The Burnt Toast Podcast

You’re listening to Burnt Toast!We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for your January Indulgence Gospel.This month instead of the usual listener questions, we are doing a late winter / early spring books forecast where we’re going to tell you about a whole bunch of books we are very excited to be reading!All of these titles are available in a special Book Gospel section of the Burnt Toast book store over at Split Rock books, where you can take 10% off any title from today’s episode with the code “bookgospel” through March 31, 2024.Indulgence gospel episodes are usually paywalled, but we’re keeping the entire books discussion free today. You will need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to listen to Butter, which includes recommendations from some of the authors featured in today’s episode for:A specially engineered wireless braAn under the radar TV showWhere to get the best cannoliand MORE!This transcript contains affiliate links. Shopping our links is another great way to support Burnt Toast!Episode 131 TranscriptCorinneAre you ready to talk about pants?VirginiaWhen are we not talking about pants?CorinneThat was my smooth segue.VirginiaThat was good. In the outline it just says “Corinne segue us to pants chat” and you did it.CorinneI think the the thing that we can’t avoid talking about right now is leggings legs. If you’ve been on Instagram or TikTok, you have probably heard leggings legsVirginiaI have and I wish I had not. CorinneThe thing about leggings legs is I learned about it because I’m seeing everyone on TikTok and Instagram have a reaction to it. When I tried to find out what leggings legs were specifically, I started by searching TikTok. Now when you search “leggings legs” on TikTok now it gives you the number for National Eating Disorder Awareness hotline. So this has quickly been turned around. The only thing I could even find was some very small scale influencer responding to a comment on her video where someone said “you have the perfect legs for leggings,” and she was like, “oh, thanks, I didn’t know,” and did a little spin. From what I can gather, the perfect leggings legs are you have a thigh gap.VirginiaRight? It’s a new way of saying thigh gap. CorinneYes. Everyone reacted so quickly being like, “this is bullshit,” that it’s over. VirginiaWell, you know what? I’m going to just say hi five team, then. This was a great rapid response effort. If you Google it, you immediately get all the news coverage being like, “people are outraged about the leggings leg trend.”CorinneYeah, but none of the news stories even link to the origin of this leggings legs thing.VirginiaI wonder if it’s like a wag the dog situation where there was no origin. Was this planted? Are we being distracted from a larger issue?CorinneI would love to know. Did Lululemon plant the story so everyone is googling “leggings”?VirginiaNow all your targeted ads are serving you leggings? We are contributing to that effort by having this conversation. I want to mostly be thrilled that our services weren’t even needed. I think the Gen Z activists were like, shut it down. But it also makes me wonder like, was it ever anything? CorinneEven if we didn’t have the term leggings legs, I feel like everyone already knew—Virginia—about thigh gaps. Do we need to explain that you don’t need to have a thigh gap? That it’s normal for human thighs to touch one another? I don’t know. It feels like it’s not a conversation we even need to have anymore.CorinneMaybe I’m just too old for this now that I’m 38.VirginiaThat was never one of my body hang ups to begin with. It’s so interesting what different body parts we get sold the narrative about. My peak bout body anxiety years were not thigh gap years, they were torso years. It was like the Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, exposed midriff. That’s my trauma. Did you have thigh gap trauma? CorinneI think thigh gap just always felt so out of reach for me. My thighs didn’t gap from the day I was born. Even as like a mid size teen, still was not close. VirginiaOkay. So leggings legs has come and gone. We are deeming it over.CorinneNobody needs to worry about it. Jeans legs, on the other hand…VirginiaYou’re excited about some new jeans and I think I want to order to them, but you need to teach me what to order. CorinneOkay, well, first of all, these are not new jeans. VirginiaThey’re new to you? They’re new to me. CorinneThey’re new to no one. They’re old. I’m just trying to get more people to buy them because people are constantly asking, “what are the best jeans?” and I’m always like, “these are the best jeans.” No one is listening to me.VirginiaI mean, I did spend all that time telling people there are no good jeans. So I may have undercut you. Apologies. CorinneOh yes, that’s true. There are good jeans. Well, for me.I like jeans from Universal Standard. I only like their like straight leg styles. Everyone recommends these skinny jeans from Universal Standard and I really don’t like the fabric of them. It’s too thin. It wears out instantaneously. VirginiaDue to my lack of thigh gap, I have busted through those thighs. CorinneSame and also I think it’s like too stretchy to the point where they just don’t stay up. VirginiaNo, they don’t. CorinneSo my personal favorite jeans from Universal Standard are the Donna style1, which is a “curve” style. I would not consider myself someone who needs to buy “curve” jeans. What they mean by curve is you have a more than 10 inch difference between your waist and hips.VirginiaI mean, I might but it goes in the other direction.CorinneI somehow ended up buying these probably without ever reading that and this is the fit that I like.The other thing that you need to know about these jeans is that when I measure my body and when I look at the size chart, I’m between like a size 26 and a 28 on the size chart. The size of jeans that fits me is a 24. So, a full size below the smallest measurement of my body according to the size chart. VirginiaIt does say right on the website that the fit runs generous! So others have confirmed that. That’s not just a Corinne fluke.CorinneIt’s not just me. Everyone needs to size down at least one size, possibly two. I know that’s very stressful and basically maybe means ordering more than one pair and returning them.Then I just want to shout out a few other styles which is the Etta which is the same style as Donna but in a straight cut. VirginiaIt also looks like it has a longer leg? The Donna looks a little cropped to me. CorinneEtta has one inch longer leg. And the Donna, if you look at the back view has a dart between the pocket and the waist. The Etta has no dart, so that’s the difference between like curve and straight. I don’t have like a huge butt, so I don’t know that I need a dart, but I do have a big belly, so maybe it helps with that. And then the other style that I like is Stevie. Stevie has a cuff and has a thicker, lower elastic denim and is also like the “straight” style cut. So less than 10 inch gap between your waist and butt.Then the other one I like is Bae, which has a 30 inch inseam (also comes in crop style!). Bae is the style that I originally got from Universal Standard, the first pair I tried. And they lasted me like so long. I’ve had them through size fluctuation and I still haven’t worn through the thighs I will say a lot of these are sold out right now, but just sign up for the notifications because they come back all the time.VirginiaI mean, by the time we finished recording, they’re going to have restocks.CorinneOr have just cancelled all these styles and now no one can get them.VirginiaI’m going to have to spend some time thinking about which of these I’m going to try and I will report back to everybody. I’ve had a lot of personal growth and I’m embracing a straight leg and I’m proud of it. CorinneI can’t wait to see.Corinne in the Donna JeansVirginiaI still struggle with boots and straight leg jeans. I’m just still on my unlearning journey there. But I think I think I can get into some of this. Oh, the Etta comes in fun colors, too.CorinneI would never, but you do you. I do white jeans. I actually haven’t tried their white styles. Maybe I should.VirginiaThat feels like an oversight.CorinneAs a tiny add on, I will say that Universal Standard just came out with some 100% Cotton denim jeans, which I have ordered, but have not arrived.2 VirginiaWe have no Intel but they might be worth exploring, too. But that means there’s going to be no stretch.CorinneNo stretch. But I think they say you order your size. I was confused about whether I would order my normal Universal Standard denim jeans size or my size according to the size chart. I bought two sizes, so we’ll see. VirginiaTo be clear, we are not sponsored by Universal Standard. I think they are a great company and they are the best for a wider range of fat fashion options. And, I want to make sure I can maintain the ability to be critical of them because they are not a perfect company. I want to make sure we’re always not getting clouded by them offering us free stuff or money. I think they’re an important company for Burnt Toast to be paying attention to, but not for financial gain. They’re kind of all we have. I also want to say that as I’ve been living in my joggers and I continue to live in my joggers, I did have the realization that part of the reason I was living in my joggers is that none of my other pants fit. It was time for a size up. I don’t know why I didn’t put it together more quickly. I put jeans on to get dressed up, as discussed they are formal wear for me now. And was like, oh, they just don’t fit. That’s the problem. They just got too tight. Which happens! Because bodies change. It’s all good. And even my Universal Standard Ponte pants I just ordered in the next size up because they had also gotten too tight and those are a very stretchy pant. I just need a bigger size. CorinneIt’s helpful to have a little stretchy, soft pant phase while you’re figuring it out. VirginiaI think if I noticed it more quickly, I would have just bought more jeans real quickly. I wasn’t in denial necessarily, but sometimes you don’t notice and it was nice having the soft pants and not having to think about it, I guess. I have compassion and grace for myself as I size up and look forward to my pants no longer cutting into my internal organs. I think I’m going to love that for me. CorinneI love that for you as well. VirginiaOne last pants update is because the snow pants recs are still coming in. I got some secondhand Eddie Bauer 2X snowpants off SellTradePlus. The seller sent them so quickly. So my snow pants needs are met. I haven’t had a chance to fully test them because we haven’t had that kind of snow again. But for $65 versus the $400 pair I was close to impulse purchasing? And they’re a very pretty emerald green.CorinneAwesome. That’s so great.VirginiaShould we get into books? I’m excited to do a books episode. What’s your first book for us, Corinne?CorinneThe first book I want to talk about is Sewing the Curve: Learn How to Sew Clothes to Boost Your Wardrobe and Your Confidence by Jenny Rushmore who runs the website Cashmerette. She’s one of the original fat sewing bloggers. And this book is really cool. It’s just a great guide if you’re getting started sewing plus size patterns. It covers tons of basics like tools, choosing the right pattern, how to measure yourself for sizing, troubleshooting sewing machines, grading between sizes if you want to make a dress but you’re one size on top and one size on the bottom. There’s also some really cool stuff that I haven’t seen elsewhere, like a little section on sewing with chronic illness or disability and how to go about that in a way that is less taxing on your body, which I thought was cool. The book also includes six printed patterns that go up to size 32.I also wanted to just like quickly mention this other thing that Jenny does, which is called MyBodyModel. It’s a website that lets you make a little custom body drawing that you can use to plan your wardrobe or see how stuff would look on you. VirginiaThat sounds fun. CorinneI know! It uses your measurements, I think, to generate a little model of yourself. And I just feel like there are probably some people in the Burnt Toast community who would find that fun.VirginiaI’m on the website right now. This looks really fun. Is the idea for planning patterns and that kind of thing?CorinneI think there are a bunch of ways you could use it. You could use it if you’re a sewist and want to think about what fabrics you want to use or what garments you want to make, or you could use it if you’re like doing some kind of wardrobe clean out and you want to put together outfits or something like that.VirginiaIt’s almost like the closet from Clueless come to life. CorinneYes, totally. VirginiaI feel like they’re missing a branding opportunity by not mentioning that, but yeah, that is super, super cool. I am never going to sew my own clothes. But I really love how many sewists we have in Burnt Toast and I love that for everybody. I did have a brief fling with sewing in high school where I made some dresses and I think I just learned that I’m a little too Type A for that hobby. My skills did not match up to my perfectionist nature. There was a mismatch.CorinneThat totally makes sense. VirginiaI took a sewing class in high school and somehow made it through but it was sometimes frustrating. Anyway. Tell us the name of the book again!CorinneIt’s called Sewing the Curve: Learn How to Sew Clothes to Boost Your Wardrobe and Your Confidence and the author is Jenny Rushmore from Cashmerette.VirginiaLove it.My first book that I’m going to talk about is The Sicilian Inheritance by Jo Piazza, friend of the show. And I cannot put it down. I considered being very behind on all of my work today so that I could finish it this morning. I started it yesterday. Jo writes excellent—I believe she’s categorized as “women’s fiction,” but she’s been on the podcast before talking about her love of writing good food in fiction. And this book takes place mostly in Sicily. You need to understand what a good food novel it is. How do I plan a trip to Sicily? It’s really good food writing. The main character, Sara is a butcher / restaurant owner who has torpedoed her life in a bunch of ways, getting a divorce and drinking too much, and losing her restaurant. Then her great aunt dies and her final request is for Sara to go to Sicily to the village their family is from and scatter her ashes. When she gets there, she also discovers that she has to solve the murder mystery of her great grandmother, which is based on a true story from Jo’s family—she’s from Sicily and there is a mystery about the death of her great grandmother. Jo has also been recording a whole podcast about this which I’m really excited to dive into. The other amazing thing about it is I love stories about unexpected pockets of radical feminism. What I mean by that is like a lot of the book is a flashback to the great grandmother’s life growing up in like the 1910s and 1920s in Sicily, and they’re in this tiny village. It’s patriarchy and the women have very few options. But then because a lot of the men started leaving Sicily to go to America because they thought they would make more money there, the women end up basically running the village because there’s like no men left to do anything. It’s this cool story of how they become self taught doctors and bakers and all these different jobs. So if you like a good mystery, if you like… I don’t know what the genre is that includes unexpected pockets or radical feminism, but if that’s something you look for in books, and really good food writing—The Sicilian Inheritance. It’s delightful.CorinneThat sounds amazing. VirginiaYep. What have you got next?CorinneThe next one I want to talk about is this book Secrets of Giants: A Journey to Uncover the True Meaning of Strength by Alyssa Ages. This is an interesting book. It’s part memoir, personal narrative, and part research. Basically, the premise is that following a miscarriage, Alyssa starts to pursue strength training more seriously, and specifically strongman training.VirginiaIs strongman different from powerlifting?CorinneYes, it’s very different. If you went to a strongman competition, people would be lifting up huge stones and lifting up these like fake metal logs and hoisting them over their heads. Yeah, it’s different and it’s very interesting. I am super interested to try it. VirginiaStay tuned for Corinne’s Stongman essay.CorinneYeah. It’s kind of an interesting story. I think a lot of Burnt Toast people would be interested. Like, okay, now she’s like not having kids anymore and kind of reclaiming her body and trying to figure out what else she can do with her body. She talks to a lot of athletes about their experiences and wrestles with ideas about femininity and weightlifting and what being “bulky” means and how women are taught that weakness is sexy and stuff like that. And then eventually, she does a strongman competition and eventually she also goes to strongman nationals. So, yeah, it’s just kind of an interesting story if you’re interested in strength training and feminism and how those things kind of fit together.VirginiaI just finished listening to Julia Turshen’s lonform essay about powerlifting that she published with Roxane Gay. It’s incredible. I really didn’t think I was interested in powerlifting. Like, I do enjoy my weekly strength training workouts with Lauren Leavell, but I don’t think I’m ever going down this rabbit hole with y’all. I just don’t need to own that many different types of shoes and a singlet and the gym vibe is not for me. And I was riveted reading. Like, it is so cool to read stories of people, especially fat folks, especially women, finding power in their bodies and finding healing through doing this. CorinneI love that essay and I was really excited to read it. I will say Alyssa is a straight size person but still just wrestling with a lot of the same stuff that we all do. VirginiaThere are some universal pieces to this.CorinneYeah, so that one is Secrets of Giants: A Journey to Uncover the True Meaning of Strength by Alyssa Ages. VirginiaOkay, I’m going to talk about a book that is already out—it came out in December—but it is On the Plus Side by Jenny L. Howe. I just had the total joy of doing one of her book launch events with her this past weekend at Split Rock Books, of course. It is such a fun, fat positive feminist romance. The premise is Everly, the heroine, gets picked for a reality TV show that’s kind of like Queer Eye meets What Not to Wear, but fat positive. And the host is sort of modeled on Nicole Byers. Like, imagine if Nicole Byers did a life coaching fat positive reality show. CorinneI would watch that. VirginiaI would absolutely watch it. Nicole, if you’re listening, talk to Jenny. Okay, so she’s doing the show and then there’s a sexy grumpy cameraman who is not fat exactly, but definitely bigger bodied. Not your typical romance hero body. And it’s just super fun and super hot.  