderstood and feeling alone and unsupported and confused about whether or not what I was going through was worthy of attention and deserving of comfort—even conversation—and deserving of support. And so especially with Taking Up Space, I really drew on that experience of being confused about what are the rules of eating. Are there rules of eating? And how do you learn how to eat and feed yourself? Sarah's journey to understand that she has all the tools she needs within herself by listening to her body, that really has been a lifelong journey for me. And so the emotional arc of the character is from my real life, and the plot of what happens to her as this incredible basketball player whose family identity is about basketball—she wants to be part of it and she wants to continue to play at an advanced level because it's so important to her identity—that is fiction. I never played basketball. I was not a basketball star.VirginiaWow. I am a complete non-athlete, so I can't say how authentic it was, but it felt very authentic to me—the team culture, the coach relationship. I thought you did such a nice job. I think something that a lot of parents with kids in sports struggle with is how body stuff gets handled in sports. We think about it a lot with gymnastics or cheerleading, which are very aesthetic-based sports, but even in sports like basketball, there's so much emphasis on your body being a certain way to be good at the sport. And the way Sarah was struggling with, “Is my body changing? And do I have to fix that in order to be good at my sport?” I thought that was so, so important to articulate that struggle. AlysonThank you. I actually purposely picked a sport that wasn't endurance or aesthetic because it is such a problem in all sports and I wanted to really showcase that this is an issue that's impacting a big part of the population. It's not just the stereotypes. I wanted her to be outside of that. And I played sports. It was sort of forced upon me. This is one of those things where I went to a school where it was a required, three seasons of sports. VirginiaOh god.AlysonI was also not an athlete. I was very much a benchwarmer. But one of the things I took away—and I brought that to Braced because Sarah is a soccer player and chess, in a lot of ways, is a team sport—was there was something about being on a team that I loved. I loved the orange slices and I loved the cheering and I loved being there for your friends and wanting to win together. That is the one takeaway of being forced to play sports. It was really not great, but—VirginiaYou had that experience.AlysonExactly, and I'm able to use it in a way that really benefits me now. That's one of the things I love about writing: You get to imagine you're good at something you really can't do at all.VirginiaI love that. I think I played field hockey for two days, and then I was like, “we have to run a lot at practice and I'm not going to do that.”AlysonAlso, there are a lot of rules in field hockey. I was always in the wrong place.VirginiaIt was very stressful. I literally lasted less than a week on the team. I was like, Nope, not for me. But I was a theater kid, and so I can relate to that sense of the group experience of building something and creating something as a team. You have that in the theater world too. It is a really special experience and it's definitely the real strength of athletics and activities like that. Another thing I love about the book is the mother-daughter relationship. This must have been pretty tough to write. I obviously don't want to give away spoilers about the book because I want everyone to go read it, but the mom is struggling quite a bit and you really show how her struggles impact Sarah in really major ways. But they also have this beautiful relationship. They have these things they can really bond over. They love the same kind of murder mysteries and there is a closeness to their relationship, as well as this distance that's happened around food and body. And I thought that was so beautifully done because I think so often, in the way we talk about eating disorders culturally, there's a lot of mom-blaming. And in the way they're often portrayed in fiction and movies or books or whatever, the not-really-examined evil mother figure comes up a lot. So I loved that you steered so deliberately away from that.I wanted to hear a little bit about your thinking there. Was that a conscious choice? Did you have to resist the urge to make Sarah’s mom the bad guy? How did you think about developing their relationship?AlysonI'm so glad that this is not a video, I should say, because you just made me cry in everything you said. I'm just totally tearing up because I think you said that so perfectly. I think there's so much mom-blaming and I think there's so much black-and-white thinking around mother-daughter relationships: that we have a good relationship, or we have a bad relationship. And I think mother-daughter relationships are really complicated, and especially for characters like Sarah and her mother, I really intentionally wanted her not to be the bad guy. And I wanted the reader to understand that she might be making bad choices as a parent, but those bad choices are because she's also a victim of diet culture. She's a victim of her own experience, and a victim of the time, of growing up in a time where it wasn't as easy to go to therapy. It was not as socially acceptable to talk about your feelings, and so those feelings got buried. Even now, when both mothers and daughters can have access, I think there are places, there are families, there are communities, where it's less accepted. And I hope that's not always going to be the case, but I think for a long time, it probably will be the case. And so when you have a parent who has complicated feelings that aren't being addressed, those feelings are going to come out in their relationship, and that's where the relationship gets complicated and messy. But it doesn't mean that it's not an amazingly close relationship, like you just said. You can be an incredible parent and also be somebody who has struggled with something in your life that makes that piece of your relationship really hard. And I think we have to get rid of the black-and-white thinking around parenting because it's just not. I'm a parent now, so I can say, "I'm such a bad mom today!" But then I have to consciously say, "No, I was challenged today and this is how I managed it, and it wasn't my favorite day that I ever had parenting, and I'm going to try to do better tomorrow." And even cutting that black-and white-thinking in the way that we talk to ourselves as parents and as kids, just rethinking it and reframing it for ourselves so that we can really see it for what it is, which is that you can be an incredible parent and have a real deficit in one area, a real blind spot. And there's also room to always change and grow, and that's one of the things—and