You probably know Laura as co-host of The Big Fat Positive Podcast, but today she’s here to talk about her new book, co authored with Gia Gambaro Blount. It’s called Good to Go: A Fresh Take on Potty Training for Today's Intentional Parent.

I'm years past potty training (thank God!!), but I honestly remember the pain of it better than childbirth. This is often a very fraught parenting milestone. And as with all things parenting: That means we encounter a ton of societal expectations and pressures around how to get potty training right, which makes it all even harder. 

If you, too, have been a victim of that viral three day potty training method, you'll want to hear this conversation. Laura has amazing advice about how to recover and do it differently. But even if you’re child-free or years out from this experience: What we’re really talking about today is how perfectionism and performative parenting can make life harder for parents (especially moms!) and really get in the way of kids’ body autonomy. And of course, promoting body autonomy is core to the work we do here on Burnt Toast.

PS. You can take 10 percent off Good to Go or any book we talk about on the podcast, if you order it from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, along with a copy of Fat Talk! (This also applies if you’ve previously bought Fat Talk from them. Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)

Laura

I am the co-author of a new potty training book that just came out called Good to Go: A Fresh Take on Potty Training for Today's Intentional Parent. You can find it everywhere. And then I am also the co-host of a long running parenting and pregnancy podcast called The Big Fat Positive Podcast. I’ve been doing that for over seven years now. Every week for seven years!

Virginia

You are an OG podcaster! I love the podcast. I’ve been on the podcast. But today we are going to talk about Good to Go. Because you reached out to me and you said, "Potty training culture is such a thing. Can we talk about it?" And I am not going to share my own children’s stories. But I’m going to say, yeah, it is such a thing. And it really messes with our heads.

And of course, my work is all about investigating cultural messages that mess with our heads, aka diet culture. So yes, let’s talk about potty training diet culture today. 

You kick off the book with the story of how you tried and failed to train your older kiddo, who you call Augie in the book. And the impetus was that you read the super popular three day potty training book that I think most of our listeners who have potty trained a child have encountered.

Why did the idea that you could magically change potty train your child in three days go so wrong?

Laura

So we kind of fell into that new parent trap of "This kid’s a genius!" He was hitting all his milestones early. He was such a talker. And I had been given that very, very popular three day potty training method that shall not be named. And I read it and really took it as gospel. 

And in the book, there were all these signs of readiness. And I was like, check, check, check, for Augie. It was stuff like, is he interested in the potty? And I thought, oh, this kid is ready, according to this book.

And there were extenuating circumstances--namely, the pandemic. We were deep in the pandemic. We were also stuck indoors because there was a wildfire nearby, so we weren’t even able to go outside. That’s Southern California life for you. And I was in my second trimester with my second pregnancy. So all of these things came together to be like, well, you know, what the hell? Let’s give it a try.

Virginia

We’re trapped indoors anyways. 

Laura

We’re trapped indoors. Let’s spend three days naked and see what happens. 

And so the very first sentence of our book is: "I’m a failure at potty training." Which is a very weird way to start a potty training book.

Virginia

But so relatable. 

Laura

Oh, I hope it’s relatable! Because the thing is, we thought we were a success at the very beginning. Right after those three days, he was mostly making it to the potty. We were like, okay, we can take away diapers.

But what we didn’t realize is that we had just entered into a state of constant vigilance with him. We were constantly reminding him to go, and we were always nervous about going anywhere and doing anything with him, like even just going to the park. We never got over the stress level, right? My mom would say, "He wasn’t potty trained. You were potty trained."

Virginia

You were trying to take him to the potty obsessively and monitor all the signs.

Laura

Exactly, exactly. 

And the other thing was, I had this idea that having two kids in diapers was going to be hard. I don’t know where I got this idea! Everyone is like oh, you can’t have two kids in diapers.

Virginia

It feels like a really common cultural message. I’ve heard a lot of friends say that, who have kids close in age. "Oh we have got to get her out of diapers before the next one comes!"

Laura

Actually having two kids in diapers is way more convenient than one who’s in a very early stage of potty training and a newborn! That was our first mistake. 

But we just continued to deal with this stress around going places. And at some point, I ended up having the baby. Augie was still out of diapers, but he was having accidents. In our book, we call them misses, but this author called them accidents, so we’ll stick with accidents. It’s the more familiar term. And he was having accidents all the time, and I was really stressed out about it.

Then I take my new baby, we call him Sebastian, to a local place called the Family Room, which is where I did mommy and me classes, and then toddler and me classes with my now co-author, Gia Gambaro Blount. I brought him for a lactation support group. But Gia happened to be there, and I descended upon Gia. I was like, "Gia, I need your help. Augie is having all these problems with potty training. I don’t know what to do."

And she looked at me, and said, "Can I ask you something? When you decided to potty train him, did you tell him it was going to happen?"

And I was like, "No." Because the book specifically tells you you’re not supposed to do that.

Virginia

You just spring it on them.

Laura

The book tells you, do not even have the little potties out, because it will confuse their little brains. And I didn’t know anything about potty training at the time, so I was like, "Sure, that sounds legit. Whatever."

So Gia was like, "You need to go back and ask him how he’s feeling about this." So I go back and I look Augie in the eyes. I’m like, "Hey baby. I know we’ve been having a lot of accidents. Do you think you want to go back to diapers for a little bit?" And he was like, "Yes!" Instantly. "Yes, yes, yes, I want to go back to diapers!" And I was shocked by that, because I thought he was going to be like, "No, I’m a big boy!"

Virginia

He was like, no, I’m really not ready for that.

Laura

And so we went back to diapers, which, by the way, in the 3 day method is a big no no. Like, huge regression. And there was also this strict thing about having to potty train between 18 and 30 months, and if you don’t do it between those times, you’ve ruined them forever. At least, that’s that’s the takeaway I had.

Virginia

And if you could do it beforehand, even better.

Laura

Yes! So I was really worried about all that. But the minute we put him back in diapers, the stress went away. And you know, TL/DR, he is not ruined forever. We ended up actually potty training him using Gia’s help just after he turned three.

Virginia

Everything in your story is so deeply relatable. Because I think those first years of parenting are such chaos. And this is certainly not all moms... but there’s a certain kind of mom who is vulnerable to this message of "control as much of it as you can." Have the feeding schedules, track the ins and outs when they’re newborns. There is a need to have a lot of information and structure around what is otherwise just this sea of "when will we ever sleep again? When will anything happen?"

That makes us really vulnerable to messages like "You want to achieve this milestone by a certain age." Or "You want to achieve this milestone before you have another baby." There is this idea that we somehow get a gold star if we get it done at a certain point.

And now that I have kids who are way, way older, and I’m just like, "I don’t even remember when it all happened." You don’t look at a bunch of seventh graders, and think, "Well, I can tell  you didn’t potty train till 3.5."

Laura

And I think that I am one of those moms who is totally susceptible to that. We had a sleep schedule with my first. And I think part of it is that I had my kids later in life, I already had a career. And when you have kids, any control you have over your days, over your schedule, over your life, just flies out the window. So I think I was grasping at anything that would give me a sense of control in my life. And rightfully so! So I’m not saying that those things don’t help people —I actually do think some of the sleep schedule stuff helped us. Or we got lucky, and that just happened to align with my kid's personality.

Virginia

You had a baby who was like, "Yes, fine, we’ll do a schedule."

Laura

Exactly. I don’t know. There’s no way to know, but it did give me a sense of control. The trap with that is, say you have a good experience, like I did with sleep training , and then you go to potty training and it’s not as successful. Suddenly you think it’s some kind of referendum on your own parenting. 

Virginia

Yes! 

Laura

Having a second kid is really helpful — or third or fourth, I imagine, even more— but having more than one kid has really helped me realize that so much of parenting is luck of the draw with your kid’s personality and temperament and all that stuff. But with your first, it can feel like such pressure and such responsibility for you to be the person who figures it all out. When it turns out that a lot of things are just not figure out-able, or need time or a different approach, or you need to be flexible.

Virginia

Social media has not helped in all of this, for sure. I mean, not that everybody documents their kids potty training on social media, but it’s of a piece with needing to celebrate milestones in this public way, I think.

Laura

Hopefully one of the gifts that we give with our book is this concept that potty training is not a light switch. It’s not a binary. You’re not either potty trained or not in some clear crossing the finish line manner.

Instead, we describe it as a continuum in terms of how much parental involvement is required. So at the very, very beginning, those first days, weeks, even months, you’re in the highly involved phase, where you are doing a lot of reminding and you’re doing a lot of cleaning up of pee on floor. You’re doing a lot of thinking about it.

Then you go into the occasionally involved phase, which is fewer accidents, they know they need to go, but you still have to wipe their butts until kindergarten, at least usually. That’s something that the other books don’t really tell you. They frame it as, "oh, you’re done after three days." But these kids need help! There are just some physiological reasons why little kids have trouble wiping their own butts. Their heads are huge! Their proportions are all off. Some kids physically cannot reach their butts. But no one’s telling you that. 

So our goal in the book is to try to shorten the highly involved phase so that you’re in the occasionally involved phase quicker, and then finally you'll get to the point where you’re rarely involved. We say that there’s some day in the future where you won’t know the last time your kid went to the bathroom. But that’s years away. I mean, in my house, it’s still getting announced!

So if you can think of it as the spectrum of where you’re in this process, then you can be a little bit less like, oh, okay, so and so just posted "oh, my two year old potty trained in one weekend." You can know in your head: Okay, yeah, that just means they’re not wearing diapers on a daily basis, right? But caregivers are still involved.

Virginia

Yeah, it doesn’t mean the two year old is like, "Okay, mom, I’ll be back in a minute!"

Laura

People will come out of the woodwork and be like, "My two year old self potty trained, they won’t let me be involved. They do everything!" And it’s like, I am so happy for you. But that is not the majority of kids and we need to just understand that’s not an expectation we should have.

Virginia

I also appreciate understanding the stages more, and the fact that you and Gia really emphasized that this means you can decide readiness, not just based on your kid. So: Are they achieving these certain milestones? Are they checking these boxes? But also: Consider yourself. Are you, the parent, ready? Maybe when you’re about to have a newborn, you don’t want to be in the highly involved potty training phase. If you don’t think you can get all the way to "less involved" by the time the baby comes, maybe put this on hold for a while. 

And that just gives us so much more permission to center our own needs in the process. And to actually have needs, which is another thing the three day discourse really leaves out. The idea that you as the parent would have any other things going on other than potty training.

Laura

Most of the 3 day experts say you cannot leave the house for three days. Okay, that’s great for a stay at home parent who has no other kids. But what happens when you have an older kid that needs to go to soccer practice? What happens if you have a prescription you need to pick up from the pharmacy?

Virginia

Or you’re a single parent.

Laura

Or a single parent doing it all. Exactly.

We were in a pandemic, in a wildfire, and that’s why I was like, okay, we can stay home for three days. There has been no other time in our lives we’ve been able to stay inside for three days. Those unrealistic expectations really set you up for failure. 

And then on top of that, the message in all these other methods is, "If your child is still having issues after the three days, you must have done something wrong. You must have not followed my method perfectly."

That’s with so much of parenting, right? But no, every kid is going to react differently and have a different timeline. And also, sometimes prescriptions need to be picked up at the pharmacy.

Virginia

My listeners frequently get a little annoyed when I say everything is a diet. But: A system that tells you that if it didn’t work, it’s because you didn’t do it right is 100 percent classic diet culture. It’s classic like, well, if only you’d followed it, if only you’d have better discipline... as opposed to: This just isn’t a match for what you’re trying to do right now. This isn’t the way for you.

Laura

And it’s trying to police this thing that everyone has to do, too. I think that’s just such an interesting analog to diet culture as well. We all have to eat. I know you’ve written about this, right? Even the most restrictive diet is going to have to provide some food, because you will die. 

And we all have to eliminate our waste and, save children with medical issues that may prevent them from potty training, almost all of us are going to end up having to learn to use a toilet at some point. It’s this thing we all have to do. And yet, we’re being told there’s this one right way to do it. But there are also at least five different people saying their way is the one right way. What gets more diet-y than that?

Virginia

Another thing I really appreciated is what Gia emphasizes in terms of assessing your child’s readiness. Because it's not just the cognitive signs, like, do they have the language? Are they looking at the potty and interested or following you into the bathroom? She also talks about this concept of interoception, which is something that comes up a lot when we talk about helping kids be intuitive eaters. So again, there are these parallels between food and potty stuff.

Can you explain how understanding where a child is with their interoception development can help you prepare for a more intuitive approach to potty training?

Laura

We talk about the three realms of readiness: There are the cognitive signs, the social-emotional signs and the physical signs. But we further split those up into two categories. Some of these things are teachable signs, and then there are some unteachable things that are just developmental.

A really good example of that is in the cognitive signs of readiness. An unteachable sign is whether your child is curious about you going to the potty, right? That is often listed as a sign of readiness, like, oh, your child wants to know what you’re doing. Why are you sitting on the potty? Wants to come be with you in the bathroom. You can’t teach that level of interest, right? And if you tried it would be weird.

And interoception is another unteachable sign. There’s nothing we can do to force your child to have more awareness of what’s going on in their body. That’s a thing we’re kind of born with that is on another spectrum. Some people are incredibly sensitive. I’m a person who’s been accused of being a hypochondriac, and I think part of that is I have heightened interoception. I feel every ache and pain. I always felt when I ovulated, for example. I also heard once that only some people can tell when their heart’s beating. That’s just a sign that some people have a more sensitive sense of interoception versus others, right? We can’t teach it. It’s just the way your kid is. 

What we can teach is supporting their interpretation of their interoception. An example that’s not potty training related is if your child gets goosebumps, you can help them identify: Do you have goosebumps because you’re feeling cold, or do you have goosebumps because you’re scared? 

Goosebumps have a feeling associated with them, and you can’t teach them how to feel that. But what you can do is try to connect language to the feeling. And that’s hard. That is the hard work of potty training, honestly.

And so Gia and I identified something we called the universal potty sequence, just to keep it short in our brain, which is, when we are as adults, go to the bathroom. We say we’re going to the bathroom. We think of it as one step, but in reality, it’s up to nine steps. We identified nine steps. But you know, it’s a bunch of different steps that the kids have to learn. It’s all new for them, right? 

So the first step is feeling. The sensation is that interoception, every step after that is kind of mechanical, right? Like you navigate to the potty, then you pull down your pants, then you sit on the potty, then you eliminate, then you flush, blah, blah, right? 

So we have this thing we call the rehearsal period. That’s about two weeks ish--again, everything is flexible--before you actually plan to take away diapers, where you teach everything on the universal potty sequence, all those steps, all those new things, all those new mechanics for them. Except step one: Feel the sensation. That one we are leaving to when you take away diapers. 

The point is when kids are thrown into "we’re taking away diapers. We’re taking away this thing that you’ve worn your entire life!" this way, the only thing they have to learn is how to connect the sensation to the need to go. Everything else isn’t brand new, so the other eight steps aren't so overwhelming. All we’re focusing on is interoception, and so that’s what we’re trying to really center in our method to help our kids connect the dots.

And that’s why we also don’t forbid prompting. Some kids are not going to have a strong sensation, and you’re going to need to sometimes, in retrospect, be like, "hmm, there’s pee on the floor now, you you had a miss." And we say miss, because we don’t want there to be shame involved, right? We don’t want to say, oh, it’s an accident. It’s not really an accident. They just didn’t get to the potty in time, right? or they didn’t even think to try to go. So we say, "Oh, you had a miss. Do you remember what it felt like before it came out? Next time we feel that feeling, let’s see if we can catch it before we go." So we’re working on that. And some kids need that extra support. 

Honestly, my six year old still likes to get hyper focused, and so he does need to get prompted to this day. And no one would say, oh, that six year old’s not potty trained. He’s definitely potty trained at school. He’s fine, but sometimes we just need to help him connect. I mean, how many adults do you know who wait till the last second go to the bathroom?

Virginia

That’s me, every work day.

What I love about this is how you’re really centering kids’ body autonomy in this process. And in way that is so counter to how I’ve seen body training explained before. This feels like such a huge shift. 

I mean, I remember when I was doing it with my own kids, feeling like, "the way I’m doing this doesn’t feel aligned with the way I’m thinking about feeding them," for example. When I’m feeding kids, I’m really focused on the power of their ability to say no to a food they don’t like, and why that’s important. And the importance of not pushing them past their fullness cues and helping them notice hunger cues. Their body autonomy is the center of it. 

And potty training is this thing where because we’re so focused on getting it done, because we’ve got all this pressure on it, it’s like... suddenly they don’t have body autonomy in the process at all. And that feels really troubling.

Laura

It does. I mean, I came to that same revelation. It was part of what allowed me to feel okay with putting Augie back in diapers, 

Virginia

Yeah, because you gave him his power back. 

Laura

Exactly and I realized this exact same thing you said. I am so dedicated to respectful parenting. I’m a Virginia Sole-Smith fan girl! Like I read all your books, and I'm offering foods without judgment, and all of that stuff. 

And yet, in this one realm, I fell into the trap of not just not centering his body autonomy, I like full on ignored it. I mean, it sounds awful, but I really did violate his own body autonomy. I forced him to do things he wasn’t ready for. And I do feel bad about it to this day. 

And it’s not an inconsequential thing, right? Like, people say, No one’s going to college still, still using a diaper. Everyone eventually learns to potty. And it’s true. But there is a lot of shame around using the bathroom. There was some Vice article that just came out, which said, like, 83 percent of Gen Zers have bathroom anxiety. And a bunch of them want to quit because of it. They don’t want to have a job because they’re afraid of using the bathroom. 

Virginia

I’m an old millennial, but I have some women’s magazine bathroom trauma. I understand what they’re saying. It’s a stressful place. 

Laura

And I’m not saying I enjoy pooping in a public bathroom either! But there are consequences, and not just about anxiety. There are actual physical consequences to involving shame in the potty training process. There's encopresis, which is a specific type of constipation and a really big problem that is so hard to solve. I’ve heard from so many parents whose children have it. It's a form of chronic constipation, and what happens is you’re so constipated that liquid poop escapes around the sides of the impacted stool, and kids can’t tell anymore that they have to poop because their colon is so enlarged. 

And this is a much more common problem than people realize, and it’s really hard to solve once it’s started. It's something you really want to get ahead of. And that’s the other reason we say if your child is refusing to poop in the potty, give them a diaper. You need to get that poop out one way or another, and it’s not a judgment on whether you’ve been able to potty train them or not. We’re looking at the long game here. We’re trying to create a child who doesn’t have long term problems that require a ton of medical intervention. What’s worse, having to go to a GI doctor for the next five years or just giving them a diaper to poop in at the end of the day?

Virginia

And giving them another month or six months in diapers, and then you try again.

Laura

It goes back to the perfectionism, though. Like, when you put it that way, you’re like, yeah, of course, I’ll give them a diaper. But if you’ve been told no, they’re going to be confused. It’s failure. That's harder.

It's not failure. These kids are way smarter than most people give them credit for, like, they will know the difference. They’re not going to be confused about what’s going on.

Virginia

I think another piece of this body autonomy conversation is night training. I really love that Gia does not endorse night training. I mean, I have heard of parents setting alarms to wake toddlers up to pee at 11pm so that they could say they were night trained.

Just tell us why this is so unnecessary.

Laura

Night training is absolutely unnecessary. 

We did a ton of research to make sure we were right. Night training is just not effective. It’s really a one hundred percent developmental shift that happens in your child’s brain and their body. When they are ready, they will be night trained. And there’s nothing you can do to force it. 

One in 6 kids at age six still wet the bed at night. At age seven, that goes down to one in 10. But that’s still a lot of kids! One in 10 kids in your second grade class are still wetting the bed at night. And that’s fine and developmentally normal. 

And so if we know that, if we can normalize that, it may lessen the pressure for night training. There’s a scientific term for waking them at night to sit them on the potty. They call it lifting. And the research shows that lifting has no measurable outcomes like lifting. People who practice lifting had no better results than people who just let their kids sleep. 

And I would imagine—this is just my hypothesis—that those parents are crabby because they have to wake up in the middle of the night to do it. And their kids are also probably crabby for having gotten woken up, even if they’re half awake, right? 

So we are firmly in the belief that you don’t have to do night training. That said, we tell you when to start looking for signs that it's time to take away night time diapers and how to do it. And also what to do when your kid is getting up to pee in the middle of the night, and that becomes a problem.

So if your child is waking up in the middle of the night every night to go pee — we get into how to address that, what the root causes might be, and how to how to deal with that when the time comes. But we say do not do night training at the same time as daytime training. Your kids will likely just night train themselves during or after the process. One in 10 will take past age seven.

Virginia

The last thing I want to hit on is the stuff piece of potty training. There’s a lot marketed to us, a lot of gear, different types of potties, all of that. And I would love to hear your take on what is actually useful and what is just marketing, and you can probably skip. 

Laura

Like anything parenting-related, mom-related specifically, there are going to be people trying to sell you a bunch of stuff. But I mean, basically you need a pot to piss in, right? Like, that is the bare bones of what you need. 

A lot of people ask us about the floor potties: Do I really need a floor potty? A lot of people find them kind of gross, unsightly. I get it. You don’t want to have a little toilet in your living room. Yeah, I didn’t either. 

But if you buy nothing else, we recommend having a floor potty. And you don't have to buy them — there are going to be 20 parents in your neighborhood who are desperate to get these out of their basements! You can get over the fact that it was used by another kid, just get some Clorox. You know, you’re fine. You don’t have to spend actual money on any of this stuff, because it is a thing that you only need for a narrow window of time.

So we recommend, at the bare minimum, having a floor potty for this reason: There are three types of awareness when it comes to your internal body awareness. There’s sensation awareness, which is, oh, I have to go. The action awareness is: Is it pee or poop? And then there’s urgency awareness, which is like, the real key to all of this. 

Urgency awareness is how much lead time you have between noticing the feeling and getting to a toilet. And when you are first potty training, in the first days and weeks, that urgency awareness window is seconds. We’re talking like five seconds between when a kid recognizes and when they go. 

Because of that, we want to give them as many opportunities to have a win as possible, right? Like, you don’t want to clean up pee off your floor, and you want your kid to feel successful, right? The more chances they have to successfully make it to the potty, the better everyone’s going to feel, and the like, quicker the process is going to go. And sometimes the difference between a win and a miss is the time it takes to walk from the living room to the bathroom.

In addition, there are a lot of things about the big potty that scare kids or just are really, really challenging for kids. It’s high up, so you have to have a step stool or something. Usually you have to have some kind of insert for the seat. So like, if you’re like, oh, I don’t want to buy a floor potty, you’re still having to buy a step stool and a seat insert. So that’s two things versus the one floor potty. And kids can be scared of the balancing being high up. They can be scared of the plopping, like the poop falling all the way into the bowl. We have some techniques to help them get over that, but there are just more barriers to entry for most kids to use the adult potty at the get-go. Obviously, you can work towards that. And I always hear from people like, well, my kid wouldn’t even go in the small potty. It’s like, okay, there you go. Now, you know. All the more reason to get one from some other parent. 

If you have a really big house, two floor potties could be helpful so you don’t have to be carrying them around everywhere you go. I mean the amount of time I’ve spent in my life carrying around a little floor potty full of pee. It’s just so gross. It’s such a glamorous life we live as parents. 

And then the only other thing that I’d say is really a good buy if you're in the car a lot, is a travel potty.

Virginia

One hundred percent.

Laura

There are so many great ones now. I have the Oxo one, it like, folds up into this flat little package. And you can either pop the legs vertical, so that you put a little plastic bag in that has a little absorbent pad so that you can sit on the potty in the backseat of the car or the trunk or whatever. But it also folds out, so it can be a little seat to use in public bathrooms. And that’s honestly really great. Public bathrooms are a whole other topic that we actually talk a lot about in the book. But one major thing is that their butts are too small. They just so you either have to hold them, and it’s a whole thing, or you can have this travel potty with you, which gives them a seat that’s their size and makes it more accessible. 

Virginia

Well, this was fantastic. Speaking of stuff, though, it does not have to be stuff. Laura, do you want to give us some Butter today?

Laura

I do. Okay, so I went straight from saying you don’t need to buy things for potty training, and then I’m going to tell you about this thing that I think you should buy for potty training. But I have to tell you about this because I have been giving these out to my friends left and right. Anytime I tell someone about it, they they’re like their mind is blown. They’ve never heard of it before, and so I feel like I have to share it, because it’s something that’s been so helpful for us, and that is a disposable travel urinal. Have you ever heard of these? 

Virginia

I do not have children with penises, so no.

Laura

Well, guess what? It works for children with vulvas, too. 

Virginia

Wow. Okay!

Laura

So it’s this universal spout. It’s basically this sort of oval shaped spout that, if you have a penis, you point this the top part up, and if you have a vulva, you point it down, just so it catches the pee. And it’s just a plastic bag, kind of like an emesis bag, but the difference is there’s a little zip lock top, so you can seal it off, and there’s like a gel pad at the bottom that’s dry when you get it, but it absorbs liquid, kind of like what’s inside of a diaper, right? And you can it folds up into this tiny little package that you can have in your purse. 

It’s saved us so many times when you are places where you just can’t get to a bathroom quickly, and they really have to pee. Because, I don’t know about your kids, but no matter how many times I tell them, like we’re leaving the park, let’s go to the bathroom. Yeah, no, I don’t have to go. And then five minutes into the drive home, I have to pee. I have to pee.

And while I do have two children with penises, I don’t usually like to have them pee on random people’s yards, right? So really helps to be able to have this thing in the car. I will tell you the most clutch moment, which hopefully doesn’t get me canceled, which is we were in line. My six year old and I were in line for the Guardians of the Galaxy breakout ride at Disney California Adventure. And it was an hour long line. And I was shocked that he was focused and able to stay in that line the whole time. But we were almost to the boarding area, and he’s like, Mommy I have to pee and it was just me and him. I couldn’t send him with his dad or anything. And this line is like a maze, you know how Disney does it’s like they create this whole experience. But I didn’t know how to get out in any quick way, even if they would have led us back in the line, I didn’t know how to get out. And it was dark in there, all moody, and so it was scary. 

And I was like, okay, baby, just turn around. So I got him face away from the crowd, and he peed in the bag, and there was a trash can right there. And it saved us! so I highly recommend it. I have one in my purse at all times, just in case. I have yet to use it for myself, but it is apparently used by adults. Okay, yeah, yeah, absolutely so. And they, I don’t have a brand recommendation. There’s like 500 different brands, so just look up disposable urinal bags. 

Virginia

Well, my Butter is not something you can pee in, but It is body adjacent in thinking about this episode, and thinking back to earlier parenting years, because, as I said, I’m like, pretty well out of the stage. Now, I was remembering how much one of our favorite picture books at that time was Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder. 

Laura

I love that book. 

Virginia

It’s incredible. It should be in every parent’s library. It’s a go-to baby shower gift for me forever, because it’s just an amazing celebration of body diversity, which is all of Tyler’s work. So that’s a Butter I’ve given before, but just to re-up. 

But recently, a friend of mine gave me a print of Tyler’s of this beautiful, fat mermaid. I’ll put a photo of it in the show notes.

And I actually hung it up by my bathroom, because our bathroom is near where our pool is. So now we have a lot of middle school girls changing into swimsuits all the time. And I am slowly making this bathroom my body celebration shrine. So I have three Tyler illustrations in that space. And I’m just adding to this little collection of body positive art so that when teenage girls are in there changing into swimsuits and having the feelings they can look around and be like, Oh, right. Bodies are cool.

So, another way to think about your bathroom as a place to affirm that body autonomy matters. 

Laura

Yeah, it really does. 

Virginia

Well, this was a delight. Laura, thank you so much for joining us. Tell folks where we can follow you, how we can support your work.

Laura

Yes. So as I said many times, my book Good to Go: A Fresh Take on Potty Training for Today's Intentional Parent is out in the US and Canada, wherever you buy your books. There’s also an e-book version you can find. We are hoping to get an audiobook going soon. And we also have a website that you can find us at and then listen to my podcast. We have great conversations all the time. We had Virginia on for two episodes when Fat Talk came out and one of our favorite episodes ever. And we are Big Fat Positive a pregnancy and parenting journey.

Virginia

Amazing. Thank you so much for being here. 

Laura

Thanks for having me. I love talking to you.

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Farideh.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

We're going to chat about:

⭐️ How we're feeling about the BIG MOVE.

⭐️ How to think about clothes after a significant size change. What even IS your style now?!

⭐️Figuring out fall uniforms!

⭐️ Diet culture in disaster prep.

⭐️ The one thing we wish straight-sized style bloggers would do differently.

And so much more! To hear the full conversation, you'll need to be a paid subscriber.

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Corinne

This is the episode you’ve been waiting for! We’re going to reveal our big news.

Virginia

Burnt Toast and Big Undies have moved to Patreon!

Corinne

We’re going to get into the how and the why, and then we’re going to answer some pretty juicy listener questions.

Virginia

This is very exciting. It's our first week over on Patreon. We’re still, to be honest, at the time of this recording, figuring out how to use Patreon? I would say?

Corinne

Absolutely.

Virginia

We're still learning our way around, which I’m sure is the experience that many listeners are also having. Unless you were already a longtime Patreon user, which I think a lot of you were. I mean, I think a lot of us use Patreon. But it’s all new. It’s different. How are you feeling, Corinne?

Corinne

I’m excited! Definitely still getting to know Patreon as a platform, but it feels refreshing to be somewhere new. It has a very different vibe over here, I think. 

And I think a lot of people kind of had beef with Substack for various reasons. And so I’m excited we're here.

Virginia

It feels like it was time. Burnt Toast hasd been on Substack for four years. Big Undies is newer, but you have been working in the Substack space for about as long as I have. And there were just a lot of ways that platform had stopped working for us. And a lot of decisions that company had made that were not feeling great. It’s something that listeners have asked for for a long time. People are like, "When are you leaving Substack? We don’t like the Nazis!" And we don’t like the Nazis either. 

But it was a really big question of how to move these businesses, how to do it without us losing big financially, and in terms of both of these brands till having our communities. We didn’t want to leave and have nobody follow us.

Corinne

Also, I think there’s an argument to be made that letting Substack turn into a Nazi-only platform is not useful.

Virginia

For sure, that has been my response for a long time, when folks asked. If we all leave, then only the Nazis remain. And that is a real concern. I think that’s what we saw happen to Twitter, for sure. So many people left, and it is just a cesspool. Is Substack going to become a cesspool? I have no idea. I hope not. 

I also don’t want to be overly rosy-eyed. I’m sure there are Nazis lurking somewhere on Patreon. I’m hopeful this company is going to do a better job of responding to that situation than Substack did. But I have worked for media corporations my entire career. There are Nazis at all of them. That's just the disgusting reality of making media. It is what it is. 

But I am hopeful. I think Patreon really understands that that has been a huge frustration of a lot of us on Substack, and I’m hopeful that it’s going to be better here. 

And not to totally pivot from Nazis to technology, but—there are a lot of great features here at Patreon that we’re really excited about! One of the biggest ones for me is that you can now pay monthly for an Extra Butter subscription after Substack only ever letting me price it annually. That might be very inside baseball to a lot of you, but so many people have emailed and been like, "I would love to do Extra Butter. Can I pay monthly instead of annually?" And I always had to say no, and now I can say yes!

Corinne

I think the Patreon tier system is very appealing. And I also think there is a nice community element to Patreon that did exist on Substack as well, but I think also it was kind of like a wider Substack community, and on Patreon, it feels a little more unique.

Virginia

This is our community. We are our own ecosystem, which is pretty cool. 

And I also just want to briefly say on the tiered thing: One piece of feedback that came up a few times in the reader survey–it was not the main throughline, but more than a few people said it—was "we don’t like tiered payment systems. It doesn’t feel egalitarian." What are your thoughts on that?

Because I’ll be honest, I hadn’t really thought about it, and then I was like, "Am I replicating a class structure?" I see that critique. People wanted one price for all of the content. 

And I also think my response is, if I’m going to do one price for all of the content, then that one price can’t be as accessible as I want it to be.

Corinne

We do rely on listener support to do this work. I also think sometimes there are people who want one email a week, but not two. 

Virginia

SO it’s nice to offer different options. On the pricing thing, we had raised the price of Burnt Toast over on Substack up to $7 a month or $70 for a year of the basic subscription. And that was in part because we couldn’t really do as much with Extra Butter as we wanted with their technology limitations. 

Now that we’re over on Patreon, a regular paid subscription is only going to be $5 a month, and Extra Butter is $10 a month. So I like that now we have a much more accessible tier, and then there’s the higher tier for folks who do want to support more or want to get more content. I hope it doesn’t feel so much like a class system and more like I’m trying to give you options. That’s really how I’m thinking of it. 

Corinne

Yeah, that makes sense. 

Virginia

And of course, I’m always going to offer comp subscriptions, no questions asked. If someone just drops me an email and says they need it, I’m always happy to do that. Not as many people take me up on it as you would think. Nobody’s taking advantage of it. People always still feel like they need to explain. You don’t need to explain. I trust that you would support the work if you could. You don’t need to let me know about your student loans or your husband losing his job or whatever. I’m happy to give the comp.

So that option still exists as well, and there will still be a lot for the free list too, but not these Extra Butter episodes. These are just for the Extra Butter folks!

Corinne

This is where the real juice is.

Virginia

And now we made it a class system. 

Corinne

Oh, sorry. The class system is juiciest, juicy, and no juice. Dry toast.

Virginia

Oh, man, thinking of the names has been the hardest thing as of this recording. I’m pretty sure the regular tier is now called Just Toast. I think that’s where we’ve landed. It’s Just Toast and Extra Butter. Y’all did make some great suggestions. There was a vocal minority support for Salty Butter. Mostly me, I was outvoted. 

Some people wanted dry toast, butter, extra butter. And I was like, "I think now we’re too in the weeds of ordering toast?" So, yes, Just Toast and Extra Butter is what we’re doing. 

Corinne

I love that. 

Virginia

Anything else we should talk about with Patreon that people are likely to be struggling with in this first week? I do realize it’s annoying that if you’re not already a Patreon user, you’re going to have to come over from Subtack. You’re going to have to click the link in your email, come over, re-enter your credit card. We are making sure if you had an annual subscription on Substack, you get credit for all of the months you already paid for. But I’m sure there’s going to be some confusion about that. Bu remember: If you were paying $7 a month on Substack, you will now be paying $5 a month when you rejoin on Patreon. So good news there!

Corinne

All right, let me read the first question. 

I would love your thoughts on building a new wardrobe after a significant size change. Not just seasonal flux situation, but the kind of change where literally none of your clothes fit anymore. Yes, there’s the shopping part, but I’m more interested in your perspective on the mental components in terms of both body change and style change, because what even is your style if you can’t shop at a lot of the same stores or sections of the store? How do you do this in an anti-diet way that doesn’t suck you into the restrictive world of flattering capsule wardrobes, especially when all the pants are bad, and going out tops, which may be long and flowy, are back.

Virginia

Going out tops are back?! I have not been leaving the house. That is not news I have heard. It doesn’t have to be back for you, is what I’ll say. What are your first thoughts on this question?

Corinne

Well, I have a lot of compassion. I feel like it sucks. It sucks! I do think it’s a mental hurdle to not only be dealing with changes in your own body, but also your accessibility to clothes.

Virginia

It is very jarring. And I hear what this person is saying about, how do I even know what my style is anymore? How do I have style now that I can’t shop in the same stores? I think that’s a real process that people go through, where you just suddenly feel like, "I don’t know what I like because what I used to like isn’t available anymore." So why would you know? It’s like when you go to a new country and eat a cuisine you’re not familiar with. You don’t know what you like because you didn’t grow up eating that food. And then you might discover you love lots of things. But you’re not like, oh, I have a go to menu order here. You’re learning it all. 

It’s not always as joyful as that. It’s okay to just be angry that that’s the reality. The industry should be better, and you should be able to still wear the same kinds of things you love, like just in your new size, and it shouldn’t be such a mind fuck.

Corinne

One hundred percent.

Virginia

That said, I think there can be opportunities to reframe a little bit, where you can start to find something about your new shape that you appreciate and enjoy dressing that you didn’t highlight in your previous shape. Does that make sense? 

Corinne

Yes.

