The Burnt Toast Podcast

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

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

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

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

Episode 213 Transcript

Emily

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

Virginia

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

Emily

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

Virginia

Wow.

Emily

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

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

Virginia

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

Emily

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

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

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

Virginia

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

Emily

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

Virginia

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

Emily

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

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

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

Virginia

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

Emily

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

Virginia

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

Emily

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

Virginia

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

Emily

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

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

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

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

Virginia

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

Emily

Yeah, it’s very much a binary. I think that it’s led to a lot of confusion among healthcare providers. Certainly, I know there have been delayed diagnoses on many, many things. I’ve also had it leveraged against me in terms of what I would consider chronic illness, because I would get sick pretty regularly when I was a child, and every time I would throw up, it would be thrown in…

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!

We are Corinne Fay and Virginia Sole-Smith.

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

Episode 212 Transcript

Corinne

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

Virginia

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

Corinne

Someone definitely said, “What day is it?”

Virginia

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

Corinne

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

Virginia

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

Corinne

Summer is so brief.

Virginia

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

Corinne

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

Virginia

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

Corinne

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

Virginia

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

Corinne

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

Virginia

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

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

Corinne

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

Virginia

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

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

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

Corinne

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

Virginia

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

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

Corinne

Oh, you pay her!

Virginia

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

Corinne

That’s really sweet.

Virginia

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

Corinne

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

Virginia

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

Corinne

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

Virginia

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

Corinne

No, I’m not.

Virginia

Okay. Should I stop, too?

Corinne

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

Virginia

Most of my sandals are something between my toes style.

Corinne

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

Virginia

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

Corinne

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

Virginia

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

Corinne

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

Virginia

I have terrible news for people about this podcast.

Corinne

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

Virginia

Time is passing.

Corinne

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

Virginia

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

Corinne

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

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

Virginia

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

Corinne

Brown has…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Resources You’ll Want From This Episode:

Here’s how to access the BeReal Let’s Eat Curriculum:

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

Episode 211 Transcript

Denise

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

Virginia

So many times getting on a scale.

Denise

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

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

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

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

Virginia

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

Denise

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

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

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

Virginia

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

Denise

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

Virginia

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

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

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

Denise

Thank you.

Virginia

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

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

Denise

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

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

You’re listening to Burnt Toast!

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so much more!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And don’t miss these:

Episode 209 Transcript

Virginia

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

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

So Laurie asked:

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

Mara

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

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

Virginia

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

Mara

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

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

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

Virginia

Cool.

Mara

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia

Which sounds scary,

Mara

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

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

And just to round it out: I looked all this up about cardiovascular events too. Things like a heart attack, a stroke. So the absolute risk was 19. So there were 19 cases of a cardiovascular event out of 10,000 women in a year. People just freaked out about this because of the way that it was covered in the media.

Virginia

I was fresh out of college, doing women’s health journalism at the time. So I fully own having been part of that problem. We definitely reported on the relative risk, not the absolute risk. And I don’t understand why. I look back and I’m like, what were we all doing? We ended up taking this medication away from millions of women who could really benefit from it.

Mara

I found a paper that showed between 2002 and 2009 prescriptions for menopausal hormone therapy declined by more than 60 percent.

Virginia

I’m not surprised.

Mara

And then even up until the time I started my training, right in 2015, we’re just seeing a huge decline in hormone therapy prescriptions.

One other thing that’s also super important to acknowledge about the Women’s Health Initiative is that they enrolled women over 60, which is not really representative of women who want or need hormone therapy. So the average age of menopause is 51 and the vast majority of women who are experiencing symptoms that would respond well to hormone therapy are much younger. We’re talking here mostly about hot flashes. Which we call vasomotor symptoms of menopause, but it’s basically hot flashes. Women dealing with this are much younger, right? So they’re approaching menopause, late 40s, and right after the menopausal transition, early 50s, and then they don’t necessarily need it anymore, after their symptoms have improved.

Virginia

And it will also be true that with women in their 60s, you’re going to see more incidence of cancer and heart disease in that age group than in women in their 40s anyway, right?