I don't want to give anything away—but one of the open pieces of the book that I wanted to keep in place is that some things are resolved and some things aren't, and the door, I think, is left open. And that's one of the special things about middle grade is you can give hope without resolving everything and putting a bow on it. And you can always work on it, you know? VirginiaYeah, and the closeness that they have is in these other ways. Because this question comes up all the time with my listeners or my readers of, “How do I talk to my own mom about this? Or, Am I a bad parent because I'm struggling?” And it's this other closeness that you have—bonding over murder mysteries, or whatever it is—that can be the foundation of a lot of healing in this area, if the person is in a position to do the work—and not everybody is. That's the other thing. Not everyone, as you're saying, has the resources, is in a culture that's going to be encouraging of that.So it can be both a really complicated thing because it's like, how can you love this parent so much when they are also doing things that are harmful to themselves and to you? But it can also be a really cathartic, beautiful opportunity for growth. I think you pack so much nuance into their interactions. It was very powerful to read, and I have a feeling for a lot of parents reading it, it will be, at times, painful, but also there's something powerful about seeing that struggle play out that way.AlysonThank you. I hope it's a conversation-starter for parents and kids, and even teachers and kids. I think there's real space in the classroom to talk about this and say, How can we listen to each other better? How can we respond more thoughtfully to each other? What you just said about a parent might not be willing to work on it and do the work, but are they willing to listen to your feedback? And can they do some of the work? Maybe it's not only for themselves, but can they do that for you? And so I think it's more complicated than just, yes, they can heal themselves, because not everybody is in a place to be able to do that. But if they can give you the space you need and the safety you need, then that can often really help.VirginiaAbsolutely. Another thing I thought about a lot while I was reading the book, because it's something I struggle with a lot in my own reporting when I read about eating disorders and disordered eating, is the level of detail to include or not include. It felt like you had probably made some very thoughtful choices about, you know, you have to tell a good story and you have to bring the reader into the experience.But my first job out of college was at Seventeen Magazine, and whenever we reported on eating disorders, I was like, “are we just teaching these kids how to have eating disorders?” Because we were including way too much detail about the vomit and all those sort of things. But as I've continued to work in this area, number one, I'm more thoughtful than I was, I think, at that point in my career. But I also think there's a reality in which kids who are struggling with this need to feel seen, and that can mean seeing descriptions of behaviors or thought patterns that may be quote-unquote triggering, but also may be like, Okay, I'm not the only one with that thought. Or, I'm not the only one who was doing that behavior. So how do you think about that issue? Because I'm sure you also struggle with this question.AlysonI think this was the hardest part of writing this book and the thing I wrestled with the most. As a middle grade author, one of the things I always think about is, How am I keeping all my readers safe? That means the reader who has never interacted with this, the reader who is struggling with an eating disorder, the reader who is struggling with constantly being bullied because of fatphobia. I'm trying to think about everybody in the room, and also let that go at some point to write the story. But then when I go back and revise, they're often on my mind in the language that I choose, especially in this book, in the detail that was given. I wrote this book many times. In the first version, there were more details. Sarah's size was more clear. And as I revised, I really started to get rid of that because I realized it was only hurting the story. We know from some indicators that Sarah is a straight-size person. You know the fashion term. We know that because she doesn't consider things like her chair and her uniform. There's no question about the sizing for her uniform. There are other things that would come up if that weren't the case, but other than that, I really tried to eliminate all those pieces because I didn't want readers walking in comparing themselves to Sarah.VirginiaThat was really smart.AlysonThat's something that I really struggled with, and have always struggled with: Am I as sick as this person? That sort of comparison, really, at the lowest points, was really hard for me. I know that that can be a struggle for a lot of people, so I wanted to keep those readers safe. And there's no scale in the book, which is also another choice, and I could have made a different choice. I tried to make a different choice at some point. Every choice that felt like the thing you think of as a stereotype when you think of an eating-disorder book or movie, I ended up getting rid of because it didn't serve the story. Truly, it's not the story I wanted to tell. This is a story about somebody who doesn't value themselves and who has learned to value herself based on outward things, based on her success at basketball, based on the way that she looks. And I wanted her to be able to recognize that and say, I really need to value myself based on myself, on who I really am. That, for me, has actually been the biggest struggle in overcoming all of my many issues. But in particular, self-worth has been the thing. And I think at the root of a lot of eating disorders is this: Does society value me? Does my job value me? Do my friends value me? How do I fit into the world? And the truth is, it's really how do you value you that matters the most. And it took me a long time to really understand that.VirginiaAnd you're completely right. If you had included the more cliché descriptions of her getting on a scale and tracking numbers and that kind of thing, that wouldn't have helped tell that story. That would have just been the more Lifetime-movie version—or Seventeen-Magazine-article version—of this story that isn't particularly helpful because it doesn't encourage readers to take these questions deeper. It doesn't help kids think beyond the behaviors about the underlying struggle, which I think Taking Up Space does so well. Because you do have other people in her life—the coach and various other people—who are able to reframe things for her and help her understand these larger questions. And that's really effectively done and, I think, contributes to that sense of safety that