Rachel and her team support national and state-level organizations fighting every day to end hunger and poverty in the United States. Most of her work focuses on making SNAP (the government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) the most effective, accessible and equitable program it can be in every community. 

JICYMI: When the federal government shut down this fall, it closed SNAP for the first time in the history of the program, pausing benefits for much of November. Benefits are up and running again in most places, but this has had major ripple effects on the state of hunger in our country right now. And it's led to a lot of long-term questions about what we do to prevent that ever happening again. 

We also talk quite a bit about how to give strategically because it is that time of year when a lot of us want to do charitable giving. Which is great! But there are good and less good ways to do that. Burnt Toast is a community of helpers, and I think this conversation will help us all be better at helping.

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Rachel

I am a SNAP advocate. That's how I think of myself. That's my identity. I live in Ohio, and I have been working on SNAP, and the food assistance programs that are connected to SNAP, for almost 20 years. I started working on it in Philly, and have now worked in a number of different states. My passion is to protect our food assistance programs that help families meet their basic needs. If we had something better than SNAP in this country, honestly, I would work on that. But because SNAP reaches 42 million Americans, and it's the best safety net we have, that's the program that I've committed to working on. 

I do policy, advocacy, administrative, legislative—wherever we can fight for the program, we are doing that.

Virginia

It's incredible. I should disclose that we have a personal connection. I first met you, I guess, 20 years ago? When you were in college, you were a student of my stepmother, Mary Summers, who has also been on the podcast.

Rachel

Actually, I was a fresh out of college working in the community at the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger. And Mary had students who she placed with us in a service learning program. Mary was one of my first and still mentors, who has supported me in lots of different ways through this career.

And I think you did some interviews with Witnesses to Hunger? I worked on that program many years ago. So yeah, we've evolved a lot, Virginia, since those days.

Virginia

Yes! When I was researching my first book, The Eating Instinct, you helped connect me with folks for interviews. Rachel and I go way back in a shared advocacy spirit, sort of way so I just wanted to give people that backstory. 

And so I emailed you a few weeks ago to say, Rachel, help! Please come on the podcast. This was when the government was shut down and it had triggered the freeze on November SNAP benefits. At that point, everybody was scrambling, and I knew you were doing the most scrambling.  

Of course, because of politics, the shutdown is now over. SNAP benefits are once again being distributed, for now anyway. But that is not to say that hunger has been solved in this country, or that the 42 million Americans who rely on that program are just totally okay now. 

You were like, "Do you still want to have this conversation?" And I was like, well, yes, because people are still going hungry!

Rachel

Yeah, thanks for the chance to talk about this!

In the 20 years I've been working on food stamps, there has never been a moment I remember where SNAP dominated the headlines for two weeks straight. So on the one hand, I'm trying to see the silver lining in this massive drama to say it's a chance to educate everybody, including your listeners, about what the SNAP program is. It has been this quiet backbone program, running and feeding communities for almost 60, years.

And during the shutdown, SNAP essentially got used as leverage for both parties to bludgeon each other with and blame each other for starving the citizens of the United States. It's unprecedented. I feel like that's an overused word these days, but this truly has never happened before. SNAP benefits stopped going out across the entire country. And the emergency food system—the food pantries, the soup kitchens, the food banks —was never meant, or equipped, to be able to overnight replace what SNAP is is doing in the community.

Just in my home state of Ohio, we're talking about $263 million a month that goes out in SNAP benefits. No fundraiser for a food bank was ever going to come close to replacing that. It was a crisis. It was an absolute crisis that we were facing. 

So starting on November 1, people's benefits were frozen. They still had to complete renewal paperwork. They still had to comply with work requirements. But people weren't getting their benefits delivered. 

And then it turned into a Supreme Court battle. It went all the way up to the Supreme Court because the administration actually did have money available that they could have spent, and they were choosing not to spend it on the program that it was dedicated for. 

So finally, when the shutdown ended, the benefits slowly started flowing again. We're recording this on November 25 and in a few states, all the benefits still have not gone out. So there are still families who are supposed to get their benefits maybe the beginning of November, and are still waiting. 

The long-term harm of this is hard to overstate. The definition of food insecurity is not knowing where your next meal is going to come from. And we just traumatized 40 million people who did not know where their next meal was going to come from. 40 percent of SNAP recipients are children. Their bodies and brains are going to remember this trauma that they just went through, and it's going to be a long time before we can repair that harm. We need to make sure that this type of a crisis never happens again, and Congress is never in a position where they can hold SNAP benefits hostage, even in a future government shutdown. 

Virginia

I've been thinking about the juggling act that this triggered for so many families. If you relied on SNAP to cover groceries, that meant you could use other income to cover childcare or pay a utility bill. So we're also going to see folks having fallen behind on other bills. Maybe they're unable to make a car payment, which then impacts their ability to get to work, to get kids to school, so many different things.

Rachel

There's a saying that poverty charges interest. You might only have gotten $200 from that SNAP benefit, which supplements your work income. But if you're now having to put a bill on a short term loan or credit card and you're paying 20 or 30 percent interest on that because you waited three weeks...How long is it going to take families to dig out of that hole? We hear all the time about utility shut-offs, all the time about evictions that get connected to a small change in household income, including the loss of SNAP benefits. 

Now I will say, because we have made SNAP such a difficult system to navigate and renew benefits, even if the government never shuts down again, this uncertainty where your benefits disappear, you go to the grocery line to checkout and you find out that your benefits aren't there because of some paperwork mishap—that actually does happen a lot in families' lives. There's a lot we have to do longterm to make this a more stable program for everybody who's experiencing the instability of food insecurity. But this was certainly a crisis moment where it was hitting everybody at the same time.

Virginia

Say a little more about that. Because for those of us who are mostly just seeing headlines, it's like, Okay, the government reopened. Okay, the SNAP benefits are back. But this is a system that was already not meeting the need. So what are some other ways SNAP struggles to support families?

Rachel

First, let me just remind folks who don't know, if you've never been connected to the program: SNAP is a very modest food benefit. It is on an EBT card, like a little debit card, that is loaded every month with money for groceries. But it's the equivalent of, like, $6 a day on average. It is about as much as most people spend on a cup of coffee. It is not a generous benefit. There's a lot of misconceptions about what SNAP is. It's a very modest benefit you can only use for grocery items. 

The program—for as great as it is, and it's the best thing we have—has a history of exclusionary policy making. Certain groups have gotten excluded and carved out over time. And HR1, the big bill that passed July 4, really took a sledgehammer to SNAP, too. It cut almost $200 billion out of the program and did some additional exclusionary policy making, the impacts of which we're just starting to feel. 

So I put the barriers to SNAP in two buckets. There are eligibility barriers, meaning the people that policy makers intentionally exclude from the program. This includes groups like legally present immigrants. It includes people who are forced to prove that they are working over and over again, and if they can't provide the paperwork proving it, then they get kicked out of the program. So there is exclusionary policy making that has to be tackled at a legislative law making level. 

Then there's all this other stuff, which is most of what I've worked on for 20 years, and what I worked on with Mary twenty years ago. These are the kind of the administrative barriers that people face in tackling the program. Application forms that are 40 pages long, that ask extremely intrusive questions, asking for tons of verification. You have to do a full interview with a case worker, you have to renew your benefits at least every six months.

All of these hoops are built up in the program to make people jump through, and that often keeps the folks most in need of benefits from accessing them. Not because they're not eligible, not because they don't need them, but because they just give up when the program is too hard to access. So we do a lot of work at the county and state level, state by state, red, blue, purple states to try to tackle some of those administrative barriers.

Virginia

It is wild that we think people need to work to have the right to buy food. And that we think people need to fill out 40 pages of paperwork just so you can buy groceries this week.

Rachel

In a number of states that have asset tests, you're asked for bank statements. You're asked for a copy of your rent receipt, your child care bills, how much do you spend on utilities every month? Applying for SNAP is harder than getting a house loan. It's harder than getting a business loan. It's harder than almost anything else, but that is the way the program was built. 

And there continues to be this persistent stigma or this narrative about unworthiness that has persisted in the program is so disconnected from reality. I'm hoping having this spotlight on SNAP, where we dominated the headlines for two weeks, does give a moment for people to take a second look at the program, really learn about what it is and start to fight for it. If you survey the American people, 90 percent of people, regardless of their political affiliation, will tell you that they think we should be doing more to help people meet their basic needs and pay for groceries, not less. But that doesn't match with what's happening legislatively in Congress. So we need people to know more about this program so that they feel like they have a stake in it. 

And I guess I just can't stop myself from saying one more thing: SNAP is so critical to our actual economy. One of the things that happened in the beginning of the shutdown is it wasn't just the folks losing that groceries on their table, it was the grocery stores they shop at, which, all of a sudden were saying, We have no customers, because 30 percent of our receipts come from SNAP and no one's shopping right now. 

I had a local store here in a rural part of Ohio which started laying people off immediately. Because they didn't know when those receipts were going to come in, and they don't have enough of a margin to be able to maintain their store without the program. So if we want our grocery stores to continue to exist and be in all parts of the country, we need SNAP. As that lifeline too.

Virginia

We agree we should be doing more to feed kids. We agree we should be doing more so that people don't go hungry. And yet, the program is built with so many barriers. And that's because there's this way we feel really good about fighting hunger—and it isn't the way that actually fights hunger.

Rachel

I'll say two things to this. Because of the history of exclusionary policy making in SNAP, there is always going to be the need for charitable giving. And there's always going to be, I think, the need for a wraparound system that provides food in real time, today, for anybody who needs it. That's what the best food pantries and soup kitchens provide: No questions asked, walk in the door, get food today. But that doesn't solve the long-term problem. 

So while we are always going to need that, I think the reason there's this mismatch is this misconception about who benefits from SNAP. 

So, if you asked those same 90 percent of people who they think the most common person on SNAP is, they would say, "It's a 30 year old in their basement playing video games." It's the same stereotype and tropes about health care, about who benefits from the safety net. There's this misconception that there are people who aren't pulling their weight in society, and that's who's benefiting from these programs. 

But if you actually look at the programs, most people getting SNAP are elderly, retired, they're people with disabilities, they are children, and they're working parents. They are parents working sometimes two or three jobs, but in low wage work that requires the supplement of a SNAP program. This group of "non-working but capable people" that people imagine are benefiting from the program is a fantasy. And it's intentionally used by politicians who want to attack the program. That goes back to Reagan and before, right? It's a long political strategy that we have in this country. 

I've been really grateful in my career to see even the food banks and the rest of the charitable sector has come a long way in talking about SNAP as an integral part of feeding the community. Feeding America is a big association of food banks. And they will say: SNAP provides nine meals for every one meal that a food bank can provide. So I think the solution is not to say, "Is it charitable giving or SNAP that solves this problem?" It's actually the blend of the two that's going to make our community's food secure.

Virginia

There's a bit of moralizing, I think, that goes into this. People feel good about giving to a canned food drive, but not necessarily good about voting for policies that would protect SNAP. And with RFK and MAHA taking over the rhetoric around all of this, is that leading to even more policing about what people can spend SNAP benefits on, and what kinds of food we want people to have access to?

Rachel

I'm going to first tackle the voting question. I think that very few people ever vote based on their beliefs or policy preferences around SNAP. I've yet to see a major political campaign where SNAP was a top issue that got talked about. That might change after the shutdown. We did see a lot of politicians on both sides of the aisle come out in defense of SNAP when the shutdown started, and that was, I hope, a jumping off point for people to actually vote. But I think there's this disconnect. 

I think there's a lot of bipartisan agreement here that we don't see. When you think about folks who are anti-SNAP, if you look at the comment section of an article in the newspaper that's about SNAP, you'll always see online comments that are disparaging SNAP. But if you look one layer under the maybe racism and misogyny that are layered on top--

Virginia

Hard to look past it, but sure, I'm with you. Comment sections are not my favorite.

Rachel

Agreed. But if you do look past, most people's story is actually about they themselves not getting benefits from the program. So it's often a story of, "I don't like SNAP because when I needed it, I couldn't get it, or because I wasn't able to comply with the work requirement and that wasn't fair," or because I was disabled, or my family member was and couldn't get the help that they needed.

So I think that, like so many social compacts in our society, if we actually built the program to help everyone who needed the help from the program, you would see more political support for it. That's why universal programs like Social Security generally benefit from really high public support, because we don't do the kicking people out there. There's not this sense of "if this group gets it, then my group doesn't get it."

Some of the realest conversations I've had about SNAP are with families and parents who are just over the income limit and are really upset that they lost access to that benefit once they got a raise or once they got a slightly better job. And that just fundamentally isn't fair. So if we brought in the program and make it more accessible, we would have higher political support for it, I think.

All right, on your MAHA question, which I know fits very well with your audience in terms of like you guys track the MAHA stuff.

Virginia

We do. Unfortunately, that has become a core part of our beat.

Rachel

The great irony of 2025 is that SNAP is one of the single best things we can do to make America healthy again. SNAP has every research study behind it that shows kids who get SNAP as children have higher economic output. They're healthier as adults, they work more. Older adults are less likely to go to the hospital, less likely to go to the nursing home, if they have access to SNAP. The research is abundant, right? 

Virginia

It's wild we needed research to prove that feeding people made them healthier, but okay.

Rachel

Yes, but we have it. It's rock solid. I spent too many years trying to help those research studies to get published in peer-reviewed journals. We know that to be true. 

You also have a parallel movement that's been happening for several years, where food banks have been working with insurance companies and other healthcare providers to make sure that they're doing tailored meals, meal boxes for people who are going through cancer treatment, people who have diabetes diagnosis. So these sort of tailored meals continue to be a trend. SNAP is a payer. Medicaid is a payer for those programs, all of those things improve health. MAHA, of course, is not about improving health. You guys know that.