Mara

Right

Virginia

So even the 19 cases, the eight cases—they were looking at a higher risk population in general.

Mara

Yeah. And so there have been all these subsequent analyses, which is why now we’re seeing menopausal hormone therapy sort of on the upswing. There’s a lot of increased interest in it.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends it, the North American Menopause Society, the British Menopause Society; …

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Ash Brandin of Screen Time Strategies, also know as The Gamer Educator on Instagram.

Ash is also the author of a fantastic new book, Power On: Managing Screen Time to Benefit the Whole Family.

Ash joined us last year to talk about how our attitudes towards screen time can be…diet-adjacent. I asked them to come back on the podcast this week because a lot of us are heading into back-to-school mode, which in my experience can mean feelingsss about screen routines.

There are A LOT of really powerful reframings in this episode that might blow your mind—and make your parenting just a little bit easier. So give this one a listen and share it with anyone in your life who’s also struggling with kids and screen time.

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

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

Episode 208 Transcript

Virginia

For anyone who missed your last episode, can you just quickly tell us who you are and what you do?

Ash

I’m Ash Brandin. I use they/them pronouns.I am a middle school teacher by day, and then with my online presence, I help families and caregivers better understand and manage all things technology—screen time, screens. My goal is to reframe the way that we look at them as caregivers, to find a balance between freaking out about them and allowing total access. To find a way that works for us.

Virginia

We are here today to talk about your brilliant new book, which is called Power On: Managing Screen Time to Benefit the Whole Family. I can’t underscore enough how much everybody needs a copy of this book. I have already turned back to it multiple times since reading it a few months ago. It just really helps ground us in so many aspects of this conversation that we don’t usually have.

Ash

I’m so glad to hear that it’s helpful! If people are new to who I am, I have sort of three central tenets of the work that I do:

* Screen time is a social inequity issue.

* Screens can be part of our lives without being the center of our lives.

* Screens and screen time should benefit whole families.

Especially in the last few years, we have seen a trend toward panic around technology and screens and smartphones and social media. I think that there are many reasons to be concerned around technology and its influence, especially with kids. But what’s missing in a lot of those conversations is a sense of empowerment about what families can reasonably do. When we focus solely on the fear, it ends up just putting caregivers in a place of feeling bad.

Virginia

You feel like you’re getting it wrong all the time.

Ash

Shame isn’t empowering. No one is like, “Well, I feel terrible about myself, so now I feel equipped to go make a change,” right?

Empowerment is what’s missing in so many of those conversations and other books and things that have come out, because it’s way harder. It’s so much harder to talk about what you can really do and reasonably control in a sustainable way. But I’m an educator, and I really firmly believe that if anyone’s in this sort of advice type space, be it online or elsewhere, that they need to be trying to empower and help families instead of just capitalizing on fear.

Virginia

What I found most powerful is that you really give us permission to say: What need is screen time meeting right now? And this includes caregivers’ needs. So not just “what need is this meeting for my child,” but what need is this meeting for me?

I am here recording with you right now because iPads are meeting the need of children have a day off school on a day when I need to work. We won’t be interrupted unless I have to approve a screen time request, which I might in 20 minutes.

I got divorced a couple years ago, and my kids get a lot more screen time now. Because they move back and forth between two homes, and each only has one adult in it. Giving myself permission to recognize that I have needs really got me through a lot of adjusting to this new rhythm of our family.

Ash

Absolutely. And when we’re thinking about what the need is, we also need to know that it’s going to change. So often in parenting, it feels like we have to come up with one set of rules and they have to work for everything in perpetuity without adjustment. That just sets us up for a sense of failure if we’re like, well, I had this magical plan that someone told me was going to work, and it didn’t. So I must be the problem, right? It all comes back to that “well, it’s my fault” place.

Virginia

Which is screens as diet culture.

Ash

All over again. We’re back at it. It’s just not helpful.