you're talking about, as well, for readers.AlysonThe other thing I thought of when you were sharing that is that I really wanted the reader who had no experience with this—the person who maybe thinks, Well, why don't they just eat? Why can't you just sit down and eat a piece of pizza? What's the big deal? I don't understand—to really be able to understand and to really be able to empathize. I taught over the course of the pandemic virtually, and I met with a lot of middle school kids who felt that whatever their pain, their mourning, their loss that they were experiencing, because it wasn't as big as other people's, that it didn't count.So they really talked down their pain and dismissed their own pain and made themselves feel bad for feeling bad when, really, everybody's pain counts. There's a spectrum of pain and you deserve support wherever you are. And I think that's something that took me a really long time to understand: that somebody can have it worse, and I can also still need help.VirginiaYes, yes. That is a tricky spot, for sure.AlysonAnd I can also be grateful for everything I have. You can be so thankful for the things that are going well, and also feel a lot of pain and be struggling in big ways. And I think as an adult, there's this tendency for adults to be like, "It'll get better. It's going to be fine. This isn't that big of a deal." But if a kid is telling you this is a big deal, that they feel something, it's a big deal, and it doesn't feel like it's going to get better. And they do need help.VirginiaAbsolutely.AlysonEven if we don't think that they need help, they sometimes do, and they need to know that. So that's one of the things I hope readers get out of Taking Up Space is a sense of empathy for other people and kindness for themselves.VirginiaAnd another thing, I'm realizing, that I think is so effective about the book is because you didn't focus in the traditional way on her weight, you were able to show that the struggle really isn't about, Are you losing a lot of weight? Or, Is your body changing? It really is this internal struggle. And I think that's so important because, going back to what you were saying earlier about, often, we feel like we're not as sick as someone else, one of the main ways that plays out is when an eating disorder doesn't result in this extreme weight loss that we expect. And, of course, the majority of eating disorders don't do that. And so all these people's struggles get swept under because you don't look like the cliché super-emaciated person. So I loved that you showed that, and you showed, too, that the tinkering with disordered eating can have pretty immediate effects on someone's ability to function and how they're feeling moving through their day, and all of that. That felt really powerful for kids to read, both either if they're going to see themselves in it, or if this is a newer concept to them, to understand that the stakes are quite high, even when you're just in the "early stages" of something. AlysonDefinitely. VirginiaI know you said your daughter is almost 4. I don't know exactly when you wrote this because books always take forever to come out, but did becoming a mom change how—and as a fellow mom who's a writer, I hate when we get reduced to being mom writers; I'm not trying to do that—but because you write for kids, and you write about these issues, I'm just curious if your relationship to the work or to this book has changed now that you are a mom of a daughter who may someday be dealing with some aspects of this.AlysonSo interesting. I started writing this book when I was pregnant with my daughter, and I think I was really thinking a lot about home and what it means to be a parent and what it means to create a sense of home, and I do so much home-creation in my storytelling. Because for 8 to 14 year olds, home is really the center, even though friends are slowly becoming the center. But it's where you come back to for safety. I thought a lot about what does it mean to have a home that's safe, emotionally and physically, and a place where you could really be yourself.And so I've given that a lot of thought in my parenting, and also I think it's really impacted my writing, and changed it. It's made me see some of the things that were safe for me in my own home growing up that maybe I wouldn't have considered before as being safe. It made me rethink things a little bit. And it made me realize some things that maybe I hadn't seen as being problematic. And I'm working on a mystery—it's very mysterious!—right now. The character's sense of home and sense of self is a major part of the story. And so I've been thinking about it a lot. It's interesting. The way that my daughter interacts with me has changed the way that—because now I'm seeing it from the other perspective. I'm not writing from the adult perspective interacting with kids, but now I am living the adult perspective interacting with kids. And even though Juliet is younger, I'm still imagining and thinking a lot about how this will play out. The three-nager years really showed me a lot about what I'm in for.VirginiaYes, that is a real phase, for sure, having done it twice. Definitely is a phase. I do think there's something to, like, the dynamics you're dealing with now will be the dynamics. Of course, kids change so much, but there are certain throughlines, for sure.AlysonAnd there are certain things that I find that will be a pain point for me. I'll feel the pain point as a parent and be like, Oh, I need help. I can't do this on my own. And seeing that from the other side is really interesting.VirginiaI was just thinking, with the mom character we talked about, she has such a richness to her, and I think your experience being on the other side maybe helped inform that too. Because it's sometimes left out—and it's understandable because kids don't see us as fully formed people, nor should they have to. But I think it's great for them to read books where the parents are flawed and struggling and fully formed people because that's useful for them to start to experience.AlysonDefinitely. A big part of my writing process is really thinking about each character as having their own arc and writing a little bit from each—sort of journaling from their perspective so that they feel like fully formed people. So I understand where they start at the beginning of the book and where they end up and how they get there. It's not just the main character. And the adults are always the hardest, which makes sense.VirginiaYeah, it does. Okay, so a question I always love to ask fellow writers is, Where do you do your writing? Tell me a little: Do you have a workspace? What do you love about it? What do you hate about it, if you don't love it? I love hearing about where people write. AlysonSo I live in Brooklyn and I have an office in my home here. I love it because it's my own space and I can close the door and shut everybody out, and it's