Hello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!

This is a newsletter where we explore questions (and some answers) around fatphobia, diet culture, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture, and the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia. Today, we’re going to do another solo episode where I answer your questions.

But first! I’m curious to know what folks think about the guest episodes versus the solo episodes. Right now I’m doing like one solo a month, and then three guest ones. Maybe you would like a different balance of guests to solo? I’m also always curious to know how many folks download and listen or how many listen to the audio versus read the transcript. I’m happy to keep doing both—I think they’re both really useful—but you know, I’m just interested. So if you have any thoughts about that, please comment on this post. That is a long way of saying any feedback is always very welcome.

Let’s dive into questions! Sometimes I manage to group these with a theme and this week, I don’t think there is a theme. It’s just kind of a grab bag. I mean, there’s the obvious themes of diet culture and fat phobia, but I don’t think I have a narrower theme than that. But that’s okay! There’s a lot of really interesting stuff in your questions this week.

Q: I loved your book and I’m just starting to try to disentangle myself from my own diet and body image hang-ups, most of which were absorbed through my loving, amazing, subtle fat-shaming family. Occasionally we engage in discussions over weight and health and while I can bust out all the stats and research I can about health and weight they inevitably bring up their ace in the hole to win the argument every time: Namely, there aren’t many obese/fat old people. And I can’t counter it because I’ve seen it myself every time I visit a relative in a long-term care home; everyone there is very old, and very thin. Any thoughts/research on this? If weight doesn’t automatically equal unhealthy outcomes, where are all the old fat people at?

A: This is such an interesting question: Where have all the old fat people gone?

What I think is happening here, is confirmation bias. I think we are confusing what we see in our own lives and our own bubbles with, this must be true for everyone. And this happens all the time in conversations around weight and health. Think of every Thin Man in your life who, even if they do gain weight, sort of effortlessly loses it just by starting to run once a week or something. And then they think everybody could lose weight so easily if they just did this. That’s confirmation bias. That’s thinking that your own lived experience is representative of everybody’s lived experience. And we know it’s not. But this comes up a lot.

But this is definitely a new twist on it, this idea that just because fat old people are invisible to you, they must not exist.

I will link to Katherine Flegal’s research on this. We know that folks in the “overweight” and “low ob*se” BMI ranges have the longest mortality. So we know that those folks are living longer than people in the “normal weight” or “underweight” ranges. At the extreme ends of the spectrum, the data is a little less clear. Folks in the very highest-weight bodies may have more complicated health issues, just like the folks at the most underweight level. And in both cases, this may impact longevity. But in the sort of skinny to small fat/medium fat space, we’re seeing that bigger bodies live longer.

So why aren’t you seeing them in the nursing home that you visit? Maybe because the nursing home you visit caters to a demographic that doesn’t have higher rates of larger body sizes. If you’re in an affluent, mostly white community, you may not see bigger body sizes as often in general, and certainly not in the nursing home setting.

Also: If Flegal’s research suggests that higher body weight is protective in aging, then those folks might not be in long term care facilities. Fat old folks might be able to live independently at home longer. And so you don’t see them in the nursing homes that you’re going to, you’re seeing there the frailest and sickest people, perhaps, and those might not be the people in the larger bodies. So this is just playing with this assumption that you’re having—I’m not saying this is definitively what’s happening in the nursing home that you visit.

Of course, as much as we know that larger body size is linked with longer mortality, we don’t know that that’s a causal relationship. It’s a correlation. So we don’t know that body weight really has much of anything to do with how long you live. You may be seeing smaller bodies in this nursing home, but that is not reflective of the general aging experience. Or these people may have been in bigger bodies earlier in their lives that enabled them to live longer. As we reach our later years, the elderly and the geriatric population does tend to lose both body fat and muscle mass with aging. So people are again frailer and also thinner once they are very old. That doesn’t mean they were that thin their entire life, that just means that’s the body you’re seeing them in right now.

So yes, you’re seeing this. But you’re not seeing the entire experience. One nursing home is not representative of even your entire community, let alone your state, your region, your country. There could be good reasons that you’re not seeing bigger bodies there. There could be bad reasons. It could be that folks in bigger bodies receive worse health care. So even if we’re seeing some protective benefits of larger bodies, we may also see that folks receive worse health care, have less access to health care, and maybe they are less likely to access the type of long term care facility you’re talking about. So there is a lot of nuance there. But I do think that “I don’t see old fat people” is not proof that they don’t exist. They are out there. Hopefully that gives you some nuggets to take back to your family conversations.

Q: Do you think intentional weight loss (and/or intentional weight change, including gaining weight) is always bad? Do you think there is any room for folks to intentionally change this aspect of their bodies just like we might change any number of other physical and aesthetic characteristics? Is there any way of decoupling intentional weight change from diet culture? (That last part is my biggest concern, of course.)

I think what this person is asking—well, they may not be asking it, but what I am often asked under the guise of this question is: Can I be anti-diet and still be dieting?

You can absolutely fight weight stigma, you can think that fatphobia is wrong, you can call it out, you can parent in ways that are weight-inclusive, you can support weight-inclusive health care, you can do all of that… and still not love the body you’re in. Our individual body struggles are quite separate from this as a sort of political social justice movement, so I think that is worth acknowledging and saying pretty explicitly. I think most people who do this work have our own stories of dieting and body acceptance struggles, and so relate very much to the idea that personally, you may not be where you want to be politically or publicly.

But do I think that personal struggle can happen separately from diet culture? At this stage? I do not.

Anytime we pursue intentional weight loss and try to change ourselves in an aesthetic way, we are driven, at least in part, by the central diet culture message that we should take up less space. It’s just the water we’re swimming in. It’s the social conditioning we have received since we were children. It is incredibly hard to turn off that noise and say, no, I definitely would want this in a void, I would want to be thinner for X, Y, and Z reasons, even if diet culture didn’t exist, and thinness gave me no social currency, and didn’t make it easier to buy clothes, and didn’t make my body feel more acceptable to society. I don’t think you can even really run that thought experiment because we cannot silence that noise. So, do I think intentional weight loss is always bad? I’m not going to shame behaviors because hey, who does that—diet culture, right? If you are dieting or intentionally losing weight, because that is something you feel you need, I am not here to judge your personal struggle. I think this is especially important to say when we’re talking about folks who live in fat bodies and decide to pursue bariatric weight loss surgery. If you have not lived in a larger body, and faced that pressure and faced the daily onslaught of weight stigma and the difficulties in accessing health care, and the reasons why that surgery might feel necessary, you are not in any position to judge that person’s decision to pursue intentional weight loss.

At the same time, I think I always feel a little bit sad, because it’s a reminder that our world could be so much better. And it’s not. We are not making the world a safe place for fat people. We’re really not making the world a safe place for anyone with a body, but particularly not for fat people. So anytime I hear about someone intentionally pursuing weight loss, I’m just reminded of how much work we have to do.

Because yes, if we could get to a point where weight loss was something you could manipulate as easily as, say, dying your hair, then maybe you could say that this is a temporary aesthetic change, and you’re making it for fun and self expression.

[Virginia’s post-recording note: Something I forgot to add here is that even if it was truly harmless to the individual, weight loss would still be a way of reinforcing the idea that thin bodies are more valuable than fat ones—which they aren’t. The anti-fat bias is impossible to escape.]

But even hair dying is not a great example of that, right, because often women dye our hair to cover our grays, to look younger, because we live in an ageist society. So pretty much any aesthetic change we make has some component of cultural pressure and cultural conditioning attached to it. And it doesn’t mean you should completely stop making any of these changes. I dye my hair, you know, and we all wear clothes, and people wear contact lenses, etc, etc. And it can certainly be a part of personal expression, and feeling good about your body and also be a response to these cultural messages.

But the reason to put weight loss, intentional weight loss, in a separate category from say, hair dye, is because intentional weight loss can be really dangerous physically. It can lead to a disordered relationship with food and your body. It can cause spiraling and anxiety and ruminating and compulsive thoughts and compulsive behaviors in a way that making choices about shoes or hair doesn’t because these other more easily changeable choices don’t have quite the same impact on our physical health, or our mental health. And again, I’m speaking broadly here—there’s going to be someone who comments and says, no, actually dyeing my hair is like this hugely complicated, dramatic journey for me, and I want to hold space for you in that journey. But we don’t have an epidemic of hair disorders, and we do have an epidemic of eating disorders.

I resist saying it’s always bad, because that sounds like I’m saying the person pursuing the weight loss is bad, and I’m not. But I do think intentional weight loss is never simple. I think it’s never just about health, or just about, oh, I don’t like how my pants fit, but I’m fine with other people being in bigger bodies. I think we find lots of ways to rationalize the desire for intentional weight loss to ourselves. And I did this for years. I wanted to support Health at Every Size, and I was dieting myself. So I really relate to this place that this questioner is in, wanting to say, I’m doing this for me, but that’s separate from the larger struggle. The truth is, we’re always intertwined with our personal and our political. With something like intentional weight loss, where the side effects can be so serious and so severe, I think it is especially important to approach that with caution.

If weight loss is something you’re pursuing because you’ve been told it’s necessary for your health, I would encourage you to check out the HAES Health Sheets that were created by Louise Metz and Ragen Chastain. They are a phenomenal resource for thinking about weight-linked conditions, from a weight-inclusive perspective. That might give you some other options to think about, do I really need to pursue weight loss for my health? Or is there another way to treat my high blood pressure? Or my acid reflux?

And if it’s about aesthetics, well, then I think you already know the answer that that’s a diet culture-driven thing. The thin ideal is driven by diet culture, it’s driven by white supremacy, it’s driven by patriarchy. It is uncomfortable to acknowledge that we are all complicit in it, but there it is. So yeah, I think we’re a long way from being able to decouple this and I’m also not sure that that should be the goal, because if we say we’ve decoupled unintentional weight loss from all of these toxic narratives, and it’s totally fine to pursue it, you’re still saying fundamentally, that smaller bodies are better, you’re still saying that this whole group of people who live in larger bodies, for whom intentional weight loss is not an option or would never achieve a thinner, a truly thinner body, that their bodies are somehow less than. So yeah, I don’t see it untangling anytime soon.

Okay, next question. The TL/DR version of this question is: My daughter “binges” on food and I don’t know how much I should control this.

Q: My 10-year-old daughter hit puberty young and has a larger body. She has not displayed any body dissatisfaction, or said anything negative about her body in front of me. She is very active and she loves food. Food is what motivates her. Food is what she turns to in boredom. She gets a lot of pleasure from food. I don’t see any of that as a problem. My concern (and my husband’s concern, who doesn’t handle it the way I would like) is that with being home all the time the last 1.5 years and counting, she is eating all day. She eats 3 “meals” in a row, each time saying she is still hungry. I try to advise her to wait a little while between meals so her body has time to realize she already ate, but she won’t do that. She’s also cooking and preparing her own food, which I love and think it is wonderful that she is independent in this area. I’m just not sure if she is ready to have all limits off on quantity of food. This might look like a tortilla with eggs and bacon, followed by frozen tamales, followed by melted cheese and crackers. She never chooses fruits or veg. If there is any sort of candy, ice cream, or baked good, she will eat it all right away and not choose any other food until that is gone. Part of the reason this is triggering for me is that I am a binge eater and it looks like she is binging when she loads up on food like this and when she is hyper-focused on the sweet foods.

A: I think there’s a lot going on here. I want to be clear that I am not a therapist or a dietician or a healthcare provider trained to diagnose or treat eating disorders, and also a podcast would not be the setting to do that even if I was. So I encourage you to reach out to a therapist who approaches weight and family feeding dynamics from a weight inclusive Health at Every Size perspective. I like Christy Harrison’s list of providers so linking that here. And I’m saying that, not because I think your daughter is showing so many red flags of a huge eating disorder, but because you are really struggling with her eating, and I think you deserve support and help to navigate what this is bringing up for you so that you can best support your daughter.

Now, as a lay person who reports on this a lot and who hears a lot of people’s eating stories, a lot of what you’re describing sounds like fairly normal 10-year-old, hungry 10-year-old in puberty behavior. When you listed the meals, the tortillas and the tamales and the cheese and crackers, I don’t know that that sounds like a binge as much as it sounds like a kid who’s exploring lots of different foods, maybe getting a lot of pleasure out of the fact that she can independently make foods like bacon, which is kind of hard to make well, and that she has that independence in the kitchen, which I love that you’ve given her. So is it necessarily that she’s eating three huge meals in a row or is she just experimenting and enjoying lots of different foods?

What we need to step back and acknowledge is: It’s not about the food. If your daughter is struggling in other ways, if she’s very anxious, if she’s depressed, if she is coping with any big negative feelings right now, and you see this eating as the way she’s coping, you want to support her in working through the negative feelings, you want to get her the help she needs with that. You don’t take away the coping skill that she has, if that’s food, before she has other coping skills, and before she has the support she needs with the underlying problem. So it’s really not about the food if this is binge eating is a way to either numb and escape emotions or cope with emotions.

But from what you’ve also said: She’s a kid stuck at home. We’re all bored, we’re all eating more because it’s novelty, and we’re programmed to seek novelty, and that’s one of the few ways we can get it. She also gets a lot of pleasure from food, and that’s great. And she’s enjoying the sort of independent cooking experience, which is really fun. And I think that the best strategy through all of that is just to continue to support her in building those skills. And along the way, she’ll be learning to listen to her body more. When you’re advising her to sort of wait in between meals, you know, or if you are coming in and trying to control quantities, that’s when you’re gonna start interrupting her own ability to listen to her body. It’s understandable, it’s natural, but it sounds like you’re trying to control too many things possibly. This happens a lot when parents freak out at their kids eating patterns and try to come in with a lot of structure. And then we both try to control the how much and the how often.

Division of Responsibility, which is the model that I sort of loosely follow and find is a good starting point for families, says the parent should be in charge of how often kids eat, but not in charge of how much. And at 10, you would probably still also have some control over what food she’s offered in terms of, you’re doing the grocery shopping, but you are starting to hand over more independence at that age about individual meal choices, and yes, cooking skills and things like that. So if you are going to try to impose structure around what the schedule looks like, you really have to back off and let her decide how much to eat in any one of those settings. And I find this is often tricky, because we will have a portion size in our mind and then the child will want more of it. You know, it happens to me often because like if we buy snack foods, like granola bars, or little packages of goldfish crackers that come in a single serve package. That’s not a single serving to my kid, she wants two or three or four of them in a sitting to make a meal or make a snack that honors her hunger. And so I’ll think wait, you’re eating more than a serving, but it’s like, I’m sorry, does the packaging company know what a serving is to my child? No, of course they don’t.

Similarly here, if it’s snack time, or it’s lunchtime, and she and you have said this is the time we’re going to eat, you need to allow her to eat as much as she needs to feel full and good in that meal. And then you can say, “Okay, now we’re going to wait until after this next activity, and then we’ll have a snack.” Versus going straight into another meal. Transitioning to more of a schedule is itself pretty hard to do. And it’s really hard to do if you’re also trying to control how much, or which food, she’s eating.

So I would pick one and I would pick the schedule to work on and not work on the how much. Let her be in charge of the how much. You truly don’t know how hungry she is. Kids in puberty need a lot of food, they are growing really fast. And it may look like much more food than you as an adult would eat in a meal. And that’s okay, that’s normal. I’m going to link to a piece I did earlier in the summer on when is it restriction and when is it good parenting, and that may give you some more ways to think about how to have this conversation with her.

Q: I, like you, consider myself a “small fat person.” I also consider myself someone that’s engaged with and interested in topics like dismantling diet culture, the toxicity of the wellness movement (and the consumerization thereof), and how it all fits in with questions of intersectional feminism. At the same time, I work as a strategist for an advertising agency that has recently been asked to work on a major diet brand campaign. In the theoretical, I can argue it is an opportunity (to affect change, to influence decision makers, to enable further understanding in an organization that doesn’t understand why it’s quite so hated today) — but in the practical, I’m struggling with it, big time. So I’m curious, as someone who started her career in the world of women’s magazines and wellness and then found an enlightened path out, how would you feel in this situation? What might you do?

A: This is tricky, because the idealist in me wants to say, don’t work for the big evil diet company. Just like, I would hope you would not work for a tobacco company or gun brand. There are certain jobs where, that door feels closed in my brain. But then there is the reality of your life. I do not know the reality of your financial situation, I do not want to assume that you can just like up and quit this job or make life difficult for yourself at this job and then weather whatever storm that would cause in terms of lack of job security, financial uncertainty, etc. So I’m certainly not going to tell you absolutely don’t take this, don’t work with that brand, if that’s your job, and I assume you need your job, as most of us do, to pay your bills.

So thinking of it as an opportunity to try to influence decision makers is the way to go about it, right? Because you need this job. And now you do have this opportunity to try to turn some tides within this company. I am not using the brand name in this because I want to protect this reader’s privacy, but I will say it is a brand that I am extremely skeptical will actually ever change on this topic. They are pretty much a weight loss brand at their core. And it’s hard to imagine that changing. So I do think you’ll have your work cut out for you.

When I started in women’s magazines, I absolutely went in thinking, “I’m making change from the inside.” I think I put that in my cover letter for the job and it’s amazing I got the job, because I was not at all quiet about that as my mission. But I will be honest about what happened next, which is: I began very quickly to rationalize content that I found objectionable as not that bad. I’d think, oh if we make this change, it won’t be so bad, this isn’t really a diet. Because number one, I wasn’t actually as clear on my own values as I thought I was at that point. Shocking, that at 22, I didn’t have that all worked out. And also because I needed the job, and because now I was working with people who I liked personally, even if I disagreed with some of the editing calls they were making. And because I wanted to make a career in this world, and it felt like I couldn’t die on every mountain and also make that happen.

So I think what you’re going to really struggle with, if you stay on this job and do this work, is being able to do it in a way that feels ethical, and in line with your values, and not like you’re rationalizing the decision. (I guess maybe the theme of today is rationalizing, or at least it was in a couple of these questions?) I think it’s very understandable that we do this. Because, again, cultural indoctrination, we’ve been hearing these messages since we were kids, and also, when we’re talking about things like job security, that’s kind of a non-negotiable. So I’m not saying, don’t do the job, because I’m sure it’s something you really need in your life. But I am curious to hear what you decide, I would love an update.

Maybe find a way to have someone outside of that world who can be a sounding board or a check-in person for you. Someone who you can come to and say, “Well, they wanted to do it this way, and I pushed back, and here’s what I won.” And that person can either celebrate that victory with you or say, “Okay, but here’s what you left on the table, here’s what they’re still doing.” And kind of keep you accountable as you try to make change from the inside. Because how do you know if you’re really making change? What are the benchmarks you’re going to use for that?

For me, personally, it was in many ways murkier. Did we make change from the inside? Yes. And no. I think there were articles that I was involved in, that caused less harm than they would have otherwise, because I was involved with them. But they still caused harm, I still own that, absolutely. Also, looking back now on where women’s magazines were in the early 2000s and where they are now, there has been an enormous sea change. I think every women’s media brand is trying much more now to lean in to critiquing diet culture, and calling out fat phobia. This is a topic that I’m regularly asked to write about for these places now, whereas years ago, I was pitching these stories, and they were falling on deaf ears. I am not personally taking credit for the entire sea change—I’m glad to have played a small part in it—but that took 20 years, first of all, so it’s not like I was able to get in there and make all these changes overnight and feel really good about the work I was doing right away. I mean, there were years when I felt not good at all about the work I was doing. And it took a long time, and we still haven’t made nearly enough progress.

So I think that’s the way to think about it: If you are going to be working to make change, it’s going to be slow, it’s going to be very uphill work. And in this particular case, I’m skeptical that this brand will really evolve. Even if it does evolve, the thing you have to watch for, the thing I still watch for with women’s magazines, and I see all the time happening with these brands, is that they’re evolving because they’re responding to consumer demand. They’re not evolving because they’ve actually made progress on the issue, or they actually are ready to acknowledge the harm that they’ve done. I have yet to write an anti-diet piece for a women’s magazine where I get to say, here’s a piece I wrote a decade ago that was actually horrible, or here are all the other ways this brand has caused harm over the years. I think there are a lot of people working in that space who are really eager to do things better now, but it still feels really scary and really untenable to acknowledge what happened in the past. That’s just sort of a hard reality of where we are.

I don’t know that I really answered this question. I don’t think I can answer it for you because I don’t know you or your life. But I hope I’ve given you some stuff to sort of ponder as you decide what to do. And everyone listening, if I answer one of your questions in one of these epsiodes, I love updates, and if you send me an update, you know, maybe I’ll update listeners as well, in a future episode. It would be really fun to hear how these things unfold for you and what you continue to work on. And if you think I got it totally right or I got it totally wrong. I’m open to hearing that too!

Thank you all so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you like this episode and you aren’t yet subscribed, please do so.

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Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Jessica McKenzie, who writes the fantastic Substack, Pinch of Dirt. Our logo is by Deanna Lowe.

And I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. You can find more of my work at virginiasolesmith.com or come say hi on Instagram and Twitter. I’m @v_solesmith. I’m barely on Facebook anymore, so don’t worry about that. Thanks for listening and talk to you soon!

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Hello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!

This is a newsletter where we explore questions (and some answers) around fatphobia, diet culture, parenting, and health. I am Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture, and I’m the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia.

Today, I’m pleased to be chatting with Dr. Rachel Millner, a psychologist based in Newtown, Pennsylvania who specializes in eating disorders. Welcome, Rachel! I’m so excited to talk to you. Before we dive into our big topic, why don’t you tell our listeners a little more about yourself and your work?

Rachel

As you already said, I’m a psychologist, outside of Philadelphia, I’m in private practice here. I work primarily with folks who are dealing with eating disorders, disordered eating, those wanting to heal their relationship with food and body. I do a lot of work around anti fat bias and weight stigma. And I frequently talk about “atypical anorexia” and weight stigma and how those issues play out within the eating disorder field.

Virginia

And you have an awesome Instagram that I will link to in the transcript. I also interviewed you for a New York Times piece last year. (And this Good Housekeeping story!) What I wanted to chat with you about today, what kind of inspired this conversation, is an Instagram post you did back in June, and I’ll just read the text here. You wrote:

And I sort of had a real like, yes moment reading this. I think this probably resonated with a lot of folks, and for other folks, this might be sort of confusing. There are a lot of misconceptions about the relationship between trauma and weight. There’s just a lot we can unpack here.

So first, I would love to hear a little bit of the background of what inspired this post for you.

Rachel

I think, you know, there is so much nuance here. And it’s one of those topics that I think does bring up a lot for people, because of all the weight stigma. You know that when we start a conversation around trauma and fatness, given the weight stigma in the culture, of course, we all kind of go into high alert and brace ourselves for like, okay, what’s coming next? What prompted this Instagram post was just sitting with clients and hearing their stories and feeling like their stories aren’t being told. And wanting to name that for some people, there might be a connection between fatness and trauma.

The other side of that narrative that’s so harmful, is this idea that if we heal trauma, then somehow we’re magically not going to be fat anymore. This is something that’s projected onto my clients all the time. So I was just thinking about these conversations that I have in my office all the time, that are never told.

Virginia

I’ve heard this from readers before, where they almost feel like they’re being a “bad fatty” if they say, “I think my body size is related to this experience I had.” That really denies their truth. And it makes it difficult for them to tell their story.

I mean, it gets really messy, it gets really messy. So, I guess, you know, for folks who are newer to this conversation, it might be useful to start by talking about some of those relationships you’re seeing among your clients? How does trauma sometimes relate to body size? What scenarios are you kind of referencing here?

Rachel

The story that I hear from my clients is that when they were going through trauma, particularly childhood trauma, although I think it’s also true for people who have experienced trauma as an adult, that oftentimes food is what’s available to cope. If somebody is in a home where they’re being traumatized, or a child who doesn’t have access to therapy or other ways of getting support, food is often available. And it’s a really effective coping mechanism. It can be really helpful to eat in response to sadness or pain or suffering. And for some people, that eating may lead to weight gain, not for everybody, but there’s, you know, people who, that eating in response to emotions over time might lead to them gaining weight.

Then too, I think for a lot of people who have trauma around weight stigma, and are put on diets at a very young age, we know that dieting often leads to weight gain. A lot of my clients talk about what it was like to have trauma around weight stigma, being told that their body was wrong at a young age, and being forced to restrict their food intake, which then, of course, leads to bingeing and leads to weight gain.

Virginia

Another narrative I often hear about is what Roxane Gay wrote about in Hunger. She framed it as almost more of a deliberate decision to eat as a form of protection. What are your thoughts are on that, if that’s something you also see coming up for folks?

Rachel

I appreciated Roxane Gay’s book so much, because I think this is a narrative that doesn’t get told. And I’m really of the belief that we need to believe people. And you know, when people share their story, we can trust that what they’re saying is true and real. When I have clients who talk about intentionally gaining weight, or thinking about fatness as a way to be protected from the male gaze, that makes a lot of sense. And we still know that that’s rooted in weight stigma. Because this idea that if we’re in bigger bodies, then men are not going to be attracted to us is rooted in weight stigma. And it’s real, right? This is the water that we swim in. It doesn’t mean, you know—there are many people in fat bodies who are in wonderful relationships and have lots of people that are attracted to them. But I think this idea, especially, I hear a lot with my clients who have had sexual trauma, is that there’s a feeling of protection when their body is bigger.

Virginia

Right, that somehow they can hide more that way. Which, yes, again, there’s the layers of fatphobia built right into that, but it’s also an understandable path to seek when you’re struggling in that way.