It has become is about policing food, right? That is what MAHA is about. And so SNAP was an unfortunately perfect target for MAHA. As soon as we got into legislative sessions. This is at the state level. In January of 2025, we saw a flurry of MAHA-supported bills that would restrict what people could buy with SNAP benefits. 

In some states, it was soda. In some states, it was candy baked goods. In a state like Iowa, it's literally everything. If it didn't grow on a farm in Iowa. If it's not a vegetable or a legume, it's not in the program. So you've got  these extreme proposals that came out of it was the same two or three lobbyists who came through. They were Casey Means, they were RFK-alliance folks who came through in the state houses. And the only opponents in those hearings were the SNAP advocates. 

It was the Morris Institute for Justice in Arizona and a couple of brave food banks in some of the red states who saw these bills, and they were there to explain to lawmakers calmly how they have been working, how SNAP supports health, how there are other alternatives. 

I will say there were some victories. During session in Kentucky, the advocates very effectively educated lawmakers that it would be better to incentivize healthier purchases — because all the research says incentivizing healthier purchases works better than restricting access programs.

Virginia

Yes. Letting people buy food works better than banning what people can eat.

Rachel

And so they actually got a legislator to to come off of a bill that he had supported and to propose a new bill for an incentive-based program. So I think that education work in some political contexts was very successful.

But then we saw the White House call governors and said, "Well, you couldn't get this through your legislature, so now you need to do it through an executive order." And that's where we really have seen the most harm done with these proposals that have come straight out of of governors offices under pressure from RFK. I think my long-term view of this is that we are going to have to see the harm done in a handful of states, and see how much of a mess it is for retailers. Still to be determined if retailers sue over these restrictions, which really put all the costs on them to police their grocery lines. 

I hope what happens is we have, at worst, a couple of states implement these rules, we see the harm done, and we walk it back. And we see that the MAHA thing was a fad that we recover from in SNAP. Because at the end of the day we're talking about a $6 a day benefit. People are not able to meet all of their grocery needs with SNAP, regardless. You may accomplish shifting the order in which people check out. Maybe we'll put all of our fresh, healthy foods at the front of the of the conveyor belt to use our SNAP benefits on, but we're still going to buy our kids the birthday treat that they deserve to have.

So it's a big old waste of time, in my opinion. And I hope that it's a fad we are able to move on from in the long run.

Virginia

I hope so. MAHA is the worst version of it, but we did have Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle arguing for no soda on SNAP back in the mid-2000s. So it does seem to be this thing that we keep circling back to. And I think it is part and parcel with "it feels good to do food drives, but not to make SNAP more robust." It's this idea that all poor people need is wealthy white people to tell them how to eat, and that will solve hunger.

Rachel

Yeah. You are right that that instinct has been there for a long time, and it it probably will outlive it. In a number of states the American Heart Association came out in support of these bills. We had some doctors groups come out in support of these bills.

But where they would get stuck—and this is where these proposals quickly fall apart—is how do you define the ingredients of these processed foods. Even, let's say a soda. So you had, in some states, the proposal was, "anything with bubbles is a soda." And therefore you can't buy it with SNAP. But then you have the doctor being like, wait, I did tell my patient to buy the diet soda or the 30 calorie soda.

Virginia

And what about seltzer!

Rachel

It's so arbitrary! And if you look at the way that grocery stores label their products, they're by category. They're not by healthy or unhealthy. There is no universal healthy or unhealthy label, as you well know. 

So it's all well and good when it's moralizing in the hypothetical. But I had to spend a solid four months sitting on a SNAP restrictions work group for the state of Ohio. It was appointed by our governor. And I was in there with industry folks, grocery folks, from health care talking about the nuts and bolts of how to put this into effect in Ohio, which we're going to have to do in the end of 2026. And once you get into the definitions, it falls apart very quickly. 

So I wish we could go back to focusing on the bigger important things, but I think we're going to have to keep re-educating people every time this wave of this fad, this intention comes around. People need to be reminded that SNAP is there as an economic support to supplement low wages. If we really wanted people to not need SNAP, we need to have a higher wage economy. And that would be a much more straightforward way to solve the problem. 

Virginia

It feels very part and parcel with the whole ultra-processed food conversation, which, similarly, when people start defining it, they're like, well, wait, what is ultra processed? What do we mean? It's everything, which then quickly becomes nothing. 

Rachel

It's a distraction. But here we are. We still work.

Virginia

Okay, so it's December. This is the biggest month of the year for charitable giving. I think you did a great job of explaining there's a role for food pantries and food bank systems in all of this. But that's not the full solution. How should people think about charitable giving, especially this December, right now, given what we're up against?

Rachel

I love that people are invested in charitable giving at the end of the year. I personally do the same thing, and I try to look at the organizations that are doing the most long-term policy advocacy, because I'm looking at the upstream solutions, and those are often the most under-resourced organizations. 

You can look at the 990s of organizations. You can look at their overall budgets online and see that your typical food bank, or really any direct service, often has a many millions of dollar budget. But an advocacy organization that's there to change a policy that would help a million people often has a budget of maybe a couple hundred thousand for the year. 

So when you donate to a policy advocacy organization or a legal aid organization, your donation goes a lot farther and is much higher impact. Because even if you can't give $10,000 and you can only give $200 or $50, you're going to make a really big impact on those smaller organizations' budgets. So that's one place I would think about. 

This year, I am doing a lot of donations around immigrant support, given the onslaught of what's happening in this country against our immigrant communities. There are a number of organizations, mostly small and sometimes kind of fitting into the mutual aid category, that are trying to provide direct support as well as legal support to immigrant communities right now as they're under attack. So that is what I think, in this moment, is a really good investment. 

At the same time, the charitable food system is very dependent on donations this time of year too, because lots of people in the community turn to them. They know that they might be able to get a turkey at Thanksgiving. They know they might be able to get a Christmas meal from them. So those are never bad investments. I do think they are very good stewards of the donations and the money that they get. But if you can look a little bit deeper in your community and see where a policy advocacy organization exists—every single one of your states has at least one or two core social justice organizations that would really benefit from donations this time of year.

Virginia

And I'll just make the point that if you are giving to the local food pantry, think dollars over donations of goods, because they can do a lot more with your money. They can buy in bulk. They know more what their community needs, rather than you assuming that it's something you have in your pantry. That's that's probably like the least impactful way to donate.

Rachel

100 percent. And a very common mistake that well meaning people make all the time is donating products that are hard to readily consume. Donating a box of mac and cheese, but not the milk and the butter that goes with it. Or a can of beans that needs a can opener. If you're going to do canned goods, make it a pop top because so the people can open it. A lot of times homeless ministries really benefit from those canned soups or whatever, but they need to be accessible without a can opener.

So if you are going to do a food drive—I know my kids' school does one, it's a great way for kids to get hands on experience with it being involved— just think through, could this be a meal on its own, rather than, is this going to be something that someone's unable to use without other fresh products?

Virginia

Let's talk a little bit about mutual aid. This is something Burnt Toast as a community, we've been just starting to wrap our arms around. We did a very successful Mutual Aid drive at the start of November to help with the benefits shut down, and raised around $11,000 that we were able to distribute to, I think it was 62 folks in our community. So that was great.

It's something we want to do more of, and I know a lot of listeners want to do it in their own communities. But there are some things that come up for folks. I've heard people say, "I don't feel comfortable donating to someone I don't know." And some of this, I think, is a little bit of that internalized moralizing stuff that we were talking about, where it's like, am I just giving money to a random person and I don't know what they're using it on? So talk us through your take on mutual aid and some of the concerns you hear coming up around it. 

Rachel

I think mutual aid is a beautiful thing that has existed for many, many generation. It hasn't just been in the modern online era.

Virginia

Right now, it's a social media hashtag.

Rachel

That's right, that's right. But it's always been in communities, and you could talk to communities all over the country, and they would say they wrap their arms around folks and share what they have in times of crisis. And that's what the modern era of mutual aid is allowing us to do—but with people who don't live in our physical neighborhood, because we're so segregated as a society. 

My fundamental belief is that cash is the best way to provide someone with the dignity to make decisions for themselves on what their family needs in that moment. I have no idea whether you need a bus pass or a pack of cigarettes or money for rent or whatever you need to get through that day as a human being. You should have the autonomy to decide what that is. 

When I started this conversation saying I've worked on SNAP for 20 years, because it's the best thing we have—if we had a robust cash assistance program, I would work on that. 

There are really nice models in some communities of how to target mutual aid towards groups who are otherwise getting excluded from public benefits and other programs. Here in Ohio, we have a local, organic thing called AMIS, it stands for Americans Making Immigrants Safe. And it's a locally funded cash assistance program for families who are excluded from public benefits. They're seeking asylum, they're working with a lawyer to get their paperwork through. They're stuck waiting on their green card, whatever it may be. And so that is a way that cash can be distributed to folks who are getting excluded from SNAP and excluded from Medicaid. 

So I really like that program, because there are folks doing the work of the connecting. I don't speak the languages of everybody who needs connecting to that program, and I would never be able to find through Facebook those folks who need that the most. So I think that's a great model.

But I also think another really cool model that evolved during the shutdown was an organization called Propel. They have an app that people use to manage their SNAP benefits. And we were talking as the shutdown was looming, and they were like, "What can we do? Should we encourage people to donate to food pantries or whatever?" And I was like, "No, just use your app to give people cash." And they did! They figured out a way to do it. I don't know how many millions of people that they helped, but they were giving a $50 cash payment to the same families who were losing out on their SNAP benefit. 

So I think that kind of creativity of just saying, "Trust people with $50 in cash and let them decide what they need in this moment." As the giver, you don't own the choice, right? If that person gets ends up buying something that you personally wouldn't spend your money on, that is not on you. And that is not a waste of a donation. That is you just putting goodness into the world and giving somebody else the dignity to decide with themselves what they need in that moment.

So that's my take. Get over yourself. Just give people cash.

Virginia

Yes, yes. Thank you, Rachel. I love that so much. I think it's just a moment when you feel those thoughts coming up, and it's important to pause and say, oh, wait, this is me thinking I know how other people should live when of course we don't. Of course we are not navigating what they are navigating in a day. But we can all imagine how would it feel if whatever our source of comfort, or vice, or coping strategy is, was suddenly inaccessible because somebody was telling you it wasn't good for you. 

Rachel

And that's the beauty of what mutual aid can do. We do all the other moralizing in our public systems. Families in the child welfare system are heavily scrutinized and penalized. People who are experiencing homelessness are heavily scrutinized. People going through drug treatment, who have had a traffic violation. There are a million other ways we police people in society. We don't need to do that with mutual aid.

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Rachel

Well, as a longtime listener, I will say I've gotten great ideas from other people's butter. So thank you for having this segment. 

Honestly, the thing that brings me the most joy right now is reading Anne of Green Gables to my daughters. We are just about to finish the third book, which is Anne of the Island. And it's, you know, from a million years ago, set in Prince Edward Island in Canada.  I will say what is just cracking me up with each chapter is the way that parents are just as annoying in the early 1900s as they are today. Anne is a school teacher in one of the books, and the things that parents complain about, like my Johnny really deserved an A on that test, are all the same things that our poor teachers have to deal with right now. 

We have screens in our house. I am not some puritanical Little House on the Prairie mother, but it's the one thing we do before bed is we've been reading Anne of Green Gables. So now we're starting to binge all the different PBS series. There's Anne with an E, Anne of Green Gables. There are redos, there's a 1980s version that's amazing. So all things Anne of Green Gables right now are bringing me joy.

Virginia

I'm so rooting for this in my own life. My kids don't take my book recommendations. So there is a copy of Anne of Green Gables sitting in my family room right now that I'm just, like, waiting patiently for someone to discover. If they know I want it too much, it won't happen. So I just leave things like that out. I'm really hoping to join you in this Anne of Green Gables magic soon.

Rachel

You can mention that Anne is a real troublemaker, that's what got my 10 year old into it. It was when I told her some of the snippets of the ways that Anne breaks rules. Then she was like, oh, all right, maybe I'll try it.

Virginia

I love it.

My Butter is a really good cookie recipe. It is a vegan chocolate chip cookie recipe, which I was extremely suspicious of—it uses banana instead of egg and peanut butter. But they are so good and chewy and it's so easy to make that I've actually been baking them more than just scooping the store-bought cookie dough, which I will always be a fan of, because the ease is unmatched. But this is a really easy recipe. They're super delicious. I don't think there's anything healthy or special about them, but if you have someone who can’t do eggs or whatever, it's a nice option to have. And this time of year we need a lot of treats.

Rachel

My daughter's art teacher just told me that she's having a fully vegan Thanksgiving, and I was super impressed with her, and trying to figure out how I could possibly gift her something at the end of year. So I'm going to try your cookie recipe. 

Virginia

Yay! Rachel, this was so helpful and informative. Thank you for everything you're doing. Tell folks, how can we support your work? If we want to learn more, where should we follow you?

Rachel

Thank you for having me on. I have been listening to, and learning from you for many years, both on the parenting side, with little picky eaters with your first book, and—oh my gosh, I want to show you my fan girl real quick. I'm sorry. Cut this out of the podcast, if you want. 

But here is a copy of—I know this is like, not a live video thing where your listeners can see me, but I am holding up Fat Talk. I was a pre-order! Let me show you, and I got it signed by you at your local bookstore. But anyway, I love your books, and I have learned a lot from you over the years. So I just want to say thank you for that. 

In terms of where you can find me, I mostly hang out on LinkedIn. I lead a consulting team because I don't like real jobs. So we actually do consulting projects for lots of different organizations that are all in the SNAP advocacy space. 