quiet. And I really need that. I really need quiet, although I do like to draft at a coffee shop. So I have missed that a lot during the pandemic, hearing other people typing. There's a YouTube channel where you can hear other people typing. So I've done a little bit of that, which has been helpful. And the thing I dislike about my workspace is that it's—well, I like that I can see out into the front of the house, but also other people can see in. So I get scared often because I'm in another world when I'm writing and then the person delivering the UPS package will knock on the window and wave to me, and I go flying.VirginiaThat's so funny. Yes. My office is on a side where I can't see our door, which means I miss every UPS package, which is its own hassle. But it is nice from that perspective of being startled out of your work mode because it's so hard to get back to it, too, once you've broken the flow. Well, you mentioned you're working on a new mystery. Anything else you're excited about right now? Whether it's a new writing project, something else new in your life. My kids started school today. That's what I'm excited about. AlysonThat is exciting.VirginiaOh god, it's so exciting.AlysonMy daughter's about to start school next week, which is very exciting. I'm really excited about this book that I'm working on. It's taken over my brain, which is great. And it means that it's going to work and it's singing. At first, I always feel like I'm putting pieces together and I'm trying to layer the onion back together. It works or it doesn't work, and it's working. And it's working in a way that I really wanted it to work.VirginiaThat's so satisfying.AlysonAnd just like the characters in Taking Up Space, I'm a huge mystery fan. I'm sort of obsessed, actually. I've watched, like, every British mystery. That's the one thing about the pandemic is I've actually gotten to watch—there were a couple of old ones that were on my list that I got to.VirginiaWhich ones?Alyson“Vera.” I had really wanted to get through that.VirginiaI've never seen that. My mom loved it, I think.AlysonThey're a little bit older, like “Foyle's War,” which is very long. It's nine seasons long. I was able to get through that.VirginiaWell, that's nice because you've got a lot. I hate when something's only two or three seasons.AlysonSo it's both exciting because I'm loving the book, but also exciting because this is a genre that has always interested me, and those were the books that I read most growing up and the books that kept my attention. So this is keeping my attention.VirginiaThat's awesome. And will this be middle grade, as well, or are you doing an adult mystery?AlysonNo, it's middle grade. And I'm hopeful that it will be a series. I'm trying to work to figure out how to do that.VirginiaThis is very exciting. All right. Well, when you're ready to talk more about that, you'll have to come back and tell us all about it because that sounds awesome. AlysonPerfect. I would love to. VirginiaAnd tell listeners where we can find more of your work and follow everything you're doing.AlysonSo my website is my name, alysongerber.com, and I am basically everywhere @AlysonGerber. So on Instagram @AlysonGerber. On Twitter @AlysonGerber. And you can find all my books also through the Scholastic website. Scholastic is my publisher.VirginiaAwesome, and I will link to all of that in the transcript. Thank you so much for coming on. This has been such a great conversation. I'm just so thrilled there are writers like you in the middle grade space doing these books because we really need more. This is a question I'm asked a lot: What can my kid be reading? And it's so great there's finally more than just Blubber to tell them about, so thank you so much.AlysonTotally. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.VirginiaAnd thanks to all of you for listening to Burnt Toast. If you like this episode and you aren't yet subscribed, please do that. If you are a subscriber, thank you so much. Please consider sharing Burnt Toast on social media or forwarding this to a friend. Our transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Jessica McKenzie, who writes the fantastic Substack Pinch of Dirt. Our logo is by Deanna Lowe, and I'm Virginia Sole-Smith. You can find more of my work at virginiasolesmith.com or come say hi on Instagram or Twitter. I am @v_solesmith. Thanks so much and talk to you soon!

Hi Burnt Toast subscribers! I’m back from vacation and I’ve missed you all! Today we’ve got an audio newsletter (recorded before my break). Tomorrow I’ll have a Friday Thread for you. (Do we need to talk about Sarah Paulson’s fat suit? Or any other burning questions on your mind? Comment below and let me know what you want to chat about!) And the big Tuesday essays will resume next week. Now on to today’s episode…Hello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast! This is a newsletter where we explore questions (and sometimes answers) on fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture and the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia.Today is another solo episode. I’m going to answer a bunch of your questions that all relate to each other, because they’re all on the theme of “How do I talk to other people about this?” I see this a lot. So often, we are in a place where we’re starting to work through our own stuff around food, our own stuff around bodies, or we’re really committed to doing things in a different way for our kids than how we were raised. But explaining this to a partner or explaining this to your parent or explaining this to your child can be so difficult. This is something I talked about with some podcast guests recently: In my conversation with Janet and Nyemade we were saying how this is an issue that we all feel sort of nervous to own, in a way that we don’t feel as nervous to stand up for ourselves around other controversial topics: Facism, homophobia, etc. Even with COVID, I think people who are firmly pro-vaccines are comfortable being firmly pro-vaccines. There are certain topics where we kind of know where we stand and feel good about standing up for ourselves. But this is one where we have internalized so much doubt and so much anxiety that advocating for ourselves or advocating for our kids can just feel super complicated.So I just want to say up top: It’s okay if you don’t have the right thing to say in every moment, in every interaction. None of us do. This is hard work. If this is someone you have a good relationship with, someone who’s in your life in an ongoing way, like your partner, or your child, it’s okay to get it wrong in one conversation and come back and have a follow up conversation. It’s okay to say, “I wish I hadn’t approached it like that, and I want another try.” That’s such good modeling for our kids, it’s good for our relationships when we can do that. I think we can give ourselves all some grace as we try to navigate