Rachel

And we know that when people either lose weight, or their body is smaller that, especially for those socialized female, oftentimes their body is sexualized, is put on display, people feel free to comment and you know, “compliment.” And that can be really vulnerable for people, for anybody, but especially people who have trauma history, especially around sexual trauma.

Virginia

I think that’s really important to articulate. The more you’re talking about this, the more I’m realizing how weight stigma plays into it right from the beginning, for so many folks navigating trauma and weight. Even, as you were saying earlier, that the sort of idea of emotional eating, getting demonized, that’s something we talk about a lot here—I’ve certainly experienced it myself. We tend to praise the idea of people losing their appetites while undergoing trauma, like that gets celebrated as if that was a good coping strategy, when actually, that’s quite alarming. That weight loss that can result, again, doesn’t always result but sometimes results, isn’t a good thing.

I remember when my daughter went through a lot of intensive medical experiences, and we lived in a hospital for weeks and months at a time at various points. And people would always sort of encourage me to get out and go for a walk, like that’s what you should do as a “healthy coping strategy.” And I was like, hey, I can’t leave her hospital room. We live here. And I’m terrified if I leave, she’ll stop breathing. So no, I’m not going for a walk. And actually, eating Au Bon Pain chocolate croissants while I sat in this hospital room for hours a day like felt good, and was comforting and it alleviated boredom and stress. I just remember wondering, through that trauma, why is my chosen coping method feeling wrong to everybody around me? And that’s weight stigma. It’s because they didn’t see it as “healthy” because it might result in weight gain, or did result in weight gain.

Rachel

Instead of being able to see the wisdom in that, that having access to food while sitting in a hospital room is so wise and comforting. If we were neutral about food and body size, then it would be like, okay, bring all the croissants, and have as many as you want, and comfort yourself and try to get through this really horrific time. Instead, we hold up some coping mechanisms and vilify others, which is ridiculous.

Virginia

I will say, for the people in my life listening to this, that I did have people who supported me on the croissants and understood when I said, “No, I really can’t. Yes, my husband can leave and go for a run, and that’s really helping him through this time, but me leaving is not something that will feel—like, that feels terrifying.” And people did respect that, but it was tricky to articulate. And it’s tricky that when you’re in the active experience of trauma, to have to articulate your need and defend a need. You shouldn’t have to assert to other people that your need is valuable at that point.

Rachel

Right, you shouldn’t have to defend it. Even just thinking over the past year and a half with COVID, there is some subset of people who have coped by eating, and there is some subset of people who have coped by restricting. And we don’t name the restriction as harmful. We praise it when really, restriction weakens your immune system and makes you more vulnerable to stress and the impact of stress. But instead, what we say is, oh, if somebody is restricting and losing weight, that that’s a positive thing. We don’t name the harm of it, where, you know, eating to cope actually makes a lot of sense. And is way more beneficial than restricting.

Virginia

Because that’s at least meeting a physical need. It’s getting you through. Absolutely.

So, we see the weight stigma showing up in the active trauma space, and as people are kind of navigating coping strategies. And then we also see it, you know, I don’t want to say after, because of course, trauma can be a long unfolding process, but in terms of how these fat bodies are then pathologized by the world, right? So talk a little bit about what is often the approach to when, you know, whether it’s in eating disorder treatment, or in trauma therapy, in general, when you know, providers encounter someone in a bigger body, and the focus goes to weight loss, and why that is not actually going to help with the healing from the trauma.

Rachel

What I often hear and see from clients is, there’s two paths that come up the most: I see clients who went to therapy, are in a fat body, and the provider made an assumption that because they’re fat, they must have had trauma, without even assessing or asking questions. And then there’s clients who do connect their fatness to trauma, and so they have gone to therapy, wanting to talk about their trauma history, and sometimes also starting out in therapy saying, and I would like to lose weight, or just not even focusing at all on body size, but just wanting to talk about their trauma. And what happens is that therapists then say, “Well, yes, we can work on your trauma. And if we work on your trauma, then you’ll lose weight.” Because if we’ve decided that eating in response to trauma lead to weight gain, then the belief is, if we heal your trauma, then your eating is gonna change, and you’ll release the weight. That’s the word that comes up.

Virginia

That phrase is really yucky.

Rachel

It seems to be the one that my clients hear quite frequently. People are in fat bodies for endless reasons. There are so many different reasons, and we don’t need to know them in order to know that promoting weight loss is harmful. It doesn’t matter if somebody is fat because of trauma, or for any of the other reasons that influence body size. It’s not like diets differentiate, that one diet says, okay, this person had trauma, so, this diet is effective.

Virginia

I can totally see the trauma diet becoming some new creepy trend on Instagram: Intermittent fasting to heal your inner child or something.

It’s just so missing the point because it’s not helping people work on, you know, processing what’s really happened to them or figuring out what they really need. It’s like solving this problem that’s, as you say, possibly related, possibly even completely unrelated, and not actually a problem at all. And giving them this other thing to focus on and then measure their “success” based on whether they can control it or not.

Rachel

I think it’s so important to name really clearly that fatness is not the trauma. Weight stigma is a trauma, and clients have all kinds of other traumas that they’re coming in with. But fatness is not the trauma, and trying to you know “fix fatness” is actually re-traumatizing. So if somebody is coming in, and a therapist is saying, '“Okay, I’m going to help you with your trauma, and I’m going to help you lose weight,” they’re actually re-traumatizing somebody who’s already been through significant trauma.

Virginia

So where do you think that sort of line of thinking in the provider community is coming from? I mean, why? Why is that an accepted practice when it’s so clearly causing harm?

Rachel

It’s an important question. I think some of it is that providers are still being trained in really stigmatizing programs. I don’t think people are learning about the impact of anti-fat bias and weight stigma. I think, unfortunately, a lot of providers haven’t done their own work around it, so they may still be trying to suppress their own weight or still trying to diet in their own life. As providers, we’re always going to be in process. It’s not that, you know, as a therapist, you suddenly get to this place where you’ve worked through everything.

But I think if we haven’t done our own work around weight stigma and our relationship with our body, then we are likely to harm clients that are coming in wanting to address those issues. I think the trauma field still supports this, I think some of it comes from the eating disorder field. But I think a lot of it comes from the trauma field. If you read some of the main books about trauma, this narrative is written about, and they are not HAES-informed books. So if you don’t already have some footing in Health at Every Size, and you’re looking for a trauma book to read, or to learn about, that narrative is going to be reinforced.

Virginia

It also makes me think about how much our internalized vision of healthy or recovered or happy is intrinsically linked to thinness, so if someone achieves weight loss—however temporary that’s likely to be, and no matter what they have to do in order to achieve it—we’re going to view that as “success,” because that narrative is so embedded in our culture. And we’re not going to look deeper than that, we’re not going to see that that isn’t actually dealing with the underlying issues.

Do you think there’s a degree to which the underlying stuff feels harder, you know, that it’s that work that might be scarier to people? And going on a diet feels like, well, this is what I can control. So let me do that.

Rachel

Absolutely. I mean, I think that all of us have been socialized to believe that weight is under our control. And that if we can just find the right diet and lose weight, then it’s going to solve other problems. And there’s so many providers who reinforce that.

Virginia

And the science that’s getting done is reinforcing this, too. I mean, I was looking at a couple of studies that were done recently on adverse childhood experiences, and they are all trying to document this phenomenon. One is called “Adverse childhood experiences are associated with an increased risk of obesity and early adolescence.” (I apologize for using the O-word, I’m quoting the fatphobic research.) And there are several others I’ll link to in the transcript. It seems like the goal of this research is to say, we should worry about childhood trauma because people might get fat from it, as if that is the outcome we’re worried about, not the trauma.

I’m curious for your thoughts on that research, I think we see the similar thing happening in research on childhood poverty and childhood hunger. Like if fat is the outcome, then it’s really bad.

Rachel

I think that we want to believe that research is objective and neutral. And the truth is that it’s not. The questions that are being asked in these research studies are inherently biased. And so they are asking a question that they think they know the answer to. I would love to sit down with somebody like Deb Burgard or somebody who’s really great at pulling through statistics, because just glancing at this research, I’m not sure that there’s actually a difference between the percentage of kids who are in higher weight bodies in this study where they’re connecting it to adverse childhood experiences, and just the percentage of kids who are in higher weight bodies in general.

Virginia

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.

Rachel

So I’d be really curious for somebody who’s really great at statistics to kind of pull all of that apart.

Virginia

Yeah, because if it’s like we’re trying, what it feels like, in a way is that they’re looking at the “childhood obesity epidemic.” They’re saying kids are in bigger bodies now, let’s find this explanation for it. And then that’s a way of pathologizing the fact that kids come in different sizes. Then you’ve decided, all those kids are traumatized or broken in some way. Now, you’ve explained it to yourself. Just yeah, that’s a pretty fatphobic way of going about the problem.

Rachel

Right. And it’s like you said, I mean: You’re identifying fatness as the problem, like, how about if we identify the problem is that so many kids have childhood trauma? This idea that, a kid’s coming in and identifying that they’ve had a history of physical abuse, sexual abuse, and the thing that these studies are worried about is fatness?!

It’s just so harmful. And it’s scary that this is how we’re responding to kids’ body size and to trauma, that the thing that these studies are focused on and asking questions about is how do we make kids not be in bigger bodies? And ignoring like, how do we protect kids from being physically and sexually abused?

Virginia

Right, right. It’s a really similar thing that played out in childhood hunger research, which was like, in order to get funding and attention on childhood hunger and childhood poverty, there was a huge effort to document the connections to higher weight. And it’s like, do I really need to explain to you, that you should care about kids being hungry? You needed some other outcome—you needed to make it about fatness? In order to care about this problem? We couldn’t just care about feeding hungry kids? It’s mind blowing. And it feels very similar.

This also feels very tied to the older conversation about whether “obesity” should be classified as a disease. And, a lot of folks who were in favor of that argued that it would reduce stigma, if we could understand high body weight as a “chronic condition” because you would understand that it was beyond people’s control, and they needed intervention and support. That has definitely not been the result of classifying obesity as a disease. We know that it has only furthered weight stigma, and it feels like a similar parallel here that if we’re trying to understand weight as always trauma related. You could argue that that’s a way of increasing empathy. But it doesn’t seem like that’s how that conversation plays out.

Rachel

Yeah, I am fascinated by this kind of line of thinking. I really am curious about who thought it was a good idea to classify body size as a disease. And like, how they convinced themselves that that was actually going to decrease stigma or not pathologize people. I understand the narrative they’re telling themselves but I would love to dig deeper and really pick apart like, what actually is going through their mind when they thought that that was a good idea.

Of course labeling body size as a disease was not going decrease stigma. I think, first of all, it contributes to the idea, like when we think disease states, we think of something that requires treatment. And so then you’re reinforcing that body size needs some sort of intervention. So naming it as a disease is not going to reduce the stigma in the culture, like we actually have to address the stigma and not try to find creative ways to describe body size, and pretend that that’s actually going to be the thing that’s beneficial. We have to find ways to reduce stigma. I’m just sick in general of our need to pathologize these expected and typical responses to being in a body, and being in a culture that harms bodies.

I think this happens with lots of different diagnoses. I don’t think this is unique to labeling body sizes as disease, but I think we’ve just got to get away from pathologizing people and name the problem in the culture and you know, in the environment, instead of saying that body size is the problem.

Virginia

Completely agree. And on the other side of this conversation, what we sort of started touching on in the beginning that I just want to hit on quickly, before we wrap up, is that it makes it harder for people to talk about what’s happened to them, because they’re worried if they own their full story, that they’re going to be pathologized for their weight. And I do sometimes feel within the Health at Every Size community, we don’t do a great job of making space for this story, right? Because we’re so quick to fight against the pathologizing. Then I hear from folks in fat bodies that feel like, I’m not allowed to be a fat person with health problems here. So I don’t know if you have any thoughts about that, because I’m sure you sort of see that tension, often.

Rachel

Totally. And it makes sense to me, I understand why that’s the reaction from the Health at Every Size community. When you’ve been oppressed for so long, and there’s such a difficult time holding nuance within the larger environment, that anytime there’s a narrative, that there’s a fear it’s going to increase oppression or marginalization, of course, people want to defend and protect against it. So it makes a lot of sense to me. But what it does create is this reinforcing of stigma and it silences people. And we want to do the opposite within the Health at Every Size community, we want everybody’s story to be able to be told. So I think we have to be able to hold space for these conversations. Because, one, they’re true, right? Like this is real. These narratives are true and real. There’s a ton of nuance within the research around, you know, fatness and health conditions that we need to be able to talk about. And when we don’t talk about them, we prevent people from getting help with the things that there actually are interventions for, and weight loss is not one of them. If somebody in a fat body can’t talk about whatever health conditions they might be dealing with, then how are they going to get appropriate interventions for whatever those health conditions are? So we’ve got to be able to talk about it.

Virginia

That makes total sense. And I am so grateful for how you articulate this nuance. Thank you so much for your work and for being here.

Rachel

Thanks for having me on for these hard conversations.

Virginia

They are hard but they’re really important and I hope it helps people feel more seen in their own experiences and more like they can own their stories.

Thank you all so much for listening to Burnt Toast! If you like this episode and you aren’t yet subscribed, please do so.

If you are a subscriber, thank you so much for being here. And please consider sharing Burnt Toast on social media or forwarding it to a friend.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Jessica McKenzie, who writes the fantastic Substack, Pinch of Dirt. Our logo is by Deanna Lowe.

And I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. You can find more of my work at virginiasolesmith.com or come say hi on Instagram and Twitter. I’m @v_solesmith. I’m barely on Facebook anymore, so don’t worry about that. Thanks for listening and talk to you soon!

Hello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!

This is a newsletter where we explore questions and some answers around fatphobia, diet culture, parenting, and health. I am Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture, and I’m the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia.

On Tuesday we talked about why parents need to question our own biases around school food. Today we are getting into all of your concerns about the diet culture your kids encounter at school. I am very excited to be chatting with Gwen Kostal, a Canadian registered dietitian and the co-founder of Dietitians4Teachers. Welcome, Gwen!

Gwen

Thank you. It’s so great to be here. I’ve followed your work.

Virginia

Well, likewise. You are who I always send everybody to when I get school questions, because your Instagram is amazing. These topics come up in such complicated ways and I always want to make sure I’m sending them to someone who is a dietitian and really understands this issue from multiple sides. So why don’t you tell us a little more about yourself and your work? How did you end up launching Dietitians4Teachers?

Gwen

That’s a great question and a little bit of a funny story because we sort of stumbled into it. So I started this work with a colleague of mine, who’s moved into consulting for this, but we were honestly going for a walk in September of last year and sort of grumbling around, like, Oh, shoot, it’s started already. The comments are back. And then we had a really great chat about, Well, how come this isn’t working? So many dietitians, so many people are talking about this. How come it’s not landing?

I’m trained in change management and quality improvement, which is really a fancy way of saying solving problems that people think, well, it’s just the way we’ve always done it. And so we started to look at the problem a little differently. And we said, Oh my gosh, what if we showed up for teachers, instead of just chastising people and making people feel like they’re always wrong? What if we showed up and started to help people unlearn this?

And so we started testing the water, seeing if there was interest with an Instagram account, and talking to some teachers we knew, and it’s just gotten so exciting. And so it’s me, and then I consult with different dietitians, depending on the expertise needed, but I’ve worked with so many great teachers, and many, many of them are ready and they want to do this differently. They know it feels icky. They just don’t have the time, the resources, and the knowledge. And when we keep wagging our fingers and not showing up to help, nothing’s going to change. So that’s a big part of where it’s come from, and it’s just been so exciting. Teachers are incredible to work with.

Virginia

I love this because, you know, I’m mostly hearing from the parents, as I’m sure you do, too. And often, the moment a parent notices this is an issue is when something has happened to their child. So they’re very emotional, understandably. They’re feeling extremely concerned about harm being caused to their child. But then immediately, we’re in this parents-versus-teachers place, which is really uncomfortable, really unfair to the teachers, really hard to navigate out of. And so I love the idea of, let’s not start there. Let’s start by engaging with these incredibly hardworking professionals, and in a respectful way. That’s fantastic.

So let’s talk big picture. I’m sure I have some listeners who aren’t parents or teachers and are kind of new to this conversation, or parents of preschoolers who haven’t totally experienced it yet. How is diet culture showing up in schools? What are you noticing the most? And why is it there?

Gwen

This is such a complicated question because it’s there for so many reasons. It’s in the curriculum to teach healthy eating, in every curriculum you come across. It’s there somehow, and 99 percent of the time, it’s written in super vague language, which is then on the teacher to interpret. Dieting has been the lay of the land for the last 50 years, so most of our teachers grew up in pro-diet culture space. So when our curriculum writers have left things really vague, they’ve left that interpretation into a space where the diet culture machine has programmed us to think healthy eating means X, Y, Z. A healthy snack is X, Y, Z. So the curriculum is part of why we’re here.

Even national food policies, like food guides, they’re new. It’s just over 100 years since the first micronutrient was identified. This is not something that’s been around a really long time. And our first food guides came out of scarcity, right? They came out of war measures and all of that, and then they got adopted more widely. And anytime there’s a national policy on something—when curriculums are national, or here, provincial, and I think in the U.S., state—they get adopted because it’s endorsed material. They don’t have to source out new things.

So that’s how we got here. And diet culture is showing up because there are companies that profit by make programs for schools, and schools are resource-tight. They don’t have a ton of time to research and read all the up-to-date evidence on what would be good. If someone’s offering them a canned, ready-to-go way to teach a certain set of subjects, that’s great news for teachers and schools and educators.

The other thing is sort of innocent. Teachers inherit resources from whoever taught the classroom before, or they’re googling online on their own time, looking for things and up comes Teachers Pay Teachers or different types of resources and free things that they’re like, “That looks good.” And because they’re not dietitians, they don’t really have a way to vet it. And it’s super important to remember that teachers were taught, at least in the Canada and Ontario context, teachers were taught how to teach. They weren’t taught all the minutiae of every topic they’re going to teach. Some of them cover aerospace!

Virginia

Yes, yes, absolutely. Yes. That makes sense. The standard teaching certification doesn’t include a quick six months through nutritional science to get you ready for this.

Gwen

And, you know, food and nutrition and health is often not the testable material. And so in Canada, we have standardized testing. It’s on math and reading and all these sort of things. So when it comes to pressures on, what do we need to standardize and make sure is taught the same way? Those are the subjects that are getting the attention.

So we see it coming out of curriculums and health class and gym class and different assignments that are trying to reach these teaching points. We also, though, see it in something I think your followers have commented quite a bit on: in just comments, or a funny policy-not-a-policy.

Virginia

Right, right.

Gwen

You know, rules that are in school, like, you have to eat your vegetables before you eat your cookies. Those kind of things. So we see it there, too.

Virginia

Yeah, absolutely. It seems like there’s the official curriculum-version of this, and then there are the unofficial comments on lunchbox contents and general off-the-cuff remarks that people make in these settings. And they can both be really tricky. So yeah, this is definitely an issue where parents feel a lot of anxiety over how, or even whether, to engage.

I’ve gotten a couple questions recently, like, Should I try to lobby for change in my public schools before my kid is attending them? If so, what? To which I would say, No. Maybe wait until you’re there and see what’s happening. Get to know the community.

But on the flip side, is there any way to even start making this kind of change without it becoming a full-time job? I can also relate to that overwhelming feeling of, how do I even begin to push this boulder up the mountain?

So how do you suggest we begin to think about these conversations? From the parents’ perspective, what can be helpful? How do you start to engage on this?

Gwen

I think the instinct or the gut-reaction that we’re going to need to do it 100 percent and for every child and for the whole school board, district, state is there and it’s real—and some reassurance to parents that there are really fabulous people working on that. There are ways you can get involved. I know there are people, especially in the States, working on that, and there are groups up here working on that, as well.

What I would say is, should you try and lobby—lobby is a really tough word. So, lobby is a fighting word. Maybe I’ll start with when your kid is already in school and you’re noticing something, and work back to whether you should approach it before your kid’s even there. My general approach is, remember that this teacher, especially in September, you’ve got eight months, and there’s a whole lot more relationship with this teacher than just around the food part.

Virginia

Yes, great point.

Gwen

The food part is really important, but so is learning safety and good communication, and building a relationship of respect and honesty and transparency is going to ripple effect through your whole year. So when you when you have a hunch that something’s going on at school, whether you’ve read something that came home and you explicitly know something’s going on at school, or you’ve heard little comments here and there, you see the cookie come back every day, the very first thing I’d say is, take a minute. And that’s not intending to sound disrespectful. I take lots of minutes. When you’re in this space, we’re so aware, right? Once you start learning about diet culture, you see it everywhere.

Virginia

Yes.

Gwen

So we do need to remind ourselves to approach with calm. The next thing I would do is, depending on the age of your kid, but if they’re school age, it’s probably appropriate, is ask some curious questions, like, what happened at lunch? Tell me about lunch? Who’s in the classroom? Is there a movie playing? And what’s going on? Does it feel rushed? Do you feel like you have to hurry? Try and understand what’s actually going on before jumping to conclusions because we assume that this is ill-intentioned. And we know that impact and intent are different and separate. But a reminder that no teacher is intentionally doing harm. They’re stuck with some unlearning to do of their own or some policies that they don’t like and they have to find ways to work around.

If you determine that you want to go forward and talk about it, I would get out of email space. We’re so comfortable with email, and teachers are so great at it after last year, but email is the land of misinterpreted tone and miscommunication. I would see if I could get a call, or even in person, if your school is doing that, and just listen to understand first. So there’s a few different models from the change-management side of things that help you approach this. And you really just want to say, Here’s what I’m seeing, or, here’s what I heard. I’m curious, or—depending on how bad or severe it is—I’m curious about it because I’m concerned about it, because I’m worried about it. All these feeling words are appropriate. You can attach them. And stay focused on your kid because you are in a parent-teacher partnership for the next year.

Virginia

Yes, yes. That’s great. And what happened to your kid is kind of the only piece you really can be knowledgeable about, right? You don’t know what’s happening in other kids’ lunchboxes, so that’s really helpful language.

Gwen

The other thing I would say is a lot of things that do happen at school are counter to evidence. So when I’ve heard from people who have reached out to parents, and they say, oh, I got an email back, but it says we do this because we know that sugar makes hyperactivity in the afternoon and worse behavior. We know the evidence doesn’t support that. That is based on one study from the 70s with one child. Feingold is the pediatrician that did that work. Thank you.

Virginia

Thanks, Feingold. Big help.

(Note to readers: For more on why sugar doesn’t cause hyperactivity, check out this piece.)

Gwen

And, you know, it’s really tricky territory when you feel the need to start sharing resources, and journal articles, specifically. So once you have this conversation of, I’m worried, I saw. What can we do together? What can we do about it? If you built that with trust and empathy and understanding that teachers have a ton on their plate, you may get to the point where you say, Do you want me to send you some stuff to read about this? I’ve been doing some learning. I’ve been changing the way I see this. Would you be interested? That’s the moment to share resources. It’s very much like your New York Times article around teachers and virtual learning. Teachers were highly watched last year, right?

Virginia

Yes.

Gwen

So we have to give them a bit of grace and a bit of space to breathe, but remember that, if they’re getting like, Hey, so-and-so parent is on line three for you, they’re probably feeling a bit of a sense of, Oh, gosh. So they might be entering that conversation with tension.

Virginia

Defensive, sure.

Gwen

Yeah, and it’s normal, right?

Virginia

Yeah, absolutely. That’s great. And I like the asking if you can send—I mean, I’m definitely the parent who has to hold myself back from being like, Here’s some stuff I’ve written. Here’s some stuff other people have written. Here are all the things that have been written. And it’s not what they need, it’s not helpful. So I like the idea of asking first, before you start peppering them with links. I mean, we’ve seen that in every Twitter thread ever. Out-linking somebody never results in that other person being like, Okay, I got it now. They just feel bad because you gave them six things to read and they have a lot of other things to do.

Let’s talk about some more specific concerns that have come up.

You know this policy that a lot of schools have of encouraging kids to eat their sandwich before their cookies or their vegetables before—the order in which children eat food comes up a lot. There’s that great lunchbox note that Katja Rowell wrote. Do you recommend something like that? Or is there another tactic you’d suggest?

Gwen

Yeah, I do, but as a third defense. I really, really encourage parents to strive for partnership and understanding and compassion. Even if that means you try an opt-out without a template note—maybe borrowing the language without saying, Look, I found a PDF online and I’ve filled it out. That can feel really off-putting, I think.

Virginia

That’s a great point, to take the time to write it yourself.

Gwen

But there will be situations that you may need to use that. So if you get a really sort of traditional teacher, or someone who’s really rooted in their own body image struggle, their own diet culture stuff, and they absolutely cannot meet you where you’re at, then opt-out is a really good option. And in a situation where the school is not providing the food, you’re the one providing the food, in a packed lunch environment, that is outside of their domain. And so you have to say, I respect that you have a way that you’re running your classroom. It won’t work for my child. I’m giving permission for my child to not participate in that. Please let me know if we need to do anything to make that happen.

And you don’t need to have a lot of explaining with that. There’s that line that goes around that says, You don’t need to explain your no. Well, a little. But you can just sort of say, I respect that we see this differently. This isn’t going to work for my kid. Please opt them out.

Virginia

I love that. That’s really helpful language. Would you do something similar—obviously, it’s going be a little different when we’re talking about the class assignments, like the health class that’s having the kids keep food logs and exercise logs and calorie-tracking, school BMI stuff, which I’m going to be doing a newsletter about soon, but certainly it is a very common practice here in the United States still, despite being pretty under-supported by evidence. Those are things where parents officially can opt out, but again, would that be sort of a last resort? How do you approach that?