The cool backstory on Jenny is that she has a PhD in medieval literature and she’s a college professor who teaches writing and literature and also writes these romance novels and that combination of things is really great.She was hilarious and told many good stories. I’ll quickly tell one even though I’m hoping to have her on the podcast for her next book in December, but I think she has endless funny stories. This is not a spoiler but a sex scene in the book features a washer dryer—I’ll let you use your imagination. And she told us that as it happened when she was writing the book, she and her husband purchased a new washer dryer. So she asked her aunt who is her accountant, “can I write off the washer dryer as book research?” And her aunt said, “Only if you can show that it is used 50% of the time for book research.”CorinneWow. I mean…VirginiaShe was like, I don’t know if I can commit to that much book research.CorinneThat’s incredible.VirginiaI’ll never not be laughing about that story anyway. Freelancers know we come up with all kinds of justifications for write offs. But yeah, that was a leap.CorinneSo brave to ask your aunt that!VirginiaWell, I don’t know if her aunt knew the context of how it was used, I think she was like, “there is a washer dryer in this novel.”CorinneThe aunt will be in for a shock when she reads the book. VirginiaYes. She just also had so many great things to say about how she thinks about writing fat characters, how she’s always writing against stereotypes and tropes. I already love a great romance but knowing that someone is coming at this genre with really good fat politics behind it is like all the more reason to support her work. She has a new book called How to Get a Life in Ten Dates that comes out in December. So you can go ahead and preorder that right now and we will try to have her on the pod then so we can hear more about all of that. CorinneIs that one also featuring a fat character?VirginiaShe was very clear, she will never not write fat protagonists. Her first novel had a fat female lead and the male lead she described as Ichabod Crane. Then this next one was a fat female lead and a bigger guy who was sort of self conscious about it—adorably so. Then the new one I think both characters are fat.CorinneThat’s really cool. Okay, the next book I want to talk about I am extremely excited about. It’s Mechanic Shop Femme’s Guide to Car Ownership: Uncomplicating Cars for All of Us. Hopefully some listeners are already familiar with Mechanic Shop Femme! Her Her name is Chaya and she does a lot of great Instagram and Tiktok content. But, yeah, the book is amazing. It covers everything from how to buy a car, how to find a mechanic, whether or not you should consider leasing a car. Then also just like, what maintenance you should do yourself versus taking it to a shop and how to use your car manual and how to check tire pressure—all kinds of great stuff. I can definitely see myself using this book, I can see myself giving it to other people, and I’m just very excited about it. VirginiaI am so excited to have it. Probably one of the most gendered things about my marriage was the amount of time I spent never thinking about my cars. Dan just did all the car things.CorinneTo be honest, that is a selling point of marriage for me. Honestly, I would love to have someone taking care of the car. VirginiaThere were various other house chores he did that I took on with no problem. Basically, I already kind of did that or knew what to do, and the car I’m just like, oh God, I have to think about the car. I have a lot of gender conditioning fear around it. I don’t think I’m going to be taken seriously when I talk to someone about car repairs or buying a car and I feel extremely self conscious. I had to text a friend to ask, how do I get my state inspection done? Because I have I haven’t done that. It wasn’t hard. In my case, I just went to the dealer and they did it. You can also go to a Valvoline oil change type place.CorinneChaya talks about that a bit at the beginning. She tells a story about wanting to go to test drive cars and calling to ask, can we come test drive cars and then showing up with her partner and basically being told to leave. VirginiaWomen have all this money. I don’t understand. CorinneI don’t know. But it’s a really good book. She definitely has the knowledge. Her story is also amazing. I think she aged out of the foster care system and then someone got her job at an auto repair place and she just learned all this stuff. She’s really knowledgeable and super smart. She has tons of great content on online about fat car safety and stuff like that. This book is definitely just a great resource.VirginiaAnd it comes out in April. So I’m going to say please, please, please preorder it because this is the kind of book we want to do really well. This is such a phenomenal resource and it’s a way to support a fat author working in a space where it is very cis white male dominated. So even if you are like, I’m not that interested in my car, I have a husband who handles the cars, order this book. As I was looking through it, I was like, it’s not actually that hard. It’s that I was told I couldn’t do it. Let’s not let that be a reason we don’t understand things. This is a great resource to help us get over that fear and figure this stuff out. CorinneTotally. I just I think it would be such a great gift for someone graduating.VirginiaOr getting divorced! It’s a great divorce gift. I’m going to buy it for all my friends.CorinneMaybe you can give it along with This American Ex-Wife.VirginiaYes! Which we’re going to talk about next. You’re going to want your divorce gift package to include Chaya’s book and then the next book you’re going to want to put in it is This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life by Lyz Lenz. It is just a real powerhouse of a book. lyz is also doing a podcast by the same name, which is hilarious and a must listen.I also want to be clear, this isn’t divorce conversion therapy. You can stay married and do all of this. You can be not partnered at all and get a lot of these books. What Lyz is doing in This American Ex-Wife is going through the history of the institution of marriage to show how it was designed as a way to make women into property to control women’s ability to own a car, forget talking to the mechanic about your car, but own your own car, own your own property, have your own credit cards. All of these things that marriage was set up to prevent women from doing. She’s very clear that within this bad system, there are partnerships that defy this, but it’s still a bad system. It’s not surprising that it fails as many people as it does. It really opened my eyes and it helped me understand more about the structural pieces of it and how that had shown up in my own life in ways I hadn’t really grappled with. I mean it for sure convinces me I will not be repeating that process of marriage ever again.CorinneNever say never! VirginiaNot without a good prenup, let me put it that way. What I think is also important to know about it is it’s really hopeful. I mean, I get it. If you’re married and you’re reading this book in your living room, I think it’s a similar to a concern we had about Fat Talk, which was like will parents want to read a book called Fat Talk in their house where their kid might pick up the book? Are people going to be afraid? I mean, her cover has a burning wedding dress on it. Are people afraid to admit they want to be a part of this conversation? To which I say, you do want to be a part of the conversation. There are so many books right now that talk about mom rage or talk about structural forces against women, and we always hear that conversation through the lens of like, well, then how do you ask your partner to help more? How do you make your life better while staying within the same system? I think it’s really helpful to hear you don’t need to be a part of that system, that there is actually another way to do this that’s much happier and much more liberating and it’s not about staying in some angry “I-hate-men” space for the rest of your life. You can just opt out of that. That’s what her book really helped me think through and I found it super helpful.CorinneThat makes sense. I’m really excited to read that one.VirginiaDid you have another one? CorinneI just wanted to quickly shout out two books that I’m excited to read, which are not books that anyone sent to me, but just books that are coming out this spring that I’m looking forward to? The first one is The Hunter by Tana French. Do you read her stuff? VirginiaYes, I like her. CorinneI feel like I’ve been waiting for a year for her to put out another book so I’m just super excited for that one. This one is a sequel to The Searcher, which was a story about an ex-cop living in Ireland. It’s not part of the Dublin Murder Squad thing. Maybe that series is over, I don’t know. VirginiaOne thing I will say about Tana French is I read them and then I’m always like, did I read that one? The titles are too similar and the covers are all white with a tree on them. I would like some more distinction between.CorinneThat’s a great point. Most of the books of hers that I’ve read, I’ve listened to. They always have really good Irish readers and there’s a lot of descriptive language where you can just kind of listen and zone out a little bit. It’s a great audio book. Then the other one I am excited about is Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez. She wrote the book Olga Dies Dreaming which I really liked. I’m excited for this one. VirginiaShe’s a really beautiful writer. Another one, I am excited to read that I have not read yet—I’m still on divorce. I didn’t intend this to be a divorce episode.CorinneThat’s fine, we all have our interests. VirginiaWe have our hobbies. But Sara Peterson just read Splinters which is the new Leslie Jamison which comes out February 20th. And like, Sara is an effusive texter most of the time, I will say with love, but the texts I was getting as she was reading this book was like epiphany after epiphany. She really went on a journey and she was like, please read it. And I was like, well, I didn’t get sent an advanced copy, Sara, so I have to wait. But I have pre ordered it, so I’m very excited to read it. I think it is about Leslie—I’m assuming from the title Splinters—exploding her life in various ways. So I’m looking forward to diving into that as well. CorinneThat sounds cool. VirginiaAnd then there is this trio of books that I have sitting in my TBR cart, because I get so many books and they sit on the to be read cart and I do work through it. But more books come in and the cart will never be emptied. And there has been this trio of books sitting on the cart that I’m so interested in, and they are all about religion and two of them are the intersection of religion and diet culture and anti-fatness.And so this one is We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (and Maybe You Should Too) by Kate Cohen, who is a really phenomenal Washington Post journalist and has done a lot of great work. It’s an impassioned atheist’s rallying cry to inspire non-believers to be honest with themselves and their families about their true beliefs and in doing so change the American cultural conversation. I’m extremely interested to read that because I was raised atheist and being raised atheist in the 80s was a little bit of a stigmatizing identity, to be honest with you. So I am just curious to get into that. Then on the religion side, Fat Church: Claiming a Gospel of Fat Liberation by Anastasia Kidd. This critiques anti-fat prejudice and the church’s historic participation in it, calling for a reckoning with fatphobia for the sake of God’s gospel of freedom. She’s ordained in the United Church of Christ. And it’s blurbed by Christyna Johnson, who I love and Amanda Martinez Beck who’s also really wonderful. I don’t think we talk about religion very often in the space because I don’t have one so I don’t feel like it’s my work. Like, I don’t feel like I’m useful in that conversation. But I really appreciate that people are interrogating this. CorinneThat sounds fascinating. VirginiaOkay, and then the last one is called Feed Yourself: Step Away from the Lies of Diet Culture and Into Your Divine Design by Leslie Schilling. Leslie is an anti-diet dietitian. I’ve known for years and years and years, interviewed her for all sorts of stories. She really knows her stuff. She is a straight sized dietitian, but she’s someone who’s done quite a lot of work centering anti-fatness in her work. This is her interrogating the church and the messages she’s gotten from the church around bodies. So I think Fat Church is maybe more of an exploration of the issues and Leslie’s book is more prescriptive advice on how, if you’re staying in the church, how to navigate the messages you’re getting, how to rethink, how to think differently about your relationship with food, all of that kind of stuff. I’m really interested in all three of those.---ButterCorinneLet’s do butter. Do you want to go first?VirginiaI’m very excited about my butter. 

Wendy Lopez and Jessica Jones discuss the importance of improving blood sugar without focusing on weight loss. They highlight the misconceptions in diabetes management, the need for inclusivity, and their new venture, Diabetes Digital, offering support and education. The podcast explores the significance of cultural competence, tailored resources, and managing diabetes with a history of disordered eating.

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!It’s time for your February Extra Butter. This month we’re unpacking content from Rosey Beeme, Brianne Huntsman, and other influencers who long identified as body positive, plus size fashion folks—and now are talking proudly about their intentional weight loss journeys. But it’s not a moral failing if you can’t wipe your own ass.CW: This episode includes some unavoidable discussion of intentional weight loss and links to posts that promote it. Take care of yourselves!To listen to the full episode and read the full transcript, you’ll need to join Extra Butter, our premium subscription tier.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)TranscriptThis episode includes affiliate links. Shopping our links is another great way to support Burnt Toast!CorinneAre you ready? We’re tackling a big one today.VirginiaThat we have been ambivalent about tackling, I want to say. Especially you? You have been ambivalent.CorinneI have been ambivalent. It’s a tough topic, but a lot of you have asked us to talk about this.So we’re going to talk about plus size influencers, Ozempic, and intentional weight loss.VirginiaThe Rosey Beeme of it all.

Teacher librarian and The Gamer Educator, Ash Brandin, discusses screen time boundaries intersecting with diet culture and anti-fatness. Topics include unlearning screen habits, social media's diet culture influence, balancing children's screen time preferences, and engaging in creative sticker stories with kids for relaxation.

You’re listening to Burnt Toast!We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for your January Indulgence Gospel.Today, we’re getting into three big questions for you:Does sugar destroy your immune system?How do we stay hopeful when fat activism gets hard?What’s the deal with 1000 Hours Outside—is it good parenting, or is it diet culture?And we’re going to get into favorite books, favorite snacks, good shows to puzzle by, Corinne’s new favorite jeans, and (inexplicably?) Virginia’s strong feelings about children’s birthday parties.This is a paywalled episode. That means to hear the whole thing you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber.

