The Burnt Toast Podcast

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it's time for your October Extra Butter episode. Today we're talking about plus size fashion influencer and body acceptance advocate Katie Sturino — who teamed up with WeightWatchers last year. What happened there? And where is the line between body liberation activism and capitalism? (Yes, we struggle with that too!) To hear the whole thing, read the full transcript, and join us in the comments, you do need to be an Extra Butter subscriber. Join Extra Butter! Already an Extra Butter subscriber, and having a hard time getting this episode in your podcast player of choice? Step by step instructions are here! Episode 217 TranscriptCorinneWelcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark! If you're listening to this, you are part of Extra Butter, which means you're our favorite Burnt Toasties. VirginiaYour support makes all our work possible and keeps Burnt Toast an ad- and sponsor free space. Which is relevant to today's conversation! CorinneToday, we're going to talk about influencer and advocate Katie Sturino, who became famous on Instagram for her #SuperSizeTheLook content and for creating the Megababe product line. But more recently, she teamed up with Oprah and Weight Watchers, and has gone public about her use of GLP-1s.VirginiaSo before we get into it, let me do my standard caveat that I give anytime we do one of these episodes where we talk about a particular person's work in deal. Body autonomy is a given at Burnt Toast. Katie has the right to take her GLP-1s. That is her business. We're not interrogating that personal decision. We are also not "women tearing down other women," which is the other go-to critique of this work. We're considering Katie's entire body of work here, and we're asking: Is this true body liberation activism? Or is this an example of capitalism co-opting activism? I think that's a valuable question for anyone in the influencing space to be grappling with. I think Corinne and I both walk that line as well in our work. So we are going to critique Katie and some of the professional choices she's made but this is a lens we all benefit from looking through. CorinneWith that, I feel that I need to disclose that I have received gifted products from Megababe.VirginiaFor example! It’s a gray area, guys. I have not, but I would have been happy to receive that gift. CorinneI recommended stuff from Megababe before I ever received free stuff! But I have received free stuff. And I do like some of their products. VirginiaThis episode is also not going to be a critique of specific products. Preventing thigh chafing is a noble endeavor.So how did you first encounter Katie Sturino? Do you remember when you first became aware of her work?CorinneIt's honestly hard for me to remember because I feel like she's been around for so long!VirginiaLike 10 years.CorinneIf not more!VirginiaIt was the mid-2010s when she really came onto the scene.CorinneI definitely encountered her Instagram. I think it was her style content. I remember seeing her going into a store and trying on stuff that didn't fit, or trying their biggest size and it wouldn't work for her. And then I also remember the #SuperSizeTheLook.VirginiaFor folks who don't know: #SuperSizeTheLook is a series where Katie picks a photo of a celebrity wearing a really cute outfit, and then styles herself wearing the same outfit. Usually not in identical pieces, because the sizes are not going to work. But she mimics the outfit, and she mimics the pose really well. If it's a celebrity getting out of a town car with a purse on her arm, Katie will also be getting out of a town car. Or walking a tiny dog. She mimics the whole vibe of the photo. And the goal is to show you that bigger bodies look cute in clothes. Which is a message we're here for! CorinneWhat about you? How did you first encounter her?VirginiaWhat's interesting about Katie and me is that we are the same age, we are both 44. And we both come out of the New York media world. I learned this all researching the episode; I don't know her personally. I never worked with her. But we have sort of similar trajectories into body liberation work.And when she first launched, her blog was originally called The 12ish Style. I was also a size 12-ish. Those were my Midsize Queen years, before moving into full plus sizes. So we've had similar trajectories of being in this space first a mid-sized person, and then a small fat person. I've always been interested in her fashion and the way she styles stuff, because it was often quite directly relevant to my own body, though not necessarily relevant to everybody. She is also, like, a foot taller than me, I think? She seems quite tall in photos and she wears very tall heels, too, which is impressive to me, if not actually something I can pull off. But I've always appreciated the vibe and the energy of Katie's content.  She's very open book. A lot of her posts are shot in her underwear, wearing no makeup, in a swimsuit. She's always showing us, "Here's what my real body looks like." There are critiques to be made of this genre of content making, but I think it's also powerful to see non-airbrushed, not super thin bodies. I think there's a lot of value in that. So I knew Megababe, I knew #SuperSizeTheLook, but I didn't know a ton of her backstory. So I did a little research, and most of what I'm going to share with you comes from a New York Times piece that ran in June with the headline, What Katie Sturino Wants You to Know About Her Body (and Yours, Too). This is by Madison Malone Kircher and it ran June 22, 2025.We're going to get into it later in the episode, but Katie is not thrilled with this piece. And I just want to say I have empathy for being in the New York Times and not being thrilled with the way they cover your work. Can relate! So I am going to quote from the piece, because I think it makes some interesting points, and there's some useful context in there. But I'm not saying this piece does the best job analyzing her work. The New York Times describes Katie as "a dog-obsessed public relations pro turned body positivity influencer slash entrepreneur, who built a social media audience by posting candidly about her life."Katie began her career in fashion PR. I think her first job was at Gucci or Dolce Gabbana. She then started her own PR firm in the 2010s. And then found found Internet fame as a dogager, which is a dog manager, running an Instagram account for her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Toast. So this is how she started. Did you know she was a dog influencer before she was a fashion influencer?CorinneI think I do vaguely remember that.VirginiaToast has since passed away. RIP Toast. Great name for a dog, obviously. But I did not know that she started as a dog influencer. That was news to me, and, frankly, rather delightful. But: Coming from a PR background, finding Internet fame through dog influencing...this is a very specific lens to which she's coming to this work. Katie is now a multi-hyphenate. She had a podcast called Boob Sweat. She wrote a non-fiction book Body Talk, which is an illustrated workbook about self love. She has a Substack newsletter. She has the Megababe the product line. And she published her first novel this spring. So Katie is very busy! She is doing a lot. Have you followed her for recs, or you've used Megababe? You like Megababe. CorinneI've used Megababe. I like Megababe. Her particular style has never quite been for me. It's hard to describe exactly what doesn't click for me. It's just very clear, even just reading the this bio—she's very savvy, she's always hustling, she always has kind of a business PR angle, which I both respect and don't relate to.VirginiaThis is her New York media roots. I never worked with Katie, but I worked with lots of Katies. I know this kind of hard-charging woman who's extremely smart and great at marketing and knows how to build a brand and talk to an audience. So she has that whole skill set—and she could be doing it about body positivity, she could be doing it about a dog. She's interested in building a brand. For example, let's consider her first novel Sunny Side Up. Katie tells the New York Times that she worked with a ghost writer: "I don't have the traditional path that a lot of people who write books have had, and I needed help," she said, adding she felt no shame or embarrassment about having a collaborator."I love how upfront she is about that. A lot of books are written by ghostwriters, and I sort of wish people were more aware of that. Mine were not. But I have been a ghost writer! So I don't mind that that's a part of it, but I do think that it's interesting that it wasn't Katie had a novel inside her that she was dying to write. It was that Katie knew that having a novel would be a good brand extension. And the novel is about a plus size fashion influencer who goes on to launch a plus size swimsuit line. And... Katie's plus size swimsuit line came out this summer right after the book launch.CorinneIt's honestly mind boggling. How does anyone handle all that?VirginiaYes, it's so many things. And it does make me take a slightly different look at some of her some of her body positive content. For example, a recurring theme is her in a swimsuit. And the caption is always something like, "figured you could use a size 18 woman in a swimsuit on your feed," just showing her normal body in a swimsuit. But now that I know she's selling the swimsuits that hits differently. So is that just a smart swimsuit marketing strategy or does it feel off to you? CorinneI mean, both? She seems incredibly smart. I'm just impressed that anyone can do as much as she's doing. And: I do think sometimes it feels like you're being sold to, you know?VirginiaAnd because her work is centered around a message that has a social justice component, and a self-help component: Where is the line between "these are her values, and she'

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today, my conversation is with Lisa Sibbett, PhD. Lisa writes The Auntie Bulletin, a weekly newsletter about kinship, chosen family and community care. As a long time Auntie herself, Lisa often focuses on the experiences of people without children who are nevertheless, in her words, "cultivating childful lives." We’ve been talking a whole bunch about community on Burnt Toast lately, and Lisa reached out to have a conversation about the systems that get in the way of our community building efforts—specifically our culture's systemic isolation of the nuclear family. This is one of those conversations that isn't "classic Burnt Toast." But we're here to do fat liberation work—and so how we think about community matters here, because community is fundamental to any kind of advocacy work. Plus it brings us joy! And joy matters too. I super appreciate this conversation with Lisa, and I know you will too.Join our community! Today’s episode is free! But don't forget, if you were a Substack subscriber, you have until October 28 to claim your free access to our paid content. Check your email for your special gift link! Episode 216 TranscriptLisaSo my newsletter is about building kinship and community care. I live in cohousing, and I’ve been an auntie for many years to lots of different kids. I’ve always been really involved in the lives of other people’s children. And people who have lives like mine, we often don’t really have even language for describing what our experience is like. It’s sort of illegible to other people. Like, what’s your role? Why are you here?And all of this has really blossomed into work that’s definitely about loving and supporting families and other people’s children, but I also write about elder care and building relationships with elders and building community and cohousing. And I have a chronic illness, so I sometimes write about balancing self-care and community care. VirginiaI have been an instant convert to your work, because a lot of what you write really challenges me in really useful ways. You have really made me reckon with how much I have been siloed in the structure of my life. It’s funny because I actually grew up with a kind of accidental–it wasn’t quite cohousing. We had two separate houses. But I was the child of a very amicable divorce, and my four parents co-parented pretty fluidly. So I grew up with adults who were not my biological parents playing really important roles in my life. And I have gotten to the point where I’m realizing I want a version of that for my kids. And that maybe that is just a better model. So it's fascinating to consider what that can look like when not everybody has those very specific circumstances. LisaIt’s a dreamy setup, actually, to have amicably divorced parents and extra parents.VirginiaI’m super proud of all of my parents for making it work. My sister —who is my half sister from my dad’s second marriage—has a baby now. And my mom made the first birthday cake for them. There are a lot of beautiful things about blended families. When they work, they’re really amazing. And it always felt like we were doing something kind of weird, and other people didn’t quite understand our family. So I also relate to that piece of it. Because when you say "cohousing community," I think a lot of folks don’t really know what that term means. What does it look like, and how does it manifest in practice? What is daily life like in a cohousing community? LisaThere are different synonyms or near neighbor terms for cohousing. Another one is "intentional community." Back in the day, we might think about it as kind of a commune, although in the commune structure, people tended to actually pool their finances. I would say that cohousing is a much more kind of hybrid model between having your own space and being up in each other’s spaces and sharing all of the resources. Join the Burnt Toast community! So I really think of cohousing as coming frpm where so many dreamy social policies come from: Scandinavia. In Denmark and I think other countries in Northern Europe there is a lot of intentional urban planning around building shared, communal living spaces where there are things like community kitchens and shared outdoor space for lots of different residences. So that’s kind of the model that cohousing in the US tends to come from. And sometimes it’s people living together in a house. Sometimes it’s houses clustered together, or a shared apartment building. It can look a lot of different ways. The shared attribute is that you’re attempting to live in a more communal way and sharing a lot of your familial resources. In my cohousing community, there are just three households. It’s really, really small. We really lucked into it. My partner and I were displaced due to growth in our city, and needed to find a new place to live. And we had been talking with some friends for years about hoping to move into cohousing with them. But it’s very hard to actually make happen. It takes a lot of luck, especially in urban environments, but I think probably anywhere in the United States, because our policies and infrastructure are really not set up for it. So we were thinking about doing cohousing with our friends. They were going to build a backyard cottage. We were thinking about moving into the backyard cottage, but it was feeling a little bit too crowded. And then my partner was like, "Well, you know, the house next door is for sale." So it was really fortuitous, because the housing market was blowing up. Houses were being sold really, really fast, but there were some specific conditions around this particular house that made it possible for us to buy it. So we ended up buying a house next door to our friends. And then they also have a basement apartment and a backyard cottage. So there are people living in the basement apartment, and then, actually, the backyard cottage is an Airbnb right now, but it could potentially be expanded. So we have three households. One household has kids, two households don’t, and our backyard is completely merged. We eat meals together four nights a week or five nights a week. Typically, we take turns cooking for each other, and have these big communal meals, and which is just such a delight. And if your car breaks down, there’s always a car to borrow. We share all our garden tools, and we have sheds that we share. There are a lot of collective resources, and availability for rides to the airport ,and that kind of thing. VirginiaThere are just so many practical applications! LisaIt’s really delightful. Prior to moving into cohousing, we never hosted people at all. I was very averse to the idea of living in shared space. I was really worried about that. But because we have our own spaces and we have communal spaces, it sort of works for different people’s energies. And I certainly have become much more flexible and comfortable with having lots of people around. I’m no longer afraid of cooking for 12 people, you know? So it just makes it a lot easier to have a life where you can go in and out of your introversion phases and your social phases.VirginiaI’m sure because you’re around each other all the time, there’s not the same sense of "putting on your outgoing personality." Like for introverts, when we socialize, there’s a bit of a putting on that persona.LisaTotally. It’s much more like family. We’re kind of hanging around in our pajamas, and nobody’s cleaning their houses. VirginiaYou have that comfort level, which is hard to replicate. It’s hard even for people who are good friends, but haven’t sort of intentionally said, "We want this in our relationship. "There are all those pressures that kick in to have your house look a certain way. This is something I’ve been writing about —how the hosting perfectionism expectations are really high. Messy House Hosting! LisaAbsolutely, yeah. And it’s just such an impairment for us to have to live that way.VirginiaFor me, it took getting divorced to reckon with wanting to make some changes. I mean, in a lot of ways, it was just necessary. There were no longer two adults in my household. The moving parts of my life were just more. I suddenly realized I needed support. But it was so hard to get over those initial hurdles. Almost every other friend I’ve had who’s gotten divorced since says the same thing. Like, wait, I’m going to ask people for a ride for my child? It’s this huge stumbling block when, actually, that should have been how we’re all parenting and living. But it really shows how much marriage really isolates us. Or, a lot of marriages really isolate us. Our beliefs about the nuclear family really isolate us and condition us to feel like we have to handle it all by ourselves. So I would love to hear your thoughts on where does that come from? Why do we internalize that so much? LisaVirginia, you’ve been cultivating this wonderful metaphor about the various things that are diets. VirginiaMy life’s work is to tell everybody, "everything is a diet."LisaEverything’s a diet! And I feel like it’s such a powerful metaphor, and I think it really, really applies here. The nuclear family is such a diet. You have done, I think, the Lord’s work over the last couple of years, helping us conceptualize that metaphor around what does it mean to say something is a diet? And the way that I’m thinking of the Virginia Sole-Smith Model of Diet Culture is that there’s an oppressive and compulsory ideal that we’re all supposed to live up to. If we’re not living up to it, then we’re doing it wrong, and we need to be working harder. And there’s this rewarding of restriction, which, of course, then increases demands for consumer goods and forces us to buy things. Then, of course, it also doesn’t actually work, right? And all of that is coming out of a culture of capitalism and individualism that wants us to solve our problems by buying stuff. VirginiaI mean, I say all the time, A