Gwen

Yeah, I think anytime you opt out or kind of throw the flag on the play—I cannot believe I just used a sports analogy; my husband will be so proud—anytime you’re going to do that, you’re going to raise awareness that there’s conflict or tension, right? And sometimes your kid doesn’t want you to do that—

Virginia

Yes, I’ve heard that a lot.

Gwen

And sometimes that damages the parent-teacher trust, right? However, that being said: Tracking, analyzing, weighing kids at school is dangerous. It’s dangerous. I would be a lot more apt to let it slide with the lunchbox policing and do some home-coaching with my kids and be like, I can appreciate that people see things differently and everybody has a different relationship, but we can be empathetic that different people think different things and you’re going to see diet culture. Here’s what it looks like, etc.

When it comes to a dangerous practice, like weighing kids at school, I would probably recommend saying: I’m concerned. I’m worried about it because this is damaging and dangerous and promotes eating-disordered bodies, fatness dissatisfaction, and these are 13-year-olds. I really would like to see an alternative assignment for this. Can you tell me what else is available for my child? Or, can you explain to me why this is still an assignment, given what’s known about the danger of these assignments?

So I think you can be a bit more clear and to the point in these situations. And this is probably one that I would move up the chain a little bit more aggressively on than, say, carrots before cookies. That’s probably not an involve-the-principal conversation. I bet you can deal with it in the class. But weighing kids at school is.

Virginia

Yeah, absolutely, because the school administration has signed off on that as a policy. And that’s a helpful line to think about in general. When it’s a teacher’s off-the-cuff comment that is displaying their own struggle or just where they are with this issue, that feels like a really different thing to me, than, this is baked in. This is the curriculum. The whole school has decided we’re weighing kids, that there’s been this decision that the seventh grade keeps calorie logs. That feels like a bigger fight. And I think that’s maybe helpful for us all to think about because the off-the-cuff comment can feel like the big fight when it happens to your kid. And that’s understandable because it can be really upsetting to the child. But I like that distinction you’re making.

You also touched on what was going to be my last question, which is, How do we talk to our kids about this? We’re obviously not going to get all of diet culture out of the classroom, so there are going to be times where—and a reader wrote in and said, our school has a no-candy, no-soda rule. How do I explain this to my kids on a kid-level without engaging in diet-culture reasoning? That is a tricky conversation.

Gwen

It is. And my first question is, How old is the kid? And every time I ask that, I think about healthcare and how there really is no age. You can start these conversations pretty young. You just might have to change how you talk about it, but avoiding diet-culture reasoning is probably not the goal. I think what we want to be showing our kids is that this is out there: school, workplaces, co-ops, on the bus. It’s around. And we want to be building up kids’ critical thinking to see it, spot it, reject it, and still be respectful, participating people in their classrooms, etc. But know that, Oh, that’s a bit funny. And come home and ask their parents about it, if that’s the safer place.

I think how I would explain that one is the same way I would explain, you know, grandma’s on a diet and talks about it all the time. I would be having a conversation with grandma and saying, you know, I really would prefer if you don’t talk about that. We can talk about that on the side, or separately, but not in front of the kids. And then I would talk to the kids and say, you know, This is happening, or, This conversation comes up and different people believe different things, and different people have been taught things, and we have to respect that everybody’s learning things at their own pace, but in our house, in our family, in our classroom—for teachers that are further along with this—in our classroom, we believe this. Because I do have teachers that are really doing awesome stuff, but that may not be the case when they go to their friend’s classroom, or they do reading in the library.

Virginia

Sure, that’s a great point. I think that’s really helpful framing, again, to help with that parental panic of feeling like you have to—we often have this feeling like we have to insulate our kids from these messages, and we just can’t. So thinking, instead, how to help them identify them and question them is just going to be a more useful set of skills.

This is so, so helpful, Gwen. Thank you so much for talking it through with us. Tell us anything else about what you’re working on, where we can follow your work, anything else I should be throwing in the transcript links?

Gwen

I would say the Instagram is where we’re the most exciting. We are on Facebook also, but I’m a bit of one of those old millennials that is still figuring out all the different social media platforms.

Virginia

With you right there.

Gwen

I think they call us geriatric millennials.

Virginia

Yes, yes.

Gwen

But we do have a Facebook page, as well. We are launching more and more education for teachers that are either ready to come individually or as a group. So I do professional development, and it actually doesn’t matter what state, country, province you’re in. As long as we speak the same language, then we can we can do it because there are no boundaries for this, and most of the curriculums are public space. And we do have a website, dietitians4teachers.ca, which gets updated when it gets updated, and all of those things.

Virginia

I hear you.

Gwen

And there are a few resources to try and compete with the ocean of bad nutrition resources. We’re starting to put some up on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Virginia

Oh, that’s fantastic.

Gwen

Hoping that teachers have new options.

Virginia

Yeah, absolutely. And I’m sure there are some teachers listening to this, so I hope they will check out your work and this will be helpful to them and the work they’re trying to do. And for parents, if you do get to the stage of sharing resources with a teacher, obviously Gwen’s stuff is your first stop. So thank you so much, Gwen. This was great.

Gwen

Thanks for having me. This was so fun.

Virginia

Thank you all so much for listening to Burnt Toast. If you like this episode and you aren’t yet subscribed, please do so. If you are a subscriber, thank you so much for being here. And please consider sharing Burnt Toast on social media or forwarding it to a friend.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Jessica McKenzie, who writes the fantastic Substack, Pinch of Dirt. This week we also had help from the also fantastic Rebecca Nathanson. Our logo is by Deanna Lowe. And I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. You can find more of my work at virginiasolesmith.com or come say hi on Instagram and Twitter. I’m @v_solesmith. I’m barely on Facebook anymore, so don’t worry about that. Thanks for listening and talk to you soon!

Hello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!

This is a newsletter where we explore questions and some answers around fatphobia, diet culture, parenting, and health. I am Virginia Sole-Smith. I'm a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture, and I'm the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia.

Today, I am delighted to be chatting with Alyson Gerber, author of the critically acclaimed novels Focused, Braced, and, most recently, Taking Up Space. Alyson, welcome!

Alyson

Thank you so much for having me.

Virginia

I'm so excited to talk to you. I have followed your work for a long time, so this is a real treat. So why don't we start with you just telling us a little bit about yourself?

Alyson

Sure. As you said, I'm an author. I write middle grade books for readers 8 and up, and the adults who care about them, so teachers and parents, doctors, anybody who's interacting with kids of this age. I really started to write for this age group because I experienced a lot of trauma right around sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. I wore a back brace to treat my scoliosis, which was the beginning of my journey to body image struggles. And at the same time, I had undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and I cover those topics in my first two middle grade novels, Braced, about scoliosis, and Focused, about a girl, a chess player, with undiagnosed ADHD.

And Taking Up Space was really the novel that I pushed off writing because I knew how difficult and challenging it would be for me to dig into it. I started writing it when I was pregnant with my daughter and I had a pretty significant disordered eating relapse. I really wanted to talk openly about what it feels like to struggle under the diagnosis. To really be facing food struggles and body image and not have a way to talk about it, I think it can become very complicated. Because there isn't a medical diagnosis for disordered eating, it becomes something that people don't talk about. So I'm always curious and interested in—and most of my books really cover—the topics that we'd rather brush under the rug because we're ashamed of them, for whatever reason.

Virginia

Right. That's such an important point. What Sarah struggles with in the novel isn't necessarily what would meet criteria for an eating disorder, but it is really serious and really difficult and way too common. You're giving voice to that struggle, which I think we are all inclined to normalize or push away or have reinforced by people in our lives, by diet culture, all that kind of stuff. I was curious because I knew the first two novels were very personally inspired: It sounds like with Taking Up Space, the topic is something you've really dealt with, as well. Are any of the characters drawn from your own life? Or was it more taking the issue and putting it into a fictional world?

Alyson

That's a great question. For all three of my books, actually, I really wrote the story of the main character from the heart of what I experienced. So from the ups and downs and the pain of feeling misunderstood and feeling alone and unsupported and confused about whether or not what I was going through was worthy of attention and deserving of comfort—even conversation—and deserving of support. And so especially with Taking Up Space, I really drew on that experience of being confused about what are the rules of eating. Are there rules of eating? And how do you learn how to eat and feed yourself?

Sarah's journey to understand that she has all the tools she needs within herself by listening to her body, that really has been a lifelong journey for me. And so the emotional arc of the character is from my real life, and the plot of what happens to her as this incredible basketball player whose family identity is about basketball—she wants to be part of it and she wants to continue to play at an advanced level because it's so important to her identity—that is fiction. I never played basketball. I was not a basketball star.

Virginia

Wow. I am a complete non-athlete, so I can't say how authentic it was, but it felt very authentic to me—the team culture, the coach relationship. I thought you did such a nice job. I think something that a lot of parents with kids in sports struggle with is how body stuff gets handled in sports. We think about it a lot with gymnastics or cheerleading, which are very aesthetic-based sports, but even in sports like basketball, there's so much emphasis on your body being a certain way to be good at the sport. And the way Sarah was struggling with, “Is my body changing? And do I have to fix that in order to be good at my sport?” I thought that was so, so important to articulate that struggle.

Alyson

Thank you. I actually purposely picked a sport that wasn't endurance or aesthetic because it is such a problem in all sports and I wanted to really showcase that this is an issue that's impacting a big part of the population. It's not just the stereotypes. I wanted her to be outside of that. And I played sports. It was sort of forced upon me. This is one of those things where I went to a school where it was a required, three seasons of sports.

Virginia

Oh god.

Alyson

I was also not an athlete. I was very much a benchwarmer. But one of the things I took away—and I brought that to Braced because Sarah is a soccer player and chess, in a lot of ways, is a team sport—was there was something about being on a team that I loved. I loved the orange slices and I loved the cheering and I loved being there for your friends and wanting to win together. That is the one takeaway of being forced to play sports. It was really not great, but—

Virginia

You had that experience.

Alyson

Exactly, and I'm able to use it in a way that really benefits me now. That's one of the things I love about writing: You get to imagine you're good at something you really can't do at all.

Virginia

I love that. I think I played field hockey for two days, and then I was like, “we have to run a lot at practice and I'm not going to do that.”

Alyson

Also, there are a lot of rules in field hockey. I was always in the wrong place.

Virginia

It was very stressful. I literally lasted less than a week on the team. I was like, Nope, not for me. But I was a theater kid, and so I can relate to that sense of the group experience of building something and creating something as a team. You have that in the theater world too. It is a really special experience and it's definitely the real strength of athletics and activities like that.

Another thing I love about the book is the mother-daughter relationship. This must have been pretty tough to write. I obviously don't want to give away spoilers about the book because I want everyone to go read it, but the mom is struggling quite a bit and you really show how her struggles impact Sarah in really major ways. But they also have this beautiful relationship. They have these things they can really bond over. They love the same kind of murder mysteries and there is a closeness to their relationship, as well as this distance that's happened around food and body. And I thought that was so beautifully done because I think so often, in the way we talk about eating disorders culturally, there's a lot of mom-blaming. And in the way they're often portrayed in fiction and movies or books or whatever, the not-really-examined evil mother figure comes up a lot. So I loved that you steered so deliberately away from that.

I wanted to hear a little bit about your thinking there. Was that a conscious choice? Did you have to resist the urge to make Sarah’s mom the bad guy? How did you think about developing their relationship?

Alyson

I'm so glad that this is not a video, I should say, because you just made me cry in everything you said. I'm just totally tearing up because I think you said that so perfectly.

I think there's so much mom-blaming and I think there's so much black-and-white thinking around mother-daughter relationships: that we have a good relationship, or we have a bad relationship. And I think mother-daughter relationships are really complicated, and especially for characters like Sarah and her mother, I really intentionally wanted her not to be the bad guy. And I wanted the reader to understand that she might be making bad choices as a parent, but those bad choices are because she's also a victim of diet culture. She's a victim of her own experience, and a victim of the time, of growing up in a time where it wasn't as easy to go to therapy. It was not as socially acceptable to talk about your feelings, and so those feelings got buried. Even now, when both mothers and daughters can have access, I think there are places, there are families, there are communities, where it's less accepted. And I hope that's not always going to be the case, but I think for a long time, it probably will be the case.

And so when you have a parent who has complicated feelings that aren't being addressed, those feelings are going to come out in their relationship, and that's where the relationship gets complicated and messy. But it doesn't mean that it's not an amazingly close relationship, like you just said. You can be an incredible parent and also be somebody who has struggled with something in your life that makes that piece of your relationship really hard. And I think we have to get rid of the black-and-white thinking around parenting because it's just not.

I'm a parent now, so I can say, "I'm such a bad mom today!" But then I have to consciously say, "No, I was challenged today and this is how I managed it, and it wasn't my favorite day that I ever had parenting, and I'm going to try to do better tomorrow." And even cutting that black-and white-thinking in the way that we talk to ourselves as parents and as kids, just rethinking it and reframing it for ourselves so that we can really see it for what it is, which is that you can be an incredible parent and have a real deficit in one area, a real blind spot.

And there's also room to always change and grow, and that's one of the things—and I don't want to give anything away—but one of the open pieces of the book that I wanted to keep in place is that some things are resolved and some things aren't, and the door, I think, is left open. And that's one of the special things about middle grade is you can give hope without resolving everything and putting a bow on it. And you can always work on it, you know?

Virginia

Yeah, and the closeness that they have is in these other ways. Because this question comes up all the time with my listeners or my readers of, “How do I talk to my own mom about this? Or, Am I a bad parent because I'm struggling?” And it's this other closeness that you have—bonding over murder mysteries, or whatever it is—that can be the foundation of a lot of healing in this area, if the person is in a position to do the work—and not everybody is. That's the other thing. Not everyone, as you're saying, has the resources, is in a culture that's going to be encouraging of that.

So it can be both a really complicated thing because it's like, how can you love this parent so much when they are also doing things that are harmful to themselves and to you? But it can also be a really cathartic, beautiful opportunity for growth. I think you pack so much nuance into their interactions. It was very powerful to read, and I have a feeling for a lot of parents reading it, it will be, at times, painful, but also there's something powerful about seeing that struggle play out that way.

Alyson

Thank you. I hope it's a conversation-starter for parents and kids, and even teachers and kids. I think there's real space in the classroom to talk about this and say, How can we listen to each other better? How can we respond more thoughtfully to each other?

What you just said about a parent might not be willing to work on it and do the work, but are they willing to listen to your feedback? And can they do some of the work? Maybe it's not only for themselves, but can they do that for you? And so I think it's more complicated than just, yes, they can heal themselves, because not everybody is in a place to be able to do that. But if they can give you the space you need and the safety you need, then that can often really help.

Virginia

Absolutely. Another thing I thought about a lot while I was reading the book, because it's something I struggle with a lot in my own reporting when I read about eating disorders and disordered eating, is the level of detail to include or not include. It felt like you had probably made some very thoughtful choices about, you know, you have to tell a good story and you have to bring the reader into the experience.

But my first job out of college was at Seventeen Magazine, and whenever we reported on eating disorders, I was like, “are we just teaching these kids how to have eating disorders?” Because we were including way too much detail about the vomit and all those sort of things. But as I've continued to work in this area, number one, I'm more thoughtful than I was, I think, at that point in my career. But I also think there's a reality in which kids who are struggling with this need to feel seen, and that can mean seeing descriptions of behaviors or thought patterns that may be quote-unquote triggering, but also may be like, Okay, I'm not the only one with that thought. Or, I'm not the only one who was doing that behavior. So how do you think about that issue? Because I'm sure you also struggle with this question.

Alyson

I think this was the hardest part of writing this book and the thing I wrestled with the most. As a middle grade author, one of the things I always think about is, How am I keeping all my readers safe? That means the reader who has never interacted with this, the reader who is struggling with an eating disorder, the reader who is struggling with constantly being bullied because of fatphobia. I'm trying to think about everybody in the room, and also let that go at some point to write the story. But then when I go back and revise, they're often on my mind in the language that I choose, especially in this book, in the detail that was given.

I wrote this book many times. In the first version, there were more details. Sarah's size was more clear. And as I revised, I really started to get rid of that because I realized it was only hurting the story. We know from some indicators that Sarah is a straight-size person. You know the fashion term. We know that because she doesn't consider things like her chair and her uniform. There's no question about the sizing for her uniform. There are other things that would come up if that weren't the case, but other than that, I really tried to eliminate all those pieces because I didn't want readers walking in comparing themselves to Sarah.

Virginia

That was really smart.

Alyson

That's something that I really struggled with, and have always struggled with: Am I as sick as this person? That sort of comparison, really, at the lowest points, was really hard for me. I know that that can be a struggle for a lot of people, so I wanted to keep those readers safe. And there's no scale in the book, which is also another choice, and I could have made a different choice. I tried to make a different choice at some point. Every choice that felt like the thing you think of as a stereotype when you think of an eating-disorder book or movie, I ended up getting rid of because it didn't serve the story. Truly, it's not the story I wanted to tell.

This is a story about somebody who doesn't value themselves and who has learned to value herself based on outward things, based on her success at basketball, based on the way that she looks. And I wanted her to be able to recognize that and say, I really need to value myself based on myself, on who I really am. That, for me, has actually been the biggest struggle in overcoming all of my many issues. But in particular, self-worth has been the thing. And I think at the root of a lot of eating disorders is this: Does society value me? Does my job value me? Do my friends value me? How do I fit into the world? And the truth is, it's really how do you value you that matters the most. And it took me a long time to really understand that.

Virginia

And you're completely right. If you had included the more cliché descriptions of her getting on a scale and tracking numbers and that kind of thing, that wouldn't have helped tell that story. That would have just been the more Lifetime-movie version—or Seventeen-Magazine-article version—of this story that isn't particularly helpful because it doesn't encourage readers to take these questions deeper. It doesn't help kids think beyond the behaviors about the underlying struggle, which I think Taking Up Space does so well. Because you do have other people in her life—the coach and various other people—who are able to reframe things for her and help her understand these larger questions. And that's really effectively done and, I think, contributes to that sense of safety that you're talking about, as well, for readers.

Alyson

The other thing I thought of when you were sharing that is that I really wanted the reader who had no experience with this—the person who maybe thinks, Well, why don't they just eat? Why can't you just sit down and eat a piece of pizza? What's the big deal? I don't understand—to really be able to understand and to really be able to empathize. I taught over the course of the pandemic virtually, and I met with a lot of middle school kids who felt that whatever their pain, their mourning, their loss that they were experiencing, because it wasn't as big as other people's, that it didn't count.

So they really talked down their pain and dismissed their own pain and made themselves feel bad for feeling bad when, really, everybody's pain counts. There's a spectrum of pain and you deserve support wherever you are. And I think that's something that took me a really long time to understand: that somebody can have it worse, and I can also still need help.

Virginia

Yes, yes. That is a tricky spot, for sure.

Alyson

And I can also be grateful for everything I have. You can be so thankful for the things that are going well, and also feel a lot of pain and be struggling in big ways. And I think as an adult, there's this tendency for adults to be like, "It'll get better. It's going to be fine. This isn't that big of a deal." But if a kid is telling you this is a big deal, that they feel something, it's a big deal, and it doesn't feel like it's going to get better. And they do need help.

Virginia

Absolutely.

Alyson

Even if we don't think that they need help, they sometimes do, and they need to know that. So that's one of the things I hope readers get out of Taking Up Space is a sense of empathy for other people and kindness for themselves.

Virginia

And another thing, I'm realizing, that I think is so effective about the book is because you didn't focus in the traditional way on her weight, you were able to show that the struggle really isn't about, Are you losing a lot of weight? Or, Is your body changing? It really is this internal struggle. And I think that's so important because, going back to what you were saying earlier about, often, we feel like we're not as sick as someone else, one of the main ways that plays out is when an eating disorder doesn't result in this extreme weight loss that we expect. And, of course, the majority of eating disorders don't do that. And so all these people's struggles get swept under because you don't look like the cliché super-emaciated person.

So I loved that you showed that, and you showed, too, that the tinkering with disordered eating can have pretty immediate effects on someone's ability to function and how they're feeling moving through their day, and all of that. That felt really powerful for kids to read, both either if they're going to see themselves in it, or if this is a newer concept to them, to understand that the stakes are quite high, even when you're just in the "early stages" of something.

Alyson

Definitely.

Virginia

I know you said your daughter is almost 4. I don't know exactly when you wrote this because books always take forever to come out, but did becoming a mom change how—and as a fellow mom who's a writer, I hate when we get reduced to being mom writers; I'm not trying to do that—but because you write for kids, and you write about these issues, I'm just curious if your relationship to the work or to this book has changed now that you are a mom of a daughter who may someday be dealing with some aspects of this.

Alyson

So interesting. I started writing this book when I was pregnant with my daughter, and I think I was really thinking a lot about home and what it means to be a parent and what it means to create a sense of home, and I do so much home-creation in my storytelling. Because for 8 to 14 year olds, home is really the center, even though friends are slowly becoming the center. But it's where you come back to for safety. I thought a lot about what does it mean to have a home that's safe, emotionally and physically, and a place where you could really be yourself.

And so I've given that a lot of thought in my parenting, and also I think it's really impacted my writing, and changed it. It's made me see some of the things that were safe for me in my own home growing up that maybe I wouldn't have considered before as being safe. It made me rethink things a little bit. And it made me realize some things that maybe I hadn't seen as being problematic.

And I'm working on a mystery—it's very mysterious!—right now. The character's sense of home and sense of self is a major part of the story. And so I've been thinking about it a lot. It's interesting. The way that my daughter interacts with me has changed the way that—because now I'm seeing it from the other perspective. I'm not writing from the adult perspective interacting with kids, but now I am living the adult perspective interacting with kids. And even though Juliet is younger, I'm still imagining and thinking a lot about how this will play out. The three-nager years really showed me a lot about what I'm in for.

Virginia

Yes, that is a real phase, for sure, having done it twice. Definitely is a phase. I do think there's something to, like, the dynamics you're dealing with now will be the dynamics. Of course, kids change so much, but there are certain throughlines, for sure.

Alyson

And there are certain things that I find that will be a pain point for me. I'll feel the pain point as a parent and be like, Oh, I need help. I can't do this on my own. And seeing that from the other side is really interesting.

Virginia

I was just thinking, with the mom character we talked about, she has such a richness to her, and I think your experience being on the other side maybe helped inform that too. Because it's sometimes left out—and it's understandable because kids don't see us as fully formed people, nor should they have to. But I think it's great for them to read books where the parents are flawed and struggling and fully formed people because that's useful for them to start to experience.

Alyson

Definitely. A big part of my writing process is really thinking about each character as having their own arc and writing a little bit from each—sort of journaling from their perspective so that they feel like fully formed people. So I understand where they start at the beginning of the book and where they end up and how they get there. It's not just the main character. And the adults are always the hardest, which makes sense.

Virginia

Yeah, it does. Okay, so a question I always love to ask fellow writers is, Where do you do your writing? Tell me a little: Do you have a workspace? What do you love about it? What do you hate about it, if you don't love it? I love hearing about where people write.

Alyson

So I live in Brooklyn and I have an office in my home here. I love it because it's my own space and I can close the door and shut everybody out, and it's quiet. And I really need that. I really need quiet, although I do like to draft at a coffee shop. So I have missed that a lot during the pandemic, hearing other people typing. There's a YouTube channel where you can hear other people typing. So I've done a little bit of that, which has been helpful. And the thing I dislike about my workspace is that it's—well, I like that I can see out into the front of the house, but also other people can see in. So I get scared often because I'm in another world when I'm writing and then the person delivering the UPS package will knock on the window and wave to me, and I go flying.

Virginia

That's so funny. Yes. My office is on a side where I can't see our door, which means I miss every UPS package, which is its own hassle. But it is nice from that perspective of being startled out of your work mode because it's so hard to get back to it, too, once you've broken the flow.

Well, you mentioned you're working on a new mystery. Anything else you're excited about right now? Whether it's a new writing project, something else new in your life. My kids started school today. That's what I'm excited about.

Alyson

That is exciting.

Virginia

Oh god, it's so exciting.

Alyson

My daughter's about to start school next week, which is very exciting. I'm really excited about this book that I'm working on. It's taken over my brain, which is great. And it means that it's going to work and it's singing. At first, I always feel like I'm putting pieces together and I'm trying to layer the onion back together. It works or it doesn't work, and it's working. And it's working in a way that I really wanted it to work.

Virginia

That's so satisfying.

Alyson

And just like the characters in Taking Up Space, I'm a huge mystery fan. I'm sort of obsessed, actually. I've watched, like, every British mystery. That's the one thing about the pandemic is I've actually gotten to watch—there were a couple of old ones that were on my list that I got to.

Virginia

Which ones?

Alyson

“Vera.” I had really wanted to get through that.

Virginia

I've never seen that. My mom loved it, I think.

Alyson

They're a little bit older, like “Foyle's War,” which is very long. It's nine seasons long. I was able to get through that.

Virginia

Well, that's nice because you've got a lot. I hate when something's only two or three seasons.

Alyson

So it's both exciting because I'm loving the book, but also exciting because this is a genre that has always interested me, and those were the books that I read most growing up and the books that kept my attention. So this is keeping my attention.

Virginia

That's awesome. And will this be middle grade, as well, or are you doing an adult mystery?

Alyson

No, it's middle grade. And I'm hopeful that it will be a series. I'm trying to work to figure out how to do that.

Virginia

This is very exciting. All right. Well, when you're ready to talk more about that, you'll have to come back and tell us all about it because that sounds awesome.

Alyson

Perfect. I would love to.