If instead, we’re thinking about what is my need right now? Sometimes it’s “I have to work.” And sometimes it’s “my kid is sick and they just need to relax.” Sometimes it’s, as you were alluding to earlier, it’s we’ve all just had a day, right? We’ve been run ragged, and we just need a break, and that need is going to dictate very different things. If my kid is laid up on the couch and throwing up, then what screen time is going to be doing for them is very different than If I’m trying to work and I want them to be reasonably engaged in content and trying to maybe learn something. And that’s fine. Being able to center “this is what I need right now,” or “this is what we need right now,” puts us in a place of feeling like we’re making it work for us. Instead of feeling like we’re always coming up against some rule that we’re not going to quite live up to.

Virginia

I’d love to talk about the inequity piece a little more too. As I said, going from a two parent household to a one parent household, which is still a highly privileged environment—but even just that small shift made me realize, wait a second. I think all the screen time guidance is just for typical American nuclear families. Ideally, with a stay at home parent.

So can you talk about why so much of the standard guidance doesn’t apply to most of our families?

Ash

It’s not even just a stay at home parent. It’s assuming that there is always at least one caregiver who is fully able to be present. Mom, default parent, is making dinner, and Dad is relaxing after work and is monitoring what the kids are doing, right? And it’s one of those times where I’m like, have you met a family?

Virginia

People are seven different places at once. It’s just not that simple.

Ash

It’s not that simple, right? It’s like, have you spent five minutes in a typical household in the last 10 years? This is not how it’s going, right?

So the beginning of the book helps people unlearn and relearn what we may have heard around screens, including what research really does or doesn’t say around screens, and this social inequity piece. Because especially since the onset of COVID, screens are filling in systemic gaps for the vast majority of families.

I’m a family with two caregivers in the home. We both work, but we’re both very present caregivers. So we’re definitely kind of a rarity, that we’re very privileged. We’re both around a lot of the time. And we are still using screens to fill some of those gaps.

So whether it’s we don’t really have a backyard, or people are in a neighborhood where they can’t send their kids outside, or they don’t have a park or a playground. They don’t have other kids in the neighborhood, or it’s not a safe climate. Or you live in an apartment and you can’t have your neighbors complain for the fifth time that your kids are stomping around and being loud. Whatever it is—a lack of daycare, affordable after school care —those are all gaps. They all have to be filled. And we used to have different ways of filling those gaps, and they’ve slowly become less accessible or …

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.

For our last August hiatus episode, we’re looking back at a conversation we ran back in February of this year — exploring the work of attorney turned self-help guru Mel Robbins.

Did Mel steal the concept of “let them?”

Is she just Andrew Huberman for the “We Can Do Hard Things” crowd?

Is high-fiving yourself in the mirror every morning a diet?

As you’ll hear, Corinne and I didn’t totally agree… until we did. Let’s get into it.

To hear our discussion, you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. Subscriptions are $7 per month or $70 for the year.

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!

First up: Please take our listener survey here: https://bit.ly/3HwYVhT

Today, we’re going to revisit our conversation about Emily Oster, and her evolving views on kids, weight and health.

This episode first aired in November 2024, right after the presidential election. We’re now 8 months into Trump’s second term, and continuing to grapple with how America has slid to the right. So the story of a public health advocate and scholar who is now aligned with conservative media feels incredibly timely—especially because many of you are starting back at school this month, and Emily’s take on school lunches is particularly complex. That said, we also want to hold space for how much Emily’s work has meant to so many of us (including Virginia!).

This is a complicated conversation. To hear the whole thing, read the full transcript, and join us in the comments, you’ll need to join Extra Butter, our premium subscription tier: https://virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

Extra Butter costs just $99 per year. (Regular paid subscribers, the remaining value of your subscription will be deducted from that total!)

In these monthly episodes we get into the GOOD stuff like:

Dating While Fat

What to do when you miss your smaller body

Is Kids Eat In Color anti-diet?

And did Virginia really get divorced over butter?

Extra Butters also get exclusive weekly chats, DM access, and a monthly bonus essay or thread. And Extra Butter ensures that the Burnt Toast community can always stay an ad- and sponsor-free space—which is crucial for body liberation journalism. Join us here!