You can also find us at our website, and learn a little bit more about the advocacy that we're doing and the organizations that we work with. But we are always trying to build more SNAP advocates, whether as a volunteer, as a person with lived experience who wants to go and testify before Congress and talk about why SNAP is important, or just someone who wants to write a check and support organizations. We can always point you in the right direction. So feel free to reach out if you're interested in learning more about SNAP.

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

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Farideh.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

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

EPISODE CREDITS

Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.

Producer: Kim Baldwin.

Logo design: Deanna Lowe.

Theme Song: Farideh.

Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku

Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron

Follow us on social!

Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.

Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.

Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.

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

Today we've got a couple of rants and answers to your listener questions. On the agenda:

⭐️ The tyranny of School Spirit Weeks — especially during the holiday season!

⭐️ How it feels to date another fat person 👀🔥

⭐️ How we're surviving — even thriving? — this Ozempic Season.

To hear the whole thing, read the full transcript, and join us in the comments, you do need to be an Extra Butter subscriber.

EPISODE CREDITS

Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.

Producer: Kim Baldwin.

Logo design: Deanna Lowe.

Theme Song: Farideh.

Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku

Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron

Follow us on social!

Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.

Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.

Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.

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

We often skip an episode drop on this day, but given how high pressure Thanksgiving can be for food, bodies and people, we thought...maybe you need a little Indulgence Gospel, a little Butter, and a little distraction from whatever your holiday weekend entails?

We've got you:

• A Helen Rosner-inspired fashion epiphany.

• Thoughts and feelings about Black Friday.

• A very good Corinne clothing rant.

• Our secret shame places.

• And more!

You do need to be a paid Just Toast subscriber to listen to this full conversation. Membership starts at just $5 per month!

Don't want an ongoing commitment? Click "buy for $4!" to listen to just this one.

EPISODE CREDITS

Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.

Producer: Kim Baldwin.

Logo design: Deanna Lowe.

Theme Song: Farideh.

Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku

Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron

Follow us on social!

Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.

Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.

Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.

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

Deb is a registered dietitian/nutritionist with 40 years of experience helping people heal their relationship with food, movement and their bodies. Her work sits at the intersection of anti-ageism, body liberation and trauma-informed care, offering a radically compassionate alternative to diet and wellness culture—especially for those in midlife and beyond. 

After turning 60, Deb began questioning the dominant narratives around aging, vitality and beauty, and quickly realized the majority of resources still centered weight loss and youthful appearance as the ultimate goals. In response, she created what she couldn't find: A framework for nourishing the body that honors body respect, prioritizes liberation and embraces the full spectrum of aging. 

Deb came on the podcast back in 2023 and we had what was really the first, or certainly one of the first, conversations we've had on Burnt Toast about the intersection of ageism and anti-fat bias. That discussion helped lay the foundation for how we're continuing to talk about those issues. Deb is someone I always turn to for resources and wisdom as we're navigating those conversations here.

Unapologetic Aging comes out on December 16, so now is the perfect time to pre-order it as a holiday gift for yourself, your mom, or anyone you know in midlife and beyond!

And don't forget that if you've bought Fat Talk from Split Rock Books, you can take 10% off your purchase of Unapologetic Aging there too — just use the code FATTALK at checkout.

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Virginia

We are here to talk about your new book, Unapologetic Aging, which comes out on December 16. I loved the book. I think it's such a valuable contribution to this whole conversation. It's really a guide to living well in midlife and beyond without, as you put it, "the whole diet and wellness mess." It's also a very powerful reckoning with how our ageism and fatphobia prevent us from doing the things we really want to do at this time.

Deb

I'm trying to create some awareness of our internalized ageism, because I think it goes unnoticed. If anybody is listening to your podcast, my hope is that they've already done quite a bit of work looking at their anti-fat bias. So then it's about looking at where those two meet, as you notice changes in your body. 

So I created a book that helps you with your awareness and with how you could look at making choices to support yourself and mending some of the body stories you carry about your aging and about changes. That includes being in a larger body, and some pieces around body image and intimacy. Body liberation as you age is such an important legacy for the generations to come.

Virginia

I want to start with something I underlined right in the introduction. You wrote that we so often hear “You haven't aged a bit!” And this is considered a grand compliment, right? But you're immediately questioning why. Unpack that for us.

Deb

Again, hoping that your audience is already aware of how “you look great,” if you lost weight is a problematic thing for someone to hear. It's very similar. It's a very parallel compliment in that you just calcify this belief that looking older is bad and looking younger is always better. That very definite binary that we impose upon ourselves. It is very much like looking thinner is always a victory, and looking larger must mean you're failing in life.

Virginia

It's so interesting when you step back from it. Why do we not want to look like we've been living? Why would I want to look like a younger, less accomplished, less mature person? Not to criticize my younger self—but why wouldn't we want to own the aging that we've done, and the living that we've done? 

Deb

We've just internalized all of this fear. And I get it. I understand that to pass as younger gives you more social collateral, and theoretically you lose relevance in our very ageist culture. So I get it. It's disempowering to say the very least. And it's a perpetual fight. I'm not a fan of fighting my body overall.

And I think that's what's at the center of my book: What happens when you stop fighting, and instead befriend, and care for, and lean into the connection and relationship you can have with your body? How beautiful it is, especially at this time in life. There's so much liberation there that I'm very attracted to that for myself and anybody that wants to talk to me about it.

Virginia

I have a kind of funny story to confess. As I was reading your book, a moment came up where I had to recognize, oh, this is my own internalized ageism showing up. The backstory is my boyfriend, Jack is nine years younger than me. So we have an age difference. And he was talking about a friend, and he referred to her as "an older woman." And I realized the person he was talking about was the same age as me, and I immediately was like, "What do you mean older woman? Why are we using the phrase older woman?" And he just looks at me and he's like, "Babe, it's a good thing. That's a neutral description. It's a neutral term." And I was like, oh, I need to reclaim "older" or "old," just like I've reclaimed fat.

So now our joke is, if you say older women, you say, "parentheses complimentary," to clarify that it's meant as a good thing. 

Deb

We're just socialized to think “older” is negative.

Virginia

Obviously you shouldn't even need that parentheses!

Deb

Well, we all do. I do it too. We all do. It was just so deeply, deeply ingrained, just like all the stuff around anti-fat bias.

Virginia

I remember last time we talked about language when you were on the podcast. And we were talking about how we like “elder,” but there are other terms that do feel more negatively imbued. So it's not necessarily that you have to reclaim every term around aging, but it is worth looking at why is this term hitting you this way?

Deb

And we may be different in the way things land with us, too. I mean, clearly with you and Jack. 

Virginia

Yeah, totally. I was like, Okay, called out for my own ageism.

So something you write about quite a few places in the book is this phenomenon of what you call “super agers," which we see constantly on social media. They're always showing up on Good Morning America. Super agers are folks who are over 70 or 80 and still windsurfing or doing yoga or  rock climbing. It's pretty much always some incredible physical feat that someone's doing in their later years. And we have such a tendency to celebrate that, but you're very clear that that's not necessarily a straightforward celebration of aging.

Deb

When I was thinking about this, I was also watching the New York City Marathon. And all the celebrations tended to be focused on people with disabilities, older ages. It was very interesting to me. And larger bodies! All of them are grouped together as celebrations because they pushed through some sort of social limitation to accomplish this thing. 

And again, as always, there is some truth in that. I do have respect for people that work hard to accomplish things. And aging is fascinating in that we become more unique and heterogeneous the older we become. The longer we live, the more experiences we have, the more  possible disease diagnosis and treatments, medications. I mean, so many things happen with each passing year. We're very unique. 

There are just as many ways to age as there are to live your life. I just want to put forward the fact that you don't have to be in a super human category to be aging well or successfully. 

It's not unlike when you say “Good Fatty." You're a “Good Fatty," if you work out right, and if you work really hard on your body and being healthy. All the healthism that starts to rise up. So it's very similar with pushing yourself despite your age.

Virginia

There are two layers to it. There's this thing where it's actually quite patronizing to the person doing the activity. Like, oh, good for you. You're doing this despite all the odds. Which you wouldn't say to a thin, able-bodied 25-year-old running a marathon. Then it's, wow, you've worked hard and have skills and experience.

And then also it's contributing to this artificially high standard of what we need to aspire to. So now it's not enough to just try to  preserve my mobility as I get older. I also need to be able to do a headstand.

Deb

The hard part is that, yeah, I do want to celebrate these accomplishments. Of course. I think that's amazing. I saw something about this woman who beat the world record and how long she could hold a plank. And she was about 10 years younger than me, so I immediately got on the floor, of course, to see what I could do. And there are so many little things on social media about tests of your capacity as you age. If you can get up from the floor in a certain way. If you can put on your socks and shoes without sitting down. And what happens, of course, is we judge ourselves, we compare ourselves. And I don't know how helpful that is. 

I mean, if it motivates you to see if you can shift and change some of your habits, to see if maybe you could work on balance, maybe that's uesful. It's very important to have healthy feet, for example, but to what end? That's what happens for a lot of people. It's like, hell no, I can't do that. I can't do this so why try?

A lot of the research on ageism shows that this narrative about decline and fear mongering does not do us any favors when we believe those negative story lines. Fear doesn't motivate us. It makes us feel like we're doomed. And there's actual data showing that we live longer with a much more positive mindset around what it's like to be in an older body. 

Virginia

It's making me think of how much we narrow the definition of health when we do this. When we say, Can you get up off the floor without using your hands? That is a sign of how healthy you are. Well, I can't do that every day. That's not something that's available to my body every day now. On the other hand, I recently increased how much weight I'm lifting when I strength train. I can lift a much heavier weight than I could when I was younger and could get up off the floor more easily. And so it's kind of a wash to me, like, which is healthier?

And that's setting aside the aging discourse around strength training —we'll get there. I just mean, there are so many different facets of health. And those two examples are just talking about physicality. That's before we get to mental health, or all of the other ways we can measure health. And I just think it's so interesting that we constantly narrow how we define health and how we're grading it.

Deb

We're so influenced by these “longevity bros.” We're just so, so inundated by those types of messages, especially on social media and podcasts, that it totally narrows our definition of beauty, our definition of  what it is to be well and to live well. 

One of the things that we need to do at midlife—and I think midlife invites this when you're staying in touch with yourself— is to embrace a reflective period. It's like, okay, I clearly have less time in front of me. What are my values? How do I want to sail the ship?

That is something that happens in midlife, and I think it's very important to clarify how you want to spend your time and energy now. And for some people, it is getting up off the floor without using their hands. For a lot of people, not so much. And that's okay.

Virginia

They are morally neutral activities.

Another phrase I underlined in the book, because as soon as you wrote it, I said, Oh God, I'm hearing that everywhere, is people saying, "Well what I've always done isn't working anymore." They're usually referring to how they're eating or how they're moving their body. Like, I always used to do X, Y and Z, and now it's not working anymore. 

You have such a smart reframe for this. Because was it ever working?

Deb

Yes, what do you mean by "working?" Working to fit your body into a certain size and shape, or maybe functionality? Why are we holding onto that? I don't think that serves us very well, because our bodies are supposed to change. 

I talk a lot about this metaphor of the monkey bars, that in order to move down the monkey bars, you have to let go of one to move to actually move forward. If you cling and grasp, you will stay, and I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in continuing to move forward, whatever that looks like. To evolve and change and become is the beauty of midlife and beyond. That's the opportunity, that's the emergence that is available to us. So this focus on holding on to what's been working, as in, keeping ourselves in the same size dress, or whatever the story is, that's another one of those, like, I can still wear the dress I wore when I went to prom in high school.

Virginia

That's a big achievement. Staying your high school size forever.

Deb

I don't think it's serving us.

Virginia

It's really not. It's really a way of staying stuck, as opposed to letting yourself change. When we fight change, we make it so much harder on ourselves.

Deb

But the social conversation is maintained. Maintaining that freeze frame--it doesn't make any sense to me. It just doesn't make sense. But I see it and hear it, and people spend a lot of money on it.

Virginia

Do you think that wanting to freeze frame is also behind so much of the menopause discourse right now? 

Deb

Absolutely. What I hear in the menopause space is fear mongering about change. And that's getting more and more extreme, in my mind. We are talking to each other right after you've probably seen the very viral conversation about how in menopause, your brain eats itself. 

Thankfully, there has a lot of pushback on that by people I respect, because there's absolutely no data. It was a rodent study, and the rodents died soon after menopause. So clearly their menopause is not the same as human menopause. But the fear mongering gets people. It just hooks you and makes you feel like you should do whatever this is being sold. 

But the research does show that our brains change in very interesting ways. As we get older, our brains have more capacity for being flexible and adapting. So that's a beautiful thing. I like celebrating the fact that we find ways to continue to live our lives as fully as we would like to, and age the way we want to age, without all this pressure and fear. Fear, in and of itself, is harmful for your brain, by the way.

Virginia

With the menopause discourse being so loud right now, especially on social media, it feels like all of diet culture is boiling down to two things that we are supposed to do as much as possible: Eat all the protein all the time, and strength train constantly in our weighted vests.

The book, I want to be clear, is so much more than that. You have so many great tools, journaling prompts, strategies to help people do this really hard work of figuring out how they want to relate to their bodies and take care of themselves in this life stage. But I do want to get you to give us your hot takes and reframes on protein and strength training, because those are the two that we get the most questions about by far.

Deb

As most things in this arena, there is some truth. There's a kernel of truth. It's just gone too far. It's gotten too extreme. 

My preference is to really honor the unique person and their needs, and I also prioritize mental health. If you are a person who has had any history of disordered eating, chronic dieting, obsessive thoughts, anxiety, then the fear mongering is going to be very harmful for you. And triggering. There is research that shows there's an increase in relapse and development of new eating disorders [at this age]. 