Virginia

And tell listeners where we can find more of your work and follow everything you're doing.

Alyson

So my website is my name, alysongerber.com, and I am basically everywhere @AlysonGerber. So on Instagram @AlysonGerber. On Twitter @AlysonGerber. And you can find all my books also through the Scholastic website. Scholastic is my publisher.

Virginia

Awesome, and I will link to all of that in the transcript. Thank you so much for coming on. This has been such a great conversation. I'm just so thrilled there are writers like you in the middle grade space doing these books because we really need more. This is a question I'm asked a lot: What can my kid be reading? And it's so great there's finally more than just Blubber to tell them about, so thank you so much.

Alyson

Totally. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Virginia

And thanks to all of you for listening to Burnt Toast. If you like this episode and you aren't yet subscribed, please do that. If you are a subscriber, thank you so much. Please consider sharing Burnt Toast on social media or forwarding this to a friend.

Our transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Jessica McKenzie, who writes the fantastic Substack Pinch of Dirt. Our logo is by Deanna Lowe, and I'm Virginia Sole-Smith. You can find more of my work at virginiasolesmith.com or come say hi on Instagram or Twitter. I am @v_solesmith. Thanks so much and talk to you soon!

Hi Burnt Toast subscribers! I’m back from vacation and I’ve missed you all! Today we’ve got an audio newsletter (recorded before my break). Tomorrow I’ll have a Friday Thread for you. (Do we need to talk about Sarah Paulson’s fat suit? Or any other burning questions on your mind? Comment below and let me know what you want to chat about!) And the big Tuesday essays will resume next week.

Now on to today’s episode…

Hello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!

This is a newsletter where we explore questions (and sometimes answers) on fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture and the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia.

Today is another solo episode. I’m going to answer a bunch of your questions that all relate to each other, because they’re all on the theme of “How do I talk to other people about this?”

I see this a lot. So often, we are in a place where we’re starting to work through our own stuff around food, our own stuff around bodies, or we’re really committed to doing things in a different way for our kids than how we were raised. But explaining this to a partner or explaining this to your parent or explaining this to your child can be so difficult. This is something I talked about with some podcast guests recently: In my conversation with Janet and Nyemade we were saying how this is an issue that we all feel sort of nervous to own, in a way that we don’t feel as nervous to stand up for ourselves around other controversial topics: Facism, homophobia, etc. Even with COVID, I think people who are firmly pro-vaccines are comfortable being firmly pro-vaccines. There are certain topics where we kind of know where we stand and feel good about standing up for ourselves. But this is one where we have internalized so much doubt and so much anxiety that advocating for ourselves or advocating for our kids can just feel super complicated.

So I just want to say up top: It’s okay if you don’t have the right thing to say in every moment, in every interaction. None of us do. This is hard work. If this is someone you have a good relationship with, someone who’s in your life in an ongoing way, like your partner, or your child, it’s okay to get it wrong in one conversation and come back and have a follow up conversation. It’s okay to say, “I wish I hadn’t approached it like that, and I want another try.” That’s such good modeling for our kids, it’s good for our relationships when we can do that. I think we can give ourselves all some grace as we try to navigate this, because we probably are going to mess it up a couple of times, many times, and we can try again.

The other thing I wanted to say: It’s not your job to convert everybody you meet to intuitive eating, or to make everybody in your life aware of the dangers of fatphobia. You know, it even is my job, and it’s also not my job. I don’t fight these fights in every conversation I have with a friend or every party I go to, every family gathering. I’m not navigating this all the time. There are lots of times when I just let something go, because it’s more important to me, in my relationship with that person, that we have a nice time and that it doesn’t become tense. And that is okay.

It is also true that those of us with a lot of privilege always have the option not to stand up and fight the fight. And people in marginalized bodies don’t.

So, if you’re a person with thin privilege, I do encourage you to push yourself out of your comfort zone when you can to take this on. For sure, it is worth calling out fatphobia when it happens around us, especially with our kids. This is very important. But there is some nuance here to how successful we’re going to be at doing it every time and if it even makes sense, if it even feels safe, to do it every time.

Enough big picture and talk, let’s dive into your questions.

Q: My teenage son is going for his first solo visit to Atkins Crazy Grandma. Do I tell her to back off before he goes?

A: First of all, I really love “Atkins Crazy Grandma,” I’m picturing that on a mug or something.

I’m going to link to my piece, The Grandparents Are Not OK. If you haven’t read it, definitely start here. It will give you a good overview as to why grandparents struggle with this issue so much and why so many Boomers are steeped in diet culture to the extent that they are. It is not entirely their fault. It is the water they have been swimming in for a very long time. They are navigating concerns around gender expectations, body expectations, aging expectations. And all of that is intersecting in a way that Gen X, millennials, Gen Z, none of us are dealing with it in quite the same way that boomers have had to deal with it. So try to hold some space in your heart for that.

Remember that the goal of this trip is for your teenage son to have a strong relationship with this grandparent. I mean, I’m assuming this is the goal of the trip. And that’s why you’re sending him there, on his own, to have time with his grandmother. If that’s the goal, it is not that helpful for you to get in and interfere and set ground rules about what they can talk about, and try to moderate their relationship in that way. This is something I didn’t state as clearly as I could have in that grandparents piece. It is not our job to control the relationship that develops between our children and their grandparents. That is its own independent relationship, quite separate from us. And if you want your kids to know your parents, as people, they’re going to know them as people, which means they’re going to learn that they are flawed, and they’re going to have things they disagree on and part of their relationship is going to be figuring that out together.

Now, I do think you can set some boundaries. If you’re worried that your mom is not going to feed your son adequately because her dieting is so restrictive, I think that would be a place to intervene. And certainly, if you think she’s going to talk negatively about how your son eats or his body, that’s a different thing. Because then she is directly causing harm. And as parents, we want to obviously step in and mitigate that.

But if it’s more like, she’ll make lots of food, but she won’t let herself eat the bread, or she’ll make comments about how she’s eating with him—if it’s more self-directed, as this diet talked often is because people criticize themselves before they direct it to others. In that situation, I think you can talk with your son ahead of time about how this is something she struggles with. And say: “Yeah, it’s a drag that grandma doesn’t eat bread, but there’s no reason you need to stop eating bread.” Let him know where you stand on this, certainly, and give him some tools to navigate this. But don’t feel like you have to make your mom or your mother-in-law act differently around your son than she would otherwise. This is something they can figure out themselves. Your son’s a teenager, he’s old enough to start to really understand his grandmother as a complicated person. I wouldn’t feel like I needed to mitigate unless it was going to be directly harmful to my child.

If you are worried about her saying things directly to your child that might be harmful to him, there is a line that I absolutely love from Amee Severson and Sumner Brooks, from their forthcoming book, How to Raise an Intuitive Eater: “My body is none of your business.” I love that. I actually taught that line to my own kids the other day, and it was hilarious to watch my three year old stomp around saying it unprompted and in response to absolutely nothing: Do you want Cheerios for breakfast? “My body is none of your business.”

So I think you can start to think about ways that your child can advocate for themselves in those situations. If you have a younger child, or if the relationship is, you know, really toxic, you are going to be at the front line of that advocacy work. Otherwise, give your son some tools, talk about it ahead of time, support him in navigating this issue with his grandmother, but don’t feel like you have to block the relationship with this person.

Q: My daughter is 12 and your work tends to address younger kids. Any resources for supporting parents of teens in intuitive eating and helping me break through my judgment of her body size?

A: My work does tend to address younger kids, partly because that’s the stage of parenting that I’m in. But also because I think that dealing with these issues when kids are young is really important. As I talk about all the time, we know that kids between three and five are starting to understand fatphobia and internalize it. So I do think the work starts there. But of course, your 12-year-old is not a lost cause! There’s a lot of really important work that has to happen in the tween and teen years on these issues. So I’m really glad you are trying to do it. And I’m really glad that you are recognizing that this is your work to do, that you want to break through your judgement about her body size, rather than seeing her body size as the problem and that she somehow needs to fix it. So, just want to give you a big high five for that, because that’s a really important first step.

Something I think is useful to sort of hold in your heart as you navigate this is: I’m guessing your feelings about your daughter’s body are tied to your feelings about your own body. This is really, really common. 12 is puberty and big body changes. And this is often an age that we experienced a lot of negative feelings about our bodies, or internalized lots of negative messages. So a lot of what might be coming up for you is your own stuff. And if she looks similar to how you looked at her age (or how you look now!) that may be kind of bringing it all together for you. So as much as possible: Recognize that this really isn’t anything to do with her, that this is you working through your own seventh grade bullshit, because Lord knows, we all have that. A therapist who works from a weight inclusive Health at Every Size perspective could be helpful. The HAES Community site has a searchable database of providers.

I’m also linking to this piece and this one, both of which I wrote for the New York Times about parents navigating body image issues with their kids. I think the parents quoted in those articles do have younger kids, but the advice is applicable to all ages. And the experts quoted in those pieces might be folks that you want to look up on Instagram or online other places and follow their work. A couple of folks I really love, who do a great job about talking about teens and eating: Katja Rowell MD is on Instagram. She is a responsive feeding expert, and a parent of a teenager. And she talks quite a lot about intuitive eating and teens in a really great way. Also, as I just mentioned, Amee Severson and Sumner Brooks, their book will be geared towards parents of teens as well as younger kids. I’m going to throw a few other links in the transcript: @teenhealthdoc on Instagram is a great resource for all things teen health but definitely comes from a body positive perspective. I also like The Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens by Elyse Resch and You Are Enough by Jen Petro-Roy; they are meant to be read by your kid but you will get a lot out of them too!

But I think, as much as possible, focus on the fact that this is bringing up stuff for you. And what you really need is support for you. It’s less about their age, and more about how you’re navigating this.

Q: My teenage daughter has postural issues. I am afraid to point them out to her because I don’t want to say anything about her body. But she is unaware her posture is problematic and therefore can’t work on it herself. Or should she? Is that just more dieting culture nonsense?

A: This is interesting. I think, if there is something about your child’s body that does not conform to societal beauty standards, and you are worried that it will sort of create a “problem” for them, the last thing your child needs is to hear that information from you. What your child needs from you is radical acceptance of their body. They need to know that you do not see their body as the enemy, you do not see their body as the problem. And that is related to whatever size their body is, certainly their posture, if they have acne, if they have anything about their body that is atypical —scars, disabilities—they need to know that you as their parent view their body as a miracle and something really special and unique and wonderful and worthy of taking care of. They need to know that you trust their body so they can trust what their body is communicating to them.

On this question of posture, I think it’s very normal for teenagers to have awkward posture because their bodies are growing really fast in lots of different directions. It’s normal for a kid to not be fully aware of how she’s holding herself through space. That’s part of being a teenager and figuring out your adult body. And I really would not think that it’s your job as her parent to speak up about it and point it out in some way because you’re only going to make her super self-conscious about it. I think your instincts are right on.

If you want to support her from a more body-positive, empowered place, I think you could look into something like taking yoga classes together, ideally with a weight-inclusive, body-positive teacher. You know, strength training can be really positive and powerful. Maybe you follow someone like Meg Boggs on Instagram who talks about strength training in a weight-neutral, weight-inclusive, body-positive way. Tally Rye is another body-positive fitness trainer and I also love fitragamuffin. So maybe you start exploring the world of joyful movement with her. But I don’t want you exploring this, because you’re thinking, “if we do yoga, it will fix her posture.” That’s not the goal, just like it’s not the goal to be like, “if we start running together, she’ll lose weight.” That’s not the goal. We’re not motivated by this perceived flaw about her body. We’re motivated by wanting to help this kid find ways to move her body that she loves, to find ways to feel strong in her body, to feel joyful in her body.

So you’re giving her tools to take care of her body in different ways. If that addresses her posture, great, if it doesn’t adjust her posture, great, that’s not really the issue. It’s really about helping her feel what it’s like to be in her body and really be embodied in her body in a positive way.

Q: Any thoughts about eating in front of the TV? It seems unsupportive of intuitive eating—but it’s one of my kid’s favorite things. And I don’t want to nag him around this other than an occasional ask, “Are you listening to your body when you’re eating in front of the TV?”

A: First of all, it kind of is nagging to say to your kid, “Are you listening to your body when you’re eating in front of the TV?” I know you’re really trying hard not to nag. But kids are smart. And I think they know that obviously, the implied answer is “No, I’m not. And you want me to stop doing this.”

I think maybe back off direct questions. It is true that eating every meal in front of a television or in front of any screen—whether that’s eating every meal while you’re playing video games, or while you’re on your computer, while you’re Virginia and you’re writing your book so you’re eating lunch at your desk while reading chapter drafts—these are all ways that we are disconnecting from the experience of eating and distracting ourselves. We’re not eating in a very “mindful” way. We’re getting fuel or we’re snacking because it feels good while we’re doing this other thing. So no, this is not, “mindful eating.”

But is this intuitive eating? It can be. Because it can be realistic to say, I’m so busy today that I’m going to eat lunch at my desk, because I know it’s really important that I eat, I know I’ll feel like garbage if I skip lunch and work straight through lunch. But I don’t have time to stop and savor this experience for 45 minutes. So I’m going to eat this while I’m working, so that I have some fuel in my body and I can keep going. But no, it’s not like the most enjoyable lunch I’ve ever had in my life. That is not anti-intuitive eating, that’s assessing what you need and meeting your needs in a variety of ways.

Similarly, I think, for a lot of us, eating delicious snacks in front of a TV show we love is a very comforting and joyful activity. And I don’t think that that’s anti-intuitive eating to say it’s the end of a long day, and I want to zone out and watch Monty Don on BritBox and eat chocolate because that is what I like to do in the evenings. Or for your child—I’m guessing your son doesn’t watch Monty Don, maybe he does, I hope he does—but whatever he’s watching, and snacking, you know, this can be really relaxing. My now eight-year-old loves to watch nature documentaries or Simpsons reruns and eat various snacks. And this is something she often does on the weekends for an hour or two while her little sister is napping (or not napping, but we’re pretending she’s napping).

I don’t see that as a problem. I see that as nice, relaxing, it’s fun to unwind and watch a favorite show and eat some good snacks. If she did that for every meal, I would be concerned. But it’s a couple times a week. During lockdown (and over the last few weeks of summer break) it was more than a couple times a week. But it’s still just one part of the day. It’s not every eating opportunity in the day. That’s how I think about TV.

Obviously, you’re going to hear more rigid viewpoints on that. There’s certainly folks in the intuitive eating world, in the Division Of Responsibility world, who would say “no meal should ever happen in front of a screen, that’s a terrible habit you should break.” But to me, that kind of rigidity, that’s like a diet culture mindset coming in saying we have to have this hard and fast rule.

Do I think it’s great for every meal? I do not. Do I make a big effort to make sure that we as a family eat dinner at a table looking at each other? Yes. Every now and then do we say, “Hey, guys, do you want to eat dinner in front of the TV?” so that my husband and I can actually talk to each other during dinner, and they can enjoy a show? Yep. We definitely do that. So I think it’s not something that you need to set hard and fast rules around. Is this happening to a degree where it’s replacing other kinds of eating experiences? Or is this just like one of your kid’s favorite things that they like to do on weekends? And sort of find some “balance” in there, as opposed to having rules, like you can only do it on Fridays, or you can only do it three times a week. Because that may be setting it up so it won’t feel like enough and they’ll want to do it more, and you’ll end up with this fixation. So I would look at the overall balance.

If this is how they eat dinner every night, you might say I want us to start eating family meals again. But if this is something they do a few times a week, it’s a relaxing thing, it’s bringing them joy, it’s not replacing time that could be spent in other ways, then I would let it go.

Q: My husband is limited in what he eats. It’s pretty much all fast food or heavily processed food (chicken fingers, pizza, Panda Express menu items, etc.) and treats (candy, soda, etc). He doesn’t like to go to other people’s houses because he’s afraid he’ll have to eat something he doesn’t like. He has traumatic memories from childhood about being pressured to eat things he didn’t like. I can only imagine how terrible that must feel.

But now my kids (ages 5 and 7) are starting to limit what they eat to processed foods, too. I will never force my kids to eat anything, but it’s important to me to serve vegetables and whole grains and encourage them to try new things, alongside the processed stuff they already like. But whenever I try to serve a meal that’s not part of their limited palate, they have serious meltdowns. 

My husband is now their ally in this. It feels like the three of them are pitted against me. He tells them they’re not allowed to have Pizza Hut every night, not because they need a balanced diet, but because “Mommy won’t let us.” He’s constantly adding more and more sweets to the kids’ breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. (I think this is his way of showing love.) Now, they’ve stopped eating the sandwiches and fruits I put in their lunches. They’re starting to steal candy and cans of soda that my husband has hidden around the house. 

I realize my husband is dealing with his own childhood issues, but I fear that all this fighting over food is going to create issues for all of us. It’s definitely creating tension between me and my husband. (We’ve talked about this many, many times.) Now, I dread dinnertime. I don’t enjoy eating any of the things we have for dinner. It’s stressful for all four of us, and I’m sure I’m making things worse. What can I do to make eating less stressful for my family?

A: So this is really tough. This happens when one or both parents have different sorts of unresolved eating issues. And this is similar to what we were talking about in that first question, when our kids hit certain stages, which are very normal for kids to hit. It’s very normal for five and seven year olds to be pretty cautious about trying new foods, and prefer comfort foods and predictable foods. But then when that intersects with a parents own issues around those same foods, you’re going to kind of have this powder keg moment with all of these different tensions coming together.

I think your family sounds like you would really benefit from some professional help. My suspicion, you know, keeping in mind that I’m just a journalist who researches this, I’m not a trained professional—this is not a medical diagnosis of any kind—but my suspicion is your husband would meet criteria for avoidant restrictive food intake disorder, otherwise known as ARFID, which is basically an eating disorder that centers around fear of food rather than body image issues, although it can get kind of all intertwined. (Here’s a piece I wrote about ARFID a few years ago; there is also a chapter devoted to it in my first book.) But often, at its core, ARFID originates because kids have had really punitive experiences of being forced to eat certain foods, and where their caution around new foods was punished or demonized. Sometimes it happens when kids have choking experiences or they gag, they have really strong sensory responses to different textures with foods. And the problem builds and builds until it’s this intense phobia around different foods.

ARFID is treatable, but it is a very poorly understood eating disorder. And it is difficult to treat because it’s often treated the same way you treat anorexia, which is to refeed and insist that people eat huge amounts of food, and for someone with really deep fears of specific foods that can pile on the trauma. So it’s really important to get good help for it. Some folks I know who work on ARFID and who do it in a really compassionate and thoughtful way are Katja Rowell MD (again), Grace Wong RD, and Lauren Mulheim, PhD. So this will hopefully give you some starting points. I’m hoping your husband will be open to talking to someone about this because it’s not easy, and he needs support, and I love how much empathy you are holding for his struggle.

But it is also true that his struggle is creating a lot of problems for you. I’m also going to link to Anna Lutz, RD, and Elizabeth Davenport. They are dietitians who specialize in family feeding dynamics and write the blog Sunnyside Up Nutrition, which is a great blog about feeding families. But they’re both also experts in these disordered eating dynamics that can have these ripple effects throughout families. So I’d really encourage you to reach out to some therapists and dietitians who can support you, because it does sound fairly entrenched. Especially because you’re referencing that he’s hiding a lot of food around the house, the kids are now finding the food that he’s hiding, and they’re sneaking his sneaking food. I mean, there’s like layers of food sneaking here. So yeah, there’s a lot going on.

In terms of how to start to navigate this as a family, I would encourage your husband not to have to hide food and to let the let the kitchen be full of foods everybody loves. So your fruits and vegetables and whole grains, right alongside his, you know, Panda Express, candy, soda, etc. Let it all be out in the open, nobody needs to feel ashamed about the food that they love in your family. Something else you might talk to a therapist about is, you know, you haven’t talked a lot about your own stuff here. I appreciate that you’re saying you don’t want to force your kids to eat anything they don’t like, but it does sound like you are focused on the vegetable/whole grain side of things, which is understandable. But you might want to consider whether you have some rigidity about that. It could be helpful to get some support to work through that, so just throwing that out there as a possibility. I think in general, though: all foods fit. There’s permission around all foods, there’s no need to be banning these foods. And maybe as you’re approaching family meals, you can have it all on the table. And if your kids are gravitating towards the “processed” stuff more than the other stuff, let that be okay. That’s very normal for their ages, it’s very age appropriate.

And they are fixating on these foods more because the dynamic between you and your husband has given them so much power, because he’s saying things like “Mommy won’t let us.” And so there’s this idea that these foods have to be forbidden and that you are the one forbidding them. I mean, this is not a fair situation for anybody. But it’s really unfair for your kids to feel like they have to sort of pick sides on food. And it’s not surprising that they’re picking the side of the foods that tastes really good to them. It’s very understandable. But you can start to give these foods less power if you can say, “I know you love Pizza Hut, that’s so great, and we’re having pizza tonight, and we’re having salad and we’re having, fruit on the table, and you can have as much as you want of what’s on the table in whatever order you want.” If they don’t eat something, it’s fine. One food is not more special or better than the other. It’s just this is what’s for dinner, they can pick from what’s offered. So I would definitely lean into making sure that there’s always some of these preferred foods on the table along with the other foods that you're hoping to expose them to.

At the same time you have a right to eat food that you like for dinner. I mean, I like a lot of processed foods. But if I had to eat mac and cheese every night, I’d be pretty grouchy about it. It’s not my favorite So if this means that you guys are sometimes serving two dinners, you know, I think that’s okay. I was talking to a friend recently and he was like, “Yeah, our kids eat with us maybe two nights a week and the rest of the week we are making two dinners and sitting down together, but they have their chicken nuggets, and my wife and I are eating what we want to eat.” And I thought, Oh, that’s genius. His kids are 5 and 7 too. And for those of us who have kids in this age range, we know that it’s just not realistic to come up with a meal seven nights a week that every member of your family is going to like. This is probably not realistic for any group of people. But it’s particularly difficult when you’re in this under eight, hyper cautious stage, when they tend to have a pretty short list of foods they want to eat, and they want to eat the same things over and over again. It’s totally normal. And it’s exhausting to try to cater to that, and also still have other foods.

So, maybe you have nights where you order from a restaurant where everyone gets to pick something they like, and it’s a restaurant that does serve something you like and something that everyone else likes. Maybe you have nights where you make a big salad that looks good to you, and you know, you’re serving chicken nuggets alongside it, that’s great. Don’t be hemmed in by rules about what the meal should look like, or do these foods even really go together? You know, we went through a phase where we were putting Eggo waffles on the table at dinner a lot because they were a preferred food. And Eggo waffles don’t really fit in with any menu I might be trying to plan, but it sure takes a lot of pressure off if my kid who really likes them knows that they’re there, and she can have those. And she can also maybe try other stuff if she’s in the mood. So I think bringing some more flexibility all the way around to the situation is going to help.

And I think it’s very fair to ask your husband not to throw you under the bus about food. I think it’s very fair to say we’re going to keep serving the foods that I like to eat—especially if you’re the one doing the work of making the foods—but at the same time know that any rules you are putting around processed foods is only going to make them more appealing, or that your kids are more prone to fixating on.

I hope you’re going to reach out to some professionals who can help you navigate what sounds like a really difficult situation. I’m also hoping folks might chime in in the comments on this one. Because I think there’s a lot of different ways to handle this. I certainly welcome anyone who’s either dealt with this firsthand and has some lived experience or any of my followers who are professionals in the responsive feeding world, feel free to chime in. Because this is a complicated one. Hopefully that gives you some starting points.

If you liked this episode and you aren’t yet subscribed, please do that! If you are a subscriber, thank you so much and please consider sharing Burnt Toast on your social media platforms, forward a free weekly essay to a friend, or purchase a gift subscription.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Jessica McKenzie who writes the fantastic Substack, Pinch of Dirt. Our logo is designed by Deanna Lowe, and I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. You can find more of my work at virginiasolesmith.com or come say hi on Instagram and Twitter where I am @v_solesmith. Thanks for listening! Talk to you soon.

Hello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!

Audio newsletters are like podcasts in your email. You can listen to the episode right here and now by pressing play, or you can add it to the podcast player of your choice and listen whenever, by clicking that “listen in podcast app” link, above. And just in case you don’t like listening (or that’s not accessible to you), I’m including a full transcript (edited lightly for clarity) below.

Today, I’m really thrilled to be chatting with Nyemade Boiwu and Janet Conroy-Quirk, who are the creators of the National Plus Guide. Welcome.

Nyemade

Thank you for having us.

Virginia

Thank you so much for being here. So why don’t we start with each of you telling my listeners just a little more about you, your background? And what drew you to doing this work?

Nyemade

Sure! This is Nyemade, I actually created the National Plus Guide just off of my own experience. I had moved to a new town from Florida to Delaware, and I was trying to find a new doctor, which anyone who lives in a larger body or marginalized body knows can be difficult sometimes. Just finding someone who doesn’t have that fatphobia. So I found myself just wishing there was somewhere I could go for recommendations or see who other people would suggest in that area. And there wasn’t anything like that, so I figured I should try to create something.

Originally, I was thinking about just doing it for that purpose, specifically doctors, but then I’m like, well, there are so many areas where, you know, sometimes we struggle to find the right thing. I know, like if my friends want to go out, I pull up Yelp to look at pictures of the restaurant, see what the seating is like, what the stairs are like, things like that. So I’m like, it’d be so great if there was a place where people could just go to get all that. So that’s where the idea came from. And that’s basically what we’re trying to build!

A little bit about me, I realize I totally skipped over that.

Virginia

No worries!