Welcome to a very special episode of Burnt Toast!We recorded this on December 3, at Seattle’s Town Hall, with an absolutely delightful crowd. This was the official end of the Fat Talk book tour, but I promise it’s not a regular book promo conversation. Because it’s Angela Garbes and me, talking about books sure, but also talking about bodies and big life transitions and other good stuff.Both of Angela’s books, and mine, are available in the Burnt Toast Bookshop!Don’t forget, you can always take 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk from Split Rock Books! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)Episode 126 TranscriptVirginiaWelcome to the first ever live recording of Burnt Toast!This is the podcast about anti-fat bias, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. AngelaAnd I’mAngela Garbes. That’s right. We’re here in Seattle, Washington! Live at Town Hall!VirginiaAngela is my co-host, and hype woman, tonight because we are in Seattle! Thank you, Town Hall. Thank you all, for coming out. Let’s do this! Let’s make a podcast!AngelaSo as you can see, there’s a large projection of Virginia’s book Fat Talk here. We’re here to talk about Virginia’s book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. We’re also going to talk about bodies and we’re going to talk about big life transitions—but we’ll put a little pin in that for the moment.I had the pleasure of reading Fat Talk before it came out, and I remember being so blown away by it. I think in the blurb I wrote like, “Virginia Sole-Smith is a visionary.” But it’s true because Virginia took so many disparate things that I understood about American culture and about bodies and about diet culture and put it all together. One of the things that I was just saying—we had dinner before this. We were talking about the male gaze—you can boo for things like that. VirginiaIt might come up a few times.AngelaBut I was like, when we talk about the male gaze, we’re talking about American culture in many ways. We’re talking about diet culture. And what Virginia helped me see when she threaded together beautifully through research and reportage is that American culture is diet culture is white supremacist culture is anti-fat culture is all of these things. When we talk about one, they are inextricably linked. No matter how much we would like to separate them out, and the powers that be would like us to separate them out, or not talk about them at all, they’re so deeply linked. And she presented that in such a way that I was like, “Well, there’s no turning back now.” I see it differently.The other thing that I love about this book is, it’s about parenting. And I’m the mother of children, but I desperately needed this book for myself! There’s so much that we, as the grownups, have to unlearn. There’s a lot of parenting and reparenting that we have to do for ourselves around diet culture and anti fat bias. Virginia’s work has been very meaningful to me. I was so honored that she asked me to read it. I was so honored when Virginia blurbed my book, and I asked her to blurb mine after. I think we have kind of cute meeting story, actually. We met in our Instagram DMs. VirginiaI think I slipped into your DMs! Or did you slip into mine?AngelaYou slipped into mine. I had posted a picture, when I was working on Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, of The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America, which is Virginia’s first book—which nobody should sleep on! Shout out for The Eating Instinct, real ones know! It was a huge part of my research process and informed several chapters of my book. So I had posted, you know, like, behind the scenes process shot, and one of Virginia’s friends sent the post to her.VirginiaAnd was like, “OMG, Angela Garbes read your book!” And it was a really big deal because Angela is a really big deal. AngelaSo then we had a real meet cute. We’re like, “No, I’m a huge fan.” “No I’m a huge fan.”And now we get to be on stage!VirginiaMutually fangirling. AngelaIn our year of becoming friends.Okay, so we are going to talk about BLTs—big life transitions. I just coined that right now.And one of the hugest transitions—and I know this—as a writer, is when you transition from being in intense research and writing mode, which is private. I mean, you have a podcast and a newsletter, but it’s very intense, private work. Sometimes I feel like until the book is out, I’m just sitting on my ass. That’s all I’ve been doing. Just thinking and having thoughts.What is it like to have published a book that was an instant New York Times bestseller? Which, we don’t live for measures of success! But that’s a pretty big one, right? Any writer who tells you it’s not a big deal is lying. So it’s been an intense time of having that come out. I’d love to know, what does it feel like to have been living with this book out in public to have it be a transformative book for your career and what has the transition to book promotion been like? VirginiaWell, some really good advice you gave me back in the spring was: You won’t really know how to answer that question for three years. So I don’t totally know. But I mean, it’s been a really surreal year, for a lot of reasons. And a lot of that was going from being very private with this conversation, to being very public with this conversation, which of course was the goal of having the conversation—for other people to come to the conversation.And obviously, while researching the book I was pretty sure anti-fat bias was a thing. But publishing a book about anti-fat bias and going out to talk about it as a fat person really confirmed for me that anti-fat bias is alive and well! Mostly for the men who email and send me DMs and have comments.And, you know, I was prepared for it—AngelaI think anyone who writes about fatness…VirginiaAnd is a woman on the Internet… AngelaYou expect a certain amount of feedback and trolling, I guess. VirginiaBut you’re still somehow surprised by how personal it can feel at times. Which isn’t to say it’s always upsetting! Like, Steve on the internet telling me that he doesn’t find me attractive is not something that’s keeping me up at night. The DMs that are like, “but men don’t like fat chicks.” I didn’t actually write this book for them? So it’s okay. I’m not looking for that. And look, although I do identify as a fat person and have lived for the last decade or so in a fat body, I was a skinny kid and then a thin younger adult, through intensive dieting efforts, not through genetics. So I grew up with a lot of thin privilege, which is a concept I talk about in the book. Thin privilege is the experience of the world as being built for your body. You fit into the seats on airplanes, the chairs here are supporting your body. You’re not worried when you go to an event like this, will the chair hold me?And I’m still what’s called small fat, which is on the lower end of the plus side spectrum. So there are a lot of ways that being fat doesn’t negatively impact my daily life because I’m not experiencing the constant oppression that folks in bigger bodies are experiencing. But going out as a Public Fat Person kind of inches you a little closer to that experience. So it gave me a firsthand appreciation of: This is what we’re asking fat people to navigate all the time without making them New York Times bestsellers. Just because they live in fat bodies, they are going into doctor’s offices unable to access health care. They’re being turned away and told to lose weight before they’re given fertility treatments or other basic medical care. They’re earning less at jobs. And for our kids in schools, they’re experiencing bullying and discrimination on a daily basis. So yeah, it really just drove all that home, thanks to Steve on the internet. AngelaYeah, thanks Steve.Obviously you did a lot of interviews, including Fresh Air with Tanya Mosley. But you told me about one, I’m assuming it was local news?VirginiaNo, it was WGN, Chicago Morning News. It was a live TV interview for the book and the thin white male news anchor audibly sighed before he could talk to me. He was like, “It sounds like you blame parents for being concerned with their kids’ health?” He was so upset to have me there. AngelaPeople really don’t want to hear this stuff.  The average size of females in America is a 16 or an 18, right? There is this idea of the standard of beauty, which is thinness, which is whiteness, like, we’re coming for you. That was a construct and it’s falling away. VirginiaIn the book, I unpack everything that’s wrong with the BMI, but yes, around 60 percent of Americans have an overweight or obese BMI. So in terms of bias, this is everyone. This is not a tiny, marginalized group of people who, even if it was tiny, wouldn’t deserve the treatment they get, of course. But like, this is everyone. AngelaThis is the majority of the population. VirginiaWe can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. This is humans in bodies. AngelaSo we spent some time on Steve on the internet. But by and large, the reception and the process of being out in the world with this book is, I’m hoping, has been positive.VirginiaI get teary just thinking about the emails I’ve gotten from parents saying this helps me think about how to keep my kids safe in the bodies that they have, how to advocate for them at the pediatrician’s office. It is marketed as a parenting book, but people saying “I don’t have kids, but this is helping me understand stuff that I experienced in my own childhood.”One person said to me, “For so long, I understood my body as a problem, that it was my job and my responsibility to make myself fit in as opposed to understanding this is a whole system that wasn’t built for my body. And that’s a systemic problem.” Even more exciting to is hearing from doctors, hearing from medical researchers saying, yes, you’re right, we have not been paying attention to the impact of anti-fat bias on people’s health. When we are studying diets, we are never controlling for the fact that when we’re documenting health benefits from weight loss, we’re never documenting the fact that if you lose some degree of weight, you will experience less anti-fatness. And that might be some of the reasons that your health appears, quote unquote, better, right? Because the world is now treating you differently, because suddenly you’re able to access the health care you weren’t able to access before. It’s opening doors, and maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it’s not how do we make everyone thinner so that they can be treated better? Maybe we flip that a little bit. AngelaI mean, that’s really a dream, as writers who work in this space of service journalism, but also wanting to give voice to these things, and then be like, hey, this is going on, this is important. This is significant. That feeling of, I don’t know, sometimes I feel like, I’m part of changing the cultural conversation. But that’s so nebulous. Like, what is that? But hearing from someone like that, it’s small, but it’s significant. That idea of change happening within those institutions is huge. VirginiaIf we can change the way weight and health get studied, to make sure any study on weight and health has to examine the presence of weight stigma and the impact on people’s health. They have to look at when people go on diets and lose weight in the short term and you get excited because their biomarkers improve, what happens to them in five years when the weight has been regained, both in terms of physical health, but also in terms of things like disordered eating and increased rates of eating disorders. None of that is getting tracked most of the time because of all of this baked in bias that says, well, fat people must want to lose weight that must make them healthier.AngelaI’m thinking about when I wrote my first book which was about pregnancy and why don’t we know anything about pregnancy? Why hasn’t it been studied? The idea that just having a fat body is like an aberration, not just a variance of a body or just having a different body. I learned this when writing Like a Mother that it wasn’t until 1993 that Congress passed a law saying that if you receive funding for clinical trials from like the federal government, which is most clinical trials and anything in a research based institution, you have to include females and people of color. Our very definition, not even just of health and wellness, of like what a human being is, doesn’t include most of us who are here. We’re up against really nothing less than that. So it’s really heartening to hear about change. VirginiaMost studies that are done on anorexia nervosa, or actually most eating disorders, use BMI cut offs when they screen for applicants. So people with a BMI above 25, which is the cutoff for the “normal” range, don’t get included in the study. Because they think that fat people don’t get eating disorders. So then we have no research on the fact that actually that happens quite a lot. Because when fat people engage in disordered eating relationships, doctors are likely to congratulate us, ask us to do it more, ask us to go further with it. That bias, those are people’s lives we’re talking about. One of the most deadly mental health conditions. AngelaOkay, do you want to talk about our our own big life transitions and how our bodies are doing with that? Because it takes a little bit of what’s hard and what’s good and what is just showing up in our vessels every day. We’ve continued throughout this year, with lots of text messages and DMs about these changes that we’ve made in our life, which is that I am coming up on one year of sobriety. I made that change for a number of reasons. One being that I realized I was an alcoholic. But so that’s big. I’m 11 months sober. And there are so many changes that show up in my body.And Virginia’s big news, if you don’t know—I’ll let you say. What’s going on in your life, Virginia? VirginiaOh, I’m getting divorced. So that’s a big change. You can clap! That’s right, you can clap that one, too. Thank you all for not just immediately going awwww. It’s good, it’s a hard thing. But a good thing. AngelaSo I’d like to ask you, the experience of separating and getting a divorce and being in the process of that—how does your body feel in that? Where do you see that showing up? VirginiaI’ve talked about this a little bit on the podcast already, but there has been this real freedom in how I feel about my body. I’m not going to talk negatively about my ex husband, who’s a really good guy and a good dad. But suddenly my body is not in relationship to anyone else. I mean, it’s also being out of the early years of motherhood, where your body belongs to your children so intensely. AngelaI think that’s a huge piece of it. VirginiaWe don’t talk enough about that. AngelaMy youngest child is now five and she and I are still very close, but it’s different. It’s just different. I’m not wiping anything anymore. There’s a lot less contact with fluids.VirginiaI’m allowed to pee with the door closed, which feels big. This is an established thing now, that company is not welcome.AngelaSo you have freedom from your children.VirginiaThere’s just this added layer, which is really interesting. It wasn’t immediate. And I think at first—this was the male gaze thing we were talking about—I was very aware of when I would be alone in my house, when my kids would be at their dad’s. The first few weekends, I felt like I was watching myself. I was observing my body still. Maybe my brain was like, well, no one’s watching you anymore, so I will. Like, someone should still be watching, right?Because especially for women, this is how we’re conditioned, to always assume our bodies will be somewhat objectified and to self-objectify our bodies. This is diet culture, teaching us that even when you’re just existing in your home, just watching tv on the couch…AngelaSomehow how you look still really matters.VirginiaSome part of my brain had really bought into that, despite the fact that it’s been almost a decade since I was last actively dieting, and trying to make myself smaller. It helped me identify that there’s this way that I’ve still been feeling like I need to contain or control this aspect of my body. So that’s been really interesting. I mean, the other piece that’s interesting is, if you get on DivorceTok—which I don’t recommend. But if you’re on TikTok, and you start getting getting fed divorce content, you’re going to come across the Revenge Body concept pretty fast. AngelaTell us more. There was an audible gasp.VirginiaPeople had a big feeling about that.So the Revenge Body is basically the idea that as soon as you get divorced, you need to start losing weight and be as hot as possible so that you can get your next man and also make your ex feel bad, I guess. And I just want no part of that. That’s not anything I’m interested in.And what’s really insidious about the revenge body is that often the narrative is, I was so stressed out by my divorce that I started losing weight, isn’t that great. Shouldn’t I ride that train all the way? AngelaShouldn’t I ride that unhealthy train into the sunset?VirginiaCorrect. Like, “Thank God, I went through this trauma that caused me to lose weight and now I can keep losing weight.”AngelaBut—correct me if I’m wrong—isn’t part of getting a divorce so you can you can worry less about what that person thinks of you?VirginiaI mean, one would hope. One would hope that would be a big part of it. But when trauma equals weight loss, we consider that a good thing. I’ve heard people say like, “Oh, when I got divorced, the weight just fell off me. I was so stressed out, I just couldn’t eat, I couldn’t eat.”I can eat still. I’m doing great with eating. I’m really doing it multiple times a day, like lots of different food groups. It’s going really well and I’m happy about that. AngelaOne might say, it’s helping you survive. And not just divorce, but life. VirginiaYes. When did we decide that not eating is the right way to respond to stress? That this is a desired effect of stress, that it would hone your body down. I want no part of that. I’m really happy I’m still eating.I mean, I understand there is a spectrum of experiences, right? I’ve had friends get divorced and say “this appetite loss is super scary.” And they don’t want to be congratulated for that. But the other thing we often hear about fat people is like, what trauma caused that body? And so why are we congratulating people for achieving Revenge Body, but demonizing people who respond to trauma by eating?AngelaWe should be asking thin people that: What trauma caused this? What racist oppressive system caused this? VirginiaExactly. I think the bottom line is: Don’t talk about people’s bodies when they’re going through big life stuff. And maybe just don’t congratulate people’s bodies ever? Don’t assume that weight loss is always good. Don’t assume that weight gain is always bad. AngelaThat’s something I think about a lot as I get older. I used to have this fixed idea of what my body was—pregnancy will really do a number on you with that, right? VirginiaTurns out, nothing is fixed. AngelaBut now I’m always like, oh, like, I’ve seen my friends go through this. Our bodies change all the time for different reasons. And now that I’m in this nebulous perimenopausal zone, I feel like my body is changing in ways. And it’s like, it’s always meant to do this. VirginiaIt’s constantly meant to do it. AngelaSo the idea of tying your body size to any sort of reflection of how you are, is flawed from the beginning, right? VirginiaI get into this in the book because the narrative we give kids about puberty is really rooted in anti-fatness. We basically say to kids, it’s going to be awful, your body is going to change. You’re not going to know what’s going on. Like, it’s so bad. It’s so scary. Periods, boobs, whatever—all of this is terrible, and to be avoided. And we really idealize a skinny child’s body, which first of all, not all kids are skinny! There are lots of fat kids before puberty. Their bodies are great. But I remember this is a former skinny kid, being afraid of the puberty weight gain which was being built up as this huge, scary thing. What if we reframed that narrative with kids, and said: Bodies are changing forever. You’re going to go through a huge amount of change in the next few years. And, you’re still going to be you. Some of it’s going to be weird. Some of it’s going to be great. Your experience is your experience. AngelaEspecially to young girls, to be like: This is your body helping you take up space in the world. Because that’s the other fear is you get too big. We’re like, “We don’t want the girls to get too big and demand things.”VirginiaWell, it’s fear of fatness. It’s also fear of sexuality. Girls becoming more easily sexualized, there are just a lot of layers there. But it really comes down to, instead of saying there’s something really messed up about our culture that a grown man would hit on a fifth