Obsessing over numbers like protein grams is harmful. I don't do it. I don't recommend it for anybody. I think understanding where protein is in our food is smart. You probably already know that. And making choices where you include some protein most of the time is helpful. You don't have to do it every single time you eat. But that is kind of how things naturally happen anyway, without a lot of effort. Unless you're a person who doesn't like protein-containing foods at all—and that can be true—then it may require more effort on your part. 

My favorite example is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I just love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or peanut butter in anything. I feel like my body goes “thank you” every single time I give myself that. It works. And I've heard that from many clients, too. Pleasure centers light up. You get carbohydrates, fat and protein. It's such a great combo. It's a beautiful food choice, and it lasts forever. You don't have to keep it in the fridge.

Another example is a charcuterie board, where you have some cheese, you have some ham if you eat meat. There tends to be a little bit of protein along with the carbohydrate and fat, naturally. So you don't really have to get down in the numbers. I encourage you to pay attention and make choices that include protein. But I think it's completely unnecessary to count the grams of protein.

Virginia

I love that the takeaway is eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Yes, done, sold. 

Deb

Anybody listening to this and has ever worked with me is probably laughing really hard right now, like, there she goes again. Peanut butter and jelly is my solution to all the things. 

Virginia

It's one of the most perfect foods! I had a phase where one of my kids basically lived on Uncrustables, and I was like, no notes. It made packing lunches so easy. We could always have them with us. It was delightful. 

Deb

Okay, strength training.

Virginia

Let's do it. 

Deb

Here's the thing that I want people to hear me say: No matter what you do, you lose muscle mass. It's not like doing all the things it's going to stop that, because it doesn't. So that's a fact. That's an opportunity for acceptance that your body softens.

There's something about that that I find very inviting. I love that my body is softening. I really, truly do. I'm attracted to the softness that's available to me that didn't used to be. I'm naturally kind of like-I don't know if anybody ever watched Popeye? Popeye's girlfriend's name was Olive Oyl, and that was my nickname when I was a kid, because I was just long and lean. So softening is exciting for me. I've never really had this softness, so I think it's sweet. 

And there's a softening that I'm attracted to around taking the edges off of all of our anxiety and our preoccupation with being perfect. I have a lot of positive associations with softening.

There are also some health protective aspects of having more storage space. That's what body fat is. You will be safer when the next virus comes around. We're in that time of the year where we're all going to get this and that virus. So you have more storage and your bones are a little bit more protected.

Weighted vests... well that's a huge conversation.

Virginia

As a fat person, I'm already wearing my weighted vest at all times.

Deb

It's just anti-fat bias that you would need to be as lean as possible and then strap on some extra weight.

I'm sorry. It makes me laugh every time I think about it. I'm sorry if people see me laugh when I see them without walking and they are wearing their weighted vests. I'm just entertained. 

Virginia

Also, caveat listeners: If any of you are like, no, I just love my weighted vest, we're not taking it away from you!

Deb

I'm not judging you if you're doing it. I totally get that you're just trying to do the right thing for yourself all the time. We all are. It's just, I'm not falling for that one. Weighted vests are on my “I'm not falling for it” list. 

But yes, we do need to do things that include bearing your body's weight and extra, if that's possible, and of course, the data supporting heavier weight is there—if that's interesting to you, if that's accessible to you. 

So many women contact me and say, I just feel like I'm not doing it right, because I just can't make myself do heavy lifting. And that's okay, too. Making yourself spend time doing something you hate doesn't feel in my mind like the thing you want to do with this precious part of your life. Because it's more and more precious. I'm in that category. Maybe I'll get to a place that I want to. I'm sure it feels good to feel yourself be powerful and strong. Yes, I get that. I'm a yogi. I love doing yoga poses where I hold my body weight. And I'm also a single mom, so I do a lot of lifting naturally in life. I do all the things around the house.

Virginia

I think it's so interesting, because I do enjoy strength training, and I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't genuinely enjoy it. Because for me, the form of exercise that I detest and get caught in this "I need to make myself do it" cycle is cardio. And if they were pushing cardio as hard as they push strength training, I would be a mess. So that's just to underscore—any way you're moving your body that makes sense for you is good. And if you can find joy in it, even better. 

Deb

Absolutely. And feel playful!

If you can find some playfulness, and if you can find some social connection, you're also doing things to help your brain and your aging process be with other people. Finding community and finding some playfulness is very, very healthy. 

Virginia

I love that.

Deb

So yes, of course I want people to keep moving. But not in this prescribed, "can you hold a plank for three minutes" way. And not in ways that disconnect you. That's probably the biggest thing for me is when you start counting grams, you get disconnected from your body. You get all in your head. When you start judging your body to make sure you're doing it right, you're disconnecting from your body again. 

Things that keep you connected and in your body are what I'm all about encouraging.

Virginia

I love that.

Are there any habits or lifestyle practices, or anything that you're like, "well, if people could add on something...?"

And I realize I sound like I'm undermining our whole conversation here, because I'm like, "tell us one habit we need to have!" and that's not what you're about. But I'm just curious what you think people benefit from doing more of in midlife?

Deb

My number one go-to is adequacy. I am very afraid that people are starting with a diet culture mindset which is so inadequate for supporting our bodies. And I notice that the symptoms of being undernourished are exactly the same symptoms that women experience in menopause. Brain fog, fatigue, anxiety, problems with sleep, loss of libido. It’s the exact same list. So I worry that this "blast your belly fat" conversation is contributing to our menopausal experience, peri and post.

You are not going to age well if you are living with scarcity and under-nourishing your brain and body. So that's my number one concern, because I hear it so often, and because diet culture has so skewed our perception of what is adequate. I feel like it's a very common experience. Trying to feed yourself throughout the day, trying not to skip, because there's a lot of that going on, a lot of skipping. Because morally, we feel like we are being good and superior thanks to diet culture when we ignore a request for fuel from our body, that little hunger that pops up. And you're going to have more food noise, by the way. I don't know if you want to get into GLP-1s today, probably not.

Virginia

I mean, when are we not getting into it? Feel free to throw it in. 

Deb

I would not be getting into it if it wasn't so commonly recommended. The new thing now is microdosing for the menopausal changes in your body. I mean, I'm not going to make a bold statement against GLP-1s, because I have many clients that are benefiting, that are in recovery with type 2 diabetes, that are benefiting and doing well. So I'm not talking about that. 

I'm talking about this facelift plus GLP-1 phenomenon. I believe in bodily autonomy, so I also don't want to diss anybody from making that choice, but discerning what you want from what the social construct is imposing on you requires some time. And that's the other thing that I want people to do in midlife, is to do some checking in with themselves, to get some clarity about what they really want versus what they think they should do. And how can you tell the difference?

Virginia

Well I love all of that, and it feels, in so many ways, more doable than counting your protein grams and wearing your weighted vest. I hope people are receiving it that way.

And your book is just such a great guide. It's like being in conversation with you. You're just so warm and wise and grounded and gently moving people through what can be heavy work, but there's a lot of joy to it as well.

Deb

Yeah, thank you. I tried to create little body breaks, chances for people to just go drink some tea and look at the sky, take a few breaths, because it can be very hard to look at the stories you carry about your body, and do you want to still carry that.

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Deb

I am in love with the Samin Nosrat book.

Virginia

The new one?

Deb

Yes, Good Things. Well, the old one too, but the new one.

Virginia

Anything Samin does, really.

Deb

Absolutely. I mean, her work is such a beautiful antidote to diet culture. I send people to her Netflix series, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, because it's pure food joy, without a single tiny second of nutrition anxiety. It's so rare to find. It's so rare.

But she has this--what does she call it? The roasted vegetable salad matrix? I've  dog-eared that page. I just keep it on my counter, because there are so many cool ideas about mixing and matching, and that's kind of how I cook anyway. It's like, what do I have? What's on sale? Can I do some extra roasting on the weekend when I have time? And what can I throw together as I go through the week? Little bit of crunchy, a little bit of bright acid, little bit of sweet. You can make sure you throw your protein in there, too.

Virginia

I haven't gotten all the way through the cookbook yet, but I love it, and I love the way she writes about food, and about giving herself permission to seek pleasure. There's a really lovely essay in there about that.

Deb

And not perfection! I mean, she rages against that perfection piece, which I think is so helpful. And try to invite people to join each other. Because the other piece about aging is you want to stay in community as much as you can.

Virginia

Well, that leads us perfectly into my Butter, which is last night I had the absolute joy of going into Brooklyn for Kate Baer's book launch event with Joanna Goddard at Books Are Magic.

Kate Baer is a phenomenal feminist poet. I probably don't need to introduce her work to anybody. Her new book is called, How About Now? There are so many fantastic poems in it. And just the experience of sitting in—it was actually in a church because Kate draws such a big crowd, they have to have it off-site from the bookstore. So we were in a Unitarian Church, and there were probably at least 300 women, most of us in midlife or beyond, just sitting together to celebrate poems about our lives that make us feel seen. I have goosebumps just thinking about it again the next day. It was really such a gift to be in community with so many women. 

Deb

That sounds amazing. 

Virginia

Kate is such a sweetheart, and I’ve been rooting for her a long time.

Yes, now let's talk more about your work. People need to preorder Unapologetic Aging: How to Mend and Nourish Your Relationship with Your Body. It's out December 16. That makes it a fantastic holiday gift for any midlife person and beyond midlife person in your life.

What else? How can we find you and support your work? What else can we do? 

Deb

Well I have a Substack called Unapologetic Aging and you can find me by my name. I am most commonly found on social media on Instagram, but you can find me anywhere, just by my name, Deb Benfield.

Virginia

Thank you so much for being here. Deb, 

Deb

I just want to say one more thing about purchasing the book. The last time we were together, we talked a lot about grandmothers and mothers and the generations, and I think my book is the perfect gift for your mother, If you're trying to have this conversation. 

Virginia

I agree with that. All the Burnt Toasties who write to me and say, "What do I do about the thing my mom says?" This is what you do.

Deb

And have a conversation. 

Virginia

Absolutely. Thank you so much for being here. 

Deb

This was really wonderful. Thanks for having me. 

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

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Farideh.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

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

EPISODE CREDITS

Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.

Producer: Kim Baldwin.

Logo design: Deanna Lowe.

Theme Song: Farideh.

Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku

Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron

Follow us on social!

Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.

Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.

Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.

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

Today we're talking about our problematic faves! These are shows, musicians, influencers and other pockets of culture that we want to enjoy without thinking much about them, even if there's discourse. We'll get into:

• Our favorite Bad Skinny Girl TV shows.

• The straight man who has Corinne's heart.

• Is Virginia a pick-me girl now?

• And so many more!!!

To hear the whole thing, read the full transcript, and join us in the comments, you do need to be an Extra Butter subscriber.

If you haven't joined us yet — we've extended your Burnt Toast gift access deadline! Check your email for "claim your free month by 11/20!" And do it TODAY!

EPISODE CREDITS

Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.

Producer: Kim Baldwin.

Logo design: Deanna Lowe.

Theme Song: Farideh.

Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku

Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron

Follow us on social!

Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.

Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.

Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.

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

Kaila is an author based in Los Angeles. Her debut memoir, Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty, came out earlier this fall to a rave review in The New York Times. She's also a luxury travel and culture writer with bylines in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The LA Times, Condé Nast Traveler and many more. 

Kaila's memoir grapples with her experience growing up Asian and female in a world that has so many stereotypes and expectations about both those things. We talk about the pressure to perform so many different kinds of specific beauty labor, the experience of being objectified sexually —and we really get into how we all navigate the dual reality of hating beauty standards and often feeling safer and happier complying with them. 

I learned so much from this book, and this conversation with Kaila.

Don't forget that if you've bought Fat Talk from Split Rock Books, you can take 10% off your purchase of Fetishized there too — just use the code FATTALK at checkout. 

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Virginia

Well, I just couldn't put this book down. Your writing is so powerful. The storytelling is incredible. The research is impeccable. It's just a phenomenal book. 

You write that from a pretty young age, "I felt the straightest path to empowerment was through courting the white male gaze," which, oof. I felt that. So many women reading can feel that in our bones.

And iIn the great New York Times Book Review of your book, the writer asks, "How much can someone be blamed for their choices when those choices are predetermined by one's culture?"

I feel like this is what we're always reckoning with at Burnt Toast, and this is what runs through the book: So often, beauty work is a logical survival strategy for us.

Kaila

We're taught at such a young age that women are just prized for this thing we have absolutely no control over, really. We can get surgery and makeup but beauty is a currency that's depreciating from the moment you receive it, according to the patriarchy. Like, it shouldn't be considered depreciating, but it is.

And we learn this from like, Disney movies, right? In the book, I bring up my favorite, which is The Little Mermaid, which, because they recently came out with it again, has had a re-examination. And I think they edited it for current audiences. But The Little Mermaid wasn't unique. That was what every fairy tale was like. The beautiful princess wins a prince at the end, and that's the goal. 

Virginia

And it doesn't matter that she gave up her family, her home, her culture, her body, everything. 

Kaila

Yeah, she fell in love with him after seeing him one time. And him the same with her, without speaking a word to her, because it doesn't matter.

Virginia

It's purely aesthetic, what we're falling in love with.

Kaila

When I was growing up—and it's changed so much since then, luckily—there was just such scarce representations of Asian women. Mostly they were just prostitutes and massage parlor girls on the side, you know? Not even speaking in movies. It wasn't really until Lucy Liu that we got a well-known named actress—and that was way after college for me. So growing up there really just wasn't anyone.

Virginia

You do a great deep dive into Memoirs of a Geisha, which, I'm embarrassed to say--I was a kid when that book came out, and I didn't realize it was written by a white man! I was like, I'm sorry, what?

Kaila

Nobody knows this! I've been talking about it, and still to this day, many people are surprised.