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today, my conversation is with Laura Birek. You probably know Laura as co-host of The Big Fat Positive Podcast, but today she’s here to talk about her new book, co authored with Gia Gambaro Blount. It’s called Good to Go: A Fresh Take on Potty Training for Today's Intentional Parent.I'm years past potty training (thank God!!), but I honestly remember the pain of it better than childbirth. This is often a very fraught parenting milestone. And as with all things parenting: That means we encounter a ton of societal expectations and pressures around how to get potty training right, which makes it all even harder. If you, too, have been a victim of that viral three day potty training method, you'll want to hear this conversation. Laura has amazing advice about how to recover and do it differently. But even if you’re child-free or years out from this experience: What we’re really talking about today is how perfectionism and performative parenting can make life harder for parents (especially moms!) and really get in the way of kids’ body autonomy. And of course, promoting body autonomy is core to the work we do here on Burnt Toast.Today’s episode is free! But don't forget, if you were a Substack subscriber, you have until October 28 to claim your free access to our paid content. Check your email for your special gift link! And drop any questions or concerns here.PS. You can take 10 percent off Good to Go or any book we talk about on the podcast, if you order it from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, along with a copy of Fat Talk! (This also applies if you’ve previously bought Fat Talk from them. Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)Episode 215 TranscriptLauraI am the co-author of a new potty training book that just came out called Good to Go: A Fresh Take on Potty Training for Today's Intentional Parent. You can find it everywhere. And then I am also the co-host of a long running parenting and pregnancy podcast called The Big Fat Positive Podcast. I’ve been doing that for over seven years now. Every week for seven years! VirginiaYou are an OG podcaster! I love the podcast. I’ve been on the podcast. But today we are going to talk about Good to Go. Because you reached out to me and you said, "Potty training culture is such a thing. Can we talk about it?" And I am not going to share my own children’s stories. But I’m going to say, yeah, it is such a thing. And it really messes with our heads. And of course, my work is all about investigating cultural messages that mess with our heads, aka diet culture. So yes, let’s talk about potty training diet culture today. You kick off the book with the story of how you tried and failed to train your older kiddo, who you call Augie in the book. And the impetus was that you read the super popular three day potty training book that I think most of our listeners who have potty trained a child have encountered. Why did the idea that you could magically change potty train your child in three days go so wrong?LauraSo we kind of fell into that new parent trap of "This kid’s a genius!" He was hitting all his milestones early. He was such a talker. And I had been given that very, very popular three day potty training method that shall not be named. And I read it and really took it as gospel. And in the book, there were all these signs of readiness. And I was like, check, check, check, for Augie. It was stuff like, is he interested in the potty? And I thought, oh, this kid is ready, according to this book. And there were extenuating circumstances--namely, the pandemic. We were deep in the pandemic. We were also stuck indoors because there was a wildfire nearby, so we weren’t even able to go outside. That’s Southern California life for you. And I was in my second trimester with my second pregnancy. So all of these things came together to be like, well, you know, what the hell? Let’s give it a try. VirginiaWe’re trapped indoors anyways. LauraWe’re trapped indoors. Let’s spend three days naked and see what happens. And so the very first sentence of our book is: "I’m a failure at potty training." Which is a very weird way to start a potty training book.VirginiaBut so relatable. LauraOh, I hope it’s relatable! Because the thing is, we thought we were a success at the very beginning. Right after those three days, he was mostly making it to the potty. We were like, okay, we can take away diapers. But what we didn’t realize is that we had just entered into a state of constant vigilance with him. We were constantly reminding him to go, and we were always nervous about going anywhere and doing anything with him, like even just going to the park. We never got over the stress level, right? My mom would say, "He wasn’t potty trained. You were potty trained."VirginiaYou were trying to take him to the potty obsessively and monitor all the signs.LauraExactly, exactly. And the other thing was, I had this idea that having two kids in diapers was going to be hard. I don’t know where I got this idea! Everyone is like oh, you can’t have two kids in diapers.VirginiaIt feels like a really common cultural message. I’ve heard a lot of friends say that, who have kids close in age. "Oh we have got to get her out of diapers before the next one comes!" LauraActually having two kids in diapers is way more convenient than one who’s in a very early stage of potty training and a newborn! That was our first mistake. But we just continued to deal with this stress around going places. And at some point, I ended up having the baby. Augie was still out of diapers, but he was having accidents. In our book, we call them misses, but this author called them accidents, so we’ll stick with accidents. It’s the more familiar term. And he was having accidents all the time, and I was really stressed out about it. Then I take my new baby, we call him Sebastian, to a local place called the Family Room, which is where I did mommy and me classes, and then toddler and me classes with my now co-author, Gia Gambaro Blount. I brought him for a lactation support group. But Gia happened to be there, and I descended upon Gia. I was like, "Gia, I need your help. Augie is having all these problems with potty training. I don’t know what to do." And she looked at me, and said, "Can I ask you something? When you decided to potty train him, did you tell him it was going to happen?" And I was like, "No." Because the book specifically tells you you’re not supposed to do that. VirginiaYou just spring it on them.LauraThe book tells you, do not even have the little potties out, because it will confuse their little brains. And I didn’t know anything about potty training at the time, so I was like, "Sure, that sounds legit. Whatever." So Gia was like, "You need to go back and ask him how he’s feeling about this." So I go back and I look Augie in the eyes. I’m like, "Hey baby. I know we’ve been having a lot of accidents. Do you think you want to go back to diapers for a little bit?" And he was like, "Yes!" Instantly. "Yes, yes, yes, I want to go back to diapers!" And I was shocked by that, because I thought he was going to be like, "No, I’m a big boy!" VirginiaHe was like, no, I’m really not ready for that. LauraAnd so we went back to diapers, which, by the way, in the 3 day method is a big no no. Like, huge regression. And there was also this strict thing about having to potty train between 18 and 30 months, and if you don’t do it between those times, you’ve ruined them forever. At least, that’s that’s the takeaway I had.VirginiaAnd if you could do it beforehand, even better.LauraYes! So I was really worried about all that. But the minute we put him back in diapers, the stress went away. And you know, TL/DR, he is not ruined forever. We ended up actually potty training him using Gia’s help just after he turned three. VirginiaEverything in your story is so deeply relatable. Because I think those first years of parenting are such chaos. And this is certainly not all moms... but there’s a certain kind of mom who is vulnerable to this message of "control as much of it as you can." Have the feeding schedules, track the ins and outs when they’re newborns. There is a need to have a lot of information and structure around what is otherwise just this sea of "when will we ever sleep again? When will anything happen?" That makes us really vulnerable to messages like "You want to achieve this milestone by a certain age." Or "You want to achieve this milestone before you have another baby." There is this idea that we somehow get a gold star if we get it done at a certain point. And now that I have kids who are way, way older, and I’m just like, "I don’t even remember when it all happened." You don’t look at a bunch of seventh graders, and think, "Well, I can tell  you didn’t potty train till 3.5." LauraAnd I think that I am one of those moms who is totally susceptible to that. We had a sleep schedule with my first. And I think part of it is that I had my kids later in life, I already had a career. And when you have kids, any control you have over your days, over your schedule, over your life, just flies out the window. So I think I was grasping at anything that would give me a sense of control in my life. And rightfully so! So I’m not saying that those things don’t help people —I actually do think some of the sleep schedule stuff helped us. Or we got lucky, and that just happened to align with my kid's personality.VirginiaYou had a baby who was like, "Yes, fine, we’ll do a schedule."LauraExactly. I don’t know. There’s no way to know, but it did give me a sense of control. The trap with that is, say you have a good experience, like I did with sleep training , and then you go to potty training and it’s not as successful. Suddenly you think it’s some kind of referendum on your own parenting. VirginiaYes! LauraHaving a second kid is really helpful — or third or fourth, I imagine, even more— but having more than one kid has rea

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark! We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, here with our first-ever Patreon podcast episode! We're going to chat about: ⭐️ How we're feeling about the BIG MOVE. ⭐️ How to think about clothes after a significant size change. What even IS your style now?! ⭐️Figuring out fall uniforms! ⭐️ Diet culture in disaster prep. ⭐️ The one thing we wish straight-sized style bloggers would do differently. And so much more! To hear the full conversation, you'll need to be a paid subscriber. Reminder: Substack subscribers, make sure to redeem your gift to read this newsletter for FREE!🧈 🧈 🧈 Check your email for your gift link.🧈 🧈 🧈As we move from Substack to Patreon, there are just a few quick (but important!) steps you’ll need to take to keep accessing the member-only podcast episodes on your favorite podcast app.👉 Follow the detailed instructions below to stay connected!This episode contains affiliate links. Shopping our links is a great way to support Burnt Toast!Episode 214 TranscriptCorinne This is the episode you’ve been waiting for! We’re going to reveal our big news.VirginiaBurnt Toast and Big Undies have moved to Patreon! CorinneWe’re going to get into the how and the why, and then we’re going to answer some pretty juicy listener questions.VirginiaThis is very exciting. It's our first week over on Patreon. We’re still, to be honest, at the time of this recording, figuring out how to use Patreon? I would say?CorinneAbsolutely.VirginiaWe're still learning our way around, which I’m sure is the experience that many listeners are also having. Unless you were already a longtime Patreon user, which I think a lot of you were. I mean, I think a lot of us use Patreon. But it’s all new. It’s different. How are you feeling, Corinne?CorinneI’m excited! Definitely still getting to know Patreon as a platform, but it feels refreshing to be somewhere new. It has a very different vibe over here, I think. And I think a lot of people kind of had beef with Substack for various reasons. And so I’m excited we're here. VirginiaIt feels like it was time. Burnt Toast hasd been on Substack for four years. Big Undies is newer, but you have been working in the Substack space for about as long as I have. And there were just a lot of ways that platform had stopped working for us. And a lot of decisions that company had made that were not feeling great. It’s something that listeners have asked for for a long time. People are like, "When are you leaving Substack? We don’t like the Nazis!" And we don’t like the Nazis either. But it was a really big question of how to move these businesses, how to do it without us losing big financially, and in terms of both of these brands till having our communities. We didn’t want to leave and have nobody follow us.CorinneAlso, I think there’s an argument to be made that letting Substack turn into a Nazi-only platform is not useful.VirginiaFor sure, that has been my response for a long time, when folks asked. If we all leave, then only the Nazis remain. And that is a real concern. I think that’s what we saw happen to Twitter, for sure. So many people left, and it is just a cesspool. Is Substack going to become a cesspool? I have no idea. I hope not. I also don’t want to be overly rosy-eyed. I’m sure there are Nazis lurking somewhere on Patreon. I’m hopeful this company is going to do a better job of responding to that situation than Substack did. But I have worked for media corporations my entire career. There are Nazis at all of them. That's just the disgusting reality of making media. It is what it is. But I am hopeful. I think Patreon really understands that that has been a huge frustration of a lot of us on Substack, and I’m hopeful that it’s going to be better here. And not to totally pivot from Nazis to technology, but—there are a lot of great features here at Patreon that we’re really excited about! One of the biggest ones for me is that you can now pay monthly for an Extra Butter subscription after Substack only ever letting me price it annually. That might be very inside baseball to a lot of you, but so many people have emailed and been like, "I would love to do Extra Butter. Can I pay monthly instead of annually?" And I always had to say no, and now I can say yes! CorinneI think the Patreon tier system is very appealing. And I also think there is a nice community element to Patreon that did exist on Substack as well, but I think also it was kind of like a wider Substack community, and on Patreon, it feels a little more unique.VirginiaThis is our community. We are our own ecosystem, which is pretty cool. And I also just want to briefly say on the tiered thing: One piece of feedback that came up a few times in the reader survey–it was not the main throughline, but more than a few people said it—was "we don’t like tiered payment systems. It doesn’t feel egalitarian." What are your thoughts on that? Because I’ll be honest, I hadn’t really thought about it, and then I was like, "Am I replicating a class structure?" I see that critique. People wanted one price for all of the content. And I also think my response is, if I’m going to do one price for all of the content, then that one price can’t be as accessible as I want it to be.CorinneWe do rely on listener support to do this work. I also think sometimes there are people who want one email a week, but not two. VirginiaSO it’s nice to offer different options. On the pricing thing, we had raised the price of Burnt Toast over on Substack up to $7 a month or $70 for a year of the basic subscription. And that was in part because we couldn’t really do as much with Extra Butter as we wanted with their technology limitations. Now that we’re over on Patreon, a regular paid subscription is only going to be $5 a month, and Extra Butter is $10 a month. So I like that now we have a much more accessible tier, and then there’s the higher tier for folks who do want to support more or want to get more content. I hope it doesn’t feel so much like a class system and more like I’m trying to give you options. That’s really how I’m thinking of it. CorinneYeah, that makes sense. VirginiaAnd of course, I’m always going to offer comp subscriptions, no questions asked. If someone just drops me an email and says they need it, I’m always happy to do that. Not as many people take me up on it as you would think. Nobody’s taking advantage of it. People always still feel like they need to explain. You don’t need to explain. I trust that you would support the work if you could. You don’t need to let me know about your student loans or your husband losing his job or whatever. I’m happy to give the comp. So that option still exists as well, and there will still be a lot for the free list too, but not these Extra Butter episodes. These are just for the Extra Butter folks!CorinneThis is where the real juice is.VirginiaAnd now we made it a class system. CorinneOh, sorry. The class system is juiciest, juicy, and no juice. Dry toast.VirginiaOh, man, thinking of the names has been the hardest thing as of this recording. I’m pretty sure the regular tier is now called Just Toast. I think that’s where we’ve landed. It’s Just Toast and Extra Butter. Y’all did make some great suggestions. There was a vocal minority support for Salty Butter. Mostly me, I was outvoted. Some people wanted dry toast, butter, extra butter. And I was like, "I think now we’re too in the weeds of ordering toast?" So, yes, Just Toast and Extra Butter is what we’re doing. CorinneI love that. VirginiaAnything else we should talk about with Patreon that people are likely to be struggling with in this first week? I do realize it’s annoying that if you’re not already a Patreon user, you’re going to have to come over from Subtack. You’re going to have to click the link in your email, come over, re-enter your credit card. We are making sure if you had an annual subscription on Substack, you get credit for all of the months you already paid for. But I’m sure there’s going to be some confusion about that. Bu remember: If you were paying $7 a month on Substack, you will now be paying $5 a month when you rejoin on Patreon. So good news there!CorinneAll right, let me read the first question. I would love your thoughts on building a new wardrobe after a significant size change. Not just seasonal flux situation, but the kind of change where literally none of your clothes fit anymore. Yes, there’s the shopping part, but I’m more interested in your perspective on the mental components in terms of both body change and style change, because what even is your style if you can’t shop at a lot of the same stores or sections of the store? How do you do this in an anti-diet way that doesn’t suck you into the restrictive world of flattering capsule wardrobes, especially when all the pants are bad, and going out tops, which may be long and flowy, are back.VirginiaGoing out tops are back?! I have not been leaving the house. That is not news I have heard. It doesn’t have to be back for you, is what I’ll say. What are your first thoughts on this question?CorinneWell, I have a lot of compassion. I feel like it sucks. It sucks! I do think it’s a mental hurdle to not only be dealing with changes in your own body, but also your accessibility to clothes.VirginiaIt is very jarring. And I hear what this person is saying about, how do I even know what my style is anymore? How do I have style now that I can’t shop in the same stores? I think that’s a real process that people go through, where you just suddenly feel like, "I don’t know what I like because what I used to like isn’t available anymore." So why would you know? It’s like when you go to a new country and eat a cuisine you’re not familiar with. You don’t know what you like because you didn’t grow up eating that food. And then you might discover you love lots of things. But you’re not like, oh, I have a go to menu order here. You’re learning it all. It’s not always a

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Emily Ladau, a disability rights activist, and author of Demystifying Disability. Our conversation today is about the many intersections between anti-fatness and ableism. This is such an important conversation, even if you feel like you’re new to both of these worlds. We investigate who is considered a “worthy” disabled person or a Good Fatty — and how these stereotypes so often pit two marginalization experiences against each other. Today’s episode is free but if you value this conversation, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you!PS. You can take 10 percent off Demystifying Disability, or any book we talk about on the podcast, if you order it from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, along with a copy of Fat Talk! (This also applies if you’ve previously bought Fat Talk from them. Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)Episode 213 TranscriptEmilyI am a disability rights activist. I am a wheelchair user. I’m the author of a book called Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but all of that is really just to say that I am very passionate about educating people about the disability experience, and doing it through a lens that recognizes that we’re all at a different point on the journey of thinking about disability and talking about disability. I really want to welcome people into what I know can be a sometimes overwhelming and uncomfortable conversation.VirginiaYou have been a disability rights activist since you appeared on Sesame Street as a 10 year old. I saw the clip. It’s just adorable, little baby Emily. I mean, first tell us about that if you want! Or if you’re sick of talking about it, I get it. But I would also love to know: When did your disability rights work morph into fat liberation work? And how do you see these two spheres intersecting?EmilyOn the Sesame Street note, my family likes to joke that I am totally milking that, because it happened when I was 10. But that was the first moment that I really understood that disabled people do have a place in the media. Prior to that, I had not seen almost anyone who looked like me, with the exception of two books that I read over and over again. And one other little girl who was also on Sesame Street who used a wheelchair.VirginiaWow.EmilyAnd I’m sure maybe somewhere else out there, there were other things. But I was an early 90s kid, and the media had just not caught up to showing me that I belonged. So having that experience is something that I really don’t take for granted.I like to joke that in many ways, I am the “typical” disabled person. If you look up a stock photo of someone with a disability, it’s probably a white woman using a wheelchair. Oddly enough, she’s probably also on a beach, holding her arms out. You know? VirginiaAs soon as you said it, I have a visual. I’ve seen that picture. Obviously, she’s on a beach.EmilyYes, so I am sort of the cliche version. But at the same time, I’m not. Because there’s sort of an “acceptable” disabled person, and she is the thin, pretty, white woman who is sitting in a wheelchair. I meet, I suppose, some of those traits, but I am someone who, in later years so far, has come to identify as fat and no longer sees that as the derogatory term that it was always leveraged towards me as.Any relationship that I have to fat liberation work has been sort of an evolutionary process for me. It’s newer to me. I didn’t understand when I was younger how that fit into disability rights work. But I see now that we can’t have those conversations separately. First of all, every issue is a disability issue. So every issue impacts disabled people. And second of all, the disability community encompasses every identity, every body type, every experience. There are more than a billion disabled people around the world. So you absolutely have every single possible body type within the disability community. And if we are not talking about fat liberation, if we are not talking about LGBTQIA+ rights, if we are not talking about ensuring that our work is meaningfully intersectional, then it’s not actually disability rights work.VirginiaBut it is tricky to figure out how all those things intersect and fit together for sure.EmilyI feel like I’m constantly playing a game of Tetris with that. And I don’t mean that to say, oh, woe is me. But more so, how do we get society to recognize how those pieces interlock with one another?VirginiaDo you mind sharing a little bit about how anti-fatness shows up in your own experiences? Sometimes it’s helpful to name those moments, because some people listening might think, oh, I’ve had that too, and I didn’t know to name it as anti-fatness, or, oh, I’ve been on the wrong side of that. And it’s helpful to hear why that was not helpful.EmilyThere is no clear direction to take this answer, because it’s impacted me in two diametrically opposed ways.The first is that I have been judged incredibly harshly as being lazy, as being unhealthy, as being someone who maybe doesn’t take care of myself in the way that I should. And the wheelchair is seen as the cause of that.On the flip side, I have also been treated as though disability is the only cause of anything going on in my body, and therefore I should be given a free pass if I am considered, as doctors would say, “overweight.”VirginiaIt’s like, Oh, it’s okay. You’re in a wheelchair. What can we do? We can’t expect you to go for a run.EmilyExactly. So you see what I mean. It’s either one or the other. I’m either bad and lazy or it’s like, oh, poor you. You can’t get up and exercise.VirginiaBoth of those are such judgmental, patronizing ways to talk about you and your body.EmilyThey’re super frustrating. I think that both of those are anti-fatness in their own right. But for me, it sends conflicting messages, because I’m trying to seek medical support for certain issues. And some doctors are like, “Lose weight!” And other doctors are like, “Well, we can’t do anything because you’re in a wheelchair.” And so both of those are very unhelpful responses.VirginiaOh man, it really speaks to the lack of intersectional care in medicine, that people don’t know how to hold these two facts together and also give you comprehensive medical care at the same time.EmilyI wish that we could just have disabled people speaking with medical students as a requirement in every single medical school program. But instead, I feel like we’re either completely relegated to the sidelines of conversations in medical school, or maybe we’re brought up in very clinical and dehumanizing ways, and we don’t stop to think holistically about a person.It’s interesting, because my mom has often said—and I should note, she has the same disability that I do. So she’s a wheelchair user as well. But she feels very strongly that a lot of other medical issues that I am dealing with now were overlooked when I was younger, because everybody was so hung up on my disability that nobody was offering me the support that I needed for other things that could have, in turn, prevented some of what I’m now navigating.So it seems like healthcare can’t hold multiple truths at once.They can’t think about your body and think about everything going on. It’s either you’re fat or you’re disabled.VirginiaGod forbid you have a health condition that is not weight linked and not linked to your disability. That’s going to throw them completely for a loop.EmilyYeah, it’s very much a binary. I think that it’s led to a lot of confusion among healthcare providers. Certainly, I know there have been delayed diagnoses on many, many things. I’ve also had it leveraged against me in terms of what I would consider chronic illness, because I would get sick pretty regularly when I was a child, and every time I would throw up, it would be thrown in my face: “Well you’re eating poorly. You’re not taking care of yourself.” And nobody thought to do anything to check what was actually going on. They just thought that I was not taking care of myself. Turns out I had gallstones and needed my gallbladder removed. But when people see the wheelchair, they don’t take me seriously.VirginiaNo, and let’s be clear: Gallstones is not a condition you can treat by eating salad. Like, that’s not something you can nutrition your way out of.EmilyI could not lettuce my way out of that one.VirginiaAre there any strategies you’ve figured out that helps you get a doctor to cut through some of those biases, or cut through some of that noise and actually focus on what you need them to focus on?EmilyI have to rehearse what I want to say in a doctor’s appointment. And I don’t think I’m unique in that. I’m sure that there are plenty of people who put together their notes and think through very carefully what they want to say before they go. As much as doctors tend to be frustrated when the patient comes in and it’s clear that they were reading WebMD, I’ve found I need to point them in the right direction, because at least it gets them started down the path that I’m hoping to explore.And I’m not saying that I think that I have years of medical school worth of expertise, but when I was little, I used to always complain to my parents, “You’re not in my body. You don’t know how I’m feeling.”VirginiaSo wise.EmilyAnd I think that that remains relevant. I’m not trying to be a difficult patient. But I have very strong awareness of what is happening internally and externally. And so if I come in and I seem like I have it together and I’m prepared, I feel like doctors take me more seriously. And I have a lot of privilege here, because I am a white woman. I communicate verbally. English is my first language. So in a lot of ways, I can prepare in this way. But I don’t think I should have to, to get the medical care that I need.VirginiaDoctors should be meeting us where