grader with boobs, we’re like, “How do we get this fifth grader with boobs to look as much like a little child as possible?” But: Some 10 year olds have boobs. That’s a normal way to have a body. And we make it the child’s problem, which then sets girls up to feel like I’m just in this race to control my body as much as possible, take up as little space as possible. AngelaI’m just thinking about something that I think I heard or had this thought six or seven years ago that is something that I come back to all the time, which is: A body or a person is never a problem. I feel like I needed to hear that every day as a child. But I think about it now. It’s like, no, there are other factors, right? It’s never just you. It’s never inherently you. It’s not a thing that you need to fix. VirginiaAnd I think this is the number one message I hope anyone who either is a parent or works with kids in any way takes away from the book and that I hope any kids who read the book at some point takeaway. We want kids to understand their body is never a problem to be solved. Your body is to be trusted, for kids in all body sizes. This isn’t like, asterisk, as long as you stay thin.And the problem is is right now so many of us, because of the culture we live in, the water we’re all swimming in, we’re always attaching an asterisk. We’re putting these conditions on who’s allowed to take up space, who’s allowed to feel safe in their bodies who’s allowed to love their bodies. That’s the fundamental thing we need to change.AngelaI want to go back to this idea that your body is just for you. Does that freedom feel like relief? Does it look like sweat pants on a day to day basis? VirginiaFor sure, sweatpants.It’s a thing I didn’t realize I was missing, you know? So I don’t even know exactly what it looks like yet. But I am really enjoying the idea that it is just for me, that there is no external gaze on it. I mean, other than all of you right now, I guess.But when I’m not on a stage, I’m enjoying—I was going to say being invisible, but I don’t mean I want to be invisible. But the privilege of a little bit of invisibility, I guess. I like being past a stage of life where walking down the street—it’s a nice thing about middle age, that you’re no longer constantly receiving feedback from people. AngelaNo longer even being perceived by people. VirginiaRight. So the lack of perception is obviously rooted in ageism and terrible, but also sort of nice sometimes. AngelaSo for me, I’m going to start with positive: Since I got sober, my skin is really, really looking good. It’s really cool. I also just got back from vacation. I look in the mirror and I’m like, whoa. I’m not putting all this stuff into my system that is like, manifesting in my face. Like, it’s less puffy. It’s still very round, but it’s not as puffy. It’s not as pink and it makes me feel really good. It’s a totally vain, silly thing. And it’s not being perceived by anyone but myself in the mirror every day. It feels really good. VirginiaIt’s giving you joy. AngelaThe thing that’s interesting is I didn’t realize it until it didn’t happen. Like what you said, this is the water we swim in. It hadn’t occurred to me—I did not get sober to lose weight. But until I didn’t miraculously lose like 30 pounds, I was like, oh, I thought I thought I would lose weight. VirginiaWell the trauma thing, right? We think, we’ll go through these stressful things and we just won’t be able to eat.AngelaAnd actually, it was the opposite. So I was like, weight isn’t just falling off of my body. That’s interesting. Also, it’s kind of a cliche, but it is true—I don’t know if it’s to replace the sugar that used to be part of drinking, but I’m definitely an ice cream with hot fudge every night guy now. I was like oh, maybe that’s also part of why I’m not losing weight.Like, it’s a change in my body, but the idea that sobriety would, I would be associating that with weight or thinking about it. It was just really interesting to me the way I felt like I was playing myself. I was like, oh, like some little part of me thought this was going to happen and was slightly disappointed that it didn’t. I mean, I feel like I’ve dealt with it and there’s so many more pluses in my life, but…VirginiaWe like you being alive and all.AngelaI like myself being alive. I like self compassion for myself, and all these other things. Also I know that sobriety is a huge investment in my health, mental and physical. This idea of wellness and how it’s just automatically on some level linked to thinness. Even I, who like, I reject this frame, I reject all of that, but it’s like, oh, it’s the call is coming from inside the house. It’s very humbling.VirginiaI mean, think of the way we’re taught to approach weight and pregnancy, right? You’re going to gain this weight, not too much weight, but some approved amount of weight during pregnancy. And then you’re going to lose it of course. People say, “Breastfeed so the weight falls off,” which is a total bullshit myth by the way. We are taught to only embrace change if it equals thinness. There are a lot of transitions in life that we think should automatically lead to thinness, right? It is this insidious narrative that keeps coming up over and over again.It’s helpful just to notice and not beat yourself up. You were programmed to think that way. AngelaYeah. Like I wanted this thing, and then I was like, well, I could stop eating ice cream. or…VirginiaThat sounds crazy. AngelaI can spend my time thinking about this thing that I realized I wanted, or I could enjoy every good thing that’s happened. It is sort of similar to postpartum stuff, where there’s pressure that I think comes mostly from the outside, this idea to lose that weight. If it was me, I’d be like, just leave me alone to continue my fourth trimester crazy period where my body is directly tied to another person’s. Like, just leave me alone. Let me have this body that’s just for that. But instead, you start thinking about external things. VirginiaI feel like there’s some fantasy, too, that these changes will equal more time to work out, more time to be healthy in these very wellness culture-y ways. Even though the reality, as anyone who’s gone through a big life transition knows, is this is not the greatest time to adopt an aggressive new workout routine? Your days are probably chaotic and maybe more downtime and more rest would be nice.But I think all of that is tied into hustle culture and productivity culture. That somehow, whatever changes we’re going through only get gold stars if you can also prove them with your body. AngelaPeople who know me know that one of my lines is, “I work really hard and I’m never trying to work harder.” I grew up in a very, like, you have to excel, excel, excel household. And I’m like low=key lazy, I thought, like, compared to my family. I had a lot of shame around that. Now I’m like, I have a lot of output and I need time to recover and restore.The first month of being sober, I was like, I am a baby, who is feeling all these things that I have purposely been trying not to feel and all I can do is cry and take naps like a baby. I did that a lot.One thing that I realized going forward is part of my healing and taking care of myself is I’m resting and chilling out a lot more. I’m lucky at this particular place in my career and time that I can do those things. But I have struggled with feeling guilty. I’m like oh, I should be doing more. But actually, rest is really suiting me. And I feel like a season of rest is coming for you. VirginiaI am available for a season of rest. I am clearing my schedule.AngelaYou’ll have a custody agreement where you’ll have some time by yourself for resting. VirginiaYes. Prior to the separation, I would get a weekend all to myself once or twice a year. It would be this rare thing. And maybe not everybody does this, but I would do this thing of like, all the things I don’t normally get time to do, I’m going to cram them into this weekend. I’m going to like have lunch with a friend and do some kind of shopping I can’t do with kids around and also clean out a bunch of closets and organize half the house. I did spend my first couple solo weekends organizing a lot of closets. And then I was like, what am I doing?I mean, if you’re a stress organizer, you get it. There’s something very cathartic about doing that. But then I was just like, oh, wow, I’m really tired. And I don’t want to make plans.  AngelaI’m definitely not a stress organizer. Why would you do that? VirginiaNext time I’m stressed, I’ll come to your house. It’s a weird compulsion and it’s often quite helpful? But yeah, then my kids would get back and I would be exhausted because I did stuff all weekend. I think again, it was the self objectification. I was like, I’ll judge me if I just like lay on the couch and watch Good Girls on Netflix. AngelaWhat trauma caused this stress organizing?VirginiaForget anti-fatness. We need to get to the bottom of this.AngelaIt was sort of a rhetorical question for laughs, so don’t feel like you need to answer that. But if you want to go there, I’m here for you. VirginiaI’m just like, what did cause it?? I’ll book it for therapy next week. Making a note, making a note. We’ll get into it.AngelaDo you want to talk a little bit about dinner before we go to audience questions?VirginiaYes! So. Dinner is this thing that we have a lot of ideals and expectations around. And I think both of us have also been talking about how big life transitions can really fuck with your expectations of dinner and what you thought you needed to be doing.AngelaI grew up in a household where both my parents worked full time, but we had dinner together every night. I realized that I bring all of that to dinner every night. Expecting a four year old and a five year old to be like, like you know what I mean?Virginia“I would love to sit at the table and discuss current events.” AngelaI’m like can’t you just stay at the table?? And my husband is like, literally, they can’t.VirginiaLiterally they don’t have the motor skills, or coordination.AngelaOne of the things that I got I’ve gotten from your work is this idea of like, what is dinner about? What is our real goal for dinner? VirginiaYeah, I mean, it’s diet culture. That’s the goal. There is all this research that families that eat dinner together regularly, kids do better in school and have fewer substance abuse issues. There are all these benefits, but every media story you see about the importance of family dinner leads with less childhood obesity. That’s the big headline, always. Right there, you have like embedded into the premise that we are doing this to prevent fatness or correct fatness.Some really interesting research I looked at for the book compared the family dinner experiences of thin kids and fat kids and they found that for thin kids, it really did give them more chances to talk to their parents and their confidence was higher and their grades were better in school and all these things. But for fat kids, family dinner was a nightmare. Because it was like, are you sure you’re going to eat that? You already had enough pasta. How about you have the broccoli? No, no dessert tonight. It was this constant policing. Angela“You can only have dessert if you eat XYZ.”VirginiaRight. You need three more bites of this and then you can have one small cookie. It was this constant policing and micromanaging of their bodies of their understanding of themselves. Like, “are you really still hungry?”AngelaCan you trust yourself? VirginiaSo when I saw that study, I started thinking, okay, so there’s this embedded anti-fatness in the way we’ve emphasized the importance of dinner, of family dinner.But there’s also a lot of classism, there’s a lot of other privileges involved, like having the time to cook, having the budget. Angela It’s also assuming a nuclear family, which is not how most people live these days.VirginiaYes, yes. I mean, so many different pieces of it started to seem really messed up, but particularly the body piece. I think, if we want our kids to grow up being able to say no in situations where it’s good to be able to say no. You know, I have two daughters, I’m thinking about teenagers, parties and dating, and whatever. I want my daughters to be able to say no and have that no respected. And if that means they get to say no to me at the dinner table about broccoli, I’m going to respect it so they know their no really matters. That is really worth them not eating some broccoli!AngelaAlright, so a couple of questions are rolling in. When we talk about all of these intersecting oppressions, it’s impossible to not see the roots of them all are capitalism. How can we fight to change the system of capitalism rather than just try and make it a kinder oppressive system?Just starting off with a softball.VirginiaThank you for that very low stakes question. I feel no pressure whatsoever. I’m just going to solve capitalism now. AngelaI’m just going to be clear. Virginia and I don’t know how to solve capitalism. VirginiaIt’s not really my expertise. AngelaBut I’m interested in this idea that I don’t want to just make a kinder oppressive system. I think that I feel really implicated in that because I think that’s something that a lot of us do. But, I mean, do you agree the root of this is capitalism? VirginiaYeah, I mean, at the root of this is a $60 billion industry that wants to sell you weight loss drugs, and diet books and plans and all the rest of it. I am really wary of making this anyone’s personal responsibility. I don’t think that’s a really useful model for social change. I think we need systemic change. We need, as I talked about, the research models to be different. We need healthcare to be radically different, all of that.Because right now, medical research is propping up the diet industry is propping up for profit health care. It’s all intertwined. So we need a big dismantling of all of this.On a personal level, one thing I do is when I do want to exercise, I don’t give money to gyms anymore. Which is not to say there’s not there are great fat positive gyms, but not where I live. So they do not get my money because I no longer want to have the experience of like tuning out the anti-fatness all around me in that kind of experience. I’d rather give it to Lauren Leavell’s online workouts—shout out to Lauren.Or any fat positive creator of color, or someone doing awesome work I’d rather support. I think it can be liberating to realize, I don’t have to keep paying for this in the ways that we are often unconsciously and deliberately paying for it. The reason I’m really wary of saying this is all on us to make better consumer decisions is one of the key ways anti-fatness plays out is by limiting the options of fat people. Clothing, for example, is a huge one. And so I am not going to demonize any fat person who’s buying fast fashion because some companies that have really terrible workers’ rights practices and are a part of the problem in all these other ways are some of the few brands making their size. AngelaAlso, fast fashion is what’s affordable for people.VirginiaIt’s affordable. It’s really complicated but to whatever degree your privilege allows you to be making different choices, that’s a good place to start. AngelaIt’s worth just repeating, you know, there’s no ethical consumption in capitalism. Until we can dismantle the entire system, we’re all complicit and implicated in a certain way. And I think we can make better choices within that. It’s not on us to bring down the whole thing. I think making good choices where you can, making deliberate choices where you can, I think is really important. We’re just going to do a few little quick ones here.How would you discuss the health effects of ultra processed foods with a child without relying on anti-fat tropes? VirginiaThe thing to understand about ultra processed foods—this is a hard one to do quickly. If you want the deep dive on this, I did two whole podcast episodes on ultra processed foods. But the short version is to understand that a lot of the research on ultra processed foods is really in its infancy.A lot of the reasons these foods get demonized is not because of their nutritional makeup. It’s because these are the foods that we associate with poverty and with people of color and fatness. There is a lot of bias bound up in the fact that we are demonizing ultra processed foods as unhealthy. If you are on a budget, if you are very time pressed, if you need to eat something quickly and this is what’s available to you, an ultra processed food is a healthy choice. It is going to always be more healthy to feed yourself than to not feed yourself. It’s always going to be healthier to feed your child than to not feed your child. We really need to keep this in mind, especially those of us who are white and privileged, when we start talking about the problems with ultra processed foods. Because they actually serve a real good in the world. That’s not the same thing as me thinking the corporations that make them are good, I don’t. So in terms of talking to kids: All foods are good foods. All foods play a role. There’s no reason not to eat any particular food unless you have a life threatening allergy to it. There’s no need to demonize these foods. So I don’t think it’s something you actually need to overly discuss with kids. You can just say, “It’s not good for us to eat the same foods all day, every day. We’d get sick if we ate broccoli for every meal, just like we’d get sick if we ate Cheetos for every meal.”AngelaAs you’ve been traveling and promoting fat talk, are there things that you’ve heard or that are helpful supports for fat parents raising fat kids? Any highlights to share?VirginiaWell, I think finding community is super important and helpful. I mean, ideally in person community, but often online community is really important. The BurntToast newsletter is a really good resource. Sorry!AngelaTrue, conveniently also true.VirginiaBut I think where fat parents often experience the most bias is when they go to the pediatricians office, because pediatricians have high levels of anti-fat bias. There’s a lot of judgment, if you have a fat kid and you’re a fat parent. It’s like a whole situation. This may sound ridiculous, but bringing a thin friend to the doctor’s office helps a lot. Like my kids’ dad is straight-sized, he has had a lot more success talking to the pediatrician about why we’re not going to get on them about only eating beige foods or whatever. So don’t be afraid to bring in that privilege to back you up when you need it. AngelaI bring my husband to anything financial. And anything like that involves forms and stuff because it just eases the tension. He’s a really nice white guy, it really helps.I like this question a lot.Any shifts in how you think about friendships? How has sobriety/fat positive lens/divorce impacted friendships? VirginiaFriendships are the best.Tracy Clark-Flory just wrote a piece on her newsletter about platonically dating your friends. AngelaI think I talked about this when I was on your podcast. I had just come from a blissful weekend where I spent a lot of time in bed with a friend watching Love is Blind. It was wonderful. VirginiaI think a big shift I’ve made as I’m now not partnered is understanding we have this hierarchy of relationships in our culture and heterosexual romantic partnership is the top of the pinnacle. When you’re doing that, you often end up leaving all these other relationships, even if you’re still invested in them. They’re just like getting less of you. So I really love that my friends are getting more of me now. And that I’m getting more of my friends.AngelaI love my friends and my people, my community is everything to me. Like, I have found deep meaningful friendships with people who I met in Zoom rooms talking about sobriety. There are people with this particular disease that I have, that community of people, I’m just able to go there with them and talk to them. It’s been everything. I don’t think that sobriety is something that I could have done alone. I know it. There’s no way I could have done it. I needed people beyond the people who knew me just as much for myself because I didn’t want to feel, I didn’t have to feel ashamed or anything. I could talk to people who understood exactly what I was going through.And you know, with other friends, it’s like, I could get it. It could be tiresome to talk about these things over and over. So yeah, you can always make new friends and find new wonderful friendships.VirginiaI love that. And I was just going to add, I think for fat folks, having other fat friends is crucial because I think there is a shorthand and shared experience. I mean, I have a lot of thin friends and they’re great, but yeah.AngelaOkay, this will be our last question before we move on into closing. And I’m sorry, we couldn’t get to all of the questions!I have zero qualms about being the family member to interrupt racist, colonialist, sexist classes et al narratives. So