Virginia

I had no idea. Why did anyone give that book the credence it was given? I mean, it's mind blowing. And you're right. It's a story of child prostitution and exploitation.

Kaila

That is glamorized. And sadly, it was beautifully written. Like, I loved the book when I was I think in high school, when I first read it. It is just so well done that you kind of just skate over the many, many red flags.

Virginia

So as an Asian teenage girl reading the book, you're thinking, "Oh, I'm seeing myself. This is Asian stories being told. This is powerful." And then, wait, who's telling the story?

Kaila

Yeah, we didn't really think about that. I think I knew it was a white guy author, but I was like, "That's okay." Like, at that age, I wasn't really thinking about it. I was like, "Thank you for sharing our story," because I didn't really know any history of geisha either. I thought this was what it was, right? 

And I was very invisible in high school. So to see these glamorous, beautiful geisha, dressing up in finery and fighting for attention in this seemingly glamorous world was very enticing to me. Because there really were no other examples.

Virginia

it speaks to the dearth of representation that you were like, "Pkay, finally, they're showing us" and it's this terrible story of a child prostitute.

Kaila

Margaret Cho really said this amazing quote, which I'm going to butcher, and I'm paraphrasing. But she said something like, "Asian actresses are like, 'Hopefully one day I can be the prostitute in a war movie, or hopefully one day I could be the woman that the husband cheats on." And she's like, there's so little representation that we would be glad to hold an umbrella behind a main celebrity, just to be in the picture.

Virginia

It's enraging. Since you mention war movies: I was fascinated by the history you include in the book, tracing the development of Asiaphile culture. And we should probably define that term for listeners, who don't know exactly what an Asiaphile is.

Kaila

Yeah, it's a pretty obscure term that's not used that often. But I use it just because it's an easy, succinct way to say man with an Asian fetish. But I want to specify that I don't think most men who are dating Asian women have an Asian fetish. I do think it's a small vocal minority, but they are very vocal and very online. And they are people who treat Asian women as disposable, replaceable sex objects.

Virginia

And this is really rooted in colonialism and in US military occupations.

Kaila

I don't think people realize the deep history of that. The origins are probably because when Western men first encountered Asian women, it was in colonialist situations. Whether they were going there to spread Christianity or during American occupations in multiple Asian countries. 

What's disturbing is that after these young, impressionable soldiers who are like probably barely out of high school, have finished fighting a very traumatic war, they're rewarded by being sent to rest and recreation centers in Thailand or somewhere beachy and nice. Where they found these stations, or clubs, of prostitutes set up specifically for them as a reward.

Virginia
It's skin crawling. That is just a part of our history. That is a thing we did. And I don't think it's well understood, and it completely makes sense then okay, this is how white men first began relating to Asian women. And it has just become more and more entrenched.

Kaila

And Thailand is still a hub of sex tourism today. I don't think there's any military occupation there now, but that industry is all from that time period.

Virginia

It's so dark.

Okay, so you have the Asiaphile issue. You have this geisha representation of Asian women as sexual objects, disposable. And then on the flip side, there is the stereotype of the Asian woman who's an A student, very cold, the Tiger Mom, the Lucy Liu sort of characters. Which is also really problematic and narrow. And those are your options. 

Kaila

Yes, yes. I fell into that model minority stereotype, which is exists because I think Asian parents immigrate here to give their children a better life, so they're very strict. My parents, at least, were very strict and expected excellence in school and obedience to parents. And so I was very shy and very studious and all of those things. And I found my social life very lacking in that way. 

And I did not like being a model minority student. Because that nerdy Asian stereotype was represented on TV at the time in very terrible ways, with the Revenge Of The Nerds guy, or with the Sixteen Candles Asian guy. Super cringy versions. You don't want to be associated with that at all, as a young person. So I really swung the other way, aggressively rebelling like some other people might not have. Most people, most Asians, didn't rebel as much as I did, but I just really, really rebelled against that stereotype.

Virginia

I mean, it's so understandable. It's not remotely empowering. Even with some of Lucy Liu's characters where she's playing like a "powerful" woman, it's a very narrow form of power.

Kaila

Yes, and it's sexualized. Always.

Virginia

So it makes sense that as a kid, you're like, "Well, I don't want to be in this box. I guess I'll go over here." And it just shows how few choices we give girls in general, but especially Asian girls. You've always got to pick a lane in a way that doesn't let you just be human.

Kaila

It's robbing women of multi-faceted humanity.

Virginia

So you were like, okay, I'm not going to be the model A student. Tell a little of where you went next.

Kaila

When I was in high school, there weren't any Asian female role models that were useful. And then the internet started. So then I was surfing around online, and I discovered that there were dozens or even hundreds of websites dedicated to this one Asian model named Sung Hi Lee. And I became really obsessed with her, because I'd never seen so many non-Asians and Asian guys be fans of an Asian woman, period. And she was so beautiful and stunning. But she was a Playboy model, so she was very, very highly sexualized. And I spent many years being a fan of hers. And then I started to aspire to want to be like her, because it just seemed like she had everything I didn't. 

And then eventually, when I got to college, I started to pursue pinup modeling, and then that eventually went into import modeling, which is very niche Asian car shows that ultimately inspired Fast and Furious. But it was not really known out of the import or Asian community.

Virginia

And were there parts of the work that were validating and enjoyable? Or was it always sort of this feeling of I'm trying to play a role, I'm trying to be something that other people want from me?

Kaila

I say that at first, it felt like love. I couldn't explain it at the time, but like looking back, I had such a lack of self-love from the beginning. I think I was just maybe born that way, or built that way. That attention, after feeling so invisible in high school, felt like so deeply validating. But it's just such a temporary hit. And then there are all these girls coming up behind you and you're being pitted against each other. So it's like a cocaine high, you know? It's lasts a day or two, and then you're chasing the next thing. So it wasn't at all fulfilling. 

Virginia

And you become increasingly aware of all you need to do in terms of your own body appearance in order to keep being the girl that they want for this. 

Kaila

I mean, before I even started pursuing import modeling, I got breast implants, which are still really huge now today, but this was the era where Baywatch was massive, and Pamela Anderson was the ideal. And I was completely flat chested, so I was like I don't feel completely feminine. Even Sung Hi Li, that model I looked up to, had breast implants.

So the complicated thing is that I don't regret the breast implants. I like them. But I wish we didn't live in a society where we have to get surgeries to feel better about ourselves, right?

Virginia

You wish it could be a choice that you made on your own terms, and not in response to this feeling of lacking something.

Kaila

But I definitely felt lacking in that arena. So that was the mindset behind the surgery. 

Then in the book I talk about—and this is a little bit timely now, because I don't know if you saw the Love Island controversy. This happened in the last season of Love Island, Cierra Ortega, who was a big contestant who made it near the end, got kicked off the show because she had made some comments about her eyes, calling them the C word, which is a slur referring to Chinese eyes. And she was basically saying, oh, my eyes look too Asian. I'm going to get them Botoxed so they're wider or whatever. 

I think Asians learned that many people didn't realize that that word is considered a slur, and then especially how she was using it, because she was saying she didn't like how her eyes looked.

Virginia

But no producer on the show knew that it was a slur?

Kaila

She didn't say it on the show. It resurfaced. You know how fans go back. So she ended up getting booted off the show. And I don't believe in cancel culture and all of that, but I thought it was important for people to know that Asians do consider that a slur. 

Virginia

It's important for everyone to understand. 

Kaila

But I myself got that eye surgery. There's a surgery called double eyelid surgery, which is probably the most popular surgery amongst Asians, at least East Asians, and it was popularized in South Korea, I believe, during the wartime by this white doctor named Dr Ralph Millard, who was trying to make prostitutes' eyes look better for military men or for wives to look better for the military men who were bringing them back home. And then in medical journals, he described the Asian eye as dull and listless and unemotional.

I wasn't trying to get my eyes lifted to look more white, and I think most Asian girls like me aren't. In Asia, bigger eyes are just considered more attractive. But it's important to know that the surgery originated from someone who had racist comments to make about the Asian eye.

Virginia

Another gift from white men. They really have done so much for us.

I had Elise Hu on the podcast when Flawless came out, her book about the Korean beauty industry, which is fascinating. It was really interesting for me to learn that these standards also are part of Asian culture. And it's not necessarily about seeking whiteness. It's also just a longheld beauty standard within the culture—but then fueled by racist white doctors developing surgeries and what not. And that that kind of push pull is really interesting to me, that it's a both/and.

Kaila

But then I wonder, as we're speaking, is that beauty standard ultimately Western? To have bigger eyes? I don't know. I haven't done enough research on that to comment on it at all, but that's a question that just popped into my head. 

Virginia

 I think what your book explores, and what you're talking about, is how we lose touch with the origin stories of these standards, but the standards feel so important to achieve all the same. 

And I think that's what we see over and over in beauty culture. We get conditioned and normalized to needing this body part to look this way. And we usually don't unpack why we've decided that's so important. And then when you do look at the origins, they're always very dark and racist.

Kaila

We've just seen it in this generation when we were growing up Paris Hilton was the body type choice, and then it was Kim Kardashian. Neither body is really that achievable? 

Virginia

No, definitely not. 

Kaila

And so it swung and you couldn't fit into either one. And then now it's back. So yeah, there's no way of winning that.

Virginia

Speaking of bodies, I wanted to ask you how you see anti-fatness, which is, of course, the beauty bias that we talk about the most on Burnt Toast, intersecting with and upholding anti-Asian racism.

Kaila

It's always a joke, when you go back to your family of origin, they're like, "Oh, you gained weight!" That's always what they'll say to criticize you.

But it's crazy. I was skinny when I was 25 and I got hired to do a movie in Beijing. And then when I got there, the skinny standards in Asia are scary. And I met the director, and then the next day, I got fired because he told my agent, like, oh, she's heavier than we thought. 

But I was not at all, I was skinnier than I am now. 

So, yeah, I do feel the beauty standards and weight standards in Asia are super, super toxic. I wouldn't want to be a woman in East Asia. It's even worse, I think, than being a woman in Western cultures. Between the youthfulness and weight standards, it's it's a lot tougher than here, I think.

Virginia

Was managing your weight something you were thinking about during those years as well? Like that was also part of achieving this look?

Kaila

Yes, definitely, weight was always a concern with that kind of East Asian expectation in place. I will be very transparent to say that I was doing a lot of cocaine at the time so that made it less of an issue, just because not eating is a symptom of a lot of cocaine.

Virginia

Yeah, that's a whole other piece. I think you write about addiction really beautifully in the memoir as well. And I super appreciated that component of it.

Kaila

When I started using substances and alcohol, it just, like, again, felt like a form of love. The first time I did ecstasy. I mean, a lot of people do describe ecstasy as feeling like love, and I think for someone so lacking in it, it was just maybe more deeply fulfilling than for the next person.

Virginia

I mean, as we were saying, working as an import model, it's so validating. It feels like love, and then it's over, and then you're not quite good enough, and you're competing against other girls. And then here's this other way to get the feeling. It just all makes sense that it would all fit together. 

How were your relationships with other women during this time? With the competition so cutthroat, and particularly the pressure on Asian women, that can create so much toxicity and competition.

Kaila

I think it was very well-reflected and illustrated for me in Memoirs of a Geisha. Because that's very much a story of how this very young girl comes into the industry and takes down this older geisha, like the most famous geisha in all of the area is taken down by this much younger girl. 

And from the minute the younger girl enters the scene, this older geisha is threatened because she knows she's there to take her place. And it probably happened to another geisha before her, you know? 

But, the thing with me is, I've always been a girl's girl. So I've always had my group of friends, and that's really helped temper some of the situations. I think I always felt very threatened in the import industry, because I felt I made it there because when I set my mind on something, I'll knock down the door to get in. But some of the girls were there just simply because they were super beautiful, and I felt like they just had an easy gliding ride through everything where I was trying to pitch and submit and get into things. So that always gave another layer of insecurity.

Virginia

Again, this is patriarchy, right? If we're all pitted against each other, then men have more control over women. And it's interesting that Memoirs of a Geisha, which was this very like formative influence on you, was portraying women pitted against each other. And then that's replicated in the industries you move into. 

And in Memoirs of a Geisha, it's not really a critique. He's not arguing that they should form an alliance, that they should reject the system. There's none of that. So it just kind of keeps perpetuating this representation of Asian women. It's all piling on top of each other, and it's so hard to start to see the whole picture.

Kaila

And then you're watching it in media happen too, right? With Britney Spears and Cristina Aguilera, who I don't think were enemies, but they probably became that way, because it was people started gossiping and then you just create conflict.

Virginia

Women are cast into these roles, and in order to hold on to the power that we have, it becomes necessary to keep playing these roles. 

What was it that helped you start to dissect all of this? Because you're clearly in a really different place with your relationship to all of this now, what was it that made you start to say, like, okay, I'm actually participating in a whole system that is harmful to me, that it doesn't align with my values.

Kaila

I don't think I even had any clarity about that until, like, maybe 10 or 15, years ago, when I got sober. I had quit modeling, and I had started a musician career. And then we had a little bit of success, but then ultimately, we weren't making any money. And I was in my 30s, so I was like, okay, I need to find a real career now. Because this wasn't working for me. 

So even then, I wasn't thinking critically about things. I was trying to find my career. But only when I got sober and I started going to a therapist, that's only when I could even look at anything with the drugs and alcohol. Everything is hazy and you could rationalize anything really. 

It's funny, because I do a lot of therapy and trauma therapy and IFS therapy. And it's much easier being sober and and having a support group and walking through some of the trauma as someone decades older than the little 21 year old. 

But it's just so important, I think, to deal with the trauma. Because I stuffed it down for decades. So then I kept having to feel it in different ways, and suffer through it. And I think when you just process the feelings and let them pass, feel them, then you're, they're no longer haunting you and your subconscious.