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!We are Corinne Fay and Virginia Sole-Smith. These episodes are usually just for our Extra Butter membership tier — but today we’re releasing this one to the whole list. So enjoy! (And if you love it, go paid so you don’t miss the next one!) Episode 212 TranscriptCorinneToday is a family meeting episode. We’re catching up on summer breaks, back to school, and a whole bunch of diet culture news stories that we’ve been wanting to discuss with you all.VirginiaWe’re also remembering how to make a podcast, because we haven’t recorded together in like six weeks. And it didn’t start off great. But I think we’re ready to go now.CorinneSomeone definitely said, “What day is it?”VirginiaIt’s hard coming out of summer mode. I don’t know if you feel that because you don’t have kids, during back to school, but it is a culture shift.CorinneI don’t think I feel the back to school thing as much, but I’m still in Maine, and it’s actively fall. It’s actively getting cold, and I’m just like, what is happening? I feel this pressure to do something, but I’m not sure what? Hibernate?Virginia“Should I buy a notebook? Should I be wearing fleece? I could go either way.” I don’t know. It’s weird. It is the start of fall. So we are moving into fall mindset. But like, don’t rush me, you know? The dahlias bloom till first frost. That’s my summer.CorinneSummer is so brief.VirginiaI’m having a lot of clothing feelings right now. I am not in a good place getting dressed, and it is for sure weather related, shoulder season-related. I’m in my annual conundrum of when do the Birkenstocks go away? When must our toes be covered for polite society? Am I showing arms? I just I don’t even know how to get dressed. I hate all my clothes. Everything’s terrible.CorinneI think this is part of what I’m feeling. I don’t have enough warm clothes and I also don’t want to buy another pair of sweatpants.VirginiaAnd you’re traveling. So you’re like, “I have warm clothes at home.” Didn’t bring them because you didn’t understand, even though you grew up in Maine and should remember that fall starts quite early there.CorinneI need to get it tattooed on my body. Bring a sweater, bring sweatpants.VirginiaWell, to be fair for this Maine trip, you were really focused on your sister’s wedding. You had your nephew. You’ve had a lot going on.CorinneI was very focused on August, and really not thinking about September.VirginiaWill we even exist after? I mean, that’s how it always is when you’re gearing up for a big event, the post-event doesn’t exist.And I don’t know if you do the thing where you’re like, well, I can deal with that after the big event. And then suddenly it’s after the big event. You’re like, well, now there’s 47 things I need to deal with.CorinneI absolutely do that. Now I’m like, wait. How and when do I get back to New Mexico? Am I going back to New Mexico ever? In which case maybe I do need to buy sweatpants?VirginiaIt’s so hard. Even without a wedding —I feel like all summer, because I have pretty skeleton childcare and I’m wanting to take time off, and it’s a privilege that our job allows some flexibility like that, so when I get requests to, like, do a podcast, do a special thing. I’m like, “Talk to me in September. I can’t do it this summer. Summer mode Virginia can’t do anything extra!” And now I’ve just spent the week saying no to lots of things, because September me can’t do it either. That was folly. I should have just said no the first time!That’s one of those life lessons I’m always relearning that’s really funny. If it’s not an instant yes, it’s a no. And I so often fall into the trap of it’s not an instant yes, so let me kick that can down the curb a little bit, and then then I feel ruder because they come back and I’m like, no, I’m sorry. Actually, we were never going to do that.CorinneAs someone who’s been on the other side of that where, like, I’ll reach out to someone for the Style Questionnaire, and they’ll be like, “Oh, can you ask me in two months?” And then when I reach out in two months, and they’re like, “No.”VirginiaTotally. I’m on the other side of it all the time when we’re booking podcast guests. So I’m completely aware of how shitty it feels. So I have a resolution. Summer Virginia just has to say no to things and not push it to Fall Virginia. Everyone hold me accountable next summer, because I’m so sorry to everybody I’ve said no to this week, but September is a real intense parenting month. There are just a lot of moving parts.I get 62 emails a day from the school. The middle school just announced back to school night will be tomorrow. They told us yesterday! One cool thing is, my older kid is in seventh grade now, so I no longer have to scramble for babysitters, which is a real achievement unlocked. Although she’s going to realize at some point that she should increase her rates with me.CorinneOh, you pay her!VirginiaFor stuff where I’m going to be out of the house and need her to put her sister to bed. It’s one thing, if I’m like, “I’m going to the store, you guys don’t want to come.” Fine. You can doodle around at home. And it’s not even really babysitting. She’s going to ignore her the whole time. But I’m going to be out from 6 to 8pm tomorrow night. I need her to actually make sure her younger sibling gets in pajamas and brushes teeth and, moves towards bed. I’m not expecting them to be in bed when I get home, but I would like them to not be nowhere close.CorinneThat’s really sweet.VirginiaPlus we have some big stuff in the works for both Burnt Toast and Big Undies, which we cannot discuss just yet. Yes, I am actively teasing it for you all.CorinneYou’re going to bring that up now?! I feel like we should mention it at the end.VirginiaI think we can mention it whenever we feel like? I think they’re probably like, “Why are they both doing reader surveys? What’s going on?” And we can’t say yet, but there’s something going on, and it’s also requiring a lot of our time and attention.CorinneWe’re really busy. But I think it’s going to be really good, and everyone’s going to love it.VirginiaIn the meantime, though: What are we wearing? Real talk, what are we wearing to get through this weird it’s not summer, it’s not fall, it’s some hybrid state. Are you still wearing open toed shoes? Sandals?CorinneNo, I’m not.VirginiaOkay. Should I stop, too?CorinneI mean, I’m only not because I’m cold. It depends on if you’re cold. I also think now is kind of the perfect time for socks with sandals.VirginiaMost of my sandals are something between my toes style. CorinneOh, I was thinking, like, socks with Birkenstocks.VirginiaAh! I do have some of the two strap Birkenstocks, and I don’t tend to wear them a lot in summer. Maybe I should experiment!CorinneI feel like, when you wear socks with the two strap Birkenstocks, they become really cozy.VirginiaI don’t wear them a lot in summer because I don’t have particularly wide feet, and they’re a little wide on me. But the sock would solve for that! And they would be cozy… all right, I’m going to experiment with this, as part of my shoulder season style.CorinneI’m still figuring out my fall must haves, which is one of my favorite topics. Although I will say I feel like this year I’ve seen a lot of people posting like, “I don’t want to hear about back to school, or I don’t want to hear about fall fashion.”VirginiaI have terrible news for people about this podcast. CorinneI feel it’s very light hearted. It could be literally anything like, who cares? We are entering fall, so…VirginiaTime is passing.CorinneI am getting cold. I do want to put on socks with my sandals and sweatshirts.VirginiaTrigger warning for anyone who is not available for a fall fashion conversation.CorinneMaybe by the time this comes out, people will be ready.I know this is like florals for spring, but I’m feeling for fall… brown pants.VirginiaWait, what? You’re blowing my mind? You’ve been feeling brown for a little while. CorinneBrown has been ramping up. I’m wearing brown pants right now.VirginiaIs it one of your colors, as a true spring?CorinneWell, I do think there are definitely some camels. And I think brown is preferable to black. So I’m thinking brown pants instead of black pants.VirginiaOh, I don’t even know what I’m thinking about pants. I’m thinking frustration with pants. I have my one pair of jeans that I reliably wear. I think I need to order another pair in case they stop making them. I’m at a scarcity mindset point with those Gap jeans. I mean, they aren’t going to stop making them. They’ve had them for years, but I just feel like I need an insurance policy.CorinneDo you fit other Gap pants, or just the jeans?VirginiaI only buy that one pair of jeans. I mean, I generally try not to shop at the Gap because they do not have a plus size section.CorinneBut they do have some really cute stuff.VirginiaIt’s gross though! Make it bigger.CorinneIf it fits you, maybe you should buy it.VirginiaCorinne is like, “Or counterpoint, don’t take a stand.”CorinneI’m always sending links to my straight-size sister for stuff at the Gap that I think she should buy.VirginiaThey do have some really cute stuff, but it infuriates me that Old Navy can make plus sizes, and Gap cannot, and Banana Republic really cannot. It’s just like, hello, class system, capitalism. It’s so revolting.CorinneOh, my God. Do you know what else I’m feeling outraged about? I went thrift shopping here a couple weeks ago, and I found some vintage Land’s End that was in sizes that they don’t make anymore.VirginiaWow, that’s rude.CorinneIt was a 4X! So they used to be way more 26/28 or 28/30. So they also, at some point, kind of cut back.VirginiaThey do, at least legitimately have a section called plus size, though.CorinneThey do, but it clearly used to be bigger.VirginiaNo, no, no. I’m not saying it’s great. I am wearing my favorite joggers a lot, because I think I’m really resisting the shift back to hard pants.CorinneHow do

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Denise Hamburger, founder and director of Be Real USA. Be Real is a nonprofit that imagines a world where every child can grow up with a healthy relationship to food and their body. They work with body image researchers, psychologists, teachers and public health officials to design curricula about nutrition and body image that are weight neutral, and inclusive of all genders, abilities, races and body sizes.So many of you reach out to me every September to say, “Oh my God, you're not going to believe what my kid is learning in health class.” Food logs, fitness trackers, other diet tools are far too common in our classrooms— especially in middle and high school health class. Denise is here to help us understand why those assignments are so harmful and talk about what parents and educators can do differently. This episode is free — so please, share it with the parents, teachers and school administrators in your communities! But if you value this conversation, consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you.PS. You can always listen to this pod right here in your email, where you’ll also receive full transcripts (edited and condensed for clarity). But please also follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and/or Pocket Casts! And if you enjoy today’s conversation, please tap the heart on this post — likes are one of the biggest drivers of traffic from Substack’s Notes, so that’s a super easy, free way to support the show!Two Resources You’ll Want From This Episode: BeReal Let’s Eat Curriculum is attached.And here’s a roundup of everything I’ve written on diet culture in schools:The Burnt Toast Guide to Diet Culture in SchoolsEpisode 211 TranscriptDeniseWell, this all started I would say about 10 years ago. Actually, about 12 years ago. I was an environmental lawyer in my first career—that's what I'm trained to do. I went to law school, was practicing in big law firms. Which has nothing to do with body image, except I was an environmental lawyer who weighed herself every day and got her mood affected by the number on the scale for 40 years. So that's four decades.VirginiaSo many times getting on a scale.DeniseI really felt like I didn’t want anyone else, especially young women today, to waste the amount of time and energy that I had wasted distracting them from what they need to be doing in their lives, figuring out their own person possibilities. That’s really what you’re here to do. And it takes us away from what we’re supposed to be doing.With that in mind, I went back to school at the University of Chicago, and I was thinking of get a social work degree and doing something with body image. But then I wrote a paper on my own body image for one of my classes at the School of Social Work and I found 50 years of research on body image. And then 30 years of discussion and research on how to prevent eating disorders and body dissatisfaction. Like, wow, there is so much out there, so much research on this. But I haven’t heard any of this. It feels like it’s not making its way into resources that people can use.So I started speaking on it, and I was speaking to middle-aged women, and I thought the message that we all would really benefit from would be everybody’s got this. Because I feel like, especially my generation, where we didn’t really talk about how we felt about our bodies. I’m at the tail end of the Baby Boom. So I’m 62 and I felt that people in my generation—again, I was 50 at the time—weren’t in touch with their own feelings on body image. After talking about this for so many years, younger generations have access to it I think a lot more. But I felt like we could all benefit from knowing that everybody’s got it—so kind of a common humanity. It’s not our fault, which helps with the shame around it.So everyone has it, it’s not our fault, and society has given it to us. And I think that this is something that would resonate with my generation. So I started speaking in local libraries and community houses to women my age, and quickly learned that it is really hard to undo decades worth of thought patterns and feelings around food, body and eating. People came to hear me talk about body image, and I think, in general, when I started out, they were hoping I had a new diet.VirginiaOh, I’m sure they were. I’m sure they were like, “Oh, we’re going to go hear her talk about how to love your body by making it smaller!”DeniseAbsolutely. And all of the women, because they were women in my workshops, were starting to talk about their daughters. They’re saying that my daughter’s got this, and she’s coming home and saying this. Then in one of my audiences, I had a health teacher at my local high school. There was a health teacher who came and said—this is about 2015—you should hear what the young girls are saying. They’ve got this new thing called Instagram and and they’re seeing pictures of, “perfect” looking people and feeling bad about themselves or feeling flawed in comparison.So she said, “What resources are there for for the students in my class?” And I said, there has got to be something because there is 50 years’ of research there, there has got to be something fabulous for you. And I called the professors listed on the the studies. The granddaddy of the industry, Michael Levine, I called him up. I said, “Michael, just tell me, what can I recommend to these teachers?” And he’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t know. We don’t have it. It’s not there. Even though the research is there.”So there was a curriculum created for high risk kids. It needed to be given by facilitators called The Body Project. And I called one of the professors who wrote The Body Project and said, “Listen, I’d like to give this tool to a teacher for universal,” which means giving it to everybody in the classroom, and and she wants to bring it to her high school, but it looks like you need to be trained. And it was a script. The Body Project was a script. And this teacher said to me, I’m not reading a script in a classroom. You’re not going to get a high school teacher to read a script.VirginiaYeah. I would imagine high school students sitting in a classroom aren’t going to respond to someone just reading a script at them.DeniseNobody wants to hear it. It’s not useful. It wasn’t created for that use. So this professor, Carolyn Becker, had actually written a paper on how the academics need to work with stakeholders to make sure that their research makes it to the public. And I said, I’m calling you. I’m a stakeholder. What do you need? And she said, “We need somebody to translate it.” And I said, “I’m your girl.”VirginiaI mean, it’s wild that the research has been there. We’ve known what works, or what strategies to use for so long, and yet it’s not in the pedagogy, it’s not in the classrooms.So you started with the body image curriculum, BodyKind. And now this year, you’ve just released your weight neutral nutrition curriculum for middle and high school students, called Let’s Eat.Full disclosure: I got to be a early reader of the of the curriculum and offer a few notes. It was already amazing when I read it.DeniseThank you.VirginiaI did not have to add a lot at any by any means, but it was really cool to see the development process, and see where you ended up with it. It’s really remarkable. So let’s start by talking about why nutrition. You’ve done the body image thing, that’s really powerful. Why was nutrition the next logical place to go?DeniseI have spoken at this point to probably 10,000 teachers. And they’re always asking me, what nutrition curriculum do you recommend? Same deal. There’s not one out thereAnd I had asked one of my interns to give me her textbook on it, like what are you learning about nutrition? And in my intern’s textbook, it was 2018, you saw encapsulated the entire problem of what’s wrong with nutrition curriculum.They are asking the children to weigh and measure themselves, and they’re asking the children to count calories in different ways, and to track their food. Food logs. Again, these were best practices in the 90s and and 2000s on how to teach nutrition. So this is all over the nutrition curriculum.Then, of course, they’re talking about good and bad foods, which foods can you eat, which foods you can’t you eat, and all of these things in the research we know cause disordered eating and eating disorders, they all contribute to it. I have a list of probably nine research papers that point to each of these things and tell you why these are bad ideas to have a nutrition class.And we also know there have been two papers written, where they polled students or young people coming in for eating disorder treatment and asked them, what do you think triggered your eating disorder? And around 14% in both studies said, “My healthy eating curriculum at school was where I started getting this obsession.” So you know, what’s out there hasn’t been helpful, and even worse, has been part of the problem in our society.[Post-recording note: Here’s Mallary Tenore Tarpley writing about this research in the Washington Post, and quoting Oona Hanson!]VirginiaIt’s so rooted in our moral panic around “the childhood obesity epidemic.” Educators, public health officials, everyone feels like, that’s the thing we have to be worried about if we’re going to talk about kids and food. It all has to be framed through that lens. And what you are arguing is: That weight-centered approach causes harm. We can see from the data that it’s not “fixing” the obesity epidemic. Kids aren’t thinner than they were 40 years ago. So it didn’t work. And it’s having all these unintended ripple effects, or sometimes, I would say, intended ripple effects.DeniseYes, exactly. Studies on nutrition curriculum have shown that over 11 years, teaching diet and exercise did not do anything, in two age groups. One was elementar