Virginia

Like just to be extremely heteronormative and reductive about it: I have bigger boobs as a fat person than I did as a thin person, and I like dressing for my boobs more. That’s not going to be everybody’s experience. But I think I often look better in things than I did when I was a B cup? No offense, B cups. But I look cuter in some stuff now that I have boobs.

Corinne

That’s awesome, I love that for you.

Virginia

I understand that’s not a universal experience. A lot of people have really complicated feelings about having big boobs.

Corinne

I think another thing you could lean into is how stuff feels. If you’re trying on clothes or whatever, like, maybe do it without a mirror and be like, is this comfortable? Do I Like this color?

Virginia

I think trying things on first without a mirror is always such a good way to try on clothes. because if it is not physically comfortable, it doesn’t matter how cute you look in it. So starting with that first and centering your experience of the clothes, not some external gaze’s experience of you in the clothes.

Corinne

I also feel like when you’re going through something like this, it can be a good time to experiment. I know that’s not always the most fun thing, but I was thinking about Nuuly or like, do you have a friend who’s a similar size who you could try on some of their clothes? Or maybe they’re getting rid of stuff and would give you stuff.

Virginia

This was kind of where I was going with "is there an aspect of your new shape that you enjoy." There can be styles that you wouldn’t have considered before that really do work on the body you have now. It’s fun to experiment and figure out what those are. And it might mean wearing stuff that you feel like, oh no, I never would have liked that. Or that’s not me at all. And a lot of it, you’ll still be like, that’s not me. I don’t like that. But you’ll find one or two things that really do work. Switching over into plus sizes, I started to play with proportions really differently in clothes.

Corinne

That’s cool. 

Virginia

And I think one aspect of that was  getting more comfortable with the fact that I was plus size and that I was going to look bigger no matter what I did. I had to make peace with the fact that I can no longer trick people into viewing my body as thin, which I think if you’re midsize or upper straight sizes, is a whole Jedi mind trick we teach ourselves to do. You’re like, "I’m a 12, but I can pass for an eight." Or whatever.

When I wore clothes as a straight size person, I was always looking for the slim cut, the skinny, to minimize, because I was trying so hard to stay in that box. And once that box is no longer available, it’s actually kind of liberating, because you’re like, "That’s just not even what we’re trying to do anymore." So I can now love wearing a wide-legged pant. Of course, we’ve talked on the podcast. This is not an instant thing. This is years of working at this. And those internalized things still come up. But it’s kind of freeing to think "If looking skinny is not the goal anymore, that goal is off the table, then what do I want to look like and what’s fun to explore?"

Corinne

Yeah, I think that’s really good advice. Think about how you want to feel in your clothes, versus how you can look smaller.

Virginia

And don’t you feel like for you–well, I don’t, I don’t know your timeline on this, so if I’m getting this wrong, just tell me. But I feel like your interest in exploring gender fluidity and stuff with fashion has come along with size changes?

Corinne

Hmm, yeah, that’s a interesting thought. Sometimes I also relate it to getting older. I haven’t fully fleshed that out. But I think something about getting older also made me feel like, oh, I don’t need to be feminine to be hot or whatever.

Virginia

Yeah, definitely not. It’s another way it can open things up. Like, do you want to explore different gender expressions? Being older, you get to give fewer fucks, because no one’s going to confuse you for at 25 year olds. It’s, in some ways, such a relief not, it is not to try to be a hot 25 year old anymore.

Corinne

What we’re saying is let yourself feel whatever you’re feeling. It’s okay to be sad and angry. Let yourself feel free.

Virginia

And if it’s caftan season or big pants season or whatever it is, you don’t need to wear a going out top. We’re not trying to be a hot 25 year old. That girl has has her whole life ahead of her, and she’s on a different journey.

All right. I’ll read the next one. 

I just left my job to go to grad school full time, and I’m looking for ideas for making sitting at my desk in my home office for many hours a day, more appealing. What do the two of you consider essential for a work from home setup, from technology to lighting to snacks? 

I love this question.

Corinne

This is such a good question. And I feel like this is something I am still very much working on.

Virginia

Well, especially right now, because you’re not in your home office setup.

Corinne

But even in my home home office! I feel like a comfortable chair is essential.

Virginia

I’m about to break up with my chair. I’ve added things to it, like my physical therapist recommended a certain kind of cushion, and I’m just like, I think I’m trying to make a West Elm chair that’s never going to be the right chair for me work. It just sucks that the comfortable chairs are all real ugly.

Corinne

Yes, and they’re like, $1,000.

Virginia

They’re $1,000 of ugliness. It’s not great. So that’s one.

Since I don't have a comfortable chair, I would also say having reasons to get up every now and then is really helpful. I’m not of the school that sitting is killing us all. That’s not what I’m here to say. But if you have the ability, from your lower back’s perspective, getting up or just changing where you work throughout the day can be useful.

Corinne

I don’t even have a great setup for this at my house, but I feel like the ability to work one place and then move and work somewhere else can be really nice just for the brain. Sometimes you need a shift in perspective. 

I also think having a light for if you have to do Zoom or video calls can be helpful. 

Virginia

It’s so annoying, but true. Investing in good lighting. I’d love to know other recs that people have, if they have one they love. 

I have worked from home and had a home office set up since 2005. So that’s 20 years working from home. And I was just thinking about this, my first home office, which I set up in basically a fugue state because I’d been laid off from my magazine job at the age of 25 and was like, okay, I’m going to be a freelance writer now. And with my last tiny paycheck from that magazine job, I went to the West Elm store and bought a desk, and to sit on, I bought an ottoman. 

See previous question about we’re not trying to be a hot 25 year old anymore! I think my back is still screwed up from perching on this little ottoman to type. It was cute, and I liked how it fit into the desk. But, like, terrible idea. Just a terrible setup.

And then I did have some years where I worked on my couch, which I also do not advise. 

Corinne

Oh, I can’t do that. 

Virginia

I think that really gets uncomfortable. Also just brain-wise, it makes your work and your leisure time too mixed up. So I would say my number one thing is: To whatever extent you can do it in your house, whether it’s a guest room or a closet, whatever —have your workspace be somewhere other than where you sleep and eat and watch TV. This is really the most important thing to me. I need something I can shut a door on, so I know when I’m not working. 

But it has evolved over the years. I’ve had a lot of different setups, a lot of different things. I have a lot of home office privilege now, because we have this kind of bonus space that I was able to turn into my office, which is really nice and much bigger than I need it to be, but it’s great. Obviously, you don’t need that. But the comfortable chair, the lighting, all help.

 Snacks is a great question. I need a morning Diet Coke. I need lunch at 11:30 I’m not a wait all the way till noon. I’m not going to be a hero. I’m going to stop at 1130 for lunch most days. And then I need some chocolate in the afternoon.

Corinne

I’m not quite so scheduled with my snacks, but yeah, I need snacks.

Virginia

They’re important. So the thing you said about changing locations. I work in my home office until about 3:15 or 3:30 when my kids get home from school, and then I bring my laptop downstairs and we have a table where my younger kid sits to do their homework, and I do my work, side-by-side. That’s when I answer emails and stuff, usually. And it is nice to kind of switch gears and go downstairs.

Corinne

Where my desk is in my house is kind of dark and then sometimes, if it’s really nice out, I like to sit at like, my kitchen table where it’s much sunnier.

Virginia

Natural light is a nice feature in a home office. It’s not required, but it makes you feel less like you’re in a cave. Good luck! It’s fun to set it up. I also think, have some cuteness, like, have some plants, if you like plants, or fun art. Don’t buy a bad West Elm ottoman to sit on. But like, having it be a little aesthetic is nice.

All right, I’m going to read this next one, which is a doozy of a question from OG Burnt Toasty Amy H. Thank you, Amy, for submitting this. I don’t know what I’m going to be able to add!

Speaking of the horrifying state of the world, many more people are focusing on being prepared by creating bug out bags. These are bags of supplies you’d take if you had to leave your home the country where there was a major infrastructure failure, no water, heat, cooling, electricity, etc. They’re normally associated with preppers preparing for armed attack or civil war, but there are more mainstream accounts recommending this kind of preparation and weight loss as part of being able to get ready to handle martial law or other situations that might require such resources. I feel weird trying to tell people that weight loss probably won’t help and that their preparation focus. Being thin and nimble to avoid harm leaves out anyone with mobility disabilities, certain elderly folks, people in hospitals, etc. Any thoughts on how to be effective in this conversation about weight loss, not needing to be part of being prepared for distressing situations?

 I’m prepared for nothing. Corinne, do you have a bug-out bag?

Corinne

I don’t, but I this is something I’ve thought about. I mean, there are also places in the world where this is just part of being alive. Like if you live in a place where there are hurricanes or fires. So I think one thing is having stuff ready, but I think another thing that is nice to think about is how would you help your neighbors? Do you have people around you who are disabled?

I mean, I don’t know what to say about the weight loss thing. 

Virginia

It just feels like it’s going to show up fucking everywhere, is what I think. Like, really, really we’re preparing for the end of the world, and people are like, better lose weight for it!!!

Corinne

I mean, if you feel like you aren’t able to get out of your house by yourself, it’s good to have a plan. But I don’t think the plan needs to be a diet.

Virginia

Also how can you be sure of the timing? You don’t know how fast you’re going to lose that weight. Disaster could hit beforehand. You know, it could be, you could be in a plateau, like...

Corinne

And calories are really important for is your brain, which you might want to be using in a situation like this.

Virginia

The last thing we need is a hangry group of people trying to survive an apocalypse.

Corinne

There are two ways to approach these apocalyptic scenarios. One is: How can I protect myself at all costs? And the other one is: How can I work within a network of people who may have things to offer and may also need things from me? We can help each other. So I would encourage people to think about it that way, rather than, "What can I do to train my individual body to be ready?"

Virginia

God, that’s so wise. So I guess when you’re in conversation with people, if they mention losing weight, you could start to pivot it towards have you thought about how you’re going to help folks in your community? Or, I’ve been worrying about the old lady down the block, like, I wonder if we should talk to her about what she needs. Especially if you live in one of these places where evacuations happen for wildfires or hurricanes or whatever.

I mean, I’m just acknowledging I have a lot of East Coast privilege. Not that anywhere is safe, but I don’t live in a place where we are regularly facing this. I guess I just thought everyone I love is coming to my house? I have a lot of Cheez-Its in the basement! I’m pretty prepped on that front, so come on over. 

Corinne

I just also don’t think that being thin necessarily makes you better able to survive a disaster. 

Virginia

No. One of the prevailing theories about fatness is we’re the ones who survived the disasters. Like, how did we evolve to survive famines? Holding on to calories is something smart your body does to prevent against destruction.

Corinne

There’s that whole paradox where, as you age, it’s actually better to have higher body weight. 

Virginia

You need some reserves. Also for babies. If you have babies in the NICU dealing with health issues, weight is a big concern there because the more reserves they have, the more they can survive whatever they’re going through. 

So yeah. Really not a time to focus on thinness. Really a time to be glad if you’ve got some reserves. And think about how to help other people in your community. That seems super important.

Corinne

if you do want to exercise to have more mobility, or more ability to get around in an emergency scenario, that’s cool. You can focus on that without focusing on weight loss specifically. 

All right!

What is the fall equivalent of my summer uniform of gauze or linen pants plus a plain t-shirt?

Virginia

Oh, I love this question. I love this summer uniform. First of all, I kind of want to go redo summer and wear a gauze pants and a plain t-shirt. A+ uniform choice. I have been thinking about this a lot lately, because my summer uniform was those Big Bud Press tank tops and some drawstring linen shorts was kind of what I was living in. So, similar concept. And I had some pants, too...Okay, I guess I was doing linen pants and a plain tee. It's me. I wrote this question.

I don’t know what my full fall uniform will be. My hybrid summer/fall uniform until we’re fully into colder weather, is these ImBodhi jumpsuits that I have. I have a black one and I have a blue one, which I wear layered with either a cardigan or an open button down shirt over it. So it’s similar, because it’s like a flowy, wide leg pants with a tank top top, and then a lighter layer. And I’m kind of wondering if you could do the same thing of just adding a button down or a cardigan to your linen pants and plain t shirt? That will get you through the next couple of weeks before it’s we’re fully into fall.

Corinne

Is it not just jeans and a plain tee?

Virginia

But I feel like the linen pants feels a little more like polished maybe? Jeans might feel too casual? I would think you could go to jeans, but I am very interested in finding some comfortable non-jeans pants for fall. And I don’t know what they are yet. We talked about this last time. My quest continues.

Corinne

I like the idea of trousers, but I do think they’re hard to find.

Virginia

Yeah. I want some elastic waist trousers. 

Corinne

Okay, I feel like, Lucy and Yak has some stuff like that, where it’s like, elastic waist, but it’s tapered, and they have a lot of fun colors. I think their sizing can be hard to figure out. 

Virginia

I had a bad experience with one of their boilersuit type jumpsuits, where I was trapped. I really needed a bug out bag for that apocalyptic situation in my closet. Barely came out alive. Anyway. 

Do you hone in on a seasonal uniform? Because I really do do this.

Corinne

I mean, I feel like my uniform is always just...

Virginia

Jeans and a shirt?

Corinne

Or shorts and a shirt? But I do tend more towards a button-down. 

Virginia

You love a button-down. 

Corinne

I mean, I definitely will wear things over and over again, but I don’t quite think of it as a uniform.

Virginia

I love a uniform. I love reducing the decisions, especially during the week. I love having outfits that give me a zero body anxiety, because I found the thing. I guess, related to that first question, like, I found one formula that’s working for my body. Let me just replicate it. But every season, it’s like, oh, what will it be? So I don’t know, what with the colder weather coming, I haven’t cracked it yet this year. But we'll see.

Corinne

Okay, I’m going to read the next one. 

It seems like there are very few actively fat-positive bloggers these days. My question is, how does it feel to work with these bloggers, does it ever feel like tokenism? For example, Cup of Jo occasionally features a stylish fat person, but she posts far, far more outfits and people who can fit outfits and labels that are only straight sized. I’m often told at least Cup of Jo posts something for fat people, most bloggers don’t at all. It just feels so hurtful, like I wouldn’t create a blog post that promotes things that only a small percentage of the US population could wear. Eek, I don’t know if I’m being overly sensitive, so I’m curious how you handle it, or if you have a different perspective.

Virginia

Yeah, I think that’s pretty valid. I think it is very frustrating how much straight size bloggers and newsletter writers, especially in the fashion space, continue to forget that fat people exist and wear clothes. So I really hear this. Corinne, you’ve written about this on Big Undies several times like this. It is an ongoing problem.  

Corinne

Yeah, I actually was just posting about this,  I posted, "New rule! You’re not allowed to use the word everyone or universal or like mankind in your marketing or brand name, if you only make up to a size extra large." I just think it’s like so common to overlook that. 

And I will say, because this person says, "I wouldn’t create a blog post that promotes things that only a small percentage of people could wear." But I do think we all have blind spots. I think you may not know the people you’re leaving out. I’m sure there are people I leave out, you know? You know, even though I strive not to.

Virginia

Good point. How many blog posts contain adaptive clothing?

Corinne

Yeah, or very short inseams. Or people who are allergic to certain materials, there are just so many different ways people can be.

And, I have found some people are open to that feedback. And some people aren’t. I’ve had people who see my posts reach out to me then and be like, hey, I would like to include more options in this post I’m doing. How can I do that?

Virginia

On Cup of Jo specifically, I will say Joanna is someone who is very open to that feedback, and I’ve appreciated that about her. I mean, I am one of the stylish fat people she includes from time to time. And I would like her to include more! But recently, she featured a Swedish woman talking about her life, and she referenced Malia Mills swimsuits and said they come in so many sizes for all bodies. So I clicked through, and they go up to a size 16. And it’s not a large 16. And I posted a comment, "Hey, this is so great. It makes me want to move to Sweden. Also, this is not an inclusive brand." And immediately, Joanna was like, "Thank you so much. Yes, correct."

So I think it is about offering consistent feedback to these folks and making sure they know that we’re noticing. And that means also noticing when they do it right.

And I understand your point about tokenism, and I don’t know how we make progress past tokenism without like—she asks me to do something. I do it so that there’s a fat person on Cup of Jo. Do you know what I mean? And sometimes I don’t and I say "I’m busy. Try Corinne, try someone else." I do try to make sure they’re getting other people on their radar, because that’s part of my responsibility here, to share the platform.

But I think we have to keep showing up to those spaces, as readers and as people who might be featured there. And the more we show up and the more we participate, the better it gets. And of course, it’s annoying that this work has to be done. But I do remember being a straight, size person and just truly not understanding this reality.

Corinne

And that Swedish woman is like, oh, here’s a great inclusive brand. It goes up to 16. But I’m someone who, like, most of the time when people are talking about inclusive stuff, they’re talking about "up to 3x," and often the 3x doesn’t fit me. So you’re always leaving someone out.

Virginia

Even the most inclusive brands who do go up to a 3X or 4X are not including everybody. There’s no perfect way to do this. But there are better ways to do this. It’s better to include a brand that goes up to 3X than only goes up to 16, but it would be better still to include one that goes up to 5X or 6X.

I think Kim France also is getting this message, and she comes from longtime fashion magazine land where nobody was above a size 12—that was unfathomable. And she’s open to it. She’s trying to do better.

But there's also the reality that these are all bloggers who have financial relationships with certain brands. They’re sponsored by those brands, and those brands might not be the most size inclusive, and so they’re in a complicated situation. And that is why Burnt Toast relies on paid subscriptions, guys! That is why advertising-driven media is always going to be a little problematic. Because when you are a content creator who is reliant on brands for your income, not on your audience, you are going to do what those brands want. And that’s the problem with that whole system.

Corinne

Subscribe now!

Virginia

I didn’t mean to turn that into a pitch, but I do just think it’s worth noting that this is one business model/ Of you personally don’t like that business model, there are options. And, choose who you’re paying for subscriptions with. There are people trying not to do it that way, but in order to do that, we can’t rely on sponsors. So the subscription model is the alternative. 

All right. Last question is a fun one.

What is everyone doing for Halloween and Halloween costume ideas?

Corinne

We’re recording this in mid-September. I do not have any Halloween ideas or any Halloween plans. 

Virginia

Okay, well, you are a child-free person, because Halloween has been discussed around here since approximately July, I would say. 

I had one kiddo who she and her friends were going to go as the K-Pop Demon Hunters girl band, but they just switched it to being dragons. I’m not sure if it’s a specific dragon or just dragons, so I’m waiting to hear more about that. And then my younger kiddo is deciding between Elphaba, which I think is going to be the one of the most popular costumes this Halloween, or the Grim Reaper.

No matter what, I will be a witch, because I decided last year I have one costume for the rest of my life, and it is witch. So I will be a witch. That said, if she is Elphaba, I might also do the green face paint with her, and we could both be Elphaba. And I did float to Jack that he could be Glinda if he wanted, just to, like, round things out. He was like, I could be the lion. I was like, or better. And he was like, well, that would be better. So we’ll see. We’ll see if that happens. 

So that’s what we’ve got going on for Halloween. This is my theme of my episode. I’m like, have a uniform. Have a Halloween costume. Never have to make decisions.

Corinne

Do you guys just go to Spirit Halloween?

Virginia

Sometimes? Usually their dad actually is in charge of executing their costumes. 

Corinne

Oh, nice 

Virginia

That's a little mental load I’ve handed off over the years. So sometimes he builds elements. Like, last year, my older kid was Zyborg. So there were a lot of elements of that costume, and he helped her source them, and they made some. When they were younger, I would spend money on a decent Halloween costume because it would go into our dress up box. So we have some Halloween costumes that have been played with for years and that we’ve been able to hand down. Like, we have a good dragon costume that I think both of them wore as little kids, and a ladybug costume. 

Do you have any local Halloween parties you go to or anything? Or is every year just kind of like whatever?

Corinne

I think every year is kind of like whatever. There is a neighborhood near me that goes really all out and shuts down a bunch of streets. People go wild. And so I often will, like, walk over to that with friends and walk around. 

Virginia

I mean, we have discussed Halloween is a hard holiday for fat people, the costume inclusivity, talk about sizing nightmares. If you are also a little bit of a Halloween hater, you can come sit us.

Corinne

Yeah, I don’t love wearing costumes.

Virginia

No, it’s not my favorite, but I’m excited to see what Burnt Toasties dress up as. We’ll try to remember to do a thread. A chat in the chat room! Now that we’re on Patreon. Got to use the lingo! A chat room about Halloween costumes and see what people are dressing up as, because I do like seeing other people’s costumes. I just don’t want the added work myself.

Corinne

Totally.

Virginia

You go first, because I have to remember my Butter.

Corinne

Okay, well, I’m going with a really classic Butter. My butter is potato chips. Because I just ate some. I’m still in Maine, as discussed. And there’s this really good potato chip brand Fox Family potato chips. They come in like a silver bag. They’re so good. They’re like, they’re better than Cape Cod, in my opinion.

Virginia

That's a major gauntlet thrown with two New Englanders.

Corinne

I know. And they have a salt and pepper flavor that I am really into right now.

Virginia

That sounds absolutely delightful.

My Butter is a new end of garden season thing I’m doing, which is pressing flowers. Jack made me a flower press for my birthday back in April, and then I kind of forgot about it for a few months. And he was like, hey, we should use the flower press. And it was so fun! We picked some flowers, we put it in the press. We forgot about it for three weeks. We opened it up, and they were like... really flat. And I don’t know why that is exciting!

And we put them in chunky acrylic frames I have that magnet together, so they were kind of like a nice modern way of because I feel like flower press art. It can be a little twee. It’s always darling. But it’s not like super my aesthetic.

I’ve also heard people now suggesting mod podging them onto stuff, which I think could be fun to do with the kids. So we may, we might try some of that.

Corinne

That could be a good costume. Mod Podge them onto some shirts or something. 

Virginia

I thought you meant go as an actual flower press. I was like, what? I tried to be a garden one year. It didn’t go very well.. I’m going to stick with witch. But thank you.

Corinne

You could be a flower witch! 

Virginia

I could be a flower witch! That’s sort of my whole personality, right there. Flower witch.

I’m always in my feelings in October about the garden wrapping up, and it’s nice to, like, preserve a little bit of it. It’s like a real low lift, low stakes, low lift. So, yeah, flower press.

 Well, this was a great episode. We are over here on Patreo! And thank you guys for coming along and checking it out with us. It’s going to be even better than what it was, but also basically the same thing. So don’t feel super stressed about the change. 

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies!

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Farideh.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Emily Ladau, a disability rights activist, and author of Demystifying Disability.

Our conversation today is about the many intersections between anti-fatness and ableism. This is such an important conversation, even if you feel like you’re new to both of these worlds. We investigate who is considered a “worthy” disabled person or a Good Fatty — and how these stereotypes so often pit two marginalization experiences against each other.

Today’s episode is free but if you value this conversation, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you!

PS. You can take 10 percent off Demystifying Disability, or any book we talk about on the podcast, if you order it from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, along with a copy of Fat Talk! (This also applies if you’ve previously bought Fat Talk from them. Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)

Emily

I am a disability rights activist. I am a wheelchair user. I’m the author of a book called Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but all of that is really just to say that I am very passionate about educating people about the disability experience, and doing it through a lens that recognizes that we’re all at a different point on the journey of thinking about disability and talking about disability. I really want to welcome people into what I know can be a sometimes overwhelming and uncomfortable conversation.

Virginia

You have been a disability rights activist since you appeared on Sesame Street as a 10 year old. I saw the clip. It’s just adorable, little baby Emily. I mean, first tell us about that if you want! Or if you’re sick of talking about it, I get it. But I would also love to know: When did your disability rights work morph into fat liberation work? And how do you see these two spheres intersecting?

Emily

On the Sesame Street note, my family likes to joke that I am totally milking that, because it happened when I was 10. But that was the first moment that I really understood that disabled people do have a place in the media. Prior to that, I had not seen almost anyone who looked like me, with the exception of two books that I read over and over again. And one other little girl who was also on Sesame Street who used a wheelchair.

Virginia

Wow.

Emily

And I’m sure maybe somewhere else out there, there were other things. But I was an early 90s kid, and the media had just not caught up to showing me that I belonged. So having that experience is something that I really don’t take for granted.

I like to joke that in many ways, I am the “typical” disabled person. If you look up a stock photo of someone with a disability, it’s probably a white woman using a wheelchair. Oddly enough, she’s probably also on a beach, holding her arms out. You know?

Virginia

As soon as you said it, I have a visual. I’ve seen that picture. Obviously, she’s on a beach.

Emily

Yes, so I am sort of the cliche version. But at the same time, I’m not. Because there’s sort of an “acceptable” disabled person, and she is the thin, pretty, white woman who is sitting in a wheelchair. I meet, I suppose, some of those traits, but I am someone who, in later years so far, has come to identify as fat and no longer sees that as the derogatory term that it was always leveraged towards me as.

Any relationship that I have to fat liberation work has been sort of an evolutionary process for me. It’s newer to me. I didn’t understand when I was younger how that fit into disability rights work.

But I see now that we can’t have those conversations separately. First of all, every issue is a disability issue. So every issue impacts disabled people. And second of all, the disability community encompasses every identity, every body type, every experience. There are more than a billion disabled people around the world. So you absolutely have every single possible body type within the disability community. And if we are not talking about fat liberation, if we are not talking about LGBTQIA+ rights, if we are not talking about ensuring that our work is meaningfully intersectional, then it’s not actually disability rights work.

Virginia

But it is tricky to figure out how all those things intersect and fit together for sure.

Emily

I feel like I’m constantly playing a game of Tetris with that. And I don’t mean that to say, oh, woe is me. But more so, how do we get society to recognize how those pieces interlock with one another?

Virginia

Do you mind sharing a little bit about how anti-fatness shows up in your own experiences? Sometimes it’s helpful to name those moments, because some people listening might think, oh, I’ve had that too, and I didn’t know to name it as anti-fatness, or, oh, I’ve been on the wrong side of that. And it’s helpful to hear why that was not helpful.

Emily

There is no clear direction to take this answer, because it’s impacted me in two diametrically opposed ways.

The first is that I have been judged incredibly harshly as being lazy, as being unhealthy, as being someone who maybe doesn’t take care of myself in the way that I should. And the wheelchair is seen as the cause of that.

On the flip side, I have also been treated as though disability is the only cause of anything going on in my body, and therefore I should be given a free pass if I am considered, as doctors would say, “overweight.”

Virginia

It’s like, Oh, it’s okay. You’re in a wheelchair. What can we do? We can’t expect you to go for a run.

Emily

Exactly. So you see what I mean. It’s either one or the other. I’m either bad and lazy or it’s like, oh, poor you. You can’t get up and exercise.

Virginia

Both of those are such judgmental, patronizing ways to talk about you and your body.

Emily

They’re super frustrating. I think that both of those are anti-fatness in their own right. But for me, it sends conflicting messages, because I’m trying to seek medical support for certain issues. And some doctors are like, “Lose weight!” And other doctors are like, “Well, we can’t do anything because you’re in a wheelchair.” And so both of those are very unhelpful responses.

Virginia

Oh man, it really speaks to the lack of intersectional care in medicine, that people don’t know how to hold these two facts together and also give you comprehensive medical care at the same time.

Emily

I wish that we could just have disabled people speaking with medical students as a requirement in every single medical school program. But instead, I feel like we’re either completely relegated to the sidelines of conversations in medical school, or maybe we’re brought up in very clinical and dehumanizing ways, and we don’t stop to think holistically about a person.

It’s interesting, because my mom has often said—and I should note, she has the same disability that I do. So she’s a wheelchair user as well. But she feels very strongly that a lot of other medical issues that I am dealing with now were overlooked when I was younger, because everybody was so hung up on my disability that nobody was offering me the support that I needed for other things that could have, in turn, prevented some of what I’m now navigating.

So it seems like healthcare can’t hold multiple truths at once.

They can’t think about your body and think about everything going on. It’s either you’re fat or you’re disabled.

Virginia

God forbid you have a health condition that is not weight linked and not linked to your disability. That’s going to throw them completely for a loop.

Emily

Yeah, it’s very much a binary. I think that it’s led to a lot of confusion among healthcare providers. Certainly, I know there have been delayed diagnoses on many, many things. I’ve also had it leveraged against me in terms of what I would consider chronic illness, because I would get sick pretty regularly when I was a child, and every time I would throw up, it would be thrown in my face: “Well you’re eating poorly. You’re not taking care of yourself.” And nobody thought to do anything to check what was actually going on. They just thought that I was not taking care of myself. Turns out I had gallstones and needed my gallbladder removed. But when people see the wheelchair, they don’t take me seriously.

Virginia

No, and let’s be clear: Gallstones is not a condition you can treat by eating salad. Like, that’s not something you can nutrition your way out of.

Emily

I could not lettuce my way out of that one.

Virginia

Are there any strategies you’ve figured out that helps you get a doctor to cut through some of those biases, or cut through some of that noise and actually focus on what you need them to focus on?

Emily

I have to rehearse what I want to say in a doctor’s appointment. And I don’t think I’m unique in that. I’m sure that there are plenty of people who put together their notes and think through very carefully what they want to say before they go. As much as doctors tend to be frustrated when the patient comes in and it’s clear that they were reading WebMD, I’ve found I need to point them in the right direction, because at least it gets them started down the path that I’m hoping to explore.

And I’m not saying that I think that I have years of medical school worth of expertise, but when I was little, I used to always complain to my parents, “You’re not in my body. You don’t know how I’m feeling.”

Virginia

So wise.

Emily

And I think that that remains relevant. I’m not trying to be a difficult patient. But I have very strong awareness of what is happening internally and externally. And so if I come in and I seem like I have it together and I’m prepared, I feel like doctors take me more seriously. And I have a lot of privilege here, because I am a white woman. I communicate verbally. English is my first language. So in a lot of ways, I can prepare in this way. But I don’t think I should have to, to get the medical care that I need.

Virginia

Doctors should be meeting us where we are. We shouldn’t be expected to do hours of homework in preparation in order to be treated with basic respect and dignity. And yet, it is helpful, I think, to hear okay, this labor can be beneficial, But it’s a lot of extra labor, for sure.

Emily

It is, and I’ve broken up with doctors over it. And I’ve also had doctors who I think have broken up with me, for lack of a better way to put it.

I have had multiple doctors who have just kind of said, “We don’t know how to deal with you, therefore we are not going to deal with you.” And in seeking the care that I need, I have run into walls because of it, whether it’s a literal, physical wall in the sense that I tried to seek care, because I was having GI distress. I tried to go see the doctor, and the doctor’s office was not wheelchair accessible, and they told me it was my fault for not asking beforehand.

Virginia

I’m sorry, what? They’re a doctor’s office.

Emily

The one place I actually thought I would be fine and not have to double check beforehand. So that’s sort of the physical discrimination.

And then getting into the office, I’ve had doctors who have said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to help you.” Go see this specialist. I’m sorry, I don’t know what I can do for you, and then not return my calls.

Virginia

Oh, I knew this conversation was going to make me mad, but it’s really making me mad.

Emily

And I say all of this is somebody, again, who has health insurance and access to transportation to get to and from doctors, and a general working knowledge of my own body and the healthcare system. But I mean, if it’s this much of a nightmare for me, multiply that by other marginalized identities, and it’s just absurd.

Virginia

It really is. You’ve kind of led us there already just in talking about these experiences, but I think there’s also so much ableism embedded in how we talk about weight and health. And I thought we could unpack some of that a little bit. One that you put on my radar is all this fearmongering about how we all sit down too much, and sitting is killing us. And if you have a job that requires you to sit all day, it’s taking years off your life.

And yet, of course, people who use wheelchairs are sitting down.

Emily

I think about this a lot, because I would say at least a few times a year some major publication releases an article that basically says we are sitting ourselves to death. And I saw one I know at least last year in the New York Times, if not this year,

Virginia

New York Times really loves this topic. They’re just all over there with their standing desks, on little treadmills all day long.

Emily

I actually decided to Google it before we chatted. I typed in, “New York Times, sitting is bad for you.” And just found rows of articles.

Emily

The first time that this ever really came up for me was all the way back in 2014, and I was kind of just starting out in the world of writing and putting myself out there in that way as an activist. And I came across an article that said that the more I sit, the closer I am to death, basically.

It’s really tough for me, because I’m sure there’s a kernel of truth in the sense that if you are not moving your body, you are not taking care of your body in a way that works for you. But the idea that sitting is the devil is deeply ableist, because I need to sit. That does not mean that I cannot move around in my own way, and that does not mean that I cannot function in my own way, but it’s just this idea that sitting is bad and sitting is wrong and sitting is lazy. Sitting is necessary.

Virginia

Sitting is just how a lot of us get things done every day, all day long.

Emily

Right, exactly.

Virginia

Sure, there were benefits to lifestyles that involved people doing manual labor all day long and being more active. Also people died in terrible farming accidents. It’s all part of that romanticization of previous generations as somehow healthier—which was objectively not true.

Emily

You make such a good point from a historical perspective. There’s this idea that it’s only if we’re up and moving and training for a 5k that we’re really being productive and giving ourselves over to the capitalist machine, but at the same time, doing that causes disability in its own way.

Virginia

Sure does. Sure does. I know at least two skinny runners in my local social circle dealing with the Achilles tendons ruptures. It takes a toll on your body.

Emily

Or doing farm labor, as you were talking about. I mean, an agrarian society is great until you throw your back out. Then what happens?

Virginia

There are a lot of disabled folks living with the consequences of that labor.

Emily

And I’ve internalized this messaging. I am not at all above any of this. I mean, I’m so in the thick of it, all the time, no matter how much work I read by fat liberation activists, no matter how much I try to ground myself in understanding that fatness does not equal badness and that sitting does not equal laziness, I am so trapped in the cycle of “I ate something that was highly caloric, and now I better do a seated chair workout video for my arm cycle.” And I say this because I’m not ashamed to admit it. I want people to understand that disabled people are like all other people. We have the same thoughts, the same feelings. We are impacted by diet culture.

Virginia

Getting all the same messaging.

Emily

We are impacted by fat shaming. And I know that no matter what I would tell another person, I’m still working on it for myself.

Virginia

Well, I always say: The great thing about fat liberation is you don’t need to be done doing the work to show up here. We are all in a messy space with it, because it’s it’s hard to live in this world, in a body, period, And you have this added layer of dealing with the ableism that comes up. I mean, even in fat liberation spaces, which should be very body safe, we see ableism showing up a lot. And I’d love you to talk a little bit about how you see that manifesting.

Emily

I think that this is a problem across pretty much every social justice movement. I just do Control F or Command F and type in the word “disability” on a website and see if it comes up in the mission statement, the vision, the values, what we care about, our issues. And so often it’s not there and you have to go digging.

And I don’t say this to say that I think disability should be hierarchically more important than any other form of marginalization. I’m saying disability should be included among the list of marginalizations that we are focusing on, because it coexists with all other identities. And yet in a lot of fat liberation spaces, I still feel like I am not represented. I don’t see myself. It’s still a certain type of body, and that body is usually non-disabled or not disclosing that they have a non-apparent disability.

I have a few people that I come across who I would say are in the fat liberation, fat activism spaces where they are also apparently disabled, and they are loud and they are proud about that. But for the most part, I still don’t see myself. And I think that’s where the ableism comes up, is that we are still celebrating only certain types of bodies. It’s very interesting when you’re in a space where the point is to celebrate all bodies, and yet all bodies are still not celebrated.

Virginia

Well, and I want to dig into why that is, because I think it’s something really problematic in how fat politics have developed in the last 10-20, years, As the Health at Every Size movement gathered steam and gathered a following, the message that was marketable, that was easy to center and get people interested and excited about, was you can be healthy at every size. And because we have such an ableist definition of what health is, that meant, let’s show a fat person running. Let’s show a fat person rock climbing. Let’s show a fat ballerina. Let’s show a fat weight lifter, and then you’re automatically going to exclude so many people. So, so many people of other abilities.

We had the folks from ASDAH on, who are the keepers of the Health at Every Size principles, and they’ve done a lot of work in recent years to start to shift this. They recognize that there was a real lack of centering disability, and I am really impressed with that. But in terms of the way the mainstream media talks about these concepts, certainly the way I talked about them in my own work for years, that mainstreaming of Health at Every Size was embedded with a lot of ableism.