Virginia

But it's hard work. I give you a lot of credit. That's major uphill work. 

And you do a really incredible job in the book of reckoning with where you were complicit. You talk about pushing some of the younger girls in the band to be more sexual than they were comfortable with, because you were trying to make sure the band was appealing to Asiaphiles.

This is not quite the same, but before I did this, I was a women's magazine writer and wrote a lot of really terrible diet stories. It's hard to look at how we participated in such toxic systems. 

Kaila

Yeah. When you're a fish swimming in water, you have no idea. And it's important to look back, I think, and reflect on it. And I think the positive part of it is that I feel like Gen Z and Z and Gen Alpha, they're so much more aware, and they're already kind of being critical as things happen. Whereas for me, I did it decades later, and there's nothing that could be changed. But if we could just keep having these conversations and look critically at things while they're happening. Right now we're like, doing this whole reckoning where we're apologizing to the women of the 2000s, like the Paris Hiltons and the Monica Lewinsky's and Amanda Knox right now because we treated them horribly. 

Virginia

 How has that changed your relationship with beauty and with beauty work now? I mean, you talked about complicated feelings about your breast implants, which makes so much sense. I'm curious if any of it feels more optional now? Do you still feel like you have to opt in? 

Kaila

I think writing the book was one of the most healing things, which was an unexpected outcome that wasn't the intention of writing the book, I guess. 

And then also, my editor, Amy Lee, is an Asian American woman, so she could deeply relate to a lot of what happened and had experienced similar things. It is complicated, because I still dye my hair. I still like to look pretty. I think what it isn't is male-centered. And that just might just be because I'm older. I'm not dressing like I dressed in my 20s. 

Virginia

You're like, I would like to be comfortable now.

Kaila

But I would love to aspire to be where Pamela Anderson is now, where she just is makeup-less on a red carpet and everyone's like, this is amazing. And if more people could do that, and we could become just more normalized to that, I think that's where the change would really, really happen.

Virginia

She has had such an interesting arc, and I give her a lot of credit, that she's just like, why are you even talking about this? I'm just showing up with my face. 

And I think women are like, oh, this is so inspiring and amazing. And then when you see the male comments...

Kaila

Oh I haven’t been reading.

Virginia

There are so many men who are personally let down to learn that it was all fake. They frame it as, she was faking it the whole time, she was never really beautiful. If this is what she really looks like. "She was lying to us for years."

And this whole premise of men thinking that women wearing makeup is "lying" is so interesting, because this is what we're supposed to do to please you. This is the standard that patriarchy requires of us. You don't get to feel personally betrayed that we have held these standards.

Kaila

I love how they're personally offended.

Virginia

They're like, "But I watched Baywatch for years. She didn't look like that!"

Kaila

She was also 21, right? Women age, as do men!

Virginia

It's like when Jennifer Love Hewitt was was doing her publicity tour for I Know What You Did Last Summer. They rebooted it, and everyone was like, oh my God, she doesn't look the same anymore. And it's like, great, it's been 20 years. She was 17 or something when she made the first one. Now she's a mom with three kids. She doesn't look the same.

Absolutely wild. And meanwhile, men are allowed to age and become silver foxes.

Kaila

I think more and more we're just showing older women like that's normal and not having crazy amounts of surgeries. Like, I think it's just all about normalizing. So we could see more and more of this. 

Like, one really good example is how when I was growing up, Asian men weren't seen as desirable. They were emasculated. But now that K Pop is big, there are a lot of women who are suddenly into Asian men as they were never before. Media representation is so, so important.

Virginia

And I think it's useful for us in our own lives to think like, well, what can I give myself permission? I mean, I'm with you. I'm still dyeing my hair, but I'm every now and then I'm like, are we ready to let the grays out? I don't know. 

It's important to at least name for ourselves: I am participating in this labor. I could opt out. That feels scary. There's parts of this I enjoy because it's fun to feel pretty and I mean that's what I try to do with my own kids, at least. Like, when they see me putting on makeup or whatever, it's like, "I'm participating in patriarchal labor! Also, it's just a lipstick!" They're like, we get it.

Kaila

They're so much more aware.

Virginia

When we do feel like we can opt out of something, that's really liberating, when you can say, okay, I'm not going to. I don't hold myself to the thinness standard anymore. That's not what my body is. It's not what it ever is gonna be without intense, traumatic interventions. And so that one I'm letting go. Other ones are harder to let go.

Kaila

I guess it's maybe the conservative movement, because that's all about controlling bodies in a negative way. Because we've swung towards the Ozempic thin again, which I find it troubling that a lot of body positive icons are like, suddenly shrinking.

Virginia

It's kind of what we were saying. On the one hand it is really hard to exist in a fat body in this world. Everyone is allowed to make their own choices about their bodies. And it's sad that we're losing fat representation. It's sad that we're seeing more homogenized thin bodies. And it's tricky, because I really believe we can't police people's individual choices. 

Kaila

Yeah, so tough, so tough to be a woman.

Virginia

It really is. It's a whole thing. 

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Kaila

Well, I just finished bingeing this show called The Girlfriend on Amazon Prime. 

Virginia

I don't know that one!

Kaila

It has Robin Wright, and her son gets this girlfriend, and there are some things about her that the mom doesn't like, and then they go to war against each other. It's not really great for, like, female on female. But it's really well done. It's like, more trashy kind of drama. 

Virginia

We love some trashy drama!

Kaila

It's escapism.

Virginia

All right, I'm going to check that out.

Less trashy, but definitely drama. I just finished watching Dying for Sex on Hulu.

Oh man, all the trigger warnings. If you have anyone in your life, any cancer stuff, choose carefully. It goes to dark places. But like, such a beautiful story of female friendship. Who knew Jenny Slate was this incredible dramatic actress? You're used to her being so goofy, comedic and she has so many layers in that performance. It's so nuanced and beautiful. Oh, my God. I just absolutely loved it. Cried through so many episodes. 

Kaila

Yeah, I went back and listened to the podcast. 

Virginia

Oh, I want to do that!

Kaila

Iit's such a unique story, right? Because we're seeing so many reboots and, like Marvel. And I just love an original story. 

Virginia

It's so original, for anyone who hasn't seen the show, I'm not spoiling this. It's in the first episode, she's diagnosed with terminal cancer. She leaves her husband and she's never had an orgasm with a partner. She really wants to explore her sexuality before she dies, and she kind of embarks on this whole journey with that. It's, like, edgy and raw and very dark, at times, but also very joyful and empowering. And, yeah, it's just, it's not a story that gets told very often, that's for sure. 

Kaila

Would a guy ever have sex if he didn't have an orgasm, right? Women are just like, not having orgasms all over the place.

Virginia

Yes, yes, the rage I felt about that. 

Kaila, thank you so much for doing this. This was wonderful. Tell folks where we can find you and how we can support your work.

Kaila

Yeah. My name is Kaila Yu, so you could find me on all social media websites. And then the book is in all bookstores and I say, support your local bookstore.

🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈

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

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Farideh.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

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

EPISODE CREDITS

Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.

Producer: Kim Baldwin.

Logo design: Deanna Lowe.

Theme Song: Farideh.

Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku

Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron

Follow us on social!

Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.

Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.

Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.

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

Today we're talking about plus size fashion influencer and body acceptance advocate Katie Sturino — who teamed up with WeightWatchers last year. What happened there? And where is the line between body liberation activism and capitalism? (Yes, we struggle with that too!)

To hear the whole thing, read the full transcript, and join us in the comments, you do need to be an Extra Butter subscriber.

Already an Extra Butter subscriber, and having a hard time getting this episode in your podcast player of choice? Step by step instructions are here!

EPISODE CREDITS

Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.

Producer: Kim Baldwin.

Logo design: Deanna Lowe.

Theme Song: Farideh.

Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku

Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron

Follow us on social!

Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.

Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.

Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.

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

Lisa writes The Auntie Bulletin, a weekly newsletter about kinship, chosen family and community care. As a long time Auntie herself, Lisa often focuses on the experiences of people without children who are nevertheless, in her words, "cultivating childful lives."

We’ve been talking a whole bunch about community on Burnt Toast lately, and Lisa reached out to have a conversation about the systems that get in the way of our community building efforts—specifically our culture's systemic isolation of the nuclear family. 

This is one of those conversations that isn't "classic Burnt Toast." But we're here to do fat liberation work—and so how we think about community matters here, because community is fundamental to any kind of advocacy work. Plus it brings us joy! And joy matters too. I super appreciate this conversation with Lisa, and I know you will too.

Lisa

So my newsletter is about building kinship and community care. I live in cohousing, and I’ve been an auntie for many years to lots of different kids. I’ve always been really involved in the lives of other people’s children. And people who have lives like mine, we often don’t really have even language for describing what our experience is like. It’s sort of illegible to other people. Like, what’s your role? Why are you here?

And all of this has really blossomed into work that’s definitely about loving and supporting families and other people’s children, but I also write about elder care and building relationships with elders and building community and cohousing. And I have a chronic illness, so I sometimes write about balancing self-care and community care. 

Virginia

I have been an instant convert to your work, because a lot of what you write really challenges me in really useful ways. You have really made me reckon with how much I have been siloed in the structure of my life. 

It’s funny because I actually grew up with a kind of accidental–it wasn’t quite cohousing. We had two separate houses. But I was the child of a very amicable divorce, and my four parents co-parented pretty fluidly. So I grew up with adults who were not my biological parents playing really important roles in my life. 

And I have gotten to the point where I’m realizing I want a version of that for my kids. And that maybe that is just a better model. So it's fascinating to consider what that can look like when not everybody has those very specific circumstances.

Lisa

It’s a dreamy setup, actually, to have amicably divorced parents and extra parents.

Virginia

I’m super proud of all of my parents for making it work. My sister —who is my half sister from my dad’s second marriage—has a baby now. And my mom made the first birthday cake for them. There are a lot of beautiful things about blended families. When they work, they’re really amazing. 

And it always felt like we were doing something kind of weird, and other people didn’t quite understand our family. So I also relate to that piece of it. Because when you say "cohousing community," I think a lot of folks don’t really know what that term means. What does it look like, and how does it manifest in practice? What is daily life like in a cohousing community?

Lisa

There are different synonyms or near neighbor terms for cohousing. Another one is "intentional community." Back in the day, we might think about it as kind of a commune, although in the commune structure, people tended to actually pool their finances. I would say that cohousing is a much more kind of hybrid model between having your own space and being up in each other’s spaces and sharing all of the resources. 

So I really think of cohousing as coming frpm where so many dreamy social policies come from: Scandinavia. In Denmark and I think other countries in Northern Europe there is a lot of intentional urban planning around building shared, communal living spaces where there are things like community kitchens and shared outdoor space for lots of different residences. So that’s kind of the model that cohousing in the US tends to come from. And sometimes it’s people living together in a house. Sometimes it’s houses clustered together, or a shared apartment building. It can look a lot of different ways. The shared attribute is that you’re attempting to live in a more communal way and sharing a lot of your familial resources. 

In my cohousing community, there are just three households. It’s really, really small. We really lucked into it. My partner and I were displaced due to growth in our city, and needed to find a new place to live. And we had been talking with some friends for years about hoping to move into cohousing with them. But it’s very hard to actually make happen. It takes a lot of luck, especially in urban environments, but I think probably anywhere in the United States, because our policies and infrastructure are really not set up for it. 

So we were thinking about doing cohousing with our friends. They were going to build a backyard cottage. We were thinking about moving into the backyard cottage, but it was feeling a little bit too crowded. And then my partner was like, "Well, you know, the house next door is for sale." So it was really fortuitous, because the housing market was blowing up. Houses were being sold really, really fast, but there were some specific conditions around this particular house that made it possible for us to buy it. So we ended up buying a house next door to our friends. 

And then they also have a basement apartment and a backyard cottage. So there are people living in the basement apartment, and then, actually, the backyard cottage is an Airbnb right now, but it could potentially be expanded. 

So we have three households. One household has kids, two households don’t, and our backyard is completely merged. We eat meals together four nights a week or five nights a week. Typically, we take turns cooking for each other, and have these big communal meals, and which is just such a delight. And if your car breaks down, there’s always a car to borrow. We share all our garden tools, and we have sheds that we share. There are a lot of collective resources, and availability for rides to the airport ,and that kind of thing. 

Virginia

There are just so many practical applications! 

Lisa

It’s really delightful. Prior to moving into cohousing, we never hosted people at all. I was very averse to the idea of living in shared space. I was really worried about that. But because we have our own spaces and we have communal spaces, it sort of works for different people’s energies. 

And I certainly have become much more flexible and comfortable with having lots of people around. I’m no longer afraid of cooking for 12 people, you know? So it just makes it a lot easier to have a life where you can go in and out of your introversion phases and your social phases.

Virginia

I’m sure because you’re around each other all the time, there’s not the same sense of "putting on your outgoing personality." Like for introverts, when we socialize, there’s a bit of a putting on that persona.

Lisa

Totally. It’s much more like family. We’re kind of hanging around in our pajamas, and nobody’s cleaning their houses. 

Virginia

You have that comfort level, which is hard to replicate. It’s hard even for people who are good friends, but haven’t sort of intentionally said, "We want this in our relationship. "There are all those pressures that kick in to have your house look a certain way. This is something I’ve been writing about —how the hosting perfectionism expectations are really high. 

Lisa

Absolutely, yeah. And it’s just such an impairment for us to have to live that way.

Virginia

For me, it took getting divorced to reckon with wanting to make some changes. I mean, in a lot of ways, it was just necessary. There were no longer two adults in my household. The moving parts of my life were just more. I suddenly realized I needed support. But it was so hard to get over those initial hurdles. 