Nyemade

Little bit about me: I work full time at a bank, but I do a lot on the side as well. I do a lot of advocacy around mental health and mental illness, I volunteer with Nami [National Alliance on Mental Illness]. I also do communications stuff, I do a lot of IG Lives: I do self-love on Sundays, mental health on Tuesdays, and then whatever other topics come up in between. And then I have a show called More Than My Size that I do with my friend Alicia, where we’re just two larger bodied women living life. Because we feel a lot of times, when there is representation of larger bodies, it’s always like this depressed place, like, oh, we’re so lazy, or we’re not doing anything and blah, blah, blah. And we wanted to show some of us are out here kicking butt. So we started that show. So that’s on YouTube. So that’s what I do with my time! I talk a lot.

Virginia

I love it. I mean, that’s what you're supposed to do on a podcast. And I will definitely link to all of that in the transcript so folks can follow you in all of those places, because that sounds amazing.

Janet, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Janet

So I’m an MSW. I was a social worker in New York City for about 15 years working with different populations. I worked with homeless individuals, the older population. And then I kind of transitioned out of that, it’s a pretty high stress job. I started doing some writing and a lot of acting, and then I became involved in the fat positivity movement. I started to write about my experiences, in theater and in the world and a big body, and eventually went on to start doing more freelance writing. I was briefly the editor of a plus magazine that I’m no longer with, which was at least a good experience. So I have just been getting back into doing more acting, a lot more writing, and when Nyemade told me that she was working on this, I was so drawn to it, because I’d had the same experiences. In medical settings, of course, and also just in things like, you know, buying a wedding dress—I have a horrific story about that. Or just going to places like restaurants and being either physically not able to feel comfortable or being mistreated in some way. So it’s so important to me to be able to help create this database, this place where people can go and make sure that they’re going to be respected and comfortable and safe, is so important to me.

Virginia

It’s so important, and I’m so grateful to both of you for doing this work and for getting this project off the ground. I mean, this comes up all the time in my reporting and conversations with friends, exactly what you were saying about how I want to go to a restaurant, but need to do this sleuthing online and try to find photos of what the chairs look like. It’s so much added emotional labor that people are asked to do just to feel like they can be safe in their bodies out in the world. And it’s so important to challenge that. So you both touched on medical experiences, restaurants, what other types of businesses or what other like sort of spaces do you feel like this comes up that are really important to include in the database?

Nyemade

Ultimately, with the database, we want it to be both a mix of plus positive spaces, and then also highlight plus-sized business owners as well. Because you can shop anywhere and spend your money anywhere, I’m just big on spending it where it has a bigger impact, whether that be, you know, I’m Black, so I try to support Black businesses and women-owned businesses and plus businesses. So it’s a mix of highlighting that and then also highlighting, as you mentioned, places that are plus positive. So like, like bed and breakfasts, hotels, sometimes people don’t really think about that. But it matters: the bedding, the showers.

You said doctors, restaurants. Honestly, we should be able to live our life to the fullest, no matter what size we are. And for me, that’s what it boils down to. Maybe it’s because I’m big on reviews, like, I’m all over reviews on Amazon and Yelp and stuff, before I make decisions, I always want to try to make things easier and efficient where I can. So for me, having this guide, hopefully it grows into a space where people can just go hey, I’m traveling, like I love traveling, I’m going to this city, I can just pull it up real quick, or, you know, I’m moving, where I can pull things up really fast, instead of really having to not only search for the category I need, and then deep research into that to figure out if it’s plus positive or not like. I want to remove that extra step for peoples so it’s more streamlined, and it’s just as easy for us to find things as it is for our smaller counterparts.

Virginia

I was talking to a friend about going to Disneyland recently. And Plus Mommy has an awesome guide to being in Disney in a larger body and what you need to know about different rides and all these different components that you’re talking about. And that also just really struck me: Disney World should be a place for everybody, it shouldn’t be a place where you feel like you might not fit. That’s ridiculous.

Janet

We have a recreation section, too. So it covers, you know exactly what you’re talking about, like amusement parks, but then also theaters and camping sites and things that you just don’t think about and realize, I need to know about that. So that’s in there, too.

We also included salons and places for personal services. And we want to include plus events, and groups that gather in different parts of the country. So we’re working on that too, as well as plus positive media. So, you know, maybe that could look like theater that is very, very, progressive in their casting. I mean, that’s maybe a little further down the road, but I think it’s probably related and would definitely fit in so. There’s a lot of categories. And we’re hoping more people will come up with different ideas and send more stuff to us. We even thought about a section for kids. You know, like for camp, I know of a couple that are really devoted to building up young people, not focusing on size. Because I know people who’ve gone to camps and had an awful experience.

Virginia

Uniforms and clothes for kids is also really tough. A friend of mine, I’ve written about this in the newsletter, recently, her daughter’s in a bigger body and trying to find softball uniform pants that fit. They were all slim cut softball pants for kids. I mean, it’s just mind boggling. Then when we talk about, you know, this sort of stereotype that kids in bigger bodies don’t play sports, it’s like, well, yeah, if they can’t wear the uniform! If you’re not literally not making a space for them! How does this perpetuate this cycle? It’s really messed up.

So I love all of these ideas. And I really love spotlighting plus creators, makers or, you know, focusing on those businesses that people can support. Because I think that’s a huge part of this conversation, too. Something I think about a lot as a writer and a journalist is which stories are not getting told, who is not getting to tell their own story. And certainly, we see this in publishing, you know, when you look at books on body positivity, a lot of them are written by thin white women, and that’s something we really need to change.

Nyemade

Yeah. And besides just having the directory, it’s definitely something that we want to grow into a community, as well. So we have the IG page. We try to repost interesting things that we see. We do like a Man Crush Monday, we shout out a business person on Tuesdays, Woman Crush Wednesday, just to highlight and promote people.

We also have a newsletter that’s going to come out. So we’re always going to be looking for people who want to write. Sometimes it’s hard breaking into the social sphere, it sometimes feels like a bubble that you can’t quite get your foot into. So you know, anywhere where we can make it a little easier. Everyone wants the person with like 1000s and 1000s of followers, but like, who’s taking a chance on the person with like, 100 followers, who might be just as brilliant as the person with 1000s and 1000s of followers, we just don’t know about them yet? So I really want to create a space for anyone plus sized or marginalized to be like, hey, I have this great idea, I want to try this series on your page, or be a part of the newsletter or something like that, just to help give them that extra platform, that space. So we also try to do lives, as well, just talking to different people to spread information about them. And we’ve been also trying to highlight plus love, just because so it came to me because I was on the page, you know, Me And Somebody’s Son? Have you ever seen that?

Virginia

I don’t think I have—

Nyemade

They’re just like, cute couple pictures. I was scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and not seeing any plus size. I saw maybe like one. But there’s love for us out there. I mean, I know my DMs aren’t dry. People like plus size women. People who are plus size find love with slim people, other plus size people, other sexes, but where do we see that? We don’t really, I mean, I don’t know if you can really think of anything. But I can’t really think of a place where it’s like, oh, plus love. I think that matters for everyone, but especially for younger people. You know, when I was younger—and also much slimmer than I am now—I remember thinking I was too big to find love, like, nobody really likes me. But that’s not true. That's a lie that society puts on us. And we kind of want to help show that that’s not true, help highlight and show and spread pictures of loving couples being happy. So whenever we scroll across one on IG, we try to repost it and share it. I think we’re gonna start trying to see if we can bring some couples in to do lives with us, just to talk about their relationship.

Virginia

I love that because you’re completely right, it’s not the default representation. And often when you do see a woman in a bigger body with, say, a thinner man, the commentary is very derogatory, like, what’s he thinking? And that’s crap. It’s not reflecting the real experiences of people in larger bodies, and it’s a terrible message to perpetuate. I love pushing back against that.

Just going back to what we were talking about in the beginning about the challenges of navigating these spaces. Obviously, the database is going to be a huge help to folks, but while it’s still building and we’re still kind of figuring out where are these safer spaces: Are there strategies that you have found to be useful when needing to advocate for yourself in a medical setting or the sort of online sleuthing you have to do to figure out if the restaurant is going to work? Are there other strategies along those lines that you can share? Because I’m sure some of my listeners have been navigating those kinds of spaces and hitting those same brick walls.

Nyemade

I’ll let Janet take this one since I shared a few of mine. If I think of any more, I’ll let you know.

Janet

Just recently, this was really helpful last weekend, I was going in for a general eye exam. Now, most people wouldn’t be nervous about that. But I just carry so much with me from being in any medical setting and having people not listen to me or assume that there’s going to be a problem because of how my body looks. So this person was recommended through a fat support Facebook group, and it was a little further away from my home than I probably normally would have traveled, but it was worth it. And I took the time to write something about my anxiety and about my past experiences. And they read it and they were ready for me and they were so accommodating. And it just made the biggest difference. I think that taking the time to communicate ahead of time is really so key. But also communicating afterwards.

Sometimes when things happen, and you’re mistreated in a restaurant, salon, or store, you don’t have your words ready. And sometimes it’s hard because as large people, a big stereotype is that we’re aggressive, or we’re angry. So getting into it with somebody in the moment can sometimes be detrimental. So, for instance, last year, my husband and I stayed at a hotel, and we loved it, everything was great. But we went down one night to get dinner at the bar to bring it up to our room (because it was COVID and you had to do that). And the bartender made a comment about how much food we had ordered. And it was really inappropriate and really rude. In the moment, I decided not to confront him and make a scene. But afterwards, I wrote to the hotel, and I wrote to the general manager, and I explained what happened. And he got back to me and was so kind and he acknowledged, he said, you know, my wife is plus sized. If anybody ever said that to her, I’d be so sad. And he handled the situation, and it was really effective. Sometimes it’s so hard to advocate in the moment, even though we want to. You don’t have to deal with it just then but dealing with it beforehand is a great strategy, and so is addressing it afterwards. So you always have a chance to go back and do it if you didn’t get the chance. And I think sometimes it’s even the wiser choice, because like I said, we, fat people, we are often seen as adversarial when we’re really just being assertive.

Virginia

Right? We’re really just saying what we need, like any person should be able to do. That’s such good advice. I think that makes a ton of sense. It just doesn’t always feel safe to speak up in the moment or you feel panicked and stressed and it’s hard to find your voice in that moment. So it’s great to think about following up afterwards.

Nyemade

Just to add to that really quick, part of it that there’s a level of shame we feel about our size, no matter how much work we do. I know I’m constantly putting in work to have self-love, self-acceptance, but we live in a society that’s told us our whole lives that our bodies are bad, our bodies are wrong. And not only that, that it’s our fault, that we look like that, no matter what your medical issue is, or blah blah blah genetics, it’s always like, well it’s your fault you’re fat. So I think that sometimes when we’re placed in situations where we don’t fit, or we don’t feel comfortable, while we know we deserve to feel comfortable like everyone else, there’s still a part of us that’s like, well, it’s my fault that I’m so fat, that this isn’t working or that they’re being like this. So I think sometimes it’s hard for us to stand up for ourselves. Or at least for me, maybe I’m saying us and I really just mean me.

Virginia

I think that’s a pretty universal experience.

Nyemade

Yeah. So sometimes that’s hard. That’s why I love Janet’s takeaway about sometimes it’s okay to wait and deal with it after if you don’t feel comfortable in that moment.

Virginia

Absolutely, that comes up too in my conversations with parents, you know, I think when we think about how to talk to our kids about these issues, that theme can come up. Because, if you’re calling out racism, or you’re calling out homophobia, like you can feel very confident in saying, that person is wrong. And this is the right way to do it.

But with weight stigma and fatphobia, because we’ve so internalized that idea that it’s our problem, it can be harder to say this is wrong, and it can be harder to push back against it in some way. There’s that nuance to dealing with this particular form of oppression that is really difficult because you have to kind of be navigating it for yourself, as well as navigating the message the world’s giving you.

The last thing I wanted to chat about a little bit is the idea of thin allyship. I often hear from readers in straight-sized bodies, saying, you know, I want to be a better ally. I want to support the plus people in my life and you know, what should I be doing? How can I be helpful? I just wondered if y’'all had any thoughts about that. Are there ways that straight size folks have showed up for you? That’s been helpful? Are there things that people have done that have been really not helpful, like, don’t do this?

Nyemade

I have a few. First thing is most fat people know that they’re fat. So they don’t need you to tell them that they’re fat.

Virginia

Amen.

Nyemade

It’s not helpful in any way, shape, or form. I’ve never had someone tell me that I was unhealthy in my comment section, and then suddenly, I was like, Oh, my God, I should change my life! It doesn’t work that way. So if you want to be an ally, definitely stop with that.

I think first and foremost is treating the people in your life, no matter what their size is, like they’re a normal size person. They’re just a person, which we are. I do think as far as being a good ally, family or friend, know what the person that you’re with is dealing with. I don’t fit in booths, I haven’t for a while. So if I’m going out with my friends, I appreciate when they get a table. Because it’s actually one of those things where, because I get nervous about it, I try to get there early to make sure I ask for a table, because once my friends got a booth, and it felt horrible being like, oh, we have to move, or let’s pull up a chair. So just be aware of stuff like that, when you’re in spaces with them. How can you help to make them feel comfortable without them necessarily having to say something? Again, that shame I mentioned earlier might make it so they’re just painfully uncomfortable the whole time, because they’re not comfortable speaking up for themselves.

I also think anytime that you can advocate for larger bodies is so helpful. I say it all the time that people who, like if someone doesn't have respect for a certain type of person, whether it’s because of their race, gender, or size, they’re not going to hear the message from that person. So if someone doesn’t have respect for larger bodies, I could say, I deserve respect all day long. They don’t care, because they already don’t have respect for me. But they might hear a slimmer person saying, hey, even though that person is larger, they still deserve respect. And I say this all the time, whether I’m talking about larger bodies, or whether I’m talking about racism, if you’re part of the group, that is in a way oppressing or just being a problem for the other group, like it really takes your voice to make a huge difference. Because we can stand on the outside saying let us in all day long, but if you’re already in, it’s a little bit easier to open that door and let people in. So use your voice to advocate for them, whether they’re there or more importantly, when they’re not there.

Virginia

Yes, agree. And that’s huge. Janet, anything you want to add?

Janet

I completely agree, all of that is so so perfect. I would also just say, you know, and this is a little sticky, because, you know, we’re all victims of diet culture, we know that. And it’s normal that everybody at every size has some feelings about their body. I do always try to help people remember that when you are not in a fat body, and you’re not experiencing the effects of that, and you complain about your own body, you comment on having gained weight, or how you feel unattractive, your bigger friends are hearing you and what they’re hearing is that you have some feelings about their body. Now that may sound harsh. And of course, we may say, that wasn’t my intent. Well, of course, it was not the intent. But let’s remember the impact. So I would say that’s something that we should all strive for. I’m a big fan of eliminating the talking about physical complements in any way. And I’m working really hard on that.

I think also just learning a little bit more about, you know, what representation looks like. Something that really helped me and really touched me, I was very, very affected by it, was when I was working with the plus size magazine, a bunch of friends bought some subscriptions. And a friend of mine sent me a photo of her two little girls who were three and four, reading—looking at the magazine not reading it—but looking at, you know, pictures of big women in bikinis, and it was so wonderful. And I thought, this is how we’re going to fix things in the future. They’re already seeing that that body belongs in a magazine. That’s great, and it’s wonderful. And it’s a lot of progress. Showing up and learning about the movement and learning why things are offensive, what fat phobia is and what it looks like, is so important.

And in terms of friendship, listening, thinking about sitting at a table rather than a booth; my friends have become very good about making sure that temperature wise I’m okay because I get very, very warm, and then I sweat. And then I get even more nervous about the sweating. My friends are not the ones who are going to be like, oh, let’s sit outside, it’s only 85 degrees. No we’ll go inside because she’s gonna be uncomfortable. And it’s not the world’s biggest deal. And I appreciate that a lot.

Virginia

It really is these small ways of being thoughtful that I think would be just a courtesy, you want to extend to anyone in your life. You’re just sort of seeing people for who they are and what they’re dealing with and how to meet them with what they need. But it is a sort of a flexible form of thinking that people haven’t been taught, you know, when we’re teaching our kids manners, we kind of forget to cover this stuff.

Nyemade

Just to piggyback off of that, it impacts how much we go out as well, right? Not everybody who’s in a larger body is introverted, but some of us just because of the uncomfortableness, like Janet said, like you’re sweating, or you’re walking or whatever, it’s just easier to stay home than deal with that. I remember I went out with some friends once, and they were like, well, it’s not that far of a walk from this point to that point. I was like, well, is it normal size, not that far of a walk or like, for me, not that far of a walk, because that is a walk. So thinking about stuff like that and like, I have my friends who I know are almost like safe spaces for me, like we can hang out, I’m not going to be embarrassed if I’m sweaty and I know, they’re not going to plan something or do something that might make me feel uncomfortable or where I might be embarrassed. So I think if someone’s listening with larger body friends, think about the activities that you’re inviting them to. Maybe there’s a reason they’re saying no. And it’s not always just because they don’t want to. I’ve had times where people have invited me to things and I’m like, that’d be so awesome, but I would be so miserable in my body. And again, like, that’s on me to work on my body and what I want to do, and blah, blah, blah. So I’m very much about body autonomy, whatever your goals are, whether it’s to stay the same or lose weight, whatever, that’s fine. But if you are trying to invite people into your space, just think about how their body would be in your space. And if you’re really making a space where they would feel comfortable saying yes.

Virginia

That’s a great tip. Yeah, we were buying some patio furniture recently. And I was like, oh, I need to really consider how accessible this furniture is for people. And that’s just a layer of thinking that we can all get used to doing and just, you know, would this work for somebody in a bigger body? I love that. And it speaks so well to what you both are doing with this project, trying to highlight businesses that are already doing this work and making these spaces for us. So amazing. Thank you so much.

Why don’t you each tell our listeners where they can find more of you, more of your work, follow you, support what you’re doing?

Nyemade

Absolutely. Definitely find National Plus Guide. That’s the main directory we’re talking about and trying to build up. We really want your suggestions, your tips, there’s a spot to go in there to either promote your business or recommend other businesses, and we’ll contact them to see if they’re cool being put in. So that is huge for us, spread the word on that, because there’s no way Janet and I are going to be able to find all the businesses in the country. We need your help. So please go to the website and try to add businesses or recommend businesses.

And then as far as me personally, I’m across all social media platforms as @thatafricanbutterfly. The best way to find me is on Instagram, which will lead you to all my other things. I also have a website, it’s being updated, but it’s still available now. Which is just www.thatafricanbutterfly.com and that gives you a bio and a linktree to all of my stuff.

Janet

My website is www.JanetConroyQuirk.com. It is under construction right now, like really under construction. On all other platforms, on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, it’s just Janet Conroy Quirk. No hyphens. So you can find me there!

Virginia

It is a project. It’s a part time job managing social stuff. Well, thank you both so much for joining me. This was such a great conversation.

Nyemade

Yes. Thank you so much for having us!

Virginia

And thank you all so much for listening to Burnt Toast. If you like this episode and you aren’t yet subscribed, please do that. If you are a subscriber, thank you so much and please consider sharing Burnt Toast on your social media platforms or forwarding it to a friend.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Jessica McKenzie who writes the fantastic Substack, Pinch of Dirt. Our logo is designed by Deanna Lowe, and I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. You can find more of my work at virginiasolesmith.com or come say hi on Instagram and Twitter where I am @v_solesmith. Thanks for listening! Talk to you soon.

Hello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!

Audio newsletters are like podcasts in your email. You can listen to the episode right here and now by pressing play, or you can add it to the podcast player of your choice and listen whenever, by clicking that “listen in podcast app” link, above. And just in case you don’t like listening (or that’s not accessible to you), I’m including a full transcript (edited lightly for clarity) below.

Virginia:

This is a newsletter where we explore questions and sometimes answers around fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture. I’m the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia.

The podcast part of this newsletter is usually where I have conversations with researchers, healthcare providers, authors, activists in the body positivity and fat liberation spaces, basically anyone whose brain I’m trying to pick and who has a lot of insight into the types of questions we discuss here. But since we are such a new operation, I figure I can also experiment from time to time with different formats for the podcast part. (I always welcome your feedback on what you like or don't like.)

Today, I want to use the podcast to work through a pile of your questions. Because you all have been sending in awesome, awesome questions! And I have many set aside that I do plan to address in essay form, but some of these are quicker questions or they are questions that come up over and over. So I thought I’d try to work through as many of them as I can in 30-ish minutes, and this might be really helpful to folks.

So, first up:

Q: I’m trying to explain to my partner and my family that yes, even things as simple as calling fries and ice creams “sometimes food” is diet culture, and that this sets up this idea of restriction as the foundation of our kid’s relationship with food. Any advice?

A: Yes, absolutely. Talking about good foods and bad foods is obviously problematic. But so is labeling some foods healthy and some foods junk or some foods growing foods and fun foods. Anytime you break down foods in this kind of dichotomy—A and B categories—you are giving some moral value, some worth to the category of food that you want your kids to be eating the most often. And, you are making the category of foods that you would like them to eat less of simultaneously more forbidden and more tempting. You’re giving those foods more power than they need, while also potentially setting up a restrictive mindset around those foods or making kids feel bad that they want those foods that you want them to have less often. So whenever possible, avoiding labels on foods is a really good way to go.

I do talk about the concept of variety with my kids. I’ll say things like, “Our stomachs would really hurt if we ate broccoli all day long, just like they would hurt if we ate cookies all day long.” Broccoli and cookies are morally equivalent—I don’t say morally equivalent to my three-year-old, but that’s what I'm trying to get across. I’m never saying “you can’t eat just this one food that we’re talking about right now,” I’m saying we need to eat lots of different types of foods to grow. And I don’t categorize them, or try to set them up against each other. But I know that’s tricky. And sometimes you just feel like you need a term to describe the foods that you want them to eat less often. I mean, we do. So when I do that, I try to just call the food, A. Something positive or neutral or B. just what it is. You know, cake is a treat, ice cream is a treat. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have treats every day, or even more than once a day on a lot of days. It just means, this is a treat food, because maybe it is something we don’t eat as often, or we get a particular amount of pleasure from it, and there’s nothing wrong with that. So I think if you need to use some terminology, “treat foods” is fine, as long as you’re also not saying and that means we only eat them once a month or super rarely.

Q: Can I prefer / put on a pedestal organic ingredients in foods?

A: I mean, you can. I did it for a long time. I didn’t find it very helpful. Wellness culture—which I discussed quite a bit with Christy Harrison a few weeks back—teaches us to worship foods that are minimally processed, farmed sustainably, close to the earth, close to their original form, blah, blah, blah. And it’s not that there aren’t important environmental and social justice reasons to farm organically. There definitely are. In my own home garden, I grow things organically. I try really hard not to use chemicals, pesticides and sprays because we eat some of the food we grow and even if we don’t, I don’t want to kill off important pollinator populations in my area. Or have my kids exposed to those chemicals. There are good reasons to choose organic if you have the budget, if you have that available to you.

But I think we want to make a big distinction between prefer and pedestal. I mean, you can say, “I prefer to buy organic when I can, when my budget allows, when it’s available to me.” Putting these ingredients on a pedestal implies that you’re failing on the days when you don’t do that. On the days when you run out of milk, and go pick it up at the gas station, which happened in my house quite recently. Or you stop for fast food or whatever. You’re failing if you don’t follow this sort of “perfectionist” way of eating. So I think you can have your values, larger social justice values, that you try to bring to choosing food, but if you’re letting that be a mandate—something you always have to do or that you feel badly if you can’t do—that’s probably a red flag that you need to back off how much power you’re giving this concept.

Remember that if these are social justice issues you really care about, there are lots of ways we can work on these issues that are going to be arguably more impactful than how we eat. You can be donating money to these causes. You can be voting for government representatives who are going to support these causes. We need big picture change to make organic farming the norm in this country. We don’t need just you never buying non-organic strawberries. So thinking a little more holistically about some of these concepts is useful.

Q: How do you respond to a naturopathic doctor’s advice to eliminate food groups for health?

A: I would respond by getting a new doctor.

I realize that might not be the response you were hoping for. But if this is a new doctor, this is the first time you’re seeing them, I think this is a big red flag. Especially if they advised eliminating food groups without first screening you for an eating disorder history. So many doctors and not just naturopathic doctors, regular old MDs as well, have a knee-jerk reaction to prescribe restriction to us. They say you need to cut out red meat or you need to cut out carbs or sugar. And they give these restriction-based eating mandates, without first checking to see if that will be healthy for you. And if you are someone who has ever struggled with dieting, disordered eating or an eating disorder, it is not healthy. It is very unhealthy for you to restrict your eating in any way, because that can be a triggering behavior, and lead to more restriction and more restriction. So if a doctor has prescribed that without first having a conversation with you to see, does that feel doable to you? Does that feel interesting to you? Does it feel safe for you? That would be a big red flag for me.

If it’s a doctor you’ve worked with a long time and they know your history, I would still want them to be bringing it up in the context of giving this advice, I want them to be asking, “What are some safety checks that we can put in place?” Maybe we are worried about celiac disease or dairy intolerance, and this makes sense to try, but what other support can we get you to make sure that cutting out these food groups for your health is not going to be dangerous to your mental health and physical health.

So yeah, I would be really concerned if a doctor gave that as a knee jerk prescription without checking into your overall history with food or without offering other support around you doing that. We know there’s very little research to support eliminating food groups for overall health in the broader sense. And often, you know, these ideas, the FODMAP diet or other elimination diets, you know, they’re very under-researched, and they can be a real stepping stone to restriction.