why am I totally unable to talk with people I love, most notably my family, about the ways their anti-fatness harms not only me and my family, but them, too?VirginiaThis is one of the most common questions I get asked. And, you know, I don’t believe in an Oppression Olympics at all. Like all of these issues are hard and complicated and nuanced in their own ways. But fat is the bias that I think, well, we don’t have a lot of fat pride parades. Do you know what I mean? We’re still working on building fat pride. I mean, we’re doing it, we’re getting there. And there are decades of fat activism that have laid this foundation.But this is one bias where we internalize it, and we put it on ourselves in a way that I think it can be easier to call out racism and be clear that this person is the bad guy for saying the racist thing. I am not bad. You know, I’m not saying that’s the universal experience. Obviously, I’m white and I don’t experience it. But you feel like “I can name this thing that I can see is unequivocally bad.” And when it comes to fatness, we’re much quicker to be like, “Well, I feel uncomfortable like this, but it’s probably my fault. And if I was thin I wouldn’t have to feel bad about this.” We’re just much quicker to buy into the system. I think a helpful exercise is sometimes if you’re hearing a fat joke, or an anti-fat statement, and you’re like, “Should I call it out? Should I not call it out?” Ask yourself, “What if they said black? What if they said gay?” And if the answer is, “Oh, I would immediately name this.” Then this is the same. Recognize that you do the work here, too. AngelaYeah, I think it’s it is really, really hard. Like, that piece of the question that’s like, how do you tell someone this is harming you, too, right? I think that’s hard because people don’t want to hear it. People don’t want to believe it. It’s a hard thing to say. Like, you are lobbing these things at me. But actually, what does it reflect about you? That’s a really hard thing to say to family, and I think I don’t necessarily have an answer.But I think that there’s that way of like, what do we have in common and what do we lose? It goes back to that question of what trauma caused your thinness? Right, like, maybe it’s just your body type or maybe it’s years of being controlled or years of trying to please people or, I don’t know. Thinking about the ways in which our fates are tied together.VirginiaThe reason I think it is also hard to call out is people are often saying deprecating things about themselves. Like, you know, “I’m so fat” or “I shouldn’t eat the cookie” or whatever it is. We often want to rush in and say, like, well, no you’re not fat, which is problematic, because now you’ve just—AngelaSometimes I’m like, no, I am a little. It’s okay. VirginiaIt’s great! And you don’t want to reinforce the idea that fatness is bad. But if you instead say something, like, “I really hate that our culture makes us feel like we have to apologize for eating.” That immediately shifts the blame over to the system and to the larger issue. Now you have formed an allyship with them. We are both experiencing this. And without you saying to them, “You, grandma, are experiencing anti-fatness.” She may not be ready for that. But you can say, “I really hate the way society makes us feel so bad about our bodies all the time.” And now you’ve just joined forces a little bit. ---ButterAngelaOkay, so I was getting dressed to come here. And I was like, Which of my cute outfits do I want to wear? And I obviously settled on a giant, one piece denim romper1 and this oversized blazer, because I’ve been thinking for the last few weeks about this idea. Someone was like, “oh, it’s really flattering.” And I was like: What do we mean, when we say flattering? Like “you should wear something that’s flattering,” like, “black is so flattering,” or like “a high waist is really flattering on you.” It means it’s thin. It makes you look thinner. It means it’s flattening, right? VirginiaLiterally. Flattening.AngelaSo I was like, I don’t think I like that. Flattering should be what makes you or what makes something look its best. And when I feel my best, I’m comfortable.And so I’m in my oversize era. And I’ve decided that flattering can be oversized and drapey. And my butter, I guess, is sort of flipping that idea of what flattering is to being what do I think flattering is? And what makes me feel my best?Leave a commentVirginiaI love that we both wore oversized denim.2 We were having a mind meld. We did not plan it. I did specify comfortable shoes, which we did both do, but but yeah, we did the oversized denim, which I love. My Butter is very related. In packing for this trip—which is the last stop on the Fat Talk book tour. As I packed my suitcase to come here, I packed no jeans. I packed no heels. And I packed no underwire bras. This feels really big for me. So. We are recommending comfortable clothes, that you can take up space in. AngelaYeah, it’s so flattering! Whatever that means to you.VirginiaWell, thank you all so much. This was an amazing conversation. AngelaAnd thank you so much to Town Hall and to Seattle for being here with us!---The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram.Follow Angela Garbes on Donita Reason or on Instagram.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.---Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!1 - Sold out, but from this designer who has many other amazing jumpsuits.2 - Virginia’s dress. (affiliate link)

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about anti-fat bias, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole Smith.Today I am chatting with author and feminist philosopher Kate Manne, about her new book Unshrinking: How To Face Fatphobia.Kate is also an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University and author of Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny and Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women.In Unshrinking Kate has given us an impeccably researched history of how anti-fat bias developed and develops within us all, as well as a thorough and incisive dissection of our modern moral panic about fatness, all woven throughout with her powerful story of reclaiming her own body. If you have ever struggled to feel safe in your body as it is, if you have ever wondered who your body is for, Kate has the answers. Our bodies belong to us. All of Kate’s books, including Unshrinking, are available in the Burnt Toast Bookshop!Don’t forget, you can always take 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk from Split Rock Books! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)And if you love today’s conversation you should come see Kate and I together at Community Bookstore in Brooklyn on January 26. We’ll be celebrating the launch of Unshrinking and we would love to see you there!If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)Episode 125 TranscriptKateSo I am a philosopher by trade. I’m an academic. Most of my work for the last 10 years, on paper at least, has been about misogyny. So I’ve been very much mired in thinking about incels, and thinking about the misogyny women face online, and thinking about ways in which women and girls face harassment, and the forms of misogyny that can be also very subtle on a daily basis. And in the last three years, I turned my attention to the intersection between misogyny and fatphobia or anti-fatness. It’s kind of a dark topic to work on. But it’s also one I find kind of liberating to try to think through in community with others.VirginiaWe’re so grateful for your work. We are talking about your new book Unshrinking, which explores how anti-fat bias develops in all of us. It is profoundly well researched, because everything you do is, but this is one where you’re also using your personal story of reclaiming your body and identifying as a fat person. So I wondered if we could, if you don’t mind, starting by just sharing a little bit of that now?KateSo, in this work that I have been doing on misogyny, people often want to know: Why did you get invested in this topic? And I have been unable to tell my story about how misogyny came to affect me personally, without telling a story about fatphobia. So to me, misogyny and fatphobia were crucially interconnected and intersected in this really deep way back when I was growing up in Australia. Because I was, at the age of 16, one of three girls who joined an all-boys school the year it integrated. VirginiaYou have told me that before and it will never not blow my mind. KateIt was such a strange decision to send me there. The backstory was, I wanted to do this special international baccalaureate certificate so that I could potentially come to the States to study, which didn’t end up happening for a bunch of reasons. But yeah, I was just someone who walked into this all male environment and was very much perceived as a girl who was on the boys’ hitherto undisputed turf. And so it was an incredibly misogynistic environment to be in. I think it’s fair to say, it was a really traumatic two years after a pretty happy childhood. And the way that the misogyny was often practiced was via fatphobia and by making my body a kind of punch line, a target for jeering and teasing and bullying, from the ostensibly littler things, like having fat bitch scrawled on my locker—VirginiaYeah, just those little things. Tiny, little micro aggression like that.KateYeah, kind of macro aggression when I say it out loud. I was just labeled the fat one, the fat girl who was undesirable, and who wasn’t serving male interest by not being quote, unquote “hot.”So there was this particular incident that I talk about in the book, at the high school assembly where, you know, it’s always kind of horrifying. We had these prizes that are always awarded for “person most likely to commit white collar crime” and “person most likely to have children out of wedlock,” and all sorts of really actually noxious stuff that’s presented as a joke. But then they said, “and the person most likely to have to pay for sex is…” and I kind of braced myself ready for it. And sure enough, it was “that person is Kate Manne.” And the auditorium just roared with laughter. Because my body was a joke.And I should say, I am speaking as someone who has a certain amount of privilege when it comes to size. I identify as a small fat person, I was at most a small fat at the time. And I can’t even imagine how horrifying the treatment would have been for someone who was a larger fat person. But it was a really eye-opening way of being exposed to the sheer cruelty, as well as the material barriers that fat people face, and the way that misogyny weaponizes any hierarchy that’s ready to hand and derogates a girl a woman in terms of it. We value intelligence, so call her stupid. We value rationality, so call her hysterical. We value thinness, so call her fat. And we value sexiness, so call her the kind of person that no one could ever want.That is how it came to be something that I became fascinated with because even though I knew the word misogyny, it wasn’t a word that I reached for to explain the kind of treatment I’d faced. Similarly, I didn’t even have a word like anti-fatness or fatphobia back at the age of 16. It wasn’t until a few years later that I discovered an online community of people who were really pushing back against anti-fatness. People like Kate Harding, people like Marianne Kirby and Lesley Kinzel, who I discovered in the early 2000s, doing this amazing work of reclaiming the bodies that had been so socially derogated partly through this intersection of misogyny and fatphobia that was my formative political experience. And it’s an experience that I tried to get personal about in the book because I have found opening up about these things is a great way, for me at least, of finding community and finding other people who have similarly been shamed, who’ve been othered. It’s that moment when we can lift our heads and meet each other’s gaze that often feels really empowering and liberating, after having had our heads bowed in shame for so long.VirginiaI had so many emotions when I read that scene in the book, and I’m revisiting them right now. I just really hope some of those boys who are now grown men read this book and feel in their hearts that they know what they did. I want them to have that moment of That was that was what I did. And I have to look at it.So that is perhaps petty. But I am actively hoping for that. KateI love that. That’s one of the reasons for this subtitle How to Face Fatphobia. Like, it’s not just me facing it. I want others who, you know, we’ve all been complicit in it to some extent, but those who have been really active in it. I have that same hope that it will be something that we collectively reckon with and face in ways. People who’ve often thought of themselves as kind and progressive and not complicit in oppression, have often perpetuated fatphobia in these ways that remain really under examined.VirginiaI’m also thinking about how you didn’t even have the word of fatphobia or anti-fatness to name what you’re experiencing. That really was such a lack back then. I mean, it’s still a lack in too many places. And what it meant was that what we often did was to try to deny fatness. The counter argument would be, “She’s not even that fat. Why are you saying that about her?” KateCompletely. Imagine how liberating it would have been for someone to say to me, instead of, “well, you’re not really fat—” because I was kind of on the borderline at that stage—but “fat people are awesome and this is such a warped value system.”And I was someone who had been raised with really strong, anti-racist values and was taught to recognize problems in society. So that critical thinking lens was something that I think could have been opened up and widened to include thinking about how irrational and immoral anti-fatness is, and also how it intersects with those forms of oppression that I had already been taught to be critical of.When I came to the early 2000s fatosphere, it was this wild moment of wait, what if there’s nothing wrong with fatness? What if fat bodies are awesome and valuable and just as good and don’t need to change to comply with these values that are so noxious and oppressive? That was a lesson that I didn’t have any trouble digesting as a political message. It took me a long time to get there in my personal practices. But it was a political message I found so powerful and so resonant. VirginiaI’d love to talk about some of the other big misconceptions around what it means to be anti-fat. You spend a lot of time in the book really eloquently talking to the weight and health myths, which we talk about a lot here on this podcast, but I’d love to go even a level deeper. What do you think people misunderstand about fatness, sort of fundamentally? And how does that make the bias so hard to unlearn?KateI think one of the pieces of this puzzle that was really striking to me when researching the book is the finding that it’s actually not that we find fat bodies unsexy or undesirable or inherently aesthetically inferior. I mean, just a little statistic about this is: Fat bodies are one of the most common search terms in pornography. So people are, at least when they’re in the privacy of their own bedrooms or studies or wherever, they’re finding fat bodies actually quite desirable and quite sexy and quite hot. But fat bodies are derogated socially in ways that make that desire and that attraction really verboten and forbidden. So oftentimes we think, well it’s just a fact of life that we don’t find fat bodies sexy. And it’s just not true. I mean, we need to look at the history of this. So fatphobia anti-fat bias is something that is a very recent prejudice. This is something brilliantly brought out by the work of Sabrina Strings, the sociologist who has shown that it really wasn’t until the mid-18th century, that fatphobia really took off. And that was in response to the burgeoning transatlantic slave trade. That meant that in Britain and France, white people had to cast about kind of desperately for a way that Black bodies were, quote unquote, inferior in order to differentiate Black bodies who are being enslaved so quickly, and so brutally, in numbers that were previously unseen. They had to cast around for a way of differentiating Black and white bodies, and there began to be this association of Blackness and fatness, which meant that for the first time, fatness became to be this socially recognized code for a body that was primitive and, quote unquote, inferior.So it’s not that fatness was derogated and then Blackness began to be associated with fatness, it’s the other way around. Fatness was first associated with Blackness and then fatness came to be derogated in this really widespread and systemic way, for kind of the first time. I mean, it’s not that there are no hints of anti-fatness in previous history, but it’s more of a mixed bag until white people needed a way to differentiate their white bodies, from the Black bodies who they were treating in such brutal and dehumanizing ways.VirginiaAnd that’s when we start to see it institutionalized, embraced in this structural way, as opposed to just beauty ideals. You can look at how the Ancient Greeks certainly prized very muscular lean bodies, but this brought it to a different level.KateAnd, in some ways, in Plato and Aristotle, there’s a lot of judgment about gluttony, but there isn’t a lot of judgment about fat or “mega bodies,” which is kind of interesting, partly because, according to the historian Susan Hill, Plato and Aristotle recognize that a body can be bigger and maybe fat, without that having anything to do with someone’s eating habits. Gluttony they certainly frowned on, in ways that I’m critical of in the book. Because bring on the food pleasure, bring on the gluttony.VirginiaAbsolutely. KateSo the dislike of fatness is this very recent historical phenomenon. And it’s very contingent on historical processes steeped in anti-Blackness. It’s not something that is this inevitable product of human history or human preferences. And even today, we see that fat bodies continue to be liked and considered sexy. It’s just that people are reticent about expressing these preferences in as much as they’re trying to access social capital via the dating and mating as public history. So it’s not that we down-rank fat bodies because we inherently dislike them. We don’t inherently dislike them. Rather, we dislike them, because they’re often down-ranked nowadays, due to this highly contingent, historically recent way of thinking about fat bodies that is steeped in anti-Black racism.To go back to the earlier part of your question, I do think that makes this kind of bias difficult to unlearn. Because, of course, we all want to have access to forms of capital and forms of just human interaction that are going to confer prestige on us and going to be something that it’s hard for someone who is dating or someone who is just trying to be a person in the world to realize that their body is being rated on this hierarchy, that is based on this category weight, that is linear and infinitely gradable. And is sort of, in some ways, superficially, or at least temporarily, changeable. So it became so tempting to try to lose weight in order to access more capital in the dating market, especially for girls and women whose value is so often seen as dependent on how we present to a white male and non-disabled, wealthy audience of kind of imagined or real people viewing our bodies and judging us and comparing us with others. VirginiaIt’s just wild. I mean, I’m thinking again, about that moment for you, in the high school award ceremony with all of those boys performing anti-fatness, and performing this idea that fat bodies can’t be sexually attractive in order to uphold their own social capital, when, as your research shows—the reality is probably that plenty of them thought you were attractive. We’re all performing this dance around that that’s not actually reflecting what people really value or really find attractive is.KateAs fat women, we are often regarded as fuckable, but not lovable, to put it really bluntly. I know for a fact that many of those boys did find me attractive, but they felt ashamed of that attraction. You see how the system is so set up to just perpetuate these human hierarchies. Weight is a quality that is so gradable that it allows us to place everybody on this kind of linear hierarchy in proportion to body mass, or in inverse proportion to body mass. So it’s this very, very powerful, ready to hand way of ranking every single body in ways that keep us scrambling to find a higher place in a human hierarchy designed to make us not only shrink our bodies, but shrink ourselves. VirginiaAnother piece that the book does a really excellent job with, is dealing with the issue of body positivity, which I think has been pushed for too long as the solution to all of