Almost every other friend I’ve had who’s gotten divorced since says the same thing. Like, wait, I’m going to ask people for a ride for my child? It’s this huge stumbling block when, actually, that should have been how we’re all parenting and living. But it really shows how much marriage really isolates us. Or, a lot of marriages really isolate us. Our beliefs about the nuclear family really isolate us and condition us to feel like we have to handle it all by ourselves.

So I would love to hear your thoughts on where does that come from? Why do we internalize that so much? 

Lisa

Virginia, you’ve been cultivating this wonderful metaphor about the various things that are diets. 

Virginia

My life’s work is to tell everybody, "everything is a diet."

Lisa

Everything’s a diet! And I feel like it’s such a powerful metaphor, and I think it really, really applies here. The nuclear family is such a diet. You have done, I think, the Lord’s work over the last couple of years, helping us conceptualize that metaphor around what does it mean to say something is a diet? And the way that I’m thinking of the Virginia Sole-Smith Model of Diet Culture is that there’s an oppressive and compulsory ideal that we’re all supposed to live up to. If we’re not living up to it, then we’re doing it wrong, and we need to be working harder. And there’s this rewarding of restriction, which, of course, then increases demands for consumer goods and forces us to buy things. 

Then, of course, it also doesn’t actually work, right? And all of that is coming out of a culture of capitalism and individualism that wants us to solve our problems by buying stuff. 

Virginia

I mean, I say all the time, Amazon Prime was my co-parent.

Lisa

I think the nuclear family is just part of that whole system of individualism and consumerism that we’re supposed to be living in. It really benefits the free market for us all to be isolated in these little nuclear families, not pulling on shared resources, so we all have to buy our own resources and not being able to rely on community care, so we have to pay for all of the care that we get in life. And that is gross. That’s bad. We don’t like that. 

And you also have written, which I really appreciate, that it’s a very logical survival strategy to adhere to these ideals, especially the farther away you are from the social ideal. If you're marginalized in any way, the more trying to adhere to these ideals gives us cover.

To me, that all just maps onto the nuclear family without any gaps. Going back to your specific question about why is it so hard to not feel like in an imposition when you’re asking for help: We’re just deeply, deeply, deeply conditioned to be self reliant within the unit of the family and not ask for help. 

Both you and I have interviewed the wonderful Jessica Slice in the last few months, and she has really helped me.

Jessica wrote Unfit Parent. She’s a disabled mom, and she has really helped me think about how interdependence and asking for help is actually really stigmatized in our culture, and the kind of logical extension of that for disabled parents is that they get labeled unfit and their kids get taken away. But there’s a whole spectrum there of asking for help as a weakness, as being a loser, as being really deeply wrong, and we should never do it. And we’re just, like, deeply conditioned in that way. 

Virginia

Speaking of community care: My 12-year-old was supposed to babysit for my friend’s daughter this afternoon, she has like a standing Tuesday gig. And my younger child was going to go along with her, to hang out, because she’s friends with the younger kiddo. I was going pick them up later. But then we heard this morning that this little friend has head lice. And that did make the community care fall apart!

Lisa

Oh no. It’s time to isolate!  

Virginia

While I want us all to be together....

Lisa

There can be too much togetherness. You don’t want to shave your head.

Virginia

That said, though: It was a great example of community care, because that mom and I are texting with our other mom friends, talking about which lice lady you want to book to come deal with that, and figuring out who needs to get their head checked. So it was still a pooling of resources and support, just not quite the way we envisioned anyway.

Lisa

It always unfolds in different ways than we expect.

Virginia

But what you’re saying about the deeply held belief that we have to do it all, that we’re inconveniencing other people by having needs: That myth completely disguises the fact that actually, when you ask for help, you build your bonds with other people, right? It actually is a way of being more connected to people. People like to be asked for help, even if they can’t do it all the time. They want to feel useful and valuable and and you can offer an exchange. 

This sounds so silly, but in the beginning I was very aware, like, if I asked someone for a ride or a play date, like, how soon could I reciprocate to make sure that I was holding up my end of the bargain? And you do slowly start to drift away from needing that. It’s like, oh no, that’s the capitalism again, right? That’s making it all very transactional, but it’s hard to let go of that mindset. 

Lisa

Yeah, and it just takes practice. I mean, I think that your example is so nice that just over time, you’ve kind of loosened up around it. It's almost like exposure therapy in asking for help. It doesn’t have to be this transactional transaction.

Virginia

And I think you start to realize, the ways you can offer help that will work for you, because that’s another thing, right? Like, we have to manage our own bandwidth. 

You wrote recently that sometimes people who aren’t in the habit of doing this are afraid that now I’ll have to say yes to everything, or this is going to be this total overhaul of my life. And  No. You can say no, because you know you say yes often enough. So talk about that a little bit.

Lisa

Absolutely. I come at this from a perspective of living with chronic illness and disability where I really need to ration my energy. I’ve only been diagnosed in the last few years, and prior to that I just thought that I was lazy and weak, and I had a lot of really negative stories about my lack of capacity, and I’m still unlearning those. But over the past few years, I’ve been really experimenting with just recognizing what I am capable of giving and also recognizing that resting is a necessary part of the process of being able to give. If I don’t rest, I can’t give. And so actually, I’m doing something responsible and good for my community when I rest. You know, whatever that resting looks like for me or for other people, and it can look a lot of different ways. Some people rest by climbing rocks. I am certainly not one of those people, but...

Virginia

That is not my idea of relaxation. 

Lisa

But, whatever, it takes all kinds, right? And I think that the systems of community care are so much more sustainable the more that we are showing up as our authentic selves. 

Virginia

You talked about how you schedule rest for yourself. I’d love to hear more about that. 

Lisa

That was an idea that I got from a really, really, really good therapist, by far the best therapist I’ve ever had, who herself lives with chronic illness and chronic pain. 

She initially suggested to me that whenever I travel--I have a hard time with travel--that, like, if I travel for three days, I need to book three days of rest. If I travel for two weeks, I need to book two weeks of rest. That’s a radical proposition to me, and one that I still am like, yeah, I don’t know if I can quite make that happen. But it did inspire me to think about what would work for me. And the reality of my life for many, many years, is that on a cycle of one to two weeks, I have at least one day where I just collapse and am incapable of doing anything. I can’t get out of bed. 

So this conversation with my therapist inspired me to go, you know, maybe I should just calendar a day of rest every week. Instead of having an uncontrolled crash, I can have a controlled crash, and then I’m making the decision ahead of time that I’m going to rest, rather than having to emergently rest when other people are relying on me for something, right? It just actually makes me more reliable to rest on a calendar.

Virginia

And it honors that need. You’re not pretending that’s not going to happen or hoping you can skip by without it. You’re like, no, this is a real need. This is going to enable me to do the other things I want to do. So let’s just embrace that and make sure that’s planned for. It’s really, really smart.

Lisa

Well, and you know, I’ll say that not having kids makes it much easier, of course. But I hope that there are ways that parents can schedule in little pieces of rest, even, of course, it’s probably not like an entire Saturday. But, the more that families lean into aunties and community care, the more that that space can be carved out. 

Virginia

So let’s talk about the auntie piece. Is it just something, like, because these friends live next door and they had kids, you found yourself playing that role? How do you cultivate being an auntie? 

Lisa

That’s a great question. For me it was kind of both always going to happen and a conscious choice. I grew up in a big family. I’m one of six kids. I spent a lot of time babysitting as a kid for both my siblings and all the kids in my town, and some of my siblings are a lot older than me, so I became an aunt in my teens, and so I’ve always had kids in my life. Really, I can’t think of a time when I didn’t have little ones around, which I think is a real benefit, not a lot of people have that kind of life. 

And I was raised by early childhood educators. My mom is a teacher. My grandma was a preschool teacher. My other grandma is a teacher. There are a lot of teachers in my family, and a lot of them worked with little kids, so there are a lot of resources available to me.

But then I also did have to make some conscious choices. I think that one of the early things that happened for me was one of my best friends asked me to be her child’s godmother, and that kid is now 17. I know, she’s a teenager, oh my god. 

So that relationship in my 20s started to condition me to think: How do I really show up for a family? How do I really show up for a child that’s not my own child? And then when we moved into cohousing, which was in 2019 right before the pandemic started. We knew that we would be involving ourselves more in the life of a family. 

At that time, my partner and I were hoping to have kids, and I ended up losing a lot of pregnancies. We decided to not become parents, but so we were initially envisioning sort of raising our kids together, right? And then when my partner and I decided not to have kids, one of the things that we sort of decided to pivot toward is like, well, we’re going to really invest in these kids who live in our community, which we already were, because the pandemic hit and we were a bubble. 

So many people know the story. All the adults are working full time. There’s no childcare. There are little kids. So it was really all hands on deck during that time, and it really pushed our community into a structure of lots and lots of interdependence around childcare and I spent a lot of time with these kids when they were really little, and that really cemented some bonds and forced us to make some very conscious decisions about how we want to be involved in each other’s lives. To the point that once you get very involved in the lives of kids, you can’t exit. Like, even if you wanted to. And so that changes your whole life trajectory. Moving to Mexico is off the table for me and my partner until these kids are at least out of the house, and that’s many years down the road, right? It would be harmful for us to separate from these kids at this point. 

So, there are conscious decisions and just sort of happenstance. And I think for anybody who’s interested in becoming an auntie or recruiting an auntie: Every situation is kind of different. But the piece about making conscious decisions is really important and requires sometimes scary conversations where we have to put ourselves out there and be vulnerable and take risks to let our loved ones know that we would like to form these kind of relationships. 

Virginia

As someone on the side with the kids, my fear would be that I’m asking this huge favor, and like, oh my gosh, what an imposition. Because kids are chaos and these friends have a lovely, child-free life--I love my children, standard disclaimer. 

Lisa

Kids are total chaos.

Virginia

Kids are always in whatever vortex of feelings and needs that that particular age and stage requires and asking someone to show up for that is, it’s big. It’s big.

Lisa

Well, I definitely can’t speak for all childless people, definitely not. But there are a lot of aunties who read The Auntie Bulletin, several thousand people who read The Auntie Bulletin, and a lot of shared values there in our community. 

Something that I think is a common feature among people who are aunties, or who want to be aunties, is: We really recognize how much we benefit from being in relationship with families. 

There are a lot of people, myself included, who were not able to have children and really want to have a child-ful life. We would feel a loss if we didn’t have kids in our lives. And so this was something that I was reckoning with during the pandemic, when my partner and I were providing really a lot of childcare for another family. People would ask me: Do you feel like you’re getting taken advantage of? What are you getting in return? 

What I realized during that time was, I’m getting paid back tenfold, because I get to have these kids in my life for the rest of my life, but I don’t have to do the hard stuff. And that’s really important. Parenting, I don’t have to tell you, is very hard. As a person with chronic illness and disability at this point, I’m very glad that I don’t have kids, because I don’t think actually that I have the stamina. It's not about capacity for love, it’s just about straight up physical energy. 

And so I’m able to have the benefits as an auntie of being parent-adjacent, without the cost. So I’m the winner in that transaction. And I think a lot of aunties think that way.

Virginia

Well, that’s really encouraging to hear. And I think, too, what you’re talking about is just having really good communication, so people can say what they can do and also have their boundaries honored when they have to set a limit. That’s key to any good relationship, so it would apply here too. 

Lisa

Yeah, totally.

Virginia

Thinking about other barriers that come up. I’ve been reading, and I know you’re a fan too, of Katherine Goldstein, and she’s been writing such interesting critiques right now of how youth sports culture really derails families’ abilities to participate in community. 

That’s a whole fairly explosive topic, because people are really attached to their sports. So, I’ll save the specifics of that for some time I have Katherine on to discuss this. Are youth sports a diet? Yes, absolutely. 

And we are not a sports family, but when she wrote about it, I immediately recognized what she meant, because every fall I noticed that my kids' friends become much less available for play dates because it’s soccer season. And it’s like, waiting for when soccer practice will be over, so that so-and-so might come over. Suddenly, even as a non-sports family, I feel like I’m loosely revolving around these schedules. 

And to bring it back to your work: That is one aspect of parenting culture that is really feeding into this isolation problem and this lack of community problem. This way that we’ve decided parenting has to be so intensive and performative around sports makes people actually less available to their communities. 

So this is a long way of asking my question: Do you think what we’re really talking about here is a problem with the institution of marriage or the institution of parenting, or is it a bit of both?

Lisa

That’s so interesting. I do think that youth sports is, like, by far, the kind of biggest engine of this. But there also are families that are, like, deep, deep, deep into youth performing arts that would have the same kind of function.

Virginia

 Dance is another big one. Competitions taking up every weekend.

Lisa

Or youth orchestra, sometimes those can be incredibly consuming and also incredibly expensive. 

So going with the grain of the parents that are really hyper investing in their kids activities: They will find community in those places often, right? It's a sort of substitute community for the length of the season, or whatever. And then my question is: What’s the culture within those spaces? Is it like, hyper competitive? Is it about getting to the national championship? Is there a sense of community? Is there a sense of supporting kids around resilience when things don’t go the way that they want them to? The cultures within these spaces matter.

And I think it just ties back to the way that the nuclear family is a diet. Because we are so deeply incentivized to be fearful in our culture and to treat our problems with money, goods, services, activities. And the fear, I think, for a lot of parents, is that their kids are going to not have a good and happy life. 

So then there’s what Annette Lareau, an educational researcher, calls concerted cultivation, particularly among more bourgeois middle class families of trying to schedule kids to the hilt, to make sure that they get every opportunity in life, and they can therefore succeed through every hurdle, and never have any adversity. Or that the adversity that they have is character building adversity in some way. And so I think that the hyper-involvement in kids activities does come from fear that’s motivated by capitalism. And is that an issue of parenting culture or marriage culture or capitalist culture or gender culture?