Someone who is a really good source to follow on this is Emily Fonnesbeck. I’ll link to her Instagram. I interviewed her for my first book, and we had her on our previous podcast a bunch. She’s a really great source on navigating the concept of elimination diets and why they can be such a trigger point for orthorexia, and restrictive eating disorders. So yeah, mostly I wouldn’t do it. And I would certainly only do it if someone was offering me a lot of support to make sure it would be helpful and not dangerous.

Q: Kid is given free lunch and breakfast at school, so he eats twice. I just need to let it happen, yes?

A: Yes, that’s right.

I’m assuming you mean that you feed your child breakfast at home, and then they get to school where your school has a free lunch and breakfast program and they eat breakfast again. Maybe they also have a morning snack, maybe not. And then they have lunch. Maybe they have an afternoon snack, they come home. That all sounds like a pretty normal amount of food for a kid to eat. If he’s hungry, when he gets to school, and that breakfast is there, then that’s great that he’s eating it. And it’s great, it’s remarkable that we finally have more schools offering free lunch and breakfast programs. And we really need to continue the push to make this a universal right in American public education. So yeah, if he likes the free breakfast, I’m glad he’s eating it. And I wouldn’t worry about it at all. Remember that kids are really good at regulating their intake. It’s very normal for kids to be hungrier at certain parts of the day than others. You may notice he eats less dinner or he doesn’t need an afternoon snack. Or you may notice he’s eating a lot at every opportunity, and that’s probably because he’s growing. And that’s a good thing.

Q: I want to change the way I talk about food with my kids, I really want to. I think about it on my own, I rehearse, I plan. And then in the heat of the moment, grumpy kids right before dinner, etc. it just goes out of the window, and I screw it up. Any tips?

A: Oh, my friend, I have been there with you. First of all, let’s just talk about how grumpy kids right before dinner are the most unpleasant form of human being. And it’s very stressful, especially if you are actively trying to prepare their dinner and their grumpiness requires so much attention that it gets in the way of you making the dinner that they need to eat. And I also know it’s sort of insulting and frustrating when your kid is demanding a snack while you’re actively preparing them another meal, I’ve definitely experienced that where I’m like, if you can just give me 15 minutes, I’m actually going to feed you. So you don’t need to eat right now.

But the problem is, with little kids, they sometimes do need to eat right then. They have smaller tummies than us, they can’t go as long between eating opportunities. And especially at the end of the day, dinner is often a challenging meal for a lot of reasons. A lot of kids need a snack the second they walk in the door. Or they really would like to be eating dinner at 4:30, and you want them to wait till 5:30 or 6pm. So there are a lot of reasons that that hour before dinner is something of a hellscape in a lot of households. (See this week’s essay on meal planning for more about that!) And just know, that is normal. And if for a while it means that you are throwing snacks at your kids before dinner, even if that undermines what they eat at dinner, you are responding to their need to be fed. And that is fundamentally a good thing.

Now, in terms of changing the way you talk about food with your kids, I mean, for one thing, I wouldn’t beat yourself up about making a grumpy comment in the heat of the moment. We’ve all done it, it happens. It’s normal. I love that you are thinking about it, planning what you’re going to say, rehearsing. I think that’s really helpful. It sounds like maybe you want to spend some more time scripting responses to the specific ways food stuff presents with your kids. Is it that they are asking for a food that you consider less healthy, like a processed snack food, right before dinner, and you're trying to make a “healthful” dinner for them? You might play around with having the snack food, the Goldfish crackers, or whatever it is, as part of the meal. So you can say, we’re not gonna eat that right now, but we’re gonna have it at dinner in 15 minutes.

If you feel like you’re shaming foods in the moment—I’m hoping you’re not shaming bodies, I’m assuming this is mostly around food, because that’s what you specified, so I’m going to focus there—you can follow up with your kids about this. Maybe after dinner when people are full and more cheerful and calmer. You can say, “I didn’t love the way I just talked about that with you, can we make a different plan for how we’re going to handle this?” Apologize for what you said, but we get many opportunities to talk to our kids about food, like every day all day. So I wouldn’t beat yourself up for one wrong comment.

I think the planning and rehearsing you’re talking about is really great. I would keep doing that. Make sure you’re scripting responses to the specific ways food comes up with your kids rather than thinking more generally how you want to talk about it. Really rehearse what you want to say to them right before dinner. Another thought is, if you have a tendency to knee-jerk to a certain kind of food shaming or something you are trying to change, make sure any other adults around you are aware of that. Let your partner know, let grandma know, so they can help you. They might say hey, you know, let’s rethink that, or, I don’t think you meant to say that. That might make you madder in the moment, I could see that turning into a lot of marital spats, sorry. But if you can agree with your partner, if you have one, or with someone you know, maybe it’s a friend who you can text, and they can text you when they’re struggling with how they talk to their kids. Support from other adults can be really helpful, so you can all kind of brainstorm together what you want to say differently. And also just be that touch point for each other, like, oh, that wasn’t what we meant to do, let’s regroup.

Q: My stepdaughter has a “friend” who calls her fat. She’s 10. How best to handle this person?

A: It does sound like this “friend” is maybe not being the best friend to your stepdaughter, which is really hard to see. I’m just entering the world of elementary school friend stuff, and it is a tough stage, a sort of heartbreaking stage in a lot of ways to watch kids navigate.

My first question: Is fat being used as an insult? Let’s start there and just check that that’s what’s happening. I think it probably is, because the kids are 10, and at that point, kids are old enough to have internalized a lot of the messages around fat in our culture. But particularly with littler kids, I would check that it’s not just sort of a description they’re giving, and they’re just noticing that this person is bigger. So, you know, check in.

Assuming that it is a negative use of the word fat, which, you know, I’m guessing it is based on the age, my next question is: Is your stepdaughter fat? Is she in a bigger body? More or less, you’re going to answer this question the same way for kids of all body sizes. But: For kids who are in bigger bodies, the most important thing we can do is recognize and validate their experience in that body. The knee jerk reaction is very often to say, “you’re not fat, you're beautiful.” And when we do that, we put fat and beauty in opposition to one another. We imply that you can’t be fat and beautiful, which is wrong. And we need to challenge that.

And the other thing is, if your child is in a bigger body, this friend may not be the only person who’s made the comment, she may be getting this message elsewhere. So you have to take a lot of care in how you navigate this with her. You might say, “You are bigger than your friends, and that’s great. Your body is amazing. I am not at all concerned about your body. But I’m so sorry that the way your friend talked to you was hurtful.” Make space for her to express those feelings. What you want to do is validate her feelings that it was hurtful to have her body described in this way, without reinforcing the message that there’s anything wrong with her body. And do we want to rethink this friendship and you know, is this person someone who’s supporting you, is all of that is worthwhile. But you can raise that without reinforcing what the friend said.

I think I’d say pretty much the same thing if your daughter is not in a bigger body, but it might also be useful there to add, “It’s so frustrating when people use fat as an insult, because it’s not. Bodies come in different shapes and sizes, and there’s nothing wrong with being fat.” Adding that layer of awareness is really important for thin kids so they can recognize weight stigma and call it out when they need to.

Q: Is there a way to lose weight?

A: This might have been a troll question, but I’m gonna answer it anyway. There are ways to lose weight. There are restrictive eating disorders, which may make you thin (not everybody’s body responds to a restrictive eating disorder with thinness, but many people’s do) but it will bring with it a ton of mental health issues and anguish. Restrictive eating disorders also have the highest mortality rate of any mental health illness. (I may have to check that, opiods may have taken the lead, but it’s up there, like top two for sure.) So that’s one way. Another way to lose weight is bariatric surgery, weight loss surgery, which has the most durable success record of intentional weight loss programs. It’s massively expensive. There’s a battery of testing you have to do to qualify for it. It involves surgically removing part of your stomach, and lots of potentially very unpleasant lifelong side effects that come with living that way, eating a different diet for the rest of your life, and it’s associated with high subsequent rates of eating disorders, alcoholism, depression, and divorce.

So those are kind of the two main ways to “successfully” lose weight. You’re not surprised to hear that I don’t endorse either one, although I do hold space for folks who are struggling with any of these issues, and certainly for folks who do pursue weight loss surgery, if they feel like that’s the only option available to them [to access healthcare or other fundamental rights; you can read more about how this happens here]. It’s a very complicated question. But what’s not complicated is the fact that intentional weight loss through dieting and exercise alone does not work. We have lots of research showing that 85 to 95 percent of people who pursue it are going to regain the weight they lost and then some within two to five years, and they're also not going to lose a ton of weight to begin with maybe five to 10 percent of their body weight, tops. And again, it comes back.

So yes, there are ways to lose weight, they tend to be really bad for your health. No, there are no healthy ways to intentionally and permanently lose weight.

Q: I have a question about the division of responsibility model. We are happy to let our four-year-old eat as much as she wants in terms of a maximum but what about when kids aren’t eating enough to get them through a night without waking up hungry. It’s not a big fight or anything, she usually just needs reminding because she gets distracted by more fun things. In theory, I want to let her decide how much to eat. In practice, I do not want to get up at 1am and try to convince her she can wait until breakfast. This holds for different kinds of food as well, like sure she can have some chocolate or carbs or whatever. But I feel like I do need her to eat protein at each meal, or she’ll be hungry. Should I relax on this?

A: There are actually two different issues going on here. One is, you’re worrying your child is not eating enough at dinner to stay full until breakfast. The easiest solution there is to add a bedtime snack. Lots of kids need bedtime snacks, even if bedtime is only an hour after dinner. Dinner can be a tough meal for little kids, four-year-olds don’t often have the attention span to sit for as long as we want them to, they may not love the food you’re serving, they may be more interested in talking to you. There are lots of reasons that dinner can be a sort of high pressure eating situation for kids. And so adding a bedtime snack is really useful. And make it something they find satisfying: a banana and some peanut butter, some cheese and crackers, a bowl of cereal, something that’s going to help them sleep well and not wake up at 1am hungry. So that’s sort of an easy tweak I would make and it’s very in line with Division of Responsibility or responsive feeding, to say she’s not eating enough at dinner, so she needs another eating opportunity before she goes to bed.

Once you have made sure she’s got multiple eating opportunities every day to eat, you can say no to food at 1 in morning. Again, assuming that this is a healthy, typically developing kid who doesn’t have a need to eat at one in the morning—I mean, there were times when my older daughter was in the hospital, we ate at one in the morning. But that was not normal life. Assuming that you are home and she’s getting frequent eating opportunities throughout the day, you don’t have to say yes to 1 am eating, you can say that’s not what we’re doing right now. Maybe have a sip of water, go back to bed, and we’ll eat a big breakfast. It is okay to say no, when kids ask for food at times that we are not prepared to feed them, like the middle of the night when you’re sleeping. As long as you are confident you are offering them enough opportunities to eat and letting them eat as much food as they want, at the times when you are offering food.

If you’re doing dinner and a bedtime snack, and she’s still waking up at one in the morning, I don’t think that’s really about the food. I think that’s about having learned that bringing up food at one in the morning gets a lot of attention, or maybe there’s a sleep issue you need to deal with. Maybe this is a kid who’s dealing with some anxiety at night. There could be lots of other stuff going on. But I don’t think she’s likely really hungry at that point. I would look sort of more broadly at why this one am wakeup is happening. Again, after having covered those bases of dinner and a bedtime snack.

Now the second part of your question, she can have chocolate and carbs or whatever, but I feel like I do need her to eat protein at each male or she’ll be hungry. Yeah, I would relax on this part. Kids are very good at covering the food groups in their own quirky, erratic, seemingly impossible to understand way. You will have days where it seems like your kid is only eating carbs, or only eating bananas or blueberries or something. And then you will have days when they’re eating lots of different foods. So I wouldn’t get worked up about that. I think it’s fine to offer some protein at every meal and snack, you know, if you want to pour a glass of milk to go alongside whatever the bedtime snack is, or have some cheese, offering a range of foods at each eating opportunity, kind of covering fat, carbs, protein always makes sense. But you don’t have to force your child to eat any particular one of those food groups. You can let them decide from there, what they’re hungry for. Eating carbs before bedtime is going to do just as much to keep her full and it’s not going to trigger the one am wake up. So I would relax on that.

Because also: If you are over-emphasizing the need for protein, you’re increasing the odds that you’re going to have a power struggle around protein-based foods. And you don’t need that because that’s going to make it harder for her to eat them. So I would relax. I would add a bedtime snack if you don’t already have one. Where I would hold firm is on the one am, no we don’t eat at this point in the middle of the night. Because that sounds very exhausting for you.

Alright, I hope this has been helpful! This was fun to do. If you have more questions like this, feel free to comment on this post, or send me an email. I keep a little stockpile and whenever I get another burst that makes sense to answer this way I will, or they may show up in an essay. Thank you so much for listening.

And! I’ve been meaning to add official credits to audio episodes, so here we go: If you like this episode, and you aren’t yet subscribed, please do that. If you are a subscriber, thank you so much, and please consider sharing Burnt Toast on the social media platform of your choosing, or forwarding one of my free essays to a friend who might be interested.

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Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Jessica McKenzie who writes the fantastic Substack, Pinch of Dirt. Our logo is designed by Deanna Lowe, and I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. You can find more of my work at virginiasolesmith.com or come say hi on Instagram and Twitter where I am @v_solesmith. Thanks for listening! Talk to you soon.

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Hello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!

This is a newsletter where we explore questions and sometimes answers around fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture. I’m the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia.

My voice is a little raspy because I was at my sister’s wedding all weekend screaming at the top of my lungs. Not like in an angry way, in a joyful way. You know. Dancing Queen came on. Anyway! Today I am, raspily, but very excited-ly, chatting with Tyler Feder, an artist whose work explores big feelings, feminism, and pop culture, all of which are things I’m obsessed with.

Tyler is the author of the young adult graphic memoir Dancing at the Pity Party. She also illustrated Together We March and Unladylike: A Field Guide to Smashing the Patriarchy and Claiming Your Space. She runs the very awesome Etsy shop Roaring Softly. And her newest project, which we’re going to talk about today is a body positive picture book for preschoolers called Bodies Are Cool.

Tyler, welcome.

Tyler

Thank you so much for having me.

Virginia

I’m so excited to chat with you. I really fangirl about your work. Your illustrations are amazing. And you know, this new book is the book that I feel like my readers, everyone in my life really, has been asking for, for so long. And I’ve been looking for as the mother of a former preschooler and a current preschooler. It’s just so needed. So thank you.

Before we talk about the new book, I’d love to hear a little bit of your story, how you became an artist. And specifically, an artist who focuses on feminism and big feelings, because I mean, those really are my favorite things.

Tyler

I grew up always very into art. I was always doodling more than I was supposed to be in my notebooks in school. I would like take every art class that I could. But I always thought it was just like, my special thing, that is just like, a cool talent or whatever, but not a career. And I went to college and studied screenwriting.

Virginia

Also a solid career path.

Tyler

That one felt more legit, a lot of classes on how to market yourself. And somehow I ended up combining the two things that I love art and writing, and doing comics. I did comics for a school newspaper growing up, and they’re really embarrassing. Like, I can’t believe that I was showing that to a lot of people.

Virginia

I feel like all of us who work in creative professions have some—I wrote a lot of one act plays in high school, and I had a lot of big teenage feelings that went into those plays. And I really can’t quite think about them now.

Tyler

I have a lot of compassion for the person that I was.

So, my mom got cancer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, and then she died during spring break of my sophomore year. So that is what my first book Dancing at the Pity Party is about. I had always liked just drawing pictures, but I never put them into a project of that length before. Definitely not anything that deep. I mean, when my mom first died, I was taking a lot of writing classes in college and I did a lot of poetry and screenplays, and play scripts, and everything was about dead moms. And it was very on the nose because that’s all that I had in my brain.

Virginia

I mean, you had to write through it. That makes sense.

Tyler

So I made this book 10 years after my mom died, so there was a little time to work on actually making it more thoughtful and working on the tone and having it not be just like 100% a death march, just this, horrible, horrible sad like—I mean, it’s still pretty sad, but I tried to make it a little light, too.

Virginia

It’s such a tricky thing. I’ve written quite a lot about my older daughter’s heart condition and honestly probably needed more distance than I had when I was writing some of those pieces. I was writing about it while we were still going through intense open heart surgeries and long ICU stays. And that’s completely not the same thing as a personal loss like yours. But it was very traumatic in its own way. There’s a weird experience of needing to write to sort of survive your trauma, but trying to figure out, is that the part that goes out in the world? Or is that writing as therapy? Sometimes the line there is very blurry.

Tyler

Just because something is in your journal, does that mean it’s a book that people who aren’t you should read?

Virginia

That is a strange space to navigate. So tell me about the new book. What inspired Bodies Are Cool? I mean, like I said, I feel like this is such a needed book when I saw it I was like, finally it exists, but I’d love to know what led you to doing it?

Tyler

After I finished Pity Party, I was like, I need to do something fun and colorful and playful and positive and less intense. And this was a perfect fit for me. I’ve been really into the body positivity and fat liberation movement for many years. My family has a history of a lot of mental health issues and eating disorders and my immediate family was extremely diet-y growing. My mom had grown up a chubby kid and got made fun of a lot. And I think she just really didn’t want her kids to feel that way. I think it came from a really wholesome and loving place, but the way it presented itself was a lot of calorie counting. My sisters and I went on Weight Watchers when we were kids and it was just not a good thing.

And I had this moment when I was little, before any of that really had come up yet. I was still so young. And I was in the basement with my dad, and he was doing sit-ups on the floor. I think I was just watching him, I was probably six or something, talking about how he wanted his stomach to be hard, to have abs. And I remember being like, why? It’s so nice that it’s soft. I had seen soft as a positive thing. Like, why would you want your pillow to be hard?

Virginia

Yes. It’s so illogical. It’s so understandable that a child would find that illogical, and then we internalize this illogical thing.

Tyler

Why should my dad be different than how he already is? Like, I love how he is.

Virginia

Oh my gosh, I love that.

Tyler

When I was much older and had gotten into learning about diet culture and everything, I thought back on that time, and I was like, oh my god. There was an age where when I thought about different bodies, it was just with a sense of wonder and awe. Just in a very neutral to positive kind of way. Like, my grandma’s arms were saggy, because she’s old and they were so soft, and we just liked to play with them, completely positive. And it was just cool. It was part of my grandma.

So with this book, I wanted to catch kids when they’re still having those positive responses to people’s bodies and really try to instill that that’s correct for them to feel that way before they start being really aware of their own bodies and differences and in a way that is free of judgment.

Virginia

Preschool is such an important age because we know that’s the age when they start absorbing this, which is heartbreaking to think about, that it starts that early, but it does. So we have to get out in front of that.

I love that the book is very diverse in terms of body size, but also so many different aspects of bodies you cover. And I was curious, what was your process for figuring out what those different aspects would be that you wanted to highlight?

Tyler

It was a big challenge. I knew tackling this type of project, the goal was people to feel accepted, and seen. That means showing as many different combinations of traits as I can. I wanted each page to be diverse, but I also wanted the whole book to be diverse. I didn’t want it to be like, every person in a wheelchair is the same race on every page, the whole book had to be shaken up, and sprinkled with the different traits everywhere. So at one point, I made this huge spreadsheet.

Virginia

I wondered, because it is so meticulous. The book reads like this beautiful kaleidoscope but when you look, there’s so much detail. And there’s so much thought into every little piece of the drawings. I was like, how did she keep track of all that? How did she possibly not repeat things? So yes, tell me about the spreadsheet, I love a spreadsheet.

Tyler

It just had like 100 columns and 100 rows: skin color, body shape, body size, age, hair, hair length, or texture, disabilities, every possible thing I could think of. And I also did like a lot of passes after I had finished most of the illustrations, I would go back and add beauty marks, or scars. It was a lot to think about and a lot of research. I was very lucky to work with some really great sensitivity readers, one for race, one for disability and one for trans representation. And that was super, super helpful.

When the book came out, I was bracing myself for people to like, be like, oh, I didn’t see my specific combination of traits in there, I feel left out. I just really hoped that I could avoid that at all costs.

Virginia

I feel like even if that happens, surely it is clear that you worked very hard to like, cover a lot of bases.

There are two kids books that I enjoy, and I have and I read with my kids, but they talk about body positivity through metaphors There’s one that’s like, “we’re all works of art.” And it shows different paintings and different bodies in paintings. But it’s still sort of narrow in that sense, and very abstract because, you know, a child knows they’re not a painting. There’s that sort of distance. And there’s another one where the characters are all different, like literal shapes, like a triangle and a square. And that’s cool. But it’s like, why are we using a metaphor instead of the real thing.

I don’t want to sound like I’m being critical those books because they’re very useful in their own way. But, you really are showing bodies, like human bodies, and it’s so great for kids, and for parents, to see these actual bodies. Were any of them based on real people or were they all fictional?

Tyler

That’s a really good question. I think because I was so careful about the spreadsheet and everything there wasn’t as much room for sneaking people that I know in illustrations, which is something that normally I really enjoy doing.

Virginia

I could see that’s tricky with the bigger goal of this book.

Tyler

There is on the body hair page, there’s this girl with two braids with dark hair and glasses sitting under a tree and that was like, vaguely inspired by me when I was a little kid. Like, hairy legs, mustache. Everyone’s playing and having a campfire she’s kind of off to the side.

Virginia

I love that little girl. I think I was also a little bit that girl.

I think I told you over email, I really appreciated the scars page. Because again, my older daughter has a zipper scar, she’s got numerous scars from her various procedures, and she’s super proud of them. They’re part of her story, her little sister’s quite jealous of them. You know, there’s lots of “well, you didn’t get to have a feeding tube, so you don’t have two belly buttons in our house,” which is pretty great. But I often think about, you know, the representation of that and wanting her to see bodies like that. So it was really special, as I think the first children’s book I found that really showed that. So, you know, special shout out from the heart parent community, because we really need that.

Tyler

It’s so cool to hear from people who point out individual elements that meant so much to them.

Virginia

Well, it just shows how hard you worked to think of all these different aspects of bodies that we need to see and that we don’t normally get to see.

I’m curious to know, as you think about parents reading this book with their kids, and the kinds of conversations that might come up. What do you think we need to be talking to kids about in terms of bodies? Obviously, your book is sort of a great starting point for these conversations, but where are you hoping it will lead families with this?

Tyler

I’m really hoping that people, families are talking about how different we all are, but in a neutral or positive way. A comparison I like to make a lot is, if you go to a flower garden, there’s all different kinds of flowers, big, floppy ones, little ones in clusters, and they’re all different colors. And we don’t think like, obviously this one is the best because of its features. The fact that they’re all different is what makes the flower garden so pretty to look at.

I also talk about dogs, like dogs look so different. And we think they’re all cute. You see a really chubby dog you’re like, oh he’s so chunky, then you see a really lanky one, and they’re so cute with their limbs flailing around. And I would like kids and their parents to be able to notice that their body is different from other people’s. But that that’s cool, that’s what makes the world beautiful, that we’re all different. And then also that they notice when they see other people that look really different from them that like, it’s cool that they’re different.

I think a lot of the focus of body positivity can be on just liking our own bodies, or liking our own bodies as they are right at this moment without gaining or losing any weight, or disability or any thing like that, or aging or whatever. And I think building empathy is a really important part of body positivity, and it can lessen fatphobia and all the things that come along with that, and racism, sexism, just like just thinking that it’s cool that we’re all different, and everyone should be included in spaces accessible for them.

Virginia

I think a lot about how with little kids in particular, we celebrate growth, for the most part, we celebrate that your body is changing. And then kids reach a certain age. And often it’s still pretty young, it might be just before puberty, or once puberty starts and suddenly the changes are bad. And that kicks off this whole lifetime of feeling any way your body changes, unless it’s becoming smaller, is a bad thing. And it’s so messed up. Both because it makes it more difficult to feel okay about your own body, and because of what it says about everybody else’s bodies, any body that is different than yours is somehow less than or you know, it creates these strange hierarchies. I love the idea of celebrating change and bodies because we all need that freedom to change.

Tyler

It doesn’t end in puberty, there’s a lot of changes that keep happening.

Virginia

Absolutely. I think that’s really useful.

I think parents often really worry and this is a question I get often, what if my kid calls out something about somebody’s body, whether it’s, you know, that they’re using a mobility aid or that they have a different skin color or that they’re fat, calls it out in a public way and then that’s so mortifying, you know, what do I do with those kinds of moments. And I’m just curious if you have any thoughts about, you know, if we’re going to encourage noticing difference, how do we pair that with respect?

Tyler

I wouldn’t ever want to speak over anyone in a community that’s more targeted by this kind of stuff. But in general, if your kid is like, wow, look at that person. They’re different, I think you can just be like, yeah, that’s great. That might have sounded sarcastic, and I didn’t mean it that way. Just, yeah, it is cool. That person’s hair is super curly, and yours is super straight. Isn’t it cool how hair can be all different shapes? And to just to not hush the kid away and make them think that it’s something bad to acknowledge that we’re different, because there’s nothing wrong with that.

Virginia

Absolutely. I think particularly white parents or particularly thin parents, anyone with a certain amount of privilege, has this idea that noticing the difference is going to be mortifying to the other person. But that’s actually their own internal biases, because what they’re really saying is it’s worse to be that way. So let’s not point out this bad thing.

But if you can let go of the idea that it’s bad to be bigger, it’s bad to be brown or any of these things, then it is just different and different is good. I have a feeling the people reading your book, like the parents are having to do a lot more work than the kids. We all have all this stuff to let go of.

Tyler

The adults are the ones that have been like swimming in this diet culture soup for their whole lives.