this, because we probably are going to mess it up a couple of times, many times, and we can try again.The other thing I wanted to say: It’s not your job to convert everybody you meet to intuitive eating, or to make everybody in your life aware of the dangers of fatphobia. You know, it even is my job, and it’s also not my job. I don’t fight these fights in every conversation I have with a friend or every party I go to, every family gathering. I’m not navigating this all the time. There are lots of times when I just let something go, because it’s more important to me, in my relationship with that person, that we have a nice time and that it doesn’t become tense. And that is okay.It is also true that those of us with a lot of privilege always have the option not to stand up and fight the fight. And people in marginalized bodies don’t.So, if you’re a person with thin privilege, I do encourage you to push yourself out of your comfort zone when you can to take this on. For sure, it is worth calling out fatphobia when it happens around us, especially with our kids. This is very important. But there is some nuance here to how successful we’re going to be at doing it every time and if it even makes sense, if it even feels safe, to do it every time.Enough big picture and talk, let’s dive into your questions.Q: My teenage son is going for his first solo visit to Atkins Crazy Grandma. Do I tell her to back off before he goes?A: First of all, I really love “Atkins Crazy Grandma,” I’m picturing that on a mug or something.I’m going to link to my piece, The Grandparents Are Not OK. If you haven’t read it, definitely start here. It will give you a good overview as to why grandparents struggle with this issue so much and why so many Boomers are steeped in diet culture to the extent that they are. It is not entirely their fault. It is the water they have been swimming in for a very long time. They are navigating concerns around gender expectations, body expectations, aging expectations. And all of that is intersecting in a way that Gen X, millennials, Gen Z, none of us are dealing with it in quite the same way that boomers have had to deal with it. So try to hold some space in your heart for that.Remember that the goal of this trip is for your teenage son to have a strong relationship with this grandparent. I mean, I’m assuming this is the goal of the trip. And that’s why you’re sending him there, on his own, to have time with his grandmother. If that’s the goal, it is not that helpful for you to get in and interfere and set ground rules about what they can talk about, and try to moderate their relationship in that way. This is something I didn’t state as clearly as I could have in that grandparents piece. It is not our job to control the relationship that develops between our children and their grandparents. That is its own independent relationship, quite separate from us. And if you want your kids to know your parents, as people, they’re going to know them as people, which means they’re going to learn that they are flawed, and they’re going to have things they disagree on and part of their relationship is going to be figuring that out together.Now, I do think you can set some boundaries. If you’re worried that your mom is not going to feed your son adequately because her dieting is so restrictive, I think that would be a place to intervene. And certainly, if you think she’s going to talk negatively about how your son eats or his body, that’s a different thing. Because then she is directly causing harm. And as parents, we want to obviously step in and mitigate that. But if it’s more like, she’ll make lots of food, but she won’t let herself eat the bread, or she’ll make comments about how she’s eating with him—if it’s more self-directed, as this diet talked often is because people criticize themselves before they direct it to others. In that situation, I think you can talk with your son ahead of time about how this is something she struggles with. And say: “Yeah, it’s a drag that grandma doesn’t eat bread, but there’s no reason you need to stop eating bread.” Let him know where you stand on this, certainly, and give him some tools to navigate this. But don’t feel like you have to make your mom or your mother-in-law act differently around your son than she would otherwise. This is something they can figure out themselves. Your son’s a teenager, he’s old enough to start to really understand his grandmother as a complicated person. I wouldn’t feel like I needed to mitigate unless it was going to be directly harmful to my child.If you are worried about her saying things directly to your child that might be harmful to him, there is a line that I absolutely love from Amee Severson and Sumner Brooks, from their forthcoming book, How to Raise an Intuitive Eater: “My body is none of your business.” I love that. I actually taught that line to my own kids the other day, and it was hilarious to watch my three year old stomp around saying it unprompted and in response to absolutely nothing: Do you want Cheerios for breakfast? “My body is none of your business.”So I think you can start to think about ways that your child can advocate for themselves in those situations. If you have a younger child, or if the relationship is, you know, really toxic, you are going to be at the front line of that advocacy work. Otherwise, give your son some tools, talk about it ahead of time, support him in navigating this issue with his grandmother, but don’t feel like you have to block the relationship with this person. Q: My daughter is 12 and your work tends to address younger kids. Any resources for supporting parents of teens in intuitive eating and helping me break through my judgment of her body size?A: My work does tend to address younger kids, partly because that’s the stage of parenting that I’m in. But also because I think that dealing with these issues when kids are young is really important. As I talk about all the time, we know that kids between three and five are starting to understand fatphobia and internalize it. So I do think the work starts there. But of course, your 12-year-old is not a lost cause! There’s a lot of really important work that has to happen in the tween and teen years on these issues. So I’m really glad you are trying to do it. And I’m really glad that you are recognizing that this is your work to do, that you want to break through your judgement about her body size, rather than seeing her body size as the problem and that she somehow needs to fix it. So, just want to give you a big high five for that, because that’s a really important first step.Something I think is useful to sort of hold in your heart as you navigate this is: I’m guessing your feelings about your daughter’s body are tied to your feelings about your own body. This is really, really common. 