Virginia

All of it. Yes. I mean, one thing I think about, too, is how these activities create their own community. But it's a very homogenous community. The child-free folks aren't there, because it’s only soccer families or dance families or whatever. And you’re only going to get families who can afford to do the activity. So it's a self-selecting group. 

This is not to say I’m doing a great job cultivating a more diverse community for my kids. I live in a white majority town. This is hard for all of us. We’re not saying you all have to quit your sports! But if that’s your primary community, that is going to narrow things in a in a way that’s worth reflecting on. 

To bring this a little more fully into the Burnt Toast space, where we talk about diet as metaphor, but also diets specifically: One question I am asked a lot from the aunties in the Burnt Toast community, is, "How do I show up for the kids in my life that are not my own, I don’t get to make the parenting calls, but for whom I still want to model anti-diet values?" Maybe there’s stuff the parents are doing with food that's sending a weird message, or dieting in the home, that kind of thing.

Lisa

Well, my sense is for myself—and I try to preach this gospel at The Auntie Bulletin— is that there are a lot of these moments for non-parents who are really deeply invested in the lives of kids, where it’s not our call. And it’s just a tricky terrain for aunties or any kind of allo-parental adults who are involved in the lives of kids who aren’t their own kids. 

I’m really fortunate that most of my friends are pretty on board with an anti-diet philosophy. The people who are close to me, where I’m really involved in feeding kids are on the same page. But it comes up in other ways, right? Where I might have a different perspective than the parents. 

My sense is really that aunties do need to follow parents' lead that it’s actually quite important to honor parents’ decision makings for their kids. And we can be sort of stealthy ninjas around how we disrupt cultural conditioning more broadly. 

So I’m not super close to their parents, but we’ve got some kids in our neighborhood who are buddies with the kids who are a big part of my life. And those neighborhood kids get a lot of diet conditioning at home. There’s this little girl, she’s in fourth grade, and she’s always telling me about her mom’s exercise and saying that she can't get fat and she can’t eat that popsicle and things like that, which is really heartbreaking to witness. And it’s exactly that kind of situation where it’s like, I’m invested in this as a just a member of our society, but I also care about these kids, and it’s just not my call, you know? 

So I can just say things like, "Well, I like my body. I feel good that I have a soft body and I’m going to have another brownie. It tastes really good." And just kind of speak from my own experience, where I’m not necessarily trying to argue with their parents, or trying to convince the kid of something different. I’m just modeling something different for them. And I think it’s totally fine to say, "In my house, you’re allowed to have another brownie if you want one!"

Virginia

That modeling is so powerful. Having one example in their life of someone doing it differently, can plant that seed and help them reframe, like, oh, okay, that’s not the only way to think about this conversation. That’s really useful.

Lisa

And I think affirming difference whenever we have the opportunity to do so is important. When a kid comments on somebody’s body size or shape, you can just always say, "Isn’t it great how people are different? It’s so wonderful. There’s so much variety."

Virginia

Related to modeling and fostering anti-diet values: I think there is a way that this collective approach to living and being in community with each other runs quite counter to mainstream narratives around what is good behavior, what are social expectations, and which groups do we let take up space. 

I’m thinking about how the group of soccer moms is allowed to be a community that everyone has paid to participate in, while the Black neighborhood having a block party might have the cops called on them. So, talk a little bit about how you see collectivism as also an act of radicalism.

Lisa

Yeah, thank you for that question. It’s such a good one. 

A soccer community that is literally pay to play, where there are increasing tiers of elitenes—that is coded as very respectable in our society. Whereas a block party in a neighborhood of color is coded as disrespectable, unrespectable, disreputable. The music is loud and the people are being inconsiderate and their bodies are hanging out. There is all of this stigma around collectivism.

I find for myself it’s very insidious and subtle, the ways that collectivism is stigmatized. I have a theoretical allegiance to collectivism, but it takes having to actually ask for help to notice our friction and our resistance to that. You were talking about that earlier in the follow up to your divorce. And I’ve had that experience, when I’ve needed to ask for help around my disability and chronic illness, and there’s all of a sudden this feeling of like, oh, I shouldn’t ask for help. Oh, there’s something wrong with that. 

And I think that there actually is a dotted line there between our resistance to asking for help and that feeling like we’re doing something bad and anti-Blackness, anti-brownness, anti-queerness. Community is so, so essential for queer folks who have had to find their own family, choose their own community for for for generations. There’s this kind of whiff of disreputability around collectivism, and these narratives around these kids are running wild and bodies are hanging out and the music’s too loud, and like, what’s going on there? What are they eating?

Virginia

There are so many ways we police it all.

Lisa

It’s all really, really policed. I think that’s really well put. So I think it's important to reclaim collectivism and reframe collectivism as legitimate, valuable, important, meaningful. Collectivism is something that a lot of people who live in dominant white communities have actually had taken from us through the medium of compulsory individualism. We need to reclaim it, and we need to not stigmatize it in all the communities that are around us and our neighbors.

Virginia

Maybe instead, we should be looking at other communities as examples to emulate.

Lisa

As resources, absolutely. The disability community as well.

Virginia

I think that’s really helpful, and I’m sure it gives folks a lot to think about, because it just continues to show up in so many small ways. 

Even as you were describing that I was thinking about the stress response that kicks in for me after I host a gathering, and my house is left in whatever state it’s left in. And it’s like, of course, the house is messy. You just had 12 people over, and there are seltzer cans laying around and throw pillows out of place. That’s because you lived in your house. You used it. 

But there’s this other part of my brain that’s so conditioned to be like, well, the house has to be tidy. And now it looks like you’re out of control. But it’s that kind of thing, that inner policing we do, that is very much related to this larger societal policing that we participate in.

Lisa

Absolutely, yeah.

Virginia

Any last tips for folks who are like, okay, I want to be doing more of this. Particularly folks who want to connect with child free folks, or for child free folks who are listening, who want to connect with more families with kids. Any little nudges, baby steps people can take towards building this?

Lisa

My big nudge is to practice courage, because it’s scary to put yourself out there. You have to be vulnerable when you ask to build a relationship that’s deeper with people. And I think it actually is analogous, in some ways, to forming romantic relationships. You have to take some risks to say what you want, and that’s a scary thing to do, but there are lots and lots of people out there who want to be more involved in the lives of families. And there are lots and lots of families out there who need more support.

Virginia

When you were talking about the pandemic, I was like, I would have killed for an auntie. 

Lisa

Every family needs an auntie. 

Two adults I love, Rosie Spinks and Chloe Sladden who both have wonderful newsletters, have been writing about this lately, that even having two adults is just not enough to run a household in the structure of society that we live in. I think that that’s right, even if you’ve got a man who’s pulling his weight, to crack open a whole other can of worms.

Virginia

Which, yeah.

Lisa

They’re rare, but it does happen, and even then, it’s not enough. We actually need more adults to make communities run than we get with the way nuclear families are set up. So it’s a really worthy thing to seek out aunties, and for aunties to seek out families, and it’s just a little bit scary. And you also have to be persistent, because when we offer, parents will usually say no. Like they don’t believe us. They think their kids are too wild and whatever. So parents have to persist and and families need to persist in being welcoming. 

Virginia

I would also add on the parent side, as much as I appreciated what you said before about aunties have to respect parents having the final call on stuff: It’s also an exercise in us having to loosen up a little. Not everything is going to go exactly the way you want it to go. The bedtime might look differently, meals might happen differently, there might be more or less screens, and we have to be less attached to those metrics of parenting and touchstones of our parenting day, and realize that the benefits of our kids getting to be with other people, way outweighs whether or not they eat three cookies or whatever it is. 

Lisa

Yeah, the more that we live in community, the more we all learn to be flexible.

Virginia

Which is really the work of my life, learning to be more flexible.

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Lisa

I feel like this is pretty nerdy, but this is my true self. The Substack algorithm fed me a newsletter yesterday that I’m so excited about. It’s about The Babysitters Club, which was, like, my favorite thing.

Virginia

Oh you shared this. Oh, my God, I keep thinking  about it. 

Lisa

And then yesterday, I ran into my childhood best friend on the beach. I’m visiting my parents right now. We read a lot of Babysitters Club together. So I’m going to tell you this guy named Andrew Knott, who I had not heard of before, but the algorithm fed it to me, wrote a post called A Classic Children’s Book Series Has Me Questioning My Parenting, and he’s reading The Babysitter’s Club together with his daughter, who I think isa tween. So for those who aren’t familiar with The Babysitters Club, where have you been? But major cultural touch point, most important books of my childhood. And, you know, very like auntie-formative books as well. Yeah, he has this really great argument about how the babysitters in these books did like, 100% of the parenting for a lot of families.

Virginia

They absolutely did!

Lisa

It’s like, this weirdly dystopian situation where the parents are just like, I guess we’re gonna go to Atlantic City for a couple days. Have fun kids.

Virginia

Yes, yes, they took two 12 year olds along to babysit a family of eight children on a beach vacation and the parents are nowhere to be found. For sure, Mary Anne and Stacey can handle all of the Pike children roaming around the Jersey Shore. It’ll be no problem.

Lisa

Yeah, I don’t know. It made me laugh so hard. I feel like I’m always on the lookout for, like, good takes on my favorite books of my childhood. And I’ve got to say this one is an absolute winner. 

Virginia

And intersects so well with your work.

My Butter is that I was thinking about the sort of evolving work of being more in community. And a really lovely win I had recently over the summer —and it also relates to what you were saying about scheduling rest— is that a friend of mine and I now have a standing Wednesday morning date, where we meet to walk in a local garden. We've been doing it all summer — every Wednesday, 10am, we walk in these gardens for an hour. And they are now about to close for the season and we're figuring out a replacement place to walk.

But when I say walk—I mean, like, stroll, maybe stop and watch bees on flowers for 10 minutes. We’re just talking and strolling and we are not wearing athletic clothing. I call it a workout because it mentally gave me permission to put it on my calendar—that’s my Wednesday workout. But it is not cardio in any way. We’re just strolling around, chatting and and it’s just such a nice touch point. And I’m really proud of myself for making time for that connection with someone. And she’s a good friend, but prior to doing that, I could go three weeks without seeing her easily. And now we always see each other once a week, and we have invited other friends to join us. 

And the really funny thing, or really, thecool thing was one day, I went and did the walk with her, and then I had a doctor’s appointment. And historically, in the last year or two, my blood pressure has been inching up a little bit. It’s been a smidge high. So I was getting nervous for the blood pressure reading. And my blood pressure was normal to low! 

Lisa

Oh my gosh. Gosh, because you’re looking at bees with your friend.

Virginia

I texted her, I was like, I truly think we’re lowering my blood pressure. 

Lisa

Yeah, it’s not weight loss. It’s looking at bees, on a schedule with your friends.

Virginia

It’s having a weekly appointment to watch the bees with your friend.

Well, thank you, Lisa. This was so much fun. Such a great conversation. Tell folks where we can find you and how we can support your work. 

Lisa

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Virginia. I’m at The Auntie Bulletin, which is the auntie.substack.com and that’s the main thing I’m working on right now, so I hope people will come check it out. Thank you so much for having me.

Virginia

It’s really fantastic. And there’s just, if any part of this conversation has resonated, there’s like, so much more over on The Auntie Bulletin. So folks need to go check it out. 

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

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Farideh.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

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

EPISODE CREDITS

Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.

Producer: Kim Baldwin.

Logo design: Deanna Lowe.

Theme Song: Farideh.

Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku

Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron

Follow us on social!

Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.

Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.

Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.

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

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

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

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

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

Laura

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

Virginia

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

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

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

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

Laura

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

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

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

Virginia

We’re trapped indoors anyways. 

Laura

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

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

Virginia

But so relatable. 

Laura

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

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

Virginia

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

Laura

Exactly, exactly. 

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

Virginia

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

Laura

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia

You just spring it on them.

Laura

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

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

Virginia

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

Laura

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

Virginia

And if you could do it beforehand, even better.

Laura

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

Virginia

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

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

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

Laura

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

Virginia

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

Laura

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

Virginia

Yes! 

Laura

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

Virginia

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

Laura

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia

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

Laura

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

Virginia

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

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

Laura

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

Virginia

Or you’re a single parent.

Laura

Or a single parent doing it all. Exactly.

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

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

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

Virginia

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

Laura

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

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

Virginia

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

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

Laura

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia

That’s me, every work day.

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

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

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

Laura

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

Virginia

Yeah, because you gave him his power back. 

Laura

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

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

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

Virginia

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

Laura

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

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

Virginia

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

Laura

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

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

Virginia

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

Just tell us why this is so unnecessary.

Laura

Night training is absolutely unnecessary. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia

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

Laura

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia

One hundred percent.

Laura

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

Virginia

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

Laura

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

Virginia

I do not have children with penises, so no.

Laura

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

Virginia

Wow. Okay!

Laura

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

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

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

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

Virginia

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

Laura

I love that book. 

Virginia

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

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

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

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

Laura

Yeah, it really does. 

Virginia

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

Laura

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

Virginia

Amazing. Thank you so much for being here. 

Laura

Thanks for having me. I love talking to you.

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

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Farideh.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

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

EPISODE CREDITS

Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.

Producer: Kim Baldwin.

Logo design: Deanna Lowe.

Theme Song: Farideh.

Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku

Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron

Follow us on social!

Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.

Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.

Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.

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

We're going to chat about:

⭐️ How we're feeling about the BIG MOVE.

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

⭐️Figuring out fall uniforms!

⭐️ Diet culture in disaster prep.

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

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

EPISODE CREDITS

Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.

Producer: Kim Baldwin.

Logo design: Deanna Lowe.

Theme Song: Farideh.

Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku

Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron

Follow us on social!

Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.

Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.

Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.

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