You’re listening to Burnt Toast!We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for your September Indulgence Gospel!It’s time for a mailbag episode, so we’ll be diving into your questions about:⭐️ How to clap back when people say, “Wow, you’ve changed!” ⭐️ What to do with ageist grandparents? (We’re surprisingly…Team Grandparent on this one?)⭐️ Why it’s so hard to like photos of ourselves!!! ⭐️ Is Back To School (the hype, the myth, the culture)…a diet? And so much more!To hear the full story, you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber.This episode contains affiliate links. Shopping our links is a great way to support Burnt Toast!Episode 210 TranscriptVirginiaCorinne, how are you? What’s going on?CorinneI’m doing good. It’s really nice and cool here, and I’m so happy. It’s like 68.VirginiaIt’s really nice and cool here, too. Listeners of the future: We are recording this in July to be ahead of the game, but it is very September weather, and it’s helping me get in the September mindset for doing this episode.Well and because it’s cooler, I do have some Pants Chat for us to get into. I’m wearing a new pair of pants from Imbodhi, which is the brand that makes that jumpsuit I’m obsessed with. They are called the Sora Wide Leg Pant, and they are basically, like the pants version of the jumpsuit. They have a fold-down waist, and they’re very stretchy, and they are just the most comfortable thing. But I am unclear if I am wearing pants or pajamas?CorinneI’m looking at their website. I don’t know anything about this brand. It looks very similar to Beyond Yoga.VirginiaIt’s very similar to Beyond Yoga. It’s a great brand (and I have a $15 off coupon for listeners!). The quality is really good. But they go up to only 3x. I’m wearing the 1X so I think it’s a legit 3X but, yeah. There are bigger sizes they could be making, and they’ve chosen not to, at this point in time. So this is the Sora Wide-Legged Pants in ribbed oatmeal. They’re the most comfortable thing. But do you see what I mean? They definitely have that “is it pants, or is it pajamas” vibe?CorinneThey’re soft pants.VirginiaAnd I think because they’re wide leg soft pants, they feel more pajama to me. Maybe I’m good with that? Maybe I’m in my pajama pants era?CorinneThat seems reasonable.VirginiaWell, that’s my pants news.CorinneThat’s great pants news.VirginiaLet’s jump into questions.CorinneYes, I will ask the first question.Doesn’t back to school kind of seem like a diet? There are the first day of school photos, the perfect bento box lunches, the school supplies, etc.VirginiaI mean, absolutely. Absolutely, it’s all a diet.CorinneNeed we say more?VirginiaIt is a diet, and it’s a diet I go on every year. We do first day of school photos. My kid’s dad does a letterboard sign with a clever pun about what grade they’re going into. My kids sort of hate the tradition, but now sort of love it. And we’re doing it. We’re locked in. We’ve got to have all 12 years of photos.CorinneBut what’s the diet element? That it has to be perfect?VirginiaWell, when I think about my most diety years of Back To School culture, it was the years, especially, when my kids were starting a new school. If they were starting kindergarten, or other transition years, where stress is really, really high. You’re going through a lot of feelings, and as the parent, you’re like, what can I control? I can have an adorable, monogrammed backpack that must be sourced! I can control that we have the right lunchbox and this and that.You can just get so hyper about needing all the details. You need a good first day of school outfit. The teachers send these incredibly detailed school supply lists, and you’re in the aisle at Staples trying to kill yourself to find the right kind of pens. You can just be really extra with it, and it can feel like if you get it wrong, you’re sabotaging your child’s happiness. The stakes are really high. And so there are a lot of diet-y elements, for sure.Here’s what’s helping me divest:Number one, my children pick their own clothes.I have not had input on the clothes that go on my children’s bodies since they were probably three or four years old at the most. So there’s no first day outfit anymore. Whatever they want to wear is the first day outfit. So that’s one thing. I’m no longer like, “I need adorable dresses!!” My kids don’t even like to wear dresses. So, done.Number two, the drugstore in our town does this great thing where they get all the school supply lists from our kids schools. And if you just tell them your kid’s name and the teacher they have for the next year, they will just bag up all the supplies and you just pay and pick them up.CorinneThat’s amazing.VirginiaAnd so I just handed this whole project off to my kid’s dad. I was like, “You’re on school supplies. You do the drug store thing every year.” I don’t think about it anymore, and it does mean you don’t get to sit there and pick out which color folders you want. And as someone who loved school supply shopping myself, that is a little hard for me! But that’s why I was like, I have to just remove myself completely. So I just try to step back from as much of it as I can.What do you see with your friends kids? Do you notice any back to school feelings?CorinneTo be honest, I haven’t. But most of my friends’ kids are in what I would consider barely school. So it hasn’t hit yet. I do remember, as a kid, wanting to school shop and and also wanting a first day outfit.VirginiaIt’s very similar to New Year’s resolution culture. You can be like, “This is the year everything’s going to be perfect!” This is the year that all these things are going to go well. And we all know we’re gonna be crying by October. It is what it is.So you can go in with a lot of a lot of energy that can be misdirected. But also: If it helps you get through the stress of that first day to pack a really good lunch for your kid, great. Do it. I think the potential for harm is when you’re being so obsessive about getting that photo that your kid is really unhappy. It’s worth asking: Will getting this detail right make your child’s day smoother? Then fine. If it’s creating more work and drama for everyone, maybe time to step back.CorinneIf your kid wants to have a special outfit and stuff, fine. And how can you make it not into a diet for them?VirginiaYes. I think especially as kids get older, they can bring this energy as well. I definitely did as a kid. I was very extra about my first day of school outfits and all of that. I would like plan the whole first week and be really manic about it.CorinneThis is so not surprising.Virginia.In a surprise to no one, Virginia was herself.So I guess my point is: This is all optional, and a lot of it is capitalism, not education.CorinneGreat point.VirginiaI’ll read the next question.On vacation, I noticed that I am struggling with photos of myself, and it feels like the final frontier of my body liberation. I guess the question is, have either of you struggled with this? And any suggestions for coping and shifting it? I admire all the fat bodies on my socials and think they look amazing and feel pretty good in my body, and think I look good in the mirror. So why am I so uncomfortable with the photos. It just feels like it’s not how I look in my head or in the mirror. Photographs are different, obviously, than real life. But it surprises me how jarring they can feel.CorinneI feel like there are a million ways to answer this question, but I will just start with this. Have you ever seen a bad photo of a hot person?VirginiaOooh.CorinneLike, yeah. Obviously you have. There are horrible paparazzi photos of everybody, of America’s hottest people.VirginiaEvery beautiful person can take a bad photo. Yes, yes, yes.CorinneYou’re pulling one second out of the movie of your life, or whatever. Obviously, there are going to be weird, bad photos.VirginiaI also really love that meme that surfaces periodically reminding us that it is impossible to take a good photo of the moon. And we think the moon is beautiful. Sunsets, also very hard to photograph well.CorinneSo true.VirginiaEven in my garden, there are things that are prettier in real life than I can capture in a photo. You just can’t get the depth or the angle.CorinneColors!VirginiaThe colors don’t translate. There are so many beautiful things that look better in real life than in photos. And that may include you. It certainly includes me.But I do absolutely struggle with this. I deeply related to this question. One thing that helps me is to remember that I have been very thrown by photos of myself throughout my whole life. There was no period in my life where I regularly saw photos and thought, “That looks exactly like me and I look amazing.” Like, even when I was thin, I would nitpick photos. And I now frequently do that thing where I look back at an old photo and think, oh my God. What was I worried about? Like, this is absurd. And so I can only assume that would continue to happen. Feelings I have about photos I take now, at age 44 when I’m 54 or 70 I’m going to be like, what was I worried about?CorinneI think also: Have you ever had a conversation about this with a friend where they’re like, oh, I hate this photo of myself, and you’re like, “What?”VirginiaWhat are you even seeing?CorinneYeah, it’s maybe not the best photo. And also, whatever.VirginiaThere are also all the ways that technology messes with this. Like, right now, we’re looking at each other on Zoom, and Zoom is mirroring my face at me, which is how I see myself in the mirror. So I look right to me. But if you’ve ever gone into Zoom and had it be not mirrored, you’re like, who the hell is that person? But that’s how everyone else sees your face all the time! That’s actually your face! So a lot of this is, we just don’t know what we look like, the photo both isn’t capturing you and it’s capturing you in a way that you never see yourself, so it’s super disorienting.CorinneYeah, I agree. It

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Mara Gordon, MD.Dr. Mara is a family physician on the faculty of Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, as well as a writer, journalist and contributor to NPR. She also writes the newsletter Your Doctor Friend by Mara Gordon about her efforts to make medicine more fat friendly.Dr. Mara is back today with Part 2 of our conversation about weight, health, perimenopause and menopause! As we discussed last time, finding menopause advice that doesn’t come with a side of diet culture is really difficult. Dr Mara is here to help, and she will not sell you a supplement sign or make you wear a weighted vest.This episode is free but if you value this conversation, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you.PS. You can always listen to this pod right here in your email, where you’ll also receive full transcripts (edited and condensed for clarity). But please also follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and/or Pocket Casts! And if you enjoy today’s conversation, please tap the heart on this post — likes are one of the biggest drivers of traffic from Substack’s Notes, so that’s a super easy, free way to support the show!And don’t miss these: Dr. Mara Will Not Sell You a Weighted VestHealthcare is Ground Zero for FatphobiaIs Dr. Mary Claire Haver Making MenopauseEpisode 209 TranscriptVirginiaSo today we’re going to move away from the weight stuff a little bit, into some of the other the wide constellation of things that can happen in menopause and perimenopause. Before we get into some nitty gritty stuff, I want to do Laurie’s question about hormone replacement therapy, since that is still one of those topics that people are like, Is it good? Is it bad? I don’t know.So Laurie asked: Is there a reason why a doctor would not want to prescribe hormone replacement therapy? My doctor seems more willing to treat individual symptoms instead of using HRT. Is that maybe because I’m still getting my period?MaraI love this question. Now my professor hat can nerd out about interpretation of scientific research! So first, I’ll just briefly say, Laurie, no big deal that you said HRT. But just so everyone’s aware, the preferred term is menopausal hormone therapy, MHT, or just hormone therapy, and it’s not a huge deal. But I think the North American Menopause Society now uses “menopausal hormone therapy.” The thinking is, hormones don’t necessarily need to be replaced. It comes back to that idea of, menopause is a natural part of life, and so the idea that they would need to be replaced is not totally accurate. VirginiaWe’re not trying to get you out of menopause, right? The goal isn’t to push you back into some pre-menopausal hormonal state. MaraBut again, not a big deal. You’ll see HRT still used, and a lot of doctors still use that term. So I graduated from medical school in 2015 and I remember one of the first times that a patient asked me about using menopausal hormone therapy, I was terrified. And I was still in training, so luckily, I had a mentor who guided me through it. But I had absorbed this very clear message from medical school, which is that menopausal hormone therapy will cause heart disease, cause pulmonary emboli, which are blood clots in the lungs, and cause breast cancer.And I was like, “Ahhh! I’m gonna cause harm to my patients. This is scary.” I had also learned that hot flashes–they weren’t life threatening. So a patient could just use a fan and she’d be fine, right? She didn’t need medicine for it.VirginiaCool.MaraI think the dismissal of symptoms here is just straight up misogyny. That message of, oh, you should just live with this You’re tough, you’re a woman, you can do it. This is just the next stage of it. Is just misogyny, right?But the fear of using menopausal hormone therapy has a specific historical context. There was a major study called the Women’s Health Initiative, and it was a randomized control trial, which is the gold standard in medical research. People were given estrogen and progestin to treat menopausal symptoms or they were given a placebo, and they didn’t know which pill they took. But WHI was actually halted early because they found an increased risk of breast cancer. This was on the front page of The New York Times. It was a really, really big deal. That was 2002 or 2003. So even 15 years later, when I was starting out as a doctor, I was still absorbing its message. And I think a lot of doctors who are still in practice have just deeply absorbed this message.But there’s a lot to consider here. The first issue is in the way that information about the Women’s Health Initiative was communicated. Nerd out with me for a second here: There is a big difference between absolute risk and relative risk. And this is a really subtle issue that’s often communicated poorly in the media.So I looked it up in the initial paper that came out of the Women’s Health Initiative. There was a relative risk of 26 percent of invasive breast cancer, right? So that meant that the people who got the estrogen and progestin, as opposed to a placebo, had a relative increased risk of 26 percent compared to the placebo arm.VirginiaWhich sounds scary,MaraSounds terrifying, right? But the absolute risk is the risk in comparison to one another. And they found that if you’re a patient taking the estrogen/progestin, your absolute risk was 8 people out of 10,000 women a year would get invasive breast cancer. So it’s very, very small.And this is an issue I see in medical journalism all the time. We talk about relative risk, like your risk compared to another group, but the absolute risk remains extremely low.And just to round it out: I looked all this up about cardiovascular events too. Things like a heart attack, a stroke. So the absolute risk was 19. So there were 19 cases of a cardiovascular event out of 10,000 women in a year. People just freaked out about this because of the way that it was covered in the media. VirginiaI was fresh out of college, doing women’s health journalism at the time. So I fully own having been part of that problem. We definitely reported on the relative risk, not the absolute risk. And I don’t understand why. I look back and I’m like, what were we all doing? We ended up taking this medication away from millions of women who could really benefit from it.MaraI found a paper that showed between 2002 and 2009 prescriptions for menopausal hormone therapy declined by more than 60 percent. VirginiaI’m not surprised. MaraAnd then even up until the time I started my training, right in 2015, we’re just seeing a huge decline in hormone therapy prescriptions.One other thing that’s also super important to acknowledge about the Women’s Health Initiative is that they enrolled women over 60, which is not really representative of women who want or need hormone therapy. So the average age of menopause is 51 and the vast majority of women who are experiencing symptoms that would respond well to hormone therapy are much younger. We’re talking here mostly about hot flashes. Which we call vasomotor symptoms of menopause, but it’s basically hot flashes. Women dealing with this are much younger, right? So they’re approaching menopause, late 40s, and right after the menopausal transition, early 50s, and then they don’t necessarily need it anymore, after their symptoms have improved.VirginiaAnd it will also be true that with women in their 60s, you’re going to see more incidence of cancer and heart disease in that age group than in women in their 40s anyway, right? MaraRightVirginiaSo even the 19 cases, the eight cases—they were looking at a higher risk population in general. MaraYeah. And so there have been all these subsequent analyses, which is why now we’re seeing menopausal hormone therapy sort of on the upswing. There’s a lot of increased interest in it. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends it, the North American Menopause Society, the British Menopause Society; here’s a full run-down. It’s not that everybody needs it, and we’ll get to that in a second, but it is a totally safe and appropriate treatment for—specifically and most importantly—for vasomotor symptoms of menopause. Like hot flashes. There’s been all these further analyses of the Women’s Health Initiative data and and then from other studies, too. And basically, it shows that when the hormone therapy is initiated before age 60, or within 10 years of menopause, there’s a reduced risk of heart disease and reduced mortality.VirginiaWow! MaraSo the timing matters. Isn’t that so interesting? The timing matters.Also, the route of administration matters. So what that means in English is that an estrogen patch seems to have a lower risk of blood clots. So one of those fears of the, you know, initial Women’s Health Initiative data was that you might have an increased risk of blood clots. But it’s something about the way that the estrogen is metabolized. It’s not metabolized through the liver when it’s absorbed through the skin, and something about that process seems to decrease the risk of blood clots.So that’s why your doctor, if you’re interested in menopausal hormone therapy, might recommend an estrogen patch rather than a pill.VirginiaGot it. MaraThere’s a lot of ambiguity in all of this data, because, you know, we’re talking about just huge numbers of people, and it’s hard to sort of isolate variables when you’re studying just like massive cohorts of people and trying to understand what you know, what factors affect your risk for which diseases. It’s not clear that taking hormones prevents heart disease. And that’s one of the big claims I see with menopause influencers, that every single person needs this.The data don’t support it at this point in time, and the major menopause organizations do not recommend it as a universal preventative treatment for everybody. Bu

