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.

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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.

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CREDITS

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

Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism. 
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Episode 171 Transcript

Virginia

Last time you were on the podcast, we talked specifically about how diet culture has co-opted ab workouts. This was inspired by a viral Twitter thread you wrote back then—back when we were on Twitter, back when we called it Twitter—where you really laid out how core muscles are super important, but the way the fitness industry markets workouts just completely misses the point.

So can you walk us through that a little bit? Because every time I even bring that up with people minds are blown.

Anna

There’s so much here, but I think the TLDR is that abs—flat abs, defined abs, visible abs—have a real hold on us as a culture. They have forever, unfortunately, and diet culture knows that. They’re going to use this promise of visible abs to get you to buy a bunch of stuff which is sketchy at best. Because for the vast majority of people those visible, defined abs are not a realistic, or at least a sustainable, goal.

What’s frustrating for me is that all of that is kind of a distraction from the many ways in which having strong and functional abs is great for you and can help you move and feel better. So I find it self-defeating. Visible ab talk is feeding into diet culture, and it’s not supporting us in any way.

Virginia

It really is wild that this very specific aesthetic trait—the ability to have visible stomach muscles, which only certain body types are going to be able to pull off even with a lot of effort—that has become our focus. Sometimes I just have to take a minute and think: Why do we care so much about how someone’s stomach muscles look like? It’s really weird.

Anna

For some reason Botox and forehead wrinkles are popping into my head. This is a bad metaphor because your forehead doesn’t really do anything for you. But what if your forehead had some amazing function, and we were distracting ourselves with the aesthetics of it by spending all this money on Botox. It’s adding this whole additional layer of functional purpose on top of the ridiculousness of the diet salesmanship of it.

Virginia

You revisited this whole conversation recently on

How to Move

which I want everyone to subscribe to, because it’s fantastic. You wrote a piece that was in conversation with a piece by another fitness writer we both like, Casey Johnston, who wrote a piece calledthe core workout is a scam.

Casey pointed out that even major fitness influencers on Tiktok will talk about how they make content with ab exercises that they actually don’t even do themselves, because they know that abs, abs, abs is what gets engagement. This brought me back to some of our lady mag days. I don’t know about you, Anna, this felt familiar to some of those workouts that we put on magazine covers.

How to Move

Are ab exercises bad, actually?

As a society, we’ve been sold a hell of a bill of goods about the abdominal muscles…

Listen now

a year ago · 14 likes · 3 comments · Anna Maltby

Anna

I love Casey. I really admire her work, and I think she’s so right that influencers and whoever else is trying to sell you workouts, they definitely p