12 is puberty and big body changes. And this is often an age that we experienced a lot of negative feelings about our bodies, or internalized lots of negative messages. So a lot of what might be coming up for you is your own stuff. And if she looks similar to how you looked at her age (or how you look now!) that may be kind of bringing it all together for you. So as much as possible: Recognize that this really isn’t anything to do with her, that this is you working through your own seventh grade bullshit, because Lord knows, we all have that. A therapist who works from a weight inclusive Health at Every Size perspective could be helpful. The HAES Community site has a searchable database of providers.I’m also linking to this piece and this one, both of which I wrote for the New York Times about parents navigating body image issues with their kids. I think the parents quoted in those articles do have younger kids, but the advice is applicable to all ages. And the experts quoted in those pieces might be folks that you want to look up on Instagram or online other places and follow their work. A couple of folks I really love, who do a great job about talking about teens and eating: Katja Rowell MD is on Instagram. She is a responsive feeding expert, and a parent of a teenager. And she talks quite a lot about intuitive eating and teens in a really great way. Also, as I just mentioned, Amee Severson and Sumner Brooks, their book will be geared towards parents of teens as well as younger kids. I’m going to throw a few other links in the transcript: @teenhealthdoc on Instagram is a great resource for all things teen health but definitely comes from a body positive perspective. I also like The Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens by Elyse Resch and You Are Enough by Jen Petro-Roy; they are meant to be read by your kid but you will get a lot out of them too! But I think, as much as possible, focus on the fact that this is bringing up stuff for you. And what you really need is support for you. It’s less about their age, and more about how you’re navigating this.Q: My teenage daughter has postural issues. I am afraid to point them out to her because I don’t want to say anything about her body. But she is unaware her posture is problematic and therefore can’t work on it herself. Or should she? Is that just more dieting culture nonsense?A: This is interesting. I think, if there is something about your child’s body that does not conform to societal beauty standards, and you are worried that it will sort of create a “problem” for them, the last thing your child needs is to hear that information from you. What your child needs from you is radical acceptance of their body. They need to know that you do not see their body as the enemy, you do not see their body as the problem. And that is related to whatever size their body is, certainly their posture, if they have acne, if they have anything about their body that is atypical —scars, disabilities—they need to know that you as their parent view their body as a miracle and something really special and unique and wonderful and worthy of taking care of. They need to know that you trust their body so they can trust what their body is communicating to them.On this question of posture, I think it’s very normal for teenagers to have awkward posture because their bodies are growing really fast in lots of different directions. It’s normal for a kid to not be fully aware of how she’s holding herself through space. That’s part of being a teenager and figuring out your adult body. And I really would not think that it’s your job as her parent to speak up about it and point it out in some way because you’re only going to make her super self-conscious about it. I think your instincts are right on.If you want to support her from a more body-positive, empowered place, I think you could look into something like taking yoga classes together, ideally with a weight-inclusive, body-positive teacher. You know, strength training can be really positive and powerful. Maybe you follow someone like Meg Boggs on Instagram who talks about strength training in a weight-neutral, weight-inclusive, body-positive way. Tally Rye is another body-positive fitness trainer and I also love fitragamuffin. So maybe you start exploring the world of joyful movement with her. But I don’t want you exploring this, because you’re thinking, “if we do yoga, it will fix her posture.” That’s not the goal, just like it’s not the goal to be like, “if we start running together, she’ll lose weight.” That’s not the goal. We’re not motivated by this perceived flaw about her body. We’re motivated by wanting to help this kid find ways to move her body that she loves, to find ways to feel strong in her body, to feel joyful in her body. So you’re giving her tools to take care of her body in different ways. If that addresses her posture, great, if it doesn’t adjust her posture, great, that’s not really the issue. It’s really about helping her feel what it’s like to be in her body and really be embodied in her body in a positive way.Q: Any thoughts about eating in front of the TV? It seems unsupportive of intuitive eating—but it’s one of my kid’s favorite things. And I don’t want to nag him around this other than an occasional ask, “Are you listening to your body when you’re eating in front of the TV?”A: First of all, it kind of is nagging to say to your kid, “Are you listening to your body when you’re eating in front of the TV?” I know you’re really trying hard not to nag. But kids are smart. And I think they know that obviously, the implied answer is “No, I’m not. And you want me to stop doing this.” I think maybe back off direct questions. It is true that eating every meal in front of a television or in front of any screen—whether that’s eating every meal while you’re playing video games, or while you’re on your computer, while you’re Virginia and you’re writing your book so you’re eating lunch at your desk while reading chapter drafts—these are all ways that we are disconnecting from the experience of eating and distracting ourselves. We’re not eating in a very “mindful” way. We’re getting fuel or we’re snacking because it feels good while we’re doing this other thing. So no, this is not, “mindful eating.”But is this intuitive eating? It can be. Because it can be realistic to say, I’m so busy today that I’m going to eat lunch at my desk, because I know it’s really important that I eat, I know I’ll feel like garbage if I skip lunch and work straight through lunch. But I don’t have time to stop and savor this experience for 45 minutes. So I’m going to eat this while I’m working, so that I have some fuel in my body and I can keep going. But no, it’s not like the most enjoyable lunch I’ve ever had in my life. That is not anti-intuitive eating, that’s assessing what you need and meeting your needs in a variety of ways.Similarly, I think, for a lot of us, eating delicious snacks in front of a TV show we love is a very comforting and joyful activity. And I don’t think