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Ash Brandin of Screen Time Strategies, also know as The Gamer Educator on Instagram. Ash is also the author of a fantastic new book, Power On: Managing Screen Time to Benefit the Whole Family. Ash joined us last year to talk about how our attitudes towards screen time can be…diet-adjacent. I asked them to come back on the podcast this week because a lot of us are heading into back-to-school mode, which in my experience can mean feelingsss about screen routines. There are A LOT of really powerful reframings in this episode that might blow your mind—and make your parenting just a little bit easier. So give this one a listen and share it with anyone in your life who’s also struggling with kids and screen time.Today’s episode is free but if you value this conversation, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you! PS. You can take 10 percent off Power On, or any book we talk about on the podcast, if you order it from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, along with a copy of Fat Talk! (This also applies if you’ve previously bought Fat Talk from them. Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)Episode 208 TranscriptVirginiaFor anyone who missed your last episode, can you just quickly tell us who you are and what you do?AshI’m Ash Brandin. I use they/them pronouns.I am a middle school teacher by day, and then with my online presence, I help families and caregivers better understand and manage all things technology—screen time, screens. My goal is to reframe the way that we look at them as caregivers, to find a balance between freaking out about them and allowing total access. To find a way that works for us. VirginiaWe are here today to talk about your brilliant new book, which is called Power On: Managing Screen Time to Benefit the Whole Family. I can’t underscore enough how much everybody needs a copy of this book. I have already turned back to it multiple times since reading it a few months ago. It just really helps ground us in so many aspects of this conversation that we don’t usually have.AshI’m so glad to hear that it’s helpful! If people are new to who I am, I have sort of three central tenets of the work that I do: * Screen time is a social inequity issue. * Screens can be part of our lives without being the center of our lives. * Screens and screen time should benefit whole families.Especially in the last few years, we have seen a trend toward panic around technology and screens and smartphones and social media. I think that there are many reasons to be concerned around technology and its influence, especially with kids. But what’s missing in a lot of those conversations is a sense of empowerment about what families can reasonably do. When we focus solely on the fear, it ends up just putting caregivers in a place of feeling bad.VirginiaYou feel like you’re getting it wrong all the time.AshShame isn’t empowering. No one is like, “Well, I feel terrible about myself, so now I feel equipped to go make a change,” right?Empowerment is what’s missing in so many of those conversations and other books and things that have come out, because it’s way harder. It’s so much harder to talk about what you can really do and reasonably control in a sustainable way. But I’m an educator, and I really firmly believe that if anyone’s in this sort of advice type space, be it online or elsewhere, that they need to be trying to empower and help families instead of just capitalizing on fear.VirginiaWhat I found most powerful is that you really give us permission to say: What need is screen time meeting right now? And this includes caregivers’ needs. So not just “what need is this meeting for my child,” but what need is this meeting for me? I am here recording with you right now because iPads are meeting the need of children have a day off school on a day when I need to work. We won’t be interrupted unless I have to approve a screen time request, which I might in 20 minutes.I got divorced a couple years ago, and my kids get a lot more screen time now. Because they move back and forth between two homes, and each only has one adult in it. Giving myself permission to recognize that I have needs really got me through a lot of adjusting to this new rhythm of our family.AshAbsolutely. And when we’re thinking about what the need is, we also need to know that it’s going to change. So often in parenting, it feels like we have to come up with one set of rules and they have to work for everything in perpetuity without adjustment. That just sets us up for a sense of failure if we’re like, well, I had this magical plan that someone told me was going to work, and it didn’t. So I must be the problem, right? It all comes back to that “well, it’s my fault” place.VirginiaWhich is screens as diet culture.AshAll over again. We’re back at it. It’s just not helpful. If instead, we’re thinking about what is my need right now? Sometimes it’s “I have to work.” And sometimes it’s “my kid is sick and they just need to relax.” Sometimes it’s, as you were alluding to earlier, it’s we’ve all just had a day, right? We’ve been run ragged, and we just need a break, and that need is going to dictate very different things. If my kid is laid up on the couch and throwing up, then what screen time is going to be doing for them is very different than If I’m trying to work and I want them to be reasonably engaged in content and trying to maybe learn something. And that’s fine. Being able to center “this is what I need right now,” or “this is what we need right now,” puts us in a place of feeling like we’re making it work for us. Instead of feeling like we’re always coming up against some rule that we’re not going to quite live up to.VirginiaI’d love to talk about the inequity piece a little more too. As I said, going from a two parent household to a one parent household, which is still a highly privileged environment—but even just that small shift made me realize, wait a second. I think all the screen time guidance is just for typical American nuclear families. Ideally, with a stay at home parent.So can you talk about why so much of the standard guidance doesn’t apply to most of our families?AshIt’s not even just a stay at home parent. It’s assuming that there is always at least one caregiver who is fully able to be present. Mom, default parent, is making dinner, and Dad is relaxing after work and is monitoring what the kids are doing, right? And it’s one of those times where I’m like, have you met a family?VirginiaPeople are seven different places at once. It’s just not that simple.AshIt’s not that simple, right? It’s like, have you spent five minutes in a typical household in the last 10 years? This is not how it’s going, right?So the beginning of the book helps people unlearn and relearn what we may have heard around screens, including what research really does or doesn’t say around screens, and this social inequity piece. Because especially since the onset of COVID, screens are filling in systemic gaps for the vast majority of families.I’m a family with two caregivers in the home. We both work, but we’re both very present caregivers. So we’re definitely kind of a rarity, that we’re very privileged. We’re both around a lot of the time. And we are still using screens to fill some of those gaps.So whether it’s we don’t really have a backyard, or people are in a neighborhood where they can’t send their kids outside, or they don’t have a park or a playground. They don’t have other kids in the neighborhood, or it’s not a safe climate. Or you live in an apartment and you can’t have your neighbors complain for the fifth time that your kids are stomping around and being loud. Whatever it is—a lack of daycare, affordable after school care —those are all gaps. They all have to be filled. And we used to have different ways of filling those gaps, and they’ve slowly become less accessible or less available. So something has to fill them. What ends up often filling them is screens. And I’m not saying that that’s necessarily a good thing. I’d rather live in a world in which everyone is having their needs met accessibly and equitably. But that’s a much harder conversation, and is one that we don’t have very much say in. We participate in that, and we might vote for certain people, but that’s about all we can really do reasonably. So, in the meantime, we have to fill that in with something and so screens are often going to fill that in.Especially if you look at caregivers who have less privilege, who are maybe single caregivers, caregivers of color, people living in poverty—all of those aspects of scarcity impacts their bandwidth. Their capacity as a caregiver is less and spread thinner, and all of that takes away from a caregiver’s ability to be present. And there were some really interesting studies that were done around just the way that having less capacity affects you as a caregiver.And when I saw that data, I thought, well, of course. Of course people are turning to screens because they have nothing else to give from. And when we think of it that way, it’s hard to see that as some sort of personal failure, right? When we see it instead as, oh, this is out of necessity. It reframes the question as “How do I make screens work for me,” as opposed to, “I’m bad for using screens.”VirginiaRight. How do I use screen time to meet these needs and to hopefully build up my capacity so that I can be more present with my kids? I think people think if you’re using a lot of screens, you’re really never present. It’s that stereotype of the parent on the playground staring at their phone, instead of watching the kid play. When maybe the reason we’re at the playground is so my kid can play and I can answer some work emails. That doesn’t mean I’m not present at other points of the day.AshOf course. You’re seeing one moment. I always find that

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.For our last August hiatus episode, we’re looking back at a conversation we ran back in February of this year — exploring the work of attorney turned self-help guru Mel Robbins.Did Mel steal the concept of “let them?” Is she just Andrew Huberman for the “We Can Do Hard Things” crowd? Is high-fiving yourself in the mirror every morning a diet? As you’ll hear, Corinne and I didn’t totally agree… until we did. Let’s get into it.To hear our discussion, you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. Subscriptions are $7 per month or $70 for the year.Episode 207 TranscriptCorinneToday, we are talking about motivational speaker and author Mel Robbins and we have maybe some surprising opinions on this topic.VirginiaWe have different takes about Mel Robbins. Some evolving takes as well. In the course of researching this episode, I think we went on a little Mel Robbins journey.CorinneI’m going to introduce this topic by saying that I first heard about Mel Robbins a few weeks ago. My coach at the gym was like, “Have you heard of Mel Robbins?” And I was like, “Hmm, sounds familiar? What is that?” And she was like, “I just listened to her on this podcast, and I saw she was on Glennon Doyle, and I was just wondering if you knew who she was.” And I didn’t know who she was, but I was like I’ll listen to her Glennon Doyle episode.I listened to it, and I liked it. I found it interesting and helpful.And then, just a few days later, you messaged me, and you were like, “should we talk about this person on the podcast?”VirginiaYes, because I had no idea who she was. We should be clear, this is someone with 22 million followers on Instagram. Us not knowing her was an oversight. She’s an enormous celebrity, but I had somehow missed her completely. Amy texted me one of her reels and was like, this feels like a Burnt Toast episode waiting to happen and I sent it to you.CorinneAnd I was kind of like… No.VirginiaYou were like, she’s not a diet. I like her. It’s fine.CorinneI enjoyed her episode on We Can Do Hard Things. She’s a run of the mill self help-y person.Just to give a little background, she has been a self help person for a long time. One of her first biggest things was she did one of the early TEDx talks that went insanely viral.VirginiaIn about 2011 or 2012.CorinneShe had this book called The Five Second Rule. The concept is basically if you’re thinking about doing something, count down to five and then do it. Which, like, how is that helpful? But okay, a lot of people found it extremely helpful.VirginiaIs it that it’s supposed to make quicker to do a thing you don’t want to do, or make you pause before doing a thing you should not do?CorinneI think it’s preventing you from overthinking / talking out yourself out of something.VirginiaI guess that’s not my struggle. But I can see for people for whom that is a struggle, having somebody push you off the diving board—I mean, as someone who would never jump off a diving board, I would need to be pushed. I get it.CorinneShe also has a podcast.VirginiaThe Wall Street Journal calls her “a billion view podcaster,” and Time Magazine says she gives millions of listeners around the globe a reason to believe in themselves.CorinneShe’s very, very, very popular.VirginiaVery popular. I also want to note that she is someone who is writing books about how to change your habits, how to overcome emotional hurdles. She is not a psychologist. She is not a social worker. She is not a therapist of any kind. She is a former attorney who first became famous because she started doing legal analysis on CNN. She covered the George Zimmerman trial for them and then that led to her first book in 2011 which was called, Stop Saying You’re Fine. So this high powered lawyer backstory to self help Guru is a is an interesting path.CorinneSo I did get her book to research for this episode—VirginiaYou got the newest book?CorinneI have her newest book, The Let Them Theory, but I want to talk about that later.But at the beginning of that book, she goes over her story, and to be honest, sitting here right now, can’t remember the details. But she has a struggle. Either she or husband got laid off, they’re having a hard time, and then she’s depressed, and that’s where the five second rule comes from. You’re saying she’s this high powered lawyer who goes into self help, but her story is like “I was struggling. I came up with this theory.”VirginiaOkay, I also just want to note that—not to take away from her truth about herself—but Wikipedia also taught me that she and her husband own homes in three locations.CorinneI mean, she’s very wealthy right now.VirginiaI’m just holding her personal struggle, overcoming how hard things were, and she is a former-attorney-turned-self-help-guru who owns three homes. So we can just hold those things together.CorinneHer struggle was 15 years ago.VirginiaDifferent time! Maybe one home, one-and-a-half homes tops at that point.CorinneDo you want to talk kind of about her Instagram reels and the diet culture of it all?VirginiaYes. My assignment for this episode was Mel Robbins’ social media, which I spent some time on, and I’m still recovering from a little bit.Her whole aesthetic on Instagram—you know how every influencer has their branding? Hers is very talk-to-the-camera, intense little pep talk videos. Or it’s excerpts from the podcast. She always starts the intense pep talks with like, “Hey, it’s your buddy Mel.” That’s her little like, “Hey, it’s your buddy Mel.” So this is our buddy, Mel, we’re going to talk about.And, you know, they’re a real mix. Some of them are the five second rule. Sometimes it’s about letting go of your expectations for other people.There was one reel I really liked where she’s just saying, like, if you’re going through a really hard time, like you have a terrible ex, or you are surviving some kind of trauma and you’re feeling overwhelmed and stressed out, that is actually what you should be doing. That’s not you failing, that’s you having a logical reaction to a hard thing. And I was like, yes, okay, I’m on board that seems right. It is important that it’s okay for us to be sad when things are sad and angry, when things are unfair. Especially given the current state of the world. That vibe I’m here for.But in this reel, she talks about how important it is to drink a glass of water in the morning before you drink your coffee.And again, this is a former attorney turned life guru, so I’m not clear why is Mel Robbins the expert for me on water before coffee?CorinneI mean, I don’t know, but it does seem like a good idea.VirginiaI’m not saying it’s not a good idea. I’m just saying, why is she presenting it?CorinneShe’s famous now, she gets to give advice on anything she wants.VirginiaShe starts talking about hormones and it gets very science-y, but there are no citations. There’s not even a nutritionist sitting next to her. Maybe this is from a podcast interview she did with a nutritionist? I don’t know. But there is no sourcing. She has this very emphatic way of speaking, and she’s like, this is the thing you need to do. And I just watched this, and I was like, oh, so she’s a Huberman bro! This is Huberman husband stuff, right?CorinneI mean, it’s self help! She’s telling you what to do.VirginiaMel Robbins would love to tell us all what to do.CorinneIn the intro to her book, where she’s talking about how she got into writing these books, she refers to having done PhD levels of research.VirginiaBut on what? Because the science about hydration and coffee intake is very different from the research on how we move through big feelings during trauma. These are not related concepts, Corinne. So she’s doing PhD level research on everything?CorinneShe has a PhD in giving advice.VirginiaDo you want to talk us through the morning routine post?CorinneSo, “this is the morning routine that’ll supercharge your energy all day.”Virginia“Backed by science,” that’s what she says.CorinneStarts with getting up when the alarm goes off. Once again, it’s not bad advice. Like, yes. But also is Mel Robbins telling you to do it going to make you do it? I don’t know.VirginiaSometimes you’re just not going to do that, and you might still have an okay day. It doesn’t mean the whole day fell apart because you didn’t get up the second your alarm went off.CorinneThe next thing, making your bed, tidying your space—another very common self help tip!VirginiaIt’s “the simplest way to practice discipline,” Corinne. “A promise kept no matter what.”CorinneI’m going to be honest, I feel okay with the first two. Number three, “high five yourself in the mirror.” Like, no. I’m never going to do that. I hate that. I really hate it.VirginiaI can’t stop laughing. She’s so serious in the photo. She has a selfie of her high fiving herself, and she’s so serious in the photo. Like she is earnestly high fiving herself.CorinneLet me tell you, “giving yourself a high five in the mirror rewires your brain to focus on self love and positive reinforcement.”VirginiaThe science behind that is all in her book, The High Five Habit. So there you go. The PhD level science that she’s done to confirm. I just imagine saying to someone actually struggling with depression or anxiety, like, “why don’t you just high five yourself in the mirror?” And, like, I think they would be justified in throat punching you. Like, “I’m sorry your mom just died. Have you tried high fiving yourself in the mirror?” Like, fuck you.CorinneThis is the thing, right? This is what we talk about. It’s like, exercising does make us feel better, but you can’t tell someone struggling, “Just exercise.” Like, this advice is good. Like, get out of bed, have a glass of water. Exercise. And, no one needs that advice. Everyone knows that.VirginiaHigh fiving yourself in the mirror I’m going to say is not good advice. Like, I’m going to say for most of us, that’s not going to be transformativ

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark! We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.Today, we’re going to revisit our conversation about Emily Oster, and her evolving views on kids, weight and health.This episode first aired in November 2024, right after the presidential election. We’re now 8 months into Trump’s second term, and continuing to grapple with how America has slid to the right. So the story of a public health advocate and scholar who is now aligned with conservative media feels incredibly timely—especially because many of you are starting back at school this month, and Emily’s take on school lunches is particularly complex. That said, we also want to hold space for how much Emily’s work has meant to so many of us (including Virginia!).This is a complicated conversation. To hear the whole thing, read the full transcript, and join us in the comments, you’ll need to join Extra Butter, our premium subscription tier: http://patreon.com/virginiasolesmithExtra Butter costs just $99 per year. (Regular paid subscribers, the remaining value of your subscription will be deducted from that total!)In these monthly episodes we get into the GOOD stuff like:Dating While FatWhat to do when you miss your smaller bodyIs Kids Eat In Color anti-diet?And did Virginia really get divorced over butter?Extra Butters also get exclusive weekly chats, DM access, and a monthly bonus essay or thread. And Extra Butter ensures that the Burnt Toast community can always stay an ad- and sponsor-free space—which is crucial for body liberation journalism. Join us here!(Questions? Glitches? Email me all the details, and cc support@substack.com.)PS. If Extra Butter isn’t the right tier for you, remember that you still get access behind almost every other paywall with a regular paid subscription.Episode 206 TranscriptVirginiaI’m just going to say up front, I am nervous about doing this episode. It is a complicated one. People have very strong feelings about Emily Oster. But we are in our Extra Butter safe space, and I am trusting that.So Corinne. You are coming in somewhat cold to this topic, because you don’t have kids, and Emily is primarily a parenting expert. What do you know about Emily Oster and her work?CorinneI know two things about Emily Oster. One is that she wrote a book about parenting or maybe pregnancy? And my main takeaway about that book is that it’s okay for you to drink a small amount of alcohol when you are pregnant. VirginiaYes. This is a gift that Emily has given to the world. Unquestionably.CorinneAnd I basically just know about that from having friends who are pregnant. Then the other thing I know is that she was involved in some COVID controversies. VirginiaUh huh. CorinneThe book came out before COVID, and then during COVID she started to become a controversial figure.VirginiaShe actually had two books come out before COVID, Expecting Better, about pregnancy, and then Crib Sheet, which is a parenting book. Expecting Better actually came out in 2013, the same year my first child was born. So it’s 11 years old. She’s been around for a long time!CorinneDid you use those books as a pregnant and child-having person?VirginiaWell, Expecting Better was published on August 20, 2013 and Violet was born on August 18. So I did not use it for that pregnancy. But I did later read a lot of Emily’s work, and in particular the work she was doing around breastfeeding not being the most essential you-have-to-do-it-or-you’re-a-terrible-mother thing. She did a lot of really great research breaking down some of those myths and showing that the benefits of breastfeeding over formula are not as extreme as we’ve been told. All of that was super helpful to me during my own breastfeeding situations. So yes, she’s definitely been a parenting voice on my radar for a long time. Emily is also actually from New Haven, Connecticut, as am I. We are around the same age, but I don’t think we knew each other as kids. But we are both ladies from Connecticut. Emily has a PhD in economics from Harvard. She then went on to pursue research in health economics and is a professor of economics at Brown University. She is a mother of two, and her official bio says, “Emily was inspired by her own pregnancy and lack of clear information to guide her decisions. She decided to use her expertise in reviewing and analyzing data to help other parents navigate those topics. She’s a New York Times best-selling author.”So we are both 40-something moms, originally from Connecticut. I think the other place our work has overlapped is that we both do some of this work of, “here is this mainstream thing you’ve been told that’s actually quite punitive towards mothers, and what if we looked at the data and flipped some of that on its head.” The work she did on pregnancy and breastfeeding was super helpful to me. It’s been super helpful to so many of my friends. My younger sister just had her first baby this summer, and she was reading Expecting Better. So I just want to go into this conversation saying I really think all of that work is valuable. Then more recently, as you noted, Emily launched ParentData, which started as a Substack newsletter that she sent out during COVID. Now it is its own standalone website. And during COVID she started sending out these newsletters that I think a lot of us, as parents, were living and dying by, because she was helping us calculate the risks. And then she started to push for schools to reopen before a lot of people were ready for schools to reopen. There was a lot of controversy around her takes at that point and how she was calculating risks. And in particular, I think, how she was calculating risks for kids from more marginalized backgrounds. It often started to sound more like she was just thinking about, “I want my kids back in school.” It was messy. I’m not going to talk a lot about her COVID stuff today, because we have a whole other issue to work through. But I do want to acknowledge that COVID is when a lot of folks started to feel very divisive about Emily. I also want to acknowledge right off the top that Emily blurbed Fat Talk and was a big supporter of Fat Talk and of my work. She’s interviewed me on ParentData twice, once before Fat Talk came out, once after. A lot of the early Burnt Toast community came from Emily’s community. So this is all the more reason why we should have this conversation. There are a lot of Emily Oster fans in our community. There are a lot of Emily Oster critics. We’re gonna talk about all of it. CorinneI feel like we should say the reason that people have been asking us to do this episode is because she has recently joined forces with conservative journalist Bari Weiss and they are doing a podcast together. And there was an episode about childhood obesity? Feeding kids? Which a bunch of people have written to you, with questions about. VirginiaThe new podcast is called Raising Parents with Emily Oster. It is produced in partnership with The Free Press, which is Bari Weiss’s publishing empire.Do you want to talk to us a little bit about what The Free Press is, and that whole piece of things before we talk about this episode?CorinneSure, yes. The Free Press is a website started by Bari Weiss. Bari Weiss is a journalist. She was hired by The New York Times after Trump was elected in 2016, in an effort to platform conservative voices at The New York Times. VirginiaThey were trying to both sides it.CorinneYes. And she notoriously quit with a manifesto-y letter, claiming that she was bullied or not really taken seriously. And then I think after that, she started this website, The Free Press. She’s someone who started out as somewhat moderate, and has become more of a conservative person. She’s very “anti woke,” I guess is what I would say. She’s very pro-free speech and anti-identity politics, that kind of thing.VirginiaYeah. I think Emily’s involvement with The Free Press is surprising and not surprising. I think what’s interesting about Emily Oster, kind of all the way along, is that she’s an incredibly smart person. I think her work really connects with a certain kind of smart, data conscious parent or person—especially moms. And I think she would say her personal values or political beliefs should not be in the mix at all, that what she’s doing is not political. And yet, of course, it is political. Health is political. If you’re going to talk about COVID, if you’re going to talk about breastfeeding, if you’re going to talk about—as we’re going to talk about—kids’ weight, it’s going to get political very quickly. It’s been interesting to watch this evolution. I think this sort of smart, data driven mom—which I certainly identify as. A lot of those types of moms who would identify as feminist were like, “yes, let me drink during pregnancy.” “Yes, tell me I don’t have to breastfeed.” That felt really resonant to us. And then there was this move in this other direction that’s been subtle, and sort of confusing at times. But I think aligning yourself with The Free Press is not subtle or confusing. So yes, we’ve got the new podcast, “Raising Parents with Emily Oster.” And episode three of the new season is called, Are We Feeding Kids The Wrong Foods? And this is the episode that a ton of you have been in my DMs and my email being like, what is happening here? So Corinne, do you want to read this quote from the top of the episode? This is from Emily, and it lays out the premise that she took into this projectCorinneYes.While BMI is just a number and doesn’t magically determine health, it is the case that BMI in this higher range is associated with a substantially elevated risk of many metabolic or other chronic illnesses. The United States ranks 12th worldwide on obesity prevalence. The question is, why? And why haven’t we been able to reduce childhood obesity rates?VirginiaSo what’s your thought about just that quick summary?CorinneIt seems like she’s both saying that BMI is a bad marker of health, and usi