Emily

And I came to Health at Every Size pretty early on in my quest to lean into fatness and stop with the internalized body shame. But instead, I think it led to internalized ableism, because I then thought, well, if I’m not going to go climb Mount Everest, am I really living up to the principles of Health at Every Size?

Virginia

There was an expectation that we all had to be exceptional fat people. And that you had to be a mythbuster. And the reality is that fat people, just like any people, are not a monolith, and we don’t all want to rock climb, and we can’t all rock climb, and fatness can coexist with disability. It didn’t make space for that.

Emily

We say the same thing about the disability community, And in the same way that there is the “good fat person,” there is the “good disabled person.” There’s the disabled person who is seen as inspirational for overcoming hardship and overcoming obstacles. And I can’t tell you how many times I have been patronized and infantilized and treated as though it’s a miracle that I got out of bed in the morning. And I like to say to people, it’s not inspiring that I got out of bed in the morning, unless you happen to know me well and know that I’m not a morning person, in which case, yes, it is very inspiring.

Virginia

I am a hero today. Thank you for noticing.

Emily

I mean, I say that as a joke, but it’s true. There’s nothing inspiring about the fact that I got out of bed in the morning, but in order to be performing at all times as the good disabled person, you have to show up in a certain way in the world. And I feel like that pressure is on me doubly, as a disabled fat person.

Because not only do I have to be the good disabled person who is doing my own grocery shopping, but I need to be mindful about what it is that I’m grocery shopping for.

I need to be eating the salad in front of people instead of something with a lot of cheese on it, right? So I feel like, no matter what I do when I’m in public, I’m putting on a performance, or at least I’m expected to. I’ve started to be able to work through that. Years of therapy and a healthy relationship. But for a very long time, if I wasn’t the ideal disabled person and the ideal fat person in every way, then I was doing something wrong, rather than that society was wrong for putting that on me.

Virginia

And it just feels like that’s so much bound up in capitalism, in the way we equate someone’s value with their productivity, with their ability to earn and produce and achieve. I haven’t lived as a disabled person, but I have a kid with a disability, and in the years when we were navigating much more intensely her medical condition, I definitely felt the pressure to be the A+ medical mom, the mom of the disabled kid. There are a lot of expectations on that, too. I had to know the research better than any doctor in the room. I had to have all these strategies for her social emotional health. And I had to, of course, be managing the nutrition.

And I can remember feeling like, when do I get to just exist? Like, when do we get to just exist as mother and daughter? When do I get to just be a person? Because there was so much piled on there. So I can only imagine lit being your whole life is another level.

Emily

I feel like I’m always putting on a show for people. I always need to do my homework. I always need to be informed. And this manifested at such an early age because I internalized this idea that, yes, I’m physically disabled. I can’t play sports. So I need to make academics into my sports, and I need to do everything I can to make sure I’m getting As and hundreds on every test. And that was my way of proving my worth.

And then, well, I can’t be a ballerina, but I can still participate in adaptive dance classes. And I try to get as close as I can to being the quote, unquote, normal kid. And let me say there’s, there’s nothing wrong with adaptive programs. There’s nothing wrong with all of those opportunities. But I think that they’re all rooted somewhat in this idea that all disabled children should be as close to normalcy as possible. Some arbitrary definition of it.

Virginia

Yes, and the definition of normal is again, so filtered through capitalism, productivity, achievement. We need different definitions. We need diversity. We need other ways of being and modeling.

Emily

Absolutely. And what it comes down to is your life is no less worth living because you’re sitting down.

Virginia

Amazing that you have to say that out loud, but thank you for saying it.

Emily

I really wish somebody had said it to me. There’s so much pressure on us at all times to be better, to be thinner, to make our bodies as acceptable as possible, in spite of our disabilities, if that makes sense.

There are thin and beautiful and blonde, blue-eyed, gorgeous women with disabilities. And I’m not saying that that’s my ideal. I’m just saying that’s mainstream society’s ideal. And that’s the disabled woman who will get the role when the media is trying to be inclusive, who will land the cover of the magazine when a company is trying to be inclusive. But I don’t feel like I’m part of that equation.

And I’m not saying this to insult anybody’s body, because everybody’s body is valid the way that it is. But what I am saying is that I still don’t feel like there’s a place for me, no matter how much we talk about disability rights and justice, no matter how much we talk about fat liberation, no matter how much privilege I hold, I still feel like I am somehow wrong.

Virginia

It’s so frustrating. And I’m sorry that that that has to be your experience, that that’s what you’re up against. It sucks.

Emily

Do you ever feel like these are just therapy sessions instead of podcasts?

Virginia

I mean. It’s often therapy for me. So yes.

Not to pivot to an even more uplifting topic, but I also wanted to talk about the MAHA of it all a little bit. Everything you’re saying has always been true, and this is a particularly scary and vulnerable time to be disabled.

We have a Secretary of Health who says something fatphobic and/or ableist every time he opens his mouth, we have vaccine access under siege. I could go on and on. By the time this episode airs, there will be 10 new things he’s done that are terrifying. It’s a lot right now. How are you doing with that?

Emily

It’s really overwhelming, and I know I’m not alone in feeling that. And I’ll say literally, two days ago, I went and got my covid booster and my flu vaccine, and I was so happy to get those shots in my arm. I am a big believer in vaccination. And I’m not trying to drum up all the controversy here,

Virginia

This is a pro-vaccine podcast, if anyone listening does not feel that way, I’m sorry, there are other places you can work that out. I want everyone to get their covid and flu shots.

Emily

I give that caveat because in the disability community, there’s this weird cross section of people who are anti-vaccine and think that it’s a disability rights issue that they are anti-vaccine. So it’s just a very messy, complicated space to be in. But I make no bones about the fact that I am very, very pro-vaccine.

More broadly, it’s a really interesting time to be disabled and to be a fat disabled person, because on the one hand, technically, if you’re immunocompromised or more vulnerable, you probably have better vaccine access right now.

Virginia

Because you’re still in the ever-narrowing category of people who are eligible.

Emily

So somehow being disabled is working out in my favor a little bit at the moment, but at the same time, as I say that, RFK is also spreading immense amounts of incorrect information about disability, about fitness, about what bodies can and should be doing. And he’s so hung up on finding the causes and then curing autism.

Virginia

Nobody asked him to do that.

Emily

Yeah. Like, no one. Or, actually, the problem is a few people said that they wanted it because people are very loud. Also, I saw that he reintroduced the Presidential physical fitness test.

Virginia

Like I don’t have enough reasons to be mad at this man. I was just like, what are you doing, sir?

Emily

So on the one hand, he’s sort of inadvertently still protecting disabled people, if you want to call it that, by providing access to vaccines. But mostly he’s just making it a lot harder to survive as a disabled person.

I am genuinely fearful for what is going to happen the longer he is at the helm of things and continues to dismantle basic access to health care. Because more people are going to become disabled. And I’m not saying that being disabled is a bad thing, but I am saying, if something is completely preventable, what are you doing?

Virginia

Right? Right? Yes, if we lose herd immunity, we’re going to have more people getting the things we vaccinate against.

Emily

Many of the major players in the disability rights movement as it was budding in the 1960s and the 1970s were disabled because of polio. I am very glad that they existed. I am very, very glad that these people fought for our rights. I’m also very, very glad that there’s a polio vaccine.

Virginia

I guess this is a two part question. Number one, is there anything you want folks to be doing specifically in response to RFK? I mean, call your representatives. But if you have other ideas for advocacy, activism work you’d like to see people engaging in.

And two, I’m curious for folks who want to be good disability allies: What do you want us doing more of?

Emily

I am a big believer in focusing on things that feel attainable, and that doesn’t mean don’t call your reps, and that doesn’t mean don’t get out there and be loud. But sometimes starting where you are can make the most difference. And so if it feels really overwhelming and you’re not gonna get up tomorrow and go to Washington, DC and join a protest, that’s okay. If you don’t feel like you have the capacity to pick up the phone and call your representatives tomorrow, that’s okay, too.

But if you can impact the perspective of one person in your life, I genuinely believe that has a ripple effect, and I think that we underestimate the power of that. Throw one stone in the ocean. All of those ripples create the wave. And so if you have somebody in your life who is being ableist in some way, whether it is through anti-vax sentiment, whether it is through the language that they use, whether it is through the assumptions that they make about people with disabilities, try to take the time to educate that person.

You may not change the whole system. You may not even change that person’s mind. But at least give them an opening to have a conversation, offer them the tools and the resources point them in the right direction. And I know that that’s really hard and really exhausting, and that sometimes it feels like people are a lost cause, but I have been able to meet people where they are in that way. Where, if I show up with the research, if I show up with the resources, if I say I’m willing to meet you halfway here, I’m not demanding that you change all your views overnight, but will you at least give me a chance to have a conversation? That’s genuinely meaningful. So that’s my best advice. And I know that it’s not going to change everything, but I’m still a believer in the power of conversation.

Virginia

That’s really helpful, because I think we do avoid those conversations, but you’re right. If you go in with the mindset of, I don’t have to totally change this person on everything, but if I can move the needle just a little bit with them, that does something I think that feels a lot more doable and accessible.

Emily

And I think it also is about honoring your own capacity. If you are a person who is marginalized in multiple ways, and you are tired of having those conversations, it is okay to set that weight down and let somebody else have the conversations.

Virginia

That is a good use of the able-bodied allies in your life. Put us to work tell us to do the thing because it shouldn’t be on you all the time.

Emily

And I’m more than happy to have these conversations and more than happy to educate but it’s empowering when we can do it on our own terms, and we’re not often given that opportunity, because we have to be activists and advocates for ourselves at every turn. And so sometimes when somebody else picks up that load, that means a lot.

Emily

I thought about this a lot.

Virginia

Everybody does. It’s a high pressure question.

Emily

I am in the last stages of wedding planning. So my recommendation is more from a self care perspective. When you are in the throes of something incredibly chaotic, and when you are in the throes of navigating the entire world while also trying to plan something joyful—lean into that joy. My recommendation is to lean into your joy.

I know I could recommend like a food or a TV show or something, but I think it’s more about like, what is that thing that brings joy to you? I bought these adorable gluten-free pumpkin cookies that have little Jack O’Lantern faces on them. And I’m doing my re-watch of Gilmore Girls, which is a wildly problematic and fatphobic show, and ableist.

Virginia

It sure is. But it’s such a good comfort watch too.

Emily

It’s making me feel a little cozy right now. I think my recommendation is just lean into your joy. You don’t need to solve all the world’s problems. And I don’t say that without complete and total awareness of everything going on in the world. I’m not setting that aside. But I’m also saying that if we don’t take time to take off our activist hats and just be for a few moments, we will burn out and be much less useful to the movements that we’re trying to contribute to.

So I hope that is taken in the spirit with which it was given, which is not ignoring the world.

Virginia

It’s clear you’re not ignoring the world. But when you’re doing a big, stressful thing, finding the joy in it is so great.

Well, my Butter is a more specific, more tangible thing, but it’s very much related to that, which is my 12 year old and I are getting really into doing our nails. And my Butter is bad nail art because I’m terrible at it, but it’s giving me a lot of joy to, like, try to do little designs. I don’t know if you can see on camera.

Emily

I’ve been looking at your nails the whole time, and I love the color. It’s my favorite color, but can you describe what’s on it?

Virginia

So I’ve done like, little polka dots, like, so my thumb has all the polka dots in all different colors, and then every finger is like a different color of polka dots. I don’t feel like the colors are translating on screen.

Emily

And by the way, it’s a bright teal nail polish.

Virginia

It’s a minty green teal color. My 12 year old and I, we watch shows together in the evening after their younger sibling goes to bed. And we just like about once a week, she breaks out her Caboodle, which brings me great joy, as a former 80s and 90s girl, that has all her polishes in it, and we sit there and do our nails. And it’s very low stakes. I work from home, it doesn’t matter what my nails look like. Last night, I tried to do this thing where you put a star shaped sticker on, and then put the polish over it, and then peel off the sticker to have like a little star stencil. It was an utter fail, like I saw it on Instagram. It looked amazing. It looked like trash on my nails. But it’s like, so fun to try something crafty that you can just be bad at and have fun with.

Emily

Oh, I love that for you. I really miss the days where I would wear like, bright, glittery eyeshadow and stick-on earrings.

Virginia

It is totally bringing me back to my stick on earring years. And I have all these friends who get beautiful nails done, like gels, or they have elaborate home systems. And I’m just, like, showing up to things with, like, a weird cat I painted on my nail that’s like, half chipped off.

Emily

I think that’s the right vibe for the moment.

Virginia

It’s super fun and a good bonding activity with tweens who don’t always want to talk to their mom. So it’s nice when we get there.

Emily

You’re reminding me to go hug my mom.

Virginia

Please everyone, go hug your moms, especially if you were once 12 years old!

Emily, this was wonderful. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us. Tell folks where we can find you and how we can be supporting your work.

Emily

Yeah. So I would say the best place to find me is Substack. My Substack is called Words I Wheel By or you can find me on Instagram.

But most importantly, I just love connecting and being here to support people wherever they are on their journey. So I hope people will take me up on that.

Virginia

Thank you, and I always appreciate you in the Burnt Toast comments too. So thanks for being a part of the space with us.

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Farideh.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!

We are Corinne Fay and Virginia Sole-Smith.

These episodes are usually just for our Extra Butter membership tier — but today we’re releasing this one to the whole list. So enjoy! (And if you love it, go paid so you don’t miss the next one!)

Corinne

Today is a family meeting episode. We’re catching up on summer breaks, back to school, and a whole bunch of diet culture news stories that we’ve been wanting to discuss with you all.

Virginia

We’re also remembering how to make a podcast, because we haven’t recorded together in like six weeks. And it didn’t start off great. But I think we’re ready to go now.

Corinne

Someone definitely said, “What day is it?”

Virginia

It’s hard coming out of summer mode. I don’t know if you feel that because you don’t have kids, during back to school, but it is a culture shift.

Corinne

I don’t think I feel the back to school thing as much, but I’m still in Maine, and it’s actively fall. It’s actively getting cold, and I’m just like, what is happening? I feel this pressure to do something, but I’m not sure what? Hibernate?

Virginia

“Should I buy a notebook? Should I be wearing fleece? I could go either way.” I don’t know. It’s weird. It is the start of fall. So we are moving into fall mindset. But like, don’t rush me, you know? The dahlias bloom till first frost. That’s my summer.

Corinne

Summer is so brief.

Virginia

I’m having a lot of clothing feelings right now. I am not in a good place getting dressed, and it is for sure weather related, shoulder season-related. I’m in my annual conundrum of when do the Birkenstocks go away? When must our toes be covered for polite society? Am I showing arms? I just I don’t even know how to get dressed. I hate all my clothes. Everything’s terrible.

Corinne

I think this is part of what I’m feeling. I don’t have enough warm clothes and I also don’t want to buy another pair of sweatpants.

Virginia

And you’re traveling. So you’re like, “I have warm clothes at home.” Didn’t bring them because you didn’t understand, even though you grew up in Maine and should remember that fall starts quite early there.

Corinne

I need to get it tattooed on my body. Bring a sweater, bring sweatpants.

Virginia

Well, to be fair for this Maine trip, you were really focused on your sister’s wedding. You had your nephew. You’ve had a lot going on.

Corinne

I was very focused on August, and really not thinking about September.

Virginia

Will we even exist after? I mean, that’s how it always is when you’re gearing up for a big event, the post-event doesn’t exist.

And I don’t know if you do the thing where you’re like, well, I can deal with that after the big event. And then suddenly it’s after the big event. You’re like, well, now there’s 47 things I need to deal with.

Corinne

I absolutely do that. Now I’m like, wait. How and when do I get back to New Mexico? Am I going back to New Mexico ever? In which case maybe I do need to buy sweatpants?

Virginia

It’s so hard. Even without a wedding —I feel like all summer, because I have pretty skeleton childcare and I’m wanting to take time off, and it’s a privilege that our job allows some flexibility like that, so when I get requests to, like, do a podcast, do a special thing. I’m like, “Talk to me in September. I can’t do it this summer. Summer mode Virginia can’t do anything extra!”

And now I’ve just spent the week saying no to lots of things, because September me can’t do it either. That was folly. I should have just said no the first time!

That’s one of those life lessons I’m always relearning that’s really funny. If it’s not an instant yes, it’s a no. And I so often fall into the trap of it’s not an instant yes, so let me kick that can down the curb a little bit, and then then I feel ruder because they come back and I’m like, no, I’m sorry. Actually, we were never going to do that.

Corinne

As someone who’s been on the other side of that where, like, I’ll reach out to someone for the Style Questionnaire, and they’ll be like, “Oh, can you ask me in two months?” And then when I reach out in two months, and they’re like, “No.”

Virginia

Totally. I’m on the other side of it all the time when we’re booking podcast guests. So I’m completely aware of how shitty it feels. So I have a resolution. Summer Virginia just has to say no to things and not push it to Fall Virginia. Everyone hold me accountable next summer, because I’m so sorry to everybody I’ve said no to this week, but September is a real intense parenting month. There are just a lot of moving parts.I get 62 emails a day from the school. The middle school just announced back to school night will be tomorrow. They told us yesterday!

One cool thing is, my older kid is in seventh grade now, so I no longer have to scramble for babysitters, which is a real achievement unlocked. Although she’s going to realize at some point that she should increase her rates with me.

Corinne

Oh, you pay her!

Virginia

For stuff where I’m going to be out of the house and need her to put her sister to bed. It’s one thing, if I’m like, “I’m going to the store, you guys don’t want to come.” Fine. You can doodle around at home. And it’s not even really babysitting. She’s going to ignore her the whole time. But I’m going to be out from 6 to 8pm tomorrow night. I need her to actually make sure her younger sibling gets in pajamas and brushes teeth and, moves towards bed. I’m not expecting them to be in bed when I get home, but I would like them to not be nowhere close.

Corinne

That’s really sweet.

Virginia

Plus we have some big stuff in the works for both Burnt Toast and Big Undies, which we cannot discuss just yet. Yes, I am actively teasing it for you all.

Corinne

You’re going to bring that up now?! I feel like we should mention it at the end.

Virginia

I think we can mention it whenever we feel like? I think they’re probably like, “Why are they both doing reader surveys? What’s going on?” And we can’t say yet, but there’s something going on, and it’s also requiring a lot of our time and attention.

Corinne

We’re really busy. But I think it’s going to be really good, and everyone’s going to love it.

Virginia

In the meantime, though: What are we wearing? Real talk, what are we wearing to get through this weird it’s not summer, it’s not fall, it’s some hybrid state. Are you still wearing open toed shoes? Sandals?

Corinne

No, I’m not.

Virginia

Okay. Should I stop, too?

Corinne

I mean, I’m only not because I’m cold. It depends on if you’re cold. I also think now is kind of the perfect time for socks with sandals.

Virginia

Most of my sandals are something between my toes style.

Corinne

Oh, I was thinking, like, socks with Birkenstocks.

Virginia

Ah! I do have some of the two strap Birkenstocks, and I don’t tend to wear them a lot in summer. Maybe I should experiment!

Corinne

I feel like, when you wear socks with the two strap Birkenstocks, they become really cozy.

Virginia

I don’t wear them a lot in summer because I don’t have particularly wide feet, and they’re a little wide on me. But the sock would solve for that! And they would be cozy… all right, I’m going to experiment with this, as part of my shoulder season style.

Corinne

I’m still figuring out my fall must haves, which is one of my favorite topics. Although I will say I feel like this year I’ve seen a lot of people posting like, “I don’t want to hear about back to school, or I don’t want to hear about fall fashion.”

Virginia

I have terrible news for people about this podcast.

Corinne

I feel it’s very light hearted. It could be literally anything like, who cares? We are entering fall, so…

Virginia

Time is passing.

Corinne

I am getting cold. I do want to put on socks with my sandals and sweatshirts.

Virginia

Trigger warning for anyone who is not available for a fall fashion conversation.

Corinne

Maybe by the time this comes out, people will be ready.

I know this is like florals for spring, but I’m feeling for fall… brown pants.

Virginia

Wait, what? You’re blowing my mind? You’ve been feeling brown for a little while.

Corinne

Brown has been ramping up. I’m wearing brown pants right now.

Virginia

Is it one of your colors, as a true spring?

Corinne

Well, I do think there are definitely some camels. And I think brown is preferable to black. So I’m thinking brown pants instead of black pants.

Virginia

Oh, I don’t even know what I’m thinking about pants. I’m thinking frustration with pants. I have my one pair of jeans that I reliably wear. I think I need to order another pair in case they stop making them. I’m at a scarcity mindset point with those Gap jeans. I mean, they aren’t going to stop making them. They’ve had them for years, but I just feel like I need an insurance policy.

Corinne

Do you fit other Gap pants, or just the jeans?

Virginia

I only buy that one pair of jeans. I mean, I generally try not to shop at the Gap because they do not have a plus size section.

Corinne

But they do have some really cute stuff.

Virginia

It’s gross though! Make it bigger.

Corinne

If it fits you, maybe you should buy it.

Virginia

Corinne is like, “Or counterpoint, don’t take a stand.”

Corinne

I’m always sending links to my straight-size sister for stuff at the Gap that I think she should buy.

Virginia

They do have some really cute stuff, but it infuriates me that Old Navy can make plus sizes, and Gap cannot, and Banana Republic really cannot. It’s just like, hello, class system, capitalism. It’s so revolting.

Corinne

Oh, my God. Do you know what else I’m feeling outraged about? I went thrift shopping here a couple weeks ago, and I found some vintage Land’s End that was in sizes that they don’t make anymore.

Virginia

Wow, that’s rude.

Corinne

It was a 4X! So they used to be way more 26/28 or 28/30. So they also, at some point, kind of cut back.

Virginia

They do, at least legitimately have a section called plus size, though.

Corinne

They do, but it clearly used to be bigger.

Virginia

No, no, no. I’m not saying it’s great.

I am wearing my favorite joggers a lot, because I think I’m really resisting the shift back to hard pants.

Corinne

How do you feel about trousers, like a pleated trouser kind of pant?

Virginia

Is that comfortable for working from home? A pleated trouser?

Corinne

Well, I feel like they’re comfortable because they’re kind of baggy but narrower at the bottom, you know?

Virginia

I do love a tapered ankle.

I also unpaused my Nuuly. And I did get a blue corduroy pair of pants from them that it hasn’t been quite cold enough to wear because shoulder seasons. Corduroy, to me is like a real like we are fully in cold weather fabric. And when it’s 50 in the morning, but 75 by lunchtime, am I going to be hot in corduroys? I guess I should just start wearing them and see.

Corinne

Are they jeans style?

Virginia

They’re slightly cropped so that’s another reason to wear them now, while I can still have bare ankles. They’re slightly cropped and slightly flared, and they’re like a royal blue corduroy.

They’re Pilcro, which is an Anthropologie brand and I know we feel gross about Anthropologie. But when it comes to pants, I think Corinne is saying we can’t have moral stances because pants are so hard to find. Other things, yes.

Corinne

It’s just hard.

Virginia

I’m not excited about clothes right now. I want to feel more excited. Maybe I need to think about what my fall must haves are. Maybe I need to make a pin board or something.

Corinne

I think that’s a good idea. Is there anything you’re feeling excited about? I remember the last episode you were talking about those Imbodhi pants.

Virginia

Oh yeah. They’ve really become lounge around the house pants, and they’re great, but they’re very thin. Imbodhi feels like a brand you could not wear once it gets cold.

Although, the jumpsuit I have from them in periwinkle—which does feel like a very summery color to me—I also got black. And over the summer it felt a little too black jumpsuit. It felt like too formal or something. But I’ve been enjoying it as a transition piece. I am still wearing it with sandals. I think it would look cute with maybe my Veja sneakers, though, and then layering over my denim shirt from Universal Standard, like open over it.

I’m glad we’re talking about this, because that’s what I’m going to wear to back to school night tomorrow night, which is a high pressure dressing occasion.

Corinne

I can see that.

Virginia

You don’t want to look like you tried too hard, but you also don’t want to look like you came in pajamas. Lots of yoga moms, a lot of pressure. Okay, I’m going to wear that black jumpsuit. I’m glad we talked about that. That’s been a good transition piece.

Corinne

Yeah, okay, well, speaking of transitions, I want to ask you about something else. Are you familiar with the Bechdel Test?

Virginia

Yes.

Corinne

Don’t you think we should have a Bechdel test for anti-fatness? And/or diets? Like, does this piece of culture have a fat character who’s not the bad guy, or on a weight loss journey, or being bullied for their size?

[Post-recording note: Rebecca Bodenheimer reached out after this episode aired to let us know she wrote about this exact concept for the LA Times in 2020. Read her excellent piece here!]

Virginia

Oohhh… OK, so what would our terms be? They can’t be the fat villain.

Corinne

Well, I feel like there’s one list for anti fatness, and one would be a piece of culture or whatever that doesn’t discuss dieting or weight loss. And I don’t know if it should all be one under one Bechdel test umbrella, or if it should be two different tests.

Virginia

I feel like it’s related. Wait, I need to look up the actual Bechdel Test criteria.

Corinne

It’s like, does the movie have two female characters talking about something other than a man.

Virginia

The work must feature at least two women.

They must talk to each other.

And their conversation must be about something other than a man.

I was just watching Your Friends and Neighbors, that new John Hamm show about super rich people stealing from each other, and it’s very entertaining, but it fails the Bechdel test so dramatically. It’s got Amanda Peet in it! She’s so smart and funny, and all she does is talk about her ex husband and how much she loves him. And I’m just like, fail, fail, fail.

Anyway, okay, I love this idea.

Corinne

So it’s like, does it have a fat character?

Virginia

Wait, I think it should have more than one fat character.

Corinne

That bar is too high. I feel like we have to be able to name something that passes the test. And what are we calling the test? The Burnt Toast Test?

Virginia

We can workshop names in the comments.

Corinne

We need a famous fat person to name it after, maybe.

Virginia

Well, I guess Allison Bechdel named it after herself. So it could be the Fay test, because you did this. The Corinne Fay test.

Corinne

Oh, God.

So it has to have one fat character, they have to talk about something other than weight loss, and they can’t be the villain.

Virginia

I would like them not to be the sidekick, too. I think it’s a central fat character.

Corinne

Can we name anything that passes?

Virginia

Shrill by Lindy West. And Too Much. Well, Lena Dunham doesn’t totally pass the Bechdel Test, but she passes the fat test.

Corinne

See, it gets very complicated. This is intersectionality!

Virginia

We strive for an intersectional world where the shows pass all the tests. This is such an interesting topic. I love this.

Corinne

I was also thinking about it because on my drive out, I read two of these Vera Stanhope mysteries. Have you read any of these?

Virginia

I have not.

Corinne

The main detective woman is fat, and I feel like it’ mostly fine. Like, 90% of the time they’re just talking about her, she’s fat, and she’s sloppy. She’s a sloppy fat person. And then, like, occasionally, there’ll be like, a sentence or two where I’m like, Ooh, I didn’t like that.

Virginia

It’s so deflating when you have something that’s seeming good, and then it takes a turn on you real fast.

Corinne

So would that pass the the fat Bechdel Test? Or whatever? Probably would.

Virginia

Because it’s as good as we can get.

Corinne

She’s the main character and not talking about dieting, really.

Virginia

Yeah, wait, so where does it fall apart for you?

Corinne

I should have brought an example, but I feel like occasionally there will be narration about her, and it’s suddenly like, “her body was disgusting,” you know?

Virginia

Oh God! I was thinking she maybe lumbered, or she sat heavily, or something. And you’re like—

Corinne

Yes. She sat heavily, that kind of thing. And I’m like, okay, sure.

But occasionally there’s just a twinge where I’m like, oh, you do kind of hate fat people.

Virginia

I would then like that author to read Laura Lippman’s work. Because Laura Lippman—regular Burnt Toasty! Hi, Laura!—has been doing such good work as a thin author to really work on her fat representation. And I just read Murder Takes a Vacation, which is one of Laura’s most recent novels, and it’s such a good read. Her protagonist, Mrs. Blossom, I believe was previously a side character in other novels who now has her own book. And the way she writes about body stuff in there is like… Laura’s been doing the work. She’s been really doing the work. It for sure, passes the Fay Fat Test.

Corinne

That’s awesome.

Virginia

So everyone check that out. And I would like Ann Cleeves to be reading Laura Lippman.

Should we talk about airplanes? Are you in a safe space to talk about airplane feelings?

Corinne

Sure. Yes.

Virginia

Corinne was just quoted in The Washington Post, which is very exciting, alongside Tigress Osborne, friend of the show, Executive Director of NAAFA, about how Southwest Airlines is changing their passenger of size policy.

Do you want to brief us on what’s happening there?

Corinne

So Southwest has had a policy in which a “customer of size,” meaning a person who doesn’t fit between two plane arm rests, can book two seats and be refunded for the second seat. Or you could show up at the airport day of, and ask for two seats. And not have to pay up front and then be refunded.

And in the past couple of months, this policy has somehow gotten really wobbly. I’ve heard all these anecdotal stories about people showing up at the airport and having Southwest tell them, “You’re not going to be able to do this anymore.” Like, don’t expect to show up and be able to book a second seat. You need to do it in advance. Blah, blah, blah.

Now Southwest has come out and said they’re changing the policy. They’re also implementing assigned seating, which they didn’t used to have. So going forward, you are going to have to book two seats in advance, and you will only be refunded if there are empty seats on the plane. Which, when are there ever empty seats?

Virginia

There are never empty seats on the plane? Never happens.

I don’t understand, because you needed two seats before, you still need two seats. So why does it matter whether there’s an empty seat or not? My brain breaks trying to follow the logic.

Corinne

I think the logic says like they could have sold the second seat to someone else.

Virginia

But then they’re not selling seats that work for people who are paying money to be there. Like, they’re taking your money, but if you can’t fit on the plane, then they just took your money. It’s so shady,

Corinne

And people who don’t need a whole seat don’t pay less.

Virginia

Over the age of two, your children do not get discounts for the fact that, they are using a third of a seat. You pay the same price for a child.

Corinne

Yep. It’s really sad, and it’s making life harder and sadder for a lot of people.

Virginia

I’m curious if another airline will step up on this. I think NAAFA has been doing a good job of making noise about this. I think people are putting pressure on them. It will be interesting if someone else realizes this is like a marketing opportunity.

Corinne

I think, they absolutely will not.

Virginia

Well, I’m not naive enough to think someone would do it just because it’s the right thing to do. But I’m hoping maybe one of Southwest’s direct competitors would realize it’s an opportunity.

Corinne

But I think that Southwest previously was the that airline. I think they were using that to their advantage, and now I think they’ve just been like, “It’s not worth it.” I think Alaska has the same policy where you can book two seats, and then if there is an empty seat, they’ll refund it.

Virginia

Well that’s great because Alaska flies so many places, people need to go.

Corinne

Well, if you’re in the if you’re in the part of the country where I live, they do! But.

Virginia

Oh! That’s good to know.

Corinne

I think they’re more on a competition level with Southwest versus like United or something, right? I don’t think United or Delta even has a customer of size policy.

Virginia

They’ve never cared.

Corinne

There’s no way to even book a second ticket for yourself, even if you want to just straight up pay for it.

Virginia

It leaves you the option of figuring out if you can afford business class to have a bigger seat. And that makes flying so much more expensive.

Corinne

Right? And it’s also just like, does business class fit everyone? Probably not.

Virginia

Well, we’re mad about that, but I did, like seeing you in the Washington Post article saying smart things. So thank you. Thanks your advocacy.

Let’s see what else has been going on… The Guardian had this interesting piece, which I’m quoted in a little bit, by Andrea Javor. She’s articulating something I’ve seen a few people starting to talk about, which is the experience of being on Ozempic and not losing weight from it.

And I think this is an interesting kind of under the radar piece of the whole GLP1s discourse. Some folks are non-responders, whether because they stay on a lower dose by choice, and it improves their numbers, but they don’t really lose weight, or some folks just don’t really lose weight on it. Her piece really articulates her feelings of shame and failure that this thing that’s supposed to be a silver bullet didn’t work for her.

Corinne

When I started reading the piece, I was extremely confused, because the the author has diabetes, but type one diabetes, and these drugs don’t help with type one diabetes. She eventually goes on it, just for weight loss. So what it didn’t work for was weight loss, And I think it actually may have ended up helping with her, like A1C, and stuff.

I agree that it does a good job of looking at the feelings that come along with that. And I do think, this does happen, and it’s not being talked about as as much as it’s happening probably.

Virginia

It feels important to highlight it in this moment where we have Serena Williams talking, about her husband’s telehealth company and promoting her use of GLP1s. And we had a great chat on Substack chat about the whole Serena Williams of it all. So I won’t rehash that whole discourse here.

I also think that’s a conversation where I want to hear from Black women. Chrissy King wrote an incredible piece. I also really appreciated the conversation that Sam Sanders, Zach Stafford and Saeed Jones had on Vibe Check about it.

So, I don’t need to get into Serena’s personal choices. But it does mean, we have another huge, very admired celebrity pushing into the conversation again to say, “This is this magic trick. This is the thing I was always looking for. It finally worked for me” And we are all vulnerable to that messaging. So it’s important to read stories like this one and understand oh, it really doesn’t actually work for everybody. Setting aside whether we think people should be pursuing weight loss, this isn’t necessarily going to be guaranteed, amazing results.

Corinne

Another interesting article that I thought maybe would want to mention is the the one in The Cut about ARFID.

Virginia

This was a great cover story in New York Magazine. The headline is The Monster at the Dinner Table, and it’s basically just encapsulating that ARFID has really been on the rise in recent years, and I think a lot of that is just because now we know what it is and we can diagnose it.

But it did include a pretty interesting discussion of what causes kids to lose the instinct to eat, what things get in the way of it. Like, it can be trauma, it can be a feature of autism. It can be a choking experience, all sorts of different things.

Corinne

ARFID is one of those conditions that I feel like I barely knew about before TikTok, and then I’ve just seen so much stuff about it on Tiktok.

Virginia

It only became a diagnosis in 2013, so it’s very, very new. My kiddo would have been diagnosed with it, if it was more fully in the vernacular at that point, but it wasn’t. So we were just told it was a “pediatric feeding disorder” type of thing. But it was very vague.

I think it’s great it’s getting more attention. Both for kids and adults. It can be such a source of anxiety and shame for parents. It is so much work. It is very difficult, and it’s harder than it should be because of diet culture, because of all the pressure put on parents to feed our kids certain ways. The backlash against ultraprocessed foods is really not helping anyone navigate ARFID. I can’t underscore that enough, really not helping. No one needs to feel shame about your kid living on chicken nuggets or frozen burritos or whatever it is.

Corinne

The amount of stigma against people who eat certain ways is nuts.

Virginia

It’s nuts and it’s sad.

Corinne

Yeah it’s socially isolating.

Virginia

It is harder to share, right? It’s very socially isolating, and it’s sad for the people around them. Anytime you’re navigating eating together with someone with food restrictions, it does create barriers and extra work and more you have to navigate.

But if we didn’t have that layer of stigma over it, where it’s like, it’s probably the mom’s fault, if only they like more whole foods at home, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, if we didn’t have all of that, you could focus just on the logistics are hard enough. You don’t need the shame.

So many sad topics. Airlines are terrible. Virginia doesn’t have any clothes to wear. ARFID is sad. Do we have anything to bring it up?

Corinne

Well, our exciting news?

Virginia

Oh, right! We are working on some very fun things.

It is exciting to think about new directions that Burnt Toast and Big Undies are going in. So stay tuned. Don’t worry, it’s not a reality TV show.

Butter

Virginia

Okay, my Butter is adjacent to the wardrobe frustration conversation. Which is: I have started cutting the collars off a lot of my shirts.

To back up: Last month, I’m on vacation in Cape Cod with my sister, and she comes down looking extremely cute. She’s wearing a graphic tee tucked into a long maxi skirt. And I was like, “This whole thing is delightful. What’s happening here?” And she was like, “Well, this shirt was actually too small for me, but I realized if I just cut the collar off it, it opened up the neck enough that then the shirt, the whole shirt fit better.” And she could still wear this cute shirt. And she said she got the idea from watching Somebody Somewhere, because Bridgett Everett cuts the collars off all her shirts.