this. Like, Kate, if only you had known you were fuckable and lovable in high school, then it wouldn’t have been so harmful for you when the entire school ridiculed your body? And so you really rightly take that to task in the book. And you’re also critical of body neutrality and argue instead for what you’re calling body reflexivity. KateTo be clear, body positivity has radical and kind of cool roots in Black feminism and in the ‘60s, was a pretty revolutionary idea. I also think that even today, it’s many people’s point of contact with body liberation, or something that deserves a kind of more full throated embrace. I don’t mean to suggest that body positivity doesn’t have an important role in all of this. But I think, as I’ve heard discussed on the podcast before in really brilliant ways, it’s kind of been coopted by thin, white women who would just be embracing a handful of cellulite, or “here’s my three stretch marks from having babies.”VirginiaA single belly roll that only appears when you sit down and hunch over.KateExactly, exactly.So, I think body positivity has been leached of much of its radical political roots. And I also find the idea of body neutrality closer to what I believe in, but it’s also kind of lackluster. The idea that we should be neutral about all bodies, including our own, feels often really hard to achieve with a subject as fraught as our own bodies. But it also feels like faint praise is bad enough, but no praise is really dispiriting. So the idea of being entirely neutral about our bodies, it feels to me a bit wan as an option. One of the things I began to think about when I was researching this book is: Why are we proposing one kind of monolithic attitude towards bodies at all? We should be positive about bodies, we should be neutral about bodies. Why do we have to have one attitude and regard bodies as good or bad or neutral? Why are we ranking bodies in the first place? To me a more transformative idea is the idea that my body is for me and that my body isn’t for comparison or ranking or rating or consumption, or for that matter, colonization or correction. My body is for me. And that’s the idea that I call body reflexivity. This idea that my perspective on my body is the only one that matters. It’s very much linked with a kind of radical politics of autonomy. But it’s also the idea that my attitude towards my body doesn’t have to be any one thing, it doesn’t have to be a rating or a ranking any more than I go around ranking or rating sunsets. I can appreciate sunsets without thinking, oh, that one was a 7 out of 10. For that matter, being entirely neutral about sunsets feels a bit strange, too. We don’t have to have that kind of lens of this body deserves a number and let’s make it a positive or neutral one rather than a potentially negative one. Let’s just take the numbers out of it altogether. And recognize that, yeah, my body is for me, your body is for you. And that applies just as much to every single body, including the bodies of children. Their bodies are so often regarded as not for them.VirginiaIt’s so liberating to think my body is just for me, it is not for anyone else, and no one else gets to measure it. I want listeners to really just sit with that concept, because it’s super powerful and super important.KateThank you. It helps me in practical ways like learning to resist the male gaze, which for me is a lifetime’s work. Even stuff like, should I walk around the house with no bra on? Or would my breasts not look right if I didn’t wear a bra? It’s like, wait, my body is for me! I’m going to do what I want, when I want, in terms of how I dress, how I present, whether or not I wear a bra. That lens had this concrete and pretty immediate repercussions for me of like, okay, what is the goal here, when I self present? It’s all for me. How I look, how I dress, how I feel in my body becomes the priority. Does this texture of clothing feel good on my skin much more than what does the silhouette look like in ways that are often implicitly anti-fat? So, the idea of this reframe is kind of abstract and philosophical. But I can apply it to questions as concrete as do I want to dye my gray hair or do I want to wear a bra in this circumstance?VirginiaIt’s just so mind blowing to realize how insidious that male gaze has been. I mean, I’ve talked about wrestling with this now that I’m separated and I have time alone in my house. The first few weekends alone, I was still putting a bra on. There was literally nobody looking at me. I was inserting a male gaze that wasn’t even in the house. I had to remind myself, it’s just for you now. And it’s been truly, really liberating. But it was fascinating. I for sure identified as someone who’s done a lot of work divesting from diet culture and then to realize, Oh, but on these subtle levels, I was still letting it all in. KateI mean, we internalize that gaze. When we talk about the male gaze, it’s of course not just coming from men, predominantly powerful men. It’s not just an a potentially appreciative glance, either. It’s that internalization of a gaze that is often threatening or disgusted. That’s why for me it’s so linked to shame, like the shame of how do I look in this particular outfit or do I look, quote unquote, frumpy? I am all about embracing my frump and crone eras, but there’s still this internalization piece of it that is very much this shame faced echo of the fact that disgusted glances come at us from the outside world, and make us feel ashamed, make us want to bow our heads and kind of disappear oftentimes.We learn to anticipate that potentially disgusted gaze, and we carry it around in our own heads in ways that are really sapping, really pointless, and really harmful. Again, even for those of us who have done all this work in divesting from that performance. VirginiaI really appreciate how your lens on all of this is to connect the work of fat liberation with feminism. Because, a real drawback of mainstream feminism has been that it has often left fat liberation out of the conversation, even though they’re clearly so intersected, as you’re explaining here. KateI’m someone who’s been in feminist circles in a way since I was 10. I identified as a feminist from a really young age. When I went to grad school, I was around feminist philosophical communities, where, first of all, the topic of anti-fatness rarely came up. I mean, almost never that I recall. A lot of the bodies that I was seeing—and this is true across the academy, but may be true in philosophy in an even more pervasive way—a lot of the bodies I was seeing of women in philosophy were very thin.For those listeners who don’t know, philosophy is the most white male dominated of the humanities by a large margin, with history a distant second, but we are basically on par with things like pure math and physics in terms of our number of women. We’re about 17 percent tenure track or tenured women in the academy in the US, at least. I was seeing a lot of people who had access to the capital of philosophical thinking because they were a woman, but they were white, they were thin, they were wealthy, they were non-disabled, they were otherwise privileged and talking about ways in which various categories intersect with that of womanhood was certainly superficially on the menu as an important topic of discussion. But fatness just wasn’t something that got talked about. I don’t think we can do feminism without combating anti-fatness, without thinking through fatphobia in this really deep way. Just to name a few of the asymmetries here: Parents are twice as likely to Google whether their daughter is overweight compared with whether their son is overweight, despite the fact that boys are actually slightly likelier to be in that completely shitty and meaningless BMI category.VirginiaBecause girls will pay a higher price.KateParents also want to know whether their daughter is ugly. I mean, I don’t know how a Google search is meant to turn up the answer to that question, but they are Googling it. And again, I don’t want to suggest that boys and men aren’t subject to anti-fatness. Of course they are, in really important ways. But when it comes to the sexual fatphobia piece of it, we see that mom bods are derogated and dismissed, while dad bods are considered sexy, we see that about 90 percent of women are teased and bullied in their relationships with straight men. So for heterosexual women, about 90 percent of women have been, I would say, abused emotionally in their relationships with a man based on their body size, whereas the converse is at least anecdotally much less common. We see this incredibly intensely noxious practice of “hogging” or a “pig roast,” where fraternity brothers will actually compete with each other to see who can bed the heaviest or fattest woman. And this has taken place recently at Cornell, where I have taught for a decade. I just found myself when I read those news articles wondering, has this been done to female students of mine? Are these fraternity bros in my class? Like, just all of the feelings.This is just to point to the ways the intersection of misogyny and fatphobia is so powerful that I would go as far as to say you cannot understand misogyny, without understanding fatphobia, and you cannot fight misogyny without fighting fatphobia.And that’s the fight I’m in.VirginiaMe too.I do have some empathy for the the battles that feminism has fought and, and made progress on. We couldn’t do it all at once, right? So it makes sense that this wasn’t always in the conversation. If you’re fighting your way into equal hiring practices or equal wages, there’s ways you have to play the game in order to get into the boardroom. I sort of understand that logic, but that has only gotten us so far. And arguably, at this point, that mindset is really holding us back. KateI have that same sort of ambivalence, because one of the interesting things about feminism is it’s the only political movement that’s reputed to come in waves. And that wave metaphor really fills me with suspicion because the idea is like, inbuilt obsolescence. And then, a whole new branch of thought that just replaces the old thinking. Why do we think that about feminism and literally no other political movement as that model of undertow taking out one wave and a new wave crashes, and then it’s over?Misogyny directed at feminists is a big thing. So we somehow need to do this, we need to manage to be critical of feminism’s huge failures and at the same time, build on strengths. Building on the brilliance and inclusivity is something that we continue to work on learning from our feminist elders, while still recognizing we have a really long way to go. VirginiaThe wave metaphor also puts the blame on these generations of feminists. But throughout second wave feminism, there were always feminists arguing for intersectionality. It’s not like we just invented that in 2015, or whatever. KateAnd let’s blame, too, which speakers have been prioritized. I say this as someone who has a lot of forms of privilege that have allowed me to have the institutional position that I have and to be able to speak out on issues that matter to me. But that is done as someone who has white privilege and who has the privilege of being someone who is non-disabled and cis and het, as well as someone who is currently—this didn’t used to be the case—but who now identifies as a small fat person.So part of the blame for this is who has been allowed to speak by overarching systems of oppression in ways that have meant that the most privileged women have had access to the platforms and that we have forgotten the voices of the brilliant women who are Black feminists and fat feminists and disabled feminists and so on because they have been literally excluded from the conversation, and often silenced in ways that it is the job of every feminist who has somewhat of a platform to amplify those voices now, and to listen attentively to our trans feminist sisters, our fat feminists and Black feminists who may still be excluded from mainstream conversations within the movement in ways that owe to broader overarching systems of oppression, that we need to be fighting intersectionally all the way. VirginiaOkay. So for those of us who are in this fight, who are ready to be doing this work, who want to be pushing our unlearning of fatphobia, talk a little more about what that work can look like. What do we know about how to lower especially our internalized anti-fatness?KateI get a lot of energy and momentum, and just sheer joy in a way, out of letting myself be angry at the overall systems that are oppressing me and so many others and more vulnerable others in countless ways. What that often looks like for me is being angry at being enmeshed in systems that are profiting off our self hatred, are profiting off our shame in these really discernible ways. And are simply wanting us to buy more, and buy rubbish that no one needs, in order to have access to forms of social capital. So, sometimes it’s not just a matter of buying things, too. Sometimes it’s a matter of a system that profits off mutilating our bodies in ways that are just really violent. An example of this is how angry that I have been lately at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. The conversation about bariatric surgery is complicated and all my love to any listener who has gone down that road I nearly went down that road myself, but this is a hospital just churning through cases and taking shortcuts in a surgery that is a very delicate thing to do to a human body, to effectively amputate up to 80 percent of a human stomach that is functioning normally, for the sake of weight loss. This particular hospital is effectively butchering patients by rushing through these surgeries, not screening people properly, not having adequate equipment or technicians or assistance. Patients are ending up with these horrific outcomes, patients who are disproportionately poor and Black and brown Americans, because the system is set up such that Medicaid reimbursements mean the hospital is profiting to the tune of about $34 million just this year, based on conservative estimates, by getting these Medicaid reimbursements for patients who are disproportionately vulnerable and are even incarcerated in some cases. So they’re getting patients from Rikers Island and recruiting from jail and operating on these prisoners.So I can step back from that and say, wait, my negative thoughts about my fat body are both the result of and benefit a system that profits so handsomely, just sheer capitalist profiteering and racist profiteering and profiteering that exploits poor folks. That system, my thinking in negative ways about my body is often wrapped up in a system that is about profiting from that shame. So, that to me is a helpful thought because it immediately identifies the thought as one that in a way isn’t really mine. I feel something about my body that traces to anti-fatness, the thought isn’t really attributable to me, it’s a thought that is enmeshed in this whole system that is so immensely profitable, and is so readily exploited for capitalists gain. It kind of almost marks the thought as one that is foreign to my own thinking. And it makes it easier to divest myself from the actions I might take on the basis of that thought. The weight loss industry as a whole is projected to be worth about $400 billion dollars annually, globally, by 2030. Novo Nordisk, the manufacturer of Ozempic and Wegovy, now has profitability that outstrips that of its native Denmark. It is the most profitable company in the entirety of Europe. So, just to think: Anti-fatness is big business. And I don’t want to be a part of that. And I’m angry at the ways my body is being used as a site for that capitalist profiteering.I think that is the kind of thought that can place us in solidarity with other folks in a similar position, rather than searching for solutions to the non problems of our body parts that don’t fit the white supremacist, capitalist and ableist as well as misogynistic mold that we’re supposed to fit.VirginiaThe Bellevue story—I can’t remember the last time I was quite that angry reading that story. I mean, the part about how they accidentally operated on a pregnant woman? The fact that they weren’t giving people adequate information? it’s not just a delicate surgery, it changes the entire course of your life. People were like, “Well, they kind of made it sound like no big deal,” and now they’re left to live with the consequences.KateThey had one information session for many patients who are disproportionately people who may not have access to all of the information about these surgeries independently. So they will just suffer for the daily practice of trying to nourish their bodies, which, by the way, as you know, will end up malnourished in so many cases. That together with the serious side effects and the serious long term consequences, including increased suicidality.So patients were being given one mental health consult prior to these surgeries that are known to increase risks of suicide at least twofold, probably fourfold. It’s so irresponsible that it really just shocks the conscience, even for someone like me, who is like, not very easily shocked by by these things. More to HateIt Was Never About HealthContent warning for fatphobia, medical trauma, and death. One patient, Jasmine Nieves, 30, wound up in agony after her surgery; when she called for help repeatedly, nobody at the clinic answered. A month later, she passed out on a couch, and her sister called an ambulance. A CT scan revealed fluid pooling in her abdomen. She required emergency surgery, …Read more2 years ago · 141 likes · 22 comments · Kate ManneVirginiaYou think you’ve seen it all and then you see that.KateCan I turn the question back to you though? And I know it’s a big one, but how would you answer that same question for people ready to do that unlearning?VirginiaI tend to go to the same place of you have to recognize that it’s the system. I also find it really liberating to recognize that it’s a system I can opt out of by giving my body permission to exist as it is, by having my body be just for me, as you say. That is a small but important act of rebellion against this larger system. I think it doesn’t get you all the way there. There is still, what do you do when you need to access health care and you’re going to be the person in the exam room getting pushed into these things? And there is a lot more to it. But that starting point feels really like a really profound shift. And it then helps you start to spot it. Because that’s the other thing, right? This can be so insidious that sometimes you can be experiencing anti-fatness and not realize you’re experiencing anti-fatness. I mean, just like what happened to you in high school, at the time you didn’t have the name for that that was anti-fatness. That happens in so many more subtle ways.And just because you were talking about the bariatric surgery suicide risk, I was flashing back to a podcast interview I did a few months ago with a white male podcast host—and now my publicist knows that we vet those more carefully when the requests come in. I was talking about the relationship between bariatric surgery and suicide risk and while he was interviewing me, he just quickly googled and read the first Google results, without looking at what study it was, didn’t give me the citation. He’s just like, “Well, I’m seeing a study that says it didn’t raise suicide risk. So I don’t know. There we go.”KateYes, one study. Instead of the careful meta analyses you were citing that looked at the whole big picture.VirginiaIt was so jarring to me in the moment. But we all experience 1000 moments like that, right? Where someone is like, “No, I’m just falling back on data here. It’s just science, it’s about weight and health, about fat being bad.” These knee-jerk lazy assumptions that people make, they can really catch you off guard and start to undermine your sense of doing this unlearning. I’m trying to hold on to this different way of thinking about this. Then someone comes in and cuts your knees off from you. That was him trying to do that. And I mean, it didn’t work because I have done some of this and I was able to be like, well thank you for that one Google result.But I think you need to keep coming back to that awareness of the system. You can at least come back to it for yourself and say, what did I just experience when that doctor told me I should lose weight to treat my ear infection? KateTotally, that that really resonates. I’ve found myself often around this work in conversations where someone will sound like a little bit like an old me of maybe 20 years ago saying, “Well, you know, I’m all on board with this political project but I just don’t feel right at this weight and I just want to lose a little weight and what about Ozempic?” And, again, all my love to those who are considering or going down this path, it is very hard to survive