Today Virginia is chatting with Anna Maltby. Anna is a health journalist, editor, content strategist, personal trainer, and author of the newsletter How to Move. Anna also created Pilates For Abortion Funds, a monthly online class that has raised about $30,000 for abortion funds since July 2022. She has been an ACE-certified personal trainer since 2015, and a certified mat pilates instructor since 2021. She’s also a certified prenatal and postpartum exercise specialist. Anna lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two kids, and two extremely cute cats.Anna was previously a guest on one of Burnt Toast’s most popular ever episodes, The Myth of Visible Abs. What’s so great about Anna—and what makes her different from a lot of fitness writers and personal trainers out there—is that she’s so smart about bodies, she’s truly anti-diet and size neutral as a fitness professional…and, she’s been in the belly of the beast. Anna worked in women’s magazines with me long enough to know all the diet culture tricks. So she’s one of my favorite people to talk fitness with, because she can dissect what is marketing, what is diet culture, and what is actually maybe useful for your body.Two content warnings for today:1. We are going to talk about specific forms of exercise. This will always be through a weight neutral lens, but if you’re recovering from an eating disorder or just otherwise in a place where exercise is not serving you, please take care.2. CW for Butter, because we ended up talking quite a lot about toilets! And while I feel it’s all incredibly practical information and you’re going to thank me for my great Butter recommendation this week, I do realize that toilet conversation is not for everyone. It’s usually not for me! So I get it! You’ve been warned.To tell us YOUR thoughts, and to get all of the links and resources mentioned in this episode, as well as a complete transcript, visit our show page.If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber — subscriptions are just $7 per month! —to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. And don’t forget to check out our Burnt Toast Podcast Bonus Content! Disclaimer: You’re listening to this episode because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore has a lot of informed opinions. Neither my guest today nor I are healthcare providers, and this conversation is not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice.FAT TALK is out in paperback! Order your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. You can also order the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.CREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay. Follow Virginia on Instagram, Follow Corinne  @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing and subscribe to Big Undies.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism. 

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark! We are Corinne Fay and Virginia Sole-Smith, and this month we’re discussing… Things Thin People Say. 👀 The list includes: ⭐️ The most bananas comment about swimsuit shopping⭐️ That thing where they think their boyfriend’s clothes will fit you ⭐️ How Caroline Chambers’ thin privilege shows up⭐️ Our thoughts on Haley Nahman’s sugar addict essay. ⭐️ And more! To hear the whole thing, read the full transcript, and join us in the comments, you’ll need to join Extra Butter, our premium subscription tier.Extra Butter costs just $99 per year. (Regular paid subscribers, the remaining value of your subscription will be deducted from that total!)Extra Butter subscribers also get access to posts like:Is weight loss surgery the new Ozempic? Does Dr. Becky have a privilege problem? Is Kids Eat In Color anti-diet?And did Virginia really get divorced over butter?And Extra Butters also get DM access and other perks. Plus Extra Butter ensures that the Burnt Toast community can always stay an ad- and sponsor-free space—which is crucial for body liberation journalism. Join us here!(Questions? Glitches? Email me all the details, and cc support@substack.com.)PS. If Extra Butter isn’t the right tier for you, remember that you still get access behind almost every other paywall with a regular paid subscription.Episode 204 TranscriptCorinneSo, today we’re going to talk about the fatphobic things that people say without realizing it. And I think any fat person you talk to probably has an example of this.VirginiaOr a dozen examples of this.CorinneOr a dozen examples of this.We asked Burnt Toast readers to share stories. And we’re going to talk about a couple of examples that we stumbled across recently…VirginiaOn the Internet.CorinneIn the course of our jobs.VirginiaWe are going to talk about Caroline Chambers. We are going to talk about Haley Nahman. We’re going to get into some stuff that’s been happening with the thin folks.Obviously, since I just mentioned some high profile people, you might think this is going to be a really juicy, gossipy episode. That’s not really the goal here.I think of this as more an opportunity to have some moments of catharsis. As fat folks, we so often have to endure these comments, which can be unintentional but still really harmful. And that’s something we all live with. So it’s just good sometimes to list them and be like… Yep. That happened.And hopefully, this is instructive for thin listeners. If you’re listening to this podcast, I assume it’s because you are interested in divesting from diet culture. You are interested in unlearning anti-fatness. And that is not always easy or comfortable work. Sometimes we have to be willing to look at ourselves. You might realize, “wow, I did say a not cool thing, and that was my thin privilege.” And I hope the place you go with that is: I didn’t even realize it was harmful. But now I know, so how can I show up as a better ally?CorinneI also think a good thing to mention about that is that, as fat people, we experience thin people making these type of comments. But as humans, we also make these types of comments about other groups of people. I’m sure I’ve made an offhanded comment that was harmful to someone who’s Black, or to someone with kids. You know?VirginiaYou offend me all the time, as a person with kids.CorinneI am so sorry. I try not to. I love kids.VirginiaYou have literally never said anything offensive about children.CorinneWell, I just can imagine—we don’t always have other people’s sensitivities in mind.VirginiaRight. The whole thing about privilege is it makes you unaware of other experiences. This is why we have to look at it.CorinneSo anyone who does this is not bad or evil. It’s a normal part of life and still worth talking about.VirginiaOK, soI think I first sent you the Caroline Chambers piece we’re going to chat about a few weeks ago. She wrote about what she was wearing during her fourth pregnancy. It’s called Getting Dressed Is Kind of Hard Right Now, and that is very relatable. Getting dressed during pregnancy is very hard, no quibbles with that.CorinneI was going to pretend that I had just organically stumbled across this article about getting dressed while pregnant, Virginia.VirginiaHow would you?CorinneI was going to be like, “I write about clothes… Caroline Chambers, of whom I’m a fan. I own her cookbook.”VirginiaAll true. But I am the one who was like, “Oh, did you see that piece?” Because there were a few comments in it that that made me pause.CorinneThe comment that made me pause—which I then quickly highlighted and restacked—was Caroline saying, “I think loose dresses like this polo number”—with a link to the dress— “are really cute while pregnant, until your stomach extends past your boobs, and then it starts to look like you’re wearing a circus tent. I’ve reached circus tense status.”VirginiaAnd you said, “here to tell you that it is, in fact, cute to wear loose dresses when your stomach extends past your boobs, whether you’re pregnant or not.” Which I support 100 percent.CorinneI stand by that.VirginiaThis is just a perfect example of these kinds of comments. When you are a thin person and you gain weight during pregnancy, it’s a disorienting experience. Your body feels very unfamiliar. I mean, everybody’s body feels unfamiliar during pregnancy, but this aspect is disorienting. Suddenly, your shape is more similar to a shape you have been told is not desirable, and so you have to reckon with that. And I don’t want to say what her intention was, but I read this and thought, “She’s saying this, and she doesn’t know what she’s saying.” Caroline Chambers probably hasn’t considered how many people in the world have stomachs that extend past boobs. That’s a pretty common way to have a body regardless of pregnancy status.CorinneYeah, I think it was one of those kind of slightly self-effacing comments that you don’t realize can be hurtful. You think you’re critiquing yourself, but… there’s actually a lot of other people that fall into that category.VirginiaI think we’re going to see this as a recurring theme. One of the most common ways thin people display their anti-fatness is by saying something critical about themselves, without realizing they’ve just described every fat person’s regular body.CorinneI do also want to say that I posted this on the Substack social media, and Caroline Chambers saw it and responded to it and edited the post and was apologetic.VirginiaProps for that. She wrote, “I’m sorry that this clearly came off in a way I didn’t mean it to. I love your Substack, and I did not mean this to be a global commentary. I’ll do better.”Yeah, we want people to be doing better. Also, read Big Undies, everyone. Corinne’s Substack is great, and I’m glad Caroline knows that.CorinneYeah, there’s definitely a lot on my Substack about wearing loose clothing.VirginiaYour recent loose clothing roundup definitely inspired me to do some shopping for big loose clothing. And it’s entirely possible I will be mistaken for pregnant in those outfits, and that’s fine. I will be very cute.Another high profile one we wanted to chat about is a recent piece by Haley Nahman. The essay is called Making Bad Decisions On Purpose. This one is really interesting because there is anti-fatness in it and there’s a lot that I agree with. And this is another common theme where I think people get it like, 40 percent or 60 percent right, but there’s still that piece they haven’t looked at because they haven’t had to look at it.CorinneThis one I had complicated feelings about.The essay was about Haley’s experience eating sugar. She frames it as an almost compulsive relationship with eating sugar. This one was complicated for me, brought up a lot of feelings. Because I think a lot of it is very relatable! But it’s one of those things where she’s talking about her own experience, her own eating habits, and it’s just hard to not extrapolate out into your own experience.The part that really stuck with me after I read it, and which I had to follow up on, was where she lists out what she’s been eating:On heavy rotation over the last year: homemade chocolate chip cookies the size of saucers; bags of sour gummy bears or chocolate-filled cookies shaped like panda bears; pints of Häagen-Dazs ice cream finished in two to three sittings; salted brown-butter rice crispy treatsShe goes on and on. She’s listing all this stuff as if it’s a lot.VirginiaIt’s like, you should be scandalized that she’s eating.CorinneAnother thing in there is “chopped up green apples dipped in greek yogurt mixed with peanut butter.” But that’s not a sugar snack.And then this one thing is driving me freaking nuts. I was like, “a pint of Haagen Dazs finished in two to three sittings?”VirginiaThat’s how long a pint lasts.CorinneI went to my freezer. I opened my freezer. I pulled out a pint of Haagen Dazs to see how many servings it contains. It’s two and a half! What the heck? How much ice cream does she think you’re supposed to be eating? A tablespoon? I don’t know. I was just like, what the heck? A pint is two cups.VirginiaAnd: Even if you’re finishing a whole pint in one sitting, that’s not necessarily a destructive eating habit. Portions are very personal and different for all of us. She’s just talking about eating ice cream several times a week. The way people do.This section reminded me a lot of that Caity Weaver essay that was in the New York Times a few months ago, which I wrote about.How That Sugar Addiction Piece Became a Journey Into HellI understand that thin people have complicated relationships with food and dieting. understand that they may have internalized diet culture messaging so they think that eating ice cream is bad and that taking three sittings to finish a pint is a problem when it’s not. Like, I get that. And: A fat person could not publish an essay listing out the food they’d eaten without expecting serious blowback.I couldn’t be in the N

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Mara Gordon, MD. Dr. Mara is a family physician on the faculty of Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, as well as a writer, journalist and contributor to NPR. She also writes the newsletter Your Doctor Friend by Mara Gordon about her efforts to make medicine more fat friendly. And she was previously on the podcast last November, answering your questions on how to take a weight inclusive approach to conditions like diabetes, acid reflux, and sleep apnea.Dr. Mara is back today to tackle all your questions about perimenopause and menopause! Actually, half your questions—there were so many, and the answers are so detailed, we’re going to be breaking this one into a two parter. So stay tuned for the second half, coming in September! As we discussed in our recent episode with Cole Kazdin, finding menopause advice that doesn’t come with a side of diet culture is really difficult. Dr Mara is here to help, and she will not sell you a supplement sign or make you wear a weighted vest. This episode is free but if you value this conversation, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you.PS. You can always listen to this pod right here in your email, where you’ll also receive full transcripts (edited and condensed for clarity). But please also follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and/or Pocket Casts! And if you enjoy today’s conversation, please tap the heart on this post — likes are one of the biggest drivers of traffic from Substack’s Notes, so that’s a super easy, free way to support the show!And don’t miss these: Healthcare is Ground Zero for FatphobiaIs Dr. Mary Claire Haver Making Menopause a Diet?Episode 203 TranscriptVirginiaWhen I put up the call out for listener questions for this, we were immediately inundated with, like, 50 questions in an hour. People have thoughts and feelings and need information! So I’m very excited you’re here. Before we dive into the listener questions, let’s establish some big picture framing on how we are going to approach this conversation around perimenopause and menopause.MaraI should start just by introducing myself. I’m a family doctor and I have a very general practice, which means I take care of infants and I have a couple patients who are over 100. It’s amazing. And families, which is such an honor, to care for multiple generations of families. So, perimenopause and menopause is one chunk of my practice, but it is not all of it.I come from the perspective of a generalist, right? Lots of my patients have questions about perimenopause and menopause. Many of my patients are women in that age group. And I have been learning a lot over the last couple of years. The science is emerging, and I think a lot of practice patterns amongst doctors have really changed, even in the time that I have been in practice, which is about 10 years. There has been a huge shift in the way we physicians think about menopause and think about perimenopause, which I think is mostly for the better, which is really exciting.There’s an increased focus on doctors taking menopause seriously, approaching it with deep care and concern and professionalism. And that is excellent. But this menopause advocacy is taking place in a world that’s really steeped in fatphobia and diet culture. Our culture is just so susceptible to corporate influence. There are tons of influencers who call themselves menopause experts selling supplements online, just selling stuff. Sort of cashing in on this. And I will note, a lot of them are medical doctors, too, so it can be really hard to sort through.VirginiaYour instinct is to trust, because you see the MD.MaraTotally. There’s a lot of diet talk wrapped up in all of it, and there’s a lot of fear-mongering, which I would argue often has fatphobia at its core. It’s a fear of fatness, a fear of aging, a fear of our bodies not being ultra thin, ultra sexualized bodies of adolescents or women in their 20s, right? This is all to say that I think it’s really exciting that there’s an increased cultural focus on women’s health, particularly health in midlife. But we also need to be careful about the ways that diet culture sneaks into some of this talk, and who might be profiting from it. So we do have some hearty skepticism, but also some enthusiasm for the culture moving towards taking women’s concerns and midlife seriously.VirginiaThe cultural discourse around this is really tricky. Part of why I wanted you to come on to answer listener questions is because you approach healthcare from a weight inclusive lens, which is not every doctor. It is certainly not every doctor in the menopause space. And you’re not selling us a supplement line or a weighted vest, so that’s really helpful. So that’s a good objective place for us to start! Here’s our first question, from Julie: It’s my understanding that the body naturally puts on weight in menopause, especially around the torso, and that this fat helps to replace declining estrogen, because fat produces estrogen. I don’t know where I’ve heard this, but I think it’s true? But I would like to know a doctor’s explanation of this, just because I think it’s just more evidence that our bodies know what they’re doing and we can trust them, and that menopause and the possible related weight gain is nothing to fear or dread or fight.MaraOof, okay, so we are just diving right in. Thank you so much for this question. It’s one I get from many of my patients, too. So I looked into some of the literature on this, and it is thought that declining estrogen—which happens in the menopausal transition—does contribute to what we call visceral adiposity, which is basically fatty tissue around the internal organs. And in clinical practice, we approximate this by assessing waist circumference. This is really spotty! But we tend to think of it as “belly fat,” which is a fatphobic term. I prefer the term “visceral adiposity” even though it sounds really medical, it gets more specifically at what the issue is, which is that this particular adipose tissue around internal organs can be pathologic. It can be associated with insulin resistance, increasing risk of cardiovascular disease, and risk of what we call metabolic—here’s a mouthful—metabolic dysfunction associated steatotic liver disease, which is what fatty liver disease has been renamed.So I don’t think we totally understand why this happens in the menopausal transition. There is a hypothesis that torso fatty tissue does help increase estrogen, and it’s the body’s response to declining estrogen and attempts to preserve estrogen. But in our modern lives, where people live much longer than midlife, it can create pathology. VirginiaI just want to pause there to make sure folks get it. So it could be that this extra fat in our torsos develops for a protective reason —possibly replacing estrogen levels—but because we now live longer, there’s a scenario where it doesn’t stay protective, or it has other impacts besides its initial protective purpose.MaraRight? And this is just a theory. It’s kind of impossible to prove something like that, but many menopause researchers have this working theory about, quote—we’ve got to find a better term for it—belly fat. What should we call it, Virginia? Virginia. I mean, or can we reclaim belly fat? But that’s like a whole project. There is a lot of great work reclaiming bellies, but we’ll go with visceral adiposity right now.MaraAnyway, this is an active area of menopause research, and I’m not sure we totally understand the phenomenon. That being said, Julie asks, “Should we just trust our bodies?” Do our bodies know what they’re doing? And I think that’s a really philosophical question, and that is the heart of what you’re asking, Julie, rather than what’s the state of the research on visceral adiposity in the menopause transition.It’s how much do we trust our bodies versus how much do we use modern medicine to intervene, to try to change the natural course of our bodies? And it’s a question about the role that modern medicine plays in our lives. So obviously, I’m a fan of modern medicine, right? I’m a medical doctor. But I also have a lot of skepticism about it. I can see firsthand that we pathologize a lot of normal physiologic processes, and I see the way that our healthcare system profits off of this pathology.So this is all to say: Most people do tend to gain weight over time. That’s been well-described in the literature. Both men and women gain weight with age, and women tend to gain mid-section weight specifically during the menopausal transition, which seems to be independent of age. So people who go through menopause earlier might see this happen earlier. This weight gain is happening in unique ways that are affected by the hormone changes in the menopausal transition, and I think it can be totally reasonable to want to prevent insulin resistance or prevent metabolic dysfunction in the liver using medications. Or can you decide that you don’t want to use medications to do that; diet and exercise also absolutely play a role. But I think it’s a deep question. I don’t know, what do you think? Virginia, what’s your take?VirginiaI think it can be a both/and. If everybody gains weight as we age, and particularly as we go through menopause transition, then we shouldn’t be pathologizing that at baseline. Because if everybody does it, then it’s a normal fact of having a human body. And why are we making that into something that we’re so terrified of?And I think this is what we’re going to get more into with these questions: It’s also possible to say, can we improve quality of life? Can we extend life? Can we use medicine to help with those things in a way that makes it not about the weight gain, but about managing the symptoms that may or may not be caused by the weight gain? If the weight gain correlates with insu