Corinne

Oh yes! That was my signature look when I was 18. A Hanes T-shirt with the collar cut off.

Virginia

I’m dressing like 18-year-old Corinne, and I’m here for it!

But I’ve realized, frequently a place that something doesn’t fit me is my neck. I’ve talked about feelings about chins and necks.

I have many complicated feelings about chins and necks. This is one place where my fatness sits. So the shirt might otherwise fit okay, but it doesn’t fit my neck, and then it feels tight and it’s a miserable feeling. So at the end of our trip, I wanted to buy a Cape Cod sweatshirt, because there were some really cute sweatshirts. But they were not size inclusive. So I was like, can I make this extra large work? And it was a little small, but I cut the collar off, and now it’s okay.

And then I did it with my old Harris Walz T-shirt from the election. It was a cute stripe. I just really liked the stripe. And I was like, Oh, I could still wear this if I get the collar off it. And a couple other things. I’ve just been, like, cutting collars off shirts that are uncomfortable. I’m into it!

Corinne

I think that’s a great Butter. I’m into any kind of clothes modification that will make you wear stuff that you wouldn’t otherwise wear.

Virginia

It was a good solution for a couple of things in my closet that I did like, but I was not reaching for. And now I’ll use them again. And the key I figured out, because I experimented with a couple ways to cut it, is really just cut right along the seam of the sewed on collar. You might think that’s going to not open it up enough, but it will stretch once you start wearing it. you could always cut more if you needed to, but that seems to have done it for me.

Corinne

Okay, well, I want to recommend a recipe, and I feel like I possibly mentioned this before. I’m staying with my mom, and we’ve been making this recipe from the New York Times called stuffed zucchini, and it’s a really good recipe for if you have a surplus of zucchini, which a lot of people do this time of year.

You kind of scoop out the middle of a zucchini and then mix some of that together with, like, sausage, tomatoes, basil, and then put it back in the zucchini and bake it with, like, some crispy breadcrumbs, and it’s so good. I can literally, eat a whole zucchini in one sitting. Highly recommend.

Virginia

That sounds amazing. All right. Well, that makes me a little more excited about the season.

Corinne

Yeah, it is a very good time of year for eating. We should have talked more about food maybe?

Virginia

That is a good point. Our tomatoes in the garden are going gangbusters. I’ve made some great sauces. I’m having a lot of cheese and tomato sandwiches. toasted and not toasted. Delightful.

Well, this was a good family meeting catch up. I think we’ve covered a lot of ground. I’m excited to hear what folks are feeling about their dressing issues, and airlines, all the stuff we got into today.

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies!

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Farideh.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Denise Hamburger, founder and director of Be Real USA.

Be Real is a nonprofit that imagines a world where every child can grow up with a healthy relationship to food and their body. They work with body image researchers, psychologists, teachers and public health officials to design curricula about nutrition and body image that are weight neutral, and inclusive of all genders, abilities, races and body sizes.

So many of you reach out to me every September to say, “Oh my God, you're not going to believe what my kid is learning in health class.”

Food logs, fitness trackers, other diet tools are far too common in our classrooms— especially in middle and high school health class. Denise is here to help us understand why those assignments are so harmful and talk about what parents and educators can do differently.

This episode is free — so please, share it with the parents, teachers and school administrators in your communities!

But if you value this conversation, consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you.

PS. You can always listen to this pod right here in your email, where you’ll also receive full transcripts (edited and condensed for clarity). But please also follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and/or Pocket Casts! And if you enjoy today’s conversation, please tap the heart on this post — likes are one of the biggest drivers of traffic from Substack’s Notes, so that’s a super easy, free way to support the show!

BeReal Let’s Eat Curriculum is attached.

And here’s a roundup of everything I’ve written on diet culture in schools:

• The Burnt Toast Guide to Diet Culture in Schools

Denise

Well, this all started I would say about 10 years ago. Actually, about 12 years ago. I was an environmental lawyer in my first career—that's what I'm trained to do. I went to law school, was practicing in big law firms. Which has nothing to do with body image, except I was an environmental lawyer who weighed herself every day and got her mood affected by the number on the scale for 40 years. So that's four decades.

Virginia

So many times getting on a scale.

Denise

I really felt like I didn’t want anyone else, especially young women today, to waste the amount of time and energy that I had wasted distracting them from what they need to be doing in their lives, figuring out their own person possibilities. That’s really what you’re here to do. And it takes us away from what we’re supposed to be doing.

With that in mind, I went back to school at the University of Chicago, and I was thinking of get a social work degree and doing something with body image. But then I wrote a paper on my own body image for one of my classes at the School of Social Work and I found 50 years of research on body image. And then 30 years of discussion and research on how to prevent eating disorders and body dissatisfaction. Like, wow, there is so much out there, so much research on this. But I haven’t heard any of this. It feels like it’s not making its way into resources that people can use.

So I started speaking on it, and I was speaking to middle-aged women, and I thought the message that we all would really benefit from would be everybody’s got this. Because I feel like, especially my generation, where we didn’t really talk about how we felt about our bodies. I’m at the tail end of the Baby Boom. So I’m 62 and I felt that people in my generation—again, I was 50 at the time—weren’t in touch with their own feelings on body image. After talking about this for so many years, younger generations have access to it I think a lot more. But I felt like we could all benefit from knowing that everybody’s got it—so kind of a common humanity. It’s not our fault, which helps with the shame around it.

So everyone has it, it’s not our fault, and society has given it to us. And I think that this is something that would resonate with my generation. So I started speaking in local libraries and community houses to women my age, and quickly learned that it is really hard to undo decades worth of thought patterns and feelings around food, body and eating. People came to hear me talk about body image, and I think, in general, when I started out, they were hoping I had a new diet.

Virginia

Oh, I’m sure they were. I’m sure they were like, “Oh, we’re going to go hear her talk about how to love your body by making it smaller!”

Denise

Absolutely. And all of the women, because they were women in my workshops, were starting to talk about their daughters. They’re saying that my daughter’s got this, and she’s coming home and saying this. Then in one of my audiences, I had a health teacher at my local high school. There was a health teacher who came and said—this is about 2015—you should hear what the young girls are saying. They’ve got this new thing called Instagram and and they’re seeing pictures of, “perfect” looking people and feeling bad about themselves or feeling flawed in comparison.

So she said, “What resources are there for for the students in my class?” And I said, there has got to be something because there is 50 years’ of research there, there has got to be something fabulous for you. And I called the professors listed on the the studies. The granddaddy of the industry, Michael Levine, I called him up. I said, “Michael, just tell me, what can I recommend to these teachers?” And he’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t know. We don’t have it. It’s not there. Even though the research is there.”

So there was a curriculum created for high risk kids. It needed to be given by facilitators called The Body Project. And I called one of the professors who wrote The Body Project and said, “Listen, I’d like to give this tool to a teacher for universal,” which means giving it to everybody in the classroom, and and she wants to bring it to her high school, but it looks like you need to be trained. And it was a script. The Body Project was a script. And this teacher said to me, I’m not reading a script in a classroom. You’re not going to get a high school teacher to read a script.

Virginia

Yeah. I would imagine high school students sitting in a classroom aren’t going to respond to someone just reading a script at them.

Denise

Nobody wants to hear it. It’s not useful. It wasn’t created for that use. So this professor, Carolyn Becker, had actually written a paper on how the academics need to work with stakeholders to make sure that their research makes it to the public. And I said, I’m calling you. I’m a stakeholder. What do you need? And she said, “We need somebody to translate it.” And I said, “I’m your girl.”

Virginia

I mean, it’s wild that the research has been there. We’ve known what works, or what strategies to use for so long, and yet it’s not in the pedagogy, it’s not in the classrooms.

So you started with the body image curriculum, BodyKind. And now this year, you’ve just released your weight neutral nutrition curriculum for middle and high school students, called Let’s Eat.

Full disclosure: I got to be a early reader of the of the curriculum and offer a few notes. It was already amazing when I read it.

Denise

Thank you.

Virginia

I did not have to add a lot at any by any means, but it was really cool to see the development process, and see where you ended up with it. It’s really remarkable.

So let’s start by talking about why nutrition. You’ve done the body image thing, that’s really powerful. Why was nutrition the next logical place to go?

Denise

I have spoken at this point to probably 10,000 teachers. And they’re always asking me, what nutrition curriculum do you recommend? Same deal. There’s not one out there

And I had asked one of my interns to give me her textbook on it, like what are you learning about nutrition? And in my intern’s textbook, it was 2018, you saw encapsulated the entire problem of what’s wrong with nutrition curriculum.

They are asking the children to weigh and measure themselves, and they’re asking the children to count calories in different ways, and to track their food. Food logs. Again, these were best practices in the 90s and and 2000s on how to teach nutrition. So this is all over the nutrition curriculum.

Then, of course, they’re talking about good and bad foods, which foods can you eat, which foods you can’t you eat, and all of these things in the research we know cause disordered eating and eating disorders, they all contribute to it. I have a list of probably nine research papers that point to each of these things and tell you why these are bad ideas to have a nutrition class.

And we also know there have been two papers written, where they polled students or young people coming in for eating disorder treatment and asked them, what do you think triggered your eating disorder? And around 14% in both studies said, “My healthy eating curriculum at school was where I started getting this obsession.” So you know, what’s out there hasn’t been helpful, and even worse, has been part of the problem in our society.

[Post-recording note: Here’s Mallary Tenore Tarpley writing about this research in the Washington Post, and quoting Oona Hanson!]

Virginia

It’s so rooted in our moral panic around “the childhood obesity epidemic.” Educators, public health officials, everyone feels like, that’s the thing we have to be worried about if we’re going to talk about kids and food. It all has to be framed through that lens. And what you are arguing is: That weight-centered approach causes harm. We can see from the data that it’s not “fixing” the obesity epidemic. Kids aren’t thinner than they were 40 years ago. So it didn’t work. And it’s having all these unintended ripple effects, or sometimes, I would say, intended ripple effects.

Denise

Yes, exactly. Studies on nutrition curriculum have shown that over 11 years, teaching diet and exercise did not do anything, in two age groups. One was elementary/middle school, another one was a high school group. And they found no changes in body size or nutritional knowledge and and only the effects of what they call weight stigma. Which is just anti-fat bias. So it only causes harm.

And these meta studies were from “obesity researchers,” right? So they are even acknowledging we don’t know how to prevent obesity.

Virginia

So you could see very clearly why the current landscape is harmful. How did you think about how to design a better curriculum?

Denise

We had been working on the back burner on an intuitive eating for students type of curriculum. Because the question I get from my teachers is, “What should I be teaching?” So we had been kind of working on an intuitive eating curriculum, and then one of my ambassadors, Selena Salfen, she works in Ramsey County Public Health in Minnesota, said, “Hey, we’re looking for a nutrition curriculum. Why don’t we do one together?”

It really turned into how to eat, not what to eat. So we started working on body cues and building trust with your food. And then started really focusing on empowering the student as an authority on their own eating behavior, teaching them how to learn from their own eating experiences. Which is part of responsive feeding. And Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility In Feeding. So we have pieces from all of these. We are empowering students to be experts on their own eating.

Virginia

It’s also so much more respectful of students’ cultural backgrounds, as opposed to the way we learned, like the food pyramid or MyPlate, saying “this is what your plate should look like.” And that doesn’t look like many plates around the world. That’s not what dinner is in lots of families. Your curriculum is saying, let’s empower students to be the experts is letting them own their own experience.

Denise

Absolutely, and trust their own experience. And trust themselves. And they don’t have to go outside of themselves. We want to teach them to act in their own best interests. That’s part of self-care, teaching them to take care of themselves. They need to learn it somewhere.

So if you do what they’ve done for years and tell them you need to cut out sugar and you need to cut out carbs, or you need to get this this many grams of protein, it leaves off all of the wonderful parts of eating that we get to experience many times a day, which is the joy, the pleasure, the sharing of food. So in our curriculum, we ask the kids, what do you do in your culture around food? How do you celebrate in your culture with food? What do you eat?

We get the discussion going with them and allowing them to feel pride in how their family celebrates. And so it’s really bringing in all these other aspects that we experience with food every day into talking about food. And we talk about pleasure, what do you like, what food do you like, what food do you enjoy? And we want them to be able to hold what foods they like, what their needs are that day.

So you talked about MyPlate, MyPlate is stagnant. It always looks the same. But your nutritional needs change every day. If I’m sick, my needs around nourishment are different from if I’ve got a soccer match after school that day. So we’re trying to teach them to be flexible and really throw perfectionism out the window, because it’s unhelpful in any area of life, but especially around eating, especially around food.

Virginia

I’m wondering what you’re hearing from school districts who are worrying about the federal guidelines. Because they do need to be in compliance with certain things.

Denise

So we spent a long time with the Food and Nutrition guidelines. The CDC food and nutrition guidelines, and we spent a long time with the HECAT standards, which are the health curriculum standards. We know that teachers are trying to match up what they’re teaching to the federal standards and the state standards. Because every state has their own discussion of this, and they write their own rules. Usually they look like the federal standards, but we find with food and nutrition, sometimes they go off. You’ll get somebody on the committee who hates soda, and will write 10 rules around soda. So every state has their own idiosyncratic rules around it as well.

Virginia

I mean, on the flip side, that means there have been opportunities for advocacy. For example in Maryland, Sarah Ganginis was able to make real progress on her state standards. But yes, the downside is you’re gonna have the anti-soda committee showing up.

Denise

Totally. And half of the country.

We really tried to hit the big standards. I’m actually thumbing through the curriculum right now. We have two pages of the HECAT model food nutrition lessons and which ones this curriculum hits. And then if you’re interested in talking about some of the others — like some of them really want to talk about specifically sugary drinks— we give links in the curriculum to discussions that we agree with. So we may mention sugary drinks in a little piece of the curriculum, but if you want to get the article or the discussion on it that frames it the way we’d like to see it framed, we’ve got links in the curriculum for that.

Virginia

So tell me about the response so far. What are you hearing from teachers and districts?

Denise

The biggest response I’m getting is, “It’s a breath of fresh air.” It’s safe, as you say. And for the teachers out there that are familiar with all of the things that we’ve been teaching that haven’t been working, this is important.

And I just want to say to all the health teachers who have been teaching nutrition out there because this is the way we’ve taught it for years: This is how it’s been done. But when you know better, you do better. And that’s the point we’re at now.

I know people have been weighing and measuring kids and telling them to count calories for decades because that was best practices at the time. But we’re beyond that. The research has figured out that that’s not the best practices going forward.

Virginia

That’s right.

Denise

We had about 50 teachers and 250 students trial it. We get the experts to say everything we want to say in the curriculum, and we put it in there, and then let’s say that takes nine months. We have another nine months where we have expert teachers like Sarah weighing in on the curriculum. Telling us what happens when she teaches it in class with her and the students. What would you like to see different? Even down to activities. How would this activity work better? So we spent another nine months making sure that the teachers and the students like it, can relate to it, and that the activities are what are working in class.

So that’s an extra step after some of the other research curriculum that we really want to make sure it’s user friendly and the students like it. We got a lot of feedback. We did two rounds of that.

Now we released it to the public after we had a masters student write a thesis on all of the the data we collected, and felt very comfortable that it does no harm.

Virginia

It’s been tested.

Denise

Yeah, it’s been tested. It’s feasible and acceptable. Now we’re going to go and do the official feasibility and acceptability tests, like we’ve done on BodyKind with Let’s Eat and then take it to schools. We use the University of North Carolina’s IRB. We use the Mind Body Lab there, run by Dr. Jennifer Webb, and we are going to be doing research on Let’s Eat. We’ve got the Portland Public Schools, and then we’ve got a school district in Maryland, in Arundel County, that we’ve identified and that we’re working with to test students. And then, we’ll hopefully do an official test, write an official paper, as we’ve done with BodyKind.

Virginia

And I should also mention, you’re making this resource free! Schools don’t have to pay for this, which I think everyone who’s ever tried to make any change in the school district of any kind knows, if it costs money, it’s harder to get done. So that’s great.

Denise

You know, it’s so funny. I’ve been speaking on this for years. I mean, we’ve been in curriculum development for five years, and I always forget to say that! I don’t know why. It’s a free curriculum! I’m a nonprofit. I’ve never been paid. This is such a passion project for me, and I continue to wake up every day energized by the work I’m doing.

And the mission of our nonprofit is to get the best, well tested resources out to schools. And we want to remove barriers. And how we remove barriers is offering it for free.

Virginia

A lot of our listeners are parents. They’re going to be listening to this thinking, “Okay, I want this in my kid’s school.” How do we do that? What do you recommend parents do?

Denise

So a couple things. We find the best advocate is the person at the school, the wellness professional, charged with curriculum decisions. So there are people in your district whose job it is to make sure that the teachers have the latest and greatest curriculum on nutrition.

And they want these resources because they want to make sure that their students get the best resources out there. So it takes a little bit of sleuthing to call up the school, whether it’s the administrator or a health teacher, and figure out who’s that person, who’s the wellness coordinator. It could be a wellness coordinator. It could be a health teacher, who’s responsible for curriculum. Find that person and talk to them. They’re looking for this conversation. It’s part of their job.

You could even say I heard about this new curriculum. It’s available for free. And you can hand them the postcard. That’s what I hand out when I speak at conferences. And it’s got a QR code. It describes what this curriculum does. We teach tuned in eating. It describes what tuned in eating does.

Virginia

Download that PDF below to QR code it right from this episode!

Denise

Yes. So you can send them as a PDF. You can write an email, figure out who the person is, send them the curriculum. Say “I was listening to a podcast, and there’s this great curriculum out there. I’d love you to check it out.”

Virginia

I think that feels really doable, it’s a great starting point.

What about when a kid comes home and tells a parent “Oh, we did calorie counting today?” Because that’s often how parents start to think about this issue. It kind of lands on their lap. Is it useful to engage directly with the teacher? How do you think about that piece of it? Because obviously, especially the school year is underway, asking a teacher like, hey, can you just change your whole curriculum right on a dime, they probably won’t appreciate that. So, what’s a, better way to think about this advocacy?

Denise

I thought you did a great job in your book Fat Talk on giving them scripts, giving parents scripts to walk into the school. You want to be sensitive to how overloaded the health teacher is, the nutrition teacher is. They’re teaching 10 subjects in health that they need to be experts on so, you know, this is just one piece of what they’re teaching.

The great thing about nutrition is, most health teachers are teaching nutrition so they’ve got some background in it, and you can just be as sensitive as possible to their time and do as you say in the book, you know, in a in a positive, collaborative way. “I heard about this research, I thought you might be interested,” rather than a critical way. And and again, your kid might not be taking health, they might just be in the school district. So maybe you have this discussion with an administrator, and ask them, who wants to talk to me about this? And ask them, who can I speak to? It could be a guidance counselor. Could be school social worker. You know, this is eating disorder and body dissatisfaction prevention, right? So who, who is interested in this topic?

Virginia

Who in the district is working on that and wants to know about this? That’s super helpful.

And I’ll also add: One thing I learned in reporting the book and thinking more about the school issue is we do, as parents, always have the right to opt our kids out of the assignments that we know to be harmful. So if you see a calorie counting assignment coming, you can ask for an alternative assignment. You can accept that your kid might get a lower grade because they don’t do it, but that might feel fair.

Especially with older kids, I think it’s important to involve them. Like, don’t just swoop in. Never a good idea. They may want to talk to the teacher or you have do it. Work that out with your kid and figure out the best way forward. But I think it’s definitely worth doing that. If your kid’s like, no, don’t talk to the teacher. No, I’m not opting out. You can still have the conversation at home about why this assignment is not aligned with your values, and that’s yes important to do, too.

• The Burnt Toast Guide to Diet Culture in Schools

Denise

I also wanted to say, we have an ambassador program at Be Real, and we have 135 ambassadors. What we’ve done with all of the materials we’ve been using for 10 years, which are presentations and worksheets for the presentations. We have frequently asked questions, where I quote you all the time. What do I do with my mother in law, who’s saying this thing? We give them scripts. What do I do when people equate body size with health? What do we do when people assume that everyone could be small if they tried hard enough? We have answers for all of these questions in our materials, frequently asked questions.

I have templated the presentations I give. I use the notes, I give the talk track, so my ambassadors can give a talk with a teleprompter if they’re doing it on Zoom. Use the presentation as a teleprompter, and all the accompanying material we have on Canva that the ambassadors can create their own and add to it, and use their own name and picture to give talks and and things like that. We’ve got all of this so people are able to take this resource to their own local area,

Virginia

So they might give this talk to a PTA or a church group or any kind of community organization they’re affiliated with.

Denise

Absolutely. And we’ve been doing this for about seven years, and the last five years, it’s grown tremendously, and we have meetings every quarter. And at the meetings, people say, how do I get into my local school? And someone else will say, you know, I tried the principal and they didn’t answer my phone calls. And then I went and looked up so and so and and then I started out doing this for professional development for health teachers in the state of Illinois. So we also have ways to to be certified as a professional development trainer on this topic. So that’s how I initially got to health teachers. And then they also speak at conferences. So I speak at National SHAPE, which is the health teacher conference, but there are state SHAPE conferences out there that my Ambassadors will go speak at and it’s really how to get all of this material, another way to get it disseminated all throughout the world.

Virginia

Oh, I love that. Well, we will definitely link in the show notes for anyone who’s interested in becoming about an ambassador.

Denise

I am obsessed with Orna Guralnik, she is a psychotherapist who has a show on Showtime called Couples Therapy.

Virginia

Yes, I’ve been hearing about this.

Denise

Oh my God, it is so good. I don’t know why I like it so much, but I just binge watched the new season. And I say every time, I’ve got to string it out and enjoy it, but no, it’s impossible. And so I just binge watched the whole season, and as I was preparing for this interview, I just kept Googling what podcast she’s been on.

Virginia

That’s so satisfying. I love when you get a really good rabbit hole to dive down with the show. Another podcast I really enjoy, called Dire Straights , hosted by two writers, Amanda Montei and Tracy Clark-Flory, they just did an episode looking at the history of couples therapy and it actually has a pretty problematic history. Was not always great for women, very much developed as a way to help husbands control unruly wives—but has become other things. But you would enjoy that episode because they talk quite a bit about the show couples therapy and, she’s obviously doing something quite different.

Denise

Okay, that’s my next one. Definitely going out and getting that.

Virginia

I will also do a TV show butter, because they are so satisfying. I just started watching with my middle schooler a show that’s been off the air for a few years now. It’s called it’s Better Things, starring Pamela Adlon and created by her. It’s about a divorced mom with three daughters. She’s a working actor in LA but it’s just like about their life. It’s very funny. It’s very real and kind of gritty.

My middle schooler and I have watched a lot of sitcoms together, and this is definitely a more adult show than we’ve watched before. But it’s still a family show, and it’s just, it’s so so good. It’s just a really incredible authentic portrayal of mothers and daughters. Which, you know, being a mother and a daughter, sometimes I’m like, is this making you like me more? Is this making you appreciate me? Probably not.

Denise

Having raised three kids, I don’t aspire to that anymore.

Virginia

Not the goal, not the goal.

Denise

Just never going to show up.

Virginia

But it is really sweet bonding in a way that I hadn’t expected. So that is my recommendation.

Denise

Lovely, lovely, lovely.

Virginia

All right, Denise. Tell folks again, just in case anyone missed it. Where do we find you? Where do we find the curriculums? How do we support your work?

Denise

Come to berealusa.org—that’s our website. We have more information on everything I’ve mentioned, on all of the curriculum, on how to become an ambassador, and just more explanation. On the website, we have fact sheets on everything we do. So if you go in, I think on the homepage, you drop down, they’ll say fact sheets. And we also have probably have 10 fact sheets that will give you more information on this. We also talk about why you shouldn’t be taking BMI school. We had a “don’t weigh me in school” campaign about five years ago that kind of went viral. So anyway, that’s all good on our website.

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Farideh.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

You’re listening to Burnt Toast!

We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for your September Indulgence Gospel!

It’s time for a mailbag episode, so we’ll be diving into your questions about:

⭐️ How to clap back when people say, “Wow, you’ve changed!”

⭐️ What to do with ageist grandparents? (We’re surprisingly…Team Grandparent on this one?)

⭐️ Why it’s so hard to like photos of ourselves!!!

⭐️ Is Back To School (the hype, the myth, the culture)…a diet?

And so much more!

To hear the full story, you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber.

This episode contains affiliate links. Shopping our links is a great way to support Burnt Toast!

Virginia

Corinne, how are you? What’s going on?

Corinne

I’m doing good. It’s really nice and cool here, and I’m so happy. It’s like 68.

Virginia

It’s really nice and cool here, too. Listeners of the future: We are recording this in July to be ahead of the game, but it is very September weather, and it’s helping me get in the September mindset for doing this episode.

Well and because it’s cooler, I do have some Pants Chat for us to get into. I’m wearing a new pair of pants from Imbodhi, which is the brand that makes that jumpsuit I’m obsessed with. They are called the Sora Wide Leg Pant, and they are basically, like the pants version of the jumpsuit. They have a fold-down waist, and they’re very stretchy, and they are just the most comfortable thing. But I am unclear if I am wearing pants or pajamas?

Corinne

I’m looking at their website. I don’t know anything about this brand. It looks very similar to Beyond Yoga.

Virginia

It’s very similar to Beyond Yoga. It’s a great brand (and I have a $15 off coupon for listeners!). The quality is really good. But they go up to only 3x. I’m wearing the 1X so I think it’s a legit 3X but, yeah. There are bigger sizes they could be making, and they’ve chosen not to, at this point in time. So this is the Sora Wide-Legged Pants in ribbed oatmeal. They’re the most comfortable thing. But do you see what I mean? They definitely have that “is it pants, or is it pajamas” vibe?

Corinne

They’re soft pants.

Virginia

And I think because they’re wide leg soft pants, they feel more pajama to me. Maybe I’m good with that? Maybe I’m in my pajama pants era?

Corinne

That seems reasonable.

Virginia

Well, that’s my pants news.

Corinne

That’s great pants news.

Virginia

Let’s jump into questions.

Corinne

Yes, I will ask the first question.

Doesn’t back to school kind of seem like a diet? There are the first day of school photos, the perfect bento box lunches, the school supplies, etc.

Virginia

I mean, absolutely. Absolutely, it’s all a diet.

Corinne

Need we say more?

Virginia

It is a diet, and it’s a diet I go on every year. We do first day of school photos. My kid’s dad does a letterboard sign with a clever pun about what grade they’re going into. My kids sort of hate the tradition, but now sort of love it. And we’re doing it. We’re locked in. We’ve got to have all 12 years of photos.

Corinne

But what’s the diet element? That it has to be perfect?

Virginia

Well, when I think about my most diety years of Back To School culture, it was the years, especially, when my kids were starting a new school. If they were starting kindergarten, or other transition years, where stress is really, really high. You’re going through a lot of feelings, and as the parent, you’re like, what can I control? I can have an adorable, monogrammed backpack that must be sourced! I can control that we have the right lunchbox and this and that.

You can just get so hyper about needing all the details. You need a good first day of school outfit. The teachers send these incredibly detailed school supply lists, and you’re in the aisle at Staples trying to kill yourself to find the right kind of pens. You can just be really extra with it, and it can feel like if you get it wrong, you’re sabotaging your child’s happiness. The stakes are really high. And so there are a lot of diet-y elements, for sure.

Here’s what’s helping me divest:

Number one, my children pick their own clothes.

I have not had input on the clothes that go on my children’s bodies since they were probably three or four years old at the most. So there’s no first day outfit anymore. Whatever they want to wear is the first day outfit. So that’s one thing. I’m no longer like, “I need adorable dresses!!” My kids don’t even like to wear dresses. So, done.

Number two, the drugstore in our town does this great thing where they get all the school supply lists from our kids schools. And if you just tell them your kid’s name and the teacher they have for the next year, they will just bag up all the supplies and you just pay and pick them up.

Corinne

That’s amazing.

Virginia

And so I just handed this whole project off to my kid’s dad. I was like, “You’re on school supplies. You do the drug store thing every year.” I don’t think about it anymore, and it does mean you don’t get to sit there and pick out which color folders you want. And as someone who loved school supply shopping myself, that is a little hard for me! But that’s why I was like, I have to just remove myself completely. So I just try to step back from as much of it as I can.

What do you see with your friends kids? Do you notice any back to school feelings?

Corinne

To be honest, I haven’t. But most of my friends’ kids are in what I would consider barely school. So it hasn’t hit yet. I do remember, as a kid, wanting to school shop and and also wanting a first day outfit.

Virginia

It’s very similar to New Year’s resolution culture. You can be like, “This is the year everything’s going to be perfect!” This is the year that all these things are going to go well. And we all know we’re gonna be crying by October. It is what it is.

So you can go in with a lot of a lot of energy that can be misdirected. But also: If it helps you get through the stress of that first day to pack a really good lunch for your kid, great. Do it. I think the potential for harm is when you’re being so obsessive about getting that photo that your kid is really unhappy. It’s worth asking: Will getting this detail right make your child’s day smoother? Then fine. If it’s creating more work and drama for everyone, maybe time to step back.

Corinne

If your kid wants to have a special outfit and stuff, fine. And how can you make it not into a diet for them?

Virginia

Yes. I think especially as kids get older, they can bring this energy as well. I definitely did as a kid. I was very extra about my first day of school outfits and all of that. I would like plan the whole first week and be really manic about it.

Corinne

This is so not surprising.

Virginia.

In a surprise to no one, Virginia was herself.

So I guess my point is: This is all optional, and a lot of it is capitalism, not education.

Corinne

Great point.

Virginia

I’ll read the next question.

On vacation, I noticed that I am struggling with photos of myself, and it feels like the final frontier of my body liberation. I guess the question is, have either of you struggled with this? And any suggestions for coping and shifting it? I admire all the fat bodies on my socials and think they look amazing and feel pretty good in my body, and think I look good in the mirror. So why am I so uncomfortable with the photos. It just feels like it’s not how I look in my head or in the mirror. Photographs are different, obviously, than real life. But it surprises me how jarring they can feel.

Corinne

I feel like there are a million ways to answer this question, but I will just start with this. Have you ever seen a bad photo of a hot person?

Virginia

Oooh.

Corinne

Like, yeah. Obviously you have. There are horrible paparazzi photos of everybody, of America’s hottest people.

Virginia

Every beautiful person can take a bad photo. Yes, yes, yes.

Corinne

You’re pulling one second out of the movie of your life, or whatever. Obviously, there are going to be weird, bad photos.

Virginia

I also really love that meme that surfaces periodically reminding us that it is impossible to take a good photo of the moon. And we think the moon is beautiful. Sunsets, also very hard to photograph well.

Corinne

So true.

Virginia

Even in my garden, there are things that are prettier in real life than I can capture in a photo. You just can’t get the depth or the angle.

Corinne

Colors!

Virginia

The colors don’t translate. There are so many beautiful things that look better in real life than in photos. And that may include you. It certainly includes me.

But I do absolutely struggle with this. I deeply related to this question. One thing that helps me is to remember that I have been very thrown by photos of myself throughout my whole life. There was no period in my life where I regularly saw photos and thought, “That looks exactly like me and I look amazing.” Like, even when I was thin, I would nitpick photos. And I now frequently do that thing where I look back at an old photo and think, oh my God. What was I worried about? Like, this is absurd. And so I can only assume that would continue to happen. Feelings I have about photos I take now, at age 44 when I’m 54 or 70 I’m going to be like, what was I worried about?

Corinne

I think also: Have you ever had a conversation about this with a friend where they’re like, oh, I hate this photo of myself, and you’re like, “What?”

Virginia

What are you even seeing?

Corinne

Yeah, it’s maybe not the best photo. And also, whatever.

Virginia

There are also all the ways that technology messes with this. Like, right now, we’re looking at each other on Zoom, and Zoom is mirroring my face at me, which is how I see myself in the mirror. So I look right to me. But if you’ve ever gone into Zoom and had it be not mirrored, you’re like, who the hell is that person? But that’s how everyone else sees your face all the time! That’s actually your face! So a lot of this is, we just don’t know what we look like, the photo both isn’t capturing you and it’s capturing you in a way that you never see yourself, so it’s super disorienting.

Corinne

Yeah, I agree. It’s a certain amount of acceptance, just practicing acceptance of bad photos. And consider, what would you say to your friend about it?

Virginia

It’s also maybe useful to know that you’re going to have this reaction. Just plan for it and be able to say, like, I am uncomfortable with myself in photos. Like, that’s something to work on, and that’s something you can overcome, but it can also just be a true statement right now, and you still had a great vacation. It’s still nice to have the memories of the vacation. If you have kids, yes, be in the photo with your kids. You are going to be really glad you have those at some point in your life. Be in the photo with your loved ones. There’s this whole problem with moms erasing themselves from the family memories, because we take all the photos, and nobody ever takes photos of us. And that’s terrible.

So I think it’s it’s fine to know it makes you uncomfortable, and it’s probably worth forcing it to happen anyway.

Corinne

It’s also fine to take photos and not look at them.

Virginia

Do you think that now that we take a lot of photos of ourselves for our jobs, does it make photos easier for you?

Corinne

I’m someone who has always taken a lot of photos of myself.

Virginia

Yes, your Instagram handle is Selfie Fay.

Corinne

Since like, high school, if not earlier. And I do find that exposure kind of helps, and I do think it kind of helps you with that mindset of just like, well, it’s just one photo. There are photos of myself I like and photos of myself I don’t like.

Virginia

Yep, agreed.

Corinne

And I still have a reaction sometimes where I see a photo of myself and I’m like, ughhhh.

Virginia

But it feels like it’s less weighted, because it’s not like twice a year you’re seeing photos of yourself on vacations and holidays.

Corinne

Yeah. It’s less jarring.

Virginia

Also, I don’t know who took the photos, but a lot of people are bad at taking photos. Really bad at it. Even people who think they’re good at it, or have nice cameras or fancy phones or whatever. It is a skill. There is a reason people are paid photographers. And so if you don’t like the photo, it’s also worth remembering that the person who took it probably didn’t think about lighting or composition or any of the elements that make a photo that your brain would be like, oh, that’s nice.

Corinne

Yeah, I’ve definitely had the experience where I ask someone to take a photo of me, and then they’re like, kneeling down on the ground. I’m like, “What are you doing? That’s not the angle!”

Virginia

And then you’re like, I really want to ask them to take it again and tell them how to do it, but I feel like that’s rude, so I shouldn’t, but…

Corinne

I’ve never been like, I want them to do it again. But I have definitely been like, well, that was kind of a waste.

Virginia

If there are photos you like of yourself, maybe it’s also worth thinking about what is it about those pictures that you like. This is maybe a little bit of beauty culture mindset. But if you like photos of yourself better with your hair down or your hair up, maybe make a point to put your hair up or down, whichever it is before you take the photo, because it’ll just remove a layer of stress. I think that’s harm reduction. It is obviously a beauty standard, but maybe checking that box makes the experience less stressful.

Corinne

Ok, I will read the next question.

I would love some suggestions for navigating fatphobia while pregnant and nursing. I’m currently four months pregnant, and the sheer amount of fatphobia and diet culture I’ve been subjected to is mind boggling.

My provider has so far not brought up my weight, although I have been weighed at every appointment. But all of the materials and guidance I’ve gotten from them has been related to not eating too much, not eating, quote, empty calories, exercising regularly. And then on top of that is the breastfeeding propaganda about how it will help you lose the baby weight and how breastfeeding prevents obesity. Navigating all of this on top of my own feelings about rapid body changes and an unprecedented level of body surveillance from family is a lot!

This episode will be coming out after I get back from visiting some very diet culture family. So I’ll definitely be in need of some Burnt Toast counter programming.

Virginia

All right, we got you! Good job surviving the family visit. We’re back now. Let’s get into it.

Corinne

Are you okay?

Virginia

Do you need a hug? Do you need a cookie? We are here.

Oh, it’s so hard, like you’re not doing enough growing an actual human being with your body. You have to deal with all of this. It is so much! Pregnancy and postpartum are really, can be really challenging times for people’s relationships with their bodies, and all of this medical messaging and fearmongering does not help.