in an anti-fat world. I am critical of the larger social systems and the practices, not the individuals enmeshed in them. I don’t know your body, and you know your body best. I’m all for body autonomy in this and you do you.But as a data point: I used to be 60 pounds heavier and I fully expect to get back to that weight and I think that will be where my body is most comfortable, actually. I’m this weight because as I talk about in the book, I had a period immediately prior to my big political reckoning with all of this where I did go on an extreme diet and it was really disordered. Like, you know, getting into territory that bordered on a full blown eating disorder, atypical anorexia was where I was headed. But I’m still at a lower weight than I was. And you know what, I still sweat walking up a hill because it’s not that I was fat, it’s that walking up a hill can make you sweaty, especially if you’re pushing up 30 pound person in a stroller, you know?And if anything at a lower weight, I happen to sweat more because, in fact, I’m less fit because I just don’t happen to exercise at the moment, even though unlike dieting, exercise would be good for me I think and I just happen not to be doing it right now, which is fine. VirginiaSeasons of life.KateBut we attribute all of these things to our weight, instead of people sweat or people snore or people have knee pain and back pain. VirginiaWalking up stairs is just hard. KateWalking up stairs is hard! It’s just having the thought that kind of treats our weight as, especially when we are in larger bodies, a go to explanation for what ails us. It’s so natural in a society where authority figures, especially doctors, and nurses and other medical professionals are going there, too. But when we can step back and be more critical of it and be like, well wait is it actually just that? I am allowed to sweat and I am feeling uncomfortable because I’m looking at myself sweating and not because there’s anything inherently wrong with feeling out of breath after doing some exercise.I think that kind of thought is also something that helps me avoid treating weight as a scapegoat for things that might be a problem or they might actually be kind of a non-problem, and about having internalized that male gaze more than about inherently needing for things to be different in my life, or in the way I move through the world.VirginiaIt comes back to your body is for you. And so, if that’s the case, your body can sweat because it is for you. No one gets to tell you that sweating is a is a moral failing. Butter often includes affiliate links. Shopping our links is a great way to support Burnt Toast!ButterKateSo, as our listeners might have deduced from my accent, I sort of have a silly hybrid accent now, because I’ve lived in the States for a long time. But I’m Australian. And I feel like I would be remiss not to have Tim Tams be my Butter.VirginiaOh, tell us about Tim Tams. KateDo you know what a Tim Tam is? VirginiaI do not.KateThey are an Australian cookie. They are a storebought cookie that is, I think, the greatest store bought cookie of all time. Obviously nostalgia is a piece of it for me, but my American husband happens to agree. They’re a chocolate biscuit. They’re a kind of chocolate cookie texture wrapped in usually milk chocolate. You can also get a dark chocolate variant. And they have this special cream inside.And I should say Tim Tams are very widely available, which wasn’t true maybe 10 years ago, but now you can buy them at Target. You can buy them at my local Wegmans.[Note: We’re not currently finding them online at Target, but here they are at Walmart, Wegman’s, and Amazon.]VirginiaInstacart has them for me. I will get them. KateAnd they’re delicious just plain, but the best way to eat them is very distinctive. You nibble off a diagonal corner, and then you suck hot tea or cocoa or hot chocolate, a warm liquid, through the Tim Tam. And the center goes molten and just mushy and delicious. And the chocolate melts a little bit. And then you kind of gobble up the whole thing before it has a chance to collapse.So it’s this delightful experience. It is very fun to do with a friend or a kid or partner or whoever is your jam to share these kinds of intimate food experiences with. But it is so fun, and they are so delicious. I recommend the double caramel flavor. It’s not what a purist would recommend, but it is a delicious flavor that is almost more Tim Tam than the original.I think there’s a deeper moral here though, Virginia, which is that temperature contrast plays a huge part of food pleasure for me. So in a way my like broader butter, and you know, I sound like a philosopher now, my broader overarching butter is temperature contrast is this huge part of food joy for me in terms of obviously ice cream with a hot fudge sauce. But also think like the savory side of it. What about like, a very warm, soft, doughy, kind of spongy bread with a cold dip?VirginiaYou’re right, temperature contrasts are big.KateIt’s great isn’t it? I’m all about maximizing food pleasure at this point in my life. I’m just a huge believer in having divested from diet culture and like it’s actually such a reliable way to get comfort and joy and pleasure in your life. Like, what do I look forward to in a day? Well, it’s partly the meals as well as conversations and walks outside and sunset. But Food is a huge part of it!So my Butter is Tim Tams but also the kind of glory of temperature contrast and food is just so my jam right now.VirginiaThe hot/cold. I love it. I love it. That’s such a good Butter, a multi-layered Butter.Alright, so mine is a show I just finished watching which I think I totally missed when it first came on the air. And it’s like one of the best feminist shows I’ve seen on Netflix in a long time. It’s Good Girls. It’s so delightful. KateIt’s so good!VirginiaNow what I am going to say is: There are four seasons and they got canceled. So you have to know going into it that the end of season four is a big letdown because it they got cancelled fast and it all just kind of falls apart in the end. It was a rocky dismount for me because they didn’t get to wrap it up the way they wanted. But it’s Christina Hendricks, Retta, and Mae Whitman play these three suburban moms who are well, Christina Hendricks and Mae Whitman are sisters and then Retta is their best friend. You have to suspend a little bit of disbelief, just go with it, just enjoy that they’re best friends. They all are dealing with different types of financial hardship and so they turn to a life of crime, as suburban moms do. They start holding up grocery stores. And then they get into laundering money, and then printing money and they just really go down a dark, sort of Breaking Bad-esque path. But it’s much campier and funnier than Breaking Bad.There’s just so much good implicit and explicit critiquing of the patriarchy and how their roles as moms is to hold it all the fuck together and how hard that is. And then, people judge them, and they’re like, I’m sorry, what would you have done in this situation? Anyway, there’s just a lot to love and you know, great fat rep with Retta and Christina Hendricks is not fat, but she is atypical for Hollywood standards. And their bodies are never anything other than considered spectacular. Tthere’s no anti-fatness, Retta’s as husband thinks she is smoking hot. It’s just great. KateAnd boy is she! I mean, I’m such a rabid fan. I have seen every episode and I am so here for this butter. I was going to say the cancellation was such a bitter blow for me. But the nice thing about it is you get to imagine how it would go.VirginiaBut you you agree it gets a little messy? It gets a little messy.KateYeah, I had a lot of forgiveness for ways in which it maybe lost its way a little in certain strands and iterations. But it’s such a good show. And yeah, the way that it’s so anti-capitalist. Such a good critique of the ways these women are just caught in the crosshairs of capitalism and they do what they have to do.VirginiaThey do what they have to do. And they’re very careful about not harming people.KateThey don’t harm people. I had a paper that I wrote just out of grad school “is stealing really wrong?” And I was like, kind of not!So as a moral philosopher I was very excited to see this show that embodied my thought about like we have all these like hang ups about stealing from big corporations still, but it’s more honestly that it would be embarrassing than that it’s actually wrong. So that is my my rogue thought for the day.I mean, insert critique of ways in which we’re seeing endless discussions of stealing at Target and all these things that are a huge media beat up, and are just designed to outsource security for Target to cops. Its not about actually increases in theft, it’s about wanting to get police involvement in security and the policing of especially poor folks in certain stores. So anyway, yeah, I think Good Girls is a show for our times.VirginiaIt really has a perfect little jewel box of a show you can dive into if you haven’t seen it. So Kate, this was wonderful, as I knew it would be. Everyone needs to go get Unshrinking and tell your friends and let’s make this book blow up, please. That is our mission on Burnt Toast. KateWell, thank you so much for having me on! Such a dream for me. I’ve been such a fan of the show and and you for so long. And yeah, you can follow me on Twitter—I am not going to say X—at Kate_Manne. Same on Instagram where I have a very small presence, but I’m trying to build that up a little. And my Substack is More to Hate.VirginiaThank you so much, Kate. This was great.KateThank you, Virginia. What a pleasure What a dream.---The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti diet journalism!

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!It’s time for your January Extra Butter episode. This month, we’re doing a few listener questions on how to find fat-friendly fitness spaces, how to deal with those coded “you look so great!” compliments, and how to tune out the mainstream media’s often relentless fatphobia (especially in January).To listen to the full episode and read the full transcript, you’ll need to join Extra Butter, our premium subscription tier.

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about anti-fat bias, diet culture, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole Smith.Since we’re on winter break this week, I picked one of my favorite episodes to rerun for you—and it’s a conversation that feels more relevant (to my life, anyway!) than ever.Today we’re chatting with lyz about divorce in diet culture.This conversation was inspired in part by a piece I wrote in fall of 2022 about how diet culture shows up in co-parenting. And it was previously paywalled, but I’m releasing the whole episode for free today because it’s just such a good one!Lyz writes the excellent newsletter Men Yell at Me. She’s also the author of God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America, and Belabored: A Vindication of the Rights of Pregnant Women. And she just launched a brand new podcast, This American Ex-Wife, which is also the title of her next book, coming out in February and available to preorder now!Don’t forget, you can always take 10 percent off that purchase at Split Rock Books if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talk! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)Episode 123 TranscriptVirginiaSo Lyz, you have written so brilliantly about divorce. You are the smartest person I know about divorce. I text you whenever I want to know about divorce.LyzWhich isn’t that often, for her husband who’s listening.VirginiaJust… when I have general questions. About people. In general. You are extremely knowledgeable about this topic and your next book, This American Ex-Wife, is about divorce. So you are here as my divorce expert and I’m curious: Do you see diet culture playing a role in American divorces?LyzOh, absolutely. Something initially with divorce that hits on diet culture is the “revenge body.” Anybody who’s gotten divorced will tell you about the stress and the weight loss associated with it—or not! Sometimes it’s weight gain. But there is the expectation of having that “post-breakup revenge body.” I’ve seen TikToks that are kind of making jokes like, you want to sit on the couch and relax, but you remember you have to be the hot one in the breakup.VirginiaI never thought about this. LyzYou know, like the “getting back out there” body. I know for a lot of men, divorce involves some free time, which, that time used to be managed by someone and now they don’t know what to do. So there is an aspect to the culture of the Divorced Dad in the gym. I follow quite a few TikTok accounts of divorce influencers which are out there…VirginiaWow, divorce influencers.LyzSo the divorced dad going to the gym, the mom trying to get hot and get back out there. It hit me so personally when I got divorced because I was so stressed out, and my response to stress is to not eat. I lost a lot of weight, and it was not healthy. And I remember people being like, “Oh, you look so good,” and me being like, “I’m so stressed out, I’m not sleeping or eating. You should be asking me if I’m okay.” I would get so angry about it, too, because then also people—as you know—people treat you differently. All of a sudden the men would see me differently because it was a very unhealthy amount of weight [to lose].VirginiaIt sounds like a a parallel with postpartum “get your body back” pressure.LyzYes. VirginiaSo for a lot of women you’ll have just done that in recent years and now you have to do the “revenge body.” And why are we not allowed to just let our bodies be during times of stress and trauma?LyzRight, right. And I think, too, it’s so hard when you layer on that the idea that exists in the divorce world that you now have to find someone else. I hate that. I hate that whole idea. That’s what most divorce books are. It’s like, okay, well, you did it, now how do you find love again? So that comes with that added pressure of being good looking which then translates to diet culture. Thinness, muscles.VirginiaI’m just remembering a piece of yours where you were like, “actually all women want is to live alone in the woods with our wolves.” No, we don’t want to get remarried. That’s not the goal but that is immediately the expectation. Why do you want to get right back into the thing you just got out of?LyzWell, I think there’s that pressure of singleness, right? There’s that stigma of singleness. But you’re right, most women post-divorce don’t remarry. It’s the men who remarry. It’s somewhere around 70% of women initiate divorces and I think it’s less than 40%—I need to fact check myself on that.2 But it is a lower number who then get remarried. It’s an overwhelming number of men who then try to remarry because, like, “I don’t know how to find mustard in the grocery store without a woman.” But no, you’re right. I mean, every married woman I know wants to just live alone in the woods with a wolf, so.VirginiaAnd part of that freedom would be not needing to be hot while you do it, just being able to be. LyzYes, not being a hot witch. VirginiaJust want to be a witch.LyzWhy do we have to have weird witch beauty standards? There’s this great moment I think about a lot in the book Don Quixote where he’s traveling along and he meets all these shepherds. And they’re like, “There’s this one bitch, she’s awful. She broke all of our hearts. She’s so beautiful. We hate her. She’s evil.” And then they’re talking about her and she just walks up to them and goes, “I’m not evil. I don’t like any of you. Stop talking to me. I didn’t try to seduce you. I just existed and you thought I was in love with you.” And then she’s basically like, “I don’t want to be in your narrative.” And then she goes back into the woods and she never shows up in the book ever again. VirginiaShe’s our queen. LyzI think about her all the time. VirginiaThat’s icon behavior for sure. So, what else besides revenge body comes up? Anything about divorce and diet culture.LyzThen there’s that whole aspect of divesting yourself of the body ideas that come from the relationship. I think there are so many ways that happens. You might have married a person looking a very specific way but, as we all know, time and life and children take a toll. And then the other person is like, “Well, you don’t look how you used to” and you’re like, “Well, I never will.”VirginiaThat’s life. That’s time passing.LyzAnd marriage is so physical. It’s a bodily connection, right? So having divorce enables you—especially if you’re in a bad marriage. I mean, obviously people can have good marriages. My bias is that I think marriage is inherently unequal and bad. You can have good relationships within a bad system, but it’s still a bad system. So I’m gonna get that out there.But so when you do divorce, part of that rebuilding of identity and rebuilding of sense of self comes with, like, who am I now? Like, what is my body now? And now I don’t have to manage that other person’s toxic body / diet stuff. I don’t have to manage the expectations of another person on my body and on my sense of self. I don’t have to have somebody judging what I’m eating. And then you can also make your own food. That was something that blew my mind that I didn’t expect. Like, I am not cooking for this other person who wants boneless, skinless chicken breasts every single fucking night. VirginiaThe saddest of proteins, trulyLyzHe would have lived on boneless, skinless chicken breast and microwaved frozen vegetables. I’m like, “let’s roast a chicken from Ina Garten. Let’s make vegan stew!” and none of that would fly. So, yeah, being able to feed yourself without the observation of someone around you just really changes things. And since we have 50/50 custody—and it’s always different with children around—but I get to sit and be like, “what is it that I actually want to eat? And when do I want to eat? And how do I want to eat?” It just makes me so much more thoughtful and grateful about what I’m consuming in my body.VirginiaOne woman I interviewed described it as a “food rumspringa” because she was free from his expectations. For her it was embracing stuff like Annie’s Mac and Cheese—like I don’t have to cook, I can just enjoy eating a box of mac and cheese for dinner and watching Gilmore Girls and be so happy. What was your favorite thing you ate when you realized this liberation? LyzFor a while I got really into cooking complicated recipes from the New York Times. That kind of stopped. I did the opposite of everybody in 2020, in the shutdown year. Everybody got into cooking and I was like, “I’m done, peace out. I will now be ordering food exclusively.” So another one was eating out because my ex does not like to go out to eat and and it was very stressful around, like, if you go out to eat and then what you order. You know, should you get a glass of wine or god forbid order dessert? That’s, like, so extra and why are you doing that? So just going out to eat by myself and an ordering whatever I wanted and dessert was a game changer. VirginiaI love that.LyzAnd then I’d make complicated recipes just for myself because I’m like, “oh, he didn’t like curry so now I will make curry.”VirginiaNow you can have all the curry! Revenge curry seems way better than revenge body, I’m just gonna put that out there. LyzYes, yes. And all bodies handle stress in different ways. Divorce is stressful, even if it’s a good change. And that expectation that you then get thinner because of stress is not everybody’s experience.VirginiaSomething that came up in my conversations with the women I interviewed for this story was was how little faith they had that a judge or the legal system would do anything to intervene when they were seeing their ex continue to parent in very controlling ways around food. Like the dad who, if you didn’t finish dinner, you got it served for breakfast the next morning, so the kid was showing up at school hungry and having meltdowns because he hadn’t eaten two meals. That seems so clearly problematic to me. But I guess I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about why family court systems aren’t set up to deal with this.LyzFamily court systems aren’t set up to deal with a lot of different types of abuse. Going to my lawyer—who was great and wonderful—she basically was like, family court operates like an equation. You punch in the numbers, you just assume everything’s equal, and there really isn’t room for understanding some of those nuances and the different ways of talking about abuse. I mean, it’s abuse. If a parent is controlling their food access, that is abusive behavior. But you have to navigate it very, very, very delicately. Because I think, especially for women, you’re getting divorced, so already there’s a little bit of a stigma on you, right? Like, you’re a little shrewish. I noticed people treated me differently, too, around their husbands. I was like, “listen, I