You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I write the Burnt Toast Newsletter. When you hear this, I will—if all goes according to plan—be sitting on a beach in Thailand. Of course, that means I survived the 25 hour flight over and jetlag with my kids. And honestly, those both feel like very open questions as I’m recording this right now.

I know New Year’s is a fraught time for a lot of us. Resolution culture means that diet noise and fitness noise are turned up to level 1000 right now. I was thinking about that and remembered this really lovely conversation that Amy Palanjian and I had with Christy Harrison on our old podcast Comfort Food and I decided that this episode called “New Year, No Diet” would be the perfect rerun to share with all of you this week. It originally aired on January 13, 2019. And wow, the world is different! But diet culture has remained so much the same. 

If you aren’t familiar with Christy, she is an anti-diet nutritionist, a journalist, and host of the beloved Food Psych podcast. She’s also the author of the book Anti-Diet, and her new book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being comes out the same day as Fat Talk. So we will be celebrating book birthdays together in April and I’m hoping Christy will be back on the podcast in real time then to talk to us about the new book.

Christy is one of the most thoughtful journalists I know. She is truly a calm and reassuring voice in the anti-diet space. So if you are struggling with any version of the New Year’s bullshit right now, I think you’re going to find this conversation really grounding and helpful. And Burnt Toast will be back next week in your inboxes with an essay on Tuesday, January 10 and in your podcast feeds with an episode with the great Aubrey Gordon on Thursday, January 12. Subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss any of it!

Episode 75 Transcript

Amy

Happy New Year, guys! It’s 2019 which kind of blows my mind and this is our first episode of the new year. So you’re probably surrounded with a lot of diet talk this week, if not for the past few weeks already. People starting new year’s resolutions, detoxes, new wellness plans, everything flooding your your email box and your social media feeds. So, we are here to help you withstand that onslaught and make this year the year you actually feel good about yourself and your food, no matter what you’re eating.

Virginia

I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I’m a writer, a contributing editor to Parents Magazine and author of The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America. I write about how women relate to food and our bodies in a culture that gives us so many unrealistic expectations about both those things.

Amy

And I’m Amy Palanjian, a writer, recipe developer and creator of Yummy Toddler Food and Yummy Family Food. I’m a contributor to Allrecipes magazine and I love helping parents relax in the daily challenge of feeding their kids.

Virginia

And today we have a very special guest! Joining us is Christy Harrison, an anti-diet dietitian, host of the amazing Food Psych podcast and the lead character in chapter two of The Eating Instinct. Christy, welcome! Thank you for being here.

Christy

Thank you so much for having me.

Virginia

Why don’t you tell us a little more about you for our listeners who might not have encountered your amazing work yet?

Christy

Absolutely. I’m a registered dietician, nutritionist, certified Intuitive Eating counselor and the host of Food Psych podcast, as you said. And I am also the author of a forthcoming book called Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating which will be out late 2019, in time for the New Year and holiday season of the coming year. 

Virginia

Excellent. Can’t wait.

Amy

We’re so excited to have you with us today because this the start of the new year always feels like such a vulnerable place for so many people. It’s strange because most of us know that resolutions don’t really stick around and yet there’s all of this pressure for us to do it. Can you talk about like why we all get pulled into this?

Christy

Absolutely. I think the reason we all get pulled into this is what a lot of people call diet culture, which is a system of beliefs that really privileges smaller bodies and stigmatizes larger ones. It elevates some foods while demonizing others, and promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status and moral virtue and oppresses people who don’t fit those molds, the cultural ideal of thinness or the cultural ideal of what “health” is supposed to look like.

So that’s a lot to unpack there. But basically, this system of beliefs is with us all year round, 24/7/365. It’s present in the media, of course, and that’s what often gets the most attention, like the photoshopped, airbrushed images of impossibly thin models. But equally important is the diet industry, or what’s now known as the wellness industry, which Virginia, you write about really, profoundly in your book. The wellness industry has become the new guise of the diet industry in the 21st century. So we have still the traditional diet industry and now the wellness industry, too.

We also have the everyday cultural manifestations of this belief system, which can take the form of a parent making a negative comment about their child’s body size or kids teasing each other for their body size on the playground or your coworker making some comment, like, “Oh, are you going to eat that? That has gluten in it. That’s terrible for you.” You know, all these tiny little manifestations. A friend of mine was telling me that the TV show Peppa Pig has a bunch of fatphobia in it.

Amy

Really? 

Virginia

It breaks my heart because my daughter loves Peppa Pig, but they shame Daddy Pig a lot for food stuff. It’s a hard one for me.

Christy

It’s everywhere. It’s in these cute cartoons that our kids watch and stuff. It’s really ubiquitous. Diet culture is particularly prevalent in the new year, because it’s become the season where the diet industry does its big push to sell you things. The idea of New Year and renewal, I think, lends itself to this concept that now you’ve just come through the holidays you’ve been eating and “indulging” so much that now it’s time to buckle down and really shrink your body and make a resolution to to change this year.

It dovetails nicely with the fact that we know that diets don’t actually work long term. And by diets, I really mean everything from traditional Jenny Craig, Weightwatchers—although now they’re calling themselves WW for wellness. Everything from that to Whole30, paleo, keto, the things that hold themselves up as just an eating plan, or a “template” or a “protocol” or a “reset.” They use all these different words. They say they’re not diets, but they actually still fall under the umbrella of diet culture, they actually still are diets by another name.

So this time of year, it’s their time for their big sales push, their time to get more clients on board. And those things don’t actually work long term. So we know, the research really shows that any sort of diet, whether it’s wellness or a traditional diet, the weight loss effects certainly don’t last beyond about the 3-5 year mark. That is when we see the vast majority of people have put back on all the weight that they lost. And oftentimes, up to two thirds of the time, people end up regaining more weight than they lost. So intentional weight loss—whatever brand, whatever sort of plan you’re using—doesn’t actually have long term effects. It results in weight cycling in the long run.

Amy

I find it so interesting to think about that marketing piece. 

Virginia

Yeah, because we think of the new year as almost like a spiritual time or a tradition. In fact it’s a line item in someone’s bu