Hello on this steamy Summer Friday! We’re popping in to share the (unedited! very casual!) video from the Live we did Wednesday… just generally catching up on some urgent summer news like: * Our new favorite tank tops* Why we hate And Just Like That (but can’t stop watching)* Why we love Lena Dunham but are…complicated?? maybe in love?? with Too Much. * Plus some Butters! As a reminder, we use the Substack Live feature super casually. These haven’t been edited to audio or visual perfection. We’re at the mercy of Substack tech (and our iPhones and Airpods) to sound good. And there is an AI-generated transcript attached (click the video to access it!) but it won’t be as beautifully edited as podcast episode transcripts, which Corinne and I spend hours on every week. Totally get if these low production values are not your jam! But if you want to debate who wears light yellow best… here you go. Links to everything we chatted about here are:The yellow tank top we both love! (Virginia wears 1X, Corinne wears 5X, avail up to 6X.)Corinne’s other favorite tank top.Corinne is making me put this in against my will: The True Spring Yellow.And this is a True Summer Yellow:Kate Manne on the toxic masculinity of Felix. (Corinne is still rooting for him!)Full details on how to make your own Mosquito Dunk Bucket. And here’s mine:

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Tracy Clark-Flory. Tracy is the feminist writer behind the newsletter TCF Emails and the author of Want Me: A Sex Writer's Journey into the Heart of Desire. She’s also the cohost of the new podcast Dire Straights where she and Amanda Montei unpack the many toxic aspects of heterosexual relationships and culture. I brought Tracy on the podcast today to talk about my feet, but we get into so much more. We talk about porn, sexual identity, and the male gaze—and, of course, how all of this makes us feel in our bodies.My Feet Are On the InternetThis episode is free but if you value this conversation, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you.PS. You can always listen to this pod right here in your email, where you’ll also receive full transcripts (edited and condensed for clarity). But please also follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and/or Pocket Casts! And if you enjoy today’s conversation, please tap the heart on this post — likes are one of the biggest drivers of traffic from Substack’s Notes, so that’s a super easy, free way to support the show!Episode 202 TranscriptVirginiaI am so excited. We’ve been Internet friends for a long time, and it’s so nice to finally have a conversation. I’m very jazzed! TracyRight? I feel like we’ve talked before, but we have not, which is such an odd sensation. We’ve emailed.VirginiaWe’ve emailed, we’ve DM-ed, we’ve commented on each other’s things. But we have not, with our faces and mouths, had a conversation. The Internet is so weird.Well, the Internet being weird is a lot of what we’re gonna talk about today. Because where I want to start today is feet.TracyWhy not?VirginiaSo I initially emailed you when I was working on my essay about my Wikifeet experience, because you have written so extensively about porn and the Internet’s treatment of women. And when I discovered my Wikifeet, one of my first thoughts was, “I need to talk to Tracy about this.” TracyThat makes me so happy. I want to be the first person that everyone thinks of when they find themselves on Wikifeet.VirginiaI was like, “I don’t know how she’ll feel…” so I’m glad you take that as a compliment.I don’t even know where to start. Even though I wrote a whole essay about this, my brain is still, like, “record scratch moment” on the whole thing. Sojust talk to us a little bit where in your vast reporting on porn did you kind of become aware of fetish sites and what’s your read on them? What’s going on there?TracyI think I first became aware of Wikifeet in 2008-ish when they launched, and that’s when I was a proper, full-time sex writer, on the sex beat, covering every weird niche Internet community. And then in the years since, I’ve unfortunately had many women colleagues—often feminist writers—who have ended up on the site. So unfortunately, you’re not the first person I know who’s ended up on there.VirginiaIt’s a weird thing that a certain type of woman writer is gonna end up on Wikifeet. Why?TracyThere are no shortage of women who are consensually volunteering photos of their feet online for people to consume in a sexualized way, right? So the fact is that this site is providing a venue for people to do it in a very nonconsensual way, where images are taken from other venues that are not sexualized. They’re stolen images, you know? Things that are screenshotted from Instagram stories, that kind of thing—and then put into this sexualized context. Not only that, but put into a sexualized context where there is a community around sexualizing and objectifying and even rating and evaluating body parts.My take is that this violation is part of the point. Because there is having a foot fetish—great, have at it, enjoy. And then there’s consuming images that are nonconsensual. So I think that the violation is part of the point. And to the point of feminist writers, women writers online, ending up on it—I don’t think it’s an accident. Because I think that there is—perhaps for some, maybe not all—some pleasure taken in that aspect of trespass.VirginiaYes. My best friend is a food blogger, and I immediately searched for her because she’s way more famous than I am, and she’s not on there. And I’m glad, I don’t want her non-consensually on there! But I was like, oh, it’s interesting that I’m on there, lyz is on there. It is a certain type of woman that men are finding objectionable on the Internet. And putting us on WikiFeet is a retaliation or just a way of—I don’t know. It’s not a direct attack, because I didn’t even know about it for however long my feet have been up there. But it is a way for men to feel like they’re in control of us in some way, right?TracyOh, totally. And it’s because there is something interesting about taking a body part that is not broadly and generally sexualized, and sexualizing it. There is this feeling of a “gotcha!” in it.There is something, too, about feet—I mean, I think this is part of what plays into foot fetish, often. There is this sense of dirtiness, potentially, but also the sense of often being hidden away. It’s secret, it’s private, it’s delicate, it’s tender. Feet are ticklish, there’s so much layered in there that I think can make it feel like this place of vulnerability.I’ve written about upskirting. This was maybe like 15 years ago. But it’s these communities where men take upskirt videos and photos of women on the subway or wherever, and then they share them in online forums. And that’s very clearly a physical trespass. You’re seeing something that was not meant to be seen. So it’s quite different. But it’s feels like it exists on a spectrum of trespass and violation and taking sexualized enjoyment out of that.VirginiaFrom someone who had no intention of you taking that enjoyment, who’s just trying to ride the train to work.TracyTotally. And the foot thing, it just makes me think of all these different ways that women experience their bodies in the world. You can’t just be at ease in your body, because someone might think your feet are hot.VirginiaIt’s really interesting. I’ve talked about this on the podcast before: A little bit after I got divorced and I started having, weekends totally to myself in my house, it was the first time I’d been alone in my house in a long time. Obviously, usually my kids were there. My husband used to be there. And I had this strange sensation of being observed, even when I was completely alone in the house.It’s just me and the dog. She’s asleep. I’m making dinner or watching TV or doing whatever I’m doing. And I couldn’t shake the sensation that I was watching myself, still thinking about what I was going to wear. It was so weird, and I realized it actually isn’t particularly a comment on my marriage. It’s more a comment on women are so trained to always feel observed. It’s really hard for us to actually access a space where we’re not going to be observed. It was wild.TracyWe adopt that perspective of the watcher, and we are the watched. We experience ourselves in that way, as opposed to being the watcher, the person who sees and consumes the world and experiences the world. It’s like we experience ourselves being experienced by someone else—an imagined man often.VirginiaYes, you’re always self-objectifying. It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to please that gaze, whether you’re trying to protect yourself against that gaze. Whatever it is, we’re always aware of how we’ll be perceived in a way that I don’t think cis men ever have to consider. I don’t think that’s a part of their experience of the world in the same way.TracyAnd how messed up is that tension between trying to please and trying to protect oneself? What an impossible tightrope walk to be constantly doing.VirginiaRight, and to not even know which one you want sometimes. Like, which one you need, which one you want.TracyYeah, going back and forth between those extremes. You’re always kind of monitoring and on edge.VirginiaAnd, it did shift. Now when I’m alone in my house, I don’t feel like I’m watching myself. Like, it did lessen. But it was this very stark moment of noticing that. And I think the way our work is so online, we are so online, it doesn’t help. Because we also have all learned through the performance art of social media to constantly be documenting. And even if you’re by yourself, you might post something about it. There’s that need to narrate and document and then also objectify your experience.TracyThe sense of, like, if I don’t take a photo of it, it doesn’t exist. It didn’t happen. It’s not real. It must be consumed by other people. I mean, when you were talking earlier about that sense of being surveyed, I think that is a very just common experience for women, period. But then I think, for me, growing up with reality TV, the explosion of reality TV, like that added this like sense of a camera on one’s life.And then I think, like, if you want to bring porn into it, too—Like, in the bedroom, that sense of the watcher, so you have this sense of being watched by men, but then you have the sense of kind of performing for an audience, because that’s so much of what I came up with culturally.VirginiaI mean, the way we often conceive of our sexuality is through performance and how are you being perceived not how are you experiencing it yourself? I mean, you write about that so well, that tension.TracyThat was my whole thing. My sexual coming of age memoir is so much about what it meant to try to move out of that focus on how I’m being perceived by my partner and into a place of what am I experiencing? What do I even want beyond being wanted?VirginiaMan, it’s amazing we’ve all survived and gotten where we are. Another layer to this, that I thought about a lot as I was processing my Wikifeet, was how instantly I felt like I had to laugh it off. I really felt like I couldn’t access my true reaction to it.

You’re listening to Burnt Toast!We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for… part 2 of our 200th episode!We are continuing to revisit favorite moments from the podcast archives. Coming up:🔥We have feelings about aging!🔥What’s our current take on heterosexual marriage?🔥How do you set boundaries when you’re in eating disorder recovery but your partner is…on a diet?And so much more!This newsletter contains affiliate links, which means if you buy something we suggest, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only ever recommend things we love and use ourselves!Episode 201 TranscriptCorinneOkay, so here’s the first question that I picked, from a mailbag episode we ran in January 2023:Is It Ever Okay to Eat at Chick-fil-A?What are your personal philosophies on aging, and are you conflicted about it in any sense?VirginiaI feel firmly that I am someone who was born to be an older person. I think my whole life, I have been working towards being someone in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, who mostly stays in and does puzzles and has plans.And I think the story I kicked this off with about my one night of tequila sidewalk lying down illustrates how bad I was at being a fun young person, and I’m so glad. I’m so glad I don’t have to be fun and young anymore.CorinneWow, there’s nothing you’re conflicted about? Like, how do you feel about gray hair?VirginiaI actually feel fine about gray hair.CorinneDo you have any?VirginiaOkay, here is the thing about me and gray hair, I don’t have a lot. I do have several. I am not actively trying to dye them, but I do get highlights, and my very talented hair stylist often places the highlights in ways that distract the gray hairs. Doesn’t cover them completely, but yes. And because I made a self care decision to outsource my hair to her, like about a decade ago, and I just do whatever she wants to do with my hair, because I’m always happy with it. And that way I don’t get, like, worked up about what should I do with my hair? I haven’t yet said to her, like, we don’t have to actively cover the grays, but, like, I haven’t started not dying it, is what I’m saying, because I’m happy with how it looks. But it’s not because I’m happy it’s covered my grays. It’s just that I don’t want to think about my hair that much, yeah. But as I get more grays, I will not be trying to hide them. Am I conflicted about aging? When does it come up for me?CorinneSagging face? Menopause?VirginiaSagging face, I will admit to feelings about face sagging sometimes. I do have a lot more chin hair in my 40s. So much more chin hair. And managing that is a hobby I didn’t really want. So that one sure. Menopause, I don’t even know. I mean, my relationship with my menstrual health is like I’m suppressing it all with an IUD for as long as possible. So I don’t know. Menopause could be a gift. It could be a nightmare. I have no idea, but what’s going on currently isn’t great.it’s not like I’m gonna be losing out on some beautiful experience of menstruation. So yeah, mostly I just love having to give fewer fucks about stuff.But yeah, what about you? You sound a little more conflicted. And we should say I’m older. I’m several years older.CorinneNot by much.VirginiaI’m going to be 42 in a few months.CorinneI’m 37 when you listen to this podcast. If I did the math right.I always thought that I wouldn’t care, and then when I started getting gray hairs, I was like, Oh, I do care. And I have the color of hair that you can’t really see them unless you’re like, up close. But yeah, I just was like, Oh, I feel sad that I’m gonna have different hair in like, a few years. I just feel like tI, like, identify with how my hair looks. But yeah, I don’t know that I will start, like, dyeing it because it seems like a lot of work and money. I think I feel like low key sad about it, but also, like I do feel also good about still being alive and giving fewer fucks.VirginiaI mean, I think there’s a lot of ways in which I haven’t had to contend with a lot of ageism yet. Because I work from home, I’m not in an office where I think it would be dealing with ageism much more concretely on a daily basis. I think that that would be harder and may become harder. I’m at this point like mostly when I sort of suddenly realized that my age or my weight, either one, has rendered me invisible, like to a man or something. I’m usually like, amused, slash, fine with it, like, annoyed sometimes, but also like, Oh, God, are you really gonna be this cliche?But I mean, again, there’s like, privilege there. My job is not hinging on how people perceive my age yet. Obviously, the idea of, like, adding more oppression is not, like, exciting, and, you know, the idea of dying one day isn’t like, a cheery thought. But, God. I don’t miss my 20s at all.CorinneDon’t miss lying on the sidewalk?VirginiaIt was one night. I can’t underscore that enough.CorinneYou’re never going to live that downCorinneSo I wanted to revisit this one, because when we recorded this, we were merely 37 and 42. And now I’m 39 and you’re 44! And we were talking about aging. We have aged. Just curious if we feel the same way or or what?VirginiaWell, first of all, I just got really excited that you’re turning 40 next year, and I want to know what we’re doing for that.CorinneOh God, I’m already having so much anticipatory anxiety about what I should do.VirginiaI’m so excited. It’s a great birthday. I had my 40th birthday during COVID. Don’t necessarily recommend that, but it’s a good birthday.I think my feelings are still very similar. I am still someone who was always born to be middle aged or elderly. I still enjoy an early bedtime. I like puzzles. I like gardening. I am extremely comfortable being in my 40s. I feel just delighted by it all the time. I feel so glad that I feel no pressure to be young and cool. That sounds exhausting.CorinneWell, I wanted to bring this up because I feel like I’ve heard you mention in some recent episodes, like the one with Sarai Walker—you were like, “I feel rage sometimes about getting older and not getting noticed or being ignored.”"I've Thought About Unleashing Jennifer on MAGA."VirginiaOh, so now you’re calling me out because I was like, I love being older?CorinneI didn’t mean it to be a call out! I just thought, oh, maybe this is something where your opinion has changed. Because I originally had much more mixed feelings about aging as a mere 37 year old.VirginiaYes, what was your deal? You were an infant!Though I actually think that’s normal. I think a lot of times, aging is something where we fear it coming. We get really worked up in advance, and then you do it. And you’re like, “Oh, right, I’m still the same person.”CorinneThat’s deep. That’s what anxiety is!VirginiaIt’s actually not that deep. That’s just what that is.So, my feelings about the stage of my life I’m in are the same, which are positive. This season of life is a great season compared to previous seasons.My feelings about how my aging is perceived by the world, yes, I think are a little more complicated now. Like, when I was like, “I feel great about gray hair. I mean, yeah, I don’t have any, but I would be fine with having it.” I think that’s still true, but I continue to not say, “Hey, let’s stop covering up my grays!” I have yet to be like, you know what? I want to see what my hair is doing!One change we talked about though: I mentioned my chin hair, and the hobby of managing my chin hair, and I did finally, a few months ago, do laser hair removal.CorinneWait! Why have you not written an essay about this?VirginiaI don’t know! Okay, this is kind of breaking news? I’ve just finished my eighth session or something.CorinneWow! Is it so painful?VirginiaOkay, I really probably should write an essay.CorinneYeah, maybe save it for the essay? I just have so many questions.VirginiaThe lip is crazy painful. With the lip, you tear up and want to die for a second, painful. The chin, not so bad. And I have to do my jowls, my whole beard area.Anyway, so, I guess that is me participating in beauty labor to resist aging. Because my facial hair increased with age, and I didn’t like it and I took it down. I would also say for me, it feels a little gender affirming?CorinneIt’s gender affirming care.VirginiaThank you. I don’t know if that’s problematic to say, as a cis woman?CorinneI think it’s actually really good to normalize cis people also participating in gender affirming care.VirginiaOkay, well, I am for sure participating in gender affirming care then, with my laser hair removal. And it’s the kind of thing that I didn’t do for so long. Even though it is painful and it is expensive, too, so those are reasons not to do it, of course. But it’s briefly painful, and then it removes this daily stress from my life because I’m not every morning like, “Oh, do I have to shave? What am I doing with my chin hair?”So that’s one change. I did decide this is one aspect of visible aging I didn’t like. And I decided to do something about. I still have yet to do anything like Botox. I have yet to really adopt a skincare routine of any kind besides sunscreen. So otherwise I feel the same. What about you? Any aesthetic-related aging differences?CorinneI also haven’t done anything aesthetic. I have done no injectables.VirginiaWell, we have fat privilege so we don’t wrinkle as much.CorinneI definitely have wrinkles.VirginiaNot as much as if you were thin, Corinne. I am telling you. That famous French actress always said, “You choose between your ass and your face.” And I think we’ve chosen our asses.CorinneThe thing I’ve been thinking about aging lately is how, if you’re a certain type of person who grows up being precocious in some way? Like you’re smart, and you’re a young, smart person, and then as you get older, you’re kind of like, wait now, I’m just an average old person.VirginiaYou can be a smart old person!CorinneBut I’m never going to be like a 30 under 30.VirginiaYes. Your prodigy days are behi