I think it’s great your provider is not bringing up weight. And I would really laser focus in on that, and ignore all the materials and guidance. It is really possible to have a great pregnancy and never read a pamphlet about pregnancy. If your doctor is not saying to you, “this is super important for your health,” then who cares? You don’t have to be an A student and read all the pamphlets, or all the books or all the Instagram content about this.

Corinne

I have so much empathy for pregnant people. I just know that I would really hate the body surveillance stuff. I feel like that is out of control and something you kind of can’t do anything about. Even if you tell people, “I don’t want to hear it,” they’re not going to stop.

Virginia

Or they’re still surveying you even if they’re not saying anything. If you’re with diet, culture-y family, you might have set the boundary around the conversation. And it also comes from total strangers, like you’re just in the grocery store, and people feel free to comment on your body. It’s horrendous.

Corinne

Totally. And also, I can only imagine how disorienting and horrible the body changes are to go through. You know, it’s a lot!

Virginia

It’s a lot, it’s a lot.

I do want to mention that we had some folks chatting about this recently in the Burnt Toast chat. And there is now a WhatsApp group of Burnt Toasties who are all new parents postpartum, trying to navigate without diet culture. So that might be a great safe space for you to check out. And obviously, the more like minded people that go there, the better that chat will be.

[Post-recording note: Just to clarify, we love that this WhatsApp group is happening, but Virginia and Corinne aren’t participating/it’s not an official form of BT content!]

Corinne

Yeah, that’s awesome.

Virginia

I do think this is a real find your people moment. And this person doesn’t say if it’s a first pregnancy or not, but I think especially in your first pregnancy, there’s a lot of forming bonds with people just because we’re all going through this life experience. But you really need to find people who are going through the life experience with the same values as you in order to really support one another.

So that’s definitely something to think about, even if you can just identify one friend in your circle who’s a safe person on all of this, that you can, like, vent to and support each other when this noise gets loud. I’ll also link to some other stuff I’ve written on pregnancy over the years, because we revisit this pretty often.

• Why "Building a Healthy Baby" is Bullshit

• When The Pregnancy App Talks About "Belly-Only Weight Gain," We Have Work To Do

• "Is My Body Too Big To Be Pregnant?"

• We Need To Talk About Fat Fertility

• The Fat Mother Narrative

The bottom line is sort of similar to the conversations we’re having about menopause right now. This is a huge life change. Your body is going through a lot. Your weight is the least interesting thing about it. And, you can have a totally healthy pregnancy and not be hyperfixated on weight or calories or any of these things. This is all optional. Breastfeeding is optional. It’s all optional. So, really feeling grounded in like, I get to choose what serves me right now, and I know from past experience, diet culture never serves me. So why would it serve me now when I’m doing something this difficult and life changing.

Corinne

It does feel like one of those things where the diet culture is just so ingrained, it’s really hard to find an alternative.

Virginia

It’s really similar to the perimenopause stuff. Everyone who is a credible expert on this subject also suddenly has a supplement to sell you, and it’s so maddening.

I will read the next one.

Do you have any good clap backs for situations where people you haven’t seen in a long time make comments about how much you have changed? I would feel less anxious having some prepared sentences under my belt.

Corinne

Okay, I have two things to say about this. The first one is, I think if someone comes up to you and says, “Oh, wow, you’ve changed,” you should say, “Thank you.”

Virginia

Nice.

Corinne

Yes, thank you.

If you want something a little different, you could be like, “What do you mean?” And really make them spell it out. But that is going to be an exercise in tolerating some amount of discomfort if they want to tell you what they mean. I think you could also say, “Yes, I have changed, and I’m so much happier or healthier,” or whatever. Even if it’s a lie, just say it.

Virginia

This is definitely a situation where lying is strongly encouraged because this person is being obnoxious.

Corinne

And then I also just want to say: I do think this is kind of one of those social anxiety things that you’re going to worry a lot more about happening than it will actually happen. It’s just one of those things that’s a nightmare scenario in your head and probably won’t actually happen in real life.

Virginia

Okay, yes, I think that’s completely true. But it is also true that people may be thinking things, and you’re aware of what they’re thinking. But —that’s a them problem, not a you problem.

Corinne

I'd love some help addressing how the grandparents are talking about aging with grandkids. While I've somehow managed to train the grandparents to not discuss bodies in terms of fat/thin/size/weight (yay!), they feel totally free to discuss how much they hate aging, wrinkling skin, botox and other body modification as it pertains to “fighting aging.” The increase in these topics definitely aligns with the celebrities around their age (and even younger) recently revealing totally new faces and necks (Kris Jenner, Ricki Lake, Lauren Sanchez, etc.). Somehow that seems to give them permission to bring the public discourse to my kids (it shouldn't).

I actually had a really great conversation with my kids (who are under 10) about how kids expect their bodies to change while adults expect their bodies to stay the same, when the reality is that bodies change forever and that there should never be an expectation of sameness. And my kids were like, duh. I'm growing, I'm going to hit puberty, I'm going to be an adult, and then I'm going to shrink (they mean in height, which made me lol). And I was like, 'well, there are many years between growing and shrinking, and in those years, your body still continues to change! That's what bodies do. But adults forget and then they get upset.'

This conversation was great with the kids, but the grandparents absolutely couldn't handle 'another topic they can't talk about with my kids. Thoughts?

Virginia

I think you handled it perfectly, and all that really matters is that you can discuss this with your kids, which you can. So I wouldn’t even attempt to put any guardrails around the grandparents on this.

Corinne

I agree that it does seem weird that your parents are talking to your kids about both their feelings about Botox. And I agree that asking them to stop is probably not going to work and just create a bunch of tension.

Virginia

The grandparents are the ones grappling with this. It feels like a time where we kind of need to check our own age privilege? I don’t know how I’m going to feel about all that stuff when I’m in my 60s and 70s. It’s going to feel harder than it feels right now, in various ways, I’m sure. Maybe also easier, I don’t know. But the point is, I haven’t lived through that. Your parents are talking from their lived experience. You don’t have to agree with their choices. You can have your own take on this. Obviously, I agree with you that bodies grow and change, and that’s something we should be embracing, but I think you can just reframe it with your kids and kind of let it wash over you when it comes from the parents, because it’s their stuff. It’s not your stuff.

Corinne

But sometimes I wonder, in this situation where you’re like, “I don’t want my kids to hear that,” is it actually bothering you and you want to say something to them about it, but you don’t know how to do that?

Virginia

Because your kids sound fine. They were like, “yeah, Grandma talked about Botox. That’s weird. Anyway.” I don’t think they were internalizing it. And I think this is so common, when people are like, “What do I do about my mom talking to my kids?” Often the kids are fine, because what a grandparent says to them doesn’t have the same impact as what your mom says to you. So I think this is one of those moments.

And if you want to set boundaries around that, I think you can find ways to be like, “I’m not really here for an age bashing conversation today,” or “I think you look great anyway.” You can set up some boundaries.

But I kind of don’t blame the grandparents for being like, “Stop giving me a list of things I can’t talk to your kids about.” It is a little micro managing. I get it. And I do feel like when people are talking about their own stuff, that’s really different from if a grandparent was directly criticizing how your child eats or your child’s body, that’s where you have to intervene. If a grandparent is like “no more pasta for your kid, she’s getting fat,” that’s where you have to jump in and set boundaries and protect your kid.

But if the grandma is not eating pasta—

Corinne

Their body, their choice.

Virginia

And you can keep reframing with your kids why you are not making that same choice.

Corinne

If it’s bothering you, I think sometimes a nice approach is just to be like, hey, when you talk about this, I feel X way. Like it gives me anxiety when you’re talking about having Botox, like I’m not quite there yet and it freaks me out.

Virginia

Yeah, just let them know you’re not the audience for this. I hope they have other people in their lives who want to talk about Botox.

All right. Next question.

Are shows like Too Much and Survival of the Thickest normalizing dating plus size women for heterosexual men? I hope so!

Corinne

You would have to ask the heterosexual men.

Virginia

Are heterosexual men watching Too Much and Survival of the Thickest?

Corinne

Great question.

Virginia

I do not think those shows have a strong, cis, straight man audience. I think they’re watched by women and gay men.

Corinne

I also feel like, I mean, are they normalizing it on television? Maybe. I also think, in real life, men dating plus size women is normal.

Virginia

That’s what I was going to say. I don’t think the men are watching these shows. I also don’t think we actually have to normalize this. I think it’s normalized. I go back to the Kate Manne interview where she talked about how it’s a number one porn search term. Straight men are attracted to fat women. They just are. And of course, there’s a lot of noise around that, and there are some men who are not or who are assholes about it. Absolutely true. But it’s not all men. That makes me sound like an apologist for men, and I’m uncomfortable with it. But I actually think it’s more normal than you think it is for straight men to be attracted to fat women.

• "You Cannot Fight Misogyny Without Fighting Fatphobia."

But what I think these shows are doing is normalizing four plus size women that we can see ourselves as attractive. They’re helping us get over it. Or I think they can be helpful for helping us get over it.

Corinne

And I think they’re definitely normalizing it being on TV. And, I do like to see that on TV.

Virginia

I think that’s really important, and we need more of it. I mean, this idea that straight men are only attracted to thin women is a figment of Hollywood’s imagination. It’s a figment of diet cultures imagination. It’s not what’s actually happening. So more representation of reality is very useful. Plus, they’re both fairly fun shows.

Corinne

The next one is a gardening question for you.

We planted a bunch of stuff this year. I was all organized and have a cute, color coded map and everything. Now, how do I keep track of what needs to be pruned back in the fall or left over winter? Do I need a spreadsheet, or am I overthinking it?

Virginia

Wow, this is a person after my own heart. And also I will link to the piece I wrote about divesting perfectionism in the garden. You don’t need a spreadsheet.

I do keep lists of things I plant every year because it’s helpful to know what you’ve planted. And I have used a spreadsheet when mapping out what to put in raised beds. Sometimes I just draw it, like plot it out, how you’re gonna plant things. And so I understand the need to do this. But no, I don’t think you need to keep a spreadsheet of what needs to be pruned back in the fall or left over winter.

The answer is much simpler. Almost everything can be left over the winter. It’s actually great to leave most of your perennials standing. They will form seed pods. There will be dry stalks, but that creates actually a lot of habitat. There are a lot of overwintering bees that like to nest in the stems of perennial plants. There are a lot of little critters that like to live in the leaf litter, and the seed pods get eaten by birds over the winter. So leaving your garden standing, even if it looks a mess is a very environmentally friendly thing to do.

I tidy up a little more out front and then leave the back for the birds and the bees. if you live in a neighborhood where that feels like your neighbors might be judgey or whatever.

Otherwise, the only things I cut back personally in the fall are peonies and hostas, because both of their foliage can harbor disease if they’re left to get wet and slimy. So those I cut back. But definitely all natives I leave standing. Pretty much everything else I leave standing.

Corinne

When do you cut it back?

Virginia

I cut it back in the spring after we’ve had about a week of 50 degree days or higher, because that’s when everything warms up and the hibernating bees come out and everybody’s like, okay, I’m good, I’m good, I’m safe. And then you can cut it back. So yeah, that’s the answer. You don’t need a spreadsheet. Leave basically everything except for your peonies and hostas.

Shrubs are a little bit of a different question. There are some shrubs that are better to be pruned in the fall and some that are better to be pruned in the spring. I would, if you have tons of different kinds of shrubs, maybe you would need a spreadsheet to keep track of that. But if you’ve planted a couple of shrubs just look up those specific things. And it is shrubs specific, so I’m not going to get into it. But yeah, just look up your shrubs, see when they best need to be pruned. Maybe keep track of that. And other than that, leave everything.

Corinne

Hmm, cool. I do like the I like the idea of a spreadsheet personally, but just because I’m very forgetful.

Virginia

Well, I could see it being helpful for the shrubs, definitely. Like, I’m just thinking around my own yard. And it’s like, lilacs you have to prune immediately after they flowers so you don’t destroy next year’s buds.

Corinne

I’m already too late.

Virginia

Yes, you are. Some hydrangeas you prune in the fall, and some hydrangeas, you can’t prune until the spring. And blueberries need to be pruned in the winter. Shrubs are weird. They all have their own ideal times to be pruned, related to preserving next year’s flowers. So it could be helpful to have a spreadsheet. Now, I’m like, okay, yeah, I want a shrub spreadsheet.

But you don’t need everything else. And the color coded map. The only reason I’m laughing at that a little bit is once you’re a few years into gardening, you will learn that plants don’t always stay where you put them. They get bigger. Sometimes they seed themselves in new locations. A lot of things often don’t survive the winter that and then you have a hole. Every year the map looks a little different. So don’t feel like you have to have it all nailed down. That’s the perfectionism thing. Gardening is not interior design. It’s not making a quilt. You’re not nailing things into space.

All right, our last question is a very delightful, whimsical one.

If you could turn into an animal, what animal would it be, and why?

Corinne

I’m having a very hard time settling on one. First, I thought, a horse. I don’t know, seems fun.

Then I was like, okay, maybe a whale?? Also seems fun to be swimming around. And then I was also like, I feel like my dog has a pretty nice life. Like, a dog in a cushy home environment where you can just kind of nap all day and get fed treats.

Virginia

I went to cat for the same reason, but even more so, because I think as an introvert, I’m more suited to cat life because cats can also be like, Fuck you, I’m out of here.

Corinne

So true.

Virginia

Whereas dogs have that need to be with you all the time, and I think I would personally start to chafe against that.

Corinne

I think if I were a cat, I’d want to be an outdoor cat, though.

Virginia

No, you don’t live very long.

Corinne

Seems fun to hunt birds?

Virginia

I know, but also they’re really hurting the bird population. I’m going to get a text from my mom if I don’t say that. So no outdoor cats. They’re bad for the birds.

Corinne

Okay, my bad.

Virginia

I think I would want to be an indoor cat. And I was also thinking about sea creatures. Octopus seems cool.

Corinne

That does seem cool. Seems pretty great. Wow.

Virginia

Oh. And then my final choice would be elephant, because I adore elephants. They’re amazing.

Corinne

I don’t have a Butter. What’s yourButter?

Virginia

We’ve failed at Butter?! Well, I have a Butter but if you think it’s too diet-y, tell me, and I’ll pick a different Butter.

My Butter this week is one minute planks. I’m doing a one minute plank every day. I worked up to one long plank. I should say. I started at 20 seconds. I’ve worked up to a minute.

Corinne

Yeah, all right.

Virginia

And by that I mean yesterday and today I did one minute. Before that, I was doing 20 seconds and then 30 and then 45. The reason I’m doing this is we have a crazy schedule this week. I don’t have time to actually do a workout, even, like, a 15 minute workout. Like, it’s just not happening. And I was getting stressed about it, because my back hurts more when I don’t work out and I don’t need to deal with my back hurting.

Corinne

I thought you were going to say, because mental illness.

Virginia

I mean also that. So many reasons that I need to get a workout in. But specifically for me, working out is primarily about managing back pain. And then I was like, I can also do five minutes—not even, three minutes—of hip stretches and a one minute plank. And then my back doesn’t hurt. For today anyway. And that is my Butter! Figuring out the shortest possible way to be like, yes, I moved my body a little bit today, despite the fact I also drove children to 47 locations and had no time to work and everything is a little chaotic.

Corinne

I think that’s a good Butter.

Virginia

Obviously you don’t have to do planks if you don’t like them. I didn’t like them for a long time. Yours could be something totally different, but I’m weirdly into it, and I might be setting a goal of learning to do push ups? Casual just maybe, maybe, maybe I’m thinking about learning to do push ups.

Corinne

I love that!

Virginia

Which I can’t do.

Corinne

Did something influence that?

Virginia

Well, I do a lot of weight lifting videos, and there’s often a push up portion that I can’t do. I can do them against a counter, but I can’t do them on the floor. And it’s just been one of those things. My whole life, I’ve always been like, “I can’t do push ups.” Like I can’t get back up, and it feels like I should be able to. Or maybe it’s learnable, and maybe I want to spend some small amount of time seeing if I can learn it.

Corinne

Cool. Can you do them on your knees?

Virginia

Yeah, I can do them on my knees. But I’ve never progressed. I’ve been at this level of modified push up forever, and I’m just like, what would it take to cross over? Not because I want to be a Navy Seal or anything. You know, I’m not going to do the push ups where they clap in the middle or whatever, but it feels like a mountain I could climb. And by which I mean, like, this feels like it should be an achievable goal.

Corinne

Yeah, I think it’s definitely an achievable goal.

Virginia

I don’t know. Do you like push ups? Are you a push up person?

Corinne

No, I’m not a push up person. But I do think there’s something fun sometimes about having an exercise goal that feels fun for you. And obviously you’re not going to go down a hole if you don’t get there.

Virginia

It’s something to do just for the sake of doing that thing. There’s no other agenda attached. I’m just like, oh, I can’t do a push up. I wonder if I could learn to do a push up. I don’t know! So we’ll see where it goes.

Corinne

I think it might be less of a learning thing and more of a building strength thing.

Virginia

I do feel like there’s a part of my brain that doesn’t understand it, though. I can go down and I just can’t get back up.

Corinne

But I think that’s strength, not your brain. It’s that those muscles aren’t strong enough.

Virginia

But, I can’t even figure out which muscles I want to activate? Like, I just get down there and I’m like, what would it be? Is it my arms? Is it my core? I don’t know. How do people do this?

Corinne

Maybe ask Anna Maltby.

Virginia

Anna Maltby, I need you!

Corinne

This will be an interesting one to check back in on.

Virginia

Okay, let’s see if I forgot all about it days after we recorded this, or if I am suddenly a push up queen, stay tuned.

[Post-recording note: Virginia has done no further push-ups! But it could still happen…some day!]

Corinne

I’m going recommend something very basic, but I want to recommend Baggu bags. I don’t really carry a purse if I’m going somewhere. I usually just claw my phone, my wallet, and my keys in one hand. I feel like there are a lot of memes about girls holding stuff. Then recently I was like, why don’t I just throw all this into a Baggu and carry that around instead?

Virginia

So you discovered…the concept of a purse?

Corinne

Yeah, but not a permanent purse. Like, I take it back out and I’ll use different ones at different times.

Virginia

You’re talking about the reusable shopping bag style, yeah?

Corinne

Yeah. I can sometimes still claw all my stuff and then sometimes have it in a little bag. But, yeah, I just think they’re great bags. And people are always like, wow, that’s such a cute bag. They’re really cute. Right now, I have some of the vegetable and fruit ones. I have like a melon one and a radish one.

Virginia

I have the strawberry one, and I love it.

Corinne

I have the strawberry one as well, so cute. They’re just very convenient, very lightweight, cute, colorful. So I’m recommending Baggu bags.

Virginia

I just ordered for my middle schoolers birthday—she’s a big horse kid and they have a new horse print. So I just got her one for, like, I don’t know what she’ll use it for, but. And I got her the little horse charm. Did you see that?

Corinne

I got a text from them about it. I was like, I need to send this to Virginia.

Virginia

And then you’re like, she gets the text as well. They really have transformed my actually remembering bags at the grocery store because they fold up so small that I can actually have them. I just remember to have them with me in a way that I never did, bulky bags.

Corinne

Because then also, if I’m carrying my wallet, etc, in one and then I’m stopping at the store, then I just dump the stuff out and use it. It’s very convenient.

Virginia

Yeah, you’re there. You’re already ready to use. They’re so well done. And I love the zipper pouches. Sorry, this is now becoming a whole Baggu ad. But you know what, guys, if you’re not on that train with us, you should get on it. They’re great.

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Mara Gordon, MD.

Dr. Mara is a family physician on the faculty of Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, as well as a writer, journalist and contributor to NPR. She also writes the newsletter Your Doctor Friend by Mara Gordon about her efforts to make medicine more fat friendly.

Dr. Mara is back today with Part 2 of our conversation about weight, health, perimenopause and menopause!

As we discussed last time, finding menopause advice that doesn’t come with a side of diet culture is really difficult. Dr Mara is here to help, and she will not sell you a supplement sign or make you wear a weighted vest.

This episode is free but if you value this conversation, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you.

PS. You can always listen to this pod right here in your email, where you’ll also receive full transcripts (edited and condensed for clarity). But please also follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and/or Pocket Casts! And if you enjoy today’s conversation, please tap the heart on this post — likes are one of the biggest drivers of traffic from Substack’s Notes, so that’s a super easy, free way to support the show!

And don’t miss these:

• Dr. Mara Will Not Sell You a Weighted Vest

• Healthcare is Ground Zero for Fatphobia

• Is Dr. Mary Claire Haver Making Menopause

Virginia

So today we’re going to move away from the weight stuff a little bit, into some of the other the wide constellation of things that can happen in menopause and perimenopause.

Before we get into some nitty gritty stuff, I want to do Laurie’s question about hormone replacement therapy, since that is still one of those topics that people are like, Is it good? Is it bad? I don’t know.

So Laurie asked:

Is there a reason why a doctor would not want to prescribe hormone replacement therapy? My doctor seems more willing to treat individual symptoms instead of using HRT. Is that maybe because I’m still getting my period?

Mara

I love this question. Now my professor hat can nerd out about interpretation of scientific research!

So first, I’ll just briefly say, Laurie, no big deal that you said HRT. But just so everyone’s aware, the preferred term is menopausal hormone therapy, MHT, or just hormone therapy, and it’s not a huge deal. But I think the North American Menopause Society now uses “menopausal hormone therapy.” The thinking is, hormones don’t necessarily need to be replaced. It comes back to that idea of, menopause is a natural part of life, and so the idea that they would need to be replaced is not totally accurate.

Virginia

We’re not trying to get you out of menopause, right? The goal isn’t to push you back into some pre-menopausal hormonal state.

Mara

But again, not a big deal. You’ll see HRT still used, and a lot of doctors still use that term.

So I graduated from medical school in 2015 and I remember one of the first times that a patient asked me about using menopausal hormone therapy, I was terrified. And I was still in training, so luckily, I had a mentor who guided me through it. But I had absorbed this very clear message from medical school, which is that menopausal hormone therapy will cause heart disease, cause pulmonary emboli, which are blood clots in the lungs, and cause breast cancer.

And I was like, “Ahhh! I’m gonna cause harm to my patients. This is scary.” I had also learned that hot flashes–they weren’t life threatening. So a patient could just use a fan and she’d be fine, right? She didn’t need medicine for it.

Virginia

Cool.

Mara

I think the dismissal of symptoms here is just straight up misogyny. That message of, oh, you should just live with this You’re tough, you’re a woman, you can do it. This is just the next stage of it. Is just misogyny, right?

But the fear of using menopausal hormone therapy has a specific historical context. There was a major study called the Women’s Health Initiative, and it was a randomized control trial, which is the gold standard in medical research. People were given estrogen and progestin to treat menopausal symptoms or they were given a placebo, and they didn’t know which pill they took. But WHI was actually halted early because they found an increased risk of breast cancer. This was on the front page of The New York Times. It was a really, really big deal. That was 2002 or 2003.

So even 15 years later, when I was starting out as a doctor, I was still absorbing its message. And I think a lot of doctors who are still in practice have just deeply absorbed this message.

But there’s a lot to consider here. The first issue is in the way that information about the Women’s Health Initiative was communicated. Nerd out with me for a second here: There is a big difference between absolute risk and relative risk. And this is a really subtle issue that’s often communicated poorly in the media.

So I looked it up in the initial paper that came out of the Women’s Health Initiative. There was a relative risk of 26 percent of invasive breast cancer, right? So that meant that the people who got the estrogen and progestin, as opposed to a placebo, had a relative increased risk of 26 percent compared to the placebo arm.

Virginia

Which sounds scary,

Mara

Sounds terrifying, right? But the absolute risk is the risk in comparison to one another. And they found that if you’re a patient taking the estrogen/progestin, your absolute risk was 8 people out of 10,000 women a year would get invasive breast cancer. So it’s very, very small.

And this is an issue I see in medical journalism all the time. We talk about relative risk, like your risk compared to another group, but the absolute risk remains extremely low.

And just to round it out: I looked all this up about cardiovascular events too. Things like a heart attack, a stroke. So the absolute risk was 19. So there were 19 cases of a cardiovascular event out of 10,000 women in a year. People just freaked out about this because of the way that it was covered in the media.

Virginia

I was fresh out of college, doing women’s health journalism at the time. So I fully own having been part of that problem. We definitely reported on the relative risk, not the absolute risk. And I don’t understand why. I look back and I’m like, what were we all doing? We ended up taking this medication away from millions of women who could really benefit from it.

Mara

I found a paper that showed between 2002 and 2009 prescriptions for menopausal hormone therapy declined by more than 60 percent.

Virginia

I’m not surprised.

Mara

And then even up until the time I started my training, right in 2015, we’re just seeing a huge decline in hormone therapy prescriptions.

One other thing that’s also super important to acknowledge about the Women’s Health Initiative is that they enrolled women over 60, which is not really representative of women who want or need hormone therapy. So the average age of menopause is 51 and the vast majority of women who are experiencing symptoms that would respond well to hormone therapy are much younger. We’re talking here mostly about hot flashes. Which we call vasomotor symptoms of menopause, but it’s basically hot flashes. Women dealing with this are much younger, right? So they’re approaching menopause, late 40s, and right after the menopausal transition, early 50s, and then they don’t necessarily need it anymore, after their symptoms have improved.

Virginia

And it will also be true that with women in their 60s, you’re going to see more incidence of cancer and heart disease in that age group than in women in their 40s anyway, right?

Mara

Right

Virginia

So even the 19 cases, the eight cases—they were looking at a higher risk population in general.

Mara

Yeah. And so there have been all these subsequent analyses, which is why now we’re seeing menopausal hormone therapy sort of on the upswing. There’s a lot of increased interest in it.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends it, the North American Menopause Society, the British Menopause Society; here’s a full run-down. It’s not that everybody needs it, and we’ll get to that in a second, but it is a totally safe and appropriate treatment for—specifically and most importantly—for vasomotor symptoms of menopause. Like hot flashes.

There’s been all these further analyses of the Women’s Health Initiative data and and then from other studies, too. And basically, it shows that when the hormone therapy is initiated before age 60, or within 10 years of menopause, there’s a reduced risk of heart disease and reduced mortality.

Virginia

Wow!

Mara

So the timing matters. Isn’t that so interesting? The timing matters.

Also, the route of administration matters. So what that means in English is that an estrogen patch seems to have a lower risk of blood clots. So one of those fears of the, you know, initial Women’s Health Initiative data was that you might have an increased risk of blood clots. But it’s something about the way that the estrogen is metabolized. It’s not metabolized through the liver when it’s absorbed through the skin, and something about that process seems to decrease the risk of blood clots.

So that’s why your doctor, if you’re interested in menopausal hormone therapy, might recommend an estrogen patch rather than a pill.

Virginia

Got it.

Mara

There’s a lot of ambiguity in all of this data, because, you know, we’re talking about just huge numbers of people, and it’s hard to sort of isolate variables when you’re studying just like massive cohorts of people and trying to understand what you know, what factors affect your risk for which diseases.

It’s not clear that taking hormones prevents heart disease. And that’s one of the big claims I see with menopause influencers, that every single person needs this.The data don’t support it at this point in time, and the major menopause organizations do not recommend it as a universal preventative treatment for everybody. But it seems like there might be some sort of association that may become clearer as research continues.

That said, now it seems like the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction. I learned, “be afraid of menopausal hormone treatment.” And now all these menopause influencers are saying everyone should be on hormone therapy.

I don’t know the answer. And so the way that I try to parse through all of this noise is, you know, go to trusted sources, right? So I stick to society guidelines, like the North American menopause society, the British menopause society, they’re run by world experts in menopause.

Virginia

Okay, so we don’t need to be terrified of hormone therapy, and you can be on it if you’re still getting your period right? Just to finish Laurie’s question.

Mara

If you’re still getting a period regularly, you’re more in perimenopause than past the menopausal transition. And we will often use contraception to help and that you can have a lot of the same benefits from using contraception in that stage. It’s also useful just because unintended pregnancy still can be totally a thing in your 40s. But yes, you can absolutely use traditional regimens of menopausal hormone therapy while you’re still getting a period too. Just know it won’t prevent pregnancy.

Virginia

Since we talked a little bit about hot flashes, I’m gonna jump to Judy’s question so we can kind of round that piece out:

One of the things I am really struggling with is the way I have lost all ability to regulate temperature. I am boiling hot almost all the time, and the slightest thing makes me break out into a full sweat, which makes me not want to move at all.

My doctor has not been super helpful in navigating this. What can I do to mitigate this issue? If anything, it is so very hard for me not to blame the size of my body for this, since the correlation seems so clear, smaller body less sweating, larger body sweating all the dang time.

Mara

Judy, I empathize first of all. Just one caveat I can’t really give medical advice to Judy. There are a lot of things that could be going on, and it’s really important that you see a doctor and get a full history and physical exam.

But I will say that this is one of the things that menopausal hormone therapy is extremely helpful for, is hot flashes.

Virginia

That was my first thought!

Mara

There are a lot of influencers who really overstate the benefits of hormone therapy, right? Hormone therapy is not really going to cause significant weight loss or prevent weight gain. It’s not totally clear that it helps with mood symptoms or even sleep is a little more ambiguous. But the one thing it really works for is hot flashes. So that would be my thought: Start there.

Virginia

And on the feeling like you want to blame your body for it: I don’t know if Judy identifies as fat, but as someone who identifies as fat, I often feel like I’m sweatier now than when I was thinner. I run warmer. All my skinny friends will be bundled up in coats, and I still won’t be wearing one in October. I do notice that. And I think that this is a situation where that is, even if those two things correlate— you’re larger and you’re sweatier—is that worth putting yourself through the hell of weight loss?

You may decide yes, it is, if hormone therapy doesn’t work for you.But that’s one of those times where I bring it back to “What would actually make my daily life miserable?” I can drink water, I can be in AC, I’m gonna find a link to this nighttime cooling bed thing that my friend Claire Zulkey really loves.

Mara

I’ve heard of those!

Virginia

I think there are options to mitigate your suffering with this. Medicine is definitely an option. Before you go to “okay, my body size has to be the thing that changes.”

Mara

I totally agree. I just deal with this all the time where people tell me in my clinic that they want to lose weight. And when I sort of gently ask, what are you hoping to achieve? What are your goals? They’re often things that can be achieved through other means. Like, people say my clothes don’t fit, right? And most of my patients are low-income, right? I’m not trying to be flippant about the idea that everyone can just go and purchase a new, you know, multi $1,000 wardrobe at the drop of a hat. But it is possible to get new clothes in affordable ways. Don’t torture yourself with clothes that don’t fit because you feel like weight gain is a moral failing.

And I think that there are things that we can do to help keep us at a comfortable temperature, right wear clothes that feel, you know, that feel good. Air conditioning is an amazing modern invention. And, you know, cool beverages, ice cream.

Virginia

Popsicle O’Clock is very important in my summer right now, very important.

Mara

Wait, what’s a popsicle clock?

Virginia

Oh, Popsicle O’Clock. It’s just the time of day where you eat popsicles. It could be 9am it could be 4pm just whenever I feel like we need to add popsicles to a situation.

Mara

I think we all need more popsicles in our life, that is absolutely for sure.

So I think what I’m hearing from Judy’s question is once again, shame about body size, and also this myopic zooming in on weight loss as the only possible solution. Which I blame doctors for in many ways!

Some people do benefit from weight loss, right? I’m not opposed to the idea that anybody would ever want to lose weight. I don’t think that that’s a betrayal of fat solidarity, necessarily. But that there are other things you can do just to make your life feel better in the meantime, or even if you choose to never pursue weight loss. There are things you can do to feel better, and we shouldn’t deprive ourselves of those things.

Virginia

And you don’t know that it is the weight gain. It could be age and hormones, and those coincided with the weight gain for you personally. But there are lots of thin women getting hot flashes all the time too.

Okay, this next question is from Michaela:

I am super curious about the connection between perimenopause, menopause and mental health symptoms, specifically, an uptick in anxiety and depression. Is this a thing?

We also got many questions about whether perimenopause and menopause exacerbate ADHD symptoms.

Mara

So this is a question I get a lot from my patients, and I’ve seen a lot of discourse about online. And the short answer is: There is probably a connection between the hormonal changes of perimenopause and the menopausal transition and mental health. Do we understand it? No.

So I mean, with ADHD specifically, I will say: This is really not my area of expertise. It’s a very complex mental health condition, and our medical understanding of it is really rapidly evolving. I have many patients who have a diagnosis of ADHD but I’m typically not the one who diagnoses them.

That being said: Estrogen affects neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are implicated in ADHD. Declining estrogen does seem to affect dopamine, in particular, which is implicated in ADHD. And anecdotally, I’ve had many of my patients say that they feel like their ability to focus and sustain attention decreases. And they experience brain fog as they enter perimenopause and menopause. So it’s there’s probably something going on, and a lot of researchers are really actively studying it, but we don’t know yet.

Virginia

Do we know if this is something that hormone therapy can help with?

Mara

So I think the answer is, I don’t know.

Virginia

What about anxiety and depression?

Mara

I don’t think the data are there, right? Hormone therapy is usually not considered a first line treatment for the mental health conditions that are often associated with the menopausal transition. But we have great medicines for those conditions. We have good treatments for ADHD, we have good treatments for anxiety and depression. And sometimes during the menopausal transition, patients might need an increase of those treatments. And that could mean going back into therapy, if you’ve been out of therapy, increasing your medications or restarting a med that you may have stopped years ago. Those are all totally valid approaches during this phase.

And I guess what I’d say, is that it’s okay to trust your body. And if you notice changes in your mental health associated with perimenopause or menopause itself, ask about it. Don’t be afraid to advocate for yourself. And while hormone therapy doesn’t look like it is an effective treatment specifically for those symptoms, there are other treatments, and you should feel empowered to ask about them.

Virginia

The next question goes back to some of the diet and exercise stuff we’ve touched on. This person writes:

Since recently reaching menopause, my cholesterol has become high. I understand there is a proven link between menopause and increased cholesterol, and that weight is part of the picture. I’m trying to lower my cholesterol with focus on nutrition and exercise. But it is fucking with my head because it feels like a very restrictive diet. I’d love any thoughts on the menopause cholesterol connection and keeping cholesterol low with nutrition and exercise without falling into the abyss of obsessing about how many almonds I’ve eaten.

Mara

Oh, that is such a good question!

Virginia

The almond of it all.

Mara

Almonds are really good in some scenarios, but also just like, kind of a sad snack. I always think about President Obama eating those, like, eight almonds, or whatever.

Virginia

It turns out that was a joke and he wasn’t doing that. But just the fact that everybody assumed he would says a lot!

Mara

That is hilarious, and I didn’t know! And it just shows how with information online, the initial story sticks. Like to this day, 10 years later, I still thought that Barack Obama ate eight almonds as his indulgent midnight snack every single night. I hope the man is eating some ice cream and living his best life.

Okay, so there is absolutely a link between menopause and elevated risk of cardiovascular disease. But even within the term cholesterol, there are different types. I wouldn’t really say to a patient, “Your cholesterol is high.” One thing you might hear is “your LDL cholesterol is high,” which is known popularly as, the “bad” cholesterol. Which, again, moral language alert.

But LDL cholesterol is a proxy for risk of cardiovascular disease. I will say it’s not a great one; it’s kind of a blunt instrument. We measure and we treat it, because we don’t have other great ways of predicting cardiovascular risk. But it is not the full portrait, although it’s certainly a risk factor for developing cardiovascular disease. And the transition of menopause seems to impact LDL, cholesterol, other biomarkers of cardiovascular disease, and increases your risk for cardiovascular disease.

And what’s interesting–I think we talked about this a little bit already, is that this happens, this this risk happens independent of normal aging.

So, for example, women who go through menopause early start developing this increased risk earlier than women who go through menopause slightly later. And overall, we see that women develop cardiovascular disease, at rates lower than men, and at later in life than men. And there’s a hypothesis that this has to do with menopause, right? That there’s a protective effect of estrogen, but then when your estrogen starts to decline in menopause, it puts women at an increased risk compared to where they were pre-menopause.

There’s also some data to suggest that the severity of menopause symptoms—particularly vasomotor symptoms like hot flashes or sleep disturbances—may indicate risk for developing cardiovascular disease. So this is not to scare everyone, but it’s good to have knowledge. If you’re having really severe hot flashes, it may indicate that you are at slightly higher risk for developing cardiovascular disease than somebody who is not.