that that’s anti-intuitive eating to say it’s the end of a long day, and I want to zone out and watch Monty Don on BritBox and eat chocolate because that is what I like to do in the evenings. Or for your child—I’m guessing your son doesn’t watch Monty Don, maybe he does, I hope he does—but whatever he’s watching, and snacking, you know, this can be really relaxing. My now eight-year-old loves to watch nature documentaries or Simpsons reruns and eat various snacks. And this is something she often does on the weekends for an hour or two while her little sister is napping (or not napping, but we’re pretending she’s napping).I don’t see that as a problem. I see that as nice, relaxing, it’s fun to unwind and watch a favorite show and eat some good snacks. If she did that for every meal, I would be concerned. But it’s a couple times a week. During lockdown (and over the last few weeks of summer break) it was more than a couple times a week. But it’s still just one part of the day. It’s not every eating opportunity in the day. That’s how I think about TV.Obviously, you’re going to hear more rigid viewpoints on that. There’s certainly folks in the intuitive eating world, in the Division Of Responsibility world, who would say “no meal should ever happen in front of a screen, that’s a terrible habit you should break.” But to me, that kind of rigidity, that’s like a diet culture mindset coming in saying we have to have this hard and fast rule.Do I think it’s great for every meal? I do not. Do I make a big effort to make sure that we as a family eat dinner at a table looking at each other? Yes. Every now and then do we say, “Hey, guys, do you want to eat dinner in front of the TV?” so that my husband and I can actually talk to each other during dinner, and they can enjoy a show? Yep. We definitely do that. So I think it’s not something that you need to set hard and fast rules around. Is this happening to a degree where it’s replacing other kinds of eating experiences? Or is this just like one of your kid’s favorite things that they like to do on weekends? And sort of find some “balance” in there, as opposed to having rules, like you can only do it on Fridays, or you can only do it three times a week. Because that may be setting it up so it won’t feel like enough and they’ll want to do it more, and you’ll end up with this fixation. So I would look at the overall balance.If this is how they eat dinner every night, you might say I want us to start eating family meals again. But if this is something they do a few times a week, it’s a relaxing thing, it’s bringing them joy, it’s not replacing time that could be spent in other ways, then I would let it go.Q: My husband is limited in what he eats. It’s pretty much all fast food or heavily processed food (chicken fingers, pizza, Panda Express menu items, etc.) and treats (candy, soda, etc). He doesn’t like to go to other people’s houses because he’s afraid he’ll have to eat something he doesn’t like. He has traumatic memories from childhood about being pressured to eat things he didn’t like. I can only imagine how terrible that must feel.But now my kids (ages 5 and 7) are starting to limit what they eat to processed foods, too. I will never force my kids to eat anything, but it’s important to me to serve vegetables and whole grains and encourage them to try new things, alongside the processed stuff they already like. But whenever I try to serve a meal that’s not part of their limited palate, they have serious meltdowns. My husband is now their ally in this. It feels like the three of them are pitted against me. He tells them they’re not allowed to have Pizza Hut every night, not because they need a balanced diet, but because “Mommy won’t let us.” He’s constantly adding more and more sweets to the kids’ breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. (I think this is his way of showing love.) Now, they’ve stopped eating the sandwiches and fruits I put in their lunches. They’re starting to steal candy and cans of soda that my husband has hidden around the house. I realize my husband is dealing with his own childhood issues, but I fear that all this fighting over food is going to create issues for all of us. It’s definitely creating tension between me and my husband. (We’ve talked about this many, many times.) Now, I dread dinnertime. I don’t enjoy eating any of the things we have for dinner. It’s stressful for all four of us, and I’m sure I’m making things worse. What can I do to make eating less stressful for my family?A: So this is really tough. This happens when one or both parents have different sorts of unresolved eating issues. And this is similar to what we were talking about in that first question, when our kids hit certain stages, which are very normal for kids to hit. It’s very normal for five and seven year olds to be pretty cautious about trying new foods, and prefer comfort foods and predictable foods. But then when that intersects with a parents own issues around those same foods, you’re going to kind of have this powder keg moment with all of these different tensions coming together.I think your family sounds like you would really benefit from some professional help. My suspicion, you know, keeping in mind that I’m just a journalist who researches this, I’m not a trained professional—this is not a medical diagnosis of any kind—but my suspicion is your husband would meet criteria for avoidant restrictive food intake disorder, otherwise known as ARFID, which is basically an eating disorder that centers around fear of food rather than body image issues, although it can get kind of all intertwined. (Here’s a piece I wrote about ARFID a few years ago; there is also a chapter devoted to it in my first book.) But often, at its core, ARFID originates because kids have had really punitive experiences of being forced to eat certain foods, and where their caution around new foods was punished or demonized. Sometimes it happens when kids have choking experiences or they gag, they have really strong sensory responses to different textures with foods. And the problem builds and builds until it’s this intense phobia around different foods.ARFID is treatable, but it is a very poorly understood eating disorder. And it is difficult to treat because it’s often treated the same way you treat anorexia, which is to refeed and insist that people eat huge amounts of food, and for someone with really deep fears of specific foods that can pile on the trauma. So it’s really important to get good help for it. Some folks I know who work on ARFID and who do it in a really compassionate and thoughtful way are Katja Rowell MD (again), Grace Wong RD, and Lauren Mulheim, PhD. So this will hopefully give you some starting points. I’m hoping your husband will be open to talking to someone about this because it’s not easy, and he needs support, and I love how much empathy you are holding for his struggle.But it is also true that