(Questions? Glitches? Email me all the details, and cc [email protected].)

PS. If Extra Butter isn’t the right tier for you, remember that you still get access behind almost every other paywall with a regular paid subscription.

Today Virginia is chatting with Anna Maltby. 

Anna is a health journalist, editor, content strategist, personal trainer, and author of the newsletter How to Move. Anna also created Pilates For Abortion Funds, a monthly online class that has raised about $30,000 for abortion funds since July 2022. She has been an ACE-certified personal trainer since 2015, and a certified mat pilates instructor since 2021. She’s also a certified prenatal and postpartum exercise specialist. Anna lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two kids, and two extremely cute cats.

Anna was previously a guest on one of Burnt Toast’s most popular ever episodes, The Myth of Visible Abs. What’s so great about Anna—and what makes her different from a lot of fitness writers and personal trainers out there—is that she’s so smart about bodies, she’s truly anti-diet and size neutral as a fitness professional…and, she’s been in the belly of the beast. Anna worked in women’s magazines with me long enough to know all the diet culture tricks. So she’s one of my favorite people to talk fitness with, because she can dissect what is marketing, what is diet culture, and what is actually maybe useful for your body.

Two content warnings for today:

1. We are going to talk about specific forms of exercise. This will always be through a weight neutral lens, but if you’re recovering from an eating disorder or just otherwise in a place where exercise is not serving you, please take care.

2. CW for Butter, because we ended up talking quite a lot about toilets! And while I feel it’s all incredibly practical information and you’re going to thank me for my great Butter recommendation this week, I do realize that toilet conversation is not for everyone. It’s usually not for me! So I get it! You’ve been warned.

To tell us YOUR thoughts, and to get all of the links and resources mentioned in this episode, as well as a complete transcript, visit our show page.

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber — subscriptions are just $7 per month! —to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. 

And don’t forget to check out our Burnt Toast Podcast Bonus Content! 

Disclaimer: You’re listening to this episode because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore has a lot of informed opinions. Neither my guest today nor I are healthcare providers, and this conversation is not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice.

FAT TALK is out in paperback! Order your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. You can also order the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay. Follow Virginia on Instagram, Follow Corinne  @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing and subscribe to Big Undies.

Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism. 

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!

We are Corinne Fay and Virginia Sole-Smith, and this month we’re discussing… Things Thin People Say. 👀

The list includes:

⭐️ The most bananas comment about swimsuit shopping

⭐️ That thing where they think their boyfriend’s clothes will fit you

⭐️ How Caroline Chambers’ thin privilege shows up

⭐️ Our thoughts on Haley Nahman’s sugar addict essay.

⭐️ And more!

To hear the whole thing, read the full transcript, and join us in the comments, you’ll need to join Extra Butter, our premium subscription tier.

Extra Butter costs just $99 per year. (Regular paid subscribers, the remaining value of your subscription will be deducted from that total!)

Extra Butter subscribers also get access to posts like:

Is weight loss surgery the new Ozempic?

Does Dr. Becky have a privilege problem?

Is Kids Eat In Color anti-diet?

And did Virginia really get divorced over butter?

And Extra Butters also get DM access and other perks. Plus Extra Butter ensures that the Burnt Toast community can always stay an ad- and sponsor-free space—which is crucial for body liberation journalism. Join us here!

(Questions? Glitches? Email me all the details, and cc [email protected].)

PS. If Extra Butter isn’t the right tier for you, remember that you still get access behind almost every other paywall with a regular paid subscription.

Episode 204 Transcript

Corinne

So, today we’re going to talk about the fatphobic things that people say without realizing it. And I think any fat person you talk to probably has an example of this.

Virginia

Or a dozen examples of this.

Corinne

Or a dozen examples of this.

We asked Burnt Toast readers to share stories. And we’re going to talk about a couple of examples that we stumbled across recently…

Virginia

On the Internet.

Corinne

In the course of our jobs.

Virginia

We are going to talk about Caroline Chambers. We are going to talk about Haley Nahman. We’re going to get into some stuff that’s been happening with the thin folks.