The intention of having this knowledge is not to make you feel shame, and not to berate you for your belly fat or whatever. It’s to have knowledge so that you can help mitigate risk factors in ways that feel aligned with your values and ways that feel aligned with the way that you want to pursue health in your life.

And so I would approach this reader’s or this listener’s question with smy same approach to all of my patients questions. “I have hypertension, does that mean I need to lose weight?” “I have diabetes, does that mean I need to lose weight?” The answer is that we have many treatments that can help you address these concerns independent of weight loss. But this is not to say that you cannot pursue weight loss too, right? And if using a GLP-1 agonist to reduce your visceral adiposity is aligned with your values, and you can tolerate the side effects, and you feel good about it, and it’s covered by your insurance….that’s totally a reasonable approach. But it’s not the only one.

So I think what I’m hearing from this patient is the menopause flavor of what I do every single day in my work as a size inclusive doctor. Which is: How can we disentangle weight stigma and body shame from these questions of how to lead a healthy life? And the idea of giving you more information, I hope, is not to shame you or make you feel guilt for the relationship between body size and risk of cardiovascular disease, but instead, to give you information that might help you take proactive care of your body, right?

And proactive care might mean committing to an exercise routine. Proactive care might mean taking a statin. A statin is a very common cholesterol medicine like Lipitor. It might mean getting your blood pressure under control and taking an antihypertensive.

Virginia

I also want to say on cholesterol, specifically, I did a piece that I’ll link to digging into the connection between nutrition and cholesterol. And the data is not as strong as I think a lot of doctors are telling folks.

And I think the benefit of making dietary changes—the amount it could lower cholesterol—was not huge. It was like three points or six points or something in one of the studies we looked at. So if it’s making you crazy to count almonds, it’s possible that medication might be a more health promoting strategy for you. Because it will be less stressful and it will have a bigger benefit on your cholesterol than just trying to control it through diet and exercise.

Mara

Yeah, I totally agree. I think there’s a really strong genetic component that we haven’t fully understood and medication is a totally reasonable approach and very safe approach. Honestly, statins are pretty benign medications. They’re pretty inexpensive, pretty minimal side effects, which is not to say– nobody’s paying me from the statin companies, I swear to God!–but yeah, like they’re, they’re pretty benign as medications go. And I think it’s a totally reasonable way to approach this issue.

Virginia

I just think it’s one of those times where this is shame coming in, where it’s like, “You should be able to fix this with how you eat and exercise, and so you don’t get the medication unless you fail at that!” This is a framing that I’ve encountered from doctors. But what if we gave the medication, what if we also consider diet and exercise, but don’t make that a pass/fail situation in order to earn the medication?

Mara

Yeah, that’s really interesting.

And even the language you’re using Virginia is what we use in the medical record, and I’ve tried to stop it. But the way we’re taught to describe patients, is “patient failed XYZ treatment,” right? And I feel like we’re both at once, overly invested in pharmaceutical treatments, right and underinvested. They’re a very useful tool. And we moralize it, both pro and con? Sometimes, like, we moralize in favor of it. So if your BMI is 26 or above, you need to be on a GLP one agonist, which is just false, right?

But on the other hand, I think we often underutilize medications because there’s this sense that you’re getting at —that you have to exhaust all of your like willpower options first, and it’s somehow failing to use a med. And that is really false too. They’re really useful tools. Science is really useful, and we shouldn’t feel ashamed to use it.

Virginia

All right. And our last question, I like because it just will give us a chance to kind of sum up some key points:

As a post menopausal woman, I feel like I’m swimming in information, and I’m overwhelmed by it all. What are Dr Gordon’s top three pieces of advice out of all of the WHO meaning, if women at this time only did these three things, it would make the biggest difference, and then they just had it. You know, is, does it need to be different for perimenopause versus post menopause? Or maybe not.

So what are your top three? Top three tips for surviving this life stage?

Mara

Oh, my God, if only I knew! I’m flattered that you’re asking, and I will do my best to answer, but I don’t think there’s a right answer at all.

So I’ve thought about a couple things. I will say that, you know, longevity and wellness and health span is extremely complicated, but it’s also kind of simple, right?

So sometimes the advice that we’ve just heard over and over again is actually really, really good, right? So, sleep. Are we sleeping enough?

Staying engaged with social relationships, that seems to be extremely important for longevity. And it’s kind of amazing, actually. When they do these long-term studies on people who are thriving into old age, like they have really strong relationships. And that is so important.

Moving our bodies and it does not need to be punishing. Workouts can be gardening. I know Virginia, I love receiving your gardening content online. Gardening is an amazing form of exercise, and can be very life affirming, and does not need to feel like punishment. Just getting up, moving our bodies, sleeping enough, maintaining relationships, cultivating a sense of purpose and meaning in our lives. It’s actually been really studied right, that people who have a sense of meaning and have a sense of purpose in their lives tend to live longer and live longer, healthier lives.

So all of this is to say that like it’s complicated, but sometimes it’s not. And there are a million people on the Internet who want to sell you a miracle drug, a miracle supplement, a miracle weighted vest, whatever. But sometimes simple, Simple is good. Easier said than done, right?

Virginia

Yeah, but start simple. That’s wonderful.

Mara

Can I ask? Virginia, what would your advice be?

Virginia

I love the three areas you hit on: Sleep, social relations and exercise or moving your body. None of those are about weight loss or dieting. I think that’s really helpful for us to keep in mind that the things that might protect our health the most can also be very joyful as well. The idea that doing things that makes you happy and reduce your stress can be health-promoting is great. And I think that’s something especially in midlife. We are all incredibly busy. We’re holding a lot of things together. A lot of us are caregivers, maybe sandwich generation caregivers. So prioritizing your own joy in that feels really wonderful.

Virginia

All right, so speaking of joy, let’s do some Butter! Dr. Mara, what do you have for us?

Mara

I have a Philadelphia-specific one, but hopefully it can be extrapolated to our listeners in different locations. So I have recently been really craving soft serve ice cream. And so I googled best soft serve in Philadelphia, and I found this Vietnamese coffee shop called Càphê Roasters, which is in North Philly. In a neighborhood called Kensington. And it has condensed milk soft serve ice cream. So good.

And so I recently, I had to give a lecture at a medical school in the north part of the city early in the morning. It was like, 8am and I was like, “Oh, I’m never up in this neighborhood. I gotta get over there.” And I went after I gave my lecture, and I bought myself ice cream at 10:30 in the morning. And I ate it in my car, and it was so good. Condensed milk. So good. But soft serve in general, is my Butter. But for those of you in Philly, go to Càphê Roasters in Kensington and get the condensed milk. It is chef’s kiss, delicious.

Virginia

Amazing. I’m gonna double your Butter and say ice cream in general is my Butter right now. We have a spare fridge freezer that I have just been loading up with all of the popsicles to get us through summer.

But also: Ice cream dates. Something that comes up a lot for me as a co-parent is figuring out how to have one on one time with my kids. Since we have joint custody, they move as a package. So I get kid-free time, which is wonderful, but when they’re with me, it’s just me. So one thing I’ve been figuring out is pockets of time when I can take one kid out for ice cream. It’s usually when a sibling is at another activity, and so we have an hour to kill, and often we would just like, wait for the activity, or go home and come back, and then you’re just driving.

And now I’m like, No, that will be our ice cream break!

Mara

I love that.

Virginia

So one kid’s at the library doing her book trivia team stuff, and the other kid and I are getting ice cream while we wait for her. And it’s great one on one time with kids. Obviously, the ice cream is delicious. The other thing I’ve realized, especially if you have younger kids who are still building restaurant skills, ice cream is a great practice run at being a person in a restaurant, which is really hard for kids understandably. It is one food thing that they’re excited to go do. And you do have to sit and practice eating it somewhat neatly. There’s a high mess potential. My pro-move for that is, always have wipes in your car, bring a pack of wipes in.

Mara

I love that, and it’s so intentional about sort of creating traditions with kids. That feels really special. But I will say I had my ice cream solo, and that was also really good solo ice cream too.

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Farideh.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Ash Brandin of Screen Time Strategies, also know as The Gamer Educator on Instagram.

Ash is also the author of a fantastic new book, Power On: Managing Screen Time to Benefit the Whole Family.

Ash joined us last year to talk about how our attitudes towards screen time can be…diet-adjacent. I asked them to come back on the podcast this week because a lot of us are heading into back-to-school mode, which in my experience can mean feelingsss about screen routines.

There are A LOT of really powerful reframings in this episode that might blow your mind—and make your parenting just a little bit easier. So give this one a listen and share it with anyone in your life who’s also struggling with kids and screen time.

Today’s episode is free but if you value this conversation, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you!

PS. You can take 10 percent off Power On, or any book we talk about on the podcast, if you order it from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, along with a copy of Fat Talk! (This also applies if you’ve previously bought Fat Talk from them. Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)

Virginia

For anyone who missed your last episode, can you just quickly tell us who you are and what you do?

Ash

I’m Ash Brandin. I use they/them pronouns.I am a middle school teacher by day, and then with my online presence, I help families and caregivers better understand and manage all things technology—screen time, screens. My goal is to reframe the way that we look at them as caregivers, to find a balance between freaking out about them and allowing total access. To find a way that works for us.

Virginia

We are here today to talk about your brilliant new book, which is called Power On: Managing Screen Time to Benefit the Whole Family. I can’t underscore enough how much everybody needs a copy of this book. I have already turned back to it multiple times since reading it a few months ago. It just really helps ground us in so many aspects of this conversation that we don’t usually have.

Ash

I’m so glad to hear that it’s helpful! If people are new to who I am, I have sort of three central tenets of the work that I do:

* Screen time is a social inequity issue.

* Screens can be part of our lives without being the center of our lives.

* Screens and screen time should benefit whole families.

Especially in the last few years, we have seen a trend toward panic around technology and screens and smartphones and social media. I think that there are many reasons to be concerned around technology and its influence, especially with kids. But what’s missing in a lot of those conversations is a sense of empowerment about what families can reasonably do. When we focus solely on the fear, it ends up just putting caregivers in a place of feeling bad.

Virginia

You feel like you’re getting it wrong all the time.

Ash

Shame isn’t empowering. No one is like, “Well, I feel terrible about myself, so now I feel equipped to go make a change,” right?

Empowerment is what’s missing in so many of those conversations and other books and things that have come out, because it’s way harder. It’s so much harder to talk about what you can really do and reasonably control in a sustainable way. But I’m an educator, and I really firmly believe that if anyone’s in this sort of advice type space, be it online or elsewhere, that they need to be trying to empower and help families instead of just capitalizing on fear.

Virginia

What I found most powerful is that you really give us permission to say: What need is screen time meeting right now? And this includes caregivers’ needs. So not just “what need is this meeting for my child,” but what need is this meeting for me?

I am here recording with you right now because iPads are meeting the need of children have a day off school on a day when I need to work. We won’t be interrupted unless I have to approve a screen time request, which I might in 20 minutes.

I got divorced a couple years ago, and my kids get a lot more screen time now. Because they move back and forth between two homes, and each only has one adult in it. Giving myself permission to recognize that I have needs really got me through a lot of adjusting to this new rhythm of our family.

Ash

Absolutely. And when we’re thinking about what the need is, we also need to know that it’s going to change. So often in parenting, it feels like we have to come up with one set of rules and they have to work for everything in perpetuity without adjustment. That just sets us up for a sense of failure if we’re like, well, I had this magical plan that someone told me was going to work, and it didn’t. So I must be the problem, right? It all comes back to that “well, it’s my fault” place.

Virginia

Which is screens as diet culture.

Ash

All over again. We’re back at it. It’s just not helpful.

If instead, we’re thinking about what is my need right now? Sometimes it’s “I have to work.” And sometimes it’s “my kid is sick and they just need to relax.” Sometimes it’s, as you were alluding to earlier, it’s we’ve all just had a day, right? We’ve been run ragged, and we just need a break, and that need is going to dictate very different things. If my kid is laid up on the couch and throwing up, then what screen time is going to be doing for them is very different than If I’m trying to work and I want them to be reasonably engaged in content and trying to maybe learn something. And that’s fine. Being able to center “this is what I need right now,” or “this is what we need right now,” puts us in a place of feeling like we’re making it work for us. Instead of feeling like we’re always coming up against some rule that we’re not going to quite live up to.

Virginia

I’d love to talk about the inequity piece a little more too. As I said, going from a two parent household to a one parent household, which is still a highly privileged environment—but even just that small shift made me realize, wait a second. I think all the screen time guidance is just for typical American nuclear families. Ideally, with a stay at home parent.

So can you talk about why so much of the standard guidance doesn’t apply to most of our families?

Ash

It’s not even just a stay at home parent. It’s assuming that there is always at least one caregiver who is fully able to be present. Mom, default parent, is making dinner, and Dad is relaxing after work and is monitoring what the kids are doing, right? And it’s one of those times where I’m like, have you met a family?

Virginia

People are seven different places at once. It’s just not that simple.

Ash

It’s not that simple, right? It’s like, have you spent five minutes in a typical household in the last 10 years? This is not how it’s going, right?

So the beginning of the book helps people unlearn and relearn what we may have heard around screens, including what research really does or doesn’t say around screens, and this social inequity piece. Because especially since the onset of COVID, screens are filling in systemic gaps for the vast majority of families.

I’m a family with two caregivers in the home. We both work, but we’re both very present caregivers. So we’re definitely kind of a rarity, that we’re very privileged. We’re both around a lot of the time. And we are still using screens to fill some of those gaps.

So whether it’s we don’t really have a backyard, or people are in a neighborhood where they can’t send their kids outside, or they don’t have a park or a playground. They don’t have other kids in the neighborhood, or it’s not a safe climate. Or you live in an apartment and you can’t have your neighbors complain for the fifth time that your kids are stomping around and being loud. Whatever it is—a lack of daycare, affordable after school care —those are all gaps. They all have to be filled. And we used to have different ways of filling those gaps, and they’ve slowly become less accessible or less available. So something has to fill them.

What ends up often filling them is screens. And I’m not saying that that’s necessarily a good thing. I’d rather live in a world in which everyone is having their needs met accessibly and equitably. But that’s a much harder conversation, and is one that we don’t have very much say in. We participate in that, and we might vote for certain people, but that’s about all we can really do reasonably. So, in the meantime, we have to fill that in with something and so screens are often going to fill that in.

Especially if you look at caregivers who have less privilege, who are maybe single caregivers, caregivers of color, people living in poverty—all of those aspects of scarcity impacts their bandwidth. Their capacity as a caregiver is less and spread thinner, and all of that takes away from a caregiver’s ability to be present. And there were some really interesting studies that were done around just the way that having less capacity affects you as a caregiver.

And when I saw that data, I thought, well, of course. Of course people are turning to screens because they have nothing else to give from. And when we think of it that way, it’s hard to see that as some sort of personal failure, right? When we see it instead as, oh, this is out of necessity. It reframes the question as “How do I make screens work for me,” as opposed to, “I’m bad for using screens.”

Virginia

Right. How do I use screen time to meet these needs and to hopefully build up my capacity so that I can be more present with my kids? I think people think if you’re using a lot of screens, you’re really never present. It’s that stereotype of the parent on the playground staring at their phone, instead of watching the kid play. When maybe the reason we’re at the playground is so my kid can play and I can answer some work emails. That doesn’t mean I’m not present at other points of the day.

Ash

Of course. You’re seeing one moment. I always find that so frustrating. It just really feels like you you cannot win. If I were sitting there staring at my child’s every move in the park, someone would be like, “you’re being a helicopter,” right? And if I look at my phone because I’m trying to make the grocery pickup order—because I would rather my child have time at the playground than we spend our only free hour in the grocery store and having to manage a kid in the grocery store and not having fun together, right? Instead I’m placing a pickup order and they’re getting to run around on the playground. Now also somehow I’m failing because I’m looking at my phone instead of my kid. But also, we want kids to have independent time, and not need constant input.

It really feels like you just can’t win sometimes. And being able to take a step back and really focus on what need is this meeting? And if it’s ours, and if it is helping me be more present and connected, that’s a win. When I make dinner in the evening, my kid is often having screen time, and I will put in an AirPod and listen to a podcast, often Burnt Toast, and that’s my decompression. Because I come home straight from work and other things. I’m not getting much time to really decompress.

Virginia

You need that airlock time, where you can decompress and then be ready to be present at dinner.

I’m sure I’ve told you this before, but I reported a piece on screen time for Parents Magazine, probably almost 10 years ago at this point, because I think my older child was three or four. And I interviewed this Harvard researcher, this older white man, and I gave him this the dinner time example. I said, I’m cooking dinner. My kid is watching Peppa Pig so that I can cook dinner, and take a breath. And then we eat dinner together. And he said, “Why don’t you involve her in cooking dinner? Why don’t you give her a bag of flour to play with while you cook dinner?”

Ash

Of all the things!

Virginia

And I said to him: Because it’s 5pm on a Wednesday and who’s coming to clean the flour off the ceiling?

Ash

A bag of flour. Of all the things to go to!

Virginia

He was like, “kids love to make a happy mess in the kitchen!” I was like, well I don’t love that. And it was just exactly that. My need didn’t matter to him at all. He was like, “h, well, if you just want to pacify your children…” I was like, I do, yes, in that moment.

Ash

Well, and I think that’s another part of it is that someone says it to us like that, and we’re like, “well, I can’t say yes,” right? But in the moment, yeah, there are times where it’s like, I need you to be quiet.

And as hard as this can be to think, sometimes it’s like right now, I need you to be quiet and convenient because of the situation we’re in. And that doesn’t mean we’re constantly expecting that of them, and hopefully that’s not something we’re doing all the time. But if the need is, oh my God, we’re all melting down, and if we don’t eat in the next 15 minutes, we’re going to have a two hour DEFCON1 emergency on our hands, then, yeah, I’m gonna throw Peppa Pig on so that we can all become better regulated humans in the next 15 minutes and not have a hungry meltdown. And that sounds like a much better alternative to me!

Virginia

Than flour all over my kitchen on a Wednesday, right? I mean, I’ll never not be mad about it. It’s truly the worst parenting advice I’ve ever received.

So thank you for giving us all more space as caregivers to be able to articulate our own needs and articulate what we need to be present. It’s what we can do in the face of gaps in the care system that leave us holding so much.

That said: I think there are some nitty gritty aspects of this that we all struggle wit, so I want to talk about some of the nuts and bolts pieces. One of my biggest struggles is still the question of how much time is too much time? But you argue that time really isn’t the measure we should be using.

As you’re saying, that need is going to vary day to day, and all the guidance that’s been telling us, like, 30 minutes at this age, an hour at this age, all of that is not particularly germane to our lives. So can you explain both why time is less what we should fixate on? And then how do I release myself? How do I divest from the screen time diet culture?

Ash

Oh man, I wish I had a magic bullet for that one. We’ll see what I can do.

When I was writing this and thinking about it and making content about it, I kept thinking about you. Because the original time guidelines that everyone speaks back to—they’re from the AAP. And they have not actually been used in about 10 years, but people still bring them up all the time. The “no time under two” and “up to an hour up to age five” and “one to two hours, five to 12.” And if you really dig in, I was following footnote after footnote for a while, trying to really find where did this actually come from? It’s not based on some study that found that that’s the ideal amount of time. It really came from a desire to find this middle ground of time spent being physically idle. These guidelines are about wanting to avoid childhood obesity.

Virginia

Of course.

Ash

It all comes back, right?

Virginia

I should have guessed it.

Ash

And so in their original recommendations, the AAP note that partially this is to encourage a balance with physical movement. Which, of course, assumes that if you are not sitting watching TV or using an iPad, that you will be playing volleyball or something.

Virginia

You’ll automatically be outside running around.

Ash

Exactly, of course, those are the only options.

Virginia

It also assumes that screen time is never physical. But a lot of kids are very physical when they’re watching screens.

Ash

Exactly. And it, of course, immediately also imposes a morality of one of these things is better—moving your body is always better than a screen, which is not always going to be true, right? All these things have nuance in them.

But I thought that was so interesting, and it shouldn’t have surprised me, and yet somehow it still did. And of course it is good to find movement that is helpful for you and to give your kids an enjoyment of being outside or moving their bodies, or playing a sport. And putting all of that in opposition to something else they may enjoy, like a screen, really quickly goes to that diet culture piece of “well, how many minutes have you been doing that?” Because now we have to offset it with however many minutes you should be running laps or whatever.

So those original recommendations are coming from a place of already trying to mitigate the negatives of sitting and doing something sort of passively leisurely. And in the last 10 years, they’ve moved away from that, and they now recommend what’s called making a family media plan. Which actually I think is way better, because it is much more prioritizing what are you using this for? Can you be doing it together? What can you do? It’s much more reasonable, I think. But many people still go back to those original recommendations, because like you said, it’s a number. It’s simple. Just tell me.

Virginia

We love to grab onto a number and grade ourselves.

Ash

Just tell me how much time so that I can tell myself I’m I’m doing a good job, right? But you know, time is just one piece of information. It can be so specific with what am I using that time to do? If I’m sitting on my computer and doing work for an hour and a half, technically, that is screen time, but it is going to affect me a lot differently than if I’m watching Netflix or scrolling my phone for an hour and a half. I will feel very different after those things.

And I think it’s really important to be aware of that, and to make our kids aware of that from an early age, so that they are thinking about more than just, oh, it’s been X amount of minutes. And therefore this is okay or not okay.

Because all brains and all screens are different. And so one kid can watch 20 minutes of Paw Patrol, and they’re going to be bouncing off the walls, because, for whatever reason, that’s just a show that’s really stimulating for them. And somebody else can sit and watch an hour and a half of something, and they’ll be completely fine. So if you have a kid that is the first kid, and after 20 minutes, you’re like, oh my god, it’s not even half an hour. This is supposed to be an okay amount. This is how they’re acting. We’re right back to that “something’s wrong. I’m wrong. They’re bad,” as opposed to, “What is this telling me? What’s something we could do differently? Could we try a different show? Could we try maybe having some physical movement before or after, see if that makes a difference?” It just puts us more in a place of being curious to figure out again, how do I make this work for me? What is my need? How do I make it work for us?

And not to rattle on too long, but there was a big study done in the UK, involving over 120,000 kids. And they were trying to find what they called “the Goldilocks amount of time.”

Virginia

Yes. This is fascinating.

Ash

So it’s the amount of time where benefit starts to wane. Where we are in that “just right”amount. Before that, might still be okay, but after that we’re going to start seeing some negative impacts, particularly when it comes to behavior, for example.

What they found in general was that the Goldilocks number tended to be around, I think, an hour and 40 minutes a day. Something around an hour and a half a day. But if you looked at certain types of screens, for computers or TV, it was much higher than that. It was closer to three hours a day before you started seeing some negative impacts. And even for things like smartphones, it was over an hour a day.

But what I found so so interesting, is that they looked at both statistical significance, but also what they called “minimally important difference,” which was when you would actually notice these negative changes, subjectively, as a caregiver.

So this meant how much would a kid have to be on a screen for their adult at home to actually notice “this is having an impact on you,” regularly. And that amount was over four and a half hours a day on screens.

Virginia

Before caregivers were like, “Okay, this is too much!”

And the fact that the statistically significant findings for the minutia of what the researchers looking at is so different from what you as a caregiver are going to actually be thrown by. That was really mind blowing to me.

Ash

Right, And that doesn’t mean that statistical significance isn’t important, necessarily. But we’re talking about real minutiae. And that doesn’t always mean that you will notice any difference in your actual life.

Of course, some people are going to hear this and go, “But I don’t want my kid on a screen for four and a half hours.” Sure. That’s completely reasonable. And if your kid is having a hard time after an hour, still reasonable, still important. That’s why we can think less about how many minutes has it been exactly, and more, what am I noticing? Because if I’m coming back to the need and you’re like, okay, I have a meeting and I need an hour, right? If you know, “I cannot have them use their iPad for an hour, because they tend to become a dysregulated mess in 25 minutes,” that’s much more useful information than “Well, it says they’re allowed to have an hour of screen time per day so this should be fine because it’s an hour.”

Virginia

Right.

Ash

It sets you up for more success.

Virginia

And if you know your kid can handle that hour fine and can, in fact, handle more fine, it doesn’t mean, “well you had an hour of screen time while I was in a meeting so now we can’t watch a show together later to relax together.” You don’t have to take away and be that granular with the math of the screens. You can be like, yeah, we needed an extra hour for this meeting, and we’ll still be able to watch our show later. Because that’s what I notice with my kids. If I start to try to take away from some other screen time, then it’s like, “Oh, god, wait, but that’s the routine I’m used to!” You can’t change it, and that’s fair.

Ash

Yes, absolutely. And I would feel that way too, right? If someone were giving me something extra because it was a convenience to them, but then later was like, “oh, well, I have to take that from somewhere.” But they didn’t tell me that. I would be like, Excuse me, that’s weird. That’s not how that works, right? This was a favor to you, right?

Virginia

Yeah, exactly. I didn’t interrupt your meeting. You’re welcome, Mom.

Where the time anxiety does tend to kick in, though, is that so often it’s hard for kids to transition off screens. So then parents think, “Well, it was too much time,” or, “The screen is bad.” This is another very powerful reframing in your work. So walk us through why just because a kid is having a hard time getting off screens doesn’t mean it was too much and it doesn’t mean that screens are evil?

Ash

So an example I use many times that you can tweak to be whatever thing would come up for your kid is bath time. I think especially when kids are in that sort of toddler, three, four age. When my kid was that age, we had a phase where transitioning to and from the bathtub was very hard. Getting into it was hard. But then getting out of it was hard.

Virginia

They don’t ever want to get in. And then they never want to leave.

Ash

They never want to get out, right? And in those moments when my kid was really struggling to get out of the bathtub, imagine how it would sound if I was like, “Well, it it’s the bathtub’s fault.” Like it’s the bath’s fault that they are having such a hard time, it’s because of the bubbles, and it smells too good, and I’ve made it too appealing and the water’s too warm. Like, I mean, I sound unhinged, right?

Virginia

“We’re going to stop bathing you.”

Ash

Exactly. We would not say, “Well, we can’t have baths anymore.” Or when we go to the fun playground, and it’s really hard to leave the fun playground, we don’t blame the playground. When we’re in the grocery store and they don’t want to leave whichever aisle, we don’t blame the grocery store. And we also don’t stop taking them to the grocery store. We don’t stop going to playgrounds. We don’t stop having baths. Instead, we make different decisions, right? We try different things. We start a timer. We have a different transition. We talk about it beforehand. We strategize, we try things.

Virginia

Give a “Hey, we’re leaving in a few minutes!” so they’re not caught off guard.

Ash

Exactly. We talk about it. Hey, last time it was really hard to leave here, we kind of let them know ahead of time, or we race them to the car. We find some way to make it more fun, to make the transition easier, right? We get creative, because we know that, hey, they’re going to have to leave the grocery store. They’re going to have to take baths in a reasonable amount of time as they grow up into their lives. We recognize the skill that’s happening underneath it.

And I think with screens, we don’t always see those underlying skills, because we see it as this sort of superfluous thing, right? It’s not needed. It’s not necessary. Well, neither is going to a playground, technically.

A lot of what we do is not technically required, but the skill underneath is still there. So when they are struggling with ending screen time, is it really the screen, or is it that it’s hard to stop doing something fun. It’s hard to stop in the middle of something. It’s hard to stop if you have been playing for 20 minutes and you’ve lost every single race and you don’t want to stop when you’ve just felt like you’ve lost over and over again, right? You want one more shot to one more shot, right?

People are going to think, “Well, but screens are so much different than those other things.” Yes, a screen is designed differently than a playground or a bath. But we are going to have kids who are navigating a technological and digital world that we are struggle to even imagine, right? We’re seeing glimpses of it, but it’s going to be different than what we’re experiencing now, and we want our kids to be able to navigate that with success. And that comes back to seeing the skills underneath. So when they’re struggling with something like that, taking the screen out of it, and asking yourself, how would I handle this if it were anything else. How would I handle this if it were they’re struggling to leave a friend’s house? I probably wouldn’t blame the friend, and I wouldn’t blame their house, and I wouldn’t blame their boys.

Virginia

We’re never seeing that child again!

Ash

I would validate and I would tell them, it’s hard. And I would still tell them “we’re ending,” and we would talk about strategies to make it easier next time. And we would get curious and try something, and we would be showing our kids that, “hey, it’s it’s okay to have a hard time doing that thing. It’s okay to have feelings about it. And we’re still gonna do it. We’re still going to end that thing.”

Most of the time, the things that we are struggling with when it comes to screens actually boil down to one of three things, I call them the ABCs. It’s either Access, which could be time, or when they’re having it, or how much. Behavior, which you’re kind of bringing up here. And Content, what’s on the screen, what they’re playing, what they what they have access to.

And so sometimes we might think that the problem we’re seeing in front of us is a behavior problem, right? I told them to put the screen away. They’re not putting the screen away. That’s a behavior problem. But sometimes it actually could be because it’s an access issue, right? It’s more time than they can really handle at that given moment. Or it could be content, because it’s content that makes it harder to start and stop. So a big part of the book is really figuring out, how do I know what problem I’m even really dealing with here? And then what are some potential things that I can do about it? To try to problem solve, try to make changes and see if this helps, and if it helps, great, keep it. And if not, I can get curious and try something else. And so a lot of it is strategies to try and ways to kind of, you know, backwards engineer what might be going on, to figure out how to make it work for you, how to make it better.

Virginia

It’s so helpful to feel like, okay, there’s always one more thing I can tweak and adjust. Versus “it’s all a failure. We have to throw it out.” That kind of all or nothing thinking that really is never productive.

The reason I think it’s so helpful that you draw that parallel with the bath or the play date is it reminds us that there are some kids for whom transitions are just always very difficult—like across the board. So you’re not just seeing a screen time problem. You’re being reminded “My kid is really building skills around transitions. We don’t have them yet.” We hope we will have them at some point. But this is actually an opportunity to work on that, as opposed to a problem. We can actually practice some of these transition skills.

Ash

And I really like coming back to the skill, because if we’re thinking of it as a skill, then we’re probably more likely to tell our kids that it’s a skill, too. Because if we’re just thinking of it as like, well, it’s a screen. It’s the screen’s fault, it’s the screen’s fault. Then we might not say those literal words to our kids, but we might say, like, it’s always so hard to turn off the TV. Why is that, right? We’re talking about it as if it’s this sort of amorphous, like it’s only about the television, or it’s only about the iPad, and we’re missing the part of making it clear to our kids that, hey, this is a skill that you’re working on, and we work on this skill in different ways.

Virginia

I did some good repair with my kids after reading your book. Because I was definitely falling into the trap of talking about screen addiction. I thought I was saying to them, “It’s not your fault. The screens are programmed to be bad for us in this way” So I thought, I was like at least not blaming them, but being like, we need less screens because they’re so dangerous.

But then I read your book, and I was like, oh, that’s not helpful either. And I did have one of my kids saying, “Am I bad because I want to watch screens all the time?” And I was like, oh, that’s too concrete and scary.

And again, to draw the parallel with diet culture: It’s just like telling kids sugar is bad, and then they think they’re bad because they like sugar. So I did do some repair. I was like, “I read this book and now I’ve learned that that was not right.” They were like, oh, okay. We’re healing in my house from that, so thank you.

Ash

Oh, you’re very welcome, and I’m glad to hear that!

I think about those parallels with food all the time, because sometimes it just helps me think, like, wait, would I be wanting to send this message about food or exercise or whatever? And if the answer is no, then how can I tweak it so that I’m sending a message I’d be okay with applying to other things. And I like being able to make those parallels with my kid. In my household right now, we’re practicing flexibility. Flexibility is a skill that we’re working on in so many parts of our lives. And when I say we, I do mean we. Me, everybody is working on this.

Virginia

Parents can use more flexibility, for sure.

Ash

Absolutely. And so like, when those moments are coming up, you know, I’m trying to say, like, hey, like, what skill is this right now? Who’s having to be flexible right now? Flexible can be a good thing, right? We might be flexible by saying yes to eating dinner on the couch and watching a TV show. That’s flexibility. Flexibility isn’t just adjust your plans to be more convenient to me, child, so that I can go do something as an adult. And coming back to those skills so they can see, oh, okay, this isn’t actually just about screens. This applies to every part of these of my life, or these different parts of my life, and if I’m working on it here, oh, wow, it feels easier over there. And so they can see that this applies throughout their life, and kind of feel more of that buy in of like, oh, I’m getting better at that. Or that was easier. That was harder. We want them to see that across the board.

Virginia

Oh, my God, absolutely.

Let’s talk about screens and neurodivergence a little bit. So one of my kiddos is neurodivergent, and I can both see how screens are wonderful for them at the end of a school day, when they come home and they’re really depleted. Screen time is the thing they need to rest and regulate. And they love the world building games, which gives them this whole world to control and explore. And there’s so much there that’s wonderful.

And, they definitely struggle more than their sibling with this transition piece, with getting off it. One kid will naturally put down the iPad at some point and go outside for a bit, and this kid will not. And it creates more anxiety for parents. Because neurodivergent kids may both need screens—in ways that maybe we’re not totally comfortable with, but need to get comfortable with—and then struggle with the transition piece.

So how do you think about this question differently with neurodivergence? Or or is it really the same thing you’re just having to drill in differently?

Ash

I think it is ultimately the same thing, but it certainly is going to feel quite more heightened. And I think especially for certain aspects of neurodivergence, especially, I think it feels really heightened because of some of the ways that they might be discussed, particularly online, when it comes to how they relate to technology.

I think about ADHD, we’ll see that a lot. Where I’ll see many things online about, like, “kids with ADHD should never be on a screen. They should never be on a device, because they are so dopamine-seeking.” And I have to just say that I find that to be such an ableist framing. Because with ADHD, we’re talking about a dopamine deficient brain. And I don’t think that we would be having that same conversation about someone needing insulin, right? Like, we wouldn’t be saying, like, oh yeah, nope, they can’t take that insulin.

Virginia

They’re just craving that insulin they need to stay alive.

Ash

A kid seeking a thing that they’re that they are somehow deficient in—that’s not some sort of defiant behavior.

Virginia

No, it’s a pretty adaptive strategy.

Ash

Absolutely, it is. And we want kids to know that nobody’s brain is good or bad, right? There’s not a good brain or a bad brain. There are all brains are going to have things that are easier or harder. And it’s about learning the brain that you’re in, and what works or doesn’t work for the brain that you’re in.

And all brains are different, right? Neurotypical brains and neurodivergent brains within those categories are obviously going to be vastly different. What works for one won’t work for another, and being able to figure out what works for them, instead of just, “because you have this kind of brain, you shouldn’t ever do this thing,” that’s going to set them up for more success.

And I think it’s great that you mentioned both how a screen can be so regulating, particularly for neurodivergent brains, and then the double-edged sword of that is that then you have to stop.

Virginia

Transition off back into the world.

Ash

So if the pain point is a transition, what is it really coming from? Is it coming from the executive function piece of “I don’t know how to find a place to stop?” A lot of people, particularly kids ADHD, they often like games that are more open-ended. So they might like something like a Minecraft or an Animal Crossing or the Sims where you can hyperfocus and deep dive into something. But what’s difficult about that is that, you know, if I play Mario Kart, the level ends, it’s a very obvious ending.

Virginia

Right? And you can say, “One more level, and we’re done.”

Ash

Exactly. We’ve reached the end of the championship. I’m on the podium. I quit now, right?

But there’s a never ending series of of tasks with a more open-ended game. And especially if I’m in my hyper focus zone, right? I can just be thinking, like, well, then I can do this and this and this and this and this, right?

And I’m adding on to my list, and the last thing I want to do in that moment is get pulled out of it when I’m really feeling like I’m in the zone. So if that’s the kind of transition that’s difficult. And it’s much less about games and more about “how do I stop in the middle of a project?” Because that’s essentially what that is.

And that would apply if I’m at school and I’m in the middle of an essay and we’re finishing it up tomorrow. Or I’m trying to decorate a cake, and we’re trying to walk out the door and I have to stop what I’m doing and come back later. So one of the tricks that I have found really helpful is to ask the question of, “How will you know when you’re done?” Or how will you know you’re at a stopping point? What would a stopping point be today? And getting them to sort of even visualize it, or say it out loud, so that they can think about, “Oh, here’s how I basically break down a giant task into smaller pieces,” because that’s essentially what that is.