You’re listening to Burnt Toast!We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for your July Indulgence Gospel!And… it’s our 200th episode! To celebrate, we’re making today’s Indulgence Gospel free to everyone and offering a flash sale — 20% off to celebrate 200 episodes!This newsletter contains affiliate links, which means if you buy something we suggest, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only ever recommend things we love and use ourselves! One Good ThingNow that it’s summer, ice cream is a daily state of being here and I’ve been using my East Fork ice cream bowls constantly (they are also the perfect size for cherries and for many of your favorite snacks). If you are also an East Fork disciple, heads up that their annual Seconds Sale starts today! This is where they sell pots that are slightly imperfect but still 100 percent functional and food safe for 30-40% off. And yes, there are a lot of cute ice cream bowls. PS. You can always listen to our episodes right here in your email, where you’ll also receive full transcripts (edited and condensed for clarity). But please also follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and/or Pocket Casts!Episode 200 TranscriptCorinne200! Can you believe it?VirginiaI can and I cannot. It’s one of those things where I feel like we’ve always been making the podcast, but also 200 feels like so many.CorinneI went back through, to look at some old episodes. And I was like, you know, I kind of remember all of them. I was like, surely there are some I have forgotten. But yeah, kind of not.VirginiaWhen I was looking back at the old episodes, it was like visiting old friends. I was like, I know you guys. We’re cool.CorinneIf you write into us with a question and we answer it, it really sticks with us!VirginiaWe continue to think about you. And would like updates, honestly. We don’t always get them, so putting that out there. We’d like to know.CorinneTo celebrate, we have a special two part episode for you. We’re picking favorite moments from the archives to revisit, to see if our feelings and opinions have changed.VirginiaAlright, I decided to look back at our many excellent guest conversations and pull out some favorites. First up, I thought I’d look back at our work ultra-processed foods since it is such an annoyingly evergreen topic. We did a great pair of episodes with Laura Thomas, PhD, who writes “Can I Have Another Snack?” which ran in July 2023. Here is a little excerpt from the first conversation.VirginiaIt feels like it’s important to say very clearly that processed is not synonymous with has no nutrition, and that actually processing foods is a good thing to do in order to eat, right?LauraYeah, well, all forms of cooking are a process, right?So unless you like want to go down some raw vegan path, you can’t really avoid processing your food to some extent.Now, advocates of NOVA, I think, would say that’s a bit of a red herring, because what we’re actually talking about is this additional level of processing, this ultra processing sort of phenomenon.But even within that category, I think there are merits to processing–even Ultra processing–our foods. One of the things that happens when we process food is we extend the shelf life of it, and that means that we are wasting less food overall, which I think we would all agree is probably a helpful thing.But industrial food processing, it reduces foodborne pathogens. It reduces microbes that would spoil food and make things like oils turn rancid faster. It also significantly cuts down on the time and labor that it requires to cook a meal. And I think that’s for me as a parent, and I know for you as well, like, that’s huge.VirginiaIt’s really everything, honestly. For me personally. Nothing should be everything for everybody, but limiting the amount of time I spend cooking dinner is the thing that enables me to eat dinner with my family at night.LauraBut it’s not just like super privileged white women that have a lot of you know nutrition knowledge, right, that benefit from ultra processed foods. I’m also thinking about kids with feeding disorders that would struggle to get all the nutrition that they need without processed foods. I’m thinking about elderly or disabled people who can maintain a level of independence because they can quickly cook some pasta and throw an ultra processed jar of pasta sauce on that and have a nourishing meal. I’m thinking about pregnant people who otherwise might not be able to stomach eating because of morning sickness and nausea, which we know lasts forever, not just morning, right?So there are so many groups of people that benefit from ultra processed foods, and they just seem to be missing entirely from the conversation around these foods.VirginiaSo often there’s this pressure of like, we have to just get poor people cooking more and get them cooking more. And it’s like, okay, but if you live in a shelter, you don’t have a kitchen. If you are crashing on a couch with family member, you know, in a house with lots of different people, and it’s not easy for you to get time in the kitchen. There’s so many different scenarios where cooking is not a practical solution, and having greater shelf stability is very important.LauraBut it also says a lot about where we place our values, right? And who is making decisions about where we cook our values? Because it’s not everyone’s value system to spend more time cooking from scratch and buying fresh ingredients and spending more time in the kitchen.VirginiaI picked this clip because I think Laura is summing up so many important pieces of this conversation that I just continue to see nowhere in the mainstream media discourse around ultra-processed foods. Like the fact that they are useful and convenient. And convenience is not a moral failing. I don’t know where we decided food should be inconvenient to be valuable and healthy? But it seems like that’s a thing that we believe.CorinneI know Maintenance Phase just did an ultra processed food episode. I listened to that.VirginiaOh, it’s excellent. CorinneAnd both they and you and Laura got into the way that “processed” is just such a moving target. It means so many different things.VirginiaIt means literally anything.CorinneAnd also nothing.VirginiaYes, when I say this is missing from the discourse, I don’t mean Maintenance Phase, who I think we’re very much in conversation with. As Mike and Aubrey kept discussing on their episode—I think Laura says some of this, too—depending whose classification system you go by, honey is ultra-processed or it’s not ultra-processed. Foods are moving categories all the time.And as Aubrey said: Really what it comes down to is they’re categorizing foods so that the ones that “people who make less money than you buy” are bad. And I was like, yep, there it is. This is really classism and racism and all the other isms to say let’s demonize these foods that people rely on. Which is not to say we shouldn’t improve the overall quality of food in the food system! But doing it through this policing of consumer habits just will never not make me furious.CorinneReally feels like this hasn’t gotten better since the episode aired two years ago? VirginiaIf anything, I think it has intensified. I think RFK and MAHA has really put this one in their crosshairs, and it’s just getting worse and worse. It’s really maddening, because we’re just not having any of the real conversations we need to have about how to improve food quality in this country or anywhere.CorinneWhat a bummer. All right, let’s listen to this next quote, which is about jeans.VirginiaOh, jeans.VirginiaSo the backstory is on recent Indulgence Gospels, we have talked about how Corinne converted me to the universal standard straight leg jeans, and I do really like them. But earlier today, I had to be in photos, and we had a plan. The three of us had a plan that I was going to wear those jeans, and at the last minute, I texted Dacy. I didn’t even text Corinne because I knew she’d yell at me. I texted Dacy, and I was like, I can’t do it. I’m in my skinny jeans for the photos. And, yeah, it was like, do I look too sloppy? Are these, like, saggy in a weird way that I have no control over?And I feel like for something like having your picture taken, like, wear the pants, you’re not going to feel like you’re only thinking about your pants. You know what I mean?CorinneOkay, so I wanted to revisit some of your feelings about jeans. You may recall that we used to open like every podcast episode by chatting about pants!VirginiaWe did. We haven’t done that!CorinneWe kind of fell off pants chat, and I don’t know why.VirginiaBring back pants chat! CorinneBut I do feel like since we started doing the podcast, your feelings about jeans have evolved? True or false?VirginiaThey have evolved. They definitely have. I mean, I still own a pair of emotional support skinny jeans. The same pair I mention in that episode. CorinneWhen is the last time you wore them?VirginiaI actually have not worn them very much at all. I did wear them two weeks ago under a shirt dress because it turned out to be colder than I thought. And I was like, “Oh, it’s not a bare leg dress day.” So I put on skinny jeans under it, but I haven’t worn them for any other reason in a really long time.And I will say: I’m wearing my Gap straight leg jeans the most, the baggier fit ones the most. So I do think I’ve evolved to embrace a more relaxed fit of jean, which does make it much easier to get jeans to fit your body.I still think the primary finding of Jean Science was correct, that jeans are designed terribly, that fashion in general is terrible at fitting people’s bodies, but particularly when it comes to fitting pants onto fat people. They’re really bad at it. And so I think all the jeans are bad.But I will say if you can embrace a wider leg or a more relaxed fit, you will have more options.CorinneYeah, I think that’s true.VirginiaI still cannot

Sorting fact from diet culture myth, with Cole KazdinYou’re listening to Burnt Toast! Today, my guest is Cole Kazdin.Cole is an Emmy Award-winning television journalist and author of What's Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety. Cole came on Burnt Toast about two years ago to talk about What's Eating Us when it first came out—and the way the eating disorder industrial complex leaves so many folks struggling to find durable recovery.Today, Cole is joining us again as an eating disorder expert, but also as a fellow woman in perimenopause… who is reeling right now from all the diet culture nonsense coming for us in this stage of life.Our goal today is to call out the anti-fatness, ageism and diet culture running rampant in peri/menopause-adjacent media. I know a lot of you have more specific questions about menopause (like how much protein DO we need?). Part 2 of the Burnt Toast Menopause Conversation will be coming in a few weeks with Mara Gordon, MD joining us to tackle those topics. So drop your questions in the comments for Dr. Mara! This episode is free but if you value this conversation, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Burnt Toast is 100% reader- and listener-supported. We literally can’t do this without you.PS. You can always listen to this pod right here in your email, where you’ll also receive full transcripts (edited and condensed for clarity). But please also follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and/or Pocket Casts! And if you enjoy today’s conversation, please tap the heart on this post — likes are one of the biggest drivers of traffic from Substack’s Notes, so that’s a super easy, free way to support the show!Episode 199VirginiaSo, Cole, you are back because you emailed me to say: Is all of menopause a diet? What are we doing? By which I mean menopause and perimenopause—we’re going to kind of lump them together everyone. They are distinct life stages. But in terms of the cultural discourse, they’re very much hooked together.You emailed and said:Look, I’m not a menopause expert, but I am an eating disorder expert and I’m seeing a lot of stuff that I don’t like. How do we take a skeptical but informed eye about the messaging we get as we age? How do we get through this without developing an eating disorder as we are in the full witch phase of our lives?So, let’s just start by getting a lay of the land. What are our first impressions as women newly arriving in perimenopause?ColeThere’s something that is so exciting about all the books that are out and the research that’s emerging, from actual OB/GYNs to the existence of the Menopause Society to Naomi Watts wrote a book about menopause. I think we’re the first real generation to have menopause information and conversations.When I asked my mom about her perimenopause and menopause she doesn’t really remember it. So I think I really want to preface this by saying how valuable this is. When I sat down to start looking at the available information and read these books, I was stunned by some of the symptoms that I’ve never heard of—tinnitus, joint pain, right? Things that aren’t just hot flashes, which I think are the standard menopause symptoms that we tend to hear about.VirginiaThere are a lot. It’s like, everything that could be happening to your body.ColeAnd then very quickly… there’s a sharp left turn to intermittent fasting. VirginiaYes. It’s like, wait, what? I want to know about my joint pain? What are we doing?ColeAnd it felt to me, like some sort of betrayal. Because you get on the train of “we’re going to learn about something that’s happening to our bodies that no one’s ever really talked about or paid attention to before.” And, then it’s oh wait, I have to track my protein. What just happened? I’m having so much trouble with that clash of gratitude and absolute hunger—pun intended, sorry, there’s no other word—for the information and research. And then being told, “But no hunger!”VirginiaI mean, this is always the story with women’s health, right? Women’s health is so ignored and forgotten by the mainstream—the media, the medical system—so we are left to put it together on our own.And of course, we have a proud tradition of centuries of midwives teaching women about our bodies. It’s the Our Bodies, Ourselves legacy. There’s all this wisdom that women figure out about how our bodies work, what we need to know to take care of ourselves. But because it’s being ignored by scientific research, it’s being ignored by the mainstream, and it is this sort of an underground thing—that also opens up a really clear market for diet culture.So it’s really easy to find an influencer—and they may even be a doctor or have some other credentials attached to their name—who you feel like, “Oh, she’s voicing something that I am feeling. I’m being ignored by my regular doctor and here’s this person on Tiktok who really seems to get it,” …and then also wants to sell me a supplement line. It’s so quick to go to this place of it’s just another Goop, basically.ColeAnd what if it didn’t go there? What does the world look like where it doesn’t go there? I am really hyper conscious of my own vulnerabilities—even though I feel very, very, very, very solid in my eating disorder recovery. I don’t go there anymore. I know there are vulnerabilities there, because I struggled on and off with eating disorders for decades. But, I really feel solid in my recovery. And then I wonder if I should start tracking my protein? I was shocked to even hear that in my own head, and then to hear my very sophisticated turn of “well, you’re not looking at calories, you’re not trying to get smaller, you’re done with that for real for real. But you should probably start looking at how much protein you’re getting!” Wait a minute, stop!VirginiaWhere’s that coming from?ColeI’m fortunate enough that because of my background and because I wrote a book on this, I can reach out to top eating disorder researchers in the country, and just ask a question. Isn’t this kind of funny that I did this? Isn’t that interesting? What do you think? And to be met with: Do not go near tracking apps! That is not safe for you. DO NOT track your protein. It’s not funny. I did that last night. I just reached out to one of the top eating disorder experts in the country, because this is something we don’t talk about. But I think with something like intermittent fasting, which we hear about in all aspects of wellness diet culture, we have to remember that intermittent fasting is extreme food restriction. Our bodies panic when we fast. But these can set us on roads towards very disordered relationships with food in our bodies. And the worst case is developing an eating disorder.VirginiaRight, or living with a subclinical eating disorder that makes you miserable, even if no one ever says, yes, you have a diagnosis.ColeAbsolutely. Thinking about protein every day is stressful and just being consumed with this idea of what we’re eating and how much we’re eating and what we need to be doing. And the fear of the consequences, right? If I don’t track my protein, I’m going to break a hip, right? I mean, I’m condensing the messaging. But if you follow the steps, that’s kind of where it goes.VirginiaWell, and I don’t think it’s even just “I’m going to break a hip.” I think it’s “I’m going to become old and vulnerable and undesirable.” The hip is symbolic of this cultural narrative about older women’s bodies, which is that you are going to become disposable and irrelevant. And the fear that’s stoking us, that’s making us hungry for the information—which is valid, it is a mysterious phase of life that we don’t know enough about. But there’s this fear of of irrelevancy and and not being attractive, and all of that. You can’t tease that out from “I’m worried about my bone density.” It’s all layered in there.ColeAnd my own OB/GYN told me at our last visit—she offers a separate let’s have a talk about perimenopause appointment, which I think is great. It’s essentially about hormone replacement therapy and when and if that might be part of your journey. But she told me that most people who don’t have some immediate symptom like hot flashes are coming to her in perimenopause because of weight gain or redistribution of weight, which is very normal during this phase of life. And they are asking if hormone replacement therapy could “fix” that issue.So it’s the post-baby body thing all over again. As if there’s a return to something, as opposed to a forward movement. But the fact that that’s an entry point for a lot of these menopause physicians that write books and have a presence on social media. It’s very, very connected to an audience that is looking for weight loss.VirginiaI think there is something about any mysterious health situation—whether it’s perimenopause, or I see a similar narrative happen around diabetes often—where the condition gets held out as this worst case scenario that’s so so bad that therefore any concerns you had about is it disordered to diet? Is it risky for me to count protein? All of that kind of goes out the window because we get laser focused and we have to solve this thing. You no longer get to have feelings about how pursuing weight loss can be damaging for you. This physical health thing trumps all the emotions.ColeIt’s a medical issue now.VirginiaRight! I’m at sea in this whole new complicated medical landscape of menopause. I don’t know what it is, so obviously, whatever I used to feel about needing to accept my body no longer applies. I don’t get to do that anymore. I have to just like, drill in and get serious about this.I’ve had older women say this to me. Like, “you can be body positive in your 30s or early 40s, but get over 50, sweetheart, and you’re not going to be able to do that anymore.” But why not? That should be available to us throughout our lives. So that frustrates me. Because simultaneously, we have no good information, we have no good sc