Virginia

Yes, and trying to do the work, but it’s not easy work, you know, when you’re having to unpack stuff that happened when you were six with your dad doing sit-ups or whatever. It takes a really long time. But this is such a great tool.

People are always asking me for other book recs, so if there’s another body positive book, either for older kids or just another book in this space you really love we always love recommendations.

Tyler

Yeah, for sure. I did a panel about body positivity with this author Shelly Anand, she wrote a children's book called Laxmi's Mooch.

Virginia

Oh, I don’t know this one.

Tyler

It’s about a little Indian girl who has hair on her upper lip. Mooch is a Hindi word for mustache. And she gets teased about it in school, and then she goes home and her mom tells her about all the women in her family that have this and all these historical figures like Frida Kahlo, and then the girl goes back to school the next day and is like, so excited about her mustache. And she’s like, I’m like a lion, or tiger or something. It gave me goosebumps. I can’t stop thinking about it. I think it’s great in general. But also, I had a mustache when I was a little kid. And it was something that would get pointed out a lot by other kids and sometimes adults. And it was really embarrassing. And I love the idea that it’s okay that you have this. You don’t have to hide it. But it’s like, it’s cool.

I mean, I cannot imagine in a million years, if when I was little, I had thought that my little mustache was cool.

Virginia

Right? If someone had given you space to embrace it. Oh, my gosh, that’s so powerful. I also love it from like, you know, fighting the gender binary perspective, like normalizing the idea that we can have all different bodies and that’s amazing. I’m really excited to check that out.

Tyler, tell us where we can find more of your work where people can follow you, how we can support your work.

Tyler

I’m on Instagram @TylerFeder. That’s my main space for posting art. I sell my art at roaringsoftly.com.

Virginia

And of course, we’ll link to the book, we’ll link to all your books so people can check those out as well. And I’m so glad I got a chance to talk to you, this was awesome. And yeah, Bodies Are Cool is just a must have in every parent’s library. So thank you for your work.

Hello and welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast!

This is a newsletter where we explore questions and sometimes answers around fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture. I’m the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia.

Today I am chatting with Christy Harrison, a dietitian, host of the beloved Food Psych podcast and author of Anti-Diet, one of my favorite books, and the forthcoming Rethinking Wellness. Welcome, Christy!

Christy

Thanks, Virginia. So good to be here.

Virginia

I’m so glad to have you on. Christy and I have been guests on each other’s podcasts over the years, so it is fun to be doing it again.

Christy, I am sure most of my listeners are going to know your work because you are kind of a legend in this space. But why don’t you give us a little background on you and your work?

Christy

Like you said, I’m a journalist and dietitian. I started my career as a journalist, and also had my own undiagnosed eating disorder at the time. It kind of made me obsessed with food, nutrition and health, and that’s what I sort of fell into reporting on. And that can really exacerbate disordered eating. Even people who don’t have pre-existing disordered eating, sometimes falling into those beats can create some disorder in one’s relationship with food. So I really struggled with that, but was slowly recovering and had a therapist and had some good people around me, supporting me to at least expand my horizons a little bit with food. I ended up working at a food magazine, Gourmet—RIP—and worked there for a couple years until it folded. And during that time, I realized that the magazine was maybe a little bit on the rocks, and the magazine industry in general was not a great—

Virginia

Not a sustainable business model—

Christy

Yeah, not the most sustainable, and that has really kind of proven to be true. So I went back to school to get my dietitian’s license and get my master's in public health nutrition. And at the time, my goal was to be the next Michael Pollan, or like, Michael Pollan meets Marion Nestle. I wanted to write about sustainability and food systems and ending the “obesity epidemic.” I had really bought into that rhetoric. I think it came out of my own disordered relationship with food and how much I had bought into to diet culture, and specifically the version of diet culture that I now call the wellness diet, which was sort of birthed by the Michael Pollan paradigm. You know, “eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” which is enough to just drive a person up a wall, thinking about the minutiae of that. And of course, my thinking about calories and carbs, and all the sort of overt diet-culture stuff never really went away, either. So it was just a hot mess in my head.

Fortunately, when I was in grad school, I started researching a book that I never ended up writing, but that kind of, in a roundabout way, became the basis of Anti-Diet 10 years later. And that original book that I was researching was about emotional eating. I considered myself an emotional eater at the time. I now can see that it’s because I wasn’t eating enough. When people are deprived of food, it makes them eat more in response to emotions, and it also can make them eat more and attribute it to emotions, when really it’s attributable to the deprivation itself, to hunger.

I wasn’t really aware of all that. But I started to find research on restrained eating and the effects of that. And I discovered the book Intuitive Eating. And those things started to shift my relationship with food, especially the book Intuitive Eating, and I started to try to practice that and brought it into my therapy. Fortunately, I had been an intuitive eater up until the age of 20, when my eating disorder started. Luckily, no one had interfered in my relationship with food growing up, so I was able to have that intuitive relationship with food, I think largely because of thin privilege—which is the privilege of being thin enough to have nobody say, “you’re too big, you need to lose weight,” and also the privilege of having food security. Those things allowed me to keep on eating intuitively through my adolescence, and I think it was a little bit easier to click back into it because I had that base. It did still take a long time, it took years to really heal my relationship with food, get back to a place of intuitive eating. But I think having that sort of memory was helpful.

Once I had gone through that I, you know, was now a nutritionist and soon to be full-fledged dietitian, and I worked for three years as a nutritionist at the New York City Department of Health. And that’s while I was recovering, and sort of re-learning intuitive eating. So the cognitive dissonance of what I was teaching and preaching to people, and what I was doing in my own life, started to be pretty clear to me. I started thinking a lot more about people’s relationships with food, and what makes someone a disordered eater versus having a peaceful relationship with food. And I realized that was the direction I wanted to go in my career. That’s what led me to the eating disorder field and to starting the podcast in 2013, and where I ended up now, I guess. Along the way, of course, I picked up more about Health at Every Size, and an anti-diet approach that I think is really necessary for working with disordered eating, but also for working with any client on any nutritional issue. People of all shapes and sizes, and people of all backgrounds really deserve to have an intuitive relationship with food and a peaceful relationship with food and not to be told what to eat or policed about their food choices.

So that’s the perspective I come from now: How can I partner with people and support people through my journalistic work to reconnect with their own innate wisdom about food and nutrition in their bodies?

Virginia

That’s the piece of the conversation that I see missing over and over, when we look at the work of the Michael Pollans of the world or the wellness industry where it is today. There’s no recognition of the emotional piece of this, the oppression that many people face around their bodies and the way the world treats them for their bodies.

Christy

It’s really seen as education is the answer to everything. And I don’t know anyone I’ve seen as a client who hasn’t sort of “known what they were supposed to be doing,” right? They come in saying, you’re gonna tell me I’m bad. I eat this. I’m so ashamed of myself, I eat a lot of processed food, or whatever. People know what the “rules” are. The fact that they’re not following them speaks to the arbitrariness and messed-up-ness of the rules themselves.

Virginia

And the unsustainability of them, ironically, given that it’s often framed as this effort to find sustainability.

I got to know Christy when I interviewed her for The Eating Instinct. Her story is in chapter two, which was excerpted in Medium. When we first met, we both had these early experiences in the magazine world. I was at a magazine called Organic Style, so it was sort of in the same realm, but not a food magazine full on, but very much an incubator of a lot of this wellness industry stuff in the early years of that, and we both had these complicated journeys out of that space. So it’s kind of cool that we both ended up where we are.

I’ve got some listener questions that I wanted to put your way. The first is getting at this intuitive eating versus processed food concept, which you sort of touched on a little bit there, and is something folks struggle with a lot. I get a version of this question all the time, but this person wrote:

“I love the idea of intuitive eating, but wonder how it works with modern processed food, which is designed to keep us eating more and more. I have heard the processed food hijacks our body’s natural impulses, that sugar and white flour are addictive. I’m especially interested in this question as I get ready to introduce solid food to my baby.”

A lot to unpack there.

[Editor’s Note: You can read Virginia’s full response to this question here.]

Christy

I get versions of this question a lot, too, and I think it’s fascinating because when I first was coming into the intuitive eating space, I still had a lot of that Michael Pollan baggage with me. And I thought, well, maybe there’s a way to bridge these two worlds and think about food politics and how “bad” processed foods are, but do it through an intuitive eating lens where we’re not demonizing anything. And through a lot of reflection on that, I sort of realized, it’s not really possible to bridge those two worlds because the Michael Pollan world is so rooted in—and I keep calling him out as the exemplar of this, but it’s so many people now, the whole wellness industry basically, now—but that world is so rooted in this concept that fat is bad, that eating certain foods makes us fat, and makes us inherently unhealthy, so we need to cut out those foods and it really demonizes certain foods and elevates others.

I’ve come to see that that’s really a hallmark of diet culture, and very much a hallmark of this modern guise of diet culture that I call the wellness diet, which is really diet culture disguising itself as health and wellness. It’s still about restriction and deprivation and fatphobia, shaming certain types of bodies and elevating others, and shaming certain types of foods, both because of their perceived connection to higher weights, and also because of other baggage about those foods being “unhealthy” in and of themselves. So now I think that is just fundamentally incompatible with intuitive eating, because one of the principles of intuitive eating is make peace with food, and this full unconditional permission to eat all foods.

What I’ve found and what the research bears out, is that when people are truly not deprived of anything, when they don’t see anything as bad or off limits, they paradoxically are able to modulate their eating in a way that is much more aligned with their body’s desires and needs. They’re not in this restrict-binge cycle, with particular foods or with food in general. There’s some research that I cite in my book about the effect of dietary restraint on people’s eating and even their brain activity in response to certain types of foods specifically like sugar, processed foods, you know, “processed” foods and highly palatable foods that are so demonized in our culture. What researchers found is that people who are restricted and deprived, people who are restrained eaters aka chronic dieters, do eat more in the presence of highly palatable foods, do eat more, get more brain reward from sweet foods [Editor’s Note: use of weight-stigmatizing language], and also eat more in the presence of food advertising, and also diet advertising.

There are ads encouraging people to eat more foods that are delicious, and also ads encouraging people to eat less, or eat more diet foods, and all of those things dieters are actually more susceptible to doing. Dieters will eat more of the foods that they are told are “good” as well as foods that diet culture deems “bad” in the presence of that kind of marketing. And their brain activity in response to sweet foods is far greater.

People who are not restrained eaters, people who are not chronic dieters, don’t show that same response. They actually eat the same amount in the presence of food industry and diet industry marketing, they have way less brain activity in response to sweet foods, they might still have some activity in the pleasure centers because, of course, sweetness is pleasurable. And we all deserve that, we all deserve to have pleasure in food, but there’s not this immense reward because there wasn’t the immense deprivation. When you’re more deprived of something, you tend to gravitate towards it more, and you tend to have a greater reward from that food. And then of course, the corresponding guilt afterwards.

Virginia

That’s so interesting, and what I’m just thinking about, as you’re talking, is how we so often hear this conversation demonizing highly palatable foods, processed foods, and demonizing food marketing for making us want more and more, but we don’t talk very often about how much that marketing is playing into the restrict-binge cycle. So much of the advertising around foods that are “highly palatable” or whatever you want to call it is sort of playing into that rhetoric that you should indulge, that message is not subtle at all in the advertising. And then the diet industry messaging is really the flip side of the same coin in terms of the marketing. We don’t think enough about how it’s not really the food itself. It really is this conversation around food that’s making us feel addicted to it or out of control around it.

Christy

And I think people like Michael Pollan, and Eric Schlosser, and Marion Nestle—

Virginia

And that new guy, Michael—

Christy

Yeah, yes. Michael Moss, Salt, Sugar, Fat.

They all sort of make this connection, which actually, in research methods, we call the ecological fallacy, which is like “X thing happened in this community around a certain time, and Y thing also happened, so X was the cause of Y.” In this case, processed food advertising increased, portion sizes increased, and then “obesity” increased, and therefore, these increases in portion sizes, and the type of marketing, made people fat.

My response to that is, if we actually step back and look at the cultural context, what was happening leading up to, most people will cite the 1970s as sort of when people’s body sizes supposedly started increasing. Diet culture existed for, you know, about 100 years before that, and really, in a concerted way for 50 years or so before that, and the market share of the diet industry was steadily increasing, and the number of people who were dieting and restricting really increased every decade from, you know, the 1910s, onward, 1920s onward, and reached kind of a fever pitch in the 1970s. So that was the context in which portion sizes also increased and food advertising increased. You have to think, well, what does that sort of mass food deprivation do to people? It makes them crave more food.

So if the industry was, in fact, increasing portion sizes and so on, some of that may have had to do with increased demand from an increased number of starving or deprived people. People want bigger portions when they’re deprived of food. You have to sort of take it as a whole, right? We can’t just blame the food industry—and also, blaming anything for people’s body size is inherently fatphobic and stigmatizing. I think looking for a reason for why people are larger is missing the point. We really don’t need to be talking about weight in that kind of pathological way. But we need to talk about this cultural context that makes people think their bodies are too large, makes people fear fatness and demonize fatness and want to do anything to outrun it, including these really extreme, but sometimes also, “less extreme” or “light” or “healthy” diets. Any sort of restriction and taking yourself away from that intuitive relationship with food interferes with that innate connection with food that we’re all born with, and sets people up for that restrict-binge cycle and other forms of disordered eating and exercise.

Virginia

Yes to all of that. On a related note, the other thing I wanted to chat about is diet foods as a sort of cultural concept. I wrote a piece a few weeks ago about how I continue to love Diet Coke, and also protein powder. I’m somehow more embarrassed about the protein powder. But anyway.

Even though it’s been, you know, a good six years plus, since I went on an official diet, and I’ve been out of diet culture in terms of my own head for that long, these are foods that, once I stripped away the diet stuff, I just enjoyed them, and I just eat them without the diet mindset. When I wrote about this, there were a couple of really interesting responses. Quite a few folks said something like, oh, I don’t eat diet foods, I just eat small portions of the real thing I want. And that, to me, is diet mentality. Right?

Christy

I think it’s so interesting that people are saying, “I just eat small portions of the real thing.” There’s something about this need to limit, that is very much the diet mentality. Because why not just say, I eat however much I want of the real thing?

In your case, I mean, I read that piece. And I thought it was really fascinating, the way that you sort of analyze your relationship with those products. Especially in the case of Diet Coke, where it’s something that you grew up with where you weren’t dieting when you were first exposed to it. It was like the taste, the just literal flavor of the diet version, instead of the regular version is what appeals to you.

Virginia

Because my family was dieting, but I was not. Like, they bought it out of a diet mindset for sure.

[Editor’s Note: Virginia’s dad says it was about dental health! Do with that what you will…]

But that was not my introduction to it or my experience of it.

Christy

Right, which is so interesting and different, because it’s like this second hand inheritance of diet culture, but you weren’t being pushed to diet yourself.

Virginia

Because I had thin privilege, I should underscore, because I was a thin kid. And so people weren’t expecting that of me. I was allowed to just experience the magic of Diet Coke. But also as diet culture has morphed into wellness culture, there is now this disdain for something like Diet Coke. Other people were saying to me, “Oh, I don’t let myself drink Diet Coke because of the chemicals or because of the aspartame.” Someone said, “Actually, that was something I didn’t let myself drink when I was dieting, because I was clean eating. And now I’ve reclaimed it.”

So there’s layers upon layers, this sort of Venn diagram happening between our feelings about processed foods and our feelings about these diet foods. And in both cases, it seems to me that we’re really just food shaming, right? We’re still playing into this idea that there’s this hierarchy around food we need to ascribe to.

Christy

Especially with that idea of “chemicals” or that Diet Coke, or regular Coke, for that matter, can’t fit into someone’s plan because it’s not healthy, or it’s demonized by this strain of wellness culture. So I think there’s so many different ways that people can relate to it. Your experience is one way where you kind of came by that flavor craving, honestly, you know, you were introduced to it in a way that was, for you at least, devoid of diet culture, not necessarily for the people introducing it to you. But for other people, maybe that was a staple in their dieting days, or in their disordered eating days. And that’s complicated too, right. Because if it’s a disordered eating thing, someone is drinking a lot of caffeine to try to avoid eating, then maybe they need to wean off of those kinds of products for a while and eat more food, and not have that disordered behavior of using caffeine to mask hunger. But maybe for other folks, like you said, the person who wouldn’t allow themselves to have it in their orthorexia clean eating days, maybe the sort of way of breaking out of that and of challenging diet culture is to actually have it and to reclaim it. It’s really different for everyone.

Then there’s a political consciousness that comes in that says, you know, I don’t want to buy something that has died on the label, because I don’t want to contribute to that. That’s another way of potentially relating to that, too. But then I think if you’re shaming yourself for what you really want, then maybe the real trick is to drop that political consciousness for the moment so that you can engage with the food you really want, so that you’re not creating this sense of deprivation or lack of permission with something that you really love. If it’s something you don’t really love, and you’re sort of like, take it or leave it, then maybe that’s a situation where you can say, I don’t go in for that stuff. You know?

Virginia

We were then talking about the diet foods that we’ve reclaimed and Skinny Pop Popcorn came up a lot. And I thought, oh, God, I’ve never bought that, and it’s completely a reaction to the word skinny. I’m just really turned off by this sort of overt fat shaming of that product. But while that’s sort of a logical response to that marketing campaign, it also means that I’m banning a food. As it happens, I don’t really like popcorn, so I don’t think in this case, I’m depriving myself of something I would love. But you can really overthink this one.

Christy

You really can but sometimes you just got to go with what you love. When I was in my orthorexia days, I never got into juicing or green juice, because it was kind of early for that, in the early 2000s. For me, the juicing trend didn’t really come until the late 2000s, early 2010s. But these days, occasionally if I see green juice on the menu or something, or just out somewhere, I’m like, oh, that seems really good. Like, I want that flavor. And I’ll sometimes be like, oh, do I want to participate? Do I want to buy from this company that’s like so gross and wellness-y, and that’s sort of against a lot of what I stand for. Sometimes I’ll be like, I don’t want it that much. And other times, I’ll be like, that seems really good. I’m gonna have it. So it can be case by case, too, how you’re feeling on a given day.

Virginia

It’s useful too to remember that the rhetoric around voting with your dollars, that really comes out of the alternative food movement and the wellness industry. And, you know, there certainly is some power to it, consumers have a lot of power. But certainly in my case, if I was like, I’m not gonna buy Diet Coke, because it has diet on the label, but I’m gonna buy a different soda, I’d probably buy regular Coke. So the same company would be profiting off my decision. And I just would enjoy my beverage less. So it’s useful to remember that your individual purchase is not rocking the boat. There’s so much guilt that goes into being an ethical grocery shopper, and a lot of that is more diet culture messaging.

Christy

It really is out of this sustainability, Michael Pollanized wellness-diet version of how we’re “supposed to eat.” We don’t have as much power as individual consumers or even as a block of consumers, as we’re made out to have.

Virginia

Unfortunately, but it’s also somewhat freeing to realize that you can truly operate from that intuitive eating place and have what you love and not worry so much about it.

The last question that came in that I would love help unpacking is a little more complicated. This reader wrote:

“Okay, but what about diet foods you may not love, but which make you feel better. I am very sluggish and tired after eating rice. So I avoid it and make cauli rice. Not saying I love cauli rice, but I do prefer how I feel after eating it compared to actual rice. I don’t eat cauli rice with the intent to be dieting, but I’m aware of the impact certain foods have on me, and then make choices with that knowledge. I’m still trying to figure out if I’m attempting anti-diet culture properly.”

Christy

Such a good question. There’s so many layers to that too, right?

I don’t know where this person is in their intuitive eating process, but I think it takes years for people to truly be able to look at how they feel after eating a certain food without having it be colored by their diet culture beliefs about that food. In the case of something like rice versus cauliflower rice, it definitely raises a red flag for me. Where does this belief about how rice makes you feel come from? Is it actually because we’ve been fed so much about carbohydrates, and, as I’ve personally evolved in my own relationship with food — and I’ve seen this in clients too; this demonization of carbs, and this sense of like, carbs make me sluggish or make me crash or I don’t feel as good after eating them. But then over time, as the prohibition on carbs starts to fade, and you make peace with them, there’s the sense, like now, I actually am not satisfied by a meal or don’t feel energized after a meal if I don’t have carbs. And I think that’s really coming from a place of having gotten rid of all that diet cultural baggage about carbs and truly listening to my body and how it feels.

Playing with that, asking yourself, do I even need to be thinking about this right now? With clients and people in my online course, I often say: Put aside questions about how particular foods make you feel at first and focus on the other principles of intuitive eating. Gentle nutrition, which is the 10th and last principle, is the last principle for a reason because it is so tricky. And gentle nutrition doesn’t even have that much to do with how particular foods make you feel. It’s also about building meals that are going to be satisfying and sustaining and snacks that are going to be satisfying and sustaining and learning how to energize and nourish yourself. There’s this misconception about intuitive eating, that probably comes from the wellness diet, that comes from the strain of diet culture that’s like, X food makes you bloated and Y food makes you sluggish. And you know, those words, sluggish, bloated, like—

Virginia

They have a lot of implicit fatphobia. And they’re vague symptoms. I don’t want to discount her lived experience of her body, but they are symptoms that are difficult to name and pin down and tie to a concrete thing. There are a lot of reasons you might feel sluggish and tired on any particular day, totally unrelated to what you’re eating.

Christy

Diet culture has conditioned us to look to food as the source instead of thinking about how much sleep did I get, how stressed am I. So many different things can affect how we feel in our bodies, our level of fatigue, or energy, our sense of bloating and digestion and stuff like that. So I think kind of broadening the lens to what beyond the food is going on. We’ve talked previously about the nocebo effect or the converse of the placebo effect. The placebo effect is, you think something’s gonna make you feel better, and so it does, because there’s the power of that mind-body connection to actually help improve symptoms, like pain and fatigue and stuff like that. And then conversely, the nocebo effect is, you think something’s gonna make you feel worse, so it does.

That’s not to say it’s all in your head, because I know how dismissive that can feel, because I have had so many health conditions and concerns myself that doctors implied were in my head when that was not the case. What I mean is that our thoughts about particular foods and other things, medications and such, do really have an effect on how we feel when taking that food or medication. Thinking about that in relation to this question, too. Can this person sort of think through how much of this maybe is the nocebo effect? And how can you change your beliefs about regular rice so that you’re not putting all this pre-existing baggage on it, that might end up making you feel worse after eating it? Versus if you can divest a little bit from those beliefs?

Your relationship with rice and how you feel after eating rice might change.

Virginia

I think I also just came away with a little sadness, where she’s saying, “I’m not saying I love this food that I’m eating.” I just want people to eat the foods that they love. If you’re not loving it, then I think it’s worth looking at why you’re making yourself eat it. That’s where I land at the end of the day. And I think that goes for, you know, any diet foods.

Christy

As you were talking, it sort of struck me how it’s this conversation about rice versus cauliflower rice, but also why not rice versus pasta, or bread? Is there something about that? Are you actually avoiding all carbs and thinking that carbs are bad. Or gluten? [Editor’s Note: Of course, all rice is gluten-free, but fear of gluten often leads to a broader fear of carbs.] Is there a belief about gluten that is sort of coming from that nocebo place or that wellness diet place too that’s making you avoid those foods?

If the only option feels like it’s cauliflower rice, then I think there’s definitely some work to be done unlearning those negative beliefs about the other food. Of course, there’s a tiny percentage of people, like 1%, or less than 1% of the population, who has Celiac Disease and would need to avoid gluten. I’m not talking about that. But even people who do have Celiac, I think it’s worth working through the harmful negative beliefs you might have about gluten-containing foods so that you’re not demonizing anything in your mind, even if you’re not eating them for self care. Just allowing yourself to drop the negativity about particular foods can help you feel a little more grounded in your food choices. I definitely know some people with Celiac Disease who sort of rebel against that deprivation and restriction by eating gluten. And that’s not super helpful for their well-being, you know, that can be definitely physically uncomfortable and potentially harmful in the long term too. And so, you know, I think getting yourself to a place where you’re not in this restrict binge cycle is always helpful.

Virginia

That totally makes sense.

Christie, thank you so much. This was a really super helpful conversation. I always love chatting with you. Why don’t you tell listeners where they can find more of your work?

Christy

People can find more of my work on my website, ChristyHarrison.com, I actually do a weekly newsletter as well, at ChristyHarrison.com/newsletter. And I also have my book and podcast and all the other stuff I do there as well.

Welcome to another audio version of Burnt Toast! This is a newsletter where we explore questions and some answers around fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture, and the author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia.

Today I am chatting with my good friend and neighbor, Melinda Wenner Moyer. Melinda, welcome.

Melinda

Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here.

Virginia

For folks who don’t know Melinda, she is a science journalist and author of a brand new book coming out a couple days after you listen to this, called How To Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes. And she writes a really fantastic Substack called “Is My Kid the Asshole?”—much like the subreddit, Am I the Asshole?—where she helps us navigate these really tricky parenting questions.

I wanted to bring her on today because a) her book is wonderful, and you should all go preorder it. But also because Melinda does a really great job breaking down the science on parenting to help us understand why our kids do the things they do and how the choices we make influence their behavior. And I found as I was reading the book that I kept thinking, oh, this is also about food. Oh, this is also about food.

Melinda is actually the first person I’ve had on the newsletter who’s not fully in the diet culture space—not that she’s a pro-diet culture person!—but it’s cool to see someone else’s work in a different genre overlapping so much with the conversations we have here.