Virginia

That’s a great tip.

Ash

“Okay, you have five minutes. What is the last thing you’re going to do today?” Because then it’s concrete in terms of, like, I’m not asking the last thing, and it will take you half an hour, right? I’m at, we have five minutes. What’s the last thing you’re wrapping up? What are you going to do?

Then, if it’s someone who’s very focused in this world, and they’re very into that world, then that last thing can also be our transition out of it. As they’re turning it off, the very first thing we’re saying to them is, “So what was that last thing you were doing?”

Virginia

Oh, that’s nice.

Ash

Then they’re telling it to us, and then we can get curious. We can ask questions. We can get a little into their world to help them transition out of that world. That doesn’t mean that we have to understand what they’re telling us, frankly. It doesn’t mean we have to know all the nuance. But we can show that interest. I think this is also really, really important, because then we are showing them it’s not us versus the screen. We’re not opposing the screen, like it’s the enemy or something. And we’re showing them, “Hey, I can tell you’re interested in this, so I’m interested in it because you are.” Like, I care about you, so I want to know more.

Virginia

And then they can invite you into their world, which what a lot of neurodivergent kids need. We’re asking them to be part of the larger world all the time. And how nice we can meet them where they are a little more.

Ash

Absolutely.

The other thing I would say is that something I think people don’t always realize, especially if they don’t play games as much, or if they are not neurodivergent and playing games, is they might miss that video games actually are extremely well-accommodated worlds, in terms of accommodating neurodivergence.

So thinking about something like ADHD, to go back to that example, it’s like, okay, some really common classroom accommodations for ADHD, from the educator perspective, the accommodations I see a lot are frequent check ins, having a checklist, breaking down a large task into smaller chunks, objectives, having a visual organizer.

Well, I think about a video game, and it’s like, okay, if I want to know what I have available to me, I can press the pause menu and see my inventory at any time. If I want to know what I should be doing, because I have forgotten, I can look at a menu and see, like, what’s my objective right now? Or I can bring up the map and it will show me where I supposed to be going.

If I start to deviate from what I’m supposed to be doing, the game will often be like, “Hey, don’t forget, you’re supposed to be going over there!” It’ll get me back on task. If I’m trying to make a potion that has eight ingredients, the game will list them all out for me, and it will check them off as I go, so I can visually see how I’m how I’m achieving this task. It does a lot of that accommodation for me. And those accommodations are not as common in the real world, or at least not as easily achieved.

And so a lot of neurodivergent kids will succeed easily in these game worlds. And we might think “oh because it’s addicting, or the algorithm, or it’s just because they love it” But there are often these structural design differences that actually make it more accessible to them.

And if we notice, oh, wow, they have no problem knowing what to do when they’re playing Zelda, because they just keep checking their objective list all the time or whatever—that’s great information.

Virginia

And helps us think, how can we do that in real life?

Ash

Exactly. We can go to them and say, hey, I noticed you, you seem to check your inventory a lot when you’re playing that game. How do we make it so that when you look in your closet, you can just as easily see what shirts you own. Whatever the thing may be, so that we’re showing them, “hey, bring that into the rest of your world that works for you here.” Let’s make it work for you elsewhere, instead of thinking of it as a reason they’re obsessed with screens, and now we resent the screens for that. Bring that in so that it can benefit the rest of their lives.

Virginia

I’m now like, okay, that just reframes something else very important for me. You have such a helpful way of helping us divest from the guilt and the shame and actually look at this in a positive and empowering way for us and our kids. And I’m just so grateful for it. It really is a game changer for me.

Ash

Oh, thank you so much. I’m so glad to hear that it was helpful and empowering for you, and I just hope that it can be that for others as well.

Butter

Ash

So my family and I have been lucky enough to spend quite a lot of time in Japan. And one of the wonderful things about Japan is they have a very huge bike culture. I think people think of the Netherlands as Bike cCentral, but Japan kind of rivals them.

And they have a particular kind of bike that you cannot get in the United States. It’s called a Mamachari, which is like a portmanteau of mom and chariot. And it’s sort of like a cargo bike, but they are constructed a little differently and have some features that I love. And so when I’ve been in Japan, we are on those bikes. I’m always like, I love this kind of bike. I want this kind of bike for me forever. And my recent Butter has been trying to find something like that that I can have in my day to day life. And I found something recently, and got a lovely step through bike on Facebook Marketplace.

Virginia

So cool! That’s exciting to find on marketplace, too.

Ash

Oh yes, having a bike that like I actually enjoy riding, I had my old bike from being a teenager, and it just was not functional. I was like, “This is not fun.” And now having one that I enjoy, I’m like, oh yes. I feel like a kid again. It’s lovely.

Virginia

That’s a great Butter. My Butter is something both my kids and my pets and I are all really enjoying. I’m gonna drop a link in the chat for you. It is called a floof, and it is basically a human-sized dog bed that I found on Etsy. It’s like, lined with fake fur.

Ash

My God. I’m looking at it right now.

Virginia

Isn’t it hilarious?

Ash

Wow. I’m so glad you sent a picture, because that is not what I was picturing?

Virginia

I can’t describe it accurately. It’s like a cross between a human-sized dog bed and a shopping bag? Sort of?

Ash

Yes, yes, wow. It’s like a hot tub.

Virginia

It’s like a hot tub, but no water. You just sit in it. I think they call it a cuddle cave. I don’t understand how to explain it, but it’s the floof. And it’s in our family room. And it’s not inexpensive, but it does basically replace a chair. So if you think of it as a furniture purchase, it’s not so bad. There’s always at least a cat or a dog sleeping in it. Frequently a child is in it. My boyfriend likes to be in it. Everyone gravitates towards it. And you can put pillows in it or a blanket.

Neurodivergent people, in particular, really love it, because I think it provides a lot of sensory feedback? And it’s very enclosed and cozy. It’s great for the day we’re having today, which is a very laid back, low demand, watch as much screen as you want, kind of day. So I’ve got one kid bundled into the floof right now with a bunch of blankets in her iPad, and she’s so happy.

Ash

Oh my gosh. Also, it kind of looks like the person is sitting in a giant pita, which I also love.

Virginia

That’s what it is! It’s like a giant pita, but soft and cozy. It’s like being in a pita pocket. And I’m sure there are less expensive versions, this was like, 300 something dollars, so it is an investment. But they’re handmade by some delightful person in the Netherlands.

Whenever we have play dates, there are always two or three kids, snuggled up in it together. There’s something extremely addictive about it. I don’t know. I don’t really know how to explain why it’s great, but it’s great.

Ash

Oh, that is lovely.

Virginia

All right, well tell obviously, everyone needs to go to their bookstore and get Power On: Managing Screen Time to Benefit the Whole Family. Where else can we find you, Ash? How can we support your work?

Ash

You can find me on Instagram at the gamer educator, and I also cross post my Instagram posts to Substack, and I’m on Substack as Screen Time Strategies. It’s all the same content, just that way you’re getting it in your inbox without, without having to go to Instagram. So if that’s something that you are trying to maybe move away from, get it via Substack. And my book Power On: Managing Screen Time to Benefit the Whole Family is available starting August 26 is when it fully releases.

Virginia

Amazing. Thank you so much. This was really great.

Ash

Thank you so much for having me back.

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Farideh.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.

For our last August hiatus episode, we’re looking back at a conversation we ran back in February of this year — exploring the work of attorney turned self-help guru Mel Robbins.

Did Mel steal the concept of “let them?”

Is she just Andrew Huberman for the “We Can Do Hard Things” crowd?

Is high-fiving yourself in the mirror every morning a diet?

As you’ll hear, Corinne and I didn’t totally agree… until we did. Let’s get into it.

To hear our discussion, you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. Subscriptions are $7 per month or $70 for the year.

Corinne

Today, we are talking about motivational speaker and author Mel Robbins and we have maybe some surprising opinions on this topic.

Virginia

We have different takes about Mel Robbins. Some evolving takes as well. In the course of researching this episode, I think we went on a little Mel Robbins journey.

Corinne

I’m going to introduce this topic by saying that I first heard about Mel Robbins a few weeks ago. My coach at the gym was like, “Have you heard of Mel Robbins?” And I was like, “Hmm, sounds familiar? What is that?” And she was like, “I just listened to her on this podcast, and I saw she was on Glennon Doyle, and I was just wondering if you knew who she was.” And I didn’t know who she was, but I was like I’ll listen to her Glennon Doyle episode.

I listened to it, and I liked it. I found it interesting and helpful.

And then, just a few days later, you messaged me, and you were like, “should we talk about this person on the podcast?”

Virginia

Yes, because I had no idea who she was. We should be clear, this is someone with 22 million followers on Instagram. Us not knowing her was an oversight. She’s an enormous celebrity, but I had somehow missed her completely. Amy texted me one of her reels and was like, this feels like a Burnt Toast episode waiting to happen and I sent it to you.

Corinne

And I was kind of like… No.

Virginia

You were like, she’s not a diet. I like her. It’s fine.

Corinne

I enjoyed her episode on We Can Do Hard Things. She’s a run of the mill self help-y person.

Just to give a little background, she has been a self help person for a long time. One of her first biggest things was she did one of the early TEDx talks that went insanely viral.

Virginia

In about 2011 or 2012.

Corinne

She had this book called The Five Second Rule. The concept is basically if you’re thinking about doing something, count down to five and then do it. Which, like, how is that helpful? But okay, a lot of people found it extremely helpful.

Virginia

Is it that it’s supposed to make quicker to do a thing you don’t want to do, or make you pause before doing a thing you should not do?

Corinne

I think it’s preventing you from overthinking / talking out yourself out of something.

Virginia

I guess that’s not my struggle. But I can see for people for whom that is a struggle, having somebody push you off the diving board—I mean, as someone who would never jump off a diving board, I would need to be pushed. I get it.

Corinne

She also has a podcast.

Virginia

The Wall Street Journal calls her “a billion view podcaster,” and Time Magazine says she gives millions of listeners around the globe a reason to believe in themselves.

Corinne

She’s very, very, very popular.

Virginia

Very popular. I also want to note that she is someone who is writing books about how to change your habits, how to overcome emotional hurdles. She is not a psychologist. She is not a social worker. She is not a therapist of any kind. She is a former attorney who first became famous because she started doing legal analysis on CNN. She covered the George Zimmerman trial for them and then that led to her first book in 2011 which was called, Stop Saying You’re Fine. So this high powered lawyer backstory to self help Guru is a is an interesting path.

Corinne

So I did get her book to research for this episode—

Virginia

You got the newest book?

Corinne

I have her newest book, The Let Them Theory, but I want to talk about that later.

But at the beginning of that book, she goes over her story, and to be honest, sitting here right now, can’t remember the details. But she has a struggle. Either she or husband got laid off, they’re having a hard time, and then she’s depressed, and that’s where the five second rule comes from. You’re saying she’s this high powered lawyer who goes into self help, but her story is like “I was struggling. I came up with this theory.”

Virginia

Okay, I also just want to note that—not to take away from her truth about herself—but Wikipedia also taught me that she and her husband own homes in three locations.

Corinne

I mean, she’s very wealthy right now.

Virginia

I’m just holding her personal struggle, overcoming how hard things were, and she is a former-attorney-turned-self-help-guru who owns three homes. So we can just hold those things together.

Corinne

Her struggle was 15 years ago.

Virginia

Different time! Maybe one home, one-and-a-half homes tops at that point.

Corinne

Do you want to talk kind of about her Instagram reels and the diet culture of it all?

Virginia

Yes. My assignment for this episode was Mel Robbins’ social media, which I spent some time on, and I’m still recovering from a little bit.

Her whole aesthetic on Instagram—you know how every influencer has their branding? Hers is very talk-to-the-camera, intense little pep talk videos. Or it’s excerpts from the podcast. She always starts the intense pep talks with like, “Hey, it’s your buddy Mel.” That’s her little like, “Hey, it’s your buddy Mel.” So this is our buddy, Mel, we’re going to talk about.

And, you know, they’re a real mix. Some of them are the five second rule. Sometimes it’s about letting go of your expectations for other people.

There was one reel I really liked where she’s just saying, like, if you’re going through a really hard time, like you have a terrible ex, or you are surviving some kind of trauma and you’re feeling overwhelmed and stressed out, that is actually what you should be doing. That’s not you failing, that’s you having a logical reaction to a hard thing. And I was like, yes, okay, I’m on board that seems right. It is important that it’s okay for us to be sad when things are sad and angry, when things are unfair. Especially given the current state of the world. That vibe I’m here for.

But in this reel, she talks about how important it is to drink a glass of water in the morning before you drink your coffee.

And again, this is a former attorney turned life guru, so I’m not clear why is Mel Robbins the expert for me on water before coffee?

Corinne

I mean, I don’t know, but it does seem like a good idea.

Virginia

I’m not saying it’s not a good idea. I’m just saying, why is she presenting it?

Corinne

She’s famous now, she gets to give advice on anything she wants.

Virginia

She starts talking about hormones and it gets very science-y, but there are no citations. There’s not even a nutritionist sitting next to her. Maybe this is from a podcast interview she did with a nutritionist? I don’t know. But there is no sourcing. She has this very emphatic way of speaking, and she’s like, this is the thing you need to do. And I just watched this, and I was like, oh, so she’s a Huberman bro! This is Huberman husband stuff, right?

Corinne

I mean, it’s self help! She’s telling you what to do.

Virginia

Mel Robbins would love to tell us all what to do.

Corinne

In the intro to her book, where she’s talking about how she got into writing these books, she refers to having done PhD levels of research.

Virginia

But on what? Because the science about hydration and coffee intake is very different from the research on how we move through big feelings during trauma. These are not related concepts, Corinne. So she’s doing PhD level research on everything?

Corinne

She has a PhD in giving advice.

Virginia

Do you want to talk us through the morning routine post?

Corinne

So, “this is the morning routine that’ll supercharge your energy all day.”

Virginia

“Backed by science,” that’s what she says.

Corinne

Starts with getting up when the alarm goes off. Once again, it’s not bad advice. Like, yes. But also is Mel Robbins telling you to do it going to make you do it? I don’t know.

Virginia

Sometimes you’re just not going to do that, and you might still have an okay day. It doesn’t mean the whole day fell apart because you didn’t get up the second your alarm went off.

Corinne

The next thing, making your bed, tidying your space—another very common self help tip!

Virginia

It’s “the simplest way to practice discipline,” Corinne. “A promise kept no matter what.”

Corinne

I’m going to be honest, I feel okay with the first two. Number three, “high five yourself in the mirror.” Like, no. I’m never going to do that. I hate that. I really hate it.

Virginia

I can’t stop laughing. She’s so serious in the photo. She has a selfie of her high fiving herself, and she’s so serious in the photo. Like she is earnestly high fiving herself.

Corinne

Let me tell you, “giving yourself a high five in the mirror rewires your brain to focus on self love and positive reinforcement.”

Virginia

The science behind that is all in her book, The High Five Habit. So there you go. The PhD level science that she’s done to confirm. I just imagine saying to someone actually struggling with depression or anxiety, like, “why don’t you just high five yourself in the mirror?” And, like, I think they would be justified in throat punching you. Like, “I’m sorry your mom just died. Have you tried high fiving yourself in the mirror?” Like, fuck you.

Corinne

This is the thing, right? This is what we talk about. It’s like, exercising does make us feel better, but you can’t tell someone struggling, “Just exercise.” Like, this advice is good. Like, get out of bed, have a glass of water. Exercise. And, no one needs that advice. Everyone knows that.

Virginia

High fiving yourself in the mirror I’m going to say is not good advice. Like, I’m going to say for most of us, that’s not going to be transformative in any way. It’s just going to be dumb.

Okay, then we get to the hydration stuff again. “Delay your caffeine one to two hours.” And then here we are. Andrew Huberman again, “Take in the morning light. Get outside ASAP.”

I currently have to wake up at five o’clock to get my middle schooler on the bus and it is dark for the next two hours. So I would be going outside in the dark. I do take in the morning light when I then drag an exhausted 11 year old out to the bus stop every morning. That counts. Okay, I get a gold star.

Corinne

So she definitely has a self help-y thing going on.

Virginia

Then the next reel I want you to look at is the one that references intermittent fasting.

In this one, she says, if you’re going through a divorce, if you’re feeling kind of lost in life, if you have no clue what you want to do, here’s a tip from your friend Mel Robbins, just do something really, really hard. As well as doing the really hard thing you’re going through. So she did five days of intensive intermittent fasting “for her gut health”—I’m using air quotes—and that is how she got through some hard time.

Corinne

Yeah. I mean, her other suggestion is training for a marathon. I sort of see a kernel of something here, but I can’t imagine actually giving someone this advice.

Virginia

Having gone through a divorce in recent memory, we can use me as an example. I felt like during those months, I was doing pretty good to keep the ball moving on my divorce. Like, keep parenting my children as best I could. Keep my business afloat. I did not need to be intermittent fasting on top of any of that. I didn’t. I was doing a lot. It was hard. I was doing all these hard things. I felt like I had enough. I don’t think training for a marathon would have done fucking anything for me. I just truly don’t. And I just needed to get through. The hard thing was enough.

I never want to demonize coping strategies, and so if someone’s like, training for my marathon did help me through my divorce. Like, amazing. But it feels like choosing a coping strategy that will give you a big block of time that’s filled with something else to distract you. And I just think, if it wasn’t diet- or exercise-related. Like, if it was like, “I’m binge drinking every Saturday night as my coping strategy,” that also fills a lot of time, also distracts you, takes your mind off your problems. But then suddenly we have a totally different narrative around it, you know? So it’s like the combining of we’re going to give you this big, all consuming thing, and we’re going to make it something that we attach a lot of moral virtue and like social performance to. And that somehow is going to be why it’s going to be helpful.

Corinne

Yes, the things she’s suggesting are committing to dry January fitness goals, building better money habits.

Virginia

Yeah, all good. But are they all projects you need? They’re all in and of themselves hard, complicated projects. Do you need to do them while in some other crisis?

Corinne

No, I don’t think you do.

Virginia

So this is why I’m saying yes, Mel Robbins is a diet. There’s just this make it as hard as possible, push yourself to do more. Everything Sounds like a simple, easy tip, but she wants you to do 900 of them. That’s what I’m pushing back against. And then, I mean, there were a couple other reels. We don’t need to take them one by one, but, she’s done podcast episodes on how to boost your metabolism for weight loss. She’s done podcast episodes about working out for menopause, where they’re just like, you want to be strong, not skinny. But everyone talking in that conversation is extremely skinny.

Corinne

Okay, I want to talk a little bit about her book. Probably the reason we both have just come across her is because she has a new book out. The book is called The Let Them Theory. And this is what she was talking about on We Can Do Hard Things. So this is what I listened to a podcast episode about and was like, I like it.

The Let Them Theory is basically letting other people do what they want to do. So it’s like, instead of making yourself miserable trying to control what other people are doing, let them. The story that she gives at the beginning to set this all up is her kid was going to prom, and they went to go take Prom pictures with a big group of kids before the event, and it started pouring rain. And then it turns out her son didn’t have a restaurant reservation for where to eat with his 20 friends before prom, and he decided he wanted to go to an outdoor taco restaurant. And she was just like, everyone is going to get soaking wet. It’s going to be horrible. Blah, blah, blah. And then her daughter was just like, Mom, let them. If they want to get soaking wet eating tacos, let them.

And I do think that’s helpful. I also think there’s a way in which, that is anti-diet, you know? Like, let people eat what they want to eat. Let kids eat brownies before dinner, whatever.

Virginia

Not to get too personal with my buddy Mel, but you were really going to control your child’s prom experience that much? They’re 17 years old and you’re weighing in on where they need to go for dinner. It’s their problem!

Corinne

It’s an anxiety thing, right? It’s like, oh my God, 20 kids are going to walk into a restaurant without a reservation. I think we all have those type of spirals where other people are doing things in a way that bothers us. And instead of getting worked up about it, I’m just going to let it go.

Virginia

I mean, I fully subscribe to this. I wrote an essay maybe two years ago about working on my own control issues and then realizing control isn’t love. And yes, this resonates very deeply with me. It is something that I am a perpetual work in progress on. And I feel like I’m having a really hard time squaring this “release people, stop trying to change people, don’t control other people” with have a 12 step morning routine. She’s like, I can’t control other people, but here’s what I can control.

Corinne

How does the let them theory square with giving anyone else advice really?

Virginia

Also that.

Corinne

So that is something that I’ve been thinking about, just as we’ve been talking.

Another thing I wanted to mention was the book definitely mentions weight loss, like she uses it as an example of if someone’s wanting to lose weight or something, but they’re not eating in that way, like, let them. Let other people’s problems be other people’s problems. But like, just noting it as this is not a person who’s necessarily versed in body liberation.

Virginia

She has clearly done no work interrogating the idea that you maybe don’t need to lose weight. She’s willing to just take that as a foregone conclusion, which is common to this kind of self help person.

Corinne

One thing that I found myself grating up against was she has a few kids. She has two daughters, and I guess they have really different bodies, and she talks about her older daughter’s feelings about her younger daughter’s body. And I have no idea how old the daughter is. I think the daughter is an adult or close to being adult. But I was just like, I really don’t like this.

Virginia

Yeah, did you have to go there? Even if they consented, why are you telling your kid’s story and talking about your kid’s body in that way?

Corinne

And, as you said, there are episodes about, weight loss, how to boost your metabolism, eat these five things or whatever.

Virginia

She brings on “experts” for all of those episodes. But this is a former attorney. I’m just like, what is your vetting process for these guests? How are you deciding? What criteria are you using? All of that is very unclear.

Corinne

Then the last thing that I want to mention is that this morning, as I was getting ready to record this episode, getting ready for my day, doing my morning routine—

Virginia

High fiving yourself.

Corinne

As I was not high fiving myself in the mirror.

Virginia

You do a high 10, you do both hands.

Corinne

I was like, I’m going to relisten to the Glennon Doyle episode, just so I can remember some of the things that Mel Robbins was saying on that podcast episode, which I enjoyed. So I opened my podcast player, I went to my We Can Do Hard Things feed, and the episode was gone!1

And I was like, this must be some phone glitch. I checked every podcast app. I texted a friend, also gone in their feed. I texted you, you also couldn’t find it. So then I start Googling, and there’s a Reddit thread about this podcast episode disappearing, and someone links to a Substack post where a person is accusing Mel Robbins of plagiarism.

Virginia

Oh my God!

Corinne

This other person named Cassie Phillips had written a poem that basically has the words and the concept “let them” and “let me,” which is like the basis of the book. And I guess that poem went really viral in 2022 and then Mel Robbins came up with the let them theory in 2023 so very close timelines.

I did read the Substack post. I feel like it’s one of those kind of like, one person says one thing, the other person says something else, situations. I don’t know if you could ever prove that Mel Robbins heard it from the poem. And in fact, Mel Robbins says that she heard it from her daughter, so I don’t know what the truth is.

Then the other thing I just wanted to mention, and this is something I had been thinking about, is that idea of “let them” and not trying to control other people. Like, that’s also just not Mel Robbins’s idea. A lot of different cultures use that. I know a lot of people in Al Anon who have embraced that as a way of just being like, you can’t control other people’s drinking, that kind of thing. So just want to acknowledge that it’s not an original idea. It’s possibly plagiarized. We don’t know.

Virginia

We cannot know about the plagiarism. But those are valid questions to be raising, given the timeline. But even if that was not a contributing factor, she definitely took this very well established concept—again, like, I wrote an essay two years ago about my own work in therapy on this idea. It’s out there. And it’s not that she can’t write about it. I wrote about it! But to then turn it into the Mel Robbins’ secret method of fixing your life, which is very much how the book is marketed and how her Instagram is marketed. It’s very much like, only Mel Robbins can tell you this hard truth. That is a real neat trick. And I think speaks much more to her ability to build a brand and build an audience than it does to her actually being a wise and research-based expert on personal growth. That’s not necessarily what she is, but she is a pretty genius marketer and packager of an idea.

Virginia

I’m just really struggling to square it with the rest of her messaging. It doesn’t actually feel very consistent. Like, let them I understand. It’s more about other people. But you count to five and throw yourself out of bed the second the alarm goes off. Like, what? It just doesn’t feel internally consistent to me at all.

Corinne

To me it’s just like if you’re just going to let them then why are you giving people advice? Why are you trying to control how people get out of bed?

Virginia

Yeah, and whether they drink coffee or water first? It’s not just that she’s giving advice. She gives really specific, granular advice about how to structure your day. She wanted to control whether her son took his friends to a taco place or not on prom night. Like, she’s real interested in people doing very tiny things, especially according to her specifications. So it’s kind of feels like maybe she got really into this idea because she knows it’s her own biggest struggle, which is totally fair. But there’s a lack of introspection to then peel back a few more layers and be like, well, where am I not letting them? I’m not letting people do a lot of things.

Another thing that feels slightly like a disconnect to me with the “let them” and this let people go thing is, when you look at how Mel Robbins is presenting herself, it’s a very specific aesthetic. She is definitely someone who—I mean, she talks about working out a lot, intermittent fasting, all of that. Her body is presenting as a highly controlled body. She’s very thin, she’s very blonde. That is not a natural blonde. That’s her body, her choice, of course. But again, it’s this interesting tension between this message that is very expansive and trying to give you room to take up space in your life, and then what she’s presenting to us in in her embodied self feels very different. And again, this is not a criticism, because it’s also like one of those things where, like, what other option does she have? She got famous as a CNN commentator. She’s now a big deal on Instagram. Thinness, blondeness, whiteness, all of that is required for those jobs. So it’s just interesting seeing that like someone else with this message, who is not a tiny blonde woman would probably not be able to blow it up to the level that she is.

Corinne

Yeah. And I also think she is older. I think she’s in her 50s.

Virginia

She has got to play the game.

Corinne

This is how people are going to pay attention to her.

Virginia

Well, that’s Mel Robbins. We learned a lot. We now know who she is, and also quite a lot about her. I’m interested to hear from listeners who have been following her. You may have more thoughts on the whole plagiarism piece, or the missing Glennon episode piece, or just have more nuanced takes on her work. So I’m excited to hear what people think.

Corinne

Do we want to definitively say, Is Mel Robbins a diet?

Virginia

I’m comfortable definitively saying it is. You have been on more of a journey. I don’t know if you’re ready to say it.

Corinne

I don’t know if I would say that Mel Robbins is a diet. I do think she’s a whole thing.

Virginia

She’s a whole thing.

Corinne

I think she’s like perfectionism culture maybe?

Virginia

She is high fiving herself in the mirror so hard.

Corinne

Is high fiving yourself in the mirror a diet?

Virginia

It’s not not a diet is where I’m going to land on that.

Corinne

Wow. I don’t know if I agree with that, but there’s a lot to think about.

Virginia

Okay, let’s do butter, because my butter is going to possibly undermine my credibility for this entire episode.

Corinne

Is your butter drinking a cup of water before you drink coffee?

Virginia

I am not doing that, but my butter is my new hydration tracking app that I’m using!

Corinne

Are you freaking kidding me?

Virginia

I knew I was going to... I knew this was going to..

Corinne

A hydration tracking app.

Virginia

It’s called Water llama. It’s adorable. Every day there’s a different animal. Today I’m tracking on this little bunny. And then it shows how much of how the water fills up on the little illustration. So I’ve drunk 2/3 of a bunny according to my goal. I am not doing this as a diet. This is not a weight loss goal. It has nothing to do with that.

I have so many migraines. My migraines have been getting worse in the last couple months. I was looking back at how often they are happening. They’ve really increased. I live in a frozen tundra. My house is so dry. I’m waking up every morning with headaches and sore throats. I have a humidifier. But I realized I really think I need to work on hydration. I’m also going to get a work up with my neurologist, but the appointment is three months out. So I was like, this is something I can work on in the meantime and see if it makes a difference.

And I have tried to just be mindful about water consumption in the past, but I will forget all about it. I hyper focus on work all day long and drink nothing, and then it’s eight o’clock and I’m very thirsty. So I was like, alright, I’m going to do this water tracking app. And I’m a week into it, and I’ve drunk so much water in the last week.

Corinne

Does it give you reminders?

Virginia

You can set it to remind you every one or two hours, if you want. So it nudges you. I haven’t even really needed the reminders, because so far I’m just excited to fill in my little numbers.

I will say I put in a custom goal that I made up. I’m not going to say what my goal is, because I think it’s somewhat absurd honestly. I’m really just trying to drink as much as possible until I don’t wake up with a headache, and then use that number as the target and see if it helps.

I deliberately put in a custom goal, because otherwise they calculate it based on your weight. So if you don’t want to mess around with that, you can just put in your own goal.

There is a weight loss challenge thing you could do, but there is an option to hide that, and I did that right away, so I don’t have to look at any weight loss content.

So you know it’s with a caveat. Like, tracking is not for everybody. Tracking is usually not for me. If this doesn’t feel good for you, please don’t do it. But if you are thirsty and need to drink more water, I’m liking it.

Corinne

Cool.

Virginia

Do you feel like I’m such a hypocrite right now?

Corinne

Um, I don’t know if I would say hypocrite? The tracking thing is interesting. Like when tracking is triggering versus when it’s not.

Virginia

I think because I have a very specific metric, which is no headaches. Like, I’m doing this for a very niche reason. It feels okay and that’s what I can come up with.

But I’m also paying attention to it, and if it starts becoming stressful, I’m putting some parameters around it where I’m like, okay, then we delete the app. But water llama, it’s pretty cute.

Corinne

Well, I hope water llama helps your migraines.

Virginia

TBD. What about you?

Corinne

I want to recommend a book that I just read. It’s called The Safekeep. I don’t want to say too much about it, because I went into it knowing almost nothing and was shocked at various points.

Virginia

By Yael van der Wouden.

Corinne

Yes, I think she’s Dutch. What will I say about it?

Virginia

I can read the summary line, which is “an exhilarating, twisted tale of desire, suspicion and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the summer of 1961.”

Corinne

That seems like a good summary.

Virginia

I mean, I want to read it. That sounds really good.

Corinne

It takes a few different turns and I think has a surprising ending that seems like it wouldn’t work, and it kind of did work for me. And I would say, like, I also just did not expect it to be as spicy as it was!

So, I recommend The Safekeep and I would say, don’t read too much about it before you read it!

Virginia

Just dive in. That’s a great butter

Well, should we high five on Zoom to wrap up this episode? Because our buddy Mel would want us to?

Corinne

I need some science behind why high five.

Virignia

You can read her whole book called The High Five Habit and just start high fiving everybody all the time.

Corinne

No.

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark! We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.

This episode first aired in November 2024, right after the presidential election. We’re now 8 months into Trump’s second term, and continuing to grapple with how America has slid to the right. So the story of a public health advocate and scholar who is now aligned with conservative media feels incredibly timely—especially because many of you are starting back at school this month, and Emily’s take on school lunches is particularly complex. That said, we also want to hold space for how much Emily’s work has meant to so many of us (including Virginia!).

This is a complicated conversation. To hear the whole thing, read the full transcript, and join us in the comments, you’ll need to join Extra Butter, our premium subscription tier: http://patreon.com/virginiasolesmith

Extra Butter costs just $99 per year. (Regular paid subscribers, the remaining value of your subscription will be deducted from that total!)

In these monthly episodes we get into the GOOD stuff like:

Dating While Fat

What to do when you miss your smaller body

Is Kids Eat In Color anti-diet?

And did Virginia really get divorced over butter?

Extra Butters also get exclusive weekly chats, DM access, and a monthly bonus essay or thread. And Extra Butter ensures that the Burnt Toast community can always stay an ad- and sponsor-free space—which is crucial for body liberation journalism. Join us here!

(Questions? Glitches? Email me all the details, and cc [email protected].)

PS. If Extra Butter isn’t the right tier for you, remember that you still get access behind almost every other paywall with a regular paid subscription.

Virginia

I’m just going to say up front, I am nervous about doing this episode. It is a complicated one. People have very strong feelings about Emily Oster. But we are in our Extra Butter safe space, and I am trusting that.

So Corinne. You are coming in somewhat cold to this topic, because you don’t have kids, and Emily is primarily a parenting expert. What do you know about Emily Oster and her work?

Corinne

I know two things about Emily Oster. One is that she wrote a book about parenting or maybe pregnancy? And my main takeaway about that book is that it’s okay for you to drink a small amount of alcohol when you are pregnant. 

Virginia

Yes. This is a gift that Emily has given to the world. Unquestionably.

Corinne

And I basically just know about that from having friends who are pregnant. Then the other thing I know is that she was involved in some COVID controversies. 

Virginia

Uh huh. 

Corinne

The book came out before COVID, and then during COVID she started to become a controversial figure.

Virginia

She actually had two books come out before COVID, Expecting Better, about pregnancy, and then Crib Sheet, which is a parenting book. Expecting Better actually came out in 2013, the same year my first child was born. So it’s 11 years old. She’s been around for a long time!

Corinne

Did you use those books as a pregnant and child-having person?

Virginia

Well, Expecting Better was published on August 20, 2013 and Violet was born on August 18. So I did not use it for that pregnancy. But I did later read a lot of Emily’s work, and in particular the work she was doing around breastfeeding not being the most essential you-have-to-do-it-or-you’re-a-terrible-mother thing. She did a lot of really great research breaking down some of those myths and showing that the benefits of breastfeeding over formula are not as extreme as we’ve been told. All of that was super helpful to me during my own breastfeeding situations. So yes, she’s definitely been a parenting voice on my radar for a long time. 

Emily is also actually from New Haven, Connecticut, as am I. We are around the same age, but I don’t think we knew each other as kids. But we are both ladies from Connecticut. Emily has a PhD in economics from Harvard. She then went on to pursue research in health economics and is a professor of economics at Brown University. She is a mother of two, and her official bio says, “Emily was inspired by her own pregnancy and lack of clear information to guide her decisions. She decided to use her expertise in reviewing and analyzing data to help other parents navigate those topics. She’s a New York Times best-selling author.”

So we are both 40-something moms, originally from Connecticut. I think the other place our work has overlapped is that we both do some of this work of, “here is this mainstream thing you’ve been told that’s actually quite punitive towards mothers, and what if we looked at the data and flipped some of that on its head.” 

The work she did on pregnancy and breastfeeding was super helpful to me. It’s been super helpful to so many of my friends. My younger sister just had her first baby this summer, and she was reading Expecting Better. So I just want to go into this conversation saying I really think all of that work is valuable. 

Then more recently, as you noted, Emily launched ParentData, which started as a Substack newsletter that she sent out during COVID. Now it is its own standalone website. 

And during COVID she started sending out these newsletters that I think a lot of us, as parents, were living and dying by, because she was helping us calculate the risks. And then she started to push for schools to reopen before a lot of people were ready for schools to reopen. There was a lot of controversy around her takes at that point and how she was calculating risks. And in particular, I think, how she was calculating risks for kids from more marginalized backgrounds. It often started to sound more like she was just thinking about, “I want my kids back in school.”

 It was messy. I’m not going to talk a lot about her COVID stuff today, because we have a whole other issue to work through. But I do want to acknowledge that COVID is when a lot of folks started to feel very divisive about Emily. 

I also want to acknowledge right off the top that Emily blurbed Fat Talk and was a big supporter of Fat Talk and of my work. She’s interviewed me on ParentData twice, once before Fat Talk came out, once after. A lot of the early Burnt Toast community came from Emily’s community. So this is all the more reason why we should have this conversation. There are a lot of Emily Oster fans in our community. There are a lot of Emily Oster critics. We’re gonna talk about all of it. 

Corinne

I feel like we should say the reason that people have been asking us to do this episode is because she has recently joined forces with conservative journalist Bari Weiss and they are doing a podcast together. And there was an episode about childhood obesity? Feeding kids? Which a bunch of people have written to you, with questions about. 

Virginia

The new podcast is called Raising Parents with Emily Oster. It is produced in partnership with The Free Press, which is Bari Weiss’s publishing empire.

Do you want to talk to us a little bit about what The Free Press is, and that whole piece of things before we talk about this episode?

Corinne

Sure, yes. The Free Press is a website started by Bari Weiss. Bari Weiss is a journalist. She was hired by The New York Times after Trump was elected in 2016, in an effort to platform conservative voices at The New York Times. 