his struggle is creating a lot of problems for you. I’m also going to link to Anna Lutz, RD, and Elizabeth Davenport. They are dietitians who specialize in family feeding dynamics and write the blog Sunnyside Up Nutrition, which is a great blog about feeding families. But they’re both also experts in these disordered eating dynamics that can have these ripple effects throughout families. So I’d really encourage you to reach out to some therapists and dietitians who can support you, because it does sound fairly entrenched. Especially because you’re referencing that he’s hiding a lot of food around the house, the kids are now finding the food that he’s hiding, and they’re sneaking his sneaking food. I mean, there’s like layers of food sneaking here. So yeah, there’s a lot going on.In terms of how to start to navigate this as a family, I would encourage your husband not to have to hide food and to let the let the kitchen be full of foods everybody loves. So your fruits and vegetables and whole grains, right alongside his, you know, Panda Express, candy, soda, etc. Let it all be out in the open, nobody needs to feel ashamed about the food that they love in your family. Something else you might talk to a therapist about is, you know, you haven’t talked a lot about your own stuff here. I appreciate that you’re saying you don’t want to force your kids to eat anything they don’t like, but it does sound like you are focused on the vegetable/whole grain side of things, which is understandable. But you might want to consider whether you have some rigidity about that. It could be helpful to get some support to work through that, so just throwing that out there as a possibility. I think in general, though: all foods fit. There’s permission around all foods, there’s no need to be banning these foods. And maybe as you’re approaching family meals, you can have it all on the table. And if your kids are gravitating towards the “processed” stuff more than the other stuff, let that be okay. That’s very normal for their ages, it’s very age appropriate.And they are fixating on these foods more because the dynamic between you and your husband has given them so much power, because he’s saying things like “Mommy won’t let us.” And so there’s this idea that these foods have to be forbidden and that you are the one forbidding them. I mean, this is not a fair situation for anybody. But it’s really unfair for your kids to feel like they have to sort of pick sides on food. And it’s not surprising that they’re picking the side of the foods that tastes really good to them. It’s very understandable. But you can start to give these foods less power if you can say, “I know you love Pizza Hut, that’s so great, and we’re having pizza tonight, and we’re having salad and we’re having, fruit on the table, and you can have as much as you want of what’s on the table in whatever order you want.” If they don’t eat something, it’s fine. One food is not more special or better than the other. It’s just this is what’s for dinner, they can pick from what’s offered. So I would definitely lean into making sure that there’s always some of these preferred foods on the table along with the other foods that you're hoping to expose them to.At the same time you have a right to eat food that you like for dinner. I mean, I like a lot of processed foods. But if I had to eat mac and cheese every night, I’d be pretty grouchy about it. It’s not my favorite So if this means that you guys are sometimes serving two dinners, you know, I think that’s okay. I was talking to a friend recently and he was like, “Yeah, our kids eat with us maybe two nights a week and the rest of the week we are making two dinners and sitting down together, but they have their chicken nuggets, and my wife and I are eating what we want to eat.” And I thought, Oh, that’s genius. His kids are 5 and 7 too. And for those of us who have kids in this age range, we know that it’s just not realistic to come up with a meal seven nights a week that every member of your family is going to like. This is probably not realistic for any group of people. But it’s particularly difficult when you’re in this under eight, hyper cautious stage, when they tend to have a pretty short list of foods they want to eat, and they want to eat the same things over and over again. It’s totally normal. And it’s exhausting to try to cater to that, and also still have other foods.So, maybe you have nights where you order from a restaurant where everyone gets to pick something they like, and it’s a restaurant that does serve something you like and something that everyone else likes. Maybe you have nights where you make a big salad that looks good to you, and you know, you’re serving chicken nuggets alongside it, that’s great. Don’t be hemmed in by rules about what the meal should look like, or do these foods even really go together? You know, we went through a phase where we were putting Eggo waffles on the table at dinner a lot because they were a preferred food. And Eggo waffles don’t really fit in with any menu I might be trying to plan, but it sure takes a lot of pressure off if my kid who really likes them knows that they’re there, and she can have those. And she can also maybe try other stuff if she’s in the mood. So I think bringing some more flexibility all the way around to the situation is going to help. And I think it’s very fair to ask your husband not to throw you under the bus about food. I think it’s very fair to say we’re going to keep serving the foods that I like to eat—especially if you’re the one doing the work of making the foods—but at the same time know that any rules you are putting around processed foods is only going to make them more appealing, or that your kids are more prone to fixating on.I hope you’re going to reach out to some professionals who can help you navigate what sounds like a really difficult situation. I’m also hoping folks might chime in in the comments on this one. Because I think there’s a lot of different ways to handle this. I certainly welcome anyone who’s either dealt with this firsthand and has some lived experience or any of my followers who are professionals in the responsive feeding world, feel free to chime in. Because this is a complicated one. Hopefully that gives you some starting points. If you liked this episode and you aren’t yet subscribed, please do that! If you are a subscriber, thank you so much and please consider sharing Burnt Toast on your social media platforms, forward a free weekly essay to a friend, or purchase a gift subscription.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Jessica McKenzie who writes the fantastic Substack, Pinch of Dirt. Our logo is designed by Deanna Lowe, and I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. You can find more of my work at virginiasolesmith.com or come say hi on Instagram and Twitter where I am @v_solesmith. Thanks for listening! Talk to you soon.