So the book is really doing two things. I’m sure you’re getting all kinds of reactions to the title—it was a great opportunity to teach my own seven-year-old the word ‘asshole,’ so thank you for that. But really, what you’re saying is: Parents need to understand that sometimes kids have to be assholes. It’s a part of growing up. They don’t have the skills that we think that they have. And they’re just going to be assholes sometimes. But at the same time you’re helping parents raise kids who don’t grow up to be permanent assholes in the sense of Donald Trump or Brett Kavanaugh. So can you explain that distinction a little bit?

Melinda

There has been understandable confusion about the title and what I actually mean by ‘how to raise kids who aren’t assholes.’ What I’m really saying is ‘how to raise kids who don’t grow up to be assholes.’ Because as parents, it’s important for us to manage our expectations, and to realize that there is no such thing as a perfectly behaved kid.

There are so many reasons for this. Kids’ brains and bodies are so very different from ours. The part of the brain that is responsible for planning and self regulation, and rational thinking, in general, is just not developed yet. And it doesn’t fully develop until kids are in their mid-20s, actually. So kids just don’t have the skills, like you said, to do adult-like things, like follow directions, or stay calm when they’re sad or angry. They also don’t have the muscle tone to do things like sit still at the dinner table for 30 minutes, which I learned when I was reporting my newsletter a few weeks ago. So they’re going to be doing things all the time that are out of line with what we would expect of adults and what we consider “good behavior.” And that’s because they really just don’t have the capacity for those things yet. So yes, kids are going to be assholes.

Another part of that, too, is that a lot of what we consider good behavior is learned. It’s not innate, and it’s based on customs and traditions. These are cultural expectations that we have to teach. And it takes a long time. So, for instance, what could be more unnatural than using a fork? Our kids are not born knowing how to use a fork or napkins, that’s kind of a weird concept. Why not use your hands?

These are customs we have to remember that are not natural and the way that kids learn about these kinds of customs is in a way by breaking them. They have to break the rules in order for us to know that we need to teach these things to them. They’re opportunities for us as parents to learn about what we need to work on with our kids.

My parents live in this very posh community. And my son, I think he was going to like a tennis clinic or something, and the tennis pro came over and held out his hand to shake my son’s hand. And I had not taught my kid, he was like six, at that point, what handshakes were. And so he looked at this tennis pro’s hand and made a face and ran away. And of course, to the tennis pro, my kid is a total asshole, right? Like, what could be more asshole-ish than that? But I mean, I hadn’t taught this to him. How would he know what to do in that situation? They need practice. And of course, in situations like that temperament matters and other traits and differences that kids have, circumstances matter. Kids not being polite to adults in social situations, not looking them in the eye, not answering their questions—so much of that can stem from fear and anxiety, even if they know what to do, even if we’ve talked to them about what we expect. They just don’t have the capacity to function in the way we want them to. Shy kids are going to struggle more with those kinds of skills. We also have to remember, there’s so much variation among kids that make them excel in certain areas and be deficient in others. And they all have different starting points.

So when we see two different seven-year-olds behaving very differently in a situation, we shouldn’t necessarily jump to the conclusion that ‘oh, shit, my kid was more of an asshole than that other kid. And therefore I’m failing as a parent.’ We just have to remember where our kids are coming from.

There was a very salient example of this, actually, yesterday, my daughter’s turning seven on Saturday, and we had a really small gathering with just four of her friends yesterday in the backyard. And some of the friends were from one school and some of the friends were from another school. They didn’t all know each other really well. And there was a moment where one of the kids was feeling left out. And I was really hoping my daughter would step up and go out of her way to be extra kind to this girl who was feeling left out. And what happened was another girl stepped up and did this wonderful thing and helped this girl feel included. And it was not my daughter. And I was like, Oh my God. I felt like I failed as a parent. Why isn’t my daughter the one doing this? But then I realized, okay, this is her birthday party. She’s been so anxious about it for like two weeks. She hates being in the spotlight. She’s got so much on her emotional plate that day. I shouldn’t feel bad that she couldn’t step up and do this.

Virginia

She’s probably not even noticing the other kid’s struggle, she’s dealing with her own thing.

Melinda

All these circumstances matters. What I’m getting at is there’s so much that shapes the day-to-day choices that our kids make that we have to keep in mind when we’re thinking about our kids and how they’re behaving. But with the book, what I’m really trying to do is thinking bigger and broader than these little bloopers. How can we instill values, and virtues in our kids that will shape their choices and behaviors for the rest of their lives? They can make plenty of mistakes now, but how do we help them learn from them? How do we instill the kinds of priorities that we want them to have?

It’s not so much, how do I make sure that my five year old doesn’t have tantrums? It’s how do I make sure that my five-year-old doesn’t grow up to be a 75-year-old man who throws tantrums like Donald Trump? How do I give them the skills to develop the emotional regulation and all of these other things so that over time, they become adults who are kind, good people who are fighting injustice instead of contributing to it. So that’s the bigger picture thing that I’m working on with the book.

Virginia

It’s reassuring, because I think anyone who is parenting young children has moments or days or weeks where you think, I am raising a legitimate sociopath. They have no compassion or awareness of other people. And you get into this in your chapters on racism and sexism, but: Kids say really awful things. This comes up a lot when we talk about bodies: kids call other kids fat, or use that word as an insult. Sometimes they don’t even understand they’re using it as an insult. So I think it’s helpful to understand that this is part of learning, and this is where the work is.

Your book does a great job of giving parents tools to navigate those conversations. One area I found especially fascinating that intersects with questions my readers often have is the part about rewards. You explain that rewards can often be short-term fixes for behavior problems, but can hinder some of our bigger goals as parents. I get this question often because food is so commonly used as a reward. You know, we’re giving M&Ms for potty training, or teachers give out Starburst or other candy in class for good behavior. And from where I’m sitting as someone who’s concerned about kids overly fixating on different foods or giving too much value to foods, there’s a reason to be worried about rewards. Why don’t you tell us how you initially used rewards with your own kids? And how your thinking evolved on that question?

Melinda

It’s such a big issue. And it’s gnarly. When my now 10-year-old was maybe six or something, we were struggling with some of his behavior. We went to see a psychologist who was firmly in the behavioral psychology camp, which is essentially to say, he really liked to use rewards. He suggested that we set up this point system with our son, and anytime our son did something that we thought was good or pro social, like he said, ‘Please,’ or ‘Thank you,’ or he helped his sister or cleaned his room, really anything. In that moment that he did it, right afterwards, we would say, two points for picking up that piece of trash and putting it in the trash can. And every point that he would get, we would keep track of it on a spreadsheet, and every point equalled one cent or one minute of screen time. And every week, if you’d gotten 100 points, you’d have 100 minutes of screen time, I can’t remember exactly how many points you would get over a week. But it helped us control his allowance, his screen time, and was supposed to be a behavior management system.

At first, it was great. It did seem to solve these problems that we had: We didn’t know how to deal with allowance, we didn’t know how to deal with screen time. And it was this really nice system for organizing all this stuff. And his behavior started to improve immediately. We saw him doing stuff that he hadn’t been doing that was, you know, pro social and great and kind.

I can’t remember how long we used it for, at least a year, maybe longer. But we started to see some ickiness surrounding it. You could see the wheels turning in his head. He would think about doing something good or kind or something, and then he would stop and say, “Will I get points for doing this?” And it became like this contingency thing where he’s only going to do it if he would get points. So I started digging into the research more.

Originally, when I read some of the research on rewards, and I wrote a Slate column about it, and I was really under the impression that it’s not generally a good idea to reward kids for doing things they already like, but that it was really fine to use rewards to motivate them to do things they didn’t like. But I started reading all of the studies done on rewards back from the 1970s, even. And that’s when I was like, hmm, I think we need to stop this point system.

There are a ton of studies that suggest that when kids are given rewards for doing things, it makes them feel controlled and manipulated. I mean, that’s essentially what we’re doing. They know they’re being controlled, and they don’t like it. Just like we don’t like being controlled or manipulated, they don’t like it. It removes the intrinsic value of the thing that we have rewarded them for doing so that it is inextricably tied to the feeling of being controlled so that they don’t really like it anymore, for itself. If they got joy out of being generous to someone and making them feel better, they couldn’t get that kind of intrinsic satisfaction out of doing good things anymore, because it’s tied up with the reward they were getting.

In one study, researchers put drawing paper and markers in a preschool classroom and watched all the kids in the preschool classroom to see whether they drew with the markers. Then they took the kids who seemed to really liked drawing, and the next week they pulled those particular students out one by one and brought them into another room. For some of them, they offered the kids a reward for drawing. For the other kids, they just said, here’s some drawing materials, if you want to draw, you can, if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. And so half of them were given rewards, half of them weren’t. And then in the third week of the study, they repeated the first part, they just had all the kids in a room with drawing paper and markers out. And they saw that the kids who had been offered rewards for drawing in the second part of the study were much less likely to want to draw in that third week compared to the kids who hadn’t been offered any rewards. So, once they had been rewarded for it, they were much less interested in doing it when they were given the opportunity. And there’s been research in adults that has shown this same pattern. So for whatever reason, it sucks out whatever sort of value that behavior had to the child inside, like deep inside of them, whatever value they got out of doing that thing, and just took it away, which is, of course, the exact opposite of the outcome we want.

Virginia

There’s a great food study I feel like I reference in practically every article I write, but I’ll recap here. It’s the “Finish Your Soup” study by Leann Birch, where they told some kids, if you finish your soup, you get dessert, and then they had other kids who were told they can have as much soup as you want, and you can have as much dessert as you want. The kids who had to finish the soup liked the soup less, they ate less of the soup, they really just cared about getting the dessert, whereas the kids who were freely choosing between the soup and the dessert actually liked the soup better and ate more of it.

So it’s cutting off kids ability to find intrinsic motivation, or intrinsic pleasure in activities or in foods. And you know, parents might say like, well, they’ll never like Brussels sprouts, or whatever. But the truth is, you aren’t even giving them the option to like them, when you’re setting them up as just currency, or just this thing you do to get to the better thing.

Melinda

Right. In a different Leann Birch study, or it might have been the same one, if there was a second part, they just had adults pressure the kids to eat soup. And again, that’s a controlling impulse. And the kids feel controlled, and the kids who were pressured to eat a particular soup ate less of it than the ones who were just left alone. And that was really interesting, too.

Virginia

Positive pressure, is still, pressure and rewards are positive, but as you said, it’s still a form of trying to control kids. And especially around food, we know, they do so much better when they can listen to themselves versus following these external rules.

I also liked that you highlight in the book that even these sort of chores can be intrinsically satisfying, like, it can feel good to set the table or it can feel good to clean your room, and realize, oh, I like my room better when it’s not covered in all of my clothes or whatever. But we’re not giving kids that opportunity to experience that if we’re saying clean your room in order to earn your points or whatever.

You also talked about this concern about making the rewards too valuable. And again, we see this happen so much with food, where kids are much more interested in the treat food and don’t want the other food. I’m curious if you saw that happening with screen time, as well, since that was sort of the primary thing you were using. I often feel like there’s a lot of parallel conversation happening around sugar and screen time.

Melinda

I mean, it’s tricky. I do feel like my kids have never not been obsessed with screens. Can I say there’s been a vast improvement since we stopped using the point system, especially because you have the pandemic in the mix? There’s so much conflation, right? We relied on screens so much this past year.

But, when we used screen time as reward, it certainly led to a focus on screens. Every time my son did anything good, and we gave him a point, that that made him think of screens, so it just highlighted screens so much more at times when it was unnecessary to be highlighting screens. I feel like that probably does fuel the obsession with screens, if you’re constantly making this connection in your head.

There’s also a lot of research showing that kids look to the world around them, to adults in power, to figure out how to behave, what to care about, what’s important, what matters in the world. I talk about this a lot in my chapters on sexism and racism, but they’re constantly making these observations. We are making choices for them that communicate that there are certain things that everybody likes, whether that’s screens or dessert, if we’re choosing that as the reward. That’s a really powerful way of telling our kids what matters and what they they should care about, too. And so it’s confirmation, again, to our kids, that sweets and desserts are the things that they should be obsessed with, because that’s what everybody cares about.

Virginia

And if you’re then pairing this thing everybody cares about with lots of restrictions on how and when you access it, and what you have to do to access it, that is a perfect storm to set up a scarcity mindset. Which is going to make a kid more fixated on the sugar, more fixated on the screen, because they think of it as this thing that they have to be manipulated to acquire or they have to manipulate circumstances to acquire.

I do feel like the pandemic threw a wrench in this, because a lot of us had pretty much like no limitations on screen time this year, and our kids still have lots of screen time. So there are obviously some nuances here. But I will say, when my older daughter spent several months in the hospital and had a Peppa Pig free for all—like we were watching Peppa Pig at three in the morning for weeks on end because she couldn’t sleep in the hospital. And it was like, what else do you do with a two-year-old in the hospital at three in the morning? We were convinced we had completely broken her and she would be screen addicted forever. But when she got back to her normal routine at home when she was healthier, she could play again. She could do other things, and the screen thing really worked itself out without us having to detox her or anything. She was just like, Oh, we don’t watch Peppa Pig breakfast, lunch and dinner anymore? This is fine.

I’m hoping we’ll see a similar thing as people come out of lockdown and kids get back to school and camp and normal routines and we can replace screen time with the other things that they love.

Melinda

I agree. We went on vacation last week and and we just created a whole new normal surrounding screens, totally different from what the kids had had. And they were completely fine with it. They’re so adaptable. We put them in a new situation. And they recognize not everything is going to be the same. We’re not going to be able to use screens all the time, we’re going to be swimming more. And they were perfectly fine with it. It was really interesting.

Virginia

I think if you had been like, this is going to be a completely screen free vacation, you might have gotten some pushback, because that would have fueled more of the scarcity mindset. But if it’s like, we are adjusting our relationship with this thing, they can handle that.

The other thing I think about a lot is physical activity. I think we tend to use more pressure around wanting kids to play certain sports, wanting kids to be physically active. I’m reporting my chapter on doctors at the moment for the next book, and this comes up a lot in the way doctors push physical activity, this sort of very prescriptive, is your kid getting an hour of exercise a day? And it’s like, you just made exercise sound like the least fun thing in the world, when you’re like, is it 30 to 60 minutes.

On the other hand, we want our kids to challenge themselves, we want them to learn new skills. One of my children loves rock climbing, and when she’s trying something, she’ll say, it hurts. And I’ll be quick to say, Oh, you don’t have to do it, don’t hurt yourself, don’t hurt your body. And she’ll be like, No, no, I want to push through and learn, and now I can do this cool trick.

And I’m like, oh, right, there’s also something satisfying in pushing yourself physically, and I want you to enjoy that as well. So, how do you think about physical activity? How can we encourage kids to push themselves but not block the intrinsic motivation that feels really key to them finding movement joyful?

Melinda

That’s a really good question. I feel like I have a lot of weird childhood memories that make it hard for me to be totally unbiased answering this too, I mean, don't we all. My parents made me play soccer when I was a kid, and I hated it. Like, I hated it so much. I felt so I was terrible at it. And I just remember being so ashamed that I kept not being good at it and letting down my team and my coach.

Five years ago, I got my eyes checked by a developmental optometrist—my eyes were crossed when I was a kid—and he said, you know, you don’t have any depth perception. Then he asked, ‘Did you find that you weren’t very good at ball sports when you were a kid?’ I was like, Oh, my God, that’s why I was so bad. And that’s why I hated it so much. I literally could not see the ball the way other kids did. And it was so validating.

Forcing kids to do activities that they just don’t like, or they know that they don’t have the aptitude for, is not necessarily constructive. But I will say, it depends on why they don’t like the activity. I think a lot of kids sometimes don’t want to do an activity because they’re scared, they’ve never done it before. It’s new, it’s scary. And sometimes, when kids have phobias or fears, you do want to expose them to the thing they’re afraid of, slowly, carefully, to help them get over that fear. Figuring out what their dislike is rooted in—fear of novelty, or just fear in general—sometimes it is good to push them out of their comfort zone and to help them learn that they don’t need to be afraid of it. If an activity isn’t rooted in fear, but lack of interest, or they just don’t enjoy it, then, I think that’s not necessarily constructive.

I’m thinking about Angela Duckworth’s advice, she wrote a book called Grit. It’s a really interesting book, I talk a lot about it in one of my chapters, and she talks about the importance of pushing—not pushing—of encouraging your kids to try something that’s fun and hard, but they get to choose what it is. So they have some autonomy of choice there. And having them stick with something for like a semester or a year before they can quit, so that they have to get over any hurdles, but but the key thing is letting them choose it. There are so many kinds of physical activities, and our kids only need to find one or two that’s going to give them joy and provide the physical movement that their bodies need.

I think as parents, sometimes we have expectations of what we want our kids to do, we want our kids to play a particular sport, because we did or, or because we think that they’re good at running, and therefore they should do cross country or something. And I think we have to realize that our kids might be different from what we were expecting and what we’re hoping and that we should let them have the choice.

I remember really wanting my son to play music forever. Like I was really into music, and he started playing cello. And he was good at it. But he hated it. And it was so hard for me to let him quit when he did want to quit. We kept him in it for a year or so, but then when he wanted to quit, we let him quit. Because I didn’t want to force him and I think it was the right decision. It’s so hard for us sometimes because we have these ideas about what we want our kids to be doing. But it’s important to let them have that autonomy.

Virginia

It is a fine line but I like the idea of having them choose the activity and not privileging certain types of activity. Especially with physical activity, not privileging team sports. I mean, I say that as someone who never played team sports and hates team sports, and is possibly denying her children the experience of team sports, because they haven’t seemed interested and we haven’t volunteered it, it’s just not happening in our house.

It might not be soccer for every kid. And that’s really okay. It might be just playing out in the backyard a lot, that might be the thing that they love, and maybe that turns into hiking or that turns into birdwatching, or who knows what. I’ve talked before about how we often privilege outdoorsiness over being an indoor kid. And there are lots of ways that these other sort of cultural beliefs around what’s a “healthy” way to live impact this conversation. I like the idea that it’s very child led, but if they do choose it, understanding that there’s value to them working through not liking it every week, and sticking out the semester, or sticking out the six weeks.

Melinda

We have so many hang ups that shape what we think our kids are going to be good at and what we expect of them. My son wanted to play soccer, and he also doesn’t have depth perception. And I was like, Oh no, I don’t want him to play soccer, because he’ll be bad at it and he’ll feel ashamed, and it’ll be tough. But we let him do it and he loves it like, and he’s not as bad, he’s certainly not as bad as I was.

I was totally wrong. This is now his joy. He loves soccer. I’m not going to tell him that he shouldn’t be good at it. But it’s so interesting, right? All the ways that our own experiences bias our choices and our thoughts about our kids and what they should do.

Virginia

Yes, definitely.

So, steering away a little bit from food and movement, but definitely still about bodies, I wanted to talk about your gender chapter, which is excellent. You talk a lot about the importance of de-emphasizing how we talk about gender with kids. There are some really mind blowing statistics about how often teachers reference gender in the course of a school day, how often parents reference gender. I remember when I was reading an earlier draft of the chapter, we had this conversation, because I thought, I’m a really good feminist mom, and I’m raising two girls, and I’m raising them to be feminists. So I talk about gender, but in a very empowering way. You know, I’ll say, you’re a strong girl, when my kids do something physical. I certainly reference their gender, but never in a pretty little girl way, but what I thought was an empowering way.

Reading your work, and then talking to you about it, I recognized that is a bit of a trap, that first, I’m assuming that I know what their gender is, which is not necessarily the case, and also, that I’m still over emphasizing gender.

So let’s talk a little bit about why gender neutral language is so important with kids of all genders in terms of fighting this discrimination. And how that plays into how they develop a healthy relationship with their body.

Melinda

I’ll start off by saying, I definitely think it’s important to talk to kids about sexism and gender stereotypes. We should be talking to our girls about how unfair it is that girls are treated differently from boys. [Virginia Note: Melinda also writes extensively about the importance of having these conversations with boys!]

We want to do this because they are seeing this already. To give you an example that still makes me angry. A couple years ago at the end of the school year, my son’s teacher gave out awards for each child, individualized awards at the end of the year. And I looked at the list, and it was awful how sexist they were. Almost all of the girls got awards for things like looking nice, being kind, or being a good listener. Four of the boys got rewards for being smart. It was just so disturbing.

Kids are noticing things like that. The reality is these sexist stereotypes exist in their world too. And they’re being communicated to our kids through teachers, the media, sometimes us, inadvertently. So we need to talk about those things so kids recognize what they are and challenge them. We want the girls in that class to realize that when the teacher chose to give out those awards the way she did, that was reflecting her bias and not reflecting any kind of actual innate difference, because that’s really important for them to be able to ascertain. If we don’t make that clear to our kids, the easiest conclusion is, oh, gosh, I guess I’m just not as smart or girls aren’t as smart. And girls should look nice.

Virginia

And it matters that I’m a good listener, because I’m a girl. The relationship implications of that are horrifying. Anyway.

Melinda

There’s research, too, that shows that when kids are taught that the reason there are fewer female scientists in the world is because of sexism and discrimination, not because girls are less good at science, that those girls who were taught that become much more interested in science than girls who are not taught the reasons for this discrepancy. It gives them the confidence, they realize, oh, these differences are because our culture is screwed up not because of me or whatever innate ability I have. So screw that. I can do this, and screw our culture. It gives them more of a fighting instinct.

So it is good to talk about discrimination, to talk about sexism, and gender stereotypes, to make our kids aware of it, but: When you look into the roots of these gender stereotypes, a lot of it has to do with this innocuous language that we use all the time surrounding gender.

As I was saying earlier, kids are always paying attention to what matters in the world. And that includes what kinds of social categories matter, they’re like little detectives walking around making observations. And so if you think about it: What is something that we communicate about a person almost every time we refer to them? We don’t refer to their hair color, or their height or their skin color, but we almost always highlight their gender, because it’s built into our pronouns. Every time we refer to a person, we’re saying, he or she, or the lady or the man, and when we do this day in and day out, our kids notice it. Their inference is, well, gosh, gender must be a really important distinction, if my parents are referring to it 800 times a day, it must be that boys and girls are different in important ways. Why else would you do this?

Add into that the fact that there are different bathrooms for different genders, different sports teams, different aisles in the toy store, different clothes, different toys in a happy meal, all of these things are emphasizing to kids that the two genders are different, and they’re very different.

Where the problems begin is this idea that we are communicating day in and day out, that boys and girls are different in important ways. Then they take that inference, and, again, being these little detectives, look around the world. And they see that there’s a gender hierarchy, that’s very obvious. They see that there’s never been a woman president, that there are fewer women who are CEOs and senators and all the ways in which there is gender hierarchy in our society. And they see that and combine that with this idea that boys and girls are different. And they make this inference that well, maybe men are just better, and smarter. Maybe boys, and men, are just better and smarter. Both boys and girls make these come to these conclusions.

There’s one study that breaks my heart whenever I describe it, involving five to seven year old girls and boys, illustrating that girls start internalizing that girls aren’t as good as boys when they’re about six or seven, which I noticed with my daughter. Researchers read a story to these boys and girls, about a very, very smart protagonist, like the story had a very, very smart protagonist. And it was described that way. Very, very smart. And then the researchers, after reading the story, said, okay, well, do you think that that really, really smart protagonist was a boy, or was it a girl? And when they asked the five year olds, all the girls said, Oh, it’s a girl. And all the boys said, Oh, it’s a boy. And that’s exactly what you would expect with in-group, out-group psychology, the group that you belong to, you think they’re better. That’s what you would expect. But around the age of six to seven, the girls started switching over and they would say, oh, the really, really smart protagonist is a boy. The boys just always said boys, of course, but the girls switched over. And that’s so heartbreaking, age six.

Virginia

That’s what makes me want to say things like you’re a strong girl, right? Because I think I’m subverting that stereotype that my daughter may have already internalized. But it sounds like I’m also reinforcing it, because it could be interpreted as, you’re strong for a girl or you are a girl who happens to be strong, unlike other girls.

Melinda

The way I think about this distinction is that I try to not call attention to gender when gender is not part of the conversation I’m having with my child. If we’re talking about people doing something and it happens to be a girl, I try to de-emphasize gender and not refer to it when it’s not relevant.

But I have plenty of conversations, especially with my daughter, about sexism and when I’m doing that, I certainly am talking about gender and I’m certainly saying you can do anything you want even though the world might tell you otherwise. And things like that.

Virginia

You can say you’re a strong kid. You’re a tough kid. The more I think about it, there’s no reason to use girl there. If your kid falls down on the playground, and is getting over a scraped knee or something, I can just say you’re a tough kid instead of, you’re a tough girl. It’s so weird that I do that now that we’ve had this conversation.

Melinda

But if you’re in the middle of a conversation about sexism, then it’s different. You might be referring to the fact that she’s a girl, because sexism is gonna affect her. And she’s got to, you know, recognize it and see what see it for what it is.

Virginia

It’s also just reinforcing the binary. When I do that, it’s assuming that my three year old is a girl. As it happens, she has identified to us as a girl, but. It’s not creating a lot of air in the room for other genders who are not represented at all in these binaries. So, there’s that piece of it, too, as a reason to sort of like ease off the girl power rhetoric. It was a really helpful chapter and made me rethink this language.

Well, this was a great conversation. Where can listeners find your work? Of course, everybody needs to go preorder the book right now, I am linking to it in the transcript. And it is out on Tuesday. So you don’t have a lot of time. But you should get your pre-order in!

Melinda

Pre-orders are awesome, they really make a difference. What might be easiest if I just give my website because if you want to subscribe to my newsletter, which is on Substack, there is a signup link on my website, MelindaWennerMoyer.com. It also has links to information about the book and pre-order links and all of those things.