Virginia

They were trying to both sides it.

Corinne

Yes. And she notoriously quit with a manifesto-y letter, claiming that she was bullied or not really taken seriously. And then I think after that, she started this website, The Free Press. She’s someone who started out as somewhat moderate, and has become more of a conservative person. She’s very “anti woke,” I guess is what I would say. She’s very pro-free speech and anti-identity politics, that kind of thing.

Virginia

Yeah. I think Emily’s involvement with The Free Press is surprising and not surprising. I think what’s interesting about Emily Oster, kind of all the way along, is that she’s an incredibly smart person. I think her work really connects with a certain kind of smart, data conscious parent or person—especially moms. And I think she would say her personal values or political beliefs should not be in the mix at all, that what she’s doing is not political. And yet, of course, it is political. Health is political. If you’re going to talk about COVID, if you’re going to talk about breastfeeding, if you’re going to talk about—as we’re going to talk about—kids’ weight, it’s going to get political very quickly. 

It’s been interesting to watch this evolution. I think this sort of smart, data driven mom—which I certainly identify as. A lot of those types of moms who would identify as feminist were like, “yes, let me drink during pregnancy.” “Yes, tell me I don’t have to breastfeed.” That felt really resonant to us. And then there was this move in this other direction that’s been subtle, and sort of confusing at times. 

But I think aligning yourself with The Free Press is not subtle or confusing. So yes, we’ve got the new podcast, “Raising Parents with Emily Oster.” And episode three of the new season is called, Are We Feeding Kids The Wrong Foods? And this is the episode that a ton of you have been in my DMs and my email being like, what is happening here? 

So Corinne, do you want to read this quote from the top of the episode? This is from Emily, and it lays out the premise that she took into this project

Corinne

Yes.

While BMI is just a number and doesn’t magically determine health, it is the case that BMI in this higher range is associated with a substantially elevated risk of many metabolic or other chronic illnesses. The United States ranks 12th worldwide on obesity prevalence. The question is, why? And why haven’t we been able to reduce childhood obesity rates?

Virginia

So what’s your thought about just that quick summary?

Corinne

It seems like she’s both saying that BMI is a bad marker of health, and using it to determine that there is a problem.

Virginia

She’s saying the question is, “why do we have high rates of obesity in the United States?” She’s not saying, why should we care? Is that even the question? Is that even the problem? 

Corinne

She’s saying BMI is just a number. And also, let’s use that number to say that we have a problem. 

Virginia

There’s some both/and-ing here that’s uncomfortable to me. And, a refusal to question the basic premise. If we have elevated risks and metabolic and other chronic illnesses, why are we not talking about those illnesses? Why are we focusing the conversation squarely on BMI, which we just acknowledged is not a useful measurement? So that’s the starting point for the whole episode.

I’m not going spend a lot of time explaining why BMI is a bad measurement. I’m assuming a lot of us have that working knowledge, but we can link in the transcript to some background if you are new and are like, but wait a second, I thought BMI was great, and what is the problem? 

I will also link to a really great analysis that Christy Harrison wrote about this episode that we’re going to refer to a few times during this conversation. Because she did dig more into what is really just bad, lazy science that Emily is doing here. So I have a little snippet if you want to read. This is Christy Harrison, MPH, RD now talking about what has kind of gone wrong at face value here:

Corinne

In her previous work, Oster has always harped on how correlation, aka Association, is not causation, and how there are many other confounding variables that can explain these sorts of relationships. Yet in this episode, she takes at face value that the link between BMI and the risk of some diseases automatically means higher weight is unhealthy. In fact, there are many confounding variables to challenge and complicate that narrative.

Virginia

And then Christy links to a whole bunch of other resources that we can include as well. 

Why Is Emily Oster Suddenly Pro–Diet Culture?

So right off the bat, I was just struck by, Wait a second, Emily. My understanding of your work is that you are data driven. You analyze this so carefully, and yet, these basic tenets of good data analysis—correlation, not causation, and understanding the confounding variables—you are suddenly willing to throw out the window in order to do a whole episode about how do we get kids’ BMIs down. 

And then immediately after setting up the problem, she’s like, “We’ve tried all these things, to fight childhood obesity, and none of them have worked.” And she specifically starts to talk about, Let’s Move, which was Michelle Obama’s big initiative in 2008 where she danced with Big Bird and overhauled school lunches and was really focused on, we are going to get the childhood obesity rate down by 5 percent. And instead, that did not happen. Child obesity rates went up. So, you know, by its own metrics, Let’s Move was a pretty big failure. Then Emily also talks about Cookie Monster, who was part of the whole Michelle Obama stuff. There’s a famous Cookie Monster bit where he’s debating whether to eat cookies or broccoli. 

Then she says, “Cookies are very tempting. At the core of concerns about children’s weight is the fact that kids are eating an inordinate amount of unhealthy food.”

Corinne

Yikes. 

Virginia

I’m just already frustrated because we’re leapfrogging wildly. To be fair, the title of the episode is, “Are we feeding kids the wrong foods?” She wanted to do an episode about food. But then why do we need to frame it in weight?

Corinne

So her rise to popularity was for questioning these correlations we have between babies’ health and breastfeeding, or pregnancy and alcohol, but now that it’s about weight…she’s just buying into it. 

Virginia

It’s a really strange pivot. The next chunk of the episode is where Emily starts getting upset about food advertising and talking about how much advertising kids get, which, like, I don’t disagree. Food advertising to children is shady. 

She quotes a mom from Ohio who talks about her kids getting influenced by Mr. Beast to want to drink some sugary energy drink. But then she also starts to blame parents, and in particular, she talks about how the average parent now only cooks four meals per week, as if this is like a major fail.

Corinne

Yikes. I mean, who has time? I might only cook four meals a week.

Virginia

I mean, that’s actually a lot of meals. Like, that’s most weeknights. You figure Friday and Saturday you might do something more fun and you probably need a break some other night. 

Why I Hate Cooking Right Now

Corinne

Especially if you’re working 40 hours a week or more than that. 

Virginia

Or work a job that has you out of the house at dinner time.

There are a million reasons why the average parent only cooks four meals a week. 

What I’m also noticing is this subtle, parent-blaming thread starting to come through. Which, again, feels so at odds with her earlier work, which was so grounded in the data. You can make your own choices about whether to drink. You can make your own choices about breastfeeding. Let’s give people the information and let them make their own choices. This is not that.

Corinne

It also seems like even if you were kind of following her logic up until this point, you could reach a different conclusion. Even if you’re saying, okay, yes, certain chronic diseases are on the rise, maybe part of the problem is the food system. Then leaping to blame parents for not cooking enough is just… tough. 

Virginia

Well, and it’s a very conservative approach, right? To use that angle, as opposed to looking at what are the larger systemic reasons. If we really need all American parents to be cooking dinner, what support do American parents need to be cooking dinner? You need to let people go home from their jobs at four o’clock. There needs to be an entire culture or shift that we have not made, and have made no steps towards. 

Corinne

Yeah, I’m thinking the problem might be capitalism, white supremacy culture, perfectionism. Lack of community care and involvement in raising children. 

Virginia

Yes, yes, yes. Who’s watching your kids while you’re cooking dinner? So many reasons why. Like, relying on American parents—and let’s be honest, we’re saying American mothers to cook dinner, to fight the childhood obesity epidemic? This cannot be the answer, guys. This is some Michael Pollan retrograde bullshit that I can’t believe I’m still having to talk about. 

Corinne

And that’s not even the end.

Virginia

Oh we are nowhere near the end. So the episode then pivots into a weird clip which is not credited, and I could not tell who it was, but it was some body positive influencer talking about the evils of diet culture. It’s a little sound bite she throws in and then Emily responds to the sound bite. So, Corinne, can you read this next block?

Corinne

There is today less stigma about weight, which is good. It’s really good. When I was growing up, I remember how cruel people were to overweight kids, and I know from being a mom that that kind of bullying still sometimes happens. What I think has changed is that such behavior is now considered wrong and despicable, and there is a growing stigma against people who bully in that way, rather than towards the overweight person. But the other thing that’s happened, perhaps inadvertently, is that people, including health experts, have stopped speaking out loud about the real health risks of obesity.

Virginia

Corinne, how do you feel about that the weight stigma is gone now?

Corinne

I mean. Said like a true thin person. Like, how the heck would she know?

Virginia

Well, she just knows. As a mother, she knows? 

Corinne

I really haven’t heard about anyone being stigmatized for bullying fat people. 

Virginia

No, that is new to me.

Corinne

Is there any evidence to back this up? Or is this just pure Emily Oster speculation?

Virginia

Just her musings, I think. I do think that, much like you were saying about the whole Bari Weiss, anti-woke culture, there is a certain group that complains, like, “you can’t even make fat jokes anymore.” In kind of the same vein as, “men can’t even harass their secretaries anymore!” I think it is hard that now we have standards for not being an asshole to people. But I actually don’t think that standard is that rigorous around weight. In a lot of social settings, fat jokes are still pretty accepted. I don’t think that we have made this much progress!

Corinne

This kind of reminds me of the whole #MeToo thing and how people were like, “But Louis CK’s career is ruined!”  

Virginia

How will these white frat boys get to a good law firm after Stanford?

Corinne

Obviously this is speculation on my part, but is she saying this because…you wrote a book? 

Virginia

I fixed it. Did you not know that? Did you not know that my book fixed it? 

Corinne

Is this your fault actually??

Virginia

You’re welcome.

Corinne

You wrote a book about fat stigma, and it stopped existing, and so this is your fault.

Virginia

I erased it, so now you can go back to being mean about fatness, because we have to make everyone thin. That was actually the master plan all along. 

I mean, this was a real heartbreak moment for me, because again, Emily has been personally lovely about my work and supportive of it in many ways in the past.

But I think that a lot of folks who work on “obesity prevention” have started to really grasp that it is important that they name the existence of weight stigma or anti-fatness. Anytime I interview someone who does mainstream obesity research now, they are fully willing to acknowledge that that is a terrible thing. Whereas five years ago, 10 years ago, when I was reporting on these issues, they were not willing to acknowledge stigma was real. They were framing weight as a personal responsibility problem. And now the party line is absolutely, weight is not a matter of personal responsibility. It’s biology—and that’s why we made these drugs. So we can fix it for you. That’s where they’ve gone. But that is not the same as saying that there is no stigma.

Their rhetoric against weight stigma is being used to sell more weight loss, which perpetuates the stigma. 

Corinne

Yeah. I mean, it’s obvious to me that weight stigma still exists.

Virginia

Because you fly on airplanes and buy clothes and move through the world.

Corinne

Because I live in the world. Is there a way to measure weight stigma? 

Virginia

Well, actually, yes. We can link to the interview I did with Jeff Hunger. Jeff Hunger is a weight stigma researcher who I think would be quite surprised to hear that weight stigma no longer exists. 

Can We Conquer Anti-Fat Bias?

Corinne

Yeah, I recall him saying in that episode that there was a lot of proof that becoming aware of stigma and doing implicit bias training didn’t actually get rid of stigma.

Virginia

Yes. They don’t really know yet what works to reduce the stigma from a data perspective, because the traditional things have not been working. Because the stigma has not been going down. 

Then there is a study that came out of Harvard in 2019 which found that while some forms of bias are decreasing—like we are making some progress towards less homophobia, less anti-Black racism, there’s some shift towards neutrality there, not to say those biases aren’t still huge problems because they absolutely are. [Post-recording note: Again, this was recorded before the election!] But we were seeing tiny drops. We are not seeing that drop when it comes to anti-fat bias, and that was the bias in the study that was actually increasing the most. 

Corinne

Oh.

Virginia

Okay, so it’s going to get even worse. Well, I don’t know if worse is the right word? But it’s definitely going to get really weird and super, super retrograde. Something I kept thinking throughout this whole episode was: Did you make this podcast in 2009 because so much of the conversation just feels like, how are we still having this conversation? 

The thing that happens next is Emily brings on Sam Kass, who is the Obama’s former private chef. He made them dinner every night when they were in the White House. And he also partnered with Michelle Obama on Let’s Move. He was kind of like her chef consultant. 

So I want to be clear that Sam Kass is not a nutritionist. He is not a public health researcher. He is not a doctor. He is a private chef who has a lot of opinions about food. He’s also now on the board of Plezi Nutrition, which is Michelle Obama’s fruit juice brand, which I wrote about last year.

Michelle Obama Is Not Coming To Save Us

I don’t consider him a thought leader on the question of our children’s health, because he has no medical or scientific qualifications to be a thought leader on children’s health. But Emily brings him on the podcast and he starts to explain to Emily that his plan was to get into the White House, and the big thing that he and Michelle originally wanted to do was to get rid of the crop subsidies for corn and sugar that have made the American diet so unhealthy. Which, I don’t know how much you followed that story, especially back in the mid 2000s.

Corinne

I remember that being a big Michael Pollan thing. 

Virginia

Totally, totally. And I think that there’s a lot of logic towards changing the way the crop subsidy situation works, and not giving industry so much incentive to grow so much corn.

However, the Obamas were not able to achieve that in Washington. They made zero progress on crop subsidies. And so, as Sam Kass explains to Emily, that actually wasn’t ever the solution. That wasn’t the right thing that they should have done in the first place. So, why don’t you read the Sam Kass quote here?

Corinne

I came running into the White House ready to go, like we’re empowered now we can fix this. It’s not the subsidies that are producing our food environment, it’s our culture. And it’s our culture that has been influenced and shaped by the industry who has pumped billions, probably trillions of dollars, over the last 40 to 50 years to shape our attitudes, norms and behaviors, but fundamentally, our culture is supporting what we choose. I think we have a culture that has separated the connection between what we put in our bodies and the impact it has on our health.

Virginia

So again, this is another way of saying, “it’s our fault.”But what is culture? That is a vague entity.

Corinne

It kind of feels like they were like, “Actually, you know what? It’s too hard to fight back against the billions of dollars that the industry is using to lobby our government, and instead we’re going to blame individual personal behavior.”

Virginia

Which, again, is a weird conservative pivot. And there are lots of food activists and child health activists who have been critical of Let’s Move because of this, because they didn’t get this done. And clearly he has decided that it didn’t matter that they didn’t get it done, because if American moms would just fucking cook dinner, then we wouldn’t have this problem. 

Okay, so that was a lot. But then Emily brings on Pamela Druckerman. 

So Corinne, do you know who Pamela Druckerman is?

Corinne

I do not.

Virginia

Okay. Pamela Druckerman, is best known for writing a book called Bringing Up Bebe. She is a journalist who lives in France and writes about French culture. Bringing Up Bebe —which came out in 2011 so it’s almost 15 years old— is a book all about how the way French children are brought up leads them to be gourmet eaters and the way American kids are brought up leads them to be terrible eaters.

My main memory of her—the book came out before I was a parent, but I remember her appearing on The Today Show wearing a beret. And again, she’s American. But she was living in France and deciding to write about how amazing French children are and how amazing the whole French parenting system is. So it is a book about how to parent like a French person, and how to feed your child like a French person.

Corinne

You know what else I hear is really amazing about France?

Virginia

What’s that?

Corinne

The healthcare and postpartum care and stuff. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

Virginia

The government-funded free preschool is probably also a pretty amazing thing. But Pamela Druckerman says no, specifically it’s the way French kids eat. Because, according to her, French kids from the age of like three are capable of sitting through a multi course dinner. They are capable of having dinner later at night. This is somehow super important, I guess, because it makes you cooler if you don’t eat dinner at 5pm? They can behave in restaurants. They don’t need to bring iPads into restaurants. They don’t eat Goldfish. They don’t need sippy cups, they are eating like tiny gourmet adults at all times.

Corinne

This also reminds me of the French Women Don’t Get Fat thing. 

Virginia

Correct, correct. 

Corinne

It’s also just like, what? So the solution is just we all moved to France? Or…?

Virginia

Yes, yes, that is one solution on the table.

Corinne

Or we get government-funded childcare? 

Virginia

That would probably do so much more. That never gets suggested in this episode. Emily never suggests that the government should fund child care. But she does talk to Pamela for a long time about how the French people get their kids to like food.

Pamela explains that you can make kids like vegetables, if you just tell them they are delicious and serve them sitting down at a table.

So that’s some really useful advice for all of us. 

Corinne

Yeah, it notoriously works great to just tell someone they like something they don’t.

Virginia

“Carrots are delicious!” I can just imagine my children staring at me in absolute disgust. 

So Emily responds to Pamela talking about the carrot thing by saying, “I can hear all the American parents now, but what about my picky eater? In their defense, there’s pretty clear data that between the ages of two and six, children get pickier, but France has a fix for that!”

And then Pamela explains what the fix is. This is a really long quote, but do you want to read this?

Corinne

Partly, what happens in France is that kids don’t eat between meals. So when they come to the table, they’re hungry. You kind of learn from an early age to tolerate not starvation level hungriness, but like having a slight pit in your stomach where you want to eat, and that pit has not been satisfied. So you get to the table and you’re more apt to eat what’s put in front of you because you’re hungry for it. You haven’t been snacking. You know, your mom didn’t give you a banana 20 minutes ago, because you were whining, she said, We’re going to eat in 20 minutes. Go play and come back, and then the first thing that’s served in this moment in the meal is a vegetable. It’s not rocket science, any of this.

Virginia

I want Pamela to come to my house and talk to my children 20 minutes before dinner. I just am so annoyed about this! I don’t know. Tell me what you’re thinking.

Corinne

It just sounds like if your kids are hungry enough, they’ll eat vegetables.

Virginia

Yes, and that they should be accustomed to walking around with a pit in their stomach all the time because you don’t let them have snacks.

Corinne

Hungry children are annoying. 

Virginia

They are!  

Corinne

I mean, even just speaking for myself, I am not the nicest, funnest, smartest person when I’m hungry.

Virginia

Nope, nope. I find this really insidious, this idea that we should teach kids to tolerate hunger is a really creepy notion to me. because I think any girl who came of age in the 90s has a lot of experience with learning to, quote, tolerate hunger. And it didn’t work out great for us. This is not the goal. This is a dieting behavior. 

Corinne

Isn’t the whole thing that when you feel really hungry, that often backfires and ends up with like bingeing or overeating?

Virginia

It just seems like you’re teaching kids to live with this experience of deprivation, which some kids bodies might do totally fine with, right? People get hungry at different rates. There are people who can eat only three times a day, and that works really well for them, and that’s awesome. But that doesn’t mean that’s going to work really well for everybody. And little kids in particular have small stomachs that empty fast. They don’t want to go six hours without eating. That is going to be meltdown city.

Corinne

It’s also like, when does this start? Because I don’t think anyone’s telling breastfeeding mothers, “Wait until your baby is starving and has a pit in their stomach to feed them.” You know?

Virginia

I think as soon as they’re off, breast milk is when it starts. Because she talks about being at the playground at 10am with the toddlers, and nobody’s carrying around little bags of Cheerios because the kids don’t expect to have snacks at the playground. Because they know they’re going to wait till they go home and eat lunch. I drive around in my Subaru at all times with a box in the back of my car filled with snacks. And we don’t always need them. It’s fine. But I don’t want to get caught somewhere with a hungry, grumpy child. If I’m sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office and it’s taking 40 minutes when I thought it was going to take 15, I’m really glad to have that bag of Goldfish. 

She’s equating snacking with sloth and excess when it’s just like parenting your child, responding to their needs, recognizing that they are getting hungry, and maybe you are too, and everyone will feel better with a snack.

Corinne

Yeah, it feels like a confusing solution.

Virginia

And again, just not very replicable. She describes the way the French schools serve lunch and how it’s this very elaborate presentation, and they get three year olds to sit around a table and use silverware. Nobody is trying that in the United States. Even if there are lessons we can learn from that, nobody is attempting to replicate that here. So any individual parent trying to replicate that at home is just making their lives really complicated.

Corinne

This is where we get into the systemic versus personal stuff again, too. Maybe it works in France because they have a totally different system. Maybe parents have more energy to tolerate kids screaming when they’re hungry because they’re not working 60 hours a week. Maybe kids are less hungry when they get home from school because they have a nice five course meal at school. You can’t take one part of the system and and bring it over here and just blame parents for not doing enough. 

Virginia

Exactly.

So then Emily decides she needs to find an American mother who is doing this so we can all learn from her. She brings in a woman named Ellie, who I think we would affectionately call an almond mom. Ellie never lets her kids buy the school lunch. She cooks from scratch at home. They are a vegetarian household. She doesn’t shop the middle of the grocery store. She only shops the perimeter, and she doesn’t let her kids have fast food or really, any processed food. Do you want to read this quote? 

Corinne

Wait, I need more information. Is Ellie, like a friend of Emily’s? Who the f is Ellie?

Virginia

No. She’s just a mom. Sprinkled throughout this episode, she just brings in regular moms to share their stories of feeding their kids. Her producers probably cast around to find people.

Corinne

Um, does she also share Ellie’s income?

Virginia

She does not.  

Corinne

Okay. Anyways, Ellie says about her children. 

They say, can we have Cheetos and mac and cheese? And we’re like, there’s nothing in that that nourishes you. Every single element of that meal is chemicals. So we might look at the box or something and talk about the difference between the way chemicals make things taste good and just the taste of food.

Virginia

So to be clear, this quote is presented with zero context or follow up, even though it contains wildly inaccurate statements. First of all, all food is chemicals, water is a chemical, air is a chemical. 

Christy Harrison broke this down really clearly about why Emily should have called out the chemical thing as just being blatantly wrong. You cannot say that mac and cheese contains more chemicals than homemade pasta. They are all foods. 

So Emily is bringing in this woman’s story and holding her up as an example, even though the woman’s position is “no processed foods, no matter what.” But Emily has already written about the fact that the processed foods debate is overblown and the health risks have not been proven by the data.

Corinne

Yeah, it’s also like, what is the proof that this parent is doing something better? That her kids aren’t fat?

Virginia

Yeah, that’s a great point. We never hear actually any details about her kids. But I’m going to go out on a limb and guess they aren’t fat just because I don’t think Emily would have brought in the mom of a fat kid and held her up as an example.

Corinne

But also, just because the kids aren’t fat now doesn’t mean that they won’t be fat someday.

Virginia

It also doesn’t mean they’re not freaking losing their minds and eating all the Cheetos when they go to their friend’s house.

Corinne

Yeah, they go to your house and eat nine Oreos. 

Virginia

You don’t let them buy school lunch and you control the food in your house, but your kids are growing up and going out into the world where all of this food is—and you have been telling them that it’s poison and they shouldn’t want it, and yet they know it tastes good.

And Emily really celebrates that this mom says, “we have a dialogue about it. And we always explain why something is bad and they can’t have it.” And that is held up as if, that’s good communication between the parent and child. But it reminds me a lot more of the protein mom weighing her food and explaining to her daughter why she’s weighing her food. Just because you’re giving your child a lot of information about your food decisions does not mean you are teaching them to have a healthy relationship with food. 

Protein Moms and the "Eating Enough" Myth

The other reason I know Ellie’s kids are not fat is then because Emily does want to hear from the mom of a kid in a bigger body. So she brings on Karen, and Karen has a six year old in a bigger body who she’s really worried about in terms of feeding her child. 

And Karen’s story in this episode really breaks my heart, because she’s the only person in this whole episode who has directly experienced any anti-fat bias. She talks about having experienced herself growing up, and then how it’s kind of doubled since she had a child who’s in a bigger body. She’s constantly made to feel like she’s doing something wrong, that it’s a moral failing that her daughter is in a bigger body. She also talks a lot about her guilt that she had to formula feed her daughter as a baby, and how she was constantly wondering if she was overfeeding her or if formula is the reason why she’s bigger.

She says the constant thought in the back of her mind was, “Are you giving your baby too much food?”

Corinne

Oh, that’s so sad.

Virginia

It’s so sad. I’ve heard that story a lot, that that is the message, especially parents of bigger babies get around formula. And it’s just, I mean, to your point earlier, no one would say to a breastfeeding mom, are you feeding them too much? Like it’s such hypocrisy.

This clip, I think, was Emily’s attempt to throw a bone towards the importance of combating anti-fatness, because Karen does sound like she’s really trying to push back against that pressure. She wants to raise her daughter to feel good about her body. She tells a story of a kid at a birthday party called her daughter fat, and her daughter was just like, we don’t talk about people’s bodies. And good for that kid, for handling that so well. So she sounds conflicted, but like she’s trying to not raise her daughter to feel ashamed about all of this. 

But then Emily just kind of drops that story and gives no support for that perspective. And she makes this really odd speech. So another long one for you to read, Corinne.

Corinne

Karen’s experience with her daughter brings up the bigger question, how much of obesity and overweight is in our control and how much is just biological? Shaming people for being overweight is unequivocally wrong, but sometimes, especially in recent years, the goal of trying not to offend people has led to a shift in the conversation and a lot of confusion about the very real effects of obesity on health.

You might hear it’s possible to be healthy at Every Size. While yes, it’s absolutely possible to be healthy at a range of weights and sizes. And no, not everyone needs to be a size two to be healthy. And in fact, for some people, a size two would mean they are not healthy. But it’s also true that, on average, many diseases and health complications and health outcomes are more likely for people who are obese.

Virginia

So again, it’s like, “Don’t shame people. Shaming people is so bad. Also, people are so unhealthy if they’re fat.”

Corinne

She’s saying people have become scared to say that the problem is being fat or something. 

Virginia

Yes, yes. They’re being silenced. And again, I think every fat person who’s been to the doctor really feels like that message isn’t getting out to us.

Corinne

Right? And again, the correlation versus causation thing, she’s implying that all of these diseases, health complications, and health outcomes are the cause of obesity, when we really don’t know that.

Virginia

Just to break down correlation causation further: When we say these diseases are more likely for people with high BMI, we don’t know that the high BMI is what causes the increased risk for thes diseases. We know that these two things happen together in some cases, but we don’t understand the relationship. 

So it could be that the diseases cause the weight increase. It could be that the weight increase sometimes causes the diseases. It could be that they are two unrelated things, but they have a shared root cause.

And in every one of those scenarios, the concern should be the disease, not the body size. What can you do for the disease? And if that changes body size, fine. But if it doesn’t change body size, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed if you can make improvements on the disease.

I feel like I have been making a version of that speech for 10 years now, and yet this episode is still out there, so that’s fine. I’m tired. 

Corinne

It just sucks because it felt like Emily Oster was someone who could wrap her head around that.

Virginia

I did think that.

But part of why I think she is not wrapping her head around that anymore—at least in this episode,—is because she then brings in another expert, this guy, Robert Davis, PhD, who is the author of The Healthy Skeptic. He is a health journalist with a public health PhD, but again, he’s not a doctor or a researcher. He writes mainstream, commercial books. 

But if you didn’t understand his background, you would interpret him in this episode as being the voice of medicine and science. He is brought in as a very credentialed expert who we are going to take seriously as having the final word on this topic. And this is what Robert Davis has to say about Health at Every Size:

Corinne

The pendulum has swung too far when it comes to the idea of body positivity and HAES. The effort to fight those ideas from diet culture is a good thing. But if we then say, well, let’s just forget about promoting weight loss or promoting a healthy weight and let’s just say people should be able to sort of eat what they feel like and eat dessert at dinner and go with intuitive eating and what they feel like eating. I think that’s a big mistake, because, again, we know that these foods that we’re talking about are designed to trick our brains and make us want more of them.

Virginia

So, it’s great to fight back against diet culture, but don’t go so far as to eat dessert at dinner. That’s a bridge too far for Robert Davis.

Corinne

Fighting diet culture is good, but we shouldn’t go far as to say that weight loss isn’t good.

Virginia

It’s unclear what he wants to fight from diet culture, because he really wants to keep quite a lot of diet culture. And I should also say Robert Davis just published an article on The Free Press, with the headline, “Diets are Bad. Ignoring Childhood Obesity is Even Worse.” The subhead is “Activists tell parents not to fat shame an overweight child, or make them go on a diet, but parents who refuse to tackle the issue are putting their kids’ lives at risk.”

And by activists, he means me, because he calls me out in the article as a “prominent ‘fat activist,’” who he thinks is getting everything wrong about this. So obviously, Robert and I are not going to, like, go to dinner and hang. 

Corinne

Even if we agreed that child obesity was a problem, there’s still not a solution. Dieting or putting your kid on a diet isn’t going to solve it. So it’s just very confusing to be like, “parents aren’t fighting back against this thing.”What does Robert want us to do? 

Virginia

I’m glad you asked. Let’s go to his article, because he does have a lot of a lot of specific ideas that I will try to read with a straight face. So he says: “Avoid restrictive diets. They don’t work and they can make the problem even worse. Instead, children should be encouraged to eat mainly whole foods, including colorful fruits, veggies, beets, beans, nuts, seeds, fish, lean poultry and whole grains.”

Children, famously fans of seeds.

Corinne

And fish. 

Virginia

That’s an easy sell. 

Virginia

“Involving kids in grocery shopping and cooking their own food gives them a sense of agency and will get them excited about eating well and using cookie cutters to slice fruits and vegetables into fun shapes like hearts and stars, where serving veggies with dips can make these foods more enticing.”

Corinne

This is really reminding me of Kids Eat In Color.

The Ballerina Farm of Kid Food Instagram

Virginia

Yes, yes, it is. 

Corinne

And once again, I feel like the problem is capitalism. Like, sure, I will cut celery into stars if I don’t have to have a job.

Virginia

I cannot listen to a white man tell women to cut their kids fucking vegetables into hearts and stars. I cannot do it.

I am incandescent with rage about this. I am sorry.  Mothers have enough to do. We do not need your guilt trip. I do not need to hear that I need to stop using Instacart and take my kids to the grocery store, an experience that will make all of us cranky and tired.

Corinne

Do we think that Robert J. Davis has children? 

Virginia

He probably does? But does he have a wife who does all of this? Also probably yes.

This advice is so simplistic. It is so ignorant of the context of family’s lives.

If you have a kid who is picky, I mean, genuinely picky and rigid around food choices.

If you have a neurodivergent kid who’s reliant on a lot of processed foods as the safe foods.

If you are on a tight budget.

There are one thousand reasons that you cannot eat like this.

He does go on to say, “How about we also get rid of screen time?” So that’s another helpful suggestion. “Have a regular game day on weekends where the entire family enjoys a fun physical activity out of the house, like hiking or bike riding.”

Corinne

My God. I just really feel like these people don’t live in the real world.

Virginia

Like, my kid’s dad takes them hiking every weekend. They may still end up in bigger bodies. If it’s something you all enjoy, that’s wonderful. This may not move the needle on body size, because body size is not determined solely by lifestyle habits. And if you’re telling people that they have to do all of these things to control body size, and it doesn’t work, that’s going to backfire and cause bigger problems.

So I’m just very tired. I’m very tired of all of this. 

Corinne

I am determined to find out if this guy has kids, and just for the record, he’s not wearing a wedding ring in his videos. I just feel like there’s no way this guy is speaking from personal experience, you know? Like he’s just spouting bullshit that he read somewhere. 

Virginia

He talks about having been in a bigger body himself and his mom putting him on diets as a child. And I have all the empathy in the world for that. But please do not think you are helping anybody by telling us to cut fruit into a fucking heart shape. I will take my cookie cutters and melt them down. My child would not eat a kiwi if it was shaped like a star if I paid her. It’s not gonna happen.  

So, I think it’s pretty clear where we land on all of this, but Emily does have one final speech in the episode which sums up where she is landing on this. And we can read that and then have feelings. 

Corinne

What will it take to get more vegetables and fruits into the hands of kids and families? That, in my view, is the core question. But the cultural problem is just as pernicious. As we learned from Pamela in France, Carrots are just delicious, objectively. In America, that’s not a fact. I’d say here, Doritos are objectively delicious, and therein lies the problem.

What would it take to have more parents like Ellie who simply refuses to give her kids fast food, who prioritizes fruits and vegetables for them because she knows and has told her children that that’s what’s good for bodies. She’s setting them up for a much better chance at good health.

Virginia

She’s also setting them up for a much higher risk of an eating disorder. I mean, the fact that we’re ending the episode by saying Ellie—who is the most restrictive parent in the episode—is doing it right, really says a lot to me about where Emily is landing on these issues now. And, just how useful this whole conversation could be to any parent, if the takeaway is you need to be rigorously cooking from scratch, getting your kids to like fruits and vegetables at any cost.

None of this is new advice. None of this has worked before. This is the Let’s Move playbook, which Emily herself acknowledges did not do anything to move the needle on childhood obesity. 

Corinne

Yeah, and this whole thing about it being like a cultural problem is so mind boggling to me, because when I hear “but it’s a cultural problem,” I’m like, yes, it’s a systemic problem. How is Ellie telling her kids that carrots are delicious solving a cultural problem? That’s just one person? 

Virginia

You’re defining culture as social systems and structures, and she’s defining culture as personal preferences. And that is not accurate. This whole pivot into personal responsibility, again, I feel like, is really at odds with her earlier work. And it’s just very aligned with The Free Press and with being in a more conservative media outlet, which is what’s happening here. And I’m sorry to see it.

Again, I do think Emily is fundamentally a smart person. I’ve had a lot of respect for her work over the years, and it’s hard to see this transition. 

The last thing I’ll say is on a personal note: Emily, if you listen to this episode, I hope you’re still letting your kids eat their Halloween candy. Because one thing I did achieve a few years ago was persuading her not to count out her kids Halloween candy anymore. And I just hope you haven’t changed on that one, because I really want your kids to enjoy their candy. 

All right, well, I’m excited to hear what everyone thinks about all of this. I’m sure there will be many diverse opinions. We welcome you in the comment section.

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Corinne

For my Butter, I want to shout out this new collaboration between Universal Standard and Jordan Underwood. They did send me a pair of pants and a tank top for free, So little caveat there. And I will say that I tried them on and then ordered some more stuff, so…

Virginia

They sent it for free and and were effective in getting you to buy more of it! 

Corinne

Yeah, it definitely worked. It’s a little capsule collection of some clothes that I think Jordan had something to do with designing, and they’re more androgynous pieces. There’s a pair of cargo pants and a cropped tank and a flannel and some sweats. But they’re really cool, and I think people should check them out.

Virginia

I am obsessed with the crop tank. I think I need it.

Corinne

Yeah, it’s really nice because it’s both high neck, which I feel like can be kind of hard to find in a tank, and it hits right at your pants waistline. 

Virginia

It’s like, the perfect amount of crop. It’s not belly-baring, which would be fine, but we’re getting into colder weather here. It’s just the right fit. 

Corinne

Also seems like it would be really great to wear under stuff, because sometimes you don’t want a long tank under a shorter shirt.

Virginia

I’m very excited to check out the collaboration. 

Corinne

What’s your Butter?

Virginia

My Butter is something I have talked about many times, but it is not in the official library of Butter, which seems important to remedy. So my Butter is Meredith Dairy Marinated Sheep and Goat Cheese, which is the world’s best cheese. I will die on this mountain forever. I thanked this cheese in the acknowledgements of my book, 

Corinne

Oh my gosh. 

Virginia

I thanked other people, too, Corinne. I thanked you! But you know, I did shout out the cheese. And when I updated the paperback edition, I continued to shout out the cheese. Stand by that forever.

It is a really good creamy goat slash sheep cheese, and it comes in this really delicious oil. Again, I’ve talked about it so many times. I feel like people are gonna be like, yeah, yeah, we know the cheese. But I just need it to be officially in the records as the best cheese. 

Corinne

I have never tried it, so I am going to search this out. 

Virginia

I know Costco sells it. It’s not a super hard to find thing anymore. A lot of grocery stores are carrying it. I know at Costco you can even get a bigger jar. I get it from a local grocery store, but I’ve definitely seen it more and more places. Because whenever I talk about it, people around the country tell me how much they love this cheese. So I know people in Wisconsin are having it, people in Oregon are having it.

It is a great cheese, and you can eat it straight. You can put it on toast with some jam of some sort. It’s very delicious. I also like to as when the jar is almost empty, save the like final bit of cheese in the oil and use that in pasta or salad dressing, and it’s life changing and delicious. 

Corinne

That sounds really good. 

Virginia

Yep, I’m just glad to have it officially in the record of butter. That was something I needed to remedy, so thank you.