don’t want your nasty husband, I don’t even want my nasty husband. I don’t want anybody’s husband .”VirginiaWeird energy.LyzSo there was a little bit of weird energy. My lawyer was just really upfront, like, “Listen, if you go before a judge in Iowa or a mediator—we got everything mediated—most of them are middle aged white men. They’re look exactly like your husband. You go in and you start making all these claims, well these could be things that they do to their children.”VirginiaThis could be their parenting style. LyzYou could turn them against you. So, it’s like, if you go in there being the “shrill divorced lady” who only nitpicks and says horrible things about her husband, which I got actually. Divorced women, when I was getting a divorce, told me not to be the “negative divorced lady.”VirginiaBut like, you’re getting divorced for all these reasons, right? Some of which are negative, right? LyzI think the problem is that we don’t talk honestly about our relationships. Nobody knows what is actually supposed to be good in a marriage because we’ve spent so much time hiding some of these things. I would tell people, “Oh, we’re not gonna go out to eat” or “How about you just come over to our house?” just to manage things, so we wouldn’t have to get into a fight later if I had a glass of wine. But I’m not being honest with my friends about that. I’m not like, “No, we can’t go to a restaurant because jerkface over there won’t let me order wine.”VirginiaRight. LyzSo anyway, you are coming into a system that very much thinks its objective but as we all know, objectivity favors the white man and favors the system. So it really is a balancing act. I’ll just tell a story that about religion. My ex was saying that I was awful because I wanted to go to a liberal Lutheran Church—and now I go to no church, which is even worse. He was telling the mediator, “She will not raise her children with the values that she agreed to when we entered the marriage contract so it is a breach of contract,” and my lawyer is like, “You can’t react. You can’t nod. Even if he’s being unreasonable, you just have to be calm and placid so that you look like the reasonable one here.”VirginiaSo you’re not the angry divorced lady.LyzRight. You’re managing so much just to get out of this situation and letting so many things go. And I know women whose exes did awful things and even then the courts were just like, “well, it’s a he said/she said situation.” So you’re just doing what you can to get out with the skin of your teeth.VirginiaAnother thing I heard was women worrying about how their bodies would be perceived by lawyers and judges. Like, if you’re fat, that’s going to be an added strike against you coming into that, especially if you have a thin ex.LyzYes. Oh, yes. The clothes you wear. I had to buy a whole new outfit for mediation. I mean, I’m a writer, I don’t have a lot of business clothes. My lawyer gave me suggestions. She’s like, “button up, nothing low cut.” Which works for me because I have no boobs. But God forbid you actually have boobs and then they’re like, “don’t dress slutty.” And you’re like, well, they’re there. Like, I have a body.VirginiaI can almost never get them to go away. LyzRight? Like, where shall I put them that would make you feel more comfortable. The whole courtroom appearance, which of course, again, is judged more for women. Men just have a uniform they can pop into or out of, you know. I can’t just buy a dress shirt.VirginiaIt has to be an outfit.LyzAnd of course, it’s expensive to do this. And you’re already like, I don’t have any money. That’s such a big aspect I think, not just of divorce but of our court and legal systems. VirginiaThe body policing. LyzYeah. We’ll judge you immediately based on appearance.VirginiaAnd how we judge mothers in general, right? The fitness of motherhood is often tied to bodies and presentation of bodies.LyzAnd then if you and your ex have very different types of bodies, then people are thinking “Well, of course they’re getting divorced because she really let herself go.” And then you get into co-parenting, which is fun.VirginiaThis is maybe a very naive question, but how much advice do you get on how to co-parent and co-parent around food?LyzEvery state does it a little differently. Iowa, God bless, is a no fault divorce state. So it’s really hard to upset the balance of that, like it’s going to be 50/50 no matter what, unless you get your former partner on video doing something horrific, right? It would be very, very, very hard. So, we had to take mandatory divorce parenting classes. And I’m sure it’s different in every state, but what that involved was going to this nonprofit called Kids First Law Center here in Iowa. They’re really great. They do amazing work, helping to represent children for low cost or free. So, you sign up for your time and you go sit in a conference room with a bunch of other divorced parents and then you watch a video that’s like a basically about how not to put your kids in the middle of fights. First of all, it’s kind of shaming because the beginning of the video, at least the one I watched was just kids being like, “this is awful. My parents are ruining my life.”VirginiaLike you’re not already worrying about that!LyzI just remember a child literally drawing a broken home and I’m like, wow, already I feel like the worst person in the world. And then it shows these different scenarios of couples fighting. There’s one where the harried divorce mom comes in from her late work shift and the kids are watching television and they’re like, “we’re so hungry mom.” And she’s like, “well, we don’t have food cause your father’s late with the child support check.” Then it’s like, “don’t do this.”There’s another one where it was like, a dad is dropping his son off back at the sad mom’s divorce department. And he’s like, “Oh, son, I would really love to take you to the big game this Saturday, but it’s your mom’s day and she won’t let me take you.” And then it’s like, “don’t do this.” VirginiaI mean, agreed, that seems not helpful to your child. But it’s not giving you a lot to work with. Like, what do you do instead would be helpful.LyzAnd it does show you better ways to say it. But it’s really basic, it’s like, “Talk to the other adult, don’t talk to the children. Don’t send messages through the children.” And I remember at the time being like, “God, this is so basic,” but then going through divorce and then having to constantly remind my ex like, “Hey you need to just text me instead of telling the kid” or whatever.VirginiaThe video is assuming that you can still communicate with this other adult.LyzYes. And that was something I had to go to therapy to talk about. There are so many times when my ex, I’ll say something to his face and he will not respond. I’ll send an email, he won’t respond.VirginiaYou can’t force two people to be grownups if one of them isn’t being a grown up.LyzThat was a lot of my summer was trying to handle some of these diet culture things that were being taught to my daughter. Our daughter, who is 11, is going through puberty and is in swimming. At her dad’s house they were restricting access to food and snacks, I think out of concern for her weight—which, already lots of different layers of problems there. Her response was to start hoarding snacks and hiding them and this is immediately terrifying to me because this is the age when girls develop eating disorders. Out of everything that I want for my children, I want them to love themselves, right? And to not think that there’s something wrong with themselves.So that was something where I’m like, Okay, how do I send this email which I know will get read, but I know will not be responded to. But you can’t be combative, right? And you can’t betray the confidence of the child. A lot of the things she’s told me have been in confidence. I had to have multiple therapy sessions where it was just writing an email about how to tackle diet culture with your ex and his wife, the kids’ stepmom. There is no handbook.VirginiaNone of this written into the custody agreement. You’re just figuring it out in these murky spaces. LyzAnd you have to assume that you have a therapist who understands these things, which I’m so lucky. My therapist specializes in disordered eating, which is something that she and I tackle a lot, and I’m still unpacking in my own life, right? So I’m lucky. She was already right there with me. I mean one of the reasons I wanted to write a divorce book was because I was looking for books about divorce, and they’re all like, “the happy divorce how to” and that’s just basically tips on how to manage your ex’s emotions.VirginiaLike, the reason you’re not married is because you don’t want to keep managing his emotions.LyzRight, which, learning how to stop managing their emotions is pretty dang difficult, especially when there are kids involved. So no, there is no manual and they’re not talking about it in that divorce class, which by at the end of the video, we all had to get into little small groups and talk about little scenarios, and then talk about what’s the good way to handle this scenario.VirginiaHow can you ever cover all the scenarios you’re actually going to encounter?LyzThey’re mostly focusing on like, money.VirginiaAnd schedule, like, I want to do something this Saturday and it’s your day with the kids, which are logistical issues. Which are not not stressful, but they’re not emotional in the same way as something like how we’re feeding the kids or how we’re talking about bodies. These are things that just trigger such deep core beliefs and emotions for everybody.LyzAnd I think something that is really, really difficult—and I think I’ve talked to you about this, too—is then trying to help your child unlearn a lot of things that they’re learning from your partner, which you’re also trying to unlearn. Like, I am on a journey and I will always be on a journey, right? I’m trying to help my kid unlearn stuff that I don’t even fully have unlearned and it triggers me to remember those moments from my own childhood. But you can’t put that on your kid because they’re different. You are just unraveling this whole complicated issue in the moment with somebody who doesn’t want to work with you. VirginiaOh, man, it’s so much. I do want to quickly say—you and I have talked about this, of course, but I want to say for listeners—what your daughter was doing hoarding food, this came up in the piece as well. I really appreciated the advice from Hilary Kinavey, one of the therapists I interviewed, of reframing that as a really smart strategy for a kid in that situation. It’s a really smart coping strategy to get herself fed when that wasn’t available.So for anyone parenting through the same kind of dynamic, it’s so important that we recognize the wisdom of how our kids are responding to these moments. Like, of course we don’t want that to be her only coping strategy in life, but I think what she was doing was actually brilliant.LyzYes. Virginia and I have a little text thread about our newsletters, but also I’m just asking Virginia for advice on parenting. So I remember telling you that and you saying, “that’s so great that she’s feeding herself,” and that helped me to immediately reframe the way I was thinking about it.And another thing I really liked in the piece was about kids correcting with food. Like the mother who talked about how her kids might seem like they binge a little when they come back to her house. I notice those kinds of behaviors at my house, and of course that really stresses me out because you’re raised to be like, “no more chips! No more candy!” and just learning how to see that as a positive thing, as a way of your child getting their needs met. Now I say, “in our house, if you’re hungry, you eat.” Know what you’re hungry for, trust yourself, trust your body. That helped alleviate a lot of my fears.Because again, this is not something that is really talked about. Hearing that it happens in someone else’s house immediately makes me think, Okay, this is a normal coping mechanism.VirginiaIt is obviously not ideal for a kid to be moving from a restrictive household and then having to respond in that way. It is a stress response and that’s concerning. But it also is a real power of divorce, that you have control over what’s happening in your house, and you can make your house the safe space for food. If you were still in the marriage, those safe spaces would be much harder to find.LyzYes. That that is something I think about a lot because I’ve got regrets about the person I chose to have children with. We all decide we’re going to be better than our parents, and we’re going to do things. So I think one of the biggest heartbreaks of my life was being in this marriage and realizing I’m not any different. I did the exact same thing. The only way out is by breaking this all apart and relearning life again. But then knowing that some of those same things will now be happening to your kid because that’s what you chose. I can’t control what happens in that house. I think, especially, too, for mothers, it’s really hard, because you’re used to controlling every single aspect. Like, you know where the shoes are, you know where everything is, you know where the milk is and the ketchup is. And then divorce is letting go of that control. And it’s really scary, because you’re like, are they even gonna get fed? And what are they gonna get fed? And how?But it also helps you build something better. I just have to focus on in my house. I can create a space where we can talk about these issues without fear, where we’re not managing other people’s emotions, where I can have a candy bowl on the kitchen counter. You know, just feed yourself, feed your body, and de-stigmatize a lot of the food.Something my ex would do and does is say, “You have to eat so many bites of so many things.” It just makes dinnertime miserable! Especially, like, my son is the most stubborn. He’s just a sweet little boy and everything’s easygoing until the moment you see his little jaw kind of like click into place. And then you can’t move him. He will not.VirginiaHe will die on this mountain forever. Good luck to you. LyzAnd sometimes the mountain is his foot is on the table, and you say, “hHey, buddy could you get your foot off the table?” And then you look under the table and he’s got his foot up touching the top of the table because he is not gonna let you win. So you can imagine that energy when… VirginiaCounting broccoli bites. LyzRight, one more bite of broccoli. When he was a toddler and he moved to solids, he dropped off the weight scale for a little while which was very scary for me. We had to get him monitored because they were like, does he have a healthy home? Which of course is like, oh my god, I’m a terrible parent. And I did have to unlearn some things! I remember the doctor being like, “well, what protein will he eat?” And I was like, “Go-Gurt, but they’re so full of sugar I don’t like to feed them.” I know, I’m terrible!VirginiaNo, no, I had the same thing.LyzAnd I’ve been going to this doctor for, gosh, 17 years now. So, you know, we know each other and it’s a small town, so we know each other. But she’s just like, “Lyz. If he’s eating it, feed him.”VirginiaFeed him the Go-Gurt.LyzYeah, feed him the Go-Gurt! And so making dinnertime a place that is not stressful is is just so nice.VirginiaYes. I’m so glad you can do that for them. Cooking complicated recipes that make you happy or not cooking because that also makes you happy.LyzOh my god, eating cheese over the sink for dinner. Amazing. Love it. VirginiaLove that.---Butter for Your Burnt ToastVirginiaSo what is your butter for us? LyzMy recommendation is not going to be super deep, but when I saw that question, I immediately thought that the thing I recommend right now is “Wednesday,” a TV show on Netflix. It’s so good. I’m watching it with my 11 year old daughter. I love it. She loves it. It’s so fun. It’s so smart. It’s so interesting. The mother / daughter relationship is great. VirginiaOh, I can’t wait. Do you think my 9 year old can watch it? Will she be into it?LyzMy 9 year old is kind of a weenie beanie and got scared by the horse in “Tangled.” VirginiaThat was a very large horse, in their defense. I can understand that. LyzWhat I’m trying to say is my kid’s threshold for scary things is very low and I know other people’s kids’ are much higher. So, it is too intense for my 9 year old but my 11 year old loves it. But I think if I was 9. I’d be totally into it because I was a weirdo. VirginiaShe is really into the Lemony Snicket show which we’ve been watching and that is quite dark. LyzIf she can do Lemony Snicket she can do Wednesday. It’s also very hilarious and smart and interesting. This should be fun because at least this has a happy ending. I remember watching Lemony Snicket with my daughter and getting to the end and her being like, there has to be another episode and it was like, “No, honey, sometimes life is just bad like that.” And then I was like, Oh my God, you’re the worst parent ever. But also, suck it up.VirginiaWell, my recommendation is a game that my kids and I have all been really into called Ransom Note. Have you ever played this? I think you and your kids would like it too, Lyz. So it’s magnetic poetry, the little word tiles. It’s basically a box full of the word tiles and then everyone gets their own little board and you draw a question and it’s like a prompt. Like the reason it’s ransom notes, it could be like “write a ransom note for kidnapping someone,” or it’s like write a parking ticket for very absurd, funny scenarios. And then you have however much time to play with all your magnetic poetry words and write your own little sentences. And then you just judge whose is funniest. That’s the whole game.We really love it, our nine year old is weirdly great at it. She’s very funny and often wins the round. Also we’re just judging each other which is a fun family activity. Even my five year old, she’ll play on a team with me because she’s like half-reading and she can pick out high frequency words. Or we just let her pick random words and then it’s funny to see what she comes up with. Anyway, it’s so fun. It’s low stakes because I guess you could play it in a competitive way, but we just like to make up the word things. It is marketed for ages 17 and up, so if you care you can edit the cards and the words a little bit because there’s some vulgarity. But my nine year old did a great job with a sentence involving genitals the other day.LyzI love those games, especially now as they’re getting older. We played one on my sister’s Switch. I don’t remember what it was called, but it was something a little similar where you had they come up with scenarios and you had to invent a solution to the problem. And the scenario was how do you make a fish be modest? My daughter’s solution was to was to convert fish to Christianity. And I mean, like she’s obviously joking but I was just like, you’re twisted. Your mind is twisted. It’s just so rewarding as a parent because you’re like, “Oh thank God, you have a personality.”VirginiaWell, and as writer parents to be so proud when they come up with clever little word combinations. I was like, Oh, I think this may actually be an educational game but we will not think of it that way. It’s a very cards against humanity kind of vibe but you can play it with your kids because the skills translate. LyzWell, we love games so we will be picking this one up. VirginiaLyz, thank you so much for being here! This was awesome. I am very excited for everyone to read your book even though I know it’s not out for a while. But stay tuned for that. Tell folks where they can follow you and support your work.LyzI also have a newsletter! It’s calledMen Yell at Me. You can find me there. I’m also on Twitter but I guess the internet’s dying. But I’ll be there tweeting along until I get hit by a meteor. Those are two of the best places to find me unless you’re in Iowa, then you know how to find me because you live here.Thanks so much for listening to Burnt Toast. If you’d like to support the show, please subscribe for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode.---The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti diet journalism. I’ll talk to you soon. 

You’re listening to Burnt Toast!VirginiaThis is the podcast about diet culture, anti-fat bias parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith.CorinneAnd I’m Corinne Fay, I work on Burnt Toast and run @selltradeplus an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus sized clothing.VirginiaAnd we are here with your December Indulgence Gospel.We have so many good questions this month. We’re going to get into holiday diet culture. We’re also getting into fat travel, which is a really complicated one. And of course, we’ll have your fat fashion recs.This is also a paywalled episode. That means to hear the whole thing you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber.